GEORGE ELIOT'S HUSBAND
261
the fame and the influence were
all
built upon a very humble founda–
tion-she was the grand-daughter of a carpenter." A great deal of the
drama of this bewitching life can be found in Professor Gordon Haight's
edition of the first three volumes of George Eliot's
Letters.
1
Haight's
massive scholarship, his long and brilliant work could hardly be
surpassed.
George Eliot's fame was immense; her books sold well and she made
money; she was a distinguished public figure; her image and spirit were
ennobling without being cold or for the few. She was solid and reassur–
ing, of a dignity as large and splendidly detailed as her solid, deep, dig–
nified novels. It is easy to think of Queen Victoria and some people who
cherish George Eliot seem to want us to think of the old, puffy-cheeked
Queen. This novelist's history has always contained an instructive moral
possibility. She is sel!n as the supreme cultural fact demonstrating the
value of sober living, earnestness, and the brisk attention to matters at
hand of a reliable man with a family business. Serene, brilliant, re–
sponsible: there she stands in her paradoxically plain grandeur.
As
one
grows older this industrious, slowly developing soul becomes dear for
a secret reason-for having published her first story at the age of thirty–
eight.
Still, too much is made of the respectability of a great lover. Her
most daring act, the most violent assertion of self, was not the "mar–
riage" with Lewes, but her marriage eighteen months after Lewes' death
to Mr. Cross, "one many years her junior and totally unknown and
obscure." Cross was probably a mistake; in all his public appearances
he is firmly on the dull side. (It is astounding to learn in Haight that
this man lived on until 1924---a strange old coot for the Jazz Age.)
George Eliot was obviously strongly impulsive, but then many of the
Victorians were troubled in spirit and indulgent in habits. Even the
familiar Dickens had his love problems, Tennyson drank, and Wordsworth
had an illegitimate child. George Eliot was certainly not Queen Victoria.
She was pre-eminently an artist, with all the irregularity of temperament
and determination to do as she pleased common among such personal–
ities. She and her husband, Lewes not Cross, are inconceivable as any–
thing except what they were, two writers, brilliant and utterly literary.
They led the literary life from morning to midnight, working, reading,
correcting proofs, traveling, entertaining, receiving and writing letters,
planning literary projects, worrying, doubting their powers, experiencing
a delicious hypochondria. The Brownings, the Webbs, the Garnetts, the
1
The George Eliot Letters,
Volumes 1-3. Edited
by
Gordon S. Haight.
Yale. $20.00.
