THE "CHURCH QUARTERLY" ON GEORGE ELIOT.
TI-'E Church Quarterly Review is one conducted with both learning and taste, but its defect seems to us a conventional kind of Churchiness, due to an exceedingly confined experience of human nature, and a permanent habit of decorous, as distinguished from ethical thought. The most remarkable illustration o f this is the paper in the current number on "Romance of Modern Scepticism," which, excepting a little parenthetical criticism of a page or two on Georges Sand, is almost wholly concerned with George Eliot. The paper is in some respects very ably written, for the introduction, on the unique effect of literary power in revealing to a writer the secret of his own strength,—a • secret of which, as Swift, quoted by the reviewer, most justly says, men are apt to be no less unconscious,—generally, perhaps, much more unconscious—than they are of their own weaknesses, —weakness causing slips, and falls, and bruises, which necessarily tell their own tale of weak joints or unmanageable limbs,—oould not have been written except by a man of some power of conception. Bet this makes the general character of the narrowness which runs through the criticism all the more remark- able. We say, without hesitation, that the critic has hardly any real insight into the author he is dealing with ; that his point of view is not indeed too Christian,—far from it, for Christianity is a searching power which goes to the heart of motives, and which makes the hollowness of all purely conventional views painfully visible,—but too unconscious what Christian morality really means, to criticise George Eliot's ethics with a shadow of success. Not, of course, that we regard George Eliot's ethics as Christian, —they are as Christian as they can be from a point of view which is certainly not that of earnest spiritual faith,—but that we do hold them to have all the inwardness of Christian ethics, all the sincere desire to judge not by outward acts and conventional appearances, but by the quality of the interior motive and purpose, —in a word, to be always teaching us that it is that only which comes out of the heart that really defiles a man, and only that which 0011108 out of the heart which can really purify him. We are perfectly aware that George Eliot has never, unless the ex- ception be in her last work, "Daniel Deronds,"—which is a very doubtful exception, no doubt,—written even from the point of view of a convinced Theist. One of her first literary efforts,—to which the reviewer in the Church Quarterly makes no reference, —was the translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's attempt to explain away both Theism and Christianity as the mere idle echo of human hopes ; and to the careful student of her books, that has appeared to be her own view, from the first of her great efforts up to the last, though in the last we saw or thought we saw a certain modification of tone on this head. It has been often a great puzzle to reconcile the profound sympathy with Christian ethics which George Eliot's works betray, with the complete absence of any- thing like Christian faith. In her first novel of all, Adam Bede, who is in essence at least a Secularist, is evidently meant to be the superior in all intellectual respects of Dinah, the sweet spiritual visionary, and to be her superior because he is so severely secularist. And from that book to her last no one could have found in George Eliot's writings the least trace of real belief in a Power above man towards whom he ought to cultivate the attitude of spiritual affection. And yet in spite of this complete absence of faith, her tone has been the tone of one who attached infinitely more im- portance to humility, purity, and spotless sincerity than to the most utilitarian and beneficent of human virtues. In "Daniel Deronda," we held,—with some hesitation, we admit,—that there was some advance on this purely ethical Christianity of tone. Whatever Mordecai believed in as to human immor- tality, he clearly believed in some inspiring Power above man. And the overruling of Deroncle's life, so that in spite of his mother's intention to withhold him from all Jewish associations, he is by that very means only made the more competent to guide- the new school of faith in Jewish inspiration, looks like a con- viction in the author that an invisible Power higher than any human agent does shape human ends, rough-hew them how we will. At least if she does not recognise this over- ruling Power, it was a clear blunder in art as well as in moral sympathy, to make so much of the mysterious coincidence be- tween the purpose of Dcronda's grandfather and the catastrople of the story, in spite of the mother's deliberate effort to counteract
her father's purpose. We admit that to infer with any positiveness a theistic faith from such data as these would be absurd, but that they do show a certain change of tendency in that direction, such as John Stuart Mill's last essays show, when compared with his earlier writings, seems to us clear. We hold, then, to the opinion we expressed at the time, that 'Daniel Deronda " is far the most genuinely religious in tone of George Eliot's books, none of which, though indicating a deep sympathy with Christian ethics, had previously indi- cated any sort of sympathy with a single article of Christian faith.
And now, what does the Church Quarterly reviewer say on George Eliot? First, he finds a real deterioration in the tone of her later books ; and next, he charges them with a definite intention of running down marriage. We cannot imagine two more groundless charges, or charges worse supported, and we can only believe that the writer's mind really worked in this way :—" It is very shock- ing that a writer who disbelieves Christianity should be getting praise for ethical depth and pureness. It is impossible she can deserve it, and impossible that it should not injure Christianity that any of its best influences should be recognised in one who is not a Christian. it would, therefore, be a good work to detect the moral poison the critics have missed, which must be there,—so I'll set about and do it." Of course, we do not imagine anything like conscious elaboration of such a train of thought in a cultivated and obviously perfectly sincere critic. But we do suspect very deeply that a profound prepossession against George Eliot's ethics is the only key to the astounding criticisms we read in this paper. On the first charge we have said enough already, and will only add that whereas in George Eliot's first novel, the picture of the religious feelings of Dinah and Seth is like Goethe's picture of a beautiful soul,'—that is, a study of lives involved in dreams with which that of the realist hero,—the worker who has no visions,—is meant to be contrasted, to the advantage of the latter,—in the last novel, the hero is chosen not only for his susceptibility to faith, but for the exceptional power this susceptibility gives him, and it is made the lever on which the whole regenerating power which he exercises works.
Now as to the second charge. The Church Quarterly reviewer asserts, in so many words, that George Eliot's "later novels show a deliberate purpose to set in an adverse light the relation of husband and wife, under the teaching of Christianity, and of the English law, as founded on that teaching." A more base- less assertion was never made. We do not hesitate to affirm that no novelist of our day has done so much to make her readers attach an importance which we may almost call sacramental,—were it not inapplicable to one who does not believe in sacraments,— to marriage, as George Eliot. Such a charge might by possibility have been brought by a very severe critic against Mr. Trollope, who is always trying to show us how young men hover between two or three girls, all of whom they would be glad enough to marry, if only the others were away ; or even against Mr. Hardy, who likes to show how very apt women's minds are to overrule their affections, and to turn the question of marriage into a question of policy, rather than a question of their inner spiritual life. But the last novelist against whom we could have imagined such a charge would have been George Eliot. And how does the Church Quarterly reviewer prove his case ? Why, he asserts that only the common-place people are made tolerably happy in marriage, liko Celia in " Middlemarch," or Mrs. Gascoigne in "Daniel Deronda," while the superior women are made unhappy, like Dorothea and Gwendolen. Furthaei-b,,r asserts that all the episode as to Grandcourt's former mistress, Mrs. Glasher, is an attack on the sacredness of marriage ; and worst of all, that Deronda's relation to Gwendolen is one which offends a pure instinct, by the mixture in it of a sort of religious reverence with a mere personal fascination. This is the sort of thing which goes on through many pages :—" The influence of attractive young men—intensely sympathising, whose expression of countenance is even in advance of their internal sentiment— upon unhappy wives, cannot be so described as to hold promise of good to the wife, or handled so as to satisfy our views of social propriety." That last word is, we suspect, the real key to the article. What the writer is really thinking of all through is not spiritual Christianity, but propriety. "is this proper ?" is the real question besetting the writer's mind,—not, "Is this con- ceived in the right spirit?" As a matter of fact, Deronda's relation to Gwendolen is so described as to hold out promise of good to her, and mainly on account of the reserve, the perfect reverence for her position, and the preoccupied heart, which preserve him from anything like ardour of sympathy. We deny altogether that the story is one which is meant or calculated to promote such relations as that between Deronda and Gwendolen, between young men of high aims in general and fascinating women who are unhappily married. On the contrary, the author's sense of the danger of the position is clearly marked ; and she takes great pains to show that the moral aid which Deronda gives to Gwendolen is given all but involuntarily on his part, because no one else is even aware of her trials. As for the
episode of Mrs. Washer, nothing more effective in the way of moral warning could, to our mind, be imagined ; and certainly George Eliot meant to teach, and did teach by it, something a good deal higher than the lesson urged in some parts of the following passage :—
"Now Gwendolen, on first being informed of this connection, and throughout, is made to rest her objection to fulfilling her promise to Grandeourt, and subsequently her self-blame for having married him, eimply on the ground of interfering with Mrs. Glashor's rights: and the rights of Mrs. Glasher and her children are the question throughout ; whereas, speaking strictly, under Christian teaching, there is no right at all on either side, but that of repenting in dust and ashes. The woman has no social rights, no rights as a citizen ; for her children she forfeits them, as well as for herself. The state they are born into is one of shame and infinite disadvantage ; but one entailed on them by their parents, and not by society. Their birth is a natural disqualification, just as a thousand other things are disqualifications interfering with the prospects of those suffering under them. It is a disqualification, however, which the author evidently desires to see done away ; a wish which she repre- sents as already gaining some ground in English society. She makes Sir Hugo, a respectable baronet, describe Mrs. Glasher to Deronda 'as a sort of wife to Grandeourt for several years,' adding that ho has left his estate to her boy. 'In my opinion,' answers Doronda, 'he did wrong when he married this wife (Gwendolen), not in leaving his estates to the son.'—'I say nothing,' replies Sir Hugo, against his leaving the land to the lad.' Yet surely the Sir Hugos of real life would see some harm if the landed property of England were to fall into the hands of such claimants."
Philistine morality could scarcely go further than this. When the reviewer says that a woman in the position of Mrs. Glasher has no rights at all, he ventures on an assertion a good deal more
startling,—if it were not mere conventionalism,—than anything suggested by George Eliot. Does he mean that it was not wrong in Grandcourt to desert her and her children, and marry as his taste inclined him? If he does not, then what it was wrong in him to do, she had a right to object to his doing, and that is the
only sense in which we can understand a right at all. But if the reviewer does mean that it was not wrong in Grandcourt and Gwendolen to leave the connection with Mrs. Glasher out of account, he means to say that a sin once committed can bring no consequences of duty after it; and a doctrine more utterly destructive of much of our spiritual life we can hardly conceive. The truth is that this reviewer stands altogether on too conven- tional a plane to enter into George Eliot's ethics,—ethics which we by no means defend against the charge of involving far too little fixed law, and far too much fluid sentiment,—but of which no one can say that they stop, as the ethics of this reviewer often appear to do, in the plane of the proper and the conventional. We believe that George Eliot has a higher conception of marriage than almost any novelist of the day, and shows it in her delineation in
Middlemarch " of Dorothea's unhappy blunder,—as well as in the beautiful picture of Mr. and Mrs. Garth's relation to each other, which the reviewer entirely ignores. But the Church Quarterly
reviewer went about to find a case against her, and of course a case, to his own satisfaction, be has found, though we venture to assert that the story of Grandcourt and Gwendolen will be read as a warning against selfish and sensual marriage by multitudes, who will never discern in it any wish to disparage the institution itself.
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