Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (978 page)

In the ‘Mill on the Floss,’ the moral interest of the whole drama is concentrated to a very great degree on Maggie Tulliver; and in her is also mainly concentrated the representative struggle between good and evil, the spirit of the Cross and that of the world; for Stephen Guest is little more than the objective form under which the latent evil of her own humanity assails her.  Her life is the field upon which we see the great conflict waging between the elements of spiritual life and spiritual death; swaying amid heart-struggle and pain, now toward victory, now toward defeat, till at last all seems lost.  Then at one rebound the strong brave spirit recovers itself, and takes up the full burden of its cross; sees and accepts the present right though the heart is breaking; and the end is victory crowned and sealed by death.

From her first appearance as a child, those elements of humanity are most prominent in her which, unguided and uncontrolled, are most fraught with danger to the higher life; and for her there is no real outward guidance or control whatever.  The passionate craving for human sympathy and love, which meets no fuller response than from the rude instinctive fondness of her father and the carefully-regulated affection of her brother, on the one hand prepares her for the storm of passion, and on the other, chilled and thrown back by neglect and refusal, threatens her with equal danger of hardness and self-inclusion.  The strong artist temperament, the power of spontaneous and intense enjoyment in everything fair and glad to eye and ear, repressed by the uncongenial accessories around her, tends to concentrate her existence in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no sustenance.  This danger is for her the greater and more insidious, because in her the sensuous, so strongly developed, is refined from all its grossness by the presence of imagination and thought.

When at last, amid the desolation that has come upon her home, and the increasing bareness of all the accessories of her young life, its deeper needs and higher aspirations awaken to definite purpose and seek definite action, the direction they take is toward a hard stern asceticism, cramping up all life and energy within a narrow round of drudgeries and privations.  She strives, as many an earnest impassioned nature like hers has done in similar circumstances, to fashion her own cross, and to make it as hard as may be to bear.  She would deny to herself the very beauty of earth and sky, the music of birds and rippling waters, and everything sweet and glad, as temptations and snares.  From all this she is brought back by Philip.  But he, touching as he is in the humility and tender unselfishness of his love, is too exclusively of the artist temperament to give direction or sustainment to the deeper moral requirements of her being.  He may win her back to the love of beauty and the sense of joy; but he is not the one to stand by her side when the stern conflict between pleasure and right, sense and soul, the world and God, is being fought out within her.

With her introduction to Stephen Guest, that conflict assumes specific and tangible form; and it has emphatically to be fought out
alone
.  All external circumstances are against her; even Lucy’s sweet unjealous temper, and Tom’s bitter hatred, combining with Philip’s painful self-consciousness to keep the safeguard of his presence less constantly at her side.  At last the crowning temptation comes.  Without design, by a surprise on the part of both, the step has been taken which may well seem irretraceable.  Going back from it is not merely going back from joy and hope, but going back to deeper loneliness than she has ever known; and going back also to misunderstanding, shame, and lifelong repentance.  But conscience, the imperative requirements of the higher life within, have resumed their power.  There is no paltering with that inward voice; no possibility but the acceptance of the present urgent right, — the instant fleeing from the wrong, though with it is bound up all of enjoyment life can know.  It is thus she has to take up her cross, not the less hard to bear that her own hands have so far fashioned it.

One grave criticism on the death-scene has been made, that at first sight seems unanswerable.  It is said that no such full, swift recognition between the brother and sister, in those last moments of their long-severed lives, is possible; because there is no true point of contact through which such recognition, on the brother’s part, could ensue.  We think, however, there is something revealed to us in the brother which brings him nearer to what is noblest and deepest in the sister than at first appears.  He also has his ideal of duty and right: it may not be a very broad or high one, but it is there; it is something without and above mere self; and it is resolutely adhered to at whatsoever cost of personal ease or pleasure.  That such aim cannot be so followed on without, to some extent, ennobling the whole nature, is shown in his love for Lucy.  It has come on him, and grown up with him, unconsciously, when there was no wrong connected with it; but with her engagement to Stephen all this is changed.  Hard and stern as he is to others, he is thenceforth the harder and sterner still to self.  There is no paltering with temptation, such as brings the sister so near to hopeless fall.  Here the cold harsh brother rises to true nobility, and shows that upon him too life has established its higher claim than that of mere self-seeking enjoyment.  There is, then, this point of contact between these two, that each has an ideal of duty and light, and to it each is content to sacrifice all things else.  Through this, in that death-look, they recognise each other; and the author’s motto in its full significance is justified, “In their death they were not divided.”

‘Silas Marner,’ though carefully finished, is of slighter character than any of the author’s later works, and does not require lengthened notice.  In Godfrey Cass we have again, though largely modified, the type of character in which self is the main object of regard, and in which, therefore, with much that is likeable, and even, for the circumstances in which it has grown up, estimable, there is little depth, truth, or steadfastness.  Repentance, and, so far as it is possible, restoration, come to him mainly through the silent ministration of a purer and better nature than his own: but the self-pleasing of the past has brought about that which no repentance can fully reverse or restore.  Even on the surface this is shown; for Eppie, unowned and neglected, can never become his daughter.  But — far beyond and beneath this — we have here, and elsewhere throughout the author’s works, indicated to us one of the most solemn, and, at the same time, most certain truths of our existence: that there are forms of accepted and fostered evil so vital that no repentance can fully blot them out from the present or the future of life.  No turning away from the accursed thing, no discipline, no futurity near or far, can ever place Arthur Donnithorne or Godfrey Cass alongside Dinah Morris or Adam Bede.  Their irreversible part of self-worship precludes them, by the very laws of our being, from the highest and broadest achievement of life and destiny.

Leaving for the present ‘Romola,’ as in many respects more directly linking itself with George Eliot’s great poetic effort, ‘The Spanish Gypsy,’ we turn for a little to ‘Felix Holt,’ the next of her English tales.  It would be perhaps natural to select, from among the characters here presented to us, in illustration of life consciously attuning itself to the highest aim irrespective of any end save that aim itself, one or other of the two in whom this is most palpably presented to us — Felix himself or Esther Lyon.  We prefer, however, selecting Harold Transome, certainly one of the most difficult and one of the most strikingly wrought out conceptions, not only in the works of George Eliot, but in modern fiction.

Harold, we believe, is not a general favourite with the modern public, any more than he was with his own contemporaries.  He has none of those lovablenesses which make Arthur Donnithorne so attractive; and at first sight nothing of that uncompromising sense of right which characterises Adam Bede.  He comes before us apparently no more than a clearheaded, hard, shrewd, successful man of the world, greatly alive to his own interests and importance, and with no particular principles to boast of.

How does it come that this man, when over and over again, in great things and in small, two paths lie before him to choose, always chooses the truer and better of the two?  When Felix attempts to interfere in the conduct of his election, even while resenting the interference as impertinent, he sets himself honestly to attempt to arrest the wrong.  He buys Christian’s secret; but it is to reveal it to her whom it enables, if so she shall choose, to dislodge himself from the position which has been the great object of his desires and efforts.  By simply allowing the trial and sentence of Felix to take their course, he would, to all appearance, strengthen the possibility that by marriage to Esther his position shall be maintained, with the further joy of having that “white new-winged dove” thenceforth by his side.  He comes forward as witness on behalf of Felix, and gives his evidence fairly, truly, and in such guise as makes it tell most favourably for the accused, and at the same time against himself; and, last and most touching of all, it is after he knows the full depth of the humiliation in which his mother’s sin has for life involved him, that his first exhibition of tenderness, sympathy, and confidence towards that poor stricken heart and blighted life comes forth.  How comes it that this “well-tanned man of the world” thus always chooses the higher and more difficult right; and does this in no excitement or enthusiasm, but coolly, calculatingly, with clear forecasting of all the consequences, and fairly entitled to assume that these shall be to his own peril or detriment?

We cannot assign this seeming anomaly to that undefinable something called the instinct of the gentleman,
 
so specially recognised in the elder and younger Debarry, as a reality and power in life.  To say nothing of the fact that this instinct deals primarily with questions of feeling, and only indirectly and incidentally with questions of moral right, Harold Transome, alike congenitally and circumstantially, could scarcely by possibility have been animated by it even in slight degree, nor does it ever betray its presence in him through those slight but graceful courtesies of life which are pre-eminently the sphere of its manifestation.  Equally untenable is the hypothesis which ascribes these manifestations of character wholly to the influence of a nature higher than his own appealing to him — that of Felix Holt, the glorious old Dissenter, or Esther Lyon.  Such appeals can have any avail only when in the nature appealed to there remains the capability to recognise that right is greater than success or joy, and the moral power of will to act on that recognition.  In the fact that Harold’s nature does respond to these appeals we have the clue to the apparent anomaly his character presents.  We see that, howsoever overlaid by temperament and restrained by circumstance, the noblest capability in man still survives and is active in him.  He
can
choose the right which imperils his own interests, because it
is
the right; he
can
set his back on the wrong which would advantage himself, because it
is
the wrong.  That he does this coolly, temperately, without enthusiasm, with full, clear forecasting of all the consequences, is only saying that he is Harold Transome still.  That he does so choose when the forecast probabilities are all against those objects which the mere man of the world most desires, proves that under that hard external crust dwells as essential a nobleness as any we recognise in Felix Holt.  There is an inherent strength and manliness in Harold Transome to which Arthur Donnithorne or Godfrey Cass can never attain.

Few things in the literary history of the age are more puzzling than the reception given to ‘Romola’ by a novel-devouring public.  That the lovers of mere sensationalism should not have appreciated it, was to be fully expected.  But to probably the majority of readers, even of average intelligence and capability, it was, and still is, nothing but a weariness.  With the more thoughtful, on the other hand, it took at once its rightful place, not merely as by far the finest and highest of all the author’s works, but as perhaps the greatest and most perfect work of fiction of its class ever till then produced.

Of its artistic merits we do not propose to speak in detail.  But as a historical reproduction of an epoch and a life peculiarly difficult of reproduction, we do not for a moment hesitate to say that it has no rival, except, perhaps, — and even that at a distance, — Victor Hugo’s incomparably greatest work, ‘Nôtre Dame de Paris.’  It is not that we
see
as in a panorama the Florence of the Medicis and Savonarola, — we live, we move, we feel as if actors in it.  Its turbulence, its struggles for freedom and independence, its factions with their complicated transitions and changes, its conspiracies and treasons, its classical jealousies and triumphs, — we feel ourselves mixed up with them all.  Names historically immortal are made to us familiar presences and voices.  Its nobles and its craftsmen alike become to us as friends or foes.  Its very buildings — the Duomo and the Campanile, and many another — rise in their stateliness and their grace before those who have never been privileged to see them, clear and vivid as the rude northern houses that daily obtrude on our gaze.

So distinct and all-pervading, in this great work, is what we are maintaining to be the central moral purpose of all the author’s works, that it can scarcely escape the notice of the most superficial reader.  Affirmatively and negatively, in Romola and Tito — the two forms of illustration to some extent combined in Savonarola — the constant, persistent, unfaltering utterance of the book is, that the only true worth and greatness of humanity lies in its pursuit of the highest truth, purity, and right, irrespective of every issue, and in exclusion of every meaner aim; and that the true debasement and hopeless loss of humanity lies in the path of self-pleasing.  The form of this work, the time and country in which the scene is laid, and the selection of one of the three great actors in it, leads the author more definitely than in almost any of those which preceded it to connect her moral lesson, not merely with Christianity as a religious faith, but with that Church which, as called by the name of Christ, howsoever fallen away from its “first love,” is still, in the very fact of its existence, a witness for Him.  While, on the other hand, through many of its subordinate characters, we have the broad catholic truth kept ever before us, that, irrespective of all formal profession or creed, voluntary acceptance of a higher life-law than the seeking our own interests, pleasure, or will, is, according to its degree, life’s best and highest fulfilment; and thus we trace Him who “pleased not Himself” as the life and the light of the world, even when that world may be least formally acknowledging Him.