Eliot

“ I have found myself, my life long, attaching value to every noted thing in respect to a great person—and George Eliot struck me on the spot as somehow illustratively great; never at any rate has the impression of those troubled moments faded from me, nor that at once of a certain high grace in her anxiety and a frank immediate appreciation of our presence, modest embarrassed folk as we were. ”

“ He himself had labored jointly with Eliot, with so much zeal and patience, and with such an unselfish and devout spirit, that he had attained a full knowledge and appreciation of all the exactions and embarrassments of the enterprise. While himself cheerful and assured, he was not over-sanguine, still less enthusiastic. He was always cautious, moderate, and discreet, recognizing alike the serious difficulties of the undertaking from the rude material with which he had to deal, and from the distrust and lack of sympathy of many of the English. ”

“ Indeed, for humour, for sheer force, for intense realism, George Eliot, in the immortal scene at the "Rainbow," may be said to rival Shakespeare. Her farriers, her butchers, her wheelwrights, her tailors, have the same startling vitality, the same unmistakable accents of nature, the same distinctive yet unforced individuality, free from either exaggeration or caricature. ”

“ George Eliot seemed to me capable not only of reading the diverse hearts of men, but of creeping into their skin, watching the world through their eyes, feeling their latent background of conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences of thought and knowledge, of life and of descent, and having obtained this experience, recovering her independence, stripping off the borrowed shell, and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul of a Vestal, a Crusader, an Anabaptist, an Inquisitor, a Dervish, a Nihilist, or a Cavalier without {61} attraction, preference, or caricature. ”

“ Musing over Eliot’s imprisonment of nearly four years and his lonely death, musing over the eleven years’ imprisonment of Valentine and Strode, who still valiantly fought against the despotism of the King, he fell asleep once more, and never woke until the surly gaoler, Aaron, brought the day’s rations, when, as he had foreseen, desperate hunger and thirst made the pennyworth of bread and the can of beer-and-water welcome enough. ”

“ Eliot, insisting that his disciples should have but one wife, was asked, “If an Indian have two wives, the first without, the second with children, which of them shall he put away? If he renounces the first, then he wrongs the one who has the strongest claim upon him. If he discards the second, then he breaks a living tie, and makes his children bastards.” “If one man sins knowingly and another ignorantly, will God punish both alike?” ”

“ In the next of this series of great works, and the one which to many of her readers is and will remain the most fascinating—‘Middlemarch’—George Eliot has stretched a broader and more crowded canvas, on which, however, every figure, to the least important that appears, is—not sketched or outlined, but—filled in with an intense and lifelike vividness and precision that makes each stand out as if it stood there alone. ”

“ He descends to criminate the duke’s magnificent tastes; he who had something of a congenial nature; for Eliot was a man of fine literature. “Infinite sums of money, and mass of land exceeding the value of money, contributions in parliament have been heaped upon him; and how have they been employed? Upon costly furniture, sumptuous feasting, and magnificent building, the visible evidence of the express exhausting of the state!”
Eliot eloquently closes—
Your lordships have an idea of the man, what he is in himself, what in his affections! ”

“ George Sand is impassioned, turbulent, revolutionary, the spiritual daughter of Rousseau, with an enthusiastic faith in man's future destiny. George Eliot, contemplative, observant, instinctively conservative, her imagination dearly loving to do "a little Toryism on the sly," is as yet the sole outcome of the modern positive spirit in imaginative literature—the sole novelist who has incorporated in an artistic form some of the leading ideas of Comte, of Mazzini, and of Darwin. ”

“ For human nature is one and the same in Griff or London or Florence, as all the amplitude of the sky is mirrored in the dewdrop. And although Eliot became in later life a more accurate reporter of the intellectual unrest of her day, and had probed deeper into the mystery and the burden of this unintelligible world, great novels are not necessarily made in that way and the majority of those who love her cleave to the less burdened, more unforced expression of her power. ”

“ Eliot looked up from the packet of books he was sorting at the end of the room.
"Hilaria!" he said, half sharply, half plaintively. She swung round at him with that beautiful sway only a crinoline can give, checking the movement abruptly so that the full sphere of muslin went surging back for another half-turn while her body stayed rigid.
"Yes, Papa, I am ready. Can't you find all your right books?" And with this adroit carrying of the war into enemy's country she deflected Mr. Eliot's interest back upon himself, at no time a difficult task. ”

“ In the winter which followed, Eliot was witness of the miserable condition of the men who had returned from the Cadiz voyage, and who, ill-clothed and half-starved, crowded the streets of Plymouth. Accordingly, when he was elected to the new parliament which met in 1626, this time as member for St. Germans, he came to it entirely estranged from the man whom he had for many years regarded with affection. Eliot was not one whose feelings were ever at a moderate heat. He had the Eliot oratorical temperament, and as soon as he distrusted Buckingham he believed him capable of the worst crimes. ”

“ George Eliot combining in an unusual degree the subtlest power of analysis with that happy gift of genius which enabled her to create such characters as Amos Barton, Hetty, Mrs. Poyser, Maggie, and Tom Tulliver, Godfrey Cass and Caleb Garth, which seem to come fresh from the mould of Nature itself. Indeed, she has hardly a rival among women in this power of objective imagination by which she throws her whole soul into natures of the most varied and opposite types, whereas George Sand only succeeds greatly when she is thoroughly in sympathy with her creations. ”

“ And then our visit to the Lewes's in their lovely home drew to an end, and we said our farewells, little thinking as we four stood in that porch, that we should never in this world look on their faces more.
The history of George Eliot's intellect is to a great extent legible in her books. But there are thousands of her readers in both hemispheres who would like to possess a more concrete image of her in their minds—an image which should give back the personal peculiarities of face, voice, and manner, that made up her outward form and semblance. ”

“ But at last she heard the word "dearest" uttered in the softest tone of pained entreaty, like that of a patient who asks for something that ought to have been given without asking. She had never heard that word since the moments in the lane at Basset, when it had come from Stephen again and again, almost as involuntarily as if it had been an inarticulate cry. Philip could hear no word, but he had moved to the opposite side of the piano, and could see Maggie start and blush, raise her eyes an instant toward Stephen's face, but immediately look apprehensively toward himself. ”

“ One of the images which, on these occasions, recurs oftenest to George Eliot's friends, is that of the frail-looking woman who would sit with her chair drawn close to the fire, and whose winning womanliness of bearing and manners struck every one who had the privilege of an introduction to her. ”

“ It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist—for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable—as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form. ”

“ It has not the pathos of Amos Barton, nor the exquisite style of Silas Marner, nor the breadth and constructive merit of Adam Bede. And except to the chosen band of Eliotists, it is not likely to retain any permanent popularity. It is a book to study for those who have special interest in George Eliot as woman, as teacher, and as artist—but for my own part I find it rather a book to reflect upon than a book to read and to re-read. ”

“ It is George Eliot's inner life in childhood and youth as it appeared to her own consciousness. We recognise in it her mental acuteness, her clinging affectionateness, her ambition, her outlook beyond the present, her religious and moral preoccupations, even her genius is not so much omitted as left in an undeveloped, rudimentary state. While her make-believe stories, her thirst for knowledge, her spiritual wrestlings, and the passionate response of her soul to high thinking, noble music, and the beautiful in all its forms, show that the making of genius was there in germ. ”

“ CHAPTER VIII. ADAM BEDE.
Rarely has a novelist come to his task with such a far-reaching culture, such an intellectual grasp, as George Eliot. We have seen her girlhood occupied with an extraordinary variety of studies; we have seen her plunged in abstruse metaphysical speculations; we have seen her translating some of the most laborious philosophical investigations of German thinkers; we have seen her again translating from the Latin the 'Ethics' of Spinoza; and, finally, we have seen her attracting, and attracted by, some of the leaders in science, philosophy, and literature. ”

“ Youth and health have withstood well the involuntary and voluntary hardships of her lot, and the nights in which she has lain on the hard floor for a penance have left no obvious trace; the eyes are liquid, the brown cheek is firm and round, the full lips are red. With her dark coloring and jet crown surmounting her tall figure, she seems to have a sort of kinship with the grand Scotch firs, at which she is looking up as if she loved them well. ”

“ George Sand eagerly shared, even to the pitch of passionate tumult and disorder, in the emotions, the aspirations, the ardour, the great conflicts and controversies of her time. In every one of these, their daily closeness to the real life of the world has given a vitality to their work which we hardly expect that even the next generation will find in more than one or two of the romances of George Eliot. ”

“ There is the outpouring of ardent feeling for her friends, sobering down, as life goes on, into a crooning kindliness, affectionate and honest, but often tinged with considerable self-consciousness. It was said of some one that his epigrams did honour to his heart; in the reverse direction we occasionally feel that George Eliot's effusive playfulness does honour to her head. It lacks simplicity and verve. Even in an invitation to dinner, the words imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides, and sense of responsibility is fatal to the charm of familiar correspondence. ”

“ The acquaintance with this gentleman, dating from the year 1867, had long ago grown into the warmest friendship, and his boundless devotion to the great woman whose society was to him as his daily bread, no doubt induced her to take a step which could not fail to startle even those who loved her the most. But George Eliot's was a nature that needed some one especially to love. ”

“ Now George Eliot absolutely does what Dickens aimed at doing. She not merely seizes the outward and accidental traits of her characters: she pierces with unerring vision to the very core of their nature, and enables us to realise the peculiarly subtle relations between character and circumstance. Her primary object is to excite our sympathy with the most ordinary aspects of human life, with the people that one may meet any day in the fields, the workshops, and the homes of England. ”

“ The Opposition, however, found a leader in Sir John Eliot, who, though he had formerly been a friend of Buckingham, was now shocked at the misconduct of the favourite and regarded him as a selfish and unprincipled adventurer. Eliot was not only a natural orator, but one of the most pure-minded of patriots, though the vehemence of his temperament often carried him to impute more evil to men of whom he thought badly than they were really guilty of. ”

“ But the minister's sensitiveness gave another interpretation to the gaze which he divined rather than saw; and in alarm lest this inconsistent extravagance should obstruct his usefulness, he hastened to say—
"You are doubtless amazed to see me with a wax-light, my young friend; but this undue luxury is paid for with the earnings of my daughter, who is so delicately framed that the smell of tallow is loathsome to her."
"I heeded not the candle, sir. I thank Heaven I am not a mouse to have a nose that takes note of wax or tallow."
The loud abrupt tones made the old man vibrate a little. ”

“ Living in a time when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene. Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus he puts himself in the confessional. ”

“ On November 27th, 1632, the spirit of John Eliot, unbroken by captivity, passed from the body his gaolers had deprived of life. A last appeal from his son to the king for the removal of his father’s body into Cornwall, there to lie with those of his ancestors at Port Eliot, received the curt refusal, “Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of the parish where he died.” And so he was buried in the Tower, and no stone marks the spot where he lies. ”