The Ethics of George Eliots Works | Page 8

much as the tempter; and no care now as to
what others shall think or say about him. All thought is for the
wretched Hetty; and all energy is concentrated on the one present
object, of arresting so far as it can be arrested the irremediable loss to
her. The wrong stands up before him in its own nakedness as a wrong.
This is repentance; and with repentance restoration becomes possible
and begins.
Adam Bede contrasts at nearly every point with Arthur Donnithorne.
Lovable is nearly the last epithet we think of applying to him. Hard
almost to cruelty toward his sinning father; hard almost to
contemptuousness toward his fond, foolish mother; bitterly hard toward
his young master and friend, on the first suspicion of personal wrong;
savagely vindictive, long and fiercely unforgiving, when he knows that
wrong accomplished;--these may well seem things irreconcilable with
any true fulfilment of that Christian life whose great law is love. Yet,
examined more narrowly, they approve themselves as nearly associated
with the larger fulness of that life. They are born of the same spirit
which said of old, "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"
fulfilments, howsoever imperfect, of that true and deep "law of
resentment" which modern sentimentalism has all but expunged from
the Christian code. The hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing,
not against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than as
it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life. It subsists in and
springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic
in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have asserted themselves as the
realities of existence. Even Seth can be more tolerant than Adam,
because the gentle, placid moral beauty of his nature is, so far as this
may ever be, the result of temperament; while in Adam whatever has

been attained has been won through inward struggle and self-conquest.
In the 'Mill on the Floss,' the moral interest of the whole drama is
concentrated to a very great degree on Maggie Tulliver; and in her is
also mainly concentrated the representative struggle between good and
evil, the spirit of the Cross and that of the world; for Stephen Guest is
little more than the objective form under which the latent evil of her
own humanity assails her. Her life is the field upon which we see the
great conflict waging between the elements of spiritual life and spiritual
death; swaying amid heart-struggle and pain, now toward victory, now
toward defeat, till at last all seems lost. Then at one rebound the strong
brave spirit recovers itself, and takes up the full burden of its cross;
sees and accepts the present right though the heart is breaking; and the
end is victory crowned and sealed by death.
From her first appearance as a child, those elements of humanity are
most prominent in her which, unguided and uncontrolled, are most
fraught with danger to the higher life; and for her there is no real
outward guidance or control whatever. The passionate craving for
human sympathy and love, which meets no fuller response than from
the rude instinctive fondness of her father and the carefully-regulated
affection of her brother, on the one hand prepares her for the storm of
passion, and on the other, chilled and thrown back by neglect and
refusal, threatens her with equal danger of hardness and self-inclusion.
The strong artist temperament, the power of spontaneous and intense
enjoyment in everything fair and glad to eye and ear, repressed by the
uncongenial accessories around her, tends to concentrate her existence
in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if it be the only life, the
diviner part of our being can find no sustenance. This danger is for her
the greater and more insidious, because in her the sensuous, so strongly
developed, is refined from all its grossness by the presence of
imagination and thought.
When at last, amid the desolation that has come upon her home, and the
increasing bareness of all the accessories of her young life, its deeper
needs and higher aspirations awaken to definite purpose and seek
definite action, the direction they take is toward a hard stern asceticism,

cramping up all life and energy within a narrow round of drudgeries
and privations. She strives, as many an earnest impassioned nature like
hers has done in similar circumstances, to fashion her own cross, and to
make it as hard as may be to bear. She would deny to herself the very
beauty of earth and sky, the music of birds and rippling waters, and
everything sweet and glad, as temptations and snares. From all this she
is brought back by Philip. But he, touching as he is in the humility and
tender unselfishness of his love, is