WIT AND WISDOM GEORGE ELIOT STAS/ HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY WIT AND WISDOM OF GEORGE ELIOT. With a Biographical Memoir. QUI LECI CRGO BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1885 no 1 13.a.in HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY FROM THE LIBRARY OF JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS APRIL 25, 1939 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by ROBERTS BROTHERS, In the Oflice of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. CONTENTS. PAGE. · . · . . 3 .. · · 2 .. · 12 SCENES FROM CLERICAL LIFE Amos Barton . . . Mr. Gilfil's Love Story . "Mr. Gilfil . . . 2. Mester Ford” . Janet's Repentance Mrs. Linnet .. ? Mr. Jerome, . 3 Mr. Dempster .. * Mr. Tryan .. .. ·········· · ·...... 13 . · 26 .. ... · · 26 27 · .. · 31 · . .. 3 · · . > . ·· · · ADAM BEDE Adam . . ? Mrs. Poyser . 3 Dinah Morris * Bartle Massey • Parson Irwine 8 Seth Bede . ? Lisbeth Bede. 8 Mrs. Irwine. • Martin Poyser . ... • • ....:· · · · · · . . . . 75 · · ···· 76 76 · • • • 17 · (iii) CONTENTS. PAGE. . 163 · · . · . · · . . . 178 · 184 · · · · • • · 188 · · · 188 • · · · · 189 • FELLS HOLT . . Felix . . . ? Rufus Lyon . 3 Mrs. Holt *Denner . . 5 Mr. Wace 6 Mr. Johnson . . 7 Rev. A. Debarry. 8 Parson Lingon . 9 Tommy Trounsen. 10 Harold Transome. 11 Mottoes . . . 12 Esther Lyon. .. · · · · 190 • · 190 · · · 190 · · · 190 · · · · 191 · · . · . · · . . . 178 · · 191 · · · · · · · · . . · · · · · · · · · · 195 . 243 245 . 246 246 248 249 249 · MIDDLEMARCH Dorothea 2 Mrs. Cadwallader. 3 Mr. Cadwallader. * Lydgate . . . 5 Mr. Farebrother. 6 Will Ladislaw Mary Garth. 8 Caleb Garth . . 9 Celia . . 10 Mr. Brooke . · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ..... · · · 249 · · · · · · · · 250 251 · · 255 · · .... · · DANIEL DERONDA * Deronda · 2 Klesmer . 3 Sir Hugo . · · · . . · . . · . . · . . · 265 . 267 . 267 · · · · · CONTENTS PAGE. · · 268 4 Kalonymos . 5 Mrs. Meyrick . 6 Hans Meyrick . . . . . . . . . . ... . . 268 . 268 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH · . 271 · . . . · · 289 . . · · 297 . . · · . 306 308 . · · . THE SPANISH GYPSY 1 Fedalma . .. 2 Juan 3 Zarca . 4 Don Silva . 6 Sephardo . 6 The Prior. 7 Blasco . 8 Lorenzo . . . · · 314 ......... . 316 · . · . . · · . 320 321 . · . . · . • 321 THE LEGEND OF JUBAL . · · . . 333 . · · . . . . 334 · · ARMGART . . 1 Armgart . 2 Leo. . 3 The Graf. . .... . · · . . 337 338 . · · . . · · . 341 341 . · · . VARIOUS POEMS A Minor Prophet Brother and Sister Oh, May I Join . Two Lovers . · · ..... 341 . 341 . · · . . · · 342 .. INDEX . · . . . . . · . . . 345 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. Not the least striking feature, perhaps, in the recently closed career of George Eliot, is the fact that at a time when public curiosity invades and lays bare the most secret places in the private lives of those who challenge its attention, she maintained from first to last a reserve so complete as almost to obliterate her personality. Never was the line between the work and the worker more dis- tinctly drawn or more persistently upheld; and though for upwards of twenty years bers had been regarded as one of the foremost figures in contemporary literature, it is literally true that at the time of her death scarcely more was known about George Eliot than is known about Shakspeare. When she was born and where; how she was educated; what were the circumstances of her early life; how she discovered her vocation to litera- ture; what was the character and personality of the woman as distinct from the artist, — these were ques- tious about which hardly enough was known to furnish a basis for plausible conjecture. Now and then some visitor at Combe Priory, less discreet or less reticent than others, would give currency to some bit of gossip as to the personal appearance and bearing of its mistress; but these were in general discredited by the very circum- (7) viii BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. stances under which they were given publicity, and at best they touched only upon the most superficial and inessential topics. The great majority of her readers thought of her not as Marian Evans, or as Mrs. Lewes, or even as Mrs. Cross, but as “ George Eliot," -- a sort of impersonal intelligence, the creator of “Adam Bede," - Silas Marner,” “Middlemarchi,” and the rest. The fame of these writings was world-wide in its extent; the writer herself remained so nearly unknown that the tidings of her death can have carried the shock of personal loss to but very few. When Thackeray died. more particularly when Dickens was so suddenly stricken down, there were many thousands who felt as though a very dear and intimately known friend had passed away; the only sentiment that has found expression in the nu- merous notices of the death of George Eliot is that of profound regret that that busy and inspiring pen is ar- rested for ever, that the “really great novel ” which was to repair the comparative failure of “Daniel Deronda" will never be forthcoming. Nor does it seem likely that the curtain of reserve which she kept so persistently lowered during her life will now be raised. Within a month after Dickens's death, enough details concerning his character and life had been published to furnish materials for an adequate biography; but from the obituary notices of George Eliot, and from the disclosures of such of her friends as have not been deterred by her own example of silence we obtain only the correction of a few misconceptions the fixing of a few dates hitherto unsettled, and the estab. lishment of a few facts which throw light at once upon BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. her career and her character. To bring together these dates and facts, and to extract from them such light as we may, rather than to attempt a critical estimate of George Eliot's work, is the object of this Memoir. Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans was born on the 22d of November, 1820, at Griff, near Nuneaton, in Warwick- shire, England, about midway between London and Liverpool. Not far away is Stratford-upon-Avon, and it is worthy of passing remark that the only woman whose genius has ever been seriously compared with that of Shakspeare was born in the same Midland region of England and even in the same county. The house in which she first saw the light, and which is still in exist- ence, stands on the highway leading to the ancient town of Coventry, and is a large brick building, surrounded by a pleasant garden, plain and unpretentious, but sug- gestive of convenience and comfort. Its situation is delightful, and near by are the scenes of several interest- ing historic events. In one direction and but a short distance off is Bosworth Field, where Richard III. was slain ; and in another are the ruins of Astley Castle, once the home of the unfortunate Lady Jane Grey. About her mother, who died when Miss Evans was fifteen, ab- solutely nothing is known, except that she was the second wife of her husband and bore him three children, of whom Mary Ann was the youngest. Her father, Robert Evans, was land agent and surveyor to five estates in Warwicksbire, including those of Lord Howe and Sir Robert Newdegate, a position now held by her brother, Isaac P. Evans, who resides in the old homestead. Robert Evans is still remembered in the neighborhood as BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. a man of rare worth of character, and during his life his reputation for probity and trustworthiness was almost proverbial. He is said to have furnished the prototype of more than one character in the writings of his daugh- ter. Conspicuous among these is Caleb Garth in “Middlemarclı;” but the same note of character -- the craftsman's keen delight in perfect work — is struck in “Adam Bede” and in the little poem on Stradivarius. No doubt many others among her characters could be traced back to her girlish experiences in that prosaic country district, for she is known to have drawn upon them largely in her first three novels as well as in the “ Scenes of Clerical Life,” the allusions in which are so direct as to have disclosed the locale if not the personal identity of the author. Indeed, in spite of the masculine pseudonyme under which they appeared, the inhabitants of Nuneaton at once declared her to be the author. Among the characters which they identified was that of Mr. Dempster, who was often called by that name in private circles, and who is said to have died only a year or two ago. On the influence upon George Eliot's writings of the part of England in which she spent her early life and which she knew best, there is no need to dwell. Says Mr. R. E. Francillon, in an article published last year: “Scott is not more distinctively of the Border, Tennyson of Lincolnshire, nor Kingsley of Devon, than she of the Midlands. Her genius is the reverse of cosmopolitan, and her strength lessens the further she goes from home. It is always a happy accident for a novelist — though probably the reverse is true of the poet — when his BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. genius is localized. Provincial life, as no one knew better than Balzac himself, is of necessity more intense in expression, deeper in its roots, at once more full of self and more enslaved by limits and circumstance, more characteristic altogether, and more open to thorough, personal, and sympathetic study than the life of great cities can possibly be, which no one hand, not even Balzac's own, has ever been large enough to hold. George Eliot's hand holds the whole of the time and of the country which she made her own, and every man knows ‘Middle- 'march, for example, better than he knows his native town.” The parents of Mary Ann Evans were devout Church- of-England people, and there are still persons in the vicinity who remember the little girl as she sat in the high-backed pew in Shepperton church listening to the sermon with grave attention. Others recollect her as teaching in the Sunday school in a little cottage near her father's house; and her youthful letters are said by a friend who has seen them to show that her mind was then deeply imbued with “Evangelical ” sentiments. These letters must have been written at a very early period, for another friend declares that she began to doubt the faith of her fathers when but twelve years old, and that by the age of sixteen her philosophical proclivities had become distinctly manifest. At the age of eighteen and twenty she was ploughing deep in “ those barren fields where German metaphysics endeavored to come to the relief (or the confusion) of German theology;" and a few years later she was engaged upon those translations which constituted her first literary work. xii BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. During this period of intellectual ferment and changing opinions, the person who appears to have exercised the strongest influence upon her mind was her aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, the original of Dinah Morris, the Meth- odist preacher, in the story of “Adam Bede.” An im- portant collection of letters written by her to this aunt during the years 1839, 1840, and 1841, is known to ex- ist, and one who has seen them recently describes them as pervaded-throughout with a religious tinge. “Nearly every line denotes that George Eliot was an earnest biblical student, and that she was very anxious about her spiritual condition. ... She is ever asking for ad- vice and spiritual guidance, and confesses her faults with a candor that is rendered additionally attractive by rea- son of the polished language in which it is clothed.” Of the extent to which “ Dinah Morris ” is a portrait we have conclusive evidence in the shape of a letter of George Eliot's, which is by far the most important that has yet been published, and which must find a promi- nent place in any biography of her that may be written. It was addressed to her friend, Miss Sara Hennell of Coventry, and was first published in the Pall Mall Gazette : - Holly LODGE, Oct. 7, 1859. DEAR SARA, — I should like, while the subject is vividly present with me, to tell you more exactly than I have ever yet done, what I knew of my aunt, Elizabeth Evans. My father, you know, lived in Warwickshire all my life with him, having finally left Staffordshire first, and then Derby- shire, six or seven years before he married my mother. There was hardly any intercourse between my father's BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. xiii family, resident in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family. Few and far-between visits of (to my childish feel- ing) strange uncles and aunts and cousins from my father's far-off native country, and once a journey of my own, as a little child, with my father and mother, to see my uncle William, a rich builder, in Staffordshire, but not my uncle and aunt Samuel, só far as I can recall the dim out- line of things, are what I remember of northerly relatives in my childhood. But when I was seventeen or more, after my sister was married and I was mistress of the house, my father took a journey into Derbyshire, in which, visiting my uncle and aunt Samuel, who were very poor and lived in a humble cottage at Wirksworth, he found my aunt in a very delicate state of health after a serious illness ; and, to do her bodily good, he persuaded her to return with him, telling her that I should be very, very happy to have her with me for a few weeks. I was then strongly under the influence of Evan- gelical belief, and earnestly endeavoring to shape this anomalous English-Christian life of ours into some consist- ency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New Testament. I was delighted to see my aunt. Although I had only heard her spoken of as a strange person, given to a fanatical vehemence of exhortation in private as well as public, I believed that I should find sympathy between us. She was then an old woman, above sixty, and, I believe, had for a good many years given up preaching. A tiny little woman, with bright, small, dark eyes, and hair that had been black, I imagine, but was now gray, — a pretty woman in her youth, but of a totally different physical type from Dinah. The difference, as you will believe, was not simply physical ; no difference is. She was a woman of strong natural excitability, which I know, from the BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. XV two things of any interest I remember in our lonely sittings and walks are her telling me one sunny afternoon how she had, with another pious woman, visited an unhappy girl in prison, stayed with her all night, and gone with her to execution, and one or two accounts of supposed miracles in which she believed, — among the rest, the face with the crown of thorns seen in the glass. In her account of the prison scenes, I remember no word she uttered, -- I only remember her tone and manner and the deep feeling I had under the recital. Of the girl she knew nothing, I believe, or told me nothing, but that she was a common coarse girl, convicted of child-murder. The incident lay in my mind for years on years, as a dead germ, apparently, till time had made my mind a nidus in which it could fructify; it then turned out to be the germ of " Adam Bede.” I saw my aunt twice after this. Once I spent a day and night with my father in the Wirksworth cottage, sleeping with my aunt, I remember. Our interview was less inter- esting than in the former time : I think I was less simply devoted to religious ideas. And once again she came with my uncle to see me when father and I were living at Foleshill ; then there was some pain, for I had given up the form of Christian belief, and was in a crude state of free-thinking. She stayed about three or four days, I think. This is all I remember distinctly, as matter I could write down, of my dear aunt, whom I really loved. You see how she suggested Dinah ; but it is not possible you should see as I do how entirely her individuality differed from Dinah's. How curious it seems to me that people should think Di- nah's sermon, prayers, and speeches were copied, when they were written with hot tears, as they surged up in my own mind! As to my indebtedness to facts of locale, and personal xvi BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. history of a small kind, connected with Staffordshire and Derbyshire, you may imagine of what kind that is, when I tell you that I never remained in either of those counties more than a few days together, and of only two such visits have I more than a shadowy, interrupted recollection. The details which I knew as facts, and have made use of for my picture, were gathered from such imperfect allusion and narrative as I heard from my father in his occasional talk about old times. As to my aunt's children or grandchildren saying, if they did say, that Dinah is a good portrait of my aunt, that is simply the vague, easily satisfied notion imperfectly instructed people always have of portraits. It is not sur- prising that simple men and women, without pretension to enlightened discrimination, should think a generic resem- blance constitutes a portrait, when we see the great public so accustomed to be delighted with misrepresentations of life and character, which they accept as representations, that they are scandalized when art makes a nearer approach to truth. Perhaps I am doing a superfluous thing in writing all this to you, but I am prompted to do it by the feeling that in future years “Adam Bede” and all that concerns it may have become a dim portion of the past, and I may not be able to recall so much of the truth as I have now told you. Once more, thanks, dear Sara. Ever your loving MARIAN. In early childhood Mary Ann Evans is said to have been not so much what is called precocious as thoughtful and earnest, but with talents remarkable enough to in- duce her father to give her the best education he could afford; so she was first sent to a boarding school in BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. xvii Coventry, kept by a Miss Franklin. A school-mate, whose reminiscences are among the most interesting that have been given to the public, says that as a girl she was very popular with teachers and pupils. “She learned every thing with ease, but was passionately devoted to music, and became thoroughly accomplished as a pianist. Her masters always brought the most difficult solos for her to play in public, and everywhere said she might make a performer equal to any then upon the concert stage. She was keenly susceptible to what she thought her lack of personal beauty, frequently saying that she was not pleased with a single feature of her face or figure. She was not especially noted as a writer, but so uncommon was her intellectual power, that we all thought her capable of any effort; and so great was the charm of her conversation, that there was continual strife among the girls as to which of them should walk with her. The teachers had to settle it by making it depend upon alphabetical succession.” How long she remained at this school, or what prog- ress she made while there, is not known, but in 1841 Miss Evans removed with her father from Griff to Foles- hill, near Coventry. Here, her sisters and brothers hav- ing married, she lived alone with her father, and became known as a most devoted daughter and an excellent household manager. At Foleshill, moreover, with am- pler opportunity and leisure, her long and laborious process of self-culture may be said to have begun. She took lessons in Greek and Latin from the Rev. T. Sheepshanks, then head master of the Coventry Gram- 'mar School; and from Signor Brezzi she acquired a xviii BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. knowledge of French, German, and Italian. Hebrew she mastered by her own unaided efforts, and at a later period Russian was added to the list of her linguistic attainments. Iler passion for music was stimulated by Mr. Simms, the veteran organist of St. Michael's, Cov- entry, from whom she received lessons; and the more populous neighborhood in which she now lived afforded wider social opportunities than she had previously en- joyed. Among the intimate and valued friends made by Miss Evans in Coventry were Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray, both well known in the literary circles of the day. In Mr. Bray's family and circle of acquaintances she found sympathy with her ardent love of knowledge and with the more liberal views that had begun to supplant those under which (as she described it) her spirit had been grievously burdened; and under these favorable influences her genius rapidly developed. Says a friend whose rem- iniscences exhibit a greater familiarity with this period of Miss Evans's life than any others with which the pub. lic has been favored : “ There was perhaps little at first sight which betokened genius in that quiet, gentle- mannered girl, with pale, grave face, naturally pensive in expression; and ordinary acquaintances regarded her chiefly for the kindness and sympathy that were never wanting to any. But to those with whom, by some un- spoken affinity, her soul could expand, her expressive gray eyes would light up with intense meaning and humor, and the low, sweet voice, with its peculiar man- nerism of speaking, - which, by the way, wore off in after years, -- would give utterance to thoughts so rich XX BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. idiomatic English was by no means light, and her inti. mate friends of that time well remember the strain it entailed upon her for upwards of a year. The result, her first published work, appeared in 1846, and she had the satisfaction of being complimented by Strauss himself upon the success that had attended her efforts. Her next published work was of the same character, a trans- lation of Feuerbach's “ Essence of Christianity” (1854); and it is now reported that she left in manuscript a com- plete translation of Spinoza's “ Ethics,” executed at about this period, when as yet, apparently, she distrusted her capacity for original or creative work. In 1819 Miss Evans's father died, and in the summer of that year she accompanied her friends, the Brays, on a continental tour, and by her own choice was left behind at Geneva, where she stayed until the following spring. On her return to England she made her home with the same family until 1851, when she was persuaded by Dr. Chapman to remove to London and assist him in the conduct of the Westminster Review, of which she had already become a valued contributor. In London she resided with Dr. Chapman, as one of the family, at the house No. 142 Strand, now occupied by a firm of tourist agents. “Her position in the house,' says a writer in The Pen, “was more that of a near relative than a friend. The ways of the Chapmans were her ways, and their interests were her interests. Her time was occupied partly with the household duties, which she shared with Mrs. Chapman, and partly in assisting Dr. Chapman in his literary labors. She was but little known outside her own circle of friends, her only published work being BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. xxi a translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus. Her original writing was confined to political and philosophical articles and reviews contributed to the Westminster Review. Her method of work on these was the same as that she afterward employed in writing her novels. Having thought deeply over the subject with which she intended to deal, she would retire to her room, and with infinite pains put her thoughts into writing, doing so little actual written work in the course of the day that a single article often took a week or more of the most laborious toil. We are informed by one who knew her in those days when her genius “bided its time,' that her habits were simple in the extreme, and that it was during this period that her metaphysical studies and unremitting literary labor matured in her that distaste for general society that never afterwards entirely left her.” Her residence in Dr. Chapman's house must be re- garded as one of the most important epochs in Miss Evans's career, for it was here that she met the persons who most profoundly influenced her character, her life, and her work. The intimate friends of the Chapmans were few in number, but among them were some of the most celebrated people of the day. In the drawing-room over the book-shop were often to be seen, amongst others, George Henry Lewes, who was a contributor to the Re- view and a constant visitor, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Dr. Newbery, who translated Carlyle's “ Frederick the Great” into German, Dr. Garth Wilkinson, our own Emerson, and, most important of all, perhaps, from the present point of view, Herbert Spencer. The relations between Mr. Spencer and George Eliot xxii BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. have been the subject of more frequent and persistent misstatements, perhaps, than any other incident in her career, and nearly all the obituary writers have repeated the current errors in regard to them. Mr. Lewes long ago denied that Mr. Spencer had instructed her in lan- guages, explaining that while Mr. Spencer knows very little of one language beside his own, George Eliot vas mistress of seven languages before she had ever met him ; and Professor E. L. Youmans, who of course knew both, has recently repudiated the idea that George Eliot was a pupil of Herbert Spencer, and that he edu- cated her in accordance with his peculiar ideas. While this oft-repeated statement is incorrect, however, Pro- fessor Youmans thinks that the influence of Mr. Spencer upon George Eliot's mind and career was very marked, and that it was he who determined her to take to ficti- tious literature. “Mr. Spencer,” he says, “had labored with her on the subject of the line of her intellectual work, insisting that it did not lie in the philosophical direction, but that her proper field was that of imagina- tive literature. She resisted the idea, and, without ad- mitting it, quietly entered upon it, and the success of the Scenes of Clerical Life' vindicated Spencer's judgment and determined her intellectual future. But Spencer's influence upon the character of her works was deeper than this. He knew well enough that she could not be an ordinary novel-writer, but would carry her philosophical traits of mind into this work, and, in fact, would only use the descriptive and dramatic form for the expression and embodiment of her conceptions. She was a profound student of his own philosophical writings, and BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. xxiii mastered the most difficult of them. The toughest book that Spencer ever published, and perhaps the most im- portant, was his ‘Principles of Psychology,' which ap- peared in 1855. It was the first systematic application of the doctrine of evolution in the sphere of mind, and the difficulty that readers had with it was its utter nov- elty as well as its profundity. . . . Now, this work was not only read by George Eliot, but was a favorite with her, and was completely assimilated by her. When she had finished writing · The Mill on the Floss,' she was in such a state of emotional excitement and tension that it completely broke her down, and she then reverted to the Principles of Psychology,' and read it all through again as a means of mental diversion, and to recover her nervous equilibrium. George Eliot was thus early in possession of a key to the analysis of character and the study of human nature of which the public knew nothing, and which was a powerful instrument for a mind as subtle and analytic as hers. This fact must be taken into account in any intelligent estimate of her remarkable works. The critics of her books have been chiefly struck by her extraordinary power of delineating the growth of character. She analyzes rather than de- scribes, and constantly deals with the dynamical side of her subject, tracing the working of circumstances and events in influencing or modifying the course of conduct. As the ideas in the ‘Principles of Psychology' become more familiar to the critical mind, it will be found that they pervade and color George Eliot's works, and that she is in future to be very much interpreted in the light of that ucw philosophy which studies human nature as a xxiv BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. problem of forces in correspondence with its environ- ment. The genius of George Eliot is undoubtedly of a high order, but it is, perhaps, more seen in the sagacity with which she discovered a new epoch of thought, the courage with which she accepted it, and the intellectual vigor with which she turned its resources to account, than in any other phase of its manifestation. 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.” The “Scenes of Clerical Life” were published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857, and it was in connection with them that the famous pseudonyme,“ George Eliot,” was first used. That it was a pen-name was generally suspected at the time, and guesses as to the author's identity were rife; but the prevalent impression was that it was the name, real or assumed, of a man, and even so astute a critic as the late John Blackwood, editor of the magazine, was completely deceived. Charles Dickens, curiously enough, appears to have been the only one who penetrated the disguise at once. He wrote to the pub. lisher a private letter, praising “her” genius, and would not give up his opinion even in face of a loyal, though false, correction. He detected the woman's touch by what he regarded as the infallible sign, that her female characters were far more perfect than her men's. “She saw only the outside of the latter; while, in treating her own sex, she seemed to know their very hearts.” And this one fact, be it observed, refutes much that has been said about the “masculine” or “sexless” character of BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. XXV George Eliot's genius. Only a woman could have elabor- ated such a hero as Daniel Deronda, or Felix Holt, or even as Adam Bede, with the expectation that he would be accepted and admired; but her heroines --- her female characters from first to last — are drawn with the serene ürmness of omniscience. The success of “The Scenes of Clerical Life” when published in book form, in 1858, though not extraordi- nary in a commercial sense, was sufficient, as the author herself said afterwards, to put an end to her reviews, and to convince her that Mr. Spencer and Mr. Lewes were right in thinking her vocation to be imaginative fiction. She must have thrown herself into her new work with a good deal of ardor, for four elaborate novels from her pen were issued in rapid succession : “ Adam Bede” in 1859, “ The Mill on the Floss” in 1860, “Silas Marner” in 1861, and “Romola” (first published as a serial in the Cornhill Magazine ) in 1863. Owing, perhaps, to the long intervals between her later stories, it has been the custom to speak of George Eliot as a very slow as well as a very painstaking writer ; but even when judged by the modern standard of literary fecundity, a novel a year for a series of years must be regarded as a tolerably conclusive indication of imaginative fertility and executive readiness, — to say nothing of the quality of the novels thus produced. This, in truth, was George Eliot's pro- lific period, and until she had exhausted the stores of observation already accumulated she seems to have been able to produce them with as much facility and rapidity as any of her rivals. Later, when new materials had to be gathered and fresh experience acquired, the high xxvi BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. conscientiousness with which she regarded her work and her indifference to the ordinary stimuli of literary produc. tiveness, appear to have rendered the work of composition a slow, arduous, and most exhausting process. There was nothing on the titlepage of “ Adam Bede” to connect it with the “Scenes of Clerical Life,” but the authorship was guessed at once, and the place of George Eliot among the foremost English novelists was never afterward called in question. Thackeray, in one of the earliest numbers of the Cornhill Magazine, hailed her as “a star of the first magnitude just risen on the horizon;" Dickens, as usual, was generous and outspoken in his praise; and there were many who believed (and still believe) that the greatest novel that has been contributed to English literature had made its appearance. “The Mill on the Floss” and “Silas Marner” were received with equal popular favor, and set the critics to wrangling over their comparative merits. “Romola” is said to have been refused by Messrs. Blackwood on the ground that, in spite of her name, it was not likely to prove suc- cessful; and, though some of her most competent and critical admirers rank it first among her works, their estimate was not wholly mistaken: it is not known and loved as are “Adam Bede,” “Silas Marner,” and “ The Mill on the Floss." Its comparative want of success appears to have discouraged the author, and it was nearly four years before her next novel appeared, “ Felix Holt, the Radical” (1866). This novel was very carefully constructed and contains some of her best writing, but it was liked by few, and is seldom spoken of in connection with her greatest works. BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. xxvii After the publication of “Felix Holt,” George Eliot turned her attention for a time to poetry, and in 1863 appeared her most important achievement in this field, “ The Spanish Gypsy.” In the following year “Agatha” was published, and “The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems” appeared in 1874. It is understood that she regarded her poetry as of higher value than hier prose, but in this opinion she was not countenanced by either the critics or the general public. The predominant feel. ing with regard to “The Spanish Gypsy” was that it is essentially a novel rather than a poem, and that it would have been more attractive in prose than in verse. A few of the shorter poems will probably find a place in the anthologies, but except for her prose romances the fame of George Eliot would be ephemeral indeed. Two of these romances yet remain to be mentioned. “ Middlemarch: a Study in Provincial Life” appeared in 1871, and in it the author went back once more to the scenes and days of her childhood, to the scenes already depicted in “ Adam Bede," “ The Mill on the Floss," “Silas Marner,” and “Felix Holt.” In a commercial sense, “Middlemarch” was the most successful of all her works; but it was five years before she had elaborated the next and last of the great novels which bear her name, ---“Daniel Deronda,” published in 1876. The only other work requiring mention -- and requiring it only in order to make the list complete — is “The Impressions of Theo- phrastus Such,” which appeared in 1879, a sort of literary hybrid, half novel and half didactic essay. Turning again now from the literary work to the private life of George Eliot, the remaining facts are very xxviii BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. scanty and not very well authenticated. Among the small but brilliant circle which she met at Dr. Chapman's house, as we have already remarked, was Mr. George Henry Lewes, who seems at a very early period to have assumed the position of her literary confidant and adviser. She told Miss Kate Field on one occasion that she should never have ventured upon a novel if Mr. Lewes had not urged her to it, that all her manuscripts passed through his hands before they were given to the public, and that he was at once her critic and her inspira- tion. This was said in Florence, shortly after the publi- cation of " Adam Bede,” when she was making a tour of the Continent in company with Mr. Lewes. On their return to London they took up their residence together at The Priory, 21 North Bank, Regent's Park, where they lived until the death of Mr. Lewes in November, 1878. During all this period there was no breach of domestic concord, and by Mr. Lewes himself, and by the numerous friends of both, she was always called “Mrs. Lewes ;" yet it is now known that no formal marriage between them ever took place. The obstacle which prevented this was the existence of another Mrs. Lewes, whose legal right to her husband's name was technically secure, though she had forfeited all moral claims upon him. All that is definitely known as to the circumstances of this unhappy situation is that the wife of Lewes eloped with a foreigner, and that he having abandoned her, and she expressing penitence for her misconduct, Lewes received her back again. By British law this acted as a condonation of his wife's offence, and though she eloped again within a year, he was debarred from obtaining a BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. xxix divorcs from her, and thus enabling liimself to give his relations with George Eliot the sanction of a formal marriage. At various times, as the years went on, it was reported and believed that, the first Mrs. Lewes being dead, such a ceremony had been performed; but this was disproved by the fact that, as executrix of Mr. Lewes's will, George Eliot subscribed to the legal form as “ Marian Evans, spinster.” It is now known, moreover, that Mrs. Lewes survived the husband whom she had wronged, and is still living in London. If it lacked the ceremonial sanction, however, the con- nection appears to have lacked nothing else. Entire mu- tual loyalty and the rarest form of domestic happiness — that which comes from perfect community of tastes and sympathies — appears to have been theirs. The defer- ential submissiveness with which George Eliot bore herself toward Mr. Lewes, and the benefit which she considered herself to have derived from his influence, sometimes exposed both to criticism, — since her death, in one or two instances, to ridicule ; but while, from one point of view, there was something grotesque in a great original genius like George Eliot bowing herself in hu- mility before a mere clever man of letters like Lewes, surely, from another point of view, just this feminine touch was wanted to give dignity and elevation to their attachment. It excuses the woman, if it derogates from the artist. Partly owing to the peculiarity of her position, but quite as much, doubtless, to her natural distaste for it, George Eliot was rarely seen in general society. The Sunday afternoon receptions at The Priory were fre- XXX BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. quented by the cleverest men and women in London, and a special invitation to a reunion there was regarded as a rare and distinguished honor; but her own excur- sions into the great world were infrequent and reluctant. Only music and art could draw her from her retirement. “At every 'private view,' at every fine classical concert, George Eliot was sure to be present, dressed unobtru- sively and seemingly oblivious of every one about her.” Her personal appearance has been often described, not always in terms that can be made to agree with each other. She was above the medium height, large and somewhat angular in form, but singularly graceful in movement and self-possessed in carriage. Her face was so plain as almost to repel the beholder at first, but the sense of this wore off on acquaintance. Her great attrac- tions were a pair of most luminous and expressive eyes, an exquisitely low and musical voice, such as Shakspeare declared to be an excellent thing in woman, and a pecul- iarly sweet and winning smile. Her conversation was not brilliant, not often animated, but it was impressive by reason of her earnestness and the opulent knowledge which it revealed. Any thing savoring of egotism was entirely absent, and her sensitiveness on the subject of her own works was so extreme that she would not tolerate the faintest allusion to them in general society. After the death of Mr. Lewes, George Eliot con- tinued for a year and a half to reside quietly at The Priory, but on May 7, 1880, the world was astonished by the unheralded announcement that on the previous day she had been married at the fashionable church o St. George's, Hanover Square, to John Walter Cross, BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR. xxxi of Weybridge, Surrey. All that could be learned about Mr. Cross was that he was senior partner in a London banking firm, that he was twenty years younger than his wife, and that he had been a frequent visitor of the Lewes bousehold. On their return from the bridal tour to Venice, they settled down at Mr. Cross's house at St. John's Wood, Chelsea, and the world again lost sight of George Eliot until the tidings of her sudden death caused a painful shock of surprise and regret. She died on the evening of Dec. 22, 1880, of pericarditis, the seriousness of her symptoms not having been discovered until a few hours before her death. This is not the place, of course, for an estimate of George Eliot's genius or for an analysis of the quality of her works; but one feature of the latter may be re- ferred to as justifying the following collection of extracts. No other writer of fiction has given utterance to so many of those pithy, pungent, and epigrammatic “sayings” which have become part of the current coin of conver- sation and literature, and the source of which is in many cases forgotten. On almost every page of her stories is to be found some wise thought finely expressed, some beautiful sentiment tenderly clothed, some pointed wit- ticism exquisitely turned, or some bit of humor genially exhibited ; and, more easily than is commonly the case, these are susceptible of being separated without damage from their context. SCENES FROM CLERICAL LIFE U AMOS BARTON. In every parting there is an image of death. O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know! Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the dominion of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish. What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wasb away into nonentity. A tallow dip, of the long-eight description, is an ex- cellent thing in the kitchen candlestick, and Betty's nose and eye are not sensitive to the difference be- tween it and the finest wax; it is only when you stick it in the silver candlestick, and introduce it into the (3) AMOS BARTON. drawing-room, that it seems plebeian, dim, and in. effectual. Alas for the worthy man who, like that candle, gets himself into the wrong place! It is only the very largest souls who will be able to appreciate and pity him — who will discern and love sincerity of purpose amid all the bungling feebleness of achieve- - ment. Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbor is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are cer- tainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace peo- ple- many of them - bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys; AMOS BARTON their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first- born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insig. nificance - in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share? Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the ex- perience of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones. I have all my life had a sympathy for mongrel un- gainly dogs, who are nobody's pets; and I would rather surprise one of them by a pat and a pleasant morsel, than meet the condescending advances of the loveliest Skye-terrier who has his cushion by my lady's chair. That, to be sure, is not the way of the world: if it happens to see a fellow of fine proportions and aris- tocratic mien, who makes no faux pas, and wins golden opinions from all sorts of men, it straightway picks out for him the loveliest of unmarried women, and says, There would be a proper match! Not at all, say I: let that successful, well-shapen, discreet and able gentleman put up with something less than the best in the matrimonial department; and let the sweet woman go to make sunshine and a soft pillow for the poor devil whose legs are not models, whose efforts are often blunders, and who in general gets more kicks than half-pence. AMOS BARTON. What mortal is there of us, who would find his sat- isfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his own doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbors? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsist- ence! The very capacity for good would go out of us. For, tell the most impassioned orator, suddenly, that his wig is awry, or his shirt-lap hanging out, and that he is tickling people by the oddity of his person, instead of thrilling them by the energy of his periods, and you would infallibly dry up the spring of his elo- quence. That is a deep and wide saying, that no miracle can be wrought without faith — without the worker's faith in himself, as well as the recipient's faith in him. And the greater part of the worker's faith in himself is made up of the faith that others be- lieve in him. Let me be persuaded that my neighbor Jenkins con- siders me a blockhead, and I shall never shine in con- versation with him any more. Let me discover that the lovely Phæbe thinks my squint intolerable, and I shall never be able to fix her blandly with my discu. gaged eye again. Thank heaven, then, that a little illusion is left to lis, to enable us to be useful and agreeable - that we don't know exactly what our friends think of us — that the world is not made of looking-glass, to show us just the figure we are making, and just what is going on Dehind our backs! By the help of dear friendly illu- AMOS BARTON. sion, we are able to dream that we are charming - and our faces wear a becoming air of self-possession; we are able to dream that other men admire our tal- ents - and our benignity is undisturbed; we are able to dream that we are doing much good — and we do a little. END OF “AMOS BARTON.” MR. GILFIL'S LOVE-STORY. It is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and mained the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered. Alas, alas! we poor mortals are often little better than wood-ashes — there is small sign of the sap, and the leafy freshness, and the bursting buds that were once there; but wherever we see wood-ashes, we know that all that early fulness of life must have been I, at least, hardly ever look at a bent old man, or a wizened old woman, but I see also, with my mind's eye, that Past of which they are the shrunken rem- nant, and the unfinished romance of rosy cheeks and bright eyes seems sometimes of feeble interest and (8) MR. GILFIL'S LOVE-STORY. significance, compared with that drama of hope and love which has long ago reached its catastrophe, and left the poor soul, like a dim and dusty stage, with all its sweet garden-scenes and fair perspectives over- turned and thrust out of sight. Rich brown locks, passionate love, and deep early sorrow, strangely different as they seem from the scanty white hairs, the apathetic content, and the un- expectant quiescence of old age, are but part of the same life's journey; as the bright Italian plains, with the sweet Addio of their beckoning maidens, are part of the same day's travel that brings us to the other side of the mountain, between the sombre rocky walls and among the guttural voices of the Valais. The inexorable ticking of the clock is like the throb of pain to sensations made keen by a sickening fear. And so it is with the great clockwork of nature. Daisies and buttercups give way to the brown waving grasses, tinged with the warm red sorrel; the waving grasses are swept away, and the meadows lie like emeralds set in the bushy hedgerows; the tawny- tipped corn begins to bow with the weight of the full ear; the reapers are bending amongst it, and it soon stands in sheaves; then, presently the patches of yellow stubble lie side by side with streaks of dark- red earth, which the plough is turning up in prepara- tion for the new-thrashed seed. And this passage froin beauty to beauty, which to the happy is like the flow of a melody, measures for many a human heart 10 MR. QILFIL'S LOVE-STORY. the approach of foreseen anguish - seems hurrying on the moment when the shadow of dread will be fol- lowed up by the reality of despair. All earthly things have their lull: even on nights when the most unappeasable wind is raging, there will be a moment of stillness before it crashes among the boughs again, and storms against the windows, and howls like a thousand lost demons through the key- holes. A mother dreads no memories—those shadows have all melted away in the dawn of Baby's smile. Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide. In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee. The delicate-tendrilled plant must have something to cling to. Human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow. AIR. GILFIL'S LOVE-STORY. 11 To minds on the Shepperton level it is repetition, not novelty, that produces the strongest effect; and phrases, like tunes, are a long time making themselves at home in the brain. “Ignorance,” says Ajax, “is a painless evil”; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it. Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms. There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright- winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us. It is a wonderful moment, the first time we stand by one who has fainted, and witness the fresh birth of consciousness spreading itself over the blank features, like the rising sunlight on the alpine summits that lay ghastly and dead under the leaden twilight. A slight shudder, and the frost-bound eyes recover their liquid light; for an instant they show the inward semi-con- sciousness of an infant's; then, with a little start, they open wider and begin to look ; the present is visible, but only as a strange writing, and the interpreter. Memory is not yet there. 12 MR. GILFILS LOVE-STORY. We have all our secret sins; and if we knew our. selves, we should not judge each other harshly.' Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better than we are. And God sees us as we are altogether, not in separate feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see us. We are always doing each other injustice, and thinking better or worse of each other than we deserve, because we only hear and see separate words and actions. We don't see each other's whole nature.' We can hardly learn humillty and tenderness enough except by suffering.' Th’ yoong men noo-a-deys, the’re poor squashy things — the looke well anoof, but the woon't wear, the woon't wear. END OF “MR. GILFIL'S LOVE-STORY." JANET'S REPENTANCE. THE golden moments in the stream of life rush past as, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone. Always there is seed being sown silently and un- seen, and everywhere there come sweet flowers with: out our foresight or labor. We reap what we sow, but Nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit that spring from no planting of ours. In the man whose childood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues. There is a power in the direct glance of a sincere and loving human soul, which will do more to dissi- pate prejudice and kindle charity than the most elab- orate arguments. The tale of the Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity. 113) 14 JANET'S REPENTAVCE. There is an unspeakable blending of sadness and sweetness in the smile of a face sharpened and paled by slow consumption. Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night. There are moments when by some strange impulse we contradict our past selves — fatal moments, when a fit of passion, like a lava stream, lays low the work of half our lives. Our habitual life is like a wall hung with pictures, which has been shone on by the suns of many years; take one of the pictures away, and it leaves a definite blank space, to which our eyes can never turn without a sensation of discomfort. Nay, the involuntary loss of any familiar object almost always brings a chill as from an evil omen; it seems to be the first finger- shadow of advancing death. In those distant days, as in all other times and places where the mental atmosphere is changing, and men are inhaling the stimulus of new ideas, folly often mistook itself for wisdom, ignorance gave itself airs of knowledge, and selfishness, turning its eyes up- ward, called itself religion. Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, JANET'S REPENTANCE. 15 once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them wofully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable. Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution: a self-obtrusive, over-hasty reformer complacently disclaiming all merit, while his friends call him a martyr, has not in reality a career the most arduous to the fleshly mind. The strong emotions from which the life of a human being receives a new bias, win their victory as the sea wins his : though their advance may be sure, they will often, after a mightier wave than usual, seem to roll back so far as to lose all the ground they had made. Nemesis is lame, but she is of colossal stature, like the gods; and sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch. What scene was ever commonplace in the descend- ing sunlight, when color has awakened from its noon- day sleep, and the long shadows awe us like a disclosed presence? Above all, what scene is commonplace to the eye that is filled with serene gladness, and bright- ens all things with its own joy? When we are suddenly released from an acute ab- 16 JANET'S REPENTANCE. sorbing bodily pain, our heart and senses leap out in new freedom; we think even the noise of streets har- monious, and are ready to hug the tradesman who is wrapping up our change. It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too — as if it were comparatively a light thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother who has to climb the whole toilsome steep with us, and all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey. The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence. It is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession. The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart: and in our moments of spiritual need, the man to whom we have no tie but our common nature, seems nearer to us than mother, brother, or friend. Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good. JANET'S REPENTANCE. 17 Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasseled flower. Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in thin vapor, and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hands, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to llame. Surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow- man is that which enables us to feel with him — which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love toat sees in all forms of human thought and work, the lifc- and-death struggles of separate human beings. Do not philosophic doctors tell us that we are unable to discern so much as a tree, except by an un- conscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations : that no one sense is independent 18 JANET'S REPENTANCE. of another, so that in the dark we can hardly taste a fricasee, or tell whether our pipe is alight or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs, instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men's motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience. See to it, friend, before you pronounce a too hasty judg- ment, that your own moral sensibilities are not of a hoofed or clawed character. The keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtle nerve filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations. Those stirrings of the more kindly, healthy sap of human feeling, by which goodness tries to get the upper hand in us whenever it seems to have the slight- est chance - on Sunday mornings, perhaps, when we are set free from the grinding hurry of the week, and take the little three-year-old on our knee at breakfast to share our egg and muffin; in moments of trouble, when death visits our roof, or illness makes us de- pendent on the tending hand of a slighted wife; in quiet talks with an aged mother, of the days when we stood at her knee with our first picture-book, or wrote her loving letters from school. The strongest heart will faint sometimes under the feeling that enemies are bitter, and that friends only JANET'S REPENTANCE. 19 know half its sorrows. The most resolute soul will now and then cast back a yearning look in treading the rough mountain-path, away from the greensward and laughing voices of the valley. The daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else. In the night it presses on our imagination — the forms it takes are false, fitful, ex- aggerated : in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary persistence of definite measurable reality. The man who looks with ghastly horror on all his property aflame in the dead of night, has not half the sense of destitution he will have in the morning, when he walks over the ruins lying blackened in the pitiless sunshine. It was probably a hard saying to the Pharisees, that “there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that re- penteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance." And certain ingenious philos- ophers of our own day must surely take offence at a joy so entirely out of correspondence with arithmetical proportion. But a heart that has been taught by its own sore struggles to bleed for the woes of another- that has “learned pity through suffering" - is likely to find very imperfect satisfaction in the “balance of happiness," "doctrine of compensations," and other short and easy methods of obtaining thorough com. placency in the presence of pain; and for such a heart that saying will not be altogether dark. The emo- tions, I have observed, are but slightly influenced by arithmetical considerations: the mother, when her 20 JANET'S REPENTANCE. na sweet lisping little ones have all been taken from her oue after another, and she is hanging over her last dead babe, finds small consolation in the fact that the tiny dimpled corpse is but one of a necessary average, and that a thousand other babes brought into the world at the same time are doing well, and are likely to live; and if you stood beside that mother - if you knew her pang and shared it, it is probable you would be equally unable to see a ground of complacency in statistics. Doubtless a complacency resting on that basis is highly rational; but emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational: it insists on caring for individuals; it abso- lutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a set-off against twelve miserable lives, which leaves a clear balance on the side of satisfaction. This is the inherent imbecility of feeling, and one must be a great philosopher to have got quite clear of all that, and to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellect, in which it is evident that individuals really exist for no other purpose than that abstractions may be drawn from them - abstractions that may rise from heaps of ruined lives like the sweet savor of a sacrifice in the nostrils of philosophers, and of a philosophic Deity. And so it comes to pass that for the man who knows sympathy because he has known sorrow, that old, old saying about the joy of angels over the repentant sin- ner outweighing their joy over the ninety-nine just, has a meaning which does not, jar with the language of his own heart. It only tells him, that for angels too there JANET'S REPENTANCE. 21 is a transcendent value in human pain, which refuses to be settled by equations; that the eyes of angels too are turned away from the serene happiness of the righteous to bend with yearning pity on the poor erring soul wandering in the desert where no water is; that for angels too the misery of one casts so tre- mendous a shadow as to eclipse the bliss of ninety- nine. No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt - a place of repose for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all creeds and all philosophies are at one: here, at least, the conscience will not be dogged by doubt, the benign impulse will not be checked by adverse theory: here you may begin to act without settling one preliminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the long night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye - these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls where the stir and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued – where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity : bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence can neither pollute nor perturb it. As we JANET'S REPENTANCE. bend over the sick-bed, all the forces of our nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience, and of love, and sweep down the miserable choking drift of our quarrels, our debates, our would-be wisdom, and our clamorous selfish desires. This blessing of serene freedom from the importunities of opinion lies in all sir ple direct acts of mercy, and is one source of that sweet calm which is often felt by the watcher in the sick-room, even when the duties there are of a hard and terrible kind. The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses. The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men; and I should imagine that neither Luther nor John Bunyan, for example, would have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who believes nothing but what is true, feels nothing but what is exalted, and does noth- ing but what is graceful. The real heroes, of God's making, are quite different: they have their natural heritage of love and conscience which they drew in with their mother's milk; they know one or two of JANET'S REPENTANCE. 23 those deep spiritual truths which are only to be won by long wrestling with their own sins and their own sor- rows; they have earned faith and strength so far as they have done genuine work; but the rest is dry barren theory, blank prejudice, vague hearsay. Their insight is blended with mere opinion; their sympathy is perhaps confined in narrow conduits of doctrine, instead of flowing forth with the freedom of a stream that blesses every weed in its course; obstinacy or self-assertion will often interfuse itself with their grandest impulses; and their very deeds of self-sac- rifice are sometimes only the rebound of a passionate egoism. Convenience, that admirable branch system from the main line of self-interest, makes us all fellow-helpers in spite of adverse resolutions. It is probable that no speculative or theological hatred would be ultimately strong enough to resist the persuasive power of con- venience: that a latitudinarian baker, whose bread was honorably free from alum, would command the custom of any dyspeptic Puseyite; that an Arminian with the toothache would prefer a skilful Calvinistic dentist to a bungler stanch against the doctrines of Election and Final Perseverance, who would be likely to break the tooth in his head; and that a Plymouth Brother, who had a well-furnished grocery shop in a favorable vicinage, would occasionally have the pleas- ure of furnishing sugar or vinegar to orthodox fam- ilies that found themselves unexpectedly "out of" these indispensable commodities. 24 JANET'S REPENTANCE. The drowning man, urged by the supreme agony, lives in an instant through all his happy and unhappy past: when the dark flood has fallen like a curtain, memory, in a single moment, sees the drama acted over again. And even in those earlier crises, which are but types of death – when we are cut off abruptly from the life we have known, when we can no longer expect to-morrow to resemble yesterday, and find our- selves by some sudden shock on the confines of the unknown - there is often the same sort of lightning- flash through the dark and unfrequented chambers of memory. In this artificial life of ours, it is not often we see a human face with all a heart's agony in it, uncontrolle, by self-consciousness; when we do see it, it startles us as if we had suddenly waked into the real world of which this every-day one is but a puppet-show copy. Janet had that enduring beauty which belongs to pure majestic outline and depth of tint. Sorrow and neglect leave their traces on such beauty, but it thrills us to the last, like a glorious Greek temple, which, for all the loss it has suffered from time and barbarous hands, has gained a solemn history, and fills our imag- ination the more because it is incomplete to the sense. There are unseen elements which often frustrate our wisest calculations - which raise up the sufferer from the edge of the grave, contradicting the prophecies of the clear-sighted physician, and fulfilling the blind JANET'S REPENTANCE. 25 clinging hopes of affection; such unseen elements Mr. Tryan called the Divine Will, and filled up the margin of ignorance which surrounds all our knowledge with the feelings of trust and resignation. Perhaps the pro- foundest philosophy could hardly fill it up better. History, we know, is apt to repeat herself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume. From the time of Xerxes clown- wards, we have seen generals playing the braggadocio at the outset of their campaigns, and conquering the enemy with the greatest ease in after-dinner specches. But events are apt to be in disgusting discrepancy with the anticipations of the most ingenious tacticians; the difliculties of the expedition are ridiculously at variance with able calculations; the enemy has the impudence not to fall into confusion, as had been reasonably ex. pected of him; the mind of the gallant general begins to be distracted by news of intrigues against him at home, and notwithstanding the handsome compliments he paid to Providence as his undoubted patron before setting out, there seema every probability that the Te Deums will be all on the nther side. Heaven knows what would become of our socialit- if we never visited people we speak ill of: we should live, like Egyptian hermits, in crowded solitude. Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means - one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally in- 26 JANET'S REPENTANCE. dulge in a few delinquencies. "They've got the money for it,” as the girl said of her mistress who had made herself ill with pickled salmon. Color blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total blindness, which sees no distinction of color at all. Hatred is like fire - it makes even light rubbish deadly. I've nothing to say again' her piety, my dear; but I know very well I shouldn't like her to cook my victual. When a man comes in hungry an' tired, piety won't feed him, I reckon. Hard carrots ’ull lie heavy on his stomach, piety or no piety. I called in one day when she was dishin' up Mr. Tryan's dinner, an' I could see the potatoes was as watery as watery. It's right enough to be speritial - I'm no enemy to that; but I like my potatoes mealy. I don't see as anybody ’ull go to heaven the sooner for not digestin' their dinner - providin' they don't die sooner, as mayhap Mr. Tryan will, poor dear man." I'd rether given ten shillin' an' help a man to stand on his own legs, nor pay half-a-crown to buy him a parish crutch; it's the ruination on him if he once goes to the parish. I've see'd many a time, if you help a man wi’ a present in a nсeborly way, it sweetens his blood - he thinks it kind on you; but the parish shillins turn it sour - he niver thinks 'em enough." JANET'S REPENTANCE. 27 Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of win- ning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. 3 Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches just saved from shipwreck: can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-pas- senger swallowed by the waves? 4 As long as we set up our own will and our own wls- dom against God's, we make that wall between us and his love which I have spoken of just now. But as soon as we lay ourselves entirely at his feet, we have enough light given us to guide our owu steps; as the foot-soldier who hears nothing of the councils that de- termine the course of the great battle he is in, hears plainly enough the word of command which he must himself obey. My mind showed me it was just such as I - the help- less who feel themselves helpless - that God specially invites to come to him, and offers all the riches of his salvation : not forgiveness only; forgiveness would be worth little if it left us under the powers of our evil passions; but strength - that strength which enables us to conquer sin.“ END OF “ JANET'S REPENTANCE.” ADAM BEDE ADAM BEDE. WHAT greater thing is there for two hunan souls, than to feel that they are joined for life — to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sor- row, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting? That adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself, is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beetho- ven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathom- able ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by ex- quisite music?— to feel its wondrous harmonies search- ing the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and (31) 32 ADAM BEDE. binding together your whole being past and present in one unspeakable vibration : melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scat- tered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard- learnt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman's cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music: what can one say more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one wo- man's soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them : it is more than a woman's love that moves us in a wo- inan's eyes — it seems to be a far-off mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by some- thing more than their prettiness — by their close kin- ship with all we have known of tenderness and peace. The noblest nature sees the most of this impersonal expression in beauty (it is needless to say that there are gentlemen with whiskers dyed and undyed who see none of it whatever), and for this reason, the noblest nature is often the most blinded to the character of the one woman's soul that the beauty clothes. Whence, I fear, the tragedy of human life is likely to continue for a long time to come, in spite of mental philosophers, ADAN BEDE. 33 who are ready with the best receipts for avoiding all mistakes of the kind. The first sense of mutual love excludes other feel. ings; it will have the soul all to itself. How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger ex: perience, their decper-rooted affections ? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music. Our love is inwrought in our enthusiasm as elec- tricity is inwrought in the air, exalting its power by a subtle presence. The man who awakes the wondering tremulous pas- sion of a young girl always thinks her affectionate. We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings. Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves. It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the 31 ADAN BEDE. moral deficiencies hidden under the “ dear deceit ” of beauty. There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in varicus styles, from the desperate to the sheepish; but there is one order of beauty which seenis made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief – a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you. Men's muscles move better when their souls are making merry music. No story is the same to us after the lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same in- terpreters. So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long- past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our imag- ination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood. DDAN BEDE. 35 But the first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odor breathed in a far-off hour of happiness. It is a memory that gives a more ex- quisite touch to tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy, and adds the last keenness to the agony of despair. Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our sub- tlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us. There is a sort of fascination in all sincere unpre- meditated eloquence, which opens to one the inward drama of the speaker's emotions. All honor and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, wo- men, and children – in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an angel, if you can, with a float. ing violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any esthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, 36 ADAM BEDE. those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot- house, those roun led backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world – those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clus- ters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesquc sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things — men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing low kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the fore- ground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque laz- zaroni or romantic criminals halt so frequent as your common laborer, who gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely-assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and greep ADAI BEDE. 37 feathers; – more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle good- ness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent, and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist. - Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin - the longer the claws and the larger the wings, the better : but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings - much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth. It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty- minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world- stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud- borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic war- riors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, 38 ADAM BEDE. or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning- wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her; - or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart-pots in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable contentment and good-will. I would not, cven if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields - on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference, or injured by your prej. udice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice. Human nature is lovable, and the way I have learnt something of its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries, has been by living a great deal among people more or less commonplace and vulgar, of whom you would perhaps hear nothing very surprising if you were to inquire about them in the neighborhoods where they dwelt. Ten to one most of the small shopkeepers in ADAN BEDE. 39 their vicinity saw nothing at all in them. For I have observed this remarkable coincidence, that the select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest. For example, I have often heard Mr. Gedge, the landlord of the Royal Oak, who used to turn a bloodshot eye on his neighbors in the village of Shepperton, sum up his opinion of the people in his own parish — and they were all the peo. ple he knew - in these emphatic words : “Ay, sir, I've said it often, and I'll say it again, they're a poor lot i' this parish - a poor lot, sir, big and little.” I think ho had a dim idea that if he could migrate to a distant parish, he might find neighbors worthy of him; and indeed he did subsequently transfer himself to the Saracen's Head, which was doing a thriving business in the back street of a neighboring market-town. But, oddly enough, he has found the people up that back street of precisely the same stamp as the inhabitants of Shepperton - "a poor lot, sir, big and little, and them as comes for a go o’gin are no better than them as comes for a pint o' twopenny — a poor lot.” It is very pleasant to see some men turn round; pleasant as a sudden rush of warm air in winter, or the flash of firelight in the chill dusk. A peasant can no more help believing in a tradi. tional superstition than a horse can help trenibling when he sees a came). 10 ADAI BEDE. We are often startled by the severity of mild people on exceptional occasions; the reason is, that mild people are most liable to be under the yoke of tradi- tional impressions. Susceptible persons are more affected by a change of tone than by unexpected words. The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return. If you feed your young setter on raw flesh, how can you wonder at its retaining a relish for uncooked par tridge in after-life? I believe there have been men who have ridden a long way to avoid a rencontre, and then galloped hastily back lest they should miss it. It is the favorite strat- agem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own. Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man's critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his char- acter. There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason - ADAN BEDE. 41 that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right. The action which before commission has been seen with that blende common-sense and fresh untarnished feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterwards with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike. Europe ad- justs itself to a fait accompli, and so does an individual character, – until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution. The strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting is course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence. Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through the fields from “afternoon church,” – as such walks used to be in those old leisurely times, when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive wonder; when Sunday books had most of them old brown-leather covers, and opened with remarkable precision always in one place. Leisure is gone - gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the pedlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in 42 ADAJI BEDE. Even idleness is eager now - eager for amusement : prone to excursion-trains, art-museums, periodical lit- erature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing, and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage: he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was frec from that periodicity of sensations which we call post- time. He was a contemplative, rather stout, gentle- man, of excellent digestion, – of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis : happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things them- selves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleas- ant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew noth. ing of weck-day services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing - liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine, - not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofy aspirations. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure: he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of the irresponsible; for had he not kept up his charter by going to church on the Sunday after- noons? Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him, and ADA3 BEDE. 43 judge him by our modern standard: he never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus. Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of cur consciences - out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused : there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon. Our moral sense learns the manners of good society, and smiles when others smile; but when some rude person gives rough names to our actions, she is apt to take part against us. Women who are never bitter and resentful are often the most querulous; and if Solomon was as wise as he is reputed to be, I feel sure that when he compared a contentious woman to a continual dropping on a very rainy day, he had not a vixen in his cye-a fury with long nails, acrid and selfish. Depend upon it, he meant a good creature, who had no joy but in the happiness of the loved ones whom she contributed to make uncomfortable, putting by all the tid-bits for them, and spending nothing on herself. Such a woman as Lisbeth for example – at once patient and com- plaining, self-renouncing and exacting, brooding the live-long day over what happened yesterday, and what is likely to happen to-morrow, and crying very readily both at the good and the evil. One of the lessons a woman most rarely learns, is never to talk to an angry or a drunken man. 44 ADAN BEDE. It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature com- mands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard expe- rience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is. An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth. Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. It is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our own per- sonal share of pain: surely it is not possible to feel otherwise, any more than it would be possible for a man with cataract to regret the painful process by which his dim blurred sight of men as trees walking had been exchanged for clear outline and effulgent day. The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of iddel strength: we can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy, than a painter or a musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula. Adam Bede had not outlined his sorrow – had not ADAM BEDE. 45 felt it slip froin him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid. It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, it we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it- if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts oľ human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same fecble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepres- sible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thank- ful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy — the one poor word which in- cludes all our best insight and our best love. In our eagerness to explain impressions, we often lose our hold of the sympathy that comprehends them. If I have read religious history aright — faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords; and it is possible, thank lIcaven! to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store, that she may carry it to her neighbor's child to "stop the fits,” may be a piteously inefficacious remedy; but the generous stirring of neighborly kindness that prompted the deed has a beneficent radiation that is not lost. Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to get enough 46 ADAM BEDE. patience and charity towards our stumbling, falling companions in the long and changeful journey? And there is but one way in which a strong determined soul can learn it — by getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he must share not only the outward consequence of their error, but their in- ward suffering. That is a long and hard lesson. Energetic natures, strong for all strenuous deeds, will often rush away from a hopeless sufferer, as if they were hard-hearted. It is the overmastering sense of pain that drives them. They shrink by an ungovernable instinct, as they would shrink from lac- eration. If a country beauty in clumsy shoes be only shallow. hearted enough, it is astonishing how closely her mental processes may resemble those of a lady in society and crinoline, who applies her refined intellect to the problem of committing indiscretions without compromising herself. Pray how many of your well-wishers would decling to make a little gain out of you? Your landlady is sincerely affected at parting with you, respects you highly, and will really rejoice if any one else is gener- ous to you; but at the same time she hands you a bill by which she gains as high a percentage as possible. We don't inquire too closely into character in the case of a handsome generous young fellow, who wili ADAM BEDE. have property enough to support numerous peccadilloes - who, if he should unfortunately break a man's legs in his rash driving, will be able to pension him hand- somely; or if he should happen to spoil a woman's ex- istence for her, will make it up to her with expensive bon-bons, packed up and directed by his own hand. 11 would be ridiculous to be prying and analytic in such cases, as if one were inquiring into the character of a confidential clerk. We use round, general, gentle- manly epithets about a young man of birth and for- tune; and ladies, with that fine intuition which is the distinguishing attribute of their sex, see at once that he is “nice.” The chances are that he will go through life without scandalizing any one; a sea-worthy vessel that no one would refuse to insure. - In young, childish, ignorant souls there is constantly this blind trust in some unshapen chance; it is as hard to a boy or girl to believe that a great wretchedness will actually befall them, as to believe that they will die. We do not hear that Memnon's statue gave forth its melody at all under the rushing of the mightiest wind, or in response to any other influence, divine or human, than certain short-lived sunbeams of morning; and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range or music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch 48 ADAM BEDE. that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony. Yes, the actions of a little trivial soul like Hetty's, struggling amidst the serious, sad destinies of a human being, are strange. So are the motions of a little vessel without ballast tossed about on a stormy sea. How pretty it looked with its parti-colored sail in the sunlight, moored in the quiet bay! “Let that man bear the loss who loosed it from its moorings.” But that will not save the vessel -- the pretty thing that might have been a lasting joy. See the difference between the impression a man makes on you when you walk by his side in familiar talk, or look at him in his home, and the figure he makes when seen from a lofty historical level, or even in the eyes of a critical neighbor, who thinks of him as an embodied system or opinion rather than as a man. Parson Irwine was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the market-place, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearth- stone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the every-day wants of every-day companions, who take all ADAM BEDE. 49 their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a sub- ject for panegyric. It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes. The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past: no wonder the secret escapes the unsympathizing observer, who might as well put on his spectacles to discern odors. That is the great advantage of dialogue on horse- back; it can be merged any minute into a trot or a canter, and one might have escaped from Socrates himself in the saddle. The beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food - it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on. There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope. Lisbeth looked round with blank eyes at the dirt and confusion on which the bright afternoon's sun shone dismally; it was all of a piece wita the sad confusion ADAM BEDE. of her mind — that confusion which belongs to the first hours of a sudden sorrow, when the poor human soul is like one who has been deposited sleeping aniong the ruins of a vast city, and wakes up in dreary amaze- ment, not knowing whether it is the growing or the dying day — not knowing why and whence came this illimitable scene of desolation, or why he too finds himself desolate in the midst of it. In our times of bitter suffering, there are almost always these pauses, when our consciousness is be numbed to everything but some trivial perception or sensation. It is as if semi-idiocy came to give us rest from the memory and the dread which refuse to leave us in our sleep. There is a strength of self-possession which is the sign that the last hope has departed. Despair no more leans on others than perfect contentment, and in de- spair pride ceases to be counteracted by the sense of dependence. When our indignation is borne in submissive silence, we are apt to feel twinges of doubt afterwards as to our own generosity, if not justice; how much more when the object of our anger has gone into everlasting silence, and we have seen his face for the last time in the meekness of death! When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is ADAM BEDE. never our tenderness that we repent of, but our se- verity. What we thought the oldest truth becomes the most startling to us in the week when we have looked on the dead face of one who has made a part of our own lives. For when men want to impress us with the effect of a new and wonderfully vivid light, do they not let it fall on the most familiar objects, that we may measure its intensity by remembering the former dimness? Our dead are never dead to us until we have for- gotten them : they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we be- stow on the smallest relic of their presence. Why did they say she was so changed? In the corpse we love, it is the likeness we see - it is the like- ness, which makes itself felt the more keenly because something else was and is not. The mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the base, degraded man. If it be true that Nature at certain moments seems charged with a presentiment of one individua' lot, inust it not also be true that she seems unmin.lful, ADAM BEDE. unconscious of another: For there is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to des- olation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different: what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our hurts will be made much of-to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more. Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning. There are faces which Nature charges with a mean- ing and pathos not belonging to the single human soul that flutters beneath them, but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations - eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless has been and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes - perhaps paired with pale eyes that can say nothing; just as a national lan- guage may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it. Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains: blends yearning and repulsion; and ADAJI BEDE. 53 ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes - ah! so like our mother's - averted from us in cold alienation; and our last darling child star- tles us with the air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage - the mechanical in- stinct, the keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious skill of the modelling hand - galls us, and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass as our own wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humors and irrational persistence. Perhaps there is no time in a summer's day more cheering, than when the warmth of the sun is just be ginning to triumph over the freshness of the morning – when there is just a lingering hint of early coolness to keep off languor under the delicious influence cť warmth. There's such a thing as being over-speritial; we must have something beside Gospel i’ this world. Look at the canals, an' th' aqueducs, an' th' coal-pit engines, and Arkwright's mills there at Cromford; a man must learn summat beside Gospel to make them things, I reckon. But thear some o' them preachers, you'd think as a man must be doing nothing all's life but shutting's eyes and looking what's a-going ou in- side him. I know a man must have the love o' God 54 ADAM BEDE. in his soul, and the Bible's God's word. But what does the Bible say? Why, it says as God put his sper- rit into the workman as built the tabernacle, to make him do all the carved work and things as wanted a nice haud. And this is my way o' looking at it: there's the sperrit o' God in all things and all times - week- day as well as Sunday — and i' the great works and inventions, and i’ the figuring and the mechanics. And God helps us with our head-pieces and our hands as well as with our souls; and if a man does bits o' jobs out o' working hours - builds a oven for 's wife to save her from going to the bakehouse, or scrats at his bit o' garden and makes two potatoes grow istead o' one, he's doing more good, and he's just as near to God, as if he was running after some preacher and a-praying and a-groaning.' I've seen pretty clear ever since I was a young un, as religion's something else besides doctrines and notions. I look at it as if the doctrines was like find- ing names for your feelings, so as you can talk of 'em when you've never known 'em, just as a man may talk o'tools when he knows their names, though he's never so much as seen 'em, still less handled 'em." "They that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of those that are weak, and not to please themselves.” There's a text wants no candle to show't; it shines by its own light. It's plain enough you get into the wrong road i' this life if you run after this and that only for the sake o' making things easy and pleasant ADAI BEDE. 55 to yourself. A pig may poke his nose into the trough and think o' nothing outside it; but if you've got a man's heart and soul in you, you can't be easy a-mak- ing your own bed an' leaving the rest to lie on the stones. Nay, nay, I'll never slip my neck out o' the yoke, and leave the load to be drawn by the weak uns. There's nothing like settling with ourselves as there's a deal we must do without i’ this life. It's no use looking on life as if it was Treddles'on fair, where folks only go to see shows and get fairings. If we do, we shall find it different.' I like to read about Moses best, in th' Old Testa. ment. He carried a hard business well through, and died when other folks were going to reap the fruits : a man must have courage to look at his life so, and think what'll come of it after he's dead and gone. A good solid bit o' work lasts: if it's only laying a floor down, somebody's the better for it being done well, besides the man as does it." I can't abide to see men throw away their tools i’ that way, the minute the clock begins to strike, as if they took no pleasure i’ their work, and was afraid o' iloing a stroke too much. ... I hate to see a man's arms drop down as if he was shot, before the clock's fairly struck, just as if he'd never a bit o' pride and delight in's work. The very grindstone 'ull go on turning a bit after you loose it." 56 ADAM BEDE. A foreman, if he's got a conscience, and delights in his work, will do his business as well as if he was a partner. I wouldn't give a penny for a man as 'ud drive a nail in slack because he didn't get extra pay for it. You can so seldom get hold of a man as can turn his brains to more nor one thing; it's just as if they wore blinkers like th’horses, and could see nothing o' one side of 'em. If a woman's young and pretty, I think you can see her good looks all the better for her being plain dressed.... It seems to me as a woman's face docsna want flowers; it's almost like a flower itself. ... It's like when a man's singing a good tune, you don't want thear bells tinkling and interfering wi' the sound.? It's wonderful how that sound of the “ Harvest Home") goes to one's heart almost like a funeral- bell, for all it tells one o' the joyfullest time o' the year, and the time when men are mostly the thankfullest. I suppose it's a bit hard to us to think anything's over and gone in our lives; and there's a parting at the root of all our joys. It seems to me it's the same with love and happi- ness as with sorrow - the more we know of it the better we can feel what other people's lives are or might be, and so we shall only be more tender to 'em, and wishful to help 'em. The more knowledge a man ADAM BEDE. 57 has, the better he'll do 's work; and feeling's a sort o knowledge.' It 'ud be a poor look-out if folks didn't remember what they did and said when they were lads. We should think no more about old friends than we do about new uns, then." There's no rule so wise but what it's a pity for somebody or other.' It's a feeling as gives you a sort o'liberty, as if you could walk more fearless, when you've more trust in another than y' have in yourself.' It's poor foolishness to run down your enemies." I've seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something else besides notions. It isn't notions sets people doing the right thing—it's feelings. It's the same with the notions in religion as it is with math’matics, -a man may be able to work problems straight off in's head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe; but if he has to make a machine or a build- ing, he must have a will and a resolution, and love something else better than his own ease.' When people's feelings have got a deadly wound, they can't be cured with favors. I know forgiveness is a man's duty, but, to my 58 ADAM BEDE. thinking, that can only mean as you're to give up all thoughts o'taking revenge: it can never mean as you're ť have your old feelings back again, for that's not possible.' The best fire doesna flare up the soonest.' I won't open the door again. It's no use staring about to catch sight of a sound. Maybe there's a world about us as we can't see, but th’ear's quicker than the eye, and catches a sound from't now and then. Some people thirk they get a sight on't too, but they're mostly folks whose eyes are not much use to 'em at anything else. For my part, I think it's better to see when your perpendicular's true, than to see a ghost.? I began to see as all this weighing and sifting what this text means and that text means, and whether folks are saved all by God's grace, or whether there goes an ounce o' their own will to 't, was no part o' real religion at all. You may talk o’ these things for hours on end, and you'll only be all the more coxy and conceited for 't.' There's a deal in a man's inward life as you can't measure by the square, and say, “Do this and that 'll follow," and, “Do that and this 'll follow.” There's things go on in the soul, and times when feelings come into you like a rushing mighty wind, as the Scripture says, and part your life in two a’most, so as ADAM BEDE. 59 you look back on yourself as if you was somebody else. Those are things as you can't bottle up in a “do this ” and “ do that"; and I'll go so far with the strongest Methodist ever you'll find. That shows me there's deep speritial things in religion. You can't make much out wi' talking about it, but you feel it.' I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clat- ter about what I could never understand." It takes something else besides 'cuteness to make folks see what 'll be their interest in the long run. It takes somes conscience and belief in right and wrong.' I don't remember ever being see-saw, when I'd made my mind up that a thing was wrong. It takes the taste out o' my mouth for things, when I know I should have a heavy conscience after 'em. I've seen pretty clear, ever since I could cast up a sum, as you can never do what's wrong without breeding sin and trouble more than you can ever see. It's like a bit o' bad workmanship — you never see th' end o' the mis- chief it'll do. And it's a poor look-out to come into the world to make your fellow-creatures worse off instead o' better. Wc hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves. I hate that talk o' people, as if there was a way o' 60 ADAM BEDE. making amends for everything. They'd inore need be brought to see as the wrong they do can never be altered. When a man's spoiled his fellow-creatur's life, he's no right to comfort himself with thinking good may come out of it: somebody else's goodi doesn't alter her shame and misery." It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.' It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off'; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree. There's nothing but what's bearable as long as a man can work: the natur o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change. The square o’ four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy; and the best o’ working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot." If we're men, and have men's feelings, I reckon we must have men's troubles. We can't be like the birds as fly from their nest as soon as they've got theii wings, and never know their kin when they see 'em and get a fresh lot every year.! 62 ADAM BEDR. Wooden folks had need ha' wooden things thandle.' There's times when the crockery seems alive, an'flies out o’your hand like a bird It's like the glass, some- times, 'ull crack as it stands. What is to be broke will be broke.? The men are mostly so slow, their thoughts overrun 'em, an' they can only catch 'em by the tail. I can count a stocking-top while a man's getting's tongue ready; an' when he outs wi’ his speech at last, there's little broth to be made on't. It's your dead chicks take the longest hatchin'.? I know the dancin's nonsense; but if you stick at everything because it's nonsense, you wonna go far i'this life. When your broth's ready-made for you, you mun swallow the thickenin', or else let the broth alone. Some folks' tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin', not to tell you the time o' the day, because there's summat wrong i’ their own inside.? It's the flesh and blood folks are made on as makes the difference. Some cheeses are made o' skimmed milk and some o' new milk, and it's no matter what you call 'em, you may tell which is which by the look und the smell. Folks as have no mind to be o use have allays the ADAN BEDE. luck to be out o' the road when there's anything to be done. It's them as take advantage that get advantage 1 tbis world, I think : folks have to wait long enough afore it's brought to 'em.? It's all very fine having a ready-made rich man, but may-happen he'll be a ready-made fool; and it's no use filling your pocket full o' money if you've got a hole in the corner. It'll do you no good to sit in a spring-cart o’ your own, if you've got a soft to drive you; he'll soon turn you over into the ditch. I allays said I'd never marry a man as had got no brains; for where's the use of a woman having brains of her own if she's tackled to a geck as everybody's a-laughing at? She might as well dress herself fine to sit back’ards on a donkey." I've had my say out, and I shall be th' easier for 't all my life. There's no pleasure i' living, if you're to be corked up forever, and only dribble your mind out ny the sly, like a leaky barrel.2 The men are mostly so tongue-tied — you ’re forced partly to guess what they mean, as you do wi’ the dumb creaturs.* I aren't like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own coansel when there's no good i' speaking.? 64 ADAM BEDE. It seems as if them as aren't wanted here are th' only folks as aren't wanted i’th other world.? One ’ud think, and hear some folks talk, as the men war 'cute enough to count the corns in a bag o’ wheat wi' only smelling at it. They can see through a barn- door, they can. Perhaps that's the reason they can see so little o' this side on ’t.2 Them as ha’ never had a cushion don't miss it." If Old Harry wants any work done, you may be sure he'll find the means." I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Al- mighty made 'em to match the men. Hetty's no better than a peacock, as ’ud strut about on the wall, and spread its tail when the sun shone if all the folks i’ the parish was dying.” I'm not one o' those as can see the cat i' the dairy, an' wonder what she's come after.? As for farming, it's putting money into your pocket wi’ your right hand and fetching it out wi’ your left. As fur as I can see, it's raising victual for other folks, and just getting a mouthful for yourself and your chil- dren as you go along. ... It's more than flesh and blood ’ull bear sometimes, to be toiling and striving, and up early and down late, and hardly s'eeping a ADAM BEDE. 65 wink when you lie down for thinking as the cheese may swell, or the cows may slip their calf, or the wheat may grow green again i’ the sheaf- and after all, at th end o' the year, it's like as if you'd been cooking a feast and had got the smell of it for your pains. It's allays the way wi' them meek-faced people; you may's well pelt a bag o’ feathers as talk to 'em. Wi’ them three gells in the house I'd need have twice the strength, to keep 'em up to their work. It's like having roast-meat at three fires; as soon as you've basted one, another's burnin’.? There's nothing you can't believe o' them wenches : they 'll set the empty kettle o' the fire, and then come an hour after to see if the water boils. ... “ Told her?” yes, I might spend all the wind i' my body, an' take the bellows too, if I was to tell them gells everything as their own sharpness wonna tell 'em.2 I have nothing to say again' Craig, on'y it is a pity de couldna be hatched o'er again, an' hatched differ- ent. I'd sooner ha' brewin' day an' washin' day together than one o' these pleasurin’days. There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an' starin' an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next; and keepin' 66 ADAM BEDE. your face i' smilin' order like a grocer o’ market-day for fear people shouldna think you civil enough. An' you've nothing to show for't when it's done, if it isn't a yallow face wi' eatin' things as disagree.? We are led on, like the little children, by a way that we know not. It's good to live only a moment at a time, as I've read in one of Mr. Wesley's books. It isn't for you and me to lay plans; we've nothing to do but to obey and to trust.3 It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing to our own souls, as if we could choose for ourselves where we shall find the fulness of the Divine Presence, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found, in loving obedience.3 It makes no difference - whether we live or die, we are in the presence of God.3 I think, sir, when God makes his presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was - he only saw the brightness of the Lord.3 It's a strange thing - sometimes when I'm quite alone, sitting in my room with my eyes closed, or walking over the hills, the people I've seen and ADAM BEDE. 67 known, if it's only been for a few days, are brought before me, and I hear their voices and see them look and move almost plainer than I ever did when they were really with me so as I could touch them. And then my heart is drawn out towards them, and I feel their lot as if it was my own, and I take comfort in spreading it before the Lord and resting in his love, on their behalf as well as my own.3 I've noticed, that in these villages where the people lead a quiet life among the green pastures and the still waters, tilling the ground and tending the cattle, there's a strange deadness to the Word, as different as can be from the great towns, like Leeds, where I once went to visit a holy woman who preaches there. It's wonderful how rich is the harvest of souls up those high-walled streets, where you seemed to walk as in a prison-yard, and the car is defeaned with the sounds of wordly toil. I think maybe it is because the promise is sweeter when this life is so dark and weary, and the soul gets more hungry when the body is ill at ease.3 I've noticed it often among my own people around Snowfield, that the strong, skilful men are often the gentlest to the women and children; and it's pretty to see 'em carrying the little babies as if they were no heavier than little birds. And the babies always seem to like the strong arm best.” Poor dog! I've a strange feeling about the dumb 68 ADAM BEDE. things as if they wanted to speak, and it was a troubt to 'em because they couldn't. I can't help being sorry for the dogs always, though perhaps there's no need. But they may well have more in them than they know how to make us understand, for we can't say half what we feel, with all our words.3 There's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for.3 We are over-hasty to speak — as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours. 3 God can't bless you while you have one falsehood in your soul; his pardoning mercy can't reach you until you open your heart to him, and say, “I have done this great wickedness; O God, save me, make me pure from sin.” While you cling to one sin and will not part with it, it must drag you down to misery after death, as it has dragged you to misery here in this world, my poor, poor Hetty. It is sin that brings dread and darkness and despair: there is light and blessedness for us as soon as we cast it off: God enters our souls then, and teaches us, and brings us strength and peace.3 The ti je cross of the Redeemer was the sin and sorrow of this world — that was what lay heavy on his heart — and that is the cross we shall share with him, that is the cup we must drink of with him, if we ADAM BEDE. 69 would have any part in that Divine Love which is one with his sorrow.” Ah, that is a blessed time, isn't it, Seth, when the outward light is fading, and the body is a little wearied with its work and its labor. Then the inward light shines the brighter, and we have a deeper sense of resting on the Divine strength. I sit on my chair in the dark room and close my eyes, and it is as if I was out of the body and could feel no want for evermore. For then, the very hardship, and the sorrow, and the blindness, and the sin, I have beheld and been ready to weep over-yeaall the anguish of the children of men, which sometimes wraps me round like sudden darkness - I can bear with a willing pain, as if I was sharing the Redeemer's cross. For I feel it, I feel it - infinite love is suffering too — yea, in the fulness of knowledge it suffers, it yearns, it mourns; and that is a blind self-seeking which wants to be freed from the sorrow wherewith the whole creation groaneth and travaileth. Surely it is not true blessedness to be free from sorrow, while there is sorrow and sin in the world; sorrow is then a part of love, and love does not seek to throw it off. It is not the spirit only that tells me this - I see it in the whole work and word of the gospel. Is there not pleading in heaven? Is not the Man of Sorrows there in that crucified body wherewith he ascended? And is he not one with the Infinite Love itself — as our love is one with our sorrow? 3 70 ADAM BEDE. Now, you see, you don't do this thing a bit better than you did a fortnight ago; and I'll tell you what's the reason. You want to learn accounts; that's well and good. But you think all you need do to learn accounts is to come to me and do sums for an hour or so, two or three times a week; and no sooner do you get your caps on and turn out of doors again, than you sweep the whole thing clean out of your mind. You go whistling about, and take no more care what you're thinking of than if your heads were gutters for any rubbish to swill through that happened to be in the way; and if you get a good notion in 'em, it's pretty soon washed out again. You think knowledge is to be got cheap - you'll come and pay Bartle Massey sixpence a week, and he'll make you clever at figures without your taking any trouble. But knowl- edge isn't to be got with paying sixpence, let me tell you: if you're to know figures, you must turn 'em over in your own heads, and keep your thoughts fixed on 'em. There's nothing you can't turn into a sum, for there's nothing but what's got number in it- even a fool. You may say to yourselves, “ I'm one fool, and Jack's another; if my fool's head weighed four pound, and Jack's three pound three ounces and three quarters, how many pennyweights heavier would my head be than Jack's?” A man that had got bis heart in learning figures would make sums for hiin- self, and work 'em in his head: when he sat at his shoemaking, he'd count his stitches by fives, and then put a price on his stitches, say half a farthing, and then see how much money he could get in an hour: ADAM BEDE. 71 and then ask himself how much money he'd get in a day at that rate; and then how much ten workmen would get working three, or twenty, or a hundred year's at that rate — and all the while his needle would be going just as fast as if he left his head empty for the devil to dance in. But the long and the short of it is - I'll have nobody in my night-school that doesn't strive to learn what he comes to learn, as hard as if he was striving to get out of a dark hole into broad day- light. I'll send no man away because he's stupid : if Billy Taft, the idiot, wanted to learn anything, I'd not refuse to teach him. But I'll not throw away good knowledge on people who think they can get it by the sixpenn'orth, and carry it away with 'em as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to me again, if you can't show that you've been working with your own heads, instead of thinking you can pay for mine to work for you. That's the last word I've got to say to you. Why, the Scotch tunes are just like a scolding, nagging woman. They go on with the same thing over and over again, and never come to a reasonable end. Anybody ’ud think the Scotch tunes had always been asking a question of somebody as deaf as old Taft, and had never got an answer yet. You must learn to deal with odd and even in life, as well as in figures. No man can be wise on an empty stomach.“ 72 ADAM BEDE. As for age, what that's worth depends on the quality o' the liquor. It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.* College mostly makes people like bladders — just good for nothing but thold the stuff as is poured into 'em. If you trust a man, let him be a bachelor - let him be a bachelor. I daresay she's like the rest of the women — thinks two and two 'll come to make five, if she cries and bothers enough about it.4 These poor silly women-things — they've not the sense to know it's no use denying what's proved." Ah! the women are quick enough — they're quick enough. They know the rights of a story before they hear it, and can tell a man what his thoughts are before he knows 'em himself.4 Mrs. Poyser's a terrible woman! — made of needles - made of needles. But I stick to Martin - I shall always stick to Martin. And he likes the needles. God help him! He's a cushion made on purpose for 'em. ... I don't say th' apple isn't sound at the core; ADAM BEDE. but it sets my tenth on edge - it sets my teeth on edge. Nonsense! Its the silliest lie a sensible man like you ever believed, to say a woman makes a house com- fortable. It's a story got up, because the women are there, and something must be found for 'em to do. I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha' been left to the men —it had better ha' been left to the men. I tell you, a woman 'ull bake you a pie every week of her life, and never come to see that the hotter th' oven the shorter the time. I tell you, a woman 'ull make your porridge every day for twenty years, and never think of measuring the proportion between the nieal and the milk – a little more or less, she'll think, doesn't signify: the porridge will be awk’ard now and then: if it's wrong, it's summat in the meal, or it's summat in the milk, or it's summat in the water. ... Don't tell me about God having made such creatures to be companions for us! I don't say but He might make Eve to be a companion to Adam in Paradise - there was no cooking to be spoilt there, and no other woman to cackle with and make mischief; though you see what mischief she did as soon as she'd an oppor- Cunity. But it's an impious, unscriptural opinion to say a woman's a blessing to a man now; you might as well say adders and wasps, and foxes and wild beasts, are a blessing, when they're only the evils that 74 ADAM BEDE. belong to this state o' probation, which it's lawful for a man to keep as clear of as he can in this life, hoping to get quit of 'em forever in another - hoping to get quit of 'em forever in another. I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.“ The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman, and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in their presence. The man may be no better able than the dog to explain the influence the more refined beauty has on him, but he feels it." When what is good comes of age and is llkely to live, there is reason for rejoicing." A man can't very well steal a bank-note unless the bank-note lies within convenient reach: but he won't make us think him an honest man because he begins to howl at the bank-note for falling in his way." A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that wa carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom. ADAM BEDE. 75 Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctua- tions that went before — consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.“ There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease. It is not for us men to apportion the shares of moral guilt and retribution. We find it impossible to avoid mistakes even in determining who has committed a single criminal act, and the problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed, is one that might well make us trem- ble to look into it. The evil consequences that may lie folded in a single act of selfish indulgence, is a thought so awful that it ought surely to awaken some feeling less presumptuous than a rash desire to punish." It's a deep mystery — the way the heart of man turns to one woman out of all the rest he's seen i’ the world, and makes it easier for him to work seven year for her, like Jacob did for Rachel, sooner than have any other woman for th' asking. I often think of them words, “And Jacob served seven years for 76 ADAM BEDE. Rachel; and they seemed to him but a few days for the love he had to her.” 6 Thee mustna undervally prayer. Prayer mayna bring money, but it brings us what no money can buy - a power to keep from sin, and be content with God's will, whatever He may please to send. Dinah doesnt hold wi' them as are for keeping the Society so strict to themselves. She doesn't mind about making folks enter the Society, so as they're fit t enter the kingdom o' God.6 Eh! well, if the Methodies are fond o' trouble, they're like to thrive: it's a pity they canna ha't all, an' take it away from them as donna like it." One morsel's as good as another when your mouth's out o'taste.? Eh, it's poor luck for the platter to wear well when it's broke i’ two.? " Said?” nay, she'll say nothin'. It's on’y the men as have to wait till folks say things afore they find 'em out.? Nonsense, child! Nature never makes a ferret in the shape of a mastiff. You'll never persuade me that I can't tell what men are by their outsides. If I don't like a mau's looks, depend upon it I shall never like ADAM BEDE. 77 him. I don't want to know people that look ugly and disagreeable, any more than I want to taste dishes that look disagreeable. If they make me shudder at the first glance, I say, take them away. An ugly, piggish, or fishy eye, now, makes me feel quite ill; it's like a bad smell.8 Eh, it's a poor look-out when th’ould foulks doesna like the young uns.9 It isn't right for old nor young nayther to make a bargain all o' their own side. What's good for one's good all round i' the long run.9 I'm no friend to young follows a-marrying afore they know the difference atween a crab an'a apple; but they may wait o'er long.9 I should be loath to leave th’ old place, and the par- ish where I was bred and born, and father afore me. We should leave our roots behind us, I doubt, and diver thrive again. END OF “ADAM BEDE.” THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. (79) THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. JOURNEYING down the Rhone on a summer's day, you have perhaps felt the sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose, like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations whose breath is in their nostrils, and making their dwellings a desolation. Strange contrast, you may have thought, between the effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of common- place houses, which in their best days were but the sign of a sordid life, belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era; and the effect produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine, which have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps, that they seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain-pine : nay, even in the day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as if they had been raised by an earth-born race, who had in- herited from their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of romance! If those rob. ber-barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them - they were forest boars with tusks, tearing and rend. (81) 82 THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. ing, not the ordinary domestic grunter; they repre. sented the demon forces forever in collision withi beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life; they made a fine contrast in the picture with the wandering min- strel, the soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. That was a time of color, wlien the sunlight fell on glancing steel and floating banners; a time of adventure and fierce struggle – nay, of liv- ing, religious art and religious enthusiasm; for were not cathedrals built in those days, and did not great emperors leave their Western palaces to die before the infidel strongholds in the sacred East? Therefore it is that these Rhine castles thrill me with a sense of poetry: they belong to the grand historic life of hu- manity, and raise up for me the vision of an epoch. But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress me with the feeling that human life — very much of it - is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vul- garity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of, were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers. That is the path we all like when we set out on our abandonment of egoism - the path of martyrdom and endurance, where the palm-branches grow, rather than the steep highway of tolerance, just allowance, and TIE MILL ON THE FLOSS. self-blame, where there are no leafy honors to be gathered and worn. Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly. We are not apt to fear for the fearless, when wa are companions in their danger. Retribution may come from any voice: the hardest, cruelest, most imbruted urchin at the street-corner can inflict it: surely help and pity are rarer things — more needful for the righteous to bestow. What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs? We judge others according to results; how else?- not knowing the process by which results are arrived at. At the entrance of the chill dark cavern, we turn with unworn courage from the warm light; but how, when we have trodden far in the damp darkness, and have begun to be faint and weary – how, if there is a sudden opening above us, and we are invited back again to the life-nourishing day? The leap of natural longing from under the pressure of pain is so strong, 84 TIE MILL ON THE FLOSS. that all less immediate motives are likely to be for. gotten — till the pain has been escaped from. Watch your own speech, and notice how it is guided by your less conscious purposes. The conduct that issues from a moral conflict has often so close a resemblance to vice, that the distinc- tion escapes all outward judgments, founded on a mere comparison of actions. Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love. Milk and mildness are not the best things for keep- ing, and when they turn only a little sour, they may disagree with young stomachs seriously. I have often wondered whether those early Madonnas of Raphael, with the blond faces and somewhat stupid expression, kept their placidity undisturbed when their strong- limbed, strong-willed boys got a little too old to do without clothing. I think they must have been given to feeble remonstrance, getting more and more peevisb as it became more and more ineffectual. Poor relations are undeniably irritating — their ex- Istence is so entirely uncalled for on our part, and they are almost always very faulty people. These bitter sorrows of childhood! when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings TIIE MILL ON TIIÈ FLOSS. 85 to fly beyond the day and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless. "Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by-and-by,” is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange piace; but we can no longer recall the poign- ancy of that moment and wecp over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent then- selves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling dis- belief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what hap- pened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and trousers, but with an intimate pen. etration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then- when it was so long from one Midsummer to another? what he felt when his school-fellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when he didn't know how to amuse hinself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into de- fiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when his 86 TUN dili UN THE Iluss. mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that “half,” although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life that gave the bitter- ness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children. Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow. There is no hopelessness so sad as that of early youth, when the soul is made up of wants, and has no long memories, no superadded life in the life of others; though we who look on think lightly of such prem- ature despair, as if our vision of the future lightened the blind sufferer's present. Maggie in her brown frock, with her eyes reddened and her heavy hair pushed back, looking from the bed where her father lay, to the dull walls of this sad chamber which was the centre of her world, was a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious lite, and give her soul a sense of home in it. No wonder, when there is this contrast between the outward and the inward, that painful collisions come of it. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. 87 Poor child ! it was very early for her to know one of those supreme moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted ir, all we can dread or endure, falls away from our regard as insignificant – is lost, like a trivial memory, in that simple, primitive love which knits us to the beings who have been nearest to us, in their times of helplessness or of anguish. Maggie had that strange dreamy weariness which comes from watching in a sick-room through the chill hours of early twilight and breaking day - in which the outside daylight life seems to have no importance, and to be a mere margin to the hours in the darkened chamber. Poor child! as she leaned her head against the win- dow-frame, with her hands clasped tighter and tighter, and her foot bcating the ground, she was as lonely in her trouble as if she had been the only girl in the civilized world of that day who had come out of her school-life with a soul untrained for incvitable strug- gles - with no other part of her inherited share in the hard-won treasures of thought, which generations of painful toil have laid up for the race of men, than shreds and patches of feeble literature and false his- tory — with much futile information about Saxon and other kings of doubtful example – but unhappily quite without that knowledge of the irreversible laws within an.1 without her, which, governing the habits, becomes morality, and, developing the feelings of submission and dependence, becomes religion :- as lonely in her 88 TIE MILL ON THE FLOSS. trouble as if every other girl besides herself had been cherished and watched over by elder minds, not for- getful of their own early time, when need was keen and impulse strong. Two hours ago, as Tom was walking to St. Ogg's, he saw the distant future before him, as he might have seen a tempting stretch of smooth sandy beach beyond a belt of flinty shingles; he was on the grassy bank, then, and thought the shingles might soon be passed. But now his feet were on the sharp stones; the belt of shingles had widened, and the stretch of sand had dwindled into narrowness. Of those two young hearts Tom's suffered the most unmixed pain, for Maggie, with all her keen suscepti- bility, yet felt as if the sorrow made larger room for her love to flow in, and gave breathing-space to her passionate nature. No true boy feels that: he would rather go and slay the Nemean lion, or perform any round of heroic labors, than endure perpetual appeals to his pity, for evils over which he can make no con- quest. While Maggie's life-struggles had lain almost en tirely within her own soul, one shadowy army fighting another, and the slain shadows forever rising again. Tom was engaged in a dustier, noisier warfare, grap- pling with more substantial obstacles, and gaining more definite conquests. So it has been since the days of Hecuba, and of Hector, Tamer of horses : in- THE MILL ON TIIE FLOSS. 89 side the gates, the women with streaming hair and uplifted hands offering prayers, watching the world's combat from afar, filling their long empty days with memories and fears : outside, the men, in fierce strug. gle with things divine and human, quenching memory in the stronger light of purpose, losing the sense of dread and even of wounds in the hurrying ardor of action. It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilization — the sight of a fashionably drest female in grief. From the sorrow of a llottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate ribbon-strings — what a long series of grada tions! In the enlightened child of civilization the abandonment characteristic of grief is checked and varied in the subtlest manner, so as to present an interesting problem to the analytic mind. If, with a crushed heart and eyes half-blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility pro- duces a composition of forces by which she takes al line that just clears the door-post. Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them languidly backward -- a touching gesture, indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm. As the tears subside a little, and with 90 THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. her head leaning backward at the angle that will not injure her bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when grief, which has made all things else a weariness, has itself become weary; she looks down pensively at her bracelets, and adjusts their clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy state. People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes; and it seems superfluous, when we consider the remote geographical position of the Ethiopians, and how very little the Greeks had to do with them, to inquire fur- ther why Homer calls them “blameless.” Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of ap oinniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart. The happilsi women, like the happiest nations, havo no history. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no chiidnood in it, – if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat isping to ourselves on the grass — the same hips and naws on the autumn hedge-rows-the same redbreasts tłaj we used to call “ God's birds,” because they did po harin to the precious crops. What novelty is worth THE MILL ON TIE FLOSS. 91 that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known? The wood I walk in on this mild May-day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue- eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet - what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird- notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these fur- rowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedge-rows - such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep- bladed grass to-day, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sun- shine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love. There is no sense of ease like the case we elt in those scenes where we were born, where ubjects be. came dear to us before we had known the labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an ex- tension of our own personality: we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that ſur- niture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorus it: 92 TIE MILL ON THE FLOSS. and is not the striving after something better and better in our surroundings, the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute — or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affec- tions had not a trick of twining round those old in- ferior things — if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable rools in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused leafage of a hedge-row bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable pref- erence to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those severely regulated minds who are free from the weak. ness of any attachment that does not rest on a demon- strable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory – that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibil- ities to form and color, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid. We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us. A suppressed resolve will betray itself in the eyes. To minds strongly marked by the positive and neg. ative qualities that create severity - strength of will, TIE MILL ON TIE FLOSS. 93 conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagin- ation and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others - prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt- provoking knowledge which we call truth. Let a prej- udice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye - however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation : it is soine. thing to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right: it is at once a staff and a baton. Every prejudice that will answer these purposes is self-evident. A character at unity with itself — that performs what it intends, subdues every counteracting impulse, and has no visions beyond the distinctly possible – is strong by its very negations. A boy's sheepishness is by no means a sign of over- mastering reverence; and while you are making en- couraging advances to him under the idea that he is overwhelmed by a sense of your age and wisdom, ten to one he is thinking you extremely queer. The only consolation I can suggest to you is, that the Greck boys probably thought the same of Aristotle. It is only when you have mastered a restive horse, or thrashed a drayman, or have got a gun in your hand, that these siiy juniors feel you to be a truly admirable and enviable character. 94 TIE MILL ON THE FLOSS. . Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies. Under these average boy- ish physiognomies that she seems to turn off by the gross, she conceals some of her most rigid, inflexible purposes, some of her most unmodifiable characters. The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it: the question whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possi- bility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of a passion against which he had struggled as a trespass, is one for which we have no master-key that will fit all cases. The cas- uists have become a by-word of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discriinination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed – the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot. All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims, because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. 95 the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, with- out the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, im- partiality - without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human. Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress. If people are to quarrel oftcn, it follows as a corol lary that their quarrels cannot be protracted beyond certain limits. We perhaps never detect how much of our social demeanor is inade up of artificial airs, until we see a person who is at once beautiful and simple: without the beauty, we are apt to call simplicity awkwardness There is nothing more widely misleading than sagac- Ity if it happens to get on the wrong scent; and sa- gacity, persuaded that men usually act and speak from distinct motives, with a consciously proposed end in view, is certain to waste its energies on imaginary game. Plotting covetousness, and deliberate contriv- ance, in order to compass a selfish end, are nowhere abundant bnt in the world of the dramatist: they 96 TIIE MILL ON THE FLOSS. demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow parishioners to be guilty of them. It is easy enough to spoil the lives of our neighbors without taking so much trouble: we can do it by lazy acqui- escence and lazy omission, by trivial falsities for which we hardly know a reason, by small frauds neu- tralized by small extravagancies, by maladroit flat- teries, and clumsily improvised insinuations. We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires — we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed-corn or the next year's crop. All long-known objects, even a mere window fasten- ing or a particular door-latch, have sounds which are a sort of recognized voice to us — a voice that will thrill and awaken, when it has been used to touch deep-lying fibres. So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffu- sive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain. It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive — when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. 97 There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music - that does not make a man sing or play the better. The middle-aged, who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when meinory is still half passionate and not merely con- templative, should surely be a sort of natural priest- hood, whom life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of self-despair. Most of us, at some moment in our young lives, would have welcomed a priest of that natural order in any sort of canonicals or uncanonicals, but had to scramble upwards into all the difficulties of nineteen entirely without such aid. It was one of those moments of implicit revelation which will sometimes happen even between people who mect quite transiently - on a mile's journey, perhaps, or when resting by the wayside. There is always this possibility of a word or look from a stranger to keep alive the sense of human brotherhood. It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love — this hunger of the heart - as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world. Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? the unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently lessening THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. 99 It is precisely the proudest and most obstinate men who are the most liable to shift their position and con- tradict themselves : everything is easier to them than to face the simple fact that they have been thoroughly defeated, and must begin life anew. Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her hus. band, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early .narried life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal gold-fish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass. Mrs. Tulli- ver was an amiable fish of this kind, and, after run- ning her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years, would go at it again to-day with un- dulled alacrity. Mrs. Tulliver's monotonous pleading had doubtless its share of force; it might even be comparable to that proverbial feather which has the credit or discredit of breaking the camel's back; though, on a strictly impartial view, the blame ought rather to lie with the previous weight of feathers which had already placed the back in such imminent peril, that an otherwise in- nocent feather could not settle on it without mischief. Mr. Tulliver was a strictly honest man, and proud of being honest, but he considered that in law the ends of justice could only be achieved by employing a stronger 100 THE MILL ON THE FLOS8. knave to frustrate a weaker. Law was a sort of cock- fight, in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a game-bird with the best pluck and the strong. est spurs. Mr. Tulliver regarded his parson with dutiful re. spect, as he did everything else belonging to the church-service; but he considered that church was one thing and common-sense another, and he wanted nobody to tell him what common-sense was. Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus for themselves under unfavorable circumstances, have been supplied by nature with an apparatus of hooks, so that they wil. get a hold on very unreceptive surfaces. The spiritual seed which had been scattered over Mr. Tulliver had apparent.y been destitute of any corresponding pro- vision, and had slipped off to the winds again, from a total absence of hooks. Feeble limbs casily resign themselves to be tethered, and when we are subdued by sickness it seems pos- sible to us to fulfil pledges which the old vigor comes back ard breaks. There is something strangely winning to most woinen in that offer of the firm arm : the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help -- the presence of strength that is outside them and yet their's - meets a continual want of the imagination. One cannot be good-natured all round. Nature her. TIIE MILL ON THE FLOSS. 101 self occasionally quarters an inconvenient parasite on an animal towards whom she has otherwise no ill-will. What then? We admire her care for the parasite. It was Mr. Stelling's favorite metaphor, that the classics and geometry constituted that culture of the mind which prepared it for the reception of any subse- quent crop. I say nothing against Mr. Stelling's the- ory: if we are to have one regimen for all minds, his seenis to me as good as any other. I only know it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented him from digesting it. It is astonishing what a different result one gets by changing the metaphor! Ouce call the brain an intel- lectual stomach, and one's ingenious conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and hairgil's seems to settle nothing. But then it is open to some one else to follow great authorities, and call the mind a s et of white paper or a mirror, in which case one's knowl- edge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant. It was doubtless an ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert, but it would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. O Aristotle! if you had had the advautage of being “the freshest modern ” instcad of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor', – that we can so selilom declare what a thing is, excepi by saying it is something else? 102 THIE MILL, UN TIE FLOSS. A man with an affectionate disposition, who finds it wife to concur wich his fundamental idea of life, easily comes to persuade himself that no other woman would have suited him so well, and does a little daily snap- ping and quarrelling without any sense of alienation. The pride and obstinacy of millers (like Mr. Tulliver), and other insignificant people, whom you pass un- noticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too; but it is of that unwept, hidden sort, that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record — such tragedy, perhaps, as lies in the conflicts of young souls, hungry for joy, under a lot made suddenly hard to them, under the dreariness of a home where the morning brings no promise with it, and where the un- expectant discontent of worn and disappointed parents weighs on the children like a damp, thick air, in which all the functions of life are depressed; or such tragedy as lies in the slow or sudden death that follows on a bruised passion, though it may be a death that finds only a parish funeral. There are certain animals to which tenacity of position is a law of life — they can never flourish again, after a single wrench : and there are certain human beings to whom predominance is a law of life — they can only sustain humiliation so long as they can refuse to believe in it, and, in their own conception, predominate still. If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal! TIIE MILL ON TIIE FLOSS. 103 that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out. O the sweet rest of that embrace to the heart-stricken Maggie! More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us. The small old-fashioned book (Thomas à Kempis), for which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness : while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart's prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary, hidden anguish, struggle, trust and triumph — not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations : the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced -- in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours — but under the same silent far-off' heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is rep- resented in every town, and by hundreds of obscure hearths: and we need not shrink from this comparison 104 THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. of small things with great; for does not science tel. us that its highest striving is after the ascertaiument of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest? In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life. There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excite- ment which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows -- in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive inten- sity that counteracts its pain - in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine;- it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and cye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction. This inalienable habit of saving, as an end in itself, belonged to the industrious men of business of a for- mer generation, who made their fortunes slowly, al- most as the tracking of the fox belongs to the harrier -- it constituted them a "race,” which is nearly lost in these days of rapid money-getting, when lavishness çoines close on the back of want. In old-fashioned times, an “independence” was hardly ever made with- THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. 105 out a litle miserliness as a condition, and you would have found that quality in every provincial district, combined with characters as various as the fruits from which we can extract acid. Surely the only courtship unshaken by doubts and fears must be that in which the lovers can sing together. The sense of mutual fitness that springs from the two deep notes fulfilling expectation just at the right moment between the notes of the silvery soprano, from the perfect accord of descending thirds and fifths, from the preconcerted loving chase of a fugue, is likely enough to supersede any immediate demand for less impassioned forms of agreement. The contralto will not care to catechise the bass; the tenor will foresee no embarrassing dearth of remark in evenings spent with the lovely soprano. Maggie and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion - when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all its mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent. The explicit- ness of an engagement wears off this finest edge of susceptibility; it is jasmine gathered and presented in a large bouquet. Mrs. Swelling was not a loving, tender-hearted woman : she was a woman whose skirt sat well, who 106 TIE MILL ON TIE FLOSS. adjusted her waist and patted her curls with a prce occupied air when she inquired after your welfare. These things, doubtless, represent a great social power, but it is not the power of love. It is pleasant to know that a new ministry just conie into ofiice are not the only fellow-men who enjoy a period of high appreciation and full-blown eulogy: in many respectable families throughout this realm, rel. atire: becoming creditable meet with a similar cordial- ity on recognition, which, in its fine freedom from the coercion of any antecedents, suggests the hopeful pos- sibility that we may some day without any notice find ourselves in full millennium, with cockatrices who have ceased to bite, and wolves that no longer show their teeth with any but the blandest intentions. It is always chilling in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give. And if you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it. Ugly and deformed people have great need of un- usual virtues, because they are likely to be extremely uncomfortable without them: but the theory that un- usual virtues spring by a direct consequence out of personal disadvantages, as animals get thicker wool in severe climates, is perhaps a little overstrained. The temptations of beauty are much dwelt upon, but I THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. 107 fancy they only bear the same relation to those of ugliness, as the temptation to excess at a feast, where the delights are varied for eye and ear as well as palate, bears to the temptations that assail the des peration of hunger. Does not the Hunger Tower stand as the type of the utinost trial to what is human in us? I think my head 's all alive inside like an old cheese, for I'm so full o'plans, one knocks another over. If I hadn't Mumps to talk to, I should get top-heavy an' tumble in a fit. I suppose it's because I niver went to school much. That's what I jaw my old mother for. I says, “You should ha' sent me to school a bit more," I says "an' then I could ha' read i' the books like fun, an' kep' my head cool an' empty.”] I think the more on 't when Mr. Tom says a thing, because his tongue doesn't overshoot him as mine does. Lors! I'm no better nor a tilted bottle, I aren't - I can't stop mysen when once I begin.' Dr. Kenn was at me to know what I did of a Sun- day, as I didn't come to church. But I told him I was upo' the travel three parts o' the Sundays - an' then I'm so used to bein' on my legs, I can't sit so long on end - 6an' lors, sir,” says I, “a packman can do wi' a small ’lowance o' church: it tastes strong,” says I: “there's no call to lay it on thick.”] Lors! it's a thousand pities such a lady as you 108 TIE MILL ON TIIE FLOSS. shouldn't deal with a packman, i'stead o goin' into these new-fangled shops, where there's half-a-dozen fine gents wi' their chins propped up wi’ a stiff stock, a-looking like bottles wi' ornamental stoppers, an' all got to get their dinner out of a bit o' calico: it stan's to reason you must pay three times the price you pay a packman, as is the nat ’ral way o' gettin' goods — an' pays no rent, an' isn't forced to throttle himself till the lies are squeezed out on him, whether he will or no. But lors! mum, you know what it is better nor I do — you can see through them shopmen, I'll be bound.' See here, now, here's a thing to make a lass's mouth water, an' on’y two shillin' – an’ why? Why, 'cause there's a bit of a moth-hole i’ this plain end. Lors, I think the moths an' the mildew was sent by Prov- idence o' purpose to cheapen the goods a bit for the good-lookin' women as han't got much money. If it hadn't been for the moths, now, every hankicher on 'em 'ud ha' gone to the rich handsome ladies, like you, mum, at five shillin' apiece - not a farthin' less; but what does the moth do? Why, it nibbles off three shillin' o' the price i' no time, an' then a packman like me can carry't to the poor lasses as live under the dark thack, to make a bit of a blaze for 'em. Lors, it's as good as a fire, to look at such a hankicher.' Mumps doesn't mind a bit o' cheating, when it's them skinflint women, as haggle an' haggle, au' 'ud like to get their flannel for nothing, an’’ud niver ask TIIE MILL ON TIIE FLOSS. 109 theirselves how I got my dinner (ut on't. I niver cheat anybody as doesn't want to cheat me, Miss — lors, I'm a honest chap, I am ; only I must hev a bit o' sport, an' now I don't go wi’ the ferrets, I'n got no varmint to come over but them haggling women.' Oh, it is difficult life is very difficult! It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; — but then, such feelings con- tinually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us — the ties that have made others dependent on us — and would cut them in two. If life were quite casy and simple, as it might have been in paradise, and we could always see that one being first towards whom .... I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes, love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to each other. But I see – I feel it is not so now: there are things we must renounce in life; some of us must resign love. Many things are difficult and dark to me; but I see one thing quite clearly - that I must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey them.” I couldn't live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God.? You feel, as I do, that the real tie lies in the feelings and expectations we have raised in other miuds. Else 110 TIIE JILL ON TIE FLOSS. all pledges might be broken, when there was no out. ward penalty. There would be no such thing as faith- fulness. Faithfulness and constancy mean something else besides doing what is easiest and pleasantest to our- selves. They mean renouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in us — whatever would cause misery to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent on us. 2 If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment. I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music. At other times one is conscious of carrying a weight. ? If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or every- day clothes, hung up in a sacred place.? I're never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them. It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity 112 THE MILL ON TIE FLOSS. mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us, and doing what is given us to do. I'll tell you how I got on. It wasn't by getting astride a stick, and thinking it would turn into a horse. if I sat on it long enough. I kept my eyes and ears open, sir, and I wasn't too fond of my own back, and I made my master's interest my own.3 If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself - that's where it is. 3 You youngsters nowadays think you're to begin with living well and working easy : you've no notion of running afoot before you get on horseback.3 You must remember it isn't only laying hold of a rope -- you must go on pulling. It's the mistake you lads make that have got nothing either in your brains or your pocket, to think you've got a better start in the world if you stick yourselves in a place where you can keep your coats clean, and have the shop-wenches take you for finc gentlemen. That wasn't the way I started, young man: when I was sixteen, my jacket smelt of tar, and I wasn't afraid of handling cheeses. That's the reason I can wear good broadcloth now, and have my legs under the same table with the heads of the best firms in St. Ogg's.3 THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. 113 I want Tom to know figures, and write like print, and see into things quick, and know what folks mean, and how to wrap things up in words as aren't action- able. It's an uncommon fine thing, that is, when you can let a man know what you think of him without paying for it. It's a pity but what Maggie 'd been the lad-she'd ha' been a match for the lawyers, she would. It's the wonderful'st thing as I picked the mother, because she wasn't o'er 'cute — bein' a good-looking woman too, an' come of a rare family for managing; but I picked her from her sisters o' purpose, 'cause she was a bit weak, like; for I wasn't agoin' to be told the rights o' things by my own fireside. But you see when a man's got brains himself, there's no knowing where they'll run to; an' a pleasant sort o' soft woman may go on breeding you stupid lads and 'cute wenches, till it's like as if the world was turned topsy-turvy. It's an uncommon puzzlin' thing." It is mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way.• A feeling of revenge is not worth much, that yon should care to keep it. I don't think any of the strongest effects our natures are susceptible of can ever be explained. We can peither detect the process by which they are arrived at, nor the mode in which they act on us. The great- 114 TIIE MILL ON THE FLOSS. est of painters only once painted a mysteriously divino child; he couldn't have told how he did it, and we can't tell why we feel it to be divine. I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our under- standings can make no complete inventory of. Certain strains of music affect me so strangely – I can never hear them without their changing my whole attitude of mind for a time, and if the effect would last, I might be capable of heroisms.5 Love gives insight, and insight often gives fore. boding.' I think of too many things -- sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from any one of them. I'm cursed with susceptibility in every direction, and effec- tive faculty in none. I care for painting and music; I care for classic literature, and medieval literature, and modern literature; I flutter all ways, and fly m none.5 It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are cer- tain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. How can we ever be satis- fied without them until our feelings are deadened? I delight in fine pictures - I long to be able to paint such. I strive and strive, and can't produce what I want. That is pain to me, and always will be pain, until my faculties lose their keenness, like aged eyes." TIE MILL ON TIE FLOSS. 115 Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps I feel about you as the artist does about the scene over which his soul has brooded with love: he would tremble to see it con- fided to other hands; he would never believe that it could bear for another all the meaning and the beauty it bears for him.5 You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or muti- lating one's nature.5 I can't think what witchery it is in you, Maggie, that makes you look best in shabby clothes; though you really must have a new dress now. But do you know, last night I was trying to fancy you in a handsome fashionable dress, and do what I would, that old limp merino would come back as the only right thing for you. I wonder if Marie Antoinette looked all the grander when her gown was darned at the elbows. Now, if I were to put anything shabby on, I should be quite unnoticeable - I should be a mere rag. 6 I suppose all phrases of mere compliment have their turn to be true. A man is occasionally grateful when he says thank yon.” It's rather hard upon him that he must use the same words with which all the world declines a disagreeable invitation - don't you think 50, Miss Tuliver?! 116 TIE MILL ON THE FLOSS. - Well, it will not go on much longer, for the bazaar is to take place on Monday week.6 Thank heaven! Kenn himself said the other day, that he didn't like this plan of making vanity to do the work of charity; but just as the British public is not reasonable enough to bear direct taxation, so St. Ogg's has not got force of motive enough to build and endow schools without calling in the force of folly.? Evicom ".ME MILL. ON THE VLORS.” SILAS MARNER (UIT: SILAS MARNER. In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet inen are led away from threatening destruc- tion: a land is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's. The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots. That famous ring that pricked its owner when he forgot duty and followed desire - I wonder if it prickej very hard when he set out on the chase, or whether it pricked but lightly then, and only pierced to the quick when the chase had long been ended, and hope, fold- ing her wings, looked backward and became regret? If there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable. (119) 120 SILAS MARNER. Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we de- tect the smallest sign of the bud. Favorable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished mau of these days yet into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute hon- est work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleun who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possibile state of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance, that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let lim forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentil- ities in a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The cvil principle deprecated in that re- ligion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind. SILAS MARNER. 121 To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and niystery: to their utravelled thought a state of wan- dering was a conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust, which would have prevented any surprise if a long course of inoffensive conduct on his part had ended in the commission of a crime; especially if he had any reputation for knowledge, or showed any skill in handi- craft. All cleverness, whether in the rapid use of that difficult instrument the tongue, or in some other art unfamiliar to villagers, was in itself suspicious : honest folks, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly not overwise or clever - at least, not beyond such a matter as knowing the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden, that they partook of the nature of conjuring. The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature. The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimnings when once the actions have become a lie. The sense of security more frequently springs from 122 SILAS MARNER. habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest aların. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by au accident as a reason why he should appreliend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink; and it is often observable, that the older a man gets, the more dificult it is to him to retain a believing conception of his own death. Instead of trying to still his fears, Godfrey encour- aged them, with that superstitious impression which clings to us all, that if we expect evil very strongly it is the less likely to come. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. Let even an affectionate Goliath get himself tied to a small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still more to snap the cord, and which of the two, pray, will be master? The vindication of the loved object is the best balm affection can find for its wounds :-"A man must have SILAS MARNER. 123 80 much on his mind,” is the belief by which a wife often supports a cheerful face under rough answers and unfeeling words. Excessive rumination and self-questioning is perhaps a inorbid habit inevitable to a mind of much moral sensibility when shut out from its due share of out- ward activity, and of practical claims on its affections - inevitable to a noble-hearted, childless woman, when her lot is narrow. "I can do so little – have I done! it all well?” is the perpetually recurring thought; and there are no voices calling her away from that solil- oquy, no peremptory demands to divert energy from vain regret or superfluous scruple. I suppose it is the way with all men and women who reach middle age without the clear perception that life never can be thoroughly joyous : under the vague dul- ness of the gray hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation of an untried good. Dissatisfaction, seated musingly on a childless hearth, thinks with envy of the father whose return is greeted by young voices - seated at the meal where the little heads rise one above another like nursery plants, it sees a black care hovering behind every one of them, and thinks the impulses by which men abandon free- dom, and seek for ties, are surely nothing but a brief madness. That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a 124 SILAS MARNEK. great weariness or a great danger- not to be inter: fered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose. Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile. Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings. The subtle and varied pains springing out the higher sensibility that accompanies higher cuille, are perhaps less pitiable than that dreary absence of im- personal enjoyment and consoi ition which leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship on their own griefs and discontents. Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit. A plain man, speaking under some embarrassment, necessarily blunders on words that are coarser than his intentions, and that are likely to fall gratingly on suisceptible feelings. I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbors with our words is, that our good-will gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pellitoes without giving them a flavor of our own SILAS JARNER. 125 egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invis- ible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly trans- ported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love have per- haps sought this Lethean influence of ex re, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories. Have not men, shut up in solitary imprisonment, found an interest in marking the moments by straight strokes of a certain length on the wall, until the growth of the sum of straight strokes, arranged in triangles, has become a mastering purpose? Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by re- peating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit? That will help us to understand how the love of accu- mulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it. 126 SILAS MARNEK. Marner's life had reduced itself to the mere function of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplatio of an end towards which the functions tended. Tk same sort of process has perhaps been undergone b wiser men, when they have been cut off from faith an: love -- only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas. they have had some erudite research, some ingenioum project, or some well-knit theory. The child was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep- only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into tha: wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky – before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway. The excitement had not passed away: it had only reached that stage when the keenness of the suscepti- bility makes the external stimulus intolerable - when there is no sense of weariness, but rather an intensity of inward life, under which sleep is an impossibility. Any one who has watched such moments in other men remembers the brightness of the eyes and the strange definiteness that comes over coarse features from that transient influence. It is as if a new fineness of ear for all spiritual voices had sent wonder-working vibra- tions through the heavy mortal frame-as if “beauty born of murmuring sound” had passed into the face of the liste ier. SILAS MARNER. 127 To people accustomed to reason abont the forins in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection. - Strange lingering echoes of the old demon worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent lis- tener among the gray-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain from in- flicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear. “Is there anything you can fancy that you would like to eat?” I once said to an old laboring man, who was in his last illness, and wbo had refused all the food his wife had offered him. “No,” he answered, “I've never been used to nothing but common victual, and I can't eat that.” Experi- ence had bred no fancies in him that could raise the phantasm of appetite. Well, Master Ma'ner, it's niver too late to turn ove' 130 SILAS JARNER. abuse their husbands, and then they turn round on one and praise 'em as if they wanted to sell 'em. There's nothing like a dairy if folks want a bit o' worrit to make the days pass. For as for rubbing furniture, when you can once see your face in a table there's nothing else to look for; but there's always something fresh with the dairy : for even in the depths o'winter there's some pleasure in conquering the butter, and making it come whether or no.? There's nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself. It's a deal the best way o' being master, to let somebody else do the ordering, and keep the blaming in your own hands. It ’ud save many a man a stroke, I believe.? You're right there, Tookey: there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.: Meanin' goes but a little way i' most things, for you may mean to stick things together and your glue may be bad, and then where are you? There's reasons in things as nobody knows on- that's pretty much what I've made out; though some folks are so wise, they'll find you fifty reasons straight SILAS MARNER. 131 off, and all the while the real reason's winking at 'em in the corner, and they niver see 't.: Breed is stronger than pasturc.“ Things look dim to old folks : they'd need have somo young eyes about 'em, to let 'em know the world's the same as it used to be.“ There's debts we can't pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped hy. While I've been putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing - it's too late now." Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand. END OF “SILAS MARNER." ROMOLA (188) ROMOLA. The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great lɔves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history – hunger and labor, seed- time and harvest, love and death. Even if, instead of following the dim daybreak, our imagination pauses on a certain historical spot, and awaits the fuller morning, we may see a world-famous city, which has hardly changed its outline since the days of Columbus, seeming to stand as an almost un- violated symbol, amidst the flux of human things, to remind us that we still resemble the men of the past more than we differ from them, as the great mechan- ital principles on which those domes and towers were raised must make a likeness in human building that will be broader and deeper than all possible change. Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our owu will. Nay, children (135) 136 ROMOLA. may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our conscious. ness. Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires — the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of public confes- sion springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity. If the subtle mixture of good and evil prepares suffering for human truth and purity, there is also suffering prepared for the wrong-doer by the same mingled conditions. Necessity does the work of courage. Tito's mind was destitute of that dread which has heen erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher than a man's animal care for his own skin: that awe of the Divine Nemesis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took a more positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the mass of mankind simply as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong- doing. Such terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate that coward. ROMOLA. 137 ice: it is the initial recognition of a moral law re- straining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling. “ It is good,” sing the old Eumenides, in Æschylus, “ that fear should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom - good that men should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else, how should they learn to revere the right?” That guardianship may become needless; but only when all outward law has become needless - only when duty and love have united in one stream and made a common force. The exhaustion consequent on violent emotion is apt to bring a dreamy disbelief in the reality of its cause. We are so made, almost all of us, that the false seeming which we have thought of with painful shrink- ing when beforehand in our solitude it has urged itself on us as a necessity, will possess our muscles and move our lips as if nothing but that were easy when once we have come under the stimulus of expectant eyes and ears. It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate power of some strong unques- tioning emotion, to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities be. yond its own horizon. 138 ROMOLA. Every strong feeling makes to itself a conscience of its own — has its own piety; just as much as the feel- ing of the son towards the mother, which will some. times survive amid the worst fumes of depravation. While we are still in our youth there can always come, in our early waking, moments when mere pas. sive existence is itself a Lethe, when the exquisiteness of subtle indefinite sensation creates a bliss which is without memory and without desire. Even to the man who presents the most elastic resistance to whatever is unpleasant, there will come moments when the pressure from without is too strong for him, and he must feel the smart and the bruise in spite of himself. A man's own safety is a god that sometimes makes very grim demands. Tito showed no other change from the two months and more that had passed since his first appearance in the weather-stained tunic and hose, than that added radiance of good fortune, which is like the just per- ceptible perfecting of a flower after it has drunk a morning's sunbeams. The feelings that gather fervor from novelty will be of little help towards making the world a home for dimmed and faded human beings; and if there is any love of which they are not widowed, it must be tho ROMOLA. 139 love that is rooted in memories and distils perpetually the sweet balms of fidelity and forbearing tenderness. The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality. A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth, as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather: what is she to believe in, if not in this vision woven from within? No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled. All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that thore would be no lapse into the old monotony. Our relations with our fellow-men are niost often determined by coincident currents; the inexcusable word or deed seldom comes until after affection or 140 ROMOLA. reverence has been already enfeebled by the strain of repeated excuses. There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mistake. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and then forever passed her by. All minds, except such as are delivered from doubt by dulness of sensibility, must be subject to a recur- ring conflict where the many-twisted conditions of life have forbidden the fulfilment of a bond. For in strict- ness there is no replacing of relations: the presence of the new does not nullify the failure and breach of the old. Life has lost its perfection; it has been maimed; and until the wounds are quite scarred, con- science continually casts backward, doubting glances. She who willingly lifts up the veil of her married life has profaned it from a sanctuary into a vulgar place. If energetic belief, pursuing a grand and remote end, is often in danger of becoming a demon-worship, in which the votary lets his son and daughter pass through the fire with a readiness that hardly looks like sacri- fice : tender fellow-feeling for the nearest has its dan- ger too, and is apt to be timid and sceptical towards the larger aims without which life cannot rise into religion. ROMOLA. it is the lot of every man who has to speak for the satisfaction of the crowd, that he must often speak in virtue of yesterday's faith, hoping it will come back to-morrow. There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to stand by and wonder. They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in one instant does the work of long premeditation. It is in the nature of all human passion, the lowest as well as the highest, that there is a point at which it ceases to be properly egoistic, and is like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel. Love does not aim simply at the conscious good of the beloved object: it is not satisfied without perfect loyalty of heart: it aims at its own completeness. Wherever affection can spring, it is like the green leaf and the blossom - pure, and breathing purity, whatever soil it may grow in. Life never seems so clear and easy as when the heart is beating faster at the sight of some generous self- risking deed. We feel no doubt then what is the high est prize the soul can win; we almost believe in our own power to attain it. As Romola walked, often in weariness, among the 142 RONOLA. sick, the hungry, and the murmuring, she felt it good to be inspired by something more than her pity — by the belief in a heroism struggling for sublime ends, towards which the daily action of her pity could only tend feebly, as the dews that freshen the weedy ground to-day tend to prepare an unseen harvest in the years to come. After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The great world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and hope. To the common run of mankind it has always seemed a proof of mental vigor to find moral questions easy, and judge conduct according to concise alternatives. To have a mind well oiled with that sort of argument which prevents any claim from grasping it, seems emi- nently convenient sometimes; only the oil becomes objectionable when we find it anointing other minds on which we want to establish a hold. As a strong body struggles against fumes with the more violence when they begin to be stifling, a strong soul struggles against phantasies with all the more alarmel energy when they threaten to govern in the place of thought. 144 ROMOLA. souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character. Tito had an innate love of reticence - let us say a talent for it - which acted as other impulses do, with- ont any conscious motive, and, like all people to whom concealment is easy, he would now and then conceal something which had as little the nature of a secret as the fact that he had seen a flight of crows. When was the fatal coquetry inherent in superfluous authorship ever quite contented with the ready praise of friends? Perfect scheming demands omniscience. Tito felt for the first time, without defining it to him- self, that loving awe in the presence of noble woman- hood, which is perhaps something like ühe worship paid of old to a great nature-goddess, who was not all-knowing, but whose life and power were something deeper and more primordial than knowledge. Perhaps of all sombre paths that on which we go back, after treading it with a strong resolution, is the one that most severely tests the ſervor of renuncia- tiol. Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air- ROMOLA. 145 blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle- down. Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have once acted greatly seems a reason why we should always be noble. There is no kind of conscious obedience that is not an advance on lawlessness. A widow at fifty-five whose satisfaction has been largely drawn from what she thinks of her own person, and what she believes others think of it, requires a great fund of imagination to keep her spirits buoyant. In the career of a great public orator who yields himself to the inspiration of the moment, that conflict of selfish and unselfish emotion which in most men is hidden in the chamber of the soul, is brought into ter- rible evidence; the language of the inner voices is written out in letters of fire. Romola felt that intensity of life which seems to transcend both grief and joy – in which the mind seems to itself akin to elder forces that wrought out existence before the birth of pleasure and pain. This was the tangled web that Romola had in her mind as she sat weary in the darkness. No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for 10 146 ROMOLA. her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear mes. sages. Such truth as came to them was brought con- fusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision- men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the ar- rest of inaction and death. There was nothing transcendent in Savonarola's face. It was not beautiful. It was strong-featured, and owed all its refinement to habits of mind and rigid discipline of the body. The source of the impression his glance produced on Romola was the sense it conveyed to her of interest in her and care for her apart from any personal feeling. It was the first time she had en- countered a gaze in which simple human fellowship expressed itself as a strongly-felt bond. Such a glance is half the vocation of the priest or spiritual guide of 10ên, There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence; there are others to whom we have need to carry our trust and reverence ready-made. ROMOLA. 147 The inspiring consciousness breathed into Roinola by Savonarola's influence that her lot was vitally united with the general lot had exalted even the minor details of obligation into religion. She was marching with a great army; she was feeling the stress of a common life. If victims were needed, and it was uncertain on whom the lot might fall, she would stand ready to answer to her name. She had stood long; she had striven hard to fulfil the bond, but she had seen all the conditions which made the fulfilment possible grad- ually forsaking her. The one effect of her marriage- tie seemed to be the stifling predominance over her of a nature that she despised. All her efforts at union had only made its impossibility more palpable, and the relation had become for her simply a degrading ser- vitude. The law was sacred. Yes, but rebellion might be sacred too. It flashed upon her mind that the problem before her was essentially the same as that which had lain before Savonarola — the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended, and where the sa- credness of rebellion began. To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the face of a law which is not unarmed with Divine lightnings — light- nings that may yet fall if the warrant has been false. No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence. Romola's trust in Savonarola was something like a rope sus- pended securely by her path, making her step elastic 148 ROMOLA. while she grasped it; if it were suddenly removed, no firmness of the ground she trod could save her from staggering, or perhaps from falling. Savonarola's nature was one of those in which op- posing tendencies coexist in almost equal strength : the passionate sensibility which, impatient of definite thought, floods every idea with emotion and tends towards contemplative ecstacy, alternated in him with a keen perception of outward facts and a vigorous practical judgment of men and things. It was the habit of Savonarola's mind to conceive great things, and to feel that he was the man to do them. Iniquity should be brought low; the cause of justice, purity, and love should triumph; and it should triumph by his voice, by his work, by his blood. In moments of ecstatic contemplation, doubtless the sense of self melted in the sense of the unspeakable, and in that part of his experience lay the elements of genuine self-abasement; but in the presence of his fellow-men for whom he was to act, preëminence seemed a nec- essary condition of his life. Perhaps no man has ever had a mighty influence over his fellows without having the innate need to dominate, and this need usually becomes the more im- perious in proportion as the complications of life make Self inseparable from a purpose which is not selfish. ROMOLA. 149 Impelled partly by the spiritual necessity that was laid upon him to guide the people, and partly by the prompting of public men who could get no measures carried without his aid, Savonarola was rapidly pass- ing in his daily sermons from the general to the special — from telling his hearers that they must post- pone their private passions and interests to the public good, to telling them precisely what sort of govern- inent they must have in order to promote that good- from “ Choose whatever is best for all ” to “ Choose the Great Council,” and “the Great Council is the will of God.” To Savonarola these were as good as identical prop- ositions. The Great Council was the only practicable plan for giving an expression to the public will large enough to counteract the vitiating influence of party interests: it was a plan that would make honest im- partial public action at least possible. And the purer the government of Florence would become - the more secure from the designs of men who saw their own advantage in the moral debasement of their fellows --- the nearer would the Florentine people approach the character of a pure community, worthy to lead the way in the renovation of the Church and the world. And Fra Girolamo's mind never stopped short of that sublimest ond: the objects towards which he felt him- self working had always the same moral magnificence. He had no private malice — he sought no petty gratifi- cation. Even in the last terrible days, when igno- miny, torture, and the fear of torture, had laid bare every hidden weakness of his soul, he could say to 150 ROMOLA. his importunate judges: “Do not wonder if it seems to you that I have told but few things; for my pur- poses were few and great." The real force of demonstration for Girolamo Savo- narola lay in his own burning indignation at the sight of wrong; in his fervent belief in an Unseen Justice that would put an end to the wrong, and in an Unseen Purity to which lying and uncleanness were an abomi- nation. To his ardent, power-loving soul, believing in great ends, and longing to achieve those ends hy the exertion of its own strong will, the faith in a supreme and righteous Ruler became one with the faith in a speedy divine interposition that would punish and reclaim. · The worst drop of bitterness can never be wrung on to our lips from without: the lowest depth of resig- nation is not to be found in martyrdom; it is only to be found when we have covered our heads in silence and felt, “I am not worthy to be a martyr; the truth shall prosper, but not by me.” There is no jot of worthy evidence that from the time of his imprisonment to the supreme moment, Savonarola thought or spoke of himself as a martyr. The idea of martyrdom had been to him a passion dividing the dream of the future with the triumph of beholding his work achieved. And now, in place of both, had come a resignatio, which he called by no glorifying name. ROMOLA. 153 But therefore he may the more fitly be called a martyr by his fellow-men to all time. For power rose against him not because of his sius, but because of his greatness — not because he sought to deceive the world, but because he sought to make it noble. And through that greatness of his he endured a double agony: not only the reviling, and the torture, and the death-throe, but the agony of sinking from the vision of glorious achievement into that deep shadow where he could only say, “I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me: yet the light I saw was the true light.” Perhaps, while no preacher ever had a more massive influence than Savonarola, no preacher ever had more heterogeneous materials to work upon. And one secret of the massive influence lay in the highly mixed character of his preaching. Baldassarre, wrought into an ecstasy of self-martyring revenge, was only an ex- treme case among the partial and narrow sympathies of that audience. In Savonarola's preaching there were strains that appealed to the very finest susceptibil- ities of men's natures, and there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous superstition. His need of per- sonal predominance, his labyrinthine allegorical inter- prctations of the Scriptures, his enigmatic visions, and his false certitude about the Divine intentions, never ceased, in his own large soul, to be ennobled by that fervid piety, that passionate sense of the infinite, that active sympathy, that clear-sighted demand for the ROMOLA. 153 Be not offended, bel giovane ; I am but repeating what I hear in my shop: as you may perceive, my eloquence is simply the cream which I skim off my clients' talk. IIeaven forbid I should fetter my im- partiality by entertaining an opinion.' Ah, mind is an enemy to beauty! I myself was thought beautiful by the women at one time --- when I was in my swaddling-bands. But now-oimè! I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!! We Florentines have liberal ideas about speech, and consider that an instrument which can flatter and prom- ise so cleverly as the tongue, must have been partly made for those purposes; and that truth is a riddle for eyes and wit to discover, which it were a mere spoil ing of sport for the tongue to betray." The cat couldn't eat her mouse if she didn't catch it alive, and Bratti couldn't relish gain if it had no taste of a bargain. The secret of oratory lies, not in saying new things, but in saying things with a certain power that moves the hearers - without which, as old Filelfo has said, your speaker deserves to be called, “non oratorem, sed (ıratorem.” And, according to that test, Fra Girolamo is a great orator. 3 I measure men's dulness by the devices they trust in for deceiving others. 154 ROVOLA. Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.3 Many of these half-way severities are mere hot- hearled blundering. The only safe blows to be in- flicted on men and parties are the blows that are too heavy to be avenged. If a mai incurs odium by sanctioning a severity that is wvi thorough enough to be final, he commits & blunder.3 I think all lines of the human face have something either touching or grand, unless they seem to come from low passions, 4 There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once Segotten. Father, it is a great gift of the gods to be born with a hatred and contempt of all injustice and meanness. Yours is a higher lot, never to have lied and truckled, than to have shared honors won by dishonor.3 It is strange this life of men possessed with fervid peliefs that seem like madness to their fellow-beings. You talk of substantial good, Tito! Are faithful- ness, and jɔve, and sweet grateful memories, no good? Is it no good that we should keep our silent promises on which others build because they believe in our love RUMOLA, 155 and truth? Is it uo good that a just lite should be justly honored? Or, is it good that we should harden our hearts against all the wants and hopes of those who have depended on us? What good can belong to men who have such souls? To talk cleverly, perhaps, and find soft couches for themselves, and live and die with their base selves as their best companions.“ It is only a poor sort of happiness, my Lillo, that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest hap- piness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good. There are so many things wrong and diffi- cult in the world, that no man can be great -- he can hardly keep himself from wickedness- unless he gives up thinking much about pleasure or rewards, and gets strength to endure what is hard and painful. My father had the greatness that belongs to integrity; he chose poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood. And there was Fra Girolamo - you know why I keep to-morrow sacred; he had the greatness which belongs to a life spent in struggling against powerful wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable of. And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of men, you must learn to fix your mind 156 ROMOLA. on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it. And remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure and escape from what is dis- agreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it, and tlat may well make a man say, “It would have been better for me if I had never been born." 4 Blindness acts like a dam, sending the streams of thought backward along the already-travelled channels and hindering the course onward.5 It is too often the "palma sine pulvere," the prize of glory without the dust of the race, that young ambition covets. But what says the Greek? “In the morning of life, work; in the mid-day, give counsel; in the evening, pray.” 5 In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause. When the towers fall, you know it is an ill business for the small nest-builders.6 Old men's eyes are like old men's memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.? I enter into no plots, but I never forsake my colors. ROMOLA. 157 If I march abreast with obstinate men, who will rush on guns and pikes, I must share the consequences.? Solco torto, sacco dritto – many a full sack comes from a crooked furrow; and he who will be captain of none but honest men will have small hire to pay.? My daughter, every bond of your life is a debt: the right lies in the payment of that debt; it can lie no- where else. 8 You are flying from your debts: the debt of a Flor- entine woman; the debt of a wife. You are turning your back on the lot that has been appointed for you - you are going to choose another. But can man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother. My daughter, you are fleeing from the presence of God into the wilderness. You are seeking your own will, my daughter. You are seeking some good other than the law you are bound to obey. But how will you find good? It is not a thing of choice: it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne, and flows by the path of obedience. I say again, man cannot choose his duties. You may choose to forsake your duties, and choose not to have the sorrow they bring. But you will go forth; and what will you find, my daughter? Sorrow without duty — bitter herbs, and no bread with them.' 158 RONOLA. My daughter, it the cross comes to you as a wife, you must carry it as a wife. You may say, “I will forsake my husband,” but you cannot cease to be a wife.8 The higher life begins for us, my daughter, when we renounce our own will to bow before a Divine law. That seems hard to you. It is the portal of wisdom, and freedom, and blessedness. And the symbol of it hangs before you. That wisdom is the religion of the cross.8 The cause of freedom, which is the cause of God's kingdom upon earth, is often most injured by the ene- mies who carry within them the power of certain hu- man virtues. The wickedest man is often not the most insurmountable obstacle to the triumph of good. Romolo. - Take care, father, lest your enemies have some reason when they say, that in your visions of what will further God's kingdom you see only what will strengthen your own party. Savonarola. — And that is true! The cause of my party is the cause of God's kingdom. Romola. – I do not believe it! God's kingdom is something wider --- else let me stand outside it with the beings that I love. Eat eggs in Lent and the snow will melt. That's what I say to our people when they get noisy over their cups at San Gallo, and talk of raising a roma ROMOLA. 159 (insurrection): I say, never do you plan a romor; you may as well try to fill Arno with buckets. When there's water enough Arno will be full, and that will not be till the torrent is ready.. A philosopher is the last sort of animal I should choose to resemble. I find it enough to live, without spinuing lies to account for life. A perfect traitor should have a face which vice caji write no marks on - lips that will lie with a dimpled smile - eyes of such agate-like brightness and depth that no infamy can dull them - cheeks that will rise from a murder and not look haggard. 10 Nello, thy tongue runs on as usual, like a mill when the Arno's full — whether there's grist or not. 10 Holy Madonna! It seems as if widows had nothing to do now but to buy their coffins and think it a thou- sand years till they get into them, instead of enjoying themselves a little when they've got their hands free for the first time. 11 Let Romola muffle herself as she will, every one wants to see what there is under her veil, for she has that way of walking like a procession." What I say is, we've got to reverence the saints, and not to set ourselves up as if we could be like them, else life would be unbearable." 160 ROMOLA. There has been no great people without processions, and the man who thinks himself too wise to be moved by them to anything but contempt, is like the puddle that was proud of standing alone while the river rushed by. 12 No man is matriculated to the art of life til he has been well tempted. 12 I remember our Antonio getting bitter about his chiselling and enamelling of these metal things, and taking in a fury to painting, because, said he, “the artist who puts his work into gold and silver, puts his brains into the melting-pot.13 After all the talk of scholars, there are but two sorts of government: one where men show their teeth at each other, and one where men show their tongues and lick the feet of the strongest. 13 To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath. 14 END OF "ROMOLA.' FELIX HOLT. (161) FELIX HOLT. THERE is seldom any wrong-doing which does not carry along with it some downfall of blindly-climbing hopes, some hard entail of suffering, some quickly- satiated desire that survives, with the life in death of old paralytic vice, to see itself cursed by its woful progeny - solie tiagic mark of kinship in the one brief life to the far-stretching life that went before, and to the life that is to come after, such as has raised the pity and terror of men ever since they began to discern between will and destiny. But these things are often unknown to the world; for there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that inake human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurry- ing existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer - committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear. (163) 164 FELIX HOLT. Far y what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning: if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in dis- gust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagina- tion, and regarded your passionate pieces with con- tempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks him- self sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except that of self-interest; but the only self-interest he can safely rely on is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever be sure of knowing this? One way of getting an idea of our fellow-country- men's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures. A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime l'hythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partner- ship with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had 166 FELIX HOLT. sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate. Running away, especially when spoken of as ab- sconding, seems at a distance to offer a good modern substitute for the right of sanctuary; but seen closely it is often found inconvenient and scarcely possible. We are all of us made more graceful by the inward presence of what we believe to be a generous purpose; our actions move to a hidden music - "a melody that's sweetly played in tune.” It is only in that freshness of our time (i. e. youth) that the choice is possible which gives unity to life, and makes the memory a temple where all relics and all votive offerings, all worship and all grateful joy, are an unbroken history sanctified by one religion. Jealousy of all sorts – whether for our fortune or our love - is ready at combinations, and likely even to outstrip the fact. All of us — whether men or women - are liable to this weakness of liking to have our preference justified before others as well as ourselves. It is terrible — the keen bright eye of a woman when it nas once been turned with admiration on what is severely true; but then the severely true rarely comes within its range of visiou. FELIX HOLT. 167 A woman's lot is made for hier by the love she ac- cepts. It comes in so many forms in this life of ours — the knowledge that there is something sweetest and no- blest of which we despair, and the sense of something present that solicits us with an immediate and easy indulgence. Human beings in moments of passionate reproach and denunciation, especially when their anger is on their own account, are never so wholly in the righ! that the person who has to wince cannot possibly pro- test against some unreasonableness or unfairness in their outburst. In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also. Perhaps some of the most terrible irony of the human Got is this of a deep truth coming to be uttered by lips that have no right to it. There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling. There is no point on which young women are more casily piqued than this of their sufficiency to judge the men who make love to them. 168 FELIX HOLT. A mind in the grasp of a terrible anxiety is not cred. ulous of easy solutions. The one stay that bears up our hopes is sure to appear frail, and if looked at long will seem to totter. A man with a definite will and an energetic person- ility acts as a sort of flag to draw and bind together che foolish units of a mob. In a mind of any nobleness, a lapse iuto transgres- sion against an object still regarded as supreme, issues in a new and purer (levotedness, chastised by humility and watched over by a passionate regret. So it was with that ardent spirit which animated the little body of Rufus Lyon. Once in his life he had been blinded, deafened, hurried along by rebellious impulse; he had gone astray after his own desires, and had let the fire die out on the altar: and as the true penitent, hating his self-besotted error, asks from all coming life duty instead of joy, and service instead of ease, so Rufus was perpetually on the watch lest he should ever again postpone to some private affection a great public opportunity which to him was equivalent to a cominand. To the end of inen's struggles a penalty will remain for those who sink from the ranks of the heroes into the crowd for whom the heroes fight and die. Very slight words and deeds may have a sacra. mental eflicacy, if we can cast our self-love behind us, FELIX HOLT. 169 in order to say or do them. And it has been well be- lieved through many ages that the beginning of com- punction is the beginning of a new life; that the mind which sees itself blameless may be called dead in tres- passes - in trespasses on the love of others, in tres- passes on their weakness, in trespasses on all those great claims which are the image of our own need. It is in the nature of exasperation gradually to con- centrate itself. The sincere antipathy of a dog towards cats in general, necessarily takes the form of indignant barking at the neighbor's black cat which makes daily trespass; the bark at imagined cats, though a fre- quent exercise of the canine mind, is yet comparatively feeble. Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking. It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in the back-ground, that mothers have a self larger than their maternity, and that when their sons have become taller than themselves, and are gone from them to college or into the world, there are wide spaces of their time which are not filled with praying for their boys, read. ing old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt-buttons. The stronger will always rule, say some, with an air of confidence which is like a lawyer's flourish, forbid. FELIX IIOLT. 171 love -- that is, by much suppression of self, and power of living in the experience of another. What to one man is the virtue which he has sunk below the possibility of aspiring to, is to another the backsliding by which he forfeits his spiritual crown. We are very much indebted to such a linking of events as makes a doubtful action look wrong. Harold was one of those people to whose presence in the room you could not be indifferent: if you do not hate or dread them, you must find the touch of their hands, nay, their very shadows, agreeable. Our pet opinic ns are usually those which place us in a minority of a minority amongst our own party :- very happily, else those poor opinions, born with no silver spoon in their mouths - how would they get nourished and fed ? Comprehensive talkers are apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information, but to be quite fair we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to the lack of matter. Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion. 172 FELIX HOLT. A diflident man likes the idea of doing soniething remarkable, which will create belief in him without any immediate display of brilliancy. Celebrity may blush and be silent, and win a grace the more. That talkative maiden, Rumor, though in the inter- est of art she is figured as a youthful winged beauty with flowing garments, soaring above the heads of inen, and breathing world-thrilling news through a gracefully-curved trumpet, is in fact a very old maid, who puckers her silly face by the fireside, and really does no more than chirp a wrong guess or a lame story into the ear of a fellow-gossip; all the rest of the work attributed to her is done by the ordinary working of those passions against which men pray in the Litany, with the help of a plentiful stupidity against which we have never yet had any authorized form of prayer. Quick souls have their intensest life in the first an- ticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pur- suit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisiacal vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing forever even out of hope in the moment which is called success. There is no private life which has not been deter- mined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milk-maid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare. Even in that conservatory existence where the fair Camellia is FELIX HOLT. 173 sighed for by the noble young Pine-apple, neither of them needing to care about the frost or rain outside, there is a nether apparatus of hot-water pipes liable to cool down on a strike of the gardeners or a scarcity of coal. I have known persons who have been suspected of undervaluing gratitude, and excluding it from the list of virtues; but on closer observation it has been seen that, if they have never felt grateful, it has been for want of an opportunity; and that, far from despising gratitude, they regard it as the virtue most of all in- cumbent — on others towards them. At the last moment there is always a reason not existing before — namely, the impossibility of further vacillation. Perhaps the moment of most diffusive pleasure from public speaking is that in which the speech ceases and the audience can turn to commenting on it. The one speech, sometimes uttered under great responsibility as to missiles and other consequences, has given a text to twenty speakers who are under no responsibility. Even in the days of duelling a man was not challenged for being a bore, nor does this quality apparently hin- der him from being much invited to dinner, which is the great index of social responsibility in a less bar- barous age. We hardly allow enough in common life for the re 174 FELIX HOLT. sults of that enkindled passionate enthusiasm which, under other conditions, makes world-famous deeds. Non omnia grandior ætas que fugiamus habet, says the wise goddess: you have not the best of it in all things, O youngsters! the elderly man has his enviable memories, and not the least of them is the memory of a long journey in mid-spring or autumn on the outside of a stage-coach. Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atinospheric pressure from Win- chester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory. The tube- journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory 0! Whereas the happy outside passenger seated on the box from the dawn to the gloaming gathered enough stories of English life, enough of English labors, in town and country, enough aspects of earth and sky, to make episodes for a modern Odyssey. When a woman feels purely and nobly, that ardor of hers which breaks through formulas too rigorously urged on men by daily practical needs, makes one of her most precious influences; she is the added im- pulse that shatters the stiffening crust of cautious experience. Her inspired ignorance gives a sublimity to actions so incongruously simple, that otherwise they would make men smile. FELIX HOL2. 175 The finest threads, such as no eye sees, iſ bound cunningly about the sensitive flesh, so that the move- ment to break them would bring torture, may make a worse bondage than any fetters. From the British point of view masculine beauty is regarded very much as it is in the drapery business : -- as good solely for the fancy department - for young noblemen, artists, poets, and the clergy. On the point of knowing when we are disagreeable, our human nature is fallible. Our lavender-water, our smiles, our compliments, and other polite falsities, are constantly offensive, when in the very nature of them they can only be meant to attract admiration and regard. All knowledge which alters our lives penetrates us more when it comes in the early morning: the day that has to be travelled with something new and per- haps forever sad in its light, is an image of the life that spreads beyond. But at night the time of rest is near. Blows are sarcasms turned stupid : wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest. Jermyn had “been the making of Johnson "; and this seems to many men a reason for expecting devo- tion, in spite of the fact that they themselves, though 176 FELIX HOLT. very fond of their own persons and lives, are not at all devoted to the Maker they believe in. Nature never makes men who are at once energet- ically sympathetic and minutely calculating. Express confessions give definiteness to memories that might more easily melt away without them. Questions of origination in stirring periods are no- toriousiy hard to settle. It is by no means ueces- sary in human things that there should be only one beginner. To be right in great memorable moments, is perhaps the thing we need most desire for ourselves. What we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities - a willing move- ment of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces — a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life. We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little – Inight as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken, and met death- a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the FELIX HOLT. 177 sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall up seen and on barrenness. M.- It was but yesterday you spoke him well — You've changed your mind so soon? N.- Not I-'tis he That, changing to my thought, has changed my mind. No man puts rotten apples in his pouch Because their upper side looks fair to him. Constancy in mistake is constant folly." Oh, sir, 'twas that mixture of spite and over-fed merriment which passes for humor with the vulgar. In their fun they have much resemblance to a turkey- cock. It has a cruel beak, and a silly iteration of ugly sounds; it spreads its tail in self-glorification, but shows you the wrong side of that ornament- liking admiration, but knowing not what is admir- able. 11 It is a good and soothfast saw; Half roasted never will be raw; No dough is dried once more to meal, No crock new-shapen by the wheel; You can't turn curds to milk again, Nor Now, by wishing, back to Then; And having tasted stolen honey, You can't buy innocence for money." Tis grievous, that with all amplification of travel 2 178 FELIX COLT. both by sea and land, a man can never separate him. self from his past history." No man believes that many-textured knowledge and skill — as a just idea of the solar system, or the power of painting flesh, or of reading written harmonies — can come late and of a sudden : yet many will not stick at believing that happiness can come at any day and hour solely by a new disposition of events; though there is nought less capable of a magical production than a mortal's happiness, which is mainly a complex of habitual relations and dispositions not to be wrought by news from foreign parts, or any whirling of For- tune's wheel for one on whose brow Time has written legibly. 11 The devil tempts us not — 'tis we tempt him, Beckoning his skill with opportunity." l'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion – the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honor- able and what is shameful. . How can polit- ical freedom make us better, any more than a religion we don't believe in, if people laugh and wink when they see men abuse and defile it? And while public opinion is what it is — while men have no better beliefs about public duty — while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace — while men are not ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen FELIX HOLT. 175 for their own petty private ends, – I say no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our condition. For, take us working men of all sorts. Suppose out of every hundred who had a vote there were thirty who had some soberness, some sense to choose with, some good feeling to make them wish the right thing for all. And suppose there were seventy out of the hundred who were, half of them, not sober, who had no sense to choose one thing in politics more than another, and who had so little good feeling in them that they wasted on their own drinking the money that should have helped to feed and clothe their wives and children; and another half of them who, if they didn't drink, were too ignorant or mean or stupid to see any good for thrinselves better than pocketing a five-shilling piece when it was offered them. Where would be the political power of the thirty sober men? The power would lie with the seventy drunken and stupid votes.' Where's the good of pulling at such a tangled skein as this electioneering trickery? As long as three- fourths of the men in this country see nothing in an election but self-interest, and nothing in self-interest but some form of greed, one might as well try to purify the proceedings of the fishes, and say to a hungry cod- fish — "My good friend, abstain; don't goggle your eyes so, or show such a stupid gluttonous mouth, or think the little fishes are worth nothing except in rela- tion to your own inside.” He'd be open to no argu- ment short of crimping him.' 180 FELIX HOLI. This world is not a very fine place for a good many of the people in it. But I've made up my mind it sha'n't be the worse for me, if I can help it. They may tell me I can't alter the world - that there must be a certain number of sneaks and robbers in it, and if I don't lie and filch somebody else will. Well, then, somebody else shall, for I won't.' The fact is, there are not many easy lots to be drawn in the world at present; and such as they are I am not envious of them. I don't say life is not worth having: it is worth having to a man who has some sparks of sense and feeling and bravery in him. And the finest fellow of all would be the one who could be glad to have lived because the world was chiefly mis- erable, and his life had come to help some one whu needed it. He would be the man who had the most powers and the fewest selfish wants. But I'm not up to the level of what I see to be best.' I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labor and common burden of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the push and the scramble for money and position. Any man is at liberty to call me a fool, and say that mankind are benefited by the push and the scramble in the long- run. But I care for the people who live now and will not be living when the long-run comes. As it is, I pre- fer going shares with the unlucky.' 'I housands of men have wedded poverty because they FELIX HOLT. 18] expect to go to heaven for it; I don't expect to go to heaven for it, but I wed it because it enables me to do what I most want to do on earth. Whatever the hopes for the world may be — whether great or small - I am a man of this generation; I will try to make life less bitter for a few within my reach. It is held reasonable enough to toil for the fortunes of a family, though it may turn to imbecility in the third genera- tion. I choose a family with more chances in it.' It is just because I'm a very ambitious feliow, with very hungry passions, wanting a great deal to satisfy me, that I have chosen to give up what people call worldly good. At least that has been one determining reason. It all depends on what a man gets into his consciousness – what life thrusts into his mind, so that it becomes present to him as remorse is present to the guilty, or a mechanical problem to an inventive genius. There are two things I've got present in that way: one of them is the picture of what I should hate to be. I'm determined never to go about making my face sim- pering or solemn, and telling professional lies for profit; or to get tangled in affairs where I must wink at dishonesty and pocket the proceeds, and justify that knavery as part of a system that I can't alter. If I once went into that sort of struggle for success, I should want to win-I should defend the wrong that I had once identified myself with. I should beco:ne everything that I see now beforehand to be detestable. And what's more, I should do this, as men are doing it every day, for a ridicilously small prize - perhaps for 182 FELIX IIOLT. none at all — perhaps for the sake of two parlors, a rank eligible for the church-wardenship, a discontented wife, and several unhopeful children.' I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best. As to just the amount of result he may see from his particular work — that's a tremendous uncertainty: the unive se has not been arranged for the gratitication of his feel- ings. As long as a man sees and believes in some great good, he'll prefer working towards that in the way he's best fit for, come what may. I put effects at their minimum, but I'd rather have the minimum of effect, if it's of the sort I care for, than the maximum of effect I don't care for - a lot of fine things that are not to my taste — and if they were, the conditions of holding them while the world is what it is, are such as would jar on me like grating metal. Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.' I should say, teach any truth you can, whether it's in the Testament or out of it. It's little enough any. body can get hold of, and still less what he can drive into the skulls of a pence-counting, parcel-tying gen- eration, such as mostly fill your chapels. There are some people one must wish to judge one truly. Not to wish it would be mere hardness." FELIX HOLT. 183 A bachelor's children are always young: they're im- mortal children — always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.' A fine lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs, and small notions, about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest." I can't bear to see you going the way of the foolish women who spoil men's lives. Men can't help loving them, and so they make themselves slaves to the petty desires of petty creatures. That's the way those who might do better spend their lives for nought- get checked in every great effort - toil with brain and limb for things that have no more to do with a manly life than tarts and confectionery. That's what makes women a curse; all life is stunted to suit their little- ness. That's while I'll never love, if I can help it; and if I love, I'll bear it, and never marry.' I wonder whether the subtle measuring of forces will ever come to measuring the force there would be in one beautiful woman whose mind was as noble as her face was beautiful — who made a man's passion for her rush in one current, with all the great aims of his life.' Felix. — I don't measure my force by the negations in me, and think my soul must be a mighty one be. cause it is more given to idle suffering than to benef. 184 FELIX HOLT. icent activity. That's what your favorite gentlemen do, of the Byronic-bilious style. Esther. – I don't admit that those are my favorite gentlemen. Felix. — I've heard you defend them-gentlemen like your Rénés, who have no particular talent for the finite, but a general sense that the infinite is the right thing for them. They might as well boast of nausea as a proof of a strong inside.' I reverence the law, but not where it is a pretext foi wrong, which it should be the very object of law to hinder. ... I hold it blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.' I have had much puerile blame cast upon me, be- cause I have uttered such names as Brougham and Wellington in the pulpit. Why not Wellington as well as Rabshakeh? and why not Brougham as well as Balaam? Does God know less of men than He did in the days of Hezekiah and Moses? — is His arm shortened, and is the world become too wide for His providence?? “And all the people said, Amen.” ... My brethren, do you think that great shout was raised in Israel by each man's waiting to say “amen” till his neighbors had said amen? Do you think there will ever be a great shout for the right - the shout of a nation as of FELIX HOLT. 185 one man, rounded and whole, like the voice of the archangel that bound together all the listeners of earth and heaven - if every Christian of you peeps round to see what his neighbors in good coats are doing, or else puts his hat before his face that he may shout and never be heard? But this is what you do: when the servant of God stands up to deliver his message, do you lay your souls beneath the Word as you set out your plants beneath the falling rain? No; one of you sends his eyes to all corners, he smothers his soul with small questions, “What does brother Y. think?” “Is this doctrine high enough for brother Z.?” 6 Will the church members be pleased?” ? Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others, may happen to sear your own fingers, and make them dead to the quality of things. 'Tis difficult enough to see our way and keep our torch steady in this dim labyrinth : to whirl the torch and dazzle the eyes of our fellow-seekers is a poor daring, and may end in total darkness.? Esther. – This will not be a grief to you, I hope, father? You think it is better that I should go? Rufus. – Nay, child, I am weak. But I would fain be capable of a joy quite apart from the accidents of my aged earthly existence, which, indeed, is a petty and almost dried-up fountain — whereas to the recep- tive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is dimin- ished. 186 FELIX HOLT. Truly, the uncertainty of things is a text rather tou wide and obvious for fruitful application; and to dis- course of it is, as one may say, to bottle up the air, and make a present of it to those who are already standing out of doors.? The Lord knoweth them that are His; but we — we are left to judge by uncertain signs, that so we may learn to exercise hope and faith towards one another; and in this uncertainty I cling with awful hope to those whom the world loves not because their con- science, albeit mistakenly, is at war with the habits of the world. Our great faith, my Esther, is the faith of martyrs : I will not lightly turn away from any man who endures harshness because he will not lie; nay, though I would not wantonly grasp at ease of mind through an arbitrary choice of doctrine, I cannot but believe that the merits of the Divine Sacrifice are wider than our utmost charity. I once believed other- wise – but not now, not now.? I say not that compromise is unnecessary, but it is an evil attendant on our imperfection; and I would pray everyone to mark that, where compromise broadens, intellect and conscience are thrust into nar- rower room. Esther. – But that must be the best life, father. That must be the best life. Rufus. - What life, my dear child? Esther. – Why, that where one bears and does every. FELIX HOLT. 187 thing because of some great and strong feeling -- SO that this and that in one's circumstances don't signify. Rufus. — Yea, verily: but the feeling that should be thus supreme is devotedness to the Divine Will. Even as in music, where all obey and concur to one end, so that each has the joy of contributing to a whole whereby he is ravished and lifted up into the courts of heaven, so will it be in that crowning time of the mil. lennial reign, when our daily prayer will be fulfilled, and one law shall be written on all hearts, and be the very structure of all thought, and be the principle of all action. The very truth hath a color from the disposition of the utterer.3 Where a great weight has to be moved, we require not so much selected instruments as abundant horse- power.” There are many who have helped to draw the car of Reform, whose ends are but partial, and who forsake not the ungodly principle of selfish alliances, but would only substitute Syria for Egypt — thinking chiefly of their own share in peacocks, gold, and ivory.? The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness. 2 The mind that is too ready at contempt and repro- 188 FELIX HOLT. bation is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding aught that is precious – though it were heaven-sent manna.? 'Tis a great and mysterious giſt, this clinging of the heart, my Esther, whereby it hath often seemed to me that even in the very moment of suffering our souls have the keenest foretaste of heaven. I speak not lightly, but as one who hath endured. And 'tis a strange truth that only in the agony of parting we look into the depths of love.2 As for being saved without works, there's a many, I daresay, can't do without that doctrine; but I thank the Lord I never needed to put myself on a level with the thief on the cross. I've done my duty, and more, if anybody comes to that; for I've gone without my bit of meat to make broth for a sick neighbor: and if there's any of the church members say they've done the same, I'd ask them if they had the sinking at the stomach as I have; for I've ever strove to do the right thing, and more, for good-natured I always was.) Your trouble's easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.3 When you've been used to doing things, and they've been taken away from you, it's as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you." FELIX HOLT. 189 I look upon it, life is like our game at whist, when Banks and his wife come to the still-room of an even- ing. I don't enjoy the game much, but I like to play niy cards well, and see what will be the end of it. 4 Why, if I've only got some orange flowers to candy, I shouldn't like to die till I see them all right. 4 I would change with nobody, madam. And if troubles were put up to market, I'd sooner buy old than new. It's something to have seen the worst.“ Well," madam, put a good face on it, and don't seem to be on the look-out for crows, else you'll set other people watching. 4 When I awake at cock-crow, I'd sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It's better to know one's robbed than to think one's going to be murdered. There's a fine presence about Mr. Harold. I re- member you used to say, madam, there were some people you would always know were in the room though they stood round a corner, and others you might never see till you ran against them. That's as true as truth. If a man's got a bit of property, a stake in the coun- try, he'll want to keep things square. Where Jack isn't sai?, Tom's in danger. 5 190 FELIX HOLT. If a nag is to throw me, I say let him have some blood. I've seen it again and again. If a man takes to tongue-work it's all over with him. “Everything's wrong,” says he. That's a big text. But does he want to make everything right? Not he. He'd lose his text. “We want every man's good,” say they. Why, they never knew yet what a man's good is. How should they? It's working for his victual — not get- ting a slice of other people's.5 Putty has said to me, “ Johnson, bear in mind there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don't understand; and the other is, to tell them what they're used to.” I shall never be the man to deny that I owe a great deal to Putty. A man who puts a non-natural strained sense on a promise is no better than a robber.? I'm no fool myself: I'm forced to wink a good deal, for fear of seeing too much, for a neighborly man must let himself be cheated a little.8 None o' your shooting for me – it's two to one you'll miss. Snaring's more fishing-like. You bait your hook, and if it isna the fishes' good-will to come, that's nothing again the sporting genelman. And that's what I say by snaring.' FELIX HOLT. 191 I think half those priggish maxims about human nature in the lump are no more to be relied on than universal remedies. There are different sorts of hu- man nature. Some are given to discontent and long- ing, others to securing and enjoying. And let me tell you, the discontented longing style is unpleasant to live with.10 It is difficult for a woman ever to try to be anything good when she is not believed in — when it is always supposed that she must be contemptible. 19 One likes a “beyond” everywhere. 19 END OF “FELIX HOLT." MIDDLEMARCH. (193) MIDDLEM ARCH. MANNERS must be very marked indeed before they cease to be interpreted by pre-conceptions either cou- fident or distrustful. A man's mind — what there is of it- has always the advantage of being masculine, as the smallest birch- tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm, and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition. Sometimes, indeed, Celia had reflected that Dodo would perhaps not make a husband happy who had not her way of looking at things; and stifled in the depths of her heart was the feeling that her sister was too re- ligious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilled needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating. Here was a man whose learning almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed ! Dorothra's inferences may seem large; but really life could never have gone on at any period but for (195) 196 MIDDLEMARCI. this liberal allowance of conclusions, which has facil. itated marriage under the difficulties of civilization. Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship? Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the un. gauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing re- fiected there in vague labyrinthine extension every quality she herself brought. Signs are small, measurable things, but interpreta- tions are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a diffused thimble- ful of matter in the shape of knowledge. They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sindbad himself may have fallen by good luck on a true description, and wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. With some endowment of stupidity and conceit,- Dorothea might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should should find her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of “Female Scripture Characters,” unfolding the private experience of Sara under the Old Dispen- sation, and Dorcas under the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir — with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if MIDDLEWARCII. 197 less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs re. ligiously inexplicable, might be prayed for and sea- sonably exhorted. On safe opportunities Celia had an indirect mode of making her negative wisdom tell upon Dorothea, and calling her down from her rhapsodic mood hy remind- ing her that people were staring, not listening. Mr. Casaubon seemed even unconscious that triv- ialities existed, and never handed around that small- talk of heavy men which is as acceptable as stale bride- cake brought forth with an odor of cupboard. She pinched Celia's chin, being in the mood now to think her very winning and lovely - fit hereafter to be an eternal cherub, and if it were not doctrinally wrong to say so, hardly more in need of salvation than a squirrel. Mr Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible subject of study, since even he, at his - age, was not in a perfect state of scientific prediction about them. All Dorothea's passion was transfused through a inind struggling toward an ideal life; the radiance of her transfigured girlhood fell on the first object that came within its level. It had been Celia's nature when a child never to 198 MIDDLEWARCH. quarrel with any one — only to observe with wouder that they quarrelled with her, and looked like turkey- cocks; whereupon she was ready to play at cat’s-cradle with them whenever they recovered themselves. Mr. Casaubon was being unconsciously wrought upon by the charms of a nature which was entirely without hidden calculations either for immediate ef fects or for remoter ends. Such a lady gave a neighborliness to both rank and religion, and mitigated the bitterness of uncommuted tithe. A much more exemplary character with an in- fusion of sour dignity would not have furthered their comprehension of the Thirty-nine Articles, and would have been less socially uniting. Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swal- lower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader's match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed. MIDDLEMARCI. 199 Her feeling toward the vulgar rich was a sort of re- ligious hatred: they had probably made all their money out of high retail prices, and Mrs. Cadwallader detested high prices for everything that was not paid in kind at the Rectory : such people were no part of God's de- sign in making the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears. A town where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe. Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the com- prehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honor to coexist with hers. She was the diplomatist of Tipton and Freshitt, and for anything to happen in spite of her was an offensive irregularity. We mortals, men and women, devour many a disap- pointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others. To have in general but little feeling seems to be the ouly security against feeling too much on any partic- ular occasion. 200 MIDDLEMARCI. Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity will help us to be witty. Toe building, of greenish stone, was in the old Eng. lish style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melan. choly looking: the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows, and little vistas of bright things to make it seem a joyous home. Certainly the mistakes that we male and female mor cals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. Dorothea filled up all blanks with unmanifested per- ſections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for secming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies. And there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship, which a loving faith fills with happy assurance. We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos. In fact, the world is full of hopeful anal- ogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities. Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous. I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape unfavorable reflections of himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a MIDDLEMIRCII. 201 spoon, must submit to have thr, ficial angle of a pumpkin. Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pres- sure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him, since we refer him to the Divine regard with perfect confidence; nay, it is even held sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he may have got from us. Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world; if he was liable to think that others were providentially made for him, and especially to consider them in the light of their fitness for the author of a “Key to all Mythologies,” this trait is not quite alien to us, and, like the other mendicant hopes of mortals, claims some of our pity. All Dorothea's eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along. She did not want to deck herself with knowledge – to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action; 202 MIDDLEMARCH. and if she had written a book she must have done it as Saint Theresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained her conscience. Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave whatever nonsense was talked to him, and his dark, steady eyes gave him impressive- pess as a listener. Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investi- gated by science. When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her reso- lution rather than on his. Mr. Casaubon took a wife to adorn the remaining quadrant of his course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable perturbation. Dorothea did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the sec- ond form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven. Any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony MIDDLEMARCII. 203 on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personce folded in her hand. Even those neighbors who had called Peter Feather- stone an old fox had never accused him of being insincerely polite, and his sister was quite used to the peculiar absence of ceremony with which he marked his sense of blood-relationship. Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about families. Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique : she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own. Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged it, self in vain. The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes. 204 MIDDLEMARCA. One can begin so many things with a new person!-- even begin to be a better man. Loud men called his subdued tone an under-tone, and sometimes implied that it was inconsistent with open- ness; though there seems to be no reason why a loud man should not be given to concealment of anything except his own voice, unless it can be shown that Holy Writ has placed the seat of candor in the lungs. Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening, and an apparently fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons who thought them- selves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the utmost improvement from their discourse. Others, who expected to make no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned on them. If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial. Such joys are reserved for con- scious merit. The mother's eyes are not always deceived in their partiality: she at least can best judge who is the ten- der, filial-hearted child. Everybody's family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish or vic- icus diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher intuitive o‘der, lying in his lady patients' immovable conviction, and was unassailable by any MIDDLEMARCI. 205 objection except that their intuitions were opposed by others equally strong. Ldygate was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common — at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, think- ing that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot. He was one of the rarer lads who early get a decided bent, and make up their minds that there is something particular in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because their fathers did it. Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiæ of mental make in which one of us differs from another. Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream of himself as a discoverer? Most of us, indeed, know little of the great originators until they have been lifted up among the constellations, and already rule our fates. But that Herschel, for ex- ample, who “broke the barriers of the heavens” – did he not once play a provincial church organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait 206 MIDDLEMARCH. and his garments than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame : each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small temp- tations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his course toward final companionship with the immortals. One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find depreciated. We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wed- ded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's “ makdom and her fairnesse,” never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of “makdom and fairnesse” which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies : sometimes it is the glorious mar- riage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is wound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the mul- titude of middle-aged men who go about their vo- cations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average, and fit to be MIDDLEWARCI. 207 packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor for generous, anpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the be- ginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath toward infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions; or perhaps it came with the vibra- tions from a woman's glance. Strange that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our per- sistent self pauses and awaits us. In these matters he was conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny; and perhaps the conscious- ness encouraged a little defiance toward the critical strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve their domestic manners, and whose lofty aims were not needed to account for their actions. The character of the publican and sinner is not al- ways practically incompatible with that of the modern Pharisee, for the majority of us scarcely see more dis- tinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the fault- iness of our own arguments, or the dulness of our own jokes. 208 MIDDLEMARCH. Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration : reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer com- ing down on his bad errands as a large, ugly man with bat's wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or ex- aggerations of wantonness that seemed to reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous com- pared with the imagination that reveals subtile actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refine- ment of energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. He, for his part, had tossed away all cheap inventions where ig- norance finds itself able and at ease: he was enamored of that arduous invention which is the very eye of re- search, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness. One must be poor to know the luxury of giving! The Vicar himself seemed to wear rather a changed aspect, as most men do when acquaintynes made else- MIDDLEMARCH. 209 where see them for the first time in their own homes; some indeed showing like an actor of genial parts dis- advantageously cast for the curmudgeon in a new piece. The Rector was a likeable man: sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bit- terness or other conversational flavors which make half of us an affliction to our friends. Many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to "find their feet” among them, while their elders go about their business. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same. And it would be astonishing to find how soon the change is felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it. To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner com- panion, or to see your favorite politician in the Min- istry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing little and believ- ing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities. In courtship everything is regarded as provisional 14 210 MIDDLEWARCH. and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way, and that the sea is not within sight — that, in fact, you are exploring an en- closed basin. There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy. “I am very glad that my presence has made any dif- ference to you,” said Dorothea, who had a vivid mem- ory of evenings in which she had supposed that Mr. Casaubon's mind had gone too deep during the day to be able to get to the surface again. How far the judicious Hooker or any other hero of erudition would have been the same at Mr. Casaubon's time of life, she had no means of knowing, so that he could not have the advantage of comparison; but her husband's way of commenting on the strangely impres- sive objects around them had begun to affect her with a sort of mental shiver: he had perhaps the best inten- tion of acquitting himself worthily, but only of acquit- ting himself. What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling MIDDLEWARCI. 211 as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried prepar- ation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge. On a wedding journey, the express object of which is to isolate two people on the ground that they are all the world to each other, the sense of disagreement is, to say the least, confounding and stultifying. To have changed your longitude extensively, and placed your- selves in a moral solitude in order to have small explo- sions, to find conversation difficult, and to hand a glass of water without looking, can hardly be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment even to the toughest minds. Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the yalue, the indispensable might of that myriad- headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal- shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the high- way, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of inuscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out -- all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry, without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a kiligion without the aid of theology. His early ambi. 212 MIDDLEMARCH. tion had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of “ business”; and though he had only been a short time under a surveyor, and had been chiefly his own teacher, he knew more of land, build- ing, and mining than most of the special men in the county. His classification of human employments was rather crude, and like the categories of more celebrated men, would not be acceptable in these advanced times. He divided them into “ business, politics, preaching, learn- ing, and amusement.” He had nothing to say against the last four; but he regarded them as a reverential pagan regarded other gods than his own. In the same way he thought very well of all ranks, but he would not himself have liked to be of any rank in which he had not such close contact with “business ” as to get often honorably decorated with marks of dust and mortar, the damp of the engine, or the sweet soil of the woods and fields. Though he had never regarded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, and would argue on prevenient grace if the subject were proposed to him, I think his virtual divinities were good prac- tical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful comple- tion of undertakings: his prince of darkness was a slack workman. But there was no spirit of denial in Caleb, and the world seemed so wondrous to him that he was ready to accept any number of systems, like any number of firmaments, if they did not obviously interfere with the best land drainage, solid building, correct measuring, and judicious boring (for coal). In 214 MIDDLEMARCH. To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame. one must have an enthusiastic soul. Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man coulil choose not only his wife, but his wife's husband! Or as if he were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own person! It is an uneasy lot at best to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self — never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but al. ways to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room; and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy. The end of Mr. Brooke's pen was a thinking organ, evolving sentences, especially of a benevolent kind, before the rest of his mind could well overtake them. It expressed regrets and proposed remedies, which, MIDDLEMARCII. 215 when Mr. Brooke read them, seemed felicitously worded — surprisingly the right thing, and determined a sequel which he had never before thought of. The right word is always a power, and communi. cates its definiteness to our action. There was a general sense running in the Feather. stone blood that everybody must watch everybody else, and that it would be well for everybody else to reficct that the Almighty was watching him. He was a large-cheeked man, nearly seventy, with small, furtive eyes, and was not only of much blander temper, but thought himself much deeper than his brother Peter; indeed, not likely to be deceived in any of his fellow-men, inasmuch as they could not well be more greedy and deceitful than he suspected them of being. He was an amateur of superior phrases, and never used poor language without immediately correcting himself — which was fortunate, as he was rather loud, and given to predominate, standing or walking about frequently, pulling down his waistcoat with the air of a man who is very much of his own opinion, trimming Limself rapidly with his forefinger, and marking each new series in these movements by a busy play with his large seals. There was occasionally a little fierce- ness in his demeanor, but it was directed chiefly against false opinion, of which there is so much to correct iu MIDDLEMARCII. 217 our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own case link us indissolubly with the established order. If Dorothea spoke with any keenness of interest to Mr. Casaubon, he heard her with an air of patience as if she had given a quotation from the Delectus familiar to him from his tender years, and sometimes men- tioned curtly what ancient sects or personages had held similar ideas, as if there were too much of that sort in stock already; at other times he would inform her that she was mistaken, and reassert what her re- mark had questioned. However slight the terrestrial intercourse between Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura, time changes the proportion of things, and in later days it is prefer- able to have fewer sonnets and more conversation. Will was not without his intentions to be always generous; but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear. When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning, there are many ways of escaping from its bonds. Any private hours in her day were usually spent in her blue-green boudoir, and she had come to be very fond of its pallid quaintness. Nothing had been nut- wardly altered there; but while the summer had grad: 218 MIDDLEWARCH. ually advanced over the western fields beyond the avenue of elms, the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an inward life whiclı fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels, the invisible yet active forms of our spiritual triumplis or our spiritual falls. Dorothea had been so used to struggle for and to find resolve in looking along the avenue toward the arc! of western light that the vision itself had gained a coinmunicating power. Even the pale stag seemed to have reminding glances, and to mean mutely, “Yes, we know.” She was blind, you see, to many things obvious to others — likely to tread in the wrong places, as Celia had warned her; yet her blindness to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose carried her safely by the side of precipices where vision would have been peril- ous with fear. When young ardor is set brooding over the concep- tion of a prompt deed, the deed itself seems to start forth with independent life, mastering ideal obstacles. Even our own persons in the glass are apt to change their aspect for us after we have heard some frank remark on their less admirable points; and on the other hand it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them. 'The energy that would animate a crime is not more MIDDLEWARCII. 219 than is wanted to inspire a resolved submission, when the noble habit of the soul reasserts itself. A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Ros. amond's fingers; and so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter. Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens to have been cut in stone, though it lie face downmost for ages on a forsaken beach, or “rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of many con- quests,” it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long empires ago; this world being apparently a huge whis- pering-gallery. Such conditions are often minutely represented in our petty lifetimes. As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labors it may at last fix the date of in- vasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the open- ing of a catastrophe. To Uriel, watching the progress of planetary history from the Sun, the one result would be just as much of a coincidence as the other. Mr. Casaubon had never put any question concerning the nature of his illness to Lydgate, nor had he even to 220 MIDDLEMARCH. Dorothea betrayed any anxiety as to how far it might be likely to cut short his labors or his life. (In this point, as on all others, he shrank from pity; and if the suspicion of being pitied for anything in his lot sur- mised or known in spite of himself was embittering, the idea of calling forth a show of compassion by frankly admitting an alarm or a sorrow was neces sarily intolerable to him. Every proud mind knows something of this experience, and perhaps it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty in- stead of exalting. When the commonplace “We must all die ” trans- forms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness, “I must die — and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterward he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first. Irregularities of judgment, I imagine, are found even in riper minds than Mary Garth's; our impartiality is kept for abstact merit and demerit, which none of us evei saw. Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospec- tive advantage equal to a dowry - the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant proph. ecy "Such as I am she will shortly be.” MIDDLEMAR 'N. 221 Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike. Mr. Horrock looked before him with as complete a neu. trality as if he had been a portrait by a great master. Costume, at a glance, gave Horrock a thrilling as- sociation with horses (enough to specify the hat-brim, which took the slightest upward angle just to escape the suspicion of bending downward), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mongolian eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seeming to follow his hat-brim in a moderate inclination upward, gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable sceptical smile, of all expres- sions the most tyrannous over a susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an in- finite fund of humor- too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable crust — and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate enough to know it, would be the thing and no other. It is a physiog- nomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been more powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses. Scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a stand-still: some- thing we must believe in and do, and whatever that something may be called, it is virtually our own judg. inent, even when it seems like the most slavish reliance on another. 222 MIDDLEMARCA. With the superfluous securities of hope at his com: mand, there was no reason why Fred should not have increased other people's liabilities to any extent but for the fact that men whose names were good for any- thing were usually pessimists, indisposed to believe that the universal order of things would necessarily be agreeable to an agreeable young gentleman. With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their more amiable qualities, forgive their little offences, and concerning each in turn try to ar- rive at the conclusion that he will be eager to oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged being as communi- cable as other warmth. There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little tire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism. Mrs. Garth, like more celebrated educators, had her favorite ancient paths, and in a general wreck of society would have tried to hold her Lindley Murray above the waves. The remote worship of a woman throned out of their reach plays a great part in men's lives, but in most cases the worshipper longs for some queenly recogni- tion, some approving sign by which his soul's sovereign may cheer him without descending from her high place. MIDDLEWARCH. 223 Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were particulars enough reported of him to breed much more specific expectations and to intensify dif- ferences into partisanship; some of the particulars being of that impressive order of which the significance is entirely hidden, like a statistical amount without a standard of comparison, but with a note of exclamation at the end. The cubic feet of oxygen yearly swallowed by a full-grown man - what a shudder they might have created in some Middlemarch circles! “Oxygen! no- body knows what that may be -- is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic? And yet there are people who say quarantine is no good!” Having to meet a man whom you dislike is not ob- served always to end in a mutual attachment. it is a little too trying to human flesh to be con- scious of expressing one's self better than others, and never to have it noticed, and in the general dearth of admiration for the right thing, even a chance bray of applause falling exactly in time is rather fortifying. Do we not shun the street version of a tine melody? or shrink from the news that the rarity — some bit of chiselling or engraving perhaps -- which we have dwelt on even with exultation in the trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is really not an uncommon thing, and may be obtained as an every-day possession? Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emo- tion; and to Will, a creature who cared little for what 224 MIDDLEMARCII. are called the solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to have within him such a feeling as he had toward Dorothea, was like the inheritance of a fortune. What others might have called the futility of his passion made an additional delight for his imag- ination: he was conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy. To collect documents is one mode of serving your country, and to remember the contents of a document is another. With regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last. It was not about the beginning of his speech that Mr. Brooke was at all anxious: this, he felt sure, would be all right; he should have it quite pat, cut out as neatly as a set of couplets from Pope. Embarking would be easy, but the vision of open sea that might come after was alarming. The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity ; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief. Bulstrode was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself, but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of MIDDLEMARCI. 225 demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory, and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held with intense satisfaction when th: depth of our sinning is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness, and a clinching proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention. The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama. If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see be- yond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come. When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could ac- cept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures. . Lydgate was constantly visiting the homes of the poor, and adjusting his prescriptions of diet to their small means; but, dear me! has it not by this time ceased to be remarkable - is it not rather what we expect in men— that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side, and never 15 226 MIDDLEMARCA. compare them with cach other? Expenditure - liko ugliness and errors — becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and meas- ure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others. Lydgate was bowing his neck under the yoke like a creature who had talons, but who had Reason too, which often reduces us to meekness. At that time the opinion existed that it was beneath A gentleman to write legibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk. Fred wrote the lines de- manded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any vis- count or bishop of the day : the vowels were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had a blotty solidity, and the let- ters disdained to keep the line : in short, it was a man- uscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret when you know beforehand what the writer means. As Caleh looked on, his visage showed a growing depression, but when Fred handed him the paper he gave something like a snarl, and rapped the paper pas- sionately with the back of his hand. Bad work like this dispelled all Caleb's mildness. "The deuce!” he exclaimed, snarlingly. “To think that this is a country where a man's education may cost hundreds and hundreds, and it turns you out this !” Then in a more pathetic tone, pushing up his spectacles and looking at the unfortunate scribe, “Tho 228 MIDDLEMARCA. sublime, though not in the least knowing why. But his endurance was mingled with a self-discontent which, if we know how to be candid, we shall confess to make more than half our bitterness under griev- ances, wife or husband included. It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstances would have been less strong against us. Rosamond was oppressed by ennui, and by that dis- satisfaction which in women's minds is continually turning into a trivial jealousy, referring to no real claims, springing from no deeper passion than the vague exactingness of egoism, and yet capable of im- pelling action as well as speech. Indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be un- necessary. In such states of mind the most incred. ulous person has a private leaning toward miracle : impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled; still — very wonderful things have happened! The terror of being judged sharpens the memory : it sends au inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened MIDDLEMARCA. 229 wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a re- pented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame. Into this second life Bulstrode's past had now risen, only the pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality. Night and day, without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect and fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his carlier life coming between him and everything else, as obsti- nately as, when we look through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees. There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep- seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individua. fellow-men. It is certainly trying to a man's dignity to reappear when he is not expected to do so: a first farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second lends an opening to comedy. Some one highly susceptible to the contemplation of a fine act has said that it produces a sort of regener- ating shudder through the frame, and makes one feel ready to begin a new life. Lydgate talked persistently when they were in his 230 MIDDLEMARCH. work-room, putting arguments for and against tho probability of certain biological views, but he had none of those definite things to say or to show which give the way-marks of a patient uninterrupted pursuit such as he used himself to insist on, saying that there must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry,” and that "a man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.” He was not an ill-tempered man; his intellectual ac- tivity, the ardent kindness of his heart, as well as his strong frame, would always, under tolerably easy con- ditions, have kept him above the petty uncontrollca susceptibilities which make bad temper. But he was now a prey to that worst irritation which arises not simply from annoyances, but from the second con- sciousness underlying those annoyances, of wasted energy and a degrading preoccupation, which was the reverse of all his former purposes. “This is what I am thinking of; and that is what I might have been thinking of,” was the bitter incessant murmur within him, making every difficulty a double goad to im- patience. Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolatlons. Lyd- gate's discontent was much harder to bear: it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and MIDDLE MARCH. 231 effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears. His troubles will perhaps appear miserably sordid, and beneath the attention of lofty persons who can know nothing of debt except on a magnificent scale. Doubtless they were sordid; and for the majority, who are not lofty, there is no escape from sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all its base hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests, its horse-dealer's desire to make bad work pass for good, its seeking for function which ought to be another's, its compulsion often to long for Luck in the shape of a wide calamity. The shallowness of a water-nixie's soul may have a charm until she becomes didactic. In inarriage, the certainty, “She will never love me much,” is easier to bear, than the fear, “ I shall love her no more.” It is a terrible moment in young lives when the closeness of love's bond has turned to the power of galling. Lydgate certainly had good reason to reflect on the service his practice did him in counteracting his per- sonal cares. He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients the direct external cails on his 232 MIDDLEMARCH. judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not sim- ply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly – it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial. Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. When a man is at the foot of the hill in his fortunes, he may stay a long while there in spite of professional accomplishment. In the British climate there is no incompatibility between scientific insight and furnished lodgings: the incompatibility is chiefly between scien- tific ambition and a wife who objects to that kind of residence. Bulstrode shrank from a direct lie with an intensity disproportionate to the number of his more indirect misdeeds. But many of these misdeeds were like the subtle muscular movements which are not taken ac- count of in the consciousness, though they bring about the end that we fix our mind on and desire. And it is only what we are vividly conscious of that we can vividly imagine to be seen by Omniscience. A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means MIDDLEMARCI. 233 of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all : but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow. This vague conviction of indeterminable guilt, which was enough to keep up much head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial professional seniors, had for the general mind all the superior power of mystery over fact. Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible. Even the more definite scandal con- cerning Bulstrode's earlier life was, for some minds, melted into the mass of mystery, as so much lively metal to be poured out in dialogue, and to take such fantastic shapes as Ileaven pleased. Hopefulness has a pleasure in making a throw of any kind, because the prospect of success is certain; and only a more generous pleasure.in offering as many as possible a share in the stake. There are episodes in most men's lives in which their highest qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects that fill their inward vision : Lyd- gate's tender-hearteduess was present just then only as a dread lest he should offend against it, not as an 234 MIDDLEJARCA, emotion that swayed him to tenderness. For he was very miserable. Only those who know the suprem- acy of the intellectual life — the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can un- derstand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances. What we call the “just possible” is sometimes true, and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false. Again and again, in his time of freedom, Lydgate had denounced the perversion of pathological doubt into moral doubt, and had said, “ The purest experi- ment in treatment may still be conscientious: my bus- iness is to take care of life, and to do the best I can think of for it. Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.” Ardent souls, ready to construct their coming lives, are apt to commit themselves to the fulfilment of their own visions. In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain igno- rant that the town held a bad opinion of her husband. No feminine intimate might carry her friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the wife of the un. pleasant fact known or believed about her husband; MIDDLEMARCA. 235 but when a woman with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbors, various moral im- pulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance. Candor was one. To be candid, in Middle- march phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth - a wide phrase, but meaning, in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than her husband's character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in her lot; the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend's moral improvement, sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be ben- efited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture, and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good. An old friend is not always the person whom it is easiest to make a confidant of: there is the barrier of remembered communication under other circum. stances, 236 MIDDLEMARCA. Rosamond's discontent in her marriage was due to the conditions of marriage itself, to its demand for self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the nature of her lusband; but the easy conception of an unreal Better had a sentimental charm which diverted her ennui. Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague, uneasy longings, some- times for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love. There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecra- tion: they bind us over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief about us : and our sins become that worst kind of sacrilege which tears down the invisible altar of trust. “If you are not good, none is good ”- those little words may give a terrific meaning to responsi- bility, may hold a vitriolic intensity for remorse. Dorothea's nature was of that kind : her own pas- sionate faults lay along the easily counted open chan- nels of her ardent character; and while she was full of pity for the visible mistakes of others, she had not yet any material within her experience for subtle con- structions and suspicions of hidden wrong. But that simplicity of hers, holding up an ideal for others in her believing conception of them, was one of the great powers of her womanhood. It swemed to Will as if he were beholding in a magic 238 MIDDLEMARCII. and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but hau their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic - the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common. Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm, and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and the world. Lydgate once called Rosamond his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a mur- dered man's brains. The determining acts of Dorothea's life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling under prosaic conditions. Among the many remarks passed on her mistakes, it was never said in the neighborhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes could not have happened if the so- ciety into which she was born had not smiled on prop- ositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half his own age-on modes of education which make a woman's knowledge another name for motley ignorance - on rules of conduct which are in flat con- tradiction with its own loudly-asserted beliefs. While this is the social air in which mortals begin to breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea's MIDDLEJARCH. 239 life, where great feelings will take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a ņew Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial : the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people, with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may pre- sent a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. After three months Freshitt had become rather op- pressive: to sit like a model for Saint Catherine look- ing rapturously at Celia's baby would not do for many hours in the day, and to remain in that momentous babe's presence with persistent disregard was a course that could not have been tolerated in a childless sister MIDDLEMARCI. 241 an exclusive optical selection. These things are a par- able. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent. Mr. Brooke's conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was only safe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions, and that he would spend as little money as possible in carrying them out. For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his own interests except the retention of his snuff-box, concerning which he was watchful, sus- picious, and greedy of clutch. Even while we are talking and meditating about the earth's orbit and the solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day. Piobabilities are as various as the faces to be seen at will in fretwork or paper-hangings: every form is there, from Jupiter to Judy, if you only look with creative inclination. Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation? Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual, 10 242 MIDDLEYARCH, and our timorous lips more or less under anxious con- trol. It was a festival with Mrs. Garth, for ber eldest son, Christy, her peculiar joy and pride, had come home for a short holiday – Christy, who held it the most desir- able thing in the world to be a tutor, to study all it- eratures and be a regenerate Porson, and who was an incorporate criticism on poor Fred, a sort of object- lesson given him by the educational mother. Christy himself, a square-browed, broad-shouldered masculine edition of his mother, not much higher than Fred's shoulder - which made it the harder that he should be held superior - was always as simple as possible, and thought no more of Fred's disinclination to schol- arship than of a giraffe's, wishing that he himself were more of the same height. It seemed clear that where there was a baby things were right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force. A man likes to assure himself, and men of pleasure generally, what he could do in the way of mischief if he chose, and that if he abstains from making himself ill or beggaring himself, or talking with the utmost looseness which the narrow limits of human capacity will allow, it is not because he is a spooney. Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather onlike ourselves : there are conditions under which MIDDLEWARCII. 243 the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incon- gruous manner. To see how an effect may be produced is often to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing ex. cept the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of doubt, and makes our minds strongly intuitive. Few things hold the perceptions more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say. It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if they were merely animals with a toilet, and never see the great soul in a man's face." Of course people need not be always talking well. Only one tells the quality of their minds when they try to talk well." Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another." It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.' There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that – to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail. MIDDLEWARCH. 245 power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear – but it murders our marriage — and then the marriage stays with us like a murder – and everything else is gone.' A. man always makes a fool of himself speechifying: there's no excuse but being on the right side, so that you can ask a blessing on your humming and hawing.' Young people should think of their families in mar- rying. I set a bad example - married a poor clergy- man, and made myself a pitiable object among the De Bracys - obliged to get my coals by stratagem, and pray to Heaven for my salad oil. However, Casau- bon has money enough; I must do him that justice. As to his blood, I suppose the family quarterings are three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant. ? Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on. When a woman is not contradicted she has no mo- tive for obstinacy in her absurdities.? You will certainly go mad in that house alone, my dear. You will see visions. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same naines as other people call them by. To be sure, for younger sons and women who have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad : they are taken care of then. But you must not run into that. I daresay you 246 MIDDLEIARCII. are a little bored here with our good dowager; but think what a bore you might become yourself to your fellow-creatures if you were always playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely. Sitting alone in that library at Lowick, you may fancy yourself ruling the weather; you must get a few people round you who wouldn't believe you if you told them. That is a good lowering medicine.? We are rather apt to consider an act wrong because it is unpleasant to us.3 It would be nonsensical to expect that I could con- vince Brooke, and make him act accordingly. Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into any mould, but he won't keep shape.3 She is a good creature – that fine girl — but a lit- tle too earnest. It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of any ques- tion, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle things after their own taste.4 I don't pretend to say that Farebrother is apostolic. Ilis position is not quite like that of the Apostles : he is only a parson among parishioners whose lives he has to try and make better. Practically I find that what is called being apostolic now is an impatience of everything in which the parson doesn't cut the prin. cipal figure. 248 MIDDLEMARCH. different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except one's self.“ When a man gets a good berth, half the deserving must come after.5 By being contemptible we set men's mind to the tune of contempt." Personal feeling is not always in the wrong if you boil it down to the impressions which make it simply an opinion.5 To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline ! 5 Young women are severe; they don't feel the stress of action as men do.5 Men outlive their love, but they don't outlive the consequences of their recklessness.5 Mr. Farebrother. — There is the terrible Nemesis fol. lowing on some errors, that it is always possible for those who like it to interpret them into a crime: there is no proof in favor of the man outside his own con- sciousness and assertion. Dorothea. -Oh, how cruel! And would you not like MIDDLEWARCU. 249 to be the one person who believed in that man's inno- cence, if the rest of the world belied him? Besides, there is a man's character beforehand to speak for him. Mr. Farebrother. - But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon, character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do. There is a great deal in the feeling for art which must be acquired. Art is an old language with a great many artificial affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing. Motives are points of honor, I suppose – nobody can prove them. Fred. - I am so miserable, Mary - if you knew how miserable I am you would be sorry for me. Mary. — There are other things to be more sorry for than that. But selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world. You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work, and in learn. 250 MIDDLEJARCH. ing to do it well, and not be always saying, There's this and there's that - if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is -1 wouldn't give two-pence for him, whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do. A woman, let her be as good as she may, has got to put up with the life her husband makes for her.8 The lad loves Mary, and a true love for a good woman is a great thing, Susan. It shapes many a rough fel- low.8 What I'm thinking of is — what it must be for a wife when she's never sure of her husbaud, when he hasn't got a principle in him to make him more afraid of doing the wrong thing by others than of getting his own toes pinched. That's the long and the short of it. Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working-day, my dcar. 8 A man may do wrong, and his will may rise clear out of it, though he can't get his life clear. That's a bad punishment. Mrs. Cadwallader says it is nonsense, people going a long journey when they are married. She says they MIDDLEMARCH. 251 get tired to death of each other, and can't quarrel com- fortably, as they would at home.' Well, it lies a little in our family. I had it myself - that love of knowledge, and going into everything - a little too much; it took me too far: though that sort of thing doesn't often run in the female line; or it runs under-ground like the rivers in Greece, you know - it comes out in the sons. Clever sons, clever mothers. 10 People say what they like to say, not what they have chapter and verse for. 10 AND OF “MIDDLEMARCH." DANIEL DERONDA. The general conviction that we are admirable does not easily give way before a single negative ; rather, when any of Vanity's large family, male or female, find their performance received coldly, they are apt to believe that a little more of it will win over the unac- countable dissident. It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one's own little core of ego- istic sensibility is a supreme care. A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge ; a spot where the definiteness of early knowledge may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the DANIEL DERONDA. 257 your ideas ingenious and forestall you in applying them, or he may have other views on acids and fixer! stars, and think ill of you in consequence. We are often unable to act on our certainties; our objection to a contrary issue (were it possible) is so strong that it rises like a spectral illusion between 118 and our certainty: we are rationally sure that the blind-worm cannot bite us mortally, but it would be so intolerable to be bitten, and the creature has a bit ing look - we decline to handle it. It is to be believed that attendance at the opéra bouffe in the present day would not leave men's minds entirely without shock, if the manners observed there with some applause were suddenly to start up in their own families. Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become pict- uresque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Children demand that their heroes should be fleck- less, and easily believe them so; perhaps a first dis- covery to the contrary is hardly a less revolutionary shock to a passionate child, than the threatened down- fall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for is in maturer life. 258 DANIEL DERONDA. There had sprung up in him (Deronda) a medita- tive yearning after wide knowledge, which is likely always to abate ardor in the fight for prize-acquire- ment in narrow tracks. Happily, he was modest, and took any second-rateness in himself simply as a fact, not as a marvel necessarily to be accounted for by a superiority. In many of our neighbors' lives there is much not only of error and lapse, but of a certain exquisite goodness which can never be written or even spoken; only divined by each of us, according to the inward instruction of our own privacy. The emptiness of all things, from politics to pas- times, is never so striking to us as when we fail in them. Perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world, except for those phlegmatic natures who, I suspect, would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope, and even in railway carriages; what banishes them is the vac- uum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the far- thest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellow- DANIEL DERONDA. 259 ship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near ? Whatever one does with a strong unhesitating out- flow of will has a store of motive that it would be hard to put into words. Some deeds seem little more than interjections, which give vent to the long passion of a life. In general, mortals have a great power of being astonished at the presence of an effect toward which they have done every thing, and at the absence of an effect toward which they have done nothing but desire it. Parents are astonished at the ignorance of their sons, though they have used the most time-honored and expensive means of securing it; husbands and wives are mutually astonished at the loss of affection which they have taken no pains to keep; and all of us in our turn are apt to be astonished that our neighbors do not admire us. In this way it happens that the truth seems highly improbable. There is a charm of eye and lip which comes with every little phrase that certifies delicate perception or fine judgment, with every unostentatious word or smile that shows a heart awake to others; and no sweep of garment or turn of figure is more satisfying than that which enters as a restoration of confidence that one person is present on whom no intention will DANIEL DERONDA. 261 and on the mere denial of their fantastic desires raged as if under the sting of wasps, which reduced the universe for them to an unjust infliction of pain. The word of all work, Love, will no more express the myriad modes of mutual attraction, than the word Thought can inform you what is passing through your ueighbor's mind. Superstitions carry consequences which often verify their hope or their foreboding. A blush is no language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two contradictories. Those who trust us educate us. The power of being quiet carries a man well through moments of embarrassment. Deronda was conscious of that peculiar irritation which will sometimes befall the man whom others are inclined to trust as mentor, – the irritation of perceiv- ing that he is supposed to be entirely off the same plane of desire and temptation as those who confess to hiin. Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless: as if those were not often the best teachers who only yester- day got corrected for their mistakes. 262 DANIEL DERONDA Liking and disliking can grow in meditation as fast as in the more immediate kind of presence. Grandcourt had no idea of a moral repulsion, and could not have believed, if he had been told it, that there may be a resentment and disgust which will gradually make beauty more detestable than ugliuess, through exasperation at that outward virtue in which hateful things can flaunt themselves, or find a supercil- ious advantage. The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world; and some feather-headed gentleman or lady, whom in pas- sing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being, may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them, - like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes color an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols. Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws ; they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories (which also have their kinship and likeness). There is a sort of human paste that when it comes DANIEL DERONDA. 263 near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder shape. What we see exclusively we are apt to see with some mistake of proportions. Day followed day with that want of perceived lei- sure which belongs to lives where there is no work to mark off intervals; and the continual liability to Grandcourt's presence and surveillance seemed to flatten every effort to the level of the boredom which his manner expressed: his negative mind was as diffu- sive as fog, clinging to all objects, and spoiling all contact. There are some persons so gifted in relation to us that their “How do you do?" seems charged with offence. It is as possible to be rigid in principle and tender in blame, as it is to suffer from the sight of things hung awry, and yet to be patient with the hanger who sees amiss. Those who have been indulged by fortune, and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind, incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the couise of the storm. 264 DANIEL DERONDA. It is hard to say how much we could forgive our. selves if we were secure from judgment by another whose opinion is the breathing-medium of all our joy; who brings to us with close pressure and immediate sequence that judgment of the Invisible and Universal which self-flattery and the world's tolerance would easily melt and disperse. In this way our brother may be in the stead of God to us, and his opinion, which has pierced even to the joints and marrow, may be our virtue in the making. Much of our lives is spent in marring our own influ- ence, and turning others' belief in us into a widely concluding unbelief which they call knowledge of the world, while it is really disappointment in you or me. The gambling appetite is more absolutely dominant than bodily hunger, which can be neutralized by an emotional or intellectual excitation; but the passion for watching chances — the habitual suspensive poise of the mind in actual or imaginary play- nullifies the susceptibility to other excitation. In its final, im- perious stage, it seems the unjoyous dissipation of demons, seeking diversion on the burning marl of perdition. What duty is made of a single difficult resolve ? The difficulty lies in the daily unflinching support of consequences that mar the blessed return of morning DANIEL DERONDA. 265 with the prospect of irritation to be suppressed or shame to be endured. I make it a virtue to be content with my miduling- ness; it is always pardonable, so that one does not ask others to take it for superiority.1 To delight in doing things because our fathers did thein is good, if it shuts out nothing better. It en- larges the range of affection; and affection is the broadest basis of good in life.' · Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.1 The refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthu- siasm for something more than our own appetites and vanities. The few may find themselves in it simply by an elevation of feeling; but for us who have to struggle for our wisdom, the higher life must be a region in which the affections are clad with knowl- edge. Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.1 One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that consciousness into a higher course 266 DANIEL DERONDA. than is common. There are many examples. Feeling what it is to have spoiled one life may well make us long to save other lives from being spoiled. 1 Within ourselves our evil will is momentous, and sooner or later it works its way outside us: it may be in the vitiation that breeds evil acts, but also it may be in the self-abhorrence that stings us into better striving. Anxiety is good for nothing if we can't turn it into a defence." Those who would be comparatively uninteresting beforehand may become worthier of sympathy when they do something that awakens in them a keen re- morse. Lives are enlarged in different ways. I dare say some would never get their eyes opened if it were not for a violent shock from the consequences of their own actions. And when they are suffering in that way one must care for them more than for the com- fortably self-satisfied.1 Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing your remorse. Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hear- ing. It may make consequences passionately present to you. DANIEL DERONDA. 267 No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.1 Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought up in a city of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for painting, and born blind: the ancestral life would lie within them as a dim longing for unknown objects and sensations; and the spell- bound habit of their inherited frames would be like a cunningly wrought musical instrument, never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy, mysterious moanings of its structure that, under the right touch, gives music. 1 What makes life dreary is the want of motive.1 Whenever an artist has been able to say, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” it has been as the end of patient practice. Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.? In fact, it's a nicety of conversation which I would have you attend to — much quotation of any sort, even in English, is bad. One couldn't carry on life com- fortably without a little blindness to the fact that every thing has been said better than we can put it ourselves. 268 DANIEL DERONDA. - - - - -- Even a wise man generally lets some folly ooze out of him in his will; . . . and if a fellow has any spite or tyranny in him, he's likely to bottle off a good dea] for keeping in that sort of document." Let us bind love with duty: for duty is the love of law; and law is the nature of the Eternal." Better a wrong will than a wavering; better a stead- fast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.4 When I am frightened, I find it a good thing to have somebody to be angry with for not being brave. it warms the blood.5 Friendships begin with liking or gratitude, — roots that can be pulled up. Mother's love begins deeper down.5 I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate in reversion, if one can keep from the tempta- tion of turning it into certainty, which may spoil all.e The jeward of one duty is the power to fulfil an: other - so faid Ben Azai. THEOPHRASTUS SUCII. THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 273 for a man to wail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of which also he knows noth- ing except through the easy process of an imperfect imagination and a flattering fancy. There has been plenty of insistence on the evil of swearing by the words of a master, and having the judgment uniformly controlled by a “ He said it ;" but a much worse woe to befall a man is to have every judgment controlled by an “I said it," - to make a divinity of his own short-sightedness or passion-led aberration and explain the world in its honor. It is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of words that “what a man is worth” has come to mean how much money he possesses ; but there seems a deeper and more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning that popular or polite speech assigns to “ morality” and “morals.” The poor part these words are made to play recalls the fate of those pagan divinities who, after being understood to rule the powers of the air and the destinies of men, came down to the level of insignificant demons, or were even made a farcical show for the amusement of the multitude. One best part of educational training is that which comes through special knowledge and manipulative or 18 274 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. other skill, with its usual accompaniment of delight, in relation to work which is the daily bread-winning occupation, — which is a man's contribution to the effective wealth of society in return for what he takes as his own share. But this duty of doing one's proper work well, and taking care that every product of one's labor shall be genuinely what it pretends to be, is not only left out of morals in popular speech, it is very little insisted on by public teachers, at least in the only effective way, — by tracing the continuous effects of ill-done work. Some of them seem to be still hopeful that it will follow as a necessary consequence from week-day services, ecclesiastical decoration, and improved hymn-books ; others apparently trust to descanting on self-culture in general, or to raising a general sense of faulty circumstances ; and mean- while lax, make-shift work, from the high conspicuous kind to the average and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace of immorality, though there is not a member of society who is not daily suffering from it materially and spiritually, and though it is the fatal cause that must degrade our national rank and our commerce in spite of all open markets and discovery of available coal-seams. Until we have altered our dictionaries and have found some other word than morality to stand in pop- ular use for the duties of man to man, let us refuse to 276 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonizing struggles with temptation, in unbroken silence. It is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one's kinship with all frailties and vices undermines the active heroism which battles against wrong. On the whole, and in the vast majority of instances, the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries. A sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he does harm. The deed of Judas has been attributed to far-reaching views, and the wish to hasten his Master's declaration of himself as the Messiah. Perhaps – I will not maintain the contrary -- Judas represented his motive in this way, and felt justified in his traitorous kiss ; but my belief that he deserved, metaphorically speak- ing, to be where Dante saw him, at the bottom of the Malebolge, would not be the less strong because he was not convinced that his action was detestable. I refuse to accept a man who has the stomach for such treachery, as a hero impatient for the redemption of mankind and for the beginning of a reign when the kisses shall be those of peace and righteousness. Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a THEOPHRASTUS SUCH, 277 great book in order to find our own name, if not in the text, at least in a laudatory note : whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents. But an attention fixed on the main theme or various matter of the book would deliver us from that slavish subjection to our own self-importance. I am really at the point of finding that this world would be worth living in without any lot of one's own. Is it not possible for me to enjoy the scenery of the earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage- garden in it ? A man who uses his balmorals to tread on your toes with much frequency and an unmistakable emphasis may prove a fast friend in adversity, but meanwhile your adversity has not arrived and your toes are ten- der. . . . I cannot submit to a chronic state of blue and green bruise as a form of insurance against an accident. Is there any country which shows at once as much stability and as much susceptibility to change as ours ? Our national life is like that scenery which I early learned to love, not subject to great convulsions, but easily showing more or less delicate (sometimes melan- choly) effects from minor changes. Hence our midland 278 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. plains have never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me ; yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of world-wide change, some new direction of human labor, has wrought itself into what one may call the speech of the landscape, — in contrast with those grander and vaster regions of the earth which keep an indifferent aspect in the presence of men's toil and devices. What does it signify that a liliputian train passes over a viaduct amidst the abysses of the Apennines, or that a caravan laden with a nation's offerings creeps across the unresting sameness of the desert, or that a petty cloud of steam sweeps for an instant over the face of an Egyptian colossus immovably submitting to its slow burial beneath the sand ? But our wood- lands and pastures, our hedge-parted cornfields and meadows, our bits of high common where we used to plant the windmills, our quiet little rivers here and there fit to turn a mill-wheel, our villages along the old coach-roads, are all easily alterable lineaments that seem to make the face of our Motherland sympathetic with the laborious lives of her children. She does not take their ploughs and wagons contemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every sheepfold, every railed bridge or fallen tree-trunk, an agreeably notice- able incident; not a mere speck in the midst of un- measured vastness, but a piece of our social history in pictorial writing. THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 279 The world seems to me well supplied with what is genuinely ridiculous : wit and humor may play as harmlessly or beneficently round the changing facets of egoism, absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling sea or the dewy meadows. Why should we make our delicious sense of the ludicrous, with its invigorating shocks of laughter and its irrepressible smiles which are the outglow of an inward radiation as gentle and cheering as the warmth of morning, flourish like a brigand on the robbery of our mental wealth ?- or let it take its exercise as a madman might, if allowed a free nightly promenade, by draw- ing the populace with bonfires which leave some vener- able structure a blackened ruin or send a scorching smoke across the portraits of the past, at which we once looked with a loving recognition of fellowship, and disfigure them into butts of mockery? — nay, worse, — use it to degrade the healthy appetites and affections of our nature as they are seen to be degraded in insane patients whose systein, all out of joint, finds matter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-turvy, makes every passion preposterous or obscene, and turns the hard-won order of life into a second chaos hideous enough to make one wail that the first was ever thrilled with light? This is what I call debasing the moral currency. An early, deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in that 280 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. division of soul which narrows all newer joys by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change. . . . In this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for an abandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. We mortals should chiefly like to talk to each other out of good-will and fellowship, not for the sake of hearing revelations or being stimulated by witticisms ; and I have usually found that it is the rather dull person who appears to be disgusted with his contem- poraries because they are not always strikingly origi- nal, and to satisfy whom the party at a country house should have included the prophet Isaiah, Plato, Fran- cis Bacon, and Voltaire. Well, well, the illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to be illusions. They feed the ideal Better, and in loving them still, we strengthen the precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly existent, but a spiritual product of our vis- ible, tangible selves. I cherish my childish loves, – the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged. It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward repre- THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 281 sentation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes ; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations of human existence. The illusion to which it is liable is not that of habitually taking duck-ponds for lilied pools, but of being more or less transiently arid in varying degrees so absorbed in ideal vision as to lose the con- sciousness of surrounding objects or occurrences; and when that rapt condition is past, the sane genius discriminates clearly between what has been given in this parenthetic state of excitement, and what he has known, and may count on, in the ordinary world of experience. . . . Isaiah gives us the date of his vision in the Temple, — “the year that King Uzziah died,” — and if afterwards the mighty-winged seraphim were present with him as he trod the street, he doubtless knew them for images of memory, and did not cry “Look!” to the passers-by. Even if my researches had shown me that some of my father's yearly sermons had been copied out from the works of elder divines, this would only have been another proof of his good judgment. One may pre- 282 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. fer fresh eggs though laid by a fowl of the meanest understanding, but why fresh sermons ? Take a large enough area of human life, and all comedy melts into tragedy, like the Fool's part by the side of Lear. The chief scenes get filled with erring heroes, guileful usurpers, persecuted discov- erers, dying deliverers : everywhere the protagonist has a part pregnant with doom. The comedy sinks to an accessory, and if there are loud laughs they seem a convulsive transition from sobs ; or if the comedy is touched with a gentle lovingness, the panoramic scene is one where “Sadness is a kind of mirth So mingled as if mirth did make us sad And sadness merry." We have been severely enough taught (if we were willing to learn) that our civilization, considered as a splendid material fabric, is helplessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments or ideal feelings. And it is this invisible police which we had need, as a community, strive to maintain in efficient force. The eminence, the nobleness of a people depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and of striving for what we call spiritual ends, — ends which consist not in immediate material possession, but in 284 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. Doubtless there are many sorts of transfiguration, and a man who has come to be worthy of all grati- tude and reverence may have had his swinish period, wallowing in ugly places ; but suppose it had been handed down to us that Sophocles or Virgil had at one time made himself scandalous in this way : the works which have consecrated their memory for our admira- tion and gratitude are not a glorifying of swinishness, but an artistic incorporation of the highest sentiment known to their age. All reverence and gratitude for the worthy Dead on whose labors we have entered, all care for the future generations whose lot we are preparing ; but some affection and fairness for those who are doing the actual work of the world, some attempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who will call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indiffer- ence or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Escept on the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe, unless I scorn every previous generation from whom they have inherited their diseases of mind and body, and by consequence scorn THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 285 my own scorn, which is equally an inheritance of mised ideas and feelings concocted for me in the boil- ing caldron of this universally contemptible life, and so on — scorning to infinity. Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight. That a gratified sense of superiority is at the root of barbarous laughter may be at least half the truth. But there is a loving laughter in which the only recognized superiority is that of the ideal self, the God within, holding the mirror and the scourge for our own pettiness as well as our neighbors'. We cannot command veracity at will : the power of seeing and reporting truly is a form of health that has to be delicately guarded, and as an ancient Rabbi has solemnly said, “ The penalty of untruth is un- truth.” The tendency of things is towards the quicker or slower fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this tendency : all we can do is to moderate its course so as to hinder it from degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid effacement of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the national genius, – the deep suckers of healthy sentiment. 286 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. A common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various activity which makes a complete man. The time is not come for cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than for communism to suf- fice for social energy. I am not bound to feel for a Chinaman as I feel for my fellow-countryman. ... Affection, intelligence, duty, radiate from a centre, and nature has decided that for us English folk that centre can be neither China nor Peru. For my part I can call mo age absolutely unpoetic : how should it be so, since there are always children to whom the acorns and the swallow's eggs are a wonder, always those human passions and fatalities through which Garrick as Hamlet in bob-wig and knee-breeches moved his audience more than some have since done in velvet tunic and plume ? But every age since the golden may be made more or less prosaic by minds that attend only to its vulgar and sordid elements, of which there was always an abun- dance even in Greece and Italy, the favorite realms of the retrospective optimists. To be quite fair towards the ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be allowed to each of them, a little implicit poetry even to those which echoed loudest with servile, pompous, and trivial prose. THE SPANISH GYPSY. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 'Tis the warm South, where Europe spreads her lands Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep : Broad-breasted Spain, leaning with equal love On the Mid Sea that moans with memories, And on the untravelled Ocean's restless tides. Within Bedmár Has come the time of sweet serenity When color glows unglittering, and the soul Of visible things shows silent happiness, As that of lovers trusting though apart. The ripe-cheeked fruits, the crimson-petalled flowers ; The winged life that pausing seems a gem Cunningly carven on the dark green leaf ; The face of man with hues supremely blent To difference fine as of a voice ’mid sounds: — Each lovely light-dipped thing seems to emerge Flushed gravely from baptismal sacrament. All beauteous existence rests, yet wakes, Lies still, yet conscious, with clear open eyes 19 THE SPANISH GYPSY. 291 . Wings half open, like a flower Inly deeper flushing, Neck and breast as virgin's pure — Virgin proudly blushing. Day is dying! Float, O swan, Down the ruby river; Follow, song, in requiem To the mighty Giver. Infant awe, that unborn breathing thing, Dies with what nourished it, can never rise From the dead womb and walk and seek new pasture. Even images of stone Look living with reproach on him who maims, Profanes, defiles them. The fond Present that with mother-prayers And mother-fancies looks for championship Of all her loved beliefs and old-world ways From that young Time she bears within her womb. It has been so with rulers, emperors, Nay, sages who held secrets of great Time, Sharing his hoary and beneficent life- Men who sate throned among the multitudes — They have sore sickened at the loss of one. 292 THE SPANISH GYPSY. PABLO'S SONG. The world is great: the birds all fly from me, The stars are golden fruit upon a tree All out of reach: my little sister went, And I am lonely. The world is great: I tried to mount the hill Above the pines, where the light lies so still, But it rose higher: little Lisa went, And I am lonely. The world is great: the wind comes rushing by, I wonder where it comes from; sea-birds cry And hurt my heart: my little sister went, And I am lonely. The world is great: the people laugh and talk, And make loud holiday: how fast they walk ! I’m lame, they push me: little Lisa went, And I am lonely. On solitary souls, the universe Looks down inhospitable; the human heart Finds nowhere shelter but in human kind. In the screening time Of purple blossoms, when the petals crowd And softly crush like cherub cheeks in heaven, 294 THE SPANISH GYPSY. Castilian gentlemen Choose not their task — they choose to do it well. Life itself May not express us all, may leave the worst And the best too, like tunes in mechanism Never awaked. Great Love has many attributes, and shrines For varied worshippers, but his force divine Shows most its many-named fulness in the man Whose nature multitudinously mixed — Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought - Resists all easy gladness, all content Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul Flooded with consciousness of good that is Finds life one bounteous answer. PABLO'S SONG. I'r was in the prime Of the sweet Spring-time. In the linnet's throat Trembled the love-note, And the love-ştirred air Thrilled the blossoms there. Little shadows danced Each a tiny elf, Happy in large light And the thinnest self. 296 THE SPANISH GYPSY. In moments high Space widens in the soul. Faith, the stronger for extremity, Becomes prophetic. Can we believe that the dear dead are gone? Love in sad weeds forgets the funeral-day, Opens the chamber door and almost smiles — Then sees the sunbeams pierce athwart the bed Where the pale face is not. Spirits seem buried and their epitaph Is writ in Latin by severest pens, Yet still they flit above the trodden grave And find new bodies, animating them In quaint and ghostly way with antique souls. So Juan was a troubadour revived, Freshening life’s dusty road with babbling rills Of wit and song, living 'mid harnessed men With limbs ungalled by armor, ready so To soothe them weary, and to cheer them sad. Guest at the board, companion in the camp, A crystal mirror to the life around, Flashing the comment keen of simple fact Defined in words; lending brief lyric voice To grief and sadness ; hardly taking note THE SPANISH GYPSY. 297 Of difference betwixt his own and others'; But rather singing as a listener To the deep moans, the cries, the wild strong joys Of universal nature, old yet young. JUAN'S SONG. Push off the boat, Quit, quit the shore, The stars will guide us back: - O gathering cloud, O wide, wide sea, O waves that keep no track! On through the pines ! The pillared woods, Where silence breathes sweet breath:- O labyrinth, O sunless gloom, The other side of death! So soft a night was never made for sleep, But for the waking of the finer sense To every murmuring and gentle sound, To subtlest odors, pulses, visitings That touch our frames with wings too delicate To be discerned amid the blare of day. (She pauses near the window to gather some jasmine : then walks again.) THE SPANISH GYPS Y. 299 Of poor unwed Fedalma. Oh, they are sweet, And none will come just like them. Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not. Are they, Silva ? 1 These rubies greet me Duchess. How they glow! Their prisoned souls are throbbing like my own. Perchance they loved once, were ambitious, proud ; Or do they only dream of wider life, Ache from intenseness, yearn to burst the wall Compact of crystal splendor, and to flood Some wider space with glory? Poor, poor gems! We must be patient in our prison-house, And find our space in loving. 1 Fedalma. — These gems have life in them : their col- ors speak, Say what words fail of. So do many things -- The scent of jasmine, and the fountain's plash, The moving shadows on the far-off hills, The slanting moonlight, and our clasping hands. ( Silva, there's an ocean round our words That overflows and drowns them. Do you know Sometimes when we sit silent, and the air Breathes gently on us from the orange-trees, It seems that with the whisper of a word 302 THE SPANISH GYPSY. No! On the close-thronged spaces of the earth A battle rages: Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows : I will keep my stand- Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another. Oh, 't is written large The thing I have to do. 1 The saints were cowards who stood by to see Christ crucified: they should have flung themselves Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain The grandest death, to die in vain — for love Greater than sways the forces of the world 11 Father, my soul is weak, the mist of tears Still rises to my eyes, and hides the goal Which to your undimmed sight is clear and changeless. But if I cannot plant resolve on hope It will stand firm on certainty of woe. I choose the ill that is most like to end With my poor being. Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness. But faithfulness can feed on suffering, And knows no disappointment. Trust in me ! If it were needed, this poor trembling hand Should grasp the torch — strive not to let it fall Though it were burning down close to my flesh, No beacon lighted yet: through the damp dark THE SPANISH GYPSY. 303 I should still hear the cry of gasping swimmers. Father, I will be true !1 Don Silva. – What am I but a miserable brand Lit by mysterious wrath ? I lie cast down A blackened branch upon the desolate ground Where once I kindled ruin. I shall drink No cup of purest water but will taste Bitter with thy lone hopelessness, Fedalma. Fedalma. — Nay, Silva, think of me as one who sees A light serene and strong on one sole path Which she will tread till death ... He trusted me, and I will keep his trust : My life shall be its temple. I will plant His sacred hope within the sanctuary And die its priestess — though I die alone, A hoary woman on the altar step, Cold ’mid cold ashes. That is my chief good. The deepest hunger of a faithful heart Is faithfulness. Wish me nought else. Calamity Comes like a deluge and o’erfloods our crimes, Till sin is hidden in woe. You -I- we two, Grasping we knew not what, that seemed delight, Opened the sluices of that deep.' Don Silva. Dear! you share the woe.-- Nay, the worst dart of vengeance fell on you. 304 THE SPANISH GYPSY. Fedalma. — Vengeance! she does but sweep us with her skirts — She takes large space, and lies a baleful light Revolving with long years — sees children's children, Blights them in their prime . . . Oh, if two lovers leaned To breathe one air and spread a pestilence, They would but lie two livid victims dead Amid the city of the dying. We With our poor petty lives have strangled one That ages watch for vainly. Oh, I am sick at heart. The eye of day, The insistent summer sun, seems pitiless, Shining in all the barren crevices Of weary life, leaving no shade, no dark, Where I may dream that hidden waters lie; As pitiless as to some shipwrecked man, Who, gazing from his narrow shoal of sand On the wide unspecked round of blue and blue, Sees that full light is errorless despair. The insects' hum that slurs the silent dark Startles, and seems to cheat me, as the tread Of coming footsteps cheats the midnight watcher Who holds her heart and waits to hear them pause, And hears them never pause, but pass and die. Music sweeps by me as a messenger · Carrying a message that is not for me. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 305 The very sameness of the hills and sky Is obduracy, and the lingering hours Wait round me dumbly, like superfluous slaves, Of whom I want nought but the secret news They are forbid to tell. 1 (To Silva.) – We may not make this world a paradise By walking it together hand in hand, With eyes that meeting feed a double strength. We must be only joined by pains divine Of spirits blent in mutual memories. Silva, our joy is dead. ... We must walk Apart unto the end. Our marriage rite Is our resolve that we will each be true To high allegiance, higher than our love. Our dear young love — its breath was happiness ! But it had grown upon a larger life Which tore its roots asunder. We rebelled - The larger life subdued us. Yet we are wed ; For we shall carry each the pressure deep Of the other's soul.? Silva. Juan, cease thy song. Our whimpering poesy and small-paced tunes Have no more utterance than the cricket’s chirp For souls that carry heaven and hell within. THE SPANISH GYPSY. 307 Men who are sour at missing larger game May wing a chattering sparrow for revenge. 2 There's more of odd than even in this world. Else pretty sinners would not be let off Sooner than ugly ; for if honeycombs Are to be got by stealing, they should go Where life is bitterest on the tongue.2 'Tis but a toilsome game To bet upon that feather Policy, And guess where after twice a hundred puffs ’T will catch another feather crossing it : Guess how the Pope will blow and how the king ; What force my lady's fan has ; how a cough Seizing the Padre's throat may raise a gust, And how the queen may sigh the feather down. Such catching at imaginary threads, Such spinning twisted air, is not for me. If I should want a game, I'll rather bet On racing snails, two large, slow, lingering snails - No spurring, equal weights — a chance sublime, Nothing to guess at, pure uncertainty.2 Your teaching orthodoxy with fagots may only bring up a fashion of roasting. Knightly love is blent with reverence As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.? THE SPANISH GYPS Y. 309 The scanty water : the fidelity Of men whose pulses leap with kindred fire, Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands, The speech that even in lying tells the truth Of heritage inevitable as past deeds, Nay, in the silent bodily presence feel The mystic stirring of a common life Which makes the many one : fidelity To the deep consecrating oath our sponsor Fate Made through our infant breath when we were born, The fellow-heirs of that small island, Life, Where we must dig and sow and reap with brothers. Fear thou that oath, my daughter — nay, not fear, But love it ; for the sanctity of oaths Lies not in lightning that avenges them, But in the injury wrought by broken bonds And in the garnered good of human trust. Let men contemn us : 't is such blind contempt That leaves the winged broods to thrive in warmth Unheeded, till they fill the air like storms. So we shall thrive - still darkly shall draw force Into a new and multitudinous life That likeness fashions to community, Mother divine of customs, faith, and laws. 'T is ripeness, 't is fame's zenith that kills hope. Huge oaks are dying, forests yet to come Lie in the twigs and rotten-seeming seeds.3 310 THE SPANISH GYPSY. Because our race has no great memories, I will so live, it shall remember me For deeds of such divine beneficence As rivers have, that teach men what is good By blessing them. 3 The rich heritage, the milder life, Of nations fathered by a mighty Past 3 “ Life and more life unto the chosen, death To all things living that would stifle them!” So speaks each god that makes a nation strong. 8 Royal deeds May make long destinies for multitudes.3 Strong souls Live like fire-hearted suns to spend their strength In farthest striving action ; breathe more free In mighty anguish than in trivial ease. 8 'T is a vile life that like a garden pool Lies stagnant in the round of personal loves; That has no ear save for the tickling lute Set to small measures -- deaf to all the beats Of that large music rolling o'er the world : A miserable, petty, low-roofed life, THE SPANISH GYPSY. 311 That knows the mighty orbits of the skies Through nought save light or dark in its own cabin. The very brutes will feel the force of kind And move together, gathering a new soul — The soul of multitudes.3 In vain, my daughter ! Lay the young eagle in what nest you will, The cry and swoop of eagles overhead Vibrate prophetic in its kindred frame, And make it spread its wings and poise itself For the eagle's flight.3 (T. Fedalma.) - Nay, never falter: no great deed is done By falterers who ask for certainty. No good is certain, but the steadfast mind, The undivided will to seek the good: 'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings A human music from the indifferent air. The greatest gift the hero leaves his race Is to have been a hero. Say we fail ! - We feed the high tradition of the world, And leave our spirit in our children's breasts.3 Is there a choice for strong souls to be weak ? For men erect to crawl like hissing snakes ? 312 THE SPANISH GYPSY. I choose not-I am Zarca. Let him choose Who halts and wavers, having appetite To feed on garbage.3 To my inward vision Things are achieved when they are well begun. The perfect archer calls the deer his own While yet the shaft is whistling. His keen eye Never sees failure, sees the mark alone. 3 Fighting for dear life men choose their swords For cutting only, not for ornament. What nought but Nature gives, man takes perforce Where she bestows it, though in vilest place. Can he compress invention out of pride, Make heirship do the work of muscle, sail Towards great discoveries with a pedigree? Sick men ask cures, and Nature serves not hers Daintily as a feast. A blacksmith once Founded a dynasty, and raised on high The leathern apron over armies spread Between the mountains like a lake of steel.3 He who rules Must humor full as much as he commands; Must let men vow impossibilities; Grant folly's prayers that hinder folly's wish And serve the ends of wisdom. 3 THE SPANISH GYPSY. 317 A light divine and searching on the earth, Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields, Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked But for Tradition; we walk evermore To higher paths, by brightening Reason's lamp. 5 Storms will lay The fairest trees and leave the withered stumps.5 Thought Has joys apart, even in blackest woe, And seizing some fine thread of verity Knows momentary godhead.5 Prediction is contingent, of effects Where causes and concomitants are mixed To seeming wealth of possibilities Beyond our reckoning. Who will pretend To tell the adventures of each single fish Within the Syrian Sea? Show me a fish, I'll weigh him, tell his kind, what he devoured, What would have devoured hiin – but for one Blas Who netted him instead; nay, could I tell That had Blas missed him, he would not have died Of poisonous mud, and so made carrion, Swept off at last by some sea-scavenger? 5 318 THE SPANISH GYPSY. Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.5 Man thinks Brutes have no wisdom, since they know not his: Can we divine their world? – the hidden life That mirrors us as hideous shapeless power, Cruel supremacy of sharp-edged death, Or fate that leaves a bleeding mother robbed? Oh, they have long tradition and swift speech, Can tell with touches and sharp darting cries Whole histories of timid races taught To breathe in terror by red-handed man.5 My lord, I will be frank; there's no such thing As naked manhood. If the stars look down On any mortal of our shape, whose strength Is to judge all things without preference, He is a monster, not a faithful man. While my heart beats, it shall wear livery.5 Nay, they are virtues for you warriors - Hawking and hunting! You are merciful When you leave killing men to kill the brutes. But, for the point of wisdom, I would choose To know the mind that stirs between the wings Of bees and building wasps, or fills the woods THE SPANISH GYPSY. 319 With myriad murmurs of responsive sense And true-aimed impulse, rather than to know The thoughts of warriors.5 If conscience has two courts With differing verdicts, where shall lie the appeal ? Our law must be without us or within. The Highest speaks through all our people's voice, Custom, tradition, and old sanctities; Or he reveals himself by new decrees Of inward certitude.5 Though Death were king, And Cruelty his right-hand minister, Pity insurgent in some human breasts Makes spiritual empire, reigns supreme As persecuted faith in faithful hearts. Your small physician, weighing ninety pounds, A petty morsel for a healthy shark, Will worship mercy throned within his soul Though all the luminous angels of the stars Burst into cruel chorus on his ear, Singing, “ We know no mercy.” He would cry- " I know it,” still, and soothe the frightened bird And feed the child a-hungered, walk abreast Of persecuted men, and keep most hate For rational torturers. There I stand firm.5 320 THE SPANISH GYPSY. I read a record deeper than the skin. What! Shall the trick of nostrils and of lips Descend through generations, and the soul That moves within our frame like God in worlds - Convulsing, urging, melting, withering - Imprint no record, leave no documents, Of her great history? Shall men bequeath The fancies of their palate to their sons, And shall the shudder of restraining awe, The slow-wept tears of contrite memory, Faith's prayerful labor, and the food divine Of fasts ecstatic - shall these pass away Like wind upon the waters, tracklessly? Shall the mere curl of eyelashes remain, And god-enshrining symbols leave no trace Of tremors reverent? 6 The fence of rules is for the purblind crowd; They walk by averaged precepts: sovereign men, Seeing by God's light, see the general By seeing all the special — own no rule But their full vision of the moment's worth. 'Tis so God governs, using wicked men - Nay, scheming fiends, to work his purposes. 6 Particular lies may speak a general truth.6 In God's war Slackness is infamy. THE SPANISH GYPSY, 321 A man 's a man; But when you see a king, you see the work Of many thousand men.? They talk of vermin; but, sirs, vermin large Were made to eat the small, or else to eat The noxious rubbish.7 Next to a missing thrust, what irks me most Is a neat well-aimed stroke that kills your man, Yet ends in mischief.8 Pooh, thou ’rt a poet, crazed with finding words May stick to things and seem like qualities. No pebble is a pebble in thy hands: 'T is a moon out of work, a barren egg, Or twenty things that no man sees but thee. 8 THE LEGEND OF JUBAL. JUBAL, Lamech's son, That mortal frame wherein was first begun The immortal life of song. . To the far woods he wandered, listening, And heard the birds their little stories sing In notes whose rise and fall seem melted speech - Melted with tears, smiles, glances — that can reach More quickly through our frame's deep-winding night, And without thought raise thought's best fruit, delight. CE . It was at evening, When shadows lengthen from each westward thing, When imminence of change makes sense more fine And light seems holier in its grand decline. The fruit-trees wore their studded coronal, Earth and her children were at festival, Glowing as with one heart and one consent - Thought, love, trees, rocks, in sweet warm radiance blent. 326 THE LEGEND OF JUBAL. The sun had sunk, but music still was there, And when this ceased, still triumph filled the air: It seemed the stars were shining with delight And that no night was ever like this night. All clung with praise to Jubal: some besought That he would teach them his new skill; some caught, Swiftly as smiles are caught in looks that meet, The tone's melodic change and rhythmic beat: ’T was easy following where invention trod — All eyes can see when light flows out from God. And thus did Jubal to his race reveal Music their larger soul, where woe and weal Filling the resonant chords, the song, the dance, Moved with a wider-winged utterance. Now many a lyre was fashioned, many a song Raised echoes new, old echoes to prolong. That true heaven, the recovered past, The dear small Known amid the Unknown vast. The future, that bright land which swims In western glory, isles and streams and bays, Where hidden pleasures float in golden haze. Man's life was spacious in the early world : It paused, like some slow ship with sail unfurled Waiting in seas by scarce a wavelet curled; 328 THE LEGEND OF JUBAL. And Work grew eager, and Device was born. It seemed the light was never loved before, Now each man said, “’T will go and come no more." No budding branch, no pebble from the brook, No form, no shadow, but new dearness took From the one thought that life must have an end; And the last parting now began to send Diffusive dread through love and wedded bliss, Thrilling them into finer tenderness. . Then Memory disclosed her face divine, That like the calm nocturnal lights doth shine Within the soul, and shows the sacred graves, And shows the presence that no sunlight craves, No space, no warmth, but moves among them all; Gone and yet here, and coming at each call, With ready voice and eyes that understand, And lips that ask a kiss, and dear responsive hand. Thus to Cain's race death was tear-watered seed Of various life and action-shaping need. But chief the sons of Lamech felt the stings Of new ambition, and the force that springs In passion beating on the shores of fate. They said, “ There comes a night when all too late The mind shall long to prompt the achieving hand. The eager thought behind closed portals stand, And the last wishes to the mute lips press Buried ere death in silent helplessness. Then while the soul its way with sound can cleave, And while the arm is strong to strike and heave, THE LEGEND OF JUBAL. 329 Let soul and arm give shape that will abide And rule above our graves, and power divide With that great god of day, whose rays must bend As we shall make the moving shadows tend. Come, let us fashion acts that are to be, When we shall lie in darkness silently.” ARMGART. ARMGART. Armg. – How old are you? Leo. Threescore and five. Armg. That's old. I never thought till now how you have lived. They hardly ever play your music? Leo (raising his eyebrows and throwing out his lip). - No! Schubert too wrote for silence: half his work Lay like frozen Rhine till a summer came That warmed the grass above him. Even so! His music lives now with a mighty youth. Armg. -- Do you think yours will live when you are dead? Leo. — Pfui! The time was, I drank that home- brewed wine And found it heady, while my blood was young: Now it scarce warms me. Tipple it as I may, I am sober still, and say: “My old friend Leo, Much grain is wasted in the world and rots; Why not thy handful?". 334 ARMGART. Armg. Strange! since I have known you Till now I never wondered how you lived. When I sang well — that was your jubilee. But you were old already. Leo. Yes, child, yes: Youth thinks itself the goal of each old life; Age has but travelled from a far-off time Just to be ready for youth's service. Well ! It was my chief delight to perfect you. Armg. - Good Leo! You have lived on little joys. But your delight in me is crushed for ever. Your pains, where are they now? They shaped intent Which action frustrates; shaped an inward sense Which is but keen despair, the agony Of highest vision in the lowest pit. The best intent Grasps but a living present which may grow Like any unfledged bird. 1 Sacraments Are not to feed the paupers of the world.1 What is fame But the benignant strength of One, transformed To joy of Many? Tributes, plaudits, come As necessary breathing of such joy, And may they come to me !1 ARMGART. 337 This moment near me, suffering what I feel, And needing me for comfort in her pang- Then it were worth the while to live; not else. Walp. - One — near you — why, they throng! you hardly stir But your act touches them. We touch afar. For did not swarthy slaves of yesterday Leap in their bondage at the Hebrews' flight, Which touched them through the thrice millennial dark? But you can find the sufferer you need With touch less subtle. Armg. Who has need of me? Walp. — Love finds the need it fills. Leo. Ay, my lady, That moment will not come again: applause May come and plenty; but the first, first draught! Music has sounds for it - I know no words. I felt it once myself when they performed My overture to Sintram. Well! 'tis strange, We know not pain from pleasure in such joy. Armg. — Oh, pleasure has cramped dwelling in our souls, And when full being comes must call on pain To lend it liberal space. Your blessed public Had never any judgment in cold blood -- VARIOUS POEMS. 342 VARIOUS POEMS. In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues. So to live is heaven. Oh, May I Join. . Two lovers by a moss-grown spring: They leaned soft cheeks together there, Mingled the dark and sunny hair, And heard the wooing thrushes sing. O budding-time! O love's blest prime! Two wedded from the portal stept: The bells made happy carollings, The air was soft as fanning wings, White petals on the pathway slept. O pure-eyed bride! O tender pride! Two faces o’er a cradle bent, Two hands above the head were locked; These pressed each other while they rocked, Those watched a life that love had sent. O solemn hour! O hidden power! VARIOUS POEMS. 43 Two parents by the evening fire: The red light fell about their knees On heads that rose by slow degrees Like buds upon the lily spire. O patient life! O tender strife! The two still sat together there, The red light shone about their knees; But all the heads by slow degrees Had gone and left that lonely pair. O voyage fast! O vanished past! The red light shone upon the floor And made the space between them wide; They drew their chairs up side by side, Their pale cheeks joined, and said, “ Once more!" O memories! O past that is ! Two Lovers. 350 INDEX. Exile, effects of, 125. Experience leads to sympathy, 56; spiritual, not to be explained, 58; often but a dream, 285. FACE, of women we love, 33; adornment needless to a beautiful, 56; lines of the human, touching, 154; of a traitor, 159; of a beau- tiful woman, 183. Faces, sharpened by consumption, 14; few uncontrolled by self- consciousness, 24; expressions of, 52; of boys, inexpressive, 94. Failure to realize plans of early life, 206. Faith, effect of loss of, in fellow-men, 139, 296. Faithless love, the Nemesis of, 279. Falsehood, becoming unconscious, 121; easy in society, 137. Fame, 334. Family likeness, strangeness of, 52. Farming, unprofitableness of, 64. Fear, use of, 136; a safeguard, 266; ever present, 314. Fedalma, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 308. Feeling, more effective than opinion, 54; needful solvent of ideas, 142. Fixed residence, advantage of, in early life, 255. Fond Present, the, 291. Force not measured by negations, 183. Forgiveness, meaning of, 57. Frailty, self-consciousness of, a preventive of active antagonism to evil, 276. Friendship, delightful, described, 169. Friendships, how they begin, 268. Future, the, 326. GAMBLING, its effects, 264. Good, substantial, 151. Good thoughts, 315. Goodness, easily discouraged, 216; of our neighbors' lives often not to be described, 258. Gossip in Middlemarch, 234. Graf, the, 338. 354 INDEX. Openness, not practicable, 256. Opéra bouffe, 257. Opinion, manner of expressing, 106; public, a great power, 178. Oratory, conflict of emotions in, 145; two kinds, popular, 190. PABLO's songs, 292, 293, 294. Pain, release from acute, 15; effect of witnessing, 46. Particular lies, 320. Parting at the root of all joy, 56. Passion, moments of, 14; difficulty of deciding between passion and duty, 91; the inspiration of crime, 141; the nature of, 141; people in passion never wholly right, 167. Patient effort necessary even to genius, 267. People, commonplace, worthy of interest, 4; effect of agreeable, 39; severity of mild, 40; susceptible, affected by tone, 40; of the country less impressible than those of the town, 67. Pity, divine and human, 13; its power for good, 319. Plans, useless to form, 66. Pleasure, wearisome days of, 65. Pluck to fight, though sure of losing, 27. Poetry, no age entirely devoid of, 286. Poets, 321. Politeness sometimes an exasperation, 213. Possibilities, uncertainty of, 200. Power, intellectual, measure of, 271; insatiableness of, 291. Poyser, Mrs., character of, 72. Prayer, power of, 76. Prediction, 317. Prejudice, natural to some minds, 92. Present discomfort no insurance against future misfortune, 277. Present, the, its proper relation to the past and the future, 284. Pride, it helps to bear disappointment, 199. Prior, the, 320. Prosperity, why Felix Holt renounced it, 180, 181. Prudence, 314. Public judgment, 337. Punishment of fellow-creatures, no cause for satisfaction, 27. 356 INDEX. Self-importance a hindrance to self-improvement, 276. Self-love possible without self-satisfaction, 255. Self-questioning a morbid habit, 123. Sentiments the spiritual police of civilization, 282. Sephardo, 314, 317, 318, 319. Servants, want of faithfulness in, 65. Severities, half-way, blunders, 154. Sick-room a refuge from the restlessness of intellectual doubt, 21. Silence, the blessedness of, 272. Silva, Don, 299, 300, 303, 305, 314, 315, 316. Sin, shame for, 11; of prosperous people, 46; cherished, prevents pardon, 68 ; effects of, widely felt, 96; leads often to greater watchfulness, 168. Slackness, the infamy of, 320. Sorrow, wounds of, permanent, 8; associations of nature with, 9; an indestructible force, 44; despair in first, 49; confusion of mind in, 49; benumbing influence of, 50; willingness to bear, 69; aris- ing from false ideas, 119; of women, caused by hasty speech, 170. Soul, the, without and within, 327. Spain, “ broad-breasted,” 289. Speech, haste in, 68; hard, sad to remember, 143.. Speech-making, secret of, 153; Mr. Brooke's, 224 ; difficulties of, 245. Stelling, Mrs., character of, 105. Storms, 317. Strangers, interesting, 203. Strength often shown in homage to weakness, 169. Strong, duty of the, 54. Strong passion’s daring, 327. Strong souls, 310. Submission, energy needful to, 218. Successful worldliness apparently the most selfish, 256. Suffering, a regeneration, 44. Superstitions, consequences of, 261. Supreme love, 315. Surprise at our troubles absurd, 260. Sympathy, a key to knowledge of others, 17; a help to patience and charity, 45; an essential basis of just criticism, 271; universal need of, 292. INDEX. 357 TALK, pleasure in, 63; possibility of abstaining from, 63; useless- ness of, 190; shows mental qualities of speaker, 243. Thought, 317. Time changes aspect of things, 34. Tom and Maggie, character of, 88. Tongues, unmanageableness of, 217. Trouble, common to all, 60; work gives help in, 60. Trust, of youth in good fortune, 47 ; gives strength, 57; best placed in bachelors, 72; need of, 128. Truth, every, valuable, 182, 316, 338. Truthfulness a rare quality, 37. Tulliver, Mr., character of, 100; Mrs., character of, 99. Tunes, Scotch, comparison of, 71. Two Lovers, 343. UNCERTAINTY of things, obvious, 186. VANITIES, our, differ, 205. Vanity, one of its effects, 255. Veracity, a plant of Paradise, 154 ; absolute, difficult to attain, 285. Vermin, 321. Vile life, a, 310. WAKING, sensations of, 138. Walking, Romola's way of, 159. Walpurga, 336, 337. Watching in a sick-room, 87. Wedding journeys, disagreements on, 211; Mrs. Cadwallader's opinion of, 250. Welfare, efforts for immediate, best tended to promote future, 276. Wills, evidence of folly in, 268. Wise books, 318. Wit and humor, their proper limits, 279. Woman's dream, a, 313. Women, complaining, described, 43; foolishness of, 64; unreason- ableness of, 72; quickness of, 72; not a blessing, 73; difference between delicate and coarse, 74; timidity of, 98; fondness for help The borrower must return this item on or before the last date stamped below. If another user places a recall for this item, the borrower will be notified of the need for an earlier return. Non-receipt of overdue notices does not exempt the borrower from overdue fines. 3 2044 012 766 069 Harvard College Widener Library Cambridge, MA 02138 617-495-2413 3 MAYUN 8. 200400 BOOK DUE Please handle with care. Thank y (ve librar