CHAPTER I.
EARLY LIFE.
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MARY ANN EVANS, as her father recorded in his
diary, was born at Arbury Farm, at five o'clock in
the morning of 22nd November 1819. [She called herself Marian.] Her father,
Robert Evans, was son of George Evans, a builder
and carpenter in Derbyshire. The family had migrated
thither from Northop in Flintshire. Robert Evans
was brought up to his father's business, and improved
his position by remarkable qualities. He possessed
great vigour both of mind and body, and was one
of the men to whom love of good work is a religion.
Once, when two labourers were waiting for a third to
enable them to carry a heavy ladder, he took the
whole weight upon his own shoulders, and astonished
them by carrying it to its destination without help.
He had also the keen eye of a skilful workman, and was
especially famous for a power of calculating with
singular accuracy the quantity of timber in a standing
tree. He acquired the highest character for integrity
and thorough devotion to his employers' interests.
His extensive knowledge in very varied practical
departments, as his daughter says, "made his services
valued through several counties. He had large knowledge
of mines, of plantations, of various branches of
valuation and measurement--of all that is essential to
the management of large estates." He was regarded
as a unique land-agent, and was able by giving his
own services to save the special fees usually paid by
landowners for expert opinions. His education had
been imperfect, and this led to some self-distrust and
"submissiveness in his domestic relations." The last
peculiarity is reflected in the character of Mr. Garth
in Middlemarch; and Mr. Garth and Adam Bede are
obviously in some degree representative of the same
type--one, it is to be feared, which has not become
commoner since his time. About 1799 Robert Evans
was agent to Mr. Francis Newdigate of Kirk Hallam
in Derbyshire, under whom he also held a farm. In
1806, upon the death of Sir Roger Newdigate, Francis
Newdigate inherited a life interest in the Arbury
estate in Warwickshire, and Evans accompanied him
thither in his old capacity. Colonel Newdigate, son
of Francis, was much impressed by the merits of his
father's agent, and through the colonel's influence
Evans became agent to various other great landowners
in the district. As became his position, Robert Evans
was a sturdy Tory. He shared the patriotic sentiment
of the days of Nelson and Wellington, and held that
a revolutionary fanatic was a mixture of fool and
scoundrel. "I was accustomed," says his daughter,
"to hear him utter the word 'Government' in a tone
that charged it with awe and made it part of my
effective religion in contrast with the word 'rebel,'
which seemed to carry the stamp of evil in its syllables,
and, lit by the fact that Satan was the first rebel,
made an argument dispensing with more detailed
inquiry." "Government," for practical purposes,
meant the great landowners, who had good reasons
for returning his respect. One of them requires a
moment's notice.
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Sir Roger Newdigate, [See The Cheverels of Cheverel Manor, by Lady
Newdigate-Newdegate, 1898.] the previous owner of Arbury,
was a typical specimen of the more cultivated country
gentleman of his day. In early life he had made the
"grand tour," and had brought back ancient marbles
and architectural drawings. He afterwards accepted
the active duties of his position. He represented
the University of Oxford for thirty years (1750-1780)
as a high Tory. He was an owner of collieries and a
promoter of canals. He built a school and a poorhouse
for the parish in which Arbury Park is situated--Chilvers-Coton,
near Nuneaton. He rebuilt Arbury
House, which stood on the site of an ancient priory,
in the "Gothic style" and adorned it with works of
art and family portraits by Romney and Reynolds.
His name at least is familiar to all Oxford men by
the prize poem which he founded just before his
death. The conditions prescribed by him for the
competition show as much sense as can be expected
from the founder of a prize poem. There were to be
no compliments to himself, and the length of the poems
was to be limited to fifty lines. Horace and King
David, as he remarked, had succeeded in confining
their noblest compositions within that length, and the
quality of the future prize poems would probably not
be such as to make us desire more of them than of
the psalms or odes. Sir Roger died thirteen years
before the birth of Evans's daughter; but certain
family stories in which he was concerned were handed
down to her, and, as we shall see, suggested one of her
most finished pieces of work. Robert Evans's first
wife, Harriet Poynton, had been for "many years,"
as her epitaph says, "the friend and servant of the
family of Arbury." She had married Evans in 1801,
and died in 1809, leaving two children. In 1813
Evans married a woman of rather superior position,
Christiana Pearson, by whom he had three children--Christiana,
Isaac, and Mary Ann--Christiana being
about five, and Isaac about three years older than the
youngest child. In March 1820, when Mary Ann
was four months old, the Evanses moved to Griff, "a
charming red brick, ivy-covered house on the Arbury
estate." It was to be the child's home for the first
twenty-one years of her life.
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The impressions made upon the girl during these
years are sufficiently manifest in the first series of her
novels. Were it necessary to describe the general characteristics
of English country life, they would enable
the "graphic" historian to give life and colour to the
skeleton made from statistical and legal information.
The Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, Silas Marner,
and The Mill on the Floss, probably give the most
vivid picture now extant of the manners and customs
of the contemporary dwellers in the midland counties
of England. There is a temptation to press the
likeness further. It is a favourite amusement of
readers to identify characters in novels with historical
individuals. They sometimes seem to think
that the question whether (for example) Caleb Garth
"was" Robert Evans can be answered by a simple
Yes or No, like the question whether Junius was
Philip Francis. In reality, of course, it is generally
impossible to say precisely how far the portrait may
have been studied from a single model, or modified
intentionally, or by blending with more or less conscious
reminiscences of other originals. George Eliot
(as it will be convenient to call her hereafter from
her name in letters), like all good novelists, generally
avoided direct delineation of individuals; while, on
the other hand, it is probable enough that she was
sometimes following the facts more closely than she
was herself aware. It is enough to say here that her
mother had a "considerable dash of the Mrs. Poyser
vein in her"; that her mother's family more or less
stood for the Dodsons in the Mill on the Floss; that
her relations to her brother resembled those of Maggie
to Tom Tulliver in the same novel; and that when
describing Celia and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch
she was more or less recalling her relations to her
elder sister Christiana. There is one person, however,
whom a novelist can hardly help revealing directly or
indirectly; and in the case of George Eliot the revelation
is unequivocal. There is no doubt, as we shall
see, that the Mill on the Floss is substantially autobiographical,
not, of course, a statement of facts, but
as a vivid embodiment of the early impressions and
the first stages of spiritual development. The scanty
framework of fact may be partly filled up from this
source.
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It is proper, however, at the present day to begin
from the physical "environment " of the organism
whose history we are to study. The Warwickshire
landscape is not precisely stimulating: and if the
county can boast of the greatest name in English
literature, it must be remembered that Shakespeare
had the good fortune to migrate to the centre of
intellectual activity at an early period. Though the
central watershed of England passes through the
country, it has no mountain ridges, and the streams
crawl off through modest undulations to more picturesque
districts. In her twenty-first year George
Eliot speaks of a little excursion in which she has (for
the first time apparently) "gazed on some--albeit the
smallest--of the 'everlasting hills,'" and has admired
"those noblest children of the earth--fine healthy
trees." She has seen, too, a fine parish church and
Lichfield Cathedral. Through her childhood she had
to put up with canals instead of rivers; and saw no
wilder open spaces than the decorous lawns of Arbury
Park. Far away in the north, the Brontë children--of
whom Charlotte, the eldest, was her senior by three
years--were spending their strange childhood in
Haworth, learning to worship Nature on the Yorkshire
moors, and to idealise the sturdy, crabbed, North-countrymen
into Rochesters and Heathcliffs. We may
speculate if we please upon the effects which might
have followed if the habitats of the two families could
have been exchanged. If we may trust their portrayers,
the fat midland pastures were hardly more
different from the Yorkshire moors than the stolid
farmers of Warwickshire from the rough population
of the West Riding.
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"Our midland plains," said George Eliot, "have
never lost their familiar expression and conservative
spirit for me; yet at every other mile, since I first
looked on them, some sign of world-wide change, some
new direction of human labour, has wrought itself
into what one may call the speech of the landscape."
The scenery, a monotonous succession of little ups
and downs, is of the kind which owes its interest to
its subordination to human society. In George
Eliot's writings, there are proofs enough of sensibility
to natural beauty, but the scenery is a background to
the actors; and there is no indication of such a passion
for her native district as Scott felt for his "honest grey
hills." The "midland plains" were "conservative,"
because they spoke of ancient order and peace; and
the opening pages of Felix Holt describe the scenery and
explain its significance. The traveller of those days,
seated by the side of one of Mr. Weller's colleagues,
whirling at the amazing speed of ten miles an hour across
the plain whence the waters flow to the Avon and the
Trent, had yet time to read many indications of
English life in the characteristic landscape. He saw
broad meadows with their long lines of willows marking
the water-courses; and cornfields divided by the
straggling hedgerows, economically wasteful but
beautiful with their bushes of hawthorn and dog-roses.
He came upon remote hamlets, abodes of dirt and
ignorance, each knowing of the world which lay beyond
its "own patch of earth and sky " only by intercourse
with "big, bold, gin-breathing tramps." But at times
also he passed through "trim cheerful villages," where
the cottage gardens bloomed with wall-flowers and
geraniums, and the blacksmith and the wheelwright
were plying their cheerful trades. Solid farmers were
jogging past from their comfortable homesteads, where
quaint yew-tree arbours were backed by the great
cornstacks. At intervals appeared the squires' statelier
mansions, embowered in the patrician trees of his
park, and hard by the gray churches with sleep-compelling
pews were the parsonages where the
squire's younger son was quartered, not yet prescient
of the "movement," and free at least from "too
much zeal." In such districts the eighteenth century
calm lingered pleasantly, and the ideal types represented
by Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of
Wakefield, or by Squire Western and Trulliber, might
still be recognized. A Sir Roger Newdigate had acquired
a taste, and here and there clerical calm was being
ruffled by Evangelical or Methodist agitation. But
the district was one of "protuberant optimists, sure
that Old England was the best of all possible countries,
and that if there were any facts which had not fallen
under their own observation they were facts not worth
observing." The traveller, it is true, might soon
come upon a very different scene. The coach would
emerge from the deep-rutted lanes into a village
"dingy with coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of
looms," or "would rattle over the pavement of a
manufacturing town, the scene of riots and trade-union
meetings." The land around him was blackened with
coal-pits, and the population was by no means convinced
that all change must be for the worse; and yet
these busy scenes seemed "to make but crowded nests
in the midst of the large-spaced, slow-moving life
of homestead and far-away cottages and oak-sheltered
parks." In the quiet agricultural region, squire and
parson, and the whole social machinery of which they
represented the mainspring, could still be accepted as
part of the unalterable system of things. The villager
was too ignorant even to conceive the possibility of
change; and if the farmer grumbled over the ruinous
results of peace, he retained his traditional
reverence for the old families, and looked with horror
upon proposals for the intrusion of railways or manufacturing
demands for free trade. If the upper social
stratum was aware that in the great towns there were
Radicals demanding the abolition of the House of
Lords and the confiscation of Church property, it
inferred that the demon of revolution had not been
completely exorcised, but could still hope that, with
the help of the great Duke, the evil spirit might be
confined to his proper region, and the British Constitution
be upheld as the pride and envy of the world.
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In due time George Eliot was to pourtray various
phases of the society around her, including the Radical
as well as the fine old Tory. In her childhood, of course,
she took the colouring of her surroundings. To the
infant the arrangements of its nursery are as unalterable
as the laws of the solar system and the existence
of any other order inconceivable. Her world was the
fireside of Griff; and if she had glimpses of the outside,
the views of Mr. Robert Evans represented
ultimate truth, or were taken as indisputable assertions
of matter of fact. He was fond of his little girl, and
took her for occasional outings in his gig, or on expeditions
to neighbouring country towns. The family
circle was small. Soon after her birth, her mother's
health became weak; the elder girl, Christiana, was
sent to school; and Mary Ann with her brother spent
part of every day at a dame-school close to their own
gates. She did not show any remarkable precocity,
though she was both a thoughtful and a very affectionate
and sensitive child. Her brother became
naturally the first object of her devotion, and devotion
to some one was throughout her life a marked need of
her nature. While still five years old, she went
through the experiences more or less idealized in the
Mill on the Floss, and more historically commemorated
in the series of sonnets called Brother and Sister. She
tells in the poems how she rambled with him through
the meadows; across the rivulet hidden by tangled
forget-me-nots; through the rookery and by the
"brown canal," where the barges seemed to bring intimations
of an unknown world beyond. In the copse,
there were traces of the "mystic gypsies," where Mr.
Petulengro perhaps had encamped, though when she
actually met him--if the narrative in the Mill on the
Floss be authentic history--he was a less romantic
being than we should judge from his behaviour in
Lavengro. Then, too, she had the wonderful adventure
of catching a perch by mistake, which suggests the inevitable
moral, namely, that "luck was with glory
wed." The early hero-worship of the little girl
running like a puppy after the slightly bigger brother
is simply and touchingly described. "School parted
us," she says; and she never found that childish world
again.
'But were another childish world my share,
I would be born a little sister there.'
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Her brother was sent to school when she was five
years old; and as her mother was still in bad health,
she was sent to join her sister at a school kept by a
Miss Lathom at Attleboro, a village only a mile or two
distant from Griff. She continued there for three or
four years, spending her Sundays at home. Her chief
memory of this part of her life was the difficulty of
getting a seat near the fireplace in cold weather. Her
health was low, it seems, and she suffered from the
nightly terrors which haunt delicate children, and which
she has ascribed to Gwendolen Harleth. "All her
soul," she said, "became a quivering fear." The other
pupils, however, made a pet of their small companion,
and she was not unhappy. She began to read such
books as then came in the way of children. In one of
them, called The Linnet's Life, she afterwards wrote a
few words, stating that it was the first present from
her father which she could remember, and recording
her early delight in its pages. She remembered, too,
her absorption in Aesop's Fables, and laughed heartily
over the pleasure she had taken in the humour of
"Mercury and the Statue Seller." A stray volume of
Joe Miller supplied her with anecdotes wherewith to
astonish her family. In those days children were less
distracted by miscellaneous scraps of print, and could
pore over the same thumbed and dogs-eared favourites.
In her eighth or ninth year she was sent to a larger
school, kept by a Miss Wallington at Nuneaton. Here
there were some thirty boarders, and she became especially
intimate with Miss Lewis, the principal governess.
Her passion for reading developed rapidly. A stray
Waverley came in her way; and when that was returned
to its owner before she had finished it, she began
writing out the story for herself, till her elders got it
back for her. She was fascinated by an extract from
Lamb's Captain Jackson even in an almanac; and among
her favourite books were Defoe's History of the Devil,
Pilgrim's Progress, and Rasselas. By this time it was
beginning to be understood that there was something
remarkable about the child. She excited the admiration
of the home-circle by acting charades with her
brother during the holidays; and if not a decided
"prodigy," was clearly capable of absorbing such intellectual
influences as could be found in Warwickshire.
In her thirteenth year she was transferred to a school
at Coventry. It was kept by two ladies named
Franklin, daughters of a Baptist minister, who had for
many years preached in a chapel at Coventry. He
lived in a house "almost exactly resembling that of
Rufus Lyon in Felix Holt." Lyon's character and some
of his little personal peculiarities were also suggested
by this original. George Eliot was always grateful to
the daughters for the excellence of their teaching.
She was at once recognized as the most promising of
their pupils. Her themes were kept for the private
edification of her teachers, instead of being read in the
class like those of her comrades. She had good
masters in French and German and music. She was
sometimes called upon to display her musical skill
before visitors, as the best performer in the school;
and obeyed with ready good humour, though suffering
agonies of shyness. The love of music generally
shows itself at an early age, but she had apparently
some difficulty in yielding to the passion. Three
years after leaving school, she attended an oratorio at
Coventry, and says in a letter that she thinks it will
be her last. She declares that she has "no soul for
music," and is a "tasteless person." She therefore is
not qualified to discuss the question of the "propriety
or lawfulness of such exhibitions of talent." For herself,
she would not regret if music were strictly confined
to purposes of worship; and cannot think that "a
pleasure that wishes the devotion of all the time and
powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an
expertness in so useless ... an accomplishment can be
quite pure and elevating in its tendency." The religious
theory is, as we shall see, characteristic; but it is
singular that a woman who was to find one of her
greatest delights in music, and who was already skilled
in the art, should think herself devoid of the capacity.
Two years later, indeed, she was moved to "hysterical
sobbing" by another oratorio. She was always diffident
and easily discouraged; and these reflections may mean
merely an attack of low spirits. Perhaps the want of
"soul" meant only the absence of a specific aptitude
for the musician's calling; or, possibly, the singing at
Coventry was out of tune. [Mr. W. A. White of New York has kindly shown me a
letter to another friend in which George Eliot speaks of the
same oratorio. It might be urged, she admits, that such
exhibitions show "the beautiful powers of the human voice
when carried to the highest point of improveability." But such
reasoning would compel us to admit "opera-dancing, horse-racing,
and even intemperance."]
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George Eliot left school finally at the end of 1835.
Her mother was failing in health, and died in the
summer of 1836, after a long illness, during which she
was nursed by her daughters. In the following spring
the elder daughter, Christiana, married Mr. Edward
Clarke, a surgeon in Warwickshire, and Mary Ann
undertook the charge of her father's household at Griff.
She set her mind to the work, and became, it is said, an
"exemplary housewife." She also exerted herself in
promoting various charitable works, and continued to
study Italian, German, and music. Her brother was
now beginning to take a share in their father's business;
and found his chief relaxation from hard work
in hunting--an amusement which was not in his sister's
line. He had also become a High Churchman, whereas
she was strongly Evangelical. Although, therefore,
the family was bound by ties of warm affection, she
found little sympathy in her favourite occupations. She
lived in intellectual solitude, conscious of abilities for
which she could find no definite outlet, and with no
one in her immediate circle capable of guiding or even
appreciating her pursuits. When long afterwards an
autobiography was suggested to her, she replied: "The
only thing I should much care to dwell on [in regard
to this period] would be the absolute despair I suffered
from of ever being able to do anything. No one
could ever have felt greater despair, and a knowledge
of this might be a help to some other struggler." On
the other hand, she added with a smile, "it might only
lead to an increase of bad writing."
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The account of George Eliot's school days may perhaps
suggest that the state of female education in
Warwickshire was not altogether so bad as energetic
modern reformers are apt to assume. There is, it is
true, something of a quaint old-fashioned colouring
about the system. Her comrades at Miss Franklin's
thought that she was competent "to get up something
in the way of a clothing club"; and beyond that
limited prospect, they may possibly have dared to hope
that she might develop into a Mrs. Chapone or Miss
Carter--capable of writing letters "upon the improvement
of the human mind," or possibly, in time, of
translating Epictetus. She was not, indeed, competent
to take a first-class in a University examination, or to
enter any career for which such honours qualified the
nobler sex; and yet, if we really believed what we are
so often told, that the test of a good education is not
the stock of knowledge acquired, but the stimulus
given to mental activity, the schooling seems to have
been successful enough. Her intellectual curiosity
was roused, though not yet fixed upon any definite
object. From the correspondence which she kept up
with her early governess, Miss Lewis, it seems that
she read a great deal of miscellaneous literature during
sixteen years at Griff. My mind, she says in 1839,
presents "an assemblage of disjointed specimens of
history, ancient and modern; scraps of poetry picked
up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and
Milton; newspaper topics; morsels of Addison and
Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology, and chemistry;
Reviews and metaphysics--all arrested and
petrified and smothered by the fast-thickening everyday
accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and
household cares and vexations. How deplorably and
unaccountably evanescent are our frames of mind, as
various as forms and hues of the summer clouds!"
For a girl of nineteen, both the style and the variety
of intellectual interests indicated are remarkable. A
genius, it may be suggested, can thrive anywhere;
and so long as it is not absolutely fettered, can derive
nourishment from any set of materials that may come
in its way. There is, however, a special characteristic
of George Eliot which already appears. A strong
imaginative impulse is generally developed early; it
is an overmastering faculty which forces its possessor
into activity often before knowledge or serious thought
has accumulated; draws romances, epic poems, and
dramas from children in their teens; and suggests
that not only the material surroundings, but even the
storage of intellectual accomplishments is but an
accidental stimulus to the innate creative power. Charlotte
and Emily Brontë, for example, informed the
world around them with so much passion and imagination,
that we fancy that any other circumstances would
have served for an incentive to powers only waiting to
be set at liberty. George Eliot, diffident in character,
and reflective as much as imaginative in intellect,
developed slowly, and was for many years ignorant
of her own truest powers. She had a full share of the
feminine docility, which is so charming to teachers--especially
of the other sex. Women really enjoy
lectures, strange as the taste appears to the male at
all ages. Even a clever boy generally regards his
schoolmaster as a natural enemy, and begins as a rebel.
The girl takes the master at his own valuation, or
something more, and has an innocent belief that
lessons give really desirable information. George
Eliot was clearly of this way of thinking; and though
she must have been aware of possessing unusual
ability, she was anxious to bow submissively to
the best instructors. At Griff or in her circle at
Coventry no very brilliant intellectual light was
shining, nor did even a very clear understanding
prevail as to the real lights of contemporary thought.
People had not taken to reading the last German
authorities; and had vague enough impressions as to
the course of European speculation. Miss Lewis and
the Miss Franklins were ardent Evangelicals; and the
Evangelical school of the day, though not given to
philosophy, representing at least the most socially
active party in the Church, was so far attractive to her
intellectually. It meant at any rate a protest against
stagnation. Then, moreover, through life she had
very deep religious sentiments, and for the present
associated them with the Evangelical dogma. She
was greatly impressed by the wife of her father's
younger brother, Mrs. Samuel Evans, a Methodist
preacher, of whom I shall presently have to speak
again. "I shall not only suffer, but be delighted to
receive the word of exhortation," she writes to her
aunt in 1839, "and I beg you not to withhold it."
The most curious of her letters in these years is one
to Miss Lewis, discussing with a quaint gravity the
ethics of reading fiction. She is good enough to admit
that certain standard works must be read--Scott, for
example, and Don Quixote--otherwise one would
not understand common allusions. Shakespeare, too,
is inevitable, though one must be as nice as the bee
"to suck nothing but honey from his pages." A
teacher, too, may consider it desirable to read fiction
by way of tasting for her pupils. But it is dangerous
to make trial on oneself of a cup because it is suspected
of being poisonous. She herself has suffered from the
poison. Her early reading of novels, lent by kind
friends, led her to castle-building, which she apparently
thinks a pernicious habit. No one, of course,
"ever dreamed of recommending" novels to children;
but men and women are but children of a larger
growth. They cannot be sure at any age of resisting
the evil influences. Nothing can be learned from
novels which cannot be better learned from history
and when she is driven to tears by the impossibility
of learning more than a fraction of realities, can she
"have any time to spend on things that never
existed"? It is plain that in those days aesthetic
prophets had not begun to expound the two relations
of art and morality; and many young ladies of nineteen
at the present day would consider themselves
competent to open the eyes of this didactic young
person. Her views changed in good time; but the
moral earnestness which prompted these rather crude
remarks was a permanent characteristic. Meanwhile,
if her scruples hindered her from acquiring a wide
knowledge upon the novels of the day, she was
spending her time to better purpose in the miscellaneous
reading already noticed. Wordsworth, it may
be observed, was an early favourite to whom she
remained faithful through life, and appealed to her
as, shortly before, he had appealed, though still more
strongly, to J. S. Mill. She was much impressed, too,
by Young's Night Thoughts, an edifying work which
in later years she criticized with the severity of a
revolted disciple. Her studies naturally took a theological
direction. She begins with Hannah More and
Wilberforce, and is presently interested by the controversies
aroused by the Oxford movement. She
cannot make up her mind as to the solution. She reads
an essay on "Schism" by Professor Hoppus of the
London University, and the Evangelical Milner's Church
History. She compares their views with those of The
Portrait of an English Churchman, by W. Gresley, an
early champion of "Tractarianism," and finds that the
Tracts themselves show a "confused appreciation of
the great doctrine of justification." They approach too
nearly to the Church marked by the "prophetical
epithets" of "the scarlet beast" and the "Mystery of
Iniquity." The authors, it is true, are zealous, learned,
and devoted, but "Satan is too crafty to commit his
cause into the hands of those who have nothing to
recommend them to approbation." She is pleased,
however, by the Lyra Apostolica and the "sweet
poetry" of the Christian Year. She is presently much
impressed by the work upon Ancient Christianity and
the Oxford Tracts, by Isaac Taylor, "one of the most
eloquent, acute, and pious of writers." She has
"gulped it in a most reptile-like fashion," but must
"chew it thoroughly to facilitate its assimilation
with her mental frame." She is attracted, too, by
the "stirring eloquence " of The Great Teacher, written
by John Harris, a popular writer of the time, with
liberal tendencies, who was afterwards principal of
an Independent College. These studies, it must be
remembered, represent her state of mind before the
completion of her twenty-first year. She was soon
to come under new influences. Meanwhile she was
already ambitious enough to propose to make a
practical application of her reading, and planned a
"chart" of ecclesiastical history, with columns showing
the dates of the principal personages, events,
schisms, and so forth, with perhaps one for the
fulfilment of the prophecies. Happily a chart was
published by some one else which extinguished hers,
and she turned to other studies. A different result of
her meditations was a poem, which, though not her first
attempt at poetry, was the first published. It is a farewell
to the world, of which this is a specimen:
"Books that have been to me as chests of gold,
Which, miserlike, I secretly have told,
And for them love, health, friendship, peace have sold,
Farewell!
Blest Volume! whose clear truth-writ page once known
Fades not before heaven's sunshine and hell's moan,
To thee I say not, of earth's gifts alone,
Farewell!
Then shall my new-born senses find new joy,
New sounds, new sights, my ears and eyes employ,
Nor fear that word that here brings sad alloy,
Farewell!"
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| 10 |
The editor of the Christian Observer, in which the
lines appeared (January 1840), adds a note to the
effect that in heaven we shall be able to do without
the Bible. The verses, however, if suspected of this
trifling heresy, show religious feeling much more
distinctly than poetical power, in which they resemble
most sacred poetry.
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