W THE WIT AND WISDOM OF GEORGE ELIOT. E will not
say that the writer who signs herself "George Eliot" is the only female humourist who has written in English, for there is much delicate and subtle humour in Miss Thackeray's fairy stories, much humour, usually of the broad
and indelicate kind, in Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu's letters, and wonderful power of humorous observation in Miss Austen's novels ; but undoubtedly George Eliot is the only woman of our time whose writings would be remembered for their humour alone, or whose sayings, just now collected into a volume by themselves, are at all likely, like Shakespeare's sayings, to pass into the sub- stance of the language. Humour is not one of the feminine faculties, and least of all humour like George Eliot's humour, which is essentially an expression of shrewdness, of keen, hard sense, rising occasionally to the level of true, though usually earthly, wisdom. There is nothing exactly like it that we know of in our language. The author herself, to judge from occasional turns of style, has a notion that on this side of her head she has some relation to Thackeray ; but Thackeray could no more have created Mrs. Poyser than George Eliot could have created Major Pendennis,—he could not have made her so shrewd and incisive and witty, yet with so little of the anatomist about her inner character. Still less is she like Charles Lamb, whose gro- tesquely felicitous conceits are foreign to her whole style ; or Charles Dickens, with his keen eye for the incongruities of the people and minds that he had known. No character throughout George Eliot's long repertoire is in the least grotesque. There is a resemblance between her humour and that of Shakespeare, who might have written the wonderful scene in the inn parlour in "Silas Marner," a scene which of itself would stamp her rank as a drama- tist; but Shakespeare is less dependent upon the relation of his humour to the mouth in which it is placed, and seldom gives such an impression of mere shrewdness, or approaches so close to the Scotch form of wit, the basis of which is worldly wisdom. This, for instance, is utterly Scotch,—a perfect illustration of the word " pawky " :—" ' You're right there, Tookey : there's allays two 'pinions ; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinious about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.'" And no one ignorant of George Eliot, but familiar with that prince of the novelists who teach by innuendo, Galt, the one great humourist whom Englishmen have never recog- nized or have speedily forgotten, would doubt to whom to ascribe this saying of Dolly Winthrop herself, a character almost or quite unique in the literature of fiction :—
"Doffy.—Yon must fix on a name for it, because it must have a name giv' it when it's christened. Silas.—My mother's name was Heph- xibah, and my little sister was named after her. Dolly.—Eh ! that's a hard name. I partly think it isn't a christened name. Silas.—It's a Bible name. Dolly.—TAen I've no call to speak again' it ; but you see I'm no soholard, and I'm slow at catching the words. My husband says I'm allays like as if I was putting the haft for the handle—that's what he says—for he's very sharp, God help him ! But it was awk'ard calling your little sister by such a hard name, when you'd got nothing big to say, like—wasn't it, Master Marner ? Silas.—We called her Eppie.— Dolly.—Well, if it was noways wrong to shorten the name, it 'uci be a deal handier."
This gibe, too, at old age might have appeared in Dean Ramsay's collection ; though there is a touch of bitterness in it, a taste of vitriol, an appreciation of the evil side of human nature, ordinarily absent from Scotch humour, which, often severe, is very seldom cruel :—" It seems as if them as aren't wanted here are th' only folks as aren't wanted r th' other world." "Annuitants never die" is the English form of that epigram, and though more direct and intelligible, is infinitely less shrewd, covers within its range much less of the discontent youth feels with age. "I'm not denyin' the women are foolish ; God Almighty made them to match the men," is just one of the sentences one would expect from those grand old women, the last generation of Scotch ladies, such as Scott knew and worshipped ; and so is this illustration of the power of habit, an illustration curious for the brevity and force with which recognition of that power and dis- like for it are both expressed. "A maggot must be born i' the rotten cheese to like it, I reckon." In many of Mrs. Poyser's best remarks the humour consists solely in the laughing surprise created by their unexpected shrewdness, in the wonder the reader feels at being compelled to give admiring assent to what, after all, is a very simple proposition :—" If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner." "It's poor eating where the flavour o' the meat lies i' the cruets. There's folks as make bad butter, and trusten to the salt t' hide it." Or this, in condemnation of the habit of perpetually praising the dead:—" It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crop." Or this. "I know the way o' wives; they set one on to abuse their husbands, and then they turn round on one and praise 'em as if they wanted to sell 'em." "If Old Harry's a mind to do a bit o' kindness for a holiday, like, who's got anything against it?" "As for age, what that's worth depends on the quality o' the liquor." This is the shrewdness of insight, not the shrewdness which comes of observation, like this description of a Scotch gardener, per- haps the very best description of that kind of conceited efficient ever put into words :—" You're mighty fond o' Craig ; but for my part, I think he's welly like a cock as thinks the sun's rose o' purpose to hear him crow." Nor is it the shrewdness born of long experience of men, like that which gives point to this profound saying of Rochefoucauld, in illus- tration of the effect of subservience upon manner :—"Awkward- ness sometimes disappears in the camp, never in the Court ;" or to this other,—" Rank is to merit what dress is to a pretty woman ;" or to this,—" however much we distrust the sincerity of others, we believe them most to be sincere when talking to ourselves ;" or to this, perhaps the most subtly true remark even Rochefoucauld ever made, " We can forgive those who bore us, but never those who are bored by us." The humour here is clearly the result of knowledge so wide that all men who read its conclusion recognize that it is accurate, and it does not spring from any depth of mental power, as that of George Eliot seems to do, even when she is only shrewd. as in Mr. Tulliver's summary of the use of brain to women :—" An over-'cute woman is no better nor a long-tailed sheep—she'll fetch none the bigger price fox that."
Sometimes, however, George Eliot rises above this level, and then she curiously enough suggests, as Rochefoucauld always seems to us to do, not any rival humourist, but the one man whose writings, without being hutnorous, have had all the effect of humour on men's minds, the wise King of Israel. It is a curious bit of evidence for the tradition that Solomon wrote most of the proverbs which bear his name, and did not merely collect them, that the proverbs of the fine French gentleman are so like those of the first King of Israel who was porphyrogenitus, the indolent, sensual, luxurious sayer of sayings which, for their bourgeois shrewdness and adaptability to life, obtained ac- ceptance among all peoples. "The wit of most women rather strengthens their folly than their reason" is a biting sen- tence that might have come out of the Proverbs, whose testimony as to woman is identical in spirit, though not, of course, in form, with Bartle Massey's famous diatribe against the sex in "Adam Bede :"—
,' Nonsense ! It's the silliest lie a sensible man like you ever believed, to say a woman makes a house comfortable. It's a story got up, because the women are there, and something must be found for 'em to do. I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor wake-shift way; it had better ha' been left to the men—it had better ha' been left to the men. I toll you, a woman 'ull bake you a pie every week of her life, and never come to see that the hotter th' oven the shorter the time. I tell you, a woman 'nil make your porridge every day for twenty years, and never think of measur- ing the proportion between the meal and the milk—a little more or less, she'll think, doesn't signify : the porridge will be awk'ard now and then: if it's wrong, it's summat in the meal, or it's summat in the milk, or its summat in the water. . . . Don't tell me about God having made such creatures to be companions for us ! I don't say but He might make Eve to be a companion to Adam in Paradise—there was no cook- ing to be spoilt there, and no other woman to cackle with and make mischief ; though you see what mischief she did as soon as she'd an opportunity. But it's an impious, unscriptural opinion to say a woman's a blessing to a man now ; you might as well say adders and wasps, and foxes and wild beasts, aro a blessing, when they're only the evils that belong to this state o' probation, which it's lawful for a man to keep as clear of as he can in this life, hoping to get quit of 'em for ever in another—hoping to get quit of 'em for ever in another."
This from Rochefoucauld is Solomon all over, though the opinion it contains is the opposite of that of the great King, who hated fools, probably for the reason that makes "good society" hate them, they are so very seldom amusing. Bray a fool in a mortar, says the King, and you get only foolishness. "I have tried George of Denmark sober," said Charles II., him- self a sayer of sayings, "and I have tried him drunk, and drunk or sober there is nothing in him." "We may cure a fool of his folly," says Rochefoncauld, who hated not folly, but temper, "but there is no cure for a cross-grained man." George Eliot deals little with fools—her only proverb about them, we think, is that "An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down," which is not half as good as the old one about setting the Thames on fire—and, so far as we remember, has not been at the trouble to paint one, for Lisbeth Bede, though foolish, is no fool ; but she often rises to this level of wisdom based on shrewdness, as when she says, "A feeling of revenge is not worth much, that you should care to keep it." "Nothing is so good as it seems be- forehand" is her variation on "Vanitas vanitatum," and in these sentences Solomon and Rochefoucauld alike would have recognized an equal. "In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause :"—" Women think walls are held together with honey." "To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath." "A woman's lot is made for her by the love she accepts." "Half the sorrows of women would be averted, if they could repress the speech they know to be useless, nay, the speech they had resolved not to utter." "Reduced to a map, one's free- hold seems insignificant,"—a curious form of the Hebrew saying about " comparing themselves with themselves." "Your trouble's easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you." "A neigh- bourly man must let himself be cheated a little." "To the sentinel that hour is regal when he comes on guard." " Wise books for half the truths they hold are honoured tombs."
We have taken all our illustrations out of a little book of George Eliot's sayings just issued by Blackwood, and would bid any one who studies it to mark this curious and to us nearly in- explicable point. The sayings are all by one hand, yet although, when attributed to a character, they are always couched in racily characteristic English, when said by the author in person they are often couched in unendurable Johnsonese. We venture to say that the following sayings, every one of them wise, would, to half the people of London, be as unintelligible as Greek :—" Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress." "If people are to quarrel often, it follows as a corollary that their quarrels cannot be protracted beyond certain limits." "Simple people are apt to clothe unimpeachable feelings in erroneous ideas." "Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile." "A
dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is
rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic."
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