The Common Reader
of her life. Marked in early youth as one “sure to get something up very
soon in the way of a clothing club”, she proceeded to raise funds for
restoring a church by making a chart of ecclesiastical history; and that
was followed by a loss of faith which so disturbed her father that he
refused to live with her. Next came the struggle with the translation of
Strauss, which, dismal and “soul-stupefying” in itself, can scarcely
have been made less so by the usual feminine tasks of ordering a
household and nursing a dying father, and the distressing conviction, to
one so dependent upon affection, that by becoming a blue-stocking she
was forfeiting her brother’s respect. “I used to go about like an owl,”
she said, “to the great disgust of my brother.” “Poor thing,” wrote a
friend who saw her toiling through Strauss with a statue of the risen
Christ in front of her, “I do pity her sometimes, with her pale sickly
face and dreadful headaches, and anxiety, too, about her father.” Yet,
though we cannot read the story without a strong desire that the stages
of her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least more
beautiful, there is a dogged determination in her advance upon the
citadel of culture which raises it above our pity. Her development was
very slow and very awkward, but it had the irresistible impetus behind
it of a deep-seated and noble ambition. Every obstacle at length was
thrust from her path. She knew every one. She read everything. Her
astonishing intellectual vitality had triumphed. Youth was over, but
youth had been full of suffering. Then, at the age of thirty-five, at
the height of her powers, and in the fullness of her freedom, she made
the decision which was of such profound moment to her and still matters
even to us, and went to Weimar, alone with George Henry Lewes.
The books which followed so soon after her union testify in the fullest
manner to the great liberation which had come to her with personal
happiness. In themselves they provide us with a plentiful feast. Yet at
the threshold of her literary career one may find in some of the
circumstances of her life influences that turned her mind to the past,
to the country village, to the quiet and beauty and simplicity of
childish memories and away from herself and the present. We understand
how it was that her first book was _Scenes of Clerical Life_, and not
_Middlemarch_. Her union with Lewes had surrounded her with affection,
but in view of the circumstances and of the conventions it had also
isolated her. “I wish it to be understood,” she wrote in 1857, “that I
should never invite any one to come and see me who did not ask for the
invitation.” She had been “cut off from what is called the world”, she
said later, but she did not regret it. By becoming thus marked, first by
circumstances and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost the power to
move on equal terms unnoted among her kind; and the loss for a novelist
was serious. Still, basking in the light and sunshine of _Scenes of
Clerical Life_, feeling the large mature mind spreading itself with a
luxurious sense of freedom in the world of her “remotest past”, to speak
of loss seems inappropriate. Everything to such a mind was gain. All
experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and
reflection, enriching and nourishing. The utmost we can say, in
qualifying her attitude towards fiction by what little we know of her
life, is that she had taken to heart certain lessons not usually learnt
early, if learnt at all, among which, perhaps, the most branded upon her
was the melancholy virtue of tolerance; her sympathies are with the
everyday lot, and play most happily in dwelling upon the homespun of
ordinary joys and sorrows. She has none of that romantic intensity which
is connected with a sense of one’s own individuality, unsated and
unsubdued, cutting its shape sharply upon the background of the world.
What were the loves and sorrows of a snuffy old clergyman, dreaming over
his whisky, to the fiery egotism of Jane Eyre? The beauty of those first
books, _Scenes of Clerical Life_, _Adam Bede_, _The Mill on the Floss_, is
very great. It is impossible to estimate the merit of the Poysers, the
Dodsons, the Gilfils, the Bartons, and the rest with all their
surroundings and dependencies, because they have put on flesh and blood
and we move among them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always with that
unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and do, which we accord to
the great originals only. The flood of memory and humour which she pours
so spontaneously into one figure, one scene after another, until the
whole fabric of ancient rural England is revived, has so much in common
with a natural process that it leaves us with little consciousness that
there is anything to criticise. We accept; we feel the delicious warmth
and release of spirit which the great creative writers alone procure for
us. As one comes back to the books after years of absence they pour out,
even against our expectation, the same store of energy and heat, so that
we want more than anything to idle in the warmth as in the sun beating
down from the red orchard wall. If there is an element of unthinking
abandonment in thus submitting to the humours of Midland farmers and
their wives, that, too, is right in the circumstances. We scarcely wish
to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human. And when we
consider how distant in time the world of Shepperton and Hayslope is,
and how remote the minds of farmer and agricultural labourers from those
of most of George Eliot’s readers, we can only attribute the ease and
pleasure with which we ramble from house to smithy, from cottage parlour
to rectory garden, to the fact that George Eliot makes us share their
lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit
of sympathy. She is no satirist. The movement of her mind was too slow
and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy. But she gathers in her large
grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them
loosely together with a tolerant and wholesome understanding which, as
one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free,
but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears. There
is the famous Mrs. Poyser. It would have been easy to work her
idiosyncrasies to death, and, as it is, perhaps, George Eliot gets her
laugh in the same place a little too often. But memory, after the book
is shut, brings out, as sometimes in real life, the details and
subtleties which some more salient characteristic has prevented us from
noticing at the time. We recollect that her health was not good. There
were occasions upon which she said nothing at all. She was patience
itself with a sick child. She doted upon Totty. Thus one can muse and
speculate about the greater number of George Eliot’s characters and
find, even in the least important, a roominess and margin where those
qualities lurk which she has no call to bring from their obscurity.
But in the midst of all this tolerance and sympathy there are, even in
the early books, moments of greater stress. Her humour has shown itself
broad enough to cover a wide range of fools and failures, mothers and
children, dogs and flourishing midland fields, farmers, sagacious or
fuddled over their ale, horse-dealers, inn-keepers, curates, and
carpenters. Over them all broods a certain romance, the only romance
that George Eliot allowed herself—the romance of the past. The books
are astonishingly readable and have no trace of pomposity or pretence.
But to the reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in view it
will become obvious that the mist of recollection gradually withdraws.
It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its
highest in the mature _Middlemarch_, the magnificent book which with all
its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up
people. But the world of fields and farms no longer contents her. In
real life she had sought her fortunes elsewhere; and though to look back
into the past was calming and consoling, there are, even in the early
works, traces of that troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and
baffled presence who was George Eliot herself. In _Adam Bede_ there is a
hint of her in Dinah. She shows herself far more openly and completely
in Maggie in _The Mill on the Floss_. She is Janet in _Janet’s
Repentance_, and Romola, and Dorothea seeking wisdom and finding one
scarcely knows what in marriage with Ladislaw. Those who fall foul of
George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and
with good reason; for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of
her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic,
and occasionally vulgar. Yet if you could delete the whole sisterhood
you would leave a much smaller and a much inferior world, albeit a world
of greater artistic perfection and far superior jollity and comfort. In
accounting for her failure, in so far as it was a failure, one
recollects that she never wrote a story until she was thirty-seven, and
that by the time she was thirty-seven she had come to think of herself
with a mixture of pain and something like resentment. For long she
preferred not to think of herself at all. Then, when the first flush of
creative energy was exhausted and self-confidence had come to her, she
wrote more and more from the personal standpoint, but she did so without
the unhesitating abandonment of the young. Her self-consciousness is
always marked when her heroines say what she herself would have said.
She disguised them in every possible way. She granted them beauty and
wealth into the bargain; she invented, more improbably, a taste for
brandy. But the disconcerting and stimulating fact remained that she was
compelled by the very power of her genius to step forth in person upon
the quiet bucolic scene.
The noble and beautiful girl who insisted upon being born into the Mill
on the Floss is the most obvious example of the ruin which a heroine can
strew about her. Humour controls her and keeps her lovable so long as
she is small and can be satisfied by eloping with the gipsies or
hammering nails into her doll; but she develops; and before George Eliot
knows what has happened she has a full-grown woman on her hands
demanding what neither gipsies nor dolls, nor St. Ogg’s itself is
capable of giving her. First Philip Wakem is produced, and later Stephen
Guest. The weakness of the one and the coarseness of the other have
often been pointed out; but both, in their weakness and coarseness,
illustrate not so much George Eliot’s inability to draw the portrait of
a man, as the uncertainty, the infirmity, and the fumbling which shook
her hand when she had to conceive a fit mate for a heroine. She is in
the first place driven beyond the home world she knew and loved, and
forced to set foot in middle-class drawing-rooms where young men sing
all the summer morning and young women sit embroidering smoking-caps for
bazaars. She feels herself out of her element, as her clumsy satire of
what she calls “good society” proves.
Good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner
engagements six weeks deep, its opera, and its faery ball rooms . . .
gets its science done by Faraday and its religion by the superior clergy
who are to be met in the best houses; how should it have need of belief
and emphasis?
There is no trace of humour or insight there, but only the
vindictiveness of a grudge which we feel to be personal in its origin.
But terrible as the complexity of our social system is in its demands
upon the sympathy and discernment of a novelist straying across the
boundaries, Maggie Tulliver did worse than drag George Eliot from her