The Life of George Eliot | Page 5

that was
inexhaustible; consequently great precipitancy, many mistakes, much
weakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous force
applied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime in her
thought.' George Eliot had none of this facility. Nor was general
benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a great
deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled an active
critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at all consisting in
hiding from an impostor that you have found him out. Like Cardinal
Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the Apologia she
expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387), she unites to the
gift of unction and brotherly love a capacity for giving an extremely
shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love. Her passion for
Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no reason why it
should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for instance (ii. 271);
from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant man; or castigating
Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or otherwise from
showing that great expansiveness of the affections went with a
remarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head.

The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive
companionship with a man of lively talents were not without some
compensating drawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain,
unrelieved by variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by
participation in the external activities of the world, tended to bring
about a loaded, over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was
not only not wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full
freshness and strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world
in his life has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the
novelist's highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George
Eliot had no greater favourite than Scott, and when a series of little
books upon English men of letters was planned, she said that she
thought that writer among us the happiest to whom it should fall to deal
with Scott. But Scott lived full in the life of his fellow-men. Even of
Wordsworth, her other favourite, though he was not a creative artist, we
may say that he daily saturated himself in those natural elements and
effects, which were the material, the suggestion, and the sustaining
inspiration of his consoling and fortifying poetry. George Eliot did not
live in the midst of her material, but aloof from it and outside of it.
Heaven forbid that this should seem to be said by way of censure. Both
her health and other considerations made all approach to busy
sociability in any of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible. But in
considering the relation of her manner of life to her work, her creations,
her meditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some
writers of her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, and
mannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first on
the memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues,
instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It is direct
calls and personal claims from without that make fiction alive. Jane
Austen bore her part in the little world of the parlour that she described.
The writer of Sylvia's Lovers, whose work George Eliot appreciated
with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was the mother of children, and
was surrounded by the wholesome actualities of the family. The
authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights passed their days in one
long succession of wild, stormy, squalid, anxious, and miserable
scenes--almost as romantic, as poetic, and as tragic, to use George
Eliot's words, as their own stories. George Sand eagerly shared, even to

the pitch of passionate tumult and disorder, in the emotions, the
aspirations, the ardour, the great conflicts and controversies of her time.
In every one of these, their daily closeness to the real life of the world
has given a vitality to their work which we hardly expect that even the
next generation will find in more than one or two of the romances of
George Eliot. It may even come to pass that their position will be to
hers as that of Fielding is to Richardson in our own day.
In a letter to Mr. Harrison, which is printed here (ii. 441), George Eliot
describes her own method as 'the severe effort of trying to make certain
ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me
first in the flesh and not in the spirit.' The passage recalls a discussion
one day at the Priory in 1877. She was speaking of the different
methods of the poetic or creative art,