Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (973 page)

                       ”He glows above
  With scarce an intervention, presses close
  And palpitatingly, His soul o’er ours.”

The lifting and inspiring power of faith in an Infinite Being he has sung with a poet’s purity of vision. Along with this faith goes his belief that man is being glowly perfected for a higher and nobler existence.

  ”To whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name?
    Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands!
  What, have fear of change from Thee, who art ever the same?
    Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?
  There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
    The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;
  What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
    On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven the perfect round.

  ”All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
    Not its likeness, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
  Whose voice has gone forth, but, each survives for the melodist
    When eternity confirms the conceptions of an hour.
  The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
    The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
  Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
    Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.”

He teaches that progress is the true mark and aim of man’s being, a progress sure and glorious.

  ”Progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
  Not God’s and not the beast’s; God is, they are,
  Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.”

Man yearns after more than he can gain here; that yearning is the mark of his higher nature and the means of progress. If he follows the better impulses of his nature, all experience will help to unfold his soul into higher attainments, and impulse will at last become, in clearer moments, revelation.

  ”Oh, we’re sunk enough here, God knows!
    But not quite so much that moments,
  Sure tho’ seldom, are denied us,
    When the spirit’s true endowments
  Stand out plainly from its false ones,
    And appraise it if pursuing
  Or the right way or the wrong way
    To its triumph or undoing.
  There are flashes struck from midnights,
    There are fireflames noondays kindle,
  Whereby piled-up honors perish.
    Whereby swol’n ambitions dwindle,
  While just this or that poor impulse
    Which for once had play unstifled
  Seems the sole work of a lifetime,
    That away the rest have trifled.”

More impersonal and dramatic than George Eliot, Browning introduces his doctrines less often. It is not easy to discover what are his theories as distinguished from those of his characters, for he makes no comments, and is faithful in developing the unity and integrity of his
dramatis personae
, whether in his monologues or dramas. Great as his other faults maybe, he surpasses George Eliot in his power to reveal character, but not in his power to make his characters stand out distinctly and unprejudiced from his own mind. His obscurity of expression and his involved style are serious defects in much of his work; and to most readers his thoroughly dramatic manner is puzzling. He gives but faint clue to the situation in his monologues, little explanation of the person, time or place. All is to be discovered from the obscurest allusions and hints. Defective as this method is in Browning’s treatment, it is the true psychologic method, wherein motive and character are developed dramatically and without labored discussion. It is a more vital and constructive process than that followed by George Eliot, because nothing of the meaning and fulness of life is lost in the process of analysis. That Browning can never be read by more than a few, indicates how great are his faults; but in lyric passion, dramatic power and psychologic analysis he is one of the greatest poets of the century. The value and range of the new method are well illustrated in its use by two such thinkers and poets.

The analytic method as applied by George Eliot regards man as a social being, studies him as a member of society. All that he is, and all the influences working upon him, are understood only as affected by his connection with the life of the race. This fact gives the most distinguishing characteristic to her literary methods. Her imitators may not, and nearly all of them do not, follow her into positivism; but they all study man as a social being. They deal with him as affected by heredity, education, and social characteristics. Even here it is not her theories, but her artistic methods, which are imitated. The novel is no longer regarded as a story to be told dramatically and with moving effect, but as a study of character, as an analysis of situations and motives. The advocates of the new method say that “in one manner or another the stories were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist thinks about persons and situations.” [Footnote: W.D. Howells in the Century for November, 1882.] This interpretation of the mission of the novelist well describes George Eliot’s work, for she never hesitated to tell her reader what she thought about the situations and the persons of whom she wrote.

The new method, as developed in sympathy with agnosticism, fails in literature just as science fails to be a complete interpretation of the universe. The process which answers in the material world does not answer in the spiritual. The instruments which tell the secrets of matter, close the avenues to the revelations of mind. The methods of experiment and demonstration which have brought the universe to man’s knowledge, have not been sufficient to make the soul known to itself. Any literary methods imitating physical science must share in its limitations without its power over the materials with which it has to deal. Literature has hitherto been made helpful and delightful and acceptable because of its ideal elements. Belief in a spiritual world, belief in the imperative law of righteousness as a divine command, runs through all effective literature. However realistic the poets have been when they have reached their highest and best, they have believed that the soul, and what belongs to it, is the only
reality
. Divorced of this Element, literature is at once lowered in tone, a dry-rot seizes upon it and eats away its finest portions. If Goethe and Shakspere are realists in literary method, as some of their interpreters would claim, yet to them the spiritual is supreme, the soul is monarch. So it is with Homer, with Dante, with Scott, with Cervantes, with Victor Hugo, with every supremely artistic and creative mind. Great minds instinctively believe in the creative power of the mind, in its capacity for self-direction. An unbiassed mind gifted with genius sees over and through all obstacles, leaps to magnificent results, will not be restrained by the momentary conditions of the present. Education or social environment, however adverse, will not long hinder the poet from his work. He writes for the future, if the present will not accept him, confident that what his soul has to utter can be truly uttered only as his own individuality impels, and that if he is faithful to his genius the world will listen in due time. This power of personality lies at the basis of all genuine literature, teaching faith in the soul, faith in a providential ordering of the world, and overturning all agnostic theories about realism and environment.

This instinctive faith in mind is the basis of all genuine idealism. The idealist is not the creator of an imaginary world, peopling it with shapes that never existed; but he is one who believes in ideas, and in mind as their creator and the vehicle of their expression. Contemporary with George Eliot was a group of men who believed in the mind as something other than the temporary product of an evolutionary process. With them she may be contrasted, her work may be measured by theirs. Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning and Buskin shared with her the radical ideas of the time. Not one of them has been fettered by narrow theories or cramped by old social doctrines. The broad, inquiring, scientific spirit of the time has been shared by them all. Buskin is a realist, Carlyle believed in the enduring realm of facts, and they have all accepted the spirit of naturalism which has ruled the century. The scientific, philosophic and social theories of the time have been their inspiration. Certain ideas about law, progress and social regeneration have affected them through and through. Yet as regards the one great characteristic of idealism, all have widely departed from George Eliot, for all regard mind as supreme, all believe in a spiritual realm environing man. This fact appears throughout their work. To them the spiritual is objective; they are the true realists. To George Eliot the spiritual is subjective, the result of our own feelings, to which it is limited. When the feelings are gone, all is gone. In the pages of these men there is consequently to be found a power and an inspiration not to be found in hers. Wonderful as is her skill as an artist, and in the analysis of character, yet we feel that we are walking over mocking graves whenever we reach her spiritual conception of the world. She deceives us with a shadow, offers us a name in place of what we crave for with every nobler instinct of the soul. Our own feelings are given us, mirrored in the feelings of others, in place of the reality we desire to possess.

These men have linked their work with those spiritual convictions which have been the moral sustenance of the ages. They have gained in strength and effectiveness thereby. Tennyson has his many doubts, his teachings have been questioned; and yet he sings, —

  ”That each, who seems a separate whole,
    Should move his rounds, and passing all
    The skirts of self again, should fall,
  Remerging in the general soul, —

  ”Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
    Eternal form shall still divide
    The eternal soul from all beside;
  And I shall know him when we meet.”

His flight of song is more sustained for this faith. He is a truer poet, of stronger wing and loftier flight, because life has for him an infinite meaning, because he opens his mind to the impressions which come of man’s spiritual existence. In the same way, Carlyle has a grander meaning running through his books, more of sublimity, a finer eloquence, because the spiritual is to him real. Doubter and scorner as he was, he could not but see that man’s being reaches beyond the material world and interprets some higher realm. Vague as that faith was with him, it was a source of the most effective literary power and stimulus. He bursts forth, under its impulse, into impassioned passages of the noblest poetic beauty.

“Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognize one another. As it is written, we shall be forever with God. The possibility, nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me.”

Ruskin has made it plain how necessary is that tone of mind which is religious to the best work in art. His own faith has been earnest and strong in the reality of the spiritual. Realist as he is in art, he believes in the original and creative power of the mind, and his work has all taken on a higher spirit and a finer expression because of his religious convictions. Writing in
Modern Painters
of man as made in the image of God, he answers the objection which is raised to the idea that all the revelation man has is contained in a being so imperfect.

“No other book, nor fragment of book, than that, will you ever find, — nothing in the clouds above, nor in the earth beneath. The flesh-bound volume is the only revelation that is, that was, or that can be. In that is the image of God painted; in that is the law of God written; in that is the promise of God revealed. Know thyself; for through thyself only thou canst know God. Through the glass, darkly; but except through the glass, in no wise. A tremulous crystal, waved as water, poured out upon the ground; — you may defile it, despise it, pollute it at your pleasure and at your peril; for on the peace of those weak waves must all the heaven you shall ever gain be first seen; and through such purity as you can win for those dark waves must all the light of the risen Sun of Righteousness be bent down by faint refraction. Cleanse them, and calm them, as you love your life. Therefore it is that all the power of nature depends on subjection to the human soul. Man is the Sun of the world; more than the real sun. The fire of his wonderful heart is the only light and heat worth gauge or measure. Where he is, are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world.”

Such words may not be scientific, but they convey real meaning. Their assertion that the world is to be tested and understood by man, not man by the world, is one worthy of attention. The conviction of this truth has a literary power and incentive not to be found in “the scientific method” or any of its corollaries.

To this group of writers may be added Mrs. Browning, who, as a poet, did great and lasting work. Its value, in large measure, rests on its depth of spiritual conviction, and on its idealism in purpose and spirit. Her conception of love is finer and truer than George Eliot’s, because she gave it an ideal as well as an altruistic meaning; because she thought it has an eternal as well as a social significance. As a poet she lost nothing of charm or of power or of inspiration because she could herself believe, with simple trust, what she has embodied in “A Child’s Thought of God.”