C. HER SYMPATHY: FURTHER

CONSIDERED

I

IT is time to examine a little more narrowly into the texture of this sympathy, which she wore, not as fine clothes or jewelry, but as a necessary garment for warmth.

It is a fine thing to be able to show how a despicable character has, perhaps by some mysterious inheritance, or by the sure working out of some hidden law, a bent or twist which circumstances will mould along the line of a resistance made the least by these conditions. The growth of Tito's duplicity was like the rising tide. He had borrowed from falsehood, and he had to pay the debt by further borrowings. George Eliot makes no weak apologies, and is not one of those fools who make a mock at sin by calling bitter sweet and sweet bitter. She subtly removes him more and more from her sympathy and ours, or rather, let us say, he removes himself from a sympathy which would still wistfully follow him if it might; and yet without dogmatism, without undue emphasis. or passion, she makes it evident that Tito's troubles come largely from an innate love of reticence. It was an impulse, acting unconsciously at the beginning: concealment was easy to him. "He would now and

then conceal something which had as little the nature of a secret as the fact that he had seen a flight of crows." It does not lessen the despicability of the character, viewed objectively, and it does not call for much waste of pity viewed subjectively; but it does widen our sympathies with glimpses into dark unopened chambers where one must grope blindly to find the key of escape. George Eliot makes us hate the sin for a long time before we begin to hate the sinner, so insidious is this growth of reticence into falsehood, and so subtly does it blend with his pleasure-loving nature, which finds it easier to lie than to bear burdens under the truth. He is a lovable fellow, even after he has begun to deceive, and we are kept hoping that he will find the courage to retrace his steps. Such good looks, such pleasant manners, such winning address, such sweet amiability — surely Apollo will not turn into an evil god! But the canker grows and grows, until in one of those grand climacteric moments which carry within them all the mockery of the past and all the tragedy of the future, he stands before Romola, not in the fair Grecian shape which won her, but "in his loathsome1 beauty," his attractiveness, her curse.

Of all hopeless cases of sympathy one would say the case of the miser was the most hopeless. Yet no one can ever read 'Silas Marner' without thinking that perhaps there are extenuating circumstanes for all the other misers also. And what is there accomplished in an idyll is more laboriously traced forth in the complicated history of Mr. Bulstrode. The piti

1 "Twenty letters of twenty pages do not display a character," says Taine, in his chapter on Richardson, "but one sharp word does."

1

ableness of his position is allowed to disturb the security of our scorn only so far as a sympathetic analysis of his temperamental peculiarities tempers our desire to see the heaviest punishment inflicted. The dangerous doctrine is not taught that a man is not to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his actions; what is enforced is the difficulty of deciding how far he is to be held responsible. The honest force of righteous indignation is nowhere minimized in George Eliot's work, but is, on the contrary, applauded; and yet there is a gentle insistence of "Judge not," because there may be some hidden fact which if known would alter the judgment. The glory of such magnanimity shines the more steadfastly in that while it is easy to find excuses for vices akin to our own, and for such as are somewhat loosely classed as "amiable," it requires sympathy of an heroic fibre to shadow forth natural causes for unnatural vices, and to attempt an understanding of one spiritually one's opposite. As George Eliot is, of all novelists, the most strenuous in emphasizing the beauty of altruism, it would be natural to expect a coldness of feeling towards the unloveliness of egoism. But it is a part of her reverent attitude towards this same Social Good that she should be eminently just to all, including therefore those opposed to the Social Good: hence her sympathy with those most naturally repugnant to her sympathy. I do not know of such a mental attitude, proceeding from such a moral purpose, in any other novelist.1

1 The fairness resulting from an honest, intelligent sympathy is clearly illustrated in her defence of Byron against the pietistic cant of Cumming. In her essay against that preacher's doctrines she repudiates with noble scorn the charge that Byron's "dying moments "

If

Thus she makes it apparent that Mr. Bulstrode's way of explaining dispensations would have been deceitful only to an idealized self,- that is, to a self freed from egoistic fetters: in view of those fetters, it was a genuine method because egoism does not affect the sincerity of beliefs: "rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief." He is wrapped in the atmosphere of a doctrine which admits of the view that the depth of a particular sin is "but a measure for the depth of forgiveness." sin is egoism, in the bad sense and with all that may logically flow from its uncontrolled possession of a man, a religious system which may be twisted into a feeder for this egoism is to be taken into consideration. Mr. Bulstrode was in the grasp of such a system. He was a hypocrite, yes, but it was a doctrinal hypocrisy; and that is of a kind that can only be understood, and then only partially, by an understanding of the doctrine. The "outer" conscience, with its concrete warnings, is likely to be swallowed up in the "inner" conscience of abstract formulas: bad deeds are excused by a sense of pardon." George Eliot does not mean to say that doctrines are responsible for sins. A man may use his religion for a cloak of maliciousness. But she delicately shows how "mixed" the sinner's motives are likely to be when the sinner is a certain kind of a "professing Christian."

were spent in writing a certain recklessly hopeless poem; rejoicing that, on the contrary, the poet's "unhappy career was ennobled and purified towards its close by a high and sympathetic purpose, by honest and energetic efforts for his fellow-men." Yet by turning to the passage referred to in the footnote to p. 196, it will be seen that this generous tribute is in the face of a general and fundamental dislike of Lord Byron's character.

Nor does she make Bulstrode wish to continue in sin that grace may abound. He would have echoed St. Paul's "God forbid!" to that; and yet that is what he actually did. He used his wealth—such, for instance, as he got through investments in the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy's silk for the exaltation of God's cause; "which was something distinct from his own rectitude of conduct." Vincy was, in Bulstrode's view, one of God's enemies, in that he was a worldly man: he was to be used, therefore, as an instrument in Mr. Bulstrode's hands for the glory of God, through wealth wrung from Vincy, who would not have used it for God's glory.

Mr. Bulstrode had from the first moments of shrinking, but they were private, and took the form of prayer. "Thou knowest how loose my soul sits from these things how I view them all as implements for tilling Thy garden rescued here and there from the wilderness." It was easy for him to settle what was due from him to others by inquiring what was God's intention in regard to himself. He was not a coarse hypocrite. "He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs."

But, that we may not charge his hypocrisy against his "Evangelical" creed, in the flattering belief that our own creed, for example, if it does not happen to be

Evangelical," would have saved him, George Eliot points out, with her wide-eyed sanity of vision, that we are all occasional hypocrites of this sort, and that Bulstrode's implicit reasoning is not peculiar to his sect. "There is no general doctrine which is not