The English Novel and the Principle of its Development

by Sidney Lanier

  IX.

  Before _Scenes from Clerical Life_ had ceased to run, in the latterpart of the year 1857, George Eliot had already begun a novel morecomplete in form than any of the three tales which composed thatseries. Early in 1858, she made a visit to the Continent, and it wasfrom Munich that a considerable portion of the MS. of her new book wassent to her publisher, Mr. Blackwood. This was _Adam Bede_, which shecompleted by the end of October, 1858.

  It was brought out immediately in book form; George Eliot seemeddesirous of putting the public to a speedier test than could besecured by running the story through successive numbers of themagazine, as usual; although the enthusiastic editor declared himselfvery willing to enrich the pages of _Blackwood's_ with it. It wastherefore printed in January, 1859.

  I have already cited a letter from Marian Evans to Miss Henschel, in whichshe mentions the only two matters of fact connected in the most shadowy wayas originals with the plot of _Adam Bede_. One of these is that in hergirlhood, she had met an aunt of hers about sixty years old, who had inearly life been herself a preacher. To this extent, and this only, is thereany original for our beautiful snow-drop--Dinah Morris, in _Silas Marner_.Again, in the same letter, George Eliot mentions that this same aunt hadtold her of once spending a night in prison to comfort a poor girl who hadmurdered her own child, and that this incident lay in her mind for manyyears, until it became the germ of _Adam Bede_.

  These are certainly but shadowy connections; yet, probably, thegreatest works are built upon quite as filmy a relation to any actualprecedent facts. A rather pretty story is told of Mrs. Carlyle, which,perhaps, very well illustrates this filmy relation. It is told thatone evening she gave to Dickens a subject for a novel which she hadindeed worked out up to the second volume, the whole subjectconsisting of a weaving together of such insignificant observations asany one must make of what goes on at houses across the street. Forexample,--Mrs. Carlyle observed of a house nearly opposite them thatone day the blinds or curtains would be up or down; the next day afigure in a given costume would appear at the window, or a cab woulddrive, hastily or otherwise, to the door, a visitor would be admittedor rejected, etc; such bits of circumstances she had managed toconnect with human characters in a subtle way which is said to havegiven Dickens great delight. She never lived, however, to finish hernovel, thus begun.

  This publication of _Adam Bede_, placed George Eliot decisively at thehead of English novel-writers, with only Dickens for second, even; andthus enables us at this point fairly to do what the ages always do inorder to get that notoriously clear view of things which comes withtime, and time only, that is to brush away all small circumstances andcloudy non-essentials of time so as to bring before our minds thewhole course of English fiction, from its beginning to the stage atwhich it is now pending with _Adam Bede_, as if it concerned but fournames and two periods, to wit:

  RICHARDSON, } middle 18th centuryFIELDING. }

  and

  DICKENS, } middle 19th century.GEORGE ELIOT. }

  Now it was shown in the last lecture how distinctly the moral purposeof the English fiction represented by this upper group was announced,though we were obliged to record a mournful failure in realizing thatannouncement. _Adam Bede_ gives us the firmest support for a first andmost notable difference between these two periods of English fiction,that while the former professes morality yet fails beyond description,the latter executes its moral purpose to a practical degree ofbeneficence beyond its wildest hopes. Without now specifying thesubtle revolutions which lie in _Adam Bede_, a single more tangibleexample will be sufficient to bring this entire difference before you.If I ask you to recall how it is less than fifty years ago thatCharles Dickens was writing of the debtors' prisons with all theterrible earnest of one who had lived with his own father and motherin those unspeakable dens; if I recall to you what marvelous haste forproverbially slow England the reform thus initiated took upon itself,how it flew from this to that prison, from this to that statute, fromthis to that country, until now not only is no such thing asimprisonment for debt known to any of Dickens's readers, but with thecustomary momentum of such generous impulses in society, the wholemovement in favor of debtors is clearly going too far and is beginningto oppress the creditor with part of the injustice it formerly metedout to the debtor; if, I say, I thus briefly recall to you this singleinstance of moral purpose carried into perfect practice, I typify agreat and characteristic distinction between these two schools. For inpoint of fact what one may call an organic impracticability lay at thecore of the moral scheme of Richardson and Fielding.

  I think all reasoning and experience show that if you confront a manday by day with nothing but a picture of his own unworthiness, thefinal effect is, not to stimulate, but to paralyze his moral energy.The picture of the man becomes the head of a Gorgon. Now this wasprecisely what this early English fiction professed to do. Itprofessed to show man exactly as he is; but although this professionincluded the good man as well as the bad man, and although there wassome endeavor to relieve the picture with tints of goodness here andthere, the final result was--and I fearlessly point any doubter to thenet outcome from _Pamela_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ down to _HumphreyClinker_--the final result was such a portrayal as must make any mansit down before the picture in a miserable deep of contempt forhimself and his fellows, out of which many spirits cannot climb atall, and none can climb clean.

  On the other hand, the work of Dickens I have just referred to is afair specimen of the way in which the later school of English fiction,while glozing no evil, showed man, not how bad he might be, but howgood he might be; and thus, instead of paralyzing the moral energy,stimulated it to the most beneficent practical reform. I think it isRobert Browning who has declared that a man is as good as his best;and there is the subtlest connection between the right to measure aman's moral stature by the highest thing that he has done, rather thanthe lowest, on the one hand, and that new and beautiful inspirationwhich comes into one's life as one contemplates more and moreinstances of the best in human behavior, as these are given by aliterature which thus lifts one up from day to day with thedeclaration that however commonplace a man may be, he yet has withinhimself the highest capabilities of what we have agreed to call therusset-coated epic. The George Eliot and Dickens school, in fact, dobut expand the text of the Master when He urges His disciples: "Be yeperfect as I am perfect."

  Let me now suggest a second difference between the two schools whichinvolves an interesting coincidence and now specially concerns us. Asbetween Richardson and Fielding, it has been well said (by whom Icannot now remember) that Fielding tells you the time of day, whilstRichardson shows you how the watch is made. As indicating Fielding'smethod of conducting the action rather by concrete dialogue and event,than by those long analytic discussions of character in whichRichardson would fill whole pages with minute descriptions of thechanging emotions of Clarissa upon reading a certain letter fromLovelace, pursuing the emotion as it were tear by tear,_lachrymatim_,--this characterization happily enough contrasts theanalytic strength of Richardson with the synthetic strength ofFielding.

  Now a strikingly similar contrast obtains as between George Eliot andCharles Dickens. Every one will recognize as soon as it is mentionedthe microscopic analysis of character throughout George Eliot ascompared with the rapid cartoon-strokes by which Dickens brings outhis figures. But the antithesis cannot be left here as between GeorgeEliot and Dickens; for it is the marvel of the former's art that,though so cool and analytic, it nevertheless sets before us perfectliving flesh-and blood people by fusing the whole analytic processwith a synthetic fire of the true poet's human sympathy.

  And here we come upon a farther difference between George Eliot andDickens of which we shall have many and beautiful examples in theworks we have to study. This is a large, poetic tolerance of times andthings which, though worthy of condemnation, nevertheless appeal toour sympathy because they once were closely bound with ourfellow-men's daily life. For example, George Eliot wri
tes often andlovingly about the England of the days before the Reform Bill, thecareless, picturesque country-squire England; not because she likesit, or thinks it better than the England of the present, but with muchthe same feeling with which a woman looks at the ragged, hob-nailedshoes of her boy who is gone--a boy who doubtless was often rude anddisobedient and exasperating to the last degree, but who was her boy.

  A keen insight into this remarkable combination of the poetictolerance with the sternness of scientific accuracy possessed by thisremarkable woman--the most remarkable of all writers in this respect,we should say, except Shakspeare--is offered us in the opening linesof the first chapter of her first story, _Amos Barton_. (I love tolook at this wonderful faculty in its germ). The chapter begins:"Shepperton Church was a very different looking buildingfive-and-twenty years ago.... Now there is a wide span of slated roofflanking the old steeple; the windows are tall and symmetrical; theouter doors are resplendent with oak graining, the inner doorsreverentially noiseless with a garment of red baize;" and we have aminute description of the church as it is. Then we have this turn inthe next paragraph, altogether wonderful for a George Eliot who hasbeen translating Strauss and Feuerbach, studying physics, Comtism andthe like among the London agnostics, a fervent disciple of progress, afrequent contributor to the _Westminster Review_; "Immenseimprovement! says the well-regulated mind, which unintermittinglyrejoices in the new police ... the penny-post, and all guaranties ofhuman advancement, and has no moments when conservative reformingintellect takes a nap, while imagination does a little Toryism by thesly, revelling in regret that dear old brown, crumbling, picturesqueinefficiency is everywhere giving place to spick-and-span,new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endlessdiagrams, plans, elevations and sections, but alas! no picture. Mine,I fear is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tendernessfor old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days ofnasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departedshades of vulgar errors." And it is worth while, if even for an aside,to notice in the same passage how this immense projection of herselfout of herself into what we may fairly call her antipodes, is not onlya matter of no strain, but from the very beginning is accompanied bythat eye-twinkle between the lines which makes much of the veryruggedest writing of George Eliot's like a Virginia fence from betweenwhose rails peep wild roses and morning-glories.

  This is in the next paragraph where after thus recalling the outsideof Shepperton church, she exclaims: "Then inside what dear oldquaintnesses! which I began to look at with delight even when I was socrude a member of the congregation that my nurse found it necessary toprovide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by smugglingbread and butter into the sacred edifice." Or, a few lines before, astill more characteristic twinkle of the eye which in a flash carriesour thoughts all the way from evolution to pure fun, when shedescribes the organ-player of the new Shepperton church as arent-collector "differentiated by force of circumstances into anorganist." Apropos of this use of the current scientific term"differentiation," it is worth while noting, as we pass, an instanceof the extreme vagueness and caprice of current modern criticism.When George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_ was printed in 1876, one of themost complacent English reviews criticized her expression "dynamicpower of" a woman's glance, which occurs in her first picture ofGwendolen Harleth, as an inappropriate use of scientific phraseology;and was immediately followed by a chorus of small voices discussingthe matter with much minute learning, rather as evidence of GeorgeEliot's decline from the proper artistic style. But here, as you havejust seen, in the very first chapter of her first story, writtentwenty years before, scientific "differentiation" is made to work veryeffectively; and a few pages further on we have an even more strikinginstance in this passage: "This allusion to brandy-and-water suggestedto Miss Gibbs the introduction of the liquor decanters now that thetea was cleared away; for in bucolic society five-and-twenty-yearsago, the human animal of the male sex was understood to be perpetuallyathirst, and 'something to drink' was as necessary a 'condition ofthought' as Time and Space." Other such happy uses of scientificphrases occur indeed throughout the whole of these first threestories, and form an integral part of that ever-brooding humor whichfills with a quiet light all the darkest stories of George Eliot.

  But now, on the other hand, it is in strong contrast that we find herco-laborer Dickens, always growing furious (as his biographerdescribes), when the ante-reform days are mentioned, those days ofrotten boroughs, etc., when, as Lord John Russell said, "a ruinedmound sent two representatives to Parliament, three niches in a stonewall sent three representatives to parliament, and a park where nohouses were to be seen sent two representatives to Parliament." WhileGeorge Eliot is indulging in the tender recollections ofpicturesqueness, etc., just given, Dickens is writing savage versionsof the old ballad, _The Fine Old English Gentleman_, in which hefiercely satirizes the old Tory England:

  "I will sing you a new ballad" (he cries), "and I'll warrant it first-rate, Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate,

  The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips and chains, With fine old English penalties and fine old English pains; With rebel heads and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins: For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains Of the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again!

  The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need, The good old times for hunting men who held their father's creed, The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed, Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed; Oh, the fine old English Tory times, When will they come again!

  In those rare days the press was seldom known to snarl or bark, But sweetly sang of men in power like any tuneful lark; Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark; And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark. Oh, the fine old English Tory times, Soon may they come again!"

  In a word, the difference between Dickens' and George Eliot's powersis here typified: Dickens tends toward the satiric or destructive viewof the old times; George Eliot, with an even more burning intoleranceof the essential evil, takes, on the other hand, the loving orconstructive view. It is for this reason that George Eliot's work, asa whole, is so much finer than some of Dickens'. The great artistnever can work in haste, never in malice, never in even the sub-acidsatiric mood of Thackeray; in love, and love only, can great work,work that not only pulls down, but builds, be done; it is love, andlove only, that is truly constructive in art.

  And here it seems profitable to contrast George Eliot's peculiarendowment as shown in these first stories, with that of Thackeray.Thackeray was accustomed to lament that "since the author of _TomJones_ was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted todepict to his utmost powers a man.... Society will not tolerate thenatural in art." Under this yearning of Thackeray's after the supposedfreedom of Fielding's time, lie at once a short-coming of love, alimitation of view and an actual fallacy of logic, which always keptThackeray's work below the highest, and which formed the chief reasonwhy I have been unable to place him here, along with Dickens andGeorge Eliot. This short-coming and limitation still exist in ourliterature and criticism to such an extent that I can do no betterservice than by asking you to examine them. And I think I canillustrate the whole in the shortest manner by some considerationsdrawn from that familiar wonder of our times, the daily newspaper.Consider the printed matter which is brought daily to your breakfasttable. The theory of the daily paper is that it is the history of theworld for one day; and let me here at once connect this illustrationwith the general argument by saying that Thackeray and his school,when they speak of drawing a man as he is--of the natural, etc., inart--would mean drawing a man as he appears in such a history as thedaily newspaper gives us. But let us test this history: let usexamine, for instance, the telegraphic column in the morning journal.I have made a faithful tran
script on the morning of this writing ofevery item in the news summary, involving the moral relation of manto man; the result is as follows: one item concerning theassassination of the Czar; the recent war with the Boers in Africa;the quarrel between Turkey and Greece; the rebellion in Armenia; thetrouble about Candahar; of a workman in a lumber-camp in Michigan, whoshot and killed his wife, twenty-two years old, yesterday; of theconfession of a man just taken from the West Virginia penitentiary, tohaving murdered an old man in Michigan, three years ago; of thesuicide of Mrs. Scott at Williamstown, Mississippi; of the killing ofKing by Clark in a fight in Logan county, Kentucky, on Sunday; of how,about 10 o'clock last night, a certain John Cram was called to thedoor of his house, near Chicago, and shot dead by William Seymour; ofhow young Mohr, thirteen years of age, died at the Charity Hospital,in Jersey City, yesterday, from the effects of a beating by hisfather; of how young Clasby was arrested at Richmond, Virginia, forstealing letters out of the mail bag; of how the miners of theConnellsville, Pennsylvania, coke regions, the journeyman bakers ofMontreal, Canada, the rubber-workers of New Brunswick, New Jersey, andthe Journeyman Tailors' Union in Cincinnati, are all about to strike;and finally, of how James Tolen, an insane wife-murderer, committedsuicide in Minnesota, yesterday, by choking himself with a twistedsheet. These are all the items involving the moral relations of man toman contained in the history of the world for Tuesday, March 22d,1881, as given by a journal noted for the extent and accuracy of itsdaily collection.

  Now suppose a picture were drawn of the moral condition of the UnitedStates from these data: how nearly would it represent the facts? Thisso-called "history of the world for one day," if you closely examineit, turns out to be, you observe, only a history of the world's crimesfor one day. The world's virtues do not appear. It is true thatPatrick Kelly murdered his wife yesterday; but then how many Kellyswho came home, tired from work, and found the wife drunk and thechildren crying for bread, instead of murdering the whole family, witha rugged sigh drew the beastly woman's form into one corner, fumbledabout the poor, dirty cupboard in another for crusts of bread, fed thecrying youngsters after some rude fashion, and finally lay down withdumb heaviness to sleep off the evil of that day. It is true thatJones, the bank clerk, was yesterday exposed in a series ofdefalcations; but how many thousands of bank clerks on that same dayresisted the strongest temptations to false entries and theallurements of private stock speculations. It is true that yesterdayMrs. Lighthead eloped with the music-teacher, leaving six children anda desolate husband; but how many thousands of Mrs. Heavyhearts spentthe same day in nursing some drunken husband, who had long agoforfeited all love; how many Milly Bartons were darning six children'sstockings at five o'clock of that morning; nay, what untold millionsof faithful women made this same day a sort of paradise for husbandand children. And finally, you have but to consider a moment that ifit lay within the power of the diligent collector of items for theAssociated Press despatches to gather together the virtuous, ratherthan the criminal actions of mankind, the virtuous would so far exceedthe criminal as that no journal would find columns enough to put themin, so as to put a wholly different complexion upon matters. Now theuse of this newspaper illustration in my present argument is this: Icomplain that Thackeray, and the Fielding school, in professing topaint men as they _are_, really paint men only as they _appear_ insome such necessarily one-sided representations as the newspaperhistory just described. And it is perfectly characteristic of theinherent weakness of Thackeray that he should so utterly fail to seethe true significance underlying society's repudiation of his proposednatural picture. The least that such a repudiation _could_ mean, wouldbe that even if the picture were good in Fielding's time, it is badnow. It is beautiful, therefore, remembering Thackeray's greatinfluence at the time when _Scenes from Clerical Life_ were written,to find a woman, George Eliot, departing utterly out of that mood ofhate or even of acidulous satire in which Thackeray so often worked,and in which, one may add, the world is seldom benefited, howeverskillful the work may be, departing from all that, deftly painting forus these pathetic Milly Bartons, and Mr. Gilfils, and Janet Dempsters,and Rev. Tryans, and arranging the whole into a picture which becomesepic because it is filled with the struggles of human personalities,dressed in whatever russet garb of clothing or of circumstances.

  Those who were at my first lecture on George Eliot will remember thatwe found the editor of _Blackwood's Magazine_ on a certain autumnnight in 1856, reading part of the MS. of _Amos Barton_, in hisdrawing-room to Thackeray, and remarking to Thackeray, who had justcome in late from dinner, that he had come upon a new author whoseemed uncommonly like a first-class passenger; it is significantlyrelated that Thackeray said nothing, and evinced no further interestin it than civilly to say, sometime afterward, that he would haveliked to hear more of it. In the light of the contrast I have justdrawn, Thackeray's failure to be impressed seems natural enough, andbecomes indeed all the more impressive, when we compare it with theenthusiastic praise which Charles Dickens lavished upon this same workin the letter which you will remember I read from him.

  And here I come upon a further contrast between George Eliot andDickens which I should be glad now to bring out as clearly appearingin these first three _Scenes from Clerical Life_ before _Adam Bede_ waswritten.

  This is her exquisite modernness in that intense feeling forpersonality, which I developed with so much care in my first sixlectures, and her exquisite scientific precision in placing thepersonalities or characters of her works before the reader.

  All the world knows how Dickens puts a personality on his canvas: he alwaysgives us a vividly descriptive line of facial curve, of dress, of form, ofgesture and the like, which distinguishes a given character. Whenever wesee this line we know the character so well that we are perfectly contentthat two rings for the eyes, a spot for the nose and a blur for the bodymay represent the rest; and we accept always with joy the rich mirthfulnessor pathetic matter with which Dickens manages to invest such hastily drawnfigures. George Eliot's principle and method are completely opposite; atthe time of her first stories which we are now considering they wereunique; and the quietness with which she made a real epoch in allcharacter-description is simply characteristic of the quietness of all herwork. She showed for the first time that without approaching dangerouslynear to caricature as Dickens was often obliged to do, a loveable creatureof actual flesh and blood could be drawn in a novel with all the advantageof completeness derivable from microscopic analysis, scientific precision,and moral intent; and with absolutely none of the disadvantages, such ascoldness, deadness and the like, which had caused all sorts ofmeretricious arts to be adopted by novelists in order to save thenaturalness of a character.

  A couple of brief expressions from _Janet's Repentance_, the third of_Scenes from Clerical Life_ show how intensely George Eliot felt uponthis matter. At the end of Chapter X of that remarkable story, forinstance, she says: "Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects mustmiss the essential truth unless it be lit up by the love that sees inall forms of human thought and work the life-and-death struggles ofseparate human beings." And again in Chapter XXII: "Emotion, I fear,is obstinately irrational: it insists on caring for individuals; itabsolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish,and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a set-off against twelvemiserable lives," leaving "a clear balance on the side ofsatisfaction.... One must be a great philosopher," she adds,sardonically, "to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellectin which it is evident that individuals really exist for no otherpurpose than that abstractions may be drawn from them:" (which isdangerously near, by the way, to a complete formula of the Emersoniandoctrine which I had occasion to quote in my last lecture.) Shecontinues: "And so it comes to pass that for the man who knowssympathy because he has known sorrow, that old, old saying, about thejoy of angels over the repentant sinner out-weighing their joy overthe ninety-nine just, has a meaning that does not jar with thelanguage of his own heart. It only tells him that for ange
ls too thereis a transcendent value in human pain which refuses to be settled byequations; ... that for angels too the misery of one casts sotremendous a shadow as to eclipse the bliss of ninety-nine." Thebeautiful personality who suggests this remark is Janet Dempster, theheroine of _Janet's Repentance_; a tall, grand, beautiful girl who hasmarried the witty Lawyer Dempster, and who, after a bitter marriedlife of some years in which Dempster finally begins amusing himself bybeating her, has come to share the customary wine decanter at table,and thus by insensible degrees to acquire the habit of taking wineagainst trouble. Presently a terrible catastrophe occurs; she isthrust out of doors barefooted at midnight, half clad, by her brutalhusband, and told never to return. Finding lodgement with a friendnext day, a whirlwind of necessity for complete spiritualre-adjustment shakes her. "She was sick," says George Eliot, "of thatbarren exhortation, 'Do right and keep a clear conscience and God willreward you, etc.' She wanted strength to do right;" and at this pointthe thought of Tryan, an unorthodox clergyman who had made a greatstir in the village and whom she had been taught to despise, occurs toher. "She had often heard Mr. Tryan laughed at for being fond of greatsinners; she began to see a new meaning in those words; he wouldperhaps understand her helplessness. If she could pour out her heartto him!" Then here we have this keen glimpse into some curiousrelations of personality. "The impulse to confession almost alwaysrequires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in ourmoments of spiritual need the man to whom we have no tie but ourcommon nature seems nearer to us than mother, brother or friend. Ourdaily, familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each otherbehind a screen of trivial words and deeds; and those who sit with usat the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soulwithin us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good." Nor can I everread the pathetic scene in which Janet secures peace for her spiritand a practicable working theory for the rest of her active life,without somehow being reminded of the second scene in Mrs. Browning's_Drama of Exile_, prodigiously different as that is from this in allexternal setting:--the scene where the figures of Adam and Eve arediscovered at the extremity of the sword-glare, flying from Eden, andAdam begins:

  "Pausing a moment on the outer edge, Where the supernal sword-glare cuts in light The dark exterior desert,--hast thou strength Beloved, to look behind us to the gate? _Eve_--Have I not strength to look up to thy face?"

  This story of _Janet's Repentance_ offers us, by the way, a strongnote of modernness as between George Eliot and Shakspeare. Shakspearehas never drawn, so far as I know, a repentance of any sort. Surely,in the whole range of our life, no phenomenon can take more powerfulhold upon the attention of the thinker than that of a human spiritsuddenly, of its own free-will, turning the whole current of its loveand desire from a certain direction into a direction entirelyopposite; so that from a small spiteful creature, enamored with allugliness, we have a large, generous spirit, filled with the love oftrue love. In looking upon such a sight one seems to be startlinglynear to the essential mystery of personality--to that hidden fountainof power not preceded, power not conditioned, which probably gives manhis only real conception of Divine power, or power acting for itself.It would be wonderful that the subtleties of human passioncomprehended in the situation of repentance had not attractedShakspeare's imagination, if one did not remember that the developingpersonality of man was then only coming into literature. The onlyapparent change of character of this sort in Shakspeare which Irecall is that of the young king Henry V. leaving Falstaff and hisother gross companions for the steadier matters of war and government;but the soliloquy of Prince Hal in the very first act of King HenryIV. precludes all idea of repentance here, by showing that at theoutset his heart is not in the jolly pranks, but that he iscalculatingly ambitious from the beginning; and his whole apparentdissipation is but a scheme to enhance his future glory. In the firstact of Henry IV. (first part), when the plot is made to rob thecarriers, at the end of Scene II., _exeunt_ all but Prince Hal, whosoliloquizes thus:

  "I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humor of your idleness: Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. ... So when this loose behaviour I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men's hopes; And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glittering o'er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which had no foil to set it off. I'll so offend to make offense a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will."

  Here the stream of his love is from the beginning and always towardsambition; there is never any turn at all, and Prince Hal's assumptionof the grace _reformation_, as applied to such a career of deliberateacting, is merely a piece of naive complacency.

  Let us now go further and say that with this reverence for personalityas to the ultimate important fact of human existence, George Eliotwonderfully escapes certain complexities due to the difference betweenwhat a man is, really, and what he seems to be to his fellows. PerhapsI may most easily specify these complexities by asking you to recallthe scene in one of Dr. Holmes' _Breakfast-Table_ series, where theProfessor laboriously expounds to the young man called John that thereare really three of him, to wit: John, as he appears to his neighbors;John, as he appears to himself; and John, as he really is.

  In George Eliot's _Theophrastus Such_, one finds explicit mention ofthe trouble that had been caused to her by two of these: "With allpossible study of myself," she says in the first chapter ... "I amobliged to recognize that while there are secrets in one unguessed byothers, these others have certain items of knowledge about the extentof my powers and the figure I make with them which, in turn, aresecrets unguessed by me.... Thus ... O fellow-men! if I trace withcurious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions ... it is not that Ifeel myself aloof from you: the more intimately I seem to discern yourweaknesses the stronger to me is the proof I share them.... No man canknow his brother simply as a spectator. Dear blunderers, I am one ofyou."

  Perhaps nothing less than this underlying reverence for all manner ofpersonality could have produced this first chapter of _Adam Bede_."With this drop of ink," she says at starting, "I will show you theroomy work-shop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in thevillage of Hayslope, as it appeared on the 18th of June, in the yearof our Lord 1799." I can never read this opening of the famouscarpenter's shop without indulging myself for a moment in the wishthat this same marvellous eye might have dwelt upon a certaincarpenter's shop I wot of, on some 18th of June, in the year of ourLord 25. What would we not give for such a picture of the work-shop ofthat master-builder and of the central figure in it as is here givenus of the old English room ringing with the song of _Adam Bede_.Perhaps we could come upon no clearer proof of that modernness ofpersonality which I have been advocating than this very fact of ourcomplete ignorance as to the physical person of Christ. One asks one'sself, how comes it never to have occurred to St. Matthew, nor St.Mark, nor St. Luke, nor St. John to tell us what manner of man thiswas--what stature, what complexion, what color of eye and hair, whatshape of hand and foot. A natural instinct arising at the very outsetof the descriptive effort would have caused a modern to acquaint uswith these and many like particulars.

  It is advancing upon the same line of thought to note that, here, inthis opening of _Adam Bede_, not only are the men marked off anddifferentiated for our physical eye, but the very first personalitydescribed is that of a dog, and this is subtly done: "On a heap ofsoft shavings a rough gray shepherd-dog had made himself a pleasantbed, and was lying with his nose between his fore-paws, occasionallywrinkling his brows to cast a glance at the tallest of the fiveworkmen, who was carving a shield in the centre of a woodenmantel-piece." This dog is our frie
nd Gyp, who emerges on severaloccasions through _Adam Bede_. Gyp is only one of a number of genuinecreations in animal character which show the modernness of GeorgeEliot and Charles Dickens, and make them especially dear. How, indeed,could society get along without that famous cock in _Adam Bede_, who,as George Eliot records, was accustomed to crow as if the sun wasrising on purpose to hear him! And I wish here to place upon the rollof fame, also, a certain cock who entered literature about this timein a series of delicious papers called _Shy Neighborhoods_. In theseCharles Dickens gave some account, among many other notable butunnoted things, of several families of fowls in which he had become,as it were, intimate during his walks about outlying London. One ofthese was a reduced family of Bantams whom he was accustomed to findcrowding together in the side entry of a pawnbroker's shop. Anotherwas a family of Dorkings, who regularly spent their evenings insomewhat riotous company at a certain tavern near the Haymarket, andseldom went to bed before two in the morning.

  My particular immortal, however, was a member of the following family:I quote from Dickens here:--"But the family I am best acquainted withreside in the densest parts of Bethnal-Green. Their abstraction fromthe objects amongst which they live, or rather their conviction thatthose objects have all come into existence into express subservienceto fowls has so enchanted me that I have made them the subject of manyjourneys at divers hours.... The leading lady" is "an aged personageafflicted with a paucity of feather and visibility of quills that giveher the appearance of a bundle of office pens. When a railwaygoods-van that would crush an elephant comes round the corner, tearingover these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under the horses perfectlysatisfied that the whole rush was a passing property in the air whichmay have left something to eat behind it. They look upon old shoes,wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets as a kind ofmeteoric discharge for fowls to peck at.... Gaslight comes quite asnatural to them as any other light; and I have more than a suspicionthat in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house at thecorner has superseded the sun. They always begin to crow when thepublic-house shutters begin to be taken down: and they salute thePot-boy when he appears to perform that duty as if he were Phoebusin person." And alongside these two cocks I must place a hen whom Ifind teaching a wise and beautiful lesson to the last man in the worldyou would suspect as accessible to influences from any such direction.This was Thomas Carlyle. Among his just-published _Reminiscences_ Ifind the following entry from the earlier dyspeptic times, which seemsimpossible when we remember the well-known story--true, as Iknow--how, after Thomas Carlyle and his wife had settled at Chelsea,London, and the crowing of the neighborhood cocks had long kept him inmartyrdom, Mrs. Carlyle planned and carried out the most brilliantcampaign of her life, in the course of which she succeeded inpurchasing or otherwise suppressing every cock within hearingdistance. But this entry is long before.

  "Another morning, what was wholesome and better, happening to notice,as I stood looking out on the bit of green under my bedroom window, atrim and rather pretty hen actively paddling about and picking up whatfood might be discoverable, 'See,' I said to myself; "look, thou fool!Here is a two-legged creature with scarcely half a thimbleful of poorbrains; thou call'st thyself a man with nobody knows how much brain,and reason dwelling in it; and behold how the one _life_ is regulatedand how the other! In God's name concentrate, collect whatever ofreason thou hast, and direct it on the one thing needful.' Irving,when we did get into intimate dialogue, was affectionate to me asever, and had always to the end a great deal of sense and insightinto things about him, but he could not much help me; how couldanybody but myself? By degrees I was doing so, taking counsel of that_symbolic_ Hen."

  In George Eliot all the domestic animals are true neighbors and arebrought within the Master's exhortation: "Thou shalt love thy neighboras thyself," by the tenderness and deep humor with which she treatsthem. This same Gyp, who is honored with first place among thecharacters described in the carpenter's shop, is continually doingsomething charming throughout _Adam Bede_. In _Janet's Repentance_dear old Mr. Jerome comes down the road on his roan mare, "shaking thebridle and tickling her flank with the whip as usual, though there wasa perfect mutual understanding that she was not to quicken her pace;"and everywhere I find those touches of true sympathy with the dumbbrutes, such as only earnest souls or great geniuses are capable of.

  Somehow--I cannot now remember how--a picture was fastened upon mymind in childhood, which I always recall with pleasure: it is thefigure of man emerging from the dark of barbarism attended by hisfriends the horse, the cow, the chicken and the dog. George Eliot'sanimal-painting brings always this picture before me.

  In April, 1860, appeared George Eliot's second great novel, _The Millon the Floss_. This book, in some respects otherwise her greatestwork, possesses a quite extraordinary interest for us now in thecircumstance that a large number of traits in the description of theheroine, Maggie Tulliver, are unquestionably traits of George Eliotherself, and the autobiographic character of the book has been avowedby her best friends. I propose, therefore, in the next lecture, toread some passages from _The Mill on the Floss_, in which I may havethe pleasure of letting this great soul speak for herself with littlecomment from me, except that I wish to compare the figure of MaggieTulliver, specially, with that of Aurora Leigh, in the light of theremarkable development of womanhood, both in real life and in fiction,which arrays itself before us when we think only of what we may callthe Victorian women; that is, of the queen herself, Sister Dora,Florence Nightingale, Ida in Tennyson's _Princess_, Jane Eyre,Charlotte Bronte and her sisters, Mrs. Browning, with her Eve andCatarina and Aurora Leigh, and George Eliot, with her creations. Ishall thus make a much more extensive study of _The Mill on the Floss_than of either of the four works which preceded it. It is hard toleave Adam Bede, and Dinah Morris and Bartle Massey, and Mrs. Poyser,but I must select; and I have thought this particularly profitablebecause no criticism that I have yet seen of George Eliot does theleast justice to the enormous, the simply unique equipment with whichshe comes into English fiction, or in the least prepares the readerfor those extraordinary revolutions which she has wrought with suchdemure quietness that unless pointed out by some diligent professionalstudent, no ordinary observer would be apt to notice them. Above allhave I done this because it is my deep conviction that we can findmore religion in George Eliot's words than she herself dreamed she wasputting there, and a clearer faith for us than she ever formulated forherself; a strange and solemn result, but one not without parallel;for Mrs. Browning's words of Lucretius in _The Vision of Poets_ partlyapply here:

  "Lucretius, nobler than his mood! Who dropped his plummet down the broad Deep Universe, and said 'No God', Finding no bottom! He denied Divinely the divine, and died Chief-poet on the Tiber-side By grace of God! His face is stern As one compelled, in spite of scorn, To teach a truth he could not learn."