A further evidence of her wide culture and reading, and of her large critical ability, may also be found in the first number of the Fortnightly Review, for which she wrote the first of the "notices of new books" which it published. This was a review of Mr. Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament. The author was one of her friends, and the decorator of the rooms in which her Sunday receptions were held. She praised the book very highly. The first paragraph of this notice betrays her appreciation of the aesthetic movement in England, and her sympathy with its objects and spirit. The moral value of aesthetic influences is characteristically expressed. The influence of the environment, as she understood it, is here seen. The largeness of her faith in the moral efficiency of material causes is nowhere so strongly expressed by her as in the words which follow.

The inventor of movable types, says the venerable Teufelsdroeckh, was disbanding hired armies, cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world. Has any one yet said what great things are being done by the men who are trying to banish ugliness from our streets and our homes, and to make both the outside and the inside of our dwellings worthy of a world where there are forests, and flower-tressed meadows, and the plumage of birds; where the insects carry lessons of color on their wings, and even the surface of a stagnant pool will show us the wonders of iridescence and the most delicate forms of leafage? They, too, are modifying opinions, for they are modifying men's moods and habits, which are the mothers of opinions, having quite as much to do with their formation as the responsible father—Reason. Think of certain hideous manufacturing towns where the piety is chiefly a belief in copious perdition, and the pleasure is chiefly gin. The dingy surface of wall pierced by the ugliest windows, the staring shop-fronts, paper-hangings, carpets, brass and gilt mouldings, and advertising placards, have an effect akin to that of malaria; it is easy to understand that with such surroundings there is more belief in cruelty than in beneficence, and that the best earthly bliss attainable is the dulling of the external senses. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose that ugliness which is taken for beauty will answer all the purposes of beauty; the subtle relation between all kinds of truth and fitness in our life forbids that bad taste should ever be harmless to our moral sensibility or our intellectual discernment; and—more than that—as it is probable that fine musical harmonies have a sanative influence over our bodily organization, it is also probable that just coloring and lovely combinations of lines may be necessary to the complete well-being of our systems, apart from any conscious delight in them. A savage may indulge in discordant chuckles and shrieks and gutturals, and think that they please the gods, but it does not follow that his frame would not be favorably wrought upon by the vibrations of a grand church organ. One sees a person capable of choosing the worst style of wall-paper become suddenly afflicted by its ugliness under an attack of illness. And if an evil state of blood and lymph usually goes along with an evil state of mind, who shall say that the ugliness of our streets, the falsity of our ornamentation, the vulgarity of our upholstery, have not something to do with those bad tempers which breed false conclusions?

The address to workingmen which George Eliot put into the mouth of Felix Holt is a suggestive and valuable piece of political writing. Tradition is therein presented as a moral and political influence. The spiritual treasures mankind possesses she says are the products of tradition, and these must be preserved. This can be done only by keeping the old institutions and forms until they can be organically supplanted by others. All the various portions of society are mutually dependent, and the destruction of any one of them will be to the injury of all. This she says to workingmen as a reason why they should not antagonize the social orders above them, whose work is as important as their own. The organs of society are the various social classes of which it is composed, and society is to be improved by turning class interests into the functions by which Humanity is to be developed. The spiritual treasures of the past are only to be preserved by order and good government; hence all revolutionary methods are suicidal. Life is to be advanced by giving social influence into the hands of the wisest. True principles must regulate society, and these George Eliot would have rest on science and altruism.

Such are some of the ideas of this remarkable essay, one of the most suggestive and instructive of all she wrote. The emphasis she laid on retribution, tradition, heredity and duties appears here in all its force. Perhaps nothing else she wrote so clearly brings out some of the characteristics of her mind. Her intense distrust of individualism does not permit her to say a single word of the rights of the laboring classes. The right of rebellion and revolution is totally disregarded, rather it is not recognized that any rights whatever exist. The workingman is not to think of himself or his class, but of society and humanity; he is to become an altruistic worker for the common good. While this is fine in theory, yet history indicates that the aristocratic classes have yielded to the broader social spirit only when they have been compelled to do so. The concessions must come from above, not from beneath. George Eliot's political philosophy, if carried into actual life, would keep the proletariate where they are, and strengthen the social power of the aristocratic classes. These words may indicate the drift of the essay:

But I come back to this: that, in our old society there are old institutions, and among them the various distinctions and inherited advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves along with all the wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our commerce and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought and professional skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its water distributed or it will bear no crop; these are the old channels, the old banks and the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new and better have been prepared, or the structure of the old has been gradually altered. But it would be fool's work to batter down a pump only because a better might be made, when you have no machinery ready for a new one: it would be wicked work, if villages lost their crops by it. Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved and our worst evils reduced, is not by any attempt to do away directly with the actually existing class distinctions and advantages, as if everybody could have the same sort of work or lead the same sort of life (which none of my hearers are stupid enough to suppose), but by turning of Class Interests into Class Functions or duties. What I mean is, that each class should be urged by the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large; that our public affairs should be got into a state in which there should be no impunity for foolish or faithless conduct. In this way, the public judgment would sift out incapability and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and even personal ambition would necessarily become of a worthier sort, since the desires of the most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the opinions of those around them: and for one person to put on a cap and bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways of getting rich that he may spend a vast sum of money in having more finery than his neighbors, he must be pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him. Now changes can only be good in proportion as they help to bring about this sort of result: in proportion as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance, and fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course of substitution class distinctions must inevitably change their character, and represent the varying Duties of men, not their varying Interests. But this end will not come by impatience. "Day will not break the sooner because we get up before the twilight." Still less will it come by mere undoing, or change merely as change. And moreover, if we believed that it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the franchise, we should be what I call superstitious men, believing in magic, or the production of a result by hocus-pocus. Our getting the franchise will greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every one of us has the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him well-judging and scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of things in this world has been determined for us beforehand, and in such a way that no ship can be expected to sail well on a difficult voyage, and reach the right port, unless it is well-manned: the nature of the winds and the waves, of the timbers, the sails and the cordage, will not accommodate itself to drunken, mutinous sailors.

You will not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to you, or of joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine way and need not be made better. What I am striving to keep in our minds is the care, the precaution, with which we should go about making things better, so that the public order may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be given to this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are bound up. After the Reform Bill of 1832, I was in an election riot, which showed me clearly, on a small scale, what public disorder must always be; and I have never forgotten that the riot was brought about chiefly by the agency of dishonest men who professed to be on the people's side. Now the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men, whose notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their hands and may do pretty much as they like. If any one can look round us and say that he sees no signs of any such danger now, and that our national condition is running along like a clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I call him a cheerful man; perhaps he does his own gardening, and seldom takes exercise far away from home. To us who have no gardens, and often walk abroad, it is plain that we can never get into a bit of a crowd but we must rub clothes with a set of roughs, who have the worst vices of the worst rich—who are gamblers, sots, libertines, knaves, or else mere sensual simpletons and victims. They are the ugly crop that has sprung up while the stewards have been sleeping; they are the multiplying brood begotten by parents who have been left without all teaching save that of a too-craving body, without all well-being save the fading delusions of drugged beer and gin. They are the hideous margin of society, at one edge drawing towards it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal class. Here is one of the evils which cannot be got rid of quickly, and against which any of us who have got sense, decency and instruction have need to watch. That these degraded fellow-men could really get the mastery in a persistent disobedience to the laws and in a struggle to subvert order, I do not believe; but wretched calamities would come from the very beginning of such a struggle, and the continuance of it would be a civil war, in which the inspiration on both sides might soon cease to be even a false notion of good, and might become the direct savage impulse of ferocity. We have all to see to it that we do not help to rouse what I may call the savage beast in the breasts of our generation—that we do not help to poison the nation's blood, and make richer provision for bestiality to come. We know well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way—that oppression has notoriously made men mad; and we are determined to resist oppression. But let us, if possible, show that we can keep sane in our resistance, and shape our means more and more reasonably towards the least harmful, and therefore the speediest, attainment of our end. Let us, I say, show that our spirits are too strong to be driven mad, but can keep that sober determination which alone gives mastery over the adaptation of means. And a first guarantee of this sanity will be to act as if we understood that the fundamental duty of a government is to preserve order, to enforce obedience of the laws. It has been held hitherto that a man can be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much money and comfort to lose. But a better state of things would be, that men who had little money and not much comfort should still be guardians of order, because they had sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a heart of justice, pity and fortitude to keep them from making more misery only because they felt some misery themselves. There are thousands of artisans who have already shown this fine spirit, and have endured much with patient heroism. If such a spirit spread and penetrated us all, we should soon become the masters of the country in the best sense and to the best ends. For, the public order being preserved, there can be no government in future that will not be determined by our insistence on our fair and practicable demands. It is only by disorder that our demands will be choked, that we shall find ourselves lost amongst a brutal rabble, with all the intelligence of the country opposed to us, and see government in the shape of guns that will sweep us down in the ignoble martyrdom of fools.

The eighteen essays published as the Impressions of Theophrastus Such purport to have been the work of a bachelor of singular habits and tastes, who had written a book which proved a failure, and who left this volume to appear posthumously. He had been in the habit of giving an account to himself of the characters he met with, and he begins his book by describing his own weaknesses. He classes himself as one of the blunderers he would portray, as having the faults and foibles he finds in others. Expressively the author says, "If the human race has a bad reputation, I perceive that I cannot escape being compromised." This may be taken as the sentiment of George Eliot herself; and it is she who really speaks in these words concerning the satirical criticisms of those she describes:

If I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavors in a rashly chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?—for even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think of exorcising it. No man can know his brother simply as a spectator.

After the second essay Theophrastus disappears, and no further hint is given that it is he who is the reputed author. This slight fictitious machinery is too weak to carry the load put upon it. The reader soon feels that it is George Eliot who is talking, and the opinions put forth, the sentiments expressed, are recognized as her own. Indeed, it would have been better, so the reader may probably come to say to himself, if this attempted disguise had been entirely dispensed with. By the time he has reached the sixth essay, "Only Temper," the discerning reader, familiar with George Eliot's books, will be ready to affirm that this is no other than the author herself speaking very frankly and finely her own sentiments. In this essay the moral temper of her mind appears, and her strong inclination to subordinate the individual to the social requirements of life.

These papers are modelled on those of the great essay-making period in English literature. Old-fashioned names are adopted, which have a greater or less significance in connection with the purpose of the essay. The man with the excitable temper is called Touchwood, while the man who slides into a deferential acceptance of opinions made for him is Mixtus. This method of the old essayists seems antiquated, cumbersome and unsuitable to the subjects discussed. The persons described lose their individuality by its use, and the reader forgets that they were meant to be creatures of flesh and blood. For the most part, they are mere abstractions, mere figures of straw, to be knocked over by the ingenious pen of the author. Some special fault or sin is given the name of a personality, but it is too much isolated from actual existence to produce the impression of a living thing.

These essays much resemble occasional chapters in her novels, and might have been studies for a new work. They are studies simply, done with a fine skill and polish, but fragmentary. The large setting of her novels is needed to give them relief and proportion. They disappoint as they are, for the satire is too apparent, and we do not see these characters in action, where their follies would obtain for them a more living interest. They are studies of individual character, portraying types of social and literary weakness, such as may have come under George Eliot's observation. They are careful dissections of motives and conduct, and full of a minute analysis of the moral and intellectual nature of her characters. There is abundance of candid criticism, shrewd observation and compressed wisdom of statement. Occasionally she is at her very best; but she uses many long, cumbersome sentences, the satire is too harsh and the wisdom too unwieldy. Her sympathy, love, pathos and pity are not so apparent as in her novels; she takes less delight in these creations, and evidently created them for purposes of dissection. She is never so weak in her other writings as in these essays, so wanting in genius and large-heartedness. She scourges many of the intellectual follies of the time, the conceit of culture, the pride of literature, and the narrowness of politics; but in most of the essays this is all.

The artistic conception of the book is too slight and fragmentary, and it gives the impression of being unfinished in execution and desultory in purpose. Yet there is in it much of fine feeling, pure sentiment, lively satire and apt wisdom. Sometimes the thought is labored; but there is a wealth of clear-cut conviction, strong thoughts and rich experience. There is force in the arguments, richness of ideas throughout, and a wonderful aptness of allusion and illustration. Her culture and learning are everywhere apparent in the fine perception of the most exact analogies and in the ease with which she brings science to the support of morals. Those of her admirers who come closest to her spirit, thoroughly appreciate her ideas, and delight in them, will read this book with satisfaction, and feel thankful that she wrote it. No one who would know the mind of George Eliot can afford to overlook it.

When George Eliot writes on subjects involving a moral purpose or ideal, she is always wise and interesting. When, however, she attempts to satirize some weakness or laugh at some folly, she is not always successful. Rich as may be the satire and the wit of her novels, both are often heavy and dull in her essays.

The greater number of essays in this volume are devoted to the analysis of special types of character, but a few are given to moral problems. These latter are of the more interest and value, and they present some new discussions of those problems with which George Eliot was so much fascinated. Her earnest faith in altruism, realism, tradition, natural retribution and the social value of morality, is as distinct here as in her novels or poems. In the essay on "False Testimonials" she gives a good realistic definition of imagination, which she says is "always based on a keen vision, a keen consciousness of what is, and carries the store of definite knowledge as material for the construction of its inward visions." She is no realist, however, in the sense of confining poetry merely to a photographic picture of outward nature. She accepts Dante as a genuine realist, for "he is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative combinations." She would have faithfulness to facts, but no limitation of vision; she would have the imagings exact and legitimate, but she would give our moral and intellectual insights no narrow bounds. Her realism is well defined when she criticises one of those persons who take mere fancy for imagination, to whom all facts are unworthy of recognition.

In at least two of these essays, those on "Debasing the Moral Currency" and "The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!" she has newly expressed herself concerning tradition. In the first she protests against the too-common custom of satirizing what is noble and venerable. Our need of faith in the higher things of life is very great, and that faith is to be established only through our regard for what has been given us by those who have gone before us. Whatever lowers our trust in the results of human efforts is corrupting, for it breaks down our faith in the true sources of human authority. "This is what I call debasing the moral currency," she says; "lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm and elevation of our social existence—the something besides bread by which man saves his soul alive." With her conception of tradition, as the legitimate source of the moral and spiritual life in man, and as the influence which builds up all which is truest and purest in our civilization, she can endure to see no contempt put upon its products. This essay, more perhaps than anything else she wrote, gives an insight into her conception of the higher life and her total lack of faith in any idealistic sources of human motive or inspiration. Contempt for the traditional, with her, implies contempt for the spiritual and moral. To destroy the traditional is revolutionary, dangerous and immoral. She cannot reject tradition in the name of higher wisdom, in the name of higher truth and authority. It gone, and all is gone; hence her fear of all iconoclastic and revolutionary methods. So she would keep whole and pure the national memories of every people. In the last essay of the book she says, "The preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, and their revival a sign of reviving nationality." It is "the divine gift of memory" as it expresses itself in the life and purposes of a people, "which inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the brutes." All which lowers the influence or the sacredness of this memory is debasing. The corrupting of this memory "is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity;" and this "new famine, a meagre fiend, with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments." That eager yearning of the nineteenth century for truth and reality, for something more than traditions and national memories, which displays itself in reforms and revolutions of every kind, had little of George Eliot's sympathy. Yet this spirit is stronger even than tradition, and creates for us a new world and a higher life.

Throughout these essays it is the social side of morality which is praised and commended. What will increase the altruistic spirit, what will widen sympathy and helpfulness, is regarded as truly ethical in its import. Ideal aims are brought to the level of present needs and the possibilities of human nature as it now exists.

Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and of the highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all else that touches the mixed life of the earth. They are archangels with awful brow and flaming sword, summoning and encouraging us to do the right and the divinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor in their presence; but to learn what it is they summon us to do, we have to consider the mortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and our own appetites.... On the whole, and in the vast majority of instances, the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries. A sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he does harm.

In another essay, that entitled "Only Temper," the social side of morality is again presented. Especially does it appear in that on "Moral Swindlers." "Let us refuse to accept as moral," says George Eliot, "any political leader who should allow his conduct in relation to great issues to be determined by egoistic passion, and boldly say that he would be less immoral even though he were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert Walpole, if at the same time his sense of the public welfare were supreme in his mind, quelling all pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous impartiality." George Eliot is almost without exception sound and just in her moral judgments, but here her theories have made her overlook the true conditions of a moral life.

Seeing that Morality and Morals under their alias of Ethics are the subject of voluminous discussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute—seeing that the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science, or that which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one might expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion of language which lends itself' to no wider view of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And since we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching duties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion—the one of these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with God which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest conduct toward men. With such a classification as this, it is no wonder, considering the strong re-action of language on thought, that many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are fain to seek for the grounds of social duty; and without entertaining any private intention of committing a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, or seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their dissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?"

It would be quite impossible for George Eliot to write an essay without some fresh thought or some new suggestion. To those who admire her genius and are in sympathy with her teachings this volume will have a special interest. Its few essays which touch upon moral or speculative subjects are of the utmost value as interpretations of her life and thought.

All her essays, the later as the earlier, are mainly of interest as aids to an understanding of her philosophy. Nothing is worthless which helps us clearly to comprehend an original mind.



XIX.

THE ANALYTIC METHOD.

George Eliot's literary method was that of Fielding and Thackeray, both of whom evidently influenced her manner. Their realism, and especially their method of comment and moral observation, she made her own. She had little sympathy with the romanticism of Scott or the idealism of Dickens. Her moral aims, her intense faith in altruism, kept her from making her art a mere process of photographing nature. Nature always had a moral meaning to her, a meaning in reference to man's happiness and health of soul; and that moral bearing of all human experiences gave dignity and purpose to her art.

It was the method of Scott to present the romantic, picturesque and poetic side of life. He was not untrue to nature, but he cared more for beauty and sentiment than for fact. He sometimes perverted the historic incidents he made use of, but he caught the spirit of the time with which he was dealing with absolute fidelity. In this capacity for historic interpretation he surpassed George Eliot, who had not his instinctive insight into the past. Scott had no theory about the past, no philosophy of history was known to him; but above all novelists he had the power to see by the light of other days, and to make the dead times live again. Not George Eliot and not Thackeray was his rival in this historic insight and poetic power of interpretation; and his superior success was due not only to his peculiar genius but also to his romanticism. Scott failed where George Eliot succeeded, in giving an intellectual interpretation of life. With certain social and moral tendencies he was clearly at home. On its side of adventure and social impulse and craving for a wider life, as a single instance of his power, he was a true interpreter of the age of Elizabeth. Its deeper spirit, its intellectual movements, he did not, and could not, bring within the range of his story. It was here George Eliot was superior, as is abundantly shown in Romola. The thoughtful aspects of Florentine life she truthfully presented; but its more romantic elements it needed a Scott to make living and real. In The Spanish Gypsy there is very little of genuine interpretation. Certain local features may be accurate, but the spirit of the time is not there; the characters are not such as that age and country developed. Scott, with all his romanticism, would have introduced reality into such an historic picture.

Within her own lines of power George Eliot is much greater than Scott, who could not have written Adam Bede or Middlemarch, or brought out what is best in those works. Adventure was necessary to Scott; he could not have transfigured the plain and homely with beauty as George Eliot has done. Where she is at her best, as in the simple scenes of Silas Marner, there is a charm, pathos and sympathy in her work which must endear it to all hearts. That peculiar power Scott did not have; yet it would be most difficult to decide which is the truer to nature. Genuine art, it is true, has its foundation in the realities of human experience: but those realities are not always best interpreted by the methods of realism. In his own province Scott was truer to nature than George Eliot was in the same field, as may be seen at once by comparing The Spanish Gypsy with Ivanhoe, or any of Scott's novels dealing with the mediaeval and feudal ages, he took the past into himself, caught its spirit, reflected it in its wholeness. In this he was a genuine realist, and all the more faithful to reality because he did not accept realism as a theory.

In comparing George Eliot with Dickens, it must first of all be noted that each is the superior of the other in his own special province. Dickens has more imagination; he appeals to more universal sentiments, touches a wider circle of experiences, captivates his readers with a resistless interest and tenderness of spirit. His characters are unreal, mere caricatures often, mere puppets. Yet he had an imagination of marvellous power, so that his characters appeared to his own mind as if real, and he describes them as if they actually stood before him, making them intensely real to his readers. Many of his persons never lived, never could have lived; yet they are types or certain traits of character made living and brought out into a distinctive existence. What those traits of character are he makes all the more apparent by this method.

Dickens had not a fine literary taste, he had no clear insight into some of the purer human sentiments, he was grossly untrue and false in many of his pictures. Yet all in all, with his many faults, it is to be said that his idealism, which was not of a high type, made him a true interpreter of life. If his characters are less faithfully drawn than George Eliot's, his insight into some of the sentiments and emotions was truer. His pictures may be false in some particulars, but he has given them the true spirit with which they should be animated.

In thoughtful fidelity to the facts of life, George Eliot surpasses Scott or Dickens. Scott by his insight, Dickens by his imagination, were able to do what she could not; but they put little thought into their work. They did not think about what life meant; she did. They worked instinctively, she thoughtfully. Her characters are more often to be met with than theirs; and there is a freshness, a wholesomeness, about them theirs do not have. She is more simple and refined than Fielding, more elevated in tone of thought, there is a deeper and a richer purpose in her work. None of the cynicism and hardness of Thackeray appear in her pages. She is fresher, more genuine, more poetic than he, with more of humanity.

In her essay on "The Natural History of German Life" she said of Dickens that he was "gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population." City life Dickens and Thackeray most truly photographed in all its features of snobbishness and selfishness. Its better side, its nobler sentiments, its humanity, they did not succeed in so well; not so well as George Eliot did, and simply because they did not so much sympathize with it. Country life they did not understand, and could not have sketched. Where George Eliot best succeeded they would have failed. Her real advance upon Dickens and Thackeray, however, lay in another direction. She says in the essay just quoted, speaking of Diekens's portraitures of town populations, that "if he could give us their psychological character—their conception of life and their emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies." In the two directions here indicated lay her superiority over other novelists,—her humanitarian sympathies and her psychologic insight. In reality, she did not contribute anything new to the realism of literary art. All which can be said for faithfulness to nature in art and poetry has been said by Ruskin, and George Eliot was early a reader of his books. Her predecessors, especially Thackeray, opened the way in the application of the realistic principles in its newer spirit. The enlargement of realism, however, was carried on to a much greater extent by the pre-Raphaelites in painting and poetry, and George Eliot was influenced by them as well. Their principle of loyal fidelity to the time and circumstances depicted was her own, at least in theory.

It was in another direction her chief characteristic lay, that of describing "psychologic character." Here she was no imitator, but she made a way of her own, and developed a new method. The method of science she applied to literature. Science has adopted the method of analysis, of inductive inquiry, of search in all the facts of nature for the laws which underlie them. So magnificent have been the results obtained by this process in the study of the material world, that it has been applied with the hope of securing the same thorough investigation of the phenomena presented by history, ethics and religion. Even here the method has justified itself, and has in recent years opened up new and valuable results, giving to the world an enriched conception of the life of man. The speculative mind has been stimulated to fresh activity, and new philosophies, of vast and imposing proportions, have been the result. The studies of Charles Darwin, and the elaboration of the theory of evolution, have given a marvellous incentive to the new method, resulting in its wide-spread application to all the questions of nature and life.

A method so productive in all directions must have its effect on literature. What claims the attention of all thinking men cannot long be kept out of poetry and art. In painting and in music it has been largely developed in the direction of a more intimate and sympathetic interpretation of nature and man. In literature the new method has been mainly brought into application hitherto in the form of photographic studies of human life. To describe what is, to make a true word-picture, has been the chief aim. With George Eliot began a wider use of the new method and its application in a more sympathetic spirit to the deeper problems of the mind and heart. She was not content to paint the surface of nature, to give photographic sketches of the outside of human life, but she wished to realize every subtle fact and every most secret impulse. An admirer of the Dutch school in painting, and of Jane Austen as a novelist, she was not content with their results and methods, wishing to interpret the spirit as well as the letter of nature and life.

In literature, the new method as developed in recent years consists in an application of psychology to all the problems of man's nature. George Eliot's intimate association with the leaders of the scientific movement in England, naturally turned her mind into sympathy with their work, and made her desirous of doing in literature what they were doing in science. In the special department of physiological psychology, no one did more than George Henry Lewes, and her whole heart went out in genuine appreciation of his work. He studied the mind as a function of the brain, as being developed with the body, as the result of inherited conditions, as intimately dependent on its environment. Here was a new conception of man, which regarded him as the last product of nature, considered as an organic whole. This conception George Eliot everywhere applied in her studies of life and character. She studied man as the product of his environment, not as a being who exists above circumstances and material conditions. "In the eyes of the psychologist," says Mr. James Sully, "the works of George Eliot must always possess a high value by reason of their large scientific insight into character and life." This value consists, as he indicates, in the fact that she interprets the inner personality as it is understood by the scientific student of human nature. She describes those obscure moral tendencies, nascent forces, and undertones of feeling and thought, which enter so much into life. She lays much stress on the subconscious mental life, the domain of vague emotion and rapidly fugitive thought.

The aim of the psychologic method is to interpret man from within, in his motives and impulses. It endeavors to show why he acts, and it unfolds the subtler elements of his character. This method George Eliot uses in connection with her evolutionary philosophy, and uses it for the purpose of showing that man is a product of hereditary conditions, that he has been shaped into his life of the emotions and sentiments by the influence of tradition. The psychologic method may be applied, however, without connection with the positive or evolutionary philosophy. The mind may be regarded as a distinct force and power, exercised within social and material limits, and capable of being studied in all its inner motives and impulses. Yet in her mental inquiries George Eliot did not regard man as an eternal soul in the process of development by divine methods, but as the inheritor of the past, moulded by every surrounding circumstance, and as the creature of the present. Instead of regarding man as sub specie eternitatis, she regarded him as an animal who has through feeling and social development come to know that he cannot exist beyond the present. This limitation of his nature affected her work throughout.

The psychologic method in literature has also been that of Robert Browning, and he has been as faithful to it as any other. He, too, analyzes his characters, penetrates all the hidden causes of motive and deed, lays bare the soul. No other poet has surpassed him in power to unveil the inner workings of the mind, to discover all the influences affecting it or in revealing how motives are created and how motives lead up to deeds. In two important particulars Robert Browning differs from George Eliot. His characters speak for themselves, reveal the secrets of their own minds. He does not talk about them, does not criticise their words and conduct, does not stand off from them as a spectator. He differs from her also in his conception of man as a being who is here developing an eternal existence under the laws of an Infinite Spirit. He, too, believes in the natural, and believes that the highest law of the soul is, to be true to every pure impulse arising within us. To calculate, to philosophize, he holds to be always to man's injury, that nature when perfectly obeyed is the only guide. He studies man as affected by all the circumstances of his existence, and as wrought upon by the great social forces which have made him what he is. His analysis is as keen as George Eliot's; he makes the soul appear before us in all its reality. His is a more creative, a more dramatic method than hers; yet he is fully as subjective, as much an interpreter of the soul. Neither is content to record the deeds of men; both wish to know why men act.

Browning has fittingly been called the poet of psychology. He is a dissecter, a prober, an analyzer in the full spirit of scientific research. He spares no pains to get at and to completely unfold the truth about man's nature, to show all the hidden causes of his action, all the secret motives of his life, using this method as thoroughly as George Eliot. It is interesting to note his attitude towards the great religious problems. His faith in God is intensely passionate and sublime in its conception. In words the most expressive in their meaning, and indicating a conviction the deepest, he reveals his faith.

"He glows above With scarce an intervention, presses close And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours."

The lifting and inspiring power of faith in an Infinite Being he has sung with a poet's purity of vision. Along with this faith goes his belief that man is being glowly perfected for a higher and nobler existence.

"To whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name? Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands! What, have fear of change from Thee, who art ever the same? Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands? There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound; What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven the perfect round.

"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist; Not its likeness, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice has gone forth, but, each survives for the melodist When eternity confirms the conceptions of an hour. The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by and by."

He teaches that progress is the true mark and aim of man's being, a progress sure and glorious.

"Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's and not the beast's; God is, they are, Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be."

Man yearns after more than he can gain here; that yearning is the mark of his higher nature and the means of progress. If he follows the better impulses of his nature, all experience will help to unfold his soul into higher attainments, and impulse will at last become, in clearer moments, revelation.

"Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! But not quite so much that moments, Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, When the spirit's true endowments Stand out plainly from its false ones, And appraise it if pursuing Or the right way or the wrong way To its triumph or undoing. There are flashes struck from midnights, There are fireflames noondays kindle, Whereby piled-up honors perish. Whereby swol'n ambitions dwindle, While just this or that poor impulse Which for once had play unstifled Seems the sole work of a lifetime, That away the rest have trifled."

More impersonal and dramatic than George Eliot, Browning introduces his doctrines less often. It is not easy to discover what are his theories as distinguished from those of his characters, for he makes no comments, and is faithful in developing the unity and integrity of his dramatis personae, whether in his monologues or dramas. Great as his other faults maybe, he surpasses George Eliot in his power to reveal character, but not in his power to make his characters stand out distinctly and unprejudiced from his own mind. His obscurity of expression and his involved style are serious defects in much of his work; and to most readers his thoroughly dramatic manner is puzzling. He gives but faint clue to the situation in his monologues, little explanation of the person, time or place. All is to be discovered from the obscurest allusions and hints. Defective as this method is in Browning's treatment, it is the true psychologic method, wherein motive and character are developed dramatically and without labored discussion. It is a more vital and constructive process than that followed by George Eliot, because nothing of the meaning and fulness of life is lost in the process of analysis. That Browning can never be read by more than a few, indicates how great are his faults; but in lyric passion, dramatic power and psychologic analysis he is one of the greatest poets of the century. The value and range of the new method are well illustrated in its use by two such thinkers and poets.

The analytic method as applied by George Eliot regards man as a social being, studies him as a member of society. All that he is, and all the influences working upon him, are understood only as affected by his connection with the life of the race. This fact gives the most distinguishing characteristic to her literary methods. Her imitators may not, and nearly all of them do not, follow her into positivism; but they all study man as a social being. They deal with him as affected by heredity, education, and social characteristics. Even here it is not her theories, but her artistic methods, which are imitated. The novel is no longer regarded as a story to be told dramatically and with moving effect, but as a study of character, as an analysis of situations and motives. The advocates of the new method say that "in one manner or another the stories were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist thinks about persons and situations." [Footnote: W.D. Howells in the Century for November, 1882.] This interpretation of the mission of the novelist well describes George Eliot's work, for she never hesitated to tell her reader what she thought about the situations and the persons of whom she wrote.

The new method, as developed in sympathy with agnosticism, fails in literature just as science fails to be a complete interpretation of the universe. The process which answers in the material world does not answer in the spiritual. The instruments which tell the secrets of matter, close the avenues to the revelations of mind. The methods of experiment and demonstration which have brought the universe to man's knowledge, have not been sufficient to make the soul known to itself. Any literary methods imitating physical science must share in its limitations without its power over the materials with which it has to deal. Literature has hitherto been made helpful and delightful and acceptable because of its ideal elements. Belief in a spiritual world, belief in the imperative law of righteousness as a divine command, runs through all effective literature. However realistic the poets have been when they have reached their highest and best, they have believed that the soul, and what belongs to it, is the only reality. Divorced of this Element, literature is at once lowered in tone, a dry-rot seizes upon it and eats away its finest portions. If Goethe and Shakspere are realists in literary method, as some of their interpreters would claim, yet to them the spiritual is supreme, the soul is monarch. So it is with Homer, with Dante, with Scott, with Cervantes, with Victor Hugo, with every supremely artistic and creative mind. Great minds instinctively believe in the creative power of the mind, in its capacity for self-direction. An unbiassed mind gifted with genius sees over and through all obstacles, leaps to magnificent results, will not be restrained by the momentary conditions of the present. Education or social environment, however adverse, will not long hinder the poet from his work. He writes for the future, if the present will not accept him, confident that what his soul has to utter can be truly uttered only as his own individuality impels, and that if he is faithful to his genius the world will listen in due time. This power of personality lies at the basis of all genuine literature, teaching faith in the soul, faith in a providential ordering of the world, and overturning all agnostic theories about realism and environment.

This instinctive faith in mind is the basis of all genuine idealism. The idealist is not the creator of an imaginary world, peopling it with shapes that never existed; but he is one who believes in ideas, and in mind as their creator and the vehicle of their expression. Contemporary with George Eliot was a group of men who believed in the mind as something other than the temporary product of an evolutionary process. With them she may be contrasted, her work may be measured by theirs. Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning and Buskin shared with her the radical ideas of the time. Not one of them has been fettered by narrow theories or cramped by old social doctrines. The broad, inquiring, scientific spirit of the time has been shared by them all. Buskin is a realist, Carlyle believed in the enduring realm of facts, and they have all accepted the spirit of naturalism which has ruled the century. The scientific, philosophic and social theories of the time have been their inspiration. Certain ideas about law, progress and social regeneration have affected them through and through. Yet as regards the one great characteristic of idealism, all have widely departed from George Eliot, for all regard mind as supreme, all believe in a spiritual realm environing man. This fact appears throughout their work. To them the spiritual is objective; they are the true realists. To George Eliot the spiritual is subjective, the result of our own feelings, to which it is limited. When the feelings are gone, all is gone. In the pages of these men there is consequently to be found a power and an inspiration not to be found in hers. Wonderful as is her skill as an artist, and in the analysis of character, yet we feel that we are walking over mocking graves whenever we reach her spiritual conception of the world. She deceives us with a shadow, offers us a name in place of what we crave for with every nobler instinct of the soul. Our own feelings are given us, mirrored in the feelings of others, in place of the reality we desire to possess.

These men have linked their work with those spiritual convictions which have been the moral sustenance of the ages. They have gained in strength and effectiveness thereby. Tennyson has his many doubts, his teachings have been questioned; and yet he sings,—

"That each, who seems a separate whole, Should move his rounds, and passing all The skirts of self again, should fall, Remerging in the general soul,—

"Is faith as vague as all unsweet: Eternal form shall still divide The eternal soul from all beside; And I shall know him when we meet."

His flight of song is more sustained for this faith. He is a truer poet, of stronger wing and loftier flight, because life has for him an infinite meaning, because he opens his mind to the impressions which come of man's spiritual existence. In the same way, Carlyle has a grander meaning running through his books, more of sublimity, a finer eloquence, because the spiritual is to him real. Doubter and scorner as he was, he could not but see that man's being reaches beyond the material world and interprets some higher realm. Vague as that faith was with him, it was a source of the most effective literary power and stimulus. He bursts forth, under its impulse, into impassioned passages of the noblest poetic beauty.

"Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognize one another. As it is written, we shall be forever with God. The possibility, nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me."

Ruskin has made it plain how necessary is that tone of mind which is religious to the best work in art. His own faith has been earnest and strong in the reality of the spiritual. Realist as he is in art, he believes in the original and creative power of the mind, and his work has all taken on a higher spirit and a finer expression because of his religious convictions. Writing in Modern Painters of man as made in the image of God, he answers the objection which is raised to the idea that all the revelation man has is contained in a being so imperfect.

"No other book, nor fragment of book, than that, will you ever find,—nothing in the clouds above, nor in the earth beneath. The flesh-bound volume is the only revelation that is, that was, or that can be. In that is the image of God painted; in that is the law of God written; in that is the promise of God revealed. Know thyself; for through thyself only thou canst know God. Through the glass, darkly; but except through the glass, in no wise. A tremulous crystal, waved as water, poured out upon the ground;—you may defile it, despise it, pollute it at your pleasure and at your peril; for on the peace of those weak waves must all the heaven you shall ever gain be first seen; and through such purity as you can win for those dark waves must all the light of the risen Sun of Righteousness be bent down by faint refraction. Cleanse them, and calm them, as you love your life. Therefore it is that all the power of nature depends on subjection to the human soul. Man is the Sun of the world; more than the real sun. The fire of his wonderful heart is the only light and heat worth gauge or measure. Where he is, are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world."

Such words may not be scientific, but they convey real meaning. Their assertion that the world is to be tested and understood by man, not man by the world, is one worthy of attention. The conviction of this truth has a literary power and incentive not to be found in "the scientific method" or any of its corollaries.

To this group of writers may be added Mrs. Browning, who, as a poet, did great and lasting work. Its value, in large measure, rests on its depth of spiritual conviction, and on its idealism in purpose and spirit. Her conception of love is finer and truer than George Eliot's, because she gave it an ideal as well as an altruistic meaning; because she thought it has an eternal as well as a social significance. As a poet she lost nothing of charm or of power or of inspiration because she could herself believe, with simple trust, what she has embodied in "A Child's Thought of God."

"God is so good, He wears a fold Of heaven and earth across his face— Like secrets kept, for love, untold. But still I feel that his embrace Slides down by thrills, through all things made, Through sight and sound of every place."

That art is to be nothing more than a copying and interpretation of nature Mrs. Browning did not believe. In Aurora Leigh she says,—

"Art's the witness of what is Beyond this show. If this world's show were all, Mere imitation would be all in art."

The glow of genius burns up out of all her pages, and there is an aroma and a subtle power in them which comes alone of this conception of art. She could not rest content with the little round of man's experience, but found that all the universe is bound together and all its parts filled with a God-spirit.

"No lily-muffled hum of a summer bee But finds some coupling with, the spinning stars; No pebble at your foot but proves a sphere; No chaffinch but implies the cherubim: ... Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God."

That is a larger faith and a truer faith than appears anywhere in the pages of George Eliot, and it is one which impregnates most of the best literature the world posseses with light and life. It is a faith which gives hope and impulse where the other saddens and unnerves.

There is wanting in George Eliot's books that freshness of spirit, that faith in the future, and that peaceful poise of soul which is to be found in the writings of Tennyson, Ruskin and Mrs. Browning. Even with all his constitutional cynicism and despair, the teachings of Carlyle are much more hopeful than hers. An air of fatigue and world-weariness is about all her work, even when it is most stimulating with its altruism. Though in theory not a pessimist, yet a sense of pain and sorrow grows out of the touch of each of her books. In this she missed one of the highest uses of literature, to quicken new hopes and to awaken nobler purposes. There is a tone of joy and exultation in the power life confers, an instinctive sense of might to conquer the world, in the best writing. To make men think, to move men to action, to confer finer feelings and motives, is the power of the true poet. When he does not accomplish this he has written to a lesser purpose. Literature aims either to please or to quicken the mind. It cannot please when it leaves the heart depressed and burdened with the failures and sadness of the world. If it is to please, it must make use of that goodness and joy which are in excess of evil and misery. It cannot quicken when it unnerves the mind and brings despair of moral purpose. If it is to inspire it must show that something great is to be done, and awaken the courage to do it.

That life has its sad and painful elements is a terrible fact, and the novelist who would paint life as it is must recognize them. It is quite as true that the good and the hopeful are more than the sad and painful, that right is more powerful in human life than wrong. The novelist who would paint life with an exact and even-handed justice, must not make all his endings sorrowful, for very many in real life are not so. The Mill on the Floss would have been a more powerful and effective book could Maggie have been made to conquer. It would have been quite as true to nature to have represented her as overcoming her defects, and as being purified through suffering. Is all suffering to conquer us, instead of our being able to conquer it, and gaining a more peaceful and a purer life through its aid? If Maggie is George Eliot in her youthful experiences, then the novel is untrue to fact in that Marian Evans conquered and Maggie failed. The same fault is to be found in Middlemarch, that Dorothea, great as she is, deserved a much better fate than that accorded to her. The elements of womanly greatness were in her character, and with all the barriers created by society she would have done better things had her creator been true to her capacities in unfolding her life-history. The effect of both these great novels is one of depression and disappointment. The reader always expects more as he goes on his way through these scenes, depicted with such genius, than is realized at the end. Disappointment is almost inevitable, for the promise is greater than the fulfilment. The like result is produced by those books which have the brightest closing scenes, as in Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda, where the author's aim was evidently hopeful and constructive. Silas Marner and Felix Holt are the only exceptions to this pessimistic tone, and in which justice is done to the better side of life. In all her later books the ending is painful. In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie and Tom are drowned after Maggie had been led to a most bitter end of her love-affairs. In Romola the heroine is left a widow, after her husband's treachery had brought him to a terrible death, and after Savonarola had suffered martyrdom. Dorothea marries into a life of ordinary drudgery, and Lydgate fails. Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen are separated from each other, and Deronda goes to the east in furtherance of a wild scheme of Jewish colonization. Fedalma loses her father by the treachery of her lover, and without hope conducts her tribe to Africa. Jubal dies dishonored, and Armgart loses her voice. Yet it is not merely that the conclusion does not lead to the expected result, but throughout there is a tone of doubt and failure. That George Eliot purposed to give life this tinge of sadness is not to be accepted as the true explanation of it. It is known that she did not have such a purpose, that she was surprised and disappointed that her books should produce such a result on her readers. The explanation is to be found in another direction.

She was an agnostic; life had no wide horizon for her. The light of a genuinely ideal and spiritual conception of life was not hers. The world was bounded to her vision, rounded into the little capacity possessed by man. Where others would have cast a glow of hope and sunset brilliance, promise of a brighter day yet to dawn over the closing scenes of her novels, she could see nothing beyond but the feeble effect of an earthly transmitted good. In this regard her books afford a most interesting contrast to those of the two other great women who have adorned English literature with their genius. The lot of Mrs. Browning and Charlotte Bronte was much sadder and more depressing than that of George Eliot; more of darkness and pain affected their lives. A subtle tone of sadness runs through their books, but it is not burdensome and depressing as is the case of George Eliot. There is hope with it, and a buoyant faith in the good, which lies above and beyond all pain and sorrow. With neither of them was this faith conventional, a mere reflection of the religion taught them in childhood. It was a thoughtful result of a large experience, and of hard contact with many of the severest facts of human experience. That wide horizon of spiritual reality which shone for them on every hand, lights all their work with a brilliance which almost puts out of sight the pain and sorrow of the world. The reader of their books is made to believe that life is an endless good; he is cheered and made stronger for what life offers him.

Agnosticism may have its great and heroic incentives, it may impel men to a nobler activity, but its literary effect, as a motive towards a more inspiring life, has not been satisfactory in the hands of George Eliot. Shakspere is not a teacher of philosophy or ethics, he has no doctrines to preach, no theories to advocate. What he believed, it would be difficult to ascertain from his writings; yet he is an effective teacher of morals, he stimulates into activity all that is best in man, life widens and deepens under the touch of his genius. So is it with Milton, Schiller, Moliere, Calderon, Montaigne and Wordsworth. So is it with George Eliot in all that concerns our duties, and even with our human sympathies. In the one direction of trust she is wanting, and her books are devoid of it. Shakspere makes us realize that God rules over the world; George Eliot leaves us with the feeling that we know nothing, and can hope for but little. That her theories really cast a shadow over the world, may be seen in all her dealings with love. Love is with her a human passion, deep, pure, blessed. It crowns some of her characters with joy and peace and strength; it is never impure and base in her pages. Yet it is human, it is a social force, it is to be made altruistic. It never gains that high poetic influence and charm which glorifies it in the writings of Mrs. Browning, Browning and Tennyson. Browning conceives of it as an eternal passion, as one with all that is divinest in man, as a medium of his spiritual development. In his pages it glows with moral promise, it inspires and regenerates. The poet should deal with love, not as a thing base and susceptible of abuse, but as an influence capable of the most beneficent results in the uplifting of man's nature. If it degrades, it also sweetens; and only that is love which makes life richer and more worthy. The true artist can afford to deal with that which pleases, not with that which saddens and disgusts. The real love is the pure love, not the depraved. The natural is the noble, not the debased life.

George Eliot's originality of method has given rise to a new school in fiction. Her imitators, even when at their best, are not her equals, and they have degraded her methods oftentimes to paltry uses. They have tried to take photographs of life, supposing that art has for its aim to copy nature. They have failed to see, what she did see, though not so clearly as could have been desired, that art must do much more than imitate some scene or fact out of nature. It must give beauty, meaning and expression to what it copies. And it must do more than imitate: it must go beyond mere description, and introduce unity, purpose and thought into its work. True art has a soul as well as a body, says something to the mind as well as to the eye, appeals to the soul as well as to sense. Had George Eliot done nothing more than to describe common English life there would have been small excuse for her work. She did more, touched that life with genius, made it blossom into beauty, and gave to it deep moral meanings. The defects of her method are to be seen in the fact that her imitators cannot get above life's surface, and deal mainly with shallow or degraded natures. Her methods do not inspire great work, while her own genius redeemed the false ways into which she was led by her philosophic theories.

Science can dissect the human body, but it can do little towards an explanation of the subtler meanings of life and mind. Its methods are analytical; it has reached no truly synthetic results in the regions where knowledge is most to be desired. Its effects on literature are destructive. Science destroys poetry, dries up the poetic sense, closes the doors of imagination. The attempt to make science co-operate with poetry is in itself the promise of failure. The limitations of George Eliot's work are the limitations of poetry subdued by science. Could she have rid herself of that burden, been impelled by a faith and an ideal purpose commensurate with her genius, the result would have been much greater. This limitation suggests the fact that literature is synthetic and constructive in its purpose and spirit. It is this fact which has made the classic literatures so powerful in their effect on modern Europe. They have given unity, spiritual purpose and ideal aims to the whole modern world. The freshness as of an eternal spring was in the literature of Greece, the naturalness of a healthy manhood. That literature is organic, it is one with life, it is refreshing as nature itself. That literature lives and flames with power because it is synthetic, buoyant, touched with an eternal spiritual beauty, great with promise of a growing earth. Its poets do not dissect, but build; they do not analyze, but create. And this is the literary need of the present time. There is need of more poetry, a more poetic interpretation of life, a richer imagination and a finer sense of beauty. The common is everywhere, but it is not necessarily great or beautiful or noble. It may have its elements of pathos and tragedy, its touches of beauty and its motives of heroism. It has in it also the promise of better things to be. That is the true poetry, the true fiction, which brings out this promise so that we know it, so that it moves us to better deeds and enchants us with music of purer living. The world is bad enough without dragging to the light all its evils and discords; let us rather know what promise it contains of the better. In one word, the real oppresses and enthralls; the ideal liberates, and brings us to ourselves.

Genius redeems every fault. It must be taken for what it is, must not be criticised, is to be used to the highest ends. Only when genius unites itself to false methods and checks itself by false theories, has the critic a right to complain. Genius, obedient to its own laws, accepts every fact life presents, and lifts each one to be an instrument for the enlargement of man's life. When it deliberately strikes out all that is not human, however, from man's experience, denies the realty of that impression and that conviction which comes from other than material sources, it cripples and denies itself.



XX.

THE LIMITATIONS OF HER THOUGHT.

It must be remembered that George Eliot does not use the novel merely for the purpose of inculcating certain doctrines, and that her genius for artistic creation is of a very high order. In dealing with her as a thinker and as a moral and religious teacher, she is to be regarded, first of all, as a poet and an artist. Her ethics are subordinate to her art; her religion is subsidiary to her genius. That she always deliberately set about the task of introducing her positivism into the substance of her novels is not to be supposed. This would be to imply a forgetfulness on her part of her own methods, and a prostration of art to purposes she would have scorned to adopt. This is evidently true, however, that certain features of the positive and the evolution philosophy had so thoroughly approved themselves to her mind as to cause them to be accepted as a completely satisfactory explanation of the world, so far as any explanation is possible. So heartily were they received, so fully did they become incorporated with the substance of her thinking, that she viewed all human experiences in their light. They had ceased to be theory and speculation with her. When she thought about the world, when she observed the acts of men, the positivist explanation was at once applied, and instinctively.

That she did teach positivism is unfortunately true, so far as her literary touch and expression is concerned. That philosophy affects all her books with its subtly insinuating flavor, and it gives meaning and bias to most of them. They thus gain in definiteness of purpose, in moral vigor, in minutely faithful study of some phases of human experience, and in a massive impression of thoughtfulness which her work creates. At the same time, they undoubtedly lose in value as studies of life; in free range of expression for her genius, her poetry and her art; and in that spiritual vision which looks forward with keen gazing eyes of hope and confident inquiry.

Her teaching, like most teaching, is a mingled good and evil. In more than one direction her ethical and religious influence was most wholesome and effective. She brought into clear light a few great facts, and made them the more conspicuous by the strong emphasis she gave them. This is, in the main, the method of all teaching and of all progress. Development seldom proceeds in a direct line, but rather, so far as man is concerned, by forcible emphasis laid on some great fact which has been previously neglected. The idealism of a previous age had shown the value of certain facts and tendencies in human nature, but it had exaggerated some faculties and capacities of man, as well as neglected others. In consequence, our own time swings to the other extreme, and cannot have too much of evolution and positivism.

Idealism is in human nature, and will give itself expression. Positivism is also a result of our experience and of our study of the universe, both material and mental; it is a result of the desire for definite knowledge. As a re-action against the excesses of idealism it is a powerful leaven, and it brings into necessary prominence those facts which are neglected by the opposite philosophy. It takes account of facts, and scorns mysticism; and it thus appeals to a deep-seated bias of the time.

George Eliot's books have an interest as an attempt at an interpretation of life from its more practical and realistic side, and not less as a re-action against the influences of very nearly all the great literary minds of the earlier half of the century in England. Under the lead of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and influenced by German thought and literature, a remarkable movement was then developed in English literature. The outcome of that movement has been surpassed only by that of the age of Shakspere. Freshness of thought, love of nature, profound humanitarian convictions, and spontaneity wedded to great largeness of ideas, characterize this period and its noble work. Such an age is almost invariably followed by an age of re-action, criticism, realism and analysis. An instinctive demand for a portrayal of the more positive side of life, and the influence of science, have developed a new literary school. For doctrine it teaches agnosticism, and in method it cares mainly for art and beauty of form. Towards the development of the new school George Eliot has been a leading influence, though her sympathies have not gone with all its tendencies and results.

If Wordsworth exaggerated the importance of the intuitive and personal, George Eliot equally exaggerated the value of the historic and hereditary. It was desirable, however, that the relations of life to the past should be brought out more distinctly by a literary development of their relations to the present, and that the influence of social heredity should be seen as affecting life on all sides. Tradition is a large and persistent element in the better life of the race, while the past certainly has a powerful influence over the present. This fact was neglected by Wordsworth, and especially is it neglected by the intuitive philosophies. They ignore the lessons of the past, and assume that a new and perfect world is to be evolved from the depths of consciousness. That to think a better world is to create a better world, they seem to take for granted, while the fact is that the truer life is the result of a painful and long-continued struggle against adverse conditions. What has been, persists in remaining, and the past, with all its narrowness and prejudices, continues to influence men more powerfully than does clear thought or regard for the truth. Emotion and sentiment cling about what has become sacred with age. Channels for thought and activity having once been made, it is very difficult to abandon them for untried paths approved even by reason.

The historic view is one of much importance, and is likely to be overlooked by the poets and novelists. It is also ignored by the radicals in morals and religion. Much which George Eliot says on this subject is of great value, and may be heeded with the utmost profit. Her words of wisdom, however, lose much of their value because they utterly ignore those spontaneous and supernatural elements of man's higher life which lift it quite out of the region of dependence on history.

There is something to be said in behalf of George Eliot's attitude towards religion, which caused her to hold it in reverence, even when rejecting the objective validity of its dogmas. Yet much more is to be said for that other attitude, which is faithful to the law of reason, and believes that reason is competent to say some truer and larger word on a subject of such vital importance and such constant interest to man. That both reason and tradition are to be listened to reverently is true, but George Eliot so zealously espoused the cause of tradition as to give it an undue prominence. Her lesson was needed, however, and we may be all the better able to profit by it because she was so much an enthusiast in proclaiming its value. The even poise of perfect truth is no more to be had from her pages than from those of others.

The emphasis she laid on feeling and sentiment was a needed one, as a counterpoise to the exaggerations of rationalism. Man does live in his feelings more than in his reason. He is a being of sentiment, a creature of impulse, his social life is one of the affections. In all the ranges of his moral, religious and social life he is guided mainly by his emotions and sentiments. It cannot be said, however, as George Eliot would have us say, that these are human born and have no higher meaning. They are the outgrowth of spiritual reality, as well as of human experience; they repeat the foregleams and foresights of a

"far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves."

Life is enriched and flooded with light by the emotions, and feeling, true and tender and pure, is as much the symbol of humanity as reason itself. It was therefore well that some one should attempt to justify the emotional life against the aspersions of those who have done it grave injustice. It is true that man is not a being who wholly arrives at his method of life through reason, but feeling lends quite as important aid. He does not only think, but he has emotions as well; he not only weighs evidence, but he acts by impulse. He is continually led by the emotions, sentiments and impulses created for him by the life of ages past. Without emotion there could be no art, no poetry and no music. Without emotion there would be no religion and no spiritual life. Sentiment sweetens, beautifies and endears all that is human and natural.

Emotion and the affections, however, seem to be shorn of their highest beauty and glory when they are restricted to a merely earthly origin and compass of power. It is altogether impossible to believe that their own impulse to look beyond the human is a delusion, and that they really have nothing to report that is valid from beyond the little round which man treads. To believe in the human beauty and glory of the feelings, and to rejoice in their power to unite us to our kind, need imply no forgetfulness of their demand for a wider expression and a higher communion.

Her theory of the origin of feeling is not to be accepted. It means something more than an inheritance of ancestral experience. It is the result rather than the cause of reason, for reason has an influence she did not acknowledge, and an original capacity which she never saw. Her view of feeling was mainly theoretical, for she was led in her attitude towards the facts of life, not by sentiment, but by reason. Hers was a thoughtful rather than an impulsive mind, and given to logic more than to emotion.

Her enthusiasm for altruism, her zeal for humanity, lends a delightful feature to her books. It gives a glow and a consecration to her work, and makes her as great a prophet as positivism is capable of creating. And it is no idle power she awakens in her positivist faith in man. She shames those who claim a broader and better faith. Zeal for man is no mean gospel, as she gives life and meaning to it in her books. To live for others, too many are not likely to do. She made altruism beautiful, she made it a consecration and a religion. Those who cannot accept her agnosticism and her positivism may learn much from her faith in man and from her enthusiasm for humanity. No faith is worth much which does not lead to a truer and a more helpful love of man. Any faith is good in so far as it makes us more humane and sympathetic. In this regard, the radicalism of George Eliot was a great advance on much of the free-thinking of our century. She desired to build, not to destroy. She was no iconoclast, no hater of what other men love and venerate. Her tendencies were all on the side of progress, good order and social growth.

Her conception of the organic social life of the race is one of great value. It led her to believe in the possibility of a social organization in the future based on science, and better capable of meeting all the wants of mankind than the more personal and competitive methods have done. This belief in the organic unity of the race is not necessarily positivist in its character, for Hegel entertained it as fully as does Herbert Spencer. The larger social life will come, however, as individuals are moved to lead the way, and not alone as the result of a general evolutionary process. On its mental side, her social theory is to be regarded with grave suspicions, for it brings all minds to the same level. No mind of commanding influence is to be found in her books. No powerful intellect gives greatness to any of her plots. Her Felix Holt is not a man of original and positive thought. We accept, but do not enthusiastically admire him. Deronda is a noble character, but he in no sense represents the largest things of which a social leader is capable. He disappoints and is weak, and he has no power to create the highest kind of leadership. In other words, he is not a great man. The world's reformers have been of another temper and mettle. He is no Mazzini, no Luther. George Eliot's social theories loft no room for such men. They were superfluous in her social system. The man not to be explained by heredity and tradition had no place in her books; and no genius, no great man, can ever be explained by heredity and tradition alone.

George Eliot evidently desired to destroy individualism as a social force. The individual, according to her teaching, is to renounce himself for the sake of the race. He is to live, not as a personal being, but as a member of the social organization; to develop his altruistic nature, not to perfect his personal character. The finer flavor of personality is brushed mercilessly away by this method.

Reason needs to be justified in opposition to her excessive praise of feeling. Meanwhile, the capacity of man to live a life higher than that of his social state is to be asserted. He is indeed a member of humanity, but humanity does not absorb him to the cost of his personality. Life is strong in those ages in which the individual is able to assert his own personality, in opposition to what is imperfect and untrue in the life of his time. This failure to recognize the worth and capacity of the individual is a most serious defect in George Eliot's work, and mars it in many directions. A very competent critic has shown how serious is the limitation arising in this manner, and permeating her books with a false conception of life.

"So far as George Eliot's life is concerned," says Mr. Stopford Brooke, "she was eager in her self-development, and as eager in her sympathies. But it was a different matter in the main drift of her work. She lowered the power of individualism. Nay, she did not believe in its having any self-caused or God-caused existence. Few have individualized their characters more than she did, and of these characters we have many distinct types. But she individualized them with, I may say, almost the set purpose of showing that their individualism was to be sacrificed to the general welfare of the race. The more her characters cling to their individuality the more they fail in reaching happiness or peace. If they are noble characters, they are finally obliged, through their very nobility, to surrender all their ideals, all their personal hopes, all the individual ends they hoped to develop; and they reach peace finally only through utter surrender of personality in humanity. The characters in her books who do not do this, who cling to their individuality and maintain it, succeed in life, for the most part, if they are strong; are broken to pieces if they are weak; but in all cases, save one, are not the noble but the ignoble characters. The whole of her books is a suppressed attack on individualism, and an exaltation of self-renunciation as the only force of progress, as the only ground of morality. I leave aside here, as apart from the moral side of the subject, the view that individual power or weakness of any kind is the consequence of the past, of race, of physical causes. What a man is found to do is not affected by that, in her view.... No one can deny that the morality is a lofty one, and, as far as it asserts self-renunciation, entirely useful; we have with all our hearts to thank George Eliot for that part of her work. But when sacrifice of self is made, in its last effort, equivalent to the sacrifice of individuality, the doctrine of self-renunciation is driven to a vicious extreme. It is not self-sacrifice which is then demanded, it is suicide ... Fully accepted, it would reduce the whole of the human race to hopelessness. That, indeed, is the last result. A sad and fatal hopelessness of life broods over all the nobler characters. All their early ideals are sacrificed, all their early joys depart, all the pictures they formed are blotted out. They gain peace through renunciation, after long failure; some happiness in yielding to the inevitable, and harmonizing life with it; and some blessedness in doing all they can for the progress of those who follow them, for the good of those that are with them. Their self is conquered, not through ennoblement of personality, but through annihilation of personality. And having surrendered their separate personality, they then attain the fitting end, silence forevermore. It is no wonder that no characters are so sad, that none steep the reader in such hopelessness of joy, as the noble characters of the later works of George Eliot. They want the mighty power, the enkindling hopes, the resurrection of life, the joy and rapture which deepens towards death and enables man to take up the ideals of youth again."

If too severe in some directions, this criticism is substantially sound. It does not matter what theory of personality we adopt, in a philosophical sense, if that theory upholds personal confidence and force of will. If it does not do this, the whole result is evil. This lack of faith in personality saddened all the work done by George Eliot. In theory a believer in an ever-brightening future, and no pessimist, yet the outcome of her work is dark with despondency and grief.

Life is sad, hard and ascetic in her treatment of it. An ascetic tone runs through all her work, the result of her theories of renunciation. The same sternness and cheerlessness is to be seen in the poetry and painting of the pre-Raphaelites. The joy, freshness and sunniness of Raphael is not to be found in their work. Life is painful, puritanic and depressing to them. Old age seems to be upon them, or the decadence of a people that has once been great. Human nature does not need that this strain be put upon it. Life is stronger when more assertive of itself. It has a right to assert itself in defiance of mere rules, and only when it does so is it true and great. The ascetic tone is one of the worst results of a scientific view of the world as applied to literature; for it is thoroughly false both in fact and in sentiment. The strong, hopeful, youthful look at life is the one which literature demands, and because it is the nearest the heart and spirit of life itself. The dead nation produces a dead literature. The age made doubtful by an excess of science produces a literature burdened with sadness and pain. Great and truthful as it may be, it lacks in power to conquer the world. It shows, not the power of Homer, but the power of Lucretius.

Her altruism has its side of truth, but not all of the truth is in it. Any system of thought which sees nothing beyond man is not likely to find that which is most characteristic in man himself. He is to be fathomed, if fathomed at all, by some other line than that of his own experience. If he explains the universe, the universe is also necessary to explain him. Man apart from the supersensuous is as little to be understood as man apart from humanity. He belongs to a Universal Order quite as much as he belongs to the human order. Man may be explained by evolution, but evolution is not to be explained by anything in the nature of man. It requires some larger field of vision to take note of that elemental law. Not less true is it that mind does not come obediently under this method of explanation, that it demands account of how matter is transformed into thought. The law of thought needs to be solved after mind is evolved.

There is occasion for surprise that a mind so acute and logical as George Eliot's did not perceive that the evolution philosophy has failed to settle any of the greater problems suggested by Kant. The studies of Darwin and Spencer have certainly made it impossible longer to accept Locke's theory of the origin of all knowledge in individual experience, but they have not in any degree explained the process of thought or the origin of ideas. The gulf between the physiological processes in the brain and thought has not been bridged even by a rope walk. The total disparity of mind and matter resists all efforts to reduce them to one. The utmost which the evolution philosophy has so far done, is to attempt to prove that mind is a function of matter or of the physiological process. This conclusion is as far as possible from being that of the unity of mind and matter.

That man is very ignorant, and that this world ought to demand the greater share of his attention and energies, are propositions every reasonable person is ready to accept. Granted their truth, all that is necessarily true in agnosticism has been arrived at. It is a persistent refusal to see what lies behind outward facts which gives agnosticism all its practical justification. Art itself is a sufficient refutation of the assertion that we know nothing of what lies behind the apparent. That we know something of causes, every person who uses his own mind may be aware. At the same time, the rejection of the doctrine of rights argues obedience to a theory, rather than humble acceptance of the facts of history. That doctrine of rights, so scorned by George Eliot, has wrought most of the great and wholesome social changes of modern times. Her theory of duties can show no historic results whatever.

To separate George Eliot's theories from her genius it seems impossible to do, but this it is necessary to do in order to give both their proper place. All praise, her work demands on its side where genius is active. It is as a thinker, as a theorizer, she is to be criticised and to be declared wanting. Her work was crippled by her philosophy, or if not crippled, then it was made less strong of limb and vigorous of body by that same philosophy. It is true of her as of Wordsworth, that she grew prosy because she tried to be philosophical. It is true of her as it is not true of him, that her work lacks in the breadth which a large view of the world gives. His was no provincial conception of nature or of man. Hers was so in a most emphatic sense. The philosophy she adopted is not and cannot become the philosophy of more than a small number of persons. In the nature of the case it is doomed to be the faith of a few students and cultured people. It can stir no common life, develop no historic movements, inaugurate no reforms, nor give to life a diviner meaning. Whether it be true or not,—and this need not here be asked,—this social and moral limitation of its power is enough to condemn it for the purposes of literature. In so far as George Eliot's work is artistic, poetic, moral and human, it is very great, and no word too strong can be said in its praise. It is not too excessive enthusiasm to call her, on the whole, the equal of any novelist. Her genius is commanding and elemental. She has originality, strength of purpose, and a profound insight into character. Yet her work is weakened by its attachment to a narrow theory of life. Her philosophy is transitory in its nature. It cannot hold its own, as developed by her, for any great length of time. It has the elements of its own destruction in itself. The curious may read her for her speculations; the many will read her for her realism, her humanity and her genius. In truth, then, it would have been better if her work had been inspired by great spiritual aims and convictions.



XXI.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

As an aid to those who may wish to carry further the preceding study of George Eliot, the following bibliography and lists of references have been compiled. In their preparation constant use has been made of Poole's Index of Periodical Literature, the bibliography contained in The Manchester Literary Club Papers for 1881, and a list of references published in The Literary World (Boston) for February 24, 1883. Numerous additions have been made to these bibliographies, while the references have been verified as far as possible. An occasional reference given in these lists has not been discoverable, as that of the Manchester Club to the London Quarterly Review for January, 1874, for an article on "George Eliot and Comtism," and Poole's reference to the same article in the London Quarterly, 47:446. This will be found in the number for January 1877, volume ninety-four.