Part 5

The light that seemed to flash on the world when this glorious book was published will never be forgotten by those who were old enough at the time to read and appreciate. By the way, is that would-be famous Liggins still alive? When he sums it all up, how much did he get out of his bold attempt to don the giant's robe?

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If "Adam Bede" was partly reminiscent, "The Mill on the Floss" was partly autobiographical. There is no question that in the sensitive, turbulent, loving nature of Maggie Tulliver Marian Evans painted herself. Those who knew her when she first came to London knew her as a pronounced insurgent. Never noisy and never coarse, always quiet in manner, sensitive, diffident and shrinking from unpleasantness, she yet had not put on that "made" and artificial pose which was her distinguishing characteristic in later years. She was still Maggie Tulliver, with a conscience and temperament at war together, and with a spiritual ideal in no way attained by her practical realisation. For indeed, the union between Marian Evans and George Lewes was far more incongruous in some of its details than was Maggie's love for Philip or her passion for Stephen. Philip appealed to her affection of old time, her pity and her love of art--Stephen to her hot blood and her sensuous love of beauty. But George Lewes's total want of all religiousness of feeling, his brilliancy of wit, which was now coarse now mere _persiflage_, his cleverness, which was more quickness of assimilation than the originality of genius, were all traits of character unlike the deeper, truer and more ponderous qualities of the woman who braved the world for his sake when first she linked her fate with his--the woman who did not, like Maggie, turn back when she came to the brink but who boldly crossed the Rubicon--and who, in her after efforts to cover up the conditions, showed that she smarted from the consequences.

Read in youth by the light of sympathy with insurgency, Maggie is adorable, and her brother Tom is but a better-looking Jonas Chuzzlewit. Read in age by the light of respect for conformity and self-control, much of Maggie's charm vanishes, while most of Tom's hardness becomes both respectable and inevitable. Maggie was truly a thorn in the side of a proud country family, not accustomed to its little daughters running off to join the gipsies, nor to its grown girls eloping with their cousin's lover. Tom was right when he said no reliance could be placed on her; for where there is this unlucky divergence between principle and temperament, the will can never be firm nor the walk steady. Sweet little Lucy had more of the true heroism of a woman in her patient acceptance of sorrow and her generous forgiveness of the cause thereof, than could be found in all Maggie's struggles between passion and principle. The great duties of life lying at our feet and about our path cannot be done away with by the romantic picturesqueness of one character contrasted with the more prosaic because conventional limitations of the other; nor is it right to give all our sympathy to the one who spoilt so many lives and brought so much disgrace on her family name, merely because she did not mean, and did not wish, and had bitter remorse after terrible conflicts, which never ended in real self-control or steadfast pursuance of the right.

There is something in "The Mill on the Floss" akin to the gloomy fatalism of a Greek tragedy. In "Adam Bede" is more spontaneity of action, more liberty of choice; but, given the natures by which events were worked out to their final issues in "The Mill on the Floss," it seems as if everything must have happened precisely as it did. An obstinate, litigious and irascible man like Mr. Tulliver was bound to come to grief in the end. Fighting against long odds as he did, he could not win. Blind anger and as blind precipitancy, against cool tenacity and clear perceptions, must go under; and Mr. Tulliver was no match against the laws of life as interpreted by Mr. Wakem and the decisions of the law courts. His choice of a fool for his wife--was not Mrs. Tulliver well known at Coventry?--was another step in the terrible March of Fate. She was of no help to him as a wife--with woman's wit to assist his masculine decisions--nor as a mother was she capable of ruling her daughter or influencing her son. She was as a passive instrument in the hands of the gods--one of those unnoted and unsuspected agents by whose unconscious action such tremendous results are produced. George Eliot never did anything more remarkable than in the union she makes in this book between the most commonplace characters and the most majestic conception of tragic fate. There is not a stage hero among them all--not a pair of buskins for the whole company; but the conception is AEschylean, though the stage is no bigger than a doll's house.

The humour in "The Mill on the Floss" is almost as rich as that of "Adam Bede," though the special qualities of the four sisters are perhaps unduly exaggerated. Sister Pullet's eternal tears become wearisome, and lose their effect by causeless and ceaseless repetition; and surely sister Grigg could not have been always such an unmitigated Gorgon! Mrs. Tulliver's helpless foolishness and tactless interference, moving with her soft white hands the lever which set the whole crushing machinery in motion, are after George Eliot's best manner; and the whole comedy circling round sister Pullet's wonderful bonnet and the linen and the chaney--comedy at last linked on to tragedy--is of inimitable richness. The girlish bond of sympathy between sister Pullet and sister Tulliver, in that they both liked spots for their patterned linen, while sister Grigg--allays contrairy to Sophy Pullet, would have striped things--is repeated in that serio-comic scene of the ruin, when the Tullivers are sold up and the stalwart cause of their disaster is in bed, paralysed. By the way, would he have recovered so quickly and so thoroughly as he did from such a severe attack? Setting that aside, for novelists are not expected to be very accurate pathologists, the humour of this part of the book is all the more striking for the pathos mingled with it.

"The head miller, a tall broad-shouldered man of forty, black-eyed and black-haired, subdued by a general mealiness like an auricula":-- "They're nash things, them lop-eared rabbits--they'd happen ha' died if they'd been fed. Things out o' natur never thrive. God Almighty doesn't like 'em. He made the rabbit's ears to lie back, and it's nothing but contrariness to make 'em lie down like a mastiff dog's":--"Maggie's tears began to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit a piece; and then Tom bit a piece, just for company, and they ate together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies":--Is there anything better than these in Mrs. Poyser's repertory?

Of acute psychological vision is that fine bit on "plotting contrivance and deliberate covetousness"; and the summing up of the religious and moral life of the Dodsons and Tullivers, beginning "Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers," is as good as anything in our language. No one theoretically knew human nature better than George Eliot. Practically, she was too thin-skinned to bear the slightest abrasion, such as necessarily comes to us from extended intercourse or the give and take of equality. But theoretically she sounded the depths and shallows, and knew where the bitter springs rose and where the healing waters flowed; and when she translated what she knew into the conduct and analysis of her fictitious characters, she gave them a life and substance peculiarly her own.

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Hitherto George Eliot has dealt with her own experiences, her reminiscences of old friends and well-known places, of familiar acquaintances, and, in Maggie Tulliver, of her own childish frowardness and affectionateness--her girlish desire to do right and facile slipping into wrong. In "Silas Marner" she ventures into a more completely creative region; and, for all the exquisite beauty and poetry of the central idea, she has failed her former excellence. The story is one of the not quite impossible but highly improbable kind, with a _Deus ex machina_ as the ultimate setter-to-rights of all things wrong. As with "Adam Bede," the date is thrown back a generation or two, without the smallest savour of the time indicated, save in the fashion of the dresses of the sisters Lammeter--a joseph substituted for a cloak, and riding on a pillion for a drive in a fly. Else there is not the least attempt to synchronise time, circumstances and sentiment, while the story is artificial in its plot and unlikely in its treatment. Yet it is both pretty and pathetic; and the little introduction of fairyland in the golden-haired child asleep by the fire, as the substitute for the stolen hoard, is as lovely as fairy stories generally are. But we altogether question the probability of a marriage between the young squire and his drunken wife. Such a woman would not have been too rigorous, and was not; and such a man as Godfrey Cass would not have married a low-born mistress from "a movement of compunction." As we said before, in the story of Hetty and Arthur, young squires a century ago were not so tender-hearted towards the honour of a peasant girl. It was a pity, of course, when things went wrong; but then young men will be young men, and it behoved the lasses to keep themselves to themselves! If the young squire did the handsome thing in money, that was all that could be expected of him. The girl would be none the worse thought of for her slip; and the money got by her fault would help in her plenishing with some honest fellow who understood things. This is the sentiment still to be found in villages, where the love-children of the daughters out in service are to be found comfortably housed in the grandmother's cottage, and where no one thinks any the worse of the unmarried mother; and certainly, a century ago, it was the universal rule of moral measurement. George Eliot undoubtedly made a chronological mistake in both stories by the amount of conscientious remorse felt by her young men, and the depth of social degradation implied in this slip of her young women.

The beginning of "Silas Marner" is much finer than that of either of her former books. It strikes the true note of a harmonious introduction, and is free from the irritating trivialities of the former openings. In those early days of which "Silas Marner" treats, a man from the next parish was held as a "stranger"; and even now a Scotch, Irish or Welsh man would be considered as much a foreigner as a "Frenchy" himself, were he to take up his abode in any of the more remote hamlets of the north or west. The state of isolation in which Silas Marner lived was true on all these counts--his being a "foreigner" to the autochthonous shepherds and farmers of Ravaloe--his half mazed, half broken-hearted state owing to the false accusation brought against him and the criminal neglect of Providence to show his innocence--and his strange and uncongenial trade. Yet, for this last, were not the women of that time familiar with the weaving industry?--else what could they have done with the thread which they themselves had spun? If it were disposed of to a travelling agent for the hand-loom weavers, why not have indicated the fact? It would have been one touch more to the good of local colour and conditional accuracy. To be sure, the paints are laid on rather thickly throughout; but eccentricities and folks with bees in their bonnets were always to be found in remote places before the broom of steam and electricity came to sweep them into a more common conformity; and that line between oddity and insanity, always narrow, was then almost invisible.

The loss of the hoarded treasure and the poor dazed weaver's terrified flight to the Rainbow introduces us to one of George Eliot's most masterly of her many scenes of rustic humour.

"The more important customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked; while the beer drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended with embarrassing sadness"--these, as well as Mr. Snell, the landlord, "a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human differences, as those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor"--do their fooling admirably. From the cautious discussion on the red Durham with a star on her forehead, to the authoritative dictum of Mr. Macey, tailor and parish clerk (were men of his social stamp called _Mr._ in those days?) when he asserts that "there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself"--from the gossip about the Lammeter land to the ghos'es in the Lammeter stables, it is all excellent--rich, racy and to the manner born. And the sudden appearance of poor, scared, weazen-faced Silas in the midst of the discussion on ghos'es, gives occasion for another fytte of humour quite as good as what has gone before.

Worthy of Mrs. Poyser, too, was sweet and patient Dolly Winthrop's estimate of men. "It seemed surprising that Ben Winthrop, who loved his quart-pot and his joke, got along so well with Dolly; but she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that 'men _would_ be so' and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks." Good, too, when speaking of his wife, is Mr. Macey's version of the "mum" and "budget" of the fairies' dance. "Before I said 'sniff' I took care to know as she'd say 'snaff,' and pretty quick too. I wasn't a-going to open _my_ mouth like a dog at a fly, and snap it to again, wi' nothing to swaller."

But in spite of all this literary value of "Silas Marner" we come back to our first opinion of its being unreal and almost impossible in plot. The marriage of Godfrey to an opium-eating(?) drab, and the robbery of Silas Marner's hoard by the squire's son were pretty hard nuts to crack in the way of probability; but the timely death of the wife just at the right moment and in the right place--the adoption of a little girl of two by an old man as nearly "nesh" as was consistent with his power of living free from the restraint of care--the discovery of Dunsay's body and the restoration to the weaver of his long-lost gold--the _impasse_ of Eppie, the squire's lawfully born daughter and his only legal inheritor, married to a peasant and living as a peasant at her father's gates: all these things make "Silas Marner" a beautiful unreality, taking it out of the ranks of human history and placing it in those of fairy tale and romance.

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In "Felix Holt" we come back to a more actual kind of life, such as it was in the early thirties when the "democratic wave," which has swept away so much of the old parcelling out of things social and political, was first beginning to make itself felt. But here again George Eliot gives us the sense of anachronism in dealing too familiarly with those new conditions of the Reform Bill which gave Treby Magna for the first time a member, and which also for the first time created the Revising Barrister--while Trades Unions were still unrecognised by the law, and did their work mainly by rattening and violence. Any one who was an intelligent and wide-awake child at that time, and who can remember the talk of the excited elders, must remember things somewhat differently from what George Eliot has set down. Radical was in those days a term of reproach, carrying with it moral obloquy and condemnation. The Tories might call the Whigs Radicals when they wanted to overwhelm them with shame, as we might now say Anarchists and Dynamiters. But the most advanced Gentleman would never have stood for Parliament as a Radical. Felix Holt himself, and the upper fringe of the working class, as also the lower sediment, might be Radicals, but scarcely such a man as Harold Transome, who would have been a Whig of a broad pattern. And as for the Revising Barrister, he was looked on as something akin to Frankenstein's Monster. No one knew where his power began nor where it ended; and on each side alike he was dreaded as an unknown piece of machinery which, once set a-going, no one could say what it would do or where it would stop.

In its construction "Felix Holt" is perhaps the most unsatisfactory of all George Eliot's books. The ins and outs of Transome and Durfey and Scaddon and Bycliffe were all too intricate in the weaving and too confused in the telling to be either intelligible or interesting. In trying on the garment of Miss Braddon the author of "Felix Holt" showed both want of perception and a deplorable misfit. Also she repeats the situation of Eppie and her adopted father Silas in that of Esther and Rufus Lyon. But where it was natural enough for the contentedly rustic Eppie to refuse to leave her beloved old father for one new and unknown--her old habits of cottage simplicity, including a suitable lover, for the unwelcome luxuries of an unfamiliar state--natural in her though eminently unnatural in the drama of life--it was altogether inharmonious with Esther's character and tastes to prefer poverty to luxury, Felix to Harold, Malhouse Yard to Transome Court. George Eliot's usually firm grip on character wavers into strange self-contradiction in her delineations of Esther Lyon. Even the situation of which she is so fond--the evolution of a soul from spiritual deadness to keen spiritual intensity, and the conversion of a mind from folly to seriousness--even in this we miss the masterly drawing of her better manner. The humour too is thinner. Mrs. Holt is a bad Mrs. Nickleby; and the comic chorus of rustic clowns, which George Eliot always introduces where she can, is comparatively poor. She is guilty of one distinct coarseness, in her own character as the author, when she speaks of the cook at Treby Manor--"a much grander person than her ladyship"--"as wearing gold and jewelry to a vast amount of suet."

When Esther has been taken up by the Transomes, George Eliot misses what would have been absolutely certain--these fine little points of difference between the high-bred lady of Transome Court and the half-bred Esther of Malhouse Yard; and yet, quite unintentionally, she makes Esther as vulgar as a barmaid in her conversations and flirtatious coquetries with Harold Transome. Nor, we venture to think, as going too far on the other side, would a girl of Esther's upbringing and surroundings have used such a delightfully literary phrase as "importunate scents." On the whole we do not think it can be denied that, so far as she had gone in her literary career when she wrote "Felix Holt," it is undeniably her least successful work.

And yet, how many and how beautiful are the good things in it! If Homer nods at times, when he is awake who can come near him? The opening of the book is beyond measure fine, and abounds in felicitous phrases. "His sheep-dog following with heedless unofficial air as of a beadle in undress:"--"The higher pains of a dim political consciousness:"--"The younger farmers who had almost a sense of dissipation in talking to a man of his questionable station and unknown experience:"--"Her life would be exalted into something quite new--into a sort of difficult blessedness such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully growing into the possession of higher powers" (true for George Eliot herself but not for such a girl as Esther Lyon):--These are instances of literary supremacy taken at random, with many more behind.

Then how exquisite is that first love-scene between Felix and Esther! It is in these grave and tender indications of love that George Eliot is at her best. Gentle as "sleeping flowers"--delicately wrought, like the most perfect cameos--graceful and suggestive, subtle and yet strong--they are always the very gems of her work. And in "Felix Holt" especially they stand out with more perfectness because of the inferior quality of so much that surrounds them.

Felix himself is one of George Eliot's masterpieces in the way of nobleness of ideal and firmness of drawing. Whether he would have won such a girl as Esther, or have allowed himself to be won by her, may be doubtful; but for all the rugged and disagreeable honesty of his nature--for all his high ideals of life and hideous taste in costume--for all his intrinsic tendency and external bearishness, he is supreme. And with one of George Eliot's best aphorisms, made in his intention, we close the book with that kind of mingled disappointment and delight which must needs be produced by the inferior work of a great master. "Blows are sarcasms turned stupid; wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest."

The last three books of the series are the most ponderous. Still beautiful and ever noble, they are like over-cultivated fruits and flowers of which the girth is inconvenient; and in one, at least, certain defects already discernible in the earlier issues attain a prominence fatal to perfect work.

Never spontaneous, as time went on George Eliot became painfully laboured. Her scholarship degenerated into pedantry, and what had been stately and dignified accuracy in her terms grew to be harsh and inartistic technicality. The artificial pose she had adopted in her life and bearing reacted on her work; and the contradiction between her social circumstances and literary position coloured more than her manners. All her teaching went to the side of self-sacrifice for the general good, of conformity with established moral standards, while her life was in direct opposition to her words; for though she did no other woman personal injustice, she did set an example of disobedience to the public law which wrought more mischief than was counteracted by even the noblest of her exhortations to submit to the restraints of righteousness, however irksome they might be. And it was this endeavour to co-ordinate insurgency and conformity, self-will and self-sacrifice, that made the discord of which every candid student of her work, who knew her history, was conscious from the beginning. Nowhere do we find this contradiction more markedly shown than in "Romola," the first of the ponderous last three.

Her noblest work, "Romola" is yet one of George Eliot's most defective in what we may call the scaffolding of the building. The loftiness of sentiment, the masterly delineation of character, the grand grasp of the political and religious movement of the time, the evidences of deep study and conscientious painstaking visible on every page, are combined with what seems to us to be the most extraordinary indifference to--for it cannot be ignorance of--the social and domestic conditions of the time. The whole story is surely impossible in view of the long arm of the Church--the personal restraints necessarily imposed on women during the turbulent unrest of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the proud exclusiveness of the well-born citizens of any state.