George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 576 pages of information about George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy.

George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 576 pages of information about George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy.
manner, of viewing, the greater problems of human existence.  Charlotte Bronte more truly represents the woman’s way of viewing life; the trustful way of one educated in the conventional views of religion.  She has given a corrector interpretation of the meaning of love to woman than George Eliot has been able to present, and simply because she thought and lived more nearly as other women think and live.  Hers was the genius of spontaneous insight and emotion, that vibrated to every experience and was moved by every sentiment.  Life played upon her heart like the wind upon an Aescolian harp, and she reflected its every movement of joy and sorrow.  George Eliot studied life, probed into it, cut it in pieces, constructed a theory of it, and then told us what it means.  In this she was unlike other women who have made a deep impression on literature.  Mrs. Browning had nearly as much culture, was as thoughtful as she, but more genuinely feminine at the heart-core.  Love she painted in a purer and happier fashion than that adopted by George Eliot, and she had the warmer impulses of a woman’s tenderness.  Her account of life is the truer, because it is the more ideal; and this may be said for Charlotte Bronte also.  George Eliot had the larger intellect, the keener mind, was a profounder thinker; but her realism held her back from that instinctive conception of life which realizes its larger ideal meanings.  It is not enough to see what is; man desires to know what ought to be.  The poet is the seer, the one who apprehends, who has that finer eye for facts by which he is able to behold what the facts give promise of.  This ideal vision Mrs. Browning had, and in so far she was the superior of George Eliot.  The same may be said for George Sand, who, with all her wildness and impurity, was a woman through and through.  She was all heart, all impulse, lived in her instincts and emotions.  She had the abandon, enthusiasm and spontaneity which George Eliot lacked.  If the one represents the head, the other expresses the heart of woman.  George Eliot, as a woman, thought, reasoned, philosophized; George Sand felt, gave every emotion reign, lived out all her impulses.  What the one lacks the other had; where one was weak the other was strong.  With somewhat of George Sand’s idealism and emotional zeal for wider and freer life, George Eliot would have been a greater writer.  Could she have moulded Dorothea with what is best in Consuelo, she would have been the rival of the greatest literary artists among men.  Yet, with her limitations, it must be said that George Eliot is the superior of all other women in her literary accomplishments.  If others are her superiors in some directions, in the totality of her powers she surpasses all.  Even as an interpreter of woman’s nature and the feminine side of life, she does not fail to keep well ahead of the best of feminine writers.  She is more thoroughly the master of her powers, is more self-centred, looks out upon human experience more calmly and with a more penetrating gaze.  Foremost of the half-dozen women who during the present century have sought to interpret the feminine side of life, she has done much for her sex.  Daring more than others, she has given a greater promise than any other of what woman is to accomplish when her nature blossoms out into all its possibilities.

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George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.