IX
GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE[1]
If it is true that the most interesting of George Eliot's characters is her own, it may be said also that the most interesting of her books is her Life. Mr. Cross has made known what is in fact the last work of the great English-woman. He possesses that art of concealing the artist which is still the rarest quality of biographers, and, apart from a few necessary pages, gives nothing but letters, journals, and fragmentary memoirs, written partly with a dim vision of publicity. The volumes will be read less for the notes of travel, the emphatic tenderness of the letters to friends, often on a lower plane, and the tonic aphorisms devised for their encouragement, than for the light they shed on the history of a wonderful intellect. The usual attractions of biography are wanting here. We see the heroine, not reflected from other minds, but nearly as she saw herself and cared to be known. Her own skilled hand has drawn her likeness. In books variously attributable to a High Church curate and to a disciple of Comte, the underlying unity of purpose was not apparent. For valid reasons they invite interpretation as much as Faust or the Paradiso. The drift and sequence of ideas, no longer obscured by irony, no longer veiled under literary precautions or overlaid with the dense drapery of style, is revealed beyond the risk of error now that the author has become her own interpreter.
- ↑ "George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and Journals, arranged and edited by her husband, J. W. Cross. In three volumes, London and Edinburgh, William Blackwood & Sons, 1885." The Nineteenth Century, March, 1885.
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