The Ethics of George Eliot's Works Part 3

The first betrayal of his trust, the first fall from truth and honour, has been accomplished. Conscience has begun to succ.u.mb to self--self under the guise of Fedalma and the overmastering self-will which refuses to resign his claim upon her. He has secretly deserted his post, transferring to another's hands the trust which was his, and only his. A slight offence it may appear--a mere error of judgment swayed by devoted love--to leave for a day or two when no danger seems specially impending, and to leave in the hands of the trusted and loving friend the charge committed to him. A slight offence, but it has been done in direct violation of conscience, and so in practical abnegation of G.o.d. Therefore the flood-gate is opened, and all sweeps swiftly, resistlessly, remedilessly on towards catastrophe.

The tender beauty of the brief scene with Fedalma is for her overcast, and hope, the highest hope, dies out within her, when she knows that her lover, in apparent faithfulness to her, has been false to himself. From that hour for her,

"Our joy is dead, and only smiles on us, A loving shade from out the place of tombs."

Then comes the interposition of the Gypsy chief, Fedalma's sweet sad steadfastness to her "high allegiance, higher than our love;" the brief moment of suspense, when

"His will was prisoner to the double grasp Of rage and hesitancy;"--

and then before the stormful revulsion of baffled and despairing pa.s.sion all else is swept away, and there only survives in the self-clouded mind and soul the fixed resolve to secure that which for him has come to overmaster all allegiance. Strange and sad beyond all description are the sophistries under which the sinner strives to veil his sin,--by which to silence that still small voice which will not be hushed amid all that inward moil. Fedalma's earnest pleadings with his better self, Zarca's calm, pitying, almost sorrowful scorn--

"_Our_ poor faith Allows not rightful choice save of the right Our birth has made for us"--

fall unheeded amid that fierce tempest of aroused self-will; and the Spanish knight and n.o.ble of that very age when

"Castilian gentlemen Choose not their task--they choose to do it well,"

becomes the renegade, abjuring and forswearing country, honour, and G.o.d.

We have hitherto abstained from quotation, except where necessary to ill.u.s.trate our remarks. But we cannot forbear extracting from this scene the most exquisite of the many beautiful lyrics scattered throughout the poem, expressing, as it does, with a mystic power and depth beyond what the most elaborate commentary could do, the all but hopelessness of return from such a fall as Don Silva's:--

"Push off the boat, Quit, quit the sh.o.r.e, The stars will guide us back:-- O gathering cloud, O wide, wide sea, O waves that keep no track!

On through the pines!

The pillared woods, Where silence breathes sweet breath:-- O labyrinth, O sunless gloom, The other side of death!"

In the scenes which follow among the Gypsy guard, both that with Juan and the lonely night immediately preceding the march, the terrible reaction has already begun to set in. The "quivering" poise of Don Silva's nature makes it impossible he should rest quiet in this utterness of moral and spiritual fall. Already we hear and see the "murdered virtues" begin

"To walk as ghosts Within the shuddering soul and shriek remorse."

The past returns on him with tyrannous power,--early a.s.sociations, the taking up of his knightly vows with all its grand religious and heroic accompaniments, the delegated and accepted trust which he has by forsaking betrayed--

"The life that made His full-formed self, as the impregnant sap Of years successive frames the full-branched tree"--

all come back with stern reproach and denunciation of the apostate who, in hope of the outward realisation of a human love, has cast off and forsworn them all. Fiercely he fronts and strives to silence the accusing throng. Still the same plea--

"My sin was made for me By men's perverseness:"

still the same impulses of mad, despairing self-a.s.sertion--

"I have a _right_ to choose my good or ill, A right to d.a.m.n myself!"--

still the same vain imagination that union is any longer possible between Fedalma's high self-abnegating truth and his self-seeking abnegation of all truth, coupled with the arrogant a.s.sumption that he, morally so weak and fallen, can sustain her steadfast and heroic strength--"I with my love will be her providence."

When with the fearful Gypsy chant and curse

"The newer oath Thrusts its loud presence on him,"

we feel that any madness of act the wild conflict within may dictate has become possible; and we follow to that presence of Fedalma which is now the only goal life has left to him, prepared for such outbreak of despair as shall be commensurate with a life called to such n.o.bleness of deed and fallen to such a depth of ruin. We see the trust he has deserted in the hands of the foe against whom he had accepted commission to guard it; his friends slaughtered at the post he had forsaken; himself as the sworn Zincalo in alliance with the enemy and slaughterer, and a.s.sociated with the havoc they have wrought. The "right to d.a.m.n" himself which he had claimed is his in all its bitterness; and when he would charge the self d.a.m.nation upon the Gypsy chief, the reply of calm withering scorn can but add keener pang to his awaking remorse: the self-d.a.m.ning

"Deed was done Before you took your oath, or reached our camp, Done when you slipped in secret from the post 'Twas yours to keep, and not to meditate If others might not fill it."

The climax of his revulsion, remorse, and despair is reached when the Prior, the man whom he has impeached as the true author of all his sin, is led forth to die. Then all sophistries are swept away, and the full import of his deed glares up before him, and its import as _his_, only and wholly his. Zarca, in his high self-possession of soul, almost pitying while he cannot but despise, presents a fitting object on which all the fierce conflicting pa.s.sions of wrath, self-accusing remorse, and despair, may vent themselves; and the sudden and treacherous deed, which

"Strangles one Whom ages watch for vainly,"

gives also to Don Silva himself to carry

"For ever with him what he fled-- _Her_ murdered love--her love, a dear wronged ghost, Facing him, beauteous, 'mid the throngs of h.e.l.l."

Few authors or artists but George Eliot could have won us again to look on Don Silva except with revulsion or disgust; and it is characteristic of more than all ordinary power that through the deep impressive solemnity of the closing scene, he, the renegade and murderer, almost divides our interest and sympathy with Fedalma herself; and this by no condoning of his guilt, no extenuation of the depth of his fall, for these are here, most of all, kept ever before our eyes. But the better and n.o.bler elements of his nature, throughout all his degradation revealed to us as never wholly overborne, as ever struggling to a.s.sert themselves, have begun to prevail, and to put down from supremacy that meaner self which has led him into such abysses of faithlessness, apostasy, and sin. The wild despair of remorse is giving way to the self- renunciation of repentance; the storm of conflicting pa.s.sions and emotions is stilled; the fearful battle between good and evil through which he has pa.s.sed has left him exhausted of every hope and aim save to die, repentant and absolved, for the country and faith he had abjured.

The self-a.s.sertion, too, of love is gone, and only its deep purity and tenderness remain. Without murmur or remonstrance, he acquiesces in the doom of hopeless separation; accepting all that remains possible to him of that "high allegiance higher than our love," which is thenceforth the only bond of union between these two. In that last sad interview with her for whom he had so fearfully sinned, and so all but utterly fallen, we can regard Don Silva with a fuller and truer sympathy than we dare accord to him in all the height of his greatness, and all the wealth, beauty, and joy of his yet unshadowed love.

In the next of this series of great works, and the one which to many of her readers is and will remain the most fascinating--'Middlemarch'--George Eliot has stretched a broader and more crowded canvas, on which, however, every figure, to the least important that appears, is--not sketched or outlined, but--filled in with an intense and lifelike vividness and precision that makes each stand out as if it stood there alone. Quote but a few words from any one of the speakers, and we know in a moment who that speaker is. And each is the type or representative of a cla.s.s; we have no monsters or unnatural creations among them. To a certain extent all are idealised for good or for evil,--it cannot be otherwise in fiction without its ceasing to be fiction; but the essential elements of character and life in all are not peculiar to them, but broad and universal as our humanity itself. Dorothea and her sister, Mr Brooke and Sir James Chettam, Rosamond Vincy and her brother, Mr Vincy and his wife, Casaubon and Lydgate, Farebrother and Ladislaw, Mary Garth and her parents, Bulstrode and Raffles, even Drs Sprague and Minchin, old Featherstone and his kindred--all are but representative men and women, with whose prototypes every reader, if gifted with the subtle power of penetration and a.n.a.lysis of George Eliot, might claim personal acquaintance.

This richly-crowded canvas presents to us such variety of ill.u.s.tration of the two great antagonistic principles of human life--self-pleasing and self-abnegation, love of pleasure and the love of G.o.d more or less absolute and consummate--that it is no easy task to select from among them. But two figures stand out before us, each portrayed with such finished yet unlaboured art--living, moving, talking before us--contrasted with such exquisite yet un.o.btrusive delicacy, and so subtilely ill.u.s.trating the two great phases of human inspiration and life--that which centres in self, and that which yearns and seeks to lose itself in the infinite of truth, purity, and love--that instinctively and irresistibly the mind fixes upon them. These are Dorothea and Rosamond Vincy.

To not a few of George Eliot's readers, we believe that Dorothea is and will always be a fairer and more attractive form than Dinah Morris or Romola di Bardi, Fedalma or Mirah Cohen. In her sweet young enthusiasm, often unguided or misguided by its very intensity, but always struggling and tending on toward the highest good; in the touching maidenly simplicity with which she at once identifies and accepts Mr Casaubon as her guide and support toward a higher, less self-contained and self-pleasing, more inclusive and all-embracing life; in the yearning pain with which the first dread of possible disappointment dawns and darkens over her, and the meek humility of her repentance on the one faint betrayal--wrung from her by momentary anguish--of that disappointment; in the tender wifely patience, reticence, forbearance, with which she hides from all, the heart-gnawings of shattered and expiring hope; the sense which she can no longer veil from her own deepest consciousness that in Mr Casaubon there is no help or stay for her and the unwearied though too soon unhoping earnestness with which she labours to establish true relations between herself and her uncongenial mate; in the patient yet crus.h.i.+ng anguish of that long night's heart-struggle which precedes the close--a struggle not against her own higher self, but whether she dare bind down that higher self to a lifelong, narrow, worthless task, and the aching consciousness of what--almost against conscience and right--her answer must be;--there is an inexpressible charm and loveliness in all this which no one, not utterly dead to all that is fairest and best in womanhood, can fail to recognise.

Not less wonderfully depicted is the guileless frankness which, from first to last, characterises her whole relations to Ladislaw. If there is one flaw in this n.o.ble work, it is that Ladislaw on first examination is scarcely equal to this exquisite creation. Yet it might have been nearly as difficult even for George Eliot to satisfy our instinctive cravings in this particular with regard to Dorothea, as in respect to Romola or Fedalma. And when we study her portrait of Ladislaw more carefully, there is a latent beauty and n.o.bleness about him; an innate and intense reverence for the highest and purest, and an unvarying aim and struggle toward it; an utter scorn and loathing of everything mean and base,--that almost makes us cancel the word flaw. We recognise this n.o.bleness of nature almost on his first appearance, in the deep reverence with which he regards Dorothea, the fulness with which he penetrates the guileless candour of the relation she a.s.sumes to him, the entireness of his trust in the spotless purity of her whole nature. And in him we have presented all those essential and fundamental elements of nature which give a.s.surance that, Dorothea by his side, he shall be no unfitting helpmeet to her, no drag or hindrance on her higher life; that he shall rise to the elevation and purity of her self-consecration, and shall stand by her side sustaining, guiding, expanding that life of ever-growing fulness and human helpfulness to which each is dedicated.

But the essence of all this moral and spiritual loveliness is its unconsciousness. Self has no place in it. From the first the one absorbing life aim and action is toward others--toward aiding the toils, advancing the well-being, relieving the suffering, elevating the life, of all around her. And this in no spirit of self-satisfied and vainglorious self-estimation, but in that utter unconsciousness which is characteristic of her whole being. Of the social reformer, the purposed philanthropist, the benefactor of the poor, the wretched, and the fallen, there is no trace in Dorothea Brooke. Grant that, as she is first presented to us, that aim is for the time apparently concentrated in improved cottage accommodation for the poor; even here there is no thought of displaying the skill of the design and contriver: there is thought alone of the object she seeks--ameliorating the condition of those she yearns to benefit.

In her very first interview with Casaubon, there is something inexpressibly touching in the humility of childlike trust with which she accepts him and his "great mind," and the innocent purity with which she allows herself to indulge the vision of a life pa.s.sed by his side; a life which he, by his influence and guidance, is to make more full and free, and delivered from those conventionalities of custom and fas.h.i.+on which restrict it. At last his cold, formal proposal of marriage is made. She sees nothing of its true character--that he is but seeking, not an helpmeet for life and soul in all their higher requirements, but simply and solely a kind of superior, blindly submissive dependant and drudge.

In the _impossibility_ of marriage presenting itself to her purity of maiden innocence as a mere establishment in life, or in any of those meaner aspects in which meaner natures regard it, she sees nothing of all this--nothing save that the yearning of her heart is fulfilled, and that henceforth her life shall pa.s.s under a higher guardians.h.i.+p, sustained by a holier strength, animated by a more self-expansive fulness, guided toward n.o.bler and fuller aims.

Picturing to some extent, in degree as we are capable of entering into a nature like hers, the anguish that such an awakening must be to her, it is exquisitely painful to follow in imagination the slow sure process of her awakening to what this man, who "has no good red blood in his body,"

really is--a cold, shallow pedant, whose entire existence is bound up in researches, with regard to which he even shrinks from inquiry as to whether all he has for years been vaguely attempting has not been antic.i.p.ated, and whose intense and absorbing egoism makes the remotest hint of depreciation pierce like a dagger. The first faint dawn of discovery breaks on her almost immediately on their arrival at Rome.

Conscious of her want of mere aesthetic culture--neglected in the past as a turning aside from life's highest aims--she has looked forward to his guidance and support for the supply of this want as enlarging her whole being; broadening and deepening, refining and elevating all its sympathies. For all shadow of aid or sympathy here, she finds herself as utterly alone as if she were in a trackless and uninhabited desert. Nay, more: he who sits by her side is as cold and dead to all sensations or emotions that art can enkindle, as the glorious marbles amid which they wander. Soon she finds herself relegated to the society and fellows.h.i.+p of her maid; her husband is less to her, is incapable of being other than less, amid those transcendant treasures of architecture, painting, and sculpture, than a hired guide or cicerone would be.

Soon follows the scene where her timid offer of humble service is thrown back with all the irritation of that absorbing egoism which is the very essence and life-in-death of the man. For the first and only time, a faint cry of conscious irritation escapes her, followed by an anguish of repentance so deep, so meekly, humbly self-accusing, it reveals to us more of her truest and innermost life than pages of elaborate description could do. A single sentence descriptive of her mood even in that first irritation brings before us her deepest soul, and the utter absence of self isolation and self-insistence there:--"However just her indignation might be, her ideal was not _to claim justice_, but _to give tenderness_."

She meets Ladislaw; and he more than hints to her that the dim, vague labours and acc.u.mulations of years which have const.i.tuted her husband's nearest approach to life have been labour in vain; that the "great mind"

has been toiling, with feeble uncertain steps, in a path which has already been trodden into firmness and completeness; toiling in wilful and obdurate ignorance that other and abler natures have more than antic.i.p.ated all he has been painfully and abortively labouring to accomplish. Again a cry bursts from the wounded heart, seemingly of anger against her informant, really of anguish--anguish, not for her own sinking hopes, but for the burden of disappointment and failure which she instinctively perceives must, sooner or later, fall on the husband who is thus throwing away life in vain.

So it goes on, through all the ever-darkening problem of her married, yet unmated, life. Effort, always more earnest on the part of her yearning, unselfish tenderness, to establish true relations between them; to find in him something of that sweet support, that expansive and elevating force, silently entering into her own innermost life, which her first childlike trust inspired; to become to him, even if no more may be, that to which her childlike humility at first alone aspired--eyes to his weakness, and strength and freedom to his pen. So it goes on; ever-gnawing pain and anguish, as all her yearning love and pity is thrown back, and that dulled insensate heart and all-absorbing egoism can find only irritation in her timid attempts at sympathy, only dread of detection of the half-conscious futility of all his labours, in her humble proffers of even mechanical aid. Not easily can even the most fervid and penetrative imagination conceive what, to a nature like Dorothea's, such a life must be, with its never-ceasing, ever-gathering pain; its longing tenderness not even actively repelled, but simply ignored or misinterpreted; its humblest, equally with its highest yearnings, baffled and shattered against that triple mail of shallowest self-includedness. And all has to be borne in silence and alone. No word, no look, no sign, betrays to other eye the inward anguish, the deepening disappointment, the slow dying away of hope. Nay, for long, on indeed to the bitter close, failure seems to her to be almost wholly on her own side; and repentance and self-upbraiding leave no room for resentment.

Ere long--indeed, very soon--another, and, if possible, a still deeper humiliation comes upon her,--another, and, in some respects, a keener pang, as showing more intensely how entirely she stands alone, is thrown into her life,--in her husband's jealousy of Ladislaw. Yet jealousy it cannot be called. Of any emotion so comparatively profound, any pa.s.sion so comparatively elevated, that self-absorbed, self-tormenting nature is utterly incapable. Jealousy, in some degree, presupposes love; love not wholly absorbed in self, but capable to some extent of going forth from our own mean and sordid self-inclusion in sympathetic relation, dependence, and aid, towards another existence. In Mr Casaubon there is no capability, no possibility of this. What in him wears the aspect of jealousy is simply and solely self-love, callous irritation, that any one should--not stand above, but--approach himself in importance with the woman he has purchased as a kind of superior slave. For long her guileless innocence and purity, her utter inability to conceive such a feeling, leaves her only in doubt and perplexity before it; long after it has first betrayed itself, she reveals this incapability in the fullest extent, and in the way most intensely irritating to her husband's self- love--by her simple-hearted proposal that whatever of his property would devolve on her should be shared with Ladislaw. Then it is that Casaubon is roused to inflict on her the last long and bitter anguish; to lay on her for life--had not death intervened--the cold, soul-benumbing, life contracting clutch of "the Dead Hand." In the innocence of her entire relations with Ladislaw, not the faintest dawning of thought connects itself with him in her husband's cold, insistent demand on her blind obedience to his will. She thinks alone of his thus binding her to a lifelong task, not only hard and ungenial, but one that shall absorb and fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, impair and frustrate all her higher and broader aims, make impossible all that better and purer fulness of life for which she yearns. Then follows the long and painful struggle,--a struggle so agonising to such a nature, that only one nearly akin to her own can adequately conceive or picture it. For it is a struggle not primarily to forego any certain or fancied mere personal good. On one side is ranged tenderest pitifulness over her husband's wasted life and energies, even though she knows those energies have been wasted--that life has been thrown away--on an object in which there is no gain to humanity, no advancement of human well-being, no profit even to himself, save, perchance, a barren and useless notoriety at last; an object that has been already far more fully and ably achieved. On the other stands her clear undoubting _conscience_ of her own truest and highest course,--the course to which every prompting of the Divine within impels her,--that she shall not thus isolate herself within this narrowest sphere, shut herself out from all social sympathies and social outgoings, and sacrifice to the Dead Hand that holds her in its cold remorseless clutch every interest that may be intrusted to her.

We instinctively shudder at the result; but we never doubt what the answer will be. We know that the tender, womanly, wifely pitifulness, the causeless remorse, will be the nearest and most urgent conscience, and will prevail. The agonised a.s.sent is to be given; but it falls on the ear of the dead.

It is scarcely necessary to follow Dorothea minutely through all the details of her widowed relations to Mr Casaubon. Enough that these are all in touching and beautiful harmony with everything that has gone before. No resentment, no recalcitration against all the ever-gathering perplexity, pain, and anguish he has caused her--nothing but the sweet unfailing pitifulness, the uncalled-for repentance, almost remorse, over her own a.s.sumed shortcomings and deficiencies--her failures to be to him what in those first days of her childlike simplicity and innocence she had hoped she might become. Even on the discovery of the worse than treachery, of the mean insulting malignity with which, trusting to her confiding purity and truthfulness, he had sought to grasp her for life in his "Dead Hand" with regard to Ladislaw, and she only escaped the irrevocable bond her own blindly-given pledge would have fixed around her by his death,--the momentary and violent shock of revulsion from her dead husband, who had had hidden thoughts of her, perhaps perverting everything she said or did, _terrified her as if it had been a sin_.

It is not alone, however, toward her husband that this simple, unconscious self-devotion and self-abnegation of Dorothea Brooke displays itself. Toward every one with whom she comes in contact, it steals out un.o.btrusively and silently, as the dew from heaven on the tender gra.s.s, to each and all according to the kind and nearness of that relation. Even for her "pulpy" uncle she has no supercilious contempt--no sense of isolation or separation; not even the consciousness of toleration toward him. Toward Celia, with her delicious commonplace of rather superficial yet _naive_ worldly wisdom, her half-conscious selfishness, her baby-wors.h.i.+p, and her inimitable "staccato," she is more than tolerant.

She looks up to her as in many respects a superior, even though her own far higher instincts and aims of life cannot accept her as an aid and guidance toward the realisation of these. Even at old Featherstone's funeral, her one emotion is of pitiful sorrow over that loveless mockery of all human pity and love; and for the "Frog-faced" there is no feeling but sympathetic compa.s.sion for his apparent loneliness amongst strangers, who all stand aloof and look askance on him. Into all Lydgate's plans, into the whole question of the hospital and all he hopes to achieve through means of it, she throws herself with swift intelligence, with active, eager sympathy, as a probable instrumentality by which at least one phase of suffering may be redressed or allayed. And in the hour of his deep humiliation, when all others have fallen away from his side, when the wife of his bosom forsakes him in callous and heartless resentment of what was done for her sake alone; when he stands out the mark of scorn and obloquy for all save Farebrother, and scans and all but loathes himself--she, with her artless trust in the best of humanity, in the strength of her instinctive recognition of the merest glimmering of whatever is true and right and high in others, comes to his side, yields him at once her fullest confidence, gives him with frank simplicity her aid, and enables him, so far as determined prejudice and uncharity will allow, to right himself before others.

Reference has already been made to her whole relations, from first to last, with Ladislaw. It is not easy to conceive anything more touchingly beautiful than these, more perfectly in harmony with her whole nature. Of anything approaching either coquetry or prudery she is incapable. The utter absence of all self-consciousness, whether of external beauty or inward loveliness; the ethereal purity, the childlike trustfulness, the instinctive recognition of all that is true and earnest and high in Ladislaw, through all the surface appearance of indecision, of vague uncertain aim and purpose and limited object in life; no thought of what is ordinarily called love toward him, of love on his part toward her--ever dawns upon her guileless innocence. Through all her yearning to do justice to him as regards the property of her dead husband, which she looks upon as fairly and justly his, or at least to be shared with him, there arises before her the determination of her dead husband that it should not be so; and her sweet regretful pitifulness over that meagre wasted life prevails. Anon, when at last through the will she is made aware of the crowning act of that concentrated callousness of heart and soul, and of the true nature of the benumbing grasp it had sought to lay on her for life, and had so far succeeded in doing, then for the first time her "tremulous" maiden purity and simplicity awakens, and for the first time it enters her mind that Ladislaw could, under any circ.u.mstances, become her lover; that another had thought of them in that light, and that he himself had been conscious of such a possibility arising. The later scenes between them are characterised by a quiet beauty, a suppressed power and pathos, compared to which most other love- scenes in fiction appear dull and coa.r.s.e. The tremulous yearning of her love, as it awakens more and more to distinct consciousness within; the new-born shyness blent with the old, trustful, frank simplicity,--bring before us a picture of love, in its purest and most beautiful aspect, such as cannot easily be paralleled in fiction.