Roots in Romanticism
"Thus sanctioned,"
The Pastor said, "I willingly confine
My narratives to subjects that excite
Feelings with these accordant; love, esteem,
And admiration; lifting up a veil,
A sunbeam introducing among hearts
Retired and covert; so that ye shall have
Clear images before your gladdened eyes
Of nature's unambitious underwood,
And flowers that prosper in the shade. And when
I speak of such among my flock as swerved
Or fell, those only shall be singled out
Upon whose lapse, or error, something more
Than brotherly forgiveness may attend;
To such will we restrict our notice, else
Better my tongue were mute.
And yet there are,
I feel, good reasons why we should not leave
Wholly untraced a more forbidding way.
For, strength to persevere and to support,
And energy to conquer and repel--
These elements of virtue, that declare
The native grandeur of the human soul--
Are oft-times not unprofitably shown
In the perverseness of a selfish course:
Truth every day exemplified, no less
In the grey cottage by the murmuring stream
Than in fantastic conqueror's roving camp,
Or 'mid the factious senate, unappalled
Whoe'er may sink, or rise--to sink again,
As merciless proscription ebbs and flows.
Wordsworth, The
Excursion, Book VI.645-674
George Eliot: Critic and Realist Novelist
Early Thoughts
Suppose a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of
idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of many-hued significance, no hoary
archaisms ‘familiar with forgotten years’—a patent deodorized and non-resonant
language which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as
algebraic signs. Your language may be a perfect medium of expression to
science, but will never express life,
which is a great deal more than science . . .
Art is the nearest thing to life; it
is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow
men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the
task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the people.
Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects
of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about
evanescent fashions--about the manners and conversations of beaux and
duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and
struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more
heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false
object instead of a true one.
This perversion is not the less fatal
because the misrepresentation which gives rise to it has what the artist
considers a moral end. The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the
motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the
labourer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act
on him. We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the
sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy and the
artisan in all his suspicious selfishness. (Eliot, “The Natural History of German
Life” (July 1856))
I never before longed so much to know the names of things as
during this visit to Ilfracombe. The desire is part of the tendency that is now
constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the
daylight of distinct, vivid ideas. The mere fact of naming an object tends to
give definiteness to our conception of it—we have then a sign that at once
calls up in our minds the distinctive qualities which mark out for us that
particular object from all others. (Eliot, Journal Entry, Ilfracombe 8 May-26
June 1856)
Art must be either real and concrete, or ideal and eclectic.
Both are good and true in their way, but my stories are of the former kind. I
undertake to exhibit nothing as it should be; I only try to exhibit some things
as they have been or are, seen through such a medium as my own nature gives me.
(Eliot, Letter to Blackwood, 1857)
The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism—the
doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful
study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on
the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality. (Eliot, Review
of Ruskin’s Modern Painters)
Eliot's Fiction
From The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton (chapter 5)
The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have
undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional
character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on
behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable, - a man whose virtues were
not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the
slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably
commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favourably
many years ago. 'An utterly uninteresting character!' I think I hear a lady
reader exclaim - Mrs Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in
fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and
comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a 'character'.
But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority
of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty
out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census
are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily
wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with
suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or
thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and
their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a
volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose
conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people
- many of them - bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do
the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys;
their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have
mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very
insignificance - in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the
glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share?
Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you
would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and
the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull
grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.
From Adam Bede (chapter 17)
Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.
