Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs

GEORGE ELIOT

ETC.

LITERARY STUDIES

BY

JOSEPH JACOBS

Shall we say : 'Let the ages judge the
spirits!' Why, we are the beginning
of the ages. GEORGE ELIOT

NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1896

TO

FREDERICK RYLAND

IN MEMORY OF OLD TIMES

AT CAMBRIDGE

PREFACE

I have explained in the Introduction why I have thought it worth while to reprint these 'éloges' of four of the chief English writers who died in the last decade and to add certain reviews of books by or about them. I desire here to emphasise the fact that these obituaries were in every case written within the two or three days that elapsed between the death of their subjects and the appearance of the ensuing issue of the 'Athenæum.' I have nothing to say against the practice of others, but I cannot myself anticipate the Great Destroyer.

I have to thank the Publisher and Editor of the 'Athenæum' for their kind and ready permission to reprint these articles from its pages.

J. J.

P.S.—To the present re-issue I have added articles on Tennyson, Stevenson, and Seeley, which appeared immediately after their death. I have to thank the Editors of the Academy and Athenæum for permission to reproduce these.

CONTENTS

	PAGE
INTRODUCTION	xi
GEORGE ELIOT
Necrologe (1st Jan. 1881)	3
'Theophrastus Such' (7th June 1879)	17
'Essays' (23d Feb. 1884)	31
Cross's 'Life' (31st Jan., 7th Feb. 1885)	49
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Necrologe (1st April 1888)	77
'Discourses in America' (27th June 1885)	87
BROWNING
Necrologe (21st Dec. 1889)	97
NEWMAN
Necrologe (16th Aug. 1890)	119
Hutton's 'Newman' (18th Oct. 1890)	130
Letters, etc. (24th Jan. 1891)	137
TENNYSON
Necrologe (Academy, 15th Oct. 1892)	155
STEVENSON
Necrologe (22nd Dec. 1894)	175
SEELEY
Necrologe (12th Jan. 1895)	189

INTRODUCTION

The first few days after a great writer's death are critical for his reputation. Then for the first time we realise all that he has been to us, all that he has done for us. We can for the first time speak of his whole work with little fear of the surprises that genius has often in store for the critic who dares to be prophetic. We can speak out our full thought of him, if for no other reason, because what we say cannot by any chance come before him. Above all, he has ceased to be a person, and we can treat more simply and directly of his spiritual influence. At the same time we that speak are those who have come under his spell in his lifetime and express the feelings of his contemporaries without any of the disturbing influences which later revelations or the modification of the Zeitgeist produce on the appeal he may have for after-times. We alone can say what he has been to us whom he addressed.

It has chanced during the past ten years that I have been called upon to give on behalf of the Athenæum an estimate of the loss English Letters have sustained by the death of the four chief writers who left us during the decade. These essays differed, I believe, in at least two respects from the obituary notices which swarm from the press on such occasions. They were estimates, not obituaries; they dealt rather with the work than with the life of each author. And they were written immediately on hearing of the death of the writer concerned, whereas it is well known that every newspaper has obituaries of all the notabilities of the time pigeon-holed for production on the morrow of the death. Whatever then the merits of these essays, they were written under the influence of the feelings I have indicated above, and were in each case, I may perhaps say, the first critical estimate of contemporary England on the lifework of these great writers. That they appeared in the foremost literary journal of the English-speaking peoples gives them an importance that I could not claim for any personal utterances. I have for these reasons thought them worthy of being put in more permanent form as documents—'documents' is a favourite word and thing just now—in the history of English opinion about the writers treated in this volume. At the same time I have thought it right to leave them in substantially the same form as that in which they first appeared, only removing a few traces of necessarily hasty writing. 'Documents' must not be falsified. I may perhaps venture to add, in fairness to myself, that there are some few things in them which I would have put differently if I had been writing over my own name in the first instance.

To make this little volume more worthy ot acceptance, I have added a few reviews of works written by or about the authors treated. These also appeared in the Athenæum for the most part after the death of the subjects of my éloges. They were more detailed estimates of parts of the authors' works, or they dealt more at large with their lives, or in other ways they seemed to me to supplement the more general éloges written for a special occasion from a special point of view.

Looking back on these memorial essays, I can now discern the general method on which they were formed, though I was not conscious of it at the time of writing. At the moment of an author's death, we think primarily of the man we have lost. But we mourn the man for the sake of his works, hence it is those of his qualities that are shown in his works which naturally engage our attention at the moment of his death. These essays are therefore appropriately devoted to the literary qualities of their subjects' minds. They are of the psychological, not of the aesthetic order of criticism.

'There are,' to quote myself elsewhere, 'two methods of studying literary productions, which may be roughly described as the aesthetic and the psychological. The former goes straight to the literary products themselves, and seeks to determine their aptitude for exerting the specific literary emotions often reflecting the critic's own feelings in the rhythm and beauty of his language. This is the method of Lamb and Mr. Swinburne, and (in his best moments) Mr. Matthew Arnold. The other or psychological method looks rather to the literary producer, and endeavours to ascertain those qualities of the author's mind that would produce such and such results. Mr. Leslie Stephen pursued this method during his Hours in a Library, and Mr. Morley and Mr. Hutton afford other instances of its use.' I need scarcely say to which of these two methods the present essays belong. By natural bent, by training I have some claims to be an expert in psychology I belong to the psychological school. To be of the aesthetic school is only given to those who are something more than critics. They are the artists in criticism; nous autres must be content with being scientific, though even we may attempt to give such artistic form to our work as science allows. Each school has its province. I have tried to show above that the psychological method has a fit application at moments when we are thinking of the literary qualities of an author's mind rather than the literary effect of his works.

In making my estimates of George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Browning, and Newman, I have had the critical advantage, though the personal loss, of not being personally acquainted with the subjects of my essays except in one case. Of George Eliot I may say at least vidi tantum. I can still recall the feelings of ardent reverence with which I approached the Priory, North Bank, one Sunday afternoon in 1877. I had written an enthusiastic—I fear I must add gushing—defence of Daniel Deronda, from a Jewish point of view, in the June number of Macmillan's Magazine of that year, and George Henry Lewes had expressed a wish that I should call upon them. I went with all the feelings of the neophyte at the shrine for the first time. Need I say that I was disappointed? Authors give of their best in their works under the consciousness of addressing the whole world. We ought not to expect them to live up to that best at all times and before all onlookers: but we do.

I have few Boswellisms to offer. I remember being struck even at that early stage of my social discernment by the contrast between the boisterous Bohemian bonhomie of George Lewes and the almost old-maidenish refinement of his life's companion. I had tried to lead her talk to my own criticism, but was met by the quiet parry, 'I never read criticisms of my own works.' I could not help thinking at the time 'que fais-je donc dans cette galère?' but she was obviously in the right. Others were present and the topics had to be general. We got upon songs for singing, and I was attempting to contend that the sweetest songs for vocal purposes were nowadays not those of the poets of the day. She pointed out that even Tennyson's in the Princess were unsuitable for that purpose, whereas the Elizabethans produced songs that were gems of literary art, yet trilled forth as naturally as a bird's carol.

I saw her but once more after Lewes's death. I had sent her something I had published in the Nineteenth Century, and she had written asking me to call. I did so, and found the house in gloom and herself in depression. On this occasion I was struck by the massiveness of the head as contrasted with the frailty of the body. When she was seated one thought her tall: such a head should have been propped up by a larger frame. The long thin sensitive hands were those of a musician. The exquisite modulations of the voice told of refinement in every well-chosen phrase. She had at least one of the qualifications one expects in an author; she did indeed 'talk like a book.' She spoke of one of her favourite themes, the appeal of the circle in which one is born even if one has in certain ways grown beyond or outside it. Before I left she asked me to find out for her the meaning of a Hebrew inscription on a seal which an old Russian Jew had given Tourgenief: he had sent her an impression, which she intrusted to me. 'You will be careful of it,' she said, 'I prize it as coming from him.' I thought of old Kalonymos and his similar caution as he hands the key of his family archives to Daniel Deronda. We parted, and I soon returned the impression with an explanation of the inscription. She sent a few words of kindly thanks, and that was all till I received the final summons to Highgate Cemetery.

I do not think that my critical estimate of George Eliot's work was at all affected by this slight personal intercourse with her. My veneration for her work in those days may have led me to some extent, however, to that curious kind of injustice, when we guard against too high praise of those we know or like just because we know and like them. My personal estimate of her work when I wrote about it was certainly higher than my written words would imply. Judged by the result I was justified in this critical caution. In the ten years or so that have elapsed since her death, George Eliot's reputation has not risen, her influence has been on the decline. It seems worth while seeking for the causes of this.

It is of course a general law that literary reputations do decline for a time at least after an author's death. While he lives there is always the halo and attraction of the unknown about what may still come from him: this fades away with his death. Then again his friends have no longer the same motives for keeping his reputation at the highest pitch. Friends, too, die away. London again is the fount of literary reputation, and Londoners, like all inhabitants of great cities, are always eager for some new thing. Old writers compete with the new ones, it is true, but the competition of the novelty is still more efficacious.

All these causes have co-operated to lessen George Eliot's influence and reputation. But there are other more special causes that have tended in the same direction. Mr. Cross's Life was a disappointment: his extreme reticence about personal details and careful excision of all humanising touches made the book dull, and the total impression of George Eliot's personality unattractive. Her last books, Daniel Deronda, Theophrastus Such, and the collected Essays, were a progressive series of anti-climaxes, and it is the latest works that give the final impression in more senses than one. Their didactic tone was too obvious, and the British public resents nothing more than being preached at too obviously.

But above and beyond all these reasons there has been a subtle and gradual change in the public mind which has told against George Eliot's work in two directions. There is a fashion in the art of the novel, as in other arts, and for some time the vogue has been growing for the conte as against the novel, and for the romantic novel of incident as against the realistic novel of character. Amid the problems and perplexities of the present we fly for relaxation to the Something-other-than-Here-and-Now, and we like to take it short. Both tendencies tell against George Eliot. There is a general tendency nowadays against taking intellectual nourishment in anything but small doses. The enormous growth of the magazines is at once a result and a cause of this. Tit-Bits completes what the Fortnightly Review began. It is indeed an Age of Tit-bits. The strenuous attention which the works of George Eliot demand is too much for minds accustomed to such intellectual food as the magazines now supply. The high seriousness of her art displeases the frivolous, and the tone of English Letters just now is distinctly frivolous.

George Eliot aimed and claimed to be a teacher. Her works were a conscious criticism of life. They gave the new feeling about life that seemed to be rendered necessary by the triumph of Darwinism in English speculation. During the 'seventies' there was a confident feeling, among those of us who came to our intellectual majority in those years, that Darwinism was to solve all the problems. This was doubtless due to the triumphant tone in which certain eminent professors of science notably Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford spoke of what science was going to do for the spiritual life when the older theological trammels had been removed. What they promised George Eliot was currently supposed to have attained, and her words were scanned for the secret message. She was to all of us what she seemed to Mr. F. W. Myers in that fine description of his interview with her in the Fellows' Garden at Trinity; she was 'a Sibyl in the gloom.' She alone, we thought, possessed the message of the New Spirit that Darwinism was to breathe into the inner life of man.

Well, Darwinism has come, and has conquered, and, as a vital influence in the spiritual life, has gone. Instead of solving all the problems, it has raised only too many fresh ones. It has thrown light on origins, or to speak more accurately, it has set us on the search for origins. But the undeveloped germ which we call origin has in it ex hypothesi all the problems which the developed product offers, and presents these in more concentrated form. And the something that develops is obviously different from its own development, which is all that Darwinism even professes to explain. To put it technically, origins are not essences, and it is the essence of the matter, the thing as in itself it really is, that we seek for. Hence Darwinism, which merely touches origins and leaves essences alone, only disappoints. The pretty quarrel, too, that is going on among the experts about the fundamentals of Darwinism has helped to discredit it. And with this discredit George Eliot, the literary voice of Darwinism, suffers too. The danger which I foresaw in 1879—'the risk of subordinating the eternal truths of art to what may be the temporary opinions of science'—has proved to be no illusory one.

Again our interests have turned from speculation, even from the bases of conduct, and are almost exclusively social. 'We are all socialists now'—since the Redistribution Act—and George Eliot has little to say on the Condition of England Question. And what little she does say, in Felix Holt for example, is not much in consonance with the feeling of to-day. Her dearest memories were of a time when old Leisure was still alive and social changes took place but slowly. Felix Holt the Radical is rather Felix Holt the Conservative; he is not even a Tory-Democrat. But the ineffectiveness of her social utterances was a sign that her heart was not in the social part of her work; we have no heart for anything else.

For all these reasons then the reputation of George Eliot is undergoing a kind of eclipse in this last decade of the nineteenth century. It is becoming safe to indulge in cheap sneers at the ineffectiveness of her heroes, at the want of élan in the movement of her stories, at the too obvious preachments of her rather overspun comments. Her heroes are perhaps rather apt to be muffs; it is the way with heroes of novels generally. Her plots might develop at greater speed; your novel of character rarely travels express. 'Here the story halts a little' might be written over many a page of Richardson and Fielding, of Miss Austen and Thackeray, but it is a part of their method and a necessary part. And the comments and discussion which cause these frequent halts, have they not a special appeal of their own, even if the appeal be somewhat alien to the art of the novel? And if George Eliot preaches, what admirable sermons she writes! The realistic writer cannot describe the life around him or her without indicating the attitude they take towards it. That very attitude is a preachment: Zola in L'Assommoir, Flaubert in Madame Bovary, are as powerful sermons as I know.

That part then of George Eliot's work which appealed more especially to the Zeitgeist is ineffective now that the Zeitgeist has changed. But how much remains that can never lose its effectiveness because it appeals to the ewige Geist of humanity. Her admirable peasants and parsons, her charming children, her scenery and her interiors, her wit and her wisdom, these are surely a possession for aye in the realm of English fiction. Whatever view we take of her art, we must recognise that she has added as many living personalities to the common acquaintance of English-speaking people as almost any other English novelist, and this after all is the final criterion. And in the difficult sphere of the aphorism, her works are more copiously studded with subtle truths aptly expressed than those of any novelist who has ever written in English. The enemy will say this has nothing to do with the novel: but the enemy can always complain of any form of art that it is not another, so we may let him sneer.

It has seemed worth while devoting some attention to the after-history of George Eliot's reputation, as so much of this volume happens already to be taken up by a consideration of George Eliot's art from various points of view, and I have here attempted to complete the survey. With the other authors considered, there is no occasion to deal in such detail, as their loss is so recent that any attempt to distinguish the permanent elements of their art would be impracticable.

I may add that I have found a difficulty in giving an appropriate name to these studies, so far as they are not reviews. 'Obituaries' of the authors they are not, for I do not profess to give any details of their lives, or even of their works. 'Necrologe' does not sound English, and besides savours of Woking. Éloge comes nearest, but that on the face of it is not English. A wicked wag among my friends suggests Post Mortems, but I trust I have not been quite so cruel as that would imply.

One more word and I have done. There seems something of ingratitude, almost of irreverence, in subjecting to cool criticism writers to whom one owes so much of one's best self. I need not refute the fallacy, that in presuming to criticise one assumes any superiority: if that were so, there would scarcely be any place for criticism, and certainly none at all for critics pur sang. The author appeals to his generation: the critic answers the appeal. In the present case the thing had to be done and I was called upon to do it. I can only say I tried to do my work as honestly and conscientiously as was in my power.