In the last lecture we obtained a view of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda as containing two distinct stories, one of which might have been called The Repentance of Gwendolen Harleth, and the other, The Mission of Daniel Deronda; and we generalized the principal objections against the work into two: namely, that the main characters were prigs, and that the artistic value of the book was spoiled by its moral purpose. In discussing the first of these objections we found that probably both of them might be referred to a common origin; for examination of precisely what is meant by a prig revealed that he is a person whose goodness is so downright, so unconforming and so reduced that it makes the mass of us uncomfortable. Now there can be no question that so far as the charge of being overloaded with moral purposes is brought against Daniel Deronda, as distinguished from George Eliot's other works, it is so palpably contrary to all facts in the case that we may clearly refer it to some fact outside the case: and I readily find this outside fact in that peculiar home-thrust of the moral of Daniel Deronda which has rendered it more tangible than that of any preceding work which concerned time past. You will remember we found that it was only in Daniel Deronda, written in 1876, after thirty years of study and of production, that George Eliot allowed herself to treat current English society; you will remember too, how we found that this first treatment revealed among other things a picture of an unspeakable brute, Grandcourt, throned like an Indian lama above the multitude, and receiving with a blasÉ stare, the special adoration of the most refined young English girls; a picture which made the worship of the golden calf or the savage dance around a merely impotent wooden idol, fade into tame blasphemy. No man could deny the truth of the picture; the galled jade was obliged to wince; this time it was my withers that were wrung. Thus the moral purpose of Daniel Deronda which is certainly beyond all comparison less obtrusive than that of any other book written by George Eliot, grew by its very nearness, out of all perspective. Though a mere gnat, it sat on the very eyelash of society and seemed a monster.

In speaking of George Eliot's earlier stories I was at pains to show how explicitly she avowed their moral purpose; in Amos Barton, in Janet's Repentance, in Adam Bede, everywhere there is the fullest avowal of didacticism; on almost every other page one meets those direct appeals from the author in her own person to the reader, in which George Eliot indulged more freely than any novelist I know, enforcing this or that moral view in plain terms of preaching. But it curiously happens that even these moral 'asides' are conspicuously absent in Daniel Deronda: the most cursory comparison of it in this particular with Adam Bede, for example, reveals an enormous disproportion in favor of Deronda as to the weight of this criticism. Yet people who had enthusiastically accepted and extolled Adam Bede, with all its explicitly moralizing passages and its professedly preaching characters, suddenly found that Daniel Deronda was intolerably priggish and didactic. But resting then on the facts in the case—easily possible by comparing Daniel Deronda with any previous work—as to show how this censure of didacticism loses all momentum as against this particular book; let us advance to the more interesting, because more general, fact that many people—some in great sincerity—have preferred this censure against all of George Eliot's work and against all didactic novels in general. The objection involved many shades of opinion, and is urged with the most diverse motives and manner. At one extreme we have the Saturday Review growling that the office of the novelist is to amuse, never to instruct, that George Eliot, in seeking the latter has even forfeited the former, and that Daniel Deronda neither amuses nor instructs; whereupon George Eliot is derisively bid, in substance, to put on the cap and bells again, and leave teaching to her betters; with a voice, by the way, wondrously like that with which the Edinburgh Review some years ago cried out to our adorable John Keats, "Back to your gallipots, young man." From this extreme we have all shades of opinion to that vague and moderate apprehension much current among young persons influenced by a certain smart sound in the modern French phrase l'Art pour l'Art, or by the German nickname of "tendency-books," that a moral intention on the part of an artist is apt to interfere with the naturalness or intrinsic beauty of his work; that in art the controlling consideration must always be artistic beauty; and that artistic beauty is not only distinct from, but often opposed to moral beauty. Now, to discuss this question a priori: to go forward and establish an Æsthetic basis for beauty, involving an examination which must range from Aristotle to Kant and Burke and Mr. Grant Allen's physiological theories, would require another course of lectures quite as long as that which is now ending; so that all I can hope to do is but to throw, if I can, some light upon this question. And, so to proceed immediately to that work with some system: permit me to recall to you in the first place that the requirement has been from time immemorial that wherever there is contest as between artistic and moral beauty, unless the moral side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravishing combination of tender curves and spheric softness that ever stood for woman; yet if the lip have a certain fulness that hints of the flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular the physical beauty suggest a moral ugliness, that sculptor—unless he be portraying a moral ugliness for a moral purpose—may as well give over his marble for paving-stones. Time, whose judgments are inexorably moral, will not accept his work. For indeed we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty—that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light, within him;—he is not yet the great artist. Here it is most instructive to note how fine and beautiful souls of time appear after awhile to lose all sense of distinction between these terms, Beauty, Truth, Love, Wisdom, Goodness, and the like. Hear some testimony upon this point: this is a case for witnesses. Let us call first Keats. Keats does not hesitate to draw a moral even from his Grecian Urn, and even in the very climacteric of his most "high sorrowful" song; and that moral effaces the distinction between truth and beauty. "Cold pastoral" he cries, at the end of the Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Again, bearing in mind this identity of truth and beauty in Keats' view, observe how Emerson, by strange turns of thought, subtly refers both truth and beauty to a common principle of the essential relation of each thing to all things in the universe. Here are the beginning and end of Emerson's poem called Each and All:

Nothing is fair or good alone: that is to say fairness or beauty, and goodness depend upon relations between creatures; and so, in the end of the poem, after telling us how he learned this lesson by finding that the bird-song was not beautiful when away from its proper relation to the sky and the river and so on, we have this:—

But again, here Mrs. Browning, speaking by the mouth of Adam in The Drama of Exile, so far identifies beauty and love as to make the former depend on the latter; insomuch that Satan, created the most beautiful of all angels, becomes the most repulsive of all angels from lack of love, though retaining all his original outfit of beauty. In The Drama of Exile, after Adam and Eve have become wise with the great lessons of grief, love and forgiveness, to them comes Satan, with such talk as if he would mock them back into their misery; but it is fine to see how the father of men now instructs the prince of the angels upon this matter of love and beauty.

Let us now carry forward this connection between love and beauty in listening to a further testimony of Emerson's in a poem called The Celestial Love, where, instead of identifying beauty and truth with Keats, we find him making love and truth to be one.

And in connection with these lines:—

I must here beg you to observe the quite incalculable advance in the ideal of love here presented by Emerson, and the ideal which was thought to be the crown and boast of the classic novel a hundred years ago, and which is still pointed to with exultation by thoughtless people. This ideal, by universal voice was held to have been consummated by Fielding in his character of Squire Allworthy, in the famous novel, Tom Jones. And here it is: we have a dramatic presentation of Squire Allworthy early on a May morning, pacing the terrace before his mansion which commanded a noble stretch of country, and then Fielding glows thus: "In the full blaze of his majesty up rose the sun, than which one object alone in this lower creation could be more glorious, and that Mr. Allworthy himself presented—a human being replete with benevolence, meditating in what manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to his creatures." Here Mr. Allworthy's benevolence has for its object to render himself most acceptable to his Creator; his love, in other words, is only another term for increasing his account in the Bank of Heaven; a perfect example, in short, of that love of the low-loving herd which is self in other still preferred.

But now let me once more turn the tube and gain another radiant arrangement of these kaleidoscopic elements, beauty and love and the like. In Emerson's poem called "Beauty," which must be distinguished from the "Ode to Beauty," the relation between love and beauty takes this turn: "Seyd," he says, "chased beauty

(where, you observe, love is substituted for beauty, as that to which he gave his days, in the most naive assumption that the one involved the other.)

George Eliot has somewhere called this word love a word-of-all-work. If with another turn I add to these testimonies one from Swedenborg, in which this same love—which we have just seen to be beauty—which beauty we just before saw to be truth—is now identified with wisdom: we prove the justice of George Eliot's phrase. In Section X of his work on the Divine Providence Swedenborg says: "The good of love is not good any further than it is united to the truth of wisdom; and the truth of wisdom is not truth any further than it is united to the good of love;" and he continues in section XIII: "Now because truth is from good, as wisdom is from love, therefore both taken together are called love or good; for love in its form is wisdom, and good in its form is truth."

And finally does not David practically confirm this view where, in Psalm CXIX. he involves the love of the law of God with wisdom in the verse: "I understand more than the ancients because I keep thy precepts?"

But I grieve that there is no time to call more witnesses; for I love to assemble these lofty spirits and hear them speak upon one topic. Is it not clear that in the minds of these serious thinkers truth, beauty, wisdom, goodness, love, appear as if they were but orators of one and the same essential God?

And if this be true cannot one say with authority to the young artist,—whether working in stone, in color, in tones or in character-forms of the novel: so far from dreading that your moral purpose will interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction that unless you are suffused—soul and body, one might say—with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love—that is, the love of all things in their proper relation—unless you are suffused with this love do not dare to meddle with beauty, unless you are suffused with beauty, do not dare to meddle with love, unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness,—in a word, unless you are suffused with beauty, truth, wisdom, goodness and love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist.

Of course I leave out of view here all that field of artistic activity which is merely neutral, which is—not immoral but—merely unmoral. The situations in Scott's novels for instance do not in general put us upon any moral question as between man and man. Or when our own Mr. Way paints his luminous bunches of grapes, one of which will feed the palates of a thousand souls though it is never eaten, and thus shows us how Art repeats the miracle of the loaves and fishes, feeding the multitude and leaving more of the original provision than was at first; we have most delightful unmoral art. This is not only legitimate, but I think among the most beneficent energies of art; it rests our hearts, it gives us holiday from the Eternal Debate, it re-creates us for all work.

But now secondly, as to the influence of moral purpose in art: we have been in the habit, as you will remember, of passing at the earliest possible moment from abstract discussion to the concrete instance; and if we now follow that course and inquire,—not whether moral purpose may interfere with artistic creation,—but whether moral purpose has interfered with artistic creation, as matter of fact, in the works of those whom the ages have set in the highest heaven of art, we get a verdict which seems to leave little room for question. At the beginning we are met with the fact that the greatest work has always gone hand in hand with the most fervent moral purpose. For example, the most poetical poetry of which we know anything is that of the author of Job, and of David and his fellow psalm-writers. I have used the expression "most poetical" here with design; for regarded as pure literature these poems in this particular of poeticalness, of pure spirituality, lift themselves into a plane not reached by any others. A single fact in proof of this exceeding poeticalness will suffice: it is the fact that these poems alone, of all ever written, bear translation from one language into another without hurt. Surely this can be said of no other poetic work. If we strike away all allowances of amateurishness and good fellowship and judge with the uncompromising truth of the pious artist; how pitiful is Homer as he appears in even Pope's English; or how subtly does the simplicity of Dante sink into childishness even with Mr. Longfellow interpreting; or how tedious and flat fall the cultured sentences of Goethe even in Taylor's version, which has by many been declared the most successful translation ever made, not only of Faust but of any foreign poem; nay, how completely the charm of Chaucer exhales away even when redacted merely from an older dialect into a later one, by hands so skillful as those of Dryden and Wordsworth.

Now, it is words and their associations which are untranslatable, not ideas; there is no idea, whether originating in a Hebrew, Greek or other mind, which cannot be adequately produced as idea in English words; the reason why Shakspeare and Dante are practically untranslatable is that recognizing how every word means more than itself to its native users,—how every word is like the bright head of a comet drawing behind it a less luminous train of vague associations which are associations only to those who have used such words from infancy,—Shakspeare and Dante, I say, have used this fact, and have constructed poems which necessarily mean more to native hearers than they can possibly mean to any foreign ear.

But this Hebrew poetry which I have mentioned is so purely composed of ideas which are universal, essential, fundamental to the personality of man, instantly recognizable by every soul of every race,—that they remain absolutely great, absolutely artistic, in whatever language they are couched.

For example: if one climbs up for a moment out of that vagueness with which Biblical expressions, for various reasons, are apt to fall upon many ears, so that one may consider the clean and virgin quality of ideas clarified from all factitious charm of word and of association,—what could be more nearly perfect as pure literature than this:

Or this:

Or this, of Isaiah's:

Or this, from the author of Job:

Here it is apparent enough that the moral purpose with which these writers were beyond all question surcharged, instead of interfering with the artistic value of their product, has spiritualized the art of it into an intensity which burns away all limitations of language and sets their poems as indestructible monuments in the hearts of the whole human race.

If we descend to the next rank of poetry I have only to ask you to observe how, in Shakspeare, just as the moral purpose becomes loftier the artistic creations become lovelier. Compare, for example, the forgiveness and reconciliation group of plays as they have been called, Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, and The Tempest, (which must have been written late in Shakspeare's life when the moral beauty of large forgiveness seems to have taken full possession of his fancy, and when the moral purpose of displaying that beauty to his fellow-men seemed to have reigned over his creative energy): compare, I say, these plays with earlier ones, and it seems to me that all the main creations are more distinctly artistic, more spiritually beautiful, lifted up into a plane of holy ravishment which is far above that of all the earlier plays. Think of the dignity and endless womanly patience of Hermione, of the heavenly freshness and morning quality of Perdita, of the captivating roguery of Autolycus, in Winter's Tale; of the colossal forgiveness of Queen Katherine in Henry VIII, of the equally colossal pardon of Prospero, of the dewy innocence of Miranda, of the gracious and graceful ministrations of Ariel, of the grotesqueries of Caliban and Trinculo, of the play of ever-fresh delights and surprises which make the drama of The Tempest a lone and music-haunted island among dramas! Everywhere in these latter plays I seem to feel the brooding of a certain sanctity which breathes out of the larger moral purpose of the period.

Leaving these illustrations, for which time fails, it seems to me that we have fairly made out our case against these objections if, after this review of the connection between moral purpose and artistic creation we advance thirdly to the fact—of which these objectors seem profoundly oblivious—that the English novel at its very beginning announces itself as the vehicle of moral purposes. You will remember that when discussing Richardson and Fielding, the first English novelists, I was at pains to show how carefully they sheltered their works behind the claim of this very didacticism. Everywhere in Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, Tom Jones, in the preface, sometimes in the very title-page, it is ostentatiously set up that the object of the book is to improve men's moral condition by setting before them plain examples of vice and virtue.

Passing by, therefore, the absurdity of the statement that the proper office of the novelist is to amuse, and that when George Eliot pretended to do more, and to instruct, she necessarily failed to do either; it is almost as odd to find that the very objectors who urge the injurious effect of George Eliot's moral purpose upon her work are people who swear by Richardson and Fielding, utterly forgetting that if moral purpose is a detriment to Daniel Deronda, it is simply destruction to Clarissa Harlowe and Tom Jones.

And lastly upon this point, when I think of the crude and hasty criticism which confines this moral purpose in Daniel Deronda to the pushing forward of Deronda's so-called religious patriotism in endeavoring to re-establish his people in the ancient seat of the Hebrews,—a view which I call crude and hasty because it completely loses sight of the much more prominent and important moral purpose of the book, namely, the setting forth of Gwendolen Harleth's repentance; when, I say, I hear these critics not only assume that Deronda's mission is the moral purpose of this book, but even belittle that by declaring that George Eliot's enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of the Jews must have been due to a chance personal acquaintance of hers with some fervid Jew who led her off into these chimerical fancies; and when, I find this tone prevailing not only with the Philistines, but among a great part of George Eliot's otherwise friends and lovers: then I am in a state of amazement which precludes anything like critical judgment on my part. As for me, no Jew—not even the poorest shambling clothes-dealer in Harrison street—but startles me effectually out of this work-a-day world: when I look upon the face of a Jew, I seem to receive a message which has come under the whole sea of time from the further shore of it: this wandering person, who without a home in any nation has yet made a literature which is at home in every nation, carries me in one direction to my mysterious brethren, the cavemen and the lake dwellers, in the other direction to the carpenter of Bethlehem, climax of our race. And now, to gather together these people from the four ends of the earth, to rehabilitate them in their thousand-fold consecrated home after so many ages of wandering, to re-make them into a homologous nation at once the newest and the oldest upon the earth, to endow the 19th Century with that prodigious momentum which all the old Jewish fervor and spirituality and tenacity would acquire in the backward spring from such long ages of restraint and oppression, and with the mighty accumulation of cosmopolitan experiences; the bare suggestion would seem enough to stir the blood of the most ungentle Gentile.

But I must hasten to complete the account of George Eliot's personal existence which we suspended at the point where she had come to London in 1851.

She had been persuaded to this step by Dr. Chapman, who was at that time editor of the Westminster Review, and who asked her to come and help him to conduct that publication. At this time she must have been one of the most captivating companions imaginable. She knew French, German and Italian, and had besides a good knowledge of Latin, Greek, Russian and Hebrew. She was a really good player of the piano, and had some proficiency on the organ; she had already mixed in some of the best society of London, for, in 1841, her father had moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, and here she quickly became intimate in the household of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray, where she met such people as Emerson, George Combe, Mr. Froude, and many other noted ones of the literary circles which the Brays delighted in drawing about them; her mind had been enlarged by the treasures of the Continent which she visited with her life-long friends, the Brays, in 1849, after the death of her father, remaining at Geneva after the Brays returned to England; she had all that homely love which comes with the successful administration of breakfast, dinner and supper, for her sisters and brothers had all married, and she lived alone with her father after his removal to Coventry in 1841, and kept his house for him from that time until his death, not only with great daughterly devotion but, it is said, with great success as a domestic manager; besides thus knowing the mysteries of good coffee and good bread she was widely versed in theology, philosophy and the movements of modern science: all of which equipment was permeated with a certain intensity which struck every one who came near her. With this endowment she came to London in 1851, as I have said, by Dr. Chapman's invitation, and took up her residence at Dr. Chapman's house. Here she immediately began to meet George H. Lewes, Carlyle, Mill and Herbert Spencer. Of her relations to Lewes it seems to me discussion is not now possible. It is known that Lewes' wife had once left him, that he had generously condoned the offense and received her again, and that in a year she again eloped; the laws of England make such a condonation preclude divorce; Lewes was thus prevented from legally marrying again by a technicality of the law which converted his own generosity into a penalty; under these circumstances George Eliot, moved surely by pure love, took up her residence with him, and according to universal account, not only was a faithful wife to him for twenty years until his death, but was a devoted mother to his children. That her failure to go through the form of marriage was not due to any contempt for that form, as has sometimes been absurdly alleged, is conclusively shown by the fact that when she married Mr. Cross, a year and a half after Lewes' death, the ceremony was performed according to the regular rites of the Church of England.

The most congenial of George Eliot's acquaintances during these early days at the Chapman's in London was Mr. Herbert Spencer. For a long time indeed the story went the rounds that Mr. Spencer had been George Eliot's tutor; but you easily observe that when she met him at this time in London she was already thirty-one years old, long past her days of tutorship. The story however has authoritatively been denied by Mr. Spencer himself. That George Eliot took pleasure in his philosophy, that she was especially conversant with his Principles of Psychology, and that they were mutually-admiring and mutually-profitable friends, seems clear enough; but I cannot help regarding it a serious mistake to suppose that her novels were largely determined by Mr. Spencer's theory of evolution, as I find asserted by a recent critic who ends an article with the declaration that "the writings of George Eliot must be regarded, I think, as one of the earliest triumphs of the Spencerian method of studying personal character and the laws of social life."

This seems to me so far from being true that many of George Eliot's characters appear like living objections to the theory of evolution. How could you, according to this theory, evolve the moral stoutness and sobriety of Adam Bede, for example, from his precedent conditions, to wit, his drunken father and querulous mother? How could you evolve the intensity and intellectual alertness of Maggie Tulliver from her precedent conditions, to wit, a flaccid mother, and a father wooden by nature and sodden by misfortune? Though surely influenced by circumstances her characters everywhere seem to flout evolution in the face.

But the most pleasant feature connected with the intercourse of George Eliot and Herbert Spencer is that it appears to have been Mr. Spencer who first influenced her to write novels instead of heavy essays in The Westminster. It is most instructive to note that this was done with much difficulty. Only after long resistance, after careful thought, and indeed after actual trial was George Eliot persuaded that her gift lay in fiction and not in philosophy; for it was pending the argument about the matter that she quietly wrote Scenes from Clerical Life and caused them to be published with all the precaution of anonymousness, by way of actual test.

As to her personal habits I have gleaned that her manuscript was wonderfully beautiful and perfect, a delight to the printers, without blot or erasure, every letter carefully formed; that she read the Bible every day and that one of her favorite books was Thomas À Kempis on The Imitation of Christ; that she took no knowledge at secondhand; that she had a great grasp of business, that she worked slowly and with infinite pains, meditating long over her subject before beginning; that she was intensely sensitive to criticism; that she believed herself a poet in opposition to the almost unanimous verdict of criticism which had pronounced The Spanish Gypsy, Agatha and The Legend of Jubal as failing in the gift of song, though highly poetic; that the very best society in London—that is to say in the world—was to be found at her Sunday afternoon receptions at the Priory, Regent's Park, where she and Mr. Lewes lived so long; and that she rarely left her own home except when tempted by a fine painting or some unusually good performance of music.

I have given here a list of complete works, with dates of publication, as far as I have been able to gather. I believe this is nearly complete.

Translation of Strauss' Leben Jesu, 1846; contributions to Westminster Review, from about 1850, during several years; translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, 1854; Scenes of Clerical Life, Blackwood's Magazine, 1857,—book-form 1858; Adam Bede, 1859; The Mill on the Floss, 1860; The Lifted Veil, Blackwood's Magazine, 1860; Silas Marner, 1861; Romola, Cornhill Magazine, book-form, 1863; Felix Holt, 1866; The Spanish Gypsy, 1868: Address to Workmen, Blackwood's Magazine, 1868; Agatha, 1869; How Lisa loved the king, Blackwood's Magazine, 1869; Middlemarch, 1871; The Legend of Jubal, 1874; Daniel Deronda, 1876; The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879; and said to have left a translation of Spinoza's Ethics, not yet published.

As the mind runs along these brief phrases in which I have with a purposed brevity endeavored to flash the whole woman before you, and as you supplement that view with this rapid summary of her literary product,—the details of fact seem to bring out the extraordinary nature of this woman's endowment in such a way that to add any general eulogium would be necessarily to weaken the picture. There is but one fact remaining so strong and high as not to be liable to this objection, which seems to me so characteristic that I cannot do better than close this study with it. During all her later life the central and organic idea which gave unity to her existence was a burning love for her fellow-men. I have somewhere seen that in conversation she once said to a friend: "What I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and as irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling," and the narrator of this speech adds that at the end of it she grasped the mantel-piece as if actually saving herself from a fall, with an intensity which made the gesture most eloquent.

You will observe that of the two commandments in which the Master summed up all duty and happiness—namely, to love the Lord with all our heart, and to love our neighbor as ourself, George Eliot's whole life and work were devoted to the exposition of the latter. She has been blamed for devoting so little attention to the former; as for me, I am too heartily grateful for the stimulus of human love which radiates from all her works to feel any sense of lack or regret. This, after all—the general stimulus along the line of one's whole nature—is the only true benefit of contact with the great. More than this is hurtful. Now a days, you do not want an author to tell you how many times a day to pray, to prescribe how many inches wide shall be the hem of your garment. This the Master never did; too well He knew the growth of personality which would settle these matters, each for itself; too well He knew the subtle hurt of all such violations of modern individualism; and after our many glimpses of the heartiness with which George Eliot recognized the fact and function of human personality one may easily expect that she never attempted to teach the world with a rule and square, but desired only to embody in living forms those prodigious generalizations in which the Master's philosophy, considered purely as a philosophy, surely excelled all other systems.

In fine, if I try to sum up the whole work of this great and beautiful spirit which has just left us in the light of all the various views I have presented in these lectures, where we have been tracing the growth of human personality from Æschylus, through Plato, Socrates, the contemporary Greek mind, through the Renaissance, Shakspeare, Richardson and Fielding, down to Dickens, and our author, I find all the numerous threads of thought which have been put before you gathered into one, if I say that George Eliot shows man what he may be, in terms of what he is.