Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/772

762 self-will and selfishness so elaborate a study is devoted in the first section, a minor character on the whole, — this seems to us certain, that if she be not meant to play a considerable part in the story, and to reap somewhat liberally the seed sown in early self-indulgence, there has been some little mistake made in making so careful a study of the character in germ. For clearly as yet it is in germ, and clearly, too, if it fades away into a character of ordinary selfishness, it will not be in keeping with the delineation already given. All her most brilliant studies of female character display, like her writings in general, a certain definiteness of bent, in which one characteristic is uppermost, and is painted with a distinctness of outline and clearness of touch which make the character containing it memorable. She is very fond of dwelling on the deep conventional vein in women, and has sometimes even made it attractive, though much oftener the reverse. In her last story there were two such characters, Celia and Rosamond, and though the latter was by far the deeper study of the two, and presented a picture of conventional sweetness, prettiness, selfishness, and superficiality, such as it will not be easy to find a companion for in the whole range of English literature, Celia's character was, at least, equally definitely drawn in its more amiable and natural conventionalism, and in proportion to the care and space given to it, the trait of conventionalism was quite equally prominent. Again, in the admirable sketch of Nancy Lammeter, — the heroine, if there be a heroine, in "Silas Marner," — George Eliot has given us the same vein of character, though there in connection with it a depth of inherited traditional prepossession and a warmth of womanly disinterestedness, which make it lovable, instead of even faintly unpleasing. On the other hand, in Romola, in Maggie of "The Mill on the Floss," and in the Dorothea of "Middlemarch," she has made a study of women the current of whose nature runs against this conventionalism, and whose life is in some degree a war with it, either in the moral or the intellectual region and here, again, the depth and intensity of the purpose which was in the author's mind are equally conspicuous. But if Gwendolen Harleth is meant to succumb to the conventional limits imposed on selfishness by social influence, George Eliot has certainly struck a wrong note at starting. The idea of the character is indeed intellectual ambition without originality, but it is moral self-will of a sort which must end in transgressing conventional limits as the pressure of life increases. It would be quite contrary to George Eliot's manner to lay so much stress on this as she has done, and then merge this feature of Gwendolen's character in conventional traits. We do not know a case in which George Eliot has carefully drawn a feminine character without an emphasis, without a stress, without a certain concentrativeness of manner which make it impossible to miss her purpose, or to doubt that that purpose is part and parcel of her sketch. She has, of course, made many clever sketches of witty or humorous women like Mrs. Poyser, or Mrs. Cadwallader, and in her degree, too, Nancy Lammeter, already referred to; but the lightness of touch here applies rather to their sayings than to the portraiture of their characters, and if we were asked what Mrs. Cadwallader or Mrs. Poyser would be in themselves, if the mother-wit which is the principal feature in them could be conceived as dormant for a time, we doubt if any reader, however careful, could form a very distinct impression. So far as their liveliness or sagacity, it is a voice which somewhat conceals the real bent of the mind within. You see that in their case George Eliot was not giving us a lightly-touched character, — indeed, she has little interest in women, unless she has enough interest either to sympathize with or dislike them, — but rather diversifying her story by their vivacious sayings. We may take it almost as a general rule, that when George Eliot paints a woman's character at all, she herself regards it with some very strongly marked feeling, and cannot, therefore, paint it with a light hand. The sketch of Celia is, perhaps, the nearest thing to the display of a light hand in her female characters, but she cannot at all conceal her profound though kindly contempt for Celia, and she brings it out here and there so as to produce on the reader something like the effect of a dissonance. Hence it seems to us that if Gwendolen Harleth is not going to be a very carefully elaborated study, she will be a flaw in the art of the story. There is too much purpose and point displayed already in the initial sketch of her to render it possible, with any true regard to art, to shade the character off into a new type of purely conventional selfishness. The stress laid on her self-will and imperiousness has already gone too far to admit of these qualities being confined within the limits which social convention imposes. George Eliot