IV

"HER INFINITE VARIETY"

Strength and honor are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.

She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness.

PERHAPS

[Proverbs.]

ERHAPS no single passage in all literature offers a better description of the influence and aims which until recently have been associated with good women than does that from which these sentences are quoted. It is only within late years that any fundamental additions have been made to the list of virtues herein catalogued, and it is a question whether these are altogether improvements.

To define or portray the aspirations and intentions of a good woman is not an easy task, and in the changing conceptions of the duties and privileges of normal women it is a rare dis

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tinction to stand in line with the soundest tendencies of the radicals and at the same time hold fast to that which has proved its value in the traditional view. George Eliot has achieved this, in the manner in which such an accomplishment most fittingly comes—without the parade of iconoclasm or the smug self-complacency of reaction. It is in her analysis of home-loving women that she has most thoroughly shown her right to be reckoned among the great interpreters of human nature.

The outstanding characteristic of George Eliot's women is the sanity and poise with which they meet the various crises which confront them. They are rarely hysterical, as are the creatures of Thomas Hardy's imagination, though at times they may display weakness or uncertainty. Even in a case like that of Gwendolen Grandcourt, where the futile groping after righteousness of an uninstructed woman forms the theme of one of the most pitiful and sordid stories in the whole series of novels, the elements of rational action are always present. As has been shown, there are no "weaker sis

ters" in George Eliot's novels; there are no women whose lives are independent of individual choice and freedom of will. This means that there are no ignorant women, in the fullest connotation of the term.

For the inability to make a rational choice in the fundamental human relationships is the mark of genuine ignorance. All Thomas Hardy's women are therefore in the ignorant class. There are none such in the novels of George Eliot. Misguided or uninstructed these women often are, yet their instinct is toward the intelligent course. Significantly enough, this groping instinct leads them inevitably toward some form of higher education. There are, to be sure, plenty of men who can say, with Mr. Tulliver, “An over-'cute woman's no better nor a long-tailed sheep-she'll fetch none the better price for all that,"-but the woman herself realizes that in education alone lies her great hope. And so she struggles toward it as best she may in the particular circumstances of her own life. Dorothea Brooke, in her marriage to Mr. Casaubon, turned the

whole force of her young idealism into the pathetic attempt to make herself a companion to the academic interests of her future husband. To this end she strove to master dead languages; to utilize every opportunity of her wedding journey to familiarize herself with the history and art which she supposed to form the background in his mind. The tragedy of her marriage lay in the fact that these could not penetrate the shell of pedantry and formalism which encompassed her husband. Gwendolen Grandcourt, knowing as she did the falsity of the motives which led to her marriage, and aware of the wrongdoing which had preceded it, yet tried to give life to a dry branch by study and at least a rudimentary attempt at self-culture. With Esther Lyon, her love for Felix Holt began with a clash of wills over intellectual concerns.

With one exception, the most interesting case of this striving after spiritual companionship is that of Maggie Tulliver. Her attempt from earliest childhood to enter into the various interests of her brother is the instinctive answer

of the enlightened woman heart to the separative education which tradition has given to men and women. Stevenson's comment: "The little rift between the sexes is immeasurably widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys," holds as true now as ever, in spite of the multiple endeavors of society to bring about the equality of the sexes. George Eliot understood intellectual companionship in fullest measure; and that it could exist without sacrifice of the "feminine" qualities she sought to prove, both in her novels and in her life itself. Her marriage to George Henry Lewes offers an illustration paralleled in literary history only by the other great idyll of the Brownings-both conspicuous justifications of the belief that the education of women should enrich rather than endanger the marriage relation, by making friendship possible within it.

This is the modern attitude toward womanhood and its potentialities, which has only of recent years approached fulfilment. The time