*b & 
 
 ^ 
 
 tf 
 & 
 
 /^ 
 
 
 V 
 
 
 < ^ 
 
 
 .V 
 
 
V 8 
 
 
 °o 
 
 
 ♦ <> 
 
 % 
 
 <L> rr\ 
 
 <<W_, 
 
THE ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
BOOKS BY SIDNEY LANIER. 
 
 — ♦— 
 
 The English Novel. A Study in the Development of Person- 
 ality. Cr. 8vo. $2.00. 
 
 The Science of English Verse. Cr. 8vo. $2.00. 
 
 Poems. Edited by his Wife, with a Memorial by William Hayes 
 Ward. With portrait. i2mo. $2.00. 
 
 Select Poems of Sidney Lanier. Edited, with an Introduction 
 and Notes, by Prof. Morgan Callaway, Jr. i2mo, net, $1.00. 
 
 BOY'S LIBRARY OF LEGEND AND CHIVALRY. 
 
 Four volumes. Illustrated. Each cr. 8vo. 82.00. 
 The Boy's Froissart. Knightly Legends of Wales. 
 
 The Boy's King Arthur. 
 
 The Boy's Percy. 
 
 I 
 
THE 
 
 ENGLISH NOVEL 
 
 A STUDY IN 
 
 Cije £)eiiel0imxent of Persionalttp 
 
 BY 
 
 SIDNEY LANIER 
 
 LECTURER IN JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
 AUTHOR OF " THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE 
 
 REVISED EDITION 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1897 
 
^ 
 
 f 
 
 vV 
 
 Copyright, 1883, 1897, 
 By Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 ©foiteitg $r«»: 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 
 
Table of Contents 
 
 i 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Purpose of these Lectures I 
 
 Forms of Expression in Prose 2 
 
 Recent Origin and Great Popularity of the Novel .... 3 
 
 Four Lines of Development to be studied 4 
 
 1. Growth in the Personality of Man 5 
 
 2. Simultaneous Rise of Music, Science, and the Novel . 9 
 
 3. Increase of Personality has required more Complex 
 
 Forms of Expression 10 
 
 4. Illustration by Extracts from Novels 10 
 
 English Prose developed much later than English Poetry . 11 
 
 Chaucer's Parson's Tale 13 
 
 And Melibceus . 16 
 
 The Six Wise Masters' Speech of Tribulation 19 
 
 Malory's Morte d' Arthur 20 
 
 Monotony of Early Prose 21 
 
 Physiological Basis of Rhythm i . . . . . 23 
 
 II 
 
 Development of Prose Rhythm 25 
 
 Prose has more Forms than Poetry 27 
 
 Science and Art commonly confounded 28 
 
 Zola's Theory of Scientific Fiction 28 
 
 True Relations of Science, Art, Religion, and Life .... 30 
 
 From Formlessness to Form is the Law 30 
 
 Illustration from the Science of Music 31 
 
 Misconception concerning the Science of English Verse . . . 33 
 
 Fallacy that Ignorance helps Spontaneity 34 
 
 Art is Selective 36 
 
 Shakspere's Careful Art 37 
 
 Science and Poetry have grown side by side ...... 38 
 
 Tennyson shows how the Poet treats Science 39 
 
xii Table of Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Fallacy that Poetry will be Democratic and Formless ... 45 
 
 Whitman's Real Value 45 
 
 Wordsworth and Whitman not Democratic 46 
 
 III 
 
 Summary of Preceding Lecture 48 
 
 How Science should help the Poet . 49 
 
 Whitman's Specious Democracy 50 
 
 True Democracy depends on Character, not on Muscle . . 56 
 
 Carlyle on Poetic Beauty 59 
 
 Freedom not reached through Formlessness 60 
 
 Beethoven and Epictetus illustrate the Connection between 
 
 Art and Freedom 61 
 
 Whitman a Dandy in Disguise 63 
 
 Zola's Theory of Fiction 65 
 
 His Misconception of Science 69 
 
 The Experimental Novel impossible 71 
 
 Science is Analytic, Art is Synthetic 72 
 
 The True Novelist is Scientific and Poetic 73 
 
 Romantic, Realistic, and Naturalistic Fiction y^ 
 
 IV 
 
 Is the Growth in Personality the Great Fact ? 78 
 
 Life teaches us to know ourselves 79 
 
 Analysis of /Eschylus's Prometheus Bound 81 
 
 Feeble Sense of Personality displayed 89 
 
 Chaucer's Description of the Golden Age 92 
 
 Prometheus Bound emphasizes Physical Pain 95 
 
 Modern, Spiritual Pain illustrated by Keats ...... 95 
 
 Shelley's Prometheus Unbound 98 
 
 Shelley's Immaturity 102 
 
 Specimens of his Excellence 106 
 
 Bayard Taylor's Prince, Deukalion .109 
 
 Plato's Republic shows Lack of Sense of Personality . . . 116 
 
Table of Contents xiii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Plato and Zola reach Similar Results 119 
 
 Plato and Whitman 121 
 
 VI 
 
 Greek Science as illustrated by Plato 127 
 
 Aristotle's Lack of Intellectual Conscience ...... 130 
 
 Plato on Immortality 133 
 
 Love of Truth a Modern Characteristic 138 
 
 Modern Science Dates from Newton 139 
 
 English Science in Pepys's Time 142 
 
 Burton's Anato??iy of Melancholy 143 
 
 Music among the Greeks 145 
 
 Absence of Harmony 148 
 
 Slow Development of Music 148 
 
 With Bach and Handel Modern Music begins 149 
 
 Modern English Novel begins with Richardson . .... 151 
 
 VII 
 
 Personality develops in Three Directions 152 
 
 The Spiritual Significance of Music 153 
 
 George Eliot represents Modern Personality 155 
 
 Her First Work, Amos Barton 157 
 
 Scenes of Clerical Life 160 
 
 Adam Bede 163 
 
 George Eliot's Early Life 164 
 
 Comparison of Milly Barton with Prometheus ..... 172 
 
 Love is the Modern Watchword 173 
 
 VIII 
 
 Historical Retrospect of English Fiction 175 
 
 Richardson's Pamela 176 
 
 Fielding's foseph A ndrews 181 
 
 Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe 183 
 
 Fielding's Jonathan Wild and Tom Jones 184 
 
 Smollett 185 
 
 Sterne • • • 186 
 
xiv Table of Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Purpose of these Eighteenth Century Novelists 187 
 
 Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield 189 
 
 Darwin's Loves of the Plants 191 
 
 Scott and his Contemporaries 194 
 
 Victorian Writers 194 
 
 Bulwer and Dickens 195 
 
 Thackeray 196 
 
 New Mission exemplified by George Eliot 197 
 
 Emerson and Carlyle on Social Inequality 199 
 
 George Eliot on Everyday Life * i' . iy9 
 
 IX 
 
 y Adam Bede 202 
 
 Influence of Didactic Fiction illustrated by Dickens . . . 204 
 
 Immorality of Richardson and Fielding 204 
 
 George Eliot both Synthetic and Analytic 206 
 
 Has Greater Tolerance than Dickens 206 
 
 Her Reverence for the Past 207 
 
 Her Use of Scientific Terms 208 
 
 Dickens's Satire on " The Good Old Times " 210 
 
 Thackeray's Method illustrated by the Daily Newspaper . 211 
 
 His One-sided View of Life 212 
 
 His Lack of Appreciation . . . . 1 214 
 
 Contrast between George Eliot's and Dickens's Methods . 215 
 
 fanet's Repentance 216 
 
 Shakspere has described no Repentance 218 
 
 George Eliot Recognizes the Complexity of Personality . . 220 
 
 Lack of Personal Details in the Gospels 221 
 
 Animals as described by George Eliot and Dickens . . . 221 
 
 Carlyle's Lesson from a Hen 223 
 
 Womanhood in Victorian Literature 225 
 
 The Mill on the Floss 227 
 
 Enormous Advance from ^Eschylus to George Eliot . . . 228 
 
 Simple Materials of her Novel 229 
 
 Individualism displayed by the Tullivers '. . 230 
 
 Love and not Justice is our Highest Need 238 
 
Table of Contents xv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Maggie Tulliver and Aurora Leigh 241 
 
 George Eliot makes the Commonplace Heroic 243 
 
 Pessimism confuted by Victorian Women 253 
 
 XI 
 
 Silas Marner and the Pardoner's Tale 256 
 
 Summary of Silas Marner 258 
 
 George Jliio. 'Supreme in portraying Spiritual Regeneration 260 
 
 Daniel Deronda 261 
 
 Interweaving of Two Stories 263 
 
 " Is Life Worth Living ? " answered for Daniel and Gwendolen 264 
 
 What is a Repentance ? 264 
 
 Illustrations from Shakspere 265 
 
 The Novel excels the Drama in depicting Spiritual States . 267 
 
 Paradise Lost 272 
 
 Shakspere's Limitations 272 
 
 Objections to Daniel Deronda examined 273 
 
 It is not a Pro-Jewish Tract , 274 
 
 Is Daniel Deronda a Prig ? 275 
 
 The Truth of the Book makes Society Wince 275 
 
 XII 
 
 George Eliot's Moral Purpose 279 
 
 " Art for Art's Sake " 281 
 
 No Real Beauty divorced from Goodness 282 
 
 Ideal Love as described by Emerson 286 
 
 Beauty as described by Emerson 287 
 
 ~- Scott's Work is mostly £7«moral 289 
 
 Influence of Moral Purpose on Art . . 289 
 
 Great Poetry, except the Hebrew, Untranslatable .... 290 
 
 English Fiction avowedly Didactic 294 
 
 - George Eliot and the Jews 295 
 
 Her Life in London 297 
 
 " How far influenced by Herbert Spencer 298 
 
 Her Personal Habits 300 
 
 List of her Works 300 
 
 Her Love for Humanity 301 
 
 Conclusion 302 
 
vi Prefatory Note 
 
 growth in the sense of personality, contrasted with 
 its faint and crude expression in the ^Eschylean 
 drama. The original title was discarded as too 
 cumbrous, and after thirteen years of circulation 
 the only practicable change is thought to be a 
 clearer statement in a new sub-title. 
 
 Immediate publication of these lectures was 
 urged in 1882 by some who had listened to them 
 and who believed that they would require only 
 careful proof-reading. At this time Mr. Lanier's 
 only companion in their preparation was disabled 
 by illness from taking any part whatever in the 
 editing; so an unrevised first draught of a work 
 shaped and penned — or sometimes dictated — 
 under the weight of a mortal malady was com- 
 mitted to the generous care of a friend who was 
 forbidden to lay any questions before the present 
 editor. Many mistakes resulted: some from the 
 copyist's unfamiliarity with the feeble handwriting, 
 and others from the former editor's uncertainty 
 regarding Mr. Lanier's final wish at various points. 
 New plates have permitted a thorough revision, 
 the addition of a table of contents and the restora- 
 tion of several omitted passages. In addition, some 
 verbal repetitions are suppressed and consistency 
 in external forms has been sought. 
 
 One slight alteration the present editor has made 
 with reluctance, upon the assurance that a liberty 
 which the author deliberately claimed the right to 
 exercise would be mistaken for unscholarly care- 
 lessness : that is, the interchangeable use of will 
 and shall as they repeatedly appear in his writings. 
 
Prefatory Note 
 
 The Johns Hopkins lectures delivered in Hop- 
 kins Hall during the winter of 1881, and published 
 in 1883 under title of The English Novel, were Mr. 
 Lanier's latest literary work excepting his Introduc- 
 tion to The Boys Mabinogion, which was dictated at 
 intervals in May and June, 1881, in the Carolina 
 mountains. Their original plan called for twenty 
 lectures ; but Mr. Lanier was at the last persuaded 
 to reduce the number to twelve, as President Gil- 
 man, with solicitude aroused by the writer's rapid 
 decline, made use of the suggestion that a shorter 
 course would better fit in with the whole schedule 
 of University lectures. To effect this change the 
 entire omission of many subjects and briefer treat- 
 ment of others became necessary, while George 
 Eliot's death occurring in the middle of the course 
 further modified the plan by urging Mr. Lanier 
 to concentrate upon her work the remaining six 
 lectures. 
 
 His own name for the course was " From 
 iEschylus to George Eliot, The Development of 
 Personality," and this better conveys the author's 
 purpose than the compacter book-title, since the 
 novel was preferred for study above other literary 
 forms merely as the fullest exponent of man's 
 
Prefatory Note vii 
 
 He must therefore be put upon record according 
 to his parenthesis " (Observe will and shall here) " 
 that follows the quotation from Sir Thomas Malory 
 on p. 21. He has defined this attitude in a frag- 
 mentary note headed "Will and Shall," where he 
 says: 
 
 " Who can assume authority on the proper use 
 of will and shall, when the Wycliffite scriptures 
 have ' I schal ryse ' and ' I schal go to my fadir ' 
 and ' I schal seie to him,' while the modern version 
 has ' I will arise ' and ' I will say,' etc. ? " 
 
 So much discretion may fall within the limits of 
 a duty attempted in this revision : to preserve the 
 author's own well-developed sense of personality in 
 its utmost freedom of expression, and to give to 
 his readers the fullest opportunity of studying that 
 rare personality as it is here revealed. 
 
 M. D. L. 
 
 January, 1897. 
 
Prefatory Note to the First Edition. 
 
 The following chapters were originally delivered 
 as public lectures at John Hopkins University, in 
 the winter and spring of 1881. Had Mr. Lanier 
 lived to prepare them for the press he would prob- 
 ably have recast them to some extent; but the 
 present editor has not felt free to make any 
 changes from the original manuscript, beyond the 
 omission of a few local and occasional allusions, 
 and the curtailment of several long extracts from 
 well known writers. 
 
 Although each is complete in itself, this work 
 and its foregoer, The Science of English Verse, 
 were intended to be parts of a comprehensive 
 philosophy of formal and substantial beauty, which, 
 unhappily, the author did not live to develop. 
 
 W. H. B. 
 
The English Novel 
 
 A Study in 
 The Development of Personality 
 
 I 
 
 The series of lectures which I last had the pleasure 
 of delivering in this hall was devoted to the exposition 
 of what is beyond doubt the most remarkable, the most 
 persistent, the most wide-spread, and the most noble 
 of all those methods of arranging words and ideas in 
 definite relations which have acquired currency among 
 men — namely, the method of verse, or formal poetry. 
 That exposition began by reducing all possible phe- 
 nomena of verse to terms of vibration ; and having thus 
 secured at once a solid physical basis for this science, 
 and a precise nomenclature in which we could talk 
 intelligibly upon this century-befogged subject, we ad- 
 vanced gradually from the most minute to the largest 
 possible considerations upon the matter in hand. 
 
 Now wishing that such courses as I might give here 
 should preserve a certain coherence with each other, I 
 have hoped that I could secure that end by successively 
 treating the great forms of modern literature ; and, 
 wishing further to gain whatever advantage of entertain- 
 ment for you may lie in contrast and variety, I have 
 
2 The English Novel 
 
 thought that inasmuch as we have already studied the 
 verse-form in general, we might now profitably study 
 some great prose-form in particular, and — in still further 
 contrast — that we might study that form not so much 
 analytically — as when we developed the science of 
 formal poetry from a single physical principle — but 
 this time synthetically, from the point of view of literary 
 art rather than of literary science. 
 
 I am further led to this general plan by the con- 
 sideration that so far as I know — but my reading in this 
 direction is not wide and I may be in error — there is no 
 book extant in any language which gives a conspectus 
 of all those well-marked and widely-varying literary 
 forms which have differentiated themselves in the course 
 of time, and of the curious and subtle needs of the 
 modern civilized man which, under the stress of that 
 imperious demand for expression which all man's emo- 
 tions make, have respectively determined the modes 
 of such expression to be in one case The Novel, in 
 another The Sermon, in another The Newspaper Leader, 
 in another The Scientific Essay, in another The Popular 
 Magazine Article, in another The Semi- Scientific Lecture, 
 and so on : each of these prose-forms, you observe, 
 having its own limitations and fitnesses quite as well- 
 defined as the sonnet-form, the ballad-form, the drama- 
 form, and the like, in verse. 
 
 And, with this general plan, a great number of -con- 
 siderations, which I hope will satisfactorily emerge as. we 
 go on, lead me irresistibly to select the novel as the 
 particular prose- form for our study. 
 
 It happens indeed that over and above -the purely 
 literary interest which would easily give this form the 
 first place in such a series as the present, the question of 
 the novel has just at this time become one of the most 
 
The Development of Personality 3 
 
 pressing and vital of all the practical problems which 
 beset our moral and social economy. 
 
 The novel — what we call the novel — is a new inven- 
 tion. It is customary to date the first English novel with 
 Richardson in 1740; and just as it has been impossible 
 to confine other great inventions to the service of virtue 
 — for the thief can send a telegram to his pal as easily 
 as the sick man to his doctor, and the locomotive spins 
 along no less merrily because ten car-loads of rascals 
 may be profiting by its speed — so vice as well as virtue 
 has availed itself of the novel-form, and we have such 
 spectacles as Scott and Dickens and Eliot and Mac- 
 donald using this means to purify the air in one place 
 while Zola in another applies the very same means to 
 defiling the whole earth and slandering all humanity 
 under the sacred names of "naturalism," of "science," 
 of "physiology." Now I need not waste time in de- 
 scanting before this audience upon the spread of the novel 
 among all classes of modern readers : while I have been 
 writing this, a well-considered paper on " Fiction in our 
 Public Libraries " has appeared in the current Inter- 
 national Review which, among many suggestive state- 
 ments, declares that out of pretty nearly five millions 
 (4,872,595) of volumes circulated in five years by the 
 Boston Public Library nearly four millions (3,824,938), 
 that is about four-fifths, were classed as "Juveniles 
 and Fiction;" and — merely mentioning the strength 
 which these figures gain when considered along with the 
 fact that they represent the reading of a people supposed 
 to be more " solid " in literary matter than any other 
 in the country — if we inquire into the proportion at 
 Baltimore, I fancy I have only to hold up this copy of 
 James's The American, which I borrowed the other day 
 from the Mercantile Library, and which I think I may 
 
4 The English Novel 
 
 say, after considerable rummaging about the books of 
 that institution, certainly bears more marks of " circula- 
 tion" than any solid book in it. In short, as a people, 
 the novel is educating us. Thus we cannot take any 
 final or secure solace in the discipline and system of 
 our schools and universities until we have also learned 
 to regulate this fascinating universal teacher which 
 has taken such hold upon all minds, from the gravest 
 scholar down to the boot-black shivering on the windy 
 street corner over his dime-novel, — this educator whose 
 principles are fastening themselves upon your boy's 
 mind so that long after he has forgotten his amo and his 
 tupto they will be controlling his relations to his fellow- 
 men and determining his happiness for life. 
 
 But we can take no really effective action upon this 
 matter until we understand precisely what the novel is 
 and means ; and it is therefore with the additional plea- 
 sure of stimulating you to systematize and extend your 
 views upon a living issue which demands your opinion, 
 that I now invite you to enter with me without further 
 preliminary upon a series of studies in which it is pro- 
 posed, first, to inquire what is that special relation of the 
 novel to the modern man by virtue of which it has become 
 a paramount literary form, and, secondly, to illustrate 
 this abstract inquiry, when completed, by some concrete 
 readings in the greatest of modern English novelists. 
 
 In the course of this inquiry I shall be called on to 
 bring before you some of the very largest conceptions of 
 which the mind is capable, and inasmuch as several of 
 the minor demonstrations will begin somewhat remotely 
 from the novel, it. will save me many details which 
 would be otherwise necessary if I indicate in a dozen 
 words the four special lines of development along one or 
 other of which I shall be always travelling. 
 
The Development of Personality 5 
 
 My first line will concern itself with the enormous 
 growth in the personality of man which our time reveals 
 when compared for instance with the time of ^Eschylus. 
 I shall insist with the utmost reverence that between 
 every human being and every other human being exists 
 a radical, unaccountable, inevitable difference from birth ; 
 this sacred difference between man and man, by virtue 
 of which I am I and you are you, this marvellous 
 separation which we express by the terms " personal 
 identity," "self-hood," "me," — it is the unfolding of 
 this, I shall insist, which since the time of vEschylus 
 (say) has wrought all those stupendous changes in the 
 relation of man to God, to physical nature, and to his 
 fellow, which have culminated in the modern cultus. I 
 can best bring before you the length and breadth of this 
 idea of modern personality as I conceive it, by stating it 
 in terms which have recently been made prominent and 
 familiar by the discussion as to the evolution of genius, 
 a phase of which appears in a very agreeable paper by 
 Mr. John Fiske in the current Atlantic Monthly on 
 " Sociology and Hero Worship." Says Mr. Fiske, in a 
 certain part of this article, " Every species of animals or 
 plants consists of a great number of individuals which 
 are nearly but not exactly alike. Each individual varies 
 slightly in one characteristic or another from a certain 
 type which expresses the average among all the indi- 
 viduals of the species. . . . Now the moth with his 
 proboscis twice as long as the average ... is what we 
 call a spontaneous variation, and the Darwin or the 
 Helmholtz is what we call a ' genius ' ; and the analogy 
 between the two kinds of variation is obvious enough." 
 He proceeds in another place : " We cannot tell why a 
 given moth has a proboscis exactly an inch and a quarter 
 in length any more than we can tell why Shakspere was 
 
6 The English Novel 
 
 a great dramatist," — there being absolutely no pre- 
 cedent conditions by which the most ardent evolutionist 
 could evolve William Shakspere, for example, from old 
 John Shakspere and his wife. "The social philosopher 
 must simply accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin ac- 
 cepts his spontaneous variations." 
 
 But now if we reflect upon this prodigious series of 
 spontaneous variations which I have called the sacred 
 difference between man and man, — this personality which 
 every father and mother are astonished at anew every 
 day when out of six children they perceive that each 
 one of the six, from the very earliest moment of activity, 
 has shown his own distinct individuality, differing wholly 
 from either parent, the child who most resembles the 
 parent physically often having a personality which 
 crosses that of the parent at the sharpest angles, — this 
 radical, indestructible, universal personality which entitles 
 every " me " to its privacy, which has in course of time 
 made the Englishman's house his castle, which has devel- 
 oped the Rights of Man, the American Republic, the 
 supreme prerogative of the woman to say whom she will 
 love, what man she shall marry, — this personality so pre- 
 cious that not even the miserablest wretch, with no other 
 possession but his personality, has ever been brought to 
 say he would be willing to exchange it entire for that of 
 the happiest being, — this personality which has brought 
 about that whereas in the time of ^Eschylus the common 
 man was simply a creature of the State, like a modern 
 corporation with rights and powers strictly limited by the 
 State's charter, now he is a genuine sovereign who makes 
 the State, a king as to every minutest particle of his in- 
 dividuality so long as that kinghood does not cross the 
 kinghood of his fellow, — when we reflect upon this awful 
 spontaneous variation of personality, this " mystery in us 
 
The Development of Personality 7 
 
 which calls itself/" (as Thomas Carlyle has somewhere 
 called it), which makes every man scientifically a human 
 atom, yet an atom endowed above all other atoms with 
 the power to choose its own mode of motion, its own 
 combining equivalent, — when further we reflect upon the 
 relation of each human atom to each other human atom 
 and to the great Giver of personalities to these atoms, — 
 how each is indissolubly bound to each and to Him, and 
 yet how each is discretely parted and impassably sepa- 
 rated from each and from Him by a gulf which is simply 
 no less deep than the width between the finite and the 
 infinite, — when we reflect, finally, that it is this simple, 
 indivisible, radical, indestructible, new force which each 
 child brings into the world under the name of its self 
 which controls the whole life of that child, so that its 
 path is always a resultant of its own individual force on 
 the one hand, and of the force of its surrounding circum- 
 stances on the other, — we are bound to confess, it seems 
 to me, that such spontaneous variations carry us upon a 
 plane of mystery very far above those merely unessential 
 variations of the offspring from the parental type in 
 physique, and even above those fare abnormal variations 
 which we call genius. 
 
 In meditating upon this matter, I found a short time 
 ago a poem of Tennyson's floating about the newspapers 
 which so beautifully and reverently chants this very sense 
 of personality, that I must read you a line or two from it. 
 I have since observed that much fun has been made of 
 this piece, and I have seen elaborate burlesques upon it. 
 But I think such an attitude could be possible only to 
 one who had not passed along this line of thought. At 
 any rate the poem seemed to me a very noble and raptu- 
 rous hymn to the great Personality above us, acknow- 
 ledging the mystery of our own personalities as finitely 
 
8 The English Novel 
 
 dependent upon, and yet so infinitely divided from His 
 Personality. 
 
 This poem is called De Profundis — Two Greetings, and 
 is addressed to a new-born child. I have time to read 
 only a line or two, here and there ; you will find the 
 whole poem much more satisfactory. Please observe, 
 however, the ample comforting phrases and summaries 
 with which Tennyson expresses the poetic idea of that 
 personality which I have just tried to express from the 
 point of view of science, of the evolutionist : 
 
 " Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, 
 When all that was to be in all that was 
 Whirl'd for a million aeons thro' the vast 
 Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light — 
 
 Thro' all this changing world of changeless law, 
 And every phase of ever-heightening life 
 
 Thou comest : 
 
 O, dear Spirit, half-lost 
 In thine own shadows and this fleshly sign 
 That thou art thou — who wailest, being born 
 Andbanish'd into mystery and the pain 
 Of this divisible-indivisible world, 
 
 . . . Our mortal veil 
 And shatter'd phantom of that infinite One 
 Who made thee inconceivably thyself 
 Out of his whole world — self and all in all — 
 Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape 
 And ivy berry choose ; and still depart 
 From death to death thro' life and life, and find 
 
 This main miracle, that thou art thou, 
 
 With power on thy own act and on the world. 
 
 We feel we are nothing— for all is Thou and in Thee ; 
 We feel we are something — that also has come from Thee ; 
 We are nothing, O Thou — but Thou wilt help us to be ; 
 Hallowed be Thy name — Hallelujah ! " 
 
The Development of Personality 9 
 
 I find some expressions here which give me great 
 satisfaction : " The Infinite One who made thee inconceiv- 
 ably thyself, — this divisible- indivisible world, this main 
 miracle that thou art thou," etc. 
 
 Now it is with this "main miracle," that I am I, and 
 you, you — with this personality, that my first train of 
 thought will busy itself; and I shall try to show, by sev- 
 eral concrete illustrations from the lines and between the 
 lines of ^Eschylus and Plato and the like writers com- 
 pared with several modern writers, how feeble the sense 
 and influence of it is in their time as contrasted with ours. 
 
 In my second line of development, I shall call your 
 attention to what seems to me a very remarkable and 
 suggestive fact : to-wit, that Physical Science, Music, and 
 the Novel, all take their rise at the same time : of course, 
 I mean what we moderns call science, music, and the 
 novel. For example, if we select — for the sake of well- 
 known representative names — Sir Isaac Newton (1642), 
 John Sebastian Bach (1685) and Samuel Richardson 
 (1689), the first standing for the rise of modern science, 
 the second for the rise of modern music, the third for the 
 rise of the modern novel, and observe that these three 
 men are born within fifty years of each other, we cannot 
 fail to find ourselves in the midst of a thousand surprising 
 suggestions and inferences. For in our sweeping arc 
 from ^Eschylus to the present time, fifty years subtend 
 scarcely any space ; we may say these men are born 
 together. And here the word accident has no meaning. 
 Time, progress, then, have no accidents. 
 
 In this second train of thought I shall endeavor to 
 connect these phenomena with the principle of person- 
 ality developed in the first train, and shall try to show 
 that this science, music, and the novel, are flowerings- 
 out of that principle in various directions ; for instance, 
 
io The English Novel 
 
 each man, in this growth of personality, feeling himself 
 in direct and personal relations with physical nature (not 
 in relations obscured by the vague intermediary hama- 
 dryads and fauns of the Greek system), a general desire 
 to know the exact truth about nature arises, and this 
 desire carried to a certain enthusiasm in the nature of 
 given men — behold the man of science ; a similar feel- 
 ing of direct personal relation to the Unknown, acting 
 similarly upon particular men, — behold the musician, 
 and the ever-increasing tendency of the modern man to 
 worship God in terms of music ; likewise, a similar feel- 
 ing of direct personal relation to each individual member 
 of humanity, high or low, rich or poor, acting similarly, 
 gives us such a novel as the Mill on the Floss, for 
 instance, where for a long time we find ourselves inter- 
 ested in two mere children — Tom and Maggie Tuiliver 
 — or such novels as those of Dickens and his fellow- 
 host who have called upon our human relation to poor, 
 unheroic people. 
 
 In my third train of thought I shall attempt to show 
 that the increase of personalities thus going on has 
 brought about such complexities of relation that the 
 older forms of expression were inadequate to them ; and 
 that the resulting necessity has developed the wonder- 
 fully free and elastic form of the modern novel out of the 
 more rigid Greek drama, through the transition form of 
 the Elizabethan drama. 
 
 And, fourthly, I shall offer copious readings from some 
 of the most characteristic modern novels in illustration 
 of the general principles thus brought forward. 
 
 Here, — as the old preacher Hugh Latimer grimly said 
 in closing one of his powerful descriptions of future pun- 
 ishment, — you see your fare. 
 
 Permit me, then, to begin the execution of this plan 
 
The Development of Personality 1 1 
 
 by bringing before you two matters which will be con- 
 veniently disposed of in the outset because they affect all 
 these four lines of thought in general, and because 
 I find the very vaguest ideas prevailing about them 
 among those whose special attention happens not to 
 have been called this way. 
 
 As to the first point : permit me to remind you how 
 lately these prose-forms have been developed in our liter- 
 ature as compared with the forms of verse. Indeed, 
 abandoning the thought of any particular forms of prose, 
 consider for how long a time good English poetry was 
 written before any good English prose appears. It is 
 historical that as far back as the seventh century Csedmon 
 is writing a strong English poem in an elaborate form of 
 verse. Well-founded conjecture carries us back much 
 farther than this ; but without relying upon that, we have 
 clear knowledge that all along the time when Beowulf 
 and The Wanderer — to me one of the most artistic 
 and affecting of English poems — and The Battle of 
 Maldon are being written, all along the time when 
 Caedmon and Aldhelm and the somewhat mythical 
 Cynewulf are singing, formal poetry or verse has reached 
 a high stage of artistic development. But not only so : 
 after the Norman change is consummated and our lan- 
 guage has fairly assimilated that tributary stock of words 
 and ideas and influences, the poetic advance, the 
 development of verse, goes steadily on. If you examine 
 the remains of our lyric poetry written along in the 
 twelfth and thirteenth centuries — short and unstudied 
 little songs as many of them are, songs which come 
 upon us out of that obscure period like brief little bird- 
 calls from a thick-leaved wood — if, I say, we examine 
 these songs, written as many of them are by nobody in 
 particular, it is impossible not to believe that a great 
 
12 The English Novel 
 
 mass of poetry, some of which must have been very 
 beautiful, was written in the two hundred years just 
 before Chaucer, and that an extremely small proportion 
 of it can have come down to us. 
 
 But, in all this period, where is the piece of English 
 prose that corresponds with The Wanderer, or with the 
 daintier Cuckoo-Song of the early twelfth century? In 
 point of fact, we cannot say that even the conception of an 
 artistic prose has occurred to English literary endeavor 
 until long after Chaucer. King Alfred's Translations, 
 the English Chronicle, the Homilies of ^Elfric, are 
 simple and clear enough ; and, coming down later, the 
 English Bible set forth by Wyclif and his contempo- 
 raries. Wyclif s own sermons and tracts, and Mandeville's 
 account of his travels are effective enough, each to its 
 own end. But in all these the form is so far overridden 
 by the direct pressing purpose, either didactic or 
 educational, that — with exceptions I cannot now specify 
 in favor of the Wyclif Bible — I can find none of them in 
 which the prose seems controlled by considerations of 
 beauty. Perhaps the most curious and interesting proof 
 I could adduce of the obliviousness of even the most 
 artistic Englishmen in this time to the possibility of 
 a melodious and uncloying English prose, is the prose 
 work of Chaucer. While, so far as concerns the mere 
 music of verse, I cannot call Chaucer a great artist, yet 
 he was the greatest of his time ; from him, therefore, 
 we have the right to expect the best craftsmanship in 
 words ; for all fine prose depends as much upon its 
 rhythms and correlated proportions as fine verse, and, 
 now, since we have an art of prose, it is a perfect test of 
 the real excellence of a poet in verse to try his corre- 
 sponding excellence in prose. But in Chaucer's time 
 there is no art of English prose. Listen, for example, to 
 
The Development of Personality 13 
 
 the opening lines of that one of Chaucer's Canterbury 
 series which he calls The Parson's Tale, and which is in 
 prose throughout. It happens very patly to my present 
 discussion that in the Prologue to this tale some con- 
 versation occurs which reveals to us quite clearly a 
 current idea of Chaucer's time as to the proper distinc- 
 tion between prose and verse — or " rym " — and as to the 
 functions and subject-matter peculiarly belonging to each 
 of these forms ; and, for that reason, let me preface my 
 quotation from The Parson's Tale with a bit of it. As 
 the Canterbury Pilgrims are jogging merrily along, 
 presently it appears that but one more tale is needed 
 to carry out the original proposition, and so the ever- 
 important Host calls on the Parson for it, as follows : 
 
 " As we were entryng at a thropes ende, 
 For while our Host, as he was wont to gye, 
 As in this caas, our joly compaignye, 
 Sayd in this wise : ' Lordyngs, everichoon, 
 Now lakketh us no tales moo than oon," " etc., 
 
 and turning to the Parson, 
 
 " ' Sir Prest,' quod he, ' artow a vicory ? 
 Or artow a persoun ? Say soth, by thy fay, 
 Be what thou be, ne breke thou nat oure play ; 
 For every man, save thou, hath told his tale. 
 Unbocle and schew us what is in thy male. 
 
 Tel us a fable anoon, for cokkes boones ! ' " 
 
 Whereupon the steadfast Parson proceeds to assure the 
 company that whatever he may have in his male [wallet] 
 there is none of your light-minded and fictitious verse 
 in it ; nothing but grave and reverend prose. 
 
 " This Persoun him answerede al at oones : 
 ' Thow getist fable noon i-told for me;'" 
 
14 The English Novel 
 
 (And you will presently observe that " fable " in the 
 Parson's mind means very much the same with verse or 
 poetry, and that the whole business of fiction — that same 
 fiction which has now come to occupy such a command- 
 ing plane with us moderns, and which we are to study 
 with such reverence under its form of the novel — implies 
 downright lying and wickedness.) 
 
 " ' Thow getist fable noon i-told for me ; 
 For Poul, that writeth unto Timothe, 
 Repreveth hem that weyveth sothfastnesse, 
 And tellen fables and such wrecchednesse, 
 
 For which I say, if that yow lust to hiere 
 Moralite and vertuous matiere,' " 
 
 (that is — as we shall presently see — prose) 
 
 " ' And thanne that ye will yive me audience, 
 I wol ful fayne at Cristis reverence, 
 Do yow plesaunce leful, as I can. 
 But trusteth wel, I am a Suthern man, 
 I can nat geste, rum, ram, ruf, by letter, 
 Ne, God wot, rym hold I but litel better; 
 And therfor, if yow lust, I wol not glose, 
 1 wol yow telle a mery tale in prose/ " 
 
 Here our honest Parson, (and he was honest : I am 
 frightfully tempted to go clean away from my path and 
 read that heart-filling description of him which Chaucer 
 gives in the general Prologue to the Canterbury Tales) 
 sweeps away the whole literature of verse and of fiction 
 with the one contemptuous word "glose " — by which he 
 seems to mean a sort of shame-faced lying all the more 
 pitiful because done in verse — and sets up prose as the 
 proper vehicle for " moralite" and vertuous matiere." 
 
 With this idea of the function of prose, you will not 
 be surprised to find, as I read these opening sentences 
 
The Development of Personality 15 
 
 of the Parson's so-called Tale, that the style is rigidly 
 sententious, and that the movement of the whole is like 
 that of a long string of proverbs, which of course pres- 
 ently becomes intolerably droning and wearisome. The 
 Parson begins : 
 
 " Many ben the weyes espirituels that leden folk to oure 
 Lord Ihesu Crist, and to the regne of glorie ; of whiche 
 weyes ther is a ful noble wey, which may not faile to no 
 man ne to womman, that thurgh synne hath mysgon fro 
 the righte wey of Jerusalem celestial ; and this wey is 
 cleped penitence. Of which men schulden gladly herken 
 and enquere with al here herte, to wyte, what is peni- 
 tence, and whens it is cleped penitence ? And in what 
 maner and in how many maneres been the acciones or 
 workynges of penaunce, and how many spieces ben of 
 penitences, and whiche thinges apperteynen and byhoven 
 to penitence, and whiche thinges destourben penitence." 
 
 In reading page after page of this bagpipe-bass, one 
 has to remember strenuously all the moral beauty of the 
 Parson's character in order to forgive the droning ugliness 
 of his prose. Nothing could better realize the descrip- 
 tion which Tennyson's Northern Farmer gives of his 
 parson's manner of preaching and the effect thereof : 
 
 "An' I hallus coomed to 's choorch afoor moy Sally wur dead, 
 An' 'eard urn a bummin' awa'ay loike a buzzard-clock ower 
 
 my 'ead. 
 An' I niver knavv'd whot a mean'd, but I thowt a 'ad summut 
 
 to saay, 
 An' I thowt a said whot a owt to 'a said an' I coomed awaay." 
 
 It must be said, however, in justice to Chaucer, that 
 he writes better prose than this when he really sets about 
 telling a tale. What the Parson calls his " Tale " turns 
 out — to the huge disgust, I suspect, of several other pil- 
 grims besides the Host — to be nothing more than a 
 
1 6 The English Novel 
 
 homily or sermon, in which the propositions about peni- 
 tence, with many minor heads and sub-divisions, are un- 
 sparingly developed to the bitter end. But in the Tale 
 of Meliboeus his inimitable faculty of story-telling comes 
 to his aid and determines his sentences to a little more 
 variety and picturesqueness, though the sententious still 
 predominates. Here, for example, is a bit of dialogue 
 between Meliboeus and his wife, which I selected be- 
 cause, over and above its applications here as early prose, 
 we shall find it particularly suggestive presently when we 
 come to compare it with some dialogue in George Eliot's 
 Adam Bede where the conversation is very much upon 
 the same topic. 
 
 It seems that Meliboeus, being still a young man, goes 
 away into the fields, leaving his wife Prudence and his 
 daughter — whose name some of the texts give in its 
 Greek form as Sophia, while others quaintly enough 
 call her Sapience, translating the Greek into Latin — in 
 the house. Thereupon " three of his olde foos " (says 
 Chaucer) " have it espyed, and setten laddres to the 
 walles of his hous, and by the wyndowes ben entred, and 
 beetyn his wyf, and woundid his daughter with fyve 
 mortal woundes, in fyve sondry places, that is to sayn, in 
 here feet, in her handes, in here eres, in her nose, and in 
 here mouth; and lafte her for deed, and went away." 
 Meliboeus assembles a great council of his friends, and 
 these advise him to make war, with an interminable dull 
 succession of sententious maxims and quotations which 
 would surely have maddened a modern person to such 
 a degree that he would have incontinently levied war 
 upon his friends as well as his enemies. But after awhile 
 Dame Prudence modestly advises against the war. 
 "This Meliboeus answerde unto his wyf Prudence: 'I 
 purpose not,' quod he, ' to werke by thy counseil, for 
 
The Development of Personality 17 
 
 many causes and resouns ; for certes every wight wolde 
 holde me thanne a fool, this is to sayn, if I for thy coun- 
 seil wolde chaunge things that affirmed ben by so many 
 wise. 
 
 " < Secondly, I say that alle wommen be wikked, and 
 noon good of hem alle. For of a thousand men, saith 
 Solomon, I fond oon good man; but certes of alle 
 wommen good womman fond I never noon. And also 
 certes, if I governede me by thy counseil, it schulde seme 
 that I hadde yiven to the over me the maistry ; and God 
 forbid er it so were. For Ihesus Syrac saith,' " etc., etc. 
 You observe how, although this is dialogue between man 
 and wife, the prose nevertheless tends to the sententious, 
 and every remark must be supported with some dry old 
 maxim or epigrammatic saw. Observe too, by the way, 
 — and we shall find this point most suggestive in study- 
 ing the modern dialogue in George Eliot's novels, etc. — 
 that there is absolutely no individuality or personality in 
 the talk ; Meliboeus drones along exactly as his friends 
 do, and his wife quotes old authoritative saws just as he 
 does. But Dame Prudence replies,— and all those who 
 are acquainted with the pungent Mrs. Poyser in George 
 Eliot's Adam Bede will congratulate Meliboeus that his 
 foregoing sentiments concerning woman were uttered 
 five hundred years before that lady's tongue began to 
 wag? _ « When Dame Prudence, ful debonerly and with 
 gret pacience, hadde herd al that hir housbande likede for 
 to seye, thanne axede sche of him licence for to speke, 
 and sayde in this wise : < My Lord,' quod sche, < as to 
 your firste resoun, certes it may lightly be answered ; for 
 I say it is no foly to chaunge counsel whan the thing is 
 chaungid, or elles whan the thing semeth otherwise 
 than it was biforn.' " This very wise position she sup- 
 ports with argument and authority, and then goes on 
 
1 8 The English Novel 
 
 boldly to attack not exactly Solomon's wisdom but the 
 number of data from which he drew it : " 'And though 
 that Solomon say he fond never good womman, it fol- 
 with nought therfore that alle wommen ben wicked : for 
 though that he fonde noone goode wommen, certes many 
 another man hath founden many a womman ful goode 
 and trewe : ' " (intimating, what is doubtless true, that 
 the finding of a good womam depends largely on the 
 kind of man who is looking for her) . 
 
 After many other quite logical replies to all of Meli- 
 boeus' positions Dame Prudence closes with the follow- 
 ing argument : " ' And moreover, whan oure Lord hadde 
 creat Adam oure forme fader, he sayde in this wise : Hit 
 is not goode to be a man aloone ; makes we to him an 
 help semblable to himself. Here may ye se that if that 
 a womman were not good, and hir counseil good and 
 profytable, oure Lord God of heven wolde neither have 
 wrought hem, ne called hem help of man, but rather con- 
 fusioun of man. And ther sayde oones a clerk in tuo 
 versus, What is better than gold ? Jasper. And what is 
 better than jasper? Wisedom. And what is better than 
 wisedom? Womman. And what is better than a good 
 womman? Nothing.'" 
 
 When we presently come to contrast this little scene 
 between man and wife in what may fairly be called the 
 nearest approach to the modern novel that can be found 
 before the fifteenth century, we shall find a surprising 
 number of particulars, besides the unmusical tendency 
 to run into the sententious or proverbial form, in which 
 the modern mode of thought differs from that of the 
 old writer from whom Chaucer got his Melibceus. 
 
 This sententious monotune (if I may coin a word) of 
 the prose, when falling upon a modern ear, gives almost 
 a comical tanc; even to the gravest utterances of the 
 
The Development of Personality 19 
 
 period. For example, here are the opening lines of a 
 fragment of prose from a MS. in the Cambridge 
 University Library, reprinted by the early English Text 
 Society in the issue for 1870. It is good, pithy reading, 
 too. It is called The Six Wise Masters' Speech of 
 Tribulation. 
 
 Observe that the first sentence, though purely in the 
 way of narration, is just as sententious in form as the 
 graver proverbs of each master that follow. 
 
 It begins : 
 
 " Here begynyth A shorte extracte, and tellyth how par 
 ware sex masterys assemblede, ande eche one askede oper 
 quhat thing pai sholde spek of gode, and all pei war acordet 
 to spek of tribulacoun. 
 
 " The fyrste master seyde, pat if ony thing hade bene mor 
 better to ony man lewynge in this werlde pan tribulacoun, 
 god wald haue gewyne it to his sone. But he sey wyell that 
 thar was no better, and tharfor he gawe it hum, and mayde 
 hume to soffer moste in this wrechede worlde than euer dyde 
 ony man, or euermore shall. 
 
 " The secunde master seyde, pat if par wer ony man pat 
 mycht be wyth-out spote of sine, as god was, and mycht 
 levyn bodely pirty yheris wyth-out mete, ande also were 
 dewote in preyinge at he mycht speke wyth angele in pe 
 erth, as dyde mary magdalene, yit mycht he not deserve in 
 pat lyffe so gret meyde as A man deservith in suffring of A 
 lytyll tribulacoun. 
 
 " The threde master seyde, pat if the moder of gode and all 
 the halowys of hewyn preyd for a man, pei should not get so 
 gret meyde as he should hymselfe be meknes and suffryng 
 of tribulacoun." 
 
 Now asking you, as I pass, to remember that I have 
 selected this extract, like the others, with the further 
 purpose of presently contrasting the substance of it with 
 modern utterances, as well as the form which now 
 
20 The English Novel 
 
 mainly concerns us — if we cut short this search after 
 artistic prose in our earlier literature, and come down at 
 once to the very earliest sign of a true feeling for the 
 musical movement of prose sentences, we are met by 
 the fact, which I hope to show is full of fruitful sugges- 
 tions upon our present studies, that the art of English 
 prose is at least eight hundred years younger than the 
 art of English verse. For in coming down our literature 
 from Csedmon — whom, in some conflict of dates, we 
 can safely place at 670 — the very first writer I find who 
 shows a sense of the rhythmical flow and gracious music 
 of which our prose is so richly capable is Sir Thomas 
 Malory ; and his one work, The History of King Arthur 
 and His Knights of the Rowid Table, dates 1469-70, 
 exactly eight hundred years after Caedmon's poetic 
 outburst. 
 
 Recalling our extracts just read, and remembering how 
 ungainly and awkward was the port of their sentences, 
 listen for a moment to a few lines from Sir Thomas 
 Malory. I think the most unmusical ear, the most 
 cursory attention, cannot fail to discern immediately 
 how much more flowing and smooth is the movement 
 of this. I read from the fifth chapter of King Arthur. 
 
 "And King Arthur was passing wroth for the hurt of Sir 
 Griflet. And by and by he commanded a man of his cham- 
 ber that his best horse and armor be without the city on to- 
 morrow-day. Right so in the morning he met with his man 
 and his horse, and so mounted up and dressed his shield, and 
 took his spear, and bade his chamberlain tarry there till he 
 came again." 
 
 Presently he meets Merlin and they go on together. 
 
 " So, as they went thus talking, they came to the fountain 
 and the rich pavilion by it. Then King Arthur was ware 
 
The Development of Personality 21 
 
 where a knight sat all armed in a chair. ' Sir Knight,' said 
 King Arthur, f for what cause abidest thou here ? that there 
 may no knight ride this way but if he do joust with thee ? ' 
 said the King. ' I rede thee leave that custom,' said King 
 Arthur. 
 
 " ' This custom,' said the knight, ' have I used and will 
 use, maugre who saith nay ; and who is grieved with my 
 custom, let him amend it that will.' 
 
 " • I will amend it,' said King Arthur. ' And I shall defend 
 it,' said the knight." 
 
 (Observe will and shall here.) 
 
 Here, you observe, not only is there musical flow of 
 single sentences, but one sentence remembers another 
 and proportions itself thereto — if the last was long, this 
 is shorter or longer, and if one calls for a certain tune, 
 the next calls for a different tune — and we have not only 
 grace but variety. In this variety may be found an easy 
 test of artistic prose. If you try to read two hundred 
 lines of Chaucer's Melibozus or his Parsoris Tale aloud, 
 you are presently oppressed with a sense of bagpipish- 
 ness in your own voice which becomes intolerable ; but 
 you can read Malory's King Arthur aloud from begin- 
 ning to end with a never-cloying sense of proportion 
 and rhythmic flow. 
 
 I wish I had time to demonstrate minutely how much 
 of the relish of all fine prose is due to the arrangement 
 of the sentences in such a way that consecutive sen- 
 tences do not call for the same tune : for example, if 
 one sentence is sharp antithesis — you know the well- 
 marked speech tune of an antithesis, " do you mean this 
 book, or do you mean that book? " — you must be care- 
 ful in the next sentences to vary the tune from that of 
 the antithesis. 
 
 In the prose I read you from Chaucer and from the 
 
22 The English Novel 
 
 old manuscript, a large part of the intolerableness is due 
 to the fact that nearly every sentence involves the tune 
 of an aphorism or proverb, and the iteration of the same 
 pitch-successions in the voice presently becomes weari- 
 some. This fault — of the succession of antithetic ideas 
 so that the voice becomes weary of repeating the same 
 contrariety of accents — I can illustrate very strikingly 
 in a letter which I happen to remember of Queen 
 Elizabeth, whom I have found to be a great sinner 
 against good prose in this particular. 
 
 Here is part of a letter from her to King Edward VI. 
 concerning a portrait of herself which it seems the king 
 had desired. (Italicized words represent antithetic 
 accents.) 
 
 " Like as the rich man that daily gathereth riches to riches, 
 and to one bag of money layeth a great sort till it come to 
 infinite j so methinks your majesty, not being sufficed with 
 so many benefits and gentleness shewed to me afore this 
 time, doth now increase them in asking and desiring where 
 you may bid and conwiand, requiring a thing not worthy the 
 desiring for itself, but made worthy for your highness' re- 
 quest. My picture I mean : in which, if the inward good 
 mind toward your grace might as well be declared, as the 
 outward face and countenance shall be seen, I would not 
 have tarried the commandment but prevented it, nor have 
 been the last to grant, but the first to offer it." 
 
 And so on. You observe here into what a sing-song 
 the voice must fall : if you abstract the words, and say 
 over the tune, it is continually : tum-ty-ty tum-ty-ty 
 tum-ty ; tum-ty-ty tum-ty-ty tum-ty. 
 
 I wish also that it lay within my province to pass on 
 and show the gradual development of English prose, 
 through Sir Thomas More, Lord Berners, and Roger 
 Ascham, whom we may assign to the earlier half of the 
 
The Development of Personality 23 
 
 sixteenth century, until it reaches a great and beautiful 
 artistic stage in the prose of Fuller, of Hooker, and of 
 Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 But the fact which I propose to use as throwing light 
 on the novel is simply the lateness of English prose as 
 compared with English verse; and we have already 
 sufficiently seen that the rise of our prose must be dated 
 at least eight centuries after that of our formal poetry. 
 
 But having established the fact that English prose is 
 so much later in development than English verse, the 
 point that I wish to make in this connection now 
 requires me to go on and ask why this is so ? 
 
 Without the time to adduce supporting facts from other 
 literatures, and indeed wholly unable to go into elaborate 
 proof, let me say at once that upon examining the mat- 
 ter it seems probable that the whole earlier speech of 
 man must have been rhythmical, and that in point of fact 
 we began with verse which is much simpler in rhythm 
 than any prose, and that we departed from this regular 
 rhythmic utterance into more and more complex utterance 
 just according as the advance of complexity in language 
 and feeling required the freer forms of prose. 
 
 To adduce a single consideration leading toward this 
 view : reflect for a moment that the very breath of every 
 man necessarily divides off his words into rhythmic 
 periods : the average rate of a man's breath being 1 7 to 
 20 respirations in a minute. Taking the faster rate as the 
 more probable one in speaking, the man would, from the 
 periodic necessity of refilling the lungs, divide his words 
 into twenty groups, equal in time, every minute, and if 
 these syllables were equally pronounced at, say, about 
 the rate of 200 a minute, we should have ten syllables 
 in each group, each ten syllables occupying ( in the ag- 
 gregate at least) the same time with any other ten syllables, 
 that is, the time of one breath. 
 
24 The English Novel 
 
 But this is just the rhythm of our English blank verse, 
 in essential type : ten syllables to the line or group : and 
 our primitive talker is speaking in the true English heroic 
 rhythm. Thus it may be that our dear friend M. Jour- 
 dain was not so far wrong after all in his astonishment 
 at rinding that he had been speaking prose all his life : it 
 would seem at any rate that man, the race, has not been 
 speaking prose all his life. 
 
The Development of Personality 25 
 
 II 
 
 Perhaps I ought here carefully to state that in pro- 
 pounding the idea that the whole common speech of 
 early man may have been rhythmical through the 
 operation of uniformity of syllables and periodicity of 
 breath, and that for this reason prose, which is practi- 
 cally verse of a very complex rhythm, was naturally 
 a later development ; in propounding this idea, I say, 
 I do not mean to declare that the prehistoric man, 
 after a hard day's work on a flint arrow-head at his 
 stone-quarry, would dance back to his dwelling in the 
 most beautiful rhythmic figures, would lay down his 
 palaeolithic axe to a slow song, and, striking an operatic 
 attitude, would call out to his wife to leave off fishing in 
 the stream and bring him a stone mug of water — all in a 
 most sublime and impassioned flight of poetry. What 
 I do mean to say is that if the prehistoric man's syllables 
 were uniform, and his breath periodic, then the rhythmi- 
 cal results described would follow. Here let me at once 
 illustrate this, and advance a step towards my final point 
 in this connection, by reminding you how easily the most 
 commonplace utterances in modern English, particularly 
 when couched mainly in words of one syllable, fall into 
 quite respectable verse-rhythms. I might illustrate this, 
 but Dr. Samuel Johnson has already done it for me : — 
 " I put my hat upon my head and walked into the Strand, 
 and there I met another man whose hat was in his hand." 
 We have only to arrange this in proper form in order to 
 
i6 The English Novel 
 
 see that it is a stanza of verse quite perfect as to all 
 technical requirement. 
 
 " I put my hat upon my head, 
 And walked into the Strand, 
 And there I met another man, 
 Whose hat was in his hand." 
 
 Now let me ask you to observe precisely what 
 happens when by adding words here and there in this 
 verse we more and more obscure its verse form and 
 bring out its prose form. Suppose for example we 
 here write " hastily," and here "rushed forth," and here 
 " encountered," and here " hanging," so as to make it read : 
 
 " I hastily put my hat upon my head, 
 And rushed forth into the Strand, 
 And there I encountered another man, 
 Whose hat was hanging in his hand." 
 
 Here we have made unmitigated prose, but how? 
 Remembering that the original verse was in iambic 4's 
 and 3's, 
 
 I put I my hat | up-on | my head | , 
 
 — by putting in the word "hastily " in the first line, 
 we have not destroyed the rhythm : we still have the 
 rhythmic sequence, " my hat upon my head," unchanged ; 
 but we have merely added another brief rhythmus — 
 namely that of the word " hastily," which we may call a 
 
 modern or logacedic dactyl (hastily). That is to say: 
 instead now of leaving our first line all iambic, we have 
 varied that rhythmus with another ; and in so doing have 
 converted our verse into prose. Similarly in the second 
 line, "rushed forth," which an English tongue would here 
 deliver as a spondee — rushed forth | — varies the rhythm 
 by this spondaic intervention, but still leaves us the orig- 
 
The Development of Personality 27 
 
 inal rhythmic cluster, "into the Strand." So of the other 
 introduced words, " encountered " and " hanging " : each 
 has its own rhythm — for an English tongue always 
 gives these words with definite time-relations between 
 the syllables, that is, in rhythm. Therefore, in order to 
 make prose out of this verse, we have not destroyed the 
 rhythms : we have added to them. We have not made 
 it formless : we have made it contain more forms. 
 
 Now in this analysis, which I have tried to bring to 
 its very simplest terms, I have presented what seems to 
 me the true genesis of prose, and have set up a distinc- 
 tion which, though it may appear abstract and insignifi- 
 cant at present, we shall presently see lies at the bottom 
 of some most remarkable and pernicious fallacies concern- 
 ing literature. That distinction is : that the relation of 
 prose to verse is not the relation of the formless to the 
 formal : it is the relation of more forms to fewer forms. It 
 is this relation which makes prose a freer form than 
 verse. 
 
 When we are writing in verse, if we have started the 
 line with an iambus (say) then our next words or sylla- 
 bles must make an iambus, and we are confined to that 
 form ; but if in prose, our next word need not be an 
 iambus because the first was, but may be any one of 
 several possible rhythmic forms : thus, while in verse we 
 must use one form, in prose we may use many forms : 
 and just to the extent of these possible forms is prose 
 freer than verse. We shall find occasion presently to 
 remember that prose is freer than verse, not because 
 prose is formless while verse is formal, but because any 
 given sequence of prose has more forms in it than a 
 sequence of verse. 
 
 Here — reserving to a later place the special applica- 
 tion of all this to the novel— I have brought my first 
 
28 The English Novel 
 
 general point to a stage where it constitutes the basis of 
 the second one. You have already heard much of 
 "forms " — of the verse-form, the prose-form, of form in 
 art, and the like. Now, in the course of a considerable 
 experience in what Shakspere sadly calls "public 
 means," I have found no matter upon which wider or 
 more harmful misconceptions exist among people of 
 culture, and particularly among us Americans, than 
 this matter of the true function of form in art, of the 
 true relation of science — which we may call the knowl- 
 edge of forms — to art, and most especially of these 
 functions and relations in literary art. These miscon- 
 ceptions have flowered out into widely different shapes. 
 
 In one direction, for example, we find a large number 
 of timorous souls who believe that science, in explaining 
 everything — as they singularly fancy — will destroy the 
 possibility of poetry, of the novel, in short of all works 
 of the imagination: the idea seeming to be that the 
 imagination always requires the hall of life to be 
 darkened before it display its magic, like the modern 
 spiritualistic sdance-givers who can do nothing with the 
 rope-tying and the guitars unless the lights are put out. 
 
 Another form of the same misconception goes pre- 
 cisely to the opposite extreme, and declares that the 
 advance of science with its incidents is going to give a 
 great new revolutionized democratic literature which will 
 wear a slouch hat, and have its shirt open at the bosom, 
 and generally riot in a complete independence of form. 
 
 And finally — to mention no more than a third phase 
 — we may consider the original misconception to have 
 reached a climax which is at once absurd and infernal 
 in a professedly philosophical work called Le Roman 
 Experimental, recently published by M. Emile Zola, 
 gravely defending his peculiar novels as the records of 
 
The Development of Personality 29 
 
 scientific experiments and declaring that the whole field 
 of imaginative effort must follow his lead. 
 
 Now if any of these beliefs are true we are wickedly 
 wasting our time here in studying the novel — at least 
 any other novels except M. Zola's — and we ought to look 
 to ourselves. Seriously, I do not believe I could render 
 you a greater service than by here arraying such contri- 
 bution as I can make towards some firm, clear and pious 
 conceptions as to this matter of form, of science, in art, 
 before briefly considering these three concrete errors I 
 have enumerated — to wit, the belief (1) that science will 
 destroy all poetry, all novel-writing and all imaginative 
 work generally; (2) that science (as Walt Whitman 
 would have it) will simply destroy the old imaginative 
 products and build up a new formless sort of imaginative 
 product in its stead; and (3) that science will absorb 
 into itself all imaginative effort (as Zola believes) so that 
 every novel will be merely the plain unvarnished record 
 of a scientific experiment in passion. Let me submit 
 two or three principles whose steady light will leave, it 
 seems to me, but little space for perplexity as to these 
 diverse claims. 
 
 Start, then, in the first place, with a definite recalling 
 to yourself of the province of form throughout our whole 
 daily life. Here we find a striking consensus, at least in 
 spirit, between the deliverances of the sternest science 
 and of the straitest orthodoxy. The latter on the one 
 hand tells us that in the beginning the earth was without 
 form and void ; and it is only after the earth is formulated 
 — after the various forms of the lights, of land and water, 
 bird, fish and man appear — it is only then that life and 
 use and art and relation and religion become possible. 
 What we call the creation, therefore, is not the making 
 out of nothing, but it is the giving of form to a some- 
 
30 The English Novel 
 
 thing which, though existing, existed to no purpose 
 because it had no form. 
 
 On the other hand, the widest generalizations of science 
 bring us practically to the same view. Science would 
 seem fairly to have reduced all this host of phenomena 
 which we call the world into a congeries of motions in 
 many forms. What we know by our senses is simply 
 such forms of these motions as our senses have a corre- 
 lated capacity for. The atoms of this substance, moving 
 in orbits too narrow for human vision, impress my sense 
 with a certain property which I call hardness or resist- 
 ance, this " hardness " being simply our name for one 
 form of atom-motion when impressing itself on the 
 human sense. So color, shape, &c. ; these are our names 
 representing a correlation between certain other forms of 
 motion and our senses. 
 
 Regarding the whole universe thus as a great con- 
 geries of forms of motion, we may now go further and 
 make for ourselves a scientific and useful generalization, 
 reducing a great number of facts to a convenient com- 
 mon denominator by considering that Science is the 
 knowledge of these forms, that Art is the creation of 
 beautiful forms, that Religion is the faith in the infinite 
 Form-giver and in that infinity of forms which many 
 things lead us to believe as existing, but existing beyond 
 any present correlative capacities of our senses, — and 
 finally that Life is the control of all these forms to the 
 satisfaction of our human needs. 
 
 And now advancing a step : when we remember how 
 all accounts, the scientific, the religious, the historical, 
 agree that the progress of things is from chaos or form- 
 lessness to form, — and, as we saw in the case of verse 
 and prose, — afterwards from the one-formed to the 
 many-formed, we are not disturbed by any shouts, how- 
 
The Development of Personality 31 
 
 ever stentorian, of a progress that professes to be win- 
 ning freedom by substituting formlessness for form : we 
 know that the ages are rolling the other way, — who 
 shall stop those wheels ? We know that what they really 
 do who profess to substitute formlessness for form is to 
 substitute a bad form for a good one, or an ugly form 
 for a beautiful one. Do not dream of getting rid of 
 form : your most cutting stroke at it but gives us two 
 forms for one. For, in a sense which adds additional 
 reverence to the original meaning of those words, we 
 may devoutly say that in form we live and move and 
 have our being. How strange, then, the furtive appre- 
 hension of danger lying behind too much knowledge of 
 form, too much technic, which one is amazed to find 
 prevailing so greatly in our own country. 
 
 But, advancing a further step from the particular con- 
 sideration of science as the knowledge of forms, let us 
 come to the fact that as all art is a congeries of forms, 
 each art must have its own peculiar science : and always 
 we have, in a true sense, the art of an art and the science 
 of that art. For example : correlative to the art of 
 music we have the general science of music, which 
 indeed consists of several quite separate sciences. If a 
 man desire to become a musical composer, he is abso- 
 lutely obliged to learn (1) the science of Musical Form, 
 (2) the science of Harmony, and (3) the science of 
 Orchestration or Instrumentation. 
 
 The science of musical form concerns this sort of 
 matter, for instance. A symphony has generally four 
 great divisions, called movements, separated usually from 
 each other by a considerable pause. Each of these 
 movements has a law of formation : it consists of two 
 main subjects, or melodies, and a modulation-part. The 
 sequence of these subjects, the method of varying them 
 
32 The English Novel 
 
 by causing now one and now another of the instru- 
 ments to come forward and play the subject in hand 
 while subordinate parts are assigned to the others, the 
 interplay of the two subjects in the modulation-part, 
 — all this is the subject-matter of a science which every 
 composer must laboriously learn. 
 
 But again : he must learn the great science of har- 
 mony, and of that wonderful tonality which has caused 
 our music to be practically a different art from what pre- 
 ceding ages called music : this science of harmony hav- 
 ing its own body of classifications and formulated laws 
 just as the science of geology has, and a voluminous 
 literature of its own. Again, he must painfully learn the 
 range and capacities of each orchestral instrument, — lest 
 he write passages for the violin which no violin can play, 
 &c, — and further, the particular ideas which seem to 
 associate themselves with the tone-color of each instru- 
 ment, as the idea of women's voices with the clarinet, 
 the idea of tenderness and childlikeness with the oboe, 
 and so on. This is not all : the musical composer may 
 indeed write a symphony if he has these three sciences 
 of music well in hand ; but a fourth science of music, 
 namely, the physics of music, or musical acoustics, has 
 now grown to such an extent that every composer will 
 find himself lame without a knowledge of it. 
 
 And so the art of painting has its correlative science 
 of painting, involving laws of optics, and of form ; the art 
 of sculpture, its correlative science of sculpture, involving 
 the science of human anatomy, &c. ; and each one of the 
 literary arts has its correlative science — the art of verse 
 its science of verse, the art of prose its science of prose. 
 Lastly, we all know that no amount of genius will supply 
 the lack of science in art. Phidias may be all afire with 
 the conception of Jove, but unless he is a scientific man 
 
The Development of Personality 33 
 
 to the extent of a knowledge of anatomy, he is no better 
 artist than Strephon who cannot mould the handle of a 
 goblet. What is Beethoven's genius until Beethoven has 
 become a scientific man to the extent of knowing the 
 sciences of Musical Form, of Orchestration, and of 
 Harmony ? 
 
 But now if I go on and ask what would be the worth 
 of Shakspere's genius unless he were a scientific man to 
 the extent of knowing the science of English verse, or 
 what would be George Eliot's genius unless she knew 
 the science of English prose or the science of novel- 
 writing, a sort of doubtful stir arises, and it would seem 
 as if a suspicion of some vague esoteric difference be- 
 tween the relation of the literary arts to their correlative 
 sciences and the relation of other arts to their correlative 
 sciences influenced the general mind. 
 
 I am so unwilling you should think me here fighting 
 a mere man of straw who has been arranged with a view 
 to the convenience of knocking him down : and I find 
 such mournful evidences of the complete misconception 
 of form, of literary science, in our literature : that, with a 
 reluctance which every one will understand, I am going 
 to draw upon a personal experience, to show the extent 
 of that misconception. 
 
 Some of you may remember that a part of the course 
 of lectures which your present lecturer delivered here 
 last year were afterwards published in book-form, under 
 the title of The Science of English Verse. Happening 
 in the publisher's office some time afterwards, I was 
 asked if I would care to see the newspaper notices and 
 criticisms of the book, whereof the publishers had col- 
 lected a great bundle. Most curious to see if some 
 previous ideas I had formed as to the general relation 
 between literary art and science would be confirmed, I 
 
 3 
 
34 The English Novel 
 
 read these notices with great interest. Not only were 
 my suspicions confirmed : but it is perfectly fair to say 
 that nine out of ten, even of those which most generously 
 treated the book in hand, treated it upon the general 
 theory that a work on the science of verse must neces- 
 sarily be a collection of rules for making verses. Now 
 not one of these writers would have treated a work on 
 the science of geology as a collection of rules for making 
 rocks ; or a work on the science of anatomy as a collec- 
 tion of rules for making bones or for procuring cadavers. 
 In point of fact, a book of rules for making verses might 
 very well be written, but then it would be a hand-book 
 of the art of verse, and would take the whole science of 
 verse for granted, — like an instruction-book for the 
 piano, or the like. 
 
 If we should find the whole critical body of a continent 
 treating (say) Prof. Huxley's late work on the crayfish as 
 really a cookery-book, intended to spread intelligent ideas 
 upon the best methods of preparing shell-fish for the table, 
 we should certainly suspect something wrong : but this 
 is precisely parallel with the mistake already mentioned. 
 
 Eut even when the functions of form, of science, in 
 literary art have been comprehended, one is amazed to 
 find among literary artists themselves a certain apprehen- 
 sion of danger in knowing too much of the forms of art. 
 A valued friend who has won a considerable place in 
 contemporary authorship, in writing me not long ago, 
 said, after much abstract and impersonal admission of a 
 possible science of verse — in the way that one admits 
 there may be griffins but feels no great concern about 
 it — " as for me I would rather continue to write verse from 
 pure instinct" 
 
 This fallacy — of supposing that we do a thing by 
 instinct simply because we learned to do it unsystematic- 
 
The Development of Personality 3$ 
 
 ally and without formal teaching — seems a curious 
 enough climax to the misconceptions of literary science. 
 You have only to reflect a moment in order to see that 
 not a single line of verse was ever written by instinct 
 alone since the world began. For — to go no farther — 
 the most poetically-instinctive child is obliged at least to 
 learn the science of language — the practical relation of 
 noun and verb and connective — before the crudest line of 
 verse can be written ; and since no child talks by instinct, 
 since every child has to learn from others every word it 
 uses, — with an amount of diligence and of study which 
 is really stupendous when we think of it — what wild ab- 
 surdity to forget these years passed by the child in learn- 
 ing even the rudiments of the science of language which 
 must be well in hand, mind you, before even the rudi- 
 ments of the science of verse can be learned — what wild 
 absurdity to fancy that one is writing verse by instinct 
 when even the language of verse, far from being instinc- 
 tive, had to be painfully, if unsystematically, learned as 
 a science. 
 
 Once, for all, remembering the dignity of form as we 
 have traced it, remembering the relations of Science as 
 the knowledge of forms, of Art as the creator of beautiful 
 forms, of Religion as the aspiration towards unknown 
 forms and the unknown Form-giver, let us abandon this 
 unworthy attitude towards form, towards science, towards 
 technic, in literary art, which has so long sapped our 
 literary endeavor. 
 
 The writer of verse is afraid of having too much form, 
 of having too much technic ; he dreads it will interfere 
 with his spontaneity. No more decisive confession of 
 weakness can be made. It is only cleverness and small 
 talent which is afraid of its spontaneity ; the genius, the 
 great artist, is forever ravenous after new forms, after 
 
36 The English Novel 
 
 technic ; he will follow you to the ends of the earth if 
 you will enlarge his artistic science, if you will give him 
 a fresh form. For indeed genius, the great artist, never 
 works in the frantic vein vulgarly supposed ; a large part 
 of the work of the poet, for example, is selective : a 
 dozen ideas in a dozen forms throng to his brain at once, 
 he must choose the best ; even in the extremest heat and 
 sublimity of his raptus he must preserve a god-like calm, 
 and order thus and so, and keep the rule so that he 
 shall to the end be master of his art and not be mastered 
 by his art. 
 
 Charlotte Cushman used often to tell me that when 
 she was, as the phrase is, carried out of herself, she 
 never acted well : she must have her inspiration, she 
 must be in a true raptus, but the raptus must be well 
 in hand, and she must retain the consciousness, at once 
 sublime and practical, of every act. 
 
 There is an old aphorism — it is twelve hundred years 
 old — which covers all this ground of the importance of 
 technic, of science, in the literary art, with such complete- 
 ness and compactness that it always affects me like a 
 poem. It was uttered, indeed, by a poet, — and a rare 
 one he must have been, — an old Armorican named Herve, 
 of whom all manner of beautiful stories have survived. 
 This aphorism is : " He who will not answer to the 
 rudder, must answer to the rocks." If any of you have 
 read that wonderful description of shipwreck on these 
 same Armorican rocks which occurs in the autobiography 
 of Millet, the painter, and which was recently quoted in 
 a number of Scribner's Magazine, you can realize that 
 one who lived in that old Armorica — the modern Brit- 
 tany from which Millet comes — knew full well what it 
 meant to answer to the rocks. 
 
 Now it is precisely this form, this science, this technic, 
 
The Development of Personality 37 
 
 which is the rudder of the literary artist, whether he 
 work at verse or novels. I wish it were everywhere 
 written, even in the souls of all our young American 
 writers, that he who will not answer to the rudder shall 
 answer to the rocks. This was the belief of the greatest 
 literary artist our language has ever produced. 
 
 We have direct contemporary testimony that Shaks- 
 pere was supremely solicitous in this matter of form. 
 Ben Jonson, in that hearty testimonial, " To the Mem- 
 ory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakspeare, 
 and What He Hath Left Us," which was prefixed to the 
 edition of 1623, says, after praises which are lavish even 
 for an Elizabethan eulogy : 
 
 " Yet must I not give Nature all : thy art," 
 (meaning here thy technic, thy care of form, thy science) 
 
 " My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part ; 
 
 For though the poet's matter Nature be, 
 His art doth give the fashion ; and that he 
 
 Who casts to write a living line must sweat, 
 (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat 
 
 Upon the Muses' anvil ; turn the same 
 (And himself with it) that he thinks to frame ; 
 
 Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn, 
 For a good poets made as well as bom, 
 
 And such zvert thou. Look how the father's face 
 Lives in his issue, even so the race 
 
 Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines 
 /;/ his well-turned and true-filed lines, 
 
 In each of which he seems to shake a lance, 
 As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance." 
 
 No fear with Shakspere of damaging his spontaneity : 
 he shakes a lance at the eyes of Ignorance in every line. 
 
 With these views of the progress of forms in general, 
 of the relations of Science — or the knowledge of all forms 
 — to Art, or the creation of beautiful forms, we are pre- 
 
38 The English Novel 
 
 pared, I think, to maintain much equilibrium in the 
 midst of the discordant cries, already mentioned, (1) of 
 those who believe that Science will destroy all literary 
 art, (2) of those who believe with Whitman that art is to 
 advance by becoming democratic and formless, (3) and 
 lastly of those who think that the future novelist is to 
 enter the service of science as a police- reporter in ordinary 
 for the information of current sociology. 
 
 Let us therefore inquire if it is really true — as I am 
 told is much believed in Germany, and as I have seen not 
 unfrequently hinted in the way of timorous apprehension 
 in our own country — that science is to abolish the poet 
 and the novel-writer and all imaginative literature. It is 
 surprising that in all the discussions upon this subject the 
 matter has been treated as belonging solely to the future. 
 But surely life is too short for the folly of arguing from 
 prophecy when we can argue from history : and it seems 
 to me this question is determined. As matter of fact, 
 science (to confine our view to English science) has been 
 already advancing with prodigious strides for two hun- 
 dred and fifty years, and side by side with it English 
 poetry has been advancing for the same period. Surely 
 whatever effect science has upon poetry can be traced 
 during this long companionship. While Hooke and 
 Wilkins and Newton and Horrox and the Herschels and 
 Franklin and Davy and Faraday and the Darwins and 
 Dalton and Huxley and many more have been penetrat- 
 ing into physical nature, Dryden, Pope, Byron, Burns, 
 Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Emerson, Longfellow, 
 have been singing; while gravitation, oxygen, electro- 
 magnetism, the atomic theory, the spectroscope, the siren, 
 are being evolved, the Ode to St. Cecilia, the Essay on 
 Man, Manfred, A man's a man for a? that, the Ode on 
 Immortality, In Memoriam, the Ode to a, Nightingale, 
 
The Development of Personality 39 
 
 Brahma, The Psalm of Life, are being written. If indeed 
 we go over into Germany, there is Goethe, at once pursu- 
 ing science and poetry. 
 
 If we examine the course and progress of this poetry, 
 born thus within the very grasp and maw of this terri- 
 ble science, it seems to me that we find — as to the 
 substance of poetry — a steadily increasing confidence and 
 joy in the mission of the poet, in the sacredness of faith 
 and love and duty and friendship and marriage, and in 
 the sovereign fact of man's personality ; while as to the 
 form of the poetry, we find that just as science has pruned 
 our faith (to make it more fruitful) so it has pruned our 
 poetic form and technic, cutting away much unproductive 
 wood and efflorescence and creating finer reserves and 
 richer yields. Since it would be simply impossible in 
 the space of these lectures to illustrate this by any 
 detailed view of all the poets mentioned, let us confine 
 ourselves to one, Alfred Tennyson, and let us inquire how 
 it fares with him. Certainly no more favorable selection 
 could be made for those who believe in the destructive- 
 ness of science. Here is a man born in the midst of sci- 
 entific activity, brought up and intimate with the freest 
 thinkers of his time, himself a notable scientific pursuer 
 of botany, and saturated by his reading with ail the sci- 
 entific conceptions of his age. If science is to sweep 
 away the silliness of faith and love, to destroy the whole 
 field of the imagination and make poetry folly, it is a 
 miracle if Tennyson escape. But if we look into his own 
 words this miracle beautifully transacts itself before our 
 eyes. Suppose we inquire : Has science cooled this poet's 
 love ? We are answered in No. 60 of In Memoriam. 
 
 " If, in thy second state sublime, 
 
 Thy ransomed reason change replies 
 With all the circle of the wise, 
 The perfect flower of human time; 
 
4-0 The English Novel 
 
 " And if thou cast thine eyes below, 
 
 How dimly character'd and slight, 
 How dwarf'd a growth of cold and night, 
 How blanch'd with darkness must I grow ! 
 
 " Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore, 
 
 Where thy first form was made a man, 
 I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can 
 The soul of Shakspeare love thee more." 
 
 Here is precisely the same loving gospel that Shakspere 
 himself used to preach, in that series of sonnets which 
 we may call his In Memoriam to his friend : the same 
 loving tenacity, unchanged by three hundred years of 
 science. It is interesting to compare this No. 60 of 
 Tennyson's poem with Sonnet 32 of Shakspere's series, 
 and note how both preach the supremacy of love over 
 style or fashion. 
 
 " If thou survive my well-contented day, 
 When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover, 
 And shalt by fortune once more re-survey 
 These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover, 
 Compare them with the bettering of the time ; 
 And though they be outstripped by every pen, 
 Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme, 
 Exceeded by the height of happier men. 
 O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought : 
 
 ' Had my friend's muse grown with this growing age, 
 A dearer birth than this his love had brought, 
 To march in ranks of better equipage : 
 But since he died, and poets better prove, 
 Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.' " 
 
 Returning to Tennyson : has science cooled his yearn- 
 ing for human friendship? We are answered in No. 90 
 of In Memoriam, When was ever such an invocation to 
 a dead friend to return ! 
 
The Development of Personality 41 
 
 " When rosy plumelets tuft the larch, 
 
 And rarely pipes the mounted thrush ; 
 Or underneath the barren bush 
 Flits by the sea-blue bird of March ; 
 
 "Come, wear the form by which I know 
 
 Thy spirit in time among thy peers ; 
 The hope of unaccomplished years 
 Be large and lucid round thy brow. 
 
 " When summer's hourly-mellowing change 
 May breathe, with many roses sweet, 
 Upon the thousand waves of wheat, 
 That ripple round the lonely grange : 
 
 " Come : not in watches of the night, 
 
 But where the sunbeam broodeth warm, 
 Come, beauteous in thine after-form, 
 And like a finer light in light." 
 
 Or still more touchingly, in No. 49, for here he writes 
 from the depths of a sick despondency, from all the dark- 
 ness of a bad quarter of an hour. 
 
 " Be near me when my light is low, 
 
 When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick 
 And tingle ; and the heart is sick, 
 And all the wheels of Being slow. 
 
 "Be near me when the sensuous frame 
 
 Is racked with pains that conquer trust ; 
 And Time, a maniac scattering dust, 
 And Life, a fury, slinging flame. 
 
 " Be near me when my faith is dry, 
 
 And men the flies of latter spring, 
 That lay their eggs, and sting and sing, 
 And weave their petty cells and die. 
 
 " Be near me when I fade away, 
 
 To point the term of human strife, 
 And on the low dark verge of life 
 The twilight of eternal day." 
 
42 The English Novel 
 
 Has it diminished his tender care for the weakness of 
 others? We are wonderfully answered in No. 33. 
 
 ft O thou that after toil and storm 
 
 Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air, 
 Whose faith has centre everywhere, 
 Nor cares to fix itself to form, 
 
 " Leave thou thy sister when she prays, 
 
 Her early Heaven, her happy views ; 
 Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse 
 A life that leads melodious days. 
 
 " Her faith thro' form is pure as thine, 
 
 Her hands are quicker unto good. 
 Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood 
 To which she links a truth divine ! 
 
 " See thou, that countest reason ripe 
 In holding by the law within, 
 Thou fail not in a world of sin, 
 And ev'n for want of such a type." 
 
 Has it crushed out his pure sense of poetic beauty ? 
 Here in No. 86 we have a poem which, for what I can 
 only call absolute beauty, is simply perfect. 
 
 " Sweet after showers, ambrosial air, 
 
 That rollest from the gorgeous gloom 
 Of evening over brake and bloom 
 And meadow, slowly breathing bare 
 
 (t The round of space, and rapt below 
 Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood, 
 And shadowing down the horned flood 
 In ripples, fan my brows and blow 
 
 " The fever from my cheek, and sigh 
 
 The full new life that feeds thy breath 
 Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death, 
 111 brethren, let the fancy fly 
 
The Development of Personality 43 
 
 " From belt to belt of crimson seas 
 
 On leagues of odour streaming far 
 To where in yonder orient star 
 A hundred spirits whisper ' Peace/ " 
 
 And finally we are able to see from his own words 
 that he is not ignorantly resisting the influences of science, 
 but that he knows science, reveres it and understands its 
 precise place and function. What he terms in the follow- 
 ing poem (1 13 of In Memoriam) Knowledge and Wisdom 
 are what we have been speaking of as Science and 
 Poetry. 
 
 " Who loves not Knowledge ? Who shall rail 
 Against her beauty ? May she mix 
 With men and prosper ! Who shall fix 
 Her pillars ? Let her work prevail. 
 
 Let her know her place ; 
 She is the second, not the first. 
 
 " A higher hand must make her mild, 
 If all be not in vain ; and guide 
 Her footsteps, moving side by side 
 With wisdom, like the younger child : 
 
 " For she is earthly of the mind, 
 
 But Wisdom heavenly of the soul. 
 O friend, who earnest to thy goal 
 So early, leaving me behind, 
 
 " I would the great world grew like thee 
 Who grewest not alone in power 
 And knowledge, but by year and hour 
 In reverence and in charity." 
 
 If then, regarding Tennyson as fairly a representative 
 victim of science, we find him still preaching the poet's 
 gospel of beauty, as comprehending the evangel of faith, 
 
44 The English Novel 
 
 hope and charity, only preaching it in those newer and 
 finer forms with which science itself has endowed him ; 
 if we find his poetry just so much stronger and richer 
 and riper by as much as he has been trained and beaten 
 and disciplined with the stern questions which scientific 
 speculation has put — questions which you will find pre- 
 sented in their most sombre terribleness in Tennyson's 
 Two Voices ; if finally we find him steadily regarding 
 science as knowledge which only the true poet can vivify 
 into wisdom : — then I say, life is too short to waste any 
 of it in listening to those who, in the face of this history, 
 still prophesy that Science is to destroy Poetry. 
 
 Nothing, indeed, would be easier than to answer all 
 this argument upon a priori grounds. The argument is, 
 in brief, that wonder and mystery are the imagination's 
 materiel, and that science is to explain away all mystery. 
 But what a crude view is this of explanation ! The mo- 
 ment you examine the process, you find that at bottom 
 explanation is simply the reduction of unfamiliar mys- 
 teries to terms of familiar mysteries. For simplest ex- 
 ample : here is a mass of conglomerate ; science explains 
 that it is composed of a great number of pebbles which 
 have become fastened together by a natural cement. But 
 after all, is not one pebble as great a mystery as a moun- 
 tain of conglomerate? though we are familiar with the 
 pebble, and unfamiliar with the other. Now to the wise 
 man, the poet, familiarity with a mystery brings no con- 
 tempt : to him every explanation of science, supremely 
 fascinating as it is, but opens up a new world of wonders, 
 but adds to old mysteries. Indeed, the wise searcher 
 into nature always finds, as a poet has declared, that 
 
 . . . " In seeking to undo 
 One riddle, and to find the true 
 I knit a hundred others new." 
 
The Development of Personality 45 
 
 And so, away with this folly : science, instead of being 
 the enemy of poetry, is its quartermaster and commissary 
 — it forever purveys for poetry ; and just so much more 
 as it shall bring man into contact with nature, just so 
 much more large and intense and rich will be the poetry 
 of the future in its contents, just so much finer and more 
 abundant in its forms. 
 
 And here we may advance to our second class who 
 believe that the poetry of the future is to be democratic 
 and formless. 
 
 Here let me first carefully disclaim and condemn all 
 that flippant and sneering tone which dominates so many 
 discussions of Whitman. While I differ from him utterly 
 as to every principle of artistic procedure; while he 
 seems to me the most stupendously mistaken man in 
 all history as to what constitutes true democracy, and 
 the true advance of art and man ; while I am immeasur- 
 ably shocked at the sweeping invasions of those reserves 
 which depend on the very personality I have so much 
 insisted upon, and which the whole consensus of the 
 ages has considered more and more sacred with every 
 year of growth in delicacy ; yet, after all these prodigious 
 allowances, I owe some keen delights to a certain com- 
 bination of bigness and naivety which make some of 
 Whitman's passages so strong and taking, and indeed, 
 on the one occasion when Whitman has abandoned his 
 theory of formlessness and written in form he has made 
 My Captain, O my Captain surely one of the most 
 tender and beautiful poems in any language. 
 
 I need quote but a few scraps from characteristic sen- 
 tences here and there in a recent paper of Whitman's in 
 order to present a perfectly fair view of his whole doc- 
 trine. When, for instance, he declares that Tennyson's 
 poetry is not the poetry of the future because, although 
 
46 The English Novel 
 
 it is " the highest order of verbal melody, exquisitely 
 clean and pure and almost always perfumed like the tube- 
 rose to an extreme of sweetness," yet it has "never one 
 democratic page," and is "never free, naive poetry, but 
 involved, labored, quite sophisticated ; " when we find 
 him bragging of " the measureless viciousness of the 
 great radical republic " (the United States, of course) 
 " with its ruffianly nominations and elections ; its loud, 
 ill-pitched voice, utterly regardless whether the verb 
 agrees with the nominative ; its fights, errors, eructations, 
 repulsions, dishonesties, audacities ; those fearful and 
 varied, long and continued storm-and-stress stages (so 
 offensive to the well-regulated, college-bred mind) where- 
 with nature, history and time block out nationalities more 
 powerful than the past ; " and when finally we hear him 
 tenderly declaring that " meanwhile democracy waits the 
 coming of its bards in silence and in twilight — but 'tis 
 the twilight of dawn " : — we are in sufficient possession 
 of the distinctive catch-words which summarize his 
 doctrine. 
 
 In examining it, a circumstance occurs to me at the 
 outset which throws a strange but effective light upon 
 the whole argument. It seems curious to reflect that the 
 two poets who have most avowedly written for the people, 
 who have claimed most distinctively to represent and 
 embody the thought of the people, and to be bone of the 
 people's bone and flesh of the people's flesh, are pre- 
 cisely the two who have most signally failed of all popu- 
 lar acceptance and who have most exclusively found 
 audience at the other extreme of culture. These are 
 Wordsworth and Whitman. We all know how strenu- 
 ously and faithfully Wordsworth believed that in using 
 the simplest words and treating the lowliest themes, he 
 was bringing poetry back near to the popular heart ; yet 
 
The Development of Personality 47 
 
 Wordsworth's greatest admirer is Mr. Matthew Arnold, 
 the apostle of culture, the farthest remove from anything 
 that could be called popular : and in point of fact it is pro- 
 bable that many a peasant who would feel his blood stir in 
 hearing^ man's a man for a 1 that, would grin and guffaw 
 if you should read him Wordsworth's Lambs and Peter 
 Grays. 
 
 And a precisely similar fate has met Whitman. Pro- 
 fessing to be a mudsill and glorying in it, chanting de- 
 mocracy and shirt-sleeves and equal rights, declaring 
 that he is nothing if not one of the people, nevertheless 
 the people, the democracy, will yet have nothing to do 
 with him, and it is safe to say that his sole audience has 
 lain among such representatives of the highest culture as 
 Emerson and the English illuminated. 
 
 The truth is, that if closely examined, Whitman, in- 
 stead of being a true democrat, is simply the most incor- 
 rigible of aristocrats masquing in a peasant's costume, 
 and his poetry, instead of being the natural outcome of 
 a fresh young democracy, is a product which would be 
 impossible except in a highly civilized society. 
 
48 The English Novel 
 
 III 
 
 At our last meeting we endeavored to secure some 
 solid basis for our ideas of form in general, and to develop 
 thereupon some conceptions of form in art, and specially 
 of literary form, which would enable us to see our way 
 clear among misconceptions of this subject which prevail. 
 We there addressed ourselves towards considering 
 particularly three of these misconceptions. The first 
 we examined was that which predicts the total death of 
 imaginative literature — poetry, novels and all — in conse- 
 quence of a certain supposed quality of imagination by 
 virtue of which, like some ruin-haunting animals, it can- 
 not live in the light, so that the destructive explanations 
 of advancing science — it was apprehended — would 
 gradually force all our imaginative energies back into 
 the dark crevices of old fable and ruined romance until 
 finally, penetrating these also, it would exterminate the 
 species. We first tested this idea by laying it alongside 
 the historic facts in the case : confining our view to 
 England, we found that science and poetry had been 
 developing alongside of each other ever since early in 
 the seventeenth century ; inquiring into the general 
 effect of this long contact, we could only find that it was 
 to make our general poetry greatly richer in substance 
 and finer in form ; and upon testing this abstract conclu- 
 sion by a concrete examination of Tennyson — as a poet 
 most likely to show the influence of science because 
 himself most exposed to it, indeed most saturated with 
 
The Development of Personality 49 
 
 it — we found from several readings in hi Metnoriam that 
 whether as to love, or friendship, or the sacredness of 
 marriage, or the pure sense of beauty, or the true relation 
 of knowledge to wisdom, or faith in God, — the effect of 
 science had been on the whole to broaden the concep- 
 tions and to clarify the forms in which they were ex- 
 pressed by this great poet. 
 
 And having thus appealed to facts, we found further 
 that in the nature of things no such destruction could 
 follow : that what we call explanation in science is at 
 bottom only a reduction of unfamiliar mysteries to terms 
 of familiar mysteries, and that, since to the true imagina- 
 tive mind, whether of poet or novelist, the mysteries of 
 this world grow all the greater as they grow more 
 familiar, the necessary effect of scientific explanations is 
 at last the indefinite increase of food for the imagination. 
 The modern imagination, indeed, shall still love mystery ; 
 but it is not the shallow mystery of those small darks 
 which are enclosed by caves and crumbling dungeons, it 
 is the unfathomable mystery of the sunlight and the sun, 
 it is this inexplicable contradictory shadow of the infinite 
 which is projected upon the finite, it is this multitudinous 
 flickering of all the other egos upon the tissue of my 
 ego : these are the lights and shades and vaguenesses of 
 mystery in which the modern imaginative effort delights. 
 And here I cannot help adding to what was said on this 
 subject in the last lecture, by declaring to every young 
 man who may entertain the hope of poethood, that at 
 this stage of the world you need not dream of winning 
 the attention of sober people with your poetry unless 
 that poetry, and your soul behind it, are informed and 
 saturated at least with the largest final conceptions of 
 current science. I do not mean that you are to write 
 Loves of the Plants, I do not mean that you are to 
 
 4 
 
50 The English Novel 
 
 versify Biology, but I mean that you must be so far 
 instinct with the scientific thought of the time that your 
 poetic conceptions will rush as it were from under these 
 pure cold facts of science like those Alpine torrents 
 which flow out of glaciers. Or, — to change the figure 
 for the better — just as the chemist, in causing chlorine 
 and hydrogen to form hydrochloric acid, finds that he 
 must not only put the chlorine and hydrogen together, 
 but must put them together in the presence of light 
 in order to make them combine : so the poet of our 
 time will find that his best poetic combinations, his 
 greatest syntheses of wisdom, own this law, and they too 
 must be effected in the presence of the awful light of 
 science. 
 
 Returning to our outline of the last lecture : After we 
 had discussed this matter, we advanced to the second of 
 the great misconceptions of the function of form in art — 
 that which holds that the imaginative effort of the future 
 will be better than that of the present, and that this im- 
 provement will come through a progress towards form- 
 lessness. After quoting several sentences from Whitman 
 which seemed to contain the substantial argument — 
 to-wit, that the poetry of the future is to be signalized by 
 independence of form, and is, by virtue of this indepen- 
 dence, to gain strength, and become a democratic poetry, 
 as contrasted with the supposed weak and aristocratic 
 poetry of the present — I called your attention to a notable 
 circumstance which seems to throw a curious light along 
 this inquiry : that circumstance being that the two Eng- 
 lish poets who have most exclusively laid claim to re- 
 present the people in poetry, to express nothing but the 
 people's heart in the people's words, namely, Words- 
 worth and Whitman, are precisely the two whose audi- 
 ence has been most exclusively confined .to the other 
 
The Development of Personality 51 
 
 extreme of culture. Wordsworth, instead of appealing 
 to Hodge, Nokes, and Stiles, instead of being found in 
 penny editions on the collier's shelves, is most cherished 
 by Mr. Matthew Arnold, the high-priest of culture. And 
 so with Whitman. We may say with safety that no 
 preacher was ever so decisively rejected by his own : 
 continually crying democracy in the market-place, and 
 crying it in forms or no-forms professing to be nothing 
 but products of the democratic spirit, nevertheless the 
 democracy everywhere have turned a deaf ear, and 
 it is only with a few of the most sober and retired 
 thinkers of our time that Whitman has found even a 
 partial acceptance. 
 
 And finally by way of showing a reason for this state 
 of things in Whitman's case, the last lecture closed with 
 the assertion that Whitman's poetry, in spite of his 
 belief (which I feel sure is most earnest) that it is 
 democratic, is really aristocratic to the last degree ; and 
 instead of belonging, as he claims, to an early and 
 fresh-thoughted stage of a republic, is really poetry 
 which would be impossible except in a highly civilized 
 state of society. 
 
 Here, then, let us take up the thread of that argument. 
 In the quotations which were given from Whitman's 
 paper, we have really the ideal democracy and democrat 
 of this school. It is curious to reflect in the first place 
 that in point of fact no such democracy, no such demo- 
 crat, has ever existed in this country. For example : 
 when Whitman tells us of " the measureless viciousness 
 of the great radical republic, with its ruffianly nomina- 
 tions and elections ; its loud ill-pitched voice ; its fights, 
 errors, eructations, dishonesties, audacities, those fearful 
 and varied storm-and-stress stages (so offensive to the 
 well-regulated, college-bred mind) wherewith nature, 
 
5 2 
 
 The English Novel 
 
 history and time block out nationalities more powerful 
 than the past;" when he tells us this, with a sort of 
 caressing touch upon all the bad adjectives, rolling the 
 "errors" and the " audacities " and the " viciousness " 
 under his tongue and faithfully believing that the strength 
 which recommends his future poetry is to come out of 
 viciousness and ruffianly elections and the like : let us 
 inquire, to what representative facts in our history does 
 this picture correspond, what great democrat who has 
 helped to block out this present republic sat for this 
 portrait ? Is it Cxeorge Washington, that beautiful, broad, 
 tranquil spirit whom, I sometimes think, even we Ameri- 
 cans have never yet held quite at his true value, — is it 
 Washington who was vicious, dishonest, audacious, com- 
 bative? But Washington had some hand in blocking 
 out this republic. Or what would our courtly and philo- 
 sophic Thomas Jefferson look like if you should put this 
 slouch hat on him, and open his shirt-front at the bosom, 
 and set him to presiding over a ruffianly nomination? 
 Yet he had some hand in blocking out this republic. In 
 one of Whitman's poems I find him crying out to Ameri- 
 cans, in this same strain : " O lands ! would you be freer 
 than all that has ever been before ? If you would be 
 freer than all that has been before, come listen to me." 
 And this is the deliverance : 
 
 " Fear grace — fear elegance, civilization, delicatesse, 
 Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey-juice ; 
 Beware the advancing mortal ripening of nature, 
 Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of States 
 and men." 
 
 And in another line, he rejoices in America because — 
 " Here are the roughs, beards, . . . combativeness," 
 and the like. 
 
The Development of Personality $3 
 
 But where are these roughs, these beards, and this 
 combativeness? Were the Adamses and Benjamin 
 Franklin roughs? was it these who taught us to make 
 ruffianly nominations? But they had some hand in 
 blocking out this republic. In short, leaving each one 
 to extend this list of names for himself, it may be fairly 
 said that nowhere in history can one find less of that 
 ruggedness which Whitman regards as the essential of 
 democracy, nowhere more of that grace which he con- 
 siders fatal to it, than among the very representative 
 democrats who blocked out this republic. In truth, 
 when Whitman cries " fear the mellow sweet," and 
 "beware the mortal ripening of nature," we have an 
 instructive instance of the extreme folly into which a 
 man may be led by mistaking a metaphor for an argu- 
 ment. The argument here is, you observe, that because 
 an apple in the course of nature rots soon after it 
 mellows, argal a man cannot mellow his spirit with 
 culture without decaying soon .afterwards. Of course 
 it is sufficient only to reflect non sequitur: for it is 
 precisely the difference between the man and the apple 
 that whereas every apple must rot after ripeness no man 
 is bound to. 
 
 If therefore after an inquiry ranging from Washington 
 and Jefferson down to William Cullen Bryant (that 
 surely unrugged and graceful figure who was so often 
 called the finest American gentleman) and Lowell and 
 Longfellow and the rest who are really the men that are 
 blocking out our republic, — if we find not a single 
 representative American democrat to whom any of these 
 pet adjectives apply, — not one who is measurelessly 
 vicious, or ruffianly, or audacious, or purposely rugged, 
 or contemptuous towards the graces of life, — then we 
 are obliged to affirm that the whole ideal drawn by 
 
54 The English Novel 
 
 Whitman is a fancy picture with no counterpart in 
 nature. It is perfectly true that we have ruffianly nomi- 
 nations ; but we have them because the real democrats 
 who govern our republic, who represent our democracy, 
 stay away from nominating conventions and leave them 
 to the ruffians. Surely no one can look with the most 
 cursory eye upon our everyday American life without 
 seeing that the real advance of our society goes on 
 not only without, but largely in spite of that ostensible 
 apparatus, legislative, executive, judicial which we call 
 the Government, — that really the most effective legisla- 
 tion in our country is that which is enacted in the 
 breasts of the individual democrats who compose it. 
 And this is true democratic growth : every day, more 
 and more, each man perceives that the shortest and 
 most effectual method of securing his own rights is 
 to respect the rights of others, and so every day do 
 we less and less need outside interference in our indi- 
 vidual relations ; so that every day we approach nearer 
 and nearer towards that ideal government in which each 
 man is mainly his own legislator, his own governor 
 or president, and his own judge, and in which the 
 public government is mainly a concert of measures for 
 the common sanitation and police. 
 
 But again : it is true as Whitman says that we have 
 dishonesties ; but we punish them, they are not repre- 
 sentative, they have no more relation to democracy than 
 the English thief has to English aristocracy. 
 
 From what spirit of blindness is it alleged that these 
 things are peculiar to our democracy? Whitman here 
 explicitly declares that the over-dainty Englishman " can- 
 not stomach the high-life below stairs of our social 
 status so far," this high-life consisting of the measureless 
 viciousness, the dishonesty, and the like. Cannot 
 
The Development of Personality $$ 
 
 stomach it, no : who could ? But how absurd to come 
 down to this republic, to American society for these 
 things ! Alas, I know an Englishman, who, three 
 hundred years ago, found these same things in that 
 aristocracy there : and he too, thank heaven, could not 
 stomach them, for he has condemned them in a sonnet 
 which is the solace of all sober- thoughted ages. I mean 
 Shakspere, and his sonnet : 
 
 LXVI. 
 
 " Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, — 
 As, to behold desert a beggar born, 
 And needy nothing trimmed in jollity, 
 And purest faith unhappily foresworn, 
 And gilded honor shamefully misplaced, 
 And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, 
 And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, 
 And strength by limping sway disabled, 
 And art made tongue-tied by authority, 
 And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill, 
 And simple truth miscalled simplicity, 
 And captive good attending captain ill : 
 Tired of all these, from these would I be gone, 
 Save that, to die, I leave my love alone." 
 
 It is true that we have bad manners \ yet among the 
 crowds at the Centennial Exposition it was universally 
 remarked that in no country in the world could such 
 vast multitudes of people have assembled day after day 
 with so few arrests by the police, with so little disorder, 
 and with such an apparent universal and effective senti- 
 ment of respect for decorum and law. 
 
 Now if we carry the result of this inquiry over into 
 art ; if we are presented with a poetry which professes to 
 be democratic because it — the poetry — is measurelessly 
 vicious, purposely eructant, striving after ruggedness, 
 despising grace, like the democracy described by Whit- 
 
56 The English Novel 
 
 man ; then we reply that as matter of fact there never 
 was any such American democracy and that the poetry 
 which represents it has no constituency. And herein 
 seems a most abundant solution of the fact just now 
 brought to your notice, that the actually existing democ- 
 racy have never accepted Whitman's poetry. But here 
 we are met with the cry of strength and manfulness. 
 Everywhere throughout Whitman's poetry the "rude 
 muscle," the brawn, the physical bigness of the Ameri- 
 can prairie, the sinew of the Western backwoodsman, are 
 apotheosized, and all these, as Whitman claims, are fitly 
 chanted in his "savage song." 
 
 Here, then, is a great stalwart man, in perfect health, 
 all brawn and rude muscle, set up before us as the ideal 
 of strength. Let us examine this strength a little. 
 For one, I declare that I do not find it impressive. 
 Yonder, in a counting-room — alas, in how many 
 counting-rooms ! — a young man with weak eyes bends 
 over a ledger, and painfully casts up the figures day by 
 day, on pitiful wages, to support his mother, or to send 
 his younger brother to school, or some such matter. If 
 we watch this young man when he takes down his hat, 
 lays off his ink-splotched office-coat, and starts home for 
 dinner, we perceive that he is in every respect the opposite 
 of the stalwart Whitman ideal ; his chest is not huge, his 
 legs are inclined to be pipe-stems, and his dress is like 
 that of any other book-keeper. Yet the weak-eyed pipe- 
 stem-legged young man impresses me as more of a man, 
 more of a democratic man, than the tallest of Whitman's 
 roughs ; to the eye of my spirit there is more strength in 
 this man's daily endurance of petty care and small weari- 
 ness, for love, more of the sort of stuff which makes a 
 real democracy and a sound republic, than in an army of 
 Whitman's unshaven loafers. 
 
The Development of Personality 57 
 
 I know — and count it among the privileges of my life 
 that I do — a woman who has spent her whole life in bed 
 for twenty years past, confined by a curious form of 
 spinal disease which prevents locomotion and which in 
 spite of constant pain and disturbance leaves the system 
 long unworn. Day by day she lies helpless, at the 
 mercy of all those tyrannical small needs which become 
 so large under such circumstances ; every meal must be 
 brought to her, a drink of water must be handed ; and 
 she is not rich, to command service. Withal her nature 
 is of the brightest and most energetic sort. Yet, sur- 
 rounded by these unspeakable pettinesses, enclosed in 
 this cage of contradictions, this woman has made herself 
 the centre of an adoring circle of the brightest people ; 
 her room is called " Sunnyside : " when brawny men are 
 tired they go to her for rest, when people in the rudest 
 physical health are sick of life they go to her for the cura- 
 tive virtue of her smiles. Now this woman has not so 
 much rude muscle in her whole body as Whitman's man 
 has in his little finger : she is so fragile that long ago 
 some one called her " White Flower," and by this name 
 she is much known : it costs her as much labor to press a 
 friend's hand as it costs Whitman's rough to fell a tree : 
 regarded from the point of view of brawn and sinew, she 
 is simply absurd ; yet to the eye of my spirit there is more 
 manfulness in one moment of her loving and self-sacri- 
 ficing existence than in an aeon of muscle-growth and 
 sinew-breeding : and hers is the manfulness which is the 
 only solution of a true democrat, hers is the manfulness 
 of which only can a republic be built. A republic is the 
 government of the spirit ; a republic depends upon the 
 self-control of each member ; you cannot make a republic 
 out of muscles and prairies and Rocky mountains : re- 
 publics are made of the spirit. 
 
58 The English Novel 
 
 Nay, when we think of it, how little is it a matter of 
 the future, how entirely is it a matter of the past, when 
 people come running at us with rude muscle and great 
 mountains and such matters of purely physical bigness to 
 shake our souls ? How long ago is it that they began to 
 put great bearskin caps on soldiers with a view to make 
 them look grisly and formidable when advancing on the 
 enemy? It is so long ago that the practice has survived 
 mainly as ceremonial, and the little boys on the streets 
 now laugh at this ferociousness when the sappers and 
 miners come by who affect this costume. 
 
 Yet here in the nineteenth century we behold artists 
 purposely setting bearskin caps upon their poetry to 
 make it effective. This sort of thing never yet succeeded 
 as against Anglo-Saxon people. I cannot help thinking 
 here of old Lord Berners' account translated from 
 Froissart, of how the Genoese cross-bowmen attempted 
 to frighten the English warriors at the battle of Cr£cy. 
 "Whan the genowayes were assembled togayder, and 
 beganne to aproche, they made a great leape and crye, 
 to abasshe thenglysshmen, but they stode sty 11, and 
 styredde not for all that ; thane the genowayes agayne 
 the seconde tyme made another leape, and a fell crye, 
 and stepped forward a lytell, and thenglysshmen remeved 
 not one fote ; thirdly, agayne they leapt and cryed, and 
 went forthe tyll they come within shotte ; thane they 
 shot feersley with their crosbowes ; than thenglysshe 
 archers stept forthe one pase, and lette fly their arowes 
 so hotly, and so thycke, that it semed snowe ; when 
 the genowayes felt the arowes persynge through heedes, 
 armes, and brestes, many of them cast downe their cros- 
 bowes, and dyde cutte their strynges, and retourned 
 dysconfited." 
 
 And so the Poetry of the Future has advanced upon us 
 
The Development of Personality 59 
 
 with a great leap and a fell cry, relying upon its loud, 
 ill-pitched voice, but the democracy have stirred not for 
 all that. Perhaps we may fairly say, gentlemen, it is five 
 hundred years too late to attempt to capture English- 
 men with a yell. 
 
 I think it interesting to compare Whitman's often 
 expressed contempt for poetic beauty — he taunts the 
 young magazine writers of the present time with having 
 the beauty-disease — with some utterances of one who 
 praised the true function of ruggedness in works the 
 world will not soon forget. I mean Thomas Carlyle, 
 who has so recently passed into the Place where the 
 strong and the virtuous and the beautiful souls assemble 
 themselves. In one of Carlyle's essays he speaks as 
 follows of Poetic Beauty. These words scarcely sound 
 as if they came from the lover of Danton and Mirabeau. 
 
 " It dwells and is born in the inmost Spirit of Man, 
 united to all love of Virtue, to all true belief in God ; or 
 rather, it is one with this love and this belief, another 
 phase of the same highest principle in the mysterious 
 infinitude of the human Soul. To apprehend this beauty 
 of poetry, in its full and purest brightness, is not easy, 
 but difficult ; thousands on thousands eagerly read poems, 
 and attain not the smallest taste of it ; yet to all uncor- 
 rupted hearts, some effulgences of this heavenly glory 
 are here and there revealed ; and to apprehend it clearly 
 and wholly, to acquire and maintain a sense of heart that 
 sees and worships it, is the last perfection of all humane 
 culture." 
 
 In the name of all really manful democracy, in the 
 name of the true strength that only can make our repub- 
 lic reputable among the nations, let us repudiate the 
 strength that is no stronger than a human biceps, let us 
 repudiate the manfulness that averages no more than six 
 
60 The English Novel 
 
 feet high. My democrat, the democrat whom I contem- 
 plate with pleasure, the democrat who is to write or to 
 read the poetry of the future, may have a mere thread for 
 his biceps, yet he shall be strong enough to handle hell, 
 he shall play ball with the earth ; and albeit his stature 
 may be no more than a boy's, he shall still be taller than 
 the great redwoods of California ; his height shall be the 
 height of great resolution and love and faith and beauty 
 and knowledge and subtle meditation ; his head shall be 
 forever among the stars. 
 
 But here we are met with the cry of freedom. This 
 poetry is free, it is asserted, because it is independent of 
 form. But this claim is also too late. . It should have 
 been made at least before the French Revolution. We 
 all know what that freedom means in politics which is 
 independent of form, of law. It means myriad- fold 
 slavery to a mob. As in politics, so in art. Once for 
 all, in art, to be free is not to be independent of any form, 
 it is to be master of many forms. Does the young artist 
 of the Whitman school fancy that he is free because 
 under the fond belief that he is yielding himself to nature, 
 stopping not for words lest he may fail to make what 
 Whitman proudly calls " a savage song," he allows him- 
 self to be blown about by every wind of passion? Is a 
 ship free because, without rudder or sail, it is turned 
 loose to the winds, and has no master but nature? 
 Nature is the tyrant of tyrants. Now, just as that free- 
 dom of the ship on the sea means shipwreck, so indepen- 
 dence of form in art means death. Here one recurs 
 with pleasure to the aphorism cited in the last lecture : 
 in art, as elsewhere, "he who will not answer to the rud- 
 der shall answer to the rocks." I find all the great art- 
 ists of time striving after this same freedom ; but it is not 
 by destroying, it is by extending the forms of art, that 
 
1 he Development of Personality 6 1 
 
 all sane and sober souls hope to attain. In a letter of 
 Beethoven's to the Archduke Rudolph, written in 1819, 
 I find him declaring " But freedom and progress are our 
 true aim in the world of art, just as in the great creation 
 at large." 
 
 We have seen how in the creation at large progress is 
 effected by the continual multiplication of new forms. 
 It was this advance which Beethoven wished : to become 
 master of new and more beautiful forms, not to abolish 
 form. In a letter of his to Matthisson, as early as 1800, 
 accompanying a copy of Adelaide, we may instructively 
 gather what he thought of this matter : " Indeed even 
 now I send you Adelaide with a feeling of timidity. 
 You know yourself what changes the lapse of some years 
 brings forth in an artist who continues to make progress ; 
 the greater the advances we make in art the less are we 
 satisfied with our works of an early date." This un- 
 studied declaration becomes full of significance when we 
 remember that this same Adelaide is still held, by the 
 common consent of all musicians, to be the most perfect 
 song-form in music ; and it is given to young composers 
 as a type and model from which all other forms are to 
 be developed. We may sum up the whole matter by 
 applying to these persons who desire formlessness, words 
 which were written of those who have been said to desire 
 death : 
 
 " Whatever crazy Sorrow saith, 
 No life that breathes with human breath 
 Has ever truly longed for death. 
 
 " 'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, 
 O life, not death, for which we pant ; 
 More life, and fuller, that I want." 
 
 In art, form and chaos are so nearly what life and 
 
62 The English Novel 
 
 death are in nature, that we do not greatly change this 
 stanza if we read : 
 
 'Tis form whereof our art is scant, 
 O form, not chaos, for which we pant, 
 More form, and fuller, that I want. 
 
 I find some deliverances in Epictetus which speak so 
 closely to more than one of the points just discussed 
 that I must quote a sentence or two. " What then," he 
 says in the chapter " About Freedom," " is that which 
 makes a man free from hindrance and makes him his 
 own master? For wealth does not do it, nor consulship, 
 nor provincial government, nor royal power; but some- 
 thing else must be discovered. What then is that which 
 when we write makes us free from hindrance and unim- 
 peded? The knowledge of the art of writing. What 
 then is it (which gives freedom) in playing the lute? 
 The science of playing the lute." If Whitman's doctrine 
 is true, the proper method of acquiring freedom on the 
 lute is to bring lute-music to that point where the loud 
 jangling chord produced by a big hand sweeping at ran- 
 dom across the strings is to take the place of the finical 
 tunes and harmonies now held in esteem. " Therefore," 
 continues Epictetus, " in life, also, it is the science of 
 life. . . . When you wish the body to be sound, is it in 
 your power or not ? — It is not. When you wish it to be 
 healthy? Neither is this in my power." (I complain of 
 Whitman's democracy that it has no provision for sick, 
 or small, or puny, or plain-featured, or hump-backed, or 
 any deformed people, and that his democracy is really 
 the worst kind of aristocracy, being an aristocracy of 
 nature's favorites in the matter of muscle.) And so of 
 estate, house, horses, life and death, — Epictetus con- 
 tinues ; these are not in our power, they cannot make us 
 
The Development of Personality 63 
 
 free. So that, in another chapter, he cries : u This is 
 the true athlete, the man who exercises himself against 
 such appearances. Stay, wretch, do not be carried away. 
 Great is the combat, divine is the work : it is for king- 
 ship, for freedom, for happiness." 
 
 And lastly, the Poetry of the Future holds that all 
 modern poetry, Tennyson particularly, is dainty and 
 over-perfumed, and Whitman speaks of it with that con- 
 tempt which he everywhere affects for the dandy. But 
 surely — I do not mean this disrespectfully — what age 
 of time ever yielded such a dandy as the founder of this 
 school, Whitman himself? The simpering beau who is 
 the product of the tailor's art is certainly absurd enough ; 
 but what difference is there between that and the other 
 dandy-upside-down who from equal motives of affectation 
 throws away coat and vest, dons a slouch hat, opens his 
 shirt so as to expose his breast, and industriously circu- 
 lates his portrait, thus taken, in his own books. And 
 this dandyism — the dandyism of the roustabout — I 
 find in Whitman's poetry from beginning to end. 
 Everywhere it is conscious of itself, everywhere it is 
 analyzing itself, everywhere it is posing to see if it cannot 
 assume a naive and striking attitude, everywhere it is 
 screwing up its eyes, not into an eyeglass like the con- 
 ventional dandy, but into an expression supposed to be 
 fearsomely rough and barbaric and frightful to the terror- 
 stricken reader, and it is almost safe to say that one half 
 of Whitman's poetic work has consisted of a detailed 
 description of the song he is going to sing. It is the 
 extreme of sophistication in writing. 
 
 But if we must have dandyism in our art, surely the 
 softer sort, which at least leans toward decorum and 
 gentility, is preferable ; for that at worst becomes only 
 laughable, while the rude dandyism, when it does acquire 
 
64 The English Novel 
 
 a factitious interest by being a blasphemy against real 
 manhood, is simply tiresome. 
 
 I have thus dwelt upon these claims of the Whitman 
 school, not so much because of any intrinsic weight they 
 possess, as because they are advanced in such taking and 
 sacred names, — of democracy, of manhood, of freedom, 
 of progress. Upon the most earnest examination, I can 
 find it nothing but wholly undemocratic ; not manful, 
 but dandy ; not free, because the slave of nature ; not 
 progressive, because its whole momentum is derived from 
 the physical-large which ceased to astonish the world 
 ages ago, in comparison with spiritual greatness. 
 
 Indeed, this matter has been pushed so far, with the 
 apparent, but wholly unreal sanction of so many influen- 
 tial names, that in speaking to those who may be poets 
 of the future, I cannot close these hasty words upon the 
 Whitman school without a fervent protest, in the name 
 of all art and all artists, against a poetry which has 
 painted a great scrawling picture of the human body 
 and has written under it, " This is the soul; " which shouts 
 a profession of religion in every line, but of a religion 
 that, when examined, reveals no tenet, no rubric, save 
 that a man must be natural, must abandon himself to 
 every passion ; and which constantly roars its belief in 
 God, but with a camerado air as if it were patting the 
 Deity on the back and bidding Him Cheer up and hope 
 for further encouragement. 
 
 It seems like a curious sarcasm of time that even the 
 form of Whitman's poetry is not poetry of the future but 
 tends constantly into the rhythm of 
 
 " Brimmanna boda abeod eft ongean," 
 
 which is the earliest rhythm of our poetry. The only 
 difference which Whitman makes is in rejecting the allit- 
 
The Development of Personality 6$ 
 
 eration, in changing the line-division, so as to admit 
 longer lines, and the allowance of much liberty in inter- 
 rupting this general rhythm for a moment. It is remark- 
 able indeed that this old rhythm is still distinctly the 
 prevalent rhythm of English prose. Some years ago 
 Walter Savage Landor remarked that the dactyl was 
 "the bindweed of English prose," and by the dactyl he 
 means simply a word of three syllables with the accent 
 on the first, like Brimmanna. For example : 
 
 " I loaf and invite my soul ; 
 I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass. 
 I exist as I am — that is enough ; 
 If no other in the world be aware, I sit content ; 
 And if each and all be aware I sit content. 
 Washes and razors for foofoos, and for me freckles and a 
 bristling beard." 
 
 "Walt Whitman am I, a cosmos of mighty Manhattan the 
 sun." 
 
 We are here arrived at a very fitting point to pass on 
 and consider that third misconception of the relation 
 between science and art which has been recently formu- 
 lated by M. Emile Zola in his work called Le Roman 
 Experimental. Zola's name has been so widely asso- 
 ciated with a certain class of novels that I am unfortunately 
 under no necessity to describe them, and I need only 
 say that the work in question is a formal reply to a great 
 number of objections which have come from many quar- 
 ters as to the characters and events which Zola's novels 
 have brought before the public. 
 
 His book, though a considerable volume, may be said 
 to consist of two sentences which the author has varied 
 with great adroitness into many forms. These two sen- 
 tences [ may sum up as follows : (i) every novel must 
 hereafter be the entirely unimaginative record of an ex- 
 
 5 
 
66 The English Novel 
 
 periment inhuman passion; and (2) every writer of the 
 Romantic school in France, particularly Victor Hugo, is 
 an ass. You are not to suppose that in this last sentiment 
 I have strengthened Zola's expressions. A single quota- 
 tion will show sufficient authority. As for example 
 where M. Zola cries out to those who are criticising 
 him : " Every one says : ' Ah yes, the naturalists ! they 
 are those men with dirty hands who want all novels to 
 be written in slang, and choose the most disgusting sub- 
 jects.' Not at all ! you lie ! . . . Do not say that I 
 am idiot enough to wish to paint nothing but the 
 gutter." 
 
 But with this quarrel we are not here concerned ; I 
 simply wish to examine in the briefest way Zola's 
 proposition to convert the novel into a work of science. 
 His entire doctrine may be fairly, indeed amply gathered 
 in the following quotations : 
 
 " We continue by our observations and experiments the 
 work of the physiologist, who has himself employed that of 
 the physicist and the chemist. We after a fashion pursue 
 scientific psychology in order to complete scientific physi- 
 ology ; and in order to complete the evolution, we need only 
 carry to the study of nature and man the invaluable tool of 
 the experimental method. In a word, we should work upon 
 characters, passions, human and social facts, as the physi- 
 cist and chemist work with inorganic bodies, as the physi- 
 ologist works with living organisms. Determinism controls 
 everything. 
 
 " This, then, is what constitutes the experimental novel, — 
 to understand the mechanism of human phenomena, to show 
 the machinery of intellectual and emotional manifestations 
 as physiology shall explain them to us under the influence 
 of heredity and surrounding circumstances ; then to show 
 man living in the social milieu which he has himself produced, 
 and which he modifies every day, while at the same time 
 experiencing in his turn a continual transformation. So we 
 
The Development of Personality 67 
 
 rest on physiology ; we take man isolated from the hands of 
 the physiologist to continue the solution of the problem and 
 to solve scientifically the question, How men live as members 
 of society. — We are, in a word, experimental philosophers, 
 showing by experiment how a passion exhibits itself in certain 
 social surroundings. The day when we shall understand the 
 mechanism of this passion, it may be treated, reduced, made 
 as inoffensive as possible." 
 
 These propositions need not detain us long. In the 
 first place, let us leave the vagueness of abstract assertions 
 and, coming down to the concrete, let us ask who 
 is to make the experiment recorded in the novel? Zola 
 says, " We (we novelists) are experimental philosophers, 
 showing by experiment how a passion exhibits itself in 
 certain social surroundings." Very well; in one of 
 Zola's most popular novels, the heroine Nana, after a 
 remarkable career, dies of small-pox ; and a great natural- 
 istic ado is made over this death. A correspondent of 
 the Herald, writing from Paris, says : "In a very few 
 days we are to be treated to the stage version of Nana, 
 at the Ambigu. . . . Nana, it will be remembered, dies at 
 the end of the story, of small-pox. We are to be given 
 every incident of the agony — every mark of the small-pox. 
 Pretty Mile. Massin (who is to play this death-scene) is to 
 be the crowning attraction of the new play. . . . We shall 
 be shown a real death of small- pox, or the nearest possible 
 approach to it. Mile. Massin, who is to sustain the pleasing 
 part of the ' heroine ' will make her pretty face hideous 
 for the occasion. At half past 1 1 every evening she will 
 issue from behind the drapery of a bed, clad only in the 
 most indispensable of nightly raiment — and that ' in most 
 admired disorder' — her neck, cheeks and forehead dis- 
 figured, changed and unrecognizable for simulated pus- 
 tules. At twenty minutes to 12 the pustules will be too 
 
68 The English Novel 
 
 much for her, and she will expire. At a quarter to 12 
 the deafening applause of the public will call her to life 
 again, and she will bow her acknowledgments." 
 
 Applying Zola's theory, sociology is to find here a 
 very instructive record of how a woman such as Nana 
 would comport herself when dying of small-pox; and 
 furthermore, his description of it must be an exact record 
 of an experiment in death from small -pox conducted by 
 M. Zola in person. But now recurring to our question 
 let us ask, how could M. Zola conduct this experiment? 
 It would certainly be inconvenient for him to catch the 
 small-pox and die, with a view to recording his sensa- 
 tions ; and yet it is perfectly apparent that the conditions 
 of scientific experiment could not be satisfied in any 
 other way. M. Zola would probably reply with effusion, 
 that he had taken pains to go to a small-pox hospital and 
 to study with great care the behavior of a patient dying 
 with that disease. But, we immediately rejoin, this is 
 very far from what his theory bound him to show us : his 
 theory bound him to show us not some person, any 
 person, dying of small-pox, but Nana with all her indi- 
 viduality derived from heredity and from her own spon- 
 taneous variation — it was Nana dying of small-pox that 
 he must set before us ; one person dies one way and 
 another person dies another way, even of the same dis- 
 ease ; Smith, a very tragic person, would make a death- 
 scene full of tragic message and gesture ; Brown might 
 close his eyes and pass without a word ; Nana, particu- 
 larly, with her peculiar career and striking individuality, 
 would naturally make a peculiar and striking death. 
 Now since Nana is purely a creation of Zola, (unless in- 
 deed the novel is a biography, which is not pretended) 
 Zola is the only person in the world who understands 
 Nana's feelings in death or on any occasion ; and this 
 
The Development of Personality 69 
 
 being so it is simply impossible that Zola could make a 
 scientific experiment of Nana's death from small-pox 
 without dying himself. This seems so absurd that one 
 goes back to Le Roman Experimental to see if Zola's 
 idea of a scientific experiment has not something pecu- 
 liar about it ; and one quickly finds that it has. It is in 
 fact interesting to observe that though Zola has this 
 word experiment continually on his lips, yet he never 
 means that the novelist is to conduct a real, gross, down- 
 right, actual brute of an experiment ; and the word with 
 him is wholly Pickwickian, signifying no more than that 
 the novelist, availing himself of such realistic helps as he 
 can find in hospitals and the like, is to evolve therefrom 
 something which he believes to be the natural course of 
 things. Examine the book wherever you may, the 
 boasted experiment, the pivot of the whole system, fades 
 into this. 
 
 The experiment of Zola is as if a professor of chemistry, 
 knowing something of the properties of given substances, 
 desiring to see how a certain molecule would behave 
 itself in the presence of a certain other molecule, 
 hitherto untried in this connection, instead of going into 
 his laboratory and bringing the molecules together and 
 observing what they actually did, should quietly sit 
 before his desk and write off a comfortable account of 
 how he thought these molecules would behave, judging 
 from his previous knowledge of their properties. It is 
 still more interesting to find that Zola is apparently 
 unconscious of the difference between these two modes 
 of experiment. About this unconsciousness I have my 
 own theory, I think it entirely probable that if these 
 two kinds of experiment were described to Zola he 
 would maintain with perfect good faith that they were 
 exactly the same. There is a phase of error — perhaps 
 
yo The English Novel 
 
 we may call it hallucination — in which certain sorts of 
 minds come to believe that two things which have been 
 habitually associated are always the same. For instance, 
 a friend of mine has told me that a certain estimable 
 teacher of the French language, who, after carrying on 
 his vocation for many years during which English and 
 French became equally instinctive tongues to him, was 
 accustomed to maintain that English and French were 
 absolutely one and the same language. "When you 
 say water" he was accustomed to argue to my friend, 
 " you mean water : when I say Veau I mean water : 
 water — Veau, Veau — water > do you not see? We 
 mean the same thing, it is the same language." 
 
 However this may be, nothing is clearer than that 
 Zola's conception of an experiment is what I have 
 described it — namely, an evolving, from the inner 
 consciousness, of what the author thinks the experimental 
 subjects would do under given circumstances. Here are 
 some of Zola's own words : and surely nothing more 
 naive was ever uttered. "The writer" (of the novel) 
 "employs both observation and experiment. The ob- 
 server gives the facts as he has observed them . . . 
 and establishes the solid ground on which his characters 
 shall march, and the phenomena shall develop them- 
 selves. Then the experimenter appears and conducts the 
 experiment; that is to say " (I am quoting from M. Zola) 
 " he moves the characters in a particular story to show 
 that the sequence of facts will be such as is determined by 
 the study of phenomena." That is to say, to carry Zola's 
 "experiment" into chemistry: knowing something of 
 chlorine and something of hydrogen separately, a chemist 
 who wishes to know their behavior under each other's 
 influence may " experiment " upon that behavior by 
 giving his opinion as to what chlorine and hydrogen 
 would likely do under given circumstances. 
 
The Development of Personality 71 
 
 It seems incredible, but it is logically beyond question, 
 that by this short process we have got to the bottom of 
 this whole elaborate system of the Experimental Novel 
 and have found that it is nothing but a repetition of the 
 old, old trick of the hand of Jacob and the voice of Esau. 
 Think how much self-sacrifice and labor, of how many 
 noble and brave spirits, from Horrox and Hooke in 
 the seventeenth century down to the hundreds of scien- 
 tific men who at this moment are living obscure and 
 laborious lives in the search of truth, — think, I say, how 
 much fervent and pious labor has gone to invest the 
 mere name of scientific experiment with that sacredness 
 under which the Zola school is now claiming the rights 
 and privileges of science for what we have seen is not 
 science, and what, we might easily see if it were worth 
 showing, is mere corruption. The hand is the hand of 
 science : but the voice is the voice of a beast. 
 
 To many, this animal voice has seemed a portentous 
 sound. But if we think what kind of beast it is, we 
 cease to fear. George Eliot, somewhere in Adam Bede, 
 has a mot : when a donkey sets out to sing, everybody 
 knows beforehand what the tune will be. This voice has 
 been heard many times before. Long before Zola came 
 on the stage, I find Schiller crying in his sweet silver 
 tones to some who were likewise misusing both art and 
 science : " Unhappy mortal, that, with science and art, 
 the noblest of all instruments, effectest and attemptest 
 nothing more than the day-drudge with the meanest ; 
 that in the domain of perfect Freedom bearest about in 
 thee the spirit of a slave." In these words, Schiller 
 has at once prophesied and punished the Experimental 
 Novel. 
 
 But there is another view of Zola's claims which leads 
 us into some thoughts particularly instructive at the 
 
72 The English Novel 
 
 present time, and will carry us very directly to the more 
 special studies which will engage our attention. 
 
 After the views of form which have been presented to 
 you, it will not be necessary for me to argue that even if 
 Zola's Experimental Novel were a physical possibility, 
 it would be an artistic absurdity. If you could make a 
 scientific record of actual experiments in human passion, 
 very well : but why should we call that record a novel, 
 if we do not call Professor Huxley's late work on the 
 crayfish a novel, or if we do not call any physician's 
 report of some specially interesting clinical experience 
 to the Medical and Surgical Journal a novel ? 
 
 Here we are put upon securing for ourselves perfectly 
 clear conceptions as to certain relations between that so- 
 called poetic activity and scientific activity of the human 
 mind which find themselves in a singularly interesting 
 contact in the true and worthy novel which we are going 
 to study. Merely reminding you of the distinction with 
 which every one is more or less familiar theoretically, that 
 that activity which we variously call " poetic," "imagina- 
 tive," or "creative," is essentially synthetic, is a process 
 of putting together, while the scientific process seems 
 distinctively analytic, or a tearing apart ; let us pass 
 from this idea to those applications of the poetic faculty 
 which are made whenever a scientific searcher goes 
 further than the mere collection of facts, to classify them 
 and to effect generalizations. This is an activity of what 
 is well called the scientific imagination. Now what is 
 the difference between a work of the scientific imagination 
 and a work of the poetic imagination ? Without going 
 into subtleties, I think . the shortest way to gain a per- 
 fectly clear working-idea of this difference is to confine 
 our attention to the differing results of these activities : 
 the scientific imagination results in a formula, whose 
 
The Development of Personality 73 
 
 paramount purpose is to be as short and as comprehen- 
 sive as possible ; the poetic imagination results in a 
 created form or forms, whose paramount purpose is to 
 be as beautiful and as comprehensive as possible. For 
 example, the well-known formula of evolution : that 
 evolution is a process from the uniform and indefinite to 
 the multiform and definite : that is a result of long efforts 
 of the scientific imagination : while on the other hand 
 Tennyson's In Memoriam, in which we have deep mat- 
 ters discussed in the most beautiful words and the most 
 musical forms of verse, is a poetic work. 
 
 And now if we pass one step farther and consider 
 what would happen if the true scientific activity and the 
 true poetic activity should engage themselves upon one 
 and the same set of facts, we arrive at the novel. 
 
 The great modern novelist is at once scientific and 
 poetic : and here, it seems to me, in the novel, we have 
 the meeting, the reconciliation, the kiss, of science and 
 poetry. George Eliot, having with those keen eyes of 
 hers collected and analyzed and sorted many facts of 
 British life, binds them together into a true poetic 
 synthesis, in, for instance, Daniel Veronda, where instead 
 of giving us the ultimate relations of all her facts in the 
 shape of a formula, like that of evolution, she gives them 
 to us in the creation of beautiful Gwendolen Harleth and 
 all the other striking forms which move through the 
 book as embodiments in flesh and blood of the scientific 
 relations between all her facts. 
 
 Perhaps we shall find it convenient here, too, to base 
 perfectly clear ideas of the three existing schools of 
 novel-writing upon these foregoing principles. It has 
 been common for some time to hear of the Romantic and 
 the Realistic school, and lately a third term has been 
 brought into use by the Zola section who call themselves 
 
74 The English Novel 
 
 the Naturalistic school. It is easy to see that these terms 
 have arisen from the greater or less prominence given 
 now to the poetic activity, now to the scientific activity, 
 in novel writing ; those who most rely on the poetic being 
 the Romantic, those on a combination of the poetic and 
 scientific the Realistic, and those who entirely reject the 
 imagination (as Zola professes to do) the Naturalistic 
 school. At all events, then, not troubling ourselves 
 with the Naturalists who, as we have seen, call that an 
 experiment which is only an imaginative product, we 
 are prepared to study the novel as a work in which 
 science is carried over into the region of art. We are not 
 to regard the novel therefore as aught else but a work of 
 art, and the novelist as an artist. 
 
 One rejoices to find our wise Emerson discussing the 
 novel in this light purely, in his very suggestive essay on 
 Books. " Whilst the prudential and economical tone of 
 society starves the imagination, affronted Nature gets 
 such indemnity as she may. The novel is that allowance 
 and frolic the imagination finds. Everything else pins 
 it down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott, 
 Disraeli, Dumas, Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray and 
 Reade. 
 
 " The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxi- 
 cation. It has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame 
 in a dance, like planets ; and, once so liberated, the 
 whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never quite 
 subside to their old stony state." 
 
 Nay, we have such beautiful novels in the world, 
 novels far from the experimental romances by which we 
 are not perfected but infected {iionperficitur, inficitur), as 
 old Burton quotes in the Anatomy, novels in which 
 scientific harmony has passed into its heavenly after-life 
 of wisdom, novels in which the pure sense of poetic 
 
The Development of Personality 75 
 
 beauty is so tenderly drawn out that I love to think of 
 them in the terms which our most beauty-loving of 
 modern poets has applied to beauty, in the opening 
 of Endymion : 
 
 " A thing of beauty is a joy forever: 
 Its loveliness increases ; it will never 
 Pass into nothingness ; but still will keep 
 A bower quiet for us, and a sleep 
 Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 
 Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing 
 A flowery band to bind us to the earth, 
 Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth 
 Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, 
 Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways 
 Made for our searching : yes, in spite of all, 
 Some shape of beauty moves away the pall 
 From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, 
 Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon 
 For simple sheep ; and such are daffodils 
 With the green world they live in ; and clear rills 
 That for themselves a cooling covert make 
 'Gainst the hot season ; the mid-forest brake, 
 Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms; 
 And such too is the grandeur of the dooms 
 We have imagined for the mighty dead ; 
 All lovely tales that we have heard or read : 
 An endless fountain of immortal drink, 
 Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink." 
 
J 6 The English Novel 
 
 IV 
 
 The points discussed at our last meeting were mainly 
 of such a nature that I need not occupy your time with 
 the detailed review which has seemed advisable here- 
 tofore. 
 
 You will remember, in a general way, that we finished 
 examining the claims of the poetry of the future, as 
 presented by Whitman, and found reason to believe 
 from several trains of argument that its alleged demo- 
 cratic spirit was based on a political misconception, its 
 religious spirit was no more than that general feeling of 
 good fellowship and cameraderie which every man of 
 the world knows to be the commonest of virtues among 
 certain classes, its strength rested upon purely physical 
 qualifications which have long ago practically ceased to 
 be strength, its contempt for dandyism was itself only 
 a cruder dandyism, and its proposed substitution of power 
 for beauty not only an artistic blindness but a historical 
 error as to the general progress of this world, which has 
 been from strength to beauty ever since the ponderous 
 old gods Ouranus and Gsea — representatives of rude 
 strength — gave way to the more orderly (that is, more 
 beautiful) reign of Saturn, and he in turn to the still 
 more orderly and beauty- representing Jupiter, whom 
 Chaucer has called the " fadyr of delicacye." 
 
 Passing thus from the Whitman school, we attacked 
 that third misconception of literary form which had 
 taken the shape of the so-called naturalistic school, as 
 
The Development of Personality 77 
 
 led by Zola in his novels and defended by him in his 
 recent work, The Experimental Novel. Here we quickly 
 discovered that if the term " experiment " were used by 
 this school in its ordinary and scientific sense, it would 
 in a large number of cases involve conditions which 
 would exterminate the authors of the projected experi- 
 mental novels often at an early stage of the plot ; but 
 that secondly, this inconvenience was avoided through 
 the very peculiar meaning which was attached to the 
 word by this school, and which reveals that they make 
 no more use of experiment, in point of fact, than any 
 one of the numerous novelists who have for years been 
 in the habit of studying real life and nature as the basis 
 of their work. In short, it appeared that to support the 
 propriety of circulating such books by calling them ex- 
 perimental novels, was as if a man should sell profitable 
 poison under the name of scientific milk, and claim 
 therefor both the gratitude of society and the privileges 
 of science. Finally, supplying ourselves with clear ideas 
 as to the difference between what has become so well 
 known in modern times as the scientific imagination and 
 the poetic imagination, we determined to regard the 
 novel as a true work of art, and the novelist as an artist, 
 by reason of the created forms in the novel which were 
 shown to be the distinctive outcome of the poetical imagi- 
 nation as opposed to the formula which is the distinctive 
 outcome of the scientific imagination. Nevertheless, in 
 view of the circumstance that the facts embodied in these 
 forms are facts which must have been collected by a 
 genuine exercise of the true scientific faculty of observ- 
 ing and classifying, we were compelled to regard the 
 novel as a joint product of science and art, ranking as 
 art by virtue of its final purely artistic outcome in the 
 shape of beautiful created forms. 
 
78 The English Novel 
 
 It is with a sense of relief that one turns away from 
 what I fear has seemed the personal and truculent tone 
 of the last lecture — an appearance almost inseparable 
 from the fact that certain schools of writing have become 
 represented by the names of their living founders, and 
 which would, indeed, have prevented your present lec- 
 turer from engaging in the discussion had not his reluc- 
 tance been overwhelmed by the sacred duty of protesting 
 against all this forcible occupation of the temple of art 
 by those who have come certainly not for worship — it is 
 with a sense of relief that one turns from this to pursue 
 the more gracious and general studies which will now 
 occupy us. 
 
 According to the plan already sketched : having now 
 acquired some clear fundamental conceptions of the cor- 
 relations among form, science, art, and the like notions 
 often so vaguely used, we are next to inquire, as our first 
 main line of research : Is it really true that what was 
 explained as the growth in human personality is the con- 
 tinuing single principle of human progress, is it really 
 true that the difference between the time of ^Eschylus 
 and the time of (say) George Eliot is the difference in the 
 strength with which the average man feels the scope and 
 sovereignty of his ego ? For upon this fundamental 
 point necessarily depends our final proposition that the 
 modern novel is itself the expression of this intensified 
 personality, and an expression which could only be made 
 by greatly extending the form of the Greek drama. 
 Pursuing our custom of leaving the abstract and plung- 
 ing into the concrete as soon as possible, let us determine 
 this question by endeavoring to find some special notable 
 works of antique and of modern times in which substan- 
 tially the same subject matter has been treated ; let us 
 then compare the difference in treatment, let us summar- 
 
The Development of Personality 79 
 
 ize the picture of things evidently existing in the old, as 
 contrasted with the modern author's and reader's minds ; 
 and finally let us see whether the differences thus emerg- 
 ing will not force themselves upon us as differences 
 growing out of personality. For the purposes of this 
 comparison I have thought that the Prometheus Bound 
 of ^Eschylus, the Prometheus Unbound of Shelley, and 
 the Prince Deukalion of Bayard Taylor offered inviting 
 resources as works which treat substantially the same 
 story, although the first was written some two thousand 
 three hundred years before the last two. Permit me 
 then, in beginning this comparison, to set before you 
 these three works in the broadest possible sketch by 
 reading from each here and there a line such as may 
 bring the action freshly before you and at the same time 
 elucidate specially the differences in treatment we are in 
 search of. As I now run rapidly through the Prometheus 
 of yEschylus, I ask you to bear along in mind the precise 
 nature of this spontaneous variation between man and man 
 which I was at some pains to define in my first lecture ; 
 and perhaps I may profitably extend the partial idea there 
 given by adopting a pretty fancy which I find in No. 44 
 of Tennyson's In Memoriam, and carrying it to a larger 
 sphere than there intended. The poet is here expressing 
 the conception that perhaps the main use of this present 
 life of ours is for each one to learn himself — possibly as 
 preparatory to learning other things hereafter. He says : 
 
 " The baby new to earth and sky 
 
 What time his tender palm is prest 
 Against the circle of the breast, 
 Has never thought that ' this is I : ' 
 
 " But as he grows he gathers much, 
 
 And learns the use of ' I ' and ' me,' 
 And finds ' I am not what I see, 
 And other than the things I touch.' 
 
80 The English Novel 
 
 " So rounds he to a separate mind 
 
 From whence clear memory may begin, 
 As thro' the frame that binds him in 
 His isolation grows defined. 
 
 " This use may lie in blood and breath, 
 
 Which else were fruitless of their due, 
 Had man to learn himself anew 
 Beyond the second birth of Death." 
 
 If we extend the process of growth here described 
 as of a single child passing through a single life to the 
 collective process of growth effected by humanity from 
 age to age, we have quite clearly the principle whose 
 light I wish to shed upon our comparison of the works 
 I have named. Just as the child learns to know himself 
 — " that I am I " — so man comes in the course of time 
 to feel more and more distinctly, I am I ; and the growth 
 of this feeling continually uproots his old relations to 
 things and brings about new relations with new forms to 
 clothe them in. 
 
 One may say indeed that this recognition of the 
 supreme finality of the ego feeling among modern men 
 seems a curious and not unrelated counterpart of the 
 theory by which the modern physicist, in order to ex- 
 plain his physical world, divides it into atoms which 
 atoms are themselves indivisible. We have here the 
 perplexing problem which in the poem De Profundis, 
 partially read to you, was poetically called " the pain of 
 this divisible-indivisible world." To explain the world, 
 whether the moral or the physical world, we must 
 suppose it divisible into atoms ; to explain the atom, we 
 must suppose that indivisible. Let us see then in what 
 form this " pain of the divisible-indivisible world " with 
 all its attendant pains of contradiction between fate and 
 free will, — between the Infinite Personality, which should 
 
The Development of Personality 81 
 
 seem boundless, and the finite personality which never- 
 theless seems to bound it, — let us see, I say, under what 
 explicit forms this pain appears in the Prometheus Bound, 
 for alas it was an old grief when ^Eschylus was a baby. 
 Here, then, in the centre of the stage lies the gigantic 
 figure of Prometheus, (let us fancy,) stark, prostrate, 
 proud, unmoving throughout the whole action. Two 
 ministers of Jove, Might and Force, have him in charge, 
 and Hephaestus — the god more commonly known as 
 Vulcan — stands by with chain, hammer and bolt. Might 
 acquaints us at once with what is toward. 
 
 " At length the utmost bound of earth we've reached, 
 This Scythian soil, this wild untrodden waste. 
 Hephaestus, now Jove's high behests demand 
 Thy care ; to these steep, cliffy rocks bind down 
 With close-linked chains of during adamant 
 This daring wretch. For he the bright rayed fire, 
 Mother of arts ..... 
 
 Filched from the gods and gave to mortals. Here 
 
 Let his pride learn to bow to Jove supreme, 
 And love men well but love them not too much." 
 
 Hephaestus proceeds to chain him, but with many pro- 
 tests, not only because Prometheus' act seems over- 
 punished, but because he is Prometheus' kinsman. 
 
 " Would that some other hand," 
 
 he cries, 
 
 " Had drawn the lot 
 To do this deed ! " 
 
 To which Might replies 
 
 " All things may be, but this : 
 To dictate to the gods. There's one that's free, 
 One only — Jove." 
 
 6 
 
82 The English Novel 
 
 And Hephaestus sullenly acquiesces, as he beats away 
 at his task, 
 
 " I know it, and am dumb." 
 
 Amid similar talk — of protest from Vulcan and piti- 
 less menace from Might — the great blacksmith proceeds 
 to force an adamantine bolt through the breast of Pro- 
 metheus, then to nail his feet to the rock, and so at last 
 cries, in relief, 
 
 " Let us away. He's fettered, limb and thew." 
 
 But Might must have his last pitiless speech. 
 
 "There lie," 
 
 he exults, — 
 
 " And feed thy pride on this bare rock, 
 Filching gods' gifts for mortal men. What man 
 Shall free thee from these woes ? Thou hast been called 
 In vain the Provident : " 
 
 (pro-vident, same as pro-metheus, he who looks ahead, 
 who provides, the provident) 
 
 " had thy soul possessed 
 The virtue of thy name, thou had'st foreseen 
 These cunning toils, and had'st unwound thee from them." 
 
 Here all depart but Prometheus. Up to this time the 
 Titan has maintained a proud silence. He now breaks 
 into that large invocation which seems still to assault our 
 physical ears across the twenty odd centuries. 
 
 " O divine TEther, and swift-winged Winds, 
 And Fountains of the rivers and multitudinous 
 Laughter of ocean, and thou Earth, 
 Born mother of us all,- and thou bright round 
 Of the all-seeing Sun, you I invoke ! 
 Behold what ignominy of causeless wrongs 
 I suffer from the gods, myself a god ! " 
 
The Development of Personality 83 
 
 (This, by the way, is one of those passages which our 
 elder poets seem to have regarded as somehow lying 
 outside the pale of moral law — like umbrellas — and 
 which they have therefore appropriated without a thought 
 of blushing. Byron, in Manfred, and Shelley, in his 
 Prometheus Unbound, have quite fairly translated parts 
 of it.) 
 
 Enter now a chorus of Oceanides, and these continue 
 throughout the play to perform the functions of exciting 
 sympathy for the Protagonist, and of calling upon him 
 for information when it becomes necessary that the 
 audience should know this and that fact essential to the 
 intelligibility of the action. 
 
 For example, after the Oceanides have alighted from 
 their wind- borne car, and have condoled with the 
 sufferer, ^schylus makes them the medium of drawing 
 from Prometheus the recital of his wrongs, and thus of 
 freshly placing that whole tremendous story before the 
 minds of his audience. 
 
 " Speak now," 
 
 say the Chorus, 
 
 " And let us know the whole offence 
 Jove charges thee withal." 
 
 And Prometheus relates : 
 
 " When first the gods their fatal strife began, 
 And insurrection raged in heaven, some striving 
 To cast old Kronos from his hoary throne 
 That Jove might reign, and others to crush i' the bud 
 His swelling mastery — I wise counsel gave 
 To the Titans, sons of primal Heaven and Earth ; 
 But gave in vain. ..... 
 
 Thus baffled in my plans, I deemed it best, 
 
 As things then were, leagued with my mother Themis, 
 
84 The English Novel 
 
 To accept Jove's proffered friendship. By my counsels 
 From his primeval throne was Kronos hurled 
 Into the pit Tartarean, dark, profound, 
 With all his troop of friends. 
 
 " Soon as he sat on his ancestral throne 
 He called the gods together, and assigned 
 To each his fair allotment, and his sphere 
 Of sway ; but, ah ! for wretched man ! 
 To him no portion fell : Jove vowed 
 To blot his memory from the Earth, and mould 
 The race anew. I only of the gods 
 Thwarted his will ; and, but for my strong aid, 
 Hades had whelmed, and hopeless ruin swamped 
 All men that breathe. Such were my crimes : 
 
 " And here I lie, in cunning torment stretched, 
 A spectacle inglorious to Jove." 
 
 Presently Ocean appears, and advises Prometheus to 
 yield. Prometheus scornfully refuses, and Ocean, fearful 
 of being found in bad company, prudently retires, 
 whereupon, after a mournful hymn from the Chorus, 
 reciting the sympathy of all nations and things with 
 Prometheus, he proceeds to relate in detail his ministry 
 in behalf of mankind. The account which he gives of 
 the primal condition of the human race is very instruc- 
 tive upon our present research, as embodying, or rather 
 as unconsciously revealing, the complete unconsciousness 
 of personality — of what we call personality — among 
 ^Eschylus and his contemporaries. 
 
 Prometheus begins by calling the whole human race 
 at that time a babe, and goes on to declare that 
 
 " Having eyes to see, they saw not, 
 And hearing, heard not, but, like dreamy phantoms, 
 A random life they led from year to year, 
 All blindly floundering on. No craft they knew " 
 
 (to build) 
 
The Development of Personality 85 
 
 " But in the dark earth burrowed. 
 Numbers too I taught them . . and how 
 
 To fix their shifting thoughts by marshalled signs." 
 
 He brings the ox, the ass, and the horse into service, 
 launches the first boat on the sea, teaches medicine, 
 institutes divination, and finally 
 
 " I probed the earth 
 To yield its hidden wealth 
 Iron, copper, silver, gold ; 
 
 And thus, with one short word to sum the tale, 
 Prometheus taught all arts to mortal men." 
 
 CHORUS. 
 
 " Do good to men, but do it with discretion. 
 Why shouldst thou harm thyself? Good hope I nurse 
 To see thee soon from these harsh chains unbound, 
 As free, as mighty, as great Jove himself." 
 
 PROMETHEUS. 
 
 " This may not be ; the destined course of things 
 Fate must accomplish. 
 Though art be strong, necessity is stronger." 
 
 CHORUS. 
 u And who is lord of strong necessity ? " 
 
 PROMETHEUS. 
 " The triform Fates and the sure-memoried Furies." 
 
 CHORUS. 
 " And mighty Jove himself must yield to them ? " 
 
 PROMETHEUS. 
 " No more than others Jove can 'scape his doom." 
 
 CHORUS. 
 
 " There's some dread mystery in thy spee/ 
 Close-veiled ." 
 
 rstery in thy speech 
 
86 The English Novel 
 
 PROMETHEUS. 
 
 " The truth thou'lt know 
 In fitting season ; now it lies concealed 
 In deepest darkness ; for relenting Jove 
 Himself must woo this secret from my breast." 
 
 (This secret — so it is told in the old myths — is that 
 Jove is to meet his own downfall through an unfortunate 
 marriage, and Prometheus is in possession of the details 
 which would enable Jove to avoid the doom.) 
 
 After a choral hymn, recommending submission to 
 Jove, we have suddenly the grotesque apparition of Io 
 upon the stage. Io had been beloved by Jove, but the 
 jealousy of Hera, or Juno, had transformed her into a 
 cow, and had doomed her to wander over the world 
 stung by an inexpugnable gadfly and watched by the 
 hundred-eyed Argus. Thus suddenly upon the specta- 
 cle of a man suffering from the hatred of Jove ^Eschylus 
 brings the spectacle of a woman suffering from the love 
 of Jove. Io enters with this fine outburst : 
 
 " What land is this ? What race of mortals 
 Owns this desert ? Who art thou, 
 Rock-bound with these wintry fetters, 
 And for what crime tortured thus ? 
 Worn and weary with far travel, 
 Tell me where my feet have borne me ! 
 O pain ! pain ! pain ! it stings and goads me again, 
 The fateful gadfly ! — save me, O Earth ! — avaunt 
 Thou horrible shadow of the earth-born Argus ! 
 Could not the grave close up thy hundred eyes, 
 But thou must come, 
 
 Haunting my path with thy suspicious look, 
 Unhoused from Hades ? 
 
 Avaunt ! avaunt ! why wilt thou hound my track, 
 The famished wanderer on the waste sea-shore ? " 
 
 After much talk Io now relates her mournful story 
 and, supported by the Chorus, persuades Prometheus to 
 
The Development of Personality 87 
 
 prophesy the very eventful future which awaits her when 
 her wanderings are over. In this prophetic account of 
 her travels ^Eschylus gives a soul-expanding review of 
 land after land according to the geographic and ethnic 
 notions of his time ; and here Mr. Blackie, whose trans- 
 lation of the Prometheus I have been partly quoting 
 from, sometimes reproduces his author in very large and 
 musical measures. For example, Prometheus chants : 
 
 " When thou hast crossed the narrow stream that parts 
 The continents, to the far flame-faced East 
 Thou shalt proceed, the highway of the sun ; 
 Then cross the sounding ocean, till thou reach 
 Cisthene and the Gorgon plains, where dwell 
 Phorcys' three daughters, maids with frosty eld, 
 White as the swan, with one eye and one tooth 
 Shared by the three ; them Phoebus, beamy-bright 
 Beholds not, nor the nightly moon. Near them 
 Their winged sisters dwell, the Gorgons dire, 
 Man-hating monsters, snaky-locked, whom eye 
 Of mortal ne'er might look upon and live. 
 
 One more sight remains 
 That fills the eye with horror. 
 The sharp-beaked Griffins, hounds of Jove, avoid, 
 Fell dogs that bark not ; and the one-eyed host 
 Of Arimaspian horsemen with swift hoofs 
 Beating the banks of golden-rolling Pluto. 
 A distant land, a swarthy people next 
 Receives thee : near the fountains of the sun 
 They dwell by Ethiop's wave. This river trace 
 Until thy weary feet shall reach the pass 
 Whence from the Bybline heights the sacred Nile 
 Pours his salubrious flood. The winding wave 
 Thence to triangled Egypt guides thee, where 
 A distant home awaits thee, fated mother 
 Of no unstoried race." 
 
 In this strain Prometheus continues to foretell the 
 adventures of Io until her son Epaphus, monarch of 
 
88 The English Novel 
 
 Egypt, is born, who will be — through the fifty daughters 
 celebrated in The Suppliants of yEschylus — the ancestor 
 of Hercules, which Hercules is to be the deliverer of 
 Prometheus himself. 
 
 Then, in a frenzy of pain, Io departs, while the Chorus 
 bursts into a hymn deploring such ill-matched unions as 
 that of Io with Jove and extolling marriage between 
 equals. 
 
 After the exit of Io — to finish our summary of the 
 play — the action hastens to the end ; the Chorus implores 
 Prometheus to submit ; presently Hermes or Mercury 
 appears and tauntingly counsels surrender, only to be 
 as tauntingly repulsed by Prometheus ; and, after a sharp 
 passage of wits between these two, accompanied by in- 
 dignant outbursts from the Chorus at the pitilessness of 
 Hermes, the play ceases with a speech from Prometheus 
 describing the new punishment of Jove : 
 
 " Now in deed and not in discourse, 
 The firm earth quakes. 
 Deep and loud the ambient thunder 
 Bellows, and the flaring lightning 
 Wreathes his fiery curls around me 
 And the whirlwind rolls his dust, 
 And the winds from rival regions 
 Rush in elemental strife, 
 And the sky is destroyed with the sea. 
 Surely now the tyrant gathers 
 All his hoarded wrath to whelm me, 
 Mighty Mother, worshipped Themis, 
 Circling ^Ether that diffusest 
 Light, the common joy of all, 
 Thou beholdest these my wrongs ! " 
 
 Thus in the crash of elements the play ends. Fortu- 
 nately our purpose with this huge old story thus treated 
 by ^Eschylus lays us under no necessity to involve our- 
 
The Development of Personality 89 
 
 selves in endless discussions of Sun-myths, of the 
 connection between ox-horned Io and the sacred Egyp- 
 tian cow Isis, of moral interpretations which vary with 
 every standpoint. The extent to which these do vary is 
 amusingly illustrated in an interpretation of the true sig- 
 nificance of Prometheus which I recently happened to 
 light upon, made by a certain Mr. Newton who pub- 
 lished an elaborate work a few years ago in defence of 
 the strictly vegetable diet. Mr. Newton would not have 
 us misapply fire to cookery ; and in this line of thought 
 he interprets the old fable that Prometheus stole fire from 
 heaven and was punished by being chained to Caucasus 
 with a vulture to gnaw his liver. The simple fact, says 
 our vegetarian, is that " Prometheus first taught the use 
 of animal food, and of fire with which to render it more 
 pleasing, etc., to the taste. Jupiter, and the rest of the 
 gods, foreseeing the consequences of the inventions" 
 (these consequences being all manner of gastric and other 
 diseases which Newton attributes to the use of animal 
 food) "were amused or irritated at the short-sighted 
 devices of the . . . creature, and left him to experience 
 the sad effects of them." In short, the chaining to a rock, 
 with a vulture to gnaw his liver, is simply a very satisfac- 
 tory symbol for dyspepsia. 
 
 Untroubled by these entanglements, which thus reach 
 from Max Muller with his Sun-wanderings, to the dys- 
 peptic theory of our vegetarian, our present concern is 
 less with what ^Eschylus or his fable meant than with 
 the frame of mind of the average man who sat in his 
 audience and who listened to these matters with favor, 
 who accepted this picture of gods and men without 
 rebellion. My argument is that if this average man's 
 sense of personality had not been most feeble he could 
 not have accepted this picture at all. Permit me then 
 
90 The English Novel 
 
 to specify three or four of the larger features of it before 
 we go on to contrast the treatment of this fable by 
 ^Eschylus with that by Shelley and Taylor in a later age. 
 
 In the first place, since we are mainly meditating 
 upon the growth of human personality, I beg you to 
 observe the complete lack of all provision for such 
 growth either among the gods or the men of this pres- 
 entation. Consider Hephaestus, for example, or Vulcan. 
 Vulcan may hammer away, immortal as he is, for a 
 million aeons upon the thunderbolts of Jove, he may 
 fashion and forge until he has exhausted the whole 
 science and art of offensive and defensive armament ; 
 but how much better off is Vulcan for that? he can 
 never step upon a higher plane, — he is to all eternity 
 simply Vulcan, armorer to Jove. And so Hermes or 
 Mercury may carry messages eternally, but no more ; 
 his faculty and apparatus go to that end and no farther. 
 But these limitations are intolerable to the modern per- 
 sonality. The very conception of personality seems to 
 me to imply a conception of growth. If I do one thing 
 to-day, another to-morrow, I am twice as much to-mor- 
 row as I was to-day, by virtue of the new thing; or, 
 even if I do only the same thing to-morrow that I did 
 to-day, I do it easier, — that is, with a less expenditure 
 of force, which leaves me a little surplus ; and by as 
 much as this surplus (which I can apply to something 
 else) I am more than I was yesterday. This " more " 
 represents the growth which I said was implied in the 
 very conception of personality, of the continuous 
 individual. 
 
 Now the feeling of. all this appears to be just as com- 
 pletely asleep in ^Eschylus himself and in all his prece- 
 dent old Greek theogonists as it is in the most witless 
 boor who gazes open-mouthed at the gigantic Pro- 
 
The Development of Personality 91 
 
 metheus. But if we here descend from the gods, to 
 the men, of this picture, we find Prometheus almost in 
 terms asserting this absence of personality among the 
 men whom he taught which we have just found by 
 implication among the gods who tortured him. 
 
 You will remember the lines I read from the first long 
 speech of Prometheus in which he describes the utterly 
 brutish, crawling cave-dwellers to whom he communi- 
 cated the first idea of every useful art. The denial of 
 all power in man himself, once he was created, of orig- 
 inating these inventions — that is, of growing — that is, 
 of personality — is complete. 
 
 I find nothing so subtly and inconsolably mournful 
 among all the explicit miseries of the Greek mythology 
 as this fixity of nature in the god or the man, by 
 which the being is suspended, as it were, at a certain 
 point of growth, there to hang forever. And in this 
 view the whole multitudinous people, divine and human, 
 of the whole Greek cyclus, seem to me as if sculptured 
 in a half relief upon the black marble wall of their Fate 
 — in half relief because but half gods and half men, 
 who in the lack of personality cannot grow, cannot move. 
 
 When Keats stands regarding the figures sculptured 
 upon the Grecian urn, it is only a cunning sign of the 
 unspeakable misery of his own life that he finds the 
 youth happy because though he can never succeed in 
 his chase he can never fall any farther behind in it ; to 
 Keats's teased aspiration a certain sense of rest comes 
 out of the very fixity of a man suspended in marble. 
 
 " Fair youth beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 
 Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare ; 
 Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss 
 Though winning near the goal ! Yet do not grieve: 
 She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss, 
 Forever wilt thou love and she be fair." 
 
9 2 The English Novel 
 
 A true old Greek despair fills these lines with a sorrow 
 which is all the more penetrating when we hear it sing- 
 ing out from among the keen and energetic personalities 
 of modern times, — personalities which will not accept 
 any youth's happiness of being howsoever near to his love 
 if that happiness be coupled with the condition that he is 
 never to be nearer, — personalities which find their whole 
 summary in continuous growth, increase, movement. 
 
 And the case grows all the stronger if we consider that 
 the Golden Age, (when the condition of primal man is 
 very far from the miserable state depicted by Prome- 
 theus,) in which the antique imagination took such great 
 delight, not all unshared, it must be confessed, by later 
 times, fails to please the modern personality. 
 
 How taking seems this simplicity : 
 
 " A blisful lyfe, a peseable and so swete, 
 Leddyn the peplis in the former age; 
 Thei helde them paied with the frutes they ete, 
 Wich that the feldes gafe them by usage ; 
 
 " Thei etyn most hawys and such pownage 
 And dronken watyr of the colde welle. 
 
 " Yet was the ground not woundyd with the plough, 
 But corne upsprange onsowe of mannes hand ; 
 
 " No man yit knew the furous of hys land ; 
 No man yit fier owt of the flynt fand. 
 
 " No flesche ne wyst offence of hegge or spere ; 
 No coyne ne knew man whiche was false or trewe ; 
 No shyppe yit karfe the wawys grene and blewe ; 
 No marchand yit ne fet owtlandische ware. 
 
 " Yit were no palys chambris, ne no hallys ; 
 In cavys and in wodes soft and swete 
 Sleptyn thys blessyd folk withowte wallys 
 On grasse or levys in partite joy and quiete. 
 
The Development of Personality 93 
 
 " Unforgyd was the hauberke and the plate; 
 The lambisshe pepyl, voyd of alle vice, 
 Hadden noo fantasye to debate, 
 But eche of hem wold oder well cheriche; 
 No pride, none envy, none avarice, 
 No lord, no taylage by no tyrannye, 
 Humblesse, and pease, good fayth the emprise. 
 
 " Yit was not Jupiter the likerous, 
 That first was fadyr of delicacye 
 Come in thys world, ne Nembroth desirous 
 To raygne hadde not made hys towrys hyghe. 
 Alas ! alas ! now may men wepe and crye, 
 For in owre days is not but covetyse, 
 Doublenesse, treson, and envye, 
 Poysonne, manslawtyr, mordre in sondri wyse." 
 
 Surely this is all soothing and enchanting enough; 
 one cannot escape the amiable complacencies which 
 breathe out from this placid scene ; but what modern 
 man would soberly agree to exchange a single moment 
 of this keen, breezy, energetic, growing existence of ours 
 for a Methuselah's life in this golden land where nature 
 does not offer enough resistance to educe manhood or 
 to furnish material for art, and where there is absolutely 
 no room, no chance, no need, no conception of this per- 
 sonality that if rightly felt makes the humblest life one 
 long enchantment of the possible. The modern per- 
 sonality confronted with these pictures, after the first 
 glamour is gone, is much minded to say with the sharp- 
 witted Glaucon in Plato's Republic, according to Jowett : 
 " after all, a state of simplicity is a city of pigs." 
 
 But secondly, the cumbrous apparatus of power with 
 which ^Eschylus presents us in this play is a conception 
 of people not acquainted with that model of infinite 
 compactness which every man finds in his own ego, 
 Jove, instead of speaking a word and instantly seeing 
 
94 The English Novel 
 
 the deed result, must rely first upon his two ministers, 
 Might and Force, who in the first scene of our play 
 have hauled in the Titan Prometheus; these, however, 
 do not suffice, but Hephaestus must be summoned in 
 order to nail him to the rocks ; and Jove cannot even 
 learn whether or not his prisoner is repentant until 
 Hermes, the messenger, visits Prometheus and returns. 
 The modern ego which, though one indivisible, impalpa- 
 ble unit, yet remembers, reasons, imagines, loves, hates, 
 fears and does a thousand more things all within its little 
 scope, without appliances or external apparatus — such 
 an ego regards such a Jove much in the light of that old 
 Spanish monarch in whose court various duties were so 
 minutely distributed and punctiliously discharged, that 
 upon a certain occasion (as is related), the monarch being 
 seated too near the fire and the proper functionary for 
 removing him being out of call, his majesty was roasted 
 to death in the presence of the entire royal household. 
 
 And as the third feature of the impersonality revealed 
 in this play, consider the fact that it is impossible for the 
 modern reader to find himself at all properly terror- 
 stricken by the purely physical paraphernalia of thunder, 
 of storms, of chains, of sharp bolts, and the like, which 
 constitute the whole resources of Jove for the punish- 
 ment of Prometheus. 
 
 The modern direct way of looking at things — the per- 
 fectly natural outcome of the habit of every man's dealing 
 with a thing for himself and of first necessarily looking 
 to see what the thing actually is — this directness of 
 vision cannot help seeing that Prometheus is a god, that 
 he is immortal, that thunder cannot kill him, that the 
 bolt through his breast' makes no wound but will repair 
 itself with ease, that he not only knows all this, but 
 knows further that it is to end (as Prometheus himself 
 
The Development of Personality 95 
 
 declares in the play) in his own triumph. Under these 
 circumstances the whole array of whirlwinds and light- 
 nings becomes a mere pin-scratch ; the whole business is 
 a matter of that purely physical pain which every man 
 is ashamed to make a noise of. We can conceive a 
 mere man fronting all these terrors of storm and thunder 
 with unbowed head and serene countenance, in the con- 
 sciousness that the whitest of these lightnings cannot 
 singe an eyelash of his immortal personality ; how, then, 
 can it be expected that we shall be greatly impressed with 
 the endurance of these ills by a god to whose greater 
 resistive endowment the whole system of this gross thrust- 
 and- smite of iron and fire is no more than the momentary 
 tease of a gnat ! To the audience of ^Eschylus, not 
 so ; they shiver and groan ; they know not themselves. 
 
 I do not know how I can better show the grossness of 
 this conception of pain than by opposing to it a subtle 
 modern conception thereof whose contrast will fairly 
 open out before us the truly prodigious gulf between 
 the average personality of the time of iEschylus and 
 that of ourselves. The modern conception I refer to is 
 Keats's Ode on Melancholy; which, indeed, if one may 
 say a word obiter, out of the fullness of one's heart — I 
 am often inclined to think for all-in-all, — that is, for 
 thoughts most mortally compacted, for words which 
 come forth, each trembling and giving off light like a 
 morning- star, and for the pure beauty of the spirit and 
 strength and height of the spirit, — which, I say, for 
 all-in-all, I am often inclined to think, reaches the highest 
 height yet touched in the lyric line. 
 
 " No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist 
 
 Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine ; 
 Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd 
 By night-shade, ruby grape of Proserpine ; 
 
96 The English Novel 
 
 Make not your rosary of yew-berries, 
 
 Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be 
 Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl 
 
 A partner in your sorrow's mysteries ; 
 
 For shade to shade will come too drowsily, 
 And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. 
 
 " But when the melancholy fit shall fall 
 
 Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, 
 
 That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, 
 And hides the green hill in an April shroud, 
 
 Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, 
 Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave, 
 Or on the wealth of globed peonies ; 
 
 Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, 
 Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave, 
 And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. 
 
 " She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die; 
 
 And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips 
 Bidding adieu ; and aching Pleasure nigh, 
 
 Turning to poison while the bee-moth sips : 
 Ay, in the very temple of Delight 
 
 Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, 
 Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue 
 
 Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine ; 
 His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, 
 
 And be among her cloudy trophies hung." 
 
The Development of Personality 97 
 
 The main direction of our studies has been indicated 
 in the preceding lectures to such an extent that from 
 this point forward our customary review may be omitted. 
 In examining the Prometheus of ^Eschylus we have found 
 three particulars in which not only ^Eschylus but his 
 entire contemporary time shows complete unconscious- 
 ness of the most precious and essential belongings of 
 personality. These particulars were, (1) the absolute 
 impossibility of growth, implicitly affirmed of the gods 
 and explicitly affirmed of men in the passages which 
 were read; (2) the awkwardness of Jove's apparatus of 
 p 0W er — which included a minister for every kind of act — 
 as contrasted with the elasticity and much-in-little which 
 each man must perceive in regarding the action of his 
 own mind; and (3) the gross and purely physical char- 
 acter of the punishments used by Jove to break the 
 spirit of Prometheus. It was contended, you remember, 
 that if the audience of ^Eschylus had acquired that 
 direct way of looking phenomena in the face which is 
 one of the incidents of our modern personality they 
 would have perceived such an inadequacy between the 
 thunders and earthquakes of Jove, on the one hand, and 
 the immortal spirit of a Titan and a god like Prome- 
 theus, on the other, that the play, instead of being a 
 religious and impressive spectacle to them, as it doubt- 
 less was, would have been simply a matter of ridicule, 
 or at best one of those mere dilettante entertainments 
 
 7 
 
98 The English Novel 
 
 where of our own free will we forgive the grossest 
 violations of common sense and propriety for the sake 
 of the music or the scenery with which they are asso- 
 ciated, as for example at the Italian opera, or the Christ- 
 mas pantomime. 
 
 This last particular brings us directly upon Shelley's 
 play of the Prometheus Unbound. We have seen that 
 ^Eschylus had a fit audience for this fable and was work- 
 ing upon emotions which are as deep as religion \ but 
 now, when we come down 2300 years to a time from 
 which the ^Eschylean religious beliefs have long exhaled, 
 and when the enormous growth of personality has quite 
 rolled away the old lumpish terror that stood before the 
 cave of the physical and darkened it : in such a time 
 it would, of course, be truly amazing if a man like 
 Shelley should have elaborated this same old Prome- 
 thean fable into a lyrical drama in the expectation of 
 shaking the souls of men with this same old machinery 
 of thunder, whirlwind and earthquake. 
 
 Such a mistake — the mistake of tearing the old fable 
 forcibly away from its old surroundings and of setting 
 it in modern thoughts before modern men — would be 
 much the same with that which Emerson has noted in 
 his poem Each and All : 
 
 " 1 thought the sparrow's note from heaven. 
 Singing at dawn on the alder bough ; 
 I brought him home in his nest at even ; 
 He sings the song, but it pleases not now, 
 For I did not bring home the river and sky — 
 He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye. 
 The delicate shells lay on the shore ; 
 Bubbles of the latest wave 
 Fresh pearls to their enamel gave ; 
 And the bellowing of the savage sea 
 Greeted their safe escape to me. 
 
The Development of Personality 99 
 
 I wiped away the weeds and foam 
 
 I fetched my sea-born treasures home ; 
 
 But the poor, unsightly, noisome things 
 
 Had left their beauty on the shore 
 
 With the sun and the sand and the wild sea-shore." 
 
 Accordingly, it is instructive, as we look into Shelley's 
 work, to observe how this inability of his to bring home 
 the river and the sky along with the sparrow — this 
 inability to bring a Greek-hearted audience to listen 
 to his Greek fable — operates to infuse a certain tang of 
 insincerity, of dilettantism, whenever he attempts to re- 
 produce upon us the old terrors of thunder and lightning 
 which ^Eschylus found so effective. We — we moderns 
 — cannot for our lives help seeing the man in his shirt- 
 sleeves who is turning the crank of the thunder-mill 
 behind the scenes ; nay, we are inclined to ask with a 
 certain proud indignation, How is it that you wish us to 
 tremble at this mere resinous lightning, when we have 
 seen a man (not a Titan nor a god), one of ourselves, go 
 forth into a thunder-storm and send his kite up into the 
 very bosom thereof and fairly entice the lightning by 
 his wit to come and perch upon his finger, and be the 
 tame bird of him and his fellows thereafter and forever? 
 But secondly, it >s still more conclusive upon our present 
 point, of the different demands made by the personality 
 of our time from that of ^Eschylus, to observe how 
 Shelley's own sense of this difference, his own modern 
 instinct, has led him to make most material alterations 
 of the old fable, not only by increasing the old list of 
 physical torments with a number that are purely spiritual 
 and modern, but also by dignifying at once the character 
 of Prometheus and the catastrophe of the play with 
 that enormous motive of forgiveness which seems to be 
 the largest outcome of the developed personality. Many 
 
ioo The English Novel 
 
 of you are aware of the scholastic belief that the 
 Prometheus Bound of ^Eschylus was but the middle play 
 of a trilogy, and that the last showed us a compromise 
 effected between Prometheus and Jove according to 
 which Prometheus reveals the fatal secret concerning 
 Jove's marriage, and Jove makes a new league of amity 
 with the Titan. We have a note of this change in 
 treatment in the very opening lines of Shelley's play — 
 which I now beg to set before you in the briefest possible 
 sketch. Scene I of Act I opens — according to the stage 
 direction — upon A ravine of icy rocks in the Indian 
 Caucasus : Prometheus is discovered bound to the precipice : 
 Panthea and lone are seated at his feet : time, night ; 
 during the scene, morning slowly breaks. Prometheus 
 begins to speak at once. I read only here and there a 
 line selected with special reference to showing the change 
 of treatment I have indicated as due to that intenser 
 instinct of personality which Shelley shared in common 
 with his contemporaries over ^Eschylus and his contem- 
 poraries. 
 
 Prometheus exclaims : 
 
 " Monarch of gods and demons, and all spirits 
 But one, who throng those bright and rolling worlds 
 Which thou and I alone of living things 
 Behold with sleepless eyes ! 
 Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours, 
 And moments aye divided by keen pangs 
 Till they seemed years, torture and solitude, 
 Scorn and despair, — these are mine empire, 
 More glorious far than that which thou surveyest 
 From thine unenvied throne ! " 
 
 Here we have the purely spiritual torments of " soli- 
 tude, scorn and despair " set before us : though Shelley 
 retains and even multiplies the physical torments of 
 
The Development of Personality 101 
 
 ^Eschylus. A few lines further on, in this same long 
 opening speech of Prometheus, we have them thus 
 described : 
 
 " Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain, 
 Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured ; without herb, 
 Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life. 
 
 The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears 
 Of their moon-freezing crystals ; the bright chains 
 Eat with their burning cold into my bones. 
 
 The earthquake fiends are charged 
 To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds 
 When the rocks split and close again behind ; 
 While from their wild abysses howling throng 
 The genii of the storm, urging the rage 
 Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail." 
 
 And presently, when after the repulse of Mercury Jove 
 begins to stir up new terrors, we hear lone exclaiming : 
 
 " O, sister, look ! white fire 
 Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar ; 
 How fearfully God's thunder howls behind ! " 
 
 But even in Shelley's array of these terrors we perceive 
 a cunning outcrop of modernness in a direction which I 
 have not yet mentioned but which we shall have frequent 
 occasion to notice when we come to read the modern 
 novel together : and that is in the detail of the description. 
 ^Eschylus paints these conclusions with a big brush, 
 and three sweeps of it : Shelley itemizes them. 
 
 It is worth while observing, too, that the same spirit 
 of detail in modern criticism forces us to convict Shelley 
 here of an inconsistency in his scene : for how could this 
 " snow-loaded cedar " of lone exist with propriety in a 
 scene which Prometheus himself has just described as 
 "without herb, insect, or beast, or sound of life? " 
 
102 The English Novel 
 
 The same instinct of modernhess both in the spiritual- 
 ity of the torment and in the minuteness of its descrip- 
 tion displays itself a little farther on in the curse of 
 Prometheus. Prometheus tells us in this same opening 
 speech that long ago he uttered a certain awful curse 
 against Jove which he now desires to recall ; but it 
 would seem that in order to recall it he wishes to hear 
 the exact words of it. "What was that curse?" — he 
 exclaims at the end of the speech ; " for ye all heard me 
 speak." To this question we have page after page of 
 replies from five voices — namely, the Voice of the Moun- 
 tains, of the Springs, of the Air, of the Whirlwinds and 
 of the Earth — embodying such a mass of falsetto sub- 
 limity that Shelley himself would surely have drawn his 
 pen through the whole if he had lived into the term of 
 manhood. Finally the whole awkward device for getting 
 the curse of Prometheus before the reader is consum- 
 mated by raising up the phantasm of Jupiter which 
 repeats the curse, word for word. We have page after 
 page of talk before this first act is finished ; and for our 
 present purpose it may be dismissed with the single 
 remark that the very wordiness of it, the detail, the 
 diffuseness, — which ramble all over the heavens and the 
 earth, and search the very depths of the spirit, for 
 similes, until the reader's mind is brought to a condition 
 like that when one repeats a word over and over until 
 the word loses all meaning, — all this, I say, may be dis- 
 missed with the single remark that the enormity of it is 
 itself an incident of the very personality we have seen 
 cropping out in so many other directions. I think I 
 know not a single English poet — not even among the 
 Elizabethans, whose besetting sin is wordiness — who sins 
 so prodigiously in this respect. In truth, Shelley appears 
 always to have labored under an essential immaturity : 
 
The Development of Personality 103 
 
 it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years 
 he would never have become a man : he was penetrated 
 with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be, 
 crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the 
 extravagant and illogical : so that I call him the modern 
 boy. 
 
 These considerations quite cover the remaining three 
 acts of his Prometheus Unbound and render it unneces- 
 sary for me to quote from them in support of the passages 
 already cited. 
 
 The first act contains, indeed, nearly the substance of 
 the whole drama. Act II contains no important motive 
 except the visit of Asia and Panthea to Demogorgon 
 under the earth. In the third act we have a view of Jove 
 surrounded by his ministers ; but in the midst of a short 
 speech to them he is suddenly swept into hell for ever- 
 lasting punishment. Here, of course, Shelley makes a 
 complete departure from the old story of the compromise 
 between Jove and Prometheus ; Shelley makes Prome- 
 theus scornfully reject such a compromise and allow Jove 
 to go down to his doom. Hercules then unbinds Pro- 
 metheus who repairs to a certain exquisite interlunar 
 cave and there dwells in tranquillity with his beloved Asia. 
 The rest of Act III is rilled with long descriptions of 
 the change which comes upon the world with the de- 
 thronement of Jove. Act IV is the most amazing piece 
 of surplusage in literature ; the catastrophe has been 
 reached long ago in the third act, Jove is in eternal 
 duress, Prometheus has been liberated and has gone with 
 Asia and Panthea to his eternal paradise above the earth, 
 and a final radiant picture of the reawakening of man 
 and nature under the new regime has closed up the whole 
 with the effect of a transformation-scene. Yet, upon 
 all this, Shelley drags in Act IV which is simply leaden 
 
104 The English Novel 
 
 in action and color alongside of Act III and in which 
 the voices of unseen spirits, the chorus of Hours, lone, 
 Panthea, Demogorgon, the Earth and the Moon pelt each 
 other with endless sweetish speeches that rain like ineffec- 
 tual comfits in a carnival of silliness. For example, a 
 Voice of Unseen Spirits cries : 
 
 " Bright clouds float in heaven, 
 Dew-stars gleam on earth, 
 Waves assemble on ocean, 
 They are gathered and driven 
 By the storm of delight, by the panic of glee ! 
 They shake with emotion, 
 They dance in their mirth. 
 But where are ye ? 
 
 H The pine boughs are singing 
 Old songs with new gladness ; 
 The billows and fountains 
 Fresh music are flinging 
 
 Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea; 
 The storms mock the mountains 
 With the thunder of gladness. 
 But where are ye ? " 
 
 The people thus inquired for, being the chorus of 
 Hours, sleepily reply : 
 
 " The voice of the spirits of air and of earth 
 Has drawn back the figured curtain of sleep 
 Which covered our being and darkened our birth 
 In the deep." 
 
 A VOICE. 
 
 "In the deep?" 
 
 SEMI-CHORUS. 
 " Oh, below the deep." 
 
 SEMI-CHORUS I. 
 
 " We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep ; 
 We have known the voice of love in dreams, 
 We have felt the wand of power come and leap — " 
 
The Development of Personality 105 
 
 SEMI-CHORUS II. 
 " As the billows leap in the morning beams," 
 
 CHORUS. 
 
 " Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze, 
 Pierce with song heaven's silent light, 
 Enchant the day that too swiftly flees, 
 To check its flight ere the cave of night. 
 
 " Once the hungry Hours were hounds 
 Which chased the day like a bleeding deer, 
 And it limped and stumbled with many wounds 
 Through the nightly dells of the desert year. 
 
 " But now oh ! weave the mystic measure 
 Of music, and dance, and shapes of light ; 
 Let the Hours and the spirits of night and pleasure 
 Like the clouds and sunbeams unite." 
 
 CHORUS OF SPIRITS. 
 " We join the throng 
 Of the dance and the song, 
 By the whirlwind of gladness borne along; 
 As the flying-fish leap 
 From the Indian deep 
 And mix with the sea-birds half asleep." 
 
 This long lyric outburst, wholly unnecessary to an 
 action which was already complete, seems an instructive 
 fact to place before young writers in a time when many 
 souls which might be poetic gardens if they would 
 compact all their energies into growing two roses and a 
 lily — three poems in all, for a lifetime — become instead 
 mere wastes of profuse weeds that grow and are cut down 
 and cast into the oven with each monthly magazine. 
 
 But it would not be fair to leave Shelley with this flat 
 taste in our mouths, and I will therefore beg to finish 
 our examination of the Prometheus Unbound by three 
 quotations from these last acts, in which his modernness 
 
106 The English Novel 
 
 of detail and of subtlety, — being exercised upon matters 
 capable of such treatment — has made for us some 
 strong and beautiful poetry. Here for instance at the 
 opening of Scene I, Act II, we have a charming specimen 
 of the modern poetic treatment of nature and of land- 
 scape, full of spirituality and full of detail. The stage 
 direction is Morning; A Lovely Vale in the Indian 
 Caucasus. Asia, alone. Asia, who is the lovely bride 
 of Prometheus, is awaiting Panthea who is to come with 
 news of him. She begins with an invocation of the 
 Spring. 
 
 ASIA. 
 
 " From all the blasts of heaven thou hast descended : 
 Yes : like a spirit, like a thought, which makes 
 Unwonted tears throng to the horny eyes, 
 And beatings haunt the desolated heart, 
 Which should have learnt repose : thou hast descended 
 Cradled in tempests ; thou dost wake, O Spring ! 
 O child of many winds ! As suddenly 
 Thou comest as the memory of a dream, 
 Which now is sad because it hath been sweet ! 
 Like genius, or like joy which riseth up 
 As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds 
 The desert of our life. 
 This is the season, this the day, the hour ; 
 At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine, 
 Too long desired, too long delaying, come ! 
 How like death-worms the wingless moments crawl ! 
 The point of one white star is quivering still 
 Deep in the orange light of widening morn 
 Beyond the purple mountains : through a chasm 
 Of wind-divided mist the darker lake 
 Reflects it : now it wanes : it gleams again 
 As the waves fade, and as the burning threads 
 Of woven cloud unravel the pale air : 
 'Tis lost ! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow 
 The roseate sunlight quivers : hear I not 
 The ^Eolian music of her sea-green plumes 
 Winnowing the crimson dawn ? " 
 
The Development of Personality 107 
 
 And here we find some limpid details of underwater 
 life which are modern. Two fauns are conversing : one 
 inquires where live certain delicate spirits whom they 
 hear talking about the woods, but never meet. We are 
 here in an atmosphere very much like that of the 
 Midsummer- -Night's Dream, I scarcely know anything 
 more compact of pellucid beauty : it seems quite worthy 
 of Shakspere. 
 
 SECOND FAUN. 
 
 " 'Tis hard to tell : 
 I have heard those more skill'd in spirits say, 
 The bubbles, which th' enchantment of the sun 
 Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave 
 The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools, 
 Are the pavilions where such dwell and float 
 Under the green and golden atmosphere 
 Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves ; 
 And when these burst, and the thin fiery air, 
 The which they breathed within those lucent domes, 
 Ascends to flow like meteors through the night, 
 They ride on them, and rein their headlong speed, 
 And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire 
 Under the waters of the earth again." 
 
 Here again, in my third extract, we have poetry which 
 is as strong as the other is dainty, and which is as 
 modern as geology. Asia is describing a vision in which 
 the successive deposits in the crust of the earth are 
 revealed to her. The whole treatment is detailed, 
 modern, vivid, powerful. 
 
 " The beams flash on 
 And make appear the melancholy ruins 
 Of cancell'd cycles : anchors, beaks of ships ; 
 Planks turn'd to marble ; quivers, helms, and spears, 
 And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels 
 Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry 
 Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts, 
 
108 The English Novel 
 
 Round which death laugh'd, sepulchred emblems 
 Of dread destruction, ruin within ruin ! 
 The wrecks beside of many a city vast, 
 Whose population which the earth grew over 
 Was mortal, but not human ; see, they lie, 
 Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons, 
 Their statues, domes, and fanes, prodigious shapes 
 Huddled in gray annihilation, split, 
 Jamm'd in the hard, black deep ; and over these 
 The anatomies of unknown winged things, 
 And fishes which were isles of living scale, 
 And serpents, bony chains, twisted around 
 The iron crags, or within heaps of dust 
 To which the torturous strength of their last pangs 
 Had crushed the iron crags ; and over these 
 The jagged alligator, and the might 
 Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once 
 Were monarch-beasts, and on the slimy shores, 
 And weed-overgrown continents of earth, 
 Increased and multiplied like summer worms 
 On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe 
 Wrapt deluge round it like a cloak, and they 
 Yelled, gasped, and were abolished ; or some God, 
 Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried 
 Be not ! And like my words they were no more." 
 
 Shelley appears not to have been completely satisfied 
 with the Promethean story. This dissatisfaction displays 
 itself in a characteristic passage of his preface to the 
 Prometheus which happens very felicitously to intro- 
 duce the only other set of antique considerations I shall 
 offer you on this subject. " Let this opportunity " (he 
 says in one place) " be conceded to me of acknowledging 
 that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically 
 terms ' a passion for reforming the world.' . . . But 
 it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical 
 compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, 
 or that I consider them in any degree as containing a 
 reasoned system on the theory of human life. . . . 
 
The Development of Personality 109 
 
 "... Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, 
 that is, produce a systematical history of what appear 
 to me to be the genuine elements of human society, let 
 not the advocates of injustice and superstition flatter 
 themselves that I should take ^Eschylus rather than 
 Plato as my model." 
 
 In Shelley's poem we have found much of the modern- 
 ness between the lines, or appearing as the result, 
 merely, of that spirit of the time which every writer must 
 share to a greater or less extent with his fellow-beings of 
 the same period. But as we proceed now to examine 
 Bayard Taylor's poem, Prince Deukalion, we find a 
 man not only possessed with modernness, but con- 
 sciously possessed, so that what was implicit in Shelley 
 — and a great deal more — here becomes explicit and 
 formulated. 
 
 As one opens the book a powerful note of modern- 
 ness in the drama, as opposed to the drama of ^Eschylus, 
 strikes us at the outset in the number of the actors. 
 One may imagine the amazement of old ^Eschylus as he 
 read down this truly prodigious array of dramatos 
 prosopa : 
 
 Eos, Goddess of the Dawn ; Gaea, Goddess of the 
 Earth ; Eros ; Prometheus ; Epimetheus ; Pandora ; 
 Prince Deukalion ; Pyrrha ; Agathon ; Medusa ; Calchas ; 
 Buddha ; Spirits of Dawn ; Nymphs ; Chorus of Ghosts ; 
 Charon ; Angels ; Spirits ; The Nine Muses ; Urania ; 
 Spirit of the Wind ; Spirit of the Snow ; Spirit of the 
 Stream ; Echoes ; the Youth \ the Artist ; the Poet ; 
 the Shepherd ; the Shepherdess ; the Mediaeval Chorus ; 
 Mediaeval Anti-Chorus ; Chorus of Builders ; Four Mes- 
 sengers. With these materials Mr. Taylor's aim is to 
 array before us the whole panorama of time, painted 
 in symbols of the great creeds which have characterized 
 
no The English Novel 
 
 each epoch. These epochs are four; and one act is 
 devoted to each. In the first act we have the passing 
 away of nymph and satyr and the whole antique Greek 
 mythos ; and we are shown the coming man and woman 
 in the persons of Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, his 
 wife-to-be, whose figures, however, are as yet merely 
 etched upon a mist of prophecy. 
 
 In Act II we have the reign and fall of the mediaeval 
 faith, all of which is mysteriously beheld by these same 
 shadowy personalities, Deukalion and Pyrrha. In Act 
 III the faith of the present is similarly treated. In Act IV 
 we have at last the coming man, or developed person- 
 ality fairly installed as ruler of himself and of the world, 
 and Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, the ideal man and 
 the ideal woman now for the first time united in deed 
 as well as in aspiration, pace forth into the world to 
 learn it and to enjoy it. Mr. Taylor, as I said, is so 
 explicit upon the points of personality and modernness 
 as compared with the ^Eschylean play, that few quota- 
 tions would be needed from his work, and I will not 
 attempt even such a sketch of it as that of Shelley's. 
 For example, in Scene I, Act I, of Prince Deukalion, 
 Scene I being given in the stage direction as 
 
 " A plain sloping from high mountains towards the sea; 
 at the bases of the mountains lofty, vaulted entrances of 
 cavemis ; a ruined temple on a rocky height ; a shepherd 
 asleep in the shadow of a clump of laurels ; the flock 
 scattered over the plain," — a shepherd awakes and won- 
 deringly describes his astonishment at certain changes 
 which have occurred during his sleep. This shepherd, 
 throughout the book, is a symbol of the mass of the com- 
 mon people, the great herd of men. Voices from various 
 directions interrupt his ejaculations : and amongst other 
 utterances of this sort we have presently one from the 
 
The Development of Personality 1 1 1 
 
 nymphs — as representative of the Greek nature- my thos 
 — which is quite to our present purpose. 
 
 NYMPHS 
 
 (Who are to the shepherd voices and nothing more) 
 
 " Our service hath ceased for you, shepherds ! 
 We fade from your days and your dreams, 
 With the grace that was lithe as a leopard's, 
 The joy that was swift as a stream's ! 
 To the musical reeds, and the grasses ; 
 To the forest, the copse, and the dell ; 
 To the mist, and the rainbow that passes, 
 The vine, and the goblet, farewell ! 
 Go, drink from the fountains that flow not ! 
 Our songs and our whispers are dumb : 
 But the thing ye are doing ye know not, 
 Nor dream of the thing that shall come." 
 
 In Scene IV, Deukalion, leading Pyrrha, passes into 
 a cavern, the last mouth of Hades left on the earth. 
 Presently the two emerge upon " a shadowy, colorless 
 landscape," and are greeted by a chorus of ghosts which 
 very explicitly formulates that dreary impossibility of 
 growth which I pointed out in the last lecture as incident 
 to the old conception of personality. 
 
 CHORUS OF GHOSTS. 
 
 " Away ! 
 Ashes that once were fires, 
 Darkness that once was day, 
 Dead passions, dead desires, 
 Alone can enter here ! 
 In rest there is no strife, 
 
 Like some forgotten star, 
 What first we were, we are. 
 The past is adamant : 
 The future will not grant 
 That, which in all its range 
 We pray for — change." 
 
112 The English Novel 
 
 In spite of these warnings they push on, find Charon 
 at his old place by the dark river, but are left to row 
 themselves across, Charon pleading age and long unused 
 joints, and after many adventures find Prometheus who 
 very distinctly declares to Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha 
 their mission. 
 
 " Since thou adrift," 
 
 says Prometheus, 
 
 " And that immortal woman by thy side 
 Floated above submerged barbarity 
 To anchor, weary, on the cloven mount, 
 Thou wast my representative." 
 
 Prince Deukalion — as perhaps many will remember — 
 is the Noah of the old Promethean cyclus, and the story 
 ran that the drowned world was miraculously repeopled 
 by him and Pyrrha. In the same speech Prometheus 
 introduces to Deukalion as a future helper his brother 
 Epimetheus — one of the most striking conceptions of the 
 old fable and one of the most effective characters in Mr. 
 Taylor's presentation. We saw in the last lecture that 
 Prometheus was called the Provident, — the pro-metheus 
 being a looking forward. Precisely opposite is Epime- 
 theus, that is, he who looks epi — upon or backward. 
 Perhaps it is a fair contrast to regard Prometheus as a 
 symbol of striving onward, or progress ; and Epimetheus 
 as a symbol of the historic instinct, the instinct which 
 goes back and clears up the past as if it were the future ; 
 which with continual effort reconstructs it ; which keeps 
 the to-be in full view of what has been ; which reconciles 
 progress and conservation. Accordingly the old story 
 reports Epimetheus as oldest at his birth and growing 
 younger with the progress of the ages. 
 
The Development of Personality 113 
 
 " Take one new comfort," 
 
 continues Prometheus, 
 
 " Epimetheus lives ! 
 Though here beneath the shadow of the crags 
 He seems to slumber, head on nerveless knees, 
 His life increases; oldest at his birth, 
 The ages heaped behind him shake the snow 
 From hoary locks, and slowly give him youth. 
 'Tis he shall be thy helper : Brother, rise ! " 
 
 epimetheus — {coming forward) 
 " I did not sleep : I mused. Ha ! comest thou, Deukalion ? " 
 
 PROMETHEUS. 
 
 " Soon thy work shall come ! 
 Shame shall cease 
 When midway on their paths our mighty schemes 
 Meet, and complete each other ! Yet my son, 
 Deukalion — yet one other guide I give, 
 Eos ! " 
 
 And presently Prometheus leads Deukalion and Pyrrha 
 to what is described in the stage-direction as " The 
 highest verge of the rocky table-land of Hades, looking 
 eastward" Eos is summoned by Prometheus, much 
 high conversation ensues, and this, the sixth and last 
 scene of the first act ends thus : 
 
 Eos (addressing young Deukalion and Pyrrha) 
 
 " Faith, when none believe ; 
 Truth, when all deceive ; 
 Freedom, when force restrains ; 
 Courage to sunder chains ; 
 Pride, when good is shame ; 
 Love, when love is blame, — 
 These shall call me in stars and flame ! 
 
 Thus if your souls have wrought, 
 Ere ye approach me, I shine unsought." 
 
ii4 The English Novel 
 
 But Eos proceeds to warn Deukalion and Pyrrha of 
 long trial, and of many disappointments, closing thus : 
 
 " When darkness falls, 
 And what may come is hard to see ; 
 
 When solid adamant walls 
 Seem built against the Future that shall be ; 
 When Faith looks backward, Hope dies, Life appals, 
 Think most of Morning and of me ! " 
 
 [The rosy glow in the sky fades away] 
 
 Prometheus (to Prince Deukalion) 
 " Go back to Earth, and wait ! " 
 
 Pandora (to Pyrrha) 
 " Go : and fulfil our fate ! " 
 
 This sketch of the first act of Taylor's work is so 
 typical of the remainder that I need not add quotations 
 from the second, or third, or fourth act : the explicit 
 modernness of the treatment, the spirituality, the per- 
 sonality of it, everywhere forms the most striking con- 
 trast to the treatment of ^Eschylus ; and I will close the 
 case as to Prince Deukalion by quoting the subtle and 
 wise words of Prometheus which end the play. The 
 time is the future : the coming man and woman, Deuka- 
 lion and Pyrrha, after long trial and long separation are 
 at last allowed to marry and to begin their earthly life. 
 These are Prometheus's parting words to them. It would 
 be difficult to imagine one plane of thought farther 
 removed from another than is that of the time-spirit 
 which here speaks through Taylor, from the time-spirit 
 which speaks through ^Eschylus. Remembering the 
 relations between man and inexorable nature, between 
 man and the exterminating god which we saw revealed 
 
The Development of Personality 1 1 5 
 
 by the Prometheus of ^Eschylus, listen to these relations 
 prophesied by the Prometheus of Taylor. 
 
 " Retrieve perverted destiny ! " 
 
 (In ^Eschylus, once " destiny " is about, all retrieval 
 grows absurd.) 
 
 "'Tis this shall set your children free. 
 The forces of your race employ 
 To make sure heritage of joy ; 
 Yet feed, with every earthly sense, 
 Its heavenly coincidence, — 
 That, as the garment of an hour ; 
 This, as an everlasting power. 
 For Life, whose source not here began, 
 Must fill the utmost sphere of Man 
 And, so expanding, lifted be 
 Along the line of God's decree, 
 To find in endless growth all good, — 
 In endless toil, beatitude. 
 Seek not to know Him ; yet aspire 
 As atoms toward the central fire ! 
 Not lord of race is He, afar, — 
 Of Man, or Earth, or any star, 
 But of the inconceivable All ; 
 Whence nothing that there is can fall 
 Beyond Him, — but may nearer rise, 
 Slow-circling through eternal skies. 
 His larger life ye cannot miss, 
 In gladly, nobly using this. 
 Now, as a child in April hours 
 Clasps tight its handful of first flowers, 
 Homeward, to meet His purpose, go ! — 
 These things are all ye need to know." 
 
 We have seen that Shelley thought of producing a 
 history of "the genuine elements of human society," 
 taking Plato as his model, instead of ^Eschylus. Had 
 he done so, how is it likely he would have fared ? It so 
 happens that of all the monstrosities of thought which 
 
n6 The English Novel 
 
 we find in the whole Greek cultus, based upon the failure 
 to conceive personality, the most monstrous are those 
 which originated with Plato. And since you have now 
 heard this word personality until your patience must be 
 severely taxed, I am glad to say that I can now close 
 this whole pending argument which I have announced 
 as our first line of research in a short and conclusive 
 way by asking you to consider for a moment the com- 
 plete massacre and deliberate extermination of all 
 those sacred bases of personality upon which the fabric 
 of our modern society rests in that ideal society which 
 Plato has embodied in his Republic. Nothing is more 
 irresistible than the conviction that the being who planned 
 Plato's Republic could neither have had the least actual 
 sense of his own personality nor have recognized even 
 theoretically the least particle of its real significance. 
 Fortunately this examination can be made with great 
 brevity by confining our attention to the three quite con- 
 clusive matters of marriage, children, and property, as 
 they are provided for in Book V of Plato's Republic. 
 
 At line 460 of that book we find Socrates inquiring : 
 " And how can marriages be made most beneficial " in 
 our ideal republic? and presently answering his own 
 question in due form. I quote here and there, to make 
 the briefest possible showing of the plan. " Why the 
 principle has been already laid down, that the best of 
 either sex should be united with the best as often as 
 possible ; and that inferiors should be prevented from 
 marrying at all." " Now these goings on must be a 
 secret which the rulers only know, ... or there will be 
 a farther danger of our herd . . . breaking into rebel- 
 lion." To these ends we had " better appoint certain 
 festivals at which the brides and bridegrooms " (whom 
 the rulers have previously selected with care and secrecy) 
 
The Development of Personality 117 
 
 " will be brought together, and sacrifices will be offered 
 and suitable hymeneal songs composed by our poets ; " 
 . . . and we "invent some ingenious kind of lots which 
 the less worthy may draw." In short, the provision for 
 marriage is that the rulers shall determine each year 
 how many couples shall marry, and shall privately 
 designate a certain number of the healthiest couples for 
 that purpose ; at the annual festival all marriageable 
 couples assemble and draw lots, these lots having pre- 
 viously been so arranged that all unhealthy or in any 
 way inferior couples shall draw blanks. Of course this 
 is fraud, but Plato defends it against Glaucon's objection 
 thus : since " our rulers will have to practice on the body 
 corporate with medicines " ; and since " falsehood and 
 deceit" may "be used with advantage as medicines; 
 our rulers will find a considerable dose of these " (that 
 is, of falsehood and deceit) " necessary for the good of 
 their subjects ; . . . and this lawful use of them seems 
 likely to be often needed in the regulations of mar- 
 riages." The couples thus married eat at a common 
 table. A brave youth, as a reward of valor, is allowed 
 more than one wife. 
 
 Such are the marriage-arrangements of Plato's ideal 
 republic, except that I have omitted all the most mon- 
 strous provisions, giving only the rosiest view of it. 
 Reserving comment, let us see how the children are 
 provided for. Immediately after birth "The proper 
 officers will take the offspring of the good " (or healthy) 
 "parents to " a certain common "fold, and there . . . 
 deposit them with certain nurses ; but the offspring of 
 the inferior, or of the better where they chance to be 
 deformed, will be put away in some mysterious unknown 
 place, as decency requires ; " the mothers are afterwards 
 allowed to come to the fold to nourish the children, but 
 
n8 The English Novel 
 
 the officers are to take " the greatest care that no mother 
 recognizes her own child : " of course these children, 
 when they grow up are to be also bridegrooms and 
 brides, and the problem of how to prevent unknown 
 brothers and sisters, and the like, from marrying is 
 duly attended to ; but the provisions for this purpose are 
 at once so silly and so beastly — nay, they out-beast 
 the beasts — that surely no one can read them without 
 wishing to blot out the moment in which he did so. 
 
 And lastly property is thus disposed of. " Then " 
 (line 482, Bk. V, Republic} " the community of wives 
 and children is clearly the source of the greatest good 
 to the State, . . . and agrees with the other principle 
 that the guardians " — the guardians are the model 
 citizens of this ideal republic — " are not to have houses 
 or lands or any other property ; their pay is to be their 
 food and they are to have no private expenses; . . . 
 Both the community of property and the community of 
 families . . . tend to make them more truly guardians ; 
 they will not tear the city in pieces by differing about 
 meum and tunm ; the one dragging any acquisition 
 which he has made into a house of his own, where he 
 has a separate wife and children, . . . and another 
 into another ; . . . but all will be affected as far as 
 may be by the same pleasures and pains ; . . . and, as 
 they have nothing but their persons which they can call 
 their own, suits and complaints will have no existence 
 among them." 
 
 Now as soon as these ideal dispositions of Plato are 
 propounded to a modern hearer they send an instanta- 
 neous shock to the remotest ends of his nature ; and 
 what I will ask you to do at present is to formulate this 
 shock in terms of personality. Taking for example the 
 Platonic provision with regard to marriage (how gro- 
 
The Development of Personality 119 
 
 tesquely, by the way, these provisions show alongside of 
 what have gained great currency as " Platonic attach- 
 ments ") : perhaps the two thousand years since Plato 
 have taught us nothing so clearly as that one of the 
 most mysterious and universal elements of personality 
 is that marvellous and absolutely inconsequential principle 
 by which a given man finds himself determined to love 
 a certain woman, or a given woman determined to love 
 a certain man ; and if we look back we find that the most 
 continuous travail of the ages has been to secure perfect 
 freedom for these determinations. 
 
 Does it not seem as if Time grinned at us in some 
 horrible dream when we remind ourselves that here the 
 divine Plato, as he has been called, and the unspeakable 
 Zola (as some of us have learned to call him) have 
 absolutely come cheek by jowl, and that the physiolog- 
 ical marriage of Zola is no more nor less than the 
 ideal marriage of Plato ? 
 
 Rejecting comment on the child-nursing arrangement 
 of Plato it is instructive to pass on and regard from a 
 different point of view, though still from the general 
 direction of personality, the Platonic community of 
 property. If men desire property, says Plato, " one 
 man's desire will contravene another's and we shall 
 have trouble. How shall we remedy it? Crush out 
 the desire : and to that end abolish property." 
 
 But no, cries modern personality to Plato, cannot you 
 imagine such an extension of personality as to make each 
 man see that on the whole the shortest way to carry out 
 his desires for property is to respect every other man's 
 desire for property, and thus, in the regulations which 
 will necessarily result from this mutual respect, to secure 
 everything he acquires by spiritual considerations in- 
 finitely more effective than spears and bars ? 
 
120 The English Novel 
 
 We had occasion to observe the other day how com- 
 plete has been the success of this doctrine here in the 
 United States : we found that the real government now 
 going on is individual, personal, — not at Washington — 
 and that we have every proper desire, — of love in mar- 
 riage, of having one woman to wife, of cherishing our 
 own children, of accumulating property, — secured by 
 external law apparently, and really by respect for that 
 law and the principles of personality it embodies. 
 
 It seems curious to me here to make two further points 
 of contact which, taken with the Zola point just made, 
 seem to tax the extremes of the heavens and the earth. 
 Plato's organic principle appears to emerge from some 
 such consideration as this. A boy ten years old is 
 found to possess a wondrous manual deftness : he can do 
 anything with his fingers : word is brought to Plato : 
 what shall the State do with this boy? Why, says Plato, 
 if he be manually so adroit, likely he will turn pickpocket : 
 the plain course is to chop off his hands, — or to expose 
 him to die in one of those highly respectable places such 
 as decency requires for generally unavailable children. 
 
 No, says the modern man : you are destroying his 
 manifest gift, the very deepest outcome of his personality ; 
 he might be a pickpocket, true, but then he might be a 
 great violinist, he might be a great worker in all manner 
 of materials requiring deftness : instead of cutting off his 
 hands, let us put him at an industrial school, let us set 
 him to playing the violin, let us cherish him, let us 
 develop his personality. So, Plato takes the gift of acquir- 
 ing property — for it is a real gift and blessing to man if 
 properly developed — and he will chop it off, that is, he 
 will crush out the desire of property by destroying the 
 possibility of its exercise. 
 
 And what is this in its outcome but the Nirvana of the 
 
The Development of Personality 121 
 
 Buddhistic religion ? My passions keep me in fear and 
 hope : therefore I will annihilate them ; when I neither 
 think nor desire, then I shall rest, then I shall enjoy 
 Nirvana. Plato institutes a Nirvana for the ills of mar- 
 riage, of offspring, of property ; and he realizes it by the 
 slow death through inanition of the desire for love, for 
 children, for property. 
 
 And as we have found the Platonic Plato arguing him- 
 self into a Zola, the dialectic Plato arguing himself into 
 a dreaming Buddha, all for lack of the sense of per- 
 sonality, we now find the ideal Plato arguing himself, 
 for the same lack, into a sturdy Whitman. Think of 
 Plato's community of property, and listen to Whitman's 
 reverie, as he looks at some cattle. It is curious to 
 notice how you cannot escape a certain sense of naivety 
 in this, and how you are taken by it, — until a moment's 
 thought shows you that the naivety is due to a cunning 
 and bold contradiction of every fact in the case. 
 
 "I think I could turn and live with 
 
 animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd : 
 I stand and look at them long and long. 
 
 " Not one is dissatisfied — not one is demented 
 with the mania of owning things : 
 Not one is respectable or industrious over the 
 
 whole earth." 
 
 The Whitman method of reaching naivety is here so 
 funnily illustrated that it seems worth while to stop a 
 moment and point it out. Upon the least reflection, one 
 must see that " animals " here must mean cows, and well- 
 fed cows; for they are about the only animals in the 
 world to whom these items would apply. For, says 
 Whitman, "not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented 
 with the mania of owning things : " but suppose he were 
 
122 The English Novel 
 
 taking one of his favorite night-strolls in the woods of 
 Bengal rather than of New Jersey, is it not more than 
 probable that the first animal he met would be some 
 wicked tiger not only dissatisfied, but perfectly demented 
 with the mania of owning Mr. Whitman, the only kind 
 of property the tiger knows ? Seriously, when we reflect 
 that property to the animal means no more than food or 
 nest or lair, and that the whole wing-shaken air above 
 us, the earth-surface about us, the earth-crust below us, 
 the seas, and all, are unceasingly agog day and night 
 with the furious activity of animals quite as fairly de- 
 mented with the mania of owning their property as men 
 theirs ; and that it is only the pampered beast who is 
 not so demented, — the cow, for instance, who has her 
 property duly brought to her in a pail so many times a 
 day, and no more to do but to enjoy the cud thereof 
 until next feed-time, — we have a very instructive model 
 of methods by which poetry can make itself naive. 
 
 And finally what a conclusive light is shed upon the 
 principles supporting Plato's community of property, 
 when we bring forward the fact, daily growing more and 
 more notable, that along with the modern passion for 
 acquiring property has grown the modern passion of 
 giving away property, that is, of charity? What ancient 
 scheme ever dreamed of the multitudinous charitable 
 organizations of some of our large cities ? Charity has 
 become organic and a part of the system of things : it 
 has sometimes overflowed its bounds so that great social 
 questions now pend as to how we shall direct the over- 
 flowing charitable instincts of society so as really to help 
 the needy and not pamper the lazy : its public manifes- 
 tations are daily, its private ministrations are endless. 
 
 Plato would have crushed the instinct of property ; but 
 the instinct, vital part of man's personality, as it is, has 
 
The Development of Personality 123 
 
 taken care of itself, has been cherished and encouraged 
 by the modern cultus, and behold, instead of breeding a 
 wild pandemonium of selfishness as Plato argued, it has 
 in its orderly progress developed this wonderful new out- 
 growth of charity which fills every thoughtful man's 
 heart with joy, because it covers such a multitude of the 
 sins of the time. 
 
 I have been somewhat earnest — I fear tediously so — 
 upon this matter, because I have seen what seem the 
 greatest and most mischievous errors concerning it 
 receiving the stamp of men who usually think with 
 clearness and who have acquired just authority in many 
 premises. 
 
 It would not be fair to the very different matters which 
 I have now to treat, to detail these errors ; and I will 
 only mention that if, with these principles of personality 
 fairly fixed in one's mind, one reads for example the 
 admirable Introduction of Professor Jowett to his trans- 
 lation of Plato's Republic, one has a perfect clew to many 
 of the problems over which that translator labors with 
 results which, I think, cannot be conclusive to his own 
 mind. 
 
 Here, too, no one can be satisfied with the otherwise 
 instructive chapter on Individuality in Professor Eucken's 
 Fundamental Concepts of Modern Philosophic Thought. 
 Eucken's direct reference to Plato's Republic is evidently 
 made upon only a very vague recollection of Plato's 
 doctrine, which is always dangerous. "The complete 
 subordination and sacrifice of the individual expressed 
 in Plato's idea of a state arose from his opposition to a 
 tendency of the times which he considered pernicious, 
 and so is characterized rather by moral energy and 
 intensity of feeling than by the quiet and simple resig- 
 nation to the objective which we find in the great men 
 
124 The English Novel 
 
 of the preceding period." But a mere " opposition to a 
 tendency of the times " could never have bred this elabo- 
 rate and sweeping annihilation of individuality ; and it is 
 forgotten that Plato is not here legislating for his times 
 or with the least dream of the practical establishment of 
 his Republic : again and again he declares his doubts as 
 to the practicability of his plans for any time. No, he 
 is building a republic for all time, and is consistently 
 building upon the ruins of that personality which he was 
 not sensible of except in its bad outcome as selfishness. 
 
 I must add that there was an explicit theory of 
 what was called Individuality among the Greeks ; the 
 phenomenon of the unaccountable differences of men 
 from birth early attracted those sharp eyes, and the 
 Stoics and others soon began to build in various direc- 
 tions from this basis. But just as the Greeks had a 
 theory of harmony, though harmony was not developed 
 until the last century, — as Richter says somewhere that 
 a man may contemplate the idea of death for twenty 
 years, and only in some moment of the twenty-first 
 suddenly have the realization of death come upon him, 
 and shake his soul — so their theory of individuality 
 must have been wholly amateur, not a working element, 
 and without practical result. Surely, we seem in condi- 
 tion to say so with confidence if you run your minds 
 back along this line of development which now comes 
 to an end. For what have we clone? We have inter- 
 rogated ^Eschylus and Plato, whom we may surely call 
 the two largest and most typic spirits of the whole Greek 
 cultus, upon the main fact of personality; we have 
 verified the abstract with the concrete by questioning 
 them upon the most vital and well-known elements 
 of personality : what do you believe about spiritual 
 growth, about spiritual compactness, about true love, 
 
The Development of Personality 125 
 
 marriage, children, property? and we have received 
 answers which show us that they have not yet caught 
 a conception of what personality means, and that when 
 they explicitly discuss individuality in their theories, 
 it is a discussion of blind men about colors. 
 
126 The English Novel 
 
 VI 
 
 We are now to enter upon the second of our four 
 lines of study by concentrating our attention upon three 
 historic details in the growth of this personality whose 
 general advance has been so carefully illustrated in our 
 first line. These details are found in the sudden rise of 
 Physical Science, of Modern Music, and of the Modern 
 Novel, at periods of time so little separated from each 
 other that we may consider these great fields of human 
 activity as fairly opening simultaneously to the en- 
 trance of man about the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries. 
 
 Addressing ourselves first then to the idea of Science, 
 let us place ourselves at a point of view from which we 
 can measure with precision the actual height and nature 
 of the step which man took in ascending from the plane 
 of, say, Aristotle's " science " to that of Sir Isaac New- 
 ton's "science." And the only possible method of 
 placing ourselves at this point of view is to pass far 
 back and fix ourselves in the attitude which antiquity 
 maintained towards physical nature, and in which suc- 
 ceeding ages comfortably dozed, scarcely disturbed even 
 by Roger Bacon's feeble protest in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, until it was shocked out of all future possibility by 
 Copernicus, Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton. 
 
 Accordingly, in pursuance of our custom of abandon- 
 ing abstract propositions at the earliest moment when 
 we can embody them in terms of the concrete, let us 
 
The Development of Personality 127 
 
 spend a quiet hour in contemplating some of the specific 
 absurdities of our ancestors in scientific thought and in 
 generalizing them into the lack of personality. Let us 
 go and sit with Socrates on his prison-bed, in the Phcedo, 
 and endeavor to see this matter of man's scientific rela- 
 tion to physical nature, with his sight. Hear Socrates 
 talking to Simmias : he is discussing the method of 
 acquiring true knowledge : it is well we are invisible as 
 we sit by him, for we cannot keep back a quiet smile, — 
 we who come out of a beautiful and vast scientific 
 acquirement all based upon looking at things with our 
 eyes, we whose very intellectual atmosphere is distilled 
 from the proverb, " seeing is believing " — when we hear 
 these grave propositions of the wisest antique man. " But 
 what of the acquisition of wisdom," says Socrates : . . . 
 " do the sight and hearing convey any certainty to man- 
 kind, or are they such as the poets incessantly report 
 them, who say that we neither hear nor see anything as 
 it is? ... Do they not seem so to you?" 
 
 "They do, indeed," replied Simmias. "When, then," 
 continued Socrates, " does the soul attain to the truth ? 
 For when it attempts to investigate anything along with 
 the body, it is plain that the soul is led astray by the 
 body. ... Is it not by reasoning, if by anything, that 
 reality is made manifest to the soul? " 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
 But now Socrates advances a step to show that not 
 only are we misled when we attempt to get knowledge 
 by seeing things, but that nothing worth attention is 
 capable of being physically seen. I shall have occasion 
 to recur in another connection to the curious fallacy 
 involved in this part of Socrates' argument. He goes on 
 to inquire of Simmias : " Do we assert that Justice is 
 anything, or not?" 
 
128 The English Novel 
 
 " We say that it is." 
 
 " And beauty and goodness, also? " 
 
 " Surely." 
 
 " Did you ever see anything of the kind with your 
 eyes?" 
 
 " Never," replied Simmias. 
 
 . . . "Then," continues Socrates, " whoever amongst 
 us prepares, with the greatest caution and accuracy, to 
 reflect upon that particular thing by itself upon which 
 he is inquiring" and . . . "using reflection alone, 
 endeavors to investigate every reality by itself, . . . 
 abstaining as much, as possible from the use of the eyes 
 ... is not such an one, if any, likely to arrive at what 
 really exists?" 
 
 "You speak, Socrates," answered Simmias, "with 
 amazing truth." 
 
 It is curious to note in how many particulars this pro- 
 cess of acquiring knowledge is opposed to that of the 
 modern scientific man. Observe specially that Socrates 
 wishes to investigate every reality by itself, while we on 
 the contrary fly from nothing with so much vehemence 
 as from an isolated fact ; it maddens us until we can put 
 it into relation with other facts, and delights us in pro- 
 portion to the number of facts with which we can relate 
 it. In that book of multitudinous suggestions which 
 Novalis (Friedrich Von Hardenberg) calls The Pupil at 
 Sais, one of the most modern sentences is that where, 
 after describing many studies of his wondrous pupil, 
 Novalis adds that " erelong he saw nothing alone." 
 
 Surely one of the earliest and most delightful sensa- 
 tions one has in spiritual growth, after one has acquired 
 the true synthetic habit which converts knowledge into 
 wisdom, is that delicious, universal impulse which accom- 
 panies every new acquisition as it runs along like a warp 
 
The Development of Personality 129 
 
 across the woof of our existing acquisition, making a 
 pleasant tang of contact, as it were, with each related 
 fibre. 
 
 But Plato speaks even more directly upon our present 
 point, in advocating a similar attitude towards physical 
 science. In Book VII, of the Republic, he puts these 
 words into the mouth of Socrates : " And whether a 
 man gapes at the heavens, or blinks on the ground, seeking 
 to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he 
 can learn, for nothing of that sort is matter of science." 
 
 Of course these, as the opinions of professed idealists, 
 would not be representative of the Greek attitude towards 
 physical science. Yet when we turn to those who are 
 pre-eminently physical philosophers we find that the 
 mental disposition, though the reverse of hostile, is 
 nearly always such as to render the work of these 
 philosophers unfruitful. When we find, for example, 
 that Thales in the very beginning of Greek philosophy 
 holds the principle, or beginning, yj dpxrj of all things to 
 be moisture, or water; that Anaximenes a little while 
 after holds the beginning of things to be air; that 
 Heraclitus holds the arche to be fire : this sounds 
 physical, and we look for a great extension of men's 
 knowledge in regard to water, air and fire, upon the 
 idea that if these are really the organic principles of 
 things thousands of keen inquiring eyes would be at once 
 levelled upon them, thousands of experiments would be 
 at once set on foot, all going to reveal properties of 
 water, air and fire. But perhaps no more expressive 
 summary of the real relation between man and nature, 
 not only during the Greek period but for many cen- 
 turies after it, could be given than the fact that these 
 three so-called elements which begin the Greek physical 
 philosophy remained themselves unknown for more than 
 
 9 
 
130 The English Novel 
 
 two thousand years after Thales and Anaximenes and 
 Heraclitus, until the very last century when, with the 
 discovery of oxygen, men are able to prove that they 
 are not elements at all, but that what we call fire is 
 merely an effect of the rapid union of oxygen with 
 bodies, while water and air are compounds of it with 
 other gases. It is perfectly true that in the years be- 
 tween Thales and the death of Aristotle a considerable 
 body of physical facts had been accumulated ; that 
 Pythagoras had observed a number of acoustic phe- 
 nomena and mathematically formulated their relations ; 
 it is true that — without detaining you to specify inter- 
 mediate inquirers — we have that wonderful summary of 
 Aristotle — wonderful for one man — which is contained 
 in his Physics, those Physics from which the name " meta- 
 physics " originated, through the circumstance that he 
 placed the other books after those on physics, calling 
 them Ta fiera ra cf>v(rixa /3i/?Ata, the meta-physical, or 
 over and above physical, books. 
 
 When we read the titles of these productions — here 
 are " Eight Books of Physical Lectures," " Four Books 
 of the Heavens," " Two Books of Production and 
 Destruction," Treatises "On Animals," "On Plants," 
 " On Colors," " On Sound " — we feel that we must be 
 in a veritable realm of physical science. But if we 
 examine these lectures and treatises, which probably 
 contain the entire body of Greek physical learning, we 
 find them hampered by a certain disability which seems 
 to me characteristic not only of Greek thought, but of 
 all man's early speculation, and which excludes the 
 possibility of a fruitful and progressive physical science. 
 I do not know how to characterize this disability other- 
 wise than by calling it a lack of that sense of personal 
 relation to fact which makes the thinker passionately and 
 
The Development of Personality 131 
 
 supremely solicitous about the truth, that is, the exist- 
 ence of his facts and the soundness of his logic : solicitous 
 of these not so much with reference to the value of his 
 conclusions as because of an inward tender inexorable 
 yearning for the truth and nothing but the truth. In 
 short, I find that early thought everywhere, whether 
 dealing with physical facts or metaphysical problems, is 
 lacking in what I may call the intellectual conscience — 
 the conscience which makes Mr. Darwin spend long 
 and patient years in investigating small facts before 
 daring to reason upon them, and which makes him 
 state the facts adverse to his theory with as much care as 
 the facts which make for it. 
 
 Part of the philosophy of this personal relation between 
 a man and a fact is very simple. For instance what do 
 you know at present of the inner life of the Patagonians ? 
 Probably no more than your Mitchell's or Cornell's 
 Geography told you at school. But if a government 
 expedition is soon to carry you to the interior of that 
 country, a personal relation arises which will probably 
 set you to searching all the libraries at your command 
 for such travels or treatises as may enlarge your 
 knowledge of Patagonia. 
 
 It is easy to give a thousand illustrations of this lack 
 of intellectual conscience in Greek thought which con- 
 tinued indeed up to the time of the Renaissance. For 
 example : it would seem that nothing less than a sort of 
 amateur mental attitude towards nature, an attitude which 
 does not bind the thinker to his facts with such iron con- 
 scientiousness that if one fact were out of due order it 
 would rack him, could account for Aristotle's grave ex- 
 position of the four elements. " We seek," he says, " the 
 principles of sensible things, that is of tangible bodies. 
 We must take therefore not all the contrarieties of quality 
 
132 The English Novel 
 
 but those only which have reference to the touch. . . . 
 Now the contrarieties of quality which refer to the touch 
 are these : hot, cold ; dry, wet ; heavy, light ; hard, soft ; 
 unctuous, meagre ; rough, smooth ; dense, rare." Aris- 
 totle then rejects the last three couplets on several 
 grounds and proceeds : " Now in four things there are 
 six combinations of two ; but the combinations of two 
 opposites, as hot and cold, must be rejected ; we have 
 therefore four elementary combinations which agree with 
 the four apparently elementary bodies. Fire is hot and 
 dry ; air is hot and wet ; water is cold and wet ; earth is cold 
 and dry." And thus we comfortably fare forward with fire, 
 air, earth and water for the four elements of all things. 
 
 But Aristotle argues that there must be a fifth element : 
 and our modern word quintessence is, by the way, a relic 
 of this argument, this fifth element having been called by 
 later writers qirinta essentia or quintessence. The argu- 
 ment is as follows : " the simple elements must have simple 
 motions, and thus fire and air have their natural motions 
 upwards and water and earth have their natural motions 
 downwards ; but besides these motions there is motion 
 in a circle which is unnatural to these elements, but 
 which is a more perfect motion than the other, because a 
 circle is a perfect line and a straight line is not ; and there 
 must be something to which this motion is natural. From 
 this it is evident that there is some essence or body dif- 
 ferent from those of the four elements, . . . and superior 
 to them. If things which move in a circle move contrary 
 to nature it is marvelous, or rather absurd that this the 
 unnatural motion should alone be continuous and eternal ; 
 for unnatural motions decay speedily. And so from all 
 this we must collect that besides the four elements which 
 we have here and about us there is another removed far 
 off and the more excellent in proportion as it is more 
 distant from us." 
 
The Development of Personality 133 
 
 Or take Aristotle's dealing with the heaviness and 
 lightness of bodies. 
 
 After censuring former writers for considering these 
 as merely relative, he declares that lightness is a positive 
 or absolute property of bodies just as weight is ; that earth 
 is absolutely heavy, and therefore tends to take its place 
 below the other three elements ; that fire has the posi- 
 tive property of lightness, and hence tends to take its 
 place above the other three elements ; (the modern word 
 empyrean is a relic of this idea from the pyr or fire, thus 
 collected in the upper regions), and so on ; and concludes 
 that bodies which have the heavy property tend to the 
 centre, while those with the light property tend to the 
 exterior, of the earth, because " Exterior is opposite to 
 Centre, as heavy is to light." 
 
 This conception, or rather misconception, of opposites 
 appears most curiously in two of the proofs which Socrates 
 offers for the immortality of the soul, and I do not know 
 how I can better illustrate the infirmity of antique thought 
 which I have just been describing than by citing the 
 arguments of Socrates in that connection according to 
 the Phcedo. Socrates introduced it with special solemnity. 
 
 " I do not imagine," he says, " that any one, not even if 
 he were a comic poet, would now say that I am trifling. . . . 
 Let us examine it in this point of view, whether the souls of 
 the dead survive or not. 
 
 " Let us consider this, whether it is absolutely necessary in 
 the case of as many things as have a contrary, that this con- 
 trary should arise from no other source than from a contrary 
 to itself. For instance, where anything becomes greater, 
 must it not follow that from being previously less it subse- 
 quently became greater?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " So too, if anything becomes less, shall it become so sub- 
 sequently to its being previously greater ? " 
 
*34 
 
 The English Novel 
 
 " Such is the case," said Cebes. 
 
 "And weaker from stronger, swifter from slower, . . . 
 worse from better, juster from more unjust? " 
 
 " Surely." 
 
 " We are then sufficiently assured of this, that all things 
 are so produced, contraries from contraries ? " 
 
 " Sufficiently so." 
 
 "... Do you now tell me likewise in regard to life and 
 death. Do you not say that death is the contrary of life ? " 
 
 " I say so." 
 
 " And that they are produced from each other ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " What then is that which is produced from life ? " 
 
 " Death," said Cebes. 
 
 " And that which is produced from death ? " 
 
 " I must allow," said Cebes, " to be life." 
 
 " Therefore, our souls exist after death." 
 
 This is one formal argument of Socrates. He now 
 goes on speaking to his friends during that fatal day at 
 great length, setting forth other arguments in favor of 
 the immortality of the soul. Finally he comes to the 
 argument which he applies to the soul, that magnitude 
 cannot admit its contrary, the small, but that one retires 
 when the other approaches. At this point he is inter- 
 rupted by one who remembers his former position. 
 Plato relates : 
 
 Then some one of those present (but who he was I do not 
 clearly recollect) when he heard this said, " In the name of 
 the gods, was not the very contrary of what is now asserted 
 laid down in the previous part of the discussion, that the 
 greater is produced from the less and the less from the 
 greater, and this positively was the mode of generating con- 
 traries from contraries?" Upon which Socrates said . . . 
 "Then it was argued that a contrary thing was produced 
 from a contrary ; but now, that contrary itself can never 
 become its own contrary. . . . But observe further if 
 
The Development of Personality 135 
 
 you will agree with me in this. Is there anything you call 
 heat and cold ? " 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
 " The same as snow and fire ? " 
 
 " Assuredly not." 
 
 "Is heat, then, something different from fire, and cold 
 something different from snow ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 11 But this I think is evident to you, that snow while it is 
 snow can never, having admitted heat, continue to be what 
 it was, snow and hot, but on the approach of heat will either 
 give way to it or be destroyed." 
 
 " Certainly so." 
 
 " And fire, on the other hand, on the approach of cold, 
 must either give way to it or be destroyed, nor can it ever 
 endure, having admitted cold, to continue to be what it was, 
 fire and cold. . . . Such I assert to be the case with the 
 number 3 and many other numbers. Shall we not insist 
 that the number 3 shall perish first . . . before it would en- 
 dure while it was yet 3 to become even? . . . What, then? 
 what do we now call that which does not admit the idea of 
 the even ? " 
 
 " Odd," replied he. 
 
 " And that which does not admit the just, nor the grace- 
 ful ? " 
 
 " The one, ungraceful, and the other, unjust." 
 
 " Be it so. But by what name do we call that which does 
 not admit death ? " 
 
 " Immortal." 
 
 " Does the soul, then, not admit death ? " (Socrates has 
 already suggested that whatever the soul occupies it brings 
 life to.) 
 
 « No." 
 
 " Is the soul, therefore, immortal ?" 
 
 " Immortal." 
 
 Socrates' argument drawn from the number 3 brings 
 before us a great host of these older absurdities of scien- 
 tific thought, embracing many grave conclusions drawn 
 
136 The English Novel 
 
 from fanciful considerations of number, everywhere 
 occurring. For briefest example : Aristotle in his book 
 On the Heavens proves that the world is perfect by 
 the following complete argument : " The bodies of which 
 the world is composed . . . have three dimensions ; now 
 3 is the most perfect number ; ... for of 1 we do not 
 speak as a number ; of 2 we say both ; but 3 is 
 the first number of which we say all; moreover, it 
 has a beginning, a middle and an end." You may 
 instructively compare with this the marvelous matters 
 which the school of Pythagoras educed out of their per- 
 fect number which was 4, or the tetractys ; and Plato's 
 number of the Republic which commentators to this day 
 have not settled. 
 
 These illustrations seem sufficient to show a mental 
 attitude towards facts which is certainly like that one has 
 towards a far-off country which one does not expect to 
 visit. The illustration I have used is curiously borne 
 out by a passage in Lactantius, writing so far down as 
 the fourth century : in which we have a picture of mediae- 
 val relations towards nature, and of customary dis- 
 cussions. 
 
 " To search," says he, " for the causes of natural 
 things; to inquire whether the sun be as large as he 
 seems, whether the moon is convex or concave, whether 
 the stars are fixed in the sky or float freely in the air ; 
 of what size and what material are the heavens ; whether 
 they be at rest or in motion ; what is the magnitude of 
 the earth ; on what foundations it is suspended and bal- 
 anced ; — to dispute and conjecture on such matters is 
 just as if we chose to discuss what we think of a city in 
 a remote country of which we never heard but the name." 
 
 Perhaps this defect of thought, this lack of personality 
 towards facts, is most strikingly perceived in the slowness 
 
The Development of Personality 137 
 
 with which most primary ideas of the form and motion 
 of the earth made their way among men. Although 
 astronomy is the oldest of sciences and the only pro- 
 gressive science of antiquity ; and although the idea that 
 the earth was a sphere was one of the earliest in Greek 
 philosophy \ yet this same Lactantius in the fourth cen- 
 tury is vehemently arguing as follows : " Is it possible that 
 men can be so absurd as to believe that the crops and 
 trees on the other side of the earth hang downwards, 
 and that men there have their feet higher than their 
 heads? If you ask of them how they defend these mon- 
 strosities — how things do not fall away from the earth 
 on that side ? they reply that the nature of things is such 
 that heavy bodies tend towards the centre, like the spokes 
 of a wheel, while light bodies, as clouds, smoke, fire, tend 
 from the earth towards the heavens on all sides. Now I 
 am really at a loss what to say of those who, when they 
 have once gone wrong, steadily persevere in their folly 
 and defend one absurd opinion by another." 
 
 And coming on down to the eighth century, the anec- 
 dote is well known of honest Bishop Virgil of Salisbury, 
 who shocked some of his contemporaries by his belief 
 in the real existence of the antipodes, to such an extent 
 that many thought he should be censured by the Pope 
 for an opinion which involved the existence of a whole 
 " world of human beings out of reach of the conditions 
 of salvation." 
 
 And finally we all know the tribulations of Columbus 
 on this point far down in the fifteenth century, at the 
 very beginning of the Renaissance. 
 
 Now this infirmity of mind is, as I have said, not dis- 
 tinctive of the Greek. To me it seems simply a natural 
 incident of the youth of reason, of the childhood of per- 
 sonality. At any rate, for a dozen centuries and more 
 
138 The English Novel 
 
 after Aristotle's death, to study science means to study 
 Aristotle ; in vain do we hear Roger Bacon in the thir- 
 teenth century — that prophet-philosopher who first 
 announces the two rallying cries of modern science, 
 mathematics and experiment — in vain do we hear 
 Roger Bacon crying : " If I had power over the works 
 of Aristotle I would have them all burnt ; for it is only 
 a loss of time, a course of error, and a multiplication of 
 ignorance beyond expression, to study in them." 
 
 Various attempts have been made to account for the 
 complete failure of Greek physical science by assigning 
 this and that specific tendency to the Greek mind : but 
 it seems a perfect confirmation of the view I have here 
 presented — to wit that the organic error was not Greek 
 but simply a part of the general human lack of person- 
 ality — to reflect that for 1,500 years after Aristotle 
 things are little better, and that when we do come to a 
 time when physical science begins to be pursued upon 
 progressive principles, we find it to be also a time when 
 all other departments of activity begin to be similarly 
 pursued, so that we are obliged to recognize not the cor- 
 rection of any specific error in Greek ratiocination, but 
 a general advance of the spirit of man along the whole 
 line. 
 
 And perhaps we have now sufficiently prepared our- 
 selves, as was proposed at the outset of this sketch of 
 Greek science, to measure precisely the height of the 
 new plane which begins with Copernicus, Kepler and 
 Galileo in the sixteenth century, over the old plane 
 which ended with Aristotle and his commentators. Per- 
 haps the true point up to which we should lay our line in 
 making this measurement is not to be found until we 
 pass nearly through the seventeenth century and arrive 
 fairly at Sir Isaac Newton. For while each one of the 
 
The Development of Personality 139 
 
 great men who preceded him had made his contribution 
 weighty enough, as such, yet each brings with him some 
 old darkness out of the antique period. 
 
 When we come to examine Copernicus we find that 
 though the root of the matter is there, a palpable envi- 
 ronment of the old cycle and epicycle still hampers 
 it ; Galileo disappoints us at various emergencies \ Kepler 
 puts forth his sublime laws amid a cluster of startling 
 absurdities; Francis Bacon is on the whole unfruitful; 
 Descartes will have his vortices or eddies as the true 
 principles of motion of the heavenly bodies ; and so it 
 is not until we reach Sir Isaac Newton at the end of the 
 seventeenth century that we find a large, quiet, wholesome 
 thinker, de- Aristotleized, de-Ptolemized, de-Cartesianized, 
 pacing forth upon the domain of reason as if it were his 
 own orchard, and seating himself in the centre of the 
 universe as if it were his own easy chair, observing the 
 fact and inferring the law as if with a personal passion 
 for truth and a personal religion towards order. In 
 short, and in terms of our present theory, with Sir Isaac 
 Newton the growth of man's personality has reached a 
 point when it has developed a true personal relation 
 between man and nature. 
 
 Let us now sum these matters. Up to the time of 
 Newton one seems to find everywhere some chilly trace 
 of the old inexorable pre-Promethean enmity of nature 
 towards man. Even from out the ancient Titanic times 
 of geologic convulsion — times of upheaval, of flood, of 
 the grind of glaciers, — times when nature as if in a 
 nightmare swarms with the great Saurians and grotesque 
 forms that make terrible the air and the oozy earth, — 
 times of huge-backed monsters, " isles of living scale," 
 looming up in the swash of muddy waves, — times that 
 have filled the crust of the earth with bones, the rem- 
 
140 The English Novel 
 
 nants and reminders of death, — times which seem to 
 have somehow crept into the memory of man to appear 
 in those wars of the Titans of which Prometheus told us, 
 or in the visions of griffins and monsters which haunt 
 the human imagination, — or perhaps in the marsh- 
 monsters, Grendel and his mother, of our own old 
 Beowulf epic, — even from out these times a vast cone 
 of shadow seems to project itself and to extend far 
 beyond the time when nature's mood itself has become 
 more gentle, when instead of the ptero-dactyl she gives 
 us the antelope, and instead of tree-fern and club-moss 
 she gives us the lily and the rose. It seems part of the 
 chill operations of this shadow that the Greek cannot 
 go directly to his vine, his mountain, his stream, his 
 tree, but can approach these only through the inter- 
 mediary Bassarid, the Oread, the Hamadryad, the 
 Nymph. It is as if, in the absence of Prometheus, 
 some one must still stand between man and this old 
 inimical nature which for so many centuries has frozen 
 him with her snows, burned him with her heats, and 
 racked him with her hungers : hence, Faun, Nymph, 
 Hamadryad. I have fancied, too, that the same stern 
 note is to be found in the very highest antique moral 
 conceptions. When Plato is developing the monstrous 
 doctrines which we have seen concerning marriage, &c, 
 he is doing so from the purest religious motives. His 
 loftiest ideal of the moral order of the universe is con- 
 tained in the principle of justice ; and he believes that 
 he is forwarding this ideal by those arrangements. But 
 it is only in the growth of modern personality that we 
 find a far more beautiful ideal of the order of things. 
 This ideal is love. Compare the Promethean punish- 
 ments, compare the inexorable marriage laws of Plato — 
 all in the interests of justice — with the principle under- 
 
The Development of Personality 141 
 
 lying that adorable sonnet No. 116 of Shakspere's in 
 which he really sets forth the doctrines of mercy, of 
 charity, of love which must now forever supersede the 
 reign of justice. 
 
 ex VI. 
 
 " Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
 Admit impediments. Love is not love 
 Which alters when it alteration finds, 
 Or bends with the remover to remove : 
 O no ; it is an ever-fixed mark, 
 That looks on tempests and is never shaken ; 
 It is the star to every wandering bark, 
 Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken. 
 Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
 Within his bending sickle's compass come; 
 Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
 But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 
 
 If this be error, and upon me prov'd, 
 
 I never writ nor no man ever lov'd." 
 
 Now this feeling of love towards man has become 
 really possible as towards inanimate nature ; the modern 
 personality can love nature directly as a man loves his 
 friend ; when this love formulates itself in observing the 
 facts of nature, classifying them, we have a Newton, a 
 Darwin ; when it expresses itself in reproducing nature in 
 beautiful forms we have the modern school of landscape- 
 painting, the modern nature-poetry, the modern elab- 
 orate description of natural scenes in the novel and the 
 like. 
 
 I should have been glad if the scope of this part of 
 my inquiry had allowed me to give some sketch at least 
 of the special workers in science who immediately pre- 
 ceded Newton, and some of whose lives were most 
 pathetic and beautiful illustrations of this personal love 
 for nature which I have tried to show as now coming 
 
142 The English Novel 
 
 into being for the first time in the history of man. 
 Besides such spectacles as the lonesome researches of 
 Jeremiah Horrox, for example, I scarcely know anything 
 in history which yields such odd and instructive con- 
 trasts as those glimpses of the scientific work which went 
 on about the court of Charles II, and of what seems to 
 have been the genuine interest of the monarch himself, 
 in Pepys's Diary. For instance, under date of May nth, 
 1663, I find the entry: "Went home after a little dis- 
 course with Mr. Pierce the surgeon who tells me that 
 . . . the other day Dr. Clarke and he did dissect 
 two bodies, a man and a woman, before the king, with 
 which the king was highly pleased." Again, February 
 1 st of the next year: "Thence to Whitehall, wherein 
 the Duke's chamber the King come and stayed an hour 
 or two, laughing at Sir W. Petty . . . and at Gresham 
 College in general : Gresham College he mightily 
 laughed at for spending time only in weighing of air 
 and doing nothing else since they sat." On the 4th he 
 was at St. Paul's school and " Dr. Wilkins " is one of 
 the " posers," Dr. Wilkins being John Wilkins, Bishop of 
 Chester, whose name was well-known in mathematics 
 and in physics. Under date of March 1st, same year, 
 the entry is : " To Gresham College where Mr. Hooke 
 read a second very curious lecture about the late comet ; 
 among other things proving very probably that this is 
 the very same comet that appeared before in the year 
 1 6 18, and that in such a time probably it will appear 
 again, which is a very new opinion ; but all will be in 
 print." And again on the 8th of August, 1666, I find 
 an entry which is of considerable interest : " Discoursed 
 with Mr. Hooke about the nature of sounds, and he did 
 make me understand the nature of musical sounds made 
 by strings mighty prettily; and told me that having 
 
The Development of Personality 143 
 
 come to a certain number of vibrations proper to make 
 any tone, he is able to tell how many strokes a fly makes 
 with her wings (those flies that hum in their flying) by 
 the note that it answers to in music during their flying. 
 That I suppose is a little too much refined ; but his dis- 
 course in general of sound was mighty fine." 
 
 On the other hand, I scarcely know how I could show 
 the newness of this science thus entering the world more 
 vividly than by recording two other entries which I find 
 in the midst of these scientific notes. One of these 
 records a charm for a burn, which Pepys thought so 
 useful as to preserve. This is, in case one should be 
 burned, to say immediately the following verse : 
 
 " There came three angels out of the East ; 
 One brought fire, the other brought frost — 
 Out fire, in frost. 
 In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost." 
 
 And the other is, under Sept. 29th, 1662, "To the 
 King's Theatre where we saw ' Midsummer's Night's 
 Dream,' which I had never seen before, nor shall ever 
 again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever 
 I saw in my life." 
 
 Indeed, if you should wish to see how recently we are 
 out of the range of Aristotle you have only to read the 
 chapter on Human Anatomy which occurs in the early 
 part of dear old Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. 
 Here is an account of the body which makes curious 
 reading for the modern biologist. I give a line here and 
 there. The body is divided into parts containing or con- 
 tained, and the parts contained are either humors or 
 spirits. Of these humors there are four : to wit, first, 
 blood, next, phlegm, third, choler, and fourth, melan- 
 choly ; and this is part of the description of each. 
 
144 The English Novel 
 
 "Blood is a hot, sweet, temperate, red humor, . . . 
 made of the most temperate parts of the chylus in the 
 liver. . . . And from it spirits are first begotten in the 
 heart. Phlegm is a cold and moist humor, begotten of 
 the colder part of the chylus in the liver. Choler is hot 
 and dry, begotten of the hotter parts of the chylus. 
 Melancholy, cold and dry, ... is a bridle to the other 
 two hot humors, blood and choler. These four humors 
 have some analogy with the four elements and to the 
 four ages in man." Having disposed thus of humors, 
 we have this account of spirit or the other contained 
 part of the body. " Spirit is a most subtle vapor which 
 is expressed from the blood and the instrument of the 
 soul to perform all his actions ; a common tie or medium 
 between the body and the soul, as some will have it ; or 
 as Paracelsus — a fourth soul of itself." Proceeding to 
 other parts of the body, here are the lungs. " The lungs 
 is a thin spongy part like an ox-hoof. . . . The instru- 
 ment of voice ; . . . and next to the heart to express 
 their thoughts by voice. That it is the instrument of 
 voice is manifest in that no creature can speak . . . 
 which wanteth these lights. It is besides the instrument 
 of breathing ; and its office is to cool the heart by send- 
 ing air into it by the venosal artery," &c, &c. 
 
 This anatomy of Burton's includes the soul, and here 
 are some particulars of it. " According to Aristotle the 
 soul is defined to be entelecheia, . . . the perfection or 
 first act of an organical body having power of life. . . . 
 But many doubts arise about the essence, subject, seat, 
 distinction and subordinate faculties of it. . . . Some 
 make one soul ; . . . others, three. . . . The common 
 division of the soul is into three principal faculties — 
 vegetal, sensible and rational." The soul of man includes 
 all three ; for the " sensible includes vegetal and rational 
 
The Development of Personality 145 
 
 both ; which are contained in it (saith Aristotle) ut trigo- 
 nes in tetragonoy as a triangle in a quadrangle. . . . Para- 
 celsus will have four souls, adding to the three grand 
 faculties a spiritual soul : which opinion of his Campa- 
 nula in his book De Sensu Rerum much labors to demon- 
 strate and prove, because carcases bleed at the sight 
 of the murderer; with many such arguments." These 
 are not the wanderings of ignorance ; they represent the 
 whole of human knowledge and are an epitome made 
 up from Aristotle, Galen, Vesalius, Fallopius, Laurentius, 
 Wecker, Melanchthon, Feruclius, Cicero, Pico Mirandola, 
 Paracelsus, Campanella, Taurellus, Philip, Flavius, Mac- 
 robius, Alhazen the Arabian, Vittellio, Roger Bacon, 
 Battista Porta, Cardan, Sambucus, Pliny, Avicenna, 
 Lucretius, and such another list as makes one weary 
 with the very names of authorities. 
 
 These details of antique science brought face to face 
 with the weighing of air at Gresham College and with 
 Sir Isaac Newton, represent with sufficient sharpness the 
 change from the old reign of enmity between Nature and 
 man, from the stern ideal of justice, to the later reign of 
 love which embraces in one direction God, in another, 
 fellow-man, in another, physical nature. 
 
 Now in these same sixteenth, seventeenth and eigh- 
 teenth centuries in which we have seen science recov- 
 ering itself after having been so long tongue-tied by 
 authority, a remarkably similar process goes on in the art 
 of music. If, as we did in considering the progress of 
 science, we now place ourselves at a standpoint from 
 which we can precisely estimate that extension of man's 
 personal relation towards the unknown during these 
 centuries, which resulted in modern music, we are met 
 with a chain of strikingly similar facts and causes. The 
 Greek music quite parallels Greek physical science. 
 
146 The English Novel 
 
 We have seen how, in the latter, a Greek philosopher 
 would start off with a well- sounding proposition that 
 all things originated in moisturcor in fire or in air; and 
 we have seen how, instead of attacking moisture, fire 
 and air, and of observing and classifying all the physical 
 facts connected with them, the philosopher after awhile 
 presents us with an amazing superstructure of pure spec- 
 ulation wholly disconnected from facts of any kind, 
 physical or otherwise. Greek music offers us precisely 
 the same net outcome. It was enthusiastically studied, 
 there were multitudes of performers upon the lyre, the 
 flute, and so on, it was a part of common education, 
 and the loftiest souls exerted their loftiest powers in 
 theorizing upon it. Thus, in Plato's Republic Socrates 
 earnestly condemns every innovation upon music. His 
 words are : " For any musical innovation is full of 
 danger to the State. . . . Damon tells me, and I can 
 quite believe him . . . that when modes of music 
 change, the fundamental laws of the State always change 
 with them ; " . . . (therefore) " our guardians must lay 
 the foundations of their fortress in music." Again, in 
 Book III, during a discussion as to the kind of music 
 to be permitted in our Republic, we have this kind of 
 talk. Socrates asks : " Which are the harmonies expres- 
 sive of sorrow?" It is replied, they are "the mixed 
 Lydian, and the full-toned or bass Lydian." 
 
 "These must be banished. . . . Which are the soft 
 or drinking harmonies? " 
 
 " The Ionian and the Lydian." 
 
 These it appears must also be banished. 
 
 " Then the Dorian and the Phrygian appear to be the 
 only ones which remain." 
 
 Socrates " answered : of the harmonies I know noth- 
 ing, but I want to have one warlike which will sound 
 
The Development of Personality 147 
 
 the word or note which a brave man utters in the hour 
 of danger or stern resolve, or when his cause is failing 
 . . . (and he) meets fortune with calmness and endur- 
 ance ; and another to be used by him in times of peace 
 and freedom of action. . . . These two harmonies I 
 ask you to leave : the strain of necessity and the strain 
 of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain 
 of the fortunate, the strain of courage and the strain of 
 temperance ; these, I say, leave." 
 
 Simmias draws a charming analogy in the Phcedo 
 between the relation of a beautiful and divine harmony 
 to the lyre, and that of the soul to the body ; Pythagoras 
 dreams upon the music of the spheres ; everywhere 
 the Greek is occupied with music, practical and theoreti- 
 cal. I find a lively picture of the times where in Book 
 VII of the Republic Socrates describes the activity of 
 the musical searchers : " By heaven," he says, " 'tis as 
 good as a play to hear them talking about their con- 
 densed notes, as they call them ; they put their ears 
 alongside of their neighbors . . . one set of them 
 declaring that they catch an intermediate note and have 
 found the least interval which should be the unit of 
 measurement ; the others maintaining the opposite 
 theory, that the two sounds have passed into the same, 
 each party setting their ears before their understanding." 
 
 And in this last clause we have a perfectly explicit 
 statement of that lack of personal relation to facts which 
 makes Greek music as meagre as Greek science. We 
 found it the common fault of Greek scientific thought 
 that it took more satisfaction in an ingenious argument 
 upon a pseudo-fact than in a solid conclusion based 
 upon plain observation and reasoning. So here, Socrates 
 is satirizing even the poor attempt at observation made 
 by these people, and sardonically accuses them of what 
 
148 The English Novel 
 
 is the very pride of modern science — namely, of setting 
 their ears before their understanding, — that is, of rigor- 
 ously observing the facts before reasoning upon them. 
 
 At any rate, in spite of all this beautiful and compre- 
 hensive talk of harmony and the like, the fact is clear 
 that the Greek had no harmony worth the name; he 
 knew nothing but the crude concords of the octave, the 
 fourth and the fifth ; moreover, his melody was equally 
 meagre ; and altogether his ultimate flight in music was 
 where voices of men and women sang, accompanied in 
 unison or octave by the lyre, the flute and the like. 
 
 And if we consider the state of music after the passing 
 away of the Greek cultus up to the fifteenth century we 
 have much the same story to tell as was just now told of 
 mediaeval science. For a time the world's stock of tunes 
 is practically comprised in the melodies collected by 
 Gregory, known as the Gregorian Chant. Presently the 
 system of polyphonic music arises in which several 
 voices sing different melodies so arranged as not to jar 
 with each other. But when we now come down to the 
 sixteenth century we find a wonderful new activity in 
 music accompanying that in science. Luther in Ger- 
 many, Gondimel in France, push forward the song : in 
 Spain, Salinas of Salamanca studies ancient music for 
 thirty years, and finally arrives at the conclusion that the 
 Greek had no instrumental music and that all their 
 melody was originally derived from the order of syllables 
 in verse. In Italy, Monte verde announces what were 
 called his "new discords," and the beautiful maestro 
 Palestrina writes compositions in several parts, which 
 are at once noble, .simple and devout. England at this 
 time is filled with music, and by the end of the sixteenth 
 century the whole land is a-warble with the madrigals 
 and part-compositions of Weelkes, Wilbye, John Milton 
 
The Development of Personality 149 
 
 Sr., and the famous Dr. John Bull, together with those 
 of Tye, Tallis, Morley, Orlando Gibbons, and hundreds 
 more. But as yet modern music is not. There is no 
 orchestra; Queen Elizabeth's dinner- music is mainly 
 drums and trumpets. It is not until the middle of the 
 seventeenth century that Jenkins and Purcell begin to 
 write sonatas for a small number of violins with organ 
 accompaniment. 
 
 A curious note of the tendency towards instrumental 
 music at this time, however, is found in the fact that 
 people begin to care so little for the words of songs as 
 to prefer them in a foreign language. Henry Lawes, one 
 of the most famous musicians of the middle of the seven- 
 teenth century, he who suggested Milton's Comus and set 
 it to music, endeavored to rebuke this affectation, as he 
 supposed it, by a cruel joke : he wrote a song, of which 
 the words were nothing more than the index of an old 
 volume of musical compositions, and had it sung amidst 
 great applause. It must have been in the same course 
 of feeling that Waller — several of whose poems had 
 been set to music by Lawes — addressed to him the 
 following stanza : 
 
 " Let those who only warble long 
 And gargle in their throats a song 
 Content themselves with do, re, mi ; 
 Let words of sense be set by thee." 
 
 And so through Allegri, Stradella, the Scarlattis and a 
 thousand singers, players and composers we come to the 
 year 1685 in which both Bach and Handel were born. 
 Here we are fairly in the face of modern music. What 
 then is modern music? Music at this time bounds for-** 
 ward in the joy of an infinitely developable principle. 
 What is this principle? In its last analysis it is what 
 has now come to be called Harmony, or more specially 
 
150 The English Novel 
 
 Tonality. According to the modern musical feeling 
 when any tone is heard it is heard in its relation to some 
 other tone which from one circumstance or another may 
 have been taken as a basis of such relations. By a long 
 course of putting our ears before our understanding — 
 a course carried on by all those early musicians whose 
 names I have mentioned, each contributing some new 
 relation between tones which his ear had discovered — 
 we have finally been able to generalize these relations in 
 such a way as to make a complete system of tonality, 
 in which every possible tone brings to our ear an impres- 
 sion dependent on the tone or tones in connection 
 with which it is heard. As the Pupil at Sais ere long 
 began to see nothing alone, so we hear nothing alone. 
 You have only to remember that the singer nowadays 
 must always have the piano accompaniment in order to 
 satisfy our demand for harmony, that we never hear any 
 unmixed melody in set music, in order to see how com- 
 pletely harmony reigns in our music instead of bare 
 melody. We may then broadly differentiate the modern 
 music which begins at the same time with modern science 
 from all precedent music as Harmony contrasted with 
 Melody. To this we must add the idea of instrumental 
 harmony, — of that vast extension of harmonies rendered 
 possible by the great development of orchestral instru- 
 ments whose compass greatly exceeds that of the human 
 voice, which formerly limited all musical energy. 
 
 It is tempting, here, to push the theory of personality 
 into fanciful extremes. You have seen how the long 
 development of melody — melody being here the individ- 
 ual — receives a great extension in the polyphonic music, 
 where individual melodies move along side by side 
 without jostling : and how at length the whole suddenly 
 bursts into the highest type of social development, where 
 the melody is at once united with the harmony in the 
 
The Development of Personality 151 
 
 most intimate way, yet never loses its individuality ; where 
 the melody would seem to maintain towards the harmony 
 almost the ideal relation of our finite personality to the 
 Infinite personality, at once autonomous as finite, and 
 yet contained in, and rapturously united with the infinite. 
 
 But without pressing the matter, it now seems clear 
 from our sketch that just as in the seventeenth century the 
 spirit of man has opened up for the first time a perfectly 
 clear and personal relation with physical nature, and has 
 thus achieved modern science with Sir Isaac Newton, so 
 in this same century, the spirit of man opens up a new 
 relation to the infinite, to the unknown, and achieves 
 modern music, in John Sebastian Bach. Nor need I 
 waste time in defending this category in which I placed 
 music, as a relation to the Unknown. If you collect all 
 the expressions of poets and philosophers upon music, 
 you will find them converging upon this idea. No one 
 will think Thomas Carlyle sentimental : yet it is he who 
 says " music which leads us to the verge of the infinite, 
 and lets us gaze on that." 
 
 And so finally, with the first English novel of Rich- 
 ardson in 1739-40, we have completed our glance at the 
 simultaneous birth of modern science, modern music, 
 and the modern novel. 
 
 And we are now prepared to carry forward our third 
 and fourth lines of thought together: which were to 
 show the development of the novel from the Greek 
 Drama, and to illustrate the whole of the principles now 
 advanced with some special studies of the modern novel. 
 These two lines will mutually support each other, and 
 will emerge concurrently, as we now go on to study the 
 life and works of that George Eliot who has so recently 
 solved the scientific problem which made her life one of 
 the most pathetic and instructive in human history. 
 
152 The English Novel 
 
 VII 
 
 Our custom, in these studies, of passing at the earliest 
 possible moment from the abstract to the concrete, and 
 of verifying theory by actual experiment, arrives at a sort 
 of beautiful climax and apotheosis as we proceed from 
 the abstract principles formulated in the last six lectures 
 to their exquisite concrete and verification in George 
 Eliot. 
 
 At our last meeting we saw that during a period of 
 time which we fix to a point by sweeping the mind from 
 the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, the 
 growing personality of man sent out three new processes 
 which have remarkably changed and enlarged the whole 
 form of our individual and social structure. 
 
 I have found it highly useful in more than one con- 
 nection to acquire a clear notion of these three processes 
 by referring them all to a common physical concept of 
 direction. For instance : we may with profit construct 
 a diagram in which it shall appear that at the Renaissance 
 period mentioned the three great and distinctive new 
 personal relations which man established for himself 
 were (1) a relation upward, 
 
 Unknown (Music) 
 
 A 
 
 Personality > Fellow-man. (The Novel) 
 
 V 
 
 Nature. (Physical Science.) 
 towards the Unknown, (2) a relation on our own level, a 
 
The Development of Personality 153 
 
 relation towards our equal, — that is, towards our fellow- 
 man, and (3) a relation towards our inferior, — in the 
 sense that the world is for man's use, is made for man, — 
 that is, towards physical nature. We have seen how 
 from the beginning of man's history these three relations 
 did not acquire the vividness and energy of personal 
 relations, nor any fixed or developable existence at all, 
 until the period mentioned. 
 
 I cannot help expressing earnest regret that the limits 
 of my present subject have not allowed me to give any 
 development whatever to this conception of the actual 
 significance of the Renaissance as a significance which, 
 crystallizing into Music, the Novel and Science, has left 
 us those as the solid residuum of that movement ; and it 
 is not a mere sentimental generalization but a hard,, 
 scientific and unifiable fact that music is the distinctive 
 form in which man's new relation to what is above him 
 has expressed itself, the novel is the distinctive form in 
 which man's new personal relation to his fellow-man has 
 expressed itself, and science is the distinctive form in 
 which man's new personal relation to nature has expressed 
 itself. 
 
 I am perfectly well aware that when one thinks of the 
 Italian Opera with its banalities and fleshly frenzies ; or 
 when one thinks of the small, low, unmanly, sensual lives 
 which so many musicians have led under our eyes : 
 one may well feel inclined to dispute this category 
 to which I have assigned music, and to question 
 whether music does belong to this wholly religious 
 sphere. I long to be able to remind such questioners of 
 the historic fact that music has been brought into the 
 church as the mouthpiece of our worship not by the sen- 
 timental people but by the sternest reformers and the 
 most untheoretical and hard-handed workers : I long to 
 
154 The English Novel 
 
 remind them how it is the same Luther who would meet 
 his accusers though ten thousand devils backed them, 
 that cares most assiduously for the hymns of the church, 
 makes them, sings them : how it is the same Puritan who 
 fights winter and hunger and the savage, that is noted 
 for his sweet songs and must have his periodic opening 
 of the musical avenue up towards the great God : or, 
 passing far back to the times before music was music, 
 and so making the case stronger, I long to remind them 
 of a single line in a letter from Pliny the younger to 
 Trajan in the year no, which puts before me a dewy 
 morning- picture of music and Christian devotion that 
 haunts my imagination — a line in which Pliny mentions 
 some people who were in the habit of " meeting on a 
 certain day before daylight and singing a hymn to Christ 
 as to a God " : or how in the fourth century the very 
 Ambrosian chant which preceded the Gregorian chant is 
 due to the fact that the good Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, 
 casting about for solace, collects a number of psalm tunes 
 and hymns and appoints them to be sung for the express 
 purpose of consoling his people in their afflictions ; and 
 coming down to the birth of modern music, I long to 
 remind these questioners of the noble and simple devout- 
 ness which Palestrina brings into the church worship 
 with his music, of the perfect calm creative life of John 
 Sebastian Bach whose music is so compact of devotion 
 as to have inspired the well-known declaration that 
 wherever it is played, it makes that place a church ; and 
 finally, I long to remind them how essential a part of 
 every modern church the organ-loft and the choir have 
 come to be, and in full view of the terrible mistakes which 
 these often make, of the screechy Italian opera music 
 which one hears floating from this or that church on a 
 Sunday, of the wholly undevout organ music with which 
 
The Development of Personality 155 
 
 the unfortunate flippant-minded organist often sends us 
 forth, — to declare that music is yet, as we have seen, a 
 new art, that we have not really learned the uses of it, 
 much less the scope of it, that indeed not all of us have 
 even yet acquired the physical capacity or ear for it, — 
 and that, finally, we are at the very threshold of those 
 sweet applications we may hereafter make of that awful 
 and mysterious power in music to take up our yearnings 
 towards the infinite, at the point where words and all 
 articulate utterance fail, and bear them onward often to 
 something like a satisfactory nearness to their divine 
 object. 
 
 But all this must be left aside, and we must now pass 
 on to consider that remarkable writer who for something 
 more than twenty years past has been chaining the atten- 
 tion of our English world purely by virtue of her extra- 
 ordinary endowment as to all three of these relations 
 which I have here sketched in diagram — these relations 
 of the growing personality of man to that which is above 
 him, or the unknown, — to that which is on his level, or 
 his fellow-man, — and to that which is beneath him, or 
 nature, — which have resulted respectively in music, the 
 novel, and science. 
 
 If I could be allowed to construct a final text and 
 sweet summary of all the principles which have been 
 announced in the preceding lectures, I could make none 
 more complete than is furnished me by two English 
 women who have recently been among us, and who, in 
 the quietest way have each made an epoch, not only in 
 literature, but in life. These two women are Elizabeth 
 Barrett Browning and George Eliot ; and although our 
 studies now lie more immediately with the latter, I shall 
 find a frequent delight as we go on in comparing her 
 printed words with those of Mrs. Browning, and in show- 
 
156 The English Novel 
 
 ing through what diverse forms of personality — so diverse 
 as to be often really . complementary to each other — 
 these two have illustrated the doctrines I have hitherto 
 expounded. 
 
 In beginning to get some clear view of the actual living 
 personality which I have hitherto designated as George 
 Eliot, one is immediately struck with the fact that it has 
 enjoyed more of what Jack Falstaff would call a com- 
 modity of good names than falls to the lot of most mor- 
 tals. As one rehearses these names it is curious also to 
 reflect what a different train of associations each one 
 suggests. It is hard to believe that Marian Evans, Amos 
 Barton (for when the editor of Blackwood's was corres- 
 ponding with her about her first unsigned manuscript, 
 which was entitled The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos 
 Barton, I find him addressing her as " My dear Amos "), 
 George Eliot, Mrs. Lewes, and Mrs. Cross are one and 
 the same person. Amid all these appellations I find 
 myself most strongly attracted towards that of George 
 Eliot. This was the name which she chose for herself, it 
 was under this name that she made her great successes, 
 it was by this name that she endeared herself to all who 
 love great and faithful work ; and surely — if one may 
 paraphrase Poe — the angels call her George Eliot. 
 Since therefore we are mainly interested in Marian 
 Evans, or Mrs. Lewes, or Mrs. Cross, just in so far as 
 they bear intimate relations to George Eliot, I find my- 
 self drawn, in placing before you such sketch as I have 
 been able to make of this remarkable personage, to begin 
 with some account of the birth of the specific George 
 Eliot, and having acquired a view of the circumstances 
 attending that event, to look backward and forward from 
 that as a central point at the origin and life of Marian 
 Evans on the one hand, and of Mrs. Lewes and Mrs. 
 Cross on the other. 
 
The Development of Personality 157 
 
 On a certain night in the autumn of 1856 the editor 
 of Blackwood's Magazine was seated in an apartment 
 of his own house reading a manuscript which he had 
 lately received from London, called The Sad Fortunes of 
 the Rev. Amos Barton. About 1 1 o'clock in the evening 
 Thackeray, who had been staying with him and had been 
 out to dinner, entered the room, and the editor remarked, 
 " Do you know I think I have lighted upon a new author 
 who is uncommonly like a first-class passenger? " 
 
 Hereupon he read to Thackeray a passage from the 
 manuscript which he held in his hand. We are able to 
 identify this passage, and it seems interesting to repro- 
 duce it here, not only as a specimen of the kind of 
 matter which was particularly striking to the editor of a 
 great magazine twenty-five years ago, but as about the 
 first tangible utterance of the real George Eliot. The 
 passage occurs early in the second chapter of the story. 
 In the first chapter we have had some description of the 
 old church and the existing society in Shepperton 
 "twenty-five years ago," which dating from 1856 would 
 show us that village about the year 1830-31. In the 
 second chapter we are immediately introduced to the 
 Rev. Amos Barton, and the page or two which our 
 editor read to Thackeray was this : 
 
 Look at him as he winds through the little churchyard ! 
 The silver light that falls aslant on church and tomb, enables 
 you to see his slim black figure, made all the slimmer by tight 
 pantaloons. He walks with a quick step, and is now rapping 
 with sharp decision at the vicarage door. It is opened with- 
 out delay by the nurse, cook, and housemaid, all at once, — 
 that is to say, by the robust maid-of-all work, Nanny ; and as 
 Mr. Barton hangs up his hat in the passage, you see that a 
 narrow face of no particular complexion, — even the small- 
 pox that has attacked it seems to have been of a mongrel, 
 indefinite kind, — with features of no particular shape, and 
 
158 The English Novel 
 
 an eye of no particular expression, is surmounted by a slope 
 of baldness gently rising from brow to crown. You judge 
 him, rightly, to be about forty. The house is quiet, for it is 
 half-past ten, and the children have long been gone to bed. 
 He opens the sitting-room door; but instead of seeing his 
 wife, as he expected, stitching with the nimblest of fingers 
 by the light of one candle, he finds her dispensing with the 
 light of a candle altogether. She is softly pacing up and 
 down by the red fire-light, holding in her arms little Walter, 
 the year-old baby, who looks over her shoulder with large 
 wide-open eyes, while the patient mother pats his back with 
 her soft hand, and glances with a sigh at the heap of large 
 and small stockings lying unmended on the table. 
 
 She was a lovely woman, — Mrs. Amos Barton : a large, 
 fair, gentle Madonna, with thick, close chestnut curls beside 
 her well rounded cheeks, and with large, tender, short-sighted 
 eyes. The flowing lines of her tall figure made the limpest 
 dress look graceful, and her old frayed black silk seemed to 
 repose on her bust and limbs with a placid elegance and 
 sense of distinction, in strong contrast with the uneasy sense 
 of being no fit, that seemed to express itself in the rustling 
 of Mrs. Farquhar's gros de Naples. The caps she wore 
 would have been pronounced, when off her head, utterly 
 heavy and hideous, — for in those clays even fashionable 
 caps were large and floppy ; but surmounting her long, 
 arched neck, and mingling their borders of cheap lace and 
 ribbon with her chestnut curls, they seemed miracles of suc- 
 cessful millinery. Among strangers she was shy and tremu- 
 lous as a girl of fifteen ; she blushed crimson if any one 
 appealed to her opinion ; yet that tall, graceful, substantial 
 presence was so imposing in its mildness that men spoke to 
 her with an agreeable sensation of timidity. ... I venture to 
 say, Mrs. Barton would never have grown half so angelic if 
 she had married the man you would perhaps have had in 
 your eye for her, — a man with sufficient income and abun- 
 dant personal eclat. Besides, Amos was an affectionate 
 husband, and, in his way valued his wife as his best 
 treasure. 
 
The Development of Personality 159 
 
 " I wish we could do without borrowing money, and yet 
 I don't see how we can. Poor Fred must have some new 
 shoes; I couldn't let him go to Mrs. Bond's yesterday 
 because his toes were peeping out, dear child ! and I can't 
 let him walk anywhere except in the garden. He must have 
 a pair before Sunday. Really, boots and shoes are the 
 greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn 
 and turn about, and make old look like new; but there's no 
 coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are." 
 
 Mrs. Barton was playfully undervaluing her skill in meta- 
 morphosing boots and shoes. She had at that moment on her 
 feet a pair of slippers which had long ago lived through the 
 prunella phase of their existence, and were now running a 
 respectable career as black silk slippers, having been neatly 
 covered with that material by Mrs. Barton's own neat fin- 
 gers. Wonderful fingers those ! they were never empty ; for 
 if she went to spend a few hours with a friendly parishioner, 
 out came her thimble and a piece of calico or muslin, which 
 before she left, had become a mysterious little garment with 
 all sorts of hemmed ins and outs. She was even trying to 
 persuade her husband to leave off tight pantaloons, because 
 if he would wear the ordinary gun-cases, she knew she could 
 make them so well that no one would suspect the tailor. 
 
 But by this time Mr. Barton has finished his pipe, the 
 candle begins to burn low, and Mrs. Barton goes to see if 
 Nanny has succeeding in lulling Walter to sleep. Nanny is 
 that moment putting him in the little cot by his mother's 
 bedside ; the head with its thin wavelets of brown hair, in- 
 dents the little pillow ; and a tiny, waxen, dimpled fist hides 
 the rosy lips, for baby is given to the infantine peccadillo of 
 thumb-sucking. 
 
 So Nanny could now join in the short evening prayer, and 
 all go to bed. 
 
 Mrs. Barton carried up stairs the remainder of her heap of 
 stockings, and laid them on a table close to her bedside, 
 where also she placed a warm shawl, removing her candle, 
 before she put it out, to a tin socket fixed at the head of her 
 bed. Her body was very weary, but her heart was not 
 heavy, in spite of Mr. Woods the butcher, and the transitory 
 
160 The English Novel 
 
 nature of shoe-leather ; for her heart so overflowed with 
 love, she felt sure she was near a fountain of love that would 
 care for her husband and babes better than she could foresee ; 
 so she was soon asleep. But about half-past five o'clock in 
 the morning, if there were any angels watching round her 
 bed, — and angels might be glad of such an office, — they 
 saw Mrs. Barton rise up quietly, careful not to disturb the 
 slumbering Amos, who was snoring the snore of the just; 
 light her candle, prop herself upright with the pillows, 
 throw the warm shawl round her shoulders, and renew her 
 attack on the heap of undarned stockings. She darned 
 away until she heard Nanny stirring, and then drowsiness 
 came with the dawn ; the candle was put out, and she sank 
 into a doze. But at nine o'clock she was at the breakfast- 
 table busy cutting bread-and-butter for five hungry mouths, 
 while Nanny, baby on one arm, in rosy cheeks, fat neck, and 
 night-gown, brought in a jug of hot milk-and-water. 
 
 Although Thackeray was not enthusiastic, the editor 
 maintained his opinion and wrote the author that the 
 manuscript was " worthy the honors of print and pay," 
 addressing the author as " My dear Amos." Considera- 
 ble correspondence followed in which the editor was free 
 in venturing criticisms. The author had offered this 
 as the first of a series to be called Scenes of Clerical 
 Life ; but no others of the series were yet written and 
 the editor was naturally desirous to see more of them 
 before printing the first. This appears to have made 
 the author extremely timid, and for a time there was 
 doubt whether it was worth while to write the remaining 
 stories. For the author's encouragement, therefore, it 
 was determined to print the first story without waiting 
 to see the others ; and accordingly in Blackwood's Maga- 
 zine for January, 1857, the story of Amos Barton was 
 printed. This stimulus appears to have had its effect; 
 and after the January number, each succeeding issue of 
 
The Development of Personality 161 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine contained an instalment of the 
 series known as Scenes of Clerical Life until it was 
 concluded in the number for November, 1857, the whole 
 series embracing the three stories of Amos Barton, Mr. 
 GilfiPs Love-Story and Janet's Repentance. It was only 
 while the second of these — Mr. GilfiPs Love-Story — was 
 appearing in the Magazine that our George Eliot was 
 born ; for it was at this time that the editor of the Maga- 
 zine was instructed to call the author by that name. 
 
 The hold which these three stories immediately took 
 upon all thinking people was most remarkable. In Jan- 
 uary, 1858 — that is, two months after the last instalment 
 of Janet 's Repentance — I find Charles Dickens writing 
 this letter : 
 
 " My dear Longford, — 
 
 " Will you — by such roundabout ways and methods as 
 may present themselves — convey this note of thanks to the 
 author of ' Scenes of Clerical Life,' whose two first stories I 
 can never say enough of, I think them so truly admirable. 
 But, if those two volumes, or a part of them, were not written 
 by a woman — then should I begin to believe that I am a 
 woman myself. 
 
 " Faithfully yours always, 
 
 "Charles Dickens." 
 
 It is especially notable to find that the editor of the 
 Magazine himself completely abandoned all those con- 
 servative habits of the prudent editor which have arisen 
 from a thousand experiences of the vapid failures of this 
 and that new contributor who seemed at first sure to 
 sweep the world, and which always teach every conduc- 
 tor of a great magazine at an early stage of his career to 
 be extremely guarded in his expressions to new writers 
 however promising they may appear. This traditional 
 guardedness seems to have been completely swept away 
 
1 62 The English Novel 
 
 by these stories ; Mr. Blackwood writes letter after let- 
 ter to George Eliot, full of expressions that the hack- 
 neyed editor would ordinarily consider extravagant : and 
 finally in a letter concerning the publication in book- 
 form of the magazine-stories : " You will recollect . . . 
 my impression was that the series had not lasted long 
 enough in the Magazine to give you a hold on the 
 general public, although long enough to make your 
 literary reputation. Unless in exceptional cases, a very 
 long time often elapses between the two stages of repu- 
 tation — the literary and the public. Your progress will 
 be sure, if not so quick as we could wish." 
 
 Before examining these stories, it seems a pleasant 
 method of pursuing our account of the George Eliot 
 thus introduced to go forward a little to the time when 
 a curious and amusing circumstance resulted in revealing 
 her actual name and sex. Thus we seem to be making 
 this lovely star rise before us historically as it rose before 
 the world. I have just spoken of the literary interest 
 which the stories excited in Mr. Blackwood : the per- 
 sonal interest appears to have been as great, and he was 
 at first very anxious to make the acquaintance of his new 
 contributor in the flesh. He was given to understand, 
 however, that the contributor wished to remain obscure, 
 for the present, and he forbore further inquiries with 
 scrupulous delicacy. It happened, however, that pres- 
 ently the authorship of Scenes of Clerical Life was claimed 
 for another person, and the claim soon assumed con- 
 siderable proportions. Certain residents about Nuneaton, 
 in Warwickshire — where in point of fact George Eliot 
 had been born and brought up — felt sure they recognized 
 in the stories of Amos Barton and Mr. Gilfil portraits of 
 people who had actually lived in that country, and began 
 to inquire what member of their community could have 
 
The Development of Personality 163 
 
 painted these portraits. Presently, while the stories were 
 running in the magazine, a newspaper published in the 
 Isle of Man boldly announced that a certain Mr. Liggins 
 of Nuneaton was their author. The only claim to 
 literary power Mr. Liggins had, it seems, lay in the cir- 
 cumstance that he had run through a fortune at Cam- 
 bridge : and in fact he himself denied the charge at first. 
 But immediately upon the heels of Sce?ies of Clerical 
 Life appeared Adam Bede, and the honor of that great 
 work was so seductive that for some reason or other — 
 whether because the reiteration of his friends had per- 
 suaded him that he actually did write the works, in some 
 such way as it is said that a man may tell a lie so often 
 and long that he will finally come to believe it himself, 
 or for whatever other reason — it seems that Mr. Liggins 
 so far compromised himself that, without active denial 
 by him, a friendly clergyman down in Warwickshire sent 
 a letter to the Times formally announcing Liggins as 
 the author of Scenes of Clerical Life and of Adam Bede. 
 Hereupon appeared a challenge from the still mythical 
 George Eliot, inviting Mr. Liggins to make a fair test 
 of his capacity by writing a chapter or two in the style 
 of the disputed works. The Blackwoods were thickly 
 besieged with letters from various persons earnestly 
 assuring them that Liggins was the author. To add to 
 the complications, it was given out that Liggins was 
 poor, so that many earnest persons wrote to the Blaok- 
 woods declaring that so great a genius ought not to be 
 hampered by want, and liberally offering their purses to 
 place him in such condition that he might write without 
 being handicapped by care. It seems to have been 
 particularly troublesome to the Blackwoods to prevent 
 money from being misapplied in this way, — for they 
 were satisfied that Liggins was not the author j and they 
 
164 The English Novel 
 
 were made all the more careful by some previous expe- 
 riences of a similar kind ; in one of Blackwood's let- 
 ters to George Eliot he comically exclaims that " some 
 years ago a rascal nearly succeeded in marrying a girl 
 with money on the strength of being the author of a 
 series of articles in the Magazine." 
 
 Thus what with the public controversy between the 
 Liggins and anti-Liggins parties — for many persons 
 appear to have remained firmly persuaded that Liggins 
 was the true author — and what with the more legiti- 
 mate stimulus excited by the confirmatory excellence of 
 Adam Bede, the public curiosity was thoroughly aroused, 
 so that even before The Mill on the Floss appeared in 
 i860 it had become pretty generally known who " George 
 Eliot " was. 
 
 Here, then, would seem to be a fitting point for us 
 to pause a moment and endeavor to construct for our- 
 selves some definite figure of the real flesh-and- blood 
 creature who, up to this time, had remained the mere 
 literary abstraction called George Eliot. 
 
 It appeared that her real name was Marian Evans and 
 that she was the daughter of a respectable land surveyor 
 who had married and settled at Nuneaton in Warwick- 
 shire. Here she was born in November, 1820; and it 
 seems pleasant to reflect that but a few miles off in the 
 same county of Warwick was the birthplace of Shak- 
 spere, whose place among male writers seems more 
 nearly filled by Marian Evans or George Eliot among 
 female writers than by any other woman, so that we 
 have the greatest English man and the greatest English 
 woman born, though two centuries and a half apart in 
 time, but a few miles apart in space. 
 
 Here among the same thick hedges and green fields 
 of the fair English Midlands with which Shakspere was 
 
The Development of Personality 165 
 
 familiar Marian Evans lived for the first large part of 
 her life. Perhaps a more quiet, uneventful existence as 
 to external happenings could hardly be imagined ; and 
 that Marian Evans was among the quietest of the quiet 
 residents there seems cunningly enough indicated if we 
 remember that when the good people of Nuneaton first 
 began to suspect that some resident of that region had 
 been taking their portraits in Scenes of Clerical Life 
 none seemed to think for a moment of a certain Marian 
 Evans as possibly connected with the matter, and popu- 
 lar suspicion, after canvassing the whole ground, was 
 able to find only one person — to wit, the Mr. Liggins 
 just referred to — who seemed at all competent to such 
 work. 
 
 Of these demure, reserved, uneventful years of country 
 existence it is of course impossible to lay before you 
 any record : no life of George Eliot has yet been given 
 to the public. Sometime ago, however, I happened 
 upon a letter of Marian Evans's published in an English 
 paper, in which she refers with so much particularity to 
 this portion of her life, that I do not know how we 
 could gain a more vivid and authentic view thereof than 
 by quoting it here. Specifically, the letter relates to a 
 controversy that had sprung up as to who was the 
 original of the character of Dinah Morris, — that beauti- 
 ful Dinah Morris you will remember in Adam Bede, 
 — solemn, fragile, strong Dinah Morris, the woman- 
 preacher whom I find haunting my imagination in 
 strange but entrancing unions of the most diverse forms, 
 as if, for instance, a snow- drop could also be St. Paul, 
 as if a kiss could be a gospel, as if a lovely phrase of 
 Chopin's most inward music should become suddenly 
 an Apocalypse revealing us Christ in the flesh, — that 
 rare, pure and marvelous Dinah Morris who would 
 
1 66 The English Novel 
 
 alone consecrate English literature if it had yielded no 
 other gift to man. It would seem that possibly a dim 
 suggestion of such a character may have been due to a 
 certain aunt of hers, Elizabeth Evans, whom Marian had 
 met in her girlhood ; but this suggestion was all ; and 
 the letter shows us clearly that the character of Dinah 
 Morris was almost an entire creation. The letter is as 
 follows : 
 
 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 Derbyshire, 
 six or seven years before he married my mother. There 
 was hardly any intercourse between my father's family, resi- 
 dent in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family — few 
 and far-between visits of (to my childish feelings) strange 
 uncles and aunts and cousins from my father's far-off native 
 county, 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, 
 so far as I can recall the dim outline of things — are what I 
 remember of northerly relations 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 Evangel- 
 ical belief, and earnestly endeavoring to shape this anoma- 
 lous English-Christian life of ours into some consistency 
 with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New Testa- 
 ment. I was delighted to see my aunt. Although I had 
 
The Development of Personality 167 
 
 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 we 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 description 
 I have heard my father and half-sister give, prevented her 
 from the exercise of discretion under the promptings of her 
 zeal. But this vehemence was now subdued by age and 
 sickness; she was very gentle and quiet in her manners — 
 very loving — and (what she must have been from the very 
 first) a truly religious soul, in whom the love of God and 
 love of man were fused together. There was nothing 
 highly distinctive in her religious conversation. I had had 
 much intercourse with pious Dissenters before. The only 
 freshness I found in our talk came from the fact that she had 
 been the greater part of her life a Wesleyan, and though she 
 left the society when women were no longer allowed to 
 preach, and joined the new Wesleyans, she retained the 
 character of thought that belongs to the genuine old Wes- 
 leyan. I had never talked with a Wesleyan before, and we 
 used to have little debates about predestination, for I was 
 then a strong Calvinist. Here her superiority came out, 
 and I remember now, with loving admiration, one thing 
 which at the time I disapproved. It was not strictly a con- 
 sequence of her Arminian belief, and at first sight might 
 seem opposed to it, — yet it came from the spirit of love 
 which clings to the bad logic of Arminianism. When my 
 uncle came to fetch her, after she had been with us a fort- 
 night or three weeks, he was speaking of a deceased minis- 
 ter, once greatly respected, who from the action of trouble 
 upon him had taken to small tippling, though otherwise not 
 culpable. " But I hope the good man's in heaven for all 
 that," said my uncle. " Oh, yes," said my aunt, with a deep 
 
1 68 The English Novel 
 
 inward groan of joyful conviction, " Mr. A.'s in heaven — 
 that's sure." This was at the time an offence to my stern, 
 ascetic, hard views — how beautiful it is to me now ! 
 
 As to my aunt's conversation, it is a fact that the only 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 interest- 
 ing 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 
 seemed to me that people should think Dinah'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 local and personal his- 
 tory of a small kind, connected with Staffordshire and Derby- 
 shire — you may imagine of what kind that is when I tell you 
 that I never remained in either of those counties more than 
 
The Development of Personality 169 
 
 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 the 
 vague, easily satisfied notion imperfectly instructed people 
 always have of portraits. It is not surprising that simple 
 men and women without pretension to enlightened discrim- 
 ination should think a generic resemblance 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. 
 
 It is easy to gather from this letter that whilst the 
 existence of Marian Evans was calm enough externally 
 her inner life was full of stirring events — of the most 
 stirring events, in fact, which can agitate the human soul : 
 for it is evident that she had passed along some quite 
 opposite phases of religious belief. In 185 1, after a visit 
 to the Continent, she goes — where all English writers 
 seem to drift by some natural magic — to London and 
 fixes her residence there. It is curious enough that with 
 all her clearness of judgment she works here for five 
 years, apparently without having perceived the vocation 
 for which her whole natural and acquired outfit had so 
 remarkably prepared her. We find her translating 
 
170 The English Novel 
 
 Spinoza's Ethics; not only translating but publishing 
 Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity and Strauss's Life of 
 Jesus. She contributes learned essays to The Westminster 
 Review ; it is not until the year 1856, when she is thirty- 
 six years old, that her first slight magazine story is sent 
 to Blackwood ; and even after his first commendations 
 her timidity and uncertainty as to whether she could 
 succeed in story-writing are so great that she almost 
 resolved to give it up. I should regard it as mournful, if 
 I could think it religious to regard anything as mournful 
 which has happened and is not revocable, that upon 
 coming to London Marian Evans fell among a group of 
 persons represented by George Henry Lewes. If one 
 could have been her spiritual physician at this time one 
 certainly would have prescribed for her some of those 
 warm influences which dissipate doubt by exposing it to 
 the fierce elemental heats of love, of active charity. 
 One would have prescribed for her the very remedy she 
 herself has so wisely commended in Janet's Repentance. 
 
 " 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 philosophers 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 ques- 
 tion. 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-question- 
 ings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of 
 consequences. Within the four walls where the stare and 
 glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued, — 
 where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender 
 
The Development of Personality 171 
 
 mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of man to man is 
 reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity ; bigotry can- 
 not confuse it; theory cannot pervert it ; passion, awed into 
 quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it." 
 
 Or one might have prescribed for her America, where 
 the knottiest social and moral problems disappear unac- 
 countably before a certain new energy of individual 
 growth which is continually conquering new points of 
 view from which to regard the world. 
 
 At the time to which we have now brought her history 
 Marian Evans would seem to have been a singularly 
 engaging person. She was small in stature and her face 
 was what would be called homely, here ■ but she was widely 
 read, master of several languages, a good talker and lis- 
 tener ; and beyond all, every current of testimony runs 
 towards a certain intensity and loving fire which pervaded 
 her and which endowed her with irresistible magnetic 
 attraction for all sensitive souls that came near her. Her 
 love for home matters, and for the spot of earth where 
 she had been born ; her gentle affection for animals ; how 
 the Bible and Thomas a Kempis were her favorite books : 
 these and a thousand womanly traits I hope to bring out 
 as we study some of her greater works, — for with all her 
 reputed reserve I find scarcely any writer so sincerely 
 communicative and so frankly desirous of sympathy on 
 the part of her reader as George Eliot. In the next 
 lecture I shall ask leave to present you with some pictures 
 of the stage at which English novel-writing has arrived 
 under the recent hands of Scott, Thackeray and Dickens 
 when George Eliot is timidly offering her first manuscript 
 to Blackwood's ; and I shall then offer some quotations 
 from these first three stories — particularly from Janefs 
 Repentance which seems altogether the most important 
 of the three — and shall attempt to show distinctly what 
 
172 
 
 The English Novel 
 
 were the main new features of wit, of humor, of doctrine 
 and of method which were thus introduced into our lit- 
 erature, especially in connection with similar features 
 which about this same time were being imparted by 
 Mrs. Browning. 
 
 Meantime let me conclude by asking you to fix your 
 attention for a moment on this figure of Milly, sweet 
 wife of Amos Barton, going to bed with her unmended 
 basket of stockings in great fatigue yet in great love and 
 trust, and contrast it with that figure of Prometheus, 
 nailed to the Caucasian rock in pain and hate, which 
 formed the first object of these studies. What a pro- 
 digious spiritual distance we have swept over from the 
 Titan lying down to unrest, thundering defiance against 
 Jove's thunder as if clashing shield against shield, and 
 the tender-limbed woman whom the simple narrative 
 puts before us in these words : " Her body was very 
 weary, but her heart was not heavy . . . ; for her heart 
 so overflowed with love, she felt sure she was near a 
 fountain of love that would care for her husband and 
 babes better than she could foresee." Fixing your 
 attention upon this word "love," and reminding you 
 how, at the close of the last lecture, we found that the 
 whole movement of the human spirit which we have 
 traced here as the growth of personality towards the 
 unknown, towards fellow-man, towards nature, — result- 
 ing in music, in the novel, in science — that this whole 
 movement becomes a unity when we arrive at the fact 
 that it really imports a complete change in man's most 
 ultimate conception of things : a change, namely, from 
 the conception of Justice as the organic idea of moral 
 order, (a conception which we have seen yEschylus and 
 Plato vainly working out to the outrageous conclusions 
 of Prometheus, of the Republic,) to the conception of 
 
The Development of Personality 173 
 
 Love as the organic idea of moral order, a conception 
 which we are just now to see George Eliot working out 
 to the divinely-satisfactory conclusion of Milly Barton, 
 who conquers with gentle love a world which proved 
 refractory alike to the justice of Jove and the defiance 
 of Prometheus ; reminding you, I say, of this concurrent 
 change from feeble personality and justice to strong per- 
 sonality and love, what an amazing arc of progress we 
 have traversed in coming from ^Eschylus to George Eliot ! 
 And it is, finally, most interesting to find this change 
 receiving clear expression for the first time in English 
 literature in the works of the two women I have men- 
 tioned, Mrs. Browning and George Eliot. In this very 
 autumn when we have seen the editor of Blackwood's 
 Magazine reading the MS. of George Eliot's first story 
 to Thackeray, Mrs. Browning is sending Aurora Leigh 
 to print ; and, as I shall have frequent occasion to point 
 out, the burden of Aurora Leigh as well as of George 
 Eliot's whole cyclus of characters is love, love, love. 
 
 There is a charming scene in the first act of Bayard 
 Taylor's Prince Deukalion which, though not extending 
 to the height we have reached, yet very dramatically 
 sums up a great number of ideas that converge towards 
 it. In this scene Gasa, the Earth, mother of men, is 
 represented as tenderly meditating upon her son, man. 
 Near her stands a rose-tree, from one bud of which Love 
 is presently to emerge. She says : 
 
 " I change with man, 
 Mother, not more than partner, of his fate. 
 Ere he was born I dreamed that he might be 
 And through long ages of imperfect life 
 Waited for him. Then, vexed with monstrous shapes 
 That spawned and wallowed in primeval ooze, 
 I lay supine and slept, or seemed to sleep ; 
 And dreamed, or waking felt as in a dream, 
 
174 The English Novel 
 
 Some touch of hands, some soft delivering help. 
 And he was there ! His faint new voice I heard ; 
 His eye that met the sun, his upright tread, 
 Thenceforth were mine ! And with him came the palm, 
 The oak, the rose, the swan, the nightingale : 
 The barren bough hung apples to the sun, 
 Dry stalks made harvest : breezes in the woods 
 Then first found music, and the turbid sea 
 First rolled a crystal breaker to the shore. 
 His foot was on the mountains, and the wave 
 Upheld him : over all things huge and coarse 
 There came the breathing of a regal sway, 
 Which bent them into beauty. Order new 
 Followed the march of new necessity, 
 And what was useless, or unclaimed before, 
 Took value from the seizure^of his hands." 
 
 In the midst of like thoughts a bud on a rose-tree 
 which stands by Gaea bursts open, and Eros, the antique 
 god of young love, appears from it. 
 
 GJEA. 
 
 " Lithe, tricksome spirit ! art thou left alone 
 Of gods and all their intermediate kin 
 The sweet survivor ? Yet a single seed, 
 When soil and seasons lend their alchemy, 
 May clothe a barren continent in green." 
 
 EROS. 
 
 " Was I born, that I should die ? 
 Stars that fringe the outer sky 
 Know me : yonder sun were dim 
 Save my torch enkindle him. 
 Then, when first the primal pair 
 Found me in the twilight air, 
 I was older than their day, 
 Yet to them as young as they. 
 All decrees of fate I spurn ; 
 Banishment is my return ; 
 Hate and force purvey for me, 
 Death is shining victory." 
 
 
The Development of Personality 175 
 
 VIII 
 
 If you should be wandering meditatively along the 
 bank of some tiny brook, a brook so narrow that you can 
 leap across it without effort, so quiet in its singing that 
 its loudest tinkle cannot be heard in the next field, car- 
 rying upon its bosom no craft that would draw more 
 water than the curving leaf of a wild-rose floating down 
 stream, too small in volume to dream of a mill-wheel 
 and turning nothing more practical than maybe a piece 
 of violet-petal in a little eddy off somewhere, — if, I say, 
 you should be strolling alongside such a brook and should 
 see it suddenly expand, without the least intermediate 
 stage, into a mighty river, turning a thousand great 
 wheels for man's profit as it swept on to the sea, and 
 offering broad highway and favorable currents to a thou- 
 sand craft freighted with the most precious cargoes of 
 human aspiration : you would behold the aptest phys- 
 ical semblance of that spiritual phenomenon which we 
 witnessed at our last meeting, when in tracing the quiet 
 and mentally- way ward course of demure Marian Evans 
 among the suave pastorals of her native Warwickshire, we 
 came suddenly upon the year 1857 when her first ven- 
 ture in fiction — The Scenes of Clerical Life — appeared 
 in Blackwood's Magazine and magically enlarged the 
 stream of her influence from the diameter of a small 
 circle of literary people in London to the width of all 
 England. 
 
 At this point it seems interesting now to pause a 
 moment, to look about and see exactly what network 
 
176 The English Novel 
 
 English fiction had done since its beginning, only about 
 a century before, to note more particularly what were 
 the precise gains to humanity which Thackeray and 
 Dickens had poured in just at this time of 1857, and 
 thus to differentiate a clear view of the actual contribu- 
 tion which George Eliot was now beginning to make to 
 English life and thought. 
 
 It is not a pleasant task, however instructive, to leave 
 off looking at a rose and cast one's contemplation down 
 to the unsavory muck in which its roots are imbedded. 
 This, however, is what one must do when one passes from 
 the many-petalled rose of George Eliot's fiction to the 
 beginning of the English novel. 
 
 This beginning was as curious as it was unlooked-for 
 by the people engaged in it. In the year 1 740 a book 
 in two volumes called Pamela : or Virtue Rewarded, 
 was printed, in which Samuel Richardson took what 
 seems to have been the first revolutionary departure from 
 the wild and complex romances — such as Sir Philip 
 Sidney's Arcadia — which had formed the nearest 
 approach to the modern novel until then. At this time 
 Richardson was fifty years old, and probably the last 
 man in England who would have been selected as likely 
 to write an epoch-making book of any description. He 
 had worked most of his life as a printer, but by the 
 time referred to had gotten so far towards the literary 
 life as to be employed by booksellers to arrange indexes 
 and to write prefaces and dedications. It so happened 
 that on a certain occasion he was asked by two book- 
 sellers to write a volume of letters on different subjects 
 which might serve as models to uneducated persons — a 
 sort of Every Man His Own Letter Writer, or the like. 
 
 The letters, in order to be more useful, were to be upon 
 such subjects as the rustic world might likely desire to 
 
The Development of Personality 177 
 
 correspond about. Richardson thinks it over ; and pres- 
 ently writes to inquire, "Will it be any harm, in a piece 
 you want to be written so low, if we should instruct 
 them how they should think and act in common cases, 
 as well as indite? " This seemed a capital idea and in 
 the course of time, after some experiments and after 
 recalling an actual story he had once heard which gave 
 him a sort of basis, he takes for his heroine a simple 
 servant-girl, daughter of Goodman Andrews, a humbly 
 born English farmer, rather sardonically names her 
 Pamela after the Lady Pamela in Sir Philip Sidney's 
 Arcadia, carries her pure through a series of incredibly 
 villainous plots against her by the master of the house 
 where she is at service, who has taken advantage of the 
 recent death of his wife, Pamela's mistress, to carry 
 these on, and finally makes the master marry her in a fit 
 of highly spasmodic goodness, after a long course of the 
 most infamous but unsuccessful villainy, calls the book 
 Pamela ; or Virtue Rewarded, prints it, and in a very 
 short time wins a great host of admiring readers, inso- 
 much that since the first two volumes ended with the 
 marriage, he adds two more showing the married life of 
 Pamela and her squire. 
 
 The whole novel, like all of Richardson's, is written in 
 the form of letters passing between the characters. It 
 is related, apropos of his genius in letter-writing, that in 
 his boyhood he was the love-letter-writer-in-chief for 
 three of the young ladies of his town, and that he main- 
 tained this embarrassing position for a long time without 
 suspicion from either of the three. Richardson himself 
 announces the moral purpose of his book, saying that 
 he thinks it might " introduce a new species of writing 
 that might possibly turn young people into a course of 
 reading different from the pomp and parade of romance- 
 
178 The English Novel 
 
 writing, and . . . promote the cause of religion and 
 virtue ; " and in the preface to the continuation before- 
 mentioned he remarks as follows : " The two former 
 volumes of Pamela met with a success greatly exceeding 
 the most sanguine expectations; and the editor hopes" 
 (Richardson calls himself the editor of the letters) " that 
 the letters which compose these will be found equally 
 written to nature ; avoiding all romantic nights, improb- 
 able surprises, and irrational machinery; and that the 
 passions are touched where requisite ; and rules equally 
 new and practicable inculcated throughout the whole 
 for the general conduct of life." I have given these 
 somewhat tedious quotations from Richardson's own 
 words to show first that the English novel starts out 
 with a perfectly clear and conscious moral mission, and 
 secondly to contrast this pleasing moral announcement 
 of Richardson's with what I can only call the silly and 
 hideous realization of it which meets us when we come 
 actually to read this wonderful first English novel — 
 Pamela. 
 
 I have already given the substance of the first two 
 volumes in which the rich squire, Mr. B. (as he is called 
 throughout the novel) finally marries and takes home 
 the girl who had been the servant of his wife and against 
 whom, ever since that lady's death, he had been plotting 
 with an elaborate baseness which has never before been, 
 and I sincerely hope will never hereafter be described. 
 By this action Mr. B. has in the opinion of Richardson, 
 of his wife, the servant-girl and the whole contem- 
 porary world, saturated himself with such a flame of 
 saintliness as to have burnt out every particle of any 
 little misdemeanor he may have been guilty of in his 
 previous existence ; and I need only read you an occa- 
 sional line from the first four letters of the third volume 
 
The Development of Personality 179 
 
 in order to show the marvelous sentimentality, the un- 
 truth towards nature, and the purely commercial view of 
 virtue and of religion which make up this intolerable 
 book. At the opening of Volume III we find that 
 Goodman Andrews, the father of the bride, and his wife 
 have been provided with a comfortable farm on the estate 
 of Mr. B., and the second letter is from Andrews to his 
 daughter, the happy bride, Pamela. After rhapsodizing 
 for several pages Andrews reaches this climax -^ and it 
 is worth while observing that though only a rude farmer 
 of the eighteenth century, whose daughter was a servant 
 maid, he writes in the most approved epistolary style of 
 the period : 
 
 " When here in this happy dwelling and this well-stocked 
 farm, in these rich meadows and well-cropped acres, we look 
 around us and whichever way we turn our heads see bless- 
 ings upon blessings and plenty upon plenty : see barns well 
 stored, poultry increasing, the kine lowing and crowding 
 about us, and all fruitful ; and are bid to call all these our 
 own. And then think that all is the reward of our child's 
 virtue ! O, my dear daughter, who can bear these things ! 
 Excuse me ! I must break off a little ! For my eyes are as 
 full as my heart ; and I will retire to bless God, and your 
 honored husband." 
 
 Here there is a break in the page, by which the honest 
 farmer is supposed to represent the period of time occu- 
 pied by him in retiring, and dividing his blessing, as one 
 hopes, impartially, between the Creator and Pamela's 
 honored husband, — and the farmer resumes his writing : 
 
 " So — my dear child — I now again take up my pen. But 
 reading what I had written, in order to carry on the thread, 
 I can hardly forbear again being in like sort affected. — " 
 
 And here we have a full stop and a dash, during which 
 it is only fair to suppose that the honest Andrews 
 
180 The English Novel 
 
 manages to weep and bless up to something like a state 
 of repose. 
 
 Presently Pamela writes : 
 
 " My dear father and mother ; I have shown your letter to 
 my beloved. . . . * Dear good souls,' said he, ' how does every- 
 thing they say and everything they write manifest the worthi- 
 ness of their hearts ! Tell them ... let them find out 
 another couple as worthy as themselves and I will do as 
 much for them. Indeed I would not place them,' continued 
 the dear obliger, ' in the same county, because I would wish 
 two counties to be blessed for their sakes.' ... I could 
 only fly to his generous bosom . . . and with my eyes 
 swimming in tears of grateful joy . . . bless God and bless 
 him with my whole heart ; for speak I could not! but almost 
 choaked with my joy, sobbed to him my grateful acknowl- 
 edgements. . . . ' 'Tis too much, too much,' said I, in 
 broken accents : ' O, sir, bless me more gradually and more 
 cautiously — for I cannot bear it ! ' And indeed my heart 
 went flutter, flutter, flutter, at his dear breast as if it wanted 
 to break its too narrow prison to mingle still more inti- 
 mately with his own." 
 
 And a few lines further on we have this purely com- 
 mercial view of religion : 
 
 "And if our prayers shall be heard," continues Pamela, 
 " and we shall have the pleasure to think that his " (her hus- 
 band's) " advances in piety are owing not a little to them ; 
 . . . then indeed may we take the pride to think we have 
 repaid his goodness to us and that we have satisfied the debt 
 which nothing less can discharge." 
 
 Or again, in the same letter she exclaims anew : 
 
 " See, O see, my excellent parents, how we are crowned 
 with blessings upon blessings until we are the talk of all who 
 know us ; you for your honesty, I for my humility and vir- 
 tue ; " so that now I have " nothing to do but to reap all the 
 
The Development of Personality 181 
 
 rewards which this life can afford ; and if I walk humbly and 
 improve my blessed opportunities, will heighten and perfect 
 all, in a still more joyful futurity." 
 
 Perhaps a more downright creed, not only of world- 
 liness, but of " other- worldliness," was never more 
 explicitly avowed. 
 
 Now — to put the whole moral effect of this book into 
 a nutshell — Richardson had gravely announced it as a 
 warning to young servant-girls : but why might he not as 
 well have announced it as an encouragement to old vil- 
 lains ? The virtue of Pamela, it is true, is duly rewarded : 
 but Mr. B., with all his villainy, certainly fares better 
 than Pamela : for he not only receives to himself a para- 
 gon of a wife, but the sole operation of his previous vil- 
 lainy towards her is to make his neighbors extol him to 
 the skies as a saint, when he turns from it ; so that, 
 considering the enormous surplus of Mr. B.'s rewards as 
 against Pamela's, instead of the title Pamela ; or Virtue 
 Rewarded, ought not the book to have been called Mr. B.: 
 or Villainy Rewarded? 
 
 It was expressly to ridicule some points of Richard- 
 son's Pamela that the second English novel was written. 
 This was Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews t which 
 appeared in 1742. It may be that the high birth of 
 Fielding — his father was great-grandson of the Earl of 
 Denbigh, and a lieutenant-general in the army — had 
 something to do with his opposition to Richardson, who 
 was the son of a joiner \ at any rate, he puts forth a set of 
 exactly opposite characters to those in Pamela, takes a 
 footman for his virtuous hero, and the footman's mistress 
 for his villainous heroine, names the footman Joseph 
 Andrews, (explaining that he was the brother of Richard- 
 son's Pamela who you remember was the daughter of 
 
1 82 The English Novel 
 
 Goodman Andrews) makes principal figures of two parsons 
 (Parson Adams and Parson Trulliber, the former of whom 
 is set up as a model of clerical behavior, and the latter the 
 reverse) and with these main materials, together with an 
 important pedler, he gives us the book still called by 
 many the greatest English novel, originally entitled The 
 Adventures of Joseph Andrews and Bis Friend Abraha?n 
 Adams. 
 
 I will not, because I cannot, here cite any of the vital 
 portions of Joseph Andrews which produce the real 
 moral effect of the book upon a reader. I can only say 
 that it is not different in essence from the moral effect of 
 Richardson's book just described, though the tone is 
 more clownish. But for particular purposes of compari- 
 son with Dickens and George Eliot hereafter let me 
 recall to you in the briefest way two of the funny scenes. 
 To show that these are fair samples of the humorous 
 atmosphere of the book I may mention that they are both 
 among the number which were selected by Thackeray, 
 who was a keen lover of Fielding generally, and of his 
 Joseph Andrews particularly, for his own illustrations 
 upon his own copy of this book. 
 
 In the first scene Joseph Andrews is riding along the 
 road upon a very unreliable horse who has already 
 given him a lame leg by a fall, attended by his friend 
 Parson Adams. They arrive at an inn, dismount, and 
 ask for lodging; the landlord is surly and presently 
 behaves uncivilly to Joseph Andrews ; whereupon Parson 
 Adams, in defence of his lame friend, knocks the land- 
 lord sprawling upon the floor of his own inn; the 
 landlord, however, quickly receives reinforcements and 
 his wife, seizing a pan of hog's blood which stands on 
 the dresser, discharges it with powerful effect into 
 the good parson's face. While the parson is in this 
 
The Development of Personality 183 
 
 condition, enters Mrs. Slipshod — a veritable GrendeFs 
 mother — 
 
 " Terrible termagant, mindful of mischief," 
 
 and attacks the landlady, with fearsome results of up- 
 rooted hair and defaced feature. In scene second, Parson 
 Adams being in need of a trifling loan goes to see his 
 counter-parson Trulliber, who was noted, among other 
 things, for his fat hogs. Unfortunately Parson Adams 
 meets Mrs. Trulliber first, and is mistakenly introduced 
 by her to her husband as " a man come for some of his 
 hogs." Trulliber immediately begins to brag of the fat- 
 ness of his swine and drags Parson Adams to his sty 
 insisting upon examination in proof of his praise. Par- 
 son Adams complies ; they reach the sty and by way 
 of beginning his examination Parson Adams lays hold 
 of the tail of a very high-fed, capricious hog ; the beast 
 suddenly springs forward and throws Parson Adams 
 headlong into the deep mire. Trulliber bursts into 
 laughter and contemptuously cries : " Why, dost not 
 know how to handle a hog?" 
 
 It is impossible for lack of space to linger over further 
 characteristics of these writers. In 1 748 appears Rich- 
 ardson's Clarissa Harlowe in eight volumes, which from 
 your present lecturer's point of view is quite sufficiently 
 described as a patient analysis of the most intolerable 
 crime in all history or fiction, watered with an amount of 
 tears and sensibility as much greater than that in Pamela 
 as the cube of eight volumes is greater than the cube of 
 four volumes. 
 
 In 1753 Richardson's third and last novel, Sir Charles 
 Grandison, appeared; a work differing in motive, but 
 not in moral tone, from the other two, though certainly 
 less hideous than Clarissa Harlowe. 
 
184 Tne English Novel 
 
 Returning to bring up Fielding's novels, in 1743 ap- 
 peared his History of the Life of the late Mr. Jonathan 
 Wild the Great, in which the hero Jonathan Wild was a 
 taker of thieves, or detective, who ended his own career 
 by being hanged ; the book being written professedly as 
 " an exposition of the motives that actuate the unprinci- 
 pled great, in every walk and sphere of life, and which 
 are common alike to the thief or murderer on the small 
 scale and to the mighty villain and reckless conqueror 
 who invades the rights or destroys the liberties of na- 
 tions." In 1749 Fielding prints his Tom Jones, which 
 some consider his greatest book. The glory of Tom 
 Jones is Squire Allworthy, whom we are invited to re- 
 gard as the most miraculous product of the divine crea- 
 tion so far in the shape of man; but to your present 
 lecturer's way of thinking the kind of virtue represented 
 by Squire Allworthy is completely summed in the fol- 
 lowing sentence of the work introducing him in the 
 midst of nature. It is a May morning, and Squire All- 
 worthy is pacing the terrace in front of his mansion 
 before sunrise; "when," says Fielding, "in the full blaze 
 of his majesty up rose the sun, than which one object 
 alone in this lower creation could be more glorious, and 
 that Mr. Allworthy himself presented — a human being 
 replete with benevolence meditating in what manner he 
 might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by 
 doing most good to his creatures : " that is, in plain com- 
 mercial terms, how he might obtain the largest possible 
 amount upon the letter of credit which he found himself 
 forced to buy against the inevitable journey into those 
 foreign parts lying beyond the waters of death. 
 
 Out of Fielding's numerous other writings, dramatic 
 and periodical, it is perhaps necessary to mention farther 
 only his Amelia, belonging to the year 1 751, in which he 
 praised his first wife and satirized the jails of his time. 
 
The Development of Personality 185 
 
 We must now hastily pass to the third so-called classic 
 writer in English fiction, Tobias Smollett, who, after 
 being educated as a surgeon, and having experiences of 
 life as surgeon's mate on a ship of the line in the expedi- 
 tion to Carthagena, spent some time in the West Indies, 
 returned to London, wrote some satires, an opera, &c, 
 and presently when he was still only twenty-seven years 
 old captivated England with his first novel, Roderick 
 Random, which appeared in 1748, the same year with 
 Clarissa Harlowe. In 1751 came Smollett's Peregrine 
 Pickle, famous for its bright fun and the caricature it 
 contains of Akenside — Pleasures of Imagination Aken- 
 side — who is represented as the host in a very absurd en- 
 tertainment after the ancient fashion. In 1752 Smollett's 
 Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom gave the world a 
 new and very complete study in human depravity. In 
 1769, appeared his Adventures of an Atom: a theme 
 which one might suppose it difficult to make indecorous 
 and which was really a political satire; but the unfor- 
 tunate liberty of locating his atom as an organic particle 
 in various parts of various successive human bodies gave 
 Smollett a field for indecency which he cultivated to its 
 utmost yield. A few months before his death in 17 71 
 appeared his Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, certainly 
 his best novel. It is worth while noticing that in Hum- 
 phrey Clinker the veritable British poorly-educated and 
 poor- spelling woman begins to express herself in the 
 actual dialect of the species, and in the letters of Mrs. 
 Winifred Jenkins to her fellow maid-servant Mrs. Mary 
 Jones at Brambleton Hall, during a journey made by 
 the family to the North, we have some very worthy and 
 strongly-marked originals not only of Mrs. Malaprop and 
 Mrs. Partington, but of the immortal Sairey Gamp and of 
 scores of other descendants in Thackeray and Dickens, 
 here and there. 
 
1 86 The English Novel 
 
 I can quote but a few lines from the last letter of Mrs. 
 Winifred Jenkins concluding the Expedition of Hum- 
 phrey Clinker, which by the way is told entirely through 
 letters from one character to another, like Richardson's. 
 
 "To Mrs. Mary Jones at Brambleton Hall. 
 "Mrs. Jones, — 
 
 " Providence has bin pleased to make great 
 halteration in the pasture of our affairs. We were yesterday 
 three kiple chined by the grease of God in the holy bands of 
 matter-money." 
 
 (The novel winds up with a general marriage of pretty 
 much all parties concerned, mistress, maid, master and man) ; 
 " and I now subscribe myself Loyd, at your sarvice." Here 
 she of course describes the wedding. " As for Madam 
 Lashmiheygo, you nose her picklearities — her head to be 
 sure was fantastical ; and her spouse had wrapped her with 
 a long . . . clock from the land of the selvedges. . . . Your 
 humble servant had on a plain pea-green tabby sack, with 
 my runnela cap, ruff toupee, and side-curls. They said I 
 was the very moral of Lady Rickmanstone but not so pale — 
 that may well be, for her ladyship is my elder by seven good 
 years or more. Now, Mrs. Mary, our satiety is to suppurate ; 
 and we are coming home " — which irresistibly reminds us 
 of the later Mrs. Malaprop's famous explanation in The 
 Rivals : — " I was putrefied with astonishment." — " Present 
 my compliments to Mrs. Gwillim, and I hope she and I will 
 live upon dissent terms of civility. Being by Godls blessing 
 removed to a higher spear you'll excuse my being familiar 
 with the lower sarvints of the family, but as I trust you will 
 behave respectful and keep a proper distance you may 
 always depend on the good will and protection of 
 " Yours, 
 
 "W. Loyd." 
 
 To these three — Richardson, Fielding and Smollett 
 — I have now only to add the name of Laurence Sterne, 
 whose Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759, in order to 
 
The Development of Personality 187 
 
 complete a group of novel writers whose moral outcome 
 is jpuch the same and who are still reputed in all cur- 
 rent manuals as the classic founders of English fiction. 
 I need give no characterization of Sterne's book, which 
 is probably the best known of all. Every one recalls the 
 Chinese puzzle of humor in Tristram Shandy, which 
 pops something grotesque or indecent at us in every 
 crook. As to its morality, I know good people who love 
 the book ; but to me, when you sum it all up, its teach- 
 ing is that a man may spend his life in low, brutish, 
 inane pursuits and may have a good many little private 
 sins on his conscience, — but will nevertheless be per- 
 fectly sure of heaven if he can have retained the ability 
 to weep a maudlin tear over a tale of distress; or, in 
 short, that a somewhat irritable state of the lachrymal 
 glands will be cheerfully accepted by the Deity as a sub- 
 stitute for saving grace or a life of self-sacrifice. As I 
 have said, these four writers still maintain their position 
 as the classic novelists and their moral influence is still 
 copiously extolled; but I cannot help believing that 
 much of this praise is simply well-meaning ignorance. 
 I protest that I can read none of these books without 
 feeling as if my soul had been in the rain, draggled, 
 muddy, miserable. In other words, they play upon life 
 as upon a violin without a bridge, in the deliberate 
 endeavor to get the most depressing tones possible from 
 the instrument. This is done under pretext of showing 
 us vice. 
 
 In fine, and this is the characterization I shall use in 
 contrasting this group with that much sweeter group led 
 by George Eliot, the distinctive feature of these first 
 novelists is to show men with microscopic detail how 
 bad men may be. I shall presently illustrate with the 
 George Eliot group how much larger the mission of the 
 
1 88 The English Novel 
 
 novel is than this : meantime, I cannot leave this matter 
 without recording in the plainest terms that — for far 
 deeper reasons than those which Roger Bacon gave for 
 sweeping away the works of Aristotle — ^ifJLhad my way 
 with these classic books I would blot them from the face 
 of the earth. One who studies the tortuous behaviors 
 of men in history soon ceases to wonder at any human 
 inconsistency ; but, so far as I can marvel, I do daily 
 that we regulate by law the sale of gunpowder, the 
 storage of nitro-glycerine, the administration of poison — 
 all of which can hurt but our bodies — but are absolutely 
 careless of these things — so-called classic books, which 
 wind their infinite insidiousnesses about the souls of 
 our young children and either strangle them or cover 
 them with unremovable slime under our very eyes, 
 working in a security of fame and so-called classicism 
 that is more effectual for this purpose than the security 
 of the dark. Of this terror it is the sweetest souls who 
 know most. 
 
 In the beginning of Aurora Leigh, Mrs. Browning 
 speaks this matter so well that I must clinch my opinion 
 with her words. Aurora Leigh says, recalling her own 
 youthful experience : 
 
 ** Sublimest danger, over which none weeps, 
 When any young wayfaring soul goes forth 
 Alone, unconscious of the perilous road, 
 The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes, 
 To thrust his own way, he an alien, through 
 The world of books ! Ah, you ! — you think it fine, 
 You clap hands — ' A fair day ! ' — you cheer him on 
 As if the worst, could happen, were to rest 
 Too long beside a fountain. Yet behold, 
 Behold ! — the world of books is still the world ; 
 And worldlings in it are less merciful 
 And more puissant. For the wicked there 
 Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes 
 
The Development of Personality 189 
 
 Is edged from elemental fire to assail 
 A spiritual life ; the beautiful seems right 
 By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong 
 Because of weakness. .... 
 
 ... In the book-world, true, 
 There's no lack, neither, of God's saints and kings, 
 
 True, many a prophet teaches in the roads ; 
 
 But stay — who judges ? . 
 
 . . . The child there ? Would you leave 
 That child to wander in a battle-field 
 And push his innocent smile against the guns ; 
 Or even in a catacomb — his torch 
 Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all 
 The dark a-mutter round him ? not a child." 
 
 But to return to our sketch of English fiction, it is 
 now delightful to find a snowdrop springing from this 
 muck of the classics. In the year 1766 appeared Gold- 
 smith's Vicaf of Wakefield. 
 
 One likes to recall the impression which the purity of 
 this charming book made upon the German Goethe. 
 Fifty years after Goethe had read it — or rather after 
 Herder read to him a translation of the Vicar of Wake- 
 field while he was a law-student at Strasburg — the old 
 poet mentions in one of his letters to Zelter the strong 
 and healthy influence of this story upon him, just at the 
 critical point of his mental development ; and yesterday 
 while reading the just published Reminiscences of Thomas 
 Carlyle I found a pleasant pendant to this testimony of 
 Goethe's in favor of Goldsmith's novel in an entry of 
 the rugged old man in which he describes the far out- 
 look and new wisdom which he managed to conquer 
 from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, after many repulsions. 
 
 " Schiller done, I began Wilhelm Meister, a task I liked 
 perhaps rather better, too scanty as my knowledge of the 
 element, and even of the language, still was. Two years 
 
190 
 
 The English Novel 
 
 before I had at length, after some repulsion, got into the 
 heart of Wilhelm Meister, and eagerly read it through; 
 my sally out, after finishing, along the vacant streets of 
 Edinburgh, a windless, Scotch-misty morning, is still vivid 
 to me. ' Grand, serenely, harmoniously built together, far- 
 seeing, wise and true. Where, for many years, or in my 
 whole life before, have I read such a book?' Which I was 
 now, really in part as a kind of duty, conscientiously trans- 
 lating for my countrymen, if they would read it — as a select 
 few of them have ever since kept doing." 
 
 Of the difference between the moral effect of Gold- 
 smith's Vicar of Wakefield and the classical works just 
 mentioned I need not waste your time in speaking. No 
 great work in the English novel appears until we reach 
 Scott whose Waverley astonished the world in 18 14; and 
 during the intervening period from this book to the 
 Vicar of Wakefield perhaps there are no works notable 
 enough to be mentioned in so rapid a sketch as this 
 unless it be the society novels of Miss Burney, Evelina 
 and Cecilia, the dark and romantic stories of Mrs. 
 Radcliffe, the Caleb Williams of William Godwin — 
 with which he believed he was making an epoch because 
 it was a novel without love as a motive — Miss Edge- 
 worth's moral tales and the quiet and elegant narratives 
 of Jane Austen. 
 
 But I cannot help mentioning here a book which 
 occurs during this period, and which attaches itself by 
 the oddest imaginable ties to what was said, in a pre- 
 vious lecture, of the novel as the true meeting-ground 
 where the poetic imagination and the scientific imagina- 
 tion come together and incorporate themselves. Now, 
 to make the true novel — the work which takes all the 
 miscellaneous products of scientific observation and 
 carries them up into a higher plane and incarnates them 
 into the characters (as we call them) of a book, and 
 
The Development of Personality 191 
 
 makes them living flesh and blood like ourselves — to 
 effect this, there must be a true incorporation and 
 merger of the scientific and poetic faculties in one : it 
 is not sufficient if they work side by side like two horses 
 abreast, they must work like a man and wife with one 
 soul; or, to change the figure, their union must not 
 be mechanical, it must be chemical, producing a thing 
 better than either alone ; or, to change the figure again, 
 the union must be like that which Browning has noticed 
 as existing among the ingredients of a musical chord, 
 when, as he says, out of three tones, one makes not 
 a fourth, but a star. 
 
 Now the book I mean shows us the scientific faculty 
 and the poetic faculty — and no weak faculties either — 
 working along together, not merged, not chemically 
 united, not lighting up matters like a star, — with the 
 result, as seems to me, of producing the very funniest 
 earnest book in our language. It is The Loves of the 
 Plants, by Dr. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather, I believe, 
 to our own grave and patient Charles Darwin. The 
 Loves of the Plants is practically a series of little novels in 
 which the heroes and heroines belong to the vegetable 
 world. Linnaeus had announced the sexuality of plants, 
 and had made this idea a principle of classification, 
 the one-stamen class, Monandria, two-stamen class, 
 Diandria, etc., etc. All this the diligent and truly loving 
 Doctor framed into poetry, and poetry which so far as 
 technical execution goes is quite as good as the very 
 best of the Pope school which it follows. Here are a 
 few specimens of the poem : 
 
 "Descend, ye hovering Sylphs! aerial Quires; 
 And sweep with little hands your silver lyres ; 
 With fairy footsteps print your grassy rings, 
 Ye Gnomes ! accordant to the tinkling strings : 
 
192 The English Novel 
 
 While in soft notes I tune to oaten reed 
 Gay hopes, and amorous sorrows of the mead ; — 
 From giant Oaks, that wave their branches dark, 
 To the dwarf Moss that clings upon their bark, 
 What Beaux and Beauties crowd the gaudy groves, 
 And woo and win their vegetable Loves." 
 
 " First the tall Canna lifts his curled brow 
 Erect to heaven, and plights his nuptial vow ; 
 The virtuous pair, in milder regions born, 
 Dread the rude blast of Autumn's icy morn ; 
 Round the chill fair he folds his crimson vest, 
 And clasps the timorous beauty to his breast." 
 
 Here, however, a serious case presents itself ; in Canna 
 there was one stamen to one pistil, and this was com- 
 fortable ; but in the next flower he happened to reach — 
 the Genista or Wild Broom — there were ten stamens to 
 one pistil, that is, ten lovers to one lady ; but the intrepid 
 Doctor carries it through, all the same, managing the 
 whole point simply by airy swiftness of treatment : 
 
 " Sweet blooms Genista 1 in the myrtle shade, 
 And ten fond brothers woo the haughty maid." 
 
 But sometimes our botanist comes within a mere ace 
 of beautiful poetry, as for example : 
 
 " When o'er the cultured lawns and dreary wastes, 
 Retiring Autumn flings her howling blasts, 
 Bends in tumultuous waves the struggling woods, 
 And showers their leafy honors on the floods ; 
 In withering heaps collects the flowery spoil ; 
 And each chill insect sinks beneath the soil : 
 Quick flies fair Tulipa the loud alarms, 
 And folds her infant closer in her arms ; 
 In some lone cave, secure pavilion, lies, 
 And waits the courtship of serener skies." 
 
 1 Genista, or Planta Genista, origin of " Plantagenet," from the 
 original name-giver's habit of wearing a tuft of his native heath or 
 broom in his bonnet. 
 
The Development of Personality 193 
 
 This book has what it calls Interludes between the 
 parts, in which the Bookseller and the Poet discuss 
 various points arising in it; and its oddity is all the 
 more increased when one finds here a number of the 
 most just, incisive, right-minded and large views not 
 only upon the mechanism of poetry, but upon its 
 essence and its relations to other arts. 1 
 
 Nor need I dwell upon Scott's novels which stretch 
 from 1814 to 1 83 1, which we have all known from our 
 childhood as among the most hale and strengthening 
 waters in which the young soul ever bathed. They 
 discuss no moral problems, they place us in no relation 
 towards our fellow that can be called moral at all, they 
 belong to that part of us which is youthful, undebating, 
 wholly unmoral — though not immoral, — they are simply 
 always young, always healthy, always miraculous. And 
 I can only give now a hasty additional flavor of these 
 
 1 Carlyle's opinion of the book is given with a comical grimness 
 in his Reminiscences a propos of the younger Erasmus Darwin, 
 who used much to visit the Carlyles after they settled in London : 
 
 " Erasmus Darwin, a most diverse kind of mortal, came to seek 
 us out very soon ('had heard of Carlyle in Germany,' etc.), and 
 continues ever since to be a quiet house-friend, honestly attached ; 
 though his visits latterly have been rarer and rarer, health so poor, 
 I so occupied, etc., etc. He had something of original and sarcas- 
 tically ingenious in him; one of the sincerest, naturally truest, and 
 most modest of men ; elder brother of Charles Darwin (the famed 
 Darwin on Species of these days), to whom I rather prefer him 
 for intellect, had not his health quite doomed him to silence and 
 patient idleness — grandsons, both, of the first famed Erasmus 
 (' Botanic Garden,' etc.), who also seems to have gone upon 
 'species ' questions, 'omnia ex conchis' (all from oysters) being a 
 dictum of his (even a stamp he sealed with still extant), as this 
 present Erasmus once told me, many long years before this of 
 Darwin on Species came up among us ! Wonderful to me, as 
 indicating the capricious stupidity of mankind : never could read 
 a page of it, or waste the least thought upon it." 
 
 !3 
 
194 The English Novel 
 
 Scott days by reminding you of the bare names of 
 Thomas Hope, Lockhart, Theodore Hook, Mrs. Trol- 
 lope, Mrs. Gore and Miss Mitford. It seems always 
 comfortable in a confusion of this kind to have some 
 easily-remembered formula which may present us a 
 considerable number of important facts in portable 
 shape. Now the special group of writers which I wish 
 to contrast with the classic group, consisting of Dickens, 
 Thackeray, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Charlotte Bronte 
 and George Eliot, are at work between 1837 and 1857, 
 and for the purpose of giving you a convenient skeleton 
 or set of vertebrae containing some main facts affecting 
 the English novel of the nineteenth century I have 
 arranged this simple table which proceeds by steps of 
 ten years up to the period mentioned. 
 
 For example : since these all end in seven ; beginning 
 with the year 1807 it seems easy to remember that that 
 is the date of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from 
 Shakspere ; skipping ten years to 181 7, in this year 
 Blackwood's Magazine is established, a momentous event 
 in fiction generally and particularly as to George Eliot's ; 
 advancing ten years, in 1827 Buhver's Pelham appears 
 and also the very stimulating Specimens of German 
 Ro7nance which Thomas Carlyle edited; in 1837 the 
 adorable Pickwick strolls into fiction; in 1847 Thack- 
 eray prints Vanity Fair, Charlotte Bronte gives us Jane 
 Eyre, and Tennyson The Princess ; and finally in 1857, 
 as we have seen, George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life 
 are printed, while so closely upon it in the previous year 
 as to be fairly considered contemporary comes Mrs. 
 Browning's Aurora Leigh. 
 
 I do not know any more vivid way of bringing before 
 you the precise work which English fiction is doing at 
 the time George Eliot sets in than by asking you to run 
 
The Development of Personality 195 
 
 your eye along the last four dates here given, 1827, 
 1837, 1847, l8 57- Here, in 1S27, advances a well- 
 dressed man, bows a fine bow, and falls to preaching his 
 gospel : " My friends, under whatever circumstances a 
 man may be placed, he has it always in his power to be 
 a gentleman ; " and Bulwer's gentleman is always given 
 as a very manful and Christian being. I am well aware 
 of the modern tendency to belittle Bulwer, as a slight 
 creature ; but with the fresh recollection of his books as 
 they fell upon my own boyhood, I cannot recall a single 
 one which did not leave as a last residuum the picture 
 in some sort of the chivalrous gentleman impressed 
 upon my heart. I cheerfully admit that he sometimes 
 came dangerously near snobbery, and that he was un- 
 civil and undignified and many other bad things in the 
 New Timon and the Tennyson quarrel ; and I concede 
 that it must be difficult for us — you and me, who are 
 so superior and who have no faults of our own — to look 
 upon these failings with patience ; and yet I cannot help 
 remembering that every novel of Bulwer's is skillfully 
 written and entertaining, and that there is not an ignoble 
 thought or impure stimulus in the whole range of his 
 works. 
 
 But, advancing, here in 1837 comes on a preacher 
 who takes up the slums and raggedest miseries of 
 London and plumps them boldly down in the parlors 
 of high life and, like the boy in the fairy tale whose 
 fiddle compelled every hearer to dance in spite of him- 
 self, presently has a great train of people following him, 
 ready to do his bidding in earnestly reforming the 
 prisons, the schools, the workhouses, and the like, what 
 time the entire train are roaring with the genialest of 
 laughter at the comical and grotesque figures which this 
 preacher Dickens has fished up out of the London mud. 
 
196 The English Novel 
 
 But again : here in 1847 we have Thackeray exposing 
 shame and high vulgarity and minute wickedness, while 
 Charlotte Bronte and Tennyson, with the widest difference 
 in method, are for the first time expounding the doctrine 
 of co-equal sovereignty as between man and woman, 
 and bringing up the historic conception of the person- 
 ality of woman to a plane in all respects level with, 
 though properly differentiated from, that of man. It is 
 curious to see the depth of Charlotte Bronte's adoration 
 for Thackeray, the intense, high-pitched woman for the 
 somewhat slack and, as I always think, somewhat low- 
 pitched satirist ; and perhaps the essential utterance' of 
 Thackeray, as well as the fervent tone which I beg you 
 to observe is now being acquired by the English novel, 
 the awful consciousness of its power and its mission, may 
 be very sufficiently gathered from some of Charlotte 
 Bronte's words about Thackeray which occur in the 
 Preface to the second edition of \\<zx Jane Eyre. 
 
 " There is a man in our own days whose words are not 
 framed to tickle delicate ears ; who, to my thinking, comes 
 before the great ones of society much as the son of Imlah 
 came before the throned kings of Judah and Israel; and who 
 speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as 
 vital — a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of 
 Vanity Fair admired in high places ? I cannot tell ; but I 
 think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek- 
 fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand 
 of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time, they 
 or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead. 
 
 " Why have I alluded to this man ? I have alluded to him, 
 reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder 
 and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recog- 
 nized ; because I regard him as the first social regenerator 
 of the day — as the very master of that working corps who 
 would restore to rectitude the warped system of things." 
 
The Development of Personality 197 
 
 Into this field of beneficent activity which the novel 
 has created, comes in 1857 George Eliot : comes with no 
 more noise than that of a snow-flake falling on snow, 
 yet — as I have said and as I wish now to show with 
 some detail — comes as an epoch-maker, both by virtue 
 of the peculiar mission she undertakes and of the method 
 in which she carries it out. 
 
 What then is that peculiar mission? 
 
 In the very first of these stories, Amos Barton, she 
 announces it quite explicitly, though it cannot be sup- 
 posed at all consciously. Before quoting the passage, 
 in order that you may at once take the full significance 
 of it, let me remind you of a certain old and grievous 
 situation as between genius and the commonplace per- 
 son. For a long time every most pious thinker must 
 have found immediately in his path a certain obstructive 
 odium upon the Supreme Being (I speak with the great- 
 est reverence) in the matter of the huge and apparently 
 unjustifiable partiality of His spiritual gifts as between 
 man and man. 
 
 We have a genius (say) once in a hundred years : 
 but this hundred years represents three generations of 
 the whole world ; that is to say, here are three thousand 
 million commonplace people to one genius. 
 
 At once, with all the force of this really inconceivable 
 numerical majority, the cry arises, How monstrous ! 
 Here are three thousand millions of people to eat, sleep, 
 die, and rot into oblivion, and but one man is to have 
 such faculty as may conquer death, win fame, and live 
 beyond the worms ! 
 
 No one feels this inequality so keenly as the great 
 genius himself. I find in Shakspere, in Beethoven, in 
 others, often an outcrop of feeling which shows that 
 the genius cringes under this load of favoritism, as if he 
 
198 The English Novel 
 
 should cry in his lonesome moments, Dear Lord, why 
 hast thou provided so much for me, and so little for yonder 
 multitude ? In plain fact, it seems as if there was never 
 such a problem as this : what shall we do about these 
 three thousand millions of common men as against the 
 one uncommon man, to save the goodness of God from 
 seeming like the blind caprice of a Roman Emperor? 
 
 It is precisely here that George Eliot comes to the 
 rescue, and though she does not solve the problem — 
 no one expects to do that — at any rate she seems to me 
 to make it tolerable, and to take it out of that class of 
 questions which one shuts back for fear of nightmare 
 and insanity. Emerson has treated this matter, partially, 
 and from a sort of side-light. " But," he exclaims in the 
 end of his essay on The Uses of Great Men, "great men : 
 — the word is injurious. Is there caste ? Is there fate ? 
 What becomes of the promise to virtue ? . . . Why are 
 the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for 
 knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, 
 . . . and they make war and death sacred ; but what for 
 the wretches whom they hire and kill ? The cheapness 
 of man is everyday's tragedy." And more to this pur- 
 port. But nothing could be more unsatisfactory than 
 Emerson's solution of the problem. He unhesitatingly 
 announces on one page that the wrong is to be righted 
 by giving every man a chance in the future, in (say) dif- 
 ferent worlds ; every man is to have his turn at being a 
 genius : until " there are no common men." But two 
 pages farther on this elaborate scheme of redress is com- 
 pletely swept away by the announcement that after all 
 the individual is nothing, the quality is what abides, and 
 so falls away in that most marvelous delusion of his — 
 the strange wise man ! — that personality is to die away 
 into the first cause. 
 
The Development of Personality 199 
 
 On the other hand, if you will permit me to quote a 
 few pathetic words which I find in Carlyle's Reminis- 
 cences, in the nature of a sigh and aspiration and breathed 
 blessing all in one upon his wife and her ministrations 
 to him during that singular period of his life when he 
 suddenly left London and buried himself in his wild 
 Scotch farm of Craigenputtoch, I shall be able to show 
 you how Carlyle, most unconsciously, dreams toward a 
 far more satisfactory end of this matter than Emerson's, 
 and then how George Eliot actually brings Carlyle's 
 dream to definite form and at least partial fulfilment in 
 the very beginning of her work. Carlyle is speaking of 
 the rugged trials and apparent impossibilities of living at 
 Craigenputtoch when he and his Jeanie went there, and 
 how bravely and quietly she faced and overcame the 
 poverty, the ugliness, the almost squalor, which was their 
 condition for a long time. " Poverty and mean obstruc- 
 tion continued," he says, " to preside over it, but were 
 transformed by human valor of various sorts into a kind 
 of victory and royalty. Something of high and great 
 dwelt in it, though nothing could be smaller and lower 
 than many of the details. How blessed might poor 
 mortals be in the straitest circumstances, if only their 
 wisdom and fidelity to Heaven and to one another were 
 adequately great ! It looks to me now like a kind of 
 humble russet-coated epic, that seven years' settlement 
 at Craigenputtoch, very poor in this world's goods, but 
 not without an intrinsic dignity greater and more impor- 
 tant than then appeared ; thanks very mainly to her, and 
 her faculties and magnanimities, without whom it had 
 not been possible." 
 
 And now, let us hear the words in which George 
 Eliot begins to preach the " russet-coated epic " of every- 
 day life and of commonplace people. 
 
200 The English Novel 
 
 " The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have under- 
 taken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or 
 exceptional character ; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing 
 to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so 
 very far from remarkable, — a man whose virtues were not 
 heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast ; 
 who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but 
 was palpably and unmistakably commonplace ; who was not 
 even in love, but had had that complaint favourably many 
 years ago. ' An utterly uninteresting character ! ' I think I 
 hear a lady reader exclaim — Mrs. Farthingale, for example, 
 who prefers the ideal in fiction ; to whom tragedy means 
 ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the 
 adventures of some personage who is quite a ' character.' 
 
 " But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of 
 your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. 
 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 hair-breadth escapes or thrilling adventures ; their 
 brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their pas- 
 sions 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 people — 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 ; 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 
 insignificance, — 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 experience 
 of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and 
 
The Development of Personality 201 
 
 that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tone. In that case, 
 I should have no fear of your not caring to know what 
 farther befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the 
 homely details I have to tell at all beneath your attention. 
 As it is, you can, if you please, decline to pursue my story 
 farther ; and you will easily find reading more to your taste, 
 since I learn from the newspapers that many remarkable 
 novels, full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and 
 eloquent writing, have appeared only within the last season." 
 
 Passing on to Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and 
 the rest of George Eliot's works in historic order, let us 
 see with what delicious fun, what play of wit, what 
 ever-abiding and depth-illuminating humor, what creative 
 genius, what manifold forms of living flesh and blood, 
 George Eliot preached the possibility of such moral 
 greatness on the part of every most commonplace man 
 and woman as completely reduces to a level the apparent 
 inequality in the matter of genius, and so illustrated the 
 universal " russet-coated epic." 
 
202 The English Novel 
 
 IX 
 
 Before Scenes of Clerical Life had ceased to run, in 
 the latter part of the year 185 7, George Eliot had already 
 begun a novel more complete in form than any of the 
 three tales which composed that series. Early in 1858 
 she made a visit to the Continent, and it was from 
 Munich that a considerable portion of the MS. of her 
 new book was sent to her publisher, Mr. Blackwood. 
 This was Adam Bede, which she completed by the end 
 of October, 1858. 
 
 It was brought out immediately in book form ; George 
 Eliot seemed desirous of putting her public to a speedier 
 test than could be secured by running the story through 
 successive numbers of the magazine, as usual ; although 
 the enthusiastic editor declared himself very willing to 
 enrich the pages oi Blackwood 1 s with it. It was there- 
 fore printed in January, 1859. 
 
 I have already cited a letter from Marian Evans to Miss 
 Henschel in which she mentions the only two matters of 
 fact connected in the most shadowy way as originals with 
 the plot of Adam Bede. One of these is that in her 
 girlhood she had met an aunt of hers, about sixty years 
 old, who had in early life been herself a preacher. To 
 this extent, and this only, is there any original for our 
 beautiful snowdrop — Dinah Morris, in Adam Bede. 
 Again, in the same letter, George Eliot mentions that 
 this same aunt had told her of once spending a night in 
 prison to comfort a poor girl who had murdered her 
 own child, and that this incident lay in her mind for 
 many years until it became the germ of Adam Bede. 
 
The Development of Personality 203 
 
 These are certainly but shadowy connections ; yet 
 probably the greatest works are built upon quite as filmy 
 a relation to any actual precedent facts. A rather pretty 
 story is told of Mrs. Carlyle, which perhaps very well 
 illustrates this filmy relation. It is told that one evening 
 she gave to Dickens a subject for a novel which she had 
 indeed worked out up to the second volume, the whole 
 subject consisting of a weaving together of such insignifi- 
 cant observations as any one must make of what goes 
 on at houses across the street. Thus, Mrs. Carlyle ob- 
 served of a house nearly opposite them that one day the 
 blinds or curtains would be up or down ; the next day a 
 figure in a given costume would appear at the window, or 
 a cab would drive — hastily or otherwise — to the door, 
 a visitor would be admitted or rejected, etc. ; such bits 
 of circumstances she had managed to connect with 
 human characters in a subtle way which is said to have 
 given Dickens great delight. She never lived, however, 
 to finish her novel thus begun. 
 
 This publication of Adam Bede placed George Eliot 
 decisively at the head of English novel-writers, with 
 only Dickens for second, even ; and thus enables us at 
 this point fairly to do what the ages always do in order 
 to get that notoriously clear view of things which comes 
 with time, and time only : that is, to brush away all 
 small circumstances and cloudy noli-essentials of time so 
 as to bring before our minds the whole course of English 
 fiction, from its beginning to the stage at which it is now 
 pending with Adam Bede, as if it concerned but four 
 names and two periods, to wit : 
 
 Richardson, ) . , ,, 04 , 
 
 ' V middle 18th century 
 
 Fielding 
 and 
 
 Dickens, 
 George Eliot 
 
 > middle 19th century. 
 
204 
 
 The English Novel 
 
 It was shown in the last lecture how distinctly the 
 moral purpose of the English fiction represented by this 
 upper group was announced, though we were obliged to 
 record a mournful failure in realizing that announcement. 
 Adam Bede gives us the firmest support for a first and 
 most notable difference between these two periods of 
 English fiction : that while the former professes morality 
 yet fails beyond description, the latter executes its 
 moral purpose to a practical degree of beneficence 
 beyond its wildest hopes. Without now specifying the 
 subtle revolutions which lie in Adam Bede, a single more 
 tangible example will be sufficient to bring this entire 
 difference before you. If I ask you to recall how it is 
 less than fifty years ago that Charles Dickens was writing 
 of the debtors' prisons with all the terrible earnest of 
 one who had lived with his own father and mother in 
 those unspeakable dens ; if I recall to you what marvel- 
 ous haste for proverbially slow^England the reform thus 
 initiated took upon itself, how it flew from this to that 
 prison, from this to that statute, from this to that coun- 
 try, until now not only is no such thing as imprisonment 
 for debt known to any of Dickens's readers, but, with 
 the customary momentum of such generous impulses in 
 society, the whole movement in favor of debtors is 
 clearly going too far and is beginning to oppress the 
 creditor with part of the injustice it formerly meted out 
 to the debtor ; if, I say, I thus briefly recall to you this 
 single instance of moral purpose carried into perfect 
 practice, I typify a great and characteristic distinction 
 between these two schools. For in point of fact what 
 one may call an organic impracticability lay at the core 
 of the moral scheme of Richardson and Fielding. I 
 think all reasoning and experience show that if you con- 
 front a man day by day with nothing but a picture of 
 
The Development of Personality 205 
 
 his own unworthiness the final effect is, not to stimulate, 
 but to paralyze his moral energy. The picture of the 
 man becomes the head of a Gorgon. And this was pre- 
 cisely what this early English fiction professed to do. It 
 professed to show man exactly as he is ; but although 
 this profession included the good man as well as the bad 
 man, and although there was some endeavor to relieve 
 the picture with tints of goodness here and there, the 
 final result was — and I fearlessly point any doubter to 
 the net outcome from Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe 
 down to Humphrey Clinker — the final result was such a 
 portrayal as must make any man sit down before the 
 picture in a miserable deep of contempt for himself and 
 his fellow out of which many spirits cannot climb at all, 
 and none can climb clean. 
 
 On the other hand, the work of Dickens I have just 
 referred to is a fair specimen of the way in which the 
 later school of English fiction — while glozing no evil — 
 showed man, not how bad he might be, but how good 
 he might be ; and thus, instead of paralyzing the moral 
 energy, stimulated it to the most beneficent practical 
 reform. I think it is Robert Browning who has declared 
 that a man is as good as his best ; and there is the 
 subtlest connection between the right to measure a man's 
 moral stature by the highest thing that he has done, 
 rather than the lowest, on the one hand, and that new 
 and beautiful inspiration which comes into one's life as 
 one contemplates more and more instances of the best 
 in human behavior, as these are given by a literature 
 which thus lifts one up, from day to day, with the declara- 
 tion that however commonplace a man may be he yet has 
 within himself the highest capabilities of what we have 
 agreed to call the russet-coated epic. The George Eliot 
 and Dickens school, in fact, do but expand the text of 
 
206 The English Novel 
 
 the Master when He urges His disciples : " Be ye per- 
 fect as I am perfect." 
 
 Let me here suggest a second difference between the 
 two schools which involves an interesting coincidence and 
 specially concerns us at this point. As between Richard- 
 son and Fielding : it has been well said (by whom I can- 
 not now remember) that Fielding tells you the time of 
 day, whilst Richardson shows you how the watch is made. 
 As indicating Fielding's method of conducting the action 
 rather by concrete dialogue and event, than by those 
 long analytic discussions of character in which Richard- 
 son would fill whole pages with minute descriptions of 
 the changing emotions of Clarissa upon reading a certain 
 letter from Lovelace, pursuing the emotion as it were 
 tear by tear, lachrymatim, — this characterization happily 
 enough contrasts the analytic strength of Richardson 
 with the synthetic strength of Fielding. 
 
 A strikingly similar contrast obtains as between George 
 Eliot and Charles Dickens. Every one will recog- 
 nize as soon as it is mentioned the microscopic analy- 
 sis of character throughout George Eliot as compared 
 with the rapid cartoon- strokes by which Dickens brings 
 out his figures. But the antithesis cannot be left here as 
 between George Eliot and Dickens : for it is the marvel 
 of the former's art that, though so cool and analytic, it 
 nevertheless sets before us perfect living flesh-and-blood 
 people by fusing the whole analytic process with a syn- 
 thetic fire of the true poet's human sympathy. 
 
 And here we come upon a further difference between 
 George Eliot and Dickens of which we shall have many 
 and beautiful examples in the works we have to study. 
 This is a large, poetic tolerance of times and things 
 which, though worthy of condemnation, nevertheless 
 appeal to our sympathy because they once were closely 
 
The Development of Personality 207 
 
 bound with our fellow-men's daily life. For example, 
 George Eliot writes often and lovingly about the England 
 of the days before the Reform Bill, the careless, pictur- 
 esque, country-squire England; not because she likes 
 it, or thinks it better than the England of the present, 
 but with much the same feeling with which a woman 
 looks at the ragged, hob-nailed shoes of her boy who is 
 gone, — a boy who doubtless was often rude and diso- 
 bedient and exasperating to the last degree, but who was 
 her boy. 
 
 A keen insight into this remarkable combination of 
 the poetic tolerance with the sternness of scientific 
 accuracy possessed by this remarkable woman — the most 
 remarkable of all writers in this respect, we should say, 
 except Shakspere — is offered us in the opening lines of 
 the first chapter of her first story, Amos Barton. (I love 
 to look at this wonderful faculty in its germ.) The chap- 
 ter begins : " Shepperton Church was a very different 
 looking building five-and-twenty years ago. . . . Now 
 there is a wide span of slated roof flanking the old 
 steeple ; the windows are tall and symmetrical ; the outer 
 doors are resplendent with oak graining, the inner doors 
 reverentially noiseless with a garment of red baize ; " and 
 we have a minute description of the church as it is. 
 Then we have this turn in the next paragraph, altogether 
 wonderful for a George Eliot who has been translating 
 Strauss and Feuerbach, studying physics, Comtism and 
 the like among the London agnostics, a fervent disciple 
 of progress, a frequent contributor to the Westminster 
 Review : " Immense improvement ! says the well-regu- 
 lated mind, which unintermittingly rejoices in the new 
 police . . . the penny-post, and all guarantees of human 
 advancement, and has no moments when conservative 
 reforming intellect takes a nap, while imagination does a 
 
208 The English Novel 
 
 little Toryism by the sly, revelling in regret that dear old 
 brown, crumbling, picturesque inefficiency is everywhere 
 giving place to spick-and-span, new-painted, new-var- 
 nished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, 
 plans, elevations and sections, but alas ! no picture. 
 Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind : it has an 
 occasional tenderness for old abuses ; it lingers with a 
 certain fondness over the days of nasal clerks and top- 
 booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed shades 
 of vulgar errors." And it is worth while, if even for an 
 aside, to notice in the same passage how this immense 
 projection of herself out of herself into what we may 
 fairly call her antipodes is not only a matter of no 
 strain, but from the very beginning is accompanied by 
 that eye-twinkle between the lines which makes much 
 of the very ruggedest writing of George Eliot's like a 
 Virginia fence from between whose rails peep wild roses 
 and morning-glories. 
 
 This is in the next paragraph where after thus recall- 
 ing the outside of Shepperton church she exclaims : 
 " Then inside what dear old quaintnesses ! which I 
 began to look at with delight even when I was so crude 
 a member of the congregation that my nurse found it 
 necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my devo- 
 tional patience by smuggling bread and butter into the 
 sacred edifice." Or, a few lines before, a still more 
 characteristic twinkle of the eye which in a flash carries 
 our thoughts all the way from evolution to pure fun, when 
 she describes the organ-player of the new Shepperton 
 church as a rent-collector " differentiated by force of cir- 
 cumstances into an organist." Apropos of this use of 
 the current scientific term "differentiation," it is worth 
 while noting, as we pass, an instance of the extreme 
 vagueness and caprice of current modern criticism. 
 
The Development of Personality 209 
 
 When George Eliot's Daniel Deronda was printed in 
 1876. one of the most complacent English reviews criti- 
 cised her expression "dynamic power of" a woman's 
 glance, which occurs in her first picture of Gwendolen 
 Harleth, as an inappropriate use of scientific phraseology ; 
 and was immediately followed by a chorus of small voices 
 discussing the matter with much minute learning, rather 
 as evidence of George Eliot's decline from proper artis- 
 tic style. But here, as you have just seen, in the very 
 first chapter of her first story, written twenty years 
 before, scientific " differentiation " is made to work very 
 effectively ; and a few pages further on we have an even 
 more striking instance in this passage : " This allusion to 
 brandy- and- water suggested to Miss Gibbs the introduc- 
 tion of the liquor decanters now that the tea was cleared 
 away ; for in bucolic society five-and-twenty years ago 
 the human animal of the male sex was understood to be 
 perpetually athirst, and ' something to drink ' was as 
 necessary a ' condition of thought ' as Time and Space." 
 Other such happy uses of scientific phrases occur indeed 
 throughout the whole of these first three stories and 
 form an integral part of that ever-brooding humor which 
 fills with a quiet light all the darkest stories of George 
 Eliot. 
 
 On the other hand, it is in strong contrast that we 
 find her co-laborer, Dickens, always growing furious 
 (as his biographer describes), when the ante-reform 
 days are mentioned, those days of rotten boroughs, 
 when, as Lord John Russell said, "a ruined mound 
 sent two representatives to Parliament, three niches in a 
 stone wall sent three representatives to Parliament, and 
 a park where no houses were to be seen sent two repre- 
 sentatives to Parliament." While George Eliot is indulg- 
 ing in the tender recollections of picturesqueness etc., 
 
 u 
 
210 The English Novel 
 
 just given, Dickens is writing savage versions of the old 
 ballad, The Fine Old English Gentleman, in which he 
 fiercely satirizes the old, Tory England. 
 
 " I'll sing you a new ballad " (he cries), " and I'll warrant it first- 
 rate, 
 Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate ; 
 
 " The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips, and 
 
 chains, 
 With fine old English penalties and fine old English pains, 
 With rebel heads and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins : 
 For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains 
 Of the fine old English Tory times ; 
 Soon may they come again ! 
 
 " The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need, 
 The good old times for hunting men who held their father's creed, 
 The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed, 
 Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed. . . . 
 Oh, the fine old English Tory times ; 
 When will they come again ! 
 
 " In those rare days the press was seldom known to snarl or bark, 
 But sweetly sang of men in pow'r like any tuneful lark ; 
 Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark ; 
 And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark. 
 Oh, the fine old English Tory times, 
 Soon may they come again ! . . . " 
 
 In a word, the difference between Dickens's and George 
 Eliot's powers is here typified : Dickens tends toward 
 the satiric or destructive view of the old times ; George 
 Eliot, with an even more burning intolerance of the 
 essential evil, takes on the other hand the loving or 
 constructive view. It is for this reason that George 
 Eliot's work, as a whole, is so much finer than some of 
 Dickens's. The great artist never can work in haste. 
 
The Development of Personality 211 
 
 never in malice, never in even the sub-acid, satiric mood 
 of Thackeray : in love, and love only, can great work, 
 work that not only pulls down but builds up, be done ; it 
 is love, and love only, that is truly constructive in art. 
 
 And here it seems profitable to contrast George Eliot's 
 peculiar endowment as shown in these first stories with 
 that of Thackeray. Thackeray was accustomed to lament 
 that " since the author of Tom Jones was buried no 
 writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict 
 to his utmost powers a man. . . . Society will not 
 tolerate the natural in art." Under this yearning of 
 Thackeray's after the supposed freedom of Fielding's 
 time lie at once a short-coming of love, a limitation of 
 view and an actual fallacy of logic which always kept 
 Thackeray's work below the highest, and which formed 
 the chief reason why I have been unable to place him 
 here, along with Dickens and George Eliot. This short- 
 coming and limitation still exist in our literature and 
 criticism to such an extent that I can do no better ser- 
 vice than by asking you to examine them. And I think 
 I can illustrate the whole in the shortest manner by 
 some considerations drawn from that familiar wonder of 
 our times, the daily newspaper. Consider the printed 
 matter which is brought daily to your breakfast table. 
 The theory of the daily paper is that it is the history of 
 the world for one day : and let me here at once connect 
 this illustration with the general argument by saying 
 that Thackeray and his school, when they speak of draw- 
 ing a man as he is — of the natural, etc., in art — would 
 mean drawing a man as he appears in such a history as 
 the daily newspaper gives us. But let us test this his- 
 tory : let us examine, for instance, the telegraphic 
 column in the morning journal. I have made a faithful 
 transcript on the morning of this writing of every item 
 
212 The English Novel 
 
 in the news summary involving the moral relation of 
 man to man ; the result is as follows : one item concern- 
 ing the assassination of the Czar; the recent war with 
 the Boers in Africa; the quarrel between Turkey and 
 Greece ; the rebellion in Armenia ; the trouble about 
 Candahar ; of a workman in a lumber-camp in Michigan, 
 who shot and killed his wife, twenty- two years old, yes- 
 terday ; of the confession of a man just taken from the 
 West Virginia penitentiary to having murdered an old 
 man in Michigan, three years ago; of the suicide of 
 Mrs. Scott at Williamstown, Mississippi; of the killing 
 of King by Clark in a fight in Logan county, Kentucky, 
 on Sunday; of how, about 10 o'clock last night, a cer- 
 tain John Cram was called to the door of his house 
 near Chicago and shot dead by William Seymour; 
 of how young Mohr, thirteen years of age, died at the 
 Charity Hospital in Jersey City yesterday, from the 
 effects of a beating by his father ; of how young Clasby 
 was arrested at Richmond, Virginia, for stealing letters 
 out of the mail bag ; of how the miners of the Connells- 
 ville, Pennsylvania coke regions, the journeyman bakers 
 of Montreal, Canada, the rubber-workers of New Bruns- 
 wick, New Jersey, and the Journeyman Tailors' Union 
 in Cincinnati, are all about to strike ; and finally, of how 
 James Tolen, an insane wife-murderer, committed suicide 
 in Minnesota yesterday, by choking himself with a 
 twisted sheet. These are all the items involving the 
 moral relations of man to man contained in the history 
 of the world for Tuesday, March 2 2d, 1881, as given by 
 a journal noted for the extent and accuracy of its daily 
 collection. 
 
 Let us suppose a picture were drawn of the moral con- 
 dition of the United States from these data : how nearly 
 would it represent the facts? This so-called " history of 
 
The Development of Personality 213 
 
 the world for one day," if you closely examine it, turns 
 out to be, you observe, only a history of the world's 
 crimes for one day. The world's virtues do not appear. 
 It is true that Patrick Kelly murdered his wife yesterday : 
 but then how many Kellys who came home tired from 
 work and found the wife drunk and the children crying 
 for bread, instead of murdering the whole family, with a 
 rugged sigh drew the beastly woman's form into one 
 corner, fumbled about the poor, dirty cupboard in 
 another for crusts of bread, fed the crying youngsters 
 after some rude fashion and finally lay down with dumb 
 heaviness to sleep off the evil of that day. It is true that 
 Jones, the bank clerk, was yesterday exposed in a series 
 of defalcations : but how many thousands of bank clerks 
 on that same day resisted the strongest temptations to 
 false entries and the allurements of private stock specu- 
 lations. It is true that yesterday Mrs. Lighthead eloped 
 with the music- teacher, leaving six children and a desolate 
 husband : but how many thousands of Mrs. Heavyhearts 
 spent the same day in nursing some drunken husband, 
 who had long ago forfeited all love ; how many Milly 
 Bartons were darning six children's stockings at five 
 o'clock of that morning ; nay, what untold millions of 
 faithful women made this same day a sort of paradise 
 for husband and children. And finally you have but to 
 consider a moment that if it lay within the power of 
 the diligent collector of items for the Associated Press 
 despatches to gather together the virtuous, rather than 
 the criminal, actions of mankind, the virtuous would so 
 far exceed the criminal as that no journal would find 
 columns enough to print them in, so as to put a wholly 
 different complexion upon matters. The use of this 
 newspaper illustration in my present argument is this : 
 I complain that Thackeray, and the Fielding school, in 
 
214 The English Novel 
 
 professing to paint men as they are, really paint men 
 only as they appear in some such necessarily one-sided 
 representations as the newspaper history just described. 
 And it is perfectly characteristic of the inherent weak- 
 ness of Thackeray that he should so utterly fail to see 
 the true significance underlying society's repudiation of 
 his proposed natural picture. The least that such a 
 repudiation could mean, would be that even if the picture 
 were good in Fielding's time, it is bad now. It is beau- 
 tiful, therefore, remembering Thackeray's great influence 
 at the time when Scenes of Clerical Life were written, 
 to find a woman, George Eliot, departing utterly out of 
 that mood of hate or even of acidulous satire in which 
 Thackeray so often worked — and in which, one may 
 add, the world is seldom benefited, however skillful the 
 work may be — departing from all that, deftly painting 
 for us these pathetic Milly Bartons, and Mr. Gilfils, and 
 Janet Dempsters, and Rev. Tryans, and arranging the 
 whole into a picture which becomes epic because it is 
 filled with the reverend struggles of human personali- 
 ties, dressed in whatever russet garb, of clothing or of 
 circumstances. 
 
 Those who were at my first lecture on George Eliot 
 will remember that we found the editor of Blackwood's 
 Magazine, on a certain autumn night in 1856, reading 
 part of the MS. of Amos Barto?i in his drawing-room to 
 Thackeray, and remarking to Thackeray, who had just 
 come in late from dinner, that he had come upon a new 
 author who seemed uncommonly like a first-class pas- 
 senger ; it is significantly related that Thackeray said 
 nothing, and evinced no further interest in it than civilly 
 to say, sometime afterward, that he would have liked to 
 hear more of it. In the light of the contrast I have just 
 drawn Thackeray's failure to be impressed seems natural 
 
The Development of Personality 215 
 
 enough, and becomes indeed all the more impressive 
 when we compare it with the enthusiastic praise which 
 Charles Dickens lavished upon this same work in the 
 letter which you will remember I read from him. 
 
 And here I come upon a further contrast between 
 George Eliot and Dickens which I should be glad now 
 to bring out as clearly appearing . in these first three 
 Scenes of Clerical Life before Adam Bale was written. 
 
 This is her exquisite modernness in that intense feel- 
 ing for personality which I developed with so much 
 care in my first six lectures, and her exquisite scientific 
 precision in placing the personalities or characters of her 
 works before the reader. 
 
 All the world knows how Dickens puts a personality 
 on his canvas : he always gives us a vividly descriptive 
 line of facial curve, of dress, of form, of gesture and the 
 like, which distinguishes a given character. Whenever 
 we see this line we know the character so well that we 
 are perfectly content that two rings for the eyes, a spot 
 for the nose and a blur for the body may represent the 
 rest ; and we accept always with joy the rich mirthful- 
 ness or pathetic matter with which Dickens's large soul 
 manages to invest such hastily drawn figures. George 
 Eliot's principle and method are completely opposite ; 
 at the time of her first stories which we are now consid- 
 ering they were unique ; and the quietness with which 
 she made a real epoch in all character-description is 
 simply characteristic of the quietness of all her work. 
 She showed for the first time that without approaching 
 dangerously near to caricature, as Dickens was often 
 obliged to do, a lovable creature of actual flesh and 
 blood could be drawn in a novel with all the advantage 
 of completeness derivable from microscopic analysis, 
 scientific precision, and moral intent; and with abso- 
 
2i 6 The English Novel 
 
 lutely none of the disadvantages, such as coldness, dead- 
 ness and the like, which had caused all sorts of mere- 
 tricious arts to be adopted by novelists in order to save 
 the naturalness of a character. 
 
 A couple of brief expressions from fanet's Repen- 
 tance, the third of Scenes of Clerical Life, show how 
 intensely George EUot felt upon this matter. At the 
 end of Chapter X of that remarkable story she says : 
 "Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss 
 the essential truth unless it be lit up by the love that 
 sees in all forms of human thought and work the life- 
 and-death struggles of separate human beings." And 
 again in Chapter XXII : " 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," leaving "a 
 clear balance on the side of satisfaction. . . . One must 
 be a great philosopher," she adds, sardonically, "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 : " (which is dangerously near, by the way, to a 
 complete formula of the Emersonian doctrine which 
 I had occasion to quote in my last lecture) . She con- 
 tinues : " 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 
 sinner out-weighing their joy over the ninety-nine just, 
 has a meaning that does not jar with the language of 
 his own heart. It only tells him that for angels too 
 there is a transcendent value in human pain which refuses 
 to be settled by equations ; . . . that for angels too the 
 misery of one casts so tremendous a shadow as to eclipse 
 
The Development of Personality 217 
 
 the bliss of ninety-nine." The beautiful personality who 
 suggests this remark is Janet Dempster, the heroine of 
 Janet's Repentance : a tall, grand, beautiful girl who has 
 married the witty Lawyer Dempster and who, after a 
 bitter married life of some years in which Dempster 
 finally begins amusing himself by beating her, has come 
 to share the customary wine decanter at table, and thus 
 by insensible degrees to acquire the habit of taking 
 wine against trouble. Presently a terrible catastrophe 
 occurs; she is thrust out of doors barefooted at mid- 
 night, half clad, by her brutal husband, and told never 
 to return. Finding lodgment with a friend next day a 
 whirlwind of necessity for complete spiritual re -adjust- 
 ment shakes her. "She was sick," says George Eliot, 
 " of that barren exhortation, ' Do right and keep a clear 
 conscience and God will reward you, etc' She wanted 
 strength to do right; " and at this point the thought of 
 Tryan, an unorthodox clergyman who had made a great 
 stir in the village and whom she had been taught to despise, 
 occurs to her. " She had often heard Mr. Tryan laughed 
 at for being fond of great sinners ; she began to see a 
 new meaning in those words ; he would perhaps under- 
 stand her helplessness. If she could pour out her heart 
 to him ! " Then here we have this keen glimpse into 
 some curious relations of personality. " 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." Nor can I ever 
 
2i 8 The English Novel 
 
 read the pathetic scene in which Janet secures peace for 
 her spirit and a practicable working- theory for the rest 
 of her active life, without somehow being reminded of the 
 second scene in Mrs. Browning's Drama of Exile, prodig- 
 iously different as that is from this in all external set- 
 ting : — the scene where the figures of Adam and Eve 
 are discovered at the extremity of the sword-glare, flying 
 from Eden, and Adam begins : 
 
 " Pausing a moment on the outer edge, 
 Where the supernal sword-glare cuts in light 
 The dark exterior desert, — hast thou strength, 
 Beloved, to look behind us to the gate ? 
 Eve. Have I not strength to look up to thy face ? " 
 
 This story of Janet's Repentance offers us, by the way, 
 a strong note of modemness as between George Eliot 
 and Shakspere. Shakspere has never drawn, so far as I 
 know, a repentance of any sort. Surely, in the whole range 
 of our life no phenomenon can take more powerful hold 
 upon the attention of the thinker than that of a human 
 spirit suddenly, of its own free-will, turning the whole 
 current of its love and desire from a certain direction 
 into a direction entirely opposite : so that from a small 
 spiteful creature, enamored with all ugliness, we have a 
 large, generous spirit, filled with the love of true love. 
 In looking upon such a sight one seems to be startlingly 
 near to the essential mystery of personality — to that 
 hidden fountain of power not preceded, power not con- 
 ditioned, which probably gives man his only real con- 
 ception of Divine power, or power acting for itself. It 
 would be wonderful that the subtleties of human passion 
 comprehended in the situation of repentance had not 
 attracted Shakspere's imagination if one did not remem- 
 ber that the developing personality of man was then 
 only coming into literature. The only apparent change 
 
The Development of Personality 219 
 
 of character of this sort in Shakspere which I recall is 
 that of the young king Henry V leaving Falstaff and 
 his other gross companions for the steadier matters of 
 war and government ; but the soliloquy of Prince Hal 
 in the very first act of King Henry IV precludes all 
 idea of repentance here, by showing that at the outset 
 his heart is not in the jolly pranks, but that he is calcu- 
 latingly ambitious from the beginning; and his whole 
 apparent dissipation is but a scheme to enhance his 
 future glory. In the first act of Henry IV (first part), 
 when the plot is made to rob the carriers, at the end of 
 Scene II, exeunt all but Prince Hal, who soliloquizes 
 thus : 
 
 " I know you all, and will awhile uphold 
 The unyoked humor of your idleness : 
 Yet herein will I imitate the sun, 
 Who doth permit the base contagious clouds 
 To smother up his beauty from the world 
 That, when he please again to be himself, 
 Being wanted, he may be more wondered at 
 By breaking through the foul and ugly mists 
 Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. 
 ... So when this loose behaviour I throw off 
 And pay the debt I never promised, 
 By how much better than my word I am 
 By so much shall I falsify men's hopes ; 
 And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, 
 My reformation, glittering o'er my fault, 
 Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes 
 Than that which had no foil to set it off. 
 I'll so offend to make offense a skill, 
 Redeeming time when men think least I will." 
 
 Here the stream of his love is from the beginning and 
 always towards ambition ; there is never any turn at all ; 
 and Prince Hal's assumption of the grace reformation, 
 as applied to such a career of deliberate acting, is merely 
 a piece of naive complacency. 
 
220 The English Novel 
 
 Let us now go further and say that with this reverence 
 for personality as to the ultimate important fact of human 
 existence George Eliot wonderfully escapes certain com- 
 plexities due to the difference between what a man is, 
 really, and what he seems to be to his fellows. Perhaps 
 I may most easily specify these complexities by asking 
 you to recall the scene in one of Dr. Holmes's Breakfast- 
 Table series, where the Professor laboriously expounds 
 to the young man called John that there are really three 
 of him, to wit : John as he appears to his neighbors, 
 John as he appears to himself, and John as he really is. 
 
 In George Eliot's Theophrastus Such one finds ex- 
 plicit mention of the trouble that had been caused to 
 her by two of these : " With all possible study of my- 
 self," she says in the first chapter . . . " I am obliged to 
 recognize that while there are secrets in me unguessed 
 by others these others have certain items of knowledge 
 about the extent of my powers and the figure I make 
 with them which, in turn, are secrets unguessed by me. 
 . . . Thus . . . O fellow-men ! if I trace with curious 
 interest your labyrinthine self-delusions ... it is not 
 that I feel myself aloof from you : the more intimately I 
 seem to discern your weaknesses the stronger to me is the 
 proof I share them. ... No man can know his brother 
 simply as a spectator. Dear blunderers, I am one of 
 you." 
 
 Perhaps nothing less than this underlying reverence 
 for all manner of personality could have produced this 
 first chapter of Adam Bede. " With this drop of ink," 
 she says at starting, " I will show you the roomy work- 
 shop of Mr. Jonathan. Burge, carpenter and builder in 
 the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the 18th of 
 June, in the year of our Lord 1799." I can never read 
 this opening of the famous carpenter's shop without 
 
The Development of Personality 221 
 
 indulging myself for a moment in the wish that this 
 same marvelous eye might have dwelt upon a certain 
 carpenter's shop I wot of, on some iSth of June, in the 
 year of our Lord 25. What would we not give for such 
 a picture of the work-shop of that master-builder and 
 of the central figure in it as is here given us of the 
 old English room ringing with the song of Adam Bede. 
 Perhaps we could come upon no clearer proof of that 
 modernness of personality which I have been advocating 
 than this very fact of our complete ignorance as to the 
 physical person of Christ. One asks one's self, how 
 comes it never to have occurred to St. Matthew, nor St. 
 Mark, nor St. Luke, nor St. John to tell us what manner 
 of man this was, — what stature, what complexion, what 
 color of eye and hair, what shape of hand and foot. A 
 natural instinct arising at the very outset of the descrip- 
 tive effort would have caused a modern to acquaint us 
 with these and many like particulars. 
 
 It is advancing upon the same line of thought to note 
 that here, in this opening of Adam Bede, not only are 
 the men marked off and differentiated for our physical 
 eye but the very first personality described is that of 
 a dog, and this is subtly done. " On a heap of soft 
 shavings a rough gray shepherd-dog had made himself 
 a pleasant bed, and was lying with his nose between his 
 fore-paws, occasionally wrinkling his brows to cast a 
 glance at the tallest of the five workmen, who was carv- 
 ing a shield in the centre of a wooden mantel-piece." 
 This dog is our friend Gyp, who emerges on several 
 occasions through Adam Bede. Gyp is only one of a 
 number of genuine creations in animal character which 
 show the modernness of George Eliot and Charles 
 Dickens, and make them especially clear. How, indeed, 
 could society get along without that famous cock in 
 
222 The English Novel 
 
 Adam Bede, who, as George Eliot records, was accus- 
 tomed to crow as if the sun was rising on purpose to 
 hear him ! And I wish here to place upon the roll of 
 fame, also, a certain cock who entered literature about 
 this time in a series of delicious papers called Shy Neigh- 
 borhoods. In these Charles Dickens gave some account, 
 among many other notable but unnoted things, of several 
 families of fowls in which he had become — as it were 
 — intimate during his walks about outlying London. 
 One of these was a reduced family of Bantams whom he 
 was accustomed to find crowding together in the side 
 entry of a pawnbroker's shop. Another was a family 
 of Dorkings who regularly spent their evenings in some- 
 what riotous company at a certain tavern near the Hay- 
 market, and seldom went to bed before two in the 
 morning. 
 
 My particular immortal, however, was a member of the 
 following family: I quote from Dickens, here: — "But 
 the family I am best acquainted with reside in the densest 
 parts of Bethnal-Green. Their abstraction from the 
 objects amongst which they live, or rather their convic- 
 tion that those objects have all come into existence in 
 express subservience to fowls has so enchanted me that 
 I have made them the subject of many journeys at 
 divers hours. . . . ' The leading lady ' is an aged person- 
 age afflicted with a paucity of feather and visibility of 
 quill that give her the appearance of a bundle of office- 
 pens. When a railway goods-van that would crush an 
 elephant comes round the corner, tearing over these 
 fowls, they emerge unharmed from under the horses 
 perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing 
 property in the air which may have left something to eat 
 behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles 
 and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets as a kind of 
 
The Development of Personality 223 
 
 meteoric discharge for fowls to peck at. . . . Gaslight comes 
 quite as natural to them as any other light ; and I have 
 more than a suspicion that in the minds of the two lords, 
 the early public-house at the corner has superseded the 
 sun. They always begin to crow when the public-house 
 shutters begin to be taken down j and they salute the 
 Pot-boy when he appears to perform that duty as 
 if he were Phoebus in person." And alongside these 
 two cocks I must place a hen whom I find teaching a 
 wise and beautiful lesson to the last man in the world 
 you would suspect as accessible to influences from any 
 such direction. This was Thomas Carlyle. Among his 
 just-published Reminiscences I find the following entry 
 from the earlier dyspeptic times, which seems impossible 
 when we remember the well-known story — true, as I 
 know — how, after Thomas Carlyle and his wife had set- 
 tled at Chelsea, London, and the crowing of the neigh- 
 borhood cocks had long kept him in martyrdom, Mrs. 
 Carlyle planned and carried out the most brilliant cam- 
 paign of her life, in the course of which she succeeded 
 in purchasing or otherwise suppressing every cock within 
 hearing distance. But this entry is long before : 
 
 " Another morning, what was wholesomer and better, 
 happening to notice, as I stood looking out on the bit 
 of green under my bedroom window, a trim and rather 
 pretty hen actively paddling about and picking up what 
 food might be discoverable, 'See,' I said to myself; 
 ' look, thou fool ! Here is a two-legged creature with 
 scarcely half a thimbleful of poor brains ; thou call'st 
 thyself a man with nobody knows how much brain, and 
 reason dwelling in it ; and behold how the one life is 
 regulated and how the other ! In God's name concen- 
 trate, collect whatever of reason thou hast, and direct it on 
 the one thing needful.' Irving, when we did get into 
 
224 The English Novel 
 
 intimate dialogue, was affectionate to me as ever, and had 
 always to the end a great deal of sense and insight into 
 things about him, but he could not much help me ; how 
 could anybody but myself? By degrees I was doing so, 
 taking counsel of that symbolic HEN." 
 
 In George Eliot all the domestic animals are true 
 neighbors and are brought within the Master's exhorta- 
 tion : " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," by the 
 tenderness and deep humor with which she treats them. 
 This same Gyp, who is honored with first place among the 
 characters described in the carpenter's shop, is contin- 
 ually doing something charming throughout Adam Bede. 
 In Janet's Repentance dear old Mr. Jerome comes down 
 the road on his roan mare, " shaking the bridle and 
 tickling her flank with the whip as usual, though there 
 was a perfect mutual understanding that she was not to 
 quicken her pace ; " and everywhere I find those touches 
 of true sympathy with the dumb brutes, such as only 
 earnest souls or great geniuses are capable of. 
 
 Somehow — I cannot now remember how — a picture 
 was fastened upon my mind in childhood which I always 
 recall with pleasure : it is the figure of man emerging 
 from the dark of barbarism attended by his friends the 
 horse, the cow, the chicken and the dog. George Eliot's 
 animal painting brings always this picture before me. 
 
 In April, i860, appeared George Eliot's second great 
 novel, The Mill 071 the Floss. This book, in some re- 
 spects otherwise her greatest work, possesses a quite 
 extraordinary interest for us now in the circumstance 
 that a large number of traits in the description of the 
 heroine, Maggie Tulliver, are unquestionably traits of 
 George Eliot herself, and the autobiographic character 
 of the book has been avowed by her best friends. I pro- 
 pose therefore in the next lecture to read some pas- 
 
The Development of Personality 225 
 
 sages from The Mill on the Floss in which I may 
 have the pleasure of letting this great soul speak for 
 herself with little comment from me, except that I wish 
 to compare the figure of Maggie Tulliver, specially, with 
 that of Aurora Leigh, in the light of the remarkable 
 development of womanhood, both in real life and in fic- 
 tion, which arrays itself before us when we think only of 
 what we may call the Victorian women : that is, of the 
 Queen herself, Sister Dora, Florence Nightingale, Ida, in 
 Tennyson's Princess, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte and 
 her sisters, Mrs. Browning, with her Eve and Catarina 
 and Aurora Leigh, and George Eliot, with her creations. 
 I shall thus make a much more extensive study of The 
 Mill on the Floss than of either of the four works which 
 preceded it. It is hard to leave Adam Bede, and Dinah 
 Morris and Bartle Massey, and Mrs. Poyser, but I must 
 select; and I have thought this particularly profitable 
 because no criticism that I have yet seen of George Eliot 
 does the least justice to the enormous, the simply unique 
 equipment with which she comes into English fiction, or 
 in the least prepares the reader for those extraordinary 
 revolutions which she has wrought with such demure 
 quietness that unless pointed out by some diligent pro- 
 fessional student no ordinary observer would be apt to 
 notice them. Above all have I done this because it is 
 my deep conviction that we can find more religion in 
 George Eliot's works than she herself dreamed she was 
 putting there, and a clearer faith for us than she ever 
 formulated for herself: a strange and solemn result, but 
 one not without parallel : for Mrs. Browning's words of 
 Lucretius, in The Vision of Poets, partly apply here : 
 
 "Lucretius, nobler than his mood! 
 Who dropped his plummet down the broad 
 Deep Universe, and said ' No God/ 
 IS 
 
226 The English Novel 
 
 Finding no bottom ! He denied 
 Divinely the divine, and died 
 Chief-poet on the Tiber-side, 
 By grace of God ! His face is stern, 
 As one compelled, in spite of scorn, 
 To teach a truth he could not learn.' 
 
The Development of Personality 227 
 
 X 
 
 While it is true that the publication of Adam Bede 
 enables us — as stated in the last lecture — to fix George 
 Eliot as already at the head of English novel writers in 
 1859, 1 should add that the effect of the book was not so 
 well defined upon the public of that day. The work was 
 not an immediate popular success ; and even some of the 
 authoritative critics, instead of recognizing its greatness 
 with generosity, went pottering about to find what ex- 
 isting authors this new one had most likely drawn her 
 inspiration from. 
 
 But The Mill on the Floss, which appeared in April, 
 i860, together with some strong and generous reviews 
 of Adam Bede which had meantime appeared in Black- 
 wood's Magazine and in the London Times, quickly car- 
 ried away the last vestige of this suspense, and The Mill 
 on the Floss presently won for itself a popular audience 
 and loving appreciation which appear to have been very 
 gratifying to George Eliot herself. This circumstance 
 alone would make the book an interesting one for our 
 present special study ; but the interest is greatly height- 
 ened by the fact — a fact which I find most positively 
 stated by those who most intimately knew her — that the 
 picture of girlhood which occupies so large a portion of 
 -the first part of the book is, in many particulars, 
 autobiographic. The title originally chosen for this 
 work by George Eliot was Sister Maggie : from which 
 we may judge the prominence she intended to give to 
 
228 The English Novel 
 
 the character of Maggie Tulliver. After the book was 
 finished, however, this title was felt to be for several 
 reasons insufficient. It was a happy thought of Mr. 
 Blackwood's to call the book The Mill on the Floss ; and 
 George Eliot immediately adopted his suggestion to 
 that effect. There is too a third reason why this par- 
 ticular work offers some peculiar contributions to the 
 main lines of thought upon which these lectures have 
 been built. As I go on to read a page here and there, 
 merely by way of recalling the book and the actual 
 style to you, you will presently find that the interest of 
 the whole has for the time concentrated itself upon the 
 single figure of a little wayward English girl some nine 
 years old, — perhaps alone in a garret in some fit of 
 childish passion accusing the Divine order of things as to 
 its justice or mercy, crudely and inarticulately enough, 
 yet quite as keenly after all as our Prometheus, either 
 according to ^Eschylus or Shelley. As I pass along rapidly 
 bringing back to you these pictures of Maggie's girlish 
 despairs, I beg you to recall the first scenes which were 
 set before you from the Prometheus, to bear those in 
 mind along with these, to note how ^Eschylus — whom 
 we have agreed to consider as a literary prototype, 
 occupying much the same relation to his age as George 
 Eliot does to ours — in stretching Prometheus upon the 
 bare Caucasian rock and lacerating him with the just 
 lightnings of outraged Fate is at bottom only studying 
 with a ruder apparatus the same phenomena which 
 George Eliot is here unfolding before us in the micro- 
 scopic struggles of the little English girl ; and I ask 
 you particularly to- observe how here, as we have so 
 many times found before, the enormous advance from 
 Prometheus to Maggie Tulliver — from ^schylus to 
 George Eliot — is summed up in the fact that while per- 
 
The Development of Personality 229 
 
 sonality in ^Eschylus' time had got no further than the 
 conception of a universe in which justice is the organic 
 idea, in George Eliot's time it has arrived at the concep- 
 tion of a universe in which love is the organic idea ; and 
 that it is precisely upon the stimulus of this new growth 
 of individualism that George Eliot's readers crowd up 
 with interest to share the tiny woes of insignificant 
 Maggie Tulliver, while ^Eschylus, in order to assemble 
 an interested audience, must have his Jove, his Titans, 
 his earthquakes, his mysticism, and the blackness of in- 
 conclusive Fate withal. 
 
 Everyone remembers a sense of mightiness in this 
 opening chapter of The Mill on the Floss where the 
 great river Floss, thick with heavy-laden ships, sweeps 
 down to the sea by the red-roofed town of St. Ogg's. 
 Remembering how we found that the first personality 
 described in Adam Bede was that of a shepherd-dog, 
 here too we find that the first prominent figures in our 
 landscape are those of animals. The author is indulg- 
 ing in a sort of dreamy prelude of reminiscences, and 
 in describing Dorlcote Mill, Maggie's home, says : 
 
 " The rush of the water and the booming of the mill bring 
 a dreamy deafness which seems to heighten the peacefulness 
 of the scene. They are like a great curtain of sound, shut- 
 ting one out from the world beyond. And now there is the 
 thunder of the huge covered wagon corning home with sacks 
 of grain. That honest wagoner is thinking- of his dinner, 
 getting sadly dry in the oven at this late hour; but he will 
 not touch it until he has fed his horses, — the strong, sub- 
 missive, meek-eyed beasts, who, I fancy, are looking mild 
 reproach at him from between their blinkers, that he should 
 crack his whip at them in that awful manner, as if they 
 needed that hint ! See how they stretch their shoulders up 
 the slope to the bridge, with all the more energy because 
 they are so near home. Look at their grand, shaggy feet, 
 
230 The English Novel 
 
 that, seem to grasp the firm earth, at the patient strength of 
 their necks bowed under the heavy collar, at the mighty 
 muscles of their struggling haunches ! I should like well to 
 hear them neigh over their hardly earned feed of corn, and 
 see them, with their moist necks freed from the harness, dip- 
 ping their eager nostrils into the muddy pond. Now they 
 are on the bridge, and down they go again at a swifter pace, 
 and the arch of the covered wagon disappears at a turning 
 behind the trees." 
 
 Remembering how we have agreed that the author's 
 comments in the modern novel, acquainting us with such 
 parts of the action as could not be naturally or conven- 
 iently brought upon the stage, might be profitably 
 regarded as a development of certain well-known func- 
 tions of the Chorus in the Greek drama — we have here 
 a quite palpable instance of the necessity for such devel- 
 opment ; how otherwise, could we be let into the inner 
 emotions of farm-horses so genially as in this charming 
 passage ? 
 
 In Chapter II we are introduced to Mr. and Mrs. 
 Tulliver talking by the fire in the left-hand corner of 
 their cosy English home, and I must read a page or two 
 of their conversation before bringing Maggie on the 
 stage if only to show the intense individualism of the 
 latter by making the reader wonder how such an indi- 
 vidualism could ever have been evolved from any such 
 precedent conditions as those of Mr. and Mrs. Tulliver. 
 "What I want, you know," said Mr. Tulliver, — 
 
 " ' What I want is to give Tom a good eddication — an 
 eddication as'll be bread to him. That was what T was 
 thinking of when I gave notice for him to leave th' academy 
 at Ladyday. I mean to put him to a downright good school 
 at Midsummer. The two years at th' academy 'ud ha' done 
 well enough, if I'd meant to make a miller and farmer of 
 
The Development of Personality 231 
 
 him, for he's had a fine sight more schoolin' nor /ever got: 
 all the learnin' my father ever paid for was a bit o' birch at 
 one end and the alphabet at th' other. But I should like 
 Tom to be a bit of a scholard, so as he might be up to the 
 tricks o' these fellows as talk fine and write with a flourish. 
 It 'ud be a help to me wi' these lawsuits, and arbitrations, 
 and things. I wouldn't make a downright lawyer o' the lad, 
 — I should be sorry for him to be a raskill, — but a sort o' 
 engineer, or a surveyor, or an auctioneer and vallyer, like 
 Riley, or one o' them smartish businesses as are all profits 
 and no out-lay, only for a big watch-chain and a high stool. 
 They're putty nigh all one, and they're not far off being 
 even wi' the law, / believe ; for Riley looks Lawyer Wakem 
 i' the face as hard as one cat looks another. He's none 
 frightened at him.' 
 
 " Mr. Tulliver was speaking to his wife, a blond comely 
 woman, in a fan-shaped cap (I am afraid to think how long 
 it was since fan-shaped caps were worn, — they must be so 
 near coming in again. At that time, when Mrs. Tulliver was 
 nearly forty, they were new at St. Ogg's, and considered 
 sweet things). 
 
 " ' Well, Mr. Tulliver, you know best: I've no objections. 
 But hadn't I better kill a couple o' fowl and have th' aunts 
 and uncles to dinner next week, so as you may hear what 
 sister Glegg and sister Pullet have got to say about it? 
 There's a couple o' fowl tvants killing !' 
 
 " ' You may kill every fowl i' the yard, if you like, Bessy ; 
 but I shall ask neither aunt nor uncle what I'm to do wi' my 
 own lad,' said Mr. Tulliver, defiantly. 
 
 " ' Dear heart ! ' said Mrs. Tulliver, shocked at this san- 
 guinary rhetoric, 'how can you talk so, Mr. Tulliver? But 
 it's your way to speak disrespectful o' my family ; and sister 
 Glegg throws all the blame upo' me, though I'm sure I'm 
 as innocent as the babe unborn. For nobody's ever heard 
 me say as it wasn't lucky for my children to have aunts and 
 uncles as can live independent. Howiver, if Tom's to go 
 to a new school, I should like him to go where I can wash 
 him and mend him ; else he might as well have calico as 
 linen, for they'd be one as yallor as th' other before they'd 
 
232 The English Novel 
 
 been washed half a dozen times. And then, when the box 
 is goin' backards and forrards, I could send the lad a cake, 
 or a pork-pie or an apple ; for he can do with an extry bit, 
 bless him, whether they stint him at the meals or no. My 
 children can eat as much victuals as most, thank God.' 
 
 " Mr. Tulliver paused a minute or two, and dived with both 
 hands into his breeches pockets as if he hoped to find some 
 suggestion there. Apparently he was not disappointed, for 
 he presently said, 'I know what I'll do, — I'll talk it over 
 wi' Riley: he's coming to-morrow, t' arbitrate about the 
 dam.' 
 
 " ' Well, Mr. Tulliver, I've put the sheets out for the best 
 bed, and Kezia's got 'em hanging at the fire. They are n't 
 the best sheets, but they're good enough for anybody to 
 sleep in, be he who he will ; for as for them best Holland 
 sheets, I should repent buying 'em, only they'll do to lay us 
 out in. An' if you was to die to-morrow, Mr. Tulliver, 
 they're mangled beautiful, an' all ready, an' smell o' laven- 
 der, as it 'ud be a pleasure to lay 'em out ; an' they lie at the 
 left-hand corner o' the big oaken chest at the back : not as I 
 should trust anybody to look 'em out but myself.' " 
 
 In the next chapter Mr. Tulliver at night, over a cosy 
 glass of brandy-and-water, is discussing with Riley the 
 momentous question of a school for Tom. Mrs. Tulliver 
 is out of the room upon household cares and Maggie is 
 off on a low stool close by the fire, apparently buried in 
 a large book that is open on her lap, but betraying her 
 interest in the conversation by occasionally shaking back 
 her heavy hair and looking up with gleaming eyes when 
 Tom's name is mentioned. Presently Maggie in an 
 agitated outburst on Tom's behalf drops the book she has 
 been reading. Mr. Riley picks it up, and here we have 
 a glimpse at the kind of food which nourished Maggie's 
 infant mind. Mr. Riley calls out, " Come, come and tell 
 me something about this book ; here are some pictures — 
 I want to know what they mean." 
 
The Development of Personality 233 
 
 Maggie, with deepening color, went without hesitation 
 to Mr. Riley's elbow and looked over the book, eagerly 
 seizing one corner and tossing back her mane, while 
 she said : 
 
 " < Oh, I'll tell you what that means. It's a dreadful picture, 
 isn't it? But I can't help looking at it. That old woman in 
 the water's a witch, — they've put her in to find out whether 
 she's a witch or no, and if she swims she's a witch, and if 
 she's drowned — and killed, you know — she's innocent, and 
 not a witch, but only a poor silly old woman. But what 
 good would it do her then, you know, when she was drowned ? 
 Only, I suppose, she'd go to heaven, and God would make it 
 up to her. And this dreadful blacksmith, with his arms 
 akimbo, laughing — oh, isn't he ugly? — I'll tell you what 
 he is. He's the devil really ' (here Maggie's voice became 
 louder and more emphatic), 'and not a right blacksmith; 
 for the devil takes the shape of wicked men, and walks 
 about and sets people doing wicked things, and he's oftener 
 in the shape of a bad man than any other, because, you know, 
 if people saw he was the devil, and he roared at 'em, they'd 
 run away, and he couldn't make 'em do what he pleased.' 
 
 " Mr. Tulliver had listened to this exposition of Maggie's 
 with petrifying wonder. 
 
 " ' Why, what book is it the wench has got hold on ? ' he 
 burst out, at last. 
 
 " ' T/ie History of the Devil, by Daniel Defoe ; not quite 
 the right book for a little girl,' said Mr. Riley. ' How came 
 it among your books, Tulliver ? ' 
 
 " Maggie looked hurt and discouraged, while her father 
 said, 'Why, it's one o' the books I bought at Partridge's 
 sale. They was all bound alike, — it's a good binding, you 
 see, — and I thought they'd be all good books. There's 
 Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying among 'em ; I read 
 in it often of a Sunday ' (Mr. Tulliver felt somehow a famil- 
 iarity with that great writer because his name was Jeremy); 
 1 and there's a lot more of 'em, sermons mostly, I think; 
 but they've all got the same covers, and I thought they were 
 all o' one sample, as you may say. But it seems one mustn't 
 judge by th' outside. This is a puzzlin' world.' 
 
234 The English Novel 
 
 " < Well,' said Mr. Riley, in an admonitory patronizing 
 tone, as he patted Maggie on the head, ' I advise you to put 
 by the History of the Devil, and read some prettier book. 
 Have you no prettier books ? ' 
 
 " ' Oh, yes,' said Maggie, reviving a little in the desire to 
 vindicate the variety of her reading ; ' I know the reading 
 in this book isn't pretty, but I like to look at the pictures, 
 and I make stories to the pictures out of my own head, you 
 know. But I've got j&sop's Fables, and a book about kan- 
 garoos and things, and the Pilgrim's Progress' — 
 
 " ' Ah ! a beautiful book,' said Mr. Riley; * you can't read 
 a better.' 
 
 " < Well, but there's a great deal about the devil in that,' 
 said Maggie, triumphantly, 'and I'll show you the picture 
 of him in his true shape, as he fought with Christian.' 
 
 " Maggie ran in an instant to the corner of the room, jumped 
 on a chair, and reached down from the small bookcase a 
 shabby old copy of Bunyan, which opened at once, without 
 the least trouble of search, at the picture she wanted. 
 
 " ' Here he is,' she said, running back to Mr. Riley, ' and 
 Tom coloured him for me with his paints when he was at 
 home last holidays — the body all black, you know, and the 
 eyes red, like fire, because he's all fire inside, and it shines 
 out at his eyes.' 
 
 " ' Go, go ! ' said Mr. Tulliver, peremptorily, beginning to 
 feel rather uncomfortable at these free remarks on the per- 
 sonal appearance of a being powerful enough to create law- 
 yers ; ' shut up the book, and let's hear no more o' such talk. 
 It is as I thought, — the child 'ud learn more mischief nor 
 good wi' the books. Go, go and see after your mother.' " 
 
 And here are further various hints of Maggie's ways, in 
 which we find clues to many outbursts of her later life. 
 
 " It was a heavy disappointment to Maggie that she was 
 not allowed to go with her father in the gig when he went to 
 fetch Tom home from the academy ; but the morning was 
 too wet, Mrs. Tulliver said, for a little girl to go out in her 
 best bonnet. Maggie took the opposite view very strongly, 
 
The Development of Personality 13 $ 
 
 and it was a direct consequence of this difference of opinion 
 that when her mother was in the act of brushing out the 
 reluctant black crop, Maggie suddenly rushed from under 
 her hands and dipped her head in a basin of water standing 
 near, — in the vindictive determination that there should be 
 no more chance of curls that day. 
 
 " ' Maggie, Maggie ! ' exclaimed Mrs. Tulliver, sitting stout 
 and helpless with the brushes on her lap, 'what is to become 
 of you if you're so naughty? I'll tell your aunt Glegg and 
 your aunt Pullet when they come next week, and they'll 
 never love you any more. Oh dear, oh dear ! look at your 
 clean pinafore, wet from top to bottom. Folks 'ull think it's 
 a judgment on me as I've got such a child, — they'll think 
 I've done summat wicked.' 
 
 " Before this remonstrance was finished, Maggie was already 
 out of hearing, making her way toward the great attic that 
 ran under the old high-pitched roof, shaking the water from 
 her black locks as she ran, like a Skye terrier escaped from 
 his bath. This attic was Maggie's favourite retreat on a wet 
 day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted out 
 all her ill-humours, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors 
 and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned 
 with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish which she pun- 
 ished for all her misfortunes. This was the trunk of a large 
 wooden doll, which once stared with the roundest of eyes 
 above the reddest of cheeks, but was now entirely defaced by 
 a long career of vicarious suffering. Three nails driven into 
 the head commemorated as many crises in Maggie's nine 
 years of earthly struggle ; that luxury of vengeance having 
 been suggested to her by the picture of Jael destroying 
 Sisera in the old Bible. The last nail had been driven in 
 with a fiercer stroke than usual, for the Fetish on that occa- 
 sion represented aunt Glegg." 
 
 But a ray of sunshine on the window of the garret 
 proves too much for her ; she dances down stairs, and 
 after a wild whirl in the sunshine with Yap the terrier 
 goes up into the mill for a talk with Luke the miller. 
 
2^6 The English Novel 
 
 " Maggie loved to linger in the great spaces of the mill, 
 and often came out with her black hair powdered to a soft 
 whiteness that made her dark eyes flash out with a new fire. 
 The resolute din, the unresting motion of the great stones, 
 giving her a dim delicious awe as at the presence of an un- 
 controllable force, — the meal forever pouring, pouring, — the 
 fine white powder softening all surfaces, and making the very 
 spider-nets look like a fancy lace-work, — the sweet, pure 
 scent of the meal — all helped to make Maggie feel that the 
 mill was a little world apart from her outside, everyday life. 
 The spiders were especially a subject of speculation with her. 
 She wondered if they had any relations outside the mill, for 
 in that case there must be a painful difficulty in their family 
 intercourse, — a flat and floury spider, accustomed to take 
 his fly well dusted with meal, must suffer a little at a cousin's 
 table where the fly was au naturelj and the lady-spiders 
 must be mutually shocked at each other's appearance. But 
 the part of the mill she liked best was the topmost story, — 
 the corn-hutch, where there were the great heaps of grain, 
 which she could sit on and slide down continually. She was 
 in the habit of taking this recreation as she conversed with 
 Luke, to whom she was very communicative, wishing him to 
 think well of her understanding, as her father did. 
 
 " Perhaps she felt it necessary to recover her position with 
 him on the present occasion, for, as she sat sliding on the 
 heap of grain near which he was busying himself, she said, 
 at that shrill pitch which was requisite in mill society, — 
 
 " ' I think you never read any book but the Bible, — did 
 you Luke ? ' 
 
 "'Nay, miss, — an' not much o' that,' said Luke, with 
 great frankness. ' I'm no reader, I are n't.' 
 
 " ' But if I lent you one of my books, Luke ? I've not got 
 any very pretty books that would be easy for you to read, 
 but there's Pug's Tour of Europe, — that would tell you all 
 about the different sorts of people in the world, and if you 
 didn't understand the reading, the pictures would help you 
 — they show the looks and the ways of the people, and what 
 they do. There are the Dutchmen, very fat, and smoking, 
 you know, — and one sitting on a barrel.' 
 
The Development of Personality 237 
 
 "'Nay, miss, I've no opinion o' Dutchmen. There ben't 
 much good i' knowin' about them? 
 
 " ' But they're our fellow-creatures, Luke, — we ought to 
 know about our fellow-creatures.' 
 
 " ' Not much o' fellow-creatures, I think, miss ; all I know, 
 — my old master, as war a knowin' man, used to say, says 
 he, " If e'er I sow my wheat wi'out brinin', I'm a Dutch- 
 man," says he ; an' that war as much as to say as a Dutch- 
 man war a fool, or next door. Nay, nay, I are n't goin' to 
 bother mysen about Dutchmen. There's fools enoo, — an' 
 rogues enoo, — wi'out lookin' i' books for 'em.' 
 
 " ' Oh, well,' said Maggie, rather foiled by Luke's unex- 
 pectedly decided views about Dutchmen, ' perhaps you would 
 like Animated Nature better; that's not Dutchmen, you 
 know, but elephants, and kangaroos, and the civet cat, and 
 the sunfish, and a bird sitting on its tail, — I forget its 
 name. There are countries full of those creatures, instead 
 of horses and cows, you know. Shouldn't you like to know 
 about them, Luke ? ' 
 
 " ' Nay, miss, I'n got to keep count o' the flour an' corn, — 
 I can't do wi' knowin' so many things besides my work. 
 That's what brings folks to the gallows, — knowin' every 
 thing but what they'n got to get their bread by. An' they're 
 mostly lies, I think, what's printed i' the books ; them 
 printed sheets are, anyhow, as the men cry i' the streets.' " 
 
 But these are idyllic hours; presently the afternoon 
 comes, Tom arrives, Maggie has an hour of rapturous 
 happiness over him and a new fishing-line which he has 
 brought her, to be hers all by herself; and then comes 
 tragedy. Tom learns from Maggie the death of certain 
 rabbits which he had left in her charge and which, as 
 might have been expected, she had forgotten to feed. 
 Here follows a harrowing scene of reproaches from Tom, 
 of pleadings for forgiveness from Maggie, until finally 
 Tom appears to close the door of mercy. He sternly 
 insists : " Last holidays you licked the paint off my 
 
238 The English Novel 
 
 lozenge box, and the holidays before that you let the 
 boat drag my fish-line down when I set you to watch it, 
 and you pushed your head through my kite, all for 
 nothing." "But I didn't mean," said Maggie; "I 
 couldn't help it." "Yes, you could," said Tom, "if 
 you'd minded what you were doing. . . . And you 
 shan't go fishing with me to-morrow." With this terri- 
 ble conclusion Tom runs off to the mill, while the heart- 
 broken Maggie creeps up to her attic, lays her head 
 against the worm-eaten shelf and abandons herself to 
 misery. 
 
 In the scene which I now read, howbeit planned upon 
 so small a scale, the absolute insufficiency of justice to 
 give final satisfaction to human hearts as now constituted, 
 and the inexorable necessity of love for such satisfaction 
 appear quite as plainly as if the canvas were of Prome- 
 thean dimensions. 
 
 " Maggie soon thought she had been hours in the attic, 
 and it must be tea-time, and they were all having their tea, 
 and not thinking of her. Well, then, she would stay up 
 there and starve herself, — hide herself behind the tub, and 
 stay there all night ; and then they would all be frightened, 
 and Tom would be sorry. Thus Maggie thought in the 
 pride of her heart, as she crept behind the tub ; but presently 
 she began to cry again at the idea that they didn't mind her 
 being there. If she went down again to Tom now, would 
 he forgive her ? Perhaps her father would be there, and he 
 would take her part. But, then she wanted Tom to forgive 
 her because he loved her, and not because his father told 
 him. No, she would never go down if Tom didn't come to 
 fetch her. This resolution lasted in great intensity for five 
 dark minutes behind. the tub; but then the need of being 
 loved, the strongest need in poor Maggie's nature, began to 
 wrestle with her pride, and soon threw it. She crept from 
 behind her tub into the twilight of the long attic, but just 
 then she heard a quick footstep on the stairs." 
 
The Development of Personality 239 
 
 In point of fact Tom has been sent from the tea-table 
 for her and mounts the attic munching a great piece of 
 plum-cake. 
 
 ..." He went out rather sullenly, carrying his piece of 
 plum-cake, and not intending to retrieve Maggie's punish- 
 ment, which was no more than she deserved. Tom was 
 only thirteen, and had no decided views in grammar and 
 arithmetic, regarding them for the most part as open ques- 
 tions; but he was particularly clear and positive on one 
 point, — namely, that he would punish every body who de- 
 served it : why, he wouldn't have minded being punished 
 himself, if he deserved ; but then he never did deserve it. 
 
 " It was Tom's step, then, that Maggie heard on the stairs 
 when her need of love had triumphed over her pride, and 
 she was going down with her swollen eyes and dishevelled hair 
 to beg for pity. At least her father would stroke her head 
 and say, ' Never mind, my wench.' It is a wonderful sub- 
 duer, this need of love, — this hunger of the heart, — as per- 
 emptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to 
 submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world. 
 
 " But she knew Tom's step, and her heart began to beat 
 violently with the sudden shock of hope. He only stood 
 still at the top of the stairs and said ' Maggie, you're to 
 come down.' But she rushed to him and clung round his 
 neck, sobbing, ' Oh, Tom, please forgive me — I can't bear 
 it — I will always be good — always remember things — do 
 love me — please, dear Tom ? ' 
 
 " We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep 
 apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred 
 phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, show- 
 ing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief 
 on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour to 
 the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct 
 ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilized 
 society. Maggie and Tom were still very much like young 
 animals, and so she could rub her cheek against his, and 
 kiss his ear in a random, sobbing way; and there were 
 tender fibres in the lad that had been used to answer to 
 
240 The English Novel 
 
 Maggie's fondling; so that he behaved with a weakness 
 quite inconsistent with his resolution to punish her as much 
 as she deserved : he actually began to kiss her in return, and 
 say, 
 
 " ' Don't cry, then, Magsie — here, eat a bit o' cake.' Mag- 
 gie's sobs began to subside, and she put out her mouth for 
 the cake and bit a piece ; and then Tom bit a piece, just for 
 company, and they ate together and rubbed each other's 
 cheeks, and brows, and noses together, while they ate, with 
 a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies. 
 
 " ' Come along, Magsie, and have tea,' said Tom at last, 
 when there was no more cake except what was down stairs." 
 
 Various points of contrast lead me to cite some types 
 of character which appear to offer instructive compar- 
 isons with this picture of the healthy English boy and 
 girl. Take for example this portrait of the modern 
 American boy given us by Mr. Henry James, Jr., in his 
 Daisy Miller — which was, I believe, the work that first 
 brought him into fame. The scene is in Europe. A 
 gentleman is seated in the garden of a hotel at Geneva, 
 smoking his cigarettes after breakfast. 
 
 " Presently a small boy came walking along the path — 
 an urchin of nine or ten. The child, who was diminutive 
 for his years, had an aged expression of countenance, a pale 
 complexion, and sharp little features. He was dressed in 
 Knickerbockers, with red stockings, which displayed his 
 poor little spindleshanks ; he also wore a brilliant red cravat. 
 He carried in his hand a long alpenstock, the sharp point of 
 which he thrust into everything that he approached — the 
 flower-beds, the garden benches, the trains of the ladies' 
 dresses. In front of Winterbourne he paused, looking at 
 him with a pair of bright penetrating little eyes. 
 
 " ' Will you give me a lump of sugar ? ' he asked in a sharp, 
 hard little voice — a voice immature, and yet, somehow, not 
 young. 
 
 "Winterbourne glanced at the small table near him on 
 which his coffee-service rested, and saw that several morsels 
 
The Development of Personality 241 
 
 of sugar remained. ' Yes, you may take one,' he answered, 
 ' but I don't think sugar is good for little boys.' 
 
 " This little boy slipped forward and carefully selected three 
 of the coveted fragments, two of which he buried in the 
 pocket of his Knickerbockers, depositing the other as promptly 
 in another place. He poked his alpenstock lance-fashion 
 into Winterbourne's bench, and tried to crack the lump of 
 sugar with his teeth. 
 
 » < Oh, blazes ; it's har-r-d ! ' he exclaimed, pronouncing 
 the adjective in a peculiar manner. 
 
 " Winterbourne had immediately perceived that he might 
 have the honor of claiming him as a fellow-countryman. 
 1 Take care you don't hurt your teeth,' he said paternally. 
 
 " < I haven't got any teeth to hurt. They have all come out. 
 I have only got seven teeth. My mother counted them last 
 night, and one came out right afterwards. She said she'd 
 slap me if any more came out. I can't help it. It's this 
 old Europe. It's the climate that makes them come out. 
 In America they didn't come out. It's these hotels.' 
 
 " Winterbourne was much amused. ' If you eat three 
 
 lumps of sugar, your mother will certainly slap you,' he said. 
 
 "'She's got to give me some candy, then,' rejoined his 
 
 young interlocutor. ' I can't git any candy here — any 
 
 American candy. American candy's the best candy.' 
 
 " < And are American boys the best little boys ? ' asked 
 Winterbourne. 
 
 " ' I don't know. I'm an American boy,' said the child. 
 " < I see you are one of the best ! ' laughed Winterbourne. 
 "'Are you an American man?' pursued this vivacious 
 infant. And then on Winterbourne's affirmative reply,— 
 'American men are the best,' he declared." 
 
 On the other hand compare this intense dark- eyed 
 Maggie in her garret and with her naming ways, with 
 Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh. Aurora Leigh, too, has 
 her garret, and doubtless her intensity, too, blossoms 
 in that congenial dark and lonesomeness. I read a few 
 lines from Book 1st by way of reminder. 
 
 16 
 
242 The English Novel 
 
 " Books, books, books ! 
 I had found the secret of a garret-room 
 Piled high with cases in my father's name 
 . . . Where, creeping in and out 
 Among the giant fossils of my past 
 Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs 
 Of a mastodon, I nibbled here or there 
 At this or that box, pulling through the gap 
 In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, 
 The first book first. And how I felt it beat 
 Under my pillow in the morning's dark, 
 An hour before the sun would let me read ! 
 My books ! At last, because the time was ripe, 
 I chanced upon the poets." 
 
 And here, every reader of The Mill on the Floss will 
 remember how, at a later period, Maggie chanced upon 
 Thomas a Kempis at a tragic moment of her existence ; 
 and it is fine to see how, in describing situations so alike, 
 the purely elemental differences between the natures of 
 Mrs. Browning and George Eliot project themselves 
 upon each other. 
 
 The scene in George Eliot concerning Maggie and 
 Thomas a Kempis is too long to repeat here, but every- 
 one will recall the sober, analytic, yet altogether vital 
 and thrilling picture of the trembling Maggie, as she 
 absorbs wisdom from the sweet old mediaeval soul. But, 
 on the other hand, Mrs. Browning sings it out, after 
 this riotous melody : 
 
 " As the earth ..... 
 
 Plunges in fury when the internal fires 
 Have reached and pricked her heart, 
 
 and throwing flat 
 The marts and temples, — the triumphal gates 
 And towers of observation, — clears herself 
 To elemental freedom — thus, my soul, 
 At poetry's divine first finger-touch 
 Let go conventions and sprang up surprised, 
 
The Development of Personality 243 
 
 Convicted of the great eternities 
 Before two worlds 
 
 ..." But the sun was high 
 When first I felt my pulses set themselves 
 For concord ; when the rhythmic turbulence 
 Of blood and brain swept outward upon words, 
 As wind upon the alders, blanching them 
 By turning up their under-natures till 
 They trembled in dilation. O delight 
 And triumph of the poet, who would say 
 A man's mere ' yes,' a woman's common ' no,' 
 A little human hope of that or this, 
 And says the word so that it burns you through 
 With special revelation, shakes the heart 
 Of all the men and women in the world 
 As if one came back from the dead and spoke, 
 With eyes too happy, a familiar thing 
 Become divine i' the utterance ! " 
 
 I have taken special pleasure in the last sentence of 
 this outburst because it restates with a precise felicity at 
 once poetic and scientific, but from a curiously different 
 point of view, that peculiar function of George Eliot 
 which I pointed out as appearing in the very first of her 
 stories : namely, the function of elevating the plane of all 
 commonplace life into the plane of the heroic by keep-; 
 ing every man well in mind of the awful ego within him 1 
 which includes all the possibilities of heroic action. 
 Now this is what George Eliot does, in putting before us 
 these humble forms of Tom and Maggie, and the like : 
 she says these common " yes's " and " noes " in terms 
 of Tom and Maggie; and yet says them so that this 
 particular Tom and Maggie burn you through with a 
 special revelation, — though one has known a hundred 
 Maggies and Toms before. Thus we find the delight 
 and triumph of the poetic and analytic novelist, George 
 Eliot, precisely parallel to this delight and triumph of the 
 
244 The English Novel 
 
 more exclusively poetic Mrs. Browning, who says a man's 
 mere " yes," a woman's common "no," so that it shakes 
 the hearts of all the men and women in the world, etc. 
 Aurora Leigh continues : 
 
 " In those days, though, I never analysed 
 Myself even. All analysis comes late. 
 You catch a sight of nature, earliest ; 
 In full front sun-face, and your eye-lids wink 
 And drop before the wonder of 't ; you miss 
 The form, through seeing the light. I lived those days, 
 And wrote because I lived — unlicensed else; 
 My heart beat in my brain. Life's violent flood 
 Abolished bounds, — and, which my neighbor's field, 
 Which mine, what mattered ? It is thus in youth ! 
 We play at leap-frog over the god Term ; 
 The love within us and the love without 
 Are mixed, confounded ; if we are loved or love 
 We scarce distinguish .... 
 
 In that first onrush of life's chariot wheels 
 We know not if the forests move, or we." 
 
 And now as showing the extreme range of George 
 Eliot's genius, —in regions where perhaps Mrs. Browning 
 never penetrated, — let me recall Sister Glegg and Sister 
 Pullet, as types of women contrasting with Maggie and 
 Aurora Leigh. You will remember how Mrs. Tulliver 
 has bidden her three sisters, Mrs. Glegg, Mrs. Pullet, and 
 Mrs. Deane, with their respective husbands, to a great 
 and typical Dodson dinner, in order to eat and drink 
 upon the momentous changes impending in Tom's edu- 
 cational existence : 
 
 " The Dodsons were certainly a handsome family, and 
 Mrs. Glegg was not the least handsome of the sisters. As 
 she sat in Mrs. Tulliver's arm-chair, no impartial observer 
 could have denied that for a woman of fifty, she had a very 
 comely face and figure, though Tom and Maggie considered 
 their aunt Glegg as the type of ugliness. It is true she de- 
 
The Development of Personality 245 
 
 spised the advantages of costume ; for though, as she often 
 observed, no woman had better clothes, it was not her way 
 to wear her new things out before her old ones. Other 
 women, if they liked, might have their best thread lace in 
 every wash, but when Mrs. Glegg died it would be found 
 that she had better lace laid by in the right-hand drawer of 
 her wardrobe, in the Spotted Chamber, than ever Mrs. Wooll 
 of St. Ogg's had bought in her life, although Mrs. Wooll 
 wore her lace before it was paid for. So of her curled 
 fronts. Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest 
 brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees 
 of fuzzy laxness ; but to look out on the week-day world from 
 under a crisp and glossy front would be to introduce a most 
 dream-like and unpleasant confusion between the sacred and 
 the secular. . . . 
 
 " So if Mrs. Glegg's front to-day was more fuzzy and lax 
 than usual, she had a design under it : she intended the most 
 pointed and cutting allusion to Mrs. Tulliver's bunches of 
 blond curls, separated from each other by a due wave of 
 smoothness on each side of the parting. Mrs. Tulliver had 
 shed tears several times at sister Glegg's unkindness on the 
 subject of these unmatronly curls, but the consciousness of 
 looking the handsomer for them naturally administered sup- 
 port. Mrs. Glegg chose to wear her bonnet in the house 
 to-day, — untied and tilted slightly, of course, — a frequent 
 practice of hers when she was on a visit, and happened to be 
 in a severe humour ; she didn't know what draughts there 
 might be in strange houses. For the same reason she wore 
 a small sable tippet, which reached just to her shoulders, 
 and was very far from meeting across her well-formed chest, 
 while her long neck was protected by a chevaux-de-frise of 
 miscellaneous frilling. One would need to be learned in the 
 fashions of those times to know how far in the rear of them 
 Mrs. Glegg's slate-coloured silk gown must have been; but, 
 from certain constellations of small yellow spots upon it, and 
 a mouldy odour about it suggestive of a damp clothes-chest, 
 it was probable that it belonged to a stratum of garments 
 just old enough to have come recently into wear. 
 
 " Mrs. Glegg held her large gold watch in her hand with 
 
246 The English Novel 
 
 the many-doubled chain round her fingers, and observed to 
 Mrs. Tulliver, who had just returned from a visit to the 
 kitchen, that whatever it might be by other people's clocks 
 and watches, it was gone half-past twelve by hers. 
 
 " ' I don't know what ails sister Pullet,' she continued. ' It 
 used to be the way in our family for one to be as early as 
 another, — I'm sure it was so in my poor father's time, — 
 and not for one sister to sit half an hour before the others 
 came. But if the ways o' the family are altered, it shan't be 
 7ny fault, — I'll never be the one to come into a house when 
 all the rest are going away. I wonder at sister Deane, — 
 she used to be more like me. But if you'll take my advice, 
 Bessy, you'll put the dinner forrard a bit, sooner than put 
 it back, because folks are late as ought to ha' known 
 better.' . . . 
 
 " The sound of wheels while Mrs. Glegg was speaking was 
 an interruption highly welcome to Mrs. Tulliver, who has- 
 tened out to receive sister Pullet, — it must be sister Pullet, 
 because the sound was that of a four-wheel. 
 
 " Mrs. Glegg tossed her head and looked rather sour 
 about the mouth at the thought of the ' four-wheel.' She 
 had a strong opinion on that subject. 
 
 " Sister Pullet was in tears when the one-horse chaise 
 stopped before Mrs. Tulliver's door, and it was apparently 
 requisite that she should shed a few more before getting 
 out ; for though her husband and Mrs. Tulliver stood ready 
 to support her, she sat still and shook her head sadly, as she 
 looked through her tears at the vague distance. 
 
 " ' Why, whativeris the matter, sister? ' said Mrs. Tulliver. 
 She was not an imaginative woman, but it occurred to her 
 that the large toilet-glass in sister Pullet's best bedroom was 
 possibly broken for the second time. 
 
 " There was no reply but a further shake of the head, as 
 Mrs. Pullet slowly rose and got down from the chaise, not 
 without casting a glance at Mr. Pullet to see that he was 
 guarding her handsome silk dress from injury. Mr. Pullet 
 was a small man with a high nose, small twinkling eyes, and 
 thin lips, in a fresh-looking suit of black and a white cravat, 
 that seemed to have been tied very tight on some higher 
 
The Development of Personality 247 
 
 principle than that of mere personal ease. He bore about 
 the same relation to his tall, good-looking wife, with her 
 balloon sleeves, abundant mantle, and large- be-feathered and 
 be-ribboned bonnet, as a small fishing-smack bears to a brig 
 with all its sails spread. 
 
 " Mrs. Pullet brushed each door-post with great nicety 
 about the latitude of her shoulders (at that period a woman 
 was truly ridiculous to an instructed eye if she did not 
 measure a yard and a half across the shoulders), and having 
 done that, sent the muscles of her face in quest of fresh 
 tears as she advanced into the parlour where Mrs. Glegg was 
 seated. 
 
 "'Well, sister, you're late; what's the matter?' said 
 Mrs. Glegg, rather sharply, as they shook hands. 
 
 "Mrs. Pullet sat down, lifting up her mantle carefully 
 behind before she answered, — 
 
 " ' She's gone,' unconsciously using an impressive figure of 
 rhetoric. 
 
 " ' It isn't the glass this time, then,' thought Mrs. Tulliver. 
 " ' Died the day before yesterday,' continued Mrs. Pullet ; 
 1 an' her legs was as thick as my body/ she added with deep 
 sadness, after a pause. 'They'd tapped her no end o' 
 times, and the water— they say you might ha' swum in it, if 
 you'd liked.' 
 
 " « Well, Sophy, it's a mercy she's gone, then, whoiver she 
 may be,' said Mrs. Glegg, with the promptitude and empha- 
 sis of a mind naturally clear and decided; 'but I can't 
 think who you're talking of, for my part.' 
 
 " ' But /know,' said Mrs. Pullet, sighing and shaking her 
 head ; ' and there isn't another such a dropsy in the parish, 
 /know as it's old Mrs. Sutton o' the Twentylands.' 
 
 " ' Well, she's no kin o' yours, nor much acquaintance as 
 I've ever heard of,' said Mrs. Glegg, who always cried just 
 as much as was proper when anything happened to her own 
 'kin,' but not on other occasions. 
 
 '"She's so much acquaintance as I've seen her legs when 
 they were like bladders. . . . And an old lady as ^ had 
 doubled her money over and over again, and kept it all 
 
248 The English Novel 
 
 in her own management to the last, and had her pocket with 
 her keys in under her pillow constant. There isn't many 
 old /rtnsh'ners like her, I doubt.' 
 
 " ' And they say she'd took as much physic as 'ud fill 
 a wagon,' observed Mr. Pullet. 
 
 " * Ah ! ' sighed Mrs. Pullet, ' she'd another complaint 
 iver so many years before she had the dropsy, and the doc- 
 tors couldn't make out what it was. And she said to me, 
 when I went to see her last Christmas, she said, " Mrs. Pul- 
 let, if iver you have the dropsy, you'll think o' me." She 
 did say so,' added Mrs. Pullet, beginning to cry bitterly 
 again ; ' those were her very words. And she's to be buried 
 o' Saturday, and Pullet's bid to the funeral.' 
 
 " ' Sophy,' said Mrs. Glegg, unable any longer to contain 
 her spirit of rational remonstrance, — ' Sophy, I wonder at 
 you, fretting and injuring your health about people as don't 
 belong to you. Your poor father never did so, nor your aunt 
 Frances neither, nor any o' the family, as I ever heared of. 
 You couldn't fret no more than this if we'd heared as our 
 cousin Abbott had died sudden without making his will.' 
 
 " Mrs. Pullet was silent, having to finish her crying, and 
 rather flattered than indignant at being upbraided for crying 
 too much. It was not every body who could afford to cry 
 so much about their neighbours who had left them nothing ; 
 but Mrs. Pullet had married a gentleman farmer, and had 
 leisure and money to carry her crying and every thing else 
 to the highest pitch of respectability. 
 
 " ' Mrs. Sutton didn't die without making her will, though,' 
 said Mr. Pullet, with a confused sense that he was saying 
 something to sanction his wife's tears; 'ours is a rich par- 
 ish, but they say there's nobody else to leave as many 
 thousands behind 'em as Mrs. Sutton. And she's left no 
 leggicies, to speak on, — left it all in lump to her husband's 
 nevvy.' 
 
 " ' There wasn't much good i' being so rich, then,' said 
 Mrs. Glegg, ' if she'd got none but husband's kin to leave it 
 to. It's poor work when that's all you're got to pinch 
 yourself for; — not as I'm one o' those as 'ud like to die 
 without leaving more money out at interest than other folks 
 
The Development of Personality 249 
 
 had reckoned. But it's a poor tale when it must go out o' 
 your own family. ' 
 
 " ' I'm sure, sister,' said Mrs. Pullet, who had recovered 
 sufficiently to take off her veil and fold it carefully, < it's a 
 nice sort o' man as Mrs. Sutton has left her money to, for 
 he's troubled with the asthmy, and goes to bed every night 
 at eight o'clock. He told me about it himself — as free as 
 could be — one Sunday when he came to our church. He 
 wears a hareskin on his chest, and has a trembling in his 
 talk, — quite a gentleman sort o' man. I told him there 
 wasn't many months in the year as I wasn't under the doc- 
 tor's hands. And he said, " Mrs. Pullet, I can feel for you." 
 That was what he said, — the very words. Ah ! ' sighed 
 Mrs. Pullet, shaking her head at the idea that there were 
 but few who could enter fully into her experiences in pink 
 mixture and white mixture, strong stuff in small bottles, and 
 weak stuff in large bottles, damp boluses at a shilling, and 
 draughts at eighteen pence. ' Sister, I may as well go and 
 take my bonnet off now. Did you see as the capbox was 
 put out? ' she added, turning to her husband. 
 
 «' Mr. Pullet, by an unaccountable lapse of memory, had 
 forgotten it, and hastened out, with a stricken conscience, to 
 remedy the omission." 
 
 Next day Mrs. Tulliver and the children visit Aunt 
 Pullet : and we have some further affecting details of that 
 sensitive lady weeping at home instead of abroad. 
 
 " Aunt Pullet, too, appeared at the doorway, and as soon 
 as her sister was within hearing said, ' Stop the children, for 
 God's sake, Bessy, — don't let 'em come up the doorsteps: 
 Sally's bringing the old mat and the duster to rub their 
 shoes.' 
 
 " Mrs. Pullet's front door mats were by no means intended 
 to wipe shoes on : the very scraper had a deputy to do its 
 dirty work. Tom rebelled particularly against this shoe- 
 wiping, which he always considered in the light of an 
 indignity to his sex. He felt it as the beginning of the dis- 
 agreeable incident to a visit at aunt Pullet's where he had 
 
250 The English Novel 
 
 once been compelled to sit with towels wrapped around his 
 boots, — a fact which may serve to correct the too hasty 
 conclusion that a visit to Garum Firs must have been a great 
 treat to a young gentleman fond of animals, — fond, that is, 
 of throwing stones at them. 
 
 " The next disagreeable was confined to his feminine com- 
 panions : it was the mounting of the polished oak stairs, 
 which had very handsome carpets rolled up and laid by in a 
 spare bedroom, so that the ascent of these glossy steps 
 might have served, in barbarous times, as a trial by ordeal 
 from which none but the most spotless virtue could have 
 come off with unbroken limbs. Sophy's weakness about 
 these polished stairs was always a subject of bitter remon- 
 strance on Mrs. Glegg's part; but Mrs. Tulliver ventured on 
 no comment, only thinking to herself it was a mercy when 
 she and the children were safe on the landing. 
 
 " ' Mrs. Gray has sent home my new bonnet, Bessy,' said 
 Mrs. Pullet, in a pathetic tone, as Mrs. Tulliver adjusted her 
 cap. 
 
 " ' Has she, sister ? ' said Mrs. Tulliver with an air of 
 much interest. ' And how do you like it ?' 
 
 " • It's apt to make a mess with clothes, taking 'em out 
 and putting 'em in again,' said Mrs. Pullet, drawing a bunch 
 of keys from her pocket and looking at them earnestly, ' but 
 it 'ud be a pity for you to go away without seeing it. 
 There's no knowing what may happen.' 
 
 " Mrs. Pullet shook her head slowly at this last serious 
 consideration, which determined her to single out a par- 
 ticular key. 
 
 " ' I'm afraid it'll be troublesome to you getting it out, 
 sister,' said Mrs. Tulliver, 'but I should like to see what 
 sort of a crown she's made you.' 
 
 " Mrs. Pullet rose with a melancholy air and unlocked one 
 wing of a very bright wardrobe, where you may have hastily 
 supposed she would find the new bonnet. Not at all. Such 
 a supposition could only have arisen from a too superficial 
 acquaintance with the habits of the Dodson family. In this 
 wardrobe Mrs. Pullet was seeking something small enough 
 to be hidden among layers of linen, — it was a door key. 
 
a i 
 
 The Development of Personality 251 
 
 You must come with me into the best room,' said Mrs. 
 
 Pullet. 
 
 "'May the children come too, sister?' inquired Mrs. 
 Tulliver, who saw that Maggie and Lucy were looking 
 rather eager. 
 
 " < Well,' said aunt Pullet, reflectively, ' it'll perhaps be 
 safer for 'em to come, — they'll be touching something if we 
 leave 'em behind.' 
 
 " So they went in procession along the bright and slippery 
 corridor, dimly lighted by the semilunar top of the window 
 which rose above the closed shutter: it was really quite 
 solemn. Aunt Pullet paused and unlocked a door which 
 opened on something still more solemn than the passage: 
 a darkened room, in which the outer light, entering feebly, 
 showed what looked like the corpses of furniture in white 
 shrouds. Everything that was not shrouded stood with its 
 legs upward. Lucy laid hold of Maggie's frock, and 
 Maggie's heart beat rapidly. 
 
 " Aunt Pullet half opened the shutter, and then unlocked 
 the wardrobe, with a melancholy deliberateness which was 
 quite in keeping with the funereal solemnity of the scene. 
 The delicious scent of rose leaves that issued from the ward- 
 robe made the process of taking out sheet after sheet of 
 silver paper quite pleasant to assist at, though the sight of 
 the bonnet at last was an anticlimax to Maggie, who would 
 have preferred something more strikingly preternatural. 
 But few things could have been more impressive to Mrs. 
 Tulliver. She looked all round it in silence for some mo- 
 ments, and then said emphatically, 'Well, sister, I'll never 
 speak against the full crowns again ! ' 
 
 " It was a great concession, and Mrs. Pullet felt it : she 
 felt something was due to it. 
 
 "'You'd like to see it on, sister?' she said sadly. 'I'll 
 open the shutter a bit farther.' 
 
 " < Well, if you don't mind taking off your cap, sister,' said 
 Mrs. Tulliver. 
 
 " Mrs. Pullet took off her cap, displaying the brown silk 
 scalp with a jutting promontory of curls which was common 
 to the more mature and judicious women of those times, 
 
i$i The English Novel 
 
 and, placing the bonnet on her "head, turned slowly round, 
 like a draper's lay-figure, that Mrs. Tulliver might miss no 
 point of view. 
 
 '" I've sometimes thought there's a loop too much o' rib- 
 bon on this left side, sister; what do you think ?' said Mrs. 
 Pullet. 
 
 " Mrs. Tulliver looked earnestly at the point indicated, 
 and turned her head on one side. ' Well, I think it's best 
 as it is; if you meddled with it, sister, you might repent.' 
 
 " ' That's true,' said aunt Pullet, taking off the bonnet and 
 looking at it contemplatively. 
 
 " ' How much might she charge you for that bonnet, sister ? ' 
 said Mrs. Tulliver, whose mind was actively engaged on the 
 possibility of getting a humble imitation of this chef-d ) ceuv?'e 
 made from a piece of silk she had at home. 
 
 "Mrs. Pullet screwed up her mouth, and shook her head, 
 and then whispered, 'Pullet pays for it; he said I was to 
 have the best bonnet at Garum church, let the next best be 
 whose it would.' 
 
 " She began slowly to adjust the trimmings, in preparation 
 for returning it to its place in the wardrobe, and her thoughts 
 seemed to have taken a melancholy turn, for she shook her 
 head. 
 
 " ' Ah ! ' she said at last, ' I may never wear it twice, sister : 
 who knows ? ' 
 
 " ' Don't talk o' that, sister,' answered Mrs. Tulliver. ' I 
 hope you'll have your health this summer.' 
 
 " ' Ah ! but there may come a death in the family, as there 
 did soon after I had my green satin bonnet. Cousin Abbott 
 may go, and we can't think o' wearing crape less than half a 
 year for him.' 
 
 " ' That would be unlucky,' said Mrs. Tulliver, entering 
 thoroughly into the possibility of an inopportune decease. 
 'There's never so much pleasure i' wearing a bonnet the 
 second year, especially when the crowns are so chancy, — 
 never two summers alike.' 
 
 "'Ah! it's the way i' this world,' said Mrs. Pullet, return- 
 ing the bonnet to the wardrobe and locking it up. She 
 maintained a silence characterized by head-shaking, until 
 
The Development of Personality 253 
 
 they had all issued from the solemn chamber and were in 
 her own room again. Then, beginning to cry, she said, 
 'Sister, if you should never see that bonnet again till I'm 
 dead and gone, you'll remember I showed it you this 
 day.'" 
 
 I sincerely wish it were in my power to develop, along- 
 side of the types of Maggie Tulliver and Aurora Leigh, 
 a number of other female figures which belong to the 
 same period of life and literature. I please myself with 
 calling these the Victorian women. They would include 
 the name-giving queen, herself, the Eve in Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's Drama of Exile, Princess Ida in Tennyson's Prin- 
 cess, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, (one of these figures, 
 you observe, is just as real to us as the other ; and I 
 have lost all sense of difference between actual and 
 literary existence), Mrs. Browning, Dinah Morris, Milly 
 Barton, Janet Dempster, Florence Nightingale and Sister 
 Dora, Romola, Dorothea Brooke, Myra, Charlotte Cush- 
 man, Mary Somerville and some others. If we are 
 grateful to our sweet master Tennyson for his Dream of 
 Fair Women, how grateful should we be to an age which 
 has given us this realization of ideal women, of women 
 who are so strong and so beautiful that they have subtly 
 brought about that I can find no adjective so satisfactory 
 for them as " womanly" women. They have redeemed 
 the whole time. When I hear certain mournful people 
 crying out that this is a gross and material age, I reply 
 that gross and material are words that have no meaning 
 as of the epoch of the Victorian women. When the 
 pessimists accuse the time of small aims and over-self- 
 ishness, I plead the Victorian women. When the pre- 
 Raphaelites clamor that railroad and telegraph have 
 fatally scarred the whole face of the picturesque and the 
 ideal among us, I reply that on the other hand the Vic- 
 
254 The English Novel 
 
 torian women are more beautiful than any product of 
 times that they call picturesque and ideal. 
 
 And it is singularly fine that in some particulars the 
 best expression of the corresponding attitude which man 
 has assumed toward the Victorian women in the growth 
 of the times has been poetically formulated by a woman. 
 In Mrs. Browning's Drama of Exile, during those first 
 insane moments when Eve is begging Adam to banish 
 her for her transgression, or to do some act of retribu- 
 tive justice upon her, Adam continually comforts her 
 and finally speaks these words : 
 
 ..." I am deepest in the guilt, 
 If last in the transgression. ... If God 
 Who gave the right and joyance of the world 
 Both unto thee and me, — gave thee to me, 
 The best gift last, the last sin was the worst, 
 Which sinned against more complement of gifts 
 And grace of giving. God ! I render back 
 Strong benediction and perpetual praise 
 From mortal feeble lips (as incense smoke, 
 Out of a little censer, may fill heaven), 
 That Thou, in striking my benumbed hands 
 And forcing them to drop all other boons 
 Of beauty and dominion and delight, — 
 Hast left this well-beloved Eve, this life 
 Within life, this best gift, between their palms, 
 In gracious compensation ! 
 
 " Oh my God ! 
 I, standing here between the glory and dark,— 
 The glory of thy wrath projected forth 
 From Eden's wall, the dark of our distress 
 Which settles a step off in that drear world — 
 Lift up to Thee the hands from whence hath fallen 
 Only creation's sceptre, — thanking Thee 
 That rather Thou hast cast me out with her 
 Than left me lorn of her in Paradise, 
 With angel looks and angel songs around 
 
The Development of Personality 255 
 
 To show the absence of her eyes and voice, 
 And make society full desertness 
 Without her use in comfort ! 
 
 " Because with her, I stand 
 Upright, as far as can be in this fall, 
 And look away from heaven which doth accuse, 
 And look away from earth which doth convict, 
 Into her face, and crown my discrowned brow 
 Out of her love, and put the thought of her 
 Around me, for an Eden full of birds, 
 And with my lips upon her lips, — thus, thus, — 
 Do quicken and sublimate my mortal breath 
 Which cannot climb against the grave's steep sides 
 But overtops this grief ! " 
 
256 The English Novel 
 
 XI 
 
 The fullness of George Eliot's mind at this time may 
 be gathered from the rapidity with which one work fol- 
 lowed another. A book from her pen had been appear- 
 ing regularly each year : The Scenes of Clerical Life 
 had appeared in book form in 1858, Adam Bede was 
 printed in 1859, The Mill on the Floss came out in 
 i860, and now, in 1861, followed Silas Marner, the 
 Weaver of Raveloe. It is with the greatest reluctance 
 that I find myself obliged to pass this book without 
 comment. In some particulars Silas Marner is the most 
 remarkable novel in our language. On the one hand, 
 when I read the immortal scene at the Rainbow Inn 
 where the village functionaries, the butcher, the farrier, 
 the parish clerk and so on are discussing ghosts, bullocks 
 and other matters over their evening ale, my mind runs 
 to Dogberry and Verges and the air feels as if Shak- 
 spere were sitting somewhere not far off. On the other 
 hand, the downright ghastliness of the young Squire's 
 punishment for stealing the long-hoarded gold of Silas 
 Marner the weaver always carries me straight to that 
 pitiless Pardoner's Tale of Chaucer in which gold is so 
 cunningly identified with death. I am sure you will 
 pardon me if I spend a single moment in recalling the 
 plots of these two stories so far as concerns this point of 
 contact. In Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale three riotous 
 young men of Flanders are drinking one day at a tavern. 
 In the midst of their merriment they hear the clink of a 
 
The Development of Personality 257 
 
 bell before a dead body which is borne past the door on 
 its way to burial. They learn that it is an old compan- 
 ion who is dead ; all three become suddenly inflamed 
 with mortal anger against Death ; and they rush forth 
 resolved to slay him wherever they may find him. Pres- 
 ently they meet an old man. " Why do you live so 
 long?" they mockingly inquire of him. "Because," 
 says he, 
 
 " Deth, alas, ne will not han my lif ; 
 Thus walke I like a resteles caitif, 
 And on the ground, which is my modres gate, 
 I knocke with my staf erlich and late 
 And say to hire ' Leve moder, let me in.' " 
 
 "Where is this Death of whom you have spoken?" 
 furiously demand the three young men. The old man 
 replied, " You will find him under an oak tree in yonder 
 grove." The three rush forward ; and upon arriving at 
 the oak find three bags full of gold coin. Overjoyed at 
 their good fortune they are afraid to carry the treasure 
 into town by day lest they be suspected of robbery. 
 They therefore resolve to wait until night and in the 
 meantime to make merry. For the latter purpose one of 
 the three goes to town after food and drink. As soon as 
 he is out of hearing the two who remain under the tree 
 resolve to murder their companion on his return so that 
 they may be the richer by his portion of the treasure : 
 he, on the other hand, whilst buying his victual in town, 
 shrewdly drops a great lump of poison into the bottle of 
 drink he is to carry back, so that his companions may 
 perish and he take all. 
 
 To make a long story short, the whole plot is carried 
 out. As soon as he who was sent to town returns, his 
 companions fall upon him and murder him ; they then 
 proceed merrily to eat and drink what he has brought ; 
 
 17 
 
258 The English Novel 
 
 the poison does its work; presently all three lie dead 
 under the oak tree by the side of the gold, and the old 
 man's direction has proved true : they have found 
 death under that tree. In George Eliot's story the 
 young English Squire also finds death in finding gold. 
 You will all remember how Dunstan Cass in returning 
 late at night from a fox-hunt on foot — for he had killed 
 his horse in the chase — finds himself near the stone hut 
 where Silas Marner the weaver has long plied his trade, 
 and where he is known to have concealed a large sum in 
 gold. The young man is extraordinarily pressed for 
 money ; he resolves to take Marner's gold ; the night is 
 dark and misty ; he makes his way through the mud and 
 darkness to the cottage and finds the door open, Marner 
 being, by the rarest of accidents, away from the hut. 
 The young man quickly discovers the spot in the floor 
 where the weaver kept his gold ; he seizes the two heavy 
 leathern bags filled with guineas, and the chapter ends, 
 " So he stepped forward into the darkness." All this 
 occurs in Chapter IV. The story then proceeds ; noth- 
 ing more is heard of Dunstan Cass in the village for 
 many years ; the noise of the robbery has long ago died 
 away ; Silas Marner has one day found a golden head of 
 hair lying on the very spot of his floor where he used to 
 finger his own gold ; the little outcast who had fallen asleep 
 with her head in this position, after having wandered 
 into Marner's cottage, has been brought up by him to 
 womanhood ; when one day, at a critical period in Silas 
 Marner's existence, it happens that in draining some 
 lower grounds the pit of an old stone quarry, which had 
 for years stood filled with rain-water near his house, be- 
 comes dry, and on the bottom is revealed a skeleton with 
 a leathern bag of gold in each hand. The young man 
 plunging out into the dark, laden with his treasure, had 
 
The Development of Personality 259 
 
 fallen in and lain for all these years to be afterwards 
 brought to light as another phase of the frequent iden- 
 tity between death and gold. Here, too, one is obliged 
 to remember those doubly dreadful words in Romeo and 
 Juliet, where Romeo having with difficulty bought poison 
 from the apothecary, cries : 
 
 n There is thy gold ; worse poison to men's souls, 
 Doing more murder in this loathsome world 
 Than these poor compounds which thou mayst not sell : 
 I sell thee poison, thou hast sold me none. 
 Farewell ; buy food and get thyself in flesh." 
 
 I must also instance one little passing picture in Silas 
 Marner which, though extremely fanciful, is yet a charm- 
 ing type of some of the greatest and most characteristic 
 work that George Eliot has done. Silas Marner had 
 been a religious enthusiast of an obscure sect of a small 
 manufacturing town of England ; suddenly a false accu- 
 sation of theft in which the circumstantial evidence 
 was strong against him brings him into disgrace among 
 his fellow-disciples ; with his whole faith in God and 
 man shattered he leaves his town, wanders over to the 
 village of Raveloe, begins aimlessly to pursue his trade 
 of weaving, presently is paid for some work in gold ; in 
 handling the coin he is smit with the fascination of its 
 yellow radiance, and presently we find him pouring out 
 all the prodigious intensity of his nature, which had 
 previously found a fitter field in religion, in the miser's 
 passion. Working day and night, while yet a young man 
 he fills his two leathern bags with gold ; and George 
 Eliot gives us some vivid pictures of how, when his day's 
 work would be done, he would brighten up the fire in 
 his stone hut which stood at the edge of the village, 
 eagerly lift up the particular brick of the stone floor 
 under which he kept his treasure concealed, pour out the 
 
260 The English Novel 
 
 bright yellow heaps of coin and run his long white fingers 
 through them with all the miser's ecstasy. But after 
 he is robbed the utter blank in his soul — and one can 
 imagine such a blank in such a soul, for he was essen- 
 tially religious — becomes strangely filled. One day a 
 poor woman leading her little golden-haired child is 
 making her way along the road past Mamer's cottage ; 
 she is the wife, by private marriage, of the Squire's eldest 
 son, and after having been cruelly treated by him for 
 years has now desperately resolved to appear with her 
 child at a great merry-making which goes on at the 
 Squire's to-day, there to expose all and demand justice. 
 It so happens however that in her troubles she has 
 become an opium-taker ; just as she is passing Marner's 
 cottage the effect of an unusually large dose becomes 
 overpowering ; she lies down and falls off into a stupor 
 which this time ends in death. Meantime the little 
 golden-haired girl innocently totters into the open door 
 of Marner's cottage during his absence, presently lies 
 down, places her head with all its golden wealth upon 
 the very brick which Marner used to lift up in order to 
 bring his gold to light, and so falls asleep, while a ray of 
 sunlight strikes through the window and illuminates the 
 little one's head. Marner now returns ; he is dazed at 
 beholding what seems almost to be another pile of gold 
 at the familiar spot on the floor. He takes this new 
 treasure into his hungry heart and brings up the little 
 girl who becomes a beautiful woman and faithful daughter 
 to him. His whole character now changes and the 
 hardness of his previous brutal misanthropy softens into 
 something at least, approaching humanity. Now it is 
 fairly characteristic of George Eliot that she constantly 
 places before us lives which change in a manner of which 
 this is typical : that is to say, she is constantly showing 
 
The Development of Personality 261 
 
 us intense and hungry spirits first wasting their intensity 
 and hunger upon that which is unworthy, often from 
 pure ignorance of anything worthier, then finding where 
 love is worthy, and thereafter loving larger loves, and 
 living larger lives. 
 
 Is not this substantially the experience of Janet 
 Dempster ; of Adam Bede, replacing the love of Hetty 
 with that of Dinah Morris; of Romola; of Dorothea; 
 of Gwendolen Harleth ? 
 
 This last name brings us directly to the work which 
 we were specially to study to-day. George Eliot's novels 
 have all striking relationships among themselves which 
 cause them to fall into various groups according to 
 various points of view. There is one point however from 
 which her entire work divides itself into two groups, of 
 which one includes the whole body of her writings up to 
 1876 : the other group consists solely of Daniel Deronda. 
 This classification is based on the fact that all the works 
 in the first group concern the life of a time which is past. 
 It is only in Daniel Deronda, after she has been writing 
 for more than twenty years, that George Eliot first 
 ventures to deal with English society of the present day. 
 To this important claim upon our interest may be added 
 a further circumstance which will in the sequel develop 
 into great significance. Daniel Deronda has had the 
 singular fate of being completely misunderstood to such 
 a degree that the greatest admirers of George Eliot 
 have even ventured to call it a failure, while the Philis- 
 tines have rioted in abusing Gwendolen Harleth as a 
 weak and rather disagreeable personage, Mirah and 
 Daniel as unmitigated prigs, and the plot as an absurd 
 attempt to awaken interest in what is called the religious 
 patriotism of the Jews. This comparative failure o(Da?iiel 
 Deronda to please current criticism, and even the ardent 
 
262 The English Novel 
 
 admirers of George Eliot, so clearly opens up what is to 
 my view a singular and lamentable weakness in certain vital 
 portions of the structure of our society that I have thought 
 I could not render better service than by conducting our 
 analysis of Daniel Deronda so as to make it embrace 
 some of the most common of the objections urged 
 against that work. Let us recall in largest possible out- 
 line the movement of Daniel Deronda. This can be done 
 in a surprisingly brief statement. The book really con- 
 cerns two people ; one is Gwendolen Harleth, a beautiful 
 English girl, brought up with all those delicate tastes 
 and accomplishments which we understand when we 
 think of the highest English refinement, — wayward — 
 mainly because she has seen as yet no way that seemed 
 better to follow than her own — and ambitious, but evi- 
 dently with that sacred discontent which desires the best 
 and which will only be small when its horizon contains 
 but small objects. The other main personage is Daniel 
 Deronda, who has been brought up as an Englishman of 
 rank, has a striking face and person, a natural love for all 
 that is beautiful and noble, a good sense that enables him 
 to see through the banalities of English political life and 
 to shrink from involving his own existence in such lit- 
 tleness, and who, after some preliminary account of his 
 youth in the earlier chapters, is placed before us early 
 in the first book as a young man of twenty who is seri- 
 ously asking himself whether life is worth living. 
 
 It so happens however that presently Gwendolen Har- 
 leth is found asking herself this same question. Tempted 
 by a sudden reverse of fortune, by the chance to take 
 care of her mother, and one must add by her own desire 
 — guilty enough in such a connection — for plenty of 
 horses to ride and for all the other luxurious accompa- 
 niments which form so integral a portion of modern 
 
The Development of Personality 163 
 
 English life ; driven, too, by what one must not hesitate to 
 call the cowardliest shrinking from the name and posi- 
 tion of a governess ; conciliated by a certain infinite 
 appearance of lordliness which in Grandcourt is mainly 
 nothing more than a blase brutality which has exhausted 
 desire, — Gwendolen accepts the hand of Grandcourt, 
 quickly discovers him to be an unspeakable brute, suf- 
 fers a thousand deaths from remorse and is soon found — 
 as is just said — wringing her hands and asking if life is 
 worth living. 
 
 Now the sole purpose and outcome of the book lie in 
 its answers to the questions of these two young people. 
 It does answer them, and answers them satisfactorily. 
 On the one hand, Gwendolen Harleth, in the course of 
 her married life, is several times thrown with Daniel 
 Deronda ; his loftiness, his straightforwardness, his fervor, 
 his frankness, his general passion for whatsoever things 
 are large and fine, — in a word, his goodness — form a 
 complete revelation to her. She suddenly discovers that 
 life is not only worth living but that the possibility of 
 making one's life a good life invests it with a romantic in- 
 terest whose depth is infinitely beyond that of all the 
 society pleasures which had hitherto formed her horizon. 
 On the other hand, Daniel Deronda discovers that he is 
 a Jew by birth, and, fired by the visions of a fervent 
 Hebrew friend, he resolves to devote his life and the 
 wealth that has fallen to him from various sources to the 
 cause of reestablishing his people in their former Eastern 
 home. Thus also for him, instead of presenting the 
 dreary doubt whether it is worth living, life opens up a 
 boundless and fascinating field for energies of the loftiest 
 kind. 
 
 Place, then, clearly before your minds these two dis- 
 tinct strands of story. One of these might be called The 
 
264 The English Novel 
 
 Repentance of Gwendolen Harleth, and this occupies 
 much the larger portion of the work. The other might 
 be called The Mission of Daniel Deronda. These two 
 strands are, as we have just seen, united into one artistic 
 thread by the organic purpose of the book, which is to 
 furnish a fair and satisfactory answer to the common 
 question over which these two young protagonists 
 struggle: " Is life worth living?" The painting of 
 this repentance of Gwendolen Harleth, the develop- 
 ment of this beautiful young aristocrat Daniel Deronda 
 into a great and strong man consecrated to a holy pur- 
 pose : all this is done with such skillful reproduction of 
 contemporary English life, with such a wealth of flesh- 
 and-blood characters, with an art altogether so subtle, 
 so analytic, yet so warm and so loving withal, that if I 
 were asked for the most significant, the most tender, the 
 most pious and altogether the most uplifting of modern 
 books it seems to me I should specify Daniel Deronda. 
 
 It was remarked two lectures ago that Shakspere had 
 never drawn a repentance ; and if we consider for a 
 single moment what is required in order to paint such 
 a long and intricate struggle as that through which our 
 poor, beautiful Gwendolen passed we are helped towards 
 a clear view of some reasons at least why this is so. For 
 upon examining the instances of repentance alleged by 
 those who disagree with me on this point — as mentioned 
 in my last lecture — I find that the real difference of opin- 
 ion between us is, not as to whether Shakspere ever drew 
 a repentance, but as to what is a repentance. There 
 certainly are in Shakspere pictures of regret for inju- 
 ries done to loved ones under mistake or under passion, 
 and sometimes this regret is long-drawn. But surely 
 such reversal of feeling is only that which would be felt 
 by any man of ordinarily manful make upon discovering 
 
The Development of Personality 265 
 
 that he had greatly wronged any one, particularly a loved 
 one. It is to this complexion that all the alleged in- 
 stances of repentances in Shakspere come at last. No- 
 where do we find any special portrayal of a character 
 engaged to its utmost depths in that complete subver- 
 sion of the old by the new, — that total substitution of 
 some higher motive for the whole existing body of emo- 
 tions and desires, — that emergence out of the twilight 
 world of selfishness into the large and sunlit plains of a 
 love which does not turn upon self, 
 
 •' Which bends not with the remover to remove," 
 Nor "alters when it alteration finds." 
 
 For example, Leontes, in Winter's Tale, who is cited 
 as a chief instance of Shakspere's repentances, quite 
 clearly shows by word and act that his regret is mainly 
 a sense of personal loss, not a change of character. He 
 is sorrowful not so much because he has sinned as 
 because he has hurt himself. In Act V, just before the 
 catastrophe which restores him his wife and daughter, we 
 find him exclaiming : 
 
 " Good Paulina 
 O that ever I 
 Had squared me to thy counsel ! Then even now 
 I might have looked upon my queen's full eyes, 
 Have taken treasure from her lips — " 
 
 And again in the same scene, where Florizel and 
 Perdita have been brought before him, he cries : 
 
 " What might I have been, 
 Might I a son and daughter now have look'd on, 
 Such goodly things as you ! " 
 
 In these it is clear that Leontes is speaking from per- 
 sonal regret ; there is no thought here of that total ex- 
 pansion of an ego into a burning love of all other egos, 
 
266 The English Novel 
 
 implied in the term repentance, as I have used it. Simi- 
 larly, King Lear, who has also been cited as an example 
 of Shakspere's repentances, is simply an example of 
 regret for the foulest of wrongs done in a moment of 
 silly passion. After the poor old man, upon regaining 
 his consciousness under Cordelia's tender ministrations, 
 is captured together with Cordelia, in Scene III of Act 
 V, Cordelia says, as if to comfort him : 
 
 " We are not the first 
 Who with best meaning have incurred the worst. 
 For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down. 
 
 Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters ? " 
 Lear. — " No, no, no, no ! Come, let's away to prison ; 
 We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage ; 
 When thou dost ask me blessing I'll kneel down 
 And ask of thee forgiveness." 
 
 Here, clearly enough, is regret for his injury to Cor- 
 delia, but, quite as clearly, no general state of repentance ; 
 and in the very few other words uttered by the old king 
 before the play ends surely nothing indicating such a 
 state appears. Of all the instances suggested only one 
 involves anything like the process of character-change 
 which I have called a repentance, such as Gwendolen 
 Harleth's, for example ; but this one, unfortunately, is 
 not drawn by Shakspere : it is only mentioned as having 
 occurred. This is the repentance of Duke Frederick 
 in As you Like it. Just at the end of that play, when 
 Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver and Celia and all the rest 
 have unravelled all their complications, and when every- 
 thing that can be called plot in the play is finished, the 
 son of old Sir Rowland appears before the company in 
 the wood and calls out : 
 
 " Let me have audience for a word or two. 
 
The Development of Personality 267 
 
 " Duke Frederick hearing how that every day 
 Men of great worth resorted to this forest 
 Addressed a mighty power 
 
 purposely to take 
 His brother here and put him to the sword, 
 And to the skirts of this wild wood he came 
 Where, meeting with an old religious man, 
 After some questions with him was converted 
 Both from his enterprise and from the world ; 
 His crown bequeathing to his banished brother, 
 And all their lands restored to them again 
 That were with him exiled." 
 
 Here we have indeed a true repentance, but this is all 
 we have of it ; the passage I have read contains the 
 whole picture. 
 
 If we now go on and ask ourselves why these fasci- 
 nating phenomena of repentance which George Eliot has 
 treated with . such success never engaged Shakspere's 
 energy, we come at the very first step upon a limitation 
 of the drama as opposed to the novel which, in the 
 strongest way, confirms the view I was at such pains to 
 set forth in my earlier lectures, of that necessity for a 
 freer form than the dramatic which arises from the more 
 complete relations between modern personalities and 
 which has really developed the novel out of the drama. 
 
 How, for instance, could Shakspere paint the yeas 
 and nays, the twists, the turns, the intricacies of Gwen- 
 dolen Harleth's thought during the long weeks while 
 she was debating whether she should accept Grandcourt? 
 The whole action of this drama, you observe, is confined 
 within the small round head of the girl herself. How 
 could such action be brought before the audience of a 
 play? The only hope would be in a prolonged soliloquy, 
 for these are thoughts which no young woman would 
 naturally communicate to any one ; but what audience 
 
268 The English Novel 
 
 could stand so prolonged a soliloquy, even if any 
 character could be found in whom it would be natural ? 
 And sometimes, too, the situation is so subtly complex 
 that Gwendolen is soliloquizing in such a manner that 
 we, the audience, hear her while Grandcourt, who is 
 standing by, does not. 
 
 " ' I used to think archery was a great bore,' Grandcourt 
 began. He spoke with a fine accent, but with a certain 
 broken drawl, as of a distinguished personage with a distin- 
 guished cold in his chest. 
 
 " ' Are you converted to-day ? ' said Gwendolen. 
 
 " (Pause, during which she imagined various degrees and 
 modes of opinion about herself that might be entertained by 
 Grandcourt.) 
 
 "'Yes, since I saw you shooting. In things of this sort 
 one generally sees people missing and simpering.' 
 
 " ' And do you care about the turf ? or is that among the 
 things you have left off ? ' 
 
 "(Pause, during which Gwendolen thought that a man of 
 extremely calm cold manners might be less disagreeable as 
 a husband than other men, and not likely to interfere with 
 his wife's preferences.) 
 
 " ' You would perhaps like tiger-hunting or pig-sticking. I 
 saw some of that for a season or two in the East. Every- 
 thing here is poor stuff after that.' 
 
 " ' You are fond of danger then ? ' 
 
 " (Pause, during which Gwendolen speculated on the prob- 
 ability that the men of coldest manners were the most ad- 
 venturous, and felt the strength of her own insight, supposing 
 the question had to be decided.) 
 
 " ' One must have something or other. But one gets used 
 to it.' 
 
 " 'I begin to think I am very fortunate, because everything 
 is new to me : it is only that I can't get enough of it. I am 
 
The Development of Personality 269 
 
 not used to anything except being dull, which I should like 
 to leave off as you have left off shooting.' 
 
 " (Pause, during which it occurred to Gwendolen that a 
 man of cold and distinguished manners might possibly be a 
 dull companion; but on the other hand she thought that most 
 persons were dull, that she had not observed husbands to be 
 companions, and that after all she was not going to accept 
 Grandcourt.) 
 
 '"Why are you dull?' 
 
 " ' This is a dreadful neighbourhood, there is nothing to 
 be done in it. That is why I practised my archery.' 
 
 "(Pause, during which Gwendolen reflected that the life of 
 an unmarried woman who could not go about and had no 
 command of anything, must necessarily be dull through all 
 the degrees of comparison as time went on.) 
 
 " ' You have made yourself queen of it. I imagine you will 
 carry the first prize.' 
 
 " ' I don't know that. I have great rivals. Did you not 
 observe how well Miss Arrowpoint shot ? ' 
 
 " (Pause, wherein Gwendolen was thinking that men had 
 been known to choose some one else than the woman they 
 most admired, and recalled several experiences of that kind 
 in novels.) " 
 
 At this point we come upon an element of difference 
 between the novel and the drama which has not hitherto 
 been fairly appreciated, so far as I know. Consider for 
 a moment the wholly supernatural power which is neces- 
 sarily involved in the pi'ojet of thus showing the most 
 secret workings of the mind and heart of this young 
 girl, Gwendolen Harleth ! In real life what power less 
 than God's can make me see the deepest thought and 
 feeling of a fellow-creature? But since the novel is al- 
 ways a transcript of real, or at any rate of possible, life 
 you observe that wherever these workings of heart and 
 brain are thus laid bare the tacit supposition is, in plain 
 terms, that God is the writer, or that the writer is a god. 
 
270 The English Novel 
 
 In the drama no supposition is necessary because here 
 we become acquainted with only such matters as are 
 shown us in the ordinary way, by scenery or by the 
 speech or gesture of the actor. This consideration seems 
 to me to lift the novel to the very highest and holiest 
 plane of creative effort ; he who takes up the pen of the 
 novelist assumes, as to that novel, to take up along with it 
 the omniscience of God. He proposes, in effect, to bring 
 about the revelations of Judgment Day long before the 
 trumpet has sounded. George Eliot shows us the play 
 of Gwendolen Harleth's soul with the same uncom- 
 promising fullness with which the most literal believer 
 expects to give account of the deeds done in the body at 
 the last day. 
 
 In contemplating this vast ascent from the attitude of 
 the dramatist to that of the novelist — the dramatist is a 
 man ; the novelist, as to that novel, is a god — we are 
 contemplating simply another phase of the growth of 
 man from Shakspere to George Eliot. 
 
 And we reach still another view of that growth when 
 we reflect that even if Shakspere could have overcome 
 the merely mechanical difficulty of presenting a repen- 
 tance without overmuch soliloquy, he would probably 
 have found but poorly-paying houses at the Globe 
 Theatre to witness any drama so purely spiritual as that 
 which George Eliot has shown us going on upon the 
 little, ill-lighted stage of a young girl's consciousness. 
 Just as we found that the prodigious advance in the near- 
 ness of man to his fellow from the time of ^Eschylus to 
 that of George Eliot was implied in the fact that the lat- 
 ter could gather an interested audience about a couple of 
 commonplace children (as in The Mill on the Floss), 
 whilst the former required the larger stimulus of Titanic 
 quarrel and angry Jove, so here we have reached an evi- 
 
The Development of Personality 271 
 
 dence of still more subtle advance as between the times 
 of Shakespere and of George Eliot when we find the 
 latter gathering a great audience about this little inward, 
 actionless, complex drama of Gwendolen Harleth, while 
 we reflect that Shakspere must have his stimulant pas- 
 sion, his crime, his patriotism, and the like, as the only 
 attracting motives. In truth I find what seems to be a 
 cunning indication that George Eliot herself did not feel 
 quite sure of her audience for this same little play. At 
 the end of Chapter XI she breaks off from a description 
 of one of Gwendolen's capricious turns, and as if in 
 apologetic defence says : 
 
 " Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in 
 human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with 
 her small inferences of the way in which she could make her 
 life pleasant ? — in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh 
 vigour making armies of themselves and the universal kinship 
 was declaring itself fiercely ; . . . a time when the soul of 
 man was waking to pulses which had for centuries been 
 beating in him unheard. . . . What, in the midst of that 
 mighty drama, are girls and their blind visions ? They are 
 the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring or 
 fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through 
 the ages the treasure of human affections.'" 
 
 Thus it appears that for Shakspere to draw such 
 repentances as Gwendolen Harleth's was not only diffi- 
 cult from the playwright's point of view but premature 
 from the point of view of the world's growth. In truth 
 I suspect if we had time to pursue this matter that we 
 should find it leading us into some very instructive 
 views of certain rugged breaking-off places in Shaks- 
 pere. I suppose we must consider the limitations of his 
 time, though it is just possible they may be limitations 
 of his genius, also. We should presently find ourselves 
 
272 The English Novel 
 
 asking further how it is that Shakspere not only never 
 drew a great reformation, but never painted a great 
 reformer? It seems a natural question : How is it that 
 it is Milton and not Shakspere who has treated the 
 subject of Paradise Lost and Regained ; how is it that 
 the first-class subject was left for the second-class genius? 
 We all know how Milton has failed in what he intended 
 with his poem, and how astonished he would be at find- 
 ing that the only one of his characters which has taken 
 any real hold upon the world is his Satan. It seems 
 irresistible to ask ourselves why might not our most 
 eloquent tongue have treated our most lofty theme? 
 Or, if we should find special reasons in the temper of 
 his time why Shakspere could not or should not have 
 treated this theme, we may still ask, why did he never 
 paint for us one of those men who seem too large to be 
 bounded in their affections merely by limits of country, 
 but who loved and worked for the whole world, Buddha, 
 Zoroaster, Mahomet, Socrates, Luther ; nay, why may 
 not the master have given us a master's picture of Chris- 
 topher Columbus or even of John Vannini, the scientific 
 martyr, or even of the fantastic Giordano Bruno who 
 against all warnings boldly wandered from town to town 
 defending his doctrines until he was burned, in 1600? 
 And if any of the academicians now in my audience 
 should incline to pursue this strange psychologico-literary 
 problem, I make no doubt that useful light would be 
 cast upon the search if you should consider along with 
 these questions the further inquiries why Shakspere never 
 mentions either of the two topics which must have been 
 foremost in the talk of his time : namely, America and 
 tobacco. Among all the allusions to contemporary mat- 
 ter in his plays the nearest he ever comes to America 
 is the single instance in The Tempest where Ariel is 
 
The Development of Personality 273 
 
 mentioned as " fetching dew from the still-vexed Ber- 
 moothes " (Bermudas). As for tobacco: although pretty 
 much all London must have been smoking vigorously 
 about the time Shakspere was writing Much Ado About 
 Nothing, and The Merry Wives of Windsor ; although 
 certainly to a countryman not a great while out of the 
 woods of Warwickshire it must have been the oddest of 
 sights to see people sucking at hollow tubes and puffing 
 smoke from their mouths and nostrils ; although, too, the 
 comedies of his contemporary Ben Jonson are often 
 cloudy with tobacco smoke : nevertheless there is not, 
 so far as my recollection goes, the faintest allusion to 
 the drinking of tobacco (as it was then called) in the 
 whole body of his writings. Now all these omissions 
 are significant because conspicuous ; always, in studying 
 genius, we learn as much from what it has not done, as 
 from what it has done ; and if research should succeed 
 in arranging these neglects from any common point of 
 view, it is possible that something new might still be 
 said about Shakspere. 
 
 But, to return to Daniel Deronda. A day or two after 
 George Eliot's death the Saturday Review contained an 
 elaborate editorial summary of her work. For some 
 special ends, permit me to read so much of it as relates 
 to the book now under consideration. " Daniel Deronda 
 is devoted to the whimsical object of glorifying real or 
 imaginary Jewish aspirations. It cannot be doubted that 
 so fantastic a form of enthusiasm was suggested by some 
 personal predilection or association. A devotion to the 
 Jewish cause unaccompanied by any kind of interest in 
 the Jewish religion is not likely to command general 
 sympathy ; but even if the purpose of the story had been 
 as useful as it is chimerical and absurd, the inherent fault 
 of didactic fiction would scarcely have been diminished. 
 
 18 
 
274 The English Novel 
 
 ... It is significant that when George Eliot deliberately 
 preferred the function of teaching to her proper office 
 of amusing she sacrificed her power of instruction as 
 well as her creative faculty." 
 
 Of course, in general, no man in his senses thinks of 
 taking in serious earnest every proposition in the Satur- 
 day Revieiu. It is an odd character which long ago 
 assumed the role of teasing English society by gravely 
 advancing any monstrous assertion at random and 
 laughing in its sleeve at the elaborate replies with which 
 this assertion would be honored by weak and unsus- 
 pecting people. But its position upon this particular 
 point of Daniel Deronda happens to be supported by 
 similar views among her professed admirers. 
 
 Even The Spectator in its obituary notice completely 
 mistakes the main purpose of Daniel Deronda, in de- 
 claring that " she takes religious patriotism for the sub- 
 ject ; " although, as I have just indicated, surely the final 
 aim of the book is to furnish to two young modern peo- 
 ple a motive sufficient to make life not only worth living 
 but fascinating ; and of the two distinct plots in the book 
 one — and the one to which most attention is paid — 
 hinges upon Gwendolen Harleth's repentance, while it is 
 only the other and slighter which is concerned with what 
 these papers call religious patriotism ; and here the phrase 
 " religious patriotism " if we examine it is not only 
 meaningless — what is religious patriotism? — but has the 
 effect of dwarfing the two grand motives which are 
 given to Daniel Deronda : namely, religion <?;/;/ patriotism. 
 
 Upon bringing together, however, all the objections 
 which have been urged against Daniel Deronda, I think 
 they may be classified and discussed under two main 
 heads. First it is urged that Daniel Deronda and Mirah 
 — and even Gwendolen Harleth, after her change of 
 
The Development of Personality 275 
 
 spirit — are all prigs ; secondly, it is urged that the moral 
 purpose of the book has overweighted the art of it, that 
 what should have been pure nature and beauty have been 
 obscured by didacticism, thus raising the whole question 
 of Art for Art's sake which has so mournfully divided 
 the modern artistic world. This last objection, opening, 
 as it does, the whole question of how far fervent moral 
 purpose injures the work of the true artist, is a matter of 
 such living importance in the present state of our art, 
 particularly of our literary art ; it so completely sums 
 up all these contributory items of thought which have 
 been gradually emerging in these lectures regarding the 
 growth of human personality together with the correla- 
 tive development of the novel ; and the discussions con- 
 cerning it are conducted upon such small planes and 
 from such low and confusing points of view : that I will 
 ask to devote my next lecture to a faithful endeavor to 
 get all the light possible upon the vexed matter of Art 
 for Art's sake, and to showing how triumphantly George 
 Eliot's Daniel Deronda seems to settle that entire debate 
 with the most practical of answers. 
 
 Meantime in discussing the other class of objections 
 which we managed to generalize, to wit that the three 
 main characters in Daniel Deronda are prigs, a serious 
 difficulty lies in the impossibility of learning from these 
 objectors exactly what is a prig. And I confess I should 
 be warned off from any attempt at discussion by this 
 initial difficulty if I did not find great light thrown on 
 the subject by discovering that the two objections of 
 prig-ism and that of didacticism already formulated are 
 really founded upon the same cunning weakness in our 
 current culture. The truth is, George Eliot's book, 
 Daniel Deronda, is so sharp a sermon that it has made 
 the whole English contemporary society uncomfortable. 
 
276 The English Novel 
 
 It is curious and instructive to see how unable all the 
 objectors have been to put their fingers upon the exact 
 source of this discomfort ; so that in their bewilderment 
 one lays it to prig-ism, another to didacticism, and so on. 
 That a state of society should exist in which such a piece 
 of corruption as Grandcourt should be not only the 
 leader but the crazing fascination and ideal of the most 
 delicate and fastidious young women in that society; 
 that a state of society should exist in which those pure 
 young girls whom George Eliot describes as " the deli- 
 cate vessels in which man's affections are hoarded through 
 the ages," should be found manoeuvring for this Grand- 
 court infamy, plotting to be Grandcourt's wife, instead of 
 flying from him in horror ; that a state of society should 
 exist in which such a thing was possible as a marriage 
 between a Gwendolen Harleth and a Grandcourt : this 
 was enough to irritate even the thickest skinned Philis- 
 tine, and this George Eliot's book showed with a terrible 
 conclusiveness. Yet the showing was made so daintily 
 and with so light a hand that, as I have said, current 
 society did not know, and has not yet recognized, 
 where or how the wound was. We have all read of 
 the miraculous sword in the German fable whose blade 
 was so keen that when, upon a certain occasion, its 
 owner smote a warrior with it from crown to crotch, 
 the warrior nevertheless rode home and was scarcely 
 aware he had been wounded until, upon his wife opening 
 the door, he attempted to embrace her and fell into two 
 pieces. Now, as I said, just as Daniel Deronda made 
 people feel uncomfortable by even vaguely revealing a 
 sharp truth — so, a prig, so far as I can make out, is a 
 person whose goodness is so genuine, essential and ever- 
 present that all ungenuine people have a certain sense of 
 discomfort when brought in contact with it. If the prig- 
 
The Development of Personality 277 
 
 hater be questioned he will not deny the real goodness of 
 the Daniel Deronda people ; he dare not — no one in 
 this age dares — to wish explicitly that Mirah and Daniel 
 Deronda might be less good ; but as nearly as anything 
 definite can be obtained what he desires is that the prig 
 should be good in some oily and lubricative way so as 
 not to jar the nerves of those who are less good. Con- 
 form, conform ! seems to be the essential cry of the prig- 
 haters; if you go to an evening party you wear your 
 dress coat and look like every other man ; but here your 
 goodness amounts to a hump, a deformity : we do not 
 ask you to cut it off, but at least pad it ; if every one 
 grows as big as you we shall have to enlarge all our draw- 
 ing-rooms and society will be disorganized. In short, 
 the cry against the prig turns out to be nothing more 
 than the old claim for conformity and the conventional. 
 For one, I never hear these admonitions to conformity 
 without recalling a comical passage of Tom Hood's in 
 which the fellows of a Zoological society propose to 
 remedy the natural defects of animal morphology, such 
 as the humps of dromedaries and the overgrowth of hair 
 upon lions, so as to bring all the grotesqueness of the 
 animal creation into more conformity with conventional 
 ideas of proportion. The passage occurs in a pretended 
 report from the keeper of the animals to the President of 
 the society. After describing the condition of the vari- 
 ous beasts the keeper proceeds : 
 
 Honnerd Sur, — Their is an aggitating skeem of witch I 
 humbly approve very hiley. The plan is owen to sum of the 
 Femail Fellers, — ... For instances the Buffloo and Fallo 
 dears and cetra to have their horns Gildid and Sheaps is to 
 hav Pink ribbings round there nex. The Ostreaches is to 
 have their plums stuck in their heds, and the Pecox tales 
 will be always spred out on fraime wurks like the hispaliers. 
 
278 The English Novel 
 
 All the Bares is to be tort to Danee to Wippert's Quadrils 
 and the Lions manes is to be subjective to pappers and the 
 curling tongues. The gould and silver Fesants is to be 
 Polisht every day with Plait Powder and the Cammils and 
 Drumdearis and other defourmed anymills is to be paddid to 
 hide their Crukidnes. Mr. Howard is to file down the tusks of 
 the wild Bores, and the Spoons of the Spoonbills is to be maid 
 as like the King's Patten as posible. The elifunt will be 
 himbelisht with a Sugger candid Castle maid by Gunter and 
 the Flaminggoes will be touched up with Frentch ruge. The 
 Sloath is propos'd to have an ellegunt Stait Bed — and the 
 Bever is to ware one of Perren's lite Warter Proof Hats — 
 and the Balld Vulters baldnes will be hided by a small Whig 
 from Trewfits. The Crains will be put into trousirs and the 
 Hippotamus tite laced for a waste. Experience will dictait 
 menny more imbellishing modes, with witch I conclud that 
 I am 
 
 Your Honners, 
 
 Very obleeged and humbel former servant, 
 
 Stephen Humphreys. 
 
 Such is the ideal to which the prig is asked to con- 
 form, but after the first six lectures of this course we are 
 specially in position to see in all this cry nothing but the 
 old clamor against personality. Upon us who have traced 
 the growth of personality from ^Eschylus to George Eliot, 
 and who have found that growth to be the one direction 
 for the advance of our species, this cry comes with little 
 impressiveness. 
 
The Development of Personality 279 
 
 XII 
 
 In the last lecture we obtained a view of George Eliot's 
 Daniel Dero?ida as containing two distinct stories, one 
 of which might have been called The Repentance of 
 Gwendolen Harleth, and the other, The Mission of Daniel 
 Deronda ; and we generalized the principal objections 
 against the work into two : namely, that the main char- 
 acters were prigs and that the artistic value of the book 
 was spoiled by its moral purpose. In discussing the 
 first of these objections we found that probably both of 
 them might be referred to a common origin ; for exami- 
 nation of precisely what is meant by a prig revealed that 
 he is a person whose goodness is so downright, so uncon- 
 forming and so radical that it makes the mass of us 
 uncomfortable. Now there can be no question that so 
 far as the charge of being overloaded with moral purpose 
 is brought against Daniel Deronda, as distinguished from 
 George Eliot's other works, it is so palpably contrary to 
 all facts in the case that we may clearly refer it to some 
 fact outside the case : and I readily find this outside 
 fact in that peculiar home-thrust of the moral of Daniel 
 Deronda which has rendered it more tangible than that 
 of any preceding work which concerned time past. You 
 will remember we found that it was only in Daniel 
 Deronda, written in 1876, after thirty years of study and 
 of production, that George Eliot allowed herself to treat 
 current English society ; you will remember too how we 
 found that this first treatment revealed among other 
 
280 The English Novel 
 
 things a picture of an unspeakable brute, Grandcourt, 
 throned like the Indian Lama above the multitude, and 
 receiving with a blase" stare the special adoration of the 
 most refined young English girls : a picture which made 
 the worship of the golden calf or the savage dance around 
 a merely impotent wooden idol, fade into tame blasphemy. 
 No man could deny the truth of the picture ; the galled 
 jade was obliged to wince ; this time it was my withers 
 that were wrung. Thus the moral purpose of Daniel 
 Deronda, which is certainly beyond all comparison less 
 obtrusive than that of any other book written by George 
 Eliot, grew, by its very nearness, out of all perspective. 
 Though a mere gnat, it sat on the very eyelash of society 
 and seemed a monster. 
 
 In speaking of George Eliot's earlier stories I was at 
 pains to show how explicitly she avowed their moral 
 purpose ; in Amos Barton, in Janet 's Repentance, in 
 Adam Bede, everywhere there is the fullest avowal of 
 didacticism ; on almost every other page one meets 
 those direct appeals from the author in her own person 
 to the reader in which George Eliot indulged more freely 
 than any novelist I know, enforcing this or that moral 
 view in plain terms of preaching. But it curiously hap- 
 pens that even these moral " asides " are conspicuously 
 absent in Daniel Deronda ; the most cursory comparison 
 of it in this particular with Adam Bede, for example, 
 reveals an enormous disproportion in favor of Deronda 
 as to the weight of this criticism. Yet people who had 
 enthusiastically accepted and extolled Adam Bede, with 
 all its explicitly moralizing passages and its professedly 
 preaching characters, suddenly found that Daniel Dero?ida 
 was intolerably priggish and didactic. But resting thus 
 on the facts in the case — easily provable by comparing 
 Daniel Deronda with any previous work — to show how 
 
The Development of Personality 281 
 
 this censure of didacticism loses all momentum as against 
 this particular book : let us advance to the more interest- 
 ing, because more general, fact that many people — 
 some in great sincerity — have preferred this censure 
 against all of George Eliot's work and against all didactic 
 novels in general. The objection involves many shades 
 of opinion, and is urged with the most diverse motives 
 and manner. At one extreme we have the Saturday 
 Review huskily growling — as in the extract quoted in my 
 last lecture — that the office of the novelist is to amuse, 
 never to instruct, that George Eliot, in seeking the latter 
 has even forfeited the former, and that Daniel Deronda 
 neither amuses nor instructs ; whereupon George Eliot is 
 derisively bid, in substance, to put on the cap and bells 
 again and leave teaching to her betters ; with a voice, by 
 the way, wondrously like that with which the Edinburgh 
 Review some years ago cried out to our adorable John 
 Keats, " Back to your gallipots, young man i " From 
 this extreme we have all shades of opinion to that vague 
 and moderate apprehension much current among young 
 persons influenced by a certain smart sound in the modern 
 French phrase V Art pour V Art — ox by the German 
 nickname of " tendency-books " — that a moral intention 
 on the part of an artist is apt to interfere with the nat- 
 uralness or intrinsic beauty of his work, that in art the 
 controlling consideration must always be artistic beauty, 
 and that artistic beauty is not only distinct from but 
 often opposed to moral beauty. Now, to discuss this 
 question a priori : to go forward and establish an aesthetic 
 basis for beauty, involving an examination which must 
 range frorn Aristotle to Kant and Burke and Mr. Grant 
 Allen's physiological theories, would require another 
 course of lectures quite as long as that which is now end- 
 ing ; so that all I can hope to do is but to throw, if I can, 
 
282 The English Novel 
 
 some light upon this question. And so, to proceed imme- 
 diately to that work with some system : permit me to 
 recall to you in the first place that the requirement has 
 been from time immemorial that wherever there is 
 contest as between artistic and moral beauty, unless the 
 moral side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor hew us 
 out the most ravishing combination of tender curves and 
 spheric softness that ever stood for woman; yet if the 
 lip have a certain fullness that hints of the flesh, if the 
 brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular the phys- 
 ical beauty suggest a moral ugliness, that sculptor — 
 unless he be portraying a moral ugliness for a moral pur- 
 pose — may as well give over his marble for paving-stones. 
 Time, whose judgments are inexorably moral, will not 
 accept his work. For indeed we may say that he who 
 has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral 
 beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common 
 ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire with moral 
 beauty just as with artistic beauty, — that he, in short, 
 who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal 
 frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of 
 beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light,, 
 within him ; — he is not yet the great artist. ""Here it is 
 most instructive to note how the fine and beautiful souls 
 of time appear after awhile to lose all sense of distinction 
 between these terms, Beauty, Truth, Love, Wisdom, 
 Goodness, and the like. Hear some testimony upon this 
 point : this is a case for witnesses. Let us call, first, 
 Keats. Keats does not hesitate to draw a moral even 
 from his Grecian Urn, and even in the very climacteric 
 of his most "high sorrowful" song; and that moral 
 effaces the distinction between truth and beauty. " Cold 
 pastoral ! " he cries, at the end of the Ode on a Grecian 
 Urn, 
 
The Development of Personality 283 
 
 " When old age shall this generation waste, 
 Thou shalt remain in midst of other woe 
 Than ours, a friend to man to whom thou say'st 
 1 Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,' — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 
 
 Again, bearing in mind this identity of truth and 
 beauty in Keats's view, observe how Emerson, by strange 
 turns of thought, subtly refers both truth and beauty to 
 a common principle of the essential relation of each thing 
 to all things in the universe. Here are the beginning 
 and end of Emerson's poem called Each and All : 
 
 " Little thinks in the field yon red-cloaked clown 
 Of thee from the hill-top looking down ; 
 The sexton tolling his bell at noon 
 Deems not that great Napoleon 
 Stops his horse and lists with delight 
 While his files sweep round yon Alpine height ; 
 Nor knowest thou what argument 
 Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent. 
 All are needed by each one ; 
 Nothing is fair or good alone." 
 
 Nothing is fair or good alone : that is to say fairness, 
 or beauty, and goodness depend upon relations between 
 creatures ; and so in the end of the poem, after telling 
 us how he learned this lesson by finding that the bird- 
 song was not beautiful when away from its proper rela- 
 tion to the sky and the river and so on, we have this : 
 
 " Then I said ' I covet truth ; 
 Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat ; 
 I leave it behind with the games of youth/ 
 As I spoke, beneath my feet 
 The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath, 
 Running over the club-moss burs ; 
 I inhaled the violet's breath ; 
 Around me stood the oaks and firs ; 
 
284 The English Novel 
 
 Pine cones and acorns lay on the ground ; 
 
 Over me soared the eternal sky, 
 
 Full of light and of deity ; 
 
 Again I saw, again I heard 
 
 The rolling river, the morning bird ; 
 
 Beauty through all my senses stole, 
 
 I yielded myself to the perfect whole." 
 
 But again, here Mrs. Browning, speaking by the mouth 
 of Adam in The Drama of Exile, so far identifies beauty 
 and love as to make the former depend on the latter ; 
 insomuch that Satan, created the most beautiful of all 
 angels, becomes the most repulsive of all angels from 
 lack of love, though retaining all his original outfit of 
 beauty. In The Drama of Exile, after Adam and Eve 
 have become wise with the great lessons of grief, love 
 and forgiveness, to them comes Satan, with such talk as 
 if he would mock them back into their misery ; but it is 
 fine to see how the father of men now instructs the prince 
 of the angels upon this matter of love and beauty. 
 
 Eve. — Speak no more with him, 
 
 Beloved ! it is not good to speak with him. 
 
 Go from us, Lucifer, and speak no more ! 
 
 We have no pardon which thou dost not scorn, 
 
 Nor any bliss, thou seest, for coveting, 
 
 Nor innocence for staining. Being bereft, 
 
 We would be alone. Go. 
 Luc. — Ah ! ye talk the same, 
 
 AH of you — spirits and clay — go, and depart ! 
 
 In Heaven they said so ; and at Eden's gate, — 
 
 And here, reiterant, in the wilderness. 
 
 None saith, Stay with me, for thy face is fair ! 
 
 None saith, Stay with me, for thy voice is sweet ! 
 
 And yet I was not fashioned out of clay. 
 
 Look on me, woman ! Am I beautiful ? 
 Eve. — Thou hast a glorious darkness. 
 Luc. — Nothing more ? 
 
 Eve. — I think, no more. 
 
The Development of Personality 285 
 
 Luc. — False Heart — thou thinkest more ! 
 
 Thou canst not choose but think, . . . that I stand 
 Most absolute in beauty. As yourselves 
 Were fashioned very good at best, so we 
 Sprang very beauteous from the creant Word 
 Which thrilled behind us, God Himself being moved 
 When that august work of a perfect shape, — 
 His dignities of sovran angel-hood, — 
 Swept out into the universe, — divine 
 With thunderous movements, earnest looks of gods, 
 And silver-solemn clash of cymbal-wings ! 
 Whereof was I, in motion and in form, 
 A part not poorest. And yet, — yet, perhaps, 
 This beauty which I speak of is not here, 
 As God's voice is not here, nor even my crown — 
 I do not know. What is this thought or thing 
 Which I call beauty ? is it thought or thing ? 
 Is it a thought accepted for a thing ? 
 Or both ? or neither ? — a pretext — a word ? 
 Its meaning flutters in me like a flame 
 Under my own breath : my perceptions reel 
 For evermore around it, and fall off, 
 As if it, too, were holy. 
 
 Eve. — Which it is. 
 
 Adam. — The essence of all beauty, I call love. 
 The attribute, the evidence, the end, 
 The consummation to the inward sense 
 Of beauty apprehended from without, 
 I still call love. As form when colorless 
 Is nothing to the eye, — that pine-tree there, 
 Without its black and green, being all a blank, — 
 So, without love, is beauty undiscerned, 
 In man or angel. Angel ! rather ask 
 What love is in thee, what love moves to thee, 
 And what collateral love moves on with thee ; 
 Then shalt thou know if thou art beautiful. 
 
 Luc. — Love ! what is love ? I lose it. Beauty and love 
 
 I darken to the image. Beauty — love ! {He disappears?) 
 
 Let us now carry forward this connection between 
 love and beauty in listening to a further testimony of 
 
286 The English Novel 
 
 Emerson's in a poem called The Celestial Love, where, 
 instead of identifying beauty and truth with Keats, we 
 find him making love and truth to be one : 
 
 " Love's hearts are faithful, but not fond, 
 Bound for the just but not beyond ; 
 Not glad, as the low-loving herd, 
 Of self in other still preferred, 
 But they have heartily designed 
 The benefit of broad mankind. 
 And they serve men austerely, 
 After their own genius, clearly, 
 Without a false humility; 
 For this is love's nobility, — 
 Not to scatter bread and gold, 
 Goods and raiment bought and sold ; 
 But to hold fast his simple sense, 
 And speak the speech of innocence, 
 And with hand, and body, and blood, 
 To make his bosom-counsel good. 
 For he that feeds men serveth few ; 
 He serves all that dares be true." 
 
 And in connection with these lines : 
 
 " Not glad, as the low-loving herd, 
 Of self in other still preferred," — 
 
 I must here beg you to observe the quite incalculable 
 advance in the ideal of love here presented by Emerson 
 and the ideal which was thought to be the crown and 
 boast of the classic novel a hundred years ago, and 
 which is still pointed to with exultation by thoughtless 
 people. This ideal, by universal voice, was held to have 
 been consummated by Fielding in his character of Squire 
 Allvvorthy, in the famous novel, Tom Jones. And here it 
 is : we have a dramatic presentation of Squire Allworthy, 
 early on a May morning pacing the terrace before 
 his mansion which commanded a noble stretch of coun- 
 
The Development of Personality 287 
 
 try, and then Fielding glows thus : "In the full blaze 
 of his majesty up rose the sun, than which one object 
 alone in this lower creation could be more glorious, and 
 that Mr. Allworthy himself presented — a human being 
 replete with benevolence, meditating in what manner he 
 might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by 
 doing most good to his creatures." Here Mr. All worthy's 
 benevolence has for its object to render himself most 
 acceptable to his Creator ; his love, in other words, is 
 only another term for increasing his account in the Bank 
 of Heaven ; a perfect example, in short, of that love of 
 the low-loving herd which is self in other still preferred. 
 
 But now let me once more turn the tube and gain 
 another radiant arrangement of these kaleidoscopic 
 elements, beauty and love and the like. In Emerson's 
 poem called Beauty (which must be distinguished from 
 the Ode to Beauty) the relation between love and beauty 
 takes this turn: "Seyd," he says, "chased beauty 
 
 everywhere, 
 In flame, in storm, in clouds of air. 
 He smote the lake to feed his eye 
 With the beryl beam of the broken wave ; 
 He flung in pebbles well to hear 
 The moment's music which they gave. 
 Oft pealed for him a lofty tone 
 From nodding pole and belting zone. 
 
 " He heard a voice none else could hear 
 From centred and from errant sphere. 
 The quaking earth did quake in rhyme, 
 Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime. 
 In dens of passion, pits of woe, 
 He saw strong Eros struggling through, 
 To sum the doubt and solve the curse 
 And beam to the bounds of the universe. 
 While thus to love he gave his days 
 In loyal worship, scorning praise," 
 
288 The English Novel 
 
 (where, you observe, love is substituted for beauty, as 
 that to which he gave his days, in the most naive assump- 
 tion that the one involves the other,) 
 
 " While thus to love he gave his days 
 In loyal worship, scorning praise, 
 How spread their lures for him in vain 
 Thieving ambition and paltering gain ! 
 He thought it happier to be dead, 
 To die for Beauty, — than live for bread." 
 
 George Eliot has somewhere called this word love 
 a word-of-all-work. If with another turn I add to these 
 testimonies one from Swedenborg, in which this same 
 love — which we have just seen to be beauty — which 
 beauty we just before saw to be truth — is now identified 
 with wisdom : we prove the justice of George Eliot's 
 phrase. In Section X of his work on the Divine Provi- 
 dence Swedenborg says : " The good of love is not good 
 any further than it is united to the truth of wisdom ; and 
 the truth of wisdom is not truth any further than it is 
 united to the good of love ; " and he continues in Section 
 XIII : " Now because truth is from good, as wisdom is 
 from love, therefore both taken together are called love 
 or good ; for love in its form is wisdom, and good in its 
 form is truth." 
 
 And finally does not David practically confirm this 
 view where, in Psalm CXIX 5 he involves the love of the 
 law of God with wisdom in the verse : " I understand 
 more than the ancients because I keep thy precepts "? 
 
 I grieve that there is no time to call more witnesses ; 
 for I love to assemble these lofty spirits and hear them 
 speak upon one topic. Is it not clear that in the minds 
 of these serious thinkers truth, beauty, wisdom, good- 
 ness, love, appear as if they were but avatars of one and 
 the same essential God? 
 
The Development of Personality 289 
 
 And if this be true cannot one say with authority to 
 the young artist, — whether working in stone, in color, 
 in tones or in character-forms of the novel : so far from 
 dreading that your moral purpose will interfere with 
 your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction 
 that unless you are suffused — soul and body, one might 
 sa y — w ith that moral purpose which finds its largest 
 expression in love — that is, the love of all things in 
 their proper relation — unless you are suffused with this 
 love, do not dare to meddle with beauty, unless you are 
 suffused with beauty, do not dare to meddle with love, 
 unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to med- 
 dle with goodness, — in a word, unless you are suffused 
 with beauty, truth, wisdom, goodness and love, abandon 
 the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist. 
 
 Of course I leave out of view here all that field of 
 artistic activity which is merely neutral, which is — not 
 immoral but — merely #;zmoral. The situations in Scott's 
 novels for instance do not in general put us upon any 
 moral question as between man and man. Or when our 
 own Mr. Way paints his luminous bunches of grapes, 
 one of which will feed the palates of a thousand souls 
 though it is never eaten, and thus shows us how Art 
 repeats the miracle of the loaves and fishes, feeding the 
 multitude and leaving more of the original provision than 
 was at first, — we have most delightful unmoral art. This 
 is not only legitimate, but I think among the most benefi- 
 cent energies of art : it rests our hearts, it gives us holi- 
 day from the Eternal Debate, it re-creates us for all work. 
 
 But now secondly, as to the influence of moral pur- 
 pose in art : we have been in the habit, as you will re- 
 member, of passing at the earliest possible moment from 
 abstract discussion to the concrete instance ; and if we 
 now follow that course and inquire, — not whether moral 
 
 19 
 
290 The English Novel 
 
 purpose may interfere with artistic creation, — but whether 
 moral purpose has interfered with artistic creation, as a 
 matter of fact, in the works of those whom the ages have 
 set in the highest heaven of art, we get a verdict which 
 seems to leave little room for question. At the begin- 
 ning we are met with the fact that the greatest work has 
 always gone hand in hand with the most fervent moral 
 purpose. For example, the most poetical poetry of 
 which we know anything is that of the author of Job, 
 and of David and his fellow psalm-writers. I have used 
 the expression "most poetical" here with design; for 
 regarded as pure literature these poems in this particular 
 of poeticalness, of pure spirituality, lift themselves into a 
 plane not reached by any others. A single fact in proof 
 of this exceeding poeticalness will suffice : it is the fact 
 that these poems alone, of all ever written, bear translation 
 from one language into another without hurt. Surely 
 this can be said of no other poetic work. If we strike 
 away all allowances of amateurishness and good fellow- 
 ship, and judge with the uncompromising truth of the 
 pious artist : how pitiful is Homer as he appears in even 
 Pope's English ; or how subtly does the simplicity of 
 Dante sink into childishness even with Mr. Longfellow 
 guiding ; or how tedious and flat fall the cultured sen- 
 tences of Goethe even in Taylor's version, which has by 
 many been declared the most successful translation ever 
 made, not only of Faust but of any foreign poem ; nay, 
 how completely the charm of Chaucer exhales away 
 even when redacted merely from an older dialect into a 
 later one, by hands so skillful as those of Dryden and 
 Wordsworth ! 
 
 Now, it is words and their associations which are 
 untranslatable, not ideas; there is no idea, whether 
 originating in a Hebrew, Greek or other mind, which 
 
The Development of Personality 291 
 
 cannot be adequately produced as idea in English words ; 
 the reason why Shakspere and Dante are practically 
 untranslatable is that, recognizing how every word means 
 more than itself to its native users, — how every word is 
 like the bright head of a comet drawing behind it a less 
 luminous train of vague associations which are associa- 
 tions only to those who have used such words from 
 infancy, — Shakspere and Dante, I say, have used this 
 fact and have constructed poems which necessarily mean 
 more to native hearers than they can possibly mean to 
 any foreign ear. 
 
 But this Hebrew poetry which I have mentioned is so 
 purely composed of ideas which are universal, essential, 
 fundamental to the personality of man, instantly recog- 
 nizable by every soul of every race, — that they remain 
 absolutely great, absolutely artistic, in whatever language 
 they are couched. 
 
 For example : if one climbs up for a moment out of 
 that vagueness with which Biblical expressions, for 
 various reasons, are apt to fall upon many ears, so that 
 one may consider the clean and virgin quality of ideas 
 clarified from all factitious charm of word and of as- 
 sociation, — what could be more nearly perfect as pure 
 literature than this : 
 
 " The entrance of Thy words giveth light ; 
 it giveth understanding unto the simple. 
 
 " I opened my mouth and panted : 
 for I longed for Thy commandments. 
 
 " Deliver me from the oppression of man : 
 so will I keep Thy precepts. 
 
 " Order my steps in Thy word, 
 and let not any iniquity have dominion over me. 
 
 " Make Thy face to shine upon Thy servant 5 
 and teach me Thy statutes. 
 
 " Rivers of waters run down my eyes, 
 because they keep not Thy law." 
 
292 The English Novel 
 
 Or this : 
 
 " I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, 
 whence cometh my help. 
 
 " My help cometh from the Lord, 
 which made heaven and earth. 
 
 " The Lord is thy keeper : the Lord is thy shade 
 upon thy right hand. 
 
 " The sun shall not smite thee by day, 
 nor the moon by night. 
 
 " The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil : 
 He shall preserve thy soul. 
 
 " The Lord shall preserve thy going out 
 and thy coming in from this time forth, 
 and even for evermore." 
 
 Or this, of Isaiah's : 
 
 " Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears 
 of the deaf unstopped. 
 
 " Then the lame shall leap as an hart, and the tongue of 
 the dumb shall s\ng : for in the wilderness shall waters break 
 out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground 
 shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water. 
 
 " In the habitations of dragons where each lay shall be 
 grass with reeds and rushes. . . . No lion shall be there, nor 
 any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found 
 there ; but the redeemed shall walk there ; 
 
 " And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to 
 Zion with songs of everlasting joy upon their heads : they 
 shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall 
 flee away." 
 
 Or this, from the author oijob: 
 
 " Surely there is a vein for the silver and a place for gold 
 where they tine it. . . 
 
 " As for the earth, out of it cometh bread : and under it is 
 turned up as it were fire. . . . 
 
 " But where shall wisdom be found ? 
 
 " And where is the place of understanding ? 
 
The Development of Personality 293 
 
 "... The depth saith, it is not in me : and the sea saith, 
 it is not with me. 
 
 "... Destruction and death say, we have heard the fame 
 thereof with our ears ; God understandeth the way thereof 
 and he knoweth the place thereof. For he looketh to the 
 ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven ; 
 
 "... When He made a decree for the rain and a way 
 for the lightning of the thunder : 
 
 "Then did He see it and declare it; 
 He prepared it, yea, and searched it out. 
 And unto man He said : ' Behold the fear of the Lord, that 
 is wisdom ; and to depart from evil is understanding.' " 
 
 Here it is apparent enough that the moral purpose 
 with which these writers were beyond all question sur- 
 charged, instead of interfering with the artistic value of 
 their product has spiritualized the art of it into an inten- 
 sity which burns away all limitations of language, and 
 sets their poems as indestructible monuments in the 
 hearts of the whole human race. 
 
 If we descend to the next rank of poetry I have only 
 to ask you to observe how, in Shakspere, just as the 
 moral purpose becomes loftier the artistic creations be- 
 come lovelier. Compare, for example, the forgiveness and 
 reconciliation group of plays, as they have been called, 
 — Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, and The Tempest (which 
 must have been written late in Shakspere's life, when the 
 moral beauty of large forgiveness seems to have taken 
 full possession of his fancy, and when the. moral purpose 
 of displaying that beauty to his fellow-men seemed to 
 have reigned over his creative energy) : compare, I say, 
 these plays with earlier ones, and it seems to me that all 
 the main creations are more distinctly artistic, more spirit- 
 ually beautiful, lifted up into a plane of holy ravishment 
 which is far above that of all the earlier plays. Think 
 
294 The English Novel 
 
 of the dignity and endless womanly patience of Hermione, 
 of the heavenly freshness and morning quality of Per- 
 dita, of the captivating roguery of Autolycus in Winter's 
 Tale, of the colossal forgiveness of Queen Katherine in 
 Henry VIII, of the equally colossal pardon of Prospero, 
 of the dewy innocence of Miranda, of the gracious and 
 graceful ministrations of Ariel, of the grotesquerie of 
 Caliban and Trinculo, of the play of ever-fresh delights 
 and surprises which make the drama of The Tempest 
 itself a lone and music-haunted island among dramas ! 
 Everywhere in these latter plays I seem to feel the 
 brooding of a certain sanctity which breathes out of the 
 larger moral purpose of the period. 
 
 Leaving these illustrations, for which time fails, it seems 
 to me that we have fairly made out our case against 
 these objectors if, after this review of the connection 
 between moral purpose and artistic creation, we advance 
 thirdly to the fact — of which these objectors seem pro- 
 foundly oblivious — that the English novel at its very 
 beginning announces itself as the vehicle of moral pur- 
 pose. You will remember that when discussing Richard- 
 son and Fielding, the first English novelists, I was at 
 pains to show how carefully they sheltered their works 
 behind the claim of this very didacticism. Everywhere 
 in Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, Tom Jones, — in the pre- 
 face, sometimes in the very titlepage, — it is ostenta- 
 tiously set up that the object of the book is to improve 
 men's moral condition by setting before them plain 
 examples of vice and virtue. 
 
 Passing by, therefore, the grinning absurdity of the 
 Saturday Review 1 s declaration that the proper office of 
 the novelist is to amuse, and that when George Eliot 
 pretended to do more, and to instruct, she necessarily 
 failed to do either, — it is almost as odd to find that the 
 
The Development of Personality 295 
 
 very objectors who urge the injurious effect of George 
 Eliot's moral purpose upon her work are people who 
 swear by Richardson and Fielding, utterly forgetting that 
 if moral purpose is a detriment to Daniel Deronda, it is 
 simply destruction to Clarissa Harlowe and Tom Jones. 
 
 And lastly upon this point, when I think of the crude 
 and hasty criticism which confines this moral purpose in 
 Daniel Deronda to the pushing forward of Deronda's 
 so-called religious patriotism in endeavoring to re-estab- 
 lish his people in the ancient seat of the Hebrews, — a 
 view which I call crude and hasty because it completely 
 loses sight of the much more prominent and important 
 moral purpose of the book, namely, the setting forth of 
 Gwendolen Harleth's repentance ; when, I say, I hear 
 these critics not only assume that Deronda's mission 
 is the moral purpose of this book, but even belittle that 
 by declaring that George Eliot's enthusiasm for the reha- 
 bilitation of the Jews must have been due to a chance 
 personal acquaintance of hers with some fervid Jew 
 who led her off into these chimerical fancies ; and when 
 I find this tone prevailing not only with the Phil- 
 istines but among a great part of George Eliot's 
 otherwise friends and lovers: then I am in a state 
 of amazement which precludes anything like critical 
 judgment on my part. As for me, no Jew — not 
 even the poorest shambling clothes-dealer in Harrison 
 street — but startles me effectually out of this work-a-day 
 world : when I look upon the face of a Jew, I seem to 
 feel a little wind fresh from off the sea of Tiberias, I 
 seem to receive a message which has come under the 
 whole sea of time from the further shore of it : this wan- 
 dering person, who without a home in any nation has 
 yet made a literature which is at home in every nation, 
 carries me in one direction to my mysterious brethren 
 
296 The English Novel 
 
 the cave-men and the lake dwellers, in the other direc- 
 tion to the masterful carpenter of Bethlehem, climax of 
 our race. Until you can bring me a statesman more 
 comprehensive in view and more diligent in detail than 
 Moses, until you can bring me poets more spiritual than 
 David and him who wrote Job, until you can bring me a 
 lover more pure or a mystic more rapt than John, until 
 you can bring me a man more dear and friendly and 
 helpful and strong and human and Christly than Jesus, 
 — do not speak to me slightingly of the Jew. And now, 
 to gather together these people from the four ends of 
 the earth, to rehabilitate them in their thousand-fold 
 consecrated home after so many ages of wandering, to 
 re-make them into a homologous nation at once the 
 newest and the oldest upon the earth, to endow the nine- 
 teenth century with that prodigious momentum which all 
 the old Jewish fervor and spirituality and tenacity would 
 acquire in the backward spring from such long ages of 
 restraint and oppression, and with the mighty accumu- 
 lation of cosmopolitan experiences ; the bare suggestion 
 would seem enough to stir the blood of the most un- 
 gentle Gentile. And if, anticipating a certain shame in 
 their attitude, these objectors add that Deronda's mis- 
 sion was chimerical, I reply that since we have seen the 
 telegraph and the photophone and the railway and Ben- 
 jamin Disraeli prime minister of England, the word 
 chimerical has ceased to have a meaning. Somewhere 
 in this same book we are discussing George Eliot says : 
 "There is a sort of human paste that when it comes 
 near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder 
 shape." Such seem to me those who remain sardoni- 
 cally unaffected by the idea of Jewish restoration. As 
 for me : the movement seems so noble and captivating 
 that to fail in it appears finer than to succeed in most 
 
The Development of Personality 297 
 
 of the promising projects of this world ; and one almost 
 wishes one were a Jew, that one might begin it without 
 loss of time. 
 
 But I must hasten to complete the account of George 
 Eliot's personal existence which we suspended at the 
 point where she had come to London in 185 1. 
 
 She had been persuaded to this step by Dr. Chapman, 
 who was at that time editor of the Westminster Review, 
 and who asked her to come and help him to conduct 
 that publication. At this time she must have been one 
 of the most captivating companions imaginable. She 
 knew French, German and Italian, and had besides a 
 good knowledge of Latin, Greek, Russian and Hebrew. 
 She was a really good player of the piano, and had some 
 proficiency on the organ ; she had already mixed in 
 some of the best society of the world, for, in 1841, her 
 father had moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, and here 
 she quickly became intimate in the household of Mr. 
 and Mrs. Charles Bray, where she met such people as 
 Emerson, George Combe, Mr. Froude, and many other 
 noted ones of the literary circles which the Brays 
 delighted in drawing about them ; her mind had been 
 enlarged by the treasures of the Continent which she 
 visited with her life-long friends, the Brays, in 1849, 
 after the death of her father, remaining at Geneva after 
 the Brays returned to England ; she had all that homely 
 lore which comes with the successful administration of 
 breakfast, dinner and supper, for her sisters and brothers 
 had all married, and she lived alone with her father after 
 his removal to Coventry in 1841, and kept his house for 
 him from that time until his death, not only with great 
 daughterly devotion but, it is said, with great success as 
 a domestic manager; besides thus knowing the mys- 
 teries of good coffee and good bread she was widely 
 
298 The English Novel 
 
 versed in theology, philosophy and the movements of 
 modern science : all of which equipment was permeated 
 with a certain intensity which struck every one who 
 came near her. With this endowment she came to Lon- 
 don in 185 1, as I have said, by Dr. Chapman's invitation, 
 and took up her residence at Dr. Chapman's house. 
 Here she immediately began to meet George H. Lewes, 
 Carlyle, Mill and Herbert Spencer. Of her relations to 
 Lewes it seems to me discussion is not now possible. It 
 is known that Lewes's wife had once left him, that he had 
 generously condoned the offence and received her again, 
 and that in a year she again eloped ; the laws of England 
 make such a condonation preclude divorce ; Lewes was 
 thus prevented from legally marrying again by a techni- 
 cality of the law which converted his own generosity into a 
 penalty ; under these circumstances George Eliot, moved 
 surely by pure love, took up her residence with him, 
 and according to universal account, not only was a faith- 
 ful wife to him for twenty years until his death, but was a 
 devoted mother to his children. That her failure to go 
 through the form of marriage was not due to any con- 
 tempt for that form, as has sometimes been absurdly 
 alleged, is conclusively shown by the fact that when she 
 married Mr. Cross, a year and a half after Lewes's death, 
 the ceremony was performed according to the regular 
 rites of the Church of England. 
 
 The most congenial of George Eliot's acquaintances 
 during these early days at the Chapmans' in London was 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer. For a long time indeed the story 
 went the rounds that Mr. Spencer had been George 
 Eliot's tutor ; but you easily observe that when she met 
 him at this time in London she was already thirty-one 
 years old, long past her days of tutorship. The story 
 however has authoritatively been denied by Mr. Spencer 
 
The Development of Personality 299 
 
 himself. That George Eliot took pleasure in his philos- 
 ophy, that she was especially conversant with his Princi- 
 ples of Psychology, and that they were mutually-admiring 
 and mutually-profitable friends, seems clear enough ; but 
 I cannot help regarding it a serious mistake to suppose 
 that her novels were largely determined by Mr. Spencer's 
 theory of evolution, as I find asserted by a recent critic 
 who ends an article with the declaration that " the writ- 
 ings of George Eliot must be regarded, I think, as one 
 of the earliest triumphs of the Spencerian method of 
 studying personal character and the laws of social life." 
 
 This seems to me so far from being true that many of 
 George Eliot's characters appear like living objections to 
 the theory of evolution. How could you, according to 
 this theory, evolve the moral stoutness and sobriety of 
 Adam Bede, for example, from his precedent conditions, 
 to wit, his drunken father and querulous mother ? How 
 could you evolve the intensity and intellectual alertness 
 of Maggie Tulliver from her precedent conditions, to wit, 
 a flaccid mother, and a father wooden by nature and 
 sodden by misfortune? Though surely influenced by 
 circumstances her characters everywhere seem to flout 
 evolution in the face. 
 
 But the most pleasant feature connected with the in- 
 tercourse of George Eliot and Herbert Spencer is that it 
 appears to have been Mr. Spencer who first influenced 
 her to write novels instead of heavy essays in The West- 
 minster. It is most instructive to note that this was 
 done with much difficulty. Only after long resistance, 
 after careful thought, and indeed after actual trial was 
 George Eliot persuaded that her gift lay in fiction and 
 not in philosophy; for it was pending the argument 
 about the matter that she quietly wrote Scenes of Cleri- 
 cal Life and caused them to be published with all the 
 precaution of anonymousness, by way of actual test. 
 
300 The English Novel 
 
 As to her personal habits I have gleaned that her man- 
 uscript was wonderfully beautiful and perfect, a delight to 
 the printers, without blot or erasure, every letter carefully 
 formed ; that she read the Bible every day and that one 
 of her favorite books was Thomas a Kempis on The Imi- 
 tation of Christ; that she took no knowledge at second- 
 hand ; that she had a great grasp of business ; that she 
 worked slowly and with infinite pains, meditating long 
 over her subject before beginning ; that she was intensely 
 sensitive to criticism ; that she believed herself a poet in 
 opposition to the almost unanimous verdict of criticism 
 which had pronounced 77ie Spanish Gypsy, Agatha and 
 The Legend of Jttbal as failing in the gift of song, though 
 highly poetic • that the very best society in London — 
 that is to say in the world — was to be found at her Sun- 
 day afternoon receptions at the Priory, Regent's Park, 
 where she and Mr. Lewes lived so long; and that she 
 rarely left her own home except when tempted by a fine 
 painting or some unusually good performance of music. 
 
 I have given here a list of her complete works, with 
 dates of publication so far as I have been able to gather. 
 I believe this is nearly complete. 
 
 Translation of Strauss' Leben Jesu, 1846 ; contributions 
 to The Westminster Review, from about 1850, during sev- 
 eral years ; translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Chris- 
 tianity, 1854 ; Scenes of Clerical Life, Blackwood 's Mag- 
 azine, 1857, — book-form, 1858 ; AdaniBede, 1859 ; The 
 Mill on the Floss, i860; The Lifted Veil, Blackwood s 
 Magazine, i860 : Silas Mamer, 1861 ; Romola, Cornhill 
 Magazine, book-form, 1863; Felix Holt, 1866; The 
 Spanish Gypsy, 1868 ; Address to Workmen, Blackwood's 
 Magazine, 1868 ; Agatha, 1869 ; How Lisa loved the king, 
 Blackwood s Magazine, 1869 ; Middlemarch, 187 1 ; The 
 Legend of Jubal, 1874 ; Daniel Deronda, 1876 ; The Im- 
 
The Development of Personality 301 
 
 press ions of Theophrastus Such, 1879 \ an d said to have 
 left a translation of Spinoza's Ethics, not yet published. 
 
 As the mind runs along these brief phrases in which 
 I have with a purposed brevity endeavored to flash the 
 whole woman before you, and as you supplement that 
 view with this rapid summary of her literary product, — 
 the details of fact seem to bring out the extraordinary 
 nature of this woman's endowment in such a way that 
 to add any general eulogium would be necessarily to 
 weaken the picture. There is but one fact remaining so 
 strong and high as not to be liable to this objection, 
 which seems to me so characteristic that I cannot do 
 better than close this study with it. During all her later 
 life the central and organic idea which gave unity to her : 
 existence was a burning love for her fellow-men. I have 
 somewhere seen that in conversation she once said to a 
 friend : " What I look to is a time when the impulse to 
 help our fellows shall be as immediate and as irresistible 
 as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am fall- 
 ing ; " and the narrator of this speech adds that at the end 
 of it she grasped the mantel-piece as if actually saving 
 herself from a fall, with an intensity which made the 
 gesture most eloquent. 
 
 You will observe that of the two commandments in 
 which the Master summed up all duty and happiness, — 
 namely, to love the Lord with all our heart, soul and mind 
 and to love our neighbor as ourself, George Eliot's whole 
 life and work were devoted to the exposition of the latter. 
 She has been blamed for devoting so little attention to the 
 former ; as for me, I am too heartily grateful for the stim- 
 ulus of human love which radiates from all her works to 
 feel any sense of lack or regret. This, after all — the 
 general stimulus along the line of one's whole nature — 
 is the only true benefit of contact with the great. More 
 
302 The English Novel 
 
 than this is hurtful. Nowadays, you do not want an 
 author to tell you how many times a day to pray, to 
 prescribe how many inches wide shall be the hem of your 
 garment. This the Master never did ; too well He knew 
 the growth of personality which would settle these mat- 
 ters, each for itself; too well He knew the subtle hurt 
 of all such violations of modern individualism ; and after 
 our many glimpses of the heartiness with which George 
 Eliot recognized the fact and function of human person- 
 ality one may easily expect that she never attempted to 
 teach the world with a rule and square, but desired only 
 to embody in living forms those prodigious generaliza- 
 tions in which the Master's philosophy, considered 
 purely as a philosophy, surely excelled all other systems. 
 In fine, if I try to sum up the whole work of this 
 great and beautiful spirit which has just left us, in the 
 light of all the various views I have presented in these 
 lectures, where we have been tracing the growth of 
 human personality from ^Eschylus, through Plato, 
 Socrates, the contemporary Greek mind, — through the 
 Renaissance, Shakspere, Richardson and Fielding, 
 down to Dickens and our author; I find all the 
 numerous threads of thought which have been put before 
 you gathered into one, if I say that George Eliot shows 
 man what he may be, in terms of what he is. 
 
b $ 
 
 
 '*b o s 
 
 
 -s 5 
 
 6 
 4 
 
 "b o< 
 
 
 
 
 ■*it A 
 
 & 
 
 
 A 
 
 *■"/" 'V't' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 K^ * 
 
 ^.^ 
 
 
 
 v •v 
 
 ^ 
 
 ./\ 
 
 =? • / .>.. 
 
 %^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
% 
 
 % 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 
 vX 
 
 
 
 ^ d< 
 
 
 
 w %/' %^ 
 V - # \ /% /^ 
 
 ^ : W* %/ %^ 
 
 
 
 
 ** 
 
 
 
 % 
 
 
 
 - 
 
 
 * #