THE

LITERARY AND THE ETHICAL QUALITY

OF

GEORGE ELIOT'S NOVELS.

G

EORGE ELIOT is more than a brilliant novelist.

She is a great writer. She is more than simply a great writer. She is a prime elemental literary power. In literature such, she is scarcely less in ethics. She is a great ethical teacher-it may be not an original, but at least a highly charged derivative, moral living force. Perhaps even thus much is still too little to have said. For George Eliot seems already securely to belong to the very small number of those choice literary names which we jealously account our greatest. There have been admirable women in literary history whose chief praise justly was the exquisite womanliness of their genius. Mrs. Browning, when we succeed in forgetting her virile affectations, appears an illustrious example. There have been other admirable historic literary women who were strong distinctively as men are strong. Madame de Staël is, perhaps, an example. There is a third class, distinguishable in conception, composed of women whom we should honor, when we thought of them, in instinctively forgetting to remember their sex at all. Of these women we should not, on the one hand say, They carried the feminine quality to its height; nor yet, on the other, They transcended the limitations of their sex. We should simply say, Here were rare human souls, nobly endowed individuals of

the human race. We should at once exalt them to the glorious severity of comparison at large with whatever personages in literary history, male or female, might appear worthy to be reckoned their peers. In this third class, if there be such a class, belongs George Eliot. If there is no such class, then George Eliot stands alone in literary history, for she certainly is such a woman.

There is, therefore, no question remaining to be raised respecting George Eliot's intellectual rank. That point is settled already, as well as a like point ever was settled concerning any author during his lifetime. To determine, however, not the quantity, but the quality, not the degree, but the kind, of her power in letters and in morals, is a problem upon which something, perhaps, may still profitably be said. Indeed, an inquiry, carefully and candidly conducted, into the quality of George Eliot's influence as a novelist, ought, it seems to me, at this time, alike on literary and on ethical grounds, to enlist the serious attention of a wide circle of readers. This inquiry may properly enough be limited to her influence as a novelist, for the reason that although she has done noteworthy work as a poet, it is through her novels chiefly, or through her poems as novels, that she has hitherto wrought upon the taste and the conscience of her age.

The present inquiry will seek to be strictly impersonal-that is to say, there will be no attempt to import an irrelevant interest into this paper, by any allusions, open or covert, to the circumstances of George Eliot's personal history. The books that she has written shall be judged, as far as is possible, with no more influence admitted from the character, alleged or actual, of the writer, than if, instead of being a woman's productions, they were the foundling progeny of Dame Nature her

self.

"Adam Bede was the first work of the author that attracted wide public attention. This was published in 1858. Inseparably water-lined into its literary texture was a certain element not literary, well calculated to raise among religious readers of the book two quite different opinions of its quality. One can, in fact, easily imagine that its early fortune in this respect may have been, in some degree, like what afterward befell "Ecce Homo," when that stumbling-block to the theologians was first given to the world. There must, on the one hand, we should say, have been religious readers not a few to welcome "Adam Bede" as they had previously welcomed "The Wide, Wide World," as they subsequently welcomed "The Schönberg - Cotta Family." Such readers would see in it gospel enough- gospel pure, and sweet, and orthodox-to fit it for a place in the Sunday-school library, or for circulation by the evangelical propaganda. On the other hand, a different class of religious readers must as naturally have thought that they discovered a quite predominant literary and artistic interest in the author's conduct of her story, which separated her, in her own individual sympathy, from the exquisitely represented religious spirit of some of her principal characters. These less credulous readers would accordingly stand a little in doubt of their author. Freely acknowledging that the sanctities of the personal religious experience were always treated by her with the most decorous respect-unable to deny that at times this respect passed over into even the most seductively seeming-sympathetic homage and awe-they would have their misgiving nevertheless. They would seem to themselves to perceive that this writer, after all, was mainly intent on what, if they could have anticipated her subsequent diction, they might, perhaps applying her favorite word—have called an "egoistic" aim of her own.

She meant to make the "holy secrets" of the Christian consciousness subserve, if not an irreverent, at least an inferior and a personal purpose. She would weave them into her design, for help to character and dialogue and plot. They should minister to an artistic, more than to any religious motive. Beyond this, her novel seemed to contain an undisclosed, but discoverable, implication, somewhat discomposing to the simply believing mind, that the author, on her own part, regarded the mystery of the life of God in the human soul from another than the obvious evangelical point of view. To her, apparently, this was but one element among many of an exceedingly complex human psychology, in which any other element whatever was divine and supernatural in quite the same sense as that.

It is curious, in the light of present knowledge, to glance from one to another among the chief periodicals of that day, and note the various conjectures hazarded by the puzzled, but admiring, reviewers as to the true theological position of the then unknown author of "Scenes of Clerical Life" and "Adam Bede." The "Westminster Review" must, of course, have been in her secret, but that quarterly affected to be as ignorant as its compeers, and after rehearsing opinions that assigned her to different theological parties from the Evangelical to the Broad Church, astutely ventured, for itself, to guess that George Eliot, while no doubt sincerely and deeply religious, was, probably, not the adherent of any one of the recognized creeds, being rather, it be lieved, of that liberal comprehension in faith which embraced whatever was true in them all.

One thing, however, at least was plain to every reader of discernment. We had here a new writer who was master, absolute master, of a style of extraordinary beauty and power. Choice English, limpid phrase,

charming simplicity, marvelous answerableness to the shifting mood, whether of thought or of feeling, the finished and assured repose of self-conscious art-art selfconscious but not self-complacent-these traits made up a style fitted in a wonderful degree to be the mirror to the world of a large soul, if, as could hardly fail to be the case, the owner of such a style turned out to have a large soul. Just what might be the inner truth of this writer's private relation to religion was, of course, matter of the purest impertinence to her literary claims. To the zealous religionist indeed it made a great difference whether one who evidently had so much power was going to wield her power for religion or against it. But the candid literary critic had only one possible interest in even entertaining a question like this. It might affect somewhat his estimate of her genius, if he could decide whether her aim in dealing with the problems of religious experience was the aim of an advocate, friendly or hostile, or merely the aim of an artist instead. This, I say, was the sole alternative that could tempt the literary critic to undertake a solution of the doubt.

"Adam Bede" itself contained evidence enough to satisfy the justly suspicious but unprejudiced literary mind what was the true state of the facts. To such a mind it was sufficiently clear that the writer of "Adam Bede" had had the penetration to perceive that the phenomena of religious experience in human hearts presented a vein of material for the novelist which no novelist had yet turned to any adequate account. Either as being herself, through the conditions of her own situation in life, exceptionally well qualified to work this vein, or, it might be, as possessing unconsciously a certain Shakespearean capacity of universal knowledge without universal experience, George Eliot had intro