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 K. M. Newton

George
Eliot
Twenty
for the

- First
Century LITERATURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
POLITICS
George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century
 K. M. Newton

George Eliot for the

Twenty-First Century
Literature, Philosophy, Politics
K. M. Newton
University of Dundee
Dundee, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-91925-6    ISBN 978-3-319-91926-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3

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For Jessica, Will, Emily-Rose, Ferne, Jamie
 Acknowledgements

An earlier version of Chap. 4 was published in Essays in Criticism: ‘George

Eliot and the Ethical’, 63:3 (2013), 298–316. I am grateful to the editors
and publisher, Oxford University Press, for permission to publish this
revised version here. I am also grateful to Cate Newton for reading the
whole text and suggesting numerous improvements.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George Eliot Past,

Present and Future   1

2 The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot  17

3 Critical Encounters: Hardy, Bonaparte, Miller  51

4 Eliot and the Reinterpretation of the Ethical  77

5 Eliot as Psychological Novelist  97

6 The Mill on the Floss and the Revision of Tragedy 137

7 Daniel Deronda and the Novel of the Future 161

8 Eliot and the Politics of Modernism 205

Index 225

ix
 About the Author

K. M. Newton is Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of

Dundee, Scotland. Among his publications are:

Interpreting the Text. Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990.

George Eliot: A Critical Reader. (Edited with Introduction, commentary,
notes, bibliography). Longman, 1991.
Theory into Practice: A Reader in Modern Literary Criticism. (Edited with
Introduction, commentary, notes). Macmillan Press, 1992.
Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. (Edited with Introduction,
commentary, notes). Macmillan Press (2nd edition). 1997.
George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism. (Joint
author with Saleel Nurbhai). Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Modern Literature and the Tragic. Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Intellectual, Proto-­
Modernist, Cultural Critic. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.

xi
 List of Abbreviations1

AB Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford

World’s Classics, 1996.
DD Daniel Deronda (1876), ed. Graham Handley. Oxford: Oxford
World’s Classics, 2014.
FH Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), ed. Fred C. Thomson. Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 1988.
ITS Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), ed. Nancy Henry.
London: Pickering, 1994.
M Middlemarch (1872), ed. David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1997.
MF The Mill on the Floss (1860), ed. Gordon S. Haight. Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 1996.
R Romola (1863), ed. Andrew Brown. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1998.
SCL Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), ed. Thomas A. Noble. Oxford
World’s Classics, 2009.
SG The Spanish Gypsy; The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and
New. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, n.d.
SM Silas Marner (1861), ed. Terence Cave. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1996.

xiii
xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Essays Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1968.
Letters The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight. 9 vols., New
Haven and London, 1954–1956, 1978.

Note
1. Page references to George Eliot’s writings—fiction and non-fiction—are
included within the text.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George

Eliot Past, Present and Future

I
It is fairly certain, as the bicentenary of Eliot’s birth approaches and pro-
motes reflection on her writing, that her literary reputation in 2019 will be
very different from what it was on the centenary of her birth in 1919. In
that year the decline of interest in and regard for her work that had been
evident towards the end of the Victorian era had not yet been halted, and
little notice was taken of the centenary outside of Nuneaton and Coventry.
It was clearly not regarded as a significant event in the literary world gen-
erally, as press comments show: ‘comparatively few among the present
generation read the works of this great Victorian novelist’; ‘George Eliot
has, I fear, no message for the twentieth century’ (Harris 2007, 42).1
Identified with the high-mindedness, high seriousness and moralism
which were widely seen as characteristic of the Victorian sensibility, the
general view seems to have been that she could be safely relegated to the
nineteenth century along with Lytton Strachey’s set of ‘eminent
Victorians’. Though there has been a major change in Eliot’s reputation
from the low point of a hundred years ago, it is likely that, while her bicen-
tenary will be generally celebrated, doubts about whether her high literary
status is deserved may again be raised in certain circles, such as critics
outside of academia and literary journalists. It may be unlikely that one
could encounter, ‘George Eliot has, I fear, no message for the twenty-first
century’, but in the light of the vicissitudes there have been in critical
judgements of her literary status and reputation she may not be

© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. M. Newton, George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_1
2 K. M. NEWTON

i­nvulnerable. It may not be difficult to show that past denigration of Eliot

now has little credibility, but this book aims to go much further and show
that few nineteenth-century writers in the next hundred years are likely to
be seen as more essential in terms of both their art and thought than Eliot.
Though Eliot’s reputation may still have been in steep decline a hun-
dred years ago, 1919 did suggest a turning point since Virginia Woolf
published, though anonymously, her now famous essay on Eliot in the
Times Literary Supplement in which Middlemarch was proclaimed as ‘the
magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English
novels written for grown-up people’ (Haight 1965, 187), a judgement
now often printed in paperback editions of the novel. One should remem-
ber, however, that Woolf also wrote in that essay that the ‘movement of
her mind was too slow and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy’; that
readers ‘have good reason’ to ‘fall foul’ of her on account of the fact that
her heroines ‘bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places,
make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar’ and that ‘she
had little verbal felicity’ (Haight 1965, 186, 187, 188), most if not all of
which are, at the very least, highly disputable. One had to wait until the
1940s before criticism took a more solidly positive turn, most notably
with F. R. Leavis’s inclusion of her as a central figure in his study of the
English novel, The Great Tradition (1948). The question as to whether
her fiction could be persuasively defended in terms of its form and art
remained a contentious issue, but with the publication of Barbara Hardy’s
The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (1959) and W. J. Harvey’s The
Art of George Eliot (1961), some of the objections made by Henry James
and modern critics influenced by him2 were confronted. From this point
on, Eliot’s reputation as a major novelist was largely restored, and for most
academic critics at least her literary importance was assured and beyond
serious question.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, that assurance
may have appeared fragile. Various critical schools were negative in their
attitudes to her fiction, and it may have seemed likely that her reputation
was again going to be subject to serious questioning. Some critics commit-
ted to a modernist aesthetic saw her fiction as flawed at its root. She was,
for example, identified with the ‘traditional novel’ which ‘assumes that the
world and the world as we are made conscious of it are one’, whereas the
modernist novel of Woolf and Proust ‘emphasiz[es] the will to form that is
characteristic of consciousness’ (Josipovici 1971, 139). Critics influenced
by Marxism such as Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton associated her
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 3

fiction with a conservative ideology, fundamentally supporting the socio-

economic status quo with its class divisions and inequalities, and exposed
what they saw as the contradictions inherent in her ideological position,
and newer forms of materialist criticism have tended to support that
stance.3 The major challenge, however, came from the most influential
‘isms’ of recent times: structuralism and post-­ structuralism, feminism,
post-colonialism. Critics influenced by Roland Barthes, such as Colin
MacCabe, have reinforced the modernist critique: ‘The conviction that the
real can be displayed and examined through a perfectly transparent lan-
guage is evident in George Eliot’s Prelude to Middlemarch … [T]his lan-
guage of empiricism runs though the text’ (MacCabe 1978, 18).
Feminist critics of the 1970s found her fiction unsympathetic to femi-
nist political aims and its representation of female characters often unin-
spiring and conservative in viewpoint, one critic notoriously proclaiming
that ‘Middlemarch can no longer be one of the books of my life’ (Edwards
1972, 238). Debate centred on Eliot among feminist critics has continued
since then, but with negative criticism generally more nuanced and
defences of her from a variety of points of view common.4 Post-colonial
critics have been even more severe in their attacks on what they see as her
conservative politics and sympathy with colonialism and imperialism, find-
ing Daniel Deronda and Impressions of Theophrastus Such particularly
problematic: ‘For Disraeli’s Tancred and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the East
is partly a habitat for native peoples (or immigrant European populations),
but also partly incorporated under the sway of empire’ (Said 1993, 63).5
None of these critiques has, however, significantly affected her status as
a major novelist. Criticism that operates outside of the more committed
perspectives outlined above has continued to devote much attention to
her writing. Historically focused criticism that aims to be non-ideological
and highlights the social and psychological themes of her novels has been
a recurrent feature of critical commentary. There have also been many
readings which exploit the breadth of Eliot’s intellectual interests, focus-
ing on her relationship to such literary figures as Goethe, Schiller, Scott,
Austen, Dickens, Woolf, and she has been linked to various thinkers and
philosophical positions, such as Comtean positivism, Mill, Spinoza. Since
the 1970s her work has aroused the interest of critics associated with
deconstructionist or psychoanalytical critical theory, notably J. Hillis
Miller and Neil Hertz whose writings on Eliot call into question the view
that her language is conventionally mimetic by focusing on her intricately
metaphoric language and what Hertz refers to as ‘complicating … strands
of figuration’ (Hertz 2003, 8).6
4 K. M. NEWTON

II
As Eliot will soon move beyond the bicentenary of her birth, are signifi-
cant new perspectives on her and her fiction emerging? Around the
beginning of the twenty-first century, a group of US critics, all with a
strong interest in Eliot, emerged, who wish to break away from the
dominant critical perspectives of the late twentieth century, such as con-
ventional historical and thematic criticism, criticism grounded in iden-
tity politics and post-structuralist theory. Theory however remains
central for these critics but in place of theory driven by ‘ideology cri-
tique’, often just referred to as ‘critique’ or the ‘hermeneutics of suspi-
cion’ and predominantly favoured by various forms of post-structuralism,
there is what has been called by Rita Felski ‘postcritical reading’, strongly
influenced by Habermas, Stanley Cavell, and various Anglo-American
thinkers with strong connections to liberalism.7 A central aim of ‘post-
critical reading’ is to break with ‘critique’ or the ‘hermeneutics of suspi-
cion’ and make literary criticism at the present time have greater cultural
engagement, impact and existential relevance. A possible revival of ‘the-
ory wars’ may make Eliot one of the most significant writers at the pres-
ent time since her writing has been a major interest both to critics
associated with post-­structuralism such as J. Hillis Miller and Neil Hertz
and also to critics strongly committed to ‘postcritical reading’ with a
major interest in Eliot, such as Amanda Anderson, Harry E. Shaw and
Andrew H. Miller.8
This search for an alternative to ‘critique’ that favours ‘unsuspicious’
readings is not only an American phenomenon. A very recent study of
Eliot by British critic Philip Davis is perhaps the most impressive dem-
onstration yet of ‘postcritical reading’ in practice. Though his book The
Transferred Life of George Eliot is categorized as a biography, it collapses
generic distinctions by refusing to separate the biographical and the lit-
erary, life and art and creates powerful humanist readings which reveal
both the power of literary language and complexities of meaning even
in texts—such as the three stories which make up Scenes of Clerical
Life—that have tended to be viewed by critics as primarily exercises in
realism and so of limited critical interest: ‘This, then, is an attempted
imaginative recognition of all that George Eliot was in mind and heart,
as though she were indeed a real and achieved person and not just a
pseudonym or an omniscient narrator made out of words and syntax on
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 5

a piece of paper’(Davis 2017, 3). Though highly relevant to current and

future critical debate, a danger is that readings of Eliot’s work may tend
to be shaped by the theoretical or critical perspective her critics happen
to favour. In my view Eliot’s mind and therefore her writing is generally
resistant to a logic of either/or. Critical discussion and interpretation in
this book will attempt to take due account of that resistance by trying
not to be overly committed in advance of reading practice to a ‘suspi-
cious’ or ‘unsuspicious’ hermeneutics.
Are there any comparable critical developments and tensions in recent
British criticism? I shall suggest that there may be intimations of those in
an aspect of Eliot that first aroused my interest in her and her work: the
intellectual continuity between her and her partner G. H. Lewes, one
which went beyond his merely influencing her or she him.9 I do not think
that Eliot can be adequately understood unless it is taken into account.
This book will argue that Eliot as artist and intellectual possessed a mind
that was different and exceptional, and far from being the ‘Last Victorian’,
as one biographer styles her,10 she is one of the few writers of the past who
is ‘our contemporary’ in that her mind and work speak to readers in the
twenty-first century more powerfully than any other Victorian writer.
Lewes’s magnum opus, the five volume Problems of Life and Mind
(1974–1979), was left unfinished. Lewes suspected that he might not live
to complete it and light-heartedly suggested to the publisher John
Blackwood that Eliot, Dorothea-like, might have to finish what he called
his ‘Key to all Psychologies’.11 This came to pass when Lewes died with
the last two volumes still incomplete. Eliot duly went into virtual seclusion
to complete them. Lewes’s Problems is vast in ambition, scope and intel-
lectual range, but it has been generally neglected until relatively recently
and completing it was not merely a matter of Eliot writing up Lewes’s
notes. Her letters show that she embarked on some serious study while
working on it and it would not be going too far to see the final two vol-
umes, at least, as in effect a collaboration with Lewes. Her journal records,
for example, that she read or more likely reread Alexander Bain as part of
her work on it as the entry for 25 March 1879 shows: ‘Read Bain on the
Nervous System’ (Harris and Johnston 1998, 167),12 and she was still
reading Bain on 20 April. Bain was one of Lewes’s oldest friends to whom
he was close intellectually, both having been disciples of John Stuart Mill
in the 1840s and eventually moving on to a different form of empiricism.
Eliot would have been generally familiar with Bain’s ideas and well aware
6 K. M. NEWTON

of Lewes’s intellectual affinities with him. Bain (unusually accompanied by

his wife) was a regular attender of Eliot’s and Lewes’s Sunday afternoons
at their London house. That she was capable of completing this work sug-
gests her close familiarity not only with Lewes’s work but also with his
immediate intellectual circle, which included not only Bain but also
Herbert Spencer, whose Principles of Psychology (1855) she and Lewes
especially admired.
Rick Rylance, in his book, Victorian Psychology and British Culture
1850–1880 (2000), breaks new ground in treating Eliot, Lewes, Spencer
and Bain as a distinct group, discussing them both separately and together
with some analyses of passages from Eliot’s fiction. However, he sees them
all essentially as operating within the sphere of positivism, rather than as
radical empiricists, a form of empiricism that owes much to Humean phi-
losophy. Eliot has been identified with empiricism—as in the quotation
from Colin MacCabe referred to earlier—which alludes to empiricism in
the positivist or scientific rationalist sense, not in the Humean sense. As
one critic points out: ‘The roots of positivism lie in the same empiricism
from which Hume’s work derived, but, the practical success of natural sci-
ence in explaining natural phenomena and predicating the laws according
to which these phenomena relate to one another took empiricism beyond
Hume’s radical sense of the word to the point at which it seemed possible
to formulate a rational order uniting all natural phenomena’ (Dale 1989,
10).13 This positivist empiricism is founded on a confidence that external
reality can be viewed as separable from human consciousness and objec-
tively measured. MacCabe and others see this as the source of a transpar-
ency of language in her fiction which has as its aim to reflect external
reality in a mirror-like fashion: ‘Realism offers itself as transparent’ (Belsey
1980, 51). When she is described as a realist and empiricist, that is what is
generally meant. For Hume-influenced empiricists in contrast, objectivity
and materialism cannot be divorced from epistemology since reality is
always mediated through human perception and consciousness and only
accessible via the senses and the ideas and impressions they generate.
Metaphysics is rejected but not replaced by conventional materialism.
If Eliot’s empiricism has continuities with the more radical Humean
form which can be found in the work of Lewes, Spencer and Bain, her
realism takes on quite a different complexion from one based on conven-
tional ideas of empiricist positivism generally identified with scientific
rationalism or traditional materialism. What distinguishes Lewes and Eliot
in particular from such ideas is that mind or psychology cannot be excluded
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 7

when considering how human beings engage or interact with external

reality. The claim of positivistic science that it can reveal the true structure
of reality in purely objective terms independent of the senses and ideas is
called into question by Eliot in the epigraph to Chap. 1 of Daniel Deronda:
‘Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe
unit, and must fix a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal
clock shall pretend that time is at Nought’ (DD, 3). It would be a mistake
to read this as rejecting the existence of the atom in its modern scientific
conception, almost certainly the ‘make-believe unit’ that is referred to, but
when that novel was written atoms only existed in the realm of concepts
or ideas. The idea of the atom as the fundamental unit of matter beyond
which one cannot go is, for a thinker such as Lewes, an ‘ideal construc-
tion’ that has instrumental value for the development of science, but the
claim that the atom existed as the fundamental unit of matter was still
unproven. Though the existence of the atom was eventually established in
scientific terms, it is no longer seen as the fundamental unit of matter as it
is divisible into more fundamental particles and new ‘ideal constructions’
such as protons or quarks—a word coined by Joyce in Finnegans Wake—
have emerged, and one may doubt whether this process will ever arrive at
a secure end point. For a radical empiricist such as Lewes, science’s inven-
tion of and need for ‘ideal constructions’ does not undermine its credibil-
ity or lead to the scepticism exemplified in Nietzsche’s famous comment
that truth is only a ‘mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropo-
morphisms’, but Lewes and Eliot insist that human perception and think-
ing—in broad terms psychology—cannot be excluded from any conception
of the nature or structure of reality. In Middlemarch, the narrator asserts
that ‘we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors,
and act fatally on the strength of them’ (M, 83), using a metaphor in
warning of the dangers of such entanglement and thus showing that it is
virtually impossible to avoid metaphor in relating to reality in human
terms. Nietzsche suggests the same in referring to ‘worn out’ metaphors
as ‘coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no
longer as coins’ (Nietzsche 1954, 47).
Eliot uses the phrase ‘ideal constructions’ in an ironic context in rela-
tion to Lydgate in Chap. 27 of Middlemarch: ‘The reveries from which it
was difficult for him to detach himself were ideal constructions of some-
thing else than Rosamond’s virtues, and the primitive tissue was still his
fair unknown’ (M, 270). The phrase probably mystified its first readers
who would have been unaware of its context in Lewes’s radical empiricist
8 K. M. NEWTON

philosophy. But whereas the atom turned out to be a scientifically produc-

tive ‘ideal construction’ whose ‘real’ existence was eventually given scien-
tific legitimacy, Lydgate’s ‘primitive tissue’ in contrast turned out to have
no more substance than Rosamond’s virtues, though in science failed
‘ideal constructions’ can be seen as essential to the scientific enterprise as
a process.14 Significantly a major appeal of the ‘primitive tissue’ for Lydgate
is its association in his mind with the idea of the ‘fair unknown’, a particu-
lar mode of mediaeval romance. I use the word association advisedly.
Associationism is a central element of radical empiricism. It might be
argued that there has been a general prejudice against it, perhaps a reac-
tion to its widespread influence in the Victorian period and its being seen
as a mechanistic process and alien to the modern concept of the ‘organic’,
promoted by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817) and influential
thereafter in literary critical circles. Gillian Beer and Sally Shuttleworth are
two major British critics of Eliot’s intellectual background and influences,
her connections with science in particular, and they are the authors of two
of the most cited studies of Eliot,15 but Beer does not, I think, mention
associationism in Darwin’s Plots, her best known book, and Shuttleworth
directly disconnects Eliot from it by identifying it with ‘the mechanistic
cosmology of the preceding two centuries’. In Eliot’s work, she claims,
there is ‘a distinct theory of character and action which departs from the
earlier mechanistic conceptions of associationist psychology’ (Shuttleworth
1984, 2, 72). Lewes does express his commitment to ‘organicism’—which
Shuttleworth sees as overturning associationism—but to assume that his
concept of ‘organicism’ is irreconcilable with ‘associationism’ is simplistic
and would be to ignore his long intellectual relationship with Bain, the
major proponent of associationism in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. A passage like the following from Middlemarch would seem to go
beyond a merely general use of the word ‘association’:

Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbours’ lot are but the back-
ground of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they
become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a
part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.
This dream-like association of something alien and ill-understood with the
deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense of loneliness
which was due to the very ardour of Dorothea’s nature. (M, 322)

A potential appeal of associationism for radical empiricists such as Eliot

and Lewes is that it can be seen as an important corollary to Darwin’s
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 9

c­ oncept of natural selection. The latter had called into question metaphys-
ics on a number of levels, particularly the most powerful metaphysical argu-
ment for the existence of God, the argument from design. Associationism
undermined an equally powerful metaphysical idea, that of the self or mind
as a kind of ‘ghost in the machine’—to use Gilbert Ryle’s phrase in his
attack on Cartesian dualism—which transcends any empirical account of its
existence. Lewes, however, deviated from Mill, Bain and Spencer in argu-
ing that there needed to be some ordering force that provides structure for
the myriad impressions and sensations that bombard the senses, an empiri-
cist equivalent to Kant’s categories or pure concepts of the understanding.
Such a force, Lewes argued—influenced in part by the work of the German
physiologist Helmholtz—was supplied by biology and physiology since
‘forms of thought’ or ‘forms of consciousness’ have emerged within the
human organism as part of the evolutionary process through natural selec-
tion. Thus association interacts with ‘forms of consciousness’ so that sensa-
tions and impressions are not atomistic but form structures and patterns
which are accessible through memory and continually accumulate so that a
distinctive self or consciousness emerges as a result, but a self that no longer
needs to be conceived of in metaphysical terms.
Two recent studies are very pertinent to any discussion of Eliot’s links
with radical empiricism and associationism: Cairns Craig’s Associationism
and the Literary Imagination (2007) and Peter Garratt’s Victorian
Empiricism (2010). Eliot is discussed relatively briefly in these studies, but
they point to a significant departure from the assumptions of previous
Eliot critics. Garratt writes: ‘… a tradition of associationism can be traced
from Hume … and finally to the theorists contemporaneous with George
Eliot’; ‘… Lewes’s own later psychological theories … would revitalize
associationism by grounding its processes in the knowing body and by
framing its physiological ideas in the context of the new evolutionary the-
ory’ (Garratt 2010, 67, 70). Craig argues that it is a caricature of associa-
tionism, for which Coleridge was primarily responsible, to see it as
mechanistic, atomistic, passive and offering little scope for the imagina-
tion: ‘The priority that association theory gave to the imagination—since
association itself is nothing other than an operation of the imagination—as
well as to the passions made it rapidly appealing in discussions of the origin
and effects of art’ (Craig, 11) and argues strongly in Chap. 2 of his book
that Wordsworth’s associationist theory of poetry in his ‘Preface’ to Lyrical
Ballads (1800) is more powerful and coherent than Coleridge’s organicist
theory, influenced by German idealism, in Biographia Literaria.
10 K. M. NEWTON

Significantly Wordsworth, who was Eliot’s favourite Romantic poet, dis-

agreed with Coleridge and did not abandon associationism. Both Eliot
and Lewes were also great admirers of Spinoza’s Ethics, Eliot having trans-
lated it, and as Garratt discusses, association was a central element of
Spinoza’s monist philosophy (Garratt 2010, 136–8).
Though Rick Rylance sees Eliot, Lewes, Bain and Spencer as a distinct
group, this does not mean that there were not differences and disagree-
ments among all of them, even Lewes and Eliot though not to a serious
degree. What makes Eliot and Lewes stand apart—he the biographer of
Goethe and she the translator of Strauss—was their stronger links with
German thought, particularly with post-Kantian and post-Hegelian
­anti-­metaphysical thinkers who emerged to some degree out of the more
radical side of German Romanticism, obviously Feuerbach in Eliot’s case
while Lewes’s radical empiricism has some continuities with German post-­
Kantianism as exemplified in the work of such figures as Hans Vaihinger,
aspects of Nietzsche, and Ernst Mach. Lewes’s attempt to overcome, at
least partially, the division between the empiricist and the Kantian tradi-
tions was probably one of the reasons why Bain had doubts about Lewes’s
philosophical project in his Problems, perhaps a step too far for him (Ashton
2000, 243). Lewes also believed his most important intellectual contribu-
tion was ‘the discovery of the social factor in Psychology’ (Ashton 2000,
271), and it would not be surprising if Eliot had considerable influence on
this aspect of his thought, which significantly distinguishes them from
Bain and Spencer.

III
Eliot’s relation to radical empiricism is not however the main focus of this
book though it will be implicit in some of its aspects and discussed more
directly in the last section of Chap. 5. Though I have argued the case
for Eliot’s radical empiricism, which most previous critics have either dis-
counted or neglected and which potentially alters critical perspectives on
Eliot, I believe it can be critically counter-productive to identify her work
too directly with specific influences so that her work tends to become defined
in terms of a particular external framework. This is not to deny the usefulness
of studies that have connected her work closely with such thinkers as Comte,
Mill, Feuerbach, Spinoza, among others, but Eliot is not a writer whose
writing can be easily decoded by being identified with one particular thinker
or one school of thought. There are diverse intellectual influences on her
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 11

writing, including those referred to above which one should be aware of, but
they should be seen as existing within the distinctive mix that constitutes
Eliot’s own unique mental mapping of reality and life and her fundamental
concern with the art of her fiction. But an important reason for drawing
attention to her affinities with radical empiricism, especially with Lewes’s
philosophical and psychological thinking, is to raise questions about the
common general identification of her with a positivistic conception of
empiricism founded on Enlightenment-­influenced rationalism and scientific
materialism. The greater part of this book is focused on a closer reading of
her writing at the textual and linguistic level than her writings normally
receive, together with detailed exploration of human situations and issues
and their wider intellectual significance in terms of philosophy, psychology
and politics, mediated through the art of the novel.
In the second chapter, it will be argued that the otherness of her mind-
set as a person living in the Victorian era as artist and intellectual—espe-
cially given the constraints of her Victorian situation and context—has not
been sufficiently recognized and explored. Discussion in this chapter will
focus on a close reading of some of her non-fiction, especially its concern
with issues that have been controversial in Eliot criticism: her personal and
existential choices in life, her relation to feminism, her politics. The third
chapter engages with the critical perspectives of three of her major critics
and, while respecting them highly, also subjects them to scrutiny. All Eliot
critics need to challenge or be challenged by alternative critical perspec-
tives. The following four chapters concentrate on her fiction, especially in
relation to such major Eliot concerns as the ethical, psychology, tragedy,
temporality. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda dominate discussion
though Silas Marner is discussed in Chap. 4, Romola briefly in Chap. 3,
and Chap. 6 focuses on The Mill on the Floss and its challenging view of
tragedy. Middlemarch is the prime focus in relation to the ethical and psy-
chology in Chaps. 4 and 5; Daniel Deronda is seen as her most ambitious
novel, one in which she aspires most self-consciously to integrate her roles
as both literary artist and intellectual, while experimenting with literary
form in terms of its narrative. It may be seen as anticipating aspects of
modernist fiction. The final chapter discusses some of the reasons why
Eliot is still conventionally identified with a Victorian ethos despite her
connections with modernism in a wider context and also explores what
relation she has to modernism’s problematic politics. A feature of past
criticism of Eliot—and I do not exclude some of my own previous criti-
cism from this—is that some general thesis or interpretive paradigm has
12 K. M. NEWTON

tended to dictate how she is read so that the particularity of the text has to
submit to the paradigm’s power, and as a consequence subtleties in the
writing or in the situations being depicted have tended often not to be
sufficiently noticed or even ignored. I hope in this book to subject the
force of the general perspective to sufficient degree of constraint so that
the complexities in her art and thought may receive due recognition and
acknowledgement, while at the same time suggesting that she is not only
the greatest ever female writer but on an equal level to that elite group of
writers who are generally regarded as being in the highest echelon of the
literary canon.

Notes
1. Margaret Harris, ‘The George Eliot Centenary of 1919’ (2007), 42.
George Saintsbury in his A Short History of English Literature, first pub-
lished in 1898 and much reprinted, refers to the ‘extravagant heights’ of
her earlier reputation followed by the critical backlash after her death and
comments: ‘This factitious height she can never recover in the estimation
of a competent judgment’ (Saintsbury 1960, 753).
2. The influence of Henry James in terms of theory of the novel perhaps cul-
minates in Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), though Eliot is
only mentioned in passing.
3. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), and Terry
Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory
(London, 1976). See also Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation
of English Fiction (1985), and Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property:
Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 1994).
4. Debates among feminist critics continue, with more balanced positions on
Eliot since the 1970s generally adopted. See Gillian Beer, George Eliot
(1986); Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and
the Novel of Development (1993); and most recently June Skye Szirotny,
George Eliot’s Feminism: The Right to Rebellion (2015).
5. See also Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and
Representation (1996).
6. See also J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: ‘Adam Bede’ and
‘Middlemarch’ Revisited’ (2011), which is discussed in detail in Chap. 3.
7. See Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015).
8. See Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of
Theory (2005); Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot
(1999); Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and
Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2008). For the origin
INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 13

of the phrase the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, see Paul Ricoeur’s essay ‘The
Conflict of Interpretations’, in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in
Interpretation (1970), 20–35.
9. See K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (1981, especially
5–10, 57–64).
10. See Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London, 1999).
11. ‘The shadow of old Casaubon hangs over me and I fear my “Key to all
Psychologies” will have to be left to Dorothea’ (Letters, V, 291). See also
Letters, V, 350.
12. Catherine Gallagher has argued that the influence of the psychophysiology
of Bain in The Emotions and the Will (1865) is evident in Daniel Deronda.
See her chapter on Deronda in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and
Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Gallagher 2006,
esp.134–5, 146–7).
13. Though critics such as Rylance and Dale place Eliot within a positivist
context, this does not mean that they and other critics such as Gillian Beer
and Sally Shuttleworth who do not see her as a radical empiricist have not
made a valuable contribution to Eliot criticism. For example, Shuttleworth
(in George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science) and Dale show that
Eliot’s relationship to positivism is not straightforward, Shuttleworth
revealing links between Lewes’s philosophy of science and that of Claude
Bernard and arguing persuasively that Bernard’s influence is reflected in
Eliot’s writing, and Dale suggestively discusses how the intellectual divi-
sion between Comte and Mill is relevant to Eliot and Lewes, Comte plac-
ing greater stress on the role of hypotheses in science and scientifically
based thinking and working with them provisionally prior to verification
whereas for Mill hypotheses had to be verified before one could make a
positive use of them. Lewes and almost certainly Eliot would have sup-
ported Comte against Mill on this issue, but on the other hand Lewes
supported Mill’s critique of Comte for dismissing psychology and again
Eliot almost certainly would have agreed with him. Dale also convincingly
shows the influence on Lewes of the work of the German physiologist
Helmholtz. Another pertinent study of Eliot and Lewes is George Levine’s
essay, ‘George Eliot, Conrad, and the Invisible World’, Chap. 12 of his
book, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady
Chatterley. Though essentially situating Eliot within scientific rationalism,
Levine recognizes that, in what he sees as her later writing and thinking,
her earlier positivism comes under some stress through ‘honoring the com-
plexities of the new reality and the new epistemologies’ (Levine 1983,
261), so that it is fruitful to connect Eliot and Conrad in terms of their
work and thought.
14 K. M. NEWTON

14. For discussion of the primitive tissue and Lydgate’s connection to Bichat
(M, 146), see W. J. Harvey, ‘The Intellectual Background to the Novel’, in
Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel, ed. Barbara Hardy, 35–6,
and also Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life, 168.
15. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983); Sally Shuttleworth, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Belief of a Beginning
(1984).

Bibliography
Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes: An Unconventional Victorian (London: Pimlico,
2000).
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
———, George Eliot (Brighton; Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986).
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980).
Cairns Craig, Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal
Chaos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the
Victorian Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Philip Davis, The Transferred Life of George Eliot: The Biography of a Novelist
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory
(London: New Left Books, 1976).
Lee Edwards, ‘Women, Energy, and Middlemarch’, Massachusetts Review, 13
(1972), 223–8.
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of
Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse
and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
———, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the
Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Peter Garratt, Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain,
Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot (Madison: Fairley Dickinson University Press,
2010).
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 15

Gordon S. Haight, ed., A Century of George Eliot Criticism (London: Methuen,

1965).
Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (Athlone Press, 1959).
———, ed., Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel (London: Athlone
Press, 1967).
Margaret Harris, ‘The George Eliot Centenary of 1919’, George Eliot Review, 38
(2007), 32–48.
Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, eds., The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
W. J. Harvey, The Art of George Eliot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961).
Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2003.
Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1999).
Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction (London:
Macmillan Press, 1971), 139.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1948).
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to
Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (5 vols.) (London: Trübner, 1874–9).
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation
(London: Routledge, 1996).
Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: Cape, 1921).
Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan
Press, 1978).
Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-­
Century British Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: ‘Adam Bede’ and ‘Middlemarch’ Revisited’
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (London: Macmillan Press,
1981).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Viking, 1954).
Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Conflict of Interpretations’, in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay
in Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1970), 20–35.
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).
George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (London: Macmillan,
1960).
16 K. M. NEWTON

Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1999).
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Belief
of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
June Skye Szirotny, George Eliot’s Feminism: The Right to Rebellion (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2015).
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus,
1973).
 CHAPTER 2

The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot

I
The critical orthodoxy for many years in regard to George Eliot was that
there was little that is ‘radical’ about her as writer, philosopher or political
thinker.1 As a novelist she may have been one of the major English realists but
according to her critics the content of her fiction was not ‘radical’, in contrast
to writers such as Dickens and Zola, nor did she in her novels attempt to
experiment with form or style in the manner of Flaubert or Henry James or
Joseph Conrad, not to mention modernists such as Virginia Woolf and James
Joyce. As an intellectual she was not considered to be an original thinker but
as a writer primarily influenced by the major thinkers of her age, such as John
Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte. Politically she was regarded
as conservative though she went through a liberal phase when younger but
showed little support for some of the major causes of her time, such as
extending the suffrage, especially for women, or giving greater political
power to the working class if that was likely to lead to a breakdown in social
order. She was seen as a gradual reformist at best. These assumptions had
considerable influence on thinking about Eliot during much of the twentieth
century even after there was a substantial recovery of her literary reputation.
If one considers more recent criticism, some of these critical attitudes have
been seriously called into question.2 This book, however, will argue and try
to show that despite advances in criticism the radical nature of Eliot’s mind
has still not been sufficiently appreciated and the critical assumptions men-
tioned above continue to retain some force. The book will argue that Eliot

© The Author(s) 2018 17

K. M. Newton, George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_2
18 K. M. NEWTON

possessed a ‘radical’ mindset that makes her stand apart from virtually all of
her Victorian contemporaries (and also from many notable writers who have
followed her in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) as literary artist,
intellectual and socio-political thinker.

II
It is useful to start at a personal level by focusing on some of the significant
choices Eliot made in her life as much negative criticism has been directed
at these choices on the grounds of their being inconsistent, incoherent or
morally or socially questionable, and these judgements have often been
carried over to the interpretation of her mental outlook and by extension
to her writing. A common perception has been that there is a lack of con-
tinuity between her early political radicalism in the 1840s and her later
thinking and the choices and actions it generated. I shall suggest that her
critics tend to operate with a conventionally defined or ideologically influ-
enced concept of consistency that Eliot calls into question. Political critics
of liberal or left-wing leanings, for example, generally admire her rebellion
against Victorian conventions by choosing to live with a married man
knowing that it would cause a scandal. Even friends who held feminist
views, such as Bessie Rayner Parkes, were shocked at her decision to live
openly in a non-marital relationship as G. H. Lewes was widely perceived
as having a disreputable past, one which Eliot would have been well aware
of. But for many of her post-Victorian feminist and liberal critics she did
not carry this social rebellion through, so that her apparent rejection of
Victorian values and assumptions in regard to what is perceived as proper
and respectable conduct, especially as applied to women, is seriously com-
promised. She insisted, for example, on being called ‘Mrs Lewes’ and
referred to G. H. Lewes as her ‘husband’ as if she were a conventional
married woman. Even worse was to follow after the death of Lewes when
she married the friend of both herself and Lewes, John Walter Cross, also
her financial advisor, in a church wedding and adopted the name ‘Cross’.
Many of her biographers find her actions difficult to come to terms
with.3 Marrying Cross, though from one point of view a conventional act,
from another was as unconventional and transgressive as choosing to live
‘in sin’ with Lewes, Cross being some twenty years younger than she was.
Whether acting ‘unconventionally’ or ‘conventionally’, Eliot shocked and
unsettled both her contemporaries and also later commentators in regard
to the choices she made in her life, it being not quite clear whether her
 THE ‘RADICAL’ MINDSET OF GEORGE ELIOT 19

relationship with Lewes and her marriage to Cross were conforming to

notions of respectability or transgressing them. She thus subverts standard
assumptions as to what is radical or what is conservative. Thomas Carlyle
is I think well justified in calling her a ‘strong minded woman’ in contrast
with the influential view promoted by her major biographer Gordon
Haight that she always needed someone to lean upon. Regarding her
elopement with Lewes, she claimed to be ‘entirely indifferent’ as to how it
was judged, asserted that ‘I have done nothing with which any person has
a right to interfere’ and found the phrase ‘“run away” as applied to me …
simply amusing—I wonder what I had to run away from … I have done
nothing with which any person has a right to interfere’ (Letters, VIII,
123–4).
She can be seen as both rebel and pragmatist at the same time. She
rebelled against Victorian marriage in choosing to live with Lewes outside
wedlock but made sure she showed respect for marriage as a concept and
social institution—a respect one should stress which was sincere—by tak-
ing the ‘married’ name of ‘Mrs Lewes’. Almost certainly she would have
married Lewes if he had been free. Marriage had human value despite the
existence of bad marriages—a significant presence in her fiction—but non-­
legal ‘marriages’ could have equal value. There is no sign that she had a
fixed position in regard to marriage or sexual relationships, rejecting both
that sexual relationships were only justifiable within marriage and that
marriages should be maintained even if they had irretrievably broken
down. Her comment on Jane Eyre in regard to Rochester’s marital situa-
tion is significant: ‘All self-sacrifice is good—but one would like it to be in
a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man
soul and body to a putrifying carcase’ (Letters, I, 268). But she had no
animus towards those who held conventionally respectable views about
marriage and evinces few indications of resentment at being ostracized by
society for being a ‘fallen woman’.
Many of her critics and biographers have expressed some shock or con-
sternation at her positive response to her brother Isaac’s letter of con-
gratulation following her marriage to John Cross, after Isaac had been
estranged from her for choosing to live with Lewes for more than a quar-
ter of a century. But Isaac Evans was a respectable Victorian who held
standard Christian beliefs, and his severing of connections was therefore to
be expected. She had chosen a different path from her brother and rejec-
tion by him was one of its inevitable consequences and no blame could
therefore be attached to him. She was prepared to pay such a price in order
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Kansan hyväksi
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
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Title: Kansan hyväksi

Author: Helmi Krohn

Release date: September 15, 2023 [eBook #71657]

Language: Finnish

Original publication: Helsinki: Otava, 1905

Credits: Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KANSAN

HYVÄKSI ***
KANSAN HYVÄKSI

Kirj.

Helmi Setälä

Helsingissä, Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava, 1905.

Äitivainajani muistolle.

Mutta nyt pysyvät usko, toivo, rakkaus, nämät kolme; vaan

rakkaus on suurin niistä.
I.

Utuun ja usvaan oli kaupunki kietoutuneena. Keltaisen himmeinä

tuikkivat tulet katulyhtyjen päissä ja kaukaisena huminana kuulosti
korvaan ajoneuvojen rätinä vilkasliikkeisemmiltä kaduilta. Ihmisvirta
vyöryi epämääräisenä haamuna katuja ylös ja alas ja äänet sulivat
yhteen hyökyaalloksi, joka kumahdellen kulki edelleen sankassa
sumumeressä.

Alastomina puut reunustivat puiston kylkiä ja vitkalleen vesipisarat

tihkuivat alas oksilta, jotka ojentautuivat katua kohti kuin paljaat
käsivarret. Puistikon keskeltä kohosi vanha puurakennus, jonka
kattopuoli kokonaan katosi sumun sekaan. Sen suurista,
moniruutuisista ikkunoista tulvaili valomeri synkkään syysilmaan ja
urkujen hillitty ääni tunkeutui seinien läpi. Äkkiä niiden ääni vahveni
ja täysivoimaisena se virtasi avatuista ovista ulos hiljaisen
ihmisjoukon mukana, joka harvalleen ja ääneti laskeutui portaita
myöten ja hajaantui puistikon teille.

Hertta Ek astui vitkalleen, silmät maahan luotuina. Hänen

sormensa olivat puristautuneet lujasti virsikirjan ympärille. Hänen
kasvonsa ilmaisivat mielenliikutusta, suun ympärillä väreili
hermostunut piirre ja hengitys oli lyhyttä ja kiihkeää. Hän pysähtyi
hetkeksi ja vilkaisi taaksensa. Tuossa kirkossa hän oli kerran
seisonut ja antanut lupauksensa — hän muisti sen päivän kuin olisi
se eilen ollut ja kuitenkin — mikä iankaikkisuus siitä jo oli kulunut.
Hänen mielensä oli silloin ollut niin herkkä kaikille vaikutteille,
arvostelematta hän oli omistanut itselleen toisten vakaumuksia ja
ajatuksia. Ja hänen sydämessään oli vallinnut hiljainen rauha.

Mutta tyyni oli vain käynyt myrskyn edellä. Se oli heittänyt hänet
tuuliajolle ja vieroittanut hänet kaikesta siitä, mikä ennen oli ollut
hänelle pyhää ja kallista. Vuosikausiin hän ei ollut kirkossakaan
käynyt. Sattumako se nyt äitivainajan kuolinpäivän oli hänen
mieleensä tuonut — siitä oli täsmälleen juuri kaksikymmentä vuotta
kulunut — vai olisiko joku muu voima hänet kirkkoon vienyt?
Kaitselmusko? Hertta hymähti itseksensä. Nuo ajatukset hän aikoja
sitten oli tyhjinä ja sisällyksettöminä karkoittanut luotaan. Ne olivat
saaneet väistyä järkeä tyydyttävämpien tieltä. — —

Hän oli istuvinaan vielä lehterillä, pilarin peitossa, jonne hän

kirkkoon tullessansa oli kyyristynyt. Hän oli kuulevinaan vielä tuon
voimakkaan äänen, joka kajahteli hänen ympärillänsä. Se ei ollut
sointuva eikä kaunis, korkeimmasta diskantista se aleni syvimpään
bassoon ja katkenneet soraäänet vihloivat tuon tuostakin korvaa,
kuin viulunkieli, joka kesken värähtelevää ääntä katkeaa haikeasti
valittaen. Mutta se oli niin vakuuttava, niin repäisevä, niin sydämeen
tunkeva. Jokapäiväisiin sanoihinkin se valoi voimaa ja hehkua ja
nostatti kylmänväreitä selkää karmimaan.

Ja kuitenkin Hertta ensimältä kuunteli vain puolella korvalla.

Tahtomattaankin hän asettui arvostelevalle kannalle. Hän koetti
syrjäisestä paikastansa nähdä pappia saarnastuolissa, mutta vaikka
hän kurottautui eteenpäin, ei hän nähnyt muuta kuin hänen laihat
kätensä, jotka lakkaamatta liikkuivat ja huitoivat ilmaa. Hän koetteli
kuvailla mielessänsä kasvoja, nekin varmaan olivat laihat ja vilkkaat,
niinkuin kädetkin, ilme vaihteleva ja silmät säkenöivät. Hän mahtoi
olla voimakas luonne, joka oli tottunut taistelemaan, mutta myöskin
voittamaan. Sen ilmaisi hänelle äänen syvä sävy.

Mutta äkkiä hänen omat hajanaiset ajatuksensa pysähtyivät ja

mielikuvat haihtuivat. Hän oli vain korvana, sittenkin kun sanat, jotka
olivat hänen huomionsa herättäneet, olivat vaienneet. Ukkosen
jyrinänä ne olivat vyöryneet papin avonaisilta huulilta ja kaikuna
kajahtaneet takaisin kirkon seinämiltä.

"Menkäät siis ja opettakaat kaikkea kansaa ja sairaita parantakaat,

spitalisia puhdistakaat, kuolleita herättäkäät. Lahjaksi te saitte, niin
myös lahjaksi antakaat."

Hertan pää painui alas. Tuskallinen vavistus sai vallan hänessä.

Koskisivatko nuo sanat häntäkin, olisivatko ne hänellekin aiotut?
Pitäisikö hänenkin mennä ja opettaa ja parantaa — vaan ketä? Eikö
hänellä olisikaan oikeutta elää vain omaa itseänsä varten, omien
pienten harrastustensa puolesta? Olisiko tässä vastaus siihen
kaihoon, jota hän sydämessään oli salannut, siihen sisälliseen
ääneen, jota hän ei ollut saanut vaikenemaan?

Vaan tätäkö hän olisi kaihonnut? Eikö se ollut jotain valoisampaa,

kirkkaampaa, jotain joka käsin kosketellessa oli vaaransa murtua ja
hajota tyhjiin? Jotain niin vienoa ja sanoin selittämätöntä… Ei niin
raskasta ja painostavaa kuin nuo papin sanat.

Ja kuitenkaan hän ei saanut ajatuksiaan irti niistä. Ne avasivat

äkkiä kuin uuden maailman hänen eteensä, maailman kaukana,
kaukana hänen silmänkannattamastaan. Mutta mitä kauemmin hän
sinne silmäsi, sitä kirkkaammaksi ja lämmittävämmäksi se muuttui ja
sitä lähemmäksi se läheni.

Kuin unessa hän oli seurannut toisia ulos kirkosta ja sivuilleen

vilkaisematta hän astui kotiansa kohti. Hienona vihmana sumu
laskeutui maahan ja kostutti hänen vaatteitansa ja kasvojansa. Mutta
hän ei huomannut sitä. Epämääräisenä hänen korvaansa tunkeutui
melu vilkasliikkeisiltä kaduilta, se kuulosti niin kaukaiselta ja
vieraalta. Hän kiirehdytti askeleitansa. Puolijuoksussa hän astui
portaita ylös ja riensi huoneesensa. Hän laski virsikirjan peilipöydälle
ja vetäisi hansikkaat käsistään. Peilistä kuva katsahti häneen,
tuskallinen piirre väreili suun ympärillä, syvä ryppy oli laskeutunut
silmien väliin ja katse oli himmeä ja epävarma.

Hertta heittäytyi nojatuoliin. Kylmän väristys kävi hänen

ruumiissansa. Kosteus oli tarttunut hänen hameensa liepeihin ja
tukkaansa. Hän raotti kyökkiin johtavaa ovea ja pyysi tulta uuniin.

— Täällä on niin kylmä, Anna.

Kyökistä kuului kopinaa ja nuori tyttö astui sisään kantaen halkoja

sylissään.

— Vai on neiti jo kotona. Kapteeni käski sanoa, että hän tulee

illaksi kotiin.

Tyttö oli polvillaan uunin edessä.

— Sanoi tuovansa vieraita tullessansa.

Tyttö katsoi olkansa yli ja iski silmää Hertalle.

Hertta oli ääneti.

 — Miksi neiti on niin surullisen näköinen? Ei edes kysy keitä tulee.

Hertta ei vastannut mitään.

— Kyllä neidin pitäisi mennä naimisiin, kun on niin nuori ja korea.

Tyttö nousi lattialta ja lähenteli Herttaa tuttavallisesti. —
Kerronkos, mitä herra Väisänen sanoi? Niin, niin, hän se tänne
lupasi
illalla tulla uudestaan, kun kapteenin kanssa ulos läksi.

Hertta katsahti tyttöön.

— Tahtoisitko sinä mennä naimisiin, Anna?

— Tahtoisin kyllä, kun olisi poika, jota oikein rakastaisin.

— Sinäpä sen sanoit, Anna.

— Kyllä se rakkaus tulee, neiti, ennenkuin arvaakaan. Ja hätäkös

teillä, kun on kosijoita vaikka joka sormelle. Toista se on tällaisen
kuin minun — —

Hertta laski kätensä tytön olkapäälle ja hymyili. — —

Tuli räiskien loimuili uunissa. Hertta nosti matalan jakkaran uunin

eteen, kävi istumaan ja nojasi päänsä käsien varaan. Hänen
ajatuksensa harhailivat hillittömästi sinne tänne, ja kaivautuivat
kauaksi menneihin aikoihin.

Varhaisimmasta lapsuudestansa hän muisti illan, jolloin hänet oli

kannettu suureen, kylmään vuoteesen. Vieraat kasvot olivat
kumartuneet hänen ylitsensä ja hyväilleet hänen poskeansa. Joku oli
käärinyt peiton lujemmin hänen ympärillensä ja jättänyt hänet yksin
pimeään huoneesen. Hän oli huutanut äitiä, nimittänyt häntä
hellimmillä lempinimillänsä, pyytänyt ja rukoillut, häntä tulemaan,
mutta ovi ei auennut, eikä kukaan hänen luoksensa kiiruhtanut. Hän
ei uskaltanut nousta vuoteestaan, oven suussa hän oli näkevinään
valkoisen peikon, joka tavoitteli häntä laihoilla käsivarsillaan. Ja
äkkiä hänen mieleensä muistui jotain outoa ja kummaa, — hän oli
nähnyt äidin liikkumatta makaavan aivan uudessa kapeassa
vuoteessa, hän oli nukkunut niin raskaasti, ettei ollut herännyt,
vaikka häntä oli nimeltä huudettu ja hän muisti jonkun sanoneen että
äiti oli kuollut.

Mitä se merkitsi, sitä hän ei voinut ymmärtää, mutta varmaan äiti

oli lähtenyt jonnekin hyvin kauaksi, koska hän antoi Hertan maata
yksin, ilman iltasiunausta ja ilman suudelmaa. Peloissaan Hertta oli
painanut kasvonsa tyynyyn ja vihdoin nukahtanut nyyhkytyksiinsä.

Seurasi sitten aika, joka oli harmaatakin harmaampi. Ei

pienintäkään vaihtelua tuossa pitkässä loppumattomassa päivien
jonossa. Matka kouluun ja koulusta kotiin, siinä kaikki, mikä hänen
mieleensä oli painunut. Vanha täti, joka joskus kuulusteli häneltä
läksyjä ja nuhteli häntä, jos hän maitolasin kaatoi puhtaalle
pöytäliinalle. Ja isä, tuo ahavoitunut, suippopartainen mies, joka
joskus palasi pitkiltä merimatkoiltansa kotiin tuoden mukanansa
eriskummallisia esineitä kaukaisista, vieraista maista. Mutta
selvimmin hänen mieleensä oli painunut pitkät, pimeät illat, jolloin
hän unettomana makasi vuoteellansa ja lakkaamatta tuumiskeli,
miksikä hän oli heitetty niin yksin maailmaan, ilman kotia, vanhempia
ja sisaruksia.

Hän muisti sitten päivän eräänä keväänä. Kepein askelin hän oli
astunut kotiin koulusta päästötodistus kädessänsä. Hän oli niin
iloinen ja vapaa mielestänsä, hän näki elämän ensi kertaa
hymyilevän edessänsä ja kaikki raskaat ajatukset olivat kadonneet.
Isä oli palannut kotiin pitkältä matkaltansa ja aikoi nyt asettua
kaupunkiin asumaan. Tuota aikaa oli Hertta kauan ikävöinyt, sillä
oma koti oli väikkynyt hänen mielessänsä kuin ihana unelma. Yhä
uudelleen hän oli mielessään luonut kuvan tuosta kodista, jossa
hänelläkin isän huoneen vieressä olisi oma pieni soppensa. Hän
asettelisi hienoja uutimia ikkunoihin ja kukkivia kasveja joka
pöydälle, äidin kuvan ympärille hän kietoisi köynnöskasvin, joka ei
koskaan saisi kuihtua ja kellastua. Ja kun kaikki olisi valmiina, hiipisi
hän hiljaa isän huoneesen, käsipuolesta taluttaisi hänet äidin kuvan
eteen ja kuuntelisi, mitä hän hänestä kertoisi.

Ja talvi-iltoina, kun isä syvässä nojatuolissansa istuisi

takkavalkean ääressä, vetäisi hän matalan jakkaran hänen
jalkojensa juureen. Hän uskoisi hänelle huolensa, ja isä lohduttaisi ja
hyväilisi häntä. Ja he eläisivät pienessä kodissansa vain toinen
toisellensa.

Mutta todellisuus ei ollut vastannut Hertan mielikuvia. Jo ensi

hetkessä oli isä tuntunut hänestä vieraalta. Hänen olennossaan oli
jotain karkeata, merikarhun tapaista, johon Hertta ei ollut edeltäpäin
valmistunut. Hänen hyväilynsä ei lämmittänyt häntä, eivätkä hänen
sanansa herättäneet vastakaikua hänen rinnassansa.

Vaistomaisesti hän oli myös tuntenut isän pettyneen hänen

suhteensa. Hänessä ei ollut sitä hilpeyttä ja reippautta, jota isä
varmaan olisi toivonut ja joka helpommin olisi lähentänyt heidät
toisiinsa. Ja kahdeksan pitkää vuotta he olivat nyt yhdessä eläneet.
Eläneet yhdessä, ja kuitenkin erillänsä.
 Hertta huokasi syvään. Mitä nuo vuodet olivat hänelle antaneet?
Nuo vuodet, jotka kuitenkin muodostivat hänen elämänsä parhaan
nuoruudenajan. Hertta kohenteli tulta uunissa, puut olivat palaneet
suuriksi kekäleiksi ja niitä liikutellessa loimuava liekki yltyi. Se kohosi
terävänä tulikielenä luoden valoa ja lämpöä pimeään huoneesen,
mutta samalla ahmien ja niellen kaikki ympärillänsä. Hän näki äkkiä
omassa elämässäänkin tuollaisen liekin, joka hetkeksi oli valaissut ja
lämmittänyt hänen sydänkammiotansa, mutta samalla myös
polttanut ja tuhonnut hänessä kaikki. Hän oli rakastanut ja luullut
myös olleensa rakastettu, mutta pettymys oli tullut liiankin pian. Ja
jäljelle oli jäänyt vain tyhjyys ja katkeruus, epäilys ihmisiä ja omaa
itseäkin kohtaan.

Siitä saakka hän oli hapuillut kuin eksynyt, löytämättä oikeata tietä.
Jossain kaukana hänelle häämöitti epäselvä päämäärä, jonka
edestä elää ja työtä tehdä, mutta aina kun hän luuli askeleen sitä
lähestyneensä, katosikin se uudelleen. Ja tuossa alituisessa
hapuilemisessa hänen mielensä muuttui yhä raskaammaksi ja
alakuloisemmaksi.

Hertta nousi ylös. Kova ääni kuului eteisestä hänen korviinsa ja

äänekäs nauru. Se uudistui jälleen ja raskaita askeleita kajahteli
viereisestä huoneesta. Hertta sulki huoneensa oven. Hän tahtoi olla
yksin. Ei mistään hinnasta hän halunnut nyt vieraiden joukkoon. Hän
otti kirjahyllyltänsä pienen kirjan, sen lehdet olivat kellastuneet, ja
kannet kuluneet, ja hän selaili sitä, etsien ja etsien yhä kiihkeämmin.
Vihdoin hän pysähtyi. Niin, tuossa se oli, Matheuksen
evankeliumissa — — "menkäät ja opettakaat kaikkea kansaa" — —.
Hieno lyijykynän merkki marginaalissa, — varmaan äitivainajan
vetämä, — tässä siis ei ollutkaan pelkän sattuman oikkua, vaan
korkeampaa johtoa ja tarkoitusta. Hertta painoi päänsä käteen. Hän
oli kuulevinaan äidin äänen, sanat olivat vain niin epäselvät ja
vieraat. Mutta johonkin hän Herttaa tahtoi, johonkin suureen, joka
vaatisi uhrausta ja itsensä kieltämistä. Ovelta kuului koputus.

— Neiti, tee on nyt pöydässä.

Hertta siveli otsaa kädellänsä. Hetkeksi hän jäi seisomaan ja

hänen katseensa oli synkkä ja surumielinen. Mutta äkkiä hänen
silmissään välähti ja jotain kirkasta levisi hänen kasvoillensa. Hänen
huulensa liikkuivat, mutta ääntä ei kuulunut. Kun hän kääntyi
mennäksensä, oli välke jo kadonnut ja kasvon piirteet saaneet
entisen jäykkyytensä.

Viereisessä huoneessa seisoi kapteeni Ek vieraineen teepöydän

ääressä.
Hertta ojensi kätensä herra Väisäselle.

— Mikä ilo nähdä teitä, neiti Ek, sanoi Väisänen mielistelevästi ja

hänen silmänsä saivat omituisen kiillon. — Miksi te aina olette niin
näkymätön? Jospa te tietäisitte minkä onnen teidän läsnäolonne
minulle tuottaa — — —

— No, no, veli hopea, paina puuta, kuka noista naisista viisastuu.
Parasta on heittää rauhaan. Kapteeni nauroi kovaäänisesti.

Hertta istui ääneti ja katsoi eteensä. Hän tunsi Väisäsen

katselevan häntä, hänen katseensa oli tungetteleva ja hänen imelä
hymynsä vastenmielinen. Mutta tahtomattaankin hänen huomionsa
kiintyi Väisäsen moitteettoman hienoon pukuun ja valkoiseen
kaulahuiviin, jonka neula kimalteli kaikissa sateenkaaren väreissä.
Ja hänen katseensa kohosi hänen vasta ajelluille poskillensa ja
rasvatuille hiuksillensa, joista levisi hajuveden väkevä haju
huoneesen.

— Kippis, veikkonen, sanoi kapteeni ja tarjosi vieraalleen ryypyn.

— Häh, häh, hyvää se tekee. Kapteeni tyhjensi yhdellä siemauksella
lasinsa ja siveli kädellään partaansa. Se oli harva ja harmaja. Hänen
kasvojensa väri oli tumma, melkein kupariin vivahtava. Monivuotinen
ahavoituminen ja meren suolainen karaisu ei ollut
mannermaallakaan hävinnyt. Puhuessaan hän alituisesti kilotti
silmillään, ikäänkuin aurinko olisi häntä häikäissyt.

— Kolmekymmentä vuotta sitten, alkoi kapteeni kertoa, — tuhat

tulimaista, joko siitä on niin pitkä aika kulunut, ja kuitenkin muistan
sen kerran ikään kuin se olisi eilen ollut, — purjehdin Indian merellä.
Hirmuinen myrsky nousi illan suussa ja — —

— Ja te hukuitte kaikki, lisäsi Väisänen iskien silmää Hertalle.

— Älä saakelissa — —

— Niinhän veli eilen illalla kertoi.

Hertta tunsi punan kohoavan poskillensa. Isän karkea puhetapa

loukkasi häntä ja hänen meriseikkailunsa, joita hän niin mielellänsä
kertoi jokaiselle, joka vain malttoi niitä kuunnella, ikävystyttivät häntä.
Sillä hän oli jo kuullut ne monen monta kertaa.

Hetken aikaa kaikki kolme olivat vaiti.

— Oliko neiti vermisellissä viime lauvantaina? kysyi Väisänen

saadakseen keskustelun aikaan.

Hertta katsoi kysyvästi häneen.

 — En tiedä, en ole kuullut mistään sellaisesta.

— Sehän oli sääli, se olisi varmaan teitä suuresti intreseerannut.

Jos olisin tiennyt, niin olisin kutsunut teidät sinne. Yleisö aivan kilvan
tunkeili laulajattaremme muotokuvan ympärillä ja konserveerasi sen
johdosta.

— Ah, te tarkoitatte taiteilijanäyttelyn avajaisia! sanoi Hertta

pilkallisesti.

Väisänen tunsi jotain ilmassa. Olisiko hän taaskin erehtynyt noiden

vieraskielisten sanojen suhteen, joiden käyttäminen oli milt'ei kunnia-
asiaksi hänelle muuttunut. Hän kadehti kaikkia niitä, jotka saattoivat
kevyesti puhallella niitä ilmaan kuin saippuapalloja. Tosin hän ei ollut
saanut korkeampaa koulusivistystä, juoksupojasta hän oli kohonnut
kauppa-apulaiseksi ja sittemmin konttoristiksi, mutta luontaista kykyä
ja sukkeluutta häneltä ei puuttunut. Ja alotettuaan oman liikkeensä,
välittämällä asioita, hankkimalla lainoja, ostamalla ja myömällä
arvopapereita, hän oli saavuttanut jonkunlaisen varmuuden ja
asemankin yhteiskunnassa. Hyvät raha-ajat olivat häntä suosineet ja
täsmällisyydellään ja uutteruudellaan hän oli voittanut luottamusta.

Mutta hän olikin äärettömän arka arvostansa. Hän ei kärsinyt

pienintäkään pilaa ja hän pelkäsi alituisesti että toisetkin huomaisivat
entisen juoksupojan, joka tuon tuostakin pisti päänsä esiin hienon
ulkokuoren alta.

Hertta huomasi hänen epävarmuutensa. Hänen kävi äkkiä häntä

sääli. Ja ikäänkuin hyvitelläkseen häntä hän sanoi:

— Se on suurenmoinen tuo muotokuva. Niin häikäisevän kaunis ja

henkevä — —
 — Ja niin mainiosti blaseerattukin! Aivan ovea vastapäätä — —

Hertta painoi päänsä alas. Koko säälin tunne oli kuin

poispuhallettu. Hän tunsi vain inhoa, koko hänen ympäristönsä
kiusoitti häntä. Hän olisi tahtonut nousta ylös ja paeta huoneesensa.
Mutta hän hillitsi itsensä ja jäi äänettömänä paikoilleen.

Kapteenilta oli keskustelu jäänyt huomaamatta. Hän oli kokonaan

kiintynyt lautaseensa ja pureskeli hartaasti lihapaloja. Äänettömyys
sai hänet heräämään ajatuksistansa. Hän katsahti Väisäseen, puna
oli noussut tälle korviin saakka ja hämillään hän kilisteli kahveliansa.

— Millä matkoilla veli viime viikolla oli? kysyi kapteeni, pyyhkien

rasvaa viiksistänsä.

— Kävin metsäkauppoja hieromassa. Väisänen tunsi taas

seisovansa vakavalla maapohjalla. — Metsän hinta on alenemassa;
huono vuodentulo ennustaa kovaa talvea ja rahat ovat vähissä.

— Omissa asioissako sinä kävit?

— Sekä omissa että "Vesa" yhtiön asioissa. Tuolla idän puolella

myövät aivan polkuhinnasta.

— Ja teillä olisi sydäntä ostaa polkuhinnasta, herra Väisänen?

sanoi
Hertta ihmeissään.

— Asia kuin asia. Ostajia on vähän näinä huonoina aikoina. Ei

kannata rahoja kiinnittää tavaraan, joka ehkä ei kaupaksi kävisi.
Mutta kansan hyväksi sopii jotain uhratakin.
 — Kyllä sinä ostaa osaat, myhäili kapteeni. — Taskumatti toisessa
kädessä ja rahat toisessa. Kuka siihen ansaan ei tarttuisi.

— Älä joutavia. Pitäähän liikemiehenkin saada palkkansa. Ei

puulla metsässä arvoa ole, hänen käsissäänhän se vasta arvoon
nousee. Sitä paitsi kilvanhan nuo käyvät kaupittelemassa. Ja kun
eivät osaa puitansa lukea, niin oma syynsä, jos kaupassa
kadottavat.

Väisänen hieroi tyytyväisenä käsiään. Hertta katsoi halveksivasti

häneen.

— Hyi teitä, kun iloitsette toisen vahingosta!

— Oma suu propsimus!

Hertta kävi yhä alakuloisemmaksi. Että saattoikin kerskailla

uhrautuvansa kansan hyväksi vaikka kaikella toimella oli itsekäs
tarkoitus. Olisipa kerrankin ollut näkemässä niitä, jotka todellakin
kansan hyväksi työskentelivät.

Ja hän alkoi kertoa kansalaiskokouksesta, joka oli kutsuttu kokoon

avun hankkimista varten hädänalaisille seuduille, ja kenraali
Löfbergistä, joka oli asettunut homman etupäähän.

— Ei kenraali Löfberg tunne kansaa, sanoi Väisänen pilkallisesti.

— Hän on ainakin kansanmielinen, intti Hertta vastaan, — eikä

etsi omaa etuansa.

— Onhan hän ottanut vävypojakseenkin kansan miehen,

naureskeli Väisänen. — Kukapa olisi uskonut että Hammarin Antti
kelpaisi kenraalin taloon.
 Kapteeni Ek näytti olevan omissa ajatuksissansa. Hän katsahti
rauhattomasti Väisäseen ja sanoi huolestuneella äänellä:

— Kato tulee tietenkin vaikuttamaan koko maan taloudelliseen

tilaan.
Yksityiset yhtiötkin — —

Väisänen keskeytti häntä.

— Ei veljen pidä turhia huolehtia. Osinkomaksut korkeintaan

voivat pienentyä, mutta ne jotka kerran seisovat vankalla pohjalla,
niinkuin "Vesa" yhtiökin, ne eivät vähällä horjahda.

— Niin sinä aina vakuutat, sanoi kapteeni epäilevästi, — ja sen

nojalla minä "Vesa" yhtiöönkin kiinnitin niin suuret summat. Mutta jos
se sortuu, niin minäkin menen sen mukana.

— No, no, eihän sitä vielä niin pitkällä olla. Voit täydellisesti luottaa
minuun.

— Hertta, sanoi kapteeni, kun hän pöydästä noustua saattoi

vieraansa huoneesensa, — lähetä meille kahvia ja konjakkia. — —

Oli jo myöhäinen ilta, kun Hertta yhä istui huoneessansa

mietteihinsä vaipuneena. Hän tunsi niin omituista liikutusta. Hänen
sydämensä sykki rajusti, jokin valtava tunne pyrki irti hänen
rinnastansa. Hän pysytteli liikkumatta, ikäänkuin odottaen jotakin ja
kuunnellen sisällistä ääntä. Hänen silmissään syttyi outo välke.
Entäs jos hänkin voisi työskennellä kansan hyväksi? Jos milloin niin
nyt, hädän sitä uhatessa, se tarvitsi apua, ja ehkä pappi kirkossa
juuri tätä oli tarkoittanutkin. Entistä voimakkaampina nuo sanat nyt
astuivat hänen eteensä. Hän luuli ne nyt täydellisesti ymmärtävänsä.
Ne kutsuivat häntä työhön, ne viittasivat hänelle tien, jota hänen tuli
kulkea. Ja kaukana Pohjan perillä hän näki edessään laajan
työkentän, tuhansia tarvitsevia veljiä, jotka odottivat vain hänen
apuansa ja lohdutustansa.

Mutta kesken innostustansa hän tunsi lamauksen ruumiissansa.

Mitäpä hän, heikko nainen, voisi saada aikaan? Kahdella tyhjällä
kädellänsä? Jos hän lähtisikin hätää lieventämään, niin voisiko hän
muuta kuin nähdä nälkää yhdessä heidän kanssansa?

Hänen silmänsä kostuivat. Miksikä kaikki mihin hän yritti tarttua,

muuttui hänen käsissään naurettavaksi?

Hertta säpsähti. Hän kuuli ääniä isän huoneesta. Miten usein tuo
nauru oli herättänyt hänet kesken uniensa ja tunkeutunut hänen
luoksensa yön hiljaisuudessa. Hän inhosi noita pitkiä yöistuntoja
konjakkilasien ääressä, joiden jälkeen isä koko aamupäiviksi
sulkeutui huoneesensa. Hän inhosi silloin koko kotiansa, johon hän
oli kytketty kiinni, ja olisi halunnut katkaista kaikki vastenmieliset
siteet.

Ei, hänen täytyi saada elämälleen tarkoitus, ilman sitä hän ei

jaksanut elää.

Hän lähtisi sittenkin hätämaille, hän ponnistelisi ja taistelisi, siksi

kuin hän voittaisi, ja hänen täytyi voittaa. Ja kaukana pimeydessä
hän näki häämöittävän valonsäteen, joka antoi hänelle toivoa ja
rohkeutta.