Essays and reviews of George Eliot

by George Eliot, S.B Herrick (Contibutor)

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192 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1887

About the author

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

Reviews

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The reviews are set in the order they were written, following the order the essays and articles were originally read, as ordered in various collections they were read from; the first few therefore being, Three Months In Weimar, and from collections - Impressions Of Theophrastus Such, and Essays of George Eliot Complete.

The latter title is as misleading as titles of various complete collections of works of George Eliot - most aren't complete, and nor is the collection of essays.

Here is an effort to put all the reviews - mine - together.
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Contents
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THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

Impressions of Theophrastus Such

The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete.

Other Essays.
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THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR
by George Eliot.
Frasers Magazine for Town and Country,
51: 306 (1855:June)
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Impressions of Theophrastus Such,

Contents

I. Looking Inward.
II. Looking Backward.
III. How We Encourage Research.
IV. A Man Surprised at his Originality.
V. A too Deferential Man.
VI. Only Temper.
VII. A Political Molecule.
VIII. The Watch-Dog of Knowledge.
IX. A Half-Breed.
X. Debasing the Moral Currency.
XI. The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb.
XII. “So Young!”
XIII. How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials, and Believe in Them.
XIV. The too Ready Writer.
XV. Diseases of Small Authorship.
XVI. Moral Swindlers.
XVII. Shadows of the Coming Race.
XVIII. The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!
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The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete.

CONTENTS.

Preface,

“George Eliot’s” Analysis of Motives,

I.—Carlyle’s Life of Sterling,
II.—Woman in France,
III.—Evangelical Teaching,
IV.—German Wit,
V.—Natural History of German Life,
VI.—Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,
VII.—Worldliness and Other-Worldliness,
VIII.—The Influence of Rationalism,
IX.—The Grammar of Ornament,
X.—Felix Holt’s Address to Workingmen,
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Other Essays.
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Contents as in various collections
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Contents from The Complete Works of George Eliot,
e-artnow, 2020
Contact: info@e-artnow.org EAN: 4064066398552

Carlyle’s Life of Sterling
Woman in France: Madame de Sablé
Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming
German Wit: Henry Heine
The Natural History of German Life
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young
The Influence of Rationalism The Grammar of Ornament
Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt
George Forster
Margaret Fuller
How to Avoid Disappointment
The Wisdom of the Child
A Little Fable with a Great Moral
Hints on Snubbing
From the Note-Book of an Eccentric
Leaves from a Note-Book
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Contents (from the Complete Works of George Eliot,
identical contents from four separate collections
including two publications from JA,
one from ATOZ Classics, and one other.)

From the Note-Book of an Eccentric.
How to Avoid Disappointment.
The Wisdom of the Child.
A Little Fable with a Great Moral.
Hints on Snubbing.
Carlyle’s Life of Sterling.
Margaret Fuller.
Woman in France: Madame de Sablé.
Three Months in Weimar.
Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming.
German Wit: Henry Heine.
The Natural History of German Life.
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.
George Forster.
Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young.
The Influence of Rationalism.
The Grammar of Ornament.
Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt.
Leaves from a Note-Book.
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Contents from
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF GEORGE ELIOT
Delphi

THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR
SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE
THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM
IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH
CARLYLE’S LIFE OF STERLING
WOMAN IN FRANCE: MADAME DE SABLÉ
EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING
GERMAN WIT: HENRY HEINE WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS: THE POET YOUNG
THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT
ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT
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Our order of reviews, followed (after

THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

Impressions of Theophrastus Such

The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete.)

For Other Essays.
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Other Essays.
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From the Note-Book of an Eccentric.
How to Avoid Disappointment.
The Wisdom of the Child.
A Little Fable with a Great Moral.
Hints on Snubbing.
Margaret Fuller.
George Forster.
Leaves from a Note-Book
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Or
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George Forster
Margaret Fuller
How to Avoid Disappointment
The Wisdom of the Child
A Little Fable with a Great Moral
Hints on Snubbing
From the Note-Book of an Eccentric
Leaves from a Note-Book
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On reading - fortunately - From the Note-Book of an Eccentric first, it would seem that other essays are a part of this, and this ought to gave been the title of this collection. So we shall read, and write review, in this order, beginning with that one.
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Reviews.
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THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR
by George Eliot.
Frasers Magazine for Town and Country,
51: 306 (1855:June)
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A very charming description of Weimar from travels of George Eliot, but impossible to find as a publication except in a collection of her works. It's not even included amongst what's published as a complete collection of her essays, for some reason.

One tends to trust a name, and Delphi is such a name, but then one realises the trust was misplaced. Not only at least one work of George Eliot is missing from this supposedly complete collection of her works, but even in such a small essay as THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR, several paragraphs are missing. Here quotes below are from two separate sources for this piece, namely, this work,

The Complete Works of George Eliot:
Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays
& Biography by George Eliot.
Kindle Edition, 6581 pages
Published by e-artnow,
July 2nd 2020,
ASIN:- B08C8NLXQB

apart from Delphi.
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To begin with, one is startled as one reads the opening.

"IT was between three and four o’clock on a fine morning in August that, after a ten hours’ journey from Frankfort, I awoke at the Weimar station. No tipsiness can be more dead to all appeals than that, which comes from fitful draughts of sleep on a railway journey by night. To the disgust of your wakeful companions, you are totally insensible to the existence of your umbrella, and to the fact that your carpet bag is stowed under your seat, or that you have borrowed books and tucked them behind the cushion. ‘What’s the odds, so long as one can sleep?’ is your formule de la vie, and it is not until you have begun to shiver on the platform, in the early morning air that you become alive to property and its duties, i.e., to the necessity of keeping a fast grip upon it. Such was my condition when I reached the station at Weimar. ... "

If one has read George Eliot's works, one doesn't expect the touch of humour that seems more of a Jerome K Jerome than her! But the picture is familiar in the arriving at unearthly hours at a train station in Germany. And further, too.

"The ride to the town thoroughly roused me, all the more because the glimpses I caught from the carriage window were in startling contrast with my preconceptions. The lines of houses looked rough and straggling, and were often interrupted by trees peeping out from the gardens behind. At last we stopped before the, Erbprinz, an inn of long standing in the heart of the town, and were ushered along heavy-looking in-and-out corridors, such as are found only in German inns, into rooms which overlooked a garden just like one you may see at the back of a farm-house in many an English village."

" ... A loud rumbling of vehicles may indeed be heard now and then; but the rumbling is loud not because the vehicles are many, but because the springs are few. ... "

" ... Our ideas were considerably modified when, in the evening, we found our way to the Belvedere chaussee, a splendid avenue of chesnut trees, two miles in length, reaching from the town to the summer residence of Belvedere; when we saw the Schloss, and discovered the labyrinthine beauties of the park; indeed, every day opened to us fresh charms in this quiet little valley and its environs. ... "
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Authors of her era didn't begin to use paragraph break when changing topics, and simply ran on until the page was exhausted, didn't they!

"First among all its attractions is the Park, which would be remarkably beautiful even among English parks, and it has one advantage over all these—namely, that it is without a fence. It runs up to the houses, and far out into the corn-fields and meadows, as if it had a “sweet will” of its own, like a river or a lake, and had not been planned and planted by human will. Through it flows the Ilm, not a clear stream, it must be confessed, but, like all water, as Novalis says, “an eye to the landscape.” Before we came to Weimar we had had dreams of boating on the Ilm, and we were not a little amused at the difference between this vision of our own and the reality. A few water-fowl are the only navigators of the river, and even they seem to confine themselves to one spot, as if they were there purely in the interest of the picturesque. The real extent of the park is small, but the walks are so ingeniously arranged, and the trees are so luxuriant and various, that it takes weeks to learn the turnings and windings by heart, so as no longer to have the sense of novelty. In the warm weather our great delight was the walk which follows the course of the Ilm, and is overarched by tall trees with patches of dark moss on their trunks, in rich contrast with the transparent green of the delicate leaves, through which the golden sunlight played, and chequered the walk before us. On one side of this walk the rocky ground rises to the height of twenty feet or more, and is clothed with mosses and rock-plants. On the other side there are, every now and then, openings, breaks in the continuity of shade, which show you a piece of meadow-land, with fine groups of trees; and at every such opening a seat is placed under the rock, where you may sit and chat away the sunny hours, or listen to those delicate sounds which one might fancy came from tiny bells worn on the garment of Silence to make us aware of her invisible presence. ... Sometimes we took our shady walk in the Stern, the oldest part of the park plantations, on the opposite side of the river, lingering on our way to watch the crystal brook which hurries on, like a foolish young maiden, to wed itself with the muddy Ilm. ... How little real knowledge of Goethe must the mind have that could wish to see him represented as a naked Apollo, with a Psyche at his knee! The execution is as feeble as the sentiment is false; the Apollo-Goethe is a caricature, and the Psyche is simply vulgar. The statue was executed under Bettina’s encouragement, in the hope that it would be bought by the King of Prussia; but a breach having taken place between her and her royal friend, a purchaser was sought in the Grand Duke of Weimar, who, after transporting it at enormous expense from Italy, wisely shut it up where it is seen only by the curious."

And the paragraph is quoted just about over a half.
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Another surprise is the description of beauty, not what a reader expects from George Eliot after reading several of her works.

" ... Exquisitely beautiful were the graceful forms of the plane-trees, thrown in golden relief on a background of dark pines. Here we used to turn and turn again in the autumn afternoons, at first bright and warm, then sombre with low-lying purple clouds, and chill with winds that sent the leaves raining from the branches. The eye here welcomes, as a contrast, the white façade of a building looking like a small Greek temple, placed on the edge of a cliff, and you at once conclude it to be a bit of pure ornament, a device to set off the landscape; but you presently see a porter seated near the door of the basement story, beguiling the ennui of his sinecure by a book and a pipe, and you learn with surprise that this is another retreat for ducal dignity to unbend and philosophize in. Singularly ill-adapted to such a purpose it seems to beings not ducal. On the other side of the Ilm the park is bordered by the road leading to the little village of Ober Weimar, another sunny walk, which has the special attraction of taking one by Goethe’s Gartenhaus, his first residence at Weimar. Inside, this Gartenhaus is a homely sort of cottage, such as many an English nobleman’s gardener lives in; no furniture is left in it, and the family wish to sell it. Outside, its aspect became to us like that of a dear friend, whose irregular features and rusty clothes have a peculiar charm. It stands, with its bit of garden and orchard, on a pleasant slope, fronting the west; before it the park stretches one of its meadowy openings to the trees which fringe the Ilm, and between this meadow and the garden hedge lies the said road to Ober Weimar. A grove of weeping birches sometimes tempted us to turn out of this road up to the fields at the top of the slope, on which not only the Gartenhaus, but several other modest villas are placed. From this little height one sees to advantage the plantations of the park in their autumnal coloring; the town, with its steep-roofed church, and castle clock-tower, painted a gay green; the bushy line of the Belvedere chaussée, and Belvedere itself peeping on an eminence from its nest of trees. Here, too, was the place for seeing a lovely sunset, such a sunset as September sometimes gives us, when the western horizon is like a rippled sea of gold, sending over the whole hemisphere golden vapors, which, as they near the east, are subdued to a deep rose-color."
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