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The Essays of "George Eliot", Complete.
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From the Note-Book of an Eccentric,
and Other Essays,
by George Eliot.
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From the Note-Book of an Eccentric.
From the Note-Book of an Eccentric,
by George Eliot
Coventry Herald and Observer
(December 1846)
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When one begins to read this, it's a tad startling.
"A week ago, I stood sole mourner at the grave of my friend Macarthy. He lies in a village churchyard;—not one of those peaceful green plots which seem to speak well for the influence of the bishop’s blessing, in which there is some spreading chestnut or yew of age immemorial, that seems to say to the world-weary, “Come and rest under my shadow.” No. The churchyard in which Macarthy lies looks not like a Gottes-acker, but a vicar’s acre, the profits of which (including the grazing of half-a-dozen sheep) go to eke out the curate’s yearly hundred, upon which he supports, or rather diets, the gentility of his wife and ten children. It is a thoroughfare for a materialized population, too entirely preoccupied with the needs of the living to retain an Old Mortality’s affectionate care for tomb-stones and epitaphs, or to offer to the graves that terrified veneration which hurries past them after sunset. They are in the strong grasp of giant Hunger, and fear no shadows. Not one of this plodding generation will long remember Macarthy, “the sick gentleman that lodged at widow Crowe’s,” and when the grass is green and long upon his grave, it will seem to say of him as truly as of others—“I cover the forgotten.” But it is not so, Macarthy. With me thou wilt still live: my thoughts will seem to be all spoken to thee, my actions all performed in thy presence; for ours was a love passing the love of women."
Is it possible, burials on land that's rented out for grazing, for benefit of poor curates? But one, of course, reads on, rather than go on a quest of an answer.
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"My friend was one of whom the world proved itself not worthy, for it never made a true estimate of him. His soul was a lyre of exquisite structure, but men knew not how to play on it: it was a bird endowed with rich and varied notes, which it was ready to bestow on human hearers; but their coarse fondling or brutal harshness scared it away, and the poor bird ceased to sing, save in the depths of the forest or the silence of night. To those who saw only the splendour of his genius, and the nobility of his sentiments, his childhood and youth seemed to promise a brilliant career; but any who were capable of a more discriminating estimate and refined analysis of his character, must have had a foreboding that it contained elements which would too probably operate as non-conductors, interposed between his highly charged mind and the negatively electrified souls around him. The quality on which a good prophet would have pronounced my friend’s fate to hang, was one which will be held to have placed him not above, but simply out of, the sphere of his fellow men. It was a morbid sensitiveness in his feeling of the beautiful, which I can compare to nothing but those alleged states of mesmeric lucidity, in which the patient obtains an unenviable cognizance of irregularities, happily imperceptible to us in the ordinary state of our consciousness."
" ... He moved among the things of this earth like a lapidarian among false gems, which fetch high prices and admiration from others, but to him are mere counterfeits. He seemed to have a preternaturally sharpened vision, which saw knots and blemishes, where all was smoothness to others. The unsightly condition of the masses—their dreary ignorance, the conventional distortion of human nature in upper classes—the absence of artistic harmony and beauty in the details of outward existence, were with him not merely themes for cold philosophy, indignant philippics, or pointed satire; but positively painful elements in his experience, sharp iron entering into his soul. Had his nature been less noble, his benevolence less God-like, he would have been a misanthropist, all compact of bitter sarcasm, and therefore no poet. As it was, he was a humourist—one who sported with all the forms of human life, as if they were so many May-day mummings, uncouth, monstrous disguises of poor human nature, which has not discovered its dignity. While he laughed at the follies of men, he wept over their sorrows; and while his wit lashed them as with a whip of scorpions, there was a stream of feeling in the deep caverns of his soul, which was all the time murmuring, “Would that I could die for thee, thou poor humanity!”
"From the age of twenty, I never knew him to form a particular predilection for any individual, or admit any new intimacy. He seemed to have learned by experience that his sensibility was too acute for special friendship—that his sympathy with mankind was that of a being of analogous, rather than of identical race."
" ... He seemed, indeed, to shrink from all organized existences. He was an ardent lover of Nature, but it was in her grand inorganic forms—the blue sky, the stars, the clouds, the sea, mountains, rocks, and rivers—in which she seems pregnant with some sublimer birth than the living races of this globe. He would lie on the grass gazing at the setting sun with a look of intense yearning which might have belonged to a banished Uriel. The roaring of the wind would produce in him an enthusiastic excitement, a spiritual intoxication. He felt a delight in the destructive power of the elements, which seemed to be in singular conflict with his angelic pity: had he been a witness of an earthquake, a city on fire, or the eruption of a volcano, I know not which would have predominated in him, bleeding compassion for the sufferers, or wild ecstacy at the triumphant fury of the forces of nature."
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One doesn't suspect George Eliot of beginning to write a satire or a spoof, however, until one has finished reading this piece, heartbreaking as it is so far, from the word go.
" ... When we had talked long and earnestly together, he pointed to a large trunk filled with manuscripts. “When I am dead,” he said, “take these as the only memorial I have to give, and use them as you will.” I refused to leave my friend until he was committed to his mother earth; and it then became my most interesting employment to examine the papers which contained the best history and image of his mind. I have found the results of profound thought and widely extended research-productions, some of which have been carefully meditated, others apparently thrown off with the rapidity of inspiration; but in all of them there is a strange mixture of wisdom and whimsicality, of sublime conception and stinging caricature, of deep melancholy and wild merriment. No publisher would venture to offer such caviare to the general; and my friend’s writings are not old and musty enough to fall within the scheme of any publishing club, so that the bulk of them will probably be their own tomb.
"Meanwhile, among his other manuscripts, I have discovered three thick little volumes, which were successively carried in his pocket for the purpose of noting down casual thoughts, sketches of character, and scenes out of the common; in short, as receptacles of what would probably have evaporated in conversation had my friend been in the habit of companionship. From these fragmentary stores I shall now and then give a selection in some modest nook of an unpretending journal—not to the world, far be so ambitious an aspiration from me—but to the half-dozen readers who can be attracted by unsophisticated thought and feeling, even though it be presented to them in the corner of the weekly newspaper of their own petty town."
Then it dawns - other pieces, their titles suggesting satires or spoofs, are a part of this.
Did she write this, spoofing such descriptions of persons by other authors, defyingobscure people for reasons not commonly given for exacting, as a satire on sentiments, even a pungent attack against fraud?
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September 26, 2021 - September 26, 2021.
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