From The Contemporary Review. THIS Sombre book reads like one long illustration of a passage contained in Mr. Myers's essay on George Eliot. show that an interior conception of good may be even more than an equivalent for God- not perhaps so soothing, not so exciting, possibly even justifying a deep tinge of melancholy, but in her opinion all I remember [says Mr Myers] how at Cam- the more enduring, all the more ineradbridge I walked with her once in the Fellows' icable, all the more independent of the garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May, processes of personal judgment. "The and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, highest calling and election' is to do and taking as her text the three words which without opium, and live through all our have been used so often as the inspiring trum- pain with conscious, clear eyed endurpet-calls of men, the words God, Immortality, ance," she wrote in 1860; and it is clear Duty, pronounced, with terrible earnestness, that she regarded the belief in revealed how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave majestic countenance turned towards me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp,. one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fate. religion and in God as nothing but opiumeating, at least for those who, like herself, could look the origin of religious creeds in the face, and who could dare to pro nounce these creeds an illusion of our own fostering, if, as she herself held, an illusion they really are. To me the character and works of this remarkable woman seem one of the most startling of the moral phenomena of our Even to the touch of artificial gloom time; and I opened Mr. Cross's book artistically pervading this last sentence, with the strongest hope that it would the biography reads like an elaborate throw some new and vivid lights on the illustration of Mr. Myers's reminiscence. paradoxes of her career. To a great exVery early in the book all belief in reve- tent I have been disappointed. It illuslation disappears, the faith in God soon trates her temperament in many ways, follows, the hope of immortality vanishes but it hardly changes in a single feature almost without a sign that it is gone; but the estimate of her mind and character as "night falls "there is more and more which her books and life had previously straining to enforce the theme of duty, suggested. It discloses, I think, that and more and more emphatically are we there was much more of straining in her assured, in vague but anxious assevera-ordinary life and temperament than there tions, that it is what we suppose Mr. was in her genius properly so called — Myers means to convey by the words that the artificial element so strong in "awful with inevitable fate." George her, was, if I may be allowed the paradox, Eliot was assuredly a law unto herself, in natural to her, though external to her a sense in which it would be hardly true genius; that she was spontaneous as a to say the same of any sceptic or agnostic novelist, artificial as a woman and a poet; who ever lived. She ascribed that law to that strenuous as she was, her strenuousno higher source than her own mind, un-ness was too self-conscious to reach the less, indeed, she regarded the antecedents point of positive strength; and that what which had resulted in her own existence I may call the pedantically scientific vein as in some vague sense higher than that existence; and yet she attributed to that law all the absoluteness and exactingness of a power it would be infamy to evade; and she made her life one long strain to • George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and her Journals. Arranged and Edited by her Husband, J. W. CROSS. With portraits and other illustrations. 3 vols. London: William Blackwood & Son. in her was not in any way contracted from her association with Mr. Lewes, but was due to her own bias or the circumstances of her education. But though the book supports and strengthens these inferences in a multitude of different ways, they are none of them entirely new to the student of her writings. The Life and correspondence verify for us what some of those ing in every way open to her the duty of a disinterested and just life, and preaching in season and out of season that men owe as much obedience to an elevated thought) of their own as they could possibly owe to any external inspirer of that thought, even though he were also the perfect and Is age of paradox, such a spectacle is a paradox greater than all the rest. there anything in the Life calculated to attenuate it? who hardly knew George Eliot personally | step downwards, not apparently deteriorathad previously conjectured, that the rich- ing or slipping any lower, but giving us est part of her was almost a secret from picture after picture of the most impressive herself quite a secret till she had kind to illustrate the depth of meaning in reached middle age- and that the char- true marriage, and the terrible conse. acter known to herself and to the circle of quences of ignoring that meaning; and her intimates, the curiously learned wom- next the paradox of a woman who held an, the austere sceptic, the considerately God to be a mere human ideal, and imgentle friend, the tenderly devoted part-mortality to be a dream, painfully enforc ner, stood to her really great genius more in the external relation of a faithful attendant than in the relation of moral substance and essence to the attributes and qualities of that genius. Still the spectacle which the Life presents is impressive enough the spectacle of an industriously regulated career cloven in two by a sudden concentrated essence of it. Even in an and striking breach with a moral law which the great majority of men hold to be of the very essence of social purity, and yet a career sustaining itself at a very high and uniform level of ethical principle after that breach as well as before it, and apparently achieving the particular object for which that breach with the commandment was made. It is the spectacle too, of a woman who was her own God, not in the least in the vulgar and injurious sense of that phrase, not in the least in the sense of worshipping her own nobility and priding herself on her own gifts, but in the better sense that the law of duty which she regarded as imposed upon her by nothing more elevated than the hidden agencies which had produced her own character, was really a religion to her, and one which she earnestly strove within her own self-imposed limits to obey, and of a woman who endeavored with all her might to promote the diffusion of these sentiments of "pity and fairness" which she regarded as embracing "the utmost deli cacies of the moral life." No one can read the Life without feeling the deepest interest in the presentation of both these paradoxes the paradox of a woman not only full of enthusiasm for the good, but not to all appearance in the least impulsive, rather singularly painstaking and deliberate in all her decisions, calmly ab-me solving herself from a moral law to which she seems to have attached what we must regard as, for a sceptic, an almost inex plicable sacredness, and, after that grave 66 In the first place, George Eliot was singularly incredulous of the love and care of others for herself. The most prominent trait which Mr. Cross observes in her, and which is amply illustrated in the Life throughout, is that George Eliot "showed from her earliest years the trait that was most marked in her all through life namely, the absolute need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and to whom she should be all in all. She had," Mr. Cross goes on to say, a pre. eminently exclusive disposition." Moreover, she not only needed to feel and to return exclusive devotion, but could not endure deficiency in the external evidence of it. "My affections are always the warmest," she writes to Mr. Bray, "when my friends are within an attainable distance. I think I can manage," she adds jestingly, "to keep respectably warm to you for three weeks without seeing you, but I cannot promise more," (vol. i., p. 146). And, laughingly as this was written, no doubt it represented some feeling of which she was really conscious. In another letter to the same friend she says: "I can't help losing belief that people love the unbelief is in my nature, and no sort of fork will drive it finally out" (vol. i., p. 469). And again, in writing to Mr. Bray: "It is an old weakness of mine to have no faith in an affection that does not most assuredly George Eliot would be one of the last to come within the wide range of his promises. Doubtless it was not so. There were some of her characteristics which were in the deepest sense Chris- for Itian; but by this powerlessness to believe that of which she had no immediate evidence before her, whether in things human or things divine, George Eliot was exceptionally distinguished. The "substance of things hoped for" was to her no substance at all; she had no buoyancy in her nature. "The evidence of things unseen was a shadow as to the various possible causes of which she could speculate at large with little confidence and no satisfactory result. I attribute to this chronic feebleness of hope, and inability to take a strong grasp even of the true significance of past moral experience, a great deal of the ease with which George Eliot surrendered herself to any personal influence which could make an impression on her keen intellect, and the readiness the precipitation I may almost say - with which she evacuated every stronghold of faith as soon as she saw it seriously at tacked. express itself; and when friends take no For nothing strikes me more in this biography than the absence of the least trace of struggle against the conclusions of the various rationalistic schools through which George Eliot's mind passed. We are told that on November 2, 1841, she called upon Mr. Charles Bray, the well-known Coventry ribbon manufacturer, - whose crude, rationalistic necessitarianism was so thoroughly meat and drink to him, that it not only glorified life, but reconciled him to a confident expectation of annihilation, to try to bring him back to Christianity. Within eleven days from that time, she writes to her friend Miss Lewis: "My whole soul has been engrossed in the most interesting of all inquiries for the last few days, and to what results my thoughts may lead I know not; possibly to one that will startle you; " and it is perfectly clear that she had all but made up her mind within those eleven days to renounce Christianity; for she thinks it necessary to warn Miss Lewis that a change may take place in her, which might possibly render Miss Lewis - who was at |