conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first paragraph for a book with the title 'Silas Marner'
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Silas Marner
  George Eliot was nearly sixty at this time so the anecdote should correct any false idea that she was a solemn prig.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The laws of life are shown in operation in what follows immediately after Silas has made known his misfortune to the village. His relations with the villagers follow the same impartial logic as before, but his impulse to turn to them for help in his trouble, and his compunction at accusing Jem of robbing him without evidence, which has stirred up memories of being falsely accused himself, have made a bridge between them. They see he is an innocent soul and in need of help. First 'contemptuous pity' replaces distrust, then the traditional neighbourly attempts to help him follow. The sympathetic ears, the good advice, the welcome presents and soothing attentions culminate in Dolly Winthrop's well-judged efforts to reach him by all the different channels she feels likely to work on him. She brings the cakes, with their religious sanction in the traditionally pricked 'good letters'; the child, as certain to touch his heart if he has one and moreover to sing a carol to move his Christmas sentiments; and a gentle remonstrance about his not going to church. All these good means fail to reach him, and we cannot but sense that something is being conveyed, in the cross-purposes and misunderstandings of their conversation, sometimes comical and sometimes full of pathos, about the difficulty of achieving any real communication between people who don't belong to the same culture. Silas doesn't even recognize the religion of church as the same Christian religion that he subscribed to in the first half of his life, for all his knowledge of the theory of salvation; here no doubt something more ironical is intended. Dolly's religion is about as far from Calvinism as possible; it is seen to be a matter of custom, traditional pieties and pagan practices, and she makes no distinction between christening and inoculation.
  Silas never does acquire the pieties inborn with the villagers. He gets along eventually by adopting all the village customs without questioning them, but never, of course, has the traditional associations which make people benefit by them. We are given an undoubtedly humorous illustration in the daily pipe-smoking which Silas takes up because it is the done thing and because he is told, against the evidence of his senses, that it is good for him. Eppie believes it does do him good and that he enjoys it, and though he would rather not smoke he does not like to set himself up against received opinion or to pain Eppie by undeceiving her. George Eliot does not press the general point here illustrated, which would have forced on us an awkward scepticism, but once again it expresses her freedom from sentimentality and her refusal to simplify, to make a 'story' by suppressing discordant facts.
  Sitting on the banks in this way, Silas began to look for the once familiar herbs again; and as the leaves, with their unchanged outline and markings, lay on his palm, there was a sense of crowding remembrances from which he turned away timidly, taking refuge in Eppie's little world, that lay lightly on his enfeebled spirit.
  As the child's mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory; as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into full consciousness.
  We are shown also that besides reviving Silas's consciousness of the world around him and its associations with his past, Eppie makes him aware of a future happiness, so that he can deduce from the present 'in the ties and charities that bound together the families of his neighbours' 'images of that time' to come, another application of the Wordsworthian doctrine. In the spirit of Wordsworth's poetry too is the description of how Eppie forges a bond between Silas and all animate and even inanimate life: 'there was love between the child and the world – from men and women with parental looks and tones, to the red lady-birds and the round pebbles'.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: So when we are returned to the company of the poor we feel relief. Here is charity and fellowship and we can enter into their difficulties and pleasures with sympathy without meeting their 'betters' again till Eppie is at the critical stage of courtship. Then we are taken back to the Red House (Chapter 17). True, the old Squire and the vicious Dunsey are gone and the Lammeters' 'liberal orderliness' is in charge, while the refinement compared with what went before suggests that Nancy may really be a 'better'. Her attitude to adoption compared to the villagers' is one test, and others follow. She is seen to be made up of 'rigid principles', a conventional good woman, loving and dutiful to her own relations but fatally limited, as is proved when she goes with her husband to claim Eppie. 'Used all her life to plenteous circumstances and the privileges of "respectability"', we are told, she cannot understand that Eppie's life can have its own attractions and compensations. This is exactly in keeping with Godfrey's conviction that Eppie would readily fall in with his wish to adopt her, he having formed 'the idea that deep affections can hardly go along with callous palms and scant means'.
  The ensuing drama is really instructive, no longer easily satiric. Godfrey loses any sympathy we may have felt for him by his selfishness, his obtuseness to the feelings of the Marners, and his dishonesty in persuading himself that he is doing for Eppie's good what now suits himself. This analysis of 'moral stupidity', one of George Eliot's favourite subjects, proceeds magnificently as Godfrey finally accuses the weaver of selfishness and reproaches him that without her real father's (his) protection 'she may marry some low working-man'. Godfrey's brutality here is the more dreadful for not being conscious; it is a class reaction only, not personal. We look to see Nancy's reaction to this test. But she notices no insult, and this comes as a shock to us because Nancy has been shown as superior to the rest of her world in delicacy of feeling. We are forced to realize that insulation by class destroys the power of imaginative sympathy in everyone. Nancy presses Godfrey's rights on Eppie, who answers the spirit of the insult with a passionate affirmation of class solidarity as well as of loyalty to the only father she has ever known. It is characteristic that the first thing Nancy then thinks of is relief that her family and the world now need never know about Godfrey's past and the relation with Eppie. What is uppermost in her mind is respectability; she is a variety of Dodson and this is the real gulf between her and the village folk who have not yet been tainted with the religion of 'respectability' (a word which George Eliot herself puts into inverted commas here). Eppie's reaction is quite plausible if we remember what social and literary history abundantly confirm, what Sturt summarizes in this sentence: 'It seems singular to think of it now, but the very labourer might reasonably hope for some satisfaction in life, nor trouble about "raising" himself into some other class, so long as he could live on peasant lines.'
  Now this constant play of ironical social criticism, and the general reflections about human nature, are what prevent the artifices (such as the elaborate parallels between Silas's and Godfrey's histories and the providential arrangements of the fits, little golden-haired girls, and so on) from being felt as artificial by the reader, for they never obtrude as such: far from being incited to work out the pattern, our attention is always being directed elsewhere. Yet without dwelling on these things we do get as we read a sense that these complexities of reference are further illustrations of those laws of life that, as the novel is concerned to demonstrate, so mysteriously exist.
  They are not laws that can be stated, but as we've seen they cover parts of human experience investigated by Wordsworth and Bunyan, Cobbett and George Sturt, among others, and embody the truths of parables in the New Testament as well as the traditional wisdom expressed in folktales. The central thesis in Mr Macey's narrative at the Rainbow is the contrast between the rich man's folly and the meek man's success in living, a theme often present in folktales of course. Godfrey with his uneasy conscience and his childless hearth gets no benefit from his riches and the wife he has gained by deception, while the humble Marner household have the last word: 'I think nobody could be happier than we are.' Eppie has brought into the home, to complete it with a garden, Aaron the gardener. That his occupation is, like the tailor's deliberately chosen is made quite explicit in his criticism of the maldistribution of goods – a return to the Radical vein:
  And we are presently told that Aaron does all the gardening for the Raveloe gentry: his kind do the world's work and have a better idea than the property owners of the right use of property, this tells us. Again we are led to ask: Who are the 'betters'?