The Life of George Eliot | Page 4

as much as it is condemning the
offenders. On all this, then, we need have neither sophistry nor cant.
But those who seek something deeper than a verdict for the honest
working purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner, may feel, as
has been observed by a contemporary writer, that men and women are
more fairly judged, if judge them we must, by the way in which they
bear the burden of an error than by the decision that laid the burden on
their lives. Some idea of this kind was in her own mind when she wrote
to her most intimate friend in 1857, 'If I live five years longer, the
positive result of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will
outweigh the small negative good that would have consisted in my not
doing anything to shock others' (i. 461). This urgent desire to balance
the moral account may have had something to do with that laborious
sense of responsibility which weighed so heavily on her soul, and had
so equivocal an effect upon her art. Whatever else is to be said of this
particular union, nobody can deny that the picture on which it left a

mark was an exhibition of extraordinary self-denial, energy, and
persistency in the cultivation and the use of great gifts and powers for
what their possessor believed to be the highest objects for society and
mankind.
A more perfect companionship, one on a higher intellectual level, or of
more sustained mental activity, is nowhere recorded. Lewes's mercurial
temperament contributed as much as the powerful mind of his consort
to prevent their seclusion from degenerating into an owlish stagnation.
To the very last (1878) he retained his extraordinary buoyancy.
'Nothing but death could quench that bright flame. Even on his worst
days he had always a good story to tell; and I remember on one
occasion in the drawing-room at Witley, between two bouts of pain, he
sang through with great brio, though without much voice, the greater
portion of the tenor part in the Barber of Seville, George Eliot playing
his accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun' (iii.
334). All this gaiety, his inexhaustible vivacity, the facility of his
transitions from brilliant levity to a keen seriousness, the readiness of
his mental response, and the wide range of intellectual
accomplishments that were much more than superficial, made him a
source of incessant and varied stimulation. Even those, and there were
some, who thought that his gaiety bordered on flippancy, that his genial
self-content often came near to shockingly bad taste, and that his
reminiscences of poor Mr. Fitzball and the green-room and all the rest
of the Bohemia in which he had once dwelt, were too racy for his
company, still found it hard to resist the alert intelligence with which
he rose to every good topic, and the extraordinary heartiness and
spontaneity with which the wholesome spring of human laughter was
touched in him.
Lewes had plenty of egotism, not to give it a more unamiable name, but
it never mastered his intellectual sincerity. George Eliot describes him
as one of the few human beings she has known who will, in the heat of
an argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong,
instead of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity.
'The intense happiness of our union,' she wrote to a friend, 'is derived in
a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and

declare our own impressions. In this respect I know no man so great as
he--that difference of opinion rouses no egotistic irritation in him, and
that he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger the
moment his intellect recognises it' (ii. 279). This will sound very easy
to the dispassionate reader, because it is so obviously just and proper,
but if the dispassionate reader ever tries, he may find the virtue not so
easy as it looks. Finally, and above all, we can never forget in Lewes's
case how much true elevation and stability of character was implied in
the unceasing reverence, gratitude, and devotion with which for
five-and-twenty years he treated her to whom he owed all his happiness,
and who most truly, in his own words (ii. 76), had made his life a new
birth.
The reader will be mistaken if he should infer from such passages as
abound in her letters that George Eliot had any particular weakness for
domestic or any other kind of idolatry. George Sand, in _Lucrezia
Floriani_, where she drew so unkind a picture of Chopin, has described
her own life and character as marked by 'a great facility for illusions, a
blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart