George Eliot: The Complete Novels + A Biography of the Author E-Book

George Eliot

• Herausgeber: Book House Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This book contains several HTML tables of contents.The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.Here you will find the complete novels of George Eliot in the chronological order of their original publication.- Adam Bede- The Mill on the Floss- Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe- Romola- Felix Holt the Radical- Middlemarch: a study of provincial life- Daniel Deronda

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George Eliot

THE COMPLETE NOVELS

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Table of Contents

George Eliot — An Extensive Biography

Adam Bede

The Mill on the Floss

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe

Romola

Felix Holt the Radical

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

Daniel Deronda

George Eliot — An Extensive Biography

by Leslie Stephen

Chapter 1 — Early Life

Chapter 2 — Coventry

Chapter 3 — The Westminster Review

Chapter 4 — Scenes of Clerical Life

Chapter 5 — Adam Bede

Chapter 6 — The Mill On the Floss

Chapter 7 — Silas Marner

Chapter 8 — Middle Life

Chapter 9 — Romola

Chapter 10 — Felix Holt

Chapter 11 — The Spanish Gypsy

Chapter 12 — Middlemarch

Chapter 13 — Daniel Deronda

Chapter 14 — Conclusion

Chapter 1 — Early Life

Mary Ann Evans,as her father recorded in his diary, was born at Arbury Farm, at five o’clock in the morning of 22nd November 1819. Her father, Robert Evans, was son of George Evans, a builder and carpenter in Derbyshire. The family had migrated thither from Northop in Flintshire. Robert Evans was brought up to his father’s business, and improved his position by remarkable qualities. He possessed great vigour both of mind and body, and was one of the men to whom love of good work is a religion. Once, when two labourers were waiting for a third to enable them to carry a heavy ladder, he took the whole weight upon his own shoulders, and astonished them by carrying it to its destination without help. He had also the keen eye of a skilful workman, and was especially famous for a power of calculating with singular accuracy the quantity of timber in a standing tree. He acquired the highest character for integrity and thorough devotion to his employers’ interests. His extensive knowledge in very varied practical departments, as his daughter says, “made his services valued through several counties. He had large knowledge of mines, of plantations, of various branches of valuation and measurement — of all that is essential to the management of large estates.” He was regarded as a unique land-agent, and was able by giving his own services to save the special fees usually paid by landowners for expert opinions. His education had been imperfect, and this led to some self-distrust and “submissiveness in his domestic relations.” The last peculiarity is reflected in the character of Mr. Garth in Middlemarch; and Mr. Garth and Adam Bede are obviously in some degree representative of the same type — one, it is to be feared, which has not become commoner since his time.

About 1799 Robert Evans was agent to Mr. Francis Newdigate of Kirk Hallam in Derbyshire, under whom he also held a farm. In 1806, upon the death of Sir Roger Newdigate, Francis Newdigate inherited a life interest in the Arbury estate in Warwickshire, and Evans accompanied him thither in his old capacity. Colonel Newdigate, son of Francis, was much impressed by the merits of his father’s agent, and through the colonel’s influence Evans became agent to various other great landowners in the district. As became his position, Robert Evans was a sturdy Tory. He shared the patriotic sentiment of the days of Nelson and Wellington, and held that a revolutionary fanatic was a mixture of fool and scoundrel “I was accustomed,” says his daughter, “to hear him utter the word ‘Government’ in a tone that charged it with awe and made it part of my effective religion in contrast with the word ‘rebel,’ which seemed to carry the stamp of evil in its syllables, and, lit by the fact that Satan was the first rebel, made an argument dispensing with more detailed inquiry.” “Government,” for practical purposes, meant the great landowners, who had good reasons for returning his respect. One of them requires a moment’s notice.

Sir Roger Newdigate, the previous owner of Arbury, was a typical specimen of the more cultivated country gentleman of his day. In early life he had made the “grand tour,” and had brought back ancient marbles and architectural drawings. He afterwards accepted the active duties of his position. He represented the University of Oxford for thirty years (1750-1780) as a high Tory. He was an owner of collieries and a promoter of canals. He built a school and a poorhouse for the parish in which Arbury Park is situated — Chilvers-Coton, near Nuneaton. He rebuilt Arbury House, which stood on the site of an ancient priory, in the “Gothic style” and adorned it with works of art and family portraits by Romney and Reynolds. His name at least is familiar to all Oxford men by the prize poem which he founded just before his death. The conditions prescribed by him for the competition show as much sense as can be expected from the founder of a prize poem. There were to be no compliments to himself, and the length of the poems was to be limited to fifty lines. Horace and King David, as he remarked, had succeeded in confining their noblest compositions within that length, and the quality of the future prize poems would probably not be such as to make us desire more of them than of the psalms or odes. Sir Roger died thirteen years before the birth of Evans’s daughter; but certain family stories in which he was concerned were handed down to her, and, as we shall see, suggested one of her most finished pieces of work. Robert Evans’s first wife, Harriet Poynton, had been for “many years,” as her epitaph says, “the friend and servant of the family of Arbury.” She had married Evans in 1801, and died in 1809, leaving two children. In 1813 Evans married a woman of rather superior position, Christiana Pearson, by whom he had three children — Christiana, Isaac, and Mary Ann — Christiana being about five, and Isaac about three years older than the youngest child. In March 1820, when Mary Ann was four months old, the Evanses moved to Griff, “a charming red brick, ivy-covered house on the Arbury estate.” It was to be the child’s home for the first twenty-one years of her life.

The impressions made upon the girl during these years are sufficiently manifest in the first series of her novels. Were it necessary to describe the general characteristics of English country life, they would enable the “graphic” historian to give life and colour to the skeleton made from statistical and legal information. The Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, and The Mill on the Floss, probably give the most vivid picture now extant of the manners and customs of the contemporary dwellers in the midland counties of England. There is a temptation to press the likeness further. It is a favourite amusement of readers to identify characters in novels with historical individuals. They sometimes seem to think that the question whether (for example) Caleb Garth “was” Robert Evans can be answered by a simple Yes or No, like the question whether Junius was Philip Francis. In reality, of course, it is generally impossible to say precisely how far the portrait may have been studied from a single model, or modified intentionally, or by blending with more or less conscious reminiscences of other originals. George Eliot (as it will be convenient to call her hereafter from her name in letters), like all good novelists, generally avoided direct delineation of individuals; while, on the other hand, it is probable enough that she was sometimes following the facts more closely than she was herself aware. It is enough to say here that her mother had a “considerable dash of the Mrs. Poyser vein in her”; that her mother’s family more or less stood for the Dodsons in the Mill on the Floss; that her relations to her brother resembled those of Maggie to Tom Tulliver in, the same novel; and that when describing Celia and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch she was more or less recalling her relations to her elder sister Christiana. There is one person, however, whom a novelist can hardly help revealing directly or indirectly; and in the case of George Eliot the revelation is unequivocal. There is no doubt, as we shall see, that the Mill on the Floss is substantially autobiographical, not, of course, a statement of facts, but as a vivid embodiment of the early impressions and the first stages of spiritual development. The scanty framework of fact may be partly filled up from this source.

It is proper, however, at the present day to begin from the physical “environment” of the organism whose history we are to study. The Warwickshire landscape is not precisely stimulating: and if the county can boast of the greatest name in English literature, it must be remembered that Shakespeare had the good fortune to migrate to the centre of intellectual activity at an early period. Though the central watershed of England passes through the country, it has no mountain ridges, and the streams crawl off through modest undulations to more picturesque districts. In her twenty-first year George Eliot speaks of a little excursion in which she has (for the first time apparently) “gazed on some — albeit the smallest — of the ‘everlasting hills,’” and has admired “those noblest children of the earth — fine healthy trees.” She has seen, too, a fine parish church and Lichfield Cathedral. Through her childhood she had to put up with canals instead of rivers; and saw no wilder open spaces than the decorous lawns of Arbury Park. Far away in the north, the Brontë children — of whom Charlotte, the eldest, was her senior by three years — were spending their strange childhood in Haworth, learning to worship Nature on the Yorkshire moors, and to idealise the sturdy, crabbed, North-countrymen into Rochesters and Heathcliffs. We may speculate if we please upon the effects which might have followed if the habitats of the two families could have been exchanged. If we may trust their portrayers, the fat midland pastures were hardly more different from the Yorkshire moors than the stolid farmers of Warwickshire from the rough population of the West Riding.

“Our midland plains,” said George Eliot, “have never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me; yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of world-wide change, some new direction of human labour, has wrought itself into what one may call the speech of the landscape.” The scenery, a monotonous succession of little ups and downs, is of the kind which owes its interest to its subordination to human society. In George Eliot’s writings, there are proofs enough of sensibility to natural beauty, but the scenery is a background to the actors; and there is no indication of such a passion for her native district as Scott felt for his “honest grey hills.” The “midland plains” were “conservative,” because they spoke of ancient order and peace; and the opening pages of Felix Holt describe the scenery and explain its significance. The traveller of those days, seated by the side of one of Mr. Weller’s colleagues, whirling at the amazing speed of ten miles an hour across the plain whence the waters flow to the Avon and the Trent, had yet time to read many indications of English life in the characteristic landscape. He saw broad meadows with their long lines of willows marking the water-courses; and cornfields divided by the straggling hedgerows, economically wasteful but beautiful with their bushes of hawthorn and dog-roses. He came upon remote hamlets, abodes of dirt and ignorance, each knowing of the world which lay beyond its “own patch of earth and sky” only by intercourse with “big, bold, gin-breathing tramps.” But at times also he passed through “trim cheerful villages,” where the cottage gardens bloomed with wall-flowers and geraniums, and the blacksmith and the wheelwright were plying their cheerful trades.

Solid farmers were jogging past from their comfortable homesteads, where quaint yew-tree arbours were backed by the great cornstacks. At intervals appeared the squires’ statelier mansions, embowered in the patrician trees of his park, and hard by the grey old churches with sleep-compelling pews were the parsonages where the squired younger son was quartered, not yet prescient of the “movement,” and free at least from “too much zeal.” In such districts the eighteenth century calm lingered pleasantly, and the ideal types represented by Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield, or by Squire Western and Trulliber, might still be recognised. A Sir Roger Newdigate had acquired a taste, and here and there clerical calm was being ruffled by Evangelical or Methodist agitation. But the district was one of “protuberant optimists, sure that Old England was the best of all possible countries, and that if there were any facts which had not fallen under their own observation they were facts not worth observing.” The traveller, it is true, might soon come upon a very different scene. The coach would emerge from the deep-rutted lanes into a village “dingy with coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of looms,” or “would rattle over the pavement of a manufacturing town, the scene of riots and trade-union meetings.”

The land around him was blackened with coal-pits, and the population was by no means convinced that all change must be for the worse; and yet these busy scenes seemed “to make but crowded nests in the midst of the large-spaced, slow-moving life of homestead and far-away cottages and oak-sheltered parks.” In the quiet agricultural region, squire and parson, and the whole social machinery of which they represented the mainspring, could still be accepted as part of the unalterable system of things. The villager was too ignorant even to conceive the possibility of change; and if the farmer grumbled over the ruinous results of peace, he retained his traditional reverence for the old families, and looked with horror upon proposals for the intrusion of railways or manufacturing demands for free trade. If the upper social stratum was aware that in the great towns there were Radicals demanding the abolition of the House of Lords and the confiscation of Church property, it inferred that the demon of revolution had not been completely exorcised, but could still hope that, with the help of the great Duke, the evil spirit might be confined to his proper region, and the British Constitution be upheld as the pride and envy of the world.

In due time George Eliot was to pourtray various phases of the society around her, including the Radical as well as the fine old Tory. In her childhood, of course, she took the colouring of her surroundings. To the infant the arrangements of its nursery are as unalterable as the laws of the solar system and the existence of any other order inconceivable. Her world was the fireside of Griff; and if she had glimpses of the outside, the views of Mr. Robert Evans represented ultimate truth, or were taken as indisputable assertions of matter of fact. He was fond of his little girl, and took her for occasional outings in his gig, or on expeditions to neighbouring country towns. The family circle was small. Soon after her birth, her mother’s health became weak; the elder girl, Christiana, was sent to school; and Mary Ann with her brother spent part of every day at a dame-school close to their own gates. She did not show any remarkable precocity, though she was both a thoughtful and a very affectionate and sensitive child. Her brother became naturally the first object of her devotion, and devotion to some one was throughout her life a marked need of her nature.

While still under five years old, she went through the experiences more or less idealised in the Mill on the Floss, and more historically commemorated in the series of sonnets called Brother and Sister. She tells in the poems how she rambled with him through the meadows; across the rivulet hidden by tangled forget-me-nots; through the rookery and by the “brown canal,” where the barges seemed to bring intimations of an unknown world beyond. In the copse, there were traces of the “mystic gypsies,” where Mr. Petulengro perhaps had encamped, though when she actually met him — if the narrative in the Mill on the Floss be authentic history — he was a less romantic being than we should judge from his behaviour in Lavengro. Then, too, she had the wonderful adventure of catching a perch by mistake, which suggests the inevitable moral, namely, that “luck was with glory wed.” The early hero-worship of the little girl running like a puppy after the slightly bigger brother is simply and touchingly described. “School parted us,” she says; and she never found that childish world again.

But were another childish world my share,

I would be born a little sister there.

Her brother was sent to school when she was five years old; and as her mother was still in bad health, she was sent to join her sister at a school kept by a Miss Lathom at Attleboro, a village only a mile or two distant from Griff. She continued there for three or four years, spending her Sundays at home. Her chief memory of this part of her life was the difficulty of getting a seat near the fireplace in cold weather. Her health was low, it seems, and she suffered from the nightly terrors which haunt delicate children, and which she has ascribed to Gwendolen Harleth. “All her soul,” she said, “became a quivering fear.” The other pupils, however, made a pet of their small companion, and she was not unhappy.

She began to read such books as then came in the way of children. In one of them, called The Linnet’s Life, she afterwards wrote a few words, stating that it was the first present from her father which she could remember, and recording her early delight in its pages. She remembered, too, her absorption in Aesop’s Fables, and laughed heartily over the pleasure she had taken in the humour of “Mercury and the Statue Seller.” A stray volume of Joe Miller supplied her with anecdotes wherewith to astonish her family. In those days children were less distracted by miscellaneous scraps of print, and could pore over the same thumbed and dogs-eared favourites. In her eighth or ninth year she was sent to a larger school, kept by a Miss Wallington at Nuneaton. Here there were some thirty boarders, and she became especially intimate with Miss Lewis, the principal governess.

Her passion for reading developed rapidly. A stray Waverley came in her way; and when that was returned to its owner before she had finished it, she began writing out the story for herself, till her elders got it back for her. She was fascinated by an extract from Lamb’s Captain Jackson even in an almanac; and among her favourite books were Defoe’s History of the Devil, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Rasselas. By this time it was beginning to be understood that there was something remarkable about the child. She excited the admiration of the home-circle by acting charades with her brother during the holidays; and if not a decided “prodigy,” was clearly capable of absorbing such intellectual influences as could be found in Warwickshire. In her thirteenth year she was transferred to a school at Coventry. It was kept by two ladies named Franklin, daughters of a Baptist minister, who had for many years preached in a chapel at Coventry. He lived in a house “almost exactly resembling that of Rufus Lyon in Felix Holt.” Lyon’s character and some of his little personal peculiarities were also suggested by this original.

George Eliot was always grateful to the daughters for the excellence of their teaching. She was at once recognised as the most promising of their pupils. Her themes were kept for the private edification of her teachers, instead of being read in the class like those of her comrades. She had good masters in French and German and music. She was sometimes called upon to display her musical skill before visitors, as the best performer in the school; and obeyed with ready good humour, though suffering agonies of shyness. The love of music generally shows itself at an early age, but she had apparently some difficulty in yielding to the passion. Three years after leaving school, she attended an oratorio at Coventry, and says in a letter that she thinks it will be her last. She declares that she has “no soul for music,” and is a “tasteless person.” She therefore is not qualified to discuss the question of the “propriety or lawfulness of such exhibitions of talent.” For herself, she would not regret if music were strictly confined to purposes of worship; and cannot think that “a pleasure that wishes the devotion of all the time and powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an expertness in so useless... an accomplishment can be quite pure and elevating in its tendency.” The religious theory is, as we shall see, characteristic; but it is singular that a woman who was to find one of her greatest delights in music, and who was already skilled in the art, should think herself devoid of the capacity.

Two years later, indeed, she was moved to “hysterical sobbing” by another oratorio. She was always diffident and easily discouraged; and these reflections may mean merely an attack of low spirits. Perhaps the want of “soul” meant only the absence of a specific aptitude for the musician’s calling; or, possibly, the singing at Coventry was out of tune.

George Eliot left school finally at the end of 1835. Her mother was failing in health, and died in the summer of 1836, after a long illness, during which she was nursed by her daughters. In the following spring the elder daughter, Christiana, married Mr. Edward Clarke, a surgeon in Warwickshire, and Mary Ann undertook the charge of her father’s household at Griff. She set her mind to the work, and became, it is said, an “exemplary housewife.” She also exerted herself in promoting various charitable works, and continued to study Italian, German, and music. Her brother was now beginning to take a share in their father’s business; and found his chief relaxation from hard work in hunting — an amusement which was not in his sister’s line. He had also become a High Churchman, whereas she was strongly Evangelical. Although, therefore, the family was bound by ties of warm affection, she found little sympathy in her favourite occupations. She lived in intellectual solitude, conscious of abilities for which she could find no definite outlet, and with no one in her immediate circle capable of guiding or even appreciating her pursuits. When long afterwards an autobiography was suggested to her, she replied: “The only thing I should much care to dwell on [in regard to this period] would be the absolute despair I suffered from of ever being able to do anything. No one could ever have felt greater despair, and a knowledge of this might be a help to some other straggler.” On the other hand, she added with a smile, “it might only lead to an increase of bad writing.”

The account of George Eliot’s school days may perhaps suggest that the state of female education in Warwickshire was not altogether so bad as energetic modern reformers are apt to assume. There is, it is true, something of a quaint old-fashioned colouring about the system. Her comrades at Miss Franklin’s thought that she was competent “to get up something in the way of a clothing club”; and beyond that limited prospect, they may possibly have dared to hope that she might develop into a Mrs. Chapone or Miss Carter — capable of writing letters “upon the improvement of the human mind,” or possibly, in time, of translating Epictetus. She was not, indeed, competent to take a first-class in a University examination, or to enter any career for which such honours qualified the nobler sex; and yet, if we really believed what we are so often told, that the test of a good education is not the stock of knowledge acquired, but the stimulus given to mental activity, the schooling seems to have been successful enough.

Her intellectual curiosity was roused, though not yet fixed upon any definite object. From the correspondence which she kept up with her early governess, Miss Lewis, it seems that she read a great deal of miscellaneous literature during sixteen years at Griff. My mind, she says in 1839, presents “an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern; scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton; newspaper topics; morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology, and chemistry; Reviews and metaphysics — all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast-thickening everyday accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations. How deplorably and unaccountably evanescent are our frames of mind, as various as forms and hues of the summer clouds!” For a girl of nineteen, both the style and the variety of intellectual interests indicated are remarkable. A genius, it may be suggested, can thrive anywhere; and so long as it is not absolutely fettered, can derive nourishment from any set of materials that may come in its way.

There is, however, a special characteristic of George Eliot which already appears. A strong imaginative impulse is generally developed early; it is an overmastering faculty which forces its possessor into activity often before knowledge or serious thought has accumulated; draws romances, epic poems, and dramas from children in their teens; and suggests that not only the material surroundings, but even the storage of intellectual accomplishments is but an accidental stimulus to the innate creative power. Charlotte and Emily Brontë, for example, informed the world around them with so much passion and imagination, that we fancy that any other circumstances would have served for an incentive to powers only waiting to be set at liberty. George Eliot, diffident in character, and reflective as much as imaginative in intellect, developed slowly, and was for many years ignorant of her own truest powers. She had a full share of the feminine docility, which is so charming to teachers — especially of the other sex. Women really enjoy lectures, strange as the taste appears to the male at all ages. Even a clever boy generally regards his schoolmaster as a natural enemy, and begins as a rebel. The girl takes the master at his own valuation, or something more, and has an innocent belief that lessons give really desirable information.

George Eliot was clearly of this way of thinking; and though she must have been aware of possessing unusual ability, she was anxious to bow submissively to the best instructors. At Griff or in her circle at Coventry no very brilliant intellectual light was shining, nor did even a very clear understanding prevail as to the real lights of contemporary thought. People had not taken to reading the last German authorities; and had vague enough impressions as to the course of European speculation. Miss Lewis and the Miss Franklins were ardent Evangelicals; and the Evangelical school of the day, though not given to philosophy, representing at least the most socially active party in the Church, was so far attractive to her intellectually. It meant at any rate a protest against stagnation. Then, moreover, through life she had very deep religious sentiments, and for the present associated them with the Evangelical dogma. She was greatly impressed by the wife of her father’s younger brother, Mrs. Samuel Evans, a Methodist preacher, of whom I shall presently have to speak again. “I shall not only suffer, but be delighted to receive the word of exhortation,” she writes to her aunt in 1839, “and I beg you not to withhold it.”

The most curious of her letters in these years is one to Miss Lewis, discussing with a quaint gravity the ethics of reading fiction. She is good enough to admit that certain standard works must be read — Scott, for example, and Don Quixote — otherwise one would not understand common allusions. Shakespeare, too, is inevitable, though one must be as nice as the bee “to suck nothing but honey from his pages.” A teacher, too, may consider it desirable to read fiction by way of tasting for her pupils. But it is dangerous to make trial on oneself of a cup because it is suspected of being poisonous. She herself has suffered from the poison. Her early reading of novels, lent by kind friends, led her to castle-building, which she apparently thinks a pernicious habit. No one, of course, “ever dreamed of recommending” novels to children; but men and women are but children of a larger growth. They cannot be sure at any age of resisting the evil influences. Nothing can be learned from novels which cannot be better learned from history; and when she is driven to tears by the impossibility of learning more than a fraction of realities, can she “have any time to spend on things that never existed”? It is plain that in those days aesthetic prophets had not begun to expound the true relations of art and morality; and many young ladies of nineteen at the present day would consider, themselves competent to open the eyes of this didactic young person. Her views changed in good time; but the moral earnestness which prompted these rather crude remarks was a permanent characteristic. Meanwhile, if her scruples hindered her from acquiring a wide knowledge upon the novels of the day, she was spending her time to better purpose in the miscellaneous reading already noticed. Wordsworth, it may be observed, was an early favourite to whom she remained faithful through life, and appealed to her as, shortly before, he had appealed, though still more strongly, to J. S. Mill. She was much impressed, too, by Young’s Night Thoughts, an edifying work which in later years she criticised with the severity of a revolted disciple.

Her studies naturally took a theological direction. She begins with Hannah More and Wilberforce, and is presently interested by the controversies aroused by the Oxford movement. She cannot make up her mind as to the solution. She reads an essay on “Schism” by Professor Hoppus of the London University, and the Evangelical Milner’s Church History. She compares their views with those of The Portrait of an English Churchman, by W. Gresley, an early champion of “Tractarianism,” and finds that the Tracts themselves show a “confused appreciation of the great doctrine of justification.” They approach too nearly to the Church marked by the “prophetical epithets” of “the scarlet beast” and the “Mystery of Iniquity.” The authors, it is true, are zealous, learned, and devoted, but “Satan is too crafty to commit his cause into the hands of those who have nothing to recommend them to approbation.” She is pleased, however, by the Lyra Apostolica and the “sweet poetry” of the Christian Year. She is presently much impressed by the work upon Ancient Christianity and the Oxford Tracts, by Isaac Taylor, “one of the most eloquent, acute, and pious of writers.” She has “gulped it in a most reptile-like fashion,” but must “chew it thoroughly to facilitate its assimilation with her mental frame.” She is attracted, too, by the “stirring eloquence” of The Great Teacher, written by John Harris, a popular writer of the time, with liberal tendencies, who was afterwards principal of an Independent College.

These studies, it must be remembered, represent her state of mind before the completion of her twenty-first year. She was soon to come under new influences. Meanwhile she was already ambitious enough to propose to make a practical application of her reading, and planned a “chart” of ecclesiastical history, with columns showing the dates of the principal personages, events, schisms, and so forth, with perhaps one for the fulfilment of the prophecies. Happily a chart was published by some one else which extinguished hers, and she turned to other studies. A different result of her meditations was a poem, which, though not her first attempt at poetry, was the first published. It is a farewell to the world, of which this is a specimen:

Books that have been to me as chests of gold,

Which, miserlike, I secretly have told,

And for them love, health, friendship, peace have sold,

Farewell!

Blest Volume! whose clear truth-writ page once known

Fades not before heaven’s sunshine and hell’s moan,

To thee I say not, of earth’s gifts alone,

Farewell!

Then shall my new-born senses find new joy,

New sounds, new sights, my ears and eyes employ,

Nor fear that word that here brings sad alloy,

Farewell!

The editor of the Christian Observer, in which the lines appeared (January 1840), adds a note to the effect that in heaven we shall be able to do without the Bible. The verses, however, if suspected of this trifling heresy, show religious feeling much more distinctly than poetical power, in which they resemble most sacred poetry.

Chapter 2 — Coventry

WhenGeorge Eliot was just twenty-one a change took place in her life which was to produce most important results. Her brother had married, and it was arranged that he should take over his father’s business at Griff. Mr. Robert Evans, now sixty-six, with his daughter migrated to Coventry. They took a semi-detached house in the Foleshill Road, with a “good bit of garden round it,” and commanding a wide reach of country, though the view was disfigured by mills and chimneys in the foreground. The secluded agricultural district was exchanged for an energetic manufacturing town, and George Eliot was gaining a new set of experiences, to be turned to account in good time. Hitherto her life had been one of intellectual isolation, though she had been encouraged by the sympathy of Miss Lewis. She had aspirations as well as reflections, and complains to her Methodist aunt that her “besetting sin was ambition — a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow-creatures. This seems the centre whence all my actions proceed.” But the powers of which she was conscious were choked in the confined atmosphere where men, as Johnson’s friend complained, talked of “runts,” that is (according to Boswell) young cows. Dr. Johnson, replied an admirer, would learn to talk of runts. George Eliot certainly listened to the talk, and then or in memory could perceive its humorous aspect; but talk confined to runts becomes tiresome in the long run; and when her loftiest hope was to compile a historical chart, she must have felt a painful need for some better end for her energies. Some one who would share her interests and direct her aspirations was obviously desirable if she was to escape from the diffident “despair” into which she was tempted to sink. Coventry could hardly be described, I imagine, as a Warwickshire Athens, or even Edinburgh; but at Coventry, as it happened, there were some people of much wider outlook than could have been expected. Charles Bray (1811-1884) was a ribbon manufacturer and a man of energy and philanthropic aims. He was a disciple of George Combe the phrenologist, whose Constitution of Man had a great influence at this time, though not much recognised by the authoritative expounders of philosophy. Bray himself in 1841 published The Philosophy of Necessity, intended to apply Combe’s scientific principles to the regeneration of society. Like George and Andrew Combe, he sympathised with Robert Owen the Socialist, and took a special interest in the attempt to found a community at Queenwood. Upon its failure he took a part in less ambitious schemes for the improvement of the working classes. In 1836 Bray married Caroline, sister of Charles and Sara Hennell. The Hennells had been brought up as Unitarians; and after his sister’s marriage to Bray, a thoroughgoing sceptic, Charles Hennell undertook to examine the evidences of Christianity with a view to meeting his brother-in-law’s objections. The result of the examination was that he became a sceptic himself, and in 1838 published an Enquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity in defence of his conclusions. The book is intended to show that Christianity is explicable by purely natural causes. A criticism of the New Testament narrative leads to the conclusion that Jesus was a man of high moral genius, who belonged originally to the sect of the Essenes, and developed their teaching under the influence of the time. Strauss, whose Life of Christhad appeared in 1835, procured a translation of Henneirs book into German; and in a preface says that Hennell, although ignorant of recent German criticism, was “on the very track” which the Germans had entered. He had, too, the practical insight of an English man of business, and solved “at one spring” problems over which the German “flutters with many learned formulae.”

Hennell treated the subject, in the “earnest and dignified tone of the truthseeker”; and, unlike rancorous assailants of Christianity, derived religion, not from priestcraft, but from the essential needs of human nature. George Eliot’s admiration for the book is shown by an analysis which she wrote on the occasion of its republication in 1852. She bought a copy soon after going to Coventry, and had read it before she met the Brays. Kingsley mentions it as one of the books which Alton Locke studied as a representative of the “intelligent artisans of the period.” Hennell’s sister Sara was interested in the same questions, and expounded her doctrines at length in Present Religion as a Faith owning Fellowship with Thought. It appeared in three volumes in 1865, 1873, and 1887, and is one of the many attempts to present a philosophical theism in consistence with scientific thought by the help of a doctrine of evolution. I am not qualified to speak of its philosophical merits on the strength of a very superficial inspection, but it is plain that Miss Hennell had read and reflected sufficiently to be accepted by George Eliot as a valuable ally in the sphere of philosophical speculation. Her decided theism led her to criticise Comte with a hostility which separated her opinions from those of her friend. They continued, however, to correspond with mutual respect and affection.

The Evanses’ house in Coventry was next door to that occupied by Mrs. Pears, a sister of Mr. Bray. An acquaintance with her neighbour Mrs. Pears soon ripened into friendship, and led in November 1841 to an introduction to the Brays. A very warm friendship sprang up. Cara and Sara (Mrs. Bray and Miss Hennell) became as sisters to George Eliot, and Mr. Bray her most intimate male friend. The alliance lasted through life, and produced an important correspondence. The effect upon George Eliot’s mental development was immediate and remarkable. The little circle at Coventry introduced her to a new world of thought. It became clear that there were regions of speculation into which her respected governess Miss Lewis and her beloved aunt Mrs. Samuel Evans had never entered. A letter to Miss Lewis of 13th November 1841 indicates the change which had come over her, and apparently refers to a recent study of Hennell’s Enquiry. “My whole soul,” she says, “has been engrossed in the most interesting of all inquiries for the last few days, and to what result my thoughts will lead I know not — possibly to one that will startle you; but my only desire is to know the truth, my only fear to cling to error.” She hopes that their “love will not discompose under the influence of separation.” “What a pity,” she says to the same correspondent a few days later, “that while mathematics are indubitable, immutable, and no one doubts the properties of a triangle or a circle, doctrines infinitely important to man are buried in a charnel heap of bones, over which nothing is heard but the barks and growls of contention.” The change of belief thus indicated appears to have been rapid, though there are indications of previous doubts as to her childish creed. By January 1842 it had led to a refusal to go to church, and a consequent family difficulty. It is not surprising that George Eliot should have followed a path which was being taken by many contemporaries; but something must be said of her special position, which was in many ways characteristic. The chief light upon her conversion — if I may use the phrase — comes from another source. George Eliot had been introduced to a family named Sibree by her old schoolmistress, Miss Franklin, and came to entertain a high regard for several of its members.

The Sibrees were of the Evangelical persuasion. A son, Mr. John Sibree, went to a German university in 1842, and afterwards translated Hegel’s Philosophy of History, a fact apparently implying that the Brays were not the only inhabitants of Coventry with some taste for philosophical speculation. George Eliot took a fancy to a daughter, Miss Mary Sibree, then a young girl, gave her German lessons, and “talked freely on all subjects,” without attempting “directly to unsettle her Evangelical beliefs.” Miss Sibree (afterwards Mrs. John Cash) preserved some interesting records of the intercourse, which show that the change of opinions, if rapid, was not unprepared. Till she left Griff, George Eliot had still used the religious language of her own circle. But the studies which have already been mentioned had raised doubts. Isaac Taylor’s book, which she proposed to “assimilate,” was in substance an attempt to show that the early Church, to which the Tractarians referred as the embodiment of pure Christianity, was in fact already corrupt.

The obvious difficulty of such an argument is to stop at the right point. If the early fathers, to whom Pusey and his friends appealed, were already unworthy of confidence, what is to be said of their predecessors? That was just the line taken by Hennell. He rejects the supernatural explanation in the case of the first teachers as well as in the case of their followers. George Eliot’s “chart” already implied an interest in ecclesiastical history which might lead to a criticism of the origins as well as of the later development of the creed. It might be noticed, too, that she was making excursions into scientific reading — Mrs. Somerville’s Connexion of the Physical Sciences, for example — and would, of course, be interested in the bearing of geology upon the book of Genesis. But the purely intellectual aspect of the question was in a great degree subordinate to other considerations. She told Mrs. Sibree that she had been shocked by the union of low morality with strong religious feeling among the poor, chiefly Methodists, whom she had been in the habit of visiting. There were, it seems, specimens there of the “Holy Willie” type. They held to the Calvinism expressed in his famous prayer —

O Thou, wha in the heavens dost dwell,

Wha, as it pleases best Thysel’,

Sends ain to heaven and ten to hell,

A’ for Thy glory,

And no’ for onie guid or ill

They’ve done afore Thee!

and apparently were capable of following his very defective practice. “I do not feel,” said a woman convicted of lying, “that I have grieved the Spirit much.” “Calvinism,” George Eliot is reported to have said at the time, “is Christianity, and that granted, it is a religion based on pure selfishness.” I need not ask whether Christianity can be identified with Calvinism, or whether antinomianism or pure egoism be in reality a logical deduction from Calvinism. Anyhow, it is clear that she might be led to one conclusion. Since Mrs. Samuel Evans and the lying old woman held the same dogmatic creed, it followed that Mrs. Evans’ lovely moral nature could not be the product of the dogmas. Other reflections tended to the same result. Robert Hall, she said, had been made unhappy for a week by reading Miss Edgeworth’s Tales. In them the characters led good, useful, and pleasant lives without reference to the cares and fears of religion. They were, in fact, model Utilitarians. When George Eliot was asked in later life what influence had unsettled her orthodoxy, she replied, “Walter Scott’s!” Scott has generally been credited with a different influence. His romantic tendency was one of the causes, according to Newman, the highest authority on the point, which led to the reaction towards the mediaeval Church.

George Eliot sympathised with another, and perhaps a really deeper, characteristic of his writings. Scott was a man of sympathies wide enough to do justice to many different types. He hated the fanaticism of the Covenanters, and speaks of them in his letters as scarcely human except in outward form. Yet he was too good an artist to yield to his antipathies; and in Old Mortality and the Heart of Midlothian has drawn the most striking pictures of the iron heroism and stem morality of the sect. George Eliot would have taken a similar view of Balfour of Burley and Davie Deans. But, in a wider sense, it is obvious that while Scott sincerely respects religious feelings and sympathises with belief, he shows as little sectarian zeal as Shakespeare. The division between good and bad does not correspond in his pages with the division between any one Church and its antagonists. The qualities which he really admires — manliness, patriotism, unflinching loyalty, and purity of life — are to be found equally among Protestants and Catholics, Roundheads and Cavaliers. The wide sympathy which sees good and bad on all sides makes it difficult to accept any version of the doctrine which supposes salvation to be associated with the acceptance of a dogma. That clearly was George Eliot’s frame of mind. She would not directly attack her young friend’s Evangelicism, but she smiled in the kindest way at the doctrine that there could be no true morality without it. “The great lesson of life,” she said, “is tolerance,” and a width of sympathy was perhaps her most characteristic quality. Her revolt from orthodox views was therefore unaccompanied by the bitterness which often accompanies the emancipation from the strictness of a sectarian tyranny. She continued to revere her aunt; only she had made up her mind that the beauty of character was in no sense the product of the creed. Nor, on the other hand, had it produced the immorality of coarse hypocrites. Taken literally and seriously, the dogmas might tend to suppress and trammel the emotional nature; but, in point of fact, beautiful souls manage to turn even their creeds to account by an unconscious logical artifice which leaves the dark side out of sight and dwells upon the higher and gentler aspirations embodied.

Her first recognition of a change of creed engendered a passing aggressiveness. A Baptist minister was induced by Miss Franklin to attempt a recovery of the lost sheep. “That young lady,” he said, “must have had the devil at her elbow to suggest doubts, for there was not a book that I recommended to her in support of Christian evidences that she had not read.” The phrase is a little ambiguous, and may be taken to attribute the books on the evidences to the devil’s suggestion. “I have attended the University sermon for forty years,” said a well-known Squire Bedell, “and I thank God that I am still a Christian.” An unconvincing refutation is apt to be irritating, and for a time George Eliot was stimulated to the combative mood. Her father was a “churchman of the old school.” His religious notions partook of those ascribed in the Mill on the Floss to Mr. Tulliver and the Dodsons. They, we are told, had the strongest respect for whatever was customary, including an acceptance of the rites of the Established Church; though their “theory of life” had “the very slightest tincture of theology.” Mr. Evans was so much annoyed by his daughter’s abandonment of churchgoing, that he resolved to give up the house at Coventry and to take up his abode with his married daughter. George Eliot proposed to take lodgings at Leamington and try to support herself by teaching.

Friends on both sides, however, effected a reconciliation. She agreed to go to church again, and her father was glad to receive her again upon those terms, and apparently asked no questions about her opinions, and made no difficulty as to the employment of her talents which they were soon to suggest. Some months later she wrote to Sara Hennell, giving the view to which she had been brought by further reflection. “When the soul,” she says, “is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope. In that state of mind we wish to proselytise.” We soon find that we can ourselves “ill afford to part even with the crutch of superstition,” and that the errors which we took to be a “mere incrustation” have grown into the living body, “and cannot be wrenched away without destroying vitality.” Intellectual agreement seems to be unattainable, and “we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union.” It is quackery to say to every one, “Swallow my opinions and you shall be whole.” When the proselytising impulse is abandoned, we ask, “Are we to remain aloof from our fellow-creatures on occasions when we may fully sympathise with the feelings exercised, although our own have been melted into another mood? Ought we not on every opportunity to seek to have our feelings in harmony, though not in union, with those who are often richer in the fruits of faith, though not in reason, than ourselves?”

The position is characteristic of her attitude through life. She shrank with deep repugnance from attacking even what she regarded as superstitions which, in the minds of believers, were interwoven with the highest aspirations. She still insists upon the necessity of free discussion and open avowals of honest belief; but her own temperament demanded the tenderest treatment of other creeds. To her exquisitely sensitive nature, the pain of inflicting pain on others would not have been compensated by any share of the true controversialist’s joy in battle. In later years she did not hold that she had deserved blame for the domestic difficulty, but she regretted a collision which might have been avoided by judicious management.

The reconciliation was made in the spring of 1842, and for the next seven years George Eliot lived at Coventry with her father. The friendship with the Brays provided her with congenial society and intellectual sympathy. She made summer expeditions with them to Wales, the Lakes (where she made acquaintance with Miss Martineau), and Scotland. She met Robert Owen at their house, and thought that if his system flourished, it would be in spite of the founder; and some time later Emerson came to see them, and she went with him and the Brays to Stratford-on-Avon. “He is,” she says, “the first man I have ever seen”; but does not expound the statement, and it does not appear that Emerson had any specific influence upon her mind. Meanwhile, she had been led to her first important piece of literary work. An excursion with the Brays and Hennells was shared by Miss Brabant, daughter of Dr. Brabant of Devizes, and followed by the engagement of Miss Brabant to Charles Hennell. Dr. Brabant was a personal friend of Strauss, and his daughter had undertaken a translation of Strauss’s Life of Jesus, for which funds were provided by Joseph Parkes (well known as a Radical politician) and others. Before her marriage she gave up the task, which was transferred to George Eliot in January 1844. For the next two years George Eliot’s energies were absorbed in this task. Translating in general is not very exhilarating work, nor Strauss’s book specially exhilarating to translate. Before the book was finished she was often depressed, and towards the end thoroughly bored. She was encouraged by Sara Hennell when she had ceased to “sit down to Strauss with any relish,” and was longing for proof sheets to convince her that her “soul-stupefying labour” would not be thrown away. She worked, however, in the most conscientious way, and finally achieved an admirable and workmanlike translation.

Dull as the labour was, the continual effort at accurate reproduction was probably of some use to her English style. Whether her father knew of her employment, or thought that her churchgoing made amends for her share in propagating scepticism, is not recorded. She seems from her letters to have accepted Strauss’s general position, though now and then she had qualms. She says, writes Mrs. Bray in 1846, that “she is Strauss-sick; it makes her ill dissecting the beautiful story of the Crucifixion, and only the sight of the Christ image” (a statuette after Thorwaldsen in her study) “and picture made her endure it.” To others the image might perhaps have suggested rather remonstrance than encouragement. The book appeared, without the translator’s name, in June 1846.

Her father’s health was now beginning to break, and her time was much occupied for the next three years by her devoted care of him. She did all the nursing herself, and is reported to have done it admirably. In the later part of the time she found some distraction in beginning a translation of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Her letters give a few indications of her thoughts upon the outward events of an exciting time. She sympathised warmly with the French Revolution of 1848, and admired Lamartine and Louis Blanc. She shows, however, some misgiving, and is depressed by the contrast between French enthusiasts and their English sympathisers. Englishmen have a much larger proportion of “selfish radicalism and unsatisfied brute sensuality than of perception or desire of justice”; and a revolution here would be simply destructive. A little later she is made melancholy by the tone of the newspapers about Louis Blanc: “The day will come when there will be a temple of white marble, where sweet incense and anthems shall rise to the memory of every man and woman who has had... a clear vision of the time when this miserable reign of Mammon shall end.” She has, she says, been wrought into fury “by the loathsome fawning, the transparent hypocrisy, the systematic giving as little as possible for as much as possible, that one meets with here at every turn. I feel that society is training men and women for hell.”

In this high-wrought and pessimistic frame of mind she speaks with remarkable enthusiasm of Rousseau and George Sand. Spite of all that may be said against him, Rousseau’s genius has “sent that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has wakened me to new perceptions, which has made man and nature a fresh world of thought and feeling to me; and this not by teaching me any new belief.” The “rushing mighty wind of his inspiration has so quickened my faculties that I have been able to shape more definitely for myself ideas which had previously dwelt as dim Ahnungen in my soul.”

George Sand has a similar power. “It is sufficient for me as a reason for bowing before her in eternal gratitude to that ‘great power of God manifested in her’ that I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human passion and its results, and (I must say, in spite of your judgment) some of the moral instincts and their tendencies, with such truthfulness, such nicety of discrimination, such tragic power, and withal such loving gentle humour, that one might live a century with nothing but one’s own dull faculties and not know so much as those six pages will suggest.” She adds that she has just acquired a “most delightful” De Imitatione Christi, with quaint woodcuts — a book which affected Maggie Tulliver in the same way. “It makes one long to be a saint for a few months. Verily, its piety has its foundations in the depth of the dumb human soul.” One may note, too, in passing, her delight in Sir Charles Grandison.“The morality,” she says, “is perfect — there is nothing for the new lights to correct.” During this period she must have been accumulating the experience to be turned to account in Middlemarch. It is curious to contrast the tone of that book with the passionate enthusiasm for such prophets of sentimentalism as Richardson, Rousseau, or George Sand. But of this I must speak hereafter.

She was meanwhile soothing her father’s last hours of consciousness by reading the Waverley novels. He died on the 31st May 1849. “What shall I be without him?” she asks. “It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone.” Soon afterwards she joined the Brays in a visit to the continent. They went through France to the North of Italy, and returned by Switzerland, where she remained at Geneva. There she stayed from July till March 1850, recovering strength and spirits after the long strain caused by her father’s illness. For the greater part of the time she was living with M. and Mme. D’Albert, to both of whom she became strongly attached. M. D’Albert was a man of artistic tastes, and became Conservateur of the Athénée — the National Gallery of Geneva. He afterwards translated several of George Eliot’s novels; and the friendship lasted till the end of her life.

A fortnight after coming to stay with them, George Eliot says that Mme. D’Albert makes a spoilt child of her, and that she already loves M. D’Albert as “if he were father and brother both. It is so delightful to get among people who exhibit no meannesses, no worldlinesses, that one may well be enthusiastic.” In fact, she had fortunately fallen into a thoroughly congenial circle; and her characteristic craving for affection had been satisfied by worthy objects. She admired the beauties of Geneva, had a little quiet and refined society, and left Spinoza’s Tractatus on the shelf. She attended certain lectures of Professor De la Rive on “Experimental Physics,” which we will hope were cheering, but otherwise resigned herself to judicious relaxation. She found, in fact, that Geneva was in itself superior to Coventry, though there were some people at Coventry “better than lake, trees, and mountains.” But for them, she would think with a shudder of returning to England. “It looks to me like a land of gloom, of ennui, of platitude, but in the midst of all this it is the land of duty and affection; and the only ardent hope I have for my future life is to have given to me some woman’s duty, some possibility of devoting myself where I may see a daily result of pure calm blessedness in the life of another.”

The phrase is significant. She was now thirty years old, and her outlook was sufficiently vague. She had grown to her full intellectual stature. She had read widely and intelligently; and if she had not devoted herself to any special line of inquiry, she was becoming familiar with the world of ideas which were ignored in the early domestic circle. So far, however, there is no appearance of any intention to take up original work. “We fancy,” says Mrs. Bray in 1846, that “she must be writing her novel” — apparently, because she “is looking very brilliant just now.” But the “novel” appears to be merely conjectural, and her labours upon Strauss had not suggested a possibility of her taking up an independent part in such inquiries. Her diffidence would suggest rightly or wrongly that she was not qualified to contribute to philosophical or critical literature. She was therefore at a loss to find any channel for the store of intellectual energy already enriched by much experience and reflection. A poem, written some years later, suggests a state of mind which may illustrate her position at this period. She describes a “Minor Prophet,” a gentleman of Puritan descent who has taken up new ideas with the old dogmatic confidence. He is a phrenologist and a vegetarian, interested in “psychical research,” and fully expecting a regeneration of the world by the adoption of scientific inventions and the elimination of “faulty human types.” She smiles sadly at the prospect, and feels “shortsighted pity” for the coming man who

Will not know half the dear imperfect things

That move my smiles and tears — will never know

The fine old incongruities that raise

My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits

That, like a needless eyeglass or black patch,

Give those who wear them harmless happiness;

The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware

That touch me to more conscious fellowship

(I am not myself the finest Parian)

With my coevals.

She goes on to explain that she is anything but indifferent to hopes for another future —

The earth yields nothing more divine

Than high prophetic vision — than the seer

Who, fasting from man’s meaner joy, beholds

The paths of beauteous order and constructs

A fairer type, to shame our low content.

But prophecy is like potential sound

Which turned to music seems a voice sublime

From out the soul of light, but turns to noise

In scrannel pipes and makes all ears averse.