George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy Part 16

George Eliot goes beyond the conduct of any one person and its results, and attempts to show how it is affected by the person's environment. It was Maggie's family, education, social standing and personal qualities of mind and heart which helped to determine for her the consequences of her conduct. It was Dorothea's education and social environment which largely helped to shape her career and to leave her bereaved of the largest possibilities of which her life was capable. Gwendolen's life was largely determined by her early training and by her social surroundings. Yet with all these, life has its necessary issues, and Nemesis plays its part.

Retribution is for all; it is ever stern, just and inevitable. Just, however, only in the sense that wrong-doing cannot escape its own effects, but not just in the sense that the guiltless must often share the fate of the guilty. Wrong-doing drags down to destruction many an innocent person. It is to be said of George Eliot, however, that she never presents any of her characters as doomed utterly by the past. However strong the memories of the ages lay upon them, they are capable of self-direction.

Not one of her characters is wholly the victim of his environment. There is no hint in _Middlemarch_ that Dorothea was not capable of heroism and self-consecration. Her environment gave a wrong direction to her moral purpose; but that purpose remained, and the moral n.o.bleness of her mind was not destroyed. Still, it is largely true, that in her books the individual is sacrificed to his social environment. He is to renounce his own personality for the sake of the race. Consequently his fate is linked with that of others, and he must suffer from other men's deeds.

With all its limitations and defects, George Eliot's teaching concerning the moral effects of conduct is wholesome and healthy. It rests on a solid foundation of experience and scientific evidence. Her books are full of moral stimulus and strengthening, because of the profound conviction with which she has presented her conception of moral cause and effect. With her, we must believe that moral sequences are as inevitable as the physical.

It would be very unjust to George Eliot to suppose that she left man in the hands of a relentless moral order which manifests no tenderness and which is incapable of pity and mercy. She did not believe in an Infinite Father, full of love and forgiveness; that faith was not for her. Yet she did believe in a providence which can a.s.suage man's sorrows and deal tenderly with his wrong-doing. While nature is stern and the moral sequences of life unbending, man may be sympathetic and helpful. Man is to be the providence of man; humanity is to be his tender forgiving Friend. A subst.i.tute so poor for the old faith would seem to have little power of moral renovation or sympathetic impulse in it; but it quickened George Eliot's mind with enthusiasm and ardor. The "enthusiasm of humanity" filled her whole soul, was a luminous hope in her heart and an inspiring purpose to her mind.

With Goethe and Carlyle she found in work for humanity the subst.i.tute for all faith and the cure for all doubt. Faust finds for his life a purpose, and for the universe a solution, when he comes to labor for the practical improvement of humanity. This was George Eliot's own conclusion, that it is enough for us to see the world about us made a little better and more orderly by our efforts. All her n.o.blest characters find in altruism a subst.i.tute for religion, and they find there a moral anchorage.

She says very plainly in _Middlemarch_, that every doctrine is capable of "eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men." To the same effect is her saying in _Romola_, that "with the sinking of the high human trust the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is a part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled." In _Janet's Repentance_ she has finely presented this faith in sympathetic humanitarianism, showing how Janet found peace in the sick-room where all had been doubt and trial before.

Day after day, with only short intervals of rest, Janet kept her place in that sad chamber. No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt--a place of repose for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all creeds and all philosophies are at one:--here, at least, the conscience will not be dogged by doubt--the benign impulse will not be checked by adverse theory: here you may begin to act without settling one preliminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the long night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye--these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no a.s.sent to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls where the stir and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued,--where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow,--the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity: bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, pa.s.sion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it. As we bend over the sick-bed all the forces of our nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience and of love, and sweep down the miserable choking drift of our quarrels, our debates, our would-be wisdom, and our clamorous, selfish desires. This blessing of serene freedom from the importunities of opinion lies in all simple, direct acts of mercy, and is one source of that sweet calm which is often felt by the watcher in the sick-room, even when the duties there are of a hard and terrible kind. [Footnote: Chapter XXIV.]

The basis of such sympathetic helpfulness she finds in the common sorrows and trials of the world. All find life hard, pain comes to all, none are to be found unacquainted with sorrow. These common experiences draw men together in sympathy, unite them in a common purpose of a.s.suagement and help. The sorrow of Adam Bede made him more gentle and patient with his brother.

It was part of that growing tenderness which came from the sorrow at work within him. For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself, working hard and delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable nature, had not outlived his sorrow--had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? G.o.d forbid! It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it--if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown toward which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and pa.s.sing from pain into sympathy--the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love. Not that this transformation of pain into sympathy had completely taken place in Adam yet; there was still a great remnant of pain, which he felt would subsist as long as _her_ pain was not a memory, but an existing thing, which he must think of as renewed with the light of every morning. But we get accustomed to mental as well as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it; it becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission; and we are contented with our day when we are able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering. For it is at such periods that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations beyond any of which either our present or prospective self is the centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert.

Armgart finds that "true vision comes only with sorrow." Sorrow and suffering create a sympathy which sends us to the relief of others. "Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compa.s.sion," we are told in _Middlemarch_. In the trying hours of Maggie Tulliver's life she came to know--

that new sense which is the gift of sorrow--that susceptibility to the bare offices of humanity which raises them into a bond of loving fellows.h.i.+p.

Again, she learns that "more helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us." Man is in this way brought to live for man, to suffer in his sufferings, to be mercifully tender and pitiful with him in his temptations and trials. Sympathy builds up the moral life, gives an ethical meaning to man's existence. Thus humanity becomes a providence to man, and it is made easier for him to bear his sufferings and to be comforted in his sorrows. Nemesis is stern, but man is pitiful; retribution is inexorable, but humanity is sympathetic. Nature never relents, and there is no G.o.d who can so forgive us our sins as to remove their legitimate effects; but man can comfort us with his love, and humanity can teach us to overcome retribution by righteous conduct.

All idealistic rights are to be laid aside, according to her theory, all personal claims and motives are to be renounced. In the duties we owe to others, life is to find its rightful expression. In _Janet's Repentance_ she says,--

The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires and impulses.

To live for self, George Eliot seems to regard as immoral; self is to be ignored except in so far as it can be made to serve humanity. As rights are individual they are repudiated, and the demand for them is regarded as revolutionary and destructive.

That man is a moral being because he is a social being she carries to its farthest extreme in some of her teachings, as when she makes public opinion the great motive power to social improvement. Felix Holt p.r.o.nounces public opinion--the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honorable and what is shameful--to be the greatest power under heaven. In the "Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt," published in _Blackwood's Magazine_, Felix is made to say to his fellows,--

Any nation that had within it a majority of men--and we are the majority--possessed of much wisdom and virtue, would not tolerate the bad practices, the commercial lying and swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating and the political bribery which are carried on boldly in the midst of us. A majority has the power of creating a public opinion. We could groan and his-s before we had the franchise: if we had groaned and hissed in the right place, if we had discerned better between good and evil, if the mult.i.tude of us artisans and factory hands and miners and laborers of all sorts had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious, sober--and I don't see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere without these qualities--we should have made an audience that would have shamed the other cla.s.ses out of their share in the national vices. We should have had better members of Parliament, better religious teachers, honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in infamous and brutal men; and we should not have had among us the abomination of men calling themselves religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten gains. I say it is not possible for any society in which there is a very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society is--to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows.

Therefore let us have done with this nonsense about our being much better than the rest of our countrymen, or the pretence that that was a reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has been given to us.

The essay on "Moral Swindlers," in _Theophrastus Such_, clearly indicates George Eliot's point of view in ethics. She makes those moral traits which are social of greater importance than those which are personal. She complains that a man who is chaste and of a clean personal conduct is regarded as a moral man when his business habits are not good. To her, his relations to his fellows in all the social and business affairs of life are of higher importance than his personal habits or his family relations. She rebels against that deep moral instinct of the race which identifies morality with personal character, and is indignant that the altruism she so much believed in is not everywhere made identical with ethics. To her, the person is nothing; the individual is thought of only as a member of a community. She forgot that any large and n.o.ble moral life for a people must rest upon personal character, upon a pure and healthy state of the moral nature in individuals. Nations cannot be moral, but persons can. Public corruption has its foundation in personal corruption. The nation cannot have a n.o.ble moral life unless the individuals of which it is composed are pure in character and n.o.ble in conduct. She complains that s.e.xual purity is made identical with morality, while business integrity is not. Every social and moral bond we have, she says, "is a debt; the right lies in the payment of that debt; _it can lie nowhere else_." It is a debt owed, not to G.o.d, but to humanity; it is therefore to be paid, not by personal holiness, but by human sympathy and devotion.

The higher social morality, that which inspires nations with great and heroic purposes, George Eliot believes is mainly due, as she says in the essay on "The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!" "to the divine gift of a memory which inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and innocent brute." The memories of the past lie mainly in the direction of national movements, and hence the higher moral life of the present must be a.s.sociated with national memories. The glorious commonplaces of historic teaching, as well as of moral inspiration, are to be found in the fact "that the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving nationality, and that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword." To reject such memories, such social influences, she regards as "a blinding superst.i.tion," and says that the moral visions of a nation are an effective bond which must be accepted by all its members. Two of her most characteristic books are written to inculcate this teaching. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ we learn that there is no moral strength and purpose for a man like Don Silva, who repudiates his country, its memories and its religion. The main purpose of _Daniel Deronda_ is to show how binding and inspiring is the vision of moral truth and life which comes from a.s.sociation even with the national memories of an outcast and alien people.

She wished to see individuals helped and good done in the present. She makes Theophrastus Such, in the essay on "Looking Backward," speak her own mind.

"All reverence and grat.i.tude for the worthy dead on whose labors we have entered, all care for the future generations whose lot we are preparing; but some affection and fairness for those who are doing the actual work of the world, some attempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who will call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven."

Again, she says that "the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries." And this was not merely the teaching of her books, it was the practice of her life. Miss Edith Simc.o.x has made it clear that she was zealously anxious to help men and women by personal effort. She tells us that "George Eliot's sympathies went out more readily towards enthusiasm for the discharge of duties than for the a.s.sertion of rights. It belonged to the positive basis of her character to identify herself more with what people wished to do themselves than with what they thought somebody else ought to do for them. Her indignation was vehement enough against dishonest or malicious oppression, but the instinct to make allowance for the other side made her a bad hater in politics, and there may easily have been some personal sympathy in her description of Deronda's difficulty about the choice of a career. She was not an inviting auditor for those somewhat pachydermatous philanthropists who dwell complacently upon 'cases' and statistics which represent appalling depths of individual suffering. Her imagination realized these facts with a vividness that was physically unbearable, and unless she could give substantial help, she avoided the fruitless agitation. At the same time, her interest in all rational good works was of the warmest, and she was inclined to exaggerate rather than undervalue the merits of their promoters, with one qualification only.

'Help the millions, by all means,' she has written; 'I only want people not to scorn the narrower effect.' Charity that did not begin at home repelled her as much as she was attracted by the unpretentious kindness which overlooked no near opportunity; and perhaps we should not be far wrong in guessing that she thought for most people the scrupulous discharge of all present and unavoidable duties was nearly occupation enough. Not every one was called to the high but difficult vocation of setting the world to rights. But on the other hand, it must be remembered that her standard of exactingness was 'high, and some of the things that in her eyes it was merely culpable to leave undone might be counted by others among virtues of supererogation. Indeed, it is within the limits of possibility that a philanthropist wrapped in over-much conscious virtue might imagine her cold to the objects proposed, when she only failed to see uncommon merit in their pursuit. No one, however, could recognize with more generous fervor, more delighted admiration, any genuine un.o.btrusive devotion in either friends or strangers, whether it were spent in making life easier to individuals, or in mending the conditions among which the ma.s.ses live and labor.' This writer gives us further insight into George Eliot's character when we are told that 'she came as a very angel of consolation to those persons of sufficiently impartial mind to find comfort in the hint that the world might be less to blame than they were as to those points on which they found themselves in chronic disagreement with it. But she had nothing welcome for those whose idea of consolation is the promise of a _deus ex machina_ by whose help they may gather grapes of thorns and figs of thistles. She thought there was much needed doing in the world, and criticism of our neighbors and the natural order might wait at all events until the critic's own character and conduct were free from blame.' She had faith in ordinary lives, and these she earnestly desired to help and encourage. Those who themselves struggle with difficulties are best capable, she thought, of helping others out of theirs. In _Daniel Deronda_ she said, 'Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless; as if those were not often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes.'"

George Eliot's interest in the present amelioration of human conditions was strengthened by her faith in the future of the race. She expected no rapid improvement, no revolutionizing development; but she believed the past of mankind justifies faith in a gradual attainment of perfect conditions. This conviction was expressed when she said,--

What I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling.

She saw too much evil and suffering to be an optimist; she could not see that all things are good or tending towards what is good. Yet her faith in the final outcome was earnest, and she looked to a slow and painful progress as the result of human struggles. When called an optimist, she responded, "I will not answer to the name of optimist, but if you like to invent Meliorist, I will not say you call me out of my name." She trusted in that gradual development which science points out as the probable result of the survival of the fittest in human life. In "A Minor Prophet" she has presented her conception of human advancement, and tenderly expressed her sympathy with all humble, imperfect lives.

Bitterly I feel that every change upon this earth Is bought with sacrifice. My yearnings fail To reach that high apocalyptic mount Which shows in bird's-eye view a perfect world, Or enter warmly into other joys Than those of faulty, struggling human kind, That strain upon my soul's too perfect wing Ends in ign.o.ble floundering: I fall Into short-sighted pity for the men Who, living in those perfect future times, Will not know half the dear imperfect things That move my smiles and tears--will never know The fine old incongruities that raise My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits That like a needless eyegla.s.s or black patch Give those who wear them harmless happiness; The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware, That touch me to more conscious fellows.h.i.+p (I am not myself the finest Parian) With my coevals. So poor Colin Clout, To whom raw onions give prospective zest, Consoling hours of dampest wintry work, Could hardly fancy any regal joys Quite unimpregnate with the onion's scent: Perhaps his highest hopes are not all clear Of waftings from that energetic bulb: 'Tis well that onion is not heresy.

Speaking in parable, I am Colin Clout.

A clinging flavor penetrates ray life-- My onion is imperfectness: I cleave To nature's blunders, evanescent types Which sages banish from Utopia.

"Not wors.h.i.+p beauty?" say you. Patience, friend!

I wors.h.i.+p in the temple with the rest; But by my hearth I keep a sacred nook For gnomes and dwarfs, duck-footed waddling elves Who st.i.tched and hammered for the weary man In days of old. And in that piety I clothe ungainly forms inherited From toiling generations, daily bent At desk, or plough, or loom, or in the mine, In pioneering labors for the world.

Nay, I am apt, when floundering confused From too rash flight, to grasp at paradox, And pity future men who will not know A keen experience with pity blent, The pathos exquisite of lovely minds Hid in harsh forms--not penetrating them Like fire divine within a common bush Which glows transfigured by the heavenly guest, So that men put their shoes off; but encaged Like a sweet child within some thick-walled cell, Who leaps and fails to hold the window-bars; But having shown a little dimpled hand, Is visited thenceforth by tender hearts Whose eyes keep watch about the prison walls.

A foolish, nay, a wicked paradox!

For purest pity is the eye of love, Melting at sight of sorrow; and to grieve Because it sees no sorrow, shows a love Warped from its truer nature, turned to love Of merest habit, like the miser's greed.

But I am Colin still: my prejudice Is for the flavor of my daily food.

Not that I doubt the world is growing still, As once it grew from chaos and from night; Or have a soul too shrunken for the hope Which dawned in human b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a double morn, With earliest watchings of the rising light Chasing the darkness; and through many an age Has raised the vision of a future time That stands an angel, with a face all mild, Spearing the demon. I, too, rest in faith That man's perfection is the crowning flower Towards which the urgent sap in life's great tree Is pressing--seen in puny blossoms now, But in the world's great morrows to expand With broadest petal and with deepest glow.

With no disgust toward the crude and wretched life man everywhere lives to-day, but with pity and tenderness for all sorrow, suffering and struggle, she yet believed that the world is being shaped to a glorious and a mighty destiny. This faith finds full and clear expression in the concluding lines of the poem just quoted.

The faith that life on earth is being shaped To glorious ends, that order, justice, love, Mean man's completeness, mean effect as sure As roundness in the dewdrop--that great faith Is but the rus.h.i.+ng and expanding stream Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past.

Our finest hope is finest memory, As they who love in age think youth is blest Because it has a life to fill with love.

Full souls are double mirrors, making still An endless vista of fair things before Repeating things behind: so faith is strong Only when we are strong, shrinks when we shrink.

It comes when music stirs us, and the chords Moving on some grand climax shake our souls With influx new that makes new energies.

It comes in swellings of the heart and tears That rise at n.o.ble and at gentle deeds-- At labors of the master-artist's hand Which, trembling, touches to a finer end, Trembling before an image seen within.

It comes in moments of heroic love, Unjealous joy in love not made for us-- In conscious triumph of the good within, Making us wors.h.i.+p goodness that rebukes.

Even our failures are a prophecy, Even our yearnings and our bitter tears After that fair and true we cannot grasp; As patriots who seem to die in vain Make liberty more sacred by their pangs, Presentiment of better things on earth Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls To admiration, self-renouncing love, Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one: Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night We hear the roll and dash of waves that break Nearer and nearer with the rus.h.i.+ng tide, Which rises to the level of the cliff Because the wide Atlantic roils behind, Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs.

George Eliot did all that could be done to make the morality she taught commendable and inspiring. In her own direct teachings, and in the development of her characters and her plots, she has done much to make it acceptable. Her strong insistence on the social basis of morality is to be admired, and the truth presented is one of great importance. Even more important is her teaching of the stern nature of retribution, that every thought, word and deed has its effect. There is need of such teaching, and it can be appropriated into the thought and life of the time with great promise of good. Yet the outcome of George Eliot's morality was rather depressing than otherwise. While she was no pessimist, yet she made her readers feel that life was pessimistic in its main tendencies. She makes on the minds of very many of her readers the impression that life has not very much light in it. This comes from the whole cast of her mind, and still more because the light of true ideal hopes was absent from her thought. A stern, ascetic view of life appears throughout her pages, one of the results of the new morality and the humanitarian gospel of altruism.

Unbending, unpitiful, does the universe seem to be when the idea of law and Nemesis is so strongly presented, and with no relief from it in the theory of man's free will. Not less depressing to the moral nature is an unrelieved view of the universe under the omnipotent law of cause and effect, which is not lighted by any vision of G.o.d and a spiritual order interpenetrating the material. Her teaching too often takes the tone of repression; it is hard and exacting. She devotes many pages to showing the effects of the law of retribution; she gives comparatively few to the correlative law that good always has its reward. Renunciation is presented as a moral force, and as duty of supreme importance; life is to be repressed for the sake of humanity. The spontaneous tendencies of the mind and heart, the importance of giving a free and healthy development to human nature, is not regarded. Her morality is justly to be criticised for its ascetic and pessimistic tendencies.

XIII.

EARLIER NOVELS.

The first four novels written by George Eliot form a group by themselves; and while all similar to each other in their main characteristics, are in important respects different from her later works. This group includes _Clerical Scenes, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss_ and _Silas Marner_.

With these may also be cla.s.sed "Brother Jacob." They are all alike novels of memory, and they deal mainly with common life. Her own life and the surroundings of her childhood, the memories and a.s.sociations and suggestions of her early life, are drawn upon. The simple surroundings and ideas of the midland village are seldom strayed away from, and most of the characters are farmers and their laborers, artisans or clergymen. _The Mill on the Floss_ offers a partial exception to this statement, for in that book we touch upon the border of a different form of society, but we scarcely enter into it, and the leading characters are from the same cla.s.s as those in the other books of this group. "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" alone enters wholly within the circle of aristocratic society. There is more of the realism of actual life in these novels than in her later ones, greater spontaneity and insight, a deeper sympathy and a more tender pathos. They came more out of her heart and sympathies, are more impa.s.sioned and pathetic.

Throughout the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ are descriptions of actual scenes and incidents known to George Eliot in her girlhood. Mrs. Hackit is a portrait of her own mother. In the first chapter of "Amos Barton,"

Shepperton Church is that at Chilvers Colon, which she attended throughout her childhood. It is from memory, and with an accurate pen, she describes--

Shepperton Church as it was in the old days with its outer court of rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its heterogeneous windows patched with desultory bits of painted gla.s.s, and its little flight of steps with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to the school-children's gallery. Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses!

which I began to look at with delight, even when I was so crude a member of the congregation that my nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by smuggling bread-and-b.u.t.ter into the sacred edifice. There was the chancel, guarded by two little cherubims looking uncomfortably squeezed between arch and wall, and adorned with the escutcheons of the Oldinport family, which showed me inexhaustible possibilities of meaning in their blood-red hands, their death's-heads and cross-bones, their leopards'

paws and Maltese crosses. There were inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of benefactions to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of capitals and final flourishes which my alphabetic erudition traced with ever-new delight. No benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round which devout churchgoers sat during "lessons," trying to look everywhere else than into each others' eyes.

No low part.i.tions allowing you, with a dreary absence of contrast and mystery, to see everything at all moments; but tall dark panels, under whose shadow I sank with a sense of retirement through the Litany, only to feel with more intensity my burst into the conspicuousness of public life when I was made to stand up on the seat during the psalms or the singing.

Not only is this description of Shepperton Church accurate in every particular, but a subject of neighborhood gossip is made the basis of the story of "Amos Barton." When George Eliot was about a dozen years old a strange lady appeared at the Cotou parsonage, and became a subject of much discussion on the part of the paris.h.i.+oners. Much pity was felt for the wife of the curate, an intimate friend of Marian Evans's mother, whose poverty, seven children and poor health made her burdens far from easy. She died not long after, and her grave may be seen at Chilvers Coton. The Knebley Church of "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" is located only a short distance from Chilvers Coton, and is the chancel of the collegiate church founded by Sir Thomas de Astley in the time of Edward III. Its spire was very high, and served as a landmark to travellers through the forest of Arden, and was called "The lanthorn of Arden." The spire fell in the year 1600, but was rebuilt later.

The present church was repaired by the patron of George Eliot's father, Sir Roger Newdigate. She describes it in the first chapter of "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" as--

a wonderful little church, with a checkered pavement which had once rung to the iron tread of military monks, with coats of arms in cl.u.s.ters on the lofty roof, marble warriors and their wives without noses occupying a large proportion of the area, and the twelve apostles with their heads very much on one side, holding didactic ribbons, painted in fresco on the walls.

A delightful lane, overshadowed with n.o.ble trees, that ran by Griff House, the birthplace of George Eliot, led to the lodge of Arbury Hall, the home of Sir Roger Newdigate. Arbury Hall was situated in the midst of a fine old forest, and it was originally a large quadrangular brick house. Sir Roger rebuilt it, acting as his own architect, and made it into a modern dwelling of the commodious gothic Order. This house and its owner appear in "Mr.

Gilfil's Love Story" as Cheverel Manor and Sir Christopher Cheverel. In the fourth chapter the reader is told that,--