The Life of George Eliot | Page 9

those three mighty
spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a
conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens
Tacitus he puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer
over the folly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness
of destiny. Hers is not the dejection of the poet who 'could lie down
like a tired child, And weep away this life of care,' as Shelley at Naples;
nor is it the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses
of the Castaway. It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry
to life, 'Thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To
wretches such as I;' nor such general sense of the woes of the race as
made Keats think of the world as a place where men sit and hear each
other groan, 'Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And
leaden-eyed despairs.' She was as far removed from the plangent
reverie of Rousseau as from the savage truculence of Swift. Intellectual
training had given her the spirit of order and proportion, of definiteness
and measure, and this marks her alike from the great sentimentalists
and the sweeping satirists. 'Pity and fairness,' as she beautifully says (iii.
317), 'are two little words which, carried out, would embrace the
utmost delicacies of the moral life.' But hers is not seldom the severe
fairness of the judge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black
cap after a conviction for high treason. In the midst of many an easy
flowing page, the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some
judgment of intense and concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in
it, some biting sentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of
Tacitus, and Dante, and Pascal. Souls like these are not born for
happiness.
* * * * *
This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot's

place in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows that
she travelled along the road that was trodden by not a few in her day.
She started from that fervid evangelicalism which has made the base of
many a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal Newman
downwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off, and
embraced with equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations which
were then associated with the Westminster Review. The second stage
did not last much longer than the first. 'Religious and moral sympathy
with the historical life of man,' she said (ii. 363), 'is the larger half of
culture;' and this sympathy, which was the fruit of her culture, had by
the time she was thirty become the new seed of a positive faith and a
semi-conservative creed. Here is a passage from a letter of 1862 (she
had translated Strauss, we may remind ourselves, in 1845, and
Feuerbach in 1854):--
Pray don't ask me ever again not to rob a man of his religious belief, as
if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have too profound a
conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual
blight that comes with no-faith, to have any negative propagandism in
me. In fact, I have very little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and
have lost all interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care
only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious
doctrine from the beginning till now (ii. 243).
Eleven years later the same tendency had deepened and gone farther:--
All the great religions of the world, historically considered, are rightly
the objects of deep reverence and sympathy--they are the record of
spiritual struggles, which are the types of our own. This is to me
preeminently true of Hebrewism and Christianity, on which my own
youth was nourished. And in this sense I have no antagonism towards
any religious belief, but a strong outflow of sympathy. Every
community met to worship the highest Good (which is understood to be
expressed by God) carries me along in its main current; and if there
were not reasons against my following such an inclination, I should go
to church or chapel, constantly, for the sake of the delightful emotions
of fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies--the very

nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding belief or
spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing obedience and save us from
the slavery of unregulated passion or impulse. And with regard to other
people, it seems to me that those who have no definite conviction
which constitutes a protesting faith, may often more beneficially
cherish