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John Morley (1838-1923). George Eliot and Her Times. David J. Brewer, et al., eds. 1900. The World's Best Essays

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John Morley (1838-1923). George Eliot and Her Times. David J. Brewer, et al., eds. 1900. The World's Best Essays Dictionary Biographies Literary Criticism Welcome Terms of Service ⧏ Previous Next ⧐ Contents Bibliographic Record David J. Brewer, et al., eds.  The World’s Best Essays.  1900. George Eliot and Her Times
By John Morley (1838–1923) From a review of “George Eliot’s Life,” by J. W. Cross.

THE PERIOD of George Eliot’s productions was from 1856, the date of her first stories, down to 1876, when she wrote, not under her brightest star, her last novel of “Daniel Deronda.” During this time the great literary influences of the epoch immediately preceding had not, indeed, fallen silent, but the most fruitful seed had been sown. Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” (1833–34), and his “Miscellaneous Essays” (collected 1839), were in all hands; but he had fallen into the terrible slough of his Prussian history (1858–65), and the last word of his evangel had gone forth to all whom it concerned. “In Memoriam,” whose noble music and deep-browed thought awoke such new and wide response in men’s hearts, was published in 1850. The second volume of “Modern Painters,” of which I have heard George Eliot say, as of “In Memoriam” too, that she owed much and very much to it, belongs to an earlier date still (1846), and when it appeared, though George Eliot was born in the same year as its author, she was still translating Strauss at Coventry. Mr. Browning, for whose genius she had such admiration, and who was always so good a friend, did indeed produce during this period some work which the adepts find as full of power and beauty as any that ever came from his pen. But Mr. Browning’s genius has moved rather apart from the general currents of his time, creating character and working out motives from within, undisturbed by transient shadows from the passing questions and answers of the day.

1   The romantic movement was then upon its fall. The great Oxford movement, which besides its purely ecclesiastical effects, had linked English religion once more to human history, and which was itself one of the unexpected outcomes of the romantic movement, had spent its original force, and no longer interested the stronger minds among the rising generation. The hour had sounded for the scientific movement. In 1859 was published the “Origin of Species,” undoubtedly the most far-reaching agency of the time, supported, as it was, by a volume of new knowledge which came pouring in from many sides. The same period saw the important speculations of Mr. Spencer, whose influence on George Eliot had from their first acquaintance been of a very decisive kind. Two years after the “Origin of Species” came Maine’s “Ancient Law,” and that was followed by the accumulations of Mr. Tylor and others, exhibiting order and fixed correlation among great sets of facts which had hitherto lain in that cheerful chaos of general knowledge which has been called general ignorance. The excitement was immense. Evolution, development, heredity, adaptation, variety, survival, natural selection, were so many patent pass-keys that were to open every chamber.

2   George Eliot’s novels, as they were the imaginative application of this great influx of new ideas, so they fitted in with the moods which those ideas had called up. “My function,” she said “is that of the æsthetic, not the doctrinal teacher—the rousing of the nobler emotions which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of special measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however strongly moved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge.” Her influence in this direction over serious and impressionable minds was great indeed. The spirit of her art exactly harmonized with the new thoughts that were shaking the world of her contemporaries. Other artists had drawn their pictures with a strong ethical background, but she gave a finer color and a more spacious air to her ethics, by showing the individual passions and emotions of her characters, their adventures and their fortunes, as evolving themselves from long series of antecedent causes, and bound up with many widely operating forces and distant events. Here, too, we find ourselves in the full stream of evolution, hereditary, survival, and fixed inexorable law.

3   This scientific quality of her work may be considered to have stood in the way of her own aim. That the nobler emotions roused by her writings tend to “make mankind desire the social right” is not to be doubted; that we are not sure that she imparts peculiar energy to the desire. What she kindles is not a very strenuous, aggressive, and operative desire. The sense of the iron limitations that are set to improvement in present and future by inexorable forces of the past is stronger in her than any intrepid resolution to press on to whatever improvement may chance to be within reach if we only make the attempt. In energy, in inspiration, in the kindling of living faith in social effort, George Sand, not to speak of Mazzini, takes a far higher place.

4   It was certainly not the business of an artist to form judgments in the sphere of practical politics, but George Eliot was of far too humane a nature not to be deeply moved by momentous events as they passed. Yet her observations, at any rate after 1848, seldom show that energy of sympathy of which we have been speaking, and these observations illustrate our point. We can hardly think that anything was ever said about the great Civil War in America, so curiously far-fetched as the following reflection: “My best consolation is that an example on so tremendous a scale of the need for the education of mankind through the affections and sentiments as a basis for true development will have a strong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid narrow antagonism which in some quarters is held to be the only form of liberal thought.”

5   In 1848, as we have said, she felt the hopes of the hour in all their fullness. To a friend she writes:—

          “You and Carlyle (Have you seen his article in last week’s Examiner?) are the only two people who feel just as I would have them—who can glory in what is actually great and beautiful, without putting forth any cold reservations and incredulities to save their credit for wisdom. I am all the more delighted with your enthusiasm because I didn’t expect it. I feared that you lacked revolutionary ardor. But no—you are just as sans-culottish and rash as I would have you. You are not one of those sages whose reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they are too constantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice in any great manifestation of the forces that underlie our everyday existence.   “I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no really great movement—that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely critical epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of my date. I would consent, however, to have a year clipped off my life for the sake of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricades bowing to the image of Christ, ‘who first taught fraternity to men.’ One trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should be something to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing newspaper critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect for the French people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can act a poem, if he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that beautiful face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his; it is worthy of an aureole. I have little patience with people who can find time to pity Louis Philippe and his moustachioed sons. Certainly our decayed monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have a hospital for them, or a sort of zoölogical garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be preserved. It is but justice that we should keep them, since we have spoiled them for any honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions, and have their dinner regularly, but, for heaven’s sake, preserve me from sentimentalizing over pampered old man, when the earth has its millions of unfed souls and bodies. Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to wish that the revolution had been deferred till his son’s days; and I think the shades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if the Bourbons, who are so little better than they had been allowed to reign much longer.”

6     The hopes of ’48 were not very accurately fulfilled, and in George Eliot they never came to life again. Yet in social things we may be sure that undying hope is the secret of vision.

7   There is a passage in Coleridge’s “Friend” which seems to represent the outcome of George Eliot’s teaching on most, and not the worst, of her readers: “The tangle of delusions,” says Coleridge, “which stifled and distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual improvement, the cautious and unhazardous labors of the industrious though contented gardener—to prune, to strengthen, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and the caterpillar.” Coleridge goes further than George Eliot, when he adds the exhortation, “Far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext.”

8   George Eliot disliked vehemence more and more as her work advanced. The word “crudity,” so frequently on her lips, stood for all that was objectionable and distasteful. The conservatism of an artistic moral nature was shocked by the seeming peril to which priceless moral elements of human character were exposed by the energumens of progress. Their impatient hopes for the present appeared to her rather unscientific; their disregard of the past, very irreverent and impious. Mill had the same feeling when he disgusted his father by standing up for Wordsworth, on the ground that Wordsworth was helping to keep alive in human nature elements which utilitarians and innovators would need when their present and particular work was done. Mill, being free from the exaltations that make the artist, kept a truer balance. His famous pair of essays on “Bentham” and “Coleridge” were published (for the first time, so far as our generation was concerned) in the same year as “Adam Bede,” and I can vividly remember how the “Coleridge” first awoke in many of us, who were then youths at Oxford, that sense of truth having many mansions, and that desire and power of sympathy with the past, with the positive bases of the social fabric, and with the value of Permanence in States, which form the reputable side of all conservatisms. This sentiment and conviction never took richer or more mature form than in the best work of George Eliot, and her stories lighted up with a fervid glow the truths that minds of another type had just brought to the surface. It was this that made her a great moral force at that epoch, especially for all who were capable by intellectual training of standing at her point of view. We even, as I have said, tried hard to love her poetry, but the effort has ended less in love than in a very distant homage to the majestic in intention and the sonorous in execution. In fiction, too, as the years go by, we begin to crave more fancy, illusion, enchantment, than the quality of her genius allowed. But the loftiness of her character is abiding, and it passes nobly through the ordeal of an honest biography. “For the lessons,” says the fine critic already quoted, “most imperatively needed by the mass of men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwavering endeavor,—for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing teacher than she whom we are commemorating now. Everything in her aspect and presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply-lined face, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air of delicate refinement, which in one way was the more impressive because it seemed to proceed so entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty would sometimes quite transform the external harshness; there would be moments when the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, the earnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gaze moving from one face to another with a grave appeal,—all these seemed the transparent symbols that showed the presence of a wise, benignant soul.” As a wise, benignant soul, George Eliot will still remain for all right-judging men and women.

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