"GEORGE ELIOT"

(MARY ANN EVANS)

(1819-1880)

HE Impressions of Theophrastus Such» appeared in 1879; and

as George Eliot" was then in her sixtieth year, it may be assumed that the essays in sequence which compose the volume represent her matured views of life and morals. Those who remember the great influence over her life exerted by George Henry Lewes may be surprised at the conservatism, both of style and thought, which controls, if it does not characterize, her writings as an essayist. In "The Impressions of Theophrastus Such," as in the "Leaves from a Note Book," and in her essays contributed to English reviews, she shows that unconsciously she is at bottom a "Low-Church" Englishwoman, governed by all the virtues which belong to good women in England through the heredity of a hundred generations of clean and virtuous lives.

In the literary history of England and of civilization she belongs to a period of storm and stress when great contending forces met in a struggle which seemed full of promise or of menace, as those who viewed it were inspired by courage or depressed by timidity. In England, in 1849, when the death of her father threw her on her own resources, the intellectual development of the century, as it influenced men of such varying activities as Darwin, Carlyle, Cobden, and Bright, was being met by the marshaling of the great forces which were to precipitate the Empire in France and the Crimean War after it, as means of postponing the millennium of popular enfranchisement announced by the Hugos, the Mazzinis, and the Heckers, - Idealists who believed in progress at any cost of the profits of that inertia which calculates percentages upon the status quo, no matter what it is. In such periods of disturbance, visionaries, whose disorderly imagination frees itself from the restraints of judgment, set up as prophets of a new and fantastic social order, and the air grows thick with the evoes of their vaticination. Society is to be taken apart as a child takes apart its doll after discovering that its faculty of crying depends on pieces of pine and sheepskin and that it is stuffed with a very unsightly article of sawdust. The analytical faculty threatens the constructive least seems to do so, until every abuse which the world was about

or at

to get rid of through the imperceptible processes of progress, is turned into a sacrosanct part of the Established Order and given sanctuary in whatever Holy of Holies orthodoxy has to offer. With Carlyle preaching Goethe's "Elective Affinities," and half a hundred aspiring prophets of a new dispensation of phalanxes and agapemones, announcing a ་ new order" under which virtue is to consist in having the largest number of passions and the greatest possible means of gratifying them, it is no wonder that English conservatism was able to shift its ground and take the aggressive. George Henry Lewes, who among English men of letters sympathized most strongly with Fourier's theory that morals and the repressive philosophy founded on morals are a mistake, came into the life of Mary Ann Evans, then leading the life of a literary woman in London, and his influence over her was in one sense decisive.

But Lewes himself was fundamentally a man of good impulses, and, in spite of the great intellectual disturbance of her time and of her own life, George Eliot retained il ben del intelletto,— that moral soundness which alone gives intellectual strength its value, — which in Dante's hell is lost irretrievably not by those who err most, but by those who venture nothing. Born on an English farm, the daughter of an English middle-class family ambitious enough to educate her above the average of the time, she had ingrained into her in her girlhood the tradition of goodness for which the virtuous Englishwoman has stood ever since the study of her character made Shakespeare great. The accident of her acquaintance with a family which was impregnated with the German "transcendentalism," then fashionable, turned her intellectually into "an extreme Radical," but her radicalism was never that of a disordered intellect. She rose superior to her mistakes by force of the inherent nobility of character which enabled her to write "The Choir Invisible,» without doubt, the noblest blank verse of the nineteenth century. Her "Scenes of Clerical Life," which appeared in 1857, were written at the suggestion of Lewes with whom she had formed an association in 1854. She had begun her literary career in London as assistant editor of the Westminster Review, and her first work was that of an essayist; but Lewes discovered her talent as a novelist and persuaded her to develop it. "Adam Bede," in which it is said she used her father as "a prototype of her hero," followed "Scenes of Clerical Life” and established her place as one of the greatest novelists of the century. Her subsequent novels merely confirmed her title to the rank she had so easily taken, and at her death, December 22d, 1880, she had won for herself the approval not merely of English aristocratic conservatism, but of Puritanism itself. Her faults of judgment—and they were grave; her follies and they were hers by infection from some of the most

dangerous of all intellectual insanities-were wiped out by the strength of her sympathy for mankind. Much was given and forgiven her because she had loved much- with a love possible only for those who crucify passion that they may

"Live again

W. V. B.

"In hearts made better by their presence.»

MORAL SWINDLERS

T is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of words

I*

that what a man is worth" has come to mean how much money he possesses; but there seems a deeper and more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning that popular or polite speech assigns to "morality" and "morals." The poor part these words are made to play recalls the fate of those pagan divinities who, after being understood to rule the powers of the air and the destinies of men, came down to the level of insignificant demons, or were even made a farcical show for the amusement of the multitude.

Talking to Melissa in a time of commercial trouble, I found her disposed to speak pathetically of the disgrace which had fallen on Sir Gavial Mantrap, because of his conduct in relation to the Eocene Mines, and to other companies ingeniously devised by him for the punishment of ignorance in people of small means: a disgrace by which the poor titled gentleman was actually reduced to live in comparative obscurity on his wife's settlement of one or two hundred thousand in the consols.

"Surely your pity is misapplied," said I, rather dubiously, for I like the comfort of trusting that correct moral judgment is the strong point in woman (seeing that she has a majority of about a million in our island), and I imagined that Melissa might have some unexpressed grounds for her opinion. "I should have thought you would rather be sorry for Mantrap's victims — the widows, spinsters, and hard-working fathers whom his unscrupulous haste to make himself rich has cheated of all their savings, while he is eating well, lying softly, and after impudently justifying himself before the public, is perhaps joining in the General Confession with a sense that he is an acceptable object in the sight of God, though decent men refuse to meet him.»

"Oh, all that about the Companies, I know, was most unfortunate. In commerce people are led to do so many things, and he might not know exactly how everything would turn out. But Sir Gavial made a good use of his money, and he is a thoroughly moral man."

"What do you mean by a thoroughly moral man?" said I.

"Oh, I suppose every one means the same by that," said Melissa, with a slight air of rebuke. "Sir Gavial is an excellent family man- quite blameless there; and so charitable round his place at Tip-Top. Very different from Mr. Barabbas, whose life, my husband tells me, is most objectionable, with actresses and that sort of thing. I think a man's morals should make a difference to us. I'm not sorry for Mr. Barabbas, but I am sorry for Sir Gavial Mantrap.”

I will not repeat my answer to Melissa, for I fear it was offensively brusque, my opinion being that Sir Gavial was the more pernicious scoundrel of the two, since his name for virtue served as an effective part of a swindling apparatus; and perhaps I hinted that to call such a man moral showed rather a silly notion of human affairs. In fact, I had an angry wish to be instructive, and Melissa, as will sometimes happen, noticed my anger without appropriating my instruction; for I have since heard that she speaks of me as rather violent tempered, and not overstrict in my views of morality.

I wish that this narrow use of words which are wanted in their full meaning were confined to women like Melissa. Seeing that Morality and Morals under their alias of Ethics are the subject of voluminous discussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute,- seeing that the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science, or that which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one might expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion of language which lends itself to no wider view of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd or debauched, not the European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing his life in chewing bang and

fondling dancing girls. And since we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching duties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion,- the one of these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with God, which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest conduct toward men.

With such a classification as this, it is no wonder, considering the strong reaction of language on thought, that many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are far to seek for the grounds of social duty, and without entertaining any private intention of commiting a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, or seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their dissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?" It is of little use to theorize in ethics, while our habitual phraseology stamps the larger part of our social duties as something that lies aloof from the deepest needs and affections of our nature. The informal definitions of popular language are the only medium through which theory really affects the mass of minds even among the nominally educated; and when a man whose business hours-the solid part of every day—are spent in an unscrupulous course of public or private action which has every calculable chance of causing widespread injury and misery, can be called moral because he comes home to dine with his wife and children, and cherishes the happiness of his own hearth, the augury is not good for the use of high ethical and theological disputation.

Not for one moment would one willingly lose sight of the truth that the relation of the sexes and the primary ties of kinship are the deepest roots of human well-being, but to make them by themselves the equivalent of morality is verbally to cut off the channels of feeling through which they are the feeders of that well-being. They are the original fountains of a sensibility to the claims of others which is the bond of societies; but being necessarily in the first instance a private good, there is always the danger that individual selfishness will see in them only the best part of its own gain; just as knowledge, navigation, commerce, and all the conditions which are of a nature to awaken