Part 15

Nor need I dwell upon Scott's novels, which stretch from 1814 to 1831, which we have all known from our childhood as among the most hale and strengthening waters in which the young soul ever bathed. They discuss no moral problems, they place us in no relation towards our fellow that can be called moral at all, they belong to that part of us which is youthful, undebating, wholly unmoral--though not immoral--they are simply always young, always healthy, always miraculous. And I can only give now a hasty additional flavor of these Scott days by reminding you of the bare names of Thomas Hope, Lockhart, Theodore Hook, Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Gore and Miss Mitford. It seems always comfortable in a confusion of this kind to have some easily-remembered formula which may present us a considerable number of important facts in portable shape. Now the special group of writers which I wish to contrast with the classic group, consisting of Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, are at work between 1837 and 1857; and for the purpose of giving you a convenient skeleton or set of vertebrae, containing some main facts affecting the English novel of the nineteenth century, I have arranged this simple table which proceeds by steps of ten years up to the period mentioned.

For example: since these all end in seven; beginning with the year 1807, it seems easy to remember that that is the date of Charles and Mary Lamb's _Tales from Shakspeare_; skipping ten years to 1817, in this year _Blackwood's Magazine_ is established, a momentous event in fiction generally and particularly as to George Eliot's; advancing ten years, in 1827, Bulwer's _Pelham_ appears, and also the very stimulating _Specimens of German Romance_, which Thomas Carlyle edited; in 1837 the adorable _Pickwick_ strolls into fiction; in 1847 Thackeray prints _Vanity Fair_, Charlotte Bronte gives us _Jane Eyre_, and Tennyson _The Princess_; and finally, in 1857, as we have seen, George Eliot's _Scenes of Clerical Life_ are printed, while so closely upon it in the previous year as to be fairly considered contemporary, comes Mrs. Browning's _Aurora Leigh_.

Now I do not know any more vivid way of bringing before you the precise work which English fiction is doing at the time George Eliot sets in, than by asking you to run your eye along the last four dates here given, 1827, 1837, 1847, 1857. Here, in 1827, advances a well-dressed man, bows a fine bow, and falls to preaching his gospel: "My friends, under whatever circumstances a man may be placed, he has it always in his power to be a gentleman;" and Bulwer's gentleman is always given as a very manful and Christian being. I am well aware of the modern tendency to disparage Bulwer, as a slight creature; but with the fresh recollection of his books as they fell upon my own boyhood, I cannot recall a single one which did not leave, as a last residuum, the picture in some sort of the chivalrous gentleman impressed upon my heart. I cheerfully admit that he sometimes came dangerously near snobbery, and that he was uncivil and undignified and many other bad things in the _New Timon_ and the Tennyson quarrel; and I concede that it must be difficult for us--you and me, who are so superior and who have no faults of our own--to look upon these failings with patience; and yet I cannot help remembering that every novel of Bulwer's is skilfully written and entertaining, and that there is not an ignoble thought or impure stimulus in the whole range of his works.

But, advancing, here, in 1837, comes on a preacher who takes up the slums and raggedest miseries of London and plumps them boldly down in the parlors of high life; and, like the boy in the fairy tale whose fiddle compelled every hearer to dance in spite of himself, presently has a great train of people following him, ready to do his bidding in earnestly reforming the prisons, the schools, the workhouses, and the like, what time the entire train are roaring with the genialest of laughter at the comical and grotesque figures which this peculiar Dickens has fished up out of the London mud.

But again: here, in 1847, we have Thackeray exposing shame and high vulgarity and minute wickedness, while Charlotte Bronte and Tennyson, with the widest difference in method, are for the first time expounding the doctrine of co-equal sovereignty as between man and woman, and bringing up the historic conception of the personality of woman to a plane in all respects level with, though properly differentiated from, that of man. It is curious to see the depth of Charlotte Bronte's adoration for Thackeray, the intense, high-pitched woman for the somewhat slack, and as I always think, somewhat low-pitched satirist; and perhaps the essential utterance of Thackeray, as well as the fervent tone which I beg you to observe is now being acquired by the English novel, the awful consciousness of its power and its mission, may be very sufficiently gathered from some of Charlotte Bronte's words about Thackeray which occur in the Preface to the second edition of her _Jane Eyre_:

"There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears; who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society much as the son of Imlah came before the throned kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital--a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of _Vanity Fair_ admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek-fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time, they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.

"Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day: as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things."

Now, into this field of beneficent activity which _The Novel_ has created, comes in 1857 George Eliot: comes with no more noise than that of a snow-flake falling on snow, yet--as I have said, and as I wish now to show with some detail--comes as an epoch-maker, both by virtue of the peculiar mission she undertakes and of the method in which she carries it out.

What then is that peculiar mission?

In the very first of these stories, _Amos Barton_, she announces it quite explicitly, though it cannot be supposed at all consciously. Before quoting the passage, in order that you may at once take the full significance of it, let me remind you of a certain old and grievous situation as between genius and the commonplace person. For a long time every most pious thinker must have found one of the mysteries most trying to his faith to be the strange and apparently unjustifiable partiality of God's spiritual gifts as between man and man.

For example, we have a genius (say) once in a hundred years; but this hundred years represents three generations of the whole world; that is to say, here are three thousand million commonplace people to one genius.

Now, with all the force of this really inconceivable numerical majority, the cry arises, How monstrous! Here are three thousand millions of people to eat, sleep, die, and rot into oblivion, and but one man is to have such faculty as may conquer death, win fame, and live beyond the worms!

Now, no one feels this inequality so keenly as the great genius himself. I find in Shakspeare, in Beethoven, in others, often an outcrop of feeling which shows that the genius cringes under this load of favoritism, as if he should cry in his lonesome moments, _Dear Lord, why hast thou provided so much for me, and so little for yonder multitude?_ In plain fact, it seems as if there was never such a problem as this: what shall we do about these three thousand millions of common men as against the one uncommon man, to save the goodness of God from seeming like the blind caprice of a Roman Emperor!

It is precisely here that George Eliot comes to the rescue; and though she does not solve the problem--no one expects to do that--at any rate she seems to me to make it tolerable, and to take it out of that class of questions which one shuts back for fear of nightmare and insanity. Emerson has treated this matter partially and from a sort of side-light. "But," he exclaims in the end of his essay on _The Uses of Great Men_, "_great men_,--the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is there fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue?... Why are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, ... and they make war and death sacred; but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is everyday's tragedy." And more to this purport. But nothing could be more unsatisfactory than Emerson's solution of the problem. He unhesitatingly announces on one page that the wrong is to be righted by giving every man a chance in the future, in (say) different worlds; every man is to have his turn at being a genius; until "there are no common men." But two pages farther on this elaborate scheme of redress is completely swept away by the announcement that after all the individual is nothing, the quality is what abides, and so falls away in that singular delusion of his, that personality is to die away into the first cause.

On the other hand, if you will permit me to quote a few pathetic words which I find in Carlyle's _Reminiscences_, in the nature of a sigh and aspiration, and breathed blessing all in one upon his wife and her ministrations to him during that singular period of his life when he suddenly left London and buried himself in his wild Scotch farm of Craigenputtoch, I shall be able to show you how Carlyle, most unconsciously, dreams toward a far more satisfactory end of this matter than Emerson's, and then how George Eliot actually brings Carlyle's dream to definite form, and at last partial fulfilment in the very beginning of her work. Carlyle is speaking of the rugged trials and apparent impossibilities of living at Craigenputtoch when he and his Jeanie went there, and how bravely and quietly she faced and overcame the poverty, the ugliness, the almost squalor, which was their condition for a long time. "Poverty and mean obstruction continued," he says, "to preside over it, but were transformed by human valor of various sorts into a kind of victory and royalty. Something of high and great dwelt in it, though nothing could be smaller and lower than many of the details. How blessed might poor mortals be in the straitest circumstances, if only their wisdom and fidelity to Heaven and to one another were _adequately_ great! It looks to me now like a kind of humble russet-coated _epic_, that seven years' settlement at Craigenputtoch, very poor in this world's goods, but not without an intrinsic dignity greater and more important than then appeared; thanks very mainly to her, and her faculties and magnanimities, without whom it had not been possible."

And now, let us hear the words in which George Eliot begins to preach the "russet-coated epic" of everyday life and of commonplace people.

The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable,--a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favorably many years ago. "An utterly uninteresting character!" I think I hear a lady reader exclaim--Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a "character."

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hair-breadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people--many of them--bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance--in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share.

Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tone. In that case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know what further befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I have to tell at all beneath your attention. As it is, you can, if you please, decline to pursue my story further; and you will easily find reading more to your taste, since I learn from the newspapers that many remarkable novels, full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and eloquent writing, have appeared only within the last season.

Let us now pass on to _Adam Bede_, _The Mill on the Floss_, and the rest of George Eliot's works in historic order, and see with what delicious fun, what play of wit, what ever-abiding and depth-illuminating humor, what creative genius, what manifold forms of living flesh and blood, George Eliot preached the possibility of such moral greatness on the part of every most commonplace man and woman as completely reduces to a level the apparent inequality in the matter of genius, and so illustrated the universal "russet-coated epic."

IX.

Before _Scenes from Clerical Life_ had ceased to run, in the latter part of the year 1857, George Eliot had already begun a novel more complete in form than any of the three tales which composed that series. Early in 1858, she made a visit to the Continent, and it was from Munich that a considerable portion of the MS. of her new book was sent to her publisher, Mr. Blackwood. This was _Adam Bede_, which she completed by the end of October, 1858.

It was brought out immediately in book form; George Eliot seemed desirous of putting the public to a speedier test than could be secured by running the story through successive numbers of the magazine, as usual; although the enthusiastic editor declared himself very willing to enrich the pages of _Blackwood's_ with it. It was therefore printed in January, 1859.

I have already cited a letter from Marian Evans to Miss Henschel, in which she mentions the only two matters of fact connected in the most shadowy way as originals with the plot of _Adam Bede_. One of these is that in her girlhood, she had met an aunt of hers about sixty years old, who had in early life been herself a preacher. To this extent, and this only, is there any original for our beautiful snow-drop--Dinah Morris, in _Silas Marner_. Again, in the same letter, George Eliot mentions that this same aunt had told her of once spending a night in prison to comfort a poor girl who had murdered her own child, and that this incident lay in her mind for many years, until it became the germ of _Adam Bede_.

These are certainly but shadowy connections; yet, probably, the greatest works are built upon quite as filmy a relation to any actual precedent facts. A rather pretty story is told of Mrs. Carlyle, which, perhaps, very well illustrates this filmy relation. It is told that one evening she gave to Dickens a subject for a novel which she had indeed worked out up to the second volume, the whole subject consisting of a weaving together of such insignificant observations as any one must make of what goes on at houses across the street. For example,--Mrs. Carlyle observed of a house nearly opposite them that one day the blinds or curtains would be up or down; the next day a figure in a given costume would appear at the window, or a cab would drive, hastily or otherwise, to the door, a visitor would be admitted or rejected, etc; such bits of circumstances she had managed to connect with human characters in a subtle way which is said to have given Dickens great delight. She never lived, however, to finish her novel, thus begun.

This publication of _Adam Bede_, placed George Eliot decisively at the head of English novel-writers, with only Dickens for second, even; and thus enables us at this point fairly to do what the ages always do in order to get that notoriously clear view of things which comes with time, and time only, that is to brush away all small circumstances and cloudy non-essentials of time so as to bring before our minds the whole course of English fiction, from its beginning to the stage at which it is now pending with _Adam Bede_, as if it concerned but four names and two periods, to wit:

RICHARDSON, } middle 18th century FIELDING. }

and

DICKENS, } middle 19th century. GEORGE ELIOT. }

Now it was shown in the last lecture how distinctly the moral purpose of the English fiction represented by this upper group was announced, though we were obliged to record a mournful failure in realizing that announcement. _Adam Bede_ gives us the firmest support for a first and most notable difference between these two periods of English fiction, that while the former professes morality yet fails beyond description, the latter executes its moral purpose to a practical degree of beneficence beyond its wildest hopes. Without now specifying the subtle revolutions which lie in _Adam Bede_, a single more tangible example will be sufficient to bring this entire difference before you. If I ask you to recall how it is less than fifty years ago that Charles Dickens was writing of the debtors' prisons with all the terrible earnest of one who had lived with his own father and mother in those unspeakable dens; if I recall to you what marvelous haste for proverbially slow England the reform thus initiated took upon itself, how it flew from this to that prison, from this to that statute, from this to that country, until now not only is no such thing as imprisonment for debt known to any of Dickens's readers, but with the customary momentum of such generous impulses in society, the whole movement in favor of debtors is clearly going too far and is beginning to oppress the creditor with part of the injustice it formerly meted out to the debtor; if, I say, I thus briefly recall to you this single instance of moral purpose carried into perfect practice, I typify a great and characteristic distinction between these two schools. For in point of fact what one may call an organic impracticability lay at the core of the moral scheme of Richardson and Fielding.

I think all reasoning and experience show that if you confront a man day by day with nothing but a picture of his own unworthiness, the final effect is, not to stimulate, but to paralyze his moral energy. The picture of the man becomes the head of a Gorgon. Now this was precisely what this early English fiction professed to do. It professed to show man exactly as he is; but although this profession included the good man as well as the bad man, and although there was some endeavor to relieve the picture with tints of goodness here and there, the final result was--and I fearlessly point any doubter to the net outcome from _Pamela_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ down to _Humphrey Clinker_--the final result was such a portrayal as must make any man sit down before the picture in a miserable deep of contempt for himself and his fellows, out of which many spirits cannot climb at all, and none can climb clean.

On the other hand, the work of Dickens I have just referred to is a fair specimen of the way in which the later school of English fiction, while glozing no evil, showed man, not how bad he might be, but how good he might be; and thus, instead of paralyzing the moral energy, stimulated it to the most beneficent practical reform. I think it is Robert Browning who has declared that a man is as good as his best; and there is the subtlest connection between the right to measure a man's moral stature by the highest thing that he has done, rather than the lowest, on the one hand, and that new and beautiful inspiration which comes into one's life as one contemplates more and more instances of the best in human behavior, as these are given by a literature which thus lifts one up from day to day with the declaration that however commonplace a man may be, he yet has within himself the highest capabilities of what we have agreed to call the russet-coated epic. The George Eliot and Dickens school, in fact, do but expand the text of the Master when He urges His disciples: "Be ye perfect as I am perfect."

Let me now suggest a second difference between the two schools which involves an interesting coincidence and now specially concerns us. As between Richardson and Fielding, it has been well said (by whom I cannot now remember) that Fielding tells you the time of day, whilst Richardson shows you how the watch is made. As indicating Fielding's method of conducting the action rather by concrete dialogue and event, than by those long analytic discussions of character in which Richardson would fill whole pages with minute descriptions of the changing emotions of Clarissa upon reading a certain letter from Lovelace, pursuing the emotion as it were tear by tear, _lachrymatim_,--this characterization happily enough contrasts the analytic strength of Richardson with the synthetic strength of Fielding.

Now a strikingly similar contrast obtains as between George Eliot and Charles Dickens. Every one will recognize as soon as it is mentioned the microscopic analysis of character throughout George Eliot as compared with the rapid cartoon-strokes by which Dickens brings out his figures. But the antithesis cannot be left here as between George Eliot and Dickens; for it is the marvel of the former's art that, though so cool and analytic, it nevertheless sets before us perfect living flesh-and blood people by fusing the whole analytic process with a synthetic fire of the true poet's human sympathy.