Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (946 page)

This faith in tradition, as giving the basis of all our best life, is perhaps nowhere so expressively set forth by George Eliot as in
The Spanish Gypsy
. It is distinctly taught by all the best characters in the words they speak, and it is emphatically taught in the whole purpose and spirit of the poem. Zarca says his tribe has no great life because it has no great national memories. He calls his people

      Wanderers whom no God took knowledge of
  To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight
  Another race to make them ampler room;
  Who have no whence or whither in their souls,
  No dimmest lure of glorious ancestors
  To make a common breath for piety.

As his people are weak because they have no traditional life, he proposes by his deeds to make them national memories and hopes and aims.

                        No lure
  Shall draw me to disown them, or forsake
  The meagre wandering herd that lows for help —
  And needs me for its guide, to seek my pasture
  Among the well-fed beeves that graze at will.
  Because our race has no great memories,
  I will so live, it shall remember me
  For deeds of such divine beneficence
  As rivers have, that teach, men what is good
  By blessing them. I have been schooled — have caught
  Lore from Hebrew, deftness from the Moor —
  Know the rich heritage, the milder life,
  Of nations fathered by a mighty Past.

The way in which such a past is made is suggested by Zarca, in answer to a question about the Gypsy’s faith; it is made by a common life of faith and brotherhood, that gives origin to a common inheritance and memories.

                           O, it is a faith
  Taught by no priest, but by their beating hearts
  Faith to each other: the fidelity
  Of fellow-wanderers in a desert place
  Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share
  The scanty water: the fidelity
  Of men whose pulses leap with kindred fire,
  Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands,
  The speech that even in lying tells the truth
  Of heritage inevitable as birth,
  Nay, in the silent bodily presence feel
  The mystic stirring of a common life
  Which makes the many one: fidelity
  To that deep consecrating oath our sponsor Fate
  Made through our infant breath when we were born
  The fellow-heirs of that small island, Life,
  Where we must dig and sow and reap with brothers.
  Fear thou that oath, my daughter — nay, not fear,
  But love it; for the sanctity of oaths
  Lies not in lightning that avenges them,
  But in the injury wrought by broken bonds
  And in the garnered good of human trust.
  And you have sworn — even with your infant breath
  You too were pledged.

George Eliot’s faith in tradition, as furnishing the basis of our best life, and the moral purpose and law which is to guide it, she has concentrated into one question asked by Maggie Tulliver.

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Although this question is asked in regard to an individual’s past, the answer to it holds quite as good for the race as for the individual. She repudiates all theories which give the individual authority to follow inclination, or even to follow some inner or personal guide. The true wisdom is always social, always grows out of the experiences of the race, and not out of any personal inspiration or enlightenment. Tradition furnishes the materials for reason to use, but reason does not penetrate into new regions, or bring to us wisdom apart from that we obtain through inherited experiences. George Eliot compares these two with each other in
The Spanish Gypsy
in the words of Sephardo.

                              I abide
  By that wise spirit of listening reverence
  Which marks the boldest doctors of our race.
  For Truth, to us, is like a living child
  Born of two parents: if the parents part
  And will divide the child, how shall it live?
  Or, I will rather say: Two angels guide
  The path of man, both aged and yet young,
  As angels are, ripening through endless years.
  On one he leans: some call her Memory,
  And some, Tradition; and her voice is sweet,
  With deep mysterious accords: the other,
  Floating above, holds down a lamp which streams
  A light divine and searching on the earth,
  Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields,
  Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew
  Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp
  Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked
  But for Tradition; we walk evermore
  To higher paths, by brightening Reason’s lamp.

Man leans on tradition, it is the support of his life, by its strength he is able to move forward. Reason is a lamp which lights the way, gives direction to tradition; it is a beacon and not a support. Tradition not only brings us the wisdom of all past experience, but it develops into a spiritual atmosphere in which we live, move and have our being. This was Comte’s idea, that the spiritual life is developed out of tradition, that the world’s experiences have produced for us intangible hopes, yearnings and aspirations; awe, reverence and sense of subtle mystery: mystic trust, faith in invisible memories, joy in the unseen power of thought and love; and that these create for us a spiritual world most real in its nature, and most powerful in its influence. On every hand man is touched by the invisible, mystical influences of the past, spiritual voices call to him out of the ages, unseen hands point the way he is to go. He breathes this atmosphere of spiritual memories, he is fed on thoughts other men have made for his sustenance, he is inspired by the heroisms of ages gone before. In an article in the
Westminster Review
in July, 1856, on “The Natural History of German Life,” in review of W.H. Riehl’s books on the German peasant, and on land and climate, she presents the idea that a people can be understood only when we understand its history. Society, she says, has developed through many generations, and has built itself up in many memories and associations. To change it we must change its traditions. Nothing can be done
de novo
; a fresh beginning cannot be had. The dream of the French Revolution, that a new nation, a new life, a new morality, was to be created anew and fresh out of the cogitations of philosophers, is not in any sense to be realized. Tradition forever asserts itself, the past is more powerful than all philosophers, and new traditions must be made before a new life can be had for society. These ideas are well expressed by George Eliot in her review of Riehl’s books.

He sees in European society
incarnate history
, and any attempt to disengage it from its historical elements must, he believes, be simply destruction of social vitality. What has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. The external conditions which society has inherited from the past are but the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both. As a necessary preliminary to a purely rational society, you must obtain purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter prejudices of hereditary affection and antipathy; which is as easy as to get running streams without springs, or the leafy shade of the forest without the secular growth of trunk and branch.

The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of language. It must be admitted that the language of cultivated nations is in anything but a rational state; the great sections of the civilized world are only approximately intelligible to each other, and even that, only at the cost of long study; one word stands for many things, and many words for one thing; the subtle shades of meaning, and still subtler echoes of association, make language an instrument which scarcely anything short of genius can wield with definiteness and certainty. Suppose, then, that the effort which has been again and again made to construct a universal language on a rational basis has at length succeeded, and that you have a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of many-hued significance, no hoary archaisms “familiar with forgotten years,” — a patent deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs. Your language may be a perfect medium of expression to science, but will never express
life
, which is a great deal more than science. With the anomalies and inconveniences of historical language, you will have parted with its music and its passion, with its vital qualities as an expression of individual character, with its subtle capabilities of wit, with everything that gives it power over the imagination; and the next step in simplification will be the invention of a talking watch, which will achieve the utmost facility and despatch in the communication of ideas by a graduated adjustment of ticks, to be represented in writing by a corresponding arrangement of dots. A “melancholy language of the future!” The sensory and motor nerves that run in the same sheath are scarcely bound together by a more necessary and delicate union than that which binds men’s affections, imagination, wit and humor with the subtle ramifications of historical language. Language must be left to grow in precision, completeness and unity, as minds grow in clearness, comprehensiveness and sympathy. And there is an analogous relation between the moral tendencies of men and the social conditions they have inherited. The nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of development is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which carries with it a life independent of the root….

It has not been sufficiently insisted on, that in the various branches of social science there is an advance from the general to the special, from the simple to the complex, analogous with that which is found in the series of the sciences, from mathematics to biology. To the laws of quantity comprised in mathematics and physics are superadded, in chemistry, laws of quality; to those again are added, in biology, laws of life; and lastly, the conditions of life in general branch out into its special conditions, or natural history, on the one hand, and into its abnormal conditions, or pathology, on the other. And in this series or ramification of the sciences, the more general science will not suffice to solve the problems of the more special. Chemistry embraces phenomena which are not explicable by physics; biology embraces phenomena which are not explicable by chemistry; and no biological generalization will enable us to predict the infinite specialties produced by the complexity of vital conditions. So social science, while it has departments which in their fundamental generality correspond to mathematics and physics, namely, those grand and simple generalizations which trace out the inevitable march of the human race as a whole, and, as a ramification of these, the laws of economical science, has also, in the departments of government and jurisprudence, which embrace the conditions of social life in all their complexity, what may be called its biology, carrying us on to innumerable special phenomena which outlie the sphere of science, and belong to natural history. And just as the most thorough acquaintance with physics, or chemistry, or general physiology, will not enable you at once to establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that your particular society of zoophytes, molluscs and echinoderms may feel themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skins; so the most complete equipment of theory will not enable a statesman or a political and social reformer to adjust his measures wisely, in the absence of a special acquaintance with the section of society for which he legislates, with the peculiar characteristics of the nation, the province, the class whose well-being he has to consult. In other words, a wise social policy must be based not simply on abstract social science but on the natural history of social bodies.

Her conception of the corporate life of the nice has been clearly expressed by George Eliot in the concluding essay in
Theophrastus Such
. In that essay she writes of the powerful influence wrought upon national life by “the divine gift of memory which inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and innocent brute.” The nations which lead the world on to a larger civilization are not merely those with most genius, originality, gift of invention or talent for scientific observation, but those which have the finest traditions. As a member of such a nation, the individual can be noble and great. We should almost be persuaded, reading George Eliot’s eloquent rhetoric on this subject, that personal genius is of little moment in comparison with a rich inheritance of national memories. It is indeed true that Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton and Shakspere have used the traditions of their people for the materials of their immortal works, but what would those traditions have been without the genius of the men who deal with the traditions in a fashion quite their own, giving them new meaning and vitality! The poet, however, needs materials for his song, and memories to inspire it. The influence of these George Eliot well understands in calling them “the deep suckers of healthy sentiment.”

The historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell on the virtues of our ancestors with emulation, and to cherish our sense of a common descent as a bond of obligation. The eminence, the nobleness of a people, depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and for striving for what we call spiritual ends — ends which consist not in an immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul. A people having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and gradual growth through past labors and struggles, such as are still demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-being thus inherited may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children’s children; when an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes a national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest with the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their blood to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity, will produce poets to sing “some great story of a man,” and thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action. An individual man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not in actual existence yet existing in the past — in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored…. Not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the presence of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each individual citizen. Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease or prosperity. [Footnote: Theophrastus Such, chapter XVIII.]