Chapter XIX (1)

In _Amos Barton_ she states her reasons for portraying characters of so little outward interest. Amos had none of the more manly and sturdy qualities of Adam Bede, and yet to George Eliot it was enough that he was human, that trouble and heartache could come to him, and that he must carry his share of the burdens and weaknesses of the world.

The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate,
was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and
perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a
man who was so very far from remarkable,--a man whose virtues were not
heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not
the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and
unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that
complaint many years ago. "An utterly uninteresting character!" I think
I hear a lady reader exclaim,--Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who
prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets,
adultery and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who
is quite a "character."

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your
fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least
eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in
the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily
wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and
liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they
have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their
brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have
not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They
are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is
more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people--many of
them--bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the
painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys;
their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they
have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in
their very insignificance,--in our comparison of their dim and narrow
existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which
they share?

Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me
to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy,
lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull
gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones. In that
case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know what further
befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I
have to tell at all beneath your attention.

In her hands the novel becomes the means of recording the history of those whom no history takes note of, and of bringing before the world its unnamed and unnoted heroes. Professor Dowden says her sympathy spreads with a powerful and even flow in every direction. In this effort she has been eminently successful; and her loving sympathy with all that is human; her warm-hearted faith in the weak and unfortunate; the graciousness of her love for the common souls who are faithful and true in their way and in their places, will excuse much greater literary faults than any into which she has fallen. The sincere and loving humanity of her books gives them a great charm, and an influence wide-reaching and noble.

No one of her imitators and successors has gained anything of like power which is given to her novels by her intense sympathy with her characters. Others have described ignorant and coarse phases of life as something to look at and study, but not to bring into the heart and love. George Eliot loves her characters, has an intense affection for them, pours out her motherliness upon them. Not so Daudet or James or Howells, who study crude life on the surface, and because it is the fashion. There is no heart-nearness in their work, little of passionate human desire to do justice to phases of life hitherto neglected. She has in this regard the genius of Scott and Hugo, who live in and with their characters, and so make them living and real. She identifies herself with the life she describes, and never looks at it from without, with curious and cold and critical gaze, simply for the sake of making a novel.

She is more at home among villagers than in the drawing-room. A profound intuition has led her to the very heart of English life among the happier and worthier classes of working-people. There is no squalor in her books, no general misery, but always conscience, respectability and home-comforts. There is something of coarseness in some of her scenes, and a realism too bare and bald; but for the most part she has come far short of what might have been done in picturing the repulsive and sensual side of life. In all her books there is abundant evidence of her painstaking, and of her anxious desire to be truthful. She has studied life on the spot, and gives to it the local coloring. In writing _Romola_, she searched into every corner of Florentine history, custom and thought. She is true to every touch of local incident and manner. In _Daniel Deronda_, she made herself familiar with Jewish life, and has given the race aroma to her portraits and scenes. She is thoroughly a realist, but a realist with a wide and attractive sympathy, a profound insight into motives and impulses, and a strong imagination. She is too great a genius to believe that the novelist can describe life as the geologist describes the strata of the earth. She feels with her characters; she has that form of insight or imagination which enables her to apprehend a mind totally unlike her own. This is what saves the history of Hetty from coarseness and repulsiveness. It is Hetty's own account of her life-woes. Its infinite pathos, and the tenderness and pity it awakens, destroys our concern for the other features of the narrative.

Psychologic analysis seems out of place in a novel, but with George Eliot it is a chief purpose of her writing. She lays bare the soul, opens its inmost secrets, and its anatomy is minutely studied. She devotes more space to the inner life and character of her personalities than to her narratives and conversations. She traces some of her characters through a long process of development, and shows how they are affected by the experiences of life. Her more important characters grow up under her pen, develop under the influence of thought or sorrow. Novelists usually carry their characters through their pages on the same level of mind and life; and George Eliot not only does this with her uncultured characters, but she also shows the soul in the process of unfolding or expanding. None of her leading characters are at the end what they were in the beginning; with the most subtle power she traces the growth of Tito Melema's mind through its perilous descent into selfish corruption, and with equal or even greater skill she unfolds the history of Daniel Deronda's development under the impulse to find for himself a life-mission. In this direction George Eliot is always great. Her skill is remarkable, albeit she has not sounded either the highest or the lowest ranges of human capacity. The range within which her studies are made is a wide one, however, and within it she has shown herself the master of human motives and a consummate artist in portraying the soul. She devotes the utmost care to describing some plain person who appears in her pages for but a moment, and is as much concerned that he shall be truly presented as if he were of the utmost consequence. More than one otherwise very ordinary character acquires under this treatment of hers the warmest interest for the reader. And she describes such persons, because their influence is subtle or momentous as it affects the lives of others. Personages and incidents play a part in her books not for the sake of the plot or to secure dramatic unity, but for the sake of manifesting the soul, in order that the unfoldment of psychologic analysis may go on. The unity she aims at is that of showing the development of the soul under influence of some one or more decisive impulses or as affected by given surroundings. The lesser characters, while given a nature quite their own, help in the process of unfolding the personality which gives central purpose to each of her novels. The influence of opposite natures on each other, the moulding power of circumstances, and especially the bearings of hereditary impulses, all play a prominent part in this process of psychologic analysis.

Through page after page and chapter after chapter she traces the feelings and thoughts of her characters. How each decisive event appears to them is explained at length. Moreover, the most trivial trait of character, the most incidental impulse, is described in all its particularity. Through many pages Hetty's conduct in her own bedroom is laid before the reader, and in no other way could her nature have been so brought to our knowledge. Her shallow lightness of heart and her vanity could not be realized by ordinary intercourse with one so pretty and so bright; but George Eliot describes Hetty's taking out the earrings given her by Arthur, and we see what she is. The author seeks to open before us the inner life of that childish soul, and we see into its nature and realize all its capacities for good and evil.

Oh, the delight of taking out that little box and looking at the
earrings! Do not reason about it, my philosophical reader, and say that
Hetty, being very pretty, must have known that it did not signify
whether she had any ornaments or not; and that, moreover, to look at
earrings which she could not possibly wear out of her bedroom could
hardly be a satisfaction, the essence of vanity being a reference to
the impressions produced on others; you will never understand women's
natures if you are so excessively rational. Try rather to divest
yourself of all your rational prejudices, as much as if you were
studying the psychology of a canary-bird, and only watch the movements
of this pretty round creature as she turns her head on one side with an
unconscious smile at the earrings nestled in the little box. Ah! you
think, it is for the sake of the person who has given them to her, and
her thoughts are gone back now to the moment when they were put into
her hands. No; else why should she have cared to have earrings rather
than anything else? and I know that she had longed for earrings from
among all the ornaments she could imagine.

This faculty of soul interpretation may be illustrated by innumerable passages and from characters the most diverse in nature and capacity. As an instance of her ability to interpret uncommon minds, those affected in some peculiar manner, reference may be made to Baldassarre, in _Romola_. The descriptions of this man's sufferings, the giving way of his mind under them, and the purpose of revenge which took complete possession of him, form a study in character unsurpassed. For subtle insight into the action of a morbid mind, and for a majestic conception of human passion, the passage wherein Baldassarre finds he can again read his Greek book is most worthy of attention.

Her ability to delineate a growing mind, and a mind at work under the influence of new and rare experiences, is shown in the case of Daniel Deronda. His quiet love of ease as a boy is described as he sits one day watching the falling rain, and meditates on the possibility which has been suggested to him, that his is not to be the life of a gentleman.

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, aptitudes;
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 noble 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 partisanship,
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 analysis 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 multitude, 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 passion, but without
fixed local habitation to render fellowship 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
multitude--some social captainship, which would come to me as a duty,
and not to be striven for as a personal prize.

In her strong tendency to psychologic analysis George Eliot much resembles Robert Browning. It is the life of passion 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 analysis 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 analysis, 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 analyze 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 assigned 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 noble 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 entitles 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 scholarship, 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 sex. While believing that woman can do her work best by being true to the instincts, sympathies and capacities of her sex, 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 transmuted 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
associating 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 sex. 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 assigned 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 authorship. 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 illustrations, 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, passions and conventionalisms of men are amply
illustrated; 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 assuredly 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 circumstance, 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,
assume 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 surpasses 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 analogous 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 Shelley 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 transmutation
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, classing them as being of the _mind-and-millinery_, the _oracular, the _white-neck-cloth_, and the _modern-antique_ varieties. All her powers of analysis 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 sex, 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 entity, 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
circumstances. "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 cluster 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 aptitudes 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 masses, it may take any form and yet
be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements--genuine
observation, humor and passion. But it is precisely this absence
of rigid requirement which constitutes 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 ass, 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
passionate 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 illustrate 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 illustriously 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 passages 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 surpasses everything France has yet produced.
There has been no style at once so large, so harmonious, so expressive,
and so unaffected: like a light shining through an alabaster vase, the
ideas shine 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 passion that was in him. But deeper than
all eloquence, grander than all grandeur of phrase, is that forlorn
splendor of a life of passionate 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 sex as was George Sand, Mrs. Browning or Charlotte Brontë. Hers was in large measure an intellect without sex; 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 Brontë 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 fashion 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 Brontë 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 surpasses 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 sex. 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 illustrated 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 fashions 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.

Especially severe is her condemnation of the tendency to introduce only fashionable or learned people into novels. She says the silly novelists rarely make us acquainted with "any other than very lofty and fashionable society," and very often the authors know nothing of such society except from the reading of other such novels.