Part 16

And here we come upon a farther difference between George Eliot and Dickens of which we shall have many and beautiful examples in the works we have to study. This is a large, poetic tolerance of times and things which, though worthy of condemnation, nevertheless appeal to our sympathy because they once were closely bound with our fellow-men's daily life. For example, George Eliot writes often and lovingly about the England of the days before the Reform Bill, the careless, picturesque country-squire England; not because she likes it, or thinks it better than the England of the present, but with much the same feeling with which a woman looks at the ragged, hob-nailed shoes of her boy who is gone--a boy who doubtless was often rude and disobedient and exasperating to the last degree, but who was her boy.

A keen insight into this remarkable combination of the poetic tolerance with the sternness of scientific accuracy possessed by this remarkable woman--the most remarkable of all writers in this respect, we should say, except Shakspeare--is offered us in the opening lines of the first chapter of her first story, _Amos Barton_. (I love to look at this wonderful faculty in its germ). The chapter begins: "Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago.... Now there is a wide span of slated roof flanking the old steeple; the windows are tall and symmetrical; the outer doors are resplendent with oak graining, the inner doors reverentially noiseless with a garment of red baize;" and we have a minute description of the church as it is. Then we have this turn in the next paragraph, altogether wonderful for a George Eliot who has been translating Strauss and Feuerbach, studying physics, Comtism and the like among the London agnostics, a fervent disciple of progress, a frequent contributor to the _Westminster Review_; "Immense improvement! says the well-regulated mind, which unintermittingly rejoices in the new police ... the penny-post, and all guaranties of human advancement, and has no moments when conservative reforming intellect takes a nap, while imagination does a little Toryism by the sly, revelling in regret that dear old brown, crumbling, picturesque inefficiency is everywhere giving place to spick-and-span, new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, plans, elevations and sections, but alas! no picture. Mine, I fear is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed shades of vulgar errors." And it is worth while, if even for an aside, to notice in the same passage how this immense projection of herself out of herself into what we may fairly call her antipodes, is not only a matter of no strain, but from the very beginning is accompanied by that eye-twinkle between the lines which makes much of the very ruggedest writing of George Eliot's like a Virginia fence from between whose rails peep wild roses and morning-glories.

This is in the next paragraph where after thus recalling the outside of Shepperton church, she exclaims: "Then inside what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with delight even when I was so crude a member of the congregation that my nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by smuggling bread and butter into the sacred edifice." Or, a few lines before, a still more characteristic twinkle of the eye which in a flash carries our thoughts all the way from evolution to pure fun, when she describes the organ-player of the new Shepperton church as a rent-collector "differentiated by force of circumstances into an organist." Apropos of this use of the current scientific term "differentiation," it is worth while noting, as we pass, an instance of the extreme vagueness and caprice of current modern criticism. When George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_ was printed in 1876, one of the most complacent English reviews criticized her expression "dynamic power of" a woman's glance, which occurs in her first picture of Gwendolen Harleth, as an inappropriate use of scientific phraseology; and was immediately followed by a chorus of small voices discussing the matter with much minute learning, rather as evidence of George Eliot's decline from the proper artistic style. But here, as you have just seen, in the very first chapter of her first story, written twenty years before, scientific "differentiation" is made to work very effectively; and a few pages further on we have an even more striking instance in this passage: "This allusion to brandy-and-water suggested to Miss Gibbs the introduction of the liquor decanters now that the tea was cleared away; for in bucolic society five-and-twenty-years ago, the human animal of the male sex was understood to be perpetually athirst, and 'something to drink' was as necessary a 'condition of thought' as Time and Space." Other such happy uses of scientific phrases occur indeed throughout the whole of these first three stories, and form an integral part of that ever-brooding humor which fills with a quiet light all the darkest stories of George Eliot.

But now, on the other hand, it is in strong contrast that we find her co-laborer Dickens, always growing furious (as his biographer describes), when the ante-reform days are mentioned, those days of rotten boroughs, etc., when, as Lord John Russell said, "a ruined mound sent two representatives to Parliament, three niches in a stone wall sent three representatives to parliament, and a park where no houses were to be seen sent two representatives to Parliament." While George Eliot is indulging in the tender recollections of picturesqueness, etc., just given, Dickens is writing savage versions of the old ballad, _The Fine Old English Gentleman_, in which he fiercely satirizes the old Tory England:

"I will sing you a new ballad" (he cries), "and I'll warrant it first-rate, Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate,

The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips and chains, With fine old English penalties and fine old English pains; With rebel heads and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins: For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains Of the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again!

The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need, The good old times for hunting men who held their father's creed, The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed, Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed; Oh, the fine old English Tory times, When will they come again!

In those rare days the press was seldom known to snarl or bark, But sweetly sang of men in power like any tuneful lark; Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark; And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark. Oh, the fine old English Tory times, Soon may they come again!"

In a word, the difference between Dickens' and George Eliot's powers is here typified: Dickens tends toward the satiric or destructive view of the old times; George Eliot, with an even more burning intolerance of the essential evil, takes, on the other hand, the loving or constructive view. It is for this reason that George Eliot's work, as a whole, is so much finer than some of Dickens'. The great artist never can work in haste, never in malice, never in even the sub-acid satiric mood of Thackeray; in love, and love only, can great work, work that not only pulls down, but builds, be done; it is love, and love only, that is truly constructive in art.

And here it seems profitable to contrast George Eliot's peculiar endowment as shown in these first stories, with that of Thackeray. Thackeray was accustomed to lament that "since the author of _Tom Jones_ was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost powers a man.... Society will not tolerate the natural in art." Under this yearning of Thackeray's after the supposed freedom of Fielding's time, lie at once a short-coming of love, a limitation of view and an actual fallacy of logic, which always kept Thackeray's work below the highest, and which formed the chief reason why I have been unable to place him here, along with Dickens and George Eliot. This short-coming and limitation still exist in our literature and criticism to such an extent that I can do no better service than by asking you to examine them. And I think I can illustrate the whole in the shortest manner by some considerations drawn from that familiar wonder of our times, the daily newspaper. Consider the printed matter which is brought daily to your breakfast table. The theory of the daily paper is that it is the history of the world for one day; and let me here at once connect this illustration with the general argument by saying that Thackeray and his school, when they speak of drawing a man as he is--of the natural, etc., in art--would mean drawing a man as he appears in such a history as the daily newspaper gives us. But let us test this history: let us examine, for instance, the telegraphic column in the morning journal. I have made a faithful transcript on the morning of this writing of every item in the news summary, involving the moral relation of man to man; the result is as follows: one item concerning the assassination of the Czar; the recent war with the Boers in Africa; the quarrel between Turkey and Greece; the rebellion in Armenia; the trouble about Candahar; of a workman in a lumber-camp in Michigan, who shot and killed his wife, twenty-two years old, yesterday; of the confession of a man just taken from the West Virginia penitentiary, to having murdered an old man in Michigan, three years ago; of the suicide of Mrs. Scott at Williamstown, Mississippi; of the killing of King by Clark in a fight in Logan county, Kentucky, on Sunday; of how, about 10 o'clock last night, a certain John Cram was called to the door of his house, near Chicago, and shot dead by William Seymour; of how young Mohr, thirteen years of age, died at the Charity Hospital, in Jersey City, yesterday, from the effects of a beating by his father; of how young Clasby was arrested at Richmond, Virginia, for stealing letters out of the mail bag; of how the miners of the Connellsville, Pennsylvania, coke regions, the journeyman bakers of Montreal, Canada, the rubber-workers of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the Journeyman Tailors' Union in Cincinnati, are all about to strike; and finally, of how James Tolen, an insane wife-murderer, committed suicide in Minnesota, yesterday, by choking himself with a twisted sheet. These are all the items involving the moral relations of man to man contained in the history of the world for Tuesday, March 22d, 1881, as given by a journal noted for the extent and accuracy of its daily collection.

Now suppose a picture were drawn of the moral condition of the United States from these data: how nearly would it represent the facts? This so-called "history of the world for one day," if you closely examine it, turns out to be, you observe, only a history of the world's crimes for one day. The world's virtues do not appear. It is true that Patrick Kelly murdered his wife yesterday; but then how many Kellys who came home, tired from work, and found the wife drunk and the children crying for bread, instead of murdering the whole family, with a rugged sigh drew the beastly woman's form into one corner, fumbled about the poor, dirty cupboard in another for crusts of bread, fed the crying youngsters after some rude fashion, and finally lay down with dumb heaviness to sleep off the evil of that day. It is true that Jones, the bank clerk, was yesterday exposed in a series of defalcations; but how many thousands of bank clerks on that same day resisted the strongest temptations to false entries and the allurements of private stock speculations. It is true that yesterday Mrs. Lighthead eloped with the music-teacher, leaving six children and a desolate husband; but how many thousands of Mrs. Heavyhearts spent the same day in nursing some drunken husband, who had long ago forfeited all love; how many Milly Bartons were darning six children's stockings at five o'clock of that morning; nay, what untold millions of faithful women made this same day a sort of paradise for husband and children. And finally, you have but to consider a moment that if it lay within the power of the diligent collector of items for the Associated Press despatches to gather together the virtuous, rather than the criminal actions of mankind, the virtuous would so far exceed the criminal as that no journal would find columns enough to put them in, so as to put a wholly different complexion upon matters. Now the use of this newspaper illustration in my present argument is this: I complain that Thackeray, and the Fielding school, in professing to paint men as they _are_, really paint men only as they _appear_ in some such necessarily one-sided representations as the newspaper history just described. And it is perfectly characteristic of the inherent weakness of Thackeray that he should so utterly fail to see the true significance underlying society's repudiation of his proposed natural picture. The least that such a repudiation _could_ mean, would be that even if the picture were good in Fielding's time, it is bad now. It is beautiful, therefore, remembering Thackeray's great influence at the time when _Scenes from Clerical Life_ were written, to find a woman, George Eliot, departing utterly out of that mood of hate or even of acidulous satire in which Thackeray so often worked, and in which, one may add, the world is seldom benefited, however skillful the work may be, departing from all that, deftly painting for us these pathetic Milly Bartons, and Mr. Gilfils, and Janet Dempsters, and Rev. Tryans, and arranging the whole into a picture which becomes epic because it is filled with the struggles of human personalities, dressed in whatever russet garb of clothing or of circumstances.

Those who were at my first lecture on George Eliot will remember that we found the editor of _Blackwood's Magazine_ on a certain autumn night in 1856, reading part of the MS. of _Amos Barton_, in his drawing-room to Thackeray, and remarking to Thackeray, who had just come in late from dinner, that he had come upon a new author who seemed uncommonly like a first-class passenger; it is significantly related that Thackeray said nothing, and evinced no further interest in it than civilly to say, sometime afterward, that he would have liked to hear more of it. In the light of the contrast I have just drawn, Thackeray's failure to be impressed seems natural enough, and becomes indeed all the more impressive, when we compare it with the enthusiastic praise which Charles Dickens lavished upon this same work in the letter which you will remember I read from him.

And here I come upon a further contrast between George Eliot and Dickens which I should be glad now to bring out as clearly appearing in these first three _Scenes from Clerical Life_ before _Adam Bede_ was written.

This is her exquisite modernness in that intense feeling for personality, which I developed with so much care in my first six lectures, and her exquisite scientific precision in placing the personalities or characters of her works before the reader.

All the world knows how Dickens puts a personality on his canvas: he always gives us a vividly descriptive line of facial curve, of dress, of form, of gesture and the like, which distinguishes a given character. Whenever we see this line we know the character so well that we are perfectly content that two rings for the eyes, a spot for the nose and a blur for the body may represent the rest; and we accept always with joy the rich mirthfulness or pathetic matter with which Dickens manages to invest such hastily drawn figures. George Eliot's principle and method are completely opposite; at the time of her first stories which we are now considering they were unique; and the quietness with which she made a real epoch in all character-description is simply characteristic of the quietness of all her work. She showed for the first time that without approaching dangerously near to caricature as Dickens was often obliged to do, a loveable creature of actual flesh and blood could be drawn in a novel with all the advantage of completeness derivable from microscopic analysis, scientific precision, and moral intent; and with absolutely none of the disadvantages, such as coldness, deadness and the like, which had caused all sorts of meretricious arts to be adopted by novelists in order to save the naturalness of a character.

A couple of brief expressions from _Janet's Repentance_, the third of _Scenes from Clerical Life_ show how intensely George Eliot felt upon this matter. At the end of Chapter X of that remarkable story, for instance, she says: "Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work the life-and-death struggles of separate human beings." And again in Chapter XXII: "Emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational: it insists on caring for individuals; it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a set-off against twelve miserable lives," leaving "a clear balance on the side of satisfaction.... One must be a great philosopher," she adds, sardonically, "to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellect in which it is evident that individuals really exist for no other purpose than that abstractions may be drawn from them:" (which is dangerously near, by the way, to a complete formula of the Emersonian doctrine which I had occasion to quote in my last lecture.) She continues: "And so it comes to pass that for the man who knows sympathy because he has known sorrow, that old, old saying, about the joy of angels over the repentant sinner out-weighing their joy over the ninety-nine just, has a meaning that does not jar with the language of his own heart. It only tells him that for angels too there is a transcendent value in human pain which refuses to be settled by equations; ... that for angels too the misery of one casts so tremendous a shadow as to eclipse the bliss of ninety-nine." The beautiful personality who suggests this remark is Janet Dempster, the heroine of _Janet's Repentance_; a tall, grand, beautiful girl who has married the witty Lawyer Dempster, and who, after a bitter married life of some years in which Dempster finally begins amusing himself by beating her, has come to share the customary wine decanter at table, and thus by insensible degrees to acquire the habit of taking wine against trouble. Presently a terrible catastrophe occurs; she is thrust out of doors barefooted at midnight, half clad, by her brutal husband, and told never to return. Finding lodgement with a friend next day, a whirlwind of necessity for complete spiritual re-adjustment shakes her. "She was sick," says George Eliot, "of that barren exhortation, 'Do right and keep a clear conscience and God will reward you, etc.' She wanted strength to do right;" and at this point the thought of Tryan, an unorthodox clergyman who had made a great stir in the village and whom she had been taught to despise, occurs to her. "She had often heard Mr. Tryan laughed at for being fond of great sinners; she began to see a new meaning in those words; he would perhaps understand her helplessness. If she could pour out her heart to him!" Then here we have this keen glimpse into some curious relations of personality. "The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of spiritual need the man to whom we have no tie but our common nature seems nearer to us than mother, brother or friend. Our daily, familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds; and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good." Nor can I ever read the pathetic scene in which Janet secures peace for her spirit and a practicable working theory for the rest of her active life, without somehow being reminded of the second scene in Mrs. Browning's _Drama of Exile_, prodigiously different as that is from this in all external setting:--the scene where the figures of Adam and Eve are discovered at the extremity of the sword-glare, flying from Eden, and Adam begins:

"Pausing a moment on the outer edge, Where the supernal sword-glare cuts in light The dark exterior desert,--hast thou strength Beloved, to look behind us to the gate? _Eve_--Have I not strength to look up to thy face?"

This story of _Janet's Repentance_ offers us, by the way, a strong note of modernness as between George Eliot and Shakspeare. Shakspeare has never drawn, so far as I know, a repentance of any sort. Surely, in the whole range of our life, no phenomenon can take more powerful hold upon the attention of the thinker than that of a human spirit suddenly, of its own free-will, turning the whole current of its love and desire from a certain direction into a direction entirely opposite; so that from a small spiteful creature, enamored with all ugliness, we have a large, generous spirit, filled with the love of true love. In looking upon such a sight one seems to be startlingly near to the essential mystery of personality--to that hidden fountain of power not preceded, power not conditioned, which probably gives man his only real conception of Divine power, or power acting for itself. It would be wonderful that the subtleties of human passion comprehended in the situation of repentance had not attracted Shakspeare's imagination, if one did not remember that the developing personality of man was then only coming into literature. The only apparent change of character of this sort in Shakspeare which I recall is that of the young king Henry V. leaving Falstaff and his other gross companions for the steadier matters of war and government; but the soliloquy of Prince Hal in the very first act of King Henry IV. precludes all idea of repentance here, by showing that at the outset his heart is not in the jolly pranks, but that he is calculatingly ambitious from the beginning; and his whole apparent dissipation is but a scheme to enhance his future glory. In the first act of Henry IV. (first part), when the plot is made to rob the carriers, at the end of Scene II., _exeunt_ all but Prince Hal, who soliloquizes thus:

"I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humor of your idleness: Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. ... So when this loose behaviour I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men's hopes; And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glittering o'er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which had no foil to set it off. I'll so offend to make offense a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will."

Here the stream of his love is from the beginning and always towards ambition; there is never any turn at all, and Prince Hal's assumption of the grace _reformation_, as applied to such a career of deliberate acting, is merely a piece of naive complacency.