George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy Part 7

He knew a great deal of what it was to be a gentleman by inheritance, and without thinking much about himself--for he was a boy of active perceptions, and easily forgot his own existence in that of Robert Bruce--he had never supposed that he could be shut out from such a lot, or have a very different part in the world from that of the uncle who petted him... But Daniel's tastes were altogether in keeping with his nurture: his disposition was one in which every-day scenes and habits beget not _ennui_ or rebellion but delight, affection, apt.i.tudes; and now the lad had been stung to the quick by the idea that his uncle--perhaps his father--thought of a career for him which was totally unlike his own, and which he knew very well was not thought of among possible destinations for the sons of English gentlemen.

The mind of this lad expands; ideal desires awake in him; there is a yearning for a life of n.o.ble knight-errantry in some heroic cause. The reader is permitted to watch from step to step the growth of this longing, and to behold each new deed by which it is expressed. He craves for a broader life, but he is surrounded by such a social atmosphere as to make his longing futile. As a young man who is seeking to know what there is in the world for him to do, and who is eager for some task that is to end in a larger life for man, he is again described.

It happened that the very vividness of his impressions had often made him the more enigmatic to his friends, and had contributed to an apparent indefiniteness in his sentiments. His early wakened sensibility and reflectiveness, had developed into a many-sided sympathy, which threatened to hinder any persistent course of action: as soon as he took up any antagonism, though only in thought, he seemed to himself like the Sabine warriors in the memorable story--with nothing to meet his spear but flesh of his flesh, and objects that he loved. His imagination had so wrought itself to the habit of seeing things as they probably appeared to others, that a strong partisans.h.i.+p, unless it were against an immediate oppression, had become an insincerity for him. His plenteous, flexible sympathy had ended by falling into one current with that reflective a.n.a.lysis which tends to neutralize sympathy. Few men were able to keep themselves clearer of vices than he; yet he hated vices mildly, being used to think of them less in the abstract than as a part of mixed human natures having an individual history, which it was the bent of his mind to trace with understanding and pity. With the same innate balance he was fervidly democratic in his feeling for the mult.i.tude, and yet, through his affections and imagination, intensely conservative; voracious of speculations on government and religion, yet loath to part with long-sanctioned forms which, for him, were quick with memories and sentiments that no argument could lay dead... He was ceasing to care for knowledge--he had no ambition for practice--unless they could both be gathered up into one current with his emotions; and he dreaded, as if it were a dwelling-place of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns the universe into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows, not everything, but everything else about everything--as if one should be ignorant of nothing concerning the scent of violets except the scent itself, for which one had no nostril. But how and whence was the needed event to come?--the influence that would justify partiality, and make him what he longed to be, yet was unable to make himself--an organic part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague, social pa.s.sion, but without fixed local habitation to render fellows.h.i.+p real? To make a little difference for the better was what he was not contented to live without; but how make it? It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.

He rescues Mirah and sets out in search of her brother. He finds Mordecai, and gradually a way is opened to him along which his yearning is satisfied.

Step by step the reader is permitted to trace the expansion of his mind. A window is opened into his soul, and we see its every movement as Daniel is led on to find the mission which was to be his. When that task is fully accepted he says to Mordecai,--

Since I began to read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task, in which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a mult.i.tude--some social captains.h.i.+p, which would come to me as a duty, and not to be striven for as a personal prize.

In her strong tendency to psychologic a.n.a.lysis George Eliot much resembles Robert Browning. It is the life of pa.s.sion and ideas which both alike delight to describe. They greatly differ, however, in their methods of dissecting the inner life. Browning lays bare the soul in some startling experience, George Eliot by the slow development of the mind through all the stages of growth. He is impersonal, but she is always present to make comments and to expound the causes of growth. Yet her characters are as clear-cut, as individual, as his. His a.n.a.lysis is the more rapid, subtle and complete in immediate expression; hers is the more penetrating, vigorous and interesting. His lightning flash sees the soul through and through in the present moment; her calmer and intenser gaze penetrates the long succession of hidden causes by which the soul is shaped to its earthly destiny.

Any account of George Eliot which dwells only on her humor and sarcasm, her realism and her powers of a.n.a.lysis, does her grave injustice. She has also in rare degree the power of artistic constructiveness, a strong and brilliant imagination and genius of almost the highest range. She can create character as well as a.n.a.lyze it, and with that brilliant command of resources which indicates a high order of genius. She had culture almost equal to Goethe's, and quite equal to Mrs. Browning's; and she had that wide sympathy with life which was his, with an equal capacity for their expression in an artistic reconstruction of human experience. While Mr. R.

H. Hutton is justified in saying that "few minds at once so speculative and so creative have ever put their mark on literature," yet the critic needs to beware lest he give the speculative tendency in her mind a place too prominent compared with that a.s.signed to her creative genius. The poet and the novelist are so seldom speculative, so seldom put into their creations the constant burden of great thoughts, that when one appears who does this, it is likely to be dwelt upon too largely by the critics. George Eliot speculates about life and its experiences, and it is evident she had a philosophy of life at her command; but it is quite as true that she soars on pinions free into the heavens of genius, and brings back the song which no other has sung, and which is a true song. She has created characters, she has described the histories of souls, in a manner which will cause some of her books to endure for all time. If she has allied her genius to current culture and speculation, it has in that way been given continuity of purpose and definiteness of aim. The genius is there and cannot be hidden or obscured; and those who love what is great and n.o.ble will be profoundly attracted by her books. If a great thinker, she is still more truly a great literary artist; and such is the largeness and gracious power of her genius that those who do not love her speculations will be drawn to her in spite of all objections. Her genius is generous, expansive, illuminative, profound. Her creativeness is an elemental power; new births are to be found in her books; life has grown under her moulding touch.

VII.

THEORY OF THE NOVEL.

Before George Eliot began her career as a novelist she had already turned her attention to what is good and bad in fiction-writing, and had given expression to her own theory of the novel. What she wrote on this subject is excellent in itself, but it now has an additional interest in view of her success as a novelist, and as throwing light on her conception of the purposes to be followed in the writing of fiction. In what she wrote on this subject two ideas stand out distinctly, that women are to find in novel-writing a literary field peculiarly adapted to their capacities, and that the novel should be a true portraiture of life.

She was a zealous advocate of woman's capacity to excel as a novelist, and she saw in this form of literature a field especially adapted to her greater powers of emotion and sympathy. Very generous and appreciative are her references to the lady novelists whom she defends, the excellence of whose work she maintains ent.i.tles them to the highest places as literary artists. In the article on "Lady Novelists" she has drawn attention both to those qualities in which woman may excel and to those in which she may fail. In writing later of "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" she criticised unsparingly those women who write novels without comprehending life or any of its problems, and who write in a merely artificial manner. The width of her own culture, the vigor of her critical talent, the largeness of her conception of life and its interests, are well expressed in these essays.

Only a large mind could have so truly conceived the real nature of woman's relations to literature, and expressed them in a spirit so intelligent and comprehensive. She would have the whole of life portrayed, and she believes only a woman can truly speak for women. But her faith in woman seems not to have been of the revolutionary character. She rather preferred that women should achieve a higher social condition by deeds than by words. A great intellectual career like her own, which places a woman in the front rank of literary creators, does more to elevate the position of women than any amount of agitation in favor of suffrage. That she sought for the highest intellectual achievement, and that she labored to attain the widest results of scholars.h.i.+p, is greatly to her credit; but more to her credit is it, that she made no claim upon the public as a woman, but only as a literary artist. She asked that her work should be judged on its literary merits, as the product of intellect, and not with reference to her s.e.x. While believing that woman can do her work best by being true to the instincts, sympathies and capacities of her s.e.x, yet she would have the same standard of literary judgment applied to women as to men. Its truthfulness, its reality, its power to widen our sympathies and enlarge our culture, its measure of genius and moral power, is the true test to be applied to any literary work. Such being her conception of the manner in which women should be judged when becoming literary creators, she had no excuses to offer for those who make use of prejudices and a false culture in their own behalf. She says that

The most mischievous form of feminine silliness is the literary form, because it tends to confirm the popular prejudice against the solid education of women.

That she believed in the solid education of women is apparent in her own efforts towards obtaining it for herself, and her conception of what is to be done with it was large and generous. Mere learning she did not hold to be an adornment in a woman. The culture must be trans.m.u.ted into life-power, and be poured forth, not as oracular wisdom in silly novels, but as sympathy and enlarged comprehension of the daily duties of life. When educated women "mistake vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality," she is not surprised that men regard rhodomontade as the native accent of woman's intellect, or that they come to the conclusion that "the average nature of women is too shallow and feeble a soil to bear much tillage."

It is true that the men who come to such a decision on such very superficial and imperfect observation may not be among the wisest in the world; but we have not now to contest their opinion--we are only pointing out how it is unconsciously encouraged by many women who have volunteered themselves as representatives of the feminine intellect. We do not believe that a man was ever strengthened in such an opinion by a.s.sociating with a woman of true culture, whose mind had absorbed her knowledge instead of being absorbed by it. A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself.... She does not write books to confound philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that delight them, in conversation she is the least formidable of women, because she understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you _can't_ understand her. She does not give you information, which is the raw material of culture,--she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest essence.

After this estimate of the value of culture to women, it is interesting to turn to George Eliot's words concerning the legitimate work which women can perform in literature. What she says on this subject shows that she not only had culture, but also the wisdom which is its highest result. She saw that while a woman is to ask for no leniency towards her work because she is a woman, yet that she is not to imitate men or to ignore her s.e.x. She is to portray life as a woman sees it, with a woman's sympathies and experiences. To interpret the feminine side of life is her legitimate province as a literary artist.

If we regard literature as the expression of the emotions, the whims, the caprices, the enthusiasms, the fluctuating idealisms which move each epoch, we shall not be far wrong; and inasmuch as women necessarily take part in these things, they ought to give them _their_ expression. And this leads us to the heart of the question, what does the literature of women mean? It means this: while it is impossible for men to express life otherwise than as they know it--and they can only know it profoundly according to their own experience--the advent of female literature promises woman's view of life, woman's experience; in other words, a new element. Make what distinctions you please in the social world, it still remains true that men and women have different organizations, consequently different experiences. To know life you must have both sides depicted. Let him paint what he knows. And if you limit woman's sphere to the domestic circle, you must still recognize the concurrent necessity of domestic life finding its homeliest and truest expression in the woman who lives it.

Keeping to the abstract heights we have chosen, too abstract and general to be affected by exceptions, we may further say that the masculine mind is characterized by the predominance of the intellect, and the feminine by the predominance of the emotions. According to this rough division, the regions of philosophy would be a.s.signed to men, those of literature to women. We need scarcely warn the reader against too rigorous an interpretation of this statement, which is purposely exaggerated the better to serve as a signpost. It is quite true that no such absolute distinction will be found in authors.h.i.+p. There is no man whose mind is shrivelled up into pure intellect; there is no woman whose intellect is completely absorbed by her emotions. But in most men the intellect does not move in such inseparable alliance with the emotions as in most women, and hence, although often not so great as in women, yet the intellect is more commonly dominant. In poets, artists, and men of letters, _par excellence_, we observe this feminine trait, that their intellect habitually moves in alliance with their emotions; and one of the best descriptions of poetry was that given by Professor Wilson, as the "intellect colored by the feelings."

Woman, by her greater affectionateness, her greater range and depth of emotional experience, is well fitted to give expression to the emotional facts of life, and demands a place in literature corresponding to that she occupies in society; and that literature must be greatly benefited thereby, follows from the definition we have given of literature.

But hitherto, in spite of ill.u.s.trations, the literature of woman has fallen short of its function, owing to a very natural and a very explicable weakness--it has been too much a literature of imitation. To write as men write, is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as women, is the real office they have to perform. Our definition of literature includes this necessity. If writers are bound to express what they have really known, felt and suffered, that very obligation imperiously declares they shall not quit their own point of view for the point of view of others. To imitate is to abdicate. We are in no need of more male writers; we are in need of genuine female experience.

The prejudices, notions, pa.s.sions and conventionalisms of men are amply ill.u.s.trated; let us have the same fulness with respect to women.

Unhappily the literature of women may be compared with that of Rome: no amount of graceful talent can disguise the internal defect. Virgil, Ovid and Catullus were a.s.suredly gifted with delicate and poetic sensibility; but their light is, after all, the light of moons reflected from the Grecian suns, and such as brings little life with its rays, To speak in Greek, to think in Greek, was the ambition of all cultivated Romans, who could not see that it would be a grander thing to utter their pure Roman natures in sincere originality. So of women.

The throne of intellect has so long been occupied by men, that women naturally deem themselves bound to attend the court. Greece domineered over Rome; its intellectual supremacy was recognized, and the only way of rivalling it seemed to be imitation. Yet not so did Rome vanquish Pyrrhus and his elephants; not by employing elephants to match his, but by Roman valor.

Of all departments of literature, fiction is the one to which, by nature and by circ.u.mstance, women are best adapted. Exceptional women will of course be found competent to the highest success in other departments; but speaking generally, novels are their forte. The domestic experiences which form the bulk of woman's knowledge finds an appropriate form in novels; while the very nature of fiction calls for that predominance of sentiment which we have already attributed to the feminine mind. Love is the staple of fiction, for it "forms the story of a woman's life." The joys and sorrows of affection, the incidents of domestic life, the aspirations and fluctuations of emotional life, a.s.sume typical forms in the novel. Hence we may be prepared to find women succeeding better in _finesse_ of detail, in pathos and sentiment, while men generally succeed better in the construction of plots and the delineation of character. Such a novel as _Tom Jones_ or _Vanity Fair_ we shall not get from a woman, nor such an effort of imaginative history as _Ivanhoe_ or _Old Mortality_; but Fielding, Thackeray and Scott are equally excluded from such perfection in its kind as _Pride and Prejudice_, _Indiana_ or _Jane Eyre_. As an artist Jane Austen surpa.s.ses all the male novelists that ever lived; and for eloquence and depth of feeling no man approaches George Sand.

We are here led to another curious point in our subject, viz., the influence of sorrow upon female literature. It may be said without exaggeration that almost all literature has some remote connection with suffering. "Speculation," said Novalis, "is disease." It certainly springs from a vague disquiet. Poetry is a.n.a.logous to the pearl which the oyster secretes in its malady.

"Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong, They learn in suffering what they teach in song."

What Sh.e.l.ley says of poets, applies with greater force to women. If they turn their thoughts to literature, it is--when not purely an imitative act--always to solace by some intellectual activity the sorrow that in silence wastes their lives, and by a withdrawal of the intellect from the contemplation of their pain, or by a trans.m.u.tation of their secret anxieties into types, they escape from the pressure of that burden. If the accidents of her position make her solitary and inactive, or if her thwarted affections shut her somewhat from that sweet domestic and maternal sphere to which her whole being spontaneously moves, she turns to literature as to another sphere. We do not here simply refer to those notorious cases where literature was taken up with the avowed and conscious purpose of withdrawing thoughts from painful subjects; but to the unconscious, unavowed influence of domestic disquiet and unfulfilled expectations, in determining the sufferer to intellectual activity. The happy wife and busy mother are only forced into literature by some hereditary organic tendency, stronger even than the domestic; and hence it is that the cleverest women are not those who have written books.

In the later essay on "Silly Novels" her powers of sarcasm were fully displayed. It showed keen critical powers, and a clear insight into the defects inherent in most novel-writing. She spared no faults, had no mercy for presumption, and condemned unsparingly the pretence of culture.

She described four kinds of silly novels, cla.s.sing them as being of the _mind-and-millinery_, the _oracular, the _white-neck-cloth_, and the _modern-antique_ varieties. All her powers of a.n.a.lysis and insight shown in her novels appeared in this article.

Severe as her criticism is, it is always just. It aims at the presentation of a truer conception of the purpose of novel-writing, and women are judged simply as literary workers. This criticism is based on the clearest apprehension of why it is that women fail as novel-writers; that it is not because they are women, but because they are false to nature and to the simplest conditions of literary art. These women write poor novels because they aim at fine writing, and believe they must be learned and grandiloquent. They ignore what they see about them every day, and which, if they were to describe it in simple language, would give them real power.

It is this falsity in thought, method and purpose which is so severely condemned. And it is the very justness of the criticism which makes it severe, which gives to a true description of these novels the nature of a stinging sarcasm. That these women are praised by the critics she justly regards as a sure indication of their incapacity, or a sign of man's chivalry towards the other s.e.x, which does not permit him to speak the truth about what he knows to be so false and immature. She also sees that what women need is to be told the truth, and to be compelled to accept the just consequences of their work,

The standing apology for women who become writers without any special qualification is, that society shuts them out from other spheres of occupation. Society is a very culpable ent.i.ty, and has to answer for the manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to bad poetry. But society, like "matter" and her Majesty's Government, and other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as well as excessive praise. Where there is one woman who writes from necessity, we believe there are three who write from vanity; and besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy fact of working for one's bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind of literature is not likely to have been produced under such circ.u.mstances. "In all labor there is profit;" but ladies' silly novels, we imagine, are less the result of labor than of busy idleness.

Happily we are not dependent on argument to prove that fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men. A cl.u.s.ter of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest;--novels, too, that have a precious specialty, lying quite apart from masculine apt.i.tudes and experience. No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline ma.s.ses, it may take any form and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements--genuine observation, humor and pa.s.sion. But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which const.i.tutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art which has its absolute _technique_ is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery. And so we have again and again the old story of La Fontaine's a.s.s, who puts his nose to the flute, and, finding that he elicits some sound, exclaims, "Moi, aussi, je joue de la flute;"--a fable which we commend, at parting, to the consideration of any feminine reader who is in danger of adding to the number of "silly novels by lady novelists."

Her praise of the great novelists is as enthusiastic as her condemnation of the silly ones is severe. It is interesting to note that in the first of these papers she selects Jane Austen and George Sand as the chiefest among women novelists, and that she praises them for the truthfulness of their portraitures of life, nor is she any the less aware of the defects of these masters than of the deficiencies of silly women who write novels. She finds that Jane Austen never penetrates into the deeper spiritual experiences of life, and that George Sand lacks in that moral poise and purity which is so necessary to the finest literary effort. Her sketches of these women are as truthful as they are interesting.

First and foremost let Jane Austen be named, the greatest artist that has ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her end. There are heights and depths in human nature Miss Austen has never scaled nor fathomed, there are worlds of pa.s.sionate existence into which she has never set foot; but although this is obvious to every reader, it is equally obvious that she has risked no failures by attempting to delineate that which she has not seen. Her circle may be restricted, but it is complete. Her world is a perfect orb and vital. Life, as it appears to an English gentlewoman peacefully yet actively engaged in her quiet village, is mirrored in her works with a purity and fidelity that must endow them with interest for all time. To read one of her books is like an actual experience of life; you know the people as if you had lived with them, and you feel something of personal affection towards them. The marvellous reality and subtle distinctive traits noticeable in her portraits has led Macaulay to call her a prose Shakspere. If the whole force of the distinction which lies in that epithet _prose_ be fairly appreciated, no one, we think, will dispute the compliment; for out of Shakspere it would be difficult to find characters so typical yet so nicely demarcated within the limits of their kind. We do not find such profound psychological insight as may be found in George Sand (not to mention male writers), but taking the type to which the characters belong, we see the most intimate and accurate knowledge in all Miss Austen's creations.

Only cultivated minds fairly appreciate the exquisite art of Miss Austen. Those who demand the stimulus of effects, those who can only see by strong lights and shadows, will find her tame and uninteresting.

We may ill.u.s.trate this by one detail. Lucy Steele's bad English, so delicately and truthfully indicated, would in the hands of another have been more obvious, more "effective" in its exaggeration, but the loss of this comic effect is more than replaced to the cultivated reader by his relish of the nice discrimination visible in its truthfulness. And so of the rest. _Strong_ lights are unnecessary, _true_ lights being at command. The incidents, the characters, the dialogue--all are of every-day life, and so truthfully presented that to appreciate the art we must try to imitate it, or carefully compare it with that of others.

We are but echoing an universal note of praise in speaking thus highly of her works, and it is from no desire of simply swelling that chorus of praise that we name her here, but to call attention to the peculiar excellence, at once womanly and literary, which has earned this reputation. Of all imaginative writers she is the most _real_. Never does she transcend her own actual experience, never does her pen trace a line that does not touch the experience of others. Herein we recognize the first quality of literature. We recognize the second and more special quality of womanliness in the tone and point of view; they are novels written by a woman, an Englishwoman, a gentlewoman; no signature could disguise that fact; and because she has so faithfully (although unconsciously) kept to her own womanly point of view, her works are durable. There is nothing of the _doctrinaire_ in Jane Austen; not a trace of woman's "mission;" but as the most truthful, charming, humorous, pure-minded, quick-witted and unexaggerated of writers, female literature has reason to be proud of her.

And this is her suggestive portrait of the other, drawn with that skill which is only displayed when one genius interprets another through community of feeling and purpose.

Of greater genius, and incomparably deeper experience, George Sand represents woman's literature more ill.u.s.triously and more obviously. In her, quite apart from the magnificent gifts of nature, we see the influence of sorrow as a determining impulse to write, and the abiding consciousness of the womanly point of view as the subject matter of her writings. In vain has she chosen the mask of a man: the features of a woman are everywhere visible. Since Goethe no one has been able to say with so much truth, "My writings are my confessions." Her biography lies there, presented, indeed, in a fragmentary shape and under wayward disguises, but nevertheless giving to the motley groups the strong and uumistakable charm of reality. Her grandmother, by whom she was brought up, disgusted at her not being a boy, resolved to remedy the misfortune as far as possible by educating her like a boy. We may say of this, as of all the other irregularities of her strange and exceptional life, that whatever unhappiness and error may be traceable thereto, its influence on her writings has been beneficial, by giving a greater range to her experience. It may be selfish to rejoice over the malady which secretes a pearl, but the possessor of the pearl may at least congratulate himself that at any rate the pearl has been produced; and so of the unhappiness of genius. Certainly few women have had such profound and varied experience as George Sand; none have turned it to more account. Her writings contain many pa.s.sages that her warmest admirers would wish unwritten; but although severe criticism may detect the weak places, the severest criticism must conclude with the admission of her standing among the highest minds of literature. In the matter of eloquence, she surpa.s.ses everything France has yet produced.

There has been no style at once so large, so harmonious, so expressive, and so unaffected: like a light s.h.i.+ning through an alabaster vase, the ideas s.h.i.+ne through her diction; while as regards rhythmic melody of phrase, it is a style such as Beethoven might have written had he uttered in words the melodious pa.s.sion that was in him. But deeper than all eloquence, grander than all grandeur of phrase, is that forlorn splendor of a life of pa.s.sionate experience painted in her works. There is no man so wise but he may learn from them, for they are the utterances of a soul in pain, a soul that has been tried. No man could have written her books, for no man could have had her experience, even with a genius equal to her own. The philosopher may smile sometimes at her philosophy, for _that_ is only the reflex of some man whose ideas she has adopted; the critic may smile sometimes--at her failure in delineating men; but both philosopher and critic must perceive that those writings of hers are _original_ and genuine, are transcripts of experience, and as such fulfil the primary condition of all literature.

This clear, intellectual apprehension of what woman can effect in literature, had much to do with George Eliot's own success. Yet it is doubtful if she was so true, in some directions, to the instincts of her s.e.x as was George Sand, Mrs. Browning or Charlotte Bronte. Hers was in large measure an intellect without s.e.x; and though she was a woman in all the instincts of her heart, yet intellectually she occupied the human rather than the woman's point of view. With a marvellous insight into the heart of woman, and great skill in portraying womanly natures, she had a man's way, the logical and impersonal manner, of viewing, the greater problems of human existence. Charlotte Bronte more truly represents the woman's way of viewing life; the trustful way of one educated in the conventional views of religion. She has given a corrector interpretation of the meaning of love to woman than George Eliot has been able to present, and simply because she thought and lived more nearly as other women think and live. Hers was the genius of spontaneous insight and emotion, that vibrated to every experience and was moved by every sentiment. Life played upon her heart like the wind upon an Aescolian harp, and she reflected its every movement of joy and sorrow. George Eliot studied life, probed into it, cut it in pieces, constructed a theory of it, and then told us what it means. In this she was unlike other women who have made a deep impression on literature. Mrs. Browning had nearly as much culture, was as thoughtful as she, but more genuinely feminine at the heart-core. Love she painted in a purer and happier fas.h.i.+on than that adopted by George Eliot, and she had the warmer impulses of a woman's tenderness. Her account of life is the truer, because it is the more ideal; and this may be said for Charlotte Bronte also. George Eliot had the larger intellect, the keener mind, was a profounder thinker; but her realism held her back from that instinctive conception of life which realizes its larger ideal meanings. It is not enough to see what is; man desires to know what ought to be. The poet is the seer, the one who apprehends, who has that finer eye for facts by which he is able to behold what the facts give promise of. This ideal vision Mrs.

Browning had, and in so far she was the superior of George Eliot. The same may be said for George Sand, who, with all her wildness and impurity, was a woman through and through. She was all heart, all impulse, lived in her instincts and emotions. She had the abandon, enthusiasm and spontaneity which George Eliot lacked. If the one represents the head, the other expresses the heart of woman. George Eliot, as a woman, thought, reasoned, philosophized; George Sand felt, gave every emotion reign, lived out all her impulses. What the one lacks the other had; where one was weak the other was strong. With somewhat of George Sand's idealism and emotional zeal for wider and freer life, George Eliot would have been a greater writer. Could she have moulded Dorothea with what is best in Consuelo, she would have been the rival of the greatest literary artists among men. Yet, with her limitations, it must be said that George Eliot is the superior of all other women in her literary accomplishments. If others are her superiors in some directions, in the totality of her powers she surpa.s.ses all. Even as an interpreter of woman's nature and the feminine side of life, she does not fail to keep well ahead of the best of feminine writers.

She is more thoroughly the master of her powers, is more self-centred, looks out upon human experience more calmly and with a more penetrating gaze. Foremost of the half-dozen women who during the present century have sought to interpret the feminine side of life, she has done much for her s.e.x. Daring more than others, she has given a greater promise than any other of what woman is to accomplish when her nature blossoms out into all its possibilities.

The chief rule for novel-writing laid down by George Eliot in these essays is, that the novel shall be the result of experience and true to nature.

She emphasizes the importance of this condition, and says that the novelist is bound to use actual experience as his material, and that alone, or else keep silent. Weak and silly novels are the result of an effort to break away from this rule; but the writer who ventures to disregard it never can be other than silly or weak. Novelists, she says, may either portray experience outwardly through observation, or inwardly through sentiment, or through a combination of both.

Observation without sentiment usually leads to humor or satire; sentiment without observation to rhetoric and long-drawn lachrymosity.

The extreme fault of the one is flippant superficiality, that of the other is what is called sickly sentimentality.

All true literature, she says, is based on fact, describes life as it is lived by men and women, touches and is fragrant with reality. This cardinal principle of literary art she has defined and ill.u.s.trated in her own strong and expressive manner in this _Review_ article.

All poetry, all fiction, all comedy, all _belles-lettres_, even to the playful caprices of fancy, are but the expression of experiences and emotions; and these expressions are the avenues through which we reach the sacred _adytum_ of humanity, and learn better to understand our fellows and ourselves. In proportion as these expressions are the forms of universal truths, of facts common to all nations or appreciable by all intellects, the literature which sets them forth is permanently good and true. Hence the universality and immortality of Homer, Shakspere, Cervantes, Moliere. But in proportion as these expressions are the forms of individual, peculiar truths, such as fleeting fas.h.i.+ons or idiosyncrasies, the literature is ephemeral. Hence tragedy never grows old, for it arises from elemental experience; but comedy soon ages, for it arises from peculiarities. Nevertheless, even idiosyncrasies are valuable as side glances; they are aberrations that bring the natural orbit into more prominent distinctness.

It follows from what has been said, that literature, being essentially the expression of experience and emotion--of what we have seen, felt and thought--that only _that_ literature is effective, and to be prized accordingly, which has _reality for its basis_ (needless to say that emotion is as real as the three-per-cents), _and effective in proportion to the depth and breadth of that basis_.

In writing? of the authors of _Jane Eyre_ and _Mary Barton_, she shows how important to her mind it is that the novel should have its basis in actual experience, and that it should be an expression of reality.

They have both given imaginative expression to actual experience--they have not invented, but reproduced; they have preferred the truth, such as their own experience testified, to the vague, false, conventional notions current in circulating libraries. Whatever of weakness may be pointed out in their works will, we are positive, be mostly in those parts where experience is deserted, and the supposed requirements of fiction have been listened to; whatever has really affected the public mind is, we are equally, certain, the transcript of some actual incident, character or emotion. Note, moreover, that beyond this basis of actuality these writers have the further advantage of deep feeling united to keen observation.