The Ethics of George Eliots Works | Page 9

side when the stern conflict between pleasure and right, sense and soul, the world and God, is being fought out within her.
With her introduction to Stephen Guest, that conflict assumes specific and tangible form; and it has emphatically to be fought out alone. All external circumstances are against her; even Lucy's sweet unjealous temper, and Tom's bitter hatred, combining with Philip's painful self- consciousness to keep the safeguard of his presence less constantly at her side. At last the crowning temptation comes. Without design, by a surprise on the part of both, the step has been taken which may well seem irretraceable. Going back from it is not merely going back from joy and hope, but going back to deeper loneliness than she has ever known; and going back also to misunderstanding, shame, and lifelong repentance. But conscience, the imperative requirements of the higher life within, have resumed their power. There is no paltering with that inward voice; no possibility but the acceptance of the present urgent right,--the instant fleeing from the wrong, though with it is bound up all of enjoyment life can know. It is thus she has to take up her cross, not the less hard to bear that her own hands have so far fashioned it.
One grave criticism on the death-scene has been made, that at first sight seems unanswerable. It is said that no such full, swift recognition between the brother and sister, in those last moments of their long-severed lives, is possible; because there is no true point of contact through which such recognition, on the brother's part, could ensue. We think, however, there is something revealed to us in the brother which brings him nearer to what is noblest and deepest in the sister than at first appears. He also has his ideal of duty and right: it may not be a very broad or high one, but it is there; it is something without and above mere self; and it is resolutely adhered to at whatsoever cost of personal ease or pleasure. That such aim cannot be so followed on without, to some extent, ennobling the whole nature, is shown in his love for Lucy. It has come on him, and grown up with him, unconsciously, when there was no wrong connected with it; but with her engagement to Stephen all this is changed. Hard and stern as he is to others, he is thenceforth the harder and sterner still to self. There is no paltering with temptation, such as brings the sister so near to hopeless fall. Here the cold harsh brother rises to true nobility, and shows that upon him too life has established its higher claim than that of mere self-seeking enjoyment. There is, then, this point of contact between these two, that each has an ideal of duty and light, and to it each is content to sacrifice all things else. Through this, in that death-look, they recognise each other; and the author's motto in its full significance is justified, "In their death they were not divided."
'Silas Marner,' though carefully finished, is of slighter character than any of the author's later works, and does not require lengthened notice. In Godfrey Cass we have again, though largely modified, the type of character in which self is the main object of regard, and in which, therefore, with much that is likeable, and even, for the circumstances in which it has grown up, estimable, there is little depth, truth, or steadfastness. Repentance, and, so far as it is possible, restoration, come to him mainly through the silent ministration of a purer and better nature than his own: but the self-pleasing of the past has brought about that which no repentance can fully reverse or restore. Even on the surface this is shown; for Eppie, unowned and neglected, can never become his daughter. But--far beyond and beneath this--we have here, and elsewhere throughout the author's works, indicated to us one of the most solemn, and, at the same time, most certain truths of our existence: that there are forms of accepted and fostered evil so vital that no repentance can fully blot them out from the present or the future of life. No turning away from the accursed thing, no discipline, no futurity near or far, can ever place Arthur Donnithorne or Godfrey Cass alongside Dinah Morris or Adam Bede. Their irreversible part of self-worship precludes them, by the very laws of our being, from the highest and broadest achievement of life and destiny.
Leaving for the present 'Romola,' as in many respects more directly linking itself with George Eliot's great poetic effort, 'The Spanish Gypsy,' we turn for a little to 'Felix Holt,' the next of her English tales. It would be perhaps natural to select, from among the characters here presented