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ISAAC FOOT
ESSAYS
E SSAYS
ON SOME OF THE
MODERN GUIDES TO ENGLISH THOUGHT
IN MATTERS OF FAITH
BY
RICHARD HOLT HUTTON
ILonHon
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1888
All rights reserved
First Edition printed by R. & R. Clark, 18S7
New Edition, 1S8S
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 Contempurartj
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
Middlemarch. 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essays, but was withdrawn in the second edition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. H.
Englefield Green, Surrey,
September 1887.
CONTENTS
I. Thomas Carlyle
II. and III. The two geeat Oxford Thinkers
Cardinal Newman and -Matthew Arnold
II. Cardinal Newman
III. Matthew Arnold
IV. George Eliot as Author
Y. George Eliot's Life and Letters
VI. Frederick Denison Maurice
PAGE
1
47
103
151
269
311
THOMAS CAELYLE
THOMAS CAELYLE
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
H Ifl 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, — shoAved 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 was 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 CARLYLK 3
discoveries ; concerned himself not at all about its
art j 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
Eevolution is a series of studies in the way men art'
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 CAKLYLE 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 wanted 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 oFlife, he called him " saw-
dustish." If he had a profound belief in any popular
idraslSeyond those acknowledged by himself, Carl}de
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.
I
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 Sterling. 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 t
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- i
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'i~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 CARLYLE
fellow-men. Perhaps the central thought of his life
was in this passage from Sartor Resartus: "What is
man himself but a symbol of God 1 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 1 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, hoj)es,
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 deep
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-
Dai/ Pamphlets, Chartism, and even the modern
I THOMAS CARLYLE I)
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 poAver
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-nVe 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'
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 tlu- very substance of English
/
A
12 THOMAS CARLYLE l
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 has done so much as
Carlyle'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 CAKLYLE 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 Re voluti on 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 v 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
1 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 Carlylese 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 Avell 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 CAKLYLK 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 the}* 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 tire 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 ? 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
\w 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 more, 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 CARLYLB 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
style to teach one that the truest language on the
deepest subjects is thrown out, as it were, with more
i Tllo.MAS CARLYLE L9
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
ill the Life of Sterling, relating to very nearly the
same subject, die 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 his 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 CARLYLE I
of heavenly inspiration struggled, in a tragically ineffectual
degree, with the weakness of flesh and blood. He say-
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 things 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,
-lavish 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 oiir 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
by the 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 Puseyisms, monstrous
illusory hybrids, and ecclesiastical chimteras, — which now
roam the earth in a very lamentable manner I"
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 w T hat 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 CAHLYLE 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, pious
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
h 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
cpialities 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 Poav<t>
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 crowdiug-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 he 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 CARLYLE 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 whose 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 : —
"And 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 ;
tills 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 whole 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 had ; splenetic without complaint ; standing
oddly inexpugnable in that natural stoicism of his ; taci-
turn, yet with strange Hashes of speech in him now and
then, — something which goes beyond laughter and articu-
i THOMAS CARLYLE :2. r >
late logic, and is the taciturn elixir of these two, — what
they call 'humour' in their dialect."
Every hero he had 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 w T its like
Jeffrey and Voltaire — if he revelled, too, in the
picture of thin, acrid natures like Robespierre'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 Ifrmiiuscences 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
(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,*! 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 -t
guide it on the road back from Orcus a little !
' 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 habitual ly
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 ourselvis.
28 THOMAS CARLYLE i
Iii 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 -Tr Deautiful 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
I it on trust from him that " sea-green incorruptible "
is a trustworthy description of Eobespierre, 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. Xo one knew this better than Carl vie, 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 injectable
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 THo.MAS 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/ w T ho 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 < ARLYLK 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. Froude 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 lie
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 Avhich any Christian might
not equally reply to his taunts 1 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, after all,
he was not in the least insincere in holding by that
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. Fronde 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. Frou.de gives us, they had
denied sincerity to Carlyle 1
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 winch 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 Revelation 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
i
34 THOMAS CARLYLE 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 Rembrandt-
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 Eesartus, " 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 w r rote, 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, Caiiyle, 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
Bailer 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 CARLYLE 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 worlcs ? —
" 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 he is old and sick, and cannot enjoy
it ; has 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 he has expressed about it, into which I do not
yet fully see. Have never spoken with him (though I
I THOMAS CARLYLE il
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 1 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). Represented verisimilarly enough as a man full
of English prejudices, idle, alternately gossiping to enor-
S
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 Carlyle 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
quite 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
THOMAS CARLYLE 4
• >
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) have 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 the 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 his 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
|[
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.
But 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 Romaniser, 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
II
pulpit at St. Mary's, and how, finally transformed into
a Cardinal, he has 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 1 ? 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
li 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 Avith
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
n
passion of the highest order, and in the next, of that
siibtle 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 earthcpiake 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 CARDINAL 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 eau
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 should 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 inquire, 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 n
only succeed in making a little party of their own,
opposed to private judgment, within a Church that
rests enthely upon private judgment : —
" For me, my dear 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 mj'self ; 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, sui 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 dear brethren,
is on your very front. ... I began myself with doubting
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
AVhig school ; I was a Dissenter or a Wesleyan, and by
ii CARDINAL NFAVMAN 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 solenmh' 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 alreadj'
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 Roman maxim,
are wont to shrink from the contumacious and to be
valiant towards the submissive ; and the authorities in
cpiestion 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 different
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 eaptandum 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
CARDINAL NEWMAN Gl
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 eveiy
62 CARDINAL NEWMAN n
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 be 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 1 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
beings, 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 n
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
st}de, 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
this wonderful intercourse of ours with intimates, after
a kind, of 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 6-">
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 eartb, while fresh
H F
66 CARDINAL NEWMAN u
hordes were carried over the first, and neared the earth
after a longer flight in their turn. For twelve miles the}'
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, fill-
ing the apartments and the most private and luxurious
chambers; not one or two, like stragglers at forage or rioters
after a victory, but in order of battle and with the array
of an army. Choice plants or flowers, about the impluvia
and xysti, for amusement and refreshment, myrtles, oranges,
pomegranates, the rose and the carnation have disappeared.
ii CARDINAL NEWMAN 67
Tliey 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 keej)s
them together as if they had a king over them. They
move along the Hoor 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 ? 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 n
deep pining for the rest of spiritual simplicity, for
the peace which passes understanding, that underlies
his nature. Take this from one of his Eoman 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 exquisite tale of
martyrdom from which I have already cpioted 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 quote 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
Pictiu'es 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, unasked, unhoped, have come ' " (Apologia,
p. 7 3 ). 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
. tpologla and his Grammar of Assent, without being
profoundly convinced that the Roman 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 U
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 calls it, he ever felt even the
II
CARDINAL NEWMAN 73
smallest temptation to reject Christianity, whether
before he became a Roman 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 onty 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 n
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
he 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 look 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 polytheist
when I looked into the world. I am speaking for myself
only, and I am far from denying the real force of the
arguments 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 mournin" and woe.' To consider the world in
li CARDINAL NEWMAN i •>
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."-
Apolo<ji«, pp. 376-378.
This is a passage taken from the Apologia, but
lony; before Dr. Newman became a Roman Catholic,
even at a time when he held confidently that the
Roman 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
'6 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
iluties 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 independent 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 he 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 Fronde, his
thought by day and his dream by night seems to
have been of the quickening of a Church which
would fight against this ZeiUjeid — 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 Roman 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 he, 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
Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone,
And in the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile."
ii CARDINAL NEWMAN 79
But mostly during this journey lie 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 be 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, Avhich 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 pi-ophet 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 n
Courteous he was and grave, so meek in mien
It seem'd untrue, or told a purpose weak,
Yet in the mood lie 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
Avork 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 Roman 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 unicpie genius than in
mastering the morbid s} T mptoms, 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 n
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 Sf>
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 1 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
It
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 kind 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 ecpially 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 1 Was not another avowedly
doubtful whether in certain instances he spoke by
inspiration or only out of his own fallible judgment ?
That an infallible authorit}* 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 tins world and all that is in it as a mere
shade, as dust and ashes, compared with the value of one
single sold. 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 whining 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 ]
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, doeslier presumed infallibility help to accomplish
II CAEDINAL NEWMAN 89
it 1 Li 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, quite 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 be 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 strusm'le,
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
ir
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
Eome 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 Revelation 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 ? 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 ? Do we or do we not
show a continuity of principle with that primitive
II
CARDINAL NEWMAN 93
Christianity 1 Do Ave 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 ] Can we prove our logical continuity with
the old teaching 1 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
n
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
excite; 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 we 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 Ave some-
times move our arms to see if Ave are aAvake or not,
and so avc 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. 71). 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 H
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 ? 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 whicli 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
11
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 Avas Childe
Harold's 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. But
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 n
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 for thoughtful seer,
Watching, in trance, nor dark nor clear,
Th' appalling future as it nearer draws :
His spirit calm'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
If chance the golden hours be nigh,
By youthful hope seen beaming round her walls.
" Forc'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, O 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 AENOLD
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 m
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 ? 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
in MATTHEW ARNOLD 107
truth of human nature, not of theology. To m}-
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 Avould 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, Avherever
Ill
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 Eeformers,
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 in
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 " we 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. So 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 workmanship of a carver in wood
or stone. But why is it more proper or natural to
attribute, in the language of feeling, false attributes
to " the stream of tendency, not ourselves, which
makes for righteousness," than it is to attribute, in
the language of feeling, false attributes to the graven
images of an idol-founder ? However, this is Mr.
Arnold's contention, though at other times he is
in 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
the 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
being, 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 III
in 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 tendencj'
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
His 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
tendency to a 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,
either hopeful or solid. For example, in one of the
most beautiful of his poems, " Stanzas from the
Ill
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 hade 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
ill
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 he 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
discloses a new life for the world, even after faith
(as we understand it) is dead. This is the promise
which 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 ;
" Which 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 writings 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 life, and attaining it in greater abundance,
is, he 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
obtaining "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 ill
seems as if ' the wishes of the flesh 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
the 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 does 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 Ave 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 " 1 Again, " Blessed are the peace-
makers, for they shall he called the children of God."
Does that mean the same as, " Blessed are the peace-
makers, for they shall attain true success " 1 " 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 " 1 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 bring 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
suffrage 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. I 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 be, 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 Shaftesbury 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 III
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, Avill 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.
Take 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 r
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
in
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, but 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." "Rejoice and
give thanks," exhorts the Old Testament. " Rejoice
evermore," exhorts the New. Tbat is most true, but
what is the ground of these constant exhortations in
both Old Testament and New 1 ? 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 quotes 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 " 1 Again, what is the context of the injunction
taken from the New Testament ] "Rejoice ever-
more. Pray without ceasing. In everything give
thanks : for this is the ivill 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 %
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 ? Mr. Arnold will
hear nothing of the promise of immortality. That is
to him Aberglaube, over-helief, 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 1 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
126 MATTHEW ARNOLD ill
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
Bible, 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 is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time
goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is
in 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."
Well, if that be so, the emotion which Mr. Arnold
insists on, in order to transform morality into religion,
becomes a very mild and aesthetic 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. . . . O Lord, open 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, 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 III
" 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.
'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 " with which
"morality " must be touched, in order to transform it
into religion, to come from 1 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 1 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 ? 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 1 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 MATTHEW ARNOLD in
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 1
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, I 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
in
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.
I make bold to say that no one ever verified the
secret of self-renunciation yet, or ever even wished to
HI 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
defined, 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 Avords are the
best : ' Thou, Eternal, art the thing that I long for,
thou art my hope, even from my youth ; through
134 MATTHEW ARNOLD
in
thee have I been holclcn up ever since I was born ;
there is nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the
commandments of the Eternal. The Eternal is niy
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 lis 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 language of the Hebrew seers Avith 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 in
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 blood,
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 1 —
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 for 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,
in MATTHEW ARNOLD 137
If a man bear to have it so,
Tilings 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 clay ;
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 Rome 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 ill
" 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 Eoman 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 Burinah : —
" I chide with thee not, that thy sharp
Upbraidings 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 she flags ;
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
ill
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. What 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 the
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
Obermann —
" 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 m
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 iidets
Send far their light voice
Up the still vale of Thisbe,
O speed, and rejoice !
" On the sward at the cliff- to p
Lie strewn the white flocks,
On the cliff-side the pigeons
Boost 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 1
What garments out-glistening
The gold-flower'd broom !
" What sweet-breathing presence
Out-perfumes the thynie ?
What 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 ?—
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 Eustum " — 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
in
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
in 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 Tynan 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 Mgsean 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 lightdiearted 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, wbere 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 Avhich 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
I 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 dough's buoyancy, though buoyancy is the
characteristic of both these essentially Oxford poets.
I dough 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
in 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 he 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 ;
Xow 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 III
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 Clough'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 ?
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. We
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
in 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 " unknoAvn 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 Avho 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 Avhich 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
with 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. Gask ell'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 sufficiently
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
exert mutual influences at all, with a rude effort,
iv 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, Avho 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
are 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 Rembrandt-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 personce
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
apj>ears 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 whicli 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
Bede, 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
H 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 Avhich 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 <;koi;<;k 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, Silas
Mariner, 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 nave 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 religious
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, —
166 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 JFilhelm 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 Maimer
that influence began to wane, and quite disappeared
in liomola, 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 books 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 Avhich it is a comment : —
" ' This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan !
iv GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 1G9
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 Bede, which seems to me the only
defect in that wonderful book. That which was only
an external mannerism in the occasional commentary
of Adam Bede 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 Lisheth. ' Set about
thy feyther's coffin ? '
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 burst 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 th'
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 ? It's the right thing to
be 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 lie done at home.
I'll go to the village this forenoon, because Mr. Burge 'nil
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 KLIOT 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 Mamer, — the conversation in the Eainbow
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 grotesqueness 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 pitcli 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 I '
" 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.
" ' Red it was,' said the butcher, in his gooddiunioured
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 J don't
know Mr. 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 —
contradick me who will.'
" The farrier looked fierce, and the mild butcher's
conversational spirit was roused a little.
"'I'm not for contradick ing 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
huskiuess 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 two 'pinions
about a cracked bell if the bell could hear itself. ' '
And further, 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 1 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 ? And so I
says to mysen, '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?
— 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 bound : she'll no more go on
IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 177
in her new ways without you than a dog 'ull 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 Romola, 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 but 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 wide 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 and 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 over-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 A.UTHOR 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 consecpience 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 Bede 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 when 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, cpiite unconscious of the unfolding plot and
180 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. He 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 Bede, 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 he 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. Eeal 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 subsidiar}- influences, whether of one kind
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 AUTHOK 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 Be.de 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
an} r 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 hest 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,
— and 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, — Avith 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 AUTHOK 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 1 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 checks 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,
Hetty V — ' 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, and 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 cprite 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 clone anything to you.
Why can't you let me be ?'
" 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 bed.
Good-night.' She went out of the room almost as quietly
and quickly as if she had been a ghost ; hut 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
tilled 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 hack 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 could
walk back across the field, and get over the stile ; and
then, in the very next held, 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 up her sleeves, and kissed her arms
with the passionate 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 o
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
which, though not her greatest, certainly contains
196 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV
some of her subtlest intellectual studies — I mean
Romola.
George Eliot's drawings, as I have before intimated,
all require a certain space, like Raffael'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 Romola 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 does 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 Avider 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 ; he
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, perhaps, of the further asser-
tion that the Word was with God and was God.
Man's sense of the great poAver 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 newvigour; and to some extent contested with the
mysteries of the Gospel the control of great men's souls.
This is the picture which Eomola 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 Eomola, 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 Eomola, 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 hook.
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 be pictured, not as originally false,
but 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, Romola'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 Bomola received from her dying brother's
hands, in the little temple crowned with the figures
of Ariadne and Bacchus, and fondly calling her
" Begina 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
Bomola'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
Eucellai 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 Avhether 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
Avere, 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.
But 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 Romola 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 ties, 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,' 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 Middlemarch, which, with its very inferior successor,
Daniel Deronda, represents her most mature and most
characteristic style of art. In Middlemarch 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 Middlemarch 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 Romola, the sense of foiled aims
and wrecked purposes unquestionably predominates,
so that we can hardly help thinking she was drawn
to the subject of Romola 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. 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. In consecpience 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 <!KORGE 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 how unplastic is such an age as
ours to the glowing emotion of an ideal purpose.
For melancholy, profoundly melancholy, both in
aim and execution, Middle-march 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 Avorld, 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
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 gained 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
i\ 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 Afe 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 noble 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
refer to in her one volume edition of Middlemarch.
IV GEORGE 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 such 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
which 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. Ifrooke, 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 coidd 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 AUTHOK 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. She 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 Kevelation 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.
4 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
falteringly, 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, deal', 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,
who 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
perfect meekness, it woidd 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
the 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 wdien
she expressed uncertainty, — how could he affect her as a
lover ? 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 r 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
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. She makes
us feel with 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 Becle. 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
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
i\ GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 225
Oriental learning, nor even access to the German
authorities who had made that learning their oavii.
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 painfully 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 sold to yours, by working hopelessly
at what I have no belief in ? — Dorothea.' Then she
deposited the paper in her own desk." Here we 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 he 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.
She 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
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 Avomen 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 ahle 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 Rosamond 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
Rosamond 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 quitted the room, indig-
IV GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR 231
riant 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 ?) ; 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. AVe have been told
indeed that she who used to fall suddenly on ber
knees on the brick floors of cottages to pray with
sick labourers had almost given up praying for her-
self, but we 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 outlier arms towards 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
nothing 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 chill 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 things
around her, and seated herself in a great chair where she
often watched before. 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 "? 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 GEOKGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR rv
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 Eight, 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-
thea's life had been crippled by a " meanness of oppor-
tunity " sadly ill-matched with her spiritual grandeur,
but also that that " meanness of opportunity " had
been gradually extending inwards, as Avell 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
hushand'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 r
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 " ; we 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 them, 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 Lydgate'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 worldliness of
nature encounters and defeats the strong, masculine,
magnanimous, generous struggles of Lydgate to over-
come the difficulties 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 skill was relied on by
many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as
a failure ; he had not done what he once meant to do.
His acquaintances thought him enviable to have so charm-
ing a wife, and nothing happened to shake their opinion.
Rosamond 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 Rosamond 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.
But it is an assumption to which George Eliot herself
is hardly quite true, for she does give us one glimpse
of liosamond'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 Rosamond'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 Eosamond 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. Farebrother, 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 ; 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, —
are all illustrations of the main idea of the book, that
Dorothea'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 Middle/march 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. Richer 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 ask a blessing on your humming and
halving," 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
prqpos 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 LadislaAv 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 it ? and then an old clothe?-
man." Mrs. Cadwallader is the author's organ of
depreciation, and a very powerful organ she is. Xo
244 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV
Mephistopheles could illustrate the "meanness of
opportunity " more successfully. Indeed, the bold,
witty wife 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 by the application of the thermometer
to him in his illness, as implying " the importance of
his 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 he 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 Avhich 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, Avhen 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 when 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 whose 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 will, 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
Fedalma, the heroine's last words —
" Our dear young love, — its breath -was happiness !
But it had grown upon a larger life
Which tore 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 Id ood 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 but 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
Right against reasons that himself had drilled
And marshalled painfully. A spirit framed
Too proudly special for obedience,
Too subtly pondering for mastery ;
Born of a goddess with a mortal sire,
Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity,
Doom- gifted with long resonant consciousness
And perilous heightening of the sentient soul."
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 betrothed. 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 Avith 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, however, 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 ]
254 GEORGE ELIOT AS AUTHOR IV
Oh, they have long tradition and sioift speech,
Can tell ivith 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 off,
Our lives deep scarred just where their beauty lay 1
The best we found thenceforth were still a worse :
The only better 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 exquisitely worked out, the characters are faint,
256 GEORGE ELIOT 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 heauty,
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
the most effective lines of the poem we are told
how
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 send
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
Lamech — Jabal, who teaches the dumb animals to
love and obey him ; Tubal Cain, who founds the
industrial arts ; Jubal, in whom the neAV sense of
limitation breeds the spirit of poetry and music —
" A yearning for some hidden soul 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 though 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 ?
Still, 'mid that vast would throb 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 Jubal'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 tlie 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 Avarnings 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
gained 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
the transfiguration of the highest thing man can
n 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 Jnbal, instead
of being cpxenched 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 he identified with his own gift to mankind, he
would have ceased to "ache smallness still in good
that had no hound," 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
Avellbeing 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 IV
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.
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, " how at Cambridge I
walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity,
on an evening of rainy May, and she, stirred somewhat
beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three 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 first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how
peremptory and absolute the 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 the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fate."
Even to the touch of artificial gloom artistically
1 George Eliot's Life as related hi her Letters and her Journals.
Arranged and edited by her husband, J. W. Cross. With
portraits and other illustrations. 3 vols. London : AVilliam
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 Eevelation 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 Avhich 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 without opium, and live through all
our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance," she
wrote in I860; 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 Avoman and a
poet; that, strenuous as she was, her strenuousness
was too self-conscious to reach the point of positive
strength j 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
n 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
us 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 was made. It is the spectacle,
too, of a woman who 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 Avhich Mr. Cross observes
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 Avarmest," 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. 146).
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 before 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-Princip 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 were 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, whether 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 inability 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 done 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 land of laughter which comes from the gratification of
the reasoning faculties. 1 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 nut.' 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 cpiotes 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 Avise judgment. It seems to me, for
instance, that the simplicity Avith Avhich 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 Ave know any historical
fact in this Avorld, Ave know that this frankly confessed
doubt of the apostles Avas extinquished in the most
fervent and practical conviction, — a conviction absorb-
ing the Avhole existence of lives of labour and pain, —
and therefore it becomes a matter of the utmost im-
portance to us to knoAv 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
avoAved. A fanatical comdction is not one Avhich
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 vieAV, 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 noio does
not depend on the exact kind or amount of evidence
by which the witnesses of the resurrection Avere 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 Avere a dream, and every-
thing to gain if it Avere 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 Beformation, and, " when the Blessed
Virgin and St. Gregor}' 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
] The italics arc 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 ELIUT'.S LIFE AND LETTERS v
affect George Eliot herself 1 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 frequently 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
critic 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
\ GEORGE KLIOT'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
consecpiences 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 w r eighty 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, 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, 1
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 we
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 <;korge 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 world 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 Avas
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 Cobbett 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. Burne 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 mcin Mann, feeling that our
Christmas was free, considered how very much he liked
being with you, omitting the other side of the cpiestion —
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 was 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 an}^ 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 Avas
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. Robert
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 ? 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 forever."
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 without 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 are 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 hardby 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 " with
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 Avhich
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 Avhat
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 ?
— 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 oft'), 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 wliat 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 ? —
or figures to itself an anaesthetic human life that one may
compare to that of the fabled grasshoppers who were once
men, 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 the 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 uot 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 ?
" 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
Avorse 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 which 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 we have to deal with wretched
materials in our effort to improve mankind, we 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 which was 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 whole career seems to be
all of a piece ; — She conceded everything to doubt ;
she conceded too nruch 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 were made, and partly in the pride
of these concessions, as though she had yielded every-
thing which the most severety intellectual view 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, would 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 " with 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 who
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 Avith 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-
gram, like most epigrams, over -reaches itself. But
I think it would be much truer to say that he 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 waste 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,
Borue high upon thy liquid 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. "AVe 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 Avords 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 clanger 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,
with 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
Isaiah 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 Kevelation, 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 hoAv 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 quite
pathetic sense of his own inadecpaacy 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 he 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,
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 inappropriateness 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 waste 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 then* 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
M 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 ard 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 works 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," Avrote 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 DEXISON 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 Avill 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 excprisite 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
Be/view, has contested Maurice's reverence for facts
on the ground that there were a good many facts to
which he could not even persuade himself to pay at-
tention. She refers to the facts from which scientific
men are supj)osed 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 and 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 own — 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 hooks 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," were 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
cn numerical blunders, and on petty historical in-
consistencies, or on the minutise 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
Strachey'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 Ave put under it by 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 Maui'ice
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 DENISON 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 joamphlet of his own on the Sabbath day : " The
working men, and many of my friends, will 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 boldly, 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 Avar 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 wars 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
h 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 ? ' :
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 DENISON 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 Avith 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, which
Fenelon 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 VI
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 Ave are always 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 are often quite unaware.
Once, when a lady asked 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 1 " 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 he 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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