The Life of George Eliot | Page 8

to write a quotation without verifying it.' 'What courage and patience,' she says of some one else, 'are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything,' and her own existence was one long and painful sermon on that text.
Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavy unmoving banks. Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy words. 'I cannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure in prospect--according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to live in past pain.' The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runs through all. Her first resounding triumph, the success of Adam Bede, instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of the weight upon her future life. 'The self-questioning whether my nature will be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty and intellectual production--presses upon me almost continually in a way that prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in the work done. I feel no regret that the fame, as such, brings no pleasure; but it is a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strong in thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its uses.'
Romola seems to have been composed in constant gloom. 'I remember my wife telling me, at Witley,' says Mr. Cross, 'how cruelly she had suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this time. The writing of Romola ploughed into her more than any of her other books. She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a well-defined transition in her life. In her own words, "I began it a young woman--I finished it an old woman."' She calls upon herself to make 'greater efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes from too egoistic a dread of failure.' 'This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that--despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity; and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated' (ii. 307). One day the entry is: 'Horrible scepticism about all things paralysing my mind. Shall I ever be good for anything again? Ever do anything again?' On another, she describes herself to a trusted friend as 'a mind morbidly desponding, and a consciousness tending more and more to consist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in a strengthening sense of achievement.' We have to turn to such books as Bunyan's Grace Abounding to find any parallel to such wretchedness.
Times were not wanting when the sun strove to shine through the gloom, when the resistance to melancholy was not wholly a failure, and when, as she says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the Stygian marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. 'Sad were we in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish smoke in our hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze.' But still for the most part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain that haunted her eyes and brow even in her most genial and animated moments, only told too truly the story of her inner life.
That from this central gloom a shadow should spread to her work was unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist--for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable--as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene. Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus he puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over the folly and the weakness of men, and the