Chapter 6 On George Eliot

A careful reading of George Eliot realizes how little we know about her, and comes to realize the credulity (which a perceptive person would not appreciate very much) It is with this attitude that one half-consciously, half-deliberately accepts a late Victorian account of a bewitched woman who has an illusory power over readers who are more bewildered than she is.It was difficult to say when and by what means the spell which bewitched her was broken.Some attribute this to the publication of her biography.Perhaps it was George Meredith, with his "snappy little circus-showrunner" and "misguided woman" from the pulpit, who sharpened and painted hundreds of arrows. poisoned, the archers were happy to shoot their arrows, though they missed the mark.She becomes one of the objects of ridicule by the young, a convenient symbol for a group of serious characters who commit the same idolatrous error and who can be dismissed with the same sneer.Sir Acton once said that she was greater than Dante; when Herbert Spencer forbade the London Library to lend any novels, he exempted her works as if they were not novels.She is a pride and a role model for women.Moreover, the record of her private life is no more intriguing than her public activities.If someone were asked to describe an afternoon in that priory, the storyteller would invariably suggest that his sense of humor was aroused by the recollections of these serious Sunday afternoons.The solemn lady in the low chair had terrified him; and he longed desperately for some sensible opinion of his own.Of course, that conversation was very serious, as a memo written in the beautiful and clear hand of the great novelist attests.The record was dated Monday morning, and she reproached herself for speaking without properly forethought of Marivoux, when she meant another writer; but there was no doubt, she said, that her audience They have made corrections.Still, it is not a romantic memory to think back on Sunday afternoons talking about Marivoux with George Eliot.As the years passed, this memory has faded.It didn't come to life as picturesque.

Indeed, one cannot help believing that that long, melancholy face, with its stern, sullen expression and almost equine strength, left a depressing impression on those who think of George Eliot, The result was that they always felt that sullen face looking at them through the pages of her book.Mr. Goss recently described the scene when he saw Eliot riding through the streets of London in a two-seat carriage: A fat and stocky witch, sitting in a dreamy state, her thick features looked somewhat sad when viewed from the side, and she wore an ill-fitting hat, always in accordance with the most fashionable Paris style. In the 1980s, a huge ostrich feather was usually inserted on this hat.

With equal skill Mrs. Ritchie leaves a more woodsy interior portrait: She sat by the fire in her beautiful black satin gown, and a lamp with a green shade stood on a table beside her, on which I saw German books, pamphlets, and ivory paper-knife.She was serene and dignified, with small, determined eyes and a sweet voice.When I looked at her, I felt that she was a friend, and that what I felt in her was not quite a personal friendship, but a kind and benevolent impulse. Fragments of her remarks have been preserved."We should respect our influence," she said. "We know through our own experience how much other people can influence our lives, and we must remember that we must have the same influence on others in turn." We teach this Carefully treasure it up and keep it firmly in your heart. You can imagine that when you look back at the scene thirty years later and retell her words, you will suddenly burst out laughing and laugh out loud for the first time in your life.

In all these records, one feels that the recorder, even if he was there at the time, kept a distance and kept his head clear, and in the years since, when he reads these novels, never There will be flashes of a lively, confusing, or beautiful personality that dazzle his eyes.Lack of charisma is a huge flaw in a novel that reveals so many personalities; and her critics, most of whom are of course male, have resented her, perhaps consciously or not, for her lack of that. A quality universally acknowledged to be extremely attractive in women.George Eliot was not charming; she had no strong femininity; she lacked that eccentricity and unusual temper which endows so many artists with a childlike simplicity.It is felt that for most people, as for Mrs. Rich, she embodies "not a personal friendship, but an impulse of kindness and benevolence."But if we examine the pictures more closely, we shall find that they are all portraits of an elderly, famous woman in a black satin gown, in a hansom, a A woman who has had a struggle, and from that experience a deep desire to be of use to others, but, except for those in the small circle that had known her from her boyhood, , she does not wish to establish a close relationship with others.We know very little of her youth; but what we do know is that her culture, her philosophy, her reputation and her influence rested on a very humble foundation—she was the granddaughter of a carpenter.

The first volume of her life record, is unusually depressing.In this volume of records, we see her groaning and struggling, struggling with the unbearable boredom of narrow rural society (her father's social status has risen, closer to the middle class, but the life of the middle class is not as good as that of the middle class). idyllic life), became assistant editor of a highly intellectual London newspaper, and a respected colleague of Herbert Spencer.When she reveals these early life stages in sad monologues, they are harrowing, and Mr. Close accuses her of using them to tell her own story.She stood out as a teenager, a girl who "was sure to pick up a certain skill about costume clubs pretty quickly"; later she made a chart of the history of Christian churches, which she used to raise money to restore a church; Her loss of religion annoyed her father so much that he refused to live with her.What followed was her struggle to translate Strauss' "Jesus".The book itself is dreary and "mind-numbing," and she had to take on the usually feminine duties of housekeeping and nursing her dying father, and she was so attached to her brotherhood that she dejectedly believed that, as a result of her becoming A scholar, who was losing the respect of her brother, hardly lessened the dull feeling.She said: "I used to walk around like an owl, which made my brother feel extremely disgusted." A friend saw her face the statue of Christ's resurrection, painstakingly translating Strauss' "Jesus "Biography," he wrote: "Poor thing! Seeing her pale and haggard, with a splitting headache, and worrying about her father, sometimes I pity her." However, while we read her story, There cannot but be a strong desire that the stages of her life's course be more beautiful, if not smoother; Raise this work above our pity.Her progress was very slow and very difficult, yet behind it a deep-rooted, noble ambition drove her as an irresistible drive.Every obstacle was at last swept from her path.She knows everyone.She reads everything.Her astonishing intellectual vigor won out in the end.Youth has gone, but her youth is full of worries.And so, at the age of thirty-five, when she was at the height of her energy and the extreme freedom of her will, she made a decision that meant so much to her and still matters to us: she decided to Go to Weimar, Germany, with George Henry Lewis.

The great freedom which came to her at the same time as her personal happiness was most fully demonstrated in those works which were produced shortly after her union with Lewis.They themselves provide us with rich spiritual enjoyment.At the beginning of her literary life, however, one can detect influences in some of her life situations which caused her thoughts to wander away from herself and the present situation, and turn to past days and rural villages, Turn to the quiet, beautiful, innocent childhood memories.We can understand why her first work was Fragments of a Priesthood and not Middlemarch.The combination of her and Louis makes her surrounded by the atmosphere of love, but because of the social environment and traditional customs, their combination makes her live in isolation.She wrote in 1857: "I hope it will be understood that I would never have invited any man to visit me if he had not asked me to do so." repelled," but she has no regrets.At first by her circumstances, then inevitably by her fame, she became so conspicuous that she lost the ability to operate under the same conditions of obscurity, a loss which, for a novelist, is very serious.Nevertheless, as we bask in the bright sunshine of "Pieces of the Priesthood," and feel the large, mature mind unfold in her "far past" world with an indulgent sense of freedom, to It seems inappropriate to talk about her loss.For such a mind, everything is gain.All experiences, filtered through layer after layer of perception and reflection, enrich and nourish this mind.In describing her attitude to fiction, the best we can do with what we know of her life is to say that she took to heart certain lessons (if she had learned them, she hadn't learned them very early) Of these lessons, perhaps, it was her melancholy quality of resignation that most impressed upon her; she gave her sympathy to ordinary characters, and took great pleasure in detailing homely, common joys and sorrows.She has none of the romantic intensity associated with a sense of individual separate existence, insatiable, unrepressed, whose image is sharply drawn against the backdrop of the world.What kind of love and hate does the fiery egotism of a defiant old priest stir up in his heart as he sips his whiskey and broods over his dreams? "A Piece of the Vicarage," "Adam Bede," and "The Mill on the Floss," these first works are very graceful.Her Poyzer, Dawtson, Gilfie, Barton, these family members and other characters, including their environment and appendages, their merits are immeasurable, because they are flesh and blood, we move among them, Now bored, now sympathetic, but we accept without question everything they say and do, and we only place that trust on great original works.She pours a torrent of memory and humor so naturally upon a character, scene after scene, until the old tapestry of the English country is recreated, that torrent and a natural progression So much in common that we rarely realize what else to criticize.We embraced it all; we felt that witty spiritual warmth and relaxation that only great, creative writers can give us.After many years of absence, when we come back to these works, they will even pour out the same rich energy and heat beyond our expectations, so that we really want to rest in this warm current, just like we bathe in the orchard. sunlight shining from above the red brick wall.We have so resignedly adopted the sense of humor of the Midland farmer and country woman, and if I have an element of unthinking laissez-faire in this, it is also in these cases.We hardly want to analyze what we feel is so grand and human.When we consider how far apart in time the worlds of Shepparton and Hyslop are, and how far the minds of those farmers and hired hands are from the minds of most of George Eliot's readers, we can only The leisurely joy with which one wanders from common house to blacksmith's workshop, from cottage drawing room to vicar's garden, is due to the fact that George Eliot did not use a gifted attitude or a curious attitude. Psychology, but a spirit of empathy that enables us to share their lives.She is not a satirist.The workings of her mind are too slow and clumsy for comedy.But she has a profound grasp of the major elements of human nature, and holds them loosely together with an understanding that is forgiving and measured, and which you will find when you re-read these works. Not only does she keep her characters alive, but she gives them an unexpected control over our joys and tears.Take the famous Mrs. Poyzer.It was easy to take her peculiar idiosyncrasies to the extreme, and indeed George Eliot was perhaps a little too often tempted to ridicule others when she herself was ridiculed in the same place.However, when we finish reading and close the book, our memory (as it sometimes does in real life) brings to the fore those fine and subtle details that we were not aware of when we were attracted by some more salient features. place.We were reminded of her poor health.On some occasions she remained completely silent.She herself is the embodiment of patience to a sick child.She doted on Totti very much.You can speculate in this silent way on most of George Eliot's characters, and find that, even in the least important ones, there is ample room for unique qualities to lurk without her having to call them Revealed from hiding.

But even in her earlier work, there are moments of greater significance, interspersed with all this patience and compassion.Her bosom seemed large enough to accommodate a whole host of fools and losers, mothers and children, dogs and the lush fields of Midland England, farmers, shrewd or drunken, horse dealers, innkeepers, curates and carpenters.They were all suffused with an air of romance, the only one George Eliot allowed herself to amplify—the romance of bygone days.These works are surprisingly readable, without the slightest trace of exaggeration or affectation.However, for readers who have kept a large body of her early work in mind, the fog of memory is clearly receding.Not that her powers were diminished, for, we think, they were at their zenith in that mature work, Middlemarch, a magnificent work, with all its inadequacies. , is one of the very few British novels written for grown-ups.However, she was no longer content with that world of fields and farmsteads.In real life she had sought her outlet elsewhere; and, though it is calm and comforting to look back on, there is, even in those early works, the bewildered mood, the exacting exactingness, the skeptical There are interrogating and frustrated characters, and that character is George Eliot himself.In Dinah in "Adam Bede", we vaguely see Eliot.In Maggie in The Mill on the Floss she reveals herself more openly and fully.She is Janet in "The Confessions of Janet," the heroine of Romula in "Romula," the heroine in "Middlemarch" who seeks wisdom and in her marriage to Ladislaw. Dorothea of ​​things that people can hardly understand.We are inclined to think that those who resent George Eliot do so because of her heroines, and with good reason; for, no doubt, they bring out her worst. On the one hand, it puts her in difficult situations, self-conscious, coy, preachy, and sometimes vulgar.If, however, you could throw away this system of sisterhood, you would leave a much smaller and lower world, though one of higher artistic attainments and higher joys and consolations.In explaining the cause of her faults (as such), you will recall that she never wrote a novel until she was thirty-seven, and that when she was thirty-seven she gradually took on a painful and a mixture bordering on resentment to consider herself.For a long time she preferred not to think of herself at all.Later, when the first high tide of creative power ebbed and she gained self-confidence, she wrote more and more personally, but she did so without hesitation in abandoning the young protagonist.Her heroine always shows traces of her self-awareness when she says what she wants to say.She did everything possible to conceal it.Besides, she endowed that self-consciousness with beauty and wealth; and, more improbably, she attempted to create a taste of brandy.But it remains an embarrassing and irritating fact that she was impelled by the power of her genius to speak out in that quiet pastoral scene.

The noble and beautiful girl who insists that she was born in the mill on the Floss is the clearest example of the destructive influence a heroine can spread around her.As a little girl she was content to run away with gypsies or to drive nails into the bodies of dolls: now a sense of humor seized her and made her innocent; but she was constantly developing; By the time George Eliot realized what was going on, she would have a fully grown woman in her hands, and what she wanted was not a gypsy, or a doll, or what St. Ogue itself could do for her. what is provided.Eliot created for her at first Philip Wickham and later Stephen Guest.The weakness of the former and the roughness of the latter are often pointed out, but these two figures, in their weakness and roughness, do not so much indicate George Eliot's inability to paint a portrait of the male as It shows the uncertain, uncertain, uncertain groping that made her hands tremble when she had to conceive of a suitable companion for her heroine.First, she was forced to look beyond the home world she knew and loved, into middle-class parlors where young men sang all summer mornings while young women sat for bazaars. Embroidered smoking cap.She feels like an outsider at it, as evidenced by her clumsy sarcasm about so-called "good society."

Good society with its clarets and its velvet carpets, its banquets held six weeks long, its operas and elegant ballrooms... Its sciences are studied by Faraday, and its religious practices by the entrance and exit How could it need faith and emphasis when it was presided over by a high priest of a wealthy family? There is no sense of humor or insight in that passage, just the vindictiveness of a jealous man, which we feel is essentially personal.But despite the horrific complexity of our social system's demands on the sympathy and discernment of a novelist who strays and transcends boundaries, Maggie Turiver did more than make George Eliot It was even scarier to be pulled out of her natural environment.She insisted on introducing great, emotional scenes into the work.She must fall in love; she must sink into despair; she must hug her brother tightly and die in the rapids.The more closely you examine these great, emotional scenes, the more you have an uneasy premonition that a dark cloud is brewing, coalescing, and closing in, and that at the critical moment it will burst open over our heads in a burst of A downpour of disillusionment and nagging.This is partly due to her weakness in grasping the conversation (when it is not dialect), and partly due to an aging person's fear of fatigue when it is necessary to work hard to arouse emotion and concentrate thoughts. , she seemed to recoil.She lets her heroines babble.She lacks clever and appropriate phrasing.She lacked that unmistakable discernment of picking a sentence and compressing into it the kernel of a scene. "Whom are you going to dance with?" asked Mr. Knightley at the Weston's ball. "Dance with you, if you invite me," said Emma; and that was enough to express her feelings.Mrs Castlebon in Middlemarch would talk for an hour, and we'd look out the window impatiently.

Yet, dismiss these heroines unsympathetically, and confine George Eliot to the rural world of her "distant past," and you not only diminish her greatness, but deprive her of her true love. s things.The greatness is here, and we cannot doubt it.The vast field of vision, the grand and solid outline of the main close-up scenes, the vigorous brilliance of those early works, and the power of exploration and rich introspection of those later works attract us to wander and linger beyond the limit.Yet it is to these heroines that we cast a final glimpse. "I've been searching for my religion since I was a little girl," said Dorothea Castlebon. "I used to pray a lot — I hardly ever pray anymore. I'm trying to let go of that desire to just be myself...." She was speaking for all those heroines.That's the problem they face.They could not live without religion, so when they were little girls they began to seek a religion.Each heroine has a deeply feminine passion for benevolent virtue, which makes the center of the work where she stands with longing and pain—a place as quiet and serene as a cathedral, Isolated from the world, however, she no longer knows whom to pray to.They pursue their goals in their learning; in the day-to-day responsibilities of adult women; in women's wider contributions.We cannot doubt that they did not find what they were after.That ancient female consciousness, full of pain and emotion, after being silent for so many ages, seems to have overflowed and overflowed in them, and made a cry for something--they hardly knew what it was —something perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence.George Eliot's intellect was too strong to tamper with the facts, and her mind was too large to appease the claim of that truth, for it is a grim truth.Besides the gallantry of their effort, that struggle always ends for her heroines in tragedy, or in a compromise which is even more tragic.Their story, however, is an incomplete version of what George Eliot himself experienced.The burdens and complexities of woman's life were not enough for her, she had to go beyond the forbidden zone and pluck for herself the strange and glorious fruits of art and knowledge.She clutched them as few women ever did, unwilling to abandon what she had inherited—a different point of view, a different standard—or accept an inappropriate reward.Thus we see her, a memorable figure, over-admired and cowering before her reputation, disappointed, reserved, shivering, shivering into the arms of love, where it seems only to be found. True fulfillment, and possibly legitimate home, at the same time, with that "critical and insatiable ambition" she reaches out to demand all that life can offer to the free and curious mind , and bravely confronts the masculine reality with her feminine aspirations.Whatever befell her creations, triumphant success was her end, and when we think of all she dared to go for and achieved, and how she overcame every obstacle that stood in her way—gender, health, convention— She sought more knowledge and more liberty, Till her body wasted and worn out under the weight of this double burden, We should place on her grave whatever souvenirs we can afford, Give her laurel and roses.