The Ethics of George Eliots Works | Page 9

too exclusively of the artist
temperament to give direction or sustainment to the deeper moral
requirements of her being. He may win her back to the love of beauty
and the sense of joy; but he is not the one to stand by her 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