BOOKS.
GEORGE ELIOT'S ESSAYS.* WE are not sure that it is a wise fashion to preserve all the minor efforts of great writers, especially when these minor efforts are not distinguished by the special qualities which have made them great. In George Eliot's case, we feel even more
B• Essays. and Leaves frets a Note-book. By George Eliot. Lcadon : William lackwood doubt than in that of most other writers. It seems to ns certain that Theophrastus Such injured instead of increasing the popular esteem for her genius, and we think that the present volume of essays will have the same effect in a greater degree.. They are certainly not great efforts ; and they have hardly any evidence of that insight into character and power of portraying it which gives George Eliot's stories their extra- ordinary charm. They are, to a considerable extent, enlarge& specimens of those criticisms on life which so often delay the progress of her stories, and vex the reader with their somewhat elaborate and elephantine raillery. The essay on Dr. Thomas- Young,.for instance, which she calls, with more than her usual felicity when dealing with subjects of this kind, " Worldli- ness and Other-Worldliness," is a very caustic and just exposure of the calculating devoutness of the Night Thoughts dilated by pages of very forced irony, in which one hardly knows whether one feels most the inevitable sympathy with George Eliot's drift, or annoyance that she labours it so painfully, and manufactures her scorn with so elaborate and ostentatious an apparatus of allusion and innuendo. Take, for example, the opening of her article on Young, a most caustic piece of composition, but a composition quite Johnsonian in its weight without being Johnsonian in its weightiness :— " The study of men, as they have appeared in different ages and, under various social conditions, may be considered as the natural his- tory of the race. Let us, then, for a moment imagine ourselves, as• students of this natural history, dredging' the first half of the- eighteenth century in search of specimens. About the year 1730 we have hauled up a remarkable individual of the species divine—a sur- prising name, considering the nature of the animal before us, but we are used to unsuitable names in natural history. Let us examine this individual at our leisure. He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if you observe him narrowly ; a sort of cross- between a sycophant and a psalmist; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the ' Last Day' and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic applause of King George and rhapsodic- applause of Jehovah. After spending a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets,' after being a hanger-on of the profligate Doke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a Parliamentary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications and fustian, odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect success, and has. determined to retire from the general-mendicancy business to a. particular branch ; in other words, he has determined on that renun- ciation of the world implied in taking orders,' with the prospect of a good living and an advantageous matrimonial connection. And he personifies the nicest balance of temporalities and spiritualities. He is equally impressed with the momentousness of death and of burial. fees; he languishes at once for immortal life and for livings? he has a fervid attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole pre- fers the Almighty. He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly things ; and he will feel some- thing more than private disgust, if his meritorious efforts in directing man's attention to another world are not rewarded by substantial: preferment in this. His secular man believes in cambric bands and. Bilk stockings as characteristic attire for an ornament of religion, and virtue;' hopes courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert Walpole ; and writes begging-letters to the King's mistress. His- spiritual man recognises no motives more familiar than Golgotha and the skies ; it walks in graveyards, or it soars among the stars. His, religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no- medium between the ecstatic and the sententious. If it were not for- the prospect of immortality, he considers, it would be wise and agree- able to be indecent, or to murder one's father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute : the brute is tti; be humbled by being reminded of its 'relation to the stalls,' and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of deathbeds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and exalting the next ; and by this double process you get the Christian —` the highest style of man.' With all this, our new-made divine is an unmistakeable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the world- ling and rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astro- nomical religion, and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive : for this divine is Edward Young, the- future author of the Night Thoughts."
Nobody can ignore the force of that, but it does not please us ; it is too " smart ;" it is highly artificial in its structure, and has the ramble of stage-thunder about it. We should greatly prefer a simpler, more natural, lighter style, and we carry away the impression from this as from most of the other essays, that George Eliot's novels would be even greater than they are, if she had not been steeped so long in the alien atmosphere of critical and philo- sophic study. Take, again, her pleasantest paper, that on " Heinrich Heine." Even that opens with what we may call heavy " prolegomena " on the distinction between" wit " and " humour,'" and especially the German varieties. The very kindly and lively account of Heine is not improved, but, on the contrary, overweighted and disfigured, by elaborate prefatory remarks of the following kind, which are not only elephantine in their humour, but have a flavour of the vulgarity characteristic of all smart writing :-
" On the other hand, German humour generally shows no sense of measure, no instinctive tact; it is either floundering and clumsy as the antics of a leviathan, or laborious and interminable as a Lapland day, in which one loses all hope that the stars and quiet will ever come. For this reason Jean Paul, the greatest of German humour- iste, is unendurable to many readers, and frequently tiresome to all. Here, as elsewhere, the German shows the absence of that delicate perception, that sensibility to gradation, which is the essence of tact and taste, and the necessary concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for the region of metaphysics. For Identitdt, in the abstract, no one can have an acuter vision ; but in the concrete he is satisfied with a very loose approximation. He has the finest nose for Empirismus in philosophical doctrine, but the presence of more or less tobacco-smoke in the air be breathes is imperceptible to him. To the typical German—Vetter Michel—it is indifferent whether his door-lock will catch; whether his teacup be more or leas than an inch thick ; whether or not his book have every other leaf unstitched ; whether his neighbour's conversation be more or less of a shout ; whether he pronounce b or p, t or d ; whether or not his adored one's teeth be few and far between. He has the same sort of insensibility to gradations in time. A German comedy is like a German sentence : you see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of Providence rather than of the author. We have heard Germans use the word Langeweile, the equivalent for ennui, and we have secretly wondered -what it can be that produces ennui in a German. Not the longest of long tragedies, for we have known him to pronounce that hochst fesseincl ; not the heaviest of heavy books, for he delights in that as griindlich ; not the slowest of journeys in a Post-wagen, for the slower the horses the more cigars he can smoke before he reaches his journey's end. German ennui must be something as superlative as Barclay's treble X, which, we suppose, implies an extremely unknown quantity of stupefaction."
Yet here and there, there are passages in this paper on Heine of great simplicity and force, so that we cannot help wishing that George Eliot had but written throughout as she did write when she had really lost herself in her subject, and was not bent on showing how masterly an exposition of it she could produce. Nothing, for instance, can be better than this, and nothing we may add, can be more different from it in style than the elaborate pleasantry we have just cited :-
" The most poetic and specifically humorous of Heine's prose writings are the Reisebilder.' The comparison with Sterne is in- evitable here ; but Heine does not suffer from it, for if he falls below Sterne in raciness of humour, he is far above him in poetic sensi- ;bility and in reach and variety of thought. Heine's humour is never 'persistent, it never flows on long in easy gaiety and drollery ; where it is not swelled by the tide of poetic feeling, it is continually dashing down the precipice of a witticism. It is not broad and unctuous ; it is aerial and sprite-like, a momentary resting-place between his poetry and his wit. In the 'Iteisebilder ' he runs through the whole gamut of his powers, and gives us every hue of thought, from the wildly 'droll and fantastic to' he sombre and the terrible."
But there is comparatively little in this volume so terse and bright as this. In the account of George Eliot's visit to Weimar, we get her simplest style ; but then, also, we get less-observation and less pictorial effect than we had expected ; it is hardly written in her most observant mood, and the enthusiasm about Goethe, Schiller, and Herder strikes us as a little unreal. We are very glad to have Felix Holt's admirable address to working-men reproduced for us in this volume. That seems to us one of the wisest poli- tical sermons ever preached, and it well deserved to be perpetu- ated in a more permanent form. For our own part, we &hold that and the account of Heine,—when stripped of its prolegomena,"—to be much the best parts of the book, if not exactly the only portions that we should have cared to possess in .a permanent form. In the essay on D'S. Cumming, George Eliot was at best breaking a fly on a wheel,—and on such a very elaborate wheel. Though it may have been quite right to examine Dr. Cumming's ostentatious claims on the religious world, and to expose their hollowness, the essay is cer- tainly not one that one cares to have preserved, and to have it preserved amongst George Eliot's works gives us the same sort of impression which a fly in amber would produce in us, if ranged amongst works of art.
Nor do we feel very thankful for the "Leaves from a Note- book." They are'like the " prolegomena " with which most of the essays commence, cumbrous in manner, and do not make their special points with anything of dexterity or lightness- Take, for example, this comparison between physical and in- tellectual manufacturers, and the moral limitations which there ought to be on either or both :—
" A manufacturer goes on producing calicoes as long and as fast as he can find a market for them ; and in obeying this indication of demand he gives his factory its utmost usefulness to the world in general and to himself in particular. Another manufacturer buys a new invention of some light kind likely to attract the public fancy, is successful in finding a multitude who will give their testers for the transiently desirable commodity, and before the fashion is out, pockets a considerable sum : the commodity was coloured with a green which had arsenic in it that damaged the factory workers and the purchasers. What then ? These, he contends (or does not know or care to contend), are superficial effects, which it is folly to dwell upon while we have epidemic diseases and bad government. The first manufacturer we will suppose blameless. Is an author simply on a par with him, as to the rules of production ? The author's capital is his brain-power,—power of invention, power of writing. The manu- facturer's capital, in fortunate cases, is being continually reproduced and increased. Here is the first grand difference between the capital which is turned into calico and the brain capital which is turned into literature. The calico scarcely varies in appropriateness of quality, no consumer is in danger of getting too much of it, and neglecting his boots, hats, and flannel-shirts in consequence. That there should be large quantities of the same sort in the calico manufacture is an advantage ; the sameness is desirable, and nobody ie likely to roll his person in so many folds of calico as to become a mere bale of cotton goods, and nullify his senses of hearing and touch, while his morbid passion for Manchester shirtings makes him still cry More !' The wise manufacturer gets richer and richer, and the consumers he sup- plies have their real wants satisfied and no more. Let it be taken as admitted that all legitimate social activity must be beneficial to others besides the agent. To write prose or verse as a private ex- ercise and satisfaction is not social activity ; nobody is culpable for this any more than for learning other people's verse by heart, if he does not neglect his proper business in consequence. if the exercise made him sillier or secretly more self-satisfied, that, to be sure, would be a roundabout way of injuring society ; for though a certain mixture of silliness may lighten existence, we have at present more than enough. But man or woman who publishes writings inevitably assumes the office of teacher or influencer of the public mind. Let him protest as he will that he only seeks to amuse, and has no pre- tension to do more than while away an hour of leisure or weariness —' the idle singer of an empty day '—he can no more escape in- fluencing the moral taste, and with it the action of the intelligence, than a setter of fashions in furniture and dress can fill the shops with his designs, and leave the garniture of persons and houses unaffected by his industry."
That elaboration of a simple and very true idea surely does not elucidate or happily illustrate it. One is rather bewildered than enlightened by the contrast between the social aspects of the demand for physical and for intellectual products. It is true, of course, that a man is not likely to buy for himself mach more calico than he wants, and that a man may buy for himself a great deal more fiction than he needs, and that in consequence a calico-producer has no reason to fear the evil results of manufacturing as much as people will buy, while a novel-writer may rightly scruple to produce as much as people will buy. But we do not know that this contrast adds any weight at all to the warning that the writers of fiction may find a demand for very indifferent and even mischievous wares, and that that demand is no reason for furnishing a supply. The truth is plain and weighty, but George Eliot's cumbrous mode of enforcing it does not strike ns as happy, and we doubt much whether she would herself have preserved these " Leaves from a Note-book," even though some very similar were em- bodied in Theophrastus Such.
On the whole, we cannot say that the publication of this volume will add to George Eliot's great reputation. That reputation will always depend on her fictions, and will not be enhanced by her tendency to dissertation, which has, indeed, done something to injure her stories. We except from this remark the spirited political sermon,—first published, if we remember rightly, in 1868, in Blackwood's Magazine,—which was put into the mouth of Felix Holt, the Radical. That is a sound bit of political counsel, which will not lose its signifi- cance with any lapse of time.
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