George Eliot's poetry, and other studies

GIFT OF

GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY

AND

OTHER STUDIES

BY

ROSE ELIZABETH CLEVELAND

FUNK & WAGNALLS

NEW YORK i8g LONDON

10 AND 12 DEY STREET 44 FLEET STREET

All Rights Reserved

31

'

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1885, by

FUNK & WAGNALLS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C,

[All Rights Reserved^
Registered at Stationers' Hall, London, England.

THESE ESSAYS, SOME OF WHICH WERE ORIGINALLY PREPARED
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES, ARE NOW
AFFECTIONATELY AND RESPECT-
FULLY DEDICATED.

^?. E. C.

CONTENTS.

GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY,

RECIPROCITY, 25

ALTRUISTIC FAITH 43

HISTORY, 61

Studies in the Middle Ayes : a Series of Historical Essays.

OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE, 81

CHARLEMAGNE, 105

THE MONASTERY, 127

CHIVALRY, 153

JOAN OF ARC, . 171

GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY.

7

t » S3 '

GEORGE ELIOT'S POETEY.
I.

A GENUINE poem is almost certain of recognition, as
such, in the long run. If verse contains poetry, that
poetry makes itself felt, whatever blemishes the verse, as
verse, may have ; but if dint of argument alone brings
us to acknowledge faultless verse a poem, like Galileo, in
the moment of recantation, we shall mutter to ourselves our
former and unrecanted conviction. Choose, for example,
any Paris to arbitrate between " Aurora Leigh" and " The
Spanish Gypsy," and which will win the golden apple '$ If
Paris is at all able to tell black from white, he will at once
perceive the " points" of which the " Gypsy" is possessed
and of which " Aurora" is destitute. He will discover in
the pages of George Eliot superlatives enough. Their color
and glow, their vigor, their passion, their nobility of senti-
ment, their perfection of pathos, the sustained movement
of the story, its tragic and worthy denouement, its perfect
prosody, its successful unities, and its everywhere-pervading
atmosphere of ethical sublimity — all these will compare
with " Aurora" to " Aurora's" disadvantage. And yet,
and yet — how is it ? — " Aurora" gets the apple ! Perhaps
poor Paris can only stammer forth, in answer to the ques-
tion, What in " Aurora" more excellent than in the
" Gypsy" establishes her claim to the prize ? —the unan-

10 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

swering answer, liJe ne sais quo£" Paris knows that by
the one he is impressed, stirred, uplifted ; and that the
other, with its high morality, and rare knowledge, and brill-
iant diction, falls cold upon his ear ; in short, whether he
comprehends it or not, it is the poetry in "Aurora" and
the lack of it in the " Gypsy" which compels his decision.
What's in a name ? A rose by any other name might
smell as swreet ; but a lily, if rechristened rose, would never
diffuse the rose's odor, nor gain, in addition to its own spot-
less perfections, the deep-hearted sorcery of that enchant-
ing, crumpled wonder, which we thrill in touching, as if
it, too, had nerves, and blood, and a human heart — a rose !
So prose can never become poetry by bearing its name. Ad-
ventitious circumstances — personal distinction, dazzling suc-
cess in other fields, the influence of sympathetic and power-
ful friends — may cause something admirable as prose to
pass, for the moment, as poetry. But the sure judgment
of time reverses such opinions, and prose continues prose,
and poetry remains forever uncounterfeited.

II.

1 come at once to the consideration of George Eliot's
verse in the mention of two qualities which it seems to me
to lack, and which 1 hold to be essentials of poetry.

The first of these two qualities has to do with form, and
is a property, if not the whole, of the outside, that which
affects and (if anything could do this) stops with the senses.
Yet here, as elsewhere in this department of criticism, it is

11

difficult to be exact. 1 ask myself, Is it her prosody ? and
am obliged to Hud it faultless as Pope's. There is never in
her metres a syllable too much or too little. Mrs. Brown-
ing's metre is often slovenly, her rhymes are often false.
Yet, explain it who will, Elizabeth Browning's verse has
always poetry and music, which George Eliot's lacks.

What was work to write is work to read. Ruskin's
dictum— " No great intellectual thing was ever done by-
great effort" — 1 suspect to be wholly true, and that it is
pre-eminently true in the production of poetry. Poetry
must be the natural manner of the poet, and can never be
assumed. I do not mean by this to ignore the aids which
study gives to genius ; I only mean to say that no mere
labor and culture can simulate poetic fire, or atone for its
absence. George Eliot puts her wealth of message into the
mould of poetic form by continuous effort. No secret of
hydraulics could cause a dewdrop to hang upon a rose-leaf
in a cube. Her torrents of thought were predestined to a
cubical deliverance. Never was the Calvinistic dilemma
more intrusive. Her free will cannot squeeze them
spherical.

George Eliot's prose carries easily its enormous burdens
of concentrated gift. It is like the incomparable trained
elephants of Eastern monarchs, which bear at once every
treasure — the iron of agriculture, the gem of royalty ; and
in its cumbrous momentum it out-distances all competitors.
But poesy should betray no burdens. Its rider should sit
lightly, with no hint of spur. It should sport along its
course and reach its goal unwearied.

The born poet has no agony in the deliverance of his
song. The uttering is to him that soothing balm which

12 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETKYj AND OTHER STUDIES.

the utterance is to his reader. Burns said, " My passions
when once lighted raged like so many devils till they got
vent in rhyme ; and then the conning over my verses, like
a spell, soothed all into quiet." Bat where will one find a
lullaby in George Eliot's verses ?

Poets do, indeed, learn in suffering what they teach in
song ; but the singing quiets the suffering. It is the weep-
ing, not the tear wept, that gives relief. Mrs. Browning
makes no secret of the headache.

" If heads that hold a rhythmic thought must ache perforce,
Then I, for one, choose headaches."

In a private letter she writes : " 1 have not shrunk from
any amount of labor where labor could do anything."
Where labor could do anything ! There it is !

George Eliot has been said to possess Shakespearian
qualities. Perhaps just here, in the relation of manner to
matter, is seen her greatest resemblance and greatest differ-
ence. No writer, all concede, ever carried and delivered
so much as Shakespeare. Never was human utterance so
packed \vith wealthy meaning, so loaded with all things
that can be thought or felt, inferred or dreamed, as his.
And it all comes with gush and rush, or with gentle, mur-
muring flow, just as it can corne, just as it must come. Tie
takes no trouble, and he gives none. From one of his plays,
replete with his incomparable wit, wisdom, and conceit, you
emerge as from an ocean bath, exhilarated by the tossing of
billows whose rough embrace dissolves to tenderest caress,
yet carries in itself hints of central fire, of utmost horizon,
of contact with things in heaven and earth undreamt of in
our philosophy. You come from one of George Eliot's

13

poems as from a Turkish bath of latest science and refine-
[tnent, — appreciative of benefit, but so battered, beaten, and
disjointed as to need repose before you can be conscious of
refreshment.

The irony of fate spares not one shining mark. George
Eliot cared most to have the name of poet. But her gait
betrays her in the borrowed robe. It is as if the parish
priest should insist on wearing in his desk my lady's
evening costume. It is too much and not enough. He
cannot achieve my lady's trick which causes the queenly
train to float behind her like the smoke-plume of a gliding
engine. Pie steps on it and stumbles. You step on it and
fall. On my lady it is never in the way ; on His Rever-
ence it is always so. Yet he will preach in it ! " There
are," writes Mrs. Browning to R. H. Home, " Mr. - — ,

Mr. , Lord , and one .or two others who have

education and natural ability enough to be anything in the
world except poets, and who choose to be poets in spite of
nature and their stars, to say nothing of gods, men, and
critical columns. ' '

III.

A second quality which George Eliot's poetry lacks is
internal and intrinsic, pertaining to matter rather than
manner, though, as will be suggested later on, standing,
perhaps, in the relation to manner of cause to effect. It is
that, indeed, which all her works lack, but which prose, as
prose, can get along without ; call it what you will, faith or

14 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

transcendentalism ; I prefer to define it negatively as the
antipode of agnosticism.

No capable student of her works but must admit the
existence of this deficiency. Everywhere and in all things
it is apparent. Between all her lines is written the stern,
self -imposed thus far and no farther. Her noblest charac-
ters move, majestic and sad, up to a — stone-wall ! There
is no need that argument be brought to establish this propo-
sition. It demands — nay, admits of, no proof, for it is self-
evident.

The question which concerns us here is simply, What has
this fact to do with George Eliot's poetry ?

I answer, Much, every way. Herein, indeed, is matter.
But my suspicions must not be disclosed in their full
heterodoxy. I venture, however, to aftinn that agnosticism
can never exist in true poetry. Let verse have every
quality which delights sense, captivates intellect, and stirs
the heart, yet lack that ray which, coming from a sun
beyond our system, reaches, blends with, vivifies, and
assures the intimation of and longing for immortality in man
— lacking this, you have not poetry.

It is the necessity of the poet, his raison d^etre, to meet
and join the moving of men's minds toward the hereafter.
For all minds tend thither. The dullest mortal spirit must
at times grope restlessly and expectantly in the outer dark-
ness for something beyond ; and this something must exist,
will exist, in a true poem. It need not be defined as
Heaven, or Paradise, or Hades, or Nirvana ; but we must
not be confronted with silence ; there must be in some way
recognition of and sympathy with this deepest yearning of
the soul. Many a one, not knowing what, not seeing

15

where, but trusting in somewhat and trusting in some-
where, has been a poet and an inspiration to his race. The
simplest bead-telling Margaret is appeased with the creedless
faith of her Faust, though it be told in " phrases slightly
different" from the parish priest's. Faust, the lore-crammed,
the knowledge-sated, yet feels the unseen, and longs and
trusts. His proud will brings no cold, impenetrable extin-
guisher to place upon this leaping flame of spirit, which
sends its groping ray far beyond his finite horizon, ever
moving, moving; in its search ; because he feels assurance of

c5 ' o

the existence of the something toward which it moves.

George Eliot, confronted by Margaret's question, answers
sadly, with submission born of a proud ignorance, " I do
not know. My feeling that there is something somewhere is,
itself, unaccountable, and proves nolhing. I simply do—
not — know. I will not conjecture. It is idle and imperti-
nent to guess. There is that of which you and I both do
know, because we have experience of it. Of this only will
1 speak. All else is but verbiage. We stop here."

And she stops here, before a great stone- wall, higher
than we can see over, thicker than we can measure, so cold
that we recoil at the touch. There is no getting <tny
farther. It is the very end.

Now, this can never be poetry ; for the poet must ever
open and widen our horizon. He need not be on the wing,
but his wings must be in sight. He need not — nay, he
must not, deal with man-made creeds and dogmas. He
need not deal with ethics even. Homer knows nothing of
most of George Eliot's sweet humanities, and confuses
shockingly all things which, since his poor day, have come
to be catalogued under the heads of virtue and vice. His

16 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

deities make merry over the cripple among them, and spend
most of their time meditating guiles concerning each other,
and each other's favorites among men. Humanity is the
football for their game. They, the relentless, cruel im-
mortals, are to be come up with if mortal may ; to be pro-
pitiated if mortal must. Nowhere is there any trace of
conscience, nowhere any sense of sin. As to the moralities
of human life, the duties of man to man, these Homeric
Hob Roys found themselves amply sufficed with

"... the simple plan
That they should take who had the power,
And they should keep who can."

Yet among all there is a boundless belief in a beyond.
The imagination and anticipation of existence comes never
to an end. Tbe future is, indeed, unknown, since he who
enters may not return from Hades. Yet it is vastly,
vaguely certain. A multitude of immortals of infinite power
and irresistible beauty surround and have continually to do
with mortal men, and for each man there is some chance of
winning from these immortals the gift of godhood. All
expands and extends. There is no end-all, no be-all.
Hence, without morality or goodness, we have poetry.

In Heine we have shocking jests and fearful impieties,
but never sincere agnosticism. He believed all, and denied
all. He threw away with one hand what he clasped with the
other. " Lying, corpse-like, upon the barren sand by the
grovelling, heaving sea, which is dipped up by the gray and
formless cloud-daughters of the air, in tedious, ceaseless
rise and fall (so like his own life !), he still sees the lumi-

GEORGE ELIOT?S POETRY. 17

nous aspect of a far-away perfection, in whose heavenly
beauty his spirit has found the inspiration that carries it
straight, like a bird, to heaven's gate." * The ilse, evan-
ished from the \vaters, where prayers are said and church-
bells ring, lies in the depths of his own sea-soul. Ever
and anon the angel-face of the little dead Veronica woos
and wins him to purity arid peace.

Byron's negatives amount to an affirmative. Amid all
his personal misery and assurance that

" Whatever thoii hast been,
'Twere something better not to be,"

he, after all, speaks only for himself. For those who care
for that sort of thing there is a paradise, heaven, angels,
rewards of virtue, God, etc. These things are not in his
line, but he knows a good deal about them. They are, but
for whom is only a matter of taste and taking the trouble.

Even the sadly carnal Swinburne predicates and care-
lessly hints at an over-realm. In his mournfulest negatives
he arrives at certainties which put some meaning into his
luxury of sound.

" From too much love of living,

From hope and fear set free,
"We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods there be,
That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

* Der Schiffbriichige.

18 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

" Then star nor sun shall waken,

Nor any change of light ;
Nor sound of waters shaken,

Nor any sound or sight ;
Nor wintry leaves, nor vernal,
Nor days, nor things diurnal ;
Only the sleep eternal

In an eternal night."

There is something quite appreciable here. It is as far
from agnosticism as it is from Christianity.

For all test one may apply to it he wins this result —
namely, that poetry, whose necessity it is to deal with
humanity in all its bearings, can never, consistently with its
mission, leave the reader merely the silence of the Sphinx
concerning the hereafter — can never return to the heavens,
aflame with sun, moon, and stars, and the milky mist of
undiscerned systems, merely the stare of stone-dead, stone-
blind eyes ! It may give him absurd fancies, wildest
dreams, sheerest nonsense, but it must give him some-
thing. It may shut him up to annihilation, but it must not
leave him to dwell with, the silence of agnosticism. It
must give him, in no wise, doctrine ; not at all creed ; not,
necessarily, piety toward God or man ; but freedom, un-
li irritation, a beyond, and a hereafter !

George Eliot, with brain surcharged with richest thought
and choicest, carefulest culture ; with heart to hold all
humanity, if that could save ; with tongue of men and
angels to tell the knowledge of her intellect, the charity of
her heart — yet, having not faith, becomes, for all of satisfac-
tion that she gives the soul, but sounding brass and tinkling
cymbal ! She will not bid me hope when she herself has
no assurance of the thing hoped for. She must not speak

19

of faith in the unknown. She cannot be cruel, but she can
be dumb ; and so her long procession of glorious thoughts,
and sweet humanities, and noblest ethics, arid stern renunci-
ations, and gracious common lots, and lofty ideal lives, with
their scalding tears, and bursting laughter, and flaming
passion — all that enters into mortal life and time's story — •
makes its matchless march before our captured vision up to
• — the stone-wall. "And here," she says, "is the end!"
We may accept her dictum and be brave, silent, unde-
ceived, and undeceiving agnostics ; but, as such, we must
say to her (of " The Spanish Gypsy," for instance), "This
is not poetry ! It is the richest realism, presenting indubi-
table phenomena from which you draw, with strictest sci-
ence, best deduction and inference concerning the known or
the knowable. But, by virtue of all this, it is not poetry.
The flattering lies and pretty guesses are not there, and.
will be missed. You must put them in as do the Chris-
tians, the transcendentalists, and the fools generally. The
( poet ' comes from these ranks. If you will persist in
this sheer stop when you reach the confines of the known,
you must not attempt to pass your work off as poetry.
Even pagans will not be attracted by such verse. They
want and will have predication. It is not so much that
you do not know — nobody knows — as that you will not
guess, or dream, or fancy, to their whim ; that you will be
so plainly, simply silent concerning the hereafter. Your
readers will not endure that in poetry. There was John
Milton, his learning as great as yours, his metres not
more exact, yet nothing saves his Paradises from being
theological treatises except the imagination in them, which
stops not with the seen, but invades and appropriates the

20 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

unseen. This blind old Titan sees and interprets the
heavens by his inner vision. His sublime audacity of faith
aerates the ponderous- craft of his verse and keeps it from
sinking into the abyss of theologic pedantry.

"Mrs. Browning, with her careless verbosity, still makes
her ' Aurora' an immortal, because both she and Aurora
believe in immortality. But your self-contained verse will
scarcely give long human life to your beloved Feldama.
However much she bids us

1 ... Think of me as one who sees
A light serene and strong on one sole path,
Which she will tread till death.
. . . though I die alone,
A hoary woman on the altar step,
Cold 'mid cold ashes. That is my chief good.
The deepest hunger of a faithful heart
Is faithfulness. Wish me naught else ' —

still your readers will persist in wishing her something else,
because they will hope and believe there is a ' good '
beyond what she calls the chief — a good toward which that
good is but a means. Her supreme renunciation will blight
her story, and men will never take it in exchange for or in
company with that of the gushing Aurora. Your sound
science and morality will win from them only silence, but
they will applaud forever such outbursts of feeling as this
of Aurora's :

' . . . There's not a flower of spring
That dies ere June but vaunts itself allied,
By issue and symbol, by significance
And correspondence, to that spirit-world
Outside the limits of our sphere and time

GEOEGE ELIO'^S POETRY. 21

Whereto we are bound. Let poets give it voice
With human meanings, else they miss the thought,
And henceforth step down lower, stand confessed,
Instructed poorly lor interpreter.'

" There is that ' horse-faced ' Wordsworth ! His ' drowsy,
frowsy ' ' Excursion ' might still be gathering dust on Mr.
Cottle's bookshelves but for his £ Intimations of Immor-
tality,' which caught the ear of the unscientific people —
always longing for such intimations — and forthwith he is
become poeta nascitur. This is a very unmeaning state-
ment :

' Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.'

" Yet the sentiment of these words fell in with the drift of
human vagary for all time. Your noble, safe, scientific
utterances will drop, dead and unregarded, beside it. It
must be after many generations have been instructed in
our first principles of true knowledge that your verse will
be received as poetry. ' '

Even so, Agnostic 1

IT.

Perhaps these two qualities of which I have spoken— the
one extrinsic, as of the body ; the other intrinsic, as of the
mind ; the one sensuous, the other spiritual — may not, in
the last analysis, be distinguishable, because the one is sine

22 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

qua non of the other. To use the language of one of tlie
agnostics, in treating of these qualities, it may come to be
" immaterial whether spirit be expressed in terms of matter,
or matter in terms of spirit." "With poeta nascitur it is
difficult to separate the material body from the spiritual
body, to say which is form, which spirit- This,

"... oft converse with heavenly habitants,
Begins. to cast a beam on the outward shape,
*******
And turn it, by degrees, to the soul's essence. "

George Eliot herself says, in a private letter lately given to
the public, referring to the evolution of her Dinah from
the germ sown in her mind years before by the person of
an aunt, and speaking of the unlikeness of the two, as well
as the likeness, " The difference was not merely physical.
No difference is. ' '

No one knows better than George Eliot knew how the
spiritual body gives curve, and feature, and expression to
the material body. Mrs. Browning herself did not more
keenly realize and everywhere acknowledge the truth that
spirit makes the form.

"... Inward evermore
To outward, so in life and so in art,
Which still is life."

No one bows with profounder recognition to the dictum
" it is the spirit which quickeneth" than does the author of
"Adam Bede" and "The Spanish Gypsy." It is this
which she thinks it worth while to teach, without which she
would have no heart to teach at all. But her teaching
takes its shape from the attitude of her own soul.

GEORGE ELIOT S POETRY. 23

To epitomize, then. George Eliot's pages are a labyrinth
of wonder and beauty ; crowded with ethics lofty and pure
as Plato's ; with human natures fine and fresh as Shake-
speare's ; but a labyrinth in which you lose the guiding
cord ! With the attitude and utterance of her spirit con-
fronting me, I cannot allow her verse to be poetry. She is
the raconteur, not the vates / the scientist, not the seer.

RECIPROCITY.

'ROCITY.

KECIPROCI

THE word reciprocity is used to denote the quid pro quo
which inheres in all our relations with each other — the give
and take of the common lot ; those mutualities which the
mere fact of living makes our privilege and our duty ; the
debit and credit of every-day affairs ; the roll of our liabili-
ties and assessments as members of the great firm of
humanity. Shakespeare said, 4' All the world's a stage,
and men and women are the actors." And his paraphrase
has in it a great deal of truth, if a great deal of poetry ;
doubtless there is something of the actor in each one of us ;
doubtless you and I occasionally drop the common gait and
slip into a grandiose stage-walk ; doubtless we assume a role
we were not born to, and play our little play upon occa-
sions, and shall continue to do so until the final drop of the
curtain. But I think that»to say all the world is a market,
and men and women are the buyers and the sellers, would
have in it more of truth if less of poetry. Indeed, this is
the strictest verity. All the world is a market, and it is a
market all the time ; and all the men and women are buy-
ing and selling, and buying and selling all the time. The
barter never ceases ; we are constantly offering something
in exchange for something else, and constantly having like
bargains pressed upon us. This is the situation ; into it we
are born. It is not of our making, and cannot be of our

28 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

unmaking. We are so related to each other that we
are perforce giving and taking, and we cannot be other-
wise.

It is the aspiration of many a soul to be self-sufficing.
Independence is a butterfly we chase summer and winter,
but we never catch it. Among all delusions by which we
flatter ourselves in this market of life, I know of none more
honest and more vain than this, that we are actually inde-
pendent, that we depend only upon ourselves, that no one is
necessary to us.

Perhaps not one of us is without a personal convincing ex-
perience of the impossibility of standing alone in this world.
1 suspect a brief experience is sufficient ; it is one of which we
are not proud, and which we are not eager to exhibit. In
truth, it is ridiculous if not pathetic, this attempt to get along
alone — ridiculous because so plainly to other eyes a failure ;
pathetic because to one's own eyes the ridiculousness is so
invisible. Occasionally a conspicuous example illustrates
our proposition. Witness beautiful, wayward Thoreau,
astride of his preferred pumpkin in his wilderness, lord over
no man, lorded over by none, and believing himself inde-
pendent of heart, independent of head, as he was indepen-
dent in all material affairs. Yet let his own charming con-
fession, albeit unconscious, show us how his human heart
unloaded itself of love to sylvan creatures. What perfect
reciprocity of affection was between him and the squirrels,
birds, fishes ! How his large, involuntary lovingness de-
pended on them for companionship ! How that intellect
which he deprived of converse with the living, yet held
communion in that wilderness with the sages and seers of
the past ! How his mind depended on their intellectual

RECIPROCITY. 29

camaraderie — none tlie less, to Tlioreau, camaraderie^ be-
cause wholly ghostly.

Many a one has had Thoreau's dream, few have come so
near realizing it as he ; and he utterly failed of it. Aristotle
said : " Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild
beast or a god." AYe have in us a good deal of each, but
3ret we are neither, and self alone could never suffice us.
!STo ; independence, in an absolute sense, is an impossibility.
The nature of things is against it. The human soul was
not made to contain itself. It was made to spill over, and
it does and will spill over, always as quid pro quo, where-
soever lodged, to the end of time. Reciprocity, constant
and equal, among all His creatures is the plan of the
only Maker of plans, whose plans never fail in the least jot
or tittle. He has reserved to Himself the power to give
without receiving. Everywhere, even among rudest nations,
has this principle of reciprocity between man and man been
recognized, and ideals of governments have been erected
on it.

Yes, life is a market, and men and women are the
marketers. There is no getting away from it. Young
men and young women stand at the threshold of their
career, and debate what shall be their calling. It is a mat-
ter of choice. They are free to select their pursuit or pro-
fession. But the circumscribing profession has already
swept its line around them ; they are not free here. Into this
or that vocation were they born, and the vocation they
choose is included in this hereditary one. Some stand in
the marketplace of life as preachers, some as teachers, some
as physicians, some as jacks-of-all-trades, jobbers, old-maid
aunts — whose profession is more imperious- than any I know.

30 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

But however our services are sub-rented, each stands
indentured to the law of the overload of life, the law of
reciprocity. Consciously or unconsciously life is but one
long quid pro quo.

" We cannot live, except thus mutually
We alternate, aware or unaware,
The reflex act of life ; and when we bear
Our virtue outward, most impulsively,
Most full of invocation, and to be
Most instantly compellent, certes, there
We live most life, whoever breathes most air
And counts his dying years by sun and sea 1"

T.

A very large proportion of what we consciously or uncon-
sciously offer in exchange is on the surface ; it is what we
call manners. I beg you to consider what is the extent of
the realm of manners ; how it covers the whole outside of
us. It is what we present to the eye of the world. It
is all from which any, save the very few who go beneath
the surface with us, have to judge from. How constantly
we are confessing this fact in our excuses for our friend,
whose manners offend some one who knows him less in-
timately than we do ! We say, " Oh, you must not mind
that ; he did not mean anything by it ; it is only his man-
ner !" But all the same, this which we plead is only his
manner has made its indelible impression. Your manner,
your use or abuse of the forms of social life, the surface
you offer, is the most extensive, if not the deepest, depart-

RECIPROCITY. 31

ment of your commercial transactions in this realm of com-
merce which we are considering. Your enemy as well as
your friend must deal with you here. The merest ac-
quaintance makes some exchange with you. I cannot come
in from a walk on the village street without something more
or less than when I started out. Somebody has offered me
a smile, and 1 have given something back. A genuine
smile generally brings its price in a genuine smile back.
Somebody has saluted me respectfully, and that person is
paid in his own coin.

Bat the manners which I know I offer, the bows I can see
myself making, the attitudes I take, the greetings, the
forms of social deportment, the conversation, the acquired
and conscious reciprocity here, however important, sink
into insignificance beside the unconscious, the impossible
to acquire. And here we come to the gravest consid-
eration of all ; here we strike upon the truth which con-
nects the department of surface manners with the deepest
depths and the highest heights. Conscious and acquired
manners we may, though not wisely, sneer at ; we may refer
them to the realm of the dancing-master and silly little gilt-
edged books on etiquette ; but the surface which is uncon-
scious, and which cannot be acquired, and which, nolens
volens, we must present — that has nothing in common with
the Turveydrops. That belongs to the realm of the seers,
and the philosophers, and the theologians. For no study
of social forms can prevent the thoughts of the brain, the
intents of the heart striking through the surface. The real
grain will show beneath the varnish. This unconscious and
self -revealing give and take in the surface-life prevails
everywhere and always, even in books whose writers have

32 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

passed away. I do not suppose Dr. Johnson was aware that
he was offering battle to his readers when he bargained
with his bookseller. I suppose the conscious bargain be-
tween himself and his readers was that of wit, and wisdom,
and learning in exchange for fame. But an unconscious
bonus was thrown in. The great lexicographer's rudeness,
his gratuitous insults, his grinding small and grinding all — in
short, his mariners, were an inseparable part of his wares
and of himself, and his buyers return him dislike with their
admiration. I do not suppose the young lady whom Lamb
has immortalized as "Hester" was conscious of that historic
smile of hers, so lavishly squandered in her morning saluta-
tion to the little essayist. She was unconscious that he got
from

..." her cheerful eyes a ray
That struck a bliss upon the day,
A bliss that would not go away."

And she got in return an immortality as long as Lamb's.
It was simply a matter of manners on her part. Your man-
ners and mine are not so much our own as they are some-
body else's. Manners are made in the market where they
are sold, and their buying and their selling are mostly
unconscious. A man is known by the company he keeps.
One must be Carlyle himself if he can keep Carlyle's man-
ners, in constant company with Jane Welch, and the gentle
spirits that scintillated around her. Observe how Dante's
manners differ as he moves among the circles of the Inferno
and the Paradiso, and how uniformly he was the poet to
Virgil.

RECIPROCITY. 33

II.

Thoughts are a prime article of commerce. The in-
tellectual life is everywhere that of reciprocity ; the prod-
acts of the brain are articles of constant export and import.
So true is this, so continual and confused is the barter,
that we sometimes cannot tell if we bring a thought to or
from the market ; the meum and tuum become involved.

But there can be no monopoly here. People sometimes
say : " I have no goods in this line ; it is not my depart-
ment of the market. You must go to the professional think-
ers, to the teachers, and preachers, and bookmakers, and
newspaper men. " So the unprofessional thinkers keep their
thoughts to themselves, and corners are created. And there
is no nobler work that any one of you could set yourself to
than to break up these intellectual corners. We must begin
this worthy work by being honest. We mast open our gran-
aries, and offer our hoarded thoughts in exchange. There is
a vast amount of thinking which ought to be in the market.
We hold our best thoughts, and give cur second best. It
never occurs to us that we are dishonest in deal here. Or,
if any one accuses us of a debt in this direction, we get off
with one excuse or another, which seems to us sufficient and
even creditable. How many of us excuse this second-best
character of the thoughts we give to others in conversation,
by the plea that we are not original thinkers, that we have no
original ideas ! A lame and impotent conclusion, and no
excuse at all. Nothing is worse for you than to think your-
self not an original person, except to think that you are
an original person. Do not flatter yourself in either direc-

34: GEORGE ELIOT' a POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

tion. You are as original as anybody else, and no more so.
There are no original people, in fact. Everybody thinks,
and everybody thinks about everything. Adam was the last
original thinker. It is not likely there have been any new
thoughts outside the Garden of Eden. That which wins
for the thinker the title of original is not the newness —
or firstness — of his thoughts ; but the newness, perhaps
firstness, of his expression of them in their relation to other
thoughts, their method and extent of elaboration. That this
is true is proven by the reception given the original think-
ers, preachers, writers, teachers. At once they are called
original, and the fact that they are called so proves that
they are not so. It is because their thoughts are the very
thoughts of their hearers, readers, scholars, but so surpris-
ingly dressed up, come at by routes so unfamiliar, con-
fronted so unexpectedly, elaborated to such distinctness.
It is not an introduction to a stranger, but the sudden
encounter with an old friend, altered, wonderfully im-
proved, developed beyond our dreams, but still the one we
knew before. It is only because it is our very own that we
are so delighted, so thrilled. We call him original who
makes us original ; for he makes us discover ourselves to be
thinkers also. The transition from unconscious to con-
scious thought is education. Learning a thing truly is but
recognizing it. A scholar never knows his lesson until he
understands it, and understanding it is thinking it for him-
self. "When he says at last of his problem, " I understand
it," he says, "That is my own thought." He confesses
that it would be a possibility for him to have written the
geometry.

It should be our serious business to become conscious

RECIPROCITY. 35

of our own thoughts ; to stand in the great intellectual marts
of life, aware that we have a right there, that all its treas-
ures are free to us by reason of stock-ownership.

We can do no better work than to stimulate the utterance
of thought. Mrs. Browning's conversation, it is said, was
pre-eminently tete-a-tete. She was a most conscientious and
magnetic listener. She compelled reciprocity of thought.
Madame de Stael was great in talking, but George Eliot
was greater in making other people talk. I am con-
vinced that people think enough ; it is the utterance
of thought that is needed. If the habit of brave attempt
at this utterance could be formed, and, despite all criti-
cism, be persevered in, how much more should we give to
each other ! What a world of enjoyment and improvement
would spring up ! How Athenian would Yankee life be-
come ! A Socrates at every doorway, an Aspasia— without
Aspasia's reproach — at every tea-urn, full of discourse that
would exclude the weary pettiness of thoughtless talk. Do
this for your neighbors, and you will be to them Ferdinands
and Isabellas, making of them the discoverers of more than
a continent, for they will discover themselves ; and you will
pay to them the debt you owe to those who have done the
same for you. But do not conceive yourself an original
person. It is a snare and a delusion.

in.

It is not in the superficial reciprocities of social life,
in the realm of manners, in the exchange of courtesies and
forms — not in the commerce of intellectual life, in the

36 GEORGE ELIOT'S, POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

interchange of thought, that the law of reciprocity is most
influential. It is in the affections that we make our best
and worst bargains, our most saving and most ruinous
exchanges.

In the fresh young years of our lives there is a fa-
cility of feeling, a readiness of devotion, a reckless expendi-
ture of faith and love. We who have forever passed be-
yond those years of glorious prodigality may well expend a
sigh upon their loss, and deem the calculating wisdom of our
later lives a dubious exchange. Oh, those days of opulent
bankruptcy, when we were rich in outlawed debts of friend-
ship— those wealthy insolvencies, when we owed everybody,
and everybody owed us, love, and faith, and loyalty ! How
quickly did our broken banks begin again their reckless
discount ! How promptly were our foreclosed mortgages
of heart re-leased ! . . .

Are you suffering, and do you attribute your suffering
to unreciprocated affection? Your diagnosis is wrong.
You are the victim again of a delusion. Less possible than
absolute independence, than original thought, is unrecipro-
cated affection. I do not undertake to convince you of this
truth. I am content to state it, and leave its demonstration
to the long run. I have unbounded faith in the long run.
Sydney Smith said that in order to preserve contentment
we must take short views of life. I think in order to pre-
serve contentment we must take long views, very long
ones. Your affection was not unrequited. Something
came back for it, if it was genuine, and something that was
quid pro quo. I never condole with the person of " blighted
affections," because I know that to true affection no blight is

RECIPROCITY. 37

possible. Its argosies are out at sea ; they have not made
their desired haven, but they will cruise around and come
back with a Golden Fleece.

A flirt is the most harmless person in the world. A
genuine flirtation is the fairest bargain possible — nothing
for nothing, nihil ex nihllo. The battle is like that be-
tween Milton's Michael and Satan — if one gets hurt, he re-
covers immediately — for flirts are ethereal creatures ; you
can walk through them and not know there is anything
there ; like those Miltonic spirits, they

" . . . can in all their liquid texture mortal wound
Receive no more than can the fluid air."

It is all a matter of tenuous reciprocity.

Shall we speak of our bargains in love and friendship ?
Shall we venture to argue the question of reciprocity be-
tween us and our friends ? Ah, how little patience we
should have in the attempt ! How well we are aware of the
generous barter ; how certain we are that we are the gain-
ers ; how assured that in every true friend we have the best
of the bargain !

There is, indeed, no room for argument here. Love
balances all accounts. In place of argument the story of
Richard, lion-hearted, comes to me ; of Richard languish-
ing a captive, hidden from sight and sound of any comrade
in an enemy's land ; of Blondel, standing finally, after long
and vain search, beneath that prison-window, and sending
up to it, by way of experiment, one couplet from a song
he and his royal friend had composed and sung together.
Instantly the next verse comes floating from behind the

38 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

prison grating down to Blondel, and Richard is discovered
and regained.

Such is the reciprocity of hearts, so souls wander in
search of each other, so many a royal heart languishes in
exile, till beneath its prison-bars love stands and sings its
own familiar and enchanting song !

But now comes the practical consideration of our subject
in the questions which are its logical outcome. What is
our personal status in the market, what the ethics that regu-
late our reciprocal transactions ? Are we making good bar-
gains ? Are we honest in deal? Are we getting rich or
poor ? How is it in the department of manners ? Man-
ners are not character, but they are the dress of character.
Character does not at once show for itself ; manners show
for it. How have we clothed our character ? Does its
dress do it justice ? Does it fitly present it to the eye ? If
not, then we are unfair in deal with a double dishonesty —
injustice to ourselves and injustice to others. Others in-
vest in what they believe to be ourselves, according as our
manners present us to them ; and whether they are deceived
in their investment or not is our responsibility in the dress
we give our characters. Our manners may cheat .other peo-
ple to our advantage or our disadvantage. They should yield
us a good income. Manners are of the surface and of
the moment. They do not have to do with the depths and
the long run ; yet it is by the surface that we enter the
depths, and the moments make the long run.

For all that others, our teachers, our preachers, our authors,
have painfully forged out into shapely gold for our enrich-
ment, what are we returning ? What is our thought within
us, what is it without ? When a high thought comes, do

RECIPROCITY. 39

we fling it abroad with liberal soul, or do \ve fold it away
in a napkin that becomes its grave-cloth ? If we do this
latter, then we are dishonest in deal, for we owe that thought
to the world. A great deal of this interment of our best
thought-life is justified to ourselves by the plea that such
thoughts are too sacred for utterance : a wretched sophistry,
a miserable excuse for what is really our fear of criticism,
our shamefaced ness of spiritual life. There are some peo-
ple who seem to be afraid of nothing so much as that they
will cast their pearls before swine. I have observed that
these people are not apt to be the best judges of either
pearls or pork.

Ah me ! what does our tasteless babble need so much as
the savor of high thought ? What do we need so much to
see as that which is sacred ? "Who of us cannot recall the
magic transmutation that took place when, some time in
the midst of idle talk, a brave soul threw down a golden
thought amid all the clattering rubbish — some gleam from
the life of the spirit, some sacred jewel of inner life ? How-
it hushed the chatter ! How grateful, if rebuked, we felt !
How encouraged ourselves to utter that which we had not
dared to speak when all utterance was so different from it !
How much more this brave spirituality of our friend has
helped us than any words that came to us from priest or
from poet, from pulpit or from book ! We can do no
braver or better thing than to bring our best thoughts to the
every- day market. They will yield us usurious interest.

How is it in our friendships ? Have we given faith for
faith, loyalty for loyalty, truth for truth ? Have our hearts
sought out the needy ? Have we cast our bread upon the
waters ? If ye love them that love you, what reward have

40 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

ye ? do not even the publicans the same ? Have we risen
above the plane of the publicans ?

These are among the most weighty questions we can ask
ourselves. But we can answer them only in part, for the
greater proportion of that which we carry, or, rather, which
goes with us to the world of social, intellectual, emotional,
and spiritual life, is unconscious. The greater part of that
which comes to us is unconscious. It makes part of us, but
we do not detect ourselves in receiving it. Our most im-
portant bargains never announce themselves. We have no
scales by which to measure these commodities of brain, and
heart, and spirit. We cannot apply the mathematics of the
money market here. We have no science for this book-
keeping that can compass all its complexity of exchanges,
follow the winding course of this commerce as it makes its
indirect returns, detect the subtle equities of this ceaseless,
silent reciprocity !

But, for all our inability, the books are kept. When the
long run has run out we shall confront exact balances, quid
pro quo, to the uttermost farthing.

I suppose that if you and I could know just what and all
were the elements of reciprocity between us, and all who
deal with us — just what was being exchanged between us,
what were our bargains, and who the parties to them, we
should be amazed, perhaps appalled. Well may we ask
with eagerness how the market is to-day ; how it goes on
'Change. For everything is at stake here ; our very all is
invested. It is orilj the golden rule, " Do unto others as ye
would that they should do unto you," which opens to us
the secret of fair deal, of good bargains, of wealth incalcu-
lable ! I congratulate you, whoever you be, if you can

RECIPROCITY. 41

square the conscious and yet more the unconscious transac-
tions in the barter of jour mental and spiritual life by the
measurements of this rule. This is the chief thing, the rule
within us. Goethe said, "It is the spirit in which we act
which is the great thing." It is the spirit in which we
traffic which is the great thing. It is, indeed, all.

We may well be thrilled when we remember how constant
and how instant is the tide of reciprocity 'twixt one and
all, 'twixt brain, and heart, and spirit of all who live, so that
not one can say, " 1 am alone ; I am independent ; I am
nothing to any one who lives, not one is anything to me."
We may well exult when we realize the dignity it puts upon
each one of us as members of this great human society ; the
importance with which it clothes us, the responsibility with
which it endows us, the riches to which it makes us heir 1

ALTRUISTIC FAITH.

ALTRUISTIC FAITH.

CADIJAH ! What image does the name evoke ? The
image, I venture, if any, of a very distinct and magnificent
face — of eyes dark yet glowing, like a midnight full of stars,
of flowing, silky beard, of turban folded over prophetic
locks — the face, not at all of Cadijah, but of Mahomet.
There is no biography of Cadijah, and no portrait. All
that we certainly know of her is that she was Mahomet's
first wife, a noble and wealthy widow, whom he wedded
when he was twenty-five and she much older, and to whom
he was singly devoted and faithful up to the time of her
death.

How, then, may this woman, standing in the darkness
which gathers around the vestibule of the Middle Ages,
offer from her poverty of resource anything worth, our
while to consider, we

" The heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time " ?

Years after the death of Cadijah, when Ayesha, the
beautiful girl, the pet child- wife of Mahomet's old age,
arrogant with the arrogance of a beauty and a favorite,
attempted to rally her now illustrious and powerful husband
upon his loyal love for his first wife, and said to him,
" Was she not old ? and has not God given you a better
in her place ?" Mahomet replied, with an effusion of lion-

46 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

est gratitude, " No, by Allali ! there can never be a better.
She believed in me when men despised me."

"She believed in me!" From Mahomet's own lips we
have our question answered. Cadijah offers to us a
splendid and immortal example of the effectual, fervent
faith of one soul in another '. And this it is of which I
have to speak. Not of the Mahomets, except by implica-
tion, but of Cadijah, whose faith has wrought out Ma-
homet, since ever the world began — whose faith must
still evolve him so long as the world lasts and Mahomets
survive.

Faith is a Trinity. It is one — faith in God ; and it is
three — faith in God, faith in self, and faith in human-
ity. Faith in God is the unit, the integral designation
of this Trinity, for it includes by logical necessity both
the other faiths. Whether men admit it or not, faith
in ourselves and faith in our brother and sister human-
ity follow from our faith in God, and if that faith be
allowed its full growth, will each win their rightful rank.
But because our faith in God is so rarely allowed its full
growth, these other faiths — faith in ourselves and faith
in each other— do not come into full view and win due
recognition.

We repeat our creed, " 1 believe in God, the. Father,"
but we do not always realize that this creed includes, " I
believe in myself," and " I believe in other people." Yet
this threefold faith should be taught. A true belief in
God is threesided, and the glory of the God-side was never
meant to obscure the brightness of the other two sides, but
rather to render them conspicuous.

It is of the most neglected of these minor faiths that I

ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 47

wish to speak — the altruistic faith, or faith in other than
self.

By the term, abstract altruistic faith, I mean to imply
that general attitude of mind which is hopeful arid expect-
ant of humanity ; a faith in human nature's intrinsic worth
and capability ; a faith which beholds man, as in Nebuchad-
nezzar's dream, sadly and mysteriously mixed of things
precious and things base ; but which beholds as clearly the
head of fine gold and the breast of silver as the feet of
iron and clay ; a faith that the race is steadily gravitating
toward a goal of final good rather than evil ; a faith that,
when the averages of the ages are accurately struck, the
leverage will be found to be constantly upward, not down-
ward ; a faith that humanity is persistently electing itself
to honor, glory, and immortality by a majority which se-
cures to the same party all future canvasses ; a faith which
wavers not an instant before the question, however cleverly
put by the pessimist, " Is life worth living?" but responds
with an immediate and hearty, " Yes, a thousand times
Yes! Life is infinitely worth living!" A faith which
looks into poorhouses, and idiot asylums, and penitentiaries
— ay, and into the darkness of great cities by night, and
still believes in humanity reclaimable, however marred or
fallen, and infinitely worth saving. A faith which con-
templates the catastrophe of moral obliquity and spiritual
suicide ; of the mole and the bat-life of thousands of us ;
of the leprous spawn of human beings that are constantly
thrown upon the shores of life only to contaminate and
curse, and yet which says, with Longfellow,

" I believe that in all ages
Every human heart is human ;

48 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

That in even savage bosoms

There are longings, yearnings, strivings,

For the good they comprehend not ;

That the feeble hands and helpless,

Groping blindly in the darkness,

Keach God's right hand in that darkness,

And are lifted up and strengthened."

But the abstract faith is subordinate — an effect rather
than a cause. For generalities and abstractions do not
demand our prolonged consideration. Oar lives are not
laid out in vast, vague prairies, but in definite domestic
door-yards, within which we are to exercise and develop
our faculties. Altruistic faith in the abstract is most valu-
able, but it is, at best, but a passive rather than an active
possession. We cannot touch humanity at large except as
we touch humanity in the individual. Altruistic faith must
exercise itself upon concretions, not abstractions, if it be a
real power for good. One may possess a whole Milky Way
of vague general belief in humanity, and yet it may be of
less avail to the benighted traveller than a single rushlight
put sympathetically into his hand. We must focus our
faith upon the individual in order to get or to give the good
of it.

This concrete altruistic faith does not require for its ex-
ercise that its possessor belong to the female sex. The con-
trary idea is, I fear, deeply rooted in the public mind.
There is a very general impression that it is in the nature
of things that woman should walk principally by faith, and
that this faith should be principally altruistic. I myself
confess to a lurking suspicion that it is oftener a woman
than a man who is a Cadijah. It may be easier for a woman
to believe in somebody else than for a man to do so. Men.

ALTRUISTIC FAITH.

as a rule, are very much occupied with believing
selves. Woman is confessedly altruistic, but not exclusively
so. Carlyle had his Cadijah in his wife ; George Eliot had
hers in her husband.

But this faith, though not inconsistent with the estate
of holy matrimony, is yet not dependent upon that estate.
I use the name Cadijah to represent the character of an
efficient believer in somebody else ; but Cadijah could have
exercised her faith in Mahomet to its full effect on his fort-
unes without having been his wife. The exercise of Mrs.
Carlyle' s faith in her husband had nothing to do with the
exercise of her hands and feet upon the Craigenputtock
kitchen-floor. Cadijah may or may not have a passionate
personal love for her Mahomet, but she will not be so " in
love" with him as to induce the blindness of that undesir-
able condition. Pascal said : " In order to know God we
must love Him ; in order to love man we must know him."
1 am not sure that all love for individual man depends upon
knowing him ; there is love and love, but the rational, last-
ing love must admit, at least, if not demand, for its persist-
ence, some real acquaintanceship. To all love that rightly
culminates in marriage there is, doubtless, an irrational
phase, a normal abnormality that may or may not outlast the
honeymoon, arid then gives place to something better. In
this period no Cadijah can flourish ; indeed, the conditions
of concrete altruistic faith do not demand the conditions of
courtship or of marriage. Cadijah-ism is not necessarily
connubiality.

Nor is this faith hero-worship. We all have our heroes
who are veritable heroes to us, frequently for no other rea-
son than because we cannot be valets to them. And that

50 GEORGE ELIOTV POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

is well and good. But the one to whom yon are Cadijah
will not be a hero to you. You will serve him, but you
will not worship him. Cadijah never imagines, as do the
worshippers, that her Mahomet can do or be anything he
may please, or she may please. She perceives that he can
do and be one thing, and possibly that this is the thing
which pleases him not. She does not discover him to be a
predestined prophet or a born poet because her love or am-
bition elect him to be such. It may be, rather, that her faith
discerns in him supreme capabilities for a dry-goods clerk or
a ranchman. No. Though my Cadijah love me as her own
soul, and have set her whole heart on me, she cannot, this
clear-eyed Cadijah of mine, persuade herself that 1 can
be what I cannot be. She can only perceive me to be
what 1 can be. Cadijah is a seer, but she is not a vision-
ary. She wields a diviner's rod, but not a wizard's wand.
The historical Cadijah was, I venture, greatly enamored of
her young and handsome lord. But I am not sure she
thought him a great prophet or a spotless priest. What
I am sure of is, that this shrewd, devoted woman perceived
him to be a born predestined leader, a man of destiny, one
to sway multitudes with the mighty magnetism of his per-
sonality ; a man to beckon and be followed ; a man to
speak and be believed ; a man to command and be obeyed.
She saw the oak in the acorn with this sixth sense of hers.
She believed in him when all men despised him, but she did
not give him hero-worship.

It is clear that to Mrs. Carlyle her husband was not a
hero. As an apostle of silence and several other things he
was a great joke to her. But as a man of ideas, great, gro-
tesque, forceful, propulsive, full of the vitality of immortal

ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 51

genius, worthy and destined to live in literature, as such she
yaw him when his fame was yet in embryo. And this faith
of hers in his power to do never flagged until it became
sight before all the world, a wisdom justified of her chil-
dren. And this is not hero-worship. It is a far finer and
usef uler thing.

To speak affirmatively, this quality of the Cadijahs I de-
fine as that faculty in my friend by which he discriminates in
me what I am good for — nay, wrhat I am best for. That one
who comes to me, resolute for me when I stand irresolute
for myself, at that point in my straight turnpike where by-
roads fork out from it — that one who comes to me while 1
waver in view of the old highway and cast lingering glances
at the new byways, and who, with hand uplifted and with
finger pointed straight before, says to me, with emphasis of
unalterable conviction, " This is your way ; this, no other,
the path which leads you to your goal !" this man, or this
woman, is my Cadijah. He may or may not have vehement
love for me, but if he has vehement faith in me, and gives
me the benefit of its momentum, he is my friend, and
" there can never be a .better," for he believes in me when
a worse than the despising of men has befallen me — the
despising of myself ! " Quand tout est perdu, Jest le
moment des grandes dmes," said Lacordaire. A grand soul
is Cadijah ; she comes to me when all is lost ! How com-
mon to us all is the experience of meeting one who seems
to have a peculiar insight into our character, so that we say,
"He divined me." How often do we hear it said, u He
seems to understand me better than any one else.'' " She
appreciates me more truly than any one ever has." This
quality of divination is the intellectual element of altru-

52 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

istic faith. It is not the whole of it, for another element
lies in the will and is essential ; but it is the extraordinary
element, and far from infrequent.

The one is gift, the other grace. The one prerogative,
the other duty. It is always true that the thing that ought
to be done is the thing that can be done. It is not always true
that the thing that can be done is the tiling that ought to be
done. But in the exercise of altruistic faith there is cer-
tainly and always an ought where there is a can, and a
can where there is an ought. When the intellect says, " I
can," the heart should say, I will.

Each of us can so believe in humanity in general as to
contribute to that pressure which constantly levers up the
race ; can surround ourselves with an atmosphere optimistic
rather than the contrary ; can believe in sorno one or more
individuals so as to be the determining factor in their careers,
as was Cadi jah in the career of Mahomet, as was Jane Welch
in the career of Carlyle.

I never knew a good man or a good woman who was not
practically an optimist. I have personally known several,
impersonally many, who were not nominally optimists, but
wholly the contrary ; they did not know themselves as such,
but other people did. It was simply a misunderstanding as
to the name. I have in mind a woman of great influence,
whose sphere circumscribes many important individuals, and
whose whole life is encouraging and helpful ; whose whole
burden of exhortation to each and all is, to make the best
of it, because there is a best to be made ; to try over and
over, because it is always worth while ; and why worth while,
except that success is possible, and if possible, certain to
the indomitable ? This woman has been a Cadijah to more

ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 53

than one individual ; has hindered suicide, and out of a
perverse profound of obliquity in one life brought obedient
order and uprightness by her simple conviction that it ought
to be so ; to another she has been a stimulus to faith in his
own genius and to continued effort, simply because of her
faith in that genius, her faith in the capacity for that effort ;
and yet the tortures of the Inquisition would not wring from
this woman a credo : to every assertion that the race is better
living than dead ; that it is, on the whole, constantly gaining
toward the goal ; that human nature progresses rather than
retrogrades, and that, after all, human life is, in a general
and particular sense, worth while — to all such statements she
but wistfully shakes her head, and wishes it were so. She
is living, and may die under the impression that she is a
pessimist. Yet this woman has more altruistic faith, in the
abstract even, than almost any one 1 know. In short, one
who has that faith in the concrete is sure to have it in the
abstract ; and the effect is that of optimism in the world.
If Byron had had sufficient altruistic faith in some one
(and that one not a beautiful woman !) to make that per-
son's life worth living, he would never have so lost all con-
science concerning his influence as to have written :

" Couut o'er the joys that thou hast seen,

Count o'er the hours from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'Twere something better not to be !"

The surest way to get the wider altruism is to exercise the
special altruism. ISo one whose faitli in another was such
as to determine the career of that other ever halted there ;
such an one must believe in the race.

And this brings me back to the core and pith of my mat-

54: GEORGE ELIOT5 S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

ter. I exhort you to the exercise of altruistic faith in the
concrete. I say to you, Believe in somebody — somebody in
particular. An abstract altruism is good ; but if it ripens
not into the concrete there is something- wrong. One of
my friends has a character in one of her plays who " does
nothing else but lie awake nights and rock days, thinkin'
how she can be doing good." Her altruism is too abstract.
That one who says truly :

' ' I live for those who love me,

For those who know me true,
For the heaven that smiles above me,
And the good that I can do,"

never fails to so specialize this altruism as to be the making
of more than one individual man. Do not concern yourself
first about the race ; do not expend much time or thought
on introspection as to whether you believe life to be worth
living. I venture to say that if the author of that remark-
able book, "Is Life Worth Living?" had occupied him-
self in making life worth living to one or more of his fellow-
men, not in the general way of well-wishing and money-
giving, but in the particular way of discovering to some
hopeless man the special aptitude in him, the painstaking
way of recognizing as good for something, and good for
something in particular, some individual or individuals who
felt themselves good for nothing — I venture to say that if
he had so occupied himself — so attitudinized his mind— he
would have found no time for the pessimistic studies and
analyses with which he treats the momentous question.

For -the question is momentous. In asking it we ask
every other question which concerns the race or the indi-
vidual. But it concerns the individual first, the race last.

ALTRUISTIC FAITH. .">.")

It may well affright — nay, appall us, as we look within
our lives for an answer, desperately desiring to find material
for an affirmative. Let this inward look be very brief, but
let it be very thorough. Let us descend into the depths of
all tlia£ inalienable experience which has gone into the mak-
ing of our lives. God pity us in that groping, unless here
and there glimmers a taper of altruism to light up the abyss
of selfishness ! Out of the blackness of this darkness we
shall emerge to objective realities forever color-blind to
any brightness for the race, or for self, unless we can bring
up hither that torch of faith in other than self.

We shall find life so worthless that we would not care for
its continuance unless we have made, are making, or shall
make somebody else's life worth living, which other life, ex-
cept for us, had not been, in the end, so worth while.

That last is, after all, the saving clause — " except for
KS /'' It fortifies us against disbelief in ourselves. We
must each feel that what we do another could not do ; else,
after all, our existence is not necessary, and, in the last
analysis, who cares to live an unnecessary life — a life that
could be dispensed with — and the result remain the same ?
No, the noble soul would choose rather not to be than
not to be somebody in particular. Herein consists that which
so much fascinates and so much misleads in the dogmas of
Buddhism. The Eastern mystic realizes that man's life, as
men live it, being filled with selfish passion, is not worth
living — cannot be in the nature of things. It is vain to try
to make it so. The individual will never subordinate sel-
fish passion to altruistic faith — passion will subtly work for
self, and surely undo any strivings of the faith for others —
it is time wasted to attempt to make the ego good for some-

56 GEOBGE ELIOT'S POETEY, AND OTHEE STUDIES.

thing ; it is good for nothing, good only to lose ! One can-
not be — was not meant to be (since he cannot be) — any-
body in particular ; therefore the summum bonum is to lose
the one in the all, which is Nirvana. He does not even
dwell upon the possibility of a nobler alternative. It is in-
conceivable that this full-blooded ego, living his intense in-
dividual life, can ever, save as the dupe of demon deceivers,
who pervert perception and destroy reflection, have a con-
scious thrill of exultation in his individual life, because he
knows that there has good come to the race which, except
for his individual life, would not have come. No, no ; the
only best is to lose the ego, the only bliss is the luxury of its
nullification.

The Eastern mystic does well on his plane. His choice
is noble since he has no more to choose from ; he admits no
better than his best. But his plane is below the highest ;
he dwells upon the stair, and forever just misses the land-
ing !

Many more than the Eastern mystic move on this plane,
dwell on this stair, and rniss the landing. But our West-
ern Buddhist cannot be so joyous in his pessimism, because
he cannot be so selfish. . He belongs to the breeze-impelled,
forward-moving race of the restless, pushing genius, the
genius which admits no condition good enough to be let
alone. This "Western thinker knows that the intensest in-
dividual life is the highest duty of the man created in
God's image ; that the supremest living is to fully bring
out that image of the Father in the child, in the farthest de-
velopment and finest finish of that child, separate and distinct
from all other individuals of the human family ; and he
feels the pain of this responsibility, which no one can lift

ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 57

from him — this responsibility of the development and finish
of this ego • that ego whom he can never hide from final
Omnipotent scrutiny and sentence. And he knows, because
of his fatal certainty here, that he cannot innocently give
the Eastern mystic his company. He knows that the
Eastern mystic's highest would be his very lowest. He
knows his life can be worth living, that therefore he can
never be blameless in losing it. He knows that whatever it
may consciously be to the Brahmin, to him it must con-
sciously be the most hideous and gigantic selfishness to put
all things behind him, except the extinction of self ; to sit
cross-legged under a palm-tree extinguishing the ego— i.e.,
throwing off all responsibilities to others, in order to attain
the eternal irresponsibility.

No ; we of the West writhe and wince under the truth ;
we would willingly shirk it, but we cannot. Each of us
is born to be somebody in particular to himself or herself,
and to others. This is the only solution of our being at
all ; and if it does not answer the question, Is life worth
living ? then there is no answer.

Let us enlarge and ennoble our capacity of altruistic
faith — the capacity to be, in some life or lives, a Cadijah.
There are those waiting for us to be this to them — for
us, for you, for me, not another. There are those waiting
for our recognition before men shall recognize them — nay,
before they shall recognize themselves. From our lips their
rightful name must fall, if it ever be heard.

No gift can pass between human creatures so divine as
this gift of recognition, for it touches upon the creative.
There is a sense in which it is true of some things that
saying so makes it so! There are capabilities in each of

58 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

us of which we are only half aware — capabilities that we
Uever dare call bj name, of which we need another's recog-
nition before we fully admit their existence.

Of the most noble is this most true. Those in whom is
most to recognize have most need of recognition. But not
one lives who has not need of it. It may be your high
privilege to recognize thus some artist, poet, painter. It may
be yours to call such an one by his own true name before he
can pronounce it for himself ; to pour baptismal oil upon him
before the great ones have sent his fame forth and the
spaniel herd that lick the footsteps of the leaders have
caught it up. It may be yours to be Cadijah to a Mahomet,
Jane Welch to a Carlyle, George Henry Lewes to a Marian
Evans. If so, you are to be congratulated ; you may right-
fully exult and say to the applauding, ratifying world, " I
told you so !" It is your rneed, your merit, your enduring
fame. But it is not probable that to you and me, my
friend, this lot, this meed, this merit, this enduring fame
will fall. Not the less by jot or tittle are you and I to
exercise the altruistic faith, and to exercise it concretely.
The Mahomets, the Carlyles, the George Eliots, need
their Cadijahs, but not so much, I would say — if com-
parison could be admitted here — as do the people with
whom we come in contact every day, in common ways and
common places. The perceptions of a Cadijah are not more
needed to detect genius than to detect aptitude. It is
mournful — nay, more, it is maddening — to observe how
many people are misplaced in the highways and byways of
life. Yet surely it is not more maddening to see a Charles
Lamb blundering over accounts at a clerk's desk than to
see Mr. John Smith, who should be there, writing essays

ALTRUISTIC FAITH. 59

in an attic. It is as truly the function of a Cadijah to say,
You are not^ as to say, You are.

To-day I met a woman who has discovered an aptitude
for exquisite dress-making in a drudging shop-girl. The
shop-girl has been simply a " hand," and this clever and
good woman proposes to put this discovery of hers behind
a brown-stone front, and fling out for her her true name in
the magic Mile, and Modes, which transform a sempstress
into an artist. This woman does precisely the thing for the
shop-girl which Cadijah did for Mahomet : she believes in
her when other people do not. It is as legitimate an exer-
cise of concrete altruistic faith to elect John Smith out
of the essayist's attic into the counting-room as to take
Charles Lamb out of the counting-room to Elia's library.

The best I can wish my readers is the blessing of a Cadi-
jah in their lives. Much pitiful need and much painful
want must mingle its bitter with the sweet of our experi-
ence before the full tale of our pilgrimage be told. Some
of us, out of the weary suffering or distracting impotence of
invalidism, will desperately crave the boon of health, and
deem all else a glad exchange for it ; some of us, from the
cramping limitations of poverty, will long sadly for the
wealth that stands to us for opportunity and development ;
and some of us, with health and wealth, will sicken with
the loneliness that comes for the loss or lack of love, the
passionate heart- craving which would gladly barter health
and wealth in exchange for

"... the touch of a vanished hand
And the sound of a voice that is still."

Some one or all of these cravings will be ours. But I deem

60 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

it true that deeper than the craving for health, or wealth,
or love, is the craving for recognition, the deep desire to be
known for what we truly are ; to hear from some human iips
our rightful name — poet, preacher, painter, clerk, dress-
maker— whatever, by testimony of the conscious power
within us, we feel ourselves most fit for ; to hear this
name, that at last we may answer to it, and find and keep
our undisputed place. This desire, this need, is, I think,
the one beyond all others. If you miss health, miss wealth,
lose or lack love, may you not miss the gift from another
of divining faith in you ; this faith which is, as is all
faith, the gift of God. The name of every Cadijah is also
Theodora.

HISTOEY.

HISTOEY.
I.

HISTORY is not an exact science. It cannot be reduced to
formulas and equations and chronological tables. Yet this is
the notion which many of us hold concerning it, and when
we have learned lists of events and names, and are glib
in chronology, we feel that we have studied history. Yet
we have not studied history one whit more than the child,
who has mastered the multiplication table, has studied
music. Mathematics has to do with music, but mathe-
matics is not music. Chronicle and chronology have to
do with history, but they are not history. We must learn
of the event ; it is indispensable, but it is not the whole.
We must take the event as a starting-point, and travel
from it to the man and men behind it. We must obtain
its accessories of time, and place, and circumstance ; we
must clothe the deed with the thought of which it is sim-
ply the skeleton ; we must invest the career with the
character, which is its spiritual body, without which it
has no significance — in short, we must make of history
simply what it is— a drama in which man, in multitudinous
men, is the actor, whose time is all time, whose place is the
past.

The past ! What is the pas^ ? Is it naught to us but a
cemetery wherein lie the perished men and women of the

64: GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY AND OTHEK STUDIES.

centuries behind ? ^ay, far otherwise is the truth. There
is a mediator between us and the past whose one hand we
must hold as we tread these silent corridors ; that common
spirit of humanity, living, potential, electric, which hovers
amid the tablets and vitalizes all the dust.

It is this truth which we must possess, or, rather, of
which we must be possessed, when we approach the realm
of history. We must be saturated with a sense of kinship.
A proper embarkation upon the sea of times past is a
veritable voyage of discovery, and we should have in it the
feelings which a fortune-hunter has who turns yellow parch-
ments in search of proof of his relationship to the rich
man who has died. For the past is simply humanity ; it is
thou and I, a vast congregation of thous and FS : forest
succeeding forest, sprout, sapling, tree, all the same multi •
form ego over and over to the end of time. Herein is the
significance of the saying that history repeats itself. It
does repeat itself, because it repeats its factors — the men
and women who compose it. These factors are everybody.
Adam stands at one end of the row, you and I at the other ;
and, as in the children's game, we must " all take hold of
hands." The spirit of a common humanity stands in the
centre and gently re-unites wherever the ring is broken.
Woe to us if we break rank. We are no longer in the
game.

It is, therefore, this sympathy with the past which can
unlock the inner halls of history and reveal to us its gran-
deur. Destitute of this, we are ever outside. We can
get date, and name, and event, but we can never get
at the company ; these things are but the furniture of the
feast j by them we make no acg naintanoe with the guests.

HISTORY. 65

It is as if one walked in the forest with eyes upon
the ground, picking up the fallen leaves of last year's
sin inner. Such an one has in his possession but the her-
barium of the past. He has walked in the forest and
picked up the fallen leaves of date, and event, and career,
and laid them away in the pages of his memory. This
is the chronicler, and this is much. It is very good to
have a herbarium. Far grander is it, I think, to walk in
the forest with eyes to the green foliage overhead, cog-
nizant of the life which animates all ; penetrated with its
bounty as it thrills the silences and winds up the arteries of
the huge veterans of the woods ; feeling the mould be-
neath trembling with the common life-blood. This is
the historian. He, too, has a herbarium, but to his herba-
rium he carries a chemistry which restores to life each
fallen leaf and hangs it in its proper place, juicy, verdant
with perennial resurrection. He who has but the events
of history has simply apprehension — knowledge, not that
sympathetic comprehension which is wisdom. It is our
privilege and our duty to carry this sympathy with us as we
chronicle the event, and by its chemistry to win from the
barren event the fruitful, vital idea of which it is but the
chrysalis, to penetrate the integument career, and in its
shining folds to find the character — the man. Thus do we
make true acquaintance with those notable personages who
shine down from the firmament of the times that have gone
over us, as luminous nuclei toward which all eyes are
drawn, raying inimitably their piercing light to the succeed-
ing generations. Thus do we enter into the past and begin
the study of history. Carlyle says : " Universal history,
the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is,

66 GEOKGE ELIOT'S" POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

at bottom, the history of the great men who have worked
here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones ;
the modellers, patterns, and, in a wide sense, creators of
whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or
attain ; all things that we see standing accomplished in the
world are properly the outer material result, the practical
realization and embodiment of thoughts that dwelt in the
great men sent into the world ; the soul of the world's his-
tory, it may justly be considered, was the history of
these."

Away, then, with that dwarfing notion of history which
makes it mere record of events, and give its place to this
true notion which makes it the drama of humanity. Let us
cease to look in its pages for date and event ; let us com-
mence to look therein for the formative ideas of the ages,
and for the holders of these ideas, the man behind the
thought, the makers of history. Let us study career as
means only to the end — character. Let us realize that his-
tory is the shrine of humanity, humanity essential in its
essence in past, present, future, wherein is stored the ego —
the thou and the I.

We have now lost a wrong and acquired a right notion of
the true character of history — a right notion which raises it
to the level of psychology — a discourse concerning the soul
of man ; and this is a truth, but not the whole truth. An-
other notion must be added which shall raise it to the alti-
tude of a theology — a discourse concerning God, for this it
surely is.

" The uncle vout astronomer is rnad."

He who perceives, as did Auguste Comte, that " the
heavens declare no other glory than that of Hipparchus, of

HISTORY. 67

Kepler, of Newton, and of all those who aided in establish-
ing their linvs ' ' —he who gazes on the midnight heavens,
who beholds the order of their march with its marvel and
its mystery, and who interprets not their hieroglyph upon
the scrolls of space into the plain handwriting of divinity
• — who, in the music of the spheres, discerns not that the
theme of this celestial opera, in infinite refrain, is God,
GOD, GOD ! he, indeed, is mad !

Less sane is he who reads the page of history, yet finds
not between all lines the same great word ; who, seeing on
the walls of all human institutions the naming out of mene
here, and tekel there, yet sees not the writer behind these
walls ; who perceives how constant and instant is the
conjunction in world-history of the hour and the man, yet
sees not the unsleeping Watcher, who at the hour produces
the man : this indeed is dulness of vision, dimness of eye,
hardness of heart ! To one who acknowledges the man
Christ to be the one top-flower of time, the perfect bloom
of His life to be the final development of all that good
toward which the heart of man in all ages has yearned — all
history is sacred, and becomes, as it did to St. Augustine,
but the history of the city of God, or to Jonathan Edwards,
a " history of redemption," and all the past is but a pano-
rama of Providence. Let a man believe in God, and he
will find Him. in history. I do not say he will find Calvin-
ism there, as did Edwards, or any other ism. That he
must first import into it before he can export it from it.
To the agnostic, doubtless, history is but one long "Wal-
purgis night of the past, from beginning to end ; he sees
but a witch dance round a caldron from which no constant
form emerges, but ever and anon, within its boil and

68 GEORGE ELIOT1 S" POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

bubble, arises to evanescent view a momentary seeming,
which he christens destiny, or chance, or the unknowable.
But let the believer in God, the Father, gaze herein, and he
will see, as in the laboratory of some chemist, that all the
past is but the crucible of God ; he will perceive the creat-
ure God has made in successive transmutations, passed and
repassed in the fires of the ages ; and he will discern the
divine Alchemist bending over His creation with constant
patience and with perfect plan. Such an one will come
away from the pages of history rhythmic with the provi-
dence of God, with strengthened faith in both the Planner
and the plan ; he will see how, although

" The old order changeth and yieldeth place to new,"

yet

" God fulfils Himself in many ways."

Those who, with Longfellow,

"... Believe that in all ages
Every human heart is human,"

will find everywhere in history the conjunction of the
divine with this human ; will see how

" In even savage bosoms

There are longings, yearnings, striving
For the good they comprehend not ;
That the feeble hands and helpless,
Groping blindly in the darkness,
Clasp God's right hand in that darkness,
And are lifted up and strengthened."

HISTORY. 69

II.

How shall we study history ?

In order to so study history that we shall get from it the
most that can be gotten, I think three qualities are indis-
pensable : conscience ; imagination ; industry.

Workmen and master ! Industry is the hand which,
with unflagging patience, chips from those conglomerates
called histories the petrified fact. Imagination is the re-
creative breath which, falling close and ardent upon this
fossil fact, restores to it life, and gathers back from out the
past its whole environment ; and conscience is the righteous
regulator and critic of the work of both.

Industry is essential. He who would penetrate into the
complex facts of history in order that he may, in turn, be
penetrated with the indivisible and universal truth of his-
tory, must not flinch before work. Morning by morning
must he go forth to his toil; and if in the evening he
bring home little spoil, yet must he not complain. Much
of his day must be spent in the rejection of the spurious
ores which fall beneath his hammer, for not until he
has laboriously excavated them, holding them off apart
for careful scrutiny and comparison with the real, will he
detect their falsity. Count, for instance, if you can, the
counterfeit Napoleon Bonapartes you have rung upon the
counter under the eye of conscience, before the true one,
or its approximation, could be passed. Much of his day
must be spent in divesting the true ore of alien sub-
stances. Tradition, myth, prejudice, so involve themselves
with facts in history, that only patientest industry can set

70 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

the facts clear. "What an accumulation must first be
stripped away from the story of Charlemagne, for in-
stance, before the even approximately true historic figure
can be seen ! Yet let not the industrious workman dream
that his time so spent is wasted. It is his apprenticeship,
and must be served. Facts of history must be gathered
from history books, and from historic places, from every-
where, for the psychologist finds everywhere a harvest ;
but industry alone is the harvester. Whether Lord JVla-
caulay had genius or not may be questioned ; but that he
had a thing as rare — industry — cannot be questioned. No
journey was so long or difficult but he would take it, so he
might the better satisfy himself concerning a fact of his-
tory. He must go to the spot and gather testimony there.
Carlyle never made his "French Revolution," instinct
with genius as it is, except by stupendous and indefatigable
industry. He was fifteen years writing his " Frederick
the Great." Hallam's i( Middle Ages" has not a particle
of the magnetism of genius in it, but will nevertheless
stand to all time as a pre-eminently valuable historical
work. Facts, and the getting of them — "hoc opus, Me
labor est /"

!Next comes imagination. Given the facts, and a properly
trained imagination can evolve from them the truth. But
the facts must be given. Imagination can do much, but
she must have something to do with. She cannot create,

I use the word imagination in what I conceive to be its
literal sense — image-making. It is a portrait painter by
profession — nothing less, nothing more. And it paints
fact-pictures and fancy- pictures. The first is its sphere in
history ; both are its sphere in poetry.

HISTORY. 71

"When, as in Carlyle's " Cromwell," it assembles together
upon the foreground men and women who lived in the
past, objective realities, veritable flesh and blood humanity ;
when it puts acts and facts from the lives of these upon its
canvas, with actor, and time, and place, and scene, so that
we see the past as present, then it deals with the facts of
history, and the painter, however much a poet he may be,
lias made a history. When, as in "Paradise Lost," with
basis of fact and knowledge it makes the conceptions of the
brain objective realities, and depicts upon its canvas a man
who was never flesh and blood, a woman, alas ! never flesh
and blood, angels and devils, Satan and God, times, places,
scenes — all the fabric of a vision, why, then, imagination
deals with purely mental conceptions, and the painter,
however much a historian, has made poetry — -or verse.

Now, both these are legitimate uses of the imagination,
with this difference,, that while the maker of poetry may
have his choice of material, facts to which he may add
fancy ad libitum, or fancy pur ei simple, the historian
must confine the exercise of his imagination most rigorously
to the bare facts of history. And here he has need of his
stern task-master, conscience. Given a fact in history, then
let imagination take this fact back to its time and place,
and there drape it with circumstance, and condition, and
atmosphere — in short, let it fly, with this captured fact,
back all the years that lie between to where, the deed was
doing, the thought thinking, so that the personage whom
thought and deed preserve can be confronted in living pres-
ence ; a faculty this which treads closest of all upon the
God-like, since it can say to the dead, Live again!

This faculty is given us for use, and its use in the study

72 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

of history is to dramatize the past. But skill in its use is
not given ; that must be gained. It is something to be
learned, practised, perfected. It is, in brief, an art.

Industry is a simple thing. It is simply a sticking to, a
keeping on. There is no art about that. No one can
plead inability here. To keep on doing a thing you must
just keep on doing it. That is industry. But how prop-
erly to exercise the imagination that it may acquire power
to give you all the aid and just the aid you need in the
acquisition of history, that is not a simple thing. And
here we may learn from the masters.

Macaulay, with indefatigable industry, gave to his im-
agination all the material he could collect from books
and people ; and when his mind was so saturated with
the facts of his subject that he could no longer hold
them, he went to the place where the hero of his histo-
ries lived, or where the deed was done, and there gave
himself up to imagining the thing. And that is the way
he made his masterpieces historical paintings. What one
of our histories teaches us so much truth concerning that
remarkable personage, Julius Caesar, as does the tragedy of
Shakespeare ? And how was this great work made except
by this same saturation of imagination ? The poet Campbell
says of this : " He" (the author of " Julius Caesar ") " cast
his eyes, both in their quiet and in their kindled inspiration"
(i.e., the eye, I take it, of industry and the eye of imagina-
tion), " both, as poet and as philosopher, upon the page of
classic history ; he discriminated its characters with the
light of philosophy, and he irradiated truth, without en-
croaching on its solid shapes, with the hues of fancy. What
is Brutus but the veritable Brutus of Plutarch . . un-

HISTORY. Y3

altered but hallowed to the imagination ? What else is
Portia ?"

Grace Greenwood writes from Belgium : " . . . An old
guide, who at the time of the battle of Waterloo was sev-
enteen years old, told us that he first conducted Victor Hugo
over the field. He said that the novelist stayed at a farm-
house in this neighborhood for two months, and walked
again and again over the ground of his marvellously vivid
scenes. That is the way an artist works !"

Yes, we say, "the way an artist works." The way a
Macanlay and a Hugo work. But we are not artists, not
Macaulaya and Hugos, and we cannot work their way.

Yet here I think we make a great mistake. We do a
great deal 'of shirking in this life on the ground of not
being geniuses. The truth is, there is an immense amount
of humbug lurking in the folds of these specious theories
about genius. The exact quantum of genius in the world
is not ascertained any more than its exact definition. But
let a man or a woman go to work at a thing, and the genius
will take care of itself. It is not our business to look at
the masters in the light of geniuses, but only in the light of
workers. It is their duty to teach us, and ours to learn,
the best methods of work. Though we may never write
historical drama, or never paint with words a Waterloo, we
may go to work as did Macaulay and Hugo, and get what
history we do get as they got theirs. We may, with
patient and unflagging industry, accumulate our facts ; we
may live among them until our thought is saturated with
them, and then, pushing aside other things, call in Imagina-
tion and let her dramatize them to our vision. She will
stir them into vivid life, and the skeletons of the past will

J: GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

assume face, voice, time, and place, and become men and
women in the present.

" Too much trouble !" do we say ?

Well, it is a good deal of trouble, I own, and chacun a
son gout. I, for my part, would rather so realize one total
character of history — as Queen Elizabeth — setting that
mighty personage in dramatic action upon my mind's arena,
by means of patient accumulation of the facts of her life,
from babyhood to queenhood, studying her speeches, her
manners, her tastes, 'her costumes, her associates, her
favorites, her whole environment, until from the com-
plete career the unit character was evolved, than to have all
the histories of the realm of England, in complete chrono-
logical detail, at my tongue's end. I consider that far more
would come to me in the former than in the latter case.
An acorn in the mind is worth more than an oak forest at
the end of the tongue. Taine says : " Genuine history is
brought into existence only when the historian begins to
unravel across the lapse of time the living man, toiling,
impassioned, intrenched in his customs, with his voice and
features, his gestures and his dress, distinct and complete
as he from whom we. have just parted in the street. ' ' And
again : " I would give fifty volumes of charters and a hun-
dred volumes of State papers for the memoirs of Cellini,
the Epistles of St. Paul, the table-talk of Luther, or the
comedies of Aristophanes."

Industry and Imagination ! Of these we have spoken,
showing feebly how indispensable are both ; how easy the
use of the former, how easy the misuse of the latter ; how
both may be joined so that they shall together be made the
engine of vast results. And in doing so we have left easy

HISTORY. 75

of inference all that need be said concerning Conscience, the
vigorous task-master which we placed over the two work-
men.

For who will persevere in industry unless Conscience
stands "by with uplifted lash ? One will work so long as
enthusiasm keeps the purpose fresh, the motive bright.
But when results are meagre and disappointments many —
when the thing you hoped to hold as concrete fact glides
off at last into a glittering generality, that most dangerous
fiction— when the half truth in histories is so much mixed
with the half lie, " ever the worst of lies" — when the
authors of histories so differ that all must be examined to
make any valuable — when philology is so loose and state-
ment so careless — when event is so far in the past that
much clutch upon it seems almost hopeless, why, then,
enthusiasm wilts away, and if conscience be not near to
keep us to our task, we will not be kept.

And if conscience be needful to keep industry up, it is
still more so to keep imagination down. At this we have
already hinted. It is a difficult thing to tell a story just
as it happened, and yet make the story good. To be
dramatic and -at the same time accurate is. a rare combina-
tion. If the one is gift, the other is grace.

And here we come upon a great rock casting a portentous
shadow. I know of but one besetment so easy in the study
of history as that of credulity ; it is that of incredulity. If
the one be Charybdis, the other is Scylla. Everywhere as
we read we repeat the question we used to put so anxiously
to the story-teller of our childhood, " Is this a true story ?"
We read each one's account in order to try to find the fact,
and the comment on all things, which Dickens makes his

76 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

dying miner utter to the woman lie loved in vain, comes
back, " It's aw' a muddle, Rachel ! It's aw' a muddle !"
When the friends of Horace Wai pole sought to entertain
him on his death-bed by offering to read to him from
histories, he would reply, " Yes, bring me my liar !"
Incredulity besets us everywhere in our reading, and with
it comes the paralyzing " cui lono?" And it is a chance
if our conscience be sufficient for either industry or imag-
ination here.

The passage is indeed narrow, with Charybdis luring on
one side, and Scylla frowning on the other ; yet there is a
way out. Our psychology must save us here. The ego
must steer us through. Do 1 wish to make acquaintance
with Napoleon Bonaparte, the " man of destiny," I must
accept first the acquaintanceship of all who have written of
him, from a Thiers to a Madame de Eemusat. Each will
have a man of his own, made up of Bonaparte and ego.
Bonaparte and Thiers make Thiers' ; Bonaparte and de
Remusat make de Remusat's. 1 must make mine of Bona-
parte— i.e., all their Bonapartes — and myself. It will take
along time; after all the ingredients are thrown into the
caldron, from " poisoned toad" to "Tartar's lip," there
must be a deal of stirring and fire-poking before the image
will emerge ; but finally come it will, my Bonaparte, my
veritable little corporal, and in him I will believe, though an
archbishop in sacerdotal robes tells me there never lived a
Bonaparte. Nowhere more than in the study of history is it
needful to "put yourself in his place" — i.e., to carry to the
making of an image of the person whose form you seek to
confront, those general and common ingredients which go
to make up each man. When you have carried to him that

HISTORY. 77

much of yourself which is common to you both, you will,
by this, be qualified to detect that in him which is himself
strictly, and not yourself ; and so to a man you will add the
individuality of this man, and have what you seek. Carlyle
carried Carlyle to the making of his Cromwell, doubtless ;
and in this way he got for himself a complete Cromwell —
wart and all — to his mind. Taine thinks Cromwell's Crom-
well is Carlyle's Cromwell, and largely because they are, in
his view, interchangeable words. Nowhere more than in
history does it ' ' take a thief to catch a thief. "

111.

Why shall we study history ? For so laborious and
perilous a process as that I have depicted, there must be
much motive and imperative motive.

I would have the study of history not an end, but a means
to an end. I would study history, first, in order to know
mysel f .

" The proper study of mankind is man." Know thyself
is the first mandate of a sound and comprehensive philoso-
phy. Yet true self-knowledge is never to be come at by
burrowing in the narrow limit of our own individual
thoughts, feelings, and experience. We must, in order to
truly see ourselves, stand before the great mirror humanity,
and in its all-reflecting focus behold our own proper individ-
uality. Taine says " all history is but the history of the
heart." "We find ourselves surrounded by humanity, we
find ourselves humanity, and of humanity we know less

78 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

than of anything else. "We have studied history wrongly,
and it has yielded us only date and event, deed and career.
Let us study it rightly, and it will yield us true self-knowl-
edge, true sympathy with others. Here, as elsewhere, it is
"the spirit that quickeneth." Goethe said, "It is the
spirit in which we act which is the great thing." It is the
spirit in which we study which is the great thing. Does
history hold a hero for us ? Let us love him boundlessly
but wisely ; if we praise him, let our praise be abundant
but understanding, as was Heine's, when he says, in explana-
tion of seeming to praise Bonaparte in praising his deeds,
•" I never praise the dead, but the human soul whose gar-
ment the deed is, and history is nothing but the soul's old
wardrobe." 1 would study history that I may be wise — wise
with a sympathetic wisdom born of much and reverent con-
tact with my brother and sister humanity.

" Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and we linger on the shore ;
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more."

1 would study history rightly that my knowledge may be
fused with wisdom. I would stand among the men and
women of the past .in order that I may stand among the
men and women of the present — an individual ; not caught,
and absorbed, and lost in the great world-current, for " wis-
dom lingers !"

And, in the second place, I would study history in order
to make my standing firmer in religious faith. In these
days of ebb and quicksand, when agnosticism rears its stone-
wall in front of faith, and writes upon it in black letters the
end-all and the be-all of all knowing, the unknowable, we
have need to go where God is to confirm our faith in Him.

HISTORY. 79

And God is in history ; He is there because the human soul
is there. " Take thy shoes from off thy feet, for this is
holy ground." Turn the pages reverently, for, as Carlyle
says, " all history is the Bible."

These two reasons why I would study history come first
in rank. After these come all other benefits which the
intellect gets to itself in any exercise of its faculties ; in no
other pursuit can these be greater. The exploration of no
science can be, in all ways, so profitable as must be the
science of humanity.

The science of matter is a very noble pursuit. To wrench
from the ores of the earth, the treasures of the sea, the
elements of the air, the secret of their functions, and their
affinities, the laws of their being, the springs of their action
—this is very noble and very good. But it ends where it
begins — in matter ; and matter is matter and not man, de-
spite the Darwins, and Tyndalls, and Huxleys ; and one
may know all that is to be known about matter and noth-
ing that need be known about man.

The science of astronomy is very grand. To make
acquaintance with the steadfast stars, to know their times
and seasons, their coinings and their goings — to learn their
hidden looks by distance -killing telescopes, so that each
feature is familiar, must make one feel a sense of more than
mundane importance, and a sense of fellowship more than
mortal. Yet, after all, if an astronomer do nothing but
gaze at the stars, he is only a star-gazer. But the science of
humanity — what limit is there here ? Here is a labyrinth
for learning, an ocean for genius, a cathedral for worship !

The most transcendent genius should occupy itself with
history. It does indeed, in a sense, for the loftiest reaches

80 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

of the loftiest minds have always heen in the study of man ;
but I would have the abstract psychology of these great
ones made concrete. 1 would that Goethe's Faust had been
a more solid figure in history — i.e., I would that all the
genius, and soul- exploration, and experience, with all the
transcendent learning that went to its making, might have
turned into some historic evolution — that of Charlemagne,
for instance. What a history would that have been !

Is there not a yearning in these dumb, eloquent faces
which confront us from the pages of history to give us the
lesson they learned here, which shall move us to accept their
teaching ? Teaching concerning our relations with each
other in this present, where we must briefly play our part,
nobly or ignobly ; teaching that shall train us for that long
hereafter, within whose dim recesses even now is set a wait-
ing messenger, biding his time to beckon, and whose beckon-
ing we must one day surely follow into those same silent
corridors of the past. Do not these, the departed great
ones, speaking all the more eloquently because the clogging
web of irrelevant detail has dropped away and left bare and
prominent to our vision only the vital and important — do
not these teach us something that we need to learn ?

There is a science which, whether in little or in much,
pursued by patient industry, by educated imagination, by
rigorous conscience, shall teach us, of all things that it con-
cerns us to know — history — the true and proper study of
humanity !

OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE.

OLD EOME AND NEW FRANCE.

I.

THERE is a notion of the Middle Ages which is common
and which is false — a notion which looks upon them as ten
centuries of starless midnight, wherein the world lay asleep
• — as good as dead. A tunnel of time, one thousand years
long, through which humanity rumbled blindly in an emi-
grant train^ the last sky-rockets of the Roman Empire flar-
ing up at one end, the first sunbeams of the Renaissance
shining in at the other — and no light between — the no-
account period of history.

We are all liable to have notions until we get knowledge ;
but if any of us hold this one, it should be corrected before
we enter upon mediaeval studies. It seems to me that
this period is not suggestively named when called the
Middle Ages, nor accurately named when called the Dark
Ages, but that both suggestion and accuracy combine in
that view which denominates it as a Twilight Age. That
period which elapses before sunrise, that period which
elapses after sunset, and all that interval between when
moon and star ray forth their multitudinous lances of silver
light, waging successful warfare with the cannonade of
serried cloud — these periods we find indeed dim, but not
wholly unlit ; obscure, but not impenetrable. Such a
night as this is that of the Middle Ages.

GEORGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHEK STUDIES.

The importance of acquaintance with this period is, by
the ordinary student, gr3atly underestimated. Yet it is
emphatically the seed-time of all that succeeds. The skilful
florist, if he wishes to insure the germination of precious
seed, casts it into pots of prepared earth, then sets these
pots away in the brooding darkness of his hothouse, and
there keeps them until the delicate sprout above the earth
assures him that germination is well under way. Growth
takes place in the night. He who would approach history
in the true attitude of a scientist, a psychologist, a student
of Providence, must concern himself with its seed time, its
time of sprouting and of early growth. As much as is the
importance of study of this period underestimated, so
greatly is its interest unappreciated. He who, with some
true conception of what the mediaeval period is to after-
times, shall but cross the threshold 'of its study, will, once
within, proceed along those dim-lit aisles with an interest as
much exceeding that of more brilliant subsequent ages as
does the fascination of the mysterious, pregnant, prodigy-
filled night exceed that of the glaring day ! Let us, then,
cross this threshold.

By one bold exercise of your imagination place yourself
with me within the vestibule of mediaeval time. Above
the lintel of the door we enter is written in blood-red
letters the date — 476. This vestibule is long — three cen-
turies lie between its doorway and the massive portal of the
temple proper yonder, on which flames forth, in letters of
gilt, the date 800.

Here in this antechamber the twilight deepens ; a side
light radiates fitfully here and there, but our way is mainly
featured to us by the rays that issue, the one from a red

OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 85

sunset behind, the other from a rising moon .in front — the
ensanguined light that lingers in the wake of Rome that
was, the ruddy gold that parts the clouds where France
shall be. In the fifth century of modern time the Roman
Empire had grown cancerous upon the world. The iron of
its blood — its Julius, its Trajan, its Aurelius— had run
out. The virus of a Nero, a Domitian, a Caligula had
mingled with the watery serum of a Ileliogabalus and an
Augustulus, and had brought mortal sickness. There was
need of surgery. Then nature, that great nature which, in
history as elsewhere, is Providence, arose, and with the
sword of Hun and Goth cut out this cancer which was
poisoning the race. With the contented retirement to his
Lucullan villa of the little, bribed Augustus — Romulus
Augustulus, too small to fight and not too big to buy — the
last effigy of Caesar flitted from the stage of history, and
Rome, the monopolist, the tyrant, the disease, vanished
from the body politic.

[Surely, I need not interject a word of tribute to that glo-
rious Rome which still lives with transmigrated life, that
other Rome, that unparalleled product into which all the
ages of the world had entered as contributors, in that fashion
which the ages have. For human history is nothing but
one ceaseless flow of cause into effect, and of effect into-
cause. There is nothing but which is consequent. You
and I are but the consequents of a vast tangle of antecedents
in all time before. And but for Rome, that stupendous
concrete of wealth and culture and intellect of eighteen
centuries ago, it had not been the same with you and me
to-day. This Rome, vastly differing from that otlie Rome
that was extinguished, died only with such death as good

86 GEOEGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

things have — a death which is transition — and in dying
bequeathed her rich arterial blood to all the ages.]

One glance, then, at. this flickering sunset sky of Rome
(its embers will light many a watch-iire of the future),
and we must face about and thread our way as best we can
along this dim vestibule of the Twilight Age, by such
radiance as glimmers from a moon struggling through
cumulous clouds before us.

In its focus stands a figure, the figure in political history
of the next three centuries, upon which we must fasten our
attention — the figure of Clovis, initial name of French
Empire. Ten years after the so-called extinction of the
Western Empire of the Romans in the deliverance up of
his little, brief authority by the puny Augustulus to
Odoacer, there ruled over the Roman territory of Gaul,
with the title, some say, of the King of the Romans, a
Roman patrician, Syagrius. This fact alone discovers to us
how life lingered in the moribund members of the ruined
empire. With less start than, it would seem, Syagrius
had, many a man had beforetime usurped the empire and
rulad the world. We may say that the time for all such
usurpations of Roman Empire was now gone by. But we
can maintain this position only after the event. It took
but the returning figure of Napoleon upon the shore of
France, after his banishment, to rally round him his army
and restore to him his empire, dislodging from the throne
of France that ancient dynasty which, in the emperor's brief
absence, had been reseated there. Some one has said that
such was the magic of Napoleon's name, that it needed but
the sight of his cocked hat, erected on the soil of France,
to strike terror to the heart of Europe. In this closing fifth

OLD KOME AND NEW FRANCE. 87

century the Roman eagles had not wholly lost their power
to stir up Roman souls ; witness the Senator Boethius, his
father-in-law, Symrnachus, and their colleagues, found
guilty, after that date, of loyalty to that ancient standard.
Nor was the subjugation and unity of the barbarian
Odoacer's kingdom so assured as to leave no room for a
reasonable hope in one who should aspire to restore the
Roman Empire to the Romans, of allies from barbarian
tribes. Syagrius, the son of a Roman hero, would seem to
have been such an one. He was exceedingly popular among
his countrymen in the Gallic territory over which he ruled ;
nor was he less so among barbarian allies, whom, by his
superiority, he both awed and attracted. He represented
to the rude nations about him what was awful, and admir-
able, and wholly beyond their reach in the traditions and
manners of that Rome which, by numbers only, they had
conquered. Here, we might say, was opportunity for a
most successful coup cVetat by this illustrious, powerful,
and accomplished Roman. We can give no conclusive
reason why it could not have happened except that it did
not. We can only be wise after the event. The panorama
of history unrolls itself always to surprised spectators.
Always " it is the unexpected that happens." Not Syagrius,
in this fifth century of time, but a roving, barbarian chief-
tain, is the coming man.

Clovis — our modern for Chodowig, mighty warrior — was
the son of Childeric, king of that branch of the Frankish
barbarians whose settlements lay along the river Sala, or
Yssel, hence their distinctive appellation, Salian Franks.
The Franks had figured in history for several centuries.
They were no strangers to the Roman world. From the

88 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

beginning, when the hero-god of Germany, Arminius, beat
back the Roman legions under Yarns, this valorous race
had, by one or another of its tribes, won the respect and
sometimes fear of the Romans, in the varying character of
enemies, allies, or subjects. The eminent qualities of this
race were courage and independence. It was from their
inconquerable passion for freedom that they won their name
— Franks, freemen. Even in their relation to their chief
they were rather allies than subjects.*

Childeric, the father of Clovis, was a wild and wilful
man, whose youthful madnesses out- Franked the Franks,
and provoked them, with characteristic democracy, to
ignore his kingship and banish him to the court of a neigh-
boring king, where, in good care, he might find space
for repentance. It does not appear that he occupied him-
self exclusively with this wholesome but bitter spiritual
exercise. Childeric seems to have anticipated the later
French character, whose law of life lay in the phrase of the
Bourbon courtiers, "Je m? amuse l^ He had the national
instinct, "pour power le temps" and in this experience
passed the time principally in making love to Bosnia, the
wife of the open-hearted King of Thuringia. She, for her
part, found no difficulty in falling duly " in love" with this
fascinating French exile, and when the Franks recalled

* The famous story of the vase of Soissons illustrates the independent
attitude they maintained as soldiers to their general and as subjects
to their king. After the first victory of Clovis, a rare and exquisite vase
was among the spoils. This Clovis set aside for himself. But a sol-
dier seeing him do this stepped forth from the ranks, and, exclaiming,
" You shall have nothing but what comes to you by lot, " struck the
vase and shivered it to atoms.

OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE,

their monarch to his place, Bosnia incontinently left Thu-
ringian bed and board, declaring, with an emancipation o^
soul which it takes the nineteenth century to equal, that
"had she found a man more beautiful than Childeric, he
should have been her choice !"

The saying that " the mother makes the man" seems to
find illustration in the character of Clovis. Bosnia was the
regulation mother for a conqueror, and she bequeathed him
the quality which he needed as equipment for his bloody and
unscrupulous career — unswerving selfishness, which allows
no foolish conscience to impede the course of its passion, be
that passion for a kingdom or — a king. So fine an irony
has history, that that which makes the shame of its wives
makes the glory of its kings !

Clovis succeeded to the kingdom of his father at the age
of fifteen, if, indeed, a strip of Rhineland and a band of
followers can be called a kingdom. Clovis was poor, but
he was young ; his resources were small, but his valor
boundless ; his followers few, but congenial.

Six years elapse, after the accession of Clovis to his
throne, before the first great event of his career writes itself
indelibly upon the page of history. At this moment of
world-history the situation in Gaul — modern France — was
as follows : Its north-eastern portion was the territory of
Syagrius. Its central and south-western lands were in-
cluded in the great barbarian kingdom of the Visigoths,
which extended also across the Pyrenees and took in part of
Spain. The small sea-coast strip remaining in the north-
west was called Armorica, and was virtually independent.
The more considerable south-eastern lands, which bordered
Italy, were possessed by the Burgundians, who also ruled

90 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETKY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

themselves. To the east of Burgundy, along that region
of the Rhine, an indeterminate host — that barbarian con-
glomerate called suggestively the Allemanni (All-men) — lay
crouching with gleaming eyes, biding their time for a
spring across the river barrier. And above them, farther
along the beach, Clovis, the young Frank chieftain, roamed
restlessly up and down, with his congenial followers, and
cast glances full of speculation across to Gallic lands. We
may well pause here to take in this situation, in this
momentous decade, between the years of our Lord 476 and
486. All eyes that glance on mediaeval history must turn
thither and fix an affrighted gaze upon these ten years, in
which the future of the world is pending. Visigoth and, be-
hind him, Yandal on the west ; Ostrogoth on the south ; Al-
lemanni on the east, each stretching neck and straining eye
— all turning a fascinated gaze upon the basilisk Syagrius.
He is the cocked hat of Napoleon to them. And all this
time Clovis whistles softly up and down the hither Rhine,
planning, in the waiting for performance ; dreaming, in
delay of deed, " dreams no mortal ever dared to dream
before." But finally the spell is broken. The contest
begins, and Clovis strides forth to throw down before
Syagrius the gauntlet of battle.

II.

" In the manner and almost in the language of chivalry,"
says Gibbon, " Clovis defied Syagrius and called him to
combat. Syagrius haughtily accepted the challenge, and
met him in the vicinity of the ancient city Soissons."

OLD HOME AND NEW FRANCE. 91

Tragic ground, this, for France ! For if the Soissons of
the fifth be not identical with the Sedan of the nineteenth
century, the two are sufficiently related to suggest a striking
reflection. For it was here, in the year 486, that Clovis
swung his battle-axe victorious over Roman heads, and
wrote in Roman blood the birthday of French Empire !
And it was here, in 1S70, that the last French emperor
delivered up his sword, and William of Prussia wrote in
Frenchmen's blood the death -day of French Empire !

The victory of Clovis at Soissons put an end to Roman
rule in Gaul. Syagrius fled to the Visigothic court and
disappeared from view. Clovis filled his place in Gaul,
and came to view for all time.

We of the nineteenth know now that at this moment, in
the fifth century, Clovis, by his victory over Syagrius, had
laid the corner-stone of French Empire. To us he already
appears a hero, having taken that first step which costs, and
after which all the others come as a matter of course. But
nothing was farther from the fact. This first step of Clovis
led the way to others more costly. What he had gained
he must hold, and that was not a matter of a day's fight.
A difficulty more subtle than the barbarian mind had been
accustomed to grapple with now arose to threaten Clovis.

The Roman world had long since been nominally Chris-
tian. Roman Gaul was extremely Christian, as we shall
see, and Roman Gaul, however it may perforce submit to
a political master not Roman, had serious scruples in sub-
mitting to a pagan master not Christian. Thus the situa-
tion became very difficult for Clovis. Not being one
which the battle-axe could adjust, he was hardly equal to it.
These Romish priests, with their wonderful learning, and

92 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

language, and polished dignity, were more than a match for
our lusty Frank. Yet Clovis was not without diplomacy ;
and two circumstances assisted him to meet the emergency.

The first of these circumstances was the circumstance of
sectarianism. A split in the opposing party, as we of
to-da}r know, is often the determining factor in the fight.
Such a split had occurred long before the time of Clovis,
and now had yawned into irreconcilable divergence. Thus
early in the history of the Christian era are we called upon
to witness the tremendous power of sect, as a force in the
causation of events. Already in the fifth century was the
half-admiring pagan world invited to u see how these
Christians hate each other !"

The great sect of those days, and that with which alone
we have to do, was that of the Arian heresy. All who
indorsed the doctrine of Arius were considered heterodox,
and were known as Arians, while those untainted with this
heresy were deemed the orthodox, and were called by that
glorious but so often misapplied name of Catholics. A good
follower of Augustine in the fifth century could no more
fellowship a good follower of Arius than could a rigid disci-
ple of Calvin in our century fellowship one of Chunder Sen.

Now, the Roman Gauls were fiercely orthodox, while all
around them, the Visigothic, Ostrogothic, and Burgundian
converts to Christianity, were fiercely Arian ; and these
two divisions of the early Church hated each other most
cordially. In this way was Ciovis helped out of his
dilemma, for the hatred of his orthodox Roman subjects of
their Christian but Arian neighbors was quite as great as
was their repugnance to a pagan ruler. They may even
have thought the latter the least of two evils. Thus

OLD ROME AND NEW FKANCE. 93

was prevented alliance with those neighbors against the
conquering Clovis, who threatened the barbarian nations in
Gaul with the same political ruin lie had brought to the
Romans. How lasting would have been this prevention of
such allied resistance to him, or what might have come
about from this complication, it were profitless to conjecture.
We can only follow the course of events, and see how the
matter took care of itself.

The course of events is just now the course of Clovis, and
the next thing we have to chronicle in his career is also the
second which served to assist him in meeting the situation
in which we find him after his conquest of Roman Gaul,
the circumstance of his marriage.

More than one woman goes to the making of one man,
or, if not, the man lacks something of being finished.
The mother makes the man, perhaps, but the wife manufact-
ures him. Sometimes the wife, in her manufacture, con-
firms the making of the mother, sometimes counteracts it.
The case of Clovis was that of counteraction, for it appears
certain that the influence of Clotilda, the wife, went far
toward nullifying the influence cf her mother-in-law. She
seems, as much as possible, to have been the opposite in
character of her husband's mother.

In the first place, Clotilda was a Christian and orthodox,
and she set herself to the task of her husband's conversion
with Catholic zeal.

I am not informed of the circumstances of the courtship
of Clovis. It occurs to me with force, however, that these
recently-acquired, troublesome Catholic subjects of his may
have acted the part of match-makers to a very great extent.
At any rate, we can all perceive the significance to them of

94 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

the marriage of their pagan monarch with this Catholic
princess, and how far it would go toward reconciling him
to them, as being now in a hopeful way for conversion to
their faith.

A painful suspicion also whispers itself in my ear, sug-
gesting that in Clovis the passion of the lover may have
conspired with the policy of the ruler in the wooing of his
bride. Be that as it may, the Roman Catholic clergy now
adhered to Clovis with hopeful loyalty. The pious hope of
priest and wife was not rewarded earlier than the date of the
next great battle of Clovis, in the year 496, ten years after
the battle of Soissons. This encounter was with a foe vastly
different from that of ten years before, but its result hardly
second in importance.

III.

We have already spoken of the Allemannic tribes as
menacing the eastern frontier of Gaul. They were but the
advance guard of untold, almost unimaginable savage hordes
that swarmed within those northern wilds of Germany
which Rome had disdained to penetrate. It was this force
which Clovis had now to confront. Had they succeeded in
the contest and pushed their way over the dead bodies of
these Franks, to fill again the place of Syagrius which
Clovis had won, unnumbered myriads must have rushed
down from those dark forests of the north to fill, in turn,
the places thus left vacant, and the establishment of the
new empire must have been indefinitely retarded or dis-
astrously changed.

OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 95

Xear the present site of Cologne these two barbarian
tribes, whom Gibbon calls the fiercest of the many then in
view, confronted each other, to settle between them this
momentous question. The battle raged furiously and
variously, but at last fortune seemed to perch upon the
Allemannic banner. The gods of the Franks were invoked
to aid, but appeared to be otherwise engaged. Then, when
defeat seemed certain, in that extremity which brings each
man begging to the Almighty One, Clovis, the long-resist-
ing, in true barbaric heartiness spoke out to Clotilda's God,
praying for victory and vowing Him the service of a Chris-
tian ever after might he but win this light. From this in-
stant the tide of battle turned. Fresh vigor flew into the
arms of the retreating Franks. They turned upon their
pursuers, and fought, with fanatic frenzy, the battle over
again. The Allemanni were slaughtered in vast numbers,
and their nation completely subdued. The dead bodies of
their slain formed an effectual barrier against invasion of

O

remoter savage hordes. The eastern frontier of Gaul was
temporarily assured.

A second consequence of this battle, greater even than
the settlement of an eastern frontier, was the conversion of
Clovis.*

* It were a profitless, perhaps painful, inquiry to seek to ascertain the
true nature of this so-called, conversion. We may well suspend our criti-
cism, and temper skepticism with faith— we who have said that we

"... believe that in all ages
Every human heart is human,
That in even savage bosoms
There are longings, yearnings, strivings,
For the good they comprehend not."

The barbarian chieftain is told the story of the death and sufferings

96 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

So Clovis keeps his vow and changes masters. He is
received into the Holy Catholic Church and— because he
is a Catholic, not an Arian — is hailed by the Pope with
the title of "Most Christian !" With three thousand of
his Franks following he goes behind Remigius to the bap-
tismal font. Here is exercise for imagination. What a
picture does it hang before us ! Clovis, fresh from the
Held of battle, with his elated soldiers, bending massive
forms before the mitred bishop in the grand Cathedral
of Rheims. That long-haired monarch — for long hair
was the distinction of the German kings — those fair-
skinned, fair-haired warriors, suppliant, while Remigius
uplifts the cross before them, and, in sonorous Latin, com-
mands for it their homage — "Mitis depone colla, Sicam-
ber ! Adora quod incendisti, incende quod adordsti /"
Truly new times this for Clovis, to bow meekly anywhere,
to anything !

Christ. Missing the meaning of that matchless tale, his impulsive heart
swells with indignation, and, clasping his battle-axe, he cries out,
" Would I had been there at the head of my valiant Franks ! I would
have avenged His injuries." Yet, I think, it is only we who smile at
this barbaric fervor. I think the patient Christ, who wept but never
laughed over the creature He died to save, would likelier lay a gentle
hand upon that outstretched arm of Clovis, discerning, as He alone can
do, the unconscious worship in that generous heart !

Led, as a child, by the bishop to the Cathedral of Bheims, Clovis, his
savage nature impressed and elated by the splendor of its adornments,
asks, " Is this the kingdom of God, of which I am become an heir?"

Then spake the gray barbarian,
Lower than a Christian child 1

AndKemigius answers, " No ; but it is the road thither !" And there
the shadow of Hildebrand was cast before !

OLD ROME AND NEW FKANCE. 97

But the cross is adored — at least in form — the pagan idols
which have been worshipped are burned, and the end for
which wife and priest have long been waiting is attained.
Clovis is a Christian, and his victorious career is fairly
under way. The sword in one hand, the cross in the other,
he is prepared for any emergency of conquest. He is now
at length ready for his third and final move in the game
which wins the new empire. This is his victory at Poitiers
over the Yisigoths in Gaul.

IY.

The Yisigoths are intensely Arian ; Clovis is intensely
Catholic. Arianism is a heresy — a shocking heresy, and
Clovis feels now that it is his duty to rebuke this scandalous
schism in the Church. He will fight the Yisigoths and
expel them from Gaul. Thus does his piety supply him
pretext for a conquest " in fresh fields and pastures new !"

The preparations of Clovis for this last great campaign
have all the character of a crusade. He summons his
prelates and princes to a council at Paris, whither he
has removed the seat of government from Soissons. Here
he advises with them on the best means of extirpation
of this lamentable heresy from the territory of Gaul. He
has a word for both. He says : "It grieves me that
the Arians possess as yet the fairest lands of Gaul. Let
us inarch against them with the aid of God, and, having
punished the heretics, we will possess and divide their
lands !"

His warriors all fall in with this disinterested plan, and

98 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

swear that until the Arians are punished their beards shall
remain uncut ! *

"When the fires of fanaticism are once kindled every cir-
cumstance adds fuel to the flames. The Crusaders eet forth
amid a shower of auspicious portents ; their journey to the
battle-field is one series of miraculous omens. Their route
is indicated by a meteor ; the unknown fording-place of a
river by the passage through before them of a white hart of
supernatural beauty. Alaric II. and his Yisigothic hosts
are paralyzed with the rumors which precede the advent of
the enemy. Under these circumstances the army of Clovis
closes in around them and reduces them to speedy submis-
sion. They fly, and Clovis pursues them ; until they dis-
appear behind the Pyrenees, he gives no quarter. Thus
ends the Yisigothic supremacy in Gaul. Thus are the
hated heretics punished and their fair lands possessed.

This third great battle on the field of Poitiers, in the
year 507, consummated substantially the Frankish conquest
of Gaul. And with this ends our concern in the career of
Clovis. Of his treaty with the little free Armorica ; of his
contests, finally ending in victory, with the more obstinate
and troublesome Burgundy ; of his indiscriminate fling-
ing hither and yon among his too presuming kindred and
dukes of the formidable Francesca, by way of filling up
his time, we have naught to say. All these things hap-

* Clotilda, the Christian wife, stands by and counsels her lord to
promise God a monastery after the accomplishment of this pious pur-
pose, and Clovis, filled with devotion, seizes his favorite battle-axe
(which, after the manner of the swords of heroes, has a name as individ-
ual as its owner), and hurling it from him, exclaims, " There, where my
Francisca shall stick, will I build a house to God !"

OLD ROME AND NEW FKANCE. 99

pened, as he who runs may read. Just one hundred years
after the sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth, in the year
510, Clovis received from the eastern empire the title —
the ultimatum, it seems, of his ambition — of Consul.
Gibbon says : " On the solemn day (of coronation) the
monarch of Gaul, placing a diadem upon his own head,
was invested, in the Church of St. Martin, with the pur-
ple tunic and mantle. From thence he proceeded on
horseback to the Cathedral of Tours, and as he passed
through the streets scattered with his own hand a donation
of gold and silver to the joyful multitude, who incessantly
repeated their acclamations of Consul ! and Augustus /"

Strange thing, this human nature, with its misapplied
magnanimity and irrelevant vanity ! Clovis, a year before
his death, with the territory of the Visigoths, the Burgun-
dians, the Romans in Gaul, and diverse barbarian tribes
beneath his feet, the crown of a new empire on his head,
looks not forward to the future of his kindred Franks, but
backward to the past of his alien Romans. The name, the
fame, the future grandeur of the nebulous new empire does
not compare with the faded grandeur of the starry old.
He would rather stand, dressed in a little brief authority —
ghostly and fictitious though it be — among the buried
Caesars, than build for himself the solid fame of founder of
that empire which subdued the empire of the Csesars.
Sweeter to him the cry from pusillanimous Roman throats
of Consul ! Consul ! and Augustus ! though he knew it but
the forced utterance of cunning policy, than all the thun-
derous vociferations of his lusty Franks of Clovis ! Clovis !
Emperor of France ! Truly, a lame and impotent con-
clusion.

100 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

The next year after his coronation as Consul, in the year
511 of the Christian era, having attained the age of only
forty-five years, after a reign of thirty years, Clovis died.

And here we part company with the founder of the French
Empire. Our knowledge of him as an individual is too
limited to justify a discussion of his character. We leave him
as we find him, unequivocally a conqueror, ic cast," as Hal-
lam says, " in the true mould of conquerors, and may justly
be counted among the first of his class both for the splen-
dor and the guiltiness of his ambition." He is conspicuous
only as the figure which emerges from the chaotic politics
of that ruinous epoch, assuming the role of Founder of the
New State. In this character his main equipment is that
of his battle-axe. We discern in him little of constructive
genius to mould the state after he has founded it.

We cannot depart from this vestibule of mediaeval time
without a glance at another figure, whose name we have
already mentioned — a figure most independent and conspic-
uous, and at this moment of world-history most significant of
the old, as is that of Clovis of the new. We must turn to
that red sky of Rome, if we would look on him, for he
stands bathed in its last glow — Boethius ! last Roman worthy
to hold rank with Cato and with Cicero. Yet not only
by that departing ray of Rome is he conspicuous to our
eyes. He shines with light self-centred — that diamond-
shine which issues from the fiery particle within,

" The light that never was on land or sea,
The consecration and the poet's dream,"

that ray which makes him common to all climes and times,
an immortal citizen in the commonwealth of genius and of

OLD KOME AND NEW FRANCE. 101

faith. There is little in the personality of Clovis to interest
us. He has no magnetism save that which the iron of his
battle-axe may lend. Bat the tender gaze of all genera-
tions is fixed with loyal love on the figure of Boethius.
We can never learn enough about him. No other could be
contrived to oppose to the figure of Clovis which should
more vividly discover the contrast of forces which contend
for mastery in the conflict of the ages, and none more
nakedly representative of the forces at work in this mingling
of the old with the new at this chaotic period.

Clovis stands to us as representative of the red young
blood, the cordy young muscle that must vitalize the
shrunken veins of time and nerve the arm of humanity for
the work of construction of new political empire in the
state that is to be. The lusty young Frank has little of
equipment — nor needs he more — for the task that is set
him, than that same bright battle-axe along whose whetted
edge we see red blood-drops globing. He stands all uncon-
scious that in the mirror of one face are seen the shades of
all Home's Caesars in their purple, and in the mirror of its
opposite face are seen the forecast images of the Louis and
the Napoleons, the Richelieus and the Bismarcks — the
shadows cast before of coming events and coming men !
Boethius stands to us as a parting summary of all that was
best of Rome — as senator, as patrician, as poet, as philoso-
pher. When Clovis was crowned Consul at Tours, Boethius
was already Consul in the court of Theodoric at Rome, and
princeps senatus. But too true a Roman to wear Roman
honors in a Gothic court, he was soon found guilty of Roman .
patriotism — i.e., of Gothic treason — and the court was ex-
changed for a dungeon. But we bless the dungeon of Boe-

102 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

thius as we bless the cell of Bunyan. For from it came
that golden volume which poured enduring consolation into
all those ages. Beloved of Alfred, beloved of Charlemagne,
beloved of Dante, called, during those dark, laboring ages
the Augustine of philosophy, Boethius comes down to us the
noblest Roman of them all, since from those prison walls
could issue strains like this: " Nobility is in no other
respect good than as it imposes an obligation upon its pos-
sessors not to degenerate from the merit of their ancestors !
If you are not therefore esteemed illustrious from your
own worth, you can derive no real splendor from the merits
of others." There speaks the nobleman, whether sixth
century patrician, in whose veins coursed the purplest -blood
of Rome's most noble families, or nineteenth century Dem-
ocrat— a grand old gardener at the gate,

"... too proud to care from whence lie came !"

Unconsciously this great soul sounds the trumpet notes
of the truth which in all those slow, sad ages struggled to
be heard above the clash and discord, and which now rings
joy-bells in our glorious nineteenth century ; but he, its
noble voicer, in that darkest time heard but the tolling of
death -knells, and looked sadly backward to Rome's free-
dom, and counted

"Sorrow's crown of sorrow
In remembering happier things."

"We may fancy the stern face of the passionless Genius of
History, as she stands upon some Alpine summit between
France and Italy, at the close of this fifth century, to relax
a little, half in pity, half in mirth, at the parody of great-

OLD ROME AND NEW FRANCE. 103

ness which her puppets play. Yet, as she gazes on the
perfect plan which through all these puppet-plays goes
on to its supreme fulfilment, we may behold a gleam of
fathomless content, restored to her countenance, and may
perhaps catch the words of that epilogue which, after the
play is over, she lingers to say.

With one hand to the south, she exclaims : " Go ! 'thou
imperial Rome ; take thou henceforth thy place among the
deeds which have been done. Die, as such deeds must die.
Imperishable fact among the facts of history, recede now
into the past, thy future dwelling-place ! I would thou
could'st go queenly, as thou cam'st and long hast stood,
the purple trailing royally and sweeping past with tragic
funereal mien. But since the comedy must come, and then
the farce, make now an end ! Thy errand with the world
is done. The time was set, and now the hour strikes.
Farewell, thou glorious Rome ! Thy glories cover well
thy guilt ; thy graces cover well thy shame. The world has
gained from thee its priceless gains, its luminous examples,
its enduring warnings. Fare thee well !"

And with a right hand to the north, she says : " Wel-
come, thou infant France, born from the death of Rome !
Two hours are set for thee, as for all things human ; the
first strikes now. That other hour is set, and it will come.
'Twixt that and this lies all thy errand with the waiting
world. For those that pass away I have a smile ; for those
that come, a tear. And over thee, yet in thy swaddling-
clothes, while 1 discern the life that is to be, I bend, and
with a solitary tear baptize thee — France /"

CHARLEMAGNE.

CHAKLEMAGNE.

AT the conclusion of the eighth century we find upon
the throne of Clovis a man, son of an usurper, called by his
kindred subjects Karl, by his alien subjects Carolus ;
endowed by nature with superb physical gifts, with a clear
and curious intellect, a swift, inexorable will, a fervent
heart, and a religious spirit ; further furnished by inherit-
ance with the dominant empire of the world, and with
the following of his father's veteran armies, while the
Genius of Conquest beckons on this side and on that. Thus
the facts of history set forth, in the eighth century,
this monarch Charlemagne. At the conclusion of the
Middle Ages we behold this same Karl standing in a radiant
flood of fiction, with the aspect of a demi-god !

Poetry has been defined as the highest truth, but the
poets have done little for history. If the singers had been
content to let Arthur alone, we might now have had a his-
tory of him. Poets rush in where historians fear to tread ;
after idyls, no history !

In the latter half of the Middle Ages the poets, in the
dearth of heroes, got hold of Charlemagne, and made him
realize to them their ideal man. The monks got hold of
Charlemagne, and made him realize to them their ideal
saint. The knights got hold of Charlemagne, and made
him realize to them their ideal chevalier ; and so it came

108 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

about that Charlemagne stood as a name for everything
which in those ages could be conceived the best in human-
ity — summing up in one every possible grace and gift of
monarch and man, hero and saint — realizing to each ideal
perfection ! But the idealized, of nations as of individuals,
are subject to the same law which governs the idealizer, the
law of reaction ; and to this rule, we fear, there are no
exceptions. With the early sunbeams of the Renaissance
the lovely legend-mists which had hung around the form of
Charlemagne were, not indeed dispelled, but cut, and
when the fresh breeze of advancing day set in were lifted
for the image. And now, in the high noon of our scientific
century, but little enchantment remains to the picture, save
that which distance always lends. The kaiser of the eighth
century unconsciously set the fashion for his own treatment
in the nineteenth, when he fell upon the Irmensul of the
Saxons, and, razing the temple, stripped the idol of its gold
and gems, and bore it, naked and unadorned, to the monas-
tery which was at -once the treasury and the library of the
Middle Ages. Disillusioned is this man to us, but not yet
destroyed. There are verities in this mass of fiction which
may be eliminated.

There was a man named Eginhardus, and he was secre-
tary to the Kaiser Karl. The secretary wrote the memoirs
of his monarch, and, making due allowance for the par-
tiality of friend, or devotion of subject, or vanity of biogra-
pher, we have left a personal history so simple and direct
that it commands our credence. From this mainly, with
a few other ancient chronicles and comments, rather than
from any modern researches, do we make some brief sketch
of this luminous figure in mediaeval history.

CHARLEMAGNE. 109

I.

First let us look at this man of whom we propose to
speak. And here we will let Eginhardus speak for us.
Behold, first, his frontispiece photograph. A. figure whose
height wras seven times the length of his foot ; whose
heavy body was well supported by massive limbs ; a round
head, hair beautiful to look upon, a nose of more than
middle size, enormous eyes, large and lively, writes the
secretary (" with the seeming of a lion's, and shining like
carbuncles," adds a curt old chronicle), a countenance joyful
and vivacious, sitting and standing like a king, walking
with a firm, quick step ; a man of splendid presence, ac-
cording to all accounts. An old song thus puts it, in obso-
lete German :

" Karl war den Eosenglich !"
* * * *

And sums up as follows :

" Ich waiz wol das von wibe
Nie wart, noch nimmer werden gol
Ein man so mannig tugend vol."

(" Karl was like a rose !"
*******

" I well know that to women
So sweet a hero-man
Ne'er lived, nor ever can !")

Let now this figure stand before you clad, as Egin-
hardus dresses him, in his short linen drawers and his long
linen drawers ; in his linen waistcoat, over which is drawn

110 GEORGE ELIOT^S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

a coat trimmed with fur ; throw upon his herculean shoul-
ders a Venetian mantle ; hang at his side his good and well-
beloved sword Joyeuse ; place his right hand upon its golden
hilt — et voila ! the Kaiser Karl in his evrery-day clothes.
For the secretary gives us to understand he is not in
the least " dressed up. " He has fine clothes, however ; but
he keeps them like the careful man he is, bringing them
forth when he goes visiting to Rome, or something of that
sort. Then he shines from diademed head to jewelled foot
with all the splendor heart could wish. Mostly French
splendor, too, for Karl was a clear Frenchman, despising
all alien finery, and never would he adopt a foreign fash-
ion. A man of superb health which no bad habits under-
mined, we are assured. He despised drunkenness, though
not an abstainer (like Charles XII. of Sweden), but moder-
ate in his drinks. In eating he was not so — runs on the
secretary — often complaining that his stomach was griev-
ously empty — a vacuum which his nature abhorred, it
would seem, for the old chronicle above quoted relates that
at one meal he would eat " a goose, two fowls, a quarter of
mutton," etc., ad lib. !

Not much of a society man, in the modern French line,
the secretary lets us know, but very much of a family
man, with very much of a family. I count up nine
(" wives," Hallam calls them !) successive or contemporary
proprietors of the royal heart, which is three more than
divided the affections of our amorous English Harry. In-
deed, Karl, no more than Henry, was a polyganiist, and
always piously interred the former incumbent of the royal
affections before wedding the next, unless, indeed, she were
unreasonably contumacious about dying, in which case a

CHARLEMAGNE. Ill

divorce could be managed, with quite the modern improve-
ments. Only one wife — as I read the secretary — was
divorced, and that his first, whom he married to please his
mother ; as a matter of course not, therefore, pleasing him-
self. In every succeeding case death divorced him, leaving
him not. wholly to mourn as those without hope. Concern-
ing the remarkable mortality of these eight successive
Fatimas we have no comments from the chronicler.

Karl's children were numerous and very dear to their
father. He gave them all the advantages for learning
which he himself so diligently improved, making no differ-
ence here, it would seem, between the sons and daughters.
In appointing their after occupations, however, he was
orthodox; The boys were duly put on horseback, armed
with gun and sword, and sent to battle-field and forest for
such game as either could afford. The daughters were
duly seated at the wheel, and taught to weave what they
spun, into woollen and linen cloths, " that they might not
grow up in hateful idleness." For both boys and girls, his
children, Karl had so great affection that lie never sat at
table without them, when at home, and when he took a
journey they accompanied him.

A unique procession that ! Karl, the kaiser, in his
knickerbockers and Venetian mantle, his trusty Joyeuse by
his side, upon his head his kingly helmet, seated high up
in his cumbrous chariot. His numerous sons, an ample
body-guard, cantering on either side ; the present kaiserin
and the daughters, up to date, following hard after on their
ambling pads. Quite a mediaeval Yicar of Waketield and
his family !

Eginhardus lived evidently before the times when no

112 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

man is a hero to his valet. Napoleon would have turned
in his sarcophagus, if not broken sheer through and stood
up, cocked hat and all, at being portrayed, as is Charle-
magne, to posterity — the comfortable old gentleman, " eat-
ing a little fruit after dinner when the days were warm,
drinking once, and then laying off his clothes and re-
posing himself for two or three hours," of a summer
'afternoon ! The grand monarque submitted to the toilette
before a crowd of courtiers who came to " assist" at the
ceremony of encasing the languid limbs of his most Chris-
tian majesty in silks and laces. Imagine Louis XIV.
calmly pulling on his own stout shoes and stockings, and
donning linen drawers and waistcoat ! Yet this was the
habit of Karl, while listening to the grievances and com-
plaints from crowds of lobbyists, and settling affairs with
the same judicial dignity, we are assured, as if he were
seated in the Hall of Justice.

A very vigilant man, this same napping old gentleman.
All eyes and feet to his adversaries. The Saxon poets sur-
named him Velox — Karl the Swift. Indeed, his velocity
was almost a superstition with his foes ; before they
dreamed he could be near he was confronting them, and
their paralysis of astonishment made them the easier his
victims.

As to brains, Karl was extremely clever, according to all
accounts, learning what there was to learn with the greatest
diligence and curiosity. Languages were the principal
acquirement in those days, the mixed condition of society
making necessary an acquisition of spoken tongues. The
secretary tells us that his master was fluent in Latin as
in his own tongue, proficient in Greek also. He also paid

CHARLEMAGNE. 113

much attention to grammar and to rhetoric. As to his
chirography, the scholars have quarrelled virtuously over
the question — Could Charlemagne write ? For in those
days a man might read and converse in Latin and Greek
and not be able to write his own name. As to the case of
Charlemagne, we are content to take the word of the secre-
tary for it— that Karl did practise penmanship, but began
so late in life that he never arrived at much " enjoyment"
in the art. At any rate, he made his mark, and that is
more than most writers do. A very religious man was
Karl, and a good Churchman of the battle-axe sort, with no
special ism. A devout worshipper, and a great stickler for
etiquette and propriety in church. Church music was a
hobby, and it chimes well with the make-up of this joy-
ous, hearty monarch that he should be a lusty singer, as
was Luther. Truly devout indeed seems Karl, profiting by
as well as profiting his church.

But we have indulged the secretary long enough in his
fond personalities. We must turn now from the man to
the monarch and the conqueror ; and here our pleasant and
affectionate secretary's garrulous record will do us little
service.

II.

Let us look, then, in our study of Charlemagne, away
from the man to his career. If Karl was a man of quali-
ties, he was also a man of deeds.

The first deed which belongs to the ages is, as a mat-
ter of course with so thorough a man, the consolidation

114: GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

of his own kingdom. Two things stood in Charlemagne's
way at his accession to the throne, or, rather, two exist-
ences— his brother Carloman and the dukes of Aquitaine.

Carloman was, by inheritance, ruler over half the king-
dom. Pepin followed the singular precedent of the Mero-
vingian monarchs, and at his death divided his kingdom
between his two sons. Here, then, at the start was a huge
something for Karl to manage, and unless he had been
joined by an invincible ally he might have found it the
most serious thing in the whole long list of his manage-
ments, and, possibly, unmanageable. Carloman might
have had as strong; a fancy for a whole loaf as Carolus,
and possibly Pepiii's grit may have been as equally di-
vided between his sons as was his kingdom. Had Carlo-
man lived ! But he did not live ; or, at least, he disap-
peared. The critics peep and mutter here, and some of
them — notably Yoltaire, that enfant terrible to the heroes
— find here a tidbit. In fact, one could wish the taking off
of Carloman had been a matter less mysterious. But, in
the absence of facts, there is room for the charity of the
charitable as well as the suspicions of the suspicious, and we
are not bound to stain the princely hand of Karl with the
"eldest, primal curse," nor to hang over the history of
infant France the cloud of fratricidal guilt, with which
tradition has inextricably invested embryo Rome. The
gist of it, to us, is that Carloman died, and his heirs disap-
peared, and that four years after his succession to half a
throne Carolus was " elected " emperor of integral France.
For Aquitaine proved not so delicate a difficulty. Its plot-
ting dukes, representatives of the dethroned dynasty, were
silenced summarily. An intermittent silence, it is true,

CHARLEMAGNE. 115

for there was never lacking under the mane of this mettle-
some Carlovingian charger the Merovingian gad-fly with
its tormenting sting ; but if too small a matter to be cured,
it could be endured, like any other irritation. So Carolus
was "elected" over the whole of the kingdom. Nothing
succeeds like success, and on this threshold of the Middle
Ages it is no time to make much sacrifice of might to
right. Yoltaire says : " The fame of Charlemagne is one
of the most eminent proofs of how the fortunate result of
an unrighteous deed justifies and makes it honorable. His
father was a rebel, himself an usurper. "

The next pre-eminent deed of Karl's was his magnifi-
cent work in Italy. The Lombards teased the popes and
menaced Koine, and so the Yicar of Christ came begging
to Karl, as before he had done to Pepin — for popes begged
illustriously in those days, and had not yet waxed fat
enough to kick at kings. Charlemagne reversed the prov-
erb, and perceived " God's extremity to be man's oppor-
tunity." He summoned his valiant Franks, leading them
up the terrible Alps and down again on the other side with
a rapidity which the Lombards could not credit, until sur-
prised at Yerona. They are beaten back to Pavia, capt-
ured, and Pavia taken ; and the plunder — persons and
pelf — Carolus, in magnificent wise, turns over to the
Pope as a trifling token of affection. This is Pope Adrian,
the Jonathan of this kingly David, and Charlemagne pays
him now a visit, in state, between the battles, by way of a
pleasure trip. First visit of the Kaiser Karl to Rome, but
not his last.

A third notable deed is wrought in Spain, and this time
it is a Moslem emir, in placo of Christian pope, whose

116 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

dilemma made Karl's excuse for new conquests. To avenge
his wrongs, Karl must fight over the same ground his grand-
sire fought. For it seems Charles Mart el did not annihilate
the Saracens. Mahometans do not die easy, even when
very " sick," as we of to-day have found. Beaten back by
Karl Martel, they still stand massed together to receive the
grandson in his day.

The battle of Tours was fought one hundred years after
the death of Mahomet. The Moslems who met Charle-
magne and routed Roland on the field of Roncesvalles might
themselves have heard from their grandsires the story of
their encounter with his grandsire, and, in turn, some
Moorish apostate might yet be living to tell of his grand-
sire's contact with contemporaries of the great Prophet
himself. The Mahometan faith was yet young and lusty,
and its adherents no mean antagonists.

With his back turned to Italy — sideways a little, perhaps,
that one eye might retain some scrutiny over the nominal
gift of his Italian conquest to his mitred friend Adrian —
thither hies Karl to settle this internal dissension among the
Saracens. Short and sharp the conflict, and Karl comes
back covered with the glory of a magnanimous interference,
and not lacking that of conquest as well, his kingdom being
the larger by that tract of land adjacent to his own terri-
tory called the Spanish March. As he flies back to the east
to meet the Saxons, who in their ponderous way are making
good the opportunity of his absence from home, he leaves
part of his forces in the lurch. This detachment being caught
by enemies in, to them, unfamiliar mountain passes, is easily
subdued despite the magic horn of the too heroic Roland,
who here spills out his blue blood in vain, and thereby

CHARLEMAGNE. 117

creates a perennial fount of inspiration at which the poets
and romancers of the Middle Ages fill their cups.

And now to the east and that unknown north toward
which Karl ever looked with longing eyes. The languid
south, the insignificant west, have small charms for his
large ambition. Those dark German forests, filled with
strange barbarian foes, worshipping in weird temples mar-
vellous idols — those famed Northmen, already vikings,
mariners, pirates — they are " foemen worthy of his steel."
The Saxons proved so, for it took thirty odd years to con-
quer them. Indomitable ones ! pouring out of their black
forests fresh supplies to fill in the broken lines at the
frontiers ; fighting to the death ; beaten back into the
forests. u Conquered," say Karl and his Franks, flying,
south to the Lombards or west to Aquitaine, to stop
some revolt broken out there. " Not so," says the Saxon
Phoenix, rising from its ashes as soon as the conqueror's
back is turned, boldly crossing the frontier, savagely
plundering and harassing by way of filling up the in-
terval. And so it goes between the Franks and the Saxons
for thirty years, until — the temple razed, the Irminsul
taken, four thousand Saxons butchered like sheep in a pen
in one day by way of example — might makes the right, and
the Saxons surrender. These things put age and discretion
into even barbarian hearts. What can they do else ?
Voltaire says : " Their gods were destroyed, their priests
murdered amid the ruins of their idols. The unhappy
people were converted with sabre cuts, and lo ! they become
Christians and — slaves !" As to the first item in Yoltaire's
sarcastic conclusion we know something about that sort of
Christianity, and the less said of it the better. They were

118 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

baptized, these Saxons, even Witikind himself — their sec-
ond Arminius, according to Hallam — laying down his arms
and suffering the rite. But we of to-day know how much
these Saxons became slaves. We know how they spilled
over, in that their first panic, by no means wholly into
France ; how they fled north to become vikings and
pirates ; how they fled west across the water, pushing the
Britons aside, mixing with the Normans, to make the Eng-
lish of to-day. Bat doubtless the Kaiser Karl thought he
had absorbed the barbarous Saxon into Christian Frank for-
ever, setting the fashion for those unsuspected Saxons of
to-day who follow so religiously his pious policy.

The Saxons being disposed of, the dark and terrible
Huns come next, remnants of Attila's Avars, swarming
in from the east, centuries before. Into their dense jungles
must this restless monarch next plunge, and with his
usual fortune. Their settlements— called rings, circular
inclosures of wooden buildings — are invaded and destroyed.
And, true to his gospel, Karl gives them peace and good-
will by the sacrifice of their idols and temples, and the sub-
stitution of his own. Their national idol was a naked sword,
symbolic of their deity, the sword-god ; this these terrible
Huns of Attila, now cowed and craven, must break in the
presence of their conqueror, and they must come thereafter
to the holy baptism of the Christians !

Surely a wonderful vitality somewhere is in this baptism !
Three centuries before, it was a sight to remember when
Clovis, with his Franks, bowed in the Cathedral of Kheims
before the cross they had but lately burnt, and received the
name of Christian. Then we beheld infant France before
its sponsor, Home. Now here stands our Christian Karl,

CHARLEMAGNE. 119

himself sponsor to this Saxon leader Witikind, signing
these fair-haired Saxons — these dark-browed Huns — with
the sign of the cross, dropping upon each Christian bap-
tism !

We have noticed that this great Karl ran down to Rome
to visit his friend Hadrian, while his Franks were stand-
ing with drawn swords before Pavia. And Karl got quite
in the way of running to Rome, until finally he made
a most notable visit there, which must be enrolled also
among his notable deeds ; for premeditated deed undoubt-
edly it was of Karl's, though coming about apparently as
the pleasantest surprise. In the year 800 this visit took
place. Four odd centuries since the sack of Rome by
Alaric the Goth. Three odd centuries since Clovis set up
the new Empire of France, and swelled with exultation
over Roman plaudits in the streets of Tours. Christmas
day in the year 800 was a day momentous to the ages ; a day
of wedding and of funeral — wedding of one named Italy
to one called France ; burial of one named Rome, finally
and forever. And priest for both is Charlemagne, his
head anointed with the royal unction, his person clad in
the imperial purple, while Leo crowns, and all the Romans
shout, " Long life to Charles ! Most pious Augustus !
crowned, by the grace of God, the great and pacific Em-
peror of the Romans !"

This was one of the deeds of Karl, and rather the most
notable thing a man has achieved or can achieve ; enough
to raise the ghost of Julius Csesar from the purple dust it
lay in. For in this ceremony the seal was set upon the
political power of Rome. The old order vanished and
gave place to new. Henceforth in place of Caesars, popes

120 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

shall represent the Deity, and priests crowd out patricians.
Here, then, is Carol us Magnus, in the year 800 of our
Lord, Emperor of France, Germany, Italy, and Hungary -
and all this is France ! — made from a strip of Rhine river
bank and five thousand barbarians led by Clovis into Gaul,
in the fifth century of our era ; there to stop and rest three
hundred years ; then to swell and swiftly break over every
boundary on east, and west, and north, and south, because of
Karl, the son of the mayor, a man too big for Gaul ; and so to
grow into that tremendous kingdom which included what
to-day is Prussia, save a bit east of the Vistula, perhaps ;
Austria this western side the Danube ; and all between this
river line and the Ebro.

" No Pyrenees" then, O grand monarque, though your
grandson failed to hew them down ! No Ehine river
then, O Kaiser Wilhelm, though your Prussia lies one
side to-day ! That was a kingdom worth Napoleon's
dreams. France ! the centre of the world, the focus of
all brightness in those dusky times of the west. Rome
came to school to Paris then, and even haughty literary
Bagdad acknowledged its acquaintance. Constantinople,
too, shook hands with Karl, but warily, and taught a sig-
nificant motto to its people, which ran thus : " Be friends
with the Franks, but be not neighbors !"

III.

We have, by this time, a hint of what Karl did in the
line of conquest. But other deeds remain whose color
is not red. Go to the secretary and hear him. tell of

CHARLEMAGNE. 121

Karl's minsters, and his monasteries, and his schools ; of
the masters he imported. Look at his laws, those famous
Capitularies. Of them Montesquieu says, in his "Esprit
des Lois :" " In Charlemagne's laws we see a vision which
commands the view of all, and a wisdom which provides
for all. . . . The father of a family could learn from him
rules for the regulation of his household. . . . He arranged
for the sale of the eggs from his farm — the same prince
who divided among his people the incalculable treasure of
the Huns who had plundered the world."

Of Charlemagne's learning we have spoken. Its limit
seems to have been in the exhaustion of means of learning,
and not at all in himself. His worshippers claim for him
varied and voluminous authorship as well. Of this we have
our doubts, though why Karl should not have " written"
as well as wrought, we do not know. He was not the man
to be behind the dead Caesar, whose place he filled. If he
wrote the epitaph upon Adrian's tomb he could certainly
have written well, if at all. Wherever the merit of its liter-
ary composition lies, it is certain the sentiment it embodies
was, as Gibbon observes, due the warm-hearted monarch.
Here is a sample, which I translate from a German copy —
Charlemagne's epitaph on the tomb of Adrian :

" Here I, Karl, engrave, while tears are swiftly thronging,

Thy epitaph, O sweetest heart, father for whom I weep !
Linger in my thought, O friend, while memory quiets longing !
Christ, the King of Heaven, henceforth forever thee shall keep.
*******
'•' Here our names united shall find no separation.

Karol, King— Hadrianus, Pope— but briefly called to part !
Ye who weeping look hereon, offer this supplication,

1 Merciful God, receive these two to Thine all-healing Heart ! ' "

122 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

Well, Carolus Magnus, Emperor of Franks and Romans,
conqueror of Spain, Saxony, Hungary, Lombardy, etc.,
improver of the empire, founder of literature, architecture,
science in Europe of the Middle Ages, finally encountered
a greater king than himself, and with little parley surren-
dered unconditionally. He died, and his body was laid in
one of his famous minsters, and over his tomb was built
an arch upon which his likeness and an inscription were
engraved. The inscription certifies : " Here lies the body
of Karl, the great and right worthy emperor, the illustrious
improver of the empire, who reigned forty-seven years
long," etc. Then the secretary goes on naively to tell of
the wonders which ensued. For three years after Karl's
death there were marvellous signs in the heavens. For a
long time there was a black spot upon the sun. All this
is recorded with the same simplicity which characterizes
the entire biography. No doubt it is fitting that the order
of nature should be disturbed when Le Roi est mort !

It is dear to the historical heart to talk of the hour and
the man, as making the most marvellous connection in the
most marvellous manner. As if the hour was ever wanting
to the man, or the man to the hour !

The hour had struck for Charlemagne, and Charlemagne
appeared — appeared to do the duty of the hour, to weld
out of conflicting races the integral nation, which should be
the Joshua of the new civilization. On the south lay
Rome, sick unto death, yet grasping, with what grasp re-
mained to that moribund old age, for the empire. The
world had too long obeyed her mandates to easily shake oif
the habit of obedience, and an echo of other days still whis-
pered in her feebly- voiced exactions. The divine right of

CHARLEMAGNE. 123

Rome had grown to be a superstition with the world, and
it needed a nerveful young master to rouse it from such a
nightmare. On the west stood Spain, with her Saracens
massed against Gibraltar, beaten back but not destroyed by
the hammer of the first Karl, waiting, watching their chance
to pounce upon these fair Franks, to transform monasteries
into mosques, and chain the Koran to the altar where the
Bible lay.

On the east the black forests cast shadows perilous to the
empire of Clovis. Swarthy savages, thicker than the forest
leaves, watched in their lair the moment of the spring,
when they might offer to their sword-god the sweet sacri-
fice of Frankish blood. Had that moment come ere Karl
came to match it, the new civilization must have been
retarded by another Middle Ages. Swarming over on all
sides, they would have pushed east and west, annihilating,
like the deluge, every former thing.

Across the forests shone the diadem of Constantinople.
Corrupted with all manner of alien blood, the Eastern
Empire had small virtue to keep sweet the world. And
from the sunrise land the domes of Bagdad sent a men-
acing gleam. Plenty of claimants for the place of Rome
were watching and planning for their hour. Had now the
Carlovingian first monarch been such as was the Merovin-
gian last — had a weak and silly Childeric arisen to fill the
place of Pepin Bref, it needs no prophet's eye to discern
what must have been ; with warring competitors within
and crowding combatants without, France must have yielded
to their combined blows and sunk beneath them. And
what then ?

The seers must tell what then ; but it needs no seer to

124: GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHEK STUDIES.

tell what not then. Not in this ninth century of our Chris-
tian era, Lombardy alchemized into Italy and put beneath
the feet of a strong master, in whose veins flowed neither
the degenerate blood of Greece nor the diseased blood of
Rome ; not Csesar stamped out of the politics of the world ;
Mahomet turned faceward to Bagdad ; Saxon exiled from
the mainland and sent flying across the British Channel, and
there, wedding with his conquerors, in due time producing
the English of to-day ; not Hun and Avar put in appren-
ticeship to the civilizer. All this, but for the monarch in
whom the man met and matched the hour, could not
have been. Setting aside all romance of the Kaiser Karl,
all story of paladins, Ogier or Roland, eschewing all lovely
legend, \ve may indorse, in sober light of historic verity,
what La Motte Fouque says of Charlemagne : " In him
was new Europe for the first time one. . . . He is the
father and creator of the German era !"

We have taken a far from comprehensive view of the
life, private and public, of one of the most conspicuous
figures in human history. Of the times upon which this
life fell we have given but a hint. Curiosity concerning
Charlemagne will never die out, and in proportion as his
true figure emerges from the mass of exaggerating fiction
and idealization which has surrounded it, it will attract a
deeper and more genuine interest. Around him centres
whatever is vital or worthy in the darkest and most
chaotic epoch of modern times, and in him is illustrated, as
perhaps in no other individual man, gigantic opportunity
meeting gigantic ability to mould the character of his own
and succeeding ages.

The author of " Undine," whose skill has found no worthy

CHARLEMAGNE. 125

compeer in certain delicate analytics, save Hawthorne, says
again : " Whoever comes to compare Karl with any other
monarch must not forget that outer deeds and their conse-
quences do not reveal the inner being nor the essence of
individuality." This is true only because of the limitations
of the observer, and not because the phenomena of deed
and life, as revealed by authentic history, could not show,
were the observer sufficiently skilled and sensitive, the
source of both, and the essence of character.

For my own part, I perceive Charlemagne to be a man
of genius, whose necessity it was to meddle with all things
at hand, arid to bring to hand things remote, and whose
good gift it was to have such a position in the world as gave
to this necessity the largest scope. It is good to look upon
this joyous, mighty man ; good to view his life ; good to
see him, struck with death, make the sign of the cross and
commend his spirit to his Lord ; good to mark the ripples
which his advent sent circling down the sea of time, and
which widen forevermore.

THE MONASTEKY.

THE MONASTERY.

SOCIETY bad two aristocracies in the Middle Ages : the
one of the State, the other of the Church. The former
took form and front in the institution of chivalry ; the latter
in that of the monastery.

The haughty chevalier, with lofty helmet and waving
plume, with broidered doublet and jewelled girdle, with
graceful cloak and burnished armor ; mounted upon his
plunging steed, richly trapped with costly harness, attended
by obsequious squire and servile suite — here was our lord
of society, the bulwark and ornament of the State.

The humble monk, with bowed head enveloped in sombre
cowl, his scanty gown dyed and stiffened by reason of his
abstinence from the sinful luxury of ablution ; his body
girt with a heavy rope, by way of showing that the beast
was well in hand ; his flesh gashed with self-inflicted
wounds and creased with ponderous chains and iron collars,
to further signify its subjection ; his feet bare and bleeding
with the stones and briers of untrodden ways ; perched
upon some all but inaccessible rock, or buried in some cave
usurped from wild-beast owner, or wandering upon the
burning sands of some desert — here was another and superior
lord of society, the bulwark and ornament of the Church.
To these monastic aristocrats even royalty itself bowed in
lowliest deference. Gibbon says : " Prosperity and peace

130 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

introduced the distinction of the vulgar and ascetic Chris-
tian."

In the mediaeval estimate, the highest-born noble, so long
as he lived in the world and was engaged in its affairs, was
the inferior of the monk, who, however obscure of birth or
low in poverty, by virtue of his secession from the ranks
of humanity, and his renunciation of all human ties and
property, was a member of a superior aristocracy. The
monastery, with its primitive lowliness, reared a loftier head
than did the feudal castle.

I.

A body of men or women, never men and women,
congregated and segregated, bound together by voluntary
obedience to a- set of rules involving renunciation of the
world, with all that intimates of sacrifice ; vowing to pov-
erty and solitude their mortal allegiance ; subjecting them-
selves to the direst extremities of exposure, hunger, and
fatigue ; inflicting upon themselves all but intolerable
torture to flesh and nerve ; seeking to expiate former utter-
ance by present speechlessness, former action by present
lethargy ; striving toward actual paralysis of all faculties
which can connect the individual with the society ; a shadow
of a living being amid shadows — this was monkhood. A
crowd of devotees, herded loosely but permanently together,
was the embryo monastery.

Antony of Egypt, in the third century, is doubtless the
founder of the Christian monastery. This man in early life
abandoned family . and home, property and all social ties,

THE MONASTERY. 131

and wandered away from the cities of the living into a city
of the dead, a region of tombs, a place of stone-covered
caves filled with bones and the dust of human skeletons.
In this sepulchral solitude he found a sphere congenial to
his penitential purpose, and here, he served out his self-
appointed time of penance, wounding and torturing his
despised body that he might rescue his soul from its thral-
dom. Att the termination of this ascetic novitiate, he
struck into the wilderness, a three-days' journey, halting at
an isolated rock which seemed suitably remote and barren,
and this he chose for his mortal residence and place of
purgatory. But his solitude was destined to be broken.
There were other men in Egypt, in those days, who were
bewildered and in despair, in doubt of present and future,
ready to practise any device by which to lose the sense of
impending doom, to flee present persecution, to secure
future salvation ; multitudes then, as now, ready to follow
if not to lead. When, therefore, it was known that
Antony, the man, the neighbor, the Egyptian, had con-
ceived such a plan, there were plenty to rush headlong in
his footsteps ; and Antony, from being the hermit of the
rock, became the abbot of the plain ; and the sands of that
Libyan desert, in the third century, became, before the
dawn of the Middle Ages, the arena of the first Christian
monastery, ruins of which, according t< Gibbon, may be
seen to this day.

Antony lived one hundred and five years, and in that
centuried lifetime he saw, as it has been the lot of few
pioneers to see, his theory and practice propagated to a
wonderful extent. Pachomius, his pupil and successor,
svas superior over seven thousand monks, Athanasius

132 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

visited Antony, caught his spirit, and carried the plan of
monastic life to yet imperial Rome, where it ran rapidly
the race of being " first endured, then pitied, then em-
braced." Martin of Tours, the bishop and soldier of the
Franks, propagated the monastic institution in Gaul, and
two thousand monks followed his body to the tomb — that
body which in dust and ashes was still so potent to work
miracles. Thence the fire leaped across the waters, and the
tiny island of lona, that Ultima Thule of the western world,
caught the holy flame, and reflected back to Cyprus in the
east an incendiary ray. Thus east and west, north and
south, the flames of monasticism flew. And at the thresh-
old of the Middle Ages we find the ground furrowed and
sown with the seeds of that stupendous growth which, in
the shape of the monastery, was to ripen through the
season of a thousand years, tares and wheat, wheat and
tares, growing together to the harvest.

In the sixth century came Benedict the Italian to weed
and cultivate the sprouting crop of Antony's sowing. The
Egyptian recluse had flung the seed, with careless hand,
hither and thither, without order or precision. Where it
fell there it lodged, and everywhere it sprouted ; but in
wild confusion. Everywhere wras to be found the monastic
spirit, the monastic profession, the monastic practice. Here,
as always, was needed the perfecter of the plan, who must
follow the pioneer.

We do not see in Antony any hint of a dream in his own
mind that he was the originator of a spiritual aristocracy.
He had in view the salvation of the individual merely, and
that individual principally the individual Antony. He fled
from the things of time and sense to save his own soul alive,

THE MONASTERY. 133

and if the sonl of his brother also, so much the better. But
\ve have no justification in history for ascribing to him wider
or more ambitious hopes.

At the epoch of the sixth century the times were no
longer the times of Antony. Already the Bishop of Rome
had become Pope, and the policy of propagation had set
in, and was giving incipient direction to religious thought
and activity. Antony stood alone ; but in Benedict's day
we see coalition ; already all things are done as means to an
end, and that end the salvation of the individual with the
establishment of the Church of Rome, as sine qua non.

Benedict was not more a monk than a missionary, and
not so much either as a reformer. Dante gives him a high
place in Paradise, and makes him

" . . . the largest and most luculent"

among the pearls which floated into sight and sound, as
he inspected those ghostly circles. Benedict, like Antony,
refused to grapple with the problem of being in the world
yet not of it. At the age of fourteen the profligacy of
Roman school-boys repelled him, and he fled from their
company into the solitudes of nature. Here a monk gave
him a dress of his order, and pointed out to him a cave in
which to meditate and do penance, and here he lived three
years, receiving his necessary food from the patron monk,
who let it down to him in his cave by a cord. Tr>ut, like
Antony, he was not suffered to remain in his cave undis-
turbed. The shepherds of the region found him out, and
the monks of the vicinity chose him for their abbot. The
fact that, having placed him in this position, these monks

134: GEORGE ELIOT' S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

endeavored to poison him thereupon, is a fact rich in com-
mentary on the character that monkhood had already
attained. Montalembert says (" Monks of the West") :
" Benedict had the ordinary fate of great men and saints.
The great number of conversions worked by the example
and fame of his austerities awakened a homicidal envy
against him." Yet Benedict lived and did his work — and
a great work for those days. lie formulated rules for the
regulation of monastic life which became " eventually the
rule of all western monachism." He grappled with a
lingering paganism, and on the ruins of a temple to
Apollo, still in the sixth century the centre of the devo-
tions of a pagan peasantry, he founded his famous Mon-
astery of Monte Cassino ; and here, standing and with
arms outstretched in prayer, in articulo mortis, he died.
From this epoch the monastery acquires organic solidity and
definite dignity. In the great Benedictine order we find
the beginnings of systematic devotion and the germ of a
more intellectual life. Of the works of the Benedictines,
Sir Walter Scott says they are u of general and perma-
nent advantage to the world at large, showing that the
revenues of the Benedictines were not always spent in self-
indulgence, and that the members of that order did not
uniformly slumber in sloth and indolence.'7 " The order
increased so rapidly that the Benedictines must be regarded
as the main agents in the spread of Christianity, civilization,
and learning in the west" (Chambers' s Encyclopaedia).

Here, then, we find the monastery full-grown. The
monks are no longer hermits, but students and propagan-
dists.

Did a man covet the career of the monk and the glory

THE MONASTERY. 135

of monastic life ? He must first totally surrender every
tie and renounce all. Then he must stand for several
days at the monastery door and receive the affronts of the
porter, by way of testing his ascetic fortitude. This pre-
liminary being satisfactorily passed, he is conducted into
the reception-room of the monastery, and some superior
monk initiates him into the rules of monastic life. Among
these is implicit obedience to his superior, which one of
the fathers calls the monk's first virtue. He is to shun
laughter, to hold no private property, to live sparely, to
exercise hospitality, and, above all, to be industrious. He
is given a long black gown, with a cowl or hood of the same,
and a scapulary. After a novitiate of one year he becomes,
by solemn ceremonies, a monk in full. His life is now
one of unvarying routine, tedious or the contrary, according
to the wealth or poverty of his own individuality, for this,
however suppressed, must follow him within his cloister,
whether he will or no. His conditions are now remarkably
ill-calculated to make his mind his kingdom, for it must be
in defiance of his vows, if he gets any intellectual stimu-
lus. His obligation of eternal poverty prevents all acquisi-
tion. He can call nothing his own. Such expressions
were severely punished. The rule of Columbanus — who
came after Benedict — inflicted six lashes for any lapsus
lingucB in which the possessive pronoun u my" slipped out.
The vow of implicit obedience in its full performance
surrendered intellect and conscience at once into the hand
of the abbot. The same Columbanus, who was an Irish
monk and a fair competitor for honor with Benedict in
missionary zeal, lays down one of his rules thus : " Any
monk who signs not the spoon with which he eats with the

136 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

sign of the cross, or who strikes the table with his knife,
or who coughs at the beginning of a psalm, shall receive six
lashes." In Maitland's " Dark Ages" we have quoted an
instance of a monk who, pronouncing the Latin verb to
teach, docere, was bidden by the Abbot to say docere • the
ignorant abbot was obeyed, and we do not learn that the
monk had the contumacy of Galileo, or that he muttered any
accented penult in an undertone. This obedient monk
was Lanfranc, afterward Archbishop of Canterbury.

II.

When we come to consider the causes from which the
monastery arose, we shall find that they are not the mo-
nopoly of the Middle Ages, nor the special property of
Christianity. The monastic spirit is inherent in man, and
has found rare and isolated development in every age.
If asceticism be a disease, yet it must be ranked among
those diseases the seeds of which are born with us, and
are called, whether scientifically or not, natural diseases,
If we grant that the monastery is a monstrosity, we must
admit also that the monstrous is everywhere possible, and
own, with Goethe, " that it is in her monstrosities that
nature reveals to us her secrets."

The idea which lies at the bottom, as corner-stone of the
monastery, may be developed, on occasion, from any indi-
vidual of the race. There is the making of a monk in
every man.

What, then, was the occasion from which, in the Middle

THE MONASTERY. 137

Ages, the monastic spirit found so gigantic and dispropor-
tioned a development as to make that time seem to have
almost the monopoly of the monastery ?

The occasion is on the surface. It is the Middle Ages
itself — the times. Given a man with scrofula in his blood,
and yet so arrange his environment that his tendencies may
find no occasion for development ; give him climate, occu-
pation, food — all that tends to suppression of the humor,
and it may never break out. He may never, except from
say 'so, know he has it. Let the opposite conditions be
provided ; let the occasion be offered, and he will soon
discover, by ics dire development, the inherent poison in
his system. The scrofula of monasticism boiled in the blood
of mediaeval men, and the times afforded just those condi-
tions which most favored its outbreak.

The times ! Never were such times. Humanity poised,
as it were, between the receding old and the advancing
new. Babylon fallen, but the captivity not ended. The
world torn by two mighty winds from opposite quarters,
one bringing thunders of regeneration and lightnings of
regeneration frpm the west, the other emptying vials of
wrath from the long tyranny of cloud-hung, rain-curtained
east. It was the unsettling of all things. The fall of
Rome had filled the world with the fragments of shattered
things, the rising Germanic Empire had covered all with a
pall of blood. Pagan temples lay prostrate, but the debris
was not cleared away, and the Christian Basilica struggled
up slowly, wrapped in a mist of the legend and fable of the
old idolatries. In these times of confusion men stood con-
fused. Their limbs trembled beneath them ; their hearts
throbbed with apprehension ; their intellects failed them ;

POETRY, AND OTIIEK STUDIES.

only the suffering, affrighted soul within them hungered
and aspired toward salvation. It was a time of panic — a
time for men to rush, blind with fear and faith, through
any door swung open before them which promised escape.
Here, then, was the moment for the monastery. Its door
swung open before panic-pursued multitudes, and tides of
humanity swept over its portal out of the world.

For the thing was to get out of the world before the
world got out itself. It was everywhere believed that the
end of the world was near. The Church fathers taught
and preached it. It was looming up, ever coming, and
coming soon. And the influence of this belief contributed
largely to the success of monastic propagation. Gregory I.,
as late as the sixth century, wrote to Ethelred in Briton
that the end of the world was coming. What could it
signify, then, how things went on in a world which was
about to burn up ? Material interests arid possessions slip-
ped easily from the grasp when the end of all things was
so near at hand.

The mediaeval man was a simple creature compared to
our complex modern. In that great twilight space, out of
which at any moment was to burst the fires of the last con-
flagration, there stood to his conception two ideas, and only
two of much importance — his Flesh and his Spirit. My body
and my soul — these made up the mediaeval ego. Very dis-
tinct and wholly antipodal ; the one from above, the other
from beneath, and between these two a great gulf fixed.
Even so large and tender a genius as Gregory Kazianzen
expresses this sentiment constantly in his poems, notably in
" Soul and Body," which is thus translated by Mrs. Brown-
ing. To his soul, he says :

THE MONASTERY. 139

" What wilt thou possess or be?
Oh, my soul, I ask of thee.
"What of great or what of small
Counted precious therewithal ?
Be it only rare and want it,
I am ready, Soul, to grant it !

******
"... what wilt thou be,

Oh, rny soul ? a deity ?

A god before the face of God,

Standing glorious in His glories,

Choral in His angels' chorus ?

******
" Go ! upon thy wing arise.

Plumed by quick energies,

Mount in circles up the skies ;

And I will bless thy winged passion,

Help, with words, thine exaltation,

And, like bird of rapid feather,

Outlaunch thee, Soul, upon the ether."

But to the body, Gregory, the poet, speaks thus

" But thou, O fleshly nature, say
Thou with odors from the clay,
Since thy presence I must have,
As a lady with a slave.
*******
May some rocky house receive thee
Self -roofed, to conceal thee chiefly !"

Then he goes on to show what this beast-body may claim
as its due — only so much as to keep it as a tenement of
spirit, alive, and with such necessaries promises it a rope
besides, calling it a household foe.

That subtle Briareus of science and sanity, the Intellect,

14:0 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

which in these days stands between flesh and spirit, and with a
hundred hands and voices entreats the one to be reconciled to
the other, was lacking then. Men were Manichees, and be-
lieved their bodies to be wholly antagonistic to their spirits.
They believed, with intense conviction, that the soul was
worth saving, and could be saved only by crucifixion of the
flesh. The body is beast possessed by devil, whose sole
function is to tempt and ruin. The soul must be torn from
its enchanter, the evil wizard, flesh. In these two ideas
lies the key to the gigantic monastery of the Middle Ages.

This simple man, made up of soul and body, was easily
persuaded. He stood, like a child overtaken by a storm in
the forest, bewildered and frightened, and ready to follow
whithersoever led. And his leaders led him into the mon-
astery. In the fourth century, Jerome, learned and wealthy,
the princely father of the Primitive Church, says of him-
self : " I voluntarily condemned myself to this prison and
exile for fear of hell, having no other company but scor-
pions and wild beasts. ... I often joined whole nights to
the days, crying, sighing, and beating my breast, . . . and,
being angry and armed with severity against myself, I went
alone into the most secret part of the wilderness, and if I dis-
covered anywhere a deep valley or craggy rock, that was the
place of my prayer ; there I threw this miserable sack of my
body." And he breaks out eloquently in praise of and per-
suasion to monastic life thus : " O desert, enamelled with
the flowers of Christ ! O solitude, where those stones are
built of which, in -the Apocalypse, is built the city of
God ! O retreat, which rejoicest in the friendship of God !
What doest thou in the world, my brother, with thy soul
greater than the world ? How long wilt thou remain in the

THE MONASTERY.

shadow of roofs, and in the smoky dungeons of cities ? Be-
lieve me, I see here more of the light." Indeed, Jerome
was a prime propagator of monastic life at this early day.
It was he who brought into the folds of the monastery the
illustrious Roman widow Paula, with all her vast wealth,
her daughters included. And she becomes straightway a
heroine of the times and times after, Jerome eulogizing her
thus : " If all the members of my body were changed into
tongues — if all my limbs resounded with a human voice, yet
should I be incapable of sounding her praises." Chrysos-
tom, " who in his preaching so carried awray his audiences
that they beat the pavement with their swords and called
him the thirteenth apostle," wrote and preached, with his
surpassing enthusiasm and eloquence, of the monastic life as
above all others. No other is comparable to it ; indeed, he
intimates that no one outside of the monastery is quite cer-
tain of salvation. This teaching and persuasion continued
all through the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century St.
Bernard, called " Mellifluous Doctor," uses all his eloquence
still in favor of monasticism. Vaughan, in his " Hours
with the Mystics," says : " With Bernard the monastic life
is the one thing needful. He began life by drawing after
him into the convent all his kindred. . . . His incessant
cry for Europe is, * Better monasteries and more of them ! ' :
Thus on all sides we find persuasion to the monastic life. Xo
one was excluded ; the soldier might desert his standard, but
if he deserted into the monastery he incurred no dishonor.
It was to all classes an asylum, an alternative where alone
could satisfaction be found. To those whose lives were well
worn out in the pleasures and sins of the world it offered
place for repentance. Pliny, as early as his day, describes

142 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

the monasteries he encounters in his travels as the abode of
" a solitary race, but constantly replenished by penitents
from the outer world." This before the thick darkness of
the Middle Ages had gathered. And when the darkness
had passed away, in the Elizabethan age, we find the great
Emperor Charles Y. abdicating the crown of Germany and
Spain to enter a monastery. Of him Byron says :

" The Spaniard, when the lust of sway

Had lost its quickening spell,
Cast crowns for rosaries away,
An empire for a cell."

— Ode to Napoleon.

To the abjectly poor it offered betterment in temporal
affairs. None so low in life but he might rise to dis-
tinction here, had lie the fortitude to exceed others in
austerity. A poor shepherd might make himself immortal
as Charlemagne if he had invention and endurance in
making himself miserable. Such an one was Simeon, the
ingenious Syrian shepherd, who deserted his sheep and
built himself a pillar of stones, gradually reaching the
height of sixty feet. Here he skilfully balanced himself
thirty years. Gibbon says : i£ Successive crowds of pilgrims
from Gaul and India saluted the divine pillar of Simeon."
He was all but adored by kings and queens. The Emperor
Theodosius consulted him on affairs of Church and State ;
his funeral was royal in its pageantry. Indeed, there was
scarcely a passion of human nature to which the monastery
could not appeal to win recruits. All that could soothe
conscience, all that could natter vanity, all that could
promise humility, all that could tempt ambition, had here

T 1 1 E M( )X A ST E RY .

a settled residence. There is indeed plenty of reason for
the existence of the monastery, and its gigantic proportion
in the Middle Age is less and less mysterious the more we
look into that age. Nor must we go too far in condemna-
tion of those, the holy fathers of the Christian faith, who,
in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, contrib-
uted so largely to the excessive growth of monastic life.
Rather let us attain to the temper of Charles Kingsley, and
seek to find, as he says, " some apology for the failings of
such truly great men as Dunstan, Becket, and Dominic,
and of many more whom, if we hate, we shall never under-
stand, while we shall be but too likely, in our own way, to
copy them." Kingsley says, in his preface to the " Saint's
Tragedy " : " The Middle Age was, in the gross, a coarse,
barbarous, and profligate age. ... It was, in fact, the very
ferocity and foulness of the times which, by a natural revul-
sion, called forth at the same time the apostolic holiness and
the Manichean asceticism of the mediaeval saints. The
world was so bad that to be saints at all they were compelled
to go out of the world. . . . But really time enough has
been lost in ignorant abuse of that period, and time enough
also, lately, in blind adoration of it. When shall we learn
to see it as it was, the dawning manhood of Europe, rich
with all the tenderness, the simplicity, the enthusiasm of
youth, but also darkened, alas ! with its full share of youth's
precipitance and extravagance, fierce passions, and blind
self-will ; its virtues and its vices colossal, and for that very
reason always haunted by the twin-imp of the colossal — the
caricatured."

14:4: GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

III.

What other than a calamity could that be considered
which took away from both Church and State its best and
purest-minded citizens ? Yet this was precisely the imme-
diate effect of the monastery upon its own times. Thou-
sands upon thousands from those mediaeval societies, so
needing manhood and Christianhood, were swept by this
monstrous epidemic superstition. In Egypt, in the century
in which Antony lived, it is stated that the number of cit-
izens thus nullified to the state was equal to those left.
Centuries before the feudal system settled like the stone of
a sepulchre upon the masses entombed beneath it — centuries
before chivalry issued in its haughty aristocracy therefrom,
clid the monastery draw to its silent prison the men and
women in whom, save for this curdling superstition, was
virtue enough to keep the whole world sweet. In vain
did the emperors issue decrees against this decimation of
the State. The eloquence of the fathers, the tyranny of
diseased conscience, exceeded in authority the mandates of
the Caesars.

In the beginning it is the individual who must be saved
at price of all penance and renunciation. In the end it is
the Church that must prosper at the cost of all individual
character — the individual contributing to the prosperity of
the Church will be saved as a matter of course. In the
beginning the monastery is a hermit, then a company of
monks — cenobites having all things in common — living on
rocks, in caves, subsisting on air and prayer. In the end it
is the gorgeous monastery of elaborate architecture — the

THE MONASTERY. 145

mitred abbot with retinue like a king, with royal refectory,
with feudal acres, lord over a spiritual aristocracy.

All along the line, however, we see effort at reform and
restoration of the early ideaL After Antony, with a lapso
of four odd centuries, comes Benedict, to put in order and
subject to rule ; after Benedict, by six odd centuries, come
Francis and Dominic, to engraft the early good fruit on the
aging, corrupt tree ; and again, in the fourteenth century,
we see the August! nian reformer. Yet this was the order
in which, in the sixteenth century, Luther found the need
and the germ of a more radical and permanent reformation.
And Luther stands to us in total contrast to any ideal, early
or late, of .monastic life. Pre-eminently a man among
men, most human in humanity, we see in his character, and
his creed, and his work the eternal antagonism of Chris-
tianity to monachism.

To its own times, then, we must view the institution of
monastic life as containing more the constituents of a curse
than a blessing. But he who comes to bring this indict-
ment must not sum up his case before he has studied the
effect of the monastery on succeeding times. And with a
lengthening sweep of vision we may discern results from
this institution on succeeding ages which, to both State and
Church — to society and Christianity rather — have been
untold blessings.

Society owes to the monastery its democracy. This off-
shoot from mediaeval society preserved in its aristocracy of
asceticism the individual to the State. Feudal aristocracy
took all the men and women, in Lady Montagu's use of
that phrase. They alone came to the surface ; there was
no chance for the low-born and the underling. Mind was

146 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

no measure of the man in those days — would never have
been, save for the gradual development of the intellectual
through the narrow but deep channels of the scholasticism
of the monasteries. Here the vulgus could rush in and
compel recognition and deference. Gregory VII., the
gigantic constructive genius of the Middle Age, the son of a
carpenter, could work his way through the cell of the monk
to the papal chair, and there compel homage and submission
from an emperor. The Church of the Middle Ages recog-
nized always the individual, and the coarsest and poorest
might be transmuted into fine gold through the crucibles of
cloister and cell. This bare suggestion may be developed
with logical sequences until we realize the grand causality
of this institution of mediaeval times, in the evolution of a
true democracy of modern times.

To the evolution of a practical Christianity in succeed-
ing times the monastery brings also an incalculable factor.
Ideals in manhood and Christianhood emerge into view, by
successive action and reaction. Doubtless the world must
some time have tried the monastic ideal. The egregious
mistake that it is clearly seen to be with the vision that
comes after the event, could never have been so seen before
the event. St. Jerome would not advise the monastic life
in the days of Kings! ey and Stanley ; yet how can we be
sure that a Kingsley or a Stanley would not have erred
with St. Jerome in his own day ? Certain it is that the
problem how to live in the world but not of the world still
confronts those who would be unworldly; and as certain
that Christendom has, once for all, had it proven that the
problem is not solved by isolation from the world.

And yet it could ill afford to spare these pioneer monks,

THE MONASTERY. 147

who, with all tlieir excesses and painful perversions, are
"those without whom we could not be made perfect.1'
Jiontalembert says: "Who has not contemplated, if not
with the eyes of faith, at least with the admiration inspired
by uncontrollable greatness of soul, the struggles of these
athletes of penitence ? . . . Everything is to be found there
— variety, pathos, the sublime and simple epic of a race of
men earnest as children and strong as giants."

One great common benefit to both mediaeval and modern
world the monastery subserved — a benefit so transcendent
that for it we forgive all its egregious suicide of citizen and
Christian, its incarceration and mutilation of each. It did
for us what could have been done by no other means in this
ruined and ruinous epoch of time — it kept us our books.
The storm raged everywhere, but here was safe repository,
and in the advanced years of the monastic institution the
compilation and copying of these priceless manuscripts was a
leading feature of the industrious life of a monk. The
Scriptorium of the monastery is to us moderns hallowed
ground, and for it we may forget its cells and their terrors.

The monastery of the Middle Ages has passed away with
the times that gave it birth. In place of a squalid encamp-
ment spread upon the burning sands of Africa, sentineled
with hermit huts, a circle of separate cells where ascetics of
superior piety burrowed like moles in the sand — in place of
the rocky rendezvous of northern lands, swarming with its-,
busy brotherhood — in place of the opulent abbey, where
sensual abbot and worldly friar in a later day became the
minions of popes and the masters of men — in place of alL
this we have, here and there, a lichened abbey, a vacant
pile of mediaeval architecture, in Africa, in Palestine, in

148 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

Italy, whose crumbling ruins make a melancholy monument
to the fanatic populace that once thronged their cells and
now lie in the dust beneath them. Here and there, indeed,
the traveller finds a roof and shelter, food and lodging, a
lighted fire and a kindly welcome from the modern friar,
whose length of belt and ringing laugh tell no tale of early
days. Rarely, indeed, as at La Trappe, may the ghost of
Antony be fancied to revisit his degenerate progeny, degen-
erate even in the austere rule and miserable asceticism of
the terrible Trappists. As we gaze upon the ruins of the
mediaeval monastery, and as our imagination summons before
us from their dust a multitude of mediaeval monks and nuns,
led by the saintly Antony, who bends beneath the hundred
years of his tortured existence ; a courtly Basil, eloquent
and learned ; a Roman matron, Paula, in whose veins were
mingled blood of Grecian Agamemnon and Roman Grac-
chus, whose wealth embraced a city of Augustinian gran-
deur ; a shepherd, Simeon, self-chained to his pillar's sum-
mit through the fires of thirty summers, through the frosts
of thirty winters, bending in the blast beneath the sun, be-
neath the stars, with ceaseless wail for a mercy, mercy !" —
when we mark the myriads that follow in their wake, noble
with peasant, scholar with clown, all alike with bowed
head, and downcast eye, and emaciated figure, loaded with
iron greaves and collars, covered with hair like the beasts
among whom they lived, winding in and out of narrow,
vacant, unlit cells, bending before the cross which every-
where confronts them — when we hear their wailing Miserere
echoing through the silent air, when we behold their pain-
sharpened features, their sunken eyes glowing with terror of
remorse, pleading for absolution, their ghastly glances fixed

THE MONASTERY. 149

upon an approaching doom which diseased conscience peo-
ples with demon and avenger — alas ! what spectacle has
history presented that equals this for melancholy ?

The mediaeval monastery has passed away. It will not
return. But monachism remains, and will remain while
human nature bides its time. Over and over again will a
wretched phantasy of conscience bid the conscience-stricken
turn his back on homely, present duty in the battle-plain of
life, and make the same old experiment of self-salvation
in unhallowed renunciations. The spirit of Monachism has
survived the mediaeval monastery. Its profitless experi-
ments, its unavailing renunciations, are not now confined
to convent walls. Not among those luminous figures which
emerge from the modern convent to carry the comfort of
the Cross to battle-field and prison-cell and hospital cot,
do we find the painfulest examples of its sad misleading ;
but in the selfish segregations of the fashionable cliques, the
complacent hypocrisy of social ostracisms, of scientific
unbelief, of sated, soulless culture, of morbid research, of
wretched introspection, of indolent abstraction from the
practicabilities of life. The mediaeval man fled into the
monastery ; the modern man flees into himself, and all un-
consciously, in manifold ways, repeats the old vain folly of
a selfish subjectivity.

Hundreds of years before Antony of Egypt laid the
corner-stone of the mediaeval monastery a young man sat
on an Eastern throne, ruler over countless myriads of servile
subjects, owner of all the wealth of India. Yet, though
swaying so potent a sceptre, seated on so towering a throne,
wearing so glittering a crown, the soul within this youthful
monarch tortured him to a strange sacrifice for its sake.

150 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

He abandons all — throne, subjects, wealth, pleasure, power
— and, searching out the meanest and most abject slave in
his realm, takes from him his tattered, filthy robe, and puts it
on his own royal form, and thus disguised goes forth from
all humanity to be alone. In trackless forest and in barren
desert, in cave of beast and rock of eagle, he serves out his
self-appointed term of penance and probation ; and when
this is accomplished he returns, another being from another
world, and lays before his subjects, among whom is none
so poor as he, the true wealth he has found — the secret of
existence, the summum lionum, of human life, the knowl-
edge how to lose existence, how to submerge human life,
how to annihilate the individual.

Behold in Buddhism the genius of the monastery ! Be-
hold in Gautama the prototype of Antony !

Bat midway between Antony and Gautama behold the
Nazarene, the young Carpenter, the Evangelist, the Son,
the Brother, the Man of Bethlehem — behold Him entering
into all the joys and sorrows of the manhood which He
dignified, wearing graciously to its last humiliation the garb
of human flesh to which He has ever joined in honorable
wedlock the unassailable human soul — behold Him, from
His manger- cradle to His death-bed cross, pre-eminently
the Man of men, fullest of humanity, whose whole burden
of mission to us lies epitomized in His own statement : " I
am come that ye might have life, arid that ye might have it
more abundantly."

Life ! Life ! A more intense, individual human life !

" 'Tis life of which our views are scant —
More life, and fuller, that we want 1"

The humanity of each of us is like some ^Eolian harp

THE MONASTERY. 151

constructed by the Master Musician and laid down ten-
derly by Him upon the sea-shore where winds from every
quarter play continuously. Buddhism would sweep into the
vast ocean this palpitating lyre, and mix its several elements
indistinguishably in the deep waters. Mediaeval monasticism
would heap it with sand and bury its melodies from every
human ear. An enlightened Christianity would leave it,
free and sensitive, upon the shore — would open it to all the
winds that hurry to and fro, that it may give out to heaven
arid earth its full completed harmony.

Behold in Christianity the antipode of Buddhism, the
antidote of Monachism !

CHIVALRY.

CHIVALRY.

As the word Chivalry falls upon our ears a motley multi-
tude, in shadowy panorama, glides before us. Here gleam
the lances of a Richard, lion-hearted, a Godfrey, a Ray-
mond, a St. Louis ; blending anon with cross and staff of
barefooted pilgrim, or hermit Peter, or pauper \Yalter, sans
savoir, or priestly St. Bernard ; changing with ample tur-
ban of remorseless Turk and flashing cimetar of bearded
Saracen, worn and borne by a Suleiman or a Saladin. Or
perhaps we think of an Arthur or a Tancred, summing up
in one the virtues of the ideal knight,

" Who reverenced his conscience as his king,
Whose glory was redressing hnman wrongs,
Who spake no slander, no, nor listened to it,
Who loved one only, and who clave to her. ' '

This masculine perfection is broad and tall, a splendid
giant, mounted always on a plunging charger, with drawn
lance and tossing plume, with broidered doublet and
jewelled girdle beneath the graceful cloak which hangs
with careful carelessness on the left shoulder. This, if our
author chance to be Tasso, or Tennyson, or Sir "Walter
Scott.

If, however, we have fallen upon Cervantes and gained
from him our notion of the mediaeval chevalier, straightway
the name evokes the Knight of the Sorrowful Figure, with

15G GEORGE ELIOT1 8 POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

disjointed, rattling armor, mounted on Iris wind-broken
steed, with pasteboard vizor, making furious raids on wind-
mills, attended at a comfortable interval by his somnolent,
sententious squire solidly astride a stiff-legged ass ! — the
one sublime, the other ridiculous, and both fictions. Yet,
if there be but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous,
that step must be our via media / and here, if anywhere
between the two extremes, shall we find our veritable his-
toric chevalier.

We cannot deny that inclination might turn us to one
side alone and leave us there, were inclination not in league
with conscience in this research. We would rather believe
in the exquisite Tancred of Tasso, the impassioned Orlando
of Ariosto, with their superhuman virtues and valors, their
transcendent prowess and fortitude, than in something less.
But we must take what history gives us.

I.

In our brief study of medigeval chivalry we must hold
ourselves ready at any time to separate the spirit of chivalry
from the institution of chivalry, to which it gave rise.

The spirit of chivalry may be inferred from the vow
which in its early history was confession of faith to the
chevalier, and is thus epitomized : " To speak the truth, to
succor the helpless and oppressed, and never to turn back
from an enemy." Fidelity, clemency, courage, courtesy—
these four seern to sum up the main points of the chivalric
code. From this vow, taken by youths of noble lineage at

CHIVALRY. 157

the age of twenty-one, and accompanied with the investiture
of arms, arose the institution of chivalry, which, from small
to large, grew, in the lapse of time, into the vast proportions
of a military organization, and for several centuries formed
a cavalry which was the nearest approach to and substitute
for a standing army in the new nations of Europe.

The ceremony of initiation into the rank of chevalier at
the age of twenty-one was preceded by a regular education
from the age of seven. From this time up to the age of
fourteen the boy was page to the lords and ladies in the
castle of his feudal superior, and at this impressible age
acquired, from association with its votaries, the notions and
manners. of chivalry. The next ssven years he was called
squire, and his duties were those of attendance upon his
superior at tournament, or joust, or real battle, where skill
and prowess in the field duties of knighthood were acquired.
Then, this seven years of apprenticeship being served, at
the age of twenty-one the young squire takes the vow pre-
scribed, is invested with arms, and made a knight in the
presence of an assembled multitude.

Command imagination to present you at this scene. Let
us join this multitude of fair women and brave men over
whom the sun, reflected from myriad glittering lances,
sheds a dazzling light. Behold in the centre of this arena,
to which all eyes are turned, the young Frank, massive of
form, fair of face, lofty of mien. Listen, while every ear
is strained and every sound is hushed, as with ringing voice
he vows toward Heaven to " speak the truth, to succor the
helpless and oppressed, and never to turn back from an
enemy." Behold him now kneel as his sovereign lord
invests him with the belt and spurs, and places in his hand

158 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

the lance of chivalry, while with his own he strikes the
glowing cheek of the yonng chevalier one blow as token
of the last insult he shall endure.

II.

There has been much dispute and research as to when
chivalry was instituted. Hallam says " chivalry may, in a
general sense, be referred to the age of Charlemagne." In
the Cabalarii of Karl we find the equipment and investi-
ture of the cavalier, if not his creed and conduct. These
pet soldiers were matched by the Milites of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries, when feudalism had established aris-
tocracy among the nations of Europe. In the decentraliza-
tion of sovereign power which followed the taking off of
Charlemagne, there began to be many centres of government
and society, inside circles, and wheels within wheels. The
king stood, with his dukes, at the centre of the system.
Barons circled outside and revolved about these, themselves
being centres of still outer circles, composed, in turn, of
their subordinates, who were sometimes nobles, but in-
ferior ; sometimes free men, but dependent ; sometimes
serfs, who were to their lords little more than chattel
property.

This state of society reached its worst and best in the
period between the ninth and twelfth centuries. The
anarchy which ensued in the kingdom of France upon the
death of Charlemagne, the extinction of the Carlovingian
and the usurpation of the Capetian dynasty, may be

CHIVALRY. 159

regarded as parent occasion to the development of that sub-
sequent aristocracy of which the head and front is found in
the institution of chivalry. From out the ranks of this
feudal aristocracy could be summoned, on occasion, an
armed and mounted cavalry to serve in its defence ; and
the relation of vassal and superior was, in its origin, not
inimical to the development of many of the virtues and
graces of chivalry.

The question, "Where was chivalry born ? may be an-
swered in a monosyllable. For in that twilight time the
stars shone chiefly on one spot. Not Italy, decrepit and
dismembered ; not Germany, the prey of savages from
eastern wjlds ; not Spain, as yet unallied with Germany and
standing, quite at bay, with lance of French hunter on the
east, and howl of wolfish Moslem on the west ; not Eng-
land, unarisen from the ground where Saxon grapples Nor-
man ere their wrestle grows to an embrace.

Nowhere but over France is there space of tranquil sky in
which the star of chivalry can rise and reach its zenith.
And there it burns, illuminating the neighboring nations,
and lighting distant ones with a lengthened ray. The
fiery Spaniard, senile Roman, sullen Saxon, and afar the
subtle Saracen copy the graces of the chevalier of France,
despite the intermittent discords among their nationalities.
The ferocity of their wars is greatly mitigated by the man-
ners and virtues of the code of chivalry. The chronic quar-
rels between the Capetians and Plantagenets were less brutal
than any battles ever were. Hallam says : " In the wars of
Edward III., originating in no real animosity, the spirit of
honorable as well as courteous conduct toward the foe seemed
to have arrived at its highest point." E-u skin says : "The

160 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

battle of Agincourt is romantic, and of Bannockburn, sim-
ply because there was an extraordinary display of human
virtue in both these battles." There was much of the joust
and something of the tournament in these engagements, de-
spite the bloodshed. In the closing decade of the eleventh
century the star of chivalry rested in its zenith over the
sepulchre in Palestine, and was reflected thence until all these
tilting lancers — Spaniard, Saxon, German, and Italian —
rallied round the chevalier of France, and bore in common
cause a common lance beneath the Oriflamme !

We gaze upon this phenomenon of chivalry, pre-eminent
not only in the history of society in the Middle Ages, but
pre-eminent in the history of society in all ages, and we
wonder whence this wondrous bloom amid the desert. We
look so unbelievingly upon the good side of our humanity
that a development there is first incredible and then unac-
countable. A Sardanapalus does not tax our credulity, nor
a Nero — the horrors of ancient and modern pagan societies ;
but a Gautama, a Socrates, an Aurelius upon the throne of
the Caesars, an Epictetus in the days of Nero — these strain
our credulity, and we constantly wonder how it was. Yet in
my view it is to the unadulterated good in humanity that we
must refer the rise and development of this pre-eminent
phenomenon of chivalry. It is true these knights had
the historic Christ, and some of them loved and served
Him with the knightly love that makes all who have it
" Knights of the Holy Ghost ;" for the modern phenom-
enon, a Christian, has in him the mediaeval phenomenon,
a chevalier. But the institution of chivalry did not spring
from Christianity, nor were the creed, tradition, or practice
of what the theologians call revealed religion any essential

CHIVALRY. 161

of the creed, tradition, or practice of chivalry ; yet it had
its springs in the religious nature of man ; it sprang from
the necessity of man to create for himself an ideal, from that
inalienable endowment of human nature by which we must
worship, aspire, obey.

This position takes very general ground, and does not pre-
vent the entrance of many particulars which may fill the
interval lying between first cause and effect. Thus some
pay the seeds of the Socratic teachings, the Stoic philoso-
phies, or that of Boethius, nearer their own times, put the
thought of chivalry into these medisevals, and caused the
formulation of its sublimely simple creed. This may be or
may not be ; I only claim for these mediaeval men that they
could have thought this thought unassisted.

Speaking of links in the chain of causation, however, I
must mention one which was certainly original with these
mediae vals — the ^ooman in it ! The romancers and poets,
Chaucer at their head, make her the first cause here ; this
I do not admit ; but 1 shall do no violence to my convictions
if I consent to call this natural religion, which was not the
worshipping, obeying, and following of a historic Christ,
the worshipping at least of woman. And here we strike
upon the great distinguishing characteristic of chivalry —
something we find nowhere else — its mystic ideal, the
woman. The last lines of Goethe's greatest work sums up
the essence of the chevalier's theology : " Ever the woman-
soul leadeth us on." The Ewigweibliche was their misty,
mystic deity; the woman supplied to. them their anthro-
pomorphic deity. Of course what I have said by way of
indicating the line of thought along which we must travel
in order to arrive at the parent causes of chivalry relates

AND OTHER STUDIES.

to the spirit or theory of chivalry rather than to the in-
stitution. I suppose we need not search long for the
causes of Charlemagne's Cabalarii. The idea in the busy
brain of the monarch which brought about the organization
of this fine cavalry was not more religious, I presume, than
that which produced the Tall Regiment of Frederick Will-
iam of Prussia, or the invincible Beef -Eaters of Henry VII.
and Victoria of England. Cause here is resolved into occa-
sion, and both are on the surface.

The institution of chivalry, as it became elaborated and
corrupted with accretions alien to its spirit, lost its chem-
istry, and became a thing of mechanism. Its affinities un-
locked, and its substance went into solution. From this
solution came, as permanent political precipitate, the stand-
ing armies of Europe. Its fantastic adornments and senti-
mental practices passed, as its superficial social crystal, into
the courtiers of later days, the cavaliers of English Stuart
and French Bourbon regimes. That intrinsic, indestruc-
tible, immutable element, the spirit of chivalry, evaporated
into those high regions whence it came and comes again,
wooing, by its gentle virtues, from the soil of all ages rare
blooms of knightly service to the world.

Hallam says the invention of gunpowder made an end of
the institution of chivalry. This engine of modern civiliza-
tion was known in the thirteenth century, but did not reach
efficiency in warfare until the commencement of the
fifteenth. The Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries engrafted upon chivalry that excessive elaboration
.which is the inevitable precursor of corruption in all human
institutions. In time the golden article of chivalry — clem-
ency to the weak and conquered, and courtesy to all — took

CHIVALRY. 163

on the character of gallantry toward women, which was, as
its workings show, either a sensual sophistry or a fantastic
sentimentality, emasculating ideal knighthood. 1 think, in
a sense not wholly literal, Hallam is right. The cannon of
the fifteenth century blew up the thing still bearing the
name of chivalry. The gun superseded the lance. The
pomp and circumstance of chivalry dispersed, its day being
done. But when the artillery of modern times levelled this
breastwork of the medisevals, if fallen, as a whole, there yet
remained fractions of the structure, but units in themselves,,
imperishable granite stones wedged into the edifice which
no shock could disintegrate, and which will endure, for the
admiration of the ages. There were immortal lords arid
ladies — for, as we have seen, ladies were sine qua non
of knights — men and women — the men and women — the
world's best — aristocracy of all the ages — a Spanish Cid,
" inferior to none that ever lived in frankness, honor, and
magnanimity," Hallam says ; and Schlegel calls him an
ineffaceable picture " of the single-minded and true-hearted
old Castilian spirit, . . . undoubtedly the genuine history1'
of the man — true Spanish gold in exchange for all Quixote
counterfeits ; and the Donna Ximena, his wife, full in-
demnity for all Dulcineas ; a Richard, lion-hearted and yet
shedding knightly tears of knightlier penitence at his father's
grave — solid gain for any dubious, superhuman Arthur ; a
veritable Tancred in good change for Tasso's saint ; and his
uncle, Robert Guiscard, the Norman knight of marvellous
renown, whom Gibbon describes as " of lofty stature, sur-
passing the tallest of his army ; his complexion ruddy, his
shoulders broad, his hair and beard long and of flaxen
color, his eyes sparkling with fire, while his voice, like that

164 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

of Achilles, could impress obedience and terror amid the
tumult of battle — wielding his sword in one hand, in the
other his lance, thrice unhorsed in battle of which he was
most eminent victor over eminent victors." Of less fleshly
splendor is a St. Louis, most tender son, most valiant Chris-
tian, whose virtues and graces realize the Arthur of poetry ;
and his mother, Regent Blanche, every inch a monarch and
every inch a mother ; and his seneschal, the Sieur de Join-
ville, of frankest heart, most lovable in child-like chivalry.
Some antiquarians seern afraid of too much light upon
these fine antiques, and perhaps many of us may have a
subtle suspicion that by a too free ventilation these time-
tinted portraits may lose those lovely hues of age which
suffice to stamp them as " genuine." This feeling comes
from the enchantment which distance lends to our ideals,
and is something to be gently criticised. But in this par-
ticular case I think there is small ground for fear. Hob
him of much with which hero-worship invests him, and there
still remains to this mediaeval chevalier that which will ever-
more preserve and distinguish him. One or two of his
characteristics are lost to us moderns, and will forever stamp
him sui generis. There are and will be men as strong of
heart, but there never will or can be, I venture, men so
strong of nerve and muscle — men of such physical perfec-
tions, of such matchless prowess, of such superb endurance.
We need not go far to find causes for our degeneration from
this stature of the perfect physical man, and we need not
take space to apologize for it ; it remains a fact, and one
upon which we shall not try to congratulate ourselves. Those
mediaeval knights are men to look at with a sigh. Men de-
void of aches, and pains, and dyspepsias ; men without

CHIVALRY. 165

nervous headaches : men to whom coddling and " soothing"
were not indispensable. Alas ! there are no duplicates of
this picture among the men of our day ; and the negative
was not preserved.

Then there is a quality of mind to match this physical
attribute which cannot be restored by any modern, process —
the quality of unconsciousness of self ; lack of that essen-
tial ubiquity, self, which our refinements of analysis and
vivisection have fastened, like an " eating lichen," to the
thought of all thinkers ; that critical detective which un-
ceasingly attends our footsteps, never letting down his watch.
The places that we moderns tread are vastly finer than those
barren rooms of the medisevals. Oar feet sink deep in soft
Axminster, and our spacious parlors are crowded with every
possible and impossible appointment for use, and luxury,
and enervation. We look down upon the owners of those
rude oak-raftered halls, wherein was only board and bench.
But our magnificent apartments are everywhere hung with
mirrors. Every article is a reflector, and nowhere can the
opulent occupant look that he can fail to see his own image.
We are ever in the custody of self -officered police, and
cannot forget ourselves long enough to breathe freely.
They — the mediae vals, the unencumbered — they were free !
strong, simple-minded children, unspoiled by " notice."
A Dr. Samuel Johnson would have been an impossibility
among these open-air men of deeds ; but could he have ex-
isted, he could never, in those times, have had his Boswell !

Nay, take this mediaeval knight, with his physical perfec-
tions, his unconsciousness of self, his picturesque costume,
his gentle mien, his powerful carriage, his knightly court-
esy, " expressing," says Ilallam, " the most highly refined

166 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

good breeding, founded less on the knowledge of ceremoni-
ous politeness— though that was not to be omitted — than on
the spontaneous modesty and self-denial and respect for
others which ought to spring from the heart ;" with that
inviolable faith toward all, which made of every knight a
Regulus, and we have a picture of a man of such propor-
tions that, " taken for all in all, we ne'er shall look upon
his like again." Something better we shall see and do see,
yet not the same. " Never, never more," says Burke,
" shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex,
that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subor-
dination of heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself,
the spirit of an exalted freedom ; . . . that sensibility of
principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a
wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity,
which ennobled whatever it touched. . . . Chivalry, the
unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the
nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise !"

III.

And now the childish treble of that ubiquitous little
Peter kin, the enfant terrible to historians, breaks in with
the question, sometimes so embarrassing to us Kaspars,

" But what good came of it ?"

The benefits which such an institution, founded upon
such principles, must necessarily have conferred upon

CIIIVALKY. 167

society in the Middle Ages and immediately subsequent
times, must be readily inferred from what has gone before
in this very imperfect sketch. We have seen that this
institution was the embryo of modern military discipline
and tactic, and the beginning of a standing army ; that it
afforded a school for the exercise of manly virtue and the
formation of refined manners ; that its interior ideal, its
primitive mainspring, lay in the normal religiousness of
man's nature — an outcome of which was the exaltation of
woman. Hallam calls it " the best school of moral disci-
pline of the Middle Ages," and this is high praise from one
whom Lord Macaulay calls the least of a worshipper he
knew. .Still I venture a step farther, and dare to affirm
that the pure and simple creed of the mediaeval chevalier
affords to all ages the best formulation of, and that its pure
and simple practice affords the best illustration of, the
natural religion of humanity ; and this is as much and
something more than a moral discipline. To us moderns,

" Heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files of time,"

a glance backward toward this phenomenon of the times we
are accustomed to call dark is, or should be, useful. It is
good for us to turn the yellow leaves of time's herbarium
and look upon this faded mediaeval bloom, howbeit our
nineteenth-century hothouse cultures can far outvie the lone
wild- flower of the past. We have indeed the needle-gun
and mitrailleuse where they had lances ; we have churches,
one for every dozen worshippers, where they had a dozen
monasteries for a nation ; \ve have schools, one apiece for
every boy and girl, where they had one university for an
empire ; we have Tyndails and Huxleys to scatter broadcast

168 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

science (exact or otherwise) where kings and scholars in
mediaeval times had but the rudiments of each ;. we have
Moodys and Sankeys and Salvation Armies where they
had mendicant friars and barefooted pilgrims ; we have
summer schools of philosophy and religion where they had
blind and bloody Crusades ; Swinburnes and Walt Whit-
mans refine and clarify our poetic senses in place of their
rude troubadours and minstrels — all this and immeasurably
more we have in our day over the Sodoms and Gomorrahs
of their day. And for all this gigantic aggregation of cult-
ure, and science, and art — for all the accumulations of these
successive centuries wherein we have

" Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes,"

how as pigmies to giants, in point of moral altitude, should
most of us compare with these unschooled medigevals ! No
need to make a comment here. Our morning papers bring
us all we need, with their long, black list of betrayed trusts,
of cowardice, of falsehood, of political intrigue. And if
the velvet curtain that backgrounds our " best society" but
rise a little, ah me ! what skeletons dance behind the scene !
When in our arrogant nineteenth-century hearts we shall
have fully apprehended the truth that intellectual accumu-
lation is not moral attainment ; that civilization is not Chris-
tianity ; that culture is not character ; that, however lit up
by the blazing chandeliers of science, and culture, and art
which swing from our frescoed ceilings in place of that sin-
gle star of chivalry which beamed down through the rafters
to the mediaeval chevalier, we have not, therefore, gained
one particle the more illumination of soul — then, indeed,
we shall not disdain to turn our proud faces backward, and

CHIVALRY. 169

learn how to salt our unsavory knowledge with the wisdom
of time's children, the creed of the chevalier !

And while we gain for ourselves one good thing from the
backward glance, let us add to it another. While we are
learning to respect mediaeval humanity, let us try to
strengthen our faith in modern humanity as well. In our
reaction from our own century, let us not join the ranks of
those few eminent persons, and those many persons who de-
sire to be eminent, who seem to find it necessary to do injus-
tice to the present in order to do justice to the past.

Let us not cry with Sir Bedivere :

" Oh, my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go ?
• Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes ?
For now I see the true old times are dead
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led '
The holy elders, with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole round table is dissolved
Which was an image of a mighty world ;
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me and the years
Among new men, strange faces, other minds." —

But let us answer with Arthur :

" The old order changeth, yieldeth place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself — what comfort is in me ?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within Himself make pure !"

Ilium fuit ! and Anchises, and Priam, and Hector ! But
let us bethink ourselves also that ^Eneas was, and the Lavi-

170 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

nian shores, and the lofty walls of Rome ; and as we look
around us on our "Western lands — Lavinian shores on which
many modern knights draw consecrated lances — let us ac-
knowledge that " there is a spirit in man" — man, the man
of Egypt, the man of Hellas, the man of the Tiber, the
man of history, the man of to-day — a spirit breathed into
him with God's own breath, which makes grand and chiv-
alrous deeds possible in every age.

" Mother Earth ! are the heroes dead ?

Do they thrill the soul of the years no more ?
Are the gleaming snows and the poppies red

All that is left of the brave of yore ?
Are there none to fight as Theseus fought,

Far in the young world's misty dawn ?
Or to teach as the gray haired Nestor taught ?

Mother Earth ! are the heroes gone ?

" Gone ? In a grander form they rise ;

Dead ? We may clasp their hands in ours ;
And catch the light of their clearer eyes,

And wreathe their brows with immortal flowers.
Wherever a noble deed is done

'Tis the pulse of a hero's heart is stirred ;
Wherever Right has a triumph won

There are the heroes' voices heard.

" Their armor rings on a fairer field

Than the Greek and the Trojan fiercely trod,
For Freedom's sword is the blade they wield,

And the light above is the smile of God.
So, in his isle of calm delight,

Jason may sleep the years away ;
For the heroes live, and the sky is bright,

And the world is a braver world to-day."

JOAN OF AEG.

JOAN OF AEG.

IN the century which the year 1428 completed, all the
adverse fates had conspired with the Plantagenet purpose
to extinguish France. In 1328, at the death of the last
Capet, Edward III., of England, rose up before the peers
of France with his egregious claim for the French crown.
A clever twisting of some loose strands in the cordage of
the Salic . law served for a pretext to contest his claim
against the clearer claim of Philip of Valois. The grand-
son with his might drew up before the cousin with his
right, and then commenced that century of war which
made France the bloodless, nerveless thing we find her at
this first quarter of the fifteenth century. At Cressy and
at Poitiers, and in divers lesser fields, the chivalry of
France was mowed by English steel. The frightful horrors
of Calais unnerved the nation. And yet, like the heroic
citizens of Calais, all France held out against the life-long
siege which Edward III. pressed round the kingdom— held
out until death conquered the besieger and succored the
besieged.

But in this century, between Edward III. of England
and Henry Y. of England, not war alone, but pestilence
and famine — those steadfast handmaids of Bellona — con-
spired against the life of France. The temple of Janus
for one hundred years was not closed, and the box of
Pandora discharged itself of every evil on the unhappy

174 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

realm. A pestilence unprecedented in the annals of pesti-
lences, and caused by the presence of so many dead lying
unburied, by reason of the Pope's interdict, in numberless
battle-fields over Europe, swept the south of France, carry-
ing off two out of every three of the inhabitants. The
shadow of this black death fell everywhere. Ships rocked
and drifted at sea, unmanned save by this pale pirate, whose
touch had laid crews and passengers lifeless at their posts.

Increasing the terror of the people, a wild fanaticism
became also epidemic. Bands of half-crazed persons,
clothed in white, wound in and out of the death-darkened
villages of France, beating their breasts and chanting sup-
plications, throwing themselves on the ground, confessing
their sins, and leaving everywhere apprehension and dis-
may, and the echo of their moaning prayer :

1 ' Nun liebet auf eure H'ande

Dass Gott dies Grosse sterben wende
Nun bebet auf eure Hande

Dass sich Gott iiber uns erbarme !"

These fanatics and others akin to them had great influence
with the people. And they had the people all to them-
selves, for the educated clergy stood aloof.

Religion was feeble ; superstition rampant. The Church
had no coherence ; the state no support. The kings of
France were beaten, and discrowned, and imprisoned.
Their dukes deserted the royal standard, and made war
among themselves.

The houses of Burgundy and Orleans sent their subtle
foxes running through the land with firebrands of civil
war. In 1418 a massacre of the Armagnacs by the Bur-

JOAN OF ARC. 175

gundians took place in Paris — a massacre without a parallel
in all the massacre-tilled pages of French history until the
Involution, says Hall am, in spite of St. Bartholomew.

In 1358 the peasantry, stung into self-defence, reared
their bruised heads against the oppressive Yalois heel with
cobra virulence, and the Jacquerie of the fourteenth cen-
tury of French history set the type for the Jacobins of the
eighteenth.

Des Serres thus represents the state of France at the
conclusion of this century : u In sooth, the estate of France
was most miserable. There appeared nothing but a horri-
ble face, confusion, poverty, desolation, solitarinesse and
feare. The lean and bare laborers in the country did ter-
rify even theeves themselves, who had nothing left to spoil
but the carkasses of these poor, miserable creatures, wan-
dering up and down like ghosts drawn out of their graves.
. . . The least farms and hamlets were fortified by
these robbers, English, Bourguignons, and French, every
one striving to do his worst ; all men of warre were well
agreed to spoile the countryman and the merchant. Even
the catell, accustomed to the larume bell, the signe of the
enemy's approach, would run home of themselves, without
any guide, by this accustomed misery." Petrarch, visiting
France in this century, thus describes it: " Nothing pre-
sented itself to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an extreme
poverty, lands uncultivated, houses in ruins. Even the
neighborhood of Paris manifested everywhere marks of
destruction and conflagration. The streets are deserted,
the roads overgrown with weeds, the whole is a vast soli-
tude." It is said that the city of Paris was so solitary and
neglected that in successive years wolves entered the city

1T6 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

through the river and devoured and wounded a number of
persons.

Thus had the fates conspired with the Plantagenet
purpose and prepared the way for Henry V. — a second
Edward III. — to propose the treaty which should secure to
himself and his posterity the throne of France. With
incredible arrogance, in 1420 this great King of England
promised an adjustment of all difficulties between France
and England upon the basis of the famous treaty of Troyes.
He said : "I will take now the Princess Catherine for a
wife and the regency of France ; and at the death of the
king I will succeed to his crown and his kingdom, and
join them to my crown and my kingdom, to be mine and
my posterity's forever. In return for so much, I will put
my sword into the scabbard, and let you, Queen Isabella,
have your amours and your intrigues undisturbed, and you,
Burgundy, have your vengeance on Orleans, since that
serves my cause as well."

With incredible dishonesty the debased queen and re-
morseless duke signed, over the imbecile old head of Charles
VI., the treaty which gave his crown and kingdom to
the Plantagenet posterity, and made France a colony of
England. With incredible pusillanimity a balance of the
peers of France acceded to the treaty. And now, in the
year 1420, Henry V. of England is Regent of France,
absolute ruler of all the realm north of the Loire. With
haughty confidence he awaits the imminent hour when the
old baby king shall totter off the stage and leave him, in
name, and fame, and full possession, that to which he holds
this marvellous title-deed. !No matter that this deed is by
all law null and void ; no matter that the thing conveyed

JOAN OF ARC. ITT

was not the property of the conveyors. What the pen has
traced in ink will suffice until the sword can superscribe in
blood ! Might, might ! that is Henry's ; he will make it
right.

Thus two years pass, and in 1422 the prize seems nearer.
(( Almost mine !" says the Plantagenet proposer. " Never
thine," says the Divine Disposer. Suddenly, unheralded,
the conqueror of Henry Y. rises into view. A pale
cavalier, all unweaponed and unattended, meets him in the
way. No need to call thy mighty men, Plantagenet ! No
need to raise that whetted sword of thine ! No challenge
here to prove thy dauntless courage or thy knightly
courtesy. This battle will be bloodless. This foe is not a
Frenchman. He will say no word, nor urge a claim, nor
draw a sword. He will but look thee in the face, will
beckon thee, will turn his steed, and thou wilt follow him.
And where he leads thou wilt not wear the wedded crown
of France and England ! Well, death thus gives the
unplanned-for cue, and Henry, who would be manager,
makes the first exit. Two months later the summons
comes for Charles, and the old imbecile King of France
totters off the stage. And now we watch for a speedy
denouement of this dark drama which the adverse fates
have plotted for a hundred years against the realm of
France.

But we watch in vain. The tragedy moves on. When
Henry died he left Plantagenets behind to carry on his role.
The regent dukes of England unrolled the Troyes treaty
and shook it haughtily, defiantly, in the face of France.
The Duke of Bedford took the paper in one hand and the
infant heir of Henry in the other, and pronounced him at

1Y8 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

Paris Henry VI., King of France and England. And all
the swords of England stood behind, flanked by Burgundy's
steel.

The Dauphin, third son of Charles VI. of France, alike
proclaimed, by his few and feeble adherents in the south,
King of France, lurked timorously around, fearing the
shadow of his royalty. There was no King of France, arid
there was no France for a king. And so it went for seven
years. Henry, King of France, and Charles, King of
France, and no France, and no king !

But the fates were brewing, and some shape must soon
emerge from out this steaming caldron. One or the other
of the contesting forces must prevail, and that right soon.

The odds were fearfully in England's favor. Henry VI.
of England was now, though but a child, a king in his
own right. His nobility were skilful, and courageous,
and ambitious ; his yeomanry invincible ; his cause so
popular that recruits flocked to his standard from every
quarter.

Charles VII. of France, in full manhood, was but a child
in character — a timorous, self-indulgent trifler, fooling, flirt-
ing, feeding in the corner there at Chinon ; his forces
inadequate, his cavalry thinned by English lances, his peas-
antry by scythes of pestilence and famine ; his only allies
Scotchmen, scant and hard to get at any price ; his finances
so low that no inducement could be offered to the poorest
of his subjects in his battle-fields. For the loan of six thou-
sand men Charles offered a province to the King of Scot-
land. Comines, a historian contemporary with this king,
relates how he — the king — having tried on a pair of boots,
told the shoemaker that he had no money to pay for them.

JOAN OF ARC. 179

But neither loyalty nor royalty compelled the thrifty Crispin
to present to his sovereign the necessary boots, or to give
him credit for future pay. He chose the safer way, and
kept the boots, while His Majesty went slipshod ! With no
kingdom, no subjects, no money, no manhood, and — no
boots — naught could this little Frenchman do but turn
away from such unpleasantness to seek a more congenial
programme in the boudoir of SoreL " Sire," said a cour-
tier to him, u I do not believe it possible that one should
lose a kingdom with greater gayety !"

Here, then, is the kingdom of Charlemagne, whose
boundaries, six hundred years before, were the Vistula
joining the Danube on the east, the Ebro and the
Atlantic Ocean on the west, the Mediterranean on the
south, the Baltic Sea on the north, reduced to a varying
quantity below the river Loire ! " Our Henry V.," boasts
Disraeli, "-had reduced the kingdom of France to the town
of Bourgcs !"

And thus much only remaining French, what power shall
prevent the whole realm from becoming to England what
( Canada is to-day ? what Cuba is to Spain ? — what power
shall arise to preserve for the nineteenth century the
French feather of French genius, the bite of French wit,
the flavor of French character, the winey bouquet of French
literature, the esprit, the verve, the je ne sals quoi, all
unmatched and unmatchable, unmixed and unmixable,
with which France has spiced the world ? Consider the
conclusion — how lame, how impotent — had the ether of
French intellect become incorporated in the solid fibre of
English intellect ! Guizot reduced to Macaulay ; two Car-
lyies in place of one Carlyle and one Hugo ; two bloody

AND OTHEK STUDIES.

Marys in place of one bloody Mary and one bloody Medici ;
two Henry VIII. s instead of one great Henry Tudor
and one great Henry Bourbon ; two Marlboroughs in-
stead of one tremendous Marlborough and one tremen-
dous Bonaparte ; two Lady Mary Wortley Montagus in-
stead of one Lady Mary and one De Stae'l ; all beef — no
poulet ! Human nature without the top-dressing of French
nature !

It is the October of the year 1428. Upon the dolorous
disk of France is darkness everywhere, with little difference
in degree. Yet -as we strain our vision a deeper shade
blackens in one direction, as if the pall of death were about
there to drop.

The city of Orleans was an ancient stronghold of the
realm. When the King of France was scarcely more than
one among his lords, in the feudal ages of its history,
when, as king, he held two counties, perhaps, when his
lords held one each — himself a count a trine lordlier than
his subject counts — Orleans was always one of the king's
counties. And the city was the centre of the county.
By this fifteenth century the city of Orleans had acquired
great importance and accumulated great wealth. The city
site was on the north bank of the Loire, but its suburbs
made an annex city — like a Brooklyn to Kew York — on the
south side. A massive bridge ran across and bound the

O

two together.

The English, advancing from the north, were building
ponderous bastiles or forts — gigantic posts of a fence to
which their numerous forces were the living rails — around
the land side of the city. This completed, all escape was
made impossible from the north side of the besieged town.

JOAN OF AKC. 181

But to preserve means of egress from the city for them-
selves was less important to the besieged than that the
besiegers should lack means 'of ingress to the city. The
Orleanais destroyed the arch that connected the towers on
the bridge across to suburban Orleans, and if there was no
getting out for the French, neither was there any getting
in for the English. But wThile they thus destroy their
southern means of escape, the English are drilling in the
last bastile that encloses them upon the north. And now
what remains for Orleans but fire, famine, flood, or —
surrender ? Upon these massive city walls, hoar and
honorable, with many a foe resisted since a thousand years
and more, when Attila and his terrible Huns hammered on
irs gates, is written — by no invisible scribe, but with the
whetted point of English swords — the mene, mene of its
doom.

We hear much of the hour and the man. Surely now
and here, if ever in history, is the hour. But where is the
man ?

The eyes of all men turn to Orleans. Of all men ; but
another eye looks down upon another spot, and hither the
inexplicable Genius of History bids us go with her.

A strange irrelevance, this scene on which she bids us
look ! What can these sloping hills of Domremy, these
trilling streams, these low-roofed cottages, have to do with
that fated city ? The little shepherd girl who sits beneath
the great tree in the doorway yonder, what can her rapt,
romantic, saintly face have of importance to thee, O destiny
of men and nations ?

But the Genius makes no response except to bid us nearer
to these pastoral frivolities, this dreaming shepherd girl.

1S2 GEOBGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHEK STUDIES.

We see her wander up and down the gentle slopes,
peering with eyes that see beyond our vision into the great
oak forest, or listening to sounds we cannot hear beneath
the fairy tree. We see her spring with lithe, intrepid
grace upon the horses of the farm, and mounted, like a
soldier, make all the thrusts and passes of a knight
preparing for the fray. W7e see her sitting silent, while
her skilful fingers ply her needle at the humble fireside,
in that early winter of 1428, listening to tales of the dis-
tress of France, the siege of Orleans, the imminent crisis
of the kingdom's fate which the roving bands of Charles'
adherents bring to Domremy. Wre see her, " about the
hour of noon, in summer-time," in her father's garden,
and we see a kindling in that innocent eye, a purpose in
that girlish face. And she tells us that a voice of God
comes to her, and with the voices a bright light shines.
And often she hears the voice and sees the light ; and St.
Michael, and St. Margaret, and St. Catherine appear to her,
in a halo of glory, their heads crowned with jewels, their
voices mild and sweet. She hears them when the bells are
sounding for the hour of prayer. She hears the voices
in the forest also, and at many times and places, and they
speak so soothingly that she kneels and weeps because
they do not take her with them back to Paradise. But
the voices say she must stay and save France from the
ruin that impends. And, by and by, when tidings come
of the distress of Orleans, of the dauphin's helplessness,
of the invincible strength of the English, of the swift ap-
proach to Orleans of doom from which there is none to de-
liver in all that stricken realm, the voices bid her up ! and
herself go forth to rescue France !

JOAN OF ARC. 183

And while we curl our lips at this wild ranting of the
half-mad shepherd girl and turn to go our way to Orleans,
where the hour wanes and all hearts wait, with hope against
hope, for the man — the hand of destiny unclasps from ours,
and, with inexorable finger, points to the girlish figure, and
amid the protests of our impatient scorn we hear the voice
that none may question saying to her: "Thou art the

in -ill /"

It is the 25th of April, 1429. The pall is just about to
drop on Orleans. An instant yet remains before the Eng-
lish have filled in the last rail to the living fence which
bristles round the place ; an instant ere the last Plantag-
enet .sword is wedged into the last loophole of escape ;
an instant of the hour yet awaits the coming of the man.
The beats of time strike like funeral peals and chime with
the heart-throbs of the Orleanais. French breaths are held
and French arms are paralyzed with fear. Even little King
Charles, the spaniel, trips it heavily behind the skirts of
Agnes Sorel, in his squalid little court at Chinon.

As we gaze upon the scene in this moment of suspense,
while the darkness deepens to extinction — in the very
article of fatal asphyxia — the wondrous transformation
comes. The peerless panoramist slides suddenly before us
the next scene in the spectacle — a scene we all know well.

We saw that shining face lifted to the skies of Dom-
remy. We behold that slight, intrepid figure, mounted
now upon a fiery war-horse, wielding now a glittering
sword. It is the little peasant maid who wears that
fifty pounds of burnished steel with such a knightly
grace. The head is without helmet, and the raven ringlets
float out to the air ; the face, uncovered, reveals the same

184 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETBY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

rapt countenance, upon the battle-field, we saw beneatli the
tree within the door-yard. We all behold that gorgeous
banner of white satin strewn with the French lilies, on
which the figure of a conqueror in glory shines, above the
words which flame beneath, Jesus Maria ! This held in
one of those girlish hands, and in the other the consecrated
lance, marked with the crosses of St. Catherine. We all
know the doer and the deed ! ~No need to tell the oft told
tale, which set forth in the soberest hues of fact, yet seems
to waking sense most like a wildest dream of fancy ; no
need to repeat the story of the old chronicler Hall — the
English historian of that day — who tells how " Pucelle,
with French capitaine, in the dedde tyme of ye night, and
in a great rayne and thundere, entered into the citie. "
We all know what followed on this entrance, which the
Duke of Bedford thus reports to his sovereign, Henry VI. :

" There felle, by the hand. of God, as it seemeth, a grete
stroke upon your people that was there (before Orleans)
assembled, in grete nombre, caused, in grete partie, as of
trowe of lakke of sadde beleve and of unlevefulle doubt
that they hadde of a disciple and lyme of the Feende called
the Pucelle, that used fals enchantments and sorcerie."

We all know how the little King Charles, the spaniel,
trotted forth to Rheims, and with royal condescension took
from the peasant girl the crow^n and throne of France ;
we all know how this little hand of muckle might, laid on
the rusty crank, set in swift revolution the wheel of
France's fortune ; how the treacherous Burgundy turned
from his allegiance with the English and returned to stand
by Charles ; how thus the left hand clasped the right and
grew again to the dismembered body of the empire ; how

JOAN OF ARC. 185

that empire convalesced and grew to giant stature in the
years to come.

Had I the ability to narrate the story of Joan of Arc
worthily, I could scarcely have the heart to add one more
to the long list of poems, and romances, and histories
which, from a Shakespeare, a Sou they, and a Schiller, to
the prize essayists and the undergraduates, have accumu-
lated since the fifteenth century. Yet had I such desire,
it could not take much time or great space to tell the round,
unvarnished tale. Unassisted by tradition, stripped of
romance and invention, we find that a few simple pictures
make the panorama of her life. A little peasant maiden
doing lowly service in the cottage home at Dornremy ;
a mail-clad maiden leading forth her soldiers from the gates
of Orleans — two faithful feet on fagots at Rouen — a ra-
diant face uplifted to the beckoning skies — a crucifix up-
held in shrivelling, flame-kissed hands — a wreath of smoke
for shroud, a wrack of smoke for pall, a heap of ashes,
and — a franchised soul !

There is no figure in history more incendiary to the
imagination than this of Joan of Arc — not one which
more enlists the energies of the Philistine, approaching us
from every quarter with demands that we subdue to the
substantial hues of the historic imagination, this tale, which
we are predestined by him to invest with the ethereal tints
of the poetic imagination. The Philistine's error is always
in his premises. His conclusions are unassailable, always
logical, therefore always wrong, because founded upon
wrong premises. He frowns down the story of Joan be-
cause it shines and glows in rose-color. His error is in
denying to history any rose-color. He starts with the

186 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

premise that rose-color is of no use, and ends with the
conclusion that there are no roses.

Now, a rose would smell as sweet by any other name,
simply because it must still remain a rose. And a rose
has its rights as well as a cabbage. The cabbage-growers
say it does not pay as well as cabbage, but all the same the
rose is red, and sweet, and immortal ! A true story of the
Maid of Orleans will take away many accessories with
which the poets have invested her, but she must still remain
a glowing rose in history, fair and immortal. We welcome
the Philistine when he brings us words like these :

" It is the business of history to distinguish between the miraculous
and the marvellous ; to reject the first in all narrations merely profane
or human ; to doubt the second ; and when obliged by unquestionable
testimony, as in the present case, to admit of something extraordinary, to
receive as little of it as is consistent with the known facts and circum-
stances."

Good, Mr. Hume ! We are to reject the miraculous, to
doubt the marvellous, and to receive only as little of the
extraordinary as the known facts and circumstances compel
us to ! Yery good. And now, Mr. Hume, for your defi-
nitions.

Define for us the miraculous. Define for us the marvel-
lous. And when you have given us perfect definitions of
these two, then we will reject the one and doubt the other,
and accept only the extraordinary !

Meanwhile we find to our purpose certain words of old
Bishop Butler, who had somewhat to say of the extraor-
dinary. " There are two courses," he said, " of nature.
One is the ordinary, the other the extraordinary" It is
this extraordinary course of nature which produces those

JOAN OF AEG. 187

phenomena which, being out of the common, are out of our
sphere, and therefore which we are accustomed to call
supernatural — or superhuman — a miracle, or a marvel. Yet
they are necessarily neither, but only extraordinary courses
of nature, outside of our knowledge of law, yet not, there-
fore, outside the sphere of law. What is law ? Trace it
link by link, pursue it phase by phase, chase its shadow
until you find its substance, and what — who have you
found ? You have found God.

Resolve the supernatural. Find that which is above
nature. Take your line and measure nature, that you may
define her limits. Sweep your arc until it is a circumscrib-
ing circumference, so that you may perceive that which is
the above-nature, the beyond-nature. What is the measure
of your measure ? What is the radius of your circumfer-
ence ? Nature, nature ! What have you outside ? What
is there that bears not the image and superscription, in its
phase ordinary, or its phase extraordinary, of the Caesar
of the universe ? Who is above this Caesar ? Who but
her maker — God ? He who fills nature and who is nature
alone exceeds nature, and is that which nature is not.
What is a miracle ? What is a marvel ? A miracle is that
which comes about by processes outside the sphere of our
observation. It is a phenomenon which is the product of
that working of law which is beyond our knowledge of its
working. Shall we call it therefore a phenomenon outside
of the working of law ? It is a result from that course of
nature which is extraordinary. Shall we therefore call it
supernatural ? Lamartine says of Joan of Arc : " Every-
thing in her life seems miraculous, and yet the miracle is
not in her voice, her vision, her sign, her standard, or her

188 GEOKGE ELIOT'S POETEY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

sword, but in herself." And yet 1 should say, least of all,
" in herself."

Nay, let us reject the miraculous theory of Joan of Arc.
Let us reject the marvellous. Let us cling to and claim for
her only the extraordinary. For in her I, for my part, see
no nature which 1 do not see in many a woman of to-day ;
but the exercise of that nature we do not often see. What,
then, were the "courses of nature" which in her could
pnfduce the " extraordinary" ?

I reduce all the miracle, and marvel, and mystery of
Joan's history to the extraordinary development of one
human capacity — love ; the extraordinary exercise of one
human capacity — faith.

Joan's love was extraordinary because it was not a passion
for a person, but a quenchless passion of love for a cause.
All the energy, and devotion, and credulity, and constancy,
and jealousy, and consuming passion, and triumphant wor-
ship that goes into a woman's love for one man, and that
makes it the thing it is, went from Joan's soul into the
cause of France. All that a woman will endure for and from
her lover or her child, that did Joan endure for and from
France. And this is very extraordinary ; strange and rare
in man — stranger and rarer in woman. And Joan's faith
was extraordinary — as is all faith, since it is from God — a
gift rather than a grace. To Joan man was as naught ; the
King of France was the vicar of Heaven. The little "JZing
of Bourges" was one whom God had appointed governor
over this, His kingdom, France. She, Joan, was a messen-
ger, a missionary. Faith fused at once into obedience.
How extraordinary, how simple ! In this scientific age—
this age of iconoclasrn — it is greatly good for us to confront

JOAN OF ABC. 189

tilings rich, rare, out-of-the-common — tilings above our
power to comprehend, beyond our power to destroy. It is
well for us who are so blind to the rose-color in our daily
lives to be forced to acknowledge its existence in the im-
perishable canvas of history ; well for us, so intensely
practical as we are, to be compelled there, at least, to con-
front the romantic and the heroic. So only perhaps can we
be made to believe in the possible heroic of to-day.

For the enduring quality in this wondrous figure of the
centuries is the common quality. If 1 know anything for
certain 'of the individual Joan, it is only because I know
something for certain of her sisters of to-day. I see,
indeed, in her some characteristics of her age which must
tinge her character, and which, not being characteristics of
our age, cannot tinge ours. The monstrous superstitions
of her times are broken bubbles of thin air in our agnostic
century. The dense ignorance of her day cannot be
repeated in any after-time. The blind fanaticism of that
age is wholly fled. And yet, superstition, ignorance, fanati-
cism, remain ; and unless we can share in this our luminous
century that one priceless gift of God, which in this poor
shepherd girl, along with her ignorance, and superstition,
and fanaticism, was her power, and must be our power, if
we have any, — then we may well put this complex age,
full of knowledge and discovery, into the balance against
that age, and watch in vain for any turning of the scales
in our favor. Faith ! Faith ! that was Joan's lever— the
lever by which that little hand moved the world — liter-
ally moved the world, for Orleans was France, and Eng-
land was the world. Let no one dream that Joan was
very clever ; let no one dream that she had military genius.

190 GEORGE ELIOT'S POETRY, AND OTHER STUDIES.

Her power was but the power which many another woman
may have — the power of a buoyant, masterful faith in God,
in herself, in humanity, and a will to come to the rescue.
It is good to make acquaintance with her — with her,
not with some wretched travesty of her. For in her
we contemplate not military genius, not surpassing clever-
ness, not superhuman wisdom ; but we do, if we will, con-
template goodness and purity. And within the folds of
these incontestable facts we may behold this shining
truth : that, when the soul is possessed by a great
purpose, all small and minor purposes are lost ; that the
woman-soul, when in faith it sets itself to come to the rescue
—in church, state, society, family — will .subordinate all
other things ; and that the citadel of the soul being before-
hand possessed of this divine passion to help, all other and
selfisher passions will find no admittance.

We can no one of us afford to count the story of Joan
of Arc an idle tale. Let what archives will be opened to
contradict or alter dates, detail, irrelevant fact — the essential
truth which Joan's life stands for, the character which
Joan's career reveals, remain unaltered and unalterable, of
far greater significance to us as spiritual truth than as the
historical fact. Joan of Arc saved France indeed, and
raised the siege of Orleans ; but this is not all her immor-
tality. She has entered as a spiritual force into inheritance
of the ages, and become a practical influence in human
lives. If you and I are not actually helped by this in-
fluence, it is our fault, not hers.

For each of us there waits an Orleans. Some time that
crisis-battle must be fought which gives us final victory or
ultimate defeat. In that long siege which precedes that

JOAN OF ARC. 191

crisis-battle, we need tlie faith of Joan, that faith which
ranges the soul on the side of the conquering powers, and
enlists it in a service which is sure to win. And we need
to see our visions, to hear our voices, as did Joan hers ;
those visions which open to us from the summits of our
holiest resolve, our highest endeavor, our most painful
abnegation ; those voices which lay on us most strenuous
commands and whisper to us, in secret chambers of our
beleaguered souls, words of conviction, of courage, and of
cheer. God grant that we be not unresponsive to that
angel voice, that we be not disobedient unto the heavenly
vision !

MOTHERS OF GREAT MEN AND
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AND THE WIVES OF SOME GREAT MEN.
These Pen Portraits include: The Mothers of, The Gracchi, Wesley,

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Byron, Humboldt, Mendelssohn, Webster, and Garfield; and

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One large volume, 8vo. Illustrated throughout, with Frontispiece

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CHINESE GORDON, THE UNCROWNED
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printed. It is a masterful romance ; short, compressed, terribly
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THE LONDON TIMES. " After perusal of this weird, fantastic
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FROUDES HISTORICAL AND OTHER
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The topics (some thirty thousand] relate to religious, social, and
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ARNOLD. BAKER. DOWDEN.

ABBOTT. BLAINK. FARRAR.

BOSWELL. CARLISLE. FROUDE.

BUNSEN. CREASEY. FORBES.

BANCROFT. CLSTIS. GIBBON.

GREEN.

HOOD. LAMARTINE. MORRISON.

HEADLEY. LESTER. MYERS.

HUTTON. MA^AULEY. MORLEY.

IRVING. MICHE ET. NORTON.

KNIGHT. MULLER. PARTON.

PATTtSON. ROLLIN. STEVENS.

PLUTARCH. SHAIRF. SYMOND.
RIDPATH. SCHILLER. TYTLER.

REIN. STOOD \RD. TYNDALL.

RAYMOND. SMITH. TROLLOPE.

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r~

THE HOYT-WARD CYCLOPEDIA OF PRAC-
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Prose and Poetry. Nearly 20,000 Quotations and 50,000 lines of
Concordance.

It contains the celebrated quotations and all the useful Proverbs
and Mottoes from the English, Latin, French, German, Italian,
Spanish and Portuguese, classified according to subjects. Latin
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It has a vast concordance of nearly 50,000 lines, by which any
quotation of note may at once be found and traced to its source. It
is to quotations what Young's or Cruden's Concordance is to the
Bible.

Its Table of Contents: Index of Authors, giving date of birth,
nativity, etc.; Topical Index with Cross References, Index of Sub .
jects, Index of Translation, together with its immense Concordance
and many other features desirable in a work of reference, combina
to make this Cyclopaedia what it is,

THE ONLY STANDARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS.

Invaluable to the Statesman, Lawyer Editor, Public Speaker,
Teacher or General Reader.

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be a help and a pleasure to many."

HON. SAMUEL J. RANDALL, WASHINGTON. "The
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HON. ABRAM S. HEWITT. " The completeness of its indices
is simply astonishing."

HON. F. T. FRELINGHUYSEN, Secretary of State. " Am
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HENRY WARD B EEC HER. "Good all the way through,
especially the proverbs of all nations."

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WENDELL PHILLIPS. "Its variety and fullness and the
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THE SCHAFF-HERZOG ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE.

Edited by PHILIP SCHAFF, D D., LL.D., assisted by 438 of the
Ablest Scholars of the World.

It contains thousands of subjects treated in a masterly way not
touched upon in Bible Dictionaries, nor in any of the general
Cyclopedias.

In the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia:

The different denominations and religions of the world are faith-
fully represented,

The living vital questions are discussed and the latest discoveries
are utilized,

The Arts and Sciences, History, Biography, Literature, and all
kindred subjects bearing upon the religions of the world, are all
treated by aole specialists and recognized scholars.

The number of omissions m some of the other Encyclopedias
of subjects treated in Vol. I, of the Schaff-Herzog, is asfollows :
THE BRITANNICA omits i>393

APPLETON'S i,383

JOHNSON'S

CHAMBERS'
MCCLINTOCK & STRONG'S
THE PEOPLES

900

39°
900

A Standard Authority.
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Very Valuable.
" It is a very valuable work of reference."

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Unsurpassed.

" Unsurpassed by anything published up to the present day."
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Unequaled.
"In fullness, fairness and accuracy the work is unequaled."

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Monumental.
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Some of the best articles are by American contributors, as Presi-
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rots," Mr. Oilman's "English and American Hymnology," etc.
Beudes these we may note Dr. John Hall's " Ireland, "Prof. Flint's
" Optimism and Pessimism," Principals Cairn's "Infidelity," and
Dr. McCosh's " David Hume."

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SELF HELPS.
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On Self Culture.
Intellectual, Physical and Moral. By Prof. JOHN STUART

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Culture and Religion.

By Prof. J. C. SHAIRP, Principal of the United College of St.
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BIOGRAPHY.
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By PAXTON HOOD, izmo, 250.; cloth, extra paper, $i.
Charlotte Bronte.
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French Celebrities. PART I.
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MEMORIE AND RIME.

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A series of charming sketches of travel, stories of Western life,
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This book abounds in life-like incidents and escapades, such as
every miner's boy has seen. It abounds in strong dramatic
situations, swift alternations between pathos and humor, and
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SATURDA Y EVENING GAZETTE, B OSTON. • ' Th e vigor,
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story is told, impresses upon the reader an irresistable charm."

THE LONDON GLOBE. "To follow him is like following
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and who attracts us by a wild grace and a beautiful skill as he
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
BERKELEY

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