Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (956 page)

George Eliot’s interest in the present amelioration of human conditions was strengthened by her faith in the future of the race. She expected no rapid improvement, no revolutionizing development; but she believed the past of mankind justifies faith in a gradual attainment of perfect conditions. This conviction was expressed when she said, —

What I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling.

She saw too much evil and suffering to be an optimist; she could not see that all things are good or tending towards what is good. Yet her faith in the final outcome was earnest, and she looked to a slow and painful progress as the result of human struggles. When called an optimist, she responded, “I will not answer to the name of optimist, but if you like to invent Meliorist, I will not say you call me out of my name.” She trusted in that gradual development which science points out as the probable result of the survival of the fittest in human life. In “A Minor Prophet” she has presented her conception of human advancement, and tenderly expressed her sympathy with all humble, imperfect lives.

                              Bitterly
  I feel that every change upon this earth
  Is bought with sacrifice. My yearnings fail
  To reach that high apocalyptic mount
  Which shows in bird’s-eye view a perfect world,
  Or enter warmly into other joys
  Than those of faulty, struggling human kind,
  That strain upon my soul’s too perfect wing
  Ends in ignoble floundering: I fall
  Into short-sighted pity for the men
  Who, living in those perfect future times,
  Will not know half the dear imperfect things
  That move my smiles and tears — will never know
  The fine old incongruities that raise
  My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits
  That like a needless eyeglass or black patch
  Give those who wear them harmless happiness;
  The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware,
  That touch me to more conscious fellowship
  (I am not myself the finest Parian)
  With my coevals. So poor Colin Clout,
  To whom raw onions give prospective zest,
  Consoling hours of dampest wintry work,
  Could hardly fancy any regal joys
  Quite unimpregnate with the onion’s scent:
  Perhaps his highest hopes are not all clear
  Of waftings from that energetic bulb:
  ’Tis well that onion is not heresy.
  Speaking in parable, I am Colin Clout.
  A clinging flavor penetrates ray life —
  My onion is imperfectness: I cleave
  To nature’s blunders, evanescent types
  Which sages banish from Utopia.
  ”Not worship beauty?” say you. Patience, friend!
  I worship in the temple with the rest;
  But by my hearth I keep a sacred nook
  For gnomes and dwarfs, duck-footed waddling elves
  Who stitched and hammered for the weary man
  In days of old. And in that piety
  I clothe ungainly forms inherited
  From toiling generations, daily bent
  At desk, or plough, or loom, or in the mine,
  In pioneering labors for the world.
  Nay, I am apt, when floundering confused
  From too rash flight, to grasp at paradox,
  And pity future men who will not know
  A keen experience with pity blent,
  The pathos exquisite of lovely minds
  Hid in harsh forms — not penetrating them
  Like fire divine within a common bush
  Which glows transfigured by the heavenly guest,
  So that men put their shoes off; but encaged
  Like a sweet child within some thick-walled cell,
  Who leaps and fails to hold the window-bars;
  But having shown a little dimpled hand,
  Is visited thenceforth by tender hearts
  Whose eyes keep watch about the prison walls.
  A foolish, nay, a wicked paradox!
  For purest pity is the eye of love,
  Melting at sight of sorrow; and to grieve
  Because it sees no sorrow, shows a love
  Warped from its truer nature, turned to love
  Of merest habit, like the miser’s greed.
  But I am Colin still: my prejudice
  Is for the flavor of my daily food.
  Not that I doubt the world is growing still,
  As once it grew from chaos and from night;
  Or have a soul too shrunken for the hope
  Which dawned in human breasts, a double morn,
  With earliest watchings of the rising light
  Chasing the darkness; and through many an age
  Has raised the vision of a future time
  That stands an angel, with a face all mild,
  Spearing the demon. I, too, rest in faith
  That man’s perfection is the crowning flower
  Towards which the urgent sap in life’s great tree
  Is pressing — seen in puny blossoms now,
  But in the world’s great morrows to expand
  With broadest petal and with deepest glow.

With no disgust toward the crude and wretched life man everywhere lives to-day, but with pity and tenderness for all sorrow, suffering and struggle, she yet believed that the world is being shaped to a glorious and a mighty destiny. This faith finds full and clear expression in the concluding lines of the poem just quoted.

   The faith that life on earth is being shaped
   To glorious ends, that order, justice, love,
   Mean man’s completeness, mean effect as sure
   As roundness in the dewdrop — that great faith
   Is but the rushing and expanding stream
   Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past.
   Our finest hope is finest memory,
   As they who love in age think youth is blest
   Because it has a life to fill with love.
   Full souls are double mirrors, making still
   An endless vista of fair things before
   Repeating things behind: so faith is strong
   Only when we are strong, shrinks when we shrink.
   It comes when music stirs us, and the chords
   Moving on some grand climax shake our souls
   With influx new that makes new energies.
   It comes in swellings of the heart and tears
   That rise at noble and at gentle deeds —
   At labors of the master-artist’s hand
   Which, trembling, touches to a finer end,
   Trembling before an image seen within.
   It comes in moments of heroic love,
   Unjealous joy in love not made for us —
   In conscious triumph of the good within,
   Making us worship goodness that rebukes.
   Even our failures are a prophecy,
   Even our yearnings and our bitter tears
   After that fair and true we cannot grasp;
   As patriots who seem to die in vain
   Make liberty more sacred by their pangs,
   Presentiment of better things on earth
   Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls
   To admiration, self-renouncing love,
   Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one:
   Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night
   We hear the roll and dash of waves that break
   Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide,
   Which rises to the level of the cliff
   Because the wide Atlantic roils behind,
   Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs.

George Eliot did all that could be done to make the morality she taught commendable and inspiring. In her own direct teachings, and in the development of her characters and her plots, she has done much to make it acceptable. Her strong insistence on the social basis of morality is to be admired, and the truth presented is one of great importance. Even more important is her teaching of the stern nature of retribution, that every thought, word and deed has its effect. There is need of such teaching, and it can be appropriated into the thought and life of the time with great promise of good. Yet the outcome of George Eliot’s morality was rather depressing than otherwise. While she was no pessimist, yet she made her readers feel that life was pessimistic in its main tendencies. She makes on the minds of very many of her readers the impression that life has not very much light in it. This comes from the whole cast of her mind, and still more because the light of true ideal hopes was absent from her thought. A stern, ascetic view of life appears throughout her pages, one of the results of the new morality and the humanitarian gospel of altruism. Unbending, unpitiful, does the universe seem to be when the idea of law and Nemesis is so strongly presented, and with no relief from it in the theory of man’s free will. Not less depressing to the moral nature is an unrelieved view of the universe under the omnipotent law of cause and effect, which is not lighted by any vision of God and a spiritual order interpenetrating the material. Her teaching too often takes the tone of repression; it is hard and exacting. She devotes many pages to showing the effects of the law of retribution; she gives comparatively few to the correlative law that good always has its reward. Renunciation is presented as a moral force, and as duty of supreme importance; life is to be repressed for the sake of humanity. The spontaneous tendencies of the mind and heart, the importance of giving a free and healthy development to human nature, is not regarded. Her morality is justly to be criticised for its ascetic and pessimistic tendencies.

XIII.

EARLIER NOVELS.

The first four novels written by George Eliot form a group by themselves; and while all similar to each other in their main characteristics, are in important respects different from her later works. This group includes
Clerical Scenes, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss
and
Silas Marner
. With these may also be classed “Brother Jacob.” They are all alike novels of memory, and they deal mainly with common life. Her own life and the surroundings of her childhood, the memories and associations and suggestions of her early life, are drawn upon. The simple surroundings and ideas of the midland village are seldom strayed away from, and most of the characters are farmers and their laborers, artisans or clergymen.
The Mill on the Floss
offers a partial exception to this statement, for in that book we touch upon the border of a different form of society, but we scarcely enter into it, and the leading characters are from the same class as those in the other books of this group. “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story” alone enters wholly within the circle of aristocratic society. There is more of the realism of actual life in these novels than in her later ones, greater spontaneity and insight, a deeper sympathy and a more tender pathos. They came more out of her heart and sympathies, are more impassioned and pathetic.

Throughout the
Scenes of Clerical Life
are descriptions of actual scenes and incidents known to George Eliot in her girlhood. Mrs. Hackit is a portrait of her own mother. In the first chapter of “Amos Barton,” Shepperton Church is that at Chilvers Colon, which she attended throughout her childhood. It is from memory, and with an accurate pen, she describes —

Shepperton Church as it was in the old days with its outer court of rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its heterogeneous windows patched with desultory bits of painted glass, and its little flight of steps with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to the school-children’s gallery. Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with delight, even when I was so crude a member of the congregation that my nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by smuggling bread-and-butter into the sacred edifice. There was the chancel, guarded by two little cherubims looking uncomfortably squeezed between arch and wall, and adorned with the escutcheons of the Oldinport family, which showed me inexhaustible possibilities of meaning in their blood-red hands, their death’s-heads and cross-bones, their leopards’ paws and Maltese crosses. There were inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of benefactions to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of capitals and final flourishes which my alphabetic erudition traced with ever-new delight. No benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round which devout churchgoers sat during “lessons,” trying to look everywhere else than into each others’ eyes. No low partitions allowing you, with a dreary absence of contrast and mystery, to see everything at all moments; but tall dark panels, under whose shadow I sank with a sense of retirement through the Litany, only to feel with more intensity my burst into the conspicuousness of public life when I was made to stand up on the seat during the psalms or the singing.

Not only is this description of Shepperton Church accurate in every particular, but a subject of neighborhood gossip is made the basis of the story of “Amos Barton.” When George Eliot was about a dozen years old a strange lady appeared at the Cotou parsonage, and became a subject of much discussion on the part of the parishioners. Much pity was felt for the wife of the curate, an intimate friend of Marian Evans’s mother, whose poverty, seven children and poor health made her burdens far from easy. She died not long after, and her grave may be seen at Chilvers Coton. The Knebley Church of “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story” is located only a short distance from Chilvers Coton, and is the chancel of the collegiate church founded by Sir Thomas de Astley in the time of Edward III. Its spire was very high, and served as a landmark to travellers through the forest of Arden, and was called “The lanthorn of Arden.” The spire fell in the year 1600, but was rebuilt later. The present church was repaired by the patron of George Eliot’s father, Sir Roger Newdigate. She describes it in the first chapter of “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story” as —

a wonderful little church, with a checkered pavement which had once rung to the iron tread of military monks, with coats of arms in clusters on the lofty roof, marble warriors and their wives without noses occupying a large proportion of the area, and the twelve apostles with their heads very much on one side, holding didactic ribbons, painted in fresco on the walls.