Trained as few college graduates
are trained, she was impelled for several years to take up the study
of German metaphysics. Her mind, like her face, was masculine in its
strength, and though she suffered in her youth from persistent
ill-health, she conquered this in her maturity and wrought with
passionate ardor at all her literary tasks. So keen was her conscience
that she often defeated her own ends by undue labor, as in the
preparation for _Romola_, whose historical background swamps the
story.
Above all she was a preacher of a stern morality. She laid down the
moral law that selfishness, like sin, corrodes the best nature, and
that the only happiness lies in absolute forgetfulness of self and in
working to make others happy. Thus all her books are full of little
sermons on life, preached with so much force that they cannot fail to
make a profound impression even upon the careless reader.
George Eliot impresses one as a very sad woman, with an eager desire
to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning
childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that
immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It
was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that
less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful
to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the conventions of
English law and society in order to take up life with the man who
stimulated her mind and actually made her one of the greatest of
English novelists.
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