into his poultry-yard, to be the companion | voluptuousness passing into treachery, of a tame one he had long kept there; but Rosamond's tender susceptibility and the tame stork disliking a rival, fell upon heartless vanity. She herself was painsthe poor stranger, and beat him so un- taking, even beyond the point up to which mercifully, that he was compelled to take genius is truly defined as the power of wing, and escaped with difficulty. About taking pains. She often took too much four months afterwards, however, the pains. Her greatest stories lose in force latter returned to the poultry-yard, in by their too wide reflectiveness, and escompany with three other storks, who no pecially by an engrafted mood of artificial sooner alighted, than they fell upon the reflectiveness not suitable to her genius. tame stork and killed him." She grew up under Thackeray's spell, and it is clear that Thackeray's satirical vein had too much influence over her from first to last, but especially in some of those earlier tales into which she threw a greater power of passion, than any which she had to spare for the two great efforts of the last ten years. "Adam Bede," which might otherwise be the greatest of all English novels,-many, no doubt, really think it so,-is gravely injured by those heavy satirical asides to the reader, in which you recognize the influence exerted over her mind by the genius of Thackeray, - asides, however, which are by no means in keeping with the large, placid, and careful drawing of her own magnificent, and on the whole tranquil, rural cartoons. The present writer, at least, never takes up these earlier stories From The Spectator. ENGLAND has suddenly lost the greatest writer among Englishwomen of this or any other age. There can be no doubt that George Eliot touched the highest point which, in a woman, has been reached in our literature, that the genius of Mrs. Browning, for instance, though it certainly surpasses George Eliot's in lyrical sweetness, cannot even be compared with hers in general strength and force. The remarkable thing about George Eliot's genius is, that though there is nothing at all unfeminine in it, if we except a certain touch of scientific pedantry which is "Silas Marner" excepted without a not pedantry in motive, but due only to a certain sense of irritation at the discreprather awkward manipulation of some- ancy between the strong, rich, and free what unfeminine learning, its greatest drawing of the life they contain, and the qualities are not in the least the qualities somewhat falsetto tone of many of the in which women have usually surpassed light reflections interspersed. George men, but rather the qualities in which, Eliot had no command of Thackeray's till George Eliot's time, women had always literary stiletto, and her substitute for it been notably deficient. Largeness of is unwieldy. Even in the "Scenes from mind, largeness of conception was her Clerical Life" this jars upon us. For first characteristic, as regards both mat- example, this sentence in "Janet's Reters of reason and matters of imagination. pentance : " "When a man is happy She had far more than many great men's enough to win the affections of a sweet power of conceiving the case of an oppo-girl, who can soothe his cares with crochet, nent, and something approaching to and respond to all his most cherished Shakespeare's power of imagining the ideas with braided urn-rugs and chairscenery of minds quite opposite in type to covers in German wool, he has at least a her own. There was nothing swift, lively, guarantee of domestic comfort, whatever shallow, or flippant about her; and yet trials may await him out of doors," does she could draw swift, lively, shallow, and not please an ear accustomed to the happy flippant people with admirable skill and bitterness of Thackeray's caustic irony. vivacity, as, for example, Mrs. Poyser, It is heavy, not to say elephantine; and Mrs. Cadwallader, and many more. Her this heavy raillery rather increased upon own nature was evidently sedate and George Eliot in "Adam Bede " and " The rather slow-moving, with a touch of Mil- Mill on the Floss." One is annoyed to tonic stateliness in it, and a love of elabo- have so great a painter of the largest ration at times even injurious to her human life turning aside to warn us that genius. Yet no characters she ever drew" when Tityrus and Meliboeus happen to were more powerfully drawn than those at the very opposite pole to her own, for example, Hetty's childish, empty selfindulgence, Tito's smooth and gliding be on the same farm, they are not sentimentally polite to each other;" or that a High Church curate, considered abstractedly, "is nothing more than a sleek, bi T manous animal, in a white neckcloth, with | shackled and overpowered the life of his Imaginatively, we hardly recognize any defect in this great painter, except that there is too little movement in her stories; they wholly want dash, and sometimes want even a steady current. No novelist, however, in the whole series of English novelists, has combined so much power of painting external life on a broad canvas with so wonderful an insight into the life of the soul. Her English butchers, farriers, auctioneers, and parish clerks, are at least as vigorously drawn as Sir Walter Scott's bailies, peasants, serving-men, and beggars; while her pictures of the inward conflicts, whether of strong or of feeble natures, are far more powerful than any which Sir Walter Scott ever attempted. Such a contrast as that between Hetty and Dinah, such a picture as that of Mr. Casaubon's mental and moral limitation and confusion, such a study as that of Gwendolen's moral suffering under the torture administered by Grandcourt, was as much beyond the sphere of Sir Walter Scott, as his historical pictures of Louis XI., Mary Stuart, Balfour of Burley, Claverhouse, or James I. are beyond the sphere of George Eliot. On the only occasion on which George Eliot attempted anything of the nature of historical portraiture, in "Romola,". the purely imaginative part of the story is far more powerful than the historical. The ideas of the time when the revival of learning took place had quite possessed themselves of George Eliot's mind, and had stirred her into a wonderful imaginative effort. But her conceptions of the purely imagined figures, of Bardo, of Baldassarre, and of Tito, -are far greater than her study of Savonarola. The genius for historical portraiture, for gathering up into a single focus the hints of chroniclers and historians, is something distinct from that of mere creation, and demands apparently a subtler mixture of interpreting with creating power, than most great creators possess. Even Sir Walter Scott failed with Napoleon, where he had not free movement enough, and the wealth of historical material No one can deny that the moral tone of George Eliot's books- "Felix Holt" being, perhaps, a doubtful exception - is of the noblest and purest kind, nor that the tone of feeling which prevails in them goes far in advance even of their direct moral teaching. We should say, for instance, that in regard to marriage, the spirit of George Eliot's books conveys an almost sacramental conception of its binding sacredness, though, unfortunately, of course, her career did much to weaken the authority of the teaching implied in her books. But the total effect of her books is altogether ennobling, though the profoundly sceptical reflections with which they are penetrated may counteract, to some extent, the tonic effect of the high moral feeling with which they are colored. Before or after most of the noblest scenes, we come to thoughts in which it is almost as impossible for the feelings delineated to live any intense or hopeful life, as it is for human lungs to breathe in the vacuum of an air-pump. After she has breathed a noble spirit into a great scene, she too often proceeds to exhaust the air which is the very life-breath of great actions, so that the reflective element in her books undermines the ground beneath the feet of her noblest characters. In "Adam Bede," she eventually justifies her hero's secularistic coldness of nature, and makes you feel that Dinah was an enthusiast, who could not justify what she taught. In "Janet's Repentance," again, she expresses in a few sentences the relief with which the mind turns away from the search for convictions calculated to urge the mind to a life of beneficent self-sacrifice, to those acts of self-sacrifice themselves : No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt, - -a place of repose for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all creeds and all philosophies | to Sir Walter Scott, and second to him are at one: here, at least, the conscience will only because her imagination, though it not be dogged by doubt, the benign impulse penetrates far deeper, had neither the will not be checked by adverse theory; here same splendid vigor of movement, nor the you may begin to act, without settling one pre- same bright serenity of tone. Her stories liminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the long night-watches, are, on the whole, richer than Fielding's, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the help as well as far nobler, and vastly less artiless limbs, to divine the want that can find no ficial than Richardson's. They cover so utterance beyond the feeble motion of the much larger a breadth and deeper a depth hand, or beseeching glance of the eye, these of life than Miss Austen's, that though are offices that demand no self-questionings, they are not perhaps so exquisitely finno casuistry, no assent to propositions, no ished, they belong to an altogether higher weighing of consequences. Within the four kind of world. walls where the stir and glare of the world are and less Rembrandt-like than They are stronger, freer, Miss shut out, and every voice is subdued, where a Brontë's; and are not mere photographs human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of social man, like Trollope's. They are of man to man is reduced to its utmost clear- patient and powerful studies of individual ness and simplicity; bigotry cannot confuse it, human beings, in an appropriate setting of theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into social manners, from that of the dumbest quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it. provincial life, to that of life of the highest As we bend over the sick-bed, all the forces of self-knowledge. And yet the reflections our nature rush towards the channels of pity, by which they are pervaded, subtle and of patience, and of love, and sweep down the often wise as they are, to some extent inmiserable, choking drift of our quarrels, our jure the art of the pictures by their satiric debates, our would-be wisdom, and our clamorous, selfish desires. This blessing of serene tone, or if they do not do that, take superfreedom from the importunities of opinion lies fluous pains to warn you how very doubtin all simple, direct acts of mercy, and is one ful and insecure is the spiritual footing source of that sweet calm which is often felt on which the highest excellence plants its by the watcher in the sick-room, even when tread. the duties there are of a hard and terrible kind. And this, too, is still more the fault of her poems, which, in spite of an almost There speaks the true George Eliot, and Miltonic stateliness, reflect too much the we may clearly say of her that in fiction it monotonous cadences of her own musical is her great aim, while illustrating what but over regulated voice. The poems she believes to be the true facts and laws want inspiration. And the speculative of human life, to find a fit stage for ideal melancholy, which only slightly injured feelings nobler than any which seem to her her prose, predominates fatally in her to be legitimately bred by those facts and verse. Throughout her poems she is laws. But she too often finds herself always plumbing the deep waters for an compelled to injure her own finest moral anchorage, and reporting "no soundings." effects by the sceptical atmosphere with The finest of her poems, "The Legend of which she permeates them. She makes Jubal," tries to affirm, indeed, that death, the high-hearted heroine of her "Mill on the loss of all conscious existence, is a the Floss" all but yield to the physiolog sort of moral gain, as though the loss ical attraction of a poor sort of man of of self were the loss of selfishness, which science. She makes the enthusiastic it not only is not, but never could be, since Dorothea, in "Middlemarch," decline selfishness can only be morally extinupon a poor creature like Ladishaw, who guished in a living self, but the lesson is has earned her regard chiefly by being the so obviously a moral gloss put on the face object of Mr. Casaubon's jealousy. She of a bad business, that there, at least, no takes religious patriotism for the subject anchorage is found. And in "The Spanish of her last great novel, but is at some Gypsy" the speculative despair is even pains to show that her hero may be relig- worse, while the failure of the imaginative ious without any belief in God, and patri-portraiture is more conspicuous, because otic without any but an ideal country. This reflective vacuum which she pumps out behind all noble action, gives to the workings of her great imagination a general effect of supreme melancholy. We should rank George Eliot second only in her own proper field-which is not the field of satire, Thackeray's field — the portraiture itself is more ambitious. It will be by her seven or eight great fictions that George Eliot will live, not by her poems, and still less by her essays. But all these, one perhaps excepted, will long continue to be counted the greatest achievements of an Englishwoman's, and perhaps even of any woman's brain. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. |