About Chapters VI and VII: Classic Critical Views

On Silas Marner

Date: 1861

by George Eliot

Author: Unsigned

From: George Eliot, Bloom's Classic Critical Views.

The following piece from the Saturday Review confirmed that Eliot was continuing to make an indelible mark on English literature. Because critics such as this writer felt that Eliot's principal contribution to literature lay in her realistic representations of the poor, they often expressed disappointment when she moved away from that particular subject. The article echoes the common nineteenth-century idea that the poor and rich were divided into "two nations" with the image of the novelist as someone venturing into "virgin soil." The review offers some insightful comparisons with the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Dickens who (along with many other contemporary novelists) had also attempted to explore the hidden country of the poor but, as the reviewer remarks, in very different ways. Reviewers agreed that Eliot's art had reached its highest point with the scenes in the Rainbow Inn. The comparison to Shakespeare was not unique—Richard Holt Hutton similarly wrote in his review for the novel, published in the Economist, that these scenes reminded him of the tavern scenes in the Henry IV plays.

The highest tribute that can be paid to this book may be paid it very readily. It is as good as Adam Bede, except that it is shorter. And that an author should be able to produce a series of works so good in so very peculiar a style, is as remarkable as anything that has occurred in the history of English literature in this century. The plot of Silas Marner is good, and the delineation of character is excellent. But other writers who have the power of story-telling compose plots as interesting, and perhaps sketch characters as well. It is in the portraiture of the poor, and of what it is now fashionable to call 'the lower middle class,' that this writer is without a rival, and no phase of life could be harder to draw. A person with observation and humour might give a sketch of one or two sets of poor people, and of village farmers and carpenters, but the sketches he could give would be limited by his personal observation. George Eliot alone moves among this unknown, and to most people unknowable, section of society as if quite at home there, and can let imagination run loose and disport itself in a field that, we think, has been only very partially opened even to the best writers. Sir Walter Scott drew a few pictures of humble Scott life, and none of his creations won him more deserved reputation than the characters of Andrew Fairservice and Caleb Balderstone, and the scenes among the poor fishing population in the Antiquary. But, good as these sketches were, they were very limited. We soon got to an end of them; but in Silas Marner, the whole book, or nearly the whole book, is made up of such scenes. The writer can picture what uneducated villagers think and say, and can reproduce on paper the picture which imagination has suggested. The gift is so special, the difficulty is so great, the success is so complete, that the works of George Eliot come on us as a new revelation of what society in quiet English parishes really is and has been. How hard is it to draw the poor may easily be seen if we turn to the ordinary tales of country life that are written in such abundance by ladies. There the poor are always looked at from the point of view of the rich. They are so many subjects for experimenting on, for reclaiming, improving, being anxious about, and relieving. They have no existence apart from the presence of a curate and a district visitor. They live in order to take tracts and broth. This is a very natural, and in some degree a very proper view for the well-intentioned rich to take of the poor. It is right that those who have spiritual and temporal blessings should care for the souls and bodies of those around them. But the poor remain, during the process and in its description, as a distinct race. What they think of and do when they are not being improved and helped, remains a blank. Those, too, who are above the reach of occasional destitution are entirely omitted from these portraitures of village life. Every one is agreed that it would be impertinent to improve a man who gets anything like a pound a week. When, therefore, George Eliot describes the whole of a village, from the simple squire down to the wheelwright and his wife, the ground thus occupied is virgin soil.

There are two chapters in Silas Marner describing the conversation of a coterie at a public-house, and what they did and said on a man appearing before them to announce a robbery, which are perfectly wonderful. It is not, perhaps, saying much to say that an intelligent reader who knew beforehand that such a scene was to be described would be utterly puzzled to think of any one thing that such people could satisfactorily be represented as remarking or doing. But some notion of what George Eliot can do may be obtained by comparing what the best writers of the day are in the habit of doing when they attempt scenes of this sort. Sir Edward Lytton and Mr. Dickens would venture to try such a scene if it came in their way. Sir Edward Lytton would only go so far as to put some very marked character or some very important personage of the story in the centre of the group, and put everything into relation and connexion with him. This is really the good ladies' novel view of the poor in another shape. The poor cluster round some one superior to them, and the only reason of the superiority which Sir Edward Lytton can claim, so far as he can claim any at all, arises from the poor being supposed to be in a position of greater naturalness and simplicity. They are represented as taking their ease in their inn, and not as being talked to by their anxious-minded betters. Mr. Dickens sets himself to draw the poor and the uneducated much more thoroughly, but his mode is to invest each person with one distinguishing peculiarity. This gives a distinctness to each picture, but it makes the whole group artificial and mechanical. He always, or almost always, keeps us in the region of external peculiarities. We are made to notice the teeth, the hair, the noses, the buttons of the people described, or some oddity of manner that marks them. The sentiment of the poor if often caught in Mr. Dickens's works with great happiness, and the chance observations that they might make under particular circumstances are well conceived; but George Eliot goes far beyond this. The people in the public-house in Silas Marner proclaim in a few words each a distinct and probable character, and sustain it. The things they say are perfectly natural, and yet show at once what the sayers are like. We know that these poor are like real poor people, just as we know that the characters in Shakspeare are like real men and women. The humour of the author, of course, pervades the representation, just as it does in the comic parts of Shakspeare. Our enjoyment in a large measure depends on the enjoyment of the writer; nor is it probable that any group at a pothouse would really say so many things on any one evening that, if recorded, would amuse us so much. But this is one of the exigencies of art. In order not to waste space, that which is characteristic must be placed closely together. Were it not for this absence of dilution, the history of the village group of Raveloe, the village in which the scenes of Silas Marner are laid, might be a mere record of an actual evening passed at a country public. It is a kind of unpermissible audacity in England to say that anything is as good as Shakspeare, and we will not therefore say that this public-house scene is worthy of the hand that drew Falstaff and Poins; but we may safely say that, however much less in degree, the humour of George Eliot in such passages is of the same kind as that displayed in the comic passages of Shakspeare's historical plays.

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"Silas Marner," April 13, 1861. Quoted as "On Silas Marner" in Bloom, Harold, ed.George Eliot, Bloom's Classic Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2009. Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 30 Sept. 2014 <http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&WID=17021&SID=5&iPin=CCVGE053&SingleRecord=True>.

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