CHAPTER X.
FELIX HOLT.
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George Eliot had first become known as a writer (by
"Amos Barton") in January 1857. When the concluding
part of Romola appeared within six years, she had
reached the first rank among her contemporaries. She
had published within that time five novels of the highest
excellence, and it is at least doubtful whether she was
ever again to reach an equally high mark. The effort
had been very great, and for the next two years she
seems to have allowed her mind to lie fallow. Then
she took up a new book, of which I shall have to speak
presently, although nothing was published until 1866.
In November 1863 the Leweses settled at the Priory,
21 North Bank, Regent's Park. This house came to
be especially associated with her memory. She
did not go out into society; but many people were
attracted by the fame of the great authoress, and
found admission to her house. Gradually she came
to hold a Sunday afternoon reception, frequented by
worshippers of genius and by a large circle of friends,
of whom only the more intimate had the privilege of
seeing her upon other days. It is needless to say that
at meetings of that kind--in England at least, for we
are told that in France things are better--there is
often a painful sense of awkwardness. The shyness
generated by the desire to prove that your homage is
genuine, and that you are so brilliant a person that
it is also worth having, gives one of those painful
sensations which is not least among the minor miseries
of life. It may, I think, be said that the evil was
reduced to a minimum on those occasions at the
Priory. George Lewes, in the first place, was
unquenchable. He was always full of anecdote and
vivacious repartee; and while more serious interviews
were taking place at the centre of the circle, there
would be a little knot on the periphery which was a
focus of laughter and good-humoured fun. It was a
rather awful moment for the neophyte when he was
presented to the quiet and dignified lady seated in
her armchair, to stammer out the appropriate remarks
which sometimes failed to present themselves before
he had to make room for a new comer; and if the
company was numerous, any general conversation was
impossible. George Eliot's gentle voice was not
calculated, if she had desired such a result, to hold the
attention of a roomful of receptive admirers. But if
rainy weather had limited the audience, and the tentative
sparks of conversation had been fanned into life,
she could be as charming as any admirer could desire.
Her personal appearance was intellectually attractive,
and had a peculiar pathetic charm. She looked fragile,
overweighted perhaps by thought, and with traces
of the depression of which she so often complains in
her letters. Her abundant hair, auburn-brown, in
later years streaked with grey, was covered by a kind
of lace mantilla. She could not be called beautiful.
She was said to be like Savonarola, of whose face she
remarks: "It was strong-featured, and owed all its
refinement to habits of mind and rigid discipline of
the body." His gaze impressed Romola because it
was one "in which simple human fellowship expressed
itself as a strongly-felt bond." That at least might be
applied to George Eliot. Her features were strongly
marked, with a rather large mouth and jaw; her eyes
a gray-blue, with very variable expression; her hands
were finely formed; her voice low and very musical--"a
contralto," it is said, in singing; and the whole appearance
expressive of a singular combination of power
with intense sensibility. The best likeness is that by
her friend Sir Frederick Burton, now in the National
Portrait Gallery. If her talk might be at times a
little too solemn for the frivolous, she could brighten
into genuine playfulness, and, on occasion, into flashes
of hearty scorn directed against the unlucky cynic.
If the incense offered was not always of the finest
quality, there was no want either of dignity or gentleness
in the recipient. And nobody could watch Lewes
on such occasions without being struck by the cordial
and generous devotion of a man not too much given
to an excess of veneration. Her belief in him was
equally visible in her manner and every allusion to
his work.
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It is perhaps not altogether healthy for any human
being to live in an atmosphere from which every
unpleasant draught of chilling or bracing influence is
so carefully excluded. Lewes performed the part of
the censor who carefully prevents an autocrat from
seeing that his flatterers are not the mouthpiece of
the whole human race. "It is my rule," said George
Eliot, "very strictly observed, not to read the criticisms
on my writings. For years I have found this
abstinence necessary to preserve me from that
discouragement as an artist which ill-judged praise no
less than ill-judged blame tends to produce in me.
For far worse than any verdict as to the proportion
of good and evil in our work is the painful impression
that we exist for a public which has no discernment
of good and evil." She spoke with a contempt for
the average quality of contemporary criticism which--as
the critics whom we now call contemporary belong
to a different generation--I might perhaps venture to
approve. But it might be an interesting question for
an essayist whether this rule of mental hygiene be
really sound. Since the days when Pope writhed
under the insults of Grub Street, sensitive authors
have called upon gods and men to pity and avenge
them. Their meanings seem to be rather unmanly.
Which is the proper comment upon the supposed
slaughter of Keats: Shelley's denunciation of the
"deaf and murderous viper" who could crown
"Life's early cup with such a draught of woe":
or Byron's comment--
"'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be Huffed out by an article"?
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I fancy that in these days, when authors subscribe to
agencies for newspaper cuttings, the general verdict
would be in favour of Byron. It would be regarded,
that is, as a contemptible weakness to be thrown off
one's balance by a "scathing" review. Yet, it may
be asked, if one really despises, is one bound to read?
It is unpleasant to be insulted even by a fool, and
why expose oneself to a pain which can have no
good results? Such abnormally sensitive poets as
Tennyson and Rossetti suffered cruelly from harsh
criticism, and it is not clear that they gained anything
from reading it. Would they not have done better
if they could have adopted George Eliot's method?
After all, what does a real genius ever learn from a
critic? There is, it seems to me, only one good piece
of advice which a critic can give to an author, namely,
that the author should dare to be himself. When he
proceeds to tell the author what the self really is,
he is generally mistaken, and is speaking upon a topic
upon which he is presumably worse informed than
the person to whom he speaks. George Eliot worked
upon her own theories, right or wrong; and considering
the constant diffidence and depression from
which she suffered, it is likely enough that a study of
the critics would only have discouraged her without
at all directing her into a better path. Against this,
it may perhaps be urged that George Eliot's talent
scarcely included the rare gift of a just appreciation
of her own limitations. It is often, and, no doubt,
justly said, that one of Jane Austen's especial merits
is that she never let herself be distracted from the
sphere in which she showed unsurpassed felicity.
When she was requested to write a romance to illustrate
the history of the "august house of Coburg,"
she judiciously declined, and indeed refrained from
less palpably absurd divagations. Now George Eliot,
as I shall presently have to remark, showed what
most people have thought to be--if not so great a
misconception, still--a conspicuously erroneous estimate
of her own special peculiarities. Perhaps, though she
closed her ears to "deaf and murderous vipers," she
listened with too much complacency to adoring and
"genial" critics who collected her "wise, witty, and
tender sayings," and took her for a great poet
and philosopher as well as for a first-rate novelist.
I will not affect to sum up the argument. It is only
worth remarking that most novelists who have given
effective portraits of human passion have lived in the
world which they described, and that some characteristics
of George Eliot's later work must be connected
with the secluded life which circumstances and her
temperament made congenial. She looked upon outside
affairs from a certain distance; and though
Lewes's eager interest in all manner of contemporary
controversies kept her in touch with the more
thoughtful minds of the day, she had little opportunity
for direct familiarity with the manners and
customs of society.
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The year 1866 was marked by two new literary
ventures, in both of which Lewes took some part.
The Pall Mall Gazette was started at the beginning
of the year, and the first number of the Fortnightly
Review, of which Lewes was the first editor, came out
in the following May. Both attracted many able
writers, and the adoption of signed articles by the
review introduced a novel practice in English journalism.
George Eliot contributed a few articles to both,
and was interested in the attempt to raise the standard
of periodical writing. She was only distracted, however,
for the moment from more serious work. The
notes in her diary on September 6, 1864: "I am
reading about Spain, and trying a drama on a subject
that has fascinated me--have written the prologue,
and am beginning the first act. But I have little
hope of making anything satisfactory." By the end
of the year she had written three acts. On 21st
February 1865 she describes herself as "ill and very
miserable: George has taken my drama away from
me"--the consequence, obviously, and not the cause
of her misery. The drama was put aside for some
time, and by the end of March she had begun her next
novel, Felix Holt. It was finished in a little more than
a year. Smith, it seems, declined to give £5000 for
it--the sum presumably fixed by Lewes; but Blackwood
accepted the terms, and she now returned to
him for the rest of her life, though without any breach
of friendship with Smith. The novel was written amid
the usual fits of depression, and with the same elaborate
care as its predecessors. "I finished writing," she
says, "after days and nights of throbbing and
palpitation--chiefly, I suppose, from a nervous excitement
which I was not strong enough to support well." She
had been painstaking in more ways than one. She
went through the Times of 1832-3 at the British
Museum in order to correct her childish memories
of the period. She is in "a horrible fidget" about
certain assumptions in the story. She wants especially
to have an answer to two questions: first, whether
after the Treaty of Amiens "the seizure and imprisonment
of civilians was exceptional, and whether it was
continued throughout the war"; and secondly, whether
in 1833 a person sentenced to transportation without
hard labour might be set at large on his arrival in the
colony. The story again involved some complex legal
relations. She began, it seems, by reading Sugden,
but happily relieved herself from the need of getting
up the law of real property by committing the
problem to Mr. Frederic Harrison. The right to an
estate must be suddenly transferred to a young
woman; but the ordinary novelist's device of a discovery
that her birth was legitimate is not applicable.
The change must be effected by the death of somebody
who has himself no interest in the matter; and both
the actual possessor and the person to whom the right
passes must be left in ignorance that the title to the
estate will be affected by the death. How this is
brought about may be discovered from the story itself.
Mr. Harrison's law is said, as we can well believe, to
be perfectly correct. Probably the average reader
will be quite content to take it as correct without
consulting Sugden. Meanwhile, he is rather bored
by the fear that unless he clearly understands both
the law and the facts, he will lose something essential
to the point of the story. When one reads Wilkie
Collins or Gaboriau, one is content to have a secret
carefully hidden, and bits of apparent irrelevance
introduced, because the chief pleasure is to consist in
guessing at the connection and admiring the ingenuity
with which the fragments of the puzzle are to be
pieced together at the end. But in a work of such
serious intention as Felix Holt, the mystery is felt to
be teasing, and we should be more really interested if we
were taken into the author's confidence at once. The
genuine artist ought to be above the "long-lost
heir" trick or the complicated substitutes for the
old-fashioned device.
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This worrying perplexity which runs through the
whole partly explains the inferiority of Felix Holt to
its predecessors. But another change is more important.
We have got back from Florence of the
Renaissance to the English midlands during the
Reform Bill agitation, and for that we may be thankful.
But George Eliot is no longer drawing upon the
old memories of Griff. She turns to account an election
riot which, we are told, she had seen in her schooldays
at Nuneaton; but she is thinking mainly of the
Coventry time. Mrs. Poyser and her dairy have
vanished, and with them the old-world charm. We
have no longer the peculiar glamour which invested
the former stories; the sense of looking at the little
world through the harmonizing atmosphere of childish
memories and affections; or of becoming for the nonce
denizens of a social order, narrow enough in its
interests, but yet wholesome, kindly, and contented.
We have some of the old-fashioned country gentry
and parsons who fill the subordinate parts satisfactorily
enough; but the principal interest is to be in
the county-town of Treby Magna, just waking to the
consciousness of the great political movement outside,
and with little enough that was romantic about its
lawyers, tradesmen, or manufacturers. Canals and
coal-mines and a saline spring are beginning to rouse
it from its "old-fashioned, grazing, brewing, wool-packing,
cheese-loading life"; and the change only
seems to reveal thoroughly prosaic, not to say vulgar
and stupefying characteristics. There is no suggestion
of any lingering fondness for an order which is essentially
mean as well as obsolete. Naturally, therefore,
we are expected to sympathise with Felix Holt the
Radical, who is trying to stir up this stagnant pool.
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George Eliot, in fact, is now occupied with the
problem which is already suggested by her previous
works. She had strong conservative tendencies, and
a dislike for violent and onesided reforms. Hitherto
she had emphasized her sympathy for the higher
purposes and aspirations which were hidden under the
commonplace and even superstitious modes of life and
thought. But, after all, she is also fully convinced that
intellectual progress and a larger culture are essential
and important; and her tenderness for the past must
not be allowed to sanction reactionary tendencies.
Romola has already been troubled by the problem in
one phase, and it is now to be presented to us in
various shapes. Young men or women, troubled
with active intellects, have to rouse from their comfortable
slumbers and to provide themselves with an
ideal; they will become missionaries of a new creed,
and have the usual difficulties of the position. If
they quarrel with the past too contemptuously, they
may become mere visionary fanatics; and if too much
inclined to compromise, they may sacrifice their aspirations
and yield to the benumbing influence of
respectability. The ordinary novelist is content with
telling us how a young couple contrive to come together
without bothering themselves at all about the
Universe or their relation to the general progress of
humanity. George Eliot, though her interests in
philosophical questions may be a little too intrusive,
may still deserve gratitude for introducing a new
motive, and showing us the fate of young people affected
by the unusual weakness of preoccupation with ideals.
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Felix Holt represents an experiment upon this
theme. He is an admirable but, I fear it must be
admitted, a far from satisfactory representative of his
breed. He is a radical of the days of 1832; and
George Eliot, as we have seen, had been refreshing her
memories of that period by reading the old newspapers,
and had been surprised by the strength of the
language about "bloated pluralists" and so forth.
We should naturally have expected that the eloquence
of Felix Holt would have reflected the same sentiment.
He is a working man, and had managed to be a student
at Glasgow, where there was plenty of good fiery
radicalism; and, in fact, he starts with a hearty contempt
for the upper classes, and thinks a Whig no
better than a Tory in disguise. Such a man might
swear by Cobbett or by Owen, and would probably
take his religious views from Paine's Age of Reason.
He would be of the stuff of which the Chartists were
soon to be made; would believe that the millennium
was to be introduced by the famous six points; and
would certainly favour the abolition of the monarchy
and the House of Lords and the confiscation of Church
property. George Eliot might have shown us how
such doctrines were a natural, though it might be, a
too precipitate outcome of really philanthropic and
generous feelings in a man of the day. Ebenezer
Elliott, the "Tyrtaeus" of the Anti-Corn Law movement,
and Thomas Cooper, the Chartist poet, were
men in Felix Holt's position, who shared his vehemence
and came to be alienated from the violent
section of their allies. Felix Holt, however, has to
be a model young man, and therefore he sees from the
first the errors of contemporary zealots. When a
self-styled radical orator addresses a public meeting
and demands "universal suffrage," and the other points
of the Charter, Felix appeals to reason. Systems of
suffrage and the rest, he tells the mob, are engines:
the force that is to work them must come from men's
passions. No scheme will do good, therefore, unless
the power behind it takes a right direction. The
"steam that is to work the engines" is public opinion,
that is, "the ruling belief in society about what is
right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what
is shameful." Nothing, therefore, is to be expected
from a party which sanctions bribery and corruption.
When Felix makes a personal application of this lofty
doctrine by pointing out that the agent of his own
party is an embodiment of corruption, he naturally
produces loud cheers; but the doctrine itself, however
philosophical, would hardly have pleased his audience.
Soon after the appearance of the novel George
Eliot published in Blackwood "An Address to Working
Men, by Felix Holt," which enforces the same moral.
It may be, as I believe myself, that her principle
is a very sound one. Still one perceives that it is a
principle which will be much more easily accepted
by readers of Blackwood's Magazine than by the
"working man" to whom it is ostensibly addressed.
He will only see that it is a highly convenient argument
for putting off all reform. With that, however,
I am not concerned. The effect in the novel is to
take the sting out of the hero. He is too reasonable
for his part. He is introduced as a redhot radical, and
shows it by extreme rudeness to Esther, whom he
suspects of fine-ladyism. Esther, being an admirable
young woman, comes to see that he is right, and even
that there is something complimentary in his exasperation
against her. I should have liked him better if he
had been exasperated to rudeness against his political
enemies, and shown his sound judgment by gentle
treatment of the trifling petulance of a pretty girl.
No doubt, Felix is an honourable man, for he refuses
to live upon a quack medicine or to look leniently at
bribery when it is on his own side. But there is a
painful excess of sound judgment about him. He gets
into prison, not for leading a mob, but for trying to
divert them from plunder by actions which are
misunderstood. He is very inferior to Alton Locke, who
gets into prison for a similar performance. The
impetuosity and vehemence only comes out in his
rudeness to Esther and plain speaking to her adopted
father; and in trying to make him an ideal of wisdom,
George Eliot only succeeds in making him unfit for
his part.
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If, therefore, we are to accept the indication given
by the title, and suppose that Felix Holt is to be the
focus of interest, the novel, I think, fails of its effect.
We no more see the rough, thorough-going radical,
stung to fury by pauperism and the slavery of children
in factories, and sharing the zeal and the illusions of
Jacobins, than we saw the true spirit of the Renaissance
in Romola. Mr. Felix Holt would have been quite in his
place at Toynbee Hall; but is much too cold-blooded for
the time when revolution and confiscation were really
in the air. Perhaps this indicates the want of masculine
fibre in George Eliot and the deficient sympathy
with rough popular passions which makes us feel that
he represents the afterthought of the judicious sociologist
and not the man of flesh and blood who was the
product of the actual conditions. Anyhow, the novel
appears to be regarded as her least interesting. There
are undoubtedly many charming scenes. One would
be disposed to think that Rufus Lyon, the old dissenting
minister, was more of a contemporary of
Baxter than could have been possible at the time; but
one cannot say confidently what survivals of the type
there may have been at Coventry, and his simplicity
and pedantry and power of emphasizing the highest
elements in the creed of his sect show the art of a
skilled humorist. Esther, too, with her naïve appreciation
of the charms of a luxurious life, is too good for
Felix. But the really strongest part of the novel is
old Mrs. Transome, brooding over her sorrows, and
dwelling remorsefully upon her error in the past.
"If she had only been more haggard and less majestic,
those who had glimpses of her outward life might
have said that she was a griping harridan with a
tongue like a razor. No one said exactly that; but
they never said anything like the full truth about her,
or divined what was hidden under her outward life--a
woman's keen sensibility and dread, which lay
screened behind all her petty habits and narrow
notions as some quivering thing with eyes and throbbing
heart may lie crouching behind withered rubbish.
The sensibility and dread had palpitated all the faster
in the prospect of her son's return; and now that she
had seen him, she said to herself in her bitter way,
'It is a lucky cub that escapes skinning. The best
happiness I shall ever know will be to escape the worst
misery.'" That is one of the striking passages in
which George Eliot shows her vivid insight into
certain moods and characters. Mrs. Transome, I confess,
interests me so much that I should have liked to
know a little more about that early intrigue which has
soured her, and how she came to be fascinated by the
old lover, who by the time at which the book opens
has shown his inferior nature and uses the old memories
to insult her. I could willingly have spared, in order
to make room for a little more of the family scandal,
some of the elaborate legal complications, and of
Mr. Felix Holt's clumsy performances as a prophet
of social reform.
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