The Ethics of George Eliot's Works

Excerpt

THE ETHICS OF GEORGE ELIOT’S WORKS.

“There is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.”

Such may be regarded as the fundamental lesson which one of the great teachers of our time has been labouring to impress upon the age.  The truth, and the practical corollary from it, are not now first enunciated.  Representing, as we believe it to do, the practical aspect of the noblest reality in man—that which most directly represents Him in whose image he is made—it has found doctrinal expression more or less perfect from the earliest times.  The older Theosophies and Philosophies—Gymnosophist and Cynic, Chaldaic and Pythagorean, Epicurean and Stoic, Platonist and Eclectic—were all attempts to embody it in teaching, and to carry it out in life.  They saw, indeed, but imperfectly, and their expressions of the truth are all one-sided and inadequate.  But they did see, in direct antagonism alike to the popular view and to the natural instinct of the animal man, that what is ordinarily called happiness does not represent the highest capability in humanity, or meet its indefinite aspirations; and that in degree as it is consciously made so, life becomes animalised and degraded.  The whole scheme of Judaism, as first promulgated in all the stern simplicity of its awful Theism, where the Divine is fundamentally and emphatically represented as the Omnipotent and the Avenger, was an emphatic protest against that self-isolation in which the man folds himself up like a chrysalid in its cocoon whenever his individual happiness—the so-called saving of his own soul—becomes the aim and aspiration of his life.  In one sense the Jew of Moses had no individual as apart from a national existence.  The secret sin of Achan, the vaunting pride of David, call forth less individual than national calamity.

At last in the fulness of time there came forth One—whence and how we do not stop to inquire—who gathered up into Himself all these tangled, broken, often divergent threads; who gave to this truth, so far as one very brief human life could give—at once its perfect and exhaustive doctrinal expression, and its essentially perfect and exhaustive practical exemplification, by life and by death.  Endless controversies have stormed and are still storming around that name which He so significantly and emphatically appropriated—the “Son of Man.”  But from amid all the controversy that veils it, one fact, clear, sharp, and unchallenged, stands out as the very life and seal of His human greatness—“He pleased not Himself.”  By every act He did, every word He spoke, and every pain He bore, He put away from Him happiness as the aim and end of man.  He reduced it to its true position of a possible accessory and issue of man’s highest fulfilment of life—an issue, the contemplation of which might be of some avail as the being first awoke to its nobler capabilities, but which, the more the life went on towards realisation, passed the more away from conscious regard.

Thenceforth the Cross, as the typical representation of this truth, became a recognised power on the earth.  Thenceforth every great teacher of humanity within the pale of nominal Christendom, whatever his apparent tenets or formal creed, has been, in degree as he was great and true, explicitly or implicitly the expounder of this truth; every great and worthy life, in degree as it assimilated to that ideal life, has been the practical embodiment of it.  “Endure hardness,” said one of its greatest apostles and martyrs, “as good soldiers of Christ.”  And to the endurance of hardness; to the recognition of something in humanity to which what we ordinarily call life and all its joys are of no account; to the abnegation of mere happiness as aim or end,—to this the world of Christendom thenceforth became pledged, if it would not deny its Head and trample on His cross....