The Life of George Eliot | Page 9

cruelty and blindness of destiny. Hers is not the dejection of the poet who 'could lie down like a tired child, And weep away this life of care,' as Shelley at Naples; nor is it the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses of the Castaway. It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry to life, 'Thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches such as I;' nor such general sense of the woes of the race as made Keats think of the world as a place where men sit and hear each other groan, 'Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And leaden-eyed despairs.' She was as far removed from the plangent reverie of Rousseau as from the savage truculence of Swift. Intellectual training had given her the spirit of order and proportion, of definiteness and measure, and this marks her alike from the great sentimentalists and the sweeping satirists. 'Pity and fairness,' as she beautifully says (iii. 317), 'are two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life.' But hers is not seldom the severe fairness of the judge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black cap after a conviction for high treason. In the midst of many an easy flowing page, the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some judgment of intense and concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in it, some biting sentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of Tacitus, and Dante, and Pascal. Souls like these are not born for happiness.
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This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot's place in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows that she travelled along the road that was trodden by not a few in her day. She started from that fervid evangelicalism which has made the base of many a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal Newman downwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off, and embraced with equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations which were then associated with the Westminster Review. The second stage did not last much longer than the first. 'Religious and moral sympathy with the historical life of man,' she said (ii. 363), 'is the larger half of culture;' and this sympathy, which was the fruit of her culture, had by the time she was thirty become the new seed of a positive faith and a semi-conservative creed. Here is a passage from a letter of 1862 (she had translated Strauss, we may remind ourselves, in 1845, and Feuerbach in 1854):--
Pray don't ask me ever again not to rob a man of his religious belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith, to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact, I have very little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now (ii. 243).
Eleven years later the same tendency had deepened and gone farther:--
All the great religions of the world, historically considered, are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy--they are the record of spiritual struggles, which are the types of our own. This is to me preeminently true of Hebrewism and Christianity, on which my own youth was nourished. And in this sense I have no antagonism towards any religious belief, but a strong outflow of sympathy. Every community met to worship the highest Good (which is understood to be expressed by God) carries me along in its main current; and if there were not reasons against my following such an inclination, I should go to church or chapel, constantly, for the sake of the delightful emotions of fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies--the very nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding belief or spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing obedience and save us from the slavery of unregulated passion or impulse. And with regard to other people, it seems to me that those who have no definite conviction which constitutes a protesting faith, may often more beneficially cherish the good within them and be better members of society by a conformity based on the recognised good in the public belief, than by a nonconformity which has nothing but negatives to utter. Not, of course, if the conformity would be accompanied by a consciousness of hypocrisy. That is a question for the