Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (945 page)

What we have done, determines what we shall do, even in opposition to our wills. After Tito Melema had done his first act towards denying his foster-father, we have this observation of the author’s:

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness; and that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on Tito for the first time.

When Tito had openly denied that father, at an unexpected moment, we hear the ever-present chorus repeating this great ethical truth:

Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character.

As a river moves in the channel made for it, as a plant grows towards the sunlight, so man does again what he has once done. The impression of his act is left upon his nature, it is taken up into his motives, it leads to feeling and impulse, it repeats itself in future conduct. His deed lives in memory, it lives in weakness or strength of impulse, it lives in disease or in health, it lives in mental listlessness or in mental vigor. What is done, determines our natures in their character and tendency for the future. “A man can never separate himself from his past history,” says George Eliot in one of the mottoes of
Felix Holt
. We cannot rid ourselves of the effects of our actions; they follow us forever. This truth takes shape in
Romola
in these words:

Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have once acted greatly, seems a reason why we should always be noble. But Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had now no memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling.

A motto in
Daniel Deronda
reiterates this oft-repeated assertion.

  Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life,
  And righteous or unrighteous, being done,
  Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself
  Be laid in stillness, and the universe
  Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more.

Feeling is to be preferred to logic, according to George Eliot, because it brings us the results of long-accumulating experiences, because it embodies the inherited experiences of the race. She was an earnest believer in “far-reaching memories and stored residues of passion,” for she was convinced that the better part of all our knowledge is brought to us by inheritance. The deeds of the individual make the habits of his life, they remain in memory, they guide the purposes of the will, and they give motives to action. Deeds often repeated give impulse and direction to character, and these appear in the offspring as predispositions of body and mind. In this way our deeds “throb in after-throbs” of our children; and in the same manner the deeds of a people live in the life of the race and become guiding motives in its future deeds. As the deeds of a person develop into habits, so the deeds of a people develop into national tendencies and actions.

George Eliot was a thorough believer in the Darwinian theories of heredity, and she has in all her books shown the effects of hereditary conditions on the individual and even upon a people. Family and race are made to play a very important part in her writings. Other novelists disregard the conditions and limitations imposed by heredity, and consider the individual as unrestricted by other laws than those of his own will; but George Eliot gives conspicuous prominence to the laws of heredity, both individual and social. Felix Holt never ceases in her pages to be the son of his mother, however enlarged his ideas may become and broad his culture. Rosamond Vincy also has a parentage, and so has Mary Garth. Daniel Deronda is a Jew by birth, the son of a visionary mother and a truth-seeking father. This parentage expresses itself throughout his life, even in boyhood, in all his thought and conduct. Heredity shapes the destiny of Tito Melema, Romola, Fedalma, Maggie Tulliver, Will Ladislaw, Gwendolen Harleth and many another character in George Eliot’s novels. It is even more strongly presented in her poems. In
The Spanish Gypsy
she describes Fedalma as a genuine daughter of her father, as inheriting his genius and tendencies, which are stronger than all the Spanish culture she had received. When Fedalma says she belongs to him she loves, and that love

is nature too, Forming a fresher law than laws of birth, —

Zarca replies, —

  Unmake yourself, then, from a Zincala —
  Unmake yourself from being child of mine!
  Take holy water, cross your dark skin white;
  Round your proud eyes to foolish kitten looks;
  Walk mincingly, and smirk, and twitch your robe:
  Unmake yourself — doff all the eagle plumes
  And be a parrot, chained to a ring that slips
  Upon a Spaniard’s thumb, at will of his
  That you should prattle o’er his words again!

Fedalma cannot unmake herself; she has already danced in the plaza, and she is soon convinced that she is a Zincala, that her place is with her father and his tribe. The Prior had declared, —

                       That maiden’s blood
  Is as unchristian as the leopard’s,

and it so proves. His statement of reasons for this conviction expresses the author’s own belief.

  What! Shall the trick of nostrils and of lips
  Descend through generations, and the soul
  That moves within our frame like God in worlds —
  Convulsing, urging, melting, withering —
  Imprint no record, leave no documents,
  Of her great history? Shall men bequeath
  The fancies of their palates to their sons,
  And shall the shudder of restraining awe,
  The slow-wept tears of contrite memory,
  Faith’s prayerful labor, and the food divine
  Of fasts ecstatic — shall these pass away
  Like wind upon the waters, tracklessly?
  Shall the mere curl of eyelashes remain,
  And god-enshrining symbols leave no trace
  Of tremors reverent?

This larger or social heredity is that which claims much the larger share of George Eliot’s attention, and it is far more clearly and distinctively presented in her writings. She gives a literary expression here to the teachings of the evolutionists, shows the application to life of what has been taught by Spencer, Haeckel and Lewes. In his
Foundations of a Creed
, Lewes has stated this theory in discussing “the limitations of knowledge.” “It is indisputable,” he says, “that every particular man comes into the world with a heritage of organized forms and definite tendencies, which will determine his feeling and thinking in certain definite ways, whenever the suitable conditions are present. And all who believe in evolution believe that these forms and tendencies represent ancestral experiences and adaptations; believe that not only is the pointer born with an organized tendency to point, the setter to set, the beaver to build, and the bird to fly, but that the man is born with a tendency to think in images and symbols according to given relations and sequences which constitute logical laws, that
what
he thinks is the necessary product of his organism and the external conditions. This organism itself is a product of its history; it
is
what it has
become
; it is a part of the history of the human race; it is also specially individualized by the particular personal conditions which have distinguished him from his fellow-men. Thus resembling all men in general characters, he will in general feel as they feel, think as they think; and differing from all men in special characters, he will have personal differences of feeling and shades of feeling, thought and combinations of thought…. The mind is built up out of assimilated experiences, its perceptions being shaped by its pre-perceptions, its conceptions by its pre-conceptions. Like the body, the mind is shaped through its history.” In other words, experience is inherited and shapes the mental and social life. What some philosophers have called intuitions, and what Kant called the categories of the mind, Lewes regarded as the inherited results of human experience. By a slow process of evolution the mind has been produced and shaped into harmony with its environment; the results of inherited experience take the form of feelings, intuitions, laws of thought and social tendencies. Its intuitions are to be accepted as the highest knowledge, because the transmitted results of all human experience.

As the body performs those muscular operations most easily to which it is most accustomed, so men as social beings perform those acts and think those thoughts most easily and naturally to which the race has been longest accustomed. Man lives and thinks as man has lived and thought; he inherits the past. In his social life he is as much the child of the past as he is individually the son of his father. If he inherits his father’s physiognomy and habits of thought, so does he socially inherit the characteristics of his race, its social and moral life. George Eliot was profoundly convinced of the value of this fact, and she has presented it in her books in all its phases. In her
Fortnightly Review
essay on “The Influence of Rationalism,” she says all large minds have long had “a vague sense” “that tradition is really the basis of our best life.” She says, “Our sentiments may be called organized traditions; and a large part of our actions gather all their justification, all their attractions and aroma, from the memory of the life lived, of the actions done, before we were born.” Tradition is the inherited experience of the race, the result of its long efforts, its many struggles, after a larger life. It lives in the tendencies of our emotions, in the intuitions and aspirations of our minds, as the wisdom which our minds hold dear, as the yearnings of our hearts after a wider social life. These things are not the results of our own reasonings, but they are the results of the life lived by those who have gone before us, and who, by their thoughts and deeds, have shaped our lives, our minds, to what they are. Tradition is the inherited experience, feeling, yearning, pain, sorrow and wisdom of the ages. It furnishes a great system of customs, laws, institutions, ideas, motives and feelings into which we are born, which we naturally adopt, which gives shape and strength to our growing life, which makes it possible for us to take up life at that stage it has reached after the experiences of many generations. George Eliot says in
Middlemarch
that “a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.” We come into a world made ready for us, and find prepared for our immediate use a vast complex of customs and duties and ideas, the results of the world’s experience. George Eliot believed, with Comte, that with each generation the influence of the past over the present becomes greater, and that men’s lives are more and more shaped by what has been. In
The Spanish Gypsy
she makes Don Silva say that

  The only better is a Past that lives
  On through an added Present, stretching still
  In hope unchecked by shaming memories
  To life’s last breath.

This deep conviction of the blessed influence of the past upon us is well expressed in the little poem on “Self and Life,” one of the most fully autobiographical of all her poems, where she makes Life bid Self remember

  How the solemn, splendid Past
    O’er thy early widened earth
  Made grandeur, as on sunset cast
    Dark elms near take mighty girth.
      Hands and feet were tiny still
      When we knew the historic thrill,
      Breathed deep breath in heroes dead,
      Tasted the immortals’ bread.

In expressive sentences, in the development of her characters, and in many other ways, she affirms this faith in tradition. In one of the mottoes in
Felix Holt
she uses a fine sentence, which is repeated in “A Minor Prophet.”

Our finest hope is finest memory.

The finest hope of the race is to be found in memory of its great deeds, as its saddest loss is to be found in forgetfulness of a noble past. In
The Mill on the Floss
, when describing St. Ogg’s, she attributes its sordid and tedious life to its neglect of the past and its inspiring memories.

The mind of St. Ogg’s did not look extensively before or after. It inherited a long past without thinking of it, and had no eyes for the spirits that walk the streets, Since the centuries when St. Ogg with his boat, and the Virgin Mother at the prow, had been seen on the wide water, so many memories had been left behind, and had gradually vanished like the receding hill-tops! And the present time was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep. The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it: the Catholics were formidable because they would lay hold of government and property, and burn men alive; not because any sane and honest parishioner of St. Ogg’s could be brought to believe in the Pope. One aged person remembered how a rude multitude had been swayed when John Wesley preached in the cattle-market; but for a long while it had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men. An occasional burst of fervor in Dissenting pulpits on the subject of infant baptism was the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober times when men had done with change. Protestantism sat at ease, unmindful of schisms, careless of proselytism; Dissent was an inheritance along with a superior pew and a business connection; and Churchmanship only wondered contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish habit that clung greatly to families in the grocery and chandlering lines, though not incompatible with prosperous wholesale dealing. [Footnote: Chapter XII.]