Eliot, GEORGE. This is the nom de plume of the great English novelist, who is perhaps best known as the author of Adam Bede. She was born on 22d November (St Cecilia's Day) 1819, and died on 22d December 1880. Her baptismal name was Mary Ann Evans, but she usually signed herself Marian Evans. She was the youngest daughter of the second family of Mr Robert Evans, a land-agent in Warwickshire, on the property of Mr Francis Newdigate. Mr Evans was at the time of the child's birth living at Arbury Farm, on the Newdigate property. Four months later he removed to Griff on the same property, 'a charming red-brick, ivy-covered house,' and here the afterwards celebrated authoress lived during the first twenty-one years of her life. Robert Evans was a man of strongly-marked and strenuous character, many of the leading traits of which were transferred by his daughter to the characters of Adam Bede in the novel of the same name, and of Caleb Garth in Middlemarch. But as Mr Evans died in 1849, and George Eliot's first work of fiction was produced in January 1857, the father was never made aware of the character of the daughter's genius. Of the life at Griff, many of the features are given in the sketch of Maggie Tulliver's and Tom's childhood in the Mill on the Floss; and especially her relation to her own brother Isaac, who was her senior by three years, is there powerfully painted. Her first school was at Miss Lathom's of Attleboro, where she remained between the ages of five and nine. Then she went to Miss Wallington's at Nuneaton, where the principal governess was Miss Lewis, with whom she formed a close friendship, and with whom she corresponded during those earlier years of expanding mind and receding faith, which intervened between her father's removal to Coventry in 1841 and his death in 1849. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, she went to school at Miss Franklin's at Coventry, where she became for a time a fervent evangelical. She lost her mother, whom she loved devotedly, in 1836, when she was only sixteen; and early in 1837 her elder sister Christiana, who was five years her senior, and whose character and relation to herself are said to have been in some degree reflected in the Celia of Middlemarch, and in the relation between Celia and Dorothea in that tale, married Mr Edward Clarke, a surgeon, practising at Meriden in Warwickshire. From this time Mary Ann Evans took entire charge of her father's house. A master came over from Coventry to give her lessons in German and Italian, and another came to teach her music, of which she was passionately fond throughout life. But besides her studies in language and music, she was an immense reader on all sorts of subjects which interested her.
In the spring of 1841, when Mary Ann Evans, or Marian Evans, as she now called herself, was just of age, her brother Isaac married and took the house at Griff, her father removing to Foleshill Road, in the outskirts of Coventry. Here she became acquainted with Mr Charles Bray, the author of several works setting forth the philosophy of necessity from the phrenological point of view, and formed a close friendship with his wife (née Caroline Hennell), as well as with her sister Sarah, and with her brother Charles Hennell, who had published in 1838 An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity, from the rationalistic point of view. On 2d November 1841, Marian Evans announces to Miss Lewis, her evangelical friend, that she is about, as she hopes, 'to effect a breach in the thick wall of indifference, behind which the denizens of Coventry seem inclined to intrench themselves,' and her biographer, Mr John Cross (to whom she was married in 1880), says that 'this probably refers to the first visit paid by Miss Evans to Mr and Mrs Bray at their house in Coventry.' We understand it as anticipating some success in bringing her new friends to a more religious state of mind. If so, the result was just the opposite of her expectations. Before a fortnight had passed—i.e. on the 11th November, she writes to the same friend anticipating that Miss Lewis may feel estranged from her as a consequence of some revolution which was taking place in her own mind, and that the visit which Miss Lewis was to have paid to Miss Evans at Christmas may no longer be one which she would wish to pay; and before the end of the year she had so greatly offended her father by refusing to go to church that he actually formed some intention, though he did not carry it out, of breaking up his household and going to live with his married daughter. Subsequently Marian Evans withdrew her objection to going to church, though she did not modify her views, and the breach between father and daughter was avoided.
At the opening of 1844, the work of translating Strauss's Leben Jesu, which had been at first undertaken by Mrs Charles Hennell, was transferred to Marian Evans, and at this she worked most laboriously till its publication in 1846. It was done in very scholarlike fashion. Indeed, the accuracy of George Eliot's work, whenever scholarship was needed, was all the more remarkable for her great imaginative power. There was nothing loose or slipshod about her. She may occasionally be fairly accused of pedantry, never of slovenliness, never of carelessness concerning facts, or of trusting to her imagination for what she had the means of verifying. She was painstaking by temperament as well as by self-discipline, though it would be difficult to find a case in which that very bad definition of genius, as 'an infinite capacity for taking pains,' would be more wholly inapplicable. George Eliot had a vast capacity for taking pains, and she had also a great genius; but her capacity for taking pains was as distinct from her genius, and showed itself in intellectual achievements as different as Silas Marner from her translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu. She translated later Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and in after-years his Ethics, though we are not aware whether either translation was ever published, certainly not with her name. On the last day of May in 1849 her father died, and on the 11th June Marian Evans went abroad with Mr and Mrs Bray, ultimately to Geneva, where she remained for some months, the Brays returning home without her. Towards the close of March 1850 she returned to England, crossing the Jura on a sledge, and reaching London on 23d March. She now began to write for the Westminster Review, and in September 1851, in the year of the Great Exhibition, she became its assistant editor, lodging at its headquarters in the Strand, and becoming the centre of the literary circle of which Mr Herbert Spencer and Mr G. H. Lewes were two of the most influential members. It was at this time that she translated Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, the only book to which she appended her real name. The drift of this book was to show that God is only a 'virtual' image of man, the magnified form of his hopes and desires.
Gradually her intimacy with Mr Lewes grew, and in 1854 she formed a connection with him which lasted till his death in 1878, a connection which was the great false step of her life. In July 1854 she went abroad with him, staying three months at Weimar, where he was preparing for his Life of Goethe. After a somewhat longer stay at Berlin, George Eliot and Mr Lewes returned to England, and took up their abode first at Dover, then at East Sheen, and then at Richmond. In November 1856, when she was just thirty-seven, she attempted her first story, The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, the commencement of the Scenes of Clerical Life. The first part of it was published in Blackwood's Magazine in January 1857, and almost all who read it recognised at once that a new English author of great power had arisen. This story was quickly followed by Mr Gilfil's Love Story and Janet's Repentance. In 1858 she wrote Adam Bede, partly at home, partly abroad at Munich and Dresden, completing it at Richmond in November. After the publication of this brilliant story, which had the most marvellous success, George Eliot found to her amazement and annoyance that a Mr Liggins, who had lived in the same country as herself in the Midlands, claimed to be himself the author. There was a sharp controversy in the Times on the subject, and it was not till the publisher, Mr Blackwood, had intervened, that Mr Liggins's authorship was generally discredited. After the publication of Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, and Felix Holt appeared in succession, but not rapid succession, for George Eliot always took her time, the last story coming out in 1866. Her first poem, The Spanish Gypsy, was published in 1868, followed in the next year by Agatha, The Legend of Jubal, and Armgarth; and in 1871 appeared the first part of what proved to be, we think, in every sense her greatest work, Middlemarch. After that Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, showed a marked falling off in power, though many of the scenes are sufficiently rich in pathos, humour, and insight. Of the Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a volume of somewhat miscellaneous essays not unlike Thackeray's Roundabout Papers in their rather vague structure, no good critic, we think, formed any very high estimate.
After the death of Mr Lewes, on 28th November 1878, George Eliot, who was always exceedingly dependent on some one person for affection and support, fell into a very melancholy state, from which she was roused by the solicitous kindness and attention of Mr John Cross, an old friend of her own and of Mr Lewes's, and to him she was married on 6th May 1880. Their married life lasted but a few months. George Eliot died in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, on 22d December of the same year, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, in the grave next to that of Mr Lewes.
As a novelist, George Eliot will probably always stand among the greatest of the English school; above Richardson, whom she greatly admired, and with whose painstaking and elaborate style of portraiture she had something in common, though in her preference for studies taken from simple rural life, from commonplace subjects so delineated as to bring out the humorous side of human shortcomings and the overmastering power of pitiable passions, she approached nearer to the still greater genius of Fielding. But her mind had not the movement and vivacity of Fielding's. If it had had that movement, that elasticity, that freedom of life in it, her genius would probably have shown itself much earlier than it did, and not waited till she was close upon forty before it betrayed even its existence. In early life she seems to have given her whole mind to the higher problems of life, and to have declared them virtually insoluble before she took refuge in portraying, with the wonderful power she actually displayed, the disappointments, the breakdowns, the narrow discontents, as well as the generous hopes and unsatisfied ideals of other human beings. She did not give the first-fruits of her intellectual energy to fiction. She exhausted, to her own thinking, the province of theology first, and having accepted with her usual too great docility the negative view of those who held that we have no trustworthy evidence that Christ's life was a revelation of divine power at all, and who held that Christianity is a mere dream dreamt in the idealising mood of eager human aspiration, she passed on sadly to a pitying study of man in the frame of mind of one who is determined to make the best of a bad business. And she extracted, perhaps, from our human lot all the good that it is possible for any one to extract from it who has once come deliberately to the conclusion that, though something may be done to elevate, and a good deal to alleviate it, and though not a little amusement may be extracted from it, yet that no power can really transfigure it, and that the more modest the aim, the less serious will be the inevitable disappointment. This subdued tone of regret that the highest human endeavour is destined to be baffled runs through all her tales, and it can hardly be doubted that their pervading melancholy is at least in some degree due to the false step which she herself, under the influence of a negative school of religious thought, had deliberately taken, when she sacrificed her own life to the ends of a connection out of which most of the joy, and almost all the sacredness, were taken by the unnatural and morally humiliating circumstances under which she entered upon it. It was greatly to her credit that, in spite of these circumstances, she steadily refused to lower the moral ideal at which she aimed, though she pursued it with scanty hope, and without the assistance of the faintest trust in the help of any higher power. She told her friend Miss Hennell in 1857, when the success of her Scenes of Clerical Life was already assured: 'If I live five years longer, the positive result of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will outweigh the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing anything to shock others, and I can conceive no consequences that will make me repent the past' (Life and Letters, vol. i. p. 461). She lived twenty-three years more; but the good of living up to one's own ideal is neither small nor negative, and the Life appears to show that the shock of having herself contributed to the world an example of a mode of life of which in her literary work she was constantly struggling to 'outweigh' the influence, was far greater and more enduring than she had at this time realised.
George Eliot's mind was one of extraordinary reflective power, but deficient in vivid personal instincts. She notices in Silas Marner how slowly impressions grow up within us, and how little we are sometimes aware of the origin of even those impressions which are destined to produce the greatest effects upon our character and external life. 'Our consciousness,' she says, 'rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us. There have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.' In most men and women, such obliviousness of the first appearance of a germ of evil would hardly apply to a violation of wholesome instincts of that peculiar and marked kind by which she set her actual life at variance with her moral ideal. But perhaps it was so in her case. Her Life and Letters appear to show that the suave and long-drawn melancholy and somewhat artificial condition of self-repression in which she lived grew upon her more and more as 'the sap circulated' and fed her ideal of the true relation of husband and wife. In story after story she attempted to impress upon others the absolute sacredness of the relations to which her own action had apparently shown her to be indifferent. Her most impressive stories, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, were all penetrated with the desire to show how selfish and desecrating what is called love may be without marriage, and how equally selfish and desecrating marriage may be without love; yet at every return to that subject there seems to be less of hopefulness, less of awe, less of testimony to the sharp remorse which follows wrong-doing, less of vivid instinct, more of the tone of tragic warning, more of a tendency to acquiescence in inevitable misery, in her treatment of the theme.
Her pictures of the English farmers and tradesmen and the lower middle class generally of the Midland counties are hardly surpassed in English literature, and may be put on a level with Sir Walter Scott's similar pictures of the Scotch peasantry. Jeanie and Effie Deans in the Heart of Midlothian are hardly more impressive than Dinah and Hetty in Adam Bede, and many might plausibly contend that they are less so. George Eliot's drawing had finer touches, and was more from within; Sir Walter Scott's was more rapid and vigorous, and excited a deeper interest in the outward careers of his dramatis personae. Then again, George Eliot's farmers and millers, and farriers and auctioneers, and parish-clerks, are painted not with more humour perhaps, but with humour of a rarer and finer kind, though it is less popular and effective than Sir Walter Scott's bailies and drovers, and dominies and gypsies. What George Eliot is too frequently deficient in is action; what Sir Walter lacks is depth of insight. But on the whole George Eliot's stories give us at least as good a picture of the life of the Midland counties, as masterly and full-length portraits of the slow-moving, beef-consuming, habit-ridden population of those counties in the earlier part of this century, as Sir Walter Scott has given us of the Border counties during the whole of the 18th century, with their wilder and more adventurous people. Of course there is a great difference in method between the two novelists, corresponding pretty closely to the difference between their favourite subjects. Sir Walter loved to show his favourites embarked in perilous adventures, Rob Roy gaining access to the Glasgow Tolbooth, and endangering his own neck to help a friend, or again, persuading the soldier to whom he was buckled to let him loose himself and dive for his life as they crossed the Forth. George Eliot on the other hand is seldom so successful as when she patiently develops her characters in rather slow but humorous dialogue—such dialogue as Shakespeare loved to interpolate in his plays when he chose to show us how the 'Goodman Dull' of the Midlands talked away in his stupid but comfortable self-satisfaction. Perhaps now and then George Eliot a little overdoes this microscopic view of inarticulate natures. In that curious short story of hers, The Lifted Veil, she gives a picture of a man with a quite preternatural insight into the vagrant and frivolous background of the minds of those amongst whom he lives, who is made to complain of 'the obtrusion on my mind of the mental process going forward in first one person and then another, with whom I happened to be in contact; the vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance . . . would force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned insect.' Had not George Eliot herself some curious gift of the same kind?—as for instance in the very long analysis she gives of the way in which the gossips of Raveloe constructed, out of their own consciousness, the dress and personal appearance of the pedlar who is supposed by them to have stolen Silas Marner's gold? She seems sometimes to have had the buzz of dull but excited gossip almost revealed to her by a kind of disagreeable intuition, and to have written it down at too great length in order to rid herself of its leaden predominance over her imagination.
But if in delineating character George Eliot is often more than the equal of Sir Walter Scott, because she goes deeper and has a more penetrating insight, she is greatly his inferior in play and richness of pictorial imagination, in rapidity of movement, and in warmth of colour. Romola, her one historical romance, though it is full of subtlety of conception, contains some very striking figures, and is painted with a surprising minuteness of realistic detail, is a doubtful success. Sir Walter Scott never failed in making the chief historical figure of his historical romances the most interesting figure in his group. His studies of Mary Stuart in the Abbot, of Elizabeth in Kenilworth, of James I. in the Fortunes of Nigel, and of Louis XI. in Quentin Durward are studies which will live in the imaginations of men as long as the most vivid of historical portraits. George Eliot did not thus succeed in painting Savonarola. It was in Tito and Tessa that she achieved her great successes. As regards the historical background of Romola, one can hardly say that it holds its place at all as compared with even the least successful historical romance of Sir Walter Scott, say, Anne of Geierstein or the Fair Maid of Perth. George Eliot's imagination was not buoyant enough to travel back into these far regions of history, and create them anew for us. Nor does her story move rapidly enough to make up for the difficulty of transporting our sympathies to so distant a region. We miss the vividness and we miss the action which are needful for the art of historical romance.
And again in her poetry George Eliot falls far short of Sir Walter Scott; she is sombre, stately, even Miltonic after a fashion of her own, but Miltonic without Milton's felicity and charm. She is as grandiose as Milton without being as grand. Sometimes she attains true grandeur, as in her delineation of the selfishness that remained at the heart even of the inspired musician Jubal:
This little pulse of self that living glowed
Through thrice three centuries, and divinely strowed
The light of music through the vague of sound,
Ached smallness, still in good that had no bound.
The last line is grand, but not with Milton's sweet and winning grandeur. And usually George Eliot falls quite short of true grandeur in her poetry, and seems to be impressive without actually impressing the reader. The rhythm is laboured, the thought is laboured, the feeling is laboured, and the effect is more artificial than artistic.
Perhaps the most curious feature of George Eliot's genius is that she wrote so very much better and with so much more ease when she was writing dramatically than she did when she was writing her own thoughts in her own name. There is hardly a good letter—considered as a letter—in the whole three volumes, made up chiefly out of her letters, which Mr Cross has given to the world. There is on the contrary hardly an ineffective speech put into the mouth of any of the characters whom she delineated in her novels. Sir Walter Scott has given us a far larger proportion of ineffectively painted characters, though also a greater number of effectively painted characters, than George Eliot. There is hardly a country squire, or dairymaid, or poacher, or innkeeper, or country lad or lass to whom George Eliot does not give a thoroughly individual voice; but when she comes to speak for herself, her voice is measured, artificial, monotonous, and a little over-sweet. Her letters read as if they were turned out by machinery, though machinery invented by some gently intellectual and laborious mind. Scott's letters are delightful reading; Miss Brontë's are full of interest; even Miss Austen's, though they disappointed everybody, give the impression of a lively and observant mind. But George Eliot's have no freedom or personal stamp upon them, unless the absence of personal feeling be itself a personal stamp. It almost seems as if her mind had been intended more as an instrument for interpreting the minds of others, more as a phonograph through the agency of which the natures of all the various interlocutors with whom she met could be delicately registered and made to report themselves to the world, than as a distinct organ of her own taste and purpose. George Eliot is in the highest degree original in her power of interpreting others, but she gives an effect of faded second-hand snavity when she comes to interpret herself. Nevertheless she will be named in the same category with Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, perhaps even above Miss Austen, if only for the richness and quantity of her admirable work. When the novelists of the nineteenth century come to be discussed in the twentieth, she will certainly rank above Trollope, or Mrs Oliphant, or Miss Brontë, or Mrs Gaskell, or Bulwer Lytton, or any of the other clever novelists who have filled so large a part of this century with their lively and skilful work.
See the Life, edited by J. W. Cross (3 vols. 1885-86); George Eliot, by Mathilde Blind (1883); F. W. H. Myers, Essays: Modern (1883); the present writer's Essays (1871) and his Modern Guides of English Thought (1887); Mr Oscar Browning's little book (1890); and Scherer's Essays in English Literature (trans. 1891).