XV.

FELIX HOLT AND MIDDLEMARCH.

HE scenes of George Eliot's later novels are laid in England, but for the most part among a town rather than a rural population. Instead of Hayslope and Raveloe, Mrs. Poyser and Silas Marner, we have Middlemarch and Treby Magna, Dorothea Brooke and Felix Holt. If Felix Holt is quite as much a workingman as Adam Bede, occupying a social position higher in no respect whatever, yet he is a workingman of a far different type. If Adam is the nobler character, the truer type of man, Felix represents a larger social purpose and has higher moral aims. In Adam Bede we find rustic simplicity and contentment, but in Felix Holt we touch social aspirations and political ambitions. The horizon has widened, the plane of social life has lifted, there are new motives and larger ideals.

Very many of her readers and critics regard Middlemarch as George Eliot's greatest novel. This is said to have been her own opinion. With great unanimity her readers pronounce Felix Holt her weakest and least interesting work. So far as the dramatic and artistic execution are concerned, these judgments are not entirely correct. The machinery of Middlemarch is clumsy, and the plot desultory in aim and method. On the other hand, Felix Holt is strongly thought out and skilfully planned. It has much of passion and enthusiasm in it, and not a little of pure and noble sentiment, while Middlemarch is never impassioned, but flows on calmly. The author evidently put herself into Felix Holt with the purpose of teaching her own views

about moral and social life. She lived in the characters, felt and hoped with them, and wrote out of a deep, spontaneous purpose. The sensational element has been more fully used, and the unity of the plot more thoroughly developed, than in any other of her works, while there is a living, breathing purpose in the story which is absent from her later works. Felix Holt is one of the two or three novels by George Eliot which have an affirmative and thoroughly constructive purpose. It is this purpose which makes the chief interest of the work. It is a story of social reform, and is to be read as an embodiment of the author's political ideas. From this point of view it is a story full of interest, and it is the one of George Eliot's novels which will most strongly impress those who are fully in sympathy with her ideas of progress and social regeneration. The purpose of Middlemarch is critical, to show how our modern social life cramps the individual, limits his energies, and destroys his power of helpful service to the world. This critical aim runs through the whole work and colors every feature of it. The impression made by the whole work is saddening; and the reader, while admiring the artistic power and the literary finish of the book, is depressed by the moral issue. In strength of imagination, intellectual insight, keen power of analysis, this novel surpasses anything else George Eliot has writter.

Felix Holt is a novel with an ethical purpose. It aims to show how social and political reform can be brought about. Felix is George Eliot's ideal workingman, a man who remains true to his own class, seeks his own moral elevation, does not have much faith in the ballot, and who is zealous for the education of his fellows. He is a radical who believes in heredity, who is aware of our debt to the past, and who would use the laws of tsocial inheritance for the elevation of mankind. The account Felix gives of his conversion contains George Eliot's conception of what is to be done

by all workingmen who rightly understand what social reform is and how it can be most truly brought about. It is to be secured by each workingman living not for self and pleasure, but to do what good he can in the world.

"I'm not speaking lightly," said Felix. "If I had not seen that I was making a hog of myself very fast, and that pig-wash, even if I could have got plenty of it, was a poor sort of thing, I should never have looked life fairly in the face to see what was to be done with it. I laughed out loud at last to think of a poor devil like me, in a Scotch garret, with my stockings out at heel and a shilling of two to be dissipated upon, with a smell of raw haggis mounting from below, and old women breathing gin as they passed me on the stairs-wanting to turn my life into easy pleasure. Then I began to see what else it could be turned into. Not much, perhaps. This world is not a very fine place for a good many of the people in it. But I've made up my mind it shan't be the worse for me, if I can help it. They may tell me I can't alter the worldthat there must be a certain number of sneaks and robbers in it, and if I don't lie and filch, somebody else will. Well, then, some body else shall, for I won't. That's the upshot of my conversion. Mr. Lyon, if you want to know it."

When Felix gives Esther an account of his plans, and describes to her his purpose to do what he can to elevate his class, we have George Eliot's own views on the subject of social reform. Felix says,

"I want to be a demagogue of a new sort: an honest one, if pos sible, who will tell the people they are blind and foolish, and neither flatter them nor batten on them. I have my heritage an order I

belong to. I have the blood of a line of handicraftsmen in my veins, and I want to stand up for the lot of the handicraftsmen as a good lot, in which a man may be better trained to all the best functions of his nature, than if he belonged to the grimacing set who have visiting-cards, and are proud to be thought richer than their neighbors."

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That the leading aim of Felix Holt is to show the nature of true social reform may be seen in the address made by Felix at the election, and even more distinctly in the address put into his mouth in Blackwood's Magazine for 1868. In the election speech Felix gives it as his belief that if workingmen "go the right way to work they may get power sooner without votes" than with them, by the use of public opinion, "the' greatest

power under heaven." The novel points out the social complications of life, the influence of hereditary privileges and abuses, and how every attempt at reform is complicated by many interests, and is likely to fall into the hands of demagogues who use the workingmen for their own purposes. The address of Felix in Blackwood's is really a commentary on the novel, or rather a fine and suggestive summary of the moral, social and political ideas it was meant to inculcate.

In Felix Holt, George Eliot would teach the world. that true social reform is not to be secured by act of Par iament, or by the possession of the ballot on the part of all workingmen. It is but another enforcement of the theory that it is not rights men are to seek after, but duties; that social and political reform is not to be secured by insistence on rights, but by the true and and manly acceptance of altruism. Felix Holt is a social reformer who is not a demagogue, who does not seek office or personal advancement, but who wishes to show by his own conduct how a larger life is to be won. He would introduce universal education; he would teach the great principles of right living, physically and morally; he would inculcate the spirit of helpfulness and mutual service. As a brave, earnest, self-sacrificing, pure-minded lover of humanity, he is an inspiring character. George Eliot evidently wished to indicate in his creation what can be done by workingmen towards the uplifting of their own class. A better social order, she would have us believe, cannot be secured from external sources; but it must be had by an internal impulse moving those whose lives are degraded to seek for higher things because of their own intrinsic good. The demagogue seeks the elevation of workingmen because he can use them for his own advancement; but Felix desires their elevation for the good of the whole social structure. To this end he would inspire in his fellows a greater moral ambition and zeal for the common good. He is a Mazzini,

Castelar or John Bright in his own social order; one who loves his own class, wishes to remain in it, and who desires above all things that it shall do its part in the work of national elevation. His aim is not to oppose the other classes in society, but to make his own necessary to the prosperity of his country. Felix is not an ideal character, for he is rough, uncultured and headstrong; but he is an inspiring personality, with gifts of intellectual fascination and moral courage. George Eliot has created no other character like him. for Deronda and Zarca, whose aims somewhat resemble his, are very different. He is no hero, he is not altogether an attractive person. He has, however, the power, which some of the noblest of George Eliot's characters possess, of attracting and uplifting other persons. He made Esther realize the wide gulf between self-pleasing and duty, he inspired her with moral courage and awakened her mind to the higher aims and satisfactions life has to give us. He was undoubtedly meant for a moral hero of the working class, a prophet to the laborers. With all his limitations he is one of the noblest and most helpful characters in George Eliot's books.

Other distinctive ideas of George Eliot's appear throughout this book. Her theories of heredity, altruism and environment affect the whole development of the story. Perhaps no more striking illustration of the law of retribution is to be found in her books than in the case of Mrs. Transome. This woman's sin corrupted her own life, and helped to darken the lives of others.

The aim had in view in Middlemarch is to illustrate the impotence of modern Tife so far as it relates to moral heroism and spiritual attainment. High and noble action is hindered and baulked by the social conditions in the midst of which we live; and those who would live grandly and purely, and in a suprerne unselfishness devote themselves to the world, find that