Silas Marner

Front matter

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Introduction

The Study of Fiction

It is a matter of curious interest to the student of literature to observe how from time to time the domi^ nant characteristics of an age create or find expression in a prevailing literary type. Just why the Elizabethan spirit sought and found expression in the drama may puzzle us to say, but we recognize that it did. In f act, so potent was the sway of the drama then that it reduced to its service minds whose highest powers were not dramatic. In the same way the genius of the age of Queen Anne found expression in the essay and the satire, and he who would know the age must study it there. It can hardly be questioned that the characteristic literary form of the nineteenth century is the novel. To say this is, of course, to say that he who would know the nineteenth century either now or hereafter must become a reader of novels; for while a type prevails it is the voice through which the thought, the passion, the baseness, and the aspiration of an age are uttered. The prevalence of the novel-reading habit, therefore, so much bemoaned by some, is really not so much a subject of regret as evidence of an instinctive, groping desire for self-knowledge. What is to be regretted is that the reading is often so unintelligent. One has only to listen to the ordinary gossip about books to discover that comparatively few persons ever do really read one of our better novels — ^read it understandingly; just as few ever really read Shakspere. But this is not so much to be wondered at. " The world of books is still the world.^^ We serve a long apprenticeship to life before we know much about it — ^before we can even tell what has happened to us, can begin to put things together, to feel the connection between our own acts and our characters and the circumstances that beset us. We are longer yet in learning to put ourselves in others' places, to give up our own point of view and see the world and the acts of another through that other^s eyes. Probably many persons never reach the stage in which unity and meaning are given to life through the perception of the relations in which life is involved. It is small wonder, therefore, if those to whom life itself is only a succession of happenings more or less joyful or painful read novels and plays for what they call the story, the mere succession of events — small wonder, but great pity. For this is to be in the world but not of it, to be in the way of living yet never live.

Now, since every real book is a presentation of life, or of some phase of life, as it has been seen by one of the larger minds among men, to read a book understandingly is to enter with intelligence into the life it presents; to perceive the forces that make it, and the relations that exist among them. The purpose of reading, therefore, is to come through books of whatever sort to a better knowledge of this human nature in us, which is all the time opening itself to our consciousness in new and perplexing fonns and making the world a riddle. We all want and need help in the problem of adjusting our lives to the social world, the organized life of man. And aside from experience, the sternest of teachers, from actual contact with living men and women and institutions, we can perhaps do no better than have recourse to the novel and the drama.

The subject-matter here is the most interesting possible — ^life in the concrete, life as lived by men and women of all sorts, good and bad, meeting various experiences and behaving in various ways, with consequences to themselves of divers kinds. In the best books, in short, we have to deal with a world in all essentials like the actual world which is so fascinating and bewildering to the more thoughtful reader, and in which the more thoughtless heedlessly lose themselves.

In this world the true reader lives as seriously as he may. He treats the men and women he finds there as real men and women. He accepts their strength and their weakness for what they are; recognizes in their loves and hates and jealousies and ambitions and selfabnegations, in their joy and in their suffering, emotions, motives, and experiences natural to us all, common by virtue of the human nature that is in us all, as therefore things not to be ignored, but to be frankly and honestly met. We may take the common possession of human nature for granted. We are then able to enter into the life in a book and interpret it because we find in it the very life we know in ourselves. In this power the least experienced among us differ from the most experienced mainly in degree. The more of life and of nnderstanding of life we can bring to a book, the more we find in it and take away from it. The reader of the greater training in life and books is able to place characters more completely in their environment; to perceive more clearly what a given environment oflEers for the development of the native traits of a character, whether for good or for evil. He has a keener eye to trace the action of causes to their more subtle effects; he better understands that acts can be properly judged only in relation to circumstances and motives; he realizes more fully the part played by ignorance and inexperience in determining human fates, realizes more fully, too, how much of the misery of the world is caused //by weakness rather than by positive evil. He distinguishes more sharply than the inexperienced can distinguish between an act and the doer of it; is at once more strict in marking an» evil act as evil, and more compassionate in judging the evil-doer. And further, while the inexperienced are still demanding the rendering of poetic justice, still demanding that the deed shall return upon the doer in its own kind in manner visible to all, the reader of broader outlook has lived and seen enough to know better. He is clear-eyed enough to see and honest enough to acknowledge that, apparently, many a good man comes to grief, many a bad man flourishes to the end. And yet, with this mystery before him, he has gone deep enough into the heart of things to feel the beauty and the compelling power of goodness and to love it for itself.

In marking the ways in which the trained reader^s power to enter into the life in a book exceeds the power of the untrained, we mark also the points at which the latter should aim. The experienced reader's superiority, as we have seen, lies mainly in his power of seeing facts in relation; in seeing life as a unity made up of experiences that find their meaning in their relation to the laws that constitute human nature and create its social and physical environments. It is thus that our greater writers present life, and it is the power to see life in this way that the student of literature should seek to develop in himself .

In doing this he has but to follow his author's lead. No book, no writer, can possibly present more than a fraction of human life. Life is too complex, too overwhelming to be otherwise presented. But in his outlook upon life, in his study of a thousand varying phenomena, an author is arrested and fascinated by the recurrence of something that he recognizes as the same in each, a something, therefore, which he traces to the underlying, persisting, essential nature of man. It thus acquires the significance of a truth of human life, and may be used as the motive of essay, sermon, poem, novel, or play. If the author is essayist or preacher, he may, if he will, present his truth in the abstract; if he is novelist or playwright, he must present it as he found it, embodied in real, individual men and women moving about on solid earth in an environment of men and women and other natural things. The novelist, that is, to present his theme, must create characters whose lives shall reveal it to us, and place them in such cir^ cumstances and bring such influences to bear upon them that the common human instincts in them shall naturally behave in such a way as to make the truth he is bent on telling manifest. If, then, characters and environment are created with this in view, everything in a well-conceived and well-wrought-out novel becomes significant. The physical setting of the story is necesi:

sary to give solidity to the men and women in it; and the very look of earth and sky are subtly associated with their spiritual moods. The social setting, also, the community life out of which the chief characters spring or in the midst of which they lead their lives, is necessary to give the chief characters a solid human reality, and often to create the complications and entanglements through which the theme is worked out. The leading characters themselves, whose lives are made the center of interest because they embody the human truth with which the author is most concerned, necessarily embody far more than this single truth, else the presentation of human life would fade into mere allegory. They must at least suggest the complexity and the fullness of life that the central truth itself may gain significance by being seen in its relations. Minor themes, therefore, are properly associated with the main theme in such wise that in the total impression the latter remains clearly the most important. Finally, through these complex characters thus conceived and thus placed in their environment, the author presents to us his theme in a story, every event in which gains its significance by its bearing, direct or indirect, on the central theme.

Even if the author proceed otherwise, the result, as far as we are concerned, is the same. Even if he see his story — ^that is, the series of events — ^first, he must nevertheless make the story interesting and reasonable to us by fitting its events into the lives of rationally conceived characters; he must make them spring from the laws that govern human action; he must make them occur in a world that exists by the interaction of laws.

The reader who accepts this view of the conception and evolution of a novel hecomes at once a student. He sees the novel as a whole^ each part involved in every other part^ and each contributing an element of life necessary to the whole. Even in the beginning he keeps the future course and end of the action in view, and learns to see in the characters and conditions as first presented possibilities of diverse future development. He learns to isolate the facts that are vital to the understanding of all that follows; to detect in each the promise of the future in germ; and again to combine them into the present as the author creates it, with its conflicting prophecies, its problematic f oreshadowings of what is to be. Later, also, when conditions change in the book-world, when new characters are introduced and new forces are set at work, he proceeds in the same way. He studies the new with the old constantly in mind. In any given character, for instance, he notes what the new conditions appeal to, what motived they quicken, what impulses they chill. He seeks to discover what it is in the man's character, as thus far developed, that makes him act as he does at a new juncture, and what his present action is preparing for his future. He observes what tendencies, widely different in nature as first perceived, have here met at a common point and merged in a single stream, and he follows the stream in its course. And, finally, when the forces active in the lives of the characters have worked out the natural conclusion, the student recalls once more the process. Viewed in the light reflected back upon it from the conclusion every point acquires fuller significance. Nor is this enlargement of meaning confined to the life in the book-world alone. Insensibly life itself has grown larger to the student of the book. He takes back into it an augmented interest, a more intelligent curiosity, and something more of power not merely to read books with pleasure and understanding, but to meet life itself intelligently.

We may say that this is the highest end not merely of the reading of fiction, but of all intelligent reading of literature of any sort. It is just as truly the guerdon of him who reads The Daffodils, The Ancient Mariner, Julius Ccesar, Self -Reliance, or On Conciliation with America, as of him who reads Silas Marner or Henry Esmond, The student who has wandered lonely as a cloud with the poet, and come upon the daffodils and caught the spirit of that jocund company, carries away with him not only the joy of the verse, but senses made more responsive to the beauty of the world, an increased activity of feeling. We turn from The Ancient Mariner as from the revelation of a world of sweeter melodies, of diviner harmonies, of more subtle and mjrsterious relationshipsr-and behold, we find it again in the world we have known all our lives. We make our own the fairness of statement, the persuasive massing of facts, the common sense, and the love of justice in Burke's great speech, and somehow we find ourselves looking upon public questions in a new light, judging public policies in a new spirit. From all these studies we return with increased power to read intelligently, and just as truly with increased power to live intelligently. The ultimate end of all teaching of literature, then, seems to be the same, and is an immediate consequence of the nature of literature.

On the other hand, the means by which the end is to be accomplished must vary with the department of literature. In dealing with literature we are dealing with life, not directly, hut through the medium of an art. Our method, therefore, must he determined with an eye to the conditions created for us hy the art. These vary so widely in the several departments of literature that he would he foolish indeed who should endeavor to apply one method rigidly in all. As we pass from lyric poetry to the epic, the drama, the novel, the essay, the speech, we nowhere fail to he occupied with human life and its interests; yet we can not reach the emotional secret of the lyric hy the same logical analysis that opens the treasures of the speech, npr will the means to be employed in either of these cases serve us with the novel. The cases of the novel and the drama are more nearly alike, and a comparison of the two is helpful.

Even here we are far from identity of conditions. Both the novel and the drama deal with men and women acting. But the liberty accorded the novelist to appear in his own person and tell us how his characters act, what makes them act so, and what he thinks of them for it, affects both the form of his work and, to some extent, our study of it. The complete suppression of the dramatist, the strict limitations of length within which he must work, create conditions that make the task of his reader in some respects more diflBcult and in some respects easier than that of the novel reader. But in the most fundamental points the drama and the novel present similar problems. In each we have a central character or group of characters, involved in a plot, an action, that carries the theme. In each we ordinarily have subordinate characters either instruments in developing the main action or principals or subordinates in a second plot, itself subsidiary to the main action.

In the drama we have the action developed in five acts with a varying number of scenes; in the novel the action runs through an indefinite number of chapters. Here is more difference in seeming than in reality. The novelist just as much as the dramatist must introduce his personages^ create the situation that supplies them with motives for various choices; show us their choice and make it explicable by their characteristics; start the consequent action into motion; complicate it with other actions which shall constantly renew the opportunity for choice; and finally bring it to a conclusion that shall both justify itself to ouv reason as a natural effect of the causes that produce it, and leave us in a deeper harmony with universal law. The novelist may, if he will, linger over the introduction of his characters, and he may move more slowly toward his goal; yet the limitations of time and space and unity of action are upon him as well as upon the dramatist. Even he can not give a complete panorama of the lives he has created. Out of the myriad situations and events that he might present, he must select such as are most significant in the light of his theme; and, rigidly suppressing everything else, he must so combine and order these that their significance shall be unmistakable. In th« drama we study each act, each scene, and every speech of every character, to make it yield its contribution to the main action. So, too, in the novel. We study the chapters as marking stages in the action, to discover what were to the author the critical conditions, the determining influences, and the decisive moments in the lives he is narrating. We analyze the dialogue to make acquaintance with the characters and to pene-' trate the secret of their interaction. And we note at-

INTRODUCTION H

tentively every word the author drops by way of comment upon his characters and explanation of their feelings and conduct.

This close study of the novel, following the lines of its structure and accepting the conditions imposed upon both writer an^ reader by the very nature of the art, achieves two results of more or less profit to the student. The first, and the more important, result is that already pointed out. It lies in the enlargement of life that comes to the student through living so intimately and intelUgently in the lives of others. The second result, though distinctly inferior to this, is of undoubted value even to the general reader, while to the special student of literature it is indispensable — ^namely, the quickening and strengthening of the critical instinct and the development of the literary judgment. It is indeed only through the reading of many authors and books, through the spontaneous appropriation and assimilation of the best they have to give both in substance and in manner, and later through a conscious and intelligent comparison of them, that anything like catholicity of taste and soundness of judgment i6 developed. No class study of two or three or half a dozen books can take the place of this gradual and half-unconscious growth. But such study as is here urged can at any rate suggest that literature of every sort is an art, with problems of its own arising out of the subject it handles, the audience it addresses, and the medium of expression it employs. Such study may even beget a curiosity to know how different authors have solved or attacked these problems, and it may give something like intelligent direction to this curiosity. It certainly enables the student more easily to enter into every new book he takes up, and to make his own whatever truth and beauty of form and substance it may have.

Geobge Eliot's Aim and Method

That George Eliot was not out of sympathy with the theory of fiction and its spiritual uses here presented can hardly be questioned by her readers. She took her work seriously, looked upon the writing of fiction as an art, and strove almost religiously to be true to the artist's function. She held herself to be a teacher; but not after the fashion of the preacher or the fabulist, with a set lesson to inculcate by every work. Hers was a more difficult and more delicate task — ^to teach high lessons through noble joys. She sought to ennoble the emotions by rousing them to a purifying activity. She sought to extend and quicken our sympathies by helping us to find ourselves in lives apparently most unlike our own. She sought to give nobler values to familiar ties, to broaden the horizon and lift the heavens that shut us in. And all this she sought to do, not by creating an impossible world, but by showing us this world as it is, or as she saw it; by interesting us in common men and women; by giving us the sBsthetic joy — ^which is also moral— -of escape from the narrow limits of our own lives into the freedom of the artist's incarnation in a hundred lives.

Her own words assure us of her feeling about her work, her aim, and her method. Writing * to M. D' Albert she says, " My books are deeply serious things to me, and come out of all the painful discipline, all the most hardly learnt lessons of my past life."

To John Blackwood, her first publisher, she writes,* " It is a comfort to me to read any criticism which recognizes the high responsibilities of literature that undertakes to represent life. The ordinary tone about art is that the artist may do what he will, provided he pleases the public."

She assures her friend Mrs. Peter Taylor that she looks upon her function as " that of the aesthetic, not doctrinal teacher — the rousing of the nobler emotions, which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of special measures." f To the same effect she writes to Charles Bray,t "If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally. . . . The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is, that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures."

A letter * to Frederic Harrison emphasizes her adherence to the aesthetic aim, and gives us a glimpse of her method — " That is a tremendously difficult problem which you have laid before me; and I think you see its difficulties, though they can hardly press upon you as they do on me, who have gone through again and again the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit.

I think aesthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching, because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely aesthetic — ^if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram — it becomes the most offensive of all teaching/^

Her method is still further unfolded to us in a letter* to K. H. Hutton, concerning a criticism on Romola — " Perhaps even a judge so discerning as yourself could not infer from the imperfect result how strict a self-control and selection were exercised in the presentation of details. I believe there is scarcely a phrase, an incident, an allusion, that did not gather its value to me from its supposed subservience to my main artistic objects. ... It is the habit of my imagination to strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a character moves as of the character itself. The psychological causes which prompted me to give such details of Florentine life and history as I have given, are precisely the same as those which determined me in giving the details of English village life in Silas Marner, or the Dodson life, out of which were developed the destinies of poor Tom and Maggie.^*

This letter to Mr. Hutton is evidence also that her characters were not mere constructions, but real creations. She evidently conceived them in their environment, and felt that they themselves within that environment worked out their own fates. When Mr. Blackwood questioned something in the conduct ascribed to Caterina in Mr. OilfiVs Love Story, she wrote, f "But I am unable to alter anything in the delineation or development of character, as my stories always grow out of my psychological conception of the dramatis personcB. . . . My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy. And I can not stir a step aside from what I feel to be true in character. If anything strikes you as untrue to human nature in my delineations, I shall be very glad if you will point it out to me, that I may reconsider the matter. But, alas! inconsistencies and weaknesses are not untrue."

And again her artistic desire for unity and completeness appears in a later letter * to the same friend— ^•'1 don^t see how I can leave anything out, because I hope there is nothing that will be seen to be irrelevant to my design."

It is possible that George Eliot^s desire for fullness of treatment, her anxiety to give a solid reality to her characters by relating them in a thousand ways to the life of a whole community, led her at times to err on the side of excess. It is certain that many of her critics charge her with such error in the first part of The Mill on the Floss, in Romola, in Middlemarch, and in Daniel Deronda; and she herself felt a lack of proportion in the handling of the ^'Dodson life" in the first named. But no one finds similar fault with Silas Mamer. Of all her books this is recognized as the most artistic. This does not necessarily imply that it is the one which we cling to most. We may forgive many a sin against art for the sake of the intense humanness of Maggie TuUiver and Tom, of Tito, of Dorothea and Jjydgate and Mr. Farebrother and the Garths and Mr. Bulstrode^ of Gwendolen and Grandcourt, and little Jacob and the whole Cohen family. The nature of Maggie^s struggle, or Komola^s, or Gwendolen's, or Dorothea's, and the greater range of life involved in telling their stories may make different readers hold this or that one of her books dearest. But there is general agreement as to the peculiar merits of Silas Marner.*

The theme of this story is, of course, the life of Silas himself. It is the story of his affection, his trustfulness, his ignorance; of his loss of faith in God and man through the treachery of a false friend and the ignorance and narrowness of a whole community; of the dwindling of his life when it is no longer fed from the sources of human affection and fellowship and the worship of an Unseen Goodness; and of its growth again, of his restoration to life through the coming of the little child whose helplessness and love and expanding life bring him once more into natural relations with the world about him.

This. is the story for which the book is written, and the clearness and beauty with which this central theme is conceived and the care with which everything in the book is made to contribute to it, give the book much of its artistic perfection. Yet it would lose much even of

* Of SUm Mamer George Eliot wrote to John Blackwood, '*It sets— or is intended to set — in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural human relations."

its artistic value and interest if the story with which it is complicated were not also of a sort to appeal strongly to our mingled human nature, conscious of good impulses and high ideals, and conscious too of strange weakness and failure; and it would lose further if the complication were not skillfully managed. No perfection of form makes a lasting work unless it is the expression of truth of substance. But it is also certain that truth of substance alone hardly avails to give permanent life. In Silas Marner, fortunately, we have a fairly organic union of truth and beauty of content with truth and beauty of form. The story of Silas appeals to universal human instincts, to our | need of human fellowship, to our sense of dependence on the common ties of friend and kindred, to our need of loving and being loved. The story of Godfrey Cass, too, takes hold of us through our sympathy with his love for Nancy, and with all the impulses of his nature that make her stand to him for a vision of brightness and purity and peace; and, alas! it takes hold of us also through our shrinking recognition of our own :< frailties; through our own aversion to the disagreeable present; -our own diflBculty in keeping a clear vision of our ideals; and, it may be, our inner sense that neither the madness of folly that led Godfrey into the intrigue and secret marriage with poor Molly, nor the cowardice that made him refuse to face his act and take the consequences, is wholly foreign to our natures. But these two stories of Silas and Godfrey derive their power over our feelings and reflections no more from their truth to life than from the beauty of their handling. Each is conceived as a whole; each may be looked at by itself, and each so viewed has interest;