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PARTISAN REVIEW
novelist, Eliza Linton, was furious about it. She thought their airs were
impossible, their solemn importance not
to
be
endured. Mrs. Linton
had met George Eliot before the latter was famous and she says about
her: "I will candidly confess my short-sighted prejudices with respect
to this to-be-celebrated person. She was known to be learned, industrious,
thoughtful, noteworthy; but she was not yet the Great Genius of her
age, nor a philosopher bracketed with Plato and Kant, nor was her per–
sonality held to be superior to the law of the land. ... She was essen–
tially underbred and provincial...."
Poor Mrs. Linton had reason to complain. She was not only a rival
novelist but, you might say, a rival divorcee. "There were people who
worshipped those two, who cut me because 1 separated from Linton...."
Envy and outrage make Mrs. Linton slyly fascinating. (One needn't
fear corruption because of the impossibility of anyone succeeding in
making George Eliot look foolish and small.) And sometimes Mrs. Lin–
ton sums it up perfectly. She writes, " ... she had the devotion of a man
whose love had in it that element of adoration and self-suppression which
is dearest of all to a woman like George Eliot, at once jealous and de–
pendent, demanding exclusive devotion and needing incessant care-–
but ready to give all she had in return." Also it is Mrs. Linton who has
left us George Eliot gravely announcing, "I should not think of allow–
ing George to stay away a night from me."
Leslie Stephen thinks George Eliot's powers were diminished by
Lewes' efforts to shield her from criticism, to keep her in a cozy nest
of approval and encouragement. But Stephen's opinion is based upon
his belief that her later novels are inferior to the earlier ones. Stephen
didn't much like
Middlemarch,
nor did Edmund Gosse--both preferred
the early work. It is hard to feel either of these men had anything
more than
respect
for George Eliot. They were formidable, learned
figures, great personages themselves. Something in the Warwickshire
novelist fails to attract them. They seem put off by the grandness of
her reputation-it makes them uneasy, even somewhat jealous. Gosse
says "we are sheep that look up to George Eliot and are not fed by
her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical influence." It is
Gosse's opinion that
Middlemarch
is "mechanical," it is "unimaginative
satire" and "genius misapplied."
Astonishing that the truest lovers of this "ponderous" and "ethical"
writer are the baroque aesthetes Proust and Henry James. And always
the strange lover, Lewes, like someone from Dostoevsky taking over duties
at the Priory, their house. Before his connection with George Eliot,
Lewes had been mad about Jane Austen.
