phase of the author's crescent fame, embolden one of the great British quarterlies in a review perhaps it was of "Adam Bede," to apply that almost awful epithet of supreme literary ascription, "Shakespearean." The felicity of expression, too, always corresponded. You read, and you smile, as you read, with pure pleasure of intellectual recognition, coming again and again upon a trait of human character or conduct so exquisitely fitted with its happy phrase that it is like what you can imagine it might be if, by some magical good fortune, you had chanced upon a treasure-trove of a few original types of nature, easily perfect at once, and with no trace of any workmanship whatever upon them. How much character, for instance, is unfolded with a stroke of the pen when of a certain "thin woman with a chronic liver-complaint," at a tea-party, it is quietly said: "She has brought her knitting-no frivolous fancy knitting, but a substantial woolen stocking; the click-click of her knitting needles is the running accompaniment to all her conversation, and in her utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend's selfsatisfaction, she was never known to spoil a stocking." Again: "Mrs. Patten does not admire this excessive click-clicking activity. Quiescence in an easy-chair under the sense of compound interest perpetually accumulating has long seemed an ample function to her and she does her malevolence gently." She cherishes a quiet blood-relation's hatred for her niece, Janet Gibbs, who, she knows, expects a large legacy, and whom she is determined to disappoint. Her money shall go in a lump to a distant relation of her husband's, and Janet shall be saved the trouble of pretending to cry by finding that she is left with a miserable pittance." A manservant does double duty as groom and as table-waiter at the house of a certain gentleman whose sister, living with him, had inherited title without estate from a deceased Polish count, her husband, but nevertheless aspired to some style in her house-keeping: "John" is represented as "removing the tea things from the drawing-room and brushing the crumbs from the table-cloth with an accompanying hiss, such as he was wont to encourage himself with in rubbing down Mr. Bridmain's horse." * * * * * The members of a clerical party are described: "At Mr. Ely's right hand you see a very small man with a sallow and somewhat puffy face whose hair is brushed straight up, evidently with the intention of giving him a height somewhat less disproportionate to his sense of his own importance than the measure of five feet three accorded to him by an oversight of nature." ture." The Rev. Amos himself was " very full of plans which were something like his moves in chess-admirably well calculated supposing the state of the case were otherwise." One feels, of course, how inadequate an impression of the fertile observation, the pregnant insight, with which these pages abound, any such excerpts torn from their relief in the context must necessarily make. A volume was recently published in England (it has since been re-published, with additions additions for "Middlemarch," in this country) entitled "Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot." It is a remarkable monument to the manifold fecundity, and to the invulnerable vitality no less, of her genius. But shreds from the woof ill represent a finished and continuous fabric of the loom. It is the exquisite fitness of the sentiment to the situation or to the character,—say rather to the character in the situation,that gives to George Eliot's exuberant, though never too exuberant, wit and wisdom their consummate value and effect. She loves to be sententious. She is fonder of reflection than she is of narration. Her plot is for the sake of her dialogue, her dialogue is for the sake of her character, and her character is for the sake of the wit and the wisdom that her many-sided genius is consciously capable and therefore desirous of lavishing on the world. This statement needs some qualification, for her dialogue now and again runs on, self-moved by its delight in its own conscious felicity. But it is approximately true. Her natural bent is about equally dramatic and ethical. She experiences a great delight in mere life-like exhibition of character. In so far she is purely dramatic. But she experiences fully as great a delight in subsequent interpretative comment and reflection on the character that she exhibits. In this she goes beyond what is dramatic and becomes ethical or else psychological. The ethical seems, perhaps, to engage her most deeply. This was more certainly and more constantly true in her earlier than it has been in her later work. Not that she has ceased to betray an ethical interest in what she writes. This is far enough from being the case. But her ethical interest has grown somehow less practical and more theoretic. The pure artist used to have to compete with the moralist. Lately the artist's competition has been rather with the doctri-naire, or with the speculative psychologist. George Eliot from the first has been consistently and earnestly moral, or religious even, as those who claim her for a chief ornament of their philosophical school would probably say. It was not, therefore, as not earnestly moral, but only as not properly and purposely Christian, in the ordinary orthodox sense of that word, that "Adam Bede," a little way back, was meant to be characterized. There is an eager and intent moral earnestness in the book. But, notwithstanding certain ambiguous superficial appearances, the moral earnestness is not clearly and narrowly Christian. The quality of the moral earnestness that George Eliot exhibits, or, more strictly, the quality of the moral influence which she is likely to exert, is reserved for examination in the concluding portion of this paper. termed the motive of the story, and incident is always fain to wait patiently on dialogue, while dialogue itself, the evident favorite diversion of George Eliot's genius, gives way full cheerfully to that which is her chief serious concern, the work of austere and subtle psychological analysis. We thus recur to the element in George Eliot's novels which has always, upon the whole, constituted the leading motive of her work. Psychological analysis is her strength and her joy. She creates character, she devises incident and situation, chiefly that she may have her occasion of indulging that almost superhuman faculty which is hers, of laying bare to its ultimate microscopic secret the anatomy of the living human consciousness in play. This motive in her work is what gives to it its unity as a progressive development -it is the one germ which has steadily unfolded and grown from her first published writing to her last. Her novels are preeminently psychological novels. The psychological element contributes the greatest proportion of the whole bulk of her volumes. There is a good deal of landscape, and there are frequent bits of brilliant meteor with delicious felicity of descriptive words, so that as mere verbal effects they are a perpetual delight. The features of a landscape, however, are seldom, if ever, photographed, as with a single sudden stroke of the sun, on the reader's imagination. A radiant haze of words is hung between your eyes and the scene. A little idealism of the right sort seems so much better here than any amount of the most conscientious realism. It is doubtful, perhaps, if George Eliot possesses just the necessary kind of imagination for this poet's purpose. But it might easily surprise a reader of George Eliot that had never before directed his attention to the point, to observe how large a proportion of the space occupied with the liveliest conversation, or with the most exciting incident, is usurped by the author for her own interspersed interpretation and comment. The unique characteristic interest too of the dialogue and the narrative is to a wonderful extent, for even the cursory reader, lodged in these interruptions from the author in her delightful character of well-informed and astute individual chorus. The Scenes of Clerical Life" contain the germs, or at least the promise, of a considerable part of all that is to beology. These parts, by the way, are done found in her maturer productions. Like these, though even in a greater degree, they depend for their interest on qualities in them separable, and in fact separate, from the narrative which they incidentally contain. The narrative is both meager and commonplace to a degree. The constructive, or rather the inventive, faculty might seem wanting to the author. Quite as probably, however, she set small value in comparison on the plot of her stories, feeling rather like a painter who should resolve to achieve his results, not by any masterly skill of composition, but by the endlessly minute Dutch life-likeness of his picture, and then by the fine interpretative light of sentiment that he would contrive to throw over the whole. George Eliot through all her novels has remained weakest in point of plot, although she has evidently paid far more attention of late to the construction of her stories. Whether this relative weakness in her performance is to be referred to inherent defect of invention in her genius, or rather to the predominating influence of the pure dramatic and the pure didactic faculty in it taken together, is, perhaps, open to question. The fact certainly is, that plot with her is everywhere subordinate to what may be VOL. VIII.-44 But George Eliot's novels could not be popular, as they are, if, at the same time that they are thus prevailingly psycholog cal, they were not also something else than psychological. She is often subtle and refined, and removed from obvious apprehension (in her sense-she is always perfectly plain in her expression) to a degree scarcely surpassed in the case of any professed psychologist or metaphysician in the world. But she has besides a broad zone of contact with the average human being that makes her, notwithstanding, as popular too as she is profound. speare's street conversations, for instance, of citizens, Nos. 1, 2, and 3, on occasion of a popular commotion, are not more faithful to the vulgar life of the populace than are such remarks as these which follow, specimen fragments of surly humor, reported from individuals of the Florentine mob during the famine and plague in "Romola." Romola, in her stately womanhood, is ministering to Baldassarre, found in a dying condition on the street. Some starving fellows watch her with envy tempered with awe : "Do you keep your bread for those that can't swallow, Madonna?' said a roughlooking fellow in a red night-cap, who had elbowed his way into the inmost circle of spectators a circle that was pressing rather closely on Romola. "If anybody isn't hungry,' said another, 'I say let him alone. He's better off than people who've got craving stomachs, and no breakfast.' "Yes, indeed; if a man's a mind to die, it's a time to encourage him, instead of making him come back to life against his will. Dead men want no trencher.' 666 'Hunger is hard to bear, I know, and you have the power to take this bread if you will. It was saved for sick women and children. You are strong men; but if you do not choose to suffer because you are strong, you have the power to take everything from the weak. You can take the bread from the basket; but I shall watch by this old man; I shall resist your taking the bread from him.' "For a few moments there was perfect silence, while Romola looked at the faces * before her, and held out the basket of bread. * The man in the night-cap looked rather silly, and backed, thrusting his elbow into his neighbor's ribs with an air of moral rebuke." ("Romola," pp. 334-5, Harper's Ed.) It was impossible not to quote, in sequel to the remarks of the men in the crowd, so penetratively humorous a trait of observation in character as is contained in the clause distinguished above by italics. The very flesh and blood of universal human nature is in that exquisite stroke. It But No doubt at bottom it is the same faculty of mind that makes one writer psychological in his method, and another writer dramatic. It is in either case a faculty for intuition of human nature-intuition, not observation alone, for the knowledge given by the faculty in question is an endowment and not an acquirement. takes, to be sure, George Eliot's genius to observe as George Eliot observes. then observation, even like hers, must often fail from lack of opportunity. For these times of failure there is intuition, if one only possesses it, not less infallible than observation itself. Such intuition George Eliot possesses. Perhaps if we sought to be entirely scientific, we should find this faculty of intuition to be identical in essence with that power of the mind which mental philosophers have distinguished as the faculty of generalization. The dra But, notwithstanding the substantial sameness of the faculty in the two cases, how different a face of the same faculty is the dramatic from the psychological. The dramatic method exhibits human nature in action-the psychological explains the grounds and motives of the action. Evidently the dramatic is limited in its effects by the degree of responsive faculty for observation and appreciation possessed by the reader or the spectator. matist can exhibit to you only so much as you are capable of perceiving. There is nothing in the dramatist's art to make you percipient and intelligent beyond your natural degree. His whole prosperity lies in the eye of his beholder. The psychological method, on the contrary, may disclose to you far more in an action than you would have been able to discover for yourself. The psychological method becomes thus the proper supplement of the dramatic. At the point where the dramatic of necessity fails the psychological may begin. This is the advantage of the novel over at all. There is, of course, no implication here intended that the novel is a higher kind of literature than the drama. The question of precedence between the two is not raised. It is simply maintained that the novel, from its mixed character, as in turn dramatic, narrative, or reflective, at choice, has certain manifest advantages at specific points over the drama. This very mixedness of its character is probably a mark of its technical inferiority. But the novel may assuredly in consequence become more deeply and subtly psychological than the drama. The drama is, of course, equally with the novel, bound to obey the laws of a sound psychology. In this sense of being psychological, there is no difference between the two. In the case of both alike, the action must proceed according to the truth of human nature. But the novel, more than the drama, is free to make its underlying psychology plain by exposition. The drama might, to be sure, conceivably employ the awkward expedient of adopting and adapting from the ancient Greek tragedy its chorus of solemn observers to interpret for us the psychology, in place of the ethics, of the action represented. In this way we might have in the drama unlimited psychological disquisition. But the drama thus modified would no longer be fit for popular representation. It would have to retire from the stage to the closet. In other words, it would, in just so far, have declined from the pure dramatic idea, and have become little distinguishable at this particular point, save in the incident of its formal construction, from the novel. Now George Eliot within her range-and her range, though, unlike Shakespeare's, it may have definite determinable limits, is still very wide,-George Eliot, I say, within her range is every whit as dramatic as Shakespeare. So natural is the dramatic method to her genius that her novels are often conceived in a succession of scenes, instead of in the continuity of narration. But when, ceasing for the moment to be dramatic, she uses the privilege of the novelist to be expressly psychological, her analysis of character and motive becomes so subtle and searching that mere dramatic exhibition seems almost vulgar in com parison. Hamlet's soliloquy is greatly admired for the depth and subtlety of psychological implication which it contains. But there is many and many a passage of clairvoyant vision and revelation in the sphere of human character and motive to be found in George Eliot's works that makes Hamlet's soliloquy superficial and tame. George Eliot's knowledge in the deep things of the human heart, in short, is hardly second to anything elsewhere exhibited in the whole realm of literature. There are marks enough in her writing of varied and watchful observation. But the knowledge of the human heart that George Eliot displays is not an acquired knowledge. It was born with her and in her. It is genius. It is a gift which is Shakespearean in quality-one might, perhaps, as well be frankly true to himself and out with his thought-it is finer than Shakespeare. In quantity it is less, but in quality it is more. Take as an instance of the advantage in point of fine psychological implication that the novel possesses over the drama, the qualifying clause, " with an air of moral rebuke," appended to the statement of fact that the fellow "in the red night-cap" falling back, on Romola's words, into the crowd, made way for himself by thrusting his elbows into his neighbor's ribs. Here the action is nothing compared with the manner of the action. But the manner of the action it is beyond the province of the dramatist to give. The dramatist has here to depend on histrionism to interpret his thought. Another instance is supplied in a powerfully conceived scene that occurs elsewhere in Romola." Tito visits the hut in which his outraged adoptive father, Baldassarre, lies couched in his straw, awaiting the retarded hour of his vengeance. Tito has decided to ease his own mortgaged future by healing the immedicable breach between himself and BaldasHe will ask forgiveness for his unfilial desertion and resume the son's affectionate care of his father. Baldassarre greets his visitor by making the abortive attempt on Tito's life with his dagger, but Tito persists. It is as yet uncertain how Baldassarre will receive the unanticipated overture. "Presently Baldassarre began to move. He threw away the broken dagger, and slowly and gradually, still trembling, began to raise himself from the ground. Tito put out his hand to help him, and so strangely quick are men's souls sarre. that in this moment, when he began to feel his atonement was accepted, he had a darting thought of the irksome efforts it entailed."* ("Romola," p. 279, Harper's Ed.) It would be hard for the dramatic method to enter so shrewdly as this into the almost subconscious movements of the human soul. An aside would not answer, for the thought does not take shape in words even in the thinker's mind. But George Eliot is not simply a dramatist and a psychologist in her novels. She is a profound and various thinker as well. The thought which goes to the production of valuable literary work is of two sorts. There is the thought which has preceded, and there is, besides, the thought which immediately accompanies the conception and execution of the work. The one sort enriches the production through having enriched the producing mind; the other more directly enriches the production itself. The one sort is immanent thought, thought subsisting as condition; the other is active thought, thought working as cause. Or the difference might be likened to the difference between the elements contributed to existing life on the globe by those geologic ages which are finished and extinct, and the elements contributed by that age which is now current and still incomplete. Of both these sorts of thought George Eliot's novels are full. Her later and maturer productions presuppose an amount of arduous thinking on the hard and high problems of human existence that is nothing short of astonishing. It would not be easy to name any other writing in recent literature that, bulk for bulk, registers a greater quantity of good, fresh, deep, clear, sound, sincere, and honest antecedent thought. The "In Memoriam" is preeminently of such a character that work is like the earth's thronged crust for the record of finished elemental processes and secular energies now in repose, that it enfolds. But George Eliot's novels are not inferior here to the "In Memoriam." The writer of these has swept as large a part of the great diapason of possible human intellectual experience as has the writer of that. The novels are inferior to the poem only in the form of expression which they give to the thought. In the *The words "began to" occurring here in each one of three consecutive sentences so short, present a trait of negligence in writing which, however venial, strikes me as decidedly unusual with George Eliot. form of expression they are inferior only as prose must be inferior to poetry-as even the most exquisite prose must still be inferior to poetry when the poetry too, happens to be equally exquisite in its superior kind. George Eliot's prose is as nearly poetic as it ought to be—that is, as nearly poetic as it could be, and remain completely and homogeneously prose. Precisely the differentia of properly poetic expression George Eliot's genius seems not to have at command.* It is a great denial to her from nature. But perfect *I hardly escape the pain of self-reproach in denying the supreme gift of poetry to a writer who produces such lines as, for instance, these from "The Spanish Gipsy:" Nay, never falter: no great deed is done That is very noble verse. Something of a true Miltonic spirit throbs in it. "The steadfast mind, the undivided will to seek the good," might almost be from the mouth of Satan himself, turned moral. The whole strain is kindred in motive with strophe IX of Mr. Lowell's magnificent "Commemoration Ode." That passage and this set in contrast and com parison, furnish a fine study of the diverse methods pursued respectively by writers, on the one hand that are essentially prose writers, and writers on the other hand that are essentially poets. George Eliot, according to her genius, had a perfectly palpable concrete thought to express. She refined it, she sublimated it, she did every thing in short but permanently change it from its proper native state as prose. She found a solid. She purified it seven times, but she left it a solid. Mr. Lowell, on the contrary, with his different sense, found an impalpable, imponderable ether. His labor was to seize it and to hold it. There was no danger of his getting a precipitate for result. The danger was rather that the volatile quality of his object would be too much for him-that he should lose his over expansile thought altogether. The process of the essential prose writer in writing verse is thus in some sort the precise opposite of that of the essential poet. The one seeks to etherealize the other seeks to compress and contain. But certain it is that what does not come to you as poetry, you can never convert into poetry with all your pains. As to the mottoes in verse to the chapters in "Middlemarch" bearing quotation marks which hint no doubt that they were borrowed from George Eliot herself, it may without disparagement be said of them, dense with thought and wisdom as they often are, they still contain many equivalents more of truth than of poetry. Her recently published volume of collected pieces in verse is full of many noble intellectual and moral qualities-of speculation, of reflection, of feeling, of power-but of poetry-? One attributes an autobiographic interest to it in parts. |