Part 13

I saw my aunt twice after this. Once I spent a day and night with my father in the Wirksworth cottage sleeping with my aunt, I remember. Our interview was less interesting than in the former time: I think I was less simply devoted to religious ideas. And once again she came with my uncle to see me--when my father and I were living at Foleshill; then there was some pain, for I had given up the form of Christian belief, and was in a crude state of free-thinking. She stayed about three or four days, I think. This is all I remember distinctly, as matter I could write down, of my dear aunt, whom I really loved. You see how she suggested Dinah; but it is not possible you should see as I do how entirely her individuality differed from Dinah's. How curious it seemed to me that people should think Dinah's sermon, prayers and speeches were copied--when they were written with hot tears, as they surged up in my own mind!

As to my indebtedness to facts of local and personal history of a small kind, connected with Staffordshire and Derbyshire--you may imagine of what kind that is when I tell you that I never remained in either of those counties more than a few days together, and of only two such visits have I more than a shadowy, interrupted recollection. The details which I knew as facts, and have made use of for my picture, were gathered from such imperfect allusion and narrative as I heard from my father in his occasional talk about old times.

As to my aunt's children or grandchildren saying, if they did say, that Dinah is a good portrait of my aunt--that is the vague, easily satisfied notion imperfectly instructed people always have of portraits. It is not surprising that simple men and women without pretension to enlightened discrimination should think a generic resemblance constitutes a portrait, when we see the great public so accustomed to be delighted with misrepresentations of life and character, which they accept as representations, that they are scandalized when art makes a nearer approach to truth.

Perhaps I am doing a superfluous thing in writing all this to you--but I am prompted to do it by the feeling that in future years "Adam Bede" and all that concerns it may have become a dim portion of the past, and I may not be able to recall so much of the truth as I have now told you.

Once more, thanks, dear Sara. Ever your loving MARIAN.

It is easy to gather from this letter that whilst the existence of Marian Evans was calm enough externally, her inner life was full of stirring events--of the most stirring events, in fact which can agitate the human soul for it is evident that she had passed along some quite opposite phases of religious belief. In 1851, after a visit to the continent, she goes--where all English writers seem to drift by some natural magic--to London, and fixes her residence there. It is curious enough that with all her clearness of judgment she works here for five years, apparently without having perceived the vocation for which her whole natural and acquired outfit had so remarkably prepared her. We find her translating Spinoza's _Ethics_; not only translating but publishing Feuerbach's _Essence of Christianity_ and Strauss's _Life of Jesus_. She contributes learned essays to the Westminster Review; it is not until the year 1856, when she is thirty-six years old that her first slight magazine story is sent to Blackwood's; and even after his first commendations her timidity and uncertainty as to whether she could succeed in story-writing are so great that she almost resolved to give it up. I should regard it as mournful, if I could think it religious to regard anything as mournful which has happened and is not revocable, that upon coming to London Marian Evans fell among a group of persons represented by George Henry Lewes. If one could have been her spiritual physician at this time one certainly would have prescribed for her some of those warm influences which dissipate doubt by exposing it to the fierce elemental heats of love, of active charity. One would have prescribed for her the very remedy she herself has so wisely commended in _Janet's Repentance_.

"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 philosophers are of one mind; here, at least, the conscience will not be dogged by adverse theory; here you may begin to act without settling one preliminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye--these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls where the stare and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued--where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity; bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it."

Or one might have prescribed for her America where the knottiest social and moral problems disappear unaccountably before a certain new energy of individual growth which is continually conquering new points of view from which to regard the world.

At the time to which we have now brought her history, Marian Evans would seem to have been a singularly engaging person. She was small in stature and her face was what would be called plain here; but she was widely read, master of several languages, a good talker and listener: and beyond all, every current of testimony runs towards a certain intensity and loving fire which pervaded her and which endowed her with irresistible magnetic attraction for all sensitive souls that came near her. Her love for home matters, and for the spot of earth where she had been born, her gentle affection for animals; how the Bible and Thomas a Kempis were her favorite books, these and a thousand womanly traits I hope to bring out as we study some of her greater works,--for with all her reputed reserve I find scarcely any writer so sincerely communicative and so frankly desirous of sympathy on the part of her reader as George Eliot. In the next article I shall ask leave to present you with some pictures of the stage at which English novel-writing has arrived under the recent hands of Scott, Thackeray and Dickens when George Eliot is timidly offering her first manuscript to Blackwood's; and I shall then offer some quotations from these first three stories--particularly from _Janet's Repentance_ which seems altogether the most important of the three--and shall attempt to show distinctly what were the main new features of wit, of humor, of doctrine, and of method which were thus introduced into literature, especially in connection with similar features which about this same time were being imparted by Mrs. Browning.

Meantime, let me conclude by asking you to fix your attention for a moment on this figure of Milly, sweet wife of Amos Barton, going to bed with her unmended basket of stockings in great fatigue, yet in great love and trust, and contrast it with that figure of Prometheus, nailed to the Caucasian rock in pain and hate, which formed the first object of these studies. What prodigious spiritual distance we have swept over from the Titan lying down, to unrest, thundering defiance against Jove's thunder, as if clashing shield against shield, and the tender-limbed woman whom the simple narrative puts before us in these words: "Her body was very weary, but her heart was not heavy ...; for her heart so overflowed with love," &c. Fixing your attention upon this word "love," and reminding you how, at the close of the last lecture, we found that the whole movement of the human spirit which we have traced here as the growth of personality towards the unknown--towards fellow-man--towards nature,--resulting in music, in the novel, in science--that this whole movement becomes a unity when we arrive at the fact that it really imparts a complete change in man's most ultimate conception of things--a change, namely, from the conception of Justice as the organic idea of moral order, a conception which we have seen Aeschylus and Plato vainly working out to the outrageous conclusions of Prometheus, of the _Republic_; to the conception of Love as the organic idea of moral order, a conception which we are just now to see George Eliot working out to the divinely-satisfactory conclusion of Milly Barton, who conquers with gentle love a world which proved refractory alike to the justice of Jove and the defiance of Prometheus; reminding you, I say, of this concurrent change from feeble personality and justice to strong personality and love, what an amazing arc of progress we have traversed in coming from Aeschylus to George Eliot!

And it is, finally, most interesting to find this change receiving clear expression, for the first time in English literature, in the works of the two women I have mentioned, Mrs. Browning and George Eliot. In this very autumn, when we have seen the editor of _Blackwood's Magazine_ reading the MS. of George Eliot's first story to Thackeray, Mrs. Browning is sending _Aurora Leigh_ to print; and, as I shall have frequent occasion to point out, the burden of _Aurora Leigh_ as well as of George Eliot's whole cyclus of characters is love.

There is a charming scene in the first Act of Bayard Taylor's _Prince Deukalion_, which, though not extending to the height we have reached, yet very dramatically sums up a great number of ideas which converge towards it. In this scene Gaea, the Earth, mother of men, is represented as tenderly meditating upon her son, man. Near her stands a rose-tree, from one bud of which Love is presently to emerge. She says:

"I change with man, Mother, not more than partner, of his fate. Ere he was born I dreamed that he might be, And through long ages of imperfect life Waited for him. Then vexed with monstrous shapes, That spawned and wallowed in primeval ooze, I lay supine and slept, or dreamed to sleep; And dreamed, or waking felt as in a dream, Some touch of hands, some soft delivering help, And he was there! His faint new voice I heard; His eye that met the sun, his upright tread, Thenceforth were mine! And with him came the palm, The oak, the rose, the swan, the nightingale; The barren bough hung apples to the sun; Dry stalks made harvest: breezes in the woods Then first found music, and the turbid sea First rolled a crystal breaker to the shore. His foot was on the mountains, and the wave Upheld him: over all things huge and coarse There came the breathing of a regal sway, Which bent them into beauty. Order new Followed the march of new necessity, And what was useless, or unclaimed before, Took value from the seizure of his hands."

In the midst of like thoughts, a bud on a rose which stands by Gaea bursts open, and Eros, the antique god of young love, appears from it.

GAEA.

Blithe, tricksome spirit! art thou left alone Of gods and all their intermediate kin The sweet survivor? Yet a single seed, When soil and seasons lend their alchemy, May clothe a barren continent in green.

EROS.

Was I born, that I should die? Stars that fringe the outer sky Know me: yonder sun were dim Save my torch enkindle him. Then, when first the primal pair Found me in the twilight air, I was older than their day, Yet to them as young as they. All decrees of fate I spurn; Banishment is my return: Hate and force purvey for me, Death is shining victory.

VIII.

If you should be wandering meditatively along the banks of some tiny brook, so narrow that you can leap across it without effort, so quiet in its singing its loudest tinkle cannot be heard in the next field, carrying upon its bosom no craft that would draw more water than the curving leaf of a wild-rose floating down stream, too small in volume to dream of a mill-wheel and turning nothing more practical than maybe a piece of violet petal in a little eddy off somewhere,--if, I say, you should be strolling alongside such a brook and should see it suddenly expand, without the least intermediate stage, into a mighty river, turning a thousand great wheels for man's profit as it swept on to the sea, and offering broad highway and favorable currents to a thousand craft freighted with the most precious cargoes of human aspirations; you would behold the aptest physical semblance of that spiritual phenomenon which we witnessed at our last meeting, when in tracing the quiet and mentally wayward course of demure Marian Evans among the suave pastorals of her native Warwickshire, we came suddenly upon the year 1857 when her first venture in fiction--_The Scenes from Clerical Life_ appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and magically enlarged the stream of her influence from the diameter of a small circle of literary people in London to the width of all England.

At this point it seems interesting now to pause a moment, to look about and see exactly what network English fiction had done since its beginning, only about a century before; to note more particularly what were the precise gains to humanity which Thackeray and Dickens had poured in just at this time of 1857; and thus to differentiate a clear view of the actual contribution which George Eliot was now beginning to make to English life and thought.

It is not a pleasant task, however instructive, to leave off looking at a rose and cast one's contemplation down to the unsavory muck in which its roots are imbedded. This, however, is what one must do when one passes from the many-petalled rose of George Eliot's fiction to the beginning of the English novel.

This beginning was as curious as it was unlooked for by the people engaged in it.

In the year 1740, a book in two volumes called _Pamela: or The Reward of Virtue_, was printed, in which Samuel Richardson took what seems to have been the first revolutionary departure from the wild and complex romances--such for example, as Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_--which had formed the nearest approach to the modern novel until then. At this time Richardson was fifty years old, and probably the last man in England who would have been selected as likely to write an epoch-making book of any description.

He had worked most of his life as a printer, but by the time referred to had gotten so far towards the literary life as to be employed by booksellers to arrange indexes and to write prefaces and dedications. It so happened that on a certain occasion he was asked by two booksellers to write a volume of letters on different subjects which might serve as models to uneducated persons--a sort of Every Man His Own Letter Writer, or the like.

The letters, in order to be more useful, were to be upon such subjects as the rustic world might likely desire to correspond about. Richardson thinks it over; and presently writes to inquire, "Will it be any harm, in a piece you want to be written so low, if we should instruct them how they should think and act in common cases, as well as indite?" This seemed a capital idea and in the course of time, after some experiments, and after recalling an actual story he had once heard which gave him a sort of basis, he takes for his heroine a simple servant-girl, daughter of Goodman Andrews, a humbly born English farmer, rather sardonically names her Pamela after the Lady Pamela in Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_, carries her pure through a series of incredibly villainous plots against her by the master of the house where she is at service, and who takes advantage of the recent death of his wife, Pamela's mistress, to carry these on, and finally makes the master marry her in a fit of highly spasmodic goodness, after a long course of the most infamous but unsuccessful villainy, calls the book _Pamela or Virtue Rewarded_, prints it, and in a very short time wins a great host of admiring readers, insomuch that since the first two volumes ended with the marriage, he adds two more showing the married life of Pamela and her squire.

The whole novel, like all of Richardson's, is written in the form of letters passing between the characters. It is related, apropos of his genius in letter-writing, that in his boyhood he was the love-letter-writer-in-chief for three of the young ladies of his town, and that he maintained this embarrassing position for a long time without suspicion from either of the three. Richardson himself announces the moral purpose of his book, saying that he thinks it might "introduce a new species of writing that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and ... promote the cause of religion and virtue;" and in the preface to the continuation before-mentioned, he remarks as follows: "The two former volumes of _Pamela_ met with a success greatly exceeding the most sanguine expectations; and the editor hopes" (Richardson calls himself the editor of the letters), "that the letters which compose these will be found equally written to nature, avoiding all romantic flights, improbable surprises, and irrational machinery; and that the passions are touched where requisite; and rules equally new and practicable inculcated throughout the whole for the general conduct of life." I have given these somewhat tedious quotations from Richardson's own words, to show first that the English novel starts out with a perfectly clear and conscious moral mission, and secondly, to contrast this pleasing moral announcement of Richardson's with what I can only call the silly and hideous realization of it which meets us when we come actually to read this wonderful first English novel--_Pamela_.

I have already given the substance of the first two volumes in which the rich squire, Mr. B. (as he is called throughout the novel), finally marries and takes home the girl who had been the servant of his wife and against whom, ever since that lady's death, he had been plotting with an elaborate baseness which has never before been, and I sincerely hope will never hereafter be described. By this action Mr. B. has, in the opinion of Richardson, of his wife, the servant girl, and of the whole contemporary world, saturated himself with such a flame of saintliness as to have burnt out every particle of any little misdemeanors he may have been guilty of in his previous existence; and I need only read you an occasional line from the first four letters of the third volume in order to show the marvellous sentimentality, the untruth towards nature, and the purely commercial view of virtue and of religion which make up this intolerable book. At the opening of Volume III. we find that Goodman Andrews, the father of the bride, and his wife have been provided with a comfortable farm on the estate of Mr. B., and the second letter is from Andrews to his daughter, the happy bride, Pamela. After rhapsodizing for several pages, Andrews reaches this climax--and it is worth while observing that though only a rude farmer of the eighteenth century whose daughter was a servant maid, he writes in the most approved epistolary style of the period:

"When here in this happy dwelling and this well-stocked farm, in these rich meadows and well-cropped acres, we look around us and whichever way we turn our heads see blessings upon blessings and plenty upon plenty; see barns well stored, poultry increasing, the kine lowing and crowding about us, and all fruitful; and are bid to call all these our own. And then think that all is the reward of our child's virtue! O, my dear daughter, who can bear these things! Excuse me! I must break off a little! For my eyes are as full as my heart; and I will retire to bless God and your honored husband."

Here there is a break in the page, by which the honest farmer is supposed to represent the period of time occupied by him in retiring, and, as one hopes, dividing his blessing impartially between the Creator and Pamela's honored husband--and the farmer resumes his writing:

"So, my dear child, I now again take up my pen. But reading what I had written, in order to carry on the thread, I can hardly forbear again being in like sort affected."

And here we have a full stop and a dash, during which it is only fair to suppose that the honest Andrews manages to weep and bless up to something like a state of repose.

Presently Pamela:

"My dear father and mother; I have shown your letter to my beloved.... 'Dear good soul,' said he, 'how does everything they say and everything they write manifest the worthiness of their hearts! Tell them ... let them find out another couple as worthy as themselves, and I will do as much for them. Indeed I would not place them,' continued the dear obliger, 'in the same county, because I would wish two counties to be blessed for their sakes.'... I could only fly to his generous bosom ... and with my eyes swimming in tears of grateful joy ... bless God and bless him with my whole heart; for speak I could not! but almost choked with joy, sobbed to him my grateful acknowledgements.... ''Tis too much, too much,' said I, in broken accents. 'O, sir, bless me more gradually and more cautiously--for I cannot bear it!' And, indeed, my heart went flutter, flutter, flutter, at his dear breast, as if it wanted to break its too narrow prison to mingle still more intimately with his own."

And a few lines further on we have this purely commercial view of religion:

"And if our prayers shall be heard," continues Pamela, "and we shall have the pleasure to think that his" (her husband's) "advances in piety are owing not a little to them ... then indeed may we take the pride to think we have repaid his goodness to us and that we have satisfied the debt which nothing less can discharge."

Or, again, in the same letter, she exclaims anew:

"See, O see, my excellent parents, how we are crowned with blessings upon blessings, until we are the talk of all who know us; you for your honesty, I for my humility and virtue;" so that now I have "nothing to do but to reap all the rewards which this life can afford; and if I walk humbly and improve my blessed opportunities, will heighten and perfect all, in a still more joyful futurity."

Perhaps a more downright creed, not only of worldliness, but of "other-worldliness," was never more explicitly avowed.