Scenes of Clerical Life [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONShortly after George Eliot's death, her friend W. M. W. Call wrote of Scenes of Clerical Life, her first book: 'All the characteristic properties of George Eliot's literary genius appear in these volumes In them lies the substance of the thought, the promise of the power afterwards so splendidly exhibited in the greater works.'' It is not surprising that this should be so, for George Eliot began to write fiction comparatively late in life, in the full strength of intellectual maturity, and with a great deal of experience as a literary critic behind her.From 1851 until her union with G. H. Lewes in 1854, she was assistant editor of the Westminster Review, a leading intellectual journal, and from then until January 1857, when the first instalment of Scenes of Clerical Life appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, she contributed long articles to the Westminster and wrote the section on 'belles-lettres', its regular review of contemporary literature. She had thought long and carefully about the aims and methods of novelists, and thus when she came to write fiction herself she had a very clear idea of what she wanted to accomplish.'The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist,' she wrote in an article published shortly before she began her first story, 'is the extension of our sympathies A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.'^ And in a letter of November 1857, when she was in the midst of writing the Scenes, she tells a friend: 'My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.' In reviews and letters of this period, and indeed throughout her career, George Eliot returns again and again to these views of art and morality, and the connection between the two.Related to her belief in the moral value of art, particularly to her conception of the novelist as a moralist, is her strong feeling about didacticism in literature. That the novelist may, indeed should, teach she has no doubt; but it is interesting to find George Eliot in her reviews rejecting novel after novel on the grounds of didacticism, the charge most commonly made against her own work by modern readers. But for her, the term is applied only to those novels in which the author's' 'George Eliot: Her Life and Writings', Westminster Review, NS 60 (July 1881), 165-7.^ 'The Natural History of German Life', Westminster Review, 66 (July 1856), 54.