John Crombie Brown - The Ethics of George Eliot\'s Works
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John Crombie Brown >> The Ethics of George Eliot\'s Works
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7 THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS
BY THE LATE JOHN CROMBIE BROWN
FOURTH EDITION
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXXXIV
_All Rights reserved_
PREFACE.
The greater part of the following Essay was written several years ago. It
was too long for any of the periodicals to which the author had been in
the habit of occasionally contributing, and no thought was then
entertained of publishing it in a separate form. One day, however,
during his last illness, the talk happened to turn on George Eliot's
Works, and he mentioned his long-forgotten paper. One of the friends
then present--a competent critic and high literary authority--expressed a
wish to see it, and his opinion was so favourable that its publication
was determined on. The author then proposed to complete his work by
taking up 'Middlemarch' and 'Deronda'; and if any trace of failing vigour
is discernible in these latter pages, the reader will bear in mind that
the greater portion of them was composed when the author was rapidly
sinking under a painful disease, and that the concluding paragraphs were
dictated to his daughter after the power of writing had failed him, only
five days before his death.
PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION.
It is a source of great gratification to the friends of the author that
his little volume has already been so well received that the second
edition has been out of print for some time. In now publishing a third,
they have been influenced by two considerations,--the continued demand
for the book, and the favourable opinion expressed of it by "George
Eliot" herself, which, since her lamented death, delicacy no longer
forbids them to make public.
In a letter to her friend and publisher, the late Mr John Blackwood,
received soon after the appearance of the first edition, she writes, with
reference to certain passages: "They seemed to me more penetrating and
finely felt than almost anything I have read in the way of printed
comments on my own writings." Again, in a letter to a friend of the
author, she says: "When I read the volume in the summer, I felt as if I
had been deprived of something that should have fallen to my share in
never having made his personal acquaintance. And it would have been a
great benefit,--a great stimulus to me to have known some years earlier
that my work was being sanctioned by the sympathy of a mind endowed with
so much insight and delicate sensibility. It is difficult for me to
speak of what others may regard as an excessive estimate of my own work,
but I will venture to mention the keen perception shown in the note on
page 29, as something that gave me peculiar satisfaction."
Once more. In an article in the 'Contemporary Review' of last month, on
"The Moral Influence of George Eliot," by "One who knew her," the writer
says: "It happens that the only criticism which we have heard mentioned
as giving her pleasure, was a little posthumous volume published by
Messrs Blackwood."
With such testimony in its favour, it is hoped a third edition will not
be thought uncalled for.
_March_ 1881.
THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS.
"There is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can do without
happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness."
Such may be regarded as the fundamental lesson which one of the great
teachers of our time has been labouring to impress upon the age. The
truth, and the practical corollary from it, are not now first enunciated.
Representing, as we believe it to do, the practical aspect of the noblest
reality in man--that which most directly represents Him in whose image he
is made--it has found doctrinal expression more or less perfect from the
earliest times. The older Theosophies and Philosophies--Gymnosophist and
Cynic, Chaldaic and Pythagorean, Epicurean and Stoic, Platonist and
Eclectic--were all attempts to embody it in teaching, and to carry it out
in life. They saw, indeed, but imperfectly, and their expressions of the
truth are all one-sided and inadequate. But they did see, in direct
antagonism alike to the popular view and to the natural instinct of the
animal man, that what is ordinarily called happiness does not represent
the highest capability in humanity, or meet its indefinite aspirations;
and that in degree as it is consciously made so, life becomes animalised
and degraded. The whole scheme of Judaism, as first promulgated in all
the stern simplicity of its awful Theism, where the Divine is
fundamentally and emphatically represented as the Omnipotent and the
Avenger, was an emphatic protest against that self-isolation in which the
man folds himself up like a chrysalid in its cocoon whenever his
individual happiness--the so-called saving of his own soul--becomes the
aim and aspiration of his life. In one sense the Jew of Moses had no
individual as apart from a national existence. The secret sin of Achan,
the vaunting pride of David, call forth less individual than national
calamity.
At last in the fulness of time there came forth One--whence and how we do
not stop to inquire--who gathered up into Himself all these tangled,
broken, often divergent threads; who gave to this truth, so far as one
very brief human life could give--at once its perfect and exhaustive
doctrinal expression, and its essentially perfect and exhaustive
practical exemplification, by life and by death. Endless controversies
have stormed and are still storming around that name which He so
significantly and emphatically appropriated--the "Son of Man." But from
amid all the controversy that veils it, one fact, clear, sharp, and
unchallenged, stands out as the very life and seal of His human
greatness--"He pleased not Himself." By every act He did, every word He
spoke, and every pain He bore, He put away from Him happiness as the aim
and end of man. He reduced it to its true position of a possible
accessory and issue of man's highest fulfilment of life--an issue, the
contemplation of which might be of some avail as the being first awoke to
its nobler capabilities, but which, the more the life went on towards
realisation, passed the more away from conscious regard.
Thenceforth the Cross, as the typical representation of this truth,
became a recognised power on the earth. Thenceforth every great teacher
of humanity within the pale of nominal Christendom, whatever his apparent
tenets or formal creed, has been, in degree as he was great and true,
explicitly or implicitly the expounder of this truth; every great and
worthy life, in degree as it assimilated to that ideal life, has been the
practical embodiment of it. "Endure hardness," said one of its greatest
apostles and martyrs, "as good soldiers of Christ." And to the endurance
of hardness; to the recognition of something in humanity to which what we
ordinarily call life and all its joys are of no account; to the
abnegation of mere happiness as aim or end,--to this the world of
Christendom thenceforth became pledged, if it would not deny its Head and
trample on His cross.
In no age has the truth been a popular one: when it becomes so, the
triumph of the Cross--and in it the practical redemption of humanity--will
be near at hand. Yet in no age--not the darkest and most corrupt
Christendom has yet seen--have God and His Christ been without their
witnesses to the higher truth,--witnesses, if not by speech and doctrine,
yet by life and death. Even monasticism, harshly as we may now judge it,
arose, in part at least, through the desire to "endure hardness;" only it
turned aside from the hardness appointed in the world without, to choose,
and ere long to make, a hardness of its own; and then, self-seeking, and
therefore anti-Christian, it fell. Amid all its actual corruption the
Church stands forth a living witness, by its ritual and its sacraments,
to this fundamental truth of the Cross; and ever and anon from its
deepest degradation there emerges clear and sharp some figure bending
under this noblest burden of our doom--some Savonarola or St Francis
charged with the one thought of truth and right, of the highest truth and
right, to be followed, if need were, through the darkness of death and of
hell.
Perhaps few ages have needed more than our own to have this fundamental
principle of Christian ethics--this doctrine of the Cross--sharply and
strongly proclaimed to it. Our vast advances in physical science tend,
in the first instance at least, to withdraw regard from the higher
requirements of life. Even the progress of commerce and navigation, at
once multiplying the means and extending the sphere of physical and
aesthetic enjoyment, aids to intensify the appetite for these. Systems
of so-called philosophy start undoubtingly with the axiom that happiness
is the one aim of man: and with at least some of these happiness is
simply coincident with physical well-being. Political Economy aims as
undoubtingly to act on the principle, "the greatest possible happiness of
the greatest possible number:" and perhaps, as Political Economy claims
to deal with man in his physical life only, it were unreasonable to
expect from it regard to aught above this. Our current and popular
literature--Fiction, Poetry, Essays on social relations--is emphatically
a literature of enjoyment, ministering to the various excitements of
pleasure, wonder, suspense, or pain. And last, and in some respects most
serious of all, our popular theology has largely conformed to the spirit
of the age. Representative of a debased and emasculated Christianity, it
attacks our humanity at its very core. It rings out to us, with
wearisome iteration, as our one great concern, the saving of our own
souls: degrades the religion of the Cross into a slightly-refined and
long-sighted selfishness: and makes our following Him who "pleased not
Himself" to consist in doing just enough to escape what it calls the
pains of hell--to win what it calls the joys of heaven.
This is the dark side of the picture; but it has its bright side too.
These advances of science, these extensions of commerce, these
philosophies, even where they are falsely so called, this Political
Economy, which from its very nature must first "labour for the meat that
perisheth,"--these are all God's servants and man's ministers still--the
ministers of man's higher and nobler life. Consciously or unconsciously,
they are working to raise from myriads burdens of poverty, care,
ceaseless and fruitless toil, under the pressure of which all higher
aspiration is wellnigh impossible. Sanitary reform in itself may mean
nothing more than better drainage, fresher air, freer light, more
abundant water: to the "Governor among the nations" it means lessened
impossibility that men should live to Him.
If in few ages the great bulk and the most popular portion of literature
has more prostituted itself to purposes of sensational or at most
aesthetic enjoyment, it is at least as doubtful if in any previous age
our highest literature has more emphatically and persistently devoted
itself to proclaiming this great doctrine of the Cross. Sometimes
directly and explicitly, oftener by implication, this is the ultimate
theme of those who are most deeply influencing the spirit of the time.
Our finest and most widely recognised pulpit oratory is at home here, and
only here: Maurice and Arnold, Trench and Vaughan, Robertson and Stanley,
James Martineau and Seeley, Thirlwall and Wilberforce, Kingsley and
Brooke, Caird and Tulloch, different in form, in much antagonistic in
what is called opinion, are of one mind and heart on this. The thought
underlying all their thoughts of man is that "higher than love of
happiness" in humanity which expresses the true link between man and God.
The practical doctrine that with them underlies all others is, "Love not
pleasure--love God. Love Him not alone in the light and amid the calm,
but through the blackness and the storm. Though He hide Himself in the
thick darkness, yet" give thanks at remembrance of His holiness. "Though
He slay thee, yet trust still in Him." The hope to which they call us is
not, save secondarily and incidentally, the hope of a great exhaustless
future. It is the hope of a true life _now_, struggling on and up
through hardness and toil and battle, careless though its crown be the
crown of thorns.
Even evangelicism indirectly, in great degree unconsciously, bears
witness to the truth through its demand of absolute self-abnegation
before God: though the inversion of the very idea of Him fundamentally
involved in its scheme makes the self-abnegation no longer that of the
son, but of the slave; includes in it the denial of that law which
Himself has written on our hearts; and would substitute our subjection to
an arbitrary despotism for our being "made partakers of His holiness."
One of the sternest and most consistent of Calvinistic theologians,
Jonathan Edwards, in one of his works expresses his willingness to be
damned for the glory of God, and to rejoice in his own damnation: with a
strange, almost incredible, obliquity of moral and spiritual insight
failing to perceive that in thus losing himself in the infinite of holy
Love lies the very essence of human blessedness, that this and this alone
is in very truth his "eternal life."
Among what may be called Essayists, two by general consent stand out as
most deeply penetrating and informing the spirit of the age--Carlyle and
Ruskin. To the former, brief reference has already been made. In the
work then quoted from, one truth has prominence above all others: that
with the will's acceptance of happiness as the aim of life begins the
true degradation of humanity; and that then alone true life dawns upon
man when truth and right begin to stand out as the first objects of his
regard. Never since has Carlyle's strong rough grasp relaxed its hold of
this truth; and howsoever in later works, in what are intended as
biographical illustrations of it, he may seem to confuse mere strength
and energy with righteousness of will, and thence to confound outward and
visible success with vital achievement, that strength and energy are
always in his eyes, fighting or enduring against some phase of the many-
headed hydra of wrong.
Of Ruskin it seems almost superfluous to speak. They have read him to
little purpose who have not felt that all his essays and criticisms in
art, all his expositions in social and political science, are essentially
unified by one animating and pervading truth: the truth that to man's
moral relations, or, in other words, the developing and perfecting in him
of that Divine image in which he is made,--all things else, joy, beauty,
life itself, are of account only to the degree in which they are
consciously used to subserve that higher life. His ultimate standard of
value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political
relations, is referred, is--not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous,
sentimental, or aesthetic, but--the measure in which may thereby be
trained up that higher life of humanity. Art is to him God's minister,
not when she is simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature in
such forms and phases as shall tend to bring man nearer to moral truth,
beauty, and purity. The Ios and Ariadnes of the debased Italian schools,
the boors of Teniers, the Madonnas of Guido, are truer to one phase of
nature than are Fra Angelico's angels, or Tintoret's Crucifixion. But
that nature is humanity as degraded by sense; and therefore the measure
of their truthfulness is for him also the measure of their debasement.
In poetry, the key-note so firmly struck by Wordsworth in his noble "Ode
to Duty" has been as firmly and more delicately caught up by other
singers; who, moreover, have seen more clearly than Wordsworth did, that
it is for faith, not for sight, that duty wears
"The Godhead's most benignant grace;"
for the path along which she leads is inevitably on earth steep, rugged,
and toilsome. Take almost any one of Tennyson's more serious poems, and
it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled and
perfected only through moral endurance and struggle. "Ulysses" is no
restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and security
by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun within, to
press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril, and fear.
"The Lotos-eaters" are no mere legendary myth: they shadow forth what the
lower instincts of our humanity are ever urging us all to seek--ease and
release from the ceaseless struggle against wrong, the ceaseless
straining on toward right. "In Memoriam" is the record of love "making
perfect through suffering:" struggling on through the valley of the
shadow of death toward the far-off, faith-seen light "behind the veil."
"The Vision of Sin" portrays to us humanity choosing enjoyment as its
only aim; and of necessity sinking into degradation so profound, that
even the large heart and clear eye of the poet can but breathe out in sad
bewilderment, "Is there any hope?"--can but dimly see, far off over the
darkness, "God make Himself an awful rose of dawn." In one of the most
profound of all His creations--"The Palace of Art"--we have presented to
us the soul surrounding itself with everything fair and glad, and in
itself pure, not primarily to the eye, but to the mind: attempting to
achieve its destiny and to fulfil its life in the perfections of
intellectual beauty and aesthetic delight. But the palace of art, _made
the palace of the soul_, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and
filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of
intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell.
The "Idylls of the King" are but exquisite variations on the one
note--that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full
and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one
of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure. In "Vivien"--the
most remarkable of them all for the subtlety of its conception and the
delicacy of its execution,--the picture is perhaps the darkest and
saddest time can show--that of a nature rich to the utmost in all lower
wisdom of the mind, struggling long and apparently truly against the
flesh, yet all the while dallying with the foul temptation, till the
flesh prevails; and in a moment, swift and sure as the lightning, moral
and spiritual death swoops down, and we see the lost one no more.
Many other illustrations might be given from our noblest and truest
poetry--from the works of the Brownings, the "Saints' Tragedy" of Charles
Kingsley, the dramatic poems of Henry Taylor--of the extent to which it
is vitally, even where not formally Christian; the extent to which the
truth of the Cross has transfused it, and become one chief source of its
depth and power. But we must hasten on to our more immediate object in
these remarks.
Those who read works of fiction merely for amusement, may be surprised
that it should be thought possible they could be vehicles for conveying
to us the deepest practical truth of Christianity,--that the highest life
of man only begins when he begins to accept and to bear the Cross; and
that the conscious pursuit of happiness as his highest aim tends
inevitably to degrade and enslave him. Even those who read novels more
thoughtfully, who recognise in them a great moral force acting for good
or evil on the age, may be startled to find George Eliot put forward as
the representative of this higher-toned fiction, and as entitled to take
place beside any of those we have named for the depth and force, the
consistency and persistence, with which she has laboured to set before us
the Christian, and therefore the only exhaustively true, ideal of life.
Yet a careful examination will, we are satisfied, show that from her
first appearance before the public, this thought, and the specific
purpose of this teaching, have never been absent from the writer's mind;
that it may be defined as the central aim of all her works: and that it
gathers in force, condensation, and power throughout the series. Other
qualities George Eliot has, that would of themselves entitle her to a
very high place among the teachers of the time. In largeness of
Christian charity, in breadth of human sympathy, in tenderness toward all
human frailty that is not vitally base and self-seeking, in subtle power
of finding "a soul of goodness even in things apparently evil," she has
not many equals, certainly no superior, among the writers of the day.
Throughout all her works we shall look in vain for one trace of the
fierce self-opinionative arrogance of Carlyle, or the narrow dogmatic
intolerance of Ruskin: though we shall look as vainly for one word or
sign that shall, on the mere ground of intellectual power, energy, and
ultimate success, condone the unprincipled ambition of a Frederick, so-
called the Great, and exalt him into a hero; or find in the cold heart
and mean sordid soul of a Turner an ideal, because one of those strange
physiological freaks that now and then startle the world, the artist's
temperament and artist's skill, were his beyond those of any man of his
age. But as our object here is to attempt placing her before the reader
as asserting and illustrating the highest life of humanity, as a true
preacher of the doctrine of the Cross, even when least formally so, we
leave these features, as well as her position as an artist, untouched on,
the rather that they have all been already discussed by previous critics.
The 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' delicately outlined as they are, still
profess to be but sketches. In them, however, what we have assumed to be
the great moral aim of the writer comes distinctly out; and even within
the series itself gathers in clearness and power. Self-sacrifice as the
Divine law of life, and its only true fulfilment; self-sacrifice, not in
some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the vain spirit of self-
pleasing, but wherever God has placed us, amid homely, petty anxieties,
loves, and sorrows; the aiming at the highest attainable good in our own
place, irrespective of all results of joy or sorrow, of apparent success
or failure,--such is the lesson that begins to be conveyed to us in these
"Scenes."
The lesson comes to us in the quiet unselfish love, the sweet hourly self-
devotion of the "Milly" of Amos Barton, so touchingly free and full that
it never recognises itself as self-devotion at all. In "Mr Gilfil's Love-
Story" we have it taught affirmatively through the deep unselfishness of
Mr Gilfil's love to Tina, and his willingness to offer up even this, the
one hope and joy of his life, upon the altar of duty; negatively, through
the hard, cold, callous, self-pleasing of Captain Wybrow--a type of
character which, never repeated, is reproduced with endless variations
and modifications in nearly all the author's subsequent works. It is,
however, in "Janet's Repentance" that the power of the author is put most
strongly forth, and also that what we conceive to be the vital aim of her
works is most definitely and firmly pronounced. Here also we have
illustrated that breadth of nature, that power of discerning the true and
good under whatsoever external form it may wear, which is almost a
necessary adjunct of the author's true and large ideal of the Christian
life. She goes, it might almost seem, out of her way to select, from
that theological school with which her whole nature is most entirely at
dissonance, one of her most touching illustrations of a life struggling
on towards its highest through contempt, sorrow, and death. That
narrowest of all sectarianisms, which arrogates to itself the name
Evangelical, and which holds up as the first aim to every man the saving
of his own individual soul, has furnished to her Mr Tryan, whose life is
based on the principle laid down by the one great Evangelist, "He that
loveth his soul shall lose it; he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto
life eternal." {15}
Mr Tryan, as first represented to us, is not an engaging figure. Narrow
and sectarian, full of many uncharities, to a great extent vain and self-
conscious, glad to be flattered and idolised by men and women by no means
of large calibre or lofty standard--it might well seem impossible to
invest such a figure with one heroic element. Yet it is before this man
we are constrained to bow down in reverence, as before one truer,
greater, nobler than ourselves; and as we stand with Janet Dempster
beside the closing grave, we may well feel that one is gone from among us
whose mere presence made it less hard to fight our battle against "the
world, the flesh, and the devil." The explanation of the paradox is not
far to seek. The principle which animated the life now withdrawn from
sight--which raised it above all its littlenesses and made it a witness
for God and His Christ, constraining even the scoffers to feel the
presence of "Him who is invisible"--this principle was self-sacrifice. So
at least the imperfections of human speech lead us to call that which
stands in antagonism to self-pleasing; but before Him to whom all things
are open, what we so call is the purification and exaltation of that self
in us which is the highest created reflex of His image--the growing up of
it into His likeness for ever.
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