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In the setting of realistic historical novels, like George Eliot's "Romola" and Flaubert's "Salammbô," what the authors have mainly striven for has been accuracy of detail; but in romantic historical novels, like those of Scott and Dumas père, the authors have sought rather for imaginative fitness of setting.
He taught me the folly of ploughing with a fluke, a custom to which the Eastern Shore was wedded, pointing out that a double surface was thus exposed to the sun's rays; and explained at length why there was more profit in small grain in that district than heavy tobacco. He gave me Dr. Eliot's "Essays on Field Husbandry," and Mill's "Husby," which I read from cover to cover.
Nine times out of ten he probably will; but in the tenth instance a Brahmin's passion may be checked by fear of contamination with a Pariah, or a King Cophetua's pride may prevent his wedding a beggar-maid, or the titled owner of an entailed estate may decline to illegitimatise his offspring by espousing his deceased wife's sister, or betrothed lovers may be parted by some such mysterious barrier as sprang up between Talbot Bulstrode and Aurora Floyd, or an Adam Bede, in spite of the example set by George Eliot's hero, may refrain from marrying Dinah for fear of breaking his brother Seth's heart.
She is central in this story just as little Aglaïa is central in Tennyson's "Princess," or Eppie in George Eliot's "Silas Marner," or the baby offspring of Cherokee Sal in "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Bret Harte had just written the last-named story when he began the composition of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat."
The scene was no less striking on the 2d of the following March, when, "amid the cries and entreaties of the Speaker held down in his chair by force," while the Usher of the Black Rod was knocking loudly at the bolted door, and the tramp of the king's soldiers was heard in the courtyard, Eliot's clear voice rang out the defiance that whoever advised the levy of tonnage and poundage without a grant from Parliament, or whoever voluntarily paid those duties, was to be counted an enemy to the kingdom and a betrayer of its liberties.
The court was satisfied, and suppressed the book, while publishing Mr. Eliot's retractation.
The features were, moreover, quite distinct, and, as I afterwards realised, the counterpart of George Eliot's curious and Savonarola-like countenance. But at the moment, oddly enough, I only thought of two things first, how extraordinary that what had appeared to me such a silly waste of time overnight should have had any element of reality about it!
"It's all wrong, Jerrold." "I know it's all wrong. But it's the best we can do. You don't suppose Anne would be happy if we did Maisie down." "No. No. She wouldn't. You're right there. But it's a damnable business." "Oh, damnable, yes." Jerrold laughed in his agony. Yet he saw, as if he had never seen it before, Eliot's goodness and the sadness and beauty of his love for Anne.
Perhaps the keynote to the charm of George Sand's art is given in her preface to her exquisite novel "La Derniere Aldini." Here is none of the accuracy and patience of the scientific enquirer into the "mysterious mixture" man, which we find in George Eliot's preface to "Middlemarch." Indeed these prefaces sum up the remarkably differing characteristics of the two writers. George Eliot is occupied with "the function of knowledge" in regard to the "ardently willing soul." She explains in her preface that the aim of her book is to trace the fate of the Saint. Theresas of a past age, in the ordinary environment and circumstances of our time. The problem was, how were detachment of mind and spiritual longing and love to find their developments in a modern prosaic setting. George Eliot brought to bear on this enquiry all her great powers of observation, discrimination and thought. Each page of the novel reveals the conscious endeavour of the born thinker to express in artistic form some conception that would help to clear the outlook on which the answer to the problem depended. George Sand, who had also her philosophising, and her analysing moods, was yet capable of feeling that novels may be romances. She could write under the sway of pure emotion and apart from theory. George Eliot never regarded her novels as mere romances. "Romances," said George Sand in her preface, "are always 'fantasies, and these fantasies of the imagination are like the clouds which pass. Whence come the clouds and whither do they go? In wandering about the Forest of Fontainebleau tête
"Laurence," said his Grandfather, "if ever you should doubt that man is capable of disinterested zeal for his brother's good, then remember how the apostle Eliot toiled. And if you should feel your own self-interest pressing upon your heart too closely, then think of Eliot's Indian Bible. It is good for the world that such a man has lived and left this emblem of his life."
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