The Life of George Eliot | Page 6

and said that she began with
moods, thoughts, passions, and then invented the story for their sake,
and fitted it to them; Shakespeare, on the other hand, picked up a story
that struck him, and then proceeded to work in the moods, thoughts,
passions, as they came to him in the course of meditation on the story.
We hardly need the result to convince us that Shakespeare chose the
better part.
The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened by
the literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed upon
herself. 'The less an author hears about himself,' she says, in one place,
'the better.' 'It is my rule, very strictly observed, not to read the
criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this abstinence
necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an artist, which
ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to produce in us.'
George Eliot pushed this repugnance to criticism beyond the personal
reaction of it upon the artist, and more than disparaged its utility, even
in the most competent and highly trained hands. She finds that the
diseased spot in the literary culture of our time is touched with the
finest point by the saying of La Bruyère, that 'the pleasure of criticism
robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by very fine things' (iii.
327). 'It seems to me,' she writes (ii. 412), 'much better to read a man's
own writings than to read what others say about him, especially when
the man is first-rate and the others third-rate. As Goethe said long ago

about Spinoza, "I always preferred to learn from the man himself what
he thought, rather than to hear from some one else what he ought to
have thought."' As if the scholar will not always be glad to do both, to
study his author and not to refuse the help of the rightly prepared
commentator; as if even Goethe himself would not have been all the
better acquainted with Spinoza if he could have read Mr. Pollock's
book upon him. But on this question Mr. Arnold has fought a brilliant
battle, and to him George Eliot's heresies may well be left.
On the personal point whether an author should ever hear of himself,
George Eliot oddly enough contradicts herself in a casual remark upon
Bulwer. 'I have a great respect,' she says, 'for the energetic industry
which has made the most of his powers. He has been writing diligently
for more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and
profiting by the lessons of public opinion and of other writers' (ii. 322).
But if it is true that the less an author hears about himself the better,
how are these salutary 'lessons of public opinion' to penetrate to him?
'Rubens,' she says, writing from Munich in 1858 (ii. 28), 'gives me
more pleasure than any other painter whether right or wrong. More than
any one else he makes me feel that painting is a great art, and that he
was a great artist. His are such real breathing men and women, moved
by passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing in mere imitation
of passion.' But Rubens did not concentrate his intellect on his own
ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings of praise and
blame, lest they should discourage his inspiration. Beethoven, another
of the chief objects of George Eliot's veneration, bore all the rough
stress of an active and troublesome calling, though of the musician, if
of any, we may say, that his is the art of self-absorption.
Hence, delightful and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligent and
discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition and
beauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of the
sensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene is apt
to lead to mental valetudinarianism. 'The ignorant journalist,' may be
left to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could inflict on
one of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even the most
philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick

red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his
handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic
reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never
have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian
rigour a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every
disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To stop every draft
with sandbags, screens, and curtains, and to limit one's exercise to a
drive in a well-warmed brougham with the windows drawn up, may
save a few annoying colds in the head, but the end of the process will
be the manufacture of an invalid.
Whatever