Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885

“As soon as it was light I went home. My mother was up, and packing my wallet with bread and olives. She had put a new cover on my mattress, which I was to take with me. The poor old dear could hardly speak, so agitated was she at my departure; my brothers and father looked on with solemn respect; and I – why, I sat staring out of the window to see Kallirhoe returning from the well with her amphora on her head. As soon as I saw her coming, I rushed out to bid her good-bye. We shook hands. I had not done this for twelve months now, and the effect was to raise my courage to the highest pitch, and banish all my nocturnal fears.

“Mother spilt a jug of water on the threshold, as an earnest of success and a happy return. My father and my brothers came down to the store to help me put the box on to the mule’s back, and greatly they murmured at the weight thereof. ‘There’s gold there,’ muttered my father beneath his breath. ‘Kola will be a prince some day,’ growled my eldest brother jealously, and I promised to make him Eparch of Santorin, or Demarch of Sikinos if he liked that better.

“The bustle of the journey hardly gave me a moment for thought. I was very ill crossing over in the caique to Ios, during which time my cowardice came over me again, and I wondered if Kallirhoe was worth all the trouble I was taking; but I was lost in astonishment at the steamer – so astonished that I had no time to be sick, so I was able to eat some olives that evening, and as I lay on my mattress on the steamer’s deck as we hurried on towards the Piræus, I pondered over what I should do on reaching land.

“You know what the Piræus is like, Effendi?” continued Nikola, after a final pause and a final glass of raki, “what a city it is, what bustle and rushing to and fro!”

I had not the heart to tell him that in England many a fishing village is larger, and the scene of greater excitement.

“They all laughed at me for my heavy box, my island accent, my island dress, and if it had not been for a kind pallikari I had met on the steamer, I think I should have gone mad. The officers of the custom house were walking about on the quay, peering suspiciously into the luggage of the newly arrived, and naturally my heavy box excited their suspicions. I was prepared for some difficulty of this kind, and the agony of my interview quite dispelled my confusion.

“‘What have you there?’

“‘Δείγματα (specimens),’ I replied.

“‘Specimens of what?’

“‘Specimens of minerals for the effendi at Laurium.’

“‘Open the box!’ And, in an agony of fright, I saw them tear off the lid of my treasure and dive their hands into its contents.

“‘Stones!’ said one official.

“‘Worthless stones!’ sneered another, ‘let the fool go; and with scant ceremony they threw the stones back into the box, and shoved me and my box away with a curse.

“I was now free to go wheresoever I wished, and with the aid of my friend I found a room into which I put my box, and as I turned the key, and sallied forth on my uncertain errand, I prayed to the Panagía Odegetria to guide my footsteps aright.

“The next few days were a period of intense anxiety for me. In subdued whispers I communicated to the consuls of each nation the existence of my treasure. One had the impudence to offer me only 200 drachmas for it, another 300, another 400, and another 500; then each came again, advancing 100 drachmas on their former bids, and so my spirits rose, until at last a grand effendi came down from Athens, and without hesitation offered me 1,000 drachmas. ‘Give me fifty more for the trouble of bringing it and you shall have it,’ said I, breathless with excitement, and in five minutes the long-coveted money was in my hands.

“My old father was very wroth when I returned to Sikinos, and when he learnt that I had done nothing with my specimens; the brightness had gone out of his eyes, he was more opprobrious than ever, but I cared nothing for what he said. My mother had her cheesecakes on Easter Sunday, and on that very day Kallirhoe and I were crowned.”

Thus ended Nikola’s romance. If ever I go to St. Petersburg, I shall look carefully for Nikola’s statue in the Hermitage collection, which, I understand, was its destination. —Gentleman’s Magazine.

THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT 25

BY JOHN MORLEY

The illustrious woman who is the subject of these volumes makes a remark to her publisher which is at least as relevant now as it was then. Can nothing be done, she asks, by dispassionate criticism towards the reform of our national habits in the matter of literary biography? “Is it anything short of odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk should be raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public be printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to read his books?” Autobiography, she says, at least saves a man or a woman that the world is curious about, from the publication of a string of mistakes called Memoirs. Even to autobiography, however, she confesses her deep repugnance unless it can be written so as to involve neither selfglorification nor impeachment of others – a condition, by the way, with which hardly any, save Mill’s, can be said to comply. “I like,” she proceeds, “that He being dead yet speaketh should have quite another meaning than that” (iii. 226, 297, 307). She shows the same fastidious apprehension still more clearly in another way. “I have destroyed almost all my friends’ letters to me,” she says, “because they were only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into the hands of persons who knew little of the writers, if I allowed them to remain till after my death. In proportion as I love every form of piety – which is venerating love – I hate hard curiosity; and, unhappily, my experience has impressed me with the sense that hard curiosity is the more common temper of mind” (ii. 286). There is probably little difference among us in respect of such experience as that.

Much biography, perhaps we might say most, is hardly above the level of that “personal talk,” to which Wordsworth sagely preferred long barren silence, the flapping of the flame of his cottage fire, and the undersong of the kettle on the hob. It would not, then, have much surprised us if George Eliot had insisted that her works should remain the only commemoration of her life. There be some who think that those who have enriched the world with great thoughts and fine creations, might best be content to rest unmarked “where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,” leaving as little work to the literary executor, except of the purely crematory sort, as did Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, and some others whose names the world will not willingly let die. But this is a stoic’s doctrine; the objector may easily retort that if it had been sternly acted on, we should have known very little about Dr. Johnson, and nothing about Socrates.

This is but an ungracious prelude to some remarks upon a book, which must be pronounced a striking success. There will be very little dispute as to the fact that the editor of these memorials of George Eliot has done his work with excellent taste, judgment, and sense. He found no autobiography nor fragment of one, but he has skilfully shaped a kind of autobiography by a plan which, so far as we know, he is justified in calling new, and which leaves her life to write itself in extracts from her letters and journals. With the least possible obtrusion from the biographer, the original pieces are formed into a connected whole “that combines a narrative of day to day life with the play of light and shade which only letters written in serious moods can give.” The idea is a good one, and Mr. Cross deserves great credit for it. We may hope that its success will encourage imitators. Certainly there are drawbacks. We miss the animation of mixed narrative. There is, too, a touch of monotony in listening for so long to the voice of a single speaker addressing others who are silent behind a screen. But Mr. Cross could not we think, have devised a better way of dealing with his material: it is simple, modest, and effective.

George Eliot, after all, led the life of a studious recluse, with none of the bustle, variety, motion, and large communication with the outer world, that justified Lockhart and Moore in making a long story of the lives of Scott and Byron. Even here, among men of letters, who were also men of action and of great sociability, are not all biographies too long? Let any sensible reader turn to the shelf where his Lives repose; we shall be surprised if he does not find that nearly every one of them, taking the present century alone, and including such splendid and attractive subjects as Goethe, Hume, Romilly, Mackintosh, Horner, Chalmers, Arnold, Southey, Cowper, would not have been all the better for judicious curtailment. Lockhart, who wrote the longest, wrote also the shortest, the Life of Burns; and the shortest is the best, in spite of defects which would only have been worse if the book had been bigger. It is to be feared that, conscientious and honorable as his self-denial has been, even Mr. Cross has not wholly resisted the natural and besetting error of the biographer. Most people will think that the hundred pages of the Italian tour (vol. ii.), and some other not very remarkable impressions of travel, might as well or better have been left out.

As a mere letter-writer, George Eliot will not rank among the famous masters of what is usually considered especially a woman’s art. She was too busy in serious work to have leisure for that most delightful way of wasting time. Besides that, she had by nature none of that fluency, rapidity, abandonment, pleasant volubility, which make letters amusing, captivating, or piquant. What Mr. Cross says of her as the mistress of a salon, is true of her for the most part as a correspondent: – “Playing around many disconnected subjects, in talk, neither interested nor amused her much. She took things too seriously, and seldom found the effort of entertaining compensated by the gain” (iii. 335). There is the outpouring of ardent feeling for her friends, sobering down, as life goes on, into a crooning kindliness, affectionate and honest, but often tinged with considerable self-consciousness. It was said of some one that his epigrams did honor to his heart; in the reverse direction we occasionally feel that George Eliot’s effusive playfulness does honor to her head. It lacks simplicity and verve. Even in an invitation to dinner, the words imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides, and sense of responsibility is fatal to the charm of familiar correspondence.

As was inevitable in one whose mind was so habitually turned to the deeper elements of life, she lets fall the pearls of wise speech even in short notes. Here are one or two: —

“My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy.”

“If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the many attitudes of ‘knowingness,’ it is that air of lofty superiority to the vulgar. She will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman.”

“It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.”

The following is one of the best examples, one of the few examples, of her best manner: —

“I have been made rather unhappy by my husband’s impulsive proposal about Christmas. We are dull old persons, and your two sweet young ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead to string on their memory, whereas to spend the time with us would be to string on a dark shrivelled berry. They ought to have a group of young creatures to be joyful with. Our own children always spend their Christmas with Gertrude’s family; and we have usually taken our sober merry-making with friends out of town. Illness among these will break our custom this year; and thus mein Mann, feeling that our Christmas was free, considered how very much he liked being with you, omitting the other side of the question – namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully ever since. Even my husband’s affectionate hopefulness cannot withstand my melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something of yourselves only on simple black-letter days, when the Herald Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning.”

This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity of human nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at the recollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott’s letters, the high spirits of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattling dare-devilry of Byron. Epistolary stilts among men of letters went out of fashion with Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every period finished with a conceit, the letter was not worth the postage. Poor spirits cannot be the explanation of the stiffness in George Eliot’s case, for no letters in the English language are so full of playfulness and charm as those of Cowper, and he was habitually sunk in gulfs deeper and blacker than George Eliot’s own. It was sometimes observed of her, that in her conversation, elle s’écoutait quand elle parlait– she seemed to be listening to her own voice while she spoke. It must be allowed that we are not always free from an impression of self-listening, even in the most caressing of the letters before us.

This is not much better, however, than trifling. I dare say that if a lively Frenchman could have watched the inspired Pythia on the sublime tripod, he would have cried, Elle s’écoute quand elle parle. When everything of that kind has been said, we have the profound satisfaction, which is not quite a matter of course in the history of literature, of finding, after all that the woman and the writer were one. The life does not belie the books, nor private conduct stultify public profession. We close the third volume of the biography, as we have so often closed the third volume of her novels, feeling to the very core that in spite of a style that the French call alambiqué, in spite of tiresome double and treble distillations of phraseology, in spite of fatiguing moralities, gravities, and ponderosities, we have still been in communion with a high and commanding intellect, and a great nature. We are vexed by pedantries that recall the précieuses of the Hôtel Rambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the most heroic women in history. We crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes action natural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of a life marked by indefatigable labor after generous purposes, by an unsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and devout fellowship with lofty thoughts.

Those who know Mr. Myers’s essay on George Eliot will not have forgotten its most imposing passage: —

“I remember how at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men. – the words God, Immortality, Duty, – pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl’s in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates.”

To many, the relation, which was the most important event in George Eliot’s life, will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce all talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so, and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain. Men and women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad, have taken this particular law into their own hands before now, and committed themselves to conduct of which “magnanimity owes no account to prudence.” But if they had sense and knew what they were about, they have braced themselves to endure the disapproval of a majority fortunately more prudential than themselves. The world is busy, and its instruments are clumsy. It cannot know all the facts; it has neither time nor material for unravelling all the complexities of motive, or for distinguishing mere libertinage from grave and deliberate moral misjudgment; it is protecting itself as much as it is condemning the offenders. On all this, then, we need have neither sophistry nor cant. But those who seek something deeper than a verdict for the honest working purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner, may feel, as has been observed by a contemporary writer, that men and women are more fairly judged, if judge them we must, by the way in which they bear the burden of an error, than by the decision that laid the burden on their lives. Some idea of this kind was in her own mind when she wrote to her most intimate friend in 1857, “If I live five years longer, the positive result of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will outweigh the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing anything to shock others” (i. 461). This urgent desire to balance the moral account may have had something to do with that laborious sense of responsibility which weighed so heavily on her soul, and had so equivocal an effect upon her art. Whatever else is to be said of this particular union, nobody can deny that the picture on which it left a mark was an exhibition of extraordinary self-denial, energy, and persistency in the cultivation and the use of great gifts and powers for what their possessor believed to be the highest objects for society and mankind.

A more perfect companionship, one on a higher intellectual level, or of more sustained mental activity, is nowhere recorded. Lewes’s mercurial temperament contributed as much as the powerful mind of his consort to prevent their seclusion from degenerating into an owlish stagnation. To the very last (1878) he retained his extraordinary buoyancy. “Nothing but death could quench that bright flame. Even on his worst days he had always a good story to tell; and I remember on one occasion in the drawing-room at Witley, between two bouts of pain, he sang through with great brio, though without much voice, the greater portion of the tenor part in the Barber of Seville, George Eliot playing his accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun” (iii. 334). All this gaiety, his inexhaustible vivacity, the facility of his transitions from brilliant levity to a keen seriousness, the readiness of his mental response, and the wide range of intellectual accomplishments that were much more than superficial, made him a source of incessant and varied stimulation. Even those, and there were some, who thought that his gaiety bordered on flippancy, that his genial self-content often came near to shockingly bad taste, and that his reminiscences of poor Mr. Fitzball and the green-room and all the rest of the Bohemia in which he had once dwelt, too racy for his company, still found it hard to resist the alert intelligence with which he rose to every good topic, and the extraordinary heartiness and spontaneity with which the wholesome spring of human laughter was touched in him.

Lewes had plenty of egotism, not to give it a more unamiable name, but it never mastered his intellectual sincerity. George Eliot describes him as one of the few human beings she has known who will, in the heat of an argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong, instead of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity. “The intense happiness of our union,” she wrote to a friend, “is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions. In this respect I know no man so great as he – that difference of opinion rouses no egotistic irritation in him, and that he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger, the moment his intellect recognises it” (ii. 279). This will sound very easy to the dispassionate reader, because it is so obviously just and proper, but if the dispassionate reader ever tries, he may find the virtue not so easy as it looks. Finally, and above all, we can never forget in Lewes’s case how much true elevation and stability of character was implied in the unceasing reverence, gratitude, and devotion with which for five-and-twenty years he treated her to whom he owed all his happiness, and who most truly, in his own words (ii. 76), had made his life a new birth.

The reader will be mistaken if he should infer from such passages as abound in her letters that George Eliot had any particular weakness for domestic or any other kind of idolatry. George Sand, in Lucrezia Floriani where she drew so unkind a picture of Chopin, has described her own life and character as marked by “a great facility for illusions, a blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart that was inexhaustible; consequently great precipitancy, many mistakes, much weakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous force applied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime in her thought.” George Eliot had none of this facility. Nor was general benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a great deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled an active critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at all consisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found him out. Like Cardinal Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the Apologia she expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387), she unites to the gift of unction and brotherly love, a capacity for giving an extremely shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love. Her passion for Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no reason why it should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for instance (ii. 271); from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant man; or castigating Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or otherwise from showing that great expansiveness of the affections went with a remarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head.

The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionship with a man of lively talents were not without some compensating drawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved by variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation in the external activities of the world, tended to bring about a loaded, over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only not wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness and strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in his life has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the novelist’s highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George Eliot had no greater favorite than Scott, and when a series of little books upon English men of letters was planned, she said that she thought that writer among us the happiest to whom it should fall to deal with Scott. But Scott lived full in the life of his fellow-men. Even of Wordsworth, her other favorite, though he was not a creative artist, we may say that he daily saturated himself in those natural elements and effects, which were the material, the suggestion, and the sustaining inspiration of his consoling and fortifying poetry. George Eliot did not live in the midst of her material, but aloof from it and outside of it. Heaven forbid that this should seem to be said by way of censure. Both her health and other considerations made all approach to busy sociability in any of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible. But in considering the relation of her manner of life to her work, her creations, her meditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some writers of her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, and mannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first on the memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues, instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It is direct calls and personal claims from without that make fiction alive. Jane Austen bore her part in the little world of the parlor that she described. The writer of Sylvia’s Lovers, whose work George Eliot appreciated with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was the mother of children, and was surrounded by the wholesome actualities of the family. The authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights passed their days in one long succession of wild, stormy, squalid, anxious, and miserable scenes – almost as romantic, as poetic, and as tragic, to use George Eliot’s words, as their own stories. George Sand eagerly shared, even to the pitch of passionate tumult and disorder, in the emotions, the aspirations, the ardor, the great conflicts and controversies of her time. In every one of these, their daily closeness to the real life of the world has given a vitality to their work which we hardly expect that even the next generation will find in more than one or two of the romances of George Eliot. It may even come to pass that their position will be to hers as that of Fielding is to Richardson in our own day.