George Eliot

“ I have little more respect for those who have reached the stage of enlightenment in which virtue is another name for prudence, who give their sanction to a system of morals as they do to a system of police—to prevent inconvenience to themselves, and to society as a necessary adjunct of themselves—who would change their morals with their climate, and become lords of a harem in a country where such a position would be a title to respect, instead of infamy.
The true philosopher knows what these men know, but he knows something more. ”

“ He has a course of his own, like our forest trees, a fixed form of growth which defies and hurls down the stones and mortar with which society attempts to bind him in. He loves individuals, he labours for specific objects, but only as transient forms of the abiding reality which he seeks; so that if the individual pass away, if the object be frustrated, his love and his labour are not essentially disappointed.
I said one day to my artist, when he was ardently engaged on a favourite picture, "Adolphe, has your love of art ever been tested by any great misfortune?" ”

“ Ladies who go to parties with the hope of being the belles of the evening, must on no account venture to snub any whose pretensions threaten to eclipse their own. This would look like envy. They must rather behave to such with a sweet, condescending blandness, as if unconscious of the danger of rivalry. They may, however, repay themselves by snubbing the plain and ill-dressed; nay, if they can manage to secure a brisk flirtation for the evening with any one of the gentlemen tolerably well to pass, they may even produce a very good effect by snubbing the remainder. ”

“ But I will extend the parallel, and say that true wisdom, which implies a moral as well as an intellectual result, consists in a return to that purity and simplicity which characterize early youth when its intuitions have not been perverted. It is, indeed, a similarity with a difference; for the wonder of a child at the material world is the effect of novelty, its simplicity and purity of ignorance; while the wonder of the wise man is the result of knowledge disclosing mystery, the simplicity and purity of his moral principles, the result of wide experience and hardly-attained self-conflict. ”

“ But Hieria grew old without finding it out, for she never looked for herself in the lake—only as, in the centuries she had lived, some of the thick forests had been cleared away from the earth, and men had begun to build and to plough, the sky was less often obscured by vapours, so that the lake was more and more beautiful to her, and she loved better and better the water-lilies that grew below her. ”

“ So the faculty of snubbing has been in exercise ever since the days of Cain and Abel, though the great intellect which is to trace out the laws by which its phenomena are governed, and lay down rules for the development of all its hidden resources, has not yet arisen. There have, indeed, been examples of snubbing genius, and it is in the nature of genius to transcend all rules—rather, to furnish the type on which all rules are framed ”

“ It is to live for the good, the true, the beautiful, which outlive every generation and are all-pervading as the light which vibrates from the remotest nebula to our own sun. The spirit which has ascertained its true relation to these can never be an orphan: it has its home in the eternal mind, from which neither things present nor to come can separate it. You may infallibly discern the man who lives thus. ”

“ Any who have been elevated in society, whether by a migration from the thoroughfare of Gudgeon Street to the more genteel locality of the Olympian Villas, or by a still more brilliant transit, must not neglect the precious opportunity of snubbing their former familiars. ”

“ All men of a thousand a year, who can occasionally afford to give champagne at their dinner parties, may feel authorized to snub any poorer genius of less magnitude than Dickens, especially if he live in the same town or neighbourhood, as in that case he can by no means be made available as a lion to be served up to the company with the soups and venison.
2. Men of great or small wit who have established a reputation as diners-out, may give additional zest to their condiments and wine by snubbing any humbler aspirant to the applause of the company. ”

“ He seeks exercise for all the minor feelings—nay, he holds that these are the only nest in which the everaspiring eagle, Nature, can be properly fledged and winged; but he baptizes and hallows them all with the chrism of the diviner soul within him, and regulates their indulgence by his consciousness of the degree in which they encourage or repress the impulses of his moral sentiments. ”

“ I have ceased to love the being whom I once believed that I must love while life lasted. I have cherished what I thought was a bright amethyst, and I have seen it losing its lustre day by day till I can no longer delude myself into a belief that it is not valueless. ”

“ But let everyone beware of snubbing on religious grounds in quarters where there is wealth, or fashion, or influence. In such cases all aberrations from the standard are to be regarded as amiable eccentricities, which do not warrant an uncharitable construction. On the whole it must be admitted that the snub religious is a most valuable agent in society, resembling those compensating contrivances by which nature makes up for the loss of one organ by an extraordinary development of the functions of another. ”

“ As it was, he was a humourist—one who sported with all the forms of human life, as if they were so many May-day mummings, uncouth, monstrous disguises of poor human nature, which has not discovered its dignity. While he laughed at the follies of men, he wept over their sorrows ”

“ Now, the hamadryads are a race of nymphs that inhabit the forests. Whenever a little acorn, or a beech nut, or any other seed of a forest tree begins to sprout, a little hamadryad is born, and grows up and lives and dies with the tree. So you see the hamadryads, the daughters of trees, live far longer than the daughters of men—some of them even a thousand years; still they do at last get old, and faded, and shrivelled. ”

“ As regards the snub domestic, gentlemen should by no means neglect one of the grand privileges of conjugal life, an unlimited power of snubbing their wives. Indeed, this may be said to be a sort of safety-valve for the masculine faculty of snubbing which, as men are somewhat amenable for its exercise and cannot, like women and priests, snub with impunity, might lead to no end of duels and horse-whippings, and thus reduce society to a horribly internecine state. ”

“ The first fruits of literary genius are often interred in order that the reading public may concentrate its attention upon a masterpiece; and whenever this principle of action is modified it is rather to exhibit a partiality for overripe, rather than for immature, productions.
The student of literature, however, has other views: for him it is of prime importance to trace the development of literary power, whether manifested in verse or prose; and I believe I am doing such students no small service in putting within their reach a few examples of George Eliot's earliest work. ”

“ Now that we have no Star-Chamber, Pillory, Test Act, etc., what would become of society without this admirable refinement on the rougher measures of our ancestors? Do we not appeal to a stronger element in the minds of suspected heretics by silently putting a chalk hieroglyphic on their backs, than by hauling them off to prison or to Smithfield? ”

“ It is a thoroughfare for a materialized population, too entirely preoccupied with the needs of the living to retain an Old Mortality's affectionate care for tomb-stones and epitaphs, or to offer to the graves that terrified veneration which hurries past them after sun-set. They are in the strong grasp of giant Hunger, and fear no shadows. Not one of this plodding generation will long remember Macarthy, "the sick gentleman that lodged at widow Crowe's," and when the grass is green and long upon his grave, it will seem to say of him as truly as of others—"I cover the forgotten." ”

“ He was an ardent lover of Nature, but it was in her grand inorganic forms—the blue sky, the stars, the clouds, the sea, mountains, rocks, and rivers—in which she seems pregnant with some sublimer birth than the living races of this globe. ”

“ The unsightly condition of the masses—their dreary ignorance, the conventional distortion of human nature in upper classes—the absence of artistic harmony and beauty in the details of outward existence, were with him not merely themes for cold philosophy, indignant philippics, or pointed satire ”

“ We assure the dullest poor fellow of an editor that he may put down such an upstart, and utterly ruin him in the esteem of the majority by keeping a stock of epithets, like so many little missles, to be hurled at him on every favourable occasion: such, for instance, as pseudo-philosopher, man of crotchets, infantine dreamer, etc. No matter how stale the epithets may be, paucity of invention is no disadvantage here, since the oftener a nickname is repeated the better it will tell. ”

“ I send my sons to the University, I give dinners, I go to balls, I go to church—all that I may be 'respectable.' Am not I a man of purpose?" Then there is the man of public spirit, who has devoted his life to some pet project, which is to be the grand catholicon for all the diseases of society. ”

“ Editors of country newspapers who feel themselves and their cause in a precarious condition, and who, therefore, as Paley said of himself, cannot afford to keep a conscience, may find a forlorn hope in snubbing. Let them choose for a victim any individual who presumes to avow an opinion in opposition to their own—and, what is more, to act upon it. ”

“ A truce to your philosophers whose elevation above their fellow-beings consists in their ability to laugh at the ties which bind women and children, who have looked just so far into the principles of ethics as to be able to disconcert a simple soul that talks of vice and virtue as realities. ”

“ The idea of snubbing presupposes inferiority in the snubbed. You can no more snub your betters than you can patronize them; on the contrary, toadyism towards superiors is the invariable attendant on a large endowment of the snubbing faculty. Toadyism, in fact, is the beautiful concavity which corresponds to the snubbing convexity: the angular posture of Baillie MacWheeble's body is a perfect illustration.
Snubbing is a generic term, comprehending many species ”

“ Self-renunciation, submission to law, trust, benignity, ingenuousness, rectitude—these are the qualities we delight most to witness in the child, and these are the qualities which most dignify the man. ”

“ He gathers his rule of conduct, not from the suggestions of appetite, not from the dictates of expediency, but from the indications of man's highest destiny, to be found in those faculties of his nature which may be justly said to be more than human, since they might belong to conditions of being far less limited than those of man. ”

“ Her strenuous earnestness of mind and purpose, her philosophical subtlety, and minutely elaborate analysis of character and motive are apt to make "hard reading" for a generation which is quickly bored with profundities of any sort, and in whose mental temperament there is little room for sympathetic understanding of those particular phases of early nineteenth century life which she most powerfully depicts. ”

“ The child which abstains from eating plums because grandmamma forbade is their superior in wisdom: it exercises faith and obedience to law—two of the most ennobling attributes of humanity which these philosophers have cast off. ”

“ He feels that in submitting to the restraint of a self-imposed law, he would be presenting humanity in its grandest aspect. But it is only the highest human state at which he aims—not anything superhuman. ”

“ ONE of my favourite lounges in Paris is the studio of an artist, who tolerates my presence on the score of a slight service which I happened to render him some years ago, and which he magnifies into a lasting claim on his gratitude. ”

“ WHEN a sort of haziness comes over the mind, making one feel weary of articulated or written signs of ideas, does not the notion of a less laborious mode of communication, of a perception approaching more nearly to intuition seem attractive! ”

“ But the chief empire of feminine talent lies in the snub religious. Anacreon tells us that nature has given weapons of defence to all creatures—horns to bulls, hoofs to horses, etc., understanding to man, and to woman beauty. ”

“ The resuscitation to-day of a few of George Eliot's early writings is, perhaps, not inopportune; firstly, as the Editor's tribute to her genius on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of her birthday; and, secondly, as the answer of her devotees to a question sometimes put:
What is the position which George Eliot holds in the regard of the present generation of English readers? ”

“ The true philosopher, then, constructs his moral code with a view to preserve these sentiments in that state of unsullied purity and freedom of exercise which he loves to see in a child. If he were to admit that all things were lawful to him, he would add, "I will not be thought under the power of any ”

“ He seemed to have learned by experience that his sensibility was too acute for special friendship—that his sympathy with mankind was that of a being of analogous, rather than of identical race. Even animals, which usually attract those who are cut off by any material or immaterial barrier from their own kind, seemed to have a repulsion for him. ”