George Willis Cooke

“ In so far as George Eliot's work is artistic, poetic, moral and human, it is very great, and no word too strong can be said in its praise. It is not too excessive enthusiasm to call her, on the whole, the equal of any novelist. Her genius is commanding and elemental. She has originality, strength of purpose, and a profound insight into character. Yet her work is weakened by its attachment to a narrow theory of life. Her philosophy is transitory in its nature. It cannot hold its own, as developed by her, for any great length of time. It has the elements of its own destruction in itself. ”

“ George Eliot has not Jane Austen's artistic skill, but she has thought, depth of purpose, originality of expression and conception, and a marvellous creative insight into character. She is less passionate and bold than George Sand, not the same daring innovator, more rational and sensible. She is not so much a poet, has little of George Sand's power of improvisation, much less of eloquence and abandon. She has more literary skill than Charlotte Brontë, less originality, but none of her crudeness. She has not so much of the subtle element of genius, but more of solidity and thought. ”

“ It has left you without a heart for the neighbors among whom you dwell, without care for the great work by which Florence is to be regenerated and the world made holy; it has left you without a share in the Divine life which quenches the sense of suffering self in the ardors of an ever-growing love. And now, when the sword has pierced your soul, you say, 'I will go away; I cannot bear my sorrow.' And you think nothing of the sorrow and the wrong that are within the walls of the city where you dwell; you would leave your place empty, when it ought to be filled with your pity and your labor. ”

“ A sad and fatal hopelessness of life broods over all the nobler characters. All their early ideals are sacrificed, all their early joys depart, all the pictures they formed are blotted out. They gain peace through renunciation, after long failure; some happiness in yielding to the inevitable, and harmonizing life with it; and some blessedness in doing all they can for the progress of those who follow them, for the good of those that are with them. ”

“ Reason is a lamp which lights the way, gives direction to tradition; it is a beacon and not a support. Tradition not only brings us the wisdom of all past experience, but it develops into a spiritual atmosphere in which we live, move and have our being. This was Comte's idea, that the spiritual life is developed out of tradition, that the world's experiences have produced for us intangible hopes, yearnings and aspirations; awe, reverence and sense of subtle mystery: mystic trust, faith in invisible memories, joy in the unseen power of thought and love ”

“ But these things are often unknown to the world, for there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. ”

“ I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields—on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice. ”

“ Heine is one of the most remarkable men of this age; no echo, but a real voice, and therefore, like all genuine things in this world, worth studying; a surpassing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic wand of his fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold of art—who sheds his sunny smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy background of life; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most scorching lightnings of satire ”

“ Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future of the world—not renounce our higher gift and say, 'Let us be as if we were not among the populations;' but choose our full heritage, claim the brotherhood of our nation, and carry into it a new brotherhood with the nations of the Gentiles. ”

“ To feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life wherein memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in one unspeakable vibration, melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love, that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy. ”

“ George Eliot is not so good a satirist as she is humorist. Her humor is as fresh and delightful as a morning in May, but her satire is nearly always labored. She is too much in sympathy with human nature to laugh at its follies and its weaknesses. Its joys, its bubbling humor and delight she can appreciate, as well as all the pain and sorrow that come to men and women; and she can fully enter into the life of her characters of every kind, and portray their inmost motives and impulses; but the foibles of the world she cannot treat in the vein of the satirist. ”

“ This involuntary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and out of tune. He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless condition of obtruding themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by the most unexpected transitions—the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and the oboe confounding both.
With a strong and eloquent energy, George Eliot teaches the natural consequences of conduct. Every feeling, thought and deed has its effect, comes to fruition. ”

“ See, then, my daughter, how you are below the life of the believer who worships that image of the Supreme Offering, and feels the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that offering was made, and beholds the history of the world as the history of a great redemption, in which he is himself a fellow-worker, in his own place and among his own people! If you held that faith, my beloved daughter, you would not be a wanderer flying from suffering, and blindly seeking the good of a freedom which is lawlessness. ”

“ In addition to the spell which bound the world to her by her genius, she had a personal power of drawing to herself, in ties of sympathy and kindly feeling, all who came under her influence. She never oppressed any one by her talents; she never allowed any one to be sensible of the depth and variety of her scholarship; she knew, as few know, how to draw forth the views and feelings of her visitors, and to make their sympathies her own. There was a charm in her personal character which of itself was sufficient to conciliate deep and lasting regard. ”

“ It is true that man is not a being who wholly arrives at his method of life through reason, but feeling lends quite as important aid. He does not only think, but he has emotions as well; he not only weighs evidence, but he acts by impulse. He is continually led by the emotions, sentiments and impulses created for him by the life of ages past. Without emotion there could be no art, no poetry and no music. Without emotion there would be no religion and no spiritual life. Sentiment sweetens, beautifies and endears all that is human and natural. ”

“ But deeper than all eloquence, grander than all grandeur of phrase, is that forlorn splendor of a life of passionate experience painted in her works. There is no man so wise but he may learn from them, for they are the utterances of a soul in pain, a soul that has been tried. No man could have written her books, for no man could have had her experience, even with a genius equal to her own. ”

“ In all the ranges of his moral, religious and social life he is guided mainly by his emotions and sentiments. It cannot be said, however, as George Eliot would have us say, that these are human born and have no higher meaning. They are the outgrowth of spiritual reality, as well as of human experience; they repeat the foregleams and foresights of a
"far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves."
Life is enriched and flooded with light by the emotions, and feeling, true and tender and pure, is as much the symbol of humanity as reason itself. ”

“ Such terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate that cowardice: it is the initial recognition of a moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling. "It is good," sing the old Eumenides, in Aeschylus, "that fear should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom—good that men should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else how shall they learn to revere the light?" ”

“ Of greater genius, and incomparably deeper experience, George Sand represents woman's literature more illustriously and more obviously. In her, quite apart from the magnificent gifts of nature, we see the influence of sorrow as a determining impulse to write, and the abiding consciousness of the womanly point of view as the subject matter of her writings. In vain has she chosen the mask of a man: the features of a woman are everywhere visible. ”

“ And is there no prophet or poet among us to make the ears of Christian Europe tingle with shame at the hideous obloquy of Christian strife which the Turk gazes at as at the fighting of beasts to which he has lent an arena? There is store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old—a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amidst the despotisms of the East. ”

“ It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown toward which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. ”

“ If, with a crushed heart and eyes half-blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves, too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the door-post. Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them languidly backward—a touching gesture, indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm. ”

“ Only when genius unites itself to false methods and checks itself by false theories, has the critic a right to complain. Genius, obedient to its own laws, accepts every fact life presents, and lifts each one to be an instrument for the enlargement of man's life. When it deliberately strikes out all that is not human, however, from man's experience, denies the realty of that impression and that conviction which comes from other than material sources, it cripples and denies itself. ”

“ Charlotte Brontë more truly represents the woman's way of viewing life; the trustful way of one educated in the conventional views of religion. She has given a corrector interpretation of the meaning of love to woman than George Eliot has been able to present, and simply because she thought and lived more nearly as other women think and live. Hers was the genius of spontaneous insight and emotion, that vibrated to every experience and was moved by every sentiment. Life played upon her heart like the wind upon an Aescolian harp, and she reflected its every movement of joy and sorrow. ”

“ In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the Divine Unity, the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking toward a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West—which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, us of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. ”

“ A people having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and gradual growth through past labors and struggles, such as are still demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-being thus inherited may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; when an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its institutions. ”

“ To have had a publisher who was in the fullest sense of the word a gentleman, and at the same time a man of excellent moral judgment, has been an invaluable stimulus and comfort to me. Your uncle had retained that fruit of experience which makes a man of the world, as opposed to the narrow man of literature. He judged well of writing, because he had learned to judge well of men and things, not merely through quickness of observation and insight, but with the illumination of a heart in the right place—a thorough integrity and rare tenderness of feeling. ”

“ It must give beauty, meaning and expression to what it copies. And it must do more than imitate: it must go beyond mere description, and introduce unity, purpose and thought into its work. True art has a soul as well as a body, says something to the mind as well as to the eye, appeals to the soul as well as to sense. Had George Eliot done nothing more than to describe common English life there would have been small excuse for her work. She did more, touched that life with genius, made it blossom into beauty, and gave to it deep moral meanings. ”