THE ROBERT E, COWAN COLLECTION 
 
 I'RKSKNTKD TO Till-; 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 MY 
 
 C. P. HU.NTINGTON 
 
 JUNE. 1897. 
 
 :essior\ No.0 3 9 Class No, 
 
 
(UNIVERSITY 
 
 1QM? 
 
 CALITORH^ 
 
 George Eliot, 
 
 A PAPER, WITH ILLUSTRATIVE SELECTIONS, 
 
 GORDON BLANDING, 
 
 E '1 HK 
 
 CHIT-CHAT CLUB, SAN FRANCISCO, 
 
 July gib, 1877. 
 
George Eliot, 
 
 A PAPER, WITH ILLUSTRATIVE SELECTIONS, 
 
 CHIT-CHAT CLUB, 
 
 San Francisco, July 9th, 1877, 
 
 BY 
 
 GORDON BLANDING. 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Have you never, gentlemen, as the Saturday pre- 
 ceding the second Monday of the month found you 
 without a line of your essay penned or penciled, nay, 
 without even so much as a plot for your story have 
 you never, I venture to ask, felt, on that momentous 
 day, a sentiment of inward debasement and dread, of 
 degraded insufficiency for the uses and purposes of 
 this mortal, life ? 
 
 On each of the two former occasions when I have 
 had the honor to be appointed to lead off in our in- 
 tellectual feast, I plead guilty to the influence of this 
 sentiment in all its power. And the present occasion 
 forms no exception to the two which have preceded 
 it ; for the cloud of the divine awe the bitter-sweet 
 of authorship hangs heavily on my soul, and I find 
 myself again appealing to your clemency rather than 
 to your justice. I cannot forbear mentioning this 
 mental attitude, now thrice recurrent, not in the least 
 by way of personal extenuation (God forbid that I 
 should imperil your digestion by post-prandial whin- 
 ing !), but because it seems to me to carry with it, by 
 necessary implication, the highest possible compliment 
 to that little brotherhood known as the " Chit-Chat 
 Club." It seems to me to imply that there is one 
 
small gathering where I shall not dare, without quaff- 
 ing the cruel potion of self-doubt, to expose my 
 feebleness and my superficiality. It is well for us 
 sometimes to tremble in the presence of intelligent 
 criticism, and, in my humility and my fear, I find the 
 loftiest tribute to that modest shrine which we, the 
 dwellers by the far Western shore, have consecrated 
 to mental culture. Long may its altar fires continue 
 to burn, and long may I be permitted to be a co-wor- 
 shipper with you at that which we have not dedicated 
 to conscious merit, but to the sincere and manly pur- 
 pose of self-knowledge and mutual development ! 
 
 Nor is the spirit of humility inappropriate to us to- 
 night ; for we are in the presence of a name which 
 designates the facile princeps of her sex, the woman 
 whom the greatest of living minds has pronounced to 
 be the most illustrious among the daughters of Eve. 
 In such a presence, we are treading on holy ground, 
 and it is but meet, that we should put aside the san- 
 dals of a flippant criticism and draw near with rev- 
 erence. 
 
 In order to determine our conception of the rank 
 of a novelist, we must first determine what is our 
 conception of the term novel. When we speak of a 
 historian, for example, that word gives to us all a 
 reasonably exact idea ; for we all know pretty accur- 
 ately what history is or ought to be ; but I fear it is 
 not so with the term novelist. We know that it de- 
 notes a writer of novels ; but what is a novel ? Let 
 us turn, for example, to Webster's Unabridged (that 
 
great authority of American households), as one of 
 the latest sources of definition, and what do we find ? 
 Why this : " Novel a fictitious tale, intended to 
 exhibit the operation of the passions and particularly 
 of love," and cited thereunder as a picked quotation, 
 embodying the cream and essence of the term, this 
 line from Dryden : " ' the trifling novels which Ariosto 
 inserted in his poems.' " Shades of New England 
 scholarship, can it be ! Was the midnight flame 
 which illumined this bit of wisdom fed from the won- 
 drous lamp of Alladdin ! Only think of going to the 
 author of the " Hind and the Panther," who lived 
 more than a hundred and fifty years before the pub- 
 lication of Waverley, for enlightenment as to that 
 which had no existence in his day. The " -Passions " 
 and " Love " and the "Trifling novels of Ariosto ! " 
 Alas for the reputations of the great romancers, from 
 him who with a master's hand painted the manners of 
 the Saxon villain and the Norman lord, down to the 
 " History of England, in five volumes, by Lord Mac- 
 aulay ! " Nay, I shall offer you rather the exposition 
 which precedes the great romance last aforesaid, where 
 the immortal Thomas Babington says that it is his 
 ambition to place before the English of the Nine- 
 teenth Century a "Picture of the life of their ances- 
 tors ; " for I really must insist on a definition which 
 will stand some chance of connoting such minor 
 works as those of Scott and Bronte, of Dickens and 
 Thackeray, of Dumas and Sand, and even of the sub- 
 ject of the present paper. 
 
A " Picture of Life ! " I am deeply grateful for the 
 phrase. Not a picture of the " Passions " or of 
 " Love ; " but a picture of all those infinite and sub- 
 tle threads and fibres and nerves of thought and deed 
 and feeling which go to make up the great complex 
 ganglion of existence. And, now, let us differentiate 
 the historian and the novelist ; for the former is, also, 
 a painter of life ; but he is a painter of the actual 
 of what has in fact happened, while the latter is a 
 painter of the possible of what, in the nature of 
 things, might have happened. It results, therefore, 
 that the novelist must be, also, a historian, must be a 
 historian plus something else, plus the power to read 
 between the lines, to infer the unknown from the 
 known, and to evolve out of an abundantly stored 
 self-consciousness the life which was, but is not. His 
 work, accordingly, resembles that of the constructive 
 anatomist. Given certain structural bones, to find the 
 muscles and sinews, nay even the flesh and blood, 
 and thence to infer the habits, the instincts and the 
 mind itself. You perceive at once, then, how exalted 
 a station I accord to the true novelist. I would not 
 tolerate the slightest inaccuracy here, any more than 
 I would in history, or, rather, ten-fold less ; for the 
 mere chronicler may be convicted from his manu- 
 scripts, but who shall impeach the renovator of buried 
 civilizations, the constructor of thought and of act 
 and of all outward and inward process ? The unit of 
 measurement may be verified once, but who shall 
 supervise its application to every possible curve or 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 square ? And think not that I am extending the 
 Websterian conception ; for how much of all that 
 frightful falsehood that has been outpoured concern- 
 ing the " Passions " and " Love," how many of the 
 " Trifling novels of Ariosto " must be excluded by this 
 test. 
 
 Do not understand me as in any way implying that 
 this has been a long recognized standard. It was not 
 admitted even, up to the time of the publication of 
 Waverley. Nay, the avowed object of precedent 
 romance, whether of the classic myths, or the contes 
 of the Troubadours, or the graceful legends of the 
 Langue UOc, or of the Round Table was to weave 
 with the threads of pure fiction and romance. With 
 them, the avowed object was to stimulate the imagin- 
 ation and, with opiate rhapsody, to bear the reader on 
 the wings of fancy, to the home of the Peri or the 
 halls of Eblis, and the work was good, just in pro- 
 portion as it was unreal. It was a vast step in ad- 
 vance when Sir Walter Scott came upon the scene. 
 He was to the novel what Chaucer was to English 
 literature. For two thousand years, philosophy and 
 history had divided the world of thought and letters, 
 and no third power had been admitted to a share of 
 empire. From Thucydides to Hume, and from Aris- 
 totle to Bacon, an illustrious mental lineage had 
 transmitted the truths of the concrete and the ab- 
 stract ; but the truths of the possible were but feebly 
 counterfeited in the nursery rhyme or the border 
 legend. And, then, the wondrous Scotchman came 
 
8 
 
 came with a delicacy of fancy, a universal sympathy, 
 a truthfulness of ideal amounting to the sublime. 
 Through the trackless sands of Syria, amid the caves 
 of Engedi, on the plains of sunny France, where the 
 demon of the Jungfrau defies the eternal avalanche, 
 over the tangled defiles of Scotia, his spirit passed 
 and waked to resurrection sleeping millions. Again 
 the Crusader sprang to horse and hurled defiance at 
 the Crescent, again the hardy Swiss rushed downward 
 and carried death to Burgundy, again the Highland 
 chieftain sounded the pibroch and led the fierce 
 foray. The ear of Europe is caught with rapture and 
 historic romance is born. But, meanwhile, philosophy 
 is making tremendous strides. The change and the 
 decay of faith have begun; men are looking within 
 themselves, with eager subjectiveness, for the secret 
 source of much that had been supposed to be in 
 nubibus, and the methods of history itself are being 
 revolutionized by the methods of empiricism. His- 
 tory and philosophy start upon a different and intenser 
 race. Shall the new-born art be, then, abandoned and 
 no hand be found to mould the unfinished clay ? Was 
 it but a meteor, or was it a portent of the coming 
 dawn ? The question is answered by a woman's voice 
 and, in the intense pleadings and questionings of 
 Shirley and of Jane Eyre, the child gives promise of 
 the man. And, then, come, in swift succession, the 
 great satirist and the great caricaturist of the English 
 novel. Millions are moved, at will, to laughter or to 
 tears, and the work begun at Abbottsford keeps swift 
 
pace with the new sciences of narration and of thought. 
 And how characteristic the change ! We are no longer 
 treated to the deeds of heroes and of conquerors, of 
 princes or of chieftains; but we are carried into the 
 lowly paths and among those who struggle with the 
 problems of humanity. History can no longer claim 
 exclusive monopoly in the narration of social truth, 
 and the pages of Macaulay, of Hallam and even of 
 Buckle give evidence of the influence of this new 
 commonwealth in the republic of letters. The " Pic- 
 ture of Life" is painted, and it might well be supposed 
 that the wandering troubadour of yesterday would rest 
 contented with his work. There is, indeed, another 
 step; but will any one be found to mount the dizzy 
 pinnacle, will any dream of combining the historian 
 and the philosopher of two thousand years in the 
 novelist of a day? Again, a woman's voice replies 
 and, lo ! the reluctant, dogmatic, exclusive ear of 
 science, the ear which had been trained for centuries 
 into deafness to everything not born of analysis is 
 startled, and stoops and listens, and can not tear itself 
 away. From distant lands, the Magi hasten with offer- 
 ings of frankincense and myrrh, and England's great- 
 est philosophic mind utters the exclamation: "Loftiest 
 of thy sex, and equalled, if equalled at all, by few 
 among our own " ! 
 
 I am aware that I have, thus far, been indulging, to 
 some extent, in what was once wittily termed, by a 
 member of this Club, a "Bird's-eye view of creation," 
 and you may think it is about time that I should say 
 
10 
 
 something concerning my subject. But bear with me, 
 gentle friends! I know that, when a pie is set before 
 a man, the world generally regards it as but a sign of 
 common sense that he should straightway proceed to 
 the dissection thereof, without preliminary flourishes 
 of knife and fork. But the world is a base materialist, 
 and I plead guilty to too great a curiosity about my 
 pie to yield to any such utilitarianism. I want to know 
 who was the cook, and what relation he bore to other 
 cooks, and whether his moral training was such that 
 he might be a priori liable to adulterate the mince- 
 meat with cat or dog. And, then, too, let us be frank! 
 You know that Fourth of July comes but once a year 
 and a boy must have a show at his firecrackers ! 
 
 And, now, will you permit me to ask, in resuming, 
 if it is not a striking phenomenon that, while the 
 world is debating, as it never debated before, what is 
 the intellectual capacity of woman and, while one great 
 school of physiologists is vehemently denying even 
 her physical fitness for the higher education, England 
 and France have each produced a woman who has 
 out-maled the males, who has displayed more mascu- 
 line breadth and depth and vigor than any of the 
 writers of fiction of the opposite sex; for what English- 
 man could have written "Middlemarch," what French- 
 man " Consuelo " ? 
 
 I have asserted that the novelist, in the highest sense 
 of the term, must be both historian and philosopher. 
 There is no doubt that George Eliot possesses the first 
 requisite. She is curtainly familiar with the language 
 
II 
 
 and literature of the Greeks, the Romans, the He- 
 brews, the Italians, the Spaniards, the French and the 
 Germans, and she is said to have been a profound 
 student of the Talmud and of the Vedas. She is 
 certainly a master of the politics, manners and cus- 
 toms of all the above peoples, and none who have read 
 " Romola " or the " Spanish Gypsy " will doubt her 
 capacity for faithful reproduction. She is perfectly at 
 ease amid all the intricacies of the constitutions and 
 inter-state relations of the Italian Republics of th 
 middle ages. The painting of the life and teachings 
 and death of Savonarola, of the plots and counter- 
 plots of the Dominicans and Franciscans, of the in- 
 trigues of the Medici and of the corruption and de- 
 cline of the papacy is a marvel of historic reproduction./ 
 And, if this, which is but the warp and woof of her 
 story, be marvelous, what shall I say of that profound 
 learning with which she explores that mere incident to 
 her tale the labored and futile erudition of the 
 Florentine scholiasts ! Bear in mind, too, that severe 
 and naked simplicity is characteristic of her style and 
 that she is at manifest pains to exclude all foreign 
 phrase, save when essential to the rilling in of her 
 work. Her fame, at least, will never rest on her capa- 
 city to emasculate a dictionary of quotations. Lo ! as 
 I stand before you to-night, that mighty canvass on 
 which is outspread the streets, the porticoes, the man- 
 ners, the customs, the literature and the life of Florence 
 rises before me, and I wander along the grassy banks 
 of the Arno, I cross the Ponte Vecchio, I lounge into 
 
12 
 
 the barber shops and enjoy again the sparkling wit of 
 the news gossips, I enter the studio of the blind 
 scholar and hear the Greeks out-Greeked, I am drawn 
 with the hurrying multitude within the arches of the 
 Cathedral to drink in the burning words of the im- 
 mortal Frate, I see the dreaded French careering along 
 the public ways, to be succeeded by the still more 
 dreaded pestilence, and my pathway is blocked with 
 rabid lazzaroni who snatch the' crusts of bread from 
 the very mouths of the stricken, and, then, the martyr 
 fires are kindled and the voice of the Frate is hushed 
 forever and all is night ! Oh Florentia, terque quater- 
 que beata, in that thou, above all other cities, shouldst 
 have been designated for immortality by the divine 
 pencil of this modern Angelo ! And, then, again, I 
 am transported to the vine-clad hills of Spain, I see 
 the Crescent slowly paling before the glory of the 
 cross, the beautiful Fedalma seized with the rhapsody 
 of song, the fierce Zingali lifting in dumb obedience 
 the body of their murdered chief and all the weird 
 complexity of that semi-oriental life ! And what of 
 our own familiar England ? What of the peasant life 
 of North Loamshire and of the home by Dorlcote 
 Mill ? And these are but samples of the historic gems 
 scattered through the deep mine. I know of but a 
 half dozen of the great novelists to whom has been 
 given an equal power of historic portraiture, and they 
 are Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Thackeray, Du- 
 mas and Sand and, possibly, in spite of his absurd ex- 
 aggerations, Victor Hugo. 
 
But I turn from the capacity of faithful delineation 
 to the philosophic method, that other element of the 
 profound novelist (for, thank God, novelists may be 
 profound, all weight of evidence to the contrary not- 
 withstanding), in which George Eliot has not only sur- 
 passed all members of her calling, but almost all phil- 
 osophers themselves. This is her peculiar province, 
 and here it is that she has created an epoch in ro- 
 mance. It was a vast step from Sir Walter Scott to 
 Charlotte Bronte and a considerable one from Char- 
 lotte Bronte to Dickens and Thackeray ; but neither 
 distance compares with either of those which divides 
 Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot from all their re- 
 spective predecessors. They have both been founders 
 of great types. The former elevated the novel to the 
 dignity of history. The latter to the crowning height 
 of philosophy. Nothing is now left to posterity but 
 to imitate the masters. 
 
 And now that I have been ruthlessly taking the 
 measure of our illustrious author for some time, I 
 propose to let her have the floor and tell what she 
 knows about scientific novel writing ; because if she 
 is going to be very modest in her programme, and 
 very distinguished in her performance, it won't do for 
 us to be too hard on her. The year is 1859. The work 
 " Adam Bede," her first regular novel. Three serial 
 stories have appeared from her pen since 1857. She 
 has begun to acquire considerable local reputation 
 and, now, on the threshhold of her career, she deem 
 it necessary to define the task which she has prescribed 
 
14 
 
 for herself in the world of fiction. Observe the mod- 
 esty of the manifesto, the unconsciousness of the 
 powers about to be developed ; we shall witness the 
 performance anon. I read from the Seventeenth 
 Chapter. 
 
 " ' This rector of Broxton is little better than a 
 pagan ! ' I hear one of my lady readers exclaim. ' How 
 much more edifying it would have been if you had 
 made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice. 
 You might have put into his mouth the most beauti- 
 ful things quite as good as reading a sermon.' 
 
 " Certainly I could, my fair critic, if I were a clever 
 novelist, not obliged to creep servilely after nature and 
 fact, but able to represent things as they never have 
 been and never will be. Then, of course, my char- 
 acters will be entirely of my own choosing, and I 
 could select the most unexceptionable type of clergy- 
 man, and put my own admirable opinions into his 
 mouth on all occasions. But you must have perceived 
 long ago that I have no such lofty vocation, and that 
 I aspire to give no more than a faithful account of 
 men and things as they have mirrored themselves in 
 my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective ; the 
 outlines will sometimes be disturbed ; the reflection 
 faint or confused ; but I feel as much bound to tell 
 you, as precisely as I can, what that reflection is, as 
 if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience 
 on oath. 
 
 " Sixty years ago it is a long time, so no wonder 
 things have changed all clergymen were not zealous; 
 indeed there is reason to believe that the number of 
 zealous clergymen was small, and it is probable that, 
 if one among the small minority had owned the liv- 
 ings of Broxton and Hayslope in the year 1799, you 
 would have liked him no better than you like Mr. 
 Irwine. 
 
15 
 
 "Ten to one, you would have thought him a 
 tasteless, indiscreet, methodistical man. It is so very 
 rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by our 
 own enlightened opinions and refined taste ! Per- 
 haps you will say, * Do improve the facts a little, 
 then ; make them more accordant with those correct 
 views which it is our privilege to possess. The world 
 is not just what we like ; do touch it up with a taste- 
 ful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a 
 mixed, entangled affair. Let all people who hold un- 
 exceptionable opinions act unexceptionably. Let . 
 your most faulty characters always be on the wrong 
 side, and your virtuous ones on the right. Then we 
 shall see at a glance whom we are to condemn, and 
 whom we are to approve. Then we shall be able to 
 admire, without the slightest disturbance of our pre- 
 possessions ; we shall hate and despise with that true 
 ruminant relish which belongs to undoubting confi- 
 dence.' 
 
 " But, my good friend, what will you do then with 
 your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband in 
 the vestry ? with your newly-appointed vicar, whose 
 style of preaching you find painfully below that of 
 his regretted predecessor ? with the honest servant 
 who worries your soul with her one failing ? with 
 your neighbor, Mrs. Green, who was really kind to 
 you in' your last illness, but has said several ill-natured 
 things about you since your convalescence? nay, 
 with your excellent husband himself, who has other 
 irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes ? 
 
 " These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted 
 as they are ; you can neither straighten their noses, 
 nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions ; 
 and it is these people among whom your life is passed 
 that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love ; 
 it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent peo- 
 
i6 
 
 pie, whose movements of goodness you should be 
 able to admire for whom you should cherish all 
 possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would 
 not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist 
 who could create a world so much better than this, in 
 which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, 
 that you would be likely to' turn a harder, colder eye 
 on the dusty streets and the common green fields 
 on the real breathing men and women, who can be 
 chilled by your indifference, or injured by your preju- 
 dice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your 
 fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave 
 justice. 
 
 " So I am content to tell my simple story, without 
 trying to make things seem better than they were ; 
 dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite 
 of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. False- 
 hood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is con- 
 scious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin the 
 longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better ; 
 but that marvelous facility, which we mistook for 
 genius, is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a 
 real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, 
 and you will find that even when you have no motive 
 to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact 
 truth, even about your own immediate feelings much 
 harder than to say something fine about them which is 
 not the exact truth. 
 
 " It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness 
 that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty- 
 minded people despise. I find a source of delicious 
 sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous, 
 homely existence, which has been the fate of so many 
 more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or 
 of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world- 
 stirring actions. 
 
" I turn without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, 
 from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old 
 woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her soli- 
 tary dinner, while the noonday light, softened, per- 
 haps, by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and 
 just touches the rim of her spinning wheel, and her 
 stone jug, and all those cheap, common things which 
 are the precious necessaries of life to her ; or I turn 
 to that village wedding, kept between four brown 
 walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance 
 with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while eld- 
 erly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irreg- 
 ular noses and lips, and probably with quart pots in 
 their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable 
 contentment and good-will. 
 
 " ' Foh ! ' says my idealistic friend, ' what vulgar 
 details ! What good is there in taking all these pains 
 to give an exact likeness of old women and clowns ? 
 What a low phase of life ! What clumsy, ugly 
 people ! ' 
 
 " But, bless us, things may be lovable that are not 
 altogether handsome, I hope ! I am not at all sure 
 that the majority of the human race have not been 
 ugly, and even among those ' lords of their kind,' the 
 British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy com- 
 plexions, are not startling exceptions. Yet there is a 
 great deal of family love among us. I have a friend 
 or two whose class of features is such that the Apollo 
 curl on the summit of their brows w r ould be decidedly 
 trying ; yet, to my certain knowledge, tender hearts 
 have beaten for them, and their miniatures flattering, 
 but still not lovely are kissed in secret by motherly 
 lips. I have seen many an excellent matron, who 
 could never in her best days have been handsome, 
 and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a 
 private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on 
 
i8 
 
 her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been 
 plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble 
 beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love 
 anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet 
 have found themselves in middle life happily settled 
 with a wife who waddles. Yes ! thank God ; human 
 feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth; 
 it does not wait for beauty it flows with resistless 
 force and brings beauty with it. 
 
 " All honor and reverence to the divine beauty of 
 form ! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, 
 women and children in our gardens and in our 
 houses ; but let us love that other beauty, too, which 
 lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of 
 deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you 
 can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by 
 the celestial light ; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, 
 turning her mild face upward, and opening her arms 
 to welcome the divine glory ; but do not impose on 
 us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the 
 region of Art those old women scraping carrots with 
 their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking 
 holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs 
 and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over 
 the spade and done the rough work of the world 
 those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, 
 their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. 
 
 " In this world there are so many of these common, 
 coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental 
 wretchedness ! 
 
 " It is so needful that we should .remember their 
 existence, else we may happen to leave them quite 
 out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty 
 theories which only fit a world of extremes. 
 
 " Therefore, let Art always remind us of them ; 
 therefore, let us always have men ready to give the 
 
19 
 
 loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of 
 commonplace things men who see beauty in these 
 commonplace things, and delight in showing how 
 kindly the light of heaven falls on them. 
 
 " There are few prophets in the world few sub- 
 limely beautiful women few heroes. I can't afford 
 to give all my love and reverence to such rarities ; I 
 w r ant a great deal of those feelings for my every day 
 fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of 
 the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands 
 I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly 
 courtesy. 
 
 " Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic 
 criminals half so frequent as your common laborer, 
 who gets his own bread and eats it vulgarly but cred- 
 itably with his own pocket knife. It is more needful 
 that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me 
 with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a 
 vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the 
 handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers ; 
 more needful that my heart should swell with loving 
 admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the 
 faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or 
 in the clergyman of my own parish, who is, perhaps, 
 rather too corpulent, and in other respects is not an 
 Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes 
 whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the 
 sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever 
 conceived by an able novelist." 
 
 So much for the programme. And now for the 
 performance. The very term analysis implies growth, 
 and thus it has been with George Eliot. Steady growth 
 has been the law of her mental being. Like all large 
 minds, she gives evidence, in all her earlier writing, of 
 
20 
 
 painful self-doubt self-doubt as to her sufficiency for 
 the toilsome way before her. But she grows bolder 
 and bolder with each successive analysis, and, from 
 the completion of "Silas Marner" in 1861, she 
 begins to teach, not as the Scribes but as one hav- 
 ing authority. c< Silas Marner " is her first great anal- 
 ytic work, the first of that wonderful series in which 
 she has become so conscious of her dissecting power 
 that she fairly revels in the exposing of muscle and 
 fibre and nerve. She feels her growing strength like 
 strong wine, and stops abruptly, on the eve of some 
 great dramatic unity, to plunge her lancet into the 
 lobes of the brain ay, even into the profoundest 
 workings of the soul itself. Nothing escapes her. 
 She gloats over her victims like the shadow of the 
 Eumenides. She tells us not only why they have done 
 or thought anything, but why they will do or think 
 anything, and we know their future equally with their 
 past. I am using no exaggeration of language. I am 
 really beneath the mark. We feel sure that the spectre 
 of his former wife will some time rise to confront God- 
 frey Cass; and it comes at last in the person of her 
 abandoned daughter. We see the very clutch of the 
 remorseless Baldassarre tightening around the throat of 
 the graceful Tito as he passes, exulting with success, 
 through the labyrinth of Italian intrigue. We know 
 that the genius and purity and ambition of Savon- 
 arola must kindle the fires of martyrdom. We 
 are certain that the high-born Silva, "Wearing 
 great honors as some delicate robe, brocaded o'er 
 
with names 'twere sin to tarnish," must drain the cup 
 of desolation and despair ; that the autobiographic 
 ideals of Dorothea are doomed to perpetual chagrin 
 and that Armgart must be humbled or crushed. We 
 know the bitter answer that is waiting for Gwendolen 
 before Herr Klesmer has opened his lips. We know, 
 on the other hand, that Adam Bede must go on daily 
 increasing in the strength of honesty and of all righ- 
 teousness ; that Dinah Morris will be found within 
 the prison cell, upon the eve of the execution, strug- 
 gling to lift a fallen soul up the steeps of Calvary. We 
 know that Romola must rise day by day, above each 
 successive bitterness, in proportion as her husband 
 sinks, until at length she stands the simplest, the 
 noblest, the purest, the grandest of ideal creations. 
 Down, down, deeper and deeper, our author goes, 
 until, in the "Spanish Gypsy," completed in 1868, 
 she touches a depth of soul-scrutiny unequaled, in my 
 opinion, by Shakspeare himself. Then, in her suc- 
 ceeding work of " Middlemarch," given to the public 
 in 1871, the whole of her dual genius of historian 
 and philosopher comes forth, in complete and finished 
 perfection, in her great studies of provincial life, and 
 gives to the world by far the finest philosophic novel 
 of English or of any literature. 
 
 I know that I am tasking your patience, gentlemen ; 
 but I crave your indulgence for a few moments longer. 
 The subject is worthy of the time, and, with your 
 gracious permission, I would fain give you a sample 
 or two of her analvsis. I read from " Silas Marner :" 
 
" This is the history of Silas Marner until the fif- 
 teenth year after he came to Raveloe. The livelong 
 day he sat in his loom, his ear filled with its monotony, 
 his eyes bent close down on the slow growth of same- 
 ness in the brownish web, his muscles moving with 
 such even repetition that their pause seemed almost 
 as much a constraint as the holding of his breath. 
 
 " But at night came his revelry; at night he closed 
 his shutters, and made fast his doors, and drew out his 
 gold. Long ago the heap of coins had become too 
 large for the iron pot to hold them, and he had made 
 for them two thick leather bags, which wasted no room 
 in their resting place, but lent themselves flexibly to 
 every corner. 
 
 " How the guineas shone as they came pouring out 
 of the dark leather mouths ! The silver bore no large 
 proportion in amount to the gold, because the long 
 pieces of linen which formed his chief work were 
 always partly paid for in gold, and out of the silver he 
 supplied his own bodily wants, choosing always the 
 shillings and sixpences to spend in this way. He loved 
 the guineas best, but he would not change the silver 
 the crowns and half-crowns that were his own earn- 
 ings, begotten by his labor; he loved them all. He 
 spread them out in heaps and bathed his hands in 
 them ; then he counted them and set them up in regu- 
 lar piles, and felt their rounded outline between his 
 thumb and fingers, and thought fondly of the guineas 
 that were only half earned by the work in his loom, as 
 if they had been unborn children thought of the 
 guineas that were coming slowly through the coming 
 years, through all his life which spread far away before 
 him, the end quite hidden by countless days of weav- 
 ing. 
 
 " No wonder his thoughts were still with his loom 
 and his money, when he made his journeys through 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 the fields and the lanes to fetch and carry home his 
 work, so that his steps never wandered to the hedge- 
 banks and the lane-side in search of the once familiar 
 herbs. These, too, belonged to the past, from which 
 his life had shrunk away, like a rivulet that has sunk 
 far down from the grassy fringe of its old breadth into 
 a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself in 
 the barren sand." 
 
 You may read on, at your leisure, the splendidly 
 depicted struggle in the miser's mind in which the 
 love of the foundling child conquers and drives out 
 the love of gold. 
 
 Hark to the sudden exclamation, the " Some mad- 
 man, surely ! " of Tito, as he meets the panther Bal- 
 dassarre upon the steps of the Duomo the unguarded 
 denial, wrested by sudden terror, t instead of the easy 
 dissimulation. 
 
 Read the great scene from pages 431 to 439, for I 
 have not time to do so, where Romola pleads, with 
 tragic power, for the interposition of the Frate to save 
 her uncle. Witness the subtle analysis in the death 
 scene where Baldassarre sits, through the long hours of 
 the night, on the body of Tito, clutching his throat 
 the avenging Nemesis, unseparated and inseparable, 
 even in death. 
 
 Permit me to turn for a moment to the " Spanish 
 Gypsy/' 
 
 [A handsome room in the Castle. On a table a rich 
 
 jewif-casket. ] 
 
 " Silva had doffed his mail and with it all 
 The heavier harness of his warlike cares. 
 
24 
 
 He had not seen Fedalma ; miser-like 
 He hoarded through the hour a costlier joy 
 By longing oft-repressed. Now it was earned ; 
 And with observance wonted he would send 
 To ask admission. Spanish gentlemen 
 Who wooed fair dames of noble ancestry 
 Did homage with rich tunics and slashed sleeves 
 And outward-surging linen's costly snow ; 
 With broidered scarf transverse, and rosary 
 Handsomely wrought to fit high-blooded prayer ; 
 So hinting in how deep respect they held 
 That self they threw before their lady's feet. 
 And Silva that Fedalma's rate should stand 
 No jot below the highest, that her love 
 Might seem to all the royal gift it was 
 Turned every trifle in his mien and garb 
 To scrupulous language, uttering to the world 
 That since she loved him he went carefully, 
 Bearing a thing so precious in his hand. 
 A man of high-wrought strain, fastidious 
 In his acceptance, dreading all delight 
 That speedy dies and turns to carrion : 
 His senses much exacting, deep instilled 
 With keen imagination's difficult needs ; 
 Like strong-limbed monsters studded o'er with eyes, 
 Their hunger checked by overwhelming vision, 
 Or that fierce lion in symbolic dream 
 Snatched from the ground by wings and new-endowed 
 With a man's thought-propelled relenting heart, 
 bilva was both the lion and the man ; 
 First hesitating shrank, then fiercely sprang, 
 Or having sprung, turned pallid at his deed 
 And loosed the prize, paying his blood for naught. 
 A nature half-transformed, with qualities 
 That oft bewrayed each other, elements 
 Not blent but struggling, breeding strange effects, 
 
Passing the reckoning of his friends or foes. 
 Haughty and generous, grave and passionate ; 
 With tidal moments of devoutest awe, 
 Sinking anon to furthest ebb of doubt ; 
 Deliberating ever., till the sting 
 Of a recurrent ardor made him rush 
 Right against reasons that himself had drilled 
 And marshalled painfully. A spirit framed 
 Too proudly special for obedience, 
 Too subtly pondering for mastery : 
 Born of a goddess with a mortal sire, 
 Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity, 
 Doom -gifted with long resonant consciousness 
 And perilous heightening of the sentient soul, 
 But look less curiously ;* life itself 
 May not express us all, may leave the worst 
 And the best, too, like tunes in mechanism 
 Never awaked. In various catalogues 
 Objects stand variously. Suva stands 
 As a young Spaniard, handsome, noble > brave, 
 WitJi titles many, high in pedigree ; 
 Or, as a nature quiveringly poised 
 In reach of storms, whose qualities may turn 
 To murdered virtues that still walk as ghosts 
 Within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse ;_. 
 \Or, as a lover . ... In the screening time 
 Of purple blossoms, when the petals crowd 
 And softly crush like cherub cheeks in heaven, 
 Who thinks of greenly withered fruit and worms ? 
 O the warm southern spring is beauteous ! 
 
 : These words corne to us like a sigh of relief after the intensity of the 
 analytic scrutiny which precedes them. 
 
 t Nothing could be more artistic, as a peroration to. a profound intellectual 
 effort, than the exquisitely poetic lines which follow lines of which it is 
 difficult to say whether the poetry or the thought is of a loftier type and 
 which are so skilfully constructed that their very poetry itself becomes a 
 prominent factor in the logical conception. 
 
26 
 
 And in love's spring all good seems possible : 
 No threats, all promise , brooklets ripple full 
 And bathe the rushes, vicious crawling things 
 Are pretty eggs, the sun shines graciously 
 And parches not, the silent rain beats warm 
 As childhood^s kisses, days are young and grow^ 
 And earth seems in its sweet beginning time 
 Fresh made for two who live in Paradise. 
 Silva is in love's spring, its freshness breathed 
 Within his soul along the dusty ways 
 While marching homeward ; '/ is around him now 
 As' in a garden fenced in for delight f * * * 
 
 Then follows the scene between Silva and the 
 Prior, near the culmination of which occurs the great 
 passage, which is itself an epitome of psychical evo- 
 lution. 
 
 DON SILVA (scornfully^. 
 Holy accusers practise palmistry 
 And, other witness lacking, read the skin. 
 
 PRIOR. 
 
 / read a record deeper than the skin, 
 What ! Shall the trick of nostrils and of lips 
 Descend through generations, and the soul 
 That moves within our frame, like God in worlds 
 Convulsing, urging, melting, withering 
 Imprint no record, leave no documents, 
 Of her great history ? Shall men bequeath 
 The fancies of their palate to their sons, 
 And shall the shudder of restraining awe, 
 
 t The whole of the foregoing passage in italics is a wonderful piece of 
 character analysis, and only surpassed if degrees of excellence may be 
 predicated of productions which are perfect in themselves by the intellec- 
 ,tual and psychical portraiture of Daniel Deronda, infra. 
 
27 
 
 The slow-wept tears of contrite memory, 
 Faith's prayerful labor, and the food divine 
 Of fasts ecstatic, shall these pass away 
 Like wind upon the waters, tracklessly ? 
 Shall the mere curl of eyelashes remain 
 And god-enshrining symbols leave no trace 
 Of tremors reverent 2 That maiden's blood 
 Is as unchristian as the leopards. 
 
 I have read more copiously from the " Spanish 
 Gypsy," because it is George Eliot's nearest approach 
 to tragedy, and because it only serves to make us fer- 
 vently hope that she may yet essay this highest walk 
 of the drama, where she may contend side by side 
 with the masterpieces of Shakspeare. Compare, too, 
 in reading this great work as I trust, if you have not 
 already done so, you will its analytic power with the 
 relative feebleness of Tennyson's " Queen Mary." 
 And, now, let me turn, for a moment, to " Armgart," 
 a fragment of subtlest force, written in 1870. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 I am not glad with that mean vanity 
 Which knows no good beyond its appetite 
 Full feasting upon praise ! I am only glad, 
 Being praised for what I know is worth the praise ; 
 Glad of the proof that I myself have part 
 In what I worship ! At the last applause 
 Seeming a roar of tropic winds that tossed 
 The handkerchiefs and many-colored flowers, 
 Falling like shattered rainbows all around 
 Think you I felt myself a prima donna ? 
 No, but a happy spiritual star, 
 Such as old Dante saw, wrought in a rose 
 
28 
 
 Of light in Paradise, whose only self 
 Was consciousness of glory wide-diffused, 
 Music, life, power I moving in the midst 
 With a sublime necessity of good. 
 
 LEO (with a shrug). 
 
 I thought it was a prima donna came 
 Within the side scenes ; ay, and she was proud 
 To find the bouquet from the royal box 
 Enclosed a jewel-case, and proud to wear 
 A star of brilliants, quite an earthly star, 
 Valued by thalers. Come, my lady, own 
 Ambition has five senses, and a self 
 That gives it good warm lodging when it sinks 
 Plump down from ecstasy. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 Own it ? Why not ? 
 
 Am I a sage whose words must fall like seed 
 Silently buried toward a far-off spring ? 
 I sing to living men, and my effect 
 Is like the summer's sun, that ripens corn 
 Or now or never. If the world brings me gifts, 
 Gold, intense, myrrh 'twill be the needtul sign 
 That I have stirred it as the high year stirs 
 Before I sink to winter. 
 
 GRAF (Armgart's lover). 
 
 Ecstasies 
 
 Are short most happily ! We should but lose 
 Were Armgart borne too commonly and long 
 Out of the self that charms us. Could I choose, 
 She were less apt to soar beyond the reach 
 Of woman's foibles, innocent vanities, 
 Fondness for trifles like that pretty star 
 Twinkling beside her cloud of ebon hair. 
 
29 
 
 ARMGART (taking out the gem and looking at if], 
 This little star ! I would it were the seed 
 Of a whole milky way, if such bright shimmer 
 Were the sole speech men told their rapture with 
 At Armgart's music. Shall I turn aside 
 From splendors which flash out the glow I make, 
 And live to make, in all the chosen breasts 
 Of half a continent ? No, may it come, 
 That splendor 1 May the day be near when men 
 Think much to let my horses draw me home, 
 And new lands welcome me upon their beach, 
 Loving me for my fame. That is the truth 
 Of what I wish, nay, yearn for. Shall I lie ? 
 Pretend to seek obscurity to sing 
 In hope of disregard ? A vile pretence ! 
 And blasphemy besides. For what is fame 
 But the benignant strength of One, transformed 
 To joy of many ? Tributes, plaudits come 
 As necessary breathing of such joy ; 
 
 And may they come to me ! 
 
 *"#.##.##'*' 
 
 [Meanwhile, Armgart has had a severe attack of 
 illness. In curing her, the physician has used violent 
 remedies that have destroyed her voice, without her 
 knowledge. Overcome with ennui and longing, she 
 escapes from her chamber of convalescence, and goes 
 to the opera, and sings, and fails.] 
 
 SCENE IV. Two HOURS LATER. 
 [Walpurga starts up, looking towards the door. Arm- 
 gart enters, followed by Leo. She throws herself 
 on a chair, speechless, not seeming to see any- 
 thing. Walpurga casts a questioning, terrified 
 look at Leo. He shrugs his shoulders, and lifts 
 up his hands behind Armgart, w r ho sits like a 
 helpless image, while Walpurga takes off her hat 
 and mantle.] 
 
WALPURGA. 
 
 Armgart, dear Armgart, only speak to me y 
 Your poor Walpurga. Oh, your hands are cold. 
 Clasp mine, and warm them ! I will kiss them warm. 
 [Armgart looks at her an instant, then draws away 
 her hands, and, turning aside, buries her face against 
 the back of the chair, Wilpurga rising and standing 
 near. Doctor enters. ] 
 
 DOCTOR. 
 News ! stirring news to-d.iy ! Wonders come thick. 
 
 ARMGART (starting up at the first sound of his voice* 
 
 and speaking vehemently}. 
 
 Yes, thick, thick, thick ! and you have murdered it ! 
 Murdered my voice poisoned the soul in me, 
 And kept me living. 
 You never told me that your cruel cures 
 Were clogging films a mouldy, dead'ning blight 
 A lava-mud to crust and bury me, 
 Yet hold me living in a deep, deep tomb, 
 Crying unheard forever ! Oh, your cures 
 Are devil's triumphs : you can rob, maim, slay, 
 And keep a hell on the other side your cure 
 Where you can see your victim quivering 
 Between the teeth of torture see a soul 
 Made keen by loss all anguish with a good 
 Once known and gone ! 
 
 ( Turns and sinks back on her chair. ) 
 
 O misery, misery ! 
 
 You might have killed me, might have let me sleep 
 After my happy day, and wake not here ! 
 In some new unremembered world not here, 
 Where all is faded, flat a feast broke off- 
 Banners all meaningless exulting words 
 
Dull, dull a drum that lingers in the air 
 Beating to melody which no man hears. 
 
 DOCTOR (after a moment's silence). 
 A sudden check has shaken you, poor child ! 
 All things seem livid, tottering to your sense, 
 From inward tumult. Stricken by a threat 
 You see your terrors only. Tell me, Leo : 
 'Tis not such utter loss. 
 
 (LEO, with a shrug, goes quietly (ntt.) 
 
 The freshest bloom 
 Merely, has left the fruit ; the fruit itself 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 Is rained, withered, is a thing to hide 
 Away from scorn or pity. Oh, you stand 
 And look compassionate now, but when Death came 
 With mercy in his hands, you hindered him. 
 I did not choose to live and have your pity. 
 You never told me, never gave me choice 
 To die a singer, lightning-struck, unmaimed, 
 Or live what you would make me with your cures 
 A self accursed with consciousness of change, 
 A mind that lives in nought but members lopped 
 A power turned to pain as meaningless 
 As letters fallen asunder that once made 
 A hymn of rapture. Oh, I had meaning once, 
 Like day and sweetest air. What am I now ? 
 The millionth woman in superfluous herds. 
 Why should I be, do, think ? Tis thistle-seed, 
 That grows and grows to feed the rubbish-heap. 
 Leave me alone ! 
 
 DOCTOR. 
 
 Well, I will come again ; 
 
 Send for me when you will, though but to rate me. 
 That is medicinal a letting blood. 
 
ARMGART. 
 
 Oh, there is one physician, only one, 
 Who cures and never spoils. Him I shall send for 
 He comes readily. 
 
 DOCTOR (to WALPURGA). 
 One word, dear Fraulein. 
 
 SCENE V. (ARMGART, WALPURGA.) 
 
 ARMGART. 
 Walpurga, have you walked this morning? 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 No. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 Go, then, and walk ; I wish to be alone. 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 I will not leave you. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 Will not, at my wish ? 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 Will not, because you wish it. Say no more, 
 But take this draught. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 The Doctor gave it you ? 
 It is an anodyne. Put it away. 
 He cured me of my voice, and now he wants 
 To cure me of my vision and resolve 
 Drug me to sleep, that I may wake again 
 Without a purpose, abject as the rest 
 To bear the yoke of life. He shall not cheat me 
 Of that fresh strength which anguish gives the soul, 
 The inspiration of revolt, ere rage 
 Slackens to faltering. Now I see the truth. 
 
33 
 
 WALPURGA (setting down the glass. ) 
 Then you must see a future in your reach, 
 With happiness enough to make a dower 
 For two of modest claims. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 Oh, you intone 
 
 That chant of consolation wherewith ease 
 Makes itself easier in the sight of pain. 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 \ 
 
 No ; I would not console you, but rebuke. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 That is more bearable. Forgive me, dear, 
 Say what you will. But now I want to write. 
 (She rises, and moves towards a table.} 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 I say then, you are simply feuered, mad ; 
 You cry aloud at horrors that would vanish 
 If you would change the light, throw into shade 
 The loss you aggrandize, and let day fall 
 On good remaining, nay on good refused 
 Which may be gain now. Did you not reject 
 A woman's lot more brilliant, as some held, 
 Than any singer's? It may still be yours. 
 Graf Dornberg loved you well. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 Not me, not me. 
 
 He loved one well who was like me in all 
 Save in a voice which made that All unlike 
 As diamond is to charcoal. Oh, a man's love ! 
 Think you he loves a woman's inner self 
 Aching with loss of loveliness ? as mothers 
 Cleave to the palpitating pain that dwells 
 Within their misformed offspring ? 
 
34 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 But the Graf 
 
 Chose you as simple Armgart had preferred 
 That you should never seek for any fame 
 But such as matrons have who rear great sons. 
 And therefore you rejected him ; but now 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 Ay, now now he would see me as I am, 
 (She takes up a hand-mirror,} 
 Russet and songless as a missel-thrush, 
 An ordinary girl a plain brown girl, 
 Who, if some meaning flash from out her words, 
 Shocks as a disproportioned thing a Will 
 That, like an arm astretch and broken off, 
 Has nought to hurl the torso of a soul. 
 I sang him into love of me ; my song 
 Was consecration, lifted me apart 
 From the crowd chiselled like me, sister forms, 
 But empty of divineness. Nay, my charm 
 Was half that I could win fame, yet renounce ! 
 A wife with glory possible absorbed 
 Into her husband's actual. 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 For shame ! 
 
 Armgart,. you slander him. What would you say 
 If now he came to you and asked again 
 That you would be his wife ? 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 No, and thrice no ! 
 
 It would be pitying constancy, not love, 
 That brought him to me now. I will not be 
 A pensioner in marriage. Sacraments 
 Are not to feed the paupers of the world. 
 If he were generous I am generous too. 
 
35 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 Proud, Armgart, but not generous. 
 ARMGART. 
 
 Say no more. 
 He will not know until 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 He knows already. 
 
 ARMGART (quickly}. 
 Is he come back ? 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 Yes, and will soon be here. 
 The Doctor had twice seen him, and would go 
 From hence again to see him. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 Well, he knows. 
 It is all one. 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 What if he were outside ? 
 I hear a footstep in the ante-room. 
 
 ARMGART (raising herself and assuming calmness}. 
 Why let him come, of course. I shall behave 
 Like what I am, a common personage 
 Who looks for nothing but civility. 
 I shall not play the fallen heroine, 
 Assume a tragic part, and throw out cues 
 For a beseeching lover. 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 Some one raps. 
 (Goes to the door.} 
 A letter from the Graf. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 Then open it. 
 
36 
 
 (WALPURGA still offers if). 
 Nay, my head swims. Read it. I cannot see. 
 (WALPURGA opens it, reads and pauses]. 
 Read it. Have done ! No matter what it is. 
 
 WALPURGA 
 
 [Reads a letter from the Graf tendering sympathy, 
 and conveying the information that he is about to de- 
 part on a journey of long duration. | 
 
 ARMGART (after a slight shudder, bitterly.} 
 The Graf has much discretion. I am glad. 
 He spares us both a pain, not seeing me. 
 What I like least is that consoling hope 
 That empty cup, so neatly ciphered " Time," 
 Handed me as a cordial for despair. 
 Time what a word to fling as charity ! 
 Bland, neutral word for slow, dull- beating pain 
 Days, months and years ! If I would wait for them. 
 
 (She takes up her hat and puts it on, then wraps 
 her mantle round her. WALPURGA leaves the room.) 
 Why, this is but beginning. 
 
 (WALPURGA re-enters.} 
 
 Kiss me, dear. 
 
 I am going now alone out for a walk. 
 Say you will never wound me any more 
 With such cajolery as nurses use 
 To patients amorous of a crippled life. 
 Flatter the blind : I see. 
 
 W T ALPURGA. 
 
 Well, I was wrong. 
 
 In haste to soothe, I snatched at flickers merely. 
 Believe me, I will flatter you no more. 
 
37 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 Bear witness, I am calm. I read my lot 
 As soberly as if it were a tale 
 Writ by a creeping feuilletonist and called 
 " The Woman's Lot : a Tale of Everyday ; " 
 A middling woman's, to impress the world 
 With high superfluousness ; her thoughts a crop 
 Of chick-weed errors or of pot-herb facts, 
 Smiled at like some child's drawing on a slate. 
 " Genteel ? " " Oh yes, gives lessons ; not so good 
 " As any man's would be, but cheaper far." 
 " Pretty ? " " No : yet she makes a figune fit 
 " For good society. Poor thing, she sews 
 " Both late and early, turns and alters all 
 " To suit the changing mode. Some widower 
 u Might do well, marrying her; but in these days! 
 " Well, she can somewhat eke her narrow gains 
 " By writing, just to furnish her with gloves 
 " And droskies in the rain. They print her things 
 " Often for charity."- Oh, a dog's life ! 
 A harnessed dog's, that draws a little cart 
 Voted a nuisance ! I am going now. 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 Not now, the door is locked. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 Give me the key ! 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 Locked on the outside. Gretchen has the key: 
 She is gone on errands. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 What, you dare keep me 
 Your prisoner? 
 
38 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 And have I not been yours? 
 Your wish has been a bolt to keep me in. 
 Perhaps that middling woman whom you paint 
 With far-off scorn 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 I paint what I must be ! 
 What is my soul to me without the voice 
 That gave it freedom? gave it one grand touch 
 And made it nobly human? Prisoned now, 
 Prisoned in all the petty mimicries 
 Called woman's knowledge, that will fit the world 
 As doll-clothes fit a man. I can do nought 
 Better than what a million women do 
 Must drudge among the crowd, and feel my life 
 Beating upon the world without response, 
 Beating with passion through an insect's horn 
 That moves a millet-seed laboriously. 
 If I would do it ! 
 
 WALPURGA (coldly). 
 And why should you not? 
 
 ARMGART (turning quickly). 
 
 Because Heaven made me royal wrought me out 
 With subtle finish towards pre-eminence, 
 Made every channel of my soul converge 
 To one high function, and then flung me down, 
 That breaking I might turn to subtlest pain. 
 An inborn passion gives a rebel's right. 
 I would rebel and die in twenty worlds 
 Sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life, 
 Each keenest sense turned into keen distaste. 
 Hunger not satisfied, but kept alive, 
 Breathing in languor half a century. 
 All the world now is but a rack of threads 
 
39 
 
 To twist and dwarf me into pettiness 
 
 And basely feigned content, the placid mask 
 
 Of woman's misery. 
 
 WALPURGA (indignantly). 
 Ay, such a mask 
 
 As the few born like you to easy joy, 
 Cradled in privilege, take for natural 
 On all the lowly faces that must look 
 Upward to you ! What revelation now 
 Shows you the mask or gives presentiment 
 Of sadness hidden? You who every day 
 These five years saw me limp to wait on you, , 
 And thought the order perfect which gave me, 
 The girl without pretension to be aught, 
 A splendid cousin for my happiness : 
 To watch the night through when her brain was fired 
 With too much gladness listen, always listen 
 To what she felt, who having power had right 
 To feel exorbitantly, and submerge 
 The souls around her with the poured-out flood 
 Of what must be ere she were satisfied! 
 That was feigned patience, was it ? Why not- love, 
 Love nurtured even with that strength of self 
 Which found no room save in another's life? 
 Oh, such as I know joy by negatives, 
 And all their deepest passion is a pang 
 Till they accept their pauper's heritage, 
 And meekly live from out the general store 
 Of joy they were born stripped of. I accept 
 Nay, now would sooner choose it than the wealth 
 Of natures you call royal, who can live 
 In mere mock knowledge of their fellows' woe, 
 Thinking their smiles -may heal it. 
 
 ARMGART (tremulously]. 
 
 Nay, Walpurga, 
 
40 
 
 I did not make a palace of my joy 
 To shut the world's truth from me. All my good 
 Was that I touched the world, and made a part 
 In the world's dower of beauty, strength, and bliss ; 
 It was the glimpse of consciousness divine 
 Which pours out day and sees the day is good. 
 Now I am fallen dark ; I sit in gloom, 
 Remembering bitterly. Yet you speak truth ; 
 I wearied you, it seems; took all your help 
 As cushioned nobles use a weary serf, 
 Not looking at his face. 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 Oh, I but stand 
 
 As a small symbol for a mighty sum 
 The sum of claims unpaid for myriad lives ; 
 I think you never set your loss beside 
 That mighty deficit. Is your work gone 
 The prouder, queenly work that paid itself 
 And yet was overpaid with men's applause? 
 Are you no longer chartered, privileged, 
 But sunk to simple woman's penury, 
 To ruthless Nature's chary average 
 Where is the rebel's right for you alone ? 
 Noble rebellion lifts a common load; 
 But what is he who flings his own load off 
 And leaves his fellows toiling? Rebel's right? 
 Say rather, the deserter's. Oh, you smiled 
 From your clear height on all the million lots 
 Which yet you brand as abject. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 I was blind 
 
 With too much happiness: true vision comes 
 Only, it seems, with sorrow. Were there one 
 This moment near me, suffering what I feel, 
 And needing me for comfort in her pang 
 Then it were worth the while to live; not else. 
 
WALPURGA, 
 
 One near you why, they throng! You hardly stir 
 But your act touches them. We touch afar. 
 For did not swarthy slaves of yesterday 
 Leap in their bondage at the Hebrew's flight, 
 Which touched them through the thrice millenial dark? 
 But you can find the sufferer you need 
 With touch less subtle. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 Who has need of me? 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 Love finds the need it fills. But you are hard. 
 
 ARMGART. 
 
 Is it not you, Walpurga, who are hard? 
 You humored all my wishes till to-day, 
 When fate has blighted me. 
 
 WALPURGA. 
 
 You would not hear 
 
 The "chant of consolation:" words of hope 
 Only embittered you. Then hear the truth 
 A lame girl's truth, whom no one ever praised 
 For being cheerful. u It is well," they said : 
 "Were she cross-grained, she could not be endured." 
 A word of truth from her had startled you ; 
 But you, you claimed the universe ; nought less 
 Than all existence working in sure tracks 
 Towards your supremacy. The wheels might scathe 
 A myriad destinies nay, must perforce ; 
 But yours they must keep clear of; just for you 
 The seething atoms through the firmament 
 Must bear a human heart which you had not ! 
 For what is it to you that 1 women, men, 
 Plod, faint, are weary, and espouse despair 
 Of aught but fellowship? Save that you spurn 
 
42 
 
 To be among them? Now, then, you are lame 
 Maimed, as you said, and leveled with the crowd : 
 Call it new birth birth from that monstrous Self 
 Which, smiling down upon a race oppressed, 
 Says, "All is good, for I am throned at ease." 
 Dear Armgart nay, you tremble I am cruel. 
 
 " Middlemarch," completed in 1871, I am forced to 
 pass by without citation ; and, indeed, it is a too per- 
 fect whole to be thus marred. Let me refer you to 
 that sublime scene in " Daniel Deronda," between 
 Herr Klesmer and Gwendolen, where play and coun- 
 terplay of feeling are so keen, and close my quota- 
 tions by this sketch from " Daniel Deronda," which is 
 the greatest piece of character study that I have ever 
 met with. 
 
 It happened that the very vividness of Deronda's 
 impressions had often made him the more enigmatic 
 to his friends, and had contributed to an apparent in- 
 definite.ness in his sentiments. His early-wakened 
 sensibility and reflectiveness had developed into a 
 many-sided sympathy, which threatened to hinder any 
 persistent course of action. As soon as he took up 
 any antagonism, though only in thought, he seemed 
 to himself like the Sabine warriors in the memorable 
 story with nothing to meet his spear, but flesh of his 
 flesh and objects that he loved. His imagination had 
 so wrought itself to the habit of seeing things as they 
 probably appeared to others, that a strong partisan- 
 ship, unless it were against an immediate oppression, 
 had become an insincerity for him. 
 
 His plenteous, flexible sympathy had ended by fall- 
 ing into one current with that reflective analysis which 
 tends to neutralize sympathy. Few men were able to 
 
43 
 
 keep themselves clearer of vices than he ; yet he 
 hated vices mildly, being used to think of them less 
 in the abstract than as a part of mixed human natures 
 having an individual history, which it was the bent of 
 his mind to trace with understanding and pity. 
 
 With the same innate balance he was fervidly 
 democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, 
 through his affections and imagination, intensely con- 
 servative ; voracious of speculations on government 
 and religion, yet loth to part with long-sanctioned 
 forms which, for him, were quick with memories and 
 sentiments that no argument could lay dead. 
 
 We fall on the leaning side ; and Deronda suspect- 
 ed himself of loving too well the losing causes of the 
 world. Martyrdom changes sides, and he was in dan- 
 ger of changing with it, having a strong repugnance 
 to taking up that clue of success which the order of 
 the world often forces upon us and makes it treason 
 against the common weal to reject. And yet his fear 
 of falling into an unreasoning, narrow hatred made a 
 check for him. He apologized for the heirs of privi- 
 lege ; he shrank with dislike from the loser's bitterness 
 and the denunciatory tone of the unaccepted inno- 
 vator. 
 
 A too reflective and diffusive sympathy was in dan- 
 ger of paralyzing in him that indignation against wrong 
 and that selectness of fellowship which are the .con- 
 ditions of moral force ; and in the last few years of 
 confirmed manhood he had become so keenly aware 
 of this that what he most longed for was either some 
 external event, or some inward light, that would urge 
 him into a definite line of action, and compress his 
 wandering energy. 
 
 He was ceasing to care for knowledge he had no 
 ambition for practice unless they could both be 
 gathered up into one current with his emotions ; and 
 
44 
 
 he dreaded, as if it were a dwelling-place of lost souls, 
 that dead anatomy of culture which turns the uni- 
 verse into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and 
 knows, not everything, but every thing else about 
 every thing as if one should be ignorant of nothing 
 concerning the scent of violets except the scent itself 
 for which one had no nostril. 
 
 But how and whence was the needed event to 
 come? the influence that would justify partiality, 
 and make him what he longed to be, yet was unable 
 to make himself an organic part of social life, in- 
 stead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied 
 spirit, stirred with a vague social passion, but without 
 fixed local habitation to render fellowship real ? To 
 make a little difference for the better was what he was 
 not content to live without ; but how make it ? 
 
 It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it. 
 He found some of the fault in his birth and the way 
 he had been brought up, which had laid no special 
 demands on him and given him no fixed relationship 
 except one of a doubtful kind ; but he did not at- 
 tempt to hide from himself that he had fallen into a 
 meditative numbness, and was gliding farther and 
 farther from that life of practically energetic senti- 
 ment which he would have proclaimed (if he had been 
 inclined, to proclaim anything) to be the best of all 
 life, and for himself the only life worth living. He 
 wanted some way of keeping emotion and its pro- 
 geny of sentiments which make the savors of life 
 substantial and strong, in the face of a reflectiveness 
 that threatened to nullify all differences. To pound 
 the objects of sentiment into small dust, yet keep sen- 
 timent alive and active, was something like the famous 
 recipe for making cannon to first take a round hole 
 and then inclose it with iron ; whatever you do, keep- 
 ing fast hold of your round hole. 
 
45 
 
 Yet how distinguish what our will may wisely save 
 in its completeness from the heaping of cat-mummies 
 and the expensive cult of enshrined putrefactions ? 
 
 Something like this was the common under-current 
 in Deronda's mind, while he was reading law, or im- 
 perfectly attending to polite conversation. 
 
 Meanwhile, he had not set about one function in 
 particular with zeal and steadiness. 
 
 Not an admirable experience to be proposed as an 
 ideal ; but a form of struggle before break of day 
 which some young men since the patriarch have had 
 to pass through, with more or less of bruising, if not 
 laming. 
 
 And what shall I say of those great, original chap- 
 ter-headings which, like overtures to classic operas, 
 swiftly prelude the harmonies to come ! Ah, now I 
 repent me of my profanation. I have torn a paltry 
 few of the jewels from the diadem and thought to 
 make them shine with the combined lustre of the per- 
 fect whole. 
 
 I have cited these passages to which you have so 
 generously listened as examples of the profoundest 
 philosophic analysis. And here let me guard you 
 against the danger of conceiving of this analysis sim- 
 ply in its universality and its breadth. To be appre- 
 ciated, it must be viewed in its far grander dimension 
 of depth. No effort to estimate the analytic work of 
 George Eliot would deserve the name of criticism 
 which did not chiefly dwell on its profoundness, and 
 yet it is just this which it is so difficult to portray, so 
 almost impossible to realize ; for, unfortunately, the 
 vastness which chiefly strikes the human mind is the 
 
vastness of surface. When we think of the ocean as 
 the symbol of power, we conceive of its area as 
 stretching from pole to pole, and not of its mighty, 
 unfathomable depths whose midnight blackness, wrap- 
 ped in solitude eternal and profound, hath never been 
 reached by the plummet nor, possibly, by any form of 
 life. And all the more would I dwell on this quality 
 of depth, because it has been imputed to George 
 Eliot as a great artistic fault. Writers of the highest 
 intelligence and culture, who would not have tolerated 
 for an instant any superficiality on her part as a phil- 
 osopher, have denied her right to be profound as a 
 novelist, and contend that the novel has nothing to 
 do with analysis in any form, much less with that of 
 motive and of soul. Alas for the ruts of custom and 
 for the intellect that would shake off the bondage of 
 a thousand years ! As if, indeed, the term novel had 
 become irrevocably absolute ! As if some divine Fiat 
 had decreed that it should be unchangeably fixed and 
 construed by the petty standards of precedent shallow- 
 ness and imbecility ! As if the work, could dictate to 
 the workman, or genins, even in novel writing, be 
 limited by aught save the capacity to achieve ! No, it 
 is the -proudest attribute of our humanity prouder 
 than the right of trial by jury, or the legacies of 
 Magna Charta that there are no vested interests in 
 mediocrity, that we are gifted with the power and the 
 right to be perfect and that naught can come between 
 us and perfection save ourselves. And why should 
 the novel be an exception to this ruJe of universal 
 
47 
 
 progress ? If it have been degraded in the past, does 
 that make it a crime, or does it not rather make it an 
 additional virtue in her who would greatly lift it from 
 its degradation ? And, if this be so, and there be no 
 necessary, organic element of inferiority in the novel 
 as such, why should it not treat of the motives and 
 the souls of men as well, or even better, than of their 
 mere outward actions? "Perfectly true," reply the 
 critics ; " but we do not differ from you here, and you 
 are only knocking down wooden men of your own 
 setting up; for nobody disputes the right of the novel, 
 in common with all things, to progress and improve- 
 ment ; but what are progress and improvement ? We 
 do not take issue with you on the fact, but merely on 
 what constitutes the fact, and the real question is this : 
 is the attempt to apply the methods of analysis to the 
 secret springs of action a step in advance in romance 
 writing, or is it only a step aside and, therefore, in 
 effect, backward?" 
 
 Ah, my conservative friends, can it be that the his- 
 tory of the body all trace and influence of which is 
 lost in a few years or generations is greater than the 
 history of the soul which perisheth not and whose 
 influence is felt forever? Can it be that the pathos 
 of mere accident and incident, in even the most 
 pathetic of lives, has exercised a deeper influence on 
 the world than the pathos in those one or two mar- 
 velous soul struggles that have descended to us on the 
 canvas of a few master painters? And yet pathos, 
 above all emotions, speaks to us from the surface and 
 
48 
 
 through action. Think you that all the delineations 
 of all the innumerable "Fields of the Cloth of Gold" 
 that have existed since the beginning of time have 
 produced the effect in this world of ours that has 
 resulted from the artless narration of that mighty 
 psychologic agony beneath the olive branches of the 
 Jewish Garden ? Ah, believe me, in novel writing, as 
 in painting, there is much in the choice of a subject ! 
 " But," continue our objectors, "the essence of a 
 novel is plot, and all effects must be grouped around 
 and built upon and be subordinate to the on e central, 
 never-to-be-lost-sight-of thread of personal intrigue, and 
 this so called scientific analysis of the mind and soul 
 is fatal to the continuity of the plot." True, my 
 friends. I do not deny that plot is the foundation 
 of novel writing ; but suffer me, in turn, to join issue 
 with you on the meaning of terms and to ask you 
 what is plot ? Is plot only of the surface, superficial ? 
 Is it only to be found in the momentary flashing of 
 the eye, or the dreamy dallying of amorousness, or 
 the look of hatred, or the dagger thrust, or the 
 poisoned chalice ? Dwelleth it only with the assassin 
 and the lover ? Or is there plot in the struggles which 
 have no voice, but have a record more piercing and 
 profound than the momentary cry which the night 
 wind beareth away into the great unread forever ? 
 Is there a plot of action and yet no plot of the mind 
 and of the soul from which all action springs? Is 
 there a plot of the human, the animal, the bestial 
 elements of life, and no plot of those which are made 
 
49 
 
 in the likeness of a God ? Are there not heroes and 
 heroines upon the battle-fields of thought and emotion, 
 whose conquests and defeats may have some interest 
 and some importance, even when compared with those 
 of Alexander the Great or Joan of Arc ? Can not 
 even the "artistic" novelist spare us a little time from 
 the narration of love and murder for the analysis of 
 the man " Doom-gifted with long resonant conscious- 
 ness and perilous heightening of the sentient soul?' 7 
 Does not the great world lying around you, which is 
 struggling to-day beneath the accumulated burden of 
 thousands of years of ignorance and superficiality 
 and which has little time and less inclination for self- 
 study, need, above all things, an every-day philosophy 
 of the self-conscious ? 
 
 At least, so hath our novelist thought, and she has 
 aimed to give us the life which is not written, but 
 vvhich is implied in every human existence. And, with 
 that conscientiousness which so characterizes all her 
 work, she has not rested short of her ideal. She has 
 carried her analysis from life itself into the inmost re- 
 cesses of consciousness, both objective and subjec- 
 tive, and has given to the world a series of mighty 
 soul-plots. Preceding novelists have considered them- 
 selves at the bottom when they have sought to de- 
 lineate that portion of our lives which is unknown to 
 others, but George Eliot portrays that portion which 
 is unknown even to ourselves ; for it must be remem- 
 bered that the origin and motive of a great deal of 
 what even we ourselves think or do is either unknown 
 
to us or ignored by us, and it is the veil of this inmost 
 unknown that George Eliot has lifted. This it is 
 which makes her, ever and anon, appear from behind 
 the scenes, in those sublime passages of exposition to 
 which her critics object, in the character, as it were, 
 of a Greek Chorus. And, yet, she is wholly unlike 
 the Greek Chorus in this, that she very rarely I 
 might say never moralizes, but contents herself strictly 
 with the invariable sequence of cause and effect. 
 
 And this leads me to notice that other vital element 
 which impresses her analysis quite as much with the 
 stamp of true philosophy as its depth, and that is its 
 consistency. I can conceive of no truer test of the 
 philosopher than this ; for I can not conceive of a 
 philosophy which is ever unphilosophical. And ob- 
 serve how great was the peril which impended over 
 her from the very fact of this consistency itself. It is 
 easy and delightful to sit in one's closet and weave 
 philosophic webs. Not one critic in a thousand will 
 be able, and not one in ten thousand will be willing 
 to undertake the laborious and painful task of practi- 
 cal verification. We are dealing in the abstract, and 
 in the abstract, it is difficult to indict and next to im- 
 possible to convict of perjury. But George Eliot un- 
 dertook to do what neither novelist nor philosopher 
 had attempted before. She stepped boldly forth from 
 the closet into the forum and the market place, and 
 carried abstraction into the daily life of the multitude. 
 A million eyes are upon her now. A million minds 
 which could never have apprehended, much less weigh- 
 
5 1 
 
 ed, the justness of an analysis in the abstract x. and y., 
 will comprehend and critically judge that analysis in 
 the concrete Smith and Jones. 
 
 It seemed almost impossible to hope for her a dual 
 success, almost incredible that she should satisfy both 
 the philosophers and the world, almost chimerical to 
 suppose that she should succeed both on the side of 
 theory and of practice. Yet I have told you what 
 the philosophers think of her work, and every day is 
 bringing forth stronger and more emphatic evidence 
 of the opinion of the people. I have said that it was 
 a position of peril for George Eliot ; but what is the 
 peril of the individual when compared with the peril 
 which was impending over mankind? If only she 
 could have failed, the bursting bubble would have been 
 scarce worthy of notice in the rushing tide of life, and 
 the great caravansary, as it moved, would have paid 
 little heed to the one feeble cry in the mighty chorus 
 of individual despair. But a greater peril was bound 
 up in hers. It was the peril which always, impends 
 over the hopes of human progress when a great, uni- 
 versal soul that has identified itself with the onward 
 march of man, and has seized the standard of the 
 forlorn hope, grows sick and faints beneath the heat 
 and burden of the day. It was peril kindred to that 
 which impended over the world in the silent, unheed- 
 ed hours of that momentous Oriental night when, 
 from agonized lips, broke forth the cry, " My Father, 
 if it be possible, let this cup pass from me," and which 
 was dispelled by the immortal peroration, " Neverthe- 
 less, not my will, but thine, be done !" 
 
5 2 
 
 Indeed, I candidly believe that no intellectual fail- 
 ure of this, or of many centuries, would have been 
 comparable in its disastrous effects on human progress 
 to the failure, either on the side of theory or of prac- 
 tice, of George Eliot ; and all the more so, because 
 that failure could not have occurred, on the practical 
 side, at least, without circumstances of attendant lu- 
 dicrousness that would have been a fatal barrier, for 
 many a year, to the growth of philosophic methods 
 among the multitude ; for, of all the things to which 
 the multitude is most sensitive, that thing is ridicule, 
 and especially ridicule when applied to those whom it 
 is likely to regard as visionary theorists who have la- 
 boriously waded beyond their depths and are flounder- 
 ing among the practical quicksands of every-day life 
 that are only to be learned by experience. But, in 
 spite of her intense, conscientious, logical consist- 
 ency, she has not failed on either side, and another 
 outpost has been carried in the ceaseless advance. 
 So universal and profound has been this philosophic 
 consistency, that it is said, on all hands, that she is a 
 " fatalist." Yet what do we mean when we speak of 
 the " fatalism of George Eliot ? " We can only mean 
 this : that unswerving fidelity to the connection be- 
 tween antecedent and consequent, between cause and 
 effect, which paints things not as they should be, but 
 as they are as they must have been. No more can 
 be meant than this. It can never be said that she is 
 a " fatalist " in any such sense as that she controls or 
 limits the development of her characters or plots, or 
 
53 
 
 presides over them in the capacity of a Fate or Des- 
 tiny. It is the very essence, the crowning glory of 
 her philosophic system, and that which distinguishes 
 her from all other writers of romance, that she does 
 just the reverse, that she permits to all situations and 
 persons full liberty for good or evil, under the condi- 
 tions of their being, and " fatalist " becomes with her 
 not a term of reproach, but her chief title to scien- 
 tific reverence. 
 
 I have said that George Eliot seldom, if ever, mor- 
 alizes. Pray understand me in the orthodox and nar- 
 row sense of the term ! For what moralizing can be 
 so wise, so lofty, or so potent as that which portrays 
 the unvarying and invariable sequence of evil after 
 sin, and of good after virtue? It is true that she does 
 not, like the Greek Chorus, invoke, with childish 
 puerility, the fitful wrath or the fitful mercy of un- 
 known force; but it is also true that she continually 
 exposes the inevitable operation of those laws which 
 are infinitely just, because infinitely uniform. But 
 the exposition of this necessary connection between 
 cause and effect, in the development of character, has 
 grated upon the ears of many hearers. They have 
 mistaken the profession of the natural, of the inevit- 
 able, for the profession of the misanthropic, of the 
 despairing, and they can not forgive a writer who has 
 paid no tribute to the supernatural sources of recuper- 
 ation and reform. But the forgiveness will come ere 
 long in bounteous measure. The day will be when 
 all will regard the philosophy of inevitable evolution 
 
54 
 
 as the loftiest of morality, as the most glorious of 
 creeds, but it will not come until we have taken many 
 upward steps; for the inevitable can never be an ac- 
 ceptable law to those whose looks are downward or 
 backward bent. Moral empire, no more than physi- 
 cal empire, can find its perfection in the worship of 
 dead ancestors ; for 
 
 " Our life is onward, and our very dust 
 
 Is longing for its change, that it may take 
 New combinations; that the seed may break 
 From its dark thraldom, where it lies in trust 
 For mightier resurrection." 
 
 And so, they have mistaken George Eliot's highest 
 philosophy for morbidness and gloom, and, having no 
 better word at hand, have called it "fatalism." But 
 the term is misleading, and should be discarded. The 
 true word of description would have been evolutionist; 
 for she is, par excellence, the evolutionist of romance. 
 Not even the pages of Buckle, of Darwin, or of Hux- 
 ley, more strongly illustrate the non-interference theory 
 of life. Some have said that this argues George Eliot 
 without a God. By no means. But it does argue 
 her with a God too infinitely, inexorably just to com- 
 pel us into or to hinder us from virtue. With her, all 
 character development is the gradual, legitimate un- 
 folding of the parent germ. (Ah, how suggestive of 
 the care that should be lavished on the germ ! ) And 
 nothing in her pages is more beautifully philosophic 
 than this constant tendency of the individual to self- 
 
55 
 
 evolution along the individual lines. And what a 
 chapter of itself might be written upon that profound 
 philosophic spectacle, so constantly visible in her 
 writings, of the rectangular struggle between the direct 
 force of individual evolution and the lateral force of 
 the environment producing, in the end, the resultant 
 diagonal of actual life. In fact, the very basis and 
 emblem of all character study with her is the parallel- 
 ogram of forces. 
 
 And now, having cited examples of the analysis of 
 George Eliot, and having dwelt upon the profound- 
 ness and the consistency of this analysis, permit me a 
 deduction or two. From this analysis constantly con- 
 tinued, has grown that intense self-consciousness which 
 exists in all her later works; but it is that well-balanced 
 self-consciousness which Herbert Spencer speaks of as 
 the attendant blessing of a pure philosophy, and it 
 has brought with it none of that dark morbidness 
 which has been so conspicuous in the. writings of 
 Charlotte Bronte. It is the self-consciousness of 
 Shakspeare, of a mind too universal to feed upon 
 itself alone, and, like the scorpion girt by fire, perish 
 of its own sting. 
 
 Hence comes also hei subjectiveness of mind. 
 When you consider the enormous variety of subjects 
 and of phases of life of which she has treated, and 
 treated to perfection, which must have been utterly 
 inaccessible, by personal experience, to one of her sex, 
 you can infer how much must have been woven from 
 the consciousness within. 
 
56 
 
 Hence, too, as might have been expected, she is 
 relatively deficient in humor, falling, like George Sand, 
 her great French representative, far short, in this re- 
 spect, of Dickens, or Thackeray, or Dumas and a 
 great host of inferior writers. In wit, on the other 
 hand, she excels, rising at times to a very high stand- 
 ard. Indeed, this is the form under which the ludi- 
 crous chiefly presents itself to her mind. 
 
 Hence, too, comes her vast power of sarcasm, which 
 is of the most refined and cutting type, not being of 
 the brutal, positive sort, but of the negative, leaving 
 much more to be inferred than is actually said. A 
 striking parallel might be drawn, in this respect, be- 
 tween herself and the remarkable form of negative 
 sarcasm which has made the columns of the New 
 York "Nation" so justly famous. 
 
 Hence, too, her tendency to epigrams, which glitter 
 through her pages with a jeweled flash, and which have 
 made the name of Mrs. Poyser as a household word; 
 and hence that vast storehouse of proverbs which she 
 has amassed against all future time. 
 
 Hence, too, comes the frequent subordination of 
 the historic or narrative sequence of plot to the logi- 
 cal sequence of character development; and from this 
 last results that constant breaking off of the thread of 
 the story (an experiment so perilous to dramatic unity 
 and climax) for what, at times, seems the almost wan- 
 ton pleasure of disquisition a peculiarity which made 
 the orations of Burke so tiresome to his hearers, and 
 so valuable for their mighty meditations to posterity 
 
57 
 
 a license of genius which deifies the great masters, but 
 covers with ridicule the common herd a rock on 
 which shoals of imitators will go high and dry ; for 
 George Eliot, like all epoch makers, will have imi- 
 tators without number. 
 
 Hence, too, comes her delicate sensibility to artistic 
 effect. Nothing with her is wholly glare or shadow ; 
 but like all great painters, where falleth light, falls 
 also darker shade. And from this last, results the 
 great difficulty of all hero-worship in connection with 
 her novels a peculiarity from which, I am per- 
 suaded, springs her unpopularity with the mass of 
 readers; for I am reluctantly compelled to bqlieve, 
 after a good deal of careful attention, that, to the 
 majority, she has never been thoroughly popular- 
 that they have respected rather than liked, feareol 
 rather than understood her; and that many, especially 
 of the regulation novel readers, know little of her save 
 the titles of her principal characters, and only con- 
 tinue to peruse her, with much inward griping, be- 
 cause it does not do to seem wholly ignorant of the 
 prevailing fashion. For the multitude of to-day loves 
 through its sympathies, and sympathy comes, in fact 
 as well as in derivation, from sun and pathos, suffering 
 together with, and the multitude does not as yet suffer 
 along with, or together with, mental and psychical 
 heroes. Its breast heaves to the audible and not the 
 spiritual sob. And this does not conflict with what 
 I have elsewhere said of George Eliot's success in 
 dealing with the practical side of life. She has been 
 
a success, indeed ; but not what is known as a popular 
 success. She has, in truth, succeeded ; but it has 
 been, not because of her popularity, but in spite of 
 her unpopularity. She has commanded, not won, the 
 admiration of the masses. The exquisite coating of 
 every-day life with which her pills are sugared over 
 has not been able to conceal the as-yet-to-many naus- 
 eous flavor of the inevitable philosophic dose within. 
 Just when the average palate has prepared itself for 
 sweetmeats ugh ! the bitterness of the physic will 
 out. Just when the average sentimental eye has com- 
 posed itself for green pastures and the waters of com- 
 fort Lo, the yawning chasm before which it recoils ! 
 And it is better so for her future influence ; for a 
 universal, unqualified welcome would have been strong 
 presumptive evidence of swift decay, and lasting phil- 
 osophic triumphs are not to be won along pathways 
 strewn with flowers. 
 
 From this habit of analysis, too, come her simplic- 
 ity and directness of style, so admirably .illustrated, 
 for example, in the opening narrative of " Felix Holt." 
 I know that many consider her involved, and grumble 
 severely thereat, making the customary remarks about 
 the shortness of human life, etc.; but that is because 
 they get entangled in the thoughts, not in the words. 
 The water is not too muddy, but too deep. Did any 
 one ever think of reproaching Laplace because he 
 took an octavo page and more to express in algebraic 
 formula the orbit of the moon. No, my friends, 
 every novel that is worth reading is worth rereading, 
 
59 
 
 and it is the best sign of our incapacity to enjoy 
 George Eliot that we do not delight in the re-perusal. 
 
 And now, with these hasty suggestions, I commit 
 to you the analytic work of this great chemist of fic- 
 tion, whose crucible no human ore, no matter how 
 refractory, has been able to withstand. That her in- 
 fluence on the world of thinkers will be vast, I doubt 
 not, and by degrees she will, through them, be assimi- 
 lated by the dwellers of the valjey and the plain. 
 No one can doubt this who has watched the influence 
 exerted, in our own country, by somewhat similar 
 means, and through similar agency, of the New York 
 " Nation." 
 
 I can not terminate this paper, in which I have 
 dwelt upon the intellectual greatness of George Eliot, 
 without pausing for an instant to notice her moral 
 greatness. Hers has not been one of those melan- 
 choly instances of the union of superabundant intel- 
 lect with deficient moral sense ; but, in all things, her 
 soul has been the fitting companion of her mind. 
 The towering summit of her genius has been crowned 
 with the driven snow of a spotless and eternal purity. 
 Take " Adam Bede," for example. The whole of its 
 plot turns upon an incident the most difficult for deli- 
 cate and refined manipulation. What glorious, what 
 almost inevitable opportunities there were here for 
 morbid pruriency ! Quelle chance perdue, as the wri- 
 ters of the French school would exclaim ! And, yet, 
 what is the only evidence given us of the crisis upon 
 which the story hinges ? Why, Arthur swiftly stoop- 
 
6o 
 
 ing- to conceal from Adam a tiny silk handkerchief 
 found within the -"Hermitage." Then, too, take the 
 relationship of Tito and of Tessa, so delicately sketched 
 that one hardly more than half suspects the true na- 
 ture of the intrigue until the denouement is reached. 
 Our author will not avail herself of even the license 
 of Italian manners the favorite field of so many a 
 prurient fancy to depart from her rigidity of refine- 
 ment. And, then, far over and above all the special 
 instances that might be given, take the constant and 
 omnipresent tendency of her lofty spirit to leave the 
 reeking fens and morasses, where earth-born imagin- 
 ations delight to dwell, and its unvarying love for 
 heavenward soaring into the light of day. Who can 
 mistake the intense sympathy with which she follows 
 the pagan Romola upward to the verge of sublimity, 
 the -Christian Dinah Morris to the throne of God ! 
 Who can mistake the love and sympathy with which 
 she follows the evolution of all good ! 
 
 I had greatly hoped to have been able to have in- 
 stituted a comparison between the subject of our .dis- 
 cussion and George Sand a comparison which might 
 have been made interesting in so many points to 
 have been able to have compared those great mister- 
 pieces of " Romola " and " Consuelo," wherein are 
 embodied the two loftiest ideals of an exalted wom- 
 anhood. I had greatly hoped to have been able to 
 compare the pathos of George Eliot with the all- 
 moving pathos of that mighty magician beneath the 
 touch of whose divine rod the waters have so often 
 
6i 
 
 gushed from stony hearts a pathos which it resembles 
 in many ways besides its exquisite simplicity. But I 
 can not tax your most generous patience to such an 
 extent. I pause, in conclusion, merely to say a word 
 with reference to George Eliot's school of ethics. And, 
 here, how r striking a fact meets us at the outset. 
 Turning to the period of her scarcely budding woman- 
 hood, we find her, in 1846, eleven years before she 
 entered the world of fiction, publishing a translation 
 of Straus' " Life of Jesus," and, eight years later, a 
 translation of Feuerbach's " Essence of Christianity." 
 Ah, how r suggestive of that terrible conflict so 
 many half-healed scars of which are visible in her 
 great masterpieces which must have gone on within 
 her before she turned away from the summit of Cal- 
 vary, convinced that, for her, at least, it bore no les- 
 son of saving truth ! Ah, how desperately she must 
 have struggled before she consented to step forth from 
 under the shadow of the Hebrew Tree ! But the 
 shadow is upon her still, as it 'is upon all souls that 
 are great enough to feel and magnanimous enough 
 to share the burden of human sin ; for the cross ay, 
 even the cross of Calvary corneth not from without, 
 but from within, is not framed of wood and spikes, 
 but of that conscience which is too divinely pure to 
 suffer the* whisper of reproach! And she passed down- 
 ward from the hallowed Mount with the cry of the 
 " Lama Sabacthani ! " within her, that cry which 
 bursts forth in the sublime invocation of Dinah Mor- 
 ris ; " Oh, Thou who hast entered into that black 
 
62 
 
 darkness, where God is not, and hast uttered the cry 
 of the forsaken !"- She passed downward, resolved to 
 find and to preserve, among the sons of men, that 
 heaven which she had not found beyond the stars, 
 and despair gives place to a deeper and more universal 
 faith. A heaven dawns upon her which is not in the 
 clouds, but upon the earth and in the human destiny 
 of her fellow-beings. She sees that men have, within 
 themselves, the capacity to work out that heaven, that 
 no task of brick-making without straw has been allot- 
 ted to them, but that the materials for the finished 
 clay are about us in rich abundance. To her ardent 
 nature, yearning above all things, after good, the possi- 
 bility becomes the certainty of perfection and, in the 
 exaltation of joy, her whole soul bursts forth in that 
 grand hymn, " O, may I join the Choir invisible." 
 
 Note how characteristic, how profoundly suggestive 
 is the line which precedes it. It is that superb utter- 
 ance of the intensely religious, reverential soul of 
 Cicero : " Longum illud tempus, quum non ero, magis 
 me movet quam hoc exiguum" that mighty space, 
 when I shall not exist, more deeply moves me than 
 this paltry present. Fitting prelude to that which 
 follows. 
 
 O may I join the choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In minds made better by their presence ; live 
 In pulses stirred to generosity, 
 In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
 For miserable aims that end with self, 
 In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
 
UNIVERSE 
 
 And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
 To vaster issues. 
 
 So to live is heaven ; 
 To make undying music in the world, 
 Breathing as beauteous order that controls 
 With growing sway the growing life of man. 
 So we inherit that sweet purity 
 For which we struggled, failed and agonized 
 With widening retrospect that bred despair. 
 Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, 
 A vicious parent shaming still its child 
 Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved ; 
 Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies, 
 Die in the large and charitable air, 
 And all our rarer, better, truer self, 
 That sobbed religiously in yearning song, 
 That watched to ease the burthen of the world, 
 Laboriously tracing what must be, 
 And what may yet be better saw within 
 A worthier image for the sanctuary, 
 And shaped it forth before the multitude 
 Divinely human, raising worship so 
 To higher reverence more mixed with love 
 That better self shall live till human Time 
 Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky 
 Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb 
 Unread forever. 
 
 This is life to come, 
 
 Which martyred men have made more glorious 
 For us who strive to follow. May I reach 
 That purest heaven, be to other souls 
 The cup of strength in some great agony, 
 Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, 
 Beget the smiles that have no cruelty 
 Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, 
 And in diffusion ever more intense. 
 
 i 
 
6 4 
 
 So shall I join the choir invisible 
 
 Whose music is the gladness of the world. 
 
 I have striven, under many disadvantages, to do a 
 great woman some feeble justice; but, in the deep 
 sense of imperfect accomplishment, I cannot help 
 asking, in the memorable words that close the drama 
 of Tito's death: "Who shall put his finger on the 
 work of justice and say, 'It is here.' Justice is like 
 the kingdom of God. It is not without us as a fact ; 
 it is within us as a great yearning." 
 
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