Mr George Eliot [antikvár]

PRELIMINARYNo biography is true. Every biographer is obliged to seek refuge in guesswork. No potential reader of the life of a man or a woman should be put off by either of these statements.People are complicated and contradictory - immensely and endlessly so. The creations of the subtlest of novelists are childishly simple and diagrammatic when set against the simplest and most ordinary of real people. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is a very stripped down lady indeed compared to Karen who operates her checkout till at the supermarket and is swept by inner turmoil many times a day. This doesn't mean that the biographer should abandon hope and turn to fiction. His business is to stick to what facts there are, reconcile conflicting evidence so far as he can, and present a portrait that is recognisably human, recognisably a 'personality'. There's no need for him to stick to the very great and the very famous. Carlyle wrote a life of John Sterling, a Scotsman born in 1806 who came under the influence of Coleridge. He suffered religious doubts which caused him to give up holy orders; he wrote a little, and died at thirty-eight. Carlyle's biography, which remains one of the greatest produced in the nineteenth century, has a ruminative conclusion which begins like this:All the remains, in palpable shape, of John Sterling's activities in this world are those Two poor Volumes; scattered fragments gathered from the general waste of forgotten ephemera by the piety of a friend: an inconsiderable memorial; not pretending to have achieved greatness; only disclosing, mournfully, to the more observant, that a promise of greatness was there. Like other such lives, like all lives, this is a tragedy; high hopes, noble efforts; under thickening difficulties and impediments, ever-new nobleness of valiant effort; -andthe result death, with conquests by no means corresponding. A life which cannot challenge the world's attention; yet which does modestly solicit it, and perhaps on clear study will be found to reward it.George Henry Lewes achieved very much more than Sterling. He wrote a life of Goethe which remains still the best biography there is in English of the great all-rounder. He was a busy journalist who reached the top of his profession. In the Leader, a weekly of which he was co-editor between 1851 and 1854, he wrote a regular piece above the signature 'Vivian' which gives him a claim to be regarded in the history of journalism as the founding father of all columnists. He wrote dramatic criticism of such quality that Bernard Shaw said that he was the only man in the business worth bothering about between himself and Hazlitt. He wrote plays - almost as many as Shaw himself though not of the same quality. Three novels stand to his name, two of which are still readable. In an age when the boundaries between philosophy and science weren't as clearly defined as they are now he wrote lucidly and fluently on both. In 1865 he became the first editor of the Fortnightly Review for which he immediately began to write a series of articles later collected and published under the title. Principles of Success in Literature. It's a book full of shrewd and practical literary criticism. And it's important to note particularly that word 'success'. Lewes believed passionately in success. If you had ability, if you were prepared to work hard, then success should follow. He was himself always willing to fulfil the conditions and looked forward to the rewards that should come after. He belonged to the type which 150 years on would be described as pushy.There were many who disliked him on this account. Carlyle and his wife Jane Welsh, who came to know him in the 1840s when he was still only in his twenties, at first thought him ugly and over-eager but changed their opinions. His freshness, vigour and talent to amuse quite won them round and for Carlyle in the 1850s Lewes was 'the Prince of journalists'. The longer people knew him the