Historical Essays and Studies

Table of Contents

Historical Essays and Studies
I. Wolsey and the Divorce of Henry VIII.
II. The Borgias and Their Latest Historian
III. Secret History of Charles II.
IV. The Civil War In America Its Place In History
V. The Rise and Fall of the Mexican Empire
VI. Cavour
VII. The Causes of the Franco-Prussian War
VIII. The War of 1870
IX. George Eliot’s Life
X. Mr. Buckle’s Thesis and Method
XI. Mr. Buckle’s Philosophy of History
XII. German Schools of History
XIII. Talleyrand’s Memoirs
XIV. The Life of Lord Houghton
XV. A History of the Papacy During the Period of the Reformation
XVI. A Short History of Napoleon the First. By John Robert Seeley the First Napoleon. a Sketch, Political and Military. By John Codman Ropes
XVII. Mabillon Et La Société De L’abbaye De Saint-germain-des-prés à La Fin Du XVII E Siécle. Par Emmanuel De Broglie.
XVIII. A History of England, 1837-1880. By the Rev. J. Franck Bright, D.D., Master of University College, Oxford.
XIX. A History of the French Revolution. By H. Morse Stephens. Vol. II
XX. Wilhelm Von Giesebrecht

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An excerpt from:

IX. GEORGE ELIOT’S LIFE

If it is true that the most interesting of George Eliot’s characters is her own, it may be said also that the most interesting of her books is her Life. Mr. Cross has made known what is in fact the last work of the great Englishwoman. He possesses that art of concealing the artist which is still the rarest quality of biographers, and, apart from a few necessary pages, gives nothing but letters, journals, and fragmentary memoirs, written partly with a dim vision of publicity. The volumes will be read less for the notes of travel, the emphatic tenderness of the letters to friends, often on a lower plane, and the tonic aphorisms devised for their encouragement, than for the light they shed on the history of a wonderful intellect. The usual attractions of biography are wanting here. We see the heroine, not reflected from other minds, but nearly as she saw herself and cared to be known. Her own skilled hand has drawn her likeness. In books variously attributable to a High Church curate and to a disciple of Comte, the underlying unity of purpose was not apparent. For valid reasons they invite interpretation as much as Faust or the Paradiso. The drift and sequence of ideas, no longer obscured by irony, no longer veiled under literary precautions or overlaid with the dense drapery of style, is revealed beyond the risk of error now that the author has become her own interpreter.

The Life, while it illustrates the novels, explains what they do not indicate,—the influences which produced the novelist. George Eliot was no spontaneous genius, singing unbidden with unpremeditated art. Her talents ripened successively and slowly. No literary reputation of this century has risen so high after having begun so late. The even maturity of her powers, original and acquired, lasted only thirteen years, and the native imagination was fading when observation and reflection were in the fulness of their prime. Mr. Cross’s first volume describes the severe discipline of life and thought, the trials and efforts by which her greatness was laboriously achieved.

Marian Evans spent the first thirty years of her life in a rural shire, and received her earliest and most enduring impressions in a region of social stability, among inert forces, away from the changing scenes that attend the making of history. Isolation, the recurring note of her existence, set in early, for her urgent craving for love and praise was repelled by the relations around her, and her childhood was unhappy. We are assured that she was affectionate, proud, and sensitive in the highest degree; and the words are significant, because they bear the concurrent testimony of her brother and her husband. The early letters, written with the ceremonious propriety of Miss Seward, give no sign of more than common understanding. She was just out of her teens when she wrote the following words:—

Men and women are but children of a larger growth; they are still imitative beings. We cannot (at least those who ever read to any purpose at all)—we cannot, I say, help being modified by the ideas that pass through our minds. We hardly wish to lay claim to such elasticity as retains no impress. How deplorably and unaccountably evanescent are our frames of mind, as various as the forms and lines of the summer clouds! A single word is sometimes enough to give an entirely new mould to our thoughts; at least I find myself so constituted, and therefore to me it is pre-eminently important to be anchored within the veil, so that outward things may be unable to send me adrift. Society is a wide nursery of plants...