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 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER STUDIES 
 
 BY 
 
 ROSE ELIZABETH CLEVELAND 
 
 Sltbtnittnfy fbttionr. 
 
 FUNK & WAGNALLS 
 
 NEW YORK x ggg LONDON 
 
 IO AND 12 DEY STREET 44 FLEET STREET 
 
 All Rightt Rtttrvtd 
 
 145833
 
 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by 
 
 FUNK & WAGNALLS, 
 In the Office ot the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. 
 
 [All Rights Reserved^ 
 Registered at Stationers' Hall, London, England.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, 7 
 
 RECIPROCITY, 25 
 
 ALTRUISTIC FAITH, 43 
 
 HISTORY, 61 
 
 Studies in the Middle Ages : a Series of Historical Essays. 
 
 OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE, 81 
 
 
 
 rt CHARLEMAGNE 105 
 
 f THE MONASTERY 127 
 
 ^ 
 
 7 CHIVALRY, 153 
 
 , - JOAN OF ARC, 171 
 
 Q

 
 GEOEGE ELIOT'S POETRY.
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY. 
 I. 
 
 A GENUINE poem is almost certain of recognition, as 
 such, in the long run. If verse contains poetry, that 
 poetry makes itself felt, whatever blemishes the verse, as 
 verse, may have ; but if dint of argument alone brings 
 us to acknowledge faultless verse a poem, like Galileo, in 
 the moment of recantation, we shall mutter to ourselves our 
 former and unrecanted conviction. Choose, for example, 
 any Paris to arbitrate between " Aurora Leigh" and " The 
 Spanish Gypsy," and which will win the golden apple ? If 
 Paris is at all able to tell black from white, he will at once 
 perceive the " points" of which the " Gypsy" is possessed 
 and of which " Aurora" is destitute. He will discover in 
 the pages of George Eliot superlatives enough. Their color 
 and glow, their vigor, their passion, their nobility of senti 
 ment, their perfection of pathos, the sustained movement 
 of the story, its tragic and worthy denouement, its perfect 
 prosody, its successful unities, and its everywhere-pervading 
 atmosphere of ethical sublimity all these will compare 
 with " Aurora" to " Aurora's" disadvantage. And yet, 
 and yet how is it ? " Aurora" gets the apple I Perhaps 
 poor Paris can only stammer forth, in answer to the ques 
 tion, What in " Aurora" more excellent than in the 
 " Gypsy" establishes her claim to the prize? the unan-
 
 10 GEORGE ELIOT'8 POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 swering answer, "Je ne sais quoi." Paris knows that by 
 the one he is impressed, stirred, uplifted ; and that the 
 other, with its high morality, and rare knowledge, and brill 
 iant diction, falls cold upon his ear ; in short, whether he 
 comprehends it or not, it is the poetry in " Aurora" and 
 the lack of it in the " Gypsy" which compels his decision. 
 "What's in a name ? A rose by any other name might 
 smell as sweet ; but a lily, if rechristened rose, would never 
 diffuse the rose's odor, nor gain, in addition to its own spot 
 less perfections, the deep-hearted sorcery of that enchant 
 ing, crumpled wonder, which we thrill in touching, as if 
 it, too, had nerves, and blood, and a human heart a rose ! 
 So prose can never become poetry by bearing its name. Ad 
 ventitious circumstances personal distinction, dazzling suc 
 cess in other fields, the influence of sympathetic and power 
 ful friends may cause something admirable as prose to 
 pass, for the moment, as poetry. But the sure judgment 
 of time reverses such opinions, and prose continues prose, 
 and poetry remains forever uncounterfeited. 
 
 II. 
 
 1 come at once to the consideration of George Eliot's 
 verse in the mention of two qualities which it seems to me 
 to lack, and which 1 hold to be essentials of poetry. 
 
 The first of these two qualities has to do with form, and 
 is a property, if not the whole, of the outside, that which 
 affects and (if anything could do this) stops with the senses. 
 Yet here, as elsewhere in this department of criticism, it is
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY. 11 
 
 difficult to be exact. I ask myself, Is it her prosody ? and 
 am obliged to find it faultless as Pope's. There is never in 
 her metres a syllable too much or too little. Mrs. Brown 
 ing's metre is often slovenly, her rhymes are often false. 
 Yet, explain it who will, Elizabeth Browning's verse has 
 always poetry and music, which George Eliot's lacks. 
 
 What was work to write is work to read. Ruskiifs 
 dictum "No great intellectual thing was ever done by 
 great effort" I* suspect to be wholly true, and that it is 
 pre-eminently true in the production of poetry. Poetry 
 must be the natural manner of the poet, and can never be 
 assumed. I drt not mean by this to ignore the aids which 
 study gives to genius ; I only mean to say that no mere 
 labor and culture can -simulate poetic fire, or atone for its 
 absence. George Eliot puts her wealth of message into the 
 mould of poetic form by continuous effort. No secret of 
 hydraulics could cause a dewdrop to hang upon a rose-leaf 
 in a cube. Her torrents of thought were predestined to a 
 cubical deliverance. Never was the Calvinistic dilemma 
 more intrusive. Her free will cannot squeeze them 
 spherical. 
 
 George Eliot's prose carries easily its enormous burdens 
 
 of concentrated gift. It is like the incomparable trained 
 
 . elephants of Eastern monarchs, which bear at once every 
 
 k treasure the iron of agriculture, the gem of royalty ; and 
 
 in its cumbrous momentum it out-distances all competitors. 
 
 But poesy should betray no burdens. Its rider should sit 
 
 lightly, with no hint of spur. It should sport along its 
 
 course and reach its goal unwearied. 
 
 The born poet has no agony in the deliverance of his 
 song. The uttering is to him that soothing balm which
 
 12 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 the utterance is to his reader. Burns said, " My passions 
 when once lighted raged like so many devils till they got 
 vent in rhyme ; and then the conning over my verses, like 
 a spell, soothed all into quiet." But where will one find a 
 lullaby in George Eliot's verses ? 
 
 Poets do, indeed, learn in suffering what they teach in 
 song ; but the singing quiets the suffering. It is the weep 
 ing, not the tear wept, that gives relief. Mrs. Browning 
 makes no secret of the headache. 
 
 " If heads that hold a rhythmic thought must ache perforce, 
 Then I, for one, choose headaches." 
 
 In a private letter she writes : " I have not shrunk from 
 any amount of labor where labor could do anything." 
 Where labor could do anything ! There it is ! 
 
 George Eliot has been said to possess Shakespearian 
 qualities. Perhaps just here, in the relation of manner to 
 matter, is seen her greatest resemblance and greatest differ 
 ence. No writer, all concede, ever carried and delivered 
 so much as Shakespeare. Never was human utterance so 
 packed with wealthy meaning, so loaded with all things 
 that can be thought or felt, inferred or dreamed, as his. 
 And it all comes with gush and rush, or with gentle, mur 
 muring flow, just as it can come, just as it must come. He 
 takes no trouble, and he gives none. From one of his plays, 
 replete with his incomparable wit, wisdom, and conceit, you 
 emerge as from an ocean bath, exhilarated by the tossing of 
 billows whose rough embrace dissolves to tenderest caress, 
 yet carries in itself hints of central fire, of utmost horizon, 
 of contact with things in heaven and earth undreamt of in 
 our philosophy. You come from one of George Eliot's
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY. 13 
 
 poems as from a Turkish batli of latest science and refine 
 ment, appreciative of benefit, but so battered, beaten, and 
 disjointed as to need repose before you can be conscious of 
 refreshment. 
 
 The irony of fate spares not one shining mark. George 
 Eliot cared most to have the name of poet. But her gait 
 betrays her in the borrowed robe. It is as if the parish 
 priest should insist on wearing in his desk my lady's 
 evening costume. It is too much and not enough. He 
 cannot achieve my lady's trick which causes the queenly 
 train to float behind her like the smoke-plume of a gliding 
 engine. He steps on it and stumbles. You step on it and 
 fall. On my lady it is never in the way ; on His Rever 
 ence it is always so. Yet he will preach in it ! " There 
 
 are," writes Mrs. Browning to II. H. Home, "Mr. , 
 
 Mr. , Lord , and one or two others who have 
 
 education and natural ability enough to be anything in the 
 world except poets, and who choose to be poets in spite of 
 nature and their stars, to say nothing of gods, men, and 
 critical columns.'* 
 
 III. 
 
 A second quality which George Eliot's poetry lacks is 
 internal and intrinsic, pertaining to matter rather than 
 manner, though, as will be suggested later on, standing, 
 perhaps, in the relation to manner of cause to effect. It is 
 that, indeed, which all her works lack, but which prose, as 
 prose, can get along without ; call it what you will, faith or
 
 14 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 transcendentalism ; I prefer to define it negatively as the 
 antipode of agnosticism. 
 
 No capable student of her works but must admit the 
 existence of this deficiency. Everywhere and in all things 
 it is apparent. Between all her lines is written the stern, 
 self-imposed thus far and no farther. Her noblest charac 
 ters move, majestic and sad, up to a stone- wall ! There 
 is no need that argument be brought to establish this propo 
 sition. It demands nay, admits of, no proof, for it is self- 
 evident. 
 
 The question which concerns us here is simply, What has 
 this fact to do with George Eliot's poetry ? 
 
 I answer, Much, every way. Herein, indeed, is matter. 
 But my suspicions must not be disclosed in their full 
 heterodoxy. I venture, however, to affirm that agnosticism 
 can nev^er exist in true poetry. Let verse have every 
 quality which delights sense, captivates intellect, and stirs 
 the heart, yet lack that ray which, coming from a sun 
 beyond our system, reaches, blends with, vivifies, and 
 assures the intimation of and longing for immortality in man 
 lacking this, you have not poetry. 
 
 It is the necessity of the poet, his raison d'etre, to meet 
 and join the moving of men's minds toward the hereafter. 
 For all minds tend thither. The dullest mortal spirit must 
 at times grope restlessly and expectantly in the outer dark 
 ness for something beyond ; and this something must exist, 
 will exist, in a true poem. It need not be defined as 
 Heaven, or Paradise, or Hades, or Nirvana ; but we must 
 not be confronted with silence ; there must be in some way 
 recognition of and sympathy with this deepest yearning of 
 the soul. Many a one, not knowing what, not seeing
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY. 15 
 
 <vhere, but trusting in somewhat and trusting in some 
 where, has been .a poet and an inspiration to his race. The 
 simplest bead-telling Margaret is appeased with the creedless 
 faith of her Faust, though it be told in " phrases slightly 
 different" from the parish priest's. Faust, the lore-crammed, 
 the knowledge-sated, yet feels the unseen, and longs and 
 trusts. His proud will brings no cold, impenetrable extin 
 guisher to place upon this leaping flame of spirit, which 
 sends its groping ray far beyond his finite horizon, ever 
 moving, moving in its search ; because he feels assurance of 
 the existence of the something toward which it moves. 
 
 George Eliot, confronted by Margaret's question, answers 
 sadly, with submission born of a proud ignorance, " I do 
 not know. My feeling that there is something somewhere is, 
 itself, unaccountable, and proves nothing. I simply do 
 not know. I will not conjecture. It is idle and imperti 
 nent to guess. There is that of which you and I both do 
 know, because we have experience of it. Of this only will 
 1 speak. All else is but verbiage. "We stop here." 
 
 And she stops here, before a great stone-wall, higher 
 than we can see over, thicker than we can measure, so cold 
 that we recoil at the touch. There is no getting any 
 farther. It is the very end. 
 
 Now, this can never be poetry ; for the poet must ever 
 open and widen our horizon. He need not be on the wing, 
 but his wings must be in sight. He need not nay, he 
 must not, deal with man-made creeds and dogmas. He 
 need not deal with ethics even. Homer knows nothing of 
 most of George Eliot's sweet humanities, and confuses 
 shockingly all things which, since his poor day, have come 
 to be catalogued under the heads of virtue and vice. His
 
 16 GEOEGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 deities make merry over the cripple among them, and spend 
 most of their time meditating guiles concerning each other, 
 and each other's favorites among men. Humanity is the 
 football for their game. They, the relentless, cruel im 
 mortals, are to be come up with if mortal may ; to be pro 
 pitiated if mortal must. Nowhere is there any trace of 
 conscience, nowhere any sense of sin. As to the moralities 
 of human life, the duties of man to man, these Homeric 
 Bob Roys found themselves amply sufficed with 
 
 "... the simple plan 
 That they should take who had the power, 
 And they should keep who can." 
 
 Yet among all there is a boundless belief in a beyond. 
 The imagination and anticipation of existence comes never 
 to an end. The future is, indeed, unknown, since he who 
 enters may not return from Hades. Yet it is vastly, 
 vaguely certain. A multitude of immortals of infinite power 
 and irresistible beauty surround and have continually to dc 
 with mortal men, and for each man there is some chance of 
 winning from these immortals the gift of godhood. All 
 expands and extends. There is no end-all, no be-all. 
 Hence, without morality or goodness, we have poetry. 
 
 In Heine we have shocking jests and fearful impieties, 
 but never sincere agnosticism. He believed all, and denied 
 .all. He threw away with one hand what he clasped with the 
 other. " Lying, corpse-like, upon the barren sand by the 
 grovelling, heaving sea, which is dipped up by the gray and 
 formless cloud-daughters of the air, in tedious, ceaseless 
 rise and fall (so like his own life !), he still sees the lumi'
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 7 8 POETRY. 17 
 
 nous aspect of a far-away perfection, m whose heavenly 
 beauty his spirit has found the inspiration that carries it 
 straight, like a bird, to heaven's gate." * The ilse, evan 
 ished from the waters, where prayers are said and church- 
 hells ring, lies in the depths of his own sea-soul. Ever 
 and anon the angel-face of the little dead Veronica woos 
 and wins him. to purity and peace. 
 
 Byron's negatives amount to an affirmative. Amid all 
 his personal misery and assurance that 
 
 " Whatever them hast been, 
 'Twere something better not to be," 
 
 he, after all, speaks only for himself. For those who care 
 for that sort of thing there is a paradise, heaven, angels, 
 rewards of virtue, God, etc. These things are not in his 
 line, but he knows a good deal about them. They are, but. 
 for whom is only a matter of taste and taking the trouble. 
 
 Even the sadly carnal Swinburne predicates and care' 
 lessly hints at an over-realm. In his mournfulest negatives 
 he arrives at certainties which put some meaning into his 
 luxury of sound. 
 
 " From too much love of living, 
 
 From hope and fear set free, 
 We thank with brief thanksgiving 
 
 Whatever gods there be, 
 That no life lives forever, 
 That dead men rise up never, 
 That even the weariest river 
 
 Winds somewhere safe to sea. 
 
 * Der Schiffbruchige.
 
 18 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 " Then star nor sun shall waken, 
 
 Nor any change of light ; 
 Nor sound of waters shaken, 
 
 Nor any sound or sight ; 
 Nor wintry leaves, nor vernal, 
 Nor days, nor things diurnal ; 
 Only the sleep eternal 
 
 In an eternal night." 
 
 There is something quite appreciable here. It is as far 
 from agnosticism as it is from Christianity. 
 
 For all test one may apply to it he wins this result- 
 namely, that poetry, whose necessity it is to deal with 
 humanity in all its bearings, can never, consistently with its 
 mission, leave the reader merely the silence of the Sphinx 
 concerning the hereafter can never return to the heavens, 
 aflame with sun, moon, and stars, and the milky mist of 
 nndiscerned systems, merely the stare of stone-dead, stone- 
 blind eyes ! It may give him absurd fancies, wildest 
 dreams, sheerest nonsense, but it must give him some 
 thing. It may shut him up to annihilation, but it must not 
 leave him to dwell with the silence of agnosticism. It 
 must give him, in no wise, doctrine ; not at all creed ; not, 
 necessarily, piety toward God or man ; but freedom, un- 
 limitation, a beyond, and a hereafter ! 
 
 George Eliot, with brain surcharged with richest thought 
 arid choicest, carefulest culture ; with heart to hold all 
 humanity, if that could save ; with tongue of men and 
 angels to tell the knowledge of her intellect, the charity of 
 her heart yet, having not faith, becomes, for all of satisfac 
 tion that she gives the soul, but sounding brass and tinkling 
 cymbal ! She will not bid me hope when she herself has 
 no assurance of the thing hoped for. She must not speak
 
 19 
 
 of faith in the unknown. She cannot be cruel, but she can 
 be dumb ; and so her long procession of glorious thoughts, 
 and sweet humanities, and noblest ethics, arid stern renunci 
 ations, and gracious common lots, and lofty ideal lives, with 
 their scalding tears, and bursting laughter, and flaming 
 passion all that enters into mortal life and time's story 
 makes its matchless march before our captured vision up to 
 the stone-wall. "And here," she says, "is the end!" 
 We may accept her dictum and be brave, silent, unde 
 ceived, and undeceiving agnostics ; but, as such, we must 
 say to her (of " The Spanish Gypsy," for instance), "This 
 is not poetry ! It is the richest realism, presenting indubi 
 table phenomena from which you draw, with strictest sci 
 ence, best deduction and inference concerning the known or 
 the knowable. But, by virtue of all this, it is not poetry. 
 The flattering lies and pretty guesses are not there, and 
 will be missed. You must, put them in as do the Chris 
 tians, the transcendentalists, and the fools generally. The 
 * poet ' comes from these ranks. If you will persist in 
 this sheer stop when you reach the confines of the known, 
 you must not attempt to pass your work off as poetry. 
 Even pagans will not be attracted by such verse. They 
 want and will have predication. It is not so much that 
 you do not know nobody knows as that you will not 
 guess, or dream, or fancy, to their whim ; that you will be 
 so plainly, simply silent concerning the hereafter. Your 
 readers will not endure that in poetry. There was John 
 Milton, his learning as great as yours, his metres not 
 more exact, yet nothing saves his Paradises from being 
 theological treatises except the imagination in them, which 
 stops not with the seen, but invades and appropriates the
 
 20 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 unseen. This blind old Titan sees and interprets the 
 heavens by his inner vision. His sublime a,udacity of faith 
 aerates the ponderous craft of his verse and keeps it from 
 sinking into the abyss of theologic pedantry. 
 
 "Mi-s. Browning, with her careless verbosity, still makes 
 her ' Aurora' an immortal, because both she and Aurora 
 believe in immortality. But your self-contained verse will 
 scarcely give long human life to your beloved Feldama. 
 However much she bids us 
 
 ' . . . Think of me as one who sees 
 A light serene and strong on one sole path, 
 "Which she will tread till death. 
 . . . though I die alone, 
 A hoary woman on the altar step, 
 Cold 'mid cold ashes. That is my chief good. 
 The deepest hunger of a faithful heart 
 Is faithfulness. Wish me naught else ' 
 
 still your readers will persist in wishing her something else, 
 because they will hope and believe there is a ' good ' 
 beyond what she calls the chief a good toward which that 
 good is but a means. Her supreme renunciation will blight 
 her story, and men will never take it in exchange for or in 
 company with that of the gushing Aurora. Your sound 
 science and morality will win from them only silence, but 
 they will applaud forever such outbursts of feeling as this 
 of Aurora's : 
 
 ' . . . There's not a flower of spring 
 That dies ere June but vaunts itself allied, 
 By issue and symbol, by significance 
 And correspondence, to that spirit-world 
 Outside the limits of our sphere and time
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'8 POETRY. 21 
 
 Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voice 
 With human meanings, else they miss the thought, 
 And henceforth step down lower, stand confessed, 
 Instructed poorly ior interpreter.' 
 
 " There is that ' horse-faced ' Wordsworth ! His 'drowsy, 
 frowsy ' ' Excursion ' might still be gathering dust on Mr. 
 Cottle's bookshelves but for his ' Intimations of Immor 
 tality,' which caught the ear of the unscientific people 
 always longing for such intimations and forthwith he is 
 become poeta nascitur. This is a very unmeaning state 
 ment : 
 
 ' Hence, in a season of calm weather, 
 Though inland far we be, 
 Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
 Which brought us hither, 
 Can in a moment travel thither 
 And see the children sport upon the shore, 
 And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.' 
 
 ** Yet the sentiment of these words fell in with the drift of 
 human vagary for all time. Your noble, safe, scientific 
 utterances will drop, dead and unregarded, beside it. It 
 must be after many generations have been instructed in 
 our first principles of true knowledge that your verse will 
 be received as poetry." 
 
 Even so, Agnostic 1 
 
 IY. 
 
 Perhaps these two qualities of which I have spoken the 
 one extrinsic, as of the body ; the other intrinsic, as of the 
 mind ; the one sensuous, the other spiritual may not, in 
 the last analysis, be distinguishable, because the one is sine
 
 22 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 qua non of the other. To use the language of one of the 
 agnostics, in treating of these qualities, it may come to be 
 " immaterial whether spirit be expressed in terms of matter, 
 or matter in terms of spirit. " "With poeta nascitur it is 
 difficult to separate the material body from the spiritual 
 body, to say which is form, which spirit. This, 
 
 "... oft converse with heavenly habitants, 
 Begins to cast a beam on the outward shape, 
 ******* 
 And turn it, by degrees, to the soul's essence. " 
 
 George Eliot herself says, in a private letter lately given to 
 the public, referring to the evolution of her Dinah from 
 the germ sown in her mind years before by the person of 
 an aunt, and speaking of the unlikeness of the two, as well 
 as the likeness, "The difference was not merely physical. 
 No difference is." 
 
 No one knows better than George Eliot knew how the 
 spiritual body gives curve, and feature, and expression to 
 the material body. Mrs. Browning herself did not more 
 keenly realize and everywhere acknowledge the truth that 
 spirit makes the form. 
 
 "... Inward evermore 
 To outward, so in life and so in art, 
 Which still is life." 
 
 No one bows with profounder recognition to the dictum 
 " it is the spirit which quickeneth" than does the author of 
 "Adam Bede" and "The Spanish Gypsy." It is this 
 which she thinks it worth while to teach, without which she 
 would have no heart to teach at all. But her teaching 
 takes its shape from the attitude of her own soul.
 
 23 
 
 To epitomize, then. George Eliot's pages arc a labyrinth 
 of wonder and beauty ; crowded with ethics lofty and pure 
 as Plato's ; with human natures fine and fresh as Shake 
 speare's ; but a labyrinth in which you lose the guiding 
 cord ! With the attitude and utterance of her spirit con 
 fronting me, I cannot allow her verse to be poetry. She is 
 the raconteur, not the vates / the scientist, not the seer.
 
 RECIPROCITY.
 
 RECIPROCITY. 
 
 THE word reciprocity is used to denote the quid pro quo 
 which inheres in all our relations with each other the give 
 and take of the common lot ; those mutualities which the 
 mere fact of living makes our privilege and our duty ; the 
 debit and credit of every-day affairs ; the roll of our liabili 
 ties and assessments as members of the great firm of 
 humanity. Shakespeare said. All the world's a stage, 
 and men and women are the actors. And his paraphrase 
 has in it a great deal of truth, if a great deal of poetry ; 
 doubtless there is something of the actor in each one of us ; 
 doubtless you and I occasionally drop the common gait and 
 slip into a grandiose stage- walk ; doubtless we assume a role 
 we were not born to, and play our little play upon occa 
 sions, and shall continue to do so until the final drop of the 
 curtain. But I think that to say all the world is a market, 
 and men and women are the buyers and the sellers, would 
 have in it more of truth if less of poetry. Indeed, this is 
 the strictest verity. All the world is a market, and it is a 
 market all the time ; and all the men and women are buy 
 ing and selling, and buying and selling all the time. The 
 barter never ceases ; we are constantly offering something 
 in exchange for something else, and constantly having like 
 bargains pressed upon us. This is the situation ; into it we 
 are born. It is not of our making, and cannot be of our
 
 28 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 unmaking. "We are so related to each other that we 
 are perforce giving and taking, and we cannot be other 
 wise. 
 
 It is the aspiration of many a soul to be self-sufficing. 
 Independence is a butterfly we chase summer and winter, 
 but we never catch it. Among all delusions by which we 
 flatter ourselves in this market of life, I know of none more 
 honest and more vain than this, that we are actually inde 
 pendent, that we depend only upon ourselves, that no one is 
 necessary to us. 
 
 Perhaps not one of us is without a personal convincing ex 
 perience of the impossibility of standing alone in this world. 
 I suspect a brief experience is sufficient ; it is one of which we 
 are not proud, and which we are not eager to exhibit. In 
 truth, it is ridiculous if not pathetic, this attempt to get along 
 alone ridiculous because so plainly to other eyes a failure ; 
 pathetic because to one's own eyes the ridiculousness is so 
 invisible. Occasionally a conspicuous example illustrates 
 our proposition. Witness beautiful, wayward Thoreau, 
 astride of his preferred pumpkin in his wilderness, lord over 
 no man, lorded over by none, and believing himself inde 
 pendent of heart, independent of head, as he was indepen 
 dent in all material affairs. Yet let his own charming con 
 fession, albeit unconscious, show us how his human heart 
 unloaded itself of love to sylvan creatures. What perfect 
 reciprocity of affection was between him and the squirrels, 
 birds, fishes ! How his large, involuntary loviugness de 
 pended on them for companionship ! How that intellect 
 which he deprived of converse with the living, yet held 
 communion in that wilderness with the sages and seers of 
 the past 1 How his mind depended on their intellectual
 
 RECIPROCITY. 29 
 
 camaraderie none the less, to Thoreau, camaraderie, be 
 cause wholly ghostly. 
 
 Many a one has had Thoreau's dream, few have come so 
 near realizing it as he ; and he utterly failed of it. Aristotle 
 said : " Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild 
 beast or a god." We have in us a good deal of each, but 
 yet we are neither, and self alone could never suffice us. 
 No ; independence, in an absolute sense, is an impossibility. 
 The nature of things is against it. The human soul was 
 not made to contain itself. It was made to spill over, and 
 it does and will spill over, always as quid pro quo, where 
 soever lodged, to the end of time. Reciprocity, constant 
 and equal, among all His creatures is the plan of the 
 only Maker of plans, whose plans never fail in the least jot 
 or tittle. He has reserved to Himself the power to give 
 without receiving. Everywhere, even among rudest nations, 
 has this principle of reciprocity between man and man been 
 recognized, and ideals of governments have been erected 
 on it. 
 
 Yes, life is a market, and men and women are the 
 marketers. There is no getting away from it. Young 
 men and young women stand at the threshold of their 
 career, and debate what shall be their calling. It is a mat 
 ter of choice. They are free to select their pursuit or pro 
 fession. But the circumscribing profession has already 
 swept its line around them ; they are not free here. Into this 
 or that vocation were they born, and the vocation they 
 choose is included in this hereditary one. Some stand in 
 the marketplace of life as preachers, some as teachers, some 
 as physicians, some as jacks-of-all-trades, jobbers, old-maid 
 aunts whose profession is more imperious than any I know.
 
 30 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 But however our services are sub-rented, each stands 
 indentured to the law of the overload of life, the law of 
 reciprocity. Consciously or unconsciously life is but one 
 long quid pro quo. 
 
 " We cannot live, except thus mutually 
 We alternate, aware or unaware, 
 The reflex act of life ; and when we bear 
 Our virtue outward, most impulsively, 
 Most full of invocation, and to be 
 Most instantly compellent, certes, there 
 We live most life, whoever breathes most air 
 And counts his dying years by sun and sea 1" 
 
 A very large proportion of what we consciously or uncon 
 sciously offer in exchange is on the surface ; it is what we 
 call manners. I beg you to consider what is the extent of 
 the realm of manners ; how it covers the whole outside of 
 us. It is what we present to the eye of the world. It 
 is all from which any, save the very few who go beneath 
 the surface with us, have to judge from. How constantly 
 we are confessing this fact in our excuses for our friend, 
 whose manners offend some one who knows him less in 
 timately than we do ! We say, " Oh, you must not mind 
 that ; he did not mean anything by it ; it is only his man 
 ner !" But all the same, this which we plead is only his 
 manner has made its indelible impression. Your manner, 
 your use or abuse of the forms of social life, the surface 
 you offer, ia the most extensive, if not the deepest, depart-
 
 EECIPEOCITY. 31 
 
 ment of your commercial transactions in this realm of com 
 merce which we are considering. Your enemy as well as 
 your friend must deal with you here. The merest ac 
 quaintance makes some exchange with you. I cannot come 
 in from a walk on the village street without something more 
 or less than when 1 started out. Somebody has offered me 
 a smile, and 1 have given something back. A genuine 
 smile generally brings its price in a genuine smile back. 
 Somebody has saluted me respectfully, and that person is 
 paid in his own coin. 
 
 But the manners which I know I offer, the bows I can see 
 myself making, the attitudes I take, the greetings, the 
 forms of social deportment, the conversation, the acquired 
 and conscious reciprocity here, however important, sink 
 into insignificance beside the unconscious, the impossible 
 to acquire. And here we come to the gravest consid 
 eration of all ; here we strike upon the truth which con 
 nects the department of surface manners with the deepest 
 depths and the highest heights. Conscious and acquired 
 manners we may, though not wisely, sneer at ; we may refer 
 them to the realm of the dancing-master and silly little gilt- 
 edged books on etiquette ; but the surface which is uncon 
 scious, and which cannot be acquired, and which, nolens 
 volen8 t we must present that has nothing in common with 
 the Turveydrops. That belongs to the realm of the seers, 
 and the philosophers, and the theologians. For no study 
 of social forms can prevent the thoughts of the brain, the 
 intents of the heart striking through the surface. The real 
 grain will show beneath the varnish. This unconscious and 
 self-revealing give and take in th,e surface-life prevail- 
 everywhere and always, even in books whose writers havo
 
 32 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 passed away. I do not suppose Dr. Johnson was aware that 
 he was offering battle to his readers when he bargained 
 with his bookseller. I suppose the conscious bargain be 
 tween himself and his readers was that of wit, and wisdom, 
 and learning in exchange for fame. But an linconscious 
 bonus was thrown in. The great lexicographer's rudeness, 
 his gratuitous insults, his grinding small and grinding all in 
 short, his manners, were an inseparable part of his wares 
 and of himself, and his buyers return him dislike with their 
 admiration. I do not suppose the young lady whom Lamb 
 has immortalized as "Hester" was conscious of that historic 
 smile of hers, so lavishly squandered in her morning saluta 
 tion to the little essayist. She was unconscious that he got 
 
 from 
 
 ..." her cheerful eyes a ray 
 That struck a bliss upon the day, 
 A bliss that would not go away." 
 
 And she got in return an immortality as long as Lamb's. 
 It was simply a matter of manners on her part. Your man- 
 ners and mine are not so much our own as they are some 
 body else's. Manners are made in the market where they 
 are sold, and their buying and their selling are mostly 
 unconscious. A man is known by the company he keeps. 
 One must be Carlyle himself if he can keep CarJyle's man 
 ners, in constant company with Jane Welch, and the gentle 
 spirits that scintillated around her. Observe how Dante's ' 
 manners differ as he moves among the circles of the Inferno I 
 and the Paradiso, and how uniformly he was the poet to 
 Virgil.
 
 EECIPEOCITY. 33 
 
 II. 
 
 Thoughts are a prime article of commerce. The in- 
 tellectual life is everywhere that of reciprocity ; the prod- 
 acts of the brain are articles of constant export and import. 
 So true is this, so continual and confused is the barter, 
 that we sometimes cannot tell if we bring a thought to or 
 from the market ; the meum and tuum become involved. 
 
 But there can be no monopoly here. People sometimes 
 say : "I have no goods in this line ; it is not my depart 
 ment of the market. You must go to the professional think 
 ers, to the teachers, and preachers, and bookmakers, and 
 newspaper men. " So the unprofessional thinkers keep their 
 thoughts to themselves, and corners are created. And there 
 is no nobler work that any one of you could set yourself to 
 than to break up these intellectual corners. We must begin 
 this worthy work by being honest. We must open our gran 
 aries, and offer our hoarded thoughts in exchange. There is 
 a vast amount of thinking which ought to be in the market. 
 We hold our best thoughts, and give our second best. It 
 never occurs to us that we are dishonest in deal here. Or, 
 if any one accuses us of a debt in this direction, we get off 
 with one excuse or another, which seems to us sufficient and 
 even creditable. How many of us excuse this second-best 
 character of the thoughts we give to others in conversation, 
 by the plea that we are not original thinkers, that we have no 
 original ideas ! A lame and impotent conclusion, and no 
 excuse at all. Nothing is worse for you than to think your 
 self not an original person, except to think that you are 
 an original person. Do not flatter yourself in either direc-
 
 34: GEOBGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 tion. You are as original as anybody else, and no more so. 
 There are no original people, in fact. Everybody thinks, 
 and everybody tkinks about everything. Adam was the last 
 original thinker. It is not likely there have been any new 
 thoughts outside the Garden of Eden. That which wins 
 for the thinker -the title of original is not the newness 
 or firstness of his thoughts ; but the newness, perhaps 
 firstness, of his expression of them in their relation to other 
 thoughts, their method and extent of elaboration. That this 
 is true is proven by the reception given the original think 
 ers, preachers, writers, teachers. At once they are called 
 original, and the fact that they are called so proves that 
 they are not so. It is because their thoughts are the very 
 thoughts of their hearers, readers, scholars, but so surpris 
 ingly dressed up, come at by routes so unfamiliar, con 
 fronted so unexpectedly, elaborated to such distinctness. 
 It is not an introduction to a stranger, but the sudden 
 encounter with an old friend, altered, wonderfully im 
 proved, developed beyond our dreams, but still the one we 
 knew before. It is only because it is our very own that we 
 are so delighted, so thrilled. We call him original who 
 makes us original ; for he makes us discover ourselves to be 
 thinkers also. The transition from unconscious to con 
 scious thought is education. Learning a thing truly is but 
 recognizing it. A scholar never knows his lesson until he 
 understands it, and understanding it is thinking it for him 
 self. When he says at last of his problem, "I understand 
 it," he says, " That is my own thought." He confesses 
 that it would be a possibility for him to have written the 
 geometry. 
 
 It should be our serious business to become conscious
 
 RECIPROCITY. 35 
 
 of our own thoughts ; to stand in the great intellectual marts 
 of life, aware that we have a right there, that all its treas 
 ures are free to us by reason of stock-ownership. 
 
 We can do no better work than to stimulate the utterance 
 of thought. Mrs. Browning's conversation, it is said, was 
 pre-eminently tete-b-tete. She was a most conscientious and 
 magnetic listener. She compelled reciprocity of thought. 
 Madame de Stae'l was great in talking, but George Eliot 
 was greater in making other people talk. I am con 
 vinced that people think enough ; it is the utterance 
 of thought that is needed. If the habit of brave attempt 
 at this utterance could be formed, and, despite all criti 
 cism, be persevered in, how much more should we give to 
 each other ! What a world of enjoyment and improvement 
 would spring up ! How Athenian would Yankee life be 
 come ! A Socrates at every doorway, an Aspasia without 
 Aspasia's reproach at every tea-urn, full of discourse that 
 would exclude the weary pettiness of thoughtless talk. Do 
 this for your neighbors, and you will be to them Ferdinands 
 and Isabellas, making of them the discoverers of more than 
 a continent, for they will discover themselves ; and you will 
 pay to them the debt you owe to those who have done the 
 same for you. But do not conceive yourself an original 
 person. It is a snare and a delusion. 
 
 III. 
 
 It is not in the superficial reciprocities of social life, 
 in the realm of manners, in the exchange of courtesies and 
 forms not in the commerce of intellectual life, in tlio
 
 36 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 interchange of thought, that the law of reciprocity is most 
 influential. It is in the affections that we make our best 
 and worst bargains, our most saving and most ruinous 
 exchanges. 
 
 In the fresh young years of our lives there is a fa 
 cility of feeling, a readiness of devotion, a reckless expendi 
 ture of faith and love. We who have forever passed be 
 yond those years of glorious prodigality may well expend a 
 sigh upon their loss, and deem the calculating wisdom of our 
 later lives a dubious exchange. Oh, those days of opulent 
 bankruptcy, when we were rich in outlawed debts of friend 
 ship those wealthy insolvencies, when we owed everybody, 
 and everybody owed us, love, and faith, and loyalty ! How 
 quickly did our broken banks begin again their reckless 
 discount ! How promptly were our foreclosed mortgages 
 of heart re-leased ! . 
 
 Are you suffering, and do you attribute your suffering 
 to unreciprocated affection? Your diagnosis is wrong. 
 You are the victim again of a delusion. Less possible than 
 absolute independence, than original thought, is unrecipro 
 cated affection. I do not undertake to convince you of this 
 truth. I am content to state it, and leave its demonstration 
 to the long run. I have unbounded faith in the long run. 
 Sydney Smith said that in order to preserve contentment 
 we must take short views of life. I think in order to pre 
 serve contentment we must take long views, very long 
 ones. Your affection was not unrequited. Something 
 came back for it, if it was genuine, and something that was 
 quid pro quo. I never condole with the person of " blighted 
 affections,' because I know that to true affection no blight is
 
 BECIPROCITY. 37 
 
 possible. Its argosies are out at sea ; they have not made 
 their desired haven, but they will cruise around and come 
 back with a Golden Fleece. 
 
 A flirt is the most harmless person in the world. A 
 genuine flirtation is the fairest bargain possible nothing 
 for nothing, nihil ex nihilo. The battle is like that be 
 tween Milton's Michael and Satan if one gets hurt, he re 
 covers immediately for flirts are ethereal creatures ; you 
 can walk through them and not know there is anything 
 there ; like those Miltonic spirits, they 
 
 "... can in all their liquid texture mortal wound 
 Receive no more than can the fluid air." 
 
 It is all a matter of tenuous reciprocity. 
 
 Shall we speak of our bargains in love and friendship ? 
 Shall we venture to argue the question of reciprocity be 
 tween us and our friends ? Ah, how little patience we 
 should have in the attempt ! How well we are aware of the 
 generous barter ; how certain we are that we are the gain 
 ers ; how assured that in every true friend we have the best 
 of the bargain ! 
 
 There is, indeed, no room for argument here. Love 
 balances all accounts. In place of argument the story of 
 Richard, lion-hearted, comes to me ; of Richard languish 
 ing a captive, hidden from sight and sound of any comrade 
 in an enemy's land ; of Blondel, standing finally, after long 
 and vain search, beneath that prison-window, and sending 
 up to it, by way of experiment, one couplet from a song 
 he and his royal friend had composed and sung together. 
 Instantly the next verse comes floating from behiud the 
 
 A rr Q Q Q
 
 38 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 prison grating down to Blondel, and Richard is discovered 
 and regained. 
 
 Such is the reciprocity of hearts, so souls wander in 
 search of each other, so many a royal heart languishes in 
 exile, till beneath its prison-bars love stands and sings its 
 own familiar and enchanting song ! 
 
 But now comes the practical consideration of our subject 
 in the questions which are its logical outcome. What is 
 our personal status in the market, what the ethics that regu 
 late our reciprocal transactions ? Are we making good bar 
 gains ? Are we honest in deal ? Are we getting rich or 
 poor ? How is it in the department of manners ? Man 
 ners are not character, but they are the dress of character. 
 Character does not at once show for itself ; manners show 
 for it. How have we clothed our character ? Does its 
 dress do it justice ? Does it fitly present it to the eye ? If 
 not, then we are unfair in deal w r ith a double dishonesty 
 injustice to ourselves and injustice to others. Others in 
 vest in what they believe to be ourselves, according as our 
 manners present us to them ; and whether they are deceived 
 in their investment or not is our responsibility in the dress 
 we give our characters. Our manners may cheat other peo 
 ple to our ad vantage or our disadvantage. They should yield 
 us a good income. Manners are of the surface and of 
 the moment. They do not have to do with the depths and 
 the long run ; yet it is by the surface that we enter tha 
 depths, and the moments make the long run. 
 
 For all that others, our teachers, our preachers, our authors, 
 have painfully forged out into shapely gold for our enrich- 
 ment, what are we returning ? What is our thought within 
 us, what is it without ? When a high thought comes, do
 
 KECIPEOCITY. 39 
 
 we fling it abroad with liberal soul, or do ^6 fold it away 
 in a napkin that becomes its grave-cloth ? If we do this 
 latter, then we are dishonest in deal, for we owe that thought 
 to the world. A great deal of this interment of our best 
 thought-life is justified to ourselves by the plea that such 
 thoughts are too sacred for utterance : a wretched sophistry, 
 a miserable excuse for what is really our fear of criticism, 
 our shamefaced ness of spiritual life. There are some peo- 
 pie who seem to be afraid of nothing so much as that they 
 will cast their pearls before swine. I have observed that 
 these people are not apt to be the best judges of either 
 pearls or pork. 
 
 Ah me ! what does our tasteless babble need so much as 
 the savor of high thought ? What do we need so much to 
 see as tiiat which is sacred ? Who of us cannot recall the 
 magic transmutation that took place when, some time in 
 the midst of idle talk, a brave soul threw down a golden 
 thought amid all the clattering rubbish some gleam from 
 the life of the spirit, some sacred jewel of inner life ? How 
 it hushed the chatter ! How grateful, if rebuked, we felt ! 
 How encouraged ourselves to utter that which we had not 
 dared to speak when all utterance was so different from it ! 
 How much more this brave spirituality of our friend has 
 helped us than any words that came to us from priest or 
 from poet, from pulpit or from book ! We can do no 
 braver or better thing than to bring our best thoughts to the 
 every- day market. They will yield us usurious interest. 
 
 How is it in our friendships ? Have we given faith for 
 faith, loyalty for loyalty, truth for truth ? Have our hearts 
 sought out the needy ? Have we cast our bread upon the 
 waters ? If ye love them that love you, what reward have
 
 40 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 ye ? do not even the publicans the same ? Have we risen 
 above the plane of the publicans ? 
 
 These are among the most weighty questions we can ask 
 ourselves. But we can answer them only in part, for the 
 greater proportion of that which we carry, or, rather, which 
 goes with us to the world of social, intellectual, emotional, 
 and spiritual life, is unconscious. The greater part of that 
 which comes to us is unconscious. It makes part of us, but 
 we do not detect ourselves in receiving it. Our most im 
 portant bargains never announce themselves. We have no 
 scales by which to measure these commodities of brain, and 
 heart, and spirit. "We cannot apply the mathematics of the 
 money market here. We have no science for this book- 
 keeping that can compass all its complexity of exchanges, 
 follow the winding course of this commerce as it makes its 
 indirect returns, detect the subtle equities of this ceaseless, 
 silent reciprocity ! 
 
 But, for all our inability, the books are kept. When the 
 long run has run out we shall confront exact balances, quid 
 pro qito, to the uttermost farthing. 
 
 I suppose that if you and 1 could know just what and all 
 were the elements of reciprocity between us, and all who 
 deal with us just what was being exchanged between us, 
 what were our bargains, and who the parties to them, we 
 should be amazed, perhaps appalled. Well may we ask 
 with eagerness how the market is to-day ; how it goes on 
 'Change. For everything is at stake here ; our very all ia 
 invested. It is onlj the golden rule, " Do unto others as ye 
 would that they should do unto you," which opens to us 
 the secret of fair deal, of good bargains, of wealth incalcu 
 lable ! I congratulate you, whoever you be., if you can
 
 RECIPROCITY. 41 
 
 square the conscious and yet more the unconscious transac 
 tions in the barter of your mental and spiritual life by the 
 measurements of this rule. This is the chief thing, the rule 
 within us. Goethe said, " It is the spirit in which we act 
 which is the great thing." It is the spirit in which we 
 traffic which is the great thing. It is, indeed, all. 
 
 We may well be thrilled when we remember how constant 
 and how instant is the tide of reciprocity 'twixt one and 
 all, 'twixt brain, and heart, and spirit of all who live, so that 
 not one can say, " I am alone ; I am independent ; I am 
 nothing to any one who lives, not one is anything to me." 
 We may well exult when we realize the dignity it puts upon 
 each one of us as members of this great human society ; the 
 importance with which it clothes us, the responsibility with 
 which it endows uj, the riches to wliick it iiiakeg us heir 1
 
 ALTRUISTIC FAITH.
 
 ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 
 
 CADIJAH ! What image does the name evoke ? The 
 image, I venture, if any, of a very distinct and magnificent 
 face of eyes dark yet glowing, like a midnight full of stars, 
 of flowing, silky beard, of turban folded over prophetic 
 locks the face, not at all of Cadijah, but of Mahomet. 
 There is no biography of Cadijah, and no portrait. All 
 that we certainly know of her is that she was Mahomet's 
 first wife, a noble and wealthy widow, whom he wedded 
 when he was twenty -five and she much older, and to whom 
 he was singly devoted and faithful up to the time of her 
 death. 
 
 How, then, may this woman, standing in the darkness 
 which gathers around the vestibule of the Middle Ages, 
 offer from her poverty of resource anything worth our 
 while to consider, we 
 
 " The heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time " ? 
 
 Years after the death of Cadijah, when Ayesha, the 
 beautiful girl, the pet child-wife of Mahomet's old age, 
 arrogant with the arrogance of a beauty and a favorite, 
 attempted to rally her now illustrious and powerful husband 
 upon his loyal love for his first wife, and said to him, 
 '* Was she not old ? and has not God given you a better 
 in her place ?" Mahomet replied, with an effusion of hon-
 
 4:6 @EORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 est gratitude, " No, by Allah ! there can never be a better. 
 She believed in me when men despised me." 
 
 " She believed in me /" From Mahomet's own lips we 
 have our question answered. Cadijah offers to us a 
 splendid and immortal example of the effectual, fervent 
 faith of one soul in another. And this it is of which I 
 have to speak. Not of the Mahomets, except by implica 
 tion, but of Cadijah, whose faith has wrought out Ma 
 homet, since ever the world began whose faith must 
 still evolve him so long as the world lasts and Mahomets 
 survive. 
 
 Faith is a Trinity. It is one faith in God ; and it is 
 three faith in God, faith in self, and faith in human 
 ity. Faith in God is the unit, the integral designation 
 of this Trinity, for it includes by logical necessity both 
 the other faiths. Whether men admit it or not, faith 
 in ourselves and faith in our brother and sister human 
 ity follow from, our faith in God, and if that faith bo 
 allowed its full growth, will each win their rightful rank. 
 But because our faith in God is so rarely allowed, its full 
 growth, these other faiths faith in ourselves and faith 
 in each other do not come into full view and win due 
 recognition. 
 
 We repeat our creed, " 1 believe in God, the Father," 
 but we do not always realize that this creed includes, " I 
 believe in myself," and u I believe in other people." Yet 
 this threefold faith should be taught. A true belief in 
 God is threesided, and the glory of the God-side was never 
 meant to obscure the brightness of the other two sides, but 
 rather to render them conspicuous. 
 
 It is of the most neglected of these minor faiths that I
 
 ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 47 
 
 wish to speak the altruistic faith, or faith m other than 
 self. 
 
 By the term, abstract altruistic faith, I mean to imply 
 that general attitude of mind which is hopeful and expect 
 ant of humanity ; a faith in human nature's intrinsic worth 
 and capability ; a faith which beholds man, as in Nebuchad 
 nezzar's dream, sadly and mysteriously mixed of things 
 precious and things base ; but which beholds as clearly the 
 head of fine gold and the breast of silver as the feet of 
 iron and clay ; a faith that the race is steadily gravitating 
 toward a goal of final good rather than evil ; a faith that, 
 when the averages of the ages are accurately struck, the 
 leverage will be found to be constantly upward, not down 
 ward ; a faith that humanity is persistently electing itself 
 to honor, glory, and immortality by a majority which se 
 cures to the same party all future canvasses ; a faith which 
 wavers not an instant before the question, however cleverly 
 put by the pessimist, " Is life worth living?" but responds 
 with an immediate and hearty, " Yes, a thousand times 
 Yea! Life is infinitely worth living!" A faith which 
 looks into poorhouses, and idiot asylums, and penitentiaries 
 ay, and into the darkness of great cities by night, and 
 still believes in humanity reclaimable, however marred or 
 fallen, and infinitely worth saving. A faith which con- 
 templates the catastrophe of moral obliquity and spiritual 
 suicide ; of the mole and the bat-life of thousands of us ; 
 of the leprous spawn of human beings that are constantly 
 thrown upon the shores of life only to contaminate and 
 curse, and yet which says, with Longfellow, 
 
 " I believe that in all ages 
 Every human heart is human ;
 
 48 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 That in even savage bosoms 
 
 There are longings, yearnings, strivings, 
 
 For the good they comprehend not ; 
 
 That the fe.eble hands and helpless, 
 
 Groping blindly in the darkness, 
 
 Reach God's right-hand in that darkness, 
 
 And are lifted up and strengthened." 
 
 But the abstract faith is subordinate an effect rather 
 than a cause. For generalities and abstractions do not 
 demand our prolonged consideration. Our lives are not 
 laid out in vast, vague prairies, but in definite domestic 
 door-yards, within which we are to exercise and develop 
 our faculties. Altruistic faith in the abstract is most valu 
 able, but it is, at best, but a passive rather than an active 
 possession. "We cannot touch humanity at large except as 
 we touch humanity in the individual. Altruistic faith must 
 exercise itself upon concretions, not abstractions, if it be a 
 real power for good. One may possess a whole Milky Way 
 of vague general belief in humanity, and yet it may be of 
 less avail to the benighted traveller than a single rushlight 
 put sympathetically into his hand. We must focus our 
 faith upon the individual in order to get or to give the good 
 of it. 
 
 This concrete altruistic faith does not require for its ex 
 ercise that its possessor belong to the female sex. The con 
 trary idea is, I fear, deeply rooted in the public mind. 
 There is a very general impression that it is in the nature 
 of things that woman should walk principally by faith, and 
 that this faith should be principally altruistic. I myself 
 confess to a lurking suspicion that it is oftener a woman 
 than a man who is a Cadijah. It may be easier for a woman 
 to believe in somebody else than for a man to do so. Men,
 
 ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 49 
 
 as a rule, are very much occupied with believing in them- 
 selves. Woman is confessedly altruistic, but not exclusively 
 so. Carlyle had his Cadijah in his wife ; George Eliot had 
 hers in her husband. 
 
 But this faith, though not inconsistent with the estate 
 of holy matrimony, is yet not dependent upon that estate. 
 I use the name Cadijah to represent the character of an 
 efficient believer in somebody else ; but Cadijah could have 
 exercised her faith in Mahomet to its full effect on his fort 
 unes without having been his wife. The exercise of Mrs. 
 Carlyle' s faith in her husband had nothing to do with the 
 exercise of her hands and feet upon the Craigenputtock 
 kitchen-floor. Cadijah may or may not have a passionate 
 personal love for her Mahomet, but she will not be so " in 
 love" with him as to induce the blindness of that undesir 
 able condition. Pascal said : " In order to know God we 
 must love Him ; in order to love man we must know him." 
 1 am not sure that all love for individual man depends upon 
 knowing him ; there is love and love, but the rational, last 
 ing love must admit, at least, if not demand, for its persist 
 ence, some real acquaintanceship. To all love that rightly 
 culminates in marriage there is, doubtless, an irrational 
 phase, a normal abnormality that may or may not outlast the 
 honeymoon, arid then gives place to something better. In 
 this period no Cadijah can flourish ; indeed, the conditions 
 of concrete altruistic faith do not demand the conditions of 
 courtship or of marriage. Cadijah-ism is not necessarily 
 connubiality. 
 
 Nor is this faith hero-worship. We all have our heroes 
 who are veritable heroes to us, frequently for no other rea 
 son than because we cannot be idlete to them. And that
 
 50 GKORGE ELIOT'S POETKT, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 is well and good. But the one to whom you are Cadijah 
 will not be a hero to you. You will serve him, but you 
 will not worship him. Cadijah never imagines, as do the 
 worshippers, that her Mahomet can do or be anything he 
 may please, or she may please. She perceives that he can 
 do and be one thing, and possibly that this is the thing 
 which pleases him not. She does not discover him to be a 
 predestined prophet or a born poet because her love or am 
 bition elect him to be such. It may be, rather, that her faith 
 discerns in him supreme capabilities for a dry -goods clerk or 
 a ranchman. No. Though my Cadijah love me as her own 
 soul, and have set her whole heart on me, she cannot, this 
 clear-eyed Cadijah of mine, persuade herself that 1 can 
 be what I cannot be. She can only perceive me to be 
 what 1 can be. Cadijah is a seer, but she is not a vision 
 ary. She wields a diviner's rod, but not a wizard's wand. 
 The historical Cadijah was, I venture, greatly enamored of 
 her young and handsome lord. But I am not sure she 
 thought him a great prophet or a spotless priest. What 
 I am sure of is, that this shrewd, devoted woman perceived 
 him to be a born predestined leader, a man of destiny, one 
 to sway multitudes with the mighty magnetism of his per 
 sonality ; a man to beckon and be followed ; a man to 
 speak and be believed ; a man to command and be obeyed. 
 She saw the oak in the acorn with this sixth sense of hers. 
 She believed in him when all men despised him, but sne did 
 not give him hero-worship. 
 
 It is clear that to Mrs. Carlyle her husband was not a 
 hero. As an apostle of silence and several other things he 
 was a great joke to her. But as a man of ideas, great, gro 
 tesque, forceful, propulsive, full of the vitality of immortal
 
 ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 51 
 
 genius, worthy and destined to live in literature, as such ehe 
 t^;i\v him when his fame was yet in embryo. And this faith 
 of hers in his power to do never flagged until it became 
 sight before all the world, a wisdom justified of her chil 
 dren. And this is not hero-worship. It is a far finer and 
 usefuler thing. 
 
 To speak affirmatively, this quality of the Cadijahs I de 
 fine as that faculty in my friend by which he discriminates in 
 me what I am good for nay, what 1 am best for. That one 
 who comes to me, resolute for me when I stand irresolute 
 for myself, at that point in my straight turnpike where by 
 roads fork out from it that one who comes to me while 1 
 waver in view of the old highway and cast lingering glances 
 at the new byways, and who, with hand uplifted and with 
 finger pointed straight before, says to me, with emphasis of 
 unalterable conviction, u This is your way ; this, no other, 
 the path which leads you to your goal !" this man, or this 
 woman, is my Cadijah. He may or may not have vehement 
 love for me, but if he has vehement faith in me, and gives 
 me the benefit of its momentum, he is my friend, and 
 " there can never be a better," for he believes in me when 
 a worse than the despising of men has befallen me the 
 despising of myself ! " Quanct, tout est perdu, c*est le 
 moment des grandes dmes," said Lacordaire. A grand soul 
 is Cadijah ; she comes to me when all is lost ! How com 
 mon to us all is the experience of meeting one who seems 
 to have a peculiar insight into our character, so that we say. 
 " He divined me." How often do we hear it said, u Ho 
 seems to understand me better than any one else. 5 ' u She 
 appreciates me more truly than any one ever has.'* This 
 quality of divination is the intellectual element of altru-
 
 52 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 istic faith. It is not the whole of it, for another element 
 lies in the will and is essential ; but it is the extraordinary 
 element, and far from infrequent. 
 
 The one is gift, the other grace. The one prerogative, 
 the other duty. It is always true that the thing that ought 
 to be done is the thing that can be done. It is not always true 
 that the thing that can be done is the thing that ought to be 
 done. But in the exercise of altruistic faith there is- cer 
 tainly and always an ought where there is a can, and a 
 can where there is an ought. When the intellect says, ' ' 1 
 can," the heart should say, I will. 
 
 Each of us can so believe in humanity in general as to 
 contribute to that pressure which constantly levers up the 
 race ; can surround ourselves with an atmosphere optimistic 
 rather than the contrary ; can believe in some one or more 
 individuals so as to be the determining factor in their careers, 
 as was Cadi jali in the career of Mahomet, as was Jane "Welch 
 in the career of Carlyle. 
 
 I never knew a good man or a good woman who was not 
 practically an optimist. I have personally known several, 
 impersonally many, who were not nominally optimists, but 
 wholly the contrary ; they did not know themselves as such, 
 but other people did. It was simply a misunderstanding as 
 to the name. I have in mind a woman of great influence, 
 whose sphere circumscribes many important individuals, and 
 whose whole life is encouraging and helpful ; whose whole 
 burden of exhortation to each and all is, to make the best 
 of it, because there is a best to be made ; to try over and 
 over, because it is always worth while ; and why worth while, 
 except that success is possible, and if possible, certain to 
 the indomitable? This woman has been a Cadijah to more
 
 ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 53 
 
 than one individual ; has hindered suicide, and out of a 
 perverse profound of obliquity in one life brought obedient 
 order and uprightness by her simple conviction that it ought 
 to be so ; to another she has been a stimulus to faith in his 
 own genius and to continued effort, simply because of her 
 faith in that genius, her faith in the capacity for that effort ; 
 and yet the tortures of the Inquisition would not wring from 
 this woman a credo : to every assertion that the race is better 
 living than dead ; that it is, on the whole, constantly gaining 
 toward the goal ; that human nature progresses rather than 
 retrogrades, and that, after all, human life is, in a general 
 and particular sense, worth while to all such statements she 
 but wistfully shakes her head, and wishes it were so. She 
 is living, and may die under the impression that she is a 
 pessimist. Yet this woman has more altruistic faith, in the 
 abstract even, than almost any one 1 know. In short, one 
 who has that faith in the concrete is sure to have it in the 
 abstract ; and the effect is that of optimism in the world. 
 If Byron had had sufficient altruistic faith in some one 
 (and that one not a beautiful woman !) to make that per 
 son's life worth living, he would never have so lost all con 
 science concerning his influence as to have written : 
 
 " Count o'er the joys that thou hast seen, 
 
 Count o'er the hours from anguish free, 
 And know, whatever thou hast been, 
 'Twere something better not to be 1" 
 
 The surest way to get the wider altruism is to exercise the 
 special altruism. Iso one whose faitli in another was such 
 as to determine the career of that other ever halted there ; 
 such an one must believe in the race. 
 
 And this brings me back to the core and pith of my mat-
 
 4 GEORGE ELIOTS POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 ter. I exhort you to the exercise of altruistic faith in the 
 concrete. I say to you, Believe in somebody somebody in. 
 particular. An abstract altruism is good ; but if it ripens 
 not into the concrete there is something wrong. One of 
 my friends has a character in one of her plays who " does 
 nothing else but lie awake nights and rock days, thinkin* 
 how she can be doing good." Her altruism is too abstract. 
 That one who says truly : 
 
 " I live for those who love me, 
 
 For those who know me true, 
 For the heaven that smiles above me, 
 And the good that I can do," 
 
 never fails to so specialize this altruism as to be the making 
 of more than one individual man. Do not concern yourself 
 first about the race ; do not expend much time or thought 
 on introspection as to whether you believe life to be worth 
 living. I venture to say that if the author of that remark 
 able book, "Is Life Worth Living?" had occupied him 
 self in making life worth living to one or more of his fellow- 
 men, not in the general way of well-wishing and money - 
 giving, but in the particular way of discovering to some 
 hopeless man the special aptitude in him, the painstaking 
 way of recognizing as good for something, and good for 
 something in particular, some individual or individuals who 
 felt themselves good for nothing I venture to say that if 
 he had so occupied himself so attitudinized his mind he 
 would have found no time for the pessimistic studies and 
 analyses with which he treats the momentous question. 
 
 For the question is momentous. In asking it we ask 
 every other question which concerns the race or the indi 
 vidual. But it concerns the individual first, the race last.
 
 ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 55 
 
 It may well affright nay, appall us, as we look within 
 our lives for an answer, desperately desiring to find material 
 for an affirmative. Let tbis inward look be very brief, but 
 let it be very thorough. Let us descend into the depths of 
 all that inalienable experience which has gone into the mak 
 ing of our lives. God pity us in that groping, unless here 
 and there glimmers a taper of altruism to light up the abyss 
 of selfishness ! Out of the blackness of this darkness we 
 shall emerge to objective realities forever color-blind to 
 any brightness for the race, or for self, unless we can bring 
 up hither that torch of faith in other than self. 
 
 We shall find life so worthless that we would not care for 
 its continuance unless we have made, are making, or shall 
 make somebody else's life worth living, which other life, ex 
 cept for us, had not been, in the end, so worth while. 
 
 That last is, after all, the saving clause " except for 
 us f" It fortifies us against disbelief in ourselves. We 
 must each feel that what we do another could not do ; else, 
 after all, our existence is not necessary, and, in the last 
 analysis, who cares to live an unnecessary life a life that 
 could be dispensed with and the result remain the same ? 
 No, the noble soul would choose rather not to be than 
 not to be somebody in particular. Herein consists that which 
 BO much fascinates and so much misleads in the dogmas of 
 Buddhism. The Eastern mystic realizes that man's life, as 
 men live it, being filled with selfish passion, is not worth 
 living cannot be in the nature of things. It is vam to try 
 to make it so. The individual will never subordinate sel 
 fish passion to altruistic faith passion will subtly work for 
 self, and surely undo any strivings of the faith for others- 
 it is time wasted to attempt to make tlioeyo good for some-
 
 56 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 thing ; it is good for nothing, good only to lose ! One can- 
 not be was not meant to be (since he cannot be) any 
 body in particular ; therefore the summum bonum is to lose 
 the one in the all, which is Nirvana. He does not even 
 dwell upon the possibility of a nobler alternative. It is in 
 conceivable that this full-blooded ego, living his intense in 
 dividual life, can ever, save as the dupe of demon deceivers, 
 who pervert perception and destroy reflection, have a con 
 scious thrill of exultation in his individual life, because he 
 knows that there has good come to the race which, except 
 for his individual life, would not have come. No, no ; the 
 only best is to lose the ego, the only bliss is the luxury of its 
 nullification. 
 
 The Eastern mystic does well on his plane. His choice 
 Is noble since he has no more to choose from ; he admits no 
 better than his best. But his plane is below the highest ; 
 he dwells upon the stair, and forever just misses the land 
 ing ! 
 
 Many more than the Eastern mystic move on this plane, 
 dwell on this stair, and rniss the landing. But our West 
 ern Buddhist cannot be so joyous in his pessimism, because 
 he cannot be so selfish. He belongs to the breeze-impelled, 
 forward-moving race of the restless, pushing genius, the 
 genius which admits no condition good enough to be let 
 alone. This Western thinker knows that the intensest in 
 dividual life is the highest duty of the man created iii 
 God's image ; that the supremest living is to fully bring 
 out that image of the Father in the child, in the farthest de 
 velopment and finest finish of that child, separate and distinct 
 from all other individuals of the human family ; and he 
 feels the pain of this responsibility, which no one can lift
 
 ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 57 
 
 from him this responsibility of the development and finish 
 of this ego ; that ego whom he can never hide from final 
 Omnipotent scrutiny and sentence. And he knows, because 
 of his fatal certainty here, that he cannot innocently give 
 the Eastern mystic his company. He knows that the 
 Eastern mystic's highest would be his very lowest. He 
 knows his life can be worth living, that therefore he can 
 never be blameless in losing it. He knows that whatever it 
 may consciously be to the Brahmin, to him it must con 
 sciously be the most hideous and gigantic selfishness to put 
 all things behind him, except the extinction of self ; to sit 
 cross-legged under a palm-tree extinguishing the ego i.e., 
 throwing off all responsibilities to others, in order to attain 
 the eternal irresponsibility. 
 
 Xo ; we of the "West writhe and wince under the truth ; 
 we would willingly shirk it, but we cannot. Each of us 
 is born to be somebody in particular to himself or herself, 
 and to others, This is the only solution of our being at 
 all ; and if it does not answer the question, Is life worth 
 living ? then there is no answer. 
 
 Let us enlarge and ennoble our capacity of altruistic 
 faith the capacity to be, in some life or lives, a Cadijah. 
 There are those waiting for us to be this to them for 
 us, for you, for me, not another. There are those waiting 
 for our recognition before men shall recognize them nay, 
 before they shall recognize themselves. From our lips their 
 rightful name must fall, if it ever be heard. 
 
 No gift can pass between human creatures so divine as 
 this gift of recognition, for it touches upon the creative. 
 There is a sense in which it is true of some things that 
 vaying so makes it so ! There are capabilities in each of
 
 58 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 ns of which we are only half aware capabilities that we 
 never dare call by name, of which we need another's recog 
 nition before we fully admit their existence. 
 
 Of the most noble is this most true. Those in whom ia 
 most to recognize have most need of recognition. But not 
 one lives who has not need of it. It may be your high 
 privilege to recognize thus some artist, poet, painter. It may 
 be yours to call such an one by his own true name before, he 
 can pronpunce it for himself ; to pour baptismal oil upon him 
 before the great ones have sent his fame forth and the 
 spaniel herd that lick the footsteps of the leaders have 
 caught it up. It may be yours to be Cadijah to a Mahomet, 
 Jane Welch to a Carlyie, George Henry Lewes to a Marian 
 Evans. If so, you are to be congratulated ; you may right 
 fully exult and say to the applauding, ratifying world, " 1 
 told you so !" It is your rneed, your merit, your enduring 
 fame. But it is not probable that to you and me, my 
 friend, this lot, this meed, this merit, this enduring fame 
 will fall. Not the less by jot or tittle are you and I to 
 exercise the altruistic faith, and to exercise it concretely. 
 The Mahomets, the Carlyles, the George Eliots, need 
 their Cadijahs, but not so much, I would say if com 
 parison could be admitted here as do the people with 
 whom we come in contact every day, in common ways and 
 common places. The perceptions of a Cadijah are not more 
 needed to detect genius than to detect aptitude. It is 
 mournful nay, more, it is maddening to observe how 
 many people are misplaced in the highways and byways of 
 life. Yet surely it is not more maddening to see a Charles 
 Lamb blundering over accounts at a clerk's desk than to 
 see Mr. John Smith, who should be there, writing essaya
 
 ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 59 
 
 in an attic. It is as truly the function of a Cadijah to say, 
 You are not, as to say, You are. 
 
 To-day I met a woman who has discovered an aptitude 
 for exquisite dress-making in a drudging shop-girl. The 
 shop-girl has been simply a " hand," and this clever and 
 good woman proposes to put this discovery of hers behind 
 a brown-stone front, and fling out for her her true name in 
 the magic Mile, and Modes, which transform a sempstress 
 into an artist. This woman does precisely the thing for the 
 shop-girl which Cadijah did for Mahomet : she believes in 
 her when other people do not. It is as legitimate an exer 
 cise of concrete altruistic faith to elect John Smith out 
 of the essayist's attic into the counting-room as to take 
 Charles Lamb out of the counting-room to Elia's library. 
 
 The best I can wish my readers is the blessing of a Cadi 
 jah in their lives. Much pitiful need and much painful 
 want must mingle its bitter with the sweet 6f our experi 
 ence before the full tale of our pilgrimage be told. Some 
 of us, out of the weary suffering or distracting impotence of 
 invalidism, will desperately crave the boon of health, and 
 deem all else a glad exchange for it ; some of us, from the 
 cramping limitations of poverty, will long sadly for the 
 wealth that stands to us for opportunity and development ; 
 and some of us, with health and wealth, will sicken with 
 the loneliness that comes for the loss or lack of love, the 
 passionate heart-craving which would gladly barter health 
 and wealth in exchange for 
 
 "... the touch ot a vanished hand 
 And the sound of a voice that is still." 
 
 Some one or all of these cravings will be ours. But I deem
 
 60 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 it true that deeper than the craving for health, or wealth, 
 or love, is the craving for recognition, the deep desire to be 
 known for what we truly are ; to hear from some human iips 
 oi:r rightful name poet, preacher, painter, clerk, dress 
 maker whatever, by testimony of the conscious power 
 within us, we feel ourselves most fit for ; to hear this 
 name, that at last we may answer to it, and find and keep 
 our undisputed place. This desire, this need, is, I think, 
 the one beyond all others. If you miss health, miss wealth, 
 lose or lack love, may you not miss the gift from another 
 of divining faith in you ; this faith which is, as is all 
 faith, the gift of God. The name of every Cadijah is also 
 Theodora.
 
 HISTORY.
 
 HISTORY. 
 I. 
 
 HISTORY is not an exact science. It cannot be reduced to 
 formulas and equations and chronological tables. Yet this is 
 the notion which many of us hold concerning it, and when 
 we have learned lists of events and names, and are glib 
 in chronology, we feel that we have studied history. Yet 
 we have not studied history one whit more than the child, 
 who has mastered the multiplication table, has studied 
 music. Mathematics has to do with music, but mathe 
 matics is not music. Chronicle and chronology have to 
 do with history, but they are not history. "We must learn 
 of the event ; it is indispensable, but it is not the whole. 
 We must take the event as a starting-point, and travel 
 from it to the man and men behind it. We must obtain 
 its accessories of time, and place, and circumstance ; we 
 must clothe the deed with the thought of which it is sim 
 ply the skeleton ; we must invest the career with the 
 character, which is its spiritual body, without which it 
 has no significance in short, we must make of history 
 simply what it is a drama in which man, in multitudinous 
 men, is the actor, whose time is all time, whose place is the 
 past. 
 
 The past ! What is the past ? Is it naught to us but a 
 cemetery wherein lie the perished men and women of the
 
 64: GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 centuries behind ? Nay, far otherwise is the truth. There 
 is a mediator between us and the past whose one hand we 
 must hold as we tread these silent corridors ; that common 
 spirit of humanity, living, potential, electric, which hovers 
 amid the tablets and vitalizes all the dust. 
 
 It is this truth which we must possess, or, rather, of 
 which we must be possessed, when we approach the realm 
 of history. We must be saturated with a sense of kinship. 
 A proper embarkation upon the sea of times past is a 
 veritable voyage of discovery, and we should have in it the 
 feelings which a fortune-hunter has who turns yellow parch 
 ments in search of proof of his relationship to the rich 
 man who has died. For the past is simply humanity ; it is 
 thou and I, a vast congregation of thous and I's : forest 
 succeeding forest, sprout, sapling, tree, all the same multi 
 form ego over and over to the end of time. Herein is the 
 significance of the saying that history repeats itself. It 
 does repeat itself, because it repeats its factors the men 
 and women who compose it. These factors are everybody. 
 Adam stands at one end of the row, you and I at the other ; 
 and, as in the children's game, we must " all take hold of 
 hands." The spirit of a common humanity stands in the 
 centre and gently re-unites wherever the ring is broken. 
 Woe to us if we break rank. We are no longer in the 
 game. 
 
 It is, therefore, this sympathy with the past which can 
 unlock the inner halls of history and reveal to us its gran 
 deur. Destitute of this, we are ever outside. We can 
 get date, and name, and event, but we can never get 
 at the company ; these things are but the furniture of the 
 feast j by them we make no acquaintance with the guests.
 
 HISTORY. 65 
 
 It is as if one walked in the forest with eyes upon 
 the ground, picking up the fallen leaves of last year's 
 summer. Such an one has in his possession but the her 
 barium of the past. He has walked in the forest and 
 picked up the fallen leaves of date, and event, and career, 
 and laid them away in the pages of his memory. This 
 is the chronicler, and this is much. It is very good to 
 have a herbarium. Far grander is it, I think, to walk in 
 the forest with eyes to the green foliage overhead, cog 
 nizant of the life which animates all ; penetrated with its 
 bounty as it thrills the silences and winds up the arteries of 
 the huge veterans of the woods ; feeling the mould be 
 neath trembling with the common life-blood. This is 
 the historian. He, too, has a herbarium, but to his herba 
 rium he carries a chemistry which restores to life each 
 fallen leaf and hangs it in its proper place, juicy, verdant 
 with perennial resurrection. He who has but the events 
 of history has simply apprehension knowledge, not that 
 sympathetic comprehension which is wisdom. It is our 
 privilege and our duty to carry this sympathy with us as we 
 chronicle the event, and by its chemistry to win from the 
 barren event the fruitful, vital idea of which it is but the 
 chrysalis, to penetrate the integument career, and in its 
 shining folds to find the character the man. Thus do we 
 make true acquaintance with those notable personages who 
 shine down from the firmament of the times that have gone 
 over us, as luminous nuclei toward which all eyes are 
 drawn, raying inimitably their piercing light to the succeed 
 ing generations. Thus do we enter into the past and begin 
 the study of history. Carlyle says : " Universal history, 
 the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is,
 
 66 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 at bottom, the history of the great men who have worked 
 here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones ; 
 the modellers, patterns, and, in a wide sense, creators of 
 whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or 
 attain ; all things that we see standing accomplished in the 
 world are properly the outer material result, the practical 
 realization and embodiment of thoughts that dwelt in the 
 great men sent into the world ; the soul of the world's his 
 tory, it may justly be considered, was the history of 
 these." 
 
 Away, then, with that dwarfing notion of history which 
 makes it mere record of events, and give its place to this 
 true notion which makes it the drama of humanity. Let us 
 cease to look in its pages for date and event ; let us com 
 mence to look therein for the formative ideas of the ages, 
 and for the holders of these ideas, the man behind the 
 thought, the makers of history. Let us study career as 
 means only to the end character. Let us realize that his 
 tory is the shrine of humanity, humanity essential in its 
 essence in past, present, future, wherein is stored the ego 
 the thou and the I. 
 
 We have now lost a wrong and acquired a right notion of 
 the true character of history a right notion which raises it 
 to the level of psychology a discourse concerning the soul 
 of man ; and this is a truth, but not the whole truth. An 
 other notion must be added which shall raise it to the alti 
 tude of a theology a discourse concerning God, for this it 
 surely is. 
 
 " The undevxrat astronomer is mad." 
 
 He who perceives, as did Auguste Comte, that " the 
 heavens declare no other glory than that of Hipparchus, of
 
 HISTORY. 67 
 
 Kepler, of Kewton, and of all those who aided in establish 
 ing their laws "--he who gazes on the midnight heavens, 
 who beholds the order of their march with its marvel and 
 its mystery, and who interprets not their hieroglyph upon 
 the scrolls of space into the plain handwriting of divinity 
 who, in the music of the spheres, discerns not that the 
 theme of this celestial opera, in infinite refrain, is God, 
 GOD, GOD ! he, indeed, is mad ! 
 
 Less sane is he who reads the page of history, yet finds 
 not between all lines the same great word ; who, seeing on 
 the walls of all human institutions the flaming out of mene 
 here, and tekel there, yet sees not the writer behind these 
 walls ; who perceives how constant and instant is the 
 conjunction in world-history of the hour and the man, yet 
 sees not the unsleeping Watcher, who at the hour produces 
 the man : this indeed is dulness of vision, dimness of eye, 
 hardness of heart ! To one who acknowledges the man 
 Christ to be the one top-flower of time, the perfect bloom 
 of His life to be the final development of all that good 
 toward which the heart of man in all ages has yearned all 
 history is sacred, and becomes, as it did to St. Augustine, 
 but the history of the city of God, or to Jonathan Edwards, 
 a " history of redemption," and all the past is but a pano 
 rama of Providence. Let a man believe in God, and he 
 will find Him in history. I do not say he will find Calvin 
 ism there, as did Edwards, or any other isni. That ho 
 must first import into it before he can export it from it. 
 To the agnostic, doubtless, history is but one long "Wal- 
 purgis night of the past, from beginning to end ; he sees 
 but a witch dance round a caldron from which no constant 
 form emerges, but ever and anon, within its boil and
 
 68 GEOEGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 bubble, arises to evanescent view a momentary seeming 5 
 which he christens destiny, or chance, or the unknowable. 
 But let the believer in God, the Father, gaze herein, and he 
 will see, as in the laboratory of some cliemit, that all the 
 past is but the crucible of God ; he will perceive the creat 
 ure God has made in successive transmutations, passed and 
 repassed in the fires of the ages ; and he will discern the 
 divine Alchemist bending over His creation with constant 
 patience and with perfect plan. Such an one will come 
 away from the pages of history rhythmic with the provi 
 dence of God, with strengthened faith in both the Planner 
 and the plan ; he will see how, although 
 
 " The old order changeth and yieldeth place to new," 
 
 yet 
 
 " God fulfils Himself in many ways." 
 
 Those who, with Longfellow, 
 
 "... Believe that in all ages 
 Every human heart is human," 
 
 
 
 will find everywhere in history the conjunction of the 
 divine with this human ; will see how 
 
 " In even savage bosoms 
 
 There are longings, yearnings, striving 
 For the good they comprehend not ; 
 That the feeble hands and helpless. 
 Groping blindly in the darkness, 
 Clasp God's right hand in that darkness, 
 And are lifted up and strengthened."
 
 HISTORY. 69 
 
 II. 
 
 How shall we study history ? 
 
 In order to so study history that we shall get from it the 
 most that can be gotten, I think three qualities are indis 
 pensable : conscience ; imagination ; industry. 
 
 Workmen and master ! Industry is the hand which, 
 with unflagging patience, chips from those conglomerates 
 called histories the petrified fact. Imagination is the re 
 creative breath which, falling close and ardent upon this 
 fossil fact, restores to it life, and gathers back from out the 
 past its whole environment ; and conscience is the righteous 
 regulator and critic of the work of both. 
 
 Industry is essential. He who would penetrate into the 
 complex facts of history in order that he may, in turn, be 
 penetrated with the indivisible and universal truth of his 
 tory, must not flinch before work. Morning by morning 
 must he go forth to his toil ; and if in the evening he 
 bring home little spoil, yet must he not complain. Much 
 of his day* must be spent in the rejection of the spurious 
 ores which fall beneath his hammer, for not until he 
 lias laboriously excavated them, holding them off apart 
 for careful scrutiny and comparison with the real, will he 
 detect their falsity. Count, for instance, if you can, the 
 counterfeit Napoleon Bonapartes you have rung upon the 
 counter under the eye of conscience, before the true one, 
 or its approximation, could be passed. Much of his day 
 must be spent in divesting the true ore of alien sub 
 stances. Tradition, myth, prejudice, so involve themselves 
 with facts in history, that only patientest industry can set
 
 70 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 the facts clear. What an accumulation must first be 
 stripped away from the story of Charlemagne, for in 
 stance, before the even approximately true historic figure 
 can be seen ! Yet let not the industrious workman dream 
 that his time so spent is wasted. It is his apprenticeship, 
 and must be served. Facts of history must be gathered 
 from history books, and from historic places, from every 
 where, for the psychologist finds everywhere a harvest ; 
 but industry alone is the harvester. Whether Lord Ma- 
 caulay had genius or not may be questioned ; but that he 
 had a thing as rare industry cannot be questioned. No 
 journey was so long or difficult but he would take it, so he 
 might the better satisfy himself concerning a fact of his 
 tory. He must go to the spot and gather testimony there. 
 Carlyle never made his " French Revolution," instinct 
 with genius as it is, except by stupendous and indefatigable 
 industry. He was fifteen years writing his " Frederick 
 the Great." Hallam's " Middle Ages" has not a particle 
 of the magnetism of genius in it, but will nevertheless 
 stand to all time as a pre-eminently valuable historical 
 work. Facts, and the getting of them " hoc opus, hie 
 labor est /" 
 
 Next comes imagination. Given the facts, and a properly 
 trained imagination can evolve from them the truth. But 
 the facts must be given. Imagination can do much, but 
 she must have something to do with. She cannot create. 
 
 I use the word imagination in what I conceive to be its 
 literal sense image-making. It is a portrait painter by 
 profession nothing less, nothing more. And it paints 
 fact-pictures and fancy-pictures. The first is its sphere in. 
 history ; both are its sphere in poetry.
 
 HISTORY. 71 
 
 When, as in Carlyle's " Cromwell," it assembles together 
 upon the foreground men and women who lived in the 
 past, objective realities, veritable flesh and blood humanity ; 
 when it puts acts and facts from the lives of these upon its 
 canvas, with actor, and time, and place, and scene, so that 
 we see the past as present, then it deals with the facts of 
 history, and the painter, however much a poet he may be, 
 lias made a history. "When, as in "Paradise Lost," with 
 basis of fact and knowledge it makes the conceptions of the 
 brain objective realities, and depicts upon its canvas a man 
 who was never flesh and blood, a woman, alas ! never flesh 
 and blood, angels and devils, Satan and God, times, places, 
 scenes- all the fabric of a vision, why, then, imagination 
 deals with purely mental conceptions, and the painter, 
 however much a historian, has made poetry or verse. 
 
 Now, both these are legitimate uses of the imagination, 
 with this difference, that while the maker of poetry may 
 have his choice of material, facts to which he may add 
 fancy ad libitum, or fancy pur et simple, the historian 
 must confine the exercise of his imagination most rigorously 
 to the bare facts of history. And here he has need of his 
 stern task-master, conscience. Given a fact in history, then 
 let imagination take this fact back to its time and place, 
 and there drape it with circumstance, and condition, and 
 atmosphere in short, let it fly, with this captured fact, 
 back all the years that lie between to where the deed was 
 doing, the thought thinking, so that the personage whom 
 thought and deed preserve can be confronted in living pres 
 ence ; a faculty this which treads closest of all upon the 
 God-like, since it can say to the dead, Live again ! 
 
 This faculty is given us for use, and its use in the study
 
 72 GEOEGE ELIOT'S POETEY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 of history is to dramatize the past. But skill in its use is 
 not given ; that must be gained. It is something to be 
 learned, practised, perfected. It is, in brief, an art. 
 
 Industry is a simple thing. It is simply a sticking to, a 
 keeping on. There is no art about that. No one can 
 plead inability here. To keep on doing a thing you must 
 just keep on doing it. That is industry. Bat how prop 
 erly to exercise the imagination that it may acquire power 
 to give you all the aid and just the aid you need in the 
 acquisition of history, that is not a simple thing. And 
 here we may learn from the masters. 
 
 Macaulay, with indefatigable industry, gave to his im 
 agination all the material he could collect from books 
 and people ; and when his mind was so saturated with 
 the facts of his subject that he could no longer hold 
 them, he went to the place where the hero of his histo 
 ries lived, or where the deed was done, and there gave 
 himself up to imagining the thing. And that is the way 
 he made his masterpieces historical paintings. What one 
 of our histories teaches us so much truth concerning that 
 remarkable personage, Julius Caesar, as does the tragedy of 
 Shakespeare ? And how was this great work made except 
 by this same saturation of imagination ? The poet Campbell 
 says of this : " He" (the author of " Julius Caesar ") " cast 
 his eyes, both in their quiet and in their kindled inspiration" 
 (i.e., the eye, I take it, of industry and the eye of imagina 
 tion), " both as poet and as philosopher, upon the page of 
 classic history ; he discriminated its characters with the 
 light of philosophy, and he irradiated truth, without en 
 croaching on its solid shapes, with the hues of fancy. What 
 is Brutus but the veritable Brutus of Plutarch . . . un-
 
 HISTORY. 73 
 
 altered but hallowed to the imagination ? "What else is 
 Portia ?" 
 
 Grace Greenwood writes from Belgium :**... An old 
 guide, who at the time of the battle of Waterloo was sev 
 enteen years old, told us that he first conducted Victor Hugo 
 over the field. He said that the novelist stayed at a farm 
 house in this neighborhood for two months, and walked 
 again and again over the ground of his marvellously vivid 
 scenes. That is the way an artist works !" 
 
 Yes, we say, "the way an artist works." The way a 
 Macaulay and a Hugo work. But we are not artists, not 
 Macaulays and Hugos, and we cannot work their way. 
 
 Yet here I think we make, a great mistake. We do a 
 great deal of shirking in this life on the ground of not 
 being geniuses. The truth is, there is an immense amount 
 of humbug lurking in the folds of these specious theories 
 -about genius. The exact quantum of genius in the world 
 is not ascertained any more than its exact definition. But 
 let a man or a woman go to work at a thing, and the genius 
 will take care of itself. It is not our business to look at 
 the masters in the light of geniuses, but only in the light of 
 workers. It is their duty to teach us, and ours to learn, 
 the best methods of work. Though we may never write 
 historical drama, or never paint with words a Waterloo, we 
 may go to work as did Macaulay and Hugo, and get what 
 history we do get as they got theirs. We may, with 
 patient and unflagging industry, accumulate our facts ; we 
 may live among them until our thought is saturated with 
 them, and then, pushing aside other things, call in Imagina 
 tion and let her dramatize them to our vision. She will 
 stir them into vivid ^fe, and the skeletons of the past will
 
 74: GEOEGE ELIOT* S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 assume face, voice, time, and place, and become men and 
 women in the present. 
 
 " Too much trouble !" do we say ? 
 
 Well, it is a good deal of trouble, I own, and chacun d 
 son gout. I, for my part, would rather so realize one total 
 character of history as Queen Elizabeth setting that 
 mighty personage in dramatic action upon my mind's arena, 
 by means of patient accumulation of the facts of her life, 
 from babyhood to queenhood, studying her speeches, her 
 manners, her tastes, her costumes, her associates, her 
 favorites, her whole environment, until from the com 
 plete career the unit character was evolved, than to have all 
 the histories of the realm of England, in complete chrono 
 logical detail, at my tongue's end. I consider that far more 
 would come to me in the former than in the latter case. 
 An acorn in the mind is worth more than an oak forest at 
 the end of the tongue. Taine says : " Genuine history is 
 brought into existence only when the historian begins to 
 unravel across the lapse of time the living man, toiling, 
 impassioned, intrenched in his customs, with his voice and 
 features, his gestures and his dress, distinct and complete 
 as he from whom we have just parted in the street." And 
 again : "I would give fifty volumes of charters and a hun 
 dred volumes of State papers for the memoirs of Cellini, 
 the Epistles of St. Paul, the table-talk of Luther, or the 
 comedies of Aristophanes." 
 
 Industry and Imagination ! Of these we have spoken, 
 showing feebly how indispensable are both ; how easy the 
 use of the former, how easy the misuse of the latter ; how 
 both may be joined so that they shall together be made the 
 engine of vast results. And in doing so we have left easy
 
 HISTORY. 75 
 
 of inference all that need be said concerning Conscience, the 
 vigorous task-master which we placed over the two work 
 men. 
 
 For who will persevere in industry unless Conscience 
 stands by with uplifted lash ? One will work so long as 
 enthusiasm keeps the purpose fresh, the motive bright. 
 But when results are meagre and disappointments many 
 when the thing you hoped to hold as concrete fact glides 
 off at last into a glittering generality, that most dangerous 
 fiction when the half truth in histories is so much mixed 
 with the half lie, " ever the worst of lies" when the 
 authors of histories so differ that all must be examined to 
 make any valuable when philology is so loose and state 
 ment so careless when event is so far in the past that 
 much clutch upon it seems almost hopeless, why, then, 
 enthusiasm wilts away, and if conscience be not near to 
 keep us to our task, we will not be kept. 
 
 And if conscience be needful to keep industry up, it is 
 still more so to keep imagination down. At this we have 
 already hinted. It is a difficult thing to tell a story just 
 as it happened, and yet make the story good. To be 
 dramatic and at the same time accurate is a rare combina 
 tion. If the one is gift, the other is grace. 
 
 And here we come upon a great rock casting a portentous 
 shadow. I know of but one besetment so easy in the study 
 of history as that of credulity ; it is that of incredulity. If 
 the one be Chary bdis, the other is Scylla. Everywhere aa 
 we read we repeat the question we used to put so anxiously 
 to the story-teller of our childhood, " Is this a true story I" 
 We read each one's account in order to try to find the fact, 
 and the comment on all things, which Dickens makes his
 
 76 GEOKGE ELIOT'S TOE-TRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 dying miner utter to tlie woman lie loved in vain, comes 
 back, "It's aw' a muddle, Rachel ! It's aw' a muddle !" 
 When the friends of Horace Wai pole sought to entertain 
 him on his death-bed by offering to read to him from 
 histories, he would reply, " Yes, bring me my liar !" 
 Incredulity besets us everywhere in our reading, and with 
 it comes the paralyzing " cui 'bono?" And it is a chance 
 if our conscience be sufficient for either industry or imag 
 ination here. 
 
 The passage is indeed narrow, with Charybdis luring on 
 one side, and Scylla frowning on the other ; yet there is a 
 way out. Our psychology must save us here. The ego 
 must steer us through. Do I wish to make acquaintance 
 with Napoleon Bonaparte, the " man of destiny," I must 
 accept first the acquaintanceship of all who have written of 
 him, from a Thiers to a Madame de Ilemusat. Each will 
 have a man of his own, made up of Bonaparte and ego. 
 Bonaparte and Thiers make Thiers' ; Bonaparte and de 
 Remusat make de liemusat's. I must make mine of Bona 
 parte i.e., all their Bonapartes and myself. It will take 
 a long time ; after all the ingredients are thrown into the 
 caldron, from "poisoned toad" to "Tartar's lip," there 
 must be a deal of stirring and fire -poking before the image 
 will emerge ; but finally come it will, my Bonaparte, my 
 veritable little corporal, and in him I will believe, though an 
 archbishop in sacerdotal robes tells me there never lived a 
 Bonaparte. Nowhere more than in the study of history is it 
 needful to "put yourself in his place" i.e., to carry to the 
 making of an image of the person whose form you seek to 
 confront, those general and common ingredients which go 
 to make up each man. When you have carried to him that
 
 HISTORY. 77 
 
 much of yourself which is common to you both, you will, 
 by this, be qualified to detect that in him which is himself 
 strictly, and not yourself ; and so to a man you will add the 
 individuality of this man, and have what you seek. Carlyle 
 carried Carlyle to the making of his Cromwell, doubtless ; 
 and in this way he got for himseit a complete Cromwell 
 wart and all to his mind. Taine thinks Cromwell's Crom 
 well is Carlyle's Cromwell, and largely because they are, in 
 his view, interchangeable words. Nowhere more than in 
 history does it " take a thief to catch a thief." 
 
 111. 
 
 Why shall we study history ? For so laborious and 
 perilous a process as that I have depicted, there must be 
 much motive and imperative motive. 
 
 I would have the study of history not an end, but a means 
 'to an end. I would study history, nrs ., in order to know 
 myself. 
 
 " The proper study of mankind is man." Know thyself 
 is the first mandate of a sound and comprehensive philoso 
 phy. Yet true self-knowledge is never to be come at by 
 burrowing in the narrow limit of our own individual 
 thoughts, feelings, and experience. We must, in order to 
 truly see ourselves, stand before the great mirror humanity, 
 and in its all-reflecting focus behold our own proper individ 
 uality. Taine says " all history is but the history of the 
 heart." We find ourselves surrounded by humanity, we 
 find ourselves humanity, and of humanity we know less
 
 78 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 than of anything else. We have studied history wrongly, 
 and it has yielded us only date and event, deed and career. 
 Let us study it rightly, and it will yield us true self-knowl 
 edge, true sympathy with others. Here, as elsewhere, it ia 
 " the spirit that quickeneth." Goethe said, "It is the 
 spirit in which we act which is the great thing." It is the 
 spirit in which we study which is the great thing. Does 
 history hold a hero for us ? Let us love him boundlessly 
 but wisely ; if we praise him, let our praise be abundant 
 but understanding, as was Heine's, when he says, in explana 
 tion of seeming to praise Bonaparte in praising his deeds, 
 " I never praise the dead, but the human soul whose gar 
 ment the deed is, and history is nothing but the soul's old 
 wardrobe." 1 would study history that I may be wise wise 
 with a sympathetic wisdom born of much and reverent con 
 tact with my brother and sister humanity. . 
 
 " Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and we linger on the shore ; 
 And the individual withers, and the world is more and more." 
 
 1 would study history rightly that my knowledge may be 
 fused with wisdom. I would stand among the men and 
 women of the past in order that 1 may stand among the 
 men and women of the present an individual ; not caught, 
 and absorbed, and lost in the great world-current, for " wis 
 dom lingers !" 
 
 And, in the second place, I would study history in order 
 to make my standing firmer in religious faith. In these 
 days of ebb and quicksand, when agnosticism rears its stone 
 wall in front of faith, and writes upon it in black letters the 
 end-all and the be-all of all knowing, the unknowable, we 
 have need to go where God is to confirm our faith in Him
 
 HISTORY. 79 
 
 And God is in history ; He is there because the human soul 
 is there. " Take thy shoes from off thy feet, for this is 
 holy ground." Turn the pages reverently, for, as Carlyle 
 says, " all history is the Bible." 
 
 These two reasons why I would study history come first 
 in rank. After these come all other benefits which the 
 intellect gets to itself in any exercise of its faculties ; in no 
 other pursuit can these be greater. The exploration of no 
 science can be, in all ways, so profitable as must be the 
 science of humanity. 
 
 The science of matter is a, very noble pursuit. To wrench 
 from the ores of the earth, the treasures of the sea, the 
 elements of the air, the secret of their functions and their 
 affinities, the laws of their being, the springs of their action 
 this is very noble and very good. But it ends where it 
 begins in matter ; and matter is matter and not man, de 
 spite the Darwins, and Tyndalls, and Huxleys ; and one 
 may know all that is to be known about matter and noth 
 ing that need be known about man. 
 
 The science of astronomy is very grand. To make 
 acquaintance with the steadfast stars, to know their times 
 and seasons, tlieir coinings and their goings to learn their 
 hidden looks by distance-killing telescopes, so that each 
 feature is familiar, must make one feel a sense of more than 
 mundane importance, and a sense of fellowship more than 
 i mortal. Yet, after all, if an astronomer do nothing but 
 gaze at the stars, he is only a star-gazer. But the science of 
 humanity what limit is there here ? Hero is a labyrinth 
 for learning, an ocean for genius, a cathedral for worship ! 
 
 The most transcendent genius should occupy itself with 
 history. It does indeed, in a sense, for the loftiest reaches
 
 80 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 of the loftiest minds have always been in the study of man ; 
 but I would have the abstract psychology of these great 
 ones made concrete. 1 would that Goethe's Faust had been 
 a more solid figure in history i.e., I would that all the 
 genius, and soul- exploration, and experience, with all the 
 transcendent learning that went to its making, might have 
 turned into some historic evolution that of Charlemagne, 
 for instance. What a history would that have been ! 
 
 Is there not a yearning in these dumb, eloquent faces 
 which confront us from the pages of history to give us the 
 lesson they learned here, which shall move us to accept their 
 teaching ? Teaching concerning our relations with each 
 other in this present, where we must briefly play our part, 
 nobly or ignobly ; teaching that shall train us for that long 
 hereafter, within whose dim recesses even now is set a wait 
 ing messenger, biding his time to beckon, and whose beckon 
 ing we must one day surely follow into those same silent 
 corridors of the past. Do not these, the departed great 
 ones, speaking all the more eloquently because the clogging 
 web of irrelevant detail has dropped away and left bare and 
 prominent to our vision only the vital and important do 
 not these teach us something that we need to learn ? 
 
 There is a science which, whether in little or in much, 
 pursued by patient industry, by educated imagination, by 
 rigorous conscience, shall teach us, of all things that it con 
 cerns us to know history the true and proper study of 
 humanity ! 
 
 Speaking of soul-exploration and experience, an old sus 
 picion of mine is revived to wit, that history has not been 
 defrauded of Goethe's genius in soul-exploration or exploita 
 tion alone. A great deal of diligence in this calling in
 
 HISTORY. 81 
 
 better people has been worse than wasted. An especially 
 refined exploitation of soul is the especially refined avoca 
 tion of an especially refined class of ladies. 1 may not be 
 entirely clear here, but there are some subjects on which, if 
 not entirely clear, one is yet clear enough. 
 
 If a fraction of the energy devoted to the avocation at 
 which I have hinted could be diverted from this feverish, 
 narrow, unimportant channel of personal history into the 
 fresh, broad, all-important paths of universal history, what 
 luminous pages would be added to its archives ! What a 
 clearing up of mysteries would take place ! The " Iron 
 Mask" would stand a poor chance for preservation of its im 
 penetrability under the mortar of those feminine fingers, did 
 those potent little manipulators feel a fraction of the same 
 itch to unmask the mysterious man within which goes 
 constantly toward unmasking the mysterious man or woman 
 of society. The secret of Kaspar Hauser's antecedents 
 would stand out distinctly if a small part of the industry 
 which determines the pedigree of the new social lion were 
 applied to it. And ah me ! if an infinitesimal atom of 
 the epistolary zeal and zest which goes into the bottomless 
 abyss of research which the letters between A. and B., 
 written for the purpose of mutually evolving each other 
 from each other's true inwardness, went into the research, 
 how beyond question would the authorship of the Letters of 
 Junius be established ! 
 
 Plenty of people do not read history, do not love history ; 
 and yet they do nothing else but read history because they 
 love it so. For it is true, as Taine says, that all history is 
 the history of the human heart. And into this human heart 
 we are ever peering, grasping at every new heart-history
 
 82 GEOEGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 with as much interest as if it were the only heart-history ; 
 peering an^ prying, and never being tired of turning the 
 pages ; returning to the study of this unsolved mystery of 
 the human heart with a fascination before which the fasci 
 nation of the mystery of unpierced matter, the mystery 
 of unvisited star, pales. People the world over occupy 
 themselves with people ; if not in a wide, important 
 way, in a small, unimportant way. Our fingers itch to 
 vivisect each other. If some of us consecrated a tithe of 
 that fine mental manipulation and dextrous research and 
 magnetic sympathy and sympathetic magnetism expended 
 in these mutual vivisections upon grand historic evolu 
 tions, womanhood, not to say manhood, would sweep out 
 on a broader and a higher plane ; life would become more 
 spiritual, and certain dreams of certain dreamers would 
 come true. 
 
 For visions are not exclusively the property of vision 
 aries. Plato pleased himself with a vision of his ideal 
 republic ; Augustus with a vision of his city of God ; 
 Milton saw in his mind a " noble and puissant nation rous 
 ing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her 
 invincible locks ;" and these things are all nearer to-day 
 than in the days of those who beheld them in a vision. 
 
 And who shall forbid us women also a vision of a 
 future, fair if far and who shall say how far ? of a time 
 to come, coming, when we shall no longer cramp our 
 selves to the petty and the personal, but shall expand into 
 the large and the impersonal ; when we shall exchange 
 a morbid scrutiny of a man, or a woman, so often piti 
 fully specific, for a fruitful contemplation, grandly generic, 
 of man ?
 
 HISTORY. 83 
 
 ' Men our brothers, men the workers, 
 
 Ever reaping something new ; 
 That which they have done bat earnest 
 Of the things that they shall do. ' ' 
 
 When that capacious curiosity which is our birthright 
 shall not be satisfied with the petty pottage of small person- . 
 alities, but shall range through all the ages of the past, get 
 ting to itself nourishment in that wide pasture of true his 
 tory, where separate men and women are stationed all along 
 the line, turning to us eloquent faces all the more eloquent 
 because the clogging web. of irrelevant detail has dropped 
 away and left bare and prominent only the vital and impor 
 tant ! men and women whose histories are significant of 
 Providence, whose environment is that of the times gone 
 over us, whose careers stand for characters, whose charac 
 ters stand for ideas, whose ideas stand for causes causes 
 that, being no longer personal or individual, no longer 
 bounded by time or place or circumstance, stand for God ! 
 
 Such a dream I have and it will come true. Let us 
 believe it ; faith is the first step toward freedom. My ideal 
 study of history, my ideal historical society of which we 
 shall a'll be members is a Coming Event.
 
 OLD ROME AND KEW FRANCE.
 
 OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 
 
 I. 
 
 TIIE-RE is a notion of the Middle Ages which is common 
 and which is false a notion which looks upon them as ten 
 centuries of starless midnight, wherein the world lay asleep 
 as good as dead. A tunnel of time, one thousand years 
 long, through which humanity rumbled blindly in an emi 
 grant train, the last sky-rockets of the Roman Empire flar 
 ing up at one end, the first sunbeams of the Renaissance 
 shining in at the other and no light between the no- 
 account period of history. 
 
 We are all liable to have notions until we get knowledge ; 
 but if any of us hold this one, it should be corrected before 
 we enter upon mediaeval studies. It seems to me that 
 this period is not suggestively named when called the 
 Middle Ages, nor accurately named when called the Dark 
 Ages, but that both suggestion and accuracy combine in 
 that view which denominates it as a Twilight Age. That 
 period which elapses before sunrise, that period which 
 elapses after sunset, and all that interval between when 
 moon and star ray forth their multitudinous lances of silver 
 light, waging successful warfare with the cannonade of 
 serried cloud these periods we find indeed dim, but not 
 wholly unlit ; obscure, but not impenetrable. Such a 
 night as this is that of the Middle Ages.
 
 88 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 The importance of acquaintance with this period is, by 
 the ordinary student, greatly underestimated. Yet it is 
 emphatically the seed-time of all that succeeds. The skilful 
 florist, if he wishes to insure the germination of precious 
 seed, casts it into pots of prepared earth, then sets these 
 pots away in the brooding darkness of his hothouse, and 
 there keeps them until the delicate sprout above the earth 
 assures him that germination is well under way. Growth 
 takes place in the night. He who would approach history 
 in the true attitude of a scientist, a psychologist, a student 
 of Providence, must concern himself with its seed time, its 
 time of sprouting and of early growth. As much as is the 
 importance of study of this period underestimated, so 
 greatly is its interest unappreciated. He who, with some 
 true conception of what the mediaeval period is to after- 
 times, shall but cross the threshold of its study, will, once 
 within, proceed along those dim-lit aisles with an interest as 
 much exceeding that of more brilliant subsequent ages as 
 does the fascination of the mysterious, pregnant, prodigy- 
 filled night exceed that of the glaring day ! Let us, then, 
 cross this threshold. 
 
 By one bold exercise of your imagination place yourself 
 with me within the vestibule of mediaeval time. Above 
 the lintel of the door we enter is written in blood-red 
 letters the date 476. This vestibule is long three cen 
 turies lie between its doorway and the massive portal of the 
 temple proper yonder, on which flames forth, in letters oi 
 gilt, the date 800. 
 
 Here in this antechamber the twilight deepens ; a side 
 light radiates fitfully here and there, but our way is mainly 
 featured to us by the rays that issue, the one from a red
 
 OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 
 
 89 
 
 sunset behind, the other from a rising moon in front the 
 ensanguined light that lingers in the wake of Koine that 
 was, the ruddy gold that parts the clouds where France 
 shall be. In the fifth century of modern time the Roman 
 Empire had grown cancerous upon the world. The iron of 
 its blood its Julius, its Trajan, its Aurelius had run 
 out. The virus of a Nero, a Domitian, a Caligula had 
 mingled with the watery serum of a Heliogabalus and an 
 Augustulus, and had brought mortal sickness. There was 
 need of surgery. Then nature, that great nature which, in 
 history as elsewhere, is Providence, arose, and with the 
 sword of Hun and Goth cut out this cancer which was 
 poisoning the race. With the contented retirement to his 
 Lucullan villa of the little, bribed Augustus Romulus 
 Augustulus, too small to light and not too big to buy the 
 last effigy of Caesar flitted from the stage of history, and 
 Rome, the monopolist, the tyrant, the disease, vanished 
 from the body politic. 
 
 [Surely, I need not interject a word of tribute to that glo 
 rious Rome which still lives with transmigrated life, that 
 other Rome, that unparalleled product into which all the 
 ages of the world had entered as contributors, in that fashion 
 which the ages have. For human history is nothing but 
 one ceaseless flow of cause into effect, and of effect into 
 cause. There is nothing but which is consequent. You 
 and I are but the consequents of a vast tangle of antecedents 
 in all time before. And but for Rome, that stupendous 
 concrete of wealth and culture and intellect of eighteen 
 centuries ago, it had not been the same with you and me 
 to-day. This Rome, vastly differing from that othe Rome 
 that was extinguished, died only with such death as good
 
 90 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 things have a death which is transition and in dying 
 bequeathed her rich arterial blood to all the ages.] 
 
 One glance, then, at this flickering sunset sky of Rome 
 (its embers will h'ght many a watch-fire of the future), 
 and we must face about and thread oar way as best we can 
 along this dim vestibule of the Twilight Age, by such 
 radiance as glimmers from a moon struggling through 
 eumulous clouds before us. 
 
 In its focus stands a figure, the figure in political history 
 of the next three centuries, upon which we must fasten our 
 attention the figure of Clovis, initial name of French 
 Empire. Ten years after the so-called extinction of the 
 "Western Empire of the Romans in the deliverance up of 
 his little, brief authority by the puny Augustulus to 
 Odoacer, there ruled over the Roman territory of Gaul, 
 with the title, some say, of the King of the Romans, a 
 Roman patrician, Syagrius. This fact alone discovers to us 
 how life lingered in the moribund members of the ruined 
 empire. With less start than, it would seem, Syagrius 
 had, many a man had beforetime usurped the empire and 
 ruled the world. We may say that the time for all such 
 usurpations of Roman Empire was now gone by. But we 
 can maintain this position only after the event. It took 
 but the returning figure of Napoleon upon the shore of 
 France, after his banishment, to rally round him his army 
 and restore to him his empire, dislodging from the throne 
 of France that ancient dynasty which, in the emperor's brief 
 absence, had been reseated there. Some one has said that 
 such was the magic of Napoleon's name, that it needed but 
 the sight of his cocked hat, erected on the soil of France, 
 to strike terror to the heart of Europe. In this closing fifth
 
 OLD ROME AX I) NEW FKANCE. 
 
 91 
 
 century the "Roman eagles had not wholly lost their power 
 to stir up Roman souls ; witness the Senator Boethius, his 
 father-in-law, Symrnachns, and their colleagues, found 
 guilty, after that date, of loyalty to that ancient standard. 
 Nor was the subjugation and unity of the barbarian 
 Odoacer's kingdom so assured as to leave no room for a 
 reasonable hope in one who should aspire to restore the 
 Roman Empire 1o the Romans, of allies from barbarian 
 tribes. Syagrius, the son of a Roman hero, would seem to 
 have been such an one. He was exceedingly popular among 
 his countrymen in the Gallic territory over which he ruled ; 
 nor was he less so amon^ barbarian allies, whom, by his 
 superiority, he both awed and attracted. He represented 
 to the rude nations about him what was awful, and admir 
 able, and wholly beyond their reach in the traditions and 
 manners of that Rome which, by numbers only, they had 
 conquered. Here, we might say, was opportunity for a 
 most successful coup d'etat by this illustrious, powerful, 
 and accomplished Roman. We can give no conclusive 
 reason why it could not have happened except that it did 
 not. We can only be wise after the event. The panorama 
 of history unrolls itself always to surprised spectators. 
 Always " it is the unexpected that happens." Not Syagrius, 
 in this fifth century of time, but a roving, barbarian chief 
 tain, is the coming man. 
 
 Clovis our modern for Chodowig, mighty warrior was 
 the son of Childeric, king of that branch of the Frankish 
 l>;u-l>arians whose aettlements lay along the river Sala, or 
 Yssel, hence their distinctive appellation, Salian Franks. 
 The Franks had figured in history for several centuries. 
 They were no strangers to the Roman world. From the
 
 92 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 beginning, when the hero-god of Germany, Arminius, heat 
 back the Roman legions under Varus, this valorous race 
 had, by one or another of its tribes, won the respect and 
 sometimes fear of the Romans, in the varying character of 
 enemies, allies, or subjects. The eminent qualities of this 
 race were courage and independence. It was from their 
 inconquerable passion for freedom that they won their name 
 Franks, freemen. Even in their relation to their chief 
 they were rather allies than subjects.* 
 
 Childeric, the father of Clovis, was a wild and wilful 
 man, whose youthful madnesses out-Franked the Franks, 
 and provoked them, with characteristic democracy, to 
 ignore his kingship and banish him to the court of a neigh 
 boring king, where, in good care, he might find space 
 for repentance. It does not appear that he occupied him 
 self exclusively with this wholesome but bitter spiritual 
 exercise. Childeric seems to have anticipated the later 
 French character, whose law of life lay in the phrase of the 
 Bourbon courtiers, "Je m'amuse!^ He had the national 
 instinct, " pour passer le temps," and in this experience 
 passed the time principally in making love to Bosnia, the 
 wife of the open-hearted King of Thuringia. She, for her 
 part, found no difficulty in falling duly " in love" with this 
 fascinating French exile, and when the Franks recalled 
 
 * The famous story of the vase of Soissons illustrates the independent 
 attitude they maintained as soldiers to their general and as subjects 
 to their king. After the first victory of Clovis, a rare and exquisite vase 
 was among the spoils. This Clovis set aside for himself. But a sol : 
 dier seeing him do this stepped forth from the ranks, and, exclaiming, 
 '" You shall have nothing but what comes to you by lot, " struck the 
 vase and shivered it to atoms.
 
 OLD HOME AND NEW FRANCE. 93 
 
 their monarch to his place, Bosnia incontinently left Tliu- 
 ringian bed and board, declaring, with an emancipation of 
 soul which it takes the nineteenth century to equal, that 
 "had she found a man more beautiful than Childeric, he 
 should have been her choice !" 
 
 The saying that " the mother makes the man" seems to 
 find illustration in the character of Clovis. Bosnia was the 
 regulation mother for a conqueror, and she bequeathed him 
 the quality which he needed as equipment for his bloody and 
 unscrupulous career unswerving selfishness, which allows 
 no foolish conscience to impede the course of its passion, be 
 that passion for a kingdom or a king. So fine an irony 
 has history, that that which makes the shame of its wives 
 makes the glory of its kings ! 
 
 Clovis succeeded to the kingdom of his father at the age 
 of fifteen, if, indeed, a strip of Rhineland and a band of 
 followers can be called a kingdom. Clovis was poor, but 
 he was young ; his resources were small, but his valor 
 boundless ; his followers few, but congenial. 
 
 Six years elapse, after the accession of Clovis to his 
 throne, before the first great event of his career writes itself 
 indelibly upon the page of history. At this moment of 
 world-history the situation in Gaul modern France was 
 as follows : Its north-eastern portion was the territory of 
 Syagrius. Its central and south-western lands were in 
 cluded in the great barbarian kingdom of the \ r i8igoth8, 
 which extended also across the Pyrenees and took in part of 
 Spain. The small sea-coast strip remaining in the north 
 west was called Armorica, and was virtually independent. 
 The more considerable south-eastern lands, which bordered 
 Italy, were possessed by the Burgundians, who also ruled
 
 94 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 themselves. To the east of Burgundy, along that region 
 of the Rhine, an indeterminate host that barbarian con 
 glomerate called suggestively the Allemanni (All-men) lay 
 crouching with gleaming eyes, biding their time for a 
 spring across the river barrier. And above them, farther 
 along the beach, Clovis, the young Frank chieftain, roamed 
 restlessly up and down, with his congenial followers, and 
 cast glances full of speculation across to Gallic lands. We 
 may well pause here to take in this situation, in this 
 momentous decade, between the years of our Lord 476 and 
 486. All eyes that glance on mediaeval history must turn 
 thither and fix an affrighted gaze upon these ten years, in 
 which the future of the world is pending. Visigoth and, be 
 hind him, Vandal on the west ; Ostrogoth on the south ; Al 
 lemanni on the east, each stretching neck and straining eye 
 all turning a fascinated gaze upon the basilisk Syagrius. 
 He is the cocked hat of Napoleon to them. And all this 
 time Clovis whistles softly up and down the hither Rhine, 
 planning, in the waiting for performance ; dreaming, in 
 delay of deed, " dreams no mortal ever dared to dream 
 before." But finally the spell is broken. The contest 
 begins, and Clovis strides forth to throw down before 
 Syagrius the gauntlet of battle. 
 
 II. 
 
 " In the manner and almost in the language of chivalry," 
 says Gibbon, " Clovis deiied Syagrius and called him to 
 combat. Syagrius haughtily accepted the challenge, and 
 met him in the vicinity of the ancient city Soissons."
 
 OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 95 
 
 Tragic ground, this, for France ! For if the Soissons of 
 the fifth be not identical with the Sedan of the nineteenth 
 century, the two are sufficiently related to suggest a striking 
 reflection. For it was here, in the year 486, that Clovis 
 swung his battle-axe victorious over Roman heads, and 
 wrote in Roman blood the birthday of French Empire ! 
 And it M-as here, in 1STO, that the last French emperor 
 delivered up his sword, and William of Prussia wrote in 
 Frenchmen's blood the death -day of French Empire ! 
 
 The victory of Clovis at Soissons put an end to Roman 
 rule in Gaul. Syagrius fled to the Visigothic court and 
 disappeared from view. Clovis filled his place in Gaul, 
 and came to view for all time. 
 
 We of the nineteenth know now that at this moment, in 
 the fifth century, Clovis, by his victory over Syagrius, had 
 laid the corner-stone of French Empire. To us he already 
 appears a hero, having taken that first step which costs, and 
 after which all the others come as a matter of course. But 
 nothing was farther from the fact. This first step of Clovis 
 led the way to others more costly. What he had gained 
 he must hold, and that was not a matter of a day's fight. 
 A difficulty more subtle than the barbarian mind had been 
 accustomed to grapple with now arose to threaten Clovis. 
 
 The Roman world had long since been nominally Chris 
 tian. Roman Gaul was extremely Christian, as we shall 
 see, and Roman Gaul, however it may perforce submit to 
 a political master not Roman, had serious scruples in sub 
 mitting to a pagan master not Christian. Thus the situa 
 tion became very difficult 'for Clovis. Not being one 
 which the battle-axe could adjust, he was hardly equal to it. 
 These Romish priests, with their wonderful learning, and
 
 96 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 language, and polished dignity, were more than a match fox 
 our lusty Frank. Yet Clovis was not without diplomacy ; 
 and two circumstances assisted hini to meet the emergency. 
 
 The first of these circumstances was the circumstance of 
 sectarianism. A split in the opposing party, as we of 
 to-day know, is often the determining factor in the fight. 
 Such a split had occurred long before the time of Clovis, 
 and now had yawned into irreconcilable divergence. Thus 
 early in the history of the Christian era are we called upon 
 to witness the tremendous power of sect, as a force in the 
 causation of events. Already in the fifth century was the 
 half -admiring pagan world invited to " see how these 
 Christians hate each other !' ' 
 
 The great sect of those days, and that \vith which alone 
 we have to do, was that of the Arian heresy. All who 
 indorsed the doctrine of Arius were considered heterodox, 
 and were known as Arians, while those untainted with this 
 heresy were deemed the orthodox, and were called by that 
 glorious but so often misapplied name of Catholics. A good 
 follower of Augustine in the fifth century could no more 
 fellowship a good follower of Arius than could a rigid disci 
 ple of Calvin in our century fellowship one of Chunder Sen. 
 
 Now, the Roman Gauls were fiercely orthodox, while all 
 around them, the Visigothic, Ostrogothic, and Burgundian 
 converts to Christianity, were fiercely Arian ; and these 
 two divisions of the early Church hated each other most 
 cordially. In this way was Clovis helped out of his 
 dilemma, for the hatred of his orthodox Roman subjects of 
 their Christian but Arian neighbors was quite as great as 
 was their repugnance to a pagan ruler. They may even 
 have thought the latter the least of two evils. Thus
 
 OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 
 
 97 
 
 prevented alliance with those neighbors against the 
 conquering Clovis, who threatened the barbarian nations in 
 Gaul with the same political ruin he had brought to the 
 Homans. How lasting would have been this prevention of 
 such allied resistance to him, or what might have come 
 about from this complication, it were profitless to conjecture. 
 We can only follow the course of events, and eee how the 
 matter took care of itself. 
 
 The course of events is just now the course of Clovis, and 
 the next thing we have to chronicle in his career is also the 
 second which served to assist him in meeting the situation 
 in which we find him after his conquest of Roman Gaul, 
 the circumstance of his marriage. 
 
 More than one woman goes to the making of one man, 
 or, if not, the man lacks something of being finished. 
 The mother makes the man, perhaps, but the wife manufact 
 ures him. Sometimes the wife, in her manufacture, con 
 firms the making of the mother, sometimes counteracts it. 
 The case of Clovis was that of counteraction, for it appears 
 certain that the influence of Clotilda, the wife, went far 
 toward nullifying the influence cf her mother-in-law. She 
 seems, as much as possible, to have been the opposite in 
 character of her husband's mother. 
 
 In the first place, Clotilda was a Christian and orthodox, 
 and she set herself to the task of her husband's conversion 
 with Catholic zeal. 
 
 I am not informed of the circumstances of the courtship 
 of Clovis. It occurs to me with force, however, that these 
 recently-acquired, troublesome Catholic subjects of his may 
 have acted the part of match-makers to a very great extent. 
 At any rate, we can all perceive the significance to them of
 
 98 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 the marriage of their pagan monarch with this Catholic 
 princess, and how far it would go toward reconciling him 
 to them, as being now in a hopeful way for conversion to 
 their faith. 
 
 A painful suspicion also whispers itself in my ear, sug 
 gesting that in Clovis the passion of the lover may have 
 conspired with the policy of the ruler in the wooing of his 
 bride. Be that as it may, the Roman Catholic clergy now 
 adhered to Clovis with hopeful loyalty. The pious hope of 
 priest and wife was not rewarded earlier than the date of the 
 next great battle of Clovis, in the year 496, ten years after 
 the battle of Soissons. This encounter was with a foe vastly 
 different from that of ten years before, but its result hardly 
 second in importance. 
 
 111. 
 
 We have already spoken of the Allemannic tribes as 
 menacing the eastern frontier of Gaul. They were but the 
 advance guard of untold, almost unimaginable savage hordes 
 that swarmed within those northern wilds of Germany 
 which Rome had disdained to penetrate. It was this force 
 which Clovis had now to confront. Had they succeeded in 
 the contest and pushed their way over the dead bodies of 
 these Franks, to fill again the place of Syagrius which 
 Clovis had won, unnumbered myriads must have rushed 
 down from those dark forests of the north to fill, in turn, 
 the places thus left vacant, and the establishment of the 
 new empire must have been indefinitely retarded or dis 
 astrously changed.
 
 OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 99 
 
 Near the present site of Cologne these two barbarian 
 tribes, whom Gibbon calls the fiercetst of the many then in 
 view, confronted each other, to settle between them this 
 momentous question. The battle raged furiously and 
 variously, but at last fortune seemed to perch upon the 
 Allemannic banner. The gods of the Franks were invoked 
 to aid, but appeared to be otherwise engaged. Then, when 
 defeat seemed certain, in that extremity which brings each 
 man begging to the Almighty One, Clovis, the long-resist 
 ing, in true barbaric heartiness spoke out to Clotilda's God, 
 praying for victory and vowing Him the service of a Chris 
 tian ever after might he but win this tight. From this in 
 stant the tide of battle turned. Fresh vigor flew into the 
 arms of the retreating Franks. They turned upon their 
 pursuers, and fought, with fanatic frenzy, the battle over 
 again. The Allemanni were slaughtered in vast numbers, 
 and their nation completely subdued. The dead bodies of 
 their slain formed an effectual barrier against invasion of 
 remoter savage hordes. The eastern frontier of Gaul was 
 temporarily assured. 
 
 A second consequence of this battle, greater even than 
 the settlement of an eastern frontier, was the conversion of 
 Clovis.* 
 
 * It were a profitless, perhaps painful, inquiry to seek to ascertain the 
 true nature of this so-called conversion. We may well suspend our criti 
 cism, and temper skepticism with faith we who have said that we 
 
 ". . . believe that in all ages 
 Every human heart is human, 
 That in even savage bosoms 
 There are longings, yearnings, strivings, 
 For the good they comprehend not." 
 
 The barbarian chieftain is told the story of the death and sufferings of
 
 100 GEOBGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 So Clovis keeps his vow and changes masters. He is 
 received into the Holy Catholic Church and because he 
 is a Catholic, not an Arian is hailed bj the Pope with 
 the title of "Most Christian !" With three thousand of 
 his Franks following he goes behind liemigius to the bap 
 tismal font. Here is exercise for imagination. What a 
 picture does it hang before us ! Clovis, fresh from the 
 lield of battle, with his elated soldiers, bending massive 
 forms before the mitred bishop in the grand Cathedral 
 of Rheims. That long-haired monarch for long hair 
 was the distinction of the German kings those fair- 
 skinned, fair-haired warriors, suppliant, while liemigius 
 uplifts the cross before them, and, in sonorous Latin, com 
 mands for it their homage "Mitis depone colla, Sicam- 
 ber ! Adora quod incendisti, incende quod adordsti /" 
 Truly new times this for Clovis, to bow meekly anywhere, 
 to anything ! 
 
 Christ. Missing the meaning of that matchless tale, his impulsive heart 
 swells with indignation, and, clasping his battle-axe, he cries out, 
 " Would I had been there at the head of my valiant Franks ! I would 
 have avenged His injuries." Yet, I think, it is only we who smile at 
 this barbaric fervor. I think the patient Christ, who wept but never 
 laughed over the creature He died to save, would likelier lay a gentle 
 hand upon that outstretched arm of Clovis, discerning, as He alone can 
 do, the unconscious worship in that generous heart ! 
 
 Led, as a child, by the bishop to the Cathedral of Kheims, Clovis, his 
 savage nature impressed and elated by the splendor of its adornments s 
 asks, ' ' Is this the kingdom of God, of which I am become an heir ?' ' 
 
 Then spake the gray barbarian, 
 Lower than a Christian child 1 
 
 And Kemigius answers, " No ; but it is the road thither !" And there 
 the shadow of Hildebrand was cast before !
 
 OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 101 
 
 But the cross is adored at least in form the pagan idols 
 which have been worshipped are burned, and the end for 
 which wife and priest have long been waiting is attained. 
 Clovis is a Christian, and his victorious career is fairly 
 under way. The sword in one hand, the cross in the other, 
 he is prepared for any emergency of conquest. He is now 
 at length ready for his third and final move in the game 
 which wins the new empire. This is his victory at Poitiers 
 over the Visigoths in Gaul. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Visigoths are intensely Arian ; Clovis is intensely 
 Catholic. Arianism is a heresy a shocking heresy, and 
 Clovis feels now that it is his duty to rebuke this scandalous 
 schism in the Church. He will fight the Visigoths and 
 expel them from Gaul. Thus does his piety supply him 
 pretext for a conquest " in fresh fields and pastures new !" 
 
 The preparations of Clovis for this last great campaign 
 have all the character of a crusade. He summons his 
 prelates and princes to a council at Paris, whither he 
 has removed the seat of government from Soissons. Here 
 he advises with them on the best means of extirpation 
 of this lamentable heresy from the territory of Gaul. He 
 has a word for both. He says : "It grieves me that 
 the A Hans possess as yet the fairest lands of Gaul. Let 
 us inarch against them with the aid of God, and, having 
 punished the heretics, we will possess and divide their 
 lands !" 
 
 His warriors all fall in with this disinterested plan, and
 
 102 GEOEGE ELIOT'S POETEY, AND OTHEB STUDIES. 
 
 swear that until the Arians are punished their beards shall 
 remain uncut ! * 
 
 When the fires of fanaticism are once kindled every cir 
 cumstance adds fuel to the flames. The Crusaders set forth 
 amid a shower of auspicious portents ; their journey to the 
 battle-field is one series of miraculous omens. Their route 
 is indicated by a meteor ; the unknown fording-place of a 
 river by the passage through before them of a white hart of 
 supernatural beauty. Alaric II. and his Visigothic hosts 
 are paralyzed with the rumors which precede the advent of 
 the enemy. Under these circumstances the army of Clovis 
 closes in around them and reduces them to speedy submis 
 sion. They fly, and Clovis pursues them ; until they dis 
 appear behind the Pyrenees, he gives no quarter. Thus 
 ends the Visigothic supremacy in Gaul. Thus are the 
 hated heretics punished and their fair lands possessed. 
 
 This third great battle on the field of Poitiers, in the 
 year 507, consummated substantially the Frankish conquest 
 of Gaul. And with this ends our concern in the career of 
 Clovis. Of his treaty with the little free Armorica ; of his 
 contests, finally ending in victory, with the more obstinate 
 and troublesome Burgundy ; of his indiscriminate fling 
 ing hither and yon among his too presuming kindred and 
 dukes of the formidable Francesco,, by way of filling up 
 his time, we have naught to say. All these things hap- 
 
 * Clotilda, the Christian wife, stands by and counsels her lord to 
 promise God a monastery after the accomplishment of this pious pur 
 pose, and Clovis, filled with devotion, seizes his favorite battle-axe 
 (which, after the manner of the swords of heroes, has a name as individ 
 ual as its owner), and hurling it from him, exclaims, " There, where my 
 Francisca shall stick, will I build a house to God !"
 
 OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 103 
 
 pened, as lie who runs may read. Just one hundred years 
 after the sack of Rome by Alarie the Goth, in the year 
 510, Clovis received from the eastern empire the title 
 the ultimatum, it seems, of his ambition of Consul. 
 Gibbon says : " On the solemn day (of coronation) the 
 monarch of Gaul, placing a diadem upon his own head, 
 was invested, in the Church of St. Martin, with the pur 
 ple tunic and mantle. From thence he proceeded on 
 horseback to the Cathedral of Tours, and as he passed 
 through the streets scattered with his own hand a donation 
 of gold and silver to the joyful multitude, who incessantly 
 repeated their acclamations of Consul f and Augustus!" 
 
 Strange thing, this human nature, with its misapplied 
 magnanimity and irrelevant vanity ! Clovis, a year before 
 his death, with the territory of the Visigoths, the Burgun- 
 dians, the Romans in Gaul, and diverse barbarian tribes 
 beneath his feet, the crown of a new empire on his head, 
 looks not forward to the future of his kindred Franks, but 
 backward to the past of his alien Romans. The name, the 
 fame, the future grandeur of the nebulous new empire does 
 not compare with the faded grandeur of the starry old. 
 He would rather stand, dressed in a little brief authority 
 ghostly and fictitious though it be among the buried 
 CiEsars, than build for himself the solid fame of founder of 
 that empire which subdued the empire of the Caesars. 
 Sweeter to him the cry from pusillanimous Roman throats 
 of Consul ! Consul ! and Augustus ! though he knew it but 
 the forced utterance of cunning policy, than all the thun 
 derous vociferations of his lusty Franks of Clovis ! Clovis ! 
 Emperor of France 1 Truly, a lame and impotent con 
 clusion.
 
 104 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 The next year after his coronation as Consul, in the year 
 511 of the Christian era, having attained the age of only 
 forty-five years, after a reign of thirty years, Clovis died. 
 
 And here we part company with the founder of the French 
 Empire. Our knowledge of him as an individual is too 
 limited to justify a discussion of his character. We leave him 
 as we find him, unequivocally a conqueror, " cast," as Hal- 
 lam says, " in the true mould of conquerors, and may justly 
 be counted among the first of his class both for the splen 
 dor and the guiltiness of his ambition." He is conspicuous 
 only as the figure which emerges from the chaotic politics 
 of that ruinous epoch, assuming the role of Founder of the 
 New State. In this character his main equipment is that 
 of his battle-axe. We discern in him little of constructive 
 genius to mould the state after he has founded it. 
 
 We cannot depart from this vestibule of mediaeval time 
 without a glance at another figure, whose name we have 
 already mentioned a figure most independent and conspic 
 uous, and at this moment of world-history most significant of 
 the old, as is that of Clovis of the new. We must turn to 
 that red sky of Rome, if we would look on him, for he 
 stands bathed in its last glow Boethius ! last Roman worthy 
 to hold rank with Cato and with Cicero. Yet not only 
 by that departing ray of Rome is he conspicuous to our 
 eyes. He shines with light self-centred that diamond- 
 shine which issues from the fiery particle within, 
 
 " The light that never was on land or sea, 
 The consecration and the poet's dream," 
 
 that ray which makes him common to all climes and times, 
 an immortal citizen in the commonwealth of genius and of
 
 OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 105 
 
 faith. There is little in the personality of Clovis to interest 
 us. He has no magnetism save that which the iron of his 
 battle-axe may lend. But the tender gaze of all genera 
 tions is fixed with loyal love on the figure of Boethius. 
 We can never learn enough about him. No other could be 
 contrived to oppose to the figure of Clovis which should 
 more vividly discover the contrast of forces which contend 
 for mastery in the conflict of the ages, and none more 
 nakedly representative of the forces at work in this mingling 
 of the old with the new at this chaotic period. 
 
 Clovis stands to us as representative of the red young 
 blood, the cordy young muscle that must vitalize the 
 shrunken veins of time and nerve the arm of humanity for 
 the work of construction of new political empire in the 
 state that is to be. The lusty young Frank has little of 
 equipment nor needs he more for the task that is set 
 him, than that same bright battle-axe along whose whetted 
 edge we see red blood-drops globing. He stands all uncon 
 scious that in the mirror of one face are seen the shades of 
 all Rome's Caesars in their purple, and in the mirror of its 
 opposite face are seen the forecast images of the Louis and 
 the Napoleons, the Richelieus and the Bismarcks the 
 shadows cast before of coming events and coming men I 
 Boethius stands to us as a parting summary of all that was 
 best of Rome as senator, as patrician, as poet, as philoso 
 pher. When Clovis was crowned Consul at Tours, Boethius 
 was already Consul in the court of Theodoric at Rome, and 
 prmceps senatus. But too true a Roman to wear Roman 
 honors in a Gothic court, he was soon found guilty of Roman 
 patriotism i.e.^ of Gothic treason and. the court was ex- 
 changed for a dungeon. But we bless the dungeon of Boe-
 
 106 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 thius as we bless the cell of Bunyan. For from it came 
 that golden volume which poured enduring consolation into 
 all those ages. Beloved of Alfred, beloved of Charlemagne, 
 beloved of Dante, called, during those dark, laboring ages 
 the Augustine of philosophy, Boethius comes down to us the 
 noblest Roman of them all, since from those prison walls 
 could issue strains like this: "Nobility is in no other 
 respect good than as it imposes an obligation upon its pos 
 sessors not to degenerate from the merit of their ancestors ! 
 If you are not therefore esteemed illustrious from your 
 own worth, you can derive no real splendor from the merits 
 of others." There speaks the nobleman, whether sixth 
 century patrician, in whose veins coursed the purplest blood 
 of Rome's most noble families, or nineteenth century Dem 
 ocrat a grand old gardener at the gate, 
 
 "... too proud to care from whence he came !" 
 
 Unconsciously this great soul sounds the trumpet notes 
 of the truth which in all those slow, sad ages struggled to 
 be heard above the clash and discord, and which now rings 
 joy-bells in our glorious nineteenth century ; but he, its 
 noble voicer, in that darkest time heard but the tolling of 
 death -knells, and looked sadly backward to Rome's free- 
 dom, and counted 
 
 " Sorrow's crown of sorrow 
 In remembering happier things." 
 
 "We may fancy the stern face of the passionless Genius of 
 History, as she stands upon some Alpine summit between 
 France and Italy, at the close of this fifth century, to relax 
 a little, half in pity, half in mirth, at the parody of great-
 
 OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 107 
 
 ness which her puppets play. Yet, as she gazes on the 
 perfect plan which through all these puppet-plays goes 
 on to its supreme fulfilment, we may behold a gleam of 
 fathomless content, restored to her countenance, and may 
 perhaps catch the words of that epilogue which, after the 
 play is over, she lingers to say. 
 
 With one hand to the south, she exclaims : " Go ! thou 
 imperial Rome ; take thou henceforth thy place among the 
 deeds which have been done. Die, as such deeds must die. 
 Imperishable fact among the facts of history, recede now 
 into the past, thy future dwelling-place ! I would thou 
 could'st go queenly, as thou cam'st and long hast stood, 
 the purple trailing royally and sweeping past with tragic 
 funereal mien. But since the comedy must come, and then 
 the farce, make now an end !. Thy errand with the world 
 is done. The time was set, and now the hour strikes. 
 Farewell, thou glorious Rome ! Thy glories cover well 
 thy guilt ; thy graces cover well thy shame. The world has 
 gained from thee its priceless gains, its luminous examples, 
 its enduring warnings. Fare thee well !" 
 
 And with a right hand to the north, she says : "Wel 
 come, thou infant France, born from the death of Rome ! 
 Two hours are set for thee, as for all things human ; the 
 first strikes now. That other hour is set, and it will come. 
 'Twixt that and this lies all thy errand with the waiting 
 world. For those that pass away I have a smile ; for those 
 that come, a tear. And over thee, yet in thy swaddling- 
 clothes, while 1 discern the life that is to be, I bend, and 
 with a solitary tear baptize thee France /"
 
 Charlemagne.
 
 CHARLEMAGNE. 
 
 AT the conclusion of the eighth century we find upon 
 the throne of Clovis a man, son of an usurper, called by his 
 kindred subjects Karl, by his alien subjects Carolus ; 
 endowed by nature with superb physical gifts, with a clear 
 and curious intellect, a swift, inexorable will, a fervent 
 heart, and a religious spirit ; further furnished by inherit 
 ance with the dominant empire of the world, and with 
 the following of his father's veteran armies, while the 
 Genius of Conquest beckons on this side and on that. Thus 
 the facts of history set forth, in the eighth century, 
 this monarch Charlemagne. At the conclusion of the 
 Middle Ages we behold this same Karl standing in a radiant 
 flood of fiction, with the aspect of a demi-god ! 
 
 Poetry has been defined as the highest truth, but the 
 poets have done little for history. If the singers had been 
 content to let Arthur alone, we might now have had a his 
 tory of him. Poets rush in where historians fear to tread ; 
 after idyls, no history ! 
 
 In the latter half of the Middle Ages the poets, in the 
 dearth of heroes, got hold of Charlemagne, and made him 
 realize to them their ideal man. The monks got hold of 
 Charlemagne, and made him realize to them their ideal 
 saint. The knights got hold of Charlemagne, and made 
 him realize to them their ideal chevalier ; and so it came
 
 112 GEORGE E-LIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 about that Charlemagne stood as a name for everything 
 which in those ages could be conceived the best in human- 
 ity summing up in one every possible grace and gift of 
 monarch and man, hero and saint realizing to each ideal 
 perfection ! But the idealized, of nations as of individuals, 
 are subject to the same law which governs the idealizer, the 
 law of reaction ; and to this rule, we fear, there are no 
 exceptions. With the early sunbeams of the Renaissance 
 the lovely legend-mists which had hung around the form of 
 Charlemagne were, not indeed dispelled, but cut, and 
 when the fresh breeze of advancing day set in were lifted 
 for the image. And now, in the high noon of our scientific 
 century, but little enchantment remains to the picture, save 
 that which distance always lends. The kaiser of the eighth 
 century unconsciously set the fashion for his own treatment 
 in the nineteenth, when he fell upon the Irmensul of the 
 Saxons, and, razing the temple, stripped the idol of its gold 
 and gems, and bore it, naked and unadorned, to the monas 
 tery which was at once the treasury and the library of the 
 Middle Ages. Disillusioned is this man to us, but not yet 
 destroyed. There are verities in this mass of fiction which 
 may be eliminated. 
 
 There was a man named Eginhardus, and he was secre 
 tary to the Kaiser Karl. The secretary wrote the memoirs 
 of his monarch, and, making due allowance for the par 
 tiality of friend, or devotion of subject, or vanity of biogra 
 pher, we have left a personal history so simple and direct 
 that it commands our credence. From this mainly, with 
 a few other ancient chronicles and comments, rather than 
 from any modern researches, do we make some brief sketch 
 of this luminous figure in mediaeval history.
 
 CHABLEMAGNE. 113 
 
 I. 
 
 First let us look at this man of whom we propose to 
 speak. And here we will let Eginhardus speak for us. 
 Behold, first, his frontispiece photograph. A figure whose 
 height was seven times the length of his foot ; whose 
 heavy body was well supported by massive limbs ; a round 
 head, hair beautiful to look upon, a nose of more than 
 middle size, enormous eyes, large and lively, writes the 
 secretary (" with the seeming of a lion's, and shining like 
 carbuncles," adds a curt old chronicle), a countenance joyful 
 and vivacious, sitting and standing like a king, walking 
 with a firm, quick step ; a man of splendid presence > ac 
 cording to all accounts. An old song thus puts it, in obso 
 lete German : 
 
 " Karl war den Bosenglich 1" 
 * * * * 
 
 And sums up as follows : 
 
 " Ich waiz wol das von wibe 
 Nie wart, noch nimmer werden sol 
 Ein man so maunig tugend vol." 
 
 (" Karl was like a rose !" 
 
 ****** 
 
 *' I well know that to women 
 So sweet a hero-man 
 Ne'er lived, nor ever can I") 
 
 Let now this figure stand before you clad, as Egin 
 hardus dresses him, in his short linen drawers and his long 
 linen drawers ; in his linen waistcoat, orer which is drawii
 
 114: GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 a coat trimmed with fur ; throw upon his herculean shoul 
 ders a Venetian mantle ; hang at his side his good and well- 
 beloved sword Joyeuse ; place his right hand upon its golden 
 hilt et voila ! the Kaiser Karl in his every-day clothes. 
 For the secretary gives us to understand he is not in 
 the least " dressed up. " He has line clothes, however ; but 
 he keeps them like the careful man he is, bringing them 
 forth when he goes visiting to Rome, or something of that 
 sort. Then he shines from diademed head to jewelled foot 
 with all the splendor heart could wish. Mostly French 
 splendor, too, for Karl was a clear Frenchman, despising 
 all alien finery, and never would he adopt a foreign fash 
 ion. A man of superb health which no bad habits under 
 mined, we are assured. He despised drunkenness, though 
 not an abstainer (like Charles XII. of Sweden), but moder 
 ate in his drinks. In eating he was not so runs on the 
 secretary often complaining that his stomach was griev 
 ously empty a vacuum which his nature abhorred, it 
 would seem, for the old chronicle above quoted relates that 
 at one meal he would eat "a goose, two fowls, a quarter of 
 mutton," etc., ad lib. ! 
 
 Not much of a society man, in the modern French line, 
 the secretary lets us know, but very much of a family 
 man, with very much of a family. I count up nine 
 (" wives," Hallam calls them !) successive or contemporary 
 proprietors of the royal heart, which is three more than 
 divided the affections of our amorous English Harry. In 
 deed, Karl, no more than Henry, was a polygamist, and 
 always piously interred the former incumbent of the royal 
 affections before wedding the next, unless, indeed, she were 
 unreasonably contumacious about dying, in which case a
 
 CHARLEMAGNE. 115 
 
 divorce could be managed, with quite the modern improve 
 ments. Only one wife as I read the secretary was 
 divorced, and that his first, whom he married to please his 
 mother ; as a matter of course not, therefore, pleasing him 
 self. In every succeeding case death divorced him, leaving 
 him not, wholly to mourn as. those without hope. Concern 
 ing the remarkable mortality of these eight successive 
 Fatimas we have no comments from the chronicler. 
 
 Karl's children were numerous and very dear to their 
 father. lie gave them all the advantages for learning 
 which he himself so diligently improved, making no differ 
 ence here, it would seem, between the sons and daughters. 
 In appointing their after occupations, however, he was 
 orthodox. The boys were duly put on horseback, armed 
 with gun and sword, and sent to battle-field and forest for 
 such game as either could afford. The daughters were 
 duly seated at the wheel, and taught to weave what they 
 spun, into woollen and linen cloths, " that they might not 
 grow up in hateful idleness." For both boys and girls, his 
 children, Karl had so great affection that he never sat at 
 table without them, when at home, and when he took a 
 journey they accompanied him. 
 
 A unique procession that ! Karl, the kaiser, in his 
 knickerbockers and Venetian mantle, his trusty Joyeuse by 
 his side, upon his head his kingly helmet, seated high up 
 in his cumbrous chariot. His numerous sons, an ample 
 body-guard, cantering on either side ; the present kaisenn 
 and the daughters, up to date, following hard after on their 
 ambling pads. Quite a mediaeval Vicar of Waketield and 
 his family ! 
 
 Eginhardus lived evidently before the times when no
 
 116 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 man is a hero to his valet. Napoleon would liave turned 
 in bis sarcophagus, if not broken sheer through and stood 
 up, cocked hat and all, at being portrayed, as is Charle 
 magne, to posterity the comfortable old gentleman, " eat 
 ing a little fruit after dinner when the days were warm, 
 drinking once, and then laying off his clothes and re 
 posing himself for two or three hours," of a summer 
 afternoon ! The grand monargne submitted to the toilette 
 before a crowd of courtiers who came to " assist" at the 
 ceremony of encasing the languid limbs of his most Chris 
 tian majesty in silks and laces. Imagine Louis XIV. 
 calmly pulling on his own stout shoes and stockings, and 
 donning linen drawers and waistcoat ! Yet this was the 
 habit of Karl, while listening to the grievances and com 
 plaints from crowds of lobbyists, and settling affairs with 
 the same judicial dignity, we are assured, as if he were 
 seated in the Hall of Justice. 
 
 A very vigilant man, this same napping old gentleman. 
 All eyes and feet to his adversaries. The Saxon poets sur- 
 named him Velox Karl the Swift. Indeed, his velocity 
 was almost a superstition with his foes ; before they 
 dreamed he could be near he was confronting them, and 
 their paralysis of astonishment made them the easier his 
 victims. 
 
 As to brains, Karl was extremely clever, according to all 
 accounts, learning what there was to learn with the greatest 
 diligence and curiosity'. Languages were the principal 
 acquirement in those days, the mixed condition of society 
 making necessary an acquisition of spoken tongues. The 
 secretary tells us that his master was fluent in Latin as 
 in his own tongue, proficient in Greek also. He also paid
 
 CHARLEMAGNE. 117 
 
 much attention to grammar and to rhetoric. As to his 
 chirography, the scholars have quarrelled virtuously over 
 the question Could Charlemagne write ? For in those 
 days a man might read and converse in Latin and Greek 
 and not be able to write his own name. As to the case of 
 Charlemagne, we are content to take the word of the secre 
 tary for it that Karl did practise penmanship, but began 
 so late in life that he never arrived at much " enjoyment" 
 in the art. At any rate, he made his mark, and that is 
 more than most writers do. A very religious man was 
 Karl, and a good Churchman of the battle-axe sort, with no 
 special ism. A devout worshipper, and. a great stickler for 
 etiquette and propriety in church. Church music was a 
 hobby, and it chimes well with the make-up of this joy 
 ous, hearty monarch that he should be a lusty singer, as 
 was Luther. Truly devout indeed seems Karl, profiting by 
 as well as profiting his church. 
 
 But we have indulged the secretary long enough in his 
 fond personalities. We must turn now from the man to 
 the monarch and the conqueror ; and here our pleasant and 
 affectionate secretary's garrulous record will do us little 
 service. 
 
 II. 
 
 Let us look, then, in our study of Charlemagne, away 
 from the man to his career. If Karl was a man of quali 
 ties, he was also a man of deeds. 
 
 The first deed which belongs to the ages is, as a mat 
 ter of course with so thorough a man, the consolidation
 
 118 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 of his own kingdom. Two things stood in Charlemagne's 
 way at his accession to the throne, or, rather, two exist 
 ences liis brother Carloman and the dukes of Aquitaine. 
 
 Carloman was, by inheritance, ruler over half the king 
 dom. Pepin followed the singular precedent of the Mero 
 vingian monarchs, and at his death divided his kingdom 
 between his two sons. Here, then, at the start was a huge 
 something for Karl to manage, and unless he had been 
 joined by an invincible ally he might have found it the 
 most serious thing in the whole long list of his manage 
 ments, and, possibly, unmanageable. Carloman might 
 have had as strong a fancy for a whole loaf as Carolus, 
 and possibly Pepin's grit may have been as equally di 
 vided between his sons as was his kingdom. Had Carlo 
 man lived ! But he did not live ; or, at least, he disap 
 peared. The critics peep and mutter here, and some of 
 them notably Voltaire, that enfant terrible to the heroes 
 find here a tidbit. In fact, one could wish the taking off 
 of Carloman had been a matter less mysterious. But, in 
 the absence of facts, there is room for the charity of the 
 charitable as well as the suspicions of the suspicious, and we 
 are not bound to stain the princely hand of Karl with the 
 "eldest, primal curse," nor to hang over the history of 
 infant France the cloud of fratricidal guilt, with which 
 tradition has inextricably invested embryo Rome. The 
 gist of it, to us, is that Carloman died, and his heirs disap 
 peared, and that four years after his succession to half a 
 throne Carolus was " elected " emperor of integral France. 
 For Aquitaine proved not so delicate a difficulty. Its plot 
 ting dukes, representatives of the dethroned dynasty, were 
 silenced summarily. An intermittent silence, it is true,
 
 CHARLEMAGNE. 119 
 
 for there was never lacking under the mane of this mettle 
 some Carlovingian charger the Merovingian gad-fly with 
 its tormenting sting ; but if too small a matter to he cured, 
 it could be endured, like any other irritation. So Carolus 
 was "elected" over the whole of the kingdom. Nothing 
 succeeds like success, and on this threshold of the Middle 
 Ages it is no time to make much sacrifice of might to 
 right. Voltaire says: "The fame of Charlemagne is one 
 of the most eminent proofs of how the fortunate result of 
 an unrighteous deed justifies and makes it honorable. His 
 father was a rebel, himself an usurper. " 
 
 The next pre-eminent deed of Karl's was his magnifi 
 cent work in Italy. The Lombards teased the popes and 
 menaced Home, and so the Yicar of Christ came begging 
 to Karl, as before he had done to Pepin for popes begged 
 illustriously in those days, and had not yet waxed fat 
 enough to kick at kings. Charlemagne reversed the prov 
 erb, and perceived " God's extremity to be man's oppor 
 tunity." He summoned his valiant Franks, leading them 
 up the terrible Alps and down again on the other side with 
 a rapidity which the Lombards could not credit, until sur 
 prised at Verona. They are beaten back to Pa via, capt 
 ured, and Pavia taken ; and the plunder persons and 
 pelf Carolus, in magnificent wise, turns over to the 
 Pope as a trifling token of affection. This is Pope Adrian, 
 the Jonathan of this kingly David, and Charlemagne pays 
 him now a visit, in state, between the battles, by way of a 
 pleasure trip. First visit of the Kaiser Karl to Rome, but 
 not his last. 
 
 A third notable deed is wrought in Spain, and this time 
 it is a Moslem emir, in place of Christian pope, whose
 
 120 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHEK. STUDIES. 
 
 dilemma made Karl's excuse for new conquests. To avenge 
 his wrongs, Karl must fight over the same ground his grand- 
 sire fought. For it seems Charles Martel did not annihilate 
 
 o 
 
 the Saracens. Mahometans do not die easy, even when 
 very " sick," as we of to-day have found. Beaten back by 
 Karl Martel, they still stand massed together to receive the 
 grandson in his day. 
 
 The battle of Tours was fought one hundred years after 
 the death of Mahomet. The Moslems who met Charle 
 magne and routed Roland on the field of Roncesvalles might 
 themselves have heard from their grandsires the story of 
 their encounter with his grandsire, and, in turn, some 
 Moorish apostate might yet be living to tell of his grand- 
 sire's contact with contemporaries of the great Prophet 
 himself. The Mahbmetan faith was yet young and lusty, 
 and its adherents no mean antagonists. 
 
 With his back turned to Italy sideways a little, perhaps, 
 that one eye might retain some scrutiny over the nominal 
 gift of his Italian conquest to his mitred friend Adrian 
 thither hies Karl to settle this internal dissension among the 
 Saracens. Short and sharp the conflict, and Karl comes 
 back covered with the glory of a magnanimous interference, 
 and not lacking that of conquest as well, his kingdom being 
 the larger by that tract of land adjacent to his own terri 
 tory called the Spanish March. As he flies back to the east 
 to meet the Saxons, who in their ponderous way are making 
 good the opportunity of his absence from home, he leaves 
 part of his forces in the lurch. This detachment being caught 
 by enemies in, to them, unfamiliar mountain passes, is easily 
 subdued despite the magic horn of the too heroic Roland, 
 who here spills out his blue blood in vain, and thereby
 
 CHARLEMAGNE. 121 
 
 creates a perennial fount of inspiration at which the poeta 
 and romancers of the Middle Ages fill their cups. 
 
 And now to the east and that unknown north toward 
 which Karl ever looked with longing eyes. The languid 
 south, the insignificant west, have small charms for his 
 large ambition. Those dark German forests, filled with 
 strange barbarian foes, worshipping in weird temples mar 
 vellous idols those famed Northmen, already vikings, 
 mariners, pirates they are " foemen worthy of his steel." 
 The Saxons proved so, for it took thirty odd years to con 
 quer them. Indomitable ones ! pouring out of their black 
 forests fresh supplies to fill in the broken lines at the 
 frontiers ; fighting to the death ; beaten back into the 
 forests. " Conquered," say Karl and his Franks, flying 
 south to the Lombards or west to Aquitaine, to stop 
 some revolt broken out there. " Not so," says the Saxon 
 Phoenix, rising from its ashes as soon as the conqueror's 
 back is turned, boldly crossing the frontier, savagely 
 plundering and harassing by way of filling up the in 
 terval. And so it goes between the Franks and the Saxons 
 for thirty years, until the temple razed, the Irminsul 
 taken, four thousand Saxons butchered like sheep in a pen 
 in one day by way of example might makes the right, and 
 the Saxons surrender. These things put age and discretion 
 into even barbarian hearts. What can they do else ? 
 Voltaire says : " Their gods were destroyed, their priests 
 murdered amid the ruins of their idols. The unhappy 
 people were converted with sabre cuts, and lo ! they become 
 Christians and slaves !' ' As to the first item in Voltaire's 
 sarcastic conclusion we know something about that sort of 
 Christianity, and the less said of it the better. They were
 
 122 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 baptized, these Saxons, even "Witikind himself their sec 
 ond Arminius, according to Hallam laying down his arms 
 and suffering the rite. . But we of to-day know how much 
 these Saxons became slaves. We know how they spilled 
 over, in that their first panic, by no means wholly into 
 France ; how they fled north to become vikings and 
 pirates ; how they fled west across the water, pushing the 
 Britons aside, mixing with the ^Normans, to make the Eng 
 lish of to-day. But doubtless the Kaiser Karl thought he 
 had absorbed the barbarous Saxon into Christian Frank for 
 ever, setting the fashion for those unsuspected Saxons of 
 to-day who follow so religiously his pious policy. 
 
 The Saxons being disposed of, the dark and terrible 
 Huns come next, remnants of Attila's Avars, swarming 
 in from the east, centuries before. Into their dense jungles 
 must this restless monarch next plunge, and with his 
 usual fortune. Their settlements called rings, circular 
 inclosures of wooden buildings are invaded and destroyed. 
 And, true to his gospel, Karl gives them peace and good 
 will by the sacrifice of their idols and temples, and the sub 
 stitution of his own. Their national idol was a naked sword, 
 symbolic of their deity, the sword-god ; this these terrible 
 Huns of Attila, now cowed and craven, must break in the 
 presence of their conqueror, and they must come thereafter 
 to the holy baptism of the Christians ! 
 
 Surely a wonderful vitality somewhere is in this baptism ! 
 Three centuries before, it was a sight to remember when 
 Clovis, with his Franks, bowed in the Cathedral of Rheims 
 before the cross they had but lately burnt, and received the 
 name of Christian. Then we beheld infant France before 
 its sponsor, Rome. Now here stands our Christian Karl,
 
 CHARLEMAGNE. 123 
 
 himself sponsor to this Saxon leader Witikind, signing 
 these fair-haired Saxons these dark-browed Huns with 
 the sign of the cross, dropping upon each Christian bap 
 tism ! 
 
 We have noticed that this great Karl ran down to Rome 
 to visit his friend Hadrian, while his Franks were stand 
 ing with drawn swords before Pavia. And Karl got quite 
 in the way of running to Home, until finally he made 
 a most notable visit there, which must be enrolled also 
 among his notable deeds ; for premeditated deed undoubt 
 edly it was of Karl's, though coming about apparently as 
 the pleasantest surprise. In the year 800 this visit took 
 place. Four odd centuries since the sack of Rome by 
 Alaric the Goth. Three odd centuries since Clovis set up 
 the new Empire of France, and swelled with exultation 
 over Roman plaudits in the streets of Tours. Christmas 
 day in the year 800 was a day momentous to the ages ; a day 
 of wedding and of funeral wedding of one named Italy 
 to one called France ; burial of one named Rome, finally 
 and forever. And priest for both is Charlemagne, his 
 head anointed with the royal unction, his person clad in 
 the imperial purple, while Leo crowns, and all the Romans 
 shout, " Long life to Charles ! Most pious Augustus 1 
 crowned, by the grace of God, the great and pacific Em 
 peror of the Romans !" 
 
 This was one of the deeds of Karl, and rather the most 
 notable thing a man has achieved or can achieve ; enough 
 to raise the ghost of Julius Caesar from the purple dust it 
 lay in. For in this ceremony the seal was set upon the 
 political power of Rome. The old order vanished and 
 gave place to new. Henceforth in place of Caesars, popes
 
 124 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETJBY, AND OTHEB STUDIES. 
 
 shall represent the Deity, and priests crowd out patricians. 
 Here, then, is Carol us Magnus, in the year 800 of out 
 Lord, Emperor of France, Germany, Italy, and Hungary 
 and all this is France /made from a strip of Rhine ri ver 
 bank and five thousand barbarians led by Clovis into Gaul, 
 in the fifth century of our era ; there to stop and rest three 
 hundred years : then to swell and swiftly break over every 
 boundary on east, and west, and north, and south, because of 
 Karl, the son of the mayor, a man too big for Gaul ; and so to 
 grow into that tremendous kingdom which included what 
 to-day is Prussia, save a bit east of the Vistula, perhaps ; 
 Austria this western side the Danube ; and all between this 
 river line and the Ebro. 
 
 " No Pyrenees" then, O grand monarque, though your 
 grandson failed to hew them down ! No Rhine river 
 then, O Kaiser Wilhelm, though your Prussia lies one 
 side to-day ! That was a kingdom worth Napoleon's 
 dreams. France ! the centre of the world, the focus of 
 all brightness in those dusky times of the west. Rome 
 came to school to Paris then, and even haughty literary 
 Bagdad acknowledged its acquaintance. Constantinople, 
 too, shook hands with Karl, but warily, and taught a sig 
 nificant motto to its people, which ran thus : u Be friends 
 with the Franks, but be not neighbors !" 
 
 III. 
 
 "We have, by this time, a hint of what Karl did in the 
 line of conquest. But other deeds remain whose color 
 is not red. Go to the secretary and hear him tell of
 
 CHARLEMAGNE. 125 
 
 Karl 'a minsters, and his monasteries, and his schools ; of 
 the masters he imported. Look at his laws, those famous 
 Capitularies. Of them Montesquieu says, in his "Esprit 
 des Lois :" "In Charlemagne's laws we see a vision which 
 commands the view of all, and a wisdom which provides 
 for all. . . . The father of a family could learn from him 
 rules for the regulation of his household. . . . He arranged 
 for the sale of the eggs from his farm the same prince 
 who divided among his people the incalculable treasure of 
 the Huns who had plundered the world." 
 
 Of Charlemagne's learning we have spoken. Its limit 
 seems to have been in the exhaustion of means of learning, 
 and not at all in himself. His worshippers claim for him 
 varied and voluminous authorship as well. Of this we have 
 our doubts, though why Karl should not have " written" 
 as well as wrought, we do not know. He was not the man 
 to be behind the dead Caesar, whose place he filled. If he 
 wrote the epitaph upon Adrian's tomb he could certainly 
 have written well, if at all. Wherever the merit of its liter 
 ary composition lies, it is certain the sentiment it embodies 
 was, as Gibbon observes, due the warm-hearted monarch. 
 Here is a sample, which I translate from a German copy 
 Charlemagne's epitaph on the tomb of Adrian : 
 
 " Here I, Karl, engrave, while tears are swiftly thronging, 
 
 Thy epitaph, O sweetest heart, father for whom I weep ! 
 Linger in my thought, O friend, while memory quiets longing ! 
 Christ, the King of Heaven, henceforth forever thee shall keep. 
 * * * # * 
 
 *" Here onr names united shall find no separation. 
 
 Karol, King Hadrianus, Pope but briefly called to part I 
 Ye who weeping look hereon, offer this supplication, 
 
 ' Merciful God, receive these two to Thine all-healing Heart 1 ' "
 
 126 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 Well, Carolus Magnus, Emperor of Franks and Romans, 
 conqueror of Spain, Saxony, Hungary, Lombardy, etc., 
 improver of the empire, founder of literature, architecture, 
 science in Europe of the Middle Ages, finally encountered 
 a greater king than himself, and with little parley surren 
 dered unconditionally. He died, and his body was laid in 
 one of his famous minsters, and over his tomb was built 
 an arch upon which his likeness and an inscription were 
 engraved. The inscription certifies : " Here lies the body 
 of Karl, the great and right worthy emperor, the illustrious 
 improver of the empire, who reigned forty-seven years 
 long," etc. Then the secretary goes on naively to tell of 
 the wonders which ensued. For three years after Karl's 
 death there were marvellous signs in the heavens. For a 
 long time there was a black spot upon the sun. All this 
 is recorded with the same simplicity which characterizes 
 the entire biography. No doubt it is fitting that the order 
 of nature should be disturbed when Le Roi est mart ! 
 
 It is dear to the historical heart to talk of the hour and 
 the man, as making the most marvellous connection in the 
 most marvellous manner. As if the hour was ever wanting 
 to the man, or the man to the hour ! 
 
 The hour had struck for Charlemagne, and Charlemagne 
 appeared appeared to do the duty of the hour, to weld 
 out of conflicting races the integral nation, which should be 
 the Joshua of the new civilization. On the south lay 
 Rome, sick unto death, yet grasping, with what grasp re 
 mained to that moribund old age, for the empire. The 
 world had too long obeyed her mandates to easily shake off 
 the habit of obedience, and an echo of other days still whis 
 pered in her feebly-voiced exactions. The divine right of
 
 CHARLEMAGNE. 127 
 
 
 
 Rome had grown to be a superstition with the world, and 
 'it needed a nerveful young master to rouse it from such a 
 nightmare. On the west stood Spain, with her Saracens 
 massed against Gibraltar, beaten back but not destroyed by 
 the hammer of the first Karl, waiting, watching their chance 
 to pounce upon these fair Franks, to transform monasteries 
 into mosques, and chain the Koran to the altar where the 
 Bible lay. 
 
 On the east the black fojests cast shadows perilous to the 
 empire of Clovis. Swarthy savages, thicker than the forest 
 leaves, watched in their lair the moment of the spring, 
 when they might offer to their sword-god the sweet sacri 
 fice of Frankish blood. Had that moment come ere Karl 
 came to match it, the new civilization must have been 
 retarded by another Middle Ages. Swarming over on all 
 sides, they would have pushed east and west, annihilating, 
 like the deluge, every former thing. 
 
 Across the forests shone the diadem of Constantinople. 
 Corrupted with all manner of alien blood, the Eastern 
 Empire had small virtue to keep sweet the world. And 
 from the sunrise land the domes of Bagdad sent a men 
 acing gleam. Plenty of claimants for the place of Rome 
 were watching and planning for their hour. Had now the 
 Carlo vingian first monarch been such as was the Merovin 
 gian last had a weak and silly Childeric arisen to fill the 
 place of Pepin Bref, it needs no prophet's eye to discern 
 what must have been ; with warring competitors within 
 and crowding combatants without, France must have yielded 
 to their combined blows and sunk beneath them. And 
 what then ? 
 
 The seers must tell what then ; but it needs no seer to
 
 128 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 tell what not then. Not in this ninth century of our Chris 
 tian era, Lombard y alchemized into Italy and put beneath 
 the feet of a strong master, in whose veins flowed neither 
 the degenerate blood of Greece nor the diseased blood of 
 Rome ; not Csesar stamped out of the politics of the world ; 
 Mahomet turned faceward to Bagdad ; Saxon exiled from 
 the mainland and sent flying across the British Channel, and 
 there, wedding with his conquerors, in due time producing 
 the English of to-day ; not Hun and Avar put in appren 
 ticeship to the civilizer. All this, but for the monarch in 
 whom the man met and matched the hour, could not 
 have been. Setting aside all romance of the Kaiser Karl, 
 all story of paladins, Ogier or Roland, eschewing all lovely 
 legend, we may indorse, in sober light of historic verity, 
 what La Motte Fouque says of Charlemagne : " In him 
 was new Europe for the first time one. . . . He is the 
 father and creator of the German era !" 
 
 "We have taken a far from comprehensive view of the 
 life, private and public, of one of the most conspicuous 
 figures in human history. Of the times upon -which this 
 life fell we have given but a hint. Curiosity concerning 
 Charlemagne will never die out, and in proportion as his 
 true figure emerges from the mass of exaggerating fiction 
 and idealization which has surrounded it, it will attract a 
 deeper and more genuine interest. Around him centres 
 whatever is vital or worthy in the darkest and most 
 chaotic epoch of modern times, and in him is illustrated, as 
 perhaps in no other individual man, gigantic opportunity 
 meeting gigantic ability to mould the character of his own 
 and succeeding ages. 
 
 The author of " Undine," whose skill has found no worthy
 
 CHARLEMAGNE. 129 
 
 compeer in certain delicate analytics, save Hawthorne, says 
 again : " Whoever comes to compare Karl with any other 
 monarch must not forget that outer deeds and their conse 
 quences do not reveal the inner being nor the essence of 
 individuality." This is true only because of the limitations 
 of the observer, and not because the phenomena of deed 
 and life, as revealed by authentic history, could not show, 
 were the observer sufficiently skilled and sensitive, the 
 source of both, and the essence of character. 
 
 For my own part, I perceive Charlemagne to be a man 
 of genius, whose necessity it was to meddle with all things 
 at hand, and to bring to hand things remote, and whose 
 good gift it was to have such a position in the world as gave 
 to this necessity the largest scope. It is good to look upon 
 this joyous, mighty man ; good to view his life ; good to 
 see him, struck with dealli, make the sign of the cross and 
 commend his spirit to his Lord ; good to mark the ripples 
 which his advent sent circling down the sea of time, and 
 which widen forevermore.
 
 THE MONASTERY.
 
 THE MONASTERY. 
 
 SOCIETY had two aristocracies in the Middle Ages : the 
 one of the 'State, the other of the Church. The former 
 took form and front in the institution of chivalry ; the latter 
 in that of the monastery. 
 
 The haughty chevalier, with lofty helmet and waving 
 plume, with broidered doublet and jewelled girdle, with 
 graceful cloak and burnished armor ; mounted upon his 
 plunging steed, richly trapped with costly harness, attended 
 by obsequious squire and servile suite here was our lord 
 of society, the bulwark and ornament of the State. 
 
 The humble monk, with bowed head enveloped in sombre 
 cowl, his scanty gown dyed and stiffened by reason of his 
 abstinence from the sinful luxury of ablution ; his body 
 girt with a heavy rope, by way of showing that the beast 
 was well in hand ; his flesh gashed with self-inflicted 
 wounds and creased with ponderous chains and iron collars, 
 to further signify its subjection ; his feet bare and bleeding 
 with the stones and briers of untrodden ways ; perched 
 upon some all but inaccessible rock, or buried in some cave 
 usurped from wild- beast owner, or wandering upon the 
 burning sands of some desert here was another and superior 
 lord of society, the bulwark and ornament of the Church. 
 To these monastic aristocrats even royalty itself bowed in 
 lowliest deference. Gibbon says : " Prosperity and peace
 
 134 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 introduced the distinction of the vulgar and ascetic Chris. 
 tian." 
 
 In the mediaeval estimate, the highest-born noble, so long 
 as he lived in the world and was engaged in its affairs, was 
 the inferior of the monk, who, however obscure of birth or 
 low in poverty, by virtue of his secession from the ranks 
 of humanity, and his renunciation of all human ties and 
 property, was a member of a superior aristocracy. The 
 monastery, with its primitive lowliness, reared a loftier head 
 than did the feudal castle. 
 
 I. 
 
 A body of men or women, never men and women, 
 congregated and segregated, bound together by voluntary 
 obedience to a set of rules involving renunciation of the 
 world, with all that intimates of sacrifice ; vowing to pov 
 erty and solitude their mortal allegiance ; subjecting them 
 selves to the direst extremities of exposure, hunger, and 
 fatigue ; inflicting upon themselves all but intolerable 
 torture to flesh and nerve ; seeking to expiate former utter 
 ance by present speechlessness, former action by present 
 lethargy ; striving toward actual paralysis of all faculties 
 which can connect the individual with the society ; a shadow 
 of a living being amid shadows this was monkhood. A 
 crowd of devotees, herded loosely but permanently together, 
 was the embryo monastery. 
 
 Antony of Egypt, in the third century, is doubtless the 
 founder of the Christian monastery. This man in early life 
 abandoned family and home, property and all social ties,
 
 THE MONASTERY. 135 
 
 and wandered away from the cities of the living into a city 
 of the dead, a region of tombs, a place of stone-covered 
 caves filled with bones and the dust of human skeletons. 
 In this sepulchral solitude he found a sphere congenial to 
 his penitential purpose, and here he served out his self- 
 appointed time of penance, wounding and torturing his 
 despised body that he might rescue his soul from its thral 
 dom. At the termination of this ascetic novitiate, he 
 struck into the wilderness, a three-days' journey, halting at 
 an isolated rock which seemed suitably remote and barren, 
 and this he chose for his mortal residence and place of 
 purgatory. But his solitude was destined to be broken. 
 There were other men in Egypt, in those days, who were 
 bewildered and in despair, in doubt of present and future, 
 ready to practise any device by which to lose the sense of 
 impending doom, to flee present persecution, to secure 
 future salvation ; multitudes then, as now, ready to follow 
 if not to lead. When, therefore, it was known that 
 Antony, the man, the neighbor, the Egyptian, had con 
 ceived such a plan, there were plenty to rush headlong in 
 his footsteps ; and Antony, from being the hermit of the 
 rock, became the abbot of the plain ; and the sands of that 
 Libyan desert, in the third century, became, before the 
 dawn of the Middle Ages, the arena of the first Christian 
 monastery, ruins of which, according to Gibbon, may be 
 seen to this day. 
 
 Antony lived one hundred and five years, and in that 
 centuried lifetime he saw, as it has been the lot of few 
 pioneers to see, his theory and practice propagated to a 
 wonderful extent. Pachoinius, his pupil and successor, 
 was superior over seven thousand monks. Athanasius
 
 136 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 visited Antony, caught his spirit, and carried the plan of 
 monastic life to yet imperial Rome, where it ran rapidly 
 the race of being " first endured, then pitied, then em 
 braced." Martin of Tours, the bishop and soldier of the 
 Franks, propagated the monastic institution in Gaul, and 
 two thousand monks followed his body to the tomb that 
 body which in dust and ashes was still so potent to work 
 miracles. Thence the fire leaped across the waters, and the 
 tiny island of lona, that Ultima Thule of the western world, 
 caught the holy flame, and reflected back to Cyprus in the 
 east an incendiary ray. Thus east and west, north and 
 south, the flames of monasticism flew. And at the thresh 
 old of the Middle Ages we find the ground farrowed and 
 sown with the seeds of that stupendous growth which, in 
 the shape of the monastery, was to ripen through the 
 season of a thousand years, tares and wheat, wheat and 
 tares, growing together to the harvest. 
 
 In the sixth century came Benedict the Italian to weed 
 and cultivate the sprouting crop of Antony's sowing. The 
 Egyptian recluse had flung the seed, with careless hand, 
 hither and thither, without order or precision. Where it 
 fell there it lodged, and everywhere it sprouted ; but in 
 wild confusion. Everywhere was to be found the monastic 
 spirit, the monastic profession, the monastic practice. Here, 
 as always, was needed the perfecter of the plan, who must 
 follow the pioneer. 
 
 "We do not see in Antony any hint of a dream in his own 
 mind that he was the originator of a spiritual aristocracy. 
 He had in view the salvation of the individual merely, and 
 that individual principally the individual Antony. He fled 
 from the things of time and sense to save his own soul alive,
 
 THE MONASTERY. 137 
 
 and if the soul of his brother also, so much the better. But 
 we have no justification in history for ascribing to him wider 
 or more ambitious hopes. 
 
 At the epoch of the sixth century the times were no 
 longer the times of Antony. Already the Bishop of Rome 
 had become Pope, and the policy of propagation had set 
 in, and was giving incipient direction to religious thought 
 and activity. Antony stood alone ; but in Benedict's day 
 we see coalition ; already all things are done as means to an 
 end, and that end the salvation of the individual with the 
 establishment of the Church of Rome, as sine qua non. 
 
 Benedict was not more a monk than a missionary, and 
 not so much either as a reformer. Dante gives him a high 
 place in Paradise, and makes him 
 
 "... the largest and most luculent" 
 
 among the pearls which floated into sight and sound, as 
 lie inspected those ghostly circles. Benedict, like Antony, 
 refused to grapple with the problem of being in the world 
 yet not of it. At the age of fourteen the profligacy of 
 Roman school -boys repelled him, and he fled from their 
 company into the solitudes of nature. Here a monk gave 
 him a dress of his order, and pointed out to him a cave in 
 which to meditate and do penance, and here he lived three 
 years, receiving his necessary food from the patron monk, 
 who let it down to him in his cave by a cord. But, like 
 Antony, he was not suffered to remain in his cave undis 
 turbed. The shepherds of the region found him out, and 
 the monks of the vicinity chose him for their abbot. The 
 fact that, having placed him in this position, those monks
 
 138 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 endeavored to poison him thereupon, is a fact rich in com 
 mentary on the character that monkhood had already 
 attained. Montalembert says ("Monks of the West"): 
 " Benedict had the ordinary fate of great men and saints. 
 The great number of conversions worked by the example 
 and fame of his austerities awakened a homicidal envy 
 against him." Yet Benedict lived and did his work and 
 a great work for those days. He formulated rules for the 
 regulation of monastic life which became " eventually the 
 rule of all western monachism." He grappled with a 
 lingering paganism, arid on the ruins of a temple to 
 Apollo, still in the sixth century the centre of the devo 
 tions of a pagan peasantry, he founded his famous Mon 
 astery of Monte Cassino ; and here, standing and with 
 arms outstretched in prayer, in articulo mortis, he died. 
 From this epoch the monastery acquires organic solidity and 
 definite dignity. In the great Benedictine order we find 
 the beginnings of systematic devotion and the germ of a 
 more intellectual life. Of the works of the Benedictines, 
 Sir Walter Scott says they are " of general and perma 
 nent advantage to the world at large, showing that the 
 revenues of the Benedictines were not always spent in self- 
 indulgence, and that the members of that order did not 
 uniformly slumber in sloth and indolence." " The order 
 increased so rapidly that the Benedictines must be regarded 
 as the main agents in the spread of Christianity, civilization, 
 and learning in the west" (Chambers' s Encyclopaedia). 
 
 Here, then, we find the monastery full-grown. The 
 monks are no longer hermits, but students and propagan 
 dists. 
 
 Did a man covet the career of the monk and the glory
 
 THE MONASTERY. 139 
 
 of monastic life ? He must first totally surrender every 
 tie and renounce all. Then he must stand for several 
 ( days at the monastery door and receive the affronts of the 
 porter, by way of testing his ascetic fortitude. Tin's pre 
 liminary being satisfactorily passed, he is conducted into 
 the reception-room of the monastery, and some superior 
 monk initiates him into the rules of monastic life. Among 
 these is implicit obedience to his superior, which one of 
 the fathers calls the monk's first virtue. He is to shun 
 laughter, to hold no private property, to live sparely, to 
 exercise hospitality, and, above all, to be industrious. He 
 is given a long black gown, with a cowl or hood of the same, 
 and a scapulary. After a novitiate of one year he becomes, 
 by solemn ceremonies, a monk in full. His life is now 
 one of unvarying routine, tedious or the contrary, according 
 to the wealth or poverty of his own individuality, for this, 
 however suppressed, must follow him within his cloister, 
 whether he will or no. His conditions are now remarkably 
 ill-calculated to make his mind his kingdom, for it must be 
 in defiance of his vows, if he gets any intellectual stimu 
 lus. His obligation of eternal poverty prevents all acquisi 
 tion. He can call nothing his own. Such expressions 
 were severely punished. The rule of Columbanus who 
 came after Benedict inflicted six lashes for any lapsiw 
 lingum in which the possessive pronoun " my" slipped out. 
 The vow of implicit obedience in its full performance 
 surrendered intellect and conscience at once into the hand 
 of the abbot. The same Columbanus, who was an Irish 
 monk and a fair competitor for honor with Benedict in 
 missionary zeal, lays down one of his rules thus : " Any 
 monk who signs not the spoon with which he eats with the
 
 140 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 sign of the cross, or who strikes the table with his knife, 
 or who coughs at the beginning of a psalm, shal] receive six 
 lashes." In Maitland's " Dark Ages" we have quoted an 
 instance of a monk who, pronouncing the Latin verb to 
 teach, docere, was bidden by the Abbot to say docere ; the 
 ignorant abbot was obeyed, and we do not learn that the 
 monk had the contumacy of Galileo, or that he muttered any 
 accented penult in an undertone. This obedient monk 
 was Lanfranc, afterward Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 
 II. 
 
 When we come to consider the causes from which the 
 monastery arose, we shall find that they are not the mo 
 nopoly of the Middle Ages, nor the special property of 
 Christianity. The monastic spirit is inherent in man, and 
 has found rare and isolated development in every age. 
 If asceticism be a disease, yet it must be ranked among 
 those diseases the seeds of which are born with us, and 
 are called, whether scientifically or not, natural diseases. 
 If we grant that the monastery is a monstrosity, we must 
 admit also that the monstrous is everywhere possible, and 
 own, with Goethe, " that it is in her monstrosities that 
 nature reveals to us her secrets." 
 
 The idea which lies at the bottom, as corner-stone of the 
 monastery, may be developed, on occasion, from any indi 
 vidual of the race. There is the making of a monk in 
 every man. 
 
 What, then, was the occasion from which, in the Middle
 
 THE MONASTERY. 
 
 Ages, the monastic spirit found so gigantic and dispropor- 
 tioned a development as to make that time seem to have 
 almost the monopoly of the monastery ? 
 
 The occasion is on the surface. It is the Middle Ages 
 itself the times. Given a man with scrofula in his blood, 
 and yet so arrange his environment that his tendencies may 
 find no occasion for development ; give him climate, occu 
 pation, food all that tends to suppression of the humor, 
 and it may never break out. He may never, except from 
 say so, know he has it. Let the opposite conditions be 
 provided ; let the occasion be offered, and he will soon 
 discover, by its dire development, the inherent poison in 
 his system. The scrofula of monasticism boiled in the blood 
 of mediaeval men, and the times afforded just those condi 
 tions which most favored its outbreak. 
 
 The times ! Never were such times. Humanity poised, 
 as it were, between the receding old and the advancing 
 new. Babylon fallen, but the captivity not ended. The 
 world torn by two mighty winds from opposite quarters, 
 one bringing thunders of regeneration and lightnings of 
 regeneration from the west, the other emptying vials of 
 vnith from the long tyranny of cloud-hung, rain-curtained 
 east. It was the unsettling of all things. The fall of 
 Home had filled the world with the fragments of shattered 
 things, the rising Germanic Empire had covered all with a 
 pall of blood. Pagan temples lay prostrate, but the debris 
 was not cleared away, and the Christian Basilica struggled i 
 up slowly, wrapped in a mist of the legend and fable of the 
 old idolatries. In these times of confusion men stood con 
 fused. Their limbs trembled beneath them ; their hearts 
 throbbed with apprehension ; their intellects failed them ;
 
 14:2 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 only the suffering, affrighted soul within them hungered 
 and aspired toward salvation. It was a time of panic a 
 time for men to rush, blind with fear and faith, through 
 any door swung open before them which promised escape. 
 Here, then, was the moment for the monastery. Its door 
 swung open before panic-pursued multitudes, and tides of 
 humanity swept over its portal out of the world. 
 
 For the thing was to get out of the world before the 
 world got out itself. It was everywhere believed that the 
 end of the world was near. The Church fathers taught 
 and preached it. It was looming up, ever coming, and 
 coming soon. And the influence of this belief contributed 
 largely to the success of monastic propagation. Gregory L, 
 as late as the sixth century, wrote to Ethelred in Briton 
 that the end of the world was coming. What could it 
 signify, then, how things went on in a world which was 
 about to burn up ? Material interests and possessions slip 
 ped easily from the grasp when the end of all things was 
 so near at hand. 
 
 The mediaeval man was a simple creature compared to 
 our complex modern. In that great twilight space, out of 
 which at any moment was to burst the fires of the last con 
 flagration, there stood to his conception two ideas, and only 
 two of much importance his Flesh and his Spirit. My body 
 and my soul these made up the mediaeval ego. Very dis 
 tinct and wholly antipodal ; the one from above, the other 
 from beneath, and between these two a great gulf fixed. 
 Even so large arid tender a genius as Gregory Nazianzen 
 expresses this sentiment constantly in his poems, notably in 
 " Soul and Body," which is thus translated by Mrs. Brown 
 ing. To his soul, he says :
 
 THE MONASTERY. 143 
 
 " What wilt thou possess or be ? 
 
 Oh, my soul, I ask of thee. 
 
 What of great or what of small 
 
 Counted precious therewithal ? 
 
 Be it only rare and want it, 
 
 I am ready, Soul, to grant it ! 
 
 ****** 
 "... what wilt thou be, 
 
 Oh, my soul ? a deity ? 
 
 A god before the face of God, 
 
 Standing glorious in His glories, 
 
 Choral in His angels' chorus ? 
 
 ****** 
 " Go ! upon thy wing arise. 
 
 Plumed by quick energies, 
 
 Mount in circles up the skies ; 
 
 And I will bless thy winged passion, 
 
 Help, with words, thine exaltation, 
 
 And, like bird of rapid feather, 
 
 Outlaunch thee, Soul, upon the ether." 
 
 But to the body, Gregory, the poet, speaks thus : 
 
 " But thou, O fleshly nature, say 
 Thou with odors from the clay, 
 Since thy presence I must have, 
 As a lady with a slave. 
 ******* 
 May some rocky house receive thee 
 Self-roofed, to conceal thee chiefly I" 
 
 Then he goes on to show what this beast-body may claim 
 as its due only so much as to keep it as a tenement of 
 spirit, alive, and with such necessaries promises it a rope 
 besides, calling it a household foe. 
 
 That subtle Briareus of science and sanity, the Intellect,
 
 144 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 which in these days stands between flesh and spirit, and with a 
 hundred hands and voices entreats the one to be reconciled to 
 the other, was lacking then. Men were Manichees, and be 
 lieved their bodies to be wholly antagonistic to their spirits. 
 They believed, with intense conviction, that the soul was 
 worth saving, and could be saved only by crucifixion of the 
 flesh. The body is beast possessed by devil, whose sole 
 function is to tempt and ruin. The soul must be torn from 
 its enchanter, the evil wizard, flesh. In these two ideas 
 lies the key to the gigantic monastery of the Middle Ages. 
 
 This simple man, made up of soul and body, was easily 
 persuaded. He stood, like a child overtaken by a storm in 
 the forest, bewildered and frightened, and ready to follow 
 whithersoever led. And his leaders led him into the mon 
 astery. In the fourth century, Jerome, learned and wealthy, 
 the princely father of the Primitive Church, says of him 
 self : "I voluntarily condemned myself to this prison and 
 exile for fear of hell, having no other company but scor 
 pions and wild beasts. ... I often joined whole nights to 
 the days, crying, sighing, and beating my breast, . . . and, 
 being angry and armed with severity against myself, I went 
 alone into the most secret part of the wilderness, and if I dis 
 covered anywhere a deep valley or craggy rock, that was the 
 place of my prayer ; there I threw this miserable sack of my 
 body." And he breaks out eloquently in praise of and per 
 suasion to monastic life thus : " O desert, enamelled with 
 the flowers of Christ ! O solitude, where those stones are 
 built of which, in the Apocalypse, is built the city of 
 God ! O retreat, which rejoicest in the friendship of God ! 
 "What doest thou in the world, my brother, with thy soul 
 greater than the world 2 How long wilt thou remain in the
 
 THE MONASTERY. 145 
 
 shadow of roofs, and in the smoky dungeons of cities ? Be 
 lieve me, 1 see here more of the light." Indeed, Jerome 
 was a prime propagator of monastic life at this early day. 
 It was he who brought into the folds of the monastery the 
 illustrious Roman widow Paula, with all her vast wealth, 
 her daughters included. And she becomes straightway a 
 heroine of the times and times after, Jerome eulogizing her 
 thus : " If all the members of my body were changed into 
 tongues if all my limbs resounded with a human voice, yet 
 should I be incapable of sounding her praises." Chrysos- 
 tom, " who in his preaching so carried away his audiences 
 that they beat the pavement with their swords and called 
 him the thirteenth apostle," wrote and preached, with his 
 surpassing enthusiasm and eloquence, of the monastic life as 
 above all others. No other is comparable to it ; indeed, he 
 intimates that no one outside of the monastery is quite cer 
 tain of salvation. This teaching and persuasion continued 
 all through the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century St. 
 Bernard, called " Mellifluous Doctor," uses all his eloquence 
 still in favor of monasticism. Yaughan, in his " Hours 
 with the Mystics," says : " With Bernard the monastic life 
 is the one thing needful. He began life by drawing after 
 him into the convent all his kindred. . . . His incessant 
 cry for Europe is, ' Better monasteries and more of them ! ' : 
 Thus on all sides we find persuasion to the monastic life. No 
 one was excluded ; the soldier might desert his standard, but 
 if he deserted into the monastery he incurred no dishonor. 
 It was to all classes an asylum, an alternative where alone 
 could satisfaction be found. To those whose lives were well 
 worn out in the pleasures and sins of the world it offered 
 place for repentance. Pliny, as early as his day, describes
 
 146 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 the monasteries he encounters in his travels as the abode of 
 " a solitary race, but constantly replenished by penitents 
 from the outer world. " This before the thick darkness of 
 the Middle Ages had gathered. And when the darkness 
 had passed away, in the Elizabethan age, we find the great 
 Emperor Charles V. abdicating the crown of Germany and 
 Spain to enter a monastery. Of him Byron says.: 
 
 " The Spaniard, when the lust of sway 
 
 Had lost its quickening spell, 
 Cast crowns for rosaries away, 
 An empire for a cell." 
 
 Ode to Napoleon. 
 
 To the abjectly poor it offered betterment in temporal 
 affairs. None so low in life but he might rise to dis 
 tinction here, had he the fortitude to exceed others in 
 austerity. A poor shepherd might make himself immortal 
 as Charlemagne if he had invention and endurance in 
 making himself miserable. Such an one was Simeon, the 
 ingenious Syrian shepherd, who deserted his sheep and 
 built himself a pillar of stones, gradually reaching the 
 height of sixty feet. Here he skilfully balanced himself 
 thirty years. Gibbon says : " Successive crowds of pilgrims 
 from Gaul and India saluted the divine pillar of Simeon." 
 He was all but adored by kings and queens. The Emperor 
 Theodosius consulted him on affairs of Church and State ; 
 his funeral was royal in its pageantry. Indeed, there was 
 scarcely a passion of human nature to which the monastery 
 could not appeal to win recruits. All that could soothe 
 conscience, all that could flatter vanity, all that could 
 promise humility, all that could tempt ambition, had here
 
 THE MONASTERY. 147 
 
 a settled residence. There is indeed plenty of reason for 
 the existence of the monastery, and its gigantic proportion 
 in the Middle Age is less and less mysterious the more we 
 look into that age. Nor must we go too far in condemna 
 tion of those, the holy fathers of the Christian faith, who, 
 in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, contrib 
 uted so largely to the excessive growth of monastic life. 
 .Rather let us attain to the temper of Charles Kingsley, and 
 seek to find, as he says, " some apology for the failings of 
 such truly great men as Dunstan, Becket, and Dominic, 
 and of many more whom, if we hate, we shall never under 
 stand, while we shall be but too likely, in our own way, to 
 copy them." Kingsley says, in his preface to the " Saint's 
 Tragedy " : " The Middle Age was, in the gross, a coarse, 
 barbarous, and profligate age. ... It was, in fact, the very 
 ferocity and foulness of the times which, by a natural revul 
 sion, called forth at the same time the apostolic holiness and 
 the Manichean asceticism of the mediaeval saints. The 
 world was so bad that to be saints at all they were compelled 
 to go out of the world. . . . But really time enough has 
 been lost in ignorant abuse of that period, and time enough 
 also, lately, in blind adoration of it. When shall we learn 
 to see it as it was, the dawning manhood of Europe, rich 
 with all the tenderness, the simplicity, the enthusiasm of 
 youth, hut also darkened, alas ! with its full share of youth's 
 precipitance and extravagance, fierce passions, and blind 
 self-will ; its virtues and its vices colossal, and for that very 
 reason always haunted by the twin-imp of the colossal --the 
 caricatured."
 
 148 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 III. 
 
 What other than a calamity could that be considered 
 which took away from both Church and State its best and 
 purest-minded citizens ? Yet this was precisely the imme 
 diate effect of the monastery upon its own times. Thou 
 sands upon thousands from those mediaeval societies, so 
 needing manhood and Christianhood, were swept by this 
 monstrous epidemic superstition. In Egypt, in the century 
 in which Antony lived, it is stated that the number of cit 
 izens thus nullified to the state was equal to those left. 
 Centuries before the feudal system settled like the stone of 
 a sepulchre upon the masses entombed beneath it centuries 
 before chivalry issued in its haughty aristocracy therefrom, 
 did the monastery draw to its silent prison the men and 
 women in whom, save for this curdling superstition, was 
 virtue enough to keep the whole world sweet. In vain 
 did the emperors issue decrees against this decimation of 
 the State. The eloquence of the fathers, the tyranny of 
 diseased conscience, exceeded in authority the mandates of 
 the Caesars. 
 
 In the beginning it is the individual who must be saved 
 at price of all penance and renunciation. In the end it is 
 the Church that must prosper at the cost of all individual 
 character the individual contributing to the prosperity of 
 the Church will be saved as a matter of course. In the 
 beginning the monastery is a hermit, then a company of 
 monks cenobites having all things in common living on 
 rocks, in caves, subsisting on air and prayer. In the end it 
 is the gorgeous monastery of elaborate architecture the
 
 THE MONASTERY. 149 
 
 mitred abbot with retinue like a king, with royal refectory, 
 with feudal acres, lord over a spiritual aristocracy. 
 
 All along the line, however, we see effort at reform and 
 restoration of the early ideal. After Antony, with a lapso 
 of four odd centuries, comes Benedict, to put in order and 
 subject to rule ; after Benedict, by six odd centuries, come 
 Francis and Dominic, to engraft the early good fruit on the 
 aging, corrupt tree ; and again, in the fourteenth century, 
 we see the Augustinian reformer. Yet this was the order 
 in which, in the sixteenth century, Luther found the need 
 and the germ of a more radical and permanent reformation. 
 And Luther stands to us in total contrast to any ideal, early 
 or late, of monastic life. Pre-eminently a man among 
 men, most human in humanity, we see in his character, and 
 his creed, and his work the eternal antagonism of Chris 
 tianity to monachism. 
 
 To its own times, then, we must view the institution of 
 monastic life as containing more the constituents of a curse 
 than a blessing. But he who comes to bring this indict 
 ment must not sum up his case before he has studied the 
 effect of the monastery on succeeding times. And with a 
 lengthening sweep of vision we may discern results from 
 this institution on succeeding ages which, to both State and 
 Church to society and Christianity rather have been 
 untold blessings. 
 
 Society owes to the monastery its democracy. This off 
 shoot from mediaeval society preserved in its aristocracy of 
 asceticism the individual to the State. Feudal aristocracy 
 took all the men and women, in Lady Montagu's use of 
 that phrase. They alone carne to the surface ; there was 
 no chance for the low-born and the underling. Mind was
 
 150 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 no measure of the man in those days would never have 
 been, save for the gradual development of the intellectual 
 through the narrow but deep channels of the scholasticism 
 of the monasteries. Here the vulgus could rush in and 
 compel recognition and deference. Gregory VII., the 
 gigantic constructive genius of the Middle Age, the son of a 
 carpenter, could work his way through the cell of the monk 
 to the papal chair, and there compel homage and submission 
 from an emperor. The Church of the Middle Ages recog 
 nized always the individual, and the coarsest and poorest 
 might be transmuted into fine gold through the crucibles of 
 cloister and cell. This bare suggestion may be developed 
 with logical sequences until we realize the grand causality 
 of this institution of mediaeval times, in the evolution of a 
 true democracy of modern times. 
 
 To the evolution of a practical Christianity in succeed 
 ing times the monastery brings also an incalculable factor. 
 Ideals in manhood and Christianhood emerge into view, by 
 successive action and reaction. Doubtless the world must 
 some time have tried the monastic ideal. The egregious 
 mistake that it is clearly seen to be with the vision that 
 comes after the event, could never have been so seen before 
 the event. St. Jerome would not advise the monastic life 
 in the days of Kingsley and Stanley ; yet how can we be 
 sure that a Kingsley or a Stanley would not have erred 
 with St. Jerome in his own day ? Certain it is that the 
 problem how to live in the world but not of the world still 
 confronts those who would be unworldly ; and as certain 
 that Christendom has, once for all, had it proven that the 
 problem is not solved by isolation from the world. 
 
 And yet it could ill afford to spare these pioneer monks,
 
 THE MONASTERY. 151 
 
 who, with all their excesses and painful perversions, are 
 4 ' those without whom we could not be made perfect." 
 Montalembert says : " Who has not contemplated, if not 
 with the eyes of faith, at least with the admiration inspired 
 by uncontrollable greatness of soul, the struggles of these 
 athletes of penitence ? . . . Everything is to be found there 
 variety, pathos, the sublime and simple epic of a race of 
 men earnest as children and strong as giants." 
 
 One great common benefit to both mediaeval and modern 
 world the monastery subserved a benefit so transcendent 
 that for it we forgive all its egregious suicide of citizen and 
 Christian, its incarceration and mutilation of each. It did 
 for us what could have been done by no other means in this 
 ruined and ruinous epoch of time it kept us our books. 
 The storm raged everywhere, but here was safe repository, 
 and in the advanced years of the monastic institution the 
 compilation and copying of these priceless manuscripts was a 
 leading feature of the industrious life of a monk. The 
 Scriptorium of the monastery is to us moderns hallowed 
 ground, and for it we may forget its cells and their terrors. 
 
 The monastery of the Middle Ages has passed away with 
 the times that gave it birth. In place of a squalid encamp 
 ment spread upon the burning sands of Africa, sentineled 
 with hermit huts, a circle of separate' cells where ascetics of 
 superior piety burrowed like moles in the sand in place of 
 the rocky rendezvous of northern lands, swarming with its 
 busy brotherhood in place of the opulent abbey, where 
 sensual abbot and worldly friar in a later day became the 
 minions of popes and the masters of men in place of all 
 this we have, here and there, a lichened abbey, a vacant 
 pile of mediaeval architecture, in Africa, in Palestine, in
 
 152 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 Italy, whose crumbling ruins make a melancholy monument 
 to the fanatic populace that once thronged their cells and 
 now lie in the dust beneath them. Here and there, indeed, 
 the traveller finds a roof and shelter, food and lodging, a 
 lighted fire and a kindly welcome from the modern friar, 
 whose length of belt and ringing laugh tell no tale of early 
 days. Rarely, indeed, as at La Trappe, may the ghost of 
 Antony be fancied to revisit his degenerate progeny, degen 
 erate even in the austere rule and miserable asceticism of 
 the terrible Trappists. As we gaze upon the ruins of the 
 mediaeval monastery, and as our imagination summons before 
 us from their dust a multitude of mediaeval monks and nuns, 
 led by the saintly Antony, who bends beneath the hundred 
 years of his tortured existence ; a courtly Basil, eloquent 
 and learned ; a Roman matron, Paula, in whose veins were 
 mingled blood of Grecian Agamemnon and Roman Grac 
 chus, whose wealth embraced a city of Augustinian gran 
 deur ; a shepherd, Simeon, self-chained to his pillar's sum 
 mit through the fires of thirty summers, through the frosts 
 of thirty winters, bending in the blast beneath the sun, be 
 neath the stars, with ceaseless wail for " mercy, mercy !" 
 when we mark the myriads that follow in their wake, noble 
 with peasant, scholar with clown, all alike with bowed 
 head, and downcast eye, and emaciated figure, loaded with 
 iron greaves and collars, covered with hair like the beasts 
 among whom they lived, winding in and out of narrow, 
 vacant, unlit cells, bending before the cross which every 
 where confronts them when we hear their wailing Miserere 
 echoing through the silent air, when we behold their pain- 
 sharpened features, their sunken eyes glowing with terror of 
 remorse, pleading for absolution, their ghastly glances fixed
 
 THE MONASTERY. 153 
 
 upon an approaching doom which diseased conscience peo 
 ples with demon and avenger alas ! what spectacle has 
 history presented that equals this for melancholy ? 
 
 The mediaeval monastery has passed away. It will not 
 return. But monachism remains, and will remain while 
 human nature bides its time. Over and over again will a 
 wretched phantasy of conscience bid the conscience-stricken 
 turn his back on homely, present duty in the battle-plain of 
 life, and make the same old experiment of self-salvation 
 in unhallowed renunciations. The spirit of Monachism has 
 survived the mediaeval monastery. Its profitless experi 
 ments, its unavailing renunciations, are not now confined 
 to convent walls. Not among those luminous figures which 
 emerge from the modern convent to carry the comfort of 
 the Cross to battle-field and prison-cell and hospital cot, 
 do we find the painf ulest examples of its sad misleading ; 
 but in the selfish segregations of the fashionable cliques, the 
 complacent hypocrisy of social ostracisms, of scientific 
 unbelief, of sated, soulless culture, of morbid research, of 
 wretched introspection, of indolent abstraction from the 
 practicabilities of life. The mediaeval man fled into the 
 monastery ; the modern man flees into himself, and all un 
 consciously, in manifold ways, repeats the old vain folly of 
 a selfish subjectivity. 
 
 Hundreds of years before Antony of Egypt laid the 
 corner-stone of the mediaeval monastery a young man sat 
 on an Eastern throne, ruler over countless myriads of servile 
 subjects, owner of all the wealth of India. Yet, though 
 swaying so potent a sceptre, seated on so towering a throne, 
 wearing so glittering a crown, the soul within this youthful 
 monarch tortured him to a strange sacrifice for its sake.
 
 154: GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 He abandons all throne, subjects, wealth, pleasure, power 
 and, searching out the meanest and most abject slave in 
 his realm, takes from him his tattered, filthy robe, and puts it 
 on his own royal form, and thus disguised goes forth from 
 all humanity to be alone. In trackless forest and in barren 
 desert, in cave of beast and rock of eagle, he serves out his 
 self-appointed term of penance and probation ; and when 
 this is accomplished he returns, another being from another 
 world, and lays before his subjects, among whom is none 
 so poor as he, the true wealth he has found the secret of 
 existence, the sicmmum bonum of human life, the knowl 
 edge how to lose existence, how to submerge human life, 
 how to annihilate the individual. 
 
 Behold in Buddhism the genius of the monastery ! Be 
 hold in Gautama the prototype of Antony ! 
 
 Bat midway between Antony and Gautama behold the 
 Nazarene, the young Carpenter, the Evangelist, the Son, 
 the Brother, the Man of Bethlehem behold Him entering 
 into all the joys and sorrows of the manhood which He 
 dignified, wearing graciously to its last humiliation the garb 
 of human flesh to which He has ever joined in honorable 
 wedlock the unassailable human soul behold Him, from 
 His manger- cradle to His death-bed cross, pre-eminently 
 the Man of men, fullest of humanity, whose whole burden 
 of mission to us lies epitomized in His own statement : "I 
 am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it 
 more abundantly." 
 
 Life 1 Life ! A more intense, individual human life ! 
 
 " 'Tis life of which our views are scant 
 
 More life, and fuller, that we want !" " 
 
 The humanity of each of us is like some ^Eolian harp
 
 THE MONASTERY. 155 
 
 constructed by the Master Musician and laid down ten 
 derly by Him upon the sea-shore where winds from every 
 quarter play continuously. Buddhism would sweep into the 
 vast ocean this palpitating lyre, and mix its several elements 
 indistinguishably in the deep waters. Mediaeval monasticism 
 would heap it with sand and bury its melodies from every 
 human ear. An enlightened Christianity would leave it, 
 free and sensitive, upon the shore would open it to all the 
 winds that hurry to and fro, that it may give out to heaven 
 and earth its full completed harmony. 
 
 Behold in Christianity the antipode of Buddhism, the 
 antidote of MonachisKi !
 
 MF.I>M:VAI. KNICIITS.
 
 CHI V A LEY. 
 
 As the word Chivalry falls upon our ears a motley multi 
 tude, in shadowy panorama, glides before us. Here gleam 
 the lances of a Richard, lion-hearted, a Godfrey, a Ray 
 mond, a St. Louis ; blending anon with cross and staff of 
 barefooted pilgrim, or hermit Peter, or pauper Walter, sans 
 savoir, or priestly St. Bernard ; changing with ample tur 
 ban of remorseless Turk and flashing cimetar of bearded 
 Saracen, worn and borne by a Suleiman or a Saladin. Or 
 perhaps we think of an Arthur or a Tancred, summing up 
 in one the virtues of the ideal knight, 
 
 " Who reverenced his conscience as his king, 
 Whose glory was redressing human wrongs, 
 Who spake no slander, no, nor listened to it, 
 Who loved one only, and who clave to her." 
 
 This masculine perfection is broad and tall, a splendid 
 giant, mounted always on a plunging charger, with drawn 
 lance and tossing plume, with broidered doublet and 
 jewelled girdle beneath the graceful cloak which hangs 
 with careful carelessness on the left shoulder. This, if our 
 author chance to be Tasso, or Tennyson, or Sir Walter 
 Scott. 
 
 If, however, we have fallen upon Cervantes and gained 
 from him onr notion of the mediaeval chevalier, straightway 
 the name evokes the Knight of the Sorrowful Figure, with
 
 160 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 disjointed, rattling armor, mounted on liis wind-broken 
 steed, with pasteboard vizor, making furious raids on wind 
 mills, attended at a comfortable interval by his somnolent, 
 sententious squire solidly astride a stiff-legged ass ! the 
 one sublime, the other ridiculous, and both fictions. Yet, 
 if there be but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, 
 that step must be our via media and here, if anywhere 
 between the two extremes, shall we find our veritable his 
 toric chevalier. 
 
 We cannot deny that inclination might turn us to one 
 side alone and leave us there, were inclination not in league 
 with conscience in this research. We would rather believe 
 in the exquisite Tancred of Tasso, the impassioned Orlando 
 of Ariosto, with their superhuman virtues and valors, their 
 transcendent prowe&s and fortitude, than in something less. 
 But we must take what history gives us. 
 
 I. 
 
 In our brief study of mediaeval chivalry we must hold 
 ourselves ready at any time to separate the spirit of chivalry 
 from the institution of chivalry, to which it gave rise. 
 
 The spirit of chivalry may be inferred from the vow 
 which in its early history was confession of faith to the 
 chevalier, and is thus epitomized : " To speak the truth, to 
 succor the helpless and oppressed, and never to turn back 
 from an enemy." Fidelity, clemency, courage, courtesy 
 these four seern to sum up the main points of the chivalrie 
 code. From this vow, taken by youths of noble lineage at
 
 CHIVALRY. 161 
 
 the age of twenty-one, and accompanied with the investiture 
 of arms, arose the institution of chivalry, which, from small 
 to large, grew, in the lapse of time, into the vast proportions 
 of a military organization, and for several centuries formed 
 a cavalry which was the nearest approach to and substitute 
 for a standing army in the new nations of Europe. 
 
 The ceremony of initiation into the rank of chevalier at 
 the age of twenty-one was preceded by a regular education 
 from the age of seven. From this time up to the age of 
 fourteen the boy was page to the lords and ladies in the 
 castle of his feudal superior, and at this impressible age 
 acquired, from association with its votaries, the notions and 
 manners of chivalry. The next ssven years he was called 
 squire, and his duties were those of attendance upon his 
 superior at tournament, or joust, or real battle, where skill 
 and prowess in the field duties of knighthood were acquired. 
 Then, this seven years of apprenticeship being served, at 
 the age of twenty-one the young, squire takes the vow pre 
 scribed, is invested with arms, and made a knight in the 
 presence of an assembled multitude. 
 
 Command imagination to present you at this scene. Let 
 us join this multitude of fair women and brave men over 
 whom the sun, reflected from myriad glittering lances, 
 sheds a dazzling light. Behold in the centre of this arena, 
 to which all eyes are turned, the young Frank, massive of 
 form, fair of face, lofty of mien. Listen, while every ear 
 is strained and every sound is hushed, as with ringing voice 
 he vows toward Heaven to " speak the truth, to succor the 
 helpless and oppressed, and never to turn back from an 
 enemy." Behold him now kneel as his sovereign lord 
 invests him with the belt and spurs, and places in his hand
 
 102 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 the lance of chivalry, while with his own he strikes the 
 glowing cheek of the young chevalier one blow as token 
 of the last insult he shall endure. 
 
 II. 
 
 There has been much dispute arid research as to when 
 chivalry was instituted. Hallam says " chivalry may, in a 
 general sense, be referred to the age of Charlemagne." In 
 the Cabalarii of Karl we find the equipment and investi 
 ture of the cavalier, if not his creed and conduct. These 
 pet soldiers were matched by the Milites of the eleventh 
 and twelfth centuries, when feudalism had established aris 
 tocracy among the nations of Europe. In the decentraliza 
 tion of sovereign power which followed the taking off of 
 Charlemagne, there began to be many centres of government 
 and society, inside circles, and wheels within wheels. The 
 king stood, with his dukes, at the centre of the system. 
 Barons circled outside and revolved about these, themselves 
 being centres of still outer circles, composed, in turn, of 
 their subordinates, who were sometimes nobles, but in 
 ferior ; sometimes free men, but dependent ; sometimes 
 serfs, who were to their lords little more than chattel 
 property. 
 
 This state of society reached its worst and best in the 
 period between the ninth and twelfth centuries. The 
 anarchy which ensued in the kingdom of France upon the 
 death of Charlemagne, the extinction of the Carlovingian 
 and the usurpation of the Capetian dynasty, may be
 
 CHIVALRY. 163 
 
 regarded as parent occasion to the development of that sub 
 sequent aristocracy of which the head and front is found in 
 the institution of chivalry. From out the ranks of this 
 feudal aristocracy could be summoned, on occasion, an 
 armed and mounted cavalry to serve in its defence ; and 
 the relation of vassal and superior was, in its origin, not 
 inimical to the development of many of the virtues and 
 graces of chivalry. 
 
 The question, Where was chivalry born ? may be an 
 swered in a monosyllable. For in that twilight time the 
 stars shone chiefly on one spot. Not Italy, decrepit and 
 dismembered ; not Germany, the prey of savages from 
 eastern wilds ; not Spain, as yet unallied with Germany and 
 standing, quite at bay, with lance of French hunter on the 
 east, and howl of wolfish Moslem on the west ; not Eng 
 land, unarisen from the ground where Saxon grapples Nor 
 man ere their wrestle grows to an embrace. 
 
 Nowhere but over France is there space of tranquil sky in 
 which the star of chivalry can rise- and reach its zenith. 
 And there it burns, illuminating the neighboring nations, 
 and lighting distant ones with a lengthened ray. The 
 fiery Spaniard, senile Roman, sullen Saxon, and afar the 
 subtle Saracen copy the graces of the chevalier of France, 
 despite the intermittent discords among their nationalities. 
 The ferocity of their wars is greatly mitigated by the man 
 ners and virtues of the code of chivalry. The chronic quar 
 rels between the Capetians and Plantagenets were less brutal 
 than any battles ever were. Hallam says : "In the wars of 
 Edward III., originating in no real animosity, the spirit of 
 honorable as well as courteous conduct toward the foe seemed 
 to have arrived at its highest point." Ruskin says : " Tho
 
 164 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 battle of Agincourt is romantic, and of Bannockburn, sim- 
 ply because there was an extraordinary display of human 
 virtue in both these battles." There was much of the joust 
 and something of the tournament in these engagements, de 
 spite the bloodshed. In the closing decade of the eleventh 
 century the star of chivalry rested in its zenith over the 
 sepulchre in Palestine, and was reflected thence until all these 
 tilting lancers Spaniard, Saxon, German, and Italian 
 rallied round the chevalier of France, and bore in common 
 cause a com.non lance beneath the Oriflamme ! 
 
 We gaze upon Uiis phenomenon of chivalry, pre-eminent 
 not only in the history of society in the Middle Ages, but 
 pre-eminent in the history of society in all ages, and we 
 wonder whence this wondrous bloom amid the desert. "We 
 look so unbelievingly upon the good side of our humanity 
 that a development there is first incredible and then unac 
 countable. A Sardanapalus does not tax our credulity, nor 
 a Nero the horrors of ancient and modern pagan societies ; 
 but a Gautama, a Socrates, an Aurelius upon the throne of 
 the Csesars, an Epictetus in the days of Nero these strain 
 our credulity, and we constantly wonder how it was. Yet in 
 my view it is to the unadulterated good in humanity that we 
 must refer the rise and development of this pre-eminent 
 phenomenon of chivalry. It is true these knights had 
 the historic Christ, and some of them loved and served 
 Him with the knightly love that makes all who have it 
 " Knights of the Holy Ghost ;" for the modern phenom 
 enon, a Christian, has in him the mediaeval phenomenon, 
 a chevalier. But the institution of chivalry did not spring 
 from Christianity, nor were the creed, tradition, or practice 
 of what the theologians call revealed religion any essential
 
 CHIVALRY. 165 
 
 of the creed, tradition, or practice of chivalry ; yet it had 
 its springs in the religious nature of man ; it sprang from 
 the necessity of man to create for himself an ideal, from that 
 inalienable endowment of human nature by which we must 
 worship, aspire, obey. 
 
 This position takes very general ground, and does not pre 
 vent the entrance of many particulars which may fill the 
 interval lying between first cause and effect. Thus some 
 say the seeds of the Socratic teachings, the Stoic philoso 
 phies, or that of Boethius, nearer their own times, put the 
 thought of chivalry into these medisevals, and caused the 
 formulation of its sublimely simple creed. This may be or 
 may not be ; I only claim for these mediaeval men that they 
 could have thought this thought unassisted. 
 
 Speaking of links in the chain of causation, however, I 
 must mention one which was certainly original with these 
 mediaevals the woman in it ! The romancers and poets, 
 Chaucer at their head, make her the first cause here ; this 
 I do not admit ; but I shall do no violence to my convictions 
 if I consent to call this natural religion, which was not the 
 worshipping, obeying, and following of a historic Christ, 
 the worshipping at least of woman. And here we strike 
 upon the great distinguishing characteristic of chivalry 
 something we find nowhere else its mystic ideal, the 
 woman. The hist lines of Goethe's greatest work sums up 
 the essence of the chevalier's theology : " Ever the woman- 
 soul leadeth us on." The Ewigweibliche was their misty, 
 mystic deity ; the woman supplied to them their anthro 
 pomorphic deity. Of course what I have said by way of 
 indicating the line of thought along which we must travel 
 in order to arrive at the parent causes of chivalry relates
 
 166 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 to the spirit or theory of chivalry rather than to the in 
 stitution. I suppose we need not search long for the 
 causes of Charlemagne's Cabalarii. The idea in the busy 
 brain of the monarch which brought about the organization 
 of this fine cavalry was not more religious, I presume, than 
 that which produced the Tall Regiment of Frederick "Will 
 iam of Prussia, or the invincible Beef -Eaters of Henry VII. 
 and Victoria of England. Cause here is resolved into occa 
 sion, and both are on the surface. 
 
 The institution of chivalry, as it became elaborated and 
 corrupted with accretions alien to its spirit, lost its chem 
 istry, and became a thing of mechanism. Its affinities un 
 locked, and its substance went into solution. Prom this 
 solution came, as permanent political precipitate, the stand 
 ing armies of Europe. Its fantastic adornments and senti 
 mental practices passed, as its superficial social crystal, into 
 the courtiers of later days, the cavaliers of English Stuart 
 and French Bourbon regimes. That intrinsic, indestruc 
 tible, immutable element, the spirit of chivalry, evaporated 
 into those high regions whence it came and comes again, 
 wooing, by its gentle virtues, from the soil of all ages rare 
 blooms of knightly service to the world. 
 
 Hallam says the invention of gunpowder made an end of 
 the institution of chivalry. This engine of modern civiliza 
 tion was known in the thirteenth century, but did not reach 
 efficiency in warfare until the commencement of the 
 fifteenth. The Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth 
 centuries engrafted upon chivalry that excessive elaboration 
 which is the inevitable precursor of corruption in all human 
 institutions. In time the golden article of chivalry clem 
 ency to the weak and conquered, and courtesy to all took
 
 CHIVALEY. 167 
 
 on the character of gallantry toward women, which was, as 
 its workings show, either a sensual sophistry or a fantastic 
 sentimentality, emasculating ideal knighthood. 1 think, in 
 a sense not wholly literal, Hallam. is right. The cannon of 
 the fifteenth century blew up the thing still bearing the 
 name of chivalry. The gun superseded the lance. The 
 pomp and circumstance of chivalry dispersed, its day being 
 done. But when the artillery of modern times levelled this 
 breastwork of the mediaevals, if fallen, as a whole, there yet 
 remained fractions of the structure, but units in themselves, 
 imperishable granite stones wedged into the edifice which 
 no shock could disintegrate, and which will endure, for the 
 admiration of the ages. There were immortal lords and 
 ladies for, as we have seen, ladies were sine qua non 
 of knights men and women the men and women the 
 world's best aristocracy of all the ages a Spanish Cid, 
 " inferior to none that ever lived in frankness, honor, and 
 magnanimity," Hallam says ; and Schlegel calls him an 
 ineffaceable picture " of the single-minded and true-hearted 
 old Castilian spirit, . . . undoubtedly the genuine history 1 " 
 of the man true Spanish gold in exchange for all Quixote 
 counterfeits ; and the Donna Ximena, his wife, full in 
 demnity for all Dulcineas ; a Richard, lion-hearted and yet 
 shedding knightly tears of knightlier penitence at his father's 
 grave solid gain for any dubious, superhuman Arthur ; a 
 veritable Tancred in good change for Tasso's saint ; and his 
 uncle, Robert Guiscard, the Norman knight of marvellous 
 renown, whom Gibbon describes as "of lofty stature, sur 
 passing the tallest of his army ; his complexion ruddy, his 
 shoulders broad, his hair and beard long and of flaxen 
 color his eyes sparkling with fire, while his voice, like that
 
 168 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 of Achilles, could impress obedience and terror amid the 
 tumult of battle wielding his sword in one hand, in the 
 other his lance, thrice unhorsed in battle of which he was 
 most eminent victor over eminent victors." Of less fleshly 
 splendor is a St. Louis, most tender son, most valiant Chris 
 tian, whose virtues and graces realize the Arthur of poetry ; 
 and his mother, Regent Blanche, every inch a monarch and 
 every inch a mother ; and his seneschal, the Sieur de Join- 
 ville, of frankest heart, most lovable in child-like chivalry. 
 Some antiquarians seem afraid of too much light upon 
 these fine antiques, and perhaps many of us may have a 
 subtle suspicion that by a too free ventilation these time- 
 tinted portraits may lose those lovely hues of age which 
 suffice to stamp them as " genuine." This feeling comes 
 from the enchantment which distance lends to our ideals, 
 and is something to be gently criticised. But in this par 
 ticular case I think there is small ground for fear. Hob 
 him of much with which hero-worship invests him, and there 
 still remains to this mediaeval chevalier that which will ever 
 more preserve and distinguish him. One or two of his 
 characteristics are lost to us moderns, and will forever stamp 
 him sui generis. There are and will be men as strong of 
 heart, but there never will or can be, I venture, men so 
 strong of nerve and muscle men of such physical perfec 
 tions, of such matchless prowess, of such superb endurance. 
 We need not go far to find causes for our degeneration from 
 this stature of the perfect physical man, and we need not 
 take space to apologize for it ; it remains a fact, and one 
 upon which we shall not try to congratulate ourselves. Those 
 mediaeval knights are men to look at with a sigh. Men de 
 void of aches, and pains, and dyspepsias ; men without
 
 CHIVALEY. 169 
 
 nervous headaches : men to whom coddling and " soothing" 
 were not indispensable. Alas ! there are no duplicates of 
 this picture among the men of our day ; and the negative 
 was not preserved. 
 
 Then there is a quality of mind to match this physical 
 attribute which cannot be restored by any modern process 
 the quality of unconsciousness of self ; lack of that essen 
 tial ubiquity, self, which our refinements of analysis and 
 vivisection have fastened, like an " eating lichen," to the 
 thought of all thinkers ; that critical detective which un 
 ceasingly attends our footsteps, never letting down his watch. 
 The places that we moderns tread are vastly finer than those 
 barren rooms of the mediae vals. Our feet sink deep in soft 
 Axminster, and our spacious parlors are crowded with every 
 possible and impossible appointment for use, and luxury, 
 and enervation. We look down upon the owners of those 
 rude oak-raftered halls, wherein was only board and bench. 
 But our magnificent apartments are everywhere hung with 
 mirrors. Every article is a reflector, and nowhere can the 
 opulent occupant look that he can fail to see his own image. 
 We are ever in the custody of self-officered police, and 
 cannot forget ourselves long enough to breathe freely. 
 They the medirevals, the unencumbered they were free ! 
 strong, simple-minded children, unspoiled by "notice." 
 A Dr. Samuel Johnson would have been an impossibility 
 among these open-air men of deeds ; but could he have ex 
 isted, he could never, in those times, have had his Boswell ! 
 
 Nay, take this mediaeval knight, with his physical perfec 
 tions, his unconsciousness of self, his picturesque costume, 
 his gentle mien, his powerful carriage, his knightly court 
 esy, " expressing," says llallam, " the most highly refined
 
 170 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 good breeding, founded less on the knowledge of ceremoni- 
 ous politeness though that was not to be omitted than on 
 the spontaneous modesty and self-denial and respect for 
 others which ought to spring from the heart ;" with that 
 inviolable faith toward all, which made of every knight a 
 Regulus, and we have a picture of a man of such propor 
 tions that, " taken for all in all, we ne'er shall look upon 
 his like again." Something better we shall see and do see, 
 yet not the same. " Never, never more," says Burke, 
 "shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank arid sex, 
 that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subor 
 dination of heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, 
 the spirit of an exalted freedom ; . . . that sensibility of 
 principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a 
 wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, 
 which ennobled whatever it touched. . . . Chivalry, the 
 unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the 
 nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise !" 
 
 III. 
 
 And now the childish treble of that ubiquitous little 
 Peterkin, the enfant terrible to historians, breaks in with 
 the question, sometimes so embarrassing to us Kaspars, 
 
 " But what good came of it ?" 
 
 The benefits which such an institution, founded upon 
 suck principles, must necessarily have conferred upon
 
 CHIVALRY. 171 
 
 society in the Middle Ages and immediately subsequent 
 times, must be readily inferred from what has gone before 
 in this very imperfect sketch. We have seen that this 
 institution was the embryo of modern military discipline 
 and tactic, and the beginning of a standing army ; that it 
 afforded a' school for the exercise of manly virtue and the 
 formation of refined manners ; that its interior ideal, its 
 primitive mainspring, lay in the normal religiousness of 
 man's nature an outcome of which was the exaltation of 
 woman. Hallam calls it " the best school of moral disci 
 pline of the Middle Ages," and this is high praise from one 
 whom Lord Macaulay calls the least of a worshipper he 
 knew. Still I venture a step farther, and dare to affirm 
 that the pure and simple creed of the mediaeval chevalier 
 affords to all ages the best formulation of, and that its pure 
 and simple practice affords the best illustration of, the 
 natural religion of humanity ; and this is as much and 
 something more than a moral discipline. To us moderns, 
 
 " Heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files of time," 
 
 a glance backward toward this phenomenon of the times we 
 are accustomed to call dark is, or should be, useful. It is 
 good for us to turn the yellow leaves of time's herbarium 
 and look upon this faded mediaeval bloom, howbeit our 
 nineteenth-century hothouse cultures can far outvie the lone 
 wild- flower of the past. We have indeed the needle-gun 
 and mitrailleuse where they had lances ; we have churches, 
 one for every dozen worshippers, where they had a dozen 
 monasteries for a nation ; we have schools, one apiece for 
 every boy and girl, where they had one university for an 
 empire ; we have Tyndalls and Huxleys to scatter broadcast
 
 172 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHEB STUDIES. 
 
 science (exact or otherwise) where kings and scholars in 
 mediaeval times had but the rudiments of each ; we have 
 Moodys and Sankeys and Salvation Armies where they 
 had mendicant friars and barefooted pilgrims ; we have 
 summer schools of philosophy and religion where they had 
 blind and bloody Crusades ; Swinburnes and Walt Whit 
 mans refine and clarify our poetic senses in place of their 
 rude troubadours and minstrels all this and immeasurably 
 more we have in our day over the Sodoms and Gomorrahs 
 of their day. And for all this gigantic aggregation of cult 
 ure, and science, and art for all the accumulations of these 
 successive centuries wherein we have 
 
 " Kansacked the ages, spoiled the climes," 
 
 how as pigmies to giants, in point of moral altitude, should 
 most of us compare with these unschooled mediaevals ' No 
 need to make a comment here. Our morning papers bring 
 us all we need, with their long, black list of betrayed trusts, 
 of cowardice, of falsehood, of political intrigue. And if 
 the velvet curtain that backgrounds our " best society" but 
 rise a little, ah me ! what skeletons dance behind the scene ! 
 When in our arrogant nineteenth-century hearts we shall 
 have fully apprehended the truth that intellectual accumu 
 lation is not moral attainment ; that civilization is not Chris 
 tianity ; that culture is not character ; that, however lit up 
 by the blazing chandeliers of science, and culture, and art 
 which swing from our frescoed ceilings in place of that sin 
 gle star of chivalry which beamed down through the rafters 
 to the mediaeval chevalier, we have not, therefore, gained 
 one particle the more illumination of soul then, indeed, 
 we shall not disdain to turn our proud faces backward, and
 
 CHIVALRY. 173 
 
 learn how to salt our unsavory knowledge with the wisdom 
 of time's children, the creed of the chevalier ! 
 
 And while we gain for ourselves one good thing from the 
 backward glance, let us add to it another. While we are 
 learning to respect mediaeval humanity, let us try to 
 strengthen our faith in modern humanity as well. In our 
 reaction from our own century, let us not join the ranks of 
 those few eminent persons, and those many persons who de 
 sire to be eminent, who seem to find it necessary to do injus 
 tice to the present in order to do justice to the past. 
 
 Let us not cry with Sir Bedivere : 
 
 " Oh, my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go ? 
 Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes ? 
 For now I see the true old times are dead 
 When every morning brought a noble chance, 
 And every chance brought out a noble knight. 
 Such times have been not since the light that led 
 The holy elders, with the gift of myrrh. 
 But now the whole round table is dissolved 
 Which was an image of a mighty world ; 
 And I, the last, go forth companionless, 
 And the days darken round me and the years 
 Among new men, strange faces, other minds." 
 
 But let us answer with Arthur : 
 
 " The old order changeth, yieldeth place to new, 
 And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 
 Comfort thyself what comfort is in me ? 
 I have lived my life, and that which I have done 
 May He within Himself make pure 1" 
 
 Ilium futi ! and Anchises, and Priam, and Hector ! But 
 let us bethink ourselves also that Jneas was, and the Lavi-
 
 174 GEORGE ELIOT 8 POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 nian shores, and the lofty walls of Rome ; and as we look 
 around us on our Western lands Lavinian shores on which 
 many modern knights draw consecrated lances let us ac 
 knowledge that " there is a spirit in man" man, the man 
 of Egypt, the man of Hellas, the man of the Tiber, the 
 man of history, the man of to-day a spirit breathed into 
 him with God's own breath, which makes grand and 
 alrous deeds possible in every age. 
 
 " Mother Earth ! are the heroes dead ? 
 
 Do they thrill the soul of the years no more ? 
 Are the gleaming snows and the poppies red 
 
 All that is left of the brave of yore ? 
 Are there none to fight as Theseus fought, 
 
 Far in the young world's misty dawn ? 
 Or to teach as the gray haired Nestor taught? 
 
 Mother Earth ! are the heroes gone ? 
 
 " Gone ? In a grander form they rise ; 
 
 Dead ? We may clasp their hands in ours ; 
 And catch the light of their clearer eyes, 
 
 And wreathe their brows with immortal flowers. 
 Wherever a noble deed is done 
 
 Tis the pulse of a hero's heart is stirred ; 
 Wherever Right has a triumph won 
 
 There are the heroes' voices heard. 
 
 Their armor rings on a fairer field 
 
 Than the Greek and" the Trojan fiercely trod, 
 For Freedom's sword is the blade they wield, 
 
 And the light above is the smile of God. 
 So, in his isle of calm delight, 
 
 Jason may sleep the years away ; 
 For the heroes live, and the sky is bright, 
 
 And the world is a braver world to-day."
 
 From Past fen La Pagr't CeMrattd T 
 JEANNE ENTEND SES VOIX CELESTES.
 
 JOAN OF AEG. 
 
 IN the century which the year 1428 completed, all the 
 adverse fates had conspired with the Plantagenet purpose 
 to extinguish France. In 1328, at the death of the last 
 Capet, Edward III., of England, rose up before the peers 
 of France with his egregious claim for the French crown. 
 A clever twisting of some loose strands in the cordage of 
 the Salic law served for a pretext to contest his claim 
 against the clearer claim of Philip of Valois. The grand 
 son with his might drew up before the cousin with his 
 right, and then commenced that century of war which 
 made France the bloodless, nerveless thing we find her at 
 this first quarter of the fifteenth century. At Cressy and 
 at Poitiers, and in divers lesser fields, the chivalry of 
 France was mowed by English steel. The frightful horrors 
 of Calais unnerved the nation. And yet, like the heroic 
 citizens of Calais, all France held out against the life-long 
 siege which Edward III. pressed round the kingdom held 
 out until death conquered the besieger and succored the 
 besieged. 
 
 But in this century, between Edward III. of England 
 and Henry V. of England, not war alone, but pestilence 
 and famine those steadfast handmaids of Bellona con 
 spired against the life of France. The temple of Janus 
 for one hundred years was not closed, and the box of 
 Pandora discharged itself of every evil on the unhappy
 
 178 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 realm. A pestilence unprecedented in the annals of pesti 
 lences, and caused by the presence of so many dead lying 
 nnburied, by reason of the Pope's interdict, in numberless 
 battle-fields over Europe, swept the south of France, carry 
 ing off two out of every three of the inhabitants. The 
 shadow of this black death fell everywhere. Ships rocked 
 and drifted at sea, unmanned save by this pale pirate, whose 
 touch had laid crews and passengers lifeless at their posts. 
 
 Increasing the terror of the people, a wild fanaticism 
 became also epidemic. Bands of half-crazed persons, 
 clothed in white, wound in and out of the death-darkened 
 villages of France, beating their breasts and chanting sup 
 plications, throwing themselves on the ground, confessing 
 their sins, and leaving everywhere apprehension and dis 
 may, and the echo of their moaning prayer : 
 
 " Nun hebet auf cure Hande 
 
 Dass Gott dies Grosse sterben wende 
 Nun hebet auf cure Hande 
 Dass sich Gott iiber uns erbarme !" 
 
 These fanatics and others akin to them had great influence 
 with, the people. And they had the people all to them 
 selves, for the educated clergy stood aloof. 
 
 Religion was feeble ; superstition rampant. The Church 
 had no coherence ; the state no support. The kings of 
 France were beaten, and discrowned, and imprisoned. 
 Their dukes deserted the royal standard, and made war 
 among themselves. 
 
 The houses of Burgundy and Orleans sent their subtle 
 foxes running through the land with firebrands of civil 
 war. In 1418 a massacre of the Armagnacs by the Bur-
 
 JOAN OF ABC. 179 
 
 gundians took place in Paris a massacre without a parallel 
 in all the massacre-tilled pages of French history until the 
 Revolution, says Hallam, in spite of St. Bartholomew. 
 
 In 1358 the peasantry, stung into self-defence, reared 
 their bruised heads against the oppressive Yalois heel with 
 cobra virulence, and the Jacquerie of the fourteenth cen 
 tury of French history set the type for the Jacobins of the 
 eighteenth. 
 
 Des Serres thus represents the state of France at the 
 conclusion of this century : " In sooth, the estate of France 
 was most miserable. There appeared nothing but a horri 
 ble face, confusion, poverty, desolation, solitarinesse and 
 feare. The lean and bare laborers in the country did ter 
 rify even theeves themselves, who had nothing left to spoil 
 but the carkasses of these poor, miserable creatures, wan 
 dering up and down like ghosts drawn out of their graves. 
 . . . The least farms and hamlets were fortified by 
 these robbers, English, Bourguignons, and French, every 
 one striving to do his worst ; all men of warre were well 
 agreed to spoile the countryman and the merchant. Even 
 the catell, accustomed to the larume bell, the signe of the 
 enemy's approach, would run home of themselves, without 
 any guide, by this accustomed misery." Petrarch, visiting 
 France in this century, thus describes it : " Nothing pre 
 sented itself to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an extreme 
 poverty, lands uncultivated, houses in ruins. Even the 
 neighborhood of Paris manifested everywhere marks of 
 destrnction and conflagration. The streets are deserted, 
 the roads overgrown with weeds, the whole is a vast soli 
 tude." It is said that the city of Paris was so solitary and 
 neglected that in successive years wolves entered the city
 
 180 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 through the river and devoured and wounded a number of 
 persons. 
 
 Thus had the fates conspired with the Plantagenet 
 purpose and prepared the way for Henry Y. a second 
 Edward III. to propose the treaty which should secure to 
 himself and his posterity the throne of France. With 
 incredible arrogance, in 1420 this great King of England 
 promised an adjustment of all difficulties between France 
 and England upon the basis of the famous treaty of Troyes. 
 He said : "I will take now the Princess Catherine for a 
 wife and the regency of France ; and at the death of the 
 king I will succeed to his crown and his kingdom, and 
 join them to my crown and my kingdom, to be mine and 
 my posterity's forever. In return for so much, I will put 
 my sword into the scabbard, and let you, Queen Isabella, 
 have your amours and your intrigues undisturbed, and you, 
 Burgundy, have your vengeance on Orleans, since that 
 serves my cause as well." 
 
 With incredible dishonesty the debased queen and re 
 morseless duke signed, over the imbecile old head of Charles 
 VI., the treaty which gave his crown and kingdom to 
 the Plantagenet posterity, and made France a colony of 
 England. With incredible pusillanimity a balance of the 
 peers of France acceded to the treaty. And now, in the 
 year 1420, Henry V. of England is Regent of France, 
 absolute ruler of all the realm north of the Loire. With 
 haughty confidence he awaits the imminent hour when the 
 old baby king shall totter off the stage and leave him, in 
 name, and fame, and full possession, that to which he holds 
 this marvellous title-deed. No matter that this deed is by 
 all law null and void ; no matter that the thing conveyed
 
 JOAN OF ARC. 181 
 
 was not the property of the conveyors. What the pen has 
 traced in ink will suffice until the sword can superscribe in 
 blood ! Might, might ! that is Henry's ; he will make it 
 right. 
 
 Thus two years pass, and in 1422 the prize seems nearer. 
 " Almost mine !" says the Plantagenet proposer. "Never 
 thine" says the Divine Disposer. Suddenly, unheralded, 
 the conqueror of Henry Y. rises into view. A pale 
 cavalier, all unweaponed and unattended, meets him in the 
 way. No need to call thy mighty men, Plantagenet ! No 
 need to raise that whetted sword of thine ! No challenge 
 here to prove thy dauntless courage or thy knightly 
 courtesy. This battle will be bloodless. This foe is not a 
 Frenchman. He will say no word, nor urge a claim, nor 
 draw a sword. He will but look thee in the face, will 
 beckon thee, will turn his steed, and thou wilt follow him. 
 And where he leads thou wilt not wear the wedded crown 
 of France and England ! Well, death thus gives the 
 unplanned-for cue, and Henry, who would be manager, 
 makes the first exit. Two months later the summons 
 comes for Charles, and the old imbecile King of France 
 totters off the stage. And now we watch for a speedy 
 denouement of this dark drama which the adverse fates 
 have plotted for a hundred years against the realm of 
 France. 
 
 But we watch in vain. The tragedy moves on. When 
 Henry died he left Plantagenets behind to carry on his r6le. 
 The regent dukes of England unrolled the Troyes treaty 
 and shook it haughtily, defiantly, in the face of France. 
 The Duke of Bedford took the paper in one hand and the 
 infant heir of Henry in the other, and pronounced him at
 
 182 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 Paris Henry VI., King of France and England. And ail 
 the swords of England stood behind, flanked by Burgundy's 
 steel. 
 
 The Dauphin, third son of Charles VI. of France, alike 
 proclaimed, b} 7 his few and feeble adherents in the south, 
 King of France, lurked timorously around, fearing the 
 shadow of his royalty. There was no King of France, and 
 there was no France for a king. And so it went for seven 
 years. Henry, King of France, and Charles, King of 
 France, and no France, and no king ! 
 
 But the fates were brewing, and some shape must soon 
 emerge from out this steaming caldron. One or the other 
 of the contesting forces must prevail, and that right soon. 
 
 The odds were fearfully in England's favor. Henry VI. 
 of England was now, though but a child, a king in his 
 own right. His nobility were skilful, and courageous, 
 and ambitious ; his yeomanry invincible ; his cause so 
 popular that recruits flocked to his standard from every 
 quarter. 
 
 Charles VII. of France, in full manhood, was but a child 
 in character a timorous, self-indulgent trifler, fooling, flirt 
 ing, feeding in the corner there at Chinon ; his forces 
 inadequate, his cavalry thinned by English lances, his peas 
 antry by scythes of pestilence and famine ; his only allies 
 Scotchmen, scant and hard to get at any price ; his finances 
 so low that no inducement could be offered to the poorest 
 of his subjects in his battle-fields. For the loan of six thou 
 sand men Charles offered a province to the King of Scot 
 land. Comines, a historian contemporary with this king, 
 relates how he the king having tried on a pair of boots, 
 told the shoemaker that he had no money to pay for them.
 
 JOAN OF ARC. 183 
 
 But neither loyalty nor royalty compelled the thrifty Crispin 
 to present to his sovereign the necessary boots, or to give 
 him credit for future pay. He chose the safer way, and 
 kept the boots, while His Majesty went slipshod ! With no 
 kingdom, no subjects, no money, no manhood, and no 
 boots naught could this little Frenchman do but turn 
 away from such unpleasantness to seek a more congenial 
 programme in the boudoir of Sorel. " Sire," said a cour 
 tier to him, " I do not believe it possible that one should 
 lose a kingdom with greater gayety !" 
 
 Here, then, is the kingdom of Charlemagne, whose 
 boundaries, six hundred years before, were the Vistula 
 joining the Danube on the east, the Ebro and the 
 Atlantic Ocean on the west, the Mediterranean on the 
 south, the Baltic Sea on the north, reduced to a varying 
 quantity below the river Loire ! " Our Henry V.," boasts 
 Disraeli, " had reduced the kingdom of France to the town 
 of Bourges !" 
 
 And thus much only remaining French, what power shall 
 prevent the whole realm from becoming to England what 
 Canada is to-day ? what Cuba is to Spain ? what power 
 shall arise to preserve for the nineteenth century the 
 French feather of French genius, the bite of French wit, 
 the flavor of French character, the winey 'bouqiiet of French 
 literature, the esprit, the verve, the je ne sais quoi, all 
 unmatched and unmatchable, unmixed and unmixable, 
 with which France has spiced the world ? Consider the 
 conclusion how lame, how impotent had the ether of 
 French intellect become incorporated in the solid fibre of 
 English intellect ! Guizot reduced to Macaulay ; two Car- 
 lyles in place of one Carlyle and one Hugo ; two bloody
 
 184 GEOEGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 Marys in place of one bloody Mary and one bloody Medici ; 
 two Henry VIlI.s instead of one great Henry Tudor 
 and one great Henry Bourbon ; two Marlboroughs in 
 stead of one tremendous Maryborough and one tremen 
 dous Bonaparte ; two Lady Mary Wortley Montagus in 
 stead of one Lady Mary and one De Stae'l ; all beef no 
 poulet ! Human nature without the top-dressing of French' 
 nature ! 
 
 It is the October of the year 1428. Upon the dolorous 
 disk of France is darkness everywhere, with little difference 
 in degree. Yet as we strain our vision a deeper shade 
 blackens in one direction, as if the pall of death were about 
 there to drop. 
 
 The city of Orleans was an ancient stronghold of the 
 realm. When the King of France was scarcely more than 
 one among his lords, in the feudal ages of its history, 
 when, as king, he held two counties, perhaps, when his 
 lords held one each himself a count a trifle lordlier than 
 his subject counts Orleans was always one of the king's 
 counties. And the city was the centre of the county. 
 By this fifteenth century the city of Orleans had acquired 
 great importance and accumulated great wealth. The city 
 site was on the north bank of the Loire, but its suburbs 
 made an annex city like a Brooklyn to New York on the 
 south side. A massive bridge ran across and bound the 
 two together. 
 
 The English, advancing from the north, were building 
 ponderous bastiles or forts gigantic posts of a fence to 
 which their numerous forces were the living rails around 
 the land side of the city. This completed, all escape was 
 made impossible from the north side of the besieged town.
 
 JOAN OF ABC. 185 
 
 But to preserve means of egress from the city for them- 
 selves was less important to the besieged than that the 
 besiegers should lack means of ingress to the city. The 
 Orleanais destroyed the arch that connected the towers on 
 the bridge across to suburban Orleans, and if there was no 
 getting out for the French, neither was there any getting 
 in for the English. But while they thus destroy their 
 southern means of escape, the English are drilling in the 
 last bastile that encloses them upon the north. And now 
 what remains for Orleans but fire, famine, flood, x>r 
 surrender? Upon these massive city walls, hoar and 
 honorable, with many a foe resisted since a thousand years 
 and more, when Attila and his terrible Huns hammered on 
 its gates, is written by no invisible scribe, but with the 
 whetted point of English swords the mene, mene of its 
 doom. 
 
 We hear much of the hour and the man. Surely now 
 and here, if ever in history, is the hour. But where is the 
 man ? 
 
 The eyes of all men turn to Orleans. Of all men ; but 
 another eye looks down upon another spot, and hither the 
 inexplicable Genius of History bids us go with her. 
 
 A strange irrelevance, this scene on which she bids us 
 look ! What can these sloping hills of Domremy, these 
 trilling streams, these low-roofed cottages, have to do with 
 that fated city ? The little shepherd girl who sits beneath 
 the great tree in the doorway yonder, what can her rapt, 
 romantic, saintly face have of importance to thee, O destiny 
 of men and nations ? 
 
 But the Genius makes no response except to bid us nearer 
 to these pastoral frivolities, this dreaming shepherd girl.
 
 186 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 We see her wander up and down the gentle slopes, 
 peering with eyes that see beyond our vision into the great 
 oak forest, or listening to sounds we cannot hear beneath 
 the fairy tree. We see her spring with lithe, intrepid 
 grace upon the horses of the farm, and mounted, like a 
 soldier, make all the thrusts and passes of a knight 
 preparing for the fray. We see her sitting silent, while 
 her skilful fingers ply her needle at the humble fireside, 
 in that early winter of 1428, listening to tales of the dis 
 tress of France, the siege of Orleans, the imminent crisis 
 of the kingdom's fate which the roving bands of Charles' 
 adherents bring to Domremy. AV^e see her, " about the 
 hour of noon, in summer-time," in her father's garden, 
 and we see a kindling in that innocent eye, a purpose in 
 that girlish face. And she tells us that a voice of God 
 comes to her, and with the voices a bright light shines. 
 And often she hears the voice and sees the light ; and St. 
 Michael, and St. Margaret, and St. Catherine appear to her, 
 in a halo of glory, their heads crowned with jewels, their 
 voices mild and sweet. She hears them when the bells are 
 sounding for the hour of prayer. She hears the voices 
 in the forest also, and at many times and places, and they 
 speak so soothingly that she kneels and weeps because 
 they do not take her with them back to Paradise. But 
 the voices say she must stay and save France from the 
 ruin that impends. And, by and by, when tidings come 
 of the distress of Orleans, of the dauphin's helplessness, 
 of the invincible strength of the English, of the swift ap 
 proach to Orleans of doom from which there is none to de 
 liver in all that stricken realm, the voices bid her up ! and 
 herself go forth to rescue France !
 
 JO AH OF ABC. 187 
 
 And while we curl our lips at this wild ranting of the 
 half-mad shepherd girl and turn to go our way to Orleans, 
 where the hour wanes and all hearts wait, with hope against 
 hope, for the man the hand of destiny unclasps from ours, 
 and, with inexorable finger, points to the girlish figure, and 
 amid the protests of our impatient scorn we hear the voice 
 that none may question saying to her : ii Thou art the 
 man /" 
 
 It is the 25th of April, 1429. The pall is just about to 
 drop on Orleans. An instant yet remains before the Eng 
 lish have filled in the last rail to the living fence which 
 bristles round the place ; an instant ere the last Plantag- 
 cnet sword is wedged into the last loophole of escape ; 
 an instant of the hour yet awaits the coming of the man. 
 The beats of time strike like funeral peals and chime with 
 the heart-throbs of the Orleanais. French breaths are held 
 and French arms are paralyzed with fear. Even little King 
 Charles, the spaniel, trips it heavily behind the skirts of 
 Agnes Sorel, in his squalid little court at Chinon. 
 
 As we gaze upon the scene in this moment of suspense, 
 while the darkness deepens to extinction in the very 
 article of fatal asphyxia the wondrous transformation 
 comes. The peerless panoramist slides suddenly before us 
 the next scene in the spectacle a scene we all know well. 
 
 We saw that shining face lifted to the skies of Dom- 
 remy. Wo behold that slight, intrepid figure, mounted 
 now upon a fiery war-horse, wielding now a glittering 
 sword. It is the little peasant maid who wears that 
 fifty pounds of burnished steel with such a knightly 
 grace. The head is without helmet, and the raven ringlets 
 float out to the air ; the face, uncovered, reveals the samo
 
 188 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 rapt countenance, upon the battle-field, we saw beneath the 
 tree within the door-yard. We all behold that gorgeous 
 banner of white satin strewn with the French lilies, on 
 which the figure of a conqueror in glory shines, above the 
 v words which flame beneath, Jesus Maria ! This held in 
 one of those girlish hands, and in the other the consecrated 
 lance, marked with the crosses of St. Catherine. "We all 
 know the doer and the deed ! No need to tell the oft-told 
 tale, which set forth in the soberest hues of fact, yet seems 
 to waking sense most like a wildest dream of fancy ; no 
 need to repeat the story of the old chronicler Hall the 
 English historian of that day who tells how " Pucelle, 
 with French capitaine, in the dedde tyme of ye night, and 
 in a great rayne and thundere, entered into the citie." 
 "We all know what followed on this entrance, which the 
 Duke of Bedford thus reports to his sovereign, Henry VI. : 
 
 " There felle, by the hand of God, as it seemeth, a grete 
 stroke upon your people that was there (before Orleans) 
 assembled, in grete nombre, caused, in grete partie, as of 
 trowe of lakke of sadde beleve and of unlevefulle doubt 
 that they hadde of a disciple and lyme of the Feende called 
 the Pucelle, that used fals enchantments and sorcerie." 
 
 We all know how the little King Charles, the spaniel, 
 trotted forth to Rheims, and with royal condescension took 
 from the peasant girl the crown and throne of France ; 
 we all know how this little hand of muckle might, laid on 
 the rusty crank, set in swift revolution the wheel of 
 France's fortune ; how the treacherous Burgundy turned 
 from his allegiance with the English and returned to stand 
 by Charles ; how thus the left hand clasped the right and 
 grew again to the dismembered body of the empire ; how
 
 JOAN OF ABC. 189 
 
 that empire convalesced and grew to giant stature in the 
 years to come. 
 
 Had I the ability to narrate the story of Joan of Arc 
 worthily, I could scarcely have the heart to add one more 
 to the long list of poems, and romances, and histories 
 which, from a Shakespeare, a Southey, and a Schiller, to 
 the prize essayists and the undergraduates, have accumu 
 lated since the fifteenth century. Yet had I such desire, 
 it could not take much time or great space to tell the round, 
 unvarnished tale. Unassisted by tradition, stripped of 
 romance and invention, we find 'that a few simple, pictures 
 make the panorama of her life. A little peasant maiden 
 doing lowly service in the cottage home at Domremy ; 
 a mail-clad maiden leading forth her soldiers from the gates 
 of Orleans two faithful feet on fagots at Rouen a ra 
 diant face uplifted to the beckoning skies a crucifix up 
 held in shrivelling, flame-kissed hands a wreath of smoke 
 for shroud, a wrack of smoke for pall, a heap of ashes, 
 and a franchised soul ! 
 
 There is no figure in history more incendiary to the 
 imagination than this of Joan of Arc not one which 
 more enlists the energies of the Philistine, approaching us 
 from every quarter with demands that we subdue to the 
 substantial hues of the historic imagination, this tale, which 
 we are predestined by him to invest with the ethereal tints 
 of the poetic imagination. The Philistine's error is always 
 in his premises. His conclusions are unassailable, always 
 logical, therefore always wrong, because founded upon 
 wrong premises. He frowns down the story of Joan be 
 cause it shines and glows in rose-color. His error is in 
 denying to history any rose-color. He starts with the
 
 190 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHEK STUDIES. 
 
 premise tliat rose-color is of no use, and ends with the 
 conclusion that there are no roses. 
 
 Now, a rose would smell as sweet by any other name, 
 simply because it must still remain a rose. And a rose 
 has its rights as well as a cabbage. The cabbage-growers 
 say it does not pay as well as cabbage, but all the same the 
 rose is red, and sweet, and immortal ! A true story of the 
 Maid of Orleans will take away many accessories with 
 which the poets have invested her, but she must still remain 
 a glowing rose in history, fair and immortal. We welcome 
 the Philistine when he brings us words like these : 
 
 " It is the business -of history to distinguish between the miraculous 
 and the marvellous ; to reject the first in all narrations merely profane 
 or human ; to doubt the second ; and when obliged by unquestionable 
 testimony, as in the present case, to admit of something extraordinary, to 
 receive as little of it as is consistent with the known facts and circum 
 stances." 
 
 Good, Mr. Hume ! We are to reject the miraculous, to 
 doubt the marvellous, and to receive only as little of the 
 extraordinary as the known facts and circumstances compel 
 us to ! Very good. And now, Mr. Hume, for your defi 
 nitions. 
 
 Define for us the miraculous. Define for us the marvel 
 lous. And when you have given us perfect definitions of 
 these two, then we will reject the one and doubt the other, 
 and accept only the extraordinary ! 
 
 Meanwhile we find to our purpose certain words of old 
 Bishop Butler, who had somewhat to say of the extraor 
 dinary. "There are two courses," he said, "of nature. 
 One is the ordinary, the other the extraordinary" It is 
 this extraordinary course of nature which produces those
 
 JOAN OF ARC. 191 
 
 phenomena which, being out of the common, are out of our 
 sphere, and therefore which we are accustomed to call 
 supernatural or superhuman a miracle, or a marvel. Yet 
 they are necessarily neither, but only extraordinary courses 
 of nature, outside of our knowledge of law, yet not, there 
 fore, outside the sphere of law. What is law ? Trace it 
 link by link, pursue it phase by phase, chase its shadow 
 until you find its substance, and what who have you 
 found ? You have found God. 
 
 Resolve the supernatural. Find that which is above 
 nature. Take your line and measure nature, that you may 
 define her limits. Sweep your arc until it is a circumscrib 
 ing circumference, so that you may perceive that which is 
 the above-nature, the beyond-nature. "What is the measure 
 of your measure ? What is the radius of your circumfer 
 ence ? Nature, nature ! What have you outside ? What 
 is there that bears not the image and superscription, in its 
 phase ordinary, or its phase extraordinary, of the Caesar 
 of the universe ? Who is above this Caesar ? Who but 
 her maker God ? He who fills nature and who is nature 
 alone exceeds nature, and is that which nature is not. 
 What is a miracle ? What is a marvel ? A miracle is that 
 which comes about by processes outside the sphere of our 
 observation. It is a phenomenon which is the product of 
 that working of law which is beyond our knowledge of its 
 working. Shall we call it therefore a phenomenon outside 
 of the working of law ? It is a result from that course of 
 nature which is extraordinary. Shall we therefore call it 
 supernatural ? Lamartine says of Joan of Arc : " Every 
 thing in her life seems miraculous, and yet the miracle is 
 not in her voice, her vision, her sign, her standard, or her
 
 192 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 sword, but in herself." And yet I should say, least of all, 
 "in herself." 
 
 Nay, let us reject the miraculous theory of Joan of Arc. 
 Let us reject the marvellous. Let us cling to and claim for 
 her only the extraordinary. For in her I, for my part, see 
 no nature which 1 do not see in many a woman of to-day ; 
 but the exercise of that nature we do not often see. What, 
 then, were the "courses of nature" which in her could 
 produce the " extraordinary" ? 
 
 I reduce all the miracle, and marvel, and mystery of 
 Joan's history to the extraordinary development of one 
 human capacity love ; the extraordinary exercise of one 
 human capacity faith. 
 
 Joan's love was extraordinary because it was not a passion 
 for a person, but a quenchless passion of love for a cause. 
 All the energy, and devotion, and credulity, and constancy, 
 and jealousy, and consuming passion, and triumphant wor 
 ship that goes into a woman's love for one man, and that 
 makes it the thing it is, went from Joan's soul into the 
 cause of France. All that a woman will endure for and from 
 her lover or her child, that did Joan endure for and from 
 France. And this is very extraordinary ; strange and rare 
 in man stranger and rarer in woman. And Joan's faith 
 was extraordinary as is all faith, since it is from God a 
 gift rather than a grace. To Joan man was as naught ; the 
 King of France was the vicar of Heaven. The little ' ''King 
 of Bourges" was one whom God had appointed governor 
 over this, His kingdom, France. She, Joan, was a messen 
 ger, a missionary. Faith fused at once into obedience. 
 How extraordinary, how simple ! In this scientific age 
 this age of iconoclasm it is greatly good for us to confront
 
 JOAN OF ABC. 193 
 
 things rich, rare, out-of-the-common things above our 
 power to comprehend, beyond our power to destroy. It is 
 well for us who are so blind to the rose-color in our daily 
 lives to be forced to acknowledge its existence in the im 
 perishable canvas of history ; well for us, so intensely 
 practical as we are, to be compelled there, at least, to con 
 front the romantic and the heroic. So only perhaps can we 
 be made to believe in the possible heroic of to-day. 
 
 For the enduring quality in this wondrous figure of the 
 centuries is the common quality. If 1 know anything for 
 certain of the individual Joan, it is only because I know 
 something for certain of her sisters of to-day. I see, 
 indeed, in her some characteristics of her age which must 
 tinge her character, and which, not being characteristics of 
 our age, cannot tinge ours. The monstrous superstitions 
 of her times are broken bubbles of thin air in our agnostic 
 century. The dense ignorance of her day cannot be 
 repeated in any after-time. The blind fanaticism of that 
 age is wholly fled. And yet, superstition, ignorance, fanati 
 cism, remain ; and unless we can share in this our luminous 
 century that one priceless gift of God, which in this poor 
 shepherd girl, along with her ignorance, and superstition, 
 and fanaticism, was her pow r er, and must be our power, if 
 we have any, then we may well put this complex age, 
 full of knowledge and discovery, into the balance against 
 that age, and watch in vain for any turning of the scales 
 in our favor. Faith ! Faith ! that was Joan's lever the 
 lever by which that little hand moved the world liter 
 ally moved the world, for Orleans was France, and Eng 
 land was the world. Let no one dream that Joan was 
 very clever ; let no one dream that she had military genius.
 
 194 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES. 
 
 Her power was but the power which many another woman 
 may have the power of a buoyant, masterful faith in God, 
 in herself, in humanity, and a will to come to the rescue. 
 It is good to make acquaintance with her with her, 
 not with some wretched travesty of her. For in her 
 we contemplate not military genius, not surpassing clever 
 ness, not superhuman wisdom ; but we do, if we will, con 
 template goodness and purity. And within the folds of 
 these incontestable facts we may behold this shining 
 truth : that, when the soul is possessed by a great 
 purpose, all small and minor purposes are lost ; that the 
 woman-soul, when in faith it sets itself to come to the rescue 
 in church, state, society, family will subordinate all 
 other things ; and that the citadel of the soul being before 
 hand possessed of this divine passion to help, all other and 
 selfisher passions will find no admittance. 
 
 We can no one of us afford to count the story of Joan 
 of Arc an idle tale. Let what archives will be opened to 
 contradict or alter dates, detail, irrelevant fact the essential 
 truth which Joan's life stands for, the character which 
 Joan's career reveals, remain unaltered and unalterable, of 
 far greater significance to us as spiritual truth than as the 
 historical fact. Joan of Arc saved France indeed, and 
 raised the siege of Orleans ; but this is not all her immor 
 tality. She has entered as a spiritual force into inheritance 
 of the ages, and become a practical influence in human 
 lives. If you and I are not actually helped by this in 
 fluence, it is our fault, not hers. 
 
 For each of us there waits an Orleans. Some time that 
 crisis-battle must be fought which gives us final victory or 
 ultimate defeat. In. that ] ong siege which precedes that
 
 JOAN OF ARC. 195 
 
 crisis-battle, we need the faith of Joan, that faith which 
 ranges the soul on the side of the conquering powers, and 
 enlists it in a service which is sure to win. And we need 
 to see our visions, to hear our voices, as did Joan hers ; 
 those visions which open to us from the summits of our 
 holiest resolve, our highest endeavor, our most painful 
 abnegation ; those voices which lay on us most strenuous 
 commands and whisper to us, in secret chambers of our 
 beleaguered souls, words of conviction, of courage, and of 
 cheer. God grant that we be not unresponsive to that 
 angel voice, that we be not disobedient \mto the heavenly 
 vision !
 
 MOTHERS OF GREAT MEN AND 
 WOMEN. 
 
 AND THE WIVES OF SOME GREAT MEN. 
 
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 Luther, Lincoln, Nupoleon, Cromwell, Madam Necker, Richter, 
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 HISTORICAL LIGHTS. 
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 GREEN. 
 
 HOOD. LAMARTINE. MORRISON. 
 
 HEADLEY. LESTER. MYERS. 
 
 HUTTON. MACAULEY. MORLEY. 
 
 IRVING. MICHEI.HT. NORTON. 
 
 KNIGHT. MULLER. PARTON. 
 
 PATTISON. ROLLIN. STEVENS. 
 
 PLUTARCH. SHAIRP. SYMOND. 
 
 RIDPATH. SCHILLER. TYTLER. 
 
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 CHAMBERS* " goj 
 
 MCCLINTOCK & STRONG'S " 390 
 
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