'Twas a mouldy crust of coarse brown bread, 7. As Sir Launfal mused with a downcast face, A light shone round about the place; The leper no longer crouched at his side, Shining and tall and fair and straight As the pillar that stood by the Beautiful Gate- Enter the temple of God in Man. 300 305 His words were shed softer than leaves from the pine, 310 And they fell on Sir Launfal as snows on the brine, 8. "Lo it is I, be not afraid! In many climes, without avail, Thou hast spent thy life for the Holy Grail; Behold it is here-this cup which thou 315 320 This water His blood that died on the tree; The Holy Supper is kept, indeed, In whatso we share with another's need; Not what we give, but what we share For the gift without the giver is bare; 325 Who gives himself with his alms feeds three- LITERARY ANALYSIS. — 298–301. 'Twas ... soul. Point out the paradox, and reconcile the statements. 302-314. As... said. In stanza 7 point out a simile; a metaphor.-Explain the allusion in the "Beautiful Gate" (307).—For what word is "brine" (311) used by synecdoche? 315-327. Point out the two noblest lines in stanza 8. 9. Sir Launfal awoke as from a swound:- 10. The castle gate stands open now, And the wanderer is welcome to the hall The summer's long siege at last is o'er; When the first poor outcast went in at the door, And mastered the fortress by surprise: There is no spot she loves so well on ground, She lingers and smiles there the whole year round. The meanest serf on Sir Launfal's land 330 235 340 345 And there's no poor man in the North Countree LITERARY ANALYSIS.—334-347. The castle...he. Paraphrase the last stanza. XXXIX. GEORGE ELIOT (MRS. G. H. LEWES). 1820-1880. CHARACTERIZATION BY R. H. HUTTON. 1. The great authoress who calls herself George Eliot is chiefly known, and no doubt deserves to be chiefly known, as a novelist, but she is certainly much more than a novelist in the sense in which that word applies even to writers of great genius-to Miss Austen or Mr. Trollope; nay, much more than a novelist in the sense in which that word applies to Miss Bronté, or even to Thackeray; though it is of course true, in relation to all these writers, that, besides being much more, she is also and necessarily not so much. 2. What is remarkable in George Eliot is the striking combination in her of very deep speculative power with a very great and realistic imagination. It is rare to find an intellect so skilled in the analysis of the deepest psychological problems, so completely at home in the conception and delineation of real characters. George Eliot discusses the practical influences acting on men and women, I do not say with the ease of Fieldingfor there is a touch of carefulness, often of over-carefulness, in all she does--but with much of his breadth and spaciousness; the breadth and spaciousness, one must remember, of a man who had seen London life in the capacity of a London police magistrate. Nay, her imagination has, I do not say of course the fertility, but something of the range and the delight in rich historic coloring, of Sir Walter Scott's; while it combines with it something too of the pleasure in ordered learning, and the laborious marshalling of the picturesque results of learning which gives the flavor of scholastic pride to the great genius of Milton. . . . 3. George Eliot's genial, broad delineations of human life have, as I said just now, more perhaps of the breadth of Fielding than of any of the manners-painters of the present day. For these imagine life only as it appears in a certain dress and sphere, which are a kind of artificial medium for their art-life as affected by drawing-rooms. George Eliot has little, if any, of their capacity for catching the undertones and allusive complexity of this sort of society. She has, however, observed the phases of a more natural and straightforward class of life, and she draws her external world as much as possible from observation-though some of her Florentine pictures must have been suggested more by literary study than by personal experience-instead of imagining it, like Miss Bronté, out of the heart of the characters she wishes to paint. . . ... 4. Another element in which George Eliot shows the masculine breadth and strength of her genius adds less to the charm of her tales,—I mean the shrewdness and miscellaneous range of her observations on life. Nothing is rarer than to see in women's writings that kind of strong acute generalization which Fielding introduced so freely. Yet the miscellaneous observations in which George Eliot so often indulges us, after the fashion of the day, are not always well suited to the particular bent of her genius; indeed, they often break the spell which that genius has laid upon her readers. She is not a satirist, and she half adopts the style of a satirist in these elements of her books. The influence of Thackeray had at first a distinctly bad effect on her genius, but in Silas Marner that influence began to wane, and quite disappeared in Romola, though I think it reappeared a little in Felix Holt. A powerful and direct style of portraiture is in ill-keeping with that flavor of sarcastic innuendo in which Thackeray delighted. It jars upon the ear in the midst of the simple and faithful delineations of human nature as it really is, with which George Eliot fills her books. It was all very well for Thackeray, who made it his main aim and business to expose the hollowness and insincerities of human society, to add his own keen comment to his own one-sided picture. But then it was of the essence of his genius to lay bare unrealities, and leave the sound life almost untouched. It was rather a relief than otherwise to see him playing with his dissecting-knife after one of his keenest probing feats; you understand better how limited his purpose is that he has been in search of organic disease and you are not surprised, therefore, to find that he has found little that was healthy. 5. The artistic conditions under which George Eliot works are, when she chooses, singularly favorable to the exhibition of the only kind of "moral" which a genuine artist should admit. No one now ever thinks of assuming that a writer of fiction lies under any obligation to dispose of his characters exactly as he would perhaps feel inclined to do if he could determine for them the circumstances of a real instead of an imaginary life. It was a quaint idea of the last generation to suppose that the moral tendency of a tale lay, not in discriminating evil and good, but in the zeal which induced the novelist to provide, before the end of the third volume, for plucking up and burning the tares. But, though we have got over that notion, our modern satirists are leading us into the opposite extreme, and trying to convince us that even discrimination itself, in such deep matters, is nearly impossible. The author of the Mill on the Floss is hardly exempt from this tendency, but in Adam Bede it is not discernible. 6. The only moral in a fictitious story which can properly be demanded of writers of genius is, not to shape their tale this way or that which they may justly decline to do on artistic grounds-but to discriminate clearly the relative nobility of the characters they do conceive; in other words, to give us light enough in their pictures to let it be clearly seen where the shadows are intended to lie. An artist who leaves it doubtful whether he recognizes the distinction between good and evil at all, or who detects in all his characters so much evil that the readers' sympathies must either be entirely passive or side with what is evil, is blind to artistic as well as moral laws. To banish confusion from a picture is the first duty of the artist, and confusion must exist where those lines which are the most essential of all for determining the configuration of human character are invisible or indistinctly drawn. Moreover, I think it may be said that in painting human nature an artist is bound to give due weight to the motives which would claim authority over him in other acts of his life; and as he would be bound at any time and in any place to do anything in his power to make clear the |