GEORGE ELIOT AND I RATIONAL IDEALISM RDENT souls, ready to construct A their coming lives, are apt to commit themselves to the fulfilment of their own visions," wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch. This anxiety to realize an ideal is one of the greatest motive forces in the world; wisely directed, it makes possible great reforms and lasting achievements, but without a rational foundation it degenerates into an aimless unrest which is doomed to futility. Under the formative influence of the nineteenth century this idealism has abolished slavery and reformed prisons; it has developed hospitals and improved sanitation; it has fostered the social 1 sciences, and ministered to the needs of its less favored contemporaries on a scale never before possible in the world's history. A great humanitarian impulse, coincident with great material development, has opened the way for tremendous, and almost unbelievable, ad vances. But with these unquestioned improvements there have come the corresponding drawbacks of various sorts. Perhaps the plainest evidence of these lies in the change which has affected the realm of speculative thought, and literature in so far as it reflects that thought. Formerly the attention of the people was fixed on a social group which stood above them. In the days when learning was the possession of the few, the learned class took this position of preeminence. In one way and another the emphasis has shifted. We no longer look at a class which we expect to contribute to our development, but at a group to whose ascent we hope to give material assistance. Our attitude is none the less aristocratic for all this; we can not make parade of our increasing democracy of spirit; what has happened is merely that we believe ourselves the aristocrats, instead of looking to others for this distinction. In our pride of emergence, we assume a tone of patronage which is in itself a sign of imperfect education. In literature the development is peculiarly striking. From the classical insistence upon themes of high and lofty import, we have gone to the opposite extreme. A modern poet, John Masefield, in the prelude to a volume of SaltWater Ballads, defines the province in which his main interest lies with precision, clearness, and poetry withal: Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers, Riding triumphantly laurelled, to lap the fat of the years, Rather the scorned, the rejected, the men hemmed in by the spears. Of the maimed, of the halt, and the blind in the rain and the cold, Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. Masefield is not alone in his preference for this stratum of society. In the mistaken effort to democratize literature and thought, we have fastened our attention upon our social and intellectual inferiors. This is legitimate enough; but before embarking upon such a course the danger should be clearly facedthat of assimilating those very traits which we wish to eradicate. This is the more dangerous in those whose privilege it is to lead their generation. A disquieting feature of the new humanitarianism is the tendency to devote the best of its artistic effort to the interpretation of the injurious or degenerating elements in our civilization. Oscar Wilde, with The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, occurs at once as a pertinent example of a few years ago; Mr. Percival Pollard, in his Masks and Minstrels of New Germany, gives examples and criticism of another phase of the same outgrowth of our civilization. These interpretations are not written in any corrective or satiric spirit, under which guise the dramatists of the Restoration used to justify their brutal representations; it is part of what purports to be an impartial presentment of life as it actually is. With such an impartial picture we have no proper quarrel; but it is seldom that this can be conducted in a strictly scientific spirit. It is argued that the portrait must be sympathetic to be accurate. From sympathy the next step is to interpretation of hidden motives, and finally to justification of them. In literature we have Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, Faithfully Presented. In criminology it takes the form of the view of the offender as the victim of disease; in education it is identified with the conception of the child as the product of an unalterable heredity, or environment, or both. Whatever the field, the tendency is invariably the same. We must place the responsibility for existing facts of personality on conditions arising from this disjointed frame of things, not by any conspiracy upon the human creature himself. It is a curious paradox that this negation of |