E 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 (V 
 
 (TO
 
 ESSAYS
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 ON SOME OF THE 
 
 MODERN GUIDES TO ENGLISH THOUGHT 
 IN MATTERS OF FAITH 
 
 BY 
 
 BICHAED HOLT IIUTTON 
 
 ILonUon 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 1891 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 First Edition printed by R. & R. Clark, 18S7 
 New Edition 1SS8. Reprinted 1891
 
 H^Te 
 
 ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 I have to thank the proprietors and editor of Good 
 Words for permitting me to republish from its pages a 
 considerable portion of the first and last essay in this 
 volume ; the proprietors and editor of the Contemporary 
 Review for permitting me to republish the essays on 
 Cardinal Newman, Matthew Arnold, and George 
 Eliot's Life and Letters; and the proprietors and 
 editors of the British Quarterly Review for permitting 
 me to republish that portion of the essay on George 
 Eliot as Author, which contains the estimate of 
 Middlemareh. A considerable portion of the latter 
 paper first appeared in the first edition of my literary 
 essays, but was withdrawn in the second edition 
 because I perceived that George Eliot at that time 
 had still to publish some of the most striking and 
 characteristic of her works. 
 
 R. H. II. 
 
 Englefield Green, Surrey. 
 September 1887. 
 
 Qon»r-c:„
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Thomas Carlyle 1 
 
 II. and III. The two great Oxford Thinkers, 
 Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold 
 
 II. Cardinal Newman 47 
 
 III. Matthew Arnold 103 
 
 IY. George Eliot as Author ... . 151 
 
 V. George Eliot's Life and Letters . . . 269 
 
 VI. Frederick Denison Maurice . . . 311
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 
 
   
 
 For many years before his death Carlyle was to 
 England what his great hero, Goethe, long was to 
 Germany, — the aged seer whose personal judgments 
 on men and things were everywhere sought after, 
 and eagerly chronicled and retailed. Yet it was 
 hardly for the same reason. In Goethe's old age, 
 the ripeness of his critical judgment, and the catho- 
 licity, not to say even the facility, of his literary 
 taste, induced a sort of confidence that he would judge 
 calmly and judge genially anything, whether in life 
 or literature, that was not extravagant. Carlyle was 
 resorted to for a very different reason. The Chelsea 
 shrine, as was well known, gave out only one sort of 
 oracle, and that sort was graphic and humorous de- 
 nunciation of all conventional falsehood and preten- 
 tiousness, or what was presumed to be conventional 
 falsehood and pretentiousness; — and consequently 
 recourse was had to that shrine only when some 
 trenchant saying was wanted that might help in 
 the sweeping away of some new formula of the 
 sentimentalists or of the panegyrists of worn-out 
 
 p H <£> B
 
 2 THOMAS CARLYLK I 
 
 symbols. His almost extravagant admiration for 
 Goethe notwithstanding, Carlyle, after his genius 
 had matured, was ever more disposed to sym- 
 pathise with the great organs of destructive than 
 with those of constructive force. He sympathised 
 with Cromwell for what he destroyed, with 
 Frederick in great measure for what he destroyed, 
 with Mirabeau and Danton for what they destroyed, 
 and even with Goethe in large degree for the 
 negative tendencies of his thought. With the 
 constructive tendencies of the past he could often 
 deeply sympathise, — as he showed in Past and 
 Present, — but with those of the present, hardly 
 ever. If I were asked what his genius did for English 
 thought and literature, I should say that it did chiefly 
 the work of a sort of spiritual volcano, — showed us 
 the perennial fire subversive of worn-out creeds which 
 lies concealed in vast stores beneath the surface of 
 society, and the thinness of the crust which alone 
 separates us from that pit of Tophet, as he would 
 himself have called it. And yet, in spite of himself, 
 he always strove to sympathise with positive work. 
 His teaching waa incessant that the reconstruction of 
 society was a far greater work than the destruction 
 of the worn-out shell which usually preceded it, — 
 only, unfortunately, in his own time, there was hardly 
 any species of reconstructive effort which could gain 
 his acquiescence, much less his approval. He despised 
 all the more positive political and philanthropic 
 tendencies of his time ; felt little interest in scientific
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 3 
 
 discoveries ; concerned himself not at all about its 
 art ; scorned its economical teaching ; and rejected 
 the modern religious instructors with even more 
 emphatic contumely than the " dreary professors of a 
 dismal science." To Carlyle the world was out of 
 joint, and his only receipt for setting it right — the 
 restoration of " the beneficent whip " for its idlers, 
 rogues, and vagabonds — was never seriously listened 
 to by thinking men. Consequently, all that he 
 achieved was achieved in the world of thought and 
 imagination. 
 
 He has often been called a prophet, and though I 
 have too little sympathy with his personal conception 
 of good and evil so to class him, — though religious 
 seer as he was, he was in no sense Christlike, — he 
 certainly had to the full the prophet's insight into 
 the power of parable and type, and the prophet's eye 
 for the forces which move society, and inspire multi- 
 tudes with contagious enthusiasm, whether for good 
 or ill. He fell short of a prophet in this, that his 
 main interest, after all, was rather in the graphic and 
 picturesque interpretation of social phenomena than 
 in any overwhelming desire to change them for the 
 better, warmly as that desire was often expressed, and 
 sincerely, no doubt, as it was entertained. Carlyle's 
 main literary motive-power was not, indeed, a moral 
 passion, but a humorous wonder. He was always 
 taking to pieces, in his own mind's eye, the marvel- 
 lous structure of human society, and bewildering 
 himself with the problem of how it could be put
 
 4 THOMAS CARLYLE I 
 
 together again. Even in studying personal character, 
 what he cared for principally was this. For men 
 who could not sway the great spiritual tides of human 
 loyalty and trust, he had — with the curious exception 
 of Goethe — no very real reverence. His true heroes 
 were all men who could make multitudes follow them 
 as the moon makes the sea follow her, — either by 
 spiritual magnetism, or by dominance of will, or by 
 genuine practical capacity. To him imagination was 
 the true organ of divinity, because, as he saw at a glance, 
 it was by the imagination that men are most easily 
 governed and beguiled. His story of the French 
 Kevolution is a series of studies in the way men are 
 beguiled and governed by their imagination, and no 
 more wonderful book of its kind has ever been written 
 in this world, though I should be sorry to have to 
 estimate accurately how much of his picture is true 
 vision, and how much the misleading guesswork of a 
 highly imaginative dreamer. 
 
 It is singular that one who manifested his genius 
 chiefly through history — or should I rather say, by 
 his insight into and delineation of some of the most 
 critical characters in history, and some of the most 
 vivid popular scenes in history? — should have been 
 so totally devoid of one most essential element in the 
 true historical sense, — the appreciation, I mean, of 
 the inherited conditions and ineradicable habits of 
 ordinary national life. There was something of the 
 historical Don Quixote about Carlyle ; he tilted at 
 windmills, and did not know that he was tilting at
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 5 
 
 windmills, but the windmills were the habits, the 
 routine, of nations. He had so deep an appreciation 
 of the vivid flashes of consciousness which mark all 
 great popular crises, because they mark all great 
 personal crises, that he Avanted to raise all human life 
 and all common popular life to the level of the high 
 self-conscious stage. He never thoroughly appreciated 
 the meaning of habit. He never adequately entered 
 into the power of tradition. He judged of human 
 life as if will and emotion were all in all. He judged 
 of political life as if great men and great occasions 
 ought to be all in all, and was furious at the waste 
 of force involved in doing things as men had been 
 accustomed to do them, wherever that appeared to 
 be a partially ineffectual way. And his error in 
 judging of peoples is equally traceable in his judg- 
 ments on individuals. If a man had a strong interest 
 in the routine and detail of life, he called him " saw- 
 dustish." If he had a profound belief in any popular 
 ideas beyond those acknowledged by himself, Carlyle 
 probably called him moonshiny. Such men as John 
 Mill came under the one condemnation, such men as 
 Mazzini under the other. And yet both John Mill 
 and Mazzini may be said to have applied a more 
 effectual knowledge of men to the historical con- 
 ditions of their own time than Thomas Carlyle. 
 Indeed, once go beyond the world of the vivid per- 
 sonal element in popular emotion and passion, and 
 Carlyle's insight seems to have been very limited, and 
 his genius to have disappeared.
 
 6 THOMAS CARLYLE I 
 
 It is in some respects curious that Carlyle has 
 connected his name so effectually as he has done with 
 the denunciation of Shams. For the passionate love 
 of truth in its simplicity was not at all his chief 
 characteristic. In the first place, his style is too 
 self-conscious for that of sheer, self-forgetting love of 
 truth. "No man of first-rate simplicity — and first-rate 
 simplicity is, I imagine, one of the conditions of a 
 first-rate love of truth — would express commonplace 
 ideas in so roundabout a fashion as he ; would say, 
 for instance, in recommending Emerson to the reading 
 public : " The words of such a man — what words he 
 thinks fit to speak — are worth attending to;" or 
 would describe a kind and gracious woman as "a 
 gentle, excellent, female soul," as he does in his Life 
 of Sti rling. There is a straining for effect in the de- 
 tails of Carlyle's style which is not the characteristic 
 of an overpowering and perfectly simple love of truth. 
 Nor was that the ruling intellectual principle of 
 Carlyle's mind. What he meant by hatred of shams, 
 exposure of unveracities, defiance to the " Everlasting 
 No," affirmation of the " Everlasting Yea," and the 
 like, was not so much the love of truth as the love of 
 divine force, — the love of that which had genuine 
 strength and effective character in it, the denunciation 
 of imbecilities, the scorn for the dwindled life of mere 
 conventionality or precedent, the contempt for extinct 
 figments, not so much because they were figments, as 
 because they were extinct and would no longer bear 
 the strain put upon them by human passion. You
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 7 
 
 can see this in the scorn which Carlyle pours upon 
 "thin" men, — his meagre reverence for "thin-lipped, 
 constitutional Hampden," for instance, and his con- 
 tempt for such men as the Edgeworth described in 
 John Sterling's life, whom he more than despises, not 
 for the least grain of insincerity, but for deficiency 
 in quantity of nature, and especially such nature as 
 moves society. 
 
 Carlyle, in short, was the interpreter to his country, 
 not so much of the " veracities " and " verities " of life, 
 as of the moral and social spells and symbols which, 
 for evil or for good, have exercised a great imaginative 
 influence over the social organism of large bodies of 
 men, and either awed them into sober and earnest 
 work, or stimulated them into delirious and anarchic 
 excitement. He was the greatest painter who ever 
 lived, of a portion of the interior life of man, of such 
 life as spreads to the multitude, — painting it not per- 
 haps exactly as it really is, but rather as it represented 
 itself to one who looked upon it as the symbol of 
 some infinite mind, of which it embodied a temporary 
 phase. I doubt if Carlyle ever really interpreted any 
 human being's career — Cromwell's, or Frederick's, or 
 Coleridge's — as justly and fully as many men of less 
 genius might have interpreted it. For this was not, 
 after all, his chief interest. His interest seems to 
 me always to have been in figuring the human mind 
 as representing some flying colour or type of the 
 Infinite Mind at work behind the Universe, and so 
 presenting this idea as to make it palpable to his
 
 8 THOMAS CAKLYLE I 
 
 fellow-men. Perhaps the central thought of his life 
 was in this passage from Sartor Besartus: ""What is 
 man himself but a symbol of God ? Is not all that 
 he does symbolical, — a revelation to sense of the 
 mystic God-given power that is in him, a gospel of 
 freedom, which he, the 'Messias of Nature,' preaches, 
 as he can, by act and word ? Not a hut he builds 
 but is the visible embodiment of a thought, but leaves 
 visible record of invisible things, but is, in the tran- 
 scendental sense, symbolical as well as real." Carlyle 
 was far the greatest interpreter our literature has 
 ever had of the infinite forces working through society, 
 of that vast, dim background of social beliefs, unbeliefs, 
 enthusiasms, sentimentalities, superstitions, hopes, 
 fears, and trusts, which go to make up either the 
 strong cement or the destructive lava -stream of 
 national life, and to image forth some of the genuine 
 features of the retributive providence of history. 
 
 Over practical politics it is needless to say that 
 he wielded no direct power, — indeed, would have 
 despised himself if he had wielded power. The deej> 
 scorn which he poured upon the whole machinery of 
 modern politics, the loathing with which he looked 
 upon the great national Palaver, the contempt which 
 he felt for the modern conception of liberty as a 
 barricade against most needful and necessary govern- 
 ment, — all prevented him from offering any but 
 the wildest and most impracticable suggestions 
 to practical statesmen. Indeed, Carlyle's Latter- 
 Day PcempKlets, Chartism, and even the modern
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 9 
 
 chapters in Past and Present, to say nothing of 
 Shooting Niagara, and After, were not adapted, even 
 if they were intended, to produce any immediate 
 effect on the political measures or methods of the day. 
 Nevertheless, I doubt whether any writer of his time 
 has produced a more powerful effect, both good and 
 bad, on the political tone and creed of thinking men, 
 or done more to destroy that blind belief in mere 
 institutions, whether aristocratic, or plutocratic, or 
 democratic, which was at one time the equivalent for 
 a political creed. 
 
 In at least five different catastrophes of the great 
 political decade between 1861 and 1871, Carlyle's 
 powerful influence over the ground ideas of politics 
 showed itself in very potent currents of English 
 thought. In relation to the great civil war between 
 North and South in the United States, there can be 
 no doubt at all that Carlyle's fierce invectives against 
 leaving " black Quashee " to the liberty of idleness, 
 had worked very powerfully in the direction of 
 persuading many intellectual men of great ability to 
 side with the South, to apologise for " the peculiar 
 institution " and the coarse aristocracy which fought 
 so bravely to perpetuate it. And again, when Mr. 
 Eyre put down with so much breathless and cruel 
 violence the revolt of our negroes in Jamaica, the 
 effect of Carlyle's teaching was more than ever dis- 
 cernible in the eager outbreak of partisanship for 
 " the beneficent whip " that divided into two hostile 
 camps the whole of British society. In these two
 
 10 THOMAS CARLYLE I 
 
 instances I hold that Carlyle's teaching had produced 
 little but evil fruit. Men had taken home his creed that 
 idleness and ignorance need drilling by main force, 
 if needful ; and had failed to take home the con- 
 ditions by which he strove, not very effectually, it must 
 be owned, to limit it, — namely, that the disciplinarians 
 who enforce that drill must themselves be foremost 
 in disinterested and devoted work, and must discipline 
 their inferiors solely in the interest of the ragged 
 regiments which need discipline, not in the interests 
 of their own pockets or fears. In enforcing the 
 lesson that such disciplinarians do but embody the 
 beneficent severity of Nature's own laws, Carlyle 
 always forgot that liberty limited by austere laws is 
 a very different thing indeed from liberty overridden 
 by the iron heel of selfish power; and that selfish power 
 is subject to fits of anger, indignation, and vindictive 
 passion, which rob it of half, or more than half, the 
 moral value of austerely enforced conditions. Again, 
 in relation to the attack of Prussia and Austria on 
 Denmark, there can be little doubt that Carlyle's 
 eager admiration of Prussia, and the Prussian drill- 
 system, did very much to reconcile those Englishmen 
 who had fallen under his influence to one of the 
 earliest and most cynical of the acts of international 
 violence for which the last twenty-five years in the 
 history of Europe have been remarkable. 
 
 On the other hand, in relation to the unification 
 of Germany, the assumption by Prussia of the leading 
 place in the German State, and the Seven Weeks'
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 11 
 
 War with the Bund, the outbreak of war between 
 Germany and France, and finally, the episode of the 
 Commune, Carlyle's general teaching tended to keep 
 the opinion of Europe, on the whole, on the right 
 side, though decidedly deflected towards the German 
 side of the centre of justice. In all these cases, 
 Carlyle's profound respect for discipline, reticence, 
 earnestness, and loyalty to honest leadership, inclined 
 him towards the true solution of the European 
 difficulty, though in his detestation of the hysteria 
 of France, and his scorn for the blindness of blunder- 
 ing democracy, he fell into the mistake of flattering 
 the Germans up to the top of their bent, and encourag- 
 ing them in that military insolence which bids fair 
 to bring them one day again to serious grief. 
 
 But it was on questions more remote from practical 
 politics than these that Carlyle's political influence 
 was, I think, most salutary. His diatribes against 
 idle aristocracies, — aristocracies bent upon protecting 
 themselves, both from their worst enemies and their 
 best friends, — aristocracies at least as anxious to 
 escape all real duties as to repel all dangerous attacks, 
 — have sunk deeper into the public mind, and done 
 more directly or indirectly to make the members of 
 these aristocracies feel that they have their social 
 position to earn and to justify, than all the writings 
 in the English tongue put together, outside Carlyle's, 
 have accomplished in the same time. Has not his 
 language in Past and Present concerning the idle 
 nobleman passed into the very substance of English
 
 12 THOMAS CARLYLE I 
 
 political thought, though it may not as yet have 
 produced all the effect it might on our House of 
 Lords 1 " His fathers worked for him, he says, or 
 successfully gambled for him ; here he sits, professes, 
 not in sorrow, but in pride, that he and his have done 
 no work, time out of mind. It is the law of the land, 
 and is thought to be the law of the Universe, that he 
 alone, of recorded men, shall have no task laid on 
 him, except that of eating his cooked victuals, and 
 not flinging himself out of window. Once more, I 
 will say, there was no stranger spectacle ever shown 
 under this sun. A veritable fact in this England of 
 the Nineteenth Century. His victuals he does eat, 
 but as for keeping on the inside of the window, — have 
 not his friends, like me, enough to do ? Truly, looking 
 at his Corn-laws, Game-laws, Chandos-clauses, Bribery- 
 elections, and much else, you do shudder over the 
 plunging and tumbling he makes, held back by the 
 lapels and coat-skirts ; only a thin fence of window- 
 glass before him, and in the street mere horrid iron 
 spikes." To a very considerable extent, I think, the 
 idle aristocracy have taken that to heart, and have 
 made, recently at least, no such mad efforts to plunge 
 out of window on to the horrid iron spikes be- 
 neath. So, again, nothing lias done so much as 
 Carlylc's diatribes against plutocracy to ennoble the 
 modern gospel of industry, and lift it out of the ruts 
 of gross competition to produce illusory cheapness and 
 dishonest saleability. Nor have any man's lessons 
 produced so great an effect as his in raising our
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 13 
 
 modern standard as to the dignity of labour, and 
 making us see that our object must be to produce true 
 labouring men, rather than wholesale men-labourers, 
 even though a good deal of labouring force be 
 sacrificed for the purpose of saving the manhood. 
 
 But most of all Carlyle influenced politics by 
 raising a kind of salutary, even if often extravagant, 
 fear of the destructive capacities of democracies when 
 not nobly led, and not in satisfactory moral relations 
 with the classes of more leisure, more knowledge, 
 and more opportunity for disinterested work. His 
 wonderful book on the French Eevolution burnt this 
 fear deep into the minds of all capable of understand- 
 ing it, and from them the salutary dread has spread 
 to many quite incapable of understanding it. For 
 my own part I believe that Carlyle, judging too 
 much by an exceptional people awaking to their 
 misery at a time when that misery was exceptionally 
 great, exaggerated the wildness of the anarchy of 
 which any Teutonic democracy, for instance, is 
 capable, and underrated the conventionalism of feel- 
 ing, as well as the sound moral convictions, which 
 such a democracy shares with the middle -class. 
 But none the less his picture produced a profound 
 effect, and made men feel afresh how helpless so- 
 called "upper-classes" are, if they are not in close and 
 friendly relations with those great masses of men in 
 trust for whose benefit alone the State really holds 
 its right to control and guide them. It is here that 
 Carlyle's greatest influence over modern politics was
 
 14 THOMAS CARLYLE I 
 
 exerted, an influence equally mingled of dread, 
 sympathy, and the sense of obligation due from the 
 educated to the ignorant, and one which, on the whole, 
 did wonders, like the ancient tragedy, to purify men 
 " by pity and by fear." Carlyle, indeed, produced on 
 our own age, by widely different means, more of the 
 characteristic effects of the Greek drama than any 
 other English writer. He was not at any time a 
 Christian politician. He felt that profound sense of 
 the pressure of destiny, and of the narrow sphere of 
 individual liberty within the grasp of " the eternities 
 and immensities," which makes men stern and awe- 
 struck, — severe masters, and in some sense dutiful 
 servants, but not, in the highest sense, spiritual 
 brethren. And, like the tragic dramatists of the 
 Greek time, he always conceived the State itself as a 
 real thing involved in the network of evil and good, 
 sin and retribution, weakness and strength, and 
 involved quite as deeply and directly as the temporary 
 rulers who stood at the helm, and who by their 
 shortcomings or their great achievements represented 
 the cowering or the strong hearts of their fellow- 
 citizens. 
 
 Indeed, it will be apparent from what I have said 
 that Carlyle was neither moralist, prophet, statesman, 
 nor politician, so much as prophetic artist. He had 
 the temperament and the powers of a great artist, 
 with what was in effect a single inspiration for his 
 art, and that, one which required so great a revolution 
 in the use of the appropriate artistic materials, that
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 15 
 
 the first impression he produced on ordinary minds 
 was that of bewilderment and even confusion. This 
 subject, — almost his only subject, — whether he wrote 
 history or biography, or the sort of musings which 
 contained his conceptions of life, was always the dim 
 struggle of man's nature with the passions, doubts, 
 and confusions by which it is surrounded, with special 
 regard to the grip of the infinite spiritual cravings, 
 whether good or evil, upon it. He was always trying 
 to paint the light shining in darkness and the dark- 
 ness comprehending it not, and therefore it was that 
 he strove so hard to invent a new sort of style which 
 should express not simply the amount of human 
 knowledge, but also, so far as possible, the much 
 vaster amount of human ignorance against which that 
 knowledge sparkled in mere radiant points breaking 
 the gloom. Every one knows what Carhjlese means, 
 and every expert literary man can manufacture a little 
 tolerably good Carlylese at will. But very few of us 
 reflect what it was in Carlyle which generated the 
 style, and what the style, in spite of its artificiality, 
 has done for us. Indeed, I doubt if Carlyle himself 
 knew. In his Reminiscences he admits its flavour of 
 affectation with a comment which seems to me to 
 show less self-knowledge than usual. Of his friend 
 Irving's early style, as an imitation of the Miltonic or 
 old English Puritan style, he says : " At this time, 
 and for years afterwards, there was something of 
 preconceived intention visible in it — in fact, of real 
 affectation, as there could not well help being. To
 
 16 THOMAS CARLYLE i 
 
 his example also I suppose I owe something of my 
 own poor affectations in that matter which are now 
 more or less visible to me, much repented of or not." 
 I suspect of the two alternatives suggested in this 
 amusing little bit of characteristic mystification, the 
 "not" should be taken as the truth. Carlyle could 
 not repent of his affectation, for it was in some sense 
 of the very essence of his art. Some critics have 
 attempted to account for the difference in style 
 between his early reviews in the Edinburgh and his 
 later productions by the corrections of Jeffrey. But 
 Jeffrey did not correct Carlyle's Life of Schiller, and 
 if any one who possesses the volume containing both 
 the life of Schiller and the life of Sterling will com- 
 pare the one with the other, he will see at once that, 
 between the two, Carlyle had deliberately developed 
 a new organon for his own characteristic genius, and 
 that so far from losing, his genius gained enormously 
 by the process. And I say this not without fully 
 recognising that simplicity is the highest of all quali- 
 ties of style, and that no one can pretend to find 
 simplicity in Carlyle's mature style. But as, after all, 
 the purpose of style is to express thought, if the 
 central and pervading thought which you wish to 
 express, and must express if you are to attain the 
 real object of your life, is inconsistent with simplicity, 
 let simplicity go to the wall, and let us have the real 
 drift. And this seems to me to be exactly Carlyle's 
 case. It would have been impossible to express 
 adequately in such English as the English of his Life
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 17 
 
 of Schiller the class of convictions which had most 
 deeply engraved themselves on his own mind. That 
 class of convictions was, to state it shortly, the result 
 of his belief — a one-sided belief, no doubt, but full of 
 significance — that human language, and especially our 
 glib cultivated use of it, had done as much or more 
 to conceal from men how little they do know, and 
 how ill they grasp even that which they partly know, 
 as to define and preserve for them the little that they 
 have actually puzzled out of the riddle of life. In 
 the very opening of the Heroes and Hero Worship 
 Carlyle says : — 
 
 " Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion 
 we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words. 
 We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud ' electricity/ 
 and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it 
 out of glass and silk. But what is it ? What made it ? 
 Whence comes it ? Whither goes it 1 Science has done 
 much for us, but it is a poor science that would hide from 
 us that great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience whither 
 we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a 
 mere superficial film. This world, after all our science 
 and sciences, is still a miracle ; wonderful, inscrutable, 
 magical, and moi'e, to whosoever will think of it." 
 
 That passage reminds one of the best of the many 
 amusing travesties of Carlyle's style, a travesty which 
 may be found in Marmaduke Savage's Falcon Family, 
 where one of the " Young Ireland " party praises an- 
 other for having " a deep no-meaning in the great fiery 
 heart of him." But in Carlyle's mind this conviction 
 of the immeasurable ignorance (or " nescience," as 
 H C
 
 18 THOMAS CARLYLE i 
 
 he preferred to call it in antithesis to science), which 
 underlies all our knowledge, was not in the least a 
 " deep no-meaning," but a constant conviction, which 
 it took a great genius like his to interpret to all who 
 were capable of learning from him. I can speak for 
 myself at least, that to me it has been the great use 
 of Carlyle's peculiar chiaroscuro style, so to turn 
 language inside out, as it were, for us, that we realise 
 its inadequacy, and its tendency to blind and mislead 
 us, as we could never have realised it by any limpid 
 style at all. To expose the pretensions of human 
 speech, to show us that it seems much clearer than it 
 is, to warn us habitually that " it swims as a mere 
 superficial film " on a wide unplumbed sea of undis- 
 covered reality, is a function hardly to be discharged 
 at all by plain and limpid speech. Genuine Carlylese 
 — which, of course, in its turn is in great danger of 
 becoming a deceptive mask, and often does become 
 so in Carlyle's own writings, so that you begin to 
 think that all careful observation, sound reasoning, 
 and precise thinking is useless, and that a true man 
 should keep his intellect foaming and gasping, as it 
 were, in one eternal epileptic fit of wonder — is in- 
 tended to keep constantly before us the relative pro- 
 portions between the immensity on every subject 
 which we fail to apprehend, and the few well-defined 
 focal spots of light that we can clearly discern and 
 take in. Nothing is so well adapted as Carlyle's 
 stylo to teach one that the truest language on the 
 deepest subjects is thrown out, as it were, with more
 
 I THOMAS CAIILYLE 19 
 
 or less happy effect, at great realities far above our 
 analysis or grasp, and is not a triumphant formula 
 which contains the whole secret of our existence. 
 
 Let me contrast a passage concerning Schiller in 
 the Life of Schiller, and one concerning Coleridge 
 in the Life of Sterling, relating to very nearly the 
 same subject, the one in ordinary English, the other 
 in developed Carlylese, and no one, I think, will 
 doubt which of the two expresses the central thought 
 with the more power. " Schiller," says Carlyle, 
 
 " Does not distort liis character or genius into shapes which 
 he thinks more becoming than their natural one ; he does 
 not bring out principles which are not his, or harbour 
 beloved persuasions which he half or wholly knows to be 
 false. He did not often speak of wholesome prejudices ; 
 he did not ' embrace the Roman Catholic religion because 
 it was the grandest and most comfortable.' Truth with 
 Schiller, or what seemed such, was an indispensable re- 
 quisite ; if he but suspected an opinion to be false, however 
 dear it may have been, he seems to have examined it with 
 rigid scrutiny, and, if he found it guilty, to have plucked 
 it out and resolutely cast it forth. The sacrifice might 
 cause him pain, permanent pain ; but danger, he imagined, 
 it could hardly cause him. It is irksome and dangerous 
 to tread in the dark ; but better so than with an ignis 
 fatuus to guide us. Considering the warmth of his sensi- 
 bilities, Schiller's merit on this point is greater than it at 
 first might appear." 
 
 And now let me take the opposite judgment passed 
 upon Coleridge in the Life of Sterling : — 
 
 " The truth is, I now see, Coleridge's talk and specula- 
 tion was the emblem of himself : in it, as in him, a ray
 
 20 THOMAS CARLYLK I 
 
 of heavenly inspiration struggled, in a tragically ineffectual 
 degree, with the weakness of flesh and blood. He says 
 once ' he had skirted the howling deserts of Infidelity ' ; 
 this was evident enough ; but he had not had the courage, 
 in defiance of pain and terror, to press resolutely across 
 said deserts to the new firm lands of faith beyond ; he 
 preferred to create logical fata-morganas for himself on the 
 hither side, and laboriously solace himself with these. To 
 the man himself Nature had given, in high measure, the 
 seeds of a noble endowment ; and to unfold it had been 
 forbidden him. A subtle lynx-eyed intellect, tremulous, 
 pious sensibility to all good and all beautiful ; truly a ray of 
 empyrean light, but embedded in such weak laxity of 
 character, in such indolences and esuriences, as had made 
 strange work with it. Once more the tragic story of a 
 high endowment with an insufficient will. An eye to 
 discern the divineness of the heaven's splendours and 
 lightnings, the insatiable wish to revel in their godlike 
 radiancies and brilliancies, but no heart to front the 
 seething terrors of them, which is the first condition of 
 your conquering an abiding place there. The courage 
 necessary for him above all tilings had been denied this 
 man. His life with such ray of the empyrean in it had 
 been great and terrible to him, and he had not valiantly 
 grappled with it ; he had fled from it ; sought refuge in 
 vague day - dreams, hollow compromises, in opium, in 
 theosophic metaphysics. Harsh pain, danger, necessity, 
 slavish harnessed toil, were of all things abhorrent to him. 
 And so the empyrean element lying smothered under the 
 terrene, and yet inextinguishable there, made sad writh- 
 ings. . . . For the old Eternal Powers do live for ever, 
 nor do their laws see any change, however we, in our poor 
 wigs and Church tippets, may attempt to read their laws. 
 To steal into Heaven — by the modern method of sticking, 
 ostrich-like, your head into fallacies on earth, equally as 
 li\ tin ancient and by all conceivable methods — is for 
 ever forbidden. High treason is the name of that attempt.
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 21 
 
 and it continues to be punished as such. Strange enough ! 
 here once more was a kind of heaven-scaling Ixion ; and 
 to him, as to the old one, the just gods were very stern ; 
 the ever-revolving, never-advancing wheel (of a kind) was 
 his through life ; and from his cloud-Juno did not he too 
 procreate strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyiems, monstrous 
 illusory hybrids, and ecclesiastical chimseras, — which now 
 roam the earth in a very lamentable manner 1 " 
 
 I think Carlyle was driving by implication at 
 something which seems to me quite false in the latter 
 passage, and possibly even in the former also. But 
 no one can doubt, I think, which of these two styles 
 conveys the more vividly the idea common to both — 
 that it is very easy and very fatal to deceive ourselves 
 into thinking or believing what we only wish to 
 believe, and that a mind which cannot distinguish 
 firmly between the two, loses all sense of the distinc- 
 tion between words and things. And how much 
 more powerfully is the thought expressed in the 
 strange idiom of the later style. The fundamental 
 difference between the two styles is that while the 
 former aims, like most good styles, at what Carlyle 
 wants to say expressly, the later is, in addition, lavish 
 of suggestions which come in aid of his express 
 meaning, by bringing out in the background the 
 general chaos of vague indeterminate agencies which 
 bewilder the believing nature, and render a definite 
 creed difficult. Take the very characteristic Carlylese 
 phrase " in a tragically ineffectual degree," and note 
 the result of grafting the stronger thought of tragedy 
 on the weaker one of ineffectually, — how it dashes
 
 22 THOMAS CARLYLE I 
 
 in a dark background to the spectacle of human 
 helplessness, and suggests, what Carlyle wanted to 
 suggest, how the powers above are dooming to dis- 
 appointment the man who fortifies himself in any 
 self-willed pet theory of his own. So, too, the ex- 
 pressions " logical fata-morganas," " tremulous, p. his 
 sensibility," "a ray of empyrean embedded in such 
 weak laxity of character," "spectral Puseyisms," 
 "monstrous illusory hybrids," "ecclesiastical chim- 
 seras," all produce their intended daunting effect on 
 the imagination, suggesting how much vagueness, 
 darkness, and ignorance Carlyle apprehended behind 
 these attempted philosophical "views" of the great 
 a priori thinker. Observe, too, the constant use of 
 the plurals "indolences and esuriences," "godlike 
 radiancies and brilliancies," which just suggest to the 
 mind in how very many different forms the same 
 qualities may be manifested. And finally, observe 
 the discouraging effect of the touch which contrasts 
 the conventionality of caste-costume, " our poor Wigs 
 and Church tippets," with the " Eternal Powers that 
 live for ever" — a touch that says to us in effect, 
 " Your conventions mystify you, take you in, make 
 you believe in an authority which the Eternal Powers 
 never gave." And all this is conveyed in such little 
 space by the mere suggestion of contrasts. The 
 secret of Carlyle's style is a great crowding-in of con- 
 trasted ideas and colours, — indeed, such a crowding 
 in, that for any purpose but his it would be wholly 
 false art. But his purpose being to impress upon us
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 23 
 
 with all the force that was in him that the universe 
 presents to us only a few focal points of light which 
 may be clearly discerned against vast and almost 
 illimitable tracts of mystery, that human language 
 and custom mislead us miserably as to what these 
 points of light are, and that much of the light — all, 
 indeed, which he himself does not recognise — comes 
 from putrefying and phosphorescent ignes fatui, which 
 will only betray us to our doom, the later style is 
 infinitely more effective than the first. He does 
 contrive to paint the incapacity of the mind to grasp 
 truth, its vast capacity to miss it, the enormous 
 chances against hitting the mark precisely in the 
 higher regions of belief, with a wonderful effect which 
 his earlier style gave little promise of. It seems to 
 me a style invented for the purpose of convincing 
 those whom it charmed, that moral truth can only be 
 discerned by a brilliant imaginative tact and audacity 
 in discriminating the various stars sprinkled in a dark 
 vault of mystery, and then walking boldly by the 
 doubtful light they give ; that there is much which 
 cannot be believed except by self-deceivers or fools, 
 but that wonder is of the essence of all right- 
 mindedness ; that the enigmatic character of life is 
 good for us, so long as we are stern and almost hard 
 in acting upon the little truth we can know ; that 
 any sort of clear solution of the enigma must be false, 
 and that any attempt to mitigate the sternness of life 
 must be ascribed to radical weakness and the smooth 
 self-delusions to which the weak are liable.
 
 24 THOMAS CAItLYLE i 
 
 In speaking of his style I have already suggested 
 by implication a good deal of the drift of Carlyle's 
 faith. What he loves to delineate is the man who 
 can discern and grope his way honestly by a little 
 light struggling through a world of darkness, — the 
 man whose gloom is deep, but Avhose lucidity of vision, 
 so far as it goes, is keen, — the man who is half hypo- 
 chondriac, half devotee, but wholly indomitable, like 
 Mahomet, Cromwell, Johnson. Thus he says of 
 Cromwell : — 
 
 "Ainl withal this hypochondria, what was it but the 
 very greatness of the man, the depth and tenderness of 
 his ideal affections ; the quantity of sympathy he had with 
 things ? The quantity of insight he could yet get into 
 the heart of things ; the mastery he could get over things ; 
 this was his hypochondria. The man's misery, as men's 
 misery always does, came of his greatness. Samuel John- 
 son is that kind of man. Sorrow-stricken, half-distracted, 
 the wide element of mournful black enveloping him — wide 
 as the world. It is the character of a prophetic man ; a 
 man with his wdiole soul seeing and struggling to see." 
 
 In his Life of Frederick the Great, writing on Vol- 
 taire, Carlyle describes the same sort of character 
 as the ideal Teutonic character, a type which recom- 
 mended itself to Voltaire because it was the reverse 
 of his own. 
 
 "A rugged, surly kind of fellow, much-enduring, not 
 intrinsically bad ; Bplenetic without complaint; standing 
 oddly inexpugnable in that natural stoicism of his; taci- 
 turn, yet with strange flashes of speech in him now and 
 then, — something which goes beyond laughter and articu-
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 25 
 
 late logic, and is the taciturn elixir of these two, — what 
 they call ' humour ' in their dialect." 
 
 Every hero he head was great in proportion as he 
 displayed at once this profound impression of the 
 darkness and difficulty of life, and this vehement 
 dictatorial mode of acting on the glimpses or visions 
 he had by way of showing valour in defiance of the 
 darkness. Carlyle's characteristic delight in Odin 
 and the Scandinavian mythology is a mere reflection 
 of this strong appreciation of the religion of the 
 volcano, the thunder-cloud, and the lightning-flash, 
 mingled with a certain grim enjoyment of the spec- 
 tacle of the inadequacy of human struggle. If Car- 
 lyle loved also to describe keen, clear wits like 
 Jeffrey and Voltaire — if he revelled, too, in the 
 picture of thin, acrid natures like Kobespierre's, it 
 was as foils to his favourite portraits of grim, vehe- 
 ment, dictatorial earnestness. As his style is chiaro- 
 scuro, so his favourite figures and characters are 
 chiaroscuro also. Carlyle did not love too much 
 light, — did not believe in it even as the gift of God. 
 Mankind to him were "mostly fools." To make the 
 best of a bad business was to his mind the highest 
 achievement of the best men. He had a great belief 
 in the sternness of purpose behind creation, but little 
 belief in the love there. In his Reminiscences he 
 describes the attitude of Irving's schoolmaster, "old 
 Adam Hope," towards his average scholars as being 
 summed up thus : " Nothing good to be expected 
 from you, or from those you come of, ye little
 
 26 THOMAS CARLYLE i 
 
 whelps, but we must get from you the best you 
 have, and not complain of anything." And so far as 
 I understand his religion, that is very much how 
 Carlyle represents to himself the attitude of the 
 Eternal mind towards us all. He tells us candidly 
 in his account of Irving that he had confessed to 
 Irving that he did not think as Irving did of the 
 Christian religion, and that it was vain for him to 
 expect he ever should or could. And, indeed, no 
 one who knows Carlyle's writings needed the avowal. 
 Carlyle had a real belief in the Everlasting mind 
 behind nature and history ; but he had not only no 
 belief in anything like a true revelation, he had, I 
 think, almost a positive repulsion, if not scorn, for 
 the idea, as if an undue and "rose-water" attempt to 
 alleviate the burden of the universe by self-deception, 
 were involved in it. When, for instance, his coarse 
 favourite, Friedrich Wilhelm, dies — the king, I mean, 
 who assaulted his own daughter in his rage, struck 
 her violently, and would have kicked her — Carlyle 
 delights to tell you that he slept " with the primeval 
 sons of Thor," and to comment on his death thus : 
 " No Beresark of them, nor Odin's self, was a bit of 
 truer human stuff ; I confess his value to me in these 
 sad times is rare and great. Considering the usual 
 Histrionic Papin's Digester, Truculent Charlatan, and 
 other species of kings, alone obtainable for the sunk 
 flunkey populations of an era given up to Mammon 
 and the worship of its own belly, what would not 
 such a population give for a Friedrich Wilhelm to
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 27 
 
 guide it on the road hack from Orcus a little 1 
 ' Would give,' I have written, but alas, it ought to 
 have been ' should give.' What they ' would ' give is 
 too mournfully plain to me, in spite of ballot-boxes, 
 a steady and tremendous truth, from the days of 
 Barabbas downwards and upwards." If this be not 
 meant as a hint that, for Carlyle, such a hero as 
 Friedrich Wilhelm was rather the king to be desired 
 than He for whom Barabbas was really substituted, — 
 and this, perhaps, is an overstrained interpretation, — 
 it certainly does suggest that Carlyle's mind habitually 
 adhered by preference to the Scandinavian type of 
 violent smoke -and -flame hero, even at those times 
 when the lessons of his childhood carried him back 
 to the divine figure of the crucified Christ. 
 
 I do not think that any portion of Carlyle's works 
 contains clear traces of the sort of ground on which 
 he came to reject the Christian revelation. His 
 diaries and letters are full of perpetually reiterated 
 vituperations of cant ; but what cant is, except that 
 it is either absolutely insincere, or — a deeper stage 
 still — sincere insincerity, Carlyle never plainly says. 
 In one place he suggests that the mere echoing of 
 other persons' beliefs is pure cant, for he bewails him- 
 self much on the misery of living amidst echoes. 
 " Ach Gott ! " he says, " it is frightful to live among 
 echoes." Well, if the echoing of other persons' be- 
 liefs — that is, believing their belief on their authority 
 — be cant, we must all of us cant on all subjects on 
 which we have not been able to satisfy ourselves.
 
 28 THOMAS CARLYLE I 
 
 In that case, it is cant to echo the astronomer's pre- 
 diction of an eclipse, or the wine merchant's opinion 
 of a brand of wine, or the farmer's of the condition 
 of the crops. It would be cant to accept Carlyle's 
 assertion that Sterling's was a " beautiful soul " which 
 " pulsed auroras," — indeed, as we suspect that to have 
 been a bit of Carlylese cant, the echoing of it might 
 really be cant. Nay, it would even be cant to take 
 it on trust from him that " sea-green incorruptible " 
 is a trustworthy description of Robespierre, or " fiery- 
 real from the great fire-bosom of Nature herself" of 
 Danton. We cannot all of us follow the researches 
 of the historians any more than those of the astrono- 
 mers or the tradesmen. If we are to have impres- 
 sions at all on the subjects on which Carlyle himself 
 has given us our impressions, we must " live among 
 echoes." It cannot be cant simply to take on trust 
 the work of others, or to echo on reasonable evidence 
 what we have not had time to investigate for our- 
 selves. Nay, to invent original views for ourselves 
 when we have not in reality the means of constructing 
 them with anything like the justice and truthfulness 
 with which others, whom we might follow and trust, 
 can construct them, is itself a very serious sort of cant, 
 of which Carlyle was not unfrequently guilty. I 
 should describe cant not as the echoing of others' 
 views or faiths — which we very often ought to echo, 
 because they are far better than any which we could 
 possibly construct of our own — but as the pretence 
 of bearing personal evidence to truths which are not
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 29 
 
 original in us at all, and which are borrowed by us 
 from others, on whose authority alone we accept 
 them. Now, it is not every one who can bear per- 
 sonal testimony to the ultimate foundations even of 
 religious truth, though every one with a religion at 
 all can bear personal testimony to the spiritual strength 
 it gives. No one knew this better than Carlyle, for 
 he bore the most eloquent testimony to the depth of 
 his own father's and mother's faith ; and yet, so far 
 as we can judge, his profound scorn for traditional 
 faiths struck in principle — though, of course, he did 
 not think so — at the sincerity of theirs. He wrote 
 with his usual wrath to Mr. Erskine of those who 
 looked at the universe through the " helps and tradi- 
 tions of others." " Others," he said, " are but offer- 
 ing him their miserable spy-glasses, Puseyite, Presby- 
 terian, Free Kirk, Old Greek, Middle -age, Italian, 
 imperfect, not to say distorted, semi-opaque, wholly- 
 opaque, and altogether melancholy and rejectable 
 spy -glasses, one and all if one has eyes left. On me, 
 too, the pressure of these things falls very heavy ; 
 indeed, I often feel the loneliest of all the sons of 
 Adam ; and, in the jargon of poor grimacing men, it 
 is as if one listened to the jabbering of spectres, — not 
 a cheerful situation at all while it lasts. ... I con- 
 fess, then, Exeter Hall, with its froth-oceans, benevo- 
 lence, etc. etc., seems to me amongst the most degraded 
 platitudes this world ever saw ; a more brutal idolatry, 
 perhaps, — for they are white men, and their century 
 is the nineteenth, — than that of Mumbo Jumbo itself.
 
 30 THOMAS CARLYLE i 
 
 ... It is every way very strange to consider what 
 'Christianity' so-called has grown to within these 
 two centuries, on the Howard and Fry side as on 
 every other, — a paltry, mealy-mouthed 'religion of 
 cowards,' who can have no religion but a sham one, 
 which also, as I believe, awaits its abolition from the 
 avenging power. If men will turn away their faces 
 from God, and set up idols, temporary phantasms, 
 instead of the Eternal One, — alas ! the consequences 
 are from of old well known." For Carlyle, at least, 
 even the self-sacrificing labours of Howard and Eliza- 
 beth Fry in trying to improve the diabolical treatment 
 of criminals once common in English prisons were 
 founded on pure cant, on a mealy-mouthed religion 
 of cowards. 
 
 Yet his own religion was not free from cant. For 
 it was, by his own admission in later life, a religion 
 which he could not reconcile with the facts of life as 
 he apprehended them. At first his religion, which 
 was cast in the stern old Hebrew type, insisted a 
 great deal on the everlasting foundations of truth, on 
 the permanent duty of honest industry, on the severe 
 grandeur of constancy and good faith, on the sublimity 
 of God's eternity, and on the magnificence of the 
 heavens ; further, it poured the utmost contempt on 
 miracle as exploded by science, treated the external 
 story of the Gospel as childish legend, which based 
 the faith in human immortality on a kind of intuition, 
 and ridiculed all positive revelation as Hebrew old 
 clothes. This is what Carlyle's faith was in his man-
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 31 
 
 hood. But apparently, if Mr. Froude may be trusted, 
 it was more hesitating towards the end. He admitted, 
 we are told, that his deep faith in Providence was 
 without evidence, if not against the evidence. When 
 Mr. Fronde told him, not long before his death, that 
 he (Mr. Froude) " could only believe in a God which 
 [sic] did something, — with a cry of pain which I shall 
 never forget he said, ' He does nothing.' For him- 
 self," adds Mr. Froude, " however, his faith stood firm. 
 He did not believe in historical Christianity. He 
 did not believe that the facts alleged in the Apostles' 
 Creed had ever really happened. The resurrection 
 of Christ was to him only the symbol of a spiritual 
 truth. As Christ rose from the dead, so were we to 
 rise from the death of sin to the life of righteousness. 
 Not that Christ had actually died and had risen again. 
 He was only believed to have died and believed to have 
 risen, in an age when legend was history, when stories 
 were accepted as true from their beauty or their sig- 
 nificance." In a word, Christianity was not true, and 
 all who " were pretending to believe, or believing 
 that they believed, becoming hypocrites conscious or 
 unconscious, the last the worst of the two, not daring 
 to look the facts in the face, so that the very sense of 
 truth was withered in them," were on the side of 
 cant. " For such souls," says Mr. Froude, describing 
 Carlyle's belief in words, let us hope, a little stronger 
 than he himself would have used, " there was no hope 
 at all." Such was Carlyle's own "Exodus from 
 Houndsditch," as he termed it. After that exodus he
 
 32 THOMAS CARLYLK I 
 
 was compelled to admit that his faith in Providence 
 was without evidence, or against the evidence, and that 
 the Everlasting Will on whose absolute government 
 of the world he rested, " does nothing." If anybody 
 had then turned round on him and told him that he 
 was not facing the facts truly but deceiving himself 
 with phantasms, that he had no right to denounce 
 the Materialism of those who simply put away their 
 faith in Providence because they found it, as he found 
 it, " without evidence," if not against the evidence, 
 and who had given up trust in an Everlasting Will 
 which, so far as they could see, he had rightly 
 described when he said, " He does nothing," what 
 could he have replied which any Christian might 
 not equally reply to his taunts ? He would prob- 
 ably have been wisely indifferent to the assertion 
 that for his soul there was "no hope at all." He 
 would perfectly well have recognised that, a fter all , 
 he was nol in the least insincere in holding ^^PTTl 
 passionate faith in Providence for which, when chal- 
 lenged, he could give no reason — nay, against which 
 he could suggest many reasons. He would have felt 
 perfectly sure that, in spite of the pain with which 
 he declared to Mr. Froude that God "does nothing," 
 it was his own dulness and deadness which made the 
 admission, and not his own life and insight. But 
 would he ever have seen that it was as truly cant in 
 himself to deny the possibility of true faith in Chris- 
 tianity to men of education and knowledge, as it would 
 have been cant in the Materialists, if, on the strength
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 33 
 
 of such evidence as Mr. Froude gives us, they had 
 denied sincerity to Carlyle ? 
 
 The truth is, that no cant is worse than the cant of 
 originality, and that no cant ought to have been more 
 clearly recognised as cant by Carlyle. He himself 
 was original only in what he omitted from the faith of 
 his parents, for no man could have retained more 
 vividly the impress of the religious type which they 
 had handed down to him. That he retained his faith 
 in Providence and immortality at all was the conse- 
 quence of the faith long and carefully preserved by 
 his ancestors, and by them transmitted to him. On 
 the mere basis of his own imaginative vision he would 
 have had no faith worth the name, — at most, indeed, 
 a perception of the possibility of faith. Nay, is it 
 not the lesson of Eevelation itself that what we in- 
 herit in this way from our parents is not a prejudice 
 but a growing faculty of insight; and that we ought to 
 value nothing more highly than the type of character 
 through which genuine belief in the spiritual world 
 becomes possible 1 Did not the Jews accumulate the 
 results of their prophetic teaching for long generations 
 of prosperity, calamity, exile, and dependent political 
 life, before the time came at which a Christian Reve- 
 lation became possible 1 And is it to be supposed for a 
 moment that that long education was not expressly 
 given in order that a new spiritual power might be 
 developed in that people 1 If valour is a great in- 
 heritance, if scientific habits of thought are a great 
 inheritance, if the capacity for industry is a great in- 
 H D
 
 34 THOMAS CAELYLE I 
 
 heritance, then the capacity for spiritual belief is the 
 greatest inheritance of all. Carlyle's proposal that 
 every religious man should set up anew on his own 
 narrow basis of religious feeling, is one of the most 
 revolutionary and anarchic ever made. I entirely be- 
 lieve that it is the duty of Christians to face boldly 
 all the real facts which science or history or criticism 
 may bring before them, and to resign every element 
 in their former faith which is really and truly incon- 
 sistent with those facts. But then they should care- 
 fully sift facts, and sift also the meaning of inconsis- 
 tency. The true use of historical religion should be 
 to give each generation a different and much higher 
 standpoint in belief than was enjoyed by the previous 
 generation. The Church is not infallible ; but the 
 Church is not what Carlyle's theory seems to make it, 
 an institution which accumulates formulas, paralyses 
 effort, and imposes error. Originality in religion is 
 only useful just as originality in ethics is useful, i.e. 
 not as encouraging any man to throw off all the great 
 heritage of conviction and habit which his fathers 
 have transmitted to him, but as enabling him to give 
 new vitality to the highest elements of that heritage, 
 and to aid in the gradual elimination of the lower and 
 less noble elements, — a work of discrimination for 
 which, as for all works of discrimination, a fine and 
 reverent judgment is absolutely essential. Carlyle's 
 judgment was in these matters not reverent, — was far 
 too much penetrated by the impulses of an excitable 
 imagination and an angry self-will. His Eembrandt-
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 35 
 
 like imagination lighted up special points and scenes 
 in the world's history with marvellous force ; but then 
 for him all the rest of the world was non-existent. 
 He judged of the whole by a very small tract round 
 the focal part of his vision. For the rest all was 
 darkness ; and yet he thought and spoke and lived 
 and taught as if all the rest was just like the little 
 tract he had brought into the field of his magic-lantern. 
 Hence his religious criticism, like so much of his his- 
 torical work, was very like the unrolling of a diorama, 
 which reveals to view what is showy and sensational, 
 and leaves all that is solid and silent out of account. 
 
 I conceive, too, that at the root of Carlyle's tran- 
 scendental scepticism was a certain contempt for the 
 raw material of human nature, as inconsistent with 
 the Christian view, and an especial contempt for the 
 particular effect produced upon that raw material by 
 what he understood to be the most common result 
 of conversion. 
 
 I think his view of Christianity — reverently as he 
 always or almost always spoke of the person of Christ 
 — was as of a religion that had something too much of 
 love in it, something slightly mawkish ; and I believe 
 that if he could but have accepted the old Calvinism, 
 its inexorable decrees would in many respects have 
 seemed to him more like the ground-system of creation 
 than the gospel either of Chalmers or of Irving. His 
 love of despots who had any ray of honesty or insight 
 in them, his profound belief that mankind should try 
 and get such despots to order their doings for them,
 
 36 THOMAS CARLYLE I 
 
 his strange hankerings after the institution of slavery 
 as the only reasonable way in which the lower races 
 of men might serve their apprenticeship to the higher 
 races — all seems to me a sort of reflection of the 
 Calvinistic doctrine that life is a subordination to a 
 hard taskmaster, directly or by deputy, and that so 
 far from grumbling over its severities, we must just 
 grimly set to work and be thankful it is not worse than 
 it is. " Fancy thou deservest to be hanged (as is most 
 likely)," he says in Sartor Resartus, " thou wilt feel it 
 happiness to be only shot ; fancy thou deservest to be 
 hanged in a hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in 
 hemp." That seems to me to represent Carlyle's real 
 conviction. He could not believe that God does, as 
 a matter of fact, care very much for " the likes of us," 
 or even is bound to care. His imagination failed to 
 realise the need or reality of divine love. " Upwards 
 of five hundred thousand two-legged animals without 
 feathers lie around us, in horizontal position, their 
 heads all in nightcaps, and full of the foolishest 
 dreams," he wrote, in describing a city at midnight. 
 And you could easily see that his whole view of life 
 was accommodated to that conception. And the 
 Creator, in Carlyle's view, takes, I think, very much 
 the same account of these "two-legged animals with 
 heads full of the foolishest dreams," as Adam Hope 
 did of his stupid scholars ; not much is to be expected 
 of us or got out of us, but God will get out of us the 
 best He can, and "not complain of anything." Even 
 the best of our race show that they are the best by
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 37 
 
 estimating their own deserts at the very lowest, by 
 saying "we are unprofitable servants." As for the 
 common sort, they deserve not so much divine love 
 and salvation as to be driven out of "the dog-hutch" 
 of their own self-love into the pitiless storm. Such 
 seems to me to be the general drift of Carlyle's reli- 
 gion. He indulged readily enough his incredulity as 
 to the Christian miracles, historical evidence, and the 
 rest ; but his chief doubt was as to the stuff of which 
 mankind is made, on which his verdict seems to me 
 to be this : Not of the kind worth saving or to be 
 saved, after Christ's fashion, at all, but to be bettered, 
 if at all, after some other and much ruder fashion, the 
 " beneficent whip," physical or moral, being, perhaps, 
 the chief instrument. 
 
 To turn from the great writer to the man, the root 
 of Carlyle's weakness was, I think, very near to the 
 root of his strength. Luther said that he never did 
 anything well till his wrath was excited, and that 
 then he could do everything well. And so too 
 Carlyle's wrath often roused his great imagination, 
 but it quite as often paralysed or extinguished his 
 never very strong judgment, especially when that 
 wrath took the place of scorn, as it very often did. 
 This is to my mind the ruling tone in his correspond- 
 ence, and is the general effect of his private life as 
 revealed to us in Mr. Froude's biography. Indeed you 
 may say of the whole tone of his diary and letters 
 that his chief desire and resolve, as expressed in it, is 
 to keep the "rabble rout" beneath his feet, rather
 
 38 THOMAS CARLYLE i 
 
 than to attain to the height of any intellectual or 
 moral virtue which he had discerned in living con- 
 temporaries. For example, with all his love for 
 Irving, you never find a thought passing through 
 Carlyle's mind that he, Carlyle, might with advantage 
 emulate Irving's large and generous nature, and his 
 eager spiritual faith. Nor do you find a character 
 anywhere, unless it be within his own family, that 
 Carlyle for a single moment set above him as an 
 ideal nobler than himself, to the elevation of which 
 he would gladly aspire. His one ideal of life seems 
 to be to tread down the "rabble rout" instead of to 
 strain after any excellence above his own. What has 
 struck me with most wonder in reading his letters is 
 that a man could remain so high-minded, as Carlyle 
 on the whole certainly did, and yet live so constantly 
 in the atmosphere of scorn — scorn certainly more or 
 less for himself as well as every one else, but especi- 
 ally for every one else, his own clan excepted. He 
 spends all his energies in a sort of vivid passion of 
 scorn. He tramples furiously sometimes on himself 
 and sometimes on the miserable generation of his 
 fellow-men, and then he is lost in wonder and vexation 
 that such trampling results in no great good. The 
 grim fire in him seems to have been in search of 
 something to consume, and the following, taken from 
 his early life when he was even less of a pessimist 
 than in his later years, was the kind of fuel which, 
 for the most part, it found. He is writing from 
 Kinnaird, in Perthshire, where he was staying with
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 39 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Charles Buller, as tutor to that Charles 
 Buller whose premature death some years later de- 
 prived England of a young statesman of the highest 
 promise : — 
 
 " I see something of fashionable people here (he wrote 
 to Miss Welsh), and truly to my plebeian conception there 
 is not a more futile class of persons on the face of the 
 earth. If I were doomed to exist as a man of fashion I 
 do honestly believe I should swallow ratsbane, or apply 
 to hemp or steel before three months were over. From 
 day to day and year to year the problem is, not how to 
 use time but how to waste it least painfully. They have 
 their dinners and their routs. They move heaven and 
 earth to get everything arranged and enacted properly ; 
 and when the whole is done, what is it ? Had the parties 
 all wrapped themselves in warm blankets and kept their 
 beds, much peace had been among several hundreds of 
 his Majesty's subjects, and the same result, the uneasy 
 destruction of half a dozen hours, had been quite as well 
 attained. No wonder poor women take to opium and 
 scandal. The wonder is rather that these queens of the 
 land do not some morning, struck by the hopelessness of 
 their condition, make a general finish by simultaneous 
 consent, and exhibit to coroners and juries the spectacle 
 of the whole world of ton suspended by their garters, and 
 freed at last from ennui in the most cheap and complete 
 of all possible modes. There is something in the life of 
 a sturdy peasant toiling from sun to sun for a plump wife 
 and six eating children, but as for the Lady Jerseys and 
 the Lord Petershams, peace be with them." 
 
 No man not a man of genius could have written this, 
 and much that is of the same type ; but then, mere 
 rage at the superficialities of the world was not 
 enough for one whom it never could have contented
 
 40 THOMAS CAKLYLE i 
 
 to be a satirist. Hardly anywhere in all these letters 
 and journals do we find Carlyle fastening with de- 
 light on traces of the nobler and truer standard of 
 thought (at least outside his own clan), while we 
 constantly find him fastening with a sort of fever 
 of excitement on traces of the ignoble and false 
 standard. Where in the world could Carlyle have 
 found nobler evidence of this higher standard of 
 worth than in the works of the great genius of his 
 age, Sir Walter Scott 1 Yet what does he say of 
 these works ? — 
 
 " It is a damnable heresy in criticism to maintain 
 either expressly or implicitly that the ultimate object of 
 poetry is sensation. That of cookery is such, but not 
 that of poetry. Sir Walter Scott is the great intellectual 
 restaurateur of Europe. He might have been numbered 
 among the Conscript Fathers. He has chosen the worser 
 part, and is only a huge Publicanus. What are his novels 
 — any one of them ? A bout of champagne, claret, port, 
 or even ale drinking. Are we wiser, better, holier, stronger 1 
 No. We have been amused." (Vol. i. p. 371.) . . . 
 " Walter Scott left town yesterday on his way to Naples. 
 He is to proceed from Plymouth in a frigate, which the 
 Government have given him a place in. Much run after 
 here, it seems ; but lie is old and sick, and cannot enjoy 
 it ; ha> had two shocks of palsy, and seems altogether in 
 a precarious way. To me he is and has been an object 
 of very minor interest for many, many years. The novel- 
 wright of his time, its favourite child, and therefore an 
 almost worthless one. Yet is there something in his deep 
 recognition of the worth of the past, perhaps better than 
 anything lie has expressed about it, into which I do not 
 yet fully sit. Have never spoken with him (though I
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLK 41 
 
 might sometimes without great effort), and now probably 
 never shall." (Vol. ii. p. 208.) 
 
 It is curious, by the way, that Carlyle, an immense 
 reader, appears to have been wholly ignorant of the 
 meaning of the word " publicanus," and to have con- 
 founded it with the English word " publican." But 
 it is much more curious that he should have passed so 
 grossly false a judgment on Sir Walter Scott. For if 
 ever there were a man whose writings showed a pro- 
 found appreciation of moral worth as distinct from 
 conventional worth, it was Sir Walter Scott. Again, 
 take the case of Wordsworth. If ever a man held and 
 preached Carlyle's own transcendental doctrine both as 
 a creed and as a practical rule of life, it was Words- 
 worth. Wordsworth genuinely held and embodied 
 in his own life the spiritual view of things, and he 
 genuinely abhorred the life of luxury, and loved the 
 life of " plain living and high thinking." In a word, 
 Wordsworth was a poetical Carlyle, without Carlyle's 
 full insight into the superficialities and conventional- 
 ities of bodies politic, but otherwise a genuine and 
 powerful spiritual ally. But what does Carlyle 
 think of Wordsworth ? Instead of delighting to 
 detect in him a kindred spirit, he writes of him in 
 this way : — 
 
 "Sir Wm. Hamilton's supper (three nights ago) has 
 done me mischief ; will hardly go to another. Words- 
 worth talked of there (by Captain T. Hamilton, his neigh- 
 bour). Eepresented verisimilarly enough as a man full 
 of English prejudices, idle, alternately gossiping to enor-
 
 42 THOMAS CARLYLE I 
 
 mous lengths, and talking, at rare intervals, high wisdom ; 
 on the whole, endeavouring to make out a plausible life 
 of halfness in the Tory way, as so many on all sides do. 
 Am to see him if I please to go thither ; would go but a 
 shortish way for that end." (Vol. ii. pp. 338-339.) 
 
 And it is the same throughout. What Caiiyle feels 
 to be false he denounces with all the eloquence of a 
 great imagination. But the evidence that what he is 
 driving at is not the dissemination of a gospel of new 
 truth to his fellow-men, but rather the intellectual 
 annihilation of an error for which he feels the utmost 
 scorn lies in the fact that he never seems to have felt 
 the slighest admiration for those contemporaries 
 who really held with him, but only a profound scorn 
 for those contemporaries who lived in the mists of 
 the illusions which he contemned. 
 
 Perhaps Carlyle's artistic fastidiousness even ex- 
 aggerated the effects of his scornful temper. It is 
 rather remarkable in a man of his peasant birth that 
 there seems to have been an intolerant fastidiousness 
 about him, not only in relation to people, but to 
 sounds and sights. This must, I suppose, be ascribed 
 to the fine artistic vein in his temperament. He says 
 epiite frankly in his Reminiscences : " In short, as has 
 been enough indicated elsewhere, I was advancing 
 towards huge instalments of bodily and spiritual 
 wretchedness in this my Edinburgh purgatory ; and 
 had to clean and purify myself in penal fire of 
 various kinds for several years coming ; the first, 
 and much the worst, two or three of which were to
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 43 
 
 be enacted in this once-loved city. Horrible to think 
 of in part even yet ! The bodily part of them was a 
 kind of base agony (arising mainly in the want of 
 any extant or discoverable fence between my coarser 
 fellow-creatures and my more sensitive self), and 
 might and could easily (had the age been pious or 
 thoughtful) bave been spared a poor creature like 
 me. Those hideous disturbances to sleep, etc., a 
 very little real care and goodness might prevent all 
 that ; and I look back upon it still with a kind of 
 angry protest, and would have my successors saved 
 from it." And in a later page he adds his confession 
 that he liked, on tbe whole, social converse with the 
 aristocracy best. " Certain of the aristocracy, how- 
 ever, did seem to me still very noble ; and, with due 
 limitation of the grossly worthless (none of whom 
 had we to do with), I should vote at present that, of 
 classes known to me in England, the aristocracy (with 
 its perfection of human politeness, its continual grace 
 of bearing and of acting, steadfast 'honour,' light 
 address and cheery stoicism), if you see well into it, 
 is actually yet the best of English classes." That is 
 a very curious testimony to the effect of Carlyle's 
 artistic feeling in modifying bis own teaching as to 
 " the gospel of work." It was not the gospel of work 
 which had made even the noblest of the aristocracy 
 what they were. 
 
 Unfortunately, as it seems to me, in his wife, 
 whose mind Carlyle had a very great share in form- 
 ing, he found a pupil only too apt in assimilating the
 
 44 THOMAS CARLYLE - i 
 
 contemptuous side of his own doctrine ; and so, as 
 Mr. Froude puts it, the sharp facets of the two 
 diamonds, as they wore against each other, " never 
 wore into surfaces which harmoniously corresponded." 
 Mrs. Carlyle said, in the late evening of her labori- 
 ous life, " I married for ambition. Carlyle has ex- 
 ceeded all my wildest hopes and expectations, and I 
 am miserable." No wonder, when no love for some- 
 thing above themselves, but rather scorn for every- 
 thing mean, was the only deep ground of their 
 mutual sympathy. The wonder rather is that that 
 scorn for what was mean should have remained, on 
 the whole, so sound as it did, and should never have 
 degenerated into a misanthropy at once selfish and 
 malignant. Yet this certainly never happened. It 
 is in the highest sense creditable both to Carlyle and 
 his wife, that with all the hardness of their natures, 
 and all the severe trials, which partly from health 
 and partly from the deficiency in that tenderness 
 which does so much to smooth the path of ordinary 
 life, they had to undergo, they kept their unquestion- 
 able cynicism free to the last from all the more 
 ignoble elements, and perfectly consistent with that 
 stoical magnanimity in which it began. 
 
 To sum up my view of Carlyle, it is, I think, as 
 the author of The French Revolution — the most unique 
 book of the century — that he will be chiefly remem- 
 bered. For that book represents not only the author 
 but the man. 
 
 In origin a peasant, who originated a new sort of
 
 I THOMAS CARLYLE 45 
 
 culture and created a most artificial style full at once 
 of affectation and of genuine power ; in faith a Calvin- 
 istic sceptic, who rejected Christianity while clinging 
 ardently to the symbolic style of the Hebrew teaching; 
 in politics a pioneer of democracy, who wanted to per- 
 suade the people to trust themselves to the almost 
 despotic guidance of Lord-protectors whom he could 
 not tell them how to find ; in literature a rugged sort 
 of poet, who could not endure the chains of rhythm, 
 and even jeered at rhyme, — Carlyle certainly stands 
 out a paradoxical figure, solitary, proud, defiant, 
 vivid. No literary man in the nineteenth century 
 is likely to stand out more distinctly than Thomas Car- 
 lyle, both for faults and genius, to the centuries which 
 will follow.
 
 II AND III 
 
 THE TWO GREAT OXFORD THINKERS 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN AND MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 II 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 It may be thought that there is something incongru- 
 ous between the two great Oxford thinkers whom I am 
 associating together — Cardinal Newman and Matthew 
 Arnold — the one a prince of the Church which holds as 
 articles of faith the immaculate conception of the Vir- 
 gin, the invocation of saints, and the efficacy of indul- 
 gences ; the other a rationaliser who dissolves away the 
 very substance, nay, the very possibility, of Revelation, 
 recognises no God but " a stream of tendency not our- 
 selves which makes for righteousness," no saviour ex- 
 cept " sweet reasonableness " in a human life, and no 
 resurrection except the resurrection from a selfish to an 
 unselfish heart. But the more impressive is the contrast 
 between Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold, the 
 more remarkable is the relation between them. New- 
 man was far and away the most characteristic and influ- 
 ential Oxonian of the second quarter of this century; 
 Matthew Arnold the most characteristic and influential 
 Oxonian of its third quarter. Both drank deep of the 
 genius of the great University to which they belong. 
 The Cardinal is perhaps most widely known by his in- 
 
 H E
 
 50 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 vocation to that "kindly light" which amidst the "en- 
 circling gloom " of this troubled existence he implored 
 to lead him on. Matthew Arnold is perhaps most 
 widely known by his description — borrowed from 
 Swift — of the spirit for which we ought to yearn, as 
 one of " sweetness and light." Both are great masters 
 of the style in which sweetness and light predominate. 
 Bu& are poets — the one a theologian first and a poet 
 afterwards ; the other a poet first, and a theologian 
 I will not say, — for a theologian without theism is 
 almost a contradiction in terms — but a rationaliser 
 of theology, an anxious inventor of supposed equiva- 
 lents for theology — afterwards. In both there is a 
 singular combination of gentleness and irony. Both 
 give us the amplest sympathy in our desire to be- 
 lieve, and both are merciless when they find us 
 practically dispensing with the logic which they have 
 come to regard as final. Both are witnesses to the 
 great power of religion — the one by the imaginative 
 power he shows in getting over religious objections 
 to his faith ; the other by the imaginative power he 
 shows in clothing a vacuum with impressive and 
 majestic shadows till it looks something like a faith. 
 Again, both, with all their richness of insight, have 
 had that strong desire to rest on something beyond 
 that insight, something which they can regard as in- 
 dependent of themselves, which led Newman first 
 to preach against the principle of private judgment, 
 and to yearn after an infallible Church, while it led 
 .Matthew Arnold to preach what he calls his doctrine
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 51 
 
 of verification — namely, that no religious or moral 
 instinct is to be trusted unless it can obtain the en- 
 dorsement on a large scale of the common consent of 
 the best human experience. Surely there is no 
 greater marvel in our age than that it has felt pro- 
 foundly the influence of both, and appreciated the 
 greater qualities of both — the leader who with bowed 
 head and passionate self-distrust, nay, with "many a 
 pause of prayer and fear," has led hundreds back to 
 surrender their judgment to a Pope whose rashness 
 Dr. Newman's own ripe culture ultimately condemned, 
 and the poet who in some of the most pathetic 
 verses of modern times has bewailed the loss of the 
 very belief which, in some of the most flippant and 
 frigid of the diatribes of modern times, he has done 
 all that was in his power to destroy. Cardinal New- 
 man has taught men to take refuge in the greatness 
 of the past from the pettiness of the present. Mr. 
 Arnold has endeavoured to restore the idolatry of the 
 Zeitgeist, the "time-spirit," which measures truth by 
 the dwindled faith of the existing generation, and 
 which never so much as dreams that one day the 
 dwindled faith of the existing generation may in its 
 turn be judged, and condemned, by that truth which 
 it has denied. Surely, that the great University of 
 Oxford should have produced first the one and then 
 the other — first the great Komaniser, and then the 
 great rationaliser — is such a sign of the times as one 
 ought not lightly to pass by. When I consider care- 
 fully how the great theologian has vanished from his
 
 52 CARDINAL NEWMAN n 
 
 pulpit at St. Mary's, and how, finally transformed into 
 a Cardinal, he lias pleaded from his Birmingham Ora- 
 tory with the same touching simplicity as in his old 
 tutorial days for the truth that to the single heart 
 " there are but two things in the whole universe — our 
 own soul and God who made it " — and then how the 
 man who succeeded him in exercising more of the 
 peculiar influence of Oxford over the world than any 
 other of the following generation — and where is there 
 a promise of any younger Oxford leader who is likely 
 to stand even in the place of Mr. Arnold 1 — tells us 
 with that mild intellectual arrogance which is the 
 leading characteristic of his didactic prose, "I do not 
 think it can be said that there is even a low degree 
 of probability for the assertion that God is a person 
 who thinks and loves," — when I consider this con- 
 trast, I realise more distinctly than in looking at any 
 of the physical changes of the universe what Shake- 
 speare meant when he wrote, " We are such stuff as 
 dreams are made of." What are messages flashed 
 under the ocean, what is our more rapid flight through 
 space, what is the virtual contraction of the distances 
 on this little molehill of a planet till the most distant 
 points upon it are accessible to almost all, compared 
 with the startling mental revolution effected within 
 thirty or forty years at most ] When the highest 
 intellect of a great place of learning in one generation 
 says in effect, "Because I believe so utterly in God 
 and His revelation, I have no choice but to believe 
 also in the Pope," while the highest intellect of the
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 53 
 
 same great school in the next generation says, " As 
 there is not even a low degree of probability that God 
 in the old sense exists, let us do all that we can with 
 streams of tendency, and morality touched with emo- 
 tion, to supply his place," we must at least admit 
 that the moral instability of the most serious convic- 
 tions of earth is alarming enough to make the 
 whole head sick and the whole heart faint. Perhaps, 
 however, I may be able in some degree to attenuate, 
 before I have dealt with both these great men, the 
 more painful aspects of the paradox on which I am 
 insisting. 
 
 Most of us know, by bust, photograph, or 
 picture, the wonderful face of the great Cardinal ; — 
 that wide forehead, ploughed deep with parallel hori- 
 zontal furrows which seem to express his careworn 
 grasp of the double aspect of human nature, its aspect 
 in the intellectual and its aspect in the spiritual world, 
 — the pale cheek down which 
 
 " long lines of shadow slope 
 Which years, and curious thought, and suffering give," 
 
 — the pathetic eye, which speaks compassion from 
 afar, and yet gazes wonderingly into the impassable 
 gulf which separates man from man, and the strange 
 mixture of asceticism and tenderness in all the lines 
 of that mobile and reticent mouth, where humour, 
 playfulness, and sympathy are intricately blended with 
 those severer moods that "refuse and restrain." On 
 the whole, it is a face full in the first place of spiritual
 
 54 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 passion of the highest order, and in the next, of that 
 subtle and intimate knowledge of the details of human 
 limitation and weakness which makes all spiritual 
 passion look utterly ambitious and hopeless, unless in- 
 deed it be guided amongst the stakes and dykes and 
 pitfalls of the human battlefield by the direct provi- 
 dence of God. 
 
 And not a little of what I say of Cardinal Newman's 
 countenance may be said also of his style. A great 
 French critic has declared that " style is the man." 
 But surely that cannot be asserted without much 
 qualification. There are some styles which are much 
 better than the man, through failing to reflect the least 
 admirable parts of him; and many that are much 
 worse — for example, styles affected by the artificial 
 influence of conventional ideas, like those which pre- 
 vailed in the last century. Again, there are styles 
 which are thoroughly characteristic of the man in one 
 sense, and yet are characteristic in part because they 
 show his delight in viewing both himself and the 
 universe through coloured media, which, while they 
 brilliantly represent some aspects of it, greatly mis- 
 represent or completely disguise all others. Such a 
 style was Carlyle's, who may be said to have seen 
 the universe with wonderful vividness as it was when 
 in earthquake and hurricane, but not to have appre- 
 hended at all that solid crust of earth symbolising the 
 conventional phlegmatic nature which most of us 
 know only too well. Gibbon, again, sees everything 
 — even himself — as if it were a striking moral pageant.
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 55 
 
 How characteristically he describes his father's dis- 
 approbation of his youthful passion for Mademoiselle 
 Curchod (afterwards Madame Necker), — " I sighed 
 as a lover, I obeyed as a son." It was evidently the 
 moral pageant of that very mild ardour, and that not 
 too reluctant submission, of which he was thinking ; 
 not of the emotion itself. And Macaulay, again, has 
 a style like a coat of mail with the visor down. It is 
 burnished, brilliant, imposing, but it presents the 
 world and human life in pictorial antitheses far more 
 vivid and brilliant than real. It is a style which 
 effectually conceals all the more homely and domestic 
 aspects of Macaulay's own nature, and represents 
 mainly his hunger for incisive contrast. But if ever it 
 were true that the style is the man, it is true, I think, 
 of Newman — nay, of both Newman and Matthew 
 Arnold. And therefore I may venture without im- 
 propriety to dwell somewhat longer on the style of 
 both, and especially of the former, than would be or- 
 dinarily justifiable. Both styles are luminous, both 
 are marked by that curious "distinction" which only 
 genius, and in general only poetic genius, can command. 
 Both show a great delight in irony, and use it with 
 great effect. Both writers can, when they choose, 
 indulge even in extravagance, and give the rein to 
 ridicule without rousing that displeasure which any 
 such excess in men of high intellectual power is apt to 
 excite. Both styles are styles of white light rather than 
 of the lurid, or glowing, or even rainbow order. Both, 
 in poetry at least, and Newman's in both poetry and
 
 56 CAEDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 prose, are capable of expressing the truest kind of 
 pathos. Both have something in them of the older 
 Oxford suavity, though in very different forms. I have 
 heard it said that the characteristic Oxford manner 
 is " ostentatiously sweet," as the characteristic Cam- 
 bridge manner is ostentatiously clumsy. But neither 
 Cardinal Newman nor Matthew Arnold have the 
 slightest trace of this excess of suavity, of the can 
 sucrSe attributed to the University. Newman's sweet- 
 ness is the sweetness of religious humility and ardour, 
 Arnold's is the sweetness of easy condescension. New- 
 man's sweetness is wistful, Arnold's is didactic ; the 
 one yearns to move your heart, the other kindly en- 
 lightens your intellect. Even Newman's prose style 
 is spiritual in its basis, Arnold's intellectual. Even 
 when treating spiritual topics, even when saying the 
 best things Arnold has ever said as to " the secret of 
 Jesus," his manner, though gracious, is gently dicta- 
 torial. Again, when Newman gives the rein to his 
 irony, it is always with a certain earnestness, or even 
 indignation against the self-deceptions he is ridiculing. 
 When Arnold does so, it is in pleasurable scorn of 
 the folly he is exposing. I may illustrate the very 
 different irony of the two men by two passages of a 
 somewhat analogous kind, in which each of them 
 repels the imputation of having something new 
 and wonderful of his own to communicate to the 
 world. Here is the striking passage in which Ar- 
 nold describes the embarrassment with which he 
 should find himself addressing a select circle of his
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 57 
 
 special admirers in the best room of the "Spotted 
 Dog":- 
 
 " The old recipe," he says, " to think a little more and 
 talk a little less, seems to me still the best recipe to 
 follow. So I take comfort when I find the Guardian 
 reproaching me with having no influence, for I know 
 what influence means — a party, practical proposals, action ; 
 and I say to myself, ' Even supposing I could get some 
 followers, and assemble them, brimming with affectionate 
 enthusiasm, in a committee-room at some inn, what on 
 earth shoiild I say to them ? What resolutions could I 
 propose ? I could only propose the old Socratic common- 
 place, Know thyself, and how black they would all look 
 at that ! ' No ; to incpiire, perhaps too curiously, what 
 the present state of English development and civilisation 
 is, which, according to Mr. Lowe, is so perfect, that to 
 give votes to the working class is stark madness ; and, on 
 the other hand, to be less sanguine about the divine and 
 saving effect of a vote on its possessor than my friends in 
 the committee-room at the ' Spotted Dog ' ; that is my 
 inevitable portion. To bring things under the light of 
 one's intelligence, to see how they look there, to accustom 
 one's self simply to regard the Marylebone Vestry, or the 
 Educational Home, or our Divorce Court, or our gin 
 palaces open on Sunday and the Crystal Palace shut, as 
 absurdities, is, I am sure, invaluable exercise for us just 
 at present. Let all persist in it who can, and steadily set 
 their desires on introducing, with time, a little more soul 
 and spirit into the too too solid flesh of English society." 
 
 I turn to Father Newman's mode of making a 
 somewhat similar protestation. He has been recalling 
 the Tractarian horror of private judgment in theology, 
 and is considering the position taken by some of 
 the Anglicans, that it would be enough if they should
 
 58 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 only succeed in making a little party of their own, 
 opposed to private judgment, within a Church that 
 rests entirely upon private judgment : — 
 
 " For me, my clear brethren, did I know myself well, 
 I should doubtless find I was open to the temptation as 
 well as others to take a line of my own, or what is called, 
 to set up for myself ; but whatever might be my real 
 infirmity in this matter, I should, from mere common 
 sense and common delicacy, hide it from myself, and give 
 it some good name in order to make it palatable. I never 
 could get myself to say, ' Listen to me, for I have some- 
 thing great to tell you, which no one else knows, but of 
 which there is no manner of doubt.' I should be kept 
 from such extravagance from an intense sense of the 
 intellectual absurdity, which, in my feelings, such a claim 
 would involve ; which would shame me as keenly, and 
 humble me in my own sight as utterly, as some moral 
 impropriety or degradation. I should feel I was simply 
 making a fool of myself, and taking on myself, in figure, 
 that penance, of which we read in the lives of saints, of 
 playing antics and making faces in the market-place. Not 
 religious principle but even worldly pride would keep me 
 from so unworthy an exhibition. . . . Do not come to me 
 at this time of day with views perfectly new, isolated, 
 original, mi generis, warranted old neither by Christian 
 nor unbeliever, and challenge me to answer what I really 
 have not the patience to read. Life is not long enough 
 for such trifles. Go elsewhere, not to me, if you wish to 
 make a proselyte. Your inconsistency, my clear brethren, 
 is on your very front. ... I began myself with doubling 
 and inquiring, you seem to say ; I departed from the 
 teaching I received ; I was educated in some older type 
 of Anglicanism — in the school of Newton, Cecil, or Scott, 
 or in the Bartlett's Buildings school, or in the Liberal 
 Whig school ; I was a Dissenter or a Wealeyan, and by
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 59 
 
 study and thought I became an Anglo-Catholic. And 
 then I read the Fathers, and I have determined what 
 books are genuine and what are not ; which of them 
 apply to all times, which are occasional, which historical, 
 and which doctrinal ; what opinions are private, what 
 authoritative ; what they only seem to hold, what they 
 ought to hold ; what are fundamental, what ornamental. 
 Having thus measured and cut and put together my creed 
 by my own proper intellect, by my own lucubrations, and 
 differing from the whole world in my results, I distinctly 
 bid you, I solemnly warn you, not to do as I have done, 
 but to take what I have found, to revere it, to use it, to 
 believe it, for it is the teaching of the old Fathers, and of 
 your mother, the Church of England. Take my word for 
 it that this is the very truth of Christ ; deny your own 
 reason, for I know better than you ; and it is as clear as 
 day that some moral fault in you is the cause of your 
 differing from me. It is pride, or vanity, or self-reliance, 
 or fulness of bread. You require some medicine for your 
 soul. You must fast ; you must make a general confes- 
 sion ; and look very sharp to yourself, for you are already 
 next door to a rationalist or an infidel." — Lectures on 
 Anglican Difficulties, pp. 126-134. 
 
 Or as he put the same thing in another passage, 
 in which he described how the authorities of the 
 Anglican Church had ruled ex cathedra, that the 
 Anglican divinity was all wrong : — 
 
 "There are those who, reversing the Eoman maxim, 
 are wont to shrink from the contumacious and to be 
 valiant towards the submissive ; and the authorities in 
 question gladly availed themselves of the power conferred 
 on them by the movement against the movement itself. 
 They fearlessly handselled their Apostolical weapons upon 
 the Apostolical party. One after another in long succes-
 
 60 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 sion they took up their song and their parable against it. 
 It was a solemn war-dance which they executed round 
 victims who, by their very principle, were bound hand 
 and foot, and could only eye with disgust and perplexity 
 this most unaccountable movement on the part of those 
 ' Holy Fathers, the representatives of the Apostles, and 
 the Angels of the Churches.' . . . When bishops spoke 
 against them, and bishops' courts sentenced them, and the 
 universities degraded them, and the people were against 
 them, from that day their ' occupation was gone,' . . . 
 henceforward they had nothing left for them but to shut 
 up the school and retire into the country. Nothing else 
 was left for them unless, indeed, they took up some other 
 theory, unless they changed their ground, unless they 
 ceased to be what they were, and became what they were 
 not ; unless they belied their own principles, and strangely 
 forgot their own luminous and most keen convictions ; 
 unless they vindicated the right of private judgment, took 
 up some fancy religion, retailed the Fathers, and jobbed 
 Theology." 
 
 Both passages are admirable in their very di lie rent 
 irony. But how wide apart is the character of that 
 irony. Matthew Arnold's is the irony of true intel- 
 lectual scorn, directed against all who appeal to 
 vulgar prejudices and wish to rally party-feeling by 
 ad captandum cries. He is delighted to boast that he 
 has nothing to say to such people, and can hardly 
 congratulate himself sufficiently on the thought that 
 they would have nothing to say to him. If he can 
 but make them feel how thorough is his contempt 
 for that whole field of popular combinations in which 
 political manoeuvres are attempted, he is quite satis- 
 fied with himself. Newman's irony, on the other
 
 II CAEDINAL NEWMAN 61 
 
 hand, is directed against what he regarded as the real 
 self-deception which went on in the minds of some 
 of his own most intimate associates and friends of 
 former days. He is all on fire to make them feel 
 that if they had really given up private judgment in 
 theology, they could not consistently hold a position 
 which is tenable only on the score that a vast number 
 of most uncertain and arbitrary private judgments, 
 approved by no Church as a whole, nor even by 
 any influential section of any, have concurred to 
 define and fortify it. Keen as his irony is, there is 
 a certain passion in it too. He cannot endure to see 
 what he thinks such unreality, such self-deception, in 
 those whom he has trusted and loved. He seeks to 
 cut them almost by main force out of a position which 
 he thinks humiliating to them, and which for himself 
 he would certainly regard as wanting in candour and 
 sincerity. And the difference between the nature 
 and bias of Arnold's irony and Newman's irony runs 
 into the difference between their styles in general. 
 Both are luminous, but Arnold's prose is luminous 
 like a steel mirror, Newman's like a clear atmosphere 
 or lake. Arnold's prose style is crystal, Newman's 
 liquid. 
 
 And with this indication of the characteristic 
 difference I will now turn to my immediate subject, 
 Cardinal Newman's style only. It is a style, as I 
 have said, that more nearly represents a clear atmo- 
 sphere than any other which I know in English litera- 
 ture. It flows round you, it presses gently on every
 
 62 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 side of you, and yet like a steady current carries you 
 in one direction too. On every facet of your mind 
 and heart you feel the light touch of his purpose, and 
 yet you cannot escape the general drift of his move- 
 ment more than the ship can escape the drift of the 
 tide. He never said anything more characteristic 
 than when he expressed his conviction that, though 
 there are a hundred difficulties in faith, into all of 
 which he could enter, the hundred difficulties are not 
 equivalent to a single doubt. That saying is most 
 characteristic even of his style, which seems to be 
 sensitive in the highest degree to a multitude of 
 hostile influences which are at once appreciated and 
 resisted, while one predominant and over-ruling power 
 moves steadily on. 
 
 I will try and illustrate my meaning briefly. 
 Take the following passage concerning the lower 
 animals : — 
 
 " Can anything he more marvellous or startling, unless 
 we were used to it, than that we should have a race of 
 beings about us whom we do see, and as little know their 
 state, or can describe their interests or their destiny, as 
 we can tell of the inhabitants of the sun and moon ? It 
 is, indeed, a very overpowering thought, when we get to 
 fix our minds on it, that we periodically use — I may say 
 hold intercourse with — creatures who are as much strangers 
 to us, as mysterious, as if they were the fabulous unearthly 
 1 K-in^s, more powerful than man, and yet his slaves, which 
 Eastern superstitions have invented. We have more real 
 knowledge about the angels than about the brutes ; they 
 have, apparently, passions, habits, and a certain account- 
 ableness ; but all is mystery about them. We do not
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 63 
 
 know whether they can sin or not, whether they are under 
 punishment, whether they are to live after this life ; we 
 inflict very great sufferings on a portion of them, and 
 they, in turn, every now and then, retaliate upon us, as 
 if by a wonderful law. . . . Cast your thoughts abroad 
 on the whole number of them, large and small, in vast 
 forests, or in the water, or in the air, and then say whether 
 the presence of such countless multitudes, so various in 
 their natures, so strange and wild in their shapes, living 
 on the earth without ascertainable object, is not as mysteri- 
 ous as anything Scripture says about the angels." 
 
 Now, does not the style of that passage perfectly 
 represent the character of the mind which conceived it, 
 as well as the special meaning it conveys ? Inferior 
 styles express the purpose but conceal the man ; New- 
 man's expresses the purpose by revealing the man. 
 This passage — and I could find scores which would suit 
 my purpose as well, and some, though not so short and 
 detachable, that would suit it better — is as luminous as 
 the day, but that is not its special characteristic, for 
 luminousness belongs to the ether, which is the same 
 whether the atmosphere be present or absent, and 
 Newman's style touches you with a visible thrill, just 
 as the atmosphere transmits every vibration of sound. 
 You are conscious of the thrill of the writer's spirit as 
 he contemplates this strange world of countless ani- 
 mated beings with whom our spiritual bond is so 
 slight ; the sufferings we inflict, and the retaliations 
 permitted in return; the blindness to spiritual marvels 
 with which custom strikes us ; the close analogy 
 between the genii of Eastern superstition and the
 
 64 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 domestic animals who serve us so industriously with 
 physical powers so much greater than our own ; the 
 strangeness and wildness of the innumerable forms 
 which hover round us in forest, field, and flood ; and 
 yet, with all those undercurrents of feeling, observe 
 how large is the imaginative reach of the whole, how 
 firmly the drift — to make it easier to believe in angelic 
 hosts — is sustained ; how steady is the subordination 
 of the whole to the object of attenuating the difficulty 
 of the spiritual mystery in which he desires men to 
 believe. Once more, how tender is the style in the only 
 sense in which we can properly attribute tenderness to 
 style, its avoidance of every harsh or violent word, its 
 shrinking aside from anything like overstatement. 
 The lower animals have, he says, " apparently passions, 
 habits, and a certain accountableness." Evidently Dr. 
 Newman could not have suggested, as Des Cartes did, 
 that they are machines, apeing feelings without having 
 them ; he never doubts their sufferings ; he could not, 
 even by a shade, exaggerate the mystery he is delineat- 
 ing. Every touch shows that he wishes to delineate 
 it as it is, and not to overcolour it by a single tint. 
 Then how piercing to our dulness is that phrase, " It is 
 indeed a very overpowering thought when we get to fix 
 our minds on it." We are not overpowered, he would 
 say, only because we cannot or do not fix our minds on 
 tin's wonderful intercourse of ours with mtimates, after 
 a kind, ot whose inner being we are yet entirely 
 ignorant. And how reticent is the inference, how 
 strictly it limits itself to its real object, to impress
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 65 
 
 upon us how little we know even of the objects of 
 sense, and how little reason there is in using our 
 ignorance as the standard by which to measure the 
 supersensual. 
 
 I have taken this passage as a fair illustration of 
 Dr. Newman's style in relation to one of the class of 
 subjects with which he most often deals. Let me 
 take another illustration from his style when he is 
 describing purely outward facts, though of course 
 " style " means less, and ought to mean less, when it 
 expresses only vivid physical vision, with perhaps a 
 dash of wonder in it, than when it expresses a variety 
 of moral emotions. Newman's external descriptions 
 are not magnificent. A magnificent style in describing 
 ordinary physical objects almost always means a style 
 that suggests what the eye neither saw nor could see. 
 And Dr. Newman's style is far from magnificent, for 
 it is delicately vivid. The subject is one of the locust 
 plagues devastating North Africa : — 
 
 " The swarm to which Juba pointed grew and grew 
 till it became a compact body as much as a furlong square, 
 yet it was but the vanguard of a series of similar hosts, 
 formed one after another out of the hot mould or sand, 
 rising into the air like clouds, enlarging into a dusky 
 canopy, and then discharged against the fruitful plain. 
 At length the large innumerous mass was put into motion, 
 and began its career, darkening the face of day. As be- 
 came an instrument of divine power, it seemed to have 
 no volition of its own ; it was set off, it drifted with the 
 wind, and thus made northward straight for Sicca. Thus 
 they advanced, host after host, for a time wafted in the 
 air, and gradually declining to the earth, while fresh 
 H F
 
 66 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 hordes were carried over the first, and neared the earth 
 after a longer flight in their turn. For twelve miles they 
 extended from front to rear, and the whizzing and hissing 
 could be heard for twelve miles on every side of them. 
 The bright sun, though hidden by them, illumined their 
 bodies, and was reflected from their quivering wings, and 
 as they heavily fell earthward they seemed like the in- 
 numerable flakes of a yellow - coloured snow, and like 
 snow did they descend, a living carpet, or rather pall, 
 upon fields, crops, gardens, copses, groves, orchards, vine- 
 yards, olive-woods, orangeries, palm-plantations, and the 
 deep forests, sparing nothing within their reach, and where 
 there was nothing to devour, lying helpless in drifts, or 
 crawling forward obstinately, as they best might, with the 
 hope of prey. They could spare their hundred thousand 
 soldiers twice or thrice over and not miss them ; the masses 
 filled the bottoms of the ravines and hollow ways, imped- 
 ing the traveller as he rode forward on his journey, and 
 trampled by thousands under his horse's hoofs. In vain 
 was all this overthrow and waste by the roadside ; in vain 
 all their loss in river, pond, and watercourse. The poor 
 peasants hastily dug pits and trenches as the enemy came 
 on ; in vain they filled them from the wells or with lighted 
 stubble. Heavily and thickly did the locusts fall ; they 
 were lavish of their lives ; they choked the flame and the 
 water which destroyed them the while, and the vast living 
 hostile armament still moved on. . . . They come up to the 
 walls of Sicca and are flung against them into the ditch. 
 Not a moment's hesitation or delay ; they recover their 
 footing, they climb up the wood or stucco, they surmount 
 the parapet, or they have entered in at the windows, till- 
 ing the apartments and the most private and luxurious 
 chambers ; not one or two, like stragglers at forage or rioters 
 after a victory, bul in order of battle ami with the array 
 of an army. Choice plants or flowers, about the impluvia 
 and xysti, for amm-cmml and refreshment, myrtles, oranges, 
 pomegranates, the rose and the carnal inn have disappeared.
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 67 
 
 They dim the bright marbles of the walls and the gilding 
 of the ceilings. They enter the triclinium in the midst 
 of the banquet, they crawl over the viands and spoil what 
 they do not devour. Unrelaxed by success and enjoy- 
 ment, onward they go ; a secret mysterious instinct keeps 
 them together as if they had a king over them. They 
 move along the floor in so strange an order that they seem 
 to be a tessellated pavement themselves, and to be the 
 artificial embellishment of the floor, so true are their lines 
 and so perfect the patterns they describe. Onward they 
 go, to the market, to the temple sacrifices, to the bakers' 
 stores, to the cookshops, to the confectioners, to the 
 druggists — nothing comes amiss to them ; wherever man 
 has aught to eat or drink there are they, reckless of death, 
 strong of appetite, certain of conquest." 
 
 Now, that is a passage in which only a few of the 
 greater qualities of style can be exhibited, but are 
 not those few exhibited in perfection 1 Could there 
 be a more luminous and orderly grasp of the strange 
 phenomenon depicted, of its full physical significance 
 and moral horror ; could there be a more rich and 
 delicate perception of the weirdness of that strange 
 fall of "yellow snow"? Could there be a deeper 
 feeling conveyed of the higher instrumentality under 
 which plagues like these are launched upon the world? 
 
 And now to bring to a close what I have to 
 say of Dr. Newman's style — though the subject grows 
 upon one — let me quote one or two of the passages in 
 which his style vibrates to the finest notes, and yet 
 exhibits most powerfully the drift and undercurrent 
 by which his mind is swayed. Perhaps he never 
 expresses anything so powerfully as he expresses the
 
 68 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 deep pining for the rest of spiritual simplicity, for 
 the peace which passes understanding, that underlies 
 his nature. Take this from one of his Roman Catholic 
 sermons : " Oh, long sought after, tardily found, 
 the desire of the eyes, the joy of the heart, the truth 
 after many shadows, the fulness after many foretastes, 
 the home after many storms; come to her, poor 
 children, for she it is, and she alone, who can unfold 
 to you the secret of your being, and the meaning 
 of your destiny." Again, in the excpiisite tale of 
 martyrdom from which I have already quoted the 
 account of the locusts, the destined martyr, whose 
 thirst for God has been awakened by her intercourse 
 with Christians, thus repels the Greek rhetorician, 
 who is trying to feed her on the husks of philosophic 
 abstractions, as she expresses the yearnings of a heart 
 weary of its desolation : " Oh that I could find 
 Him!" Callista exclaimed passionately. "On the 
 right hand and on the left I grope, but touch Him 
 not. Why dost thou fight against me ; why dost 
 thou scare and perplex me, oh First and only fair?" 
 Or take one of Dr. Newman's most characteristic 
 poems — the few poems which have really been fused 
 in the glow of his heart before they were uttered by 
 his tongue. The lines I am going to epiote were 
 written on a fancy contained in the writings of Bede ; 
 the fancy that there is a certain " meadow as it were," 
 in which the souls of holy men suffer nothing, but 
 wait the time when they should be fit to bear the 
 vision of God : —
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 69 
 
 " They are at rest : 
 
 We may not stir the heaven of their repose 
 With loud-voiced grief, or passionate request, 
 
 Or selfish plaint for those 
 Who in the mountain grots of Eden lie, 
 And hear the fourfold river as it hurries by. 
 
 " They hear it sweep 
 
 In distance down the dark and savage vale, 
 But they at eddying pool or current deep 
 
 Shall never more grow pale ; 
 They hear, and meekly muse as fain to know, 
 How long untired, unspent, that giant stream shall flow. 
 
 " And soothing sounds 
 
 Blend with the neighbouring waters as they glide ; 
 Posted along the haunted garden's bounds 
 
 Angelic forms abide, 
 Echoing as words of watch, o'er lawn and grove, 
 The verses of that hymn which seraphs chant above." 
 
 In another of these poems Dr. Newman has referred 
 to the sea described in the book of Revelation : — 
 
 " A sea before 
 The throne is spread ; its pure still glass 
 Pictures all earth scenes as they pass. 
 
 We on its shore 
 Share in the bosom of our rest, 
 God's knowledge, and are blest." 
 
 It has always seemed to me that Newman's style 
 succeeds, so far as a human form of expression can, 
 in picturing the feelings of earth in a medium as 
 clear, as liquid, and as tranquil, as sensitive alike to 
 the minutest ripples and the most potent tidal waves
 
 70 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 of providential impulse, as the sea spread before the 
 throne itself. 
 
 I have dwelt so much on Dr. Newman's style 
 because in his case at least, I take the style to be 
 the reflection of the man. But when I say this, it 
 must not be supposed that in describing his style as 
 a clear atmosphere or liquid medium, which makes 
 itself felt everywhere, and yet urges him whom it 
 envelops steadily in one direction, I mean to suggest 
 that Cardinal Newman is wanting in the most marked 
 personal character. A very brief reference to his 
 career will show how very false an impression that 
 would convey. Newman's early life at Oxford was, 
 as we know, a very tranquil, and rather a solitary 
 one. "Never less alone than when alone," were the 
 words in which Dr. Copleston, the Provost of Oriel, 
 addressed him on an accidental meeting in one of his 
 Oxford walks. And he tells us, " It was not I who 
 sought friends, but friends who sought me. Never 
 man had kinder or more indulgent friends than I 
 have had, but I have expressed my own feelings as 
 to the mode in which I gained them," in the year 
 1829, "in the course of a copy of verses. Speaking 
 of my blessings, I said — 'blessings of friends which 
 to my door, umtsi-al, anltopcd, have come'" (Apologia, 
 p. 73). That is, others were more attracted towards the 
 mind which had its own highest attraction in the in- 
 visible world, than he towards them. Keble was from 
 the first Newman's chief object of hero-worship, for 
 Newman at least never lost sight of quality in sheer
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 71 
 
 force, never made the mistake which is usually attri- 
 buted to Carlyle. When, after his election as a 
 fellow of Oriel, he went to receive the congratulations 
 of the other fellows, " I bore it," he wrote, " till 
 Keble took my hand, and then felt so abashed and 
 unworthy of the honour that I seemed desirous of 
 quite sinking into the ground." This was years be- 
 fore the publication of The Christian Year. But even 
 Keble's influence was less personal than theological. 
 The Christian Year appeared in 1827, and immedi- 
 ately took the strongest hold of Newman. Indeed, 
 the whole history of his life shows how absurd is the 
 view which has sometimes been taken by able men, 
 that Newman's life has been a continuous struggle 
 against scepticism. No one can read his long series 
 of sermons, and his remarkable though much shorter 
 series of poems, and still less re-read them by the 
 light of his lectures " On Anglican Difficulties," his 
 Apologia and his Grammar of Assent, without being 
 profoundly convinced that the Eoman Catholic in 
 Newman is as deep as his thought, the High Church- 
 man as deep as his temperament, and the Christian 
 as deep as his character, being intertwined with it 
 inextricably — nay, not only intertwined, but identi- 
 fied. I can understand what Dr. Newman was as an 
 Anglican, because the first part of the most character- 
 istic work of his life was done as an Anglican, and I 
 believe that it was Reason, and Reason almost alone, 
 working on the assumptions which were so deeply 
 rooted in him in 1843, which made him a Roman
 
 72 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 Catholic. I cannot understand what he was as an 
 Evangelical Protestant, because even so far as he 
 ever was an Evangelical Protestant, it was only during 
 his earliest youth, and the whole drift of his nature 
 seems to have carried him away from the moor- 
 ings of his early creed. But what would be left of 
 Dr. Newman if you could wipe the Christian heart 
 out of his life and creed I could as little guess as I 
 could what would have been left of Sir Walter Scott 
 if you could have emptied out of him the light of old 
 romance and legend ; or of Carlyle, if you could have 
 managed somehow to graft upon him a conventional 
 " gigmanic " creed. Keble's conception of the poetry 
 in the Christian faith, and the nature -symbolism 
 it contained, took a hold upon Newman which made 
 his career what it became. In many respects, of 
 course, his own mind vastly enlarged and deepened 
 the intellectual view of Keble, turned it into some- 
 thing more masculine, more logical, more construc- 
 tive ; but it would be almost as unreasonable to speak 
 of Keble himself as fighting all his life against a 
 mordant scepticism as of Newman's doing so. It is 
 true, of course, that Newman has seen, as Keble 
 probably never saw, how profoundly the moral 
 assumptions with which the conscious intellectual life 
 begins, influence our faith or want of faith. He has 
 done as much justice to the logical strength of certain 
 types of sceptical thought as he has to the logic of 
 Christian thought itself. But that, since his first 
 "conversion," as he 'alls it, he ever felt even the
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 73 
 
 smallest temptation to reject Christianity, whether 
 before he became a Eoman Catholic or since, is 
 simply incredible. We have his own explicit asser- 
 tion for the latter denial, and the evidence of his 
 singularly self-consistent life for the former. 
 
 I have pointed out that Newman early rested on 
 the conviction of the existence of " two, and two only, 
 supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself 
 and my Creator" (Apologia, p. 59). Of all points of 
 faith, he tells us elsewhere, " the being of a God is to 
 my mind encompassed with the most difficulty and 
 borne in on our minds with most power" (Ibid. 
 p. 374). And to the aid of this central conviction 
 came Keble's teaching, that the sacramental system 
 has its roots deep in the natural creation itself, or, as 
 Dr. Newman, expressing his obligations to Keble, 
 puts it, " that material phenomena are both the types 
 and the instruments of real things unseen, a doctrine 
 which embraces not only what Anglicans no less 
 than Catholics believe about sacraments properly so 
 called, but also the article of the communion of 
 Saints in its fulness, and likewise the mysteries of 
 the faith." 
 
 Now the more earnestly Newman embraced the 
 doctrine that the natural universe is full of the types 
 and the instrumentality of spiritual beings unseen — 
 and no one can read Newman's poems without feel- 
 ing how deeply this conviction had struck its roots 
 into him — the more perplexing the external realities 
 of human history and human conduct, barbarous or
 
 74 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 civilised, mediaeval or modern, seemed to him. His 
 faith in the sacramental principle taught him to look 
 for a created universe from which the Creator should 
 be reflected back at every point ; but he actually 
 found one from which disorder, confusion, enmity to 
 God, was reflected back at every point. Here are 
 his own words : — 
 
 " Starting then with the being of a God (which, as I 
 have said, is as certain to me as the certainty of my own 
 existence, though when I try to put the grounds of that 
 certainty into logical shape I find a difficulty in doing so 
 in mood and figure to my satisfaction), I fook out of my- 
 self into the world of men, and there I see a sight which 
 fills me with unspeakable distress. The world seems 
 simply to give the lie to that great truth of which my 
 whole being is so full, and the effect upon me is in con- 
 sequence, as a matter of necessity, as confusing as if it 
 denied that I am in existence myself. If I looked into a 
 mirror and did not see my face I should have that sort of 
 feeling which actually comes upon me when I look into 
 this living busy world and see no reflection of the Creator. 
 This is to me one of the great difficulties of this absolute 
 primary truth to which I referred just now. Were it not 
 for this voice speaking so clearly in my conscience and my 
 heart I should be an atheist, or a pantheist, or a polytheisf 
 when I looked into the world. I am speaking for myself 
 only, and 1 am far from denying the real force of the 
 
 iiments in proof of a God drawn from the general facts 
 of human society ; but these do not warm me or enlighten 
 me ; they do not take away the winter of my desolation 
 or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me 
 and my moral being rejoice. The sight of the world is 
 nothing else than the prophet's vision, full of 'lamenta- 
 tions and mourning and woo.' To consider the world in
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 75 
 
 its length and breadth, its various history, the many races 
 of men, their starts, their fortune, their mutual alienation, 
 their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, 
 forms of worship, their enterprises, their aimless courses, 
 their random achievements and acquirements, and then 
 the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens 
 so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind 
 evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, 
 the progress of things as if from unreasoning elements, 
 not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of 
 man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain 
 hung over his future, the disappointments of life, the 
 defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental 
 anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the prevailing 
 idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, 
 that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly 
 described in the Apostle's words, ' Having no hope, and 
 without God in the world,' all this is a vision to dizzy 
 and appal, and inflicts on the mind the sense of a profound 
 mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution." — 
 Apologia, pp. 376-378. 
 
 This is a passage taken from the Apologia, but 
 long before Dr. Newman became a Koman Catholic, 
 even at a time when he held confidently that the 
 Eoman Catholic Church was anti-Christian, he had 
 pressed home the same deep conviction that the 
 spectacle of the moral universe and of human history 
 is so utterly abhorrent to the heart taught from 
 within, that it can only be explained at all on the 
 principle that the human race has been implicated in 
 some "great aboriginal calamity" which can only be 
 obviated by some equally great supernatural inter- 
 ference in human affairs, specially adapted to remedy
 
 76 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 that calamity. Even before he threw himself into 
 the Tractarian movement, even before he went abroad 
 with Mr. Hurrell Froude in 1832 on that memorable 
 journey in which, whether quarantined in lazarettos, 
 or conversing with Roman ecclesiastics, or lying sick 
 almost to death in Sicily, or tossing in an orange 
 boat on the Mediterranean, he was so haunted by the 
 belief that he had a " work to do in England," that 
 he shrank from every kind of contact with influences 
 which seemed to him incongruous with that work, — 
 he had urged on Oxford students and Oxford audiences 
 of every kind, with passionate earnestness, his warnings 
 against trusting what Matthew Arnold delights to 
 call the Zeitgeist, the " modern spirit," the spirit of 
 the age. 
 
 " Our manners are courteous [he says], we avoid giving 
 pain or offence ; our words become correct ; our relative 
 duties are carefully performed ; our sense of propriety 
 shows itself even in our domestic arrangements, in the 
 embellishment of our houses, in our amusements, and so 
 also in our religious profession. Vice now becomes un- 
 seemly and hideous to the imagination, or, as it is some- 
 times familiarly said, 'out of taste.' Thus elegance is 
 gradually made the test and standard of virtue, which is 
 no longer thought to possess an intrinsic claim on our 
 hearts, or to exist further than it leads to the quiet and 
 comfort of others. Conscience is no longer recognised as 
 an independenl arbiter of actions, its authority is explained 
 away ; partly it is superseded in the minds of men by 
 the so-called moral sense which is regarded merely as the 
 love of the beautiful ; partly by the rule of expediency 
 which is forthwith substituted for it in the details of con-
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 77 
 
 duct. Now, conscience is a stern, gloomy principle ; it 
 tells us of guilt and of prospective punishment. Accord- 
 ingly, when its terrors disappear, then disappear also in 
 the creed of the day those fearful images of divine wrath 
 with which the Scripture abounds." — Parochial Sermons, 
 vol. i. p. 311. 
 
 And then lie utters that celebrated sentence — 
 
 " I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction 
 that it would be a gain to this country were it vastly 
 more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more 
 fierce in its religion than at present it shows itself to be. 
 Not, of course, that I think the tempers of mind herein 
 implied desirable, which would be an evident absurdity, 
 but I think them infinitely more desirable and more 
 promising than a heathen obduracy, and a cold, self- 
 sufficient, self-wise tranquillity." — Parochial Sermons, p. 
 320. 
 
 In short, when Newman went abroad in 1832, 
 with his consumptive friend Hurrell Froude, his 
 thought by day and his dream by night seems to 
 have been of the quickening of a Church which 
 would fight against this Zeitgeist — against the religion 
 of the day, against the theophilanthropic ideas of the 
 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and 
 fix the minds of its children upon those eternal 
 realities, which the " modern spirit " of our own time 
 is as anxious to soften, blanch, and water down, as 
 the mediaeval spirit was to travesty by isolating and 
 exaggerating their austere and terrible warnings. 
 There was a passion at this time in all Newman said 
 and did. He told himself to learn to hate evil as the
 
 78 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 only adequate preparation for loving good. He 
 was conscious of a driving force which carried him 
 on — 
 
 " Wave reared on wave its godless head 
 "While my keen bark, by breezes sped, 
 Dash'd fiercely through the ocean bed, 
 And chafed towards its goal." 
 
 He passed through Konian Catholic countries, 
 carefully avoiding their worship ; he fell sick of 
 malaria when in Sicily, and told his servant that he 
 should not die, adding to himself, " because I have 
 not sinned against the light," a phrase which he says 
 he has never understood, but which no doubt meant 
 that he had not forfeited the right to be, what he 
 felt himself destined to be, God's instrument for 
 quickening the Church of England. When tossing 
 at sea in the straits of Bonifazio, this austerer mood 
 relented, and he felt for once that more gentle spirit 
 which has marked all the later portions of his career. 
 Almost every one now knows the poem to which 
 I allude ; I recall one verse only to show how different 
 is its keynote to that of the eager flame of zeal with 
 which during this journey he seems in general to 
 have been burnt up : — 
 
 " So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still 
 Wil] lead me on, 
 O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till 
 
 The night is gone, 
 And in the morn those angel laces smile, 
 Which I have loved long since and lost awhile."
 
 ir 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 79 
 
 But mostly during this journey he harps on theluke- 
 warmness of the age, and the indifference to eternal 
 truth which it displays. Becalmed at sea, he implores 
 patience, and confesses that he feels very sorely " the 
 languor of delay." He muses much, too, on certain 
 tendencies which he finds in his own character, ten- 
 dencies which he believes to be pure, but which he 
 knows are likely to be confounded by the world with 
 craft and pride : — 
 
 " How didst thou start, thou Holy Baptist, bid 
 To pour repentance on the sinless brow ! 
 Then all thy meekness from thy hearers hid 
 Beneath the ascetic's port and preacher's fire, 
 Flowed forth, and with a pang thou didst desire 
 He might he chief, not thou. 
 
 " And so on us at whiles it falls to claim 
 Powers that we dread, or dare some forward part ; 
 Nor must we shrink as cravens from the blame 
 Of pride, in common eyes, or purpose deep, 
 But with pure thoughts look up to God, and keep 
 Our secret in our heart." 
 
 Nay, he has a dream of St. Paul, which tells him 
 that St. Paul too was exposed to the same unjust 
 charges to which he himself was liable : — 
 
 " I dreamed that with a passionate complaint 
 I wish'd me born amid God's deeds of might, 
 And envied those who had the presence bright 
 Of gifted prophet and strong-hearted saint, 
 Whom my heart loves and fancy strives to paint. 
 I turned, when straight a stranger met my sight, 
 Come as my guest, and did awhile unite 
 His lot with mine ; and lived without restraint.
 
 80 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 Courteous lie was and grave, so meek in mien 
 It seem'd untrue, or told a purpose weak, 
 Yet in the mood he could with aptness speak, 
 Or with stern force, or show of feelings keen, 
 Marking deep craft, methought, or hidden pride ; — 
 Then came a voice, ' St. Paul is at thy side.' ' : 
 
 In this spirit Newman went back to commence the 
 Tractarian movement. "There was," he has since 
 confessed, " at that time a double aspect in my bear- 
 ing towards others. My behaviour had in it a mix- 
 ture both of fierceness and of sport, and on this 
 account, I daresay, it gave offence to many, nor can 
 I here defend it." The truth was that he really did 
 feel to the bottom of his heart that he was doing a 
 work of which he himself knew neither the scope nor 
 the goal, and that, so far as he was acquitted by his 
 own conscience, he did not much care what men said 
 of him. He believed that it was given to him to 
 open to the Church of England a new career, to 
 raise it up as a new power to witness against the sins 
 and whims and false ideals of the day, and the various 
 idolatries of the Zeitgeist. 
 
 Where did he go wrong? Of course one does not 
 like to say of a man of the highest genius, and of a 
 kind of genius specially adapted to the subject on 
 which he writes, that he is wrong, and that a man of 
 no genius, who criticises him, is right ; but still, as I 
 believe that he did go seriously wrong, and should be 
 a Koman Catholic myself if I did not, I must give my 
 explanation of the error I think I see. It seems to
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 81 
 
 me, then, that he went wrong in his primary assump- 
 tion that what he calls " the dogmatic principle " 
 involves the existence of an infallible human authority, 
 which can say, without possibility of error, 'this is 
 what God has revealed, and this again is radically in- 
 consistent with what He has revealed.' I will quote 
 his own account of his convictions on this subject 
 from the Apologia. It is a very striking passage, and 
 very instructive as to the course of this great thinker's 
 personal history : — 
 
 " Supposing, then, it to be the will of the Creator to 
 interfere in human affairs, and to make provisions for re- 
 taining in the world a knowledge of Himself, so definite 
 and distinct as to be proof against the energy of human 
 scepticism, — in such a case, I am far from saying that 
 there was no other way, but there is nothing to surprise 
 the mind, if He should think fit to introduce a power 
 into the world invested with the prerogative of infalli- 
 bility on religious matters. Such a provision would be a 
 direct, immediate, certain, and prompt means of with- 
 standing the difficulty ; it would be an instrument suited 
 to the need ; and when I find that this is the very claim 
 of the Catholic Church, not only do I feel no difficulty in 
 admitting the idea, but there is a fitness in it which re- 
 commends it to my mind. And thus I am brought to 
 speak of the Church's infallibility as a provision, adapted 
 by the mercy of the Creator, to preserve religion in the 
 world, and to restrain that freedom of thought, which of 
 course in itself is one of the greatest of natural gifts, and 
 to rescue it from its own suicidal excesses." — Apologia, 
 p. 382. 
 
 That seems to me a definite contention that the 
 reason of man is naturally so restless, so disposed to 
 
 H G
 
 82 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 devour its own offspring, as to need the bit and 
 bridle of an infallible human authority in addition to 
 the guidance of God's spirit. But is not that in a 
 sense really putting man above God, or at best put- 
 ting God's providence as revealed in human institu- 
 tions above God's spirit as revealed in conscience and 
 reason 1 ? I should have supposed that to a thinker 
 with so passionate a belief in God as the deepest of 
 all realities, the true security for the ultimate stability 
 of our reason, for the ultimate subjection of our reason 
 to the power and fascination of revelation, would 
 have been simply this, that God after all sways our 
 spirits, and draws them to Himself. But Newman 
 has so keen an insight into the morbid side of the 
 cravings of Rationalism for devouring its own off- 
 spring that he can hardly believe that we shall ever 
 rest on what God has revealed, unless that revelation 
 receives a genuinely human embodiment in an in- 
 fallible institution set upon a rock for all men to 
 recognise as stamped by Providence with one of 
 God's greatest attributes, inability to err. This is 
 saying, in other words, that when Newman passes 
 from the world within to the world without, he dis- 
 cerns far more keenly the evils, the miseries, the 
 weaknesses, the diseases, the woes, the corruptions 
 of our nature, than he does its affinity with the divine 
 life. Like a great physician, when he looks out of 
 himself, his sight is sharper for the signs of disorder 
 and internal malady than for the signs of life and 
 strength. It is, I think, profound pity for the rest-
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 83 
 
 lessness and insatiability of human reason which has 
 made him a Roman Catholic. He is always seeking 
 for some caustic which may burn away the proud 
 flesh from our hearts, for some antiseptic which shall 
 destroy the germs of canker in our intellect. He has 
 a wonderful insight into the natural history of all 
 our morbid symptoms. His hand is ever on the 
 feeble and rapid pulse of human impatience, his eye 
 is keen to discern the hectic flush on the worn face. 
 He sees in the Roman Catholic Church a great 
 laboratory of spiritual drugs which will lower fever 
 and arrest the growth of fungoid parasites, and he 
 cannot help grasping at the medicaments she offers. 
 
 Newman never shows more unique genius than in 
 mastering the morbid symptoms, both of human con- 
 science and human reason, though he is spiritually 
 greatest when, after showing us how deep is his know- 
 ledge of all the intricate maladies of human nature, 
 he shakes the trouble from him, and passes quietly 
 into the peaceful rest of perfect faith. But his attach- 
 ment to the Roman Catholic Church is, I think, in 
 great measure given to its functions as a mediciner of 
 souls, to its various appliances of penance, its ex- 
 haustive study of casuistry, and its elaborate phar- 
 macopoeia of spiritual tonics and febrifuges. 
 
 But to go back to the evil for which he maintains 
 that an infallible Church is the only remedy, namely, 
 the tendency of reason to undermine every faith for 
 which we have not the daily evidence of universal 
 experience : — he holds, truly I think, that no church,
 
 84 CARDINAL NEWMAN TI 
 
 no witness to God, can stand without a steady dog- 
 matic basis, and that, without submission to some 
 visible vicegerent of God, no dogmatic basis of religious 
 truth can ever be established. Well, I should be the 
 last to assail dogma, as Matthew Arnold, for instance, 
 has assailed it. It seems to me that even the fact of 
 writing as I do implies a dogma — the dogma that my 
 readers and I really exist. If God announces His 
 holiness and love to man, He announces implicitly 
 His own existence. If He announces the redemption 
 of man, He announces the existence of the Redeemer. 
 If we are convinced that a divine light has illumined 
 our consciences, that fact alone implies a good many 
 intellectual truths, which will more and more impress 
 themselves on us as we recognise the fact and conform 
 our lives to it. Theological dogma is nothing in the 
 world but a rationale of the relations in which God 
 places Himself towards us in the act of revealing 
 Himself. But why does revelation imply the human 
 possession of any infallible rationale of these relations 1 
 The Jews had a revelation continued during many 
 centuries, a revelation which made them undoubtedly 
 the specific medium through which divine truth was 
 revealed to the world. But they had no infallible 
 authority to which they could appeal on points in 
 dispute. And it cannot be said that there never 
 were any points in dispute. As a matter of fact, one 
 of the greater prophets has assured us. that, at one 
 time during the history of that people, "the pro- 
 phets " themselves " prophesy falsely, and the priests
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 85 
 
 bear rule by their means, and my people love to have 
 it so." How were the Jewish people to know, except 
 by trusting their impressions of character, — a charac- 
 ter educated by God Himself, — that Jeremiah was 
 divinely taught in revealing to them that other pro- 
 phets, who also claimed to be the organs of divine 
 revelation, in this case at least made that claim 
 falsely 1 Again, not only had the Jewish Church no 
 infallible exponent of the drift of the divine teaching, 
 but where is the evidence that even the primitive 
 Christian Church made any such claim ? What was 
 the apostolate of Judas Iscariot except a divine 
 warning against attributing too final an authority 
 even to those earthen vessels chosen by the Redeemer 
 Himself ? Moreover, how should an infallible author- 
 ity — even if one existed — on the dogmatic truths 
 involved in revelation imply the right understanding 
 of these truths, unless the believer be guided by the 
 spirit of God in receiving them 1 The same words 
 mean totally different things to the humble mind 
 and the arrogant mind, to the selfish mind and to 
 the self-denying. Even the infallible human author- 
 ity could inculcate only a lesson of error and illusion 
 when addressing itself to a fallible and sinful believer. 
 I cannot for the life of me see how the infallible 
 human authority for dogma could, even if it existed, 
 be of any service to rebellious, misguided, passionate 
 men, unless it could infuse the grace to understand 
 spiritually, as well as authorise the right form of 
 words to be understood. Surely revelation, once
 
 86 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 communicated, must live and exert itself, and deepen 
 for itself the spiritual channels in which it is to run, 
 just as the original moral teaching, engraved both on 
 tables of stone and on the heart, has lived and exerted 
 itself, and deepened for itself the moral channels in 
 which it is to run. Both revelations have been mis- 
 understood ; both have been perverted ; both have 
 been defied ; both have been ridiculed ; both have 
 been scorned ; yet both have exerted an ever deepen- 
 ing and widening influence, and have found out the 
 true hearts for which they were intended. 
 
 I cannot help thinking, then, that Dr. Newman's 
 belief, that the most fitting power to subdue the 
 anarchy of human passions and intellectual pride is 
 an infallible Church, is an error, and an error of that 
 most serious hind which, by throwing the Church 
 which boasts infallibility off its guard, produces an 
 abundant crop of special dangers and mistakes. So 
 far from the assumption of infallibility having actually 
 " preserved religion in the world," and " restrained 
 the freedom of thought " which is so apt to run into 
 " suicidal excesses," I cannot help thinking that that 
 assumption has done more not only to foster "suicidal 
 excesses " in the Church which makes it, but to drive 
 the churches which deny it into "suicidal excesses" 
 of another kind, than any other equally important 
 factor in the history of revelation. I do not deny, on 
 the contrary, I heartily join Dr. Newman in believing, 
 that the only attitude of mind in which we can hope 
 to profit by revelation is that of profound humility
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 87 
 
 towards an infallible authority above us ; but by 
 whom is it wielded, by man or by God 1 Where is 
 the evidence, or the vestige of evidence, that since 
 Christ's ascension it has ever been put in commission 
 in human hands at all 1 Was not one apostle rebuked 
 as Satan the moment after his confession had been 
 treated as putting him in possession of the keys 
 of the new kingdom ] Was not another avowedly 
 doubtful whether in certain instances he spoke by 
 inspiration or only out of his own fallible judgment ? 
 That an infallible authority should impart wisdom to 
 fallible men I can understand ; that it should make 
 over its own infallibility on any terms to fallible men 
 I cannot understand. And it seems to me that the 
 result of the assumption in all countries which have 
 accepted the infallible Church has been to secure 
 indeed the intellectual ascendency of dogma, but 
 often at the cost of destroying the moral ascendency 
 of the truths of which dogma is but the skeleton. 
 Roman Catholics who, like Dr. Newman, nourish 
 themselves on a genuinely spiritual view of their 
 own theology, seem to me to be among the salt of 
 the earth. But what seems to be far commoner 
 amongst Roman Catholic nations than even amongst 
 Protestant nations is the habit of assenting with the 
 mind to what the heart ignores ; and is not this the 
 direct consequence of attaching so much importance 
 to the infallibility of a Church of which the earthly 
 corner-stone may be such a Judas as Alexander 
 Borgia 1 ? In the remarkable lecture — which as a
 
 88 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 youth I had the privilege of hearing — on " The 
 Political State of Catholic Countries no Prejudice to 
 the Sanctity of the Church," I remember the full 
 sympathy and even enthusiasm with which I heard 
 Dr. Newman say what I trust a great many Pro- 
 testants would say with him, that the Church 
 
 "Aims not at making a show, but at doing a work. 
 She regards this world and all that is in it as a mere 
 shade, as dust and ashes, compared with the value of one 
 single soul. She holds that unless she can in her own 
 way do good to souls, it is no use her doing anything ; 
 she holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop 
 from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for the many mil- 
 lions upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as 
 far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will 
 not say should be lost, but should commit one single* venial 
 sin, should tell one wilful untruth, though it harmed no 
 one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse. She con- 
 siders the action of this world and the action of the soul 
 simply incommensurate, viewed in their respective spheres ; 
 she would rather save the soul of one single wild bandit 
 of Calabria, or winning beggar of Palermo, than draw a 
 hundred lines of railroad through the length of Italy, 
 or carry out a sanitary reform in its fullest details 
 in every city of Sicily, except so far as these great 
 national works tended to some spiritual good beyond 
 them." 
 
 But, then, does the Church habitually mean by 
 saving the soul what I am sure Dr. Newman means 1 
 Does it mean putting an abiding purity into the 
 bandit or the beggar — making him holy with the 
 holiness of Christ 1 And if the Church does mean 
 this, does her presumed infallibility help to accomplish
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 89 
 
 it ? In the same remarkable lecture Dr. Newman 
 drew a picture which I remember to have supposed 
 at the time that he took from Ireland. 
 
 " Take a mere beggar-woman, lazy, ragged, filthy, and 
 not over scrupulous of truth (I do not say she has 
 arrived at perfection) " — [here he was so overcome by his 
 own deep sense of humour that he laughed behind his 
 MS., then crossed himself, and I think said a Pater 
 Noster to himself before resuming] — " but if she is chaste 
 and sober and cheerful, and goes to her religious duties, 
 and I am supposing not at all an impossible case, she 
 will, in the eyes of the Church, have a prospect of 
 heaven, cpute closed and refused to the State's pattern 
 man, the just, the upright, the generous, the honour- 
 able, the conscientious, if he be all this not from a super- 
 natural power — (I no not determine whether this is likely 
 to be the fact, but I am contrasting views and principles) 
 — not from a supernatural power, but from mere natural 
 virtue." 
 
 I should have supposed it impossible to be at heart 
 and in motive really just and upright, and absolutely 
 a contradiction in terms to he really " conscientious," 
 from any mere natural quality. Indeed, " virtue " 
 does not seem to me, in its highest meaning, a natural 
 quality at all, but distinctly a supernatural one, 
 though I would not for a moment deny it even to an 
 atheist who should follow, after a severe struggle, 
 the guidance of divine light, while supposing himself 
 to be following only his own best instincts. But my 
 main criticism on that passage is that even in the 
 country of which I suppose Dr. Newman to have 
 been thinking when he depicted the chaste, sober
 
 90 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 and religious, though lazy, ragged, and untruthful 
 beggar-woman, the Catholic Church has failed to 
 bring home to the great mass of the population the 
 supernatural character of those elementary duties on 
 which Dr. Newman himself insists so justly. Ireland 
 was for a long time the favourite Catholic example 
 of a spiritual nation, not well trained in those secular 
 virtues which are at the roots of prosperity. Is 
 Ireland that favourite example still 1 Does not that 
 utter want of moral and spiritual courage, in conse- 
 quence of which the peasantry, far and wide, have 
 submitted to the decrees of cruel and unscrupulous 
 Ribbonmen, and have sheltered murderers from their 
 well-earned punishment, attest that the infallible 
 Church has not succeeded in bringing home even the 
 most elementary of spiritual duties to the hearts and 
 consciences of the people 1 I cannot help believing 
 that the assumption of infallibility as to dogma has 
 tended to divert the attention of the Church of 
 Rome most seriously and unduly from the great 
 danger of all churches — namely, the willingness to 
 accept true words about God in the place of real 
 spiritual acts founded on the love of His righteousness. 
 I cannot conclude this study of Dr. Newman with- 
 out a few words on one of the most momentous of his 
 books, the great book on Development of Christian 
 Doctrine, which was destined to anticipate so curiously, 
 in the ecclesiastical field, much that Mr. Darwin 
 had to tell us in the field of biology. It is a great 
 book, and one from which Protestants might learn
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 91 
 
 much — much that they might use against Dr. New- 
 man, much also that they might accept from him and 
 apply for their own benefit. Now, it does not, as it 
 seems to me, admit of doubt that we ought to examine 
 most carefully, as evidence of what a divine revelation 
 was, if we once believed that such a revelation has 
 been given, what impression it actually produced on 
 the generation which received it and on its immediate 
 successors. We cannot and ought not to treat what 
 we believe to come from above as we should what 
 comes from our own mixed nature. We must admit 
 fully the possibility that Eevelation may contain 
 elements which we cannot easily apprehend, elements 
 which it takes even the faithful observance of many 
 generations to apprehend and justify, elements which 
 assert their full influence over believers very gradually, 
 but then turn out to be of unspeakable importance. 
 It has therefore always seemed to me that Protestants 
 are far too anxious to depreciate the immense im- 
 portance of the appeal to the actual Christianity of 
 the Apostolic fathers and the Church of the second 
 century. To know fully what Christianity was, we 
 must know not only what the apostles have left to 
 us in a documentary form as the drift of their teaching, 
 but what was the immediate effect of what they 
 taught, what the early Church believed that it had 
 really received from them, what the type of Christian- 
 ity was after it had been impressed on a generation 
 born in communion with the Church. No book has 
 done more to show the importance of this historic
 
 92 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 treatment than Dr. Newman's Essay on Develop- 
 ment; none, I think, to lay down truer rules for 
 genuine development ; none, perhaps, to illustrate 
 those rules less fortunately or with more preconceived 
 bias. But who can fail to be grateful to the man 
 who has insisted that a genuine " development " of 
 revealed truth must preserve intact the original type, 
 must keep continuously to the principles of the 
 primitive doctrinal teaching, must show the power 
 adequately to assimilate nutriment foreign yet sub- 
 servient to it and to throw off alien material, must 
 be able to show early indications that such a develop- 
 ment would be likely, must be logically consistent 
 with all that was originally taught, must be able to 
 protect itself by "preservative additions" which 
 secure the type instead of altering it, and, finally, 
 must show tenacity of life 1 How far Dr. Newman's 
 instances of those tests of development make good 
 his own position is a very different question indeed 
 — is, indeed, a question like that whether the House 
 of Commons can be considered a " preservative 
 addition " to the monarchy, or rather an addition 
 which, while it has preserved it for centuries, is 
 likely some day to supersede it. But what I hold 
 to be the enormous value of Dr. Newman's essay is 
 that it puts us on the way to a true investigation of 
 the claims of our various churches to represent the 
 primitive revelation of Christ. Do we or do we not 
 preserve the original type 1 Do we or do we not 
 show a continuity of principle with that primitive
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 93 
 
 Christianity 1 Do we show any power of assimilating 
 life from without, and imposing the structural law of 
 Christian hearts upon that life from without 1 Can 
 we show the power to reject as alien to us what is 
 poisonous to Christian habits of life 1 Can we show 
 early anticipations of our modern religious develop- 
 ments 1 Can we prove our logical continuity with 
 the old teaching ? Are our " preservative additions " 
 monstrous innovations tending to the neglect of the 
 deepest truths, or real provisions for the security of 
 the Christian life 1 And is there true buoyancy and 
 vital tenacity in our developments, or an ever-growing 
 languor of life 1 All these are questions which are 
 no less relevant, and far more important, in regard 
 to developments of revelation, than they are in 
 biology in determining whether certain changes of 
 structure cause an improvement or a marked degenera- 
 tion of the stock which exhibits them. One of the 
 great evidences of Cardinal Newman's genius is the 
 proof that his mind was running on the tests of 
 genuine developments and corruptions in doctrine, 
 long years before the mind of the day had been 
 awakened by Darwin and his contemporaries to the 
 true touchstone of development or degeneration in 
 biological forms. 
 
 Before I conclude, I will make some attempt to 
 answer the question what the drift of Cardinal 
 Newman's best teaching really is. 
 
 In the first place, though a great idealist — one of 
 the greatest of idealists in this sense, that for him all
 
 94 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 material things are symbols, and all spiritual things 
 the most vivid of realities — no one has pressed home 
 upon us more powerfully, I might almost say more 
 painfully, the difference between an unreal state of 
 mind and a real state of mind, between unreal words 
 and real words. Such a sermon as that on "The 
 Eeligious Use of Excited Feelings " (Parochial Ser- 
 mons, vol. i. sermon ix.), has in it all that is sound 
 in the practice of religious revivals, as well as the 
 antidote for all that is unsound. It is a death-blow 
 to that unreality of mind which revels in agonies of 
 remorse and tumults of devotion, and which does not 
 reflect that, as Dr. Newman teaches, "emotion and 
 passion are in our power indeed to repress, but not to 
 < xcite; that there is a limit to the tumults and swellings 
 of the heart, foster them as we will, and when that 
 time comes the poor misused soul is left exhausted 
 and resourceless." No utilitarian teacher has pressed 
 home so sternly as Newman the need of deeds to give 
 any real significance to words, or even to our feel- 
 ings ; no one has made us recognise as he has done 
 that right words and even right feelings are but the 
 shadows of things, and that it is only by the help of 
 actions that wo can ever learn to fathom the depth of 
 our own words, or to turn to good account our other- 
 wise idle emotions. " Let not your words run on," he 
 tells us ; " force every one of them into action as it 
 goes" (Ibid. vol. i. p. 70). "In dreams we some- 
 times move our arms to see if we are awake or not, 
 ami so we are awakened. This is the way to
 
 II 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 95 
 
 keep your heart awake also. Try yourself daily in 
 little deeds, to prove that your faith is more than a 
 deceit" {Parochial Sermons, vol. i. p. 7 1 ). How scathing 
 is his language towards men who indulge in the inculca- 
 tion of truths which they do not embody in their own 
 lives. He tells us his opinion of mere men of litera- 
 ture in no ambiguous language : " A man of literature 
 is considered to preserve his dignity by doing nothing, 
 and when he proceeds forward into action he is thought 
 to lose his position, as if he was degrading his calling 
 by enthusiasm and becoming a politician or a partisan. 
 Hence mere literary men are able to say strong things 
 against the opinions of their age, whether religious or 
 political, without offence, because no one thinks they 
 mean anything by them. They are not expected to 
 go forward to act upon them, and mere words hurt 
 no one " (Ibid. vol. v. p. 42). And yet he says, " To 
 make professions is to play with edged tools unless 
 we attend to what we are saying. Words have a 
 meaning whether we mean that meaning or not ; and 
 they are imputed to us in their real meaning when 
 our not meaning it is our own fault" {Ibid. vol. 
 v. p. 33). No one has done so much as Newman to 
 teach us at once how little and how much words may 
 mean, how to one man they are the mere tools by which 
 to move others, for their own selfish advantage, while 
 to another they are the buoys floating on the sur- 
 face by which the sunken reefs and quicksands are 
 mapped out, and the whole configuration of the 
 invisible depths of human nature, as it has been
 
 96 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 ascertained by innumerable soundings, is brought to 
 light. 
 
 Again, no one has laid to heart like Newman, and 
 made us lay to heart also, the comparatively small 
 influence of mere logic, and the vast influence of 
 unconscious assumptions — intellectual, moral, and 
 spiritual — over the whole history of our inward lives. 
 It is not too much to say that Newman has been the 
 first to illustrate the almost automatic influence exerted 
 by prepossessions and assumptions, once fairly im- 
 planted in the heart and mind, in leavening the 
 whole nature ; that he may be said to have taught us 
 that all minds, however deeply steeped in a world of 
 false teaching, are given some chance of struggling 
 and finding their way to something better, and that 
 our spiritual life depends on our eagerly using that 
 chance, and voluntarily submitting ourselves ever 
 more and more, as time goes on, both consciously and 
 unconsciously, to the higher influence which has 
 thus touched our lives. Newman anticipated not 
 only the modern doctrine of evolution in its relation 
 to religion, but also the modern doctrine of the 
 automatic and unconscious influence of ideal ferments 
 over the character of our thought, and the effect pro- 
 duced by the latent heat which in critical moments they 
 will give out on the formation of our convictions. 
 
 »' 
 
 "There is good reason," he told the University of 
 Oxford forty-two years ago, "for saying that the impres- 
 sion made upon the mind need not even be recognised by 
 the parties possessing it. It is no proof that persons are
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 97 
 
 not possessed, because they are not conscious, of an idea. 
 Nothing is of more frequent occurrence, whether in things 
 sensible or intellectual, than the existence of such unper- 
 ceived impressions. What do we mean when we say that 
 certain persons do not know themselves, but that they 
 are ruled by views, feelings, prejudices, objects, which 
 they do not recognise 1 How common is it to be exhilar- 
 ated or depressed, we do not recollect why, though we 
 are aware that something has been told us, or has hap- 
 pened, good or bad, which accounts for our feeling, could 
 we but recall it ! What is memory itself but a vast 
 magazine of such dormant, but present and excitable 
 ideas 1 Or consider when persons would trace the history 
 of their own opinions in past years, how baffled they are 
 in the attempt to fix the date of this or that conviction, 
 their system of thought having been all the while in con- 
 tinual, gradual, tranquil expansion ; so that it were as 
 easy to follow the growth of the fruit of the earth, ' first 
 the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the 
 ear,' as to chronicle changes which involved no abrupt 
 revolution, or reaction, or fickleness of mind, but have 
 been the birth of an idea, the development in explicit 
 form, of what was already latent within it. Moreover, it 
 is a question whether that strange and painful feeling of 
 unreality which religious men experience from time to 
 time, when nothing seems true, or good, or right, or profit- 
 able, when faith seems a name, and duty a mockery, and 
 all endeavours to do right absurd and hopeless, and all 
 things forlorn and dreary, as if religion was wiped out of 
 the world, may not be the direct effect of the temporary 
 obscuration of some master -vision which unconsciously 
 supplies the mind with spiritual life and peace." — 
 University Sermons, pp. 321-322. 
 
 No one, then, can doubt that Cardinal Newman 
 has in relation to religion forestalled the leading 
 
 H H
 
 98 CARDINAL NEWMAN II 
 
 scientific ideas of his younger contemporaries — the 
 conception of evolution, and the conception of latent, 
 or as some people call it, unconscious thought — in 
 moulding human life ; that his unique position 
 consists in this, that while most of those for whom 
 these ideas have had a great fascination have used 
 them rather for the purpose of superseding Revelation, 
 and explaining or trying to explain how we might 
 have attained all the advantages of faith without 
 faith, Newman has steadily used these scientific ideas 
 in subordination to that master-key of all our being 
 which he has found in Revelation. And yet, instead 
 of being diverted from the study of natural laws 
 by his profound devotion to things spiritual, that 
 devotion seems to have quickened tenfold his keen- 
 ness of eye for the natural history of man's mind, 
 which he always rightly regards as the very basis 
 upon which all supernatural teaching is necessarily 
 founded and superinduced. 
 
 How shall I gather up in one expression the great 
 Cardinal's characteristics % Shelley, with that curious 
 want of discrimination for spiritual things which he 
 combined so strangely with a delight in what is 
 unearthly, called Byron, in his Adonais, "the 
 Pilgrim of Eternity." Of course it was Childe 
 Earoltfs Pilgrimage which suggested to him this 
 most inappropriate epithet, for never was there a fine 
 thought and expression more cruelly misapplied than 
 when this term was applied to Byron, who, as Matthew 
 Arnold has .so grandly said, bore
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 99 
 
 " With haughty scorn that mocked the smart 
 From Europe to the iEtolian shore 
 The pageant of his bleeding heart." 
 
 All that was most delirious and most transient in what 
 Shakespeare calls "life's fitful fever" Byron experi- 
 enced and confided to the world, while of eternity 
 in time he never seems to have had a dream. Bat 
 for eighty-six years Newman has lived amongst us 
 as though he had no continuing city here, and 
 comparatively very early in life he became aware 
 that this was his destiny. In one very beautiful 
 sonnet he speaks of his youthful hopes of " Isaac's 
 pure blessing and a verdant home," but tells us that 
 he has been led on step by step till he was found "a 
 pilgrim pale with Paul's sad girdle bound." And no 
 one has made us feel as he has done the detachment 
 of the pilgrim from all earth's closest ties, at the very 
 time when he enters so vividly into every change that 
 affects the moral and religious prospects not only of 
 his own Church but of our whole nation. The vivid 
 pulse of time is to him the faint symbol of eternal 
 interests behind and beyond time. In his wonderful 
 poem on death, which he calls "The Dream of 
 Gerontius," he makes the angel say to the passing soul, 
 " It is the very energy of thought that keeps thee 
 from thy God." And while it was energy of thought, 
 no doubt, which kept Newman — I wish it had kept 
 him permanently — from the Church in which he 
 found refuge — nay, which kept him for two years 
 from that Church even after he had taken final leave
 
 100 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 II 
 
 of his Anglican friends, it is energy of thought, too, 
 which has kept his life from being merged in the 
 great Church he has joined, and which has indeed 
 made him almost as much of a pilgrim since he joined 
 it as he was for the ten previous years when " through 
 words and things " he went " sounding on his dim 
 and perilous way." He has ever been a pilgrim, and 
 a " pilgrim of eternity," if a pilgrim of eternity means 
 a pilgrim who is severed by his love for eternal 
 things from that whirl and eddy of temporary 
 interests in which so many of us turn giddy and lose 
 our heads. May I not indeed sum up Newman in 
 the noble words in which his friend Keble describes 
 the seer and the watchman who gaze through a 
 twilight " neither clear nor dark," in their vigil for the 
 signs of God's coming 1 
 
 "That is the heart lor thoughtful seer, 
 Watching, in trance, nor dark nor clear, 
 Tli' appalling future as it nearer draws : 
 
 His spirit ealm'd the storm to meet, 
 
 Feeling the rock beneath his feet, 
 And tracing through the cloud th' eternal cause. 
 
 "That is the heart for watchman true, 
 Waiting to see what God will do, 
 As o'er the Church the gath'ring twilight falls : 
 No more he strains his wistful eye 
 [f chance the golden hours be nigh, 
 By youthful hope seen beaming round her walls. 
 
 "Porc'd from his shadowy paradise, 
 His thoughts to Heaven the steadier rise : 
 There seek his answer when the world reproves :
 
 II CARDINAL NEWMAN 101 
 
 Contented in his darkling round 
 If only he be faithful found 
 When from the East th' eternal morning moves." 
 
 And yet even this would give too strong an impres- 
 sion of the mere hermit and recluse. Newman is 
 neither. The tenderness of his heart is at least as 
 unique as the detachment of his soul from earthly 
 interests. And I cannot express this better than by 
 concluding with the exquisitely beautiful words in 
 which, two years before he finally left it, Newman 
 took his farewell of the Church of England : — 
 
 " kind and affectionate hearts, loving friends, 
 should you know any one whose lot it has been, by 
 writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to help you 
 ... if he has ever told you what you knew about your- 
 selves or what you did not know, has read to you your 
 wants or feelings and comforted you by the very reading ; 
 has made you feel that there was a higher life than this 
 daily one and a brighter world than that you see ; or en- 
 couraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the in- 
 quiring, or soothed the perplexed ; if what he has said or 
 done has ever made you take interest in him and feel well 
 inclined towards him, remember such a one in time to 
 come though you hear him not, and pray for him that in 
 all things he may know God's will, and at all times he 
 may be ready to fulfil it."
 
 II AND III 
 
 THE TWO GREAT OXFORD THINKERS 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN AND MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 III 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 The difference between the intellectual and moral 
 atmospheres which, seem to have been breathed by 
 Newman and Arnold is so astonishing that one can 
 hardly realise that, for sixty-four years at least, they 
 have been, what they still are, contemporaries. 
 Bunyan, whose Pilgrim's Progress was published in 
 1678, says of his dream : "I espied a little before me 
 a cave, where two giants, Pope and Pagan, dwelt in 
 old time, by whose power and tyranny the men 
 whose bones, blood, ashes, etc., lay there, were 
 cruelly put to death. But by this place Christian 
 went without much danger, whereat I somewhat 
 wondered ; but I have learned since that Pagan has 
 been dead many a day ; and as for the other, though 
 he be yet alive, he is, by reason of age, and also of 
 the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his 
 younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, 
 that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's 
 mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting 
 his nails because he cannot come at them." That 
 appeared 208 years ago ; and yet I have just been
 
 106 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 III 
 
 descanting on one great man who has given in his 
 hearty adhesion to one of these giants after years 
 of meditative hesitation, while the second has been 
 made captive — I will not say by the other giant risen 
 from the grave, for I heartily admit that much of Mr. 
 Arnold's spirit is distinctively Christian, but at least 
 by a successor who has in him more, I think, of 
 Pagan than of Bunyan's Christian lore. What a 
 curious light is this on Mr. Arnold's doctrine of 
 the Zeitgeist, the " Time-spirit," which he so much 
 admires. In lecturing in Edinburgh on Butler, he 
 said of the Analogy : " The great work on which 
 such immense praise has been lavished is, for all real 
 intents and purposes now, a failure ; it does not 
 serve. It seemed once to have a spell and a power ; 
 but the Zeitgeist breathes upon it, and we rub our 
 eyes, and it has the spell and the power no longer." 
 And in another place he has said : " The Spirit of 
 Time is a personage for whose operations I have the 
 greatest respect ; whatever he does is in my opinion 
 of the greatest effect." Well, is it so very great 
 after all 1 The Zeitgeist breathed upon Bunyan and 
 made him believe that Paganism was dead for ever, 
 and that the Papacy was in its dotage. It breathes 
 upon us in the nineteenth century, and while some 
 of its children rub their eyes, and find that Giant 
 Pope is the true sponsor for revelation after all, 
 others rub their eyes, and find that Giant Pagan is 
 still in his youth; that there is indeed no revelation, 
 and that Christianity, so far as it is true at all, is a
 
 Ill MATTHEW AENOLD 107 
 
 truth of human nature, not of theology. To ray 
 mind the Zeitgeist is a will-o'- the -wisp, who mis- 
 leads us at least as much as he enlightens. In the 
 scene on the Brocken in Goethe's Faust, the will-o'- 
 the-wisp, when ordered by Mephistopheles — who 
 also, we may remember, has the greatest admiration 
 for the Zeitgeist — to conduct them to the summit, 
 replies — 
 
 " So deep my awe, I trust I may succeed 
 My fickle nature to repress indeed ; 
 But zigzag is my usual course, you know." 
 
 And that, I think, might very justly be said of Mr. 
 Arnold's Time-spirit. Its usual course is zigzag. It 
 breathes on us, and we can no longer see a truth 
 which was clear yesterday. It breathes again, and 
 like invisible ink held to the fire, the truth comes out 
 again in all its brightness. However, the drift of all 
 this is, that Mr. Arnold, while he sees much which 
 Cardinal Newman has neglected, has certainly ne- 
 glected more which Cardinal Newman sees, so that they 
 seem to live in worlds as different as their countenances. 
 On the one countenance are scored the indelible signs 
 of what a great Jewish prophet calls " the Lord's 
 controversy " ; on the other, whose high benignant 
 brow rises smooth and exulting above a face of serene 
 confidence, there sits the exhilaration which speaks 
 of difficulties surmounted and a world that is either 
 fast coming, or, in the thinker's opinion, must soon 
 come, over to his side. Mr. Arnold is a master of
 
 108 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 III 
 
 the grand style. He has the port of a great teacher. 
 He derives from his father, the reformer of Rugby, 
 that energy of purpose which makes itself felt in a 
 certain authority of tone. We should never dream 
 of applying to him Wordsworth's fine lines — 
 
 " The intellectual power through words and things 
 Goes sounding on its dim and perilous way." 
 
 Rather "would his churches — for in some sense Mr. 
 Arnold may be said to have churches of his own — 
 quote the famous saying — 
 
 " Nil desperandum Teucro duce, et auspice Teucro." 
 
 He has succeeded in almost becoming himself what 
 he has delineated in Goethe — 
 
 "For he pursued a lonely road, 
 His eyes on Nature's plan ; 
 Neither made man too much a God, 
 Nor God too much a man." 
 
 Certainly Mr. Arnold has not fallen into the latter 
 error, whether into the former or not. He seems to 
 have no doubts or difficulties in steering his course. 
 He can eviscerate the Bible, and restore its meaning 
 with the supernatural personality excluded. He has 
 shown us how to "evolve" the Decalogue from the 
 two primitive instincts of human nature. He has 
 reconciled Isaiah with the "Time-spirit," and taught 
 even sceptics to read him with exceptional delight. He 
 has shown the Puritans what they might gain from the 
 children of Athens, and the Athenian spirit, wherever
 
 in MATTHEW ARNOLD 109 
 
 it still exists, what it should learn from the Puritans. 
 Take up the volume of his Prose Passages — and I know 
 no book fuller of fascinating reading — and we shall 
 find in it the rebukes which cultivated Germany 
 administers to English Philistines, the rebukes which 
 Conservative good taste addresses to rash Reformers, 
 and the rebukes which brooding self-knowledge de- 
 livers to superficial politicians. We may learn there 
 how Ireland would have been dealt with by statesmen 
 who dive beneath the surface ; and even how helpless 
 and impotent is popular foreign policy in the hands of 
 a minister guided by middle-class opinion. And when 
 we have learned from his prose how keen and shrewd 
 he is as an observer of the phenomena of his day, 
 we may turn to his poetry, and lose ourselves in 
 wonder at the truth and delicacy of his vision, the 
 purity of his sympathies, the mellow melancholy of 
 his regret, and the irrepressible elation which under- 
 lies even that regret itself. I think him so very great 
 a poet that I will keep what I have to say on his 
 poetry to the last ; and will begin by referring to 
 his more direct teaching, and especially to that teach- 
 ing which implicitly accepts from science the exhorta- 
 tion to believe nothing which does not admit of 
 complete verification, and which is intended to find 
 for our age a truly scientific substitute for the theology 
 of which the breath of the Zeitgeist has robbed us. 
 
 We must remember, then, that though Mr. Arnold 
 proposes to demonstrate for us the truthfulness and 
 power of the Bible, he commences by giving up
 
 110 MATTHEW ARNOLD III 
 
 absolutely the assumption that there is any Divine 
 Being who thinks and loves, revealed in the Bible — a 
 proposition for which he does not consider that there 
 is even "a low degree of probability." One naturally 
 asks, " Well, then, what remains that can be of any 
 use ? " Does not the Bible profess, from its opening 
 to its close, to be the revelation of a Being who thinks 
 about man and loves him, and who, because He thinks 
 about man and loves him, converses with him, mani- 
 fests to him His own nature as well as man's true 
 nature, and insists " thou shalt be holy because I am 
 holy." Mr. Arnold, however, is not at all staggered 
 by this. He holds that "Ave very properly and 
 naturally make " God a Being who thinks and loves 
 " in the language of feeling " ; but this is an utterly 
 unverifiable assumption, without even a low degree of 
 probability. Ho that why we may " properly and 
 naturally" mislead ourselves by " language of feeling " 
 so very wide of any solid ground of fact, I cannot 
 imagine. We have always reproached the idolaters, 
 as Israel represented them, with worshipping a God 
 who is nothing in the world but the work of men's 
 hands, the cunning Avorkmanship of a carver in Avood 
 or stone. But Avhy is it more proper or natural to 
 attribute, in the language of feeling, false attributes 
 to " the stream of tendency, not ourselves, AA^hich 
 makes for righteousness," than it is to attribute, in 
 the language of feeling, false attributes to the graven 
 images of an idol-founder? HoAvever, this is Mr. 
 Arnold's contention, though at other times he is
 
 Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 111 
 
 ready to admit that whenever emotion has been 
 powerfully excited by supposed knowledge, and when 
 that supposed knowledge turns out to be illusion, the 
 emotion will disappear with the disappearance of our 
 belief in the assumptions which we had formerly ac- 
 cepted. I should have thought that this would apply 
 to the Bible, and that if ever we could be convinced 
 that there is not even a low degree of probability 
 for the conviction that God is a being who thinks 
 and loves, all the emotions excited by the innumerable 
 passages in which He is revealed as such a being 
 would die away and be extinguished. But this is not 
 Mr. Arnold's view. On the contrary, he holds that, 
 
 " Starting from what may be verified about God — that He 
 is the Eternal which makes for righteousness — and read- 
 ing the Bible with this idea to govern us, we have here 
 tbe elements for a religion more solid, serious, awe-in- 
 spiring, and profound, than any which the world has yet 
 seen. True, it will not be just the same religion which 
 prevails now ; but who supposes that the religion now 
 current can go on always, or ought to go on ? Nay, and 
 even of that much-decried idea of God as the stream of 
 tendency in which all things seek to fulfil the law of their 
 heing, it may be said with confidence that it has in it the 
 elements of a religion, new indeed, but in the highest 
 degree serious, hopeful, solemn, and profound." 
 
 It has always puzzled me very much to make out 
 why Mr. Arnold should think, or say, that it is in 
 any sense " verifiable," in his acceptation of that 
 word, that the power which makes for righteous- 
 ness is "eternal." But I believe, from a passage
 
 112 MATTHEW ARNOLD ill 
 
 iii Literature and Dogma (p. 61), that he really 
 means by " eternal " nothing more than " enduring," 
 and by "enduring," enduring in the history of man ; 
 so that the verifiable proposition which he takes as 
 the foundation of a new religion is after all nothing 
 more than this, that so far as history gives evidence 
 at all, there has always been hitherto, since man 
 appeared upon the earth, a stream of tendency which 
 made for righteousness. Nevertheless, if the earth 
 came to an end, and there be, as Mr. Arnold ap- 
 parently inclines to believe, no life for man beyond 
 his life on earth, then the enduring stream of tendency 
 would endure no longer, and " the eternal " would, 
 so far as it was verifiable, sink back into a transitory 
 and extinct- phenomenon of the terrestrial past. 
 Well, then, so far as the Bible holds true at all in 
 Mr. Arnold's mind, we must substitute uniformly for 
 the God who there reveals and declares Himself and 
 llis love, a being who cannot either declare himself 
 or feel, in our sense, the love which he is said to 
 declare ; one who must be discovered by man, instead 
 of discovering himself to man, and who, when dis- 
 covered, is nothing but a more or less enduring 
 ti'iidenc) to ;i certain deeper and truer mode of life, 
 which we call righteous life. No wonder that "the 
 religion in the highest degree serious, hopeful, solemn, 
 and profound," to which Mr. Arnold hopes to convert 
 the world, does not always appear, even to himself, 
 cither hopeful or solid. For example, in one of the 
 most beautiful of his poems, " Stanzas from the
 
 in MATTHEW ARNOLD 113 
 
 Grande Chartreuse," he explains, in a very different 
 tone from that of the passage I have just quoted 
 from Literature and Dogma (and I think a much 
 more suitable and appropriate tone), how helpless 
 and crippled his religious position really is, and how 
 it came to pass that in visiting the home of one of 
 the austere monastic orders he could feel a certain 
 passion of regret without either much sympathy or 
 much hope : — 
 
 " For rigorous teachers seized my youth, 
 And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire, 
 Showed me the high, white star of Truth, 
 There bade me gaze, and there aspire. 
 Even now their whispers pierce the gloom : 
 What dost thou in this living tomb ? 
 
 " Forgive me, masters of the mind ! 
 At whose behest I long ago 
 So much unlearnt, so much resigned — 
 I come not here to be your foe ! 
 I seek these anchorites, not in ruth, 
 To curse and to deny your truth ; 
 
 " Not as their friend, or child, I speak ! 
 But as, on some far northern strand, 
 Thinking of his own gods, a Greek, 
 In pity and mournful awe, might stand 
 Before some fallen Runic stone — 
 For both were faiths, and both are gone. 
 
 " Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born, 
 With nowhere yet to rest my head, 
 Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. 
 Their faith, my tears, the world deride — 
 I come to shed them at their side." 
 
 H I
 
 114 MATTHEW ARNOLD III 
 
 In his poetry Mr. Arnold is often frank enough, 
 as he certainly is here. In his prose he will not 
 admit that the Church to which he looks as the 
 Church of the future " is powerless to be born." But 
 powerless to be born it is ; a " stream of tendency," 
 more or less enduring, which cannot even reveal itself, 
 is not a power to excite emotion of any depth at 
 all, unless it represents not only a tendency but a 
 purpose. Religion, says Mr. Arnold, is " morality 
 touched with emotion."' But surely morality cannot 
 be " touched with emotion " without reason, or at 
 least excuse, for the emotion it is to excite. And 
 yet this is what Mr. Arnold's language seems to point 
 at. In one of his American lectures he appears to 
 say that the emotions will remain even though the 
 objects which properly excite them disappear ; and 
 in another passage of the same lecture he nevertheless 
 intimates that even the very same thought may be so 
 expressed as either to excite emotion or not to excite 
 it, the difference between the two modes of expression 
 being, except in its actual effect, quite undiscernible. 
 But if Religion depends on an accident of that kind, 
 Religion is an accident itself. An intention to make 
 for Righteousness rightly excites emotion, but a 
 tendency and an intention are different. Plague, 
 pestilence, and famine, in God's hands, have often 
 made for Righteousness. But without faith in God, 
 plague, pestilence, and famine are more likely to 
 touch immorality with emotion, than to touch morality 
 with it.
 
 Ill 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 115 
 
 How, then, is Mr. Arnold to conjure up the 
 emotion which certainly does not seem to be naturally 
 radiated from this more or less enduring " stream of 
 tendency " ? He strives to excite it by disclosing to 
 us the promise of life, which is implicit in all con- 
 formity to this " stream of tendency " ; for life is the 
 word which, in Mr. Arnold's teaching, takes the place 
 of faith. He values Christ's teaching because he says 
 that it discloses the true secret of life — because it 
 disposes a new life for the world, even after faith 
 (as we understand it) is dead. This is the promise 
 Avhich he makes his favourite thinker, M. de Senan- 
 cour, better known as the author of " Obermann," 
 address to him : — 
 
 " Though more than half thy years be past, 
 And spent thy youthful prime ; 
 Though, round thy firmer manhood cast, 
 Hang weeds of our sad time 
 
 ■" Whereof thy youth felt all the spell, 
 And traversed all the shade — 
 Though late, though dimm'd, though weak, yet tell 
 Hope to a world new-made ! 
 
 " Help it to fill that deep desire, 
 The want which rack'd our brain, 
 Consumed our heart with thirst like fire, 
 Immedicable pain : 
 
 " Winch to the wilderness drove out 
 Our life, to Alpine snow, 
 And palsied all our word with doubt, 
 And all our work with woe —
 
 116 MATTHEW ARNOLD III 
 
 " What still of strength is left, employ- 
 That end to help attain : 
 One common wave of thought and joy 
 Lifting mankind again ! " 
 
 And that is the purpose to which Matthew Arnold 
 has devoted what we may call his quasi-theological 
 writings ; in other words, his Avritings produced to 
 show that we may get all the advantages of theology 
 without the theology — which we can and must do 
 without. This new teaching is that which Tennyson 
 has so tersely and finely expressed in " The Two 
 Voices " — 
 
 " 'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant ; 
 Oh life, not death, for which we pant : 
 More life, and fuller, that I want." 
 
 To the same effect Arnold quotes M. de Senancour : 
 " The aim for men is to augment the feeling of joy, 
 to make our expansive energy bear fruit, and to 
 combat in all thinking beings the principle of degrada- 
 tion and misery." And Mr. Arnold's new version 
 of Christianity promises us this life. " The all-ruling 
 effort to live " is identical, he says, with " the desire 
 for happiness," and this craving for life is, he asserts, 
 sanctioned by Christ in the saying, " I am come that 
 men might have life, and might have it more abun- 
 dantly ; and ye will not come to me that ye may 
 have life." I had always thought this a promise of 
 life given by a being in whose hands is the power to 
 bestow it. Not so Mr. Arnold. This power of
 
 in MATTHEW ARNOLD 117 
 
 attaining Jife, and attaining it in greater abundance, 
 is, lie declares, a mere natural secret which Christ 
 had discovered, and which any man may rediscover 
 for himself. It is a method of obtaining life, of 
 ol itaining " exhilaration." Indeed, exhilaration is, 
 says Mr. Arnold, one of the greatest qualities of the 
 Hebrew prophets. And this exhilaration is attainable 
 by a merely natural process — namely, the renunciation 
 by man of the superficial and temporary self, in 
 favour of the deeper and permanent self. In Litera- 
 ture and Dogma Mr. Arnold has explained the " secret 
 of Jesus," the true secret, as he holds, for riding 
 buoyantly upon 
 
 " That common wave of thought and joy, 
 Lifting mankind again." 
 
 We are there told that the essence of Christianity is 
 not the possession of supernatural life flowing from 
 the love or gift of a supernatural being, but is simply 
 the discovery and use of a certain secret of the wise 
 heart. The secret is conveyed in Christ's promise : 
 "He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that 
 hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life 
 eternal. Whosoever would come after me, let him 
 renounce himself, and take up his cross daily and 
 follow me." Christ's method, Mr. Arnold says, — 
 
 " Directed the disciple's eye inward, and set his conscious- 
 ness to work ; and the first thing his consciousness told 
 him was that he had two selves pulling him different 
 ways. Till we attend, till the method is set at work, it
 
 118 MATTHEW ARNOLD III 
 
 seems as if ' the wishes of the llesh and of the current 
 thoughts ' (Eph. ii. 3) were to be followed as a matter of 
 course ; as if an impulse to do a thing means that we 
 should do it. But when we attend we find that an im- 
 pulse to do a thing is really in itself no reason at all why 
 we should do it, because impulses proceed from two 
 sources quite different, and of quite different degrees of 
 authority. St. Paul contrasts them as the inward man 
 and the man in our members ; the mind of the flesh and 
 the spiritual mind. Jesus contrasts them as life properly 
 so named and life in this world. And the moment we 
 seriously attend to conscience, to the suggestions which 
 concern practice and conduct, we can see plainly enough 
 from which source a suggestion comes, and that the sug- 
 gestions from one source are to overrule suggestions from 
 the other." — Literature and Dogma, pp. 201-202. "The 
 breaking the sway of what is commonly called one's self, 
 ceasing our concern with it, and leaving it to perish, is 
 not, he (i.e. Jesus Christ) said, being thwarted or crossed, 
 but living. And the proof of this is that it has the 
 character of life in the highest degree — the power of 
 going right, hitting the mark, succeeding. That is, it 
 has the character of happiness, and happiness is for Israel 
 the same thing as having the Eternal with us — seeing 
 tin- salvation of God." — Literature and Dogma, p. 203. 
 
 Now, surely it is hardly justifiable for Mr. Arnold, 
 in describing the " secret of Jesus," to substitute for 
 the words of Jesus words of his own so very different 
 in tone and meaning from those in which that secret 
 was first disclosed. Where docs our Lord ever say 
 that the evidence of spiritual life is in the conscious- 
 ness it gives us of hitting the mark, of succeeding? 
 If we are to take our Lord's secret, let us take it in 
 His own language, not in Mr. Arnold's. Turn then
 
 Ill 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 119 
 
 to His own language, and what do we find 1 We find, 
 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see 
 God." Does that mean the same thing as, " Blessed 
 are the pure in heart, for they shall hit the mark, 
 they shall succeed " % Again, " Blessed are the peace- 
 makers, for they shall be called the children of God." 
 Does that mean the same as, " Blessed are the peace- 
 makers, for they shall attain true success " ] " Blessed 
 are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, 
 and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely 
 for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for 
 great is your reward in heaven." Does that promise 
 mean the same as " the more you are persecuted and 
 maligned, the greater is your reward on earth, no 
 matter whether there be any world beyond this or 
 not " % Yet that is what Mr. Arnold tries to make it 
 mean in order to reconcile his interpretation of the 
 " secret of Jesus " with the actual words of Jesus. I 
 believe that Mr. Arnold misreads even the language 
 of the conscience, when he makes it say that as we 
 advance in our development we become aware "of 
 two lives, one permanent and impersonal, the other 
 transient and bound to our contracted self ; he 
 becomes aware of two selves, one higher and real, the 
 other inferior and apparent ; and that the instinct in 
 him truly to live, the desire for happiness, is served 
 by following the first self and not the second " {Last 
 Essays on Church and Religion, pp. 116-117). What 
 we really become aware of is, that behind the loud- 
 voiced, strenuous, well-established self of our lower
 
 120 MATTHEW ARNOLD III 
 
 nature, there is growing up a faint, embryo, struggling, 
 nobler self, without strength, without permanence; 
 but that on the side of that self there pleads another 
 and higher power, offering us, if we listen to the 
 nobler voice, infinite prospects of a new world of 
 communion, a new buoyancy, a new career. It is not 
 the nobler self which is, as Mr. Arnold says, strong 
 and permanent. Nothing can be weaker or more 
 fitful. But the promise is, that if we give ourselves 
 to the weak and fitful but nobler voice, our doing so 
 will brins; us into direct communion with one who is 
 really strong, who is really permanent, who is really 
 eternal; not merely what Mr. Arnold means by 
 eternal — namely, more or less enduring. I take it that 
 the " secret of Jesus " is wholly misinterpreted if its 
 promise of a communion between the weaker but 
 nobler self and the eternal source of life and light be 
 ignored. It falls in that case from the secret of 
 Jesus to the secret of Matthew Arnold. Now the 
 " secret of Jesus " is life indeed. The secret of Matthew 
 Arnold is only better than death, because it gives its 
 sull'rage on the right side, though with the right suffrage 
 it fails to connect the promise and the earnest of joy 
 with which Jesus Christ connected it. 1 think every 
 reasonable reader of the Bible must perceive that if 
 this promise of permanent joy in an eternal love is 
 not true, the whole chain of Hebrew prophecy is 
 false and misleading, from the time of Abraham to 
 the death of St. Paul. 
 
 But then Mr. Arnold will turn upon me with his
 
 Ill 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 121 
 
 demand for verification : Can the promise be verified 1 
 " Experience proves that whatever for men is true, 
 men can verify." I should answer, certainly it is 
 verifiable in a sense even truer and higher than that in 
 which Mr. Arnold's own rationale of the moral secret, 
 which he misnames the secret of Jesus, is verifiable. 
 Even Mr. Arnold admits that his interpretation of 
 the secret of Jesus has not always been verified. 
 
 " People may say," he tells us, " they have not got this 
 sense that their instinct to live is served by loving their 
 neighbours ; they may say that they have, in other words, 
 a dull and uninformed conscience. But that does not 
 make the experience less a true thing, the real experience 
 of the race. Neither does it make the sense of this 
 experience to he, any the less, genuine conscience. And 
 it is genuine conscience, because it apprehends what does 
 really serve our instinct to live, or desire for happiness. 
 And when Shafteshury supposes the case of a man think- 
 ing vice and selfishness to be truly as much for his 
 advantage as virtue and benevolence, and concludes that 
 such a case is without remedy, the answer is ' Not at all ; 
 let such a man get conscience, get right experience.' And 
 if the man does not, the result is not that he goes on just 
 as well without it ; the result is that he is lost."- — Last 
 Essays on Church and Religion, pp. 115-116. 
 
 Well, if that is what Mr. Arnold means by verifica- 
 tion, I think that it is easy to show that there is a 
 much more perfect verification for the ordinary and 
 natural interpretation of the " secret of Jesus " than 
 for his mutilated interpretation of it. If it is verifi- 
 cation to appeal to the best experience of the best, 
 to the growing experience of those who have most
 
 122 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 Hi 
 
 intimately studied the various discipline of life, who 
 can doubt what the reply must be to the question, 
 Does experience testify to the self-sufficiency and 
 adequacy to itself of what Mr. Arnold calls the 
 permanent and higher self, or rather to its growing 
 sense of inadequacy and dependence, and to its 
 constant reference to that higher life in communion 
 with which it lives 1 I do not hesitate to say that 
 Mr. Arnold's mutilated interpretation of the " secret 
 of Jesus," which omits indeed the very talisman of 
 the whole, will receive no confirmation at all from 
 the higher experience of the race, which testifies to 
 nothing more persistently than this, that growing- 
 humility and the deepest possible sense of the 
 dependence of the nobler self on communion with a 
 righteous being external to it, is the unfailing ex- 
 perience of those in whom the nobler self is most 
 adequately developed. Mr. Arnold's rationale of 
 what he erroneously terms the "more permanent" 
 and " stronger " self — but what experience proves to 
 be indeed a very variable and very weak self, leaning 
 on constant communion with another for its strength 
 — is a mutilation of the true experience of man as 
 delivered by the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. 
 'lake the Psalmist: '"Whom have I in heaven but 
 thee, and there is none upon earth I desire in com- 
 parison with thee. My flesh and my heart faileth, 
 but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion 
 for ever.'' Take Isaiah: "Woe is me, for I am 
 undone ; because i am a man of unclean lips, and I
 
 HI MATTHEW ARNOLD 123 
 
 dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips ; for 
 mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts." 
 Take St. Paul : " I was with you in weakness, and in 
 fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and 
 my preaching was not with enticing words of man's 
 wisdom, hut in demonstration of the Spirit and of 
 power : that your faith should not stand in the 
 wisdom of men, but in the power of God." It is 
 impossible to find in the Bible anything like a 
 reference to the permanent and stronger self which 
 asserts itself in us. The testimony is always to a 
 nobler but weaker self, which leans on the sustaining 
 grace of God. Well, but says Mr. Arnold in opposing 
 Bishop Butler's view that the most we can hope for 
 in this life is to escape from misery and not to obtain 
 happiness, — in this contention Butler goes counter 
 not only to the most intimate, " the most sure, the 
 most irresistible instinct of human nature," but also 
 "to the clear voice of our religion." "Kejoice and 
 give thanks," exhorts the Old Testament. "Bejoice 
 evermore," exhorts the New. That is most true, but 
 what is the ground of these constant exhortations in 
 both Old Testament and New? Surely not the 
 strength and depth of the life, even the higher life, 
 in man, but, on the contrary, the largeness and 
 generosity of the succour granted to the righteous 
 by God. On what, for instance, is grounded the 
 injunction which Mr. Arnold cpiotes from the Old 
 Testament'? On this, that "the Lord hath done 
 marvellous things : his right hand, and his holy arm,
 
 124 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 in 
 
 hath wrought salvation for him." And again on this, 
 that " the Lord hath made known his salvation : his 
 righteousness hath he openly showed in the sight of 
 the nations." Can Mr. Arnold justify such a ground 
 for rejoicing as that, on the lips of any one who 
 disbelieves altogether in a God who " thinks and 
 loves " ? Again, what is the context of the injunction 
 taken from the New Testament 1 ? "Rejoice ever- 
 more. Pray without ceasing. In everything give 
 thanks : for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus 
 concerning you." The ground of rejoicing is a will — 
 a will which is equally made the ground of prayer ; 
 without the ground for praying there could be no 
 ground for rejoicing. Without a known will of God 
 there could be neither the one nor the other. And 
 it is the humility which recognises the strength, 
 external to its own, which is the source at once of 
 the joy and the prayer. The life which is so 
 abundantly promised throughout the Bible is indeed 
 not natural life, as Mr. Arnold explains it, but what 
 we are more accustomed to call grace — the life poured 
 in from outside. 
 
 Nor, indeed, can I understand how Mr. Arnold's 
 explanation can hold at all, without this supernatural 
 source of strength and joy. When Mr. Arnold says 
 that it is the " permanent " and " stronger " self which 
 conquers, and gives us life by the conquest, is it in- 
 appropriate to ask, How permanent, and how strong 1 
 Suppose, as has often happened, that the deeper and 
 nobler self suggests a course which involves instant
 
 Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 125 
 
 death, where is the permanence 1 Mr. Arnold will 
 hear nothing of the promise of immortality. That is 
 to him Aberglaube, over-belief, belief in excess of the 
 evidence. In some of his most exquisite lines he 
 speaks of death as the 
 
 " Stern law of every mortal lot 
 Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear, 
 And builds himself, I know not what 
 Of second life, I know not where." 
 
 So that he guarantees us assuredly no permanence for 
 the nobler self. And then as to strength : Is the nobler 
 self strong enough to endure the hard conditions 
 which are often imposed on us by our best acts — the 
 slander and persecution to which we expose ourselves, 
 the misery which we bring on ourselves ? The answer 
 of the Bible is plain enough : No, it is not ; but you 
 may rely on the grace promised to the weakest, if 
 you comply with the admonitions of that grace. Mr. 
 Arnold can make no such reply. Unless the nobler 
 self is intrinsically also the stronger self, in his opinion 
 you are lost. It seems to me, then, that the in- 
 junction to " rejoice and give thanks," the injunction 
 to "rejoice evermore," cannot be justified except in 
 connection with a trust in One who can give us real 
 succour from without, under the prospect of certain 
 death and the still more certain collapse of human 
 powers in the presence of great trials and temptations. 
 In a word, the faith taught by revelation is not, as 
 Mr. Arnold himself admits, Mr. Arnold's faith. The 
 former is intended to awaken and discipline a group
 
 12G MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 III 
 
 of genuine affections, using the word in the same sense 
 — though in the same sense raised to a higher plane 
 of life — as we use it of the human affections. Read 
 the Psalms, and you will find in them the germs of 
 all the affections generated in His disciples by Christ's 
 own teaching — the shame, the grief, the remorse, the 
 desolation, the hope, the awe, the love in its highest 
 sense, which human beings feel in the presence of a 
 human nature, holier, deeper, richer, stronger, nobler 
 than their own, when they have sinned against it and 
 are conscious of its displeasure, its retributive justice, 
 its joy in human repentance, and its forgiveness. 
 The whole drift of revelation is to excite these affec- 
 tions, to make us feel the divine passion which our 
 human passions elicit, to reach the deepest fountain 
 of our tears, and to fill us with that joy which, how- 
 ever deep, is all humility and all gratitude, because 
 its source is the love of another, and not the strength 
 or buoyancy of our own life. Well, this is not, and 
 could not be, Mr. Arnold's religion. In his expurgated 
 I'.iUe, the affections in this sense have to be omitted. 
 He tells us quite plainly that the facts — or, as he calls 
 them, " the supposed facts " — by which the religious 
 affections have been fostered in us are illusions, that 
 our religion is nothing in the world but the culture 
 of that ideal life which man has happily a tendency 
 to develop. These are his words : 
 
 "The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, 
 where it i-< worthy of it- big! destinies, our race, as time 
 '^ii's mi, will I i 1 1 < 1 an ever surer and surer stay. There is
 
 Ill 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 127 
 
 not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma 
 which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tra- 
 dition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion 
 has materialised itself in the fact — in the supposed fact ; 
 it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is 
 failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything ; the rest 
 is a world of illusion — of divine illusion. Poetry attaches 
 its emotion to the idea ; the idea is the fact." 
 
 j 
 
 Well, if that be so, the emotion which Mr. Arnold 
 insists on, in order to transform morality into religion, 
 becomes a very mild and eesthetic kind of emotion 
 indeed, — not one which can penetrate the sinner's 
 heart with anguish, not one which can irradiate the 
 penitent's heart with gratitude. Imagine the changes 
 which you must make in the language of the Psalmist 
 to empty it of what Mr. Arnold calls belief in " the 
 supposed fact," and to conform the emotions to that 
 which is attached to " the idea " alone : — 
 
 " Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine 
 iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, God ; and 
 renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from 
 thy presence ; and take not thy Holy Spirit from me. 
 Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation ; and uphold me 
 with thy free Spirit. ... Lord, ojien thou my lips ; 
 and my mouth shall show forth thy praise. For thou 
 desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it ; thou delightest 
 not in burnt-offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken 
 spirit : a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt 
 not despise." 
 
 Take the divine illusion, as Mr. Arnold calls it, out of 
 this, and how much of " the emotion " requisite for 
 religion would remain 1 Has he not himself told us ?—
 
 128 MATTHEW ARNOLD in 
 
 " That gracious Child, that thorn-crown'd Man ! 
 — He lived while we believed. 
 
 " While we believed, on earth he went, 
 And open stood his grave. 
 Men called from chamber, church, and tent ; 
 And Christ was by to save. 
 
 " Now he is dead ! Far hence he lies 
 In the lorn Syrian town ; 
 And on his grave, with shining eyes 
 The Syrian stars look down. 
 
 " In vain men still, with hoping new, 
 Regard his death-place dumb, 
 And say the stone is not yet to, 
 And wait for words to come. 
 
 " Ah, o'er that silent sacred land, 
 Of sun, and arid stone, 
 And crumbling wall, and sultry sand, 
 Sounds now one word alone ! 
 
 " From David's lips that word did roll, 
 5 Tis true and living yet : 
 No man can save his brother's soul, 
 Nor pay his brother's debt. 
 
 "Alone, self-pois'd, henceforward man 
 Must labour ! — must resign 
 His all too human creeds, and scan 
 Simply the way divine." 
 
 Well, then, where is the "emotion" witli which 
 "morality " must be touched, in order to transform it 
 into religion, to come from ? Mr. Arnold makes no 
 answer, — except that it must be emotion excited by 
 ideas alone, and not by supposed facts, which, as he 
 says, will not stand the tests of scientific verification.
 
 Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 129 
 
 But with regard to that asserted demand of science 
 for verification, let me just make one final observation: 
 That in the sense in which Mr. Arnold uses it, to 
 explode all belief in light coming to us from a mind 
 higher than our own, it equally explodes belief in the 
 authority of those suggestions of the deeper self to 
 which what he calls the " secret of Jesus " teaches us 
 to defer. For why are we to obey them? Mr. 
 Arnold replies simply, human experience teaches us that 
 it adds to our life, to our happiness, to the vitality 
 of our true and permanent self, to do so. But how 
 are we to get the verification without trying both the 
 wrong way and the right 1 You cannot found on mere 
 experience without the experience. And does, then, 
 the way to virtue lead through sin alone 1 Mr. Arnold 
 guards himself by saying that some " finely-touched " 
 souls have " the presentiment " of how it will be — a 
 presentiment, I suppose, derived by evolution from 
 the experience of ancestors. But is it a duty, then, 
 to found your actions on those obscure intimations 
 which your ancestors' experience may have transmitted 
 to you ? Should you not test your ancestors' experi- 
 ence for yourself before adopting it ? Should you 
 not sin in order to be sure that sin saps your true life 
 and diminishes your fund of happiness 1 I fear there 
 is nothing for Mr. Arnold but to admit that this is not 
 sin — that trying evil in order to be sure it is evil is 
 not forbidden by any law, if there be no spiritual 
 nature higher than man's, which lays its yoke upon us, 
 and subdues us into the attitude of reverence and awe. 
 H K
 
 130 MATTHKW ARNOLD Til 
 
 The principle which Mr. Arnold calls " verification " 
 is in reality fatal to all purity. It makes experience 
 of evil the ground of good. For myself, I believe 
 that there is enough verification for the purposes of 
 true morality in the recognition, without the test of 
 experience, of the higher character of the nature con- 
 fronted with our own ; and that we may learn the 
 reality of revelation, the reality of a divine influence 
 which should be a law to us, and rebellion against 
 which is, in the deepest sense, sin, without trying the 
 effect of that rebellion, without making proof of both 
 the alternatives before us. The life even of the truest 
 human affections is one long protest against the prin- 
 ciple that you can know nothing without what is 
 termed experiment and verification in the scientific 
 sense of the word. What creature which has learnt 
 to love tries the effect of piercing the heart of another 
 before it learns to reject that course as treachery ? 
 Revelation, as I understand it, is an appeal to the 
 human affections — a divine discipline for them. It 
 no more demands experiment and verification, in the 
 scientific sense which men try to foist so inappropri- 
 ately into our moral life, than a parent would think 
 of demanding from his child that, in order to be sure 
 that his wishes and commands are wise, the child 
 should make experiments in disobedience, and only 
 conform to his father's injunctions after he had learned 
 by a painful experience that these experiments had 
 ended in pain and discomfiture. 
 
 In insisting on the striking, T might almost say the
 
 Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 131 
 
 dismaying, contrast between the great Oxford leader, 
 whose whole mind has been occupied with theological 
 convictions from his earliest years of Oxford life to 
 the present day, and the Oxford leader who has 
 avowed himself unable to see even a slender proba- 
 bility that God is a being who thinks and loves, I 
 have said that I hoped to do something to attenuate 
 the paradox before I had done. This is probably 
 the right place to say a few words on the subject, for 
 undoubtedly it is the assumption running through 
 Mr. Arnold's theoretical writings, that no belief is 
 trustworthy which has not what he calls the verifica- 
 tion of experience to sustain it, to which we owe his 
 repudiation of all theology. Undoubtedly the twenty 
 years or so by which he is Cardinal Newman's junior 
 made an extraordinary difference in the intellectual 
 atmosphere of Oxford, and of the English world of 
 letters outside Oxford, during the time at which a 
 thoughtful man's mind matures. Mr. Arnold was 
 not too late at Oxford to feel the spell of Dr. New- 
 man, but his mind was hardly one to feel the whole 
 force of that spell, belonging as it does, I think, rather 
 to the stoical than to the religious school — the school 
 which magnifies self-dependence, and regards serene 
 calm, not passionate worship, as the highest type of 
 the moral life. And he was at Oxford too early, I 
 think, for a full understanding of the limits within 
 which alone the scientific conception of life can be 
 said to be true. A little later, men came to see that 
 scientific methods are really quite inapplicable to the
 
 132 MATTHEW ARNOLD ill 
 
 sphere of moral truth, that the scientific assumption 
 that whatever is true can be verified is, in the sense 
 of the word "verification" which science applies, a 
 very serious blunder, and that such verification as we 
 can get of moral truth is of a very different, though 
 I will not scruple to say a no less satisfactory, kind 
 from that which we expect to get of scientific truth. 
 Mr. Arnold seems to me to have imbibed the pre- 
 judices of the scientific season of blossom, when the 
 uniformity of nature first became a kind of gospel, 
 when the Vestiges of Creation was the book in vogue, 
 when Emerson's and Carlyle's imaginative scepticism 
 first took hold of cultivated Englishmen, and when 
 Mr. Froude published the sceptical tales by which his 
 name was first known amongst us. Mr. Arnold 
 betrays the immovable prejudices by which his intel- 
 lectual life is overridden in a hundred forms ; for 
 example, by the persistency with which he remarks 
 that the objection to miracles is that they do not 
 happen, the one criticism which I venture to say no 
 one who had taken pains to study evidence in the 
 best accredited individual cases, not only in ancient 
 but in modern times, would choose to repeat. And 
 again, he betrays it by the pertinacity with which he 
 assumes that you can verify the secret of self-renuncia- 
 tion, the secret of Jesus, in the same sense in which 
 you can verify the law of gravitation, one of the most 
 astounding and, I think, false assumptions of our day. 
 T make bold to say that no one ever verified the 
 secret of self-renunciation yet, or ever even wished to
 
 Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 133 
 
 verify it, who had not assumed the moral obligation 
 it involves before even attempting a verification ; 
 while with the law of gravitation it is quite different: 
 we believe it solely because it has been verified, or, 
 in the case of the discoverer, because evidence was 
 before him that it might very probably be verified. 
 
 But though Mr. Arnold's mind is of the stoical 
 rather than the religious type, and though certain 
 premature scientific assumptions, which were in vogue 
 before the limits of the region in which the uniformity 
 of nature has been verified, had been at all carefully 
 denned, run through all his theoretical writings, it is 
 nevertheless true that his whole intellectual strength 
 has been devoted to sustaining, I cannot say the 
 cause of religion — for I do not think his constant cry 
 for more emotion in dealing with morality has been 
 answered — but the cause of noble conduct, and to 
 exalting the elation of duty, the rapture of righteous- 
 ness. Allow for his prepossessions — his strangely 
 obstinate prepossessions — and he remains still a 
 figure on which we can look with admiration. We 
 must remember that, with all the scorn which 
 Matthew Arnold pours on the trust we place in 
 God's love, he still holds to the conviction that the 
 tendency to righteousness is a power on which we 
 may rely even with rapture. Israel, he says, took 
 " his religion in rapture, because he found for it an 
 evidence irresistible. But his own words are the 
 best : ' Thou, Eternal, art the thing that I long for, 
 thou art my hope, even from my youth ; through
 
 134 MATTHEW ARNOLD m 
 
 thee have I been holdcn up ever since I was born ; 
 there is nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the 
 commandments of the Eternal. The Eternal is my 
 strength ; my heart has trusted in Him, and I am 
 helped ; therefore my heart danceth for joy, and in my 
 song I will praise him ' " (Literature and Dogma, p. 
 319). And Mr. Arnold justifies that language, 
 though it seems to me clear that with his views he 
 could never have been the first to use it. Still, do 
 not let us forget that he does justify it, that the 
 great Oxonian of the third quarter of this century, 
 though he is separated wide as the poles from 
 Cardinal Newman in faith, yet uses even the most 
 exalted lammace of the Hebrew seers with all the 
 exultation which even Cardinal Newman could evince 
 for it. I think it is hardly possible to think of such 
 an attitude of mind as the attitude of a common 
 agnostic. The truth is, that his deep poetical idealism 
 saves Mr. Arnold from the depressing and flattening 
 influences of his theoretical views. The poet of 
 modern thought and modern tendencies cannot be, 
 even though he strives to be, a mere agnostic. The 
 insurrection of the agnosticism of the day against 
 faith is no doubt one of its leading features ; but the 
 failure of that insurrection to overpower us, the 
 potent resistance it encounters in all our hearts, is a 
 still more remarkable feature. Matthew Arnold 
 reflects both of these characteristics, though the 
 former perhaps more powerfully than the latter. 
 In passing from the thinker to the poet, I am
 
 ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 135 
 
 passing from a writer whose curious earnestness and 
 ability in attempting the impossible will soon, I 
 believe, be a mere curiosity of literature, to one of 
 the most considerable of English poets, whose place 
 will probably be above any poet of the eighteenth 
 century, excepting Burns, and not excepting Pope, or 
 Cowper, or Goldsmith, or Gray ; and who, even 
 amongst the great poets of the nineteenth century, 
 may very probably be accorded the sixth or fifth, or 
 even by some the fourth place. He has a power of 
 vision as great as Tennyson's, though its magic 
 depends less on the rich tints of association, and 
 more on the liquid colours of pure natural beauty ; 
 a power of criticism and selection as fastidious as 
 Gray's, with infinitely more creative genius ; and a 
 power of meditative reflection which, though it never 
 mounts to Wordsworth's higher levels of genuine 
 rapture, never sinks to his wastes and flats of com- 
 monplace. Arnold is a great elegiac poet, but there 
 is a buoyancy in his elegy which we rarely find in 
 the best elegy, and which certainly adds greatly to 
 its charm. And though I cannot call him a dramatic 
 poet, his permanent attitude being too reflective for 
 any kind of action, he shows in such poems as the 
 "Memorial Verses" on Byron, Goethe, and Words- 
 worth, in the " Sick King in Bokhara," and " Tristram 
 and Iseult," great precision in the delineation of 
 character, and not a little power even of forcing 
 character to delineate itself. What feeling for the 
 Oriental type of character is there not in the Vizier
 
 136 MATTHEW ARNOLD III 
 
 of the Sick King of Bokhara when he remonstrates 
 with the young king for taking too much to heart 
 the tragic end of the man who had insisted, under 
 the Mahometan law, on being stoned, because in a 
 hasty moment he had cursed his mother ! — 
 
 " King, in this I praise thee not ! 
 Now must I call thy grief not wise. 
 Is he thy friend, or of thy Wood, 
 To find such favour in thine eyes ? 
 
 " Nay, were he thine own mother's son, 
 Still, thou art king, and the law stands. 
 It were not meet the balance swerved, 
 The sword were broken in thy hands. 
 
 " But being nothing, as he is, 
 Why for no cause make sad thy face ? — 
 Lo, I am old ! three kings, ere thee, 
 Have I seen reigning in this place. 
 
 " But who, through all this length of time, 
 Could bear the burden of his years, 
 If he fur strangers pain'd his heart 
 Not less than those who merit tears ? 
 
 "Fathers we must have, wife and child, 
 And grievous is the grief for these ; 
 This pain alone, which must be borne, 
 Makes the head white, and bows the knees. 
 
 " But other loads than this his own 
 One man is not well made to bear. 
 Besides, to each are his own friends, 
 To mourn with him, and show him care. 
 
 " Look, this is but one single place, 
 Though it be great ; all the earth round,
 
 ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 137 
 
 If a man bear to have it so, 
 
 Things which might vex him shall be found. 
 
 " Upon the Russian frontier, where 
 The watchers of two armies stand 
 Near one another, many a man, 
 Seeking a prey unto his hand, 
 
 " Hath snatch 'd a little fair-hair'd slave ; 
 They snatch also, towards Merve, 
 The Shiah dogs, who pasture sheep, 
 And up from thence to Orgunje. 
 
 " And these all, labouring for a lord, 
 Eat not the fruit of their own hands ; 
 Which is the heaviest of all plagues, 
 To that man's mind, who understands. 
 
 " The kaffirs also (whom God curse !) 
 Vex one another, night and day ; 
 There are the lepers, and all sick ; 
 There are the poor, who faint alway. 
 
 "All these have sorrow, and keep still, 
 Whilst other men make cheer, and sing. 
 Wilt thou have pity on all these ? 
 No, nor on this dead dog, King ! " 
 
 And again, how deep is the insight into the Oriental 
 character in the splendid contrast between Borne and 
 the East after the Eastern conquests of Rome, in 
 the second of the two poems on the Author of 
 Obermann : — 
 
 " In his cool hall, with haggard eyes, 
 The Roman noble lay; 
 He drove abroad, in furious guise. 
 Along the Appian Way.
 
 138 MATTHEW ARNOLD m 
 
 " He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, 
 And crown'd his hair with flowers — 
 No easier nor no quicker pass'd 
 The impracticable hours. 
 
 " The brooding East with awe beheld 
 Her impious younger world. 
 The Koman tempest swell'd and swell'd, 
 And on her head was hurl'd. 
 
 " The East bow'd low before the blast 
 In patient, deep disdain ; 
 She let the legions thunder past, 
 And plunged in thought again. 
 
 " So well she mused, a morning broke 
 Across her spirit gray ; 
 A conquering, new-born joy awoke, 
 And fill'd her life with day. 
 
 " ' Poor world,' she cried, ' so deep accurst, 
 That runn'st from pole to pole 
 To seek a draught to slake thy thirst — 
 Go, seek it in thy soul ! ' " 
 
 Or take the famous description, in the lines at Heine's 
 grave, of our own country taking up burden after bur- 
 den, with " deaf ears and labour-dimm'd eyes," as she 
 has just taken up the new burden of Burmah: — 
 
 " I chide with thee not, that thy sharp 
 Upbraii lings often assail'd 
 England, my country — for we, 
 Heavy and sad, for her sons, 
 Long since, deep in our hearts, 
 Echo the blame of her foes. 
 We, too, sigh that Bhe Hags ; 
 We, too, say that she now —
 
 Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 139 
 
 Scarce comprehending the voice 
 Of her greatest, golden-mouth'd sons 
 Of a former age any more — 
 Stupidly travels her round 
 Of mechanic business, and lets 
 Slow die out of her life 
 Glory, and genius, and joy. 
 
 " So thou arraign'st her, her foe ; 
 So we arraign her, her sons. 
 
 " Yes, we arraign her ! but she, 
 The weary Titan, with deaf 
 Ears, and labour-dimm'd eyes, 
 Regarding neither to right 
 Nor left, goes passively by, 
 Staggering on to her goal ; 
 Bearing on shoulders immense, 
 Atlantean, the load, 
 Wellnigh not to be borne, 
 Of the too vast orb of her fate." 
 
 Though not a dramatic poet, it is clear, then, that 
 Matthew Arnold has a deep dramatic insight ; but 
 that is only one aspect of what I should call his main 
 characteristic as a poet — the lucid penetration with 
 which he discerns and portrays all that is most 
 expressive in any situation that awakens regret, and 
 the buoyancy with which he either throws off the 
 pain, or else takes refuge in some soothing digression. 
 For Arnold is never quite at his best except when he 
 is delineating a mood of regret, and then his best 
 consists not in yielding to it, but in the resistance he 
 makes to it. He is not, like most elegiac poets, a 
 mere sad muser ; he is always one who finds a secret
 
 140 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 III 
 
 of joy in the midst of pain, who discovers a tonic for 
 the suffering nerve, if only in realising the large 
 power of sensibility which it retains. Take his 
 description of the solitude in which we human beings 
 live — heart yearning after heart, but recognising the 
 eternal gulf between us — a solitude decreed by the 
 power which 
 
 " bade betwixt our shores to be 
 The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea ! " 
 
 How noble the line, and how it sends a shiver through 
 one ! And yet not a shiver of mere regret or mere 
 yearning; rather a shiver of awe at the infinitude of 
 the ocean in which we are all enisled. It is the same 
 with all Arnold's finest elegiac touches. In all of 
 them regret seems to mingle with buoyancy, and 
 buoyancy to have a sort of root in regret. AVhat he 
 calls (miscalls, I think) the " secret of Jesus " — 
 " miscalls," because the secret of Jesus lay in the 
 knowledge of His Father's love, not in the natural 
 buoyancy of the renouncing heart — is in reality tbe 
 secret of his own poetry. Like the East, he bows 
 low before the blast, only to seek strength in his 
 own mind, and to delight in the strength he finds 
 there. He enjoys plumbing the depths of another's 
 melancholy. Thus he says in relation to his favourite 
 Obcrmann — 
 
 "A fever in these pages burns 
 Beneath the calm they feign ; 
 A wounded human spirit turns, 
 Here, on its bed of pain.
 
 Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 141 
 
 " Yes, though the virgin mountain-air 
 Fresh through these pages blows ; 
 Though to these leaves the glaciers spare 
 The soul of their white snows ; 
 
 " Though here a mountain-murmur swells 
 Of many a dark-boughed pine, 
 Though, as you read, you hear the bells 
 Of the high-pasturing kine — 
 
 " Yet, through the hum of torrent lone, 
 And brooding mountain-bee, 
 There sobs I know not what ground-tone 
 Of human agony." 
 
 But even so, the effect of the verses is not the effect 
 of Shelley's most exquisitely melancholy lyrics. It 
 does not make us almost faint under the poet's own 
 feeling of desolation. On the contrary, even in the 
 very moment in which Arnold cries — 
 
 " Farewell ! Under the sky we part, 
 In this stern Alpine dell. 
 unstrung will ! broken heart ! 
 A last, a last farewell ! '' 
 
 we have a conviction that the poet went off with a 
 buoyant step from that unstrung will and broken 
 heart, enjoying the strength he had derived from his 
 communion with that strong spirit of passionate pro- 
 test against the evil and frivolity of the world. It is 
 just the same with his "Empedocles on Etna." He 
 makes the philosopher review at great length the evils 
 of human life, and decide that, as he can render no 
 further aid to men, he must return to the elements.
 
 142 MATTHEW ARNOLD ill 
 
 But after he has made his fatal plunge into the crater 
 of the burning mountain, there arises from his friend 
 Callicles, the harp-player on the slopes of the mountain 
 below, the following beautiful strain : — 
 
 " Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts, 
 Thick breaks the red flame ; 
 All Etna heaves fiercely 
 Her forest-clothed frame. 
 
 " Not here, Apollo ! 
 Are haunts meet for thee. 
 But, where Helicon breaks down 
 In cliff to the sea, 
 
 " Where the moon-silver'd inlets 
 Send far their light voice 
 Up the still vale of Thisbe, 
 O speed, and rejoice ! 
 
 " On the sward at the cliff-top 
 Lie strewn the white flocks, 
 On the clill'-sidt' (he pigeons 
 Roost deep in the rocks. 
 
 "In the moonlight the shepherds, 
 Soft lull'd by the rills, 
 Lie wrapt in their blankets 
 Asleep on the hills. 
 
 " — What forms are these coming 
 So white through the gloom ? 
 What garments out-glistening 
 The gold-flower'd broom ? 
 
 " What sweet-breathing presence 
 Out-perfumes the thyme >. 
 W'liai voices enrapture 
 The night's balmy prime?—
 
 Ill MATTHEW ARNOLD 143 
 
 "'Tis Apollo comes leading 
 His choir, the Nine. 
 — The leader is fairest, 
 But all are divine. 
 
 "They are lost in the hollows 
 They stream up again ! 
 What seeks on this mountain 
 The glorified train 1 — 
 
 " They bathe on this mountain, 
 In the spring by their road ; 
 Then on to Olympus, 
 Their endless abode. 
 
 " — Whose praise do they mention ? 
 Of what is it told 1 — 
 What will be for ever ; 
 What was from of old. 
 
 " First hymn they the Father 
 Of all things ; and then, 
 The rest of immortals, 
 The action of men. 
 
 " The day in his hotness, 
 The strife with the palm ; 
 The night in her silence, 
 The stars in their calm." 
 
 And we close the poem with a sense, not of trouble, 
 but of refreshment. So in the tragic story of "Sohrab 
 and Rustum " — in which the father, without knowing 
 it, kills his own son, who dies in his arms — the poem 
 ends not in gloom, but in a serene vision of the course 
 of the Oxus as it passes, " brimming and bright and 
 large," towards its mouth in the Sea of Aral, a course
 
 144 MATTHEW ARNOLD III 
 
 which is meant to be typical of the peaceful close of 
 Rustum's stormy and potent and victorious, though 
 tragic, career. It seems to be Matthew Arnold's 
 secret in Art not to minimise the tragedy or sadness 
 of the human lot, but to turn our attention from the 
 sadness or the tragedy to the strength which it illus- 
 trates and elicits, and the calm in which even the 
 tumultuous passions of the story eventually subside. 
 Even the sad poem on the Grand Chartreuse closes 
 with a wonderful picture of cloistered serenity, 
 entreating the busy and eager world to leave it un- 
 molested to its meditations — 
 
 " Pass, banners, pass, and bugles cease ; 
 And leave our desert to its peace." 
 
 There is nothing which Matthew Arnold conceives 
 or creates so well, nothing so characteristic of him, as 
 the soothing digressions, as they seem — digressions, 
 however, more germane to his purpose than any 
 epilogue — in which he withdraws our attention from 
 his main subject, to refresh and restore the minds 
 which he has perplexed and bewildered by the pain- 
 ful problems he has placed before them. That most 
 beautiful and graceful poem, for instance, on " The 
 Scholar-Gipsy," the Oxford student who is said to 
 have forsaken academic study in order to learn, if it 
 might be, those potent secrets of Nature, the tradi- 
 tions of which the gipsies are supposed sedulously to 
 guard, ends in a digression of the most vivid beauty, 
 suggested by the exhortation to the supposed lover
 
 Ill 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 145 
 
 of Nature to " fly our paths, our feverish contact fly," 
 as fatal to all calm and healing life — 
 
 " Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles ! 
 — As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea, 
 
 Descried at sunrise an emerging prow 
 Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily, 
 
 The fringes of a southward-facing brow 
 Among the iEgsean isles ; 
 And saw the merry Grecian coaster come, 
 
 Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, 
 
 Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steep'd in brine — • 
 And knew the intruders on his ancient home, 
 
 ''The young ligktdiearted masters of the waves — 
 
 And snatch'd his rudder, and shook out more sail ; 
 
 And day and night held on indignantly 
 O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale, 
 Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily, 
 To where the Atlantic raves 
 Outside the western straits ; and unbent sails 
 
 There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets 
 
 of foam, 
 Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come ; 
 And on the beach undid his corded bales." 
 
 Nothing could illustrate better than this passage 
 Arnold's genius or his art. He wishes to give us a 
 picture of the older type of audacity and freedom as 
 it shakes itself impatiently rid of the paltry skill and 
 timid cunning of the newer age, and plunges into the 
 solitudes into which the finer craft of dexterous know- 
 ledge does not dare to follow. His whole drift having 
 been that care and effort and gain and the pressure 
 of the world are sapping human strength, he ends 
 
 H L
 
 146 MATTHEW ARNOLD III 
 
 with a picture of the old-world pride and daring 
 
 which exhibits human strength in its freshness and 
 
 vigour, and he paints it with all that command of 
 
 happy poetical detail in which Mr. Arnold so greatly 
 
 excels. No one knows as he knows how to use detail 
 
 without overlaying the leading idea which he intends 
 
 to impress on us. The Tyrian trader, launching out 
 
 into the deep, in his scorn for the Greek trafficker 
 
 hugging the shore with his timid talent for small 
 
 gains, brings home to us how much courage, freedom, 
 
 and originality we may lose by the aptness for social 
 
 intercourse which the craft of civilisation brings with 
 
 it. So he closes his poem on the new scrupulousness 
 
 and burdensomeness and self-consciousness of human 
 
 life by recalling vividly the pride and buoyancy of 
 
 old-world enterprise. I could quote poem after 
 
 poem which Arnold closes by some such buoyant 
 
 digression — a buoyant digression intended to shake 
 
 off the tone of melancholy, and to remind us that 
 
 the world of imaginative life is still wide open to us. 
 
 "This problem is insoluble," he seems to say; "but 
 
 insoluble or not, let us recall the pristine strength of 
 
 the human spirit, and not forget that we have access 
 
 to great resources still." 
 
 And this is where Arnold's buoyancy differs in 
 kind from Clough's buoyancy, though buoyancy is the 
 characteristic of both these essentially Oxford poets. 
 Clough is buoyant in hope, and sometimes, though 
 perhaps rarely, in faith ; Arnold is buoyant in neither, 
 but yet he is buoyant — buoyant in rebound from
 
 Ill 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 147 
 
 melancholy reflection, buoyant in throwing off the 
 weight of melancholy reflection. " The outlook," he 
 seems to say, " is as bad as possible. We have lost 
 our old faith, and we cannot get a new one. Life is 
 sapping the noblest energies of the mind. We are 
 not as noble as we used to be. We have lost the 
 commanding air of the great men of old. We can- 
 not speak in the grand style. We can only boldly 
 confront the truth and acknowledge the gloom ; and 
 yet, and yet — 
 
 ' Yet on lie fares, by his own heart inspired.' " 
 
 Through hope or despair, through faith or doubt, the 
 deep buoyancy of the imaginative life forbids Arnold 
 to rest in any melancholy strain ; he only snatches 
 his rudder, shakes out more sail, and day and night 
 holds on indignantly to some new shore which as 
 yet he discovers not. Clough's buoyancy is very 
 different. It is not the buoyancy which shakes off 
 depressing thoughts, but the buoyancy which over- 
 comes them — 
 
 "Sit, if you will, sit down upon the ground, 
 Yet not to weep and wail, but calmly look around. 
 Whate'er befell 
 Earth is not hell ; 
 Now too, as when it first began, 
 Life is yet life, and man is man. 
 For all that breathe beneath the heaven's high cope, 
 Joy with grief mixes, with despondence, hope. 
 Hope conquers cowardice, joy grief ; 
 Or, at least, faith unbelief.
 
 148 MATTHEW ARNOLD m 
 
 Though dead, not dead, 
 
 Not gone, though fled, 
 
 Not lost, though vanished, 
 
 In the great gospel and true creed 
 
 He is yet risen indeed, 
 
 Christ is yet risen." 
 
 There is dough's buoyancy of spirit, which goes to 
 the heart of the matter. But Arnold, with equal 
 buoyancy, seems to aim rather at evading than 
 averting the blows of fate. He is somewhat unjust 
 to Wordsworth, I think, in ascribing to Wordsworth, 
 as his characteristic spell, the power to put aside the 
 " cloud of mortal destiny " instead of confronting it — 
 
 " Others will teach us how to dare, 
 And against fear our breast to steel ; 
 Others will strengthen us to bear — 
 But who, ah ! who, will make us feel 1 
 The cloud of mortal destiny, 
 Others will front it fearlessly —   
 But who, like him, will put it by ? " 
 
 That, I should have said, is not Wordsworth's position 
 in poetry, but Matthew Arnold's. Wordsworth 
 "strengthened us to bear" by every means by which 
 a poet can convey such strength ; but Arnold, exqui- 
 site as his poetry is, teaches us first to feel, and then 
 to put by, the cloud of mortal destiny. But he does 
 not teach us, as Wordsworth does, to bear it. AVe 
 delight in his pictures ; we enjoy more and more, the 
 more we study it, the poetry of his exquisite detail ; 
 we feel the lyrical cry of his sceptical moods vibrating 
 in our heart of hearts ; we feel the reviving air of his
 
 Ill 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 149 
 
 buoyant digressions as he escapes from his own spell, 
 and bids us escape too, into the world of imaginative 
 freedom. But he gives us no new strength to bear. 
 He gives us no new light of hope. He gives us no 
 new nerve of faith. He is the greatest of our elegiac 
 poets, for he not only makes his readers thrill with 
 the vision of the faith or strength he has lost, but 
 puts by " the cloud of mortal destiny " with an ease 
 that makes us feel that after all the faith and strength 
 may not be lost, but only hidden from his eyes. 
 Though the poet and the thinker in Matthew Arnold 
 are absolutely at one in their conscious teaching, the 
 poet in him helps us to rebel against the thinker, and 
 to encourage us to believe that the "stream of ten- 
 dency " which bears him up with such elastic and 
 patient strength is not blind, is not cold, and is not 
 dumb. He tells us — 
 
 " We, in some unknown Power's employ, 
 Move on a rigorous line ; 
 Can neither, when we will, enjoy, 
 Nor, when we will, resign." 
 
 But if the " unknown Power " be such that when we 
 will to enjoy, we are taught to resign, and when we 
 will to resign, we are bid, though it may be in some 
 new and deeper sense, to enjoy, surely the "unknown 
 Power " is not an unknowing Power, but is one that 
 knows us better than we know ourselves.
 
 IV 
 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR
 
 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 
 
 The great authoress who called herself George Eliot 
 is chiefly known, and no doubt deserved to be chiefly 
 known, in England, as a novelist, but she was cer- 
 tainly much more than a novelist in the sense in 
 which that word applies even to writers of great 
 genius, to Miss Austen, or Mr. Trollope, — nay, much 
 more than a novelist in the sense in which that word 
 applies to Miss Bronte, or even to Thackeray, though 
 it is of course true in relation to all these writers, 
 that besides being much more, she is also, and neces- 
 sarily, not so much. What is remarkable in George 
 Eliot is the striking combination in her of very deep 
 speculative power with a very great and realistic 
 imagination. It is rare to find an intellect so skilled 
 in the analysis of psychological problems so com- 
 pletely at home in the conception and delineation of 
 real characters. George Eliot discusses the practical 
 influences acting on men and women, I do not say 
 with the ease of Fielding, — for there is a touch of 
 carefulness, often of over-carefulness in all she does, 
 — but with much of his breadth and spaciousness —
 
 154 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 the breadth and spaciousness, one must remember, of 
 a man who had seen London life in the capacity of 
 a London police magistrate. Nay, her imagination 
 has, I do not say of course the fertility, but some- 
 thing of the range and the delight in rich historic 
 colouring, of Sir Walter Scott's, while it combines 
 Avith it something too of the pleasure in ordered 
 learning, and the laborious marshalling of the pictur- 
 esque results of learning, — though her learning is 
 usually in a very different field, — which gives the 
 flavour of scholastic pride to the great genius of 
 Milton. Not that I think George Eliot's verse entitles 
 her to be described as a poet, though the poetic side 
 of her mind has been deep enough and true enough 
 to lend richness, depth, and harmony to her romances. 
 I am only pointing out now how much she is besides 
 a novelist, — how inevitable it was that in her novels 
 she should range far beyond the region of the most 
 successful novelists of recent times, — far beyond that 
 little world of English society which has determined 
 for novelists of the most different type of genius, — 
 for Miss Austen, for Mrs. Gaskell, for Trollope, for 
 Thackeray, and for many less successful, but still 
 very successful contemporaries, — their peculiar field 
 of work. 
 
 It is, indeed, a great help towards understanding 
 her true genius to compare George Eliot with the 
 school of society-novelists of whom I have spoken. 
 "What one remarks about the works of those who 
 have studied any particular society as a whole far
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 155 
 
 more deeply than they have studied the individual 
 characters in it is, that their creations all stand on 
 one level, are delineated, with great accuracy, down 
 to the same not very considerable depth, and no 
 further ; that all, in short, are bas-reliefs cut out on 
 the same surface. The novelists of this school are 
 perfectly inexhaustible in resource on the special 
 social ground they choose, and quite incapable of 
 varying it. And all of them disappoint us in not 
 giving more insight into those deeper roots of char- 
 acter which lie beneath the social surface. Probably 
 the mobile sympathies which are so essential to 
 artists of this class, and the faculty of readily realising, 
 and of being easily satisfied with realising, the 
 workings of other minds, are to some extent incon- 
 sistent with that imaginative intensity and tenacity 
 which is needful for the deeper insight into human 
 character. Certainly the accomplished artists I have 
 named carve out their marvellously lifelike groups 
 in a very shallow though sufficiently plastic material. 
 How perfect and how infinitely various are the images 
 left on the mind by the characters in Miss Austen's 
 novels ! Lord Macaulay has expressed just admira- 
 tion of the skill which could paint four young clergy- 
 men, " all belonging to the upper part of the middle 
 class, all liberally educated, all under the restraints 
 of the same sacred profession, all young, all in love, 
 all free from any disposition to ride a special hobby, 
 and all without a ruling passion," without making 
 them insipid likenesses of each other. And no doubt
 
 156 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 this does show great power ; but it is equally remark- 
 able that all of them are drawn just to the same 
 depth, all delineated out of the same social elements. 
 None of their minds are exhibited in any direct con- 
 tact with the ultimate realities of life ; none of them 
 are seen grasping at the truth by which they seek to 
 live, struggling with a single deadly temptation, — or, 
 in short, dealing with any of the deeper elements 
 of human life. The same may almost be said of 
 Thackeray's, Mr. Trollope's, and Mrs. Gaskell's 
 sketches. These authors, indeed, sometimes probe 
 the motives of their leading characters, but they 
 generally report that at a very small depth below 
 the surface the analysis fails to detect any certain 
 result. The whole graphic effect of their art is pro- 
 duced with scarcely any disturbance of the smooth 
 surface of social usage. The artist's graver just 
 scratches off the wax in a few given directions till 
 the personal bias of taste and bearing is sufficient!}' 
 revealed, while the pervading principle of the society 
 in which the artist lives is strictly preserved. 
 
 It was very different with Miss Bronte. Her 
 imagination was not, and under the circumstances of 
 her life could not have been, at home with the light 
 play of social influences. There is even an abruptness 
 of outline, a total want of social cohesion among her 
 characters. They are sternly drawn, with much 
 strong shading, and kept in isolated spheres. They 
 break, or rather burst, in upon each other, when they 
 exerl mutual influences at all, with a rude effort,
 
 VI GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 157 
 
 that is significant enough of the shyness of a solitary 
 creative imagination. Still, for this very reason, 
 what characters Miss Bronte does conceive truly, she 
 reveals much more deeply than the society-novelists 
 of whom I have been speaking. She has no famili- 
 arity with the delicate touches and shades by which 
 they succeed in conveying a distinct impression with- 
 out laying bare the deeper secrets of character. She 
 has not, like them, any power of giving in her delinea- 
 tions traces of thought and feeling which lie beyond 
 her actual grasp. She has a full and conscious hold 
 of all the moods she paints ; and though her paintings 
 are in nine cases out of ten far less lifelike, yet when 
 lifelike they are far more profoundly imagined than 
 those of Mr. Trollope, Miss Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, or 
 even Thackeray himself. There is as little common 
 life, diffused atmosphere of thought, and there are 
 as few connecting social ideas, amongst the various 
 figures in Miss Bronte's tales as is possible to con- 
 ceive among fellow-men and fellow-countrymen. But 
 what personal life there is, is of the deepest sort, 
 though it is apt to be too exceptional and individual, 
 and too little composed out of elements of universal 
 experience. 
 
 The novelists of the society-school, who delineate 
 not so much individual figures as a complete phase of 
 society, have what one may call a medium ready to 
 their hand in which to trace the characteristic features 
 of the natures they delineate. They have a familiar 
 world of manners to paint, in which a modulation, an
 
 158 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 omission, or an emphasis here and there, are quite 
 sufficient to mark a character, or indicate a latent 
 emotion. Not so an author who, like Miss Bronte, 
 endeavoured to fit all her characters with a new and 
 appropriate outward manner of their own as distinct 
 and special as the inward nature it expressed. With 
 her there was necessarily a directness of delineation, 
 a strong downrightness in the drawing which is in 
 very marked contrast with the method that charms 
 us so much in the pictures of Miss Austen and her 
 modern successors. Much of the art of the drawing- 
 room novelists consists in the indirectness, the allusive- 
 ness, the educated reticence of the artists. They 
 portray a society ; they indicate an individuality. 
 They delight in fine strokes ; they will give a long 
 conversation which scarcely advances the narrative at 
 all, for the sake of a few delicate touches of shade or 
 colour on an individual character. In the power to 
 paint this play of common social life, in which there 
 arc comparatively but few keynotes of distinct per- 
 sonality, the charm of this school of art consists ; 
 while Miss Bronte's lay in the Rembrandt-like dis- 
 tinctness with which all that the mind conceived was 
 brought into the full blaze of light, and the direct 
 vigour with which all the prominent features were 
 marked out. 
 
 George Eliot as a novelist has points of connection 
 with both of these schools of art, besides some charac- 
 teristics peculiarly her own. There is the same 
 clearness of drawing, delicacy of finish, and absence
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 159 
 
 of excitement, which characterise the modern semi- 
 satirical school. But there is less of play in the 
 surface-painting, — more of depth in the deeper char- 
 acters imagined, — a broader touch, a stronger, directer 
 fashion of delineation, — less of manner-painting, and 
 more of the bare naturalism of human life. On the 
 other hand, there is nothing of the Eembrandt-like 
 style of Miss Bronte; the light flows more equally 
 over George Eliot's pictures ; one finds nothing of 
 the irregular emphasis with which Currer Bell's char- 
 acters are drawn, or of the strong subjective colouring 
 which tinges all her scenes. George Eliot's imagina- 
 tion, like Miss Bronte's, loves to go to the roots of 
 character, and portrays best by broad direct strokes ; 
 but there the likeness between them, so far as there 
 is any, ends. The reasons for the deeper method 
 and for the directer style are hardly likely to have 
 been similar in the two cases. Miss Bronte can 
 scarcely be said to have had any large instinctive 
 knowledge of human nature ; — her own life and 
 thoughts were exceptional, cast in a strongly-marked 
 but not very wide mould ; her imagination was soli- 
 tary ; her experience was very limited ; and her own 
 personality tinged all she wrote. She " made out " 
 the outward life and manner of her dramatis personm 
 by the sheer force of her own imagination ; and as 
 she always imagined the will and the affections as 
 the substance and centre of her characters, those of 
 her delineations which are successful at all are deep, 
 and their manner broad.
 
 160 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 George Eliot's genial, broad delineations of human 
 life have, as I said just now, more perhaps of the 
 breadth of Fielding than of any of the manner-painters 
 of the present day. For these imagine life only as it 
 appears in a certain dress and sphere, which are a 
 kind of artificial medium for their art, — life as 
 affected by drawing-rooms. George Eliot has little, 
 if any, of their capacity for catching the under-tones 
 and illusive complexity of this sort of society. She 
 has, however, observed the phases of a more natural 
 and straightforward class of life, and she draws her 
 external world as much as possible from observation 
 — though some of her Florentine pictures must have 
 been suggested more by literary study than by 
 personal experience — instead of imagining it, like 
 Miss Bronte, out of the heart of the characters she 
 wishes to paint. The English manners she delights 
 in are chiefly of the simplest and most homely kind, 
 — of the rural farmers and labourers, of the half- 
 educated portion of the country middle-class, who 
 have learnt no educated reticence, and of the resi- 
 dent country gentry and clergy in their relations 
 with these rough-mannered neighbours. This is a 
 world in which she could not but learn a direct style 
 of treatment. The habit of concealing, or at most of 
 suggesting rather than downright expressing, what 
 is closest to our hearts, is, as we know, a result of 
 education. It is quite foreign to the class of people 
 whom George Eliot knows most thoroughly, and has 
 drawn with the fullest power. All her deepest
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 161 
 
 knowledge of human nature has probably been 
 acquired among people who speak their thoughts 
 with the directness, though not with the sharp 
 metallic ring, of Miss Bronte's Yorkshire heroes. 
 But instead of almost luxuriating, as Miss Bronte 
 appears to do, in the startling emphasis of this 
 mannerism, and making all her characters precipitate 
 themselves in speech in the way best calculated to 
 give a strongly-marked picture of the conception in 
 her own brain, George Eliot has evidently delighted 
 to note all the varieties of form which varying 
 circumstances give to these direct and simple manners, 
 and takes as much pleasure in painting their different 
 shades as Miss Austen does in guiding her more 
 elaborate conversations to and fro so as to elicit traits 
 of personal character. Directness of delineation is, 
 indeed, evidently natural to the author of Adam 
 Bale, but it has no tendency whatever to take, with 
 her, that form of concentrated intensity which it 
 assumed in Miss Bronte ; her style has all the general 
 composure and range of tone of the life she paints, 
 and shows her as more in sympathy with the dumb 
 and stolid phases of rural society than with the more 
 active forms of urbane converse. There was some- 
 thing of the poet in both. But George Eliot's poetry 
 was rooted in the more intellectual emotions, Miss 
 Bronte's was rooted in the most personal. George 
 Eliot's poetic tendencies are rather of the kind to 
 soften outlines and harmonise the effects of her 
 pictures. Miss Bronte's, on the other hand, were 
 
 II M
 
 162 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 adapted to express the passion of her own imagina- 
 tion ; and while the effect was graphic and unique, it 
 was monotonous, and not unfrequently unreal. 
 
 George Eliot's pictures are not only directer and 
 simpler than those of the drawing-room novelists, but 
 her deeper and frequently poetic imagination discrimi- 
 nates finely between the various degrees of depth 
 which she gives to her characters, and throws more 
 of universality and breadth into them. The manners 
 of " good society " are a kind of social costume or 
 disguise which is, in fact, much more effective in 
 concealing how much of depth ordinary characters 
 have, and in restraining the expression of universal 
 human instincts and feelings, than in hiding the in- 
 dividualities, the distinguishing inclinations, talents, 
 bias, and tastes of those who assume them. The 
 slight restraints which are imposed by society upon 
 the expression of individual bias are, in fact, only a 
 new excitement to its more subtle and various, though 
 less straightforward, development. Instead of speak- 
 ing itself simply out, it gleams out in a hundred ways 
 by the side-paths of a more elaborate medium. To 
 avail yourself skilfully of all the opportunities which 
 these social manners give you of being yourself, adds 
 a fresh, though very egotistic, interest to life, and con- 
 tributes much of the zest to the sort of study in 
 which Thackeray and Trollope were the acknowledged 
 masters. But this applies only to the lighter and 
 more superficial part of human personality. Those 
 stronger passions and emotions in which all men
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 163 
 
 share more or less deeply ; which are in the strictest 
 sense personal, and yet in the strictest sense universal ; 
 which are private, because either the objects or the 
 occasions which excite them most deeply are different 
 for every different person, and universal, because 
 towards some objects, or on some occasions, they are 
 felt alike by all ; — these most personal and most 
 widely diffused of all the elements of human nature 
 are sedulously suppressed in cultivated society ; and 
 even the most skilful of the drawing-room novelists 
 find little room for delineating the comparative depth 
 of their roots in different minds. 
 
 And yet these deepest portions of human character, 
 which the simpler and less educated grades of society, 
 in their comparative indifference to the sympathy 
 they receive, do not care to hide, and which educated 
 society half suppresses, or expresses only by received 
 formulas quite without personal significance, are far 
 truer measures of force and mass in human character 
 than any other elements. They are, in fact, the only 
 common measures which are applicable to all in 
 nearly equal degree. After all, what we care chiefly 
 to know of men and women is not so much their 
 special tastes, bias, gifts, humours, or even the exact 
 proportions in which these characteristics are com- 
 bined, as the general depth and mass of the human 
 nature that is in them, — the breadth and the power 
 of their life, its comprehensiveness of grasp, its 
 tenacity of instinct, its capacity for love, its need 
 of trust. A thousand skilful outlines of character,
 
 164 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 based on mere individualities of taste and talent and 
 temper, are not near as moving to us as one vivid 
 picture of a massive nature stirred to the very depths 
 of its commonplace instinct and commonplace faith. 
 And the means of studying these broader aspects of 
 human life are much fewer in the educated society 
 which Miss Austen and Thackeray draw than in the 
 country-towns, mills, and farmhouses which are dotted 
 about George Eliot's Scenes from Clerical Life, Si/us 
 Marner, and her more elaborate English tales. 
 
 In the depth, force, and thorough naturalness of 
 the human characteristics in the delineation of which 
 she delights, George Eliot is not superior to Miss 
 Bronte, who never fails to give us a distinct measure 
 of the instinctive tenderness, depth of affection, and 
 energy of will, of her creations. But in breadth of 
 range George Eliot is far beyond Currer Bell. In- 
 tensity is the main characteristic of the authoress of 
 Jane Eyre. She cannot paint quiet massive strength, 
 still less easy, composed, and inert natures. George 
 Eliot enters into these with even more insight than 
 into the more concentrated. Eager prejudice, dumb 
 pain, the passive famine of inarticulate desires, are 
 painted by both authors with marvellous and almost 
 equal power; but George Eliot has the wider and 
 more tranquil sympathies, and sometimes almost 
 seems to rival Sir Walter Scott in the art of delineat- 
 ing the repose of strong natures and the effortless 
 strength they put forth. 
 
 Again, in one field — the field of religious faith —
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 165 
 
 the author of Adam Bede and Romola shows much 
 broader insight than any of the writers I have named. 
 The drawing-room school of novelists do not and 
 cannot often go down to a stratum of life deep enough 
 to come upon the springs of faith. Miss Austen 
 never touches them. Thackeray turns dizzy with the 
 very mobility of his own sympathies, and finding a 
 distinct type of faith in every different man's mind, 
 not only proclaims the inscrutability of all divine 
 topics, but refuses altogether to assign any strong- 
 motive power to religious emotions in his delineations 
 of human life. Miss Bronte, too, finds it needful to 
 eliminate the supernatural, though she once or twice 
 admits the preternatural, in her pictures. As an 
 artist she is strictly a secularist, delineating religions 
 enthusiasm only once, and then exhibiting it as the 
 stimulus of a cold nature and as putting forth 
 unlawful claims to overrule legitimate human affec- 
 tions. Even Sir Walter Scott, powerfully as he 
 could paint fanaticism, and keen as was his pleasure 
 in the marvellous, never attempted to paint the 
 quieter and deeper forms of religious faith. He 
 evidently did not admit any supernatural element 
 into his conception of sensible men and women, and 
 never paints its influence over a sober and tranquil 
 will. 
 
 George Eliot holds that the stronger class of 
 intellects meddle least with religious faith. But she 
 sees far more clearly than any of them the actual 
 space occupied by spiritual motives in human life, —
 
 1GG GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 the depth, beauty, and significance which they, and 
 they alone, give to human action. And, accordingly, 
 in almost all her tales she introduces some character 
 with conscious cravings for something beyond human 
 happiness ; while in the most popular of her works 
 she delineates the most delicately beautiful and 
 spiritual nature with which I have ever met in the 
 whole range of fiction. Goethe's picture of the Fair 
 Saint in Wilhelm Meister cannot properly be said to 
 belong to fiction at all. Not only is it, in fact, a 
 minute copy from real life, but it is not even woven 
 by his imagination into the texture of his story. It 
 is an episode of mere description, and the character 
 is not delineated in action. Nay, in itself, the Schone 
 Seele which Goethe has so delicately mirrored for us 
 cannot compare in simplicity and beauty with Dinah 
 in Adam Bede. 
 
 Another element in which George Eliot shows the 
 masculine breadth and strength of her genius adds 
 less to the charm of her tales, — I mean the shrewd- 
 ness and range of her miscellaneous observations on 
 life. Nothing is rarer than to see in women's writ- 
 ings that kind of strong acute generalisation which 
 Fielding introduced so freely. Yet the miscellaneous 
 observations in which George Eliot so often indulges 
 us, after the fashion of the day, are not always well 
 suited to the particular bent of her genius — indeed, 
 they often break the spell which that genius has laid 
 upon her readers. She is not a satirist, and she half 
 adopts the style of a satirist in these portions of her
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 167 
 
 books. The influence of Thackeray had at first a 
 distinctly bad effect on her genius, but in Silas Marner 
 that influence began to wane, and quite disappeared 
 in Bomola, though I think it reappeared a little in 
 Felix Holt. A powerful, somewhat slow, and direct 
 style of portraiture is in ill-keeping with that flavour 
 of sarcastic innuendo in which Thackeray delighted. 
 It jars upon the ear in the midst of the simple and faith- 
 ful delineations of human nature as it really is, with 
 which George Eliot fills her books. It was all very 
 well for Thackeray who made it his main aim and 
 business to expose the hollowness and insincerities of 
 human society, to add his own keen comment to his 
 own one-sided picture. But then it was of the 
 essence of his genius to lay bare unrealities, and leave 
 the sound life almost untouched. It was rather a 
 relief than otherwise to see him playing with his 
 dissecting-knif e after one of his keenest probing feats ; 
 you understand better how limited his purpose is, — 
 that he has been in search of organic disease, — and 
 you are not surprised, therefore, to find that he has 
 found little that was healthy. 
 
 But George Eliot had a different power. She could 
 delineate what is sound even more powerfully than 
 what is unsound. She does not expose but paints 
 human nature, its weakness and its strength ; and 
 the satirical tone in which Thackeray justified to his 
 readers the severity of his criticisms, by trying to 
 show that they were all of them open to criticisms at 
 least as severe, was a setting not at all in harmony
 
 168 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 with George Eliot's style of art. This is, indeed, 
 usually so deep, direct, and real, that the interrup- 
 tion needed to listen to the author's aside is a painful 
 break. It would suit her boohs far better if, in this 
 respect, she had followed Miss Bronte's eager and 
 undeviating style of narration, and had never in- 
 dulged in the pleasure of being her own critic. But 
 if she felt bound to intersperse her narratives with 
 comments and thoughts of her own, she could not 
 have found a less suitable tone for them than that 
 satirical contempt for his readers' unreal state of 
 mind to which the author of Vanity Fair accustomed 
 us. "When in the midst of an admirable sketch of 
 the farm-labourers on Mr. Poyser's farm, by no means 
 ill-natured in itself, we come upon such a sentence as 
 this, for instance : — " When Tityrus and Meliboeus 
 happen to be on the same farm, they are not senti- 
 mentally polite to each other," — we feel suddenly 
 transported to the latitude of a clumsy Vanity Fair. 
 Often it is only that observations, themselves not 
 ungenial, are clothed in the half-scornful language 
 which Thackeray's success induced so many light 
 writers to adopt. For example, there is in the 
 chapter which opens as follows nothing that is not 
 genial and wise ; but throughout the whole there 
 runs a tone of bantering depreciation — a "what a 
 vulgar world it is we live in " sort of air — which has 
 no justification either in the tenor of what is said, or 
 the particular incident on which it is a comment : — 
 " ' This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan !'
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 169 
 
 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 beautiful 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 characters would be entirely of my own choos- 
 ing, and I could select the most unexceptionable type of 
 clergyman, and put my own admirable opinions into his 
 mouth on all occasions." 
 
 This is, when read in its context, sarcasm quite 
 out of its natural element, floundering like a fish out 
 of water. Indeed, this foreign mannerism gives a 
 certain air of laborious smartness to the chapters of 
 comment in Adam Bcde, which seems to me the only 
 defect in that wonderful book. That which was only 
 an external mannerism in the occasional commentary 
 of Adam Bcde grew into a rankling foreign substance 
 in The Mill on the Floss, and it was a great relief to 
 her admirers to find that in her later works George 
 Eliot had in a great degree discontinued it. 
 
 For George Eliot was no satirist. Even where her 
 banter is least heavy, hers was not the bent to bring- 
 out without effort, and yet in full relief, the weak 
 points of men, as the genius of satire requires ; and 
 one feels painfully that, like most able people who 
 do what it is not their bent to do, she overdoes it, 
 and breaks a butterfly on the wheel. How lightly 
 and tauntingly Thackeray would have given us the
 
 170 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 following ! how broadly ludicrous Dickens might have 
 made it ! but in George Eliot's hands it is neither 
 broad fun nor indirect satire, but laborious, pains- 
 taking, intellectual power, commenting with slow 
 contempt on human foibles : —   
 
 " It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the 
 complexity introduced into the emotions by a high state 
 of civilisation — the sight of a fashionably-drest female in 
 grief. From the sorrow of a Hottentot to that of a woman 
 in large buckram sleeves, with several bracelets on each 
 arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate ribbon-strings 
 — what a long series of gradations ! In the enlightened 
 child of civilisation the abandonment characteristic of 
 grief is checked and varied in the subtlest manner, so as 
 to present an interesting problem to the analytic mind. 
 If, with a crushed heart and eyes half-blinded by the mist 
 of tears, she were to walk with a too devious step through 
 a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves too, 
 and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a 
 composition of forces by which she takes a line that just 
 clears the doorpost. Perceiving that the tears are hurrying 
 fast, she unpins her strings and throws them languidly 
 backward — a touching gesture, indicative, even in the 
 deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when 
 cap-strings will once more have a charm. As the tears 
 subside a little, and with her head leaning backward at 
 the angle that will not injure a bonnet, she endures that 
 terrible moment when grief, which has made all things 
 else a weariness, has itself become weary ; she looks down 
 pensively at her bracelets and adjusts their clasps with 
 that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to 
 her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy 
 state." 
 
 George Eliot's humour, which is very great, is not
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 171 
 
 of the ironical kind. The covert meaning which 
 aims at one thing while it appears to say another is 
 not in her way. The humour in which she excels 
 most has nothing in it of the self-command and reti- 
 cence which give the edge to irony. The satirist just 
 moves away sufficiently from the station at which for 
 the moment his character is placed to show you how 
 one-sided and shallow that character is ; but he keeps 
 on the mask of sympathy, though he allows you to 
 see him smiling under it ; and half the sting of his 
 irony consists in his assuming that the weakness 
 probed is too deeply rooted in human nature to 
 mock at openly, though you need not shut your eyes 
 to it. 
 
 There is nothing of this species of humour in 
 George Eliot. She has a large share of that dramatic 
 humour of which Shakespeare's is the model, which 
 consists in a rapid and complete change of moral and 
 intellectual latitude, in showing us the strangely 
 different views of human things — vulgar, contem- 
 plative, and practical — which differently situated 
 beings take. Of this kind of humour there is no 
 more perfect and delightful specimen than the scene 
 in which she paints the unflinching (or, as we might 
 falsely call it, indelicate) feeling of the uneducated 
 towards Death and the necessary accompaniments of 
 Death, as illustrated by Lisbeth Bede's wishes about 
 her husband's coffin and funeral. 
 
 " ' What art goin' to do 1 ' asked Lisbeth. ' Set about 
 thy feyther's coffin 1 '
 
 172 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 " ' No, mother,' said Adam ; ' we're going to take the 
 wood to the village, and have it made there.' 
 
 " ' Nay, my lad, nay,' Lisbeth hurst out in an eager, 
 wailing tone ; ' thee wotna let nobody make thy feyther's 
 coffin but thysen ? Who'd make it so well ? An' him 
 as know'd what good work war, an 's got a son as is tli' 
 head o' the village, an' all Treddles'on too, for clever- 
 ness.' 
 
 " ' Very well, mother, if that's thy wish, I'll make the 
 coffin at home ; but I thought thee wouldstna like to hear 
 the work going on.' 
 
 " ' An' why shouldna I like't 1 It's the right thing to 
 lie done. An' what's likin' got to do wi't ? It's choice o' 
 mislikins is all I'n got i' this world. One mossel's as good 
 as another when your mouth's out o' taste. Thee mun 
 set about it now this mornin' fust thing. I wunna ha' 
 nobody to touch the coffin but thee.' 
 
 "Adam's eyes met Seth's, which looked from Dinah 
 to him rather wistfully. 
 
 " ' No, mother,' he said, ' I'll not consent ; but Seth 
 shall have a hand in it too, if it's to be done at home. 
 I'll go to the village this forenoon, because Mr. Burge 'ull 
 want to see me, and Seth shall stay at home and begin 
 the coffin. I can come back at noon, and then he 
 can go.' 
 
 " ' Nay, nay,' persisted Lisbeth, beginning to cry, ' I'n 
 set my heart on 't as thee shalt ma' thy feyther's coffin. 
 Thee 't so stiff an' masterful, thee 't ne'er do as thy 
 mother wants thee. Thee wast often angered wi' thy 
 feyther when he war alive ; thee must be the better to 'm 
 now he's goen'. He'd ha thought nothin' on 't for Seth to 
 ma' 's coffin.' " 
 
 Some of George Eliot's most subtle and character- 
 istic humour consists in giving to the conversation of 
 her rural louts a distinct, though of course unconscious,
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 173 
 
 bearing on the intellectual questions contemporane- 
 ously discussed by the most highly cultivated, without 
 coming to any much more impressive results. Even 
 when this is not the case, there is a humour in the 
 mere sharpness of the contrast between the favourite 
 subjects of her boors and those of refined society. 
 Thus, in the inimitable conversation at the opening 
 of Silas Marner, — the conversation in the Rainbow 
 Inn, — the subject is simply and solely one to excite 
 the professional interest of butchers and of all con- 
 noisseurs in grazing stock. But the pungency is 
 given by the grotescpieness of the contrast between 
 the professional interests of the lower and middle 
 classes, and by that additional flavour of profession- 
 ally which every descent in the scale of education 
 certainly ensures. 
 
 "The conversation, which was at a high pitch of 
 animation when Silas approached the door of the Rainbow, 
 had, as usual, been slow and intermittent when the com- 
 pany first assembled. The pipes began to be puffed in a 
 silence which had an air of severity ; the more important 
 customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the fire, 
 staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the 
 first man who winked ; while the beer-drinkers, chiefly 
 men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids 
 down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if 
 their draughts of beer had been a funereal duty attended 
 with embarrassing sadness. At last, Mr. Snell, the land- 
 lord, a man of neutral disposition, accustomed to stand 
 aloof from human differences as those of beings who were 
 all alike in need of liquor, broke silence, by saying in a 
 doubtful tone to his cousin the butcher, —
 
 174 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 " ' Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you druv 
 in yesterday, Bob 1 ' 
 
 " The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man, was 
 not disposed to answer rashly. He gave a few puffs 
 before he spat and replied, ' And they wouldn't be fur 
 wrong, John.' 
 
 " After this feeble delusive thaw, the silence set in as 
 severely as before. 
 
 " ' Was it a red Durham ? ' said the farrier, taking 
 up the thread of discourse after the lapse of a few 
 minutes. 
 
 " The farrier looked at the landlord, and the landlord 
 looked at the butcher, as the person who must take the 
 responsibility of answering. 
 
 " ' Eed it was,' said the butcher, in his good-humoured 
 husky treble — ' and a Durham it was.' 
 
 " ' Then you needn't tell me who you bought it of,' said 
 the farrier, looking round with some triumph ; ' I know 
 who it is has got the red Durhams o' this country-side. 
 And she'd a white star on her brow, I'll bet a penny ? ' 
 The farrier leaned forward with his hands on his knees as 
 he put this question, and his eyes twinkled knowingly. 
 
 " ' Well, yes — she might,' said the butcher slowly, con- 
 sidering that he was giving a decided affirmative. 'I don't 
 say contrary.' 
 
 "'I knew that very well,' said the farrier, throwing 
 himself backward again and speaking defiantly ; 'if /don't 
 know 'Sir. Lammeter's cows, I should like to know who 
 does — that's all. And as for the cow you've bought, 
 bargain or no bargain, I've been at the drenching of her — 
 conl radick me who will.' 
 
 "The farrier looked fierce, and the mild butcher's 
 conversational spirit was roused a little. 
 
 '"I'm not for contradicking no man,' he said ; 'I'm 
 for peace and quietness. Some are for cutting long ribs 
 — I'm for cutting 'em short, myself; but / don't quarrel 
 with 'em. All I say is, it's a lovely carkiss — and any-
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 175 
 
 body as was reasonable, it 'ud bring tears into their eyes 
 to look at it.' 
 
 " ' Well, it's the cow as I drenched, whatever it is,' 
 pursued the farrier angrily ; ' and it was Mr. Lammeter's 
 cow, else you told a lie when you said it was a red 
 Durham.' 
 
 " ' I tell no lies,' said the butcher, with the same mild 
 huskiness as before ; ' and I contradick none — not if a 
 man was to swear himself black : he's no meat o' mine, 
 nor none of my bargains. All I say is, it's a lovely 
 carkiss. And what I say I'll stick to ; but I'll quarrel 
 wi' no man.' 
 
 " ' No,' said the farrier, with bitter sarcasm, looking at 
 the company generally ; ' and p'rhaps you aren't pig- 
 headed ; and p'rhaps you didn't say the cow was a red 
 Durham ; and p'rhaps you didn't say she'd got a star on 
 her brow — stick to that, now you're at it.' 
 
 " ' Come, come,' said the landlord ; ' let the cow alone. 
 The truth lies atween you : you're both right and both 
 wrong, as I allays say. And as for the cow's being Mr. 
 Lammeter's, I say nothing to that ; but this I say, as the 
 Rainbow's the Rainbow.' " 
 
 But as soon as Mr. Macey, the parish clerk and 
 tailor, enters into the conversation, a faint shadow of 
 the intellectual phases of "modern thought" — just 
 sufficient to remind the reader of the form which 
 they take in the present day, without in any way 
 marring the truth of the picture — begins to fall on 
 it. Mr. Macey has fallen upon some appropriate 
 form of the difficulty of distinguishing between the 
 " subjective " and the " objective." He it is who tells 
 us that " there's allays two 'pinions ; there's the 
 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion
 
 176 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 other folks have on him. There'd be tAvo 'pinions 
 about a cracked bell if the bell could hear itself." 
 And farther, in discussing the error of a bride and 
 bridegroom who had interchanged their respective 
 responses in the marriage service, he throws up the 
 difficult question as to the relation between "sub- 
 stance" and "form." "Is it the meaning or the 
 words as makes folks fast in wedlock ? For the 
 parson meant right, and the bride and bridegroom 
 meant right. But then, when I come to think on it, 
 meanin' goes but a little way i' most things, for you 
 may mean to stick things together, and your glue 
 may be bad, and then where are you 1 And so I 
 says to my sen, 'It isn't the meanin', it's the glue.' 
 And I was worreted as if I'd got three bells to 
 pull at once. . . . But where's the use o' talking 1 ? 
 — you can't think what goes on in a 'cute man's 
 inside." 
 
 There is also in George Eliot abundance of what 
 always accompanies dramatic humour, — I mean a 
 great fertility in illustrative analogies which go to 
 the very heart of a one-sided view of any question. 
 Of this Mrs. Poyser's justly admired wit is the most 
 obvious example. When, for instance, she wishes to 
 impress upon Dinah that her village convert's piety 
 is an artificial result of her own personal influence, 
 and cannot outlast her absence a day, what can be 
 more felicitous than her simile ? " There's that Bessy 
 Cranage, she'll be flaunting in new finery three weeks 
 after you're gone, I'll be hound : she'll no more go on
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS' AUTHOR 177 
 
 in her new ways without you than a dog 'nil stand on 
 its hind legs when nobody's looking." 
 
 But while George Eliot's imagination is opulent 
 enough in its power of dramatic humour, in its capacity 
 for easily migrating from one moral latitude to another, 
 and fertile enough in illustration of any view, or any 
 character it once grasps, one sees in the third volume 
 of The Mill on the Floss, in the somewhat laborious 
 gossip of the Florentine society in Eomola, and con- 
 stantly in Middlemarch, that there is no proportionate 
 power of indirectly portraying character by the side- 
 lights and shadows of easy general conversation, — a 
 power which often distinguishes feminine novelists. 
 In the picture of life as it passed in St. Ogg's or 
 Middlemarch drawing-rooms, she falls so much below 
 herself that this, it is quite clear, is not her natural 
 field of art. With all her subtlety and intellectual 
 power, which are obviously great, and her humour, 
 which is greater, she falls far short of many who are 
 greatly her inferiors in genius in her attempt to 
 delineate character through this tranquil play of 
 educated social intercourse. Take up almost any 
 scene in Thackeray or Trollope, and you will find 
 a conversation in which, without any formal dis- 
 cussion, every character seems to be answering by 
 some slight modification in its own tone to the chords 
 struck by the others. This sort of play of character 
 is mainly a fruit of social elasticity. The type of 
 mind in the uncultivated and the philosophising 
 classes, whom George Eliot has made her chief study, 
 
 H N
 
 178 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 is much stiffer and more monotonous. The latter 
 change with the changes in their own mood, but do 
 not suffer the same subtle modifications of tone and 
 feeling from social influences which you perceive in 
 society. George Eliot has hut little skill in delineat- 
 ing this social phenomenon. Her imagination requires 
 to have a distinct conception of the mood or thought 
 to be seized before she can paint it There is nothing 
 of that easy modulation (grasped by instinct rather 
 than by imagination) in the conversation of her 
 educated people, which constitutes half its charm, 
 and which gives to the modern novelist so Avide a 
 field for indirect portraiture. Among Miss Austen's 
 scenes, for instance, George Eliot might perhaps have 
 written those between people of a totally different 
 social level, as, for example, the humorous scenes 
 between the Miss Steeles and the Miss Dashwoods in 
 Sense and Sensibility. But Middlemarch and Daniel 
 Deronda both show that the delicately-delineated play 
 of feeling between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy 
 in Pride mid Prejudice, or between Emma and Jane 
 Fairfax in Emma, would have been quite out of her 
 sphere. It is much more difficult for an Englishman 
 to criticise her very elaborate picture of the gossip of 
 Florentine market-places, but to me there seems a 
 constant ovcr-laboriousness even there. 
 
 Indeed, there are probably no two more different 
 types of genius than that which excels in indirect 
 and that which excels in direct delineation. And 
 George Eliot, like Sir Walter Scott, is always most
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 179 
 
 successful with the broadest and simplest modes in 
 which human character expresses itself. In short, 
 for masculine composure and range of sympathy, for 
 strength of grasp in dealing with universal human 
 feelings, for skill in habitually realising to us that 
 individual differences of character are engrafted on a 
 fundamental community of nature, she had no rival 
 among the literary artists of her day. And though 
 it was in part a logical consequence of these great 
 gifts, yet, as I have shown, it is exceptional enough 
 to deserve separate notice and adds indefinitely to 
 the charm they exercise, that she had a keen sense 
 of that infinite hunger of the spirit which nothing 
 human could appease, though an inadequate apprecia- 
 tion of the inward conditions, by the true fulfilment 
 of which that hunger is satisfied. 
 
 Adam Becle is always likely to remain George 
 Eliot's most popular work. It is a story of which 
 any English author, however great his name, could 
 not fail to have been proud. Everything about it 
 (if I except perhaps a touch of melodrama connected 
 with the execution scene) is at once simple and great, 
 and the plot is unfolded with singular simplicity, 
 purity, and power. Her genius delighted in depicting 
 the life of a little community ; and even Avhen she 
 had got a really deep interest at work on her village 
 stage, she was always anxious to remind herself and 
 her readers how the general population were doing 
 meanwhile in spite of it, — to picture them as they 
 were, quite unconscious of the unfolding plot and
 
 ISO GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 living out their ordinary lives in the ordinary way, 
 with but few half- curious glances at the slowly- 
 maturing crisis. 
 
 This tendency gave a great charm to a tale in 
 which the interest was really profound ; for it turned 
 the story from a mere narrative of individual perils, 
 trials, joys, and sorrows, into a vivid illustration of 
 the common human lot. There is a concentrated 
 sort of egotism about common novels even of a high 
 order of talent, which is one reason why the interest 
 in them is apt to die away in riper years. Sir Walter 
 Scott's novels are never iron-bound by this purely 
 individual kind of interest : to children they seem 
 far too discursive, too little limited to the particular 
 story ; but his tales retain among the mature the 
 popularity which they have in youth, in great measure 
 on this very account, that they range so pleasantly 
 beyond the borders of the immediate narrative, and 
 give us so wide a knowledge of the great common 
 life in the heart of which the individual actors of the 
 story are placed. But then, Sir "Walter Scott had 
 also an intense sympathy with action, an eager interest 
 in the unwinding of his own tales, which generally 
 at least prevented his discursiveness from passing the 
 boundaries of legitimate art. lie never failed to give 
 us a general background, a vista of tradition concern- 
 ing the times of which he writes; but he seldom failed 
 to make it a background to some much more vivid 
 interest which fills the foreground in his own mind. 
 
 George Eliot was to a great extent deficient
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 181 
 
 in this sympathy with action. She had obviously a 
 strong dislike to all those artificial enhancements of 
 interest which do not arise fairly out of the moral 
 constitution of the characters ; and this may have 
 induced her sometimes to overlook the artistic value 
 of a rapid current of action, of a certain shadow of 
 suspense, as instruments in the exhibition of the 
 deeper springs of human character. But if this 
 indifference to the machinery of romance was a defect, 
 it disappeared in Adam Beck, and was closely con- 
 nected with its greatest beauties. In almost any 
 other writer's hands the story of seduction which is 
 at the basis of Adam Bede would have been heightened 
 by innumerable factitious elements, and the various 
 threads of interest would have been multiplied and 
 interwoven at every point. George Eliot's natural 
 aversion to these adventitious effects induced her to 
 limit herself strictly to the simplest possible unfolding 
 of the tragedy ; and the consequence is, that the 
 story gains in moral spaciousness far more than it 
 could have lost in exciting elements. 
 
 Nor is this clearness of the moral space, this free 
 movement of personal character, a common character- 
 istic of modern novels. There are two common errors 
 into which even the greatest authors manage to fall, 
 and by which they produce a suffocating effect in their 
 pictures, and give the impression that their characters 
 are, as Thackeray calls them, "puppets," with the 
 strings pulled from behind. One error, the com- 
 monest in the greater modern artists, is to smother
 
 182 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 character in society, — to limit the whole scope of the 
 delineation to the little effects which can be produced 
 on a crowded canvas, where there is no room for even 
 one mind to be itself, or to be seen apart from the 
 rippling of social influences upon it. The other error, 
 the commonest in writers of the older school, is to 
 smother character in incident, to accumulate motives 
 and external excitements so thickly as to drown all 
 spontaneous life in the artificial tension of passive 
 emotion and involuntary impulse. One amongst 
 several reasons why Scott's heroes and heroines are 
 usually the poorest characters in his tales is, that 
 they are made the centres of all these circumstantial 
 interests — the puppets arbitrarily moved about by 
 these hidden strings. In neither case is there proper 
 space for the free play of personal life. Real men of 
 any force have a free sphere of their own, influenced, 
 but in no way determined, by the social or circum- 
 stantial influences which hem them round ; and to 
 encumber the principal characters with too great a 
 pressure of subsidiary influences, whether of one hind 
 or another, is almost inevitably to cramp the design 
 and destroy the freedom of the life portrayed. Now 
 there is nothing of all this in Adam Bede. There is 
 no such concentration of distracting influences as to 
 bewilder any of the characters out of their natural 
 responsibility for themselves and their own actions. 
 No doubt a rural society, a certain community of life, 
 is depicted ; but while this is kept constantly present 
 to one's mind by the fidelity with which all the
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 183 
 
 mutual relations of the village society are impressed 
 on the language and bearing of the characters deline- 
 ated, yet each character stands out distinct and clear, 
 holding its own destiny in its own power. This gives 
 dignity, freedom, and simplicity to the whole, and 
 adds a kind of solemnity to the movement of the 
 principal action in the story, which, had it been com- 
 plicated by any extraneous or chance elements, must 
 have produced a less profound and single effect on 
 the imagination. 
 
 Even in Adam Bede there is an occasional loose- 
 ness in the texture of the narrative which indicates 
 the characteristic tendency of the author to sketch-in 
 freely all her imagination has grasped, without refer- 
 ence to unity of design ; but the intrinsic interest of 
 the plot so far checks this tendency as to render it 
 visible only when previously suggested by her other 
 works. One sees it mainly in this, that some of the 
 principal figures, quite essential to the whole effect 
 of the tale, stand too much outside the thread of the 
 story, and take no part in its evolution. In Goethe's 
 novels this fault reaches its climax ; for no one has 
 any reason to suppose, merely because a figure appears 
 there, and is very carefully painted in, that it is to 
 be connected in any way with the unwinding of the 
 tale. George Eliot is not chargeable with any fault 
 so great as this ; but, apart from any disposition to 
 uphold mere technical or formal rules of art, there is 
 a greater vividness of impression, a more concentrated 
 effect produced on the mind, when the course of the
 
 184 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 narrative works in conjunction with the power of the 
 artist to engrave the picture upon the memory, than 
 when they work apart. Seth Bede, for instance, one 
 of the best conceptions in the story, is almost entirely 
 a spectator of its course ; one might remember the 
 whole essence of the plot, and almost forget his 
 existence, — and yet he is not a mere side-sketch, like 
 Bartle Massey or Mr. Craig, for his character is 
 essential to bring out in full relief the characters of 
 Adam and of Dinah. Even in this tale, then, the 
 group of characters painted is a far more perfect 
 work of art than the story, taken as a whole, which 
 includes them ; for only one or two are strongly 
 impressed on the mind by virtue of their close con- 
 nection with the action of the narrative ; the images 
 of the remainder, graphically as they are rendered, 
 are conveyed to the reader mainly through dialogue 
 and description. 
 
 But, this once admitted, there is no further quali- 
 fication to make in one's admiration of the art of the 
 story. The group of characters, conceived in them- 
 selves, and without reference to the narrative, seems 
 to me perfect, — a rural cartoon of marvellous sim- 
 plicity, and yet stately in its beauty. The strong- 
 headed, manly, sharp-tempered, secular carpenter, 
 with his energetic satisfaction in work, his impatience 
 of dreamers, and his early passion for Hetty's earthly 
 loveliness, — the tender-hearted, mystic-minded Seth, 
 who so readily unlooses his hold of his one dream of 
 happiness, — the pretty, vain, little, pleasure -loving
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 185 
 
 dairymaid, with her inarticulate love of luxury and 
 dread of shame, so shallow that she cannot even feel 
 a passing anticipation of the fate before her, but 
 flutters into it like a moth into the candle, — the 
 spiritual, transparent-minded, meditative, yet clear- 
 sighted Wesleyan factory-girl, whose delicate sensi- 
 tiveness to the inward condition and wants of others 
 never ruffles her own distinct apprehension of the 
 personal duty before her, — the good-natured, self- 
 deceiving, weak young squire, with his patronising 
 generosity, and his disposition to comfort himself, in 
 his self-reproach, with the good opinion of those who 
 are totally ignorant of his grounds for self-reproach, 
 — -arid the noble, easy -minded, tolerant rector who 
 feels so little impulse to exert moral influence over 
 others that the Wesleyan factory-girl is a problem to 
 him, and who, even where he has natural authority, 
 rather shrinks from the intrusion necessary to exert 
 it, — with the many other vividly-painted figures more 
 or less in the background, — the quick-witted, fretful 
 Lisbeth, with her excessive fondness for the son she 
 fears, and her half-contempt for the son whose reli- 
 giousness she regards as an insurance to the family, — 
 the more quick-witted and more audacious farmer's 
 wife, whose reverence for the piety of her niece is 
 so strongly mixed with dislike of eccentricity and 
 dissent ; — these, with the slighter but equally true 
 outlines with which the picture is filled up, form one 
 of the truest and most typical groups of English life 
 I have ever seen delineated.
 
 186 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 Moreover, the characters themselves are not more 
 perfectly handled than the scene. It is impossible to 
 forget where we are for a moment. The hum of 
 village-life is heard throughout ; the paramount influ- 
 ence of the manor-house, the substantial importance 
 of the well-to-do farmer, the rector's authority in the 
 parish, — are all conveyed without any effort through 
 the force with which the author realises her scenes ; 
 and frequently we have a picture of idyllic beauty — 
 as where Adam Bede finds Hetty picking currants in 
 the garden — that reminds us of the soft poetic touch 
 with which Goethe delineated a situation that had 
 sunk deep into his mind. 
 
 The greatest effort and greatest success of the book 
 consist, however, in the wonderful power of the con- 
 trast between Hetty and Dinah. From the first intro- 
 duction of Dinah preaching to the crowd on the village 
 green, and winning her little success over the vain 
 heart of the blacksmith's daughter, and the first 
 appearance of Hetty tossing her butter in the dairy, 
 full of conscious delight at her little success in riveting 
 Captain Donnithorne's admiration, the interest centres 
 in these two figures. What common measure of 
 human nature can apply to them both 1 Near as 
 they are in position, and equal in attractions, and 
 belonging alike to the same half-educated class, they 
 represent evidently the highest and lowest grade in 
 the scale of spiritual nature, and the thoughts that 
 fill the mind of the one do not even rouse the faintest 
 echo in the nature of the other. The art of the con-
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 187 
 
 trast is the greater that it is never forced on our 
 attention, and never exaggerated. Yet from the first 
 it is growing upon us. Dinah's gentle rejection of 
 the one brother whom she cannot love opens the tale, 
 while Hetty's conduct to the other whom she cannot 
 love forms its climax of interest. The interest is the 
 deeper and truer that it is not the commonplace 
 antithesis between right and wrong, but between the 
 finest and most delicate of spiritual consciences, and 
 that absolute inaccessibility to moral or spiritual 
 thought which marks a soft, shallow, pleasure-loving 
 nature preoccupied with self-love. The moral material 
 of which the two girls are made seems chargeable 
 with the difference rather than any conduct of their 
 own. Can any meeting-point be found between the 
 two ? or, if not, any experience, however strange, 
 which shall bridge the apparently impassable gulf ? 
 This is in great measure the theme of the story ; and 
 the scene in which it is first fully realised — where 
 Dinah and Hetty are pictured in the adjoining bed- 
 rooms, each in their separate world — is one of the 
 most powerful pieces of imaginative writing which 
 the present generation has produced. I can but 
 extract the closing passage : — 
 
 " What a strange contrast the two figures made ! Visible 
 enough in that mingled twilight and moonlight. Hetty, 
 her cheeks flushed and her eyes glistening from her ima- 
 ginary drama, her beautiful neck and arms bare, her hair 
 hanging in a curly tangle down her back, and the baubles 
 in her ears. Dinah, covered with her long white dress,
 
 188 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 her pale face full of subdued emotion, almost like a lovely 
 corpse into which the soul has returned charged with 
 sublimer secrets and a sublimer love. They were nearly 
 of the same height ; Dinah evidently a little the taller as 
 she put her arm round Hetty's waist, and kissed her fore- 
 head. 
 
 " ' I knew you were not in bed, my dear,' she said, in 
 her sweet clear voice, which was irritating to Hetty, 
 mingling with her own peevish vexation like music with 
 jangling chains, ' for I heard you moving ; and I longed 
 to speak to you again to-night, for it is the last but one 
 that I shall be here, and we don't know what may happen 
 to-morrow to keep us apart. Shall I sit down with you 
 while you do up your hair V — ' yes,' said Hetty, hastily 
 turning round and reaching the second chair in the room, 
 glad that Dinah looked as if she did not notice her ear- 
 rings. 
 
 " Dinah sat down, and Hetty began to brush together 
 her hair before twisting it up, doing it with that air of 
 excessive indifference which belongs to confused self- 
 consciousness. But the expression of Dinah's eyes gradu- 
 ally relieved her ; they seemed unobservant of all details. 
 ' Dear Hetty,' she said, ' it has been borne in upon my 
 mind to-night that you may some day be in trouble — 
 trouble is appointed for us all here below, and there comes 
 a time when we need more comfort and help than the 
 things of this life can give. I want to tell you that if 
 ever you are in trouble and need a friend that will always 
 feel for you and love you, you have got that friend in 
 Dinah Morris at Snowfield ; and if you come to her, or 
 send for her, she'll never forget this night, and the words 
 she is speaking to you now. Will you remember it, 
 llrttyl' — 'Yes,' said Hetty, rather frightened. 'But why 
 should you think I shall be in trouble? Do you know 
 of anything V Hetty had seated herself as she tied on her 
 cap, ami now Dinah leaned forwards and took her hands 
 as she answered,
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 189 
 
 " ' Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life : 
 we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for 
 us to have, and then we go sorrowing ; the people we love 
 are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because 
 they are not with us ; sickness comes, and we faint under 
 the burden of our feeble bodies ; we go astray and do 
 wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow- 
 men. There is no man or woman born into this world 
 to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel 
 that some of them must happen to you ; and I desire for 
 you, that while you are young you should seek for strength 
 from your Heavenly Father, that you may have a support 
 which will not fail you in the evil day.' 
 
 " Dinah paused and released Hetty's hands, that she 
 might not hinder her. Hetty sat quite still : she felt no 
 response within herself to Dinah's anxious affection ; but 
 Dinah's words, uttered with solemn, pathetic distinctness, 
 affected her with a chill fear. Her flush had died away 
 almost to paleness ; she had the timidity of a luxurious 
 pleasure-seeking nature, which shrinks from the hint of 
 pain. Dinah saw the effect, and her tender anxious plead- 
 ing became the more earnest, till Hetty, full of a vague 
 fear that something evil was sometime to befall her, began 
 to cry. . . . Dinah had never seen Hetty affected in this 
 way before, and with her usual benignant hopefulness, she 
 trusted it was the stirring of a divine impulse. She kissed 
 the sobbing thing, and began to cry with her for grateful 
 joy. But Hetty was simply in that excitable state of mind 
 in which there is no calculating what turn the feelings 
 may take from one moment to another, and for the first 
 time she became irritated under Dinah's caress. She 
 pushed her away impatiently, and said with a childish 
 sobbing voice, ' Don't talk to me so, Dinah. Why do you 
 come to frighten me ? I've never done anything to you. 
 Why can't you let me be V 
 
 " Poor Dinah felt a pang. She was too wise to persist, 
 and only said mildly, ' Yes, my dear, you're tired ; I won't
 
 190 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 hinder you any longer. Make haste and get into hed. 
 Good-night.' She went out of the room almost as quietly 
 and quickly as if she had heen a ghost ; but once by the 
 side of her own bed she threw herself on her knees, and 
 poured out in deep silence all the passionate pity that 
 filled her heart. As for Hetty, she was soon in the wood 
 again — her waking dreams being merged in a sleeping 
 life scarcely more fragmentary and confused." 
 
 This is powerful, and it seems scarcely possible 
 that the conception of a problem so deep should be 
 worked out with any adequate success ; and yet the 
 development is as powerful as the commencement, 
 and the solution most powerful of all. To depict the 
 sufferings of a sensitive but frail nature, — the remorse 
 of guilt, the despair of shame, — this would be com- 
 paratively easy to an imagination so powerful as 
 George Eliot's. But to deal with a nature too 
 shallow for any real sense of guilt, too easily numbed 
 by pain for clear thought at all, too cowardly for 
 despair, and to show how, by the slow, dull pressure 
 of mingled shame and hardship, momentarily broken 
 by a new instinct, and then renewed after a more 
 conscious act of guilt, a dim sense of spiritual things 
 is literally wrung out of this sterile little pleasure- 
 loving life, till under Dinah's kindly influence it 
 becomes a distinct cry for help, — this is a task as 
 great as any which an imaginative writer below the 
 rank of a great poet ever attempted. Observe with 
 what flexibility the author contracts her own powerful 
 imagination within the limits of Hetty's nature, and 
 delineates the growing wretchedness and numbness
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 191 
 
 of her vacant mind during the futile journey in search 
 of Captain Donnithorne, the helpless attempt to de- 
 stroy herself, and the violent shrinking of her whole 
 being from the brink of death. 
 
 "The horror of this cold, and darkness, and solitude — out 
 of all human reach — became greater every long minute : it 
 was almost as if she were dead already, and knew that she 
 was dead and longed to get back to life again. But no : 
 she was alive still ; she had not taken the dreadful leap. 
 She felt a strange contradictory wretchedness and exul- 
 tation ; wretchedness, that she did not dare to face death ; 
 exultation, that she was still in life — that she might yet 
 know light and warmth again. She walked backwards 
 and forwards to warm herself, beginning to discern some- 
 thing of the objects around her, as her eyes became accus- 
 tomed to the night : the darker line of the hedge, the 
 rapid motion of some living creature — perhaps a field- 
 mouse — rushing across the grass. She no longer felt as 
 if the darkness hedged her in : she thought she conld 
 walk back across the field, and get over the stile ; and 
 then, in the very next field, she thought she remembered 
 there was a hovel of furze near a sheepfold. . . . 
 
 " She had found the shelter : she groped her way, 
 touching the prickly gorse, to the door, and pushed it 
 open. It was an ill-smelling close place, but warm, and 
 there was straw on the ground : Hetty sank down on the 
 straw with a sense of escape. Tears came — she had never 
 shed tears before since she left Windsor — tears and sobs 
 of hysterical joy that she had still hold of life, that she 
 was still on the familiar earth, with the sheep near her. 
 The very consciousness of her own limbs was a delight 
 to her : she turned tip her sleeves, and kissed her arms 
 with the j>assionate love of life." 
 
 Seldom has any human experience been more power-
 
 192 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 fully painted, and yet the confession in prison which 
 Dinah at last wins from her is still more powerful. 
 In short, the whole thread of inward history which 
 unites the first interview between them in Hetty's 
 bedroom with the last in her cell is recounted with a 
 power quite unsurpassed in fiction. With no more 
 promising instrument to work upon than the most 
 sterile and frivolous of characters, George Eliot has 
 brought forth tones which are far more pathetic than 
 could have been extorted from a nobler type of suffer- 
 ing and penitence, for they seem to attest more 
 solemnly the capacities of all men — of man. The 
 spiritual and the earthly natures find at last a single 
 meeting-point in the infantine cry for divine mercy 
 which poor little Hetty puts forth to Dinah rather 
 than to God. How strange and painful it is to realise 
 that the great author who painted this for us did not 
 herself believe in the divine mercy which she makes 
 Dinah proclaim ! 
 
 The artistic conditions under which George Eliot 
 works, are, when she chooses, singularly favourable to 
 the exhibition of the only kind of "moral" which a 
 genuine artist should admit. No one now ever thinks 
 of assuming that a writer of fiction lies under any 
 obligation to dispose of his characters exactly as he 
 would perhaps feel inclined to do, if he could deter- 
 mine for them the circumstances of a real instead of 
 an imaginary life. It was a quaint idea of the last 
 generation to suppose that the moral tendency of a 
 tale lay, not in discriminating evil and good, but in
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 193 
 
 the zeal which induced the novelist to provide, before 
 the end of the third volume, for plucking up and 
 burning the tares. But though we have got over 
 that notion, our modern satirists are leading us into 
 the opposite extreme, and trying to convince us that 
 even discrimination itself, in such deep matters, is 
 nearly impossible. The author of The Mill on the 
 Floss is hardly exempt from this tendency ; but in 
 Adam Bede it is not discernible. 
 
 The only moral in a fictitious story which can 
 properly be demanded of writers of genius is, not to 
 shape their tale this way or that, which they may 
 justly decline to do on artistic grounds, but to 
 discriminate clearly the relative nobility of the char- 
 acters they do conceive ; in other words, to give us 
 light enough in their pictures to let it be clearly seen 
 where the shadows are intended to lie. An artist 
 who leaves it doubtful whether he recognises the 
 distinction between good and evil at all, or who 
 detects in all his characters so much evil that the 
 readers' sympathies must either be entirely passive 
 or side with what is evil, is blind to artistic as well as 
 moral laws. To banish confusion from a picture is 
 the first duty of the artist ; and confusion must exist 
 where those lines which are the most essential of all 
 for determining the configuration of human character 
 are invisible or indistinctly drawn. Moreover, I 
 think it may be said, that in painting human nature 
 an artist is bound to give due weight to the motives 
 which would claim authority over him in other acts 
 
 H
 
 194 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 of his life ; and as he would be bound at any time 
 and in any place to do anything in his power to 
 make clear the relation between good and evil, the 
 same motive ought to induce him never to omit in 
 his drawing to put in a light or a shadow which 
 would add to the moral truthfulness of the picture. 
 
 But this conceded, an artist must still work accord- 
 ing to the conditions of his own genius, and where 
 that genius leads him only to give lively sketches, 
 such as Miss Austen's for example, of the social 
 externals of character, and barely to indicate the 
 interior forces which determine its form and growth, 
 it is unreasonable to expect more than a very super- 
 ficial moral. Those stories alone can have deep 
 morals which are concerned with the deepest moral 
 phenomena; but where this is so they must show 
 them in their true light. Adam Bede may be said 
 to produce in this sense a deeper and nobler moral 
 impression than any other English story of our day. 
 It exhibits in close mutual relations characters of 
 very various degrees of moral depth. It teaches us 
 to discriminate truly between them. It has for its 
 centre-piece one singularly beautiful and bright char- 
 acter which illuminates the whole narrative, and so 
 aids us to realise the good and the evil in all the 
 others ; and hence every conscience as well as every 
 imagination gains fresh force and distincter vision 
 from its perusal. 
 
 The Mill on the Floss is in every way inferior, in 
 some respects painfully inferior, to Adam Bede. It is
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 195 
 
 a masterly fragment of fictitious biography in two 
 volumes, followed by a second-rate one-volume novel, 
 — the three connected into a single whole by very 
 inadequate links. The deeper characters in the tale 
 are not nearly so deep as those in Adam Bede ; and 
 the shallower characters do not serve in the same 
 way to bring into relief the nobler characteristics of 
 the deeper. The moral foundations of the story are 
 almost entirely laid on the same dreary level. Moral 
 and spiritual perspective there is almost none. The 
 one character which is intended to give depth to and 
 light up the tale, at one time threatens to go out in 
 smoke ; and the shadows are anything but clear. 
 There is occasional confusion, both artistic and moral, 
 some exaggeration, and, I think, in the mere physio- 
 logical attraction felt by the heroine for Stephen 
 Guest, and all but yielded to, there is a serious 
 artistic and moral blot. Yet The Mill on the Floss is 
 a book of great genius. Its overflowing humour 
 would alone class its author high among the humorists, 
 and there are some sketches in it of English country 
 life which have all the vivacity and not a little of the 
 power of Sir Walter Scott's best works. The proud, 
 warm-hearted, not very clear-headed miller, whose 
 heart is broken by bankruptcy, and whose spirit is 
 consumed with the thirst for revenge, is a character 
 to live in the imagination. Yet The Mill on the Floss 
 is so inferior in art to George Eliot's really greatest 
 works that I may pass on to speak of the tale 
 Avhich, though not her greatest, certainly contains
 
 196 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 some of her subtlest intellectual studies — I mean 
 Eomola. 
 
 George Eliot's drawings, as I have before intimated, 
 all require a certain space, like Kaffael's cartoons, and 
 are not of that kind which produce their effect by the 
 reiteration of scenes each complete in itself. You 
 have to unroll a large surface of the picture before 
 even the smallest unit of its effect is attained. And 
 this is far more true of JRomola than of her English 
 tales. In the latter, the constant and striking de- 
 lineation of social features with which we are all 
 familiar, satisfies the mind in the detail almost as 
 much as in the complete whole. This cannot be so 
 when even greater power is shown in mastering the 
 life of a foreign nation in a past age. We do not 
 care about the light Florentine buzz with which so 
 great a part of the first volume is filled. Its allusions 
 are half riddles, and its liveliness a blank to us. 
 Small local colours depend for their charm on the 
 familiarity of small local knowledge. Then, again, 
 George Eliot is much greater as an imaginative painter 
 of character than as an imaginative painter of action, 
 and naturally much more inclined for the one than 
 the other. What her characters do is always subordi- 
 nate with her to what they are. This is the highest 
 artistic power, but it carries its inconveniences with 
 it. She docs not carry her readers away, as it is 
 called ; it is generally easy to stop reading her ; she 
 satisfies you for the moment, and does not make you 
 look forward to the end. She has a touch of Sir
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 197 
 
 Walter Scott's power to revivify the past, but not 
 Scott's force in making you plunge into it with as 
 headlong an interest as into the present. For this 
 she compensates by a deeper and wider intellectual 
 grasp ; but still it is easy enough to understand why 
 half-developed characters, sketched in with unfamiliar 
 local colours on a background of history that has long 
 melted away, should look strange and uninviting, 
 especially when not carried off by any exciting- 
 current of events, to the ordinary reader's eye. It 
 is marvellous that, in spite of these disadvantages, 
 the wide and calm imaginative power of the writer 
 should have produced a work which is likely to be 
 permanently celebrated in English literature — in 
 which Italy and England may feel a common pride. 
 
 The great artistic purpose of the story is to trace 
 out the conflict between liberal culture and a most 
 passionate form of Christian faith in that strange era 
 (which has so many points of resemblance with the 
 present), when the two in their most characteristic 
 forms struggled for pre-eminence over Florentines 
 who had been educated into the half-pedantic and 
 half-idealistic scholarship of Lorenzo de Medici, who 
 faintly shared the new scientific impulses of the age 
 of Columbus and Copernicus, and whose hearts and 
 consciences were stirred by the preaching, political as 
 well as spiritual, of one of the very greatest as well as 
 earliest of the reformers, the Dominican friar Savona- 
 rola. No period could be found when mingling faith 
 and culture effervesced with more curious results. In
 
 198 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 some great and noble minds the new learning, clear- 
 ing away the petty rubbish of mediaeval superstition, 
 and revealing the severe simplicities of the great age 
 of Greece, grew into a feeling that supplied all the 
 stimulus of fever, if not the rest of faith, and of these 
 the author has drawn a very fine picture in the blind 
 Florentine scholar, Romola's father, Bardo, who, with 
 a restless fire in his heart, " hung over the books and 
 lived with the shadows" all his life. Nothing is 
 more striking and masterly in the story than the 
 subtle skill with which the dominant influence of this 
 scholarship over the imagination of the elder genera- 
 tion of that time — the generation which saw the first 
 revival of learning — is delineated in the pictures of 
 Bardo and Baldassarre. In the former you get some- 
 thing like a glimpse of the stately passion for learning, 
 which, in a later age (though England was then 
 a good deal behind Italy), took so vital a hold of the 
 intellect of Milton, and overlaid his powerful imagina- 
 tion with all its rich fretwork of elaborate classical 
 allusion. In the latter character, Baldassarre, the 
 same impression is conveyed in a still more subtle 
 and striking form, because by painting the intermittent 
 flashes of intellectual power in a scholar's failing 
 memory, and its alternations with an almost animal 
 passion of revenge, we gain not only a more distinct 
 knowledge of the relative value in which scholarship 
 was there and then held as compared with other 
 human attainments, but a novel sense of sympathy, 
 which, in an age of diffused culture like this, it is not
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 199 
 
 very easy to attain, with the extravagance, as we 
 should now think it, of the value attached to the 
 scholar's powers. There are few passages of subtler 
 literary grandeur in English romance than that which 
 paints the electrifying effect of a thrill of vindictive 
 passion on Baldassarre's paralysed memory in recal- 
 ling once more his full command of Greek learning, 
 and the sense of power which thus returned to him : — 
 
 " He leaned to take up the fragments of the dagger ; 
 then he turned towards the book which lay open at his 
 side. It was a fine large manuscript, an old volume of 
 Pausanias. The moonlight was upon it, and he could see 
 the large letters at the head of the page : 
 
 ME22HNIKA. KB'. 
 
 In old days he had known Pausanias familiarly • yet an 
 hour or two ago he had been looking hopelessly at that 
 page, and it had suggested no more meaning to him than 
 if the letters had been black weather-marks on a wall ; 
 but at this moment they were once more the magic signs 
 that conjure up a world. That moonbeam falling on the 
 letters had raised Messenia before him, and its struggle 
 against the Spartan oppression. He snatched up the 
 book, but the light was too pale for him to read further 
 by. No matter ; he knew that chapter ; he read inwardly. 
 He saw the stoning of the traitor Aristocrates — stoned by 
 a whole people, who cast him out from their borders to 
 lie unburied, and set up a pillar with verses upon it, 
 telling how Time had brought home justice to the unjust. 
 The words arose within him, and stirred innumerable 
 vibrations of memory. He forgot that he was old ; lie 
 could almost have shouted. The light was come again, 
 mother of knowledge and joy ! In that exultation his 
 limbs recovered their strength : he started up with his
 
 200 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 broken dagger and book, and went out under the broad 
 moonlight. It was a nipping frosty air, but Baldassarre 
 could feel no chill — he only felt the glow of conscious 
 power. He walked about and paused on all the open spots 
 of that high ground, and looked down on the domed and 
 towered city, sleeping darkly under its sleeping guardians, 
 the mountains ; on the pale gleam of the river ; on the 
 valley vanishing towards the peaks of snow ; and felt him- 
 self master of them all. That sense of mental empire, 
 which belongs to us all in moments of exceptional clear- 
 ness, was intensified for him by the long days and nights in 
 which memory had been little more than the consciousness 
 of something gone. That city, which had been a weary 
 labyrinth, was material that he could subdue to his 
 purposes now : his mind glanced through its affairs with 
 flashing conjecture ; he was once more a man who knew 
 cities, whose sense of vision was instructed with large 
 experience, and who felt the keen delight of holding all 
 things in the grasp of language. Names ! Images ! — his 
 mind rushed through its wealth without pausing, like one 
 who enters on a great inheritance." 
 
 This passage, taken with those which lead up to 
 it, whether they refer to Bardo or Baldassarre, has 
 the effect of reproducing one great feature in the age 
 of the revival of learning with the finest effect — that 
 sense of large human power which the mastery over 
 a great ancient language, itself the key to a magnifi- 
 cent literature, gave, and which made scholarship 
 then a passion, while with us it has almost relapsed 
 into an antiquarian dry-as-dust pursuit. "We realise 
 again, in reading about Bardo and Baldassarre, how, 
 for those times, the first sentence of St. John, "In 
 the beginning was the Word," had regained all its
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 201 
 
 force — to the exclusion, jDerhaps, of the further asser- 
 tion that the Word was with God and was God. 
 Man's sense of the great power of language, of which 
 we have now so little, which, indeed, it is the tendency 
 of the present day to depreciate, was in that day full 
 of a new vigour; and to some extent contested with the 
 mysteries of the Gospel the control of great men's souls. 
 This is the picture which Romola makes so living 
 for us. We find here the strife between the keen 
 definite knowledge of the reviving Greek learning, and 
 the visionary mysticism of the reviving Dominican 
 piety. We find a younger generation, represented 
 by Romola, and Dino, and Tito, that has inherited 
 this scholarship, and finds it wholly inadequate for 
 its wants, looking upon that almost as dry bones, 
 which the older generation felt to be stimulating 
 nourishment, and either turning from it, like Dino, 
 to the rapture of mystical asceticism, or using it, like 
 Tito, as a useful sharp-edged tool in the battle of 
 Florentine politics, or trying, like Romola, to turn it 
 to its true purpose, viz. that of clarifying and sifting 
 the false from the true elements in the great faith 
 presented to her conscience by Savonarola. The 
 pride of laborious far-seeing scholarship, gazing with 
 clear, scornful eyes at the inarticulate convulsive 
 ecstasies of faith, — all the powers of language rebel- 
 ling passionately, as it were, against the deep and 
 fervent passions which transcend the containing 
 powers of language, and boil over its edges, in 
 religious, or even in the opposite animal raptures, —
 
 202 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 this is a picture wonderfully painted, and which 
 produces all the more impression, that the minute 
 vivid ripple of the light gossip of the Florentine 
 market-place gives a ground-tone to the book. 
 
 This fundamental conflict between the Greek 
 scholarship and the mystical Christian faith which 
 runs through the book is made even more striking 
 by the treacherous character of the man who repre- 
 sents the Greek culture cut adrift from all vestige of 
 moral or religious faith. The fine gradations of 
 social dissimulation so characteristic of Florence in 
 the Medicean era, ranging from the single politic 
 insincerity of Savonarola, which raises so grand a 
 struggle in his mind, down to the easy-sliding treach- 
 ery of Tito, bring up before us in another shape the 
 characteristic contrasts' of that day between that 
 earnest spirit which revived the old culture because 
 it was truer than the degraded current superstitions, 
 — that pliant worldliness which adopted and adapted 
 itself to it, because it was an instrument of finer edge 
 and wider utility, — and lastly, that fervent faith which 
 despised it as substituting the study of a dead past 
 for the great conflict of a living present. Tito's 
 smooth dissimulation is all the more striking a pic- 
 ture, because it comes out as the natural fruit of a 
 mind almost incapable of either strong conviction or 
 strong personal fidelity, gliding about in an age when 
 strong convictions were coming to the birth, and 
 among a race barely redeemed from a spirit of poli- 
 tical falsehood (which was just going to be called
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 203 
 
 Machiavellian) by a proud sense of loyalty to personal 
 and party ties. 
 
 Tito is pictured, as the Greeks of that time per- 
 haps deserved to he pictured, not as originally false, 
 hut as naturally pleasure-loving, and swerving aside 
 before every unpleasant obstacle in the straight path, 
 at the instance of a quick intelligence and a keen 
 dislike both to personal collisions and to personal 
 sacrifices. His character is, to use a mathematical 
 term, the osculating curve which touches that of each 
 of the others at the surface, and nowhere else — 
 Savonarola's at the point of his external political 
 policy, fiomola's in her love of beauty and hatred of 
 the turbid exhalations of visionary excitement, and 
 the scholarly enthusiasm of Bardo only in the apt 
 classical knowledge, by no means in the ardour of 
 his love for it. On Tito's very first entrance to the 
 stage the Florentine artist of the story, Piero di 
 Cosimo, is eager to paint him as a Sinon, not that 
 there is treachery in his face, but that there is in it 
 the softness and suppleness, and gliding ease of move- 
 ment, and nimbleness of intellect, which, in a time of 
 political passion, seem likely to lead to treachery, 
 because, first, they qualify, both intellectually and 
 morally, for the traitor's part, and next, they serve 
 to mask his play. From this scene, when the fatal 
 ease of the man's manner is first suggested, to the 
 noble scene at the conclusion, in which he sounds, 
 and sounds successfully, Savonarola's too eager states- 
 manship, with intent to betray him to the Duke of
 
 204 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 Milan and the Pope, you see Tito's character grow 
 into the foulest treachery, simply from its consistent 
 desire to compass every pleasant end which suggests 
 itself to him as feasible, without openly facing, if he 
 can help it, any one's severe displeasure. 
 
 Nor is anything drawn more finely than the 
 peculiar species of fear which is an essential part of 
 this character, — a fear which, in the last resort, spurs 
 the keen intellect of the man into a certain desperate 
 energy, but which usually remains too cowardly even 
 to understand itself, and lurks on in the character as 
 a kind of unconscious resentment against those who 
 wring from him the exercise of such an energy. A 
 character essentially treacherous only because it is full 
 of soft fluid selfishness is one of the most difficult to 
 paint. But whether when locking up the crucifix, 
 which Komola received from her dying brother's 
 hands, in the little temple crowned with the figures 
 of Ariadne and Bacchus, and fondly calling her 
 " Regina mia," which somehow conveys that he less 
 loves the woman than passionately admires her, — or 
 buying his "garment of fear," the coat of light chain 
 armour, from the armour- smith, — or faithlessly 
 deceiving the poor little contadina Tessa by the 
 mock marriage at the carnival, — or shrinking before 
 Iiomola's indignation into that frigid tone of empty 
 affectionateness which is the clearest sign of a con- 
 tracted heart, — or interpreting the Latin proclamation 
 to the people with a veil of good-nature over his 
 treacherous purpose, — or crowned in the feast at the
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 205 
 
 Rucellai Gardens, and paling suddenly beneath Bal- 
 dassarre's vindictive glance, — or petting Tessa and 
 her children in his hiding-place on the hill, — the 
 same wonderful power is maintained throughout, of 
 stamping on our imagination with the full force of a 
 master hand a character which seems naturally too 
 fluent for the artist's purpose. There is not a more 
 masterly piece of painting in English romance than 
 this figure of Tito. 
 
 Of Romola it is less easy to say whether one is 
 satisfied or not. The suspicion of hardness of which 
 one is conscious as somewhat detracting from her 
 power, the skill with which the author has prepared 
 us for a mental struggle exactly similar, even in its 
 minutest features, to what might occur to-day between 
 the claims of a sublime faith appealing to the con- 
 science, and a distaste for miracle or vision in its 
 prophet, the striking contrast with Tessa, the ignor- 
 ant "pretty little pigeon," who thinks every one who 
 is kind to her a saint, — all render it a little difficult 
 to say whether we know her intimately, or whether 
 we have only a very artistic idea of what she is not, 
 and what she is only by inference and contrast. My 
 own feeling is that Romola is the least perfect figure 
 in the book, — that she is a shade more modernised 
 than the others, several shades less individual, and, 
 after all, though the pivot of her character turns, as it 
 were, on faith, that she does not distinctly show any 
 faith except that which George Eliot owned herself, 
 the faith in rigid honour, in human pity, and partially
 
 206 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 also in Savonarola's personal greatness and power. I 
 do not say the character is not natural, — I only say it 
 is half-revealed and more suggested than fully painted, 
 though these harder feminine characters always seem 
 to ask to be outlined more strongly than any others. 
 The portrait of Savonarola produces a greater 
 effect on the first reading than it does on the memory 
 and judgment. It is impressive, but it cannot com- 
 pare for a moment with Scott's great historical por- 
 traits. It does not live in the memory. We are 
 intended to see a large human-hearted Italian Luther, 
 narrower than Luther on some sides, owing to the 
 thin Medicean culture against which he led the 
 reaction, but with a far more statesmanlike and 
 political purpose, and far more fiery imagination, — 
 the same, in fact, whom Mr. Maurice has intellectually 
 delineated with so much delicate fidelity in his history 
 of modern philosophy, and who paints himself in 
 almost everything he wrote, but who yet, even in 
 this book, is hardly so presented as to live before us. 
 Cut there are passages of great power. Nothing can 
 be finer and more impressive — nothing more difficult 
 to make fine and impressive — than Savonarola's ex- 
 hortation to Eomola to return to the home from 
 which she was flying. You see in it the man's 
 profound trust in God, as the author of all human 
 ties and of all social and political tics, breaking 
 through the fetters of his Dominican order, and 
 asserting the divine order in Nature rather than the 
 divine order out of Nature. This, however, is not
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 207 
 
 the most characteristic side of the study. George 
 Eliot was too sceptical at heart to desire to paint a 
 finer picture of the believer than of the half-believer. 
 And she threw her whole mind into the profoundly 
 pathetic scene in which Savonarola, having in the 
 fervour of his eloquence committed God to working 
 him a miracle at the right moment, is brought to 
 book both by his enemies and friends on the question 
 of the trial by fire, and kneels in prayer that in fact 
 refuses to be prayer, but rises into a political debate 
 within himself as to the policy of seeming to take 
 a step which he knows he must somehow evade. 
 " While his lips were uttering audibly ' cor mundum 
 crea in me, 7 his mind was still filled with the images 
 of the snare his enemies had prepared for him, still 
 busy with the arguments by which he could justify 
 himself against their taunts and accusations." The 
 scene is too long to snatch from the context, and is, 
 indeed, closely bound up with the picture of the 
 encounter with Tito which follows. George Eliot 
 rejected apparently the authenticity of the last great 
 words attributed to Savonarola as he is dying on the 
 scaffold, which Mr. Maurice accepts. " The voice of 
 the Papal emissary," says the historian of philosophy, 
 " was heard proclaiming that Savonarola was cut off 
 from the Church militant and triumphant. Another 
 voice was heard saying, 'No, not from the Church 
 triumphant, they cannot shut me out of that.' ' It 
 is not surprising that she rejected the evidence for 
 these words. Yet they would have formed a far
 
 208 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 higher artistic ending to her story than the some- 
 what feeble and womanish chapter with which it 
 concludes, — the chief blot on the book. Large and 
 genial as was George Eliot's sympathy with Savona- 
 rola, she had, of course, no wish to represent his faith 
 as triumphant. Yet Romola's faith in goodness and 
 self-sacrifice, and in little children and " the eternal 
 marriage of love and duty," etc. etc., which the proem 
 tells us is ever to last, would be an idle dream for 
 the world, without a Christ in whose eternal nature 
 all these realities live and grow. George Eliot's 
 conception of the great Reformer probably lost power 
 in consequence of her own deep distrust of religious 
 faith and her reluctance to conceive of it except as a 
 kind of noble self-deception. 
 
 Felix Holt contains so little new illustration of 
 George Eliot's genius beyond the fragments of poetry 
 which first taught most of us to understand the poetic 
 side of her imagination, that I will pass it by to speak 
 of Middlcmarch, which, with its very inferior successor, 
 Daniel Deronda, represents her most mature and most 
 characteristic style of art. \ In Middlcmarch for the 
 first time George Eliot's deep scepticism may be said 
 to have been openly confessed. At least read by the 
 side of her biography and letters, it is clear that the 
 "prelude" to Middlcmarch implies a confession that 
 in her belief no Providence guides human destinies. 
 The story itself gains in more respects, I think, than 
 it loses, from this comparative frankness of intellectual 
 purpose. None of George Eliot's tales can compare
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 209 
 
 with Middlemarch for delicacy of detail and complete- 
 ness of finish — completeness as regards not only the 
 individual figures, but the whole picture of life 
 delineated — and for the breadth of life brought within 
 the field of the story. It is, no doubt, as a story, 
 inferior both to Adam Bede and to Silas Marner, 
 the latter a perfect little gem of its kind, in which 
 the author has done what is so rare with her, 
 sacrificed something of her own deep feeling of the 
 unsatisfactoriness of real life to the ideal demand for 
 " poetical justice," by rounding off the events some- 
 what more ideally than human lots are usually 
 rounded off, in harmony with the author's and reader's 
 inward sense of moral fitness, and scarcely in harmony 
 with the average teaching of vigilant observation. 
 And yet, even in Silas Marner, she has left a certain 
 spring of unhealed and undeserved pain to remind us 
 of the deep unsatisfactoriness of human things ; in 
 the catastrophe of Adam Bede, we hardly know 
 whether she has not left more rankling pain than 
 satisfaction ; and in Bomola, the sense of foiled aims 
 and wrecked purposes unquestionably predominates, 
 so that we can hardly help thinking she was drawn 
 to the subject of Bomola by perceiving a certain 
 similarity between the spiritual illusions of the age of 
 the great Dominican heretic and our own — a similarity 
 which enables her to paint a great historical theme in 
 her own favourite melancholy tone, without any 
 violence to nature. I Again, in Middlemarch, George 
 Eliot set herself, from the very beginning, to illustrate 
 
 H P
 
 210 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 her own profound conviction that the noblest aims, 
 however faithfully and simply pursued, are apt to be 
 wrecked, at least to outward seeming, in this our 
 modern age of distracted life. She set herself to 
 paint by no means a tragedy, but what she herself 
 described as "a life of mistakes, the offspring of a 
 certain spiritual grandeur, ill-matched with the mean- 
 ness of opportunity." And what she lost in beauty 
 and in grandeur of effect by this deliberate aim she 
 gained in ease, and in the obviously greater accordance 
 between her array of intellectual and moral assump- 
 tions, and her artistic treatment of them. We feel 
 that the inmost mind of the writer was reflected, not 
 merely in the criticisms and the casual observations 
 of the tale, but in the tale itself ; we feel throughout 
 the painful sincerity which underlies both the humour 
 and the sarcasm ; we feel the desolateness of the 
 formative thought as well as the root of its bitterness, 
 and yet we never cease to feel the author's extra- 
 ordinary fidelity to her own moral aims. Middlemarch 
 is, as the preface (unfortunately called a " prelude ") 
 pretty plainly confesses, a sort of pictorial indictment 
 of modern society for the crippling conditions it 
 imposes on men and women, especially women, of 
 high ideal enthusiasm. Tn consequence of the very 
 aim of the tale, it could hardly be a satisfying 
 imaginative whole, either tragic or otherwise ; 
 for the object is to paint not the grand defeat, but 
 the helpless entanglement and miscarriage, of noble 
 aims ; to make us see the eager stream of high purpose,
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 211 
 
 not leaping destructively from the rock, but more or 
 less silted up, though not quite lost, in the dreary 
 sands of modern life. 
 
 The very nature of this conception, while it 
 ensured a certain vein of melancholy and even bitter- 
 ness in the story, gave George Eliot's genius a fuller 
 play than it had ever had for its predominant realism, 
 and also for that minute knowledge of the whole 
 moral field of modern life which alone tests the 
 strength of a realistic genius. It was impossible to 
 show how ideal aims could be frustrated and over- 
 borne by the mere want of room for them, and the 
 crowd of pettier thoughts and hopes in the society 
 in which they were conceived, without a broad canvas 
 and great variety of grouping ; and this is exactly 
 where George Eliot excels. To any one who can 
 endure the melancholy which is rather to be read 
 between the lines than ostentatiously paraded, to 
 any one who either does not constantly ask himself 
 how this great author is really conceiving the ultimate 
 problems of faith and duty, or who, if understanding 
 fully the nature of her answer, is steeled against the 
 pain it is liable to give, — the wonderful freshness and 
 variety of the pictures of county character (high and 
 low), the perfect drawing and bold outlines of her 
 figures, and the minute delicacy of the lights and 
 shades, the abundant humour, the caustic philosophy, 
 and the deep undertone of unsatisfied desire, will 
 give, if certainly not pure delight, all the pleasure 
 which can be derived from profound and unaffected
 
 212 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 admiration. \As the object in this tale was to show 
 the paralysis, and the misleading diversions from its 
 natural course, which a blunt and unsympathetic 
 world prepares for the noblest ideality of feeling that 
 is not in sympathy with it, it was essential for the 
 author to give such a solidity and complexity to her 
 picture of the world by which her hero's and heroine's 
 idealism was to be tested and more or less subdued, 
 as would justify the impression that she understood 
 fully the character of the struggle. I doubt if any 
 other novelist who ever wrote could have succeeded 
 equally well in this melancholy design, could have 
 framed as complete a picture of the English county 
 and county - town temper, with all its rigidities, 
 jealousies, and pettiness, with its thorough good- 
 nature, stereotyped habits of thought, and very 
 limited accessibility to higher ideas, and have threaded 
 all these pictures together by a story, if not of the 
 deepest interest, still admirably fitted for its peculiar 
 purpose of showing lnnv^nnpljisH c . is finrh ajLj^f- as 
 ours to the glowing emotion of an ideal purpose. 
 
 For melancholy, profoundly melancholy, both in 
 aim and execution, Middlemarch certainly is ; not that 
 either hero or heroine dies within its limits ; on the 
 contrary, the only deaths are deaths of people pro- 
 foundly indifferent or disagreeable to the reader. 
 And the heroine, though she makes a sad blunder in 
 her first marriage, marries the only man she has ever 
 loved at the end of the tale. Nay, there is another 
 love affair, which eventually prospers well, running
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 213 
 
 through the tale ; and the only characters of any 
 moment which are left in a certain cheerless solitude 
 at the close, are those of the young surgeon who has 
 married the woman of his choice, but found the choice 
 a fatal mistake for himself, and of the middle-aged 
 and very Broad Church vicar, who shows to much 
 more advantage in giving up his love than he could 
 have shown in urging it, and who is made the 
 occasion of giving us, perhaps, the only really 
 satisfying emotion which the story excites. The 
 melancholy of the story consists not in the cata- 
 strophes of fortune, but in the working out of the 
 design with which the author set out — the picture 
 " of the cygnet reared uneasily among the ducklings 
 in the brown pond, and who never finds the living 
 stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind;" 
 in the delineation of what George Eliot (with a senti- 
 mentalism and disposition to " gush," of which she 
 is rarely guilty) calls the "loving heart -beats and 
 sobs after an unattained goodness," which "tremble 
 off and are dispersed among hindrances instead of 
 centring in some long-recognisable deed." The object 
 of the book is gained by showing in Dorothea's case 
 that a rare nature of the most self-forgetting kind, 
 and the most enthusiastic love for the good and 
 beautiful, is rather more likely to blunder, in its way 
 through the world, than one of much lower moral 
 calibre — which is probable enough ; and also by 
 showing that this rare nature does not find any 
 satisfying inward life to compensate these blunders,
 
 214 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 and turn them into the conditions of purer strength 
 and less accidental happiness — which I should have 
 thought impossible ; and again in Lydgate's case, by 
 showing that an ardent love for truth — of the purely 
 intellectual kind — is liable to be betrayed, by the 
 commonplace good - nature with which it is often 
 combined, into a paralysing contact with sordid cares 
 and domestic trials — which, again, is probable enough ; 
 and finally, by showing that this love of truth is not 
 transmuted into any higher moral equivalent through 
 the noble and genuine self-denial of the sacrifice made 
 for another's good — which, again, I should have held 
 v to be impossible. That Lydgate, marrying as he did, 
 and with his wholesome nature, should before long 
 have merged the gratification of his disinterested 
 speculative passion in the necessity of considering 
 the happiness of his shallow-natured wife, is most true 
 to nature. That, in pursuing that course from the 
 high and right motive from which, on the whole, he 
 pursued it, he should have gaiued no new power over 
 either her or himself, but should have become bitter 
 on his side, and left her as vain and shallow as he 
 found her, is, I think, not true to nature, but a picture 
 due to that set theory of semi-pessimism which George 
 Eliot evidently regarded as the best substitute for 
 faith. It is only here and there, in the rare glimpses 
 she gives us of the solitude of Dorothea's heart, that 
 this radical deficiency of faith is carried, as it seems 
 to me, into any touch untrue to what we know of 
 real life. It does so come out, I think, in one or two
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 215 
 
 descriptions of Dorothea's secret struggles, and in the 
 bitter tone in which the close of Lydgate's career is 
 described. Generally, however, nothing can be more 
 truthful or less like preconceived theory than the 
 pictures of provincial life in this wonderful book. 
 But not the less does this deep distrust of "the 
 Supreme Power," who, in the words of the "prelude" 
 to Middlemarch, has fashioned the natures of women 
 " with inconvenient indefiniteness," give a certain air 
 of moral desolation to the whole, and make us feel 
 how objectless is that network of complicated motives 
 and grotesque manners, of which she gives us so 
 wonderfully truthful a picture — objectless as those 
 strange scrawlings on the bare mountain-side which, 
 mistaken when seen from a distance for the hand- 
 writing of some gigantic power, turn out when 
 approached to be the mere tracks of old destructive 
 forces, since diverted into other channels — the furrows 
 of dried - up torrents or the grooves of exhausted 
 glaciers. 
 
 By far the most remarkable effort in Middlemarch 
 — I am by no means sure that the success is at 
 all in proportion to the effort, though the success is 
 considerable, and one which only a mind of great 
 genius could have attained — is, of course, the sketch 
 of Dorothea Brooke (as she is at the beginning of the 
 tale), Dorothea Casaubon (as she is throughout its 
 greater portion), Dorothea Ladislaw (as she is at its 
 close). One sees, on looking back over the tale, that 
 it was an essential of George Eliot's purpose to make
 
 216 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 this high-minded and enthusiastic girl marry twice, 
 and in neither case make an " ideal " marriage, though 
 the second is an improvement on the first. The 
 author, indeed, attempted at the close, at least in her 
 original edition, 1 to ascribe the first mistake partly 
 to causes which she had never before indicated, and 
 in so doing made, as I think, a faulty criticism on 
 her own creation. She attenuated Dorothea's own 
 responsibility for her first marriage after a fashion 
 hardly consistent either with the type of the character 
 itself, or with the story as it had been told. 
 
 " Dorothea," we are told, "was spoken of to a younger 
 generation as a fine girl, who married a sickly clergyman, 
 old enough to be her father, and in little more than a 
 year after his death gave up her estate to marry his cousin 
 — young enough to have been his son, with no property, 
 and not well born. Those who had not seen anything of 
 Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been 
 ' a nice woman,' else she would not have married either 
 the one or the other. Certainly those determining acts of 
 her life were not ideally beautiful. [They were the mixed 
 result of young and noUe impulse struggling under prosaic 
 conditions. Among the many remarks passed on her 
 mistakes, it was never said in the neighbourhood of 
 Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened 
 if the society into which she was born had not smiled on 
 propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less 
 than half his own age, on modes of education which make 
 a woman's knowledge another name for motley ignorance, 
 
 1 I am much obliged to a correspondent who has called my 
 attention to the fact that George Eliot withdrew the passage I 
 n fer t>. in her one yolume edition of Middlemarch.
 
 IV GEOKGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 217 
 
 on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction with 
 its own loudly-asserted beliefs. While this is the social 
 air in which mortals begin to breathe, there will be 
 collisions snch as those in Dorothea's life, where great 
 feelings will take the aspect of error, and great faith the 
 aspect of illusion. 1 ] For there is no creature whose inward 
 being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by 
 what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have 
 the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more 
 than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring 
 all for the sake of a brother's burial ; the medium in 
 vdiich their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But 
 we insignificant people, with our daily words and acts, are 
 preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which 
 may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea 
 whose story we know. Her finely-touched spirit had still 
 its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her 
 full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the 
 strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name 
 on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around 
 her was incalculably diffusive ; for the growing good of 
 the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts ; and 
 that things are not so ill with you and me as they might 
 have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully 
 a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." 
 
 Now, the remark as to the world's " smiling on a 
 proposition of marriage from a sickly man to a girl 
 less than half his own age," really has no foundation 
 
 1 In the one volume edition of Middlemarch, the passage 
 within square brackets reads as follows : — " They were the 
 mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the 
 conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings 
 will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of 
 illusion."
 
 218 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 at all in the tale itself. When Mr. Brooke, Dorothea's 
 uncle, weakly carries Mr. Casaubon's offer to Dorothea, 
 he accompanies it with as much slipshod dissuasion 
 as it is possible for so helpless a nature to use. 
 Dorothea's sister Celia hears of it with an ill-disguised 
 horror of disgust which bitterly offends Dorothea. 
 If the rector's wife, Mrs. Cadwallader, represents 
 county opinion (and who could represent it better ?), 
 the whole society disapproved it. Would George 
 Eliot have had orphan girls protected against the 
 weakness of such uncles as Mr. Brooke by the Court 
 of Chancery, or would she have liked to see a law 
 fixing the maximum difference of ages permissible 
 between husband and wife 1 I hardly see how 
 Dorothea could have been better protected against 
 her first mistake than the picture which she painted 
 of life in Middlemarch represented her as having 
 actually been protected. I note this point only 
 because I find in this passage a trace that George 
 Eliot was, on reviewing her own work, dissatisfied 
 with her own picture of the " prosaic conditions " to 
 which she ascribed Dorothea's misadventures ; and 
 that she tried to persuade herself that they were 
 actually more oppressive and paralysing than they 
 really were. It is obvious, I think, that Dorothea's 
 character was one of much more impetuous self- 
 assertion, of much more adventurous and self-willed 
 idealism, than this passage would suggest. She is 
 painted from the first as groping her way with an 
 imperious disregard of the prevailing conventional
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 219 
 
 ideas, — ideas quite too mean and barren for the 
 guidance of such a nature, — and as falling, in con- 
 sequence of that imperious disregard, into her mistake 
 — the mistake being due about equally to her hasty 
 contempt for the existing social standards of conduct, 
 and to her craving for nobler standards not supplied. 
 It was rather the ambitious idealism and somewhat 
 wilful independence of Dorothea's nature than any 
 want of a sound general opinion about the matter, 
 which is represented as leading her into the mistake 
 of her marriage with the pedantic bookworm, Mr. 
 Casaubon ; and George Eliot was not fair to the life 
 she had so wonderfully portrayed, when she threw 
 the responsibility of Dorothea's first great mistake 
 upon it. In the early part of the tale, George Eliot 
 clearly intended to charge the society around Dorothea 
 with sins of omission rather than sins of commission ; 
 with having no noble aims to which such a nature as 
 Dorothea's could dedicate itself with any satisfaction, 
 rather than with failing to have a certain " bottom of 
 good sense," which might have saved her from her 
 blunder, if she could but have shared it without 
 losing anything in ideal purpose by sharing it. But 
 in her final criticism of her heroine the author, in her 
 desire to apologise for her, wavered in her conception, 
 and instead of charging her failure, as at the start, 
 on " the meanness of opportunity," charged it on the 
 positive distortion of the social morality by which 
 she was surrounded — a distortion which in her own 
 picture she had not only forgotten to describe, but
 
 220 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 had carefully proved not to exist. This little incon- 
 sistency is important only as showing that George 
 Eliot had unconsciously, in the course of her story, 
 aggravated the faults of the society against which she 
 brought her indictment both at the beginning and 
 the close — a tendency which attaches more or less 
 to her very negative spiritual philosophy. Faith is 
 wanted in order to make people perfectly candid 
 about the blots in human ideals. A frequent tendency 
 may be noted in those who find no anchor for faith, 
 to throw upon some abstract offender like " society " 
 the faults they see in those who most satisfy their 
 longing for perfection. It is only profound belief in 
 God which prevents us from indulging our moral 
 superstitions about our human ideals, or, as one may 
 almost call them, the idols of one's conscience. 
 
 ^Nevertheless, after all such deductions, the character 
 of Dorothea is very noble, after an original type. She 
 is introduced to us as an enthusiastic girl, with high 
 impulses which were a little unintelligible to the 
 people around her, " a young lady of some birth and 
 fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by 
 the side of a sick labourer, and prayed fervidly as if 
 she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles; 
 who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and 
 of sitting up at night to read old theological books ; " 
 who indulged herself in riding, "in spite of some 
 conscientious qualms ;" for "she felt that she enjoyed 
 it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward 
 to renouncing it." She is "open, ardent, and not in
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 221 
 
 the least self-admiring " ; a purist in her dislike of 
 ornament for herself, but ever eager to indulge her 
 sister (Celia) in it, though somewhat astonished by 
 her taste, and obliged to apologise for her to her 
 own mind by the remark that "souls have com- 
 plexions " as well as skins, and that " what will suit 
 one will not suit another." The scene to which I 
 allude, the first in the book, gives a most skilful 
 artistic portrait of Dorothea's enthusiastic and mystic 
 and slightly haughty, though generous nature, and 
 I must extract a portion at the close, in order to 
 bring this fresh and ardent character clearly before 
 my readers : — 
 
 " Celia had unclasped the necklace, and drawn it off. 
 ' It would be a little tight for your neck ; something to 
 lie down and hang would suit you better,' she said, with 
 some satisfaction. The complete unfitness of the necklace 
 from all points of view for Dorothea made Celia happier 
 in taking it. Sbe was opening some ring-boxes which 
 disclosed a fine emerald with diamonds, and just then the 
 sun passing beyond a cloud sent a bright gleam over the 
 table. 
 
 " ' How very beautiful these gems are ! ' said Dorothea, 
 under a new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. 
 ' It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, 
 like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are 
 used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John. 
 They look like fragments of heaven. I think that 
 emerald is more beautiful than any of them.' 
 
 " ' And there is a bracelet to match it,' said Celia. 
 ' We did not notice this at first.' 
 
 " ' They are lovely,' said Dorothea, slipping the ring 
 and bracelet on her finely-turned finger and wrist, and
 
 222 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 holding them towards the window on a level with her 
 eyes. All the while her thought was trying to justify her 
 delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic 
 religious joy. 
 
 " 'You would like those, Dorothea,' said Celia, rather 
 i'alteringly, beginning to think with wonder that her sister 
 showed some weakness, and also that emeralds would suit 
 her own complexion even better than purple amethysts. 
 ' You must keep that ring and bracelet — if nothing else. 
 But see, these agates are very pretty— and quiet.' 
 
 " ' Yes ! I will keep these — this ring and bracelet,' said 
 Dorothea. Then, letting her hand fall on the table, she 
 said in another tone — ' Yet what miserable men find such 
 things, and work at them, and sell them ! ' She paused 
 again, and Celia thought that her sister was going to re- 
 nounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do. 
 
 " ' Yes, dear, I will keep these,' said Dorothea de- 
 cidedly ; ' but take all the rest away, and the casket.' 
 
 " ' She took up her pencil without removing the 
 jewels, and still looking at them. She thought of often 
 having them by her, to feed her eye at these little fount- 
 ains of pure colour, 
 
 " ' Shall you wear them in company 1 ' said Celia, 
 wlio was watching her with real curiosity as to what she 
 would do. 
 
 " Dorothea glanced quickly at her sister. Across all 
 her imaginative adornment of those whom she loved there 
 darted now and then a keen discernment, which was not 
 without a scorching quality. If Miss Brooke ever attained 
 perfeel meekness, it would not be for lack of inward fire. 
 " ' Perhaps,' she said, rather haughtily. ' I cannot tell 
 to what level I may sink.' 
 
 "Celia blushed, and was unhappy ; she saw that she 
 had offended her sister, and dared not say even anything 
 pretty about the gift of the ornaments, which she put back 
 into the box and carried away. Dorothea, too, was un- 
 happy, as she went on with her plan-drawing, questioning
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 223 
 
 tlie purity of her own feeling and speeeh in the scene 
 which had ended with that little explosion." 
 
 Farther on we are told of this generous and 
 buoyant girl that — 
 
 "Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths 
 of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She 
 felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious 
 Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from 
 that wretched mistake he made in matrimony ; or John 
 Milton when his blindness had come on ; or any of the 
 other great men whose odd habits it would have been 
 glorious piety to endure ; but an amiable handsome 
 baronet, who said ' Exactly ' to her remarks, even when 
 she expressed uncertainty, — how could he affect her as a 
 lover 1 The really delightful marriage must be that where 
 your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you 
 even Hebrew, if you wished it." 
 
 Now it is the main idea of this book to work out 
 the mal-adaptation, as it were, of this fresh, disinter- 
 ested, and spiritual- minded girl, to the world into 
 which she was born; to show that instead of giving 
 her a full natural channel for her enthusiasm, and 
 opening to her a career as large as her heart and 
 mind, it, for a time at least, absorbed her great 
 qualities in futile and fruitless efforts, which left 
 hardly any one but herself the better for them ; that 
 it made her the victim of a sort of irony of destiny, 
 gave her no chance of marriage with the one man — 
 living in her neighbourhood and in circles where they 
 frequently crossed each other's paths — whom she could 
 perhaps have helped to something great and noble,
 
 224 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 and left her, even at the close, in no position better 
 adapted to her rare qualities than that of a wife 
 of a clever, mercurial, petulant young politician, not -** 
 without good in him, but without any signal need of r 
 the help of such a woman as this, a woman who, as 
 his wife, came to be " only known in a certain circle 
 as a wife and mother." Yet no one who knew 
 George Eliot will suppose that this history is meant to 
 throw any doubt on the intrinsic value of high moral 
 qualities. However negative her spiritual creed may 
 have been, her ethics were always noble. Shejnakes 
 us feel Avith increasing force, as the story goes on, the 
 intrinsic grandeur of Dorothea's capacity for self- 
 forgetfulness, sympathy, • and love. The story does 
 not end without one signal triumph of the purity of 
 her unselfish purpose over poorer and meaner natures, 
 a triumph painted in a scene that deserves to rank 
 for power beside that in which Dinah wins her vic- 
 tory over Hetty's guilty heart in Adam Bcde. But 
 while true as ever to her own passionate love of a 
 deep and inward morality, George Eliot's main pur- 
 pose was to show how ill-suited this world is to detect 
 the highest natures that find their way into it, and 
 to use them for the highest ends. ^Dorothea's desire \n9- 
 to devote herself to some one wiser than herself 
 leads her into marrying the Rev. Edward Casaubon, 
 a middle-aged, reserved, vain, and dry clergyman, 
 given to laborious researches into a somewhat vague 
 science, Comparative Mythology, for the full treat- 
 ment of which he does not possess the adequate
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 225 
 
 Oriental learning, nor even access to the German 
 authorities who had made that learning their own. 
 He acts upon Dorothea as a mere moral sponge, to 
 absorb all the finer juices of her nature without being 
 the happier or the better for them — rather, perhaps, 
 the more irritable, and the worse. Her intellectual 
 brightness, her power of perceiving that he himself 
 distrusts his own power for his task, daunts him, and 
 makes him feel under a sort of intellectual surveil- 
 lance. Her ardent sympathy with his poor cousin, 
 Mr. Ladislaw, and wish to befriend him, make Mr. 
 Casaubon jealous, and dimly conscious of his own 
 narrowness of nature. Her desire to share his 
 deepest life makes him painiflilly conscious that he 
 has no deepest life to be shared. Her ardour is a 
 reproach to his formalism. Her enthusiasm is be- 
 wildering to his self-occupation. They lead together 
 a life of mutual disappointment, in which her self- 
 forgetful compassion for his broken health and his 
 fear of intellectual wreck gradually overpower her 
 own regrets, and she is on the very eve of promising 
 him to carry out after his death, from his voluminous 
 notes, his hopeless intellectual design, — without the 
 slightest remaining faith, on her part, in its value, — 
 when his sudden death relieves her of the necessity 
 of making the fatal promise. Nothing can be finer 
 than the picture of their mutual relations to each 
 other; his reserved pride, her disappointed tender- 
 ness ; his formal kindness and suspicious vigilance in 
 watching the signs of his wife's distrust of his powers, 
 H Q
 
 226 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 her sickness of heart when she first begins to under- 
 stand that his work will come to nothing, and to 
 desire to give him a sympathy he cannot and will 
 not receive. It is a picture such as no one but George 
 Eliot could draw. And the delicate touch with which 
 it is concluded, when she declines, after his death, 
 to carry out his plan according to the "Synoptical 
 Tabulation for the use of Mrs. Casaubon " found in 
 his desk, is one of those signal marks of great genius 
 in which, even taken alone, you would at once discern 
 the master-hand. His "Synoptical Tabulation" she 
 "carefully enclosed and sealed, writing within the 
 envelope, ' / could not use it. Do you not see now that 
 I could not submit my soul to yours, by working hopelessly 
 at what I have no belief in? — Dorothea.' Then she 
 deposited the paper in her own desk." Here avc see 
 that great need of Dorothea for distinctness of feeling, 
 which separates her from so many idealists of the 
 same type. Instead of shrinking from the subject of 
 the trust her dead husband wished to repose in her, 
 and which she could not accept, she felt the need to 
 put down distinctly for him, even though his presence 
 was only imagined, the answer of her heart. She 
 could not leave him without an answer altogether. 
 But she could not but refuse what lie had asked. As 
 a whole, the picture, however, is, and is meant to be, | 
 one of moral waste, — of a rich and generous and 
 buoyant nature wasted on one which was only 
 rendered restless and exhausted by intercourse with 
 her. Nor is the picture of Dorothea's relation to
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 227 
 
 Mr. Casaubon's young cousin, Mr. Ladislaw, whom 
 her husband forbade her, by his will, to marry on 
 pain of his property going away from her, at all a 
 moral compensation. It is true that his love for her 
 is ardent, though not self-forgetful; but her interest 
 in him is chiefly due to Mr. Casaubon's indifference 
 and apparent injustice, and her love begins only after 
 her attention is painfully called to the subject by the 
 revelation of her husband's suspicions in his will. 
 
 %Iie" lavishes herself on Will Ladislaw as a sort of 
 generous compensation for his own relation's coldness 
 to him ; and one feels, and is probably meant to feel 
 acutely, that here, too, it is " the meanness of oppor- 
 tunity," and not intrinsic suitability, which determines 
 
 ' Dorothea's second comparatively happy marriage. 
 The world around her is a sponge to absorb Dorothea's 
 
 I great qualities, without profiting by them and without 
 
 \ providing any adequate sphere for their expansion 
 and their refinement. 
 
 It may be said that in one signal and final instance, 
 George Eliot has given Dorothea the victory over the 
 selfishness of others through the victory over herself; 
 and so, at the end of her tale, has left her beautiful 
 heroine enveloped in the imagination of the reader in 
 a pure and radiant glory. And it is perfectly true 
 that in this one instance she shows a spiritual grand- 
 eur not "ill-matched with the meanness of oppor- 
 tunity," but, on the contrary, well-matched with the 
 nobleness of opportunity, and so far satisfying, even 
 to the imagination. But even in the instance to
 
 228 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 which we refer, there is a void which it is impossible 
 not to feel — an intentional and painful void in the 
 background of the picture, which leaves upon us the 
 oppressive sense that Dorothea's fine religious nature 
 had no inward spiritual object on which to feed 
 itself, no object in relation to which its invisible 
 growth would be assured and permanent even when 
 the outward world failed to call into full play her 
 stores of spiritual compassion. But to justify this 
 remark I must say something of the wonderful 
 pendant or companion picture to Dorothea — Rosamond 
 Vincy, afterwards Rosamond Lydgate. 
 
 No one has ever so drawn the cruelty that springs 
 from pure thinness and shallowness of nature, and 
 yet given that cruelty so delicate and feminine an 
 embodiment, as George Eliot in her marvellous pic- 
 ture of Rosamond. This exquisitely-painted figure 
 is the deadliest blow at the common assumption that 
 limitation in both heart and brain is a desirable thing 
 for women that has ever been struck. The first 
 impression is of grace, gentleness, propriety, conven- 
 tional sense, soft tenacity of purpose, and something 
 even that almost looks like tenderness. I refer to 
 the time when Rosamond first falls in love with 
 Lydgate. The reader is even a little disposed at 
 this time to resent the author's evident scorn for 
 Rosamond, and almost to take her part against the 
 critic who seems to have hardened her heart against 
 her own creation. But as the story proceeds, when 
 Rosamond is married, when Lydgate gradually falls
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 229 
 
 into money difficulties, and his graceful wife shows 
 herself not only not able to give him sympathy, but 
 constrained, apparently by her mere poverty of nature, 
 to turn her heart away from him, and even to intrigue 
 against his plans, the picture becomes painfully real 
 and convincing. The reader has no power to doubt 
 its fidelity. The cruelty of a shallow heart in woman 
 has been painted a hundred times on its active side — 
 in its love of power, its delight in admiration, its 
 malicious vivacity. But it has never, as far as I 
 know, been painted entirely in its passive phase, its 
 absolute incompressibility — like the incompressibility 
 of water itself, — its cold aversion to any one, however 
 conventionally dear, who, after being expected to be 
 a source of pride and lustre, turns out to be in need 
 of active sacrifices and of some spontaneousness of 
 sympathy. Rosamond's helpless finesse, and mild, 
 but stony-hearted irresponsiveness to her husband's 
 appeals, her unashamed insincerity, her unyielding 
 passiveness, and her perfect confidence in the wisdom 
 of her own wishes in spite of her total inability to 
 understand what is necessary to be understood, make 
 up a startling picture of the unconscious but cruel 
 inexorability of feminine selfishness, and of fair in- 
 capacity to understand and feel. The art which has 
 contrasted this picture of Eosamond with that of 
 Dorothea it is not easy to overpraise. The rich 
 spontaneous pity and sympathy of Dorothea are 
 thrown into relief by that poverty of heart of 
 Eosamond which is not even stirred by the most
 
 230 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 touching appeals of Lydgate's generous self-reproach. 
 The deep, impulsive sincerity of Dorothea is thrown 
 into like relief by that absolute absence of all com- 
 punction, of all discomposure, in insincerity, which 
 Rosamond shows in hiding from her husband her 
 counter-plots against his plans. Dorothea's perfect 
 indifference to the world and rank is in striking 
 contrast to poor Rosamond's positive pining after the 
 society of titled people and the little excitements 
 of social esteem. Dorothea's disposition to lavish 
 herself and her means on others is in most curious 
 contrast of all to Rosamond's constant wish to get 
 others to devote their means to her. In short, it is 
 impossible to conceive a finer foil to Dorothea than 
 Rosamond. The realism of the portrait of Rosamond 
 engrosses the imagination even more completely than 
 the noble freshness and living ardour of Dorothea. 
 But though to some extent they cross each other in 
 the story — Rosamond wishing to detach Ladislaw 
 from his love for Dorothea — they hardly meet, in any 
 real contact of mind, till just at the close. And that 
 meeting is a scene of surpassing power. Dorothea, 
 then a widow, assured, as she thinks, of Ladislaw's 
 love for her, is bent on helping Lydgate, who, in the 
 difficulties and false suspicions which have fallen on 
 him, has just given her a glimpse of his wife's 
 inability to understand his position ; she has called 
 on Rosamond, and found her own lover, Ladislaw, 
 apparently bending in a lover -like attitude over 
 Rosamond's hand, and has < putted the room, indig-
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 231 
 
 nant and heart-broken. The night of anguish she 
 passes after this scene, is most powerfully described 
 (though, by the way, with one false note : when did 
 we ever before hear so true and refined a writer as 
 George Eliot gushing about Dorothea's "grand 
 woman's frame," like a sentimental poetaster 1) ; but 
 the victory she gains over herself seems to me a 
 victory that, in such a one as Dorothea at all events, 
 could not have been gained without something more 
 than a bare moral struggle. We have been told 
 indeed that she who used to fall suddenly on her 
 knees on the brick floors of cottages to pray with 
 sick labourers had almost given up praying for her- 
 self, but Ave have not been told that she had been 
 overtaken by any deep speculative doubts ; and unless 
 this were so, nay, even if it were so, the conflict of 
 this night could hardly have passed through in the 
 cold moral solitude described ; so that there is a 
 painful void, no less artistic than spiritual, to my 
 mind, in reading the following powerful but crippled 
 picture of Dorothea's moral crisis: — 
 
 " In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of 
 solitude have looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles 
 of man — she besought hardness and coldness and aching 
 weariness to bring her relief from the mysterious incor- 
 poreal might of her anguish : she lay on the bare floor 
 and let the night grow cold around her ; while her grand 
 woman's frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been a 
 despairing child. 
 
 " There were two images — two living forms that tore 
 her heart in two, as if it had been the heart of a mother
 
 232 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 who seems to see her child divided by the sword, and 
 presses one bleeding half to her breast while her gaze goes 
 forth in agony towards the half which is carried away by 
 the lying woman that has never known the mother's pang. 
 
 " Here, with the nearness of an answering smile, here 
 within the vibrating bond of mutual speech, was the bright 
 creature whom she had trusted — who had come to her 
 like the spirit of morning visiting the dim vault where 
 she sat as the bride of a worn-out life ; and now, with a 
 full consciousness which had never awakened before, she 
 stretched out her arms to wards him and cried with bitter cries 
 that their nearness was a parting vision ; she discovered 
 her passion to herself in the unshrinking utterance of despair. 
 
 " And there, aloof, yet persistently with her, moving 
 wherever she moved, was the "Will Ladislaw who was a 
 changed belief exhausted of hope, a detected illusion — no, 
 a living man towards whom there could not yet struggle 
 any wail of regretful pity, from the midst of scorn and 
 indignation and jealous offended pride. The fire of Doro- 
 thea's anger was not easily spent, and it flamed out in 
 fitful returns of spurning reproach. Why had he come 
 obtruding his life into hers, hers that might have been 
 whole enough without him ? Why had he brought his 
 cheap regard and his lip -born words to her who had 
 m ithing paltry to give in exchange ? He knew that he was 
 deluding her — wished, in the very moment of farewell, 
 to make her believe that he gave her the whole price of her 
 heart, and knew that he had spent it half before. Why had 
 he not stayed among the crowd of whom she asked nothing 
 — but only prayed that they might be less contemptible 1 
 
 " But she lost energy at last even for her loud-whisp- 
 ered cries and moans ; she subsided into helpless sobs, 
 and on the cold floor she sobbed herself to sleep. 
 
 " In the (bill hours of the morning twilight, when all 
 was dim around her, she awoke — not with any amazed 
 wondering where she was or what had happened, but with 
 the clearest consciousness that she was looking into the
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 233 
 
 eyes of sorrow. She rose, and wrapped warm tilings 
 around her, and seated herself in a great chair where she 
 often watched hefore. She was vigorous enough to have 
 borne that hard night without feeling ill in body, beyond 
 some aching and fatigue ; but she had waked to a new 
 condition : she felt as if her soul had been liberated from 
 its terrible conflict ; she was no longer wrestling with her 
 grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion 
 and make it a sharer in her thoughts. For now the 
 thoughts came thickly. It was not in Dorothea's nature, 
 for longer than the duration of a paroxysm, to sit in the 
 narrow cell of her calamity, in the besotted misery of a 
 consciousness that only sees another's lot as an accident of 
 its own. 
 
 " She began now to live through that yesterday morn- 
 ing deliberately again, forcing herself to dwell on every 
 detail and its possible meaning. Was she alone in that 
 scene 1 Was it her event only 1 She forced herself to 
 think of it as bound up with another woman's life — a 
 woman towards whom she had set out with a longing to 
 carry some clearness and comfort into her beclouded youth. 
 In her first outleap of jealous indignation and disgust, 
 when quitting the hateful room, she had flung away all 
 the mercy with which she had undertaken that visit. 
 She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burn- 
 ing scorn, and it seemed to her as if Rosamond were 
 burned out of her sight for ever. But that base prompt- 
 ing which makes a woman more cruel to her rival than to 
 a faithless lover, could have no strength of recurrence in 
 Dorothea when the dominant spirit of justice within her 
 had once overcome the tumult and had once shown her 
 the truer measure of things. All the active thought with 
 which she had before been representing to herself the trials 
 of Lydgate's lot, and this young marriage union which, 
 like her own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident 
 troubles— all this vivid sympathetic experience returned 
 to her now as a power : it asserted itself as acquired
 
 234 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 knowledge asserts itself, and will not let us see as we saw 
 in the day of our ignorance. She said to her own irre- 
 mediable grief, that it should make her more helpful, 
 instead of driving her back from effort. 
 
 " And what sort of crisis might not this be in three 
 lives whose contact with hers laid an obligation on her as 
 if they had been suppliants bearing the sacred branch 1 
 The objects of her rescue were not to be sought out by her 
 fancy ; they were chosen for her. She yearned towards 
 the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, 
 and rule her errant will. ' What should I do — how 
 should I act now, this very day, if I could clutch my own 
 pain, and compel it to silence, and think of those 
 three?" 
 
 This picture leaves a sense of want in the mind 
 of the reader that survives even the powerful and 
 pathetic scene of Dorothea's victory over Rosamond, 
 a scene that, as I have already said, challenges com- 
 parison with that in which Dinah succeeds in touch- 
 ing Hetty's heart in Adam Bede. There is left upon 
 us that for which the previous course of the tale had 
 been preparing us, a conviction not only that Doro- 
 1 hca's life had been crippled by a " meanness of oppor- 
 t unity" sadly ill-matched with her spiritual grandeur, 
 but also that that " meanness of opportunity " had 
 been gradually extending inwards, as well as im- 
 prisoning her from outside. There is no such thing 
 as inward "meanness of opportunity " to one who has 
 a life hidden in God as well as a life spent upon the 
 world. That is a resource and a refuge, the grandeur 
 of which is always on the increase, and is sometimes 
 greatest of all when the outward field of opportunity
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 235 
 
 is poorest. With this inward source of joy for 
 Dorothea, one might have left her, even if Will 
 Ladislaw had really failed her, with composure, with 
 that sense of rest which even Greek tragedy, with its 
 far fainter spiritual insights, always gives. But, 
 without it, to know that she married after her first 
 husband's death the young man whom her own 
 generosity had first taught her to love, that she was 
 recognised " in a certain circle as a wife and mother," 
 and that she fascinated all who really came to know 
 her, and even by poor shallow Rosamond was never 
 mentioned with depreciation, is a poor, ungracious, 
 and unhappy close to a delineation of great power. 
 " Meanness of opportunity " does not really win the 
 victory — Dorothea is too noble for that ; but it does, 
 in the picture at least, finally circumscribe and cripple 
 a spirit of rare beauty and strength. Dorothea not 
 only fails to express herself in " a constant unfolding 
 of far-resonant action " ; Ave feel that she also fails to 
 reach the constant unfolding of mute but far expati- 
 ating faith. She is noble to all whom she closely 
 touches ; but she is denied a great life within as well 
 as without. It is true that the Divine Spirit lives in 
 her, but she does not live in Him. She has not the 
 joy, though she has the strength of the spiritual life. 
 She has not the sweetness, though she has the good 
 guidance of the life of purity and self-denial. The 
 " meanness " of external opportunity is, in fact, far 
 more fatal to her than it could be to any equally 
 noble nature with the life of faith freely open before
 
 236 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 it, for opportunities arising out of her external life 
 are for her the only opportunities ; she has no escape 
 from the failing of her heart and flesh to one of whom 
 she can say, " He is the strength of my heart and my 
 portion for ever." The "meanness of opportunity" 
 could have no more cruel triumph. 
 
 I must not dwell at the same length on the other 
 parts of this wonderful photograph of provincial life ; 
 but it is well to point out the unity of thought which 
 runs through it all, and also the artistic skill to 
 combine with a full expression of love for the noble 
 parts of human nature and an exquisite delineation 
 of thenjf a pervading impression of the " meanness of 
 opportunity" that besets all noble aims, especially 
 in provincial society in this century. The most 
 elaborate illustration of this, next to Dorothea's 
 history, is Lyclgate's. His earnest, though purely 
 intellectual, thirst for scientific truth is far more 
 completely defeated and subjugated by the meanness 
 of opportunity than Dorothea's thirst for goodness, 
 no doubt, because it is purely intellectual, and because 
 his moral nature, though manly and generous, has 
 no particularly exalted aims. There are no scenes in 
 English literature so full of power — the sort of power 
 from the excess of which we almost shrink — as those 
 in which Rosamond's thin, unyielding, inexpressible, 
 and incompressible selfishness and workllincss of 
 nature encounters and defeats the strong, masculine, 
 magnanimous, generous struggles of Lydgate to over- 
 come the dilliculties caused by an improvident
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 237 
 
 marriage, and to hold fast to his resolve of devoting 
 his life to the higher scientific aims of physiological 
 study, and not merely to winning his bread as a 
 medical specialist. I cannot dwell on the picture, 
 but I cannot leave it without saying that I think 
 here, too, George Eliot put too dark a ground into 
 her canvas, and probably from the same cause as in 
 the previous picture. I quite recognise the fidelity 
 of the conception which makes Rosamond triumph 
 over Lydgate's scientific zeal without even knowing 
 what she is doing. But this final picture is, on its 
 moral side I think, painfully and, at least by what it 
 omits, excessively sombre : — 
 
 " Lydgate's hair never became white. He died when 
 he was only fifty, leaving his wife and children provided 
 for by a heavy insurance on his life. He had gained an 
 excellent practice, alternating, according to the season, 
 between London and a continental bathing-place ; having 
 written a treatise on Gout, a disease which has a good 
 deal of wealth on its side. His skdl was relied on by 
 many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as 
 a failure ; he had not f l"ii° what hp once meant to il<>. 
 His acquaintances thought him enviable to have so charm- 
 ing a wife, and nothing happened to shake their opinion. 
 Eosamond never committed a second compromising indis- 
 cretion. She simply continued to be mild in her temper, 
 inflexible in her judgment, disposed to admonish her 
 husband, and able to frustrate him by stratagem. As the 
 years went on he opposed her less and less, whence 
 Rosamond concluded that he had learned the value of her 
 opinion; on the other hand, she had a more thorough 
 conviction of his talents now that he gained a good 
 income, and instead of the threatened cage in Bride
 
 238 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 Street, provided one all flowers and gilding, fit for the 
 bird of paradise that she resembled. In brief, Lydgate 
 was what is called a successful man. But he died prema- 
 turely of diphtheria, and Rosamond afterwards married an 
 elderly and wealthy physician, who took kindly to her four 
 children. She made a very pretty show with her daughters 
 driving out in her carriage, and often spoke of her happi- 
 ness as ' a reward' — she did not say for what, but probably 
 she meant that it was a reward for her patience with 
 Tertius, whose temper never became faultless, and to the 
 last occasionally let slip a bitter speech which was more 
 memorable than the signs he made of his repentance. 
 He once called her his basil plant ; and when she asked 
 for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had 
 flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains. 
 Rosamond had a placid but strong answer to such speeches. 
 "Why, then, had he chosen her ? It was a pity he had 
 not had Mrs. Ladislaw, whom he was always praising and 
 placing above her. And thus the conversation ended 
 with the advantage on Rosamond's side. But it would be 
 unjust not to tell that she never uttered a word in 
 depreciation of Dorothea, keeping in religious remembrance 
 the generosity which had come to her aid in the sharpest 
 crisis of her life." 
 
 Granted George Eliot's view of Eosamond as one 
 of those persons of whom in this world it is hopeless 
 to expect anything like spiritual growth, except under 
 the rarest and happiest moral influences, which she 
 did not encounter, that touch as to her own view 
 of her second marriage is one of the highest genius. 
 I '.lit it is nn assumption to which George Eliot herself 
 is hardly quite true, for she does give us one glimpse 
 of Rosamond's reawakening tenderness towards her 
 husband, and makes Dorothea win a complete victory
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 239 
 
 over her ; nor is it easy to believe that a nature even 
 so shallow and limited as Eosamond's could have 
 wholly failed to be warmed into something like 
 appreciation of her husband's hasty but generous 
 tenderness. Is there not something of the painter's 
 temptation to deepen unduly the most characteristic 
 lines in a picture in the last touches he gives to it — 
 in order to leave a distincter and stronger effect on 
 the spectator's mind — in this brilliant but bitter fare- 
 well to Rosamond 1 And with regard to Lydgate, 
 though one can easily believe that his final relinquish- 
 ment of his higher scientific aims might have left 
 such depths of bitterness in him as would break out 
 in the speech about his basil plant, that could hardly 
 have been all. He must have felt even in his solitude 
 that the "meanness of opportunity" which had 
 crushed his ideal ambition in one direction, had 
 opened to him an ideal of an even higher kind in the 
 renunciations he had willingly embraced for the sake 
 of others ; and to leave him without a word as to 
 the softer brightness which this humbler but nobler 
 life must have brought him, is to leave him in need- 
 less gloom. George Eliot attributes too much moral 
 influence to opportunity, because she ignores the 
 fountain of light which is alone independent of 
 opportunity. 
 
 The whole picture both of town and county life 
 in Middlemarch, though it is seldom cynical, and 
 often most sympathetic in its portraiture of true 
 nobility of character, is wonderfully vivid in its
 
 240 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 illustration of the pettiness and of the meanness of 
 the aims generally pursued. Even Caleb Garth, the 
 land-surveyor, a noble figure, with his delight in 
 honest work — which he praises in a phraseology of 
 borrowed Scripture dialect from which the Scriptural 
 ideas have disappeared — only shows his nobility by 
 his benevolence, his integrity, his thoroughness, and 
 his charity, but not by any vision of a life higher 
 than that of the surveyor and land-agent. Though 
 he lives, within his small sphere, up to the full height 
 of Christian purity and charity, his imagination 
 dwells solely on his work of promoting benevolently 
 the thorough cultivation of the land ; capable as he 
 is of great self-sacrifices to his own ideal of conduct, 
 the author is anxious to make you see that Caleb 
 Garth's ideal is of the purest secularistic type. Then 
 Mr. Farcbrother, a most winning character, is saved 
 from his excusable but not very noble desire to win 
 money at whist to add to his small savings, not by 
 any effort of will, but by opportunity, which gives 
 him a better living. It is true he triumphs manfully 
 over the temptation his love for Mary Garth suggests 
 to him, to let her younger and more favoured lover 
 fall into bad ways without making an effort to save 
 him j and here, for a second time in the story, the 
 "meanness of opportunity" is beaten by the spiritual 
 fidelity of one of its characters. But these endeavours 
 of noble character only bring out, and are intended 
 to bring out, the poverty of the moral circumstances 
 amidst which they move. Again, the whole account
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 241 
 
 — and most powerful it is — of the illness and death 
 of the old miser, Peter Featherstone, and of the 
 conduct of his relatives, the brilliant if slightly over- 
 drawn picture of the evangelical banker's fraud and 
 crimes, 1 the account of Mr. Vincy's worldly selfish- 
 ness, the jealousies of the medical men of Middle- 
 march, the ignorance and meanness of its shopkeepers, 
 the moral vacuity of the country gentry, amongst 
 whom leniency to the tenants and liberality as regards 
 fencing and draining seem to be the highest moral 
 aims of which they have any knowledge, and the 
 clever but petty tittle-tattle of the county society, — 
 
 fi all illustrations of the main idea of the book, that 
 rothea's noble, ideal nature had been placed in a 
 world, not indeed of such evil, but of such mean 
 opportunity, that it must have been badly straitened 
 for want of congenial food and air. As poor Dorothea 
 says in one place, "I don't feel sure about doing 
 good in any way now ; everything seems like going on a 
 mission to people whose language I don't know ; unless it 
 were building good cottages, there can be no doubt 
 about that." And the whole tale is founded on this 
 mutual unintelligibility of Dorothea's language of the 
 soul, and Middlemarch's language of the senses. 
 
 Indeed, it is the main function of the rich and 
 abundant humour of Middlemarch to re-enforce the 
 
 1 "When I call it overdrawn I refer to the complete absence 
 of remorse in Mr. Bulstrode's demeanour on the day of the 
 death of his victim. I do not believe that a man who had had 
 such a conflict with his conscience on the previous night could 
 have felt pure relief at the apparent success of his own guilt. 
 H R
 
 242 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 same idea. Eicher and more abundant humour there 
 has not been in any book of our own day ; but de- 
 lightful as it is, the general drift of it is to show up 
 the petty moral scale of the life depicted. The most 
 humorous picture in the book is probably that of 
 Dorothea's uncle, Mr. Brooke, with his kindly penuri- 
 ousness, his fragmentary literary interests, his intel- 
 lectual shuffle, his dread of going far enough to mean 
 anything, his scraps of reminiscence, and his mode 
 of alleviating disagreeable news by introducing it 
 " among a number of disjointed particulars, as if it 
 would get a milder flavour by mixing." A more 
 humorous picture than that of Mr. Brooke has hardly 
 been produced in all the range of English literature ; 
 but it is obvious that its special significance in this 
 story is to illustrate the ideal impotence of the society 
 in which Dorothea was to figure, to give us a vivid 
 impression of the intellectual and moral paralysis of 
 the figures from whom chiefly Dorothea had to look 
 for help and guidance. Then again, the extremely 
 humorous picture of Mrs. Cadwallader, the aristo- 
 cratic, witty rector's wife, who is always cheapening, 
 not only the commodities she buys, but the minds 
 she encounters in the county life around her, is a 
 perfect instrument for exhibiting the weaknesses and 
 incoherences of the more important figures in Middle- 
 march in a pointed and striking form. Thus, when 
 she tells Mr. Brooke that he is sure to make a fool 
 of himself if he goes speechifying for the radicals, 
 " there's no excuse except being on the right side,
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 243 
 
 so that you can ash a blessing on your humming and 
 hawing" she brings the helplessness of political argu- 
 mentation before us in the most graphic way, as if it 
 contained no inherent power at all, although, when 
 rightly intentioned, it might be the signal for some 
 miraculous intervention in its favour. And again, 
 when she gives Celia a little advice on marriage, a 
 propos of her sister's engagement to Mr. Casaubon, 
 how neatly she manages to make everything and 
 every one she touches — the motives for marriage, 
 household economies, religious petitions, and poor 
 Mr. Casaubon — seem ludicrously small all at once : 
 " We are all disappointed, my dear. Young people 
 should think of their families in marrying. I set a 
 bad example — married a poor clergyman, and made 
 myself a pitiable object among the De Bracys — 
 obliged to get my meals by stratagem, and pray to 
 Heaven for my salad oil. However, Casaubon has 
 money enough ; I must do him that justice. As to 
 his blood, I suppose the family quarterings are three 
 cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant." She 
 destroys Ladislaw in the same way, suggesting that 
 Dorothea might almost as well marry "an Italian 
 with white mice," and then comments thus on his 
 genealogy : " It must be admitted that his blood is a 
 frightful mixture ! The Casaubon cuttle-fish fluid to 
 begin with, and then a rebellious Polish fiddler or 
 dancing-master — was itl and then an old clothes- 
 man." Mrs. Cadwallader is the author's organ of 
 depreciation, and a very powerful organ she is. No
 
 244 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 Mephistopheles could illustrate the "meanness of 
 opportunity" more successfully. Indeed, the bold, 
 witty Avife of a clergyman, with a flavour of religious 
 phraseology in her mouth, and a keen sarcastic wit, 
 comes as near to the spirit who ' ' uniformly denies " 
 as we could hope to approach in the English society 
 of our own century. 
 
 Then again, observe the effect of the humour em- 
 bodied in the figures of Peter Featherstone's relations, 
 of the horse-doctor and horse-dealer of Middlemarch, 
 and of that exquisitely -drawn hero, the pompous, 
 good-humoured auctioneer, Mr. Trumbull, who is so 
 much comforted hy the application of the thermometer 
 to him in his illness, as implying " the importance of 
 liis temperature," by the sense that "he furnished 
 objects for the microscope," and by learning many 
 new words suitable to " the dignity of his secretions." 
 The effect of the overflowing humour in all these 
 sketches is the same — to illustrate the narrowness 
 of thought and feeling, the contracted principles, the 
 suffocating social atmosphere of the provincial world 
 in which Dorothea and Lydgate were to struggle, for 
 the most part vainly, after their moral and intel- 
 lectual ideals. When George Eliot tells us that the 
 kindly Mr. Borthrop Trumbull " would have liked to 
 have the universe under his hammer, feeling that it 
 would go at a higher figure for his recommendation," 
 we almost feel that he might have been right ; that 
 the human universe, at all events, in which lie lived 
 was small enough to have gained by his recommenda-
 
 iv GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 245 
 
 tion, and was, in any case, full of opportunities so 
 mean, that with them any spiritual "grandeur" 
 whatever, however inadequate to its own standard, 
 must have been utterly "ill-matched." The inex- 
 haustible humour of Middlemarch is certainly care- 
 fully calculated to enhance the contrast between the 
 greater natures delineated in it and the world of 
 circumstance in which they move. 
 
 George Eliot means to draw noble natures strug- 
 gling hard against the currents of a poor kind of 
 world, and without any trust in any invisible rock 
 higher than themselves to which they can entreat to 
 be lifted up. Such a picture is melancholy in its 
 very conception. That in spite of this absence of 
 any inward vista of spiritual hope, and in spite of 
 the equally complete absence of any outward vista 
 of "far-resonant action," George Eliot should paint 
 the noble characters in which her interest centres as 
 clinging tenaciously to that caput mortuum into which 
 Mr. Arnold has so strangely reduced the Christian 
 idea of God, — "a stream of tendency, not ourselves, 
 which makes for righteousness," — and as never even 
 inclined to cry out, " Let us eat and drink, for to- 
 morrow we die," is a great testimony to the ethical 
 depth and nobility of her mind. And it will add to 
 the interest of Middlemarch, and of its very inferior 
 though still remarkable successor Daniel Deronda, 
 in future generations, when at length this great wave 
 of scepticism has swept by us, and "this tyranny is 
 overpast," that in pointing to them as registering the
 
 246 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 low-tide mark of spiritual belief among the literary 
 class in the nineteenth century, the critics of the 
 future will be compelled to infer from them that even 
 during that low ebb of trust in the supernatural, 
 there was no want of ardent belief in the spiritual 
 obligations of purity and self-sacrifice, nor even in 
 that " secret of the Cross " which, strangely enough, 
 survives the loss of the faith from which it sprang. 
 
 I cannot leave George Eliot without saying a word 
 of her poetry, though I do not regard her poetry 
 as anything but the attempt of a large but slow 
 imagination to use a medium not really well fitted 
 to her genius. Her verse wants spontaneity. "The 
 Spanish Gipsy," with all its rich colour, and some- 
 times almost Miltonic stateliness, shows, I think, 
 that George Eliot is far greater when she interprets 
 freely the poetry of real life in her novels and 
 romances than Avhen she submits her imagination 
 to the chains of verse. Verse to her is a fetter, and 
 not a stimulus. In prose she is so free and dramatic 
 that it is a disappointment to find the characters in 
 her " Spanish Gipsy " moving in servile obedience to 
 the intellectual views which the reader at once dis- 
 covers to have produced them. If I except, perhaps, 
 — and even there I am doubtful, — the Spanish Duke, 
 Don Silva, whose character is certainly finely con- 
 ceived both in outline and detail, though the general 
 effect is, I think, a little like " the misty Hyades," 
 a haze of moral worlds melting into each other, — 
 the chief characters of the story, including especially
 
 iv GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 247 
 
 the Gipsy chief and the Gipsy heroine, do not leave 
 upon me any impression of dramatic power at all 
 comparable to the leading figures of George Eliot's 
 greater prose works. Adam Bede and Middlemarch 
 remain much her greatest imaginative efforts, though 
 there is, of course, ample opportunity in the mere 
 form of verse for imaginative beauties of a kind inad- 
 missible and unadmitted in her novels. 
 
 The intellectual background of the tragedy — for 
 tragedy, with interspersed narrative links, it really is 
 — seems to me the greatest thing about it, and is 
 truly great. The figures which are painted in upon 
 that background, and Avhose movements are intended 
 to bring it out into relief, are, I think, hardly living 
 and real enough to assert fully their own independent 
 vitality. They betray the intellectual analysis to 
 which they have been subjected, and to illustrate 
 which they were probably created. If I may venture 
 to interpret so great a writer's thought, I should say 
 that " The Spanish Gipsy " is written to illustrate not 
 merely doubly and trebly, but from four or five dis- 
 tinct points of view, her belief that the inheritance of 
 the definite streams of impulse and tradition, stored 
 up in what we call race, often puts a tragic veto 
 upon any attempt of spontaneous individual emotion 
 or volition to ignore or defy their control, and to 
 emancipate itself from the tyranny of their disputable 
 and apparently cruel rule. 
 
 You can see the influence of the Darwinian 
 doctrines, so far as they are applicable at all to
 
 248 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 moral characteristics and causes, in almost every page 
 of the poem. How the threads of hereditary capacity 
 and hereditary sentiment control, as with invisible 
 cords, the orbits of even the most powerful characters, 
 — how the fracture of those threads, so far as it can 
 be accomplished by mere ivill, may have even a 
 greater effect in wrecking character than moral 
 degeneracy would itself produce, — how the man who 
 trusts and uses the hereditary forces which natural 
 descent has bestowed upon him becomes a might and 
 a centre in the world, while the man, perhaps intrinsi- 
 cally the nobler, who dissipates his strength by trying 
 to swim against the stream of his past, is neutralised 
 and paralysed by the vain effort, — again, how a 
 divided past, a past not really homogeneous, may 
 weaken this kind of power, instead of strengthening 
 it by the command of a larger experience, — all this 
 George Eliot's poem paints with a force that answers 
 to Aristotle's fine definition of tragedy, that which 
 "purifies" by pity and by fear. 
 
 The heroine of the book, an infant of gipsy birth, 
 as she subsequently discovers, has been adopted by 
 Duke Silva's mother, and when the poem opens the 
 Duke is planning their immediate marriage. The 
 motto of the story might be given in some of 
 Fedahna, the heroine's last words — 
 
 " Our clear young love, — its breath was liajipiness ! 
 But it In id grown upon a larger life 
 Which toix its roots asunder. We rebelled, — 
 The larger life subdued us."
 
 iv GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 249 
 
 At the very opening of the poem the seeds of the 
 constitutional difference of tendency between the free 
 gipsy blood and the deeply-furrowed Spanish pride 
 and honour are beginning to flower. Though the 
 love between the two is perfect, Fedalma frets against 
 the restraints of the secluded Spanish grandeur, and 
 yearns after a larger measure of popular sympathies. 
 On a lovely southern evening she even dances on the 
 Plaza, the public square of Bedmar, the garrison of 
 which Duke Alva commands (for a Moorish force is 
 in the neighbourhood), — and this she does from the 
 mere yearning to express, after the Southern fashion, 
 her spontaneous delight in the harmony of the even- 
 ing, and her fulness of sympathy with the people who 
 are looking on. This incident is the first made use 
 of by the author to indicate the immense divergence 
 between the inherited natures of the Gipsy and the 
 Spanish Duke, — and this though the difference is 
 purely one of inheritance, for Fedalma has been 
 brought up from her birth in the strict seclusion of a 
 Spanish grandee. Here is her excuse to her lover 
 for the breach of conventional manners of which she 
 has been guilty — 
 
 " Yes, it is true. I was not wrong to dance. 
 The air was filled with music, with a song 
 That seemed the voice of the sweet eventide — 
 The glowing light entering through eye and ear — 
 That seemed our love — mine, yours — they are hut one— 
 Trembling through all my limbs, as fervent words 
 Tremble within my soul and must be spoken. 
 And all the people felt a common joy
 
 250 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 And shouted for the dance. A brightness soft 
 As of the angels moving down to see 
 Illumined the broad space. The joy, the life 
 Around within me were one heaven : I longed 
 To blend them visibly : I longed to dance 
 Before the people — be as mounting flame 
 To all that burned within them ! Nay, I danced ; 
 There was no longing : I but did the deed, 
 Being moved to do it." 
 
 And on this turns the finest study of character in 
 the poem — that of the Spanish Duke, who has a love 
 in him that overflows the channels of Spanish tradi- 
 tion and convention, and whose wreck of mind, due 
 to the impulse which seizes him to break with those 
 traditions rather than with his love, is the true theme 
 of the tragedy : — 
 
 " 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. 
 Silva 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.
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 251 
 
 Haughty and generous, grave and passionate ; 
 
 With tidal moments of devoutest awe, 
 
 Sinking anon to farthest ebb of doubt ; 
 
 Deliberating ever, till the sting 
 
 Of a recurrent ardour made him rush 
 
 Kieht 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." 
 
 This is evidently poetry of the will, but it is not 
 without stateliness. When Fedalma is claimed by 
 her father, the Zincalo (or Gipsy) chief, and called 
 upon by him to break from her Spanish ties and aid 
 him in the task he has set himself of forming his 
 gipsy tribe into an independent nation on the shore 
 of Africa, the struggle between the two natures — the 
 inherited deference to a captain and father of Zarca's 
 free, bold, and commanding nature, and the acquired 
 nature, the passion for her Spanish lover — begins. 
 But in Fedalma it only appears as a struggle which 
 is from the first decided in favour of the stronger 
 nature she has inherited. Her love to the Duke is 
 true and inexhaustible ; but she realises at once that 
 to wrap herself up in the subtle tendernesses of her 
 ducal lover, and leave her father to wrestle alone 
 with his great enterprise on a foreign shore, will 
 make her utterly unworthy even of her own place 
 in life, and so fill her with the conviction that
 
 252 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 she is mean and selfish and worthless. If she so 
 acted she would not be worthy even of the part she 
 had to play, and would sink in her own and Silva's 
 esteem. So she goes with her father, broken-hearted, 
 but firm, and breaks away from Silva. 
 
 The Duke, on the other hand, tramples on the ties 
 of rank, family, and country, for the sake of his love. 
 He gives up his place as commander of the fortress 
 to follow Fedalma, hoping to win her back to him. 
 Finding the Gipsy chief firm, and his daughter in- 
 exorably resolved to sacrifice her love to what she 
 thinks her duty, he sacrifices his own place in life 
 altogether, and swears fealty to the Zincalo chief 
 rather than lose his beti'othed. In the meantime the 
 latter has to earn his Moorish safe conduct to Africa 
 by taking the fortress of Bedmar, which Silva had 
 commanded, and Silva finds, to his unutterable horror 
 and remorse, that the fortress has been surprised and 
 all his own dearest companions in arms slain by the 
 troop of Zincali with whom he had united himself. 
 In his insanity of remorse he kills Zarca, — Fedalma's 
 father, — and the tragedy ends with their final separa- 
 tion : she to take, so far as she may, her father's 
 place as ruler of the Gipsy people on the African 
 shore ; he to get absolved for his sin, and to recover 
 his knightly name as a Spanish soldier of the Cross. 
 The point of the tragedy, hoAvever, is the contrast 
 between the moral strength of the Gipsy chief, Zarca, 
 whose inherited qualities of mind and body and 
 whole life had been absolutely in harmony, and the
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 253 
 
 comparative weakness of his daughter, in whom 
 Spanish training and Spanish ties had partly neu- 
 tralised her gipsy blood, and, again, between both of 
 these and the absolute wreck of character in Silva 
 when he breaks through his whole ancestral traditions, 
 and tries to make a sacrifice of them to love. 
 
 The same striking theme is illustrated from several 
 other points of view. Silva's uncle, Father Isidor, 
 the prior of San Domingo, the priest of the Spanish 
 Inquisition, whose nature is all held within the deep- 
 cut channels of Spanish tradition, within the ideas 
 which dominated the Spanish chivalry and the Spanish 
 faith, is the moral foil to his nephew. He stands out 
 — keen, hard, loyal to his own ideas, domineering 
 without hesitation, and crushing without a scruple 
 all even in himself which tends to divide himself — 
 as the model of the morality which acts rigidly and 
 severely, volition and nature being in perfect unison, 
 on a fixed and customary type. 
 
 But apart even from these leading characters, per- 
 petually recurring touches throughout the whole poem 
 show how entirely this theme had occupied George 
 Eliot's imagination. Take but as one instance, this, 
 on the inherited forces which form the characters of 
 monkeys a propos of the juggler's ape — 
 
 " Man thinks 
 Brutes have no wisdom, since they know not his : 
 Can we divine their world ? — the hidden life 
 That mirrors us as hideous shapeless power, 
 Cruel supremacy of sharp-edged death, 
 Or fate that leaves a bleeding mother robbed 1
 
 254 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 Oh, they have long tradition and swift speech, 
 Can tell with touches and sharp darting cries 
 Whole histories of timid races taught 
 To breathe in terror by red-handed man." 
 
 It is impossible, indeed, to speak too highly of the 
 intellectual basis of the poem, and the finish and 
 power with which many of the ideas are worked out 
 and adorned. Thus, how fine for its purpose is the 
 scene between Don Silva and the Jewish astrologer, 
 Sephardo, who perceives so clearly the scientific 
 limits to astrological prediction, that he refines away 
 and distinguishes till his science is but, as Silva tells 
 him, to pinch 
 
 " With confident selection these few grains 
 And call them verity, from out the dust 
 Of crumbling error." 
 
 This discussion between Silva and the Jewish astro- 
 loger on the decaying science of astral influence, and 
 on those contingencies of human life which its clearest 
 visions leave unsolved, — and again, this glimpse of a 
 subtle scientific mind, which, while it had lost confid- 
 ence in the boasted power of the science, still clung 
 cautiously to the dwindling grain of truth which it 
 still believed that the science contained, are, as it 
 were, poetical glosses and commentaries on the main 
 theme of the story, showing how the past of Europe, 
 in that age of religious inquisition and scientific dis- 
 covery, was pressing upon the present, how much of 
 it was crumbling away beneath the intellectual solvent 
 of the new thought, and yet how keenly the most
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 255 
 
 vigilant and subtle minds of the age felt the danger 
 of breaking, even intellectually, with the past, and 
 how anxiously, as they cut away the superfluous 
 traditions, they held to everything which had not yet 
 been disproved. 
 
 This fading belief, like other fading beliefs, is 
 intended to have its effect on Silva's mind, disposing 
 him to distrust the social and religious traditions 
 in which he had been brought up, and therefore to 
 trust more amply the passion of love in his heart 
 which he knew to be both noble and true. Yet even 
 from the first he, too, cannot keep his mind off the 
 danger of the schism in his life which he feels 
 approaching, and of which his mere love for a nature 
 so untrammelled by tradition as Fedalma's cannot 
 but warn him. In his first love scene with Fedalma 
 he says — 
 
 " Ah yes ! all preciousness 
 To mortal hearts is guarded by a fear. 
 All love fears loss, and most that loss supreme, 
 Its own perfection — seeing, feeling, change 
 From high to lower, dearer to less dear. 
 Can love be careless ? If we lost our love, 
 What should we find 1 — with this sweet Past torn oif, 
 Our lives deep scarred just where their beauty lay 1 
 The best we found thenceforth were still a worse : 
 The only letter is a Past that lives 
 On through an added Present, stretching still, 
 In hope unchecked by shaming memories 
 To life's last breath." 
 
 While the intellectual ground plan of the tragedy 
 is excpiisitely worked out, the characters are faint,
 
 256 GEORGE ELTOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 misty, imperfectly executed, — and this applies espe- 
 cially to the Gipsy chief and his daughter. The 
 lyrics, too, though one or two are of some beauty, 
 do not interest me like the reflective verse. It 
 is a meditative, hardly at all dramatic work, — its 
 meditation inlaid, as all true meditation must be, 
 with keen and clear observation. Of touches of 
 humour of George Eliot's grave kind there are many. 
 Of wise apophthegms there are still more, and of 
 wholesome sentiment and fancy as much as heart 
 could wish. But as verse it is, I think, less striking 
 than the author's characteristic and sad poem on 
 " The Legend of Jubal." And as a work of imagina- 
 tion it certainly falls far below her greater prose 
 works. 
 
 The subject of this latter poem, which I make no 
 apology for analysing, not only as a work of art, but 
 as a doctrinal work, — for so great a writer as George 
 Eliot should be studied as a thinker as well as a 
 painter, — is praise of death, and of the fulness of 
 energy which the dark inevitable fate that awaits us 
 has lent to human life while it lasts. Cain is intro- 
 duced flying from the wrath of God, and seeking 
 some land where other and kinder gods ruled, who 
 might remit the stern decree of death. He finds 
 such a land as he supposes, and for hundreds of 
 years his descendants grow up around him, without 
 hearing of death, in glad idleness. In some of 
 tlic most effective lines of the poem we are told 
 
 llOAV
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 257 
 
 " They laboured gently, as a maid who weaves 
 Her hair in mimic mats, and pauses oft 
 And strokes across her hand the tresses soft, 
 Then peeps to watch the poised butterfly 
 Or little burdened ants that homeward hie. 
 Time was but leisure to their lingering thought, 
 There was no need for haste to finish aught ; 
 But sweet beginnings were repeated still 
 Like infant babblings that no task fulfil ; 
 For love, that loved not change, constrained the simple 
 will." 
 
 Into this world, unconscious of doom, the knowledge 
 of death enters by the accidental death of one of 
 Lamech's children, and Cain is compelled to disclose 
 the fate which remains for all of them by that stern 
 will of Jehovah, which he has hoped, but failed, to 
 escape by his long pilgrimage : — 
 
 "And a new spirit from that hour came o'er 
 The race of Cain ; soft idlesse was no more, 
 But even the sunshine had a heart of care, 
 Smiling with hidden dread, — a mother fair 
 Who folding to her breast a dying child 
 Beams with feigned joy that but makes sadness mild. 
 Death was now lord of life, and at his word 
 Time, vague as air before, new terrors stirred, 
 With measured wing now audibly arose 
 Throbbing through all things to some unseen close. 
 Now glad Content by clutching Haste was torn, 
 And Work grew eager and Device was born. 
 It seemed the light was never loved before. 
 Now each man said, ' 'Twill go and come no more.' 
 No budding branch, no pebble from the brook, 
 No form, no shadow, but new clearness took 
 From the one thought that life must have an end ; 
 H S
 
 258 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 And the last parting now began to semi 
 Diffusive dread through love and wedded bliss, 
 Thrilling them into finer tenderness. 
 Then Memory disclosed her face divine, 
 That like the calm nocturnal lights doth shine 
 Within the soul and shows the sacred graves, 
 And shows the presence that no sunlight craves, 
 No space, no warmth, but moves among them all ; 
 Gone and yet here, and coming at each call, 
 "With ready voice and eyes that understand, 
 And lips that ask a kiss, and dear responsive hand. 
 Thus to Cain's race Death was tear- watered seed 
 Of various life, and action-shaping need." 
 
 The vivifying effect of this knowledge of Death is 
 described especially in relation to the three sons of 
 Laraech — Jabal, who teaches the dumb animals to 
 love and obey him ; Tubal Cain, who founds the 
 industrial arts ; Jubal, in whom the new sense of 
 limitation breeds the spirit of poetry and music — 
 
 " A yearning for some hidden sold of things, 
 Some outward touch complete on inner springs 
 That vaguely moving bred a lonely pain, — 
 A want that did but stronger grow with gain 
 Of all good else, as spirits might be sad 
 For lack of speech to tell us they are glad." 
 
 Jubal invents the lyre and the art of song, and re- 
 ceives unmeasured glory and gratitude from his kin- 
 dred for his gift to them of the new faculty, till he 
 grows weary of hearing the echo of his own words, 
 and resolves to seek some distant land where he can 
 find new harmonies and give up his heart to solitary
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 259 
 
 raptures. He journeys on for ages, sowing music 
 everywhere as he goes, till he reaches the sea, and 
 finds himself so utterly unable to render again the 
 music of that " mighty harmonist " that he touches 
 his lyre no more, and longs again for the land where 
 first he realised the power which is ebbing away from 
 him as his " heart widens with its widening home." 
 He returns to find his name famous, and temples 
 built in his praise ; but also to find a generation 
 which knows him not and which hardly notices the 
 feeble old man who is the true claimant for these 
 divine honours. Jubal feels a passionate desire to 
 identify himself with the object of all this veneration. 
 A germ of selfishness lurks in him still — 
 
 " What thcmgh his song should spread from man's small 
 race 
 Out through the myriad worlds that people space, 
 And make the heavens one joy-diffusing choir 1 
 Still, 'mid that vast would throh the keen desire 
 Of this poor aged flesh, this eventide, 
 This twilight soon in darkness to subside, 
 This little pulse of self that, having glowed 
 Through thrice three centuries, and divinely strowed 
 The light of music through the vague of sound, 
 Ached smallness still in good that had no bound." 
 
 In other words, the yearning to be personally recog- 
 nised and identified as the giver of these great gifts 
 to man was the poor alloy still left in Jubai's nature 
 — an alloy which the mere fear of death had, by the 
 way, apparently stimulated rather than diminished ;
 
 260 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 for George Eliot expressly tells us that Tubal Cain at 
 least, and still more, I should think, Jubal, 
 
 ..." wot not of treachery, 
 Or greedy lust, or any ill to be, 
 Save the one ill of sinking into naught, 
 Banished from action and act-shaping thought." 
 
 However, Death itself is to purify Jubal from this in- 
 satiable longing for personal recognition as the author 
 of that music and song which the fear of Death had 
 generated in him ; for Jubal's claim to be the inventor 
 of the lyre is treated as a profanity, and he is beaten 
 and driven away from the temple built in his honour 
 to die alone. Dying, a vision comes to him of the 
 "angel of his life and death," who teaches him that 
 his life had been full enough of blessing without his 
 receiving in his own person the honour due to it, — that 
 
 " In thy soul to bear 
 The growth of song, and feel the sweet unrest 
 Of the world's springtide in thy conscious breast," 
 
 was itself the greatest of all gifts, far greater than 
 any gratitude which might seem to be due to it. 
 Indeed, it was the very intensity of the light he had 
 radiated which caused his old age to be despised, — as 
 a shrine too mean for a rumour so divine. Nay, it 
 was the final blessing of Death — so I understand the 
 author to teach — that, after stimulating such creative 
 activity as Jubal's, it destroyed the "fleshy self" 
 with all its egotisms, and left him only an impersonal
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 261 
 
 immortality in that human gladness which, in its 
 rejoicings, does not recognise the personal origin of 
 its joys— 
 
 " This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow, 
 And that immeasurable life to know 
 From which the fleshy self falls shrivelled, dead, 
 A seed primeval that has forests bred. 
 It is the glory of the heritage 
 Thy life has left, that makes thy outcast age ; 
 Thy limbs shall lie, dark, tombless on the sod, 
 Because thou shinest in man's soul a god, 
 Who found and gave new passion and new joy, 
 That naught but earth's destruction can destroy. 
 Thy gifts to give was thine of men alone ; 
 'Twas but in giving that thou could'st atone 
 For too much wealth amid their poverty." 
 
 And with these warnings in his ears Jubal is left at 
 the close of this melancholy legend, 
 
 " Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave, 
 The All-creating Presence for his grave." 
 
 Whether the poetic form is adequate to the thought 
 is questionable. But at all events the thought itself 
 is gravely passionate, expressing a strange depth of 
 gratitude for the power of Death to stimulate energy 
 and give a new keenness of emotion to the race ; and 
 finally for Death's power to rob the individual soul 
 of the one selfish husk which clings to all such energy, 
 however disinterested, — the craving for personal 
 recognition. 
 
 So I understand the teaching of this legend — a
 
 262 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV 
 
 sort of quasi-Miltonic rendering of Positivism. The 
 deepest part of the teaching, the part of it most 
 likely to strike the imagination and affect the heart 
 of its readers, seems to me profoundly false, and the 
 didactive form of the verse, though sonorous, is, I 
 think, a little leaden. I have already noted the 
 apparent contradiction implied in praising Death for 
 the stimulus it gives to the generally beneficent per- 
 haps, but certainly egotistic desire for immortal fame, 
 and yet praising it also for separating the shrivelled, 
 dead husk of the " fleshy self " from the immeasurable 
 life it has engendered in generations to come. But 
 there is a deeper vice still in the doctrine that Death 
 extinguishes that selfish egotism which, as George 
 Eliot so finely says, "ached smallness still in good 
 that has no bound." To extinguish the power of 
 selfish feeling is not really a victory over selfish feel- 
 ing ; Jubal dies before he has gained any such victory. 
 If he had gained the victory there would have been 
 no praise due to Death, by which he could not have 
 gi lined it. To be willing to submit to annihilation 
 for the infinite good of others might be a noble and 
 disinterested attitude of mind, but then such willing- 
 ness is not the gift of Death, but of Life, and he who 
 has it can gain nothing by Death, while the universe 
 loses by it the very flower of its life. The death of 
 the corn of wheat, which, "except it die, abideth 
 alone, but if it die bringeth forth much fruit," is not 
 the death of annihilation, but of transfiguration ; and 
 i he transfiguration of the highest thing man can
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 263 
 
 know, personal love, involves the retention and de- 
 velopment of that highest element, the personality, 
 not its degradation and extinction. If Jubal, instead 
 of being quenched like "a sun-wave" in the "grave" 
 of an "All-creating Presence," — what a paradox is 
 there ! — had learnt to renounce the passionate desire 
 to be identified with his own gift to mankind, he 
 would have ceased to "ache smallness still in good 
 that had no bound," in a far higher and truer sense 
 than any in which that can be asserted of "a 
 quenched sun-wave " which has altogether ceased to 
 be. The doctrine of this poem seems to me to come 
 to this : either that Death creates by making us 
 smart under the consciousness of limitation, by sting- 
 ing self-love into haste and energy, or that purely 
 disinterested creation — creation without the thirst for 
 personal recognition — is not for personal beings like 
 men at all, but is the privilege only of unconscious 
 and impersonal life. But what we do actually 
 experience, in however imperfect a degree, cannot be 
 impossible to us, — and the creative power of purely 
 disinterested love has no fascination, indeed, strictly 
 speaking, no meaning, for us, if we drop the thought 
 of the personal centre from which it flows. "Love" 
 implies the self-surrender of a conscious being to the 
 wellbeing of others. An unconscious stream of 
 beneficent energy is in no sense "love," and excites 
 none of the moral awe which the display of divine 
 love excites. 
 
 Moreover, even the true and undeniable effect of
 
 264 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR iv 
 
 death in stimulating energy, and making men, by 
 suggesting loss, conscious of the love which otherwise 
 they might hardly know, is more or less conditional 
 on death's being believed to be not final. A man with 
 death near at hand will seldom undertake any task 
 unconnected with the life into which he believes him- 
 self about to plunge, because it seems hardly worth 
 while. Those who lose their belief in immortality 
 too often sink under the moral paralysis of a creed 
 which leaves so little to be done that it is worth while 
 to attempt. Especially, the loss of faith in immor- 
 tality usually saps the deepest and tenderest affections 
 of human nature, instead of giving them, as George 
 Eliot intimates, a new tenderness. It is clear that 
 the apprehension of loss cannot create feeling ; it can 
 and does only bring home to the heart the depth of 
 feeling already cherished there. But the belief in a 
 final death does much more than this : it undermines 
 our respect for the intrinsic worth of a nature so 
 ephemeral, and makes it seem more reasonable — per- 
 haps I should say, makes it really more reasonable — 
 to contract our love into better keeping with the short 
 minutes during which alone it can be entertained. 
 
 I have analysed this poem, and even criticised its 
 doctrine at some length, because it was one of the 
 few direct confessions of faith which the great critic I 
 am criticising put on record in her lifetime, though in- 
 dications of similar views are freely scattered through 
 her works ; and it is impossible to understand so 
 deep and so thoroughly intellectual a painter without
 
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 265 
 
 knowing her deepest thoughts and measuring them 
 to some extent by one's own. To me, indeed, George 
 Eliot's scepticism seems one of the greatest of the 
 limitations on her genius. One rises from the study 
 of her works, profoundly impressed with their 
 thoroughness, their depth, their rich colouring, their 
 marvellous humour, their laborious conscientiousness, 
 their noble ethical standard, and their weariness, — 
 the weariness of a great speculative intellect which 
 can find no true spring of elasticity and hope, and in 
 vain forces from itself a certain amount of enthusiasm 
 for optimist views of that " wide, gray, lampless, deep, 
 unpeopled world," from which Shelley makes Beatrice 
 Cenci recoil in horror. The only flaw I can see in 
 George Eliot's intellect consists in her rather heavy 
 attempts to conform her mind to facts against which 
 she inwardly rebels. In The Mill on the Floss she 
 spoilt her story by endeavouring to paint the phy- 
 siological attraction of a certain kind of animal 
 character for a nature far above it, as if it were more 
 nearly irresistible than in fact I think it is, and, as 
 far as I can see, only because she had arrived at a 
 conviction that, as physiological attractions exert a 
 great influence in human life, realists should put a 
 certain amount of force on their own dislike to 
 recognise them fully ; and, in the poem I have just 
 criticised, George Eliot seems to me to make an ex- 
 traordinary blunder for so fine and subtle an intellect, 
 in not recognising clearly that Death, if it could really 
 quench the possibility of selfish feeling, would in no
 
 266 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR TV 
 
 way carry on and complete the triumph of true disin- 
 terestedness, but, on the contrary, would finally 
 prevent that triumph. But, in truth, George Eliot 
 was here making the best of a bad business — trying 
 to discover virtues in inevitable destiny because it is 
 inevitable. It would have been more like her, I 
 think, to admit at once, that while the expectation of 
 Death does actually stimulate finite and selfish men 
 to energy, the hope by which it thus stimulates them 
 is empty air, if Death be all it seems. The laborious 
 enthusiasm in " The Legend of Jubal " seems to me 
 melancholy in disguise, — melancholy striving for a 
 calm and serenity it does not feel. 
 
 George Eliot, with a faith like that of her own 
 "Dinah," would, to my mind, have had one of the 
 most effective intellects the world had ever seen. 
 Her imagination would have gained that vivacity and 
 spring the absence of which is its only artistic defect ; 
 her noble ethical conceptions would have gained 
 certainty and grandeur ; her singularly just and 
 impartial judgment would have lost the tinge of 
 gloom which seems always to pervade it; and her 
 poetic feelings would have been no longer weighed 
 down by the superincumbent mass of a body of 
 sceptical thought with which they struggled for the 
 mastery in vain. Few minds at once so speculative 
 and so creative have ever put their mark on literature. 
 If she could not paint the glow of human enterprise 
 like Scott, or sketch with the easy rapidity of 
 Fielding, she could do what neither of them could
 
 IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 267 
 
 do — see and explain the relation of the broadest and 
 commonest life to the deepest springs of human 
 motive. With a quicker pulse of life, with a richer, 
 happier faith, I could hardly conceive the limit to 
 her power.
 
 V 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 1 
 
 This sombre book reads like one long illustration of 
 a passage contained in Mr. Myers's essay on George 
 Eliot. 
 
 " I remember," says Mr. Myers, " bow at Cambridge I 
 walked witb ber once in tbe Fellows' Garden of Trinity, 
 on an evening of rainy May, and sbe, stirred somewbat 
 beyond ber wont, and taking as ber text tbe tbree words 
 which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet- 
 calls of men, — the words God, Immortality, Duty, — pro- 
 nounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was 
 the jirst, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how 
 peremptory and absolute tbe third. Never, perhaps, had 
 sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal 
 and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell ; her 
 grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a 
 Sibyl's in the gloom ; it was as though she withdrew from 
 my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and 
 left me tbe third scroll only, awful with inevitable fate." 
 
 Even to the touch of artificial gloom artistically 
 
 1 George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and her Journals. 
 Arranged and edited by her husband, J. W. Cross. With 
 portraits and other illustrations. 3 vols. London : William 
 Blackwood and Sons.
 
 272 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS V 
 
 pervading this last sentence, the biography reads like 
 an elaborate illustration of Mr. Myers's reminiscence. 
 Very early in the book all belief in Revelation dis- 
 appears, the faith in God soon follows, the hope of 
 immortality vanishes almost without a sign that it is 
 gone; but as "night falls" there is more and more 
 straining to enforce the theme of duty, and more and 
 more emphatically are we assured, in vague but 
 anxious asseverations, that it is what we suppose Mr. 
 Myers means to convey by the words " awful with 
 inevitable fate." George Eliot was assuredly a law 
 unto herself, in a sense in which it would be hardly 
 true to say the same of any sceptic or agnostic who 
 ever lived. She ascribed that law to no higher 
 source than her own mind — unless, indeed, she re- 
 garded the antecedents which had resulted in her 
 own existence as in some vague sense higher than 
 that existence ; and yet she attributed to that law 
 all the absoluteness and exactingness of a power it 
 would be infamy to evade ; and she made her life 
 one long strain to show that an interior conception 
 of good may be even more than an equivalent for 
 God — not perhaps so soothing, not so exciting, possibly 
 even justifying a deep tinge of melancholy, but in 
 her opinion all the more enduring, all the more in- 
 eradicable, all the more independent of the processes 
 of personal judgment. "The highest 'calling and 
 election' is to do ivithout opium, and live through all 
 our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance," she 
 wrote in 18G0; and it is clear that she regarded the
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 273 
 
 belief in revealed religion and in God as nothing but 
 opium-eating, at least for those who, like herself, 
 could look the origin of religious creeds in the face, 
 and who could dare to pronounce these creeds an 
 illusion of our own fostering, if, as she herself held, 
 an illusion they really are. 
 
 To me the character and works of this remarkable 
 woman seem one of the most startling of the moral 
 phenomena of our time ; and I opened Mr. Cross's 
 book with the strongest hope that it would throw 
 some new and vivid lights on the paradoxes of her 
 career. To a great extent I have been disappointed. 
 It illustrates her temperament in many ways, but it 
 hardly changes in a single feature the estimate of her 
 mind and character which her books and life had 
 previously suggested. It discloses, I think, that 
 there was much more of straining in her ordinary 
 life and temperament than there was in her genius 
 properly so-called — that the artificial element so strong 
 in her was, if I may be allowed the paradox, natural 
 to her, though external to her genius ; that she was 
 spontaneous as a novelist, artificial as a woman and a 
 poet; that, strenuous as she was, her strenuousness 
 was too self-conscious to reach the point of positive 
 strength ; and that what I may call the pedantically 
 scientific vein in her was not in any way contracted 
 from her association with Mr. Lewes, but was due to 
 her own bias or the circumstances of her education. 
 But though the book supports and strengthens these 
 inferences in a multitude of different ways, they are 
 H T
 
 274 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS V 
 
 none of them entirely new to the student of her 
 writings. The Life and Correspondence verify for 
 vis what some of those who hardly knew George 
 Eliot personally had previously conjectured, that the 
 richest part of her was almost a secret from herself, — 
 quite a secret till she had reached middle-age, — and 
 that the character known to herself and to the circle 
 of her intimates, the curiously-learned woman, the 
 austere sceptic, the considerately gentle friend, the 
 tenderly-devoted partner, stood to her great genius 
 more in the external relation of a faithful attendant 
 than in the relation of moral substance and essence 
 to the attributes and qualities of that genius. 
 
 Still, the spectacle which the Life presents is im- 
 pressive enough — the spectacle of an industriously 
 regulated career cloven in two by a sudden and 
 striking breach with a moral law which the great 
 majority of men hold to be of the very essence of 
 social purity, and yet a career sustaining itself at a 
 very high and uniform level of ethical principle after 
 that breach as well as before it, and apparently 
 achieving the particular object for which that breach 
 with the commandment Avas made. It is the spectacle, 
 too, of a woman Avho was her own God — not in the 
 least in the vulgar and injurious sense of that phrase, 
 not in the least in the sense of worshipping her own 
 nobility and priding herself on her own gifts, but in 
 the better sense that the law of duty, which she 
 regarded as imposed upon her by nothing more 
 elevated than the hidden agencies which had pro-
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 275 
 
 duced her own character, was really a religion to her, 
 and one which she earnestly strove within her own 
 self-imposed limits to obey, and of a woman who 
 endeavoured with all her might to promote the 
 diffusion of these sentiments of " pity and fairness " 
 which she regarded as embracing " the utmost deli- 
 cacies of the moral life." No one can read the Life 
 without feeling the deepest interest in the presentation 
 of both these paradoxes — the paradox of a woman 
 not only full of enthusiasm for the good, but not to 
 all appearance in the least impulsive, rather singularly 
 painstaking and deliberate in all her decisions, calmly 
 absolving herself from a moral law to which she 
 seems to have attached what we must regard as, for 
 a sceptic, an almost inexplicable sacredness, and, 
 after that grave step downwards, not apparently 
 deteriorating or slipping any lower, but giving us 
 picture after picture of the most impressive kind to 
 illustrate the depth of meaning in true marriage, and 
 the terrible consequences of ignoring that meaning ; 
 and next the paradox of a woman who held God to 
 be a mere human ideal, and immortality to be a 
 dream, painfully enforcing in every way open to her 
 the duty of a disinterested and just life, and preaching 
 in season and out of season that men owe as much 
 obedience to an elevated thought of their own as 
 they could possibly owe to any external inspirer of 
 that thought, even though he were also the perfect and 
 concentrated essence of it. Even in an age of paradox 
 such a spectacle is a paradox greater than all the
 
 276 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS v 
 
 rest. Is there anything in the Life calculated to 
 attenuate it 1 
 
 In the first place, George Eliot was singularly 
 incredulous of the love and care of others for herself. 
 The most prominent trait which Mr. Cross ohserves 
 in her, and which is amply illustrated in the Life 
 throughout, is that George Eliot "showed from her 
 earliest years the trait that was most marked in her 
 all through life — namely, the absolute need of some 
 one person who should be all in all to her, and to 
 whom she should be all in all. She had," Mr. Cross 
 goes on to say, " a pre-eminently exclusive disposition." 
 Moreover, she not only needed to feel and to return 
 exclusive devotion, but could not endure deficiency 
 in the external evidence of it. " My affections are 
 always the warmest," she writes to Mr. Bray, "when 
 my friends are within an attainable distance. I think 
 I can manage," she adds jestingly, "to keep respect- 
 ably warm to you for three weeks without seeing 
 you, but I cannot promise more" (vol. i. p. 14G). 
 And, laughingly as this was written, no doubt it 
 represented some feeling of which she was really 
 conscious. In another letter to the same friend she 
 says : "I can't help losing belief that people love me 
 — the unbelief is in my nature, and no sort of fork 
 will drive it finally out " (vol. i. p. 469). And again, 
 in writing to Mr. Bray : "It is an old weakness of 
 mine to have no faith in an affection that does not 
 express itself ; and when friends take no notice of 
 me for a long while I generally settle down into the
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 277 
 
 belief that they have become indifferent, or have 
 begun to dislike me. That is not the best mental 
 constitution ; but it might be worse — for I don't feel 
 obliged to dislike them in consequence " (vol. i. p. 471). 
 In other words, even in her relations to human beings, 
 George Eliot had extraordinary little faith ; at least, 
 as regarded the permanence of any feeling for herself. 
 " If human beings would but believe it," she writes, 
 " they do me most good by saying to me the kindest 
 things truth will permit " (vol. i. p. 228). And, un- 
 doubtedly, her self-distrust, her doubt that she was 
 of any real importance to others, was so strong that, 
 even befwe she had given up her faith in God, she 
 describes her most painful state of feeling as that 
 in which she seemed to be conscious of dwindling 
 " to a point," and finding herself only a miserable 
 " agglomeration of atoms " ; a poor " tentative effort 
 of the Natur-Princvp to mould a personality " (vol. i. 
 p. 189). It was this deep self-distrust, perhaps, which 
 made her so anxious to be "petted," as she calls it ; 
 and since, of course, she must do as she would be 
 done by, to " pet " others. Thus she tells her sisters- 
 in-law, as the phrase which best expresses her tender- 
 ness for them, to consider themselves "spiritually 
 petted." Again she declares that after Mr. Lewes's 
 death she had been "conscious of a certain drying-up 
 of tenderness," which was all restored to her by her 
 marriage with Mr. Cross. Hence I read George 
 Eliot's nature as one which, while intellectually, even 
 unduly self-reliant, was very diffident as to the love
 
 278 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS v 
 
 felt for her by others ; not from humility, — for though 
 she appears to have been wholly without vanity, there 
 is no indication of humility, though of diffidence as 
 to her power of inspiring love there is much, — but 
 from deep-rooted hopelessness, and, what may have 
 had the same origin, sheer incredulity as to the 
 existence of that of which she had no plain evidence. 
 If the blessing on those " who have not seen and yet 
 have believed " were the only beatitude touching the 
 secrets of the soul which Christ pronounced, most 
 assuredly George Eliot would be one of the last to 
 come within the wide range of His promises. Doubt- 
 less it was not so. There Avere some of her character- 
 istics which were in the deepest sense Christian ; but 
 by this powerlessness to believe that of which she 
 had no immediate evidence before her, Avhether in 
 things human or things divine, George Eliot was 
 exceptionally distinguished. The "substance of 
 things hoped for " was to her no substance at all ; 
 she had no buoyancy in her nature. "The evidence 
 of things unseen " was a shadow — as to the various 
 possible causes of which she could speculate at large 
 with little confidence and no satisfactory result. I 
 attribute to this chronic feebleness of hope and 
 inability to take a strong grasp even of the true 
 significance of past moral experience, a great deal of 
 the ease with which George Eliot surrendered herself 
 to any personal influence which could make an im- 
 pression on her keen intellect, and the readiness — 
 the precipitation I may almost say — with which she
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 279 
 
 evacuated every stronghold of faith as soon as she 
 saw it seriously attacked. 
 
 For, in the next place, nothing strikes me more 
 in this biography than the absence of the least trace 
 of struggle against the rationalistic schools of thought 
 through which George Eliot's mind passed. We are 
 told that on November 2, 1841, she called upon Mr. 
 Charles Bray, the well-known Coventry ribbon manu- 
 facturer, — whose crude rationalistic necessitarianism 
 was so thoroughly meat and drink to him that it not 
 only glorified life, but reconciled him to a confident 
 expectation of annihilation, — to try and bring him 
 back to Christianity. Within eleven days from that 
 time she writes to her friend Miss Lewis : " My whole 
 soul has been engrossed in the most interesting of all 
 inquiries for the last few days, and to what results 
 my thoughts may lead I know not ; possibly to one 
 that will startle you ; " and it is perfectly clear that 
 she had all but made up her mind within those eleven 
 days to renounce Christianity, for she thinks it neces- 
 sary to warn Miss Lewis that a change may take place 
 in her, which might possibly render Miss Lewis — who 
 was at that time, as Miss Evans had been a few days 
 previously, an Evangelical Christian — unwilling to 
 spend her Christmas holidays with her, as had been 
 previously settled ; and so rapidly is the ultimate 
 decision taken, that early in December Mary Ann 
 Evans announced to her father her inabilitj'' to con- 
 tinue to go to church, and incurred his deep dis- 
 pleasure thereby. Indeed this resolution caused a
 
 280 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS V 
 
 temporary separation between father and daughter, 
 as well as some alienation of feeling. This sudden 
 change was produced by reading Mr. Hennell's In- 
 quiry concerning the Origin of Christianity. Mr. Hen- 
 nell's book contains the usual arguments, thoughtfully 
 put, for regarding Christ's teaching as just such a 
 product of the age as a man of religious genius and 
 noble character might have been expected to put forth, 
 and for rejecting altogether all that is generally 
 deemed to be supernatural in Christ's life ; but to me 
 the remarkable point is that George Eliot felt herself 
 relieved of a burden rather than robbed of a great 
 spiritual mainstay by the change. Not only is there 
 for her no deep paradox in supposing that the life 
 and death of Christ are purely human phenomena, 
 but it is quite clear that Mr. Hennell carried her 
 even more completely with him in the superficial 
 characteristics of his book than in the more serious 
 arguments. She writes some years later : — 
 
 " Mr.Hennell ought to be one of the happiest of men, that 
 he has clone such a life's work. I am sure if I had written 
 such a hook I should he invulnerable to all the arrows of all 
 the gods and goddesses. I should say, ' None of these 
 things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself,' 
 seeing that I have delivered such a message of God unto 
 men. The book is full of wit to me. It gives me that ex- 
 quisite hind of laughter which comes from the gratification of 
 the reasoning faculties} For instance : ' If some of those 
 who were actually at the mountain doubted whether they 
 saw Jesus or not, we may reasonably doubt whether he 
 
 1 The italics are mine, not George Eliot's.
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 281 
 
 was to be seen at all there, especially as the words attri- 
 buted to him do not seem at all likely to have been used, 
 from the disciples paying no attention to them.' ' The 
 disciples considered her (Mary Magdalene's) words idle 
 tales and believed them not.' We have thus their examples 
 for considering her testimony alone as insufficient and for 
 seeking further evidence" (vol. i. p. 165). 
 
 That passage seems to me to show the remarkable 
 limitation, not the power, of George Eliot's mind. 
 At the time this letter was written, indeed, she put 
 the merit of Mr. Hennell's book on the ground that 
 it was a " message of God to men." But within a 
 few years more she was translating Feuerbach, and 
 endeavouring to prove that fancied messages of God 
 to men are all of them really messages only from 
 men to men ; and yet she seems to have attached 
 much the same value to the great thesis of Feuerbach 
 — that God is like the Brocken shadow, which merely 
 reflects on a gigantic scale the gestures of man — which 
 she had previously attached to Mr. Hennell's testimony 
 when she described it as a message from God. Indeed, 
 " the exquisite kind of laughter which comes from the 
 gratification of the reasoning faculties" influenced 
 George Eliot's judgment far too much. She never 
 wrote directly on the great subjects on which she 
 had translated so much from the German, but you 
 can see in all that she says indirectly on these sub- 
 jects that irony, of the kind which she quotes from 
 Mr. Hennell, was one of the chief instruments that 
 had undermined her faith. Yet a mind of any 
 capacity can use irony, and use it effectively, against
 
 282 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS v 
 
 almost any convictions or any doubts ; so that irony, 
 as such, should, I think, weigh little or nothing in 
 the scales of a wise judgment. It seems to me, for 
 instance, that the simplicity with which the first 
 evangelist tells us that when the risen Christ met 
 His eleven apostles in Galilee " they worshipped him, 
 but some doubted," though it would have justified 
 Mr. Hennell's sarcasm if that had been the end of 
 the Christian story, throws a very different light 
 upon the actual issue. If we know any historical 
 fact in this world, we know that this frankly confessed 
 doubt of the apostles was extinquished in the most 
 fervent and practical conviction, — a conviction absorb- 
 ing the whole existence of lives of labour and pain, — 
 and therefore it becomes a matter of the utmost im- 
 portance to us to know that the doubt had been felt, 
 and had been openly declared, that both in the first 
 gospel and in the fourth the existence of this doubt, 
 even after the day of Eesurrection, had been plainly 
 avowed. A fanatical conviction is not one which 
 surmounts doubt, but one which is from the first 
 incapable of doubt. It seems to me that, looking 
 at the matter from the broadest point of view, the 
 evidence that doubt once existed is at least as import- 
 ant for the purposes of an historical estimate as the 
 still more unequivocal evidence that doubt soon ceased 
 to exist. A reasonable man's faith in Christ now docs 
 not depend on the exact kind or amount of evidence 
 by which the witnesses of the resurrection were con- 
 vinced of its truth, but on the broad fact that though
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 283 
 
 these witnesses had once given up all for lost, and 
 though they had been hard of belief, even after they 
 had begun to hope again, those who had everything 
 to lose if the resurrection were a dream, and every- 
 thing to gain if it were a fact, were actually so pro- 
 foundly persuaded of their Master's resurrection that 
 they spent their lives, and often came to their deaths, 
 in publishing the truth, and in building up the Church 
 founded on that truth. And I cannot help thinking, 
 therefore, that the sensitiveness which George Eliot 
 displayed in this case, as in many other cases, to the 
 power of a rather minute and petty irony, showed 
 that her intellectual keenness was far in advance of 
 her intellectual grasp and strength. 
 
 Now one sees easily how George Eliot came to 
 use irony so freely and confidently, and to regard 
 Christian convictions, of which she found it so easy 
 to make light, as intrinsically valueless. She had a 
 great dramatic power of interpreting vividly the 
 petty motives of mankind, and it was no easy matter 
 to use this dramatic power freely, and not to be 
 shaken as to the depth of a great many apparently 
 solemn convictions. She delighted to observe how 
 people with a meagre lot, and no influence of any 
 importance in this world, reconciled themselves to 
 their obscurity by embracing some peculiar faith 
 which enabled them to feel themselves "in secure 
 alliance with the unseen but supreme " power. She 
 liked to discern in prosperous people a preference for 
 " such a view of this world and the next as would
 
 284 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS v 
 
 preserve the existing arrangements of English society 
 quite unshaken, keeping down the obtrusiveness of 
 the vulgar and the discontent of the poor." She 
 liked to observe how " when the Black Benedictines 
 ceased to pray and chaunt " in a particular church at 
 the time of the Eeformation, and, " when the Blessed 
 Virgin and St. Gregory were expelled, the Debarrys, 
 as lords of the manor, came next to Providence, and 
 took the place of the saints." And to a mind loving 
 such bits of dramatic insight as this, it is evident 
 how difficult it must have been to regard creeds, if 
 once her faith had been greatly shaken, as represent- 
 ing anything but the various aspects of human desire, 
 some of them no doubt charitable and noble, but 
 some of them vulgar and selfish desires, and all of 
 them of human origin. To a mind alert as hers the 
 very fact that she saw clearly how much of irrelevant 
 or even unworthy motive is mingled consciously or 
 unconsciously in the profession of the most sacred 
 and momentous beliefs — and this she did see — must 
 have disposed her to accept the key to religious belief 
 which Feuerbach offered her, — the explanation which 
 traces it back simply to human desire or need. I 
 feel no doubt that to a dramatic genius like hers this 
 explanation must have seemed far more adequate 
 and satisfactory than it really is. Feuerbach's book 
 suggested that the whole history of religious belief 
 is nothing but a history of human fears, wishes and 
 hopes asserting their own fulfilment, declaring dog- 
 matically their own realisation. And at this solution
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 285 
 
 George Eliot, who had already resolved the most 
 authoritative of all the professed revelations of God 
 into a myth, eagerly grasped, as resolving the deepest 
 religious problem of all on the same lines with Strauss's 
 solution of the questions involved in the origin of 
 Christianity. Feuerbach's is indeed an ironic ex- 
 planation of the religions of the world, and it was 
 as an ironic explanation of the religions of the world 
 that George Eliot, as I interpret her, so eagerly 
 embraced it. Possibly she would not herself have 
 called it ironic. She would have said that, though 
 this solution of the objective truth of religious creeds 
 discards God, it leaves the nobler orders of human 
 feeling and motive, which had been falsely attributed 
 to an external being, as much superior to the ignobler 
 orders of human feeling and motive as any divine 
 law or revelation could have made them, and in so 
 speaking she would have been perfectly serious. 
 None the less, this explanation of religion — this bold 
 assertion that man's temporary and evanescent feelings 
 have been the true origin of the supposed eternity 
 and immutability of the divine character and volitions 
 — is unquestionably an ironic explanation, which 
 makes the most momentous factor in the history of 
 the world to consist in a grand procession of pure 
 illusions ; and, unless I greatly misread both George 
 Eliot's works and her letters, it is the ironic aspect 
 of this solution which constituted for her one of its 
 chief fascinations, if not absolutely its greatest charm. 
 No one can study her carefully without seeing how
 
 286 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS v 
 
 deeply ingrained in her is the belief that you must 
 make men feel small, before you can make them 
 modest enough to attempt only what they have 
 some chance of achieving. To this end she uses 
 irony in season and out of season, with good taste 
 and bad taste, on small subjects and great subjects — 
 her real belief evidently being that pure religion is 
 pure idealism, and that every attempt to represent 
 ideals as actually existing in any world has led to 
 the blunders and follies which make men rely solely 
 on another world for help which they ought to find, 
 and would otherwise find, for themselves. Thus she 
 says in a letter to Mr. Bray, written in 1853, about 
 the time of her Feuerbach studies : "I begin to feel 
 other people's wants and sorrows a little more than I 
 used to do," and then she explains why ; the reason 
 is that, as there is nothing in existence which is not 
 more or less mingled with want and sorrow, if we 
 don't help each other, there is no help at all to be 
 found. For she goes on : " Heaven help us, said the 
 old religion ; the new one, from its very lack of that 
 faith, 1 will teach us all the more to help one another " 
 (vol. i. p. 302). And in a letter to Miss Sara Hennell 
 she reiterates the same conviction : "I wish less of 
 our piety were spent in imagining perfect goodness, 
 and more given to real imperfect goodness " (vol. i. 
 p. 392). And again, still more emphatically : " My 
 books have for their main bearing a conclusion . . . 
 without which I could not have cared to write any 
 1 The italics are mine, not George Eliot's.
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 287 
 
 representation of human life — namely, that the fellow- 
 ship between man and man, which has been the 
 principle of development, social and moral, is not 
 dependent on conceptions of what is not man ; and 
 that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high 
 spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely 
 human (i.e. an exaltation of the human)" (vol. iii. p. 
 245). In other words, George Eliot held that ideals 
 affect us only so far as they persuade us to adopt 
 them into our own principles of conduct, that the 
 fear of God is idle and mischievous, that the trust in 
 His doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves is 
 vain, and makes the heart sick by hope deferred ; and 
 that all which is operative in faith is the attractive- 
 ness which makes us embody our own ideal in our 
 own thoughts and actions. And I think that, as I 
 have already suggested, a great deal of her persistent 
 effort to make men feel the poverty of their own 
 lives was due to the belief that thereby she would 
 render them more disposed to aim at what was within 
 their reach, and more likely to secure what they 
 aimed at. By exposing, as she believed, the illusory 
 ambitiousness of human creeds, she thought to con- 
 centrate men's attention on the little they could 
 really do to embody in their own lives the concep- 
 tions of righteousness which religious people had so 
 often contented themselves with glorifying in God 
 without any attempt to transfer them to their own 
 conduct. 
 
 But then, how did this humanised view of religion
 
 288 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS v 
 
 affect George Eliot herself ? I think the Life gives 
 ample evidence that it affected her gravely, and very 
 far indeed from happily. It is impossible to hold 
 that there is no spiritual judge of human conduct 
 outside man, without a doubly mischievous effect 
 resulting to all proud, self-reliant, but otherwise 
 noble natures. First, there is a readiness to absolve 
 yourself more easily from any self-accusation of moral 
 declension on great occasions ; for where you hold 
 that there is no spiritual judge by whom your own 
 absolution of yourself will be revised, you run a great 
 risk of mistaking a final resolve for a final conviction. 
 Next there is a tendency to be always holding yourself 
 in hand, so as to fall into an artificially painstaking 
 and self-conscious groove of life ; for if you believe 
 that, when you do not spur yourself on to due effort, 
 there is no other power in creation which can be 
 relied on to spur you on from within, you are pretty 
 certain to apply the spur, if there is any nobility in 
 you, too frecpiently and too energetically. I know it 
 will be said that these objections answer each other ; 
 that it is self-contradictory first to look for too easy 
 a sentence of self- absolution in relation to conduct 
 which, if you believed in an external spiritual judge, 
 you would probably condemn, and then to assert 
 that the same absence of belief in an external judge 
 will make you too scrupulous and even fastidious a 
 ciitic of your own actions. Nevertheless, to any one 
 who knows human nature, there is nothing but what 
 is justified by experience in the apprehension of
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 289 
 
 this double mischief; and I think I see the clear 
 evidence of both in George Eliot's life. She certainly 
 took the moral law into her own hands with very 
 unhappy results in forming what is euphemistically 
 called her "union" with Mr. Lewes; and warmly 
 as she protests against any imputation that she 
 secretly condemned herself for that step, or ever 
 repented it, it is clear to me that, on the whole, she 
 intended her work as an authoress to be expiatory 
 of, or at least to do all that was possible to counter- 
 balance, the effect of her own example. She almost 
 says as much in her letter to Miss Hennell, in which 
 she promises herself that, " If I live five years longer, 
 the positive result of my existence on the side of 
 truth and goodness will outweigh the small negative 
 good that would have consisted in my not doing 
 anything to shock others" (vol. i. p. 461). And 
 though she adds immediately, "I can conceive no 
 consequences that can make me repent the past," 
 she has already admitted that the example of her 
 life would need " outweighing " by the influence of 
 her books. Nor did she remember, apparently, that 
 the higher the estimate formed of her books, and the 
 higher their moral tone, the more weighty would be 
 the personal authority of the woman who had written 
 such books, and the more effective, therefore, would 
 be the shield which her example would cast over 
 those who guided themselves by her practice rather 
 than by the moral drift of her fictions. But even in 
 the very remarkable letters in which George Eliot 
 h u
 
 290 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS V 
 
 defends herself to Mrs. Bray and Mrs. Peter Taylor 
 for what she has done, she explicitly rests her defence 
 on grounds which practically condemn her conduct. 
 "Light and easily broken ties," she writes to Mrs. 
 Bray, "are what I neither desire theoretically, nor 
 could live for practically ; we are working hard to 
 provide for others better than we provide for ourselves, 
 and to fulfil every responsibility that lies upon us " 
 (vol. i. pp. 327-328). And to Mrs. Peter Taylor she 
 writes in 1861 : " For the last six years I have ceased 
 to be 'Miss Evans' for any one who has personal 
 relations with me, having held myself under all the 
 responsibilities of a married woman " (vol. ii. p. 294). 
 Probably there is not one woman of the smallest 
 nobility of character — unless it were George Sand — 
 who ever entered into such relations as George Eliot's 
 with Mr. Lewes, who would not have echoed George 
 Eliot's words, though it may not have been eventually 
 in the power of such women, as it actually proved 
 to be in George Eliot's, to carry out her intention 
 without the help of any legal tie. But the woman 
 who sets the example of dispensing with that tie 
 in her own case, sets the example of entering upon 
 relations which no good intentions on either side, 
 nor even mere good intentions on both, can secure 
 by giving to these relations the seriousness and 
 permanence which George Eliot so justly valued. 
 And yet it can hardly be said that she valued even 
 seriousness and permanence enough, for in the letter 
 which she wrote concerning Miss Bronte's Jane
 
 v GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 291 
 
 Eyre t a letter written in 1848, years before her own 
 deplorable course was taken, she assails Miss Bronte's 
 heroine, as we understand it, for thinking it a needful 
 self-sacrifice to abandon a man who could not marry 
 her, only because his wife was living and a lunatic. 
 "All self-sacrifice," she says, "is good, but one would 
 like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of 
 a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to 
 a putrefying carcase" (vol. i. p. 191). For putrefying 
 carcase, read here an insane wife. There is clearly 
 not the highest " seriousness or permanence " about 
 George Eliot's view of a relation which, in her opinion, 
 ought to be dissolved by such a calamity as alienation 
 of mind supervening on either side. The "seriousness 
 and permanence " which George Eliot claimed for the 
 relation of marriage, and which she thought ought to 
 be regarded as the moral equivalent of marriage even 
 where no legal tie was possible, were certainly not 
 very profound, if she held a law to be "diabolical" 
 which does not dissolve the relation whenever the 
 greatest of earthly calamities falls upon either of the 
 parties. And it is still clearer that such " seriousness 
 and permanence" would soon become a dream, if 
 good men and women thought themselves at liberty 
 to follow her own example. And so I verily believe 
 she herself felt, even if she did not consciously think 
 so, for I look upon most of her novels as written in 
 great measure to impress on others the depth and 
 significance of a tie, the sacredness of which her own 
 example will do much to undermine. Moreover, I
 
 292 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS V 
 
 very much doubt whether, if George Eliot had 
 continued to believe in the spiritual Judge of all 
 men, she would have found it so easy to absolve 
 herself from the provisions of the moral law of 
 marriage as she did find it. To a very proud and 
 self-reliant intellect like hers it must certainly be 
 easier to take a final resolve which sets social tradi- 
 tions at defiance, if it disbelieves in any true spiritual 
 censorship, than it can be when it regards its own 
 decisions as liable to be scrutinised and reversed by 
 a perfect and omniscient Judge. The mere belief in 
 the existence of a Court of Moral Appeal is a great 
 security for care and humility in most natures. 
 
 Now of care there is enough and to spare in George 
 Eliot. She is nothing if not careful, and nothing if 
 not anxious to increase the store of pity and fairness 
 in human life. But of humility, which seems to me 
 so essential to the moral life of such "beings as Ave 
 are," there is a remarkable deficiency in her judgments. 
 It was not so much that she was proud — though all 
 who knew her seem to speak of her as "proud and 
 sensitive " in a manner peculiarly her own — but that 
 her "fastidious, yet hungry ambition" (vol. iii. p. 125), 
 as she herself described the side of her nature which 
 caused her a perpetual melancholy, made her an easy 
 prey to all those multitudinous doubts of which 
 intellectual criticisms and intellectual subtleties are 
 the source. She was reproached once by a friend at 
 Geneva with having " more intellect than morale" 
 and says that the remark was "more true than agree-
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 293 
 
 able " (vol. i. p. 223). It is very doubtful, however, 
 how far this was true. It was certainly not true at 
 all, if it meant that she had more sympathy with 
 intellectual people than she had with moral enthusiasts. 
 But it is true that her ambition always took an 
 intellectual form, that she despised the moral judg- 
 ments of those who were not intellectual, and never 
 showed a trace of sympathy with the Christian 
 principle that " God hath chosen the foolish things of 
 the Avorld to confound the wise, and the weak things 
 of the world to confound the things which are mighty, 
 and base things of the world and things which are 
 despised hath God chosen ; yea, and things which are 
 not, to bring to nought things that are." George 
 Eliot had absolutely none of this feeling ; she was 
 always aiming at being even more intellectual than 
 she really was, and this gives the touch of pedantry 
 to her writings, and the large vein of pedantry to 
 her letters. "It would really have been a pity to 
 stay at Plongeon," she writes from Geneva, though 
 all the people at Plongeon had been most kind and 
 attentive to her, " out of reach of everything and with 
 people so little worth talking to ; " and that was 
 always her attitude towards non-intellectual people. 
 This is indeed the one flaw in her intellect, that she 
 values every indication of intellect too highly, and so 
 is often grandiose when she might have been great. 
 She loves to write of " schematic forms," of a " terrene 
 destiny," of "centripetal" and "centrifugal" forces 
 that would carry her to or from her friends, the Brays;
 
 294 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS v 
 
 she is pleased with herself for suggesting that man is 
 "an epizoon making his abode in the skin of the 
 planetary organism," where Cobhett would have 
 called him a tick or a harvest-bug; and she even 
 describes her marriage as " something like a miracle- 
 legend," though it certainly requires a good deal of 
 intellectual grandiosity to detect the resemblance. 
 Unquestionably, the one defect of her intellect was 
 her utter inability to see that simplicity, not strain, 
 is the token of true mastery. So far as I can judge, 
 she really thought the elaborate theories by which 
 Strauss and Feuerbach attempted to replace the 
 supposition of the truth of Christianity and of Theism 
 by certain purely subjective illusions more, not less, 
 likely to be true for their elaboration and far-fetched- 
 ness and surprising ingenuity. With her wonderful 
 dramatic power she could be simple enough when she 
 had a simple character to interpret. Her children 
 are admirably drawn, though she is not very fond of 
 drawing them. But when she writes about children 
 in her own person, how stiff and unnatural she is ! 
 Mr. John Morley, whose estimate of George Eliot 
 seems to me in general a very accurate one, has 
 quoted as the best specimen of her letters one written 
 (vol. iii. p. 323) to cancel an invitation to the children 
 of her friend, Mr. Burnc Jones, to spend Christmas 
 Day with them ; and it seems to me hardly possible 
 to exaggerate the artificiality of that letter's pleasantry. 
 Here it is : —
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 295 
 
 " Letter to Mrs. Burne Jones. 
 
 "3d December 1877. 
 " I have been made rather unhappy by my husband's 
 impulsive proposal about Christmas. We are dull old 
 persons, and your two sweet young ones ought to find at 
 Christmas a new bright bead to string on their memory, 
 whereas to spend the time with us would be to string on 
 a dark shrivelled berry. They ought to have a group of 
 young creatures to be joyful with. Our own children 
 always spend their Christmas with Gertrude's family ; 
 and we have usually taken our sober merry-making with 
 friends out of town. Illness among these will break our 
 custom this year ; and thus mein Mann, feeling that our 
 Christmas was free, considered how very much he liked 
 being with you, omitting the other side of the question — 
 namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably joyous 
 meeting, a real festival for Phil and Margaret. I was 
 conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, 
 and the consciousness has been pressing on me more and 
 more painfully ever since. Even my husband's affectionate 
 hopefulness cannot withstand my melancholy demonstra- 
 tion. So pray consider that kill-joy proposition as entirely 
 retracted, and give us something of yourselves only on 
 simple black-letter days, when the Herald Angels have 
 not been raising expectations early in the morning." 
 
 That seems to me just one of the elaborately playful 
 letters which it sets one's teeth on edge to read, — a 
 mosaic of genuine tenderness for children and intel- 
 lectual contempt for their credulous attitude of mind. 
 But it was this ardent belief in intellectuality, 
 this complete failure to regard humility as in any 
 sense whatever a true guide to truth, which, as it 
 appears to me, greatly increased that moral tension
 
 296 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS V 
 
 so vividly present to the mind of Mr. Myers, as he 
 listened to her remark that the less you believe in 
 God the more peremptory becomes the personal 
 authority of duty. Now I quite admit that this 
 conception of an ideal to which George Eliot felt 
 herself absolutely bound to approximate as closely as 
 she could, and to which she did not believe that any 
 one but herself could effectually urge her, pervades 
 her whole correspondence. But I think that, eager 
 as her devotion to the ideal is, it constrained, even 
 if it stimulated, the fibre of her character. Un- 
 doubtedly, as I have said before, George Eliot was in 
 the highest sense her own God, not the object of her 
 own worship, but her own moral Providence, her own 
 conscience, her own lawgiver, her own judge, her own 
 Saviour. This is, as it seems to me, what makes the 
 sense of strain in her life grow greater towards the 
 close. There never was much spontaneousness in her, 
 but what there Avas at first grows rapidly less and less. 
 She tried to do for herself all that religious people 
 rightly leave to God, as well as all that religious 
 people rightly do for themselves. Of course, George 
 Eliot thought this the great advantage of her 
 scepticism. It secured her, she held, from expending 
 piety on " imaginary perfection," and required her to 
 spend it on "real imperfection." But whatever her 
 own view of this economy of force may have been, I 
 think it plain that her genuine anxiety to be a law 
 to herself, though it broke down at a very critical 
 moment, usually made her painfully eager to assume
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 297 
 
 the right moral posture, and to assume it with 
 emphasis. A human being of strong ethical con- 
 victions, who thinks that God is to be replaced by his 
 own moral thoughtfulness, must be always exerting 
 himself to be more and more morally thoughtful, and 
 must injure himself by giving to his moral thought- 
 fulness a highly artificial character, and that seems to 
 me exactly George Eliot's case. "I am better now," 
 she writes in 1852 to Mrs. Bray ; "have rid myself 
 of all distasteful work, and am trying to love the 
 glorious destination of humanity, looking before and 
 after." What can be worse for any mind than 
 " trying to love the glorious destination of humanity, 
 looking before and after 1 " and this, though George 
 Eliot, of course, confessed to herself, that in the 
 absence of any faith in God, she could only judge by 
 the most doubtful criteria what that destination was 
 likely to be. For my part, I wonder that she did 
 not feel worse instead of better for that Quixotic 
 endeavour to love the ambiguous destiny of a father- 
 less race. Again, in 1870 she writes to Mrs. Eobert 
 Lytton (now Lady Lytton) : "I try to delight in the 
 sunshine that will be, when I shall never see it any 
 more, and I think it is possible for this sort of 
 impersonal life to attain great intensity — possible for 
 us to gain much more independence than is usually 
 believed of the small bundle of facts that make our 
 own personality." Can any one conceive a more 
 artificial strain than an endeavour to delight in " the 
 sunshine that will be " after we are dead 1 That
 
 298 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS V 
 
 seems to me a vain endeavour to make up for the 
 void with which George Eliot has in imagination 
 replaced God, by craning eagerly into an as yet non- 
 existent universe, and blessing it in her own person. 
 A fine nature stripped of faith will put itself through 
 all sorts of painful gymnastic efforts in the attempt to 
 supply to bereaved humanity the place of Him who is 
 the same " yesterday, to-day, and for ever." 
 
 One of the finest touches in this book is contained 
 in that letter to Madame Bodichon from which I have 
 already quoted, where George Eliot, after stating that 
 she has full faith " in the working out of higher 
 possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church 
 has presented," goes on to say that "those who have 
 strength to wait and endure, are bound to accept no 
 formula which their whole souls — their intellect as 
 well as their emotions — do not embrace with entire 
 reverence. The highest ' calling and election ' is to 
 do mthout opium, and live through all our pain with 
 conscious, clear-eyed endurance." I heartily agree. 
 The sceptic, however great his hunger of soul, is 
 bound not to make-believe that he thinks what in his 
 real inner mind he does not think, for the sake merely 
 of the satisfaction of a little sympathy and warmth. 
 Doubtless there is such a thing as opium-taking in the 
 shape of entertaining in the mind soothing beliefs 
 which arc not really held with inward conviction. 
 But it seems to me that George Eliot had not the 
 strength to act up to her own principle. Minute 
 doses of opium in the shape of soothing but thoroughly
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 299 
 
 unreal assuagements of the pain of her own incapacity 
 to help her friends when in trouble, she certainly did 
 take. It is no doubt very painful to hear of the 
 anguish of a friend and to have nothing further to 
 say than that the knowledge of that anguish gives 
 you pain. And there are no dismaller letters than 
 the letters in which George Eliot tries to make 
 believe very much that she has something more than 
 this to say. For example, on such an occasion she 
 writes to Mrs. Bray, justly enough from her point of 
 view : " There is no such thing as consolation when 
 we have made the lot of another our own ; " but the 
 words are hardly written before she makes an attempt 
 at consolation, and, as it appears to me, a most 
 unhappy one, which may have imposed on herself, 
 but cannot have imposed on her friends : —   
 
 " I don't know whether you strongly share, as I do, 
 the old belief that made men say the gods loved those 
 who died young. It seems to me truer than ever, now 
 life has become more complex, and more and more difficult 
 problems have to be worked out. Life, though a good to 
 men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to 
 some not a good at all. To my thought it is a source of 
 constant mental distraction to make the denial of this a 
 part of religion — to go on pretending things are better 
 than they are. To me early death takes the aspect of 
 salvation, though I feel, too, that those who live and suffer 
 may sometimes have the greater blessedness of being a 
 salvation " (vol. ii. p. 400). 
 
 I think this is hardly opium — at best it is make- 
 believe opium ; but it is curiously unreal all the same.
 
 300 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS v 
 
 If the early extinction of life — for that is what George 
 Eliot means by death — is in any sense a matter for 
 rejoicing, it must clearly be, as she implies, simply on 
 the ground that longer life would involve a prepond- 
 erance of evil ; but how escape by extinction from 
 a preponderance of evil can, in any real sense, be 
 called a "salvation," — a making whole, — and that, 
 too, in the very same context in which such salvation 
 or making whole as the good procure for those on 
 whose behalf they suffer, is appreciated at its true 
 worth, it is simply impossible to conjecture. The truth 
 is, that salvation is a conception which George Eliot, 
 with her creed, was bound to reserve exclusively for 
 the healing of the moral maladies of the living. To 
 talk of salvation as secured by the dead was playing 
 fast and loose with her own convictions in the sup- 
 posed interest of those who were suffering under 
 some keen grief. So again in writing to another 
 friend she says : " I have had a great personal loss 
 lately, in the death of a sweet woman to whom I have 
 sometimes gone, and hoped to go again, for a little 
 moral strength. She had long been confined to 
 her room by consumption, which has now taken her 
 quite out of reach except to memory, which makes 
 all dear human beings undying to us as long as we 
 ourselves live" (vol. ii. pp. 377-378). In other 
 words, as there is no real compensation for the loss 
 we suffer in the death of our friends, to those who 
 believe that death is final, and as it is intolerable to 
 confess this to ourselves " with conscious, clear-eyed
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 301 
 
 endurance," we must talk of memory making the 
 dead undying to us as long as we ourselves live, 
 though there is no meaning in the phrase, since 
 memory does not begin when our friends die, but, on 
 the contrary, rather begins then to grow less vivid. 
 Still more unreal appears to me to be the consolation 
 offered to a widowed friend : " You will think of 
 things to do such as he would approve of your doing, 
 and every day will be sacred with his memory — nay, 
 his presence. There is no pretence or visionariness 
 in saying that he is still part of you." Certainly 
 there is no pretence or visionariness in saying so, if 
 you only mean it, as George Eliot only meant it, in 
 a very inferior sense to that in which you may say 
 that your ancestors are still part of you. But as 
 there is no particular consolation in thinking of that 
 — and certainly it would not justify you in saying 
 that they are present with you — it is surely a very 
 make-believe consolation to tell a widow that her 
 husband is present with her, when you mean only, 
 and she knows that you mean only, that you want to 
 say something which sounds comfortable, though it 
 has no comfort in it. That surely is not "living 
 through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endur- 
 ance." And when it came to experiencing the same 
 trouble herself, George Eliot did not find much con- 
 solation in reflections of this kind. On the contrary, 
 she says, " I had been conscious of a certain drying- 
 up of tenderness in me," and she took refuge, not in 
 amusing herself by imagining the " presence " witli
 
 302 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS V 
 
 her, in a non-natural sense, of him whom she had lost, 
 but in the speedy formation of new ties. The moral 
 strain under which she lived, in the effort to be a law 
 to herself, did not fail to distort her intellect into very 
 unnatural postures, which she herself even found to 
 be hollow and unmeaning when she came to test 
 them for herself. 
 
 George Eliot's letters are at their best when she 
 sets herself to persuade a correspondent, who had 
 apparently been turned into something like a misan- 
 thrope by the philosophy which rejects God, immor- 
 tality, and moral freedom, that she is quite unreason- 
 able in allowing any deeper insight into the lot of 
 man to alienate her sympathies from man. I have 
 already quoted the first few sentences of this letter to 
 Lady Ponsonby, in which George Eliot declares her 
 belief that the idea of God has only influenced men 
 for good, so far as it has contained a true ideal of 
 human goodness. The remainder of the letter is 
 devoted to showing that more, not less, pity ought to 
 be felt for mere mortals, than for immortals with a 
 future in reserve ; that no belief in the necessarian 
 or determinist theory of human action ought to 
 affect any one's resolve to take the proper means for 
 becoming just, tender and sympathetic ; and that to 
 plead the petty scale of human life as a reason for 
 ignoring the difference between happiness and misery 
 is to use an argument to which no one would be in 
 the least disposed to grant any validity, if it were 
 brought to bear on his own lot. The letter seems to
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 303 
 
 me on the whole so much the ablest which these 
 volumes contain, and so full of the kind of determin- 
 ation to make the best of a bad business which 
 constituted George Eliot's philosophy of human life, 
 that I must give the remainder of it in full. Nothing 
 can express better her absolute disbelief in what 
 seems to me the noblest elements of the human 
 character, and the grave fortitude with which she 
 braced herself and her friends up to the task of 
 attenuating the miseries of a lot thus discredited : — 
 
 " Have you quite fairly represented yourself in saying 
 that you have ceased to pity your suffering fellow-men, 
 because you can no longer think of them as individualities 
 of immortal duration, in some other state of existence 
 than this of which you know the pains and the pleasures 1 
 — that you feel less for them now you regard them as 
 more miserable ? And, on a closer examination of your 
 feelings, should you find that you had lost all sense of 
 quality in actions — all possibility of admiration that 
 yearns to imitate — all keen sense of what is cruel and in- 
 jurious — all belief that your conduct (and therefore the 
 conduct of others) can have any difference of effect on the 
 wellbeing of those immediately about you (and therefore 
 on those afar off), whether you carelessly follow your self- 
 ish moods or encourage that vision of others' needs which 
 is the source of justice, tenderness, sympathy, in the 
 fullest sense ? I cannot believe that your strong intellect 
 will continue to see, in the conditions of man's appearance 
 on this planet, a destructive relation to your sympathy : 
 this seems to me equivalent to saying that you care no 
 longer for colour, now you know the laws of the spectrum. 
 
 " As to the necessary combinations through which life 
 is manifested, and which seem to present themselves to 
 you as a hideous fatalism, which ought logically to petrify
 
 304 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS v 
 
 your volition — have they, in fact, any such influence on 
 your ordinary course of action in the primary affairs of 
 your existence as a human, social, domestic creature ? 
 And if they don't hinder you from taking measures for a 
 bath, without which you know that you cannot secure 
 the delicate cleanliness which is your second nature, why 
 should they hinder you from a line of resolve in a higher 
 strain of duty to your ideal, both for yourself and others 1 
 But the consideration of molecular physics is not the 
 direct ground of human love and moral action, any more 
 than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture 
 or of enjoying great music. One might as well hope to 
 dissect one's own body and be merry in doing it as take 
 molecular physics (in which you must banish from your 
 field of view what is specifically human) to be your 
 dominant guide, your determiner of motives in what is 
 solely human. That every study has its bearing on every 
 other is true ; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have 
 their peculiar history which make an experience and 
 knowledge over and above the swing of atoms. 
 
 " The teaching you quote as George Sand's would, I 
 think, deserve to be called nonsensical if it did not de- 
 serve to be called wicked. What sort of 'culture of. the 
 intellect' is that which, instead of widening the mind to 
 a fuller and fuller response to all the elements of our ex- 
 istence, isolates it in a moral stupidity? — which flatters 
 egoism with the possibility that a complex and refined 
 human society can continue, wherein relations have no 
 sacredness beyond the inclination of changing moods I — 
 or figures to itself an anaesthetic human life that one may 
 compare to that of the fabled grasshoppers who were once 
 nun, but having heard the song of the Muses could do 
 nothing but sing, and starved themselves so till they died 
 and had a fit resurrection as grasshoppers; 'And this,' 
 says Socrates, ' was the return the Muses made them.' 
 
 '• With regard to tin- pains and limitations of one's 
 personal lot, I suppose there is not a single man or
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 305 
 
 woman who has not more or less need of that stoical re- 
 signation which is often a hidden heroism, or who, in 
 considering his or her past history, is not aware that it 
 has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish action 
 of some fellow-being in a more or less close relation of 
 life. And to my mind there can be no stronger motive 
 than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives 
 nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from us. 
 
 " The progress of the world — which you say can only 
 come at the right time — can certainly never come at all 
 save by the modified action of the individual beings who 
 compose the world ; and that we can say to ourselves with 
 effect, ' There is an order of considerations which I will 
 keep myself continually in mind of, so that they may con- 
 tinually be the prompters of certain feelings and actions,' 
 seems to me as undeniable as that we can resolve to study 
 the Semitic languages and apply to an Oriental scholar to 
 give us daily lessons. What would your keen wit say to 
 a young man who alleged the physical basis of nervous action 
 as a reason why he could not possibly take that course 1 
 
 " As to duration and the way in which it affects your 
 view of the human history, what is really the difference 
 to your imagination between infinitude and billions when 
 you have to consider the value of human experience ? 
 Will you say that since your life has a term of threescore 
 years and ten, it was really a matter of indifference whether 
 you were a cripple with a wretched skin disease, or an 
 active creature with a mind at large for the enjoyment of 
 knowledge, and with a nature which has attracted others 
 to you. 
 
 " Difficulties of thought — acceptance of what is, with- 
 out full comprehension — belong to every system of think- 
 ing. The question is to find the least incomplete." 
 
 It is a strange and yet a most characteristic state 
 of mind, which insists that the more insignificant 
 man really is, the more miserable he is, and there- 
 
 H X
 
 306 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS V 
 
 fore the more deserving of pity, for if that were so, 
 the ephemera would thereby be proved more miser- 
 able and pitiable still. But it was very characteristic 
 in her to accept without a murmur a pessimistic 
 estimate of man's nature and capacities, and then to 
 strain to the utmost all her powers to show that the 
 worse his condition the more imperative is the duty 
 to mitigate its miseries. That is George Eliot all 
 over — the low-spirited acquiescence in a depreciating 
 estimate of human nature, and the obstinate resolve 
 to take the more pity on it, the more dismal is its 
 plight. It never occurs to her that perhaps it would 
 be the truest pity to look deeper into the question 
 why man is so pitiable ; — whether it is possible that 
 a mere creature of circumstances and of the hour, 
 without the capacity for either true responsibility or 
 true guilt, could be deserving of so much pity as she 
 bestowed on him, or could be even capable of feeling 
 so much pity as she herself felt. She told herself 
 truly enough that she did not admire colour the less 
 for understanding the laws of the spectrum, but then 
 she forgot to add that there is nothing in the laws 
 of the spectrum to lower the significance commonly 
 attached to colour, while there is a great deal in her 
 fatalist philosophy of human conduct to extinguish 
 the significance commonly attached to responsibility, 
 to virtue, and to guilt. It was very characteristic in 
 her to urge that it is just as silly to ignore the fittest 
 Incentives to virtue, if you want to be virtuous, as it 
 is to ignore the proper steps for learning Hebrew, if
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 307 
 
 you want to learn Hebrew. But it is equally char- 
 acteristic in her to pass by the consideration that, if 
 you don't want to be virtuous, the fatalist can always 
 omit the requisite incentives to virtue, and attribute 
 the omission to the defective conditions under which 
 his character was formed, and console himself by 
 remembering all the time that it is not he, but the 
 conditions under winch he acts, which are to blame. 
 The whole letter shows George Eliot acquiescing, 
 almost eagerly, in the poverty of human nature, yet 
 none the less obstinately set on teaching the world 
 that, even though Ave have to deal with wretched 
 materials in our effort to improve mankind, Ave are 
 bound to make the condition of men better than we 
 found it, and that we have the means of doing so if 
 we will. This resolve is noble enough ; but it seems 
 strange that she did not infer from it that, after all, 
 she had misunderstood the nature Avhich Avas thus 
 tenacious of its ground, and which, though believing 
 the odds to be all against it, fights on all the same. 
 
 To me, George Eliot's Avhole career seems to be 
 all of a piece ; — She conceded everything to doubt ; 
 she conceded too much to temptation, perhaps rather 
 from a strong sense of the hopelessness of holding 
 high ground than from any inability to maintain her 
 ground when once she had taken it; but after all 
 these concessions Avere made, and partly in the pride 
 of these concessions, as though she had yielded every- 
 thing Avhich the most severely intellectual vieAv of 
 human nature could demand, she fought on in gloom
 
 308 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS V 
 
 and dejection as strenuous a fight for a pitiful demean- 
 our towards the human race as it is in man to main- 
 tain. Her own position was, by her own choice, one 
 of serious moral disadvantage ; her philosophy made 
 that position of moral disadvantage one of intellectual 
 disadvantage also ; her dramatic insight showed her 
 very vividly how petty and illusory human motives 
 frequently are ; but none the less she struggled on, 
 often in gloom, sometimes in despair, to convince 
 mankind that their one clear duty is to be more 
 pitiful to each other's sufferings, and more fair to 
 each other's faults. "Pity and fairness — two little 
 words which, carried out, Avould embrace the utmost 
 delicacies of the moral life — seem to me not to rest 
 on an unverifiable hypothesis, but on facts quite as 
 irreversible as the perception that a pyramid will not 
 stand on its apex" (vol. iii. p. 317). There is George 
 Eliot's philosophy compressed, and a very inadequate 
 philosophy indeed it is ; for " pity and fairness " at 
 their best will only teach us to treat others as we 
 treat ourselves, and will not teach us to treat our- 
 selves as we ought. But with a languid temperament, 
 with no faith worthy of the name, and an artificial 
 and enervating theory of human nature, George Eliot 
 yet used her vigorous and masculine imagination in 
 the service of " pity and fairness " Avith a strenuous- 
 ness and even a passion which we might most of us 
 emulate in vain. Still this Life seems to me to serve 
 rather as a dusky background against which we see 
 more clearly the true moral of her works, than as
 
 V GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS 309 
 
 any enhancement of the pleasure which these works 
 give us. Instead of enlarging the suggestions of 
 those striking works, it rather makes them a greater 
 mystery than ever. 
 
 Two grave disappointments certainly the book has 
 for me. The first, that it seems rather to conceal, as 
 under a mask and domino, the vivacity and fertility 
 which one naturally ascribes to the great author Avho 
 understood labourers and butchers and farriers and 
 sporting clergymen and auctioneers and pedlars better 
 even than she understood scholars and poets and 
 metaphysicians. The second and still greater dis- 
 appointment was to find that, so far as I can judge 
 from these letters, her heart never seems to have 
 rebelled against her own dim creed — a creed for 
 pallid ghosts rather than for living and struggling 
 men. In the last few months of her life she visited 
 the Grande Chartreuse, as Mr. Arnold had done many 
 years before her ; nor have we any indication in her 
 brief notice of enjoyment that she shared those sad 
 feelings which the most sceptical of our Oxford poets 
 has depicted as his experience there. But to the 
 reader of her Life nothing seems to express better its 
 joyless and yet laborious attitude towards the world 
 of faith than Matthew Arnold's touching lament that 
 he could neither believe with the Carthusians nor re- 
 joice with the so-called leaders of Western progress : — 
 
 " Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born, 
 With nowhere yet to rest my head,
 
 310 GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE AND LETTERS v 
 
 Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. 
 Their faith, my tears, the world deride, 
 I come to shed them at their side. 
 
 " Oh hide me in your glooms profound 
 Ye solemn seats of holy pain ! 
 Take me cowl'd forms and fence me round 
 Till I possess my soul again ; 
 Till free my thoughts before me roll 
 Not chaf'd by hourly false control." 
 
 For this is, to my mind, the secret of a character 
 which through all its years waited "forlorn "for a 
 faith which the " hourly false control " of a powerful 
 but disintegrating intellect withheld to the very last.
 
 VI 
 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE
 
 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 1 
 
 This book must read like the story of a shadow in a 
 dream to those who think that there is no eternal 
 world at all. Nothing illustrates better the fidelity 
 and skill with which Colonel Maurice has pictured 
 for us his father's life — chiefly, as he himself tells us, 
 in his father's own words— than the force with which 
 from beginning to end it impresses on us the convic- 
 tion that here was a man living, and living eagerly, in 
 time, for ends which mere creatures of time cannot 
 either measure or apprehend. It is not surprising, 
 therefore, that the Life of Maurice is not what any 
 one would think of calling a popular book. And yet 
 it has already awakened a kind of interest which no 
 popular book would awaken, for it is one of the most 
 striking testimonies to the existence of an eternal life, 
 in Maurice's own sense of the word, that was ever 
 yet given. Throughout these twelve hundred closely 
 printed pages one cannot come on the trace of a day 
 
 1 The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, chiefly told in his 
 own Letters. Edited by his son, Frederick Maurice. With 
 portraits. In two volumes. Macmillan and Co.
 
 314 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE vi 
 
 of Maurice's life that was not chiefly lived in the 
 light of eternity. I don't, of course, mean that he 
 lived always as he himself would have desired to 
 live ; for one of the chief notes of this remarkable 
 book is the profound sense, not merely of humility, 
 but of almost extravagant humiliation which marks 
 it. I only mean this, that whether Maurice lived as 
 he would have desired to live or not, every day of 
 his life seems to have been scored and furrowed 
 either with the passionate desire so to live, or an 
 almost unreasonable self-reproach for not having so 
 lived. It has been said that his life was one long 
 pursuit of "unattainable ends" by "inappropriate 
 means." If Maurice's ends were really unattainable 
 it does not require much literary acuteness to per- 
 ceive that any means he took to gain them must 
 necessarily have been inappropriate, so that the epi- 
 gn in, like most epigrams, over-reaches itself. But 
 I think it would be much truer to say that lie lived 
 to pursue ends which he actually attained with much 
 more marvellous success than ends of that kind are 
 usually attained, by means which often seemed, and 
 sometimes were, clumsy, and more or less inappropriate 
 for the end he had in view. There was nothing of 
 the genius of delicate adjustment about Maurice. 
 The ends which he attained he attained often with a 
 great Avaste of power, and partly, perhaps, by show- 
 ing how indifferent he was to the wasting of himself 
 upon them, if only he might somehow gain them 
 even partially at last. What Cardinal Newman once
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 315 
 
 wrote in reference to St. Gregory Nasianzen has often 
 seemed to me curiously applicable to Maurice : — 
 
 " So works the All- wise ! our services dividing 
 
 Not as we ask : 
 For the world's profit, by our gifts deciding 
 
 Our duty-task. 
 See in kings' courts loth Jeremiah plead, 
 And slow-tongued Moses rule by eloquence of deed. 
 
 " Yes, thou bright Angel of the East didst rear 
 The Cross divine, 
 Borne high upon thy licpiid accents where 
 
 Men mocked the sign ; 
 Till that wild city heard thy battle-cry, 
 And hearts were stirred and deemed a Pentecost 
 was nigh !" 
 
 So it was that London heard Maurice's battle-cry. 
 And yet a great deal of his work was undoubtedly 
 tentative, awkward, "inappropriate." But the per- 
 severing and redundant laboriousness with which, 
 when needful, it was all done over again, produced 
 an effect which could hardly have been produced by 
 the highest genius for adapting means to ends. There 
 was the lavishness of the eternal world in all his 
 efforts, though there was all the humiliation of human 
 inadequacy too. " We have this treasure in earthen 
 vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of 
 God and not of ourselves," might be the motto of 
 Maurice's career, so little did he feel the brightness 
 of success, and so much nevertheless did he really 
 attain. 
 
 And the present Life of Maurice only echoes, alike
 
 316 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE VI 
 
 in its evidence of failure and in its evidence of success, 
 the impression produced by the career of the living 
 man. It is about forty years since my most 
 intimate friend, the late Walter Bagehot, who was 
 then a student of Lincoln's Inn where he was after- 
 wards called to the bar, took me to hear one of the 
 afternoon sermons of the chaplain of the Inn. I 
 remember Bagehot's telling me, with his usual 
 caution, that he would not exactly answer for my 
 being impressed by the sermon, but that at all events 
 he thought I should feel that something different went 
 on there from that which goes on in an ordinary 
 church or chapel service ; that there was a sense 
 of " something religious " — a phrase Maurice himself 
 would hardly have appreciated — in the air which 
 was not to be found elsewhere. I went, and it is 
 hardly too much to say that the voice and manner of 
 the preacher — his voice and manner in the reading- 
 desk at least as much as in the pulpit — have lived in 
 my memory ever since, as no other voice and manner 
 have ever lived in it. The half-stern, half-pathetic 
 emphasis with which he gave the words of the Con- 
 fession, " And there is no health in us," throwing the 
 weight of the meaning on to the last word, and the 
 rising of his voice into a higher plane of hope as he 
 passed away from the confession of weakness to the 
 invocation of God's help, struck the one note of his 
 life — the passionate trust in eternal help — as it had 
 never been struck in my hearing before. There 
 was intensity — almost too thrilling — and some-
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 317 
 
 thing, too, of sad exultation in every tone, as if 
 the reader were rehearsing a story in which he had no 
 part except his personal certainty of its truth, his 
 gratitude that it should be true, and his humiliation 
 that it had fallen to such lips as his to declare it. 
 This was what made his character present itself so 
 strongly to the mind as almost embodied in a voice. 
 He seemed to be the channel for a communication, 
 not the source of it. There was a gentle hurry, and 
 yet a peremptoriness, in those at once sad and sonorous 
 tones, which spoke of haste to tell their tale, and of 
 actual fear of not telling it with sufficient emphasis 
 and force. " They hurried on as if impatient to fulfil 
 their mission." They seemed put into his mouth, 
 while he, with his whole soul bent on their wonderful 
 drift, uttered them as an awestruck but thankful 
 envoy tells the tale of danger and deliverance. Yet 
 though Mr. Maurice's voice seemed to be the essential 
 part of him as a religious teacher, his face, if you ever 
 looked at it, was quite in keeping with his voice. 
 His eye was full of sweetness, but fixed, and, as it 
 were, fascinated on some ideal point. His countenance 
 expressed nervous, high-strung tension, as though all 
 the various play of feelings in ordinary human nature 
 converged, in him, towards a single focus — the declara- 
 tion of the divine purpose. Yet this tension, this 
 peremptoriness, this convergence of his whole nature 
 on a single point, never gave the effect of a dictatorial 
 air for a moment. There was a quiver in his voice, 
 a tremulousness in the strong deep lines of his face,
 
 318 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE vi 
 
 a tenderness in his eye, which assured you at once 
 that there was nothing of the hard, crystallising char- 
 acter of a dogmatic belief in the Absolute in the faith 
 which had conquered his heart; and most men re- 
 cognised this, for the hardest voices took a tender and 
 almost caressing tone in addressing him. The more 
 Maurice believed in Christ, the less he confounded 
 himself with the object of his belief, and the more 
 pathetic was his distrust of his own power to see 
 aright, or say aright what he saw. The only fault, 
 as most of his hearers would think, of his manner, 
 was the perfect monotony of its sweet and solemn 
 intonation. His voice was the most musical of voices, 
 with the least variety and play. His mind was one 
 of the simplest, deepest, humblest, and most intense, 
 Avith the least range of illustration. He had humour 
 and irony, — usually faculties of broad range, — but 
 with him they moved on a single line. His humour 
 and irony were ever of one kind — the humour and 
 irony which dwell perpetually on the inconsistencies 
 and paradoxes involved in the contrast between human 
 dreams and divine purposes, and which derive only a 
 kindlier feeling for the former from the knowledge 
 that they are apparently so eager to come into painful 
 collision with the latter. As an intimate friend very 
 truly remarked, his irony was rather the irony of 
 [saiah than the irony of Sophocles, but it was gentler 
 and less indignant. The most bitter flight of irony 
 that I can recollect is a very fine passage in one of 
 the Lincoln's Inn sermons, wherein Mr. Maurice,
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 319 
 
 speaking of the travesty which the popular theology 
 makes of Revelation, in that it starts from the 
 fundamental assumption of original sin rather than 
 from God, suggested the clauses of an imaginary Te 
 Diabolum Laudamus, in honour and propitiation of 
 the powers of darkness, as the psalm which, if it only 
 rightly knew itself, the modern theology ought to 
 substitute for the great song of Christian thankfulness. 
 It could not but have suggested to many who heard 
 it Isaiah's grim irony against the idolaters who, after 
 using some of their timber to cook their dinner, " with 
 the residue thereof made them a god." But Mr. 
 Maurice's irony was not often so keen. Generally it 
 was mixed with sweetness, and almost always double- 
 edged, with one edge for himself and only one for 
 his opponent. Sometimes, perhaps, he a little overdid 
 the irony intended to be at his own expense. He 
 was not insensible to the pleasure which some men 
 find in under-rating their own influence and power. 
 His humility was as sincere as it was profound ; but 
 he seems to me to have derived something of fresh 
 assurance for the great truths of which he was most 
 sure, through unduly exaggerating the extent of his 
 own personal shortcomings in setting them forth. 
 
 His life, indeed, was a sort of chaunt, rich, deep, 
 awestruck, passionately humble, from beginning to 
 end. And it was this in more senses than one. No 
 man, as I have said, ever was more anxious to use 
 words in their simplest, most straightforward, most 
 obvious sense. No man was ever more indignant at
 
 320 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE VI 
 
 the pretensions of journalists and others to speak for 
 a class, when they really only expressed the convic- 
 tions of an individual. No man was ever more explicit 
 in making people understand that what he said he 
 said only for himself, that he expressed nothing in 
 the world but the faith, or the hope, or the opinion, 
 or the surmise, as the case might be, of a single and 
 very humble mind. Yet, as a matter of fact, no 
 man's thoughts ever fell more into the forms of a 
 kind of litany than Mr. Maurice's. You can hardly 
 interpret him fairly if you treat all his avowals 
 of "shameful" failure, of humiliating inferiority to 
 everybody with whom he acted, of suspected dishonesty 
 lurking at the root of his best thoughts, of " hard and 
 proud words" used when he ought to have been 
 gentle and forbearing, as if they were strictly individual 
 confessions limited to individual memories. They 
 were, as I believe, nothing of the kind. He had a 
 strange power of sympathy with others, especially, I 
 think, with their weaknesses ; and when he felt this 
 sympathy, he imputed it to himself as a fault that 
 he had felt it, even though in the next minute he 
 would be ready to declare that he had felt too little 
 sympathy, and had alienated those whom he might 
 have helped by his own hardness of heart. Thus it 
 happened that the tenderness of his moral sympathies 
 gave him a double ground for self-reproach and self- 
 abasement. He thought himself guilty of the guilt 
 into the depths of which he had pierced, and he thought 
 himself equally guilty of not having entered into its
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 321 
 
 pangs more generously, and with more healing power. 
 His confessions, then, were a kind of litany, poured 
 forth in the name of a human nature, the weakness and 
 sinfulness of which he felt most keenly, most individ- 
 ually, most painfully, but which he felt at least as 
 much in the character of the representative of a race 
 by the infirmities of which he was overwhelmed, as 
 on his own account. For example, in one letter he 
 writes : "I wish to confess the sins of the time as 
 my own. Ah, how needful do I feel it, for the sins 
 of others produce such sin in me, and stir up my un- 
 sanctified nature so terribly." That passage reveals ac- 
 curately the secret of the matter. Maurice's confessions 
 of profound unworthiness are as simple and genuine 
 as confessions can be, but they are confessions at 
 least as much due to his consciousness of being able 
 to enter to the full into all the evil of the social life 
 to which he belonged, as to any experience that could 
 be called strictly individual. In one who does not 
 catch the wonderful depth of his social nature, his 
 curiously profound sense of shame at noticing that 
 the evil of others produced a sort of reverberation in 
 his own heart, his constant chaunt of self -depre- 
 ciation, looks unreal. When, however, you catch that 
 he feels — as all the deeper religious natures have 
 always felt — a sort of self-reproachful complicity in 
 every sinful tendency of his age, you feel that the 
 litany in which he expresses his shame, though most 
 genuine, nay, most piercing in its genuineness, is not 
 so much morbid self-depreciation as a deep sense of 
 H Y
 
 322 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE VI 
 
 the cruel burden of social infirmity and social sin, 
 
 which he laid down on behalf of all men in whose 
 
 infirmities and sins he could perceive echoes of his 
 
 own, at the feet of his Saviour. Thus, in one of his 
 
 books, after criticising what is wrong in others, he 
 
 adds : " If I have any occasion to speak against them, 
 
 I will add that I do not hold them to be worse men 
 
 than I am, and that I am satisfied they have a better 
 
 and nobler spirit in them, which is aspiring to the 
 
 true God, and rendering, probably, a more acceptable 
 
 homage to Him than I render. I will say this, because 
 
 I hold it to be true, and because I ought to say it," 
 
 though he expects to be charged with hypocrisy for 
 
 saying it. That means, what I believe to be the 
 
 exact truth, that Mr. Maurice's many and strong 
 
 expressions of inferiority to all the rest of the world 
 
 were really as much due to the sense of shame and 
 
 confusion with which the perception of other men's 
 
 weaknesses and sins came home to him when he 
 
 recognised kindred feelings in his own nature, as to 
 
 the urgency of those feelings in his own individual 
 
 experience. His confessions must be taken as the 
 
 outpourings of the conscience of a race rather than as 
 
 the outpouring of the conscience of an individual, 
 
 or they will seem artificial and unreal. Once catch 
 
 the perfect simplicity with which he pours out the 
 
 humiliation of the heart of man, rather than the 
 
 humiliation of the heart of an individual man, — 
 
 though, of course, it is the experience of the individual 
 
 man which justifies him in that confession, — and you
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 323 
 
 see how truthful and genuine it is, and how wonder- 
 ful was the ardour with which Maurice entered into 
 the social tendencies of his day. 
 
 Yet a simpler and homelier man there never was 
 in this world; indeed, he was one who, though he 
 could hardly speak without showing that his mind 
 was occupied with invisible realities, had a cpiite 
 pathetic sense of his own inadequacy to do what he 
 desired to do, and the tenderest possible sympathy 
 with the like incapacities of others. His own idea of 
 himself was curiously unlike the truth. He felt 
 deeply his own want of sympathy with most human 
 enjoyments, and tells Mr. Kingsley that he is a 
 "hard Puritan, almost incapable of enjoyment; though 
 I try," he adds, "to feel no grudge against those who 
 have that which my conscience tells me it is not a 
 virtue but a sin to want." 
 
 The sin of which he thus accused himself was his 
 joylessness, and his envy of the joyousness of others ; 
 and also the tendency which the sight of evil in others 
 had to provoke anger in himself of a kind which he could 
 not justify, and which he told himself was Pharisaic. 
 Any man less like a Pharisee probably never lived, 
 and it has often been a puzzle to me how he even sus- 
 pected himself of that species of arrogance and hard- 
 ness. I think he mistook the monotone of his religious 
 feeling, when he compared it with the liveliness and 
 flexibility of others, for evidence of aridity and dog- 
 matism. And yet so subtle was his religious feeling 
 that he was sometimes thankful for his own hardness,
 
 324 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE VI 
 
 because it helped him to ascribe more genuinely all 
 that was not hard in him to God. His theory of 
 himself obviously was that he was deficient in human 
 feeling, but that this consciousness of deficiency in 
 human feeling was good for him, because it enabled 
 him to refer to the divine love alone all the conscious- 
 ness he had of being able to stir the hearts of others. 
 In a most characteristic letter to myself which Colonel 
 Maurice has published he says : " The sense of our 
 substantial union as men with Christ, and of His 
 union with the Father, sometimes comes to me with 
 overpowering conviction, not of delight such as a 
 Santa Theresa or Fenelon may have felt, but of its 
 stern, hard, scientific reality, which makes me long 
 that I had the fervour and earnestness in making my 
 belief known, which I admire and ought not to envy 
 in other men. But at other times I can thank God 
 for having granted me a cold, uncordial temperament 
 and constitution, on purpose that I may refer all 
 love, and all power of acting upon the reason and the 
 conscience and the heart to Him. Some day I hope 
 our tongues may be loosed, and that we may as 
 earnestly speak of what we feel to be deep and 
 universal, as we drop what we find to be only 
 transitory and for a few." What he chiefly found 
 fault with in himself was his spiritual rigidity, his 
 deficiency in keen human emotions and sympathies, 
 though this deficiency was a mere inference of his own 
 from his want of a vivid perceptive and sensitive life, 
 such as lie saw with admiration, for instance, in his
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 325 
 
 close friends Charles Kingsley and Tom Hughes. 
 Whether he really felt, as he so often implies that he 
 did, the temptation of the Pharisee to judge harshly 
 the sins of others, more powerful within him than 
 very inferior men feel it, it is of course impossible to 
 say. But if he did, no one ever contended against 
 that temptation more successfully, or warned the 
 world so well of its own Pharisaic bias. But it is 
 true, I think, that Maurice did feel so strongly upon 
 him the spell of the eternal and invisible will that 
 he had some reason to dread the temptation to 
 identify it with himself, and to speak as if that which 
 he discerned outside him were really part of him. 
 Certainly he dreaded this temptation much more 
 than he dreaded the ordinary weaknesses to which he 
 was liable. He had a warm temper, and accused 
 himself freely of having indulged it, but he never 
 accused himself of that with half the same bitterness 
 with which he accused himself of Pharisaically judg- 
 ing others. He knew the extent of the one danger, 
 
 'O 
 
 but he never seemed able to measure for himself the 
 extent of the other. Bearing witness, as his whole 
 nature did, to the eternal world, he was always, he 
 thought, in danger of imagining that what he judged 
 to be evil God must judge to be equally evil ; and 
 consequently there was no sin on which he passed 
 such vehement and stern sentences, for he always 
 believed that those vehement and stern sentences 
 were passed virtually upon himself. Colonel Maurice 
 gives us one very curious illustration of this in the
 
 326 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE VI 
 
 interesting chapter on the controversy with Dr. 
 Mansel. Maurice had always accused himself of not 
 having been tender enough in dealing with the scep- 
 tical leanings of Sterling, of having shown dogmatic 
 hardness towards Sterling's doubts. He refers to this 
 in his remarks on the agnostic theory of Mansel with 
 the same poignant self-reproach that he had always 
 felt, saying that " the remembrance of hard and proud 
 words spoken against those who were crying out for 
 truth will always be the bitterest " of remembrances 
 for one who holds that the Bible testifies, from its 
 first page to its last, that God does implant and does 
 satisfy the yearning for truth, and does satisfy it by 
 unveiling Himself to all who really seek Him. Dr. 
 Mansel, in his profound ignorance of Maurice's general 
 drift, style, and character, was blind enough to 
 suppose that this was a sneer directed against him, 
 though the whole drift of his own book, against the 
 teaching of which Maurice was protesting, had been 
 to prove that God does not and cannot so unveil 
 Himself to men as Maurice believed, but can only 
 give us " regulative " hints, carefully-adapted rules of 
 action — working hypotheses concerning Himself — on 
 the assumption of which He directs us for all practical 
 purposes to proceed. This blunder of Dr. Mansel's 
 exactly illustrates the frequent inappropriatencss of 
 Maurice's language for the purpose of conveying his 
 meaning, even when that meaning was nearest his 
 own heart. In the intensity of his earnestness he 
 wrote on as if in soliloquy, without clearly repre-
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 327 
 
 senting to himself either the class of people or the 
 individual person for whose immediate benefit he was 
 writing, and expressing himself much as he would 
 have expressed himself to the most intimate friend 
 who perfectly understood the reserves and illusions 
 by which he qualified almost all his teaching. The 
 great Avaste of energy of which I have spoken was 
 probably never better illustrated than in his answers 
 to Dr. Mansel, full of noble truth and passion as they 
 were. The Dean did not catch his drift at all, indeed 
 but few of the theologians of the day caught his 
 drift ; it was only those who had got the key to his 
 mind from the study of many previous writings who 
 really understood what he meant. And yet what he 
 meant was intrinsically lucid as well as true, and was 
 marked by large intellectual grasp. There was no 
 economy of spiritual power possible to him. 
 
 Again, the biography shows us quite frankly 
 where Maurice's own light failed him. For example, 
 he always held the language that the whole race has 
 been and is redeemed by Christ once and for ever. 
 Hence, in his correspondence with Mr. Kingsley (vol. 
 ii. pp. 272-274), he admits that the Baptismal Service 
 which speaks of the infant as " made " the child of 
 God in baptism — instead of simply being declared so 
 — is not entirely satisfactory to him ; and he explains 
 it away after a fashion, as it seems to me, not at all 
 different from similar explanations in " Tract 90." In 
 another place Colonel Maurice gives us, as I think, quite 
 clearly, the origin of a certain very gross misunder-
 
 328 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE VI 
 
 standing of his father, with which however, when he 
 meets with that misunderstanding in Principal Shairp's 
 account of Mr. MacLeod Campbell's conversation, he is 
 greatly shocked. Mr. MacLeod Campbell's statement 
 was that, according to Maurice and his friends, " there 
 is nothing real in the nature of things answering to this 
 sense of guilt. The sense of guilt becomes a mistake, 
 which further knowledge reverses. All sin is thus 
 reduced to ignorance." Doubtless this is a gross mis- 
 understanding of the general tenor of Maurice's writ- 
 ings, where the sense of guilt is profoundly, deeply, 
 oppressively apparent from beginning to end. But 
 surely there was much in his language at times to 
 excuse the misunderstanding. If the only difference 
 between sin and righteousness is that men living in 
 sin do not recognise their accomplished redemption, 
 while men living in faith do, the sin would appear to 
 be a sin of ignorance rather than of will. And in 
 exact agreement with this view, Maurice says, in a 
 remarkable letter to Miss Barton (vol. i. p. 233), that 
 he wishes to treat evil " as though it were not, for in 
 very truth it is a falsehood. It has no reality, and 
 why should not we treat it as having none 1" If Mr. 
 MacLeod Campbell had come upon that sentence alone, 
 — and there are a good many partially analogous state- 
 ments to be found here and there in Maurice's writ- 
 ings, — surely he might be excused for supposing that 
 Maurice regarded sin as a purely negative and unreal 
 affair. For my own part, I have never been able 
 to reconcile Maurice's profound and deep sense of the
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 329 
 
 awful reality of sin — expressed hundreds or thousands 
 of times in these volumes— with his language as to 
 the absolute completeness of redemption even as re- 
 gards those who have not been rescued from a life of 
 sin ; nor with his language here and there — language 
 which I believe he holds in common with the Roman 
 Church — as to the purely negative and unreal char- 
 acter of sin. But it is Colonel Maurice's great merit 
 that he conceals nothing. He weaves together with 
 great art, and in a fashion that must have cost con- 
 tinuous labour carried on through a great portion 
 of twelve years since his father's death, passages of 
 Maurice's letters revealing his thoughts and hopes 
 as to all the main events of his life, inward and out- 
 ward, and interpreting them, when they need inter- 
 pretation, by the light of his own deep insight into 
 his father's Avorks and his own profound reverence for 
 his father's character. 
 
 Maurice was always lavish of himself. That is why 
 he influenced those who once fell under his spell so 
 much, for it is this wealth of energy, which is unable 
 to economise itself, that exerts the greatest effect when 
 it produces an effect at all. When he was still a young 
 man of twenty-five, Arthur Hallam, the subject of 
 " In Memoriam," wrote to Mr. Gladstone : " I do not 
 myself know Maurice, but I know many whom he 
 has moulded like a second nature, and these, too, 
 men eminent for intellectual powers, to whom the 
 presence of a commanding spirit would, in all other 
 cases, be a signal rather for rivalry than reverential
 
 330 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE VI 
 
 acknowledgment. The effect which he has produced 
 on the minds of many at Cambridge by the single 
 creation of that society of the Apostles (for the spirit 
 though not the form was created by him) is far greater 
 than I can dare to calculate, and will be felt both 
 directly and indirectly in the age that is upon us." 
 Archdeacon Hare, one of the authors of the Guesses 
 at Truth, told Mr. Llewelyn Davies that, in his be- 
 lief, "no such mind as Maurice's had been given to 
 the world since Plato's." And though there was no 
 trace in Maurice of that exquisite imaginative grace 
 which makes Plato's philosophy so much more 
 fascinating than the philosophy of any other human 
 thinker, there is no doubt that he had more of Plato's 
 eye for discerning the evidence of a superhuman 
 origin of truth, and of the complete incapacity of our 
 minds to originate the highest truths which it is given 
 us to perceive, than any Englishman of our century, 
 Coleridge himself — to whom he owed so much — not 
 excepted. There has probably never been a thinker 
 who has more perfectly realised himself, and more 
 successfully compelled others to realise, that the truth 
 and our knowledge of the truth are of very different 
 orders of importance ; that needful as it often is for 
 us to know the truth, the truth itself produces its 
 most potent effects whether we know it or not ; the 
 only consequence of our ignorance of it being, that 
 when ignorant of it we often stumble up against it 
 and lame ourselves, whereas if it could cease to be, 
 we should cease to be with it. This being Maurice's
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 331 
 
 profound conviction, he naturally held that Revelation 
 — the truth concerning His own being voluntarily 
 communicated to us by Him who is the truth — must 
 be infinitely the most important part of all truth, 
 though it cannot of course be separated for a moment 
 from the truths concerning our condition which God 
 has enforced upon us by the gradual training of our 
 minds and bodies. This was what made Maurice a 
 theologian. He could not read the history of the 
 Hebrew people without feeling assured that God had 
 trained that particular race for the express purpose 
 of manifesting His own nature through it to men; 
 and this he regarded as the great complement and 
 key to the lessons which in all other races man had 
 been taught concerning the significance of human 
 nature, and of the otherwise inexplicable yearnings 
 and wants by which that nature is penetrated. 
 
 Miss Wedgwood, in the very striking paper on 
 Maurice which she contributed to the British Quarterly 
 Review, has contested Maurice's reverence for facts 
 on the ground that there were a good many facts to 
 Avhich he could not even persuade himself to pay at- 
 tention. She refers to the facts from which scientific 
 men are supposed to deduce almost all their general 
 views of the meaning of the universe, and I have 
 no doubt that, if . challenged, she could also illus- 
 trate her meaning by the utter indifference which 
 Maurice showed to such criticisms as those of Bishop 
 Colenso on the historical accuracy of the Pentateuch, 
 through his inability to conceive that the kind of
 
 332 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE vi 
 
 inaccuracy in the Bible for which Bishop Colenso con- 
 tended, had any relevancy at all to his own conviction 
 that the Bible contains the key to human history and 
 destiny. Yet I cannot think that Miss Wedgwood is 
 right in regarding Maurice's indifference to these facts 
 as significant of a want of reverence for fact in general. 
 So far as I can judge, it never occurred to him that 
 either physical science or historical criticism, whatever 
 might come of either, could possibly break down either 
 the truth or the importance of revelation. He did 
 not meddle very much with either, because he did 
 not think himself well fitted to do so with effect, and 
 he had the humblest possible opinion of his own powers 
 whenever he travelled out of the range of truths press- 
 ing closely upon his own mind. But though I have 
 often regretted that he did not pay more attention to 
 the methods of physical science and of historical criti- 
 cism, I cannot say that I think his neglect to do so 
 betrayed the smallest want of reverence for fact. 
 What it did betray was a great want of reverence for 
 theories which he regarded as unintelligible ami un- 
 justifiable generalisations from facts which he was 
 eager to acknowledge. He had no more belief that 
 the discovery of uniform laws of phenomena could 
 disprove the possibility of the supernatural facts re- 
 corded in the Bible, than he had that the discovery 
 of a mass of inaccurate figures in the Pentateuch could 
 disprove the truth that Moses had been led by God 
 when he guided his people through the wilderness to 
 the borders of the promised land. Indeed he had
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 333 
 
 never entered into the minds of the men who began 
 life without any belief except in the uniformity of the 
 outside world, or the minds of the men who supposed 
 that the first guarantee of divine revelation must be 
 the perfect accuracy of all the figures and minute 
 incidents with which the memory of that revelation 
 was mixed up. It is a pity, I think, that he did not 
 more earnestly endeavour to master both states of 
 mind, and to say exactly what one who had entered 
 into those states of mind, but who held his own faith, 
 might have said. But his neglect to do so was, I be- 
 lieve, due much more to an excessive indifference to 
 theory than to the smallest indifference to fact. I 
 should say that whenever he thought any fact estab- 
 lished by history, he was disposed even to over-estimate 
 its importance. Consider, for instance, his frank sur- 
 render of his OAvn — to me unintelligible — attachment 
 to the practice of subscription at the universities, 
 and to the practice of reading the Athanasian Creed 
 in churches, so soon as he saw that it was simply 
 impossible to make men in general accept his own 
 view of the meaning of these practices. Consider 
 again his ardent political constitutionalism, which 
 was wholly founded on his reverence for institutions 
 which had proved their strength. Consider further 
 his extreme prudence in directing the co-operative 
 societies to which he devoted so much of his time, 
 and the anxiety with which he strove to keep out 
 all innovations for which the theorisers or dreamers 
 amongst his companions contended. Again, to me
 
 334 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE VI 
 
 the charm at once of such books as The Prophets and 
 Kings of the Old Testament, and of such books as his 
 Metaphysical and Moral Philosophy, depends almost 
 entirely on the love for fact shown in both, the naked 
 realism with which he accepts such histories as Jehu's, 
 and the characteristic fidelity with which he recounts 
 the teaching of Hobbes or Spinoza, and connects it 
 with the facts of their external lives. 
 
 The admiration Maurice always felt for men who 
 openly confessed themselves in the wrong — as Mr. 
 Gladstone, for instance, did on the Maynooth question 
 — was, I believe, really founded, as he himself said 
 that it was, on his belief that facts are " angels of the 
 Lord," against which it is useless and impious to 
 struggle. No doubt, like most idealists, he made at 
 times a long struggle for opinions of his own, which 
 he had taken for something more than opinions ; but 
 I do not think he ever once realised the relevancy 
 of a fact on any subject without endeavouring to 
 ascertain its full significance and bearing, with a 
 humility all his own. "The vesture of God's own 
 ideas must be facts," he writes to a son, who had told 
 him how he had heard it argued that a Christian 
 legend which appealed to the conscience might pro- 
 duce the same result as a fact. "If He reveals His 
 ideas to us, the revelation must be through facts. . . . 
 I believe the modern process of idealising tends to 
 destroy ideas and facts both, and to leave nothing 
 but a certain deposit of both. The sensation novel 
 is the appropriate sink or cesspool for this deposit.
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 335 
 
 All historical criticism is good, it seems to me, just 
 so far as it tests facts, in love and reverence for 
 facts and for what facts contain ; all is bad and 
 immoral which introduces the notion that it signifies 
 little whether they turn out to be facts or no, or the 
 notion that their reality as facts depends on certain 
 accidents in the narration of them." I think Maurice's 
 reverence for facts was profound, but that the facts 
 which he regarded as " the vesture of God's ideas," 
 and not the facts which he regarded as " the accidents 
 of the narration," Avere those to which he accorded 
 this reverence. And often, no doubt, he put by 
 as an unimportant "accident in the narration," 
 what another may have held to be of its essential 
 character. Now, of course, the most sincere believer 
 in the sacredness of facts as " angels of the Lord " 
 must select for himself which facts are cardinal and 
 which are not. To the man who believes that he 
 has to establish the credit of the Bible, before he even 
 thinks of guiding himself by it, the cardinal facts 
 will be the small consistencies or the small incon- 
 sistencies of the narrative, and he will postpone all 
 question of learning from it the mind and character of 
 God, till he is quite sure that all the human joints 
 and seams are in perfect order. To Maurice, who 
 never dreamt of thinking about the Bible from this 
 point of view, and who certainly held that the revela- 
 tion it contained was proved at once by the strong 
 light it shed on human nature, and by the fresh 
 power it bestowed on human nature, the stress laid
 
 336 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE VI 
 
 on numerical blunders, and on petty historical in- 
 consistencies, or on the minutiae of the sacred litera- 
 ture generally, was not intelligible. While Colenso 
 thought Maurice hardly candid, Maurice thought 
 Colenso hardly sober and serious, and too much in- 
 clined to weigh grains of dust against the testimony 
 of the soul. How different were their standards of 
 fact may be gathered best, perhaps, from the letter 
 in which Maurice declares that to him the Book of 
 Isaiah seems lucidity itself compared with Lord 
 Mahon's Life of Pitt ; the difference, of course, being 
 that in Isaiah the reference of everything to the 
 divine standard is plain, and only the implied human 
 events obscure, while in Lord Mahon's Life of Pitt 
 the human events are pretty clearly determined, and 
 only the standard to which his policy was referred is 
 wholly obscure and ambiguous. After all, were not 
 Maurice's " facts " the more important class of facts 
 of the two? Events, without their moral motives 
 and their spiritual influences, are hardly facts, and 
 are certainly unintelligible facts. The existence of 
 moral motives and the prevalence of great spiritual 
 influences are facts, and facts of the first order, even 
 where the precise events which proceeded from those 
 motives and exerted those influences are more or less 
 ill-defined and left in shadow. In one of Sir Edward 
 St mchey's very interesting letters he tells his corre- 
 spondent that "Maurice said the other day that if 
 we ignore facts we change substances for suppositions ; 
 that which really does stand under an appearance
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 337 
 
 for that which we put under it hy our imaginations." 
 No more weighty or more scientific remark could be 
 made ; but, of course, the question remains as to the 
 criterion by which we are to distinguish the trust- 
 worthiness of the appearance. Colenso thought he 
 could distinguish the untrustworthiness of a history 
 sufficiently by bringing to light a great number of 
 minor discrepancies in it. Maurice thought he could 
 distinguish its trustworthiness as regarded its main 
 features by comparing the moral and spiritual ante- 
 cedents in one page of the history with the moral 
 and spiritual consequents in another, and showing 
 how truly they corresponded to each other, and how 
 full of human nature, and how fully verified by our 
 own experience, was the connection between the 
 different stages. For my part I believe that both 
 are right up to a certain point, but that Maurice 
 had got hold of immeasurably the more important 
 criterion of the two. 
 
 Perhaps those who have written upon Maurice have 
 not given enough prominence to the militant side of 
 his nature. He was essentially a spiritual knight- 
 errant, and this was the side of his nature which 
 led him into extravagance. Such expressions as those 
 which were called forth from him by a narrowly 
 denominational meeting of " the National Society " 
 are not unfrequent in his life, and are quite Quixotic 
 in their vehemence. " The National Society will either 
 become a mere dead log or it will be inspired with a 
 false demoniacal life by a set of Church clubs, which I 
 
 H Z
 
 338 FREDERICK DEN1S0N MAURICE VI 
 
 do believe will, ten years hence, have left the Jacobin 
 Club, and every other, at an immeasurable distance 
 behind them in the race of wickedness. I speak what 
 I feel — would that I trembled ten times more than I 
 do at my own prophecy." And again, in reference to 
 a pamphlet of his own on the Sabbath day : " The 
 working men, and many of my friends, Avill suppose 
 that I write it to please the religious world, which I 
 hope will hate me more and more, and which I hope 
 to hate more and more." Such passages abound, 
 but though they express Maurice's very serious con- 
 viction that men often do worse things under the 
 plea of what they call fidelity to their religious, or, 
 for that matter, to their irreligious, opinions than 
 they would ever dare to do simply on their own 
 responsibility, yet I cannot but think that the whole 
 of his horror of clubs, leagues, sects, denominations, 
 irresponsible associations of every kind, is expressed 
 much more in the spirit of a knight-errant who has 
 had to fight against them, almost unaided, than in 
 the spirit of sober judgment. He had learnt from 
 the Bible to fight bold!}', and the spirit of the soldier 
 ran through his whole life. No man was a more 
 generous enemy when he knew his antagonist, But 
 no man was a more vehement foe when he was 
 charging against what he thought — often hastily — to 
 be a spirit of evil sheltered under the vague authority 
 of unknown and irresponsible organs. He writes to 
 Mr. Ludlow that in his opinion the Bible is the his- 
 tory of God's conflict with evil, and that it assumes
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 339 
 
 that evil is not to be crushed out by omnipotence, 
 but to be vanquished in what may be called a fair 
 fight. " The question is whether the unintelligibility 
 of evil and the omnipotence of God is a reason for 
 not regarding Him as carrying on a war against evil, 
 and for not expecting that in that war evil will be 
 vanquished. I know that there are some who think 
 so. For God to make war instead of crushing evil, 
 if it can be crushed at all, by a simple fiat, is for 
 them a sinful absurdity. What I say is, that, if it 
 be, the Bible is from beginning to end an absurdity, 
 for it is the book of the Avars of the Lord. It does 
 not define evil, but it assumes evil ; it assumes evil 
 to be in a will ; it assumes evil not to be vanquish- 
 able by an omnipotent fiat ; it sets forth a process by 
 which it has been overcome in a number of wills ; it 
 teaches us to pray, ' Thy will be done on earth as it 
 is in heaven,' where it is done perfectly ; it says that 
 if we pray according to God's will He hears us, and 
 we shall have the petition which we ask of Him." 
 And it is as a knight-errant fighting in the wars of 
 the Lord that Maurice must often be regarded. 
 At the same time a knight-errant is not always in a 
 judicial frame of mind, and I cannot help thinking 
 that when Maurice was attacking " the religious 
 world," or " the religious press," or any other anony- 
 mous organ of "religious" notions which seemed to 
 him profoundly irreligious, he almost forgot that 
 these people, however they might be hoodwinked by 
 ignoring their individual responsibility, had still the 
 ii z 2
 
 340 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE vi 
 
 consciences and spirits of men. " I have heard," he 
 writes in one very able letter to Sir T. Acland, " of 
 a poor creature in St. Luke's in a lucid moment 
 snatching a lady by the arm who was visiting the 
 asylum, with the exclamation, ' Have you thanked 
 God for your reason to-day 1 ' and then relapsing into 
 fury. Surely one of these men [political journalists] 
 might say to either of us, ' Have you thanked God 
 to-day for having passed through a debating society 
 with any portion of your souls undestroyed 1 ' and at 
 least to one of us, 'Have you meddled with periodicals, 
 and have you thanked God that you still think, love, 
 go to church, and find any one to love you 1 ' : 
 There is all the pent-up wrath here of a man who 
 felt how full the press of his day was of unreal 
 pretension and dishonest judgment, and doubtless 
 both in that day and in this there was enough 
 justification for wrath. But it is poured out as the 
 soldier pours out his wrath on the foe whom he is 
 fighting, not as the judge passes sentence on the 
 offender whose case he has heard. And while the 
 soldier-like element in Maurice was one of the noblest 
 aspects of his nature, it often led him into extravagant 
 expressions, which he would, on calmer consideration, 
 have himself described as overstrained and perhaps 
 uncharitable. For it is possible surely to be uncharit- 
 able to associations or sects, as well as to individuals. 
 Indeed, he says in one letter to Archbishop Trench, 
 that " the spirit dwells in the body, and in each of 
 its members as such, and not as individuals. The
 
 VI FREDERICK DENLSON MAURICE 341 
 
 spirit in an individual is a fearful contradiction. - ' If 
 that be so, the spirit which unites men together in 
 any association, however temporary, is the true bond 
 of that association, and if that be on the whole good, 
 which no man will decide off-hand that it is not, even 
 though its doings be anonymous and insufficiently 
 weighted with responsibility, there must be uncharit- 
 ableness in bitterly condemning it. Maurice, however, 
 had seen so much of the evil in religious and political 
 coteries and sects, that he was apt to charge at them 
 whenever he came upon them, almost as if they must 
 be spiritual freebooters and foes of truth and peace. 
 Again, Maurice had none of that patience and tolera- 
 tion for what he found deficient in himself, Avhich 
 F6nelon presses on us as a duty wherever it does not 
 cover a really false self -excuse. But this again is 
 due to the militant spirit which was so strong in 
 Maurice. He could not have tilted so chivalrously 
 against all the moral and spiritual tyrants of the 
 day, if he had not tilted with still more passionate 
 fervour against the weaknesses and sins which he 
 discovered in his own heart. In his indignation 
 against himself he called himself cold-blooded. In 
 reality Maurice had the hot blood of the genuine 
 reformer — the reformer who begins by assailing 
 himself. 
 
 But knight-errant as he was, there was no caprice 
 or tolerance of caprice in Maurice. His aggressive- 
 ness was the aggressiveness of spiritual chivalry 
 against the dogmatists who in his belief had repelled
 
 342 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE V] 
 
 men from Christ, and nothing shocked him more 
 than the prospect of obtaining followers for himself 
 at the cost of the Church and the Church's Master. 
 His whole teaching was a protest against the delusion 
 of redemption through opinion, whether right or 
 wrong, and an assertion of redemption through the 
 life of God incarnate in the nature of man. " The 
 light of the sun is not in you, but out of you ; and 
 yet you can see everything by it if you will open 
 your eyes," was the analogy by which he loved to 
 illustrate the difference between the power of opinion 
 and the power of that truth of which even the 
 correctest opinion is but a faint reflection. He held 
 this so strongly that he made light even of the duty 
 of bringing feeling into harmony with faith. "Faith 
 first and feeling afterwards is, I believe, the rule 
 which we are alwaj^s trying to reverse," he writes ; 
 and that is one of the keys of his teaching. "In 
 quietness and confidence is our strength," he says 
 again, "but not in thinking of quietness and con- 
 fidence, or grieving that we have so little of either." 
 In a word, Maurice was one of the greatest of those 
 teachers who have impressed upon us that it is not 
 by virtue of any conscious state of ours that we can 
 be redeemed, but by a power which can dispense, and 
 dispense even for an indefinite time, with our own 
 recognition of its beneficence ; just as the body is 
 restored to health by influences of the life-giving 
 character of which we arc often quite unaware. 
 Once, when a lady ;isked him his belief as to our
 
 VI FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE 343 
 
 recognition of each other hereafter, he replied that 
 that question always made him say to himself, "Ah, 
 how little we have recognised each other here ! may 
 not that be the first great step in recognition ? " and 
 he would have applied the same remark in an even 
 stronger sense to our recognition of the source of 
 truth. Our recognition of the truth may be necessary 
 to our own happiness, but it is the heat and light 
 which proceeds from it, not our recognition of that 
 heat and light, which heals us. And one may surely 
 say the same of Maurice himself. How little did we 
 recognise him here ; and how much, in spite of that 
 want of recognition, did he effect for us ! May it not 
 be the first step in our recognition of him hereafter, 
 that we should understand how little in reality we 
 ever recognised him truly here 1 
 
 THE END 
 
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