Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs

Front matter

GEORGE ELIOT

ETC.

BY

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

The first few days after a great writer's death are critical for his reputation. Then for the first time we realise all that he has been to us, all that he has done for us. We can for the first time speak of his whole work with little fear of the surprises that genius has often in store for the critic who dares to be prophetic. We can speak out our full thought of him, if for no other reason, because what we say cannot by any chance come before him. Above all, he has ceased to be a person, and we can treat more simply and directly of his spiritual influence. At the same time we that speak are those who have come under his spell in his lifetime and express the feelings of his contemporaries without any of the disturbing influences which later revelations or the modification of the Zeitgeist produce on the appeal he may have for after-times. We alone can say what he has been to us whom he addressed.

It has chanced during the past ten years that I have been called upon to give on behalf of the Athenæum an estimate of the loss English Letters have sustained by the death of the four chief writers who left us during the decade. These essays differed, I believe, in at least two respects from the obituary notices which swarm from the press on such occasions. They were estimates, not obituaries; they dealt rather with the work than with the life of each author. And they were written immediately on hearing of the death of the writer concerned, whereas it is well known that every newspaper has obituaries of all the notabilities of the time pigeon-holed for production on the morrow of the death. Whatever then the merits of these essays, they were written under the influence of the feelings I have indicated above, and were in each case, I may perhaps say, the first critical estimate of contemporary England on the lifework of these great writers. That they appeared in the foremost literary journal of the English-speaking peoples gives them an importance that I could not claim for any personal utterances. I have for these reasons thought them worthy of being put in more permanent form as documents—'documents' is a favourite word and thing just now—in the history of English opinion about the writers treated in this volume. At the same time I have thought it right to leave them in substantially the same form as that in which they first appeared, only removing a few traces of neces- sarily hasty writing. 'Documents' must not be falsified. I may perhaps venture to add, in fairness to myself, that there are some few things in them which I would have put differently if I had been writing over my own name in the first instance.

To make this little volume more worthy ot acceptance, I have added a few reviews of works written by or about the authors treated. These also appeared in the Athenæum for the most part after the death of the subjects of my éloges. They were more detailed estimates of parts of the authors' works, or they dealt more at large with their lives, or in other ways they seemed to me to supplement the more general éloges written for a special occasion from a special point of view.

Looking back on these memorial essays, I can now discern the general method on which they were formed, though I was not conscious of it at the time of writing. At the moment of an author's death, we think primarily of the man we have lost. But we mourn the man for the sake of his works, hence it is those of his qualities that are shown in his works which naturally engage our attention at the moment of his death. These essays are therefore appropriately devoted to the literary qualities of their subjects' minds. They are of the psychological, not of the aesthetic order of criticism.

'There are,' to quote myself elsewhere, 'two methods of studying literary productions, which may be roughly described as the aesthetic and the psychological. The former goes straight to the literary products themselves, and seeks to determine their aptitude for exerting the specific literary emotions often reflecting the critic's own feelings in the rhythm and beauty of his language. This is the method of Lamb and Mr. Swinburne, and (in his best moments) Mr. Matthew Arnold. The other or psychological method looks rather to the literary producer, and endeavours to ascertain those qualities of the author's mind that would produce such and such results. Mr. Leslie Stephen pursued this method during his Hours in a Library, and Mr. Morley and Mr. Hutton afford other instances of its use.' I need scarcely say to which of these two methods the present essays belong. By natural bent, by training I have some claims to be an expert in psychology I belong to the psychological school. To be of the aesthetic school is only given to those who are something more than critics. They are the artists in criticism; nous autres must be content with being scientific, though even we may attempt to give such artistic form to our work as science allows. Each school has its province. I have tried to show above that the psychological method has a fit application at moments when we are thinking of the literary qualities of an author's mind rather than the literary effect of his works.

In making my estimates of George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Browning, and Newman, I have had the critical advantage, though the personal loss, of not being personally acquainted with the subjects of my essays except in one case. Of George Eliot I may say at least vidi tantum. I can still recall the feelings of ardent reverence with which I approached the Priory, North Bank, one Sunday afternoon in 1877. I had written an enthusiastic—I fear I must add gushing—defence of Daniel Deronda, from a Jewish point of view, in the June number of Macmillan's Magazine of that year, and George Henry Lewes had expressed a wish that I should call upon them. I went with all the feelings of the neophyte at the shrine for the first time. Need I say that I was disappointed? Authors give of their best in their works under the consciousness of addressing the whole world. We ought not to expect them to live up to that best at all times and before all onlookers: but we do.

I have few Boswellisms to offer. I remember being struck even at that early stage of my social discernment by the contrast between the boisterous Bohemian bonhomie of George Lewes and the almost old-maidenish refinement of his life's companion. I had tried to lead her talk to my own criticism, but was met by the quiet parry, 'I never read criticisms of my own works.' I could not help thinking at the time que fais-je donc dans cette galère? but she was obviously in the right. Others were present and the topics had to be general. We got upon songs for singing, and I was attempting to contend that the sweetest songs for vocal purposes were nowadays not those of the poets of the day. She pointed out that even Tennyson's in the Princess were unsuitable for that purpose, whereas the Elizabethans produced songs that were gems of literary art, yet trilled forth as naturally as a bird's carol.

I saw her but once more after Lewes's death. I had sent her something I had published in the Nineteenth Century, and she had written asking me to call. I did so, and found the house in gloom and herself in depression. On this occasion I was struck by the massiveness of the head as contrasted with the frailty of the body. When she was seated one thought her tall: such a head should have been propped up by a larger frame. The long thin sensitive hands were those of a musician. The exquisite modulations of the voice told of refinement in every well-chosen phrase. She had at least one of the qualifications one expects in an author; she did indeed 'talk like a book.' She spoke of one of her favourite themes, the appeal of the circle in which one is born even if one has in certain ways grown beyond or outside it. Before I left she asked me to find out for her the meaning of a Hebrew inscription on a seal which an old Russian Jew had given Tourgenief: he had sent her an impression, which she intrusted to me. 'You will be careful of it,' she said, 'I prize it as coming from him.' I thought of old Kalonymos and his similar caution as he hands the key of his family archives to Daniel Deronda. We parted, and I soon returned the impression with an explanation of the inscription. She sent a few words of kindly thanks, and that was all till I received the final summons to Highgate Cemetery.

I do not think that my critical estimate of George Eliot's work was at all affected by this slight personal intercourse with her. My veneration for her work in those days may have led me to some extent, however, to that curious kind of injustice, when we guard against too high praise of those we know or like just because we know and like them. My personal estimate of her work when I wrote about it was certainly higher than my written words would imply. Judged by the result I was justified in this critical caution. In the ten years or so that have elapsed since her death, George Eliot's reputation has not risen, her influence has been on the decline. It seems worth while seeking for the causes of this.

It is of course a general law that literary reputations do decline for a time at least after an author's death. While he lives there is always the halo and attraction of the unknown about what may still come from him: this fades away with his death. Then again his friends have no longer the same motives for keeping his reputation at the highest pitch. Friends, too, die away. London again is the fount of literary reputation, and Londoners, like all inhabitants of great cities, are always eager for some new thing. Old writers compete with the new ones, it is true, but the competition of the novelty is still more efficacious.

All these causes have co-operated to lessen George Eliot's influence and reputation. But there are other more special causes that have tended in the same direction. Mr. Cross's Life was a disappointment: his extreme reticence about personal details and careful excision of all humanising touches made the book dull, and the total impression of George Eliot's personality unattractive. Her last books, Daniel Deronda, Theophrastus Such, and the collected Essays, were a progressive series of anti-climaxes, and it is the latest works that give the final impression in more senses than one. Their didactic tone was too obvious, and the British public resents nothing more than being preached at too obviously.

But above and beyond all these reasons there has been a subtle and gradual change in the public mind which has told against George Eliot's work in two directions. There is a fashion in the art of the novel, as in other arts, and for some time the vogue has been growing for the conte as against the novel, and for the romantic novel of incident as against the realistic novel of character. Amid the problems and perplexities of the present we fly for relaxation to the Something-other-than-Here-and-Now, and we like to take it short. Both tendencies tell against George Eliot. There is a general tendency nowadays against taking intellectual nourishment in anything but small doses. The enormous growth of the magazines is at once a result and a cause of this. Tit-Bits completes what the Fortnightly Review began. It is indeed an Age of Tit-bits. The strenuous attention which the works of George Eliot demand is too much for minds accustomed to such intellectual food as the magazines now supply. The high seriousness of her art displeases the frivolous, and the tone of English Letters just now is distinctly frivolous.

George Eliot aimed and claimed to be a teacher. Her works were a conscious criticism of life. They gave the new feeling about life that seemed to be rendered necessary by the triumph of Darwinism in English speculation. During the 'seventies' there was a confident feeling, among those of us who came to our intellectual majority in those years, that Darwinism was to solve all the problems. This was doubtless due to the triumphant tone in which certain eminent professors of science notably Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford spoke of what science was going to do for the spiritual life when the older theological trammels had been removed. What they promised George Eliot was currently supposed to have attained, and her words were scanned for the secret message. She was to all of us what she seemed to Mr. F. W. Myers in that fine description of his interview with her in the Fellows' Garden at Trinity; she was 'a Sibyl in the gloom.' She alone, we thought, possessed the message of the New Spirit that Darwinism was to breathe into the inner life of man.

Well, Darwinism has come, and has conquered, and, as a vital influence in the spiritual life, has gone. Instead of solving all the problems, it has raised only too many fresh ones. It has thrown light on origins, or to speak more accurately, it has set us on the search for origins. But the undeveloped germ which we call origin has in it ex hypothesi all the problems which the developed product offers, and presents these in more concentrated form. And the something that develops is obviously different from its own development, which is all that Darwinism even professes to explain. To put it technically, origins are not essences, and it is the essence of the matter, the thing as in itself it really is, that we seek for. Hence Darwinism, which merely touches origins and leaves essences alone, only disappoints. The pretty quarrel, too, that is going on among the experts about the fundamentals of Darwinism has helped to discredit it. And with this discredit George Eliot, the literary voice of Darwinism, suffers too. The danger which I foresaw in 1879—'the risk of subordinating the eternal truths of art to what may be the temporary opinions of science'—has proved to be no illusory one.

Again our interests have turned from speculation, even from the bases of conduct, and are almost exclusively social. 'We are all socialists now'—since the Redistribution Act—and George Eliot has little to say on the Condition of England Question. And what little she does say, in Felix Holt for example, is not much in consonance with the feeling of to-day. Her dearest memories were of a time when old Leisure was still alive and social changes took place but slowly. Felix Holt the Radical is rather Felix Holt the Conservative; he is not even a Tory-Democrat. But the ineffectiveness of her social utterances was a sign that her heart was not in the social part of her work; we have no heart for anything else.

For all these reasons then the reputation of George Eliot is undergoing a kind of eclipse in this last decade of the nineteenth century. It is becoming safe to indulge in cheap sneers at the ineffectiveness of her heroes, at the want of élan in the movement of her stories, at the too obvious preachments of her rather overspun comments. Her heroes are perhaps rather apt to be muffs; it is the way with heroes of novels generally. Her plots might develop at greater speed; your novel of character rarely travels express. 'Here the story halts a little' might be written over many a page of Richardson and Fielding, of Miss Austen and Thackeray, but it is a part of their method and a necessary part. And the comments and discussion which cause these frequent halts, have they not a special appeal of their own, even if the appeal be somewhat alien to the art of the novel? And if George Eliot preaches, what admirable sermons she writes! The realistic writer cannot describe the life around him or her without indicating the attitude they take towards it. That very attitude is a preachment: Zola in L'Assommoir, Flaubert in Madame Bovary, are as powerful sermons as I know.

That part then of George Eliot's work which appealed more especially to the Zeitgeist is ineffective now that the Zeitgeist has changed. But how much remains that can never lose its effectiveness because it appeals to the ewige Geist of humanity. Her admirable peasants and parsons, her charming children, her scenery and her interiors, her wit and her wisdom, these are surely a possession for aye in the realm of English fiction. Whatever view we take of her art, we must recognise that she has added as many living personalities to the common acquaintance of English-speaking people as almost any other English novelist, and this after all is the final criterion. And in the difficult sphere of the aphorism, her works are more copiously studded with subtle truths aptly expressed than those of any novelist who has ever written in English. The enemy will say this has nothing to do with the novel: but the enemy can always complain of any form of art that it is not another, so we may let him sneer.

It has seemed worth while devoting some attention to the after-history of George Eliot's reputation, as so much of this volume happens already to be taken up by a consideration of George Eliot's art from various points of view, and I have here attempted to complete the survey. With the other authors considered, there is no occasion to deal in such detail, as their loss is so recent that any attempt to distinguish the permanent elements of their art would be impracticable.

I may add that I have found a difficulty in giving an appropriate name to these studies, so far as they are not reviews. 'Obituaries' of the authors they are not, for I do not profess to give any details of their lives, or even of their works. 'Necrologe' does not sound English, and besides savours of Woking. Éloge comes nearest, but that on the face of it is not English. A wicked wag among my friends suggests Post Mortems, but I trust I have not been quite so cruel as that would imply.

One more word and I have done. There seems something of ingratitude, almost of irreverence, in subjecting to cool criticism writers to whom one owes so much of one's best self. I need not refute the fallacy, that in presuming to criticise one assumes any superiority: if that were so, there would scarcely be any place for criticism, and certainly none at all for critics pur sang. The author appeals to his generation: the critic answers the appeal. In the present case the thing had to be done and I was called upon to do it. I can only say I tried to do my work as honestly and conscientiously as was in my power.

George Eliot

GEORGE ELIOT

December 22, 1880

GEORGE ELIOT

SEVENTEEN years ago the Christmas week was darkened by the death of Thackeray. Once again the festive season has been saddened in many a household by the knowledge that George Eliot was no more. It is not too much to say that with many her works have been far more than novels; they have formed an animating principle co-operating with some of the most powerful spiritual influences of the time. It appears, therefore, to be an appropriate occasion to pass in critical review the works she has left behind her and to estimate their importance.

As is well known, her earlier productions were translations of German works on the metaphysics of religion. Strauss's Life of Jesus appeared in an English form in 1846, and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity in 1853. As translations they were excellent, but it cannot be said that they have had any influence on English speculation. Their chief interest consists in the evidence they give of George Eliot's early devotion to 'advanced' thinking and absorbing interest in the philosophy of religion.

Her importance in the history of English literature rests upon the series of fictions commenced in 1857 with the Scenes of Clerical Life, and concluded in 1876 by Daniel Deronda. It is not difficult to discern in these works two widely varying sets of artistic motives. The Scenes, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, and Middlemarch are all clearly connected by their subject-matter, and, in large measure, by their style of treatment. In them she went back to the scenes and days of her childhood. It has been often remarked that the plastic period of the literary artist, when impressions are retained with that minute observation necessary for the novel, ceases at an extremely early age. Dickens was only at home in the England of coaches and among the lower classes. George Eliot was most happy when recalling mid-England in the days before the Reform Bill. Her father was a land surveyor, and she thus came in contact with all classes of provincial society, so that her pictures are far more complete than either Dickens's or Thackeray's accounts of London life. Both George Eliot and George Sand had learned that provincial life is more intense, if more monotonous and simple, than the busy life of towns. Amid the turmoil of cities, existence passes through a series of shallows, as it were; whereas in the country the emotions are collected into one deep pool, which pours forth tumultuously if once disturbed. Throughout these novels of memory, as they may be termed, the incidents and tone have a tragic ring about them which is wanting in the majority of novels dealing with London life. Only in the Brontës, and perhaps in Mrs. Gaskell, do we find anything like the depth of earnestness displayed in these novels of George Eliot. Much of their piquancy depends on the contrast between the subject-matter and the manifold reflections to which it gives rise. While the subject is entirely obsolete, the reflections are in accord with the most advanced thought of the day. Every one knows something of the scenery and the characters amid which these novels are placed. The rich fields of Loamshire and their owners and cultivators in the early years of this century form the common background of these tragedies of human life. Generally speaking, they treat of the influence of adverse circumstance on the inner life of the actors. It is essentially the spiritual life of her heroes and heroines which interests the writer. It is characteristic that she has introduced the religious life as a leading motive of the novel. Dinah Morris's spiritual experiences and exhortations, Maggie Tulliver's conversion by Thomas à Kempis, even Mr. Bulstrode's wrestlings of the spirit, are themes which only the deepest spiritual sympathy could have handled adequately. Not that she is deficient in the lighter qualities of the novelist's art. No one has described English scenery with more accurate touch or displayed a more Shakespearean sense of humour. Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey are unequalled creations. In the delineation of children's character she stands almost on a level with Victor Hugo. Altogether, in range of sympathy, in nobility of tone, in fertility of reflection, and in subtlety of insight these novels of memory are unique in the history of fiction. Opinion will differ as to their comparative merits, and each has its distinctive qualities. Yet it is probable that Adam Bede will always retain a certain supremacy; there is a freshness of tone as if the writer were luxuriating in new-found powers. The unsavoury motif of Felix Holt places it out of competition; Silas Marner, finished as it is, is on a smaller scale; and the concluding part of The Mill on the Floss destroys the almost perfect 'artistry' of the story of Tom and Maggie Tulliver. Middlemarch remains, and as 'a study in provincial life' is complete; yet the deficiencies in the plot and a certain undercurrent of social protest counterbalance its other advantages, and the palm is left to George Eliot's first and probably greatest work. The subject of Adam Bede required extreme delicacy of treatment; but all such requirements are satisfied. The shallowness of Hetty's character removes from her that sympathy which would otherwise render her fate too sad for the imagination; but her history illustrates the lesson which all these novels were consciously made to teach. They aided the great work of Wordsworth in educating the emotions to sympathise with the fundamental joys and sorrows of human life in all social spheres. And in the fine words of Wordsworth about his own works, 'They will co-operate with the benign tendencies in nature and society, and will, in their degree, be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier.'

The remaining novels, Romola, The Spanish Gypsy (apart from its unfortunate form), and Daniel Deronda, deal with an entirely different range of interests. They are romances of the historic imagination, consciously creative in- stead of being, as in the other novels, unconsciously reproductive. The first two dealt with the history of the past, and one cannot help thinking that The Spanish Gypsy would have been almost as successful a reproduction as Romola if it had been written in a congenial medium. In these laborious research did the work that loving memory effected in the other novels. As the artist went to work more consciously, so the motive principle of her work came more to the surface. The leading conception of modern science as applied to man, the influence of hereditary transmission, was transmuted into the moral principle of the claims of race. In the novels of memory this had been disguised under the simpler form of family love. Maggie Tulliver's action at the end of The Mill on the Floss is entirely based on the claims of family as opposed to personal affection for Stephen Guest. 'Love is not enough' is the refrain, and this comes out still more strongly on the broader historic canvas of Romola and The Spanish Gypsy. The point of Tito Melema's treachery is the absence of hereditary connection with Florentine politics. Fedalma sacrifices everything to the claims of race. In Daniel Deronda the difficult task was attempted of raising contemporary events to a quasi-historic level. By the mere force of genius George Eliot strove to create a personality which she deliberately asserted to be on a level with the great spiritual leaders of mankind. We have reasons for saying that the identification of the Jewish prophet of Daniel Deronda with a philosophic Jew described by Mr. G. H. Lewes in the Fortnightly Review is erroneous. The Jews give the greatest example in modern times of fidelity to the claims of race, and it was natural that George Eliot should have sympathised with Jewish aspirations. In The Spanish Gypsy she had already portrayed a fine figure in the Jew Sephardo. In Mordecai Cohen she attempted to idealise the history of this remarkable race, and by so doing destroyed the chances of success for her most elaborate production. Want of knowledge and want of sympathy with the Jewish ideal will probably always be an effectual bar to the appreciation of Daniel Deronda, and the hero plays the difficult part of irradiating sympathy instead of doing noble deeds. Yet it would be rash to assert that, if the Jewish race again became prominent as a nationality, Daniel Deronda may not ultimately figure as one of the favourite books of the Chosen People. Even as it is, it must be recognised that the conception of such a character as the principal Jew of the book shows singular artistic daring.

While Romola and Daniel Deronda are of a different genre from the other novels,, they have a share of their excellences of style and characterisation. Since attention was first drawn to the point, too much stress has been laid on the 'scientific technicalities' of her style of late years. She would not have been the foremost woman of her age if she had not been influenced by one of its greatest movements. Yet the evidences of this are as clear in her earliest as in her latest works. In Janet's Repentance we read that 'the idea of duty ... is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.' In the second page of Adam Bede, Seth's 'coronal arch' becomes a prominent feature in his portrait. In The Mill on the Floss George Eliot cannot let us know the ingenious trick by which Bob Jakin gains a couple of inches in measuring out his flannel without referring to his thumb as the 'mark of difference between the man and the monkey.' It is not quite correct to say that her style became more scientific in her last two novels; it would be more exact to say that it became more complex. As her thoughts became more subtle, her sentences naturally became more complex, and it would be difficult to determine the limits beyond which subtlety and complexity become inartistic. Allied to this error is the statement, frequently repeated in the obituary notices of the newspapers, that George Eliot was essentially an analytic genius, and that she constructed her characters out of analytic materials. The idea immediately suggested by this curiously uncritical assertion is that the perusal of Mr. Bain's works is the best propædeutic for the creation of a character like Dolly Winthrop. It would be far more correct to say that George Eliot's genius was essentially constructive, and that her analytic comments are the results of her training and experience. Like all great moderns, George Eliot possessed the power of feeling deeply and of simultaneously intellectualising her feelings; this is the most characteristic note of the modern mind. In this regard it is interesting to notice her accuracy and completeness, which at first sight appear peculiarly scientific. Yet it is the selective accuracy of the artist, not the exhaustive exactness of the savant, that she displays. When Cabel Garth's eyebrows 'make their pathetic angle' we have this trait alone given, and not a paragraph from Mr. Darwin's Expression of the Emotions. It would perhaps be more appropriate to point to her stern adherence to the fact of human nature as answering to the accuracy and impartiality of the scientific mind. Maggie Tulliver's sudden love for a dandy like Stephen Guest may grate against Mr. Swinburne's critical feelings, but is, no doubt, true to human nature. It is this fidelity to the facts of life that gives the prominent sadness to her works. She has chosen tragic themes, and tragic events are apt to be sad. Perhaps the most dominant idea of her Weltanschauung is the conception of law in human character.