(1879)
ELIOT INTENDED to call this collection of eighteen essays Characters and Characteristics, or Impressions of Theophrastus Such and name herself as its editor. The essays were written during Lewes’s last illness, and the first edition has a publisher’s note: ‘The manuscript of this Work was put into our hands towards the close of last year, but the publication has been delayed owing to the domestic affliction of the author.’
The essays are sometimes heavily witty. The first, ‘Looking Inward’, describes the character of the narrator, a bachelor, who has been an ‘attentive companion’ to himself all his life and now chooses to be garrulous on paper. The character has things in common with the narrative persona of ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton’ and the choice of the Theophrastian form shows an abiding interest in the collections of ‘Characters’ discussed in Eliot’s essay on Madame de Sablé.
Theophrastus (c. 371–c. 287 BC) was a pupil and friend of Aristotle, a scientific inquirer and philosopher best remembered for his Characters. La Bruyère (1645–96), who is cited in this essay, translated Theophrastus and wrote his own Characters in imitation.
In his Characters of Theophrastus, La Bruyère divides men into three kinds: those who desire precise methodical definitions of virtue and vice; those who reduce morals to a matter of physically caused passions; and a third kind who like to read books about the mixture of the good and the bad, the wise and the silly, by applying their own moral principles to the study of particular men and manners, ‘correcting each by comparison with the others, through these images of things so familiar to them, from which they have nevertheless not taken thought to draw instruction’. These principles bear an obvious close relation to Eliot’s earliest thoughts about both characterization and instruction.