The word most associated with Eliot’s work is “maturity.” Hers is, as Virginia Woolf said, literature for grown-ups—seeing life from a perspective both more elevated and more immediate, both wiser and more generous. “People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbor,” she wrote—a mature sentiment if ever there was one.22
A woman named Bessie Rayner Parkes met Eliot when she was still a young woman. She wrote later to a friend saying that she didn’t yet know if she would come to like this creature, still known then as Mary Anne Evans. “Whether you or I should ever love her, as a friend, I don’t know at all. There is as yet no high moral purpose in the impression she makes, and it is that alone which commands love. I think she will alter. Large angels take a long time unfolding their wings, but when they do, soar out of sight. Miss Evans either has no wings, or which I think is the case, they are coming budding.”23
Mary Anne Evans took a long road to become George Eliot. She had to grow out of self-centeredness into generous sympathy. But it was a satisfying maturation. She never overcame her fits of depression and her anxieties about the quality of her own writing, but she could think and feel her way into other people’s minds and hearts to exercise what she called “the responsibility of tolerance.” From disgrace she rose, by the end of her life, to be celebrated as a large angel.
The crucial event in that long journey was her love for George Lewes, which stabilized, lifted, and deepened her. The fruits of their love are embodied in the inscriptions she put in each of her works:
Adam Bede (1859): To my dear husband, George Henry Lewes, I give the MS of a work which would never have been written but for the happiness which his love has conferred on my life.
The Mill on the Floss (1860): To my beloved husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this MS of my third book, written in the sixth year of our life together.
Romola (1863): To the Husband whose perfect love has been the best source of her insight and strength, this manuscript is given by his devoted wife, the writer.
Felix Holt (1866): From George Eliot to her dear Husband, this thirteenth year of their united life, in which the deepening sense of her own imperfectness has the consolation of their deepening love.
The Spanish Gypsy (1868): To my dear—every day dearer—Husband.
Middlemarch (1872): To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes, in this nineteenth year of our blessed union.
CHAPTER 8
ORDERED LOVE
Augustine was born in the year 354 in the town of Thagaste in what is now Algeria. He was born at the tail end of the Roman Empire, at a time when the empire was collapsing but still seemed eternal. His hometown was near the edge of that empire, two hundred miles from the coast, in a culture that was a messy mix of Roman paganism and fervent African Christianity. He lived, for the first half of his life, caught in the tension between his personal ambitions and his spiritual nature.
Augustine’s father, Patricius, a minor town counselor and tax collector, headed a family that was somewhere in the upper end of the middle class. Patricius was materialistic and spiritually inert, and he hoped that his brilliant son would one day have the glittering career he had missed out on. One day he saw his pubescent son in the public baths and wounded Augustine with a lewd crack about his pubic hair or penis size or something. “He saw in me only hollow things,” Augustine would write, dismissively.
Augustine’s mother, Monica, has always riveted the attention of historians—and psychoanalysts. On the one hand, she was an earthy, unlettered woman, raised in a church that was dismissed, at the time, as primitive. She devoutly attended services each morning, ate meals on the tombs of the dead, and consulted her dreams as omens and guides. On the other hand, she had a strength of personality, and a relentlessness in her convictions about her views, that makes your jaw drop. She was a force in the community, a peacemaker, above gossip, formidable, and dignified. She was capable, as the magnificent biographer Peter Brown notes, of dismissing the unworthy with biting sarcasm.1
Monica ran the household. She corrected her husband’s errors, waited out and rebuked his infidelities. Her love for her son, and her hunger to run his life, were voracious and at times greedy and unspiritual. Much more than most mothers, Augustine admitted, she longed to have him by her side and under her dominion. She warned him away from other women who might snare him into marriage. She organized her adult life around the care of his soul, doting on him when he tended toward her version of Christianity, weeping and exploding in a delirium of rage when he deviated. When Augustine joined a philosophic sect she disapproved of, she banished him from her presence.
At twenty-eight, when Augustine was already a successful adult, he had to trick her so he could get on a boat to leave Africa. He told her that he was going to the harbor to see a friend off and then slipped aboard a vessel with his mistress and son. As he sailed away, he saw her weeping and gesticulating on the shore, consumed, as he put it, by “a frenzy of grief.” She followed him to Europe, of course, prayed for him, got rid of his mistress, and set up an arranged marriage with a ten-year-old heiress that she hoped would force Augustine to receive the rites of baptism.
Augustine understood the possessive nature of her love, but he could not dismiss her. He was a sensitive boy, terrified of her disapproval, but even in adulthood he was proud of her spirit and commonsense wisdom. He was delighted when he found she could keep conversational pace with scholars and philosophers. He understood that she suffered for him even more than he suffered for himself, or more than she could suffer for herself. “I have no words to express the love she had for me; and how much more anguish she was now suffering during the pangs of birth for my spiritual state than when she had given birth to me physically.”2 Through it all, she would love him fiercely and stalk his soul. For all her overbearing harshness, some of the sweetest moments of Augustine’s life were moments of reconciliation and spiritual communion with his mother.
Ambition
Augustine was a sickly child who grew seriously ill with chest pains at seven and looked prematurely old in middle age. As a schoolboy, he was brilliant and sensitive, but uncooperative. He was bored by the curriculum and detested the beatings that were a constant feature of school discipline. When possible, he skipped school to see the pagan bear fights and cockfights that were put on in the town arena.
Even as a young boy, Augustine was caught between the competing ideals of the classical world and the Judeo-Christian world. As Matthew Arnold writes in Culture and Anarchy, the primary idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness, while the governing idea of what he calls Hebraism is strictness of conscience.
That is to say, a person in a Hellenistic frame of mind wants to see things as they really are and explore the excellence and good she finds in the world. A person in this frame of mind approaches the world in a spirit of flexibility and playfulness. “To get rid of one’s ignorance, to see things as they are, and by seeing them as they are to see them in their beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which Hellenism holds out before human nature.”3 The Hellenistic mind has an “aerial ease, clearness and radiancy.” It is filled with “sweetness and light.”
Hebraism, by contrast, “seizes upon certain plain, capital intimations of the universal order, and rivets itself, one may say, with unequalled grandeur of earnestness and intensity on the study and observance of them.”4 So while the person in a Hellenistic frame of mind is afraid of missing any part of life and is really directing her own life, the person in a Hebraic frame of mind is focusing on the higher truth and is loyal to an immortal order: “Self-conquest, self-devotion, the following not of our own individual will, but the will of God, obedience, is the fundamental idea of this form.”5