Modern English Books of Power Part 4

The story of _Villette_ is the real story of Charlotte's experiences in a Brussels boarding school, where she first tasted the delights of literary study and her genius first found adequate expression. The original draft of this novel was called _The Professor_. Charlotte knew that it contained good material. So, after the death of her sisters, she took up the subject, and with all her mature power produced _Villette_--one of those novels struck off at a white heat, like George Sand's _Indiana_ or Balzac's _Seraphita_. The story is largely autobiographical, but the episodes of Charlotte's life are touched with romance when they appear as the experiences of Lucy Snow, the forlorn English girl in the Continental school, among people of alien natures and strange speech.

In _s.h.i.+rley_, Charlotte Bronte revealed much genuine humor in the malicious portraits of the three curates, who were drawn from real life. In fact, throughout her books one will find most of the characters sketched from real people. Hence, if one reads the story of her life he can trace her from her return from her Continental life down through the cruel years almost to the end. Back she came to her gloomy home from Brussels only to watch in succession the lingering death of her brother and her two sisters. Think of these three sisters, two marked for sure and early death, laboring at literary work every day with the pa.s.sion and intensity that come to few men.

Think of Emily, the eldest, with fierce pride refusing help to climb the steep stairway of the parsonage home when her strength was almost spent and her racking cough struck cold on the hearts of her sisters.

And think of Charlotte in her terrible grief turning to fiction as the only resource from unbearable woe and loneliness. It is one of the great tragedies of literature, but out of it came the flowering of a brilliant genius.

GEORGE ELIOT AND HER TWO GREAT NOVELS

"ADAM BEDE" AND "THE MILL ON THE FLOSS"--HER EARLY STORIES ARE RICH IN CHARACTER SKETCHES, WITH MUCH PATHOS AND HUMOR.

George Eliot is a novelist in a cla.s.s by herself. She never impressed me as a natural story-teller, save when she lived over again that happy girlhood which served to relieve the sadness of her mature life.

In parts of _Adam Bede_ and throughout _The Mill on the Floss_ she seems to tell her stories as though she really enjoyed the work. All the scenes of her beautiful girlhood in the pleasant Warwicks.h.i.+re country, when she drove through the pleasant sweet-scented lanes and enjoyed the lovely views that she has made immortal in her books--these she dwelt upon, and with the touch of poetry that redeemed the austerity of her nature she makes them live again, even for us in an alien land. So, too, the English rustics live for us in her pages with the same deathless force as the villagers in Hardy's novels of Wess.e.x life. And George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are the two English writers who have made these villagers, with their peculiar dialect and their insular prejudices, serve the purpose of the Greek chorus in warning the reader of the fate that hangs over their characters.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GEORGE ELIOT IN 1864 FROM THE ETCHING BY MR. PAUL RAJON--DRAWN BY MR. FREDERICK BURTON--FROM THE FRONTISPIECE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF "GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE," BY HER HUSBAND, J.W.

CROSS]

Of all English novelists, George Eliot was probably the best equipped in minute and accurate scholars.h.i.+p. Trained as few college graduates are trained, she was impelled for several years to take up the study of German metaphysics. Her mind, like her face, was masculine in its strength, and though she suffered in her youth from persistent ill-health, she conquered this in her maturity and wrought with pa.s.sionate ardor at all her literary tasks. So keen was her conscience that she often defeated her own ends by undue labor, as in the preparation for _Romola_, whose historical background swamps the story.

Above all she was a preacher of a stern morality. She laid down the moral law that selfishness, like sin, corrodes the best nature, and that the only happiness lies in absolute forgetfulness of self and in working to make others happy. Thus all her books are full of little sermons on life, preached with so much force that they cannot fail to make a profound impression even upon the careless reader.

George Eliot impresses one as a very sad woman, with an eager desire to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning childhood and a still more pa.s.sionate desire to believe in that immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the conventions of English law and society in order to take up life with the man who stimulated her mind and actually made her one of the greatest of English novelists.

Left alone, it is very doubtful whether George Eliot ever would have found herself, ever would have developed that mine of reminiscence which produced those perfect early stories of English country life. To George Henry Lewes, the man for whose love and companions.h.i.+p she incurred social ostracism, readers in all English-speaking countries owe a great debt of grat.i.tude, for it was his wise counsel and his constant stimulus and encouragement which resulted in making George Eliot a writer of fine novels instead of an essayist on ethical and religious subjects. It detracts little from this debt that Lewes was also responsible for the stimulus of George Eliot's bent toward philosophical speculation and to that cold if clear scientific thought, which spoiled parts of _Middlemarch_ and ruined _Daniel Deronda_.

Marian Evans was born at Ashbury farm in Warwicks.h.i.+re in 1819 and died in 1880. Her father was the agent for a large estate, and the happiest hours of her girlhood were spent in driving about the country with him. Those keen eyes which saw so deeply into human nature were early trained to observe all the traits of the English rustic, and those childish impressions gave vitality to her humorous characters. Before she was ten years old Marian had read Scott and Lamb, as well as _Pilgrim's Progress_ and _Ra.s.selas_. When thirteen years old she revealed unusual musical gifts. She had the misfortune at seventeen to lose her mother, and for years after she managed her father's house.

Evidently the old farmer, whom his daughter has sketched with loving hand in _Adam Bede_, took great pride in the mental superiority of his daughter, for he hired tutors for her in Latin, Greek, Italian and German. All four languages she mastered as few college men master them. She read everything, both old and new, and her intimacy with the wife of Charles Bray of Coventry led her to refuse to go to church.

This free thinking angered her father and caused him to demand that she leave his house. After three weeks her love and her keen sense of duty led her to conform to her father's wishes and to resume the church-going, which in his eyes was a part of life that could not be dropped.

But that early departure from the established religion carried her into the field of German skepticism. She translated Strauss' _Life of Jesus_. For three years her studies were interrupted by the serious illness of her father. When he died she went to Geneva and remained on the Continent a year. Then she came home and took up her residence with the Brays. The development of her mind was very rapid. She served for some time as editor of the WESTMINSTER REVIEW. She then formed a strong friends.h.i.+p with Herbert Spencer, and through Spencer she met George Henry Lewes, who made a special study of Goethe and the German philosophers, and who was the editor of the LEADER, the organ of the Free Thinkers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GEORGE ELIOT'S BIRTHPLACE, SOUTH FARM, ARBURY, NUNEATON]

Lewes and Marian Evans soon became all the world to each other, but Lewes had an insane wife, and the foolish law of England forbade him to get a divorce or to marry again. So the two decided to live together and to be man and wife in everything except the sanction of the law. The result was disastrous for a time to the woman. There is no question that the social isolation that resulted hurt her deeply.

Her close friends like Spencer remained loyal, and her husband was always the devoted lover as well as the ideal companion.

Two years after this new connection Lewes induced his wife to try fiction. Her first story was _The Sad Adventures of the Rev. Amos Barton_ which was followed by _Janet's Repentance_. These stories appeared under the pen name of George Eliot, which she never relinquished. Gathered into book form under the t.i.tle _Scenes From Clerical Life_, these stories in a minor key made a profound impression on Charles d.i.c.kens, who divined they were the work of a woman of unusual gifts.

The praise of Lewes and the appreciation of d.i.c.kens and other experts gave great stimulus to her mind, and she produced _Adam Bede_, perhaps her best work, which had a great success. In the following year came _The Mill on the Floss_, an even greater success. Then in quick succession came the other early novels, _Silas Marner_, _Romola_ and _Felix Holt_. A break of six years follows, and then came _Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_.

Lewes died in 1878, and two years later this woman, almost exhausted by her tremendous literary labors, married J.W. Cross, an old friend, but, like Charlotte Bronte, she had only short happiness, for she died in the following year. The nations praised her, but she never recovered from the shock of Lewes' death.

Of George Eliot's work the things that impress one most are her fine descriptions of natural scenes, her keen a.n.a.lyses of character and her many little moral sermons on life and conduct. With an abnormal conscience and a keen sense of duty, life proved very hard for her.

This is reflected in the somberness of her stories and in the dread atmosphere of fate that hangs over her characters. But over against this must be placed her joy in depicting the rustic character and humor and her delight in reproducing the scenes of her childhood in one of the most beautiful counties of England.

Herbert Spencer, who was long a.s.sociated with George Eliot, and for a time contemplated the possibility of a union with that remarkable woman, pays her a high tribute in _The Study of Sociology_. After explaining the origin in women of the ability to distinguish quickly the pa.s.sing feelings of those around, he says: "Ordinarily, this feminine faculty, showing itself in an apt.i.tude for guessing the state of mind through the external signs, ends simply in intuitions formed without a.s.signable reasons; but when, as happens in rare cases, there is joined with it skill in psychological a.n.a.lysis, there results in extremely remarkable ability to interpret the mental states of others.

Of this ability we have a living example (George Eliot) never hitherto paralleled among women, and in but few, if any, cases exceeded among men."

Perhaps the reader who does not know George Eliot would do well to begin with _The Mill on the Floss_, her finest work, which is full of humor, lovely pictures of English rural life and an a.n.a.lysis of soul in Maggie Tolliver that has never been surpa.s.sed. Yet the end is cruel and unnatural, as hard and as unsatisfying as the author's own religious creed. Next read _Adam Bede_, one of the saddest books in all literature, with comic relief in Mrs. Poyser, one of the most humorous characters in English fiction.

George Eliot drew Dinah Morris from her favorite aunt, who was a Methodist exhorter, and the power and spontaneity of this novel came from the sharpness and clearness of her early impressions, joined to her love of living over again her girlhood days, before doubt had clouded her sky. Also read _Silas Marner_ with its perfect picture of Raveloe, "an English village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices." These descriptions are instinct with poetry, and they affect one like Wordsworth's best poems or like Tennyson's vignettes of rural life. The pale weaver of Raveloe will always remain as one of the great characters in English fiction.

Of George Eliot's more elaborate work it is impossible to speak in entire praise. If you have the leisure, and these books I have named please you, then by all means read _Romola_, which is a remarkable study of the degeneracy of a young Greek and of the n.o.ble strivings of a great-hearted woman. The pictures of Florence in the time of Savonarola are splendid, but they smell of the lamp. _Middlemarch_ is also worth careful study for its fine a.n.a.lysis of character and motive. In all George Eliot's books her characters develop before our eyes, and this is especially true in this elaborate study of the pathos and the tragedy of human life.

George Eliot wrote little poetry, but one piece may be commended to careful attention, "The Choir Invisible." It sums up with impa.s.sioned force her ethical creed, which she put in these fine lines:

Oh, may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rect.i.tude, in scorn For miserable aims that end in self.

This is life to come Which martyred men have made more glorious For us who strive to follow. May I reach That purest heaven, be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love.

Beget the smiles that have no cruelty-- Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense.

So shall I join the choir invisible, Whose music is the gladness of the world.

This was the creed of George Eliot, which she preached in her books and which she followed in her life. This was the only hope of immortality that she cherished--to "live again" in minds that she stimulated.

RUSKIN THE APOSTLE OF ART

HIS WORK AS ART CRITIC AND SOCIAL REFORMER--BEST BOOKS ARE "MODERN PAINTERS," "THE SEVEN LAMPS" AND "THE STONES OF VENICE."

John Ruskin deserves a place among the great English writers of the last century, not only because of his superb style and the amount of his work, but because he was the first to encourage the study of art and nature among the people. So enormous have been the strides made in the last twenty years in popular knowledge of art and architecture, and so great the growth of interest in the beauties of nature that it is difficult to appreciate that a little over a half century ago, when Ruskin first came into prominence as a writer, the English public was densely ignorant of art, and was equally ignorant of the world of pleasure to be derived from beautiful scenery.

It was Ruskin's great service to the world that he opened the eyes of the public to the glories of the art of all countries, and that he also revealed the wonders of architecture. Many critics have laid bare his infirmities as a critic, but a man of colder blood and less emotional nature would never have reached the large public to which Ruskin appealed. Like a great orator he was swayed by the pa.s.sion of convincing his audience, and the very extravagance of his language and the ardor of his nature served to make a profound impression upon readers who are not usually affected by such appeals as his.

Ruskin was one of the most impractical men that ever lived, but in the exuberance of his nature and in his rare unselfishness he started a dozen social reforms in England, any one of which should have given fame to its founder. He gave away a great fortune in gifts to the public and in private generosity. He founded museums, established scholars.h.i.+ps, tried to put into practical working order his dream of a New Life founded on the union of manual labor and high intellectual aims, labored to induce the public to read the good old books that help one to make life worth living.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN RUSKIN FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ON JULY 20, 1882, BY MESSRS. ELLIOTT & FRY]

That much of his good work was neutralized by his lack of common sense detracts nothing from the world's debt to Ruskin. The simple truth is that he was a reformer as well as a great writer, and the very fervor of his religious and social beliefs, his contempt of mere money getting, his hatred of falsehood, his boundless generosity and his childlike simplicity of mind--all these traits at which the world laughed lifted Ruskin above the other men of genius of his time and placed him among the world's great reformers.

Among this small body of men whose spiritual force continues to live in their books or through the influence of their great self-sacrifices, Ruskin deserves a place, for he gave fortune, work and a splendid enthusiasm to the common people's cause.

Ruskin's whole life was abnormal, and his early training served to accentuate those weaknesses of mind and will that made failures of so many schemes for the public good. If Ruskin had been trained in the English public schools he would have learned common sense in boyhood.

As it was, his father and mother s.h.i.+elded the boy in every way from all contact with the world. Ruskin's father was a prosperous wine merchant with much culture; his mother was a religious fanatic, whose pa.s.sion for the Bible imposed upon her boy the daily reading of the Scriptures and the daily memorizing of scores of verses.

Such training in most cases causes a revolt against religion, but in Ruskin's case it resulted in training his boyish ear to the cadences of the Bible writers and in filling his mind with the sublime imagery of the prophets, with the result that when he began to write he had already formed a style, the richest and most varied of the last century.

The boy was a mental prodigy, for he taught himself to read when four years old, and at five he had devoured hundreds of books and was already writing poems and plays. At ten, when he had his first tutor, his knowledge was wide and he had become a pa.s.sionate lover of natural scenery, as well as no mean artist with pen and pencil. Scott's novels and Byron's _Childe Harold_ formed much of his reading at a time when most boys are content with the stories of Ballantyne or Mayne Reid.

The range of his mental activity until he entered Oxford at eighteen was very wide. He was interested in mineralogy, meteorology, mathematics, drawing and painting. What probably expanded his mind more than all else was the education of travel. His father spent about half his time journeying through England and the Continent in an old-fas.h.i.+oned chaise and John always shared in these expeditions. At Oxford he competed for the Newdigate prize in poetry, and after being twice defeated won the coveted honor. He never gained any high scholars.h.i.+p, but he received valuable training in writing.

There is no s.p.a.ce here to chronicle more than a few of his many activities after leaving college. He first came into prominence by his pa.s.sionate defense of the painter Turner against the art critics, and his study of Turner led him to adopt art criticism as his life work.

At twenty-three years of age, when most youths are puzzled about their vocation, Ruskin had completed the first volume of _Modern Painters_, the publication of which gave him fame and made him a social lion in London. Other volumes of this great work followed swiftly and caused a great commotion in the world of art and letters because of the radical views of the author and the remarkable qualities of his style.

This was followed by _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, in which Ruskin expounded his radical views on this kindred art; _The Stones of Venice_, an eloquent book enforcing the argument that Gothic architecture sprang from a pure national faith and the domestic virtues; _King's Treasuries_, a n.o.ble plea for good books; _Fors Clavigera_, a series of ninety-six parts published in eight volumes, the record of his social experiments; _Preterita_, one of the most charming books of youthful reminiscences in any language, and many others. Ruskin's mental activity was enormous. He had to his credit in his fifty-five active years no less than seventy-two volumes and one hundred magazine articles, as well as thousands of lectures.