GEORGE ELIOT

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23053, 22 June 1940, Page 14

GEORGE ELIOT

TO THE EDITOR OP THE PRESS Sir, —Dowden, Leslie Stephen, Stopford Brooke, and Saintsbury are formidable names. Dr. G. M. L. Lester, writing a review between luncheon and dinner, may have inquired to hurry. It is curious to note time’s revenges. Jane Austen is “in”; Tennyson is “out.” When the hum of the last aeroplane is silenced, and the clop-clop of. hoofs is again heard in leafy lanes, men will seek to refurbish the magic of Arthur, long buried in their hearts; and when yet another Renaissance sweeps a darkened world, George Eliot’s torch will flare anew. One forgets that- she owed her literary eminence partly to the fact that, in her time, she was accounted a phenomenon—an erudite woman. Their numbers now are legion, and any first-rate woman novelist feels capable of producing, between one summer and the next, an historical romance with a background of genuine scenery, instead of a painted drop-scene, but fears (if she remembers “Romola”) that her capacity for spiritual analysis may never grow to the searchlight beam that George Eliot turned into the souls of Romola and Tito. If only the artist in George Eliot had throttled the moralist, if a belief in Absolution had dispatched her preoccupation with sin and its consequences, if the dramatist (poor starveling) had garrotted the bluestocking, then had she been what Mr F. K. Tucker claims for her; but she would not have been George Eliot and we might not have had the exquisite pleasure of reading Dinah Morris’s sermons. If I had .been writing that review (and thank heaven I was not) I would have placed “Silas Marnc-r” and “The Mill on the Floss” after “Adam Bede.” I enjoy Dr. Lester’s mellifluous prose. It sets me pleasantly nodding after dinner, dreaming of mellow ecclesiastical portraits on oaken walls. I should never have accused him of “superciliousness”:* of superficiality, perhaps. Parts .of “Romola” may be compared to the “black-out” of genius; the whole of “Daniel Deronda” to its complete annihilation.—Yours, etc., GODWIN ELSE. Prebbleton, June 18, 1940.