Sidney Lanier

Our custom, in these studies, of passing at the earliest possible moment from the abstract to the concrete, and of verifying theory by actual experiment, arrives at a sort of beautiful climax and apotheosis as we proceed from the abstract principles formulated in the last six lectures, to their exquisite concrete and verification in George Eliot.

At our last meeting we saw that during a period of time which we fix to a point by sweeping the mind from the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, the growing personality of man sent out three new processes, which have remarkably changed and enlarged the whole form of our individual and social structure.

I have found it highly useful in more than one connection to acquire a clear notion of these three processes by referring them all to a common physical concept of direction. For example: we may with profit construct a diagram in which it shall appear that at the renaissance period mentioned the three great and distinctive new personal relations which man established for himself were (1) a relation upward,

Diacrtics

towards the unknown, (2) a relation on our own level, a relation towards our equal,—that is towards our fellow man, and (3) a relation towards our inferior,—in the sense that the world is for man's use, is made for man,—that is, towards physical nature. We have seen how from the beginning of man's history these three relations did not acquire the vividness and energy of personal relations, nor any fixed or developable existence at all until the period mentioned.

I cannot help expressing earnest regret that the limits of my present subject have not allowed me to give any development whatever to this conception of the actual significance of the Renaissance as a significance which crystallizing into Music, the Novel, and Science, has left us those as the solid residuum of that movement; and it is not a mere sentimental generalization but a hard, scientific and unifiable fact that music is the distinctive form in which man's new relation to what is above him has expressed itself; the novel is the distinctive form in which man's new personal relation to his fellow-man has expressed itself; and science is the distinctive form in which man's new personal relation to nature has expressed itself.

I am perfectly well aware, for instance, that when one thinks of the Italian Opera with its banalities and fleshly frenzies; or when one thinks of the small, low, unmanly sensual lives which so many musicians have led under our eyes; one may well feel inclined to dispute this category to which I have assigned music, and to question whether music does belong to this wholly religious sphere. I long to be able to remind such questioners of the historic fact that music has been brought into the church as the mouthpiece of our worship, not by the sentimental people but by the sternest reformers and the most untheoretical and hard-handed workers: I long to remind them now it is the same Luther who would meet his accusers though ten thousand devils backed them, that cares most assiduously for the hymns of the church, makes them, sings them: how it is the same Puritan who fights winter and hunger and the savage, that is noted for his sweet songs, and must have his periodic opening of the musical avenue up towards the great God: or, passing far back to the times before music was music, and so making the case stronger, I long to remind them of a single line in a letter from Pliny the younger to Trajan in the year 110, which puts before me a dewy morning picture of music and Christian devotion that haunts my imagination—a line in which Pliny mentions some people who were in the habit of "meeting on a certain day before daylight and singing a hymn to Christ as to a God": or how in the fourth century the very Ambrosian chant which preceded the Gregorian chant is due to the fact that the good Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, casting about for solace, collects a number of psalm tunes and hymns and appoints them to be sung for the express purpose of consoling his people in their afflictions: and coming down to the birth of modern music, I long to remind these questioners of the noble and simple devoutness which Palestrina brings into the church worship with his music; of the perfect calm creative life of John Sebastian Bach whose music is so compact of devotion as to have inspired the well-known declaration that wherever it is played, it makes that place a church; and finally I long to remind them how essential a part of every modern church the organ-loft and the choir have come to be—and in full view of the terrible mistakes which these often make, of the screechy Italian opera music which one hears floating from this or that church on a Sunday, of the wholly undevout organ music with which the unfortunate flippant-minded organist often sends us forth—to declare that music is yet, as we have seen, a new art, that we have not really learned the uses of it, much less the scope of it; that indeed not all of us have even yet acquired the physical capacity or ear for it,—and that finally we are at the very threshold of those sweet applications we may hereafter make of that awful and mysterious power in music to take up our yearnings towards the infinite at the point where words and all articulate utterance fail, and bear them onward often to something like a satisfactory nearness to their divine object.

But all this must be left aside, and we must now pass on to consider that remarkable writer who for something more than twenty years past has been chaining the attention of our English world purely by virtue of her extraordinary endowment as to all three of these relations which I have here sketched in diagram—these relations to the growing personality of man to that which is above him, or the unknown—to that which is in his level, or his fellow-man; and to that which is beneath him, or nature—which have resulted respectively in music, the novel, and science.

If I could be allowed to construct a final text and summary of all the principles which have been announced in the preceding lectures, I could make none more complete than is furnished me by two English women who have recently been among us, and who, in the quietest way have each made an epoch, not only in literature but in life. These two women are Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot; and although our studies now lie more immediately with the latter, I shall find a frequent delight as we go on in comparing her printed words with those of Mrs. Browning, and in showing through what diverse forms of personality—so diverse as to be often really complementary to each other—these two have illustrated the doctrines I have hitherto expounded.

In beginning to get some clear view of the actual living personality which I have hitherto designated as George Eliot, one is immediately struck with the fact that it has enjoyed more of what Jack Falstaff would call a commodity of good names than falls to the lot of most mortals. As one rehearses these names it is curious also to reflect what a different train of associations each one suggests. It is hard to believe that Marian Evans, Amos Barton (for when the editor of Blackwood's was corresponding with her about her first unsigned manuscript, which was entitled, The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, I find him addressing her as "My dear Amos"), George Eliot, Mrs. Lewes, and Mrs. Cross are one and the same person. Amid all these appellations I find myself most strongly attracted towards that of George Eliot. This was the name which she chose for herself; it was under this name that she made her great successes; it was by this name that she endeared herself to all who love great and faithful work; and surely—if one may paraphrase Poe—the angels call her George Eliot. Since therefore we are mainly interested in Marian Evans, or Mrs. Lewes, or Mrs. Cross, just in so far as they bear intimate relations to George Eliot, I find myself drawn, in placing before you such sketch as I have been able to make of this remarkable personage, to begin with some account of the birth of the specific George Eliot, and having acquired a view of the circumstances attending that event, to look backward and forward from that as a central point at the origin and life of Marian Evans on the one hand, and of Mrs. Lewes and Mrs. Cross on the other.

On a certain night in the autumn of 1856, the editor of Blackwood's Magazine, was seated in an apartment of his own house, reading a manuscript which he had lately received from London, called The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton. About 11 o'clock in the evening Thackeray, who had been staying with him and had been out to dinner, entered the room, and the editor remarked, "Do you know I think I have lighted upon a new author who is uncommonly like a first-class passenger?"

Hereupon he read to Thackeray a passage from the manuscript which he held in his hand. We are able to identify this passage, and it seems interesting to reproduce it here, not only as a specimen of the kind of matter which was particularly striking to the editor of a great magazine twenty-five years ago, but as about the first tangible utterance of the real George Eliot. The passage occurs early in the second chapter of the story. In the first chapter we have had some description of the old church and the existing society in Shepperton "twenty-five years ago," which dating from 1856 would show us that village about the year 1830-31. In the second chapter we are immediately introduced to the Rev. Amos Barton, and the page or two which our editor read to Thackeray was this:

Look at him as he winds through the little churchyard! The silver light that falls aslant on church and tomb, enables you to see his slim black figure, made all the slimmer by tight pantaloons. He walks with a quick step, and is now rapping with sharp decision at the vicarage door. It is opened without delay by the nurse, cook, and housemaid, all at once—that is to say, by the robust maid-of-all work, Nanny; and as Mr. Barton hangs up his hat in the passage, you see that a narrow face of no particular complexion—even the small-pox that has attacked it seems to have been of a mongrel, indefinite kind—with features of no particular shape, and an eye of no particular expression, is surmounted by a slope of baldness gently rising from brow to crown. You judge him, rightly, to be about forty. The house is quiet, for it is half-past ten, and the children have long been gone to bed. He opens the sitting-room door, but instead of seeing his wife, as he expected, stitching with the nimblest of fingers by the light of one candle, he finds her dispensing with the light of a candle altogether. She is softly pacing up and down by the red fire-light, holding in her arms little Walter, the year-old baby, who looks over her shoulder with large wide-open eyes, while the patient mother pats his back with her soft hand, and glances with a sigh at the heap of large and small stockings lying unmended on the table.

She was a lovely woman—Mrs. Amos Barton; a large, fair, gentle Madonna, with thick, close chestnut curls beside her well rounded cheeks, and with large, tender, short-sighted eyes. The flowing line of her tall figure made the limpest dress look graceful, and her old frayed black silk seemed to repose on her bust and limbs with a placid elegance and sense of distinction, in strong contrast with the uneasy sense of being no fit, that seemed to express itself in the rustling of Mrs. Farquhar's gros de Naples. The caps she wore would have been pronounced, when off her head, utterly heavy and hideous—for in those days even fashionable caps were large and floppy; but surmounting her long, arched neck, and mingling their borders of cheap lace and ribbon with her chestnut curls, they seemed miracles of successful millinery. Among strangers she was shy and tremulous as a girl of fifteen; she blushed crimson if any one appealed to her opinion; yet that tall, graceful, substantial presence was so imposing in its mildness, that men spoke to her with an agreeable sensation of timidity.... I venture to say Mrs. Barton would never have grown half so angelic if she had married the man you would perhaps have had in your eye for her—a man with sufficient income and abundant personal Éclat. Besides, Amos was an affectionate husband, and, in his way, valued his wife as his best treasure.

---

"I wish we could do without borrowing money, and yet I don't see how we can. Poor Fred must have some new shoes; I couldn't let him go to Mrs. Bond's yesterday because his toes were peeping out, dear child; and I can't let him walk anywhere except in the garden. He must have a pair before Sunday. Really, boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there's no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are."

Mrs. Barton was playfully undervaluing her skill in metamorphosing boots and shoes. She had at that moment on her feet a pair of slippers which had long ago lived through the prunella phase of their existence, and were now running a respectable career as black silk slippers, having been neatly covered with that material by Mrs. Barton's own neat fingers.

Wonderful fingers those! they were never empty; for if she went to spend a few hours with a friendly parishioner, out came her thimble and a piece of calico or muslin, which before she left, had become a mysterious little garment with all sorts of hemmed ins and outs. She was even trying to persuade her husband to leave off tight pantaloons; because if he would wear the ordinary gun-cases, she knew she could make them so well that no one would suspect the tailor.

But by this time Mr. Barton has finished his pipe, the candle begins to burn low, and Mrs. Barton goes to see if Nanny has succeeded in lulling Walter to sleep. Nanny is that moment putting him in the little cot by his mother's bedside; the head with its thin wavelets of brown hair, indents the little pillow; and a tiny, waxen, dimpled fist hides the rosy lips, for baby is given to the infantine peccadillo of thumb-sucking. So Nanny could now join in the short evening prayer, and all go to bed. Mrs. Barton carried up stairs the remainder of her heap of stockings, and laid them on a table close to her bedside, where also she placed a warm shawl, removing her candle, before she put it out, to a tin socket fixed at the head of her bed. Her body was weary, but her heart was not heavy, in spite of Mr. Woods the butcher, and the transitory nature of shoe-leather; for her heart so overflowed with love, she felt sure she was near a fountain of love that would care for her husband and babes better than she could foresee; so she was soon asleep. But about half-past five o'clock in the morning, if there were any angels watching round her bed—and angels might be glad of such an office—they saw Mrs. Barton rise up quietly, careful not to disturb the slumbering Amos, who was snoring the snore of the just; light her candle, prop herself upright with the pillows, throw the warm shawl round her shoulders, and renew her attack on the heap of undarned stockings. She darned away until she heard Nanny stirring, and then drowsiness came with the dawn; the candle was put out, and she sank into a doze. But at nine o'clock she was at the breakfast-table busy cutting bread and butter for five hungry mouths, while Nanny, baby on one arm, in rosy cheeks, fat neck, and night-gown, brought in a jug of hot milk and water.

Although Thackeray was not enthusiastic, the editor maintained his opinion and wrote the author that the manuscript was "worthy the honors of print and pay," addressing the author as "My dear Amos." Considerable correspondence followed in which the editor was free in venturing criticisms. The author had offered this as the first of a series to be called "Scenes from Clerical Life;" but no others of the series were yet written and the editor was naturally desirous to see more of them before printing the first. This appears to have made the author extremely timid, and for a time there was doubt whether it was worth while to write the remaining stories. For the author's encouragement, therefore, it was determined to print the first story without waiting to see the others; and accordingly in Blackwood's Magazine for January, 1857, the story of Amos Barton was printed.

This stimulus appears to have had its effect; and after the January number, each succeeding issue of Blackwood's Magazine contained an instalment of the series known as Scenes of Clerical Life, until it was concluded in the number for November, 1857; the whole series embracing the three stories of Amos Barton, Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story and Janet's Repentance. It was only while the second of these—Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story—was appearing in the Magazine that our George Eliot was born; for it was at this time that the editor of the Magazine was instructed to call the author by that name.

The hold which these three stories immediately took upon all thinking people was remarkable. In January, 1858, that is two months after the last instalment of Janet's Repentance—I find Charles Dickens writing this letter:

"My dear Longford—

"Will you—by such roundabout ways and methods as may present themselves—convey this note of thanks to the author of 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' whose two first stories I can never say enough of, I think them so truly admirable. But, if those two volumes or a part of them, were not written by a woman—then should I begin to believe that I am a woman myself.

Faithfully Yours Always,
Charles Dickens."

It is especially notable to find that the editor of the Magazine himself completely abandoned all those conservative habits of the prudent editor which have arisen from a thousand experiences of the rapid failures of this and that new contributor who seemed at first sure to sweep the world, and which always teach every conductor of a great magazine at an early stage of his career to be extremely guarded in his expressions to new writers however promising they may appear. This traditional guardedness seems to have been completely swept away by these stories; Mr. Blackwood writes letter after letter to George Eliot, full of expressions that the hackneyed editor would ordinarily consider extravagant: and finally in a letter concerning the publication in book-form of the magazine-stories: "You will recollect ... my impression was that the series had not lasted long enough in the Magazine to give you a hold on the general public, although long enough to make your literary reputation. Unless in exceptional cases, a very long time often elapses between the two stages of reputation—the literary and the public. Your progress will be sure, if not so quick as we could wish."

Before examining these stories, it seems a pleasant method of pursuing our account of the George Eliot thus introduced, to go forward a little to the time when a curious and amusing circumstance resulted in revealing her actual name and sex. Thus we seem to be making this lovely star rise before us historically as it rose before the world. I have just spoken of the literary interest which the stories excited in Mr. Blackwood. The personal interest appears to have been as great, and he was at first very anxious to make the acquaintance of his new contributor in the flesh. He was given to understand, however, that the contributor wished to remain obscure, for the present, and he forbore further inquiries with scrupulous delicacy. It happened, however, that presently the authorship of Scenes of Clerical Life was claimed for another person, and the claim soon assumed considerable proportions. Certain residents about Nuneaton, in Warwickshire—where in point of fact George Eliot had been born and brought up—felt sure they recognized in the stories of Amos Barton and Mr. Gilfil portraits of people who had actually lived in that country, and began to inquire what member of their community could have painted these portraits. Presently, while the stories were running in the magazine, a newspaper published in the Isle of Man boldly announced that a certain Mr. Liggins, of Nuneaton, was their author. The only claim to literary power Mr. Liggins had, it seems, lay in the circumstance that he had run through a fortune at Cambridge; and in fact he himself denied the charge at first. But immediately upon the heels of Scenes of Clerical Life appeared Adam Bede, and the honor of that great work was so seductive that for some reason or other—whether because the reiteration of his friends had persuaded him that he actually did write the works, in some such way as it is said that a man may tell a lie so often and long that he will finally come to believe it himself, or for whatever other reason—it seems that Mr. Liggins so far compromised himself that, without active denial by him, a friendly clergyman down in Warwickshire sent a letter to the Times, formally announcing Liggins as the author of Scenes of Clerical Life and of Adam Bede. Hereupon appeared a challenge from the still mythical George Eliot, inviting Mr. Liggins to make a fair test of his capacity by writing a chapter or two in the style of the disputed works. The Blackwoods were thickly besieged with letters from various persons earnestly assuring them that Liggins was the author. To add to the complications, it was given out that Liggins was poor, so that many earnest persons wrote to the Blackwoods declaring that so great a genius ought not to be hampered by want, and liberally offering their purses to place him in such condition that he might write without being handicapped by care. It seems to have been particularly troublesome to the Blackwoods to prevent money from being misapplied in this way—for they were satisfied that Liggins was not the author; and they were made all the more careful by some previous experiences of a similar kind; and in one of Blackwood's letters to George Eliot he comically exclaims that "some years ago a rascal nearly succeeded in marrying a girl with money on the strength of being the author of a series of articles in the Magazine."

Thus what with the public controversy between the Liggins and anti-Liggins parties—for many persons appear to have remained firmly persuaded that Liggins was the true author—and what with the more legitimate stimulus excited by the confirmatory excellence of Adam Bede, the public curiosity was thoroughly aroused, so that even before The Mill on the Floss appeared in 1860, it had become pretty generally known who "George Eliot" was.

Here, then, would seem to be a fitting point for us to pause a moment and endeavor to construct for ourselves some definite figure of the real flesh-and-blood creature who, up to this time, had remained the mere literary abstraction called George Eliot.

It appeared that her real name was Marian Evans, and that she was the daughter of a respectable land surveyor, who had married and settled at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire. Here she was born in November, 1820; and it seems pleasant to reflect that but a few miles off in the same county of Warwickshire was the birthplace of Shakspeare, whose place among male writers seems more nearly filled by Marian Evans or George Eliot among female writers than by any other woman, so that we have the greatest English man and the greatest English woman born, though two centuries and a half apart in time, but a few miles apart in space.

Here, among the same thick hedges and green fields of the fair English Midlands with which Shakspeare was familiar, Marian Evans lived for the first large part of her life. Perhaps a more quiet, uneventful existence as to external happenings could hardly be imagined; and that Marian Evans was among the quietest of the quiet residents there seems cunningly enough indicated if we remember that when the good people of Nuneaton first began to suspect that some resident of that region had been taking their portraits in Scenes of Clerical Life, none seemed to think for a moment of a certain Marian Evans as possibly connected with the matter; and popular suspicion, after canvassing the whole ground, was able to find only one person—to wit, the Mr. Liggins just referred to—who seemed at all competent to such work.

Of these demure, reserved, uneventful years of country existence it is, of course, impossible to lay before you any record; no life of George Eliot has yet been given to the public. Sometime ago, however, I happened upon a letter of Marian Evans published in an English paper, in which she refers with so much particularity to this portion of her life, that I do not know how we could gain a more vivid and authentic view thereof than by quoting it here. Specifically, the letter relates to a controversy that had sprung up as to who was the original of the character of Dinah Morris—that beautiful Dinah Morris, you will remember in Adam Bede—solemn, fragile, strong Dinah Morris, the woman-preacher whom I find haunting my imagination in strange but entrancing unions of the most diverse forms, as if, for instance, a snow-drop could also be St. Paul, as if a kiss could be a gospel, as if a lovely phrase of Chopin's most inward music should become suddenly an Apocalypse—that rare, pure and strange Dinah Morris who would alone consecrate English literature if it had yielded no other gift to man. It would seem that possibly a dim suggestion of such a character may have been due to a certain aunt of hers, Elizabeth Evans, whom Marian had met in her girlhood; but this suggestion was all; and the letter shows us clearly that the character of Dinah Morris was almost an entire creation. The letter is as follows:

It is easy to gather from this letter that whilst the existence of Marian Evans was calm enough externally, her inner life was full of stirring events—of the most stirring events, in fact which can agitate the human soul for it is evident that she had passed along some quite opposite phases of religious belief. In 1851, after a visit to the continent, she goes—where all English writers seem to drift by some natural magic—to London, and fixes her residence there. It is curious enough that with all her clearness of judgment she works here for five years, apparently without having perceived the vocation for which her whole natural and acquired outfit had so remarkably prepared her. We find her translating Spinoza's Ethics; not only translating but publishing Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity and Strauss's Life of Jesus. She contributes learned essays to the Westminster Review; it is not until the year 1856, when she is thirty-six years old that her first slight magazine story is sent to Blackwood's; and even after his first commendations her timidity and uncertainty as to whether she could succeed in story-writing are so great that she almost resolved to give it up. I should regard it as mournful, if I could think it religious to regard anything as mournful which has happened and is not revocable, that upon coming to London Marian Evans fell among a group of persons represented by George Henry Lewes. If one could have been her spiritual physician at this time one certainly would have prescribed for her some of those warm influences which dissipate doubt by exposing it to the fierce elemental heats of love, of active charity. One would have prescribed for her the very remedy she herself has so wisely commended in Janet's Repentance.

Or one might have prescribed for her America where the knottiest social and moral problems disappear unaccountably before a certain new energy of individual growth which is continually conquering new points of view from which to regard the world.

At the time to which we have now brought her history, Marian Evans would seem to have been a singularly engaging person. She was small in stature and her face was what would be called plain here; but she was widely read, master of several languages, a good talker and listener: and beyond all, every current of testimony runs towards a certain intensity and loving fire which pervaded her and which endowed her with irresistible magnetic attraction for all sensitive souls that came near her. Her love for home matters, and for the spot of earth where she had been born, her gentle affection for animals; how the Bible and Thomas À Kempis were her favorite books, these and a thousand womanly traits I hope to bring out as we study some of her greater works,—for with all her reputed reserve I find scarcely any writer so sincerely communicative and so frankly desirous of sympathy on the part of her reader as George Eliot. In the next article I shall ask leave to present you with some pictures of the stage at which English novel-writing has arrived under the recent hands of Scott, Thackeray and Dickens when George Eliot is timidly offering her first manuscript to Blackwood's; and I shall then offer some quotations from these first three stories—particularly from Janet's Repentance which seems altogether the most important of the three—and shall attempt to show distinctly what were the main new features of wit, of humor, of doctrine, and of method which were thus introduced into literature, especially in connection with similar features which about this same time were being imparted by Mrs. Browning.

Meantime, let me conclude by asking you to fix your attention for a moment on this figure of Milly, sweet wife of Amos Barton, going to bed with her unmended basket of stockings in great fatigue, yet in great love and trust, and contrast it with that figure of Prometheus, nailed to the Caucasian rock in pain and hate, which formed the first object of these studies. What prodigious spiritual distance we have swept over from the Titan lying down, to unrest, thundering defiance against Jove's thunder, as if clashing shield against shield, and the tender-limbed woman whom the simple narrative puts before us in these words: "Her body was very weary, but her heart was not heavy ...; for her heart so overflowed with love," &c. Fixing your attention upon this word "love," and reminding you how, at the close of the last lecture, we found that the whole movement of the human spirit which we have traced here as the growth of personality towards the unknown—towards fellow-man—towards nature,—resulting in music, in the novel, in science—that this whole movement becomes a unity when we arrive at the fact that it really imparts a complete change in man's most ultimate conception of things—a change, namely, from the conception of Justice as the organic idea of moral order, a conception which we have seen Æschylus and Plato vainly working out to the outrageous conclusions of Prometheus, of the Republic; to the conception of Love as the organic idea of moral order, a conception which we are just now to see George Eliot working out to the divinely-satisfactory conclusion of Milly Barton, who conquers with gentle love a world which proved refractory alike to the justice of Jove and the defiance of Prometheus; reminding you, I say, of this concurrent change from feeble personality and justice to strong personality and love, what an amazing arc of progress we have traversed in coming from Æschylus to George Eliot!

And it is, finally, most interesting to find this change receiving clear expression, for the first time in English literature, in the works of the two women I have mentioned, Mrs. Browning and George Eliot. In this very autumn, when we have seen the editor of Blackwood's Magazine reading the MS. of George Eliot's first story to Thackeray, Mrs. Browning is sending Aurora Leigh to print; and, as I shall have frequent occasion to point out, the burden of Aurora Leigh as well as of George Eliot's whole cyclus of characters is love.

There is a charming scene in the first Act of Bayard Taylor's Prince Deukalion, which, though not extending to the height we have reached, yet very dramatically sums up a great number of ideas which converge towards it. In this scene GÆa, the Earth, mother of men, is represented as tenderly meditating upon her son, man. Near her stands a rose-tree, from one bud of which Love is presently to emerge. She says:

In the midst of like thoughts, a bud on a rose which stands by GÆa bursts open, and Eros, the antique god of young love, appears from it.

gÆa.

eros.