Part 23

She had been persuaded to this step by Dr. Chapman, who was at that time editor of the _Westminster Review_, and who asked her to come and help him to conduct that publication. At this time she must have been one of the most captivating companions imaginable. She knew French, German and Italian, and had besides a good knowledge of Latin, Greek, Russian and Hebrew. She was a really good player of the piano, and had some proficiency on the organ; she had already mixed in some of the best society of London, for, in 1841, her father had moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, and here she quickly became intimate in the household of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray, where she met such people as Emerson, George Combe, Mr. Froude, and many other noted ones of the literary circles which the Brays delighted in drawing about them; her mind had been enlarged by the treasures of the Continent which she visited with her life-long friends, the Brays, in 1849, after the death of her father, remaining at Geneva after the Brays returned to England; she had all that homely love which comes with the successful administration of breakfast, dinner and supper, for her sisters and brothers had all married, and she lived alone with her father after his removal to Coventry in 1841, and kept his house for him from that time until his death, not only with great daughterly devotion but, it is said, with great success as a domestic manager; besides thus knowing the mysteries of good coffee and good bread she was widely versed in theology, philosophy and the movements of modern science: all of which equipment was permeated with a certain intensity which struck every one who came near her. With this endowment she came to London in 1851, as I have said, by Dr. Chapman's invitation, and took up her residence at Dr. Chapman's house. Here she immediately began to meet George H. Lewes, Carlyle, Mill and Herbert Spencer. Of her relations to Lewes it seems to me discussion is not now possible. It is known that Lewes' wife had once left him, that he had generously condoned the offense and received her again, and that in a year she again eloped; the laws of England make such a condonation preclude divorce; Lewes was thus prevented from legally marrying again by a technicality of the law which converted his own generosity into a penalty; under these circumstances George Eliot, moved surely by pure love, took up her residence with him, and according to universal account, not only was a faithful wife to him for twenty years until his death, but was a devoted mother to his children. That her failure to go through the form of marriage was not due to any contempt for that form, as has sometimes been absurdly alleged, is conclusively shown by the fact that when she married Mr. Cross, a year and a half after Lewes' death, the ceremony was performed according to the regular rites of the Church of England.

The most congenial of George Eliot's acquaintances during these early days at the Chapman's in London was Mr. Herbert Spencer. For a long time indeed the story went the rounds that Mr. Spencer had been George Eliot's tutor; but you easily observe that when she met him at this time in London she was already thirty-one years old, long past her days of tutorship. The story however has authoritatively been denied by Mr. Spencer himself. That George Eliot took pleasure in his philosophy, that she was especially conversant with his _Principles of Psychology_, and that they were mutually-admiring and mutually-profitable friends, seems clear enough; but I cannot help regarding it a serious mistake to suppose that her novels were largely determined by Mr. Spencer's theory of evolution, as I find asserted by a recent critic who ends an article with the declaration that "the writings of George Eliot must be regarded, I think, as one of the earliest triumphs of the Spencerian method of studying personal character and the laws of social life."

This seems to me so far from being true that many of George Eliot's characters appear like living objections to the theory of evolution. How could you, according to this theory, evolve the moral stoutness and sobriety of Adam Bede, for example, from _his_ precedent conditions, to wit, his drunken father and querulous mother? How could you evolve the intensity and intellectual alertness of Maggie Tulliver from _her_ precedent conditions, to wit, a flaccid mother, and a father wooden by nature and sodden by misfortune? Though surely influenced by circumstances her characters everywhere seem to flout evolution in the face.

But the most pleasant feature connected with the intercourse of George Eliot and Herbert Spencer is that it appears to have been Mr. Spencer who first influenced her to write novels instead of heavy essays in _The Westminster_. It is most instructive to note that this was done with much difficulty. Only after long resistance, after careful thought, and indeed after actual trial was George Eliot persuaded that her gift lay in fiction and not in philosophy; for it was pending the argument about the matter that she quietly wrote _Scenes from Clerical Life_ and caused them to be published with all the precaution of anonymousness, by way of actual test.

As to her personal habits I have gleaned that her manuscript was wonderfully beautiful and perfect, a delight to the printers, without blot or erasure, every letter carefully formed; that she read the Bible every day and that one of her favorite books was Thomas a Kempis on _The Imitation of Christ_; that she took no knowledge at secondhand; that she had a great grasp of business, that she worked slowly and with infinite pains, meditating long over her subject before beginning; that she was intensely sensitive to criticism; that she believed herself a poet in opposition to the almost unanimous verdict of criticism which had pronounced _The Spanish Gypsy_, _Agatha_ and _The Legend of Jubal_ as failing in the gift of song, though highly poetic; that the very best society in London--that is to say in the world--was to be found at her Sunday afternoon receptions at the Priory, Regent's Park, where she and Mr. Lewes lived so long; and that she rarely left her own home except when tempted by a fine painting or some unusually good performance of music.

I have given here a list of complete works, with dates of publication, as far as I have been able to gather. I believe this is nearly complete.

Translation of Strauss' _Leben Jesu_, 1846; contributions to Westminster Review, from about 1850, during several years; translation of Feuerbach's _Essence of Christianity_, 1854; _Scenes of Clerical Life_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1857,--book-form 1858; _Adam Bede_, 1859; _The Mill on the Floss_, 1860; _The Lifted Veil_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1860; _Silas Marner_, 1861; _Romola_, Cornhill Magazine, book-form, 1863; _Felix Holt_, 1866; _The Spanish Gypsy_, 1868: _Address to Workmen_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1868; _Agatha_, 1869; _How Lisa loved the king_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1869; _Middlemarch_, 1871; _The Legend of Jubal_, 1874; _Daniel Deronda_, 1876; The _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, 1879; and said to have left a translation of _Spinoza's Ethics_, not yet published.

As the mind runs along these brief phrases in which I have with a purposed brevity endeavored to flash the whole woman before you, and as you supplement that view with this rapid summary of her literary product,--the details of fact seem to bring out the extraordinary nature of this woman's endowment in such a way that to add any general eulogium would be necessarily to weaken the picture. There is but one fact remaining so strong and high as not to be liable to this objection, which seems to me so characteristic that I cannot do better than close this study with it. During all her later life the central and organic idea which gave unity to her existence was a burning love for her fellow-men. I have somewhere seen that in conversation she once said to a friend: "What I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and as irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling," and the narrator of this speech adds that at the end of it she grasped the mantel-piece as if actually saving herself from a fall, with an intensity which made the gesture most eloquent.

You will observe that of the two commandments in which the Master summed up all duty and happiness--namely, to love the Lord with all our heart, and to love our neighbor as ourself, George Eliot's whole life and work were devoted to the exposition of the latter. She has been blamed for devoting so little attention to the former; as for me, I am too heartily grateful for the stimulus of human love which radiates from all her works to feel any sense of lack or regret. This, after all--the general stimulus along the line of one's whole nature--is the only true benefit of contact with the great. More than this is hurtful. Now a days, you do not want an author to tell you how many times a day to pray, to prescribe how many inches wide shall be the hem of your garment. This the Master never did; too well He knew the growth of personality which _would_ settle these matters, each for itself; too well He knew the subtle hurt of all such violations of modern individualism; and after our many glimpses of the heartiness with which George Eliot recognized the fact and function of human personality one may easily expect that she never attempted to teach the world with a rule and square, but desired only to embody in living forms those prodigious generalizations in which the Master's philosophy, considered purely as a philosophy, surely excelled all other systems.

In fine, if I try to sum up the whole work of this great and beautiful spirit which has just left us in the light of all the various views I have presented in these lectures, where we have been tracing the growth of human personality from Aeschylus, through Plato, Socrates, the contemporary Greek mind, through the Renaissance, Shakspeare, Richardson and Fielding, down to Dickens, and our author, I find all the numerous threads of thought which have been put before you gathered into one, if I say that George Eliot shows man what he may be, in terms of what he is.

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