The Ethics of George Eliots Works | Page 4

of humanity; and that then alone true life dawns upon
man when truth and right begin to stand out as the first objects of his
regard. Never since has Carlyle's strong rough grasp relaxed its hold of
this truth; and howsoever in later works, in what are intended as
biographical illustrations of it, he may seem to confuse mere strength
and energy with righteousness of will, and thence to confound outward
and visible success with vital achievement, that strength and energy are
always in his eyes, fighting or enduring against some phase of the
many- headed hydra of wrong.
Of Ruskin it seems almost superfluous to speak. They have read him to
little purpose who have not felt that all his essays and criticisms in art,
all his expositions in social and political science, are essentially unified
by one animating and pervading truth: the truth that to man's moral
relations, or, in other words, the developing and perfecting in him of
that Divine image in which he is made,--all things else, joy, beauty, life
itself, are of account only to the degree in which they are consciously
used to subserve that higher life. His ultimate standard of value to
which everything, alike in art and in social and political relations, is

referred, is--not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous, sentimental,
or aesthetic, but--the measure in which may thereby be trained up that
higher life of humanity. Art is to him God's minister, not when she is
simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature in such forms and
phases as shall tend to bring man nearer to moral truth, beauty, and
purity. The Ios and Ariadnes of the debased Italian schools, the boors
of Teniers, the Madonnas of Guido, are truer to one phase of nature
than are Fra Angelico's angels, or Tintoret's Crucifixion. But that nature
is humanity as degraded by sense; and therefore the measure of their
truthfulness is for him also the measure of their debasement.
In poetry, the key-note so firmly struck by Wordsworth in his noble
"Ode to Duty" has been as firmly and more delicately caught up by
other singers; who, moreover, have seen more clearly than Wordsworth
did, that it is for faith, not for sight, that duty wears
"The Godhead's most benignant grace;"
for the path along which she leads is inevitably on earth steep, rugged,
and toilsome. Take almost any one of Tennyson's more serious poems,
and it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled
and perfected only through moral endurance and struggle. "Ulysses" is
no restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and
security by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun
within, to press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril,
and fear. "The Lotos-eaters" are no mere legendary myth: they shadow
forth what the lower instincts of our humanity are ever urging us all to
seek--ease and release from the ceaseless struggle against wrong, the
ceaseless straining on toward right. "In Memoriam" is the record of
love "making perfect through suffering:" struggling on through the
valley of the shadow of death toward the far-off, faith-seen light
"behind the veil." "The Vision of Sin" portrays to us humanity choosing
enjoyment as its only aim; and of necessity sinking into degradation so
profound, that even the large heart and clear eye of the poet can but
breathe out in sad bewilderment, "Is there any hope?"--can but dimly
see, far off over the darkness, "God make Himself an awful rose of
dawn." In one of the most profound of all His creations--"The Palace of

Art"--we have presented to us the soul surrounding itself with
everything fair and glad, and in itself pure, not primarily to the eye, but
to the mind: attempting to achieve its destiny and to fulfil its life in the
perfections of intellectual beauty and aesthetic delight. But the palace
of art, made the palace of the soul, becomes its dungeon-house,
self-generating and filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes;
and the heaven of intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative
and intenser hell. The "Idylls of the King" are but exquisite variations
on the one note--that the only true and high life of humanity is the life
of full and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of
necessity one of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure. In
"Vivien"--the most remarkable of them all for the subtlety of its
conception and the delicacy of its execution,--the picture is perhaps the
darkest and saddest time can show--that of a nature rich to the utmost
in all lower wisdom of the mind, struggling long and apparently truly
against the flesh, yet all the while dallying with the foul temptation, till
the flesh prevails; and