Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (947 page)

Zealous as is George Eliot’s faith in tradition, she is broad-minded enough to see that it is limited in its influence by at least two causes, — by reason and by the spirit of universal brotherhood. We have already seen that she makes reason one of man’s guides. In
Romola
the right of the individual to make a new course for action is distinctly expressed. Romola had “the inspiring consciousness,” we are told, “that her lot was vitally united with the general lot which exalted even the minor details of obligation into religion,” and so “she was marching with a great army, she was feeling the stress of a common life.” Yet she began to feel that she must not merely repeat the past; and the influence of Savonarola, in breaking with Rome for the sake of a pure and holy life, inspired her.

To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in face of a law which is not unarmed with divine lightnings — lightnings that may yet fall if the warrant has been false.

It is reason’s lamp by which “we walk evermore to higher paths;” and by its aid, new deeds are to be done, new memories created, fresher traditions woven into feeling and hope. National memories are to be superseded by the spirit of brotherhood, for, as the race advances, nations are brought closer to each other, have more in common, and development is made of world-wide traditions. Theophrastus Such, in the last of his essays, tells us that “it is impossible to arrest the tendencies of things towards the quicker or slower fusion of races.”

The environment of her characters George Eliot makes of very great importance. She dwells upon the natural scenery which they love, but especially does she magnify the importance of the social environment, and the perpetual influence it has upon the whole of life. Mr. James Sully has clearly interpreted her thought on this subject, and pointed out its engrossing interest for her.

“A character divorced from its surroundings is an abstraction. A personality is only a concrete living whole, when we attach it by a network of organic filaments to its particular environment, physical and social. Our author evidently chooses her surroundings with strict regard to her characters. She paints nature less in its own beauty than in its special aspect and significance for those whom she sets in its midst. ‘The bushy hedgerows,’ ‘the pool in the corner of the field where the grasses were dank,’ ‘the sudden slope of the old marl-pit, making a red background for the burdock’ — these things are touched caressingly and lingered over because they are so much to the ‘midland-bred souls’ whose history is here recorded; so much because of cumulative recollection reaching back to the time when they ‘toddled among’ them, or perhaps ‘learnt them by heart standing between their father’s knees while he drove leisurely.’ And what applies to the natural environment applies still more to those narrower surroundings which men construct for themselves, and which form their daily shelter, their work-shop, their place of social influence. The human interest which our author sheds about the mill, the carpenter’s shop, the dairy, the village church, and even the stiff, uninviting conventicle, shows that she looks on these as having a living continuity with the people whom she sets among them. Their artistic value is but a reflection of all that they mean to those for whom they have made the nearer and habitually enclosing world.” The larger influence in the environment of any person, according to George Eliot, is that which arises from tradition. Cut off from the sustenance given by tradition, the person loses the motives, the supports of his life. This is well shown in the case of Silas Marner, who had fled from his early home and all his life held dear. George Eliot describes the effect of such a change of environment.

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible — nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas — where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories. [Footnote: Chapter II.]

She delights to return again and again to the influences produced upon us by the environment of childhood. In
The Mill on the Floss
she tells us how dear the earth becomes by such associations.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, — if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass — the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows — the same redbreasts that we used to call “God’s birds,” because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and
loved
because it is known?

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers, and the blue-eyed speedwell, and the ground-ivy at my feet — what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows — such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us, and transform our perception into love. [Footnote: Chapter V.]

In the backward glance of
Theophrastus Such
this anchorage of the life in familiar associations is described as a source of our faith in the spiritual, even when all the childhood thoughts about those associations cannot be retained.

The illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to be illusions. They feed the ideal better, and in loving them still, we strengthen, the precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly existent, but a spiritual product of our visible, tangible selves.

In the evolution philosophy she found the reconciliation between Locke and Kant which she so earnestly desired to discover in girlhood. The old school of experimentalists did not satisfy her with their philosophy; she saw that the dictum that all knowledge is the result of sensation was not satisfactory, that it was shallow and untrue. On the other hand, the intellectual intuition of Schelling was not acceptable, nor even Kant’s categories of the mind. She wished to know why the mind instinctively throws all experiences and thoughts under certain forms, and why it must think under certain general methods. She found what to her was a perfectly satisfactory answer to these questions in the theory of evolution as developed by Darwin and Spencer. Through the aid of these men she found the reconciliation between Locke and Kant, and discovered that both were wrong and both right. So familiar has this reconciliation become, and so wide is its acceptance, that no more than a mere hint of its meaning will be needed here. This philosophy asserts, with Locke, that all knowledge begins in sensation and experience; but with Kant, it affirms that knowledge passes beyond experience and becomes intuitional. It differs from Kant as to the source of the intuitions, pronouncing them the results of experience built up into legitimate factors of the mind by heredity. Experience is inherited and becomes intuitions. The intuitions are affirmed to be reliable, and, to a certain extent, sure indications of truth. They are the results, to use the phrase adopted by Lewes, of “organized experience;” experience verified in the most effective manner in the organism which it creates and modifies. According to this philosophy, man must trust the results of experience, but he can by no means be certain that those results correspond with actuality. They are actual for him, because it is impossible for him to go beyond their range. Within the little round created by “organized experience,” which is also Lewes’s definition of science, man may trust his knowledge, because it is consistent with itself; but beyond that strict limit he can obtain no knowledge, and even knows that what is without it does not correspond with what is within it. In truth, man knows only the relative, not the absolute; he must rely on experience, not on creative reason.

George Eliot would have us believe that the sources of life are not inward, but outward; not dependent on the deep affirmations of individual reason, or on the soul’s inherent capacity to see what is true, but on the effects of environment and the results of social experience. Man is not related to an infinite world of reason and spiritual truth, but only to a world of universal law, hereditary conditions and social traditions. Invariable law, heredity, feeling, tradition; these words indicate the trend of George Eliot’s mind, and the narrow limitations of her philosophy. Man is not only the product of nature, but, according to this theory, nature limits his moral capacity and the range of his mental activity. Environment is regarded as all-powerful, and the material world as the
source
of such truth as we can know. In her powerful presentation of this philosophy of life George Eliot indicates her great genius and her profound insight. At the same time, her work is limited, her genius cramped, and her imagination crippled, by a philosophy so narrow and a creed so inexpansive.

XI.

RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES.

As a great literary creator, George Eliot holds a singular position in reference to religious beliefs. To most literary artists religion is a vital part of life, which enters as a profound element into their teachings or into their interpretations of character and incident. Religion deeply affects the writings of Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin; its problems, its hopes, its elements of mystery and infinity touch all their pages. In an equal degree, though with a further departure from accredited beliefs, and with a greater effect from philosophical or humanitarian influences, has it wrought itself into the genius of Goethe, Carlyle and Hugo. Even the pages of Voltaire, Shelley and Heine have been touched by its magic influence; their words glow with its great interests, and bloom into beauty through its inspiration. None of these is more affected by religion than George Eliot has been; nor does it form a greater element in their writings than in hers.

What is singular about George Eliot’s position is, that she both affirms and denies; she is deeply religious and yet rejects all religious doctrines. No writer of the century has given religion a more important relation to human interests or made it a larger element in his creative work; and yet no other literary artist has so completely rejected all positive belief in God and immortality. In her books she depicts every phase of religious belief and life, and with sympathy and appreciation. A very large proportion of her characters are clergymen or other religious persons, who are described with accuracy and sympathy. Her own faith, the theory of religion she accepts, is not given to any of her characters. What she believes, appears only in her comments, and in the general effect which life produces on the persons she describes. She believed Christianity is subjectively true, that it is a fit expression of the inner nature and of the spiritual wants of the soul. She did not propagate the pantheism of Spinoza or the theism of Francis Newman, because she did not regard them as so near the truth as the Christianity of Paul. As intellectual theories they may have been preferable to her, but from the outlook of feeling which she ever occupied, Paul was the truer teacher, and especially because his teachings are linked with the spiritual desires and outpourings of many generations. The spontaneous movements of the human mind, which have taken possession of vast numbers of people through long periods of time, have a depth of meaning which the speculations of no individual theorizer can ever possess. Especially did she regard Christianity as a pure and noble expression of the soul’s inner wants and aspirations. It is an objective realization of feeling and sentiment, it gives purpose and meaning to man’s cravings for a diviner life, it links generation to generation in a continued series of beautiful traditions and noble inspirations. Her intellectual view of the subject was expressed to a friend in these words:

    Deism seems to me the most incoherent of all systems, but to
    Christianity I feel no objection but its want of evidence.

She also expressed more sympathy with the simple faith of the multitude than with the intellectual speculations of philosophers and theologians; and again, she said that she felt more sympathy with than divergence from the narrowest and least cultivated believer in Christianity. As a vehicle of the accumulated hopes and traditions of the world’s feeling and sorrow she appreciated Christianity, saw its beauty, felt deeply in sympathy with its spirit of renunciation, accepted its ideal of a divine life. She learned from Feuerbach that religion, that Christianity, gives fit expression to the emotional life and spiritual aspirations of man, and that what it finds within in no degree corresponds with that which surrounds man without.