Chapter VII

Our custom, in these studies, of passing at the earliest possible moment from the abstract to the concrete, and of verifying theory by actual experiment, arrives at a sort of beautiful climax and apotheosis as we proceed from the abstract principles formulated in the last six lectures, to their exquisite concrete and verification in George Eliot.

At our last meeting we saw that during a period of time which we fix to a point by sweeping the mind from the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, the growing personality of man sent out three new processes, which have remarkably changed and enlarged the whole form of our individual and social structure.

I have found it highly useful in more than one connection to acquire a clear notion of these three processes by referring them all to a common physical _concept_ of direction. For example: we may with profit construct a diagram in which it shall appear that at the renaissance period mentioned the three great and distinctive new personal relations which man established for himself were (1) a relation upward,

unknown (Music)

Personality ---->[**arrow right] Fellow-man. (The Novel)[**arrow up
to "Music"]

[**arrow down from "Personality"]Nature. (Physical Science.)

towards the unknown, (2) a relation on our own level, a relation towards our equal,--that is towards our fellow man, and (3) a relation towards our inferior,--in the sense that the world is for man's use, is made for man,--that is, towards physical nature. We have seen how from the beginning of man's history these three relations did not acquire the vividness and energy of personal relations, nor any fixed or developable existence at all until the period mentioned.

I cannot help expressing earnest regret that the limits of my present subject have not allowed me to give any development whatever to this conception of the actual significance of the Renaissance as a significance which crystallizing into Music, the Novel, and Science, has left us those as the solid residuum of that movement; and it is not a mere sentimental generalization but a hard, scientific and unifiable fact that music is the distinctive form in which man's new relation to what is above him has expressed itself; the novel is the distinctive form in which man's new personal relation to his fellow-man has expressed itself; and science is the distinctive form in which man's new personal relation to nature has expressed itself.

I am perfectly well aware, for instance, that when one thinks of the Italian Opera with its banalities and fleshly frenzies; or when one thinks of the small, low, unmanly sensual lives which so many musicians have led under our eyes; one may well feel inclined to dispute this category to which I have assigned music, and to question whether music does belong to this wholly religious sphere. I long to be able to remind such questioners of the historic fact that music has been brought into the church as the mouthpiece of our worship, not by the sentimental people but by the sternest reformers and the most untheoretical and hard-handed workers: I long to remind them now it is the same Luther who would meet his accusers though ten thousand devils backed them, that cares most assiduously for the hymns of the church, makes them, sings them: how it is the same Puritan who fights winter and hunger and the savage, that is noted for his sweet songs, and must have his periodic opening of the musical avenue up towards the great God: or, passing far back to the times before music was music, and so making the case stronger, I long to remind them of a single line in a letter from Pliny the younger to Trajan in the year 110, which puts before me a dewy morning picture of music and Christian devotion that haunts my imagination--a line in which Pliny mentions some people who were in the habit of "meeting on a certain day before daylight and singing a hymn to Christ as to a God": or how in the fourth century the very Ambrosian chant which preceded the Gregorian chant is due to the fact that the good Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, casting about for solace, collects a number of psalm tunes and hymns and appoints them to be sung for the express purpose of consoling his people in their afflictions: and coming down to the birth of modern music, I long to remind these questioners of the noble and simple devoutness which Palestrina brings into the church worship with his music; of the perfect calm creative life of John Sebastian Bach whose music is so compact of devotion as to have inspired the well-known declaration that wherever it is played, it makes that place a church; and finally I long to remind them how essential a part of every modern church the organ-loft and the choir have come to be--and in full view of the terrible mistakes which these often make, of the screechy Italian opera music which one hears floating from this or that church on a Sunday, of the wholly undevout organ music with which the unfortunate flippant-minded organist often sends us forth--to declare that music is yet, as we have seen, a new art, that we have not really learned the uses of it, much less the scope of it; that indeed not all of us have even yet acquired the physical capacity or ear for it,--and that finally we are at the very threshold of those sweet applications we may hereafter make of that awful and mysterious power in music to take up our yearnings towards the infinite at the point where words and all articulate utterance fail, and bear them onward often to something like a satisfactory nearness to their divine object.

But all this must be left aside, and we must now pass on to consider that remarkable writer who for something more than twenty years past has been chaining the attention of our English world purely by virtue of her extraordinary endowment as to all three of these relations which I have here sketched in diagram--these relations to the growing personality of man to that which is above him, or the unknown--to that which is in his level, or his fellow-man; and to that which is beneath him, or nature--which have resulted respectively in music, the novel, and science.

If I could be allowed to construct a final text and summary of all the principles which have been announced in the preceding lectures, I could make none more complete than is furnished me by two English women who have recently been among us, and who, in the quietest way have each made an epoch, not only in literature but in life. These two women are Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot; and although our studies now lie more immediately with the latter, I shall find a frequent delight as we go on in comparing her printed words with those of Mrs. Browning, and in showing through what diverse forms of personality--so diverse as to be often really complementary to each other--these two have illustrated the doctrines I have hitherto expounded.

In beginning to get some clear view of the actual living personality which I have hitherto designated as George Eliot, one is immediately struck with the fact that it has enjoyed more of what Jack Falstaff would call a commodity of good names than falls to the lot of most mortals. As one rehearses these names it is curious also to reflect what a different train of associations each one suggests. It is hard to believe that Marian Evans, Amos Barton (for when the editor of Blackwood's was corresponding with her about her first unsigned manuscript, which was entitled, _The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton_, I find him addressing her as "My dear Amos"), George Eliot, Mrs. Lewes, and Mrs. Cross are one and the same person. Amid all these appellations I find myself most strongly attracted towards that of George Eliot. This was the name which she chose for herself; it was under this name that she made her great successes; it was by this name that she endeared herself to all who love great and faithful work; and surely--if one may paraphrase Poe--the angels call her George Eliot. Since therefore we are mainly interested in Marian Evans, or Mrs. Lewes, or Mrs. Cross, just in so far as they bear intimate relations to George Eliot, I find myself drawn, in placing before you such sketch as I have been able to make of this remarkable personage, to begin with some account of the birth of the specific George Eliot, and having acquired a view of the circumstances attending that event, to look backward and forward from that as a central point at the origin and life of Marian Evans on the one hand, and of Mrs. Lewes and Mrs. Cross on the other.

On a certain night in the autumn of 1856, the editor of _Blackwood's Magazine_, was seated in an apartment of his own house, reading a manuscript which he had lately received from London, called _The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton_. About 11 o'clock in the evening Thackeray, who had been staying with him and had been out to dinner, entered the room, and the editor remarked, "Do you know I think I have lighted upon a new author who is uncommonly like a first-class passenger?"

Hereupon he read to Thackeray a passage from the manuscript which he held in his hand. We are able to identify this passage, and it seems interesting to reproduce it here, not only as a specimen of the kind of matter which was particularly striking to the editor of a great magazine twenty-five years ago, but as about the first tangible utterance of the real George Eliot. The passage occurs early in the second chapter of the story. In the first chapter we have had some description of the old church and the existing society in Shepperton "twenty-five years ago," which dating from 1856 would show us that village about the year 1830-31. In the second chapter we are immediately introduced to the Rev. Amos Barton, and the page or two which our editor read to Thackeray was this:

Look at him as he winds through the little churchyard! The silver
light that falls aslant on church and tomb, enables you to see
his slim black figure, made all the slimmer by tight pantaloons.
He walks with a quick step, and is now rapping with sharp
decision at the vicarage door. It is opened without delay by the
nurse, cook, and housemaid, all at once--that is to say, by the
robust maid-of-all work, Nanny; and as Mr. Barton hangs up his
hat in the passage, you see that a narrow face of no particular
complexion--even the small-pox that has attacked it seems to have
been of a mongrel, indefinite kind--with features of no
particular shape, and an eye of no particular expression, is
surmounted by a slope of baldness gently rising from brow to
crown. You judge him, rightly, to be about forty. The house is
quiet, for it is half-past ten, and the children have long been
gone to bed. He opens the sitting-room door, but instead of
seeing his wife, as he expected, stitching with the nimblest of
fingers by the light of one candle, he finds her dispensing with
the light of a candle altogether. She is softly pacing up and
down by the red fire-light, holding in her arms little Walter,
the year-old baby, who looks over her shoulder with large
wide-open eyes, while the patient mother pats his back with her
soft hand, and glances with a sigh at the heap of large and small
stockings lying unmended on the table.

She was a lovely woman--Mrs. Amos Barton; a large, fair, gentle
Madonna, with thick, close chestnut curls beside her well rounded
cheeks, and with large, tender, short-sighted eyes. The flowing
line of her tall figure made the limpest dress look graceful, and
her old frayed black silk seemed to repose on her bust and limbs
with a placid elegance and sense of distinction, in strong
contrast with the uneasy sense of being no fit, that seemed to
express itself in the rustling of Mrs. Farquhar's _gros de
Naples_. The caps she wore would have been pronounced, when off
her head, utterly heavy and hideous--for in those days even
fashionable caps were large and floppy; but surmounting her long,
arched neck, and mingling their borders of cheap lace and ribbon
with her chestnut curls, they seemed miracles of successful
millinery. Among strangers she was shy and tremulous as a girl of
fifteen; she blushed crimson if any one appealed to her opinion;
yet that tall, graceful, substantial presence was so imposing in
its mildness, that men spoke to her with an agreeable sensation
of timidity.... I venture to say Mrs. Barton would never have
grown half so angelic if she had married the man you would
perhaps have had in your eye for her--a man with sufficient
income and abundant personal eclat. Besides, Amos was an
affectionate husband, and, in his way, valued his wife as his
best treasure.

* * * * *

"I wish we could do without borrowing money, and yet I don't see
how we can. Poor Fred must have some new shoes; I couldn't let
him go to Mrs. Bond's yesterday because his toes were peeping
out, dear child; and I can't let him walk anywhere except in the
garden. He must have a pair before Sunday. Really, boots and
shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one
can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there's
no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are."

Mrs. Barton was playfully undervaluing her skill in
metamorphosing boots and shoes. She had at that moment on her
feet a pair of slippers which had long ago lived through the
prunella phase of their existence, and were now running a
respectable career as black silk slippers, having been neatly
covered with that material by Mrs. Barton's own neat fingers.

Wonderful fingers those! they were never empty; for if she went
to spend a few hours with a friendly parishioner, out came her
thimble and a piece of calico or muslin, which before she left,
had become a mysterious little garment with all sorts of hemmed
ins and outs. She was even trying to persuade her husband to
leave off tight pantaloons; because if he would wear the ordinary
gun-cases, she knew she could make them so well that no one would
suspect the tailor.

But by this time Mr. Barton has finished his pipe, the candle
begins to burn low, and Mrs. Barton goes to see if Nanny has
succeeded in lulling Walter to sleep. Nanny is that moment
putting him in the little cot by his mother's bedside; the head
with its thin wavelets of brown hair, indents the little pillow;
and a tiny, waxen, dimpled fist hides the rosy lips, for baby is
given to the infantine peccadillo of thumb-sucking. So Nanny
could now join in the short evening prayer, and all go to bed.
Mrs. Barton carried up stairs the remainder of her heap of
stockings, and laid them on a table close to her bedside, where
also she placed a warm shawl, removing her candle, before she put
it out, to a tin socket fixed at the head of her bed. Her body
was weary, but her heart was not heavy, in spite of Mr. Woods the
butcher, and the transitory nature of shoe-leather; for her heart
so overflowed with love, she felt sure she was near a fountain of
love that would care for her husband and babes better than she
could foresee; so she was soon asleep. But about half-past five
o'clock in the morning, if there were any angels watching round
her bed--and angels might be glad of such an office--they saw
Mrs. Barton rise up quietly, careful not to disturb the
slumbering Amos, who was snoring the snore of the just; light her
candle, prop herself upright with the pillows, throw the warm
shawl round her shoulders, and renew her attack on the heap of
undarned stockings. She darned away until she heard Nanny
stirring, and then drowsiness came with the dawn; the candle was
put out, and she sank into a doze. But at nine o'clock she was at
the breakfast-table busy cutting bread and butter for five hungry
mouths, while Nanny, baby on one arm, in rosy cheeks, fat neck,
and night-gown, brought in a jug of hot milk and water.

Although Thackeray was not enthusiastic, the editor maintained his opinion and wrote the author that the manuscript was "worthy the honors of print and pay," addressing the author as "My dear Amos." Considerable correspondence followed in which the editor was free in venturing criticisms. The author had offered this as the first of a series to be called "_Scenes from Clerical Life_;" but no others of the series were yet written and the editor was naturally desirous to see more of them before printing the first. This appears to have made the author extremely timid, and for a time there was doubt whether it was worth while to write the remaining stories. For the author's encouragement, therefore, it was determined to print the first story without waiting to see the others; and accordingly in _Blackwood's Magazine_ for January, 1857, the story of _Amos Barton_ was printed.

This stimulus appears to have had its effect; and after the January number, each succeeding issue of _Blackwood's Magazine_ contained an instalment of the series known as _Scenes of Clerical Life_, until it was concluded in the number for November, 1857; the whole series embracing the three stories of _Amos Barton_, _Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story_ and _Janet's Repentance_. It was only while the second of these--_Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story_--was appearing in the Magazine that our George Eliot was born; for it was at this time that the editor of the Magazine was instructed to call the author by that name.

The hold which these three stories immediately took upon all thinking people was remarkable. In January, 1858, that is two months after the last instalment of _Janet's Repentance_--I find Charles Dickens writing this letter:

"MY DEAR LONGFORD--

"Will you--by such roundabout ways and methods as may present
themselves--convey this note of thanks to the author of 'Scenes
of Clerical Life,' whose two first stories I can never say enough
of, I think them so truly admirable. But, if those two volumes or
a part of them, were not written by a woman--then should I begin
to believe that I am a woman myself.

Faithfully Yours Always,

CHARLES DICKENS."

It is especially notable to find that the editor of the Magazine himself completely abandoned all those conservative habits of the prudent editor which have arisen from a thousand experiences of the rapid failures of this and that new contributor who seemed at first sure to sweep the world, and which always teach every conductor of a great magazine at an early stage of his career to be extremely guarded in his expressions to new writers however promising they may appear. This traditional guardedness seems to have been completely swept away by these stories; Mr. Blackwood writes letter after letter to George Eliot, full of expressions that the hackneyed editor would ordinarily consider extravagant: and finally in a letter concerning the publication in book-form of the magazine-stories: "You will recollect ... my impression was that the series had not lasted long enough in the Magazine to give you a hold on the general public, although long enough to make your literary reputation. Unless in exceptional cases, a very long time often elapses between the two stages of reputation--the literary and the public. Your progress will be _sure_, if not so quick as we could wish."

Before examining these stories, it seems a pleasant method of pursuing our account of the George Eliot thus introduced, to go forward a little to the time when a curious and amusing circumstance resulted in revealing her actual name and sex. Thus we seem to be making this lovely star rise before us historically as it rose before the world. I have just spoken of the literary interest which the stories excited in Mr. Blackwood. The personal interest appears to have been as great, and he was at first very anxious to make the acquaintance of his new contributor in the flesh. He was given to understand, however, that the contributor wished to remain obscure, for the present, and he forbore further inquiries with scrupulous delicacy. It happened, however, that presently the authorship of _Scenes of Clerical Life_ was claimed for another person, and the claim soon assumed considerable proportions. Certain residents about Nuneaton, in Warwickshire--where in point of fact George Eliot had been born and brought up--felt sure they recognized in the stories of Amos Barton and Mr. Gilfil portraits of people who had actually lived in that country, and began to inquire what member of their community could have painted these portraits. Presently, while the stories were running in the magazine, a newspaper published in the Isle of Man boldly announced that a certain Mr. Liggins, of Nuneaton, was their author. The only claim to literary power Mr. Liggins had, it seems, lay in the circumstance that he had run through a fortune at Cambridge; and in fact he himself denied the charge at first. But immediately upon the heels of _Scenes of Clerical Life_ appeared _Adam Bede_, and the honor of that great work was so seductive that for some reason or other--whether because the reiteration of his friends had persuaded him that he actually did write the works, in some such way as it is said that a man may tell a lie so often and long that he will finally come to believe it himself, or for whatever other reason--it seems that Mr. Liggins so far compromised himself that, without active denial by him, a friendly clergyman down in Warwickshire sent a letter to the _Times_, formally announcing Liggins as the author of _Scenes of Clerical Life_ and of _Adam Bede_. Hereupon appeared a challenge from the still mythical George Eliot, inviting Mr. Liggins to make a fair test of his capacity by writing a chapter or two in the style of the disputed works. The Blackwoods were thickly besieged with letters from various persons earnestly assuring them that Liggins was the author. To add to the complications, it was given out that Liggins was poor, so that many earnest persons wrote to the Blackwoods declaring that so great a genius ought not to be hampered by want, and liberally offering their purses to place him in such condition that he might write without being handicapped by care. It seems to have been particularly troublesome to the Blackwoods to prevent money from being misapplied in this way--for they were satisfied that Liggins was not the author; and they were made all the more careful by some previous experiences of a similar kind; and in one of Blackwood's letters to George Eliot he comically exclaims that "some years ago a rascal nearly succeeded in marrying a girl with money on the strength of being the author of a series of articles in the Magazine."

Thus what with the public controversy between the Liggins and anti-Liggins parties--for many persons appear to have remained firmly persuaded that Liggins was the true author--and what with the more legitimate stimulus excited by the confirmatory excellence of _Adam Bede_, the public curiosity was thoroughly aroused, so that even before _The Mill on the Floss_ appeared in 1860, it had become pretty generally known who "George Eliot" was.

Here, then, would seem to be a fitting point for us to pause a moment and endeavor to construct for ourselves some definite figure of the real flesh-and-blood creature who, up to this time, had remained the mere literary abstraction called George Eliot.

It appeared that her real name was Marian Evans, and that she was the daughter of a respectable land surveyor, who had married and settled at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire. Here she was born in November, 1820; and it seems pleasant to reflect that but a few miles off in the same county of Warwickshire was the birthplace of Shakspeare, whose place among male writers seems more nearly filled by Marian Evans or George Eliot among female writers than by any other woman, so that we have the greatest English man and the greatest English woman born, though two centuries and a half apart in time, but a few miles apart in space.

Here, among the same thick hedges and green fields of the fair English Midlands with which Shakspeare was familiar, Marian Evans lived for the first large part of her life. Perhaps a more quiet, uneventful existence as to external happenings could hardly be imagined; and that Marian Evans was among the quietest of the quiet residents there seems cunningly enough indicated if we remember that when the good people of Nuneaton first began to suspect that some resident of that region had been taking their portraits in _Scenes of Clerical Life_, none seemed to think for a moment of a certain Marian Evans as possibly connected with the matter; and popular suspicion, after canvassing the whole ground, was able to find only one person--to wit, the Mr. Liggins just referred to--who seemed at all competent to such work.

Of these demure, reserved, uneventful years of country existence it is, of course, impossible to lay before you any record; no life of George Eliot has yet been given to the public. Sometime ago, however, I happened upon a letter of Marian Evans published in an English paper, in which she refers with so much particularity to this portion of her life, that I do not know how we could gain a more vivid and authentic view thereof than by quoting it here. Specifically, the letter relates to a controversy that had sprung up as to who was the original of the character of Dinah Morris--that beautiful Dinah Morris, you will remember in _Adam Bede_--solemn, fragile, strong Dinah Morris, the woman-preacher whom I find haunting my imagination in strange but entrancing unions of the most diverse forms, as if, for instance, a snow-drop could also be St. Paul, as if a kiss could be a gospel, as if a lovely phrase of Chopin's most inward music should become suddenly an Apocalypse--that rare, pure and strange Dinah Morris who would alone consecrate English literature if it had yielded no other gift to man. It would seem that possibly a dim suggestion of such a character may have been due to a certain aunt of hers, Elizabeth Evans, whom Marian had met in her girlhood; but this suggestion was all; and the letter shows us clearly that the character of Dinah Morris was almost an entire creation. The letter is as follows:

HOLLY LODGE, Oct. 7, 1859.

DEAR SARA:

I should like, while the subject is vividly present with me, to
tell you more exactly than I have ever yet done, what I knew of
my aunt, Elizabeth Evans. My father, you know, lived in
Warwickshire all my life with him, having finally left
Staffordshire first, and then Derbyshire, six or seven years
before he married my mother. There was hardly any intercourse
between my father's family, resident in Derbyshire and
Staffordshire, and our family--few and far between visits of (to
my childish feelings) strange uncles and aunts and cousins from
my father's far-off native county, and once a journey of my own,
as a little child, with my father and mother, to see my uncle
William, a rich builder, in Staffordshire--but not my uncle and
aunt Samuel, so far as I can recall the dim outline of
things--are what I remember of northerly relations in my
childhood.

But when I was seventeen or more--after my sister was married and
I was mistress of the house--my father took a journey into
Derbyshire, in which, visiting my uncle and aunt Samuel, who were
very poor, and lived in a humble cottage at Wirksworth, he found
my aunt in a very delicate state of health after a serious
illness, and, to do her bodily good, he persuaded her to return
with him, telling her that I should be very, very happy to have
her with me for a few weeks. I was then strongly under the
influence of Evangelical belief, and earnestly endeavoring to
shape this anomalous English-Christian life of ours into some
consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New
Testament.

I was delighted to see my aunt. Although I had only heard her
spoken of as a strange person, given to a fanatical vehemence of
exhortation in private as well as public, I believed that we
should find sympathy between us. She was then an old woman--above
sixty--and, I believe, had for a good many years given up
preaching. A tiny little woman, with bright, small dark eyes, and
hair that had been black, I imagine, but was now gray--a pretty
woman in her youth, but of a totally different physical type from
Dinah. The difference--as you will believe--was not simply
physical; no difference is. She was a woman of strong natural
excitability, which, I know, from the description I have heard my
father and half-sister give, prevented her from the exercise of
discretion under the promptings of her zeal. But this vehemence
was now subdued by age and sickness; she was very gentle and
quiet in her manners--very loving--and (what she must have been
from the very first) a truly religious soul, in whom the love of
God and love of man were fused together. There was nothing highly
distinctive in her religious conversation. I had had much
intercourse with pious Dissenters before. The only freshness I
found in our talk, came from the fact that she had been the
greater part of her life a Wesleyan; and though she left the
society when women were no longer allowed to preach, and joined
the new Wesleyans, she retained the character of thought that
belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked with a
Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about
predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her
superiority came out, and I remember now, with loving admiration,
one thing which at the time I disapproved. It was not strictly a
consequence of her Arminian belief, and at first sight might seem
opposed to it,--yet it came from the spirit of love which clings
to the bad logic of Arminianism. When my uncle came to fetch her,
after she had been with us a fortnight or three weeks, he was
speaking of a deceased minister, once greatly respected, who from
the action of trouble upon him had taken to small tippling,
though otherwise not culpable. "But I hope the good man's in
heaven for all that," said my uncle. "Oh, yes," said my aunt,
with a deep inward groan of joyful conviction, "Mr. A.'s in
heaven--that's sure." This was at the time an offence to my
stern, ascetic, hard views--how beautiful it is to me now!

As to my aunt's conversation, it is a fact that the only two
things of any interest I remember in our lonely sittings and
walks are her telling me one sunny afternoon how she had, with
another pious woman, visited an unhappy girl in prison, stayed
with her all night, and gone with her to execution; and one or
two accounts of supposed miracles in which she believed--among
the rest, the face with the crown of thorns seen in the glass. In
her account of the prison scenes, I remember no word she
uttered--I only remember her tone and manner, and the deep
feeling I had under the recital. Of the girl she knew nothing, I
believe--or told me nothing--but that she was a common coarse
girl, convicted of child-murder. The incident lay in my mind for
years on years, as a dead germ, apparently--till time had placed
in my mind a nidus in which it could fructify; it then turned out
to be the germ of "Adam Bede."

I saw my aunt twice after this. Once I spent a day and night with
my father in the Wirksworth cottage sleeping with my aunt, I
remember. Our interview was less interesting than in the former
time: I think I was less simply devoted to religious ideas. And
once again she came with my uncle to see me--when my father and I
were living at Foleshill; then there was some pain, for I had
given up the form of Christian belief, and was in a crude state
of free-thinking. She stayed about three or four days, I think.
This is all I remember distinctly, as matter I could write down,
of my dear aunt, whom I really loved. You see how she suggested
Dinah; but it is not possible you should see as I do how entirely
her individuality differed from Dinah's. How curious it seemed to
me that people should think Dinah's sermon, prayers and speeches
were copied--when they were written with hot tears, as they
surged up in my own mind!

As to my indebtedness to facts of local and personal history of a
small kind, connected with Staffordshire and Derbyshire--you may
imagine of what kind that is when I tell you that I never
remained in either of those counties more than a few days
together, and of only two such visits have I more than a shadowy,
interrupted recollection. The details which I knew as facts, and
have made use of for my picture, were gathered from such
imperfect allusion and narrative as I heard from my father in his
occasional talk about old times.

As to my aunt's children or grandchildren saying, if they did
say, that Dinah is a good portrait of my aunt--that is the vague,
easily satisfied notion imperfectly instructed people always have
of portraits. It is not surprising that simple men and women
without pretension to enlightened discrimination should think a
generic resemblance constitutes a portrait, when we see the great
public so accustomed to be delighted with misrepresentations of
life and character, which they accept as representations, that
they are scandalized when art makes a nearer approach to truth.

Perhaps I am doing a superfluous thing in writing all this to
you--but I am prompted to do it by the feeling that in future
years "Adam Bede" and all that concerns it may have become a dim
portion of the past, and I may not be able to recall so much of
the truth as I have now told you.

Once more, thanks, dear Sara.
Ever your loving
MARIAN.

It is easy to gather from this letter that whilst the existence of Marian Evans was calm enough externally, her inner life was full of stirring events--of the most stirring events, in fact which can agitate the human soul for it is evident that she had passed along some quite opposite phases of religious belief. In 1851, after a visit to the continent, she goes--where all English writers seem to drift by some natural magic--to London, and fixes her residence there. It is curious enough that with all her clearness of judgment she works here for five years, apparently without having perceived the vocation for which her whole natural and acquired outfit had so remarkably prepared her. We find her translating Spinoza's _Ethics_; not only translating but publishing Feuerbach's _Essence of Christianity_ and Strauss's _Life of Jesus_. She contributes learned essays to the Westminster Review; it is not until the year 1856, when she is thirty-six years old that her first slight magazine story is sent to Blackwood's; and even after his first commendations her timidity and uncertainty as to whether she could succeed in story-writing are so great that she almost resolved to give it up. I should regard it as mournful, if I could think it religious to regard anything as mournful which has happened and is not revocable, that upon coming to London Marian Evans fell among a group of persons represented by George Henry Lewes. If one could have been her spiritual physician at this time one certainly would have prescribed for her some of those warm influences which dissipate doubt by exposing it to the fierce elemental heats of love, of active charity. One would have prescribed for her the very remedy she herself has so wisely commended in _Janet's Repentance_.

"No wonder the sick room and the lazaretto have so often been a
refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt--a place of repose
for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all
creeds and philosophers are of one mind; here, at least, the
conscience will not be dogged by adverse theory; here you may
begin to act without settling one preliminary question. To
moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the night-watches, to
bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine
the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of
the hand or beseeching glance of the eye--these are offices that
demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to
propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls
where the stare and glare of the world are shut out, and every
voice is subdued--where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on
the tender mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of man to
man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity; bigotry
cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into
quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it."

Or one might have prescribed for her America where the knottiest social and moral problems disappear unaccountably before a certain new energy of individual growth which is continually conquering new points of view from which to regard the world.

At the time to which we have now brought her history, Marian Evans would seem to have been a singularly engaging person. She was small in stature and her face was what would be called plain here; but she was widely read, master of several languages, a good talker and listener: and beyond all, every current of testimony runs towards a certain intensity and loving fire which pervaded her and which endowed her with irresistible magnetic attraction for all sensitive souls that came near her. Her love for home matters, and for the spot of earth where she had been born, her gentle affection for animals; how the Bible and Thomas a Kempis were her favorite books, these and a thousand womanly traits I hope to bring out as we study some of her greater works,--for with all her reputed reserve I find scarcely any writer so sincerely communicative and so frankly desirous of sympathy on the part of her reader as George Eliot. In the next article I shall ask leave to present you with some pictures of the stage at which English novel-writing has arrived under the recent hands of Scott, Thackeray and Dickens when George Eliot is timidly offering her first manuscript to Blackwood's; and I shall then offer some quotations from these first three stories--particularly from _Janet's Repentance_ which seems altogether the most important of the three--and shall attempt to show distinctly what were the main new features of wit, of humor, of doctrine, and of method which were thus introduced into literature, especially in connection with similar features which about this same time were being imparted by Mrs. Browning.

Meantime, let me conclude by asking you to fix your attention for a moment on this figure of Milly, sweet wife of Amos Barton, going to bed with her unmended basket of stockings in great fatigue, yet in great love and trust, and contrast it with that figure of Prometheus, nailed to the Caucasian rock in pain and hate, which formed the first object of these studies. What prodigious spiritual distance we have swept over from the Titan lying down, to unrest, thundering defiance against Jove's thunder, as if clashing shield against shield, and the tender-limbed woman whom the simple narrative puts before us in these words: "Her body was very weary, but her heart was not heavy ...; for her heart so overflowed with love," &c. Fixing your attention upon this word "love," and reminding you how, at the close of the last lecture, we found that the whole movement of the human spirit which we have traced here as the growth of personality towards the unknown--towards fellow-man--towards nature,--resulting in music, in the novel, in science--that this whole movement becomes a unity when we arrive at the fact that it really imparts a complete change in man's most ultimate conception of things--a change, namely, from the conception of Justice as the organic idea of moral order, a conception which we have seen Aeschylus and Plato vainly working out to the outrageous conclusions of Prometheus, of the _Republic_; to the conception of Love as the organic idea of moral order, a conception which we are just now to see George Eliot working out to the divinely-satisfactory conclusion of Milly Barton, who conquers with gentle love a world which proved refractory alike to the justice of Jove and the defiance of Prometheus; reminding you, I say, of this concurrent change from feeble personality and justice to strong personality and love, what an amazing arc of progress we have traversed in coming from Aeschylus to George Eliot!

And it is, finally, most interesting to find this change receiving clear expression, for the first time in English literature, in the works of the two women I have mentioned, Mrs. Browning and George Eliot. In this very autumn, when we have seen the editor of _Blackwood's Magazine_ reading the MS. of George Eliot's first story to Thackeray, Mrs. Browning is sending _Aurora Leigh_ to print; and, as I shall have frequent occasion to point out, the burden of _Aurora Leigh_ as well as of George Eliot's whole cyclus of characters is love.

There is a charming scene in the first Act of Bayard Taylor's _Prince Deukalion_, which, though not extending to the height we have reached, yet very dramatically sums up a great number of ideas which converge towards it. In this scene Gaea, the Earth, mother of men, is represented as tenderly meditating upon her son, man. Near her stands a rose-tree, from one bud of which Love is presently to emerge. She says:

"I change with man,
Mother, not more than partner, of his fate.
Ere he was born I dreamed that he might be,
And through long ages of imperfect life
Waited for him. Then vexed with monstrous shapes,
That spawned and wallowed in primeval ooze,
I lay supine and slept, or dreamed to sleep;
And dreamed, or waking felt as in a dream,
Some touch of hands, some soft delivering help,
And he was there! His faint new voice I heard;
His eye that met the sun, his upright tread,
Thenceforth were mine! And with him came the palm,
The oak, the rose, the swan, the nightingale;
The barren bough hung apples to the sun;
Dry stalks made harvest: breezes in the woods
Then first found music, and the turbid sea
First rolled a crystal breaker to the shore.
His foot was on the mountains, and the wave
Upheld him: over all things huge and coarse
There came the breathing of a regal sway,
Which bent them into beauty. Order new
Followed the march of new necessity,
And what was useless, or unclaimed before,
Took value from the seizure of his hands."

In the midst of like thoughts, a bud on a rose which stands by Gaea bursts open, and Eros, the antique god of young love, appears from it.

GAEA.

Blithe, tricksome spirit! art thou left alone
Of gods and all their intermediate kin
The sweet survivor? Yet a single seed,
When soil and seasons lend their alchemy,
May clothe a barren continent in green.

EROS.

Was I born, that I should die?
Stars that fringe the outer sky
Know me: yonder sun were dim
Save my torch enkindle him.
Then, when first the primal pair
Found me in the twilight air,
I was older than their day,
Yet to them as young as they.
All decrees of fate I spurn;
Banishment is my return:
Hate and force purvey for me,
Death is shining victory.