BOOKS.

GEORGE ELIOT.* 'run faults of this book appear to us chiefly two,—one, that Miss Blind has written in anticipation of the materials for s, true biography, and has consequently been compelled to make her book more of a literary criticism than of a life, and so dis- appoints our expectations ; the other, that she does not really Lace the chief act -of George Eliot's life, on which it is certain

• George Eliot. By IINtbilde Blind. One of "The Eminent Women Series," -edited by 70bn H. Ingram. London : W. IL Allen and Co.

that the estimate of her as a woman must more or less turn, and while Miss Blind is herself doubtful about it, she does not attempt to reconcile it with the principles which she admits that George Eliot herself laid down for her own guidance and the guidance of others, in cases of similar trial.

Of the former, the literary side of the book, we have not very much to say. Miss Blind is not an indiscrimi- nate admirer. She knows the weak points of George Eliot's writing, and points them out clearly enough. She is not a profound admirer of the poems. She can see the falling-

off from the standard of George Eliot's former works in the book called The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, though why she attributes to that dull book "cutting irony and in- cisive ridicule," we cannot imagine. She is quite alive to the weak element in Daniel Deronda, and generally we may say that Miss Blind's literary judgment is extremely sensible, though she is apt to use somewhat pedantic and high-flying phraseology in expressing it. Why, for instance, in speaking of George Eliot's first period of scepticism, should Miss Blind close her sentence with the extremely pedantic and very unintelligible phrase, "It was a period of transition, through which she gradually passed into a new religious synthesis"? Miss Blind means at most a new religious doctrine,' and had no real occasion at all for that new- • fangled use of a purely logical word in a purely common-place sense. Again, what is it but a mannerism, and a bad mannerism, to talk of the following passage from George Eliot's essay on "Worldliness and Other-worldliness" as scathing ? There is

nothing even aggressive in it ; it is only a defensive remark, made on the part of those who do not believe in immortality, to the effect that a good deal of morality remains as potent over themselves as ever it was,—nay, that there are moral claims which seem to be even the more potent for the loss of their belief in a future world:—

" For certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious importance to untheological minds,--a delicate sense of our neigh- bour's rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our

fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the condition of good to others, in a word, the extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature, we think it of some importance to contend, that they have no more direct rela- tion to the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable • that to some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality—that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones, and to our many suffering fellow-men, lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence To us it is matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessity of healthful life is inde- pendent of theological ink, and that its evolution is ensured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or of art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with undefinable

It may be true that one sentence here was intended to re- flect on the selfishness of those who attach more importance to the prospect of their own future reward or punishment than to the actual pangs or joys of their fellow-creatures, but even that implied reflection is mild enough, and to speak of it as " scathing " is to misapply language altogether. Again, what in the world does Miss Blind mean by speaking of "the trans- fixing medium of George Eliot's genius "? She is speaking of the Dodson family painted in The Mill on the Floss, and remarks :—" Realism in Art can go no further in this direction. These women, if present in the flesh, would not be so dis- tinctively vivid as when beheld in the transfixing medium of George Eliot's genius." How can a medium transfix ? And if it could transfix, how could it make anything more vivid by trans- fixing it ? Was St. Sebastian any the more vivid for being transfixed by the arrows? Miss Blind is at bottom a woman of good common-sense, but her style is, unfortunately, a little pre-

tentious; and when she tries to say something fine, she falls much below the mark, instead of, as she intends, rising above it.

On the whole, however, we should be inclined to say that Miss Blind knows very well what is best and what is least good in George Eliot's writings, and tells her readers truly enough what she knows. But we do not think 'that her extracts and criticisms answer any very good purpose, except that of refreshing a failing memory. The latter are usually sound, but they are never subtle or original.

On the other hand, Miss Blind's treatment of the most critical resolve ever taken by the subject of her memoir is wholly

unsatisfactory. She hardly ventures to pass any judgment on it herself. And she does indicate her surprise that a writer whose openly expressed convictions on the general sanctity of marriage appeared to incline so strongly in the direction of reverencing the marriage tie above almost every other social institution, should have adopted for herself a course so widely at variance with the apparent drift of those convictions. Speaking of the poem of "The Spanish Gipsy," Miss Blind says :—

"Nowhere do we perceive so clearly as here the profound sadness of

her [George Eliot's] view of life; nowhere d oes she so emphatically reiter- ate the stern lesson of the duty of resignation and self-sacrifice ; or that other doctrine that the individual is bound absolutely to subordinate his personal happiness to the social good, that he has no rights save the right of fulfilling his obligations to his age, his country, and his family. This idea is perhaps more completely incorporated in Fedalma than in any ether of her characters—Fedalma, who seems so bountifully endowed with the fullest measure of beauty, love, and happiness, that her renunciation may be the more absolute. She who, in her young joy suddenly knows herself as an aged sorrow,' exclaiming :-

'I I will not take a heaven

Haunted by shrieks of far-off misery.

This deed and I have ripened with the hours : It is a part of me—a wakened thought That, rising like a giant, masters me, And grows into a doom. 0 mother life, That seemed to nourish me so tenderly, Even in the womb you vowed me to the fir, Bung on my soul the burden of men's hopes, And pledged me to redeem !—I'll pay the debt.

You gave me strength that I should pour it all Into this anguish. I can never shrink Back into bliss—my heart has grown too big With things that might be.'"

Surely, if these high sentiments mean anything, then, to one who held, as George Eliot certainly did, that on the sanctity of the marriage tie depend the highest bonds of social life, it should have been impossible to set the example which George Eliot set, an example which, as Miss Blind candidly admits, has tended to neutralise,—in all probability, indeed, has much more than neutralised,—the direct influence of George Eliot's own teaching. If the individual be " bound absolutely to subordinate his personal happiness to the social good," and if, as Miss Blind contends, George Eliot's writings "inculcate an almost slavish adherence to whatever surroundings, beliefs, and family ties a human being may be born to,"— an expression much stronger than any which we ourselves should have used,—the great authoress could hardly have dealt a severer blow to the moral influence of her writings than by personally setting at defiance that belief in the sanctity of marriage which, to do her justice, her stories most re- ligiously inculcate. It is not enough to say, as Miss Blind says, that the companion whom she chose was already married, though his married life was over, and that he could not obtain a divorce. And we cannot understand how she, even without any reverence for the divine authority under which marriage usually shelters itself, can have held that it was really "subordinating her individual happiness to the social good," when she struck this heavy blow at the domestic morality of her country and her age. Miss Blind speaks strongly enough of George Eliot's own private convictions :—

"Circumstances prompted her to disregard one of the most binding laws of society, yet, while she considered herself justified in doing ISO, her sympathies were, on the whole more enlisted in the state of things as they are than as they might be. It is certainly carious that the woman who in her own life had followed such an independent course, severing herself in many ways from her past with all its traditional sanctities, should yet so often inculcate the very opposite teaching in her works—should inculcate an almost slavish adherence to whatever surroundings, beliefs, and family ties a human being may be born to."

We cannot disguise our conviction that George Eliot, whilst holding up in her works a view of marriage not only noble' but almost sacramental in its strictness, deviated in her own life from her own high standard, without apparently having even the excuse of that engrossing and absorbing species of personal devotion which leaves its stamp on the entire life. The sequel of her own history makes its most important incident much more difficult than it otherwise might have been to inter- pret in any fashion consistent with the moral reverence with which George Eliot's tone on these subjects usually inspires us. Mr. C. Kegan Paul, in a biographical study of George Eliot which he has just published, is bolder on this subject than Miss Blind, for he speaks of her step in uniting her lot to a man whom she could not marry, as not one "for which there was need of excuse." We entirely differ' from him, and agree with Miss Blind that we find the gravest reason in George Eliot's own writings to think that, whatever she may have believed her final decision to be, her own mind was never easy on the subject, and that she was always striving to make corn pensation in her works for the influence of her example. That, no

doubt, was noble in her. Indeed, it is the unquestionable nobility of her writings which makes us grieve the more deeply for the still graver loss of her example. But that she did conceive of a far higher ideal of moral duty in this matter than any which she realised, we entertain no doubt at all. The truth, probably, is that her scepticism as regarded the divine authority of the most sacred of human institutions, unhappily sapped her practical reverence for that institution itself.

As regards George Eliot's genius, it is pretty clear that its chief defect was want of instinct, want of spontaneity, want of spring. Her voice, her style, her cast of thought were all some- what heavily self-conscious. Her voice was musical, but severely graded. She intoned, rather than conversed. Her style was without ease, moulded into august sentences often painfully scientific. Her whole cast of thought was wanting in spon- taneity. She believed too much in the power of elabor- ate reflection to reach truth, and assigned far too little' importance to the vehement protests of those spiritual instincts which assured her that, in deference to one sec- tion of her intellect, she was browbeating what had more claim to intellectual authority than all the power of her skilful analysis. To our minds, she is never at her greatest when she is giving us her own thoughts. Her essays, her prologues.

to her novels, her satire, her chitchat, her poetry, rich as. they are in powerful thought, are prevailingly heavy,.

careworn, and weary in tone, without any victorious life in them. It is when she paints others, and chiefly when she paints those most different from herself, that she rises into a world of genius all her own. Her pictures of Dinah and Hetty, of Mrs. Poyser and Mrs. Cadwallader, of Mr. Trumbull and Mr. Brooke, of Tito and Tessa, and dozens of other characters,.

raise her to one of the highest levels of creative genius ever attained in English literature. But no sooner does she drop' into the reflective and satiric vein, than she seems to us to fall heavily to the ground,—to become cumbrous, self-conscious, and sometimes even pedantic.

Mr. Kegan Paul, who knew her well, speaks of her counten- ance as reminding hinrof the countenances of Dante, Sa.vonarola, and Cardinal Newman. But surely there was not that ex- pression of passionate self-abnegation in her face which is in that of the two first, at all events, if not also in that of the- great Oxonian Cardinal. Miss Blind, on the other hand, gives- a very odd hint of one o the elements in that expression, for which we were quite unprepared, and which, so far as our own knowledge goes, we should have entirely denied :—

"Besides M. d'Albert's Genovese portrait of George Eliot, we have- s drawing by Mr. Burton, and another by Mr. Lawrence, the latter- taken soon after the publication of Adam Bede. In criticising the latter likeness, a keen observer of human nature remarked that it conveyed no indication of the infinite depth of her observant eye, nor of that cold, subtle, and unconscious cruelty of expression which. might occasionally be detected there."

Is there any authentic foundation for that criticism P There is. certainly no trace of cruelty in George Eliot's writings, though: there is of intellectual scorn, which is a very different quality indeed.

On the whole, we should Bay that Miss Blind's book is as good as we could have expected from a competent but not a brilliant writer who has not had access to any original biographic store- of material, and who has been compelled, therefore, to produce- a study of a life before the materials for that study were in her hands.