The Ethics of George Eliot's Works Part 1

The Ethics of George Eliot's Works.

by John Crombie Brown.

PREFACE.

The greater part of the following Essay was written several years ago. It was too long for any of the periodicals to which the author had been in the habit of occasionally contributing, and no thought was then entertained of publis.h.i.+ng it in a separate form. One day, however, during his last illness, the talk happened to turn on George Eliot's Works, and he mentioned his long-forgotten paper. One of the friends then present--a competent critic and high literary authority--expressed a wish to see it, and his opinion was so favourable that its publication was determined on. The author then proposed to complete his work by taking up 'Middlemarch' and 'Deronda'; and if any trace of failing vigour is discernible in these latter pages, the reader will bear in mind that the greater portion of them was composed when the author was rapidly sinking under a painful disease, and that the concluding paragraphs were dictated to his daughter after the power of writing had failed him, only five days before his death.

PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION.

It is a source of great gratification to the friends of the author that his little volume has already been so well received that the second edition has been out of print for some time. In now publis.h.i.+ng a third, they have been influenced by two considerations,--the continued demand for the book, and the favourable opinion expressed of it by "George Eliot" herself, which, since her lamented death, delicacy no longer forbids them to make public.

In a letter to her friend and publisher, the late Mr John Blackwood, received soon after the appearance of the first edition, she writes, with reference to certain pa.s.sages: "They seemed to me more penetrating and finely felt than almost anything I have read in the way of printed comments on my own writings." Again, in a letter to a friend of the author, she says: "When I read the volume in the summer, I felt as if I had been deprived of something that should have fallen to my share in never having made his personal acquaintance. And it would have been a great benefit,--a great stimulus to me to have known some years earlier that my work was being sanctioned by the sympathy of a mind endowed with so much insight and delicate sensibility. It is difficult for me to speak of what others may regard as an excessive estimate of my own work, but I will venture to mention the keen perception shown in the note on page 29, as something that gave me peculiar satisfaction."

Once more. In an article in the 'Contemporary Review' of last month, on "The Moral Influence of George Eliot," by "One who knew her," the writer says: "It happens that the only criticism which we have heard mentioned as giving her pleasure, was a little posthumous volume published by Messrs Blackwood."

With such testimony in its favour, it is hoped a third edition will not be thought uncalled for.

_March_ 1881.

THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS.

"There is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness."

Such may be regarded as the fundamental lesson which one of the great teachers of our time has been labouring to impress upon the age. The truth, and the practical corollary from it, are not now first enunciated.

Representing, as we believe it to do, the practical aspect of the n.o.blest reality in man--that which most directly represents Him in whose image he is made--it has found doctrinal expression more or less perfect from the earliest times. The older Theosophies and Philosophies--Gymnosophist and Cynic, Chaldaic and Pythagorean, Epicurean and Stoic, Platonist and Eclectic--were all attempts to embody it in teaching, and to carry it out in life. They saw, indeed, but imperfectly, and their expressions of the truth are all one-sided and inadequate. But they did see, in direct antagonism alike to the popular view and to the natural instinct of the animal man, that what is ordinarily called happiness does not represent the highest capability in humanity, or meet its indefinite aspirations; and that in degree as it is consciously made so, life becomes animalised and degraded. The whole scheme of Judaism, as first promulgated in all the stern simplicity of its awful Theism, where the Divine is fundamentally and emphatically represented as the Omnipotent and the Avenger, was an emphatic protest against that self-isolation in which the man folds himself up like a chrysalid in its coc.o.o.n whenever his individual happiness--the so-called saving of his own soul--becomes the aim and aspiration of his life. In one sense the Jew of Moses had no individual as apart from a national existence. The secret sin of Achan, the vaunting pride of David, call forth less individual than national calamity.

At last in the fulness of time there came forth One--whence and how we do not stop to inquire--who gathered up into Himself all these tangled, broken, often divergent threads; who gave to this truth, so far as one very brief human life could give--at once its perfect and exhaustive doctrinal expression, and its essentially perfect and exhaustive practical exemplification, by life and by death. Endless controversies have stormed and are still storming around that name which He so significantly and emphatically appropriated--the "Son of Man." But from amid all the controversy that veils it, one fact, clear, sharp, and unchallenged, stands out as the very life and seal of His human greatness--"He pleased not Himself." By every act He did, every word He spoke, and every pain He bore, He put away from Him happiness as the aim and end of man. He reduced it to its true position of a possible accessory and issue of man's highest fulfilment of life--an issue, the contemplation of which might be of some avail as the being first awoke to its n.o.bler capabilities, but which, the more the life went on towards realisation, pa.s.sed the more away from conscious regard.

Thenceforth the Cross, as the typical representation of this truth, became a recognised power on the earth. Thenceforth every great teacher of humanity within the pale of nominal Christendom, whatever his apparent tenets or formal creed, has been, in degree as he was great and true, explicitly or implicitly the expounder of this truth; every great and worthy life, in degree as it a.s.similated to that ideal life, has been the practical embodiment of it. "Endure hardness," said one of its greatest apostles and martyrs, "as good soldiers of Christ." And to the endurance of hardness; to the recognition of something in humanity to which what we ordinarily call life and all its joys are of no account; to the abnegation of mere happiness as aim or end,--to this the world of Christendom thenceforth became pledged, if it would not deny its Head and trample on His cross.

In no age has the truth been a popular one: when it becomes so, the triumph of the Cross--and in it the practical redemption of humanity--will be near at hand. Yet in no age--not the darkest and most corrupt Christendom has yet seen--have G.o.d and His Christ been without their witnesses to the higher truth,--witnesses, if not by speech and doctrine, yet by life and death. Even monasticism, harshly as we may now judge it, arose, in part at least, through the desire to "endure hardness;" only it turned aside from the hardness appointed in the world without, to choose, and ere long to make, a hardness of its own; and then, self-seeking, and therefore anti-Christian, it fell. Amid all its actual corruption the Church stands forth a living witness, by its ritual and its sacraments, to this fundamental truth of the Cross; and ever and anon from its deepest degradation there emerges clear and sharp some figure bending under this n.o.blest burden of our doom--some Savonarola or St Francis charged with the one thought of truth and right, of the highest truth and right, to be followed, if need were, through the darkness of death and of h.e.l.l.

Perhaps few ages have needed more than our own to have this fundamental principle of Christian ethics--this doctrine of the Cross--sharply and strongly proclaimed to it. Our vast advances in physical science tend, in the first instance at least, to withdraw regard from the higher requirements of life. Even the progress of commerce and navigation, at once multiplying the means and extending the sphere of physical and aesthetic enjoyment, aids to intensify the appet.i.te for these. Systems of so-called philosophy start undoubtingly with the axiom that happiness is the one aim of man: and with at least some of these happiness is simply coincident with physical well-being. Political Economy aims as undoubtingly to act on the principle, "the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number:" and perhaps, as Political Economy claims to deal with man in his physical life only, it were unreasonable to expect from it regard to aught above this. Our current and popular literature--Fiction, Poetry, Essays on social relations--is emphatically a literature of enjoyment, ministering to the various excitements of pleasure, wonder, suspense, or pain. And last, and in some respects most serious of all, our popular theology has largely conformed to the spirit of the age. Representative of a debased and emasculated Christianity, it attacks our humanity at its very core. It rings out to us, with wearisome iteration, as our one great concern, the saving of our own souls: degrades the religion of the Cross into a slightly-refined and long-sighted selfishness: and makes our following Him who "pleased not Himself" to consist in doing just enough to escape what it calls the pains of h.e.l.l--to win what it calls the joys of heaven.

This is the dark side of the picture; but it has its bright side too.

These advances of science, these extensions of commerce, these philosophies, even where they are falsely so called, this Political Economy, which from its very nature must first "labour for the meat that perisheth,"--these are all G.o.d's servants and man's ministers still--the ministers of man's higher and n.o.bler life. Consciously or unconsciously, they are working to raise from myriads burdens of poverty, care, ceaseless and fruitless toil, under the pressure of which all higher aspiration is wellnigh impossible. Sanitary reform in itself may mean nothing more than better drainage, fresher air, freer light, more abundant water: to the "Governor among the nations" it means lessened impossibility that men should live to Him.

If in few ages the great bulk and the most popular portion of literature has more prost.i.tuted itself to purposes of sensational or at most aesthetic enjoyment, it is at least as doubtful if in any previous age our highest literature has more emphatically and persistently devoted itself to proclaiming this great doctrine of the Cross. Sometimes directly and explicitly, oftener by implication, this is the ultimate theme of those who are most deeply influencing the spirit of the time.

Our finest and most widely recognised pulpit oratory is at home here, and only here: Maurice and Arnold, Trench and Vaughan, Robertson and Stanley, James Martineau and Seeley, Thirlwall and Wilberforce, Kingsley and Brooke, Caird and Tulloch, different in form, in much antagonistic in what is called opinion, are of one mind and heart on this. The thought underlying all their thoughts of man is that "higher than love of happiness" in humanity which expresses the true link between man and G.o.d.

The practical doctrine that with them underlies all others is, "Love not pleasure--love G.o.d. Love Him not alone in the light and amid the calm, but through the blackness and the storm. Though He hide Himself in the thick darkness, yet" give thanks at remembrance of His holiness. "Though He slay thee, yet trust still in Him." The hope to which they call us is not, save secondarily and incidentally, the hope of a great exhaustless future. It is the hope of a true life _now_, struggling on and up through hardness and toil and battle, careless though its crown be the crown of thorns.

Even evangelicism indirectly, in great degree unconsciously, bears witness to the truth through its demand of absolute self-abnegation before G.o.d: though the inversion of the very idea of Him fundamentally involved in its scheme makes the self-abnegation no longer that of the son, but of the slave; includes in it the denial of that law which Himself has written on our hearts; and would subst.i.tute our subjection to an arbitrary despotism for our being "made partakers of His holiness."

One of the sternest and most consistent of Calvinistic theologians, Jonathan Edwards, in one of his works expresses his willingness to be d.a.m.ned for the glory of G.o.d, and to rejoice in his own d.a.m.nation: with a strange, almost incredible, obliquity of moral and spiritual insight failing to perceive that in thus losing himself in the infinite of holy Love lies the very essence of human blessedness, that this and this alone is in very truth his "eternal life."

Among what may be called Essayists, two by general consent stand out as most deeply penetrating and informing the spirit of the age--Carlyle and Ruskin. To the former, brief reference has already been made. In the work then quoted from, one truth has prominence above all others: that with the will's acceptance of happiness as the aim of life begins the true degradation of humanity; and that then alone true life dawns upon man when truth and right begin to stand out as the first objects of his regard. Never since has Carlyle's strong rough grasp relaxed its hold of this truth; and howsoever in later works, in what are intended as biographical ill.u.s.trations of it, he may seem to confuse mere strength and energy with righteousness of will, and thence to confound outward and visible success with vital achievement, that strength and energy are always in his eyes, fighting or enduring against some phase of the many- headed hydra of wrong.

Of Ruskin it seems almost superfluous to speak. They have read him to little purpose who have not felt that all his essays and criticisms in art, all his expositions in social and political science, are essentially unified by one animating and pervading truth: the truth that to man's moral relations, or, in other words, the developing and perfecting in him of that Divine image in which he is made,--all things else, joy, beauty, life itself, are of account only to the degree in which they are consciously used to subserve that higher life. His ultimate standard of value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political relations, is referred, is--not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous, sentimental, or aesthetic, but--the measure in which may thereby be trained up that higher life of humanity. Art is to him G.o.d's minister, not when she is simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature in such forms and phases as shall tend to bring man nearer to moral truth, beauty, and purity. The Ios and Ariadnes of the debased Italian schools, the boors of Teniers, the Madonnas of Guido, are truer to one phase of nature than are Fra Angelico's angels, or Tintoret's Crucifixion. But that nature is humanity as degraded by sense; and therefore the measure of their truthfulness is for him also the measure of their debas.e.m.e.nt.

In poetry, the key-note so firmly struck by Wordsworth in his n.o.ble "Ode to Duty" has been as firmly and more delicately caught up by other singers; who, moreover, have seen more clearly than Wordsworth did, that it is for faith, not for sight, that duty wears

"The G.o.dhead's most benignant grace;"

for the path along which she leads is inevitably on earth steep, rugged, and toilsome. Take almost any one of Tennyson's more serious poems, and it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled and perfected only through moral endurance and struggle. "Ulysses" is no restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and security by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun within, to press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril, and fear.

"The Lotos-eaters" are no mere legendary myth: they shadow forth what the lower instincts of our humanity are ever urging us all to seek--ease and release from the ceaseless struggle against wrong, the ceaseless straining on toward right. "In Memoriam" is the record of love "making perfect through suffering:" struggling on through the valley of the shadow of death toward the far-off, faith-seen light "behind the veil."

"The Vision of Sin" portrays to us humanity choosing enjoyment as its only aim; and of necessity sinking into degradation so profound, that even the large heart and clear eye of the poet can but breathe out in sad bewilderment, "Is there any hope?"--can but dimly see, far off over the darkness, "G.o.d make Himself an awful rose of dawn." In one of the most profound of all His creations--"The Palace of Art"--we have presented to us the soul surrounding itself with everything fair and glad, and in itself pure, not primarily to the eye, but to the mind: attempting to achieve its destiny and to fulfil its life in the perfections of intellectual beauty and aesthetic delight. But the palace of art, _made the palace of the soul_, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser h.e.l.l.

The "Idylls of the King" are but exquisite variations on the one note--that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure. In "Vivien"--the most remarkable of them all for the subtlety of its conception and the delicacy of its execution,--the picture is perhaps the darkest and saddest time can show--that of a nature rich to the utmost in all lower wisdom of the mind, struggling long and apparently truly against the flesh, yet all the while dallying with the foul temptation, till the flesh prevails; and in a moment, swift and sure as the lightning, moral and spiritual death swoops down, and we see the lost one no more.

Many other ill.u.s.trations might be given from our n.o.blest and truest poetry--from the works of the Brownings, the "Saints' Tragedy" of Charles Kingsley, the dramatic poems of Henry Taylor--of the extent to which it is vitally, even where not formally Christian; the extent to which the truth of the Cross has transfused it, and become one chief source of its depth and power. But we must hasten on to our more immediate object in these remarks.

Those who read works of fiction merely for amus.e.m.e.nt, may be surprised that it should be thought possible they could be vehicles for conveying to us the deepest practical truth of Christianity,--that the highest life of man only begins when he begins to accept and to bear the Cross; and that the conscious pursuit of happiness as his highest aim tends inevitably to degrade and enslave him. Even those who read novels more thoughtfully, who recognise in them a great moral force acting for good or evil on the age, may be startled to find George Eliot put forward as the representative of this higher-toned fiction, and as ent.i.tled to take place beside any of those we have named for the depth and force, the consistency and persistence, with which she has laboured to set before us the Christian, and therefore the only exhaustively true, ideal of life.

Yet a careful examination will, we are satisfied, show that from her first appearance before the public, this thought, and the specific purpose of this teaching, have never been absent from the writer's mind; that it may be defined as the central aim of all her works: and that it gathers in force, condensation, and power throughout the series. Other qualities George Eliot has, that would of themselves ent.i.tle her to a very high place among the teachers of the time. In largeness of Christian charity, in breadth of human sympathy, in tenderness toward all human frailty that is not vitally base and self-seeking, in subtle power of finding "a soul of goodness even in things apparently evil," she has not many equals, certainly no superior, among the writers of the day.

Throughout all her works we shall look in vain for one trace of the fierce self-opinionative arrogance of Carlyle, or the narrow dogmatic intolerance of Ruskin: though we shall look as vainly for one word or sign that shall, on the mere ground of intellectual power, energy, and ultimate success, condone the unprincipled ambition of a Frederick, so- called the Great, and exalt him into a hero; or find in the cold heart and mean sordid soul of a Turner an ideal, because one of those strange physiological freaks that now and then startle the world, the artist's temperament and artist's skill, were his beyond those of any man of his age. But as our object here is to attempt placing her before the reader as a.s.serting and ill.u.s.trating the highest life of humanity, as a true preacher of the doctrine of the Cross, even when least formally so, we leave these features, as well as her position as an artist, untouched on, the rather that they have all been already discussed by previous critics.

The 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' delicately outlined as they are, still profess to be but sketches. In them, however, what we have a.s.sumed to be the great moral aim of the writer comes distinctly out; and even within the series itself gathers in clearness and power. Self-sacrifice as the Divine law of life, and its only true fulfilment; self-sacrifice, not in some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the vain spirit of self- pleasing, but wherever G.o.d has placed us, amid homely, petty anxieties, loves, and sorrows; the aiming at the highest attainable good in our own place, irrespective of all results of joy or sorrow, of apparent success or failure,--such is the lesson that begins to be conveyed to us in these "Scenes."

The lesson comes to us in the quiet unselfish love, the sweet hourly self- devotion of the "Milly" of Amos Barton, so touchingly free and full that it never recognises itself as self-devotion at all. In "Mr Gilfil's Love- Story" we have it taught affirmatively through the deep unselfishness of Mr Gilfil's love to Tina, and his willingness to offer up even this, the one hope and joy of his life, upon the altar of duty; negatively, through the hard, cold, callous, self-pleasing of Captain Wybrow--a type of character which, never repeated, is reproduced with endless variations and modifications in nearly all the author's subsequent works. It is, however, in "Janet's Repentance" that the power of the author is put most strongly forth, and also that what we conceive to be the vital aim of her works is most definitely and firmly p.r.o.nounced. Here also we have ill.u.s.trated that breadth of nature, that power of discerning the true and good under whatsoever external form it may wear, which is almost a necessary adjunct of the author's true and large ideal of the Christian life. She goes, it might almost seem, out of her way to select, from that theological school with which her whole nature is most entirely at dissonance, one of her most touching ill.u.s.trations of a life struggling on towards its highest through contempt, sorrow, and death. That narrowest of all sectarianisms, which arrogates to itself the name Evangelical, and which holds up as the first aim to every man the saving of his own individual soul, has furnished to her Mr Tryan, whose life is based on the principle laid down by the one great Evangelist, "He that loveth his soul shall lose it; he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal." {15}

Mr Tryan, as first represented to us, is not an engaging figure. Narrow and sectarian, full of many uncharities, to a great extent vain and self- conscious, glad to be flattered and idolised by men and women by no means of large calibre or lofty standard--it might well seem impossible to invest such a figure with one heroic element. Yet it is before this man we are constrained to bow down in reverence, as before one truer, greater, n.o.bler than ourselves; and as we stand with Janet Dempster beside the closing grave, we may well feel that one is gone from among us whose mere presence made it less hard to fight our battle against "the world, the flesh, and the devil." The explanation of the paradox is not far to seek. The principle which animated the life now withdrawn from sight--which raised it above all its littlenesses and made it a witness for G.o.d and His Christ, constraining even the scoffers to feel the presence of "Him who is invisible"--this principle was self-sacrifice. So at least the imperfections of human speech lead us to call that which stands in antagonism to self-pleasing; but before Him to whom all things are open, what we so call is the purification and exaltation of that self in us which is the highest created reflex of His image--the growing up of it into His likeness for ever.

We may here, once for all, and very briefly, advert to one specialty of the author's works, which, if we are right in our interpretation of their central moral import, flows almost necessarily as a corollary from it. In each of these sketches one princ.i.p.al figure is blotted out just when our regards are fixed most strongly on it. Milly, Tina, and Mr Tryan all die, at what may well appear the crisis of life and destiny for themselves or others. There is in this--if not in specific intention, certainly in practical teaching--something deeper and more earnest than any mere artistic trick of pathos--far more real than the weary commonplace of suggesting to us any so-called immortality as the completion and elucidation of earthly life; far profounder and simpler, too, than the only less trite commonplace of hinting to us the mystery of G.o.d's ways in what we call untimely death. The true import of it we take to be the separation of all the world calls success or reward from the life that is thus seeking its highest fulfilment. In conformity with the average doctrine of "compensation," Amos Barton should have appeared before us at last installed in a comfortable living, much respected by his flock, and on good terms with his brethren and well-to-do neighbours around. With a truer and deeper wisdom, the author places him before us in that brief after-glimpse still a poor, care-worn, bowed-down man, and the sweet daughter-face by his side shows the premature lines of anxiety and sorrow. Love, anguish, and death, working their true fruits within, bring no success or achievement that the eye can note. By all the principles of "poetic justice," Mr Tryan ought to have recovered and married Janet; under the influence of her larger nature to have shaken off his narrownesses; to have lived down all contempt and opposition, and become the respected influential inc.u.mbent of the town; and in due time to have toned down from his "enthusiasm of humanity" into the simply earnest, hard-working, and rather commonplace town rector. Better, because truer, as it is. Only in the earlier dawn of this higher life of the soul, either in the race or in the individual man; only in the days of the Isaacs and Jacobs of our young humanity, though not with the Abrahams, the Moses', or the Joshuas even then; only when the soul first begins to apprehend that its true relation to G.o.d is to be realised only through the Cross--is there conscience and habitual "respect unto the recompense" of _any_ reward.

In 'Adam Bede,' the first of George Eliot's more elaborate works, the ill.u.s.trations of the great moral purpose we have a.s.signed to her are so numerous and varied, that it is not easy to select from among them. On the one hand, Dinah Morris--one of the most exquisitely serene and beautiful creations of fiction--and Seth and Adam Bede present to us, variously modified, the aspect of that life which is aiming toward the highest good. On the other hand, Arthur Donnithorne and Hetty Sorrel--poor little vain and shallow-hearted Hetty--bring before us the meanness, the debas.e.m.e.nt, and, if unarrested, the spiritual and remediless death inevitably a.s.sociated with and accruing from that "self- pleasing" which, under one form or other, is the essence of all evil and sin. Of these, Arthur Donnithorne and Adam Bede seem to us the two who are most sharply and subtilely contrasted; and to these we shall confine our remarks.

In Arthur Donnithorne, the slight sketch placed before us in Captain Wybrow is elaborated into minute completeness, and at the same time freed from all that made Wybrow even superficially repellent. Handsome, accomplished, and gentlemanly; loving and lovable; finding his keenest enjoyment in the enjoyment of others; irreproachable in life, and free from everything bearing the semblance of vice,--what more could the most exacting fictionist desire to make up his ideal hero? Yet, without ceasing to be all thus portrayed, he scatters desolation and crime in his path. He does this, not through any revulsion of being in himself, but in virtue of that very principle of action from which his lovableness proceeds. Of duty simply as duty, of right solely as right, his knowledge is yet to come. Essentially, his ideal of life as yet is "self- pleasing." This impels him, const.i.tuted as he is, to strive that he shall stand well with all. This almost necessitates that he shall be kindly, genial, loving; enjoying the joy and well-being of all around him, and therefore lovable. But this also a.s.sures that his struggle against temptation shall be weak and vacillating; and that when, through his paltering with it, it culminates, he shall at once fall before it.

The wood scene with Adam Bede still further ill.u.s.trates the same characteristics. This man, so genial and kindly, rages fiercely in his heart against him whom he has unwittingly wronged. Frank and open, apparently the very soul of honour, he shuffles and lies like a coward and a knave; and this in no personal fear, but because he shrinks to lose utterly that goodwill and esteem of others,--of Adam in particular, because Adam constrains his own high esteem,--which are to him the reflection of his own self-wors.h.i.+p. Repentance comes to him at last, because conscience has never in him been entirely overlaid and crushed.

It comes when the whirlwind of anguish has swept over him, scattered all the flimsy mists of self-excuse in which self-love had sought to veil his wrong-doing, and bowed him to the dust; but who shall estimate the remediless and everlasting loss already sustained?

We have spoken of Captain Wybrow as the prototype of Arthur. He is so in respect of both being swayed by that vital sin of self-pleasing to which all wrong-doing ultimately refers itself; but that in Arthur the corruption of life at its source is not complete, is shown throughout the whole story. The very form of action which self-love a.s.sumes in him, tells that self though dominant is not yet supreme. It refers itself to others. It absolutely requires human sympathy. So long as the man lives to some extent in the opinion and affections of his brother men,--so long as he is even uncomfortable under the sense of being shut out from these otherwise than as the being so shall affect his own _interests_,--we may be quite sure he is not wholly lost. The difference between the two men is still more clearly shown when they are brought face to face with the result of their wrong-doing. With each there is sorrow, but in Wybrow, and still more vividly as we shall see in t.i.to Melema, it is the sorrow of self-wors.h.i.+p only. No thought of the wronged one otherwise than as an obstacle and embarra.s.sment, no thought of the wrong simply as a wrong, can touch him. This sorrow is merely remorse, "the sorrow of the world which worketh death." Arthur, too, is suddenly called to confront the misery and ruin he has wrought; but in him, self then loses its ascendancy. There is no attempt to plead that he was the tempted as much as the tempter; and no care now as to what others shall think or say about him. All thought is for the wretched Hetty; and all energy is concentrated on the one present object, of arresting so far as it can be arrested the irremediable loss to her. The wrong stands up before him in its own nakedness as a wrong. This is repentance; and with repentance restoration becomes possible and begins.

Adam Bede contrasts at nearly every point with Arthur Donnithorne.

Lovable is nearly the last epithet we think of applying to him. Hard almost to cruelty toward his sinning father; hard almost to contemptuousness toward his fond, foolish mother; bitterly hard toward his young master and friend, on the first suspicion of personal wrong; savagely vindictive, long and fiercely unforgiving, when he knows that wrong accomplished;--these may well seem things irreconcilable with any true fulfilment of that Christian life whose great law is love. Yet, examined more narrowly, they approve themselves as nearly a.s.sociated with the larger fulness of that life. They are born of the same spirit which said of old, "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"

fulfilments, howsoever imperfect, of that true and deep "law of resentment" which modern sentimentalism has all but expunged from the Christian code. The hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing, not against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than as it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life. It subsists in and springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have a.s.serted themselves as the realities of existence. Even Seth can be more tolerant than Adam, because the gentle, placid moral beauty of his nature is, so far as this may ever be, the result of temperament; while in Adam whatever has been attained has been won through inward struggle and self-conquest.

In the 'Mill on the Floss,' the moral interest of the whole drama is concentrated to a very great degree on Maggie Tulliver; and in her is also mainly concentrated the representative struggle between good and evil, the spirit of the Cross and that of the world; for Stephen Guest is little more than the objective form under which the latent evil of her own humanity a.s.sails her. Her life is the field upon which we see the great conflict waging between the elements of spiritual life and spiritual death; swaying amid heart-struggle and pain, now toward victory, now toward defeat, till at last all seems lost. Then at one rebound the strong brave spirit recovers itself, and takes up the full burden of its cross; sees and accepts the present right though the heart is breaking; and the end is victory crowned and sealed by death.

From her first appearance as a child, those elements of humanity are most prominent in her which, unguided and uncontrolled, are most fraught with danger to the higher life; and for her there is no real outward guidance or control whatever. The pa.s.sionate craving for human sympathy and love, which meets no fuller response than from the rude instinctive fondness of her father and the carefully-regulated affection of her brother, on the one hand prepares her for the storm of pa.s.sion, and on the other, chilled and thrown back by neglect and refusal, threatens her with equal danger of hardness and self-inclusion. The strong artist temperament, the power of spontaneous and intense enjoyment in everything fair and glad to eye and ear, repressed by the uncongenial accessories around her, tends to concentrate her existence in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no sustenance. This danger is for her the greater and more insidious, because in her the sensuous, so strongly developed, is refined from all its grossness by the presence of imagination and thought.

When at last, amid the desolation that has come upon her home, and the increasing bareness of all the accessories of her young life, its deeper needs and higher aspirations awaken to definite purpose and seek definite action, the direction they take is toward a hard stern asceticism, cramping up all life and energy within a narrow round of drudgeries and privations. She strives, as many an earnest impa.s.sioned nature like hers has done in similar circ.u.mstances, to fas.h.i.+on her own cross, and to make it as hard as may be to bear. She would deny to herself the very beauty of earth and sky, the music of birds and rippling waters, and everything sweet and glad, as temptations and snares. From all this she is brought back by Philip. But he, touching as he is in the humility and tender unselfishness of his love, is too exclusively of the artist temperament to give direction or sustainment to the deeper moral requirements of her being. He may win her back to the love of beauty and the sense of joy; but he is not the one to stand by her side when the stern conflict between pleasure and right, sense and soul, the world and G.o.d, is being fought out within her.