The Life of George Eliot | Page 3

the question--namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably
joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was conscious
of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and the consciousness
has been pressing on me more and more painfully ever since. Even my
husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot withstand my melancholy
demonstration. So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely
retracted, and give us something of yourselves only on simple
black-letter days, when the Herald Angels have not been raising
expectations early in the morning.
This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity of
human nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at the
recollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott's letters, the high spirits
of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattling dare-devilry of
Byron. Epistolary stilts among men of letters went out of fashion with
Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every period finished with a
conceit, the letter was not worth the postage. Poor spirits cannot be the
explanation of the stiffness in George Eliot's case, for no letters in the

English language are so full of playfulness and charm as those of
Cowper, and he was habitually sunk in gulfs deeper and blacker than
George Eliot's own. It was sometimes observed of her, that in her
conversation, elle s'écoutait quand elle parlait--she seemed to be
listening to her own voice while she spoke. It must be allowed that we
are not always free from an impression of self-listening, even in the
most caressing of the letters before us.
This is not much better, however, than trifling. I daresay that if a lively
Frenchman could have watched the inspired Pythia on the sublime
tripod, he would have cried, Elle s'écoute quand elle parle. When
everything of that kind has been said, we have the profound satisfaction,
which is not quite a matter of course in the history of literature, of
finding after all that the woman and the writer were one. The life does
not belie the books, nor private conduct stultify public profession. We
close the third volume of the biography, as we have so often closed the
third volume of her novels, feeling to the very core that in spite of a
style that the French call alambiqué, in spite of tiresome double and
treble distillations of phraseology, in spite of fatiguing moralities,
gravities, and ponderosities, we have still been in communion with a
high and commanding intellect and a great nature. We are vexed by
pedantries that recall the précieuses of the Hôtel Rambouillet, but we
know that she had the soul of the most heroic women in history. We
crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes action natural and
repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of a life marked
by indefatigable labour after generous purposes, by an unsparing
struggle for duty, and by steadfast and devout fellowship with lofty
thoughts.
Those who know Mr. Myers's essay on George Eliot will not have
forgotten its most imposing passage:--
I remember how at Cambridge, I waited with her once in the Fellows'
Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred
somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words
which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of
men,--the words God, Immortality, Duty,--pronounced, with terrible

earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the
second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps,
had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and
unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic
countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as
though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of
promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates.
To many, the relation which was the most important event in George
Eliot's life will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce all
talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so, and
those who disregard a social law have little right to complain. Men and
women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad,
have taken this particular law into their own hands before now, and
committed themselves to conduct of which 'magnanimity owes no
account to prudence.' But if they had sense and knew what they were
about, they have braced themselves to endure the disapproval of a
majority fortunately more prudential than themselves. The world is
busy, and its instruments are clumsy. It cannot know all the facts; it has
neither time nor material for unravelling all the complexities of motive,
or for distinguishing mere libertinage from grave and deliberate moral
misjudgment; it is protecting itself