The Morality of Thackeray and of George Eliot

DICKENS excepted, there have been no English novelists of the present age so widely known and greatly admired as Thackeray and George Eliot, —a man of genius and a woman of genius, each in his and her own way preëminently a moralist. It is interesting, and perhaps not unprofitable, briefly to compare these two in their character of ethical teachers, putting aside any judgment upon their qualities as literary artists. There are certain writers, such as Turgenieff, whose work contains an unmistakable moral clement, but who yet do not openly proclaim themselves as teachers of morality; who prefer to stand apart, and leave their work to make its own impression, unemphasized by any commentary of the author’s own. It is not so with Thackeray and George Eliot; they, on the contrary, frankly acknowledge the direct ethical purport of their work, and have no hesitation in pointing the moral of their tale whenever it pleases them to do so. One may read them, of course, for the mere pleasure of the story or the charm of its telling, and no doubt many persons do so read The Newcomes and Middlemarch ; but it is certain that the authors of these novels intended something more than simply to amuse. Some readers find an endless delight in the humor and satire of the books independently of any moral lessons they convey; others, again, would find in the vivid pictures of human weakness and wickedness an interest that would be too painful but for the fact that the exhibition was meant to serve a moral purpose.

To readers of this latter sort, one of the strongest impressions left on the mind by Thackeray and George Eliot alike is a feeling of sadness and discouragement. It is true, critics have long ceased to speak of Thackeray as a harsh and bitter cynic. He was, indeed, a man of kind, even tender heart. Yet I doubt if his influence is not on the whole the worse, on that account, on those who accept his theories. The bitter cynic, by the very extravagance of his doctrine, brings about a reaction against it: he never can succeed in making any large number of men agree with him in wholesale contempt for the species. The majority of persons do not feel comfortable in the seat of the scornful, in the cold and gloomy isolation in which they must dwell apart from their kind. Thackeray had no real desire to make men permanently dissatisfied with themselves or the world. He held that the world was not a bad place to be born into, provided one learned what not to expect from it, and could find a way to accommodate one’s self to one’s place in it. In the process of learning the lesson, one must of course lose a number of agreeable illusions, and discover an immense deal that was unpleasant in the companions one was forced to live among; but a man of sense ought not to grumble at the inevitable, or be astonished long at finding the earth no paradise of innocence. The meanness, selfishness, hypocrisy, and general rascality going about the world in more or less clever disguise must sooner or later become patent to one who has eyes keen enough to see somewhat below the surface. ’T is true ’t is pity; but pity ’t is, ’t is true. At least, one might congratulate one’s self on not being befooled by smooth appearances; and thus the very keen-eyed author of Pendennis — a Selfish Story, as he calls it — with the best of intentions sets himself to uncover for us some of this masked folly and wickedness of the world, which, without his assistance, we might not have found out for ourselves so readily. Now, I do not mean to say that Thackeray secretly delighted, in his self-imposed task ; I merely want to describe the prevailing tone of his writing. We know how lengthy and frequent are the pages of moralizing commentary upon the character and action of his personages, which occur in most of his novels. After we have become familiar with the constant tone of these pages, do we not, as a rule, prefer to skip them, in our rereading of the books ? It is very well, no doubt, to be reminded that if we are asked to become acquainted with some very low specimens of our kind, it behooves us to recollect that they are of one kind with ourselves, in their faults as in their virtues, and that what is to be avoided above all things is self-righteous judgment. If we so understand the purport of Thackeray’s moralizing, we must of course approve it; but, unfortunately, it is quite as open to be interpreted in another fashion, and may very easily seem the preaching of a doctrine of content with low achievement, since no other is possible to creatures frail as we are. Jones is a small-minded, self-interested individual, the author confesses; but if we reflect that we and our neighbors are really no better than Jones, we shall be loath to condemn him harshly. The reader feels this to be true enough, in a sense ; and yet if we are not to pass judgment upon Jones, and we and Jones stand on the same level, then surely it follows that we are not called on to exercise any undue severity toward ourselves.

It is not that Thackeray paints men and women so much worse than they are, but we find ourselves wishing that he were content to picture his selfish worldling or his hypocritical toady, his Major Pendennis or his Charles Honeyman, without feeling it needful, at the same time, to hint to us that the odious person is only one of a numerous company of such like individuals, whom we have only to look about us to recognize. How few in proportion are the truly admirable figures that fill his large canvases ! We can almost count them on the fingers of one hand. And how often it happens that the brighter shapes seem to shine less by their own native brilliancy than as points of contrast to the surrounding darkness! Thackeray is never able to put a thorough trust in human nature, or to grant that goodness is a militant power in the world. With all our liking and admiration for Colonel Newcome and Esmond, we cannot help feeling that their goodness was neither a very positive force as regarded others, nor even the sufficient stay of their own inner life.

Thackeray lauded women continually, after a certain fashion ; they are beings of almost angelic nature, born to be the guardians of sinful men ; but he was incapable of painting one wholly noble woman. We suspect the sincerity of his praise; indeed, we detect in it a tone of half contempt, or, at best, of patronage, which women instinctively resent. No doubt he fancied that he understood the heart of a good woman when he said, “ There are stories to a man’s disadvantage which the women who are fondest of him are always the most eager to believe,” and when he made Arthur Pendennis’s mother ready at once to credit the vile accusation of an anonymous letter against her much-loved son. Thackeray’s women are unjust and ungenerous to those they love most fondly ; but Helen Pendennis and Lady Castlewood are modeled after the author’s little theory, not after the truth of human nature.

It is not when we first know our Thackeray — unless it be in the pages of Vanity Fair or Barry Lyndon that we thus discover him — that we are disposed to charge him with that cynicism which is worst because most goodnatured. The humor of the great portrait painter is so genial and irresistible, he mocks and gibes with such a merry face, that we do not at once begin to feel the force of the sting in his laughing tongue. It is when we have laid the book down, after a second reading, that we find ourselves experiencing a revulsion from it, the sort of sickening sensation that comes from the sight of some distressingly malformed creature. Then we begin to wonder if we have not misread our author, and to recall the pleasanter personages of the society he has introduced us to, and the most cheering words of his we can remember. But do what we will, we cannot but feel that the dominant impression left on us is that Thackeray had but little faith in humankind, and but small encouragement to give men on their way through the world. He has no better philosophy to offer than that we must take life a good deal as we find it, and try for our own part not to make it much worse, if we cannot hope to make it much better ; that men and women being but mortal, we must content ourselves with the good in them, if we cannot avoid seeing the bad ; that if, on the whole, no one is to be admired unreservedly, neither is it worth while to spend too much energy or honest indignation in contending against fools and rogues. This seems to be about the sum of his teaching.

In the case of George Eliot, the cause of the discouraging impression produced by her work is not the same as in that of Thackeray. To answer at once the question whence it does arise, it may be said briefly that it is not so much because her doctrine is false as because it is defective. Her creed is a kind of modern stoicism, or stoicism plus certain modern ideas. It must be admitted that such a creed has in it much of truth and nobleness. There is no earnest-minded reader but must acknowledge a debt to George Eliot for the inspiration her books have been to him. The words of a sympathetic critic in reference to Daniel Deronda hold good of her writings as a whole: “This book has done something to prevent our highest moments from making our every-day experience seem vulgar and incoherent, and something to prevent our every-day experience from making our highest moments seem spectral and unreal.” The message which George Eliot delivers by the mouths of all the noblest characters of her novels is no uncertain one, and, whatever its variety of utterance, the burden of it is always the same ; namely, that, frail as human nature is, it may ever aspire to the perfect good, and be faithful to the highest truth it has been able to find for itself. Dorothea, in the hour of her deepest trial, “yearned toward the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her and rule her errant will; ” and after the crisis of her anguish is passed she says to another, “ Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not ? How can we think that any one has trouble, — piercing trouble,—and we could help them, and never try ? ” Maggie Tulliver says to her lover, “ Oh, life is difficult! Many things are difficult and dark to me; but I see one thing quite clearly, — that I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural, but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural, too.” Romola says, “ We can only have the highest happiness by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves ; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see that it is good.” Utterances like these may he multiplied indefinitely. The only life worth living, she tells us, is the life, toward self, of infinite aspiration, and, toward others, of infinitely active compassion. She will not allow, with Thackeray, that we can strike an average of goodness, and make ourselves content with that. If she sees clearly the pettiness of human nature, she discerns also the nobility that is in it; she believes in the latter equally with the former, and in man’s capacity for self-elevation equally with his capacity for self-degradation. She understands the baseness of human nature, as witness Grandcourt and Peter Featherstone ; and she understands, also, all its variety of meanness, selfishness, weakness, and possibility of deterioration, as witness the Gleggs, Tom Tulliver, Rosamond Vincy, Hetty, Arthur, Godfrey, Casaubon, Gwendolen, and Tito. But the lights of the picture alway balance the shades ; to console us for the existence of the contemptible, we are persuaded to look on the admirable, and are made to realize the possibility of the one as fully as that of the other. Side by side with the least estimable of the species we are shown an Adam and Dinah, a Seth, a Felix Holt, a Romola, a Maggie, a Dorothea, a Fedalma, a Derouda.

If we had nothing better, we might be thankful to accept a teaching like that of these great works. Indeed, such is the power of a writer like George Eliot that it is difficult, while the spell of her genius is immediately upon us, to resist falling into accord with her tone, and seeming to ourselves to adopt her point of view ; for the time being we can see no brighter illumination of the mystery of existence than shines from these pages. The men and women she creates are for us veritable human beings, whom we come to know and sympathize with intimately ; and such wisdom as these are able to attain unto appears the sole wisdom attainable by any. But we may fully admit and freely admire all that is true and noble in the writings of a Marcus Aurelius or a George Eliot, and yet be far from regarding them as containing the whole truth.

The defect of ancient stoicism and of modern humanitarianism is, in a word, a lack of religion ; of an assured hold on those fundamental principles which give an answer to the deep questioning of the human spirit as to the why and whence and whither of its existence. So far as we can judge, George Eliot appears to have adopted the general stand-point of agnosticism. The mere lack of any determinate expression of religious belief would not support this inference ; but we feel that here George Eliot is eager to make known to mankind the best that she has found for herself, and therefore her silence touching these vital questions of the origin and destiny of man is full of sad significance. For her, perhaps, as well as for Mr. Frederic Harrison, Christianity meant “ what is taught in average churches to the millions of professing Christians.” If such teaching represented to her the truth of Christianity, she may not have greatly cared to examine it; but if she had desired to inquire into the matter, it is reasonably certain that such current, conventional Christianity would not have satisfied her religious needs. It is not for us to inquire into an author’s personal convictions, unless, as in this case, an insight into them helps us to interpret writings whose chief interest is in their ethical purport; and it is not in the spirit of Christian Philistinism that I comment on or lament George Eliot’s want of religion. To make use of a phrase of Mr. John Morley, the mere label that is commonly affixed to a person is matter of little moment. There is a kind of orthodoxy which is consistent with a complete unintelligence of the profound simplicities of religion that Christ himself believed in and lived by. We may, however, allow ourselves the regret that the light did not shine into places which remained dark for George Eliot to the end, and the wish that she might have been able to enter into the spirit of true Christianity, for the sake of her own greater inward peace and joy, and for the sake of the highest stimulus and encouragement her writings might have afforded to others. Large and noble as was her own spiritual nature, George Eliot intellectually was not above her age, but of it; and it is in this fact that we see the explanation of the underlying sadness in all her books, which it is impossible for those who have received the most good from them to ignore.

It is from a fancied necessity to deny the possibility of any absolute knowledge of spiritual things that this depressing influence results. To recognize an influence the opposite of this, and to feel the fuller inspiration that comes from the intellectual affirmation of religious truth, we have only to turn to Robert Browning. Whether or not he is a Christian of the most orthodox pattern we do not know, and need not ask ; the important thing we do know, because we can see it for ourselves, is that he has the substance of religious faith. In all his poetic work there is manifested a confidence amounting to settled certainty in the being of God and the immortality of man. Browning’s mind is in some respects more akin to George Eliot’s than that of any other writer of the day: he has an intellect like hers, both keen and strong, the varied learning and the power of subtle analysis so remarkable in her, the same deep knowledge of human nature and the same wide sympathies which she displays. But when they speak of life, its meaning and its end, how different is his tone from hers ! All his knowledge of life’s sorrows, mistakes, temptations, failures, has no power to sink him in despondency: over all these he rises triumphant, in the assurance of his faith in God, and in a life beyond this narrow present. Existence is no sad, perplexing mystery ; in the light of the great spiritual facts of God’s being and man’s relation to him, all is explained, all is bright with hope. The only real failure on man’s part is to lose hope, and to cease from aspiration. Sorrow and temptation, what are they but

George Eliot’s Romola misses all the happiness of her life ; Dorothea errs, and fails of the good she would have done ; Maggie Tulliver’s life “ trails on a broken wing ” to its tragic end. It is of such lives as these that Browning says,

All this, he says, the man or woman is worth to God “ whose wheel the pitcher shaped.” George Eliot, too, would say that all which her Maggie and Dorothea could not be, and all that others ignored in them, went to swell their amount; but she does not go on and bid us note that metaphor of the potter’s wheel and confidently declare,

Falling short or failure is the token of man’s superiority over the brute creation, which knows of nothing but itself, nor of any advance beyond itself. Mere moral blamelessness Browning cares little for, because it is not enough ; he has ceased to concern himself with that, in his eager desire for something higher; he rejoices in all those impulses and passions that rouse men from apathetic rest, and urges them to spiritual effort. In Rabbi Aben Ezra, the poem from which I have quoted the above verses, he looks forward to old age, and to the life beyond, which is to carry on and complete the earthly one.

And so, the old man says he will

In his high and hopeful philosophy, based on a firm belief in an absolute source and principle of spiritual life who is a personal God and Father of spirits, Browning shows himself beyond his age, which for that reason has heretofore failed to recognize his greatness, or appreciate the worth of his teaching. But the time must come when his title to honor as a teacher of spiritual truth will be gratefully acknowledged, and there are signs that the day is not far off.

Maria Louise Henry.