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قراءة كتاب The Ethics of George Eliot's Works

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The Ethics of George Eliot's Works

The Ethics of George Eliot's Works

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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right solely as right, his knowledge is yet to come.  Essentially, his ideal of life as yet is “self-pleasing.”  This impels him, constituted as he is, to strive that he shall stand well with all.  This almost necessitates that he shall be kindly, genial, loving; enjoying the joy and well-being of all around him, and therefore lovable.  But this also assures that his struggle against temptation shall be weak and vacillating; and that when, through his paltering with it, it culminates, he shall at once fall before it.  The wood scene with Adam Bede still further illustrates the same characteristics.  This man, so genial and kindly, rages fiercely in his heart against him whom he has unwittingly wronged.  Frank and open, apparently the very soul of honour, he shuffles

and lies like a coward and a knave; and this in no personal fear, but because he shrinks to lose utterly that goodwill and esteem of others,—of Adam in particular, because Adam constrains his own high esteem,—which are to him the reflection of his own self-worship.  Repentance comes to him at last, because conscience has never in him been entirely overlaid and crushed.  It comes when the whirlwind of anguish has swept over him, scattered all the flimsy mists of self-excuse in which self-love had sought to veil his wrong-doing, and bowed him to the dust; but who shall estimate the remediless and everlasting loss already sustained?

We have spoken of Captain Wybrow as the prototype of Arthur.  He is so in respect of both being swayed by that vital sin of self-pleasing to which all wrong-doing ultimately refers itself; but that in Arthur the corruption of life at its source is not complete, is shown throughout the whole story.  The very form of action which self-love assumes in him, tells that self though dominant is not yet supreme.  It refers itself to others.  It absolutely requires human sympathy.  So long as the man lives to some extent in the opinion and affections of his brother men,—so long as he is even uncomfortable under the sense of being shut out from these otherwise than as the being so shall affect his own interests,—we may be quite sure he is not wholly lost.  The difference between the two men is still more clearly shown when they are brought face to face with the result of their

wrong-doing.  With each there is sorrow, but in Wybrow, and still more vividly as we shall see in Tito Melema, it is the sorrow of self-worship only.  No thought of the wronged one otherwise than as an obstacle and embarrassment, no thought of the wrong simply as a wrong, can touch him.  This sorrow is merely remorse, “the sorrow of the world which worketh death.”  Arthur, too, is suddenly called to confront the misery and ruin he has wrought; but in him, self then loses its ascendancy.  There is no attempt to plead that he was the tempted as much as the tempter; and no care now as to what others shall think or say about him.  All thought is for the wretched Hetty; and all energy is concentrated on the one present object, of arresting so far as it can be arrested the irremediable loss to her.  The wrong stands up before him in its own nakedness as a wrong.  This is repentance; and with repentance restoration becomes possible and begins.

Adam Bede contrasts at nearly every point with Arthur Donnithorne.  Lovable is nearly the last epithet we think of applying to him.  Hard almost to cruelty toward his sinning father; hard almost to contemptuousness toward his fond, foolish mother; bitterly hard toward his young master and friend, on the first suspicion of personal wrong; savagely vindictive, long and fiercely unforgiving, when he knows that wrong accomplished;—these may well seem things irreconcilable with any true fulfilment of that Christian

life whose great law is love.  Yet, examined more narrowly, they approve themselves as nearly associated with the larger fulness of that life.  They are born of the same spirit which said of old, “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” fulfilments, howsoever imperfect, of that true and deep “law of resentment” which modern sentimentalism has all but expunged from the Christian code.  The hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing, not against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than as it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life.  It subsists in and springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have asserted themselves as the realities of existence.  Even Seth can be more tolerant than Adam, because the gentle, placid moral beauty of his nature is, so far as this may ever be, the result of temperament; while in Adam whatever has been attained has been won through inward struggle and self-conquest.

In the ‘Mill on the Floss,’ the moral interest of the whole drama is concentrated to a very great degree on Maggie Tulliver; and in her is also mainly concentrated the representative struggle between good and evil, the spirit of the Cross and that of the world; for Stephen Guest is little more than the objective form under which the latent evil of her own humanity assails her.  Her life is the field upon which we see the great conflict waging between the elements

of spiritual life and spiritual death; swaying amid heart-struggle and pain, now toward victory, now toward defeat, till at last all seems lost.  Then at one rebound the strong brave spirit recovers itself, and takes up the full burden of its cross; sees and accepts the present right though the heart is breaking; and the end is victory crowned and sealed by death.

From her first appearance as a child, those elements of humanity are most prominent in her which, unguided and uncontrolled, are most fraught with danger to the higher life; and for her there is no real outward guidance or control whatever.  The passionate craving for human sympathy and love, which meets no fuller response than from the rude instinctive fondness of her father and the carefully-regulated affection of her brother, on the one hand prepares her for the storm of passion, and on the other, chilled and thrown back by neglect and refusal, threatens her with equal danger of hardness and self-inclusion.  The strong artist temperament, the power of spontaneous and intense enjoyment in everything fair and glad to eye and ear, repressed by the uncongenial accessories around her, tends to concentrate her existence in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no sustenance.  This danger is for her the greater and more insidious, because in her the sensuous, so strongly developed, is refined from

all its grossness by the presence of imagination and thought.

When at last, amid the desolation that has come upon her home, and the increasing bareness of all the accessories of her young life, its deeper needs and higher aspirations awaken to definite purpose and seek definite action, the direction they take is toward a hard stern asceticism, cramping up all life and energy within a narrow round of drudgeries and privations.  She strives, as many an earnest impassioned nature like hers has done in similar circumstances, to fashion her own cross, and to make it as hard as may be to bear.  She would deny to herself the very beauty of earth and sky, the music of birds and rippling waters, and everything sweet and glad, as temptations and snares.  From all this she is brought back by Philip.  But he, touching as he is in the humility and tender unselfishness of his love, is too exclusively of the artist temperament to give direction or sustainment to the deeper moral

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