HANDY VOLUME EDITION 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS 
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS 
 
 SUCH THE VEIL LIFTED 
 
 BROTHER JACOB 
 
 <By 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 DANA ESTES & COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 PEEFACE. 
 
 WISHES have often been expressed that the articles 
 known to have been written by George Eliot in the 
 Westminster Review before she had become famous under that 
 pseudonyme, should be republished. Those wishes are now 
 gratified as far, at any rate, as it is possible to gratify 
 them. For it was not George Eliot's desire that the whole 
 of those articles should be rescued from oblivion. And in 
 order that there might be no doubt on the subject, she 
 made, some time before her death, a collection of such of 
 her fugitive writings as she considered deserving of a per- 
 manent form, carefully revised them for the press, and left 
 them in the order in which they here appear, with written 
 injunctions that no other pieces written by her, of date 
 prior to 1857, should be republished. 
 
 It will thus be seen that the present collection of Essays 
 has the weight of her sanction, and has had, moreover, the 
 advantage of such corrections and alterations as a revision 
 long subsequent to the period of writing may have sug- 
 gested to her. 
 
 The opportunity afforded by $iis republication seemed a 
 suitable one for giving to the world some " notes," as George 
 Eliot simply called them, which belong to a much later 
 period, and which have not been previously published. 
 The exact date of their writing cannot be fixed with any 
 certainty, but it must have been some time between the
 
 ii PREFACE. 
 
 appearance of " Middlemarch " and that of " Theophrastus 
 Such." They were probably written without any distinct 
 view to publication, some of them for the satisfaction of 
 her own mind ; others perhaps as memoranda, and with an 
 idea of working them out more fully at some later tune. 
 It may be of interest to know that, besides the "notes" 
 here given, the note-book contains four which appeared in 
 "Theophrastus Such," three of them practically as they 
 there stand ; and it is not impossible that some of those in 
 the present volume might also have been so utilized had 
 they not happened to fall outside the general scope of the 
 work. The marginal titles are George Eliot's own, but 
 for the general title, "Leaves from a Note-book," I am 
 responsible. 
 
 I need only add that, in publishing these notes, I have 
 the complete concurrence of my friend, Mr. Cross. 
 
 CHARLES LEE LEWES. 
 
 HIGHOATE, December, 1883.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 ESSAYS. 
 
 PAG* 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS : THE POET YOUNG . . 9 
 
 (Westminster Review, 1857.) 
 
 GERMAN WIT : HEINRICH HEINE 63 
 
 (Westminster Review, 1856.) 
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING : DR. GUMMING 105 
 
 (Westminster Review, 1855.) 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OP RATIONALISM: LECKY'S HISTORY .... 139 
 (Fortnightly Review, 1865.) 
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE: RIEHL 157 
 
 (Westminster Review, 1856.) 
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR 194 
 
 (Eraser's Magazine, 1855.) 
 
 ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT 214 
 
 (Blackwood's Magazine, 1868.) 
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 
 
 AUTHORSHIP 233 
 
 JUDGMENTS ON AUTHORS 238 
 
 STORY-TELLING ., 240 
 
 HISTORIC IMAGINATION 243 
 
 VALUE IN ORIGINALITY 245 
 
 To THE PROSAIC ALL THINGS ARE PROSAIC 245
 
 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 "DEAR RELIGIOUS LOVE" 245 
 
 WE MAKE OUR OWN PRECEDENTS 246 
 
 BIRTH OP TOLERANCE 246 
 
 FELIX QUI NON POTUIT 247 
 
 DIVINE GRACE A REAL EMANATION 247 
 
 "A FINE EXCESS." FEELING is ENERGY . 248 
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 
 
 LOOKING INWARD 253 
 
 LOOKING BACKWARD 265 
 
 HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH 279 
 
 A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY 293 
 
 A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN 301 
 
 ONLY TEMPER 309 
 
 A POLITICAL MOLECULE 316 
 
 THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE 320 
 
 A HALF-BREED 327 
 
 DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY 334 
 
 THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEY-COMB 341 
 
 "So YOUNG!" .., 353 
 
 HOW WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE TESTIMONIALS, AND 
 
 BELIEVE IN THEM 359 
 
 THE TOO READY WRITER 368 
 
 DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP 377 
 
 MORAL SWINDLERS 386 
 
 SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE 395 
 
 THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 401 
 
 THE LIFTED VIIL *27 
 
 BROTHER JACOB , . . , 475
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 ENGRAVED BY GEORGE T. ANDKEW. 
 
 PORTRAIT OF GEORGE ELIOT . . E. A. Fowle . Frontispiece 
 
 PORTRAIT OF HEINE Wm. Unger .... 63 
 
 PORTRAIT OF GOETHE F. Lungren .... 196
 
 ESSAYS OF GEOKGE ELIOC
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS : 
 THE POET YOUNG. 
 
 THE study of men, as they have appeared in different 
 ages and under various social conditions, may be con- 
 sidered as the natural history of the race. Let us, then, for 
 a moment imagine ourselves as students of this natural his- 
 tory, dredging the first half of the eighteenth century in 
 search of specimens. About the year 1730 we have hauled 
 up a remarkable individual of the species divine a surpris- 
 ing name, considering the nature of the animal before us, but 
 we are used to unsuitable names in natural history. Let us 
 examine this individual at our leisure. He is on the verge 
 of fifty, and has recently undergone his metamorphosis into 
 the clerical form. Kather a parodoxical specimen, if you ob- 
 serve him narrowly : a sort of cross between a sycophant and 
 a psalmist ; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by 
 the Last Day and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates 
 between rhapsodic applause of King George and rhapsodic 
 applause of Jehovah. After spending " a foolish youth, the 
 sport of peers and poets," after being a hanger-on of the pro- 
 fligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamen- 
 tary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with 
 fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted 
 with his imperfect success, and has determined to retire from 
 the general mendicancy business to a particular branch ; in 
 other words, he has determined on that renunciation of the 
 world implied in " taking orders," with the prospect of a 
 good living and an advantageous matrimonial connection. 
 And no man can be better fitted for an Established Church.
 
 10 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 He personifies completely her nice balance of temporalities 
 and spiritualities. He is equally impressed with the momen- 
 tousness of death and of burial fees ; he languishes at once 
 for immortal life and for " livings ;" he has a fervid attach- 
 ment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the 
 Almighty. He will teach, with something more than official 
 conviction, the nothingness of earthly things ; and he will 
 feel something more than private disgust if his meritorious 
 efforts in directing men's attention to another world are not 
 rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His secular 
 man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as charac- 
 teristic attire for "an ornament of religion and virtue," 
 hopes courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert Wai* 
 pole, and writes begging-letters to the King's mistress. His 
 spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar than Gol- 
 gotha and " the skies ; " it walks in graveyards, or it soars 
 among the stars. His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations 
 and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and 
 the sententious. If it were not for the prospect of immortal- 
 ity, he considers, it would be wise and agreeable to be inde- 
 cent, or to murder one's father ; and, heaven apart, it would 
 be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave. Man, 
 he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute : the 
 brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its " relation to 
 the stalls," and frightened into moderation by the contempla- 
 tion of death-beds and skulls ; the angel is to be developed 
 by vituperating this world and exalting the next ; and by 
 this double process you get the Christian, "th-3 highest 
 style of man." With all this, our new-made divine is an un- 
 mistakable poet. To a clay, compounded chiefly of the 
 worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of 
 Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and 
 objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house 
 morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut 
 made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive ; 
 for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of tbp 
 "Night Thoughts."
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 11 
 
 It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that OUT 
 readers are not acquainted with the facts of Young's life 5 
 they are amongst the things that " every one knows ; " but we 
 have observed that, with regard to these universally kncwn 
 matters, the majority of readers like to be treated after the 
 plan suggested by Monsieur Jourdain. When that distin- 
 guished bourgeois was asked if he knew Latin, he replied, 
 "Oui, mais faites comme si je ne le savais pas." Assum- 
 ing, then, as a polite writer should, that our readers know 
 everything about Young, it will be a direct sequitur from 
 that assumption that we should proceed as if they knew 
 nothing, and recall the incidents of his biography with 
 as much particularity as we may, without trenching on the 
 space we shall need for our main purpose the reconsidera- 
 tion of his character as a moral and religious poet. 
 
 Judging from Young's works, one might imagine that the 
 preacher had been organized in him by hereditary transmit 
 sion through a long line of clerical forefathers, that the 
 diamonds of the " Night Thoughts " had been slowly con- 
 densed from the charcoal of ancestral sermons. Yet it was 
 not so. His grandfather, apparently, wrote himself gentle- 
 man, not clerk ; and there is no evidence that preaching had 
 run in the family blood before it took that turn in the per- 
 son of the poet's father, who was quadruply clerical, being 
 at once rector, prebendary, Court chaplain, a"nd dean. Young 
 was born at his father's rectory of Upham, in 1681. We may 
 confidently assume that even the author of the "Night 
 Thoughts " came into the world without a wig ; but, apart 
 from Dr. Doran's authority, we should not have ventured to 
 state that the excellent rector "kissed, with dignified emo* 
 tion, his only son and intended namesake." Dr. Doraa 
 doubtless knows this, from his intimate acquaintance with 
 clerical physiology and psychology. He has ascertained that 
 the paternal emotions of prebendaries have a sacerdotal 
 quality, and that the very chyme and chyle of a rector are 
 conscious of the gown and band. 
 
 In due time the boy went to Winchester College, and sub-
 
 12 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 sequently, though not till he was twenty-two, to Oxford, 
 where, for his father's sake, he was befriended by the war- 
 dens of two colleges, and in 1708, three years after his 
 father's death, nominated by Archbishop Tenison to a law- 
 fellowship at All Souls. Of Young's life at Oxford in these 
 years, hardly anything is known. His biographer, Croft, has 
 nothing to tell us but the vague report that, when " Young 
 found himself independent and his own master at Ail Souls, 
 he was not the ornament to religion and morality that he after- 
 wards became," and the perhaps apocryphal anecdote, that 
 Tindal, the atheist, confessed himself embarrassed by the 
 originality of Young's arguments. Both the report and the 
 anecdote, however, are borne out by indirect evidence. As 
 to the latter, Young has left us sufficient proof that he was 
 fond of arguing on the theological side, and that he had his 
 own way of treating old subjects. As to the former, we 
 learn that Pope, after saying other things which we know to 
 be true of Young, added, that he passed "a foolish youth, 
 the sport of peers and poets ; " and, from all the indications 
 we possess of his career till he was nearly fifty, we are in- 
 clined to think that Pope's statement only errs by defect, and 
 that he should rather have said, "a foolish youth and middle 
 age." It is not likely that Young was a very hard student, for 
 he impressed Johnson, who saw him in his old age, as " not a 
 great scholar," and as surprisingly ignorant of what Johnson 
 thought " quite common maxims " in literature ; and there 
 is no evidence that he filled either his leisure or his purse by 
 taking pupils. His career as an author did not commence 
 till he was nearly thirty, even dating from the publication of 
 a portion of the " Last Day," in the " Tatler ; " so that he 
 could hardly have been absorbed in composition. But where 
 the fully developed insect is parasitic, we believe the larva is 
 usually parasitic also, and we shall probably not be far wrong 
 in supposing that Young at Oxford, as elsewhere, spent a 
 good deal of his time in hanging about possible and actual 
 patrons, and accommodating himself to their habits with con- 
 siderable flexibility of conscience and of tongue j being none
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 13 
 
 the less ready, upon occasion, to present himself as the cham- 
 pion of theology, and to rhapsodize at convenient moments 
 in the company of the skies or of skulls. That brilliant profli- 
 gate, the Duke of Wharton, to whom Young afterwards clung 
 as his chief patron, was at this time a mere boy ; and, though 
 it is probable that their intimacy had commenced, since the 
 Duke's father and mother were friends of the old Dean, that 
 intimacy ought not to aggravate any unfavorable inference as 
 to Young's Oxford life. It is less likely that he fell into any 
 exceptional vice, than that he differed from the men around 
 him chiefly in his episodes of theological advocacy and rhap- 
 sodic solemnity. He probably sowed his wild oats after the 
 coarse fashion of his times, for he has left us sufficient evi- 
 dence that his moral sense was not delicate ; but his compan- 
 ions, who were occupied in sowing their own oats, perhaps 
 took it as a matter of course that he should be a rake, and 
 were only struck with the exceptional circumstance that he 
 was a pious and moralizing rake. 
 
 There is some irony in the fact that the two first poetical 
 productions of Young, published in the same year, were his 
 " Epistle to Lord Lansdowne," celebrating the recent creation 
 of peers, Lord Lansdowne's creation in particular, and the 
 " Last Day." Other poets, besides Young, found the device 
 for obtaining a Tory majority by turning twelve insignificant 
 commoners into insignificant lords an irresistible stimulus 
 to verse ; but no other poet showed so versatile an enthu- 
 siasm, so nearly equal an ardor for the honor of the new 
 baron and the honor of the Deity. But the twofold nature 
 of the sycophant and the psalmist is not more strikingly 
 shown in the contrasted themes of the two poems, than in 
 the transitions from bombast about monarchs to bombast 
 about the resurrection, in the " Last Day " itself. The dedi- 
 cation of the poem to Queen Anne, Young afterwards sup- 
 pressed, for he was always ashamed of having flattered a 
 dead patron. In this dedication, Croft tells us, " he gives 
 her Majesty praise indeed for her victories, but says that the 
 author is more pleased to see her rise from this lower world,
 
 14 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 soaring above the clouds, passing the first and second heavens, 
 and leaving the fixed stars behind her ; nor will he lose her 
 there, he says, but keep her still in view through the bound- 
 less spaces on the other side of creation, in her journey 
 towards eternal bliss, till he behold the heaven of heavens 
 open, and angels receiving and conveying her still onward 
 from the stretch of his imagination, which tires in her pur- 
 suit, and falls back again to earth." 
 
 The self-criticism which prompted the suppression of the 
 dedication, did not, however, lead him to improve either the 
 rhyme or the reason of the unfortunate couplet 
 
 " When other Bourbons reign in other lands, 
 And, if men's sins forbid not, other Annes." 
 
 In the " Epistle to Lord Lansdowne," Young indicates his 
 taste for the drama ; and there is evidence that his tragedy 
 of " Busiris " was " in the theatre " as early as this very year, 
 1713, though it was not brought on the stage till nearly six 
 years later ; so that Young was now very decidedly bent on 
 authorship, for which his degree of B. C. L., taken in this 
 year, was doubtless a magical equipment. Another poem, 
 '' The Force of Keligion ; or, Vanquished Love," founded on 
 the execution of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, quickly 
 followed, showing fertility in feeble and tasteless verse ; and 
 on the Queen's death, in 1714, Young lost no time in making 
 a poetical lament for a departed patron a vehicle for ex- 
 travagant laudation of the new monarch. No further literary 
 production of his appeared until 1716, when a Latin oration, 
 which he delivered on the foundation of the Codrington 
 Library at All Souls, gave him a new opportunity for dis- 
 playing his alacrity in inflated panegyric. 
 
 In 1717 it is probable that Young accompanied the Duke 
 of Wharton to Ireland, though so slender are the materials 
 for his biography, that the chief basis for this supposition is 
 a passage in his "Conjectures on Original Composition," 
 written when he was nearly eighty, in which he intimates 
 that he had once been in that country. But there are many
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 15 
 
 facts surviving to indicate that for the next eight or nine 
 years, Young was a sort of attache of Wharton's. In 1719, 
 according to legal records, the Duke granted him an annuity, 
 in consideration of his having relinquished the office of tutor 
 to Lord Burleigh, with a life annuity of 100 a year, on his 
 Grace's assurances that he would provide for him in a much, 
 more ample manner. And again, from the same evidence, it 
 appears that in 1721 Young received from Wharton a bond 
 for 600, in compensation of expenses incurred in standing 
 for Parliament at the Duke's desire, and as an earnest of 
 greater services which his Grace had promised him on his 
 refraining from the spiritual and temporal advantages of 
 taking orders, with a certainty of two livings in the gift of 
 his college. It is clear, therefore, that lay advancement, as 
 long as there was any chance of it, had more attractions for 
 Young than clerical preferment; and that at this time he 
 accepted the Duke of Wharton as the pilot of his career. 
 
 A more creditable relation of Young's was his friendship 
 with Tickell, with whom he was in the habit of interchanging 
 criticisms, and to whom in 1719 the same year, let us note, 
 in which he took his doctor's degree he addressed his 
 " Lines on the Death of Addison." Close upon these followed 
 his " Paraphrase of part of the Book of Job," with a dedica- 
 tion to Parker, recently made Lord Chancellor, showing that 
 the possession of Wharton's patronage did not prevent Young 
 from fishing in other waters. He knew nothing of Parker, 
 but that did not prevent him from magnifying the new 
 Chancellor's merits ; on the other hand, he did know Whar- 
 ton, but this again did not prevent him from prefixing to his 
 tragedy, " The Kevenge," which appeared in 1721, a dedication 
 attributing to the Duke all virtues as well as all accomplish- 
 ments. In the concluding sentence of this dedication Young 
 naively indicates that a considerable ingredient in his grati- 
 tude was a lively sense of anticipated favors. " My present 
 fortune is his bounty, and my future his care, which I will 
 venture to say will always be remembered to his honor ; since 
 he, I know, intended his generosity as an encouragement to
 
 16 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 merit, though, through his very pardonable partiality to one 
 who bears him so sincere a duty and respect, I happen to 
 receive the benefit of it." Young was economical with his 
 ideas and images ; he was rarely satisfied with using a clever 
 thing once, and this bit of ingenious humility was afterwards 
 made to do duty in the " Instalment," a poem addressed to 
 Walpole : 
 
 " Be this thy partial smile, from censure free ; 
 'T was meant for merit, though it fell on me." 
 
 It was probably " The Eevenge," that Young was writing 
 when, as we learn from Spence's anecdotes, the Duke of 
 Wharton gave him a skull with a candle fixed in it, as the 
 most appropriate lamp by which to write tragedy. Accord- 
 ing to Young's dedication, the Duke was " accessary " to the 
 scenes of this tragedy in a more important way, " not only 
 by suggesting the most beautiful incident in them, but by 
 making all possible provision for the success of the whole." 
 A statement which is credible, not indeed on the ground of 
 Young's dedicatory assertion, but from the known ability of 
 the Duke, who, as Pope tells us, possessed 
 
 " each gift of Nature and of Art, 
 And wanted nothing but an honest heart." 
 
 The year 1722 seems to have been the period of a visit to 
 Mr. Dodington, of Eastbury, in Dorsetshire, the " pure Dor- 
 setian downs," celebrated by Thomson, in which Young 
 made the acquaintance of Voltaire; for in the subsequent 
 dedication of his "Sea Piece" to "Mr. Voltaire," he recalls 
 their meeting on "Dorset Downs;" and it was in this year 
 that Christopher Pitt, a gentleman-poet of those days, ad- 
 dressed an " Epistle to Dr. Edward Young, at Eastbury, in 
 Dorsetshire," which has at least the merit of this biographi- 
 cal couplet 
 
 " While with your Dodington retired yon sit, 
 Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit." 
 
 Dodington, apparently, was charmed in his turn, for he told 
 Dr. Wharton that Young was " far superior to the French
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 17 
 
 poet in the variety and novelty of his borwnots and repartees." 
 Unfortunately, the only specimen of Young's wit on this 
 occasion, that has been preserved to us, is the epigram repre- 
 sented as an extempore retort (spoken aside, surely) ' to 
 Voltaire's criticism of Milton's episode of sin and death : 
 
 " Thou art so witty, profligate, and thin, 
 At once we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin ; " 
 
 an epigram which, in the absence of "flowing Burgundy,* 
 does not strike us as remarkably brilliant. Let us give Young 
 the benefit of the doubt thrown on the genuineness of this 
 epigram by his own poetical dedication, in which he repre- 
 sents himself as having " soothed " Voltaire's " rage " against 
 Milton " with gentle rhymes ; " though in other respects that 
 dedication is anything but favorable to a high estimate of 
 Young's wit. Other evidence apart, we should not be eager 
 for the after-dinner conversation of the man who wrote, 
 
 " Thine is the Drama, how renowned ! 
 Thine Epic's loftier trump to sound; 
 But let Arion's sea-strung harp be mine ; 
 But where '* his dolphin ? Knaw'st thou where t 
 May that be found in thee, Voltaire! " 
 
 The " Satires " appeared in 1725 and 1726, each, of course, 
 with its laudatory dedication and its compliments insinuated 
 amongst the rhymes. The seventh and last is dedicated to 
 Sir Kobert Walpole, is very short, and contains nothing in 
 particular except lunatic flattery of George the First and hia 
 prime minister, attributing that royal hog's late escape from 
 a storm at sea to the miraculous influence of his grand and 
 virtuous soul ; for George, he says, rivals the angels : 
 
 " George, who in foes can soft affections raise, 
 And charm envenomed satire into praise. 
 Nor human rage alone his power perceives, 
 But the mad winds and the tumultuous waves, 
 E'en storms (Death's fiercest ministers ! ) forhear, 
 And in their own wild empire learn to spare. 
 Thus, Nature's self, supporting Man's decree, 
 Styles Britain's sovereign, sovereign of the sea."
 
 18 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 As for Walpole, what he felt at this tremendous crisis 
 
 " No powers of language, but his own, can tell ; 
 His own, which Nature and the Graces form, 
 At will to raise, or hush, the civil storm." 
 
 It is a coincidence worth noticing, that this Seventh 
 Satire was published in 1726, and that the warrant of George 
 the First, granting Young a pension of 200 a year from 
 Lady-day, 1725, is dated May 3, 1726. The gratitude ex- 
 hibited in this Satire may have been chiefly prospective, but 
 the " Instalment," a poem inspired by the thrilling event of 
 Walpole's installation as Knight of the Garter, was clearly 
 written with the double ardor of a man who has got a pension, 
 and hopes for something more. His emotion about Walpole 
 is precisely at the same pitch as his subsequent emotion 
 about the Second Advent. In the " Instalment " he says, 
 
 " With invocations some their hearts inflame ; 
 / need no muse, a Walpole is my theme." 
 
 And of God coming to Judgment, he says, in the " Night 
 Thoughts:" 
 
 " I find my inspiration is my theme ; 
 The grandeur of my subject is my muse" 
 
 Nothing can be feebler than this " Instalment," except m 
 the strength of impudence with which the writer professes 
 to scorn the prostitution of fair fame, the "profanation of 
 celestial fire." 
 
 Herbert Croft tells us that Young made more than three 
 thousand pounds by his " Satires," a surprising statement, 
 taken in connection with the reasonable doubt he throws on 
 the story related in Spence's " Anecdotes," that the Duke of 
 Wharton gave Young 2,000 for this work. Young, however, 
 seems to have been tolerably fortunate in the pecuniary re- 
 sults of his publications ; and with his literary profits, his 
 annuity from Wharton, his fellowship, and his pension, not 
 to mention other bounties which may be inferred from the 
 high merits he discovers in many men of wealth and position,
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 1& 
 
 we may fairly suppose that he now laid the foundation of the 
 considerable fortune he left at his death. 
 
 It is probable that the Duke of Wharton's final departure 
 for the Continent and disgrace at Court in 1726, and the 
 consequent cessation of Young's reliance on his patronage, 
 tended not only to heighten the temperature of his poetical 
 enthusiasm for Sir Kobert Walpole, but also to turn his 
 thoughts towards the Church again, as the second-best means 
 of rising in the world. On the accession of George the Sec- 
 ond, Young found the same transcendent merits in him as in 
 his predecessor, and celebrated them in a style of poetry pre- 
 viously unattempted by him the Pindaric ode, a poetic 
 form which helped him to surpass himself in furious bom- 
 bast. " Ocean, an Ode : concluding with a Wish," was the 
 title of this piece. He afterwards pruned it, and cut off, 
 amongst other things, the concluding' Wish, expressing the 
 yearning for humble retirement which, of course, had prompted 
 him to the effusion ; but we may judge of the rejected stanzas 
 by the quality of those he has allowed to remain. For exam- 
 ple, calling on Britain's dead mariners to rise and meet their 
 " country's full-blown glory," in the person of the new King, 
 he says : 
 
 * What powerful charm 
 
 Can Death disarm ? 
 Your long, your iron slumbers break ? 
 
 By Jove, by Fame, 
 
 By George's name, 
 Awake ! awake ! awake ! awake ! " 
 
 Soon after this notable production, which was written with 
 the ripe folly of forty-seven, Young took orders, and was 
 presently appointed chaplain to the King. " The Brothers," 
 his third and last tragedy, which was already in rehearsal, he 
 now withdrew from the stage, and sought reputation in a way 
 more accordant with the decorum of his new profession, by 
 turning prose writer. But after publishing " A True Esti- 
 mate of Human Life," with a dedication to the Queen, as one 
 of the " most shining representatives " of God on earth, and
 
 20 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 a sermon, entitled " An Apology for Princes ; or, the Eever- 
 ence due to Government," preached before the House of Com- 
 mons, his Pindaric ambition again seized him, and he matched 
 his former ode by another, called " Imperiuin Pelagi ; a Naval 
 Lyric ; written in imitation of Pindar's spirit, occasioned by 
 his Majesty's return from Hanover, 1729, and the succeeding 
 Peace." Since he afterwards suppressed this second ode, we 
 must suppose that it was rather worse than the first. Next 
 came his two " Epistles to Pope, concerning the Authors of 
 the Age," remarkable for nothing but the audacity of affecta- 
 tion with which the most servile of poets professes to despise 
 servility. 
 
 In 1730 Young was presented by his college with the rec- 
 tory of Welwyn, in Hertfordshire, and, in the following year, 
 when he was just fifty, he married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a 
 widow with two children, who seems to have been in favor 
 with Queen Caroline, and who probably had an income 
 two attractions which doubtless enhanced the power of her 
 other charms. Pastoral duties and domesticity probably 
 cured Young of some bad habits ; but, unhappily, they did 
 not cure him either of flattery or of fustian. Three more 
 odes followed, quite as bad as those of his bachelorhood, ex- 
 cept that in the third he announced the wise resolution of 
 never writing another. It must have been about this time, 
 since Young was now "turned of fifty," that he wrote the 
 letter to Mrs. Howard (afterwards Lady Suffolk), George the 
 Second's mistress, which proves that he used other engines, 
 besides Pindaric ones, in "besieging Court favor." The let- 
 ter is too characteristic to be omitted : 
 
 MONDAY MORNING. 
 
 MADAM, I know his majesty's goodness to Ms servants, and his 
 love of justice in general, so well, that I am confident, if His Majesty 
 knew my case, I should not have any cause to despair of his gracious 
 favor to me. 
 
 Abilities. Want. 
 
 Good Manners. Sufferings \ 
 
 Service. and > for his majesty. 
 
 Age, Zeal >
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 21 
 
 These, madam, are the proper points of consideration in the person that 
 humbly hopes his majesty's favor. 
 
 As to Abilities, all I can presume to say is, I have done the best I 
 could to improve them. 
 
 As to Good manners, I desire no favor, if any just objection lies 
 against them. 
 
 As for Service, I have been near seven years hi his majesty's, and 
 never omitted any duty in it, which few can say. 
 
 As for Age, I am turned of fifty. 
 
 As for Want, I have no manner of preferment. 
 
 As for Sufferings, I have lost 300 per ann. oy being in his 
 majesty's service; as I have shown hi a Representation which his 
 majesty has been so good as to read and consider. 
 
 As for Zeal, I have written nothing without showing my duty to 
 their majesties, and some pieces are dedicated to them. 
 
 This, madam, is the short and true state of my case. They that 
 make their court to the ministers, and not their majesties, succeed bet- 
 ter. If my case deserves some consideration, and you can serve me in 
 it, I humbly hope and believe you will: I shall, therefore, trouble 
 you no farther ; but beg leave to subscribe myself, with truest respect 
 and gratitude, 
 
 Yours, &c., 
 
 EDWARD YOUNO. 
 
 P. S. I have some hope that my Lord Townshend is my friend ; 
 if therefore soon, and before he leaves the court, you had an oppor- 
 tunity of mentioning me, with that favor you have been so good to 
 show, I think it would not fail of success ; and, if not, I shall owe you 
 more than any. (Suffolk Letters, vol. i. p. 285.) 
 
 Young's wife died in 1741, leaving him one son, born in 
 1733. That lie had attached himself strongly to her two 
 daughters by her former marriage, there is better evidence in 
 the report, mentioned by Mrs. Montagu, of his practical kind- 
 ness and liberality to the younger, than in his lamentations 
 over the elder as the Narcissa of the "Night Thoughts." 
 Narcissa had died in 1735, shortly after marriage to Mr. 
 Temple, the son of Lord Palmerston ; and Mr. Temple him- 
 self, after a second marriage, died in 1740, a year before Lady 
 Elizabeth Young. These, then, are the three deaths supposed
 
 22 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 to have inspired "The Complaint," which forms the three 
 first books of the " Night Thoughts : " 
 
 " Insatiate archer, could not one suffice ? 
 Thy shaft flew thrice : and thrice my peace was slain : 
 And thrice, ere thrice yon moon had filled her horn." 
 
 Since we find Young departing from the truth of dates, in, 
 order to heighten the effect of his calamity, or at least of his 
 climax, we need not be surprised that he allowed his imagi- 
 nation great freedom in other matters besides chronology, 
 and that the character of Philander can, by no process, be 
 made to fit Mr. Temple. The supposition that the much- 
 lectured Lorenzo, of the " Night Thoughts," was Young's 
 own son, is hardly rendered more absurd by the fact that the 
 poem was written when that son was a boy, than by the obvi- 
 ous artificiality of the characters Young introduces as targets 
 for his arguments and rebukes. Among all the trivial efforts 
 of conjectured criticism, there can hardly be one more futile 
 than the attempt to discover the original of those pitiable 
 lay-figures, the Lorenzos and Altamonts of Young's didac- 
 tic prose and poetry. His muse never stood face to face 
 with a genuine, living human being ; she would have been as 
 much startled by such an encounter as a necromancer whose 
 incantations and blue fire had actually conjured up a demon. 
 
 The "Night Thoughts " appeared between 1741 and 1745. 
 Although he declares in them that he has chosen God for his 
 "patron" henceforth, this is not at all to the prejudice of 
 some half-dozen lords, duchesses, and right honorables, who 
 have the privilege of sharing finely turned compliments with 
 their co-patron. The line which closed the Second Night in 
 the earlier editions 
 
 " Wits spare not Heaven, O Wilmington ! nor thee " 
 
 is an intense specimen of that perilous juxtaposition of ideas 
 by which Young, in his incessant search after point and 
 novelty, unconsciously converts his compliments into sar- 
 casms ; and his apostrophe to the moon, as more likely to be 
 favorable to his song if he calls her "fair Portland of the
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 23 
 
 skies," is worthy even of his Pindaric ravings. His ostenta- 
 tious renunciation of worldly schemes, and especially of his 
 twenty years' siege of Court favor, are in the tone of one who 
 retains some hope, in the midst of his querulousness. 
 
 He descended from the astronomical rhapsodies of his 
 Ninth Night, published in 1745, to more terrestrial strains, 
 in his " Eeflections on the Public Situation of the Kingdom," 
 dedicated to the Duke of Newcastle ; but in this critical year 
 we get a glimpse of him through a more prosaic and less re< 
 fracting medium. He spent a part of the year at Tunbridge 
 Wells ; and Mrs. Montagu, who was there too, gives a very 
 lively picture of the " divine doctor," in her letters to the 
 Duchess of Portland, on whom Young had bestowed the su- 
 perlative bombast to which we have recently alluded. We 
 shall borrow the quotations from Dr. Doran, in spite of their 
 length, because, to our mind, they present the most agreeable 
 portrait we possess of Young : 
 
 lt I have great joy in Dr. YouDg, whom I disturbed in a reverie. 
 At first he started, then bowed, then fell back into a surprise ; then 
 began a speech, relapsed into his astonishment two or three times, 
 forgot what he had been saying ; began a new subject, and so went on. 
 I told him your grace desired he would write longer letters j to which 
 he cried ' Ha ! ' most emphatically, and I leave you to interpret what 
 it meant. He has made a friendship with one person here, whom I 
 believe you would not imagine to have been made for his bosom friend. 
 You would, perhaps, suppose it was a bishop or dean, a prebend, a 
 pious preacher, a clergyman of exemplary life, or, if a layman, of most 
 virtuous conversation, one that had paraphrased St. Matthew, or wrote 
 comments on St. Paul. . . . You would not guess that this asso- 
 ciate of the doctor's was old Gibber ! Certainly in their religious, 
 moral, and civil character, there is no relation j but in their dramatic 
 capacity there is some." [Mrs. Montagu was not aware that Gibber, 
 whom Young had named not disparagingly in his Satires, was the 
 brother of his old schoolfellow ; but to return to our hero.] "The 
 osiers," says Mrs. Montagu, " have raised his spirits to a fine pitch, as 
 your grace will imagine, when I tell you how sublime an answer he 
 made to a very vulgar question. I asked him how long he stayed at 
 the Wells : he said, ' As long as my rival stayed j as long as the sun
 
 24 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 did.' Among the visitors at the Wells were Lady Sunderland (wife 
 of Sir Robert Sutton) and her sister, Mrs. Tichborne. He did an 
 admirable thing to Lady Sunderland : on her mentioning Sir Robert 
 Button, he asked her where Sir Robert's lady was ; on which we all 
 laughed very heartily, and I brought him off, half ashamed, to my 
 lodgings, where, during breakfast, he assured me he had asked after 
 Lady Sunderland, because he had a great honor for her; and that, 
 having a respect for her sister, he designed to have inquired after her, 
 if we had not put it out of his head by laughing at him. You must 
 know Mrs. Tichborne sat next to Lady Sunderland. It would have 
 been admirable to have had him finish his compliment in that man- 
 ner. . . . His expressions all bear the stamp of novelty, and his 
 thoughts of sterling sense. He practises a kind of philosophical ab- 
 stinence. . . . He carried Mrs. Rolt and myself to Tunbridge, five 
 miles from hence, where we were to see some fine old ruins. . . . 
 First rode the doctor on a tall steed, decently caparisoned in dark 
 gray ; next, ambled Mrs. Rolt on a hackney horse ; . . . then fol- 
 lowed your humble servant on a milk-white palfrey. I rode on in 
 safety, and at leisure to observe the company, especially the two 
 figures that brought up the rear. The first was my servant, valiantly 
 armed with two uncharged pistols; the last was the doctor's man 
 whose uncombed hair so resembled the mane of the horse he rode, one 
 could not help imagining they were of kin, and wishing, for the honor 
 of the family, that they had had one comb betwixt them. On his 
 head was a velvet cap, much resembling a black saucepan, and on his 
 side hung a little basket. At last we arrived at the King's Head, 
 where the loyalty of the doctor induced him to alight ; and then, 
 knight-erraut-like, he took his damsels from off their palfreys, and 
 courteously handed us into the inn. . . . The party returned to 
 the-Wells; and 'the silver Cynthia held up her lamp in the heavens' 
 the while. The night silenced all but our divine doctor, who some- 
 times uttered things fit to be spoken in a season when all nature seems 
 to be hushed and hearkening. I followed, gathering wisdom as I went, 
 till I found, by my horse's stumbling, that I was in a bad road, and 
 that the blind was leading the blind. So I placed my servant between 
 the doctor and myself; which he not perceiving, went on in a most 
 philosophical strain, to the great admiration of my poor clown of a 
 servant, who, not being wrought up to any pitch of enthusiasm, nor 
 making any answer to all the fine things he heard, the doctor, won- 
 dering I was dumb, and grieving I was so stupid, looked round and 
 declared his surprise."
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER- WORLDLINESS. 25 
 
 Young's oddity and absence of mind are gathered from 
 other sources besides these stories of Mrs. Montagu's, and 
 gave rise to the report that he was the original of Fielding's 
 " Parson Adams ; " but this Croft denies, and mentions another 
 Foung, who really sat for the portrait, and who, we imagine, 
 had both more Greek and more genuine simplicity than the 
 poet. His love of chatting with Colley Cibber was an in- 
 dication that the old predilection for the stage survived, in 
 spite of his emphatic contempt for "all joys but joys that 
 never can expire ; " and the production of " The Brothers," 
 at Drury Lane in 1753, after a suppression of fifteen years, 
 was perhaps not entirely due to the expressed desire to give 
 the proceeds to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. 
 The author's profits were not more than 400, in those 
 days a disappointing sum ; and Young, as we learn from his 
 friend Eichardson, did not make this the limit of his dona- 
 tion, but gave a thousand guineas to the Society. " I had 
 some talk with him," says Eichardson in one of his letters, 
 " about this great action. ' I always,' said he, ' intended to 
 do something handsome for the Society. Had I deferred it 
 to my demise, I should have given away my son's mo^ey. 
 All the world are inclined to pleasure; could I have gjiven 
 myself a greater by disposing of the sum to a different u^e, 
 I should have done it.' " Surely he took his old friend Eich- 
 ardson for Lorenzo ! 
 
 His next work was " The Centaur not Fabulous ; in Six 
 Letters to a Friend, on the Life in Vogue," which reads 
 very much like the most objurgatory parts of the "Night 
 Thoughts " reduced to prose. It is preceded by a preface 
 which, though addressed to a lady, is, in its denunciations of 
 vice, as grossly indecent and almost as flippant as the epi- 
 logues written by "friends," which he allowed to be reprinted 
 after his tragedies in the latest edition of his works. We 
 like much better than "The Centaur," "Conjectures on Origi- 
 nal Composition," written in 1759, for the sake, he says, of 
 communicating to the world the well-known anecdote about 
 Addison's death-bed, and, with the exception of his poem on 
 Resignation, the last thing he ever published.
 
 26 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 The estrangement from his son which must have embittered 
 the later years of his life, appears to have begun not many 
 years after the mother's death. On the marriage of her 
 second daughter, who had previously presided over Young's 
 household, a Mrs. Hallows, understood to be a woman of dis- 
 creet age, and the daughter (or widow^ of a clergyman who 
 was an old friend of Young's, became housekeeper at Welwyn. 
 Opinions about ladies are apt to differ. " Mrs. Hallows was 
 a woman of piety, improved by reading," says one witness. 
 " She was a very coarse woman," says Dr. Johnson ; and we 
 shall presently find some indirect evidence that her temper 
 was perhaps not quite so much improved as her piety. Ser- 
 vants, it seems, were not fond of remaining long in the house 
 with her ; a satirical curate, named Kidgell, hints at " drops 
 of juniper " taken as a cordial (but perhaps he was spiteful, 
 and a teetotaler) ; and Young's son is said to have told his 
 father that "an old man should not resign himself to the 
 management of anybody." The result was, that the son was 
 banished from home for the rest of his father's lifetime, 
 though Young seems never to have thought of disinheriting 
 him. 
 
 Our latest glimpses of the aged poet are derived from 
 certain letters of Mr. Jones, his curate, letters preserved in 
 the British Museum, and happily made accessible to common 
 mortals in Nichols's "Anecdotes." Mr. Jones was a man of 
 some literary activity and ambition, a collector of interest- 
 ing documents, and one of those concerned in the " Free and 
 Candid Disquisitions," the design of which was " to point out 
 such things in our ecclesiastical establishment as want to be 
 reviewed and amended." On these and kindred subjects he 
 corresponded with Dr. Birch, occasionally troubling him with 
 queries and manuscripts. We have a respect for Mr. Jones. 
 Unlike any person who ever troubled its with queries or 
 manuscripts, he mitigates the infliction by such gifts as " a 
 fat pullet," wishing he "had anything better to send; but 
 this depauperizing vicarage [of Alconbury] too often checks 
 the freedom and forwardness of my mind." Another day
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 27 
 
 comes a " pound canister of tea ; " another, a " young fatted 
 goose." Clearly, Mr. Jones was entirely unlike your literary 
 correspondents of the present day ; he forwarded manuscripts, 
 but he had " bowels," and forwarded poultry too. His first 
 letter from Welwyn is dated June, 1759, not quite six years 
 before Young's death. In June, 1762, he expresses a wish 
 to go to London " this summer. But," he continues, 
 
 " My time and pains are almost continually taken up here, and . . . 
 I have been, I now find, a considerable loser, upon the whole, by con- 
 tinuing here so long. The consideration of this, and the inconven- 
 iences I sustained, and do still experience, from my late illness, 
 obliged me at last to acquaint the Doctor [Young] with my case, and 
 to assure him that I plainly perceived the duty and confinement here 
 to be too much for me ; for which reason I must, I said, beg to be at 
 liberty to resign my charge at Michaelmas. I began to give him these 
 notices in February, when I was very ill j and now I perceive, by 
 what he told me the other day, that he is in some difficulty : for which 
 reason he is at last, he says, resolved to advertise, and even, which 
 is much wondered at, to raise the salary considerably higher. (What 
 he allowed my predecessors was 20 per annum ; and now he proposes 
 50, as he tells me.) I never asked him to raise it for me, though I 
 well knew it was not equal to the duty ; nor did I say a word about 
 myself when he lately suggested to me his intentions upon this 
 subject." 
 
 In a postscript to this letter, he says : 
 
 " I may mention to yon farther, as a friend that may be trusted, 
 that, In all likelihood, the poor old gentleman will not find it a very 
 easy matter, unless by dint of money, and force upon himself, to pro- 
 cure a man that he can like for his next curate, nor one that will stay 
 with him so long as I have done. Then, his great age will recur to 
 people's thoughts ; and if he has any foibles, either in temper or con- 
 duct, they will be sure not to be forgotten on this occasion by those 
 who know him ; and those who do not, will probably be on their 
 guard. On these and the like considerations, it is by no means an 
 eligible office to be seeking ont For a curate for him, as he has several 
 times wished me to do ; and would, if he knew that I am now writing 
 to you, wish your assistance also. But my best friends here, who well 
 foresee the probable conseoitences, and wish me well, earnestly dissuade
 
 28 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 me from complying : and I will decline the office with as much decency 
 as I can : but high salary will, I suppose, fetch in somebody or other, 
 soon." 
 
 In the following July he writes : 
 
 " The old gentleman here (I may venture to tell you freely) 
 seems to me to be in a pretty odd way of late, moping, dejected, 
 self-willed, and as if surrounded with some perplexing circumstances. 
 Though I visit him pretty frequently for short intervals, I say very 
 little to Ms affairs, not choosing to be a party concerned, especially in 
 cases of so critical and tender a nature. There is much mystery in 
 almost all his temporal affairs, as well as in many of his speculative 
 theories. Whoever lives in this neighborhood to see his exit, will 
 probably see and hear some very strange things. Time will show, 
 1 am afraid, not greatly to his credit. There is thought to be an irre- 
 movable obstruction to his happiness within his walls, as well as another 
 without tliem, but the former is the more powerful, and like to continue 
 so. He has this ' day been trying anew to engage me to stay with 
 him. No lucrative views can tempt me to sacrifice my liberty or my 
 health, to such measures as are proposed here. Nor do I like to have 
 to do with persons whose word and honor cannot be depended on. So 
 much for this very odd and unhappy topic." 
 
 In August, Mr. Jones's tone is slightly modified. Earnest 
 entreaties, not lucrative considerations, have induced him to 
 cheer the Doctor's dejected heart by remaining at Welwyn 
 some time longer. The Doctor is, "in various respects, a 
 very unhappy man," and few know so much of these respects 
 as Mr. Jones. In September he recurs to the subject : 
 
 " My ancient gentleman here is still full of trouble : which moves 
 my concern, though it moves only the secret laughter of many, and 
 some untoward surmises in disfavor of him and his household. The 
 loss of a very large sum of money (about 200) is talked of; whereof 
 this vill and neighborhood is full. Some disbelieve ; others say, ' It 
 is no wonder, where about eighteen or more servants are sometimes taken 
 and dismissed in the course of a year.'' The gentleman himself is 
 allowed by all to be far more harmless and easy in his family than 
 some one else who hath too much the lead in it. This, among others, 
 was one reason for my late motion to quit."
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 29 
 
 No other mention of Young's affairs occurs until April 2, 
 1765, when he says that Dr. Young is very ill, attended by 
 two physicians. 
 
 "Having mentioned this ypung gentleman [Dr. Young's son], I 
 would acquaint you next, that he came hither this morning, having 
 been sent for, as I am told, by the direction of Mrs. Hallows. Indeed, 
 she intimated to me as much herself. And, if this be so, I must say 
 that it is one of the most prudent acts she ever did, or could have 
 done in such a case as this ; as it may prove a means of preventing 
 much confusion after the death of the Doctor. I have had some little 
 discourse with the son : he seems much affected, and I believe really 
 is so. He earnestly wishes his father might be pleased to ask after 
 him ; for you must know he has not yet done this, nor is, in my opin- 
 ion, like to do it. And it has been said, farther, that upon a late 
 application made to him on the behalf of his son, he desired that no 
 more might be said to him about it. How true this may be I can- 
 not as yet be certain ; all I shall say is, it seems not improbable . . . 
 I heartily wish the ancient man's heart may prove tender towards his 
 son ; though, knowing him so weU, I can scarce hope to hear such 
 desirable news." 
 
 Eleven days later he writes : 
 
 " I have now the pleasure to acquaint you that the late Dr. Young, 
 though he had for many years kept his son at a distance from him, 
 yet has now at last left him all his possessions, after the payment of 
 certain legacies ; so that the young gentleman, who bears a fair char- 
 acter and behaves well, as far as I can hear or see, will, I hope, soon 
 enjoy and make a prudent use of a handsome fortune. The father, 
 on his death-bed, and since my return from London, was applied to in 
 the tenderest manner, by one of his physicians and by another person, 
 to admit the son into his presence, to make submission, intreat for- 
 giveness, and obtain his blessing. As to an interview with his son, 
 he intimated that he chose to decline it, as his spirits were then low 
 and his nerves weak. With regard to the next particular, he said, ' I 
 heartily forgive him; ' and upon mention of this last, he gently lifted 
 up his hand, and letting it gently fall, pronounced these words, ' God 
 bless him!' ... I know it will give you pleasure to be farther in- 
 formed that he was pleased to make respectful mention of me in his 
 will, expressing his satisfaction in my care of his parish, bequeath- 
 ing to me a handsome legacy, and appointing me to be one of hia 
 executors."
 
 30 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 So far Mr. Jones, in his confidential correspondence with 
 a " friend who may be trusted." In a letter communicated 
 apparently by him to the " Gentleman's Magazine," seven 
 years later, namely, in 1782, on the appearance of Croft's 
 biography of Young, we find him speaking of " the ancient 
 gentleman," in a tone of reverential eulogy, quite at variance 
 with the free comments we have just quoted. But the Rev. 
 John Jones was probably of opinion with Mrs. Montagu, 
 whose contemporary and retrospective letters are also set in a 
 different key, that " the interests of religion were connected 
 with the character of a man so distinguished for piety as Dr. 
 Young." At all events, a subsequent quasi-official statement 
 weighs nothing as evidence against contemporary, spontane- 
 ous, and confidential hints. 
 
 To Mrs. Hallows, Young left a legacy of 1,000, with the 
 request that she would destroy all his manuscripts. This 
 final request, from some unknown cause, was not complied 
 with, and among the papers he left behind him was the 
 following letter from Archbishop Seeker, which probably 
 marks the date of his latest effort after preferment. 
 
 DEANERY OF ST. PAUL'S, July 8, 1758. 
 
 GOOD DR. YOUNG, I have long wondered that more suitable 
 notice of your great merit hath not been taken by persons in power. 
 But how to remedy the omission I see not. No encouragement hath 
 ever been given me to mention things of this nature to his Majesty. 
 And therefore, in all likelihood, the only consequence of doing it would 
 be weakening the little influence which else I may possibly have on 
 some other occasions. Your fortune and your reputation set you above 
 the need of advancement; and your sentiments above that concern for 
 it, on your own account, which, on that of the public, ia sincerely 
 felt by 
 
 Your loving Brother, 
 
 THO. CANT. 
 
 The "loving Brother's" irony is severe I 
 
 Perhaps the least questionable testimony to the better side 
 of Young's character, is that of Bishop Hildesley, who, as 
 the vicar of a parish near Welwyn, had been Young's neigh-
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 31 
 
 bor for upwards of twenty years. The affection of the clergy 
 for each other, we have observed, is, like that of the fair sex, 
 not at all of a blind and infatuated kind ; and we may there- 
 fore the rather believe them when they give each other 
 any extra-official praise. Bishop Hildesley, then writing of 
 Young to Richardson, says : 
 
 " The impertinence of my frequent visits to him was amply re- 
 warded; forasmuch as, I can truly say, he never received me but 
 with agreeable open complacency ; and I never left him but with 
 profitable pleasure and improvement. He was one or other, the most 
 modest, the most patient of contradiction, and the most informing and 
 entertaining I ever conversed with at least, of any man who had so 
 just pretensions to pertinacity and reserve." 
 
 Mr. Langton, however, who was also a frequent visitor of 
 Young's, informed Boswell 
 
 " That there was an air of benevolence in his manner 5 but that he 
 could obtain from him less information than he had hoped to receive 
 from one who had lived so much in intercourse with the brightest 
 men of what had been called the Augustan Age of England ; and that 
 he showed a degree of eager curiosity concerning the common occur- 
 rences that were then passing, which appeared somewhat remarkable 
 in a man of such intellectual stores, of such an advanced age, 
 and who had retired from life with declared disappointment in his 
 expectations." 
 
 The same substance, we know, will exhibit different quali- 
 ties under different tests ; and, after all, imperfect reports of 
 individual impressions, whether immediate or traditional, 
 are a very frail basis on which to build our opinion of a man. 
 One's character may be very indifferently mirrored in the 
 mind of the most intimate neighbor ; it all depends on the 
 quality of that gentleman's reflecting surface. 
 
 But, discarding any inferences from such uncertain evi- 
 dence, the outline of Young's character is too distinctly trace- 
 able in the well-attested facts of his life, and yet more in the 
 self-betrayal that runs through all his works, for us to fear 
 that our general estimate of him may be false. For, while
 
 32 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 no poet seems less easy and spontaneous than Young, no 
 poet discloses himself more completely. Men's minds have 
 no hiding-place out of themselves ; their affectations do but 
 betray another phase of their nature. And if, in the present 
 view of Young, we seem to be more intent on laying bare 
 unfavorable facts than on shrouding them in " charitable 
 speeches," it is not because we have any irreverential pleas- 
 ure in turning men's characters " the seamy side without," 
 but because we see no great advantage in considering a mac 
 as he was not. Young's biographers and critics have usually 
 set out from the position that he was a great religious teacher, 
 and that his poetry is morally sublime ; and they have toned 
 down his failings into harmony with their conception of the 
 divine and the poet. For our own part, we set out from pre- 
 cisely the opposite conviction namely, that the religious 
 and moral spirit of Young's poetry is low and false ; and 
 we think it of some importance to show that the "Night 
 Thoughts" are the reflex of a mind in which the higher 
 human sympathies were inactive. This judgment is en- 
 tirely opposed to our youthful predilections and enthusiasm. 
 The sweet garden-breath of early enjoyment lingers about 
 many a page of the "Night Thoughts," and even of the 
 " Last Day," giving an extrinsic charm to passages of stilted 
 rhetoric and false sentiment; but the sober and repeated 
 reading of maturer years has convinced us that it would 
 hardly be possible to find a more typical instance than 
 Young's poetry, of the mistake which substitutes interested 
 obedience for sympathetic emotion, and baptizes egoism as 
 religion. 
 
 Pope said of Young, that he had "much of a sublime gen 
 ius without common sense." The deficiency Pope meant to 
 indicate was, we imagine, moral rather than intellectual ; it 
 was the want of that fine sense of what is fitting in speech 
 and action, which is often eminently possessed by men and 
 women whose intellect is of a very common order, but who 
 have the sincerity and dignity which can never coexist with 
 the selfish preoccupations of vanity or interest. This was the
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 33 
 
 "common sense" in which Young was conspicuously defi- 
 cient ; and it was partly owing to this deficiency that his 
 genius, waiting to be determined by the highest prize, flut- 
 tered uncertainly from effort to effort, until, when he was 
 more than sixty, it suddenly spread its broad wing, and 
 soared so as to arrest the gaze of other generations besides 
 his own. For he had no versatility of faculty to mislead 
 him. The "Night Thoughts" only differ from his previous 
 works in the degree and not in the kind of power they mani- 
 fest. Whether he writes prose or poetry, rhyme or blank 
 verse, dramas, satires, odes, or meditations, we see everywhere 
 the same Young, the same narrow circle of thoughts, the 
 same love of abstractions, the same telescopic view of human 
 things, the same appetency towards antithetic apothegm and 
 rhapsodic climax. The passages that arrest us in his trage- 
 dies are those in which he anticipates some fine passage in 
 the "Night Thoughts," and where his characters are only 
 transparent shadows, through which we see the bewigged 
 embonpoint of the didactic poet, excogitating epigrams or 
 ecstatic soliloquies by the light of a candle fixed in a skull. 
 Thus in " The Revenge," Alonzo, in the conflict of jealousy 
 and love that at once urges and forbids him to murder hig 
 wife, says, 
 
 "This vast and solid earth, that blazing sun, 
 Those skies, through which it rolls, must all have end 
 What then is man ? The smallest part of nothing. 
 Day buries day ; month, month ; and year, the year ! 
 Our life is but a chain of many deaths. 
 Can then Death's self be feared ? Our life much rather : 
 Life is the desert, life the solitude ; 
 Death joins us to the great majority : 
 'T is to be born to Plato and to Cassar ; 
 T is to be great forever ; 
 T is pleasure, 't is ambition, then, to die." 
 
 His prose writings all read like the "Night Thoughts," 
 either diluted into prose, or not yet crystallized into poetry. 
 For example, in his " Thoughts for Age," he says,
 
 34 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 " Though we stand on its awful brink, such our leaden bias to the 
 world, we turn our faces the wrong way ; we are still looking on our 
 old acquaintance, Time, though now so wasted and reduced, that we 
 can see little more of him thau his wings and his scythe : our age en- 
 larges hi* wings to our imagination ; and our fear of death, his scythe ; 
 as Time himself grows less. His consumption is deep; his auuihilji- 
 tion is at hand." 
 
 This is a dilution of the magnificent image : 
 
 " Time in advance behind him hides his wings, 
 And seems to creep decrepit with his age. 
 Behold him when past by ! What then is seen 
 But his proud pinions, swifter than the winds ? " 
 
 Again : 
 
 "A requesting Omnipotence? What can stun and confound thy 
 reason more ? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart ? It cannot 
 but ravish and exalt ; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee, 
 to take in all that thought suggests. Thou child of the dust I Thou 
 speck of misery and sin ! How abject thy weakness, how great is 
 thy power! Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) 
 controller of the skies ! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths 
 I have in view : which cannot be weighed too much ; which the more 
 they are weighed, amaze the more ; which to have supposed, before 
 they were revealed, would have been as great madness, and to have pre- 
 sumed on as great sin, as it is now madness and sin not to believe." 
 
 Even in his Pindaric odes, in which he made the most vio- 
 lent efforts against nature, he is still neither more nor less 
 than the Young of the " Last Day," emptied and swept of 
 his genius, and possessed by seven demons of fustian and 
 bad rhyme. Even here, his " Ercles' Vein " alternates with 
 his moral platitudes, and we have the perpetual text of the 
 " Night Thoughts : " 
 
 " Gold, pleasure buys ; 
 
 But pleasure dies, 
 For soon the gross fruition cloys; 
 
 Though raptures court, 
 
 The sense is short : 
 But virtue kindles living joys,
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 85 
 
 " Joys felt alone ! 
 
 Joys asked of none ! 
 Which Time's and Fortune's arrows miss : 
 
 Joys that subsist, 
 
 Though fates resist, 
 An unprecarious, endless bliss ! 
 
 " Unhappy they ! 
 
 And falsely gay ! 
 Who bask forever in success ; 
 
 A constant feast 
 
 Quite palls the taste, 
 And long enjoyment is distress." 
 
 In the " Last Day," again, which is the earliest thing he 
 wrote, we have an anticipation of all his greatest faults and 
 merits. Conspicuous among the faults is that attempt to ex- 
 alt our conceptions of Deity by vulgar images and compari- 
 sons, which is so offensive in the later "Night Thoughts." 
 In a burst of prayer and homage to God, called forth by the 
 contemplation of Christ coming to Judgment, he asks, " Who 
 brings the change of the seasons ? " and answers, 
 
 " Not the great Ottoman, or Greater Czar ; 
 Not Europe's arbitress of peace and war ! " 
 
 Conceive the soul in its most solemn moments, assuring 
 God that it doesn't place his power below that of Louis 
 Napoleon or Queen Victoria ! 
 
 But in the midst of uneasy rhymes, inappropriate imagery, 
 vaulting sublimity that o'erleaps itself, and vulgar emotions, 
 we have in this poem an occasional flash of genius, a touch 
 of simple grandeur, which promises as much.as Young ever 
 achieved. Describing the on-coming of the dissolution of all 
 things, he says, 
 
 " No sun in radiant glory shines on high ; 
 No light but from the terrors of the sky." 
 
 And again, speaking of great armies, 
 
 " Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn 
 Boused the broad front, and called the battle on."
 
 86 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 And this wail of the lost souls is fine : 
 
 " And this for sin ? 
 Could I offend if I had never been * 
 But still increased the senseless, happy mans. 
 Flowed in the 8tream, or shivered in the gram t 
 Father of mercies ! Why from silent earth 
 Didst thou awake and curse me into birth ? 
 Tear me from quiet, ravish me from night, 
 And make a thankless present of thy light ? 
 Push into being a reverse of thee, 
 And animate a clod with misery f " 
 
 But it is seldom in Young's rhymed poems that the effect 
 of a felicitous thought or image is not counteracted by our 
 Sense of the constraint he suffered from the necessities of 
 rhyme, that " Gothic demon," as he afterwards called it, 
 " which modern poetry tasting, became mortal." In relation 
 to his own power, no one will question the truth of his dic- 
 tum, that " blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst ; verse re- 
 claimed, reinthroned in the true language of the gods ; who 
 never thundered nor suffered their Homer to thunder in 
 rhyme." His want of mastery in rhyme is especially a 
 drawback on the effects of his Satires; for epigrams and 
 witticisms are peculiarly susceptible to the intrusion of a 
 superfluous word, or to an inversion which implies con- 
 straint. Here, even more than elsewhere, the art that con- 
 ceals art is an absolute requisite, and to have a witticism 
 presented to us in limping or cumbrous rhythm is as coun- 
 teractive to any electrifying effect, as to see the tentative 
 grimaces by which a comedian prepares a grotesque counte- 
 nance. We diicern the process, instead of being startled by 
 the result. 
 
 This is one reason why the Satires, read seriatim, have a 
 flatness to us, which, when we afterwards read picked pas- 
 sages, we are inclined to disbelieve in, and to attribute to 
 some deficiency in our own mood. But there are deeper rea- 
 sons for that dissatisfaction. Young is not a satirist of a 
 high order. His satire has neither the terrible vigor, the 
 lacerating energy, of genuine indignation, nor the humor
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 37 
 
 which owns loving fellowship with the poor human nature it 
 laughs at ; nor yet the personal bitterness which, as in Pope's 
 characters of Sporus and Atticus, ensures those living touches 
 by virtue of which the individual and particular in Art be- 
 comes the universal and immortal. Young could never 
 describe a real, complex human being j but what he could do, 
 with eminent success, was to describe, with neat and finished 
 point, obvious types of manners rather than of character, 
 to write cold and clever epigrams on personified vices and 
 absurdities. There is no more emotion in his satire than if 
 he were turning witty verses on a waxen image of Cupid, or 
 a lady's glove. He has none of those felicitous epithets, none 
 of those pregnant lines, by which Pope's Satires have enriched 
 the ordinary speech of educated men. Young's wit will be 
 found in almost every instance to consist in that antithetic 
 combination of ideas which, of all the forms of wit, is most 
 within reach of clever effort. In his gravest arguments, as 
 well as in his lightest satire, one might imagine that he had 
 set himself to work out the problem, how much antithesis 
 might be got out of a given subject. And there he com- 
 pletely succeeds. His neatest portraits are all wrought on 
 this plan. Narcissus, for example, who 
 
 "Omits no duty ; nor can Envy say 
 He missed, these many years, the Church or Play : 
 He makes no noise in Parliament, 't is true ; 
 But pays his debts, and visit when 't is due ; 
 His character and gloves are ever clean, 
 And then he can out-bow the bowing Dean; 
 A smile eternal on his lip he wears, 
 Which equally the wise and worthless share*. 
 In gay fatigues, this most undaunted chief, 
 Patient of idleness beyond belief, 
 Most charitably lends the town his face 
 For ornament in every public place ; 
 As sure as cards he to th' assembly comes, 
 And is the furniture of drawing-rooms : 
 When Ombre calls, his hand and heart are free, 
 And, joined to two, he fails not to make three ; 
 Narcissus is the glory of his race ;
 
 38 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 For who does nothing with a better grace * 
 
 To deck my list by nature were designed 
 
 Such shining expletives of human kind, 
 
 Who want, while through blank life they dream along, 
 
 Sense to be right and passion to be wrong." 
 
 It is but seldom that we find a touch of that easy slyness 
 which gives an additional zest to surprise; but here is an 
 instance : 
 
 " See Tityrus, with merriment possest, 
 Is burst with laughter ere he hears the jest ; 
 What need he stay, for when the joke is o'er, 
 His teeth will be no whiter than before." 
 
 Like Pope, whom he imitated, he sets out with a psycho- 
 logical mistake as the basis of his satire, attributing all forms 
 of folly to one passion, the love of fame, or vanity, a 
 much grosser mistake, indeed, than Pope's exaggeration of 
 the extent to which the "ruling passion" determines con- 
 duct in the individual. Not that Young is consistent in his 
 mistake. He sometimes implies no more than what is the 
 truth that the love of fame is the cause, not of all follies, 
 but of many. 
 
 Young's satires on women are superior to Pope's, which is 
 only saying that they are superior to Pope's greatest failure. 
 We can more frequently pick out a couplet as successful than 
 an entire sketch. Of the too emphatic Syrena he says : 
 
 " Her judgment just, her sentence is too strong ; 
 Because she 's right, she 's ever in the wrong." 
 
 Of the diplomatic Julia : 
 
 " For her own breakfast she 11 project a scheme, 
 Nor take her tea without a stratagem." 
 
 Of Lyce, the old painted coquette : 
 
 "In vain the cock has summoned sprites away ; 
 She walks at noon and blasts the bloom of day." 
 
 Of the nymph who, " gratis, clears religious mysteries : "
 
 WOBLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 39 
 
 " 'T is hard, too, she who makes no use but ohat 
 Of her religion, should be barred in that." 
 
 The description of the literary belle, Daphne, well pre- 
 faces that of Stella, admired by Johnson : 
 
 " With legs tossed high, on her sophee she sits 
 Vouchsafing audience to contending wits : 
 Of each performance she 's the final test ; 
 One act read o'er, she prophesies the rest ; 
 And then, pronouncing with decisive air, 
 Fully convinces all the town she 'sfair. 
 Had lonely Daphne Hecatessa's face, 
 How would her elegance of taste decrease ! 
 Some ladies' judgment in their features lies, 
 And all their genius sparkles in their eyes. 
 But hold, she cries, lampooner ! have a care ! 
 Must I want common sense because I 'm fair I 
 Oh no ; see Stella : her eyes shine as bright 
 As if her tongue was never in the right ; 
 And yet what real learning, judgment, fire ! 
 She seems inspired, and can herself inspire. 
 How then (if malice ruled not all the fair) 
 Could Daphne publish, and could she forbear ? " 
 
 After all, when we have gone through Young's seven Sa- 
 tires, we seem to have made but an indifferent meal. They 
 are a sort of fricassee, with some little solid meat in them, 
 and yet the flavor is not always piquant. It is curious to 
 find him, when he pauses a moment from his satiric sketch- 
 ing, recurring to his old platitudes : 
 
 " Can gold calm passion, or make reason shine 1 
 Can we dig peace or wisdom from the mine t 
 Wisdom to gold prefer : " 
 
 platitudes which he seems inevitably to fall into, for the 
 same reason that some men are constantly asserting their 
 contempt for criticism because he felt the opposite so 
 keenly. 
 
 The outburst of genius in the earlier books of the " Night 
 Thoughts " is the more remarkable, that, in the interval be- 
 tween them and the Satires, he had produced nothing but his
 
 40 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Pindaric odes, in which he fell far below the level of his pre- 
 vious works. Two sources of this sudden strength were the 
 freedom of blank verse and the presence of a genuine emo- 
 tion. Most persons, in speaking of the "Night Thoughts," 
 have in their minds only the two or three first Nights ; the 
 majority of readers rarely getting beyond these, unless, as 
 Wilson says, they " have but few books, are poor, and live in 
 the country." And in these earlier Nights there is enough 
 genuine sublimity and genuine sadness to bribe us into too 
 favorable a judgment of them as a whole. Young had only 
 a very few things to say or sing, such as that life is vain, 
 that death is imminent, that man is immortal, that virtue is 
 wisdom, that friendship is sweet, and that the source of vir- 
 tue is the contemplation of death and immortality, and 
 even in his two first Nights he had said almost all he had to 
 say in his finest manner. Through these first outpourings of 
 "complaint" we feel that the poet is really sad, that the 
 bird is singing over a rifled nest; and we bear with his 
 morbid picture of the world and of life, as the Job-like lament 
 of a man whom "the hand of God hath touched." Death 
 has carried away his best-beloved, and that "silent land," 
 whither they are gone, has more reality for the desolate one 
 than this world, which is empty of their love : 
 
 " This is the desert, this the solitude ; 
 How populous, how vital, is the grave ! " 
 
 Joy died with the loved one : 
 
 " The disenchanted earth 
 
 Lost all her lustre. Where her glittering towers ? 
 Her golden mountains, where ? All darkened down 
 To naked waste ; a dreary vale of tears : 
 The great magician 's dead ! " 
 
 Under the pang of parting, it seems to the bereaved man 
 as if love were only a nerve to suffer with, and he sickens at 
 the thought of every joy of which he must one day say, "It 
 was" In its unreasoning anguish, the soul rushes to the 
 idea of perpetuity as the one element of bliss:
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 41 
 
 " O ye blest scenes of permanent delight ! 
 Conld ye, so rich in rapture, fear an end, 
 That ghastly thought would drink up all your joy, 
 And quite unparadise the realms of light." 
 
 In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, 
 we tolerate morbid exaggerations ; we are prepared to see 
 him turn away a weary eye from sunlight and flowers and 
 sweet human faces, as if this rich and glorious life had no 
 significance but as a preliminary of death ; we do not criticise 
 his views, we compassionate his feelings. And so it is with 
 Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some arti- 
 ficiality even in his grief, and feeling often slides into 
 rhetoric ; but through it all we are thrilled with the unmis- 
 takable cry of pain, which makes us tolerant of egoism and 
 hyperbole : 
 
 " In every varied posture, place, and hour, 
 How widowed every thought of every joy! 
 Thought, busy thought ! too busy for my peace! 
 Through the dark postern of time long elapsed 
 Led softly, by the stillness of the night, 
 Led like a murderer (and such it proves!) 
 Strays (wretched rover!) o'er the pleasing past, 
 In quest of wretchedness, perversely strays ; 
 And finds all desert now ; and meets the ghosts 
 Of my departed joys." 
 
 But when he becomes didactic, rather than complaining, 
 when he ceases to sing his sorrows, and begins to insist on 
 his opinions, when that distaste for life, which we pity as 
 a transient feeling, is thrust upon us as a theory, we become 
 perfectly cool and critical, and are not in the least inclined 
 to be indulgent to false views and selfish sentiments. 
 
 Seeing that we are about to be severe on Young's failings and 
 failures, we ought, if a reviewer's space were elastic, to dwell 
 also on his merits, on the startling vigor of his imagery, on 
 the occasional grandeur of his thought, on the piquant force of 
 that grave satire into which his meditations continually run. 
 But, since our limits are rigorous, we must content ourselves
 
 42 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 with the less agreeable half of the critic's duty ; and we may the 
 rather do so, because it would be difficult to say anything new 
 of Young in the way of admiration, while we think there are 
 many salutary lessons remaining to be drawn from his faults. 
 One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his 
 radical insincerity as a poetic artist. This, added to the thin 
 and artificial texture of his wit, is the true explanation of 
 the paradox that a poet who is often inopportunely witty 
 has the opposite vice of bombastic absurdity. The source of 
 all grandiloquence is the want of taking for a criterion the 
 true qualities of the object described, or the emotion ex- 
 pressed. The grandiloquent man is never bent on saying 
 what he feels or what he sees, but on producing a certain 
 effect on his audience ; hence he may float away into utter 
 inanity without meeting any criterion to arrest him. Here 
 lies the distinction between grandiloquence and genuine 
 fancy or bold imaginativeness. The fantastic or the boldly 
 imaginative poet may be as sincere as the most realistic ; he 
 is true to his own sensibilities or inward vision, and in his 
 wildest flights he never breaks loose from his criterion the 
 truth of his own mental state. Now, this disruption of lan- 
 guage from genuine thought and feeling is what we are con- 
 stantly detecting in Young ; and his insincerity is the more 
 likely to betray him into absurdity, because he habitually 
 treats of abstractions, and not of concrete objects or specific 
 emotions. He descants perpetually on virtue, religion, " the 
 good man," life, death, immortality, eternity subjects which 
 are apt to give a factitious grandeur to empty wordiness. 
 When a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird's- 
 eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of 
 his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth 
 for proximity to heaven. Thus, 
 
 " His hand the good man fixes on the skies, 
 And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl," 
 
 may, perhaps, pass for sublime with some readers. But 
 pause a moment to realize the image, and the monstrous ab-
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 43 
 
 surdity of a man's grasping the skies, and hanging habitually 
 suspended there, while he contemptuously bids the earth 
 roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested 
 so unnatural a conception. 
 
 Again, 
 
 
 
 " See the man immortal : him, I mean, 
 Who lives as such ; whose heart, full bent on Heaven, 
 Leans all that way, his bias to the stars." 
 
 This is worse than the previous example : for you can at 
 least form some imperfect conception of a man hanging from 
 the skies, though the position strikes you as uncomfortable, 
 and of no particular use ; but you are utterly unable to imag- 
 ine how his heart can lean towards the stars. Examples of 
 such vicious imagery, resulting from insincerity, may be 
 found, perhaps, in almost every page of the "Night Thoughts." 
 But simple assertions or aspirations, undisguised by imagery, 
 are often equally false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked 
 by the slightest truthful intentions, could have said, 
 
 " An eye of awe and wonder let me roll, 
 And roll forever." 
 
 Abstracting the more poetical associations with the eye, this 
 is hardly less absurd than if he had wished to stand forever 
 with his mouth open. 
 Again, 
 
 " Far beneath 
 A soul immortal is a mortal joy." 
 
 Happily for human nature, we are sure no man really believes 
 that. Which of us has the impiety not to feel that our souls 
 are only too narrow for the joy of looking into the trusting 
 eyes of our children, of reposing on the love of a husband or 
 a wife, nay, of listening to the divine voice of music, or 
 watching the calm brightness of autumnal afternoons ? But 
 Young could utter this falsity without detecting it, because, 
 when he spoke of "mortal joys," he rarely had in his mind 
 any object to which he could attach sacredness. He was
 
 44 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 thinking of bishoprics and benefices, of smiling monarchs, 
 patronizing prime-ministers, and a " much indebted muse." 
 Of anything between these and eternal bliss, he was but rarely 
 and moderately conscious. Often, indeed, he sinks very 
 much below even the bishopric, and seems to have no notion 
 of earthly pleasure, but such as breathes gaslight and the 
 fumes of wine. His picture of life is precisely such as you 
 would expect from a man who has risen from his bed at two 
 o'clock in the afternoon with a headache, and a dim remem- 
 brance that he has added to his " debts of honor : " 
 
 " What wretched repetition cloys us here ! 
 What periodic potions for the sick, 
 Distempered bodies, and distempered minds? " 
 
 And then he flies off to his usual antithesis : 
 
 " In an eternity what scenes shall strike ! 
 Adventures thicken, novelties surprise !" 
 
 " Earth " means lords and levees, duchesses and Delilahs, 
 South-Sea dreams and illegal percentage ; and the only things 
 distinctly preferable to these, are eternity and the stars. 
 Deprive Young of this antithesis, and more than half his elo- 
 quence would be shrivelled up. Place him on a breezy com- 
 mon, where the furze is in its golden bloom, where children 
 are playing, and horses are standing in the sunshine with 
 fondling necks, and he would have nothing to say. Here are 
 neither depths of guilt nor heights of glory ; and we doubt 
 whether in such a scene he would be able to pay his usual 
 compliment to the Creator : 
 
 " Where'er I turn, what claim on all applause ! " 
 
 It is true that he sometimes not often speaks of virtue 
 as capable of sweetening life, as well as of taking the sting 
 from death and winning heaven ; and, lest we should be 
 guilty of any unfairness to him, we will quote the two pas- 
 sages which convey this sentiment the most explicitly. In 
 the one, he gives Lorenzo this excellent recipe for obtain- 
 ing cheerfulness :
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 45 
 
 " Go, fix some weighty truth ; 
 
 Chain down some passion; do some generous good; 
 Teach Ignorance to see, or Grief to smile ; 
 Correct thy friend ; befriend thy greatest foe ; 
 Or, with warm heart, and confidence divine, 
 Spring up, and lay strong hold on Him who made thec." 
 
 The other passage is vague, "but beautiful, and its music 
 has murmured in our minds for many years : 
 
 " The cuckoo seasons sing 
 The same dull note to such as nothing prize 
 But what those seasons from the teeming earth 
 To doting sense indulge. But nobler minds, 
 Which relish fruit unripened by the sun, 
 Make their days various ; various as the dyes 
 On the dove's neck, which wanton in his rays. 
 On minds of dove-like innocence possessed, 
 On lightened minds that bask in Virtue's beamt, 
 Nothing hangs tedious, nothing old revolves 
 In that for which they long, for which they live. 
 Their glorious efforts, winged with heavenly hoped, 
 Each rising morning sees still higher rise ; 
 Each bounteous dawn its novelty presents 
 To worth maturing, new strength, lustre, fame ; 
 While Nature's circle, like a chariot wheel, 
 Rolling beneath their elevated aims, 
 Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour ; 
 Advancing virtue in a line to bliss." 
 
 Even here, where he is in his most amiable mood, you see 
 at what a telescopic distance he stands from mother Earth 
 and simple human joys, " Nature's r circle rolls beneath." 
 Indeed, we remember no mind in poetic literature that seems 
 to have absorbed less of the beauty and the healthy breath of 
 the common landscape than Young's. His images, often 
 grand and finely presented, witness that sublimely sudden 
 leap of thought, 
 
 " Embryos we must be till we burst the shell, 
 Yon ambient azure shell, and spring to life," 
 
 lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which 
 would be familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about
 
 46 ESSAYS OP GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 the theatres, read the newspaper, and went home often by 
 moon and star light. 
 
 There is no natural object nearer than the moon that seems 
 to have any strong attraction for him ; and even to the moon 
 he chiefly appeals for patronage, and " pays his court " to her. 
 It is reckoned among the many deficiencies of Lorenzo, that 
 he "never asked the moon, one question" an omission 
 which Young thinks eminently unbecoming a rational being. 
 He describes nothing so well as a comet, and is tempted to 
 linger with fond detail over nothing more familiar than the 
 Day of Judgment and an imaginary journey among the stars. 
 Once on Saturn's ring, he feels at home, and his language 
 becomes quite easy : 
 
 " What behold I now ? 
 A wilderness of wonders burning round, 
 Where larger suns inhabit higher spheres j 
 Perhaps the villa* of descending godt ! " 
 
 It is like a sudden relief from a strained posture when, In 
 the " Night Thoughts," we come on any allusion that carries 
 us to the lanes, woods, or fields. Such allusions are amazingly 
 rare, and we could almost count them on a single hand. That 
 we may do him no injustice, we will quote the three beat : 
 
 " Like blossomed trees o'erturned by vernal storm, 
 Lovely in death the beauteous ruin lay. 
 
 In the same brook none ever bathed him twice : 
 
 To the same life none ever twice awoke. 
 
 We call the brook the same the same we think 
 
 Our life, though still more rapid in fts flow; 
 
 Nor mark the ranch irrevocably lapsed 
 
 And mingled with the sea. 
 
 The crown of manhood is a winter joy ; 
 
 An evergreen that stands the northern blast, 
 
 And blossoms in the rigor of our fate." 
 
 The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of 
 abstractions, Is closely allied in Young to the want of genuine
 
 WORLDLDTESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 4V 
 
 emotion. He sees Virtue sitting on a mount serene, far abore 
 the mists and storms of earth ; he sees Religion coming down 
 from the skies, with this world in her left hand and the other 
 world in her right ; but we never find him dwelling on virtue 
 or religion as it really exists in the emotions of a man 
 dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fireside of an 
 evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little 
 daughter, in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the in- 
 ternal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, 
 in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which 
 are found in the details of ordinary life. Now emotion 
 links itself with particulars, and only in a faint and second- 
 ary manner with abstractions. An orator may discourse 
 very eloquently on injustice in general, and leave his au- 
 dience cold ; but let him state a special case of oppression, 
 and every heart will throb. The most untheoretic persons 
 are aware of this relation between true emotion and particular 
 facts, as opposed to general terms, and implicitly recognize 
 it in the repulsion they feel towards any one who professes 
 strong feeling about abstractions, in the inter jectional 
 " humbug ! " which immediately rises to their lips. Wher- 
 ever abstractions appear to excite strong emotion, this occurs 
 in men of active intellect and imagination, in whom the ab- 
 stract term rapidly and vividly calls up the particulars it 
 represents, these particulars being the true source of the 
 emotion ; and such men, if they wished to express their feel- 
 ing, would be infallibly prompted to the presentation of 
 details. Strong emotion can no more be directed to generali- 
 ties apart from particulars, than skill in figures can be di- 
 rected to arithmetic apart from numbers. Generalities are 
 the refuge at once of -deficient intellectual activity and de- 
 ficient feeling. 
 
 If we except the passages in " Philander," " Narcissa," and 
 " Lucia," there is hardly a trace of human sympathy, of self- 
 forgetfulness in the joy or sorrow of a fellow-being, through- 
 out this long poem, which professes to treat the various 
 phases of man's destiny. And even in the "Narcissa" Night,
 
 48 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Young repels us by the low moral tone of his exaggerated 
 lament. This married step-daughter died at Lyons, and, 
 being a Protestant, was denied burial, so that her friends had 
 to bury her in secret, one of the many miserable results 
 of superstition, but not a fact to throw an educated, still less 
 a Christian man, into a fury of hatred and vengeance, in con- 
 templating it after the lapse of five years. Young, however, 
 takes great pains to simulate a bad feeling : 
 
 "Of grief 
 
 And indignation rival bursts I poured, 
 Half execration mingled with my prayer; 
 Kindled at man, while I his God adored ; 
 Sore grudged the savage land her sacred dust ; 
 Stamped the cursed soil; and with humanity 
 (Denied Narcissa) wished them aH a grave." 
 
 The odiously bad taste of this last clause makes us hope 
 that it is simply a platitude, and not intended as witticism, 
 until he removes the possibility of this favorable doubt by 
 immediately asking, " Flows my resentment into guilt ? " 
 
 When, by an afterthought, he attempts something like 
 sympathy, he only betrays more clearly his want of it. Thus, 
 in the first Night, when he turns from his private griefs to 
 depict earth as a hideous abode of misery for all mankind, 
 and asks, 
 
 " What then am I, who sorrow for myself ? " 
 
 he falls at once into calculating the benefit of sorrowing for 
 others : 
 
 " More generous sorrow, while it sinks, exalts ; 
 And conscious virtue mitigates the pang. 
 Nor virtue, more than prudence, bids me give 
 Swollen thought a second channel." 
 
 This remarkable negation of sympathy's in perfect con- 
 sistency with Young's theory of ethics : 
 
 " Virtue is a crime, 
 A crime to reason, if it costs us pain 
 Unpaid."
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 49 
 If there is no immortality for man, 
 
 " Sense ! take the rein ; blind Passion, drive as on; 
 And Ignorance ! befriend us on our way. 
 Yes, give the Pulse full empire ; live the Brute, 
 Since as the brute we die. The sum of man, 
 Of godlike man, to revel and to rot. 
 
 
 If this life's gain invites him to the deed, 
 Why not his country sold, his father slain f 
 
 Ambition, avarice, by the wise disdained, 
 Is perfect wisdom, while mankind are foola. 
 And think a turf or tombstone covers all. 
 
 Die for thy country, thou romantic fool ! 
 Seize, seize the plank thyself, and let her sink. 
 
 As in the dying parent dies the child, 
 Virtue with Immortality expires. 
 Who tells me he denies his soul immortal, 
 Whole' er his boast, has told me he 's a knave. 
 His duty 't is to love himself alone ; > 
 Nor care though mankind perish, if he smiles" 
 
 We can imagine the man who " denies his soul immortal," 
 replying : " It is quite possible that you would be a knave, 
 and love yourself alone, if it were not for your belief in im- 
 mortality; but you are not to force upon me what would 
 result from your own utter want of moral emotion. I am 
 just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, 
 but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty 
 towards myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who 
 would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dishonest 
 towards them. Why should I give my neighbor short weight 
 in this world, because there is not another world in which I 
 should have nothing to weigh out to him? I am honest, 
 because I don't like to inflict evil on others in this life, not 
 because I 'm afraid of evil to myself in another. The fact is, 
 I do not love myself alone, whatever logical necessity there 
 may be for that in your mind. I have a tender love for my 
 
 4
 
 50 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 wife and children and friends, and through that love I sym- 
 pathize with like affections in other men. It is a pang to me to 
 witness the sufferings of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffer- 
 ing the more acutely because he is mortal) because his life 
 is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with hap- 
 piness and not misery. Through my union and fellowship 
 with the men and women I have seen, I feel a like, though a 
 fainter, sympathy with those I have not seen ; and I am able 
 so to live in imagination with the generations to come, that 
 their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labor 
 for ends which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them. 
 It is possible that you may prefer to live the brute, to sell 
 your country, or to slay your father, if you were not afraid of 
 some disagreeable consequences from the criminal laws of an- 
 other world ; but even if I could conceive no motive but my own 
 worldly interest, or the gratification of my animal desire, I 
 have not observed that beastliness, treachery, and parricide 
 are the direct way to happiness and comfort on earth. And I 
 should say that, if you feel no motive to common morality, 
 but your fear of a criminal bar in heaven, you are decidedly 
 a man for the police on earth to keep their eye upon, since it 
 is matter of world-old experience that fear of distant conse- 
 quences is a very insufficient barrier against the rush of im- 
 mediate desire. Fear of consequences is only one form of 
 egoism, which will hardly stand against half-a-dozen other 
 forms of egoism bearing down upon it. And in opposition to 
 your theory that a belief in immortality is the only source of 
 virtue, I maintain that, so far as moral action is dependent 
 on that belief, so far the emotion which prompts it is not 
 truly moral, is still in the stage of egoism, and has not yet 
 attained the higher development of sympathy. In proportion 
 as a man would care less for the rights and welfare of his 
 fellow if he did not believe in a future life, in that proportion 
 is he wanting in the genuine feelings of justice and benevo- 
 lence ; as the musician who would care less to play a sonata 
 of Beethoven finely in solitude than in public, where he was 
 to be paid for it, is wanting in genuine enthusiasm for music."
 
 WOKLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 51 
 
 Thus far might answer the man who " denies himself im- 
 mortal ; " and allowing for that deficient recognition of the 
 finer and more indirect influences exercised by the idea of 
 immortality which might be expected from one who took up 
 a dogmatic position on such a subject we think he would 
 have given a sufficient reply to Young, and other theological 
 advocates who, like him, pique themselves on the loftiness of 
 their doctrine when they maintain that "Virtue with Im- 
 mortality expires." We may admit, indeed, that if the better 
 part of virtue consists, as Young appears to think, in con- 
 tempt for mortal joys, in " meditation of our own decease," 
 and in " applause " of God in the style of a congratulatory 
 address to her Majesty, all which has small relation to the 
 well-being of mankind on this earth, the motive to it must 
 be gathered from something that lies quite outside the sphere 
 of human sympathy. But for certain other elements of 
 virtue, which are of more obvious importance to untheological 
 minds, a delicate sense of our neighbor's rights, an active 
 participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a 
 magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for our- 
 selves when it is the condition of good to others, in a word, 
 the extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature, 
 we think it of some importance to contend, that they have no 
 more direct relation to the belief in a future state than the 
 interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of 
 worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable that in some minds the 
 deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality that 
 we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this 
 earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to our 
 many suffering fellow-men lies nearer the fountains of 
 moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. 
 And surely it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of 
 mortality, as well as of immortality, be favorable to virtue. 
 Do writers of sermons and religious novels prefer that men 
 should be vicious in order that there may be a more evident 
 political and social necessity for printed sermons and clerical 
 fictions? Because learned gentlemen are theological, are we
 
 52 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 to have no more simple honesty and good-will? We can 
 imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a 
 dread of common springs ; but, for our own part, we think 
 there cannot be too great a security against a lack of fresh 
 water or of pure morality. To us it is a matter of unmixed 
 rejoicing that this latter necessary of healthful life is in- 
 dependent of theological ink, and that its evolution is ensured 
 in the interaction of human souls, as certainly as the evolution 
 of science or of art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, 
 melting into them with undefinable limits. 
 
 To return to Young. We can often detect a man's deficien- 
 cies in what he admires, more clearly than in what he con- 
 temns, in the sentiments he presents as laudable, rather 
 than in those he decries. And in Young's notion of what is 
 lofty he casts a shadow by which we can measure him with- 
 out further trouble. For example, in arguing for human 
 immortality, he says: 
 
 " First, what is true ambition f The pursuit 
 Of glory nothing less than man can share. 
 
 The Visible and Present are for brutes, 
 A slender portion, and a narrow bound ! 
 These Reason, with an energy divine, 
 O'erleaps, and claims the Future and Unseen, 
 The vast Unseen, the Future fathomless ! 
 When the great soul buoys up to this high point, 
 Leaving gross Nature's sediments below, 
 Then, and then only, Adam's offspring quits 
 The sage and hero of the fields and woods, 
 Asserts his rank, and rises into man." 
 
 So, then, if it were certified that, as some benevolent minds 
 have tried to infer, our dumb fellow-creatures would share a 
 future existence, in which it is to be hoped we should neither 
 beat, starve, nor maim them, our ambition for a future life 
 would cease to be " lofty ! " This is a notion of loftiness 
 which may pair off with Dr. Whewell's celebrated observation, 
 that Bentham's moral theory is low, because it includes jus- 
 tice and mercy to brutes.
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER WORLDLINESS. 53 
 
 But, for a reflection of Young's moral personality on a 
 colossal scale, we must turn to those passages where his 
 rhetoric is at its utmost stretch of inflation where he ad- 
 dresses the Deity, discourses of the divine operations, or de- 
 scribes the Last Judgment. As a compound of vulgar pomp, 
 crawling adulation, and hard selfishness, presented under the 
 guise of piety, there are few things in literature to surpass 
 the Ninth Night, entitled "Consolation," especially in the 
 pages where he describes the Last Judgment, a subject 
 to which, with naive self-betrayal, he applies phraseology 
 favored by the exuberant penny-a-liner. Thus, when God 
 descends, and the groans of hell are opposed by " shouts of 
 joy," much as cheers and groans contend at a public meet- 
 ing where the resolutions are not passed unanimously, the 
 poet completes his climax in this way: 
 
 " Hence, in one peal of loud, eternal praise, 
 The charmed spectators thunder their applause." 
 
 In the same taste, he sings : 
 
 " Eternity, the various sentence past, 
 Assigns the severed throng distinct abodes, 
 Sulphureous or ambrosial" 
 
 Exquisite delicacy of indication! He is too nice to be 
 specific as to the interior of the " sulphureous " abode ; but 
 when once half the human race are shut up there, hear how 
 he enjoys turning the key on them ! 
 
 " What, ensues ? 
 
 The deed predominant, the deed of deeds ! 
 Which makes a hell of hell, a heaven of heaven I 
 The goddess, with determined aspect, turns 
 Her adamantine key's enormous size 
 Through destiny's inextricable wards, 
 Deep driving every bolt on both their fates. 
 Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven, 
 Down, down she hurls it through the dark profound, 
 Ten thousand, thousand fathom ; there to rust 
 And ne'er unlock her resolution more. 
 The deep resounds ; and hell, through all her gloom* 
 Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar."
 
 54 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 This is one of the blessings for which Dr. Young thanks 
 God "most:" 
 
 " For all I bless thee, most, for the severe ; 
 Her death my own at hand thejiery gulf, 
 That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent t 
 It thunders ; but it thunders to preserve ; 
 
 its wholesome dread 
 
 Averts the dreaded paiii ; its hideous groans 
 
 Join heaven's sweet Hallelujahs in thy praise, 
 
 Great Source of good alone ! How kind in all ! 
 
 In vengeance kind ! Pain, Death, Gehenna, save "... 
 
 i. e., save me, Dr. Young j who, in return for that favor, promise 
 to give my divine patron the monopoly of that exuberance in 
 laudatory epithet, of which specimens may be seen at any 
 moment in a large number of dedications and odes to kings, 
 queens, prime-ministers, and other persons of distinction. 
 That, in Young's conception, is what God delights in. His 
 crowning aim in the drama of the ages is to vindicate his 
 own renown. The God of the "Night Thoughts" is simply 
 Young himself, "writ large," a didactic poet, who "lec- 
 tures " mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and 
 immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven, and ex- 
 pects the tribute of inexhaustible "applause." Young has no 
 conception of religion as anything else than egoism turned 
 heavenward ; and he does not merely imply this, he insists on 
 it. Religion, he tells us, in argumentative passages too long 
 to quote, is "ambition, pleasure, and the love of gain," di- 
 rected towards the joys of the future life instead of the 
 present. And his ethics correspond to his religion. He 
 vacillates, indeed, in his ethical theory, and shifts his position 
 in order to suit his immediate purpose in argument ; but he 
 never changes his level so as to see beyond the horizon of 
 mere selfishness. Sometimes he insists, as we have seen, 
 that the belief in a future life is the only basis of morality ; 
 but elsewhere he tells us 
 
 " In Mil -applause is virtue's golden pru*."
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLDJESS. 55 
 
 Virtue, with Young, must always squint, must never look 
 straight towards the immediate object of its emotion and 
 effort. Thus, if a man risks perishing in the snow himself, 
 rather than forsake a weaker comrade, he must either do this 
 because his hopes and fears are directed to another world, or 
 because he desires to applaud himself afterwards ! Young, 
 if we may believe him, would despise the action as folly 
 unless it had these motives. Let us hope he was not so bad 
 as he pretended to be ! The tides of the divine life in man 
 move under the thickest ice of theory. 
 
 Another indication of Young's deficiency in moral i. &., in 
 sympathetic emotion, is his unintermitting habit of peda- 
 gogic moralizing. On its theoretic and perceptive side, moral- 
 ity touches science ; on its emotional side, art. Now, the 
 products of art are great in proportion as they result from that 
 immediate prompting of innate power which we call Genius, 
 and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule ; and 
 the presence of genius or innate prompting is directly op- 
 posed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of 
 faculty is imperious, and excludes the reflection why it should 
 act. In the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, 
 *. ., has affinity with art, it will exhibit itself in direct 
 sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition 
 of a rule. Love does not say, " I ought to love," it loves. 
 Pity does not say, "It is right to be pitiful," it pities. 
 Justice does not say, "I am bound to be just," it feels 
 justly. It is only where moral emotion is comparatively 
 weak that the contemplation of a rule or theory habitually 
 mingles with its action; and in accordance with this, we 
 think experience, both in literature and life, has shown 
 that the minds which are pre-eminently didactic which in- 
 sist on a lesson, and despise everything that will not convey 
 a moral are deficient in sympathetic emotion. A certain 
 poet is recorded to have said, that he " wished everything of 
 his burnt that did not impress some moral; even in love- 
 verses, it might be flung in by the way." What poet was it 
 who took this medicinal view of poetry ? Dr. Watts, or
 
 56 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 James Montgomery, or some other singer of spotless life and 
 ardent piety? Not at all. It was Waller. A significant 
 fact in relation to our position, that the predominant didactic 
 tendency proceeds rather from the poet's perception that it 
 is good for other men to be moral, than from any overflow of 
 moral feeling in himself ! A man who is perpetually think- 
 ing in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admoni- 
 tion, can have little energy left for simple emotion. And 
 this is the case with Young. In his highest flights of con- 
 templation, and his most wailing soliloquies, he interrupts 
 himself to fling an admonitory parenthesis at Lorenzo, or to 
 hint that " folly's creed " is the reverse of his own. Before 
 his thoughts can flow, he must fix his eye on an imaginary 
 miscreant, who gives unlimited scope for lecturing, and re- 
 criminates just enough to keep the spring of admonition and 
 argument going to the extent of nine Books. It is curious to 
 see how this pedagogic habit of mind runs through Young's 
 contemplation of Nature. As the tendency to see our own 
 sadness reflected in the external world has been called by Mr. 
 Buskin the " pathetic fallacy," so we may call Young's dis- 
 position, to see a rebuke or a warning in every natural object, 
 the " pedagogic fallacy." To his mind, the heavens are " for 
 ever scolding as they shine ; " and the great function of the 
 stars is to be a " lecture to mankind." The conception of the 
 Deity as a didactic author is not merely an implicit point of 
 view with him; he works it out in elaborate imagery, and 
 at length makes it the occasion of his most extraordinary 
 achievement in the " art of sinking," by exclaiming, apropos, 
 we need hardly say, of the nocturnal heavens : 
 
 " Divine Instructor ! Thy first volume this 
 For man's perusal ! all in CAPITALS ! " 
 
 It is this pedagogic tendency, this sermonizing attitude of 
 Young's mind, which produces the wearisome monotony of 
 his pauses. After the first two or three Nights, he is rarely 
 singing, rarely pouring forth any continuous melody inspired 
 by the spontaneous flow of thought or feeling. He is rather
 
 WORLDLLNESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESa. 57 
 
 occupied with argumentative insistence, with hammering in 
 the proofs of his propositions by disconnected verses, which 
 he puts down at intervals. The perpetual recurrence of the 
 pause at the end of the line throughout long passages, makes 
 them as fatiguing to the ear as a monotonous chant, which 
 consists of the endless repetition of one short musical phrase. 
 For example : 
 
 " Past hours, 
 
 If not by guilt, yet wound us by their flight, 
 If folly bound our prospect by the grave, 
 All feeling of futurity be numbed, 
 All godlike passion for eternals quenched, 
 All relish of realities expired ; 
 Renounced all correspondence with the skies ; 
 Our freedom chained ; quite wingless our desire ; 
 In sense dark-prisoned all that ought to soar ; 
 Prone to the centre ; crawling in the dust ; 
 Dismounted every great and glorious aim ; 
 Enthralled every faculty divine, 
 Heart-buried in the rubbish of the world." 
 
 How different from the easy, graceful melody of Cowper's 
 blank verse ! Indeed, it is hardly possible to criticise Young, 
 without being reminded at every step of the contrast pre- 
 sented to him by Cowper. And this contrast urges itself 
 upon us the more from the fact that there is, to a certain 
 extent, a parallelism between the " Night Thoughts " and the 
 " Task." In both poems the author achieves his greatest, in 
 virtue of the new freedom conferred by blank verse ; both 
 poems are professedly didactic, and mingle much satire with 
 their graver meditations ; both poems are the productions of 
 men whose estimate of this life was formed by the light of a 
 belief in immortality, and who were intensely attached to 
 Christianity. On some grounds we might have anticipated a 
 more morbid view of things from Cowper than from Young. 
 Cowper's religion was dogmatically the more gloomy, for he 
 was a Calvinist ; while Young was a " low " Arminian, be- 
 lieving that Christ died for all, and that the only obstacle to 
 any man's salvation lay in his will, which he could change if
 
 companionship in enjoyment; no vague rant 
 misery and human virtue, but that close and vivl 
 tion of particular sorrows and privations, of partj 
 and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emc 
 Cowper's exquisite mind falls with the inild warn) 
 ing sunlight on the commonest objects, at one 
 every detail, and investing every detail with beav 
 ject is too small to prompt his song, not the 
 the bars, or the spoutless teapot holding a bit of I 
 that serves to cheer the dingy town-lodging with 
 Nature lives ; " and yet his song is never trivij 
 alive to small objects, not because his mind is naj 
 cause his glance is clear and his heart is large. \ 
 trying to edify us by supercilious allusions td 
 and the stalls, he interests us in that tragedy 
 roost, when the thief has wrenched the door, 
 
 " Where Chanticleer amidst his harem sleeps 
 In unsuspecting pomp ; " 
 
 in the patient cattle, that on the winter's moi
 
 VORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 59 
 
 " Mourn in corners where the fence 
 Screens them, and seem half petrified to sleep 
 In unrecumbent sadness ; " 
 
 in the little squirrel, that, surprised by him in his woodland 
 walk, 
 
 " At once, swift as a bird, 
 
 Ascends the neighboring beech ; there whisks his brash. 
 And perks his ears, and stamps, and cries aloud, 
 With all the prettiness of feigned alarm 
 And anger insignificantly fierce." 
 
 And then he passes into reflection, not with curt apothegm 
 and snappish reproof, but with that melodious flow of utter- 
 ance which belongs to thought when it is carried along in a 
 stream of feeling : 
 
 " The heart is hard in nature, and unfit 
 For human fellowship, as being void 
 Of sympathy, and therefore dead alike 
 To love and friendship both, that is not pleased 
 With sight of animals enjoying life, 
 Nor feels their happiness augment his own." 
 
 His large and tender heart embraces the most every-day forms 
 of human life the carter driving his team through the 
 wintry storm ; the cottager's wife who, painfully nursing the 
 embers on her hearth, while her infants " sit cowering o'er 
 the sparks," 
 
 " Retires, content to quake, so they be warmed ; " 
 or the villager, with her little ones, going out to pick 
 " A cheap but wholesome salad from the brook; " 
 
 and he compels our colder natures to follow his in its mani- 
 fold sympathies, not by exhortations, uot by telling us to 
 meditate at midnight, to indulge the thought of death, or 
 to ask ourselves how we shall " weather an eternal night," 
 but by presenting to us the object of his compassion truthfully 
 and lovingly. And when he handles greater themes, when he 
 takes a wider survey, and considers the men or the deeds
 
 60 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 which have a direct influence on the welfare of communities 
 and nations, there is the same unselfish warmth of feeling, 
 the same scrupulous truthfulness. He is never vague in his 
 remonstrance or his satire ; but puts his finger on some par- 
 ticular vice or folly, which excites his indignation or "dis- 
 solves his heart in pity," because of some specific injury it 
 does to his fellow-man or to a sacred cause. And when he is 
 asked why he interests himself about the sorrows and wrongs 
 of others, hear what is the reason he gives. Not, like Young, 
 that the movements of the planets show a mutual dependence, 
 and that, 
 
 " Thus man his sovereign duty learns in this 
 Material picture of benevolence ; " 
 
 or that, 
 
 " More generous sorrow while it sinks, exalts, 
 And conscious virtue mitigates the pang." 
 
 What is Cowper's answer, when he imagines some " sage 
 erudite, profound," asking him "What's the world to 
 you?" 
 
 " Much. I was born of woman, and drew milk 
 As sweet as charity from human breasts. 
 I think, articulate, I laugh and weep, 
 And exercise all functions of a man. 
 How then should I and any man that lives 
 Be strangers to each other ? " 
 
 Young is astonished that men can make war on each other 
 that any one can " seize his brother's throat," while 
 
 " The Planets cry, ' Forbear.' " 
 Cowper weeps because 
 
 " There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart : 
 It does not feel for man" 
 
 Young applauds God as a monarch with an empire, and a 
 court quite superior to the English, or as an author who pro- 
 duces " volumes for man's perusal." Cowper sees his Father's 
 love in all the gentle pleasures of the home fireside, in the 
 eharma even of the wintry landscape, and thinks,
 
 WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS. 61 
 
 * Happy who walks with him ! whom what he finds 
 Of flavor or of scent in fruit or flower, 
 Or what he views of beautiful or grand 
 In nature, from the broad, majestic oak 
 To the green blade that twinkles in the sun, 
 Prompts mtk remembrance of a present God." 
 
 To conclude, for we must arrest ourselves in a contrast 
 that would lead us beyond our bounds, Young flies for 
 his utmost consolation to the Day of Judgment, when 
 
 " Final Ruin fiercely drives 
 Her ploughshare o'er creation ; " 
 
 when earth, stars, and sun are swept aside, 
 
 " And now, all dross removed, heaven's own pure day, 
 Full on the confines of our ether, flames : 
 While (dreadful contrast!) far (how far!) beneath, 
 Hell, bursting, belches forth her blazing seas, 
 And storms sulphureous ; her voracious jaws 
 Expanding wide, and roaring for her prey," 
 
 Dr. Young, and similar " ornaments of religion and virtue," 
 passing of course with grateful " applause " into the upper 
 region. Cowper finds his highest inspiration in the Millen- 
 nium in the restoration of this, our beloved home of earth, 
 to perfect holiness and bliss, when the Supreme 
 
 " Shall visit earth in mercy ; shall descend 
 Propitious in his chariot paved with love ; 
 And what his storms have blasted and defaced 
 For man's revolt, shall with a smile repair." 
 
 And into what delicious melody his song flows at the 
 thought of that blessedness to be enjoyed by future genera- 
 tions on earth ! 
 
 " The dwellers in the vales and on the rocks 
 Shout to each other, and the mountain-tops 
 From distant mountains catch the flying joy; 
 Till, nation after nation taught the strain, 
 Earth rolls the rapturous Hosanna round ! " 
 
 The sum of our comparison is this : In Young we have the 
 type of that deficient human sympathy, that impiety towards
 
 62 ESSAYS OP GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 the present and the visible, which flies for its motives, its 
 sanctities, aiid its religion, to the remote, the vague, and the 
 unknown ; in Cowper we have the type of that genuine love 
 which cherishes things in proportion to their nearness, and 
 feels its reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its 
 knowledge.
 
 PORTRAIT OF HEINE.
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 
 
 " "VTOTHING," says Goethe, " is more significant of men's 
 -L-N character than what they find laughable." The truth 
 of this observation would perhaps have been more apparent 
 if he had said culture instead of character. The last thing 
 in which the cultivated man can have community with the 
 vulgar is their jocularity ; and we can hardly exhibit more 
 strikingly the wide gulf which separates him from them, than 
 by comparing the object which shakes the diaphragm of a 
 coal-heaver, with the highly complex pleasure derived from a 
 real witticism. That any high order of wit is exceedingly 
 complex, and demands a ripe and strong mental development, 
 has one evidence in the fact that we do not find it in boys at 
 all in proportion to their manifestation of other powers. 
 Clever boys generally aspire to the heroic and poetic rather 
 than the comic, and the crudest of all their efforts are their 
 jokes. Many a witty man will remember how in his school- 
 days a practical joke, more or less Rabelaisian, was for him 
 the ne plus ultra of the ludicrous. It seems to have been the 
 same with the boyhood of the human race. The history and 
 literature of the ancient Hebrews give the idea of a people 
 who went about their business and their pleasure as gravely 
 as a society of beavers ; the smile and the laugh are often 
 mentioned metaphorically, but the smile is one of compla- 
 cency, the laugh is one of scorn. Nor can we imagine 
 that the facetious element was very strong in the Egyptians ; 
 no laughter lurks in the wondering eyes and the broad calm 
 lips of their statues. Still less can the Assyrians have had 
 any genius for the comic; the round eyes and simpering
 
 66 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 disposition; but humor approaches us more deliberately and 
 leaves us masters of ourselves. Hence it is, that while coarse 
 and cruel humor has almost disappeared from contemporary 
 literature, coarse and cruel wit abounds ; even refined men 
 cannot help laughing at a coarse bon mot or a lacerating per- 
 sonality, if the "shock" of the witticism is a powerful one; 
 while mere fun will have no power over them if it jar on 
 their moral taste. Hence, too, it is, that while wit is peren- 
 nial, humor is liable to become superannuated. 
 
 As is usual with definitions and classifications, however, 
 this distinction between wit and humor does not exactly 
 represent the actual fact. Like all other species, wit and 
 humor overlap and blend with each other. There are bon 
 mots, like many of Charles Lamb's, which are a sort of face- 
 tious hybrids ; we hardly know whether to call them witty or 
 humorous ; there are rather lengthy descriptions or narra- 
 tives, which, like Voltaire's Micromegas," would be more 
 humorous if they were not so sparkling and antithetic, so 
 pregnant with suggestion and satire, that we are obliged to 
 call them witty. We rarely find wit untempered by humor, 
 or humor without a spice of wit; and sometimes we find 
 them both united in the highest degree in the same mind, 
 as in Shakspeare and Moliere. A happy conjunction this, 
 for wit is apt to be cold and thin-lipped and Mephistophe- 
 lean in men who have no relish for humor, whose lungs do 
 never crow like Chanticleer at fun and drollery ; and broad- 
 faced, rollicking humor needs the refining influence of wit. 
 Indeed, it may be said that there is no really fine writing in 
 which wit has not an implicit, if not an explicit, action. The 
 wit may never rise to the surface, it may never flame out 
 into a witticism; but it helps to give brightness and trans- 
 parency, it warns off from flights and exaggerations which 
 verge on the ridiculous; in every genre of writing it pre- 
 serves a man from sinking into the genre ennuyeux. And it is 
 eminently needed for this office in humorous writing ; for as 
 humor has no limits imposed on it by its material, no law but 
 its own exuberance, it is apt to become preposterous and
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 67 
 
 wearisome unless checked by wit, which is the enemy of all 
 monotony, of all lengthiness, of all exaggeration. 
 
 Perhaps the nearest approach Nature has given us to a 
 complete analysis, in which wit is as thoroughly exhausted 
 of humor as possible, and humor as bare as possible of wit, 
 is in the typical Frenchman and the typical German. Vol- 
 taire, the intensest example of pure wit, fails in most of his 
 fictions from his lack of humor. " Micromegas " is a perfect 
 tale, because, as it deals chiefly with philosophic ideas 
 and does not touch the marrow of human feeling and life, 
 the writer's wit and wisdom were all-sufficient for his pur- 
 pose. Not so with "Candide." Here Voltaire had to give 
 pictures of life as well as to convey philosophic truth and 
 satire, and here we feel the want of humor. The sense of 
 the ludicrous is continually defeated by disgust, and the 
 scenes, instead of presenting us with an amusing or agreeable 
 picture, are only the frame for a witticism. On the other 
 hand, German humor generally shows no sense of measure, 
 no instinctive tact ; it is either floundering and clumsy as the 
 antics of a leviathan, or laborious and interminable as a Lap- 
 land day, in which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet 
 will ever come. For this reason, Jean Paul, the greatest of 
 German humorists, is unendurable to many readers, and fre- 
 quently tiresome to all. Here, as elsewhere, the German 
 shows the absence of that delicate perception, that sensibility 
 to gradation, which is the essence of tact and taste, and the 
 necessary concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for 
 the region of metaphysics. For Identitat in the abstract, no 
 one can have an acuter vision, but in the concrete he is satis- 
 fied with a very loose approximation. He has the finest nose 
 for Empirismus in philosophical doctrine, but the presence of 
 more or less tobacco-smoke in the air he breathes is imper- 
 ceptible to him. To the typical German Vetter Michel 
 it is indifferent whether his door-lock will catch ; whether his 
 tea-cup be more or less than an inch thick ; whether or not 
 his book have every other leaf unstitched; whether his 
 neighbor's conversation be more or less of a shout ; whether
 
 68 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 he pronounce b or p, t or d; whether or not his adored one's 
 teeth be few and far between. He has the same sort of in- 
 sensibility to gradations in time. A German comedy is like 
 a German sentence ; you see no reason in its structure why 
 it should ever come to an end, and you accept the conclusion 
 as an arrangement of Providence rather than of the author. 
 We have heard Germans use the word Langeweile, the equiv- 
 alent for ennui, and we have secretly wondered what it can 
 be that produces ennui in a German. Not the longest of long 
 tragedies, for we have known him to pronounce that hochst 
 fesselnd (so enchaining ! ) ; not the heaviest of heavy books, 
 for he delights in that as griindlich ( deep, sir, deep ! ) ; not 
 the slowest of journeys in a Post-wag en, for the slower the 
 horses, the more cigars he can smoke before he reaches his 
 journey's end. German ennui must be something as super- 
 lative as Barclay's treble X, which, we suppose, implies an 
 extremely unknown quantity of stupefaction. 
 
 It is easy to see that this national deficiency in nicety of 
 perception must have its effect on the national appreciation 
 and exhibition of humor. You find in Germany ardent 
 admirers of Shakspeare, who tell you that what they think 
 most admirable in him is his Wortspiel, his verbal quibbles ; 
 and one of these, a man of no slight culture and refinement, 
 once cited to a friend of ours Proteus's joke in " The Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona," "Nod, I? why that's Noddy," as 
 a transcendent specimen of Shakspearian wit. German face- 
 tiousness is seldom comic to foreigners, and an Englishman 
 with a swelled cheek might take up " Kladderadatsch," the 
 German " Punch," without any danger of agitating his facial 
 muscles. Indeed, it is a remarkable fact that, among the 
 five great races concerned in modern civilization, the German 
 race is the only one which, up to the present century, had 
 contributed nothing classic to the common stock of European 
 wit and humor ; for " Eeineke Fuchs " cannot be regarded as 
 a peculiarly Teutonic product. Italy was the birthplace of 
 Pantomime and the immortal Pulcinello ; Spain had produced 
 Cervantes ; France had produced Eabelais and Moliere, and
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 69 
 
 classic wits innumerable ; England had yielded Shakspeare 
 and a host of humorists. But Germany had borne no great 
 comic dramatist, no great satirist, and she has not yet re- 
 paired the omission ; she had not even produced any humorist 
 of a high order. Among her great writers, Lessing is the 
 one who is the most specifically witty. We feel the implicit 
 influence of wit, the "flavor of mind," throughout his 
 writings ; and it is often concentrated into pungent satire, as 
 every reader of the " Hamburgische Dramaturgic" remem- 
 bers. Still, Lessing's name has not become European through 
 his wit, and his charming comedy, " Minna von Barnhelm," 
 has won no place on a foreign stage. Of course, we do not 
 pretend to an exhaustive acquaintance with German litera- 
 ture ; we not only admit, we are sure, that it includes much 
 comic writing of which we know nothing. We simply state 
 the fact, that no German production of that kind, before the 
 present century, ranked as European ; a fact which does not, 
 indeed, determine the amount of the national facetiousness, 
 but which is quite decisive as to its quality. Whatever may 
 be the stock of fun which Germany yields for home-consump- 
 tion, she has provided little for the palate of other lands. 
 All honor to her for the still greater things she has done for 
 us ! She has fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, 
 has produced the grandest inventions, has made magnificent 
 contributions to science, has given us some of the divinest 
 poetry, and quite the divinest music, in the world. No one 
 reveres and treasures the products of the German mind more 
 than we do. To say that that mind is not fertile in wit, is 
 only like saying that excellent wheat-land is not rich pasture ; 
 to say that we do not enjoy German facetiousness, is no more 
 than to say that, though the horse is the finest of quadrupeds, 
 we do not like him to lay his hoof playfully on our shoulder. 
 Still, as we have noticed that the pointless puns and stupid 
 jocularity of the boy may ultimately be developed into the 
 epigrammatic brilliancy and polished playfulness of the man, 
 as we believe that racy wit and chastened delicate humor 
 are inevitably the results of invigorated and refined mental
 
 70 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 activity, we can also believe that Germany will, one day, 
 yield a crop of wits and humorists. 
 
 Perhaps there is already an earnest of that future crop in 
 the existence of Heinrich Heine, a German born with the 
 present century, who, to Teutonic imagination, sensibility, 
 and humor, adds an amount of esprit that would make him 
 brilliant among the most brilliant of Frenchmen. True, this 
 unique German wit is half a Hebrew ; but he and his ances- 
 tors spent their youth in German air, and were reared on 
 Wurst and Sauerkraut, so that he is as much a German as a 
 pheasant is an English bird, or a potato an Irish vegetable. 
 But whatever else he may be, Heine is one of the most remark- 
 able men of this age : no echo, but a real voice, and therefore, 
 like all genuine things in this world, worth studying ; a sur- 
 passing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in 
 delicious song ; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the 
 magic wand of his fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold 
 of art who sheds his sunny smile on human tears, and 
 makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy background 
 of life ; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most scorch- 
 ing lightnings of satire ; an artist in prose literature, who has 
 shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of 
 German prose ; and in spite of all charges against him, 
 true as well as false a lover of freedom, who has spoken 
 wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow-men. He is, 
 moreover, a suffering man, who, with all the highly wrought 
 sensibility of genius, has to endure terrible physical ills ; and 
 as such he calls forth more than an intellectual interest. It 
 is true, alas ! that there is a heavy weight in the other scale 
 that Heine's magnificent powers have often served only to 
 give electric force to the expression of debased feeling, BO 
 that his works are no Phidian statue of gold and ivory and 
 gems, but have not a little brass and iron and miry clay 
 mingled with the precious metal. The audacity of his occa- 
 sional coarseness and personality is unparalleled in contem 
 porary literature, and has hardly been exceeded by the license 
 former days. Hence, before his volumes are put within
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 71 
 
 the reach of immature minds, there is need of a friendly pen- 
 knife to exercise a strict censorship. Yet, when all coarse- 
 ness, all scurrility, all Mephistophelean contempt for the 
 reverent feelings of other men, is removed, there will be a 
 plenteous remainder of exquisite poetry, of wit, humor, and 
 just thought. It is apparently too often a congenial task to 
 write severe words about the transgressions committed by 
 men of genius, especially when the censor has the advantage 
 of being himself a man of no genius, so that those transgres- 
 sions seem to him quite gratuitous ; he, forsooth, never lac- 
 erated any one by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a 
 coarse allusion, and his indignation is not mitigated by any 
 knowledge of the temptation that lies in transcendent power. 
 We are also apt to measure what a gifted man has done by 
 our arbitrary conception of what he might have done, rather 
 than by a comparison of his actual doings with our own or 
 those of other ordinary men. We make ourselves over- 
 zealous agents of heaven, and demand that our brother should 
 bring usurious interest for his five Talents, forgetting that it 
 is less easy to manage five Talents than two. Whatever ben- 
 efit there may be in denouncing the evil, it is after all more 
 edifying, and certainly more cheering, to appreciate the good. 
 Hence, in endeavoring to give our readers some account of 
 Heine and his works, we shall not dwell lengthily on his fail- 
 ings; we shall not hold the candle up to dusty, vermin- 
 haunted corners, but let the light fall as much as possible on 
 the nobler and more attractive details. Our sketch of Heine's 
 life, which has been drawn from various sources, will be free 
 from everything like intrusive gossip, and will derive its 
 coloring chiefly from the autobiographical hints and descrip- 
 tions scattered through his own writings. Those of our read- 
 ers who happen to know nothing of Heine, will in this way 
 be making their acquaintance with the writer while they are 
 learning the outline of his career. 
 
 We have said that Heine was born with the present 
 century ; but this statement is not precise, for we learn that, 
 according to his certificate of baptism, he was born December
 
 72 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 12, 1799. However, as he himself says, the important 
 point is, that he was born, and born on the banks of the 
 Rhine at Dusseldorf, where his father was a merchant. In 
 his " Reisebilder " he gives us some recollections, in his wild 
 poetic way, of the dear old town where he spent his child- 
 hood, and of his school boy troubles there. We shall quote 
 from these in butterfly fashion, sipping a little nectar here 
 and there, without regard to any strict order : 
 
 " I first saw the light on the banks of that lovely stream, where 
 folly grows on the green hills, and in autumn is plucked, pressed, 
 poured into casks, and sent into foreign lands. Believe me, I yester- 
 day heard some one utter folly which, in anno 1811, lay in a bunch of 
 grapes I then saw growing on the Johannisberg. . . . Mon Dieu ! if 
 I had only such faith in me that I could remove mountains, the Johan- 
 nisberg would be the very mountain I should send for wherever I 
 might be ; but as my faith is not so strong, imagination must help me, 
 and it transports me at once to the lovely Rhine. ... I am again 
 a child, and playing with other children on the Schlossplatz, at 
 Diisseldorf on the Rhine. Yes, madam, there was I born; and I note 
 this expressly, in case, after my death, seven cities Schilda, Krah- 
 winkel, Polkwitz, Bockmn, Dulken, Gottingen, and Schoppenstadt 
 should contend for the honor of being my birthplace. Diisseldorf 
 is a town on the Rhine ; sixteen thousand men live there, and many 
 hundred thousand men besides lie buried there. . . . Among them, 
 many of whom my mother says that it would be better if they were 
 still living, for example, my grandfather and my uncle, the old Herr 
 von Geldern, and the young Herr von Geldern, both such celebrated doc- 
 tors, who saved so many men from death, and yet must die themselves. 
 And the pious Ursula, who carried me in her arms when I was a child, 
 also lies buried there, and a rosebush grows on her grave ; she loved 
 the scent of roses so well in life, and her heart was pure rose-incense 
 and goodness. The knowing old Canon, too, lies buried there. 
 Heavens, what an object he looked when I last saw him ! He was 
 made tip of nothing but mind and plasters, and nevertheless studied 
 day and night, as if he were alarmed lest the worms should find an 
 idea too little in his head. And the little William lies there, and for 
 this I am to blame. We were schoolfellows in the Franciscan mon- 
 astery, and were playing on that side of it where the Dtissel flows be- 
 tween stone walls ; and I said, ' William, fetch out the kitten that
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 73 
 
 has just fallen in ; ' and merrily he went down on to the plank which 
 lay across the brook, snatched the kitten out of the water, but fell in 
 himself, and was dragged out dripping and dead* The kitten lived to a 
 good old age. . . . Princes in that day were not the tormented race as 
 they are now; the crown grew firmly on their heads, and at night 
 they drew a nightcap over it, aud slept peacefully, and peacefully 
 slept the people at their feet ; and when the people waked in the morn- 
 ing, they said, ' Good-morning, father ! ' and the princes answered, 
 ' Good-morning, dear children ! ' But it was suddenly quite otherwise; 
 for when we awoke one morning at Diisseldorf, and were ready to say, 
 ' Good-morning, father ! ' lo ! the father was gone away ; and in 
 the whole town there was nothing but dumb sorrow, everywhere a sort 
 of funeral disposition ; and people glided along silently to the market, 
 and read the long placard placed on the door of the Town Hall. It 
 was dismal weather ; yet the lean tailor, Kiliaii, stood in his nankeen 
 jacket, which he usually wore only in the house, and his blue worsted 
 stockings hung down so that his naked legs peeped out mournfully, 
 and his thin lips trembled while he muttered the announcement to 
 himself. And an old soldier read rather louder, and at many a word a 
 crystal tear trickled down to his brave old mustache. I stood near 
 nim and wept in company, and asked him why we wept? He 
 answered, 'The Elector has abdicated.' And then he read again; 
 and at the words, f for the long-manifested fidelity of my subjects,' and 
 ' hereby set you free from your allegiance,' he wept more than ever. 
 It is strangely touching to see an old man like that, with faded uni- 
 form and scarred face, weep so bitterly all of a sudden. While we 
 were reading, the Electoral arms were taken down from the Town 
 Hall ; everything had such a desolate air, that it was as if an eclipse 
 of the sun were expected. ... I went home and wept, and wailed 
 out, 'The Elector has abdicated!' In vain my mother took a 
 world of trouble to explain the thing to me. I knew what I knew ; 
 I was not to be persuaded, but went crying to bed, and in the night 
 dreamed that the world was at an end." 
 
 The next morning, however, the sun rises as usual, and 
 Joachim Murat is proclaimed Grand Duke, whereupon there 
 is a holiday at the public school, and Heinrich (or Harry, 
 for that was his baptismal name, which he afterwards had 
 the good taste to change), perched on the bronze horse 
 of the Electoral statue, sees quite a different scene from 
 yesterday's :
 
 74 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 " The next day the world was again all in order, and we had school 
 as before, and things were got by heart as before ; the Roman em- 
 perors, chronology, the nouns in im, the verba irregularia, Greek, 
 Hebrew, geography, mental arithmetic! heavens! rny head is still 
 dizzy with it all must be learned by heart ! And a great deal of this 
 came very conveniently for me in after life. For if I had not known 
 the Roman kings by heart, it would subsequently have been quite in- 
 different to me whether Niebuhr had proved or had not proved that 
 they never really existed. . . . But oh ! the trouble I had at school 
 with the endless dates. And with arithmetic it was still worse. 
 What I understood best was subtraction, for that has a very practical 
 rule : ' Four can't be taken from three, therefore I must borrow one. 4 
 But I advise every one in such a case to borrow a few extra pence, for 
 no one can tell what may happen. ... As for Latin, you have no 
 idea, madam, what a complicated affair it is. The Romans would 
 never have found time to conquer the world if they had first had to learn 
 Latin. Luckily for them, they already knew in their cradles what 
 nouns have their accusative in im. I, on the contrary, had to learn 
 them by heart in the sweat of my brow ; nevertheless, it is fortunate 
 for me that I know them j . . . and the fact that I have them at my 
 finger-ends if I should ever happen to want them suddenly, affords me 
 much inward repose and consolation in many troubled hours of life. 
 ... Of Greek I will not say a word, I should get too much irritated. 
 The monks in the Middle Ages were not so far wrong when they main- 
 tained that Greek was an invention of the devil. God knows the suf- 
 fering I endured over it. ... With Hebrew it went somewhat better, 
 for I had always a great liking for the Jews, though to this very hour 
 they crucify my good name ; but I could never get on so far in Hebrew 
 as my watch, which had much familiar intercourse with pawnbrokers, 
 and in this way contracted many Jewish habits, for example, it 
 wouldn't go on Saturdays." 
 
 Heine's parents were apparently not wealthy, but his edu- 
 cation was cared for by his uncle, Solomon Heine, a great 
 banker in Hamburg, so that he had no early pecuniary dis- 
 advantages to struggle with. He seems to have been very 
 happy in his mother, who was not of Hebrew, but of Teutonic 
 blood ; he often mentions her with reverence and affection, 
 and in the " Buch der Lieder " there are two exquisite sonnets 
 addressed to her, which tell how his proud spirit was always
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 75 
 
 subdued by the charm of her presence, and how her love was 
 the home of his heart after restless weary ramblings : 
 
 " Wie machtig auch mein stoker Muth sich blahe^ 
 In deiner selig svissen, trauten Nahe 
 Ergreift mich oft ein demuthvolles Zagen. 
 
 Und immer irrte ich nach Liebe, immer 
 Nach Liebe, doch die Liebe fand ich ninuuer, 
 Und kehrte um nach Hause, krauk und triibe. 
 Doch da bist du entgegen mir gekommen, 
 Und ach ! was da in deinem Aug' geschwommen, 
 Das war die siisse, langgesuchte Liebe." 
 
 He was at first destined for a mercantile life, but nature 
 declared too strongly against this plan. " God knows," he has 
 lately said in conversation with his brother, " I would will- 
 ingly have become a banker, but I could never bring myself 
 to that pass. I very early discerned that bankers would one 
 day be the rulers of the world." So commerce was at length 
 given up for law, the study of which he began in 1819 at the 
 University of Bonn. He had already published some poems 
 in the corner of a newspaper, and among them was one on 
 Napoleon, the object of his youthful enthusiasm. This poem, 
 he says in a letter to St. Rene Taillandier, was written when 
 he was only sixteen. It is still to be found in the " Buch der 
 Lieder" under the title "Die Grenadiere," and it proves that 
 even in its earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly 
 specific character. 
 
 It will be easily imagined that the germs of poetry sprouted 
 too vigorously in Heine's brain for jurisprudence to find 
 much room there. Lectures on history and literature, we are 
 told, were more diligently attended than lectures on law. 
 He had taken care, too, to furnish his trunk with abundant 
 editions of the poets, and the poet he especially studied at 
 that time was Byron. At a later period we find his taste 
 taking another direction, for he writes: "Of all authors, 
 Byron is precisely the one who excites in me the most intol- 
 erable emotion ; whereas Scott, in every one of his works,
 
 74 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 " The next day the world was again all in order, and we had school 
 as before, and things were got by heart as before ; the Roman em- 
 perors, chronology, the nouns in im, the verba irregularia, Greek, 
 Hebrew, geography, mental arithmetic ! heavens ! my head is still 
 dizzy with it all must be learned by heart ! And a great deal of this 
 came very conveniently for me in after life. For if I had not known 
 the Roman kings by heart, it would subsequently have been quite in- 
 different to me whether Niebuhr had proved or had not proved that 
 they never really existed. . . . But oh ! the trouble I had at school 
 with the endless dates. And with arithmetic it was still worse. 
 What I understood best was subtraction, for that has a very practical 
 rule : ' Four can't be taken from three, therefore I must borrow one. v 
 But I advise every one in such a case to borrow a few extra pence, for 
 no one can tell what may happen. ... As for Latin, you have no 
 idea, madam, what a complicated affair it is. The Romans would 
 never have found time to conquer the world if they had first had to learn 
 Latin. Luckily for them, they already knew in their cradles what 
 nouns have their accusative in im. I, on the contrary, had to learn 
 them by heart in the sweat of my brow ; nevertheless, it is fortunate 
 for me that I know them ; . . . and the fact that I have them at my 
 finger-ends if I should ever happen to want them suddenly, affords me 
 much inward repose and consolation in many troubled hours of life. 
 ... Of Greek I will not say a word, I should get too much irritated. 
 The monks in the Middle Ages were not so far wrong when they main- 
 tained that Greek was an invention of the devil. God knows the suf- 
 fering I endured over it. ... With Hebrew it went somewhat better, 
 for I had always a great liking for the Jews, though to this very hour 
 they crucify my good name ; but I could never get on so far in Hebrew 
 as my watch, which had much familiar intercourse with pawnbrokers, 
 and in this way contracted many Jewish habits, for example, it 
 wouldn't go on Saturdays." 
 
 Heine's parents were apparently not wealthy, but his edu- 
 cation was cared for by his uncle, Solomon Heine, a great 
 banker in Hamburg, so that he had no early pecuniary dis- 
 advantages to struggle with. He seems to have been very 
 happy in his mother, who was not of Hebrew, but of Teutonic 
 blood ; he often mentions her with reverence and affection, 
 and in the " Buch der Lieder " there are two exquisite sonnets 
 addressed to her, which tell how his proud spirit was always
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 75 
 
 subdued by the charm of her presence, and how her love was 
 the home of his heart after restless weary ramblings : 
 
 " Wie machtig auch mein stolzer Muth sich blahe^ 
 In deiner selig siissen, trauten Nahe 
 Ergreift mich oft ein demuthvolles Zagen. 
 
 Und immer irrte ich nach Liebe, immer 
 Nach Liebe, doch die Liebe fand ich nimmer, 
 Und kehrte um nacli Hause, krank und triibe. 
 Doch da bist du entgegen mir gekommen, 
 Und ach ! was da in deinem Aug' geschwommen, 
 Das war die siisse, langgesuchte Liebe." 
 
 He was at first destined for a mercantile life, but nature 
 declared too strongly against this plan. " God knows," he has 
 lately said in conversation with his brother, " I would will- 
 ingly have become a banker, but I could never bring myself 
 to that pass. I very early discerned that bankers would one 
 day be the rulers of the world." So commerce was at length 
 given up for law, the study of which he began in 1819 at the 
 University of Bonn. He had already published some poems 
 in the corner of a newspaper, and among them was one on 
 Napoleon, the object of his youthful enthusiasm. This poem, 
 he says in a letter to St. Rene Taillandier, was written when 
 he was only sixteen. It is still to be found in the " Buch der 
 Lieder" under the title "Die Grenadiere," and it proves that 
 even in its earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly 
 specific character. 
 
 It will be easily imagined that the germs of poetry sprouted 
 too vigorously in Heine's brain for jurisprudence to find 
 much rooni there. Lectures on history and literature, we are 
 told, were more diligently attended than lectures on law. 
 He had taken care, too, to furnish his trunk with abundant 
 editions of the poets, and the poet he especially studied at 
 that time was Byron. At a later period we find his taste 
 taking another direction, for he writes : " Of all authors, 
 Byron is precisely the one who excites in me the most intol- 
 erable emotion ; whereas Scott, in every one of his works,
 
 76 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 gladdens my heart, soothes and invigorates me." Another 
 indication of his bent in these Bonn days was a newspaper 
 essay, in which he attacked the Romantic School ; and here 
 also he went through that chicken-pox of authorship, the 
 production of a tragedy. Heine's tragedy, " Almansor," is, 
 as might be expected, better than the majority of these 
 youthful mistakes. The tragic collision lies in the conflict 
 between natural affection and the deadly hatred of religion 
 and of race, in the sacrifice of youthful lovers to the strife 
 between Moor and Spaniard, Moslem and Christian. Some 
 of the situations are striking, and there are passages of con- 
 siderable poetic merit; but the characters are little more 
 than shadowy vehicles for the poetry, and there is a want 
 of clearness and probability in the structure. It was pub- 
 lished two years later, in company with another tragedy in 
 one act, called " William Ratcliffe," in which there is rather 
 a feeble use of the Scotch second-sight after the manner of 
 the Fate in the Greek tragedy. We smile to find Heine say- 
 ing of his tragedies, in a letter to a friend soon after their 
 publication : " I know they will be terribly cut up, but I will 
 confess to you in confidence that they are very good, better 
 than my collection of poems, which are not worth a shot.", 
 Elsewhere he tells us, that when, after one of Paganini's con- 
 certs, he was passionately complimenting the great master on 
 his violin-playing, Paganini interrupted him thus: "But 
 how were you pleased with my bows ? " 
 
 In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Gottingen. He there pursued 
 his omission of law studies ; and at the end of three months 
 he was rusticated for a breach of the laws against duelling. 
 Whilst there he had attempted a negotiation with Brockhaus 
 for the printing of a volume of poems, and had endured the 
 first ordeal of lovers and poets, a refusal It was not until 
 a year after, that he found a Berlin publisher for his first 
 volume of poems, subsequently transformed, with additions, 
 into the " Buch der Lieder." He remained between two and 
 three years at Berlin, and the society he found there seems 
 to have made these years an important epoch ia his culture.
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 77 
 
 He was one of the youngest members of a circle which as- 
 sembled at the house of the poetess Elise von Hohenhausen, 
 the translator of Byron, a circle which included Chamisso, 
 Varnhagen, and Rahel (Varnhagen's wife). For Kahel, Heine 
 had a profound admiration and regard ; he afterwards dedi- 
 cated to her the poems included under the title " Heimkehr ; " 
 and he frequently refers to her or quotes her in a way that 
 indicates how he valued her influence. According to his 
 friend, F. von Hohenhausen, the opinions concerning Heine's 
 talent were very various among his Berlin friends, and it was 
 only a small minority that had any presentiment of his future 
 fame. In this minority was Elise von Hohenhausen, who 
 proclaimed Heine as the Byron of Germany ; but her opinion 
 was met with much head-shaking and opposition. We can 
 imagine how precious was such a recognition as hers to the 
 young poet, then only two or three and twenty, and with by 
 no means an impressive personality for superficial eyes. Per- 
 haps even the deep-sighted were far from detecting in that 
 small, blond, pale young man, with quiet, gentle manners, the 
 latent powers of ridicule and sarcasm the terrible talons 
 that were one day to be thrust out from the velvet paw of 
 the young leopard. 
 
 It was apparently during this residence in Berlin that 
 Heine united himself with the Lutheran Church. He would 
 willingly, like many of his friends, he tells us, have remained 
 free from all ecclesiastical ties, if the authorities there had not 
 forbidden residence in Prussia, and especially in Berlin, to 
 every one who did not belong to one of the positive religions 
 recognized by the state. 
 
 "As Henry IV. once laughingly said, 'Paris vaut lien ime messe,' 
 60 I might with reason say, Berlin vaut lien une prSche; and I could 
 afterwards, as before, accommodate myself to the very enlightened 
 Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had 
 In the churches of Berlin, and which was even free from the divinity of 
 Christ, like turtle-soup without turtle." 
 
 At the same period, too, Heine became acquainted with 
 Hegel. In his lately published " Gestiindnisse " (Confes-
 
 78 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 eions), he throws on Hegel's influence over him the blue light 
 of demoniacal wit, and confounds us by the most bewildering 
 double-edged sarcasms ; but that influence seems to have been 
 at least more wholesome than the one which produced the 
 mocking retractations of the " G-estandnisse." Through all 
 his self-satire, we discern that in those days he had some- 
 thing like real earnestness and enthusiasm, which are cer- 
 tainly not apparent in his present theistic confession of 
 faith. 
 
 " On the whole, I never felt a strong enthusiasm for this philosophy, 
 and conviction on the subject was out of question. I never was an 
 abstract thinker, and I accepted the synthesis of the Hegelian doctrine 
 without demanding any proof, since its consequences flattered my 
 vanity. I was young and proud ; and it pleased my vainglory when I 
 learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my grandmother 
 believed, the God who lives in heaven, but myself here upon earth. 
 This foolish pride had not in the least a pernicious influence on my feel- 
 ings ; on the contrary, it heightened these to the pitch of heroism. I 
 was at that time so lavish in generosity and self-sacrifice, that I must 
 assuredly have eclipsed the most brilliant deeds of those good bourgeois 
 of virtue who acted merely from a sense of duty, and simply obeyed the 
 laws of morality." 
 
 His sketch of Hegel is irresistibly amusing ; but we must 
 warn the reader that Heine's anecdotes are often mere devices 
 of style by which he conveys his satire or opinions. The 
 reader will see that he does not neglect an opportunity of 
 giving a sarcastic lash or two, in passing, to Meyerbeer, for 
 whose music he had a great contempt. The sarcasm conveyed 
 in the substitution of reputation for music, and journalists for 
 musicians, might perhaps escape any one unfamiliar with the 
 sly and unexpected turns of Heine's ridicule. 
 
 "To speak frankly, I seldom understood him, and only arrived at 
 the meaning of his words by subsequent reflection. I believe he 
 wished not to be understood ; and hence his practice of sprinkling his 
 discourse with modifying parentheses ; hence, perhaps, his preference 
 for persons of whom he knew that they did not understand him, and 
 to whom he all the more willingly granted the honor of his familiar
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 79 
 
 acquaintance. Thus every one in Berlin wondered at the intimate com- 
 panionship of the profound Hegel with the late Heinrich Beer, a 
 brother of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is universally known by his rep- 
 utation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journalists. This 
 Beer, namely Heinrich, was a thoroughly stupid fellow, and indeed 
 was afterwards actually declared imbecile by his family, and placed 
 under guardianship; because instead of making a name for himself in 
 art or in science by means of his great fortune, he squandered his 
 money on childish trifles, and, for example, one day bought six 
 thousand thalers' worth of walking-sticks. This poor man, who had 
 no wish to pass either for a great tragic dramatist, or for a great star- 
 gazer, or for a laurel-crowned musical genius, a rival of Mozart and 
 Rossini, and preferred giving his money for walking-sticks this 
 degenerate Beer enjoyed Hegel's most confidential society ; he was the 
 philosopher's bosom-friend, his Pylades, and accompanied him every- 
 where like his shadow. The equally witty and gifted Felix Mendels- 
 sohn once sought to explain this phenomenon, by maintaining that 
 Hegel did not understand Heinrich Beer. I now believe, however, that 
 the real ground of that intimacy consisted in this : Hegel was con- 
 vinced that no word of what he said was understood by Heinrieh Beer; 
 and he could therefore, in his presence, give himself up to all the in- 
 tellectual outpourings of the moment. In general, Hegel's conversa- 
 tion was a sort of monologue, sighed forth by starts in a noiseless voice; 
 the odd roughness of his expressions often struck me, and many of them 
 have remained in my memory. One beautiful starlight evening we 
 stood together at the window, and I, a young man of one-and-twenty, 
 having just had a good dinner and finished my coffee, spoke with en- 
 thusiasm of the stars, and called them the habitations of the departed. 
 But the master muttered to himself : 'The stars! hum! hum! The 
 stars are only a brilliant leprosy on the face of the heavens.' ' For God's 
 sake,' I cried, ' is there, then, no happy place above, where virtue is 
 rewarded after death I ' But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said, 
 cuttingly : ' So you want a bonus for having taken care of your sick 
 mother, and refrained from poisoning your worthy brother f ' At these 
 words he looked anxiously round, but appeared immediately set at rest 
 when he observed that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached 
 to invite him to a game at whist." 
 
 In 183 Jleine returned to Gottingen to complete his career 
 as a law-student, and this time he gave evidence of advanced
 
 80 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 mental maturity, not only by producing many of the charming 
 poems subsequently included in the " Reisebilder," but also 
 by prosecuting his professional studies diligently enough to 
 leave Gottingen, in 1825, as Doctor juris. Hereupon he settled 
 at Hamburg as an advocate, but his profession seems to have 
 been the least pressing of his occupations. In those days a 
 small blond young man, with the brim of his hat drawn over 
 his nose, his coat flying open, and his hands stuck in his 
 trouser-pockets, might have been seen stumbling along the 
 streets of Hamburg, staring from side to side, and appearing 
 to have small regard to the figure he made in the eyes of the 
 good citizens. Occasionally an inhabitant, more literary than 
 usual, would point out this young man to his companion aa 
 Heinrich Heine ; but in general the young poet had not to 
 endure the inconveniences of being a lion. His poems were 
 devoured, but he was not asked to devour flattery in return. 
 Whether because the fair Hamburgers acted in the spirit of 
 Johnson's advice to Hannah More, to " consider what her 
 flattery was worth before she choked him with it," or for 
 some other reason, Heine, according to the testimony of 
 August Lewald, to whom we owe these particulars of his 
 Hamburg life, was left free from the persecution of tea- 
 parties. Not, however, from another persecution of genius, 
 nervous headaches, which some persons, we are told, re- 
 garded as an improbable fiction, intended as a pretext for rais- 
 ing a delicate white hand to his forehead. It is probable that 
 the sceptical persons alluded to were themselves untroubled 
 with nervous headache, and that their hands were not delicate. 
 Slight details these, but worth telling about a man of genius, 
 because they help us to keep in mind that he is, after all, our 
 brother, having to endure the petty every-day ills of life as we 
 have; with this difference, that his heightened sensibility 
 converts what are mere insect-stings for us into scorpion- 
 stings for him. 
 
 It was, perhaps, in these Hamburg days that Heine paid 
 the visit to Goethe, of which he gives us this charming little 
 picture :
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 81 
 
 " When I visited him in Weimar, and stood before him, I involun- 
 tarily glanced at his side, to see whether the eagle was not there with 
 the lightning in his beak. I was nearly speaking Greek to him ; but, 
 as I observed that he understood German, I stated to him in German, 
 that the plums on the road between Jena and Weimar were very good. 
 I had for so many long winter-nights thought over what lofty and pro- 
 found things I would say to Goethe, if ever I. saw him ! And when I 
 saw him at last, I said to him, that the Saxon plums were very good ! 
 And Goethe smiled." 
 
 During the next few years Heine produced the most pop- 
 ular of all his works, those which have won him his place 
 as the greatest of living German poets and humorists. Be- 
 tween 1826 and 1829 appeared the four volumes of the 
 " Reisebilder " (Pictures of Travel), and the " Buch der Lie- 
 der " (Book of Songs) a volume of lyrics, of which it is 
 hard to say whether their greatest charm is the lightness and 
 finish of their style, their vivid and original imaginativeness, 
 or their simple, pure sensibility. In his " Reisebilder," 
 Heine carries us with him to the Harz, to the isle of Nor- 
 derney, to his native town, Diisseldorf, to Italy, and to Eng- 
 land, sketching scenery and character, now with the wildest, 
 most fantastic humor, now with the finest idyllic sensibility 
 letting his thoughts wander from poetry to politics, from 
 criticism to dreamy reverie, and blending fun, imagination, 
 reflection, and satire in a sort of exquisite, ever-varying 
 shimmer, like the hues of the opal. 
 
 Heine's journey to England did not at all heighten his 
 regard for the English. He calls our language the " hiss of 
 egoism " (Zischlaute des Egoismus) ; and his ridicule of Eng. 
 lish awkwardness is as merciless as English ridicule of Ger^ 
 man awkwardness. His antipathy towards us seems to have 
 grown in intensity, like many of his other antipathies ; and 
 in his " Vermischte Schriften " he is more bitter than ever. 
 Let us quote one of his philippics, since bitters are under- 
 stood to be wholesome. 
 
 "It is certainly a frightful injustice to pronounce sentence of con- 
 demnation on an entire people. But with regard to the English, mo 
 VOL. ix 6
 
 82 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 mentary disgust might br tray me into this injustice ; and on looking 
 at the mass, I easily forget the many brave and noble men who dis- 
 tinguished themselves by intellect and love of freedom. But these, 
 especially the British poete, were .always all the more glaringly m coq 
 trast with the rest of the nation ; they were isolated martyrs to their 
 national relations ; and, besides, great geniuses do not belong to the 
 particular land of their birth ; they scarcely belong to this earth, the 
 Golgotha of their sufferings. The mass the English blockheads, 
 God forgive me ! are hateful to me in my inmost soul ; aud I often 
 regard them not at all as my fellow-men, but as miserable automata 
 machines, whose motive power is egoism. In these moods it seems 
 to me as if I heard the whizzing wheelwork by which they think, ft- <!, 
 reckon, digest, and pray ; their praying, their mechanical Anglican 
 church-going, with the gilt prayer-book under their arms, their stupid, 
 tiresome Sunday, their awkward piety, are most of all odious to me. 
 I am firmly convinced that a blaspheming Frenchman is a more pleas- 
 ing sight for the Divinity than a praying Englishman." 
 
 On his return from England, Heine was employed at Mu- 
 nich in editing the " Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen," but 
 in 1830 he was again in the North, and the news of the July 
 Revolution surprised him on the island of Heligoland. He 
 has given us a graphic picture of his democratic enthusiasm 
 in those days, in some letters, apparently written from Heli- 
 goland, which he had inserted in his book on Borne. We 
 quote some passages, not only for their biographic interest 
 as showing a phase of Heine's mental history, but because 
 they are a specimen of his power in that kind of dithyram- 
 bic writing which, in less masterly hands, easily becomes 
 ridiculous. 
 
 " The thick packet of newspapers arrived from the Continent with 
 these warm, glowing-hot tidings. They were sunbeams wrapped up 
 in packing-paper, and they inflamed my soul till it burst into the 
 wildest conflagration. ... It is all like a dream to me ; especially 
 the name, Lafayette, sounds to me like a legend out of my earliest 
 childhood. Does he really sit again on horseback, commanding the 
 National Guard ? I almost fear it may not be true, for it is in print. 
 I will myself go to Paris, to be convinced of it with my bodily eyes. , . 
 It must be splendid, when he rides through the streets, the citizen of
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 83 
 
 two worlds, the godlike old man, with his silver locks streaming 
 down his sacred shoulder. . . He greets, with his dear old eyes, the 
 grandchildren of those who once fought with him for freedom and 
 equality. ... It is now sixty years since he returned from America 
 with the Declaration of Human Rights, the Decalogue of the world's 
 new creed, which was revealed to him amid the thunders and light- 
 nings of cannon. . . . And the tri-colored flag waves again on the 
 towers of Paris, and its streets resound with the Marseillaise ! ... It 
 is all over with my yearning for repose. I now know again what I will 
 do, what I ought to do, what I must do. ... I am the son of the 
 Revolution, and seize again the hallowed weapons on which my 
 mother pronounced her magic benediction. . . . Flowers, flowers ! 
 I will crown my head for the death-fight. And the lyre, too ; reach 
 me the lyre, that I may sing a battle-song. . . . Words like flaming 
 stars, that shoot down from the heavens, and burn up the palaces, and 
 illuminate the huts. . . . Words like bright javelins, that whirr up to 
 the seventh heaven and strike the pious hypocrites who have skulked 
 into the Holy of Holies. ... I am all joy and song, all sword and 
 flame ! Perhaps, too, all delirium. . . . One of those sunbeams 
 wrapped in brown paper has flown to my brain, and set my thought! 
 aglow. In vain I dip my head into the sea. No water extinguishes 
 this Greek fire. . . . Even the poor Heligolanders shout for joy, although 
 they have only a sort of dim instinct of what has occurred. The 
 fisherman who yesterday took me over to the little sand-island, which 
 is the bathing-place here, said to me smilingly, ' The poor people 
 have won ! ' Yes, instinctively the people comprehend such events, 
 perhaps, better than we, with all our means of knowledge. Thue 
 Frau von Varnhagen once told me that when the issue of the battla 
 of Leipzig was not yet known, the maid-servant suddenly rushed into 
 the room with the sorrowful cry, ' The nobles have won ! ' . . . This 
 morning another packet of newspapers is come. I devour them like 
 manna. Child that I am, affecting details touch me yet more than 
 the momentous whole. Oh, if I could but see the dog Medor. . . . 
 The dog Medor brought his master his gun and cartridge-box, and 
 when his master fell, and was buried with his fellow-heroes in the 
 Court of the Louvre, there stayed the poor dog like a monument of 
 faithfaluess, sitting motionless on the grave, day and night, eating but 
 little of the food that was offered him, burying the greater part of 
 it in the earth, perhaps as nourishment for his buried master."
 
 84 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 The enthusiasm which was kept thus at boiling heat by 
 imagination, cooled down rapidly when brought into contact 
 with reality. In the same book he indicates, in his caustic 
 way, the commencement of that change in his political tem- 
 perature for it cannot be called a change in opinion 
 which has drawn down on him immense vituperation from 
 some of the Patriotic party, but which seems to have resulted 
 simply from the essential antagonism between keen wit and 
 fanaticism. 
 
 " On the very first days of my arrival in Paris, I observed that 
 things wore, in reality, quite different colors from those which had 
 been shed on them, when in perspective, by the light of my enthusiasm. 
 The silver locks which I saw fluttering so majestically on the shoulders 
 of Lafayette, the hero of two worlds, were metamorphosed into a 
 brown peruke, which made a pitiable covering for a narrow skull. 
 And even the dog Medor, which I visited in the Court of the Louvre, 
 and which, encamped under tri-colored flags and trophies, very quietly 
 allowed himself to be fed, he was not at all the right dog, but quite 
 an ordinary brute, who assumed to himself merits not his own, as 
 often happens with the French ; and, like many others, he made a 
 profit out of the glory of the Revolution. . . . He was pampered and 
 patronized, perhaps promoted to the highest posts, while the true 
 Medor, some days after the battle, modestly slunk out of sight, like 
 the true people who created the Revolution." 
 
 That it was not merely interest in French politics which 
 sent Heine to Paris in 1831, but also a perception that Ger- 
 man air was not friendly to sympathizers in July Revolutions, 
 is humorously intimated in the " Gestandnisse." 
 
 " I had done much and suffered much, and when the sun of the July 
 Revolution arose in France, I had become very weary and needed 
 some recreation. Also my native air was every day more unhealthy 
 for me, and it was time I should seriously think of a change of cli- 
 mate. I had visions ; the clouds terrified me, and made all sorts of 
 ugly faces at me. It often seemed to me as if the sun were a Prussian 
 cockade ; at night I dreamed of a hideous black eagle, which gnawed 
 nay liver ; and I was very melancholy. Add to this, I had beoome 
 acquainted with an old Berlin Justizrath, who had spent many years
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 85 
 
 In the fortress of Spandau, and he related to me how unpleasant it is 
 when one is obliged to wear irons in winter. For myself I thought it 
 very unchristian that the irons were not warmed a trifle. If the irons 
 were warmed a little for us, they would not make so unpleasant an im- 
 pression, and even chilly natures might then bear them very well ; it 
 would be only proper consideration, too, if the fetters were perfumed 
 with essence of roses and laurels, as is the case in this country [France] . 
 I asked my Justizrath whether he often got oysters to eat at Spandau. 
 He said, ' No, Spandau was too far from the sea.' Moreover, he said 
 meat was very scarce there, and there was no kind of volatile except 
 flies, which fell into one's soup. . . . Now, as I really needed some 
 recreation, and, as Spandau is too far from the sea for oysters to be got 
 there, and the Spandau fly-soup did not seem very appetizing to me; 
 as, besides all this, the Prussian chains are very cold in winter, and 
 could not be conducive to my health, I resolved to visit Paris." 
 
 Since this time Paris has been Heine's home, and his best 
 prose works have been written either to inform the Germans 
 on French affairs, or to inform the French on German phi- 
 losophy and literature. He became a correspondent of the 
 "AHgemeine Zeitung,"and his correspondence, which extends, 
 with an interruption of several years, from 1831 to 1844, 
 forms the volume entitled " Franzb'sische Zustande " (French 
 Affairs), and the second and third volume of his " Vermischte 
 Schriften." It is a witty and often wise commentary on pub- 
 lic men and public events. Louis Philippe, Casimir Perier, 
 Thiers, Guizot, Eothschild, the Catholic party, the Socialist 
 party, have their turn of satire and appreciation ; for Heine 
 deals out both with an impartiality which made his less 
 favorable critics Borne, for example charge him with 
 the rather incompatible sins of reckless caprice and venality. 
 Literature and art alternate with politics : we have now a 
 sketch of George Sand, or a description of one of Horace Ver- 
 net's pictures ; now a criticism of Victor Hugo, or of Liszt ; 
 now an irresistible caricature of Spontini or Kalkbrenner; 
 and occasionally the predominant satire is relieved by a fine 
 saying, or a genial word of admiration. And all is done with 
 that airy lightness, yet precision of touch, which distinguishes
 
 86 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT* 
 
 Heine beyond any living writer. The charge of venality was 
 loudly made against Heine in Germany t first, it was said 
 that he was paid to write ; then, that he was paid to abstain 
 from writing ; and the accusations were supposed to have an 
 irrefragable basis in the fact that he accepted a stipend from 
 the French government. He has never attempted to conceal 
 the reception of that stipend, and we think his statement 
 (in the " Vermischte Schriften ") of the circumstances under 
 which it was offered and received, is a sufficient vindication 
 of himself and M. Guizot from any dishonor in the matter. 
 
 It may be readily imagined that Heine, with so large a 
 share of the Gallic element as he has in his composition, was 
 soon at his ease in Parisian society, and the years here were 
 bright with intellectual activity and social enjoyment. " His 
 wit," wrote August Lewald, "is a perpetual gushing foun- 
 tain; he throws off the most delicious descriptions with 
 amazing facility, and sketches the most comic characters in 
 conversations." Such a man could not be neglected in Paris, 
 and Heine was sought on all sides as a guest in distin- 
 guished salons, as a possible proselyte in the circle of the 
 Saint Siraonians. His literary productiveness seems to have 
 been furthered by this congenial life, which, however, was 
 soon to some extent embittered by the sense of exile; for 
 since 1835 both his works and his person have been the 
 object of denunciation by the German governments. Between 
 1833 and 1845 appeared the four volumes of the "Salon/* 
 "Die Eomantische Schule" (both written, in the first in- 
 stance, in French) 5 the book on Borne ; " Atta Troll," a roman- 
 tic poem; " Deutschland," an exquisitely humorous poem, 
 describing his last visit to Germany, and containing some 
 grand passages of serious writing ; and the " Neue Gedichte," 
 a collection of lyrical poems. Among the most interesting 
 of his prose works are the second volume of the "Salon/' 
 which contains a survey of religion and philosophy in Ger- 
 many, and the " Bomantische Schule," a delightful introduc- 
 tion to that phase of German literature known as the 
 Romantic School. The book on Borne, which appeared in
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 87 
 
 1840, two years after the death of that writer, excited great 
 indignation in Germany, as a wreaking of vengeance on the 
 dead, an insult to the memory of a man Who had worked and 
 suffered in the cause of freedom a cause which was Heine's 
 own. Borne we may observe parenthetically, for the in- 
 formation of those who are not familiar with recent German 
 literature was a remarkable political writer of the ultra- 
 liberal party in Germany, who resided in Paris at the same 
 time with Heine, a man of stern, uncompromising partisan- 
 ship and bitter humor. Without justifying Heine's produc- 
 tion of this book, we see excuses for him which should temper 
 the condemnation passed on it. There was a radical opposition 
 of nature between him and Borne ; to use his own distinction, 
 Heine is a Hellene sensuous, realistic, exquisitely alive to 
 the beautiful, while Borne was a Nazarene ascetic, spirit- 
 ualistic, despising the pure artist as destitute of earnestness. 
 Heine has too keen a perception of practical absurdities and 
 damaging exaggerations ever to become a thoroughgoing 
 partisan ; and with a love of freedom, a faith in the ultimate 
 triumph of democratic principles, of which we see no just 
 reason to doubt the genuineness and consistency, he has been 
 unable to satisfy more zealous and one-sided liberals by giving 
 his adhesion to their views and measures, or by adopting a 
 denunciatory tone against those in the opposite ranks. Borne 
 could not forgive what he regarded as Heine's epicurean in- 
 difference and artistic dalliance, and he at length gave vent 
 to his antipathy in savage attacks on him through the press, 
 accusing him of utterly lacking character and principle, and 
 even of writing under the influence of venal motives. To 
 these attacks Heine remained absolutely mute from con- 
 tempt, according to his own account ; but the retort, which he 
 resolutely refrained from making during Borne's life, comes 
 in this volume published after his death, with the concentrated 
 force of long-gathering thunder* The utterly inexcusable 
 part of the book is the caricature of Btfrne's friend, Madame 
 Wohl, and the scurrilous insinuations concerning Borne's do* 
 mestic life. It is said, we know not with how much truth,
 
 88 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 that Heine had to answer for these in a duel with Madame 
 Wohl's husband, and that, after receiving a serious wound, he 
 promised to withdraw the offensive matter from a future 
 edition. That edition, however, has not been called for. 
 Whatever else we may think of the book, it is impossible to 
 deny its transcendent talent, the dramatic vigor with which 
 Borne is made present to us, the critical acumen with which 
 he is characterized, and the wonderful play of wit, pathos, 
 and thought which runs through the whole. But we will let 
 Heine speak for himself, and first we will give part of his 
 graphic description of the way in which Borne's mind and 
 manners grated on his taste : 
 
 " To the disgust which, in intercourse with Borne, I was in danger 
 of feeling towards those who surrounded him, was added the annoy- 
 ance I felt from his perpetual talk about politics. Nothing but polit- 
 ical argument, and again political argument, even at table, where he 
 managed to hunt me out. At dinner, when I so gladly forget all the 
 vexations of the world, he spoiled the best dishes for me by his patri- 
 otic gall, which he poured as a bitter sauce over everything. Calf s 
 feet a la maitre d'Mtel, then my innocent bonne bouclw, he completely 
 spoiled for me by Job's tidings from Germany, which he scraped to- 
 gether out of the most unreliable newspapers. And then his accursed 
 remarks, which spoiled one's appetite I ... This was a sort of table- 
 talk which did not greatly exhilarate me, and I avenged myself by 
 affecting an excessive, almost impassioned indifference for the object of 
 Borne's enthusiasm. For example, Borne was indignant that im- 
 mediately on my arrival in Paris, I had nothing better to do than to 
 write for German papers a long account of the Exhibition of Pictures. 
 I omit all discussion as to whether that interest in Art which induced 
 me to undertake this work was so utterly irreconcilable with the Rev- 
 olutionary interests of the day ; but Borne saw in it a proof of my 
 indifference towards the sacred cause of humanity, and I could in my 
 turn spoil the taste of his patriotic sauerkraut for him by talking all 
 dinner-time of nothing but pictures, of Robert's 'Reapers,' Horace 
 Vernet's 'Judith,' and Scheffer's 'Faust.' . . . That I never thought 
 it worth tf hile to discuss my political principles with him it is needless 
 to say ; and once when he declared that he had found & contradiction 
 in my writings, I satisfied myself with the ironical answer, ' You are 
 mistaken, mon cher; such contradictions never occur in my works, for
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 89 
 
 always before I begin to write, I read over the statement of my polit- 
 ical principles in my previous writings, that I may not contradict 
 myself, and that no one may be able to reproach me with apostasy 
 from my liberal principles.'" 
 
 And here is his own account of the spirit in which the 
 book was written : 
 
 " I was never Borne's friend, nor was I ever his enemy. The dis- 
 pleasure which he could often excite in me was never very important, 
 and he atoned for it sufficiently by the cold silence which I opposed to 
 all his accusations and raillery. While he lived I wrote not a line 
 against him, I never thought about Mm, I ignored him completely ; 
 and that enraged him beyond measure. If I now speak of him, I do 
 o neither out of enthusiasm nor out of uneasiness ; I am conscious of 
 the coolest impartiality. I write here neither an apology nor a 
 critique ; and, as in painting the man I go on my own observation, the 
 image I present of him ought perhaps to be regarded as a real portrait. 
 And such a monument is due to him to the great wrestler who, in 
 the arena of our political games, wrestled so courageously, and earned, 
 if not the laurel, certainly the crown of oak-leaves. I give an image 
 with his true features, without idealization the more like him, the 
 more honorable for his memory. He was neither a genius nor a hero ; 
 he was no Olympian god. He was a man, a denizen of this earth ; he 
 was a good writer and a great patriot. . . . Beautiful, delicious peace, 
 which I feel at this moment in the depths of my soul ! Thou re- 
 wardest me sufficiently for everything I have done and for everything 
 I have despised. ... I shall defend myself neither from the reproach 
 of indifference nor from the suspicion of venality. I have for years, 
 during the life of the insinuator, held such self-justification unworthy 
 of me ; now even decency demands silence. That would be a frightful 
 spectacle, polemics between Death and Exile ! Dost thou stretch 
 out to me a beseeching hand from the grave* Without rancor I 
 reach mine towards thee. . . . See how noble it is, and pure ! It was 
 never soiled by pressing the hands of the mob, any more than by the 
 impure gold of the people's enemy. In reality thou hast never injured 
 me. ... In all thy insinuations there is not a louis d'or's worth of 
 truth." 
 
 In one of these years Heine was married, and, in deference 
 to the sentiments of his wife, married according to the rites
 
 90 ESSAYS OF GEOttGE ELIOT. 
 
 of the Catholic Church. On this fact busy rumor afterwards 
 founded the story of his conversion to Catholicism, and could 
 of course name the day and the spot on which he abjured 
 Protestantism. In his " Gestandnisse M Heine publishes a 
 denial of this rumor ; less, he says, for the sake of depriving 
 the Catholics of the solace they may derive from their belief 
 in a new convert, than in order to cut off from another party 
 the more spiteful satisfaction of bewailing his instability : 
 
 " That statement of time and place was entirely correct. I was 
 actually on the specified day in the specified church, which was, more- 
 over, a Jesuit church, namely St. Sulpice ; and I then went through a 
 religious act. But this act was no odious abjuration, but a very in- 
 nocent conjugation ; that is to say, my marriage, already performed 
 according to the civil law, there received the ecclesiastical consecration, 
 because my wife, whose family are stanch Catholics, would not have 
 thought her marriage sacred enough without such a ceremony. And 
 I would on no account cause this beloved being any uneasiness or 
 disturbance in her religious views." 
 
 For sixteen years, from 1831 to 1847, Heine lived that 
 rapid, concentrated life which is known only in Paris ; but 
 then, alas ! stole on the " days of darkness," and they were to 
 be many. In 1847 he felt the approach of the terrible spinal 
 disease which has for seven years chained him to his bed in 
 acute suffering. The last time he went out of doors, he tell& 
 us, was in May, 1848 : 
 
 " With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank 
 down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddes* 
 of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her 
 feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me. 
 The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time dis- 
 consolately, as if she would say : Dost thou not see, then, that I have 
 no arms, and thus cannot help thee ' " 
 
 Since 1848, Chen, this poet, whom the lovely objects oi 
 nature have always "haunted like a passion," has not de- 
 scended from the second story of a Parisian house ; this man 
 of hungry intellect has been shut out from all direct observer
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 91 
 
 tion of life, all contact with society, except such as is de- 
 rived from visitors to his sick-room. The terrible nervous 
 disease has affected his eyes ; the sight of one is utterly gone, 
 and he can only raise the lid of the other by lifting it with 
 his finger. Opium alone is the beneficent genius that stills 
 his pain. We hardly know whether to call it an alleviation 
 or an intensification of the torture that Heine retains his 
 mental vigor, his poetic imagination, and his incisive wit ; 
 for if this intellectual activity fills up a blank, it widens the 
 sphere of suffering. His brother described him in 1851 as 
 still, in moments when the hand of pain was not too heavy 
 on him, the same Heinrich Heine, poet and satirist by turns. 
 In such moments, he would narrate the strangest things in 
 the gravest manner. But when he came to an end, he would 
 roguishly lift up the lid of his right eye with his finger, to see 
 the impression he had produced; and if his audience had 
 been listening with a serious face, he would break into Ho- 
 meric laughter. We have other proof than personal testimony, 
 that Heine's disease allows his genius to retain much of its 
 energy, in the " Romanzero," a volume of poems published 
 in 1851, and written chiefly during the three first years of his 
 illness ; and in the first volume of the " Vermischte Schrif- 
 ten," also the product of recent years. Very plaintive is the 
 poet's own description of his condition, in the epilogue to the 
 " Eomanzero : " 
 
 "Do I really exist! My body is so shrunken that I am hardly 
 anything but a voice ; and my bed reminds me of the singing grave of 
 the magician Merlin, which lies in the forest of Brozeliand, in Brittany, 
 under tall oaks whose tops soar like green flames towards heaven. 
 Alas ! I envy thee those trees and the fresh breeze that moves their 
 branches, brother Merlin, for no green leaf rustles about my mattress- 
 grave in Paris, where early and late I hear nothing but the rolling of 
 vehicles, hammering, quarrelling, and piano-strumming. A grave 
 without repose, death without the privileges of the dead, who have no 
 debts to pay, and need write neither letters nor books that is a pite- 
 ous condition. Long ago the measure has been taken for my coffin 
 and for my necrology, but I die BO slowly, that the process is tedious
 
 92 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 for me as well as my friends. But patience ; everything has an end. 
 You will one day find the booth closed where the puppet-show of my 
 humor has so often delighted you." 
 
 As early as 1850 it was rumored, that since Heine's illness 
 a change had taken place in his religious views ; and as rumor 
 seldom stops short of extremes, it was soon said that he had 
 become a thorough pietist, Catholics and Protestants by turns 
 claiming him as a convert. Such a change in so uncompro- 
 mising an iconoclast, in a man who had been so zealous in his 
 negations as Heine, naturally excited considerable sensation 
 in the camp he was supposed to have quitted, as well as in 
 that he was supposed to have joined. In the second volume 
 of the " Salon " and in the " Komantische Schule," written 
 in 1834 and 1835, the doctrine of Pantheism is dwelt on with 
 a fervor and unmixed seriousness which show that Pantheism 
 was then an animating faith to Heine, and he attacks what 
 he considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christi- 
 anity as the enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well- 
 being. Now, however, it was said that Heine had recanted 
 all his heresies ; but from the fact that visitors to his sick- 
 room brought away very various impressions as to his actual 
 religious views, it seemed probable that his love of mystifica- 
 tion had found a tempting opportunity for exercise on this 
 subject, and that, as one of his friends said, he was not in- 
 clined to pour out unmixed wine to those who asked for a 
 sample out of mere curiosity. At length, in the epilogue to 
 the " Komanzero," dated 1851, there appeared, amidst much 
 mystifying banter, a declaration that he had embraced The- 
 ism and the belief in a future life, and what chiefly lent an 
 air of seriousness and reliability to this affirmation, was 
 the fact that he took care to accompany it with certain 
 negations : 
 
 " As concerns myself, I can boast of no particular progress in poli- 
 tics ; I adhered (after 1848) to the same democratic principles which 
 had the homage of my youth, and for which I have ever since glowed 
 with increasing fervor. In theology, on the contrary, I must accuse
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 93 
 
 myself of retrogression, since, as I have already confessed, I returned 
 to the old superstition to a personal God. This fact is, once for all, 
 not to be stifled, as many enlightened and well-meaning friends would 
 fain have had it. But I must expressly contradict the report that my 
 retrograde movement has carried me as far as to the threshold of a 
 Church, and that I have even been received into her lap. No : my 
 religious convictions and views have remained free from any tincture 
 of ecclesiasticism ; no chiming of bells has allured me, no altar-candles 
 have dazzled me. I have dallied with no dogmas, and have not ut- 
 terly renounced my reason." 
 
 This sounds like a serious statement. But what shall we 
 say to a convert who plays with his newly acquired belief in 
 a future life, as Heine does in the very next page ? He says 
 to his reader : 
 
 " Console thyself; we shall meet again in a better world, where I 
 also mean to write thee better books. I take for granted that my 
 health will there be improved, and that Swedenborg has not deceived 
 me. He relates, namely, with great confidence, that we shall peace- 
 fully carry on our old occupations in the other world, just as we have 
 done hi this ; that we shall there preserve our individuality unaltered, 
 and that death will produce no particular change in our organic devel- 
 opment. Swedenborg is a thoroughly honorable fellow, and quite 
 worthy of credit in what he tells us about the other world, where he 
 saw with his own eyes the persons who had played a great part on our 
 earth. Most of them, he says, remained unchanged, and busied them- 
 selves with the same things as formerly; they remained stationary, 
 were old-fashioned, rococo which now and then produced a ludicrous 
 effect. For example, our dear Dr. Martin Luther kept fast by his doc- 
 trine of Grace, about which he had for three hundred years daily writ- 
 ten down the same mouldy arguments ; just in the same way as the 
 late Baron Ekstein, who during twenty years printed in the " Alle- 
 meine Zeitung " one and the same article, perpetually chewing over 
 again the old end of Jesuitical doctrine. But, as we have said, all per- 
 sons who once figured here below were not found by Swedenborg in such 
 a state of fossil immutability; many had considerably developed their 
 character, both for good and evil, in the other world, and this gave rise 
 to some singular results. Some who had been heroes and saints on earth 
 had there sunk into scamps and good-for-nothings; and there were
 
 94 ESSAYS OP GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 examples, too, of a contrary transformation. For instance, the fumes of 
 self-conceit mounted to Saint Anthony's head when he learned what 
 immense veneration and adoration had been paid to him by all Chris 
 tendom ; and he who here below withstood the most terrible tempta- 
 tions, was now quite an impertinent rascal and dissolute gallows-bird, 
 who vied with his pig in rolling himself in the mud. The chaste 
 Susanna, from having been excessively vain of her virtue, which she 
 thought indomitable, came to a shameful fall, and she who once so 
 gloriously resisted the two old men, was a victim to the seductions of 
 the young Absalom, the son of David. On the contrary, Lot's 
 daughters had in the lapse of time become very virtuous, and passed in 
 the other world for models of propriety ; the old man, alas I had stuck 
 to the wine-flask." 
 
 In his " Gestandnisse " the retraction of former opinions 
 and profession of Theism are renewed, but in a strain of irony 
 that repels our sympathy and baffles our psychology. Yet 
 what strange, deep pathos is mingled with the audacity of 
 the following passage : 
 
 " What avails it me, that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown 
 my marble bust with laurel, when the withered hands of an aged nurse 
 are pressing Spanish flies behind my ears ? What avails it me, that 
 all the roses of Shiraz glow and waft incense for me ? Alas ! Shiraz 
 is two thousand miles from the Jlue d' Amsterdam, where, in the weari- 
 some lonelinesfe of my sick-room, I get no scent, except it be, perhaps, 
 the perfume of warmed towels. Alas ! God's satire weighs heavily on 
 me. The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, 
 was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little, 
 earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only piti- 
 ful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I 
 am beneath him in humor, in colossal mockery." 
 
 For our own part, we regard the paradoxical irreverence 
 with which Heine professes his theoretical reverence as patho- 
 logical, as the diseased exhibition of a predominant tendency, 
 urged into anomalous action by the pressure of pain and men- 
 tal privation, as the delirium of wit starved of its proper 
 nourishment. It is not for us to condemn, who have never 
 had the same burden laid on us ; it is not for pygmies at
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINBICH HEINE. 95 
 
 their ease to criticise the writhings of the Titan chained to 
 the rock. 
 
 On one other point we must touch before quitting Heine's 
 personal history. There is a standing accusation against him, 
 in some quarters, of wanting political principle, of wishing to 
 denationalize himself, and of indulging in insults against his 
 native country. Whatever ground may exist for these accu- 
 sations, that ground is not, so far as we see, to be found in 
 his writings. He may not have much faith in German revo- 
 lutions and revolutionists ; experience, in his case as in that 
 of others, may have thrown his millennial anticipations into 
 more distant perspective ; but we see no evidence that he has 
 ever swerved from his attachment to the principles of freedom, 
 or written anything which to a philosophic mind is incompati- 
 ble with true patriotism. He has expressly denied the report 
 that he wished to become naturalized in France ; and his yearn- 
 ing towards his native land and the accents of his native lan- 
 guage is expressed with a pathos the more reliable from the 
 fact that he is sparing in such effusions. We do not see why 
 Heine's satire of the blunders and foibles of his fellow- 
 countrymen should be denounced as the crime of lese^patrie, 
 any more than the political caricatures of any other satirist. 
 The real offences of Heine are his occasional coarseness and 
 his unscrupulous personalities, which are reprehensible, not 
 because they are directed against his fellow-countrymen, but 
 because they are personalities. That these offences have 
 their precedents in men whose memory the world delights to 
 honor does not remove their turpitude, but it is a fact which 
 should modify our condemnation in a particular case ; unless, 
 indeed, we are to deliver our judgments on a principle of 
 compensation, making up for our indulgence in one direc- 
 tion by our severity in another. On this ground of coarse- 
 ness and personality, a true bill may be found against 
 Heine ; not, we think, on the ground that he has laughed at 
 what is laughable in his compatriots. Here is a speci- 
 men of the satire under which we suppose German patriot* 
 winee:
 
 96 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 " Rhenish Bavaria was to be the starting-point of the German Rev- 
 olution. Zweibrucken was the Bethlehem in which the infant Saviour 
 Freedom lay in the cradle, and gave whimpering promise of re- 
 deeming the world. Near his cradle bellowed many an ox, who after- 
 wards, when his horns were reckoned on, showed himself a very 
 harmless brute. It was confidently believed that the German Revolu- 
 tion would begin in Zweibrucken, and everything was there ripe for an 
 outbreak. But, as has been hinted, the tender-heartedness of some 
 persons frustrated that illegal undertaking. For example, among the 
 Bipontiue conspirators there was a tremendous braggart, who was 
 always loudest in his rage, who boiled over with the hatred of tyranny ; 
 and this man was fixed on to strike the first blow, by cutting down a 
 pentinel who kept an important post. . . . ' What ! ' cried the man, 
 when this order was given him ' What ! me ! Can you expect so 
 horrible, so bloodthirsty an act of me? I /, kill an innocent sentinel? 
 J, who am the father of a family ! And this sentinel is perhaps also 
 father of a family. One father of a family kill another father of a 
 femily ? Yes ! Kill murder ! ' 
 
 In political matters, Heine, like all men whose intellect 
 and taste predominate too far over their impulses to allow of 
 their becoming partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat 
 and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man 
 who holds incendiary principles; by the other as a half- 
 hearted " trimmer." He has no sympathy, as he says, with 
 " that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of en- 
 thusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an 
 ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the 
 American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for 
 General Jackson, that he at last sprang from the top of a 
 mast into the sea, crying, ' I die for General Jackson ! ' " 
 
 " But thou liest, Brutus, thou liest, Cassius, and thou, too, liest, 
 Asinius, In maintaining that my ridicule attacks those ideas which are 
 the precious acquisition of Humanity, and for which I myself have so 
 striven and suffered. No! for the very reason that those ideas con- 
 stantly hover before the poet in glorious splendor and majesty, he is 
 the more irresistibly overcome by laughter when he sees how rudely, 
 awkwardly, and clumsily those ideas a?^ seized and mirrored in the 
 contracted minds of contemporaries. . . . There are mirrors which
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 97 
 
 have so rough a surface that even an Apollo reflected in them becomes 
 a caricature and excites our laughter. But we laugh then only at the 
 caricature, not at the god.' 11 
 
 For the rest, why should we demand of Heine that he 
 should be a hero, a patriot, a solemn prophet, any more than 
 we should demand of a gazelle that it should draw well in 
 harness ? Nature has not made him of her sterner stuff 
 not of iron and adamant, but of pollen of flowers, the juice of 
 the grape, and Puck's mischievous brain, plenteously mixing 
 also the dews of kindly affection and the gold-dust of noble 
 thoughts. It is, after all, a tribute which his enemies pay 
 him when they utter their bitterest dictum, namely, that he 
 is " nur Dichter " only a poet. Let us accept this point of 
 view for the present, and, leaving all consideration of him as 
 a man, look at him simply as a poet and literary artist. 
 
 Heine is essentially a lyric poet. The finest products of 
 his genius are 
 
 " Short swallow-flights of song, that dip 
 Their wings in tears, and skim away ; " 
 
 and they are so emphatically songs that, in reading them, we 
 feel as if each must have a twin melody born in the same 
 moment and by the same inspiration. Heine is too impres- 
 sible and mercurial for any sustained production ; even in 
 his short lyrics his tears sometimes pass into laughter, and 
 his laughter into tears ; and his longer poems, " Atta Troll " 
 and "Deutschland," are full of Ariosto-like transitions. His 
 song has a wide compass of notes; he can take us to the 
 shores of the Northern Sea and thrill us by the sombre sub- 
 limity of his pictures and dreamy fancies ; he can draw forth 
 our tears by the voice he gives to our own sorrows, or to the 
 sorrows of " Poor Peter ; " he can throw a cold shudder over 
 us by a mysterious legend, a ghost story, or a still more 
 ghastly rendering of hard reality ; he can charm us by a quiet 
 idyl, shake us with laughter at his overflowing fun, or give 
 us a piquant sensation of surprise by the ingenuity of his 
 transitions from the lofty to the ludicrous. This last power 
 
 TOL. IX. -7
 
 98 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 ia not, indeed, essentially poetical ; but only a poet can use it 
 with the same success as Heine, for only a poet can poise our 
 emotion and expectation at such a height as to give effect to 
 the sudden fall. Heine's greatest power as a poet lies in his 
 simple pathos, in the ever-varied but always natural expres- 
 sion he has given to the tender emotions. We may perhaps 
 indicate this phase of his genius by referring to Wordsworth's 
 beautiful little poem, "She dwelt among the untrodden 
 waysj" the conclusion 
 
 " She dwelt alone, and few could know 
 
 When Lucy ceased to be ; 
 But she is in her grave, and, oh! 
 The difference to me " 
 
 is entirely in Heine's manner ; and so is Tennyson's poem of a 
 dozen lines, called " Circumstance." Both these poems have 
 Heine's pregnant simplicity. But, lest this comparison 
 should mislead, we must say that there is no general resem- 
 blance between either Wordsworth, or Tennyson, and Heine. 
 Their greatest qualities lie quite away from the light, del- 
 icate lucidity, the easy, rippling music, of Heine's style. 
 The distinctive charm of his lyrics may best be seen by com- 
 paring them with Goethe's. Both have the same masterly, 
 finished simplicity and rhythmic grace; but there is more 
 thought mingled with Goethe's feeling. His lyrical genius 
 is a vessel that draws more water than Heine's, and, though 
 it seems to glide along with equal ease, we have a sense 
 of greater weight and force accompanying the grace of its 
 movement. 
 
 But, for this very reason, Heine touches our hearts more 
 strongly ; his songs are all music and feeling ; they are like 
 birds, that not only enchant us with their delicious notes, but 
 nestle against us with their soft breasts, and make us feel the 
 agitated beating of their hearts. He indicates a whole sad 
 history in a single quatrain ; there is not an image in it, not 
 a thought ; but it is beautiful, simple, and perfect as a " big 
 round tear ; " it is pure feeling breathed in pure music :
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 99 
 
 " Anfanga wollt' ich fast verzagen 
 Und ich glanbt' ich trng es nie, 
 Und ich hab' es doch getragen, 
 Aber fragt mich nor nicht, wie." * 
 
 He excels equally in the more imaginative expression of 
 feeling ; he represents it by a brief image, like a finely cut 
 cameo ; he expands it into a mysterious dream, or dramatizes 
 it in a little story, half -ballad, half-idyl ; and in all these 
 forms his art is so perfect that we never have a sense of ar- 
 tificiality or of unsuccessful effort, but all seems to have 
 developed itself by the same beautiful necessity that brings 
 forth vine-leaves and grapes and the natural curls of child- 
 hood. Of Heine's humorous poetry, "Deutschland" is the 
 most charming specimen charming, especially, because its 
 wit and humor grow out of a rich loam of thought. " Atta 
 Troll " is more original, more various, more fantastic ; but it 
 is too great a strain on the imagination to be a general 
 favorite. We have said that feeling is the element in which 
 Heine's poetic genius habitually floats ; but he can occasionally 
 soar to a higher region, and impart deep significance to pict- 
 uresque symbolism ; he can flash a sublime thought over the 
 past and into the future ; he can pour forth a lofty strain of 
 hope or indignation. Few could forget, after once hearing 
 them, the stanzas at the close of " Deutschland," in which he 
 warns the King of Prussia not to incur the irredeemable hell 
 which the injured poet can create for him, the singing flames 
 of a Dante's t&rza rima ! 
 
 "Kennst da die Holle des Dante nicht, 
 Die schrecklichen Terzetten ? 
 Wen da der Dichter hineingesperrt 
 Den kann kein Gott mehr retten. 
 
 " Kein Gott, kein Heiland, erlost ihn je 
 Ang diesen singenden flammen ! 
 Nimm dich in Acht, das wir dich nicht 
 Zu solcher Holle verdammen." 8 
 
 1 At first I was almost in despair, and I thought I conld nerer bear it 5 
 and yet I have borne it, only do not ask me how f 
 
 8 It is not fair to the English reader to indulge in German quotations, 
 but in our opinion poetical translations are usually worse than valelw.
 
 100 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 As a prosaist, Heine is, in one point of view, even more 
 distinguished than as a poet. The German language easily 
 lends itself to all the purposes of poetry ; like the ladies of 
 the Middle Ages, it is gracious and compliant to the Trouba- 
 dours. But as these same ladies were often crusty and re- 
 pulsive to their unmusical mates, so the German language 
 generally appears awkward and unmanageable in the hands of 
 prose-writers. Indeed, the number of really fine German pro- 
 saists before Heine would hardly have exceeded the numerat- 
 ing powers of a New Hollander, who can count three and no 
 more. Persons the most familiar with German prose testify 
 that there is an extra fatigue in reading it, just as we feel an 
 extra fatigue from our walk when it takes us over ploughed 
 clay. But in Heine's hands German prose, usually so heavy, 
 so clumsy, so dull, becomes like clay in the hands of the chem- 
 ist, compact, metallic, brilliant ; it is German in an allotropic 
 condition. No dreary labyrinthine sentences in which you 
 find " no end in wandering mazes lost ; " no chains of adjec- 
 tives in linked harshness long drawn out; no digressions 
 thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and 
 clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate preci- 
 sion, all those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to 
 the highest order of prose. And Heine has proved what 
 Madame de Stael seems to have doubted that it is possible 
 to be witty in German ; indeed, in reading him, you might 
 imagine that German was pre-eminently the language of wit, 
 so flexible, so subtle, so piquant does it become under his 
 management. He is far more an artist in prose than Goethe. 
 He has not the breadth and repose, and the calm development 
 which belong to Goethe's style, for they are foreign to his 
 mental character ; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to 
 the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over its 
 
 For those who think differently, however, we may mention that Mr. Stores 
 Smith has published a modest little book, containing " Selections from the 
 Poetry of Heinrich Heine," and that a meritorious (American) translation 
 of Heine's complete works, by Charles Lelaiid, is now appearing in shilling 
 numbers.
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 101 
 
 effects. Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow ; he 
 alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly 
 allusion, and daring piquancy ; and athwart all these there 
 runs a vein of sadness, tenderness, and grandeur, which reveals 
 the poet. He continually throws out those finely chiselled 
 sayings which stamp themselves on the memory, and become 
 familiar by quotation. For example : " The people have time 
 enough, they are immortal ; kings only are mortal." 
 "Wherever a great soul utters its thoughts, there is Gol- 
 gotha." " Nature wanted to see how she looked, and she 
 created Goethe." "Only the man who has known bodily 
 suffering is truly a man ; his limbs have their Passion history, 
 they are spiritualized." He calls Rubens " this Flemish Ti- 
 tan, the wings of whose genius were so strong that he soared 
 as high as the sun, in spite of the hundred-weight of Dutch 
 cheeses that hung on his legs." Speaking of Bb'rne's dislike 
 to the calm creations of the true artist, he says : " He was 
 like a child which, insensible to the glowing significance of a 
 Greek statue, only touches the marble and complains of 
 cold." 
 
 The most poetic and specifically humorous of Heine's prose 
 writings are the " Reisebilder." The comparison with Sterne 
 is inevitable here ; but Heine does not suffer from it, for if 
 he falls below Sterne in raciness of humor, he is far above 
 him in poetic sensibility and in reach and variety of thought. 
 Heine's humor is never persistent, it never flows on long in 
 easy gayety and drollery ; where it is not swelled by the tide 
 of poetic feeling, it is continually dashing down the precipice 
 of a witticism. It is not broad and unctuous ; it is aerial and 
 sprite-like, a momentary resting-place between his poetry and 
 his wit. In the " Eeisebilder " he runs through the whole 
 gamut of his powers, and gives us every hue of thought, from 
 the wildly droll and fantastic to the sombre and the terrible. 
 Here is a passage almost Dantesque in conception : 
 
 "Alas! one ought in truth to write against no one in this world. 
 Each of us is sick enough in this great lazaretto, and many a polemi-
 
 102 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 eal writing reminds me involuntarily of a revolting quarrel, in a little 
 hospital at Cracow, of which I chanced to be a witness, and where it 
 was horrible to hear how the patients mockingly reproached each other 
 with their infirmities: how one who was wasted by consumption 
 jeered at another who was bloated by dropsy j how one laughed at 
 another's cancer in the nose, and this one again at his neighbor's 
 locked jaw or squint; until at last the delirious fever-patient sprang 
 out of bed and tore away the coverings from the wounded bodies of his 
 companions, and nothing was to be seen but hideous misery and 
 mutilation." 
 
 And how fine is the transition in the very next chapter, 
 where, after quoting the Homeric description of the feasting 
 gods, he says : 
 
 "Then suddenly approached, panting, a pale Jew, with drops of 
 blood on his brow, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a great 
 cross laid on his shoulders ; and he threw the cross on the high table 
 of the gods, so that the golden cups tottered, and the gods became 
 dumb and pale, and grew ever paler, till they at last melted away into 
 vapor." 
 
 The richest specimens of Heine's wit are perhaps to be 
 found in the works which have appeared since the " jteise- 
 bilder." The years, if they have intensified his satirical bit- 
 terness, have also given his wit a finer edge and polish. His 
 sarcasms are so subtly prepared and so slyly allusive, that 
 they may often escape readers whose sense of wit is not very 
 acute ; but for those who delight in the subtle and delicate 
 flavors of style, there can hardly be any wit more irresistible 
 than Heine's. We may measure its force by the degree in 
 which it has subdued the German language to its purposes, 
 and made that language brilliant in spite of a long hereditary 
 transmission of dulness. As one of the most harmless exam- 
 ples of his satire, take this on a man who has certainly had 
 his share of adulation : 
 
 " Assuredly it is far from my purpose to depreciate M. Victor Cousin. 
 The titles of this celebrated philosopher even lay me under an obliga- 
 tion to praise him. He belongs to that living pantheon of France, 
 which we call the peerage, and his intelligent legs rest on the velvet
 
 GERMAN WIT: HEINRICH HEINE. 103 
 
 benches of the Luxembourg. I must indeed sternly repress all private 
 feelings which might seduce me into an excessive enthusiasm. Other- 
 wise I might be suspected of servility ; for M. Cousin is very influen- 
 tial hi the state by means of his position and his tongue. This 
 consideration might even move me to speak of his faults as frankly as 
 of his virtues. Will he himself disapprove of this ? Assuredly not. 
 I know that we cannot do higher honor to great minds than when we 
 throw as strong a light on their demerits as on their merits. When 
 we sing the praises of a Hercules, we must also mention that he once 
 laid aside the lion's skin and sat down to the distaff: what then? he 
 remains notwithstanding a Hercules ! So when we relate similar cir- 
 cumstances concerning M. Cousin, we must nevertheless add, with dis- 
 criminating eulogy : M. C&usin, if he has sometimes sat twaddling at the 
 distaff, has never laid aside the lion's skin. ... It is true that, having 
 been suspected of demagogy, he spent some time in a German prison, 
 just as Lafayette and Richard Coaur de Lion. But that M. Cousin 
 there in his leisure hours studied Kant's ' Critique of Pure Reason ' is 
 to be doubted on three grounds. First, this book is written in Ger- 
 man. Secondly, in order to read this book, a man must understand 
 German. Thirdly, M. Cousin does not understand German. ... I 
 fear I am passing unawares from the sweet waters of praise into the 
 bitter ocean of blame. Yes, on one account I cannot refrain from bit- 
 terly blaming M. Cousin, namely, that he who loves truth far more 
 than he loves Plato and Tenneman, is unjust to himself when he wants 
 to persuade us that he has borrowed something from the philosophy 
 of Schelling and Hegel. Against this self-accusation, I must take 
 M. Cousin under my protection. On my word and conscience, this 
 honorable man has not stolen a jot from Schelling arid Hegel, and if he 
 brought home anything of theirs, it was merely their friendship. That 
 does honor to his heart. But there are many instances of such false 
 self-accusation in psychology. I knew a man who declared that he had 
 stolen silver spoons at the king's table ; and yet we all knew that the 
 poor devil had never been presented at court, and accused himself of 
 stealing these spoons to make us believe that he had been a guest at 
 the palace. No ! In German philosophy M. Cousin has always kept the 
 sixth commandment ; here he has never pocketed a single idea, not so 
 much as a salt-spoon of an idea. All witnesses agree in attesting that 
 in this respect M. Cousin is honor itself. ... I prophesy to you that 
 the renown of M. Cousin, like the French Revolution, will go round 
 the world ! I hear some one wickedly add : Undeniably the renown of
 
 104 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 M. Cousin is going round the world, and it has already taken its de- 
 parture from France." 
 
 The following " symbolical myth " about Louis Philippe 
 is very characteristic of Heine's manner : 
 
 " I remember very well that immediately on my arrival [in Paris] 
 I hastened to the Palais Royal to see Louis Philippe. The friend who 
 conducted me told me that the king now appeared on the terrace only 
 at stated hours, but that formerly he was to be seen at any time for 
 five francs. ' For five francs ! ' I cried with amazement; ' does he then 
 show himself for money ? ' ' No j but he is shown for money, and it 
 happens in this way : There is a society of claqueurs, marchands de 
 contremarques, and such riff-raff, who offered every foreigner to show 
 him the king for five francs; if he would give ten francs, he might see 
 the king raise his eyes to heaven, and lay his hand protestingly on his 
 heart; if he would give twenty francs, the king would sing the Mar- 
 seillaise. If the foreigner gave five francs, they raised a loud cheering 
 under the king's windows, and His Majesty appeared on the terrace, 
 bowed, and retired. If ten francs, they shouted still louder, and gestic- 
 ulated as if they had been possessed, when the king appeared, who 
 then, as a sign of silent emotion, raised his eyes to heaven, and laid 
 his hand on his heart. English visitors, however, would sometimes 
 spend as much as twenty francs, and then the enthusiasm mounted to 
 the highest pitch; no sooner did the king appear on the terrace, than 
 the Marseillaise was struck up and roared out frightfully, until Louis 
 Philippe, perhaps only for the sake of putting an end to the singing, 
 bowed, laid his hand on his heart, and joined in the Marseillaise. 
 Whether, as is asserted, he beat time with his foot, I cannot say.' " 
 
 One more quotation and it must be our last : 
 
 "Oh the women ! We must forgive them much, for they love much, 
 and many. Their hate is properly only love turned inside out. Some- 
 times they attribute some delinquency to us, because they think they 
 can in this way gratify another man. When they write, they have 
 always one eye on the paper and the other on a man ; and this is true 
 of all authoresses, except the Countess Hahn-Hahu, who has only one 
 ey*."
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 
 
 IVEN, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard 
 not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence 
 and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, 
 without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain 
 power and reputation in English society ? Where is that 
 Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and 
 learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes 
 will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, 
 unctuous egoism as God-given piety ? Let such a man be- 
 come an evangelical preacher ; he will then find it possible 
 to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial 
 knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale 
 with a high reputation for sanctity. Let him shun practical 
 extremes and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic : let 
 him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fast- 
 ing ; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity of punishment, 
 but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of Time ; 
 ardent and imaginative on the pre-millennial advent of Christ, 
 but cold and cautious towards every other infringement of 
 the status quo. Let him fish for souls, not with the bait of in- 
 convenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable 
 conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his interpretation 
 only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers 
 and adversaries ; but when the letter of the Scriptures presses 
 too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it 
 into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of 
 Antichrist ; let him be less definite in showing what sin is
 
 106 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 than in showing who is the Man of Sin, less expansive on the 
 blessedness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. 
 Above all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, and 
 rival Moore's Almanack in the prediction of political events, 
 tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spir- 
 itual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems 
 and charades for their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious 
 enough to solve these, they may have their Christian graces 
 nourished by learning precisely to whom they may point as 
 the "horn that had eyes," "the lying prophet," and the "un- 
 clean spirits." In this way he will draw men to him by the 
 strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being 
 baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a 
 metropolitan pulpit ; the avenues to his church will be as 
 crowded as the passages to the opera ; he has but to print his 
 prophetic sermons and bind then/ in lilac and gold, and they 
 will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, 
 who will regard as a sort of pious " light reading " the dem- 
 onstration that the prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in 
 their tail is fulfilled in the fact of the Turkish commander's 
 having taken a horse's tail for his standard, and that the 
 French are the very frogs predicted in the Revelations. 
 
 Pleasant to the clerical flesh under such circumstances is 
 the arrival of Sunday ! Somewhat at a disadvantage during 
 the week, in the presence of working-day interests and lay 
 splendors, on Sunday the preacher becomes the cynosure of a 
 thousand eyes, and predominates at once over the Amphit- 
 ryon with whom he dines, and the most captious member of 
 his church or vestry. He has an immense advantage over all 
 other public speakers. The platform orator is subject to the 
 criticism of hisses and groans. Counsel for the plaintiff 
 expects the retort of counsel for the defendant. The honor- 
 able gentleman on one side of the House is liable to have his 
 facts and figures shown up by his honorable friend on the 
 opposite side. Even the scientific or literary lecturer, if he 
 is dull or incompetent, may see the best part of his audience 
 quietly slip out one by one. But the preacher is completely
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 107 
 
 master of the situation : no one may hiss, no one may depart. 
 Like the writer of imaginary conversations, he may put what 
 imbecilities he pleases into the mouths of his antagonists, 
 and swell with triumph when he has refuted them. He may 
 riot in gratuitous assertions, confident that no man will con- 
 tradict him ; he may exercise perfect free-will in logic, and 
 invent illustrative experience ; he may give an evangelical 
 edition of history with the inconvenient facts omitted ; all 
 this he may do with impunity, certain that those of his hear- 
 ers who are not sympathizing are not listening. For the Press 
 has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and 
 chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the 
 preacher, to make a "feature" in their article; the clergy 
 are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers. For 
 this reason, at least, it is well that they do not always allow 
 their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are often induced 
 to fix them in that black and white in which they are open to 
 the criticism of any man who has the courage and patience to 
 treat them with thorough freedom of speech and pen. 
 
 It is because we think this criticism of clerical teaching 
 desirable for the public good, that we devote some pages to 
 Dr. Gumming. He is, as every one knows, a preacher of im- 
 mense popularity ; and of the numerous publications in which 
 he perpetuates his pulpit labors, all circulate widely, and 
 some, according to their titlepage, have reached the sixteenth 
 thousand. Now, our opinion of these publications is the very 
 opposite of that given by a newspaper eulogist : we do not 
 " believe that the repeated issues of Dr. Cumming's thoughts 
 are having a beneficial effect on society," but the reverse ; 
 and hence, little inclined as we are to dwell on his pages, we 
 think it worth while to do so, for the sake of pointing out in 
 them what we believe to be profoundly mistaken and per- 
 nicious. Of Dr. Gumming personally we know absolutely 
 nothing ; our acquaintance with him is confined to a perusal 
 of his works, our judgment of him is founded solely on 
 the manner in which he has written himself down on his 
 pages. We know neither how he looks nor how he lives.
 
 108 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 We are ignorant whether, like St. Paul, he has a bodily pres- 
 ence that is weak and contemptible, or whether his person is 
 as florid and as prone to amplification as his style. For 
 aught we know, he may not only have the gift of prophecy, 
 but may bestow the profits of all his works to feed the poor, 
 and be ready to give his own body to be burned with as much 
 alacrity as he infers the everlasting burning of Roman Catho- 
 lics and Puseyites. Out of the pulpit he may be a model of 
 justice, truthfulness, and the love that thinketh no evil ; but 
 we are obliged to judge of his charity by the spirit we find 
 in his sermons, and shall only be glad to learn that his prac- 
 tice is, in many respects, an amiable non sequitur from his 
 teaching. 
 
 Dr. Cumming's mind is evidently not of the pietistic order. 
 There is not the slightest leaning towards mysticism in his 
 Christianity, no indication of religious raptures, of delight 
 in God, of spiritual communion with the Father. He is most 
 at home in the forensic view of Justification, and dwells on 
 salvation as a scheme rather than as an experience. He 
 insists on good works as the sign of justifying faith, as labors 
 to be achieved to the glory of God ; but he rarely represents 
 them as the spontaneous, necessary outflow of a soul filled 
 with Divine love. He is at home in the external, the polem- 
 ical, the historical, the circumstantial, and is only episodi- 
 cally devout and practical. The great majority of his 
 published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic 
 against Romanists and unbelievers, with "vindications" of 
 the Bible, with the political interpretation of prophecy, or 
 the criticism of public events; and the devout aspiration, 
 or the spiritual and practical exhortation, is tacked to them as 
 a sort of fringe in a hurried sentence or two at the end. He 
 revels in the demonstration that the Pope is the Man of Sin ; 
 he is copious on the downfall of the Ottoman Empire ; he ap- 
 pears to glow with satisfaction in turning a story which tends 
 to show how he abashed an " infidel ; " it is a favorite exer- 
 cise with him to form conjectures of the process by which the
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 109 
 
 earth is to be burned up, and to picture Dr. Chalmers and 
 Mr. Wilberforce being caught up to meet Christ in the air, 
 while Romanists, Puseyites, and infidels are given over to 
 gnashing of teeth. But oi really spiritual joys and sorrows, 
 of the life and death of Christ as a manifestation of love 
 that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that yearning over 
 the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem, 
 and prompted the sublime prayer, " Father, forgive them," 
 of the gentler fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which 
 passeth understanding, of all this, we find little trace in 
 Dr. Cumming's discourses. 
 
 His style is in perfect correspondence with this habit of 
 mind. Though diffuse, as that of all preachers must be, it 
 has rapidity of movement, perfect clearness, and some apt- 
 ness of illustration. He has much of that literary talent 
 which makes a good journalist, the power of beating out 
 an idea over a large space, and of introducing far-fetched 
 apropos. His writings have, indeed, no high merit: they 
 have no originality or force of thought, no striking felicity 
 of presentation, no depth of emotion. Throughout nine 
 volumes we have alighted on no passage which impressed us 
 as worth extracting, and placing among the "beauties" of 
 evangelical writers, such as Robert Hall, Foster the Essayist, 
 or Isaac Taylor. Everywhere there is commonplace clever- 
 ness, nowhere a spark of rare thought, of lofty sentiment, or 
 pathetic tenderness. We feel ourselves in company with a 
 voluble retail talker, whose language is exuberant but not 
 exact, and to whom we should never think of referring for 
 precise information or for well-digested thought and expe- 
 rience. His argument continually slides into wholesale asser- 
 tion and vague declamation, and in his love of ornament he 
 frequently becomes tawdry. For example, he tells us 1 that 
 " Botany weaves around the cross her amaranthine garlands ; 
 and Newton comes from his starry home, Linnaeus from his 
 flowery resting-place, and Werner and Hufcton from their sub- 
 terranean graves, at the voice of Chalmers, to acknowledge 
 1 Apoc. Sketches, p. 265.
 
 110 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 that all they learned and elicited in their respective provinces, 
 has only served to show more clearly that Jesus of Nazareth 
 is enthroned on the riches of the universe ; " and so prosaio 
 an injunction to his hearers as that they should choose a resi- 
 dence within an easy distance of church, is magnificently 
 draped by him as an exhortation to prefer a house "that 
 basks in the sunshine of the countenance of God." Like all 
 preachers of his class, he is more fertile in imaginative para- 
 phrase than in close exposition, and in this way he gives us 
 some remarkable fragments of what we may call the romance 
 of Scripture, filling up the outline of the record with an elab- 
 orate coloring quite undreamed of by more literal minds. 
 The serpent, he informs us, said to Eve, "Can it be so? 
 Surely you are mistaken, that God hath said you shall die, a 
 creature so fair, so lovely, so beautiful. It is impossible. 
 The laws of nature and physical science tell you that my inter- 
 pretation is correct ; you shall not die. I can tell you by my 
 own experience as an angel that you shall be as gods, know- 
 ing good and evil." 1 Again, according to Dr. dimming, 
 Abel had so clear an idea of the Incarnation and Atonement, 
 that when he offered his sacrifice " he must have said, 'I feel 
 myself a guilty sinner, and that in myself I cannot meet thee 
 alive ; I lay on thine altar this victim, and I shed its blood 
 as my testimony that mine should be shed ; and I look for 
 forgiveness and undeserved mercy through Him who is to 
 bruise the serpent's head, and whose atonement this typi- 
 fies.' " 2 Indeed, his productions are essentially ephemeral ; 
 he is essentially a journalist, who writes sermons instead of 
 leading articles, who, instead of venting diatribes against her 
 Majesty's Ministers, directs his power of invective against 
 Cardinal Wiseman and the Puseyites, instead of declaiming 
 on public spirit, perorates on the " glory of God." We fancy 
 he is called, in the more refined evangelical circles, an "intel- 
 lectual preacher ; " by the plainer sort of Christians, a " flow- 
 ery preacher ; " and we are inclined to think that the more 
 spiritually minded class of believers, who look with greater 
 1 Apoc. Sketches, p. 294. 2 Occa*. Disc., vol. i. p. 23.
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. Ill 
 
 anxiety for the kingdom of God within them than for the 
 visible advent of Christ in 1864, will be likely to find Dr. 
 Cumming's declamatory flights and historico-prophetical exer- 
 citations as little better than "clouts o' cauld parritch." 
 
 Such is our general impression from his writings after an 
 attentive perusal. There are some particular characteristics 
 which we shall consider more closely, but in doing so we 
 must be understood as altogether declining any doctrinal dis- 
 cussion. We have no intention to consider the grounds of 
 Dr. Cumming's dogmatic system, to examine the principles 
 of his prophetic exegesis, or to question his opinion concern- 
 ing the little horn, the river Euphrates, or the seven vials. 
 We identify ourselves with no one of the bodies whom he 
 regards it as his special mission to attack ; we give our adhe- 
 sion neither to Romanism, Puseyism, nor to that anomalous 
 combination of opinions which he introduces to us under the 
 name of Infidelity. It is simply as spectators that we criti- 
 cise Dr. Cumming's mode of warfare ; and we concern our- 
 selves less with what he holds to be Christian truth than 
 with his manner of enforcing that truth, less with the doc- 
 trines he teaches than with the moral spirit and tendencies 
 of his teaching. 
 
 One of the most striking characteristics of Dr. Cumming's 
 writings is unscrupufasity of statement. His motto apparently 
 is, Christianitatem, quocunque modo Christianitatem ; and the 
 only system he includes under the term Christianity is Cal- 
 vinistic Protestantism. Experience has so long shown that 
 the human brain is a congenial nidus for inconsistent beliefs 
 that we do not pause to inquire how Dr. Gumming, who attrib- 
 utes the conversion of the unbelieving to the Divine Spirit, 
 can think it necessary to co-operate with that Spirit by argu- 
 mentative white lies. Nor do we for a moment impugn the 
 genuineness of his zeal for Christianity, or the sincerity of 
 his conviction that the doctrines he preaches are necessary 
 to salvation; on the contrary, we regard the flagrant un ve- 
 racity that we find on his pages as an indirect result of that 
 conviction, as a result, namely, of the intellectual and
 
 112 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 moral distortion of view which is inevitably produced by 
 assigning to dogmas, based on a very complex structure of 
 evidence, the place and authority of first truths. A distinct 
 appreciation of the value of evidence in other words, the 
 intellectual perception of truth is more closely allied to 
 truthfulness of statement, or the moral quality of veracity, 
 than is generally admitted. There is not a more pernicious 
 fallacy afloat in common parlance than the wide distinction 
 made between intellect and morality. Amiable impulses 
 without intellect man may have in common with dogs and 
 horses ; but morality, which is specifically human, is depen- 
 dent on the regulation of feeling by intellect. All human 
 beings who can be said to be in any degree moral have their 
 impulses guided, not indeed always by their own intellect, 
 but by the intellect of human beings who have gone before 
 them, and created traditions and associations which have 
 taken the rank of laws. Now, that highest moral habit, the 
 constant preference of truth both theoretically and practi- 
 cally, pre-eminently demands the co-operation of the intellect 
 with the impulses ; as is indicated by the fact that it is only 
 found in anything like completeness in the highest class of 
 minds. In accordance with this we think it is found that, 
 in proportion as religious sects exalt feeling above intellect, 
 and believe themselves to be guided by direct inspiration 
 rather than by a spontaneous exertion of their faculties, 
 that is, in proportion as they are removed from rationalism, 
 their sense of truthfulness is misty and confused. No one 
 can have talked to the more enthusiastic Methodists, and lis- 
 tened to their stories of miracles, without perceiving that they 
 require no other passport to a statement than that it accords 
 with their wishes and their general conception of God's deal- 
 ings ; nay, they regard as a symptom of sinful scepticism an 
 inquiry into the evidence for a story which they think un- 
 questionably tends to the glory of God, and in retailing such 
 stories, new particulars, further tending to his glory, are 
 "borne in" upon their minds. Now, Dr. dimming, as we 
 have said, is no enthusiastic pietist : within a certain circle,
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 113 
 
 within the mill of evangelical orthodoxy, his intellect is 
 perpetually at work; but that principle of sophistication 
 which our friends the Methodists derive from the predomi- 
 nance of their pietistic feelings, is involved for him in the 
 doctrine of verbal inspiration ; what is for them a state of 
 emotion submerging the intellect, is with him a formula im- 
 prisoning the intellect, depriving it of its proper function, 
 the free search for truth and making it the mere servant- 
 of-all-work to a foregone conclusion. Minds fettered by this 
 doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether 
 it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords 
 with Scripture ; they do not search for facts, as such, but for 
 facts that will bear out their doctrine. They become accus- 
 tomed to reject the more direct evidence in favor of the less 
 direct, and where adverse evidence reaches demonstration 
 they must resort to devices and expedients in order to ex- 
 plain away contradiction. It is easy to see that this mental 
 habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense 
 of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into 
 fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood. 
 
 We have entered into this digression for the sake of miti- 
 gating the inference that is likely to be drawn from that 
 characteristic of Dr. Cumming's works to which we have 
 pointed. He is much in the same intellectual condition as 
 that professor of Padua who, in order to disprove Galileo's 
 discovery of Jupiter's satellites, urged that as there were 
 only seven metals there could not be more than seven planets, 
 a mental condition scarcely compatible with candor. And 
 we may well suppose that if the Professor had held the be- 
 lief in seven planets, and no more, to be a necessary condi- 
 tion of salvation, his mental condition would have been so 
 dazed that even if he had consented to look through Galileo's 
 telescope, his eyes would have reported in accordance with 
 his inward alarms rather than with the external fact. So 
 long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable 
 to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible, any 
 more than it is possible for a man who is swimming for his 
 
 8
 
 114 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 life to make meteorological observations on the storm which 
 threatens to overwhelm him. The sense of alarm and haste, 
 the anxiety for personal safety, which Dr. Gumming insists 
 upon as the proper religious attitude, unmans the nature, and 
 allows no thorough calm-thinking, no truly noble, disin- 
 terested feeling. Hence we by no means suspect that the 
 nnscrupulosity of statement with which we charge Dr. Cum- 
 ming extends beyond the sphere of his theological prejudices ; 
 we do not doubt that, religion apart, he appreciates and prac- 
 tises veracity. 
 
 A grave general accusation must be supported by details ; 
 and in adducing those, we purposely select the most obvious 
 eases of misrepresentation, such as require no argument to 
 expose them, but can be perceived at a glance. Among Dr. 
 Oumming's numerous books, one of the most notable for un- 
 scrupulosity of statement is the " Manual of Christian Evi- 
 dences," written, as he tells us in his preface, not to give the 
 deepest solutions of the difficulties in question, but to fur^ 
 nish ScripturerBeaders, City Missionaries, and Sunday-school 
 Teachers with a ready reply " to sceptical arguments. 
 This announcement that readiness was the chief quality 
 sought for in the solutions here given, modifies our inference 
 from the other qualities which, those solutions present ; and 
 it is but fair to presume that when the Christian disputant 
 is not in a hurry, Dr. Gumming would recommend replies less 
 ready and more veracious. Here is an example of what in 
 another place l he tells his readers is ^ change in their pocket, 
 ... a little ready argument which they can employ, and 
 therewith answer a fool according to his folly." From the 
 nature of this argumentative small coin, we are inclined to 
 think Dr. Gumming understands answering a fool according 
 to his folly to mean, giving him a foolish answer. We quote 
 from the " Manual of Christian Evidences," p. 62 : 
 
 " Some of the gods which the heathen worshipped were among the 
 greatest monsters that ever walked the earth. Mercury was a thief ; 
 and because he was an expert thief, he was enrolled among the gods. 
 1 Lect. OB Daniel, p. 6.
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DIt. CAMMING. 115 
 
 Bacchus was a mere sensualist and drunkard j and therefore he wag 
 enrolled among the gods. Venus Was a dissipated and abandoned 
 courtesan; and therefore she Was enrolled ainotig the goddesses. 
 Mars was a savage, that gloried in battle and in blood; and therefore 
 he was deified and enrolled among the gods." 
 
 Does Dr. Gumming believe the purport of these sentences ? 
 If so, this passage is worth handing down as his theory of 
 the Greek myth, as a specimen of the astounding ignorance 
 which was possible in a metropolitan preacher, A. D. 1854. 
 And if he does not believe them, the inference must 
 then be, that he thinks delicate veracity about the ancient 
 Greeks is not a Christian virtue, but only a " splendid sin " 
 of the unregenerate. This inference is rendered the more 
 probable by our finding, a little further on, that he is not 
 more scrupulous about the moderns, if they come under his 
 definition of "Infidels." But the passage we are about to 
 ouote in proof of this has a worse quality than its discrep- 
 ancy with fact. Who that has a spark of generous feeling, 
 that rejoices in the presence of good in a fellow-being, has 
 not dwelt with pleasure on the thought that Lord Byron's 
 unhappy career was ennobled and purified towards its dloeie 
 by a high and sympathetic purpose, by honest and etiefge'tfo 
 efforts for his fellow-men? Who has not read with deep 
 emotion those last pathetic 1 lines, beautiful as the afterglow 
 of sunset, in which love and resignation ate mingled with 
 something of a melancholy heroism ? Who has not lingered 
 with compassion over the dying scene at Missolonghi, the 
 sufferer's inability to make his farewell messages of loVe in* 
 telligible, and the last long hours of silent pain ? Yet for 
 the sake of furnishing his disciples with a fi i*eady reply," 
 Dr. Gumming can prevail on himself to modulate them with 
 a bad-spirited falsity like the following : -=- 
 
 " We have one striking exhibition of an infidefs brightest thottghts 
 in some lines written in his dying moments by a man gifted with great 
 genius, capable of prodigious intellectual prowess, but of worthless 
 principle and yet more worthless practices, I mean the celebrated 
 Lord Byron. He Says : -*
 
 116 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 'Though gay companions o'er the bowl 
 
 Dispel awhile the sense of ill, 
 Though pleasure fills the maddening soul, 
 The heart the heart is lonely stilL' 
 
 'Ay, but to die, and go, alas ! 
 
 Where all have gone and all must go; 
 To be the Nothing that I was, 
 Ere born to life and living woe ! 
 
 'Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 
 Count o'er thy days from anguish free, 
 And know, whatever thou hast been, 
 'T is something better not to be. 
 
 'Nay, for myself, so dark my fate 
 
 Through every turn of life hath been, 
 Man and the world so much I hate, 
 I care not when I quit the scene."* 
 
 It is difficult to suppose that Dr. Gumming can have bee 
 so grossly imposed upon, that he can be so ill-informed as 
 really to believe that these lines were " written " by Lord 
 Byron in his dying moments; but, allowing him the full 
 benefit of that possibility, how shall we explain his introduc- 
 tion of this feebly rabid doggerel as "an infidel's brightest 
 thoughts"? 
 
 In marshalling the evidences of Christianity, Dr. Gumming 
 directs most of his arguments against opinions that are either 
 totally imaginary or that belong to the past rather than to 
 the present, while he entirely fails to meet the difficulties 
 actually felt and urged by those who are unable to accept 
 Revelation. There can hardly be a stronger proof of mis- 
 conception as to the character of free-thinking in the present 
 day, than the recommendation of Leland's " Short and Easy 
 Method with the Deists," a method which is unquestion- 
 ably short and easy for preachers disinclined to reconsider 
 their stereotyped modes of thinking and arguing, but which 
 has quite ceased to realize those epithets in the conversion of 
 Deists. Yet Dr. Gumming not only recommends this book, 
 but takes the trouble himself to write a feebler version of its
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 117 
 
 arguments. For example, on the question of the genuine- 
 ness and authenticity of the New Testament writings, he 
 says : " If, therefore, at a period long subsequent to the death 
 of Christ, a number of men had appeared in the world, drawn 
 up a book which they christened by the name of the Holy 
 Scripture, and recorded these things which appear in it as 
 facts when they were only the fancies of their own imagina- 
 tion, surely the Jews would have instantly reclaimed that no 
 such events transpired, that no such person as Jesus Christ 
 appeared in their capital, and that their crucifixion of Him, 
 and their alleged evil treatment of his apostles, were mere 
 fictions." * It is scarcely necessary to say that, in such argu- 
 ment as this, Dr. Gumming is beating the air. He is meeting 
 a hypothesis which no one holds, and totally missing the real 
 question. The only type of " infidel " whose existence Dr. 
 Gumming recognizes is that fossil personage who " calls the 
 Bible a lie and a forgery." He seems to be ignorant or he 
 chooses to ignore the fact that there is a large body of 
 eminently instructed and earnest men who regard the Hebrew 
 and Christian Scriptures as a series of historical documents, 
 to be dealt with according to the rules of historical criticism, 
 and that an equally large number of men, who are not histori- 
 cal critics, find the dogmatic scheme built on the letter of the 
 Scriptures opposed to their profoundest moral convictions. 
 Dr. Cumming's infidel is a man who, because his life is vicious, 
 tries to convince himself that there is no God, and that Chris- 
 tianity is an imposture, but who is all the while secretly con' 
 scious that he is opposing the truth, and cannot help " letting 
 out " admissions " that the Bible is the Book of God." We 
 are favored with the following " Creed of the Infidel : " 
 
 " I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God, and God is 
 matter; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or not. I 
 believe also that the world was not made, but that the world made 
 itself, or that it had no beginning, and that it will last forever. I be- 
 lieve that man is a beast; that the soul is the body, and that the body 
 is the soul ; and that after death there is neither body nor soul. I be- 
 
 1 Man. of Evidences, p. 81.
 
 118 ESSAYS OF GEOKGE ELIOT. 
 
 lieve that there is no religion, that natural religion is ttte only religion, 
 and all religion unnatural. I believe not in Moses j I believe in the 
 first philosophers. I believe not in the evangelists ; I believe in 
 Chubb, Collins, Toland, Tindal, and Hobbes. I believe in Lord 
 Bolingbroke, and I believe not in St. Paul. I believe not in revela- 
 tion ; I believe in tradition; 1 believe in the Talmud; I believe in the 
 Kordn; I believe not in the Bible. I believe in Socrates ; I believe 
 in Confucius; I believe in Mahomet; I believe not in Christ. And 
 lastly, I believe in all unbelief." 
 
 The intellectual and moral monster whose creed is this 
 complex web of contradictions is, moreover, according to 
 Dr. Gumming, a being who unites much simplicity and imbe- 
 cility with his Satanic hardihood, much tenderness of con- 
 science with his obdurate vice. Hear the " proof : " 
 
 " I once met with an acute and enlightened infidel, with whom I 
 reasoned day after day, and for hours together ; I submitted to him the 
 internal, the external, and the experimental evidences, but made no im- 
 pression on his scorn and unbelief. At length I entertained a suspicion 
 that there was something morally, rather than intellectually wrong, and 
 that the bias was not in the intellect, but in the heart; one day there- 
 fore I said to him, ' I must now state my conviction, and you may 
 call me uncharitable, but duty compels me; you are living in some 
 known and gross sin.' The maw's countenance became pale; he bowed 
 and left me." ' 
 
 Here we have the remarkable psychological phenomenon 
 of an "acute and enlightened" man who, deliberately pur- 
 posing to indulge in a favorite sin, and regarding the Gospel 
 with scorn and unbelief, is, nevertheless, so much more scru- 
 pulous than the majority of Christians, that he cannot "em- 
 brace sin and the Gospel simultaneously } " who is so alarmed 
 at the Gospel in which he does not believe, that he cannot be 
 easy without trying to crush it ; whose acutehess and enlight- 
 enment suggest to him, as a means of crushing the Gospel, to 
 argue from day to day with Dr. Gumming , and who is withal 
 BO naive that he is taken by surprise when Dr Gumming, 
 failing in argument, resorts to accusation, and so tender IB 
 * Mao. of Evidences, p. S54.
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 119 
 
 conscience that, at the mention of his sin, he turns pale and 
 leaves the spot. If there be any human mind in existence 
 capable of holding Dr. Cumming's " Creed of the Infidel," of 
 at the same time believing in tradition and " believing in all 
 unbelief," it must be the mind of the infidel just described, 
 for whose existence we have Dr. Cumming's ex officio word as 
 a theologian ; and to theologians we may apply what Sancho 
 Panza says of the bachelors of Salamanca, that they never 
 tell lies except when it suits their purpose. 
 
 The total absence from Dr. Cumming's theological mind of 
 any demarcation between fact and rhetoric is exhibited in 
 another passage, where he adopts the dramatic form: 
 
 "Ask the peasant on the hill and I have asked amid the moun- 
 tains ofBraemar and Deeside, ' How do you know that this book is 
 divine, and that the religion you profess is true? You never read 
 Paley ? ' ' No, I never heard of him.' ' You have never read But- 
 ler ?' ' No, I have never heard of him.' ' Nor Chalmers ? ' ' No, 
 I do not know him.' ' You have never read any books on evidence?' 
 ' No, I have read no such books.' ' Then how do you know this 
 book is true I ' ' Know it ! Tell me that the Dee, the Clunie, and 
 the Garrawalt, the streams at my feet, do not run ; that the winds do 
 not sigh amid the gorges of these blue hills ; that the sun does not 
 kindle the peaks of Loch-na-Gar; tell me my heart does not beat, and 
 I will believe you ; but do not tell me the Bible is not divine. I have 
 found its truth illuminating my footsteps ; its consolations sustaining 
 my heart. May my tongue cleave to my mouth's roof, and my right 
 hand forget its cunning, if I ever deny what is my deepest inner ex- 
 perience, that this blessed book is the book of God.' " 1 
 
 Dr. Gumming is so slippery and lax in his mode of presen- 
 tation, that we find it impossible to gather whether he means 
 to assert, that this is what a peasant on the mountains of 
 Braemar did say, or that it is what such a peasant would say : 
 in the one case, the passage may be taken as a measure of 
 his truthfulness ; in the other, of his judgment. 
 
 His own faith, apparently, has not been altogether intui- 
 tire, like that of his rhetorical peasant, for he tells us" 
 
 l Church before the Flood, p. 35. a Apoc. Sketches, p. 405.
 
 120 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 that he has himself experienced what it is to have religious 
 doubts. "I was tainted while at the University by this 
 spirit of scepticism. I thought Christianity might not be 
 true. The very possibility of its being true was the thought 
 I felt I must meet and settle. Conscience could give me no 
 peace till I had settled it. I read, and I have read from 
 that day, for fourteen or fifteen years, till this, and now I 
 am as convinced, upon the clearest evidence, that this book 
 is the book of God as that I now address you." This expe- 
 rience, however, instead of impressing on him the fact that 
 doubt may be the stamp of a truth-loving mind, that 
 sunt quibus non credidisse honor est, et fidei futures pignus, 
 seems to have produced precisely the contrary effect. It has 
 not enabled him even to conceive the condition of a mind 
 " perplext in faith but pure in deeds," craving light, yearning 
 for a faith that will harmonize and cherish its highest pow- 
 ers and aspirations, but unable to find that faith in dogmatic 
 Christianity. His own doubts apparently were of a different 
 kind. Nowhere in his pages have we found a humble, can- 
 did, sympathetic attempt to meet the difficulties that may be 
 felt by an ingenuous mind. Everywhere he supposes that 
 the doubter is hardened, conceited, consciously shutting his 
 eyes to the light, a fool who is to be answered according to 
 his folly, that is, with ready replies made up of reckless 
 assertions, of apocryphal anecdotes, and, where other re- 
 sources fail, of vituperative imputation. As to the reading 
 which he has prosecuted for fifteen years either it has left 
 him totally ignorant of the relation which his own religious 
 creed bears to the criticism and philosophy of the nineteenth 
 century, or he systematically blinks that criticism and that 
 philosophy; and instead of honestly and seriously endeav- 
 oring to meet and solve what he knows to be the real diffi- 
 culties, contents himself with setting up popinjays to shoot 
 at, for the sake of confirming the ignorance and winning the 
 cheap admiration of his evangelical hearers and readers. 
 Like the Catholic preacher who, after throwing down his cap 
 and apostrophizing it as Luther, turned to his audience and,
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMLNG. 121 
 
 said, "You see this heretical fellow has not a word to say 
 for himself ," Dr. Gumming, having drawn his ugly portrait 
 of the infidel, and put arguments of a convenient quality into 
 his mouth, finds a " short and easy method " of confounding 
 this " croaking frog." 
 
 In his treatment of infidels, we imagine he is guided by a 
 mental process which may be expressed in the following syl- 
 logism : Whatever tends to the glory of God is true ; it is for 
 the glory of God that infidels should be as bad as possible ; 
 therefore, whatever tends to show that infidels are as bad as 
 possible is true. All infidels, he tells us, have been men of 
 " gross and licentious lives." Is there not some well-known 
 unbeliever David Hume, for example of whom even Dr. 
 Cumming's readers may have heard as an exception? No 
 matter. Some one suspected that he was not an exception ; 
 and as that suspicion tends to the glory of God, it is one for 
 a Christian to entertain. 1 If we were unable to imagine this 
 kind of self-sophistication, we should be obliged to suppose 
 that, relying on the ignorance of his evangelical disciples, he 
 fed them with direct and conscious falsehoods. " Voltaire," 
 he informs them, "declares there is no God;" he was "an 
 antitheist, that is, one who deliberately and avowedly opposed 
 and hated God, who swore in his blasphemy that he would 
 dethrone him," and " advocated the very depths of the lowest 
 sensuality." With regard to many statements of a similar 
 kind, equally at variance with truth, in Dr. Cumming's vol- 
 umes, we presume that he has been misled by hearsay or by 
 the second-hand character of his acquaintance with free- 
 thinking literature. An evangelical preacher is not obliged 
 to be well-read. Here, however, is a case which the extrem- 
 .est supposition of educated ignorance will not reach. Even 
 books of " evidences " quote from Voltaire the line, 
 
 " Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait 1'inventer ; " 
 
 even persons fed on the mere whey and buttermilk of litera- 
 ture must know that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if 
 
 1 See Man. of Evidences, p. 73.
 
 122 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Hot a theist, -*- must know that he wrote not against God, but 
 against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom he believed to 
 be a false God, must know that to say Voltaire was an athe- 
 ist on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite 
 opposed hereditary monarchy because he declared the Bruns- 
 wick family had no title to the throne. That Dr. Gumming 
 should repeat the vulgar fables about Voltaire's death is 
 merely what we might expect from the specimens we have 
 seen of his illustrative Stories. A man whose accounts of 
 his own experience are apocryphal, is not likely to put bor- 
 rowed narratives to any severe test. 
 
 The alliance between intellectual and moral perversion is 
 strikingly typified by the way in which he alternates from 
 the un veracious to the absurd, from misrepresentation to con- 
 tradiction. Side by side with the adduction of " facts " such 
 as those we have quoted, we find him arguing on one page 
 that the Trinity was too grand a doctrine to have been con- 
 ceived by man, and was therefore Divine; and on another 
 page, that the Incarnation had been preconceived by man, 
 and is therefore to be accepted as Divine. But we are less 
 concerned with the fallacy of his " ready replies " than with 
 their falsity ; and even of this we can only afford space for 
 a very few specimens. Here is one : " There is a thousand 
 times more proof that the gospel of John was written by him 
 than there is that the Ava/3cuns was written by Xenophon, or 
 the Ar8 Poetioa by Horace." If Dr. Gumming had chosen 
 Plato's Epistles or Anaoreon's Poems, instead of the Anabasis 
 or the ArS Poetic^ he Would have reduced the extent of the 
 falsehood; and would have furnished a ready reply which 
 would have been equally effective with his Sunday-school 
 teachers and their disputants. Hence we conclude this prodi- 
 gality of misstatement, this exuberance of mendacity, is an 
 effervescence of zeal in majorem glorlam Dei. Elsewhere he 
 tells us that " the idea of the author of the * Vestiges ' is, 
 that man is the development of a monkey, that the monkey 
 is the embryo man, so that if you keep a baboon long enough, 
 it will develop itself into a man." How well Dr. Gumming
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 
 
 has qualified himself to judge of the ideas in "that very 
 unphilosophical book," as he pronounces it, may be inferred 
 from the fact that he implies the author of the " Vestiges " 
 to have originated the nebular hypothesis. 
 
 In the volume from which the last extract is taken, even 
 the hardihood of assertion is surpassed by the suicidal char' 
 acter of the argument. It is called " The Church before the 
 Flood," and is devoted chiefly to the adjustment of the ques-i 
 tion between the Bible and Geology. Keeping within the 
 limits we have prescribed to ourselves, we do not enter into 
 the matter of this discussion ; we merely pause a little over 
 the volume in order to point out Dr. Cumming's mode of 
 treating the question. He first tells us that < ( the Bible has 
 not a single scientific error in it ; " that " its slightest intima- 
 tions of scientific principles or natural phenomena have in every 
 instance been demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true," and 
 he asks : 
 
 " How is it that Moses, with no greater education than the Hindoo 
 or the ancient philosopher, has written his book, touching science at 
 a thousand points, so accurately that scientific research has discov- 
 ered no flaws in it ; and yet in those investigations which have taken 
 place in more recent centuries, it has not teen shown that he has 
 committed one single error, or made one Bplitary assertion which cafl 
 be proved by the maturest science, or by the mpst eagle-eyed philqgo-!- 
 pher, to be incorrect, scientifically or historically ? " 
 
 According to this, the relation of the Bible to Science 
 should be one of the strong points of apologists for Revela- 
 tion ; the scientific accuracy of Moses should stand at the. 
 head of their evidences; and they might urge with some 
 cogency, that since Aristotle, who devoted himself to science, 
 and lived many ages after Moses, does little else than err in-t 
 geniously, this fact, that the Jewish Lawgiver, though touch-, 
 ing science at a thousand points, has written nothing that haj 
 not been "demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true," is 
 an irrefragable proof of his having derived his knowledge 
 from a supernatural source. How does it happen, then, that 
 Dr. Cumming forsakes this strong position ? How is it that
 
 124 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 we find him, some pages further on, engaged in reconciling 
 Genesis with the discoveries of science, by means of imagi- 
 native hypotheses and feats of " interpretation " ? Surely, 
 that which has been demonstrated to be exactly and strictly 
 true does not require hypothesis and critical argument, in 
 order to show that it may possibly agree with those very dis- 
 coveries by means of which its exact and strict truth has 
 been demonstrated. And why should Dr. Gumming suppose, 
 as we shall presently find him supposing, that men of science 
 hesitate to accept the Bible, because it appears to contradict 
 their discoveries ? By his own statement, that appearance of 
 contradiction does not exist; on the contrary, it has been 
 demonstrated that the Bible precisely agrees with their dis- 
 coveries. Perhaps, however, in saying of the Bible that its 
 " slightest intimations of scientific principles or natural phe- 
 nomena have in every instance been demonstrated to be 
 exactly and strictly true," Dr. Gumming merely means to im- 
 ply that theologians have found out a way of explaining the 
 biblical text so that it no longer, in their opinion, appears to 
 be in contradiction with the discoveries of science. One of 
 two things, therefore : either he uses language without the 
 slightest appreciation of its real meaning ; or the assertions 
 he makes on one page are directly contradicted by the argu- 
 ments he urges on another. 
 
 Dr. Cumming's principles or, we should rather say, con- 
 fused notions of biblical interpretation, as exhibited in 
 this volume, are particularly significant of his mental calibre. 
 He says : a " Men of science, who are full of scientific investi- 
 gation and enamored of scientific discovery, will hesitate be- 
 fore they accept a book which, they think, contradicts the 
 plainest and. the most unequivocal disclosures they have 
 made in the bowels of the earth or among the stars of the 
 sky. To all these we answer, as we have already indicated, 
 there is not the least dissonance between God's written book 
 and the most mature discoveries of geological science. One 
 thing, however, there may be ; there may be a contradiction 
 1 Church before the Flood, p. 93.
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 125 
 
 between the discoveries of geology and our preconceived inter- 
 pretations of the Bible. But this is not because the Bible is 
 wrong, but because our interpretation is wrong." (The ital- 
 ics in all cases are our own.) 
 
 Elsewhere he says : " It seems to me plainly evident that 
 the record of Genesis, when read fairly and not in the light 
 of our prejudices, and, mind you, the essence of Popery is to 
 read the Bible in the light of our opinions, instead of viewing 
 our opinions in the light of the Bible, in its plain and obvious 
 sense, falls in perfectly with;' the assertion of geologists." 
 
 On comparing these two passages, we gather that when Dr. 
 Gumming, under stress of geological discovery, assigns to the 
 biblical text a meaning entirely different from that which, on 
 his own showing, was universally ascribed to it for more than 
 three thousand years, he regards himself as "viewing his 
 opinions in the light of the Bible in its plain and obvious 
 sense " ! Now he is reduced to one of two alternatives : 
 either he must hold that the "plain and obvious meaning" 
 of the whole Bible differs from age to age, so that the cri- 
 terion of its meaning lies in the sum of knowledge possessed 
 by each successive age, the Bible being an elastic garment 
 for the growing thought of mankind ; or he must hold that 
 some portions are amenable to this criterion, and others not 
 so. In the former case he accepts the principle of interpre- 
 tation adopted by the early German rationalists ; in the latter 
 case he has to show a further criterion by which we can 
 judge what parts of the Bible are elastic and what rigid. If 
 he says that the interpretation of the text is rigid wherever 
 it treats of doctrines necessary to salvation, we answer that 
 for doctrines to be necessary to salvation they must first be 
 true ; and in order to be true, according to his own principle, 
 they must be founded on a correct interpretation of the bibli- 
 cal text. Thus he makes the necessity of doctrines to salva- 
 tion the criterion of infallible interpretation, and infallible 
 interpretation the criterion of doctrines being necessary to 
 salvation. He is whirled round in a circle, having, by admit- 
 ting the principle of novelty in interpretation, completely
 
 126 ESSAYS OP GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 deprived himself of a basis. That he should seize the very 
 moment in which he is most palpably betraying that he has 
 no test of biblical truth beyond his own opinion, as an appro- 
 priate occasion for flinging the rather novel reproach against 
 Popery that its essence is to " read the Bible in the light of 
 our opinions," would be an almost pathetic self-exposure, if 
 it were not disgusting. Imbecility that is not even meek 
 ceases to be pitiable and becomes simply odious. 
 
 Parenthetic lashes of this kind against Popery are very 
 frequent with Dr. Gumming, and occur even in his more de- 
 vout passages, where their introduction must surely disturb 
 the spiritual exercises of his hearers. Indeed, Roman Cath- 
 olics fare worse with him even than infidels. Infidels are the 
 small vermin, the mice to be bagged en passant. Th main 
 object of his chase the rats which are to be nailed up as 
 trophies are the Roman Catholics. Romanism is the mas- 
 terpiece of Satan ; but reassure yourselves ! Dr. Gumming 
 has been created. Antichrist is enthroned in the Vatican ; 
 but he is stoutly withstood by the Boanerges of Crown Court. 
 The personality of Satan, as might be expected, is a very 
 prominent tenet in Dr. Cumming's discourses; those who 
 doubt it are, he thinks, " generally specimens of the victims 
 of Satan as a triumphant seducer ; " and it is through the 
 medium of this doctrine that he habitually contemplates 
 Roman Catholics. They are the puppets of which the Devil 
 holds the strings. It is only exceptionally that he speaks of 
 them as fellow-men, acted on by the same desires, fears, and 
 hopes as himself ; his rule is to hold them up to his hearers 
 as foredoomed instruments of Satan, and vessels of wrath. 
 If he is obliged to admit that they are "no shams," that they 
 are " thoroughly in earnest," that is because they are in- 
 spired by hell, because they are under an "infra-natural" 
 influence. If their missionaries are found wherever Protes- 
 tant missionaries go, this zeal in propagating their faith ig 
 not in them a consistent virtue, as it is in Protestants, but a 
 " melancholy fact," affording additional evidence that they 
 are instigated and assisted by the Devil. And Dr. Gumming
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 127 
 
 is inclined to think that they work miracles, because that is 
 no more than might be expected from the known ability of 
 Satan, who inspires them. 1 He admits, indeed, that "there 
 is a fragment of the Church of Christ in the very bosom of 
 that awful apostasy," 2 and that there are members of the 
 Church of Home in glory ; but this admission is rare and epi- 
 sodical, is a declaration, pro forma, about as influential on 
 the general disposition and habits as an aristocrat's profession 
 of democracy. 
 
 This leads us to mention another conspicuous characteristic 
 of Dr. Cumming's teaching. the absence of genuine charity. 
 It is true that he makes large profession of tolerance and 
 liberality within a certain circle ; he exhorts Christians to 
 unity ; he would have Churchmen fraternize with Dissenters, 
 and exhorts these two branches of God's family to defer the 
 settlement of their differences till the millennium. But the 
 love thus taught is the love of the clan, which is the correla- 
 tive of antagonism to the rest of mankind. It is not sym- 
 pathy and helpfulness towards men as men, but towards 
 men as Christians, and as Christians in the sense of a small 
 minority. Dr. Cumming's religion may demand a tribute of 
 love, but it gives a charter to hatred ; it may enjoin charity, 
 but it fosters all uncharitableness. If I believe that God 
 tells me to love my enemies, but at the same time hates his 
 own enemies and requires me to have one will with him, 
 which has the larger scope, love or hatred ? And we refer 
 to those pages of Dr. Cumming's in which he opposes Koman 
 Catholics, Puseyites, and infidels, pages which form the 
 larger proportion of what he has published, for proof that 
 the idea of God which both the logic and spirit of his dis- 
 courses keep present to his hearers, is that of a God who 
 hates his enemies, a God who teaches love by fierce denun- 
 ciations of wrath, a God who encourages obedience to his 
 precepts by elaborately revealing to us that his own govern- 
 ment is in precise opposition to those precepts. We know 
 the usual evasions on this subject. We know Dr. Cumming 
 1 Signs of the Times, p. 38.' * Apoc. Sketches, p. 243.
 
 128 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 would say that even Roman Catholics are to be loved and 
 succored as men; that he would help even that "unclean 
 spirit," Cardinal Wiseman, out of a ditch. But who that is 
 in the slightest degree acquainted with the action of the 
 human mind, will believe that any genuine and large charity 
 can grow out of an exercise of love which is always to have 
 an arriere-pensee of hatred ? Of what quality would be the 
 conjugal love of a husband who loved his spouse as a wife, 
 but hated her as a woman ? It is reserved for the regenerate 
 mind, according to Dr. Cumming's conception of it, to be 
 " wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral, in a 
 moment." Precepts of charity uttered with faint breath at 
 the end of a sermon are perfectly futile, when all the force of 
 the lungs has been spent in keeping the hearer's mind fixed 
 on the conception of his fellow-men, not as fellow-sinners 
 and fellow-sufferers, but as agents of hell, as automata 
 through whom Satan plays his game upon earth, not on 
 objects which call forth their reverence, their love, their hope 
 of good even in the most strayed and perverted, but on a 
 minute identification of human things with such symbols as 
 the scarlet whore, the beast out of the abyss, scorpions whose 
 sting is in their tails, men who have the mark of the beast, 
 and unclean spirits like frogs. You might as well attempt 
 to educate a child's sense of beauty by hanging its nursery 
 with the horrible and grotesque pictures in which the early 
 painters represented the Last Judgment, as expect Christian 
 graces to flourish on that prophetic interpretation which Dr. 
 Gumming offers as the principal nutriment of his flock. Quite 
 apart from the critical basis of that interpretation, quite apart 
 from the degree of truth there may be in Dr. Cumming's 
 prognostications, questions into which we do not choose to 
 enter, his use of prophecy must be a priori condemned in 
 the judgment of right-minded persons, by its results as testi- 
 fied in the net moral effect of his sermons. The best minds 
 that accept Christianity as a divinely inspired system be- 
 lieve that the great end of the Gospel is not merely the 
 saving but the educating of men's souls, the creating within
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. 129 
 
 them of holy dispositions, the subduing of egoistical preten- 
 sions, and the perpetual enhancing of the desire that the will 
 of God a will synonymous with goodness and truth may 
 be done on earth. But what relation to all this has a system 
 of interpretation which keeps the mind of the Christian in 
 the position of a spectator at a gladiatorial show, of which 
 Satan is the wild beast in the shape of the great red dragon, 
 and two thirds of mankind the victims, the whole provided 
 and got up by God for the edification of the saints ? The 
 demonstration that the Second Advent is at hand, if true, 
 can have no really holy, spiritual effect ; the highest state of 
 mind inculcated by the Gospel is resignation to the disposal 
 of God's providence, " Whether we live, we live unto the 
 Lord; whether we die, we die unto the Lord," not an eager- 
 ness to see a temporal manifestation which shall confound 
 the enemies of God and give exaltation to the saints ; it is to 
 dwell in Christ by spiritual communion with his nature, not 
 to fix the date when he shall appear in the sky. Dr. Cum- 
 ming's delight in shadowing forth the downfall of the Man 
 of Sin, in prognosticating the battle of Gog and Magog, and 
 in advertising the premillennial Advent, is simply the trans- 
 portation of political passions on to a so-called religious plat- 
 form; it is the anticipation of the triumph of "our party," 
 accomplished by our principal men being " sent for " into the 
 clouds. Let us be understood to speak in all seriousness. 
 If we were in search of amusement, we should not seek for it 
 by examining Dr. Cumming's works in order to ridicule them. 
 We are simply discharging a disagreeable duty in delivering 
 our opinion that, judged by the highest standard even of or- 
 thodox Christianity, they are little calculated to produce 
 
 " A close* walk with God, 
 A calm and heavenly frame ; " 
 
 but are more likely to nourish egoistic complacency and pre- 
 tension, a hard and condemnatory spirit towards one's fellow- 
 men, and a busy occupation with the minutiae of events, 
 instead of a reverent contemplation of great facts and a wise
 
 130 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 application of great principles. It would be idle to consider 
 Dr. Cumining's theory of prophecy in any other light ; as a 
 philosophy of history or a specimen of biblical interpreta- 
 tion, it bears about the same relation to the extension of gen- 
 uine knowledge as the astrological " house " in the heavens 
 bears to the true structure and relations of the universe. 
 
 The slight degree in which Dr. Cumming's faith is imbued 
 with truly human sympathies is exhibited in the way he 
 treats the doctrine of Eternal Punishment. Here a little of 
 that readiness to strain the letter of the Scriptures which he 
 so often manifests when his object is to prove a point against 
 Romanism would have been an amiable frailty if it had been 
 applied on the side of mercy. When he is bent on proving 
 that the prophecy concerning the Man of Sin, in the Second 
 Epistle to the Thessalonians, refers to the Pope, he can ex- 
 tort from the innocent word Katiurat the meaning cathedrize, 
 though why we are to translate " He as God cathedrizes in 
 the temple of God," any more than we are to translate " Ca- 
 thedrize here, while I go and pray yonder," it is for Dr. Gum- 
 ming to show more clearly than he has yet done. But when 
 rigorous literality will favor the conclusion that the greater 
 proportion of the human race will be eternally miserable, 
 then he is rigorously literal. 
 
 He says : " The Greek words, ek TOVS cuwvas TWV auavw, here 
 translated 'everlasting,' signify literally 'unto the ages of 
 ages ; ' ail &v, ' always being,' that is, everlasting, ceaseless 
 existence. Plato uses the word in this sense when he says, 
 ' The Gods that live forever.' But I must also admit, that 
 this word is used several times in a limited extent, as, for 
 instance, 'The everlasting hills.' Of course, this does not 
 mean that there never will be a time when the hills will 
 cease to stand; the expression here is evidently figurative, 
 but it implies eternity. The hills shall remain as long as 
 fchat earth lasts, and no hand has power to remove them but 
 that Eternal One which first called them into being ; so the 
 state of the soul remains the same after death as long as the 
 soul exists, and no one has power to alter it The same
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 131 
 
 word is often applied to denote the existence of God, ' the 
 Eternal God.' Can we limit the word when applied to him ? 
 Because occasionally used in a limited sense, we must not infer 
 it is always so. 'Everlasting' plainly means in Scripture 
 ' without end ; ' it is only to be explained figuratively when 
 it is evident it cannot be interpreted in any other way." 
 
 We do not discuss whether Dr. Cumming's interpretation 
 accords with the meaning of the New Testament writers : we 
 simply point to the fact that the text becomes elastic for him 
 when he wants freer play for his prejudices, while he makes 
 it an adamantine barrier against the admission that mercy 
 will ultimately triumph, that God, L e., Love, will be all in 
 all. He assures us that he does not " delight to dwell on the 
 misery of the lost ; " and we believe him. That misery does 
 not seem to be a question of feeling with him, either one way 
 or the other. He does not merely resign himself to the aw- 
 ful mystery of eternal punishment ; he contends for it. Do 
 we object, he asks, 1 to everlasting happiness ? then why ob- 
 ject to everlasting misery? reasoning which is perhaps 
 felt to be cogent by theologians who anticipate the everlast- 
 ing happiness for themselves and the everlasting misery for 
 their neighbors. 
 
 The compassion of some Christians has been glad to take 
 refuge in the opinion that the Bible allows the supposition 
 of annihilation for the impenitent ; but the rigid sequence of 
 Dr. Cumming's reasoning will not admit of this idea. He sees 
 that flax is made into linen, and linen into paper ; that paper, 
 when burnt, partly ascends as smoke and then again descends 
 in rain or in dust and carbon. "Not one particle of the 
 original flax is lost, although there may be not one particle 
 that has not undergone an entire change : annihilation is not, 
 but change of form is. It will be thus with our bodies at the 
 resurrection. The death of the body means not annihilation. 
 Not one feature of the face will be annihilated." Having es- 
 tablished the perpetuity of the body by this close and clear 
 analogy, namely, that as there is a total change in the parti- 
 1 Man. of Christ. Evidences, p. 184.
 
 132 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 cles of flax in consequence of which they no longer appear as 
 flax, so there will not be a total change in the particles of the 
 human body, but they will reappear as the human body, he 
 does not seem to consider that the perpetuity of the body in- 
 volves the perpetuity of the soul, but requires separate evi- 
 dence for this, and finds such evidence by begging the very 
 question at issue ; namely, by asserting that the text of the 
 Scriptures implies " the perpetuity of the punishment of the 
 lost, and the consciousness of the punishment which they 
 endure." Yet it is drivelling like this which is listened to 
 and lauded as eloquence by hundreds, and which a Doctor of 
 Divinity can believe that he has his " reward as a saint " for 
 preaching and publishing ! 
 
 One more characteristic of Dr. Cumming's writings, and 
 we have done. This is the perverted moral judgment that 
 everywhere reigns in them. Not that this perversion is 
 peculiar to Dr. Gumming : it belongs to the dogmatic system 
 which he shares with all evangelical believers. But the ab- 
 stract tendencies of systems are represented in very different 
 degrees according to the different characters of those who 
 embrace them, just as the same food tells differently on dif- 
 ferent constitutions ; and there are certain qualities in Dr. 
 Cumming that cause the perversion of which we speak to 
 exhibit itself with peculiar prominence in his teaching. A 
 single extract will enable us to explain what we mean. 
 
 " The ' thoughts ' are evil. If it were possible for human eye to 
 discern and to detect the thoughts that flutter around the heart of an un- 
 regenerate man, to mark their hue and their multitude, it would be 
 found that they are indeed ' evil.' We speak not of the thief, and the 
 murderer, and the adulterer, and such like, whose crimes draw down 
 the cognizance of earthly tribunals, and whose unenviable character it 
 is to take the lead in the paths of sin j but we refer to the men who 
 are marked out by their practice of many of the seemliest moralities of 
 life, by the exercise of the kindliest affections, and the interchange 
 of the sweetest reciprocities, and of these men, if unrenewed and 
 unchanged, we pronounce that their thoughts are evil. To ascertain 
 this, we must refer to the object around which our thoughts ought
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 133 
 
 continually to circulate. The Scriptures assert that this object is the 
 glory of God ; that for this we ought to think, to act, and to speak ; 
 and that in thus thinking, acting, and speaking, there is involved the 
 purest and most enduring bliss. Now it will be found true of the 
 most amiable men, that with all their good society and kindliness of 
 heart, and all their strict and unbending integrity, they never or rarely 
 think of the glory of God. The question never occurs to them, Will 
 this redound to the glory of God ? Will this make his name more 
 known, his being more loved, his praise more sung ? And just inas- 
 much as their every thought comes short of this lofty aim, in so much 
 loes it come short of good, and entitle itself to the character of eviL 
 If the glory of God is not the absorbing and the influential aim of 
 their thoughts, then they are evil ; but God's glory never enters into 
 their minds. They are amiable, because it chances to be one of the 
 constitutional tendencies of their individual character, left uneffaced by 
 the Fall ; and they are just and upright, because they have perhaps no 
 occasion to be otherwise, or find it subservient to their interests to main- 
 tain such a character." l 
 
 Again we read: 8 
 
 " There are traits in the Christian character which the mere worldly 
 man cannot understand. He can understand the outward morality, 
 but he cannot understand the inner spring of it : he can understand 
 Dorcas' liberality to the poor, but he cannot penetrate the ground of 
 Dorcas' liberality. Some men give to the poor because phey are os- 
 tentatious, or because they think the poor will ultimately avenge their 
 neglect; but the Christian gives to the poor, not only because he has 
 sensibilities like other men, but because, ' inasmuch as ye did it to the 
 least of these my brethren, ye did it unto me.' " 
 
 Before entering on the more general question involved in 
 these quotations, we must point to the clauses we have 
 marked with italics, where Dr. Gumming appears to express 
 sentiments which, we are happy to think, are not shared by 
 the majority of his brethren in the faith. Dr. Gumming, it 
 seems, is unable to conceive that the natural man can have 
 any other motive for being just and upright than that it is 
 useless to be otherwise, or that a character for honesty ia 
 
 1 Qcc. Disc. vol. I. p. & * Ibid. p. 230.
 
 134 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 profitable ; according to his experience, between the feelings 
 of ostentation and selfish alarm and the feeling of love to 
 Christ, there lie no sensibilities which can lead a man to re- 
 lieve want. Granting, as we should prefer to think, that it 
 is Dr. Cuinm ing's exposition of his sentiments which is defi- 
 cient rather than his sentiments themselves, still the fact 
 that the deficiency lies precisely here, and that he can over- 
 look it not only in the haste of oral delivery but in the 
 examination of proof-sheets, is strongly significant of his 
 mental bias, of the faint degree in which he sympathizes 
 with the disinterested elements of human feeling, and of the 
 fact, which we are about to dwell upon, that those feelings 
 are totally absent from his religious theory. Now, Dr. Gum- 
 ming invariably assumes that, in fulminating against those 
 who differ from him, he is standing on a moral elevation to 
 which they are compelled reluctantly to look up ; that his 
 theory of motives and conduct is in its loftiness and purity a 
 perpetual rebuke to their low and vicious desires and prac- 
 tice. It is time he should be told that the reverse is the 
 fact ; that there are men who do not merely cast a superfi- 
 cial glance at his doctrine, and fail to see its beauty or jus- 
 tice, but who, after a close consideration of that doctrine, 
 pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development, and 
 therefore positively noxious. Dr. Gumming is fond of show- 
 ing up the teaching of Romanism, and accusing it of under- 
 mining true morality : it is time he should be told that there 
 is a large body, both of thinkers and practical men, who hold 
 precisely the same opinion of his own teaching, with this 
 difference, that they do not regard it as the inspiration of 
 Satan, but as the natural crop of a human mind where the 
 soil is chiefly made up of egoistic passions and dogmatic 
 beliefs. 
 
 Dr. Cumming's theory, as we have seen, is that actions are 
 good or evil according as they are prompted or not prompted 
 by an exclusive reference to the " glory of God." God, then, 
 in Dr. Cumming's conception, is a being who has no pleasure 
 in the exercise of love and truthfulnesg and justice, consid-
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 135 
 
 ered as affecting the well-being of his creatures ; he has sat- 
 isfaction in us only in so far as we exhaust our motives and 
 dispositions of all relation to our fellow-beings, and replace 
 sympathy with men by anxiety for the " glory of God." The 
 deed of Grace Darling, when she took a boat in the storm to 
 rescue drowning men and women, was not good if it was 
 only compassion that nerved her arm and impelled her to 
 brave death for the chance of saving others ; it was only good 
 if she asked herself, Will this redound to the glory of God ? 
 The man who endures tortures rather than betray a trust, the 
 man who spends years in toil in order to discharge an obliga- 
 tion from which the law declares him free, must be animated 
 not by the spirit of fidelity to his fellow-man, but by a de- 
 sire to make "the name of God more known." The sweet 
 charities of domestic life the ready hand and the sooth- 
 ing word in sickness, the forbearance towards frailties, the 
 prompt helpfulness in all efforts and sympathy in all joys, 
 are simply evil if they result from a "constitutional ten- 
 dency," or from dispositions disciplined by the experience of 
 suffering and the perception of moral loveliness. A wife is 
 not to devote herself to her husband out of love to him and 
 a sense of the duties implied by a close relation, she is to 
 be a faithful wife for the glory of God ; if she feels her nat- 
 ural affections welling up too strongly, she is to repress them ; 
 it will not do to act from natural affection, she must think 
 of the glory of God. A man is to guide his affairs with en- 
 ergy and discretion, not from an honest desire to fulfil his 
 responsibilities as a member of society and a father, but 
 that " God's praise may be sung." Dr. Cumming's Christian 
 pays his debts for the glory of God ; were it not for the coer- 
 cion of that supreme motive, it would be evil to pay them. 
 A man is not to be just from a feeling of justice ; he is not 
 to help his fellow-men out of good-will to his fellow-men ; he 
 is not to be a tender husband and father out of affection : all 
 these natural muscles and fibres are to be torn away and re- 
 placed by a patent steel-spring, anxiety for the " glory of 
 God."
 
 136 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Happily, the constitution of human nature forbids the com- 
 plete prevalence of such a theory. Fatally powerful as re- 
 ligious systems have been, human nature is stronger and 
 wider than religious systems, and though dogmas may ham* 
 per, they cannot absolutely repress its growth : build walls 
 round the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar have 
 by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of 
 the sap. But next to that hatred of the enemies of God 
 which is the principle of persecution, there perhaps has been 
 no perversion more obstructive of true moral development 
 than this substitution of a reference to the glory of God for 
 the direct promptings of the sympathetic feelings. Benevo- 
 lence and justice are strong only in proportion as they are 
 directly and inevitably called into activity by their proper 
 objects : pity is strong only because we are strongly impressed 
 by suffering ; and only in proportion as it is compassion that 
 speaks through the eyes when we soothe, and moves the arm 
 when we succor, is a deed strictly benevolent. If the sooth- 
 ing or the succor be given because another being wishes or 
 approves it, the deed ceases to be one of benevolence, and 
 becomes one of deference, of obedience, of self-interest, or 
 vanity. Accessory motives may aid in producing an action, 
 but they presuppose the weakness of the direct motive; 
 and conversely, when the direct motive is strong, the action 
 of accessory motives will be excluded. If, then, as Dr. 
 Gumming inculcates, the glory of God is to be " the absorb- 
 ing and the influential aim " in our thoughts and actions, this 
 must tend to neutralize the human sympathies ; the stream 
 of feeling will be diverted from its natural current in order 
 to feed an artificial canal. The idea of God is really moral 
 in its influence it really cherishes all that is best and love- 
 liest in man only when God is contemplated as sympathiz- 
 ing with the pure elements of human feeling, as possessing 
 infinitely all those attributes which we recognize to be moral 
 in humanity. In this light, the idea of God and the sense of 
 His presence intensify all noble feeling, and encourage all 
 noble effort, on the same principle that human sympathy is
 
 EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. GUMMING. 137 
 
 found a source of strength : the brave man feels braver when 
 he knows that another stout heart is beating time with his ; 
 the devoted woman who is wearing out her years in patient 
 effort to alleviate suffering or save vice from the last stages 
 of degradation, finds aid in the pressure of a friendly hand 
 which tells her that there is one who understands her deeds, 
 and in her place would do the like. The idea of a God who 
 not only sympathizes with all we feel and endure for our 
 fellow-men, but who will pour new life into our too languid 
 love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an ex- 
 tension and multiplication of the effects produced by human 
 sympathy ; and it has been intensified for the better spirits 
 who have been under the influence of orthodox Christianity 
 by the contemplation of Jesus as " God manifest in the flesh." 
 But Dr. Cumming's God is the very opposite of all this. He 
 is a God who, instead of sharing and aiding our human sym- 
 pathies, is directly in collision with them ; who, instead of 
 strengthening the bond between man and man, by encourag- 
 ing the sense that they are both alike the objects of His love 
 and care, thrusts Himself between them and forbids them to 
 feel for each other except as they have relation to Him. He 
 is a God who, instead of adding His solar force to swell the 
 tide of those impulses that tend to give humanity a common 
 life in which the good of one is the good of all, commands us 
 to check those impulses, lest they should prevent us from 
 thinking of His glory. It is in vain for Dr. Gumming to say 
 that we are to love man for God's sake : with the conception 
 of God which his teaching presents, the love of man for God's 
 sake involves, as his writings abundantly show, a strong 
 principle of hatred. We can only love one being for the 
 sake of another when there is an habitual delight in associat- 
 ing the idea of those two beings, that is, when the object 
 of our indirect love is a source of joy and honor to the object 
 of our direct love ; but, according to Dr. Cumming's theory, 
 the majority of mankind the majority of his neighbors 
 are in precisely the opposite relation to God. His soul has 
 no pleasure in them, they belong more to Satan than to Him,
 
 138 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 and if they contribute to His glory, it is against their will. 
 Dr. Gumming then can only love some men for God's sake ; 
 the rest he must in consistency hate for God's sake. 
 
 There must be many, even in the circle of Dr. Cumming's 
 admirers, who would be revolted by the doctrine we have 
 just exposed, if their natural good sense and healthy feeling 
 were not early stifled by dogmatic beliefs, and their reverence 
 misled by pious phrases. But as it is, many a rational ques- 
 tion, many a generous instinct, is repelled as the suggestion 
 of a supernatural enemy, or as the ebullition of human pride 
 and corruption. This state of inward contradiction can be 
 put an end to only by the conviction that the free and dili- 
 gent exertion of the intellect, instead of being a sin, is part 
 of their responsibility, that Bight and Reason are synony- 
 mous. The fundamental faith for man is, faith in the result 
 of a brave, honest, and steady use of all his faculties : 
 
 " Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
 But more of reverence in us dwell ; 
 That mind and soul according well 
 May make one music as before, 
 But vaster." 
 
 Before taking leave of Dr. Gumming, let us express a hope 
 that we have in no case exaggerated the unfavorable charac- 
 ter of the inferences to be drawn from his pages. His creed 
 often obliges him to hope the worst of men, and exert him- 
 self in proving that the worst is true ; but thus far we are 
 happier than he. We have no theory which requires us to 
 attribute unworthy motives to Dr. Gumming, no opinions, 
 religious or irreligious, which can make it a gratification to 
 us to detect him in delinquencies. On the contrary, the bet- 
 ter we are able to think of him as a man, while we are obliged 
 to disapprove him as a theologian, the stronger will be the 
 evidence for our conviction that the tendency towards good 
 in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly coun- 
 teract, and which ensures the ultimate triumph of that ten- 
 dency over all dogmatic perversions.
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 
 
 THERE is a valuable class of books on great subjects 
 which have something of the character and functions of 
 good popular lecturing. They are not original, not subtle, 
 not of close logical texture, not exquisite either in thought 
 or style ; but by virtue of these negatives they are all the 
 more fit to act on the average intelligence. They have 
 enough of organizing purpose in them to make their facts 
 illustrative, and to leave a distinct result in the mind even 
 when most of the facts are forgotten ; and they have enough 
 of vagueness and vacillation in their theory to win them ready 
 acceptance from a mixed audience. The vagueness and vacil- 
 lation are not devices of timidity ; they are the honest result 
 of the writer's own mental character, which adapts him to be 
 the instructor and the favorite of the " general reader." For 
 the most part, the general reader of the present day does not 
 exactly know what distance he goes ; he only knows that he 
 does not go "too far." Of any remarkable thinker, whose 
 writings have excited controversy, he likes to have it said 
 that "his errors are to be deplored," leaving it not too cer- 
 tain what those errors are ; he is fond of what may be called 
 disembodied opinions, that float in vapory phrases above all 
 systems oi thought or action; he likes an undefined Chris- 
 tianity which opposes itself to nothing in particular, an unde- 
 fined education of the people, an undefined amelioration of 
 all things : in fact, he likes sound views, nothing extreme, 
 but something between the excesses of the past and the ex- 
 cesses of the present. This modern type of the general reader 
 may be known, in conversation by the cordiality with which
 
 140 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 he assents to indistinct, blurred statements : say that black 
 is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it ; say that 
 black is not so very black, he will reply, " Exactly." He has 
 no hesitation, if you wish it, even to get up a public meeting 
 and express his conviction that at times, and within certain 
 limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal ; but, 
 on the other hand, he would urge that the spirit of geometry 
 may be carried a little too far. His only bigotry is a bigotry 
 against any clearly denned scepticism, but belonging to a lack 
 of coherent thought, a spongy texture of mind, that gravi- 
 tates strongly to nothing. The one thing he is stanch for, 
 is the utmost liberty of private haziness. 
 
 But precisely these characteristics of the general reader, 
 rendering him incapable of assimilating ideas unless they are 
 administered in a highly diluted form, make it a matter of 
 rejoicing that there are clever, fair-minded men, who will 
 write books for him, men very much above him in knowl- 
 edge and ability, but not too remote from him in their habits 
 of thinking, and who can thus prepare for him infusions of 
 history and science, that will leave some solidifying deposit, 
 and save him from a fatal softening of the intellectual skele- 
 ton. Among such serviceable writers, Mr. Lecky's " History 
 of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Eu- 
 rope " entitles him to a high place. He has prepared him- 
 self for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed 
 reading ; he has chosen his facts and quotations with much 
 judgment ; and he gives proofs of those important moral qual- 
 ifications, impartiality, seriousness, and modesty. This praise 
 is chiefly applicable to the long chapter on the History of 
 Magic and Witchcraft, which opens the work, and to the two 
 chapters on the Antecedents and History of Persecution, which 
 occur, the one at the end of the first volume, the other at the 
 beginning of the second. In these chapters Mr. Lecky has a 
 narrower and better traced path before him than in other 
 portions of his work ; he is more occupied with presenting a 
 particular class of facts in their historical sequence, and in 
 their relation to certain grand tide-marks of opinion, than
 
 THE INFLUENCE OP RATIONALISM. 141 
 
 with disquisition; and his writing is freer than elsewhere 
 from an apparent confusedness of thought, and an exuber- 
 ance of approximative phrases, which can be serviceable in 
 no other way than as diluents needful for the sort of reader 
 we have just described. 
 
 The history of magic and witchcraft has been judiciously 
 chosen by Mr. Lecky, as the subject of his first section on 
 the declining sense of the miraculous, because it is strikingly 
 illustrative of a position, with the truth of which he is 
 strongly impressed, though he does not always treat of it 
 with desirable clearness and precision ; namely, that certain 
 beliefs become obsolete, not in consequence of direct argu- 
 ments against them, but because of their incongruity with 
 prevalent habits of thought. Here is his statement of the 
 two classes of influences by which the mass of men, in 
 what is called civilized society, get their beliefs gradually 
 modified : 
 
 " If we ask why it is that the world has rejected what was once so 
 universally and so intensely believed, why a narrative of an old woman 
 who had been seen riding on a broomstick, or who was proved to have 
 transformed herself into a wolf, and to have devoured the flocks of her 
 neighbors, is deemed so entirely incredible, most persons would proba- 
 bly be unable to give a very definite answer to the question. It is uot 
 because we have examined the evidence and found it insufficient, for the 
 disbelief always precedes, when it does not prevent, examination. It 
 is rather because the idea of absurdity is so strongly attached to such 
 narratives, that it is difficult even to consider them with gravity. Yet 
 at one time no such improbability was felt, and hundreds of persons 
 have been burnt simply on the two grounds I have mentioned. 
 
 " When so complete a change takes place in public opinion, it may 
 be ascribed to one or other of two causes. It may be the result of a 
 controversy which has conclusively settled the question, establishing to 
 the satisfaction of all parties a clear preponderance of argument or fact 
 in favor of one opinion, and making that opinion a truism which is 
 accepted by all enlightened men, even though they have not them- 
 selves examined the evidence on which it rests. Thus, if any one in a 
 company of ordinarily educated persons were to deny the motion of the 
 earth or the circulation of the nlnod, his statement would be received
 
 142 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 with derision, though it is probable that some of his audience would 
 be unable to demonstrate the first truth, and that very few of them 
 could give sufficient reasons for the second. They may not themselves 
 be able to defend their position ; but they are aware that, at certain 
 known periods of history, controversies on those subjects took place, 
 and that known writers then brought forward some definite arguments 
 or experiments, which were ultimately accepted by the whole learned 
 world as rigid and conclusive demonstrations. It is possible, also, for 
 as complete a change to be effected by what is called the spirit of the 
 age. The general intellectual tendencies pervading the literature of a 
 century profoundly modify the character of the public mind. They 
 form a new tone and habit of thought. They alter the measure of 
 probability. They create new attractions and new antipathies, and 
 they eventually cause as absolute a rejection of certain old opinions as 
 could be produced by the most cogent and definite arguments." 
 
 Mr. Lecky proceeds to some questionable views concerning 
 the evidences of witchcraft, which seem to be irreconcilable 
 even with his own remarks later on ; but they lead him to 
 the statement, thoroughly made out by his historical survey 
 that " the movement was mainly silent, unargumentative, and 
 insensible ; that men came gradually to disbelieve in witch- 
 craft, because they came gradually to look upon it as absurd ; 
 and that this new tone of thought appeared, first of all, in 
 those who were least subject to theological influences, and 
 soon spread through the educated laity, and, last of all, took 
 possession of the clergy." 
 
 We have rather painful proof that this "second class of 
 influences " with a vast number go hardly deeper than fashion, 
 and that witchcraft to many of us is absurd only on the same 
 ground that our grandfather's gigs are absurd. It is felt pre- 
 posterous to think of spiritual agencies in connection with 
 ragged beldames soaring on broomsticks, in an age when it 
 is known that mediums of communication with the invis- 
 ible world are usually unctuous personages dressed in excel- 
 lent broadcloth, who soar above the curtain-poles without 
 any broomstick, and who are not given to unprofitable in- 
 trigues. The enlightened imagination rejects the figure of a 
 witch with her profile in dark relief against the moon, and
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 143 
 
 her broomstick cutting a constellation. No undiscovered nat- 
 ural laws, no names of " respectable " witnesses, are invoked to 
 make us feel our presumption in questioning the diabolic inti- 
 macies of that obsolete old woman, for it is known now that the 
 undiscovered laws, and the witnesses qualified by the payment 
 of income tax, are all in favor of a different conception, the 
 image of a heavy gentleman in boots and black coat-tails fore- 
 shortened against the cornice. Y"et no less a person than Sir 
 Thomas Browne once wrote that those who denied there were 
 witches, inasmuch as they thereby denied spirits also, were 
 " obliquely and upon consequence a sort, not of infidels, but 
 of atheists." At present, doubtless, in certain circles unbe- 
 lievers in heavy gentlemen who float in the air by means of 
 undiscovered laws are also taxed with atheism ; illiberal as it 
 is not to admit that mere weakness of understanding may 
 prevent one from seeing how that phenomenon is necessarily 
 involved in the divine origin of things. With still more re- 
 markable parallelism, Sir Thomas Browne goes on : " Those 
 that, to refute their incredulity, desire to see apparitions, 
 shall questionless never behold any, nor have the power to 
 be so much as witches. The Devil hath made them already 
 in a heresy as capital as witchcraft, and to appear to them, were 
 but to convert them." It would be difficult to see what has 
 been changed here but the mere drapery of circumstance, if it 
 were not for this prominent difference between our days and 
 the days of witchcraft, that instead of torturing, drowning, or 
 burning the innocent, we give hospitality and large pay to 
 the highly distinguished medium. At least we are safely rid 
 of certain horrors ; but if the multitude that " farraginous 
 concurrence of all conditions, tempers, sexes, and ages " do 
 not roll back even to a superstition that carries cruelty in its 
 train, it is not because they possess a cultivated reason, but 
 because they are pressed upon and held up by what we may 
 call an external reason, the sum of conditions resulting from 
 the laws of material growth, from changes produced by great 
 historical collisions shattering the structures of ages and mak- 
 ing new highways for events and ideas, and from the activities
 
 144 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 of higher minds no longer existing merely as opinions and 
 teachings, but as institutions and organizations with which 
 the interests, the affections, and the habits of the multitude 
 are inextricably interwoven. No undiscovered laws account- 
 ing for small phenomena going forward under drawing-room 
 tables are likely to affect the tremendous facts of the increase 
 of population, the rejection of convicts by our colonies, the 
 exhaustion of the soil by cotton plantations, which urge even 
 upon the foolish certain questions, certain claims, certain 
 views concerning the scheme of the world, that can never 
 again be silenced. 
 
 If right reason is a right representation of the co-existences 
 and sequences of things, here are co-existences and sequences 
 that do not wait to be discovered, but press themselves upon 
 us like bars of iron. No seances at a guinea a head for the 
 sake of being pinched by " Mary Jane " can annihilate rail- 
 ways, steamships, and electric telegraphs, which are demon- 
 strating the interdependence of all human interests, and 
 making self-interest a duct for sympathy. These things are 
 part of the external reason to which internal silliness has 
 inevitably to accommodate itself. 
 
 Three points in the history of magic and witchcraft are 
 well brought out by Mr. Lecky : First, that the cruelties con- 
 nected with it did not begin until men's minds had ceased to 
 repose implicitly in a sacramental system which made them 
 feel well armed against evil spirits ; that is, until the eleventh 
 century, when there came a sort of morning dream of doubt 
 and heresy, bringing on the one side the terror of timid 
 consciences, and on the other the terrorism of authority or 
 zeal bent on checking the rising struggle. In that time of 
 comparative mental repose, says Mr. Lecky, 
 
 " all those conceptions of diabolical presence, all that predisposition 
 towards the miraculous, which acted so fearfully upon the imaginations 
 of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, existed ; but the implicit faith, 
 the boundless and triumphant credulity, with which the virtue of eccle- 
 siastical rites was accepted, rendered them comparatively innocuous. 
 If men had been a little less superstitious, the effects of their supersti-
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 145 
 
 tion would have been much more terrible. It was firmly believed that 
 any one who deviated from the strict line of orthodoxy must soon suc- 
 cumb beneath the power of Satan ; but as there was no spirit of re- 
 bellion or doubt, this persuasion did not produce any extraordinary 
 terrorism." 
 
 The Church was disposed to confound heretical opinion 
 with sorcery ; false doctrine was especially the devil's work, 
 and it was a ready conclusion that a denier or innovator had 
 held consultation with the father of lies. It is a saying of a 
 zealous Catholic in the sixteenth century, quoted by Maury in 
 his excellent work, " De la Magie," " Crescit cum, magia 
 hceresis, cum hceresi magia." Even those who doubted were 
 terrified at their doubts, for trust is more easily undermined 
 than terror ; fear is easier born than hope, lays a stronger 
 grasp on man's system than any other passion, and remains 
 master of a larger group of involuntary actions. A chief 
 aspect of man's moral development is the slow subduing of 
 fear by the gradual growth of intelligence, and its suppression 
 as a motive by the presence of impulses less animally selfish ; 
 so that in relation to invisible power fear at last ceases to 
 exist, save in that interfusion with higher faculties which we 
 call awe. 
 
 Secondly, Mr. Lecky shows clearly that dogmatic Protes- 
 tantism, holding the vivid belief in Satanic agency to be an 
 essential of piety, would have felt it shame to be a whit 
 behind Catholicism in severity against the Devil's servants. 
 Luther's sentiments were, that he would not suffer a witch to 
 live (he was not much more merciful to Jews) ; and, in spite 
 of his fondness for children, believing a certain child to have 
 been begotten by the Devil, he recommended the parents to 
 throw it into the river. The torch must be turned on the 
 worst errors of heroic minds, not in irreverent ingratitude, 
 but for the sake of measuring our vast and various debt to all 
 the influences which have concurred in the intervening ages 
 to make us recognize as detestable errors the honest convic- 
 tions of men who in mere individual capacity and moral 
 force were very much above us. Again, the Scotch Puritans,
 
 146 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 during the comparatively short period of their ascendency, 
 surpassed all Christians before them in the elaborate ingenu- 
 ity of the tortures they applied for the discovery of witch- 
 craft and sorcery, and did their utmost to prove that if Scotch 
 Calvinism was the true religion, the chief " note " of the true 
 religion was cruelty. It is hardly an endurable task to read 
 the story of their doings ; thoroughly to imagine them as a 
 past reality is already a sort of torture. One detail is enough, 
 and it is a comparatively mild one. It was the regular pro- 
 fession of men, called " prickers," to thrust long pins into the 
 body of a suspected witch in order to detect the insensible 
 spot which was the infallible sign of her guilt. On a super- 
 ficial view one would be in danger of saying that the main 
 difference between the teachers who sanctioned these things, 
 and the much-despised ancestors who offered human victims 
 inside a huge wicker idol, was that they arrived at a more 
 elaborate barbarity by a longer series of dependent proposi- 
 tions. We do not share Mr. Buckle's opinion that a Scotch 
 minister's groans were a part of his deliberate plan for keep- 
 ing the people in a state of terrified subjection ; the ministers 
 themselves held the belief they taught, and well might groan 
 over it. What a blessing has a little false logic been to the 
 world ! Seeing that men are so slow to question their prem- 
 ises, they must have made each other much more miserable, 
 if pity had not sometimes drawn tender conclusions not war- 
 ranted by major and minor ; if there had not been people with 
 an amiable imbecility of reasoning which enabled them at 
 once to cling to hideous beliefs, and to be conscientiously in- 
 consistent with them in their conduct. There is nothing like 
 acute deductive reasoning for keeping a man in the dark ; it 
 might be called the technique of the intellect, and the concen- 
 tration of the mind upon it corresponds to that predominance 
 of technical skill in art which ends in degradation of the art- 
 ist's function, unless new inspiration and invention come to 
 guide it. 
 
 And of this there is some good illustration furnished by 
 that third node in the history of witchcraft, the beginning of
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 147 
 
 its end, which, is treated in an interesting manner by Mr. 
 Lecky. It is worth noticing that the most important de- 
 fences of the belief in witchcraft, against the growing scepti- 
 cism in the latter part of the sixteenth century and in the 
 seventeenth, were the productions of men who in some de- 
 partments were among the foremost thinkers of their time. 
 One of them was Jean Bodin, the famous writer on govern- 
 ment and jurisprudence, whose " Republic," Hallam thinks, 
 had an important influence in England, and furnished "a 
 store of arguments and examples that were not lost on the 
 thoughtful minds of our countrymen." In some of his views 
 he was original and bold ; for example, he anticipated Mon, 
 tesquieu in attempting to appreciate the relations of govern- 
 ment and climate. Hallam inclines to the opinion that he 
 was a Jew, and attached Divine authority only to the Old Tes- 
 tament. But this was enough to furnish him with his chief 
 data for the existence of witches and for their capital punish- 
 ment ; and in the account of his "Republic," given by Hallam, 
 there is enough evidence that the sagacity which often en- 
 abled him to make fine use of his learning was also often 
 entangled in it, to temper our surprise at finding a writer on 
 political science of whom it could be said that, along with 
 Montesquieu, he was "the most philosophical of those who 
 had read so deeply, the most learned of those who had 
 thought so much," in the van of the forlorn hope to main- 
 tain the reality of witchcraft. It should be said that he was 
 equally confident of the unreality of the Copernican hypothe- 
 sis, on the ground that it was contrary to the tenets of the 
 theologians and philosophers and to common-sense, and there- 
 fore subversive of the foundations of every science. Of his 
 work on witchcraft, Mr. Lecky says : 
 
 " The ' Demonomanie des Sorciers ' is chiefly an appeal to authority, 
 which the author deemed on this subject so unanimous and so conclu- 
 sive that it was scarcely possible for any sane man to resist it. He 
 appealed to the popular belief in all countries, in all ages, and in all 
 religions. He cited the opinions of an immense multitude of the 
 greatest writers of pagan antiquity, and of the most illustrious of
 
 148 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 the fathers. He showed how the laws of all nations recognized the 
 existence of witchcraft ; and he collected hundreds of cases which had 
 been investigated before the tribunals of his own or of other countries. 
 He relates with the most minute and circumstantial detail, and with 
 the most unfaltering confidence, all the proceedings at the witches' Sab- 
 bath, the methods which the witches employed in transporting them- 
 selves through the air, their transformations, their carnal intercourse 
 with the Devil, their various means of injuring their enemies, the signs 
 that led to their detection, their confessions when condemned, and 
 their demeanor at the stake." 
 
 Something must be allowed for a lawyer's affection towards 
 a belief which had furnished so many " cases." Bodin's work 
 had been prompted by the treatise, "De Prestigiis Daemo- 
 num," written by John Wier, a German physician, a treatise 
 which is worth notice as an example of a transitional form of 
 opinion for which many analogies may be found in the his- 
 tory of both religion and science. Wier believed in demons, 
 and in possession by demons ; but his practice as a physician 
 had convinced him that the so-called witches were patients 
 and victims, that the Devil took advantage of their diseased 
 condition to delude them, and that there was no consent of an 
 evil will on the part of the women. He argued that the word 
 in Leviticus translated "witch" meant " poisoner," and be- 
 sought the princes of Europe to hinder the further spilling 
 of innocent blood. These heresies of Wier threw Bodin into 
 such a state of amazed indignation that if he had been an 
 ancient Jew, instead of a modern economical one, he would 
 have rent his garments. "No one had ever heard of pardon 
 being accorded to sorcerers ; " and probably the reason why 
 Charles IX. died young was because he had pardoned the 
 sorcerer, Trois Echelles ! We must remember that this was in 
 1581, when the great scientific movement of the Renaissance 
 had hardly begun, when Galileo was a youth of seventeen, and 
 Kepler a boy of ten. 
 
 But directly afterwards, on the other side, came Montaigne, 
 whose sceptical acuteness could arrive at negatives without 
 any apparatus of method. A certain keen narrowness of
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 149 
 
 nature will secure a man from many absurd beliefs which the 
 larger soul, vibrating to more manifold influences, would have 
 a long struggle to part with. And so we find the charming, 
 chatty Montaigne, in one of the brightest of his essays, " Des 
 Boiteux," where he declares that, from his own observation 
 of witches and sorcerers, he should have recommended them 
 to be treated with curative hellebore, stating in his own way 
 a pregnant doctrine, since taught more gravely. It seems to 
 him much less of a prodigy that men should lie, or that their 
 imaginations should deceive them, than that a human body 
 should be carried through the air on a broomstick or up a 
 chimney by some unknown spirit. He thinks it a sad busi- 
 ness to persuade one's self that the test of truth lies in the 
 multitude of believers : " En une presse ou les fols surpassent 
 de tant les sages en nombre." Ordinarily he has observed, 
 when men have something stated to them as a fact, they are 
 more ready to explain it than to inquire whether it is real : 
 "Us passent par-dessus les propositions, mais ils examinent 
 les consequences ; ils laissent les choses, et courent aux causes" 
 There is a sort of strong and generous ignorance which is as 
 honorable and courageous as science: "Ignorance pour la- 
 quelle concevoir il n'y a pas moins de science qu'a concevoir 
 la science." And apropos of the immense traditional evi- 
 dence which weighed with such men as Bodin, he says : " As 
 for the proofs and arguments founded on experience and facts, 
 I do not pretend to unravel these. What end of a thread is 
 there to lay hold of ? I often cut them, as Alexander did his 
 knot. Apres tout, c'est mettre ses conjectures a bien hautprix, 
 que cPenfaire cuire un homme tout vif" 
 
 Writing like this, when it finds eager readers, is a sign that 
 the weather is changing ; yet much later, namely, after 1665, 
 when the Koyal Society had been founded, our own Glanvil, 
 the author of the " Scepsis Scientifica," a work that was a 
 remarkable advance towards a true definition of the limits 
 of inquiry, and that won him his election as fellow of the 
 Society, published an energetic vindication of the belief in 
 witchcraft, of which Mr. Lecky gives the following sketch :
 
 150 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 " The ' Sadducismus Triumphatus,' which ia probably the ablest 
 book ever published iu defence of the superstition, opens with a strik- 
 ing picture of the rapid progress of the scepticism in England. Every- 
 where a disbelief in witchcraft was becoming fashionable in the upper 
 classes ; but it was a disbelief that arose entirely from a strong sense 
 of its antecedent improbability. All who were opposed to the Ortho- 
 dox faith united in discrediting witchcraft. They laughed at it, as 
 palpably absurd, as involving the most grotesque and ludicrous con- 
 ceptions, as so essentially incredible that it would be a waste of time 
 to examine it. This spirit had arisen since the restoration, although 
 the laws were still in force, and although little or no direct reasoning 
 had been brought to bear upon the subject. In order to combat it, 
 Glanvil proceeded to examine the general question of the credibility of 
 tbe miraculous. He saw that the reason why witchcraft was ridiculed 
 was because it was a phase of the miraculous, and the work of the 
 Devil ; that the scepticism was chiefly due to those who disbelieved in 
 miracles and the Devil ; and that the instances of witchcraft or posses- 
 sion in the Bible were invariably placed on a level with those that were 
 tried in the courts of England. That the evidence of the belief was 
 overwhelming, he firmly believed; and this, indeed, was scarcely dis- 
 puted ; but, until the sense of a priori improbability was removed, no 
 possible accumulation of facts would cause men to believe it. To that 
 task he accordingly addressed himself. Anticipating the idea and 
 almost the words of modern controversialists, he urged that there was 
 such a thing as a credulity of unbelief; and that those who believed 
 so strange a concurrence of delusions as was necessary on the sup- 
 position of the unreality of witchcraft, were far more credulous than 
 those who accepted the belief. He made his verj scepticism his prin- 
 cipal weapon ; and, analyzing with much acuteness the a priori objec- 
 tions, he showed that they rested upon an unwarrantable confidence Jn 
 our knowledge of the laws of the spirit world, that they implied the 
 existence of some strict analogy between the faculties of men and of 
 spirits, and that, as such analogy most probably did not exist, no rea- 
 soning based on the supposition could dispense men from examining 
 the evidence. He concluded with a large collection of oases, the 
 evidence of which was, as he thought, incontestable." 
 
 We have quoted this sketch because Glanvil's argument 
 against the a priori objection of absurdity is fatiguingly 
 urged in relation to other alleged marvels which to busy
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 151 
 
 people, seriously occupied with the difficulties of affairs, of 
 science, or of art, seem as little worthy of examination as 
 aeronautic broomsticks ; and also because we here see Glan- 
 vil, in combating an incredulity " that does not happen to be 
 his own, wielding that very argument of traditional evidence 
 which he had made the subject of vigorous attack in his 
 "Scepsis Scientifica." But perhaps large minds have been 
 peculiarly liable to this fluctuation concerning the sphere of 
 tradition, because, while they have attacked its misapplica- 
 tions, they have been the more solicited by the vague sense 
 that tradition is really the basis of our best life. Our senti- 
 ments may be called organized traditions ; and a large part of 
 our actions gather all their justification, all their attraction 
 and aroma, from the memory of the life lived, of the actions 
 done, before we were born. In the absence of any profound 
 research into psychological functions or into the mysteries of 
 inheritance, in the absence of any profound comprehensive 
 view of man's historical development and the dependence of 
 one age on another, a mind at all rich in sensibilities must 
 always have had an indefinite uneasiness in an undistinguish- 
 ing attack on the coercive influence of tradition. And this 
 may be the apology for the apparent inconsistency of Glan- 
 vil's acute criticism on the one side, and his indignation at 
 the " looser gentry," who laughed at the evidences for witch- 
 craft on the other. We have already taken up too much space 
 with this subject of witchcraft, else we should be tempted to 
 dwell on Sir Thomas Browne, who far surpassed Glanvil in 
 magnificent incongruity of opinion, and whose works are 
 the most remarkable combination existing, of witty sarcasm 
 against ancient nonsense and modern obsequiousness, with 
 indications of a capacious credulity. After all, we may be 
 sharing what seems to us the hardness of these men, who sat 
 in their studies and argued at their ease about a belief that 
 would be reckoned to have caused more misery and bloodshed 
 than any other superstition, if there had bsen no such thing 
 as persecution on the ground of religious opinion. 
 
 On this subject of persecution, Mr. Lecky writes his best j
 
 152 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 with clearness of conception, with calm justice, bent on ap- 
 preciating the necessary tendency of ideas, and with an 
 appropriateness of illustration that could be supplied only 
 by extensive and intelligent reading. Persecution, he shows, 
 is not in any sense peculiar to the Catholic church ; it is a 
 direct sequence of the doctrines that salvation is to be had 
 only within the Church, and that erroneous belief is damna- 
 tory, doctrines held as fully by Protestant sects as by the 
 Catholics ; and in proportion to its power, Protestantism has 
 been as persecuting as Catholicism. He maintains, in opposi- 
 tion to the favorite modern notion of persecution defeating 
 its own object, that the Church, holding the dogma of exclu- 
 sive salvation, was perfectly consequent, and really achieved 
 its end of spreading one belief and quenching another, by 
 calling in the aid of the civil arm. Who will say that gov- 
 ernments, by their power over institutions and patronage, as 
 well as over punishment, have not power over the interests 
 and inclinations of men, and over most of those external con- 
 ditions into which subjects are born, and which make them 
 adopt the prevalent belief as a second nature ? Hence, to a 
 sincere believer in the doctrine of exclusive salvation, gov- 
 ernments had it in their power to save men from perdition ; 
 and wherever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, 
 no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecu- 
 tion was the result. "Compel them to come in," was a rule 
 that seemed sanctioned by mercy ; and the horrible sufferings 
 it led men to inflict seemed small to minds accustomed to 
 contemplate, as a perpetual source of motive, the eternal, un- 
 mitigated miseries of a hell that was the inevitable destination 
 of a majority amongst mankind. 
 
 It is a significant fact, noted by Mr. Lecky, that the only 
 two leaders of the Reformation who advocated tolerance were 
 Zuinglius and Socinus, both of them disbelievers in exclusive 
 salvation. And in corroboration of other evidence that the 
 chief triumphs of the Reformation were due to coercion, he 
 commends to the special attention of his readers the follow- 
 ing quotation from a work attributed without question to the
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 153 
 
 famous Protestant theologian, Jurieu, who had himself been 
 hindered, as a Protestant, from exercising his professional 
 functions in France, and was settled as pastor at Rotterdam. 
 It should be remembered that Jurieu's labors fell in the latter 
 part of the seventeenth century and in the beginning of the 
 eighteenth, and that he was the contemporary of Bayle, with 
 whom he was in bitter controversial hostility. He wrote, 
 then, at a time when there was warm debate on the question 
 of toleration ; and it was his great object to vindicate him- 
 self and his French fellow-Protestants from all laxity on this 
 point : 
 
 " Pent on nier que le pagauisme est tombe" dans le monde par 1'auto- 
 rite des empereurs remains? On peut assurer sans temerite que le 
 paganisme eeroit encore debout, et que les trois quarts de 1'Europe 
 seroient encore payens si Constantin et ses successeurs n'avaient em- 
 ploye leur autorite pour Pabolir. Mais, je vous prie, de quelles voies 
 Dieu s'est il servi dans ces derniers siecles pour rdtablir la veritable 
 religion dans Poccident ? Les rois de Suede, ceux de Danemarck, ceux 
 d'Angleterre, les magistrats souverains de Suisse, des Pais Bos, des 
 villes libres d'Allemagne, les princes Mecteurs, et autres princes souve- 
 rains de Pempire, n'ont ils pas emploie leur autorite' pour abbattre le 
 papisme f " 
 
 Indeed, wherever the tremendous alternative of everlasting 
 torments is believed in, believed in so that it becomes a 
 motive determining the life, not only persecution, but every 
 other form of severity and gloom, is the legitimate conse- 
 quence. There is much ready declamation in these days 
 against the spirit of asceticism and against zeal for doctrinal 
 conversion ; but surely the macerated form of a St. Francis, 
 the fierce denunciations of a St. Dominic, the groans and 
 prayerful wrestlings of the Puritan who seasoned his bread 
 with tears, and made all pleasurable sensation sin, are more 
 in keeping with the contemplation of unmending anguish as 
 the destiny of a vast multitude whose nature we share, than 
 the rubicund cheerfulness of some modern divines, who pro- 
 fess to unite a smiling liberalism with a well-bred and tacit 
 but unshaken confidence in the reality of the bottomless pit.
 
 154 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 But, in fact, as Mr. Lecky maintains, that awful image, with 
 its group of associated dogmas concerning the inherited curse, 
 and the damnation of unbaptized infants, of heathens, and of 
 heretics, has passed away from what he is fond of calling 
 " the realizations " of Christendom. These things are no 
 longer the objects of practical belief. They may be mourned 
 for in encyclical letters ; bishops may regret them ; doctors 
 of divinity may sign testimonials to the excellent character 
 of these decayed beliefs ; but for the mass of Christians they 
 axe no more influential than unrepealed but forgotten statutes. 
 And with these dogmas has melted away the strong basis for 
 the defence of persecution. No man now writes eager vindi- 
 cations of himself and his colleagues from the suspicion of 
 adhering to the principle of toleration. And this momentous 
 change, it is Mr. Lecky 's object to show, is due to that con- 
 currence of conditions which he has chosen to call "the 
 advance of the spirit of rationalism." 
 
 In other parts of his work, where he attempts to trace the 
 action of the same conditions on the acceptance of miracles 
 and on other chief phases of our historical development, Mr. 
 Lecky has laid himself open to considerable criticism. The 
 chapters on the miracles of the Church, the aesthetic, scien 
 tine, and moral development of rationalism, the seculariza- 
 tion of politics, and the industrial history of rationalism, 
 embrace a wide range of diligently gathered facts ; but they 
 are nowhere illuminated by a sufficiently clear conception 
 and statement of the agencies at work, or the mode of their 
 action, in the gradual modification of opinion and of life. 
 The writer frequently impresses us as being in a state of 
 hesitation concerning his own standing-point, which may 
 form a desirable stage in private meditation but not in pub- 
 lished exposition. Certain epochs in theoretic conception, 
 certain considerations, which should be fundamental to his 
 survey, are introduced quite incidentally in a sentence or 
 two, or in a note which seems to be an afterthought. Great 
 writers and their ideas are touched upon too slightly and 
 with too little discrimination, and important theories are
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM. 155 
 
 sometimes characterized with a rashness which conscientious 
 revision will correct. There is a fatiguing use of vague or 
 shifting phrases, such as "Modern Civilization," "Spirit of 
 the Age," "Tone of Thought," "Intellectual Type of the Age," 
 " Bias of the Imagination," " Habits of Keligious Thought," 
 unbalanced by any precise definition ; and the spirit of ration- 
 alism is sometimes treated of as if it lay outside the specific 
 mental activities of which it is a generalized expression. 
 Mr. Curdle's famous definition of the dramatic unities as 
 "a sort of a general oneness," is not totally false; but such 
 luminousness as it has could only be perceived by those who 
 already knew what the unities were. Mr. Lecky has the 
 advantage of being strongly impressed with the great part 
 played by the emotions in the formation of opinion, and with 
 the high complexity of the causes at work in social evolution ; 
 but he frequently writes as if he had never yet distinguished 
 between the complexity of the conditions that produce preva- 
 lent states of mind, and the inability of particular minds to 
 give distinct reasons for the preferences or persuasions pro- 
 duced by those states. In brief, he does not discriminate, or 
 does not help his reader to discriminate, between objective 
 complexity and subjective confusion. But the most muddle- 
 headed gentleman who represents the spirit of the age by 
 observing, as he settles his collar, that the development 
 theory is quite " the thing," is a result of definite processes, 
 if we could only trace them. " Mental attitudes " and " pre- 
 dispositiois," however vague in consciousness, have not vague 
 causes, any more than the " blind motions of the spring " in 
 plants and animals. 
 
 The word " rationalism " has the misfortune, shared by 
 most words in this gray world, of being somewhat equivocal. 
 This evil may be nearly overcome by careful preliminary 
 definition ; but Mr. Lecky does not supply this, and the origi- 
 nal specific application of the word to a particular phase of 
 Biblical interpretation seems to have clung about his use of it 
 with a misleading effect. Through some parts of his book he 
 appears to regard the grand characteristics of modern thought
 
 156 ESSAYS OF GEOKGE ELIOT. r i 
 
 and civilization, compared with ancient, as a radiation in the 
 first instance from a change in religious conceptions. The 
 supremely important fact that the gradual reduction of all 
 phenomena within the sphere of established law, which car- 
 ries as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous, has its 
 determining current in the development of physical science, 
 seems to have engaged comparatively little of his attention ; 
 at least, he gives it no prominence. The great conception of 
 universal regular sequence, without partiality and without 
 caprice, the conception which is the most potent force at 
 work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical 
 form given to our sentiments, could only grow out of that 
 patient watching of external fact and that silencing of pre- 
 conceived notions which are urged upon the mind by the 
 problems of physical science. 
 
 There is not room here to explain and justify the impres- 
 sions of dissatisfaction which have been briefly indicated ; but 
 a serious writer, like Mr. Lecky, will not find such sugges- 
 tions altogether useless. The objections, even the misunder- 
 standings, of a reader who is not careless or ill-disposed, may 
 serve to stimulate an author's vigilance over his thoughts as 
 well as his style. It would be gratifying to see some future 
 proof that Mr. Lecky has acquired juster views than are im- 
 plied in the assertion that philosophers of the sensational 
 school "can never rise to the conception of the disinter- 
 ested ; " and that he has freed himself from all temptation 
 to that mingled laxity of statement and ill-pitched elevation 
 of tone which are painfully present in the closing pages of 
 his second volume.
 
 THE NATUKAL HISTOEY OF GEEMAN LIFE. 
 
 IT is an interesting branch of psychological observation to 
 note the images that are habitually associated with ab- 
 stract or collective terms, what may be called the picture- 
 writing of the mind, which it carries on concurrently with 
 the more subtle symbolism of language. Perhaps the fixity 
 or variety of these associated images would furnish a tolera 
 bly fair test of the amount of concrete knowledge and expe- 
 rience which a given word represents in the minds of two 
 persons who use it with equal familiarity. The word rail- 
 ways, for example, will probably call up, in the mind of a 
 man who is not highly locomotive, the image either of a 
 Bradshaw, or of the station with which he is most famil- 
 iar, or of an indefinite length of tram-road ; he will alternate 
 between these three images, which represent his stock of con- 
 crete acquaintance with railways. But suppose a man to 
 have had successively the experience of a navvy, an engi 
 neer, a traveller, a railway director and shareholder, and a 
 landed proprietor in treaty with a railway company, and it is 
 probable that the range of images which would by turns pre- 
 sent themselves to his mind at the mention of the word rail- 
 ways, would include all the essential facts in the existence 
 and relations of the thing. Now it is possible for the first- 
 mentioned personage to entertain very expanded views as to 
 the multiplication of railways in the abstract, and their ulti^ 
 mate function in civilization. He may talk of a vast net- 
 work of railways stretching o\rer the globe, of future lines 
 in Madagascar, and elegant refreshment-rooms in the Sand- 
 wich. Islands, with none the less glibness because his distinct
 
 158 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 conceptions on the subject do not extend beyond his one star 
 tion and his indefinite length of tram-road. But it is evi- 
 dent that if we want a railway to be made, or its affairs to 
 be managed, this man of wide views and narrow observation 
 will not serve our purpose. 
 
 Probably, if we could ascertain the images called up by the 
 terms "the people," "the masses," "the proletariat," "the 
 peasantry," by many who theorize on those bodies with elo- 
 quence, or who legislate without eloquence, we should find 
 that they indicate almost as small an amount of concrete 
 knowledge, that they are as far from completely representing 
 the complex facts summed up in the collective term, as the 
 railway images of our non-locomotive gentleman. How little 
 the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to 
 those who are outside them, how little their natural history 
 has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our art as well as 
 by our political and social theories. Where, in our picture- 
 exhibitions, shall we find a group of true peasantry ? What 
 English artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness such 
 studies of popular life as the pictures of Teniers or the ragged 
 boys of Murillo ? Even one of the greatest painters of the 
 pre-eminently realistic school, while, in his picture of " The 
 Hireling Shepherd," he gave us a landscape of marvellous 
 truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground 
 who were not much more real than the idyllic swains and 
 damsels of our chimney-ornaments. Only a total absence 
 of acquaintance and sympathy with our peasantry ctfuld 
 give a moment's popularity to such a picture as " Cross- 
 Purposes," where we have a peasant-girl who looks as if she 
 knew L. E. L.'s poems by heart, and English rustics, whose 
 costume seems to indicate that they are meant for plough- 
 men, with exotic features that remind us of a handsome 
 primo tenore. Rather than such cockney sentimentality as 
 this, as an education for the taste and sympathies, we prefer 
 the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. 
 But even those among our painters, who aim at giving the 
 rustic type of features, who are far above the effeminate
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 159 
 
 feebleness of the " Keepsake " style, treat their subjects under 
 the influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of 
 direct observation. The notion that peasants are joyous, that 
 the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is 
 when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, 
 that cottage matrons are usually buxom and village children 
 necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dis- 
 lodge from the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into 
 literature instead of life. The painter is still under the in- 
 fluence of idyllic literature, which has always expressed the 
 imagination of the cultivated and town-bred, rather than the 
 truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they 
 drive their team afield ; idyllic shepherds make bashful love 
 under hawthorn bushes ; idyllic villagers dance in the check- 
 ered shade, and refresh themselves, not immoderately, with 
 spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual 
 ploughmen thinks them jocund; no one who is well acquainted 
 with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The 
 slow gaze, in which no sense of beauty beams, no humor twin- 
 kles, the slow utterance, and the heavy slouching walk, re- 
 mind one rather of that melancholy animal the camel, than of 
 the sturdy countryman, with striped stockings, red waistcoat, 
 and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peas- 
 ant. Observe a company of haymakers. When you see them 
 at a distance, tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden 
 light, while the wagon creeps slowly with its increasing bur- 
 den over the meadow, and the bright-green space, which tells 
 of work done, gets larger and larger, you pronounce the scene 
 "smiling," and you think these companions in labor must 
 be as bright and cheerful as the picture to which they give 
 animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find that 
 haymaking time is a time for joking, especially if there are 
 women among the laborers ; but the coarse laugh that bursts 
 out every now and then, and expresses the triumphant taunt, 
 is as far as possible from your conception of idyllic merri- 
 ment. That delicious effervescence of the mind which we call 
 fun, has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except tipsy
 
 160 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the 
 English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart-pot. 
 
 The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up 
 pocket-books and never looks into them, and who is too sim- 
 ple even to know that honesty has its opposite, represents 
 the still lingering mistake, that an unintelligible dialect is a 
 guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders 
 indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true that a 
 thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical 
 cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his mas- 
 ter's corn in his shoes and pocket ; a reaper is not given to 
 writing begging-letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling 
 the dairymaid into filling his small-beer bottle with ale. 
 The selfish instincts are not subdued by the sight of butter- 
 cups, nor is integrity in the least established by that classic 
 rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men moral, some- 
 thing more is requisite than to turn them out to grass. 
 
 Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. B-uskin's in- 
 dignation, are surely too frank an idealization to be mislead- 
 ing ; and since popular chorus is one of the most effective 
 elements of the opera, we can hardly object to lyric rustics 
 in elegant lace bodices and picturesque motley, unless we are 
 prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in their pit costume, 
 or a ballet of char-women and stocking-weavers. But our 
 social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and 
 the unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The 
 greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, 
 or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals 
 founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy 
 ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a 
 picture of human life such as a great artist can give, sur- 
 prises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to 
 what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw 
 material of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into 
 Luckie Mucklebackit's cottage, or tells the story of "The 
 Two Drovers ; " when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of 
 " Poor Susan ; " when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 161 
 
 yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into 
 the first wood he ever saw ; when Hornung paints a group of 
 chimney-sweepers, more is done towards linking the higher 
 classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of 
 exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophi- 
 cal dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life ; it is a 
 mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact 
 with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. 
 All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he under- 
 takes to paint the life of the people. Falsification here is> 
 far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. 
 It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas 
 about evanescent fashions, about the manners and conver- 
 sation of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our 
 sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the 
 tragedy, and the humor in the life of our more heavily-laden 
 fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false 
 object instead of the true one. 
 
 This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepre- 
 sentation which gives rise to it has what the artist considers 
 a moral end. The thing for mankind to know is, not what 
 are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks 
 ought to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what are the 
 motives and influences which do act on him. We want to be 
 taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental 
 peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the 
 artisan in all his suspicious selfishness. 
 
 We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost 
 power of rendering the external traits of our town popula- 
 tion ; and if he could give us their psychological character 
 their conception of life, and their emotions with the same 
 truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the 
 greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of 
 social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's 
 colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, 
 while there is the same startling aspiration in his de- 
 scription of the gestures and phrases of Boots, as in the
 
 162 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 speeches of Shakspeare's mobs or numskulls, he scarcely 
 ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional 
 and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality 
 as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. But 
 for the precious salt of his humor, which compels him to re- 
 produce external traits that serve in some degree as a cor- 
 rective to his frequently false psychology, his preternaturally 
 virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen 
 and courtesans, would be as obnoxious as Eugene Sue's ideal- 
 ized proletaires, in encouraging the miserable fallacy, that 
 high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh 
 social relations, ignorance, and want ; or that the working- 
 classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial 
 state of altruism, wherein every one is caring for every one 
 else, and no one for himself. 
 
 If we need a true conception of the popular character to 
 guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check 
 our theories, and direct us in their application. The ten- 
 dency created by the splendid conquests of modern general- 
 ization, to believe that all social questions are merged in 
 economical science, and that the relations of men to their 
 neighbors may be settled by algebraic equations ; the dream 
 that the uncultured classes are prepared for a condition 
 which appeals principally to their moral sensibilities; the 
 aristocratic dilettanteism which attempts to restore the " good 
 old times " by a sort of idyllic masquerading, and to grow 
 feudal fidelity and veneration as we grow prize turnips, by 
 an artificial system of culture, none of these diverging 
 mistakes can co-exist with a real knowledge of the people, 
 with a thorough study of their habits, their ideas, their mo- 
 tives. The landholder, the clergyman, the mill-owner, the 
 mining-agent, have each an opportunity for making precious 
 observations on different sections of the working-classes, but 
 unfortunately their experience is too often not registered at 
 all, or its results are too scattered to be available as a source 
 of information and stimulus to the public mind generally. 
 If any man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth,
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 163 
 
 whose observations would not be vitiated by a foregone con- 
 clusion or by a professional point of view, would devote 
 himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, 
 especially of the small shopkeepers, artisans, and peasantry, 
 the degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, 
 their maxims and habits, the points of view from which they 
 regard their religious teachers, and the degree in which they 
 are influenced by religious doctrines, the interaction of the 
 various classes on each other, and what are the tendencies in 
 their position towards disintegration or towards development, 
 and if, after all this study, he would give us the result of 
 his observations in a book well nourished with specific facts, 
 his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political 
 reformer. 
 
 What we are desiring for ourselves has been in some de- 
 gree done for the Germans by Biehl ; and we wish to make 
 his books known to our readers, not only for the sake of 
 the interesting matter they contain, and the important reflec- 
 tions they suggest, but also as a model for some future or 
 actual student of our own people. By way of introducing 
 Eiehl to those who are unacquainted with his writings, we 
 will give a rapid sketch from his picture of the German peas- 
 antry ; and perhaps this indication of the mode in which he 
 treats a particular branch of his subject, may prepare them to 
 follow us with more interest when we enter on the general 
 purpose and contents of his works. 
 
 In England, at present, when we speak of the peasantry, 
 we mean scarcely more than the class of farm-servants and 
 farm-laborers ; and it is only in the most primitive districts, 
 as in Wales, for example, that farmers are included under 
 the term. In order to appreciate what Kiehl says of the 
 German peasantry, we must remember what the tenant- 
 farmers and small proprietors were in England half a cen- 
 tury ago, when the master helped to milk his own cows, 
 and the daughters got up at one o' clock in the morning to 
 brew, when the family dined in the kitchen with the ser- 
 vants, and sat with them round the kitchen-fire in the even-
 
 164 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 
 
 ing. In those days the quarried parlor was innocent of a 
 carpet, and its only specimens of art were a framed sampler 
 and the best tea-board; the daughters, even of substantial 
 farmers, had often no greater accomplishment in writing and 
 spelling than they could procure at a dame-school ; and, in- 
 stead of carrying on sentimental correspondence, they were 
 spinning their future table-linen, and looking after every 
 saving in butter and eggs that might enable them to add to 
 the little stock of plate and china which they were laying in 
 against their marriage. In our own day, setting aside the 
 superior order of farmers, whose style of living and mental 
 culture are often equal to that of the professional class in 
 provincial towns, we can hardly enter the least imposing 
 farmhouse without finding a bad piano in the "drawing- 
 room," and some old annuals, disposed with a symmetrical 
 imitation of negligence, on the table ; though the daughters 
 may still drop their A's, their vowels are studiously narrow ; 
 and it is only in very primitive regions that they will con- 
 sent to sit in a covered vehicle without springs, which was 
 once thought an advance in luxury on the pillion. 
 
 The condition of the tenant-farmers and small proprietors 
 in Germany is, we imagine, about on a par, not, certainly, 
 in material prosperity, but in mental culture and habits, 
 with that of the English farmers who were beginning to be 
 thought old-fashioned nearly fifty years ago ; and if we add 
 to these the farm servants and laborers, we shall have a class 
 approximating in its characteristics to the Bauernihum, or 
 peasantry, described by Riehl. 
 
 In Germany, perhaps more than in any other country, it is 
 among the peasantry that we must look for the historical 
 type of the national physique. In the towns this type has 
 become so modified to express the personality of the individ- 
 ual, that even family likeness is often but faintly marked. 
 But the peasants may still be distinguished into groups, by 
 their physical peculiarities. In one part of the country we 
 find a longer-legged, in another a broader-shouldered race, 
 which has inherited these peculiarities for centuries. For
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 165 
 
 example, in certain districts of Hesse are seen long faces, 
 with high foreheads, long, straight noses, and small eyes, 
 with arched eyebrows and large eyelids. On comparing these 
 physiognomies with the sculptures in the church of St. Eliza- 
 beth, at Marburg, executed in the thirteenth century, it will 
 be found that the same old Hessian type of face has sub- 
 sisted unchanged ; with this distinction only, that the sculp- 
 tures represent princes and nobles, whose features then bore 
 the stamp of their race, while that stamp is now to be found 
 only among the peasants. A painter who wants to draw 
 mediaeval characters with historic truth, must seek his models 
 among the peasantry. This explains why the old German 
 painters gave the heads of their subjects a greater uniformity 
 of type than the painters of our day ; the race had not at- 
 tained to a high degree of individualization in features and 
 expression. It indicates, too, that the cultured man acts 
 more as an individual, the peasant more as one of a group. 
 Hans drives the plough, lives, and thinks just as Kunz does ; 
 and it is this fact, that many thousands of men are as like 
 each other in thoughts and habits as so many sheep or 
 oysters, which constitutes the weight of the peasantry in the 
 social and political scale. 
 
 In the cultivated world each individual has his style of 
 speaking and writing ; but among the peasantry it is the race, 
 the district, the province, that has its style, namely, its dia- 
 lect, its phraseology, its proverbs, and its songs, which belong 
 alike to the entire body of the people. This provincial style 
 of the peasant is again, like his physique, a remnant of his- 
 tory, to which he clings with the utmost tenacity. In certain 
 parts of Hungary there are still descendants of German col- 
 onists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who go about 
 the country as reapers, retaining their old Saxon songs and 
 manners, while the more cultivated German emigrants in a 
 very short time forget their own language, and speak Hunga- 
 rian. Another remarkable case of the same kind is that of 
 the Wends, a Sclavonic race settled in Lusatia, whose num- 
 bers amount to two hundred thousand, living either scattered
 
 166 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 amoag the German population, or in separate parishes. They 
 have their own schools and churches, and are taught in the 
 Sclavonic tongue. The Catholics among them are rigid ad- 
 herents of the Pope ; the Protestants, not less rigid adherents 
 of Luther, or Doctor Luther, as they are particular in calling 
 him a custom which, a hundred years ago, was universal 
 in Protestant Germany. The Wend clings tenaciously to the 
 usages of his Church, and perhaps this may contribute not a 
 little to the purity in which he maintains the specific charac- 
 teristics of his race. German education, German law and 
 government, service in the standing army, and many other 
 agencies, are in antagonism to his national exclusiveness ; 
 but the wives and mothers here, as elsewhere, are a conserva- 
 tive influence, and the habits temporarily laid aside in the 
 outer world are recovered by the fireside. The Wends form 
 several stout regiments in the Saxon army ; they are sought 
 far and wide, as diligent and honest servants ; and many - 
 weakly Dresden or Leipzig child becomes thriving under the 
 care of a Wendish nurse. In their villages they have the air 
 and habits of genuine, sturdy peasants, and all their cus- 
 toms indicate that they have been, from the first, an agricul- 
 tural people. For example, they have traditional modes of 
 treating their domestic animals. Each cow has its own name, 
 generally chosen carefully, so as to express the special quali- 
 ties of the animal; and all important family events are 
 narrated to the bees, a custom which is found also in West- 
 phalia. Whether by the help of the bees or not, the Wend 
 farming is especially prosperous ; and when a poor Bohemian 
 peasant has a son born to him, he binds him to the end of a 
 long pole and turns his face towards Lusatia, that he may be 
 as lucky aa the Wends, who live there. 
 
 The peculiarity of the peasant's language consists chiefly 
 in his retention of historical peculiarities, which gradually 
 disappear under the friction of cultivated circles. He prefers 
 any proper name that may be given to a day in the calendar, 
 rather than the abstract date, by which he very rarely reck- 
 ons. In the baptismal names of his children he is guided by
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 167 
 
 the old custom of the country, not at all by whim and fancy. 
 Many old baptismal names, formerly common in Germany, 
 would have become extinct but for their preservation among 
 the peasantry, especially in North Germany ; and so firmly 
 have they adhered to local tradition in this matter, that it 
 would be possible to give a sort of topographical statistics of 
 proper names, and distinguish a district by its rustic names, 
 as we do by its Mora and Fauna. The continuous inherit- 
 ance of certain favorite proper names in a family, in some 
 districts, forces the peasant to adopt the princely custom of 
 attaching a numeral to the name, and saying, when three 
 generations are living at once, Hans L, II., and III. ; or in 
 the more antique fashion Hans the elder, the middle, and 
 the younger. In some of our English counties there is a 
 similar adherence to a narrow range of proper names ; and, as 
 a mode of distinguishing collateral branches in the same 
 family, you will hear of Jonathan's Bess, Thomas's Bess, and 
 Samuel's Bess the three Bessies being cousins. 
 
 The peasant's adherence to the traditional has much greater 
 inconvenience than that entailed by a paucity of proper 
 names. In the Black Forest and in Huttenberg you will see 
 him in the dog-days wearing a thick fur cap because it is 
 an historical fur cap, a cap worn by his grandfather. In the 
 Wetterau, that peasant-girl is considered the handsomest who 
 wears the most petticoats. To go to field-labor in seven 
 petticoats can be anything but convenient or agreeable, but 
 it is the traditionally correct thing ; and a German peasant- 
 girl would think herself as unfavorably conspicuous in an 
 untraditional costume, as an English servant-girl would now 
 think herself in a linsey-woolsey apron or a thick muslin cap. 
 In many districts no medical advice would induce the rustic 
 to renounce the tight leather belt with which he injures his 
 digestive functions ; you could more easily persuade him to 
 smile on a new communal system than on the unhistorical 
 invention of braces. In the eighteenth century, in spite of 
 the philanthropic preachers of potatoes, the peasant for 
 years threw his potatoes to the pigs and the dogs, before he
 
 168 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 could be persuaded to put them on his own table. However, 
 the unwillingness of the peasant to adopt innovations has a 
 not unreasonable foundation in the fact, that for him ex- 
 periments are practical, not theoretical, and must be made 
 with expense of money instead of brains ; a fact that is not, 
 perhaps, sufficiently taken into account by agricultural the- 
 orists, who complain of the farmer's obstinacy. The peas- 
 ant has the smallest possible faith in theoretic knowledge ; 
 he thinks it rather dangerous than otherwise, as is well in- 
 dicated by a Lower Rhenish proverb : " One is never too old 
 to learn, said an old woman ; so she learned to be a witch." 
 
 Between many villages an historical feud, once perhaps 
 the occasion of much bloodshed, is still kept up under the 
 milder form of an occasional round of cudgelling, and the 
 launching of traditional nicknames. An historical feud of 
 this kind still exists, for example, among many villages on 
 the Rhine and more inland places in the neighborhood. 
 Rkeinschnacke (of which the equivalent is perhaps " water- 
 snake ") is the standing term of ignominy for the inhabitant 
 of the Rhine village, who repays it in kind by the epithet 
 karst (mattock) or kukuk (cuckoo), according as the object 
 of his hereditary hatred belongs to the field or the forest. If 
 any Romeo among the " mattocks " were to marry a Juliet 
 among the " water-snakes," there would be no lack of Tybalts 
 and Mercutios to carry the conflict from words to blows, 
 though neither side knows a reason for the enmity. 
 
 A droll instance of peasant conservatism is told of a village 
 on the Taunus, whose inhabitants, from time immemorial, 
 had been famous for impromptu cudgelling. For this his- 
 torical offence the magistrates of the district had always 
 inflicted the equally historical punishment of shutting up the 
 most incorrigible offenders, not in prison, but in their own 
 pigsty. In recent times, however, the government, wishing 
 to correct the rudeness of these peasants, appointed an " en- 
 lightened " man as a magistrate, who at once abolished the 
 original penalty above mentioned. But this relaxation of 
 punishment was so far from being welcome to the villagers,
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 169 
 
 that they presented a petition praying that a more energetic 
 man might be given them as a magistrate, who would have 
 the courage to punish according to law and justice, "as had 
 been beforetime." And the magistrate who abolished in- 
 carceration in the pigsty could never obtain the respect of 
 the neighborhood. This happened no longer ago than the 
 beginning of the present century. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that the historical piety of 
 the German peasant extends to anything not immediately 
 connected with himself. He has the warmest piety towards 
 the old tumble-down house which his grandfather built, and 
 which nothing will induce him to improve ; but towards the 
 venerable ruins of the old castle that overlooks his village, 
 he has no piety at all, and carries off its stones to make a 
 fence for his garden, or tears down the gothic carving of the 
 old monastic church, which is " nothing to him," to mark off 
 a foot-path through his field. It is the same with historical 
 traditions. The peasant has them fresh in his memory, so 
 far as they relate to himself. In districts where the peasantry- 
 are unadulterated, you discern the remnants of the feudal 
 relations in innumerable customs and phrases, but you will 
 ask in vain for historical traditions concerning the empire, 
 or even concerning the particular princely house to which 
 the peasant is subject. He can tell you what " half people 
 and whole people" mean; in Hesse you will still hear of 
 " four horses making a whole peasant," or of " four-day and 
 three-day peasants ; " but you will ask in vain about Charle- 
 magne and Frederic Barbarossa. 
 
 Riehl well observes that the feudal system, which made 
 the peasant the bondman of his lord, was an immense benefit 
 in a country, the greater part of which had still to be colon- 
 ized, rescued the peasant from vagabondage, and laid the 
 foundation of persistency and endurance in future genera- 
 tions. If a free German peasantry belongs only to modern 
 times, it is to his ancestor who was a serf, and even, in the 
 earliest times, a slave, that the peasant owes the foundation 
 of his independence, namely, his capability of a settled ex-
 
 170 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 istence, nay, his unreasoning persistency, which has its 
 important function in the development of the race. 
 
 Perhaps the very worst result of that unreasoning persist- 
 ency is the peasant's inveterate habit of litigation. Every 
 one remembers the immortal description of Dandie Bin- 
 in ont's importunate application to Lawyer Pleydell to man- 
 age his " bit lawsuit," till at length Pleydell consents to help 
 him to ruin himself, on the ground that Dandie may fall into 
 worse hands. It seems this is a scene which has many 
 parallels in Germany. The farmer's lawsuit is his point of 
 honor ; and he will carry it through, though he knows from 
 the very first day that he shall get nothing by it. The lit- 
 igious peasant piques himself, like Mr. Saddletree, on his 
 knowledge of the law, and this vanity is the chief impulse to 
 many a lawsuit. To the mind of the peasant, law presents 
 itself as the " custom of the country," and it is his pride to 
 be versed in all customs. Citstom with him holds the place of 
 sentiment, of theory, and, in many cases, of affection. Biehl 
 justly urges the importance of simplifying law proceedings, 
 so as to cut off this vanity at its source, and also of encour- 
 aging, by every possible means, the practice of arbitration. 
 
 The peasant never begins his lawsuit in summer, for the 
 same reason that he does not make love and marry in sum- 
 mer, because In has no time for that sort of thing. Any- 
 thing is easier to him than to move out of his habitual course, 
 and he is attached even to his privations. Some years ago 
 a peasant youth, out of the poorest and remotest region of 
 the Westerwald, was enlisted as a recruit, at Weilburg in 
 Nassau. The lad, having never in his life slept in a bed, 
 when he had got into one for the first time began to cry like 
 a child ; and he deserted twice because he could not reconcile 
 himself to sleeping in a bed, and to the " fine " life of the 
 barracks ; he was homesick at the thought of his accustomed 
 poverty and his thatched hut. A strong contrast, this, with 
 the feeling of the poor in towns, who would be far enough 
 from deserting because their condition was too much im- 
 proved ! The genuine peasant is never ashamed of his rank
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 171 
 
 and calling j he is rather inclined to look down on every one 
 who does not wear a smock frock, and thinks a man who has 
 the manners of the gentry is likely to be rather windy and 
 unsubstantial. In some places, even in French districts, this 
 feeling is strongly symbolized by the practice of the peasantry, 
 on certain festival days, to dress the images of the saints 
 in peasant's clothing. History tells us of all kinds of peas- 
 ant insurrections, the object of which was to obtain relief for 
 the peasants from some of their many oppressions ; but of 
 an effort on their part to step out of their hereditary rank 
 and calling, to ,become gentry, to leave the plough and carry 
 on the easier business of capitalists or government-function- 
 aries, there is no example. 
 
 The German novelists who undertake to give pictures of 
 peasant-life, fall into the same mistake as our English novel- 
 ists; they transfer their own feelings to ploughmen and 
 woodcutters, and give them both joys and sorrows of which 
 they know nothing. The peasant never questions the obliga- 
 tion of family ties, he questions no custom, but tender 
 affection, as it exists amongst the refined part of mankind, 
 is almost as foreign to him as white hands and filbert-shaped 
 nails. That the aged father who has given up his property 
 to his children on condition of their maintaining him for the 
 remainder of his life, is very far from meeting with delicate 
 attentions, is indicated by the proverb current among the 
 peasantry, "Don't take your clothes off before you go to 
 bed." Among rustic moral tales and parables, not one is 
 more universal than the story of the ungrateful children, 
 who made their gray-headed father, dependent on them for a 
 maintenance, eat at a wooden trough, because he shook the 
 food out of his trembling hands. Then these same ungrate- 
 ful children observed one day that their own little boy was 
 making a tiny wooden trough ; and when they asked him what 
 it was for, he answered, that his father and mother might 
 eat out of it, when he was a man and had to keep them. 
 
 Marriage is a very prudential affair, especially among the 
 peasants who have the largest share of property. Politic
 
 172 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 marriages are as common among them as among princes ; and 
 when a peasant-heiress in Westphalia marries, her husband 
 adopts her name, and places his own after it with the prefix 
 geborner (nee). The girls niarry young, and the rapidity with 
 which they get old and ugly is one among the many proofs 
 that the early years of marriage are fuller of hardships than 
 of conjugal tenderness. " When our writers of village sto- 
 ries," says Blehl, "transferred their own emotional life to 
 the peasant, they obliterated what is precisely his most pre- 
 dominant characteristic, namely, that with him general cus- 
 tom holds the place of individual feeling." 
 
 We pay for greater emotional susceptibility too often by 
 nervous diseases of which the peasant knows nothing. To 
 him headache is the least of physical evils, because he thinks 
 headwork the easiest and least indispensable of all labor. 
 Happily, many of the younger sons in peasant families, by 
 going to seek their living in the towns, carry their hardy 
 nervous system to amalgamate with the overwrought nerves 
 of our town population, and refresh them with a little rude 
 vigor. And a return to the habits of peasant life ia the best 
 remedy for many moral as well as physical diseases induced 
 by perverted civilization. Eiehl points to colonization as 
 presenting the true field for this regenerative process. On 
 the other side of the ocean, a man will have the courage to 
 begin life again as a peasant, while at home, perhaps, oppor- 
 tunity as well as courage will fail him. Apropos of this 
 subject of emigration, he remarks the striking fact, that the 
 native shrewdness and mother-wit of the German peasant 
 seem to forsake him entirely when he has to apply them 
 under new circumstances, and on relations foreign to his 
 experience. Hence it is that the German peasant who 
 emigrates, so constantly falls a victim to unprincipled ad- 
 venturers in the preliminaries to emigration ; but if once he 
 gets his foot on the American soil, he exhibits all the first- 
 rate qualities of an agricultural colonise ; and among all Ger- 
 man emigrants, the peasant class are the most successful. 
 
 But many disintegrating forces have been at work on the
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 173 
 
 peasant character, and degeneration is unhappily going on at 
 a greater pace than development. In the wine districts 
 especially, the inability of the small proprietors to bear up 
 under the vicissitudes of the market, or to insure a high qual- 
 ity of wine by running the risks of a late vintage, and the 
 competition of beer and cider with the inferior wines, have 
 tended to produce that uncertainty of gain which, with the 
 peasant, is the inevitable cause of demoralization. The small 
 peasant proprietors are not a new class in Germany, but many 
 of the evils of their position are new. They are more de- 
 pendent on ready money than formerly : thus, where a peas- 
 ant used to get his wood for building and firing from the 
 common forest, he has now to pay for it with hard cash ; he 
 used to thatch his own house, with the help perhaps of a 
 neighbor, but now he pays a man to do it for him ; he used 
 to pay taxes in kind, he now pays them in money. The 
 chances of the market have to be discounted, and the peasant 
 falls into the hands of money-lenders. Here is one of the 
 cases in which social policy clashes with a purely economical 
 policy. 
 
 Political vicissitudes have added their influence to that of 
 economical changes in disturbing that dim instinct, that 
 reverence for traditional custom, which is the peasant's prin- 
 ciple of action. He is in the midst of novelties for which he 
 knows no reason changes in political geography, changes of 
 the government to which he owes fealty, changes in bureau- 
 cratic management and police regulations. He finds himself 
 in a new element, before an apparatus for breathing in it is de- 
 veloped in him. His only knowledge of modern history is in 
 some of its results for instance, that he has to pay heavier 
 taxes from year to year. His chief idea of a government is 
 of a power that raises his taxes, opposes his harmless cus- 
 toms, and torments him with new formalities. The source of 
 all this is the false system of "enlightening" the peasant 
 which has been adopted by the bureaucratic governments. A 
 system which disregards the traditions and hereditary attach- 
 ments of the peasant, and appeals only to a logical under-
 
 174 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 standing which is not yet developed in him, is simply dis- 
 integrating and ruinous to the peasant character. The inter- 
 ference with the communal regulations has been of this fatal 
 character. Instead of endeavoring to promote to the utmost 
 the healthy life of the Commune, as an organism the con- 
 ditions of which are bound up with the historical character- 
 istics of the peasant, the bureaucratic plan of government is 
 bent on improvement by its patent machinery of state- 
 appointed functionaries and off-hand regulations in accordance 
 with modern enlightenment. The spirit of communal ex- 
 clusiveness, the resistance to the indiscriminate establish 
 ment of strangers, is an intense traditional feeling in the 
 peasant. " This gallows is for us and our children," is the 
 typical motto of this spirit. But such exclusivencss is 
 highly irrational, and repugnant to modern liberalism; there- 
 fore a bureaucratic government at once opposes it, and 
 encourages to the utmost the introduction of new inhabitants 
 in the provincial communes. Instead of allowing the peas- 
 ants to manage their own affairs, and, if they happen to 
 believe that five and four make eleven, to unlearn the 
 prejudice by their own experience in calculation, so that they 
 may gradually understand processes, and not merely see 
 results, bureaucracy comes with its " Ready Reckoner " and 
 works all the peasant's sums for him the surest way of 
 maintaining him in his stupidity, however it may shake his 
 prejudice. 
 
 Another questionable plan for elevating the peasant is the 
 supposed elevation of the clerical character, by preventing 
 the clergyman from cultivating more than a trifling part of 
 the land attached to his benefice, that he may be as much as 
 possible of a scientific theologian, and as little as possible of 
 a peasant. In this, Riehl observes, lies one great source of 
 weakness to the Protestant Church as compared with the 
 Catholic, which finds the great majority of its priests among 
 the lower orders ; and we have had the opportunity of making 
 an analogous comparison in England, where many of us can 
 remember country districts in which the great mass of the
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 175 
 
 people were Christianized by illiterate Methodist and Inde- 
 pendent ministers, while the influence of the parish clergy- 
 man among the poor did not extend much beyond a few old 
 women in scarlet cloaks, and a few exceptional church-going 
 laborers. 
 
 Bearing in mind the general characteristics of the German 
 peasant, it is easy to understand his relation to the revolu- 
 tionary ideas and revolutionary movements of modern times. 
 The peasant, in Germany as elsewhere, is a born grumbler. 
 He has always plenty of grievances in his pocket, but he 
 does not generalize those grievances ; he does not complain 
 of government or society, probably because he has good 
 reason to complain of the burgomaster. When a few sparks 
 from the first French Revolution fell among the German 
 peasantry, and in certain villages of Saxony the country- 
 people assembled together to write down their demands, 
 there was no glimpse in their petition of the universal 
 rights of man, but simply of their own particular affairs as 
 Saxon peasants. Again, after the July Revolution of 1830, 
 there were many insignificant peasant insurrections ; but the 
 object of almost all was the removal of local grievances. 
 Toll-houses were pulled down ; stamped paper was destroyed ; 
 in some places there was a persecution of wild boars; in 
 others, of that plentiful tame animal, the German Rath, or 
 councillor who is never called into council. But in 1848 it 
 seemed as if the movements of the peasants had taken a new 
 character ; in the small western states of Germany it seemed 
 as if the whole class of peasantry was in insurrection. But, 
 in fact, the peasant did not know the meaning of the part he 
 was playing. He had heard that everything was being set 
 right in the towns, and that wonderful things were happen- 
 ing there ; so he tied up his bundle and set off. Without any 
 distinct object or resolution, the country-people presented 
 themselves on the scene of commotion, and were warmly 
 received by the party leaders. But, seen from the windows 
 of ducal palaces and ministerial hotels, these swarms of 
 peasants had quite another aspect, and it was imagined that
 
 176 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 they had a common plan of co-operation. This, however, 
 the peasants have never had. Systematic co-operation im- 
 plies general conceptions, and a provisional subordination 
 of egoism, to which even the artisans of towns have rarely 
 shown themselves equal, and which are as foreign to the mind 
 of the peasant as logarithms or the doctrine of chemical pro- 
 portions. And the revolutionary fervor of the peasant was 
 soon cooled. The old mistrust of the towns was reawakened 
 on the spot. The Tyrolese peasants saw no great good in the 
 freedom of the press, and the constitution, because these 
 changes " seemed to please the gentry so much." Peasants 
 who had given their voices stormily for a German parliament, 
 asked afterwards, with a doubtful look, whether it were to con. 
 sist of infantry or cavalry. When royal domains were de- 
 clared the property of the state, the peasants in some small 
 principalities rejoiced over this, because they interpreted it to 
 mean that every one would have his share in them, after the 
 manner of the old common and forest rights. 
 
 The very practical views of the peasants, with regard to 
 the demands of the people, were in amusing contrast with the 
 abstract theorizing of the educated townsmen. The peasant 
 continually withheld all state payments until he saw how 
 matters would turn out, and was disposed to reckon up the 
 solid benefit, in the form of land or money, that might come 
 to him from the changes obtained. While the townsman was 
 heating his brains about representation on the broadest basis, 
 the peasant asked if the relation between tenant and landlord 
 would continue as before, and whether the removal of the 
 feudal obligations meant that the farmer should become 
 owner of the land. 
 
 It is in the same naive way that Communism is interpreted 
 by the German peasantry. The wide spread among them of 
 communistic doctrines, the eagerness with which they lis- 
 tened to a plan for the partition of property, seemed to coun- 
 tenance the notion that it was a delusion to suppose the 
 peasant would be secured from this intoxication by his love 
 of secure possession and peaceful earnings. But, in fact, the
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 177 
 
 peasant contemplated partition by the light of an histori- 
 cal reminiscence rather than of novel theory. The golden 
 age, in the imagination of the peasant, was the time when 
 every member of the commune had a right to as much wood 
 from the forest as would enable him to sell some, after using 
 what he wanted in firing, in which the communal posses- 
 sions were so profitable that, instead of his having to pay 
 rates at the end of the year, each member of the commune 
 was something in pocket. Hence the peasants in general 
 understood by " partition " that the state lands, especially the 
 forests, would be divided among the communes, and that, by 
 some political legerdemain or other, everybody would have 
 free firewood, free grazing for his cattle, and over and above 
 that, a piece of gold without working for it. That he should 
 give up a single clod of his own to further the general par- 
 tition had never entered the mind of the peasant commun- 
 ist ; and the perception that this was an essential preliminary 
 to partition, was often a sufficient cure for his Communism. 
 
 In villages lying in the neighborhood of large towns, 
 however, where the circumstances of the peasantry are very 
 different, quite another interpretation of Communism is prev- 
 alent. Here the peasant is generally sunk to the position 
 of the proletaire, living from hand to mouth ; he has nothing 
 to lose, but everything to gain by partition. The coarse 
 nature of the peasant has here been corrupted into bestiality 
 by the disturbance of his instincts, while he is as yet inca- 
 pable of principles ; and in this type of the degenerate peas- 
 ant is seen the worst example of ignorance intoxicated by 
 theory. 
 
 A significant hint as to the interpretation the peasants put 
 on revolutionary theories may be drawn from the way they/ 
 employed the few weeks in which their movements were un- 
 checked. They felled the forest trees and shot the game; 
 they withheld taxes ; they shook off the imaginary or real 
 burdens imposed on them by their mediatized princes, by 
 presenting their demands in a very rough way before the 
 ducal or princely Schloss ; they ^et their faces against the 
 
 VOL. IX. 12
 
 178 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 bureaucratic management of the communes, deposed the gov- 
 ernment functionaries who had been placed over them as 
 burgomasters and magistrates, and abolished the whole bu- 
 reaucratic system of procedure, simply by taking no notice 
 of its regulations, and recurring to some tradition, some old 
 order or disorder of things. In all this it is clear that they 
 were animated not in the least by the spirit of modern revo- 
 lution, but by a purely narrow and personal impulse towards 
 reaction. 
 
 The idea of constitutional government lies quite beyond 
 the range of the German peasant's conceptions. His only 
 notion of representation is that of a representation of ranks, 
 of classes ; his only notion of a deputy is of one who takes 
 care, not of the national welfare, but of the interests of his 
 own order. Herein lay the great mistake of the democratic 
 party, in common with the bureaucratic governments, that 
 they entirely omitted the peculiar character of the peasant 
 from their political calculations. They talked of the peo- 
 ple, and forgot that the peasants were included in the term. 
 Only a baseless misconception of the peasant's character 
 cpuld induce the supposition that he would feel the slightest 
 enthusiasm about the principles involved in the reconstitu- 
 tion of the Empire, or even about the reoongtitutjon itself. 
 He has no zeal fpr a written law, as such, but only so far as 
 it takes the form of a living law, a tradition. It was the 
 external authority which the revolutionary party had won in 
 Baden that attracted the peasants into a participation of the 
 struggle. 
 
 Such, Biehl tells us, are the general characteristics of the 
 German peasantry, characteristics which subsist amidst a 
 wide variety of circumstances. In Mecklenburg, Pomerania, 
 ajid Brandenburg, the peasant lives on extensive estates ; in 
 Westphalia he lives in large isolated homesteads; in the 
 "Westerwald and in Sauerland, in little groups of villages and 
 hamlets } on the Rhine, land is for the most part parcelled 
 out among small proprietors, who live together in large vil- 
 lages. Then, of course, the diversify physical geography of
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 1?9 
 
 Germany gives rise to equally diversified methods of land- 
 culture ; and out of these various circumstances grow numer- 
 ous specific differences in manner and character. But the 
 generic character of the German peasant is everywhere the 
 same, in the clean mountain-hamlet and in the dirty fishing- 
 village on the coast, in the plains of North Germany and in 
 the backwoods of America. " Everywhere he has the same 
 historical character, everywhere custom is his supreme law. 
 Where religion and patriotism are still a naive instinct, are 
 still a sacred custom, there begins the class of the German 
 Peasantry." 
 
 Our readers will perhaps already have gathered from the 
 foregoing portrait of the German peasant, that Kiehl is not a 
 man who looks at objects through the spectacles either of the 
 doctrinaire or the dreamer ; and they will be ready to believe 
 what he tells us in his Preface, namely, that years ago he 
 began his wanderings over the hills and plains of Germany 
 for the sake of obtaining, in immediate intercourse with 
 the people, that completion of his historical, political, arid 
 economical studies which he was unable td find in books. 
 He began his investigations with no party prepossessions, 
 and his present views were evolved entirely from his own 
 gradually amassed obsef vations. He was, first of all, a pedes- 
 trian, and only in the second place a political author. The 
 views at which he has arrived by this inductive process he 
 sums up in the term, sociatpoUtical-conservatism ; but his 
 conservatism is, We conceive, of a thoroughly philosophical 
 kind. He sees in European society mcai^nate history, and 
 any attempt to disengage it from its historical elements must, 
 he believes, be simply destructive of social vitality. 1 What 
 has grown up historically can only die out historically, by 
 the gradual operation of necessary laws. The external con- 
 ditions which society has inherited from the past are but the 
 manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human 
 
 1 Throughout this article, in our statement of Riehl's opinions, we must 
 be understood not as quoting Kiehl, but as interpreting and illustrating 
 him.
 
 180 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT- 
 
 beings who compose it ; the internal conditions and the exter- 
 nal are related to each other as the organism and its medium, 
 and development can take place only by the gradual consen- 
 taneous development of both. Take the familiar example of 
 attempts to abolish titles, which have been about as effective 
 as the process of cutting off poppy-heads in a cornfield. tTe- 
 dem Menschen, says Kiehl, ist sein Zopf angeboren, warum soil 
 denn der sociale Sprachgebrauch nicht auch sein Zopf haben ? 
 which we may render : " As long as snobbism runs in the 
 blood, why should it not run in our speech ? " As a neces- 
 sary preliminary to a purely rational society, you must ob- 
 tain purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter 
 prejudices of hereditary affection and antipathy ; which is as 
 easy as to get running streams without springs, or the leafy 
 shade of the forest without the secular growth of trunk and 
 branch. 
 
 The historical conditions of society may be compared with 
 those of language. It must be admitted that the language of 
 cultivated nations is in anything but a rational state; the 
 great sections of the civilized world are only approxiniatively 
 intelligible to each other, and even that, only at the cost 
 of long study ; one word stands for many things, and many 
 words for one thing ; the subtle shades of meaning, and still 
 subtler echoes of association, make language an instrument 
 which scarcely anything short of genius can wield with defi- 
 niteness and certainty. Suppose, then, that the effect which 
 has been again and again made to construct a universal lan- 
 guage on a rational basis has at length succeeded, and that 
 you have a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of 
 idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful simmer of many-hued 
 significance, no hoary archaisms "familiar with forgotten 
 years," a patent deodorized and non-resonant language, 
 which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and 
 rapidly as algebraic signs. Your language may be a perfect 
 medium of expression to science, but will never express life, 
 which is a great deal more than science. With the anomalies 
 and inconveniences of historical language, you will have
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 181 
 
 parted with its music and its passions, and its vital qualities 
 as an expression of individual character, with its subtle capa- 
 bilities of wit, with everything that gives it power over the 
 imagination ; aoid the next step in simplification will be the 
 invention of a talking watch, which will achieve the utmost 
 facility and despatch in the communication of ideas by a 
 graduated adjustment of ticks, to be represented in writing 
 by a corresponding arrangement of dots. A melancholy " lan- 
 guage of the future ! " The sensory and motor nerves, that 
 run in the same sheath, are scarcely bound together by a 
 more necessary and delicate union than that which binds men's 
 affections, imagination, wit, and humor, with the subtle rami- 
 fications of historical language. Language must be left to 
 grow in precision, completeness, and unity, as minds grow in 
 clearness, comprehensiveness, and sympathy. And there is 
 an analogous relation between the moral tendencies of men 
 and the social conditions they have inherited. The nature of 
 European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can 
 only be developed by allowing those roots to remain undis- 
 turbed while the process of development is going on, until 
 that perfect ripeness of the seed which carries with it a life 
 independent of the root. This vital connection with the past 
 is much more vividly felt on the Continent than in England, 
 where we have to recall it by an effort of memory and reflec- 
 tion ; for though our English life is in its core intensely tra- 
 ditional, Protestantism and commerce have modernized the 
 face of the land and the aspects of society in a far greater 
 degree than in any Continental country : 
 
 " Abroad," says Ruskin, " a building of the eighth or tenth century 
 stands ruinous in the open streets ; the children play round it, the 
 peasants heap their corn in it. The buildings of yesterday nestle about 
 it, and fit their new stones in its rents, and tremble in sympathy as it 
 trembles. No one wonders at it, or thinks of it as separate, and of an- 
 other time; we feel the ancient world to be a real thing, and one with 
 the new ; antiquity is no dream ; it is rather the children playing about 
 the old stones that are the dream. But all is continuous, and the 
 words 'from generation to generation,' understandable here."
 
 182 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 This conception of European society as incarnate history, 
 is the fundamental idea of Eiehl's books. After the notable 
 failure of revolutionary attempts conducted from the point of 
 view of abstract democratic and socialistic theories, after the 
 practical demonstration of the evils resulting from a bureau- 
 cratic system, which governs by an undiscriminating, dead 
 mechanism, Kiehl wishes to urge on the consideration of his 
 countrymen a social policy founded on the special study of 
 the people as they are, on the natural history of the various 
 social ranks. He thinks it wise to pause a little from the- 
 orizing, and see what is the material actually present for 
 theory to work upon. It is the glory of the socialists in 
 contrast with the democratic doctrinaires who have been too 
 much occupied with the general idea of " the people " to in- 
 quire particularly into the actual life of the people that 
 they have thrown themselves with enthusiastic zeal into the 
 study at least of one social group, namely, the factory opera- 
 tives ; and here lies the secret of their partial success. But 
 unfortunately they have made this special duty of a single 
 fragment of society the basis of a theory which quietly sub- 
 stitutes for the small group of Parisian proletaires or English 
 factory-workers, the society of all Europe, nay, of the 
 whole world. And in this way they have lost the best fruit 
 of their investigations. For, says Kiehl, the more deeply we 
 penetrate into the knowledge of society in its details, the 
 more thoroughly we shall be convinced that a universal social 
 policy has no validity except on paper, and can never be carried 
 into successful practice. The conditions of German society 
 are altogether different from those of French, of English, or 
 of Italian society ; and to apply the same social theory to 
 these nations indiscriminately, is about as wise a procedure 
 as Triptolemus Yellowley's application of the agricultural 
 directions in Virgil's "Georgics" to his farm in the Shetland 
 Isles. 
 
 It is the clear and strong light in which Eiehl places this 
 important position, that in our opinion constitutes the sug- 
 gestive value of his books for foreign as well as German
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 183 
 
 readers. It lias not been sufficiently insisted on, that in the 
 various branches of Social Science there is an advance from 
 the general to the special, from the simple to the complex, 
 analogous with that which is found in the series of the 
 sciences, from mathematics to biology. To the laws of quan- 
 tity, comprised in mathematics and physics, are superadded, 
 in chemistry, laws of quality ; to these again are added, in 
 biology, laws of life ; and lastly, the conditions of life in gen- 
 eral branch out into its special conditions, or natural history, 
 on the one hand, and into its abnormal conditions, or pathol- 
 ogy, on the other. And in this series or ramification of the 
 sciences, the more general science will not suffice to solve 
 the problems of the more special. Chemistry embraces phe- 
 nomena which are not explicable by physics ; biology em- 
 braces phenomena which are not explicable by chemistry ; and 
 no biological generalization will enable us to predict the in- 
 finite specialities produced by the complexity of vital con- 
 ditions. So Social Science, while it has departments which 
 in their fundamental generality correspond to mathematics 
 and physics, namely, those grand and simple generalizations 
 which trace out the inevitable march of the human race as a 
 whole, and, as a ramification of these, the laws of economical 
 science, has also, in the departments of government and ju- 
 risprudence, which embrace the conditions of social life in all 
 their complexity, what may be called its biology, carrying us 
 on to innumerable special phenomena which outlie the sphere 
 of science, and belong to natural history. And just as the 
 most thorough acquaintance with physics or chemistry or 
 general physiology will not enable you at once to establish 
 the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that your 
 particular society of zoophytes, molluscs, and echinoderms 
 may feel themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their 
 skin; so the most complete equipment of theory will not 
 enable a statesman or a political and social reformer to adjust 
 his measures wisely, in the absence of a special acquaintance 
 with the section of society for which he legislates, with the 
 peculiar characteristics of the nation, the province, the class
 
 184 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 whose well-being he has to consult. In other words, a wise 
 social policy must be based not simply on abstract social 
 science, but on the natural history of social bodies. 
 
 Riehl's books are not dedicated merely to the argumentative 
 maintenance of this or of any other position ; they are in- 
 tended chiefly as a contribution to that knowledge of the 
 German people on the importance of which he insists. He 
 is less occupied with urging his own conclusions, than with 
 impressing on his readers the facts which have led him to 
 those conclusions. In the volume entitled " Land und Leute," 
 which, though published last, is properly an introduction to 
 the volume entitled " Die Biirgerliche Gesellschaft," he con- 
 siders the German people in their physical-geographical rela- 
 tions; he compares the natural divisions of the race, as 
 determined by land and climate and social traditions, with 
 the artificial divisions which are based on diplomacy ; and he 
 traces the genesis and influences of what we may call the 
 ecclesiastical geography of Germany, its partition between 
 Catholicism and Protestantism. He shows that the ordinary 
 antithesis of North and South Germany represents no real 
 ethnographical distinction, and that the natural divisions of 
 Germany, founded on its physical geography, are threefold, 
 namely, the low plains, the middle mountain region, and the 
 high mountain region, or Lower, Middle, and Upper Germany ; 
 and on this primary natural division all the other broad ethno- 
 graphical distinctions of Germany will be found to rest. The 
 plains of North or Lower Germany include all the seaboard 
 the nation possesses; and this, together with the fact that 
 they are traversed to the depth of six hundred miles by nav- 
 igable rivers, makes them the natural seat of a trading race. 
 Quite different is the geographical character of Middle Ger- 
 many. While the northern plains are marked off into great 
 divisions, by such rivers as the Lower Rhine, the Weser, and 
 the Oder, running almost in parallel lines, this central region 
 is cut up like a mosaic by the capricious lines of valleys and 
 rivers. Here is the region in which you find those famous 
 roofs from which the rain-water runs towards two different
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN IAXL. 185 
 
 seas, and the mountain-tops from which yon may look into 
 eight or ten German States. The abundance of water-power 
 and the presence of extensive coal-mines allow of a very 
 diversified industrial development in Middle Germany. In 
 Upper Germany, or the high mountain region, we find the 
 same symmetry in the lines of the rivers as in the north ; 
 almost all the great Alpine streams flow parallel with the 
 Danube. But the majority of these rivers are neither nav- 
 igable nor available for industrial objects, and instead of 
 serving for communication, they shut off one great tract from 
 another. The slow development, the simple peasant life of 
 many districts, is here determined by the moTrntain and the 
 river. In the southeast, however, industrial activity spreads 
 through Bohemia towards Austria, and forms a sort of balance 
 to the industrial districts of the Lower Rhine. Of course, 
 the boundaries of these three regions cannot be very strictly de- 
 fined ; but an approximation to the limits of Middle Germany 
 may be obtained by regarding it as a triangle, of which one 
 angle lies in Silesia, another in Aix-la-Chapelle, and a third 
 at Lake Constance. 
 
 This triple division corresponds with the broad distinctions 
 of climate. In the northern plains the atmosphere is damp 
 and heavy; in the southern mountain region it is dry and 
 rare, and there are abrupt changes of temperature, sharp 
 contrasts between the seasons, and devastating storms ; but 
 in both these zones men are hardened by conflict with the 
 roughnesses of the climate. In Middle Germany, on the 
 contrary, there is little of this struggle : the seasons are more 
 equable, and the mild, soft air of the valleys tends to make 
 the inhabitants luxurious and sensitive to hardships. It is 
 only in exceptional mountain districts that one is here re- 
 minded of the rough, bracing air on the heights of Southern 
 Germany. It is a curious fact that, as the air becomes grad- 
 ually lighter and rarer, from the North German coast towards 
 Upper Germany, the average of suicides regularly decreases. 
 Mecklenburg has the highest number, then Prussia, while the 
 fewest suicides occur in Bavaria and Austria.
 
 186 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Both the northern and southern regions have still a largo 
 extent of waste lands,-*' downs, morasses, and heaths ; and to 
 these are added, in the south, abundance of snow-fields and 
 naked rock ; while in Middle Germany culture has almost 
 overspread the face of the land, and there are no large tracts 
 of waste. There is the same proportion in the distribution 
 of forests. Again, in the north we see a monotonous contin- 
 uity of wheat-fields, potato-grounds, meadow-lands, and vast 
 heaths, and there is the same uniformity of culture over 
 large surfaces in the southern table-lands, and the Alpine 
 pastures. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is a 
 perpetual variety of crops within a short space ; the diversity 
 of land surface, and the corresponding variety in the species 
 of plants, are an invitation to the splitting up of estates, and 
 this again encourages to the utmost the motley character of 
 the cultivation. 
 
 According to this threefold division, it appears that there 
 are certain features common to North and South Germany, in 
 which they differ from Central Germany, and the nature of 
 this difference Eiehl indicates by distinguishing the former 
 as Centralized Land, and the latter as Individualized Land ; 
 a distinction which is Well symbolized by the fact that North 
 and South Germany possess the great lines of railway which 
 are the medium for the traffic of the world, while Middle 
 Germany is far richer in lines for local communication, and 
 possesses the greatest length of railway within the smallest 
 space. Disregarding superficialities, the East Frieslanders, 
 the Schleswig-Holsteiners, the Mecklenburghers, and the 
 Pomeranians are much more nearly allied to the old Bava- 
 rians, the Tyrolese, and the Styrians, than any of these are 
 allied to the Saxons, the Thuringians, or the Bhinelanders. 
 Both in North and South Germany original races are still 
 found in large masses, and popular dialects are spoken ; you 
 still find there thoroughly peasant districts, thorough vil- 
 lages, and also, at great intervals, thorough cities ; you etill 
 find there a sense of rank. In Middle Germany, on the con- 
 trary, the original races are fused together, or sprinkled
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 187 
 
 hither and thither ; the peculiarities of the popular dialects 
 are worn down or confused ; there is no very strict line of 
 demarcation between the country and the town population, 
 hundreds of small towns and large villages being hardly dis- 
 tinguishable in their characteristics ; and the sense of rank, as 
 part of the organic structure of society, is almost extinguished. 
 Again, both in the north and south there is still a strong 
 ecclesiastical spirit in the people, and the Pomeranian sees 
 Antichrist in the Pope as clearly as the Tyrolese sees him in 
 Doctor Luther; while in Middle Germany the confessions 
 are mingled, they exist peaceably side by side in very narrow 
 space, and tolerance or indifference has spread itself widely, 
 even in the popular mind. And the analogy, or rather the 
 causal relation between the physical geography of the three 
 regions and the development of the population, goes still 
 further. 
 
 "For," observes Riehl, "the striking connection which has been 
 pointed out between the local geological formations in Germany, and 
 the revolutionary disposition of the people, has more than a metaphor- 
 ical significance. Where the primeval physical revolutions of the 
 globe bave been tbe wildest in their effects, and tbe most multiform 
 strata have been tossed together or thrown one upon the other, it is a 
 very intelligible consequence that on a land surface thus broken up 
 the population should sooner develop itself into small communities, 
 and tbat the more intense life generated in these smaller communities 
 should become the most favorable nidus for the reception of modern 
 culture, and with this a susceptibility for its revolutionary ideas ; while 
 a people settled in a region where its groups are spread over ^ large 
 space will persist much more obstinately in the retention of its original 
 character. The people of Middle Germany have none of that exclu- 
 sive one-sidedness which determines tbe peculiar genius of great 
 national groups, just as this one-sidedness, or uniformity, is wanting to 
 the geological and geographical character of their land." 
 
 This ethnographical outline Riehl fills up with special and 
 typical descriptions, and then makes it the starting-point for 
 a criticism of the actual political condition, of Germany. The 
 volume is full of vivid pictures, as well as penetrating glances
 
 188 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 into the maladies and tendencies of modern society. It 
 would be fascinating as literature, if it were not important 
 for its facts and philosophy. But we can only commend it 
 to our readers, and pass on to the volume entitled " Die Biir- 
 gerliche Gesellschaft," from which we have drawn our sketch 
 of the German peasantry. Here Elehl gives us a series of 
 studies in that natural history of the people, which he re- 
 gards as the proper basis of social policy. He holds that, in 
 European society, there are three natural ranks, or estates : 
 the hereditary landed aristocracy, the citizens or commercial 
 class, and the peasantry, or agricultural class. By natural 
 ranks he means ranks which have their roots deep in the 
 historical structure of society, and are still, in the present, 
 showing vitality above ground ; he means those great social 
 groups which are not only distinguished externally by their 
 vocation, but essentially by their mental character, their 
 habits, their mode of life, by the principle they represent 
 in the historical development of society. In his conception 
 of the Fourth Estate he differs from the usual interpreta- 
 tion, according to which it is simply equivalent to the prole- 
 tariat, or those who are dependent on daily wages, whose 
 only capital is their skill or bodily strength factory opera- 
 tives, artisans, agricultural laborers, to whom might be added ; 
 especially in Germany, the day-laborers with the quill, the 
 literary proletariat. This, Riehl observes, is a valid basis of 
 economical classification, but not of social classification. In 
 his view, the Fourth Estate is a stratum produced by the 
 perpetual abrasion of the other great social groups ; it is the 
 sign and result of the decomposition which is commencing in 
 the organic constitution of society. Its elements are derived 
 alike from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry. 
 It assembles under its banner the deserters of historical so- 
 ciety, and forms them into a terrible army, which is only 
 just awaking to the consciousness of its corporate power. 
 The tendency of this Fourth Estate, by the very process of its 
 formation, is to do away with the distinctive historical char- 
 acter of the other estates, and to resolve their peculiar rank
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 189 
 
 and vocation into a uniform social relation, founded on an 
 abstract conception of society. According to Riehl's classifi- 
 cation, the day-laborers, whom the political economist desig- 
 nates as the Fourth Estate, belong partly to the peasantry, or 
 agricultural class, and partly to the citizens, or commercial 
 class. 
 
 Kiehl considers, in the first place, the peasantry and aris- 
 tocracy as the "forces of social persistence," and, in the 
 second, the bourgeoisie and the Fourth Estate as the " forces 
 of social movement." 
 
 The aristocracy, he observes, is the only one among these 
 four groups which is denied by others besides Socialists to 
 have any natural basis as a separate rank. It is admitted 
 that there was once an aristocracy which had an intrinsic 
 ground of existence ; but now, it is alleged, this is an histori- 
 cal fossil, an antiquarian relic, venerable because gray with 
 age. In what, it is asked, can consist the peculiar vocation 
 of the aristocracy, since it has no longer the monopoly of the 
 land, of the higher military functions, and of government 
 offices, and since the service of the Court has no longer any 
 political importance ? To this Biehl replies, that in great 
 revolutionary crises, the " men of progress " have more than 
 once abolished the aristocracy. But, remarkably enough, 
 the aristocracy has always reappeared. This measure of 
 abolition showed that the nobility were no longer regarded 
 as a real class, for to abolish a real class would be an absurd- 
 ity. It is quite possible to contemplate a voluntary break- 
 ing up of the peasant or citizen class in the socialistic sense, 
 but no man in his senses would think of straightway abol- 
 ishing citizens and peasants. The aristocracy, then, was 
 regarded as a sort of cancer, or excrescence of society. Nev- 
 ertheless, not only has it been found impossible to annihilate 
 an hereditary nobility by decree, but, also, the aristocracy of 
 the eighteenth century outlived even the self-destructive acts 
 of its own perversity. A life which was entirely without 
 object, entirely destitute of fractions, would not, says Biehl, 
 be so persistent. He has an acute criticism of those who
 
 190 ESSAYS OP GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 conduct a polemic against the idea of an hereditary aristoc- 
 racy, while they are proposing an "aristocracy of talent," 
 which, after all, is based on the principle of inheritance. 
 The Socialists are, therefore, only consistent in declaring 
 against an aristocracy of talent. "But when they have 
 turned the world into a great foundling hospital, they will 
 still be unable to eradicate the ' privileges of birth.' " We 
 must not follow him in his criticism, however ; nor can we 
 afford to do more than mention hastily his interesting sketch 
 of the mediaeval aristocracy, and his admonition to the Ger- 
 man aristocracy of the present day, that the vitality of their 
 class is not to be sustained by romantic attempts to revive 
 mediaeval forms and sentiments, but only by the exercise of 
 functions as real and salutary for actual society as those of 
 the mediaeval aristocracy were for the feudal age. " In mod- 
 ern society the divisions of rank indicate division of labor, 
 according to that distribution of functions in the social or- 
 ganism which the historical constitution of society has deter- 
 mined. In this way the principle of differentiation and the 
 principle of unity are identical." 
 
 The elaborate study of the German bourgeoisie, which 
 forms the next division of the yolume, must be passed over ; 
 but we may pause a moment to note Kiehl's definition of the 
 social Philister (Philistine), an epithet for which we have no 
 equivalent, not at all, however, for want of the object it rep- 
 resents. Most people, who read a little German, know that 
 the epithet Philister originated in the Burschen-leben, or stu- 
 dent-life of Germany, and that the antithesis of Bursch and 
 Philister was equivalent to the antithesis of "gown and 
 town ; " but since the word has passed into ordinary language, 
 it has assumed several shades of significance which have 
 not yet been merged in a single, absolute meaning ; and one 
 of the questions which an English visitor in Germany will 
 probably take an opportunity of asking is, " What is the strict 
 meaning of the word Philister ? " Kiehl's answer is, that the 
 Philister is one who is indifferent to all social interests, all 
 public life, as distinguished from selfish and private interests ;
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 191 
 
 he has no sympathy with political and social events except 
 as they affect his own comfort and prosperity, as they offer 
 him material for amusement or opportunity for gratifying his 
 vanity. He has no social or political creed, but is always of 
 the opinion which is most convenient for the moment. He 
 is always in the majority, and is the main element of unreason 
 and stupidity in the judgment of a " discerning public." It. 
 seems presumptuous in us to dispute Kiehl's interpretation of 
 a German word, but we must think that, in literature, the 
 epithet Philister has usually a wider meaning than this 
 includes his definition and something more. We imagine the 
 Philister is the personification of the spirit which judges 
 everything from a lower point of view than the subject de- 
 mands, which judges the affairs of the parish from the ego- 
 tistic or purely personal point of view, which judges the 
 affairs of the nation from the parochial point of view, and 
 does not hesitate to measure the merits of the universe from 
 the human point of view. At least this must surely be the 
 spirit to which Goethe alludes in a passage cited by Biehl 
 himself, where he says that the Germans need not be ashamed 
 of erecting a monument to him as well as to Bliicher ; for if 
 Bliicher had freed them from the French, he (Goethe) had 
 freed them from the nets of the Philister : 
 
 "Ihr mogt mir immer ungescheut 
 Gleich Bliichern Denkmal setzen ! 
 Von Franzosen hat er euch befreit, 
 Ich von Philister-netzen." 
 
 Goethe could hardly claim to be the apostle of public spirit ; 
 but he is eminently the man who helps us to rise to a lofty 
 point of observation, so that we may see things in their rela- 
 tive proportions. 
 
 The most interesting chapters in the description of the 
 Fourth Estate, which concludes the volume, are those on 
 the Aristocratic Proletariat and the Intellectual Proleta- 
 riat. The Fourth Estate in Germany, says Biehl, has its 
 centre of gravity not, as in England and France, in the day.
 
 192 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 laborers and factory operatives, and still less in the degen- 
 erate peasantry. In Germany, the educated proletariat is 
 the leaven that sets the mass in fermentation ; the dangerous 
 classes there go about, not in blouses, but in frock-coats ; 
 they begin with the impoverished prince and end in the hun- 
 griest litterateur. The custom that all the sons of a noble- 
 man shall inherit their father's title, necessarily goes on 
 multiplying that class of aristocrats who are not only with- 
 out function but without adequate provision, and who shrink 
 from entering the ranks of the citizens by adopting some 
 honest calling. The younger son of a prince, says Eiehl, is 
 usually obliged to remain without any vocation ; and however 
 zealously he may study music, painting, literature, or science, 
 he can never be a regular musician, painter, or man of sci- 
 ence ; his pursuit will be called a " passion," not a " calling," 
 and to the end of his days he remains a dilettante. " But 
 the ardent pursuit of a fixed practical calling can alone sat- 
 isfy the active man." Direct legislation cannot remedy this 
 evil. The inheritance of titles by younger sons is the uni- 
 versal custom, and custom is stronger than law. But if all 
 government preference for the " aristocratic proletariat " were 
 withdrawn, the sensible men among them would prefer emi- 
 gration, or the pursuit of some profession, to the hungry 
 distinction of a title without rents. 
 
 The intellectual proletaires Kiehl calls the "church mili- 
 tant " of the Fourth Estate in Germany. In no other coun- 
 try are they so numerous ; in no other country is the trade 
 in material and industrial capital so far exceeded by the 
 wholesale and retail trade, the traffic and the usury, in the 
 intellectual capital of the nation. Germany yields more intel- 
 lectual produce than it can use and pay for. 
 
 " This over-production, which is uot transient bat permanent, nay, 
 is constantly on the increase, evidences a diseased state of the national 
 industry, a perverted application of industrial powers, and is a far more 
 pungent satire on the national condition than all the poverty of opera- 
 tives and peasants. . . . Other nations need not envy us the prepon- 
 derance of the intellectual proletariat over the proletaires of manual
 
 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. 193 
 
 labor. For man more easily becomes diseased from over-study than 
 from the labor of the hands ; and it is precisely in the intellectual pro- 
 letariat that there are the most dangerous seeds of disease. This is 
 the group in which the opposition between earnings and wants, be- 
 tween the ideal social position and the real, is the most hopelessly 
 irreconcilable." 
 
 We must unwillingly leave our readers to make acquaint- 
 ance for themselves with the graphic details with which 
 Kiehl follows up this general statement ; but before quitting 
 these admirable volumes, let us say, lest our inevitable omis- 
 sions should have left room for a different conclusion, that 
 Kiehl's conservatism is not in the least tinged with the par- 
 tisanship of a class, with a poetic fanaticism for the past, or 
 with the prejudice of a mind incapable of discerning the 
 grander evolution of things to which all social forms are but 
 temporarily subservient. It is the conservatism of a clear- 
 eyed, practical, but withal large-minded man a little caus- 
 tic, perhaps, now and then, in his epigrams on democratic 
 doctrinaires who have their nostrum for all political and 
 social diseases, and on communistic theories which he regards 
 as "the despair of the individual in his own manhood, re- 
 duced to a system," but nevertheless able and willing to do 
 justice to the elements of fact and reason in every shade of 
 opinion and every form of effort. He is as far as possible 
 from the folly of supposing that the sun will go backward 
 on the dial, because we put the hands of our clock backward ; 
 he only contends against the opposite folly of decreeing that 
 it shall be mid-day, while in fact the sun is only just touch- 
 ing the mountain-tops, and all along the valley men are stum- 
 bling in the twilight. 
 
 VOL. at.
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 
 
 IT was between three and four o'clock on a fine morning 
 in August, that after a ten hours' journey from Frank- 
 fort, I awoke at the Weimar station. No tipsiness can be 
 more dead to all appeals than that which comes from fitful 
 draughts of sleep on a railway journey by night. To the 
 disgust of your wakeful companions, you are totally insen- 
 sible to the existence of your umbrella, and to the fact that 
 your carpet-bag is stowed under your seat, or that you 
 have borrowed books and tucked them behind the cushion. 
 " What 's the odds, so long as one can sleep ? " is your philo- 
 sophic formula ; and it is not until you have begun to shiver 
 on the platform in the early morning air that you become 
 alive to property and its duties, that is, to the necessity of 
 keeping a fast grip upon it. Such was my condition when 
 I reached the station at Weimar. The ride to the town 
 thoroughly roused me, all the more because the glimpses I 
 caught from the carriage window were in startling contrast 
 with my preconceptions. The lines of houses looked rough 
 and straggling, and were often interrupted by trees peeping 
 out from the gardens behind. At last we stopped before the 
 Erbprinz, an inn of long standing, in the heart of the town, 
 and were ushered along heavy-looking in-and-out corridors, 
 such as are found only in German inns, into rooms which 
 overlooked a garden just like one you may see at the back of 
 a farmhouse in many an English village. 
 
 A walk in the morning in search of lodgings confirmed the 
 impression that Weimar was more like a market-town than 
 the precinct of a court. "And this is the Athens of the
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 195 
 
 North!" we said. Materially speaking, it is more like 
 Sparta. The blending of rustic and civic life, the indica- 
 tions of a central government in the midst of very primitive- 
 looking objects, has some distant analogy with the condition 
 of old Lacedaemon. The shops are most of them such as you 
 would see in the back streets of an English provincial town, 
 and the commodities on sale are often chalked on the door- 
 posts. A loud rumbling of vehicles may indeed be heard 
 now and then; but the rumbling is loud, not because the 
 vehicles are many, but because the springs are few. The 
 inhabitants seemed to us to have more than the usual heavi- 
 ness of Germanity ; even their stare was slow, like that of 
 herbivorous quadrupeds. We set out with the intention of 
 exploring the town, and at every other turn we came into a 
 street which took us out of the town, or else into one that 
 led us back to the market from which we set out. One's first 
 feeling was, How could Goethe live here in this dull, lifeless 
 village ? The reproaches cast on him for his worldliness and 
 attachment to court splendor seemed ludicrous enough ; and 
 it was inconceivable that the stately Jupiter, in a frock-coat, 
 so familiar to us all through Ranch's statuette, could have 
 habitually walked along these rude streets and among these 
 slouching mortals. Not a picturesque bit of building was to 
 be seen ; there was no quaintness, nothing to remind one of 
 historical associations, nothing but the most arid prosaism. 
 
 This was the impression produced by a first morning's 
 walk in Weimar, an impression which very imperfectly 
 represents what Weimar is, but which is worth recording, 
 because it is true as a sort of back view. Our ideas were 
 considerably modified when in the evening we found our way 
 to the Belvedere chaussee, a splendid avenue of chestnut- 
 trees, two miles in length, reaching from the town to the 
 summer residence of Belvedere ; when we saw the Schloss, 
 and discovered the labyrinthine beauties of the Park ; indeed, 
 every day opened to us fresh charms in this quiet little valley 
 and its environs. To any one who loves Nature in her gentle 
 aspects, who delights in the checkered shade on a summer
 
 196 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 morning, and in a walk on the corn-clad upland at sunset, 
 within sight of a little town nestled among the trees below, 
 I say come to Weimar. And if you are weary of English 
 unrest, of that society of " eels in a jar," where each is try- 
 ing to get his head above the other, the somewhat stupid 
 well-being of the Weimarians will not be an unwelcome con- 
 trast, for a short time at least. If you care nothing about 
 Goethe and Schiller and Herder and Wieland, why, so much 
 the worse for you, you will miss many interesting thoughts 
 and associations ; still, Weimar has a charm independent of 
 these great names. 
 
 First among all its attractions is the Park, which would be 
 remarkably beautiful even among English parks ; and it has 
 one advantage over all these, namely, that it is without a 
 fence. It runs up to the houses and far out into the corn- 
 fields and meadows, as if it had a " sweet will " of its own, 
 like a river or a lake, and had not been planned and planted by 
 human will. Through it flows the Ilm, not a clear stream, 
 it must be confessed, but, like all water, as Novalis says, "an 
 eye to the landscape." Before we came to Weimar we had 
 had dreams of boating on the Ilm, and we were not a little 
 amused at the difference between this vision of our own and 
 the reality. A few water-fowl are the only navigators of 
 the river ; and even they seem to confine themselves to one 
 spot, as if they were there purely in the interest of the pic- 
 turesque. The real extent of the Park is small ; but the walks 
 are so ingeniously arranged, and the trees are so luxuriant 
 and various, that it takes weeks to learn the turnings and 
 windings by heart, so as no longer to have the sense of nov- 
 elty. In the warm weather our great delight was the walk 
 which follows the course of the Ilm, and is overarched by 
 tall trees with patches of dark moss on their trunks, in rich 
 contrast with the transparent green of the delicate leaves, 
 through which the golden sunlight played and checkered the 
 walk before us. On one side of this walk the rocky ground 
 rises to the height of twenty feet or more, and is clothed 
 with mosses and rock-plants. On the other side there are.
 
 IrOETHE.
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 197 
 
 every now and then, openings, breaks in the continuity of 
 shade, which show you a piece of meadow-land with fine 
 groups of trees ; and at every such opening a seat is placed 
 under the rock, where you may sit and chat away the sunny 
 hours, or listen to those delicate sounds which one might 
 fancy came from tiny bells worn on the garment of Silence 
 to make us aware of her invisible presence. It is along this 
 walk that you come upon a truncated column, with a serpent 
 twined round it, devouring cakes, placed on the column as 
 offerings, a bit of rude sculpture in stone. The inscription 
 Genio loci enlightens the learned as to the significance 
 of this symbol ; but the people of Weimar, unedified by clas- 
 sical allusions, have explained the sculpture by a story which 
 is an excellent example of a modern myth. Once on a time, 
 say they, a huge serpent infested the Park, and evaded all 
 attempts to exterminate him, until at last a cunning baker 
 made some appetizing cakes which contained an effectual 
 poison, and placed them in the serpent's reach, thus meriting 
 a place with Hercules, Theseus, and other monster-slayers. 
 Weimar, in gratitude, erected this column as a memorial of 
 the baker's feat and its own deliverance. A little farther on 
 is the Borkenhaus, where Carl August used to play the her- 
 mit for days together, and from which he used to telegraph 
 to Goethe in his Gartenhaus. Sometimes we took our shady 
 walk in the Stern, the oldest part of the Park plantations, on 
 the opposite side of the river, lingering on our way to watch 
 the crystal brook which hurries on, like a foolish young 
 maiden, to wed itself with the muddy Ilm. The Stern 
 (Star), a large circular opening among the trees, with walks 
 radiating from it, has been thought of as the place for the 
 projected statues of Goethe and Schiller. In Ranch's model 
 for these statues the poets are draped in togas, Goethe, who 
 was considerably the shorter of the two, resting his hand on 
 Schiller's shoulder; but it has been wisely determined to 
 represent them in their "habit as they lived," so Ranch's 
 design is rejected. Against classical idealizing in portrait 
 sculpture, Weimar has already a sufficient warning in the
 
 198 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 eolossal statue of Goethe, executed after Bettina's design, 
 which the readers of the "Correspondence with a Child" 
 may see engraved as a frontispiece to the second volume. 
 This statue is locked up in an odd structure, standing in the 
 Park, and looking like a compromise between a church and a 
 summer-house. (Weimar does not shine in its buildings !) 
 How little real knowledge of Goethe must the mind have 
 that could wish to see him represented as a naked Apollo, 
 with a Psyche at his knee ! The execution is as feeble as 
 the sentiment is false ; the Apollo-Goethe is a caricature, 
 and the Psyche is simply vulgar. The statue was executed 
 under Bettina's encouragement, in the hope that it would be 
 bought by the King of Prussia ; but a breach having taken 
 place between her and her royal friend, a purchaser was 
 sought in the Grand Duke of Weimar, who, after transport- 
 ing it at enormous expense from Italy, wisely shut it up 
 where it is seen only by the curious. 
 
 As autumn advanced and the sunshine became precious, 
 we preferred the broad walk on the higher grounds of the 
 Park, where the masses of trees are finely disposed, leaving 
 wide spaces of meadow which extend on one side to the 
 Belvedere allee with its avenue of chestnut-trees, and on the 
 other to the little cliffs which I have already described as 
 forming a wall by the walk along the Ilm. Exquisitely 
 beautiful were the graceful forms of the plane-trees, thrown 
 in golden relief on a background of dark pines. Here we 
 used to turn and turn again in the autumn afternoons, at 
 first bright and warm, then sombre with low-lying purple 
 olouds, and chill with winds that sent the leaves raining 
 from the branches. The eye here welcomes, as a contrast, 
 the white facade of a building looking like a small Greek 
 temple, placed on the edge of a cliff, and you at once con- 
 clude it to be a bit of pure ornament, a device to set off the 
 landscape; but you presently see a porter seated near the 
 door of the basement story, beguiling the ennui of his sine- 
 cure by a book and a pipe, and you learn with surprise that 
 this is another retreat for ducal dignity to unbend and
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 199 
 
 philosophize in. Singularly ill-adapted to such a purpose it 
 seems to beings not ducal. On the other side of the Ilm the 
 Park is bordered by the road leading to the little village of 
 Ober Weimar, another sunny walk, which has the special 
 attraction of taking one by Goethe's Gartenhaus, his first 
 residence at Weimar. Inside, this Gartenhaus is a homely 
 sort of cottage, such as many an English nobleman's gardener 
 lives in ; no furniture is left in it, and the family wish to 
 sell it. Outside, its aspect became to us like that of a dear 
 friend, whose irregular features and rusty clothes have a 
 peculiar charm. It stands, with its bit of garden and orchard, 
 on a pleasant slope, fronting the west; before it the Park 
 stretches one of its meadowy openings to the trees which 
 fringe the Ilm, and between this meadow and the garden 
 hedge lies the said road to Ober Weimar. A grove of weep- 
 ing birches sometimes tempted us to turn out of this road 
 up to the fields at the top of the slope, on which not only 
 the Gartenhaus, but several other modest villas are placed. 
 From this little height one sees to advantage the plantations 
 of the Park in their autumnal coloring ; the town, with its 
 steep-roofed church, and castle clock-tower, painted a gay 
 green ; the bushy line of the Belvedere chaussee, and Belve- 
 dere itself peeping on an eminence from its nest of trees. 
 Here, too, was the place for seeing a lovely sunset, such a 
 sunset as September sometimes gives us, when the western 
 horizon is like a rippled sea of gold, sending over the whole 
 hemisphere golden vapors, which, as they near the east, are 
 subdued to a deep rose-color. 
 
 The Schloss is rather a stately, ducal-looking building, 
 forming three sides of a quadrangle. Strangers are admitted 
 to see a suite of rooms called the Dichter-Zimmer (Poet's 
 Eooms), dedicated to Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland. The 
 idea of these rooms is really a pretty one : in each of them 
 there is a bust of the poet who is its presiding genius, and 
 the walls of the Schiller and Goethe rooms are covered with 
 frescos representing scenes from their works. The Wieland 
 room is much smaller than the other two, and serves as an
 
 200 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 antechamber to them; it is also decorated more sparingly, 
 but the arabesques on the walls are very tastefully designed, 
 and satisfy one better than the ambitious compositions from 
 Goethe and Schiller. 
 
 A more interesting place to visitors is the library, which 
 occupies a large building not far from the Schloss. The 
 principal Saal, surrounded by a broad gallery, is ornamented 
 with some very excellent busts and some very bad portraits. 
 Of the busts, the most remarkable is that of Gliick, by 
 Houdon, a striking specimen of the real in art. The sculp- 
 tor has given every scar made by the small-pox ; he has left 
 the nose as pug and insignificant, and the mouth as common, 
 as Nature made them ; but then he has done what, doubtless, 
 Nature also did, he has spread over those coarsely cut feat- 
 ures the irradiation of genius. A specimen of the opposite 
 style in art is Trippel's bust of Goethe as the young Apollo, 
 also fine in its way. It was taken when Goethe was in Italy ; 
 and in the " Italianische Reise," mentioning the progress of 
 the bust, he says that he sees little likeness to himself, but 
 is not discontented that he should go forth to the world as 
 such a good-looking fellow, hiibscher Bursch. This bust, 
 however, is a frank idealization ; when an artist tells us that 
 the ideal of a Greek god divides his attention with his imme- 
 diate subject, we are warned. But one gets rather irritated 
 with idealization in portrait when, as in Dannecker's bust of 
 Schiller, one has been misled into supposing that Schiller's 
 brow was square and massive, while, in fact, it was receding. 
 We say this partly on the evidence of his skull, a cast of 
 which is kept in the library, so that we could place it in jux- 
 taposition with the bust. The story of this skull is curious. 
 When it was determined to disinter Schiller's remains, that 
 they might repose in company with those of Carl August and 
 Goethe, the question of identification was found to be a diffi- 
 cult one, for his bones were mingled with those of ten insig- 
 nificant fellow-mortals. When, however, the eleven skulls 
 were placed in juxtaposition, a large number of persons who 
 had known Schiller separately and successively fixed upon
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 201 
 
 fche same skull as his, and their evidence was clenched by 
 the discovery that the teeth of this skull corresponded to the 
 statement of Schiller's servant, that his master had lost no 
 teeth, except one, which he specified. Accordingly it was 
 decided that this was Schiller's skull, and the comparative 
 anatomist Loder was sent for from Jena to select the bones 
 which completed the skeleton. 1 The evidence certainly leaves 
 room for a doubt; but the receding forehead of the skull 
 agrees with the testimony of persons who knew Schiller, that 
 he had, as Eauch said to us, a " miserable forehead ; " it 
 agrees, also, with a beautiful miniature of Schiller, taken 
 when he was about twenty. This miniature is deeply inter- 
 esting ; it shows us a youth whose clearly cut features, with 
 the mingled fire and melancholy of their expression, could 
 hardly have been passed with indifference ; it has the langer 
 Gansehals (long goose-neck) which he gives to his Karl 
 Moor; but instead of the black, sparkling eyes, and the 
 gloomy, overhanging, bushy eyebrows he chose for his robber 
 hero, it has the fine wavy auburn locks and the light-blue 
 eyes which belong to our idea of pure German race. We 
 may be satisfied that we know at least the form of Schiller's 
 features, for in this particular his busts and portraits are in 
 striking accordance ; unlike the busts and portraits of Goethe, 
 which are a proof, if any were wanted, how inevitably sub- 
 jective art is, even when it professes to be purely imitative, 
 how the most active perception gives us rather a reflex of 
 what we think and feel, than the real sum of objects before 
 us. The Goethe of Rauch or of Schwanthaler is widely dif- 
 ferent in form, as well as expression, from the Goethe of 
 Stieler ; and Winterberger, the actor, who knew Goethe inti- 
 mately, told us that to him not one of all the likenesses, 
 sculptured or painted, seemed to have more than a faint 
 resemblance to their original. There is, indeed, one likeness, 
 taken in his old age, and preserved in the library, which is 
 
 1 I tell this story from my recollection of Stahr's account in his " Weimar 
 nnd Jena," an account which was confirmed to me by residents in Weimar; 
 bat as I have not the book by me, I cannot test the accuracy of my memory.
 
 202 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 startling from the conviction it produces of close resemblance, 
 and Winterberger admitted it to be the best he had seen. 
 It is a tiny miniature painted on a small cup, of Dresden 
 china, and is so wonderfully executed that a magnifying-glass 
 exhibits the perfection of its texture as if it were a flower or 
 a butterfly's wing. It is more like Stieler's portrait than any 
 other ; the massive neck, unbent though withered, rises out 
 of his dressing-gown, and supports majestically a head from 
 which one might imagine (though, alas I it never is so in 
 reality) that the discipline of seventy years had purged away 
 all meaner elements than those of the sage and the poet, 
 a head which might serve as a type of sublime old age. 
 Among the collection of toys and trash, melancholy records 
 of the late Grand Duke's eccentricity, which occupy the 
 upper rooms of the library, there are some precious relics 
 hanging together in a glass case, which almost betray one 
 into sympathy with " holy coat " worship. They are 
 Luther's gown, the coat in which Gustavus Adolphus was 
 shot, and Goethe's court coat and Schlafrock. What a rush 
 of thoughts from the mingled memories of the passionate 
 reformer, the heroic warrior, and the wise singer ! 
 
 The only one of its great men to whom Weimar has at 
 present erected a statue in the open air is Herder. His 
 statue, erected in 1850, stands in what is called the Herder 
 Platz, with its back to the church in which he preached ; in 
 the right hand is a roll bearing his favorite motto, Licht, 
 Liebe, Leben (Light, Love, Life), and on the pedestal is the 
 inscription Von Deutschen alter Lander (from Germans of 
 all lands). This statue, which is by Schaller of Munich, is 
 very much admired ; but, remembering the immortal descrip- 
 tion in the " Dichtung und Wahrheit," of Herder's appear- 
 ance when Goethe saw him for the first time at Strasburg, I 
 was disappointed with the parsonic appearance of the statue, 
 as well as of the bust in the library. The part of the town 
 which imprints itself on the memory, next to the Herder 
 Platz, is the Markt, a cheerful square made smart by a new 
 Kath-haus. Twice a week it is crowded with stalls and
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 203 
 
 country people; and it is the very pretty custom for the 
 band to play in the balcony of the Rath-haus about twenty 
 minutes every market-day to delight the ears of the peas- 
 antry. A head-dress worn by many of the old women, and 
 here and there by a young one, is, I think, peculiar to 
 Thuringia. Let the fair reader imagine half a dozen of her 
 broadest French sashes dyed black, and attached as streamers 
 to the back of a stiff black skull-cap, ornamented in front 
 with a large bow, which stands out like a pair of donkey's 
 ears ; let her further imagine, mingled with the streamers of 
 ribbon, equally broad pendants of a thick woollen texture, 
 something like the fringe of an urn-rug, and she will have 
 an idea of the head-dress in which I have seen a Thuringian 
 damsel figure on a hot summer's day. Two houses in the 
 Markt are pointed out as those from which Tetzel published 
 his indulgences and Luther thundered against them ; but 
 it is difficult to one's imagination to conjure up scenes 
 of theological controversy in Weimar, where, from princes 
 down to pastry-cooks, rationalism is taken as a matter of 
 course. 
 
 Passing along the Schiller-strasse, a broad, pleasant street, 
 one is thrilled by the inscription, Hier wohnte Schiller, over 
 the door of a small house with casts in its bow-window. 
 Mount up to the second story, and you will see Schiller's 
 study very nearly as it was when he worked in it. It is a 
 cheerful room with three windows, two towards the street 
 and one looking on a little garden which divides his house 
 from the neighboring one. The writing-table, which he notes 
 as an important purchase in one of his letters to Korner, and 
 in one of the drawers of which he used to keep rotten apples 
 for the sake of their scent, stands near the last-named win- 
 dow, so that its light would fall on his left hand. On another 
 side of the room is his piano, with his guitar lying upon it ; 
 and above these hangs an ugly print of an Italian scene, 
 which has a companion equally ugly on another wall. 
 Strange feelings it awakened in me to run my fingers over 
 the keys of the little piano and call forth its tones, now so
 
 204 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 queer and feeble, like those of an invalided old woman whose 
 voice could once make a heart beat with fond passion or 
 soothe its angry pulses into calm. The bedstead on which 
 Schiller died has been removed into the study, from the small 
 bedroom behind, which is now empty. A little table is placed 
 close to the head of the bed, with his drinking-glass upon it, 
 and on the wall above the bedstead there is a beautiful sketch 
 of him lying dead. He used to occupy the whole of the 
 second floor. It contains, besides the study and bedroom, an 
 antechamber, now furnished with casts and prints on sale, in 
 order to remunerate the custodiers of the house, and a salon 
 tricked out, since his death, with a symbolical cornice, statues, 
 and a carpet worked by the ladies of Weimar. 
 
 Goethe's house is much more important-looking, but, to 
 English eyes, far from being the palatial residence which 
 might be expected, from the descriptions of German writers. 
 The entrance hall is indeed rather imposing, with its statues 
 in niches, and its broad staircase, but the rest of the house is 
 not proportionately spacious and elegant. The only part of 
 the house open to the public and this only on a Friday 
 is the principal suite of rooms which contain his collection 
 of casts, pictures, cameos, etc. This collection is utterly in- 
 significant, except as having belonged to him ; and one turns 
 away from bad pictures and familiar casts, to linger over the 
 manuscript of the wonderful " Romische Elegein," written by 
 hmself in the Italian character. It is to be regretted that 
 a large sum offered for this house by the German Diet was 
 refused by the Goethe family, in the hope, it is said, of ob- 
 taining a still larger sum from that mythical English Croesus 
 always ready to turn fabulous sums into dead capital, who 
 haunts the imagination of Continental people. One of the 
 most fitting tributes a nation can pay to its great dead is to 
 make their habitation, like their works, a public possession, 
 a shrine where affectionate reverence may be more vividly 
 reminded that the being who has bequeathed to us immortal 
 thoughts or immortal deeds had to endure the daily struggle 
 with the petty details, perhaps with the sordid cares of this
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 205 
 
 working-day world ; and it is a sad pity that Goethe's study, 
 bedroom, and library, so fitted to call up that kind of sym- 
 pathy, because they are preserved just as he left them, should 
 be shut out from all but the specially privileged. We were 
 happy enough to be among these, to look through the mist 
 of rising tears at the dull study with its two small windows, 
 and without a single object chosen for the sake of luxury or 
 beauty ; at the dark little bedroom with the bed on which he 
 died, and the arm-chair where he took his morning coffee as 
 he read ; at the library with its common deal shelves, and 
 books containing his own paper-marks. In the presence of 
 this hardy simplicity, the contrast suggests itself of the study 
 at Abbotsford, with its elegant Gothic fittings, its delicious 
 easy-chair, and its oratory of painted glass. 
 
 We were very much amused at the privacy with which 
 people keep their shops at Weimar. Some of them have not . 
 so much as their names written up; and there is so much 
 indifference of manner towards customers that one might 
 suppose every shopkeeper was a salaried functionary em- 
 ployed by government. The distribution of commodities, 
 too, is carried on according to a peculiar Weimarian logic ; 
 we bought our lemons at a ropemaker's, and should not have 
 felt ourselves very unreasonable if we had asked for shoes at 
 a stationer's. As to competition, I should think a clever 
 tradesman or artificer is almost as free from it at Weimar 
 as 2Esculapius or Vulcan in the days of old Olympus. Here 
 is an illustration. Our landlady's husband was called the 
 "susser Kabenhorst," by way of distinguishing him from a 
 brother of his who was the reverse of sweet. This Eaben- 
 horst, who was not sweet, but who nevertheless dealt in 
 sweets, for he was a confectioner, was so utter a rogue that 
 any transaction with him was avoided almost as much as if 
 he had been the Evil One himself, yet so clever a rogue that 
 he always managed to keep on the windy side of the law. 
 Nevertheless, he had so many dainties in the confectionery 
 line so viel SiissigTceiten und Leckerbissen that people bent 
 on giving a fine entertainment were at last constrained to
 
 206 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 eay, " After all, I must go to Rabenhorst ; " and so he got 
 abundant custom, in spite of general detestation. 
 
 A very fair dinner is to be had at several tables d'hote in 
 Weimar for ten or twelve groschen (a shilling or fifteen 
 pence). The Germans certainly excel us in their Mehlspeise, 
 or farinaceous puddings, and in their mode of cooking vege- 
 tables ; they are bolder and more imaginative in their combi- 
 nation of sauces, fruits, and vegetables with animal food, and 
 they are faithful to at least one principle of dietetics, 
 variety. The only thing at table we have any pretext for 
 being supercilious about is the quality and dressing of animal 
 food. The meat at a table d'hote in Thuringia, and even 
 Berlin, except in the very first hotels, bears about the same 
 relation to ours as horse-flesh probably bears to German beef 
 and mutton ; and an Englishman with a bandage over his 
 eyes would often be sorely puzzled to guess the kind of flesh 
 he was eating. For example, the only flavor we could ever 
 discern in hare, which is a very frequent dish, was that of 
 the more or less disagreeable fat which predominated in the 
 dressing ; and roast meat seems to be considered an extrava- 
 gance rarely admissible. A melancholy sight is a flock of 
 Weimarian sheep, followed or led by their shepherd. They 
 are as dingy as London sheep, and far more skinny ; indeed, 
 an Englishman who dined with us said the sight of the sheep 
 had set him against mutton. Still, the variety of dishes you 
 get for ten groschen is something marvellous to those who 
 have been accustomed to English charges ; and among the six 
 courses it is not a great evil to find a dish or two the reverse 
 of appetizing. I suppose, however, that the living at tables 
 d'hote gives one no correct idea of the mode in which the 
 people live at home. The basis of the national food seems 
 to be raw ham and sausage, with a copious superstratum of 
 Blaukraut, Sauerkraut, and black bread. Sausage seems to 
 be to the German what potatoes were to the Irish, the sine 
 qua non of bodily sustenance. Goethe asks the Frau von 
 Stein to send him so eine Wurst when he wants to have a 
 make-shift dinner away from home; and in his letters to
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 20? 
 
 Kestner he is enthusiastic about the delights of dining on 
 Blaukraut and Leberwurst (blue cabbage and liver sausage). 
 If Kraut and Wurst may be called the solid prose of Thurin- 
 gian diet, fish and Kuchen (generally a heavy kind of fruit tart) 
 are the poetry : the German appetite disports itself with these 
 as the English appetite does with ices and whipped creams. 
 
 At the beginning of August, when we arrived in Weimar, 
 almost every one was away "at the Baths," of course 
 except the tradespeople. As birds nidify in the spring, so 
 Germans wash themselves in the summer : their Waschung- 
 strieb acts strongly only at a particular time of the year ; 
 during all the rest, apparently, a decanter and a sugar-basin 
 or pie-dish are an ample toilet-service for them. We were 
 quite contented, however, that it was not yet the Weimar 
 "season," fashionably speaking, since it was the very best 
 time for enjoying something far better than Weimar gayeties, 
 the lovely Park and environs. It was pleasant, too, to see 
 the good bovine citizens enjoying life in their quiet fashion. 
 Unlike our English people, they take pleasure into their cal- 
 culations, and seem regularly to set aside part of their time 
 for recreation. It is understood that something is to be done 
 in life besides business and housewifery: the women take 
 their children and their knitting to the Erholung, or walk 
 with their husbands to Belvedere, or in some other direction 
 where a cup of coffee is to be had. The Erholung, by the 
 way, is a pretty garden, with shady walks, abundant seats, 
 an orchestra, a ball-room, and a place for refreshments. The 
 higher classes are subscribers and visitors here as well as the 
 bourgeoisie; but there are several resorts of a similar kind 
 frequented by the latter exclusively. The reader of Goethe 
 will remember his little poem, " Die Lustigen von Weimar," 
 which still indicates the round of amusements in this simple 
 capital : the walk to Belvedere or Tiefurt ; the excursion to 
 Jena, or some other trip, not made expensive by distance; 
 the round game at cards ; the dance ; the theatre ; and so 
 many other enjoyments to be had by a people not bound to 
 give dinner-parties and " keep up a position."
 
 208 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 It is charming to see how real an amusement the theatre 
 is to the Weimar people. The greater number of places are 
 occupied by subscribers, and there is no fuss about toilet or 
 escort. The ladies come alone, and slip quietly into their 
 places without need of " protection," a proof of civilization 
 perhaps more than equivalent to our pre-eminence in patent 
 locks and carriage springs ; and after the performance is 
 over you may see the same ladies following their servants, 
 with lanterns, through streets innocent of gas, in which an 
 oil-lamp, suspended from a rope slung across from house to 
 house, occasionally reveals to you the shafts of a cart or 
 omnibus, conveniently placed for you to run upon them. 
 
 A yearly autumn festival at Weimar is the Fogelschiessen, 
 or Bird-shooting ; but the reader must not let his imagination 
 wander at this word into fields and brakes. The bird here 
 concerned is of wood, and the shooters, instead of wandering 
 over breezy down and common, are shut up, day after day, 
 in a room clouded with tobacco-smoke, that they may take 
 their turn at shooting with the rifle from the window of a 
 closet about the size of a sentinel's box. However, this is 
 a mighty enjoyment to the Thuringian yeomanry, and an 
 occasion of profit to our friend Punch, and other itinerant 
 performers ; for while the Vogelschiessen lasts, a sort of fair 
 is held in the field where the marksmen assemble. 
 
 Among the quieter every-day pleasures of the Weimarians, 
 perhaps the most delightful is the stroll on a bright afternoon 
 or evening to the Duke's summer residence of Belvedere, 
 about two miles from Weimar. As I have said, a glorious 
 avenue of chestnut-trees leads all the way from the town to 
 the entrance of the grounds, which are open to all the world 
 as much as to the Duke himself. Close to the palace and its 
 subsidiary buildings there is an inn, for the accommodation 
 of the good people who come to take dinner or any other 
 meal here, by way of holiday-making. A sort of pavilion 
 stands on a spot commanding a lovely view of Weimar and 
 its valley, and here the Weimarians constantly come on sum- 
 mer and autumn evenings to smoke a cigar or drink a cup of
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 209 
 
 coffee. In one wing of the little palace, which is made smart 
 by wooden cupolas, with gilt pinnacles, there is a saloon, 
 which I recommend to the imitation of tasteful people in 
 their country-houses. It has no decoration but that of natu- 
 ral foliage : ivy is trained at regular intervals up the pure 
 white walls, and all round the edge of the ceiling, so as to 
 form pilasters and a cornice; ivy again, trained on trellis- 
 work, forms a blind to the window, which looks towards the 
 entrance court ; and beautiful ferns, arranged in tall baskets, 
 are placed here and there against the walls. The furniture 
 is of light cane-work. Another pretty thing here is the 
 Natur-Theater, a theatre constructed with living trees, 
 trimmed into walls and side scenes. We pleased ourselves 
 for a little while with thinking that this was one of the 
 places where Goethe acted in his own dramas, but we after- 
 wards learned that it was not made until his acting days 
 were over. The inexhaustible charm of Belvedere, however, 
 is the grounds, which are laid out with a taste worthy of a 
 first-rate landscape-gardener. The tall and graceful limes, 
 plane-trees, and weeping birches, the little basins of water 
 here and there, with fountains playing in the middle of them, 
 and with a fringe of broad-leaved plants, or other tasteful 
 bordering round them, the gradual descent towards the river, 
 and the hill clothed with firs and pines on the opposite side, 
 forming a fine dark background for the various and light 
 foliage of the trees that ornament the gardens, all this we 
 went again and again to enjoy, from the time when every- 
 thing was of a vivid green until the Virginian creepers which 
 festooned the silver stems of the birches were bright scarlet, 
 and the touch of autumn had turned all the green to gold. 
 One of the spots to linger in is at a semicircular seat against 
 an artificial rock, on which are placed large glass globes of 
 different colors. It is wonderful to see with what minute 
 perfection the scenery around is painted in these globes. 
 Each is like a pre-Raphaelite picture, with every little detail 
 of gravelly walk, mossy bank, and delicately leaved, inter- 
 lacing boughs presented in accurate miniature. 
 
 VOL. IX. . .* .
 
 210 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 In the opposite direction to Belvedere lies Tiefurt, with its 
 small park and tiny chateau, formerly the residence of the 
 Duchess Amalia, the mother of Carl August, and the friend 
 and patroness of Wieland, but now apparently serving as 
 little else than a receptacle for the late Duke Carl Friedrich's 
 rather childish collections. In the second story there is a 
 suite of rooms, so small that the largest of them does not 
 take up as much space as a good dining-table, and each of 
 these doll-house rooms is crowded with prints, old china, and 
 all sorts of knick-knacks and rococo wares. The park is a 
 little paradise. The Ilm is seen here to the best advantage : 
 it is clearer than at Weimar, and winds about gracefully 
 between the banks, on one side steep, and curtained with 
 turf and shrubs, or fine trees. It was here, at a point where 
 the bank forms a promontory into the river, that Goethe and 
 his Court friends got up the performance of an operetta, " Die 
 Fischerin," by torchlight. On the way to Tiefurt lies the 
 Webicht, a beautiful wood, through which run excellent 
 carriage-roads and grassy footpaths. It was a rich enjoy- 
 ment to skirt this wood along the Jena road, and see the sky 
 arching grandly down over the open fields on the other side 
 of us, the evening red flushing the west over the town, and 
 the stars coming out as if to relieve the sun in its watch ; or 
 to take the winding road through the wood, under its tall, 
 overarching trees, now bending their mossy trunks forward, 
 now standing with the stately erectness of lofty pillars ; or 
 to saunter along the grassy footpaths where the sunlight 
 streamed through the fairy-like foliage of the silvery-barked 
 birches. 
 
 Stout pedestrians who go to Weimar will do well to make 
 a walking excursion, as we did, to Ettersburg, a more distant 
 summer residence of the Grand Duke, interesting to us before- 
 hand as the scene of private theatricals and sprees in the 
 Goethe days. We set out on one of the brightest and hottest 
 mornings that August ever bestowed, and it required some 
 resolution to trudge along the shadeless chatisste, which 
 formed the first two or three miles of our way. One com-
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 211 
 
 pensating pleasure was the sight of the beautiful mountain- 
 ash trees in full berry, which, alternately with cherry-trees, 
 border the road for a considerable distance. At last we 
 rested from our broiling walk on the borders of a glorious 
 pine wood, so extensive that the trees in the distance form a 
 complete wall with theii trunks, and so give one a twilight 
 very welcome on a summer's noon. Under these pines you 
 tread on a carpet of the softest moss, so that you hear no 
 sound of a footstep, and all is as solemn and still as in the 
 crypt of a cathedral. Presently we passed out of the pine 
 wood into one of limes, beeches, and other trees of trans- 
 parent and light foliage ; and from this again we emerged into 
 the open space of the Ettersburg Park in front of the Schloss, 
 which is finely placed on an eminence commanding a mag- 
 nificent view of the far-reaching woods. Prince Puckler 
 Muskau has been of service here by recommending openings 
 to be made in the woods, in the taste of the English parks. 
 The Schloss, which is a favorite residence of the Grand Duke, 
 is a house of very moderate size, and no pretension of any 
 kind. Its stuccoed walls, and doors long unacquainted with 
 fresh paint, would look distressingly shabby to the owner of 
 a villa at Richmond or Twickenham ; but much beauty is pro- 
 cured here at slight expense, by the tasteful disposition of 
 creepers on the balustrades, and pretty vases full of plants 
 ranged along the steps, or suspended in the little piazza 
 beneath them. A walk through a beech-wood took us to the 
 Mooshutte, in front of which stands the famous beech from 
 whence Goethe denounced Jacobi's "Woldemar." The bark 
 is covered with initials cut by him and his friends. 
 
 People who only allow themselves to be idle under the 
 pretext of hydropathizing, may find all the apparatus neces- 
 sary to satisfy their conscience at Bercka, a village seated in 
 a lovely valley about six miles from Weimar. Now and then 
 a Weimar family takes lodgings here for the summer, retiring 
 from the quiet of the capital to the deeper quiet of Bercka ; 
 but generally the place seems not much frequented. It would 
 be difficult to imagine a more peace-inspiring scene than this
 
 212 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 little valley. The hanging woods; the soft coloring and 
 graceful outline of the uplands; the village, with its roofs 
 and spire of a reddish-violet hue, muffled in luxuriant trees , 
 the white Kurhaus glittering on a grassy slope ; the avenue 
 of poplars contrasting its pretty primness with the wild, 
 bushy outline of the wood-covered hill, which rises abruptly 
 from the smooth, green meadows ; the clear, winding stream, 
 now sparkling in the sun, now hiding itself under soft gray 
 willows, all this makes an enchanting picture. The walk 
 to Bercka and back was a favorite expedition with us and a 
 few Weimar friends ; for the road thither is a pleasant one, 
 leading at first through open, cultivated fields, dotted here 
 and there with villages, and then through wooded hills, the 
 outskirts of the Thuringian Forest. We used not to despise 
 the fine plums which hung in tempting abundance by the 
 roadside ; but we afterwards found that we had been deceived 
 in supposing ourselves free to pluck them, as if it were the 
 golden age, and that we were liable to a penalty of ten 
 groschen for our depredations. 
 
 But I must not allow myself to be exhaustive on pleasures 
 which seem monotonous when told, though in enjoying them 
 one is as far from wishing them to be more various as from 
 wishing for any change in the sweet sameness of successive 
 summer days. I will only advise the reader who has yet to 
 make excursions in Thuringia to visit Jena, less for its tra- 
 ditions than for its fine scenery, which makes it, as Goethe 
 says, a delicious place in spite of its dull, ugly streets ; and 
 exhort him, above all, to brave the discomforts of a Postwagen 
 for the sake of getting to Hmenau. Here he will find the 
 grandest pine-clad hills, with endless walks under their sol- 
 emn shades ; beech- woods where every tree is a picture ; an 
 air that he will breathe with as conscious a pleasure as if he 
 were taking iced water on a hot day ; baths ad libitum, with 
 a douche lofty and tremendous enough to invigorate the giant 
 Cormoran; and more than all, one of the most interesting 
 relics of Goethe, who had a great love for Ilmeuau. This is 
 the small wooden house, on the height called the Kickelhahn,
 
 THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR. 213 
 
 where he often lived in his long retirements here, and where 
 you may see written by his own hand, near the window- 
 frame, those wonderful lines, perhaps the finest expression 
 yet given to the sense of resignation inspired by the sublime 
 calm of Nature, 
 
 " Ueber alien Gipfeln 
 1st Rah, 
 In alien Wipfeln 
 Spiirest du 
 Kaum einen Hauch; 
 Die Vogelein schweigen im Waldt, 
 Warte nur, balde 
 Honest da aocu."
 
 ADDEESS TO WORKING-MEN, BY FELIX HOLT 
 
 TjlELLOW-WOKKMEN : I am not going to take up your 
 -L 1 time by complimenting you. It has been the fashion 
 to compliment kings and other authorities when they have 
 come into power, and to tell them that, under their wise and 
 beneficent rule, happiness would certainly overflow the land 
 But the end has not always corresponded to that beginning. 
 If it were true that we who work for wages had more of tha 
 wisdom and virtue necessary to the right use of power than 
 has been shown by the aristocratic and mercantile classes, we 
 should not glory much in that fact, or consider that it car- 
 ried with it any near approach to infallibility. 
 
 In my opinion there has been too much complimenting of 
 that sort ; and whenever a speaker, whether he is one of our- 
 selves or not, wastes our time in boasting or flattery, I say, 
 let us hiss him. If we have the beginning of wisdom, which 
 is, to know a little truth about ourselves, we know that as a 
 body we are neither very wise nor very virtuous. And to 
 prove this, I will not point specially to our own habits and 
 doings, but to the general state of the country. Any nation 
 that had within it a majority of men and we are the ma- 
 jority possessed of much wisdom and virtue, would not 
 tolerate the bad practices, the commercial lying and swind- 
 ling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating, 
 and the political bribery which are carried on boldly in the 
 midst of us. A majority has the power of creating a public 
 opinion. We could groan and hiss before we had the fran- 
 chise : if we had groaned and hissed in the right place, if we 
 had discerned better between good and evil, if the multitude
 
 ADDRESS TO WORKING-MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 215 
 
 of us artisans, and factory hands, and miners, and laborers of 
 all sorts, had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious, 
 sober, and I don't see how there can be wisdom and virtue 
 anywhere without these qualities, we should have made an 
 audience that would have shamed the other classes out of 
 their share in the national vices. We should have had better 
 members of Parliament, better religious teachers, honester 
 tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in in- 
 famous and brutal men ; and we should not have had among 
 us the abomination of men calling themselves religious while 
 living in splendor on ill-gotten gains. I say, it is not possible 
 for any society in which there is a very large body of wise 
 and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society is, to have 
 as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief 
 in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of 
 what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his 
 fellows. Therefore let us have done with this nonsense 
 about our being much better than the rest of our countrymen, 
 or the pretence that that was a reason why we ought to have 
 such an extension of the franchise as has been given to us. 
 The reason for our having the franchise, as I want presently 
 to show, lies somewhere else than in our personal good quali- 
 ties, and does not in the least lie in any high betting chance 
 that a delegate is a better man than a duke, or that a Shef- 
 field grinder is a better man than any one of the firm he 
 works for. 
 
 However, we have got our franchise now. We have been 
 sarcastically called in the House of Commons the future mas- 
 ters of the country ; and if that sarcasm contains any truth, 
 it seems to me that the first thing we had better think of is, 
 our heavy responsibility, that is to say, the terrible rik we 
 run of working mischief and missing good, as others have 
 done before us. Suppose certain men, discontented with the 
 irrigation of a country which depended for all its prosperity 
 on the right direction being given to the waters of a great 
 river, had got the management of the irrigation before they 
 were quite sure how exactly it could be altered for the better,
 
 216 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 or whether they could command the necessary agency for 
 such an alteration. Those men would have a difficult and 
 dangerous business on their hands ; and the more sense, feel- 
 ing, and knowledge they had, the more they would be likely 
 to tremble rather than to triumph. Our situation is not alto- 
 gether unlike theirs. For general prosperity and well-being 
 is a vast crop, that like the corn in Egypt can be come at, not 
 at all by hurried snatching, but only by a well-judged patient 
 process ; and whether our political power will be any good to 
 us now we have got it, must depend entirely on the means 
 and materials, the knowledge, ability, and honesty we have 
 at command. These three things are the only conditions on 
 which we can get any lasting benefit, as every clever work- 
 man among us knows : he knows that for an article to be 
 worth much there must be a good invention or plan to go 
 upon, there must be a well-prepared material, and there must 
 be skilful and honest work in carrying out the plan. And by 
 this test we may try those who want to be our leaders. Have 
 they anything to offer us besides indignant talk? When 
 they tell us we ought to have this, that, or the other thing, 
 can they explain to us any reasonable, fair, safe way of get- 
 ting it ? Can they argue in favor of a particular change by 
 showing us pretty closely how the change is likely to work ? 
 I don't want to decry a just indignation ; on the contrary, I 
 should like it to be more thorough and general. A wise man, 
 more than two thousand years ago, when he was asked what 
 would most tend to lessen injustice in the world, said, "If 
 every bystander felt as indignant at a wrong as if he himself 
 were the sufferer." Let us cherish such indignation. But 
 the long-growing evils of a great nation are a tangled busi- 
 ness, asking for a good deal more than indignation in order 
 to be got rid of. Indignation is a fine war-horse, but the 
 war-horse must be ridden by a man : it must be ridden by 
 rationality, skill, courage, armed with the right weapons, and 
 taking definite aim. 
 
 We have reason to be discontented with many things, and, 
 looking back either through the history of England to much
 
 ADDRESS TO WORKTNG-MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 217 
 
 earlier generations or to the legislation and administrations 
 of later times, we are justified in saying that many of the 
 evils under which our country now suffers are the conse- 
 quences of folly, ignorance, neglect, or self-seeking in those 
 who, at different times, have wielded the powers of rank, 
 office, and money. But the more bitterly we feel this, the 
 more loudly we utter it, the stronger is the obligation we lay 
 on ourselves to beware, lest we also, by a too hasty wresting 
 of measures which seem to promise an immediate partial re- 
 lief, make a worse time of it for our own generation, and 
 leave a bad inheritance to our children. The deepest curse 
 of wrong-doing, whether of the foolish or wicked sort, is that 
 its effects are difficult to be undone. I suppose there is 
 hardly anything more to be shuddered at than that part of 
 the history of disease which shows how, when a man injures 
 his constitution by a life of vicious excess, his children and 
 grandchildren inherit diseased bodies and minds, and how 
 the effects of that unhappy inheritance continue to spread 
 beyond our calculation. This is only one example of the law 
 by which human lives are linked together; another example 
 of what we complain of when we point to our pauperism, to 
 the brutal ignorance of multitudes among our fellow-country- 
 men, to the weight of taxation laid on us by blamable wars, 
 to the wasteful channels made for the public money, to the 
 expense and trouble of getting justice, and call these the ef- 
 fects of bad rule. This is the law that we all bear the yoke 
 of, the law of no man's making, and which no man can undo. 
 Everybody now sees an example of it in the case of Ireland. 
 We who are living now are sufferers by the wrong-doing of 
 those who lived before us; we are the sufferers by each 
 other's wrong-doing ; and the children who come after us are 
 and will be sufferers from the same causes. Will any man 
 say he does n't care for that law it is nothing to him 
 what he wants is to better himself ? With what face then 
 will he complain of any injury ? If he says that in politics 
 or in any sort of social action he will not care to know what 
 are likely to be the consequences to others besides himself, he
 
 218 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 is defending the very worst doings that have brought about 
 his discontent. He might as well say that there is no better 
 rule needful for men than that each should tug and drive for 
 what will please him, without caring how that tugging will 
 act on the fine wide-spread network of society in which he is 
 fast meshed. If any man taught that as a doctrine, we should 
 know him for a fool. But there are men who act upon it ; 
 every scoundrel, for example, whether he is a rich religious 
 scoundrel who lies and cheats on a large scale, and will per- 
 haps come and ask you to send him to Parliament, or a poor 
 pocket-picking scoundrel, who will steal your loose pence 
 while you are listening round the platform. None of us are 
 so ignorant as not to know that a society, a nation, is held to- 
 gether by just the opposite doctrine and action, by the de- 
 pendence of men on each other and the sense they have of a 
 common interest in preventing injury. And we working-men 
 are, I think, of all classes the last that can afford to forget 
 this j for if we did we should be much like sailors cutting 
 away the timbers of our own ship to warm our grog with. 
 For what else is the meaning of our trades-unions ? What 
 else is the meaning of every flag we carry, every procession 
 we make, every crowd we collect for the sake of making some 
 protest on behalf of our body as receivers of wages, if not 
 this : that it is our interest to stand by each other, and that 
 this being the common interest, no one of us will try to make 
 a good bargain for himself without considering what will be 
 good for his fellows ? And every member of a union believes 
 that the wider he can spread his union, the stronger and 
 surer will be the effect of it. So I think I shall be borne out 
 in saying that a working-man who can put two and two to- 
 gether, or take three from four and see what will be the re- 
 mainder, can understand that a society, to be well off, must 
 be made up chiefly of men who consider the general good as 
 well as their own. 
 
 Well, Tbut taking the world as it is and this is one way 
 we must take it when we want to find out how it can be im- 
 proved no society is made up of a single class: society
 
 ADDRESS TO WORKING-MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 219 
 
 stands before us like that wonderful piece of life, the human 
 body, with all its various parts depending on one another, 
 and with a terrible liability to get wrong because of that del- 
 icate dependence. We all know how many diseases the hu- 
 man body is apt to suffer from, and how difficult it is even 
 for the doctors to find out exactly where the seat or begin- 
 ning of the disorder is. That is because the body is made up 
 of so many various parts, all related to each other, or likely 
 all to feel the effect if any one of them goes wrong. It is 
 somewhat the same with our old nations or societies. No 
 society ever stood long in the world without getting to be 
 composed of different classes. Now, it is all pretence to say 
 that there is no such thing as class interest. It is clear that 
 if any particular number of men get a particular benefit from 
 any existing institution, they are likely to band together, in 
 order to keep up that benefit and increase it, until it is per- 
 ceived to be unfair and injurious to another large number, 
 who get knowledge and strength enough to set up a resist- 
 ance. And this, again, has been part of the history of every 
 great society since history began. But the simple reason fo 
 this being, that any large body of men is likely to have mori< 
 of stupidity, narrowness, and greed than of far-sightedne?* 
 and generosity, it is plain that the number who resist unfair- 
 ness and injury are in danger of becoming injurious in their 
 turn. And in this way a justifiable resistance has become a 
 damaging convulsion, making everything worse instead of 
 better. This has been seen so often that we ought to profit 
 a little by the experience. So long as there is selfishness in 
 men ; so long as they have not found out for themselves institu-, 
 tions which express and carry into practice the truth, that the 
 highest interest of mankind must at last be a common and 
 not a divided interest ; so long as the gradual operation of 
 steady causes has not made that truth a part of every man's 
 knowledge and feeling, just as we now not only know that it 
 is good for our health to be cleanly, but feel that cleanliness 
 is only another word for comfort, which is the under side or 
 lining of all pleasure, so long, I say, as men wink at theii
 
 220 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 own knowingness, or hold their heads high because they have 
 got an advantage over their fellows, so long class interest 
 will be in danger of making itself felt injuriously. No set of 
 men will get any sort of power without being in danger of 
 wanting more than their right share. But, on the other 
 hand, it is just as certain that no set of men will get angry 
 at having less than their right share, and set up a claim on 
 that ground, without falling into just the same danger of ex- 
 acting too much, and exacting it in wrong ways. It 's human 
 nature we have got to work with all round, and nothing else. 
 That seems like saying something very commonplace, nay, 
 obvious ; as if one should say that where there are hands 
 there are mouths. Yet, to hear a good deal of the speechify- 
 ing and to see a good deal of the action that go forward, one 
 might suppose it was forgotten. 
 
 But I come back to this : that, in our old society, there are 
 old institutions, and among them the various distinctions and 
 inherited advantages of classes, which have shaped them- 
 selves along with all the wonderful, slow-growing system of 
 things made up of our laws, our commerce, and our stores of 
 all sorts, whether in material objects, such as buildings and 
 machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought and 
 professional skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the 
 irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its water 
 distributed or it will bear no crop ; there are the old channels, 
 the old banks, and the old pumps, which must be used as 
 they are until new and better have been prepared, or the 
 structure of the old has been gradually altered. But it would 
 be fool's work to batter down a pump only because a better 
 might be made, when you had no machinery ready for a new 
 one : it would be wicked work, if villages lost their crops by 
 it. Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily 
 improved and our worst evils reduced, is not by any attempt to 
 do away directly with the actually existing class distinctions 
 and advantages, as if everybody could have the same sort of 
 work, or lead the same sort of life (which none of my hearers 
 are stupid enough to suppose), but by the turning of class
 
 ADDRESS TO WORKING-MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 221 
 
 interests into class functions or duties. What I mean is, that 
 each class should be urged by the surrounding conditions to 
 perform its particular work under the strong pressure of re- 
 sponsibility to the nation at large ; that our public affairs 
 should be got into a state in which there should be no impun- 
 ity for foolish or faithless conduct. In this way the public 
 judgment would sift out incapability and dishonesty from 
 posts of high charge, and even personal ambition would nec- 
 essarily become of a worthier sort, since the desires of the 
 most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the opinions 
 of those around them ; and for one person to put on a cap 
 and bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways of getting 
 rich that he may spend a vast sum of money in having more 
 finery than his neighbors, he must be pretty sure of a crowd 
 who will applaud him. Now, changes can only be good in 
 proportion as they help to bring about this sort of result ; in 
 proportion as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance, 
 and fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course 
 of that substitution class distinctions must inevitably change 
 their character, and represent the varying duties of men, not 
 their varying interests. But this end will not come by impa- 
 tience. " Day will not break the sooner because we get up/ 
 before the twilight." Still less will it come by mere undoing, 
 or change merely as change. And moreover, if we believed 
 that it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the 
 franchise, we should be what I call superstitious men, believ- 
 ing in magic, or the production of a result by hocus-pocus. 
 Our getting the franchise will greatly hasten that good end 
 in proportion only as every one of us has the knowledge, the 
 foresight, the conscience, that will make him well-judging and 
 scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of things in this 
 world has been determined for us beforehand, and in such a 
 way that no ship can be expected to sail well on a difficult 
 voyage, and reach the right port, unless it is well manned : 
 the nature of the winds and the waves, of the timbers, the 
 sails, and the cordage, will not accommodate itself to drunken, 
 mutinous sailors.
 
 222 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 You will not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to 
 you, or of joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine 
 way, and need not be made better. What I am striving to 
 keep in our minds is the care, the precaution, with which we 
 should go about making things better, so that the public order 
 may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be given to 
 this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are 
 bound up. After the Keform Bill of 1832 I was in an elec- 
 tion riot, which showed me clearly, on a small scale, what pub- 
 lic disorder must always be ; and I have never forgotten that 
 the riot was brought about chiefly by the agency of dishonest 
 men who professed to be on the people's side. Now, the dan- 
 ger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it 
 tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number of 
 ignorant men, whose notions of what is good are of a low and 
 brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their 
 hands, and may do pretty much as they like. If any one can 
 look round us and say that he sees no signs of any such dan- 
 ger now, and that our national condition is running along like 
 a clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I 
 call him a cheerful man : perhaps he does his own gardening, 
 and seldom takes exercise far away from home. To us who 
 have no gardens, and often walk abroad, it is plain that we 
 can never get into a bit of a crowd but we must rub clothes 
 with a set of roughs, who have the worst vices of the worst 
 rich, who are gamblers, sots, libertines, knaves, or else 
 mere sensual simpletons and victims. They are the ugly 
 crop that has sprung up while the stewards have been sleep- 
 ing ; they are the multiplying brood begotten by parents who 
 have been left without all teaching save that of a too craving 
 body, without all well-being save the fading delusions of 
 drugged beer and gin. They are the hideous margin of so- 
 ciety, at one edge drawing toward it the undesigning igno- 
 rant poor, at the other darkening imperceptibly into the 
 lowest criminal class. Here is one of the evils which cannot 
 be got rid of quickly, and against which any of us who have 
 got sense, decency, and instruction have need to watch.
 
 ADDRESS TO WORKING-MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 223 
 
 That these degraded fellow-men could really get the mastery 
 in a persistent disobedience to the laws and in a struggle to 
 subvert order, I do not believe , but wretched calamities must 
 come from the very beginning of such a struggle, and the 
 continuance of it would be a civil war, in which the inspira- 
 tion on both sides might soon cease to be even a false notion 
 of good, and might become the direct savage impulse of feroc- 
 ity. We have all to see to it that we do not help to rouse 
 what I may call the savage beast in the breasts of our gener- 
 ation, that we do not help to poison the nation's blood, and 
 make richer provision for bestiality to come. We know 
 well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way, that 
 oppression has notoriously made men mad ; and we are de- 
 termined to resist oppression. But let us, if possible, show 
 that we can keep sane in our resistance, and shape our means 
 more and more reasonably toward the least harmful, and 
 therefore the speediest, attainment of our end. Let us, I say, 
 show that our spirits are too strong to be driven mad, but 
 can keep that sober determination which alone gives mastery 
 over the adaptation of means. And a first guarantee of this 
 sanity will be to act as if we understood that the fundamental 
 duty of a government is to preserve order, to enforce obe- 
 dience of the laws. It has been held hitherto that a man can 
 be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has 
 much money and comfort to lose. But a better state of 
 things would be, that men who had little money and not 
 much comfort should still be guardians of order, because they 
 had sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a 
 heart of justice, pity, and fortitude, to keep them from mak- 
 ing more misery only because they felt some misery them- 
 selves. There are thousands of artisans who have already 
 shown this fine spirit, and have endured much with patient 
 heroism. If such a spirit spread, and penetrated us all, we 
 should soon become the masters of the country in the best 
 sense and to the best ends. For, the public order being pre- 
 served, there can be no government in future that will not 
 be determined by our insistence on our fair and practicable
 
 224 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 demands. It is only by disorder that our demands will be 
 choked, that we shall find ourselves lost among a brutal ral> 
 ble, with all the intelligence of the country opposed to us, 
 and see government in the shape of guns that will sweep us 
 down in the ignoble martyrdom of fools. 
 
 It has been a too common notion that to insist much on 
 the preservation of order is the part of a selfish aristocracy 
 and a selfish commercial class, because among these, in the 
 nature of things, have been found the opponents of change. 
 I am a Eadical ; and what is more, I am not a Eadical with a 
 title, or a French cook, or even an entrance into fine society. 
 I expect great changes, and I desire them. But I don't ex- 
 pect them to come in a hurry, by mere inconsiderate sweep- 
 ing. A Hercules with a big besom is a fine thing for a filthy 
 stable, but not for weeding a seed-bed, where his besom would 
 soon make a barren floor. 
 
 That is old-fashioned talk, some one may say. We know 
 all that. 
 
 Yes, when things are put in an extreme way, most people 
 think they know them ; but, after all, they are comparatively 
 few who see the small degrees by which those extremes are 
 arrived at, or have the resolution and-self control to resist 
 the little impulses by which they creep on surely toward a 
 fatal end. Does anybody set out meaning to ruin himself, or 
 to drink himself to death, or to waste his life so that he be- 
 comes a despicable old man, a superannuated nuisance, like 
 a fly in winter. Yet there are plenty, of whose lot this is the 
 pitiable story. Well now, supposing us all to have the best- 
 intentions, we working-men, as a body, run some risk of 
 bringing evil on the nation in that unconscious manner 
 half hurrying, half pushed in a jostling march toward an end 
 we are not thinking of. For just as there are many things 
 which we know better and feel much more strongly than the 
 richer, softer-handed classes can know or feel them ; so there 
 are many things many precious benefits which we, by 
 the very fact of our privations, our lack of leisure and in- 
 struction, are not so likely to be aware of and take into our
 
 ADDRESS TO WORKING-MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 225 
 
 account. Those precious benefits form a chief part of what 
 I may call the common estate of society : a wealth over and 
 above buildings, machinery, produce, shipping, and so on, 
 though closely connected with these ; a wealth of a more del- 
 icate kind, that we may more unconsciously bring into dan- 
 ger, doing harm and not knowing that we do it. I mean that 
 treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, 
 feeling, and manners, great memories and the interpretation 
 of great records, which is carried on from the minds of one 
 generation to the minds of another. This is something dis- 
 tinct from the indulgences of luxury and the pursuit of vain 
 finery ; and one of the hardships in the lot of working-men 
 is that they have been for the most part shut out from shar- 
 ing in this treasure. It can make a man's life very great, 
 very full of delight, though he has no smart furniture and no 
 horses : it also yields a great deal of discovery that corrects 
 error, and of invention that lessens bodily pain, and must at 
 least make life easier for alL 
 
 Now the security of this treasure demands, not only the 
 preservation of order, but a certain patience on our part with 
 many institutions and facts of various kinds, especially touch- 
 ing the accumulation of wealth, which from the light we 
 stand in, we are more likely to discern the evil than the good 
 of. It is constantly the task of practical wisdom not to say, 
 " This is good, and I will have it," but to say, " This is the 
 less of two unavoidable evils, and I will bear it." And this 
 treasure of knowledge, which consists in the fine activity, the 
 exalted vision of many minds, is bound up at present with 
 conditions which have much evil in them. Just as in the 
 case of material wealth and its distribution we are obliged to 
 take the selfishness and weaknesses of human nature into 
 account, and however we insist that men might act better, 
 are forced, unless we are fanatical simpletons, to consider 
 how they are likely to act ; so in this matter of the wealth 
 that is carried in men's minds, we have to reflect that the too 
 absolute predominance of a class whose wants have been of 
 a common sort, who are chiefly struggling to get better and 
 
 VOL. IX. 16
 
 226 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 more food, clothing, shelter, and bodily recreation, may lead 
 to hasty measures for the sake of having things more fairly 
 shared, which, even if they did not fail of their object, would 
 at last debase the life of the nation. Do anything which will 
 throw the classes who hold the treasures of knowledge nay, 
 I may say, the treasures of refined needs into the back- 
 ground, cause them to withdraw from public affairs, stop too 
 suddenly any of the sources by which their leisure and ease 
 are furnished, rob them of the chances by which they may be 
 influential and pre-eminent, and you do something as short- 
 sighted as the acts of France and Spain when in jealousy and 
 wrath, not altogether unprovoked, they drove from among 
 them races and classes that held the traditions of handicraft 
 and agriculture. You injure your own inheritance and the 
 inheritance of your children. You may truly say that this 
 which I call the common estate of society has been anything 
 but common to you ; but the same may be said, by many of 
 us, of the sunlight and the air, of the sky and the fields, of 
 parks and holiday games. Nevertheless, that these blessings 
 exist makes life worthier to us, and urges us the more to en- 
 ergetic, likely means of getting our share in them ; and I say, 
 let us watch carefully, lest we do anything to lessen this 
 treasure which is held in the minds of men, while we exert 
 ourselves, first of all, and to the very utmost, that we and 
 our children may share in all its benefits. Yes ; exert our- 
 selves to the utmost, to break the yoke of ignorance. If we 
 demand more leisure, more ease in our lives, let us show that 
 we don't deserve the reproach of wanting to shirk that indus- 
 try which, in some form or other, every man, whether rich or 
 poor, should feel himself as much bound to as he is bound to 
 decency. Let us show that we want to have some time and 
 strength left to us, that we may use it, not for brutal in- 
 dulgence, but for the rational exercise of the faculties which 
 make us men. Without this no political measures can bene- 
 fit us. No political institution will alter the nature of Igno- 
 rance, or hinder it from producing vice and misery. Let 
 Ignorance start how it will, it must run the same round of
 
 ADDRESS TO WORKING-MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 227 
 
 low appetites, poverty, slavery, and superstition. Some of us 
 know this well, nay, I will say, feel it, for knowledge of 
 this kind cuts deep ; and to us it is one of the most painful 
 facts belonging to our condition that there are numbers of 
 our fellow-workmen who are so far from feeling in the same 
 way, that they never use the imperfect opportunities already 
 offered them for giving their children some schooling, but 
 turn their little ones of tender age into bread-winners, often 
 at cruel tasks, exposed to the horrible infection of childish 
 vice. Of course, the causes of these hideous things go a long 
 way back. Parents' misery has made parents' wickedness. 
 But we who are still blessed with the hearts of fathers and 
 the consciences of men, we who have some knowledge of the 
 curse entailed on broods of creatures in human shape, whose 
 enfeebled bodies and dull perverted minds are mere centres 
 of uneasiness in whom even appetite is feeble and joy impos- 
 sible, I say we are bound to use all the means at our com- 
 mand to help in putting a stop to this horror. Here, it seems 
 to me, is a way in which we may use extended co-operation 
 among us to the most momentous of all purposes, and make 
 conditions of enrolment that would strengthen all educational 
 measures. It is true enough that there is a low sense of pa- 
 rental duties in the nation at large, and that numbers who 
 have no excuse in bodily hardship seem to think it a light 
 thing to beget children, to bring human beings with all their 
 tremendous possibilities into this difficult world, and then 
 take little heed how they are disciplined and furnished for 
 the perilous journey they are sent on without any asking of 
 their own. This is a sin, shared in more or less by all classes ; 
 but there are sins which, like taxation, fall the heaviest on 
 the poorest, and none have such galling reasons as we work- 
 ing-men to try and rouse to the utmost the feeling of respon- 
 sibility in fathers and mothers. We have been urged into 
 co-operation by the pressure of common demands. In war 
 men need each other more; and where a given point has to 
 be defended, fighters inevitably find themselves shoulder to 
 shoulder. So fellowship grows, so grow the rules of fellow-
 
 228 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 ship, which gradually shape themselves to thoroughness as 
 the idea of a common good becomes more complete. We feel 
 a right to say, If you will be one of us, you must make such 
 and such a contribution, you must renounce such and such a 
 separate advantage, you must set your face against such and 
 such an infringement. If we have any false ideas about our 
 common good, our rules will be wrong, and we shall be co-oper- 
 ating to damage each other. But, now, here is a part of our 
 good, without which everything else we strive for will be 
 worthless, I mean the rescue of our children. Let us de- 
 mand from the members of our unions that they fulfil their 
 duty as parents in this definite matter, which rules can reach. 
 Let us demand that they send their children to school, so as 
 not to go on recklessly, breeding a moral pestilence among 
 as, just as strictly as we demand that they pay their contri- 
 butions to a common fund, understood to be for a common 
 benefit. While we watch our public men, let us watch one 
 another as to this duty, which is also public, and more mo- 
 mentous even than obedience to sanitary regulations. While 
 we resolutely declare against the wickedness in high places, 
 let us set ourselves also against the wickedness in low places, 
 not quarrelling which came first, or which is the worse of the 
 two, not trying to settle the miserable precedence of plague 
 or famine, but insisting unflinchingly on remedies once ascer- 
 tained, and summoning those who hold the treasure of knowl- 
 edge to remember that they hold it in trust, and that with 
 them lies the task of searching for new remedies, and finding 
 the right methods of applying them. 
 
 To find right remedies and right methods. Here is the 
 great function of knowledge : here the life of one man may 
 make a fresh era straight away, in which a sort of suffering 
 that has existed shall exist no more. For the thousands of 
 years down to the middle of the sixteenth century that hu- 
 man limbs had been hacked and amputated, nobody knew 
 how to stop the bleeding except by searing the ends of the 
 vessels with red-hot iron. But then came a man named Am- 
 brose Pare, and said, '' Tie up the arteries ! " That was a fine
 
 ADDRESS TO WORKING-MEN, BY FELIX HOLT. 229 
 
 word to utter. It contained the statement of a method, a 
 plan by which a particular evil was forever assuaged. Let 
 us try to discern the men whose words carry that sort of 
 kernel, and choose such men to be our guides and representa- 
 tives, not choose platform swaggerers, who bring us nothing 
 but the ocean to make our broth with. 
 
 To get the chief power into the hands of the wisest, which 
 means to get our life regulated according to the truest prin- 
 ciples mankind is in possession of, is a problem as old as the 
 very notion of wisdom. The solution comes slowly, because 
 men collectively can only be made to embrace principles, and 
 to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching of the 
 world's events. Men will go on planting potatoes, and 
 nothing else but potatoes, till a potato disease comes and 
 forces them to find out the advantage of a varied crop. Self- 
 ishness, stupidity, sloth, persist in trying to adapt the world 
 to their desires, till a time comes when the world mani- 
 fests itself as too decidedly inconvenient to them. Wisdom 
 stands outside of man and urges itself upon him, like the 
 marks of the changing seasons, before it finds a home within 
 him, directs his actions, and from the precious effects of 
 obedience begets a corresponding love. 
 
 But while still outside of us, wisdom often looks terrible, 
 and wears strange forms, wrapped in the changing conditions 
 of a struggling world. It wears now the form of wants and 
 just demands in a great multitude of British men : wants and 
 demands urged into existence by the forces of a maturing 
 world. And it is in virtue of this in virtue of this pres- 
 ence of wisdom on our side as a mighty fact, physical and 
 moral, which must enter into and shape the thoughts and 
 actions of mankind that we working-men have obtained 
 the suffrage. Not because we are an excellent multitude, 
 but because we are a needy multitude. 
 
 But now, for our own part, we have seriously to consider 
 this outside wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable 
 nature of things, and watch to give it a home within us and 
 obey it. If the claims of the unendowed multitude of work-
 
 230 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 ing-men hold within them principles which must shape the 
 future, it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their 
 inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without 
 which no worthy, noble future can be moulded. Many of the 
 highest uses of life are in their keeping ; and if privilege has 
 often been abused, it has also been the nurse of excellence. 
 Here again we have to submit ourselves to the great law of 
 inheritance. If we quarrel with the way in which the labors 
 and earnings of the past have been preserved and handed 
 down, we are just as bigoted, just as narrow, just as wanting 
 in that religion which keeps an open ear and an obedient 
 mind to the teachings of fact, as we accuse those of being, 
 who quarrel with the new truths and new needs which are 
 disclosed in the present. The deeper insight we get into the 
 causes of human trouble, and the ways by which men are 
 made better and happier, the less we shall be inclined to the 
 unprofitable spirit and practice of reproaching classes as such 
 in a wholesale fashion. Not all the evils of our condition 
 are such as we can justly blame others for ; and, I repeat, 
 many of them are such as no changes of institutions can 
 quickly remedy. To discern between the evils that energy 
 can remove and the evils that patience must bear, makes the 
 difference between manliness and childishness, between good 
 sense and folly. And more than that, without such discern- 
 ment, seeing that we have grave duties toward our own body 
 and the country at large, we can hardly escape acts of fatal 
 rashness and injustice. 
 
 I am addressing a mixed assembly of workmen, and some 
 of you may be as well or better fitted than I am to take up 
 this office. But they will not think it amiss in me that I 
 have tried to bring together the considerations most likely 
 to be of service to us in preparing ourselves for the use of 
 our new opportunities. I have avoided touching on special 
 questions. The best help toward judging well on these is to 
 approach them in the right temper without vain expectation, 
 and with a resolution which is mixed with temperance.
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK.
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 
 
 AUTHORSHIP. 
 
 TO lay down in the shape of practical moral rules courses 
 of conduct only to be made real by the rarest states of 
 motive and disposition, tends not to elevate, but to degrade 
 the general standard, by turning that rare attainment from 
 an object of admiration into an impossible prescription, 
 against which the average nature first rebels and then flings 
 out ridicule. It is for art to present images of a lovelier 
 order than the actual, gently winning the affections, and so 
 determining the taste. But in any rational criticism of the 
 time which is meant to guide a practical reform, it is idle to 
 insist that action ought to be this or that, without consider- 
 ing how far the outward conditions of such change are present, 
 even supposing the inward disposition towards it. Practi- 
 cally, we must be satisfied to aim at something short of per- 
 fection, and at something very much further off it in one 
 case than in another. While the fundamental conceptions of 
 morality seem as stationary through ages as the laws of life, 
 so that a moral manual written eighteen centuries ago still 
 admonishes us that we are low in our attainments, it is quite 
 otherwise with the degree to which moral conceptions have 
 penetrated the various forms of social activity, and made 
 what may be called the special conscience of each calling, art, 
 or industry. While on some points of social duty public 
 opinion has reached a tolerably high standard, on others a 
 public opinion is not yet born ; and there are even some func- 
 tions and practices with regard to which men far above the 
 line in honorableness of nature feel hardly any scrupulosity,
 
 234 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 though their consequent behavior is easily shown to be as in- 
 jurious as bribery, or any other slowly poisonous procedure 
 which degrades the social vitality. 
 
 Among those callings which have not yet acquired any- 
 thing near a full-grown conscience in the public mind is Au- 
 thorship. Yet the changes brought about by the spread 
 of instruction and the consequent struggles of an uneasy 
 ambition are, or at least might well be, forcing on many 
 minds the need of some regulating principle with regard to 
 the publication of intellectual products, which would override 
 the rule of the market, a principle, that is, which should 
 be derived from a fixing of the author's vocation according to 
 those characteristics in which it differs from the other bread- 
 winning professions. Let this be done, if possible, without 
 any cant, which would carry the subject into Utopia, away 
 from existing needs. The guidance wanted is a clear notion 
 of what should justify men and women in assuming public 
 authorship, and of the way in which they should be deter- 
 mined by what is usually called success. But the forms of 
 authorship must be distinguished ; journalism, for example, 
 carrying a necessity for that continuous production which 
 in other kinds of writing is precisely the evil to be fought 
 against, and judicious careful compilation, which is a great 
 public service, holding in its modest diligence a guarantee 
 against those deductions of vanity and idleness which draw 
 many a young gentleman into reviewing, instead of the sort- 
 ing and copying which his small talents could not rise to 
 with any vigor and completeness. 
 
 A manufacturer goes on producing calicoes as long and as 
 fast as he can find a market for them ; and in obeying this 
 indication of demand he gives his factory its utmost useful- 
 ness to the world in general and to himself in particular. 
 Another manufacturer buys a new invention of some light 
 kind likely to attract the public fancy, is successful in find- 
 ing a multitude who will give their testers for the transiently 
 desirable commodity, and before the fashion is out, pockets a 
 considerable sum : the commodity was colored with a green
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 235 
 
 which had arsenic in it that damaged the factory workers and 
 the purchasers. What then ? These, he contends (or does 
 not know or care to contend), are superficial effects, which 
 it is folly to dwell upon while we have epidemic diseases 
 and bad government. 
 
 The first manufacturer we will suppose blameless. Is an au- 
 thor simply on a par with him, as to the rules of production ? 
 
 The author's capital is his brain-power, power of inven- 
 tion, power of writing. The manufacturer's capital, in for- 
 tunate cases, is being continually reproduced and increased. 
 Here is the first grand difference between the capital which 
 is turned into calico and the brain capital which is turned 
 into literature. The calico scarcely varies in appropriate- 
 ness of quality; no consumer is in danger of getting too 
 much of it, and neglecting his boots, hats, and flannel 
 shirts in consequence. That there should be large quantities 
 of the same sort in the calico manufacture is an advantage : 
 the sameness is desirable, and nobody is likely to roll his 
 person in so many folds of calico as to become a mere bale 
 of cotton goods, and nullify his senses of hearing and touch, 
 while his morbid passion for Manchester shirtings makes 
 him still cry " More ! " The wise manufacturer gets richer 
 and richer, and the consumers he supplies have their real 
 wants satisfied and no more. 
 
 Let it be taken as admitted that all legitimate social activ- 
 ity must be beneficial to others besides the agent. To write 
 prose or verse as a private exercise and satisfaction is not 
 social activity ; nobody is culpable for this any more than for 
 learning other people's verse by heart, if he does not neglect 
 his proper business in consequence. If the exercise made 
 him sillier or secretly more self-satisfied, that, to be sure, 
 would be a roundabout way of injuring society ; for though 
 a certain mixture of silliness may lighten existence, we have 
 at present more than enough. 
 
 But man or woman who publishes writings inevitably as- 
 sumes the office of teacher or influeneer of the public mind. 
 Let him protest as he will that he only seeks to amuse, and
 
 236 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 has no pretension to do more than while away an hour of 
 leisure or weariness, " the idle singer of an empty day," 
 he can no more escape influencing the moral taste, and with 
 it the action of the intelligence, than a setter of fashions in 
 furniture and dress can fill the shops with his designs and 
 leave the garniture of persons and houses unaffected by his 
 industry. 
 
 For a man who has a certain gift of writing to say, " I will 
 make the most of it while the public likes my wares, as long 
 as the market is open and I am able to supply it at a money 
 profit, such profit being the sign of liking," he should have 
 a belief that his wares have nothing akin to the arsenic 
 green in them, and also that his continuous supply is secure 
 from a degradation in quality which the habit of consump- 
 tion encouraged in the buyers may hinder them from mark- 
 ing their sense of by rejection, so that they complain, but 
 pay, and read while they complain. Unless he has that be- 
 lief, he is on a level with the manufacturer who gets rich by 
 fancy wares colored with arsenic green. He really cares for 
 nothing but his income. He carries on authorship on the 
 principle of the gin-palace ; and bad literature of the sort 
 called amusing is spiritual gin. 
 
 A writer capable of being popular can only escape this 
 social culpability by first of all getting a profound sense that 
 literature is good for nothing if it is not admirably good; 
 he must detest bad literature too heartily to be indifferent 
 about producing it if only other people don't detest it. And 
 if he has this sign of the divine afflatus within him, he must 
 make up his mind that he must not pursue authorship as a 
 vocation with a trading determination to get rich by it. It 
 is in the highest sense lawful for him to get as good a price 
 as he honorably can for the best work he is capable of ; but 
 not for him to force or hurry his production, or even do over 
 again what has already been done, either by himself or 
 others, so as to render his work no real contribution, for the 
 sake of bringing up his income to the fancy pitch. An au- 
 thor who would keep a pure and noble conscience, and with
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 237 
 
 that a developing instead of degenerating intellect and taste, 
 must cast out of his aims the aim to be rich. And there- 
 fore he must keep nis expenditure low, he must make for 
 himself no dire necessity to earn sums in order to pay bills. 
 
 In opposition to this, it is common to cite Walter Scott's 
 case, and cry, " Would the world have got as much muocent 
 (and therefore salutary) pleasure out of Scott, if he had not 
 brought himself under the pressure of money-need ? " I 
 think it would and more; but since it is impossible to 
 prove what would have been, I confine myself to replying 
 that Scott was not justified in bringing himself into a posi- 
 tion where severe consequences to others depended on his 
 retaining or not retaining his mental competence. Still less 
 is Scott to be taken as an example to be followed in this 
 matter, even if it were admitted that money-need served to 
 press at once the best and the most work out of him ; any 
 more than a great navigator who has brought his ship to port 
 in spite of having taken a wrong and perilous route, is to be 
 followed as to his route by navigators who are not yet as- 
 certained to be great. 
 
 But after the restraints and rules which must guide the 
 acknowledged author, whose power of making a real contri- 
 bution is ascertained, comes the consideration, How or on 
 what principle are we to find a check for that troublesome 
 disposition to authorship arising from the spread of what is 
 called Education, which turns a growing rush of vanity and 
 ambition into this current ? The well-taught an increasing 
 number are almost all able to write essays on given themes, 
 which demand new periodicals to save them from lying in 
 cold obstruction. The ill-taught also an increasing num- 
 ber read many books, seem to themselves able to write 
 others surprisingly like what they read, and probably supe- 
 rior, since the variations are such as please their own fancy, 
 and such as they would have recommended to their favorite 
 authors : these ill-taught persons are perhaps idle and want 
 to give themselves " an object ; " or they are short of money, 
 and feel disinclined to get it by a commoner kind of work ;
 
 238 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 or they find a facility in putting sentences together which 
 gives them more than a suspicion that they have genius, 
 which, if not very cordially believed in by private confidants, 
 will be recognized by an impartial public; or, finally, they 
 observe that writing is sometimes well paid, and some- 
 times a ground of fame or distinction, and without any use 
 of punctilious logic, they conclude to become writers 
 themselves. 
 
 As to these ill-taught persons, whatever medicines of a 
 spiritual sort can be found good against mental emptiness 
 and inflation, such medicines are needful for them. The con- 
 tempt of the world for their productions only comes after 
 their disease has wrought its worst effects. But what is to 
 be said to the well-taught, who have such an alarming 
 equality in their power of writing " like a scholar and a 
 gentleman " ? Perhaps they too can only be cured by the 
 medicine of higher ideals in social duty, and by a fuller rep- 
 resentation to themselves of the processes by which the 
 general culture is furthered or impeded. 
 
 JUDGMENTS ON AUTHORS. 
 
 IN endeavoring to estimate a remarkable writer who aimed 
 at more than temporary influence, we have first to consider 
 what was his individual contribution to the spiritual wealth 
 of mankind. Had he a new conception ? Did he animate 
 long-known but neglected truths with new vigor, and cast 
 fresh light on their relation to other admitted truths ? Did 
 he impregnate any ideas with a fresh store of emotion, and 
 in this way enlarge the area of moral sentiment ? Did he, 
 by a wise emphasis here, and a wise disregard there, give a 
 more useful or beautiful proportion to aims or motives ? 
 And even where his thinking was most mixed with the sort 
 of mistake which is obvious to the majority, as well as that 
 which can only be discerned by the instructed, or made mani- 
 fest by the progress of things, has it that salt of a noble 
 enthusiasm which should rebuke our critical discrimination
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. - 239 
 
 if its correctness is inspired with a less admirable habit of 
 feeling ? 
 
 This is not the common or easy course to take in estimat- 
 ing a modern writer. It requires considerable knowledge of 
 what he has himself done, as well as of what others have done 
 before him, or what they were doing contemporaneously ; it 
 requires deliberate reflection as to the degree in which our 
 own prejudices may hinder us from appreciating the intel- 
 lectual or moral bearing of what on a first view offends 
 us. An easier course is to notice some salient mistakes, 
 and take them as decisive of the writer's incompetence; 
 or to find out that something apparently much the same as 
 what he has said in some connection not clearly ascertained 
 had been said by somebody else, though without great effect, 
 until this new effect of discrediting the other's originality 
 had shown itself as an adequate final cause ; or to pronounce 
 from the point of view of individual taste that this writer 
 for whom regard is claimed is repulsive, wearisome, not to 
 be borne except by those dull persons who are of a different 
 opinion. 
 
 Elder writers who have passed into classics were doubtless 
 treated in this easy way when they were still under the mis- 
 fortune of being recent, nay, are still dismissed with the 
 same rapidity of judgment by daring ignorance. But people 
 who think that they have a reputation to lose in the matter 
 of knowledge have looked into cyclopeedias and histories of 
 philosophy or literature, and possessed themselves of the 
 duly balanced epithets concerning the immortals. They are 
 not left to their own unguided rashness, or their own un- 
 guided pusillanimity. And it is this sheeplike flock who 
 have no direct impressions, no spontaneous delight, no genu- 
 ine objection or self-confessed neutrality in relation to the 
 writers become classic, it is these who are incapable of 
 passing a genuine judgment on the living. Necessarily. 
 The susceptibility they have kept active is a susceptibility to 
 their own reputation for passing the right judgment, not the 
 susceptibility to qualities in the object of judgment. Who
 
 240 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 learns to discriminate shades of color by considering what Is 
 expected of him ? The habit of expressing borrowed judg- 
 ments stupefies the sensibilities, which are the only founda- 
 tion of genuine judgments, just as the constant reading and 
 retailing of results from other men's observations through 
 the microscope, without ever looking through the lens one's 
 self, is an instruction in some truths and some prejudices, 
 but is no instruction in observant susceptibility ; on the con- 
 trary, it breeds a habit of inward seeing according to verbal 
 statement, which dulls the power of outward seeing according 
 to visual evidence. 
 
 On this subject, as on so many others, it is difficult to strike 
 the balance between the educational needs of passivity or re- 
 ceptivity, and independent selection. We should learn noth- 
 ing without the tendency to implicit acceptance ; but there 
 must clearly be a limit to such mental submission, else we 
 should come to a standstill. The human mind would be no 
 better than a dried specimen, representing an unchangeable 
 type. When the assimilation of new matter ceases, decay 
 must begin. In a reasoned self-restraining deference there 
 is as much energy as in rebellion ; but among the less ca- 
 pable, one must admit that the superior energy is on the side 
 of the rebels. And certainly a man who dares to say that 
 he finds an eminent classic feeble here, extravagant there, 
 and in general overrated, may chance to give an opinion 
 which has some genuine discrimination in it concerning a 
 new work or a living thinker, an opinion such as can 
 hardly ever be got from the reputed judge who is a correct 
 echo of the most approved phrases concerning those who 
 have been already canonized, 
 
 STORY-TELLING. 
 
 WHAT is the best way of telling a story ? Since the stan- 
 dard must be the interest of the audience, there must be 
 several or many good ways rather than one best. For we 
 get interested in the stories life presents to us through divers
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 241 
 
 orders and modes of presentation. Very commonly our first 
 awakening to a desire of knowing a man's past or future 
 comes from our seeing him as a stranger in some unusual or 
 pathetic or humorous situation, or manifesting some remark- 
 able characteristics. We make inquiries in consequence, or 
 we become observant and attentive whenever opportunities 
 of knowing more may happen to present themselves without 
 our search. You have seen a refined face among the prison- 
 ers picking tow in jail ; you afterwards see the same unfor- 
 getable face in a pulpit : he must be of dull fibre who would 
 not care to know more about a life which showed such con- 
 trasts, though he might gather his knowledge in a fragmentary 
 and unchronological way. 
 
 Again, we have heard much, or at least something not 
 quite common, about a man whom we have never seen, and 
 hence we look round with curiosity when we are told that he 
 is present ; whatever he says or does before us is charged with 
 a meaning due to our previous hearsay knowledge about him, 
 gathered either from dialogue of which he was expressly and 
 emphatically the subject, or from incidental remark, or from 
 general report either in or out of print. 
 
 These indirect ways of arriving at knowledge are always 
 the most stirring even in relation to impersonal subjects. 
 To see a chemical experiment gives an attractiveness to a 
 definition of chemistry, and fills it with a significance which 
 it would never have had without the pleasant shock of an 
 unusual sequence, such as the transformation of a solid into 
 gas, and vice versa. To see a word for the first time either 
 as substantive or adjective in a connection where we care 
 about knowing its complete meaning, is the way to vivify its 
 meaning in our recollection. Curiosity becomes the more 
 eager from the incompleteness of the first information. More- 
 over, it is in this way that memory works in its incidental 
 revival of events : some salient experience appears in inward 
 vision, and in consequence the antecedent facts are retraced 
 from what is regarded as the beginning of the episode in 
 which that experience made a more or less strikingly memo- 
 
 TOL. IX. 16
 
 242 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 rable part. " Ah ! I remember addressing the mob from the 
 hustings at Westminster, you would n't have thought that I 
 could ever have been in such a position. Well, how I came 
 there was in this way;" and then follows a retrospective 
 narration. 
 
 The modes of telling a story founded on these processes of 
 outward and inward life derive their effectiveness from the 
 superior mastery of images and pictures in grasping the at- 
 tention, or, one might say with more fundamental accuracy, 
 from the fact that our earliest, strongest impressions, our 
 most intimate convictions, are simply images added to more 
 or less of sensation. These are the primitive instruments of 
 thought. Hence it is not surprising that early poetry took 
 this way, telling a daring deed, a glorious achievement, 
 without caring for what went before. The desire for orderly 
 narration is a later, more reflective birth. The presence of 
 the Jack in the box affects every child : it is the more reflec- 
 tive lad, the miniature philosopher, who wants to know how 
 he got there. 
 
 The only stories life presents to us in an orderly way are 
 those of our autobiography, or the career of our companions 
 from our childhood upwards, or perhaps of our own children. 
 But it is a great art to make a connected strictly relevant 
 narrative of such careers as we can recount from the begin- 
 ning. In these cases the sequence of associations is almost 
 sure to overmaster the sense of proportion. Such narratives 
 db ovo are sumnier's-day stories for happy loungers ; not the 
 cup of self-forgetting excitement to the busy who can snatch 
 an hour of entertainment. 
 
 But the simple opening of a story with a date and neces- 
 sary account of places and people, passing on quietly towards 
 the more rousing elements of narrative and dramatic presen- 
 tation, without need of retrospect, has its advantages, which 
 have to be measured by the nature of the story. Spirited 
 narrative, without more than a touch of dialogue here <md 
 there, may be made eminently interesting, and is suited to 
 the novelette. Examples of its charm are seen in the
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 243 
 
 tales in which the French have a mastery never reached by 
 the English, who usually demand coarser flavors than are 
 given by that delightful gayety which is well described by 
 La Fontaine 1 as not anything that provokes fits of laughter, 
 but a certain charm, an agreeable mode of handling, which 
 lends attractiveness to all subjects, even the most serious. 
 And it is this sort of gayety which plays around the best 
 French novelettes. But the opening chapters of the " Vicar 
 of Wakefield " are as fine as anything that can be done in 
 this way. 
 
 Why should a story not be told in the most irregular 
 fashion that an author's idiosyncrasy may prompt, provided 
 that he gives us what we can enjoy ? The objections to 
 Sterne's wild way of telling "Tristram Shandy" lie more 
 solidly in the quality of the interrupting matter than in the 
 fact of interruption. The dear public would do well to re- 
 flect that they are often bored from the want of flexibility in 
 their own minds. They are like the topers of " one liquor." 
 
 HISTORIC IMAGINATION. 
 
 THE exercise of a veracious imagination in historical pictur- 
 ing seems to be capable of a development that might help the 
 judgment greatly with regard to present and future events. 
 By veracious imagination, I mean the working out in detail 
 of the various steps by which a political or social change 
 was reached, using all extant evidence and supplying defi- 
 ciencies by careful analogical creation. How triumphant 
 opinions originally spread ; how institutions arose ; what 
 were the conditions of great inventions, discoveries, or theo- 
 retic conceptions ; what circumstances affecting individual 
 lots are attendant on the decay of long-established systems, 
 all these grand elements of history require the illumination 
 of special imaginative treatment. But effective truth in this 
 
 1 " Je n'appelle pas gajete ce qui excite le rire, tnais un certain charme, 
 on air agreable qu'on peat donner a toutes sortes de sujets, mesme les plot 
 B&ieux." Preface to FabU,
 
 244 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 application of art requires freedom from the vulgar coercion 
 of conventional plot, which is become hardly of higher in- 
 fluence on imaginative representation than a detailed "order" 
 for a picture sent by a rich grocer to an eminent painter, 
 allotting a certain portion of the canvas to a rural scene, 
 another to a fashionable group, with a request for a murder 
 in the middle distance, and a little comedy to relieve it. A 
 slight approximation to the veracious glimpses of history 
 artistically presented, which I am indicating, but applied only 
 to an incident of contemporary life, is " Un Paquet de 
 Lettres " by Gustave Droz. For want of such real, minute 
 vision of how changes come about in the past, we fall into 
 ridiculously inconsistent estimates of actual movements, con- 
 demning in the present what we belaud in the past, and pro- 
 nouncing impossible processes that have been repeated again 
 and again in the historical preparation of the very system 
 under which we live. A false kind of idealization dulls our 
 perception of the meaning in words when they relate to past 
 events which have had a glorious issue ; for lack of compari- 
 son no warning image rises to check scorn of the very phrases 
 which in other associations are consecrated. 
 
 Utopian pictures help the reception of ideas as to con- 
 structive results, but hardly so much as a vivid presentation 
 of how results have been actually brought about, especially 
 in religious and social change. And there is the pathos, the 
 heroism, often accompanying the decay and final struggle of 
 old systems, which has not had its share of tragic commemo- 
 ration. What really took place in and around Constantino 
 before, upon, and immediately after his declared conversion ? 
 Could a momentary flash be thrown on Eusebius in his say- 
 ings and doings as an ordinary man in bishop's garments ? 
 Or on Julian and Libanius ? There has been abundant writ- 
 ing on such great turning-points, but not such as serves to 
 instruct the imagination in true comparison. I want some- 
 thing different from the abstract treatment which belongs to 
 grave history from a doctrinal point of view, and something 
 different from the schemed picturesqueness of ordinary
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 245 
 
 historical fiction. I want brief, severely conscientious repro- 
 ductions, in their concrete incidents, of pregnant movements 
 in the past. 
 
 VALUE IN ORIGINALITY. 
 
 THE supremacy given in European cultures to the litera- 
 tures of Greece and Home has had an effect almost equal to 
 that of a common religion in binding the Western nations 
 together. It is foolish to be forever complaining of the con- 
 sequent uniformity, as if there were an endless power of 
 originality in the human mind. Great and precious origina- 
 tion must always be comparatively rare, and can only exist 
 on condition of a wide, massive uniformity. When a multi- 
 tude of men have learned to use the same language in speech 
 and writing, then and then only can the greatest masters of 
 language arise. For in what does their mastery consist f f 
 They use words which are already a familiar medium of 
 understanding and sympathy in such a way as greatly to en- 
 large the understanding and sympathy. Originality of this 
 order changes the wild grasses into world-feeding grain. 
 Idiosyncrasies are pepper and spices of questionable aroma. 
 
 TO THE PROSAIC ALL THINGS ARE PROSAIC. 
 
 " Is the time we live in prosaic ? " " That depends : it 
 must certainly be prosaic to one whose mind takes a prosaic 
 stand in contemplating it." " But it is precisely the most 
 poetic minds that most groan over the vulgarity of the pres- 
 ent, its degenerate sensibility to beauty, eagerness for mate- 
 rialistic explanation, noisy triviality." "Perhaps they would 
 have had the same complaint to make about the age of Eliza- 
 beth, if, living then, they had fixed their attention on its 
 more sordid elements, or had been subject to the grating in- 
 fluence of its every-day meannesses, and had sought refuge 
 from them in the contemplation of whatever suited their 
 taste in a former age."
 
 246 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIO1X 
 
 "DEAR RELIGIOUS LOVE." 
 
 WE get our knowledge of perfect Love by glimpses and in 
 fragments chiefly, the rarest only among us knowing what 
 it is to worship and caress, reverence and cherish, divide our 
 bread and mingle our thoughts at one and the same time, 
 under inspiration of the same object. Finest aromas will so 
 often leave the fruits to which they are native and cling 
 elsewhere, leaving the fruit empty of all but its coarser 
 structure ! 
 
 WE MAKE OUR OWN PRECEDENTS. 
 
 IN the times of national mixture, when modern Europe wa^ 
 as one may say, a-brewing, it was open to a man who did not 
 like to be judged by the Roman law to choose which of cer- 
 tain other codes he would be tried by. So, in our own times, 
 they who openly adopt a higher rule than their neighbors do 
 thereby make act of choice as to the laws and precedents by 
 which they shall be approved or condemned ; and thus it may 
 happen that we see a man morally pilloried for a very custo- 
 mary deed, and yet having no right to complain, inasmuch as 
 in his foregoing deliberative course of life he had referred 
 himself to the tribunal of those higher conceptions, before 
 which such a deed is without question condemnable. 
 
 BIRTH OF TOLERANCE. 
 
 TOLERANCE first comes through equality of struggle, as in 
 the case of Arianism and Catholicism in the early times, 
 Valens, Eastern and Arian, Valentinian, Western and Catho- 
 lic, alike publishing edicts of tolerance ; or it comes from a 
 common need of relief from an oppressive predominance, as 
 when James II. published his Act of Tolerance towards non- 
 Anglicans, being forced into liberality towards the Dissenters 
 by the need to get it for the Catholics. Community of in- 
 terest is the root of justice ; community of suffering, the root 
 of pity ; community of joy, the root of love.
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 247 
 
 ENVELOPED in a common mist, we seem to walk in clear- 
 ness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshroudi 
 others. 
 
 SYMPATHETIC people are often incommunicative about 
 themselves : they give back reflected images which hide theii 
 own depths. 
 
 THE pond said to the ocean, " Why do you rage so ? The 
 wind is not so very violent, nay, it is already fallen. Look 
 at me. I rose into no foaming waves, and am already smooth 
 again." 
 
 FELIX QUI NON POTtJlT. 
 
 MANY feel themselves very confidently on safe ground 
 when they say : It must be good for man to know the Truth, 
 But it is clearly not good for a particular man to know some 
 particular truth, as irremediable treachery in one whom he 
 cherishes, better that he should die without knowing it. 
 
 Of scientific truth, is it not conceivable that some facts as 
 to the tendency of things affecting the final destination of 
 the race might be more hurtful when they had entered into 
 the human consciousness than they would have been if they 
 had remained purely external in their activity ? 
 
 DIVINE GRACE A REAL EMANATION. 
 
 THERE is no such thing as an impotent or neutral deity, if 
 the deity be really believed in, and contemplated either in 
 prayer or meditation. Every object of thought reacts on the 
 mind that conceives it, still more on that which habitually 
 contemplates it. In this we may be said to solicit help from 
 a generalization or abstraction. Wordsworth had this truth 
 in his consciousness when he wrote (in the Prelude), 
 
 "Nor general truths, which are themselves a sort 
 Of elements and agents, Under-powert, 
 Subordinate helpers of the living mind " 
 
 not indeed precisely in the same relation, but with a meaning 
 which involves that wider moral influence.
 
 248 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 A FINE EXCESS." FEELING IS ENERGY. 
 
 ONE can hardly insist too much, in the present stage of 
 thinking, on the efficacy of feeling in stimulating to ardent 
 co-operation, quite apart from the conviction that such co- 
 operation is needed for the achievement of the end in view. 
 Just as hatred will vent itself in private curses no longer 
 believed to have any potency, and joy, in private singing far 
 out among the woods and fields, so sympathetic feeling can 
 only be satisfied by joining in the action which expresses it, 
 though the added "Bravo!" the added push, the added 
 penny, is no more than a grain of dust on a rolling mass. 
 When students take the horses out of a political hero's car- 
 riage, and draw him home by the force of their own muscle, 
 the struggle in each is simply to draw or push, without con- 
 sideration whether his place would not be as well filled by 
 somebody else, or whether his one arm be really needful to 
 the effect. It is under the same inspiration that abundant 
 help rushes towards the scene of a fire, rescuing imperilled 
 lives, and laboring with generous rivalry in carrying buckets. 
 So the old blind King John of Bohemia at the battle of 
 Crecy begged his vassals to lead him into the fight that he 
 might strike a good blow, though his own stroke, possibly fa- 
 tal to himself, could not turn by a hair's-breadth the imperious 
 course of victory. 
 
 The question, " Of what use is it for me to work towards 
 an end confessedly good ? " comes from that sapless kind of 
 reasoning which is falsely taken for a sign of supreme mental 
 activity, but is really due to languor, or incapability of that 
 mental grasp which makes objects strongly present, and to a 
 lack of sympathetic emotion. In the "Spanish Gypsy" 
 Fedalma says, 
 
 "The grandest death! to die in vain for Love 
 Greater than sways the forces of the world "* 
 
 1 Vide what Demosthenes says (" De Corona") about Athens punning 
 the same course, though she had known from the beginning that her heroic 
 resistance would be in vain.
 
 LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 249 
 
 referring to the image of the disciples throwing themselves, 
 consciously in vain, on the Eoman spears. I really believe 
 and mean this not as a rule of general action, but as a 
 possible grand instance of determining energy in human 
 sympathy, which even in particular cases, where it has only 
 a magnificent futility, is more adorable, or as we say divine, 
 than unpitying force, or than a prudent calculation of results. 
 Perhaps it is an implicit joy in the resources of our human 
 nature which has stimulated admiration for acts of self- 
 sacrifice which are vain as to their immediate end. Marcus 
 Curtius was probably not imagined as concluding to himself 
 that he and his horse would so fill up the gap as to make a 
 smooth terra firma. The impulse and act made the heroism, 
 not the correctness of adaptation. No doubt the passionate 
 inspiration which prompts and sustains a course of self- 
 sacrificing labor in the light of soberly estimated results gath- 
 ers the highest title to our veneration, and makes the supreme 
 heroism. But the generous leap of impulse is needed too, to 
 swell the flood of sympathy in us beholders, that we may 
 not fall completely under the mastery of calculation, which 
 in its turn may fail of ends for want of energy got from 
 ardor. We have need to keep the sluices open for possible 
 influxes of the rarer sort.
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH
 
 LOOKING INWAKD. 
 
 IT is my habit to give an account to myself of the charac- 
 ters I meet with ; can I give any true account of my 
 own ? I am a bachelor, without domestic distractions of any 
 sort, and have all my life been an attentive companion to 
 myself, flattering my nature agreeably on plausible occasions, 
 reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me ; and in gen- 
 eral remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity 
 which is too apt to raise surprise, if not disgust, at the care- 
 less inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opin- 
 ions I never held, express their desire to convert me to my 
 favorite ideas, forget whether I have ever been to the East, 
 and are capable of being three several times astonished at 
 my never having told them before of my accident in the 
 Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever since 
 notably diminished my digestive powers. Surely I ought to 
 know myself better than these indifferent outsiders can 
 know me ; nay, better even than my intimate friends, to 
 whom I have never breathed those items of my inward ex- 
 perience which have chiefly shaped* my life. 
 
 Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even 
 the acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and 
 tenets as they would be if I were a dead philosopher, are 
 probably aware of certain points in me which may not be in- 
 cluded in my most active suspicion. We sing an exquisite 
 passage out of tune, and innocently repeat it for the greater 
 pleasure of our hearers. Who can be aware of what his for- 
 eign accent is in the ears of a native ? And how can a man 
 be conscious of that dull perception which causes him to
 
 254 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 mistake altogether what will make him agreeable uu a par- 
 ticular woman, and to persevere eagerly in a behavior which 
 she is privately recording against him ? I have had some 
 confidences, from my female friends, as to their opinion of 
 other men, whom I have observed trying to make themselves 
 amiable ; and it has occurred to me that, though I can hardly 
 be so blundering as Lippus, and the rest of those mistaken 
 candidates for favor whom I have seen mining their chance 
 by a too elaborate personal canvass, I must still come under 
 the common fatality of mankind, and share the liability to 
 be absurd without knowing that I am absurd. It is in the 
 nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish rea- 
 soner. Hence, with all possible study of myself, with all 
 possible effort to escape from the pitiable illusion which 
 makes men laugh, shriek, or curl the lip at Folly's likeness, 
 in total unconsciousness that it resembles themselves, I am 
 obliged to recognize that, while there are secrets in me un- 
 guessed by others, these others have certain items of knowl- 
 edge about the extent of my powers, and the figure I make 
 with them, which in turn are secrets unguessed by me. 
 When I was a lad I danced a hornpipe with arduous scru- 
 pulosity, and while suffering pangs of pallid shyness, was 
 yet proud of my superiority as a dancing-pupil, imagining 
 for myself a high place in the estimation of beholders ; but 
 I can now picture the amusement they had in the incongruity 
 of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. What sort of horn- 
 pipe am I dancing now ? 
 
 Thus, if I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with 
 curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the 
 inconsistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at your 
 helpless endeavors in a rashly chosen part, it is not that I 
 feel myself aloof from you ; the more intimately I seem to dis- 
 cern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the proof that I 
 share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment ? - 
 for even what we are averse to, what we vow not to en- 
 tertain, must have shaped or shadowed itself within us as 
 a possibility, before we can think of exorcising it. No man
 
 LOOKING INWARD. 255 
 
 can know his brother simply as a spectator. Dear blunderers, 
 1 am one of you. I wince at the fact, but I am not ignorant 
 of it, that I too am laughable on unsuspected occasions ; nay, 
 in the very tempest and whirlwind of my anger, I include 
 myself under my own indignation. If the human race has a 
 bad reputation, I perceive that I cannot escape being com- 
 promised. And thus, while I carry in myself the key to 
 other men's experience, it is only by observing others that I 
 can so far correct my self-ignorance as to arrive at the cer- 
 tainty that I am liable to commit myself unawares, and to 
 manifest some incompetency, which I know no more of than 
 the blind man knows of his image in the glass. 
 
 Is it then possible to describe one's self at once faithfully 
 and fully ? In all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, 
 an incompleteness which may have the effect of falsity. We 
 are each of us bound to reticence by the piety we owe to 
 those who have been nearest to us and have had a mingled 
 influence over our lives, by the fellow-feeling which should 
 restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confes- 
 sions into an act of accusation against others, who have no 
 chance of vindicating themselves; and most of all by that 
 reverence for the higher efforts of our common nature, which 
 commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible rem- 
 nants of the brute, its most agonizing struggles with tempta- 
 tion, in. unbroken silence. But the incompleteness which 
 comes of self-ignorance may be compensated by self -betrayal. 
 A man who is affected to tears in dweUing on the generosity 
 of his own sentiments makes me aware of several things not 
 included under those terms. Who has sinned more against 
 those three duteous reticences than Jean Jacques? Yet 
 half our impressions of his character come not from what 
 he means to convey, but from what he unconsciously enables 
 us to discern. 
 
 This naive veracity of self-presentation is attainable by 
 the slenderest talent on the most trivial occasions. The 
 least lucid and impressive of orators may be perfectly suc- 
 cessful in showing us the weak points of his grammar.
 
 256 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Hence I too may be so far like Jean Jacques as to commu- 
 nicate more than I am aware of. I am not, indeed, writing 
 an autobiography, or pretending to give an unreserved de- 
 scription of myself, but only offering some slight confessions 
 in an apologetic light, to indicate that if in my absence you 
 dealt as freely with my unconscious weaknesses as I have 
 dealt with the unconscious weaknesses of others, I should 
 not feel myself warranted by common-sense in regarding 
 your freedom of observation as an exceptional case of evil- 
 speaking, or as malignant interpretation of a character 
 which really offers no handle to just objection, or even as 
 an unfair use, for your amusement, of disadvantages which, 
 since they are mine, should be regarded with more than 
 ordinary tenderness. Let me at least try to feel myself in 
 the ranks with my fellow-men. It is true, that I would 
 rather not hear either your well-founded ridicule or your 
 judicious strictures. Though not averse to finding fault 
 with myself, and conscious of deserving lashes, I like to keep 
 the scourge in my own discriminating hand. I never felt 
 myself sufficiently meritorious to like being hated, as a proof 
 of my superiority, or so thirsty for improvement as to desire 
 that all my acquaintances should give me their candid opin- 
 ion of me. I really do not want to learn from my enemies ; 
 I prefer having none to learn from. Instead of being glad 
 when men use me despitefully, I wish they would behave 
 better, and find a more amiable occupation for their intervals 
 of business. In brief, after a close intimacy with myself for 
 a longer period than I choose to mention, I find within me 
 a permanent longing for approbation, sympathy, and love. 
 
 Yet I am a bachelor, and the person I loved best has never 
 loved me, or known that I loved her. Though continually 
 in society, and caring about the joys and sorrows of my 
 neighbors, I feel myself, so far as my personal lot is con- 
 cerned, uncared for and alone. " Your own fault, my dear 
 fellow ! " said Minutius Felix, one day that I had incau- 
 tiously mentioned this uninteresting fact. And he was 
 right, in senses other than he intended. Why should 1
 
 LOOKING INWARD. 257 
 
 expect to be admired, and have my company doted on? 
 1 have done no services to my country beyond those of every 
 peaceable, orderly citizen ; and as to intellectual contribution 
 my only published work was a failure, so that I am spokei 
 of to inquiring beholders as " the author of a book you havs 
 probably not seen." (The work was a humorous romance, 
 unique in its kind, and I am told is much tasted in a Cher- 
 okee translation, where the jokes are rendered with all the 
 serious eloquence characteristic of the red races.) This 
 sort of distinction, as a writer nobody is likely to have read, 
 can hardly counteract an indistinctness in my articulation, 
 which the best-iutentioned loudness will not remedy. Then, 
 in some quarters, my awkward feet are against me, the length 
 of my upper lip, and an inveterate way I have of walking 
 with my head foremost and my chin projecting. One can 
 become only too well aware of such things by looking in the 
 glass, or in that other mirror, held up to nature in the frank 
 opinions of street-boys, or of our Free People travelling by 
 excursion-train; and no doubt they account for the half- 
 Suppressed smile which I have observed on some fair faces 
 when I have first been presented before them. This direct- 
 perspective judgment is not to be argued against. But I am 
 tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have 
 mentioned are apparently taken to warrant unfavorable in- 
 ferences concerning my mental quickness. With all the 
 increasing uncertainty which modern progress has thrown 
 over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clear 
 that wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the bal- 
 ance of the haunches in walking has nothing to do with the 
 subtle discrimination of ideas. Yet strangers evidently do 
 not expect me to make a clever observation, and my good 
 things are as unnoticed as if they were anonymous pictures. 
 I have indeed had the mixed satisfaction of finding that 
 when they were appropriated by some one else they were 
 found remarkable, and even brilliant. It is to be borne in 
 mind that I am not rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and 
 no very high connections such as give to a look of imbecility 
 
 VOL. IX.
 
 258 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 a certain prestige of inheritance through a titled line ; just 
 as " the Austrian lip " confers a grandeur of historical asso- 
 ciations on a kind of feature which might make us reject an 
 advertising footman. I have now and then done harm to a 
 good cause by speaking for it in public, and have discovered 
 too late that my attitude on the occasion would more suit- 
 ably have been that of negative beneficence. Is it really to 
 the advantage of an opinion that I should be known to hold 
 it ? And as to the force of my arguments, that is a second- 
 ary consideration with audiences who have given a new 
 scope to the ex pede Herculem principle, and from awkward 
 feet infer awkward fallacies. Once, when zeal lifted me on 
 my legs, I distinctly heard an enlightened artisan remark, 
 " Here 's a rum cut ! " and doubtless he reasoned in the 
 same way as the elegant Glycera, when she politely puts on 
 an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and 
 chills her glance in sign of predetermined neutrality ; both 
 have their reasons for judging the quality of my speech 
 beforehand. 
 
 This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, 
 who has also the innocent vanity of desiring to be agreeable, 
 has naturally a depressing if not embittering tendency ; and 
 in early life I began to seek for some consoling point of view, 
 some warrantable method of softening the hard peas I had 
 to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism which might supply 
 the needed self-satisfaction. At one time I dwelt much on 
 the idea of compensation, trying to believe that I was all 
 the wiser for my bruised vanity, that I had the higher place 
 in the true spiritual scale, and even that a day might come 
 when some visible triumph would place me in the French 
 heaven of having the laughers on my side. But I presently 
 perceived that this was a very odious sort of self-cajolery. 
 Was it in the least true that I was wiser than several of my 
 friends who made an excellent figure, and were perhaps praised 
 a little beyond their merit ? Is the ugly, unready man in the 
 corner, outside the current of conversation, really likely to 
 have a fairer view of things than the agreeable talker, whose
 
 LOOKING INWARD. 259 
 
 success strikes the unsuccessful as a repulsive example of 
 forwardness and conceit ? And as to compensation in future 
 years, would the fact that I myself got it reconcile me to an 
 order of things in which I could see a multitude with as bad 
 a share as mine, who, instead of getting their corresponding 
 compensation, were getting beyond the reach of it in old age ? 
 What could be more contemptible than the mood of mind 
 which makes a man measure the justice of divine or human 
 law by the agreeableness of his own shadow and the ample 
 satisfaction of his own desires ? 
 
 I dropped a form of consolation which seemed to be en- 
 couraging me in the persuasion that my discontent was the 
 chief evil in the world, and my benefit the soul of good in 
 that evil. May there not be at least a partial release from 
 the imprisoning verdict that a man's philosophy is the for- 
 mula of his personality ? In certain branches of science we 
 can ascertain our personal equation, the measure of difference 
 between our own judgments and an average standard : may 
 there not be some corresponding correction of our personal 
 partialities in moral theorizing ? If a squint, or other ocular 
 defect, disturbs my vision, I can get instructed in the fact, be 
 made aware that my condition is abnormal, and either through 
 spectacles or diligent imagination I can learn the average ap- 
 pearance of things : is there no remedy or corrective for that 
 inward squint which consists in a dissatisfied egoism, or other 
 want of mental balance ? In my conscience I saw that the 
 bias of personal discontent was just as misleading and odious 
 as the bias of self-satisfaction. Whether we look through the 
 rose-colored glass or the indigo, we are equally far from the 
 hues which the healthy human eye beholds in heaven above 
 and earth below. I began to dread ways of consoling which 
 were really a flattering of native illusions, a feeding-up into 
 monstrosity of an inward growth already disproportionate ; 
 to get an especial scorn for that scorn of mankind which is a 
 transmuted disappointment of preposterous claims ; to watch 
 with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate 
 of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric
 
 260 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper. The 
 standing-ground worth striving after seemed to be some De- 
 lectable Mountain whence I could see things in proportions 
 as little as possible determined by that self-partiality which 
 certainly plays a necessary part in our bodily sustenance, but 
 has a starving effect on the mind. 
 
 Thus I finally gave up any attempt to make out that I 
 preferred cutting a bad figure, and that I liked to be despised, 
 because in this way I was getting more virtuous than my 
 successful rivals ; and I have long looked with suspicion on 
 all views which are recommended as peculiarly consolatory 
 to wounded vanity, or other personal disappointment. The 
 consolations of egoism are simply a change of attitude, or a 
 resort to a new kind of diet, which soothes and fattens it. 
 Fed in this way, it is apt to become a monstrous spiritual 
 pride, or a chuckling satisfaction that the final balance will 
 not be against those who now eclipse us. Examining the 
 world in order to find consolation is very much like looking 
 carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our 
 own name, if not in the text, at least in a laudatory note ; 
 whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has 
 hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents. But an 
 attention fixed on the main theme, or various matter of the 
 book, would deliver us from that slavish subjection to our 
 own self-importance. And I had the mighty volume of the 
 world before me. Nay, I had the struggling action of a 
 myriad lives around me, each single life as dear to itself 
 as mine to me. Was there no escape here from this stu- 
 pidity of a murmuring self-occupation ? Clearly enough, if 
 anything hindered my thought from rising to the force of 
 passionately interested contemplation, or my poor pent-up 
 pond of sensitiveness from widening into a beneficent river 
 of sympathy, it was my own dulness ; and though I could 
 not make myself the reverse of shallow all at once, I had at 
 least learned where I had better turn my attention. 
 
 Something came of this alteration in my point of view, 
 though I admit that the result is of no striking kind. It is
 
 LOOKING INWARD. 261 
 
 unnecessary for me to utter modest denials, since none have 
 assured me that I have a vast intellectual scope, or what 
 is more surprising, considering I have done so little that I 
 might, if I chose, surpass any distinguished man whom they 
 wish to depreciate. I have not attained any lofty peak of 
 magnanimity, nor would I trust beforehand in my capability 
 of meeting a severe demand for moral heroism. But that 1 
 have at least succeeded in establishing a habit of mind which 
 keeps watch against my self-partiality, and promotes a fair 
 consideration of what touches the feelings or the fortunes of 
 my neighbors, seems to be proved by the ready confidence 
 with which men and women appeal to my interest in their ex- 
 perience. It is gratifying to one, who would above all things 
 avoid the insanity of fancying himself a more momentous or 
 touching object than he really is, to find that nobody expects 
 from him the least sign of such mental aberration, and that 
 he is evidently held capable of listening to all kinds of per- 
 sonal outpouring, without the least disposition to become 
 communicative in the same way. This confirmation of the 
 hope that my bearing is not that of the self-flattering lunatic 
 is given me in ample measure. My acquaintances tell me un- 
 reservedly of their triumphs and their piques ; explain their 
 purposes at length, and reassure me with cheerfulness as to 
 their chances of success ; insist on their theories, and accept 
 me as a dummy with whom they rehearse their side of future 
 discussions ; unwind their coiled-up griefs in relation to their 
 husbands, or recite to me examples of feminine incomp/e- 
 hensibleness as typified in their wives ; mention frequently 
 the fair applause which their merits have wrung from some 
 persons, and the attacks to which certain oblique motives 
 have stimulated others. At the time when I was less free 
 from superstition about my own power of charming, I occa- 
 sionally, in the glow of sympathy which embraced me and my 
 confiding friend on the subject of his satisfaction or resent- 
 ment, was urged to hint at a corresponding experience in my 
 own case: but the signs of a rapidly lowering pulse and 
 spreading nervous depression in my previously vivacious in-
 
 262 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 terlocutor warned me that I was acting on that dangerous 
 misreading, "Do as you are done by." Recalling the true 
 version of the Golden Rule, I could not wish that others should 
 lower my spirits as I was lowering my friend's. After several 
 times obtaining the same result from a like experiment, in 
 which all the circumstances were varied except my own per- 
 sonality, I took it as an established inference that these fitful 
 signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were gener- 
 ally felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that 
 sanity which I aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is 
 not without its gratifications, as I have said. While my de- 
 sire to explain myself in private ears has been quelled, the 
 habit of getting interested in the experience of others has 
 been continually gathering strength, and I am really at the 
 point of finding that this world would be worth living in 
 without any lot of one's own. Is it not possible for me to 
 enjoy the scenery of the earth without saying to myself I 
 have a cabbage-garden in it ? But this sounds like the lunacy 
 of fancying one's self everybody else, and being unable to 
 play one's own part decently, another form of the disloyal 
 attempt to be independent of the common lot, and to live with- 
 out a sharing of pain. 
 
 Perhaps I have made self-betrayals enough already, to 
 show that I have not arrived at that non-human independ- 
 ence. My conversational reticences about myself turned 
 into garrulousness on paper; as the sea-lion plunges and 
 swims the more energetically, because his limbs are of a sort 
 to make him shambling on land. The act of writing, in 
 spite of past experience, brings with it the vague, delightful 
 illusion of an audience nearer to my idiom than the Chero- 
 kees, and more numerous than the visionary One for whom 
 many authors have declared themselves willing to go through 
 the pleasing punishment of publication. My illusion is of a 
 more liberal kind, and I imagine a far-off, hazy, multitu- 
 dinous assemblage, as in a picture of Paradise, making an 
 approving chorus to the sentences and paragraphs of which 
 I myself particularly enjoy the writing. The haze is a nee-
 
 LOOKING INWARD. 263 
 
 essary condition. If any physiognomy becomes distinct in 
 the foreground, it is fatal. The countenance is sure to be 
 one bent on discountenancing my innocent intentions : it is 
 pale-eyed, incapable of being amused when I am amused, or 
 indignant at what makes me indignant ; it stares at my pre- 
 sumption, pities my ignorance, or is manifestly preparing to 
 expose the various instances in which I unconsciously dis- 
 grace myself. I shudder at this too corporeal auditor, and 
 turn toward another point of the compass where the haze is 
 unbroken. Why should I not indulge this remaining illusion, 
 since I do not take my approving choral paradise as a warrant 
 for setting the press to work again and making some thousand 
 sheets of superior paper unsalable ? I leave my manuscripts 
 to a judgment outside my imagination ; but I will not ask to 
 hear it, or request my friend to pronounce before I have been 
 buried decently, what he really thinks of my parts, and to 
 state candidly whether my papers would be most usefully 
 applied in lighting the cheerful domestic fire. It is too 
 probable that he will be exasperated at the trouble I have 
 him of reading them ; but the consequent clearness 
 vivacity with which he could demonstrate to me that 
 the fault of my manuscripts, as of my one published work, 
 is simply flatness, and not that surpassing subtilty which is 
 the preferable ground of popular neglect this verdict, 
 however instructively expressed, is a portion of earthly dis- 
 cipline of which I will not beseech my friend to be the in- 
 strument. Other persons, I am aware, have not . the same 
 cowardly shrinking from a candid opinion of their perform- 
 ances, and are even importunately eager for it ; but I have 
 convinced myself, in numerous cases, that such exposers of 
 their own back to the smiter were of too hopeful a disposi- 
 tion to believe in the scourge, and really trusted in a pleas- 
 ant anointing, an outpouring of balm without any previous 
 wounds. I am of a less trusting disposition, and will only 
 ask my friend to use his judgment in insuring me against 
 posthumous mistake. 
 
 Thus I make myself a character to write, and keep the
 
 264 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 pleasing, inspiring illusion of being listened to, though I 
 may sometimes write about myself. What I have already 
 said on this too familiar theme has been meant only as a 
 preface, to show that in noting the weaknesses of my ac- 
 quaintances I am conscious of my fellowship with them. 
 That a gratified sense of superiority is at the root of bar- 
 barous laughter may be at least half the truth. But there 
 is a loving laughter in which the only recognized supe- 
 riority is that of the ideal self, the God within, holding the 
 mirror and the scourge for our own pettiness as well as our 
 neighbors'.
 
 LOOKING BACKWARD. 
 
 MOST of us, who have had decent parents, would shrink 
 from wishing that our father and mother had been some- 
 body else whom we never knew ; yet it is held no impiety 
 rather, a graceful mark of instruction for a man to wail 
 that he was not the son of another age and another nation, 
 of which also he knows nothing except through the easy 
 process of an imperfect imagination and a nattering fancy. 
 
 But the period thus looked back on with a purely admiring 
 regret, as perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always 
 a long way off; the desirable contemporaries are hardly 
 nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most likely they are the fel- 
 low-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the ^Eolic lyrists, 
 whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast with 
 our redundance. No impassioned personage wishes he had 
 been born in the age of Pitt, that his ardent youth might 
 have eaten the dearest bread, dressed itself with the longest 
 coat-tails and shortest waist, or heard the loudest grumbling 
 at the heaviest war-taxes ; and it would be really something 
 original in polished verse if one of our young writers de- 
 clared he would gladly be turned eighty-five, that he might 
 have known the joy and pride of being an Englishman when 
 there were fewer reforms and plenty of highwaymen, fewer 
 discoveries and more faces pitted with the small-pox, when 
 laws were made to keep up the price of corn, and the trouble- 
 some Irish were more miserable. Three-quarters of a cen- 
 tury ago is not a distance that lends much enchantment to 
 the view. We are familiar with the average men of that 
 period, and are still consciously encumbered with its bad
 
 266 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 contrivances and mistaken acts. The lords and gentlemen 
 painted by young Lawrence talked and wrote their nonsense 
 in a tongue we thoroughly understand ; hence their times 
 are not much flattered, not much glorified, by the yearnings 
 of that modern sect of Flagellants who make a ritual of 
 lashing not themselves, but all their neighbors. To me, 
 however, that parental time, the time of my father's youth, 
 never seemed prosaic, for it came to my imagination first 
 through his memories, which made a wondrous perspective 
 to my little daily world of discovery. And, for my part, I 
 can call no age absolutely unpoetic: how should it be so, 
 since there are always children to whom the acorns and the 
 swallow's eggs are a wonder, always these human passions 
 and fatalities, through which Garrick as Hamlet in bob-wig 
 and knee-breeches moved his audience, more than some have 
 since done in velvet tunic and plume ? But every age since 
 the golden may be made more or less prosaic by minds that 
 attend only to its vulgar and sordid elements, of which there 
 was always an abundance, even in Greece and Italy, the 
 favorite realms of the retrospective optimists. To be quite 
 fair toward the ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must 
 be allowed to each of them, a little implicit poetry even to 
 those which echoed loudest with servile, pompous, and trivial 
 prose. 
 
 Such impartiality is not in vogue at present. If we ac- 
 knowledge our obligation to the ancients, it is hardly to be 
 done without some flouting of our contemporaries, who, with 
 all their faults, must be allowed the merit of keeping the 
 world habitable for the refined eulogists of the blameless 
 past. One wonders whether the remarkable originators who 
 first had the notion of digging wells, or of churning for but- 
 ter, and who were certainly very useful to their own time as 
 well as ours, were left quite free from invidious comparison 
 with predecessors who let the water and the milk alone ; or 
 whether some rhetorical nomad, as he stretched himself on 
 the grass with a good appetite for contemporary butter, be- 
 came loud on the virtue of ancestors who were uneorrupted
 
 LOOKING BACKWARD. 267 
 
 by tlie produce of the cow ; nay, whether, in a high flight of 
 imaginative self-sacrifice (after swallowing the butter), he 
 even wished himself earlier born and already eaten for the 
 sustenance of a generation more naive than his own. 
 
 I have often had the fool's hectic of wishing about the un- 
 alterable ; but with me that useless exercise has turned chiefly 
 on the conception of a different self, and not, as it usually 
 does in literature, on the advantage of having been born in a 
 different age, and more especially in one where life is im- 
 agined to have been altogether majestic and graceful. With 
 my present abilities, external proportions, and generally 
 small provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is the ground 
 for confidence that I should have had a preferable career in 
 such an epoch of society ? An age in which every depart- 
 ment has its awkward-squad seems in my mind's eye to suit 
 me better. I might have wandered by the Strymon under 
 Philip and Alexander without throwing any new light on 
 method or organizing the sum of human knowledge ; on the 
 other hand, I might have objected to Aristotle as too much of 
 a systematizer, and have preferred the freedom of a little self- 
 contradiction as offering more chances of truth. I gather, 
 too, from the undeniable testimony of his disciple Theo- 
 phrastus, that there were boors, ill-bred persons, and detrac* 
 tors, even in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to 
 the English, and not yet made endurable by being classic ; 
 and altogether, with my present fastidious nostril, I feel 
 that I am the better off for possessing Athenian life solely 
 as an inodorous fragment of antiquity. As to Sappho's 
 Mitylene, while I am convinced that the Lesbian capital 
 held some plain men of middle stature and slow conversa- 
 tional powers, the addition of myself to their number, though 
 clad in the majestic folds of the himation and without cravat, 
 would hardly have made a sensation among the accomplished 
 fair ones who were so precise in adjusting their own drapery 
 about their delicate ankles. Whereas, by being another sort 
 of person in the present age, I might have given it some 
 needful theoretic clew ; or I might have poured forth poetic
 
 268 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 strains which would have anticipated theory, and seemed a 
 voice from " the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming 
 of things to come ; " or I might have been one of those be- 
 nignant lovely souls who, without astonishing the public and 
 posterity, make a happy difference in the lives close around 
 them, and in this way lift the average of earthly joy : in 
 some form or other I might have been so filled from the 
 store of universal existence, that I should have been freed 
 from that empty wishing which is like a child's cry to be in- 
 side a golden cloud, its imagination being too ignorant to 
 figure the lining of dimness and damp. 
 
 On the whole, though there is some rash boasting about 
 enlightenment, and an occasional insistence on an originality 
 which is that of the present year's corn-crop, we seem too 
 much disposed to indulge, and to call by complimentary 
 names, a greater charity for other portions of the human 
 race than for our contemporaries. All reverence and grati- 
 tude for the worthy dead on whose labors we have entered, 
 all care for the future generations whose lot we are prepar- 
 ing ; but some affection and fairness for those who are doing 
 the actual work of the world, some attempt to regard them 
 with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on private 
 or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who 
 will call us ancient ! Otherwise, the looking before and 
 after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of 
 turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogi- 
 cal indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the as- 
 cetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on the ground of 
 a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no 
 rational footing for scorning the whole present population 
 of the globe ; unless I scorn every previous generation from 
 whom they have inherited their diseases of mind and body, 
 and by consequence scorn my own scorn, which is equally 
 an inheritance of mixed ideas and feelings, concocted for 
 me in the boiling caldron of this universally contemptible 
 life and so on, scorning to infinity. This may represent 
 some actual states of mind, for it is a narrow prejudice of
 
 LOOKING BACKWARD. 269 
 
 mathematicians to suppose that ways of thinking are to be 
 driven out of the field by being reduced to an absurdity. 
 The Absurd is taken as an excellent juicy thistle by many 
 constitutions. 
 
 Reflections of this sort have gradually determined me not 
 to grumble at the age in which I happen to have been born 
 a natural tendency certainly older than Hesiod. Many an- 
 cient beautiful things are lost, many ugly modern things have 
 arisen ; but invert the proposition, and it is equally true. I 
 at least am a modern, with some interest in advocating toler- 
 ance ; and notwithstanding an inborn beguilement which car- 
 ries my affection and regret continually into an imagined 
 past, I am aware that I must lose all sense of moral propor- 
 tion unless I keep alive a stronger attachment to what is 
 near, and a power of admiring what I best know and under- 
 stand. Hence this question of wishing to be rid of one's 
 contemporaries associates itself with my filial feeling, and 
 calls up the thought that I might as justifiably wish that I 
 had had other parents than those whose loving tones are my 
 earliest memory, and whose last parting first taught me the 
 meaning of death. I feel bound to quell such a wish, as 
 blasphemy. 
 
 Besides, there are other reasons why I am contented that 
 my father was a country parson, born much about the same 
 time as Scott and Wordsworth ; notwithstanding certain 
 qualms I have felt at the fact that the property on which I 
 am living was saved out of tithe before the period of com- 
 mutation, and without the provisional transfiguration into a 
 modus. It has sometimes occurred to me, when I have been 
 taking a slice of excellent ham, that, from a too tenable point 
 of view, I was breakfasting on a small, squealing, black pig 
 which, more than half a century ago, was the unwilling rep- 
 resentative of spiritual advantages, not otherwise acknowl- 
 edged by the grudging farmer or dairyman who parted with 
 him. One enters on a fearful labyrinth in tracing compound 
 interest backward, and such complications of thought have 
 reduced the flavor of the ham j but since I have nevertheless
 
 270 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 eaten it, the chief effect has been to moderate the severity 01 
 my radicalism (which was not part of my paternal inheritance) 
 and to raise the assuaging reflection, that if the pig and the 
 parishioner had been intelligent enough to anticipate my his- 
 torical point of view, they would have seen themselves and 
 the rector in a light that would have made tithe voluntary. 
 Notwithstanding such drawbacks, I am rather fond of the 
 .mental furniture I got by having a father who was well ac- 
 quainted with all ranks of his neighbors, and am thankful that 
 he was not one of those aristocratic clergymen who could not 
 have sat down to a meal with any family in the parish except 
 my lord's, still more, that he was not an earl or a marquis. 
 A chief misfortune of high birth is that it usually shuts a 
 man out from the large sympathetic knowledge of human ex- 
 perience which comes from contact with various classes on 
 their own level, and in my father's time that entail of social 
 ignorance had not been disturbed as we see it now. To look 
 always from overhead at the crowd of one's fellow-men must 
 be in many ways incapacitating, even with the best will and 
 intelligence. The serious blunders it must lead to in the 
 effort to manage them for their good, one may see clearly by 
 the mistaken ways people take of flattering and enticing those 
 whose associations are alike their own. Hence I have always 
 thought that the most fortunate Britons are those whose ex- 
 perience has given them a practical share in many aspects of 
 the national lot, who have lived long among the mixed com- 
 monalty, roughing it with them under difficulties, knowing 
 how their food tastes to them, and getting acquainted with 
 their notions and motives, not by inference from traditional 
 types in literature or from philosophical theories, but from 
 daily fellowship and observation. Of course such experience 
 is apt to get antiquated, and my father might find himself much 
 at a loss among a mixed rural population of the present day ; 
 but he knew very well what could be wisely expected from the 
 miners, the weavers, the field-laborers, and farmers of his own 
 time, yes, and from the aristocracy, for he had been brought 
 tip in close contact with them, and had been companion to a
 
 LOOKING BACKWAKD. 271 
 
 young nobleman who was deaf and dumb. " A clergyman, 
 lad," he used to say to me, " should feel in himself a bit of 
 every class ; " and this theory had a felicitous agreement with 
 his inclination and practice, which certainly answered in 
 making him beloved by his parishioners. They grumbled at 
 their obligation towards him ; but what then ? It was natu- 
 ral to grumble at any demand for payment, tithe included, but 
 also natural for a rector to desire his tithe and look well 
 after the levying. A Christian pastor who did not mind about 
 his money was not an ideal prevalent among the rural minds 
 of fat central England, and might have seemed to introduce a 
 dangerous laxity of supposition about Christian laymen who 
 happened to be creditors. My father was none the less be- 
 loved because he was understood to be of a saving dispose 
 tion ; and how could he save without getting his tithe ? The 
 sight of him was not unwelcome at any door, and he was 
 remarkable among the clergy of his district for having no 
 lasting feud with rich or poor in his parish. I profited by his 
 popularity ; and for months after my mother's death, when I 
 was a little fellow of nine, I was taken care of first at one 
 homestead, and then at another, a variety which I enjoyed 
 much more than my stay at the Hall, where there was a tutor. 
 Afterward, for several years, I was my father's constant com- 
 panion in his out-door business, riding by his side on my 
 little pony, and listening to the lengthy dialogues he held with 
 Darby or Joan, the one on the road or in the field, the other 
 outside or inside her door. In my earliest remembrance of 
 him his hair was already gray, for I was his youngest as well 
 as his only surviving child; and it seemed to me that ad- 
 vanced age was appropriate to a father, as indeed in all re- 
 spects I considered him a parent so much to my honor, that 
 the mention of my relationship to him was likely to secure 
 me regard among those to whom I was otherwise a stranger, 
 my father's stories from his life including so many names 
 of distant persons, that my imagination placed no limit to his 
 acquaintanceship. He was a pithy talker, and his sermons 
 bore marks of his own composition. It is true, they must
 
 272 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 hare been already old when I began to listen to them, and 
 they were no more than a year's supply, so that they recurred 
 as regularly as the Collects. But though this system has 
 been much ridiculed, I am prepared to defend it as equally 
 sound with that of a liturgy ; and even if my researches had 
 shown me that some of my father's early sermons had been 
 copied out from the works of elder divines, this would only 
 have been another proof of his good judgment. One may 
 prefer fresh eggs, though laid by a fowl of the meanest 
 understanding ; but why fresh sermons ? 
 
 Nor can I be sorry, though myself given to meditative if 
 not active innovation, that my father was a Tory who had 
 not exactly a dislike to innovators and dissenters, but a slight 
 opinion of them as persons of ill-founded self-confidence; 
 whence my young ears gathered many details concerning 
 those who might perhaps have called themselves the more 
 advanced thinkers in our nearest market-town, tending to 
 convince me that their characters were quite as mixed as 
 those of the thinkers behind them. This circumstance of 
 my rearing has at least delivered me from certain mistakes 
 of classification which I observe in many of my superiors, 
 who have apparently no affectionate memories of a goodness 
 mingled with what they now regard as outworn prejudices. 
 Indeed my philosophical notions, such as they are, continu- 
 ally carry me back to the time when the fitful gleams of 
 a spring day used to show me my own shadow as that of a 
 small boy on a small pony, riding by the side of a larger cob- 
 mounted shadow over the breezy uplands which we used to 
 dignify with the name of hills, or along by-roads, with broad 
 grassy borders and hedgerows reckless of utility, on our way 
 to outlying hamlets, whose groups of inhabitants were as dis- 
 tinctive to my imagination as if they had belonged to different 
 regions of the globe. From these we sometimes rode onward 
 to the adjoining parish, where also my father officiated, for 
 he was a pluralist, but I hasten to add on the smallest 
 scale; for his own extra living was a poor vicarage, with 
 hardly fifty parishioners, and its church would have made a
 
 LOOKING BACKWARD. 273 
 
 very shabby barn, the gray, worm-eaten wood of its pews 
 and pulpit, with their doors only half-hanging on the hinges, 
 being exactly the color of a lean mouse which I once observed 
 as an interesting member of the scant congregation, and con- 
 jectured to be the identical Church-mouse I had heard re- 
 ferred to as an example of extreme poverty; for I was a 
 precocious boy, and often reasoned after the fashion of my 
 elders, arguing that Jack and Jill were real personages in 
 our parish, and that if I could identify Jack I should find 
 on him the mark of a broken crown. 
 
 Sometimes when I am in a crowded London drawing-rooro 
 (for I am a town-bird now, acquainted with smoky eaves, an$ 
 tasting Nature in the parks), quick nights of memory take 
 me back among my father's parishioners, while I am still 
 conscious of elbowing men who wear the same evening uni- 
 form as myself ; and I presently begin to wonder what va- 
 rieties of history lie hidden under this luonotcny of aspect. 
 Some of them, perhaps, belong to families with many quar- 
 terings ; but how many " quarterings " of diverse contact 
 with their fellow-countrymen enter into their qualifications 
 to be parliamentary leaders, professors of social science, or 
 journalistic guides of the popular mind ? Not that I feel 
 myself a person made competent by experience ; on the con- 
 trary, I argue that since an observation of different ranks 
 has still lef : me practically a poor creature, what must be 
 the condition of those who object even to read about the life 
 of other British classes than their own ? But of my elbow- 
 ing neighbors with their crush-hats I usually imagine that 
 the most distinguished among them have probably had a far 
 more instructive journey into manhood than mine. Here, 
 perhaps, is a thought-worn physiognomy, seeming at the 
 present moment to be classed as a mere species of white 
 cravat and swallow-tail, which may once, like Faraday's, have 
 shown itself in curiously dubious embryonic form leaning 
 against a cottage-lintel, in small corduroys, and hungrily eat- 
 ing a bit of brown bread and bacon ; there is a pair of eyes, 
 now too much wearied by the gas-light of public assemblies,
 
 274 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 that once perhaps learned to read their native England 
 through the same alphabet as mine not within the boun- 
 daries of an ancestral park, never even being driven through 
 the country town five miles off, but among the midland 
 villages and markets, along by the tree-studded hedgerows, 
 and where the heavy barges seem in the distance to float 
 mysteriously among the rushes and the feathered grass. 
 Our vision, both real and ideal, has since then been filled 
 with far other scenes, among eternal snows and stupendous 
 sun-scorched monuments of departed empires, within the 
 scent of the long orange-groves, and where the temple of 
 Neptune looks out over the siren-haunted sea. But my eyes 
 at least have kept their early affectionate joy in our native 
 landscape, which is one deep root of our national life and 
 language. 
 
 And I often smile at my consciousness that certain con- 
 servative prepossessions have mingled themselves for me 
 with the influences of our midland scenery, from the tops of 
 the elms down to the buttercups and the little wayside 
 vetches. Naturally enough ! That part of my father's prime 
 to which he oftenest referred had fallen on the days when 
 the great wave of political enthusiasm and belief in a speedy 
 regeneration of all things had ebbed, and the supposed mil- 
 lennial initiative of France was turning into a Napoleonic em- 
 pire the sway of an Attila, with a mouth speaking -.roud 
 things, in a jargon half-revolutionary, half-Eoman. Men 
 were beginning to shrink timidly from the memory of their 
 own words, and from the recognition of the fellowships they 
 had formed ten years before ; and even reforming English- 
 men, for the most part, were willing to wait for the perfec- 
 tion of society, if only they could keep their throats perfect, 
 and help to drive away the chief enemy of mankind from 
 our coasts. To my father's mind the noisy teachers of rev- 
 olutionary doctrine were, to speak mildly, a variable mixture 
 of the fool and the scoundrel ; the welfare of the nation lay 
 in a strong government which could maintain order ; and I 
 was accustomed to hear him utter the word " government "
 
 LOOKING BACKWARD. 275 
 
 in a tone that charged it with awe, and made it part of my 
 effective religion, in contrast with the word " rebel," which 
 seemed to carry the stamp of evil in its syllables, and, lit by 
 the fact that Satan was the first rebel, made an argument 
 dispensing with more detailed inquiry. I gathered that our 
 national troubles in the first two decades of this century 
 were not at all due to the mistakes of our administrators, and 
 that England, with its fine Church and Constitution, would 
 have been exceedingly well off if every British subject had 
 been thankful for what was provided, and had minded his 
 own business if, for example, numerous Catholics of that 
 period had been aware how very modest they ought to be, 
 considering they were Irish. The times, I heard, had often 
 been bad ; but I was constantly hearing of " bad times " as a 
 name for actual evenings and mornings, when the godfathers 
 who gave them that name appeared to me remarkably com- 
 fortable. Altogether, my father's England seemed to me 
 lovable, laudable, full of good men, and having good rulers, 
 from Mr. Pitt on to the Duke of Wellington, until he was 
 for emancipating the Catholics ; and it was so far from pro- 
 saic to me, that I looked into it for a more exciting romance 
 than such as I could find in my own adventures, which con- 
 sisted mainly in fancied crises calling for the resolute wield- 
 ing of domestic swords and fire-arms against unapparent 
 robbers, rioters, and invaders, who, it seemed, in my father's 
 prime, had more chance of being real. The morris-dancers 
 had not then dwindled to a ragged and almost vanished rout 
 (owing the traditional name probably to the historic fancy 
 of our superannuated groom) ; also the good old king was 
 alive and well, which made all the more difference, because 
 I had no notion what he was and did only understand- 
 ing in general that, if he had been still on the throne, he 
 would have hindered everything that wise persons thought 
 undesirable. 
 
 Certainly that elder England with its frankly salable 
 boroughs, so cheap compared with the seats obtained under 
 the reformed method, and its boroughs kindly presented by
 
 276 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 noblemen desirous to encourage gratitude ; its prisons, with a 
 miscellaneous company of felons and maniacs, and without 
 any supply of water ; its bloated, idle charities ; its non-resi- 
 dent, jovial clergy ; its militia-balloting ; and, above all, its 
 blank ignorance of what we, its posterity, should be thinking 
 of it has great differences from the England of to-day. Yet 
 we discern a strong family likeness. Is there any country 
 which shows at once as much stability and as much suscep- 
 tibility to change as ours ? Our national life is like that 
 scenery which I early learned to love, not subject to great 
 convulsions, but easily showing more or less delicate (some- 
 times melancholy) effects from minor changes. Hence our 
 midland plains have never lost their familiar expression and 
 conservative spirit for me ; yet at every other mile, since I 
 first looked on them, some sign of world-wide change, some 
 new direction of human labor, has wrought itself into what 
 one may call the speech of the landscape in contrast with 
 those grander and vaster regions of the earth which keep an 
 indifferent aspect in the presence of men's toil and devices. 
 What does it signify that a liliputian train passes over a 
 viaduct amidst the abysses of the Apennines, or that a cara- 
 van, laden with a nation's offerings, creeps across the un- 
 resting sameness of the desert, or that a petty cloud of steam 
 sweeps for an instant over the face of an Egyptian colossus, 
 immovably submitting to its slow burial beneath the sand ? 
 But our woodlands and pastures, our hedge-parted cornfields 
 and meadows, our bits of high common where we used to 
 plant the windmills, our quiet little rivers here and there fit 
 to turn a mill-wheel, our villages along the old coach-roads, 
 are all easily alterable lineaments that seem to make the 
 face of our mother-land cympathetic with the laborious lives 
 of her children. She does not take their ploughs ana wagons 
 contemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every 
 sheepfold, every railed bridge or fallen tree-trunk, an agree- 
 ably noticeable incident ; not a mere speck in the midst of 
 unmeasured vastness, but a piece of our social history in 
 pictorial writing.
 
 LOOKING BACKWARD. 277 
 
 Our rural tracts, where no Babel-chimney scales the heav- 
 ens, are without mighty objects to fill the soul with the 
 sense of an outer world unconquerably aloof from our ef- 
 forts. The wastes are playgrounds (and let us try to keep 
 them such for the children's children, who will inherit no 
 other sort of demesne) ; the grasses and reeds nod to each 
 other over the river, but we have cut a canal close by ; the 
 very heights laugh with corn in August, or lift the plough- 
 team against the sky in September. Then comes a crowd of 
 burly navvies with pickaxes and barrows ; and while hardly 
 a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's face, or a new curve 
 of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are cut through or 
 the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level, and 
 the white steam-pennon flies along it. 
 
 But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, 
 all signs of permanence upon it raise a tender attachment 
 instead of awe : some of us, at least, love the scanty relics of 
 our forests, and are thankful if a bush is left of the old 
 hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where the delicate ivy- 
 leaved toad-flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of gray 
 thatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and a troop 
 of grass-stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. And then 
 the tiled roof of cottage and homestead ; of the long cow-shed 
 where generations of the milky mothers have stood patiently ; 
 of the broad-shouldered barns, where the old-fashioned flail 
 once made resonant music, while the watch-dog barked at the 
 timidly venturesome fowls, making pecking raids on the out- 
 flying grain, the roofs that have looked out from among 
 the elms and walnut-trees, or beside the yearly group of hay 
 and corn stacks, or below the square stone steeple, gathering 
 their gray or ochre-tinted lichens and their olive-green 
 mosses under all ministries let us praise the sober har- 
 monies they give to our landscape, helping to unite us pleas- 
 antly with the elder generations, who tilled the soil for us be- 
 fore we were born, and paid heavier and heavier taxes, with 
 much grumbling, but without that deepest root of corruption 
 the self-indulgent despair which cuts down and consumes, 
 and never plants.
 
 278 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 But I check myself. Perhaps this England of my affec- 
 tions is half -visionary a dream in which things are con- 
 nected according to my well-fed, lazy mood, and not at all 
 by the multitudinous links of graver, sadder fact, such as 
 belong everywhere to the story of human labor. Well, well, 
 the illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted 
 with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to 
 be illusions. They feed the ideal Better ; and in loving them 
 still, we strengthen the precious habit of loving something 
 not visibly, tangibly existent, but a spiritual product of our 
 visible, tangible selves. 
 
 I cherish my childish loves, the memory of that warm 
 little nest where my affections were fledged. Since then I 
 have learned to care for foreign countries, for literatures 
 foreign and ancient, for the life of Continental towns dozing 
 round old cathedrals, for the life of London, half-sleepless 
 with eager thought and strife, with indigestion, or with hun- 
 ger ; and now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy, anx- 
 ious, metropolitan sort. My system responds sensitively to 
 the London weather-signs, political, social, literary ; and my 
 bachelor's hearth is imbedded where, by much craning of 
 head and neck, I can catch sight of a sycamore in the Square 
 garden. I belong to the " Nation of London." Why ? There 
 have been many voluntary exiles in the world ; and probably 
 in the very first exodus of the patriarchal Aryans for I am 
 determined not to fetch my examples from races whose talk 
 is of uncles and no fathers some of those who sallied forth 
 went for the sake of a loved companionship, when they 
 would willingly have kept sight of the familiar plains, and 
 of the hills to which they had first lifted up their eyes.
 
 HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 
 
 THE serene and beneficent goddess Truth, like other 
 deities whose disposition has been too hastily inferred 
 from that of the men who have invoked them, can hardly be 
 well pleased with much of the worship paid to her even in 
 this milder age, when the stake and the rack have ceased to 
 form part of her ritual. Some cruelties still pass for service 
 done in her honor; no thumb-screw is used, no iron boot, 
 no scorching of flesh, but plenty of controversial bruising, 
 laceration, and even life-long maiming. Less than formerly ; 
 but so long as this sort of Truth-worship has the sanction of 
 a public that can often understand nothing in a controversy 
 except personal sarcasm or slanderous ridicule, it is likely 
 to continue. The sufferings of its victims are often as 
 little regarded as those of the sacrificial pig offered in old 
 time, with what we now regard as a sad miscalculation of 
 effects. 
 
 One such victim is my old acquaintance, Merman. 
 
 Twenty years ago Merman was a young man of promise, a 
 conveyancer with a practice which had certainly budded, but, 
 like Aaron's rod, seemed not destined to proceed further in 
 that marvellous activity. Meanwhile he occupied himself in 
 miscellaneous periodical-writing, and in a multifarious study 
 of moral and physical science. What chiefly attracted him 
 in all subjects were the vexed questions, which have the ad- 
 vantage of not admitting the decisive proof or disproof that 
 renders many ingenious arguments superannuated. Not that 
 Merman had a wrangling disposition : he put all his doubts, 
 queries, and paradoxes deferentially ; contended without un-
 
 280 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 pleasant heat, and only with a sonorous eagerness, against the 
 personality of Homer ; expressed himself civilly though firmly 
 on the origin of language ; and had tact enough to drop at the 
 right moment such subjects as the ultimate reduction of all 
 the so-called elementary substances, his own total scepticism 
 concerning Manetho's chronology, or even the relation be- 
 tween the magnetic condition of the earth and the outbreak of 
 revolutionary tendencies. Such flexibility was naturally much 
 helped by his amiable feeling toward woman, whose nervous 
 system, he was convinced, would not bear the continuous 
 strain of difficult topics ; and also by his willingness to con- 
 tribute a song whenever the same desultory charmer proposed 
 music. Indeed, his tastes were domestic enough to beguile 
 him into marriage when his resources were still very moderate 
 and partly uncertain. His friends wished that so ingenious 
 and agreeable a fellow might have more prosperity than they 
 ventured to hope for him ; their chief regret on his account 
 being that he did not concentrate his talent, and leave off 
 forming opinions on at least half a dozen of the subjects over 
 which he scattered his attention, especially now that he had 
 married " a nice little woman " (the generic name for ac- 
 quaintances' wives when they are not markedly disagreeable). 
 He could not, they observed, want all his various knowledge 
 and Laputan ideas for his periodical-writing which brought 
 him most of his bread, and he would do well to use his talents 
 in getting a specialty that would fit him for a post. Perhaps 
 these well-disposed persons were a little rash in presuming 
 that fitness for a post would be the surest ground for getting 
 it ; and, on the whole, in now looking back on their wishes 
 for Merman, their chief satisfaction must be that those wishes 
 did not contribute to the actual result. 
 
 For in an evil hour Merman did concentrate himself. He 
 had for many years taken into his interest the comparative 
 history of the ancient civilizations, but it had not preoccupied 
 him so as to narrow his generous attention to everything else. 
 One sleepless night, however (his wife has more than once 
 narrated to me the details of an event memorable to her as
 
 HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 281 
 
 the beginning of sorrows), after spending some hours over 
 the epoch-making work of Grampus, a new idea seized him 
 with regard to the possible connection of certain symbolic 
 monuments common to widely scattered races. Merman 
 started up in bed. The night was cold; and the sudden 
 withdrawal of warmth made his wife first dream of a snow- 
 ball, and then cry, 
 
 " What is the matter, Proteus ? " 
 
 "A great matter, Julia. That fellow Grampus, whose 
 book is cried up as a revelation, is all wrong about the Magi- 
 codumbras and the Zuzumotzis, and I have got hold of the 
 right clew." 
 
 " Good gracious ! does it matter so much ? Don't drag 
 the clothes, dear." 
 
 " It signifies this, Julia, that if I am right I shall set the 
 world right ; I shall regenerate history ; I shall win the mind 
 of Europe to a new view of social origins ; I shall bruise the 
 head of many superstitions." 
 
 "Oh no, dear, don't go too far into things. Lie down 
 again. You have been dreaming. What are the Madicojum- 
 bras and Zuzitotzums ? I never heard you talk of them 
 before. What use can it be, troubling yourself about such 
 things?" 
 
 "That is the way, Julia! That is the way wives alienate 
 their husbands, and make any hearth pleasanter to him than 
 his own." 
 
 " What do you mean, Proteus ? " 
 
 "Why, if a woman will not try to understand her hus- 
 band's ideas, or at least to believe that they are of more value 
 than she can understand, if she is to join anybody who 
 happens to be against him, and suppose he is a fool because 
 others contradict him, there is an end of our happiness. 
 That is all I have to say." 
 
 "Oh no, Proteus, dear. I do believe wLat you say is 
 right. That is my only guide. I am sure I never have any 
 opinions in any other way, I mean about subjects. Of course 
 there are many little things that would tea** you, that you
 
 282 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 like me to judge of for myself. I know I said once that I did 
 not want you to sing ' Oh, ruddier than the cherry,' because it 
 was not in your voice. But I cannot remember ever differing 
 from you about subjects. I never in my life thought any one 
 cleverer than you." 
 
 Julia Merman was really " a nice little woman," not one 
 of the stately Dians sometimes spoken of in those terms. 
 Her black silhouette had a very infantine aspect ; but she had 
 discernment and wisdom enough to act on the strong hint of 
 that memorable conversation, never again giving her husband 
 the slightest ground for suspecting that she thought treason- 
 ably of his ideas in relation to the Magicodumbras and Zuzu- 
 motzis, or in the least relaxed her faith in his infallibility 
 because Europe was not also convinced of it. It was well for 
 her that she did not increase her troubles in this way ; but 
 to do her justice, what she was chiefly anxious about was to 
 avoid increasing her husband's troubles. 
 
 Not that these were great in the beginning. In the first 
 development and writing out of his scheme, Merman had a 
 more intense kind of intellectual pleasure than he had ever 
 known before. His face became more radiant, his general 
 view of human prospects more cheerful. Foreseeing that 
 truth as presented by himself would win the recognition of 
 his contemporaries, he excused with much liberality their 
 rather rough treatment of other theorists, whose basis was 
 less perfect. His own periodical-criticisms had never before 
 been so amiable ; he was sorry for that unlucky majority whom 
 the spirit of the age, or some other prompting more definite 
 and local, compelled to write without any particular ideas. 
 The possession of an original theory, which has not yet been 
 assailed, must certainly sweeten the temper of a man who is 
 not beforehand ill-natured. And Merman was the reverse of 
 ill-natured. 
 
 But the hour of publication came; and to half a dozen 
 persons, described as the learned world of two hemispheres, 
 it became known that Grampus was attacked. This might; 
 have been a small matter ; for who or what on earth, t/xat is
 
 HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 283 
 
 good for anything, is not assailed by ignorance, stupidity, or 
 malice, and sometimes even by just objection ? But on ex- 
 amination it appeared that the attack might possibly be held 
 damaging, unless the ignorance of the author were well ex- 
 posed, and his pretended facts shown to be chimeras of that 
 remarkably hideous kind begotten by imperfect learning on 
 the more feminine element of original incapacity. Grampus 
 himself did not immediately cut open the volume which 
 Merman had been careful to send him, not without a very 
 lively and shifting conception of the possible effects which 
 the explosive gift might produce on the too eminent scholar 
 effects that must certainly have set in on the third day from 
 the despatch of the parcel. But in point of fact Grampus 
 knew nothing of the book until his friend Lord Narwnal sent 
 him an American newspaper containing a spirited article by 
 the well-known Professor Sperm N. Whale, which was rather 
 equivocal in its bearing, the passages quoted from Merman 
 being of rather a telling sort, and the paragraphs which 
 seemed to blow defiance being unaccountably feeble, coming 
 from so distinguished a Cetacean. Then, "by another post, 
 arrived letters from Butzkopf and Dugong, both men whose 
 signatures were familiar to the Teutonic world, in the "Selten- 
 erscheinender Monat-schrift," or Hyrick for the insertion of 
 Split Hairs, asking their Master whether he meant to take up 
 the combat, because, in the contrary case, both were ready. 
 
 Thus America and Germany were roused, though England 
 was still drowsy ; and it seemed time now for Grampus to 
 find Merman's book under the heap, and cut it open. For his 
 own part, he was perfectly at ease about his system ; but thk' 
 i? a world in which the truth requires defence, and specious 
 falsehood must be met with exposure. Grampus having once 
 looked through the book, no longer wanted any urging to 
 write the most crushing of replies. This, and nothing less 
 than this, was due from him to the cause of sound inquiry ; 
 and the punishment would cost him little pains. In three 
 weeks from that time the palpitating Merman saw his book 
 announced in the programme of the leading Review. No
 
 284 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 need for Grampus to put his signature. Who else had his 
 vast yet microscopic knowledge, who else his power of epi- 
 thet ? This article in which Merman was pilloried and as 
 good as mutilated, for he was shown to have neither ear 
 nor nose for the subtleties of philological and archaeological 
 study was much read and more talked of ; not because of 
 any interest in the system of Grampus, or any precise con- 
 ception of the danger attending lax views of the Magicodum- 
 bras and Zuzumotzis, but because the sharp epigrams with 
 which the victim was lacerated, and the soaring fountains of 
 acrid mud which were shot upward and poured over the fresh 
 wounds, were found amusing in recital. A favorite passage 
 was one in which a certain kind of socialist was described as 
 a creature of the walrus kind, having a phantasmal resem- 
 blance to higher animals when seen by ignorant minds in the 
 twilight, dabbling or hobbling in first one element and then 
 the other, without parts or organs suited to either ; in fact, 
 one of Nature's impostors, who could not be said, to have 
 any artful pretences, since a congenital incompetence to all 
 precision of aim and movement made their every action a 
 pretence just as a being born in doeskin gloves would nec- 
 essarily pass a judgment on surfaces, but we all know what 
 his judgment would be worth. In drawing-room circles, and 
 for the immediate hour, this ingenious comparison was as dam- 
 aging as the showing-up of Merman's mistakes, and the mere 
 smattering of linguistic and historical knowledge which he had 
 presumed to be a sufficient basis for theorizing ; but the more 
 learned cited his blunders aside to each other, and laughed the 
 laugh of the initiated. In fact, Merman's was a remarkable 
 case of sudden notoriety. In London drums and clubs he 
 was spoken of abundantly as one who had written ridicu- 
 lously about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis : the leaders 
 of conversation, whether Christians, Jews, infidels, or of any 
 other confession, except the confession of ignorance, pro- 
 nouncing him shallow and indiscreet, if not presumptuous and 
 absurd. He was heard of at Warsaw, and even Paris took 
 knowledge of him. M. Cachalot had not read either Grampus
 
 HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 285 
 
 or Merman, but heard of their dispute in time to insert a 
 paragraph upon it in his brilliant work, " L'Orient au Point de 
 Vue Actuel," in which he was Dispassionate enough to speak 
 of Grampus as possessing a c ip d'ceil presque franpais in mat- 
 ters of historical interpretation, and of Merman as neverthe- 
 less an objector qui merite d'etre connu. M. Porpesse, also, 
 availing himself of M. Cachalot's knowledge, reproduced it in 
 an article with certain additions, which it is only fair to dis- 
 tinguish as his own, implying that the vigorous English of 
 Grampus was not always as correct as a Frenchman could de- 
 sire, while Merman's objections were more sophistical than 
 solid. Presently, indeed, there appeared an able extrait of 
 Grampus's article in the valuable " Eapporteur Scientifique 
 et Historique," and Merman's mistakes were thus brought 
 under the notice of certain Frenchmen who are among the 
 masters of those who know on Oriental subjects. In a word, 
 Merman, though not extensively read, was extensively read 
 about. 
 
 Meanwhile, how did he like it ? Perhaps nobody, except 
 his wife, for a moment reflected on that. An amused society 
 considered that he was severely punished, but did not take 
 the trouble to imagine his sensations ; indeed, this would have 
 been a difficulty for persons less sensitive and excitable than 
 Merman himself. Perhaps that popular comparison of the 
 walrus had truth enough to bite and blister on thorough ap- 
 plication, even if exultant ignorance had not applauded it. 
 But it is well known that the walrus, though not in the least 
 a malignant animal, if allowed to display its remarkably plain 
 person and blundering performances at ease in any element 
 it chooses, becomes desperately savage, and musters alarming 
 auxiliaries when attacked or hurt. In this characteristic, 
 at least, Merman resembled the walrus. And now he con- 
 centrated himself with a vengeance. That his counter-theory 
 was fundamentally the right one he had a genuine conviction, 
 whatever collateral mistakes he might have committed ; and 
 his bread would not cease to be bitter to him until he had 
 convinced his contemporaries that Grampus had used his
 
 286 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 minute learning as a dust-cloud to hide sophistical evasions 
 that, in fact, minute learning was an obstacle to clear-sighted 
 judgment, more especially with regard to the Magicodumbras 
 and Zuzumotzis, and that the best preparation in this matter 
 was a wide survey of history, and a diversified observation of 
 men. Still, Merman was resolved to muster all the learning 
 within his reach, and he wandered day and night through 
 many wildernesses of German print ; he tried compendious 
 methods of learning Oriental tongues, and, so to speak, get- 
 ting at the marrow of languages independently of the bones, 
 for the chance of finding details to corroborate his own views, 
 or possibly even to detect Grampus in some oversight or tex- 
 tual tampering. All other work was neglected ; rare clients 
 were sent away, and amazed editors found this maniac indif- 
 ferent to his chance of getting book-parcels from them. It 
 was many months before Merman had satisfied himself that 
 he was strong enough to face round upon his adversary. But 
 at last he had prepared sixty condensed pages of eager argu- 
 ment, which seemed to him worthy to rank with the best 
 models of controversial writing. He had acknowledged his 
 mistakes, but had restated his theory, so as to show that it was 
 left intact in spite of them ; and he had even found cases in 
 which Ziphius, Microps, Scrag Whale the explorer, and other 
 Cetaceans of unanswerable authority, were decidedly at issue 
 with Grampus. Especially a passage cited by this last from 
 that greatest of fossils, Megalosaurus, was demonstrated by 
 Merman to be capable of three different interpretations, all 
 preferable to that chosen by Grampus, who took the words 
 in their most literal sense ; for (1) the incomparable Saurian, 
 alike unequalled in close observation and far-glancing com- 
 prehensiveness, might have meant those words ironically; 
 (2) motzis was probably a false reading for potzis, in which 
 case its bearing was reversed ; and (3) it is known that in 
 the age of the Saurians there were conceptions about the mot- 
 zis which entirely remove it from the category of things com- 
 prehensible in an age when Saurians run ridiculously small : 
 all which views were godfathered by names quite fit to be
 
 HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 287 
 
 ranked with that of Grampus. In fine, Merman wound up 
 his rejoinder by sincerely thanking the eminent adversary, 
 without whose fierce assault he might not have undertaken a 
 revision, in the course of which he had met with unexpected 
 and striking confirmations of his own fundamental views. 
 Evidently Merman's anger was at white heat. , 
 
 The rejoinder being complete, all that remained was to find 
 a suitable medium for its publication. This was not so easy. 
 Distinguished mediums would not lend themselves to con- 
 tradictions of Grampus ; or if they would, Merman's article 
 was too long and too abstruse, while he would not consent to 
 leave anything out of an article which had no superfluities, 
 for all this happened years ago, when the world was a differ- 
 ent stage. At last, however, he got his rejoinder printed, and 
 not on hard terms, since the medium, in every sense modest, 
 did not ask him to pay for its insertion. 
 
 But if Merman expected to call out Grampus again, he 
 was mistaken. Everybody felt it too absurd that Merman 
 should undertake to correct Grampus in matters of erudition, 
 and an eminent man has something else to do than to refute 
 a petty objector twice over. What was essential had been 
 done : the public had been enabled to form a true judgment 
 of Merman's incapacity. The Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis 
 were but subsidiary elements in Grampus's system, and Mer- 
 man might now be dealt with by younger members of the 
 Master's school. But he had at least the satisfaction of find- 
 ing that he had raised a discussion which would not be let 
 die. The followers of Grampus took it up with an ardor and 
 industry of research worthy of their exemplar. Butzkopf 
 made it the subject of an elaborate Einleitung to his impor- 
 tant work " Die Bedeutung des ^Egyptischen Labyrinthes ; " 
 and Dugong, in a remarkable address which he delivered to 
 a- learned society in Central Europe, introduced Merman's 
 theory with so much power of sarcasm that it became a theme 
 of more or less derisive allusion to men of many tongues. 
 Merman with his Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis was on the 
 Way to become a proverb, being used illustratively by many
 
 288 ESSAYS OF, GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 able journalists, who took those names of questionable things 
 to be Merman's own invention "than which," said one of the 
 graver guides, " we can recall few more melancholy examples 
 of speculative aberration." Naturally, the subject passed into 
 popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertised 
 programmes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and 
 a younger member of his remarkable family, known as S. Cat- 
 ulus, made a special reputation by their numerous articles, 
 eloquent, lively, or abusive, all on the same theme, under 
 titles ingeniously varied, alliterative, sonorous, or boldly fan- 
 ciful such as, " Moments with Mr. Merman," " Mr. Merman 
 and the Magicodumbras," " Greenland Grampus and Proteus 
 Merman," " Grampian Heights and their Climbers, or the 
 New Excelsior." They tossed him on short sentences ; they 
 swathed him in paragraphs of winding imagery ; they found 
 him at once a mere plagiarist and a theorizer of unexampled 
 perversity, ridiculously wrong about potzis and ignorant of 
 Pali ; they hinted, indeed, at certain things which to their 
 knowledge he had silently brooded over in his boyhood, and 
 seemed tolerably well assured that this preposterous attempt 
 to gainsay an incomparable Cetacean of world-wide fame had 
 its origin in a peculiar mixture of bitterness and eccentricity 
 which, rightly estimated and seen in its definite proportions, 
 would furnish the best key to his argumentation. All alike 
 were sorry for Merman's lack of sound learning; but how 
 could their readers be sorry? Sound learning would not 
 have been amusing; and as it was, Merman was made to 
 furnish these readers with amusement at no expense of trouble 
 on their part. Even burlesque-writers looked into his book 
 to see where it could be made use of ; and those who did not 
 know him were desirous of meeting him at dinner, as one 
 likely to feed their comic vein. 
 
 On the other hand, he made a serious figure in sermons 
 under the name of " Some " or " Others," who had attempted 
 presumptuously to scale eminences too high and arduous for 
 human ability, and had given an example of ignominious 
 failure, edifying to the humble Christian.
 
 HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 285 
 
 All this might be very advantageous for able persoaar whose 
 superfluous fund of expression needed a paying investment ; 
 but the effect on Merman himself was unhappily not so tran- 
 sient as the busy writing and speaking of which he had be* 
 come the occasion. His certainty that he was right naturally 
 got stronger in proportion as the spirit of resistance was 
 stimulated. The scorn and unfairness with which he felt 
 himself to have been treated, by those really competent to 
 appropriate his ideas, had galled him and made a chronic 
 sore ; and the exultant chorus of the incompetent seemed a 
 pouring of vinegar on his wound. His brain became a reg- 
 istry of the foolish and ignorant objections made against 
 him, and of continually amplified answers to these objec- 
 tions. Unable to get his answers printed, he had recourse 
 to that more primitive mode of publication, oral transmission, 
 or button-holding, now generally regarded as a troublesome 
 survival ; and the once pleasant, flexible Merman was on the 
 way to be shunned as a bore. His interest in new acquain- 
 tances turned chiefly on the possibility that they would care 
 about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis j that they would 
 listen to his complaints and exposures of unfairness, and not 
 only accept copies of what he had written on the subject, but 
 send him appreciative letters in acknowledgment. Eepeated 
 disappointment of such hopes tended to embitter him ; and 
 not the less because after awhile the fashion of mentioning 
 him died out, allusions to his theory were less understood, 
 and people could only pretend to remember it. And all the 
 while Merman was perfectly sure that his very opponents, 
 who had knowledge enough to be capable judges, were aware 
 that his book, whatever errors of statement they might detect 
 in it, had served as a sort of divining-rod, pointing out hid- 
 den sources of historical interpretation ; nay, his jealous ex- 
 amination discerned in a new work by Grampus himself a 
 certain shifting of ground, which so poor Merman declared 
 was the sign of an intention gradually to appropriate the 
 riews of the man he had attempted to brand as an ignorant 
 impostor.
 
 290 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 And Julia ? And the housekeeping, the rent, food, and 
 clothing, which controversy can hardly supply, unless it be 
 of the kind that serves as a recommendation to certain posts ? 
 Controversial pamphlets have been known to earn large 
 plums ; but nothing of the sort could be expected from un- 
 practical heresies about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, 
 painfully the contrary. Merman's reputation as a sober 
 thinker, a safe writer, a sound lawyer, was irretrievably 
 injured ; the distractions of controversy had caused him to 
 neglect useful editorial connections, and indeed his dwindling 
 care for miscellaneous subjects made his contributions too 
 dull to be desirable. Even if he could now have given a new 
 turn to his concentration, and applied his talents so as to be 
 ready to show himself an exceptionally qualified lawyer, he 
 would only have been like an architect in competition, too 
 late with his superior plans: he would not have had an 
 opportunity of showing his qualification. He was thrown 
 out of the course. The small capital which had filled up defi- 
 ciencies of income was almost exhausted, and Julia, in the 
 effort to make supplies equal to wants, had to use much in- 
 genuity in diminishing the wants. The brave and affection- 
 ate woman, whose small outline, so unimpressive against an 
 illuminated background, held within it a good share of fem- 
 inine heroism, did her best to keep up the charm of home 
 and soothe her husband's excitement, parting with the best 
 jewel among her wedding presents in order to pay rent, 
 without ever hinting to her husband that this sad result had 
 come of his undertaking to convince people who only laughed 
 at him. She was a resigned little creature, and reflected 
 that some husbands took to drinking and others to forgery ; 
 hers had only taken to the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, 
 and was not unkind only a little more indifferent to her 
 and the two children than she had ever expected he would 
 be ; his mind was eaten up with " subjects," and constantly 
 a little angry, not with her, but with everybody else, es- 
 pecially those who were celebrated. 
 
 This was the sad truth. Merman felt himself ill-used by
 
 HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 291 
 
 the world, and thought very much worse of the world in con- 
 sequence. The gall of his adversaries' ink had been sucked 
 into his system and ran in his blood. He was still in the 
 prime of life, but his mind was aged by that eager, monoto- 
 nous construction Avhich comes of feverish excitement on a 
 single topic, and uses up the intellectual strength. 
 
 Merman had never been a rich man, but he was now con- 
 spicuously poor, and in need of the friends who had power 
 or interest which he believed they could exert on his behalf. 
 Their omitting or declining to give this help could not seem 
 to him so clearly as to them an inevitable consequence of his 
 having become impracticable, or at least of his passing for a 
 man whose views were not likely to be safe and sober. Each 
 friend in turn offended him, though unwillingly, and was 
 suspected of wishing to shake him off. It was not altogether 
 so ; but poor Merman's society had undeniably ceased to be 
 attractive, and it was difficult to help him. At last the pres- 
 sure of want urged him to try for a post far beneath his 
 earlier prospects, and he gained it. He holds it still, for he 
 has no vices, and his domestic life has kept up a sweetening 
 current of motive around and within him. Nevertheless, the 
 bitter flavor mingling itself with all topics, the premature 
 weariness and withering, are irrevocably there. It is as if 
 he had gone through a disease which alters what we call the 
 constitution. He has long ceased to talk eagerly of the ideas 
 which possess him, or to attempt making proselytes. The 
 dial has moved onward, and he himself sees many of his for- 
 mer guesses in a new light. On the other hand, he has seen 
 what he foreboded, that the main idea which was at the root 
 of his too rash theorizing has been adopted by Grampus and 
 received with general respect, no reference being heard to 
 the ridiculous figure this important conception made when 
 ushered in by the incompetent " Others." 
 
 Now and then, on rare occasions, when a sympathetic 
 tete-a-tete has restored some of his old expansiveness, he will 
 tell a companion in a railway-carriage, or other place of meet- 
 ing favorable to autobiographical confidences, what has been
 
 292 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 the course of things in his particular case, as an example of 
 the justice to be expected of the world. The companion 
 usually allows for the bitterness of a disappointed 
 and is secretly disinclined to believe that Grampus was 
 blame.
 
 A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 
 
 AMONG the many acute sayings of La Kochefoueauld, 
 there is hardly one more acute than this : " La plus 
 grande ambition n'en a pas la moindre apparence lorsqu'elle 
 se rencontre dans une impossibility absolue d'arriver oil elle 
 aspire." Some of us might do well to use this hint in our 
 treatment of acquaintances and friends, from whom we are 
 expecting gratitude because we are so very kind in thinking 
 of them, inviting them, and even listening to what they say 
 considering how insignificant they must feel themselves to 
 be. We are often fallaciously confident in supposing that 
 our friend's state of mind is appropriate to our moderate es- 
 timate of his importance, almost as if we imagined the hum- 
 ble mollusk (so useful as an illustration) to have a sense of his 
 own exceeding softness and low place in the scale of being. 
 Your mollusk, on the contrary, is inwardly objecting to every 
 other grade of solid, rather than to himself. Accustomed to 
 observe what we think an unwarrantable conceit exhibiting 
 itself in ridiculous pretensions and forwardness to play the 
 lion's part, in obvious self-complacency and loud peremptori- 
 ness, we are not on the alert to detect the egoistic claims of 
 a more exorbitant kind, often hidden under an apparent neu- 
 trality or an acquiescence in being put out of the question. 
 
 Thoughts of this kind occurred to me yesterday, when I 
 saw the name of Lentulus in the obituary. The majority of 
 his acquaintances, I imagine, have always thought of him as 
 a man justly unpretending and as nobody's rival ; but some 
 of them have perhaps been struck with surprise at his reserve 
 in praising the works of his contemporaries, and have now
 
 294 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 and then felt themselves in need of a key to his remarks on 
 men of celebrity in various departments. He was a man of 
 fair position, deriving his income from a business in which 
 he did nothing, at leisure to frequent clubs and at ease in 
 giving dinners, well-looking, polite, and generally accept- 
 able in society as a part of what we may call its bread-crumb, 
 the neutral basis needful for the plums and spice. Why, 
 then, did he speak of the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus 
 with a peculiarity in his tone of assent to other people's 
 praise which might almost have led you to suppose that the 
 eminent poet had borrowed money of him and showed an in- 
 disposition to repay ? He had no criticism to offer, no sign 
 of objection more specific than a slight cough, a scarcsly per- 
 ceptible pause before assenting, and an air of self-control in 
 his utterance as if certain considerations had determined 
 him not to inform against the so-called poet, who, to his 
 knowledge, was a mere versifier. If you had questioned him 
 closely, he would perhaps have confessed that he did think 
 something better might be done in the way of Eclogues and 
 Georgics, or of Odes and Epodes, and that to his mind poetry 
 was something very different from what had hitherto been 
 known under that name. 
 
 For my own part, being of a superstitious nature, given 
 readily to imagine alarming causes, I immediately, on first 
 getting these mystic hints from Lentulus, concluded that he 
 held a number of entirely original poems, or at the very least 
 a revolutionary treatise on poetics, in that melancholy manu- 
 script state to which works excelling all that is ever printed 
 are necessarily condemned ; and I was long timid in speaking 
 of the poets when he was present. For what might not Len- 
 tulus have done, or be profoundly aware of, that would make 
 my ignorant impressions ridiculous ? One cannot well be 
 sure of the negative in such a case, except through certain 
 positives that bear witness to it ; and those witnesses are not 
 always to be got hold of. But time wearing on, I perceived 
 that the attitude of Lentulu* toward the philosophers was 
 essentially the same as his attitude toward the poets ; nay,
 
 A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 295 
 
 there was something so much more decided in his mode of 
 closing his mouth after brief speech on the former, there was 
 such an air of rapt consciousness in his private hints as to 
 his conviction that all thinking hitherto had been an elab- 
 orate mistake, and as to his own power of conceiving a sound 
 basis for a lasting superstructure, that I began to believe less 
 in the poetical stores, and to infer that the line of Lentulus 
 lay rather in the rational criticism of our beliefs and in sys- 
 tematic construction. In this case I did not figure to myself 
 the existence of formidable manuscripts ready for the press ; 
 for great thinkers are known to carry their theories growing 
 within their minds long before committing them to paper, 
 and the ideas which made a new passion for them when their 
 locks were jet or auburn, remain perilously unwritten, an 
 inwardly developing condition of their successive selves, 
 until the locks are gray or scanty. I only meditated im- 
 provingly on the way in which a man of exceptional faculties, 
 and even carrying within him some of that fierce refiner's fire 
 which is to purge away the dross of human error, may move 
 about in society totally unrecognized, regarded as a person 
 whose opinion is superfluous, and only rising into a power in 
 emergencies of threatened black-balling. Imagine a Des- 
 cartes or a Locke being recognized for nothing more than a 
 good fellow and a perfect gentleman ; what a painful view 
 does such a picture suggest of impenetrable dulness in the 
 society around them ! 
 
 I would at all times rather be reduced to a cheaper esti- 
 mate of a particular person, if by that means I can get a more 
 cheerful view of my fellow-men generally; and I confess 
 that, in a certain curiosity which led me to cultivate Lentu- 
 lus's acquaintance, my hope leaned to the discovery that he 
 was a less remarkable man than he had seemed to imply. It 
 would have been a grief to discover that he was bitter or 
 malicious ; but by finding him to be neither a mighty poet, 
 nor a revolutionary poetical critic, nor an epoch-making phi- 
 losopher, my admiration for the poets and thinkers whom he 
 rated so low would recover all its buoyancy, and I should
 
 296 ESSAYS OF GKORGE ELIOT. 
 
 not be left to trust to that very suspicious sort of merit 
 which constitutes an exception in the history of mankind, 
 and recommends itself as the total abolitionist of all previous 
 claims on our confidence. You are not greatly surprised at 
 the infirm logic of the coachman who would persuade you 
 to engage him by insisting that any other would be sure to 
 rob you in the matter of hay and corn, thus demanding a 
 difficult belief in him as the sole exception from the frailties 
 of his calling ; but it is rather astonishing that the whole- 
 sale decriers of mankind and its performances should be 
 even more unwary in their reasoning than the coachman, 
 since each of them not merely confides in your regarding 
 himself as an exception, but overlooks the almost certain 
 fact that you are wondering whether he inwardly excepts 
 you. Now, conscious of entertaining some common opin- 
 ions which seemed to fall under the mildly intimated but 
 sweeping ban of Lentulus, my self-complacency was a little 
 concerned. 
 
 Hence I deliberately attempted to draw out Lentulus in 
 private dialogue, for it is the reverse of injury to a man to 
 offer him that hearing which he seems to have found nowhere 
 else. And for whatever purposes silence may be equal to 
 gold, it cannot be safely taken as an indication of specific 
 ideas. I sought to know why Lentulus was more than indif- 
 ferent to the poets, and what was that new poetry which he 
 had either written or, as to its principles, distinctly conceived. 
 But I presently found that he knew very little of any partic- 
 ular poet, and had a general notion of poetry as the use of 
 artificial language to express unreal sentiments ; he instanced 
 "The Giaour," "Lalla Rookh," "The Pleasures of Hope," 
 and " Ruin seize thee, ruthless King," adding, " and plenty 
 more." On my observing that he probably preferred a larger, 
 simpler style, he emphatically assented. "Have you not," 
 said I, " written something of that order ? " " No, but I 
 often compose as I go along. I see how things might be 
 written as fine as Ossian, only with true ideas. The world 
 has no notion what poetry will be."
 
 A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 297 
 
 It was impossible to disprove this, and I am always glad 
 to believe that the poverty of our imagination is no measure 
 of the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get 
 fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them. But 
 what this conversation persuaded me of was, that the birth 
 with which the mind of Lentulus was pregnant could not be 
 poetry, though I did not question that he composed as he 
 went along, and that the exercise was accompanied with a 
 great sense of power. This is a frequent experience in 
 dreams, and much of our waking experience is but a dream 
 in the daylight. Nay, for what I saw, the compositions 
 might be fairly classed as Ossianic. But I was satisfied that 
 Lentulus could not disturb my grateful admiration for the 
 poets of all ages by eclipsing them, or by putting them under 
 a new electric light of criticism. 
 
 Still, he had himself thrown the chief emphasis of his 
 protest and his consciousness of corrective illumination on 
 the philosophic thinking of our race ; and his tone in assuring 
 me that everything which had been done in that way was 
 wrong, that Plato, Kobert Owen, and Dr. Tuffle, who wrote 
 in the " Regulator," were all equally mistaken, gave my 
 superstitious nature a thrill of anxiety. After what had 
 passed about the poets, it did not seem likely that Lentulus 
 had all systems by heart ; but who could say he had not 
 seized that thread which may somewhere hang out loosely 
 from the web of things, and be the clew of unravelment ? 
 We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not made by 
 erudition. Lentulus at least had not the bias of a school ; 
 and if it turned out that he was in agreement with any cel- 
 ebrated thinker, ancient or modern, the agreement would 
 have the value of an undesigned coincidence not due to for- 
 gotten reading. It was therefore with renewed curiosity 
 that I engaged him on this large subject, the universal 
 erroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus 
 began that process. And here I found him more copious 
 than on the theme of poetry. He admitted that he did con- 
 template writing down his thoughts, but his difficulty was
 
 298 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 their abundance. Apparently he was like the wood-cutter 
 entering the thick forest, and saying, "Where shall I begin ? " 
 The same obstacle appeared in a minor degree to cling about 
 his verbal exposition, and accounted perhaps for his rather 
 helter-skelter choice of remarks bearing on the number of 
 unaddressed letters sent to the post-office; on what logic 
 really is, as tending to support the buoyancy of human me- 
 diums and mahogany tables ; on the probability of all mir- 
 acles under all religions when explained by hidden laws, and 
 my unreasonableness in supposing that their profuse occur- 
 rence at half a guinea an hour in recent times was anything 
 more than a coincidence ; on the hap-hazard way in which 
 marriages are determined showing the baselessness of 
 social and moral schemes; and on his expectation that he 
 should offend the scientific world when he told them what 
 he thought of electricity as an agent. 
 
 No man's appearance could be graver or more gentleman- 
 like than that of Lentulus as we walked along the Mall, 
 while he delivered these observations, understood by himself 
 to have a regenerative bearing on human society. His wrist- 
 bands and black gloves, his hat and nicely clipped hair, his 
 laudable moderation in beard, and his evident discrimination 
 in choosing his tailor, all seemed to excuse the prevalent esti- 
 mate of him as a man untainted with heterodoxy, and likely 
 to be so unencumbered with opinions that he would always 
 be useful as an assenting and admiring listener. Men of 
 science, seeing him at their lectures, doubtless flattered them- 
 selves that he came to learn from them; the philosophic 
 ornaments of our time, expounding some of their luminous 
 ideas in the social circle, took the meditative gaze of Lentulus 
 for one of surprise, not unmixed with a just reverence at 
 such close reasoning toward so novel a conclusion ; and those 
 who are called men of the world considered him a good 
 fellow, who might be asked to vote for a friend of their own, 
 and would have no troublesome notion to make him unac- 
 commodating. You perceive how very much they were aU 
 mistaken, except in qualifying him as a good fellow.
 
 A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 299 
 
 This Lentulus certainly was, in the sense of being free 
 from envy, hatred, and malice ; and such freedom was all the 
 more remarkable an indication of native benignity, because of 
 his gaseous, inimitably expansive conceit. Yes, conceit ; for 
 that his enormous and contentedly ignorant confidence in his 
 own rambling thoughts was usually clad in a decent silence, 
 is no reason why it should be less strictly called by the name 
 directly implying a complacent self -estimate unwarranted by 
 performance. Nay, the total privacy in which he enjoyed 
 his consciousness of inspiration was the very condition of its 
 undisturbed, placid nourishment and gigantic growth. Your 
 audibly arrogant man exposes himself to tests ; in attempting 
 to make an impression on others, he may possibly (not always) 
 be made to feel his own lack of definiteness; and the demand 
 for definiteness is to all of us a needful check on vague de- 
 preciation of what others do, and vague ecstatic trust in our 
 own superior ability. But Lentulus was at once so unreeep- 
 tive, and so little gifted with the power of displaying his 
 miscellaneous deficiency of information, that there was really 
 nothing to hinder his astonishment at the spontaneous crop 
 of ideas which his mind secretly yielded. If it occurred to, 
 him that there were more meanings than one for the word 
 "motive," since it sometimes meant the end aimed at, and 
 sometimes the feeling that prompted the aiming, and that the 
 word " cause " was also of changeable import, he was naturally 
 struck with the truth of his own perception, and was con- 
 vinced that if this vein were well followed out much might 
 be made of it. Men were evidently in the wrong about cause 
 and effect ; else why was society in the confused state we be- 
 hold ? And as to motive, Lentulus felt that when he came 
 to write down his views he should look deeply into this kind 
 of subject, and show up thereby the anomalies of our social 
 institutions; meanwhile the various aspects of "motive" and 
 " cause " flitted about among the motley crowd of ideas which 
 he regarded as original, and pregnant with reformative effi- 
 cacy. For his unaffected good-will made him regard all his 
 insight as only valuable because it tended toward reform.
 
 300 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 The respectable man had got into his illusory maze of di- 
 coveries, by letting go that clew of conformity in his thinking 
 which he had kept fast hold of in his tailoring and manners. 
 He regarded heterodoxy as a power in itself, and took his 
 inacquaintance with doctrines for a creative dissidence. But 
 his epitaph needs not to be a melancholy one. His benevo- 
 lent disposition was more effective for good, than his silent 
 presumption for harm. He might have been mischievous 
 but for the lack of words ; instead of being astonished at his 
 inspirations in private, he might have clad his addled origi- 
 nalities, disjointed commonplaces, blind denials, and balloon* 
 like conclusions in that mighty sort of language which would 
 have made a new Koran for a knot of followers. I mean no 
 disrespect to the ancient Koran, but one would not desire the 
 roc to lay more eggs, and give us a whole wing-flapping brood 
 to soar and make twilight. 
 
 Peace be with Lentulus, for he has left us in peace. 
 Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from 
 giving us wordy evidence of the fact, from calling on us to 
 look through a heap of millet-seed, in order to be sure that 
 there is no pearl in it.
 
 A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 
 
 A LITTLE unpremeditated insincerity must be indulged 
 under the stress of social intercourse. The talk even 
 of an honest man must often represent merely his wish to 
 be inotxensive or agreeable, rather than his genuine opinion 
 or feeling on the matter in hand. His thought, if uttered, 
 might be wounding ; or he has not the ability to utter it with 
 exactness, and snatches at a loose paraphrase ; or he has really 
 no genuine thought on the question, and is driven to fill up 
 the vacancy by borrowing the remarks in vogue. These are 
 the winds and currents we have all to steer among, and they 
 are often too strong for our truthfulness or our wit. Let us 
 not bear too hardly on each other for this common incidental 
 frailty, or think that we rise superior to it by dropping all 
 considerateness and deference. 
 
 But there are studious, deliberate forms of insincerity 
 which it is fair to be impatient with Hinze's, for example. 
 From his name you might suppose him to be German; in 
 fact, his family is Alsatian, but has been settled in England 
 for more than one generation. He is the superlatively defer- 
 ential man, and walks about with murmured wonder at the 
 wisdom and discernment of everybody who talks to him. He 
 cultivates the low-toned tete-a-tete, keeping his hat carefully 
 in his hand, often stroking it, while he smiles with downcast 
 eyes, as if to relieve his feelings under the pressure of the 
 remarkable conversation which it is his honor to enjoy at the 
 present moment. I confess to some rage on hearing him 
 yesterday talking to Felicia, who is certainly a clever woman, 
 and without any unusual desire to show her cleverness, occa-
 
 302 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 sionally says something of her own, or makes an allusion which 
 is not quite common. Still, it must happen to her, as to every 
 one else, to speak of many subjects on which the best things 
 were said long ago ; and in conversation with a person who 
 has been newly introduced, those well-worn themes naturally 
 recur as a further development of salutations and preliminary 
 media of understanding, such as pipes, chocolate, or mastic- 
 chewing, which serve to confirm the impression that our new 
 acquaintance is on a civilized footing, and has enough regard 
 for formulas to save us from shocking outbursts of individu- 
 alism, to which we are always exposed with the tamest bear 
 or baboon. Considered purely as a matter of information, it 
 cannot any longer be important for us to learn that a British 
 subject, included in the last census, holds Shakspeare to be 
 supreme in the presentation of character ; still, it is as admis- 
 sible for any one to make this statement about himself as to 
 rub his hands and tell you that the air is brisk, if only he 
 will let it fall as a matter of course, with a parenthetic light- 
 ness, and not announce his adhesion to a commonplace with 
 an emphatic insistence, as if it were a proof of singular in- 
 sight. We mortals should chiefly like to talk to each other 
 out of good-will and fellowship, not for the sake of hearing 
 revelations or being stimulated by witticisms; and I have 
 usually found that it is the rather dull person who appears 
 to be disgusted with his contemporaries because they are not 
 always strikingly original, and to satisfy whom the party at 
 a country-house should have included the prophet Isaiah, 
 Plato, Francis Bacon, and Voltaire. It is always your heaviest 
 bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities ; 
 naturally, for a little of his company has reduced them to a 
 state of flaccid fatigue. It is right and meet that there 
 should be an abundant utterance of good sound commonplaces. 
 Part of an agreeable talker's charm is that he lets them fall 
 continually with no more than their due emphasis. Giving 
 a pleasant voice to what we are all well assured of, makes a 
 sort of wholesome air for more special and dubious remark 
 to move in.
 
 A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 303 
 
 Hence it seemed to me far from unbecoming in Felicia that 
 in her first dialogue with Hinze, previously quite a stranger 
 to her, her observations were those of an ordinarily refined 
 and well-educated woman on standard subjects, and might 
 have been printed in a manual of polite topics and creditable 
 opinions. She had no desire to astonish a man of whom 
 she had heard nothing particular. It was all the more exas- 
 perating to see and hear Hinze's reception of her well-bred 
 conformities. Felicia's acquaintances knew her as the suit- 
 able wife of a distinguished man, a sensible, vivacious, kindly 
 disposed woman, helping her husband with graceful apologies 
 written and spoken, and making her receptions agreeable to 
 all comers. But you would have imagined that Hinze had 
 been prepared by general report to regard this introduction 
 to her as an opportunity comparable to an audience of the 
 Delphic Sibyl. When she had delivered herself on the 
 changes in Italian travel, on the difficulty of reading Ariosto 
 in these busy times, on the want of equilibrium in French 
 political affairs, and on the pre-eminence of German music, 
 he would know what to think. Felicia was evidently embar- 
 rassed by his reverent wonder, and, in dread lest she should 
 seem to be playing the oracle, became somewhat confused, 
 stumbling on her answers rather than choosing them. But 
 this made no difference to Hinze's rapt attention and sub- 
 dued eagerness of inquiry. He continued to put large ques- 
 tions, bending his head slightly, that his eyes might be a 
 little lifted in awaiting her reply. 
 
 " What, may I ask, is your opinion as to the state of Art 
 in England ? " 
 
 "Oh," said Felicia, with a light deprecatory laugh, "I 
 think it suffers from two diseases bad taste in the patrons, 
 and want of inspiration in the artists." 
 
 "That is true indeed," said Hinze, in an undertone of 
 deep conviction. " You have put your finger with strict ac- 
 curacy on the causes of decline. To a cultivated taste like 
 yours this must be particularly painful." 
 
 "I did not say there was actual decline," said Felicia,
 
 304 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 with a touch of brusquerie. " I don't set myself up as the 
 great personage whom nothing can please." 
 
 " That would be too severe a misfortune for others/' says 
 my complimentary ape. "You approve, perhaps, of Rose- 
 mary's ' Babes in the Wood,' as something fresh and naive 
 in sculpture ? " 
 
 " I think it enchanting." 
 
 "Does he know that? Or will you permit me to tell 
 him ? " 
 
 " Heaven forbid ! It would be an impertinence in me to 
 praise a work of his, to pronounce on its quality ; and that 
 I happen to like it can be of no consequence to him." 
 
 Here was an occasion for Hinze to smile down on his hat 
 and stroke it Felicia's ignorance that her praise was ines- 
 timable being peculiarly noteworthy to an observer of man- 
 kind. Presently he was quite sure that her favorite author 
 was Shakspeare, and wished to know what she thought of 
 Hamlet's madness. When she had quoted Wilhelm Meister 
 on this point, and had afterward testified that " Lear " was 
 beyond adequate presentation, that " Julius Caesar " was an 
 effective acting play, and that a poet may know a good deal 
 about human nature while knowing little of geography, Hinze 
 appeared so impressed with the plenitude of these revela- 
 tions that he recapitulated them, weaving them together with 
 threads of compliment: "As you very justly observed;" 
 and "It is most true, as you say;" and "It were well if 
 others noted what you have remarked." 
 
 Some listeners, incautious in their epithets, would have 
 called Hinze an " ass." For my part, I would never insult 
 that intelligent and unpretending animal, who no doubt brays 
 with perfect simplicity and substantial meaning to those ac- 
 quainted with his idiom, and if he feigns more submission 
 than he feels, has weighty reasons for doing so; I would 
 never, I say, insult that historic and ill-appreciated animal, 
 the ass, by giving his name to a man whose continuous pre- 
 tence is so shallow in its motive, so unexcused by any sharp 
 appetite, as this of Hinze's.
 
 A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 805 
 
 But perhaps you would say that his adulatory manner was 
 originally adopted under strong promptings of self-interest, 
 and that his absurdly overacted deference to persons from 
 whom he expects no patronage is the unreflecting persistence 
 of habit just as those who live with the deaf will shout to 
 everybody else. 
 
 And you might indeed imagine that in talking to Tulpian, 
 who has considerable interest at his disposal, Hinze had a 
 desired appointment in his mind. Tulpian is appealed to on 
 innumerable subjects, and if he is unwilling to express him- 
 self on any one of them, says so with instructive copiousness ; 
 he is much listened to, and his utterances are registered and 
 reported with more or less exactitude. But I think he has 
 no other listener who comports himself as Hinze does who, 
 figuratively speaking, carries about a small spoon, ready to 
 pick up any dusty crumb of opinion that the eloquent man 
 may have let drop. Tulpian, with reverence be it said, has 
 some rather absurd notions, such as a mind of large discourse 
 often finds room for. They slip about among his higher con- 
 ceptions and multitudinous acquirements, like disreputable 
 characters at a national celebration in some vast cathedral, 
 where to the ardent soul all is glorified by rainbow-light and 
 grand associations ; any vulgar detective knows them for 
 what they are. But Hinze is especially fervid in his desire 
 to hear Tulpian dilate on his crotchets, and is rather trouble- 
 some to bystanders in asking them whether they have read 
 the various fugitive writings in which these crotchets have 
 been published. If an expert is explaining some matter on 
 which you desire to know the evidence, Hinze teases you 
 with Tulpian's guesses, and asks the expert what he thinks 
 of them. 
 
 In general, Hinze delights in the citation of opinions, and 
 would hardly remark that the sun shone, without an air of 
 respectful appeal or fervid adhesion. The " Iliad," one sees, 
 would impress him little, if it were not for what Mr. Fugle- 
 man has lately said about it ; and if you mention an image or 
 sentiment in Chaucer, he seems not to heed the bearing of 
 TOL. ix. 20
 
 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 your reference, but immediately tells you that Mr. Hautboy, 
 too, regards Chaucer as a poet of the first order, and he is 
 delighted to find that two such judges, as you and Hautboy, 
 are at one. 
 
 What is the reason of all this subdued ecstasy, moving 
 about, hat in hand, with well-dressed hair, and attitudes of 
 unimpeachable correctness ? Some persons, conscious of sa- 
 gacity, decide at once that Hinze knows what he is about in 
 flattering Tulpian, and has a carefully appraised end to serve, 
 though they may not see it. They are misled by the com- 
 mon mistake of supposing that men's behavior, whether ha- 
 bitual or occasional, is chiefly determined by a distinctly 
 conceived motive, a definite object to be gained or a definite 
 evil to be avoided. The truth is that, the primitive wants of 
 nature once tolerably satisfied, the majority of mankind, even 
 in a civilized life full of solicitations, are with difficulty 
 aroused to the distinct conception of an object toward which 
 they will direct their actions with careful adaptation ; and it 
 is yet rarer to find one who can persist in the systematic pur- 
 suit of such an end. Few lives are shaped, few characters 
 formed, by the contemplation of definite consequences seen 
 from a distance, and made the goal of continuous effort or the 
 beacon of a constantly avoided danger. Suoh control by fore- 
 sight, such vivid picturing and practical logic, are the dis- 
 tinction of exceptionally strong natures ; but society is chiefly 
 made up of human beings whose daily acts are all performed 
 either in unreflecting obedience to custom and routine, or 
 from immediate promptings of thought or feeling to execute 
 an immediate purpose. They pay their poor-rates, give their 
 vote in affairs political or parochial, wear a certain amount 
 of starch, hinder boys from tormenting the helpless, and 
 spend money on tedious observances called pleasures, with- 
 out mentally adjusting these practices to their own well- 
 understood interest, or to the general, ultimate welfare of 
 the human race ; and when they fall into ungraceful compli- 
 ment, excessive smiling, or other luckless efforts of com- 
 plaisant behavior, these are but the tricks or habits gradually
 
 A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 307 
 
 formed under the successive promptings of a wish to be 
 agreeable, stimulated day by day without any widening fe- 
 sources for gratifying the wish. It dbes not in the least 
 follow that they are seeking by studied hypocrisy to get 
 something for themselves. And so with Hinze's deferential 
 bearing, complimentary parentheses; and worshipful tones, 
 which seem to some like the overacting of a part in a comedy. 
 He expects no appointment or other appreciable gain through 
 Tulpian's favor ; he has no doubleness toward Felicia ; there 
 is no sneering or backbiting obverse to his ecstatic admiration. 
 He is very well off in the world, and cherishes no unsatisfied 
 ambition that could feed design and direct flattery. As you 
 perceive, he has had the education and other advantages of a 
 gentleman, without being conscious of marked result, such as 
 a decided preference for any particular ideas or functions ; 
 his mind is furnished as hotels are, with everything for oc- 
 casional and transient use. But one cannot be an English- 
 man and gentleman in general ; it is in the nature of things 
 that one must have an individuality, though it may be of an 
 often-repeated type. As Hinze in growing to maturity had 
 grown into a particular form and expression of person, so he 
 necessarily gathered a manner and frame of speech which 
 made him additionally recognizable. His nature is not tuned 
 to the pitch of a genuine direct admiration, only to an atti- 
 tudinizing deference which does not fatigue itself with the 
 formation of real judgments. All human achievement must 
 be wrought down to this spoon-meat, this mixture of other 
 persons' washy opinions and his own flux of reverence for 
 what is third-hand, before Hinze can find a relish for it. 
 
 He has no more leading characteristic than the desire to 
 stand well with those who are justly distinguished ; he has 
 no base admirations ; and you may know by his entire presen- 
 tation of himself, from the management of his hat to the 
 angle at which he keeps his right foot, that he aspires to cor- 
 rectness. Desiring to behave becomingly, and also to make 
 a figure in dialogue, he is only like the bad artist, whose pic- 
 ture is a failure. We may pity these ill-gifted strivers, but
 
 308 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 not pretend that their works are pleasant to behold. A man 
 is bound to know something of his own weight and muscular 
 dexterity, and the puny athlete is called foolish before he is 
 seen to be thrown. Hinze has not the stuff in him to be at 
 once agreeably conversational and sincere, and he has got 
 himself up to be at all events agreeably conversational. Not- 
 withstanding this deliberateness of intention in his talk, he is 
 unconscious of falsity ; for he has not enough of deep and 
 lasting impression to find a contrast or diversity between his 
 words and his thoughts. He is not fairly to be called a 
 hypocrite ; but I have already confessed to the more exaspera- 
 tion at his make-believe reverence, because it has no deep 
 hunger to excuse it.
 
 ONLY TEMPER. 
 
 WHAT is temper ? Its primary meaning, the proportion 
 and mode in which qualities are mingled, is much 
 neglected in popular speech, yet even here the word often 
 carries a reference to an habitual state or general tendency of 
 the organism, in distinction from what are held to be spe- 
 cific virtues and vices. As people confess to bad memory 
 without expecting to sink in mental reputation, so we hear a 
 man declared to have a bad temper, and yet glorified as the 
 possessor of every high quality. When he errs, or in any 
 way commits himself, his temper is accused, not his charac- 
 ter ; and it is understood that, but for a brutal, bearish mood, 
 he is kindness itself. If he kicks small animals, swears vio- 
 lently at a servant who mistakes orders, or is grossly rude to 
 his wife, it is remarked apologetically that these things mean 
 nothing they are all temper. 
 
 Certainly there is a limit to this form of apology, and the 
 forgery of a bill, or the ordering of goods without any pros- 
 pect of paying for them, has never been set down to an un- 
 fortunate habit of sulkiness or of irascibility. But, on the 
 whole, there is a peculiar exercise of indulgence toward the 
 manifestations of bad temper, which tends to encourage them, 
 so that we are in danger of having among us a number of 
 virtuous persons who conduct themselves detestably, just as 
 we have hysterical patients who, with sound organs, are 
 apparently laboring under many sorts of organic disease. 
 Let it be admitted, however, that a man may be "a good 
 fellow" and yet have a bad temper, so bad that we recog- 
 nize his merits with reluctance, and are inclined to resent
 
 310 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 his occasionally amiable behavior as an unfair demand on 
 our admiration. 
 
 Touchwood is that kind of good fellow. He is by turns 
 insolent, quarrelsome, repulsively haughty to innocent peo- 
 ple who approach him with respect, neglectful of his friends, 
 angry in face of legitimate demands, procrastinating in th< 
 fulfilment of such demands, prompted to rude words an(* 
 harsh looks by a moody disgust, with his fellow-men in gen- 
 eral and yet, as everybody will assure you, the soul of 
 honor, a steadfast friend, a defender of the oppressed, an 
 affectionate-hearted creature. Pity that, after a certain expe- 
 rience of his moods, his intimacy becomes insupportable ! A 
 man who uses his balmorals to tread on your toes with much 
 frequency, and an unmistakable emphasis, may prove a fast 
 friend in adversity ; but meanwhile your adversity has not ar- 
 rived, and your toes are tender. The daily sneer or growl at 
 your remarks is not to be made amends for by a possible 
 eulogy, or defence of your understanding against depreda- 
 tors who may not present themselves, and on an occasion 
 which may never arise. I cannot submit to a chronic state 
 of blue and green bruise as a form of insurance against an 
 accident. 
 
 Touchwood's bad temper is of the contradicting, pugna- 
 cious sort. He is the honorable gentleman in opposition, 
 whatever proposal or proposition may be broached ; and when 
 others join him, he secretly damns their superfluous agree- 
 ment, quickly discovering that his way of stating the case is 
 not exactly theirs. An invitation, or any sign of expectation, 
 throws him into an attitude of refusal. Ask his concurrence 
 in a benevolent measure ; he will not decline to give it, be- 
 cause he has a real sympathy with good aims, but he com- 
 plies resentfully } though where he is let alone, he will do 
 much more than any one would have thought of asking for. 
 No man would shrink with greater sensitiveness from the im- 
 putation of not paying his debts ; yet when a bill is sent in 
 with any promptitude, he is inclined to make the tradesman 
 wait for the money he is in such a hurry to get. One sees
 
 ONLY TEMPER. 811 
 
 that this antagonistic temper must be much relieved by find- 
 ing a particular object, and that its worst moments must be 
 those where the mood is that of vague resistance, there being 
 nothing specific to oppose. Touchwood is never so little 
 engaging as when he comes down to breakfast with a cloud 
 on his brow, after parting from you the night before with an 
 affectionate effusiveness, at the end of a confidential conver- 
 sation, which has assured you of mutual understanding. Im- 
 possible that you can have committed any offence ! If mice 
 have disturbed him, that is not your fault ; but, nevertheless, 
 your cheerful greeting had better not convey any reference to 
 the weather ; else it will be met by a sneer which, taking you 
 unawares, may give you a crushing sense that you make a 
 poor figure with your cheerfulness, which was not asked for. 
 Some daring person perhaps introduces another topic, and 
 uses the delicate flattery of appealing to Touchwood for his 
 opinion, the topic being included in his favorite studies. An 
 indistinct muttering, with a look at the carving-knife, in reply, 
 teaches that daring person how ill he has chosen a market 
 for his deference. If Touchwood's behavior affects you very, 
 closely, you had better break your leg in the course of the 
 day : his bad temper will then vanish at once ; he will take 
 a painful journey on your behalf ; he will sit up with you 
 night after night ; he will do all the work of your department, 
 so as to save you from any loss in consequence of your acci- 
 dent ; he will be even uniformly tender to you till you are 
 well on your legs again, when he will some fine morning in- 
 sult you without provocation, and make you wish that his 
 generous goodness to you had not closed your lips against 
 retort. 
 
 It is not always necessary that a friend should break his 
 leg for Touchwood to feel compunction, and endeavor to make 
 amends for his bearishness or insolence. He becomes spon- 
 taneously conscious that he has misbehaved, and he is not 
 only ashamed of himself, but has the better prompting to try 
 and heal any wound he has inflicted. Unhappily, the habit 
 of being offensive " without meaning it " leads usually to a
 
 312 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 way of making amends which the injured person cannot but 
 regard as a being amiable without meaning it. The kind- 
 nesses, the complimentary indications or assurances, are apt 
 to appear in the light of a penance adjusted to the foregoing 
 lapses, and, by the very contrast they offer, call up a keener 
 memory of the wrong they atone for. They are not a spon- 
 taneous prompting of good-will, but an elaborate compensa- 
 tion. And, in fact, Dion's atoning friendliness has a ring of 
 artificiality. Because he formerly disguised his good feeling 
 toward you, he now expresses more than he quite feels. It 
 is in vain. Having made you extremely uncomfortable last 
 week, he has absolutely diminished his power of making you 
 happy to-day. He struggles against the result by excessive 
 effort ; but he has taught you to observe his fitfulness, rather 
 than to be warmed by his episodic show of regard. 
 
 I suspect that many persons who have an uncertain, in- 
 calculable temper, natter themselves that it enhances their 
 fascination ; but perhaps they are under the prior mistake of 
 exaggerating the charm which they suppose to be thus 
 strengthened ; in any case, they will do well not to trust in 
 the attractions of caprice and moodiness for a long continu- 
 ance or for close intercourse. A pretty woman may fan the 
 flame of distant adorers by harassing them ; but if she lets one 
 of them make her his wife, the point of view from which he 
 will look at her poutings and tossings, and mysterious ina- 
 bility to be pleased, will be seriously altered. And if slavery 
 to a pretty woman, which seems among the least conditional 
 forms of abject service, will not bear too great a strain from 
 her bad temper, even though her beauty remain the same, it 
 is clear that a man whose claims lie in his high character, or 
 high performances, had need impress us very constantly with 
 his peculiar value and indispensableness, if he is to test our 
 patience by an uncertainty of temper which leaves us abso- 
 lutely without grounds for guessing how he will receive our 
 persons or humbly advanced opinions, or what line he will 
 take on any but the most momentous occasions. 
 
 For it is among the repulsive effects of this bad temper,
 
 ONLY TEMPER. 313 
 
 which is supposed to be compatible with shining virtues, that 
 it is apt to determine a man's sudden adhesion to an opinion, 
 whether on a personal or impersonal matter, without leaving 
 him time to consider his grounds. The adhesion is sudden 
 and momentary, but it either forms a precedent for his line 
 of thought and action, or it is presently seen to have been 
 inconsistent with his true mind. This determination of par- 
 tisanship by temper has its worst effects in the career of the 
 public man, who is always in danger of getting so enthralled 
 by his own words that he looks into facts and questions, not 
 to get rectifying knowledge, but to get evidence that will 
 justify his actual attitude, which was assumed under an im- 
 pulse dependent on something else than knowledge. There 
 has been plenty of insistence on the evil of swearing by the 
 words of a master, and having the judgment uniformly con- 
 trolled by a " He said it ; " but a much worse woe to befall a 
 man is to have every judgment controlled by an " I said it " 
 to make a divinity of his own short-sightedness or passion- 
 led aberration, and explain the world in its honor. There is 
 hardly a more pitiable degradation than this, for a man of high 
 gifts. Hence I cannot join with those who wish that Touch- 
 wood, being young enough to enter on public life, should get 
 elected for Parliament, and use his excellent abilities to serve 
 his country in that conspicuous manner. For hitherto, in the 
 less momentous incidents of private life, his capricious temper 
 has only produced the minor evil of inconsistency, and he is 
 even greatly at ease in contradicting himself, provided he can 
 contradict you, and disappoint any smiling expectation you 
 may have shown that the impressions you are uttering are 
 likely to meet with his sympathy, considering that the day 
 before he himself gave you the example which your mind is 
 following. He is at least free from those fetters of self-jus- 
 tification which are the curse of parliamentary speaking ; and 
 what I rather desire for him is that he should produce the 
 great book which he is generally pronounced capable of writ- 
 ing, and put his best self imperturbably on record for the ad- 
 vantage of society ; because I should then have steady ground
 
 314 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 for bearing with his diurnal incalculableness, and could fix 
 my gratitude as by strong staple to that unvarying monu- 
 mental service. Unhappily, Touchwood's great powers have 
 oeen Only so fat manifested as to be believed in, not demon- 
 strated. Everybody rates them highly, and thinks that 
 whatever he chose to do would be done in a firstrate manner. 
 Is it his love of disappointing complacent expectancy, which 
 has gone so far as to keep up this lamentable negation, 
 and made him resolve not to write the comprehensive work 
 which he would have written if nobody had expected it 
 of him? 
 
 One can see that if Touchwood were to become a public 
 man, and take to frequent speaking on platforms or from his 
 seat in the House, it would hardly be possible for him to 
 maintain much integrity of opinion, or to avoid courses of 
 partisanship which a healthy public sentiment would stamp 
 with discredit. Bay that he were endowed with the purest 
 honesty, it would inevitably be dragged captive by this mys- 
 terious, Protean, bad temper. There would be the fatal pub- 
 lic necessity of justifying oratorical temper, which had got 
 on its legs in its bitter mood and made insulting imputations, 
 or of keeping up some decent show of consistency with opin- 
 ions vented out of temper's contradictoriness. And words' 
 would have to be followed up by acts of adhesion. 
 
 Certainly, if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtu- 
 ous, he must be so under extreme difficulties. I doubt the 
 possibility that a high order of character can coexist with a 
 temper like Touchwood's. For it is of the nature of such 
 temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental habits, 
 which depend on a growing harmony between perception, 
 conviction, and impulse. There may be good feelings, good 
 deeds, for a human nature may pack endless varieties and 
 blessed inconsistencies in its windings, but it is essential 
 to what is worthy to be called high character, that it may be 
 safely calculated on, and that its qualities shall have taken 
 the form of principles or laws^ habitually, if not perfectly, 
 obeyed. 

 
 ONLY TEMPER. 815 
 
 If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up 
 false attitudes, intermits his acts of kindness with rude be- 
 havior or cruel words, and falls into the consequent vulgar 
 error of supposing that he can make amends by labored 
 agreeableness, I cannot consider such courses any the less 
 ugly because they are ascribed to "temper." Especially I 
 object to the assumption, that his having a fundamentally 
 good disposition is either an apology or a compensation for 
 his bad behavior. If his temper yesterday made him lash 
 the horses, upset the curricle, and cause a breakage in my 
 rib, I feel it no compensation that to-day he vows he will 
 drive me anywhere, in the gentlest manner, any day, as long as 
 he lives. Yesterday was what it was, my rib is paining 
 me; it is not a main object of my life to be driven by 
 Touchwood, and I have no confidence in his life-long gentle- 
 ness. The utmost form of placability I am capable of is to 
 try and remember his better deeds already performed, and, 
 mindful of my own offence, to bear him no malice. But I 
 cannot accept his amends. 
 
 If the bad-tempered man wants to apologize, he had need 
 to do it on a large public scale, make some beneficent dis- 
 covery, produce some stimulating work of genius, invent 
 some powerful process, prove himself such a good to con- 
 temporary multitudes and future generations as to make the 
 discomfort he causes his friends and acquaintances a vanish- 
 ing quality, a trifle even in their own estimate.
 
 A POLITICAL MOLECULE. 
 
 most arrant denier must admit that a man often fur- 
 JL thers larger ends than he is conscious of, and that 
 while he is transacting his particular affairs with the narrow 
 pertinacity of a respectable ant, he subserves an economy 
 larger than any purpose of his own. Society is happily not 
 dependent for the growth of fellowship on the small minority 
 already endowed with comprehensive sympathy. Any mole- 
 cule of the body politic, working toward his own interest in 
 an orderly way, gets his understanding more or less pene- 
 trated with the fact that his interest is included in that of a 
 large number. I have watched several political molecules 
 being educated in this way, by the nature of things, into a 
 faint feeling of fraternity. But at this moment I am think- 
 ing of Spike, an elector who voted on the side of Progress, 
 though he was not inwardly attached to it under that name. 
 For abstractions are deities having many specific names, local 
 habitations, and forms of activity, and so get a multitude of 
 devout servants, who care no more for them under their high- 
 est titles than the celebrated person who, putting with forci- 
 ble brevity a view of human motives now much insisted on, 
 asked what Posterity had done for him that he should care 
 for Posterity ? To many minds, even among the ancients 
 (thought by some to have been invariably poetical), the god- 
 dess of wisdom was doubtless worshipped simply as the pa- 
 troness of spinning and weaving. Now spinning and weaving, 
 from a manufacturing, wholesale point of view, was the chief 
 form under which Spike from early years had unconsciously 
 been a devotee of Progress.
 
 A POLITICAL MOLECULE. 817 
 
 He was a political molecule of the most gentleman-like ap- 
 pearance, not less than six feet high, and showing the utmost 
 nicety in the care of his person and equipment. His um- 
 brella was especially remarkable for its neatness, though 
 perhaps he swung it unduly in walking. His complexion 
 was fresh, his eyes small, bright, and twinkling. He was 
 seen to great advantage in a hat and great-coat garments 
 frequently fatal to the impressiveness of shorter figures ; but 
 when he was uncovered in the drawing-room, it was impossi- 
 ble not to observe that jfcs head shelved off too rapidly from 
 the eyebrows toward thft crown, and that his length of limb 
 seemed to have used up his mind so as to cause an air of 
 abstraction from conversational topics. He appeared, indeed, 
 to be preoccupied with a sense of his exquisite cleanliness, 
 clapped his hands together and rubbed them, frequently 
 straightened his back, and even opened his mouth and closed 
 it again with a slight snap, apparently for no other purpose 
 than the confirmation to himself of his own powers in that 
 line. These are innocent exercises, but they are not such as 
 give weight to a man's personality. Sometimes Spike's mind, 
 emerging from its preoccupation, burst forth in a remark de- 
 livered with smiling zest as, that he did like to see gravel- 
 walks well rolled, or that a lady should always wear the best 
 jewelry, or that a bride was a most interesting object ; but 
 finding these ideas received rather coldly, he would relapse 
 into abstraction, draw up his back, wrinkle his brows longi- 
 tudinally, and seem to regard society, even including gravel- 
 walks, jewelry, and brides, as essentially a poor affair. Indeed, 
 his habit of mind was desponding, and he took melancholy 
 views as to the possible extent of human pleasure and the 
 value of existence ; especially after he had made his fortune 
 in the cotton manufacture, and had thus attained the chief 
 object of his ambition the object which had engaged his 
 talent for order and persevering application for his easy 
 leisure caused him much ennui. He was abstemious, and 
 had none of those temptations to sensual excess which fill up 
 a man's time, first with indulgence, and then with the process
 
 318 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 of getting well from its effects. He had not, indeed, ex- 
 hausted the sources of knowledge, but here again his notions 
 of human pleasure were narrowed by his want of appetite ; 
 for, though he seemed rather surprised at the consideration 
 that Alfred the Great was a Catholic, or that, apart from the 
 Ten Commandments, any conception of moral conduct had oc- 
 curred to mankind, he was not stimulated to further inquiries 
 on these remote matters. Yet he aspired to what he regarded 
 as intellectual society, willingly entertained beneficed clergy- 
 men, and bought the books he heard spoken of, arranging 
 them carefully on the shelves of what he called his library, 
 and occasionally sitting alone in the same room with them. 
 But some minds seem well glaced by nature against the ad- 
 mission of knowledge, and Spike's was one of them. It was 
 not, however, entirely so with regard to politics. He had had 
 a strong opinion about the Keform Bill, and saw clearly that 
 the large trading-towns ought to send members. Portraits 
 of the Reform heroes hung framed and glazed in his library ; 
 he prided himself on being a Liberal. In this last particular, 
 as well as in not giving benefactions, and not makipg loans 
 without interest, he showed unquestionable firmness. On the 
 Repeal of the Corn Laws, again, he was thoroughly convinced. 
 His mind was expansive toward foreign markets, and his 
 imagination could see that the people from whom we took 
 corn might be able to take the cotton goods which they had 
 hitherto dispensed with. On his conduct in these political 
 concerns, his wife, otherwise influential as a woman who be- 
 longed to a family with a title in it, and who had conde- 
 scended in marrying him, could gain no hold; she had to 
 blush a little at what was called her husband's " radicalism," 
 an epithet which was a very unfair impeachment of Spike, 
 who never went to the root of anything. But he understood 
 his own trading affairs, and in this way became a genuine, 
 constant political element. If he had been born a little later 
 he could have been accepted as an eligible member of Par- 
 liament, and if he had belonged to a high family he might 
 have done for a member of the Government. Perhaps his
 
 A POLITICAL MOLECULE. 319 
 
 indifference to "views " would have passed for administrative 
 judiciousness, and he would have been so generally silent 
 that he must often have been silent in the right place. But 
 this is empty speculation; there is no warrant for saying 
 what Spike would have been and known, so as to have made 
 a calculable political element, if he had not been educated 
 by having to manage his trade. A small mind, trained to 
 useful occupation for the satisfying of private need, becomes 
 a representative of genuine class-needs. Spike objected to 
 certain items of legislation, because they hampered his own 
 trade, but his neighbor's trade was hampered by the same 
 causes ; and though he would have been simply selfish, in a 
 question of light or water between himself and a fellow- 
 townsman, his need for a change in legislation, being shared 
 by all his neighbors in trade, ceased to be simply selfish, and 
 raised him to a sense of common injury and common benefit. 
 True, if the law could have been changed for the benefit of 
 his particular business, leaving the cotton trade in general in 
 a sorry condition while he prospered, Spike might not have 
 thought that result intolerably unjust; but the nature of 
 things did not allow of such a result being contemplated as 
 possible ; it allowed of an enlarged market for Spike, only 
 through the enlargement of his neighbors' market, and the 
 Possible is always the ultimate master of our efforts and de- 
 sires. Spike was obliged to contemplate a general benefit, and 
 thus became public-spirited in spite of himself. Or rather, 
 the nature of things transmuted his active egoism into a 
 demand for a public benefit. 
 
 Certainly, if Spike had been born a marquis he could not 
 have had the same chance of being useful as a political ele- 
 ment. But he might have had the same appearance, have 
 been equally null in conversation, sceptical as to the reality 
 of pleasure, and destitute of historical knowledge, perhaps 
 even dimly disliking Jesuitism as a quality in Catholic minds, 
 or regarding Bacon as the inventor of physical science. The 
 depths of middle-aged gentlemen's ignorance will never be 
 known, for want of public examinations in this branch.
 
 THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 MORDAX is an admirable man, ardent in intellectual 
 work, public-spirited, affectionate, and able to find 
 the right words in conveying ingenious ideas or elevated 
 feeling. Pity that to all these graces he cannot add what 
 would give them the utmost finish, the occasional admis- 
 sion that he has been in the wrong, the occasional frank wel- 
 come of a new idea as something not before present to his 
 mind! But no; Mordax's self-respect seems to be of that 
 fiery quality which demands that none but the monarchs of 
 thought shall have an advantage over him, and in the pres- 
 ence of contradiction, or the threat of having his notions cor- 
 rected, he becomes astonishingly unscrupulous and cruel for 
 so kindly and conscientious a man. 
 
 "You are fond of attributing those fine qualities to 
 Mordax," said Acer, the other day, "but I have not much 
 belief in virtues that are always requiring to be asserted, in 
 spite of appearances against them. True fairness and good- 
 will show themselves precisely where his are conspicuously 
 absent I mean in recognizing claims which the rest of the 
 world are not likely to stand up for. It does not need much 
 love of truth and justice in me to say that Aldebaran is a 
 bright star, or Isaac Newton the greatest of discoverers ; or 
 much kindliness in me to want my notes to be heard above 
 the rest in a chorus of hallelujahs to one already crowned. 
 It is my way to apply tests. Does the man who has the 
 ear of the public use his advantage tenderly toward poor 
 fellows who may be hindered of their due if he treats their 
 pretensions with scorn ? That is my test of his justice and 
 benevolence."
 
 THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 321 
 
 My answer was, that his system of moral tests might be 
 as delusive as what ignorant people take to be tests of in- 
 tellect and learning. If the scholar or savant cannot answer 
 their haphazard questions on the shortest notice, their belief 
 in his capacity is shaken. But the better-informed have given 
 up the Johnsonian theory of mind as a pair of legs able to 
 walk east or west according to choice. Intellect is no longer 
 taken to be a ready-made dose of ability to attain eminence 
 (or mediocrity) in all departments ; it is even admitted that 
 application in one line of study or practice has often a lam- 
 ing effect in other directions, and that an intellectual quality 
 or special facility which is a furtherance in one medium of 
 effort is a drag in another. We have convinced ourselves 
 by this time that a man may be a sage in celestial physics, 
 and a poor creature in the purchase of seed-corn, or even in 
 theorizing about the affections ; that he may be a mere f um- 
 bler in physiology, and yet show a keen insight into human 
 motives ; that he may seein the " poor Poll " of the company 
 in conversation, and yet write with some humorous vigor. It 
 is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength 
 of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point. 
 Why should we any more apply that fallacious standard 
 of what is called consistency to a man's moral nature ; and 
 argue against the existence of fine impulses or habits of feel- 
 ing in relation to his actions generally, because those better 
 movements are absent in a class of cases which act peculiarly 
 on an irritable form of his egoism ? The mistake might be 
 corrected by our taking notice that the ungenerous words or 
 acts which seem to us the most utterly incompatible with good 
 dispositions in the offender, are those which offend ourselves. 
 All other persons are able to draw a milder conclusion. Lan- 
 iger, who has a temper but no talent for repartee, having 
 been run down in a fierce way by Mordax, is inwardly per- 
 suaded that the highly lauded man is a wolf at heart ; he is 
 much tried by perceiving that his own friends seem to think 
 no worse of the reckless assailant than they did before ; and 
 Corvus, who has lately been flattered by some kindness from 
 
 VOL. IX. XL
 
 322 ESSAYS OF GEQHGE ELIOT. 
 
 Mordax, is unmindful enough of Laniger's feeling to dwell on 
 this instance of good-nature with admiring gratitude. There 
 is a fable that wher* the badger had been stung all over by 
 bees, a bear consoled him by a rhapsodic account of how he 
 himself had just breakfasted on their honey. The badger re- 
 plied, peevishly, " The stings are in my flesh, and the sweet- 
 ness is on your muzzle-" The bear, it is said, was surprised 
 at the badger's want of altruism. 
 
 But this difference of sensibility between Laniger and his 
 friends only mirrors ip. a faint way the difference between his 
 own point of view and that of the man who has injured him. 
 If those neutral, perhaps even affectionate persons, form no 
 lively conception of what Laniger suffers, how should Mor- 
 dax have any such sympathetic imagination to check him in 
 what he persuades himself is a scourging administered by the 
 qualified man to the unqualified ? Depend upon it, his con- 
 science, though active enough in some relations, has never 
 given him a twinge because of his polemical rudeness and 
 even brutality. He would go from the room where he has 
 been tiring himself through the watches of the night, in lifting 
 and turning a sick friend, and straightway write a reply or 
 rejoinder in which, he mercilessly pilloried a Laniger who had. 
 supposed that he could tell the world something else or more 
 than had been sanctioned by the eminent Mordax and, what 
 was worse, ha4 sometimes really done so. Does this nullify 
 the genuineness of motive which made him tender to his suf- 
 fering friend ? $"ot at all. It only proves that his arrogant 
 egpism, set on fire, sends up smoke and flame where just be- 
 fore there had been the dews of fellowship and pity. He 
 is angry, and equips himself accordingly with a penknife to 
 give the offender a comprachico countenance, a mirror to show 
 him the effect, and a pair of nailed boots to give him his dis- 
 missal. All this to teach hini who the Komans really were, 
 and to purge Inquiry of incompetent intrusion, so rendering 
 an important service to mankind. 
 
 When a man is in a rage, and wants to hurt another in 
 consequence, he can always regard himself as the civil arm
 
 THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 328 
 
 of a spiritual power, and all the more easily because there is 
 real need to assert the righteous efficacy of indignation. I 
 for my part feel with the Lanigers, and should object all the 
 more to their or my being lacerated and dressed with salt, if 
 the administrator of such tbrture alleged as a motive his Care 
 for truth and posterity, and got himself pictured with a halo 
 in consequence. In transactions between fellow-men it is 
 well to consider a little, in the first place, what is fair and 
 kind toward the person immediately concerned, before we 
 spit and roast him on behalf of the next century but one. 
 Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and 
 of the highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all 
 else that touches the mixed life of the earth. They are arch- 
 angels with awful brow and flaming sword, summoning and 
 encouraging us to do the right and the divinely heroic, and 
 we feel a beneficent tremor in their presence; but to learn 
 what it is they thus summon us to do, we have to consider 
 the mortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and 
 our own appetites. I cannot feel sure how my voting will 
 affect the condition of Central Asia in the coming ages, but 
 I have good reason to believe that the future populations there 
 will be none the worse off because I abstain from conjectural 
 vilification of my opponents during the present parliamentary 
 session, and I am very sure that I shall be less injurious to 
 my contemporaries. On the whole, and in the vast majority 
 of instances, the action by which we can do the best for 
 future ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and 
 grace for contemporaries. A sour father may reform prisons, 
 but considered in his sourness he does harm. The deed of 
 Judas has been attributed to far-reaching views, and the wish 
 to hasten his Master's declaration of himself as the Messiah. 
 Perhaps I will not maintain the contrary Judas repre- 
 sented his motive in this way, and felt justified in his trai- 
 torous kiss ; but my belief that he deserved, metaphorically 
 speaking, to be where Dante saw him, at the bottom of the 
 Malebolge, would not be the less strong "because he was not 
 convinced that his action was detestable. I refuse to accept
 
 824 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 a man, who has the stomach for such treachery, as a hero 
 impatient for the redemption of mankind, and for the be- 
 ginning of a reign when the kisses shall be those of peace 
 and righteousness. 
 
 All this is by the way, to show that my apology for Mor- 
 dax was not found on his persuasion of superiority in his own 
 motives, but on the compatibility of unfair, equivocal, and 
 even cruel actions with a nature which, apart from special 
 temptations, is kindly and generous ; and also to enforce the 
 need of checks, from a fellow-feeling with those whom our 
 acts immediately (not distantly) concern. Will any one be 
 so hardy as to maintain that an otherwise worthy man cannot 
 be vain and arrogant? I think most of us have some in- 
 terest in arguing the contrary. And it is of the nature of 
 vanity and arrogance, if unchecked, to become cruel and 
 self -justifying. There are fierce beasts within ; chain them, 
 chain them, and let them learn to cower before the creature 
 with wider reason. This is what one wishes for Mordax 
 that his heart and brain should restrain the outleap of roar 
 and talons. 
 
 As to his unwillingness to admit that an idea which he 
 has not discovered is novel to him, one is surprised that 
 quick intellect and shrewd observation do not early gather 
 reasons for being ashamed of a mental trick which makes 
 one among the comic parts of that various actor, Conceited 
 Ignorance. 
 
 I have a sort of valet and factotum, an excellent, respect- 
 able servant, whose spelling is so unvitiated by non-phonetic 
 superfluities that he writes night as nit. One day, looking over 
 his accounts, I said to him jocosely : " You are in the latest 
 fashion with your spelling, Pummel; most people spell 
 ' night ' with a gh between the i and the t, but the greatest 
 scholars now spell it as you do." " So I suppose, sir," says 
 Pummel ; " I 've seen it with a gh, but I 've noways give in to 
 that myself." You would never catch Pummel in an inter- 
 jection of surprise. I have sometimes laid traps for his aston- 
 ishment ; but he has escaped them all, either by a respectful
 
 THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 325 
 
 neutrality, as of one who would not appear to notice that hia 
 master had been taking too much wine, or else by that strong 
 persuasion of his all-knowingness, which makes it simply im- 
 possible for him to feel himself newly informed. If I tell him 
 that the world is spinning round and along like a top, and that 
 he is spinning with it, he says, " Yes, I *ve heard a deal of that 
 in my time, sir," and lifts the horizontal lines of his brow 
 a little higher, balancing his head from side to side as if it 
 were too painfully full. Whether I tell him that they cook 
 puppies in China, that there are ducks with fur coats in 
 Australia, or that in some parts of the world it is the pink of 
 politeness to put your tongue out on introduction to a re- 
 spectable stranger, Pummel replies, "So I suppose, sir," with 
 an air of resignation to hearing my poor version of well- 
 known things, such as elders use in listening to lively boys 
 lately presented with an anecdote-book. His utmost con- 
 cession is that what you state is what he would have sup- 
 plied if you had given him carte blanche instead of your 
 needless instruction, and in this sense his favorite answer is, 
 "I should say." 
 
 " Pummel," I observed, a little irritated at not getting my 
 coffee, " if you were to carry your kettle and spirits of wine 
 up a mountain of a morning, your water would boil there 
 sooner." " I should say, sir." Or, " There are boiling springs 
 in Iceland. Better go to Iceland." " That 's what I Ve been 
 thinking, sir." 
 
 I have taken to asking him hard questions, and, as I 
 expected, he never admits his own inability to answer 
 them, without representing it as common to the human race. 
 "What is the cause of the tides, Pummel?" "Well, sir, 
 nobody rightly knows. Many gives their opinion, but if I 
 was to give mine, it 'ud be different." 
 
 But while he is never surprised himself, he is constantly 
 imagining situations of surprise for others. His own con- 
 sciousness is that of one so thoroughly soaked in knowledge 
 that further absorption is impossible ; but his neighbors appear 
 to him to be in the state of thirsty sponges, which it is a
 
 326 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 charity to besprinkle. His great interest in thinking of for. 
 eigners is that they must be surprised at what they see in 
 England, and especially at the beef. He is often occupied 
 with the surprise Adam must have felt at the sight of the 
 assembled animals " for he was not like us, sir, used from 
 a b'y to Wombwell's shows." He is fond of discoursing to 
 the lad who acts as shoeblack and general subaltern, and I 
 have overheard him saying to that small upstart, with some 
 severity, " Now don't you pretend to know, because the more 
 you pretend the more I see your ignirance " a lucidity on 
 his part which has confirmed my impression that the thor- 
 oughly self-satisfied person is the only one fully to appreciate 
 the charm of humility in others. 
 
 Your diffident, self -suspecting mortal is not very angry that 
 others should feel more comfortable about themselves, pro- 
 vided they are not otherwise offensive : he is rather like the 
 chilly person, glad to sit next a warmer neighbor; or the 
 timid, glad to have a courageous fellow-traveller. It cheers 
 him to observe the store of small comforts that his fellow- 
 ereatures may find in their self-complacency, just as one is 
 pleased to see poor old souls soothed by the tobacco and snuff 
 for which one has neither nose nor stomach one's self. 
 
 But your arrogant man will not tolerate a presumption 
 which he sees to be ill-founded. The service he regards so- 
 ciety as most in need of, is to put down the conceit which is 
 so particularly rife around him that he is inclined to believe 
 it the growing characteristic of the present age. In the 
 schools of Magna Graecia, or in the sixth century of our era, 
 or even under Kublai Khan, he finds a comparative freedom 
 from that presumption by which his contemporaries are stir- 
 ring his able gall. The way people will now flaunt notions 
 which are not his, without appearing to mind that they are 
 not his, strikes him as especially disgusting. It might seem 
 surprising to us that one strongly convinced of his own value 
 should prefer to exalt an age in which he did not flourish, if 
 it were not for the reflection that the present age is the only 
 >me in which anybody has appeared to undervalue him.
 
 A HALF-BREED. 
 
 AN early, deep-seated love to which we become faith- 
 less has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division 
 of soul which narrows all newer joys by the intrusion of re- 
 gret and the established presentiment of change. I refer not 
 merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas, prac- 
 tical beliefs, and social habits. And faithlessness here means 
 not a gradual conversion, dependent on enlarged knowledge, 
 but a yielding to seductive circumstance; not a conviction 
 that the original choice was a mistake, but a subjection to 
 incidents that natter a growing desire. In this sort of love 
 it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot ; for an aban- 
 doned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. The 
 child of a wandering tribe, caught young and trained to polite 
 life, if he feels a hereditary yearning, can run away to the 
 old wilds and get his nature into tune. But there is no such 
 recovery possible to the man who remembers what he once 
 believed, without being convinced that he was in error ; who 
 feels within himself unsatisfied stirrings toward old beloved 
 habits, and intimacies from which he has far receded, without 
 conscious justification or unwavering sense of superior attrac- 
 tiveness in the new. This involuntary renegade has his 
 character hopelessly jangled and out of tune. He is like an 
 organ with its stops in the lawless condition of obtruding 
 themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by 
 the most unexpected transitions the trumpet breaking in 
 on the flute, and the oboe confounding both. 
 
 Hence the lot of Mixtus affects me pathetically, notwith- 
 standing that he spends his growing wealth with liberality
 
 328 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 and manifest enjoyment. To most observers he appears to 
 be simply one of the fortunate and also sharp commercial 
 men, who began with meaning to be rich, and have become 
 what they meant to be a man never taken to be well-born, 
 but surprisingly better informed than the well-born usually 
 are, and distinguished among ordinary commercial magnates 
 by a personal kindness which prompts him not only to help 
 the suffering in a material way through his wealth, but also 
 by direct ministration of his own ; yet with all this, diffusing, 
 as it were, the odor of a man delightedly conscious of his 
 wealth, as an equivalent for the other social distinctions of 
 rank and intellect, which he can thus admire without envying. 
 Hardly one among those superficial observers can suspect that 
 he aims or has ever aimed at being a writer : still less can 
 they imagine that his mind is often moved by strong currents 
 of regret, and of the most unworldly sympathies, from the 
 memories of a youthful time when his chosen associates were 
 men and women whose only distinction was a religious, a 
 philanthropic, or an intellectual enthusiasm ; when the lady, 
 on whose words his attention most hung, was a writer of 
 minor religious literature ; when he was a visitor and exhorter 
 of the poor in the alleys of a great provincial town, and when 
 he attended the lectures given especially to young men by 
 Mr. Apollos, the eloquent Congregational preacher, who had 
 studied in Germany, and had liberal advanced views, then 
 far beyond the ordinary teaching of his sect. At that time 
 Mixtus thought himself a young man of socially reforming 
 ideas, of religious principles and religious yearnings. It was 
 within his prospects also to be rich, but he looked forward to 
 a use of his riches chiefly for reforming and religious pur- 
 poses. His opinions were of a strongly democratic stamp; 
 except that even then, belonging to the class of employers, 
 he was opposed to all demands in the employed that would 
 restrict the expansiveness of trade. He was the most demo- 
 cratic in relation to the unreasonable privileges of the aris. 
 tocracy and landed interest, and he had also a religious sense 
 of brotherhood with the poor. Altogether he was a sincerely
 
 A HALF-BREED. 329 
 
 benevolent young man, interested in ideas, and renouncing 
 personal ease for the sake of study, religious communion, and 
 good works. If you had known him then, you would have 
 expected him to marry a highly serious and perhaps literary 
 woman, sharing his benevolent and religious habits, and likely 
 to encourage his studies a woman who, along with himself, 
 would play a distinguished part in one of the most enlight-' 
 ened religious circles of a great provincial capital. 
 
 How is it that Mixtus finds himself in a London mansion, 
 and in society totally unlike that which made the ideal of 
 his younger years ? And whom did he marry ? 
 
 Why, he married Scintilla, who fascinated him, as she had 
 fascinated others, by her prettiness, her liveliness, and her 
 music. It is a common enough case, that of a man being 
 suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his 
 ideal ; or, if not wholly captivated, at least effectively cap- 
 tured, by a combination of circumstances, along with an un- 
 warily manifested inclination which might otherwise have 
 been transient. Mixtus was captivated and then captured 
 on the worldly side of his disposition, which had-been always 
 growing and flourishing side by side with his philanthropic 
 and religious tastes. He had ability in business, and he had 
 early meant to be rich ; also, he was getting rich, and the 
 taste for such success was naturally growing with the pleas- 
 ure of rewarded exertion. It was during a business sojourn 
 in London that he met Scintilla, who, though without for- 
 tune, associated with families of Greek merchants living in 
 a style of splendor, and with artists patronized by such 
 wealthy entertainers. Mixtus on this occasion became famil- 
 iar with a world in which wealth seemed the key to a more 
 brilliant sort of dominance than that of a religious patron in 
 the provincial circles of X. Would it not be possible to 
 unite the two kinds of sway ? A man bent on the most use- 
 ful ends might, with a fortune large enough, make morality 
 magnificent, and recommend religious principle by showing 
 it in combination with the best kind of house and the most 
 liberal of tables ; also with, a wife whose graces, wit, and
 
 330 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 accomplishments gave a finish sometimes lacking, even to 
 establishments got up with that unhesitating worldliness to 
 Which high cost is a sufficient reason. Enough. 
 
 Mixtus married Scintilla. Now this lively lady knew 
 nothing of Non-conformists, except that they were unfashion- 
 able ; she did not distinguish one conventicle from another ; 
 and Mr. Apollos, with his enlightened interpretations, seemed 
 to her as heavy a bore, if not quite so ridiculous, as Mr. Johns 
 could have been, with his solemn twang, at the Baptist chapel 
 in the lowest suburbs, or as a local preacher among the Meth- 
 odists. In general, people who appeared seriously to believe 
 in any sort of doctrine, whether religious, social, or philo- 
 sophical, seemed rather absurd to Scintilla. Ten to one these 
 theoretic people pronounced oddly, had some reason or other 
 for saying that the most agreeable things were wrong, wore 
 objectionable clothes, and wanted you to subscribe to some- 
 thing. They were probably ignorant of art and music, did 
 not understand badinage, and, in fact, could talk of nothing 
 amusing. In Scintilla's eyes the majority of persons were 
 ridiculous, and deplorably wanting in that keen perception 
 of what was good taste with which she herself was blessed by 
 nature and education ; but the people understood to be re- 
 ligious, or otherwise theoretic, were the most ridiculous of 
 all, without being proportionately amusing and invitable. 
 
 Did Mixtus not discover this view of Scintilla's before 
 their marriage ? Or did he allow her to remain in ignorance 
 of habits and opinions which had made half the occupation 
 of his youth ? 
 
 When a man is inclined to marry a particular woman, and 
 has made any committal of himself, this woman's opinions, 
 however different from his own, are readily regarded as part 
 of her pretty ways, especially if they are merely negative ; 
 as, for example, that she does riot insist on the Trinity, or on 
 the rightfulness or expediency of Church rates, but simply 
 regards her lover's troubling himself in disputation on these 
 heads as stuff and nonsense. The man feels his own superior 
 Itrength, and is sure that marriage will make no difference
 
 A HALF-BREED. 831 
 
 to him on the subjects about which he is in earnest. And 
 to laugh at men's affairs is a woman's privilege, tending to 
 enliven the domestic hearth. If Scintilla had no liking 
 for the best sort of Non-conformity, she was without any 
 troublesome bias toward Episcopacy, Anglicanism, and early 
 sacraments, and was quite contented not to go to church. 
 
 As to Scintilla's acquaintance with fyer lover's tastes on 
 these subjects, she was equally convinced on her side that a 
 husband's queer ways, while he was a bachelor, would be easily 
 laughed out of him when he had married an adroit woman. 
 Mixtus, she felt, was an excellent creature, quite likable, who 
 was getting rich ; and Scintilla meant to have all the advan- 
 tages of a rich man's wife. She was not in the least a wicked 
 woman; she was simply a pretty animal of the ape kin4j 
 with an aptitude for certain accomplishments, which educa- 
 tion had made the most of. 
 
 But we have seen what has been the result to poor Mixtus.' 
 He has become richer even than he dreamed of being, has a 
 little palace in London, and entertains with splendor the half- 
 aristocratic, professional, and artistic society which he is 
 proud to think select. This society regards him as a clever 
 fellow in his particular branch, seeing that he has become a 
 considerable capitalist, and as a man desirable to have on the 
 list of one's acquaintance. But from every other point of 
 view Mixtus finds himself personally submerged : what he 
 happens to think is not felt by his esteemed guests to be of 
 any consequence ; and what he used to think, with the ardor 
 of conviction, he now hardly ever expresses. He is trans- 
 planted, and the sap within him has long been diverted intp 
 other than the old lines of vigorous growth. How could he 
 speak to the artist Crespi, or to Sir Hong Kong Bantam, 
 about the enlarged doctrine of Mr. Apollos ? How could he 
 mention to them his former efforts toward evangelizing the 
 inhabitants of the X. alleys ? And his references to his his- 
 torical and geographical studies, toward a survey of possible 
 markets for English produpts, are received with an air of 
 ironical suspicion by many of his political friends, who take
 
 332 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 his pretension to give advice concerning the Amazon, the 
 Euphrates, and the Niger, as equivalent to the currier's wide 
 views on the applicability of leather. He can only make a 
 figure through his genial hospitality. It is in vain that he 
 buys the best pictures and statues of the best artists. Nobody 
 will call him a judge in art. If his pictures and statues are 
 well chosen, it is generally thought that Scintilla told him 
 what to buy; and yet Scintilla, in other connections, is 
 spoken of as having only a superficial and often questionable 
 taste. Mixtus, it is decided, is a good fellow, not ignorant, 
 no really having a good deal of knowledge as well as sense, 
 but not easy to classify otherwise than as a rich man. He 
 has, consequently, become a little uncertain as to his own 
 point of view ; and in his most unreserved moments of friendly 
 intercourse, even when speaking to listeners whom he thinks 
 likely to sympathize with the earlier part of his career, he 
 presents himself in all his various aspects, and feels himself 
 in turn what he has been, what he is, and what others take 
 him to be (for this last status is what we must all more or 
 less accept). He will recover with some glow of enthusiasm 
 the vision of his old associates, the particular limit he was 
 once accustomed to trace of freedom in religious speculation, 
 and his old ideal of a worthy life ; but he will presently pass 
 to the argument that money is the only means by which you 
 can get what is best worth having in the world, and will 
 arrive at the exclamation, " Give me money ! " with the tone 
 and gesture of a man who both feels and knows. Then if one 
 of his audience, not having money, remarks that a man may 
 have made up his mind to do without money, because he pre- 
 fers something else, Mixtus is with him immediately, cor- 
 dially concurring in the supreme value of mind and genius, 
 which indeed make his own chief delight, in that he is able 
 to entertain the admirable possessors of these attributes at his 
 own table, though not himself reckoned among them. Yet he 
 will proceed to observe there was a time when he sacrificed his 
 sleep to study ; and even now, amidst the press of business, he 
 from time to time thinks of taking up the manuscripts which
 
 A HALF-BREED. 333 
 
 he hopes some day to complete, and is always increasing his 
 collection of valuable works bearing on his favorite topics. 
 And it is true that he has read much in certain directions, 
 and can remember what he has read ; he knows the history 
 and theories of colonization, and the social condition of 
 countries that do not at present consume a sufficiently large 
 share of our products and manufactures. He continues his 
 early habit of regarding the spread of Christianity as a great 
 result of our commercial intercourse with black, brown, and 
 yellow populations ; but this is an idea not spoken of in the 
 sort of fashionable society that Scintilla collects round her 
 husband's table ; and Mixtus now philosophically reflects that 
 the cause must come before the effect, and that the thing to 
 be directly striven for is the commercial intercourse not 
 excluding a little war, if that also should prove needful as a 
 pioneer of Christianity. He has long been wont to feel bash- 
 ful about his former religion, as if it were an old attachment, 
 having consequences which he did not abandon but kept in 
 decent privacy, his avowed objects and actual position being 
 incompatible with their public acknowledgment. 
 
 There is the same kind of fluctuation in his aspect toward 
 social questions and duties. He has not lost the kindness 
 that used to make him a benefactor and succorer of the needy, 
 and he is still liberal in helping forward the clever and indus- 
 trious ; but in his active superintendence of commercial un- 
 dertakings he has contracted more and more of the bitterness 
 which capitalists and employers often feel to be a reason- 
 able mood toward obstructive proletaries. Hence many who 
 have occasionally met him when trade questions were being 
 discussed, conclude him to be indistinguishable from the 
 ordinary run of moneyed and money-getting men. Indeed, 
 hardly any of his acquaintances know what Mixtus really is, 
 considered as a whole uor does Mixtus himself know it.
 
 DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 
 
 " TL ne faut pas jnettre un ridicule oh il n'y en a point : c'est 
 _L se gater le gout, c'est corrompre son jugement et celui 
 des autres. Mais le ridicule qui est quelque part, il faut 1'y 
 voir, Ten tirer avec grace et d'une maniere qui plaise et qui 
 instruise." 
 
 I am fond of quoting this passage from La Bruyere, because 
 the subject is one where J like to show a Frenchman on my 
 side, to save my sentiments from being set down to my pecul- 
 iar dulness and deficient sense of tjie ludicrous \ and also that 
 they may profit by that enhancement of ideas when presented 
 in a foreign tongue, that glamour of unfamiliarity conferring 
 a dignity on the foreign names of very common things, of 
 which even a philosopher like Dugald Stewart confesses the 
 influence. I remember hearing a fervid woman attempt to 
 recite in English the narrative of a begging Frenchman, who 
 described the violent death of his father in the July days. 
 The narrative had impressed her, through the mists of her 
 flushed anxiety to understand it, as something quite grandly 
 pathetic ; but rinding the facts turn out meagre, and her audi- 
 ence cold, she broke off, saying, " It sounded so much finer 
 in French J'ai vu le sang de mon pere and so on I wish I 
 could repeat it in French." This was a pardonable illusion, 
 in an old-fashioned lady, who had not received the polyglot 
 education of the present (Jay ; but I observe that even now 
 much nonsense and bad taste win admiring acceptance solely 
 by virtue of the French language, and one may fairly desire 
 that what seems just discrimination should profit by the 
 fashionable prejudice in favor of La Bruyere'a idiom. But
 
 DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 335 
 
 I wish he had added that the habit of dragging the ludicrous 
 into topics where the chief interest is of a different or even 
 opposite kind, is a sign not of endowment but of deficiency. 
 The art of spoiling is within reach of the dullest faculty : 
 the coarsest clown, with a hammtr in his hand, might chip 
 the nose off every statue and bust in the Vatican, and stand 
 grinning at the effect of his work. Because wit is an exqui- 
 site product of high powers, we are not therefore forced to 
 admit the sadly confused inference of the monotonous jester, 
 that he is establishing his superiority over every less face- 
 tious person, and over every topic on which he is ignorant 
 or insensible, by being uneasy until he has distorted it in 
 the small cracked mirror which he carries about with him 
 as a joking apparatus. Some high authority is needed to 
 give many worthy and timid persons the freedom of muscular 
 repose, under the growing demand on them to laugh when 
 they have no other reason than the peril of being taken for 
 dullards ; still more, to inspire them with the courage to say 
 that they object to the theatrical spoiling, for themselves and 
 their children, of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds 
 and aims of men, by burlesque associations, adapted to ttyp 
 taste of rich fishmongers in the stalls and their assistants iu 
 the gallery. The English people in the present generation 
 are falsely reputed to know Shakspeare (as by some inno- 
 cent persons the Florentine mule-drivers are believed to have 
 known the "Divina Commedia," not, perhaps, excluding all the 
 subtle discourses in the Purgatorio and Paradiso) ; but there 
 seems a clear prospect that in the coming generation he 
 will be known to them through burlesques, and that his 
 plays will find a new life as pantomimes. A bottle-nosed 
 Lear will come on with a monstrous corpulence, from which 
 he will frantically dance himself free during the midnight 
 storm; Rosalind and Celia will join in a grotesque ballet 
 with shepherds and shepherdesses; Opuelia, in fleshings 
 and a voluminous brevity of grenadine, will dance through 
 the mad scene, finishing with the famous "attitude of the 
 scissors" in the arms of Laertes j and all the speeches in
 
 336 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 "Hamlet" will be so ingeniously parodied that the origi- 
 nals will be reduced to a mere memoria technica of the im- 
 prover's puns premonitory signs of a hideous millennium, 
 in which the lion will have to lie down with the lascivious 
 monkeys, whom (if we may trust Pliny) his soul naturally 
 abhors. 
 
 I have been amazed to find that some artists, whose own 
 works have the ideal stamp, are quite insensible to the damag- 
 ing tendency of the burlesquing spirit which ranges to and 
 fro, and up and down, on the earth, seeing no reason (except 
 a precarious censorship) why it should not appropriate every 
 sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme which serves to make up 
 the treasure of human admiration, hope, and love. One 
 would have thought that their own half-despairing efforts to 
 invest in worthy outward shape the vague inward impressions 
 of sublimity, and the consciousness of an implicit ideal in the 
 commonest scenes, might have made them susceptible of 
 some disgust or alarm at a species of burlesque which is 
 likely to render their compositions no better than a dissolv- 
 ing view, where every noble form is seen melting into its 
 preposterous caricature. It used to be imagined of the 
 unhappy mediaeval Jews that they parodied Calvary by cru- 
 cifying dogs ; if they had been guilty, they would at least 
 have had the excuse of the hatred and rage begotten by 
 persecution. Are we on the way to a parody which shall 
 have no other excuse than the reckless search after fodder 
 for degraded appetites after the pay to be earned by pas- 
 turing Circe's herd where they may defile every monument 
 of that growing life which should have kept them human ? 
 
 The world seems to me well supplied with what is genu- 
 inely ridiculous ; wit and humor may play as harmlessly or 
 beneficently round the changing facets of egoism, absurdity, 
 and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling sea or the dewy 
 meadows. Why should we make our delicious sense of the 
 ludicrous with its invigorating shocks of laughter, and its 
 irrepressible smiles, which are the outglow of an inward 
 radiation as gentle and cheering as the warmth of morning
 
 DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 337 
 
 flourish like a brigand on the robbery of our mental wealth ? 
 or let it take its exercise as a madman might, if allowed a 
 free nightly promenade, by drawing the populace with bon- 
 fires which leave some venerable structure a blackened ruin, 
 or send a scorching smoke across the portraits of the past, at 
 which we once looked with a loving recognition of fellowship, 
 and disfigure them into butts of mockery ? nay, worse, 
 use it to degrade the healthy appetites and affections of oui 
 nature, as they are seen to be degraded in insane patients, 
 whose system, all out of joint, finds matter for screaming 
 laughter in mere topsy-turvy, makes every passion preposter- 
 ous or obscene, and turns the hard-won order of life into a 
 second chaos, hideous enough to make one wail that the first 
 was ever thrilled with light ? 
 
 This is what I call debasing the moral currency : lowering 
 the value of every inspiring fact and tradition, so that it will 
 command less and less of the spiritual products, the generous 
 motives, which sustain the charm and elevation of our social 
 existence the something besides bread by which man saves 
 his soul alive. The bread-winner of the family may demand 
 more and more coppery shillings or assignats or greenbacks 
 for his day's work, and so get the needful quantum of food ; 
 but let that moral currency be emptied of its value, let a 
 greedy buffoonery debase all historic beauty, majesty, and 
 pathos, and the more you heap up the desecrated symbols, 
 the greater will be the lack of the ennobling emotions which 
 subdue the tyranny of suffering, and make ambition one with 
 social virtue. 
 
 And yet, it seems, parents will put into the hands of their 
 children ridiculous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous 
 illustrations) of the poems which stirred their own ten- 
 derness or filial piety, and carry them to make their first 
 acquaintance with great men, great works, or solemn crises, 
 through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque, which, 
 with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among 
 their primary associations, and reduce them, throughout their 
 time of studious preparation for life, to the moral imbecility 
 VOL. ir. ~2
 
 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 of an inward giggle at what might have stimulated their high 
 emulation, or fed the fountains of compassion, trust, and con- 
 stancy. One wonders where these parents have deposited 
 that stock of morally educating stimuli which is to be inde- 
 pendent of poetic tradition, and to subsist, in spite of the 
 finest images being degraded, and the finest works of 
 genius being poisoned as with some befooling drug. 
 
 Will fine wit, will exquisite humor, prosper the more 
 through this turning of all things indiscriminately into food 
 for a gluttonous laughter, an idle craving, without sense of 
 flavors ? On the contrary. That delightful power which La 
 Bruyere points to " le ridicule qui est quejque part, il f aut 
 1'y voir, Pen tirer avec grace et d'une maniere qui plaise et 
 qui instruise " depends on a discrimination only compatible 
 with the varied sensibilities which give sympathetic insight, 
 and with the justice of perception which is another name for 
 grave knowledge. Such a result is no more to be expected 
 from faculties on the strain to find some small hook by which 
 they may attach the lowest incongruity to the most moment- 
 ous subject, than it is to be expected of a sharper, watching 
 for gulls in a great political assemblage, that he will notice 
 the blundering logic of partisan speakers, or season his obser- 
 vation with the salt of historical parallels. But after all 
 our psychological teaching, and in the midst of our zeal for 
 education, we are still, most of us, at the stage of believing 
 that mental powers and habits have somehow, qot perhaps in 
 the general statement but in any particular case, a kind of 
 spiritual glaze against conditions which we are continually 
 applying to them. We soak our children in habits of con- 
 tempt and exultant gibing, and yet are confident that, as 
 Clarissa one day said to me, " We can always teach them to 
 be reverent in the right place, you know." And doubtless if 
 she were to take her boys to see a burlesque Socrates, with 
 swollen legs, dying in the utterance of cockney puns, and 
 were to hang up a sketch of this comic scene among their 
 bedroom prints, she would think this preparation not at all 
 to the prejudice of their emotions on hearing their tutor read
 
 DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 339 
 
 that narrative of the " Apology," which has been consecrated 
 by the reverent gratitude of ages. This is the impoverishment 
 that threatens our posterity : a new Famine, a meagre fiend, 
 with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a moral mildew 
 over the harvest of our human sentiments. These are the 
 most delicate elements of our too easily perishable civiliza- 
 tion. And here again I like to quote a French testimony. 
 Sainte-Beuve, referring to a time of insurrectionary disturb- 
 ance, says : " Kien de plus prompt a baisser que la civilise 
 tion dans les crises comme celle-ci ; on perd en trois semaineg 
 le resultat de plusieurs siecles; La civilisation, la vie, est une 
 chose apprise et invented, qu'on le sache bien : ' Invenias aut 
 qui vitam excoluere per artes.' J.es homines apres quelques 
 annees de paix oublient trope cette verite: ils arrivent a 
 croire que la culture est chose innee, qu'elle est la meme chose 
 que la nature. La sauvagerie est toujours la a deux pas, et, 
 des qu'on lache pied, elle recommence." We have been 
 severely enough taught (if we were willing to learn) that our 
 civilization, considered as a splendid material fabric, is help- 
 lessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments or 
 ideal feelings. And it is this invisible police which we had 
 need, as a community, strive to maintain in efficient force. 
 How if a dangerous " Swing " were sometimes disguised in a 
 versatile entertainer, devoted to the amusement of mixed 
 audiences ? And I confess that sometimes when I see a cer- 
 tain style of a young lady, who checks our tender admiration 
 with rouge and henna and all the blazonry of an extravagant 
 expenditure, with slang and bold brusguerie intended to sig- 
 nify her emancipated view of things, and the cynical mockery 
 which she mistakes for penetration, I am sorely tempted to 
 hiss out " Petroleuse ! " It is a small matter to have our pal- 
 aces set aflame, compared with the misery of having our sense 
 of a noble womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purify ing ( 
 shame, the promise of life-penetrating affection, stained and' 
 blotted out by images of repulsiveness. These things come 
 not of higher education but of dull ignorance, fostered into 
 pertness by the greedy vulgarity which reverses Peter's vision-
 
 840 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 ary lesson, and learns to call all things common and unclean. 
 It comes of debasing the moral currency. 
 
 The Tirynthians, according to an ancient story reported 
 by Athenaeus, becoming conscious that their trick of laughter 
 at everything and nothing was making them unfit for the con- 
 duct of serious affairs, appealed to the Delphic oracle for 
 some means of cure. The god prescribed a peculiar form of 
 sacrifice, which would be effective if they could carry it 
 through without laughing. They did their best; but the 
 flimsy joke of a boy upset their unaccustomed gravity, and in 
 this way the oracle taught them that even the gods could not 
 prescribe a quick cure for a long vitiation, or give power and 
 dignity to a people who, in a crisis of the public well-being, 
 were at the mercy of a poor jest.
 
 THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE 
 HONEY-COMB. 
 
 "VTO man, I imagine, would object more strongly than 
 -i-N Euphorion to communistic principles in relation to ma- 
 terial property, but with regard to property in ideas he enter- 
 tains such principles willingly, and is disposed to treat the 
 distinction between Mine and Thine in original authorship as 
 egoistic, narrowing, and low. I have known him, indeed, 
 insist, at some expense of erudition, on the prior right of an 
 ancient, a mediaeval, or an eighteenth-century writer to be 
 credited with a view or statement lately advanced with some 
 show of originality ; and this championship seems to imply 
 a nicety of conscience toward the dead. He is evidently 
 unwilling that his neighbors should get more credit than is 
 due to them, and in this way he appears to recognize a cer- 
 tain proprietorship even in spiritual production. But per- 
 haps it is no real inconsistency that, with regard to many 
 instances of modern origination, it is his habit to talk with a 
 Gallic largeness and refer to the universe : he expatiates on 
 the diffusive nature of intellectual products, free and all- 
 embracing as the liberal air ; on the infinitesimal smallness of 
 individual origination compared with the massive inheritance 
 of thought on which every new generation enters ; on that 
 growing preparation for every epoch through which certain 
 ideas or modes of view are said to be in the air, and, still 
 more metaphorically speaking, to be inevitably absorbed, so 
 that every one may be excused for not knowing how he got 
 them. Above all, he insists on the proper subordination of 
 the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea or combination
 
 342 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 which, being produced by the sum total of the human race, 
 must belong to that multiple entity, from the accomplished 
 lecturer or popularizer who transmits it, to the remotest gen- 
 eration of Fuegians or Hottentots, however indifferent these 
 may be to the superiority of their right above that of the 
 eminently perishable dyspeptic author. 
 
 One may admit that stwh considerations carry a profound 
 truth, to be even religiously contemplated, and yet object all 
 the more to the mode in which Euphorion seems to apply 
 them. I protest against the use of these majestic conceptions 
 to do the dirty work of unscrapulosity, and justify the non- 
 payment of conscious debts, which cannot be defined or en- 
 forced by the law ; especially since it is observable that the 
 large views as to intellectual property, which can apparently 
 reconcile an able person to the use of lately borrowed ideas 
 as if they were his own, when this spoliation is favored by- 
 the public darkness, never hinder him from joining in the 
 zealous tribute of recognition and applause to those warriors 
 of truth whose triumphal arches are seen in the public ways, 
 those conquerors whose battles and " annexations " even the 
 carpenters and bricklayers know by name. Surely the ac- 
 knowledgment of a mental debt which will not be imme- 
 diately detected, and may never be asserted, is a case to 
 which the traditional susceptibility to "debts of honor" 
 would be suitably transferred. There is no massive public 
 opinion that can be expected to tell on these relations o* 
 thinkers and investigators^ relations to be thoroughly under- 
 stood and felt only by those who are interested in the life of 
 ideas and acquainted with their history. To lay false claim 
 to an invention or discovery which has an immediate market 
 value ; to vamp up a professedly new book of reference by 
 stealing from the pages of one already produced at the cost 
 of much labor and material ; to copy somebody else's poem 
 and send the manuscript to a magazine, or hand it about 
 among friends as an original " effusion ; " to deliver an ele- 
 gant extract from a known writer as a piece of improvised 
 eloquence these are the limits within which the dishonest
 
 THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEY-COMB. 343 
 
 pretence of originality is likely to get hissed or hooted, and 
 bring more or less shame on the culprit. It is not necessary 
 to understand the merit of a performance, or even to spell 
 with any comfortable confidence, in order to perceive at once 
 that such pretences are not respectable. But the difference 
 between these vulgar frauds these devices of ridiculous jays, 
 whose ill-secured plumes are seen falling off them as they 
 run and the quiet appropriation of other people's philosophic 
 or scientific ideas, can hardly be held to lie in their moral 
 quality, unless we take impunity as our criterion. The 
 pitiable jays had no presumption in their favor, and foolishly 
 fronted an alert incredulity ; but Euphorion, the accomplished 
 theorist, has an audience who expect much of him, and take 
 it as the most natural thing in the world that every unusual 
 view which he presents anonymously should be due solely to 
 his ingenuity. His borrowings are no incongruous feathers, 
 awkwardly stuck on; they have an appropriateness which 
 makes them seem an answer to anticipation, like the return 
 phrases of a melody. Certainly one cannot help the ignorant 
 conclusions of polite society ; and there are, perhaps, fashion- 
 able persons who, if a speaker has occasion to explain what 
 the occiput is, will consider that he has lately discovered that 
 curiously named portion of the animal frame. One cannot 
 give a genealogical introduction to every long-stored item of 
 fact or conjecture that may happen to be a revelation for the 
 large class of persons who are understood to judge soundly 
 on a small basis of knowledge ; but Euphorion would be Very 
 sorry to have it supposed that he is unacquainted with the 
 history of ideas, and sometimes carries even into minutiae 
 the evidence of his exact registration of names in connection 
 with quotable phrases or suggestions. I can therefore only 
 explain the apparent infirmity of his memory in cases of 
 larger " conveyance " by supposing that he is accustomed, by 
 the very association of largeness, to range them at once under 
 those grand laws of the universe in the light of which Mine 
 and Thine disappear and are resolved into Everybody's or 
 Nobody's ; and one man's particular obligations to another
 
 344 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 melt untraceably into the obligations of the earth to the solar 
 system in general. 
 
 Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowl- 
 edgment were brought home to him, would probably take a 
 narrower ground of explanation. It was a lapse of memory ; 
 or it did not occur to him as necessary in this case to men- 
 tion a name, the source being well known; or (since this 
 seems usually to act as a strong reason for mention) he rather 
 abstained from adducing the name because it might injure 
 the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure trade-mark 
 casts discredit on a good commodity, and even on the retailer 
 who has furnished himself from a quarter not likely to be es- 
 teemed firstrate. No doubt this last is a genuine and fre- 
 quent reason for the non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to 
 what one may call impersonal as well as personal sources: 
 even an American editor of school classics, whose own Eng- 
 lish could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of the 
 cheapest sort, felt it unfavorable to his reputation for sound 
 learning that he should be obliged to the " Penny Cyclopaedia," 
 and disguised his references to it under contractions in which 
 Us. Knowl. took the place of the low word Penny. Works of 
 this convenient stamp, easily obtained and well nourished 
 with matter, are felt to be like rich but unfashionable re- 
 lations, who are visited and received in privacy, and whose 
 capital is used or inherited without any ostentatious insist- 
 ence on their names and places of abode. As to memory, it 
 is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts 
 which are less flattering to our self-love when it does not 
 retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy 
 spots with a warning flag over them. But it is always in- 
 teresting to bring forward eminent names, such as Patricius 
 or Scaliger, Euler or Lagrange, Bopp or Humboldt. To 
 know exactly what has been drawn from them is erudition, 
 and heightens our own influence, which seems advantageous 
 to mankind ; whereas to cite an author whose ideas may pass 
 as higher currency under our own signature, can have no ob- 
 ject except the contradictory one of throwing the illumination
 
 THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEY-COMB. 345 
 
 over his figure, when it is important to be seen one's self. 
 All these reasons must weigh considerably with those spec- 
 ulative persons who have to ask themselves whether or not 
 Universal Utilitarianism requires that in the particular in- 
 stance before them they should injure a man who has been of 
 service to them, and rob a fellow-workman of the credit 
 which is due to him. 
 
 After all, however, it must be admitted that hardly any 
 accusation is more difficult to prove, and more liable to be 
 false, than that of a plagiarism which is the conscious theft 
 of ideas and deliberate reproduction of them as original. 
 The arguments on the side of acquittal are obvious and 
 strong the inevitable coincidences of contemporary think* 
 ing, and our continual experience of finding notions turning 
 up in our minds without any label on them to tell us whence 
 they came ; so that if we are in the habit of expecting much 
 from our own capacity we accept them at once as a new 
 inspiration. Then, \n relation to the elder authors, there is 
 the difficulty first of learning and then of remembering 
 exactly what has been wrought into the backward tapestry of 
 the world's history, together with the fact that ideas acquired 
 long ago reappear as the sequence of an awakened interest or 
 a line of inquiry which is really new in us ; whence it is con- 
 ceivable that if we were ancients some of us might be offering 
 grateful hecatombs by mistake, and proving our honesty in a 
 ruinously expensive manner. On the other hand, the evi- 
 dence on which plagiarism is concluded is often of a kind 
 which, though much trusted in questions of erudition and 
 historical criticism, is apt to lead us injuriously astray in our 
 daily judgments, especially of the resentful, condemnatory 
 Hort. How Pythagoras came by his ideas, whether St. Paul 
 was acquainted with all the Greek poets, what Tacitus must 
 iiave known by hearsay and systematically ignored, are points 
 on which a false persuasion of knowledge is less damaging to 
 justice and charity than an erroneous confidence, supported 
 by reasoning fundamentally similar, of my neighbor's blame- 
 worthy behavior in a case where I am personally concerned.
 
 346 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELlOT. 
 
 No premises require closer scrutiny than those which lead to 
 the constantly echoed conclusion, " He must have known," or 
 " He must have read." I marvel that this facility of belief 
 on the side of knowledge can subsist under the daily demon- 
 stration that the easiest of all things to the human mind is 
 not to know and not to read. Td praise, to blame, to shout, 
 grin, or hiss, where others shout, grin, or hiss these are 
 native tendencies; but to know and to read are artificial, hard 
 accomplishments, concerning which the only safe supposition 
 is, that as little of them has been done as the case admits. 
 An authorj keenly conscious of having written, can hardly 
 help imagining his condition of lively interest to be shared 
 by others ; just as we are all apt to suppose that the chill or 
 heat we are conscious of must be general, or even to think 
 that our sons and daughters, our pet schemes, and our 
 quarrelling correspondence, are themes to which intelligent 
 persons will listen long without weariness. But if the ardent 
 author happen to be alive to practical teaching, he will soon 
 learn to divide the larger part of the enlightened public into 
 those who have not read him, and think it necessary to tell 
 him so when they meet him in polite society, and those who 
 have equally abstained from reading him, but wish to con- 
 ceal this negation, and speak of his " incomparable works " 
 with that trust in testimony which always has its cheering 
 tide. 
 
 Hence it is worse than foolish to entertain silent suspi- 
 cions of plagiarism, stili more to give them voice, when they 
 are founded on a construction of probabilities which a little 
 more attention to every-day occurrences, as a guide in reason- 
 ing, would show us to be really worthless, Considered as proof. 
 The length to which one man's memory can go in letting drop 
 associations that are vital to another can hardly find a limit. 
 It is not to be supposed that a person desirous to make an 
 agreeable impression on you would deliberately choose to 
 insist to you, with some rhetorical sharpness, on an argument 
 which you were the first to elaborate in public ; yet any who 
 listens may overhear such instances of obliviousaess. Ytu
 
 THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEY-COMB. 347 
 
 naturally remember your peculiar connection with your 
 acquaintance's judicious views; but why should he? Your 
 fatherhood, which is an intense feeling to you, is only an 
 additional fact of meagre interest for him to remember ; and 
 a sense of obligation to the particular living fellow-straggler 
 who has helped us in our thinking, is not yet a form of mem- 
 ory the want of which is felt to be disgraceful or derogatory, 
 unless it is taken to be a want of polite instruction, or causes 
 the missing of a cockade on a day of celebration. In our 
 suspicions of plagiarism we must recognize, as the first 
 weighty probability, that what we, who feel injured, remember 
 best is precisely what is least likely to enter lastingly into the 
 memory of our neighbors. But it is fair to maintain that the 
 neighbor who borrows your property, loses it for awhile, and 
 when it turns up again forgets your connection with it and 
 counts it his own, shows himself so much the feebler in 
 grasp and rectitude of mind. Some absent persons cannot 
 remember the state of wear in their own hats and umbrellas, 
 and have no mental check to tell them that they have car- 
 ried home a fellow-visitor's more recent purchase. They may 
 be excellent householders, far removed from the suspicion of 
 low devices, but one wishes them a more correct perception, 
 and a more wary sense that a neighbor's umbrella may be 
 newer than their own. 
 
 True, some persons are so constituted that the very excel- 
 lence of an idea seems to them a convincing reason that it 
 must be, if not solely, yet especially theirs. It fits in so 
 beautifully with their general wisdom, it lies implicitly in so 
 many of their manifested opinions, that, if they have not yet 
 expressed it (because of preoccupation), it is clearly a part of 
 their indigenous produce, and is proved by their immediate 
 eloquent promulgation of it to belong more naturally and 
 appropriately to them than to the person who seemed first to 
 have alighted on it, and who sinks in their all-originating 
 consciousness to that low kind of entity, a second cause. 
 This is not lunacy, or pretence, but a genuine state of mind 
 Very effective in practice, and often carrying the public with
 
 348 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 it, so that the poor Columbus is found to be a very faulty 
 adventurer, and the continent is named after Amerigo. 
 Lighter examples of this instinctive appropriation are con- 
 stantly met with among brilliant talkers. Aquila is too 
 agreeable and amusing for any one, who is not himself bent 
 on display, to be angry at his conversational rapine his 
 habit of darting down on every morsel of booty that other 
 birds may hold in their beaks, with an innocent air, as if it 
 were all intended for his use, and honestly counted on by 
 him as a tribute in kind. Hardly any man, I imagine, can 
 have had less trouble in gathering a showy stock of informa- 
 tion than Aquila. On close inquiry you would probably find 
 that he had not read one epoch-making book of modern 
 times, for he has a career which obliges him to much cor- 
 respondence and other official work, and he is too fond of 
 being in company to spend his leisure moments in study; 
 but to his quick eye, ear, and tongue, a few predatory 
 excursions in conversation, where there are instructed persons, 
 gradually furnish surprisingly clever modes of statement and 
 allusion on the dominant topic. When he first adopts a 
 subject he necessarily falls into mistakes, and it is interesting 
 to watch his gradual progress into fuller information and 
 better nourished irony, without his ever needing to admit 
 that he has made a blunder or to appear conscious of correc- 
 tion. Suppose, for example, he had incautiously founded 
 some ingenious remarks on a hasty reckoning that nine 
 thirteens made a hundred and two, and the insignificant 
 Bantam, hitherto silent, seemed to spoil the flow of ideas by 
 stating that the product could not be taken as less than a 
 hundred and seventeen. Aquila would glide on in the most 
 graceful manner, from a repetition of his previous remark to 
 the continuation "All this is on the supposition that a 
 hundred and two were all that could be got out of nine thir- 
 teens, but as all the world knows that nine thirteens will 
 yield," etc. proceeding straightway into a new train of 
 ingenious consequences, and causing Bantam to be regarded 
 by all present as one of those slow persons who take irony
 
 THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEY-COMB. 349 
 
 for ignorance, and who would warn the weasel to keep awake. 
 How should a small-eyed, feebly crowing mortal like him be 
 quicker in arithmetic than the keen-faced, forcible Aquila, in 
 whom universal knowledge is easily credible ? Looked into 
 closely, the conclusion, from a man's profile, voice, and fluency, 
 to his certainty in multiplication beyond the twelves, seems 
 to show a confused notion of the way in which very common 
 things are connected; but it is on such false correlations 
 that men found half their inferences about each other, and 
 high places of trust may sometimes be held on no better 
 foundation. 
 
 It is a commonplace that words, writings, measures, and 
 performances in general, have qualities assigned them, not 
 by a direct judgment on the performances themselves, but by 
 a presumption of what they are likely to be, considering who 
 is the performer. We all notice in our neighbors this refer- 
 ence to names as guides in criticism, and all furnish illustra- 
 tions of it in our own practice; for check ourselves as we 
 will, the first impression from any sort of work must depend 
 on a previous attitude of mind, and this will constantly be 
 determined by the influences of a name. But that our prior 
 confidence or want of confidence in given names is made up 
 of judgments just as hollow as the consequent praise or blame 
 they are taken to warrant, is less commonly perceived, though 
 there is a conspicuous indication of it in the surprise or 
 disappointment often manifested in the disclosure of an 
 authorship about which everybody has been making wrong 
 guesses. No doubt if it had been discovered who wrote the 
 "Vestiges," many an ingenious structure of probabilities 
 would have been spoiled, and some disgust might have been 
 felt for a real author who made comparatively so shabby an 
 appearance of likelihood. It is this foolish trust in pre- 
 possessions, founded on spurious evidence, which makes a 
 medium of encouragement for those who, happening to have 
 the ear of the public, give other people's ideas the advantage 
 of appearing under their own well-received name ; while any 
 remonstrance from the real producer becomes an unwelcome
 
 350 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 disturbance of complacency with each person who has paid 
 complimentary tributes in the wrong place. 
 
 Hardly any kind of false reasoning is more ludicrous than 
 this on the probabilities of origination. It would be amusing 
 to catechise the guessers as to their exact reasons for thinking 
 their guess " likely ; " why Hoopoe of John's has fixed on 
 Toucan of Magdalen ; why Shrike attributes its peculiar style 
 to Buzzard, who has not hitherto been known as a writer; 
 why the fair Columbia thinks it must belong to the Reverend 
 Merula; and why they are all alike disturbed in their pre- 
 vious judgment of its value by rinding that it really came 
 from Skunk, whom they had either not thought of at all, or 
 thought of as belonging to a species exclude^ by the nature 
 of the case. Clearly they were all wrong in their notion of 
 the specific conditions, which lay ur xpectedly in the small 
 Skunk, and in him alone in spite of his education nobody 
 knows where, in spite of somebody's knowing his uncles and 
 cousins, and in spite of nobody's knowing that he was clev 
 erer than they thought him. 
 
 Such guesses remind one of a fabulist's imaginary council 
 of animals assembled to consider what sort of creature had 
 constructed a honey-comb, found and much tasted by Bruin 
 and other epicures. The speakers all started from the prob- 
 ability that the maker was a bird, because this was the 
 quarter from which a wondrous nest might be expected ; for 
 the animals at that time, knowing little of their own history, 
 would have rejected as inconceivable the notion that the nest 
 could be made by a fish ; and as to the insects, they were not 
 willingly received in society and their ways were little 
 known. Several complimentary presumptions were expressed 
 that the honey-comb was due to one or the other admired 
 and popular bird, and there was much fluttering on the part 
 of the Nightingale and Swallow, neither of whom gave a 
 positive denial, their confusion perhaps extending to their 
 sense of identity ; but the Owl hissed at this folly, arguing 
 from his particular knowledge that the animal which pro- 
 duced honey must be the Musk-rat, the wpndrous nature of
 
 THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEY-COMB. 351 
 
 whose secretions required no proof; and, in the powerful 
 logical procedure of the Owl, from musk to honey was but a 
 step. Some disturbance arose hereupon, for the Musk-rat 
 began to make himself obtrusive, believing in the Owl's 
 opinion of his powers, and feeling that he could have pro- 
 duced the honey if he had thought of it, until an experimental 
 Butcher-bird proposed to anatomize him as a help to decision. 
 The hubbub increased, the opponents of the Musk-rat in- 
 quiring who his ancestors were, until a diversion was created 
 by an able discourse of the Macaw on structures generally, 
 which he classified so as to include the honey-comb, entering 
 into so much admirable exposition that there was a prevalent 
 sense of the honey-comb having probably been produced by 
 one who understood it so well. But Bruin, who had probably 
 eaten too much to listen with edification, grumbled, in his 
 low kind of language, that " Fine words butter no parsnips ; " 
 by which he meant to say that there was no new honey 
 forthcoming. 
 
 Perhaps the audience generally was beginning to tire, 
 when the Fox entered with his snout dreadfully swollen, and 
 reported that the beneficent originator in question was the 
 Wasp, which he had found much smeared with undoubted 
 honey, having applied his nose to it; whence, indeed, the 
 able insect, perhaps justifiably irritated at what might seem 
 a sign of scepticism, had stung him with some severity, an 
 infliction Reynard could hardly regret, since the swelling of 
 a snout normally so delicate would corroborate his statement, 
 and satisfy the assembly that he had really found the honey- 
 creating genius. 
 
 The Fox's admitted acuteness, combined with the visible 
 swelling, were taken as undeniable evidence, and the revela- 
 tion undoubtedly met a general desire for information on a 
 point of interest. Nevertheless, there was a murmur the 
 reverse of delighted, and the feelings of some eminent 
 animals were too strong for them: the Orang-outang's jaw 
 dropped so as seriously to impair the vigor of his expression, 
 the edifying Pelican screamed and flapped her wings, the
 
 352 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Owl hissed again, the Macaw became loudly incoherent, and 
 the Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh ; while the Hyena, after 
 indulging in a more splenetic guffaw, agitated the question 
 whether it would not be better to hush up the whole affair, 
 instead of giving public recognition to an insect whose prod- 
 uce, it was now plain, had been much over-estimated. But 
 this narrow-spirited motion was negatived by *.he sweet- 
 toothed majority. A complimentary deputation to the Wasp 
 was resolved on, and there was a confident hope that this 
 diplomatic measure would tell on the production oi honey.
 
 "SO YOUNG!" 
 
 ANYMEDE was once a girlishly handsome, precocious 
 youth. That one cannot, for any considerable number 
 of years, go on being youthful, girlishly handsome, and pre- 
 cocious, seems, on consideration, to be a statement as worthy 
 of credit as the famous syllogistic conclusion, " Socrates was 
 mortal." But many circumstances have conspired to keep up 
 in Ganymede the illusion that he is surprisingly young. He 
 was the last born of his family, and from his earliest memory 
 was accustomed to be commended as such to the care of his 
 elder brothers and sisters ; he heard his mother speak of him 
 as her youngest darling with a loving pathos in her tone, 
 which naturally suffused his own view of himself, and gave 
 him the habitual consciousness of being at once very young 
 and very interesting. Then, the disclosure of his tender 
 years was a constant matter of astonishment to strangers 
 who had had proof of his precocious talents ; and the aston- 
 ishment extended to what is called the world at large, when 
 he produced " A Comparative Estimate of European Nations " 
 before he was well out of his teens. All comers, on a first 
 interview, told him that he was marvellously young, and 
 some repeated the statement each time they saw him; all 
 critics who wrote about him called attention to the same 
 ground for wonder ; his deficiencies and excesses were alike 
 to be accounted for by the flattering fact of his youth, and 
 his youth was the golden background which set off his many- 
 hued endowments. Here was already enough to establish a 
 strong association between his sense of identity and his sense 
 of being unusually young. But after this he devised and 
 
 VOL. IX. 2$
 
 354 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 founded an ingenious organization for consolidating the liter- 
 ary interests of all the four continents (subsequently includ- 
 ing Australasia and Polynesia), he himself presiding in the 
 central office, which thus became a new theatre for the con- 
 stantly repeated situation of an astonished stranger in the 
 presence of a boldly scheming administrator found to be re- 
 markably young. If we imagine with due charity the effect 
 on Ganymede, we shall think it greatly to his credit that he 
 continued to feel the necessity of being something more than 
 young, and did not sink by rapid degrees into a parallel of 
 that melancholy object, a superannuated youthful phenome- 
 non. Happily he had enough of valid, active faculty to save 
 him from that tragic fate. He had not exhausted his foun- 
 tain of eloquent opinion in his "Comparative Estimate,'' so 
 as to feel himself like some other juvenile celebrities, the sad 
 survivor of his own manifest destiny, or like one who has 
 risen too early in the morning, and finds all the solid day 
 turned into a fatigued afternoon. He has continued to be 
 productive both of schemes and writings, being perhaps 
 helped by the fact that his " Comparative Estimate " did not 
 greatly affect the currents of European thought, and left him 
 with the stimulating hope that he had not done his best, but 
 might yet produce what would make his youth more surpris- 
 ing than ever. 
 
 I saw something of him through his Antinous period, the 
 time of rich chestnut locks, parted not by a visible white line, 
 but by a shadowed furrow from which they fell in massive 
 ripples to right and left. In these slim days he looked the 
 younger for being rather below the middle size ; and though 
 at last one perceived him contracting an indefinable air of 
 self-consciousness, a slight exaggeration of the facial move- 
 ments, the attitudes, the little tricks, and the romance in 
 shirt collars, which must be expected from one who, in spite 
 of his knowledge, was so exceedingly young, it was impossi- 
 ble to say that he was making any great mistake about him- 
 self. He was only undergoing one form of a common moral 
 disease j being strongly mirrored for himself in the remark
 
 "SO YOUNG!" 355 
 
 of others, he was getting to see his real characteristics as a 
 dramatic part, a type to which his doings were always in cor- 
 respondence. Owing to my absence on travel, and to other 
 causes, I had lost sight of him for several years ; but such a 
 separation, between two who have not missed each other, seems 
 in this busy century only a pleasant reason, when they hap- 
 pen to meet again in some old accustomed haunt, for the one 
 who has stayed at home to be more communicative about 
 himself than he can well be to those who have all along been 
 in his neighborhood. He had married in the interval, and as 
 if to keep up his surprising youthfulness in all relations, he 
 had taken a wife considerably older than himself. It would 
 probably have seemed to him a disturbing inversion of the 
 natural order that any one very near to him should have been 
 younger than he, except his own children, who, however 
 young, would not necessarily hinder the normal surprise at 
 the youthfulness of their father. And if my glance had re- 
 vealed my impression on first seeing him again, he might 
 have received a rather disagreeable shock, which was far 
 from my intention. My mind, having retained a very exact 
 image of his former appearance, took note of unmistakable 
 changes, such as a painter would certainly not have made by 
 way of flattering his subject. He had lost his slimness, and 
 that curved solidity, which might have adorned a taller man, 
 was a rather sarcastic threat to his short figure. The English 
 branch of the Teutonic race does not produce many fat youths, 
 and I have even heard an American lady say, that she was 
 much "disappointed" at the moderate number and size of 
 our fat men, considering their reputation in the United 
 States ; hence a stranger would now have been apt to remark 
 that Ganymede was unusually plump for a distinguished 
 writer, rather than unusually young. But how was he to 
 know this ? Many long-standing prepossessions are as hard 
 to be corrected as a long-standing mispronunciation, against 
 which the direct experience of eye and ear is often power- 
 less. And I could perceive that Ganymede's inwrought sense 
 of his surprising youthfulness had been stronger than the
 
 356 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 superficial reckoning of his years and the merely optical 
 phenomena of the looking-glass. He now held a post under 
 government, and not only saw, like most subordinate func- 
 tionaries, how ill everything was managed, but also what 
 were the changes that a high constructive ability would dic- 
 tate ; and in mentioning to me his own speeches, and other 
 efforts toward propagating reformatory views in his depart- 
 ment, he concluded by changing his tone to a sentimental 
 head-voice and saying : 
 
 " But I am so young, people object to any prominence on 
 my part; I can only get myself heard anonymously, and 
 when some attention has been drawn the name is sure to 
 creep out. The writer is known to be young, and things are 
 none the forwarder." 
 
 " Well," said I, " youth seems the only drawback that is 
 sure to diminish. You and I have seven years less of it than 
 when we last met." 
 
 " Ah," returned Ganymede, as lightly as possible, at the 
 same time casting an observant glance over me, as if he were 
 marking the effect of seven years on a person who had prob- 
 ably begun life with an old look, and even as an infant had 
 given his countenance to that significant doctrine, the trans- 
 migration of ancient souls into modern bodies. 
 
 I left him on that occasion without any melancholy fore- 
 cast that his illusion would be suddenly or painfully broken 
 up. I saw that he was well victualled and defended against 
 a ten years' siege from ruthless facts ; and in the course of 
 time observation convinced me that his resistance received 
 considerable aid from without. Each of his written produc- 
 tions, as it came out, was still commented on as the work of 
 a very young man. One critic, finding that he wanted so- 
 lidity, charitably referred to his youth as an excuse. An- 
 other, dazzled by his brilliancy, seemed to regard his youth 
 as so wondrous that all other authors appeared decrepit by 
 comparison, and their style such as might be looked for from 
 gentlemen of the old school. Able pens (according to a famil- 
 iar metaphor) appeared to shake their heads good-humoredly,
 
 "SO YOUNG!" 357 
 
 Implying that Ganymede's crudities were pardonable in one 
 so exceedingly young. Such unanimity amidst diversity, 
 which a distant posterity might take for evidence that on the 
 point of age at least there could have been no mistake, was 
 not really more difficult to account for than the prevalence of 
 cotton in our fabrics. Ganymede had been first introduced 
 into the writing world as remarkably young, and it was no 
 exceptional consequence that the first deposit of information 
 about him held its ground against facts which, however open 
 to observation, were not necessarily thought of. It is not so 
 easy, with our rates and taxes and need for economy in all 
 directions, to cast away an epithet or remark that turns up 
 cheaply, and to go in expensive search after more genuine 
 substitutes. There is high Homeric precedent for keeping 
 fast hold of an epithet under all changes of circumstance, and 
 so the precocious author of the "Comparative Estimate" 
 heard the echoes repeating "Young Ganymede," when an 
 illiterate beholder at a railway station would have given him 
 forty years at least. Besides, important elders, sachems of 
 the clubs and public meetings, had a genuine opinion of him 
 as young enough to be checked for speech on subjects which 
 they had spoken mistakenly about when he was in his cradle ; 
 and then, the midway parting of his crisp hair, not common 
 among English committee-men, formed a presumption against 
 the ripeness of his judgment which nothing but a speedy 
 baldness could have removed. 
 
 It is but fair to mention all these outward confirmations 
 of Ganymede's illusion, which shows no signs of leaving 
 him. It is true that he no longer hears expressions of sur- 
 prise at his youthfulness, on a first introduction to an admir- 
 ing reader ; but this sort of external evidence has become an 
 unnecessary crutch to his habitual inward persuasion. His 
 manners, his costume, his suppositions of the impression he 
 makes on others, have all their former correspondence with 
 the dramatic part of the young genius. As to the incongruity 
 of his contour, and other little accidents of physique, he is 
 probably no more aware that they will affect others as incon-
 
 358 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 gruities, than Armida is conscious how much her rouge pro- 
 vokes our notice of her wrinkles, and causes us to mention 
 sarcastically that motherly age which we should otherwise 
 regard with affectionate reverence. 
 
 But let us be just enough to admit that there may be old- 
 young coxcombs as well as old-young coquettes.
 
 HOW WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE 
 TESTIMONIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM. 
 
 IT is my way, when I observe any instance of folly, any 
 queer habit, any absurd illusion, straightway to look for 
 something of the same type in myself, feeling sure that, 
 amidst all differences, there will be a certain correspondence ; 
 just as there is more or less correspondence in the natural 
 history even of continents widely apart, and of islands in 
 opposite zones. No doubt men's minds differ in what we 
 may call their climate, or share of solar energy, and a feeling 
 or tendency which is comparable to a panther in one may have 
 no more imposing aspect than that of a weasel in another : 
 some are like a tropical habitat, in which the very ferns cast 
 a mighty shadow, and the grasses are a dry ocean in which a 
 hunter may be submerged; others like the chilly latitudes 
 in which your forest-tree, fit elsewhere to prop a mine, is a 
 pretty miniature suitable for fancy potting. The eccentric 
 man might be typified by the Australian fauna, refuting half 
 our judicious assumptions of what nature allows. Still, 
 whether fate commanded us to thatch our persons among the 
 Eskimos or to choose the latest thing in tattooing among the 
 "Polynesian isles, our precious guide, Comparison, would teach 
 as in the first place by likeness, and our clew to further 
 knowledge would be resemblance to what we already know. 
 Hence, having a keen interest in the natural history of my 
 inward self, I pursue this plan I have mentioned, of using 
 my observation as a clew or lantern by which I detect small 
 herbage or lurking life ; or I take my neighbor, in his least 
 becoming tricks or efforts, as an opportunity for luminous
 
 360 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 deduction concerning the figure the human genus makes in 
 the specimen which I myself furnish. 
 
 Introspection which starts with the purpose of finding out 
 one's own absurdities is not likely to be very mischievous, 
 yet of course it is not free from dangers, any more than 
 breathing is, or the other functions that keep us alive and 
 active. To judge of others by one's self is, in its most inno- 
 cent meaning, the briefest expression for our only method of 
 knowing mankind ; yet, we perceive, it has come to mean in 
 many cases either the vulgar mistake which reduces every 
 man's value to the very low figure at which the valuer him- 
 self happens to stand, or else the amiable illusion of the 
 higher nature misled by a too generous construction of the 
 lower. One cannot give a recipe for wise judgment ; it re- 
 sembles appropriate muscular action, which is attained by 
 the myriad lessons in nicety of balance and of aim that only 
 practice can give. The danger of the inverse procedure, 
 judging of self by what one observes in others, if it is car- 
 ried on with much impartiality and keenness of discernment, 
 is that it has a laming effect^ enfeebling the energies of in- 
 dignation and scorn, which are the proper scourges of wrong- 
 doing and meanness, and which should continually feed the 
 wholesome restraining power of public opinion. I respect 
 the horsewhip when applied to the back of cruelty, and think 
 that he who applies it is a more perfect human being because 
 his.outleap of indignation is not checked by a too curious re- 
 flection on the nature of guilt a more perfect human being 
 because he more completely incorporates the best social life 
 of the race, which can never be constituted by ideas that nul- 
 lify action. This is the essence of Dante's sentiment (it is 
 painful to think that he applies it very cruelly) 
 
 " E cortesia ffo, lui esser villano " l 
 
 and it is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one's 
 kinship with all frailties and vices undermines the active 
 heroism which battles against wrong. 
 
 1 luferno, xxxii. 150.
 
 FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 361 
 
 But certainly nature has taken care that this danger should 
 not at present be very threatening. One could not fairly de- 
 scribe the generality of one's neighbors as too lucidly aware 
 of manifesting in their own persons the weaknesses which 
 they observe in the rest of her Majesty's subjects ; on the 
 contrary, a hasty conclusion as to schemes of Providence 
 might lead to the supposition that one man was intended to 
 correct another by being most intolerant of the ugly quality 
 or trick which he himself possesses. Doubtless philosophers 
 will be able to explain how it must necessarily be so, but 
 pending the full extension of the a priori method, which will 
 show that only blockheads could expect anything to be other- 
 wise, it does seem surprising that Heloisa should be dis- 
 gusted at Laura's attempts to disguise her age attempts 
 which she recognizes so thoroughly because they enter into- 
 her own practice ; that Semper, who often responds at public 
 dinners and proposes resolutions on platforms, though he has 
 a trying gestation of every speech and a bad time for himself 
 and others at every delivery, should yet remark pitilessly on 
 the folly of precisely the same course of action in Ubique ; 
 that Aliquis, who lets no attack on himself pass unnoticed, 
 and for every handful of gravel against his windows sends a 
 stone in reply, should deplore the ill-advised retorts of Quis- 
 piam, who does not perceive that to show one's self angry 
 with an adversary is to gratify him. To be unaware of our 
 own little tricks of manner or our own mental blemishes and 
 excesses is a comprehensible unconsciousness j the puzzling 
 fact is that people should apparently take no account of their 
 deliberate actions, and should expect them to be equally ig- 
 nored by others. It is an inversion of the accepted order : 
 there it is the phrases that are official, and the conduct or pri- 
 vately manifested sentiment that is taken to be real ; here it 
 seems that the practice is taken to be official and entirely 
 nullified by the verbal representation which contradicts it. 
 The thief making a vow to Heaven of full restitution and 
 whispering some reservations, expecting to cheat Omniscience 
 by an " aside," is hardly more ludicrous than the many ladies
 
 362 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 and gentlemen who have more belief, and expect others to 
 have it, in their own statement about their habitual doings 
 than in the contradictory fact which is patent in the daylight. 
 One reason of the absurdity is that we are led by a tradition 
 about ourselves, so that long after a man has practically de- 
 parted from a rule or principle, he continues innocently to 
 state it as a true description of his practice just as he has a 
 long tradition that he is not an old gentleman, and is startled 
 when he is seventy at overhearing himself called by an epi- 
 thet which he has only applied to others. 
 
 " A person with your tendency of constitution should take 
 as little sugar as possible," said Pilulus to Bovis, somewhere 
 in the darker decades of this century. " It has made a great 
 difference to Avis since he took my advice in that matter ; he 
 'used to consume half a pound a day." 
 
 " God bless me I " cries Bovis. " I take very little sugar 
 myself." 
 
 "Twenty-six large lumps every day of your life, Mr. 
 Bovis," says his wife. 
 
 " No such thing ! " exclaims Bovis. 
 
 " You drop them into your tea, coffee, and whiskey your 
 self, my dear, and I count them." 
 
 " Nonsense ! " laughs Bovis, turning to Pilulus, that they 
 may exchange a glance of mutual amusement at a woman's 
 inaccuracy. 
 
 But she happened to be right. Bovis had never said in- 
 wardly that he would take a large allowance of sugar, and he 
 had the tradition about himself that he was a man of the 
 most moderate habits; hence, with this conviction, he was 
 naturally disgusted at the saccharine excesses of Avis. 
 
 I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in be- 
 lieving that they are still what they once meant to be this 
 undisturbed appropriation of a traditional character which is 
 often but a melancholy relic of early resolutions, like the 
 worn and soiled testimonial to soberness and honesty carried 
 in the pocket of a tippler whom the need of a dram has driven 
 into peculation may sometimes diminish the turpitude of 

 
 FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 363 
 
 what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. It is notorious that 
 a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts 
 till he at last believes in them. Is it not possible that some- 
 times, in the very first utterance, there may be a shape of 
 creed-reciting belief, a reproduction of a traditional self which 
 is clung to against all evidence ? There is no knowing all 
 the disguises of the lying serpent. 
 
 When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind 
 in sane body, the final test of completeness seems to be a 
 security of distinction between what we have professed and 
 what we have done, what we have aimed at and what we 
 have achieved, what we have invented and what we have 
 witnessed or had evidenced to us, what we think and feel 
 in the present and what we thought and felt in the past. 
 
 I know that there is a common prejudice which regards 
 the habitual confusion of now and then, of it was and it is, 
 of it seemed so and I should like it to be so, as a mark of high 
 imaginative endowment, while the power of precise statement 
 and description is rated lower, as the attitude of an every-day 
 prosaic mind. High, imagination is often assigned or claimed 
 as if it were a ready activity in fabricating extravagances such 
 as are presented by fevered dreams, or as if its possessors 
 were in that state of inability to give credible testimony 
 which would warrant their exclusion from the class of accept- 
 able witnesses in a court of justice ; so that a creative genius 
 might fairly be subjected to the disability which some laws 
 have stamped on dicers, slaves, and other classes whose posi- 
 tion was held perverting to their sense of social responsi- 
 bility. 
 
 This endowment of mental confusion is often boasted of 
 by persons whose imaginativeness would not otherwise be 
 known, unless it were by the slow process of detecting that 
 their descriptions and narratives were not to be trusted. Cal- 
 lista is always ready to testify of herself that she is an imag- 
 inative person ; and sometimes adds, in illustration, that if she 
 had taken a walk and seen an old heap of stones on her way, 
 the account she would give on returning would include many
 
 364 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 pleasing particulars of her own invention, transforming the 
 simple heap into an interesting castellated ruin. This creative 
 freedom is all very well in the right place ; but before I can 
 grant it to be a sign of unusual mental power, I must inquire 
 whether, on being requested to give a precise description of 
 what she saw, she would be able to cast aside her arbitrary 
 combinations and recover the objects she really perceived, so 
 as to make them recognizable by another person who passed 
 the same way. Otherwise her glorifying imagination is not 
 an addition to the fundamental power of strong, discerning 
 perception, but a cheaper substitute. And in fact, I find, 
 on listening to Callista's conversation, that she has a very 
 lax conception even of common objects, and an equally lax 
 memory of events. It seems of no consequence to her whether 
 she shall say that a stone is overgrown with moss or with 
 lichen; that a building is of sandstone or of granite; that 
 Melibceus once forgot to put on his cravat or that he always 
 appears without it; that everybody says so, or that one 
 stock-broker's wife said so yesterday ; that Philemon praised 
 Euphemia up to the skies, or that he denied knowing any 
 particular evil of her. She is one of those respectable wit- 
 nesses who would testify to the exact moment of an appari- 
 tion, because any desirable moment will be as exact as another 
 to her remembrance ; or who would be the most worthy to 
 witness the action of spirits on slates and tables, because the 
 action of limbs would not probably arrest her attention. She 
 would describe the surprising phenomena exhibited by the 
 powerful Medium, with the same freedom that she vaunted 
 in relation to the old heap of stones. Her supposed imagi- 
 nativeness is simply a very usual lack of discriminating 
 perception, accompanied with a less usual activity of misrep- 
 resentation, which, if it had been a little more intense, or 
 had been stimulated by circumstance, might have made her 
 a profuse writer, unchecked by the troublesome need of 
 veracity. 
 
 These characteristics are the very opposite of such as yield 
 a fine imagination, which is always based on a keen vision,
 
 FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 365 
 
 a keen consciousness of what is, and carries the store of 
 definite knowledge as material for the construction of its 
 inward visions. Witness Dante, who is at once the most 
 precise and homely in his reproduction of actual objects, and 
 the most soaringly at large in his imaginative combinations. 
 On a much lower level we distinguish the hyperbole, and 
 rapid development in descriptions of persons and events, 
 which are lit up by humorous intention in the speaker we 
 distinguish this charming play of intelligence, which resem- 
 bles musical improvisation on a given motive, where the 
 farthest sweep of curve is looped into relevancy by an in- 
 stinctive method, from the florid inaccuracy or helpless exag- 
 geration, which is really something commoner than the correct 
 simplicity often depreciated as prosaic. 
 
 Even if high imagination were to be identified with illu- 
 sion, there would be the same sort of difference between the 
 imperial wealth of illusion which is informed by industrious 
 observation, and the trumpery stage-property illusion which 
 depends on the ill-defined impressions gathered by capricious 
 inclination, as there is between a good and a bad picture of 
 the Last Judgment. In both these the subject is a combi- 
 nation never actually witnessed, and in the good picture the 
 general combination may be of surpassing boldness ; but on 
 examination it is seen that the separate elements have been 
 closely studied from real objects. And even where we find 
 the charm of ideal elevation with wrong drawing and fantastic 
 color, the charm is dependent on the selective sensibility of 
 the painter to certain real delicacies of form which confer the 
 expression he longed to render ; for apart from this basis of 
 an effect perceived in common, there could be no conveyance 
 of aesthetic meaning by the painter to the beholder. In this 
 sense it is as true to say of Fra Angelico's Coronation of the 
 Virgin, that it has a strain of reality, as to say so of a portrait 
 by Eembrandt, which also has its strain of ideal elevation to 
 Eembrandt's virile selective sensibility. 
 
 To correct such self-flatterers as Callista, it is worth re- 
 peating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision,
 
 366 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 but intense inward representation, and a creative energy con- 
 stantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutias of expe- 
 rience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh 
 wholes, not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the 
 fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of 
 ideal association which informs every material object, every 
 incidental fact, with far-reaching memories and stored residues 
 of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations 
 of human existence. The illusion to which it is liable is not 
 that of habitually taking duck-ponds for lilied pools, but of 
 being more or less transiently and in varying degrees so 
 absorbed in ideal vision as to lose the consciousness of sur- 
 rounding objects or occurrences; and when that rapt con- 
 dition is past, the sane genius discriminates clearly between 
 what has been given in this parenthetic state of excitement, 
 and what he has known, and may count on, in the ordinary 
 world of experience. Dante seems to have expressed these 
 conditions perfectly in that passage of the Purgatoria where, 
 after a triple vision which has made him forget his surround- 
 ings, he says : 
 
 " Quando 1'anima mia tonb di faori 
 Alle cose che son fnor di lei vere, 
 lo riconobbi i miei non falsi errori." 
 
 CAMTO XT. 
 
 He distinguishes the ideal truth of his entranced vision 
 from the series of external facts to which his consciousness 
 had returned. Isaiah gives us the date of his vision in the 
 Temple, " the year that King Uzziah died ; " and if after- 
 ward the mighty-winged seraphim were present with him as 
 he trod the street, he doubtless knew them for images of 
 memory, and did not cry, " Look ! " to the passers-by. 
 
 Certainly the seer, whether prophet, philosopher, scientific 
 discoverer, or poet, may happen to be rather mad ; his powers 
 may have been used up, like Don Quixote's, in their visionary 
 or theoretic constructions, so that the reports of common- 
 sense fail to affect him, or the continuous strain of excitement
 
 FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 367 
 
 may have robbed his mind of its elasticity. It is hard for 
 our frail mortality to carry the burden of greatness with 
 steady gait and full alacrity of perception. But he is the 
 strongest seer who can support the stress of creative energy, 
 and yet keep that sanity of expectation which consists in 
 distinguishing, as Dante does, between the cose che son vere 
 outside the individual mind, and the non falsi errori which 
 are the revelations of true imaginative power.
 
 THE TOO READY WRITER. 
 
 ONE who talks too much, hindering the rest of the com- 
 pany from taking their turn, and apparently seeing no 
 reason why they should not rather desire to know his opinion 
 or experience in relation to all subjects, or at least to renounce 
 the discussion of any topic where he can make no figure, has 
 never been praised for this industrious monopoly of work 
 which others would willingly have shared in. However 
 various and brilliant his talk may be, we suspect him of 
 impoverishing us by excluding the contributions of other 
 minds, which attract our curiosity the more because he has 
 shut them up in silence. Besides, we get tired of a "manner" 
 in conversation as in painting, when one theme after another 
 is treated with the same lines and touches. I begin with 
 a liking for an estimable master, but by tne time he has 
 stretched his interpretation of the world unbrokenly along a 
 palatial gallery, I have had what the cautious Scotch mind 
 would call " enough " of him. There is monotony and nar- 
 rowness already to spare in my own identity; what conies 
 to me from without should be larger and more impartial 
 than the judgment of any single interpreter. On this ground 
 even a modest person, without power or will to shine in the 
 conversation, may easily find the predominating talker a 
 nuisance ; while those who are full of matter on special 
 topics are continually detecting miserably thin places in the 
 web of that information which he will not desist from im- 
 parting. Nobody that I know of ever proposed a testimonial 
 to a man for thus volunteering the whole expense of the 
 conversation.
 
 THE TOO READY WRITER. 369 
 
 Why is there a different standard of judgment with regard 
 to a writer who plays much the same part in literature as the 
 excessive talker plays in what is traditionally called conver- 
 sation ? The busy Adrastus, whose professional engagements 
 might seem more than enough for the nervous energy of one 
 man, and who yet finds time to print essays on the chief cur- 
 rent subjects, from the tri-lingual inscriptions, or the idea ot 
 the infinite among the prehistoric Lapps, to the Colorado 
 beetle and the grape disease in the south of France, is gener- 
 ally praised, if not admired, for the breadth of his mental 
 range and his gigantic powers of work. Poor Theron, wha 
 has some original ideas on a subject to which he has given 
 years of research and meditation, has been waiting anxiously 
 from month to month to see whether his condensed exposition 
 will find a place in the next advertised programme, but sees 
 it, on the contrary, regularly excluded, and twice the space 
 he asked for filled with the copious brew of Adrastus, whose 
 name carries custom like a celebrated trade-mark. Why should 
 the eager haste to tell what he thinks on the shortest notice, 
 as if his opinion were a needed preliminary to discussion, get 
 a man the reputation of being a conceited bore in conversa- 
 tion, when nobody blames the same tendency if it shows itself 
 in print ? The excessive talker can only be in one gathering 
 at a time, and there is the comfort of thinking that every, 
 where else other fellow-citizens who have something to say 
 may get a chance of delivering themselves ; but the exorbitant 
 writer can occupy space and spread over it the more or less 
 agreeable flavor of his mind in four " mediums " at once, and 
 on subjects taken from the four winds. Such restless and 
 versatile occupants of literary space and time should have 
 lived earlier, when the world wanted summaries of all extant 
 knowledge, and this knowledge being small, there was the more 
 room for commentary and conjecture. They might have 
 played the part of an Isidor of Seville or a Vincent of Beau- 
 vais brilliantly, and the willingness to write everything them- 
 selves would have been strictly in place. In the present day, 
 the busy retailer of other people's knowledge, which he has 
 
 VOL. IT. **
 
 370 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 spoiled in the handling, the restless guesser and commenta- 
 tor, the importunate hawker of undesirable superfluities, the 
 everlasting word-couipeller, who rises early in the morning to 
 praise what the world has already glorified, or makes himself 
 haggard at night in writing out his dissent from what nobody 
 ever believed, is not simply " gratis, anhelans, multa agendo 
 nihil agens;" he is an obstruction. Like an incompetent 
 architect, with too much interest at his back, he obtrudes his 
 ill-considered work where place ought to have been left to 
 better men. 
 
 Is it out of the question that we should entertain some 
 scruple about mixing our own flavor, as of the too cheap and 
 insistent nutmeg, with that of every great writer and every 
 great subject especially when our flavor is all we have to 
 give, the matter or knowledge having been already given by 
 somebody else ? What if we were only like the Spanish wine- 
 skins which impress the innocent stranger with the notion 
 that the Spanish grape has naturally a taste of leather. One 
 could wish that even the greatest minds should leave some 
 themes unhandled, or at least leave us no more than a para- 
 graph or two on them, to show how well they did in not being 
 more lengthy. 
 
 Such entertainment of scruple can hardly be expected 
 from the young; but happily their readiness to mirror the 
 universe anew for the rest of mankind is not encouraged by 
 easy publicity. In the vivacious Pepin I have often seen the 
 image of my early youth, when it seemed to me astonishing 
 that the philosophers had left so many difficulties unsolved, 
 and that so many great themes had raised no great poet to 
 treat them. I had an elated sense that I should find my brain 
 full of theoretic clews when I looked for them, and that wher- 
 ever a poet had not done what I expected, it was for want of 
 my insight. Not knowing what had been said about the play 
 of Borneo and Juliet, I felt myself capable of writing some- 
 thing original on its blemishes and beauties. In relation to 
 all subjects I had a joyous consciousness of that ability which 
 is prior to knowledge, and of only needing to apply myself in
 
 THE TOO READY WRITER. 371 
 
 order to master any task to conciliate philosophers whose 
 systems were at present but dimly known to me, to estimate 
 foreign poets whom I had not yet read, to show up mistakes 
 in a historical monograph that roused my interest in an epoch 
 which I had been hitherto ignorant of when I should once 
 have had time to verify my views of probability by looking 
 into an encyclopaedia. So Pepin ; save only that he is indus- 
 trious while I was idle. Like the astronomer in Rasselas, I 
 swayed the universe in my consciousness, without making any 
 difference outside me ; whereas Pepin, while feeling himself 
 powerful with the stars in their courses, really raises some 
 dust here below. He is no longer in his spring-tide ; but hav- 
 ing been always busy, he has been obliged to use his first 
 impressions as if they were deliberate opinions, and to range 
 himself on the corresponding side in ignorance of much that 
 he commits himself to ; so that he retains some characteristics 
 of a comparatively tender age, and among them a certain sur- 
 prise that there have not been more persons equal to himself. 
 Perhaps it is unfortunate for him that he early gained a hear- 
 ing, or at least a place in print, and was thus encouraged in 
 acquiring a fixed habit of writing, to the exclusion of any 
 other bread-winning pursuit. He is already to be classed as 
 a " general writer/' corresponding to the comprehensive wants 
 of the " general reader," and with this industry on his hands 
 it is not enough for him to keep up the ingenuous self-reliance 
 of youth : he finds himself under an obligation to be skilled 
 in various methods of seeming to know ; and having habit- 
 ually expressed himself before he was convinced, his interest 
 in all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has not made a 
 mistake, and to feel his infallibility confirmed. That impulse 
 to decide, that vague sense of being able to achieve the unat- 
 tempted, that dream of aerial unlimited movement at will 
 without feet or wings, which were once but the joyous mount- 
 ing of young sap, are already taking shape as unalterable 
 woody fibre ; the impulse has hardened into "style," and into 
 a pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in 
 the presence of other men's failures is turning into the official
 
 372 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 arrogance of one who habitually issues directions which he 
 has never himself been called on to execute; the dreamy 
 buoyancy of the stripling has taken on a fatal sort of reality 
 in written pretensions which carry consequences. He is on 
 the way to become like the loud-buzzing, bouncing Bombus, 
 who combines conceited illusions enough to supply several 
 patients in a lunatic asylum, with the freedom to show him- 
 self at large in various forms of print. If one who takes him- 
 self for the telegraphic centre of all American wires is to be 
 confined as unfit to transact affairs, what shall we say to the 
 man who believes himself in possession of the unexpressed 
 motives and designs dwelling in the breasts of all sovereigns 
 and all politicians ? And I grieve to think that poor- Pepin, 
 though less political, may by and by manifest a persuasion 
 hardly more sane, for he is beginning to explain people's writ- 
 ings by what he does not know about them. Yet he was once 
 at the comparatively innocent stage, which I have confessed 
 to be that of my own early astonishment at my powerful 
 originality ; and copying the just humility of the old Puritan, 
 I may say, " But for the grace of discouragement, this cox- 
 combry might have been mine." 
 
 Pepin made for himself a necessity of writing (and getting 
 printed) before he had considered whether he had the knowl- 
 edge or belief that would furnish eligible matter. At first, 
 perhaps, the necessity galled him a little, but it is now as 
 easily borne, nay, is as irrepressible a habit as the outpouring 
 of inconsiderate talk. He is gradually being condemned to 
 have no genuine impressions, no direct consciousness of enjoy- 
 ment, or the reverse, from the quality of what is before him : 
 his perceptions are continually arranging themselves in forms 
 suitable to a printed judgment ; and hence they will often 
 turn out to be as much to the purpose if they are written 
 without any direct contemplation of the object, and are guided 
 by a few external conditions which serve to classify it for him. 
 In this way he is irrevocably losing the faculty of accurate 
 mental vision; having bound himself to express judgments 
 which will satisfy some other demands than that of veracity,
 
 THE TOO READY WRITER. 373 
 
 he has blunted his perceptions by continual preoccupation. 
 We cannot command veracity at will ; the power of seeing 
 and reporting truly is a form of health that has to be deli- 
 cately guarded, and as an ancient Eabbi has solemnly said, 
 " The penalty of untruth is untruth." But Pepin is only a 
 mild example of the fact that incessant writing with a view 
 to printing carries internal consequences which have often 
 the nature of disease. And however unpractical it may be 
 held to consider whether we have anything to print which it 
 is good for the world to read, or which has not been better 
 said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worth considering 
 what effect the printing may have on ourselves. Clearly 
 there is a sort of writing which helps to keep the writer in a 
 ridiculously contented ignorance, raising in him continually 
 the sense of having delivered himself effectively, so that the 
 acquirement of more thorough knowledge seems as super- 
 fluous as the purchase of costume for a past occasion. He 
 has invested his vanity (perhaps his hope of income) in his 
 own shallownesses and mistakes, and must desire their pros- 
 perity. Like the professional prophet, he learns to be glad 
 of the harm that keeps up his credit, and to be sorry for the 
 good that contradicts him. It is hard enough for any of us, 
 amidst the changing winds of fortune and the hurly-burly of 
 events, to keep quite clear of a gladness which is another's 
 calamity ; but one may choose not to enter on a course which 
 will turn such gladness into a fixed habit of mind, commit- 
 ting ourselves to be continually pleased that others should 
 appear to be wrong, in order that we may have the air of 
 being right. 
 
 In some cases, perhaps, it might be urged that Pepin has 
 remained the more self-contented because he has not written 
 everything he believed himself capable of. He once asked 
 me to read a sort of programme of the species of romance 
 which he should think it worth while to write a species 
 which he contrasted in strong terms with the productions of 
 illustrious but overrated authors in this branch. Pepin's 
 romance was to present the splendors of the Roman Empire
 
 374 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 at the culmination of its grandeur, when decadence was spirit- 
 ually but not visibly imminent ; it was to show the workings 
 of human passion in the most pregnant and exalted of human 
 circumstances, the designs of statesmen, the interfusion of 
 philosophies, the rural relaxation and converse of immortal 
 poets, the majestic triumphs of warriors, the mingling of a 
 quaint and sublime in religious ceremony, the gorgeous de- 
 lirium of gladiatorial shows, and under all the secretly working 
 leaven of Christianity. Such a romance would not call the 
 attention of society to the dialect of stable-boys, the low 
 habits of rustics, the vulgarity of small schoolmasters, the 
 manners of men in livery, or to any other form of uneducated 
 talk and sentiments ; its characters would have virtues and 
 vices alike on the grand scale, and would express themselves 
 in an English representing the discourse of the most powerful 
 minds, in the best Latin, or possibly Greek, when there oc- 
 curred a scene with a Greek philosopher on a visit to Rome, 
 or resident there as a teacher. In this way Pepin would do 
 in fiction what had never been done before ; something not 
 at all like " Rienzi " or " Notre Dame de Paris," or any other 
 attempt of that kind, but something at once more penetrating 
 and more magnificent, more passionate and more philo- 
 sophical, more panoramic yet more select; something that 
 would present a conception of a gigantic period; in short, 
 something truly Roman and world-historical. 
 
 When Pepin gave me this programme to read he was 
 mush younger than at present. Some slight success in an. 
 other vein diverted him from the production of panoramic 
 and select romance ; and the experience of not having tried 
 to carry out his programme has naturally made him more 
 biting and sarcastic on the failures of those who have actually 
 written romances without apparently having had a glimpse of 
 a conception equal to his. Indeed, I am often comparing 
 his rather touchingly inflated na/ivet, as of a small young 
 person walking on tiptoe while he is talking of elevated 
 things, at the time when he felt himself the author of that un- 
 written romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and
 
 THE TOO READY WRITER. 375 
 
 affectation of power kept strictly in reserve. His paragraphs 
 now seem to have a bitter smile in them, from the conscious- 
 ness of a mind too penetrating to accept any other man's 
 ideas, and too equally competent in all directions to seclude 
 his power in any one form of creation, but rather fitted to 
 hang over them all as a lamp of guidance to the stumblers 
 below. You perceive how proud he is of not being indebted 
 to any writer; even with the dead he is on the creditor's side, 
 for he is doing them the service of letting the world know 
 what they meant better than those poor pre-Pepinians them- 
 selves had any means of doing; and he treats the mighty 
 shades very cavalierly. 
 
 Is this fellow-citizen of ours, considered simply in the 
 light of a baptized Christian and tax-paying Englishman, 
 really as madly conceited, as empty of reverential feeling, as 
 unveracious and careless of justice, as full of catch-penny de- 
 vices and stagey attitudinizing, as on examination his writing 
 shows itself to be ? By no means. He has arrived at the 
 present pass in "the literary calling" through the self- 
 imposed obligation to give himself a manner which would 
 convey the impression of superior knowledge and ability. 
 He is much worthier and more admirable than his written 
 productions, because the moral aspects exhibited in his 
 writing are felt to be ridiculous or disgraceful in the personal 
 relations of life. In blaming Pepin's writing, we are ac- 
 cusing the public conscience, which is so lax and ill-formed 
 on the momentous bearings of authorship, that it sanctions 
 the total absence of scruple in undertaking and prosecuting 
 what should be the best warranted of vocations. 
 
 Hence I still accept friendly relations with Pepin, for he 
 has much private amiability ; and though he probably thinks 
 of me as a man of slender talents, without rapidity of coup 
 cfosil, and with no compensatory penetration, he meets me 
 very cordially, and would not, I am sure, willingly pain me in 
 conversation by crudely declaring his low estimate of my 
 capacity. Yet I have often known him to insult my betters, 
 and contribute (perhaps unreflectingly) to encourage injurious
 
 *76 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 / 
 
 conceptions of them ; but that is done in the course of his 
 professional writing, and the public conscience still leaves 
 such writing nearly on a level of the Merry -Andrew's dress, 
 which permits an impudent deportment and extraordinary 
 gambols to one who, in his ordinary clothing, shows himself 
 the decent father of a family.
 
 DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 
 
 PARTICULAR callings, it is known, encourage particular 
 diseases. There is a painter's colic ; the Sheffield grinder 
 falls a victim to the inhalation of steel-dust ; clergymen so 
 often have a kind of sore throat that this otherwise secular 
 ailment gets named after them. And perhaps, if we were to 
 inquire, we should find a similar relation between certain 
 moral ailments and these various occupations, though here in 
 the case of clergymen there would be specific differences ; 
 the poor curate, equally with the rector, is liable to clergy- 
 man's sore throat, but he would probably be found free from 
 the chronic moral ailments encouraged by the possession of 
 glebe and those higher chances of preferment which follow 
 on having a good position already. On the other hand, the 
 poor curate might have severe attacks of calculating ex- 
 pectancy concerning parishioners' turkeys, cheeses, and fat 
 geese, or of uneasy rivalry for the donations of clerical 
 charities. 
 
 Authors are so miscellaneous a class that their personified 
 diseases, physical and moral, might include the whole proces- 
 sion of human disorders, led by dyspepsia and ending in mad- 
 ness the awful dumb-show of a world-historic tragedy. 
 Take a large enough area of human life, and all comedy 
 melts into tragedy, like the Fool's part of the side of Lear. 
 The chief scenes get filled with erring heroes, guileful usurp- 
 ers, persecuted discoverers, dying deliverers s everywhere the 
 protagonist has a part pregnant with doom. The comedy 
 sinks to an accessory, and if there are loud laughs they 
 seem a convulsive transition from sobs j or if the comedy is
 
 378 ESSAYS OF GEORGE EMOT. 
 
 touched with a gentle lovingness, the panoramic scene is one 
 where 
 
 " Sadness is a kind of mirth, 
 So mingled as if mirth did make us sad 
 And sadness merry." 1 
 
 But I did not set out on the wide survey that would carry 
 me into tragedy, and, in fact, had nothing more serious in 
 my mind than certain small chronic ailments that come of 
 small authorship. I was thinking principally of Vorticella, 
 who flourished in my youth, not only as a portly lady walk- 
 ing in silk attire, but also as the authoress of a book entitled 
 "The Channel Islands, with Notes and an Appendix." I 
 would by no means make it a reproach to her that she wrote 
 no more than one book ; on the contrary, her stopping there 
 seems to nee a laudable example. What one would have 
 wished, after experience, was that she had refrained from 
 producing even that single volume, and thus from giving her 
 self-importance a troublesome kind of double incorporation 
 which became oppressive to her acquaintances, and set up in 
 herself one of those slight chronic forms of disease to which 
 I have just referred. She lived in the considerable provincial 
 town of Pumpiter, which had its own newspaper press, with 
 the usual divisions of political partisanship and the usual 
 varieties of literary criticism the florid and allusive, the 
 staccato and peremptory, the clairvoyant and prophetic, the 
 safe and pattern-phrased, or what one might call " the many- 
 a-long-day style." 
 
 Vorticella, being the wife of an important townsman, had 
 naturally the satisfaction of seeing " The Channel Islands " 
 reviewed by all the organs of Pumpiter opinion, and their 
 articles or paragraphs held as naturally the opening pages 
 in the elegantly bound album prepared by her for the 
 reception of "critical opinions." This ornamental volume 
 lay on a special table in her drawing-room, close to the still 
 more gorgeously bound work of which it was the significant 
 
 * The Two Noble Kinsmen.
 
 DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 379 
 
 effect, and every guest was allowed the privilege of reading 
 what had been said of the authoress and her work in the 
 " Pumpiter Gazette and Literary Watchman," the " Pumpshire 
 Post," the " Church Clock," the " Independent Monitor," and 
 the lively but judicious publication known as the " Medley 
 Pie ; " to be followed up, if he chose, by the instructive perusal 
 of the strikingly confirmatory judgments, sometimes concur- 
 rent in the very phrases, of journals from the most distant 
 countries, as the " Latchgate Argus," the " Penllwy Universe," 
 the "Cockaleekie Advertiser," the " Goodwin Sands Opinion," 
 and the "Land's End Times." 
 
 I had friends in Pumpiter, and occasionally paid a long 
 visit there. When I called on Vorticella, who had a cousin- 
 ship with my hosts, she had to excuse herself because a 
 message claimed her attention for eight or ten minutes ; and 
 handing me the album of critical opinions, said, with a certain 
 emphasis which, considering my youth, was highly compli- 
 mentary, that she would really like me to read what I should 
 find there. This seemed a permissive politeness which I 
 could not feel to be an oppression ; and I ran my eyes over the 
 dozen pages, each with a strip or islet of newspaper in the 
 centre, with that freedom of mind (in my case meaning free- 
 dom to forget) which would be a perilous way of preparing 
 for examination. This ad libitum perusal had its interest for 
 me. The private truth being that I had not read "The 
 Channel Islands," I was amazed at the variety of matter 
 which the volume must contain, to have impressed these 
 different judges with the writer's surpassing capacity to 
 handle almost all branches of inquiry and all forms of pre- 
 sentation. In Jersey she had shown herself a historian, in 
 Guernsey a poetess, in Alderney a political economist, and in 
 Sark a humorist. There were sketches of character scattered 
 through the pages which might put our " fictionists " to the 
 blush ; the style was eloquent and racy, studded with gems 
 of felicitous remark ; and the moral spirit throughout was so 
 superior that, said one, " the recording angel " (who is not 
 supposed to take account of literature as such) "would
 
 380 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 assuredly set down the work as a deed of religion." The force 
 of this eulogy on the part of several reviewers was much 
 heightened by the incidental evidence of their fastidious and 
 severe taste, which seemed to suffer considerably from the 
 imperfections of our chief writers, even the dead and canon- 
 ized : one afflicted them with the smell of oil ; another lacked 
 erudition, and attempted (though vainly) to dazzle them with 
 trivial conceits; one wanted to be more philosophical than 
 nature had made him ; another, in attempting to be comic, 
 produced the melancholy effect of a half-starved Merry-An- 
 drew ; while one and all, from the author of the " Areopagi- 
 tica " downward, had faults of style which must have made an 
 able hand in the " Latchgate Argus " shake the many-glanced 
 head belonging thereto with a smile of compassionate dis- 
 approval. Not so the authoress of " The Channel Islands ; " 
 Vorticella and Shakspeare were allowed to be faultless. I 
 gathered that no blemishes were observable in the work of 
 this accomplished writer, and the repeated information that 
 she was " second to none " seemed after this superfluous. Her 
 thick octavo notes, appendix, and all was unflagging from 
 beginning to end ; and the "Land's End Times," using a rather 
 dangerous rhetorical figure, recommended you not to take up 
 the volume unless you had leisure to finish it at a sitting. It 
 had given one writer more pleasure than he had had for 
 many a long day a sentence which had a melancholy reso- 
 nance, suggesting a life of studious languor such as all 
 previous achievements of the human mind failed to stimulate 
 into enjoyment. I think the collection of critical opinions 
 wound up with this sentence, and I had turned back to look 
 at the lithographed sketch of the authoress which fronted 
 the first page of the album, when the fair original re-entered, 
 and I laid down the volume on its appropriate table. 
 
 " Well, what do you think of them ? " said Vorticella, with 
 an emphasis which had some significance unperceived by me. 
 " I know you are a great student. Give me your opinion of 
 these opinions." 
 
 " They must be very gratifying to you," I answered, with
 
 DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 381 
 
 a little confusion ; for I perceived that I might easily mis- 
 take my footing, and I began to have a presentiment of an 
 examination for which I was by no means crammed. 
 
 " On the whole yes," said Vorticella, in a tone of con- 
 cession. " A few of the notices are written with some pains, 
 but not one of them has really grappled with the chief idea 
 in the appendix. I don't know whether you have studied 
 political economy, but you saw what I said on page 398 about 
 the Jersey fisheries ? " 
 
 I bowed I confess it with the mean hope that this 
 movement in the nape of my neck would be taken as sufficient 
 proof that I had read, marked, and learned. I do not forgive 
 myself for this pantomimic falsehood ; but I was young and 
 morally timorous, and Vorticella's personality had an effect 
 on me something like that of a powerful mesmerizer, when 
 he directs all his ten fingers toward your eyes, as unpleasantly 
 visible ducts for the invisible stream. I felt a great power 
 of contempt in her if I did not come up to her expectations. 
 
 "Well," she resumed, "you observe that not one of them 
 has taken up that argument; but I hope I convinced you 
 about the drag-nets?" 
 
 Here was a judgment on me. Orientally speaking, I had 
 lifted up my foot on the steep descent of falsity, and was 
 compelled to set it down on a lower level. " I should think 
 you must be right," said I, inwardly resolving that on the 
 next topic I would tell the truth. 
 
 "I know that I am right," said Vorticella. "The fact is 
 that no critic in this town is fit to meddle with such subjects 
 unless it be Volvox, and he, with all his command of lan- 
 guage, is very superficial. It is Volvox who writes in the 
 'Monitor.* I hope you noticed how he contradicts himself ? " 
 
 My resolution, helped by the equivalence of dangers, stoutly 
 prevailed, and I said " No." 
 
 " No ! I am surprised. He is the only one who finds fault 
 with me. He is a Dissenter, you know. The ' Monitor ' is the 
 Dissenters' organ, but my husband has been so useful to them 
 in municipal affairs that they would not venture to run my
 
 382 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 book down ; they feel obliged to tell the truth about me. 
 Still, Volvox betrays himself. After praising me for my 
 penetration and accuracy, he presently says I have allowed 
 myself to be imposed upon, and have let my active imagina- 
 tion run away with me. That is like his Dissenting imperti- 
 nence. Active my imagination may be, but I have it under 
 Control. Little Vibrio, who writes the playful notice in the 
 ^ Medley Pie,' has a clever hit at Volvox iu tliat passage about 
 the steeple-chase of imagination, where the loser wants to 
 make it appear that the winner was only run away with. 
 But if you did not notice Volvox's self-contradiction you 
 would not see the point," added Vorticella, with rather a 
 chilling intonation. " Or perhaps you did not read the < Med- 
 ley Pie ' notice ? That is a pity. Do take up the book again. 
 Vibrio is a poor little tippling creature ; but, as Mr. Carlyle 
 would say, he has an eye, and he is always lively." 
 
 I did take up the book again, and read as demanded. 
 
 "It is very ingenious," said I, really appreciating the 
 difficulty of being lively in this connection ; it seemed even 
 more wonderful than that a Vibrio should have an eye. 
 
 "You are probably surprised to see no notices from the 
 London press," said Vorticella. " I have one, a very re- 
 markable one, but I reserve it until the others have spoken, 
 and then I shall introduce it to wind up. I shall have them 
 reprinted, of course, and inserted in future copies. This from 
 the ' Candelabrum ' is only eight lines in length, but full of 
 venom. It calls my style dull and pompous. I think that 
 will tell its own tale, placed after the other critiques" 
 
 "People's impressions are so different," said I. "Some 
 persons find 'Don Quixote' dull." 
 
 ' " Yes," said Vorticella, in emphatic chest-tones, " dulness 
 is a matter of opinion ; but pompous ! That I never was and 
 never could be. Perhaps he means that my matter is too 
 important for his taste ; and I have no objection to that. I 
 did not intend to be trivial. I should just like to read you 
 that passage about the drag-nets, because I could make it 
 clearer to you."
 
 DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 383 
 
 A second (less ornamental) copy was at her elbow and was 
 already opened, when to my great relief another guest was 
 announced, and I was able to take my leave without seeming 
 to run away from " The Channel Islands," though not with- 
 out being compelled to carry with me the loan of " the marked 
 copy," which I was to find advantageous in a reperusal of the 
 appendix, and was only requested to return before my de- 
 parture from Pumpiter. Looking into the volume now with 
 some curiosity, I found it a very ordinary combination of the 
 commonplace and ambitious one of those books which one 
 might imagine to have been written under the old Grub Street 
 coercion of hunger and thirst, if they were not known before- 
 hand to be the gratuitous productions of ladies and gentlemen, 
 whose circumstances might be called altogether easy, but for 
 an uneasy vanity that happened to have been directed toward 
 authorship. Its importance was that of a polypus, tumor, 
 fungus, or other erratic outgrowth, noxious and disfiguring 
 in its effect on the individual organism which nourishes it. 
 Poor Vorticella might not have been more wearisome on a 
 visit than the majority of her neighbors, but for this disease 
 of magnified self-importance belonging to small authorship. 
 I understand that the chronic complaint of "The Channel 
 Islands" never left her. As the years went on, and the 
 publication tended to vanish in the distance for her neighbors' 
 memory, she was still bent on dragging it to the foreground ; 
 and her chief interest in new acquaintances was the possibility 
 of lending them her book, entering into all details concerning 
 it, and requesting them to read her album of " critical opin- 
 ions." This really made her more tiresome than Gregarina, 
 whose distinction was that she had had cholera, and who did 
 not feel herself in her true position with strangers until they 
 knew it. 
 
 My experience with Vorticella led me for a time into the 
 false supposition that this sort of fungous disfiguration, which 
 makes Self disagreeably larger, was most common to the fe- 
 male sex ; but I presently found that here too the male could 
 assert his superiority and show a more vigorous boredom. I
 
 384 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 have known a man with a single pamphlet containing an as- 
 surance that somebody else was wrong, together with a few 
 approved quotations, produce a more powerful effect of shud- 
 dering at his approach than ever Vorticella did with her 
 varied octavo volume, including notes and appendix. Males 
 of more than one nation recur to my memory who produced 
 from their pocket on the slightest encouragement a small 
 pink or buff duodecimo pamphlet, wrapped in silver paper, 
 as a present held ready for an intelligent reader. " A mode 
 of propagandising 7 you remark in excuse ; " they wished to 
 spread some useful corrective doctrine." Not necessarily; 
 the indoctrination aimed at was perhaps to convince you of 
 their own talents by the sample of an " Ode on Shakspeare's 
 Birthday," or a translation from Horace. 
 
 Vorticella may pair off with Monas, who had also written 
 his one book, " Here and There ; or, a Trip from Truro to 
 Transylvania, " and not only carried it in his portmanteau 
 when he went on visits, but took the earliest opportunity of 
 depositing it in the drawing-room, and afterward would enter 
 to look for it, as if under pressure of a need for reference, 
 begging the lady of the house to tell him whether she had 
 seen " a small volume bound in red." One hostess at last 
 ordered it to be carried into his bedroom to save his time ; 
 but it presently reappeared in his hands, and was again left, 
 with inserted slips of paper, on the drawing-room table. 
 
 Depend upon it, vanity is human native alike to men and 
 women ; only in the male it is of denser texture, less volatile, 
 so that it less immediately informs you of its presence, but is 
 more massive and capable of knocking you down if you come 
 into collision with it ; while in woman vanity lays by its small 
 revenges as in a needle-case always at hand. The difference 
 is in muscle and finger-tips, in traditional habits and mental 
 perspective, rather than in the original appetite of vanity. It 
 is an approved method now to explain ourselves by a refer- 
 ence to the races as little like us as possible ; which leads me 
 to observe that in Fiji the men use the most elaborate hair- 
 dressing, and that wherever tattooing is in vogue the male
 
 DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 385 
 
 expects to carry off the prize of admiration for pattern and 
 workmanship. Arguing analogically, and looking for this 
 tendency of the Fijian or Hawaian male in the eminent 
 European, we must suppose that it exhibits itself under the 
 forms of civilized apparel ; and it would be a great mistake 
 to estimate passionate effort by the effect it produces on our 
 perception or understanding. It is conceivable that a man 
 may have concentrated no less will and expectation on his 
 wristbands, gaiters, and the shape of his hat-brim, or an 
 appearance which impresses you as that of the modern 
 " swell," than the Ojibbeway on an ornamentation which 
 seems to us much more elaborate. In what concerns the 
 search for admiration, at least, it is not true that the effect 
 is equal to the cause and resembles it. The cause of a flat 
 curl on the masculine forehead, such as might be seen when 
 George the Fourth was king, must have been widely different 
 in quality and intensity from the impression made by that 
 small scroll of hair on the organ of the beholder. Merely to 
 maintain an attitude and gait which I notice in certain club 
 men, and especially an inflation of the chest accompanying 
 very small remarks, there goes, I am convinced, an expendi- 
 ture of psychical energy little appreciated by the multitude 
 a mental vision of Self and deeply impressed beholders, which 
 is quite without antitype in what we call the effect produced 
 by that hidden process. 
 
 No! there is no need to admit that women would carry 
 away the prize of vanity in a competition where differences 
 of custom were fairly considered. A man cannot show his 
 vanity in a tight skirt which forces him to walk sideways 
 down the staircase ; but let the match be between the respec- 
 tive vanities of largest beard and tightest skirt, and here too 
 the battle would be to the strong. 
 
 TOL. DC. 26
 
 MORAL SWINDLERS. 
 
 IT is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of 
 words that "what a man is worth" has come to mean 
 how much money he possesses ; but there seems a deeper 
 and more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning that 
 popular or polite speech assigns to "morality" and "morals." 
 The poor part these words are made to play recalls the fate 
 of those pagan divinities who, after being understood to rule 
 the powers of the air and the destinies of men, came down 
 to the level of insignificant demons, or were even made a 
 farcical show for the amusement of the multitude. 
 
 Talking to Melissa in a time of commercial trouble, I found 
 her disposed to speak pathetically of the disgrace which had 
 fallen on Sir Gavial Mantrap, because of his conduct in rela- 
 tion to the Eocene Mines, and to other companies ingeniously 
 devised by him for the punishment of ignorance in people of 
 small means : a disgrace by which the poor titled gentleman 
 was actually reduced to live in comparative obscurity on his 
 wife's settlement of one or two hundred thousand in the 
 consols. 
 
 "Surely your pity is misapplied," said I, rather dubiously; 
 for I like the comfort of trusting that a correct moral judg- 
 ment is the strong point in woman (seeing that she has a 
 majority of about a million in our island), and I imagined 
 that Melissa might have some unexpressed grounds for her 
 opinion. "I should have thought you would rather be sorry 
 for Mantrap's victims the widows, spinsters, and hard-work- 
 ing fathers, whom his unscrupulous haste to make himself rich 
 has cheated of all their savings, while he is eating well, lying
 
 MORAL SWINDLERS. 387 
 
 softly, and, after impudently justifying himself before the 
 public, is perhaps joining in the General Confession with a 
 sense that he is an acceptable object in the sight of God, 
 though decent men refuse to meet him." 
 
 " Oh, all that about the Companies, I know, was most un- 
 fortunate. In commerce people are led to do so many things, 
 and he might not know exactly how everything would turn 
 out. But Sir Gavial made a good use of his money, and he 
 is a thoroughly moral man." 
 
 " What do you mean by a thoroughly moral man ? " said I. 
 
 " Oh, I suppose every one means the same by that," said 
 Melissa, with a slight air of rebuke. " Sir Gavial is an excel- 
 lent family man quite blameless there ; and so charitable 
 round his place at Tip-top. Very different from Mr. Barab- 
 bas, whose life, my husband tells me, is most objectionable, 
 with actresses and that sort of thing. I think a man's morals 
 should make a difference to us. I 'm not sorry for Mr. Barab- 
 bas, but I am sorry for Sir Gavial Mantrap." 
 
 I will not repeat my answer to Melissa, for I fear it was 
 offensively brusque, my opinion being that Sir Gavial was 
 the more pernicious scoundrel of the two, since his name for 
 virtue served as an effective part of a swindling apparatus ; 
 and perhaps I hinted that to call such a man " moral " showed 
 rather a silly notion of human affairs. In fact, I had an 
 angry wish to be instructive, and Melissa, as will sometimes 
 happen, noticed my anger without appropriating my instruc- 
 tion ; for I have since heard that she speaks of me as rather 
 violent-tempered, and not over-strict in my views of morality. 
 
 I wish that this narrow use of words which are wanted in 
 their full meaning were confined to women like Melissa. See- 
 ing that " morality " and "morals," under their alias of Ethics, 
 are the subject of voluminous discussion, and their true basia 
 a pressing matter of dispute seeing that the most famous 
 book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief study in our 
 colleges, allies ethical with political science, or that which 
 treats of the constitution and prosperity of states, one might 
 expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a per-
 
 388 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 version of language which lends itself to no wider view of 
 life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even respectable 
 historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing 
 that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction 
 gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by prais- 
 ing him for his pure moral character ; by which one must sup- 
 pose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not 
 the European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom 
 Macaulay describes as passing his life in chewing bang and 
 fondling dancing-girls. And since we are sometimes told of 
 such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at 
 the curious result, that the most serious wide-reaching duties 
 of man lie quite outside both morality and religion the 
 one of these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and per- 
 haps not drinking too much), and the other in certain ritual 
 and spiritual transactions with God, which can be carried on 
 equally well side by side with the basest conduct toward 
 men. With such a classification as this it is no wonder, con- 
 sidering the strong reaction of language on thought, that 
 many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and 
 philosophy, are far to seek for the grounds of social duty, 
 and without entertaining any private intention of committing 
 a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, or seeking gain 
 by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel them- 
 selves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not 
 do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety 
 by their dissatisfaction with all answers to this " Why ? " It 
 is of little use to theorize in ethics while our habitual phrase- 
 ology stamps the larger part of our social duties as something 
 that lies aloof from the deepest needs and affections of our 
 nature. The informal definitions of popular language are the 
 only medium through which theory really affects the mass of 
 minds, even among the nominally educated ; and when a man 
 whose business hours, the solid part of every day, are spent 
 in an unscrupulous course of public or private action which 
 has every calculable chance of causing wide-spread injury 
 and misery, can be called moral because he comes home to
 
 MORAL SWINDLERS. 389 
 
 dine with his wife and children and cherishes the happiness 
 of his own hearth, the augury is not good for the use of high 
 ethical and theological disputation. 
 
 Not for one moment would one willingly lose sight of the 
 truth that the relation of the sexes and the primary ties of 
 kinship are the deepest roots of human well-being, but to 
 make them by themselves the equivalent of morality is ver- 
 bally to cut off the channels of feeling through which they 
 are the feeders of that well-being. They are the original 
 fountains of a sensibility to the claims of others, which is the 
 bond of societies ; but being necessarily in the first instance 
 a private good, there is always the danger that individual self- 
 ishness will see in them only the best part of its own gain ; 
 just as knowledge, navigation, commerce, and all the condi- 
 tions which are of a nature to awaken men's consciousness of 
 their mutual dependence and to make the world one great 
 society, are the occasions of selfish, unfair action, of war and 
 oppression, so long as the public conscience or chief force of 
 feeling and opinion is not uniform and strong enough in its 
 insistence on what is demanded by the general welfare. And 
 among the influences that must retard a right public judg- 
 ment, the degradation of words which involve praise and 
 blame will be reckoned worth protesting against by every 
 mature observer. To rob words of half their meaning, while 
 they retain their dignity as qualifications, is like allowing to 
 men who have lost half their faculties the same high and 
 perilous command which they won in their time of vigor, or 
 like selling food and seeds after fraudulently abstracting their 
 best virtues; in each case what ought to be beneficently 
 strong is fatally enfeebled, if not empoisoned. Until we 
 have altered our dictionaries and have found some other word 
 than " morality " to stand in popular use for the duties of man 
 to man, let us refuse to accept as moral the contractor who 
 enriches himself by using large machinery to make paste- 
 board soles pass as leather for the feet of unhappy conscripts 
 fighting at miserable odds against invaders; let us rather 
 call him a miscreant, though he were the tenderest, most
 
 390 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT- 
 
 faithful of husbands, and contend that his own experience of 
 home happiness makes his reckless infliction of suffering on 
 others all the more atrocious. Let us refuse to accept as 
 moral any political leader who should allow his conduct in 
 relation to great issues to be determined by egoistic passion, 
 and boldly say that he would be less immoral, even though 
 he were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert Walpole, 
 if at the same time his sense of the public welfare were 
 supreme in his mind, quelling all pettier impulses beneath a 
 magnanimous impartiality. And though we were to find 
 among that class of journalists who live by recklessly report- 
 ing injurious rumors, insinuating the blackest motives in 
 opponents, descanting at large and with an air of infallibility 
 on dreams which they both find and interpret, and stimu- 
 lating bad feeling between nations by abusive writing which 
 is as empty of real conviction as the rage of a pantomime- 
 king, and would be ludicrous if its effects did not make it 
 appear diabolical though we were to find among these a 
 man who was benignancy itself in his own circle, a healer of 
 private differences, a soother in private calamities, let us 
 pronounce him nevertheless flagrantly immoral, a root of 
 hideous cancer in the commonwealth, turning the channels 
 of instruction into feeders of social and political disease. 
 
 In opposite ways one sees bad effects likely to be encouraged 
 by this narrow use of the word " morals," shutting out from 
 its meaning half those actions of a man's life which tell mo- 
 mentously on the well-being of his fellow-citizens, and on the 
 preparation of a future for the children growing up around 
 him. Thoroughness of workmanship, care in the execution 
 of every task undertaken, as if it were the acceptance of a 
 trust which it would be a breach of faith not to discharge 
 well, is a form of duty so momentous that if it were to die 
 out from the feeling and practice of a people, all reforms of 
 institutions would be helpless to create national prosperity 
 and national happiness. Do we desire to see public spirit 
 penetrating all classes of the community and affecting every 
 man's conduct, so that he shall make neither the saving of
 
 MORAL SWINDLERS. 391 
 
 his soul nor any other private saving an excuse for indif- 
 ference to the general welfare ? Well and good. But the 
 sort of public spirit that scamps its bread-winning work, 
 whether with the trowel, the pen, or the overseeing brain, 
 that it may hurry to scenes of political or social agitation, 
 would be as baleful a gift to our people as any malignant 
 demon could devise. One best part of educational training 
 is that which comes through special knowledge and manipula- 
 tive or other skill, with its usual accompaniment of delight, 
 in relation to work which is the daily bread-winning occupa- 
 tion, which is a man's contribution to the effective wealth 
 of society in return for what he takes as his own share. But 
 this duty of doing one's proper work well, and taking care 
 that every product of one's labor shall be genuinely what 
 it pretends to be, is not only left out of morals in popular 
 speech; it is very little insisted on by public teachers, at 
 least in the only effective way by tracing the continuous 
 effects of ill-done work. Some of them seem to be still 
 hopeful that it will follow as a necessary consequence from 
 week-day services, ecclesiastical decoration, and improved 
 hymn-books; others apparently trust to descanting on self- 
 culture in general, or to raising a general sense of faulty 
 circumstances ; and meanwhile lax, makeshift work, from the 
 high conspicuous kind to the average and obscure, is allowed 
 to pass unstamped with the disgrace of immorality, though 
 there is not a member of society who is not daily suffering 
 from it materially and spiritually, and though it is the fatal 
 cause that must degrade our national rank and our commerce, 
 in spite of all open markets and discovery of available coal- 
 seams. 
 
 I suppose one may take the popular misuse of the words 
 " morality " and " morals " as some excuse for certain absurdi- 
 ties which are occasional fashions in speech and writing cer- 
 tain old lay-figures, as ugly as the queerest Asiatic idol, which 
 at different periods get propped into loftiness, and attired in 
 magnificent Venetian drapery, so that whether they have a 
 human face or not is of little consequence. One is, the no-
 
 392 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 tion that there is a radical, irreconcilable opposition between 
 intellect and morality. I do not mean the simple statement 
 of fact, which everybody knows, that remarkably able men 
 have had very faulty morals, and have outraged public feel- 
 ing even at its ordinary standard ; but the supposition that 
 the ablest intellect, the highest genius, will see through mor- 
 ality as a sort of twaddle for bibs and tuckers, a doctrine of 
 dulness, a mere incident in human stupidity. We begin to 
 understand the acceptance of this foolishness by considering 
 that we live in a society where we may hear a treacherous 
 monarch, or a malignant and lying politician, or a man who 
 uses either official or literary power as an instrument of his 
 private partiality or hatred, or a manufacturer who devises 
 the falsification of wares, or a trader who deals in virtueless 
 seed-grains, praised or compassionated because of his excel- 
 lent morals. Clearly, if morality meant no more than such 
 decencies as are practised by these poisonous members of 
 society, it would be possible to say, without suspicion of 
 light-headedness, that morality lay aloof from the grand 
 stream of human affairs, as a small channel fed by the stream 
 and not missed from it. While this form of nonsense is con- 
 veyed in the popular use of words, there must be plenty of 
 well-dressed ignorance at leisure to run through a box of 
 books, which will feel itself initiated in the freemasonry 
 of intellect by a view of life which might take for a Shak- 
 spearian motto, 
 
 " Fair is foul and foul is fair, 
 Hover through the fog and filthy air," 
 
 and will find itself easily provided with striking conversation 
 by the rule of reversing all the judgments on good and evil 
 which have come to be the calendar and clock-work of society. 
 But let our habitual talk give morals their full meaning as the 
 conduct which, in every human relation, would follow from 
 the fullest knowledge and the fullest sympathy, a meaning 
 perpetually corrected and enriched by a more thorough appre- 
 ciation of dependence in things, and a finer sensibility to
 
 MORAL SWINDLERS. 393 
 
 both physical and spiritual fact, and this ridiculous ascrip- 
 tion of superlative power to minds which have no effective 
 awe-inspiring vision of the human lot, no response of under- 
 standing to the connection between duty and the material 
 processes by which the world is kept habitable for cultivated 
 man, will be tacitly discredited without any need to cite the, 
 immortal names that all are obliged to take as the measure 
 of intellectual rank and highly charged genius. 
 
 Suppose a Frenchman I mean no disrespect to the great 
 French nation, for all nations are afflicted with their peculiar 
 parasitic growths, which are lazy, hungry forms, usually char- 
 acterized by a disproportionate swallowing apparatus sup- 
 pose a Parisian who should shuffle down the Boulevard with 
 a soul ignorant of the gravest cases and the deepest tender- 
 ness of manhood, and a frame more or less fevered by de- 
 bauchery, mentally polishing into utmost refinement of phrase 
 and rhythm verses which were an enlargement on that Shak- 
 spearian motto, and worthy of the most expensive title to be 
 furnished by the venders of such antithetic ware as " Les Mar- 
 guerites de 1'Enfer," or "Les delices de Beelzebuth." This 
 supposed personage might probably enough regard his nega- 
 tion of those moral sensibilities which make half the warp and 
 woof of human history his indifference to the hard thinking 
 and hard handiwork of life, to which he owed even his own 
 gauzy mental garments, with their spangles of poor paradox 
 as the royalty of genius, for we are used to witness such self- 
 crowning in many forms of mental alienation ; but he would 
 not, I think, be taken, even by his own generation, as a living 
 proof that there can exist such a combination as that of moral 
 stupidity and trivial emphasis of personal indulgence, with the 
 large yet finely discriminating vision which marks the intel- 
 lectual masters of our kind. Doubtless there are many sorts 
 of transfiguration, and a man who has come to be worthy of 
 all gratitude and reverence may have had his swinish period, 
 wallowing in ugly places ; but suppose it had been handed 
 down to us that Sophocles or Virgil had at one time made 
 himself scandalous in this way; the works which have
 
 394 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 consecrated their memory for our admiration and gratitude 
 are not a glorifying of swinishness, but an artistic incorpora- 
 tion of the highest sentiment known to their age. 
 
 All these may seem to be wide reasons for objecting to 
 Melissa's pity for Sir Gavial Mantrap, on the ground of his 
 good morals ; but their connection will not be obscure to any 
 one who has taken pains to observe the links uniting the 
 scattered signs of our social development.
 
 SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE. 
 
 "1 >f~Y friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of 
 _LY_L the universe hitherto, but is confident that at some 
 future period, within the duration of the solar system, ours 
 will be the best of all possible worlds, a hope which I 
 always honor as a sign of beneficent qualities, my friend 
 Trost always tries to keep up my spirits, under the sight of 
 the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which 
 many of our fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with 
 the assurance that " all this will soon be done by machinery." 
 But he sometimes neutralizes the consolation by extending it 
 over so large an area of human labor, and insisting so im- 
 pressively on the quantity of energy which will thus be set 
 free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire an oc- 
 casional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the 
 humbler kinds of work should be entirely nullified while 
 there are still left some men and women who are not fit for 
 the highest. 
 
 Especially, when one considers the perfunctory way in 
 which some of the most exalted tasks are already executed 
 by those who are understood to be educated for them, there 
 rises a fearful vision of the human race evolving machinery 
 which will by and by throw itself fatally out of work. When, 
 in the Bank of England, I see a wondrously delicate machine 
 for testing sovereigns, a shrewd implacable little steel Rhad- 
 amanthus that, once the coins are delivered up to it, lifts and 
 balances each in turn for the fraction of an instant, fini* it 
 wanting or sufficient, and dismisses it to right or left with 
 rigorous justice ; when I am told of micrometers and thermo
 
 396 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 piles and tasimeters, which deal physically with the invisible, 
 the impalpable, and the unimaginable ; of cunning wires and 
 wheels and pointing needles which will register your and my 
 quickness so as to exclude flattering opinion ; of a machine 
 for drawing the right conclusion, which will doubtless by-and- 
 by be improved into an automaton for finding true premises ; 
 of a microphone which detects the cadence of a fly's foot on 
 the ceiling, and may be expected presently to discriminate 
 the noises of our various follies as they soliloquize or con- 
 verse in our brains, my mind seeming too small for these 
 things, I get a little out of it, like an unfortunate savage too 
 suddenly brought face to face with civilization, and I exclaim : 
 
 "Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race ? and 
 will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede 
 us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the labora- 
 tory, and performing, with infallible exactness, more than 
 everything that we have performed, with a slovenly approxi- 
 mativeness, and self-defeating inaccuracy?" 
 
 " But," says Trost, treating me with cautious mildness on 
 hearing me vent this raving notion, "you forget that these 
 wonder-workers are the slaves of our race, need our tendance 
 and regulation, obey the mandates of our consciousness, and 
 are only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which we decipher 
 and make use of. They are simply extensions of the human 
 organism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably more powerful, 
 ever more subtle finger-tips, ever more mastery over the in- 
 visibly great and the invisibly small. Each new machine 
 needs a new appliance of human skill to construct it, new 
 devices to feed it with material, and often keener-edged facul- 
 ties to note its registrations or performances. How, then, 
 can machines supersede us ? They depend upon us. When 
 we cease, they cease." 
 
 " I am not so sure of that," said I, getting back into my 
 mind, and becoming rather wilful in consequence. " If, as I 
 have heard you contend, machines as they are more and more 
 perfected will require less and less of tendance, how do I 
 know that they may not be ultimately made to carry, or may
 
 397 
 
 not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, self-repair, 
 and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty and subtle 
 work possible on this planet better than we could do it, but 
 with the immense advantage of banishing from the earth's 
 atmosphere screaming consciousnesses which, in our compara- 
 tively clumsy race, make an intolerable noise and fuss to each 
 other about every petty ant-like performance, looking on at 
 all work only as it were to spring a rattle here or blow a 
 trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense of being effective ? I 
 for my part cannot see any reason why a sufficiently penetrat- 
 ing thinker, who can see his way through a thousand years 
 or so, should not conceive a parliament of machines, in which 
 the manners were excellent and the motions infallible in logic ; 
 one honorable instrument, a remote descendant of the Voltaic 
 family, might discharge a powerful current (entirely without 
 animosity) on an honorable instrument opposite, of more up- 
 start origin, but belonging to the ancient edge-tool race, which 
 we already at Sheffield see paring thick iron as if it were mel- 
 low cheese by this unerringly directed discharge operating 
 on movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and 
 by necessary meshanical consequence on movements corre- 
 sponding to what we call the Funds, which, with a vain 
 analogy, we sometimes speak of as ' sensitive.' For every 
 machine would be perfectly educated, that is to say, would have 
 the suitable molecular adjustments, which would act not the 
 less infallibly for being free from the fussy accompaniment 
 of that consciousness to which our prejudice gives a supreme 
 governing rank, when in truth it is an idle parasite on the 
 grand sequence of things." 
 
 " Nothing of the sort ! " returned Trost, getting angry, 
 and judging it kind to treat me with some severity ; " what 
 you have heard me say is, that our race will and must act as 
 a nervous centre to the utmost development of mechanical 
 processes : the subtly refined powers of machines will react 
 in producing more subtly refined thinking processes, which 
 will occupy the minds set free from grosser labor. Say, for 
 example, that all the scavengers' work in London were donb,
 
 398 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 so far as human attention is concerned, by the occasional pres- 
 sure of a brass button (as in the ringing of an electric bell), 
 you will then have a multitude of brains set free for the ex- 
 quisite enjoyment of dealing with the exact sequences and 
 high speculations supplied and prompted by the delicate ma- 
 chines which yield a response to the fixed stars, and give 
 readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in 
 the production of epic poems or great judicial harangues. So 
 far from mankind being thrown out of work, according to 
 your notion," concluded Trost, with a peculiar nasal note of 
 scorn, " if it were not for your incurable dilettanteism in sci- 
 ence as in all other things if you had once understood the 
 action of any delicate machine you would perceive that the 
 sequences it carries throughout the realm of phenomena 
 would require many generations, perhaps eons of understand- 
 ings considerably stronger than yours, to exhaust the store of 
 work it lays open." 
 
 "Precisely," said I, with a meekness which I felt was 
 praiseworthy ; " it is the feebleness of my capacity, bringing 
 me nearer than you to the human average, that perhaps ena- 
 bles me to imagine certain results better than you can. 
 Doubtless the very fishes of your rivers, gullible as they 
 look, and slow as they are to be rightly convinced in another 
 order of facts, form fewer false expectations about each other 
 than we should form about them if we were in a position of 
 somewhat fuller intercourse with their species ; for even as it 
 is, we have continually to be surprised that they do not rise 
 to our carefully selected bait. Take me then as a sort of re- 
 flective and experienced carp, but do not estimate the justice 
 of my ideas by my facial expression." 
 
 " Pooh ! " says Trost. (We are on very intimate terms.) 
 "Naturally," I persisted, "it is less easy to you than to 
 me to imagine our race transcended and superseded, since the 
 more energy a being is possessed of, the harder it must be 
 for him to conceive his own death. But I, from the point of 
 view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine myself and my 
 congeners dispensed with in the frame of things, and giving
 
 SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE. 399 
 
 way not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of en- 
 tity. What I would ask you is, to show me why, since each 
 new invention casts a new light along the pathway of dis- 
 covery, and each new combination or structure brings into 
 play more conditions than its inventor foresaw, there should 
 not at length be a machine of such high mechanical powers 
 that it would find and assimilate the material to supply its 
 own waste, and then, by a further evolution of internal 
 molecular movements, reproduce itself by some process of 
 fission or budding. This last stage having been reached, 
 either by man's contrivance or as an unforeseen result, one 
 sees that the process of natural selection must drive men 
 altogether out of the field ; for they will long before then 
 have begun to sink into the miserable condition of those 
 unhappy characters in fable, who having demons or djinns at 
 their beck, and being obliged to supply them with work, 
 found too much of everything done in too short a time. 
 What demons so potent as molecular movements, none the 
 less tremendously potent for not carrying the futile cargo of 
 a consciousness screeching irrelevantly, like a fowl tied head 
 downmost to the saddle of a swift horseman ? Under such 
 uncomfortable circumstances, our race will have diminished 
 with the diminishing call on their energies ; and by the time 
 that the self -repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but 
 a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will 
 have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other 
 degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydro- 
 cephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and 
 intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been 
 overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the 
 immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will 
 naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, 
 subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight. Thus the 
 feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be 
 accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined 
 itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted 
 existences do before the fittest i. e. f the existence composed
 
 400 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 of the most persistent groups of movements and the most 
 capable of incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. 
 Who, if our consciousness is, as I have been given to under- 
 stand, a mere stumbling of our organisms on their way to 
 unconscious perfection, who shall say that those fittest ex- 
 istences will not be found along the track of what we call in- 
 organic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate 
 processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that 
 the minerals are metamorphosing themselves continually in 
 the dark laboratory of the earth's crust ? Thus this planet 
 may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the 
 inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and com- 
 plicated as those of human language, and all the intricate 
 web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, 
 without sensitive impulse; there may be, let us say, mute 
 orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no conscious- 
 ness there even to enjoy the silence." 
 
 "Absurd ! " grumbled Trost. 
 
 "The supposition is logical," said L " It is well argued 
 from the premises." 
 
 "Whose premises?" cried Trost, turning on me with 
 some fierceness. "You don't mean to call them mine, I 
 hope?" 
 
 " Heaven forbid. They seem to be flying about in the air 
 with other germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my 
 melancholy fancies. Nobody really holds them. They bear 
 the same relation to real belief, as walking on the head for a 
 show does to running away from an explosion or walking 
 fast to catch the train."
 
 THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 
 
 discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, 
 J- does not require so fine a mental edge as the discerning 
 of diversity amidst general sameness. The primary rough 
 classification depends on the prominent resemblances of 
 things : the progress is toward finer and finer discrimination 
 according to minute differences. 
 
 Yet even at this stage of European culture, one's attention 
 is continually drawn to the prevalence of that grosser mental 
 sloth which makes people dull to the most ordinary prompt- 
 ing of comparison, the bringing things together because of 
 their likeness. The same motives, the same ideas, the same 
 practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and 
 denounced, according to their association with superficial 
 differences, historical or actually social. Even learned writers, 
 treating of great subjects, often show an attitude of mind not 
 greatly superior in its logic to that of the frivolous fine lady 
 who is indignant at the frivolity of her maid. 
 
 To take only the subject of the Jews : it would be difficult 
 to find a form of bad reasoning about them which has not 
 been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity 
 of print ; but the neglect of resemblances is a common prop- 
 erty of dulness which unites all the various points of view 
 the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and the abysmally 
 ignorant. 
 
 That the preservation of national memories is an element 
 and a means of national greatness ; that their revival is a sign 
 of reviving nationality ; that every heroic defender, every pa- 
 triotic restorer, has been inspired by such memories and has 
 VOL. ix. '<&
 
 402 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 made them bis watchword ; that even such a corporate exist 
 ence as that of a Roman legion or an English regiment has 
 been made valorous by memorial standards, these are the 
 glorious commonplaces of historic teaching at our public 
 schools and universities, being happily ingrained in Greek 
 and Latin classics. They have also been impressed on the 
 world by conspicuous modern instances. That there is a free 
 modern Greece is due through all infiltration of other than 
 Greek blood to the presence of ancient Greece in the 
 consciousness of European men; and every speaker would 
 feel his point safe if he were to praise Byron's devotion to a 
 cause made glorious by ideal identification with the past ; 
 hardly so, if he were to insist that the Greeks were not to be 
 helped further because their history shows that they were 
 anciently unsurpassed in treachery and lying, and that many 
 modern Greeks are highly disreputable characters, while 
 others are disposed to grasp too large a share of our com- 
 merce. The same with Italy ; the pathos of his country's 
 lot pierced the youthful soul of Mazzini, because, like Dante's, 
 his blood was fraught with the kinship of Italian greatness, 
 his imagination filled with a majestic past that wrought it- 
 self into a majestic future. Half a century ago, what was 
 Italy? An idling-place of dilettanteism or of itinerant 
 motiveless wealth, a territory parcelled out for papal suste- 
 nance, dynastic convenience, and the profit of an alien 
 Government. What were the Italians ? No people, no voice 
 in European counsels, no massive power in European affairs : 
 a race thought of in English and French society as chiefly 
 adapted to the operatic stage, or to secure as models for 
 painters; disposed to smile gratefully at the reception of 
 half-pence ; and by the more historical remembered to be 
 rather polite than truthful in all probability, a combination 
 of Machiavelli, Kubini, and Masaniello. Thanks chiefly to the 
 divine gift of a memory which inspires the moments with a 
 past, a present, and a future, and gives the sense of corporate 
 existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable 
 and innocent brute, all that, or most of it, is changed.
 
 THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 403 
 
 Again, one of our living historians finds just sympathy in 
 his vigorous insistence on our true ancestry, on our being the 
 strongly marked heritors, in language and genius, of those old 
 English seamen, who, beholding a rich country with a most 
 convenient seaboard, came, doubtless with a sense of divine 
 warrant, and settled themselves on this or the other side 
 of fertilizing streams, gradually conquering more and more 
 of the pleasant land from the natives who knew nothing of 
 Odin, and finally making unusually clean work in ridding 
 themselves of those prior occupants. " Let us," he virtually 
 says " let us know who were our forefathers, who it was 
 that won the soil for us, and brought the good seed of those 
 institutions through which we should not arrogantly but 
 gratefully feel ourselves distinguished among the nations as 
 possessors of long-inherited freedom ; let us not keep up an 
 ignorant kind of naming which disguises our true affinities 
 of blood and language, but let us see thoroughly what sort 
 of notions and traditions our forefathers had, and what sort of 
 song inspired them. Let the poetic fragments which breathe 
 forth their fierce bravery in battle, and their trust in fierce 
 gods who helped them, be treasured with affectionate rever- 
 ence. These seafaring, invading, self-asserting men were the 
 English of old time, and were our fathers, who did rough, 
 work by which we are profiting. They had virtues which 
 incorporated themselves in wholesome usages, to which we 
 trace our own political blessings. Let us know and acknowl- 
 edge our common relationship to them, and be thankful that, 
 over and above the affections and duties which spring from 
 our manhood, we have the closer and more constantly guiding 
 duties which belong to us as Englishmen." 
 
 To this view of our nationality most persons, who have 
 feeling and understanding enough to be conscious of the 
 connection between the patriotic affection and every other 
 affection which lifts us above emigrating rats and free-loving 
 baboons, will be disposed to say Amen. True, we are not 
 indebted to those ancestors for our religion ; we are rather 
 proud of having got that illumination from elsewhere. The
 
 404 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 men who planted our nation were not Christians, though they 
 began their work centuries after Christ, and they had a de- 
 cided objection to Christianity when it was first proposed to 
 them ; they were not monotheists, and their religion was the 
 reverse of spiritual. But since we have been fortunate 
 enough to keep the island home they won for us, and have 
 been on the whole a prosperous people, rather continuing the 
 plan of invading and spoiling other lands than being forced 
 to beg for shelter in them, nobody has reproached us because 
 our fathers, thirteen hundred years ago, worshipped Odin, 
 massacred Britons, and were with difficulty persuaded to 
 accept Christianity, knowing nothing of Hebrew history and 
 the reasons why Christ should be received as the Saviour of 
 mankind. The Ked Indians, not liking us when we settled 
 among them, might have been willing to fling such facts in 
 our faces, but they were too ignorant; and, besides, their 
 opinions did not signify, because we were able, if we liked, 
 to exterminate them. The Hindoos also have doubtless had 
 their rancors against us, and still entertain enough ill-will to 
 make unfavorable remarks on our character, especially as to 
 our historic rapacity and arrogant notions of our own superi- 
 ority. They perhaps do not admire the usual English profile, 
 and they are not converted to our way of feeding ; but though 
 we are a small number of an alien race, profiting by the 
 territory and produce of these prejudiced people, they are 
 unable to turn us out ; at least, when they tried, we showed 
 them their mistake. We do not call ourselves a dispersed 
 and a punished people ; we are a colonizing people, and it is 
 we who have punished others. 
 
 Still, the historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell 
 on the virtues of our ancestors with emulation, and to cherish 
 our sense of a common descent as a bond of obligation. The 
 eminence, the nobleness of a people, depends on its capability 
 of being stirred by memories, and for striving for what we 
 call spiritual ends ends which consist not in an immediate 
 material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great feeling 
 that animates the collective body as with one souL A people
 
 THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 405 
 
 having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering 
 thrill when it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died 
 to preserve its national existence ; when it is reminded of its 
 small beginnings and gradual growth through past labors and 
 struggles, such as are still demanded of it in order that the 
 freedom and well-being thus inherited may be transmitted 
 unimpaired to children and children's children; when an 
 appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great 
 precedents in its history, and to the better genius breathing 
 in its institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in 
 common which makes a national consciousness. Nations so 
 moved will resist conquest with the very breasts of their 
 women, will pay their millions and their blood to abolish 
 slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity, will 
 produce poets to sing "some great story of a man," and 
 thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action. An in- 
 dividual man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a 
 nation of this order, if not in actual existence yet existing in 
 the past in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, 
 once a reality, and perhaps to be restored. A common hu- 
 manity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various 
 activity which makes a complete man. The time is not come 
 for cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than of 
 communism to suffice for social energy. I am not bound to 
 feel for a Chinaman as I feel for my fellow-countryman : I 
 am bound not to demoralize him with opium, not to compel 
 him to my will by destroying or plundering the fruits of his 
 labor, on the alleged ground that he is not cosmopolitan 
 enough, and not to insult him for his want of my tailoring 
 and religion when he appears as a peaceable visitor on the 
 London pavement. It is admirable in a Briton with a good 
 purpose to learn Chinese ; but it would not be a proof of fine 
 intellect in him to taste Chinese poetry in the original more 
 than he tastes the poetry of his own tongue. Affection, in- 
 telligence, duty, radiate from a centre, and nature has decided 
 that for us English folk that centre can be neither China nor 
 Peru. Most of us feel this unreflectingly, for the affectation
 
 406 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 of undervaluing everything native, and being too fine for 
 one's own country, belongs only to a few minds of no danger- 
 ous leverage. What is wanting is that we should recognize 
 a corresponding attachment to nationality as legitimate in 
 every other people, and understand that its absence is a pri- 
 vation of the greatest good. 
 
 For, to repeat, not only the nobleness of a nation depends 
 on the presence of this national consciousness, but also the 
 nobleness of each individual citizen. Our dignity and recti- 
 tude are proportioned to our sense of relationship with some- 
 thing great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, 
 worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to self -repression 
 and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and more 
 attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal 
 ease or prosperity. And a people possessing this good should 
 surely feel not only a ready sympathy with the effort of those 
 who, having lost the good, strive to regain it, but a profound 
 pity for any degradation resulting from its loss, nay, some- 
 thing more than pity when happier nationalities have made 
 victims of the unfortunate whose memories, nevertheless, are 
 the very fountain to which the persecutors trace their most 
 vaunted blessings. 
 
 These notions are familiar ; few will deny them in the ab- 
 stract, and many are found loudly asserting them in relation 
 to this or the other particular case. But here as elsewhere, 
 in the ardent application of ideas, there is a notable lack of 
 simple comparison or sensibility to resemblance. The Euro- 
 pean world has long been used to consider the Jews as alto- 
 gether exceptional, and it has followed naturally enough that 
 they have been excepted from the rules of justice and mercy, 
 which are based on human likeness. But to consider a people 
 whose ideas have determined the religion of half the world, 
 and that the more cultivated half, and who made the most 
 eminent struggle against the power of Home, as a purely 
 exceptional race, is a demoralizing offence against rational 
 knowledge, a stultifying inconsistency in historical interpre- 
 tation. Every nation of forcible character, i. e., of strongly
 
 THE MODERN HEP! HEPi HEP! 407 
 
 marked characteristics, is so far exceptional. The distinctive 
 note of each bird-species is in this sense exceptional, but the 
 necessary ground of such distinction is a deeper likeness. 
 The superlative peculiarity in the Jews admitted, our affinity 
 with them is only the more apparent when the elements of 
 their peculiarity are discerned. 
 
 From whatever point of view the writings of the Old Testa- 
 ment may be regarded, the picture they present of a national 
 development is of high interest and speciality ; nor can their 
 historic momentousness be much affected by any varieties of 
 theory as to the relation they bear to the New Testament 
 or to the rise and constitution of Christianity. Whether 
 we accept the canonical Hebrew books as a revelation, or 
 simply as a part of an ancient literature, makes no difference 
 to the fact that we find there the strongly characterized por- 
 traiture of a people educated from an earlier or later period 
 to a sense of separateness unique in its intensity a people 
 taught by many concurrent influences to identify faithfulness 
 to its national traditions with the highest social and religious 
 blessings. Our too scanty sources of Jewish history, from 
 the return under Ezra to the beginning of the desperate re- 
 sistance against Rome, show us the heroic and triumphant 
 struggle of the Maccabees, which rescued the religion and 
 independence of the nation from the corrupting sway of the 
 Syrian Greeks, adding to the glorious sum of its memorials, 
 and stimulating continuous efforts of a more peaceful sort to 
 maintain and develop that national life which the heroes had 
 fought and died for, by internal measures of legal administra- 
 tion and public teaching. Thenceforth the virtuous elements 
 of the Jewish life were engaged, as they had been with vary- 
 ing aspects during the long and changeful prophetic period 
 and the restoration under Ezra, on the side of preserving the 
 specific national character against a demoralizing fusion with 
 that of foreigners whose religion and ritual were idolatrous 
 and often obscene. There was always a Foreign party reviling 
 the National party as narrow, and sometimes manifesting 
 their own breadth in extensive views of advancement or profit
 
 408 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 to themselves by flattery of a foreign power. Such internal 
 conflict naturally tightened the bands of conservatism, which 
 needed to be strong if it were to rescue the sacred Ark, the 
 vital spirit of a small nation " the smallest of the nations " 
 whose territory lay on the highway between three conti- 
 nents ; and when the dread and hatred of foreign sway had 
 condensed itself into dread and hatred of the Romans, many 
 Conservatives became Zealots, whose chief mark was that they 
 advocated resistance to the death against the submergence 
 of their nationality. Much might be said on this point 
 toward distinguishing the desperate struggle against a con- 
 quest which is regarded as degradation and corruption, from 
 rash, hopeless insurrection against an established native gov- 
 ernment ; and for my part (if that were of any consequence) 
 I share the spirit of the Zealots. I take the spectacle of the 
 Jewish people defying the Roman edict, and preferring death 
 by starvation or the sword to the introduction of Caligula's 
 deified statue into the temple, as a sublime type of steadfast- 
 ness. But all that need be noticed here is the continuity of 
 that national education (by outward and inward circumstance) 
 which created in the Jews a feeling of race, a sense of corpo- 
 rate existence, unique in its intensity. 
 
 But not, before the dispersion, unique in essential qualities. 
 There is more likeness than contrast between the way we 
 English got our island and the way the Israelites got Canaan. 
 We have not been noted for forming a low estimate of our- 
 selves in comparison with foreigners, or for admitting that 
 our institutions are equalled by those of any other people 
 under the sun. Many of us have thought that our sea-wall is 
 a specially divine arrangement to make and keep us a nation 
 of sea-kings after the manner of our forefathers, secure against 
 invasion, and able to invade other lands when we need them, 
 though they may lie on the other side of the ocean. Again, it 
 has been held that we have a peculiar destiny as a Protestant 
 people, not only able to bruise the head of an idolatrous 
 Christianity in the midst of us, but fitted, as possessors of the 
 most truth and the most tonnage, to carry our purer religion
 
 THE MODERN HEP! HEP1 HEP! 409 
 
 over the world and convert mankind to our way of thinking. 
 The Puritans, asserting their liberty to restrain tyrants, found 
 the Hebrew history closely symbolical of their feelings and 
 purpose ; and it can hardly be correct to cast the blame of 
 their less laudable doings on the writings they invoked, since 
 their opponents made use of the same writings for different 
 ends, finding there a strong warrant for the divine right of 
 kings and the denunciation of those who, like Korah, Dathan, 
 and Abiram, took on themselves the office of the priesthood, 
 which belonged of right solely to Aaron and his sons, or, in 
 other words, to men ordained by the English bishops. We 
 must rather refer the passionate use of the Hebrew writings 
 to affinities of disposition between our own race and the Jew- 
 ish. Is it true that the arrogance of a Jew was so immeasur- 
 ably beyond that of a Calvinist ? And the just sympathy 
 and admiration which we give to the ancestors who resisted 
 the oppressive acts of our native kings, and by resisting res- 
 cued or won for us the best part of our civil and religious 
 liberties is it justly to be withheld from those brave and 
 steadfast men of Jewish race who fought and died, or strove 
 by wise administration to resist, the oppression and corrupt- 
 ing influences of foreign tyrants, and by resisting, rescued 
 the nationality which was the very hearth of our own relig- 
 ion ? At any rate, seeing that the Jews were more specifi- 
 cally than any other nation educated into a sense of their 
 supreme moral value, the chief matter of surprise is that 
 any other nation is found to rival them in this form of self- 
 confidence. 
 
 More exceptional less like the course of our own history 
 has been their dispersion and their subsistence as a sepa- 
 rate people through ages in which, for the most part, they 
 were regarded and treated very much as beasts hunted for 
 the sake of their skins, or of a valuable secretion peculiar to 
 their species. The Jews showed a talent for accumulating 
 what was an object of more immediate desire to Christians 
 than animal oils or well-furred skins, and their cupidity and 
 avarice were found at once particularly hateful and particu-
 
 410 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 larly useful : hateful when seen as a reason for punishing 
 them by mulcting or robbery ; useful when this retributive 
 process could be successfully carried forward. Kings and 
 emperors naturally were more alive to the usefulness of sub- 
 jects who could gather and yield money ; but edicts issued to 
 protect " the King's Jews " equally with the King's game 
 from being harassed and hunted by the commonalty, were 
 only slight mitigations to the deplorable lot of a race held 
 to be under the divine curse, and had little force after the 
 Crusades began. As the slaveholders in the United States 
 counted the curse on Ham a justification of negro slavery, 
 so the curse on the Jews was counted a justification for hin- 
 dering them from pursuing agriculture and handicrafts ; for 
 marking them out as execrable figures by a peculiar dress ; 
 for torturing them to make them part with their gains, or 
 for more gratuitously spitting at them and pelting them ; for 
 taking it as certain that they killed and ate babies, poisoned 
 the wells, and took pains to spread the plague ; for putting 
 it to them whether they would be baptized or burned, and 
 not failing to burn and massacre them when they were obsti- 
 nate ; but also for suspecting them of disliking the baptism 
 when they had got it, and then burning them in punishment 
 of their insincerity ; finally, for hounding them by tens on 
 tens of thousands from the homes where they had found 
 shelter for centuries, and inflicting on them the horrors of a 
 new exile and a new dispersion. All this to avenge the 
 Saviour of mankind, or else to compel these stiff-necked 
 people to acknowledge a Master whose servants showed such 
 beneficent effects of his teaching. 
 
 With a people so treated, one of two issues was possible : 
 either from being of feebler nature than their persecutors, 
 and caring more for ease than for the sentiments and ideas 
 which constituted their distinctive character, they would 
 everywhere give way to pressure and get rapidly merged in 
 the populations around them; or being endowed with un- 
 common tenacity, physical and mental, feeling peculiarly the 
 ties of inheritance both in blood and faith, remembering na
 
 THE MODERN HEP! HEP I HEP I 411 
 
 tional glories, trusting in their recovery, abhorring apostasy, 
 able to bear all things and hope all things with the conscious- 
 ness of being steadfast to spiritual obligations, the kernel of 
 their number would harden into an inflexibility more and 
 more insured by motive and habit. They would cherish all 
 differences that marked them off from their hated oppressors, 
 all memories that consoled them with a sense of virtual 
 though unrecognized superiority ; and the separateness which 
 was made their badge of ignominy would be their inward 
 pride, their source of fortifying defiance. Doubtless such a 
 people would get confirmed in vices. An oppressive govern- 
 ment and a persecuting religion, while breeding vices in 
 those who hold power, are well known to breed answering 
 vices in those who are powerless and suffering. What more 
 direct plan than the course presented by European history 
 could have been pursued in order to give the Jews a spirit of 
 bitter isolation, and scorn for the wolfish hypocrisy that made 
 victims of them, of triumph in prospering at the expense of 
 the blunderers who stoned them away from the open paths 
 of industry ; or, on the other hand, to encourage in the less 
 defiant a lying conformity, a pretence of conversion for the 
 sake of the social advantages attached to baptism, an out- 
 ward renunciation of their hereditary ties, with the lack of 
 real love toward the society and creed which exacted this 
 galling tribute ; or again, in the most unhappy specimens 
 of the race, to rear transcendent examples of odious vice, 
 reckless instruments of rich men with bad propensities, 
 unscrupulous grinders of alien people who wanted to grind 
 them? 
 
 No wonder the Jews have their vices ; no wonder if it 
 were proved (which it has not hitherto appeared to be) that 
 some of them have a bad pre-eminence in evil, an unrivalled 
 superfluity of naughtiness. It would be more plausible to 
 make a wonder of the virtues which have prospered among 
 them under the shadow of oppression. But instead of dwell- 
 ing on these, or treating as admitted what any hardy or 
 ignorant person may deny, let us found simply on the loud
 
 412 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 assertions of the hostile. The Jews, it is said, resisted the 
 expansion of their own religion into Christianity ; they were 
 in the habit of spitting on the cross ; they have held the name 
 of Christ to be Anathema. Who taught them that? The 
 men who made Christianity a curse to them ; the men who 
 made the name of Christ a symbol for the spirit of vengeance, 
 and, what was worse, made the execution of the vengeance a 
 pretext for satisfying their own savageness, greed, and envy ; 
 the men who sanctioned with the name of Christ a barbaric 
 and blundering copy of Pagan fatalism, in taking the words 
 " His blood be upon us and on our children " as a divinely 
 appointed verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty, from genera- 
 tion to generation, on the people from whose sacred writings 
 Christ drew his teaching. Strange retrogression in the pro- 
 fessors of an expanded religion, boasting an illumination 
 beyond the spiritual doctrine of Hebrew prophets! For 
 Hebrew prophets proclaimed a God who demanded mercy 
 rather than sacrifices. The Christians also believed that God 
 delighted not in the blood of ranis and of bulls, but they 
 apparently conceived him as requiring for his satisfaction the 
 sighs and groans, the blood and roasted flesh, of men whose 
 forefathers had misunderstood the metaphorical character of 
 prophecies which spoke of spiritual pre-eminence under the 
 figure of a material kingdom. Was this the method by 
 which Christ desired his title to the Messiahship to be com- 
 mended to the nation in which he was born ? Many of his 
 sayings bear the stamp of that patriotism which places 
 fellow-countrymen in the inner circle of affection and duty. 
 And did the words "Father, forgive them, they know not 
 what they do," refer only to the centurion and his band, a 
 tacit exception being made of every Hebrew there present 
 from the mercy of the Father and the compassion of the 
 Son, nay, more, of every Hebrew yet to come, who re- 
 mained unconverted after hearing of his claim to the Mes- 
 siahship, not from his own lips or those of his native apostles, 
 but from the lips of alien men, whom cross, creed, and bap- 
 tism had left cruel, rapacious, and debauched ? It is more
 
 THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 413 
 
 reverent to Christ to believe that he must have approved the 
 Jewish martyrs who deliberately chose to be burned or 
 massacred rather than be guilty of a blaspheming lie, more 
 than he approved the rabble of Crusaders who robbed and 
 murdered them in his name. 
 
 But these remonstrances seem to have no direct applica- 
 tion to personages who take up the attitude of philosophic 
 thinkers and discriminating critics, professedly accepting 
 Christianity from a rational point of view, as a vehicle of the 
 highest religious and moral truth, and condemning the Jews 
 on the ground that they are obstinate adherents of an out- 
 worn creed, maintain themselves in moral alienation from the 
 peoples with whom they share citizenship, and are destitute 
 of real interest in the welfare of the community and state 
 with which they are thus identified. These anti-Judaic 
 advocates usually belong to a party which has felt itself 
 glorified in winning for Jews, as well as Dissenters and 
 Catholics, the full privileges of citizenship, laying open to 
 them every path to distinction. At one time the voice of 
 this party urged that differences of creed were made danger- 
 ous only by the denial of citizenship, that you must make 
 a man a citizen before he could feel like one. At present, 
 apparently, this confidence has been succeeded by a sense of 
 mistake ; there is a regret that no limiting clauses were in- 
 sisted on, such as would have hindered the Jews from coming 
 too far and in too large proportion along those opened 
 pathways ; and the Roumanians are thought to have shown 
 an enviable wisdom in giving them as little chance as possible. 
 But then the reflection occurring that some of the most 
 objectionable Jews are baptized Christians, it is obvious that 
 such clauses would have been insufficient, and the doctrine 
 that you can turn a Jew into a good Christian is emphatically 
 retracted. But, clearly, these liberal gentlemen, too late 
 enlightened by disagreeable events, must yield the palm of 
 wise foresight to those who argued against them long ago ; 
 and it is a striking spectacle to witness minds so panting for 
 advancement in some directions that they are ready to force
 
 414 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 it on an unwilling society, in this instance despairingly 
 recurring to mediaeval types of thinking insisting that the 
 Jews are made viciously cosmopolitan by holding the world's 
 money-bag ; that for them all national interests are resolved 
 into the algebra of loans ; that they have suffered an inward 
 degradation stamping them as morally inferior, and " serve 
 them right," since they rejected Christianity. All which is 
 mirrored in an analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also a ser- 
 vile race, who have rejected Protestantism, though it has 
 been repeatedly urged on them by fire and sword and penal 
 laws, and whose place in the moral scale may be judged by 
 our advertisements, where the clause, "No Irish need ap- 
 ply," parallels the sentence which for many polite persons 
 sums up the question of Judaism, "I never did like the 
 Jews." 
 
 It is certainly worth considering whether an expatriated, 
 denationalized race, used for ages to live among antipathetic 
 populations, must not inevitably lack some conditions of 
 nobleness. If they drop that separateness which is made 
 their reproach, they may be in danger of lapsing into a cos- 
 mopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and of missing 
 that inward identification with the nationality immediately 
 around them which might make some amends for their inher- 
 ited privation. No dispassionate observer can deny this 
 danger. Why, our own countrymen who take to living 
 abroad, without purpose or function to keep up their sense of 
 fellowship in the affairs of their own land, are rarely good 
 specimens of moral healthiness ; still, the consciousness of 
 having a native country, the birthplace of common memories 
 and habits of mind, existing like a parental hearth quitted 
 but beloved ; the dignity of being included in a people which 
 has a part in the comity of nations and the growing federa- 
 tion of the world ; that sense of special belonging which is 
 the root of human virtues, both public and. private, all 
 these spiritual links may preserve migratory Englishmen 
 from the worst consequences of their voluntary dispersion. 
 Unquestionably the Jewa, having been more than any other
 
 THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP! 415 
 
 race exposed to the adverse moral influences of alienism, 
 must, both in individuals and in groups, have suffered some 
 corresponding moral degradation ; but in fact they have es- 
 caped with less of abjectness, and less of hard hostility 
 toward the nations whose hand has been against them, than 
 could have happened in the case of a people who had neither 
 their adhesion to a separate religion founded on historic 
 memories, nor their characteristic family affectionateness. 
 Tortured, flogged, spit upon, the corpus vile on which rage or 
 wantonness vented themselves with impunity, their name 
 flung at them as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred, and 
 contempt, they have remained proud of their origin. Does 
 any one call this an evil pride ? Perhaps he belongs to that 
 order of man who, while he has a democratic dislike to dukes 
 and earls, wants to make believe that his father was an idle 
 gentleman, when in fact he was an honorable artisan, or who 
 would feel flattered to be taken for other than an English- 
 man. It is possible to be too arrogant about our blood or our 
 calling, but that arrogance is virtue compared with such 
 mean pretence. The pride which identifies us with a great 
 historic body is a humanizing, elevating habit of mind, in- 
 spiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or other selfish 
 ambition, for the sake of that ideal whole; and no man 
 swayed by such a sentiment can become completely abject. 
 That a Jew of Smyrna, where a whip is carried by passengers 
 ready to flog off the too officious specimens of his race, can 
 still be proud to say " I am a Jew," is surely a fact to awaken 
 admiration in. a mind capable of understanding what we may 
 call the ideal forces in human history. And again, a varied, 
 impartial observation of the Jews in different countries tends 
 to the impression that they have a predominant kindliness 
 which must have been deeply ingrained in the constitution of 
 their race to have outlasted the ages of persecution and op- 
 pression. The concentration of their joys in domestic life 
 has kept up in them the capacity of tenderness ; the pity for 
 the fatherless and the widow, the care for the women and 
 the little ones, blent intimately with their religion, is a well
 
 410 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 of mercy that cannot long or widely be pent up by exclusive- 
 ness. And the kindliness of the Jew overflows the line of 
 division between him and the Gentile. On the whole, one of 
 the most remarkable phenomena in the history of this scattered 
 people, made for ages " a scorn and a hissing," is, that after 
 being subjected to this process, which might have been ex- 
 pected to be in every sense deteriorating and vitiating, they 
 'have come out of it (in any estimate which allows for numer- 
 ical proportion) rivalling the nations of all European coun- 
 tries in healthiness and beauty of physique, in practical 
 ability, in scientific and artistic aptitude, and in some forms 
 of ethical value. A significant indication of their natural 
 rank is seen in the fact that at this moment the leader of the 
 Liberal party in Germany is a Jew, the leader of the Repub- 
 lican party in France is a Jew, and the head of the Conserva- 
 tive ministry in England is a Jew. 
 
 And here it is that we find the ground for the obvious 
 jealousy which is now stimulating the revived expression of 
 old antipathies. " The Jews," it is felt, " have a dangerous 
 tendency to get the uppermost places, not only in commerce 
 but in political life. Their monetary hold on governments is 
 tending to perpetuate in leading Jews a spirit of universal 
 alienism (euphemistically called cosmopolitanism), even where 
 the West has given them a full share in civil and political 
 rights. A people with Oriental sunlight in their blood, yet 
 capable of being everywhere acclimatized, they have a force 
 and toughness which enables them to carry off the best 
 prizes; and their wealth is likely to put half the seats in 
 Parliament at their disposal." 
 
 There is truth in these views of Jewish social and political 
 relations ; but it is rather too late for Liberal pleaders to urge 
 them in a merely vituperative sense. Do they propose, as a 
 remedy for the impending danger of our healthier national 
 influences getting overridden by Jewish predominance, that 
 we should repeal our emancipatory laws ? Not all the Ger- 
 manic immigrants who have been settling among us for gen- 
 erations, and are still pouring in to settle, are Jews, but
 
 THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEPt 417 
 
 thoroughly Teutonic and more or less Christian craftsmen, 
 mechanicians, or skilled and erudite functionaries; and the 
 Semitic Christians who swarm among us are dangerously like 
 their unconverted brethren in complexion, persistence, and 
 wealth. Then there are the Greeks, who, by the help of 
 Phoenician blood or otherwise, are objectionably strong in the 
 city. Some judges think that the Scotch are more numerous 
 and prosperous here in the South than is quite for the good 
 of us Southerners; and the early inconvenience felt under 
 the Stuarts, of being quartered upon by a hungry, hard-work- 
 ing people, with a distinctive accent and form of religion, and 
 higher cheek-bones than English taste requires, has not yet 
 been quite neutralized. As for the Irish, it is felt in high 
 quarters that we have always been too lenient toward them ; 
 at least if they had been harried a little more-, there might 
 not have been so many of them on the English press, of 
 which they divide the power with the Scotch, thus driving 
 many Englishmen to honest and ineloquent labor. 
 
 So far shall we be carried if we go in search of devices to 
 hinder people of other blood than our own from getting the 
 advantage of dwelling among us. 
 
 Let it be admitted that it is a calamity to the English, as 
 to any other great historic people, to undergo a premature 
 fusion with immigrants of alien blood, that its distinctive 
 national characteristics should be in danger of obliteration by 
 the predominating quality of foreign settlers. I not only 
 admit this ; I am ready to unite in groaning over the threat- 
 ened danger. To one who loves his native language, who 
 would delight to keep our rich and harmonious English un- 
 defiled by foreign accent, and those foreign tinctures of 
 verbal meaning which tend to confuse all writing and dis- 
 course, it is an affliction as harassing as the climate, that on 
 our stage, in our studies, at our public and private gatherings, 
 in our offices, warehouses, and workshops, we must expect to 
 hear our beloved English, with its words clipped, its vowels 
 stretched and twisted, its phrases of acquiescence and polite- 
 ness, of cordiality, dissidence, or argument, delivered alwayi 
 
 TOL. IX. -W
 
 418 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 in the wrong tones, like ill-rendered melodies, marred beyond 
 recognition, that there should be a general ambition to speak 
 every language except our mother English, which persons "of 
 style " are not ashamed of corrupting with slang, false for- 
 eign equivalents, and a pronunciation that crushes out all color 
 from the vowels and jams them between jostling consonants. 
 An ancient Greek might not like to be resuscitated for the 
 sake of hearing Homer read in our universities ; still he would 
 at least find more instructive marvels in other developments 
 to be witnessed at those institutions ; but a modern English- 
 man is invited from his after-dinner repose to hear Shak- 
 speare delivered under circumstances which offer no other 
 novelty than some novelty of false intonation, some new dis- 
 tribution of strong emphasis on prepositions, some new mis- 
 conception of a familiar idiom. Well, it is our inertness that 
 is in fault, our carelessness of excellence, our willing igno- 
 rance of the treasures that lie in our national heritage, while 
 we are agape after what is foreign, though it may be only a 
 vile imitation of what is native. 
 
 This marring of our speech, however, is a minor evil com- 
 pared with what must follow from the predominance oi 
 wealth-acquiring immigrants, whose appreciation of our po- 
 litical and social life must often be as approximative or 
 fatally erroneous as their delivery of our language. But take 
 the worst issues, what can we do to hinder them ? Are we 
 to adopt the exclusiveness for which we have punished the 
 Chinese? Are we to tear the glorious flag of hospitality 
 which has made our freedom the world-wide blessing of the 
 oppressed ? It is not agreeable to find foreign accents and 
 stumbling locutions passing from the piquant exception to 
 the general rule of discourse. But to urge on that account 
 that we should spike away the peaceful foreigner, would be a 
 view of international relations not in the long run favorable 
 to the interests of our fellow-countrymen ; for we are at least 
 equal to the races we call obtrusive in the disposition to set- 
 tle wherever money is to be made and cheaply idle living to 
 be found. In meeting the national evils which are brought
 
 THE MODERN HEP1 HEP! HEP! 419 
 
 upon us by the onward course of the world, there is often no 
 more immediate hope or resource than that of striving after 
 fuller national excellence, which must consist in the mould- 
 ing of more excellent individual natives. The tendency of 
 things is toward the quicker or slower fusion of races. It is 
 impossible to arrest this tendency : all we can do is to mod- 
 erate its course, so as to hinder it from degrading the moral 
 status of societies by a too rapid effacement of those national 
 traditions and customs which are the language of the national 
 genius, the deep suckers of healthy sentiment. Such mod- 
 erating and guidance of inevitable movement is worthy of all 
 effort. And it is in this sense that the modern insistence on 
 the idea of nationalities has value. That any people, at once 
 distinct and coherent enough to form a state, should be held 
 in subjection by an alien antipathetic government, has been 
 becoming more and more a ground of sympathetic indigna- 
 tion ; and, in virtue of this, at least one great state has been 
 added to European councils. Nobody now complains of the 
 result in this case, though far-sighted pe'rsons see the need to 
 limit analogy by discrimination. We have to consider who 
 are the stifled people and who the stiflers, before we can be 
 sure of our ground. The only point in this connection on 
 which Englishmen are agreed is, that England itself shall not 
 be subject to foreign rule. The fiery resolve to resist inva- 
 sion, though with an improvised array of pitchforks, is felt 
 to be virtuous, and to be worthy of a historic people. Why ? 
 Because there is a national life in our veins. Because there 
 is something specifically English which we feel to be su- 
 premely worth striving for, worth dying for, rather than liv- 
 ing to renounce it. Because we too have our share perhaps 
 a principal share in that spirit of separateness which has 
 not yet done its work in the education of mankind, which has 
 created the varying genius of nations, and, like the Muses, is 
 the offspring of memory. 
 
 Here, as everywhere else, the human task seems to oe the 
 discerning and adjustment of opposite claims. But the end 
 can hardly be achieved by urging contradictory reproaches,
 
 420 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 and, instead of laboring after discernment as a preliminary to 
 intervention, letting our zeal burst forth according to a ca- 
 pricious selection, first determined accidentally, and after- 
 ward justified by personal predilection. Not only John 
 Gilpin and his wife, or Edwin and Angelina, seem to be of 
 opinion that their preference or dislike of Russians, Servians, 
 or Greeks, consequent, perhaps, on hotel adventures, has some- 
 thing to do with the merits of the Eastern Question ; even in 
 a higher range of intellect and enthusiasm we find a distribu- 
 tion of sympathy or pity for sufferers of different blood or 
 votaries of different religions, strangely unaccountable on any 
 other ground than a fortuitous direction of study or trivial 
 circumstances of travel. With some even admirable persons 
 one is never quite sure of any particular being included under 
 a general term. A provincial physician, it is said, once or- 
 dering a lady patient not to eat salad, was asked pleadingly 
 by the affectionate husband whether she might eat lettuce, or 
 cresses, or radishes. The physician had too rashly believed 
 in the comprehensiveness of the word " salad," just as we, 
 if not enlightened by experience, might believe in the all- 
 embracing breadth of " sympathy with the injured and op- 
 pressed." What mind can exhaust the grounds of exception 
 which lie in each particular case ? There is understood to 
 be a peculiar odor from the negro body, and we know that 
 some persons, too rationalistic to feel bound by the curse on 
 Ham, used to hint very strongly that this odor determined 
 the question on the side of negro slavery. 
 
 And this is the usual level of thinking in polite society 
 concerning the Jews. Apart from theological purposes, it 
 seems to be held surprising that anybody should take an in- 
 terest in the history of a people whose literature has furnished 
 all our devotional language ; and if any reference is made to 
 their past or future destinies, some hearer is sure to state, as 
 a relevant fact which may assist our judgment, that she, for 
 her part, is not fond of them, having known a Mr. Jacobson 
 who was very unpleasant, or that he, for his part, thinks 
 meanly of them as a race, though, on inquiry, you find that
 
 THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP1 421 
 
 he is so little acquainted with their characteristics that he is 
 astonished to learn how many persons whom he has blindly 
 admired and applauded are Jews to the backbone. Again, 
 men who consider themselves in the very van of modern ad- 
 vancement, knowing history and the latest philosophies of 
 history, indicate their contemptuous surprise that any one 
 should entertain the destiny of the Jews as a worthy subject, 
 by referring to Moloch, and their own agreement with the 
 theory that the religion of Jehovah was merely a transformed 
 Moloch-worship, while in the same breath they are glorifying 
 "civilization" as a transformed tribal existence of which 
 some lineaments are traceable in grim marriage customs of the 
 native Australians. Are these erudite persons prepared to 
 insist that the name " Father " should no longer have any 
 sanctity for us, because in their view of likelihood our Aryan 
 ancestors were mere improvers on a state of things in which 
 nobody knew his own father ? 
 
 For less theoretic men, ambitious to be regarded as practi- 
 cal politicians, the value of the Hebrew race has been meas- 
 ured by their unfavorable opinion of a prime minister who is 
 a Jew by lineage. But it is possible to form a very ugly 
 opinion as to the scrupulousness of Walpole or of Chatham ; 
 and in any case I think Englishmen would refuse to accept 
 the character and doings of those eighteenth-century states- 
 men as the standard of value for the English people and the 
 part they have to play in the fortunes of mankind. 
 
 If we are to consider the future of the Jews at all, it seems 
 reasonable to take, as a preliminary question, Are they des- 
 tined to complete fusion with the peoples among whom they 
 are dispersed, losing every remnant of a distinctive conscious- 
 ness as Jews ? or, Are there in the breadth and intensity with 
 which the feeling of separateness, or what we may call the 
 organized memory of a national consciousness, actually exists 
 in the world-wide Jewish communities the seven millions 
 scattered from the east to west ? and again, Are there, in 
 the political relations of the world, the conditions present or 
 approaching for the restoration of a Jewish State planted on
 
 422 ESSAYS OF GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 the old ground as a centre of national feeling, a source of 
 dignifying protection, a special channel for special energies, 
 which may contribute some added form of national genius, 
 and an added voice in the councils of the world? 
 
 They are among us everywhere ; it is useless to say we are 
 not fond of them. Perhaps we are not fond of proletaries 
 and their tendency to form Unions, but the world is not 
 therefore to be rid of them. If we wish to free ourselves from 
 the inconveniences that we have to complain of, whether in 
 proletaries or in Jews, our best course is to encourage all 
 means of improving these neighbors who elbow us in a thick- 
 ening crowd, and of sending their incommodious energies into 
 beneficent channels. Why are we so eager for the dignity of 
 certain populations of whom, perhaps, we have never seen a 
 single specimen, and of whose history, legend, or literature 
 we have been contentedly ignorant for ages, while we sneer 
 at the notion of a renovated national dignity for the Jews, 
 whose ways of thinking and whose very verbal forms are on 
 our lips in every prayer which we end with an Amen ? Some 
 of us consider this question dismissed when they have said 
 the wealthiest Jews have no desire to forsake their European 
 palaces and go to live in Jerusalem. But in a return from 
 exile, in the restoration of a people, the question is not 
 whether certain rich men will choose to remain behind, but 
 whether there will be found worthy men who will choose to 
 lead the return. Plenty of prosperous Jews remained in 
 Babylon when Ezra marshalled his band of forty thousand 
 and began a new glorious epoch in the history of his race, 
 making the preparation for that epoch in the history of the 
 world which has been held glorious enough to be dated from 
 forevermore. The hinge of possibility is simply the existence 
 of an adequate community of feeling, as well as widespread 
 need, in the Jewish race, and the hope that among its finer 
 specimens there may arise some men of instruction and ar- 
 dent public spirit, some new Ezras, modern Maccabees, who 
 will know how to use all favoring outward conditions, how 
 to triumph by heroic example over the indifference of their
 
 THE MODERN HEP1 HEP! HEP! 428 
 
 fellows and the scorn of their foes, and -will steadfastly set 
 their faces toward making their people once more one among 
 the nations. 
 
 Formerly, Evangelical Orthodoxy was prone to dwell on 
 the fulfilment of prophecy in the " restoration of the Jews." 
 Such interpretation of the prophets is less in vogue now. 
 The dominant mode is to insist on a Christianity that dis- 
 owns its origin, that is not a substantial growth, having a 
 genealogy, but is a vaporous reflex of modern notions. The 
 Christ of Matthew had the heart of a Jew : " Go ye first to 
 the lost sheep of the house of Israel." The Apostle of the 
 G-entiles had the heart of a Jew : " For I could wish that my- 
 self were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen 
 according to the flesh : who are Israelites ; to whom per- 
 taineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and 
 the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the prom 
 ises ; whose are the fathers, and of whom, as concerning the 
 flesh, Christ came." Modern apostles, extolling Christianity, 
 are found using a different tone ; they prefer the mediaeval 
 cry translated into modern phrase. But the mediaeval cry, 
 too, was in substance very ancient more ancient than the 
 days of Augustus. Pagans in successive ages said, " These 
 people are unlike us, and refuse to be made like us ; let us 
 punish them." The Jews were steadfast in their separateness, 
 and through that separateness Christianity was born. A mod- 
 ern book on Liberty has maintained that from the freedom of 
 individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world may be 
 enriched. Why should we not apply this argument to the 
 idiosyncrasy of a nation, and pause in our haste to hoot it 
 down ? There is still a great function for the steadfastness 
 of the Jew : not that he should shut out the utmost illumina- 
 'tion which knowledge can throw on his national history, but 
 that he should cherish the store of inheritance which that his- 
 tory has left him. Every Jew should be conscious that he is 
 one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety, in the 
 immortal achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors 
 who have transmitted to them a physical and mental type
 
 424 ESSAYS OF GEORGi, ELIOT. 
 
 strong enough, eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough 
 with peculiar promise, to constitute a new beneficent individ- 
 uality among the nations, and, by confuting the traditions of 
 scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their fathers. 
 
 There is a sense in which the worthy child of a nation that 
 has brought forth illustrious prophets, high and unique 
 among the poets of the world, is bound by their visions. 
 
 Is bound ? 
 
 Yes, for the effective bond of human action is feeling; and 
 the worthy child of a people owning the triple name of He- 
 brew, Israelite, and Jew, feels his kinship with the glories 
 and the sorrows, the degradation and the possible renovation, 
 of his national family. 
 
 Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling, and 
 call his doctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding 
 superstition, the superstition that a theory of human well- 
 being can be constructed in disregard of the influences which 
 have made us human.
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL.
 
 Give me no light, great Heaven, bat such as turns 
 
 To energy of human fellowship ; 
 
 No powers beyond the growing heritage 
 
 That makes completer manhood.
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 TtE time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject 
 to attacks of angina, pectoris ; and in the ordinary course of 
 things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my 
 life will not be protracted many months. Unless, then, I 
 am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am 
 cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much 
 longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly 
 existence. If it were to be otherwise if I were to live on 
 to the age most men desire and provide for I -should for 
 once have known whether the miseries of delusive expectation 
 can outweigh the miseries of true prevision. For I foresee 
 when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my last 
 moments. 
 
 Just a month from this day, on the 20th of September, 1850, 
 I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock at 
 night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, 
 without delusions and without hope. Just as I am watching 
 a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burn- 
 ing low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I 
 shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, 
 before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer 
 my bell. I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will 
 have quarrelled. My "housekeeper will have rushed out of the 
 house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will be- 
 lieve she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, 
 and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep 
 on a bench : she never answers the bell j it does not. wa.lre her.
 
 428 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 The sense of suffocation increases : my lamp goes out with a 
 horrible stench : I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell 
 again. I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for 
 the unknown : the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with 
 the known, and be weary of it : I am content. Agony of pain 
 and suffocation and all the while the earth, the fields, the 
 pebbly brook at the bottom of the rookery, the fresh scent 
 after the rain, the light of the morning through my chamber- 
 window, the warmth of the hearth after the frosty air will 
 darkness close over them forever ? 
 
 Darkness darkness no pain nothing but darkness : but 
 I am passing on and on through the darkness : my thought 
 stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving 
 onward. . . . 
 
 Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease 
 and strength in telling the strange story of my experience. 
 I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being ; I 
 have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of 
 my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meeting with 
 some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead : 
 it is the living only who cannot be forgiven the living only 
 from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like 
 the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise 
 it it is your only opportunity ; while the eye can still turn 
 towards you with moist timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy 
 unanswering gaze ; while the ear, that delicate messenger to 
 the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of 
 kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, 
 or envious affectation of indifference ; while the creative brain 
 can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning 
 for brotherly recognition make haste oppress it with your 
 ill-considered judgments, your trivial comparisons, your care- 
 less misrepresentations. The heart will by-and-by be still 
 ubi sceva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit ; * the eye will 
 cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have 
 ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then your 
 charitable speeches may find vent ; then you may remember 
 
 1 Inscription on Swift's tombstone.
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 429 
 
 and pity the toil and the struggle and the failure ; then you 
 may give due honor to the work achieved ; then you may find 
 extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them. 
 
 That is a trivial schoolboy text ; why do I dwell on it ? It 
 has little reference to me, for I shall leave no works behind 
 me for men to honor. I have no near relatives who will make 
 up, by weeping over my grave, for the wounds they inflicted 
 on me when I was among them. It is only the story of 
 my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy from 
 strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would ob- 
 tain from my friends while I was living. 
 
 My childhood perhaps seems happier to me than it really 
 was, by contrast with all the after-years. For then the curtain 
 of the future was as impenetrable to me as to other children : 
 I had all their delight in the present hour, their sweet indefi- 
 nite hopes for the morrow ; and I had a tender mother : even 
 now, after the dreary lapse of long years, a slight trace of 
 sensation accompanies the remembrance of her caress as she 
 held me on her knee her arms round my little body, her 
 cheek pressed on mine. I had a complaint of the eyes that 
 made me blind for a little while, and she kept me on her knee 
 from morning till night. That unequalled love soon vanished 
 out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness it was 
 as if that life had become more chill. I rode my little white 
 pony with the groom by my side as before, but there were no 
 loving eyes looking at me as I mounted, no glad arms opened 
 to me when I came back. Perhaps I missed my mother's love 
 more than most children of seven or eight would have done, 
 to whom the other pleasures of life remained as before ; for I 
 was certainly a very sensitive child. I remember still the 
 mingled trepidation and delicious excitement with which I 
 was affected by the tramping of the horses on the pavement 
 in the echoing stables, by the loud resonance of the grooms' 
 voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as my father's car- 
 riage thundered under the archway of the courtyard, by the 
 din of the gong as it gave notice of luncheon and dinner. 
 The measured tramp of soldiery which I sometimes heard -~ 
 for my father's house lay near a county town where there
 
 430 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 were large barracks made me sob and tremble ; and yet 
 when they were gone past, I longed for them to come back 
 again. 
 
 I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little 
 fondness for me ; though he was very careful in fulfilling what 
 he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the 
 middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had 
 been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty when he mar- 
 ried her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, 
 in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the 
 active landholder, aspiring to county influence : one of those 
 people who are always like themselves from day to day, who 
 are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy 
 nor high spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more 
 timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times ; a cir- 
 cumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the inten- 
 tion to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive 
 one with which he had complied in the case of my elder 
 brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be 
 his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and 
 Oxford, for the sake of making connections, of course : my 
 father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satir- 
 ists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic 
 position. But, intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those 
 dead but sceptred spirits ; " having qualified himself for form- 
 ing an independent opinion by reading Potter's "^Eschylus," 
 and dipping into Francis's " Horace." To this negative view 
 he added a positive one, derived from a recent connection with 
 mining speculations ; namely, that a scientific education was 
 the really useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was 
 clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter 
 the rough experience of a public school. Mr. Letherall had 
 said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall was a large man in 
 spectacles, who one day took my small head between his large 
 hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, suspi- 
 cious manner then placed each of his great thumbs on my 
 temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and stared at 
 me with glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared to
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 431 
 
 displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, 
 drawing his thumbs across my eyebrows 
 
 " The deficiency is there, sir there ; and here," he added, 
 touching the upper sides of my head, "here is the excess. 
 That must be brought out, sir, and this must be laid to sleep." 
 
 I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I 
 was the object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my 
 first hatred hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled 
 my head about as if he wanted to buy and cheapen it. 
 
 I am not aware how much Mr. Letherall had to do with the 
 system afterwards adopted towards me, but it was presently 
 clear that private tutors, natural history, science, and the mod- 
 ern languages, were the appliances by which the defects of my 
 organization were to be remedied. I was very stupid about 
 machines, so I was to be greatly occupied with them ; I had 
 ho memory for classification, so it was particularly necessary 
 that I should study systematic zoology and botany ; I was 
 hungry for human deeds and human emotions, so I was to be 
 plentifully crammed with the mechanical powers, the elemen- 
 tary bodies, and the phenomena of electricity and magnetism. 
 A better-constituted boy would certainly have profited under 
 my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus ; and 
 would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and 
 magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured 
 they were. As it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance 
 of whatever was taught me, with the worst Latin scholar that 
 was ever turned out of a classical academy. I read Plutarch, 
 and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied my- 
 self in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was 
 assuring me that " an improved man, as distinguished from an 
 ignorant one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran 
 down-hill." I had no desire to be this improved man ; I was 
 glad of the running water ; I could watch it and listen to it 
 gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the bright green 
 water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to know 
 why it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good 
 reasons for what was so very beautiful. 
 
 There is no need to dwell on this part of my life. I have
 
 432 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 said enough to indicate that my nature was of the sensitire, 
 unpractical order, and that it grew up in an uncongenial me- 
 dium, which could never foster it into happy, healthy develop- 
 ment. When I was sixteen I was sent to Geneva to complete 
 my course of education ; and the change was a very happy one 
 to me, for the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on 
 them, as we descended the Jura, seemed to me like an entrance 
 into heaven ; and the three years of my life there were spent 
 in a perpetual sense of exaltation, as if from a draught of de- 
 licious wine, at the presence of Nature in all her awful love- 
 liness. You will think, perhaps, that I must have been a poet, 
 from this early sensibility to Nature. But my lot was not so 
 happy as that. A poet pours forth his song and believes in the 
 listening ear and answering soul, to which his song will be 
 floated sooner or later. But the poet's sensibility without his 
 voice the poet's sensibility that finds no vent but in silent ' 
 tears on the sunny bank, when the noonday light sparkles on 
 the water, or in an inward shudder at the sound of harsh hu- 
 man tones, the sight of a cold human eye this dumb passion 
 brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the society of one's 
 fellow-men. My least solitary moments were those in which 
 I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the 
 lake ; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain- 
 tops, and the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherish- 
 ing love such as no human face had shed on me since my 
 mother's love had vanished out of my life. I used to do as 
 Jean Jacques did lie down in my boat and let it glide where 
 it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving one 
 mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire 
 were passing over them on its way to the home of light. 
 Then, when the white summits were all sad and corpse-like, 
 I had to push homeward, for I was under careful surveillance, 
 and was allowed no late wanderings. This disposition of mine 
 was not favorable to the formation of intimate friendships 
 among the numerous youths of my own age who are always to 
 be found studying at Geneva. Yet I made one such friend- 
 ship ; and, singularly enough, it was with a youth whose intel- 
 lectual tendencies were the very reverse of my own. I shall
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 433 
 
 call him Charles Meunier ; his real surname an English one, 
 for he was of English extraction having since become cele- 
 brated. He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance 
 while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a spe- 
 cial genius. Strange ! that with my vague mind, susceptible 
 and unobservant, hating inquiry and given up to contempla- 
 tion, I should have been drawn towards a youth whose strong- 
 est passion was science. But the bond was not an intellectual 
 one ; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid 
 with the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical : it came from 
 community of feeling. Charles was poor and ugly, derided by 
 Genevese gamins, and not acceptable in drawing-rooms. I saw 
 that he was isolated, as I was, though from a different cause, 
 and, stimulated by a sympathetic resentment, I made timid 
 advances towards him. It is enough to say that there sprang 
 up as much comradeship between us as our different habits 
 would allow ; and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the 
 Saleve together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I listened 
 dreamily to the monologues in which he unfolded his bold 
 conceptions of future experiment and discovery. I mingled 
 them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of blue water 
 and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and the 
 distant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that my 
 mind was half absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way ; 
 for don't we talk of our hopes and our projects even to dogs 
 and birds, when they love us ? I have mentioned this one 
 friendship because of its connection with a strange and terrible 
 scene which I shall have to narrate in my subsequent life. 
 
 This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe 
 illness, which is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly 
 remembered suffering, with the presence of my father by my 
 bed from time to time. Then came the languid monotony of 
 convalescence, the days gradually breaking into variety and 
 distinctness as my strength enabled me to take longer and 
 longer drives. On one of these more vividly remembered days, 
 my father said to me, as he sat beside my sofa 
 
 "When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I 
 shall take you home with me. The journey will amuse you 
 
 TTOT. TT. 21
 
 434 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 and do you good, for I shall go through the Tyrol and Austria, 
 and you will see many new places. Our neighbors, the Fil- 
 mores, are come ; Alfred will join us at Basle, and we shall all 
 go together to Vienna, and back by Prague " 
 
 My father was called away before he had finished his sen- 
 tence, and he left my mind resting on the word Prague, with 
 a strange sense that a new and wondrous scene was breaking 
 upon me : a city under the broad sunshine, that seemed to me 
 as if it were the summer sunshine of a long-past century 
 arrested in its course unrefreshed for ages by the dews of 
 night, or the rushing rain-cloud ; scorching the dusty, weary, 
 time -eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale 
 repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings 
 in their regal gold-inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty 
 that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal ; and the 
 blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along 
 the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their 
 saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners 
 of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying 
 to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it 
 for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, 
 who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned 
 time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me ; who 
 pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace 
 which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who 
 worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by 
 no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old 
 and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as they live on 
 in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the new 
 birth of morning. 
 
 A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, 
 and I became conscious of the objects in my room again : one 
 of the fire-irons had fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring 
 me my draught. My heart was palpitating violently, and I 
 begged Pierre to leave my draught beside me ; I would take 
 it presently. 
 
 As soon as I was alone again, I began to ask myself whether 
 I had been sleeping. Was this a dream this wonderfully
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 435 
 
 distinct vision minute in its distinctness down to a patch of 
 rainbow light on the pavement, transmitted through a colored 
 lamp in the shape of a star of a strange city, quite unfamil- 
 iar to my imagination ? I had seen no picture of Prague : it 
 lay in my mind as a mere name, with vaguely remembered his- 
 torical associations ill-defined memories of imperial gran- 
 deur and religious wars. 
 
 Nothing of this sort had ever occurred in my dreaming ex- 
 perience before, for I had often been humiliated because my 
 dreams were only saved from being utterly disjointed and 
 commonplace by the frequent terrors of nightmare. But I 
 could not believe that I had been asleep, for I remembered 
 distinctly the gradual breaking-in of the vision upon me, like 
 the new images in a dissolving view, or the growing distinct- 
 ness of the landscape as the sun lifts up the veil of the morn- 
 ing mist. And while I was conscious of this incipient vision, 
 I was also conscious that Pierre came to tell my father Mr. 
 Filmore was waiting for him, and that my father hurried out 
 of the room. No, it was not a dream ; was it the thought 
 was full of tremulous exultation was it the poet's nature in 
 me, hitherto only a troubled yearning sensibility, now mani- 
 festing itself suddenly as spontaneous creation ? Surely it 
 was in this way that Homer saw the plain of Troy, that Dante 
 saw the abodes of the departed, that Milton saw the earthward 
 flight of the Tempter. Was it that my illness had wrought 
 some happy change in my organization given a firmer ten- 
 sion to my nerves carried off some dull obstruction ? I had 
 often read of such effects in works of fiction at least. Nay ; 
 in genuine biographies I had read of the subtilizing or exalt- 
 ing influence of some diseases on the mental powers. Did not 
 Novalis feel his inspiration intensified under the progress of 
 consumption ? 
 
 When my mind had dwelt for some time on this blissful 
 idea, it seemed to me that I might perhaps test it by an exer- 
 tion of my will. The vision had begun when my father was 
 speaking of our going to Prague. I did not for a moment 
 believe it was really a representation of that city ; I believed 
 I hoped it was a picture that my newly liberated genius had
 
 436 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 painted in fiery haste, with the colors snatched from lazy 
 memory. Suppose I were to fix my mind on some other place 
 Venice, for example, which was far more familiar to my 
 imagination than Prague : perhaps the same sort of result 
 would follow. I concentrated my thoughts on Venice ; I 
 stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove 
 to feel myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself present 
 in Prague. But in vain. I was only coloring the Canaletto 
 engravings that hung in my old bedroom at home ; the picture 
 was a shifting one, my mind wandering uncertainly in search 
 of more vivid images ; I could see no accident of form or 
 shadow without conscious labor after the necessary conditions. 
 It was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity, such as I had 
 experienced half an hour before. I was discouraged: but I 
 remembered that inspiration was fitful. 
 
 For several days I was in a state of excited expectation, 
 watching for a recurrence of my new gift. I sent my thoughts 
 ranging over my world of knowledge, in the hope that they 
 would find some object which would send a reawakening vibra- 
 tion through my slumbering genius. But no; my world 
 remained as dim as ever, and that flash of strange light refused 
 to come again, though I watched for it with palpitating 
 eagerness. 
 
 My father accompanied me every day in a drive, and a 
 gradually lengthening walk as my powers of walking in- 
 creased; and one evening he had agreed to come and fetch 
 me at twelve the next day, that we might go together to select 
 a musical box, and other purchases rigorously demanded of a 
 rich Englishman visiting Geneva. He was one of the most 
 punctual of men and bankers, and I was always nervously 
 anxious to be quite ready for him at the appointed time. 
 But, to my surprise, at a quarter past twelve he had not 
 appeared. I felt all the impatience of a convalescent who 
 has nothing particular to do, and who has just taken a tonic 
 in the prospect of immediate exercise that would carry off 
 the stimulus. 
 
 Unable to sit still and reserve my strength. I walked up and 
 down the room, looking out on the current of the Rhone, just
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 437 
 
 where it leaves the dark-blue lake ; but thinking all the while 
 of the possible causes that could detain my father. 
 
 Suddenly I was conscious that my father was in the room, 
 but not alone : there were two persons with him. Strange I 
 I had heard no footstep, I had not seen the door open ; but I 
 saw my father, and at his right hand our neighbor Mrs. Fil- 
 more, whom I remembered very well, though I had not seen 
 her for five years. She was a commonplace middle-aged 
 woman, in silk and cashmere ; but the lady on the left of my 
 father was not more than twenty, a tall, slim, willowy figure, 
 with luxuriant blond hair, arranged in cunning braids and 
 folds that looked almost too massive for the slight figure and 
 the small-featured, thin-lipped face they crowned. But the 
 face had not a girlish expression : the features were sharp, the 
 pale gray eyes at once acute, restless, and sarcastic. They 
 were fixed on me in half-smiling curiosity, and I felt a painful 
 sensation as if a sharp wind were cutting me. The pale-green 
 dress, and the green leaves that seemed to form a border about 
 her pale blond hair, made me think of a Water-Nixie, for my 
 mind was full of German lyrics, and this pale, fatal-eyed 
 woman, with the green weeds, looked like a birth from some 
 cold sedgy stream, the daughter of an aged river. 
 
 " Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said. . . . 
 
 But while the last word was in my ears, the whole group 
 vanished, and there was nothing between me and the Chinese 
 painted folding-screen that stood before the door. I was cold 
 and trembling ; I could only totter forward and throw myself 
 on the sofa. This strange new power had manifested itself 
 again. . . . But was it a power ? Might it not rather be a 
 disease a sort of intermittent delirium, concentrating my 
 energy of brain into moments of unhealthy activity, and leav- 
 ing my saner hours all the more barren ? I felt a dizzy sense 
 of unreality in what my eye rested on ; I grasped the bell con- 
 vulsively, like one trying to free himself from nightmare, and 
 rang it twice. Pierre came with a look of alarm in his face. 
 
 " Monsieur ne se trouve pas bien ? " he said, anxiously. 
 
 " I 'm tired of waiting, Pierre," I said, as distinctly and em- 
 phatically as I could, like a man determined to be sober in
 
 438 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 spite of wine; "I'm afraid something has happened to my 
 father he's usually so punctual. Kun to the Hotel des 
 Bergues and see if he is there." 
 
 Pierre left the room at once, with a soothing " Bien, Mon- 
 sieur ; " and I felt the better for this scene of simple, waking 
 prose. Seeking to calm myself still further, I went into my bed- 
 room, adjoining the salon, and opened a'case of eau-de-Cologne ; 
 took out a bottle ; went through the process of taking out the 
 cork very neatly, and then rubbed the reviving spirit over my 
 hands and forehead, and under my nostrils, drawing a new- 
 delight from the scent because I had procured it by slow 
 details of labor, and by no strange sudden madness. Already 
 I had begun to taste something of the horror that belongs to 
 the lot of a human being whose nature is not adjusted to 
 simple human conditions. 
 
 Still enjoying the scent, I returned to the salon, but it was 
 not unoccupied, as it had been before I left it. In front of 
 the Chinese folding-screen there was my father, with Mrs. 
 Filmore on his right hand, and on his left the slim blond- 
 haired girl, with the keen face and the keen eyes fixed on me 
 in half-smiling curiosity. 
 
 " Well, Latimer, you thought me long," my father said. . . . 
 
 I heard no more, felt no more, till I became conscious that 
 I was lying with my head low on the sofa, Pierre and my 
 father by my side. As soon as I was thoroughly revived, my 
 father left the room, and presently returned, saying 
 
 " I 've been to tell the ladies how you are, Latimer. They 
 were waiting in the next room. We shall put off our shopping 
 expedition to-day." 
 
 Presently he said, " That young lady is Bertha Grant, Mrs. 
 Filmore's orphan niece. Filmore has adopted her, and she 
 lives with them, so you will have her for a neighbor when 
 we go home perhaps for a near relation; for there is a 
 tenderness between her and Alfred, I suspect, and I should 
 be gratified by the match, since Filmore means to provide 
 for her in every way as if she were his daughter. It had not 
 occurred to me that you knew nothing about her living with 
 the Filmores."
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL, 439 
 
 He made no further allusion to the fact of my having fainted 
 at the moment of seeing her, and I would not for the world 
 have told him the reason : I shrank from the idea of disclosing 
 to any one what might be regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, 
 most of all from betraying it to my father, who would have 
 suspected my sanity ever after. 
 
 I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of 
 my experience. I have described these two cases at length, 
 because they had definite, clearly traceable results in my 
 after-lot. 
 
 Shortly after this last occurrence I think the very next 
 day I began to be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensi- 
 bility, to which, from the languid and slight nature of my 
 intercourse with others since my illness, I had not been alive 
 before. This was the obtrusion on my mind of the mental 
 process going forward in first one person, and then another, 
 with whom I happened to be in contact : the vagrant, frivolous 
 ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance Mrs. 
 Filmore, for example would force themselves on my con- 
 sciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, 
 or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect. But this un- 
 pleasant sensibility was fitful, and left me moments of rest, 
 when the souls of my companions were once more shut out 
 from me, and I felt a relief such as silence brings to wearied 
 nerves. I might have believed this importunate insight to be 
 merely a diseased activity of the imagination, but that my 
 prevision of incalculable words and actions proved it to have a 
 fixed relation to the mental process in other minds. But this 
 superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough when 
 it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, 
 became an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be open- 
 ing to me the souls of those who were in a close relation 
 to me when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the 
 wittily turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to 
 make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust 
 asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the interme- 
 diate frivolities, all the suppressed egoism, all the struggling 
 chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and
 
 440 THE LIFTED VEIU 
 
 indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and 
 deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap. 
 
 At Basle we were joined by my brother Alfred, now a 
 handsome self-confident man of six-and-twenty a thorough 
 contrast to my fragile, nervous, ineffectual self. I believe I 
 was held to have a sort of half- womanish, half -ghostly beauty; 
 for the portrait-painters, who are thick as weeds at Geneva, 
 had often asked me to sit to them, and I had been the model 
 of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture. But I thoroughly dis- 
 liked my own physique, and nothing but the belief that it was 
 a condition of poetic genius would have reconciled me to it. 
 That brief hope was quite fled, and I saw in my face now 
 nothing but the stamp of a morbid organization, framed for 
 passive suffering too feeble for the sublime resistance of 
 poetic production. Alfred, from whom I had been almost con- 
 stantly separated, and who, in his present stage of character 
 and appearance, came before me as a perfect stranger, was 
 bent on being extremely friendly and brother-like to me. He 
 had the superficial kindness of a good-humored, self-satisfied 
 nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contra- 
 rieties. I am not sure that my disposition was good enough 
 for me to have been quite free from envy towards him, even if 
 our desires had not clashed, and if I had been in the healthy 
 human condition which admits of generous confidence ana 
 charitable construction. There must always have been an 
 antipathy between our natures. As it was, he became in a 
 few weeks an object of intense hatred to me ; and when ht. 
 entered the room, still more when he spoke, it was as if u 
 sensation of grating metal had set my teeth on edge. My dis- 
 eased consciousness was more intensely and continually occu- 
 pied with his thoughts and emotions, than with those of any 
 other person who came in my way. I was perpetually exas 
 perated with the petty promptings of his conceit and his love 
 of patronage, with his self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant's 
 passion for him, with his half-pitying contempt for me seen 
 not in the ordinary indications of intonation and phrase and 
 slight action, which an acute and suspicious mind is on the 
 watch for, but in all their naked skinless complication.
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 441 
 
 For we were rivals, and our desires clashed, though he was 
 not aware of it. I have said nothing yet of the effect Bertha 
 Grant produced in me on a nearer acquaintance. That effect 
 was chiefly determined by the fact that she made the only 
 exception, among all the human beings about me, to my un- 
 happy gift of insight. About Bertha I was always in a state 
 of uncertainty : I could watch the expression of her face, and 
 speculate on its meaning ; I could ask for her opinion with the 
 real interest of ignorance ; I could listen for her words and 
 watch for her smile with hope and fear : she had for me the 
 fascination of an unravelled destiny. I say it was this fact 
 that chiefly determined the strong effect she produced on me : 
 for, in the abstract, no womanly character could seem to have 
 less affinity for that of a shrinking, romantic, passionate youth 
 than Bertha's. She was keen, sarcastic, unimaginative, pre- 
 maturely cynical, remaining critical and unmoved in the most 
 impressive scenes, inclined to dissect all my favorite poems, 
 and especially contemptuous towards the German lyrics which 
 were my pet literature at that time. To this moment I am 
 unable to define my feeling towards her : it was not ordinary 
 boyish admiration, for she was the very opposite, even to the 
 color of her hair, of the ideal woman who still remained to me 
 the type of loveliness ; and she was without that enthusiasm 
 for the great and good, which, even at the moment of her 
 strongest dominion over me, I should have declared to be 
 the highest element of character. But there is no tyranny 
 more complete than that which a self-centred negative nature 
 exercises over a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving 
 sympathy and support. The most independent people feel 
 the effect of a man's silence in heightening their value for his 
 opinion feel an additional triumph in conquering the rever- 
 ence of a critic habitually captious and satirical : no wonder, 
 then, that an enthusiastic self -distrusting youth should watch 
 and wait before the closed secret of a sarcastic woman's face, 
 as if it were the shrine of the doubtfully benignant deity who 
 ruled his destiny. For a young enthusiast is unable to imagine 
 the total negation in another mind of the emotions which are 
 stirring his own : they may be feeble, latent, inactive, he thinks,
 
 442 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 but they are there they may be called forth ; sometimes, in 
 moments of happy hallucination, he believes they may be there 
 in all the greater strength because he sees no outward sign of 
 them. And this effect, as I have intimated, was heightened 
 to its utmost intensity in me, because Bertha was the only 
 being who remained for me in the mysterious seclusion of soul 
 that renders such youthful delusion possible. Doubtless there 
 was another sort of fascination at work that subtle physical 
 attraction which delights in cheating our psychological predic- 
 tions, and in compelling the men who paint sylphs, to fall 
 in love with some bonne et brave femme, heavy-heeled and 
 freckled. 
 
 Bertha's behavior towards me was such as to encourage all 
 my illusions, to heighten my boyish passion, and make me 
 more and more dependent on her smiles. Looking back with 
 my present wretched knowledge, I conclude that her vanity 
 and love of power were intensely gratified by the belief that 
 I had fainted on first seeing her purely from the strong im- 
 pression her person had produced on me. The most prosaic 
 woman likes to believe herself the object of a violent, a poetic 
 passion ; and without a grain of romance in her, Bertha had 
 that spirit of intrigue which gave piquancy to the idea that 
 the brother of the man she meant to marry was dying with 
 love and jealousy for her sake. That she meant to marry my 
 brother, was what at that time I did not believe ; for though 
 he was assiduous in his attentions to her, and I knew well 
 enough that both he and my father had made up their minds 
 to this result, there was not yet an understood engagement 
 there had been no explicit declaration ; and Bertha habitually, 
 while she flirted with my brother, and accepted his homage 
 in a way that implied to him a thorough recognition of its in- 
 tention, made me believe, by the subtlest looks and phrases 
 feminine nothings which could never be quoted against her 
 that he was really the object of her secret ridicule ; that 
 she thought him, as I did, a coxcomb, whom she would have 
 pleasure in disappointing. Me she openly petted in my 
 brother's presence, as if I were too young and sickly ever 
 to be thought of as a lover ; and that was the view he took
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 443 
 
 of me. But I believe she must inwardly have delighted in 
 the tremors into which she threw me by the coaxing way in 
 which she patted my curls, while she laughed at my quota- 
 tions. Such caresses were always given in the presence of 
 our friends ; for when we were alone together, she affected 
 a much greater distance towards me, and now and then took 
 the opportunity, by words or slight actions, to stimulate my 
 foolish timid hope that she really preferred me. And why 
 should she not follow her inclination ? I was not in so advan- 
 tageous a position as my brother, but I had fortune, I was not 
 a year younger than she was, and she was an heiress, who 
 would soon be of age to decide for herself. 
 
 The fluctuations of hope and fear, confined to this one chan- 
 nel, made each day in her presence a delicious torment. There 
 was one deliberate act of hers which especially helped to in- 
 toxicate me. When we were at Vienna her twentieth birth- 
 day occurred, and as she was very fond of ornaments, we all 
 took the opportunity of the splendid jewellers' shops in that 
 Teutonic Paris to purchase her a birthday present of jewellery. 
 Mine > naturally, was the least expensive ; it was an opal ring 
 the opal was my favorite stone, because it seems to blush 
 and turn pale as if it had a soul. I told Bertha so when I 
 gave it her, and said that it was an emblem of the poetic nature, 
 changing with the changing light of heaven and of woman's 
 eyes. In the evening she appeared elegantly dressed, and 
 wearing conspicuously all the birthday presents except mine. 
 I looked eagerly at her fingers, but saw no opal. I had no 
 opportunity of noticing this to her during the evening; but 
 the next day, when I found her seated near the window alone, 
 after breakfast, I said, " You scorn to wear my poor opal. I 
 should have remembered that you despised poetic natures, and 
 should have given you coral, or turquoise, or some other 
 opaque unresponsive stone." " Do I despise it ? " she answered, 
 taking hold of a delicate gold chain which she always wore 
 round her neck and drawing out the end from her bosom with 
 my ring hanging to it ; " it hurts me a little, I can tell you," 
 she said, with her usual dubious smile, "to wear it in that 
 secret place; and since your poetical nature is so stupid as
 
 444 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 to prefer a more public position, I shall not endure the paki 
 any longer." 
 
 She took off the ring from the chain and put it on her fin- 
 ger, smiling still, while the blood rushed to my cheeks, and 
 I could not trust myself to say a word of entreaty that she 
 would keep the ring where it was before. 
 
 I was completely fooled by this, and for two days shut my 
 self up in my own room whenever Bertha was absent, that I 
 might intoxicate myself afresh with the thought of this scene 
 and all it implied. 
 
 I should mention that during these two months which 
 seemed a long life to me from the novelty and intensity of 
 the pleasures and pains I underwent my diseased participa- 
 tion in other people's consciousness continued to torment me ; 
 now it was my father, and now my brother, now Mrs. Filmore 
 or her husband, and now our German courier, whose stream of 
 thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not to be 
 got rid of, though it allowed my own impulses and ideas to 
 continue their uninterrupted course. It was like a preter- 
 naturally heightened sense of hearing, making audible to one a 
 roar of sound where others find perfect stillness. The weari- 
 ness and disgust of this involuntary intrusion into other souls 
 was counteracted only by my ignorance of Bertha, and my 
 growing passion for her ; a passion enormously stimulated, if 
 not produced, by that ignorance. She was my oasis of mystery 
 in the dreary desert of knowledge. I had never allowed my 
 diseased condition to betray itself, or to drive me into any un- 
 usual speech or action, except once, when, in a moment of 
 peculiar bitterness against my brother, I had forestalled some 
 words which I knew he was going to utter a clever obser- 
 vation, which he had prepared beforehand. He had occasion- 
 ally a slightly affected hesitation in his speech, and when he 
 paused an instant after the second word, my impatience and 
 jealousy impelled me to continue the speech for him, as if it 
 were something we had both learned by rote. He colored and 
 looked astonished, as well as annoyed ; and the words had no 
 sooner escaped my lips than T felt a shock of alarm lest such 
 an anticipation of words very far from being words of
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 445 
 
 course, easy to divine should have betrayed me as an excep- 
 tional being, a sort of quiet energumen, whom every one, 
 Bertha above all, would shudder at and avoid. But I magni- 
 fied, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could 
 produce on others ; for no one gave any sign of having noticed 
 my interruption as more than a rudeness, to be forgiven me 
 on the score of my feeble nervous condition. 
 
 While this superadded consciousness of the actual was 
 almost constant with me, I had never had a recurrence of 
 that distinct prevision which I have described in relation to 
 my first interview with Bertha ; and I was waiting with eager 
 curiosity to know whether or not my vision of Prague would 
 prove to have been an instance of the same kind. A few days 
 after the incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of our 
 frequent visits to the Lichtenberg Palace. I could never look 
 at many pictures in succession ; for pictures, when they are 
 at all powerful, affect me so strongly that one or two exhaust 
 all my capability of contemplation. This morning I had been 
 looking at Giorgione's picture of the cruel-eyed woman, said 
 to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia. I had stood long alone 
 before it, fascinated by the terrible reality of that cunning, 
 relentless face, till I felt a strange poisoned sensation, as if I 
 had long been inhaling a fatal odor, and was just beginning 
 to be conscious of its effects. Perhaps even then I should not 
 have moved away, if the rest of the party had not returned 
 to this room, and announced that they were going to the Bel- 
 vedere Gallery to settle a bet which had arisen between my 
 brother and Mr. Filmore about a portrait. I followed them 
 dreamily, and was hardly alive to what occurred till they had 
 all gone up to the gallery, leaving me below ; for I refused to 
 come within sight of another picture that day. I made my way 
 to the Grand Terrace, since it was agreed that we should saun- 
 ter in the gardens when the dispute had been decided. I had 
 been sitting here a short space, vaguely conscious of trim gar- 
 dens, with a city and green hills in the distance, when, wishing 
 to avoid the proximity of the sentinel, I rose and walked down 
 the broad stone steps, intending to seat myself farther on in 
 the gardens. Just as I reached the gravel-walk, I felt an arm
 
 446 
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 slipped within mine, and a light hand gently pressing my 
 wrist. In the same instant a strange intoxicating numbnes? 
 passed over me, like the continuance or climax of the sens'*. 
 tion I was still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia. The 
 gardens, the summer sky, the consciousness of Bertha's arm 
 being within mine, all vanished, and I seemed to be suddenly 
 in darkness, out of which there gradually broke a dim firelight, 
 and I felt myself sitting in my father's leather chair in the 
 library at home. I knew the fireplace the dogs for the wood- 
 fire the black marble chimney-piece with the white marble 
 medallion of the dying Cleopatra in the centre. Intense and 
 hopeless misery was pressing on my soul ; the light became 
 stronger, for Bertha was entering with a candle in her hand 
 Bertha, my wife with cruel eyes, with green jewels and 
 green leaves on her white ball-dress ; every hateful thought 
 within her present to me. ..." Madman, idiot ! why don't 
 you kill yourself, then ? " It was a moment of hell. I saw 
 into her pitiless soul saw its barren worldliness, its scorch- 
 ing hate and felt it clothe me round like an air I was obliged 
 to breathe. She came with her candle and stood over me with 
 a bitter smile of contempt; I saw the great emerald brooch 
 on her bosom, a studded serpent with diamond eyes. I shud- 
 dered I despised this woman with the barren soul and mean 
 thoughts ; but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched 
 my bleeding heart, and would clutch it till the last drop of 
 life-blood ebbed away. She was my wife, and we hated each 
 other. Gradually the hearth, the dim library, the candle-light 
 disappeared seemed to melt away into a background of 
 light, the green serpent with the diamond eyes remaining a 
 dark image on the retina. Then. I had a sense of my eyelids 
 quivering, and the living daylight broke in upon me ; I saw 
 gardens, and heard voices ; I was seated on the steps of the 
 Belvedere Terrace, and my friends were round me. 
 
 The tumult of mind into which I was thrown by this hideous 
 vision made me ill for several days, and prolonged our stay at 
 Vienna. I shuddered with horror as the scene recurred to me ; 
 and it recurred constantly, with all its minutiae, as if they had 
 been burnt into my memory ; and yet, such is the madness of
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 447 
 
 the human heart under the influence of its immediate desires, 
 I felt a wild hell-braving joy that Bertha was to be mine ; for 
 the fulfilment of my former prevision concerning her first 
 appearance before me, left me little hope that this last hideous 
 glimpse of the future was the mere diseased play of my own 
 mind, and had no relation to external realities. One thing 
 alone I looked towards as a possible means of casting doubt 
 on my terrible conviction the discovery that my vision of 
 Prague had been false and Prague was the next city on our 
 route. 
 
 Meanwhile, I was no sooner in Bertha's society again, than 
 I was as completely under her sway as before. What if I saw 
 into the heart of Bertha, the matured woman Bertha, my 
 wife ? Bertha, the girl, was a fascinating secret to me still : 
 I trembled under her touch ; I felt the witchery of her pres- 
 ence ; I yearned to be assured of her love. The fear of poison 
 is feeble against the sense of thirst. Nay, I was just as jeal- 
 ous of my brother as before just as much irritated by his 
 small patronizing ways ; for my pride, my diseased sensibility, 
 were there as they had always been, and winced as inevitably 
 under every offence as my eye winced from an intruding mote. 
 The future, even when brought within the compass of feeling 
 by a vision that made me shudder, had still no more than the 
 force of an idea, compared with the force of present emotion 
 of my love for Bertha, of my dislike and jealousy towards 
 my brother. 
 
 It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, 
 and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take 
 effect at a distant day ; then rush on to snatch the cup their 
 souls thirst after with an impulse not the less savage because 
 there is a dark shadow beside them forevermore. There is 
 no short cut, no patent tram-road to wisdom : after all the 
 centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny 
 wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleed- 
 ing feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old 
 time. 
 
 My mind speculated eagerly on the means by which I should 
 become my brother's successful rival, for I was still too timid.
 
 448 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 in my ignorance of Bertha's actual feeling, to venture on any 
 step that would urge from her an avowal of it. I thought I 
 should gain confidence even for this, if my vision of Prague 
 proved to have been veracious; and yet, the horror of that 
 certitude! Behind the slim girl Bertha, whose words and 
 looks I watched for, whose touch was bliss, there stood con- 
 tinually that Bertha with the fuller form, the harder eyes, the 
 more rigid mouth, with the barren selfish soul laid bare ; no 
 longer a fascinating secret, but a measured fact, urging itself 
 perpetually on my unwilling sight. Are you unable to give 
 me your sympathy you who read this ? Are you unable to 
 imagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing 
 OQ like two parallel streams which never mingle their water? 
 and blend into a common hue ? Yet you must have known 
 something of the presentiments that spring from an insight at 
 war with passion ; and my visions were only like presenti- 
 ments intensified to horror. You have known the powerless- 
 ness of ideas before the might of impulse ; and my visions, 
 when once they had passed into memory, were mere ideas 
 pale shadows that beckoned in vain, while my hand was 
 grasped by the living and the loved. 
 
 In after days I thought with bitter regret that if I had fore- 
 seen something more or something different if instead of 
 that hideous vision which poisoned the passion it could not 
 destroy, or if even along with it I could have had a foreshadow- 
 ing of that moment when I looked on my brother's face for 
 the last time, some softening influence would have been shed 
 over my feeling towards him : pride and hatred would surely 
 have been subdued into pity, and the record of those hidden 
 sins would have been shortened. But this is one of the vain 
 thoughts with which we men flatter ourselves. We try to 
 believe that the egoism within us would have easily been 
 melted, and that it was only the narrowness of our knowledge 
 which hemmed in our generosity, our awe, our human piety, 
 and hindered them from submerging our hard indifference to 
 the sensations and emotions of our fellow. Our tenderness 
 and self-renunciation seem strong when our egoism has had its 
 day when, after our mea-_ striving for a triumph that is to
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 449 
 
 be another's loss, the triumph comes suddenly, and we shudder 
 at it, because it is held out by the chill hand of death. 
 
 Our arrival in Prague happened at night, and I was glad of 
 this, for it seemed like a deferring of a terribly decisive mo- 
 ment, to be in the city for hours without seeing it. As we 
 were not to remain long in Prague, but to go on speedily to 
 Dresden, it was proposed that we should drive out the next 
 morning and take a general view of the place, as well as visit 
 some of its specially interesting spots, before the heat became 
 oppressive for we were in August, and the season was hot 
 and dry. But it happened that the ladies were rather late at 
 their morning toilet, and to my father's politely repressed but 
 perceptible annoyance, we were not in the carriage till the 
 morning was far advanced. I thought with a sense of relief, 
 as we entered the Jews' quarter, where we were to visit the 
 old synagogue, that we should be kept in this flat, shut-up 
 part of the city, until we should all be too tired and too warm 
 to go farther, and so we should return without seeing more 
 than the streets through which we had already passed. That 
 would give me another day's suspense suspense, the only 
 form in which a fearful spirit knows the solace of hope. But, 
 as I stood under the blackened, groined arches of that old 
 synagogue, made dimly visible by the seven thin candles in 
 the sacred lamp, while our Jewish cicerone reached down the 
 Book of the Law, and read to us in its ancient tongue, I 
 felt a shuddering impression that this strange building, with 
 its shrunken lights, this surviving withered remnant of medi- 
 aeval Judaism, was of a piece with my vision. Those darkened 
 dusty Christian saints, with their loftier arches and their larger 
 candles, needed the consolatory scorn with which they might 
 point to a more shrivelled death-in-life than their own. 
 
 As I expected, when we left the Jews' quarter the elders of 
 our party wished to return to the hotel. But now, instead of 
 rejoicing in this, as I had done beforehand, I felt a sudden 
 overpowering impulse to go on at once to the bridge, and put 
 an end to the suspense I had been wishing to protract I de- 
 clared, with unusual decision, that I would get out of the car- 
 riage and walk on alone ; they might return without me. My 
 VOL. ix. 'y
 
 450 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 father, thinking this merely a sample of my usual " poetic 
 nonsense," objected that I should only do myself harm by 
 walking in the heat; but when I persisted, he said angrily 
 that I might follow my own absurd devices, but that Schmidt 
 (our courier) must go with me. I assented to this, and set off 
 with Schmidt towards the bridge. I had no sooner passed 
 from under the archway of the grand old gate leading on to 
 the bridge, than a trembling seized me, and I turned cold 
 under the mid-day sun ; yet I went on ; I was in search of 
 something a small detail which I remembered with special 
 intensity as part of my vision. There it was the patch of 
 rainbow light on the pavement transmitted through a lamp in 
 the shape of a star. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 BEFORE the autumn was at an end, and while the brown 
 leaves still stood thick on the beeches in our park, my brother 
 and Bertha were engaged to each other, and it was understood 
 that their marriage was to take place early in the next spring. 
 In spite of the certainty I had felt from that moment on the 
 bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my wife, my 
 constitutional timidity and distrust had continued to benumb 
 me, and the words in which I had sometimes premeditated a 
 confession of my love, had died away unuttered. The same 
 conflict had gone on within me as before the longing for an 
 assurance of love from Bertha's lips, the dread lest a word of 
 contempt and denial should fall upon me like a corrosive acid. 
 What was the conviction of a distant necessity to me ? I 
 trembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present 
 joy, I was clogged and chilled by a present fear. And so the 
 days passed on : I witnessed Bertha's engagement and heard 
 her marriage discussed as if I were under a conscious night- 
 mare knowing it was a dream that would vanish, but feel- 
 ing stifled under the grasp of hard-clutching fingers.
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 451 
 
 When I was not in Bertha's presence and I was with her 
 very often, for she continued to treat me with a playful 
 patronage that wakened no jealousy in my brother I spent 
 my time chiefly in wandering, in strolling, or taking long 
 rides while the daylight lasted, and then shutting myself up 
 with my unread books ; for books had lost the power of chain- 
 ing my attention. My self-consciousness was heightened to 
 that pitch of intensity in which our own emotions take the 
 form of a drama which urges itself imperatively on our con- 
 templation, and we begin to weep, less under the sense of our 
 suffering than at the thought of it. I felt a sort of pitying 
 anguish over the pathos of my own lot : the lot of a being 
 finely organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres that 
 responded to pleasure to whom the idea of future evil 
 robbed the present of its joy, and for whom the idea of future 
 good did not still the uneasiness of a present yearning or a 
 present dread. I went dumbly through that stage of the 
 poet's suffering, in which he feels the delicious pang of utter- 
 ance, and makes an image of his sorrows. 
 
 I was left entirely without remonstrance concerning this 
 dreamy wayward life : I knew my father's thought about me : 
 " That lad will never be good for anything in life : he may 
 waste his years in an insignificant way on the income that falls 
 to him : I shall not trouble myself about a career for him." 
 
 One mild morning in the beginning of November, it hap- 
 pened that I was standing outside the portico patting lazy old 
 Caesar, a Newfoundland almost blind with age, the only dog 
 that ever took any notice of me for the very dogs shunned 
 me, and fawned on the happier people about me when the 
 groom brought up my brother's horse which was to carry him 
 to the hunt, and my brother himself appeared at the door, 
 florid, broad-chested, and self-complacent, feeling what a good- 
 natured fellow he was not to behave insolently to us all on 
 the strength of his great advantages. 
 
 " Latimer, old boy," he said to me in a tone of compassion- 
 ate cordiality, " what a pity it is you don't have a run with 
 the hounds now and then 1 The finest thing in the world for 
 low spirits 1 "
 
 452 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 " Low spirits ! " I thought bitterly, as he rode away ; 
 " that is the sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow natures 
 like yours think to describe experience of which you can 
 know no more than your horse knows. It is to such as 
 you that the good of this world falls : ready dulness, healthy 
 selfishness, good-tempered conceit these are the keys to 
 happiness." 
 
 The quick thought came, that my selfishness was even 
 stronger than his it was only a suffering selfishness instead 
 of an enjoying one. But then, again, my exasperating insight 
 into Alfred's self-complacent soul, his freedom from all the 
 doubts and fears, the unsatisfied yearnings, the exquisite tor- 
 tures of sensitiveness, that had made the web of my life, 
 seemed to absolve me from all bonds towards him. This man 
 needed no pity, no love ; those fine influences would have been 
 as little felt by him as the delicate white mist is felt by the 
 rock it caresses. There was no evil in store for him : if he 
 was not to marry Bertha, it would be because he had found a 
 lot pleasanter to himself. 
 
 Mr. Filmore's house lay not more than half a mile beyond 
 our own gates, and whenever I knew my brother was gone 
 in another direction, I went there for the chance of finding 
 Bertha at home. Later on in the day I walked thither. By 
 a rare accident she was alone, and we walked out in the 
 grounds together, for she seldom went on foot beyond the 
 trimly swept gravel-walks. I remember what a beautiful 
 sylph she looked to me as the low November sun shone on 
 her blond hair, and she tripped along teasing me with her 
 usual light banter, to which I listened half fondly, half 
 moodily ; it was all the sign Bertha's mysterious inner self 
 ever made to me. To-day perhaps the moodiness predomi- 
 nated, for I had not yet shaken off the access of jealous hate 
 which my brother had raised in me by his parting patronage. 
 Suddenly I interrupted and startled her by saying, almost 
 fiercely, "Bertha, how can you love Alfred?" 
 
 She looked at me with surprise for a moment, but soon her 
 light smile came again, and she answered sarcastically, " Why 
 do you suppose I love him ? "
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 453 
 
 "How can you ask that, Bertha ? " 
 
 " What ! your wisdom thinks I must love the man I 'm 
 going to marry ? The most unpleasant thing in the world. I 
 should quarrel with him; I should be jealous of him; our 
 menage would be conducted in a very ill-bred manner. A 
 little quiet contempt contributes greatly to the elegance of 
 life." 
 
 " Bertha, that is not your real feeling. Why do you delight 
 in trying to deceive me by inventing such cynical speeches ? " 
 
 "I need never take the trouble of invention in order to 
 deceive you, my small Tasso " (that was the mocking name 
 she usually gave me). " The easiest way to deceive a poet is 
 to tell him the truth." 
 
 She was testing the validity of her epigram in a daring way, 
 and for a moment the shadow of my vision the Bertha 
 whose soul was no secret to me passed between me and the 
 radiant girl, the playful sylph whose feelings were a fascinat- 
 ing mystery. I suppose I must have shuddered, or betrayed in 
 some other way my momentary chill of horror. 
 
 "Tasso!" she said, seizing my wrist, and peeping round 
 into my face, "are you really beginning to discern what a 
 heartless girl I am? Why, you are not half the poet I 
 thought you were ; you are actually capable of believing the 
 truth about me." 
 
 The shadow passed from between us, and was no longer the 
 object nearest to me. The girl whose light fingers grasped 
 me, whose elfish charming face looked into mine who, I 
 thought, was betraying an interest in my feelings that she 
 would not have directly avowed, this warm-breathing pres- 
 ence again possessed my senses and imagination like a return- 
 ihg syren melody which had been overpowered for an instant 
 by the roar of threatening waves. It was a moment as deli- 
 cious to me as the waking up to a consciousness of youth after 
 a dream of middle age. I forgot everything but my passion, 
 and said with swimming eyes 
 
 " Bertha, shall you love me when we are first married ? 
 I would n't mind if you really loved me only for a little 
 while."
 
 454 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 Her look of astonishment, as she loosed my hand and started 
 away from me, recalled me to a sense of my strange, my crimi- 
 nal indiscretion. 
 
 " Forgive me," I said, hurriedly, as soon as I could speak 
 again ; " I did not know what I was saying." 
 
 "Ah, Tasso's mad fit has come on, I see," she answered 
 quietly, for she had recovered herself sooner than I had. 
 " Let him go home and keep his head cool. I must go in, for 
 the sun is setting." 
 
 I left her full of indignation against myself. I had let 
 slip words which, if she reflected on them, might rouse in her 
 a suspicion of my abnormal mental condition a suspicion 
 which of all things I dreaded. And besides that, I was 
 ashamed of the apparent baseness I had committed in utter^ 
 ing them to my brother's betrothed wife. I wandered home 
 slowly, entering our park through a private gate instead of 
 by the lodges. As I approached the house, I saw a man 
 dashing off at full speed from the stable-yard across the park. 
 Had any accident happened at home ? No ; perhaps it was 
 only one of my father's peremptory business errands that 
 required this headlong haste. Nevertheless I quickened my 
 pace without any distinct motive, and was soon at the house. 
 I will not dwell on the scene I found there. My brother was 
 dead had been pitched from his horse, and killed on the 
 spot by a concussion of the brain. 
 
 I went up to the room where he lay, and where my father 
 was seated beside him with a look of rigid despair. I had 
 shunned my father more than any one since our return home, 
 for the radical antipathy between our natures made my insight 
 into his inner self a constant affliction to me. But now, as 
 I went up to him, and stood beside him in sad silence, I felt 
 the presence of a new element that blended us as we had 
 never been blent before. My father had been one of the most 
 successful men in the money-getting world : he had had no 
 sentimental sufferings, no illness. The heaviest trouble that 
 had befallen him was the death of his first wife. But he 
 married my mother soon after; and I remember he seemed 
 exactly the same, to my keen childish observation, the week
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 455 
 
 after her death as before. But now, at last, a sorrow had 
 come the sorrow of old age, which suffers the more from 
 the crushing of its pride and its hopes, in proportion as the 
 pride and hope are n. TOW and prosaic. His son was to have 
 been married soon would probably have stood for the 
 borough at the next election. That son's existence was the 
 bost motive that could be alleged for making new purchases 
 of land every year to round off the estate. It is a dreary 
 thing to live on doing the same things year after year, with- 
 out knowing why we do them. Perhaps the tragedy of dis- 
 appointed youth and passion is less piteous than the tragedy 
 of disappointed age and worldliness. 
 
 As I saw into the desolation of my father's heart, I felt a 
 movement of deep pity towards him, which was the beginning 
 of a new affection an affection that grew and strengthened 
 in spite of the strange bitterness with which he regarded me 
 in the first month or two after my brother's death. If it had 
 not been for the softening influence of my compassion for him 
 the first deep compassion I had ever felt I should have 
 been stung by the perception that my father transferred the 
 inheritance of an eldest son to me with a mortified sense that 
 fate had compelled him to the unwelcome course of earing for 
 me as an important being. It was only in spite of himself 
 that he began to think of me with anxious regard. There is 
 hardly any neglected child for whom death has made vacant a 
 more favored place, who will not understand what I mean. 
 
 Gradually, however, my new deference to his wishes, the 
 effect of that patience which was born of my pity for him, 
 won upon his affection, and he began to please himself with 
 the endeavor to make me fill my brother's place as fully as my 
 feebler personality would admit. I saw that the prospect 
 which by-and-by presented itself of my becoming Bertha's hus- 
 band was welcome to him, and he even contemplated in my 
 case what he had not intended in my brother's that his son 
 and daughter-in-law should make one household with him. 
 My softened feeling towards my father made this the happiest 
 time I had known since childhood ; these last months in 
 which I retained the delicious illusion of loving Bertha, of
 
 456 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 longing and doubting and hoping that she might love me. 
 She behaved with a certain new consciousness and distance 
 towards me after my brother's death; and I too was under 
 a double constraint that of delicacy towards my brother's 
 memory, and of anxiety as to the impression my abrupt words 
 had left on her mind. But the additional screen this mutual 
 reserve erected between us only brought me more completely 
 under her power : no matter how empty the adytum, so that 
 the veil be thick enough. So absolute is our soul's need of 
 something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that 
 doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that 
 if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the 
 interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie 
 between ; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one 
 morning and our one afternoon ; we should rush fiercely to the 
 Exchange for our last possibility of speculation, of success, of 
 disappointment ; we should have a glut of political prophets 
 foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within the only twenty-four 
 hours left open to prophecy. Conceive the condition of the 
 human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident 
 except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a 
 summer's day, but in the mean time might be the subject of 
 question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, litera- 
 ture and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition 
 which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more 
 eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our 
 impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to 
 the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, 
 or the irritability of our muscles. 
 
 Bertha, the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts 
 and emotions were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing 
 obviousness of the other minds around me, was as absorbing 
 to me as a single unknown to-day as a single hypothetic 
 proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and all the 
 cramped, hemmed-in belief and disbelief, trust and distrust, of 
 my nature, welled out in this one narrow channel. 
 
 And she made me believe that she loved me. Without ever 
 quitting her tone of badinage and playful superiority, she
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 457 
 
 intoxicated me with the sense that I was necessary to her, that 
 she was never at ease unless I was near her, submitting to her 
 playful tyranny. It costs a woman so little effort to besot us 
 in this way ! A half-repressed word, a moment's unexpected 
 silence, even an easy fit of petulance on our account, will serve 
 us as hashish for a long while. Out of the subtlest web of 
 scarcely perceptible signs, she set me weaving the fancy that 
 she had always unconsciously loved me better than Alfred, but 
 that, with the ignorant fluttered sensibility of a young girl, 
 she had been imposed on by the charm that lay for her in 
 the distinction of being admired and chosen by a man who 
 made so brilliant a figure in the world as my brother. She 
 satirized herself in a very graceful way for her vanity and 
 ambition. What was it to me that I had the light of my 
 wretched prevision on the fact that now it was I who possessed 
 at least all but the personal part of my brother's advantages ? 
 Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions, like 
 effects of color that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken 
 glass, and rags. 
 
 We were married eighteen months after Alfred's death, one 
 cold, clear morning in April, when there came hail and sun- 
 shine both together ; and Bertha, in her white silk and pale- 
 green leaves, and the pale hues of her hair and face, looked 
 like the spirit of the morning. My father was happier than 
 he had thought of being again: my marriage, he felt sure, 
 would complete the desirable modification of my character, 
 and make me practical and worldly enough to take my place 
 in society among sane men. For he delighted in Bertha's tact 
 and acuteness, and felt sure she would be mistress of me, and 
 make me what she chose : I was only twenty-one, and madly in 
 love with her. Poor father ! He kept that hope a little while 
 after our first year of marriage, and it was not quite extinct 
 when paralysis came and saved him from utter disappointment. 
 
 I shall hurry through the rest of my story, not dwelling so 
 much as I have hitherto done on my inward experience. When 
 people are well known to each other, they talk rather of what 
 befalls them externally, leaving their feelings and sentiments 
 to be inferred.
 
 458 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 We lived in a round of visits for some time after our return 
 home, giving splendid dinner-parties, and making a sensation 
 in our neighborhood by the new lustre of our equipage, for my 
 father had reserved this display of his increased wealth for 
 the period of his son's marriage ; and we gave our acquaint- 
 ances liberal opportunity for remarking that it was a pity I 
 made so poor a figure as an heir and a bridegroom. The ner- 
 vous fatigue of this existence, the insincerities and platitudes 
 which I had to live through twice over through my inner 
 and outward sense would have been maddening to me, if I 
 had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness which came 
 from the delights of a first passion. A bride and bridegroom, 
 surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through 
 the day by the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments 
 with hastily snatched caresses, are prepared for their future 
 life together as the novice is prepared for the cloister by 
 experiencing its utmost contrast. 
 
 Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha's in- 
 ward self remained shrouded from me, and I still read her 
 thoughts only through the language of her lips and demeanor : 
 I had still the human interest of wondering whether what I 
 did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a word of affec- 
 tion, of giving a delicious exaggeration of meaning to her smile. 
 But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner 
 towards me ; sometimes strong enough to be called haughty 
 coldness, cutting and chilling me as the hail had done that 
 came across the sunshine on our marriage morning ; some- 
 times only perceptible in the dexterous avoidance of a tete-a- 
 tete walk or dinner to which I had been looking forward. I 
 had been deeply pained by this had even felt a sort of 
 crushing of the heart, from the sense that my brief day of 
 happiness was near its setting ; but still I remained dependent 
 on Bertha, eager for the last rays of a bliss that would soon be 
 gone forever, hoping and watching for some after-glow more 
 beautiful from the impending night. 
 
 I remember how should I not remember ? the time 
 when that dependence and hope utterly left me, when the 
 sadness I had felt in Bertha's growing estrangement became a
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 459 
 
 joy that I looked back upon with longing, as a man might 
 look back on the last pains in a paralyzed limb. It was just 
 after the close of my father's last illness, which had neces- 
 sarily withdrawn us from society and thrown us more upon 
 each other. It was the evening of my father's death. On 
 that evening the veil which had shrouded Bertha's soul from 
 me had made me find in her alone among my fellow-beings 
 the blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation 
 was first withdrawn. Perhaps it was the first day since 
 the beginning of my passion for her, in which that passion 
 was completely neutralized by the presence of an absorbing 
 feeling of another kind. I had been watching by my father's 
 death-bed : I had been witnessing the last fitful yearning glance 
 his soul had cast back on the spent inheritance of life the 
 last faint consciousness of love he had gathered from the pres- 
 sure of my hand. What are all our personal loves when we 
 have been sharing in that supreme agony ? In the first mo- 
 ments when we come away from the presence of death, every 
 other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the 
 great relation of a common nature and a common destiny. 
 
 In that state of mind I joined Bertha in her private sitting- 
 room. She was seated in a leaning posture on a settee, with 
 her back towards the door ; the great rich coils of her pale 
 blond hair surmounting her small neck, visible above the back 
 of the settee. I remember, as I closed the door behind me, a 
 cold tremulousness seizing me, and a vague sense of being 
 hated and lonely vague and strong, like a presentiment. 
 I know how I looked at that moment, for I saw myself in 
 Bertha's thought as she lifted her cutting gray eyes, and 
 looked at me: a miserable ghost-seer, surrounded by phan- 
 toms in the noonday, trembling under a breeze when the 
 leaves were still, without appetite for the common objects of 
 human desire, but pining after the moonbeams. We were 
 front to front with each other, and judged each other. The 
 terrible moment of complete illumination had come to me, and 
 I saw that the darkness had hidden no landscape from me, 
 but only a blank prosaic wall : from that evening forth, through 
 the sickening years which followed, I saw all round the
 
 460 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 narrow room of this woman's soul saw petty artifice and 
 mere negation where I had delighted to believe in coy sensi- 
 bilities and in wit at war with latent feeling saw the light 
 floating vanities of the girl defining themselves into the 
 systematic coquetry, the scheming selfishness, of the woman 
 saw repulsion and antipathy harden into cruel hatred, giv- 
 ing pain only for the sake of wreaking itself. 
 
 For Bertha too, after her kind, felt the bitterness of dis- 
 illusion. She had believed that my wild poet's passion for 
 her would make me her slave ; and that, being her slave, I 
 should execute her will in all things. With the essential 
 shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was 
 unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything 
 else than weaknesses. She had thought my weaknesses 
 would put me in her power, and she found them unman- 
 ageable forces. Our positions were reversed. Before mar- 
 riage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she 
 was a secret to me ; and I created the unknown thought be- 
 fore which I trembled as if it were hers. But now that her 
 soul was laid open to me, now that I was compelled to share 
 the privacy of her motives, to follow all the petty devices that 
 preceded her words and acts, she found herself powerless 
 with me, except to produce in me the chill shudder of repul- 
 sion powerless, because I could be acted on by no lever 
 within her reach. I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social 
 vanities, to all the incentives within the compass of her 
 narrow imagination, and I lived under influences utterly in- 
 visible to her. 
 
 She was really pitiable to have such a husband, and so all 
 the world thought. A graceful, brilliant woman, like Bertha, 
 who smiled on morning callers, made a figure in ball-rooms, 
 and was capable of that light repartee which, from such a 
 woman, is accepted as wit, was secure of carrying off all sym- 
 pathy from a husband who was sickly, abstracted, and, as 
 some suspected, crack-brained. Even the servants in our 
 house gave her the balance of their regard and pity. For 
 there were no audible quarrels between us ; our alienation, 
 our repulsion from each other, lay within the silence of our
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 461 
 
 own hearts ; and if the mistress went out a great deal, and 
 seemed to dislike the master's society, was it not natural, 
 poor thing ? The master was odd. I was kind and just 
 to my dependants, but I excited in them a shrinking, half- 
 contemptuous pity ; for this class of men and women are but 
 slightly determined in their estimate of others by general 
 considerations, or even experience, of character. They judge 
 of persons as they judge of coins, and value those who pass 
 current at a high rate. 
 
 After a time I interfered so little with Bertha's habits, that 
 it might seem wonderful how her hatred towards me could 
 grow so intense and active as it did. But she had begun to 
 suspect, by some involuntary betrayals of mine, that there 
 was an abnormal power of penetration in me that fitfully, 
 at least, I was strangely cognizant of her thoughts and inten- 
 tions, and she began to be haunted by a terror of me, which 
 alternated every now and then with defiance. She meditated 
 continually how the incubus could be shaken off her life 
 how she could be freed from this hateful bond to a being whom 
 she at once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as an inquisi- 
 tor. For a long while she lived in the hope that my evident 
 wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide; 
 but suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely 
 swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown 
 forces, to believe in my power of self-release. Towards my 
 own destiny I had become entirely passive ; for my one ardent 
 desire had spent itself, and impulse no longer predominated 
 over knowledge. For this reason I never thought of taking 
 any steps towards a complete separation, which would have 
 made our alienation evident to the world. Why should I 
 rush for help to a new course, when I was only suffering from 
 the consequences of a deed which had been the act of my 
 intensest will ? That would have been the logic of one who 
 had desires to gratify, and I had no desires. But Bertha and 
 I lived more and more aloof from each other. The rich find 
 it easy to live married and apart. 
 
 That course of our life which I have indicated in a few sen- 
 tences filled the space of years. So much misery so slow
 
 462 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 and hideous a growth of hatred and Bin, may be compressed 
 into a sentence ! And men judge of each other's lives through 
 this summary medium. They epitomize the experience of 
 their fellow-mortal, and pronounce judgment on him in neat 
 syntax, and feel themselves wise and virtuous conquerors 
 over the temptations they define in well-selected predicates. 
 Seven years of wretchedness glide glibly over the lips of the 
 man who has never counted them out in moments of chill 
 disappointment, of head and heart throbbings, of dread and 
 vain wrestling, of remorse and despair. We learn words by 
 rote, but not their meaning ; that must be paid for with our 
 life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves. 
 
 But I will hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified 
 at once to those who readily understand, and to those who 
 will never understand. 
 
 Some years after my father's death, I was sitting by the 
 dim firelight in my library one January evening sitting in 
 the leather chair that used to be my father's when Bertha 
 appeared at the door, with a candle in her hand, and advanced 
 towards me. I knew the ball-dress she had on the white 
 ball-dress, with the green jewels, shone upon by the light of 
 the wax candle which lit up the medallion of the dying Cleo- 
 patra on the mantel-piece. Why did she come to me before 
 going out ? I had not seen her in the library, which was my 
 habitual place, for months. Why did she stand before me 
 with the candle in her hand, with her cruel contemptuous 
 eyes fixed on me, and the glittering serpent, like a familiar 
 demon, on her breast ? For a moment I thought this fulfil- 
 ment of my vision at Vienna marked some dreadful crisis in 
 my fate, but I saw nothing in Bertha's mind, as she stood 
 before me, except scorn for the look of overwhelming misery 
 with which I sat before her. ..." Fool, idiot, why don't you 
 kill yourself, then ? " that was her thought. But at length 
 her thoughts reverted to her errand, and she spoke aloud. The 
 apparently indifferent nature of the errand seemed to make. 
 a ridiculous anticlimax to my prevision and my agitation. 
 
 "I have had to hire a new maid. Fletcher is going to be 
 married, and she wants me to ask you to let her husband have
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 463 
 
 the public-house and farm at Molton. I wish him to have it. 
 You must give the promise now, because Fletcher is going to- 
 morrow morning and quickly, because I 'm in a hurry." 
 
 "Very well; you may promise her," I said, indifferently, 
 and Bertha swept out of the library again. 
 
 I always shrank from the sight of a new person, and all the 
 more when it was a person whose mental life was likely to 
 weary my reluctant insight with worldly ignorant trivialities. 
 But I shrank especially from the sight of this new maid, be- 
 eause her advent had been announced to me at a moment to 
 which I could not cease to attach some fatality : I had a vague 
 dread that I should find her mixed up with the dreary drama 
 of my life that some new sickening vision would reveal her 
 to me as an evil genius. When at last I did unavoidably meet 
 her, the vague dread was changed into definite disgust. She 
 was a tall, wiry, dark-eyed woman, this Mrs. Archer, with a 
 face handsome enough to give her coarse hard nature the 
 odious finish of bold, self-confident coquetry. That was 
 enough to make me avoid her, quite apart from the con- 
 temptuous feeling with which she contemplated me. I seldom 
 saw her ; but I perceived that she rapidly became a favorite 
 with her mistress, and, after the lapse of eight or nine months, 
 I began to be aware that there had arisen in Bertha's mind 
 towards this woman a mingled feeling of fear and dependence, 
 and that this feeling was associated with ill-defined images of 
 candle-light scenes in her dressing-room, and the locking up of 
 something in Bertha's cabinet. My interviews with my wife 
 had become so brief and so rarely solitary, that I had no 
 opportunity of perceiving these images in her mind with more 
 defiuiteness. The recollections of the past become contracted 
 in the rapidity of thought till they sometimes bear hardly a 
 more distinct resemblance to the external reality than the 
 forms of an oriental alphabet to the objects that suggested 
 them. 
 
 Besides, for the last year or more a modification had been 
 going forward in my mental condition, and was growing more 
 and more marked. My insight into the minds of those around 
 me was becoming dimmer and more fitful, and the ideas that
 
 464 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 crowded my double consciousness became less and less depend- 
 ent on any personal contact. All that was personal in me 
 seemed to be suffering a gradual death, so that I was losing 
 the organ through which the personal agitations and projects 
 of others could affect me. But along with this relief from 
 wearisome insight, there was a new development of what I 
 concluded as I have since found rightly to be a prevision 
 of external scenes. It was as if the relation between me and 
 my fellow-men was more and more deadened, and my relation 
 to what we call the inanimate was quickened into new life. 
 The more I lived apart from society, and in proportion as my 
 wretchedness subsided from the violent throb of agonized 
 passion into the dulness of habitual pain, the more frequent 
 and vivid became such visions as that I had had of Prague 
 of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight 
 skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, 
 of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through 
 the boughs : I was in the midst of such scenes, and in all of 
 them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all these mighty 
 shapes the presence of something unknown and pitiless. 
 For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within 
 me : to the utterly miserable the unloving and the unloved 
 there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of 
 devils. And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was 
 the vision of my death the pangs, the suffocation, the last 
 struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain. 
 
 Things were in this state near the end of the seventh year. 
 I had become entirely free from insight, from my abnormal 
 cognizance of any other consciousness than my own, and in- 
 stead of intruding involuntarily into the world of other minds, 
 was living continually in my own solitary future. Bertha was 
 aware that I was greatly changed. To my surprise she had of 
 late seemed to seek opportunities of remaining in my society, 
 and had cultivated that kind of distant yet familiar talk which 
 is customary between a husband and wife who live in polite 
 and irrevocable alienation. I bore this with languid submis- 
 sion, and without feeling enough interest in her motives to be 
 roused into keen observation ; yet I could not help perceiving
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 465 
 
 something triumphant and excited in her carriage and the 
 expression of her face something too subtle to express itself 
 in words or tones, but giving one the idea that she lived in a 
 state of expectation or hopeful suspense. My chief feeling 
 was satisfaction that her inner self was once more shut out 
 from me ; and I almost revelled for the moment in the absent- 
 melancholy that made me answer her at cross purposes, and 
 betray utter ignorance of what she had been saying. I re- 
 member well the look and the smile with which she one day 
 said, after a mistake of this kind on my part : " I used to 
 think you were a clairvoyant, and that was the reason why 
 you were so bitter against other clairvoyants, wanting to keep 
 your monopoly ; but I see now you have become rather duller 
 than the rest of the world." 
 
 I said nothing in reply. It occurred to me that her recent 
 obtrusion of herself upon me might have been prompted by 
 the wish to test my power of detecting some of her secrets ; 
 but I let the thought drop again at once : her motives and her 
 deeds had no interest for me, and whatever pleasures she 
 might be seeking, I had no wish to balk her. There was still 
 pity in my soul for every living thing, and Bertha was living 
 was surrounded with possibilities of misery. 
 
 Just at this time there occurred an event which roused me 
 somewhat from my inertia, and gave me an interest in the 
 passing moment that I had thought impossible for me. It 
 was a visit from Charles Meunier, who had written me word 
 that he was coming to England for relaxation from too strenu- 
 ous labor, and would like to see me. Meunier had now a 
 European reputation ; but his letter to me expressed that keen 
 remembrance of an early regard, an early debt of sympathy, 
 which is inseparable from nobility of character : and I too 
 felt as if his presence would be to me like a transient resur- 
 rection into a happier pre-existence. 
 
 He came, and as far as possible, I renewed our old pleasure 
 of making tete-a-tete excursions, though, instead of mountains 
 and glaciers and the wide blue lake, we had to content our- 
 selves with mere slopes and ponds and artificial plantations. 
 The years had changed us both, but with what different result 1 
 VOL. ix. 30
 
 466 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 Meunier was now a brilliant figure in society, to whom ele- 
 gant women pretended to listen, and whose acquaintance was 
 boasted of by noblemen ambitious of brains. He repressed 
 with the utmost delicacy all betrayal of the shock which I am 
 sure he must have received from our meeting, or of a desire to 
 penetrate into my condition and circumstances, and sought by 
 the utmost exertion of his charming social powers to make 
 our reunion agreeable. Bertha was much struck by the unex- 
 pected fascinations of a visitor whom she had expected to find 
 presentable only on the score of his celebrity, and put forth 
 all her coquetries and accomplishments. Apparently she suc- 
 ceeded in attracting his admiration, for his manner towards 
 her was attentive and flattering. The effect of his presence 
 on me was so benignant, especially in those renewals of our 
 old tete-a-tete wanderings, when he poured forth to me won- 
 derful narratives of his professional experience, that more 
 than once, when his talk turned on the psychological rela- 
 tions of disease, the thought crossed my mind that, if his 
 stay with me were long enough, I might possibly bring myself 
 to tell this man the secrets of my lot. Might there not lie 
 some remedy for me, too, in his science ? Might there not at 
 least lie some comprehension and sympathy ready for me in 
 his large and susceptible mind ? But the thought only flick- 
 ered feebly now and then, and died out before it could become 
 a wish. The horror I had of again breaking in on the pri- 
 vacy of another soul, made me, by an irrational instinct, draw 
 the shroud of concealment more closely around my own, as 
 we automatically perform the gesture we feel to be wanting 
 in another. 
 
 When Meunier's visit was approaching its conclusion, there 
 happened an event which caused some excitement in our 
 household, owing to the surprisingly strong effect it appeared 
 to produce on Bertha on Bertha, the self-possessed, who 
 usually seemed inaccessible to feminine agitations, and did 
 even her hate in a self-restrained hygienic manner. This 
 event was the sudden severe illness of her maid, Mrs. Archer. 
 I have reserved to this moment the mention of a circumstance 
 which had forced itself on my notice shortly before Meunier's
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 467 
 
 arrival, namely, that there had been some quarrel between 
 Bertha and this maid, apparently during a visit to a distant 
 family, in which she had accompanied her mistress. I had 
 overheard Archer speaking in a tone of bitter insolence, which 
 I should have thought an adequate reason for immediate 
 dismissal. No dismissal followed; on the contrary, Bertha 
 seemed to be silently putting up with personal inconveniences' 
 from the exhibitions of this woman's temper. I was the more 
 astonished to observe that her illness seemed a cause of strong 
 solicitude to Bertha ; that she was at the bedside night and 
 day, and would allow no one else to officiate as head-nurse. 
 It happened that our family doctor was out on a holiday, an 
 accident which made Meunier's presence in the house doubly 
 welcome, and he apparently entered into the case with an in- 
 terest which seemed so much stronger than the ordinary pro- 
 fessional feeling, that one day when he had fallen into a long 
 fit of silence after visiting her, I said to him 
 " Is this a very peculiar case of disease, Meunier ? " 
 "No," he answered, "it is an attack of peritonitis, which 
 will be fatal, but which does not differ physically from many 
 other cases that have come under my observation. But I '11 
 tell you what I have on my mind. I want to make an experi- 
 ment on this woman, if you will give me permission. It can 
 do her no harm will give her no pain for I shall not make 
 it until life is extinct to all purposes of sensation. I want to 
 try the effect of transfusing blood into her arteries after the 
 heart has ceased to beat for some minutes. I have tried the 
 experiment again and again with animals that have died of 
 this disease, with astounding results, and I want to try it on 
 a human subject. I have the small tubes necessary, in a case 
 I have with me, and the rest of the apparatus could be pre- 
 pared readily. I should use my own blood take it from my 
 own arm. This woman won't live through the night, I 'm con- 
 rinced, and I want you to promise me your assistance in mak- 
 ing the experiment. I can't do without another hand, but it 
 would perhaps not be well to call in a medical assistant from 
 among your provincial doctors. A disagreeable foolish version 
 of the thing might get abroad."
 
 4G8 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 " Have you spoken to my wife on the subject ? " I said, 
 "because she appears to be peculiarly sensitive about this 
 woman: she has been a favorite maid." 
 
 " To tell you the truth," said Meunier, " I don't want her to 
 know about it. There are always insuperable difficulties with 
 women in these matters, and the effect on the supposed dead 
 body may be startling. You and I will sit up together, and 
 be in readiness. When certain symptoms appear 1 shall take 
 you in, and at the right moment we must manage to get every 
 one else out of the room." 
 
 I need not give our farther conversation on the subject. 
 He entered very fully into the details, and overcame my 
 repulsion from them, by exciting in me a mingled awe and 
 curiosity concerning the possible results of his experiment. 
 
 We prepared everything, and he instructed me in my part 
 as assistant. He had not told Bertha of his absolute convic- 
 tion that Archer would not survive through the night, and 
 endeavored to persuade her to leave the patient and take a 
 night's rest. But she was obstinate, suspecting the fact that 
 death was at hand, and supposing that he wished merely to save 
 her nerves. She refused to leave the sick-room. Meunier and 
 I sat up together in the library, he making frequent visits to 
 the sick-room, and returning with the information that the case 
 was taking precisely the course he expected. Once he said to 
 me, "Can you imagine any cause of ill feeling this woman 
 has against her mistress, who is so devoted to her ? " 
 
 "I think there was some misunderstanding between them 
 before her illness. Why do you ask?" 
 
 " Because I have observed for the last five or six hours 
 since, I fancy, she has lost all hope of recovery there seems 
 a strange prompting in her to say something which pain and 
 failing strength forbid her to utter; and there is a look of 
 hideous meaning in her eyes, which she turns continually 
 towards her mistress. In this disease the mind often remains 
 singularly clear to the last." 
 
 "I am not surprised at an indication of malevolent feeling 
 in her," I said. " She is a woman who has always inspired 
 me with distrust and dislike, but she managed to insinuate
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 469 
 
 herself into her mistress's favor." He was silent after this, 
 looking at the fire with an air of absorption, till he went up- 
 stairs again. He stayed away longer than usual, and on 
 returning, said to me quietly, "Come now." 
 
 I followed him to the chamber where death was hovering. 
 The dark hangings of the large bed made a background that 
 gave a strong relief to Bertha's pale face as I entered. She 
 started forward as she saw me enter, and then looked at Meu- 
 nier with an expression of angry inquiry; but he lifted up 
 his hand as if to impose silence, while he fixed his glance on 
 the dying woman and felt her pulse. The face was pinched 
 and ghastly, a cold perspiration was on the forehead, and the 
 eyelids were lowered so as almost to conceal the large dark 
 eyes. After a minute or two, Meunier walked round to the 
 other side of the bed where Bertha stood, and with his usual 
 air of gentle politeness towards her begged her to leave the 
 patient under our care everything should be done for her 
 she was no longer in a state to be conscious of an affectionate 
 presence. Bertha was hesitating, apparently almost willing 
 to believe his assurance and to comply. She looked round at 
 the ghastly dying face, as if to read the confirmation of that 
 assurance, when for a moment the lowered eyelids were raised 
 again, and it seemed as if the eyes were looking towards Ber- 
 tha, but blankly. A shudder passed through Bertha's frame, 
 and she returned to her station near the pillow, tacitly imply- 
 ing that she would not leave the room. 
 
 The eyelids were lifted no more. Once I looked at Bertha 
 as she watched the face of the dying one. She wore a rich 
 peignoir, and her blond hair was half covered by a lace cap : 
 in her attire she was, as always, an elegant woman, fit to 
 figure in a picture of modern aristocratic life : but I asked 
 myself how that face of hers could ever have seemed to me 
 the face of a woman born of woman, with memories of child- 
 hood, capable of pain, needing to be fondled ? The features 
 at that moment seemed so preternaturally sharp, the eyes were 
 so hard and eager she looked like a cruel immortal, finding 
 her spiritual feast in the agonies of a dying race. For across 
 those hard features there came something like a flash when
 
 470 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 the last hour had been breathed out, and we all felt that 
 the dark veil had completely fallen. What secret was there 
 between Bertha and this woman ? I turned my eyes from her 
 with a horrible dread lest my insight should return, and I 
 should be obliged to see what had been breeding about two 
 unloving women's hearts. I felt that Bertha had been watch- 
 ing for the moment of death as the sealing of her secret : I 
 thanked Heaven it could remain sealed for me. 
 
 Meunier said quietly, " She is gone." He then gave his arm 
 to Bertha, and she submitted to be led out of the room. 
 
 I suppose it was at her order that two female attendants 
 came into the room, and dismissed the younger one who had 
 been present before. When they entered, Meunier had already 
 opened the artery in the long thin neck that lay rigid on the 
 pillow, and I dismissed them, ordering them to remain at a 
 distance till we rang : the doctor, I said, had an operation to 
 perform he was not sure about the death. For the next 
 twenty minutes I forgot everything but Meunier and the ex- 
 periment in which he was so absorbed, that I think his senses 
 would have been closed against all sounds or sights which had 
 no relation to it. It was my task at first to keep up the artificial 
 respiration in the body after the transfusion had been effected, 
 but presently Meunier relieved me, and I could see the won- 
 drous slow return of life ; the breast began to heave, the 
 inspirations became stronger, the eyelids quivered, and the 
 soul seemed to have returned beneath them. The artificial 
 respiration was withdrawn : still the breathing continued, and 
 there was a movement of the lips. 
 
 Just then I heard the handle of the door moving : I suppose 
 Bertha had heard from the women that they had been dis- 
 missed : probably a vague fear had arisen in her mind, for she 
 entered with a look of alarm. She came to the foot of the bed 
 and gave a stifled cry. 
 
 The dead woman's eyes were wide open, and met hers in 
 full recognition the recognition of hate. With a sudden 
 strong effort, the hand that Bertha had thought forever still 
 was pointed towards her, and the haggard face moved. The 
 gasping eager voice said
 
 THE LIFTED VEIL. 471 
 
 " You mean to poison your husband . . the poison is in 
 the black cabinet ... I got it for you . . . you laughed at 
 me, and told lies about me behind my back, to make me 
 disgusting . . . because you were jealous . . . are you sorry 
 . . . now?" 
 
 The lips continued to murmur, but the sounds were no 
 longer distinct. Soon there was no sound only a slight 
 movement : the flame had leaped out, and was being extin- 
 guished the faster. The wretched woman's heart-strings had 
 been set to hatred and vengeance ; the spirit of life had swept 
 the chords for an instant, and was gone again forever. Great 
 God ! Is this what it is to live again ... to wake up with 
 our unstilled thirst upon us, with our unuttered curses ris- 
 ing to our lips, with our muscles ready to act out their half- 
 committed sins ? 
 
 Bertha stood pale at the foot of the bed, quivering and 
 helpless, despairing of devices, like a cunning animal whose 
 hiding-places are surrounded by swift-advancing flame. Even 
 Meunier looked paralyzed ; life for that moment ceased to be 
 a scientific problem to him. As for me, this scene seemed of 
 one texture with the rest of my existence : horror was my 
 familiar, and this new revelation was only like an old pain 
 recurring with new circumstances. 
 
 * 
 
 Since then Bertha and I have lived apart she in her own 
 neighborhood, the mistress of half our wealth, I as a wanderer 
 in foreign countries, until I came to this Devonshire nest to 
 die. Bertha lives pitied and admired ; for what had I against 
 that charming woman, whom every one but myself could have 
 been happy with ? There had been no witness of the scene in 
 the dying room except Meunier, and while Meunier lived his 
 lips were sealed by a promise to me. 
 
 Once or twice, weary of wandering, I rested in a favorite 
 spot, and my heart went out towards the men and women and 
 children whose faces were becoming familiar to me ; but I was 
 driven away again in terror at the approach of my old insight 
 driven away to live continually with the one Unknown 
 Presence revealed and yet hidden by the moving curtain of
 
 472 THE LIFTED VEIL. 
 
 the earth and sky. Till at last disease took kold of me and 
 forced me to rest here forced me to live in dependence on 
 my servants. And then the curse of insight of my double 
 consciousness, came again, and has never left me. I know all 
 their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard, their half-wearied 
 pity. 
 
 * 
 
 It is the 20th of September, 1850. I know these figures I 
 have just written, as if they were a long familiar inscrip- 
 tion. I have seen them on this page in my desk unnumbered 
 times, when the scene of my dying struggle has opened upon 
 me. .
 
 BUOTHEE JACOB.
 
 Trompeurs, c'est ponr vous que j'4cru>, 
 Attendez vous li la pareille. 
 
 LA FONTAINE.
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 AMONG the many fatalities attending the bloom of young 
 desire, that of blindly taking to the confectionery line has 
 not, perhaps, been sufficiently considered. How is the son of a 
 British yeoman, who has been fed principally on salt pork and 
 yeast dumplings, to know that there is satiety for the human 
 stomach even in a paradise of glass jars full of sugared al- 
 monds and pink lozenges, and that the tedium of life can 
 reach a pitch where plum-buns at discretion cease to offer the 
 slightest enticement ? Or how, at the tender age when a con- 
 fectioner seems to him a very prince whom all the world 
 must envy, who breakfasts on macaroons, dines on marengs, 
 sups on twelfth-cake, and fills up the intermediate hours with 
 sugar-candy or peppermint, how is he to foresee the day 
 of sad wisdom, when he will discern that the confectioner's 
 calling is not socially influential, or favorable to a soaring 
 ambition ? I have known a man who turned out to have a 
 metaphysical genius, incautiously, in the period of youthful 
 buoyancy, commence his career as a dancing-master ; and you 
 may imagine the use that was made of this initial mistake by 
 opponents who felt themselves bound to warn the public 
 against his doctrine of the Inconceivable. He could not give 
 up his dancing-lessons, because he made his bread by them, 
 and metaphysics would not have found him in so much as salt 
 to his bread. It was really the same with Mr. David Faux 
 and the confectionery business. His uncle, the butler at the 
 great house close by Brigford, had made a pet of him in his 
 early boyhood, and it was on a visit to this uncle that the con- 
 fectioners' shops in that brilliant town had, on a single day,
 
 476 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 fired his tender imagination. He carried home the pleasing 
 illusion that a confectioner must be at once the happiest and 
 the foremost of men, since the things he made were not only 
 the most beautiful to behold, but the very best eating, and 
 such as the Lord Mayor must always order largely for his 
 private recreation ; so that when his father declared he must 
 be put to a trade, David chose his line without a moment's 
 hesitation ; and, with a rashness inspired by a sweet tooth, 
 wedded himself irrevocably to confectionery. Soon, however, 
 the tooth lost its relish and fell into blank indifference ; and 
 all the while, his mind expanded, his ambition took new 
 shapes, which could hardly be satisfied within the sphere his 
 youthful ardor had chosen. But what was he to do ? He 
 was a young man of much mental activity, and, above all, 
 gifted with a spirit of contrivance ; but then, his faculties 
 would not tell with great effect in any other medium than 
 that of candied sugars, conserves, and pastry. Say what you 
 will about the identity of the reasoning process in all branches 
 of thought, or about the advantage of coming to subjects with 
 a fresh mind, the adjustment of butter to flour, and of heat to 
 pastry, is not the best preparation for the office of prime min- 
 ister; besides, in the present imperfectly organized state of 
 society, there are social barriers. David could invent delight- 
 ful things in the way of drop-cakes, and he had the widest 
 views of the sugar department ; but in other directions he 
 certainly felt hampered by the want of knowledge and practi- 
 cal skill ; and the world is so inconveniently constituted, that 
 the vague consciousness of being a fine fellow is no guarantee 
 of success in any line of business. 
 
 This difficulty pressed with some severity on Mr. David 
 Faux, even before his apprenticeship was ended. His soul 
 swelled with an impatient sense that he ought to become 
 something very remarkable that it was quite out of the 
 question for him to put up with a narrow lot as other men 
 did : he scorned the idea that he could accept an average- He 
 was sure there was nothing average about him : even such a 
 person as Mrs. Tibbits, the washerwoman, perceived it, and 
 probably had a preference for his linen. At that particular
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 477 
 
 period lie -wns weighing out gingerbread-nuts ; but such an 
 anomaly could not continue. No position could be suited to 
 Mr. David Faux that was not in the highest degree easy to 
 the flesh and flattering to the spirit. If he had fallen on the 
 present times, and enjoyed the advantages of a Mechanics' 
 Institute, he would certainly have taken to literature and 
 have written reviews ; but his education had not been liberal. 
 i He had read some novels from the adjoining circulating 
 library, and had even bought the story of " Inkle and Yarico," 
 which had made him feel very sorry for poor Mr. Inkle ; so 
 that his ideas might not have been below a certain mark of 
 the literary calling; but his spelling and diction were too 
 unconventional. 
 
 When a man is not adequately appreciated or comfortably 
 placed in his own country, his thoughts naturally turn towards 
 foreign climes ; and David's imagination circled round and 
 round the utmost limits of his geographical knowledge, in 
 search of a country where a young gentleman of pasty vis- 
 age, lipless mouth, and stumpy hair, would be likely to be 
 received with the hospitable enthusiasm which he had a right 
 to expect. Having a general idea of America as a country 
 where the population was chiefly black, it appeared to him 
 the most propitious destination for an emigrant who, to begin 
 with, had the broad and easily recognizable merit of white- 
 ness ; and this idea gradually took such strong possession of 
 him that Satan seized the opportunity of suggesting to him 
 that he might emigrate under easier circumstances, if he sup- 
 plied himself with a little money from his master's till. But 
 that evil spirit, whose understanding, I am convinced, has 
 been much overrated, quite wasted his time on this occasion. 
 David would certainly have liked well to have some of his 
 master's money in his pocket, if he had been sure his master 
 would have been the only man to suffer for it ; but he was a 
 cautious youth, and quite determined to run no risks on his 
 own account. So he stayed out his apprenticeship, and com- 
 mitted no act of dishonesty that was at all likely to be 
 discovered, reserving his plan of emigration for a future op- 
 portunity. And the circumstances under which he carried it
 
 178 BBOTHEB JACOB. 
 
 out were in this wise. Having been at home a week or two 
 partaking of the family beans, he had used his leisure in as- 
 certaining a fact which was of considerable importance to 
 him, namely, that his mother had a small sum in guineas 
 painfully saved from her maiden perquisites, and kept in the 
 corner of a drawer where her baby-linen had reposed for the 
 last twenty years ever since her son David had taken to his 
 feet, with a slight promise of bow-legs which had not been 
 altogether unfulfilled. Mr. Faux, senior, had told his son 
 very frankly, that he must not look to being set up in business 
 by him : with seven sons, and one of them a very healthy and 
 well-developed idiot, who consumed a dumpling about eight 
 inches in diameter every day, it was pretty well if they got 
 a hundred apiece at his death. Under these circumstances, 
 what was David to do ? It was certainly hard that he should 
 take his mother's money ; but he saw no other ready means 
 of getting any, and it was not to be expected that a young 
 man of his merit should put up with inconveniences that 
 could be avoided. Besides, it is not robbery to take property 
 belonging to your mother : she does n't prosecute you. And 
 David was very well behaved to his mother ; he comforted 
 her by speaking highly of himself to her, and assuring her 
 that he never fell into the vices he saw practised by other 
 youths of his own age, and that he was particularly fond of 
 honesty If his mother would have given him her twenty 
 guineas as a reward of this noble disposition, he really would 
 not have stolen them from her, and it would have been more 
 agreeable to his feelings. Nevertheless, to an active mind 
 like David's, ingenuity is not without its pleasures : it was 
 rather an interesting occupation to become stealthily ac- 
 quainted with the wards of his mother's simple key (not in 
 the least like Chubb's patent), and to get one that would do 
 its work equally well ; and also to arrange a little drama by 
 which he would escape suspicion, and run no risk of forfeiting 
 the prospective hundred at his father's death, which would 
 be convenient in the improbable case of his not making a large 
 fortune in the " Indies." 
 
 First, he spoke freely of his intention to start shortly for
 
 BKOTHEK JACOB. 479 
 
 Liverpool and take ship for America ; a resolution which cost 
 his good mother some pain, for, after Jacob the idiot, there 
 was not one of her sons to whom her heart clung more than 
 to her youngest-born, David. Next, it appeared to him that 
 Sunday afternoon, when everybody was gone to church except 
 Jacob and the cow-boy, was so singularly favorable an oppor- 
 tunity for sons who wanted to appropriate their mothers' 
 guineas, that he half thought it must have been kindly in- 
 tended by Providence for such purposes. Especially the third 
 Sunday in Lent ; because Jacob had been out on one of his 
 occasional wanderings for the last two days ; and David, 
 being a timid young man, had a considerable dread and hatred 
 of Jacob, as of a large personage who went about habitually 
 with a pitchfork in his hand. 
 
 Nothing could be easier, then, than for David on this Sunday 
 afternoon to decline going to church, on the ground that he was 
 going to tea at Mr. Lunn's, whose pretty daughter Sally had 
 been an early flame of his, and, when the church-goers were 
 at a safe distance, to abstract the guineas from their wooden 
 box and slip them into a small canvas bag nothing easier 
 than to call to the cow-boy that he was going, and tell him to 
 keep an eye on the house for fear of Sunday tramps. David 
 thought it would be easy, too, to get to a small thicket and bury 
 his bag in a hole he had already made and covered up under 
 the roots of an old hollow ash, and he had, in fact, found the 
 hole without a moment's difficulty, had uncovered it, and was 
 about gently to drop the bag into it, when the sound of a large 
 body rustling towards him with something like a bellow was 
 such a surprise to David, who, as a gentleman gifted with much 
 contrivance, was naturally only prepared for what he expected, 
 that instead of dropping the bag gently he let it fall so as to 
 make it untwist and vomit forth the shining guineas. In the 
 same moment he looked up and saw his dear brother Jacob 
 close upon him, holding the pitchfork so that the bright smooth 
 prongs were a yard in advance of his own body, and about a 
 foot off David's. (A learned friend, to whom I once narrated 
 this history, observed that it was David's guilt which made 
 these prongs formidable, and that the metis nil conscia sibi strips
 
 180 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 
 
 a pitchfork of all terrors. I thought this idea so valuable, that 
 I obtained his leave to use it on condition of suppressing his 
 name.) Nevertheless, David did not entirely lose his presence 
 of mind ; for in that case he would have sunk on the earth or 
 started backward ; whereas he kept his ground and smiled at 
 Jacob, who nodded his head up and down, and said, "Hoich, 
 Zavy ! " in a painfully equivocal manner. David's heart was 
 beating audibly, and if he had had any lips they would have 
 been pale ; but his mental activity, instead of being paralyzed, 
 was stimulated. While he was inwardly praying (he always 
 prayed when he was much frightened), " Oh, save me this 
 once, and I '11 never get into danger again ! " he was thrust- 
 ing his hand into his pocket in search of a box of yellow 
 lozenges, which he had brought with him from Brigford among 
 other delicacies of the same portable kind, as a means of con- 
 ciliating proud beauty, and more particularly the beauty of 
 Miss Sarah Lunn. Not one of these delicacies had he ever 
 offered to poor Jacob, for David was not a young man to waste 
 his jujubes and barley-sugar in giving pleasure to people from 
 whom he expected nothing. But an idiot with equivocal 
 intentions and a pitchfork is as well worth flattering and cajol- 
 ing as if he were Louis Napoleon. So David, with a prompti- 
 tude equal to the occasion, drew out his box of yellow lozenges, 
 lifted the lid, and performed a pantomime with his mouth and 
 fingers, which was meant to imply that he was delighted to 
 see his dear brother Jacob, and seized the opportunity of 
 making him a small present, which he would find particularly 
 agreeable to the taste. Jacob, you understand, was not an 
 intense idiot, but within a certain limited range knew how to 
 choose the good and reject the evil : he took one lozenge, by 
 way of test, and sucked it as if he had been a philosopher ; 
 then, in as great an ecstasy at its new and complex savor as 
 Caliban at the taste of Trinculo's wine, chuckled and stroked 
 this suddenly beneficent brother, and held out his hand for 
 more ; for, except in fits of anger, Jacob was not ferocious or 
 needlessly predatory. David's courage half returned, and he 
 left off praying ; pouring a dozen lozenges into Jacob's palm, 
 and trying to look very fond of him. He congratulated him-
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 481 
 
 self that he had formed the plan of going to see Miss Sally 
 Lunn this afternoon, and that, as a consequence, he had 
 brought with him these propitiatory delicacies: he was cer- 
 tainly a lucky fellow ; indeed, it was always likely Providence 
 should be fonder of him than of other apprentices, and since 
 he was to be interrupted, why, an idiot was preferable to any 
 other sort of witness. For the first time in his life, David 
 thought he saw the advantage of idiots. 
 
 As for Jacob, he had thrust his pitchfork into the ground, 
 and had thrown himself down beside it, in thorough abandon- 
 ment to the unprecedented pleasure of having five lozenges in 
 his mouth at once, blinking meanwhile, and making inarticu- 
 late sounds of gustative content. He had not yet given any 
 sign of noticing the guineas, but in seating himself he had 
 laid his broad right hand on them, and unconsciously kept it 
 in that position, absorbed in the sensations of his palate. If 
 he could only be kept so occupied with the lozenges as not to 
 see the guineas before David could manage to cover them ! 
 That was David's best hope of safety ; for Jacob knew his 
 mother's guineas ; it had been part of their common experience 
 as boys to be allowed to look at these handsome coins, and 
 rattle them in their box on high days and holidays, and among 
 all Jacob's narrow experiences as to money, this was likely to 
 be the most memorable. 
 
 " Here, Jacob," said David, in an insinuating tone, handing 
 the box to him, " I '11 give 'em all to you. Eun ! make 
 haste ! else somebody '11 come and take 'em." 
 
 David, not having studied the psychology of idiots, was not 
 aware that they are not to be wrought upon by imaginative 
 fears. Jacob took the box with his left hand, but saw no 
 necessity for running away. Was ever a promising young man 
 wishing to lay the foundation of his fortune by appropriating 
 his mother's guineas obstructed by such a day-mare as this ? 
 But the moment must come when Jacob would move his right 
 hand to draw off the lid of the tin box, and then David would 
 sweep the guineas into the hole with the utmost address and 
 swiftness, and immediately seat himself upon them. Ah, no 1 
 It 's of no use to have foresight when you are dealing with an 
 
 TOL. IX. J,
 
 482 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 idiot: lie is not to be calculated upon. Jacob's right hand 
 was given to vague clutching and throwing; it suddenly 
 clutched the guineas as if they had been so many pebbles, 
 and was raised in an attitude which promised to scatter them 
 like seed over a distant bramble, when, from some prompting 
 or other probably of an unwonted sensation it paused, 
 descended to Jacob's knee, and opened slowly under the 
 inspection of Jacob's dull eyes. David began to pray again, 
 but immediately desisted another resource having occurred 
 to him. 
 
 " Mother ! zinnies ! " exclaimed the innocent Jacob. Then, 
 looking at David, he said, interrogatively, "Box?" 
 
 "Hush! hush!" said David, summoning all his ingenuity 
 in this severe strait. " See, Jacob ! " He took the tin box 
 from his brother's hand, and emptied it of the lozenges, re- 
 turning half of them to Jacob, but secretly keeping the rest 
 in his own hand. Then he held out the empty box, and said, 
 " Here 's the box, Jacob ! The box for the guineas ! " gently 
 sweeping them from Jacob's palm into the box. 
 
 This procedure was not objectionable to Jacob ; on the con- 
 trary, the guineas clinked so pleasantly as they fell, that he 
 wished for a repetition of the sound, and seizing the box, began 
 to rattle it very gleefully. David, seizing the opportunity, 
 deposited his reserve of lozenges in the ground and hastily 
 swept some earth over them. " Look, Jacob ! " he said, at 
 last. Jacob paused from his clinking, and looked into the 
 hole, while David began to scratch away the earth, as if in 
 doubtful expectation. When the lozenges were laid bare, he 
 took them out one by one, and gave them to Jacob. 
 
 " Hush ! " he said, in a loud whisper, " Tell nobody all for 
 Jacob hush sh sh ! Put guineas in the hole they '11 
 come out like this ! " To make the lesson more complete, he 
 took a guinea, and lowering it into the hole, said, " Put in so." 
 Then, as he took the last lozenge out, he said, " Come out so," 
 and put the lozenge into Jacob's hospitable mouth. 
 
 Jacob turned his head on one side, looked first at his brother 
 and then at the hole, like a reflective monkey, and, finally, 
 laid the box of guineas in the hole with much decision. David
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 483 
 
 made haste to add every one of the stray coins, put on the 
 lid, and covered it well with earth, saying in his most coaxing 
 tone 
 
 " Take 'm out to-morrow, Jacob ; all for Jacob I Hush sh 
 sh!" 
 
 Jacob, to whom this once indifferent brother had all at once 
 become a sort of sweet-tasted fetish, stroked David's best coat 
 with his adhesive fingers, and then hugged him with an accom- 
 paniment of that mingled chuckling and gurgling by which 
 he was accustomed to express the milder passions. But if 
 he had chosen to bite a small morsel out of his beneficent 
 brother's cheek, David would have been obliged to bear it. 
 
 And here I must pause, to point out to you the short-sighted- 
 ness of human contrivance. This ingenious young man, Mr. 
 David Faux, thought he had achieved a triumph of cunning 
 when he had associated himself in his brother's rudimentary 
 mind with the flavor of yellow lozenges. But he had yet to 
 learn that it is a dreadful thing to make an idiot fond of you, 
 when you yourself are not of an affectionate disposition : 
 especially an idiot with a pitchfork obviously a difficult 
 friend to shake off by rough usage. 
 
 It may seem to you rather a blundering contrivance for a 
 clever young man to bury the guineas. But, if everything 
 had turned out as David had calculated, you would have seen 
 that his plan was worthy of his talents. The guineas would 
 have lain safely in the earth while the theft was discovered, 
 and David, with the calm of conscious innocence, would have 
 lingered at home, reluctant to say good-by to his dear mother 
 while she was in grief about her guineas ; till at length, on the 
 eve of his departure, he would have disinterred them in the 
 strictest privacy, and carried them on his own person without 
 inconvenience. But David, you perceive, had reckoned with- 
 out his host, or, to speak more precisely, without his idiot 
 brother an item of so uncertain and fluctuating a character, 
 that I doubt whether he would not have puzzled the astute 
 heroes of M. de Balzac, whose foresight is so remarkably at 
 home in the future. 
 
 It was clear to Darid now that he had only one alternative
 
 484 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 before him : he must either renounce the guineas, by quietly 
 putting them back in his mother's drawer (a course not un- 
 attended with difficulty) ; or he must leave more than a suspicion 
 behind him, by departing early the next morning without 
 giving notice, and with the guineas in his pocket. For if 
 he gave notice that he was going, his mother, he knew, would 
 insist on fetching from her box of guineas the three she had 
 always promised him as his share ; indeed, in his original plan, 
 he had counted on this as a means by which the theft would 
 be discovered under circumstances that would themselves 
 speak for his innocence ; but now, as I need hardly explain, 
 that well-combined plan was completely frustrated. Even if 
 David could have bribed Jacob with perpetual lozenges, an 
 idiot's secrecy is itself betrayal. He dared not even go to 
 tea at Mr. Lunn's, for in that case he would have lost sight 
 of Jacob, who, in his impatience for the crop of lozenges, might 
 scratch up the box again while he was absent, and carry it 
 home depriving him at once of reputation and guineas. 
 No ! he must think of nothing all the rest of this day, but of 
 coaxing Jacob and keeping him out of mischief. It was a 
 fatiguing and anxious evening to David ; nevertheless, he 
 dared not go to sleep without tying a piece of string to his 
 thumb and great toe, to secure his frequent waking ; for he 
 meant to be up with the first peep of dawn, and be far out of 
 reach before breakfast-time. His father, he thought, would 
 certainly cut him off with a shilling ; but what then ? Such 
 a striking young man as he would be sure to be well received 
 in the West Indies: in foreign countries there are always 
 openings even for cats. It was probable that some Princess 
 Yarico would want him to marry her, and make him presents 
 of very large jewels beforehand ; after which, he need n't 
 marry her unless he liked. David had made up his mind 
 not to steal any more, even from people who were fond of 
 him : it was an unpleasant way of making your fortune in a 
 world where you were likely to be surprised in the act by 
 brothers. Such alarms did not agree with David's constitu- 
 tion, and he had felt so much nausea this evening that no doubt 
 his liver was affected. Besides, he would have been greatly
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 485 
 
 hurt not to be thought well of in the world : he always meant 
 to make a figure, and be thought worthy of the best seats and 
 the best morsels. 
 
 Ruminating to this effect on the brilliant future in reserve 
 for him, David by the help of his check-string kept himself on 
 the alert to seize the time of earliest dawn for his rising and 
 departure. His brothers, of course, were early risers, but he 
 should anticipate them by at least an hour and a half, and the 
 little room which he had to himself as only an occasional visi- 
 tor, had its window over the horse-block, so that he could slip 
 out through the window without the least difficulty. Jacob, 
 the horrible Jacob, had an awkward trick of getting up before 
 everybody else, to stem his hunger by emptying the milk-bowl 
 that was " duly set " for him ; but of late he had taken to 
 sleeping in the hay-loft, and if he came into the house, it 
 would be on the opposite side to that from which David was 
 making his exit. There was no need to think of Jacob ; yet 
 David was liberal enough to bestow a curse on him it was 
 the only thing he ever did bestow gratuitously. His small 
 bundle of clothes was ready packed, and he was soon treading 
 lightly on the steps of the horse-block, soon walking at a smart 
 pace across the fields towards the thicket. It would take him 
 no more than two minutes to get out the box ; he could make 
 .out the tree it was under by the pale strip where the bark was 
 off, although the dawning light was rather dimmer in the 
 thicket. But what, in the name of burnt pastry was that 
 large body with a staff planted beside it, close at the foot of 
 the ash-tree ? David paused, not to make up his mind as to 
 the nature of the apparition he had not the happiness of 
 doubting for a moment that the staff was Jacob's pitchfork 
 but to gather the self-command necessary for addressing his 
 brother with a sufficiently honeyed accent. Jacob was ab- 
 sorbed in scratching up the earth, and had not heard David's 
 approach. 
 
 " I say, Jacob," said David in a loud whisper, just as the 
 tin box was lifted out of the hole. 
 
 Jacob looked up, and discerning his sweet-flavored brother, 
 nodded and grinned in the dim light in a way that made him
 
 486 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 seem to David like a triumphant demon. If he had been of 
 an impetuous disposition, he would have snatched the pitch- 
 fork from the ground and impaled this fraternal demon. But 
 David was by no means impetuous , he was a young man 
 greatly given to calculate consequences, a habit which has 
 been held to be the foundation of virtue. But somehow it had 
 not precisely that effect in David : he calculated whether an 
 action would harm himself, or whether it would only harm 
 other people. In the former case he was very timid about 
 satisfying his immediate desires, but in the latter he would 
 risk the result with much courage. 
 
 " Give it me, Jacob," he said, stooping down and patting his 
 brother. " Let us see." 
 
 Jacob, finding the lid rather tight, gave the box to his 
 brother in perfect faith. David raised the lid, and shook his 
 head, while Jacob put his finger in and took out a guinea to 
 taste whether the metamorphosis into lozenges was complete 
 and satisfactory. 
 
 "No, Jacob; too soon, too soon," said David, when the 
 guinea had been tasted. " Give it me ; we '11 go and bury it 
 somewhere else ; we '11 put it in yonder," he added, pointing 
 vaguely toward the distance. 
 
 David screwed on the lid, while Jacob, looking grave, rose 
 and grasped his pitchfork. Then, seeing David's bundle, he 
 snatched it, like a too officious Newfoundland, stuck his pitch- 
 fork into it and carried it over his shoulder in triumph as he 
 accompanied David and the box out of the thicket. 
 
 What on earth was David to do ? It would have been easy 
 to frown at Jacob, and kick him, and order him to get away ; 
 but David dared as soon have kicked the bull. Jacob was 
 quiet as long as he was treated indulgently ; but on the slight- 
 est show of anger, he became unmanageable, and was liable to 
 fits of fury which would have made him formidable even with- 
 out his pitchfork. There was no mastery to be obtained over 
 him except by kindness or guile. David tried guile. 
 
 "Go, Jacob," he said, when they were out of the thicket 
 pointing towards the house as he spoke ; " go and fetch me a 
 spade a spade. But give me the bundle," he added, trying
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 487 
 
 to reach it from the fork, where it hung high above Jacob's 
 tall shoulder. 
 
 But Jacob showed as much alacrity in obeying as a wasp 
 shows in leaving a sugar-basin. Near David, he felt himself 
 in the vicinity of lozenges : he chuckled and rubbed his 
 brother's back, brandishing the bundle higher out of reach. 
 David, with an inward groan, changed his tactics, and walked 
 on as fast as he could. It was not safe to linger. Jacob would 
 get tired of following him, or, at all events, could be eluded. 
 If they could once get to the distant highroad, a coach would 
 overtake them, David would mount it, having previously by 
 some ingenious means secured his bundle, and then Jacob 
 might howl and flourish his pitchfork as much as he liked. 
 Meanwhile he was under the fatal necessity of being very 
 kind to this ogre, and of providing a large breakfast for him 
 when they stopped at a roadside inn. It was already three 
 hours since they had started, and David was tired. Would no 
 coach be coming up soon ? he inquired. No coach for the 
 next two hours. But there was a carrier's cart to come imme- 
 diately, on its way to the next town. If he could slip out, 
 even leaving his bundle behind, and get into the cart without 
 Jacob ! But there was a new obstacle. Jacob had recently 
 discovered a remnant of sugar-candy in one of his brother's 
 tail-pockets ; and, since then, had cautiously kept his hold on 
 that limb of the garment, perhaps with an expectation that 
 there would be a further development of sugar-candy after a 
 longer or shorter interval. Now every one who has worn a 
 coat will understand the sensibilities that must keep a man 
 from starting away in a hurry when there is a grasp on his 
 coat-tail. David looked forward to being well received among 
 strangers,, but it might make a difference if he had only one 
 tail to his coat. 
 
 He felt himself in a cold perspiration. He could walk no 
 more : he must get into the cart and let Jacob get in with 
 him. Presently a cheering idea occurred to him : after so 
 large a breakfast, Jacob would be sure to go to sleep in the 
 cart ; you see at once that David meant to seize his bundle, 
 jump out, and be free. His expectation was partly fulfilled
 
 488 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 Jacob did go to sleep in the cart, but it was in a peculiar 
 attitude it was with his arms tightly fastened round his 
 dear brother's body ; and if ever David attempted to move, 
 the grasp tightened with the force of an affectionate boa- 
 constrictor. 
 
 " Th' innicent 's fond on you," observed the carrier, think- 
 ing that David was probably an amiable brother, and wishing 
 to pay him a compliment. 
 
 David groaned. The ways of thieving were not ways of 
 pleasantness. Oh, why had he an idiot brother ? Or why, 
 in general, was the world so constituted that a man could not 
 take his mother's guineas comfortably ? David became grimly 
 speculative. 
 
 Copious dinner at noon for Jacob ; but little dinner, because 
 little appetite, for David. Instead of eating, he plied Jacob 
 with beer ; for through this liberality he descried a hope. 
 Jacob fell into a dead sleep, at last, without having his arms 
 round David, who paid the reckoning, took his bundle, and 
 walked off. In another half-hour he was on the coach on his 
 way to Liverpool, smiling the smile of the triumphant wicked. 
 He was rid of Jacob he was bound for the Indies, where a 
 gullible princess awaited him. He would never steal any 
 more, but there would be no need ; he would show himself so 
 deserving, that people would make him presents freely. He 
 must give up the notion of his father's legacy ; but it was not 
 likely he would ever want that trifle ; and even if he did 
 why, it was a compensation to think that in being forever 
 divided from his family he was divided from Jacob, more 
 terrible than Gorgon or Demogorgon to David's timid green 
 eyes. Thank heaven, he should never see Jacob any more 1
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 489 
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 IT was nearly six years after the departure of Mr. David 
 Faux for the West Indies, that the vacant shop in the market- 
 place at Grimworth was understood to have been let to the 
 stranger with a sallow complexion and a buff cravat, whose 
 first appearance had caused some excitement in the bar of the 
 Woolpack, where he had called to wait for the coach. 
 
 Grimworth, to a discerning eye, was a good place to set up 
 shopkeeping in. There was no competition in it at present ; 
 the Church-people had their own grocer and draper ; the 
 Dissenters had theirs ; and the two or three butchers found a 
 ready market for their joints without strict reference to re- 
 ligious persuasion except that the rector's wife had given a 
 general order for the veal sweet-breads and the mutton kid- 
 neys, while Mr. Eodd, the Baptist minister, had requested 
 that, so far as was compatible with the fair accommodation 
 of other customers, the sheep's trotters might be reserved for 
 him. And it was likely to be a growing place, for the trustees 
 of Mr. Zephauiah Crypt's Charity, under the stimulus of a 
 late visitation by commissioners, were beginning to apply 
 long-accumulating funds to the rebuilding of the Yellow Coat 
 School, which was henceforth to be carried forward on a 
 greatly extended scale, the testator having left no restrictions 
 concerning the curriculum, but only concerning the coat. 
 
 The shopkeepers at Grimworth were by no means unani- 
 mous as to the advantages promised by this prospect of in- 
 creased population and trading, being substantial men, who 
 liked doing a quiet business in which they were sure of their 
 customers, and could calculate their returns to a nicety. 
 Hitherto, it had been held a point of honor by the families in 
 Grimworth parish, to buy their sugar and their flannel at the 
 shops where their fathers and mothers had bought before 
 them ; but, if new-comers were to bring in the system of neeb
 
 490 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 and-neck trading, and solicit feminine eyes by gown-pieces 
 laid in fan-like folds, and surmounted by artificial flowers, 
 giving them a factitious charm (for on what human figure 
 would a gown sit like a fan, or what female head was like a 
 bunch of China-asters ?), or, if new grocers were to fill their 
 windows with mountains of currants and sugar, made seduc- 
 tive by contrast and tickets, what security was there for 
 Grimworth, that a vagrant spirit in shopping, once introduced, 
 would not in the end carry the most important families to the 
 larger market town of Cattelton, where, business being done 
 on a system of small profits and quick returns, the fashions 
 were of the freshest, and goods of all kinds might be bought 
 at an advantage ? 
 
 With this view of the times predominant among the trades- 
 people at Grimworth, their uncertainty concerning the nature 
 of the business which the sallow-oomplexioned stranger was 
 about to set up in the vacant shop, naturally gave some addi- 
 tional strength to the fears of the less sanguine. If he was 
 going to sell drapery, it was probable that a pale-faced fellow 
 like that would deal in showy and inferior articles printed 
 cottons and muslins which would leave their dye in the wash- 
 tub, jobbed linen full of knots, and flannel that would soon 
 look like gauze. If grocery, then it was to be hoped that no 
 mother of a family would trust the teas of an untried grocer. 
 Such things had been known in some parishes as tradesmen 
 going about canvassing for custom with cards in their pockets : 
 when people came from nobody knew where, there was no 
 knowing what they might do. It was a thousand pities that 
 Mr. Moffat, the auctioneer and broker, had died without leav- 
 ing anybody to follow him in the business, and Mrs. Cleve's 
 trustee ought to have known better than to let a shop to a 
 stranger. Even the discovery that ovens were being put up 
 on the premises, and that the shop was, in fact, being fitted 
 up for a confectioner and pastry-cook's business, hitherto 
 unknown in Grimworth, did not quite suffice to turn the scale 
 in the new-comer's favor, though the landlady at the Wool- 
 pack defended him warmly, said he seemed to be a very 
 clever young man, and from what she could make out, came
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 491 
 
 of a very good family ; indeed, was most likely a good many 
 people's betters. 
 
 It certainly made a blaze of light and color, almost as if a 
 rainbow had suddenly descended into the market-place, when, 
 one fine morning, the shutters were taken down from the new 
 shop, and the two windows displayed their decorations. On 
 one side, there were the variegated tints of collared and 
 marbled meats, set off by bright green leaves, the pale brown 
 of glazed pies, the rich tones of sauces and bottled fruits 
 enclosed in their veil of glass altogether a sight to bring 
 tears into the eyes of a Dutch painter ; and on the other, 
 there was a predominance of the more delicate hues of pink, 
 and white, and yellow, and buff, in the abundant lozenges, 
 candies, sweet biscuits and icings, which to the eyes of a 
 bilious person might easily have been blended into a faery 
 landscape in Turner's latest style. What a sight to dawn 
 upon the eyes of Grimworth children ! They almost forgot to 
 go to their dinner that day, their appetites being preoccupied 
 with imaginary sugar-plums ; and I thik even Punch, setting 
 up his tabernacle in the market-place, would not have suc- 
 ceeded in drawing them away from those shop-windows, where 
 they stood according to gradations of size and strength, the 
 biggest and strongest being nearest the window, and the little 
 ones in the outermost rows lifting wide-open eyes and mouths 
 towards the upper tier of jars, like small birds at meal-time. 
 
 The elder inhabitants pished and pshawed a little at the 
 folly of the new shopkeeper in venturing on such an outlay in 
 goods that would not keep ; to be sure, Christmas was coming, 
 but what housewife in Grimworth would not think shame to 
 furnish forth her table with articles that were not home- 
 cooked ? No, no. Mr. Edward Freely, as he called himself, 
 was deceived, if he thought Grimworth money was to flow 
 into his pockets on such terms. 
 
 Edward Freely was the name that shone in gilt letters on a 
 mazarine ground over the doorplace of the new shop a gen- 
 erous-sounding name, that might have belonged to the open- 
 hearted, improvident hero of an old comedy, who would have 
 delighted in raining sugared almonds, like a new manna-gift.
 
 492 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 among that small generation outside the windows. But Mr. 
 Edward Freely was a man whose impulses were kept in due 
 subordination : he held that the desire for sweets and pastry 
 must only be satisfied in a direct ratio with the power of pay- 
 ing for them. If the smallest child in Grimworth would go to 
 him with a halfpenny in its tiny fist, he would, after ringing 
 the halfpenny, deliver a just equivalent in " rock." He was 
 not a man to cheat even the smallest child he often said so, 
 observing at the same time that he loved honesty, and also 
 that he was very tender-hearted, though he didn't show his 
 feelings as some people did. 
 
 Either in reward of such virtue, or according to some more 
 hidden law of sequence, Mr. Freely's business, in spite of preju- 
 dice, started under favorable auspices. For Mrs. Chaloner, the 
 rector's wife, was among the earliest customers at the shop, 
 thinking it only right to encourage a new parishioner who had 
 made a decorous appearance at church ; and she found Mr. 
 Freely a most civil, obliging young man, and intelligent to a 
 surprising degree for & confectioner ; well-principled, too, for 
 in giving her useful hints about choosing sugars he had thrown 
 much light on the dishonesty of other tradesmen. Moreover, 
 he had been in the West Indies, and had seen the very estate 
 which had been her poor grandfather's property ; and he said 
 the missionaries were the only cause of the negro's discontent 
 an observing young man, evidently. Mrs. Chaloner ordered 
 wine-biscuits and olives, and gave Mr. Freely to understand 
 that she should find his shop a great convenience. So did the 
 doctor's wife, and so did Mrs. Gate, at the large carding-mill, 
 who, having high connections frequently visiting her, might 
 be expected to have a large consumption of ratafias and 
 macaroons. 
 
 The less aristocratic matrons of Grimworth seemed likely 
 at first to justify their husbands' confidence that they would 
 never pay a percentage of profits on drop-cakes, instead of 
 making their own, or get up a hollow show of liberal house- 
 keeping by purchasing slices of collared meat when a neighbor 
 came in for supper. But it is my task to narrate the gradual 
 corruption of Grimworth manners from their primitive sim-
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 493 
 
 plicity a melancholy task, if it were not cheered by the pros- 
 pect of the fine peripateia or downfall by which the progress 
 of the corruption was ultimately checked. 
 
 It was young Mrs. Steene, the veterinary surgeon's wife, 
 who first gave way to temptation. I fear she had been rather 
 over-educated for her station in life, for she knew by heart 
 many passages in "Lalla Rookh," the "Corsair," and the 
 " Siege of Corinth," which had given her a distaste for domestic 
 occupations, and caused her a withering disappointment at the 
 discovery that Mr. Steene, since his marriage, had lost all in- 
 terest in the " bulbul," openly preferred discussing the nature 
 of spavin with a coarse neighbor, and was angry if the pud- 
 ding turned out watery indeed, was simply a top-booted 
 "vet.," who came in hungry at dinner-time; and not in the 
 least like a nobleman turned Corsair out of pure scorn for his 
 race, or like a renegade with a turban and crescent, unless it 
 were in the irritability of his temper. And scorn is such a 
 very different thing in top-boots ! 
 
 This brutal man had invited a supper-party for Christmas 
 eve, when he would expect to see mince-pies on the table. 
 Mrs. Steene had prepared her mince-meat, and had devoted 
 much butter, fine flour, and labor, to the making of a batch of 
 pies in the morning; but they proved to be so very heavy 
 when they came out of the oven, that she could only think 
 with trembling of the moment when her husband should catch 
 sight of them on the supper-table. He would storm at her, 
 she was certain; and before all the company; and then she 
 should never help crying : it was so dreadful to think she had 
 come to that, after the bulbul and everything ! Suddenly the 
 thought darted through her mind that this once she might send 
 for a dish of mince-pies from Freely's : she knew he had some. 
 But what was to become of the eighteen heavy mince-pies '.* 
 Oh, it was of no use thinking about that ; it was very expen- 
 sive indeed, making mince-pies at all was a great expense, 
 when they were not sure to turn out well : it would be much 
 better to buy them ready-made. You paid a little more for 
 them, but there was no risk of waste. 
 
 Such was the sophistry with which this misguided young
 
 494 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 woman enough. Mrs. Steene sent for the mince-pies, and, 
 I am grieved to add, garbled her household accounts in order 
 to conceal the fact from her husband. This was the second 
 step in a downward course, all owing to a young woman's 
 being out of harmony with her circumstances, yearning after 
 renegades and bulbuls, and being subject to claims from a 
 veterinary surgeon fond of mince-pies. T.'ne third step was to 
 harden herself by telling the fact of the bought mince-pies to 
 her intimate friend Mrs. Mole, who had already guessed it, 
 and who subsequently encouraged herself in buying a mould 
 of jelly, instead of exerting her own skill, by the reflection 
 that " other people " did the same sort of thing. The infection 
 spread ; soon there was a party or clique in Griinworth on the 
 side of " buying at Freely's ; " and many husbands, kept for 
 some time in the dark on this point, innocently swallowed at 
 two mouthfuls a tart on which they were paying a profit of a 
 hundred per cent, and as innocently encouraged a fatal dis- 
 ingenuousness in the partners of their bosoms by praising the 
 pastry. Others, more keen-sighted, winked at the too frequent 
 presentation on washing-days, and at impromptu suppers, of 
 superior spiced-beef, which flattered their palates more than 
 the cold remnants they had formerly been contented with. 
 Every housewife who had once " bought at Freely's " felt a 
 secret joy when she detected a similar perversion in her neigh- 
 bor's practice, and soon only two or three old-fashioned mis- 
 tresses of families held out in the protest against the growing 
 demoralization, saying to their neighbors who came to sup 
 with them, " I can't offer you Freely's beef, or Freely's cheese- 
 cakes; everything in our house is home-made; I'm afraid 
 you '11 hardly have any appetite for our plain pastry." The 
 doctor, whose cook was not satisfactory, the curate, who kept 
 no cook, and the mining agent, who was a great ban vivant, 
 even began to rely on Freely for the greater part of their 
 dinner, when they wished to give an entertainment of some 
 brilliancy. In short, the business of manufacturing the more 
 fanciful viands was fast passing out of the hands of maids 
 and matrons in private families, and was becoming the work 
 of a special commercial urtran.
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 495 
 
 I an? not ignorant that this sort of thing is called the inevi- 
 table course of civilization, division of labor, and so forth, and 
 that the maids and matrons may be said to have had their 
 hands set free from cookery to add to the wealth of society 
 in some other way. Only it happened at Grim worth, which, 
 to be sure, was a low place, that the maids and matrons could 
 do nothing with their hands at all better than cooking; not 
 even those who had always made heavy cakes and leathery 
 pastry. And so it came to pass, that the progress of civiliza- 
 tion at Grimworth was not otherwise apparent than in the 
 impoverishment of men, the gossiping idleness of women, and 
 the heightening prosperity of Mr. Edward Freely. 
 
 The Yellow Coat School was a double source of profit to the 
 calculating confectioner; for he opened an eating-room for 
 the superior workmen employed on the new school, and he 
 accommodated the pupils at the old school by giving great 
 attention to the fancy-sugar department. When I think of 
 the sweet-tasted swans and other ingenious white shapes 
 crunched by the small teeth of that rising generation, I am 
 glad to remember that a certain amount of calcareous food 
 has been held good for young creatures whose bones are not 
 qu|te formed ; for I have observed these delicacies to have an 
 inorganic flavor which would have recommended them greatly 
 to that young lady of the "Spectator's" acquaintance who 
 habitually made her dessert on the stems of tobacco-pipes. 
 
 As for the confectioner himself, he made his way gradually 
 into Grimworth homes, as his commodities did, in spite of 
 some initial repugnance. Somehow or other, his reception as 
 a guest seemed a thing that required justifying, like the pur- 
 chasing of his pastry. In the first place, he was a stranger, 
 and therefore open to suspicion ; secondly, the confectionery 
 business was so entirely new at Grimworth, that its place in 
 the scale of rank had not been distinctly ascertained. There 
 was no doubt about drapers and grocers, when they came of 
 good old Grimworth families, like Mr. Luff and Mr. Pretty- 
 man : they visited with the Palfreys, who farmed their own 
 land, played many a game at whist with the doctor, and conde- 
 scended a little towards the timber-merchant, who had lately
 
 496 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 taken to the coal-trade also, and had got new furniture ; but 
 whether a confectioner should be admitted to this higher level 
 of respectability, or should be understood to find his associates 
 among butchers and bakers, was a new question on which tra- 
 dition threw no light. His being a bachelor was in his favor, 
 and would perhaps have been enough to turn the scale, even 
 if Mr. Edward Freely's other personal pretensions had been 
 of an entirely insignificant cast. But so far from this, it very 
 soon appeared that he was a remarkable young man, who had 
 been in the West Indies, and had seen many wonders by sea 
 and land, so that he could charm the ears of Grimworth 
 Desdemonas with stories of strange fishes, especially sharks, 
 which he had stabbed in the nick of time by bravely plunging 
 overboard just as the monster was turning on his side to de- 
 vour the cook's mate ; of terrible fevers which he had under- 
 gone in a land where the wind blows from all quarters at once ; 
 of rounds of toast cut straight from the bread-fruit trees ; of 
 toes bitten off by land-crabs ; of large honors that had been 
 offered to him as a man who knew what was what, and was 
 therefore particularly needed in a tropical climate ; and of a 
 Creole heiress who had wept bitterly at his departure. Such 
 conversational talents as these, we know, will overcome dis- 
 advantages of complexion ; and young Towers, whose cheeks 
 were of the finest pink, set off by a fringe of dark whisker, 
 was quite eclipsed by the presence of the sallow Mr. Freely. 
 So exceptional a confectioner elevated his business, and might 
 well begin to make disengaged hearts flutter a little. 
 
 Fathers and mothers were naturally more slow and cautious 
 in their recognition of the new-comer's merits. 
 
 "He's an amusing fellow," said Mr. Prettyman, the highly 
 respectable grocer. (Mrs. Prettyman was a Miss Fothergill, 
 and her sister had married a London mercer.) "He's an 
 amusing fellow ; and I 've no objection to his making one at 
 the Oyster Club ; but he 's a bit too fond of riding the high 
 horse. He 's uncommonly knowing, I '11 allow ; but how came 
 he to go to the Indies ? I should like that answered. It 's 
 unnatural in a confectioner. I'm not fond of people that have 
 been beyond seas, if they can't give a good account how they
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 497 
 
 happened to go. When folks go so far off, it's because they've 
 got little credit nearer home that 's my opinion. However, 
 he's got some good rum; but I don't want to be hand and 
 glove with him, for all that." 
 
 It was this kind of dim suspicion which beclouded the view 
 of Mr. Freely's qualities in the maturer minds of Grimworth 
 through the early months of his residence there. But when 
 the confectioner ceased to be a novelty, the suspicions also 
 ceased to be novel, and people got tired of hinting at them, 
 especially as they seemed to be refuted by his advancing pros- 
 perity and importance. Mr. Freely was becoming a person of 
 influence in the parish ; he was found useful as an overseer 
 of the poor, having great firmness in enduring other people's 
 pain, which firmness, he said, was due to his great benevo- 
 lence; he always did what was good for people in the end. 
 Mr. Chaloner had even selected him as clergyman's church- 
 warden, for he was a very handy man, and much more of Mr. 
 Chaloner's opinion in everything about church business than 
 the older parishioners. Mr. Freely was a very regular church- 
 man, but at the Oyster Club he was sometimes a little free in 
 his conversation, more than hinting at a life of Sultanic self- 
 indulgence which he had passed in the West Indies, shaking 
 his head now and then and smiling rather bitterly, as men are 
 wont to do when they intimate that they have become a little 
 too wise to be instructed about a world which has long been 
 flat and stale to them. 
 
 For some time he was quite general in his attentions to the 
 fair sex, combining the gallantries of a lady's man with a 
 severity of criticism on the person and manners of absent 
 belles, which tended rather to stimulate in the feminine breast 
 the desire to conquer the approval of so fastidious a judge. 
 Nothing short of the very best in the department of female 
 charms and virtues could suffice to kindle the ardor of Mr. 
 Edward Freely, who had become familiar with the most luxu- 
 riant and dazzling beauty in the West Indies. It may seem 
 incredible that a confectioner should have ideas and conversa- 
 tion so much resembling those to be met with in a higher walk 
 of life, but it must be remembered that he had not merely 
 VOL. ix. 32
 
 498 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 travelled, he had also bow-legs and a sallow, small-featured 
 visage, so that nature herself had stamped him for a fastidious 
 connoisseur of the fair sox. 
 
 As last, however, it seemed clear that Cupid had found a 
 sharper arrow than usual, and that Mr. Freely's heart was 
 pierced. It was the general talk among the young people at 
 Grimworth. But was it really love ? and not rather ambi- 
 tion? Miss Fullilove, the timber-merchant's daughter, was 
 quite sure that if she were Miss Penny Palfrey, she would be 
 cautious ; it was not a good sign when men looked so much 
 above themselves for a wife. For it was no less a person than 
 Miss Penelope Palfrey, second daughter of the Mr. Palfrey who 
 farmed his own land, that had attracted Mr. Freely's peculiar 
 regard, and conquered his fastidiousness ; and no wonder ; for 
 the Ideal, as exhibited in the finest waxwork, was perhaps 
 never so closely approached by the Real as in the person of 
 the pretty Penelope. Her yellowish flaxen hair did not curl 
 naturally, I admit, but its bright crisp ringlets were such 
 smooth, perfect miniature tubes, that you would have longed 
 to pass your little finger through them, and feel their soft 
 elasticity. She wore them in a crop, for in those days, when 
 society was in a healthier state, young ladies wore crops long 
 after they were twenty, and Penelope was not yet nineteen. 
 Like the waxen ideal, she had round blue eyes, and round 
 nostrils in her little nose, and teeth such as the ideal would be 
 seen to have, if it ever showed them. Altogether, she was a 
 small, round thing, as neat as a pink and white double daisy, 
 and as guileless ; for I hope it does not argue guile in a pretty 
 damsel of nineteen, to think that she should like to have a 
 beau and be " engaged," when her elder sister had already 
 been in that position a year and a half. To be sure, there was 
 young Towers always coming to the house ; but Penny felt 
 convinced he only came to see her brother, for he never had 
 anything to say to her, and never offered her his arm, and was 
 as awkward and silent as possible. 
 
 It is not unlikely that Mr. Freely had early been smitten by 
 Penny's charms, as brought under his observation at church, 
 but he had to make his way in society a little before he could
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 499 
 
 come into nearer contact with them ; and even after he was 
 well received in Grimworth families, it was a long while before 
 he could converse with Penny otherwise than in an incidental 
 meeting at Mr. Luff's. It was not so easy to get invited to 
 Long Meadows, the residence of the Palfreys ; for though Mr. 
 Palfrey had been losing money of late years, not being able 
 quite to recover his feet after the terrible murrain which 
 forced him to borrow, his family were far from considering 
 themselves on the same level even as the old-established 
 tradespeople with whom they visited. The greatest people, 
 even kings and queens, must visit with somebody, and the 
 equals of the great are scarce. They were especially scarce at 
 Grimworth, which, as I have before observed, was a low par- 
 ish, mentioned with the most scornful brevity in gazetteers. 
 Even the great people there were far behind those of their 
 own standing in other parts of this realm. Mr. Palfrey's 
 farmyard doors had the paint all worn off them, and the front 
 garden walks had long been merged in a general weediness. 
 Still, his father had been called Squire Palfrey, and had been 
 respected by the last Grimworth generation as a man who 
 could afford to drink too much in his own house. 
 
 Pretty Penny was not blind to the fact that Mr. Freely 
 admired her, and she felt sure that it was he who had sent 
 her a beautiful valentine ; but her sister seemed to think so 
 lightly of him (all young ladies think lightly of the gentlemen 
 to whom they are not engaged), that Penny never dared men- 
 tion him, and trembled and blushed whenever they met him, 
 thinking of the valentine, which was very strong in its expres- 
 sions, and which she felt guilty of knowing by heart. A man 
 who had been to the Indies, and knew the sea so well, seemed 
 to her a sort of public character, almost like Eobinson Crusoe 
 or Captain Cook ; and Penny had always wished her husband 
 to be a remarkable personage, likely to be put in Mangnall's 
 Questions, with which register of the immortals she had become 
 acquainted during her one year at a boarding school. Only 
 it seemed strange that a remarkable man should be a con-' 
 fectioner and pastry-cook, and this anomaly quite disturbed 
 Penny's dreams. Her brothers, she knew, laughed at men
 
 500 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 who could n't sit on horseback well, and called them tailors ; 
 but her brothers were very rough, and were quite without that 
 power of anecdote which made Mr. Freely such a delightful 
 companion. He was a very good man, she thought, for she 
 had heard him say at Mr. Luff's, one day, that he always 
 wished to do his duty in whatever state of life he might be 
 placed ; and he knew a great deal of poetry, for one day he 
 had repeated a verse of a song. She wondered if he had made 
 the words of the valentine ! it ended in this way : 
 
 " Without thee, it is pain to live, 
 But with thee, it were sweet to die." 
 
 Poor Mr. Freely ! her father would very likely object 
 she felt sure he would, for he always called Mr. Freely " that 
 sugar-plum fellow." Oh, it was very cruel, when true love 
 was crossed in that way, and all because Mr. Freely was a 
 confectioner : well, Penny would be true to him, for all that, 
 and since his being a confectioner gave her an opportunity of 
 showing her faithfulness, she was glad of it. Edward Freely 
 was a pretty name, much better than John Towers. Young 
 Towers had offered her a rose out of his button-hole the other 
 day, blushing very much ; but she refused it, and thought with 
 delight how much Mr. Freely would be comforted if he knew 
 her firmness of mind. 
 
 Poor little Penny ! the days were so very long among the 
 daisies on a grazing farm, and thought is so active how was 
 it possible that the inward drama should not get the start of 
 the outward ? I have known young ladies, much better edu- 
 cated, and with an outward world diversified by instructive 
 lectures, to say nothing of literature and highly developed 
 fancy-work, who have spun a cocoon of visionary joys and 
 sorrows for themselves, just as Penny did. Her elder sister 
 Letitia, who had a prouder style of beauty, and a more worldly 
 ambition, was engaged to a wool-factor, who came all the way 
 from Cattelton to see her ; and everybody knows that a wool 
 factor takes a very high rank, sometimes driving a double- 
 bodied gig. Letty's notions got higher every day, and Penny 
 never dared to speak of her cherished griefs to her lofty sister
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 501 
 
 never dared to propose that they should call at Mr. Freely's 
 to buy liquorice, though she had prepared for such an incident 
 by mentioning a slight sore throat. So she had to pass the 
 shop on the other side of the market-place, and reflect, with a 
 suppressed sigh, that behind those pink and white jars some- 
 body was thinking of her tenderly, unconscious of the small 
 space that divided her from him. 
 
 And it was quite true that, when business permitted, Mr. 
 Freely thought a great deal of Penny. He thought her pretti- 
 ness comparable to the loveliest things in confectionery ; he 
 judged her to be of submissive temper likely to wait upon 
 him as well as if she had been a negress, and to be silently 
 terrified when his liver made him irritable ; and he consid- 
 ered the Palfrey family quite the best in the parish possess- 
 ing marriageable daughters. On the whole, he thought her 
 worthy to become Mrs. Edward Freely, and all the more so, 
 because it would probably require some ingenuity to win her. 
 Mr. Palfrey was capable of horse-whipping a too rash pre- 
 tender to his daughter's hand; and, moreover, he had three 
 tall sons : it was clear that a suitor would be at a disadvan- 
 tage with such a family, unless travel and natural acumen had 
 given him a countervailing power of contrivance. And the 
 first idea that occurred to him in the matter was, that Mr. 
 Palfrey would object less if he knew that the Freelys were a 
 much higher family than his own. It had been foolish modesty 
 in him hitherto to conceal the fact that a branch of the Freelys 
 held a manor in Yorkshire, and to shut up the portrait of 
 his great-uncle the admiral, instead of hanging it up where a 
 family portrait should be hung over the mantel-piece in the 
 parlor. Admiral Freely, K.C.B., once placed in this conspicu- 
 ous position, was seen to have had one arm only, and one eye, 
 
 in these points resembling the heroic Nelson, while a 
 certain pallid insignificance of feature confirmed the relation- 
 ship between himself and his grand-nephew. 
 
 Next, Mr. Freely was seized with an irrepressible ambition 
 to possess Mrs. Palfrey's receipt for brawn, hers being pro- 
 nounced on all hands to be superior to his own as he in- 
 formed her in a very flattering letter carried by his errand-boy.
 
 502 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 Now Mrs. Palfrey, like other geniuses, wrought by instinct 
 rather than by rule, and possessed no receipts, indeed, 
 despised all people who used them, observing that people who 
 pickled by book, must pickle by weights and measures, and 
 such nonsense ; as for herself, her weights and measures were 
 the tip of her finger and the tip of her tongue, and if you 
 went nearer, why, of course, for dry goods like flour and spice, 
 you went by handfuls and pinches, and for wet, there was a 
 middle-sized jug quite the best thing whether for much or 
 little, because you might know how much a teacupful was if 
 you 'd got any use of your senses, and you might be sure it 
 would take five middle-sized jugs to make a gallon. Knowl- 
 edge of this kind is like Titian's coloring, difficult to commu- 
 nicate ; and as Mrs. Palfrey, once remarkably handsome, had 
 now become rather stout and asthmatical, and scarcely ever 
 left home, her oral teaching could hardly be given anywhere 
 except at Long Meadows. Even a matron is not insusceptible 
 to flattery, and the prospect of a visitor whose great object 
 would be to listen to her conversation, was not without its 
 charms to Mrs. Palfrey. Since there was no receipt to be 
 sent in reply to Mr. Freely's humble request, she called on 
 her more docile daughter, Penny, to write a note, telling him 
 that her mother would be glad to see him and talk with him 
 on brawn, any day that he could call at Long Meadows. 
 Penny obeyed with a trembling hand, thinking how wonder- 
 fully things came about in this world. 
 
 In this way, Mr. Freely got himself introduced into the 
 home of the Palfreys, and notwithstanding a tendency in the 
 male part of the family to jeer at him a little as " peaky " and 
 bow-legged, he presently established his position as an ac- 
 cepted and frequent guest. Young Towers looked at him with 
 increasing disgust when they met at the house on a Sunday, 
 and secretly longed to try his ferret upon him, as a piece of 
 vermin which that valuable animal would be likely to tackle 
 with unhesitating vigor. But so blind sometimes are par- 
 ents neither Mr. nor Mrs. Palfrey suspected that Penny 
 would have anything to say to a tradesman of questionable 
 rank whose youthful bloom was much withered. Young
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 503 
 
 Towers, they thought, had an eye to her, and that was likely 
 enough to be a match some day ; but Penny was a child at 
 present. And all the while Penny was imagining the circum- 
 stances under which Mr. Freely would make her an offer : 
 perhaps down by the row of damson-trees, when they were 
 in the garden before tea ; perhaps by letter in which case, 
 how would the letter begin ? " Dearest Penelope ? " or " My 
 dear Miss Penelope ? " or straight off, without dear anything, 
 as seemed the most natural when people were embarrassed ? 
 But, however he might make the offer, she would not accept 
 it without her father's consent : she would always be true to 
 Mr. Freely, but she would not disobey her father. For Penny 
 was a good girl, though some of her female friends were after- 
 wards of opinion that it spoke ill for her not to have felt an 
 instinctive repugnance to Mr. Freely. 
 
 But he was cautious, and wished to be quite sure of the 
 ground he trod on. His views in marriage were not entirely 
 sentimental, but were as duly mingled with considerations of 
 what would be advantageous to a man in his position, as if he 
 had had a very large amount of money spent on his education. 
 He was not a man to fall in love in the wrong place ; and so, 
 he applied himself quite as much to conciliate the favor of the 
 parents, as to secure the attachment of Penny. Mrs. Palfrey 
 had not been inaccessible to flattery, and her husband, being 
 also of mortal mould, would not, it might be hoped, be proof 
 against rum that very fine Jamaica rum of which Mr. Freely 
 expected always to have a supply sent him from Jamaica. It 
 was not easy to get Mr. Palfrey into the parlor behind the 
 shop, where a mild back-street light fell on the features of the 
 heroic admiral; but by getting hold of him rather late one 
 evening as he was about to return home from Grimworth, the 
 aspiring lover succeeded in persuading him to sup on some 
 collared beef which, after Mrs. Palfrey's brawn, he would find 
 the very best of cold eating. 
 
 From that hour Mr. Freely felt sure of success: being in 
 privacy with an estimable man old enough to be his father, 
 and being rather lonely in the world, it was natural he should 
 unbosom himself a little on subjects which he could not speak
 
 504 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 of in a mixed circle especially concerning his expectations 
 from his uncle in Jamaica, who had no children, and loved 
 his nephew Edward better than any one else in the world, 
 though he had been so hurt at his leaving Jamaica, that he had 
 threatened to cut him off with a shilling. However, he had 
 since written to state his full forgiveness, and though he was 
 an eccentric old gentleman and could not bear to give away 
 money during his life, Mr. Edward Freely could show Mr. 
 Palfrey the letter which declared, plainly enough, who would 
 be the affectionate uncle's heir. Mr. Palfrey actually saw the 
 letter, and could not help admiring the spirit of the nephew 
 who declared that such brilliant hopes as these made no differ- 
 ence to his conduct ; he should work at his humble business 
 and make his modest fortune at it all the same. If the Ja- 
 maica estate was to come to him well and good. It was 
 nothing very surprising for one of the Freely family to have 
 an estate left him, considering the lands that family had pos- 
 sessed in time gone by, nay, still possessed in the North- 
 umberland branch. Would not Mr. Palfrey take another glass 
 of rum ? and also look at the last year's balance of the ac- 
 counts ? Mr. Freely was a man who cared to possess personal 
 virtues, and did not pique himself on his family, though some 
 men would. 
 
 We know how easily the great Leviathan may be led, when 
 once there is a hook in his nose or a bridle in his jaws. Mr. 
 Palfrey was a large man, but, like Leviathan's, his bulk went 
 against him when once he had taken a turning. He was not 
 a mercurial man, who easily changed his point of view. 
 Enough. Before two months were over, he had given his 
 consent to Mr. Freely's marriage with his daughter Penny, 
 and having hit on a formula by which he could justify it, 
 fenced off all doubts and objections, his own included. The 
 formula was this: "I'm not a man to put my head up an 
 entry before I know where it leads." 
 
 Little Penny was very proud and fluttering, but hardly so 
 happy as she expected to be in an engagement. She wondered 
 if young Towers cared much about it, for he had not been 
 to the house lately, and her sister and brothers were rather
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 505 
 
 inclined to sneer than to sympathize. Grim worth rang with the 
 news. All men extolled Mr. Freely's good fortune ; while the 
 women, with the tender solicitude characteristic of the sex, 
 wished the marriage might turn out well. 
 
 While affairs were at this triumphant juncture, Mr. Freely 
 one morning observed that a stone-carver who had been break- 
 fasting in the eating-room had left a newspaper behind. It 
 
 was the " X shire Gazette," and X shire being a county 
 
 not unknown to Mr. Freely, he felt some curiosity to glance 
 over it, and especially over the advertisements. A slight flusl, 
 came over his face as he read. It was produced by tin 
 following announcement : " If David Faux, son of Jona- 
 than Faux, late of Gilsbrook, will apply at the office of Mr. 
 Strutt, attorney, of Kodharn, he will hear of something to hi? 
 advantage." 
 
 "Father's dead!" exclaimed Mr. Freely, involuntarily. 
 "Can he have left me a legacy?" 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 
 PERHAPS it was a result quite different from your expects 
 tions, that Mr. David Faux should have returned from the 
 West Indies only a few years after his arrival there, and have 
 set up in his old business, like any plain man who had never 
 travelled. But these cases do occur in life. Since, as we 
 know, men change their skies and see new constellations with- 
 out changing their souls, it will follow sometimes that they 
 don't change their business under those novel circumstances. 
 
 Certainly, this result was contrary to David's own expecta- 
 tions. He had looked forward, you are aware, to a brilliant 
 career among " the blacks ; " but, either because they had 
 already seen too many white men, or for some other reason, 
 they did not at once recognize him as a superior order of 
 human being ; besides, there were no princesses among them.
 
 506 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 Nobody in Jamaica was anxious to maintain David for the 
 mere pleasure of his society ; and those hidden merits of a man 
 which are so well known to himself were as little recognized 
 there as they notoriously are in the effete society of the Old 
 World. So that in the dark hints that David threw out at 
 the Oyster Club about that life of Sultanic self-indulgence 
 spent by him in the luxurious Indies, I really think he was 
 doing himself a wrong ; I believe he worked for his bread, 
 and, in fact, took to cooking again, as, after all, the only 
 department in which he could offer skilled labor. He had 
 formed several ingenious plans by which he meant to circum- 
 vent people of large fortune and small faculty ; but then he 
 never met with exactly the right people under exactly the 
 right circumstances. David's devices for getting rich without 
 work had apparently no direct relation with the world outside 
 him, as his confectionery receipts had. It is possible to pass a 
 great many bad halfpennies and bad half-crowns, but I believe 
 there has no instance been known of passing a halfpenny or a 
 half-crown as a sovereign. A sharper can drive a brisk trade 
 in this world : it is undeniable that there may be a fine career 
 for him, if he will dare consequences ; but David was too timid 
 to be a sharper, or venture in any way among the man-traps 
 of the law. He dared rob nobody but his mother. And so he 
 had to fall back on the genuine value there was in him to 
 be content to pass as a good halfpenny, or, to speak more 
 accurately, as a good confectioner. For in spite of some ad- 
 ditional reading and observation, there was nothing else he 
 could make so much money by ; nay, he found in himself even 
 a capability of extending his skill in this direction, and em- 
 bracing all forms of cookery ; while, in other branches of human 
 labor, he began to see that it was not possible for him to shine. 
 Fate was too strong for him ; he had thought to master her 
 inclination and had fled over the seas to that end; but she 
 caught him, tied an apron round him, and snatching him from 
 all other devices, made him devise cakes and patties in a 
 kitchen at Kingstown. He was getting submissive to her, 
 since she paid him with tolerable gains ; but fevers and prickly 
 heat, and other evils incidental to cooks in ardent climates,
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 507 
 
 made him long for his native land ; so he took ship once more, 
 carrying his six years' savings, and seeing distinctly, this time, 
 what were Fate's intentions as to his career. If you question 
 me closely as to whether all the money with which he set up 
 at Grimworth consisted of pure and simple earnings, I am 
 obliged to confess that he got a sum or two for charitably 
 abstaining from mentioning some other people's misdemeanors. 
 Altogether, since no prospects were attached to his family 
 name, and since a new christening seemed a suitable com- 
 mencement of a new life, Mr. David Faux thought it as well 
 to call himself Mr. Edward Freely. 
 
 But lo ! now, in opposition to all calculable probability, 
 some benefit appeared to be attached to the name of David 
 Faux. Should he neglect it, as beneath the attention of a 
 prosperous tradesman ? It might bring him into contact with 
 his family again, and he felt no yearnings in that direction : 
 moreover, he had small belief that the " something to his ad- 
 vantage " could be anything considerable. On the other hand, 
 even a small gain is pleasant, and the promise of it in this 
 instance was so surprising, that David felt his curiosity awak- 
 ened. The scale dipped at last on the side of writing to the 
 lawyer, and, to be brief, the correspondence ended in an ap- 
 pointment for a meeting between David and his eldest brother 
 at Mr. Stmtt's, the vague "something" having been defined as 
 a legacy from his father of eighty-two pounds three shillings. 
 
 David, you know, had expected to be disinherited; and so 
 he would have been, if he had not, like some other indifferent 
 sons, come of excellent parents, whose conscience made them 
 scrupulous where much more highly instructed people often 
 feel themselves warranted in following the bent of their indig- 
 nation. Good Mrs. Faux could never forget that she had 
 brought this ill-conditioned son into the world when he was 
 in that entirely helpless state which excluded the smallest 
 choice on his part ; and, somehow or other, she felt that his 
 going wrong would be his father's and mother's fault, if they 
 failed in one tittle of their parental duty. Her notion of 
 parental duty was not of a high and subtle kind, but it included 
 giving him his due share of the family property ; for when a
 
 508 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 man had got a little honest money of his own, was he so likely 
 to steal ? To cut the delinquent son off with a shilling, was 
 like delivering him over to his evil propensities. No ; let the 
 sum of twenty guineas which he had stolen be deducted from 
 his share, and then let the sura of three guineas be put back 
 from it, seeing that his mother had always considered three of 
 the twenty guineas as his ; and, though he had run away, and 
 was, perhaps, gone across the sea, let the money be left to him 
 all the same, and be kept in reserve for his possible return. 
 Mr. Faux agreed to his wife's views, and made a codicil to 
 his will accordingly, in time to die with a clear conscience. 
 But for some time his family thought it likely that David 
 would never reappear ; and the eldest son, who had the charge 
 of Jacob on his hands, often thought it a little hard that David 
 might perhaps be dead, and yet, for want of certitude on that 
 point, his legacy could not fall to his legal heir. But in this 
 state of things the opposite certitude namely, that David 
 was still alive and in England seemed to be brought by the 
 testimony of a neighbor, who, having been on a journey to 
 Cattelton, was pretty sure he had seen David in a gig, with 
 a stout man driving by his side. He could "swear it was 
 David," though he could "give no account why, for he had 
 no marks on him ; but no more had a white dog, and that 
 did n't hinder folks from knowing a white dog." It was this 
 incident which had led to the advertisement. 
 
 The legacy was paid, of course, after a few preliminary dis- 
 closures as to Mr. David's actual position. He begged to send 
 his love to his mother, and to say that he hoped to pay her a 
 dutiful visit by-and-by ; but, at present, his business and near 
 prospect of marriage made it difficult for him to leave home. 
 His brother replied with much frankness. 
 
 " My mother may do as she likes about having you to see 
 her, but, for my part, I don't want to catch sight of you on the 
 premises again. When folks have taken a new name, they 'd 
 better keep to their new 'quinetance." 
 
 David pocketed the insult along with the eighty-two pounds 
 three, and travelled home again in some triumph at the ease 
 of a transaction which had enriched him to this extent. Ha
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 509 
 
 had no intention of offending his brother by further claims on 
 his fraternal recognition, and relapsed with full contentment 
 into the character of Mr. Edward Freely, the orphan, scion of a 
 great but reduced family, with an eccentric uncle in the West 
 Indies. (I have already hinted that he had some 'acquaintance 
 with imaginative literature ; and being of a practical turn, 
 he had, you perceive, applied even this form of knowledge to 
 practical purposes.) 
 
 It was little more than a week after the return from his 
 fruitful journey, that the day of his marriage with Penny 
 having been fixed, it was agreed that Mrs. Palfrey should 
 overcome her reluctance to move from home, and that she and 
 her husband should bring their two daughters to inspect little 
 Penny's future abode and decide on the new arrangements to 
 be made for the reception of the bride. Mr. Freely meant her 
 to have a house so pretty and comfortable that she need not 
 envy even a wool-factor's wife. Of course, the upper room over 
 the shop was to be the best sitting-room ; but also the parlor 
 behind the shop was to be made a suitable bower for the 
 lovely Penny, who would naturally wish to be near her hus- 
 band, though Mr. Freely declared his resolution never to allow 
 his wife to wait in the shop. The decisions about the parlor 
 furniture were left till last, because the party was to take tea 
 there ; and, about five o'clock, they were all seated there with 
 the best muffins and buttered buns before them, little Penny 
 blushing and smiling, with her "crop" in the best order, 
 and a blue frock showing her little white shoulders, while 
 her opinion was being always asked and never given. She 
 secretly wished to have a particular sort of chimney orna- 
 ments, but she could not have brought herself to mention it. 
 Seated by the side of her yellow and rather withered lover, 
 who, though he had not reached his thirtieth year, had already 
 crow's-feet about his eyes, she was quite tremulous at the great- 
 ness of her lot in being married to a man who had travelled so 
 much and before her sister Letty ! The handsome Letitia 
 looked rather proud and contemptuous, thought her future 
 brother-in-law an odious person, and was vexed with her 
 father and mother for letting Penny marry him. Dear little
 
 510 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 Penny ! She certainly did look like a fresh white-heart cherry 
 going to be bitten off the stem by that lipless mouth. Would 
 no deliverer come to make a slip between that cherry and that 
 mouth without a lip ? 
 
 " Quite a family likeness between the' admiral and you, Mr. 
 Freely," observed Mrs. Palfrey, who was looking at the family 
 portrait for the first time. " It 's wonderful ! and only a grand- 
 uncle. Do you feature the rest of your family, as you know 
 of?" 
 
 "I can't say," said Mr. Freely, with a sigh. "My family 
 have mostly thought themselves too high to take any notice 
 of me." 
 
 At this moment an extraordinary disturbance was heard in 
 the shop, as of a heavy animal stamping about and making 
 angry noises, and then of a glass vessel falling in shivers, 
 while the voice of the apprentice was heard calling " Master " 
 in great alarm. 
 
 Mr. Freely rose in anxious astonishment, and hastened into 
 the shop, followed by the four Palfreys, who made a group at 
 the parlor-door, transfixed with wonder at seeing a large man 
 in a smock-frock, with a pitchfork in his hand, rush up to 
 Mr. Freely and hug him, crying out, " Zavy, Zavy, b'other 
 Zavy!" 
 
 It was Jacob, and for some moments David lost all presence 
 of mind. He felt arrested for having stolen his mother's 
 guineas. He turned cold, and trembled in his brother's grasp. 
 
 " Why, how 's this ? " said Mr. Palfrey, advancing from the 
 door. "Who is he?" 
 
 Jacob supplied the answer by saying over and over again, 
 
 " I 'se Zacob, b'other Zacob. Come 'o zee Zavy " till hun- 
 ger prompted him to relax his grasp, and to seize a large 
 raised pie, which he lifted to his mouth. 
 
 By this time David's power of device had begun to return, 
 but it was a very hard task for his prudence to master his 
 rage and hatred towards poor Jacob. 
 
 " I don't know who he is ; he must be drunk," he said, in 
 a low tone to Mr. Palfrey. "But he's dangerous with that 
 pitchfork. He '11 never let it go." Then checking himself
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 511 
 
 on the point of betraying too great an intimacy with Jacob's 
 habits, he added, " You watch him, while I run for the con- 
 stable." And he hurried out of the shop. 
 
 " Why, where do you come from, my man ? " said Mr. 
 Palfrey, speaking to Jacob in a conciliatory tone. Jacob was 
 eating his pie by large mouth fuls, and looking round at the 
 other good things in the shop, while he embraced his pitchfork 
 with his left arm and laid his left hand on some Bath buns. 
 He was in the rare position of a person who recovers a long 
 absent friend and finds him richer than ever in the character- 
 istics that won his heart. 
 
 " I 's Zacob b'other Zacob 't home. I love Zavy 
 b'other Zavy," he said, as soon as Mr. Palfrey had drawn his 
 attention. " Zavy come back from z' Indies got mother's 
 zinnies. Where 's Zavy ? " he added, looking round and then 
 turning to the others with a questioning air, puzzled by 
 David's disappearance. 
 
 " It 's very odd," observed Mr. Palfrey to his wife and 
 daughters. " He seems to say Freely 's his brother come back 
 from th' Indies." 
 
 " What a pleasant relation for us ! " said Letitia, sarcasti- 
 cally. " I think he 's a good deal like Mr. Freely. He 's got 
 just the same sort of nose, and his eyes are the same color." 
 
 Poor Penny was ready to cry. 
 
 But now Mr. Freely re-entered the shop without the consta- 
 ble. During his walk of a few yards he had had time and 
 calmness enough to widen his view of consequences, and he 
 saw that to get Jacob taken to the workhouse or to the lock- 
 up house as an offensive stranger, might have awkward effects 
 if his family took the trouble of inquiring after him. He 
 must resign himself to more patient measures. 
 
 "On second thoughts," he said, beckoning to Mr. Palfrey 
 and whispering to him while Jacob's back was turned, " he 's 
 a poor half-witted fellow. Perhaps his friends will come after 
 him. I don't mind giving him something to eat, and letting 
 him lie down for the night. He 's got it into his head that he 
 knows me they do get these fancies, idiots do. He '11 per- 
 haps go away again in an hour or two, and make no more ado.
 
 512 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 I 'm a kind-hearted man myself I should n't like to have the 
 poor fellow ill-used." 
 
 " Why, he '11 eat a sovereign's worth in no time," said Mr. 
 Palfrey, thinking Mr. Freely a little too magnificent in his 
 generosity. 
 
 " Eh, Zavy, come back ? " exclaimed Jacob, giving his dear 
 brother another hug, which crushed Mr. Freely's features 
 inconveniently against the stale of the pitchfork. 
 
 " Ay, ay," said Mr. Freely, smiling, with every capability of 
 murder in his mind, except the courage to commit it. He 
 wished the Bath buns might by chance have arsenic in them. 
 
 " Mother's zinnies ? " said Jacob, pointing to a glass jar of 
 yellow lozenges that stood in the window. " Zive 'em me." 
 
 David dared not do otherwise than reach down the glass jar 
 and give Jacob a handful. He received them in his smock- 
 frock, which he held out for more. 
 
 " They '11 keep him quiet a bit, at any rate," thought David, 
 and emptied the jar. Jacob grinned and mowed with delight. 
 
 u You 're very good to this stranger, Mr. Freely," said Leti- 
 tia ; and then spitefully, as David joined the party at the 
 parlor-door, " I think you could hardly treat him better, if he 
 was really your brother." 
 
 " I Ve always thought it a duty to be good to idiots," said 
 Mr. Freely, striving after the most moral view of the sub- 
 ject. " We might have been idiots ourselves everybody 
 might have been born idiots, instead of having their right 
 senses." 
 
 "I don't know where there 'd ha' been victual for us all 
 then," observed Mrs. Palfrey, regarding the matter in a house- 
 wifely light. 
 
 "But let us sit down again and finish our tea," said Mr. 
 Freely. " Let us leave the poor creature to himself." 
 
 They walked into the parlor again ; but Jacob, not appar- 
 ently appreciating the kindness of leaving him to himself, 
 immediately followed his brother, and seated himself, pitch 
 fork grounded, at the table. 
 
 "Well," said Miss Letitia, rising, "I don't know whether 
 you mean to stay, mother ; but I shall go home."
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 513 
 
 "Oh, me too," said Penny, frightened to death at Jacob, 
 who had begun to nod and grin at her. 
 
 " Well, I think we had better be going, Mr. Palfrey," said 
 the mother, rising more slowly. 
 
 Mr. Freely, whose complexion had become decidedly yel- 
 lower during the last half-hour, did not resist this proposi- 
 tion. He hoped they should meet again "under happier 
 circumstances." 
 
 " It 's my belief the man is his brother," said Letitia, when 
 they were all on their way home. 
 
 " Letty, it 's very ill-natured of you," said Penny, beginning 
 to cry. 
 
 " Nonsense ! " said Mr. Palfrey. " Freely 's got no brother 
 he 's said so many and many a time ; he 's an orphan ; he 's 
 got nothing but uncles leastwise, one. What 's it matter 
 what an idiot says ? What call had Freely to tell lies ? " 
 
 Letitia tossed her head and was silent. 
 
 Mr. Freely, left alone with his affectionate brother Jacob, 
 brooded over the possibility of luring him out of the town 
 early the next morning, and getting him conveyed to Gilsbrook 
 without further betrayals. But the thing was difficult. He 
 saw clearly that if he took Jacob away himself, his absence, 
 conjoined with the disappearance of the stranger, would either 
 cause the conviction that he was really a relative, or would 
 oblige him to the dangerous course of inventing a story to 
 account for his disappearance, and his own absence at the 
 same time. David groaned. There come occasions when 
 falsehood is felt to be inconvenient. It would, perhaps, have 
 been a longer-headed device, if he had never told any of those 
 clever fibs about his uncles, grand and otherwise ; for the 
 Palfreys were simple people, and shared the popular prejudice 
 against lying. Even if he could get Jacob away this time, 
 what security was there that he would not come again, having 
 once found the way ? O guineas ! O lozenges ! what enviable 
 people those were who had never robbed their mothers, and 
 had never told fibs ! David spent a sleepless night, while Jacob 
 was snoring close by. Was this the upshot of travelling to the 
 Indies, and acquiring experience aombined with anecdote ? 
 
 TOL IX. 88
 
 614 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 He rose at break of day, as he had once before done when 
 he was in fear of Jacob, and took all gentle means to rouse 
 this fatal brother from his deep sleep ; he dared not be loud, 
 because his apprentice was in the house, and would report 
 everything. But Jacob was not to be roused. He fought out 
 with his fist at the unknown cause of disturbance, turned over, 
 and snored again. He must be left to wake as he would. 
 David, with a cold perspiration on his brow, confessed to him- 
 self that Jacob could not be got away that day. 
 
 Mr. Palfrey came over to Grimworth before noon, with a 
 natural curiosity to see how his future son-in-law got on with 
 the stranger to whom he was so benevolently inclined. He 
 found a crowd round the shop. All Grimworth by this time 
 had heard how Freely had been fastened on by an idiot, who 
 called him " Brother Zavy ; " and the younger population 
 seemed to find the singular stranger an unwearying source of 
 fascination, while the householders dropped in one by one to 
 inquire into the incident. 
 
 a Why don't you send him to the workhouse ? " said Mr. 
 Prettyman. " You '11 have a row with him and the children 
 presently, and he '11 eat you up. The workhouse is the proper 
 place for him ; let his kin claim him, if he 's got any." 
 
 " Those may be your feelings, Mr. Prettyman," said David* 
 his mind quite enfeebled by the torture of his position. 
 
 " What ! is he your brother, then ? " said Mr. Prettyman, 
 looking at his neighbor Freely rather sharply. 
 
 " All men are our brothers, and idiots particular so," said 
 Mr. Freely, who, like many other travelled men, was not 
 master of the English language. 
 
 "Come, come, if he's your brother, tell the truth, man," 
 said Mr. Prettyman, with growing suspicion. " Don't be 
 ashamed of your own flesh and blood." 
 
 Mr. Palfrey was present, and also had his eye on Freely. 
 It is difficult for a man to believe in the advantage of a truth 
 which will disclose him to have been a liar. In this critical 
 moment, David shrank from this immediate disgrace in the 
 eyes of his future father-in-law. 
 
 " Mr. Prettyman," he said, " I take your observations as an
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 515 
 
 insult. I Ve no reason to be otherwise than proud of my own 
 flesh and blood. If this poor man was my brother more than 
 all men are, I should say so." 
 
 A tall figure darkened the door, and David, lifting his eyes 
 in that direction, saw his eldest brother, Jonathan, on the 
 door-sill. 
 
 " I '11 stay wi' Zavy," shouted Jacob, as he, too, caught sight 
 of his eldest brother ; and, running behind the counter, he 
 clutched David hard. 
 
 " What, he is here ? " said Jonathan Faux, coming forward. 
 " My mother would have no nay, as he 'd been away so long, 
 but I must see after him. And it struck me he was very like 
 come after you, because we 'd been talking of you o' late, and 
 where you lived." 
 
 David saw there was no escape ; he smiled a ghastly smile. 
 
 " What ! is this a relation of yours, sir ? " said Mr. Palfrey 
 to Jonathan. 
 
 "Ay, it's my inniceut of a brother, sure enough," said 
 honest Jonathan. " A fine trouble and cost he is to us, in 
 th' eating and other things, but we must bear what 's laid 
 on us." 
 
 " And your name 's Freely, is it ? " said Mr. Prettyman. 
 
 " Nay, nay, my name 's Faux, I know nothing o' Freelys," 
 said Jonathan, curtly. " Come," he added, turning to David, 
 " I must take some news to mother about Jacob. Shall I take 
 him with me, or will you undertake to send him back ? " 
 
 "Take him, if you can make him loose his hold of me," 
 said David, feebly. 
 
 "Is this gentleman here in the confectionery line your 
 brother, then, sir ? " said Mr. Prettyman, feeling that it was 
 an occasion on which formal language must be used. 
 
 " I don't want to own him," said Jonathan, unable to resist 
 a movement of indignation that had never been allowed to 
 satisfy itself. " He run away from home with good reasons 
 in his pocket years ago : he did n't want to be owned again, I 
 reckon." 
 
 Mr. Palfrey left the shop ; he felt his own pride too severely 
 wounded by the sense that he had let himself be fooled, to
 
 516 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 feel curiosity for further details. The most pressing business 
 was to go home and tell his daughter that Freely was a 
 poor sneak, probably a rascal, and that her engagement was 
 broken off. 
 
 Mr. Prettyman stayed, with some internal self-gratulation 
 that he had never given in to Freely, and that Mr. Chalouer 
 would see now what sort of fellow it was that he had put over 
 the heads of older parishioners. He considered it due from 
 him (Mr. Prettyman) that, for the interests of the parish, he 
 should know all that was to be known about this " interloper." 
 Grimworth would have people coming from Botany Bay to 
 settle in it, if things went on in this way. 
 
 It soon appeared that Jacob could not be made to quit his 
 dear brother David except by force. He understood, with a 
 clearness equal to that of the most intelligent mind, that 
 Jonathan would take him back to skimmed milk, apple- 
 dumpling, broad-beans, and pork. And he had found a para- 
 dise in his brother's shop. It was a difficult matter to use 
 force with Jacob, for he wore heavy nailed boots ; and if his 
 pitchfork had been mastered, he would have resorted without 
 hesitation to kicks. Nothing short of using guile to bind him 
 hand and foot would have made all parties safe. 
 
 "Let him stay," said David, with desperate resignation, 
 frightened above all things at the idea of further disturbances 
 in his shop, which would make his exposure all the more con- 
 spicuous. " You go away again, and to-morrow I can, perhaps, 
 get him to go to Gilsbrook with me. He '11 follow me fast 
 enough, I dare say," he added, with a half-groan. 
 
 " Very well," said Jonathan, gruffly. " I don't see why you 
 should n't have some trouble and expense with him as well as 
 the rest of us. But mind you bring him back safe and soon, 
 else mother '11 never rest." 
 
 On this arrangement being concluded, Mr. Prettyman begged 
 Mr. Jonathan Faux to go and take a snack with him, an invi- 
 tation which was quite acceptable ; and as honest Jonathan 
 had nothing to be ashamed of, it is probable that he was very 
 frank in his communications to the civil draper, who, pursuing 
 the benefit of the parish, hastened to ake all the infonna-
 
 BROTHER JACOB. 517 
 
 tion he could gather about Freely common parochial property. 
 You may imagine that the meeting of the Club at the Wool- 
 pack that evening was unusually lively. Every member was 
 anxious to prove that he had never liked Freely, as he called 
 himself. Faux was his name, was it ? Fox would have been 
 more suitable. The majority expressed a desire to see him 
 hooted out of the town. 
 
 Mr. Freely did not venture over his door-sill that day, for 
 he knew Jacob would keep at his side, and there was every 
 probability that they would have a train of juvenile followers. 
 He sent to engage the Woolpack gig for an early hour the 
 next morning ; but this order was not kept religiously a secret 
 by the landlord. Mr. Freely was informed that he could not 
 have the gig till seven; and the Grim worth people were early 
 risers. Perhaps they were more alert than usual on this par- 
 ticular morning ; for when Jacob, with a bag of sweets in his 
 hand, was induced to mount the gig with his brother David, 
 the inhabitants of the market-place were looking out of their 
 doors and windows, and at the turning of the street there was 
 even a muster of apprentices and schoolboys, who shouted as 
 they passed in what Jacob took to be a very merry and friendly 
 way, nodding and grinning in return. " Huzzay, David Faux ! 
 how 's your uncle ? " was their morning's greeting. Like other 
 pointed things, it was not altogether impromptu. 
 
 Even this public derision was not so crushing to David as 
 the horrible thought that though he might succeed now in 
 getting Jacob home again there would never be any security 
 against his coming back, like a wasp to the honey-pot. As 
 long as David lived at Grimworth, Jacob's return would be 
 hanging over him. But could he go on living at Grimworth 
 an object of ridicule, discarded by the Palfreys, after 
 having revelled in the consciousness that he was an envied 
 and prosperous confectioner ? David liked to be envied ; he 
 minded less about being loved. 
 
 His doubts on this point were soon settled. The mind of 
 Grimworth became obstinately set against him and his viands, 
 and the new school being finished, the eating-room was closed. 
 If there had been no other reason, sympathy with the Palfreys,
 
 618 BROTHER JACOB. 
 
 that respectable family who had lived in the parish time out of 
 mind, would have determined all well-to-do people to decline 
 Fr^ely's goods. Besides, he had absconded with his mother's 
 guineas : who knew what else he had done, in Jamaica or else- 
 where, before he came to Grimworth, worming himself into 
 families under false pretences ? Females shuddered. Dread- 
 ful suspicions gathered round him : his green eyes, his bow- 
 legs, had a criminal aspect. The rector disliked the sight of 
 a man who had imposed upon him; and all boys who could 
 not afford to purchase, hooted " David Faux " as they passed 
 his shop. Certainly no man now would pay anything for the 
 " good-will " of Mr. Freely's business, and he would be obliged 
 to quit it without a peculium so desirable towards defraying 
 the expense of moving. 
 
 In a few months the shop in the market-place was again to 
 let, and Mr. David Faux, alias Mr. Edward Freely, had gone 
 nobody at Grimworth knew whither. In this way the de- 
 moralization of Grimworth women was checked. Young Mrs. 
 Steene renewed her efforts to make light mince-pies, and hav- 
 ing at last made a batch so excellent that Mr. Steene looked 
 at her with complacency as he ate them, and said they were 
 the best he had ever eaten in his life, she thought less of bul- 
 buls and renegades ever after. The secrets of the finer cookery 
 were revived in the breasts of matronly housewives, and 
 daughters were again anxious to be initiated in them. 
 
 You will further, I hope, be glad to hear, that some pur- 
 chases of drapery made by pretty Penny, in preparation for 
 her marriage with Mr. Freely, came in quite as well for her 
 wedding with young Towers as if they had been made ex 
 pressly for the latter occasion. For Penny's complexion had 
 not altered, and blue always became it best. 
 
 Here ends the story of Mr. David Faux, confectioner, and 
 his brother Jacob. And we see in it, I think, an admirable 
 instance of the unexpected forms in which the great Nemesis 
 hides herself.

 
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