George Eliot

Through the facts of her life and the implications of her work, George Eliot reveals herself in detail with fullness nearly complete. Her first, her essential characteristic was passion: intense feeling made her suffer in childhood and afterward on to the climax when, in her sixtieth year, Lewes died. Passion energized her, while she was yet a schoolgirl, to raise her mind to its highest level; passion for knowledge, for ambition, culture, perfection. Passion urged her devotion to family; to Isaac when she was a little thing, to mother and father whom she tended lovingly. Passion dominated her when she craved to merge her life with another's life; to find the calm blessedness of a woman's lot. Love came, succeeding disappointment through those and in those who would not or could not give her what she wanted, came through the back door of her heart open to tenderness and sympathy, entered and remained. At first the way love came did not matter. George Eliot was nobody of importance, or even had she been, as in childhood she had felt she must one day be, she would have accepted as her right its presence.

With the years her capacity for passion broadened and deepened into that sympathy, compassion, which is the wellspring of her greatness. Early religious faith, stirring her to good deeds, gradually approached the religion of humanity, whose prophet was Comte. George Eliot's concepts, strengthened by Dante, passed beyond those of the French philosopher; but in practical application she found Comte's teachings a guide.

Eliot's passion was the condition of her art. To evolve and eternalize a world of beauty was her high purpose. Her good sense would have held her to familiar material even if her own inclination and ability had not been determined from her memories: she wished to help common humanity. Consequence follows cause; selflessness and love for others are noble ideals; dreams guide the soul. So Maggie Tulliver lost herself but gained freedom. That her freedom ends in death is sad, but life is sad and always ends in death, George Eliot would have replied, though she would have removed this sadness by improving conditions, by universal sympathy.

Her characters are everyday characters - clergymen, carpenters, squires, housewives, young girls, old maids, children of the middle class, chiefly and best - because the everyday man or woman is the normal man or woman she knew, and through whom the world must move upward. George Eliot had learned from Wordsworth the art of firing her imagination through simple, homely folk; she had learned from Dante the worth of accurate representation; and her imagination, enlivened through memory, had its power through early keenness of vision and a consciousness which, like that of Sophocles, saw life steadily and whole.

This consciousness, unlike that of most Victorian novelists, made her an intellectual writer. Analysis, she said, comes before synthesis. Dissecting her humanity for motive and act-hers and Lewes's interest in the new science of psychology made the dissection more enjoyable - she understood, from the evidence at least, better than most writers those hidden inner springs of complex characteristics that propel word and deed. Though created for the idea which rules her story, they bleed blood, not sawdust; they are developed from brain out; not from a portrait, inward.

Nothing like the combination of George Eliot's disciplined intellect, her ability willed by passionate energy to accomplishment, her genius in fiction, her selflessness, her compassion - nothing like this combination has existed in any other woman of whom history has kept the record. Women there have been who had greater scholarship; many women who had her loving-kindness and sense of duty; other women, even of her day, who had genius more luminous. Not one approached her in possession of all; no one who approached her in any particular was more superbly woman in feeling.