GEORGE ELIOT 1819-1880 GEORGE ELIOT (Mary Ann Evans) was born at Nuneaton, in Warwick< shire, in November, 1819, and died in London, in December, 1880. Of her early life little is publicly known. At the age of thirty she took up her residence in London, where she formed friendships with several men eminent in letters and in public life. By these she was at once recognized as the possessor of exceptional genius. The next five years of her life were years of laborious study and writing. She became an accomplished linguist, and translated several ethical works from the German. She contributed some notable essays to the Westminster Review. Then, in 1857, she published anonymously in Blackwood's Magazine her "Scenes from Clerical Life." This was followed, the next year, by her first ambitious novel "Adam Bede," and its reception fully justified the anticipations of her literary sponsors. A few years later it was followed by "The Mill on the Floss" and "Romola." All these were published over the pen-name which she had adopted, and by which she will always be remembered, of "George Eliot." With each production her fame increased, and for many years she held rank among the first novelists of this century. Her last novels, "Middlemarch" and "Daniel Deronda," had an almost unprecedented popularity. Two volumes of poetry have come from her pen, both full of strength and beauty. There is what may be called a lack of cosmopolitanism in the works of "George Eliot; " she dwells on ground that is familiar to her, - the details of country life, with which she made acquaintance in her youth, and the operations of the human heart and the delineation of character of which her studies and the associations of her later life made her an intelligent student. Her novels combine profound thought with vigorous, if not brilliant, imagination. The selection given below is from "Middlemarch." DOCTOR LYDGATE I. A GREAT historian,1 as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium, and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot-house. I, at least, have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on 1 Henry Fielding, the novelist this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch. For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool, and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown, — known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions. There was a general impression, however, that Lydgate was not altogether a common country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an impression was significant of great things being expected from him. For everybody's family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish or vicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher intuitive order, lying in his lady patients' immovable conviction, and was unassailable by any objection except that their intuitions were opposed by others equally strong. Nobody's imagination had gone so far as to conjecture that Mr. Lydgate could know as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians who alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme, and when the smallest hope was worth a guinea. Still, I repeat, there was a general impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any general practitioner in Middlemarch. And this was true. He was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common, at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot. He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school. His father, a military man, had made but little provision for three children; and when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education, it seemed easier to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing him to a country practitioner than to make any objections on the score of family dignity. He was one of the rarer lads who early get a decided bent, and make up their minds that there is something particular in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. Something of that sort happened to Lydgate. He was a quick fellow, and, when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better; but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then read through "Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea," which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk; and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid. His school-studies had not much modified that opinion; for though he "did" his classics and mathematics, he was not preeminent in them. It was said of him that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable. He was a vigorous animal, with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered. Judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life. Probably this was not an exceptional result of expensive teaching at that period of shortwaisted coats, and other fashions which have not yet recurred. But, one vacation, a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have some freshness for him in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty row of volumes with gray paper backs and dingy labels, - the volumes : of an old Cyclopedia which he had never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them down. But he opened the volume he first took from the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a make-shift attitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valve were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light, startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame. A liberal education had, of course, left him free to read the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left his imagination quite unbiased, so that for anything he knew, his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold. But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, thể world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion. We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdom and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is wound up with the other passion sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men |