The Life of George Eliot | Page 7

view we may take of the precise connection between what
she read, or abstained from reading, and what she wrote, no studious
man or woman can look without admiration and envy on the breadth,
variety, seriousness, and energy, with which she set herself her tasks
and executed them. She says in one of her letters, 'there is something
more piteous almost than soapless poverty in the application of
feminine incapacity to literature' (ii. 16). Nobody has ever taken the
responsibilities of literature more ardently in earnest. She was
accustomed to read aloud to Mr. Lewes three hours a day, and her
private reading, except when she was engaged in the actual stress of
composition, must have filled as many more. His extraordinary alacrity
and her brooding intensity of mind prevented these hours from being
that leisurely process in slippers and easy-chair which passes with
many for the practice of literary cultivation. Much of her reading was
for the direct purposes of her own work. The young lady who begins to
write historic novels out of her own head will find something much to
her advantage if she will refer to the list of books read by George Eliot
during the latter half of 1861, when she was meditating Romola (ii.
325). Apart from immediate needs and uses, no student of our time has
known better the solace, the delight, the guidance that abide in great
writings. Nobody who did not share the scholar's enthusiasm could
have described the blind scholar in his library in the adorable fifth
chapter of Romola; and we feel that she must have copied out with keen
gusto of her own those words of Petrarch which she puts into old
Bardo's mouth--'_Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et
viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur._'

As for books that are not books, as Milton bade us do with 'neat repasts
of wine,' she wisely spared to interpose them oft. Her standards of
knowledge were those of the erudite and the savant, and even in the
region of beauty she was never content with any but definite
impressions. In one place in these volumes, by the way, she makes a
remark curiously inconsistent with the usual scientific attitude of her
mind. She has been reading Darwin's Origin of Species, on which she
makes the truly astonishing criticism that it is 'sadly wanting in
illustrative facts,' and that 'it is not impressive from want of luminous
and orderly presentation' (ii. 43-48). Then she says that 'the
development theory, and all other explanation of processes by which
things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the
mystery that lies under processes.' This position it does not now
concern us to discuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her
strong habitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge,
over vague and misty moods in the region of the unknowable and the
unreachable.
George Eliot's means of access to books were very full. She knew
French, German, Italian, and Spanish accurately. Greek and Latin, Mr.
Cross tells us, she could read with thorough delight to herself; though
after the appalling specimen of Mill's juvenile Latinity that Mr. Bain
has disinterred, the fastidious collegian may be sceptical of the
scholarship of prodigies. Hebrew was her favourite study to the end of
her days. People commonly supposed that she had been inoculated with
an artificial taste for science by her companion. We now learn that she
took a decided interest in natural science long before she made Mr.
Lewes's acquaintance, and many of the roundabout pedantries that
displeased people in her latest writings, and were set down to his
account, appeared in her composition before she had ever exchanged a
word with him.
All who knew her well enough were aware that she had what Mr. Cross
describes as 'limitless persistency in application.' This is an old account
of genius, but nobody illustrates more effectively the infinite capacity
of taking pains. In reading, in looking at pictures, in playing difficult
music, in talking, she was equally importunate in the search, and

equally insistent on mastery. Her faculty of sustained concentration was
part of her immense intellectual power. 'Continuous thought did not
fatigue her. She could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour; the
body might give way, but the brain remained unwearied' (iii. 422). It is
only a trifling illustration of the infection of her indefatigable quality of
taking pains, that Lewes should have formed the important habit of
rewriting every page of his work, even of short articles for Reviews,
before letting it go to the press. The journal shows what sore pain and
travail composition was to her. She wrote the last volume of Adam
Bede in six weeks; she 'could not help writing it fast, because it