The Ethics of George Eliots Works | Page 6

and also that what we
conceive to be the vital aim of her works is most definitely and firmly
pronounced. Here also we have illustrated that breadth of nature, that
power of discerning the true and good under whatsoever external form
it may wear, which is almost a necessary adjunct of the author's true
and large ideal of the Christian life. She goes, it might almost seem, out
of her way to select, from that theological school with which her whole
nature is most entirely at dissonance, one of her most touching
illustrations of a life struggling on towards its highest through contempt,
sorrow, and death. That narrowest of all sectarianisms, which arrogates
to itself the name Evangelical, and which holds up as the first aim to
every man the saving of his own individual soul, has furnished to her
Mr Tryan, whose life is based on the principle laid down by the one
great Evangelist, "He that loveth his soul shall lose it; he that hateth his
soul shall keep it unto life eternal." {15}
Mr Tryan, as first represented to us, is not an engaging figure. Narrow
and sectarian, full of many uncharities, to a great extent vain and self-
conscious, glad to be flattered and idolised by men and women by no
means of large calibre or lofty standard--it might well seem impossible
to invest such a figure with one heroic element. Yet it is before this

man we are constrained to bow down in reverence, as before one truer,
greater, nobler than ourselves; and as we stand with Janet Dempster
beside the closing grave, we may well feel that one is gone from among
us whose mere presence made it less hard to fight our battle against
"the world, the flesh, and the devil." The explanation of the paradox is
not far to seek. The principle which animated the life now withdrawn
from sight--which raised it above all its littlenesses and made it a
witness for God and His Christ, constraining even the scoffers to feel
the presence of "Him who is invisible"--this principle was self-sacrifice.
So at least the imperfections of human speech lead us to call that which
stands in antagonism to self-pleasing; but before Him to whom all
things are open, what we so call is the purification and exaltation of
that self in us which is the highest created reflex of His image--the
growing up of it into His likeness for ever.
We may here, once for all, and very briefly, advert to one specialty of
the author's works, which, if we are right in our interpretation of their
central moral import, flows almost necessarily as a corollary from it. In
each of these sketches one principal figure is blotted out just when our
regards are fixed most strongly on it. Milly, Tina, and Mr Tryan all die,
at what may well appear the crisis of life and destiny for themselves or
others. There is in this--if not in specific intention, certainly in practical
teaching--something deeper and more earnest than any mere artistic
trick of pathos--far more real than the weary commonplace of
suggesting to us any so-called immortality as the completion and
elucidation of earthly life; far profounder and simpler, too, than the
only less trite commonplace of hinting to us the mystery of God's ways
in what we call untimely death. The true import of it we take to be the
separation of all the world calls success or reward from the life that is
thus seeking its highest fulfilment. In conformity with the average
doctrine of "compensation," Amos Barton should have appeared before
us at last installed in a comfortable living, much respected by his flock,
and on good terms with his brethren and well-to-do neighbours around.
With a truer and deeper wisdom, the author places him before us in that
brief after-glimpse still a poor, care-worn, bowed-down man, and the
sweet daughter-face by his side shows the premature lines of anxiety
and sorrow. Love, anguish, and death, working their true fruits within,

bring no success or achievement that the eye can note. By all the
principles of "poetic justice," Mr Tryan ought to have recovered and
married Janet; under the influence of her larger nature to have shaken
off his narrownesses; to have lived down all contempt and opposition,
and become the respected influential incumbent of the town; and in due
time to have toned down from his "enthusiasm of humanity" into the
simply earnest, hard-working, and rather commonplace town rector.
Better, because truer, as it is. Only in the earlier dawn of this higher life
of the soul, either in the race or in the individual man; only in the days
of the Isaacs and Jacobs of our young humanity, though not with the
Abrahams, the Moses', or the