CHAPTER XIV.
CONCLUSION.
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THE Leweses had been in the habit of recruiting their
health in various country places in the neighbourhood
of London, as well as in occasional trips to the Continent.
In 1876 they bought a house at Witley, near
Godalming, in the charming Surrey country which
looks up to Hindhead and Blackdown. They were
neighbours of Tennyson, who saw them occasionally
both there and in town. An anecdote of a quarrel
between them is refuted by Tennyson's son. What
really happened was that, as she was leaving his
house, Tennyson pressed her hand "kindly and
sweetly" and said, "I wish you well with your
molecules!" She replied as gently, "I get on very
well with my molecules." Tennyson held that the
flight of Hetty in Adam Bede and Thackeray's account
of Colonel Newcome's decline were "the two
most pathetic things in modern fiction." He greatly
admired her insight into character, "but did not
think her so true to nature as Shakespeare and Miss
Austen." I will not argue upon such dicta, though
they are interesting in regard to both persons.
George Eliot was more or less acquainted with other
eminent writers of her time. The Leweses stayed
with Mark Pattison at Oxford, and afterwards with
Jowett, who sent them the proof-sheets of his Plato.
Dickens was friendly till his death, and she speaks
with affection of Anthony Trollope, "one of the
heartiest, most genuine, and moral men we know."
Their life, however, continued to be secluded, and
they thought of retiring altogether to Witley. Lewes
was now working at his last book, the Problems of
Life and Mind, but his health was beginning to break.
He was taken ill at the "Priory" towards the end
of 1878, and died on 28th November.
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George Eliot was prostrated by the blow. The
first employment to which she could devote herself
was the arrangement of Lewes's unfinished work.
She resolved to found a "George Henry Lewes
studentship," which should enable some young man
to carry on physiological research. Henry Sidgwick,
Sir Michael Foster, and others gave her advice, and
in the course of the year the plan was settled and a
student elected. Gradually she revived. Her friend,
Madame Bodichon, describes her in June 1879 as
"wretchedly thin" and looking "in her long loose
black dress like the black shadow of herself." Still,
she said that "she had so much to do that she must
keep well"; the world was so "intensely interesting."
She had at this time published the last of her books,
which had already been read and approved by Lewes.
The Impressions of Theophrastus Such is a curious
performance which certainly seems to suggest that her
intellect--though not weakened--had somehow got
into the least appropriate application of its energies.
A short essay should above all things be bright and
clear, and if it touches grave thoughts, touch them with
a light hand. Nobody can call Theophrastus Such light
in its touch. The mannerism which showed itself
occasionally in her first works, the ironical application
of scientific analogies to trifling matters, sometimes hits
the mark, but was always apt to become ponderous,
if not pedantic. Theophrastus Such seems to be entirely
composed of such matter, questionable, perhaps, at the
best, and making the unpleasant impression of all
laborious attempts at witticism. She had, for example,
been disgusted, as every real lover of good literature
must be disgusted, at flippant and irreverent burlesques.
She protests against a practice which she
calls "debasing the moral currency." "And yet, it
seems, parents will put into the hands of their children
ridiculous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous
'illustrations') of the poems which stirred their own
tenderness and filial duty, and cause them to make
their first acquaintance with great men, great works,
or solemn crises, through the medium of some miscellaneous
burlesque which, with its idiotic puns and
farcical attitudes, will remain among their primary
associations and reduce them throughout their time
of studious preparation for life to the moral imbecility
of an inward giggle at what might have stimulated
the high emulation which fed the fountains of compassion,
trust, and constancy." That may be very
true, but surely it would be possible to put it a
little more pointedly. George Eliot in writing these
essays seems first to have got into the too didactic vein
to which she was always prone, and then to have put
her observations into the most tortuous and cumbrous
shape by way of giving them an air of solemnity.
What, one asks, had become of Mrs. Poyser? The
book, however, succeeded well enough to satisfy her;
but I can hardly believe that anybody can now read
it except from a sense of duty.
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The remainder of George Eliot's life may be told in
a few words. In 1867 Lewes had been introduced by
Mr. Herbert Spencer to Mrs. Cross, a lady then living
at Weybridge with a daughter, Miss Elizabeth D.
Cross, who had just published a volume of poems.
Miss Cross was invited by Lewes to see George Eliot,
and a friendship sprang up between the families. In
1869 the Leweses paid a visit to the Crosses at Weybridge,
and the friendship became intimacy. The
death of Lewes's son, Thornton, and of a married
daughter of Mrs. Cross within the next two months,
strengthened the bond by mutual sympathy. Mr.
John Walter Cross, son of Mrs. Cross, then a banker
at New York, was staying at Weybridge during George
Eliot's visit, and soon afterwards settled in England in
his mother's house. He became very intimate with
the Leweses, and frequently visited them at Witley.
After Lewes's death he was an able and sympathetic
adviser. His mother had died a week after Lewes,
and he was anxious to find relief and occupation in
some new pursuit. He began to read Dante, and
George Eliot proposed to help him in his studies.
From that time they saw each other constantly; and
as George Eliot's spirit recovered from the shock, she
began again to find pleasure in music and in visiting
the National Gallery. The support of Mr. Cross's
companionship relieved her sense of desolation, and in
April 1880 they decided upon marriage. The marriage
took place on 6th May, and the only possible comment
is her own statement to Mme. Bodichon. "Mr. Cross's
family," she says, "welcome me with the utmost
tenderness. All this is wonderful blessing falling to
me beyond my share after I had thought that life was
ended, and that, so to speak, my coffin was ready for
me in the next room. Deep down below there is a
river of sadness, but this must always be with those
who have lived long--and I am able to enjoy my
newly reopened life. I shall be a better, more loving
creature than I could have been in solitude. To be
contantly, lovingly grateful for the gift of a perfect
love is the best illumination of one's mind to all the
possible good there may be in store for man on this
troublous little planet."
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The Crosses made a tour after their marriage, staying
some time at Venice, and returning to Witley by
the end of July. Her health seemed at first to have
greatly improved, and she was able to take walks and
to see sights during the journey. After returning
to England, she had a serious attack in September,
followed by a partial recovery. On 4th December
the Crosses moved into a new house which they had
taken at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. A fortnight later
a slight chill brought on a fresh attack. Her previous
illness had weakened her power of rallying, and she
died on 22nd December 1880.
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George Eliot's main personal characteristics should
be sufficiently indicated by what I have already said.
A few remarks, however, may help to complete the
picture. Among her active employments she found
time to lead the life of an industrious student. Though
frequently interrupted by ill-health, she was capable
of sustained and severe attention to difficult subjects.
The list of her accomplishments acquired at different
periods is a long one. She had a thorough knowledge
of French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and could
talk in each language correctly, though "with difficulty."
She could read the classical languages with
pleasure; and kept up her familiarity with the great
masterpieces of all periods by frequent re-reading.
She was fond of reading aloud, especially Milton and
the Bible; and a fine voice, perfectly under command,
gave peculiar power to her rendering of solemn and
majestic passages. Hebrew was a favourite study; and
though she read little of the lighter literature of the
day, she had a very retentive memory of the novels--George
Sand's, for example--which she had read in her
youth. She read a good many historical works, and,
as we have seen, could get up minute antiquarian
details with unflagging industry. Besides her main
studies, she had dipped into scientific writings, had
at one time taken to geometry, and thought that she
had some aptitude for mathematics. Her interest in
the philosophical speculations of the time we have
sufficiently indicated. Her powers of assimilating
knowledge were, in fact, extraordinary, and it may
safely be said that no novelist of mark ever possessed
a wider intellectual culture. With all her knowledge,
she attended to the ordinary feminine duties. She
was proud of her good housekeeping, and her early
training and love of order had given her a thorough
knowledge of how such matters should be done. She
sympathized, of course, with projects for reforming
female education, and was one of the first subscribers
to Girton College. She had, however, a characteristic
misgiving lest a university system might weaken the
bonds of family life. The feminine qualities are as
characteristic of the student as of the writer. She
read reverently, with a desire to appreciate and
admire. The critical, or rather scoffing attitude of
mind, was intensely antipathetic to her. She seems
to have loved especially the gentler and more serious
observers of life, such as Goldsmith and Cowper and
Miss Austen, and venerated such great men as Dante
and Milton ("her demi-god," as she calls him), whose
austerity breathes a lofty moral sentiment. She rarely
expresses her antipathies; but one instance is characteristic.
Of Byron she speaks with disgust, as the
"most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a
great effect in literature." The author of Don Juan
could not well be congenial to the creator of Fedalma.
Women, it is said, are wanting in humour; and perhaps
for the obvious reason that the humorist is apt to
find that the easiest roads of making a point lie
through profanity or indecency. George Eliot's sense
of humour was undeniably keen, but she will not give
play to it when it takes the offensive. That need not
be regretted. It is a less satisfactory result when her
desire to sympathise with all high impulses leads her
in her later stories to shut her eyes to the comic side,
which forces itself upon the less restrained humorists,
and to present us with model characters verging too
decidedly upon priggishness. A touch of pedagogic
severity saddens her view of the frivolous world. Her
profound conviction of the mischief done by stupidity,
of the clogging and degrading effect of the general
atmosphere of commonplace upon aspiring souls,
diminishes her appreciation of fools, and Theophrastus
Such suggests even a tinge of sourness. George Eliot,
we are told, took little interest in contemporary politics.
During the war of 1870 she reminds a friend of the
famous anecdote of Goethe's indifference to the Revolution
of 1830 as compared with the controversies of
Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire. She says that it is impossible
to "doff aside" the French and German war after that
fashion. In general, however, she seems to have
accepted Goethe's attitude, and to have been more
interested in the advances of scientific thought than
in the reforming energies of Gladstone's first government.
She thought that political matters in England
were managed by "amateurs," that their quarrels
involved a growing quantity of personal abuse and imputation
of unworthy motive. That is a natural impression
of the philosophical looker-on; and I need not ask
whether active politicians are justified in meeting it
with simple contempt. Her sympathy with the positivists
predisposed her, moreover, to think more of
the slow operation of changed ideals than of particular
political changes. Her interest in positivism was
always strong. She was on terms of intimate friendship
with Dr. Congreve, Mr. Frederic Harrison, and
Professor Beesly, and subscribed to the funds of the
central body. She did not, indeed, accept positivist
doctrines unreservedly, and had by her side a keen
critic in George Lewes, who had followed Comte's
early teaching, but repudiated the theories of social
reconstruction propounded in the later Politique Positive.
Both, it appears, regarded it as "a Utopia, presenting
hypotheses rather than doctrines," and she
could sympathize with Comte as "an individual"
trying "to anticipate the work of future generations."
The special point of sympathy was, of course, the
aspect with which the Comtists regarded the old
creeds as stages in the continuous evolution of
humanity. In that respect, too, George Eliot was
eminently feminine. She had the strong religious
instinct common to so many noble women in whose
sympathy masculine reformers have found comfort
amidst the harsh controversies and struggles of active
work. The history of her books is on one side a
history of the consequent development of her mind.
Her intellectual expansion led her to accept the teaching
of the men who represented for her the most
advanced thought of the time. But the aggressiveness
which it generated for a time was a transitory
frame of mind. The first series of novels represents
the fond dwelling upon all the loftier impulses which
had uttered themselves in stammering and imperfect
dialects prescribed by dogmas no longer tenable;
while the later correspond to a longing to find an
utterance reconcilable with full acceptance of scientific
truth. Daniel Deronda, one fancies, would have embodied
her sentiments more completely if, instead of
devoting himself to the Jews, he had become a leading
prophet in the church of humanity. That, no doubt,
would have brought him into too close a contact with
notorious facts.
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I have said that George Eliot's peculiar place among
the novelists of the time was in some sense determined
by the philosophical tendencies which were shared by
none of her contemporaries. I do not mean to imply
that it was her proper function to propagate any
philosophical doctrine, and have tried to point out
the defects due to her inclinations in that direction.
Novels should, I take it, be transfigured experience;
they should be based upon the direct observation and
the genuine emotions which it has inspired: when
they are deliberately intended to be a symbolism of
any general formula, they become unreal as representative
of fact, and unsatisfactory as philosophical exposition.
George Eliot's early success and the faults
of her later work illustrate, I have said, the right and
wrong methods. But, in conclusion, I may try to
indicate what seems to me to be the quality which, in
spite of inevitable shortcomings in undertaking the
impossible, gives the permanent interest of her works.
That, I think appears most simply by regarding them
as implicit autobiography. George Eliot gives a direct
picture of the England of her early days, and, less
directly, a picture of its later developments. Her
picture of the old country life owes its charm to the
personal memories, and may possibly have a little
personal colouring. If a novelist could be thoroughly
"realistic," and give the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, there would no doubt be a good
deal to add to the descriptions of the life at Shepperton
and Dorlcote Mill. But, then, I do not believe that
any human intellect can give the whole truth about
anything. What can be given truly is the impression
made upon the mind of the observer; and when the
observer has a mind of such reflective power, so much
insight, and such tenderness and sensibility as George
Eliot's, its impressions will correspond to realities, and
reveal most interesting though not all-comprehensive
truths. The combination of an exquisitely sympathetic
and loving nature with a large and tolerant intellect is
manifest throughout. George Eliot could see the
absurdities, and even the brutalities, of her neighbours
plainly, but understood them well enough to make
them intelligible, not mere absurdities to be caricatured;
she saw the charming aspects of the old order with
equal clearness, but has no illusions which would
convert the country into a pretty Arcadia; and
her sympathy with sorrow and unsatisfied longings
is too deep and reflective to allow her to stray into
mere sentimentalism. Her pathos is powerful because
it is always under command. The more superficial
writer treats an era of misery as implying a grievance
which can be summarily removed, or finds in it an
opportunity of exhibiting his own sensibility. Her
feeling is too deep and her perception of the complexity
of its causes too thorough to admit of such
treatment. We see the tender woman who has gone
through much experience, always devotedly attached
by the strongest ties of affection; but always reflecting,
shrinking from excesses of passion or of scoffing, and
trying to see men and life as parts of a wider order.
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The same personal element appears in her later
work in spite of the defects which I take to be
undeniable. George Eliot, as we have seen, looked on
the world with a certain aloofness. She read little of
the ephemeral literature of the day, and apparently
thought very ill of what she did read. She looked at
the political warfare from a distance, and did not go
into the society deeply interested in such matters. The
"Priory" was frequented by a circle whose talk was of
philosophy and scientific discoveries, and which was
more interested in theories than in the gossip of the
day. She had not therefore the experience which could
enable her to describe contemporary life, with its
social and political ambitions and the rough struggle
for existence in which practical lawyers and men of
business are mainly occupied. She thinks of the
world chiefly as the surrounding element of sordid
aims into which her idealists are to go forth with such
hope as may be of leavening the mass. She could not,
therefore, draw lifelike portraits of such characters
as were the staple of the ordinary novelist. The
questions, however, in which she was profoundly
interested were undeniably of the highest importance.
The period of her writings was one in which, as we
can now see more clearly than at the time, very
significant changes were taking place in English
thought and life. Controversies on "evolutionism" and
socialism and democracy were showing the set of the
current. George Eliot's heroes and heroines are all
more or less troubled by the results, whether they live
ostensibly in England or in distant countries and
centuries. I need say nothing more of her special
view of the questions at issue. But, incidentally, as
one may say, she came, in treating of her favourite
theme--the idealist in search of a vocation--to exhibit
her own characteristics. The long gallery of heroines,
from Milly Barton to Gwendolen Harleth, have
various tasks set to them, in which we may be
more or less interested. But the women themselves,
whatever their outward circumstances, have an interest
unsurpassed by any other writer. They have, of
course, a certain family likeness; and if Maggie is
most like her creator, the others show an affinity to
some of her characteristics. George Eliot is reported
to have said that the character which she found most
difficult to support was that of Rosamond Vincy, the
young woman who paralyses Lydgate. One can understand
the statement, for it is Rosamond's function to do
exactly what is most antipathetic to her biographer.
She is the embodied contradictory of her creator's
morality. Yet she, too, is a vigorous portrait, and the
whole series may be given triumphantly as a proof of
what is called "knowledge of the human heart." I
dislike the phrase, because it seems to imply that
an abstract science with that subject-matter is in
existence--which I should certainly deny. But if it
only means that George Eliot could--without any
formula--sympathise with a singularly wide range
of motive and feeling, and especially with noble and
tender natures, and represent the concrete embodiment
with extraordinary power, then I can fully subscribe
to the opinion. I think, as I have said, that one is
always conscious that her women are drawn from the
inside, and that her most successful men are substantially
women in disguise. But the two sexes have
a good deal in common; and in the setting forth some
of the moral and intellectual processes which we can
all understand, George Eliot shows unsurpassable skill.
Here and there, no doubt, there is too much explicit
"psychological analysis," and a rather ponderous
enumeration of obvious aphorisms in the pomp of
scientific analogy. But she is singularly powerful in
describing the conflicts of emotions; the ingenious
modes of self-deception in which most of us acquire
considerable skill; the uncomfortable results of keeping
a conscience till we have learnt to come to an
understanding with it; the grotesque mixture of motives
which results when we have reached a modus vivendi;
the downright hypocrisy of the lower nature, or the
comparatively pardonable and even commendable state
of mind of the person who has a thoroughly consistent
code of action, though he unconsciously interprets its
laws in a non-natural sense to suit his convenience.
George Eliot's power of watching and describing the
various manoeuvres by which people keep their self-respect
and satisfy their feelings shows her logical
subtlety, which appears again in her quaint description
of the odd processes which take the place of reasoning
in the uneducated intelligence.
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George Eliot believed that a work of art not only
may, but must, exercise also an ethical influence. I
will not inquire how much influence is actually
exerted by novels upon the morality of their readers;
but so far as any influence is exerted, it is due, I think,
in the last resort to the personality of the novelist.
That is to say, that from reading George Eliot's novels
we are influenced in the same way as by an intimacy
with George Eliot herself. Undoubtedly, in effect,
that might vary indefinitely according to the prejudices
and character of the other party. But, in any
case, we feel that the writer with whom we have been
in contact possessed a singularly wide and reflective
intellect, a union of keen sensibility with a thoroughly
tolerant spirit, a desire to appreciate all the good
hidden under the commonplace and narrow, a lively
sympathy with all the nobler aspirations, a vivid
insight into the perplexities and delusions which beset
even the strongest minds, brilliant powers of wit, at
once playful and pungent, and, if we must add, a rather
melancholy view of life in general, a melancholy
which is not nursed for purposes of display, but forced
upon a fine understanding by the view of a state of
things which, we must admit, does not altogether lend
itself to a cheerful optimism. I have endeavoured to
point out what limitations must be adopted by an
honest critic. George Eliot's works, as I have read,
have not, at the present day, quite so high a position
as was assigned to them by contemporary enthusiasm.
That is a common phenomenon enough; and, in her
case, I take it to be due chiefly to the partial misdirection
of her powers in the later period. But when I
compare her work with that of other novelists, I cannot
doubt that she had powers of mind and a richness of
emotional nature rarely squalled, or that her
writings--whatever their shortcomings--will have a
corresponding value in the estimation of thoughtful readers.
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