Elizabeth Hardwick
GEORGE ELIOT'S HUSBAND
She was melancholy, head-achy, with a slow, disciplined,
hard-won, aching genius that bore down upon her with a wondrous
and exhausting force, like a great love affair in middle age. Driven,
worn-out, dedicated, George Eliot needed unusual care and constant
encouragement; indeed she could not even begin her great career until
the great person appeared to help her. Strange that it should always be
said of this woman of bold strength that she "was not fitted to stand
alone." She waited for help, standing in the wings, ailing, thinking and
feeling-speechless. She was homely, even ugly, and perhaps that ac–
counted for some of her thoroughness and quiet determination; she was
afraid of failure and rebuff. She suffered. Who can doubt that she was
profoundly passionate and romantic
?
You cannot read her books or
study her personal history, search for her character and temperament,
without feeling her passionate nature immediately. It was agony not to
be able to
appeal
in a simple, feminine way. Her countenance quite
spontaneously brought to mind-the horse. Virginia Woolf speaks of
George Eliot's "expression of serious and sullen and almost equine
power" and Henry James felt himself nearly in love with the "great,
horse-faced, blue-stocking."
If
she did not appeal, she
impressed
over–
whelmingly. Her genius, her splendid power of mind, yes, but there is
something powerfully affecting about her too, the fact that it was this
particular woman who had the genius and the mind. When she died
Lord Acton said, "It seems to me as
if
the sun had gone out. You can–
not imagine how much I loved her."
Nothing was easy. It was always unremitting effort, "raising herself
with groans and struggles." Sometimes it seems that she is at the mercy
of her intelligence; she is not an argumentative woman and likes peace
and affection about her. Still she had to learn German, was compelled
by an inner demon to suffer through a decision about going to church
with her father; she must read Spinoza, must make up her mind about
difficult matters. In an almost helpless way she cared about philosophy,
politics, moral issues as other women care about clothes while often wish–
ing they needn't. Again Virginia Woolf: "the culture, the philosophy,
