"I have no brains above my eyes" he
said; "I describe what I see." Hence there is wanting in his creations
that final charm which Shakspere's have. For what the eyes see is not
all.
The great woman who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was a
humorist, too. She had a rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that
crystallized into sayings which are not epigrams only because their
wisdom strikes more than their smartness. But humor was not, as with
Thackeray and Dickens, her point of view. A country girl, the daughter
of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, her early
letters and journals exhibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity.
Later, when her truth to her convictions led her to renounce the
Christian belief, she carried into positivism the same religious
earnestness, and wrote the one English hymn of the religion of humanity:
O, let me join the choir invisible, etc.
Her first published work was a translation of Strauss's _Leben Jesu_,
1846. In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the
Radical organ, the _Westminster Review_. Here she formed a connection--a
marriage in all but the name--with George Henry Lewes, who was, like
herself, a freethinker, and who published, among other things, a
_Biographical History of Philosophy_.
Pages:
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301