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George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
65
This, Father, scatter from the soul,
and grant that we the wisdom
May reach, in confidence of which,
Thou justly guidest all things;
That we by Thee in honour set,
with honour may repay Thee,
Raising to all thy works a hymn
perpetual; as beseemeth
A mortal soul: since neither man
nor god has higher glory
Than rightfully to celebrate
Eternal Law all-ruling.”*
Art.
IV.—George Eliot
as a
Moral Teacher.
ATOVELS are the journals or records of manners,” is a definiIN tion to be found in “ The Conduct of Life.” Mr. Ruskin,
on the other hand, has just described fiction as a “feigned,
fictitious, artificial, put-together-out-of-one’s-head thing,” and
gives us, as the best type of it, a Greek vase. Something
between the two is perhaps what a good novel should.be, not a
mere journal of the outward manners of the world, without any
ruling design to give nobility and light to the correctness of
detail; nor yet only a “ put-together-out-of-one’s-head thing,”
without that foundation of carefully observed and well considered
fact, which lends dignity to imagination and gives meaning to
fictitious creations. Mr. Ruskin’s vivid fancy makes him prefer
suggestion to description, simile to definition ; and doubtless he
perceives in a Greek vase the type of every quality essential to
good fiction. For less splendid imaginations it is easier to
consider that the best sort of novel should resemble a finely
conceived picture, where the details are true and simple to the
recognition of the least artistic of us all, but where there is also
such an arrangement of light, shade, line, and colour, as to
bring out the nobler and more lasting beauties of the scene, and
suggest, if not reveal, to us the deeper meaning and more
permanent law, working over and through the common things
that hide them from dull eyes.
A novel has been called also an epic in prose, but the tendency
of modern fiction to develop itself more and more through the
sparkling rivulets of dialogue, less and less through the broad
river of narrative, brings it nearer to the drama than it was in
its earlier days. True pictures of men and women, revealed in
* From the Hymn of Cleanthes, translated by Mr. Francis Newman in
The Soul, p. 73, fifth edition.
[Vol. 0XVII. No. CCXXXI.j—New Series, Vol. LXI.No. I. E
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George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
speech and action, are what we most urgently demand from it;
the use. of it seems to be the bringing in clear light before us
of fine ideals which we may be inspired to follow, and the reve
lation to us of our own responsibility, both in thought and
action, by the tracing of far off and unimagined consequences,
towards which we may have been surely travelling, though they
lay beyond our horizon or hidden by nearer things.
Since the death of George Eliot we have heard much of her
literary power and excellent artistic manner; but her value as a
moral teacher, that continual working towards good m her writings
which might be described as a lt making for righteousness,”
has not been sufficiently pointed out. It is this quality which
constitutes her. a master of prose-fiction in its noblest aspect, that
of virtue teaching truth, and of effort-inspiring revelation.
Fiction has been made a vehicle for the conveyance of moral
lessons since the days of David, son of Jesse, when Nathan the
pi ophet came, with his story of the ewe-lamb to the guilty king.
It was used abundantly eighteen centuries and a half ago, on the
shores of the Sea of Galilee and among the hills of Judea.
And to-day it performs still its highest office, more or less
worthily, but not with so much directness. We have no longer
the allegory in which we are to read out our own lesson step by
step, nor yet the amusing story of adventure with a brief moral
tacked on to the end of it as a sort of apology for its existence :
but we have fiction as a work of art, self-sustaining and self
explaining, truth revealed to us under the keen light of lofty
and virtue-loving thought. It is true that we have novels that
teach us nothing, and novels that teach us evilj but we do not
.find these among the works of George Eliot.
In the beginning of this century historical romance was very
popular; the action of novels was thrown back into the pic
turesque past, and the heroes and heroines were clad in attractively
unfamiliar attire. The tendency of later years has been to study
and . depict the present, to occupy ourselves more with life
studies from our contemporaries and less with fancy portraits of
our ancestors. The world has perhaps been the gainer for this
■change : Sir Walter Scott could take the old pictures down
from the walls and breathe human souls into their ancient
figures, touching them with fervour and passion until they lived
and walked among us as friends ; but there is a danger in having
beauty and nobility always depicted to us afar off, existing only
in other places and times than our own; we need to be taught
to perceive the great possibilities of our own life, the subtle
beauties of our own surroundings, and the unremarked virtues
of our neighbours.
�George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
67
il I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court.
Nay, if there’s room for poets in this world
A little overgrown (I think there is),
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s—-this, live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles.”
We have been taught, eloquently and truly, in the works of
Mr. Ruskin, that no falseness, no shirking of fact, can produce
beauty. It has been demonstrated to us that the fineness of
Greek architecture becomes almost ugliness in Northern climes;
and that the incongruity of flat roofs and windy porches under
English skies can only be regarded as an outrage against true
taste. We have been instructed to clothe our needs with
beauty, and not to pursue elegance of outline as something apart
from use and fitness. We have been encouraged to give up
stale imitations of Doric temples, to attempt a combination of
beautiful form with serious purpose which shall be worthy the
name of design, and to find opportunities, of decoration in the
light-giving windows, the smoke-conveying chimneys, the rain
draining roofs of our Northern climate. After having been
taught in this way to perceive that in the common-place require
ments of our life may lie concealed the foundations of artistic
beauty, we need not go much farther to discover, amid our
experiences of every day, noble types and poetic pictures of our
common humanity. Jeanie travelled in a stage-coach in 1736,
had she lived in 1881 she would not perhaps have refused the
accommodation of an omnibus; and her errand would have been
not less devoted, her heart not less true, in one conveyance than
in the other. We cannot abolish cabs and tram-cars, but it is
left to us to be and to picture noble human beings using the
unpicturesq-ue vehicles, and living the unadventurous lives of our
own times. In this century, as in every other, the spirit can
elevate, if it cannot dictate, the form of life.
The fact, however, that much modern fiction represents the
life of to-day, limits the possibility of adventure, and brings
character into prominence as a cause as well as a resisting power.
Men and women are depicted to us surrounded by temptation
instead of bodily danger, and exposed to moral instead of
physical hardship. In past times courage and constancy on the
part of the hero, beauty and constancy on the part of the heroine,
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George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
carried them through all troubles; most of the heroes and
heroines had indeed no other distinguishing qualities, and all
had these in common; they were young, they were handsome,
they were true; they were, in short, types rather than characters.
The young man was generous because he never troubled himself
about money, others provided it for him ; the young woman was
sweet-tempered because she rarely had anything to do except to
look pretty and to insist on marrying the right young man.
Both lived above the reach of the trivial cares that oppress so
many of us; the trials of daily life were put out of sight behind
picturesque sorrow, and life—as well as human beings—was clad
in the garb of romance. This is better, perhaps, than a morbid
dwelling on sordid details, but better still is a picture of natural
life poetically rendered.
Except in “ Romola,” George Eliot went back into no remote
past, and sought no far lands for the inspiration of her stories.
Among English orchards and meadows, over English hills she
leads us, and we see familiar English faces and hear familiar
English voices, as they are in our own time, as they were in our
fathers’, or as they used to be in the days our grandfathers have
told us of. If every word of the Scotch dialect of Sir Walter
Scott is worthy of careful study, what must be the English
dialect of George Eliot, the dialect which was our Shakespeare’s,
and which is true and pure enough to be used to-day in expla
nation of a knotty point in “ Hamlet” ?
“ I hate the sound of women’s voices; they’re always either
a-buzz or a-squeak—always either a-buzz or a-squeak. Mrs.
Poyser keeps at the top o’ the talk like a fife,” George Eliot wrote
in the latter half of the nineteenth century ; while Shakespeare,
in the beginning of the seventeenth, spoke of “an aiery of children,
little eyases, that cry out on the top of question,” i.e. talk.
George Eliot’s perfection of dialect is, however, only part of
that excellent literary method, to which—with two distinguished
exceptions—ample justice has already been done by the best of
her contemporaries. The end to which she applied the wonderful
means at her command is a separate question for consideration,
and surely we have only to study her works in order to perceive
that she belonged to the remarkable few who have united the
highest gifts to the noblest intentions.
Among the many styles of novel-writing popular to-day, two
great and extreme schools may be singled out for cleverness and
contrast. The one is a partisan of passion, the other a worshipper
of conventionality. The first breaks free from all social law, to
proclaim the sovereignty of feeling and impulse; the second paints
human life as necessarily bound in the fetters of fashion and
custom. In a certain class of French novelists we find the first
�George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
69
■of these singular types of modern thought. It represents to us
vice rampant under the more attractive title of Nature, and with
out the sequence of punishment which Nature visits on the socalled votaries who profane her name. It depicts to us, in
eloquent writing, physical indulgence without limit, and also
without the consequent diseases which are its natural result;
caprice of feeling encouraged in both sexes to their mutual satis
faction, without the concomitant caprice of weariness, leading to
neglect and desertion on the one side, to melancholy or jealousy
on the other. To complete this theory, and indeed to render it
possible or endurable to any but the basest minds, the world is
pictured to us as holding only one generation. There are—in
these strange studies of human existence—-no aged persons suffer
ing for the vices of their youth, no young children bearing the
burden of their parents’ sins, no sons and daughters dependent
for comfort on the result of their father’s conduct. The present
is everything; and the present belongs only to those who are
young at the moment. No action brings an indirect and undesired
sequence. It is made to appear that if the unjust and arbitrary
punishment of social opinion could be removed, there would be
no punishment left for individual excess, no silent inevitable
working of that great Mother Nature who has been profaned,
and who bears in her bosom disease and death, as well as life and
love, the destruction of her children as well as their nourishment.
The reverse of this school is one which is highly popular in
England just now, being happily more tolerable to an English
mind than the eloquent glorification of vice can yet make itself.
It is a school which deifies custom and regards fashion almost
as a sacred thing. In the pages of its votaries no one endures
hunger, or runs about houseless; but some of the heroines suffer
keenly because the tablecloths are put on crookedly at their
homes, or the maid-servants present an untidy appearance when
they open the door to visitors. We have pictures of poverty
always closely pursued by vulgarity, and discomfort for ever
treading on the heels of limited incomes. The adherents of this
school do not deal, like Shakespeare and the poets, with the
permanent heart of humanity, which throbs with the same great
and simple impulses through all time. Their novels are little
more than pictures of a code of manners and tone of thought
which are woven out of the latest fashion, and will depart with
the newest. The heaven of the personages moving therein is a
higher social circle ; the amelioration of character to which some
of them are led through various trials is only an improvement
of manners; a favoured few are translated from the miserable
pit of vulgarity to a delightful knowledge of social etiquette :
still more of them are made happy by a sufficient staff of servants
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George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
and an income large enough to secure a perpetual supply of the
right sort of furniture. In a clever novel which appeared a few
years ago, the heroine’s happiness is represented as hopelessly
lost while she persists in walking out in a bright silk dress ; but
when she renounces that sin against fashion, and enters into the
ways of good taste as translated by the brief caprice of the day,
life unfolds itself with bright promise before her; love and
admission to good society hasten, like twin goddesses, to her
embrace.
To neither of these two modern schools of fiction, did George
Eliot belong, and the best refutation of their sophistries or their
prejudices is to be found in her pictures of human life, which
surpass those of either school both in truth and beauty, and make
us understand that, on the one hand, no human soul is at peace
with itself or of use to the world until it grasps—amid the narrow
needs of to-day—the duties and capabilities of a whole life; and,
on the other hand, that a pure man or woman, living in true and
simple relationship to surrounding persons and things (which
cannot be without the fulfilment of duty), is free of fashion, and
stands above the stupid, unelastic laws of conventionalism.
“Adam Bede” is, perhaps, her masterpiece ; it is the book which,
of all she has written, keeps the nearest to the broad perpetual
stream of persistent human interests. Its style is clear enough
almost to escape our observation, the very perfection of the
medium causing it to elude admiration ; its suggestions of natural
scenery fill up the background of the characters without diverting
our attention from them, and rest in our minds longer than full
descriptions could do; the wit of its secondary personages
is no mere sparkle of words^ but full of tender and humorous
revelation of character: lastly, its plot is simple and clear,
fulfilling Mr. Ruskin’s demand that it should be “ handled
handily.
. . . Comprehensible, not a mass that both your
arms cannot get round; tenable, not a confused pebble
heap of which you can only lift one pebble at a time.'” And
it is worked out with so much power and pathos, such a
strong hand of truth carries the tragedy on to the end, that our
pitying protests are silenced; as the great poets silence us when
they move us most, convincing us that so—just as they have said
it—it was, and could not otherwise be. And we rise from its
perusal with a feeling that nothing can be said about this book
which it does not say for itself; only one answer need be given
to those who question its excellence, “ Read it.” If this does
not suffice, no dissertation or explanation can make a difference.
The story begins, like the actual tragedies of life, without
threats or evil omens, in clear gay sunlight, and minus the growl
ing of any melodramatic thunder. It goes on amid carelessness
�George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
71
and laughter, amid ploughing, churning, and cooking, in an
atmosphere of scolding and kisses, gossip and flirtation, work and
leisure, and culminates so to a tragic and natural end. There is
nothing arbitrary here, no introduction of extraneous machinery
to punish the wrong-doers; there is indeed no interference of
obnoxious social and so-called artificial laws until the worst of the
tragedy is over. Hetty is not driven to her great sin because she
is cast away by her friends; they are still ignorant of her first
fault when she strives to destroy its unthought-of consequences
by a second. She is even convinced that she might find refuge
and help, beyond the need of further sin, with the pure and
loving Dinah ; but she wants more than this. She had begun
by playing at life like an irresponsible kitten, only to find after
wards in her own heart the complicated needs of a woman, selfesteem, respect of friends, an assured position, a natural guardian
for her child; all these she discovered to be necessary for her
own happiness, as well as the kisses and praise in summer weather
for which she had forfeited them all. dSTo unnatural picture is
here presented to us of remorse in a nature too narrow to under
stand sin in the abstract, Hetty is sorry for herself, not repentant
of her wrong-doing. This blind and cruel Mother IS ature whose
instincts she has followed (without any of those limitations of
intelligence and self-restraint, and outlook towards consequences
to others or ourselves, which we call virtue) has led her onwards
through the paths of self-indulgence to the way of self-destruc
tion. There is none of the original light-hearted Hetty left when
she emerges from the wood where her infant lies forsaken.
And yet, at the beginning, Hetty has been showm to us as a
natural picture of what is called by most persons innocence. She
has no evil intentions, she bears malice against no one, and has
no apparent leaning towards what is depraved and vicious. She
only loves herself, Hetty Sorrel, very well indeed; has a limited
appreciation of any other motive for action than the pleasure of
Hetty Sorrel; refuses to see any distinction between right and
wrong except as they visibly affect the present enjoyment of
Hetty Sorrel. She intends just to please herself and to mind
what no one else says ; and this terrible and unexpected end
comes upon her. The great dumb laws of Nature, which give us
no kindly warnings when we are breaking them, fall like an
avalanche on this feeble creature, and crush her utterly. In the
terrible consequences of her fault she looks back at the tempta
tion to it and finds it insufficient, not worth its results. The
selfish indulgence which brought her to this position makes her
keenly miserable in it. She wants to be comfortable ; she wants
to be well thought of; she wants to be married to a man who is
fond of her; she wants, in fact, good things which she can only
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George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
get from other people, and of which she has already dissipated
the price. She would conceal her fault if she could, even now,
at the cost of murder, and go on cheating her friends with false
coin after the real is spent.
But here, also, she cannot succeed. She is not strong enough
anywhere. She has no more self-restraint in times of danger
than in times of delight; she only weaves the web of fate (which
is the sequence of character) more closely about her stumbling
feet. No dark and repulsive visions of that character rose before
us when she tripped in her loveliness and vanity through the
summer woods, nothing in the world seeming (in her own esteem)
too good for Hetty Sorrel; and yet, when we look back, we see
the end in that beginning. The harvest has ripened fast; but
it is the natural fruit of the seed sown.
The mysterious laws of Nature permit the partner of her wrong
doing to go freer than his companion from actual immediate
personal punishment. The consequences of his fault do not so
directly interfere with the circumstances of his life, and if he
had been a worse man he would have suffered less. But in his
sufferings George Eliot teaches us to perceive the best hope for
him. A man who could be happy while others endured misery
for his sin would have had to live afterwards with a companion
little better than a beast; that companion being himself. His
penalty would have been the degradation of his own nature.
The tragic story of Adam Bede is rendered doubly tragic by
its simplicity, by the absence of extraneous accident and adven
ture. We feel that this is no romance of fiction, but rather a
simple history of those easy beginnings of wrong which may all,
and which do some of them, work on to such an end. We under
stand, with Arthur Donnithorne, that we may be guilty of a
crime, even when we have not directly intended it, but have only
accepted the possibility of it in working out our own pleasures.
Scott has chosen a similar subject in “ The Heart of Mid
Lothian,” but he has not pictured Effie’s nature as so much
hardened by her sin as was Hetty Sorrel’s; he has also given to
Effie a strong maternal feeling. It is, however, one of the most
terrible consequences of such a fault as Hetty’s that it tends to
destroy the affections as well as the sacredness of motherhood,
and to convert that which should be a blessing into a burden
and disgrace. Certainly, the end of Hetty, the poor miserable
prisoner, never given back to the warm happy life she loved, stirs
us more keenly, and with a fuller sense of truth, than the uneasy
grandeur and dissatisfied fine-lady life of Effie Staunton. There
is another point in Sir Walter Scott’s great romance in which—
perhaps because, as men suffer less in such a tragedy than women,
a man must be less keen than a woman to perceive all its work
�George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
73
ings—he falls short of the perfect justice which ought to follow
poetic perception, and deals out judgment like a mere novelist
who permits himself to have favourites among his characters.
This point is the history of Madge Wildfire. The great romancist
makes us feel in the delineation of George Robertson, or Staunton,
that his character would have been utterly repulsive if he had not
felt keenly Effie’s sufferings, and desired to make her the best
reparation in his power. And yet we perceive him indifferent
to the sad result of his earlier sin in the pitiable condition of
Madge Wildfire; we are expected to be indifferent ourselves:
because the poor creature is not revealed to us in the strong light
of the novelist’s compassion her madness becomes only an interest
ing incident in so much as it affects the fate of Effie Deans.
Again, a higher note of feeling is touched in the tenderness of
Dinah than even in the sisterly devotion of Jeanie Deans. The
brave Scotch lassie is inspired by the hope of saving her unhappy
sister’s life; the quaint M ethodist maiden sees no such blessed
chance before her, but she has a full assurance that all is not
lost even if Hetty must suffer the extreme punishment, an
assurance so sublimely strong that she feels capable of conveying
it to the poor miserable girl herself. Sin is worse than death,
love is stronger than either, is the divine teaching of every word
and action of hers, from the moment she appears at the prison
door until the terrible hour when she clasps Hetty in her arms
within sight of the scaffold.
On this one theme, then, George Eliot has worked out a truer
tragedy, because more sublimely simple and less involved in the
intricacies of romance, than her great predecessor.
When we come to her love-story—almost every great writer
having produced one love-tragedy pure and simple, as Shake
speare wrote “Romeo and Juliet,” Sir Walter Scott “ The Bride
of Lammermoor ”—we find the deficiency of a somewhat unworthy
hero. The tragedy of “ The Mill on the Floss ” is essentially one
of modern life ; in the parting of the lovers the voluntary sacri
fice so often demanded to-day plays the part of the cruel persecu
tion of old times. It is only by a delicate treatment of a difficult
subject that we are enabled to understand how Maggie can be
weak enough to drift into an affection for Stephen, and yet strong
enough to refuse to marry him. A sense of freedom to love, or
obligation not to love has, among persons living in habits of
self-control, more to do with the voluntariness of affection than
the theory of Walilverwandschaften would lead us to believe.
But Maggie’s situation was peculiar enough to leave her a sense
of freedom of feeling until the time for action came, then she
realized that she was bound. The perplexities of opposing
desires had grown strong enough meanwhile to destroy her peace
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George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
of mind, but she was able to cling with a touching persistence to
the one conviction that it could not be right to work outlier own
happiness through the misery of others. The sense of what was
due to those who had trusted her, was as deep within her as the
passionate longing to be at last happy herself. She says, in one
of her moments of strongest temptation, “ The real tie lies in
the feelings and expectations we have raised in others’ minds.
Else all pledges might be broken when there was no outward
penalty. There would be no such thing as faithfulness.” And,
again, “ If life did not make duties for us before love comes, love
would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each other.”
Wherein, simply spoken, lies the moral of the whole matter.
From bright and handsome Maggie Tulliver to a miserly old
weaver the distance in subject is very great; but “The Mill on
the Floss ” and “ Silas Marner’’ both give us the same charming
pictures of English country life in the near past, and of quaint
English country people, with their simple ways and their curious
mode of talk. The sketches of childhood which they present to
us, like those in “ Adam Bede ” and in “ Scenes from Clerical
Life,” are full of tender womanly touches, justifying Mr. Swin
burne’s words of praise :—
{< Duty divine and Thought with eyes of fire,
Still following Righteousness with deep desire,
Shone sole and stern before her and above,
Sure stars and sole to steer by ; but more sweet
Shone lower the loveliest lamp for earthly feet;
The light of little children, and their love.”
Silas Marner, the poor old weaver himself, is a unique and
pathetic figure in literature. He is no miser from natural
greediness; his life has been narrowed for him, by the wrong
doing of others, to the smallest circle of interests on w’hich a
human soul can starve without actually dying. He is in himself
a good and simple old man, whom injustice may perplex, but
cannot sour. He recedes more and more from human companion
ship as he finds jt hurtful and fraught with pain, but he is not
embittered, only full of wonder.
George Eliot has a gift for the sympathetic rendering of the
characters of such good old men. She has given us a companion
picture in the minister in “ Felix Holt.” Not a few of us keep
in our memories a sacred place for some whom we have known
long ago, and who were not wholly unlike these pictures ; men
who were unlearned in the wisdom of this world, and yet knew
how to guide an infant’s steps with precepts which would help him
in after-life more than the books of the philosophers or the counsels
�George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
75
of the worldly wise; men so pure in their unselfishness, so simple in
their truthfulness, so patient in their persistent diligence . in the
performance of duty, so unambitious in their expectations of
reward, so bravely straightforward and kind in the face of a
lying and cruel world, that we keep the memory of their lives as
a refreshing thought in the midst of the hideous careers and
almost as hideous precepts which are not uncommon in society,
to-day and always. Such of us who have reason to cherish these
sacred memories hold it not the least of George Eliot’s claims to
our gratitude that she has known how to depict to us, not
unworthily, this simple and excellent, this unlearned but wholly
incorruptible type of human nature. Others might have sketched
for us the same characters ; but they would have been exaggerated
probably into oddities, oddities whom we liked, but at whom we
must be permitted to laugh. And whoever thinks of laughing
at the poor old weaver, Silas Marner? Who does not rather
regard him with absolute tenderness, with a desire to smooth
the road for his failing steps, to keep the warp and weft of life
straight for his perplexed fingers ?
The youthful heroines of “ Felix Holt” and “ Silas Marner”
are different in many particulars and similar only in one. Hester
has a natural longing for luxury and refined society ; she acts the
fine lady and visits fine people, while Eppie hardly knows of a
higher world than the village circle in which she moves. But
they are both alike in their affection for the old men whom they
call father ; and it strikes us as no unnatural thing in the one or
the other that she should finally refuse to step out of the lowly
life to which her so-called father belongs, in order to possess riches
and dwell in grand houses. Faithfulness to her first lover is
entailed in the final choice of each girl, but we cannot consider
that the cause of the choice. It is rather the influence of the
quiet old man with whom she has lived so long, who has repre
sented to her all that is simplest, truest, and best in life ; the per
manent good among fleeting attractions; and whose image she
cannot imagine transferred to the grander houses, the finer society
to which she is invited. The supreme sincerity of George Eliot
is proved in nothing more strongly than in the fact that she leaves
us satisfied that her heroines should choose poverty rather than
wealth. We have no lingering regrets for the luxuries and the
good society which they lose thereby (regrets which would
prove that the spirit of the book had not prepared us sufficiently
for its end, which would make that end only an ambitious and
incomplete effort), we do not even think that Hester or Eppie
has behaved nobly, she seems only to have acted naturally in
refusing riches. How could the triumph of the author’s principles
be more complete ?
�7G
George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
This question of poverty has been dealt with very variously
by different writers; we may suppose that each has treated it
from the point of view at which it touched most keenly his own
nature. With many of the popular writers of the day poverty is
represented as being very vulgar or very uncomfortable. It is not
admitted that we may live in a simpler way, wuth fewer ap
pliances for pleasure and ease than others of our own rank, with
out being ashamed and unhappy; unless indeed we have a
deficiency of good taste.
With Thackeray poverty was always mean. He touched its
consequences more from the spiritual than the material side, but
still he made its influence debasing. He does not tell us, in
“ Vanity Fair,’"’ that Emmy's parents, when they lost their fortune,
had to sit on horsehair chairs and drink out of cracked cups;
but he sours the kindly mother’s nature strangely indeed. And
we know of nothing sadder in fiction, or more humiliating to
human nature, than the picture of Clive’s home in “TheNewcomes,” after misfortune had overtaken the household. The
horrible temper of the mother-in-law, the mean acquiescence of
the silly wife, the weak-spiritedness of the husband himself, form
a picture which even the courage of the old colonel fails to
redeem. To see a fine nature daily tormented by small insults,
because only of the poverty of the family and the angry discon
tent of the women, is too painful a spectacle. We want to shut
our eyes and turn another way.
Dickens, on the other hand, whether he liked poverty himself
or not, had a knack of depicting it as the most cheerful and
delightful thing in existence. As long as there was abundance
of money every one was melancholy, nobody behaved properly;
but when once want had looked in at the doorway, provided
that he did not actually force an entrance, all the world was as
blithe as a lark from morning to-night.
To live in a kitchen compels vulgarity in Mrs. Oliphant's
novels; it necessitates meanness in Thackeray’s; but in Dickens’
it is an assurance of joy, honesty, and content. A shining kettle
is a more inspiriting sight than any quantity of polished silver ;
and a man has hard work indeed to reach the highest pitch of
excellence if he is not also poor. Are not these views exaggerated
or one-sided ? Is there not a truer and a nobler picture possible,
in which the precise amount of income is a mere incident, not a
predominating influence on the lives of men and women ?
We find such pictures in Shakespeare and the poets, and if we
study carefully the stories of George Eliot we shall find in her
also a fine perception of the value of inward over outward things
in human life. She hardly touches upon the quality of her
heroines’ dresses or the number of their servants. If the question
�George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
77
of costume comes in at all, it is with a consciousness that Eppie
may look as well in her print gown as Nancy Lammeter did years
before in her silvery silk. Lesser writers, when they are intend
ing an ultimate triumph to poverty and fine principles, cannot
forbear yielding little side tributes to the delights of the opposite
position; they will not go back to the flesh-pots of Egypt, but
they must describe them, how excellently the flesh was cooked,
in what delightfully artistic pots it was served. When Godfrey
Cass and his wife visited Eppie and her adopted father, it would
have been easy to indulge in a little description of the superiority
of Mrs. Cass’s dress and manners. Eppie might have been
represented as overcome by them at first, although her filial
affection for the weaver would have ultimately triumphed.
We should have known that she had proved her moral position
superior to that of the greater people, but we should have had
an uncomfortable consciouness of an outward inferiority at the
same time.
Eppie’s profound and yet natural simplicity saves her from
this humiliation. Having no longing for the actual good things
of a sphere above her own, she has no desire for even the
outward appearance of them. Her dress, her style of living, the
absence of much furniture in her home, do not, for a moment,
embarrass her clear mind or suggest the shadow of shame.
Why should she blush to be without things that it would be
wrong for her to get ? Why should she feel discomposed because
she had not that polish of speech which she could only have
obtained by neglecting her actual duties ? She is the right
thing in the right place, and it would have shown more idiocy
than intelligence to feel remorseful because she would not prove
the right thing in another place, which was not hers.
One of the most healthful, because the most natural, pictures
of middle-class poverty which literature has given to us is that
of the home of the Garths in “ Middlemarch.” It is a sketch
which shows to us the probable troubles of such poverty, the want
of means to apprentice the boys, the necessity for the girls to
leave home, and so on; but false shame has no place there.
Mrs. Garth goes on washing-up the breakfast things while the
vicar makes his call; and we straightway wonder why we ever
thought her occupation less lady-like than crewel work ; it does
not blunt refinement or debar intelligence. If she had wiped
her hands hastily and sat down, hot and discomposed, and tried
to look as if she had been doing nothing of the sort, we might
indeed have blushed with her, and ought perhaps to have blushed
for her. But if the authoress had been clever enough (as this
authoress would have been if she had put her talent in harness
to the prejudices of her time) we should have sympathized with
�78
George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
Mrs. Garth, and might have thought, “ Could not her husband
contrive somehow to keep a servant to do this work ?” and our
hot indignation would have gone out to him; we should have
said that it was his duty to give up theories and to make money ;
that a man’s highest virtue was to look after the members of his
family and to place them in the best possible position. If
they begin life by keeping no servant he must strain his faculties
to procure them one; if they begin with one he must toil his
utmost to secure them two; and so on up all the steps of the
arbitrary social scale; and, if we could have had our own way,
a good man would have been spoilt; while clever, capable
Mrs. Garth would have sat with her hands before her in her
front parlour, trying to enjoy the nominal ease which her
husband had purchased too dearly. Mr. Garth had his faults,
however; and it was a great fault, almost an inexcusable fault
in so good a man, to make himself a surety for the good-fornothing Fred. He had no possible right to endanger the future
of his children, in order to oblige a self-indulgent, extravagant,
rich man’s son. He did not fail in his duty when he preferred
good work with little pay to bad work and more money; but he
did fail when he could not say “ no” to an unreasonable demand.
Good nature is sometimes a criminal form of self-indulgence ; it
is succumbing to the weakness of a moment; buying ease and
approbation on one occasion for ourselves at the cost of terrible
trouble and disappointment in the future, which will not fall
on ourselves only, but on others also who have a right to expect
thoughtful protection from us.
This novel of “Middlemarch” deals, more than George Eliot’s
earlier works, with the intricacies of an advanced civilization ;
and as sad as Dorothea’s blind seekings after a finer type of life
than was open to her in her limited sphere is the history of
Lydgate’s failures. The heroes of old time, the men who were
stronger than their fellows, are depicted to us struggling against
the brute forces of Nature, or warring against avowed adversaries.
The heroes of to-day must fight against their friends. Man has,
in a great degree, subdued Nature ; he has bridged the Atlantic
with his steamers, brought far distant lands within speaking
distance with his cables ; made, as we have often been assured,
the fire his servant and the lightning his messenger; but he has
become a more complicated animal than his forefather was, and
is more dependent on his fellow creatures. It is hard for him to
be entirely noble to-day, entirely free to choose the best course;
and Lydgate, though he began life from a good starting-point for
independence, and was not crippled by narrowness in his desires
or prejudices in his judgment, was not likely to keep his freedom
long. He had too much scorn of other men and of their influence
�George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
79
on his life ; and yet it was partly by and through these men that
he had to work ; he could not be entirely independent, for they
were his instruments; he grasped the weapon of intercourse
carelessly, like a knife with which he meant to cut his way to
knowledge and success ; and the blade maimed him, where the
handle might have helped. His chosen pursuit lay amongst his
fellow men ; freedom to carry it out depended in a measure on
their approbation ; and yet he thought himself at liberty to
follow his own ideas entirely; he believed that the clue to his
success lay altogether in his single-mindedness. He was singleminded enough to deserve a better fate : but he was practically
wrong ; even from his own scientific point of view. If he had had
to calculate the course of a planet, he would have been too wise
to ignore the smaller influences while he gave the full weight to
the greater attractions. Yet he left out of the calculation for
his own course of life the innumerable small social bodies, highly
charged with heavy prejudices, through which he had to move.
The one act of his life which, taken singly, maimed him more than
any other, was his marriage. A good woman might have helped
him in many crises where Rosamond hindered. Dorothea had
made the mistake of supposing that the quality of tenderness
was not essential in a husband ; Lydgate followed it by the error
of believing that intellect was not necessary in a wife. It is
astonishing how many men, self-indulgent, strongly perceptive
of the requirements of their own comfort in other respects, deny
themselves the luxury of a household companion who is capable
of entering into their ideas and furthering their ambitions. It
was not, however, poverty of resource which compelled Lydgate
to put up with an inferior wife ; it was not that lie was without
the qualities that would have entitled him to win a noble woman.
He married Rosamond solely because he thought that she pos
sessed everything which a man required to find in his wife ; he
was not blinded by passion so much as led astray by a want of
consideration of the ultimate importance of the subject; just as
he had been in his dealings with the Mawmseys and Gambits,
the grocers and apothecaries of Middlemarch. If any one persists
in looking at his intended goal without regarding the obstacles
about his feet, he may easily break his leg over a wheelbarrow,
at a moment when a strong man would have opposed his pro
gress in vain.
Lydgate, the capable man baffled by his own mistakes, the man
of heroic resolve entangled in the web of other people’s mean
ness, is a solitary picture in George Eliot’s works. Adam Bede
kept his course straight to the end, and Tito Melema never pos
sessed any noble qualities. But Dorothea had her prototype in
Romola.
�80
George Eliot as a Moral Teacher.
Both these heroines made mistakes in their marriages; they
failed to find in their husbands the true men of their imagination,
and in their histories there is much noble teaching °for the
women of to-day. Surely the thought of Dorothea that “ how
ever just her indignation might be, her ideal was not to claim
justice, but to give tenderness,’ may keep, in the memories of
all good women, a place beside the lessons learnt from “ The
Queen’s Garden ” for help and inspiration. And for men and
women alike what subtle warning and suggestion are to be found
in these words from “ Romola
“ We prepare ourselves for
sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil which
gradually determines character.”
In “ Armgart” we are told that
“We must bury our dead joys,
And live above them with a living world.”
And, further, it is beautifully suggested to us—
“ Mothers do so, bereaved ; then learn to love
Another’s living child.”
For even sorrow has no right to be selfish ; there is always left
to us the hope of ministering to the joy of another.
We have seen how George Eliot could expound to us the
broad claims of the world’s brotherhood on individual lives, how
she could reveal to us in the human heart the small beginnings
of great crimes, how she could leave us satisfied with poverty and
unafraid of death: but she could also feel and express with
simplicity all the intensity of passionate personal devotion :—
“ Sweet evenings come and go, love,
They came and went of yore :
This evening of our life, love,
Shall go and come no more.
“ When we have passed away, love,
All things will keep their name ;
But yet no life on earth, love,
With ours will be the same.
“ The daisies will be there, love,
The stars in heaven will shine :
I shall not feel thy wish, love,
Nor thou my hand in thine.
“ A better time will come, love,
And better souls be born :
I would not be the best, love,
To leave thee now forlorn.”
�Working-Class Insurance as it is.
81
In the line “ I shall not feel thy wish, love,” is revealed all the
unselfishness which belonged to George Eliot’s conception of love.
She breathed an elevating spirit into every subject that she
touched, and her highest claim to our gratitude is not her literary
excellence, great as that is; not her wit, humour, or pathos; but
the noble purpose which gave to her genius a larger life. She
“ Saw the human nature broad,
At both sides, comprehending too the souls’,
And all the high necessities of art.”
And she always remained true to her highest perceptions.
Art. V.—Working-Class Insurance as it is.
1. Reports of the Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies for the
year endinq December 31, 1879. Part I. (A.) 373—
Sess. 2. 1880.
2. Life Assurance Companies. Statements and Abstracts of
Reports for 1880. Pari. Papers. 1881. No. 216.
3. Paupers, Indoor (Members of Benefit Societies}. Pari.
Papers. 1881. No. 444?.
HE Annual Report of the Chief Registrar of Friendly
Societies is a document which deserves far more attention
than it usually receives. Its contents are of interest and value
to a much larger class than that which comprises the officers and
members of the Societies with whose affairs it specially deals.
The whole nation is concerned in the welfare of institutions into
whose exchequers such vast sums are being poured by its indus
trial population every year. These associations are far more to
the working classes than assurance companies are to the middle
and wealthier classes. To the latter, a life assurance policy is
often but a supplementary provision for the family when the
bread-winner is removed ; but for the immense majority of wage
earners, the Friendly Society or the Industrial Assurance Com
pany takes all that they can afford to put by against the “rainy
days ” and the dark days that are sure to come.
The
“ Society,” as they commonly call it, is their only resource, and
if that goes, everything goes, so far as provision for their families
is concerned. But, in the very nature of the case, the evil
results of failure cannot be limited to the immediate sufferers ;
the Poor-law must, sooner or later, make good the loss, and that,
of course, means that the entire community shares in the disaster.
In the opinion of the Chief Registrar, “ the current estimate
of =£2,000,000 yearly as being virtually saved to the Poor-rates,
through the operation of Friendly Societies, must be far within
[Vol. CXVII. No. CCXXXI.j—New Series, Vol. LXI. No. I.
F
T
�82
Working-Class Insurance as it is.
the mark?’ If this be the case, then on this ground alone, to
say nothing of higher considerations, the question of the sound
ness or unsoundness of these valuable institutions must be one
which concerns every person in the kingdom.
No more important document has ever been presented by
the Chief Registrar to Parliament and the country, than the
Report for 1879 which has been issued during the present year.
It enables us, for the first time, accurately to estimate the
financial condition of a not inconsiderable proportion of all the
registered Friendly Societies in England and Wales. For many
years serious doubts have been felt as to the actual solvency of a
number of these Societies, and, in order to test the truth of these
suspicions, Parliament enacted in 1875 that a valuation of the
liabilities and the assets of all Friendly Societies should be made,
at least once in every five years, by a competent valuer. The
form to be used in making a “ Return” of these valuations to
the department was prescribed, and the date within which the
first returns were required to be sent in was fixed at December 31, 1880. Only eighteen valuation returns were received by the
Chief Registrar in 1877, and no more than forty during 1878,
although in each Annual Report issued since the passing of the
Act, the obligation to make such returns has been most strongly
insisted upon. In 1879, however, 948 valuation returns were
received by the department ; and, in an Appendix of sixty-seven
pages, the Ghief-Registrar gives an abstract of these returns, in
the last Report presented by him to Parliament. (Friendly
Societies, &c., Report, 1879. Part. I.—(A).
It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of the
information contained in this Appendix. At the date of this
report there were 15,379 Registered Friendly Societies and
Branches in England and Wales, 12,300 of which had made
the usual annual returns, showing an aggregate membership of
4,672,175, and total accumulated funds amounting to <F12,148,609
From tliis it appears that nearly one-fifth of the entire population
of the country were directly interested in the continued stability
of Friendly Societies ; any evidence which can be adduced upon
this point" must, therefore, be of the greatest possible value,
especially when, as in this case, it is evidence which is thoroughly
reliable. It is on this account that we invite the attention of
our readers to the valuation returns, of which an abstract is
placed before us by the Chief Registrar ; we have, however,
summarized its voluminous contents, and give the results in a
form which we trust no one can fail to understand.
Perhaps, however, it may be desirable briefly to explain what
a valuation is, and how it should be made, to be acceptable to
the authorities, and of real value to the members of the Friendly
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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George Eliot as a moral teacher
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 65-81 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From Westminster Review 61 (January 1882).
Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
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[s.n.]
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[n.d.]
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CT58
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Literature
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Conway Tracts
English Fiction-19th Century
George Eliot