The Life of George Eliot | Page 2

of day-to-day life with the play of light and shade
which only letters written in serious moods can give.' The idea is a
good one, and Mr. Cross deserves great credit for it. We may hope that
its success will encourage imitators. Certainly there are drawbacks. We
miss the animation of mixed narrative. There is, too, a touch of
monotony in listening for so long to the voice of a single speaker
addressing others who are silent behind a screen. But Mr. Cross could
not, we think, have devised a better way of dealing with his material: it
is simple, modest, and effective.
George Eliot, after all, led the life of a studious recluse, with none of
the bustle, variety, motion, and large communication with the outer
world, that justified Lockhart and Moore in making a long story of the
lives of Scott and Byron. Even here, among men of letters, who were
also men of action and of great sociability, are not all biographies too
long? Let any sensible reader turn to the shelf where his Lives repose;
we shall be surprised if he does not find that nearly every one of them,
taking the present century alone, and including such splendid and
attractive subjects as Goethe, Hume, Romilly, Mackintosh, Horner,
Chalmers, Arnold, Southey, Cowper, would not have been all the better

for judicious curtailment. Lockhart, who wrote the longest, wrote also
the shortest, the Life of Burns; and the shortest is the best, in spite of
defects which would only have been worse if the book had been bigger.
It is to be feared that, conscientious and honourable as his self-denial
has been, even Mr. Cross has not wholly resisted the natural and
besetting error of the biographer. Most people will think that the
hundred pages of the Italian tour (vol. ii.), and some other not very
remarkable impressions of travel, might as well or better have been left
out.
As a mere letter-writer, George Eliot will not rank among the famous
masters of what is usually considered especially a woman's art. She was
too busy in serious work to have leisure for that most delightful way of
wasting time. Besides that, she had by nature none of that fluency,
rapidity, abandonment, pleasant volubility, which make letters amusing,
captivating, or piquant. What Mr. Cross says of her as the mistress of a
salon, is true of her for the most part as a correspondent:--'Playing
around many disconnected subjects, in talk, neither interested nor
amused her much. She took things too seriously, and seldom found the
effort of entertaining compensated by the gain' (iii. 335). There is the
outpouring of ardent feeling for her friends, sobering down, as life goes
on, into a crooning kindliness, affectionate and honest, but often tinged
with considerable self-consciousness. It was said of some one that his
epigrams did honour to his heart; in the reverse direction we
occasionally feel that George Eliot's effusive playfulness does honour
to her head. It lacks simplicity and verve. Even in an invitation to
dinner, the words imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides,
and sense of responsibility is fatal to the charm of familiar
correspondence.
As was inevitable in one whose mind was so habitually turned to the
deeper elements of life, she lets fall the pearls of wise speech even in
short notes. Here are one or two:--
'My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction
that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we
sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy.'

'If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the many
attitudes of "knowingness," it is that air of lofty superiority to the
vulgar. She will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman.'
'It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while
we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.'
The following is one of the best examples, one of the few examples, of
her best manner:--
I have been made rather unhappy by my husband's impulsive proposal
about Christmas. We are dull old persons, and your two sweet young
ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead to string on their
memory, whereas to spend the time with us would be to string on a
dark shrivelled berry. They ought to have a group of young creatures to
be joyful with. Our own children always spend their Christmas with
Gertrude's family; and we have usually taken our sober merry-making
with friends out of town. Illness among these will break our custom this
year; and thus mein Mann, feeling that our Christmas was free,
considered how very much he liked being with you, omitting the other
side of