George Eliot's Intellectual Life

GEORGE ELIOT’S INTELLECTUAL LIFE It is well known that George Eliot’s intelligence and her wide knowledge of literatur...

Author: Avrom Fleishman

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GEORGE ELIOT’S INTELLECTUAL LIFE

It is well known that George Eliot’s intelligence and her wide knowledge of literature, history, philosophy and religion shaped her fiction, but until now no study has followed the development of her thinking from her early years to her later works. This intellectual biography traces the course of that development from her initial Christian culture, through her loss of faith and working out of a humanistic and cautiously progressive worldview, to the thought-provoking achievements of her novels. It focuses on her responses to her reading in her essays, reviews and letters as well as in the historical pictures of Romola, the political implications of Felix Holt, the comprehensive view of English society in Middlemarch, and the visionary account of personal inspiration and possible national renewal in Daniel Deronda. This portrait of a major Victorian intellectual is an important new addition to our understanding of Eliot’s mind and works, as well as of her place in nineteenth-century British culture. avrom fleishman was Professor of English at The Johns Hopkins University, now retired.

GEORGE ELIOT’S INTELLECTUAL LIFE AVROM FLEISHMAN

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521117364 © Avrom Fleishman 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2010 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Fleishman, Avrom. George Eliot’s intellectual life / Avrom Fleishman. p. cm. Includes index. isbn 978-0-521-11736-4 1. Eliot, George, 1819–1880. 2. Novelists, English – 19th century – Biography. 3. Intellectuals – Great Britain – Biography. 4. Eliot, George, 1819–1880 – Religion. 5. Eliot, George, 1819–1880 – Philosophy. 6. Eliot, George, 1819–1880 – Political and social views. 7. Eliot, George, 1819–1880 – Knowledge – Literature. 8. Eliot, George, 1819–1880 – Knowledge – History. I. Title. pr4681.f64 2009 8230 .8–dc22 [B] 2009021481 isbn 978-0-521-11736-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

for Felicia Bonaparte, doyenne of Eliot studies, with gratitude

Contents

Acknowledgements Preface

page viii ix

Introduction

1

1

The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture

12

2

The Apostate: moving beyond the Christian mythos

24

3

The Journalist: editing, reviewing, shaping a worldview

44

4

The Germanist: balancing the counterweight of German thinkers

72

5

The Novelist: mixing realism, naturalism and mythmaking

93

6

The Historian: tracking ideals – utopian and national – in Romola and The Spanish Gypsy

112

7

The “Radical”: taking an anti-political stance in Felix Holt

140

8

The Encyclopedist: transcending the past in Middlemarch

161

9

The Visionary: transmitting ideals in Daniel Deronda

190

10 The Intellectual: cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such

218

Notes Works cited Name index

252 282 292

vii

Acknowledgements

A number of friends have contributed substantially to inform my impressions on various subjects: Edward Alexander, on Victorian thinkers; William Baker, on George Eliot and George Henry Lewes; Felicia Bonaparte, on Victorian fiction and on classical scholarship; Heather and Thomas Callow, on religious discourse; the late Randolph Chalfant, on nineteenth-century development; the late Owen Hannaway, on the history of science; the late John Higham, on intellectuals; the late Samuel Ivry, on Jewish lore; Richard Macksey, on bibliography; Orest Ranum, on historiography; Patricia Ranum, on French culture; the late Charles Revelle, on scientific method; the late David Spring, and Eileen Spring, on British history; and the late Julian Stanley, on intelligence. As this is partly a necrology, I take this opportunity to express gratitude for having had these scholars as my guides. The use I’ve made of their learning is, of course, another matter.

viii

Preface

What to call her? The subject of this study changed her name repeatedly during her life, but I shall refer to her throughout as George Eliot, not only for convenience but on a psychological premiss. While modifying her social identity by renaming, she was continuously creating an intellectual identity. “George Eliot” names this evolving self-creation. This developmental view of Eliot avoids thinking of her as permanently attached to any ideology or definitively influenced by any other thinker. As with all great writers, her mind was marked by independence, a synthetic tendency, and broad sympathy. A few words on method. My preparation for writing this study involved reading (or reading in) what George Eliot read. As a teacher of mine once remarked, she read “everything” – and what she didn’t read, Lewes read. So I haven’t read every word she read; considering the dross she had to review, it’s not certain that she read every word either. My aim in serving as an intellectual historian has been somewhat different from that of my training as a literary critic. It is the Collingwoodian one, to recreate in my own understanding the mind of the historical subject, to grasp the motivation, content and action of that mind in her writing, both fictional and nonfictional. This is, of course, an unattainable goal, not the less worth striving for. A related methodological concern has been to make it difficult for the reader to discern where I agree or disagree with Eliot’s ideas. In this aim, too, I have probably not succeeded. Eliot’s novels will be considered here not as works of art but as moments for the emergence of ideas. This is obviously an artificial distinction, for artistic constructs are ideas, too. Yet it should be possible to discuss distinct elements of an artwork without undertaking the task of literary criticism, the explication of whole works. The theoretical challenges of my approach lie within the sphere of the history of ideas, rather than in literary criticism, which has its own theoretical problems. There are roughly three approaches to ideas in fiction: an author believed certain things and here they are in the ix

x

Preface

novel or poem – the insertive approach; here is an idea in a novel or poem, and the author must have believed it – the extractive approach; and, here is how an idea works in the course of a novel or poem – the functional approach. I have looked for opportunities to discuss active ideas in Eliot’s fiction, just as my reading of her non-fictional writings stresses the dynamic element in her thinking. There have been numerous studies of Eliot’s ideas. To recall only booklength, and highly rewarding, works: Pierre Bourl’honne’s George Eliot: Essai de biographie intellectuelle et morale (1933); Michael Wolff’s unpublished dissertation, “Marian Evans to George Eliot: The Moral and Intellectual Foundations of Her Career” (1958); Bernard J. Paris’s Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (1965); William Myers’s The Teaching of George Eliot (1984); and Valerie Dodd’s George Eliot: An Intellectual Life (1990). The common goal of their efforts has been summation: to assemble a coherent order of Eliot’s ideas so as to present her mind as an accomplished – a highly accomplished – structure. I have chosen to present it as a work in progress, emphasizing not merely its transitional but its progressive character. Just as – as shall emerge in what follows – Eliot’s fiction traces the progress of her heroes and heroines toward more adequate ways of conducting their lives, just as – it shall also be maintained – her main philosophic affinities were to theories of past and potential human advancement, so in her own life she lived out the extended drama of intellectual challenge and response. By looking at matters from a slightly different angle, one sees – or thinks one sees – some different things, or the same ones differently. By taking the tack mentioned above, I have come to believe a number of things about Eliot’s mind that are not in the current repertoire of received ideas of the subject. As suggested above, she emerges as a progressive – though not a “liberal,” in either the Victorian or current senses of the term – who believed in the possibility and reality of improvement in the social and personal spheres. (I shall shortly qualify this claim.) She was closer to John Stuart Mill’s version of progress, as is manifested by her consistent and appreciative reading of the great liberal’s works as they appeared, than to Auguste Comte’s, which she read scantily, and with increasing chagrin as his authoritarian tendencies emerged. She was receptive to and even a passing participant in the growth of scientific discovery, closely supportive of her common-law husband’s career change in this direction, and not a skeptic of scientific truth, as maintained by recent critics. She was a humanist, to use the term for a loose association of thinkers that emerged in the nineteenth century, deriving a set of ethical values from a tradition broader than the Judeo-Christian one alone. And she was tragically idealistic, if one may

Preface

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coin a phrase, believing both in the awesome spirituality of human aspirations toward the higher life and in the ultimate inefficacy of all attempts to realize the ideal. (As a footnote: I make a distinction between “idealist” and “idealistic” – the former referring to a distinct philosophic position, the latter to a broader orientation, for which “progressive,” “meliorist” and “visionary” are at times useful equivalents.) If these be heresies, I shall try to make the most of them. As a contribution to the history of ideas, the present work exposes what some will consider fatal flaws in that approach. In place of currently fashionable marxisant views of the strong, even determining, relation between ideas and social history, there will be an emphasis here on the relations of one mind to another, as these developed in the course of reading and personal encounters. There will be little talk of the Victorian frame of mind, nascent capitalism and bourgeois ideology. In partial compensation, there will be close attention to Eliot’s views of the middle class she intimately knew and portrayed in her novels as deathlessly as Balzac did for the French equivalent. (Indeed, one of the suggestions in a chapter on her fictional modes is to make plausible this connection.) With all her awareness of how her nation and her world were developing and struggling around her, Eliot’s thinking was largely conducted by individual interaction, one thinker thinking another’s thoughts and responding with his own or with variations on the other’s. To place my adherence to this approach in its own intellectual context, it is the tradition of A. O. Lovejoy and his followers, which may be called the internal history of ideas, as distinct from the external history that relates ideas to their non-intellectual, material contexts. If this be theoretical idealism, I shall try to make the most of it. Finally, a word on a neglected matter. In all the talk of intellectuals, ideas, mind, thinking, etc., one term fails to make an appearance: intelligence. If one were to look for instances of the life of the mind being constrained by the social conditions of the time, this avoidance would provide a strong example. But the brute fact lies before us: George Eliot was an extremely intelligent person who, largely self-educated in languages, literary and other arts, religion and philosophy of religion, the social sciences, etc., etc., developed herself not only into what many regard as England’s greatest novelist but into a leading intellectual of her time. These developments, too, will receive due consideration.

Introduction

… though I have studied [Mill’s] books, especially his Logic and Political Economy, with much benefit, I have no consciousness of their having made any marked epoch in my life. Of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s friendship I have had the honour and advantage for twenty years, but I believe that every main bias of my mind had been taken before I knew him. Like the rest of his readers, I am of course indebted to him for much enlargement and clarifying of thought.

(letter of August 13, 1875)

If you referred to something in Mr. Lewes’s letter, let me say once for all that you must not impute my opinions to him, nor vice versa. The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

(letter of November 13, 1860)

There is as yet no high moral purpose in the impression she makes, and it is that alone which commands love. I think she will alter. Large angels take a long time unfolding their wings; but when they do, soar out of sight.

Bessie R. Parkes (letter of March 6, 1852)1

What is an intellectual biography? It would be the story of a life largely devoted to and directed by ideas – i.e., the biography of an intellectual. In the case of an intellectual who is also a creative artist, little distinction is to be made between narration of the life and description of the works; the latter are life-events conveying not ideas as such but stances taken by the artist-intellectual toward aspects of her experience, her responses to the world. And they are often directed toward the reading public not only to convey those responses but to inspire life-experiences, too. Studies of intellectual writers’ development have had varying degrees of success in dealing with the interaction of thinking and living, and with the interaction of ideas and creative work. They range from compendia of 1

2

George Eliot’s Intellectual Life

mental acquisitions like Harris Fletcher’s The Intellectual Development of John Milton to works like Newman White’s volumes on Shelley, in which the poet’s critical and political prose and his poetry are set side by side and accorded equal attention. Perhaps closest to an integrated account of intellectual activities and creative production are narratives of an author’s readings becoming art, like J. Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Coleridge’s). A sense of this dynamic has not been achieved in previous biographies of George Eliot, though copious data on her activities and writings have been supplied by Gordon Haight and those proceeding in his wake.2 Critical awareness of Eliot’s fiction as a literature of ideas is a general and rewarding one, but her achievement in the specific genre of the novel of ideas has received only an outline in an essay by Gillian Beer.3 The present work will not assign Eliot to specific philosophical movements, as have students of her Comtism, nor will it dwell on them as sources for her fiction, as those with critical emphasis have done. It will attempt instead a developmental account of her mental working, emphasizing change and expansion, refinement and response to challenges from without and within. To take up another key question in approaching this subject: what is an intellectual? A vexed question, probably unanswerable to the satisfaction of all concerned since the intellectual is by its nature a permanently contested concept. Stefan Collini has usefully classified the myriad definitions of intellectuals under three heads: the “sociological sense,” in which they are treated as a professional group necessary to, though different in, every society; the “subjective sense,” an honorific and somewhat moralistic account, usually containing expressions like “a true [i.e., authentic] intellectual”; and the “cultural sense,” featuring their publicly influential role, often with the sobriquet of “public intellectual.”4 I shall blend the three approaches, and consider Eliot as a mighty mind, operating in distinct social roles (editor, reviewer, translator, creative writer), and exercising, or attempting to exercise, ethical and perspectival influence in the society in which she worked.5 From her country home, Mary Anne Evans moves to a nearby city (Coventry) to be exposed to society in view of greater marriageability, and falls in with a group of freethinkers, the brother of one of whom has recently published the first English exercise in the “higher criticism” of the Bible. In this milieu, she finds a bourgeois lifestyle in place of her rural one, a Unitarian religiosity and emergent agnosticism instead of her Anglican upbringing, a devotion to scientific inquiry well in advance of her schoolgirl curriculum. She forthwith loses her faith not only in the stories of the son of

Introduction

3

God (the focus of Charles Hennell’s critique) but in a loving and providential deity. To promulgate this insight, she translates the groundbreaking German work of higher criticism, David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus). Much of her subsequent life is devoted to the making of a worldview in which the ethics, the social values and even the aura of religion at its best can be accessed without recourse to mythology. In this pursuit, much mythology and other writings are canvassed and converted to new meanings – a phenomenon familiar to culture critics from Nietzsche to Northrop Frye, which Sartre called “la grande affaire.”6 After her father’s death, after a Continental sojourn in virtual isolation, she moves to London on the offer of a journalistic position and directly enters the center of the intellectual world, becoming assistant editor (functionally, the editor) of one of the foremost quarterlies in the land. Although the Westminster Review had fallen on hard times, she restores it to its former eminence – no longer the organ of philosophic radicalism, now without partisan affiliation. In addition to reviewing for the literary journals, she translates a philosophical work on religion as mythology, thereby continuing the effort to contribute to her society’s enlightenment. In her new intellectual milieu, she befriends both a young journalist, Herbert Spencer, destined to become one of the leading philosophers and social theorists of the century, and a man of letters, George Henry Lewes, with a weekly journal of his own and an extensive repertoire in fiction, drama, literary criticism, history of philosophy, etc. No doubt moved by more than intellectual attractions, she elopes with Lewes, an unhappily but encumbered married man, in a non-demonstrative but socially defiant decision. Having skirted the margins of Bohemia in her relations with her editor’s domestic circle, she steps into social marginality with a selfconfidence rare in this most self-critical of geniuses. To relieve her from the drudgery of copious but financially necessary book reviewing, Lewes leads her into a translation project with a disappointing outcome, then encourages her to try her hand at fiction. She takes up the idea with immediate success, taking “George Eliot” as a pen-name (and signing herself in correspondence as an equally fictive “M[arian] E[vans] Lewes”). In the course of a twenty-year career, she becomes England’s greatest novelist, both in her own day and in the literary-historical canon. It is a wish-fulfillment story akin to the day-dreams of her fictional avatar, Maggie Tulliver. Each of her seven novels is infused with a number of leading ideas, though their didactic drive is subsumed in an intensively detailed realism. Most are the products of extensive research in cultures past and present

4


(though only Romola is set in a remote time and place), so as to stand as the foremost English examples of an important nineteenth- and twentiethcentury subgenre, the novel of ideas. Perhaps the only life-events in Eliot’s relatively brief mature life (she died at sixty-one) not governed by ideas are her formal marriage – to a much younger friend, after Lewes’s death – and her own death soon after. Where did she get her ideas? Many were self-generated, of course, in response to encounters with people and things. She read the newspapers, often minutely, and commented on political and other events as we all do. But most of her ideas were stimulated by books and review-articles in the periodical literature of her day. To tell the story of how her life and writings were shaped by ideas we must follow the course of her reading as well as her more outgoing experiences. From the moment she channeled her religious de-conversion into the social activity of translating Strauss’s Life of Jesus, Eliot was on track to be a public intellectual, and the decision to write fiction was only another, though a determining, step in that ongoing commitment. Indeed, one may claim that she was among the first intellectuals to write fiction – Godwin, Peacock and Edgeworth having preceded her in England – and that she was perhaps the greatest novelist to be an intellectual, sharing the top tier in this class with her almost exact contemporary, Dostoyevsky. One of the challenges in writing her life is at least partially to explain how an intellectual could so well transform herself into a creative artist. This will be the story of a life of ideas not like Shakespeare’s, in which a world of ideas is gathered in, on the condition that they lead to the making of great art. Nor will it be a story like that of Goethe, a continual generation of ideas on literature, science, life and love. It is, rather, like a life of Dante, in which the author assimilates the leading (and some of the laggard) ideas of his time and produces comprehensive work that can stand as the cultural summa of the age. Given the evident appropriateness of such comparisons, we may venture to ask, just how intelligent was she? (A recent New York Times reviewer asks rhetorically, “Does anyone go near the word ‘intelligent’ without an armed escort these days?” [Dec. 17, 2006].) From any ideological standpoint, one would think a credible assessment of historical persons impossible in the absence of norms, even without standardized testing (or even with it), but the attempt has been made. In the 1920s, a group of Stanford University psychologists produced studies of the partially genetic basis of high intelligence, including a volume on “the early mental traits of three hundred geniuses.”7 Estimates were made on the evidence of contemporary reports

Introduction

5

of childhood achievements and on writings like John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography – naturally he tops the list. Eliot ranks in a rather middling category with an estimated IQ of 150, along with women like George Sand, Mme de Staël, Harriet Martineau and Charlotte Brontë; their male opposite numbers include Descartes, Hume, Hegel and Comte, along with Wordsworth, Byron and Tennyson. The strongest support for such an estimate comes from the fact that Eliot’s schools were all of the local dames’ school variety, with language instruction limited to French, and from the fact that she left school at age sixteen, i.e., that she was largely self-educated, adding Latin, Greek and German early on and Italian, Spanish and some Hebrew later, along with competence in history, philosophy, the sciences, social and physical, and numerous literatures. Our present sense of awe at Eliot’s accomplishments may be exaggerated, but they are in line with her contemporaries’ view of her. Most such observations come in the years of her eminence as a novelist, but the few early ones are worth noting. George Combe, Britain’s leading exponent of the would-be science of phrenology – correlating character traits with craniological measurements – made a reading of Eliot’s skull in 1851 and noted in his journal: “Miss Evans is the most extraordinary person of the party [the Charles Bray circle] … She has a very large brain, the anterior lobe is remarkable for length, breadth, and height …” In addition to correlations of character traits and skull features, Combe ventured psychological and physiological observations of some precocity: “Her temper[ament] is nervous lymphatic. She is rather tall, near 40 apparently, pale and in delicate health.” Though Combe was off the mark in his estimate of her age – she was thirty-one at the time – his mistake accords with his, and our own, sense of her as readily subject to depression and illness, as she would be throughout her life. While attentive to her masculine head proportions, he noted that “she is extremely feminine and gentle,” and concluded, “she appeared to me the ablest woman whom I have ever seen.”8 George Eliot was born in the Midlands countryside of England in 1819. Into which social class was she born? Her father, starting out in his father’s craft as a carpenter, raised himself to become estate manager for an aristocratic family, the Newdigates, and by all accounts was accomplished in managerial and related specialities like forestry, surveying and property valuation. His income has not been reported, but he left property to his sons not only in Warwickshire but also in his ancestral Wales, along with £2,000 (life-income of £90 a year) to Eliot and each of her sisters. He was of “little schooling,” according to Haight, and married, twice, women of approximately the same class: “His second wife, Christiana Pearson [George

6


Eliot’s mother], was the youngest daughter of Isaac Pearson, a wellestablished yeoman …” The word, not in our lexicon but in contemporary usage, permits a judgment about Evans’s class; he himself used the term “yeomanry” in recording his son’s entry into a semi-formal local group (Haight, p. 30). Not quite a gentleman, he was treated respectfully by his aristocratic employers, one of whom predicted that he would become Mayor of Coventry upon his move there. The social category gains further relevance from its Tory burdens of historical rootedness and traditional values, especially political affiliation with the ruling class, for Robert Evans was an unblinking Tory. We may measure the distance Eliot came in the course of her life when we recall another class term later used of her: “the Insurgents.”9 For this socially marginal grouping, I shall employ another term of comparable force: outsiders. Evans was a member of the Church of England, in which denomination Eliot was raised. Her later apostasy from Christianity was not the first of her moves in the religious sphere. In adolescence, she showed affinities for what was then called Evangelicalism (with not the same meaning as in current parlance). What does it mean to be an Evangelical at that time? I shall address this question more closely in Chapter 1, but one may anticipate that this was Eliot’s first decisive intellectual stance, and that like later stances it was marked by distinctly individual features. To anticipate the direction, if not the conclusions, of this study: Eliot has been called many things by her critics, some of them apt even when they seem contradictory. Given a minimal definition of positivism, it might be generally agreed that she was a positivist with a small p, eschewing the rigors of Auguste Comte’s Positivist movement but maintaining a steady commitment to the advancement of knowledge, yet with an awareness of the nonrational elements and the ultimate limitations of all forms of inquiry. These limitations are the defining marks of positivism, according to Edwin A. Burtt’s definition: “It is possible to acquire truths about things without presupposing any theory of their ultimate nature, or, more simply, it is possible to have a correct knowledge of the part without knowing the nature of the whole.”10 The rubrics sometimes used in describing the balance between her positivism and her non-rationalist streak are “religious humanist” or “romantic humanist.”11 To her humanism we may assent, but the adjectives “religious” and “romantic” are more problematic. Even without placing Eliot in the Romantic tradition, a number of critics have ascribed to her its defining epistemological tenet that “truth is not an objective structure, independent of those who seek it … but is itself in all its guises created by the seeker.” Without impugning the value of many of their observations

Introduction

7

on Eliot’s fiction, I believe this characterization to be off the mark, perhaps as a result of a disposition toward Romantic ideology, in its postmodernist guise, entertained by many current literary scholars. Instead, I shall maintain that Eliot’s view was that the mind is capable of learning pragmatic and scientific truths with assurance, though within its cognitive limitations, with specific qualifications for their processing, and without access to ultimate reality.12 Some misreadings of Eliot’s fiction stem from a tendency to find her turned to the dark side of the human quest for knowledge rather than the bright and open one – in keeping with the Romantic or postmodern perspective. Thus, Middlemarch is frequently held to display Eliot’s disdain for all “keys” or totalizing systems, without recognizing that Casaubon’s quest for a key to all mythologies is doomed to failure not by the impossibility of generalization about mythologies but by his specific point of view, that of an orthodox cleric who believes that they are all mere veiled forms of Christian truth. Similarly, Eliot’s description of the enthusiasm and imagination involved in another character’s search for the “primitive tissue” is often glowingly approved, but without taking account of the fact that this pre-cytological research, whether by the fictional character or his opposite numbers in the history of science (the great Bichat is invoked), was on the wrong track – as acknowledged in the text – and that the true state of affairs, the structure of the cell, was discovered in less romantic fashion by a plodding succession of approximations, culminating in Schleiden and Schwann. (The subject will be pursued in discussing Middlemarch.) On the other hand, Eliot displayed considerable interest in the totalizing (and ultimately discredited) mythological theory of Max Müller, reading his works consecutively as they were published; and she never lost interest in, though she never took on, the totalizing systems of Comte and Spencer. She appears to have valued both the failed exercises of scientific imagination, since they were imaginative, and the overarching systems of the grand theorists, since they were grand, without despairing of reliable conclusions in a middle ground between subjectivity and abstraction. Eliot’s confidence in the power of mind, despite its limitations, to achieve progress through scientific investigation was only one strain in a broader faith in human advancement. The evidence I go on is typified by Eliot’s credo, a poem she wrote in 1865, part way through her career in fiction (indeed, she used three lines from the poem as an epigraph in Felix Holt). It is from “A Minor Prophet,” in which a simplistic optimism is satirized and a better kind proposed:

8

George Eliot’s Intellectual Life The faith that life on earth is being shaped To glorious ends, that order, justice, love Mean man’s completeness, mean effect as sure As roundness in the dew-drop – that great faith Is but the rushing and expanding stream Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past. Our finest hope is finest memory, As they who love in age think youth is blest Because it has a life to fill with love. Full souls are double mirrors, making still An endless vista of fair things before Repeating things behind; so faith is strong Only when we are strong, shrinks when we shrink. It comes when music stirs us, and the chords Moving on some grand climax shake our souls With influx new that makes new energies. It comes in swellings of the heart and tears That rise at noble and at gentle deeds – At labours of the master-artist’s hand Which, trembling, touches to a finer end, Trembling before an image seen within. It comes in moments of heroic love, Unjealous joy in joy not made for us – In conscious triumph of the good within Making us worship goodness that rebukes. Even our failures are a prophecy, Even our yearnings and our bitter tears After that fair and true we cannot grasp; As patriots who seem to die in vain Make liberty more sacred by their pangs.13

Noteworthy in this credo is its idealistic vision, its fervent commitment to the possibilities of progress – a disposition so out of date in modern intellectual circles as to make it sound, pejoratively, “Victorian.” Its emphasis on the relevance of past experience in directing human enterprise is devoid of nostalgia; though this sense of the past is imbued with reverence and love, it enables us to envision “an endless vista of fair things” without “repeating things behind.” This is also a humanism that, while indulging in abstractions like “order, justice, love,” focuses on personal determination: “faith is strong / Only when we are strong.” It supplies ample space for the positive influence of art, here exemplified by the evocative power of music. And it has room for the politically idealistic: “patriots who seem to die in vain / Make liberty more sacred by their pangs.” This “presentiment of better things on earth” (to extend the quotation) is so out of keeping with

Introduction

9

the postmodern temper that it is no wonder that it has been all but ignored in Eliot criticism. Other aspects of Eliot’s humanism call for attention, even at this preliminary stage. One is the belief in a human essence, another tenet at odds with the postmodern belief in the almost exclusive influence of culture rather than human nature in determining what we are and do. (Neurobiological research is helping to dispel this illusion.) Eliot had no trouble speaking of “the state of mind which cares for that which is essentially human in all forms of belief” (Letters III, 111). Hence her appreciation of the varieties of religious experience well before that phrase was established in the canon. Multicultural variety was attractive to her not in and for itself but rather as it speaks to the manifold forms of innate human aspiration toward things of the higher life. A second such principle is her tragic sense of life, whose relation to her optimism is a problem “clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it” – as she says of another such crux in The Mill on the Floss.14 Thus her ars poetica: “the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures” (Letters III, 111; this is the letter in which she also speaks of “that which is essentially human in all forms of belief”). Eliot’s imaginative sympathy in her individual portrayals and her inducement of personal responsiveness among her readers have been rightly judged the high moral burden of her writings, but their evocation of mankind as a band of “struggling erring human creatures” must be regarded as having equal, tragic force. George Eliot, it is not too much to claim, was the first tragic novelist; others, like Goethe, had produced instances of the tragic novel (in his case, Die Wahlverwandschaften [Elective Affinities]), but Eliot’s work in this vein includes Adam Bede, The Mill, Romola and important elements of Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. All of these have lighter tones throughout and redemptive features in their denouements, to be sure, but in each the tragic sense of life – especially for the female protagonists, Hetty, Maggie, Romola, Mrs. Transome, Gwendolen (Dorothea is the exception) – is predominant. (That these women’s tragedies derive from their dysfunctional relations with men – or their relations with dysfunctional men – adds a piquant note of modernity to this version of tragedy.) Eliot can be placed with the classical tragedians on the one side and with Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad on the other, placed among those who would join Hardy in declaring, “if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst” (“In Tenebris II”).15

10


These elements of a tragically idealistic mentality – the “main bias of [her] mind,” I would claim – represent only the underpinnings of a continual mental development, the “enlargement and clarifying of thought” (to employ phrases from the epigraphs to this Introduction). The stages of this process, following her initial de-conversion, include: her absorption of the positivistic view of knowledge and its application to social progress exemplified by Mill, rather than by the rationalistic utopian program of Comte; her qualifying of positivism’s social-scientific generalizations by drawing on early knowledge of rural folk and folkways (which the work of Wilhelm von Riehl served merely to crystallize); her expanding sense of the complexity of human behavior, enriched by her readings in the emergent sciences of anthropology and sociology; and her late resort to the idealistic element involved in national aspirations (rather than to that ideology itself), given her increasing despair of the power of her own or anyone else’s altruistic teaching to modify contemporary England’s individualist ethos. In her last years, she turned to the role of culture critic, making intellectual critique her object in published and unpublished writings. Thus, although her thinking and writing initially and primarily operate at the level of personal experience, they develop larger resonance in the culture of her time. Two further aspects of the current project should be specified early on. One concerns the variety of evidence to be employed in the following narrative. This study will try to assess the effect of Eliot’s experience, both intellectual and non-intellectual, on her fiction and other writings. The effect was subtle and diffuse, rather than concentrated in a select number of strands that could be called influences. Transmitted ideas were thoroughly mixed with and modified by less lofty acquisitions. The resonances of her early “Evangelical” phase (the quotation marks to be explained below) carried into the portrayal of religious protagonists throughout her oeuvre. But the ideas and emotions of her initial orientation were supplemented by casual and interpersonal resources, for example, “my aunt’s story” in Adam Bede, or personal reports of anti-Evangelical agitation in “Janet’s Repentance.” Writing fiction was, of course, guided by her reading of fiction, and her favorites – Goethe, Scott, Sand, Balzac, et al. – became models of fiction’s range and power. But she also took negative guidance, learning from reviewing what she called “silly novels” how not to write one. Her experience of Germany and German culture was both broadly meaningful and subtly pointed: in an alien space, she could begin to grasp the total scope and complexity of a social organism, while reflecting on the peculiar aspects of her own society brought to mind by the contrast. Again, her reading of and even some casual activity in science made few direct

Introduction

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inroads in her writing but provided norms of close observation and description – a realism at times resembling naturalism. At Eliot’s entry into fiction and after, it is possible to see myriad strands of intellectual and other experience there for her to draw on, as she did. The other aspect of this study to be mentioned at the outset concerns its implications in a sphere wider than that of a single novelist. Although I have defended a decision to pursue the internal rather than the external history of George Eliot’s intellectual career, it remains true that no life exists in a vacuum. It would be generally agreed that to approach her thinking and writing without considering her intellectual milieu would be sterile, if not impossible, and I shall discuss related tendencies in the course of describing her activities.16 It may be feasible to go further, to consider her mental development as symptomatic of cultural changes in England at large. Her origin in the early nineteenth-century Midlands placed her in a traditional Christian culture, with a typical middle-class girl’s education and orientation in life. Her subsequent demystification was highly atypical, of course, but corresponds to the tendency toward secularization in English culture that gathered steam by mid-century. Her cosmopolitanism was more intensive than that of almost all her contemporaries, yet was in tune with a growing awareness of the world in those years, partly in response to England’s expanding colonial relations. The deepening of her knowledge of science and medicine was fully in accord with the intensification and progress of research in old and new fields. Her work in historical fiction and poetry ran parallel to a broadening of many Victorians’ historical perspective beyond the confines of English history. Taking a stand on politics in the period of the second Reform Bill was to enter into the public debate not only on the mechanics but the principles of democratic enfranchisement. Similarly, Eliot’s late hopefulness for a number of national, collective causes responded to a growing sense that England’s traditional individualism was a limiting if not barren mode in social relationships. And her last work, a set of satirical essays in intellectual critique, took part in the increasing self-consciousness and self-criticism among British intellectuals. Even without an elaboration of these parallels in the focused account that follows, Eliot’s achievement may be seen as not only a personal triumph but an intellectual career of major cultural significance.

chapter 1


George Eliot was born Mary Anne Evans on November 22, 1819, and was baptised shortly afterward, thereby becoming a communicant in the Church of England, the Anglican Church. Its doctrines would dominate the first twenty-two years of her mental life, for more than a third of her lifespan. It behooves any inquiry into her thought and art to consider the elements of her first culture, not only as a background to what came later but as a comprehensive worldview in their own right. Fortunately, there survives a bundle of letters to a former schoolmistress become friend, Maria Lewis, whom Gordon Haight believed to be the source of Eliot’s early religiosity: “She also inculcated in the impressionable young girl a most painful form of Evangelical piety that frowned on every kind of worldly amusement” (Letters I, lxxii).1 There remains, in addition, a small number of letters to a former classmate and to her uncle and aunt, Methodist preachers both. It will be a first order of business to determine the tenets of Eliot’s belief at this time (1836–41; aet. 16–22) and to compare them with the Evangelical principles of the period. But first a note on terminology. Evangelicalism, the movement of a late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglican Church party, is distinguished from the sectarian dissenting tendency known as evangelicalism – which included Eliot’s aunt and uncle’s Methodism – not only by remaining within the Church but by its doctrinal emphases and social activities. Eliot’s experience was entirely within the Church, although she was interested in and moved by her aunt’s experiences outside it. Eliot herself did not make the terminological distinction I am following: in a letter of 1859, explaining her use of “my aunt’s story” in Adam Bede, she uses the capitalized word to describe the influence on her of evangelicalism, “Dissenters” like her aunt and uncle (Letters III, 174–75). Although she writes of being “strongly under the influence of Evangelical belief” at the time, her statements and practices do not show Dissenter influence, while they also do not conform to Anglican Evangelicalism, as I shall document. We may then be in a position to confirm 12


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or modify the received wisdom concerning her Evangelical origins. I shall set out the tenets of Eliot’s belief in the following order: cosmology, the creation and ordering of the universe; history, in this case a sacred history, including the expected future; ethics, the principles of conduct that follow from the above; worship, including private devotions with the Bible; and applications, including attitudes and behavior. God is affirmed the creator of the universe, in the traditional language of the argument from design: she writes of “the chief design of the Almighty in creating those microscopic objects whose delicate and complicated conformations so astonish us …” (Letters I, 11), adding the related belief in His providential concern for mankind: “we are the objects of the special and particular care of our Maker.” This favored position is rendered in Pascalian language: “Blessed, is it not, to belong to that [human] family in heaven and in earth which is as much superior to the rest of this ‘corner of the universe’ as Pascal argues man to be compared with all matter” (Letters I, 56; she early on acquired the Pensées as a school prize). The nature of human existence is, however, to live an unstable life in a realm of mutability, though a realm of permanence exists and is at least emotionally accessible: “Truly may change be called our only certainty; may our experience of the fact lead us feelingly to join in that beautiful collect [for the fourth Sunday after Easter] which closes with praying that amidst all the changes of this transitory life, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found” (Letters I, 4–5). The young Eliot had no need, of course, to recite to her friends the events of sacred history recounted in the Gospels, but she often refers to the Old Testament narratives and to the history of the Church. On the former, she is skeptical that its events may be used as authentication for later events or practices (the principle of typology), as in L. V. Harcourt’s use of Scripture: “the author deduces from the doctrine of the deluge that of baptismal regeneration and I humbly opine supports or rather shakes a weak position by weak arguments” (Letters I, 34). Yet sacred history is highly meaningful: “How replete with meaning for doctrine, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness is the historical part of Scripture” (Letters I, 59). In the history of the Church, Eliot was sufficiently informed and interested to prepare a chart of ecclesiastic history, which she described in detail (Letters I, 44–45).2 The future can be anticipated if not predicted, for the individual and at least a part of the race: “To be called, justified, sanctified and in due time glorified, according to the sweet promise ‘Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty, they shall behold the land that is very far off’” (Letters I, 74, quoting Isaiah 33:17). It is noteworthy that she does not predict an early date

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for the Apocalypse, in contrast to “extreme Evangelicals,”3 like Edward Irving and Joanna Southcote, of whom she speaks with disdain (Letters I, 11–12). She does believe in “mighty revolutions ere long to take place in our world” (Letters I, 11–12), yet is guarded about predictions and applications based on history: “Certain divines enjoin us to consult ecclesiastical records for the settling of our faith, a result the very opposite to what they appear likely to produce …” (Letters I, 46). The consequences of such beliefs in the ethical realm follow directly: “sober and prayerful consideration of the mighty revolutions ere long to take place in our world would by God’s blessing serve to make us less grovelling, more devoted and energetic in the service of God” (Letters I, 12). The Christian life is one of “inevitable endurance of suffering,” but “God generally makes up to His people for the loss of earthly comforts by an increased grant of joy and peace in believing” (Letters I, 16, 17). It is a life of service – “O that I might be made as useful in my lowly and obscure station …” (Letters I, 12, comparing her record of service to that of the Evangelical leader, William Wilberforce) – and of submission: “the whole of religion is, simply to submit to God” (Letters I, 63, citing C. G. Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion). There is some doubt not only about her own ethical status – she speaks of “my character, instead of that regular progress from strength to strength that marks even in this world of mistakes the people that shall in the heavenly Zion stand before God” (Letters I, 14) – but about her co-religionists’: “I doubt whether the idea [of submission], still less the act be fully comprehended and carried out by the majority even of professing Christians” (Letters I, 63). Such shortcomings do not lessen her idealistic aspiration “to unclothe all around me of its conventional, human, temporary dress, to look at it in its essence and in its relation to eternity …” (Letters I, 70, responding to Louis Aimé-Martin’s De l’éducation des mères de famille). The pattern of the young Eliot’s worship is not detailed in these letters but it does not seem to have gone beyond regular Sunday attendance, once during the day. Of the Oxford Tracts’ “attempts to give a romish colour to our ordinances” (Letters I, 26), she had nothing good to say. On church worship, she could be censorious; attending service at St. Paul’s during a visit to London, she was indignant at the “surpliced personages, chapters I think they are, who performed the chanting, for it appears with them a mere performance …” (Letters I, 7). Of the Bible, on the other hand, she was a devoted reader, to an extent that approached committing it to memory, as indicated by her constant allusions and quotations. One letter, offering consolation for her aunt’s illness, contains by Haight’s count


15

fourteen biblical quotations and allusions – and “there are doubtless others” (Letters I, 61n.). The applications of the young woman’s faith in her attitudes to worldly affairs and in daily conduct are notably ascetic. After attending a performance of an oratorio, no less, she rejects the concert as a waste of time for both the performers and the listeners: “I think nothing can justify the using of an intensely interesting and solemn passage of Scripture, as a rope-dancer uses her rope, or as a sculptor the pedestal on which he places the statue, that is alone intended to elicit admiration” (Letters I, 9; as can be seen in these comparisons, there is some confusion in the writer’s mind). This puritanism extends to “opera[,?] dancing, horse racing [and] intemperance” (Letters I, 9). But music gains an entry in curtailed form: “it would not cost me any regrets if the only music heard in our land were that of strict worship …” (Letters I, 13). Ironically, given her destiny, she is particularly severe on fiction, both secular and religious: “Religious novels are more hateful to me than merely worldly ones” (Letters I, 23; further quotations in this paragraph are from this letter, of March 16, 1839, and are cited by page number alone). Her grounds go beyond objecting to any deviation from attending on the divine; they include the traditional literalist interpreter’s distrust of statements not intended to be literally true, “the adventures of some phantom conjured up by fancy” (p. 23). There are, to be sure, exceptions: novels and poems listed as “conveniently describ[ing] characters and ideas” (p. 21), books by “persons of perceptions so quick … and minds so comprehensive” that “we cannot legislate” against them (p. 21), and, of course, Shakespeare – though even here, “we have need of as nice a power of distillation as the bee to suck nothing but honey from his pages” (p. 22). The barely mentioned source of this guarded approbation is clearly the writer’s considerable emotional investment in her reading; beyond the psychological anxiety that “we cannot I say help being modified by the ideas that pass through our minds” (p. 23), there are “causes which exist in my own breast to render novels and romances pernicious” (p. 22). And this young communicant had a great deal of secular pleasure to worry about, in readings I shall list below. The most severe injunction of her asceticism clearly indicates its source in her worldly condition: “when I hear of the marrying and giving in marriage that is constantly being transacted I can only sigh for those who are multiplying earthly ties … those are happiest who are not fermenting themselves by engaging in projects for earthly bliss, who are considering this life merely a pilgrimage …” (Letters I, 6). To elaborate on her need for a religion of selfdenial, she adds: “I do not deny that there may be many who can partake

16


with a high degree of zest of all the lawful enjoyments the world can offer and yet live in near communion with their God; … but I confess that in my short experience and narrow sphere of action I have never been able to attain this …” The long letter concludes: “those who have the Lord for their portion enjoy satisfaction utterly unknown to those without hope and without God in the world.” One may not discount these sentiments as merely registering a nineteen-year-old’s anxiety at her lack of prospects in life, particularly in the romantic sphere, although it is evident that a process of sublimation was a driving force in her otherworldliness. These were the tenets of George Eliot’s belief that she expressed in letters of 1836–42. She may have held others and failed to express them in these letters, or expressed them in other letters or in conversation. But there would be some significance in her omitting certain important Christian convictions in these sustained and repeated testaments of faith, if only that the unexpressed beliefs were less salient or compelling for her. What are these unexpressed tenets of Protestant theology, and of what significance are they in determining her position vis-à-vis the Evangelical movement? The most obvious omission is the doctrine of the atonement and its related doctrine of justification by faith – the belief that Christ’s sacrifice of himself on the cross redeemed mankind, or some part of it, from original sin and damnation – in either of its prevalent formulations. These are the Arminian view that the self-sacrifice redeemed all who are prepared to accept it, i.e., salvation by faith alone, as opposed to the Calvinist view, with variations, that only the elect are predestined to receive this reprieve.4 There is, moreover, little reference to the crucifixion or to other events in the life of Jesus, an omission particularly notable when we recall the emphasis on physical suffering, blood and death in the hymnology and rhetoric of both High and Low Church Evangelicalism. There are, to be sure, references to Jesus here and there – for example, “I trust you may safely apply the comfort the apostle gives to those whose friends sleep in Jesus …” (Letters I, 5) – but she is conscious of her failure to feel a personal attachment to Him: “it is for want of this, of a continual ‘looking to Jesus’… that makes my character and conduct so chequered” (Letters I, 32). There is, in these letters, no sense of mankind’s sinfulness but only of its futility, no mention of the Virgin Mary as mercifulness personified, and only a vague imagination of the life to come. We may tentatively conclude that Christianity was not for the young believer a salvational or redemptive religion and that the figures of the Gospel narrative generated no intense personal love. Christianity provided rather an alternative structure to organize a sense of life’s inadequacy, the inadequacy both of the world in which she lived and of her own existence.


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Since she was lacking a keen commitment to key elements of Evangelical theology, what can we say of George Eliot’s relationship to the movement? The question warrants a brief review of the particulars of Evangelicalism; to quote a summary of the standard story of its development: “On 24 May 1738 Wesley was converted. From that moment, so it is argued, a corrupt and lifeless Established Church was faced with the shock of the Methodist Revival. The Methodists, persecuted by mobs and forbidden to preach in many Anglican churches, were at length driven from the Church of England. Their impact, however, continued through their spiritual descendants, the Evangelicals. These Evangelicals … did not effect a takeover of the Church of England, but rather a takeover of the whole nation, imbuing it with their values and creating Victorianism.”5 This account of the historical sequence is often supplemented by a list of “fathers of the Victorians,”6 literally the men who bred sons the like of Newman, Macaulay, Gladstone, Browning, Stephen, Butler et al. – most of whom deviated from the faith of their fathers but rechanneled it in various ways. In addition to calling for greater piety within the Church and stricter morality in society at large, the movement engaged in vigorous political campaigns for policy changes based on religious principles, notably the campaign for abolition of the slave trade and of slavery in British colonies, which triumphed in 1833. Evangelicalism’s activities in the political sphere, particularly its position on labor issues, have been seen as the basis of its historical importance,7 but its sociopolitical dimension does not appear in the young Eliot’s thought and behavior. In the sphere of social welfare activity, she limited herself to planning a “Clothing Club,” presumably to pass on hand-me-down clothes to the poor (Letters I, 41). Evangelicalism as an organized system of belief has been described under four heads: biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism and activism.8 The Bible was not merely intensively read and quoted but was “the ultimate source of authority on all disputed points of doctrine” (p. 27). “Crucicentrism” has been described above in terms of the doctrines of the atonement and justification by faith. “Conversionism” refers to the frequently reported “new birth”: “Numerous evangelicals believed that their lives had been completely transformed, sometimes quite suddenly, by a startling experience or series of experiences which subsequently became the defining moments in their lives” (p. 28). Frequently involved here are an intense conviction of sin, burning love of the redeemer and, consistent with the doctrine of salvation by faith, certitude of salvation. Finally, activism meant “the obligation to bring its benefit to others” (p. 29) by a vigorous proselytizing effort, mainly conducted by widely distributed tracts (as opposed to Wesleyan field preaching).

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Given the absence in George Eliot’s early letters of all four of these points of reference, it becomes doubtful that the term “Evangelical” suitably applies to her religious stance or experience. When visiting London, she didn’t attend the sermons of leading Evangelical ministers but rather those of preachers more famous for rhetorical performance than for doctrinal purity (“a very animated and experimental sermon from the Revd T[homas] Dale”; “we did not hear Mr. [Edward] Craig to advantage” [Letters I, 6–7]).9 The only works by or about distinctly Evangelical figures that she mentions are Hannah More’s letters (Letters I, 6–7), the life of Wilberforce (Letters I, 12), and Edward Bickersteth’s A Practical Guide to the Prophecies (Letters I, 48) – sent to her by Maria Lewis in connection with her ecclesiastical table scheme. (She asks who the author is; it’s possible that Ms. Lewis merely copied out a portion, Appendix II, for her.) When she ventured into print with a deathless – or rather death-ful – poem, beginning “As o’er the fields by evening’s light I stray” (Letters I, 27–28), it was in the Christian Observer, the best-selling Evangelical journal during the 1830s, but here she fell astray and was corrected by the editor, who added a note to point out that there would be no need for the Bible in the world to come. In all, a very spotty adherence to the Evangelical movement. It is, of course, the young woman’s asceticism, particularly her rejection of the arts, that has given George Eliot the reputation of having begun life as an Evangelical. But we can see, by examining the full scope of her reading during this period, that she was hardly puritanical in her taste and interests. In addition to the more-or-less mandatory choice of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Rasselas and The Vicar of Wakefield, she read at least two and probably four novels by Scott, probably four by G. P. R. James, Bulwer-Lytton’s Devereux, The Pickwick Papers, Mme de Staël’s Corinne, and probably the novels by Cervantes, Defoe and Le Sage that she labored to justify (Letters I, 21).10 In that letter she also adverts to her reading of poetry: “Byron’s Poetical romances, Southey’s do.,” as well as Scott’s. The list could be extended to include Spenser, Milton, Herbert, Butler, Young (Night Thoughts a frequently quoted treasure, later to be despised), Cowper, Wordsworth and Shelley, as well as Felicia Hemans and Reginald Heber among lesser contemporaries. Her study of Latin led her to Horace, Virgil and Ovid, of Italian, to Petrarch and Tasso, and of German, to Schiller – in early acquired French, she knew Molière (as well as Pascal). Secular history was, of course, easier to justify; she knew Caesar and Josephus among the ancients, Hallam’s Literature of Europe, Carlo Botta’s Italy, and a work of local history, William Coxe’s Monmouthshire. In science, she read not only conservative geologists like William Buckland and John P. Smith but also


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popularizations of general science by Mary Somerville and John P. Nichol – perhaps absorbing something of scientific method from Bacon. Beyond the above-mentioned biography of Wilberforce and Edwin Sidney’s Life of Sir Richard Hill (a Calvinistic Evangelical), she knew Boswell’s Johnson, Lockhart’s Scott, and a curious item, the autobiography of the Renaissance humanist, Thomas Platter – not to speak of Sartor Resartus. There is nothing remarkable in any of this; it is simply the selection of a well-read young woman of her time, but the list makes the point that she by no means confined herself to religious works, and certainly not to Evangelical favorites. Her extensive reading of religious works requires, however, to be closely examined. They may be divided into several types: history of religion; apologetic and controversial works; biblical commentary; ethical guidance; and religious poetry. In the first group lie Milner’s History of the Church of Christ and Finney’s Revivals of Religion. Apologetic and controversial works include a volume of the Tracts for the Times, Hoppus’s Schism, and a number of works by Isaac Taylor, a great favorite of Eliot’s. Among the biblical commentaries are Craig’s Jacob, Leighton’s Commentary upon … St. Peter, Harcourt’s Doctrine of the Deluge, and Pearson’s Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses. Ethical guidance was to be had from Aimé-Martin’s Woman’s Mission, Sheppard’s Private Devotion, Hewlett’s Priscilla, the Helper and Harris’s The Great Teacher. Religious poetry was copious in hymnologies by Isaac Watts and by John Ryland, anthologies edited by Alaric Watts and by John East, Keble’s Christian Year, and probably the Oxford Movement writers’ Lyra Apostolica. We may ask, which of these made a profound impression on this reader, and which were found wanting under her exacting standards? In describing works in the first of these categories, young Eliot made a succinct but rather dry summary of the standard arguments supporting the Anglican establishment in Joseph Milner’s The History of the Church of Christ, from the Days of the Apostles to the Close of the Eighteenth Century (1794–97): “the views of a moderate evangelical episcopalian on the inferences to be drawn from ecclesiastical remains; he equally repudiates the loud assertion of a jus divinum, to the exclusion of all separatists from the visible church, though he calmly maintains the superiority of the evidence in favour of episcopacy of a moderate kind both in power and extent of diocese, as well as the benefit of a national establishment” (Letters I, 25–26). One may put this account side by side with her response to the Presbyterian Charles G. Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), which expressed “the evangelical outlook that became the prevailing one among middle-class

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churchgoers in mid-nineteenth-century America,” taking “a middle ground between the ambitions of the clerical Whigs, who hoped to erect a national church as a bulwark against atheistic monocracy, and the efforts of those anticlerical Democrats who were trying to reduce Christianity to little more than an exalted system of ethics.”11 Eliot’s response: “Mr. Finney in his Lectures on Revivals (a powerful book but to be read with broad views of the differences in national character) says that the whole of religion is, simply to submit to God” (Letters I, 63). One takes away the impression that Eliot was comfortable in a middling position on church organization, accepting without fervor the Anglican episcopacy and its nationally established status (though hinting at a degree of skepticism about the arguments for its authority based on ecclesiastical precedent), while displaying a trace of tartness in reporting that Finney’s “powerful book” in support of a middling position regarding America’s churches can be reduced to the injunction to submit to the will of God. These inferences can be reinforced by her responses to other works. She is guarded but apparently receptive in describing John Hoppus’s Schism, as Opposed to the Unity of the Church: Especially in the Present Times (1839): it “ably expresses the tenets of those who deny that any form of Church government is so clearly dictated in Scripture as to possess a Divine right, and consequently to be binding on Christians” (Letters I, 25).12 In the same vein, a rejection of claimed precedent is made by “my jewel,” the layman Isaac Taylor (Letters I, 98), “one of the most eloquent, acute, and pious of writers” (Letters I, 64), in Ancient Christianity, and the Doctrines of the Oxford Tracts for the Times (1839–40). This, too, tests the application of church history, this time in the context of the Tractarian move toward greater emulation of Catholic ritual and doctrine. Taylor’s strategy is to dig further into the Tractarians’ use of the precedents of the early church and to reject the implications they would draw from them. For example, on the issue of a married clergy, the Tractarians’ preference for a celibate clergy was based partly on the celibacy of early Christian priests, but Taylor notes that the latter’s asceticism was a product of the influx of Gnosticism into the early church – later condemned as a heresy – so that a return to celibacy would be a return to heresies already overcome.13 Her attitude toward arguments of this type may, then, have been neatly summarized when, describing the Anglican minister William Gresley’s Portrait of an English Churchman, she quotes Jeremiah’s derision of priestly orthodoxy: “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are exclusively these” (Letters I, 26) – the word “exclusively” is hers. She demurely adds, “I will not be the judge.”


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In the matter of biblical commentary, we have already noted her cautiousness regarding applications of scripture to contemporary issues. Her response to a specific application in the Anglican minister L. Vernon Harcourt’s The Doctrine of the Deluge: Vindicating the Scriptural Account from the Doubts which Have Recently Been Cast upon It by Geological Speculations (1838) was, as noted above, skeptical, and exemplifies a wider skepticism. The book traces “the image of the Ark and Mt. Ararat through the faded tapestries that line the temple of mythological history, until one is ready to fancy one sees the first in a linen chest and the last in Vandyke’s frills, just as objects in which we have long gazed remain on the retina when we would fain be rid of them …” (Letters I, 34). We need not find Eliot waiting till the publication of Middlemarch to see her displaying impatience with the “faded tapestries” of “mythological history” – particularly biblecentered mythography.14 Yet she is in accord with commentators of the Bridgewater school attempting to dispel the implications of the new geology; after reading the Congregationalist John P. Smith’s The Relation Between the Holy Scriptures and Some Parts of Geological Science (1839), she declares that “the interpretation of the Mosaic records, is fully satisfactory to me …” (Letters I, 110).15 The same response would have been forthcoming to Rev. William Buckland’s then authoritative Geology and Mineralogy as Exhibiting the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God (1836; he was Reader in Geology at Oxford). But she may have been stirred if not shaken by her first foray into Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes in the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation (1830–33). Not recognizing the latter’s revolutionary implications, she notes, “I have read Buckland’s Treatise on Geology with much pleasure, and I believe Lyell’s is good though it differs in Theory …” (Letters VIII, 8). We might conclude that she exhibited a keen mind’s skepticism of far-fetched argumentation, while remaining unwilling to give up on the authority of the Bible. When reading works of ethical improvement, the young George Eliot displays the appropriate reactions. After reading Woman’s Mission (1839), a sketchy English adaptation of Louis Aimé-Martin’s De l’éducation des mères de famille, où la civilisation du genre humain par les femmes (1834), she sought out the original and found it “the most philosophical; and masterly on the subject I ever read or glanced over” (Letters I, 66). This work goes beyond a plea for women’s education to make the case for their being the ideal educators; responding to Rousseau’s call to guide women by “un gouverneur ideal,” the author asks, “mais où trouvera-t-il des gouverneurs?” (where

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do we find such governors?) and answers, “Toutes les perfections si difficiles a realiser dans un gouverneur, il ne faillait qu’un mot pour les obtenir d’une mère!” (All the perfections so difficult to realize in a governor require only a word to obtain from a mother!; pp. 45, 48, 49; I quote the ninth [!] edition [1875].) If any element of Eliot’s early reading has relevance for her later mental formation, it is this idea as carried forward by Comte, for here the source of women’s civilizing influence is located in their renunciation of self – even to the employment of the phrase, “vivre pour autrui” – to live for others. But Aimé-Martin’s foundation remains within Christianity, as the only system that associates happiness with self-renunciation, so that women can exercise their mission only when imbued with the Christian spirit. (Eliot deplored his being a “soi-distant [sic] ‘rational’ Christian” [Letters I, 72].) Further ethical inspiration was to be gained from the Independent minister John Harris’s The Great Teacher: Characteristics of Our Lord’s Ministry (1836), which posits that “the Recollection of our Lord’s Character [is] necessary, to feel the Pathos of his Teaching,” that this teaching is practical in that it “not only commands, but enables,” and that “the World contains nothing like it” – though the author laments “our Proneness to repose in a Form of Piety to the Neglect of Evangelical Holiness” (I quote the table of contents). Eliot’s response was correspondingly emotive: “I am … ‘innig bewegt’ as a German would say by its stirring eloquence which leaves you no time or strength for a cold estimate of the writer’s strict merits” (Letters I, 72) – again the note of caution in accepting the argument. Similarly, she found John Sheppard’s Thoughts Chiefly Designed as Preparative or Persuasive to Private Devotion (1824) “a sweet booklet of pious meditation adapted to accompany the Christian in all the windings of his experience” (Letters I, 101). Sheppard tried, however, to avoid “that seeming egotism, or obtrusion of personal feeling on the public, which attaches to what is composed in the manner of private reflection…” (preface). Again, reading John G. Hewlett’s Priscilla, the Helper: A Memoir of Mrs. [Anne] Rowton, of Coventry (1841) – a local heroine of charitable pursuits – she is “shamestricken in having brought to my remembrance my own opportunities of benefitting others by conversation, writing, and the powerful eloquence of tacit obedience to the Divine precepts, and contrasting my use of them with that [which] she made of every similar occasion” (Letters I, 118). Some of this uplifting literature was, however, open to her caustic pen; she noted of the Tractarian William Gresley’s Portrait of an English Churchman (1838) and Clement Walton; or the English Citizen (1840) that “they are sure to have a powerful influence on the minds of small readers and shallow thinkers …” (Letters I, 45).


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With religious poetry, this avid reader of poetry is alive to esthetic as well as ethical considerations. After early love of the hymns of Watts, Cowper, and Ryland – copying out an entire hymn by the last-named in one of her letters (Letters I, 16–17) – she broadened her taste to take in “a volume of sweet poetry” (Letters I, 46), John Keble’s The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year (1827). This was surely a cut above the standard of religious versification, to be welcomed even though it put out Tractarian feelers for reconciliation with Rome (“Speak gently of our sister’s fall: / Who knows but gentle love / May win her at our patient call…” [“Gunpowder Treason”]). But to read much of Rev. William S. Bucknill’s Poems (n.d.) was “to waste one’s time … I simply declare my determination not to feed on the broth of literature when I can get strong soup, such for instance as Shelley’s Cloud, the five or six stanzas of which contain more poetic metal than is beat out in all Mr. B’[s] pages” (Letters I, 66). Indeed, Bucknill’s “The Churchman’s Love: An Answer to the Charge of Bigotry” has not stood the test of time. The avid reader preferred the atheist poet’s “poetic metal” – a better metaphor than “strong soup.” To sum up the impression the young George Eliot makes in her epistolary comments on her reading in religious and secular literature, we may conclude that she responds much as would a typical Anglican churchgoer of the middling classes in early Victorian England. There are signs of the widespread influence of Evangelical ministers in this period, who are estimated to have comprised one-third to one-half the force. She was doubtless rather prim in her teens, eschewing worldly temptations in the arts and elsewhere, but in her early twenties she seems to have relaxed such restraints, to judge by the extent of her reading in the classics. She was highly demanding and critical of herself in personal piety, but reported no severe penances or mental self-flagellation. She recognized the obligations of social service in the Christian spirit, but did little to live up to that ideal, as she was uncomfortably aware. She was highly critical of her community’s failure to live the Christian life, but was equally scornful of “morning calling and evening party controversialists” and the “foot-balling of religious parties” (Letters I, 45). She was a devoted reader of the Bible and of commentaries upon it, but was skeptical of the more far-fetched interpretations and applications to contemporary church practices. In all, the ascription to her of the epithet “Evangelical” reflects the mentality and taste of present-day commentators rather than those of her time. Upon her astonishingly abrupt de-conversion, she passed from a normal, not a fanatic, believer to apostacy.

chapter 2


George Eliot’s demystification was astonishingly abrupt, and the abruptness calls for an attempt at explanation almost as much as the demystification itself. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the process was its serenity; though not particularly Evangelical, as we have seen, she was a normal churchgoing Anglican of the time, few of whom, so far as we know, lost their faith as decisively as she. The peculiarity of her change of mind conforms to a rubric later put forward by John Henry Newman, the distinction between certainty, the coming to a logical conclusion, and certitude, the total conviction of religious faith. Eliot’s change was, I shall try to show, of the former variety. It is worth going over the precise dating of the events in her intellectual and social life. On March 17, 1841, Eliot moves to Coventry to enjoy its social life in view of greater marriageability; almost five months later, on August 12, she declares, “I am alone in the world” (Letters I, 102); on November 2, she anticipates a visit to the family of Charles Bray, “I am going I hope to-day to effect a breach in the thick wall of indifference behind which the denizens of Coventry seem inclined to entrench themselves, but I fear I shall fail” (Letters I, 120). In her next letter to Maria Lewis, she writes, “My whole soul has been engrossed in the most interesting of all enquiries for the last few days, and to what result my thoughts may lead I know not – possibly to one that will startle you, but my only desire is to know the truth, my only fear to cling to error” (Letters I, 120–21; Nov. 13, 1841). The consensus in Eliot studies has been that she was introduced by the Brays not only to their homebrewed blend of Unitarianism, phrenology and rationalistic determinism but specifically to Charles C. Hennell’s An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity. This work, said to be the first exercise in the Higher Criticism of the Bible by an Englishman, was first published in 1838 and received a second edition in August, 1841, three months before Eliot’s first visit to the Brays. As the author was the brother of Mrs. Bray, née Caroline Hennell, it is more than likely that Eliot heard praise of him and was loaned a copy of the book. (When she first read it, “it is impossible to say” [Haight, p. 39].) Her high interest in 24


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it is established by the date of her inscription in the copy she bought for herself: “Mary Ann Evans. Jany 1st, 1842” (Haight, p. 39n.; the book is now in Dr. Williams’s Library, London). In a letter dated by Haight January 1, 1842 (but probably misdated, as it invites Maria Lewis to visit, while Robert Evans’s journal records her taking Communion with him the following day), Eliot writes of “the sure laws of consequence [that] bless every one who does his work faithfully and lives in loving activity” (Letters I, 124). (The terms show the influence both of Charles Bray’s The Philosophy of Necessity; or, the Laws of Consequences as Applicable to Mental, Moral, and Social Science [1841] and of Thomas Carlyle’s work ethic.) On January 2, Eliot’s father records in his journal, “Went to Trinity Church in the forenoon … Mary Ann did not go.” The doubts were already deep, no doubt, though on November 13 she expressed her faith in “an all-bountiful, all-wise Creator” (Letters I, 121), and on December 16 acknowledged “His will who has originated and sustains our existence” (Letters I, 123). But by the end of January, she writes: For my part, I wish to be among the ranks of that glorious crusade that is seeking to set Truth’s Holy Sepulchre free from a usurped domination. We shall then see her resurrection! Meanwhile, although I cannot rank among my principles of action a fear of vengeance eternal, gratitude for predestined salvation, or a revelation of future glories as a reward, I fully participate in the belief that the only heaven here or hereafter is to be found in conformity with the will of the Supreme; a continual aiming at the attainment of that perfect ideal, the true Logos that dwells in the bosom of the One Father. (Letters I, 125–26)

This is not her final word on the subject of Christian ideas, to be sure, but its secularized version of theological terminology – “Truth’s Holy Sepulchre,” “the will of the Supreme,” “the true Logos” – places it in the tradition (actually, near the beginning of the tradition) that came to be known as Humanism.1 The letter in which it appears, to Mrs. Abijah H. Pears, Charles Bray’s sister and Eliot’s next-door neighbor – “My guardian angel,” she says of her (Letters I, 131) – is clearly an attempt at self-justification to a well-meaning recent friend (not a member of the freethinking household of Mrs. P’s brother). Although she closes with a hint of the disturbance that this mental change entailed (“I hardly know whether I am ranting after the fashion of one of the Primitive Methodist prophetesses …” [p. 126]), the tone of the body of the letter is that of rational conviction: “Of course I must desire the ultimate downfall of error: for no error is innocuous, but this assuredly will occur without my proselyting aid, and the best proof of a real love of the truth, – that freshest stamp of divinity, – is a calm confidence in its intrinsic

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power to secure its own high destiny, – that of universal empire” (p. 125). She seems to be trying to assuage Mrs. Pears’s fears that she will become a proselytizer for atheism, and thus even more of an embarrassment to her family. Thus far, Eliot’s letters provide evidence of the expected mixture of the new and the old that marks any such transition. In a poem newly produced and quoted for Maria Lewis’s edification, she writes: Mid the rich store of nature’s gifts to man Each has his loves, close wedded to his soul By fine associations’ golden links. As the Great Spirit bids creation teem With conscious being and intelligence, So man His miniature resemblance gives To matter’s every form a speaking soul, An emanation from his spirit’s fount, The impress true of its peculiar seal. Here finds he thy best image, sympathy!

(Letters I, 127; Feb. 18, 1842)

Given what we know of the mature George Eliot, the poem is a vivid harbinger. It speaks of the continuing power of early associations and affections, of the presence of creative forces in nature and man, of their capacity to infuse the material world with knowable meaning, and of “thy best image, – sympathy!” – although the absence of an antecedent makes it unclear whose image this is. “Beautiful ego-ism! to quote one’s own,” she remarks (Letters I, 127), in another anticipation of one of her later themes. The imbrication of old and new ideas and terms comes out clearly in a further passage of the letter in which the poem appears: “People absurdly talk of self-denial – why there is none in Virtue to a being of moral excellence – the greatest torture to such a soul would be to run counter to the dictates of conscience, to wallow in the slough of meanness, deception, revenge or sensuality. This was Paul’s idea in the 1st chapter of 2d Ep[istle] to Timothy (I think that is the passage)” (Letters I, 127). The renunciation of the ascetic pleasure of self-denial, the independent strength of moral purpose, the reference (now a bit shaky) to Scripture, all speak to the modification of her former worldview in the new one she is working out. What did Charles Hennell write that had such decisive effect on Eliot’s mind? Though The Origin of Christianity was revolutionary in the life of the young George Eliot, it was hardly so in the history of biblical criticism.2 Hennell opens his introduction to the first edition with an acknowledgement


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of this tradition: “The hypothesis, that there is a mixture of truth and fable in the four Gospels, has been admitted, in different degrees, by many critics bearing the Christian name.”3 His aim was to determine “the precise limits which ought to be assigned to the credible portion of the miraculous narratives” (p. v), on the assumption that at least “the principal miraculous facts supposed to lie at the foundation of Christianity would be found to be impregnable …” (pp. v–vi). His methods were the standard ones: reference to historical data so as to date the writings and test their assertions against other sources, where possible; stylistic reading so as to individuate each author and characterize his provenance, sources of information and intentions; comparison among the texts “to weigh the probability in favour of the real occurrence of a fact” and “to ascertain whether [the Evangelists] wrote independently, or copied from each other” (p. vi). Hennell’s characterization of the Gospel of St. Matthew follows tracks that have been travelled before and since: “The rude poetry of warm and unrestrained imagination prevails throughout; the zealous Jewish Christian endeavouring to commemorate his master, thinks not of future theologians and critics, but recklessly invests Jesus with all the dignity which fulfilled prophecy, visions, and convulsions of nature, could suggest to an uncultivated reader of the Hebrew legends” (p. 99). His account of Mark’s writing accords it both immediacy and credibility in many details of Jesus’s career, yet “he himself seems to be in a great measure unconscious of the primary nature and meaning of those transactions” (p. 104). After examining the relationship of these two texts to each other and to that of Luke, Hennell sums up: “Thus it appears that the first three Gospels were written at a considerable distance of time from the transactions recorded; that it is not improbable, although not certain, that there may be some parts which the writers learned direct from the apostles or other eye-witnesses; but that it is uncertain which these parts are, and that there is reason to believe that they are largely mingled with second-hand narrations, hearsay, and traditions which had passed through several stages” (p. 134). Turning to the Gospel of St. John, Hennell follows received and current opinion that it is “the attempt of a half-educated but zealous follower of Jesus, to engraft his conceptions of the Platonic philosophy upon the original faith of the disciples” (p. 139).4 Distinguishing the Synoptic Gospels’ historical or narrative aim from John’s “argumentative or controversial one” (p. 140) leads to the looming outcome: “To endeavour to reconcile John with his predecessors on the hypothesis, that all four wrote invariably true and correct history, is evidently hopeless” (p. 144). But Hennell goes further:

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There does not appear in this Gospel any of that high-toned morality which cultivates the love of abstract truth, apart from interest and feeling. This is to be sought for chiefly amongst the most philosophic as well as benevolent minds; and even amongst such it is perhaps not very common. But in an uneducated Galilean disciple – apparently of moderate intellect, deep feeling, and vivid imagination, a partizan among opponents, of a nation with whom religious fables and legends formed a favourite and important part of their literature – such a moral attainment must have excited our surprise; the absence of it can leave none. (p. 156)

In his “concluding reflections,” Hennell maintains a positive view: “The virtue, wisdom, and sufferings of Jesus, then, will secure to him a powerful influence over men so long as they continue to be moral, intellectual, and sympathizing beings” (p. 369). But of the Gospels the summary is severe: “their authorship is far from certain; they were written from forty to seventy years after the events which they profess to record; the writers do not explain how they came by their information; two of them appear to have copied from the first; all the four contain notable discrepancies and manifest contradictions; they contain statements at variance with histories of acknowledged authority; some of them relate wonders which even many Christians are obliged to reject as fabulous …” (p. 370). The disappointed critic continues: “the miraculous part of Christ’s history is presented to us not as an indifferent fact, but as one which is to influence our whole life and conduct; the belief or non-belief of it is even to decide our condition in another world … One would have expected that the clearness of the evidence would have been in proportion to the necessity for belief …” He thereby misses the point of faith, best expressed by Tertullian’s Credo quia impossibile – I believe because it is impossible. It is this test of the Christian’s faith, his belief in what it is impossible to believe on rational examination of unreliable evidence, that Hennell as a philosopher of religion distinctly fails. But it is also this test of Christian faith that George Eliot evidently failed. When Hennell’s inquiry was complete, with the inconsistency of the Gospel accounts and their deviation from the laws of nature and the facts of history manifest, the implications of his discoveries did not overly disturb the Unitarian author: “Most of the doctrines of Christianity are admitted to be so much in accordance with the purest dictates of natural reason, that, on recognizing the latter as the supreme guide, no violent disruption of the habits and associations of the religious world is necessary” (p. viii). Somewhat naively, he anticipated that “Christianity, thus regarded as a system of elevated thought and feeling, will not be injured by being freed from those fables, and those views of local or temporary interest, which hung about its


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origin” (p. ix). (Hennell’s sanguine view that the core of the Christian burden will prevail is characteristically Unitarian, while his making natural reason the “supreme guide” shows its origins in Enlightenment rationalism.) In words that Eliot may well have singled out for attention, he closes the preface to the second edition (the one which she acquired) by acknowledging that although religious faith may “be productive of the most permanent mental tranquility, and, in some extreme cases, may probably be indispensable to preserve fortitude … a moderate experience must convince us that theological belief, even of the simplest kind, and benevolence, do not necessarily exist in proportion to each other; and that both a creed, and the want of one, may be met with in conjunction with that which irresistibly demands our sympathies, – a devotion to the cause of happiness on this earth” (pp. xii–xiii). Two of Eliot’s strongest principles, the non-necessity of religious faith for high morality and the aspiration toward human improvement, were here set out for her. That is not, however, the tone of Eliot’s initial sally in what she wittily, bitterly called her “Holy War” (Letters I, 133; March 31, 1842). Explaining herself to her father, she goes beyond disclaiming a switch in denominational affiliation, which her association with the Brays and her reading of their brother’s book might have suggested: I wish entirely to remove from your mind the false notion that I am inclined visibly to unite myself with any Christian community, or that I have any affinity in opinion with Unitarians more than with other classes of believers in the Divine authority of the books comprising the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life and drawn as to its materials from Jewish notions to be most dishonourable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness. (Letters I, 128; Feb. 28, 1842)5

Here Eliot makes the case that Hennell was unwilling to make: that the unreliable historical basis of Christianity invalidates its theological system and reduces its ethical force to elements of the “moral teaching of Jesus himself.” We may conclude that she was at liberty to follow Hennell’s evidence and argument to a soft position on Christian ideology but that she chose the harder one. Beyond the bristling tone and a degree of self-righteousness in these and other credos by Eliot in the first spate of her apostacy, we may note her remarkable self-assurance on the veridical basis of her position. Just as there was no sign of religious doubt during her “Evangelical” period, there is

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no hint of intellectual crisis in her reformed position. She simply passes from being fully engrossed with the certitude of faith to the certainty of non-belief. Crisis there was, to be sure, in that her father, feeling that he, having taken considerable pains to provide a socially accessible home for her, had made a bad investment, made plans to abandon Coventry and the social stigma that would attach to his daughter. Eliot was made to feel both the ingratitude of her behavior, with respect to the outlays on her behalf, and the insecurity of her coming position in whatever household Robert Evans chose to establish. Her situation at Coventry was typical of the unsettled state that many a convert, before and since, has experienced. There was the drawing near to those who sympathized: Caroline Bray is now addressed as “My dearest friend” (Letters I, 130). There was the emotional identification with those who have gone the same or similar difficult route: Mrs. Bray recorded that she had “delighted her beyond measure by letting her read some of C. C. [Hennell’s] letters in 1837 concerning the progress of his investigations when writing the ‘Inquiry’” (Letters I, 138n., quoting the Bray–Hennell Extracts). There was the family quarrelling, opinions ranging from her brother Isaac’s uncharacteristic attempts at peacemaking to her half-sister’s agreeing with her that the “miraculous part of Christianity [was] purely mythical” but thinking her “very foolish not to keep her notions snugly to herself ” (Letters I, 157). And there were the wasted efforts to get her to change her mind. A professor of theology at an Independent (i.e., Congregational) divinity school provided her with a copy of Rodolph A. Vinet’s Mémoir en faveur de la liberté des cultes (1826; 1841–42) to encourage her to remain within the broad range of Christian positions. When this tactic failed he sent along F. A. G. Tholuck’s book on the believability of evangelical history (together with a critique of Strauss’s Life of Jesus) and Carl Ullmann’s answer to the big question regarding the Gospels, historical or mythical?, to undermine her confidence in biblical criticism’s conclusions.6 Her response to Vinay’s ecumenicism: “I am so far from seeing that … no other system [than Christianity] is less burthened with insoluble problems, that I cannot at present embrace it…” (Letters I, 135–36); to Tholuck and Ullmann’s anticritical criticism: “I am indebted to both for some important thoughts” (Letters I, 142).7 The most important result of this jousting was, to be sure, the production of new and more refined ideas. To a new friend, another Hennell sister, Sara Sophia – destined to become a lifelong correspondent on religious and philosophical issues – she wrote, expanding on her misery under family pressure:


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Reason seeks not for a release from penalty – if the result of that penalty be purification, but this cannot apply to the doctrine of Forgiveness as presented by Christianity. According to that, forgiveness is synonymous with the enlargement of the spirit from the prison of darkness and enmity to God. The punishment to be shunned would be unmixed evil to the individual and to choose unmixed evil is impossible to the human mind … Assuredly this earth is not the home of the spirit – it will rest only in the bosom of the Infinite. But the non-satisfaction of the affections and intellect being inseparable from the unspeakable advantage of such a mind as that of man in connection with his corporeal conditions and terrene destiny, forms not at present an argument with me for the realization of particular desires. (Letters I, 150–51)

Noteworthy in this somewhat opaque utterance are the continuing critique of Christian doctrine, the philosophical idealist terminology (perhaps inspired by Sara Hennell), and the affirmation of suffering as it may lead to “purification” (as distinguished from the Christian view of earthly experience as merely nugatory).8 She also entertains the idea (probably Sara’s) that acceptance of human limitation (the “non-satisfaction of the affections and intellect”) is actually an “unspeakable advantage,” though it doesn’t serve as a justification for realizing personal desires. The key issue is the deferred accession of the “spirit” to the “Infinite,” probably echoing Sara’s discourse in a “Confessional” she passed on to her.9 In another letter to Sara Hennell of the year following (1843), further ideas of wide scope are percolating: Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union. We find that the intellectual errors which we once fancied were a mere incrustation have grown into the living body and that we cannot in the majority of causes [sic for “cases”?], wrench them away without destroying vitality. We begin to find that with individuals, as with nations, the only safe revolution is one arising out of the wants which their own progress has generated. It is the quackery of infidelity to suppose that it has a nostrum for all mankind … (Letters I, 162)

The sequence of ideas is breathtakingly agile, but we can make out a number of self-reflective views and new acquisitions. In the former class is the notion that “intellectual errors” – in her own case, Christian belief – can’t be simply expunged but remain part of the person who held them. Her metaphor for this retention is biological and vaguely organicist. Another idea of this type is that abrupt change, whether in personal experience or collective history, can only be positive if arising from already achieved progress. In the same vein, the arrogance of the atheist who thinks his

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ideas can change the world is rebuked; Eliot seems never to have entertained the notion that her new beliefs could constitute a “nostrum.” Perhaps more noteworthy than the self-reflections in this passage is the newly acquired Romantic orientation it conveys. The subjectivity of “speculative truth,” the “truth of feeling” as its better alternative, the organicist view of individual and collective progress, all serve to support the acute observation of another new friend: Eliot “seemed to be leaning slightly to the doctrines of Carlyle and Emerson when she remarked that she considered the Bible a revelation in a certain sense, as she considered herself a revelation of the mind of the Deity, etc. She was very anxious to know if you had heard Schelling” (Letters I, 162n., Mary Sibree Cash to her brother, John Sibree, Jr., who had studied in Germany). Eliot met Emerson in 1848 – “the first man I have ever seen” (Letters I, 270) – and startled him by her affinity with Carlyle on at least one point, their admiration of Rousseau’s Confessions. She had read a deal of Carlyle by this time, but beyond her use of his favorite term, “quackery,” it is not clear that his influence was a decisive one. In the quoted passage, the idea of a good or successful revolution requiring organic preparation is a Burkean more than a Carlylian one, while the idea of a “universal bond of union” would probably have drawn that favorite term, “quackery,” down on it. The idea as well as the phrasing of a “nostrum for all mankind” does, however, echo Carlyle in its contemptuous tone. And, as noted above, she bought into the Carlylian work ethic.10 Mary Sibree’s intuition that Eliot had “rather changed her mind on some points” is accurate not only regarding the Romantic overtones it had taken on but with respect to her family experiences. The letter quoted above goes on to describe the baleful results of a hypothetical apostate’s futile efforts to explain his changed beliefs: “He cannot make his reasons intelligible, and so his conduct is regarded as a relaxation of the hold that moral ties had on him previously. The rest are infected with the disease they imagine in him …” (Letters I, 163). Yet she rejects the implication that it would be better to keep silence: “how are we to do anything toward the advancement of mankind? … I think the best and the only way of fulfilling our mission is to sow good seed in good i.e. prepared ground … We cannot fight and struggle enough for freedom of enquiry … Those who can write, let them do it as boldly as they like …” (Letters I, 163). Two sides of the mature George Eliot are emerging here: her diffidence about twisting other people’s arms in pursuit of the truth – especially in the writing of didactic fiction – and the vigor of her continued aspiration to raise the level of her audience’s ethical development.


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In the years of uneasy truce in the Holy War, in which Eliot was obliged to attend church services to maintain respectability, she was widening her horizons in other spheres. Her study of languages led her to Schiller, with whose plays and histories she tutored Cara Bray, François Guizot (an odd choice, but the liberal statesman was prominent at the time), and Alessandro Manzoni, whose “silver” style she found superior to his translator’s “pewter” (Letters I, 153).11 But the use she began to make of her Latin exceeded all these. She announced that she was translating “a part of Spinoza’s works for a friend” (Letters I, 158); it would be worth much to know which work this was. It has been proposed that it was a portion of the Ethics, but I agree with Haight that it was more likely the Tractatus theologico-politicus, which she worked on more systematically in 1849. The reasoning here is that Cara Bray, the friend in question, wrote that when the book arrived, it “looked so temptingly easy that I was grieved to let Mary Ann carry it off, for I am sure I could understand his Latin better than her English” (Letters I, 158n. – an amusing asperity). No one has ever said this of the language of the Ethics.12 Spinoza’s theological-political treatise is to the field of biblical studies what his work of metaphysics (only nominally or tangentially on ethics) is to that field: foundational, but not always acknowledged as such. Various precedents for its biblical critique have been cited, but the Tractatus remains the first thorough exercise in the “higher” criticism, going beyond philological study (the “lower” criticism) to examine the Gospels’ provenance, sources, content and consistency. Having been raised in the Jewish tradition, the author was well equipped to bring Old Testament passages into juxtaposition with the Gospels, thus breaking ground for the demythologizing readings of later commentators. But the work goes beyond demystification of the Old Testament and, more glancingly, of the New, to construct – some would say, to deconstruct – a theory of religion generally. And this relatively brief text closes by drawing the implications of its theory for political policy regarding religious diversity. Its fame rests largely on its groundbreaking advocacy of freedom of religious belief and observance, but it still offers guidance for the student of biblical lore, as well as a continuing challenge to the philosophy of religion to come up with a better account of the significance of that book than Spinoza’s. Though Eliot never finished translating the Tractatus, its argument is so relevant to her emerging sensibility in religious matters that it merits brief review.13 After an opening epistemological skirmish, settling on the human need for imagination (a lesser faculty for Spinoza) to interpret the mind of God, in the absence of the direct knowledge gained by rational intuition (ch. i), the first question raised, rather oddly, is, what is a prophet? The

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answer is given with typical Spinozistic irony (fully equal to Socratic irony in penetration): a prophet is one possessing the power of vivid imagination – in the absence of superior intellectual powers – as well as constant piety (chs. i and ii). He reviews these intermediaries between God and man from Moses, through the authors of the prophetic books, to Jesus and the Apostles, whom he includes in this category without a qualm. He rationalistically disposes of most of the content of the Old Testament as nationally integrative and fabulous (as was necessary for the instruction of what Spinoza regularly calls “the multitude”: ch. v), on the principle that “divine” law was not written for one nation – a principle on which Christianity holds a clear superiority.14 His main proposition then emerges: all the prophets are in accord on a core of spiritual and ethical values – later boiled down by Talmudic commentators to such propositions as “love thy neighbor as thyself” or “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God” (ch. xiii). (He also lists seven attributes of God as certain, but belief in them isn’t necessary for righteous conduct.) Spinoza begs off detailed examination of the New Testament, pleading inadequate command of Greek and other excuses for his obvious unwillingness to be further persecuted for his ideas (end of ch. x). But he does venture a rhetorical analysis of the Epistles to show them not as divine revelation but as personal teaching, i.e., interpretation. Yet the Apostles are prophets, too, in conveying the divine/natural law: “although religion, as preached by the Apostles, does not come within the sphere of reason, in so far as it consists in the narration of the life of Christ, yet its essence, which is chiefly moral, like the whole of Christ’s doctrine, can readily be apprehended by the natural faculties of all” (p. 162). Spinoza is aware of the dangers of this reduction: “Those who look upon the Bible as a message sent down by God from Heaven to men, will doubtless cry out that I have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost because I have asserted that the Word of God is faulty, mutilated, tampered with, and inconsistent …” (p. 165). Yet the Bible, in his view, is not only divine (i.e., natural) but true, when its excrescences are stripped from it: “We can thus easily see how God can be said to be the Author of the Bible: it is because of the true religion therein contained, and not because he wished to communicate a certain number of books” (p. 170; to a publishing scholar, the irony of the last phrase is withering). When this reduction of the text to its essence is effected, “the meaning by which alone an utterance is entitled to be called Divine, has come down to us uncorrupted, even though the original wording may have been more often changed than we suppose … For from the Bible itself we learn, without the smallest difficulty or ambiguity, that its cardinal


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precept is: To love God above all things, and one’s neighbour as one’s self. This cannot be a spurious passage, nor due to a hasty and mistaken scribe …” (p. 172). The apparently orthodox but sharply limiting conclusion follows: “the [meaning of the] whole Divine law, as taught by Scripture, has come down to us uncorrupted” (p. 173).15 It is impossible to state with confidence which tenets of the Tractatus attracted or repelled George Eliot, but her interest in translating it, at one or both dates, suggests a broad measure of approval. Among the points that she may have readily endorsed are: the universality of religion, in the ethical sense specified; the historical character of both books of the Bible, produced for ideological influence on the populace; the superfluousness of theology, ritual and the fine points of creeds; et al. Well before she came to read and translate Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthums (The Essence of Christianity), she might have found in Spinoza a philosophy of religion that could serve to replace her inherited and discarded one. One thing we can say with some assurance: the Tractatus provided Eliot with additional bases for the humanistic position she was developing, to be further enriched by the Ethics, which she was later to translate. Spinoza’s book came to Cara Bray from Robert H. Brabant, and thereby forms a link to Eliot’s major achievement in translation, her rendition of David F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus). Dr. Brabant was the father-in-law of Charles Hennell, and his daughter had taken up the Strauss translation before her marriage, only to give it up under domestic demands, perhaps involving her husband’s declining health, which led to his early death. It was by a circuitous yet strongly linked path that the book came to be translated by Eliot. She knew the freethinking Brabants and in 1843 had enjoyed (though that is hardly the word) a brief flirtation with the father, before being sent packing by his wife (in a pattern that was to repeat itself some years later with the John Chapmans). When “Rufa,” as Mrs. Hennell was nicknamed, gave up the translation project, it, and the 250-odd manuscript pages she had done, came to Eliot by way of Rufa’s sisters-in-law, Sara Hennell and Cara Bray.16 The project occupied more than two years of Eliot’s life – beginning in January, 1844, and ending in April, 1846 – and thus, if for no other reason, deserves close attention.17 Before proceeding to examine the Strauss text and Eliot’s response to it, we may pause to consider her emotional condition during the translating process. She accepted the proposal with alacrity and only later inquired about details of the publishing arrangements (Letters I, 172); we may guess that one motive was a desire to fulfill a vocation, for she had none at this stage of her life (she was now twenty-four). When publication was

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assured by a Unitarian backer of the project, she was overjoyed: “It seemed to give her new life …,” wrote Cara Bray (Letters I, 182n., quoting the Bray– Hennell Extracts). There was, to be sure, no expectation of ample monetary reward; she was eventually paid £20 for her plus-two-years’ effort. The work was exacting, given its inherent complexity and sharpened by her high standards for herself; her correspondence with Sara Hennell in these years is mainly devoted to questions of wording. But the highs and lows of spirit as she worked reveal something of her deeper motives. Numerous critics have quoted her fatigued admission of nostalgia for the Christian mythos; “She said she was Strauss-sick,” Cara Bray reported; “it made her ill dissecting the beautiful story of the crucifixion, and only the sight of her Christ-image and picture [a small statue and engraving] made her endure it” (Letters I, 206). Fewer have mentioned her concluding satisfaction not only with her accomplishment but with Strauss’s ideas: “I do really like reading our Strauss – he is so klar und ideenvoll [clear and full of ideas] …” (Letters I, 218). The letter goes on to mention another longstanding concern, her work’s public impact: “I do not know one person who is likely to read the book through.” In the midst of her labors, she had expressed similarly mixed feelings: “Glad am I that some one can enjoy Strauss! The million certainly will not, and I have ceased to sit down to him with any relish” (Letters I, 185). Perfectly to balance these passing but recurring moods may be impossible for us, as it was for her, but one may gather that her respect for Strauss’s concept remained great, that she aspired to but was doubtful of its public appreciation, and that fatigue with the laborious process did not entirely dash her educational enthusiasm. What was Strauss’s big idea? It must appear reductive to single out one concept in a complex and broadly applied argument, sustained over 1,500 pages (800 in the current English edition) to a single proposition, but it may be done with more justice here than in other cases. Eliot was herself aware of the possibility that much in the book can be reduced to its root concepts; as she wound up her work, she noted that “the last 100 pages have certainly been totally uninteresting to me, considered as matter for translation. Strauss has inevitably anticipated in the earlier part of his work all the principles and many of the details of his criticism, and he seems fagged himself ” (Letters I, 207). Despite his monomania, Strauss remains an outstanding biblical critic in his ability to read a text closely and incisively,18 to show that its statements are impossible to take literally, or are self- or mutually contradictory, or are falsifiable on other evidence. An example of the first kind is the statement in a book purportedly written by Moses that he not only died but was buried at a certain place and time; of the second, the Gospels’ conflicting accounts


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of the Crucifixion; of the third, the lack of contemporary corroboration for the statements that earthquake and atmospheric upheaval followed it. But these are the negative aspects of Strauss’s enterprise, in which he continued and fulfilled the line of skeptical reading that had gone on for two centuries. It is his positive thesis that commands attention, in its own right and in its potential importance for George Eliot’s development. Strauss is the leading exponent of the brand of biblical exegesis called the “mythical mode.” It is a sharp but double-edged sword in the campaign to undercut the historical grounding of Christian belief, for it follows the lines of that belief itself, attempts to invalidate it, yet may turn out in some degree to bolster it. Strauss explains many of the statements as to the events of Jesus’s earthly life and many of the attributes and words ascribed to him as having been made because these were expected events, attributes and words. In this approach, he proceeds along a line of biblical interpretation long established in the Christian exegetical tradition, the approach called “typology.” Typological interpretation proposes that Jesus’s advent and the events of his life were not only preordained but were predicted in the Old Testament, in which numerous persons and events were types, anticipations of or parallels to the eventual model or “antitype.” His noble family origins (in the house of David), his experience as a “suffering servant,” his messianic effect and many other details of his career were lent greater credibility by the Old Testament texts in which they were prepared or predicted (particularly the portion of the Book of Isaiah known as Isaiah II). Strauss simply turns this validation on its head: the Gospel narratives say what they do because these things were supposed to happen – in the double sense of the word “supposed.” The product of this Jewish textual tradition and of the apocalyptic hopes, indeed expectations, of the period – one in which Roman rule and other forces created a crisis in the Jewish nation – was a just-so story or, to give it a more august name, a myth. The introduction traces the “development of the mythical point of view” from the ancients down through the eighteenth-century Deists and “Rationalists” to Strauss’s immediate predecessors, Schelling, Bauer and Baur. It then distinguishes among the sources of the varied interpretations that have been offered for some of the Gospel statements: if read as an allegory, their ultimate source must be God himself; if a moral interpretation is made, its authority must be the individual Evangelist or his interpreter; but if a mythological reading is chosen, it assumes that the source of the text must lie in the community that produced it (section 12). Strauss makes a further distinction between historical myths, which start from widely known facts and add ideas or motifs to explain or enlarge upon them, and

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evangelical myths, which draw on traditional ideas – here, messianic expectations – and popular impressions of a hero’s character, acts and fate – here, the self-sacrificing “servant” (section 15). To distinguish myth from history, Strauss puts forward five criteria for the former: contravention of the laws of nature; inconsistency, either internal or in relation to external and wellestablished narratives; the argumentum ex silentio, where a narrator must have known and could not fail to mention certain facts but did not do so; agreement of the content narrated with the narrator’s tradition; and poetic rather than discursive form (section 16). The key element is the fourth of these criteria: Strauss rides it like a hobby horse, but it may be a fatal weakness to assume it in all cases. (One might also note that the first criterion begs the question regarding claimed miraculous events.) To see how these interpretive principles perform, one might take his account of the Transfiguration as an example (part II, ch. x). (The book is divided into three parts: the birth and childhood of Jesus, his public life, and his passion, death and resurrection.) The Synoptic Gospels report that shortly after his first announcement of his passion, Jesus ascended a mountain with three favored disciples; they witness his countenance and even his clothes illuminated with supernatural radiance; two Old Testament figures, Moses and Elias, appear and converse with him; and a heavenly voice declares him to be the Son of God (Matthew 17, Mark 9, Luke 9). Strauss begins with a reductio ad absurdum: metamorphosis is mentioned in these texts, which could only refer to an internal change, but here the emanation proceeds even from the clothes. The apparent absurdity leads to a reductive judgment: “compared with the spiritual glory which Jesus created for himself by word and deed, this physical glorification, consisting in the investing of his body with a brilliant light, must appear very insignificant, nay, almost childish” (p. 536). Further details are rejected on the mythological criterion: the presence of Moses and Elias is for “convincing the disciples that the doctrine and fate of Jesus were in accordance with Moses and the prophets” (p. 537), and are thus a parti pris based on Jewish tradition. The supernatural voice is questioned on anthropological principle: “what an anthropomorphic conception of the Divine Being must that be, which admits the possibility of real, audible speech on his part” (p. 537). After an excursion into polemics against the so-called “natural explanation” by rationalistic apologists – that these reported events are expressions of the psychic experiences of the participants – Strauss sums up his mythic interpretation. He cites repeated Old Testament references to divine illumination, in the literal sense, of God, Adam, Moses and Joshua, now transferred to Jesus a minori ad


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majus: “especially in the Messiah himself, it was expected that there would be a splendour which would correspond to that of Moses, nay, outshine it … the illumination of the countenance of Moses served as a type for the transfiguration of Jesus …” (p. 544). The Gospels’ details fully accord with the tradition: the ascent of a mountain, the three witnesses, the inclusion of Elias as a forerunner of the messiah, the voice from a cloud, the messianic declaration – all have Old Testament precedents (pp. 544–45). The conclusion follows: “we have here a mythus, the tendency of which is twofold: first, to exhibit in the life of Jesus an enhanced repetition of the glorification of Moses; and secondly, to bring Jesus as the Messiah into contact with his two forerunners, – by this appearance of the lawgiver and the prophet [Elijah], of the founder and the reformer of the theocracy, to represent Jesus as the perfecter of the kingdom of God, and the fulfillment of the law and the prophets …” (p. 545). Strauss’s attitude toward his conclusions?: “while according to the mythical interpretation, I do not, it is true, see in the evangelical narrative any real event, – I yet retain a sense, a purpose in the narrative, [I] know to what sentiments and thoughts of the first Christian community it owes its origin, and why the authors of the gospels included so important a passage in their memoirs” (p. 546). The book ends with a “concluding dissertation” on the “dogmatic import of the life of Jesus.”19 After acknowledging the obvious, that his investigations “have apparently annihilated the greatest and most valuable part of that which the Christian has been wont to believe concerning his Saviour Jesus,” the problem remains, “to re-establish dogmatically that which has been destroyed critically” (p. 757).20 His “dogmatic criticism” is pursued on the philosophical plane, engaging with Schleiermacher, Kant, Hegel and others. He specifically rejects the so-called Rationalist position of the Enlightenment, ultimately stemming from Spinoza: “a Christ who is only a distinguished man, creates indeed no difficulty to the understanding, but is not the Christ in whom the Church believes” (p. 768). In the end, Strauss takes up another idea in the Spinozistic tradition, that of the uniformity of the human mind and thus the unity of mankind, and gives it a turn in keeping with the “Young Hegelian” philosophy of his time (in opposition to orthodox Hegelian theologians): “is not the [Christian] idea of the unity of the divine and human natures a real one … when I regard the whole race of mankind as its realization, [rather] than when I single out one man as such a realization? … This is the key to the whole of Christology, that … we place, instead of an individual, an idea” (p. 780). This idea, the idea of the divine-human race, is followed out in mythological accents: “It is Humanity that dies, rises, and ascends to heaven … By

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faith in this Christ, especially in his death and resurrection, man is justified before God; that is, by the kindling within him of the idea of Humanity, the individual man participates in the divinely human life of the species” (p. 780). The attempt to state this idea in terms derived from Christology places it squarely in the Humanist tradition. It becomes clearer in the nearly contemporary formulations of Ludwig Feuerbach (to be discussed in Chapter 4) and, coming from a quite different direction, in the contemporaneous writings of Auguste Comte. In translating The Life of Jesus, George Eliot experienced her earliest exposure to the idea, not merely of the unity and sanctity of mankind, but of religion’s symbolic expression of that unity and sanctity – or, as Strauss might put it, of their mythological embodiment in the figure of Christ. This “dogmatic” critic may well be accorded the recognition of having put Eliot on her way to a version of the religion of humanity. We have seen, in Chapter 1, that the young Eliot had scant regard for the biblical commentators she read, who proposed to validate elements of church government, belief and ritual on the basis of ingenious readings of the Old Testament, in which they often discovered confirmatory similarities to the mythological data of other religions. Her disdain for the “faded tapestries of mythological history” was her earliest approach to the subject; her eventual position was informed by intensive reading in the anthropological literature of her time, and much of her fiction draws upon a life-long interest in the meaning of myth in human experience.21 In this long development, her close attention to The Life of Jesus may be considered a turningpoint and the grounding of an orientation. To whatever extent she accepted the negative implication of Strauss’s exposure of the Evangelists’ narrative motivations, the more important effect of his mythical method may well have been to open to her mind the power of myth to influence human thought, behavior and writing in many genres.22 The acquired habit of putting pen to paper in the course of publishing a book seems to have helped the emergent George Eliot along in the direction of becoming a writer. Six months after The Life of Jesus appeared, she published five brief essays – comparable to the periodical genre called feuilletons – in the local newspaper Charles Bray had acquired, the Coventry Herald and Observer.23 Beyond the fact that they represent Eliot’s first imaginative publications (except for the poem, “Farewell,” in the Christian Observer, as noted in Chapter 1), they are of some literary significance as an early experiment in the satirical mode of her final book, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. There is, however, another reason for looking into them: in the absence of other distinct indications of Eliot’s state of mind


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during her mid-to-late twenties, they suggest fragile and somewhat disturbed self-images, as well as highly idealistic sketches of the kind of person she would like to become. They are, in effect, artfully disguised pieces of deeply personal expression. The first, “Introductory,” portrays the imputed author of the ensuing pieces, one Macarthy, the eccentric of the general title: My friend was one of whom the world proved itself not worthy, for it never made a true estimate of him … [His character] contained elements which would too probably operate as non-conductors, interposed between his highly-charged mind and the negatively electrified souls around him … [one of these elements] was a morbid sensitiveness in his feeling of the beautiful, which I can compare to nothing but those alleged states of mesmeric lucidity, in which the patient obtains an unenviable cognizance of irregularities, happily imperceptible to us in the ordinary state of our consciousness. (pp. 14–15)

Readers of Eliot’s fiction will have no difficulty recognizing this early appearance of a recurrent theme, which provides the donnée of the story, “The Lifted Veil,” and the subject of one of the best-known passages of Middlemarch, “the other side of silence.” Here the “preternaturally sharpened vision” produces a “humourist, – one who sported with all the forms of human life, as if they were so many May-day mummings, uncouth, monstrous disguises of poor human nature, which has not discovered its dignity” (p. 15). In consequence, Macarthy is a loner, unloving and unloved, a cosmopolitan wanderer, without profession – although on his death-bed he passes a trunkful of manuscripts on to his one friend, the narrator, who publishes the pieces that follow. For such a crabbed soul, the first of these, “How to Avoid Disappointment,” is an astonishingly idealistic portrait of the artistic imagination, whose vision of “the perfect whole” provides him with the nostrum of the title. Rejecting the governing purposes in life both of the bourgeois “man of the world” and of the political “man of public spirit,” the artist lives not merely for “the good, the true, the beautiful” (p. 18): “He has a course of his own, like our forest trees, a fixed form of growth, which defies and hurls down the stones and mortar with which society attempts to bind him in. He loves individuals, he labours for specific objects, but only as transient forms of the abiding reality which he seeks …” (p. 19). The Romantic image concludes, “Who would not have some purpose in life as independent in its value as art is to the artist?” (p. 19). It would be too much to say that Eliot was framing a career for herself at this early stage, but in the event these speculations on the artistic life must be deemed prophetic.

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Idealization takes a more general form still in the next piece, “The Wisdom of the Child,” where Wordsworth is improved upon. The child is father to the man “perhaps in more senses than the poet thought” (p. 21); in principle, the “true philosopher” “gathers his rule of conduct, not from the suggestions of appetite, not from the dictates of expediency, but from the indications of man’s highest destiny, to be found in those faculties of his nature which may be justly said to be more than human … Self-renunciation, submission to law, trust, benignity, ingenuousness, rectitude, – these are the qualities we delight most to witness in the child, and these are the qualities which most dignify the man” (p. 20). The artistic vocation may or may not have represented a distinct aspiration for Eliot at this stage of her life, but the idealistic image of fulfilled humanity in this essay was one she maintained throughout her life. The remaining two pieces are slighter things. The one, “A Little Fable with a Great Moral,” compares one narcissistic Hamadryad with another who “cared not to look at herself in the lake; she only cared about watching the heavens as they were reflected in its bosom” (pp. 21–22), and who thereby gains by dying without being aware that she had become old. The last piece, “Hints on Snubbing,” is in the standard satirical mode, a list of snobs: “all men of a thousand-a-year,” men who have “established a reputation as diners-out,” “editors of country newspapers” (we may wonder what the Herald’s editor thought of this), “any who have been elevated in society,” “ladies who go to parties with the hope of being the belles of the evening,” gentlemen who snub their wives, wives who snub governesses, servants and old maids, servants who snub the shoe-black, etc. (pp. 23–26). “But the chief empire of feminine talent lies in the snub religious” (p. 25) – Eliot must have known whereof she spoke. “All ladies of decidedly orthodox sentiments and serious habits, who, in short, form the public for whom young Clergymen print volumes of sermons, which may be compared to that popular specific, treacle and brimstone …” – she has come a long way from her “Evangelical” days. These idealistic and satirical writings – as well as reviews of substantial works by French historians (Michelet and Quinet) and of a novel about apostacy by J. A. Froude – were all very well at the outset of a provincial career, but Eliot’s situation was far from satisfactory. She lacked a vocation, other than the housekeeping duties she provided for a declining parent, and she had few worldly contacts beyond her family and the Bray circle. There was much to be read, of course, and the list of her readings in this period shows breadth in philosophy – Voltaire, St. Simon, perhaps Hegel, Emerson, Carlyle, Macaulay, Mill, et al. – as well as depth in fiction,


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including perhaps ten of George Sand’s novels and plays.24 But from the latter half of 1846 to the spring of 1849 she led a humdrum life, stressed by the growing illness of her father. Then, upon his death, the world began to open for her. The Brays took her on her first, relatively brief continental tour, through France, northern Italy and Switzerland. She found herself so much attracted by the latter that she stayed on at Geneva for about half a year, first at a pension and then as lodger with an artist and his family, who became friends of long standing. As Haight succinctly notes, “Little is known of her reading at this time, though it must have been extensive” (Haight, p. 77). On returning to Coventry, she found herself not alone but, literally as well as figuratively, homeless: “I am sad at the sight of my own country and feel more of an outcast here than at Geneva” (Letters I, 333). After brief visits to her family, she stayed on with the Brays, still without a role to play in the world. And then, as a later novelist and skeptic might have put it, as luck would have it, Providence was on her side.

chapter 3


In October 1850, two visitors to the Brays, where George Eliot was temporarily staying, made a number of overtures to her that were to prove transformative. They were a young publisher, John Chapman, and a scholarly gentleman, Robert W. Mackay. Chapman had recently published Mackay’s book, The Progress of the Intellect, which purported to trace civilization’s advance beyond early religion, and which was reputed to follow Strauss’s mythical approach to the Bible. “It was natural that Chapman should ask the Translator of Strauss to write an article on the book, which the editor of the Westminster Review had agreed to publish. [Eliot] was only too glad of the opportunity.”1 The assignment was not only an entry into the world of publishing at a high level, but also the occasion of a literal move to the center of London’s intellectual milieu. Chapman’s office-cum-home-cumboarding house at 142 Strand (the Strand being a continuation of Fleet Street) was also to prove a scene of sexual fiddle-faddle involving her (if only tangentially) with Chapman, his wife and his mistress, as well as of high intellectual pursuits, but it has become, or should become, a shrine for believers in the “progress of the intellect.” Eliot’s review (shortly to be discussed) was to be placed in the Westminster Review, in which Chapman had more than a book publisher’s interest. He was engaged in negotiations to take over the journal, which had had an illustrious run as the organ of the progressive Parliamentary group known as the Philosophic Radicals – for a time under the editorship of John Stuart Mill – but which had fallen on hard times under its current proprietor and editor. With the financial backing of an “eccentric gentleman,” Chapman took control in 1851. He then made his move to return the journal to its former eminence, perhaps the wisest move in his somewhat patchy life: “he knew intimately a person with the intelligence and literary ability needed to conduct a first-rate liberal quarterly of real distinction, a person, who, under his charm, would be content to remain in the background and let him bask publicly in editorial glory” (Haight, p. 89). And so, at a stroke, the “ardent 44


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spinster in Coventry” became the assistant editor – functionally, the editor, under Chapman as publisher – of, potentially, one of the most important cultural institutions in the land. Under her relatively brief tutelage, and with the additional omnibus reviews she published there after she resigned her editorship, the Westminster Review gained a new purchase on the mind of England, no longer as a partisan organ but as the country’s most comprehensive review of books. It accomplished this by systematic, though relatively brief coverage, rather than in the Victorian genre of essays posing as reviews, of which it also contained distinguished examples.2 Given this ambition for the scope of the Westminster Review, what were Eliot’s ideas for the content or direction of the revived journal? We learn this from her draft for Chapman’s letter to a prospective contributor, the Independent theologian James Martineau, on what was expected on the subject of “Christian Ethics”: The future Editors of the Westminster desire that the article in question should contain an impartial inquiry into the moral spirit and code of the primitive Christians as embodied in the New Testament, conducted on true principles of critical investigation, and with entire freedom from conscious or unconscious predisposition to accommodate the phraseology of the Gospels and Epistles to the expression of modern ideas … The article, however, while shewing what Christianity has not done or cannot do for us, should do full justice to the positive side and endeavour clearly to define what we really owe to Christianity as a stage in the religious development of the race. (Letters VIII, 25–27)

No less than many another newly appointed editor, Eliot had distinct ideas of what she wanted, according to her own historical and moral views, and chose contributors capable of obliging (although such extensive specifications, of which I have omitted the greater part, may have proved daunting to them). The last phrase quoted, on Christianity’s place in the “religious development of the race,” also aligns the journal in the direction of Mackay’s book, whose full title is: The Progress of the Intellect, as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews. This is a mid-century addition to a long line of rationalistic histories of civilization dating back to the Enlightenment, in which examples of the stature of Montesquieu’s and Vico’s works stand out. In contrast to the frequent appearance in this tradition of works emphasizing the passage of all or most human societies’ dominant modes of thought from religious and mythical to philosophical and scientific orientation (a tradition in which Comte’s work also stands), Mackay limits himself to progress within the religious sphere and in only two traditions. Yet in its two volumes, totalling more than 1,000 pages, there is no consistent pattern of development to be discerned, merely alternative ways of formulating the

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religious impulse. Hebraic and Greek conceptions and representations of the deity are set side by side, since there is no way of linking them in a historical sequence, and while there is shown to be a change from the Hebraic to the Christian scheme of things, as well as development from the classical Greek to the Alexandrian and Gnostic visions, no clear progress toward the eventual emergence of a philosophical or scientific mode of thought emerges.3 It is, indeed, difficult to discern in the book any particular philosophic or historical position beyond that of reading, thinking and writing a great deal about ancient religions. No wonder, then, that Eliot was geared to encourage directional views, including positive and negative assessments of Christianity’s role in religious development, by her contributors. The strength of Mackay’s work lies not in producing a history of cultural progress but in formulating the varied representational modes in which religious thought has been expressed. The writer clearly has absorbed Coleridge’s distinction between symbolism and allegory,4 he is sophisticated about such tropes as personification (I, 146–47) and apologue (II, 404–05), and he develops mythmaking in the direction soon to achieve canonical form in the work of F. Max Müller, that is, the predominance of solar mythography, at least among the Greeks (I, 274–75). Despite the presence of insightful treatments of these and other issues in the philosophy of religion, The Progress of the Intellect reeks of the autodidact and of the crotchet, and would long have been forgotten if not for the existence of Eliot’s review. Eliot was, perhaps for personal reasons, more generous and welcoming toward Mackay’s tome than the present writer can find it in himself to be. Her description of him as a scholar presents an idealized portrait of “men of erudition”: “It may be doubted, whether a mind which has no susceptibility to the pleasure of changing its point of view, of mastering a remote form of thought, of perceiving identity of nature under variety of manifestation – a perception which resembles an expansion of one’s own being, a preexistence in the past – can possess the flexibility, the ready sympathy, or the tolerance, which characterizes a truly philosophic culture.”5 When Eliot goes on to credit Mackay with combining “minute erudition with the largeness of view necessary to give it a practical bearing; a high appreciation of the genius of antiquity, with a profound belief in the progressive character of human development – … a wonderful intuition of the mental conditions of past ages with an ardent participation in the most advanced ideas and most hopeful efforts of the present; a nature like some mighty river …” (p. 29), we recognize where we have heard something of this before – it is Dorothea’s view of Casaubon in Middlemarch, in full idealistic spate. Eliot’s enthusiasm doesn’t blind her to a few eddies in this “mighty


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river”: “we begin to perceive the author’s defects, or rather his redundancies. Some of his pages read like extracts from his common-place book … rather than like a digested result of study, intended to inform the general reader” (p. 35). These characterizations of the scholar gain their significance from what they tell of Eliot’s intellectual aspirations, whatever their application to Mackay. When she turns to the book’s content, her elevated state of mind doesn’t prevent succinct thematization, even in the absence of succinctness and thematic clarity in the original: Mr. Mackay commences his survey and delineation of religious development, selecting that of the Hebrews and Greeks as the most typical and complete, and tracing it up to the period when the combination of the two modes of thought in the Alexandrian theosophy formed that web of metaphysical and religious dogma, which constitutes speculative Christianity. While the Hebrew and Greek religions are his main subject, he has not neglected the copious illustration to be drawn from the Persian, the Hindoo and the Northern mythologies, by indicating instances of analogy and possible derivation, and thus the “Progress of the Intellect,” is, perhaps, the nearest approach in our language to a satisfactory natural history of religion. (p. 35)

Whatever the justice of Eliot’s view of the clarity of the book’s thesis or its adequacy as a “natural history,”6 she is surely right about its extensive dealings with mythology, hither and yon: “Mr. Mackay holds, with Creuzer, that the basis of all mythology was a nature-worship; that ‘those interpreters are in the main right, who held that the heathen Pantheon, in its infinite diversity of names and personifications, was but a multitudinous, though in its origin, unconscious allegory, of which physical phenomena, and principally the heavenly bodies, were the fundamental types’” (p. 37). And so we get – solar mythology rampant. It is not surprising, in retrospect, that Eliot had much patience with Mackay’s reductivism (or with Georg F. Creuzer’s nature worship), given her extended interest in Max Müller’s solar mythology in later years – though she read the latter for his learning in linguistics, Oriental religion and much else beyond his monomyth. More surprising, perhaps, is her tolerance for such a key to all mythologies while being fully aware of the “orthodox prepossessions of writers such as [Jacob] Bryant, who saw in the Greek legends simply misrepresentations of the authentic history given in the book of Genesis” (p. 36). When the hero of Middlemarch names Bryant as typical of the misreading in which Casaubon engages, he is pinpointing that divine’s “orthodox prepossessions,” but the failings of such monomanias in dealing with the heterogeneous material of world mythology occur equally in

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the “nature-worship” industry, particularly its “heavenly bodies” branch. Yet tolerate it in Mackay she did, at this time.7 In coming to a conclusion, Eliot quotes a long passage from Mackay’s section on “Mediation of Philosophy,” of which I give only the highlights: The true religious philosophy of an imperfect being is not a system of creed, but, as Socrates thought, an infinite search or approximation … A remnant of the mythical lurks in the very sanctuary of science. Forms or theories ever fall short of nature … To a certain extent they are reliable and complete; as a system of knowledge they are but intermediate and preparatory … Science … gratifies the religious feeling without arresting it, and opening out the barren mystery of the one [Mackay’s text reads “One”] into more explicit and manageable “forms” expressing, not indeed his essence, but his will, feeds an endless enthusiasm by accumulating for ever new objects of pursuit. We have long experienced that knowledge is profitable; we are beginning to find out that it is moral, and shall at last discover it to be religious … while no real knowledge is powerless or fruitless, the fruits differ in refinement and value, the highest being unquestionably those disinterested gratifications which minister to the highest wants of the highest faculties, and which earned for philosophy the title of a divine love, realizing the mysterious longing of the soul, and promoting the accomplishment of its destiny … (pp. 44–45)

Let us take these propositions serially, to try to estimate how far they accord with Eliot’s beliefs at this time. Mackay begins with a religious individualist’s preference for “infinite search” rather than any “system of creed.” He defines his sphere of interest as “religious philosophy,” suggesting a fusion of the two domains. The succeeding remarks on the mythical element in science and science’s gratification of the “religious feeling” suggests a further fusion of this way of knowing with the others, so that all three are inseparable, if not identical. Although “to a certain extent” some theories are “reliable and complete,” all are “intermediate and preparatory,” presumably because the knowledge of an “imperfect being” is inevitably limited. Yet science can at least partly penetrate the “mystery of the one” or “One” (the use of the personal pronoun, his, for this being indicates whom Mackay has in mind). There is, indeed, “real knowledge,” though its varieties differ in “refinement and value.” Some knowledge is capable of ministering to “the highest wants of the highest faculties,” and has all sorts of good effects on the knower. To how much of this credo, both skeptical and idealist, would Eliot have subscribed? On the limited capacity of all systems, there can be no doubt of her assent, given the prominence of this idea throughout her work. On the conflation of religion, philosophy and science, there is no evidence that she saw anything but the obvious distinctions among these ongoing human institutions and their differing truth claims. On the mythical element in


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science and on science’s gratification of the “religious feeling,” there is, again, no evidence for her having maintained these views. On the capacity of science or any other mode of inquiry to penetrate the “mystery of the one” or “One” – Eliot’s misquotation is significant – the question does not arise in her work. On the moral and religious dimensions of knowledge, there can be no doubt of her assent, when religion is specified as a secular religion of humanity. The most tenuous judgment on her views at this time must come at Mackay’s concluding sentence on philosophy as “divine love, realizing the mysterious longing of the soul.” Here in Platonizing language (also found elsewhere in the quoted passage) is the idealist credo: the highest kind of knowledge is that which disinterestedly gratifies the “highest faculties,” expressing the intellectual’s inveterate taste for and claim to possess recondite, even esoteric information. Eliot was idealistic, markedly so in these years, but she cannot be found to have been an idealist, particularly on the possibility of a higher kind of knowledge. Perhaps swayed by its lofty rhetoric, she seems, in quoting this passage at the conclusion of her review, to give its ideas a prominence that will demand fuller refinement in her mind and renewed attention in her intellectual biography. Eliot’s ideas on religion were more distinct than these lofty speculations, and were conveyed in other reviews and review-essays of the period. (I include two pieces that came later in the decade, as they form part of her orientation at this time.) She reviewed William R. Greg’s The Creed of Christendom (London, 1851) in George Henry Lewes’s weekly, The Leader.8 The review does not materially add to the ideas she had already formulated in her letters, but is devoted to spreading the word about the “New Reformation” (p. 229) of Christianity to be made on the basis of research into its origins. She points out approvingly that Greg bases his analysis of the Gospels on the work of Strauss and Hennell, among others (p. 231). The relatively new note (following Spinoza) is his treatment of the Old Testament in much the same procedure that the higher critics had employed on the New. Thus the Pentateuch, “instead of being, as is popularly supposed, the production of Moses, is a compilation of separate documents, the earliest of which must have been written as late as the time of Saul …” (p. 231). Against this background, Greg asks whether Christianity can be considered a revealed religion, and answers that he “‘finds no adequate reason for believing Jesus to be the son of God, nor his doctrines to be a direct and special revelation’” (quoted on p. 233). Like his predecessors, Greg finds Jesus himself “‘an embodied revelation; humanity in its divinest phase’” (quoted on p. 233), so that Christianity becomes “Christian Ecle[c]ticism,” promoting the higher virtues (p. 234, quoting Greg’s chapter title). In the

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ethical sphere, Eliot emphasizes that Greg rebukes Christian resignation as based on “the narrow ground that sufferings are specially ordained for the benefit of the individual; and that it appeals to the selfish motives – the desire for recompense, rather than to the highest – the love of the good for its own sake” (p. 234). And he rejects its “ascetic and depreciating view of life, incompatible with that energetic devotion to the improvement of our races, and with that delight in the innocent adornment of our existence in this world …” (p. 236). She closes by noting that the book has gained a respectful reception in the press, in contrast with the scorn heaped on Hennell’s Inquiry only twelve years earlier – reflecting Pascal’s mot juste, “La terre tourne malgré qu’on le nie … – The earth turns in spite of all denials …” (pp. 236–37). Although she denies subscribing to all that Greg says, her treatment clearly assumes that the book and its favorable reception are signs of England’s, if not all mankind’s, progress. Eliot had previously expressed her doubts about Christian ethics as ultimately self-seeking – defining Calvinism, for example, as “a religion based on pure selfishness” (Letters I, 151n.) – and she would continue her assault on its spokesmen’s lack of altruism in two review-essays that came later in the decade: “Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming” and “Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young.”9 These pieces are as close as she ever came to getting angry in print, and part of the anger perhaps expresses self-rebuke, for Young’s Night Thoughts were a great favorite and frequent source of aphorisms for the young Eliot. Dr. John Cumming was a famous preacher in the Scottish National Church, and was thus not a member of the Church of England’s Evangelical party – hence the use of the lower-case e in the text. His numerous works, which Eliot only nominally reviews, bear such titles as Apocalyptic Sketches (1848–49), Prophetic Studies (1850), and The Pope, the Man of Sin (1851).10 In some respects distinctively Scottish, Cumming also represented characteristics of the dissenting sects, the Protestant communions outside the Anglican Church, marked by apocalypticism, puritanical Calvinism, and emotional fervor. A near-satire of a typical “evangelical preacher” (p. 160), the essay ranks with Matthew Arnold’s critique of the “dissidence of Dissent” in Culture and Anarchy as a withering rebuke to Low Church cultural attitudes. One need not rehearse the litany of Eliot’s complaints against Cumming’s “absence of genuine charity … the love of the clan, which is the correlative of antagonism to the rest of mankind” (p. 179), and his “perverted moral judgment,” which leads him to believe that “the natural man can have [no] other motive for being just and upright than that it is useless [i.e., unprofitable] to be otherwise, or that a character for honesty is profitable …”


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(p. 185). Our interest must lie in the essay’s implications of Eliot’s positive view of humanity’s unaided moral resources: “A man is not to be just,” her sarcasm runs, “from a feeling of justice; he is not to help his fellow-men out of good-will to his fellow-men; he is not to be a tender husband and father out of affection: all these natural muscles and fibres are to be torn away and replaced by a patent steel-spring – anxiety for the ‘glory of God’” (p. 187). As for the God whom this glory surrounds, “The idea of a God who not only sympathizes with all we feel and endure for our fellow-men, but who will pour new life into our too languid love, and give firmness to our vacillating purpose, is an extension and multiplication of the effects produced by human sympathy … Dr. Cumming’s God is the very opposite of all this: he is a God who instead of sharing and aiding our human sympathies, is directly in collision with them; who instead of strengthening the bond between man and man … thrusts himself between them and forbids them to feel for each other except as they have relation to Him” (p. 188). At the time Eliot was writing this, she had recently translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity); in Chapter 4, we shall be able to see the Cummings essay as applied Feuerbachism. The Young essay is extremely long because Eliot takes the recent publication of biographical information about the poet as an occasion to review his career in detail. It is a sordid tale of sycophantism, money-grubbing and extreme selfishness that accords well with the morality she finds expressed in Young’s works. In part, her critique is literary criticism, an early example of her writing in that genre: “Whether he writes prose or poetry, rhyme or blank verse, dramas, satires, odes, or meditations, we see everywhere the same Young – the same narrow circle of thoughts, the same love of abstractions, the same telescopic view of human things, the same appetency towards antithetic apothegm and rhapsodic climax” (p. 359). The source of Young’s poetic defects is, however, a moral failing: “One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his radical insincerity as a poetic artist … The source of all grandiloquence is the want of taking for a criterion the true qualities of the object described, or the emotion expressed” (pp. 366–67). And the reason he takes his eye off the object or emotion is that he doesn’t see or feel them: “we never find him dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists – in the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his fire-side of an evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter; in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, in all the sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the details of ordinary life” (p. 371). Beyond literary and ethical criticism, Eliot’s

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characterization of true morality offers examples of her inclination toward a humane realism, ultimately to be expressed in her fiction. The sympathies of personal relations are to be expanded into a larger sympathy: “Through my union and fellowship with the men and women I have seen, I feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have not seen; and I am able so to live in imagination with the generations to come, that their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labour for ends which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them” (p. 374). Beyond suggesting a better Christianity than the version offered by Cumming and Young, Eliot was propounding a religion of humanity in more poetic terms than those of Mill, Comte, Spencer and Feuerbach. In focusing on the “man in an ordinary coat … with his hand resting on the head of his little daughter” as the proper sphere of moral discourse, she was hinting at an approach to writing fiction, which she began to do in the very months in which this essay was written (April to December 1856).11 Eliot had not, to this point in life, met any philosophers above the level of the amateur Charles Bray (her introduction to Emerson was brief), nor any scientists – unless her encounter with the phrenologist George Combe be counted. This lacuna would soon (from October 1851) be filled by her friendship with a fellow journalist destined to become England’s premier philosopher of science, and with a man of letters later to become a zoologist and physiological psychologist.12 She had read a number of philosophic and scientific works, both popular and specialized, as well as those of John Stuart Mill in which the philosophic bases for the social sciences, politics and economics were elaborately set out. As an epigraph to the present biography notes, Eliot “studied [Mill’s] books, especially his Logic and Political Economy, with much benefit,” though she “had no consciousness of their having made any marked epoch” in her life. Let us examine what she may have gathered from A System of Logic (1843), which she had read by 1849 (Letters I, 310) and wished to look at again in 1851 (“I shall be glad to have it by me for reference” [Letters I, 363]), while passing over her response to his Principles of Political Economy (1848). The function of A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive is not, Mill makes clear, to serve as another or better arrangement of the long accumulated wisdom on reasoning but to supply a basis for new knowledge, that is, for scientific discovery, particularly in the social sciences. The subtitle conveys this intention: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. Consequently, its final section is devoted to the “Logic of the Moral Sciences,” with chapters devoted severally to the experimental, abstract (“geometrical” or rationalistic), deductive and


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13

historical methods. Although the possibility of a social science is firmly established (book VI, ch. vi) and careful attention paid to the operations and conditions of each of these approaches, the proper study of the social world emerges as both heroically comprehensive and markedly limited: We can never either understand in theory or command in practice the condition of a society in any one respect, without taking into consideration its condition in all other respects. There is no social phenomenon which is not more or less influenced by every other part of the condition of the same society, and therefore by every cause which is influencing any other of the contemporaneous social phenomena … unless two societies could be alike in all the circumstances which surround and influence them, (which would imply their being alike in their previous history,) no portion whatever of the phenomena will, unless by accident, precisely correspond; no one cause will produce exactly the same effects in both … We can never, therefore, affirm with certainty that a cause which has a particular tendency in one people or in one age will have exactly the same tendency in another, without referring back to our premises, and performing over again for the second age or nation, that analysis of the whole of its influencing circumstances which we had already performed for the first. The deductive science of society will not lay down a theorem, asserting in an universal manner the effect of any cause; but will rather teach us how to frame the proper theorem for the circumstances of any given case. It will not give the laws of society in general, but the means of determining the phenomena of any given society from the particular elements or data of that society. (VI, ix, 899–900)

George Eliot did not depend on this philosophy of the social sciences to register a strong inclination toward particularized attention to social phenomena – what later anthropologists have come to call “thick description” – and a corresponding hesitation in face of generalized social theories. But Mill’s thorough exposition of the grandeur and misery of social investigation was there for her to see, as a basis for both intensive study of how societies work and iron control of any temptation to generalize freely from their special circumstances. These traits show themselves in her accounts of a social stratum (the bourgeoisie in The Mill on the Floss), a historical nation (Renaissance Florence in Romola), and an entire provincial society in Middlemarch. The final chapter of Mill’s System of Logic distinguishes the methods of the physical sciences from the methods of art, employing a somewhat archaic sense of the term to indicate maxims of practice – “whatever speaks in rules, or precepts, not in assertions respecting matters of fact” (VI, xii, 943). In considering how knowledge may be applied in ethics and governmental policies, he divides the latter into construction of rules (legislative) and interpretation of rules (judicial). The core of Mill’s approach to science’s

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political and ethical value then emerges: “the reasons of a maxim of policy, or of any other rule of art, can be no other than the theorems of the corresponding science” (VI, xii, 944). The basis of effective legislation and, by implication, of correct moral judgment lies, therefore, in applying the best information attainable – in the case of politics, guided by the scientific data applicable to a given social problem. This approach, while it may appear monolithic, is considerably more flexible than the more usual practice among political and ethical theorists, their consistent application of sweeping premises: “The error is therefore apparent, of those who would deduce the line of conduct proper to particular cases, from supposed universal practical maxims; overlooking the necessity of constantly referring back to the principles of the speculative science …” involved in each case (VI, xii, 946). We may sense here the appeal to Eliot of a politics and ethics that guard against “setting up such unbending principles” (VI, xii, 946). It may be noted in passing that Mill’s prime example of deductive rule-making is not the moralizers of religion but the “political speculators whom I have characterized as the geometrical school; especially in France …” (While he was still at this time impressed by Comte’s general schema, he was later to critique his absolutist conclusions.) The anti-rationalist, inductivist train of Mill’s thought leads to a validation of democratic governance: “no government produces all possible beneficial effects, but all are attended with more or fewer inconveniences … Under a government of legitimacy, the presumption is far rather in favour of institutions of popular origin; and in a democracy, in favour of arrangements tending to check the impetus of popular will” (VI, xii, 947). Again, we may detect here comparable formulations of Eliot’s frequently expressed hopes for social progress to match intellectual progress, the limitations and mixed consequences of government action, and the special requirements of democratic legislation. From here, Mill goes on to the question of questions, the “first principles of Conduct”: “There must be some standard by which to determine the goodness or badness, absolute and comparative, of ends, or objects of desire” (VI, xii, 951). It comes as no surprise that “the general principle to which all rules of practice ought to conform, and the test by which they should be tried, is that of conduciveness to the happiness of mankind …” (VI, xii, 951). For those not satisfied that human happiness is sufficiently uplifting as a unique moral end, Mill adds an idealistic flourish: “the cultivation of an ideal nobleness of will and conduct, should be to individual human beings an end, to which the specific pursuit either of their own happiness or of that of others … should, in any case of conflict, give way.


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But I hold that the very question, what constitutes this elevation of character, is itself to be decided by a reference to happiness as the standard” (VI, xii, 952). And the book concludes with moral uplift second to no idealist’s: “The character itself should be, to the individual, a paramount end, simply because the existence of this ideal nobleness of character, or of a near approach to it, in any abundance, would go further than all things else toward making human life happy; both in the comparatively humble sense, of pleasure and freedom from pain, and in the higher meaning, of rendering life, not what it now is almost universally, puerile and insignificant – but such as human beings with highly developed faculties can care to have” (VI, xii, 952). One is tempted to claim that much of this ethical theory sounds like a critical description of the moral dynamic of George Eliot’s novels. I shall, however, restrict comparisons of the theory to one novel, The Mill on the Floss. This was begun within a decade of Eliot’s reading of the Logic, and doesn’t constitute so great a contextual leap as might at first appear (also, no pun on the names is intended). The portion of the novel devoted to the heroine’s protracted dialogues with her would-be (and partial) seducer (from Book VI, ch. xi, to Book VII, ch. ii) reads like a formal debate between the hedonist version of Utilitarianism and Mill’s refined and humanistic version. The importunate lover, Stephen Guest, appeals to the pleasure principle by making repeated references to its natural basis – decrying Maggie Tulliver’s initial refusals as “unnatural” (the word is repeated) and by a form of the Utilitarian pleasure–pain calculus: “We can’t help the pain [our happiness] will give” to others (Book VI, ch. xi, p. 448). Maggie’s self-defense is grounded in the larger conception of human happiness and the more elevated sense of personal character that Mill encouraged: “I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too” (VI, xi, 450). The debate continues after a dreamy elopement downriver, Stephen appealing to “natural law” and Maggie countering with her ringing declaration, “If the past [i.e., human relationships] is not to bind us, where can duty lie?” (VI, xiv, 475). In the denouement, when social opprobrium falls on the still innocent party and when she unsuccessfully appeals to her religious guide for moral clarity, Eliot’s ethical preoccupations come to the fore in an extended peroration: The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it … The casuists have become a byword of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed – the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened

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by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot … the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality … from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human. (VII, ii, 497–98)

It would be footless to claim that Eliot believed these things after reading them in Mill, but her moral vision is strikingly akin to his: in place of abstract principles and their rational application, whether coming from religious or from rationalist sources, we are condemned, in judging ourselves and others, to the effort of gaining full information about complex situations and determining the balance of good and evil for the parties involved; in place of “natural law” as a hedonist pleasure-principle we are asked to apply an enlarged conception of “all that is human” and to develop some knowledge of others in our judgments; in place of a strict application of the greatest happiness calculus, we see displayed in Maggie’s tragic life another Millian maxim: “the cultivation of an ideal nobleness of will and conduct, should be to individual human beings an end, to which the pursuit of their own happiness or of that of others … should, in any case of conflict, give way” (as quoted from the Logic above). What, then, can we say that Eliot got from Mill? We may not conclude that she fell in with the Philosophic Radicals’ program of social and political reform, with which Mill was continually tinkering. One can’t infer that Eliot sympathized either with Mill’s flirtation with socialism – which tended to value its educational advantages in encouraging voluntary association (!) – or with his modified version of laissez-faire economics, in contrast to her friend Herbert Spencer’s extreme libertarian version (to be considered below). In keeping with the moral vision outlined above, she shared with Mill something of greater sweep and greater price: an estimation of the desirability and the possibilities of human development – despite all the cultural and natural impediments to its full realization – through the application of informed and sympathetic reflection. For Eliot, despite her developing sense of human limitation and of the inescapable consequences of egoistic choices – her tragic sense of life – was in the ranks of Victorian progressives, of whom Mill was the avatar. While it might seem counter-intuitive to link the vigorously rational Mill to George Eliot’s more fluid thinking, they shared common ground in espousing the Religion of Humanity. It may also seem strange to find these noted agnostics linked by their quasi-religious ideals, yet this emerges from taking a broader view of the subject than is often taken.14 Mill’s status as a


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religious thinker – not merely his thinking about religion but the religious character of his thought – has been developed in Maurice Cowling’s Mill and Liberalism.15 Mill was an early exponent of elements of this religion, and the issues for Eliot raised by their appearance in his works – works that she studied – are thus: which of these ideas did she adopt, which of hers were homemade, and where else might she have found those she adopted? To consider the first strands of this tangled web, I quote Cowling’s account of the tenets of Mill’s religion, roughly in the order of his presentation, and direct attention to his notes for their appearance in Mill’s works. These tenets may be labeled: progressivism, identification (of the individual with the collective good), disinterestedness, intellectual tradition, and educability: Mill’s political, ethical, sociological and religious writings were an attempt to fill the place left vacant by the decrepitude of Christianity, and to provide a doctrine or religion which all men would find suitable as they passed out of the theological and metaphysical stages of world history, as Comte had conceived it, into the positive, scientific age which was about to arrive. [p. 329] … Mankind, in its constant struggle to improve the world, has, through [its] work of resistance to mediocrity, enunciated elevated doctrines: the history of mankind is a record of their progressive accumulation. [p. 350] … The interest of a man is not, in Mill’s usage, his interest in a vulgar selfish sense: a man’s interest is his interest as a progressive being – a progressive being with an obligation to be concerned for the well-being of society as a whole, and to maximize the greatest amount of happiness altogether. [p. 332] … The principle of utility enjoins maximization of the finest things of which men are capable: and this is what Mill means by the Religion of Humanity. [p. 338] … the principle of utility and the Religion of Humanity alike are supposed to induce a higher disinterestedness than any that has ever been advocated by the highest ethical doctrines in the past. Disinterested concern for the welfare of mankind is the first, and central, injunction in Mill’s practical doctrine, and provides essential direction of the higher faculties towards an “ideal object.” [p. 350] … the Religion of Humanity is the outcome, not of authoritative dictate, but of the efforts of all those highest minds which, in the course of history, have turned their attention to the problems of human conduct. [p. 348] … The fellowship of the best minds, and the moral approbation of humanity, provide, indeed, a secular version of the Communion of Saints … [p. 349] … All men, whatever their class, temperament or social standing, are capable of making the approach [to truth]. And “the present wretched educational and social arrangements are the only real hindrance to its being attainable by almost all.” The religion, has, in other words, an ecumenical quality characteristic of all the world’s great faiths. (p. 352)

I have tried, without entire success, to limit my summary of Cowling’s account to sentences lacking his repeated sneers at Mill’s “unctuousness,” “prozelytizing,” and other perceived indiscretions.

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A point-by-point comparison of Mill’s views and Eliot’s may help to clarify their relations with Comte’s version of the religion. To begin with progressivism, one may apply again to The Mill on the Floss. In a chapter introducing the crisis of the narrative, Eliot’s narrator makes an extended comparison of progressive and non-progressive societies under an extended metaphor of the Rhine and Rhone rivers (not entirely, it’s true, to the advantage of the former). After extending the description of the slowflowing and eternally banal Rhone to the river of the novel and the society on its banks, the narrator says: “I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom [the heroine’s brother] and Maggie – how it has acted on young natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the generation before them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is represented in this way in every town, and by hundreds of obscure hearths …” (IV, i, 272–73). These phrases – “the onward tendency of human things … risen above the mental level of the generation before them … every historical advance of mankind …” – indicate what one may ascribe to George Eliot in the way of progressivism. There is no implication in them of historical inevitability, nor of advancement according to any special driving force, nor of periodization, nor of teleology, nor of directional or deterministic laws – the features that distinguish the nineteenth-century concepts called “historicism” from a more general historical perspective.16 All of these features are absent not only from Eliot but also from Mill, while a number of them are present in Comte. We may reckon up Eliot’s relations with the two philosophers on the other aspects of the Religion of Humanity outlined above. The identification of the individual’s sense of personal interest with the interests of others in his social sphere and ultimately of the entire species is a cardinal tenet of Eliot’s fiction, though without the ethical theory that would require and justify it in Mill’s eyes; it is also present in Comte, but in an even more theoretical form that lacks ethical or psychological justification. These reflections apply pari passu to the next characteristic of the religion, disinterestedness. On the other hand, Eliot’s strong sense of an intellectual tradition in the passage from The Mill quoted above and embodied in many of her writings is more forcefully developed in Comte’s than in Mill’s oeuvre, eventually reaching the scale of what Cowling would call the Communion of the Saints. Eliot was sufficiently taken with the credal calendar in the


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Système de politique positive, which associates great contributors to humanity with the days of the year, to make copious excerpts.17 Finally, on educability, regarding the criteria for admission to the progressive class, Mill, who has been accused of elitism, is far less liable to the charge than Comte, whose anticipations of his new society include a rigid division of social functions worthy of Plato. As for the education of the masses, Eliot also stands closer to Mill than to Comte, whose work shows no interest in raising the level of the proletariat (his term). Her novels’ eponymous working-men heroes, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Felix Holt – as well as female characters like Maggie, Romola, and Esther Lyon of Felix Holt – are all in training to expand their vistas, with varying degrees of success, in various kinds of education. These estimations of the relative importance of Mill and Comte in her thinking raise important issues for George Eliot studies. In the longish list of books on her intellectual sources – from Pierre Bourl’honne’s George Eliot: Essai de biographie intellectuelle et morale (1933) through Bernard Paris’s Experiments in Life (1965) to William Myers’s The Teaching of George Eliot (1984) – Comte has been considered a foundational element.18 Some of these studies show awareness of Mill’s influence as well, and there is no reason to censure the inclusion of Comte in any large estimate of Eliot’s mental structure. But Mill came first and most consistently to her mind: she read his major works throughout her life, in more or less the order of their appearance.19 Her initial recorded awareness of Comte came in 1851, in advising Chapman about a translator for the Cours de philosophie positive, either Harriet Martineau or Wathan M. W. Call (Eliot preferred Call: Letters I, 360–61); in 1853 it may have been she who briefly reviewed Martineau’s abridgement (Letters II, 122–23n.); in 1859 she read Comte’s Catechism of Positive Religion;20 and only in 1861 did she demonstrably read one of the volumes of the Cours (Letters III, 438, where she speaks highly of the survey of the Middle Ages in volume v). These are hardly the moves of one under deep influence; indeed, it would be hard to prove that Eliot read much of the six-volume Cours, though she read enough of the Système de politique positive to be highly critical, as will be developed below. Indeed, Eliot may have come at Comte by way of Mill, through his frequent discussions of Comte’s views on various philosophic issues (e.g., in the Logic, book VI, ch. xii), summed up in his Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865). Comte’s philosophy is a coherent system of historical generalizations held together by a rationalistic temperament, a faith in the superiority of scientific knowledge to all other kinds, and an overweening self-confidence. It is a direct descendant of the Enlightenment, through the mediating figure of

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Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, whom Comte had served as an assistant (and towards whom he was correspondingly hostile), and takes off from a critique of the Marquis de Condorcet’s utopian version of rational progress. It makes this move by positing what has come to be called the law of the three stages of history – the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive or scientific eras – as a basis for promoting the kind of social reorganization that Comte sought. In most discussions of this idea, its key word, law, has tended to draw less attention than the terms for the three stages themselves. Yet it is the idea that these periods relate to each other not merely by succession in time but by logical necessity deriving from the nature of the human mind that makes Comte’s system a leading example of the nineteenth-century intellectual phenomenon known as historicism, which gained (if that’s the right word) an ideological status in the twentieth as a rationale for various international social movements.21 Historicism is essentially neither idealist nor materialist: its most stunning exemplars are Hegel’s system for the progressive realization of the “Idea” in history and Marx’s vision of inevitable change toward a classless society. It is explicitly deterministic, as it accounts for historical progress (and, in some versions, historical regress) not merely by recourse to empirical data but by a deduction from first principles on the nature of things historical and human. Hence the peculiarity notable in other deterministic systems, like Calvinism: its proponents are often willing to take up arms to make sure that its founders’ predictions of inevitable outcomes will in fact come true. From the basic tenet of his system, Comte draws consequential ideas in the realms of science, social structure and morality – even in, or as, religion – and I shall describe them under these heads. After establishing the inevitable development of civilization (and Comte always means Western civilization, with occasional glances beyond) according to the necessary fulfillment of human potentialities,22 he sets out the schema of his three cultural or intellectual stages. His next move is to characterize the development of science throughout these periods – science thus functioning as a super-stage, present in each of the others. Thus each in his catalogue of the sciences – and these are themselves developed from each other by iron laws – has passed through the prior stages of theological and metaphysical thinking: for example, astronomy has not only advanced to become (or to fuse with) physics, but in its own field has gone from mythological conceptions of the heavens through the Church’s theological order of the cosmos to the present empirical-theoretical enterprise. (Here as elsewhere, the beautiful system is inexactly applied or indifferent to actual developments; the progression


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posited is from mythological to theological to positive thinking – skipping the metaphysical stage.) The sufficient answer to Comte’s elaborate and learned description of the sciences’ historical development was delivered in an article by Herbert Spencer, who could match Comte in developmental ideas and in scientific erudition. “The Genesis of Science,”23 which Eliot read with attention (Letters II, 165), makes short (or moderately short) work of undoing Comte’s historical statements about individual sciences, their development and interrelations. The hierarchy of the sciences was a particular offense to Spencer – and also to George Henry Lewes, whose early promulgation of Comte stopped short on this point – because, among other reasons, it all but omitted psychology, for which Comte had a particular distaste as it involved real human beings. Here, almost in its entirety, is Eliot’s response to the article, if not to Comte’s hierarchy: “Herbert Spencer’s article on the Genesis of Science is a grand one. You [Sara Hennell] must read it. He will stand in the Biographical Dictionaries of 1954 as ‘Spencer, Herbert, an original and profound philosophical writer, especially known by his great work x x x which gave a new impulse to psychology and has mainly contributed to the present advanced position of that science, compared with that which it had attained in the middle of the last century.’” When we come to Comte’s deduction of a necessary social structure that comes with the dominance of scientific thinking in civilization, the Cours offers a utopian system on the model of The Republic’s division of classes according to function. This regime was set out in punctilious detail in the Système in the years in which Eliot was forming her ideas of his work, and although there is no indication in the sources that she read it at that time, she may well have picked up an idea of it from Lewes, who published articles on Comte’s philosophy of the sciences in 1852, gathering them in a book with that title in 1853. Although this was largely confined to an exposition in the Cours, he knew Comte well enough to be informed of the social statics beginning to appear in the Système, with which he briefly closes. Eliot herself got to the “Discours préliminaire” of the Système in 1863 (Letters IV, 111) and to the book itself about 1865 (Notebook, pp. 97–98). With all his Olympian overview of the entire course of history, Comte was highly charged on the social questions of his day, particularly the tendency of his compatriots to stage revolutions with some regularity, and sketched a system to control such tendencies yet provide for intellectual advancement: “There would be only one class, the proletariat, governed by two auxiliary elites – the spiritual power exercising intellectual authority and the temporal power exercising administrative authority. Political strife

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would disappear with politics itself, since the two powers would be strictly separated into the realms of thought and action, each elite confining itself to its own sphere. Government would become a science, upon which there could be no more disagreement than amongst scientists on the laws of physics.”24 Though this classless society under twin elite “powers” may seem utopian, the proletarian world comes to look much like the capitalist one, for the masters of finance and industry remain exactly where they are; on the other hand, the ideological apparatus that sustains the system is worked out with a thoroughness that resembles Stalinism rather more than Platonism. (See below for more on these points.) Comte and Mill corresponded extensively during the 1840s on politics as well as philosophy: their main thrust, promoting legislation informed by scientific inquiry, was their common contribution to nineteenth-century political thought. But Mill came increasingly to see that Comte’s legislative ideas were hardly of the progressive kind that he championed, while the status of the intellectual elite was less as a body of consultants than as a new ruling class. To take only one example, education: the account in the Cours’ chapter on “the Final Tendency of Modern Society” (Book VI [“Social Physics”], ch. xii) envisions the “educational function” of the “spiritual authority” as the “regeneration of morality” (to use the subsection headings), rather than a Millian liberation of people of all classes for independent thought and personal development. Approaching a third element of Comte’s philosophy, its ethical views, their potential implications for Eliot may best be evaluated by considering the accounts of his influence on her by literary critics. Bernard J. Paris’s Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values,25 as its subtitle suggests, is focused on Comte’s moral dimensions and their shaping of Eliot’s fiction. Paris moves from an accurate summary of Comte’s version of empiricism (p. 73) to an apparent implication of his epistemology for Eliot’s ethics, with literary results: “the great division among George Eliot’s characters is between egoists and those who approach reality objectively” (p. 84). The difficulty with this move is not only that positivistic tenets are common to empiricists generally – and Paris does yeoman service in bringing Mill, Lewes and others into account – but that Eliot does not directly draw from them the moral implication that egoism is a baleful thing because it fails to accept or produce objective knowledge. “Approach[ing] reality objectively” does not describe the required subtle gauging – guided, indeed, by disciplined feeling – of the nuances and antinomies of the moral life, and cannot be pinned down as the norm of Eliot’s “great division.” Paris is closer to the mark when noting (p. 44) that her strong emphasis on resignation in


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face of the immodifiable, together with openness to new possibilities and vigorous action in pursuit of them, follows a Comtean formula: “I have better learned that as Comte and other wise men have said, ‘Notre vraie destinée se compose de resignation et d’activité’” (Letters II, 134, cf. II, 127). But as she suggests, many wise men have said much the same thing. Comte said more on the subject, however, and highlighting his words is one of the contributions of another scholar of Eliot’s positivist connections. William Myers’s The Teaching of George Eliot26 makes the bald statement that “George Eliot was a Positivist” (p. 71). (With a capital letter! This would have surprised Eliot’s friends among the leaders of the English Positivist society, who kept urging her to join.) Hence it is not surprising that the generalizations about resignation that Eliot, Comte and numerous others share become doctrine in The Teaching. But the difference between Eliot’s sense of resignation and Comte’s more strenuous “submission” become obvious in Myers’s quotations of the latter on “the subordination of man to the world”: “Complete submission” “always tends to make altruism prevail over egoism by repressing personality, from which all revolt proceeds” (pp. 23–24). Comte hated revolt in any form, of course, but Eliot was considerably more sensitive to the dynamics of personal rebellion and self-suppression in such characters as Maggie Tulliver, Romola de’ Bardi and Dorothea Brooke. “Subordination,” “submission,” “repressi[on]” are hardly the words to describe a recommended way of life in Eliot’s fiction or in her own career. (For the relation of submission to an equally important element of Eliot’s orientation, rebellion, see the discussion of her “Notes on the Spanish Gypsy” in Chapter 6.) And Myers’s formula for all Eliot’s fiction – steady accumulation of “moral and psychological entanglements,” the hero’s or heroine’s “submission,” followed by a resolution in which altruism triumphs over egoism (p. 23) – sounds as hollow as any formula for Eliot, whether of a single novel or of the entire oeuvre. Since the differences between Comte’s ethics and Eliot’s art are partly a matter of temperament, a few animadversions on the philosopher’s personality may not be out of place. There is some irony in erecting as the prophet of altruism triumphing over egoism one of the most colossal egotists who ever lived. Auguste Comte displayed in his life and writings all the characteristics of a cult leader: total self-assurance (despite or because of having spent time in a mental institution), reliance on his rational powers to deduce all historical and future phenomena from his premises (with a special distaste for particulars that might impede his systematization), fierce combativeness with regard to his own master (Saint-Simon) and to his followers, the maintenance of an order of disciples with strong attention to the financial

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backing they could and did provide, fixation on an unpossessable woman whom he raised to sainthood after her death, the elaboration of a social utopia with an order of intellectuals as its elite, and at the apex a supreme leader – unnamed, but we can guess who. Eliot doesn’t express distaste for the man, but like Mill and Lewes she was explicit in rejecting the totalitarian implications of the Système – and we can make an educated guess at her response to the totalizing scheme of the Cours. Eliot’s explicit rejection of Comte’s “spiritual authority” or intellectual elite came late, in a manuscript essay, “Historic Guidance,” of the 1870s: “It has yet to be shown that the human being modified into a philosopher – still more a vast body of men so modified – will be exempt from the temptations or warping influences which have hitherto made corporations disposed to amplify their power even to tyranny … Doctrine, no matter of what sort, is liable to putrefy when kept in close chambers to be dispensed according to the will of men authorized to hold the keys.”27 Perhaps the most palatable presentation of the Comte influence is an unpublished dissertation by Michael Wolff, “Marian Evans to George Eliot: The Moral and Intellectual Foundations of Her Career.”28 It brings up an important and hitherto (in the present work) unmentioned aspect of Eliot’s development, the beginning of her lifelong relationship with George Henry Lewes. Wolff has repeated recourse to Lewes’s writings, particularly A [later: The] Biographical History of Philosophy (1846), so that Comte’s potential influence tends to be mediated by Lewes, making it the more plausible as a continuing influence on Eliot. What, then, did she know of Lewes’s writings in the early 1850s, and how did these affect her thinking? She was introduced to Lewes – “a sort of miniature Mirabeau in appearance” (Letters I, 367) – in October 1851 and had occasional social and professional encounters with him in the following years. She attended four of his plays – translation-adaptations from the French, written under pseudonyms (Letters II, 18, 34, 131 and 162) – and read his novel, Rose, Blanche, and Violet (Letters VIII, 51), his articles on Comte (Letters II, 54) and other articles and reviews in The Leader (the weekly of which he was co-editor), and the Biographical History of Philosophy in 1853 (Letters II, 126). After an early low estimation of his work (“defective,” “undiscriminating,” “unsatisfactory” are some of the choice words she had for some of them), she defended an article of his that had been disparaged (Letters II, 80) and came to regard him as “quite a pleasant friend” (Letters II, 97). Finally she eloped with him to Germany in her most spectacular act of self-liberation before becoming a novelist, and in Germany, where he was pursuing his research for a biography of Goethe, she read vast stretches of that writer’s enormous


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output in order to read Lewes’s The Life and Works of Goethe (1855) in manuscript (Journals, p. 24). One may conclude that she became thoroughly familiar with this many-sided man’s mind as well as with his heart. It is possible to trace Lewes’s evolving presentation of Comte through several stages. The Biographical History of 1846 contains such statements as these: “We have no hesitation in recording our conviction that the Cours de Philosophie Positive is the greatest work of our century, and will form one of the mighty landmarks to the history of opinion”;29 “The conception of a social science is due to M. Comte. No one before him ever dreamed of treating social problems otherwise than upon theological or metaphysical methods” (IV, 249); “We believe that Comte’s law [of the three stages] is the fundamental law of mental evolution” (IV, 251); “When the positive method is universally accepted – and the day we hope is not far distant, at least among the élite of humanity – then shall we again have unity of thought …” (IV, 256). In the edition of 1857, “much enlarged and thoroughly revised,” as the title page notes, these statements and the paragraphs in which they are made drop out. The chapter on Comte still concludes the history of philosophy, and “the positive Method is the only Method … on which truth can be found” (pp. 659–60), but the emphasis lies squarely on Comte’s classification of the sciences. Here Lewes registers a modest demurrer by inserting a word in his previous summary of the classification: “Psychology is not a science yet …” (IV, 264) becomes “Psychology is not a mature science yet …” (pp. 663–64 in the 1857 edition).30 Lewes’s Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences: Being an Exposition of the Principles of the Cours de philosophie positive of Auguste Comte31 is as straightforward as its subtitle suggests. It, too, aims to popularize the leading ideas of “the greatest thinker of modern times,” but the first part includes “a large admixture of criticism, illustration, new speculation and fact” (Preface). Psychology is included as an independent science, while in the second part, on social science and the philosophy of history, mere summation suffices, since the final two volumes of the Système had not as yet been published. (Lewes’s distaste for Comte’s political and religious doctrines would become marked on their appearance.) The opening passages suggest the difficulty with which Lewes pursued his task: I owe too much to the influence of Auguste Comte, guiding me through the toilsome active years, and giving the sustaining Faith which previous speculation had scattered, not to desire that others should likewise participate in it. For ten years it has been with me, surviving all changes of opinion, and modifying my whole mental history; and my debt of gratitude is inexpressible in words. If, after

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this recognition, I shall be found dissenting from some opinions energetically maintained by Comte and his unhesitating disciples, it is only necessary to remind the reader that reverence is not incompatible with independence. (p. 2)

Independence of thought is, of course, precisely what Comte, not merely as a personal tic but as a philosophic principle, would eschew – as he would Lewes’s deviationary tendencies. The moderations in Lewes’s view of Comte – still prepossessed with his greatness, studious of his copious learning in the sciences, and thrilled by his opening of a future for the social sciences – occurred in the years when Eliot and Lewes became increasingly attached. One might as readily infer that Lewes’s moderation regarding Comte was the result of his contact with Eliot as that his Comtism was a guiding light for her. While Lewes, following the pronouncements of Comte, describes Positivism as primarily a moral philosophy rather than an intellectual one (pp. 5 and 8–9) – i.e., that the intellect must serve the heart rather than the other way round – most of the exposition shows little sign of that salutary conviction. Comte’s history and philosophy of science remain the focus: his “conception of all the sciences – physical and social – as branches of one Science, to be investigated on one and the same Method”; and “that beautiful classification of the sciences,” arranging them “according to their dependence on each other” (pp. 10–11). But in Comte’s adherence to the already superseded tissue theory of Marie F. Bichat (of which more will be said in the chapter on Middlemarch to come) and to the pseudo-scientific phrenology of Franz J. Gall, we see his pretentions to promulgate scientific progress exposed as tenacious system maintenance. Lewes’s deferential treatment of these views brought down on him the withering criticism of T. H. Huxley in the “Science” section of the Westminster Review (Jan. 1854) and may have provoked him to become an experimental rather than a “book” scientist. It is when we arrive at Comte’s political philosophy that the full measure of his anachronism becomes evident. He is described by Lewes and others as a “philosophic socialist,” but not on principles that other socialists would be happy to acknowledge – although erstwhile Communists might well recognize him. In Lewes’s summary: “the absolute right of free inquiry, of which the dogma of unlimited liberty of conscience constitutes the fundamental principle … tends more and more to become a systematic obstacle to all true social reorganisation” (pp. 236–37); “The same may be said of the dogma of equality … In fact, far from bringing us nearer to a chimerical equality, the progress of civilization tends on the contrary, by its very nature, to develop extreme intellectual and moral inequality …” (p. 237); “the invariable spirit


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of the institution [of marriage] always consists in a natural subordination of woman …” (p. 261). In the Système, as Lewes summarizes it, Comte’s predictions of the social structure of the future are elaborated: the unitary proletariat has become a set of classes including “the real industrial hierarchy: placing in the highest rank the Bankers … next the Merchants, then the Manufacturers, and lastly the Agriculturalists” (pp. 333–34), while reserving pride of place for intellectuals: “The first application of this hierarchical theory to the new social economy leads us to conceive this speculative class as superior to the active class …” (p. 332). We have Comte’s assurance that “it would besides be evidently chimerical to dread the ultimate transformation of classes into castes, in an economy entirely free from the theological principle: for it is clear that castes could never have any solid existence without a religious consecration” (p. 336). “Chimerical” – a repeated word in Lewes’s exposition – indeed! What could George Eliot’s response to this philosophical and political system have been? We have no direct statement from her on the points singled out here, or even on the larger number that Lewes develops – an omission of some significance in itself. But in a review of the following years, she sets out philosophical predilections that accord not at all with those of Comte, although they are close to Mill’s and Lewes’s. In her review of Otto F. Gruppe’s Gegenwart und Zukunft der Philosophie in Deutschland (Present and Future of Philosophy in Germany),32 she plays up Gruppe’s empiricist credentials and rebukes him solely for his neglect of Mill’s importance. The review begins with a quotation from Gruppe: “‘The age of systems is passed … System is the childhood of philosophy; the manhood of philosophy is investigation’” (Essays, p. 148). Little more need be said of this as a rebuke to system-builders like Comte, but the deeper rebuke to him occurs in the author’s and reviewer’s vigorous empiricism, their emphasis on “investigation” – not at all the rationalistic deductiveness by which Comte operated (although he advocated investigation for others). The review is an expression of Eliot’s broadly empiricist credentials, although she does not enter into the epistemological refinements of the philosophy. In the review, Eliot goes beyond censuring Gruppe’s failure to recognize Mill’s importance for his thesis, to correct mistaken impressions of Mill’s thought. The censure: “the gist of [Gruppe’s] philosophical labours is partly to map out the road which John Mill (to whose work he seems to have given imperfect attention) has actually wrought out and made available” (p. 150). In the correction, Mill’s ideas of deductive and inductive method are clarified: “Professor Gruppe, in common with many before him, makes

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war against the syllogism [as the instrument of deduction]. He seems to us not to have rightly apprehended Mill’s analysis of the syllogism and the function he assigns to it, since he makes it an objection to that writer’s views that he gives an important place to deduction in his method. Deduction, as Mill shows, is not properly opposed to induction but to experiment, and is a means of registering and using the results of induction, indispensable to any great progress in science” (pp. 152–53). This is less a technical correction in logic than an emphasis on Mill’s experimental approach to knowledge, an improvement on Gruppe’s turn to “investigation.” Eliot’s summary of the latter’s contribution places a similar emphasis on the Millian vision of human progress through science; it upholds not only Gruppe’s call to “renounce metaphysics: … the ambitious attempt to form a theory of the universe” (p. 153), but also his implied adherence to Mill’s “a posteriori path which will lead, not indeed to heaven, but to an eminence whence we may see very bright and blessed things on earth” (p. 153). This is as close as Eliot came, to this point in her life, to affirming a philosophical position, and it is in the spirit of Mill’s scientific progressivism. During the years of Eliot’s developing relationship with Lewes, she was also enjoying a close friendship with Herbert Spencer, who worked across the road from the Westminster Review offices at the Economist. There is speculation that she would have welcomed a marriage proposal from him, but none was forthcoming from this eminently self-absorbed man, who never did marry. Beyond going out with him to concerts and plays, she followed his publications with attention; we have already noted her admiring reception of his critique of Comte’s speculative history of science, in favor of an empirical history of scientific developments. She welcomed another of his articles even more: “If you [Sara Hennell] don’t think the Universal Postulate first-rate, I shall renounce you as a critic” (Letters II, 118).33 Despite Eliot’s ballyhoo, the “Universal Postulate” comes down to a single logical proposition: a general statement is true if its opposite is inconceivable. This potentially amorous couple was deeply engaged in questions of logic; Spencer was exaggeratedly grateful, in Eliot’s opinion, for her suggested modification of his formulation of a logical relation developed by Mill (Letters II, 145). Another of Spencer’s articles in this period, “The Unknowable,” might have struck an even more sympathetic chord in Eliot, although she appears not to have read it until its inclusion in First Principles (1862), when she praises it (Letters III, 358). The essay was a peculiar one for a man who already showed signs of aspiring to bring the entire world of knowledge under his survey – eventually publishing volumes on most of the social and


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biological sciences as parts of his “synthetic philosophy.” Its thesis is the limits of knowledge in face of the “Unknowable,” a realm of speculation in metaphysical systems but one at which, like Kant, Spencer was unwilling to try his hand. He was content to leave it as a repository for any religious promptings he or others might be subject to. Eliot must have welcomed this as she did other speculations that acknowledge the limits of speculation, a tendency we may account to her sensitivity to human hybris rather than to a metaphysical or anti-metaphysical streak. But it was Social Statics (1850) that presented the Spencer that we have come to recognize as the peculiar thinker whose name has become almost a watchword for illiberalism in our more liberal age.34 The book’s subtitle suggests its dogmatic drive: The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of them Developed.35 The first condition for human happiness in Spencer’s view is freedom, especially freedom from governmental interference in almost all phases of life, with the consequences that have been associated with his name: a rejection of state education, regulation in the economic sphere (beyond protecting property), public sanitation, a national currency, a government postal system, poor laws (or other welfare schemes), etc. – the state to be limited to its policing and military functions, and even these to be watched with suspicion of their impeding personal freedom. There is more in Social Statics and in the books and essays that followed it than these narrow principles; there is a social philosophy of some ingenuity and plausibility, and Spencer is rightly accounted one of the founders of sociology as a discipline. But the question his work raises for Eliot studies is the degree of its vividness in her mind. She read the book in 1851, when she summarized it for Chapman’s publisher’s catalogue, cited Lewes’s view of it as “the best book he has seen on the subject,” and recommended it to a friend (Letters I, 364 and note). What could have attracted her attention, if not her full commitment? All appearances to the contrary, Spencer conceived of society on the organicist model that stresses human interdependence, and as a moralist recommended sympathy in governing human relations and thus as the basis of social stability. On the first of these points, the following may be cited: “the analogy between a society and a living creature is borne out to a degree quite unsuspected … This union of many men into one community, this increasing mutual dependence of units which were originally independent, this gradual segregation of citizens into separate bodies with reciprocally subservient functions, this formation of a whole consisting of numerous essential parts, this growth of an organism of which one portion cannot be injured without the rest feeling it, may all be generalized under the law of

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individuation” (p. 408). The surprise of finding so selfish a politics to be based on so collectivist a theory may be mitigated by grasping that this organicism is compatible, to his mind, with a strong individualist principle – the “tendency to individuate – to become a thing” – as the driving force in life. From this version of individualism there follows an equally unexpected consequence: “And rightly interpreted, the manifold forms of progress going on around us are uniformly significant of this tendency” (p. 408). This idea of progress would include political reforms like the extension of the franchise and economic reforms like the revocation of the Corn Laws and other restraints on trade, while rebuking what Spencer in another article called “State Tampering with Money and Banks” and other interventions. In the second of his surprisingly humane conceptions, we find the following derivation of morality from social necessity: In the preordained course of things, men have multiplied until they are constrained to live more or less in presence of each other … In this social state, the sphere of activity of each individual being limited by the spheres of activity of other individuals, it follows that the men who are to realize this greatest sum of happiness must be men of whom each can obtain complete happiness within his own sphere of activity without diminishing the spheres of activity required for the acquisition of happiness by others.36

This focus on the individual who “can obtain complete happiness within his own sphere of activity” may sound like another version of the individualist credo, but Spencer continues: to compass greatest happiness, the human constitution must be such as that each man may perfectly fulfill his own nature, not only without diminishing other men’s spheres of activity, but without giving unhappiness to other men in any direct or indirect way … let these beings be so constituted as that each, in addition to the pleasurable emotions personally received by him, can sympathetically participate in the pleasurable emotions of all others, and the sum total of happiness becomes largely increased … each shall be capable of receiving happiness from the happiness of the rest. (pp. 62–63)

Part of the difficulty in taking in these principles – which Spencer labels justice, negative beneficence and positive beneficence, respectively – is his characteristic mode of deriving what ought to be from what is, in an evolutionary perspective.37 Even more difficult to assimilate is the prominence of sympathy in his rather unemotional thinking. His promotion of sympathy as a social principle, alongside the well-known dicta of laissez faire, may explain the importance Eliot assigned to his book.


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The importance to Eliot of sympathy in the social and moral spheres has led other commentators to erect Comte (implausibly, in my view) as her strongest influence, yet it can be found writ large in Social Statics. She is noncommittal on the issues of government intervention in the private sphere, so we can’t conclude either that she favored or rejected Spencer’s political and economic ideas. Neither can we infer that she would have favored Mill’s version of political and economic liberalism, set out in the Principles of Political Economy, which she had read by this time, and in the classic works, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, etc., which she later read, since she doesn’t comment on their arguments. The most we can say is that she was not a devotee of laissez-faire ideology, and that mental gap may have been enough not only to leave her, like Spencer, open to the advances in political and economic life that were on the move in the mid-nineteenth century, but unmoved by the stridency of Victorian individualism. That stridency became, indeed, a critical subject in her last novel, Daniel Deronda. After all is noted on the specific philosophical issues raised here, what can be said of George Eliot’s state of mind in the early 1850s, in her years as a London journalist? To sum up: her favorable review of Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect acknowledges that civilization has made progress, not confined, as in this book, to certain phases of religious history. Her sustained reading of and reference to Mill’s works implies an empiricist view of improved forms of operation not only in science but in social science as related to government. As her review of Gruppe’s book on the present and future of philosophy (not only in Germany) makes explicit, she believed that experimental attention to both theoretical and concrete problems would bring humanity to improved states of affairs. As for herself, she harbored wide ambitions for her participation in reviving the Westminster Review: James Martineau, F. H. Newman, Mill, Froude – “These men can write more openly in the Westminster than anywhere else. They are amongst the world’s vanguard …” (Letters II, 49). Is there a better term than “progressive humanist” or “humanist progressive” to label Eliot at this phase of her life, if label we must?

chapter 4


George Eliot eloped to Germany with Lewes (July 20, 1854) ostensibly to accompany him while he pursued his project to write a biography of Goethe and, quite as likely, to put some distance between themselves and the social opprobrium that their union would generate. She had earlier resigned her position at the Westminster Review (around March 3, 1854, according to Letters VIII, 104). The reasons were manifold, and included tensions in the Chapman household that had previously induced her to change her residence; an editor’s normal difficulties with authors, compositors, et al., which tried her fragile nerves; her expectation (fulfilled) that Chapman would come a cropper financially, ending his proprietorship; and her feeling that she hadn’t succeeded in making the Westminster the ideal journal she envisaged. She was both right and wrong on the last point, for while not ideal, it had again become a force in English intellectual life. Review-articles like that by Harriet Martineau on the historian Niebuhr in the July 1852 issue, by John Oxenford on Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the April 1853 issue, and by T. H. Huxley on science in the January 1854 issue were operating at the highest level in those disciplines and putting important thinkers on the English intellectual map. But leave the editorship she did, and leave England, for a bit over seven months, she did. In doing so, she took steps toward becoming a member of a social grouping that has carried many names – Bohemians, Insurgents, etc. – among which I shall choose the most neutral, “outsiders.”1 An account of her life abroad may be subsumed under three heads: what she did, what she read, and what she thought. For the first, we have copious information, as she kept a diary, apparently for the first time (published in the volume of her Journals). She also wrote up these impressions in two longish sketches, “Recollections of Weimar 1854” and “Recollections of Berlin 1854–1855” (also in the Journals volume). These, again, formed the basis of two travel pieces, “Three Months in Weimar” and “Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar.”2 They recount her socializing with the likes of Franz 72


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Liszt and his entourage, Otto Gruppe, whose philosophical book she would review, Adolf Stahr, whose works in art history she also reviewed, K. A. Varnhagen von Ense, a leading intellectual and statesman, to whom Lewes had been introduced by Carlyle (who would regret his recommendation of this vile seducer), et al. She was even introduced to David Strauss, although their interview was hampered by her still awkward conversational German. What did she learn from these encounters? It would be cavalier to reduce her cultural experience to specific points, but one thing she must have observed was that not every nation socially ostracized a woman who lived with a man without benefit of clergy, for there was the Princess Wittgenstein, apparently suffering no diminution from living openly with Liszt. As for the latter’s pianism – “For the first time in my life I beheld real inspiration” (Letters II, 170). In more mundane social life, she responded well to German Gemütlichkeit: “One sees everywhere in Germany what is the rarest of all things in England – thorough bien-être, freedom from gnawing cares and ambitions, contentment in inexpensive pleasures with no suspicion that happiness is a vice which we must not only not indulge in ourselves but as far as possible restrain others from giving way to” (Letters II, 185). Like many a traveler’s report, this tells us more about her view of the condition of England than it does about Germany. For the more serious doings of these months, there is her translation of Spinoza’s Ethics to show (although it was completed only upon her return to England). This remained unpublished during her lifetime, through a contre-temps over its publisher’s contract, a contre-temps for which Lewes was not without responsibility.3 Eliot had been prepared for her work by Lewes’s glowing account of Spinoza in the Biographical History of Philosophy, seconded by J. A. Froude’s review of a new edition of his works in the Westminster Review (64 [July, 1855]), which she pronounced “admirable” (Letters II, 211). There is no indication in anything Eliot wrote that she fell in with Spinoza’s amazing stroke through the theological Gordian knot by identifying God and nature.4 There is no indication, either, of her identifying with Spinoza’s experience of apostacy and exclusion, with consequences for his achievement set out by Leo Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952) and others in his wake.5 Finally, there is no trace in her work of his practical ethics, which required Olympian intellectual distance, a version of Stoic-Epicurean apatheia, in confronting the apparent (but only apparent) imperfections of the universe. (Leibnitz’s theodicy – “the best of all possible worlds,” in Voltaire’s phrase – is for Spinoza a world as good as it can be, without undue optimism.) The closest Eliot was to come to a

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Spinozistic view was in the area of psychology; the philosopher has recently been recognized as a forerunner of the understanding of mind and brain as two names for the same thing, or as aspects of one thing.6 In Lewes’s subsequent writings on Spinoza and in his own research in physiological psychology, this insight is adumbrated, and Eliot’s participation in publishing his Problems of Life and Mind places her in the van of its tenuous advance into modern science. Her work on the Ethics involved a shift in Eliot’s translating range from German to Latin, but also represents a continuity of expertise in the rendition of difficult philosophical-religious works. Before leaving England in 1854, she published a translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums (1843) as The Essence of Christianity (1854). Together with numerous reviews of books on religion, both before and shortly after her return to England, this constitutes a body of writing that gives us an idea of Eliot’s state of mind on religious issues at this time. “With the ideas of Feuerbach I everywhere agree …,” she wrote, in the course of her translating work (Letters II, 153) – for her, a rare statement of bald approval.7 What was Feuerbach’s big idea – for his ideas may perhaps without excessive reduction be subsumed under one?8 Briefly stated (no mean feat, given Feuerbach’s Hegelian idiom), the idea is that in worshipping a god, especially one who is incarnated as a human being, humanity (or at least its Christian division) worships itself, or the ideal form of itself: “The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man” (p. 14). This idea, or a version of it, had already been presented to Eliot’s mind in the conclusion of Strauss’s Life of Jesus, as we have seen, and the idea must have had its appeal both to her strong idealistic tendencies and to her equally strong humanist orientation. An especially resonant extension of the idea in its Christian and Buddhist versions must have attracted her: “God suffers – suffering is the predicate – but for men, for others, not for himself. What does that mean in plain speech? Nothing else than this: to suffer for others is divine; he who suffers for others, who lays down his life for them, acts divinely, is a God to men” (p. 60). This insight would seem to give religion a new lease on life, but Feuerbach is no mean iconoclast: “Religion is the relation of man to his own nature, – therein lies its truth and its power of moral amelioration; but to his nature not recognised as his own, herein lies its untruth, its limitation, its contradiction to reason and morality; herein lies the noxious source of religious fanaticism … all the horrible scenes, in the tragedy of religious history” (p. 197). Respect for its ideality and disdain for many of


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its influences: such is the balanced view of religion in both Feuerbach and Eliot. How many of the moves in Feuerbach’s argument (if its bald and repeated assertions can be called that) in support of this idea Eliot acceded to, it is impossible to say.9 She cannot have agreed with everything in the book, as she claimed, for some of its propositions are over the top, for example, the Jews’ “principle, their God, is the most practical principle in the world, – namely egoism; and moreover egoism in the form of religion … science, like art, arises only out of polytheism, for polytheism is the frank, open, unenvying sense of all that is beautiful and good without distinction …” (p. 114).10 Where she was in undoubted sympathy with Feuerbach is in the ethical implications of his idea: “The other is my thou, – the relation being reciprocal … In another, I first have the consciousness of humanity; through him I first learn, I first feel, that I am a man: in my love for him it is clear to me that he belongs to me and I to him, that we two cannot be without each other, that only community constitutes humanity” (p. 158). (This passage must have been a source for Martin Buber’s famous doctrine, though I cannot prove it.) We must therefore fold in The Essence of Christianity with other works that helped to furnish Eliot’s own version of the religion of humanity. What did she read while living in Germany (or soon after), some of which books she reviewed? The list is an impressive one. I give these titles only to convey a sense of the depth and breadth of Eliot’s immersion in German culture.11 She read books about Germany: Mme de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (On Germany), Varnhagen von Ense’s Denkwürdigkeiten (Memoirs), Adolf Stahr’s Weimar und Jena, Johannes Scherr’s Deutsche Kultur- und Sittengeschichte (History of German Culture and Customs), R. G. Gottschall’s Die deutsche National-Literatur, A. F. C. Vilmar’s Geschichte der deutschen National-Literatur, G. G. Gervinus’s Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen. She read German works of art criticism: J. J. Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of Ancient Art), Stahr’s Torso (reviewing portions of it on a number of occasions), Ludwig Ross’s Archäologische Aufsätze (Archaeological Essays), Heinrich Brunn’s Geschichte der griechischen Künstler (History of Greek Artists). She read German reactions to other countries: Stahr’s Ein Jahr in Italien (A Year in Italy), K. E. Vehse’s Memoirs of the Court of Austria (a translation, which she reviewed, of part of a much longer work), H. L. H. von Pückler-Muskau’s Tour in England, Ireland, and France and Friedrich Gerstacker’s Nach Amerika. She read in or on Germanic mythology: August Schrader’s Germanische Mythologie, Wolfgang Menzel’s Zur deutschen

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Mythologie, Friedrich Panzer’s Bayerische Sagen und Brauche (Bavarian Sayings and Customs), Ludwig Bechstein’s Romantische Märchen und Sagen, Martin Meyer’s Sagen-Kränzlein aus Tirol (A Wreath of Sayings from Tirol), and the Nibelungenlied. (Her reading of the Grimm brothers’ Märchen collection came later.) She read German philosophy: works by Otto Gruppe besides the one she reviewed, F. H. Jacobi’s Briefe über Spinoza (Letters on Spinoza), A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, Lessing’s Laocoon, and Aus Herders Nachlass (From Herder’s Remains). In Stimmung with Lewes’s research on Goethe, she read almost everything by that overachieving polymath – on which, more later. She also read the poets Ludwig Uhland, Friedrich Halm, Ferdinand Freiligrath, K. L. Börne and A. H. Hoffmann von Fallersleben, and reviewed an anthology of translations by Mary Anne Burt. (Her reading and reviewing of Heine calls for subsequent extensive treatment.) She read German fiction: J. J. C. von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus, Fanny Lewald’s Wandlungen (Transformations) and Berthold Auerbach’s Schatzkästlein des Gevattersmanns (Grandfather’s Treasure-chest). She read and saw performances of German drama: Schiller’s Die Räuber (The Robbers) (following earlier immersion in his works), Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, Minna von Barnhelm and Emilia Galotti, August von Kotzebue’s Der arme Poet (the first sign of a longstanding attraction to his plays – or was it Lewes’s?), and potboilers by the likes of W. Friedrich (a pseudonym), Friedrich Halm and J. E. von Plötz. She socialized with and attended concerts by Liszt, read his articles on Wagner, and read the latter’s Kunstwerk der Zukunft (Artwork of the Future). And she attended German opera – Gluck, Beethoven, Wagner – as well as museums of German painting and sculpture. What did she get from her reading of Goethe? One might focus on the effect of his tragedies, Egmont, Iphigenie auf Tauris and Torquato Tasso, on her developing conception of tragedy (to be discussed below). One might look at suggestions rather than influences, like Iphigenia as a model of female heroism (or the more specific relevance of the heroine of the quasiepic poem, Hermann und Dorothea, to her namesake). Or one might join Lewes in making much of Goethe as a scientist, generating the inspiration for Lewes’s beginning a second career as a scientist shortly after his return to England, in which he employed Eliot as a research assistant – to give her gathering molluscs for him a professional name. I shall instead focus on Goethe’s initiation of the fictional genre known as the Bildungsroman, based on his version of the pervasive German philosophical theme of Bildung.12 This concept of a comprehensive education achieved through a lifetime of


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personal development was based on the Humanitätsideal of the German version of the Enlightenment, the Aufklärung. From Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man to the educator Wilhelm von Humboldt and beyond, the potentialities of humanity’s progress were opened to the individual in the form of personal self-realization. In this optimistic process, there is a hint of a secular form of traditional teleology at work. In Kant, for example, mankind “works its way up to the condition in which all seeds which nature has planted can be fully developed, and the human species can fulfill its destiny on earth.”13 On the individual level, however, the possibilities are rather more limited by the prosaic character of life; as Hegel put it, commenting on the heroes of the novels of his day: “It is their aim to punch a hole in this order of things, to change the world … These struggles are, however, in the modern world nothing but the apprenticeship, the education of the individual at the hands of the given reality … For the conclusion of such an apprenticeship usually amounts to the hero getting the corners knocked off him.” But the seriocomic condition of apprenticeship is precisely what the Bildungsroman features, nowhere more extensively and vividly than in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren, years of learning, usually translated “Apprenticeship.” As Goethe put it to his faithful interlocutor, J. P. Eckermann, “the whole work seems to say nothing more than that man, despite all his follies and errors, being led by a higher hand, reaches some happy goal at last.”14 Perhaps needless to say, this providential or teleological note is lacking in Eliot’s reading of the novel and in her own fiction, where openness of and to experience prevails, but without guarantees. George Eliot did not have to wait for her German years to formulate a version of Bildung for herself. In a conversation with a French intellectual in 1852, when challenged sarcastically, “Est-ce-que nous sommes faits pour chercher le bonheur? Est-ce là, votre idée, dites moi,” she replied, “Mais non – nous sommes faites, je pense, pour nous développer le plus que possible” (Letters II, 5: “Are we made to search for happiness? Is that your idea, tell me … But no, we’re made, I think, to develop ourselves as much as possible”). Nor did she wait to read Wilhelm Meister to find the idea of personal development dramatized in fiction, for she had read Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a later example of the genre, in 1844.15 But Goethe’s novel struck a deeper chord, as evidenced by her 1855 essay, “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister.”16 This brief essay, ostensibly to mark the appearance of a new translation of the novel, was an outgrowth of her reading the book aloud with Lewes and an echoing of his account of it in his Life of Goethe (see the headnote

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in Essays for details). Most of the piece is devoted to refuting the puritanical bias against the novel, apparently a common one in England. As she sums up, “we dismiss the charge of immorality against Wilhelm Meister on these two counts – the absence of moral bias in the mode of narration, and the comfortable [i.e., happy] issues allowed to questionable actions and questionable characters” (p. 145). She goes on to “deeper considerations,” namely the novel’s tolerance toward characters who live together out of wedlock – a touchy point with Eliot, of course. Her most telling answer to the charge of immorality is a curious, comparative one: “The sphere of the artist has its limit somewhere,” she allows, and “Balzac, perhaps the most wonderful writer of fiction the world has ever seen, has in many of his novels overstepped this limit … But no one can say that Goethe has sinned in this way” (p. 146). (I shall have more to say of her view of Balzac’s realism in Chapter 5.) The essay’s moral thrust then emerges: “Everywhere [Goethe] brings us into the presence of living, generous humanity – mixed and erring, and self-deluding, but saved from utter corruption by the salt of some noble impulse, some disinterested effort, some beam of good nature, even though grotesque or homely. And his mode of treatment seems to us precisely that which is really moral in its influence” (p. 146). The novel’s morality conveys an even more generous idea of human beings: “the line between the virtuous and vicious, so far from being a necessary safeguard to morality, is itself an immoral fiction” (p. 147) – a rather advanced statement by a Victorian! Learning her view of Goethe’s “large tolerance,” his “moral superiority” (p. 147), we may anticipate the drift of the fiction she was to begin writing a couple of years later. We may understand this tolerance not merely in the broad terms of cosmopolitan outsiders like Eliot and Lewes but in the more specific context of those who conceive of life as Bildung, an emergence of human nobility from the dross of earth-bound experience and personal limitation. It is no accident that most of Eliot’s novels either are or contain elements of the Bildungsroman: these would include The Mill on the Floss, Romola, and one of the three main plots of Middlemarch, as well as the “Jewish” half of Daniel Deronda. A peculiarity in Eliot’s Bildungsromane that has not always drawn favorable reactions may, in this context, find a rationale. Romola’s final state in her novel is a settled but limited, ambiguous one, Dorothea’s is a suspended one, predicted to be subsidiary to her husband’s political career, and Daniel’s future is probably less that of a Zionist agitator than as a scholar researching Jewish archives. (Maggie’s life is, of course, more sharply resolved, by death, but that in turn has given dissatisfaction.) In defense


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of such lame resolutions it can be said that at least they’re better than the more definite outcomes of Bildungsromane according to Hegel: “In the last analysis he usually gets his girl and some kind of job, marries and becomes a philistine just like the others.”17 That isn’t, however, how Wilhelm Meister ends; as the hero himself assesses, “We are led with great solemnity to a place which truly inspires awe [the esoteric Society of the Tower], we are allowed to see the most wondrous visions, we are given scrolls full of marvellous, secret sayings [by the wise-man ‘Abbe’ of the Society] – of which we admittedly understand but the smallest part – we are informed that up to now we were apprentices, we are pronounced ready and allowed to go, and we are no wiser than before” (Swales, p. 69, quoting Carlyle’s translation). As Wilhelm’s exasperation suggests, this is a seriocomic resolution that smacks more of the picaresque tradition (of which the Bildungsroman may be considered the Germanic rendition) than of the confirmatory Masonic rites of Mozart’s Magic Flute. An explanation of Goethe’s approach to (or rather, withdrawal from) firm resolutions may be made in terms of temperament: “Goethe himself was reluctant to strengthen the thesis or central idea of his novel: he expressed dislike for ‘any clear-cut message which appeals to the conceptual faculty alone’” (Swales, p. 70). But a more adequate explanation lies with the concept of human freedom implied in the concept of Bildung: “Ultimately, the novel comes to rest on an article of faith: the world gives the individual the room and the time to grow as his selfhood demands … But in the last analysis the world will help him to find himself when he is ready to cope adequately with any given experience. In one sense, then, there is a happy ending, but it is perfunctory because the process of living and erring goes on” (Swales, p. 72). How much of this Goethean openness to life is reflected in the open endings of Eliot’s novels must await closer inspection of her work. The other German writer whom Eliot read almost to completion was Heinrich Heine, perhaps the least obvious choice for this idealistic sérieuse. The title of her long essay on his life and work, “German Wit: Heinrich Heine,” 18 suggests her taking up a challenge to validate an oxymoron. She posits the prejudices of her English readers as a given: “the German shows the absence of that delicate perception, that sensibility to gradation, which is the essence of tact and taste, and the necessary concomitant of wit. All his subtlety is reserved for the region of metaphysics. For Identität in the abstract, no one can have an acuter vision, but in the concrete he is satisfied with a very loose approximation. He has the finest nose for Empirismus in philosophical doctrine, but the presence of more or less tobacco-smoke in the air he breathes is imperceptible to him” (p. 221). The basis of this

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disparagement is thus a quasi-metaphysical one: the lack of wit rests on a lack of a sense of the concrete, and the latter is an impediment not only to fullness of life but to realistic philosophy. (As if to give an example of the quality that Germans are lacking, the passage continues: “A German comedy is like a German sentence: you see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end …” [p. 221].) Her procedure involves an extended distinction, in the best Germanic manner, between wit and humor, in the course of which her own distaste is vented (p. 222), with a weak palliative at the end (“No one reveres and treasures the products of the German mind more than we do” – modified in a later edition (p. 223 and note). The entire passage exhibits some of the frustration as well as the rewards she experienced during her German sojourn. Turning to Heine, she turns to an exception, with a suggested explanation: “True, this unique German wit is half a Hebrew …” (p. 223). The issue of Heine’s half-Jewishness isn’t further developed (and isn’t explained in the later edition; he was a convert to Christianity), but the implied distinction between Germanic idealists and Jewish ironists comes out in another form later in the essay: “to use his own distinction, Heine is a Hellene – sensuous, realistic, exquisitely alive to the beautiful; while [his friend Ludwig] Börne was a Nazarene – ascetic, spiritualistic, despising the pure artist as destitute of earnestness” (p. 238; Börne, a poet and ardent political liberal, was the subject of a biography by Heine, documenting their ambivalent relationship). The peculiarity of this contrast lies not only in anticipating Matthew Arnold’s classic distinction between Hebrews and Hellenes but in modifying – in part, reversing – its terms: the Germanic poet is now placed among pious Hebrews (“Nazarenes” connoting here not early Christians but Old Testament moralists), while the “Jewish” poet becomes true Greek in his esthetic and concrete (even “sensuous”) sense of life. Eliot, despite a reputation that extends to the present day for moralism rather than lightness-of-being, here clearly puts herself on the side of the latter.19 The whole discussion displays, however, the inconsistency that marks all such generalizations about national character, which Eliot was prone to make, perhaps against her better judgment. When she turns to Heine’s works, two further comparisons become salient: his lyric poetry is different from, but just as good as, Goethe’s, and his prose is far better than the run of German prose. On the poetry: “Both have the same masterly, finished simplicity and rhythmic grace; but there is more thought mingled with Goethe’s feeling – his lyrical genius is a vessel that draws more water than Heine’s … But, for this very reason, Heine touches our hearts more strongly; his songs are all music and feeling –


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they are like birds that not only enchant us with their delicious notes, but nestle against us with their soft breasts, and make us feel the agitated beating of their hearts” (pp. 248–49). Turning to the other comparison: as an example of the kind of style Eliot has in mind in praising Heine’s prose above the usual Germanic, the last sentence quoted may serve. The striking aspect of her stylistic comparison is its ultimate preference: Heine “is far more an artist in prose than Goethe. He has not the breadth and repose, and the calm development which belong to Goethe’s style, for they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over its effects” (p. 251). By way of qualification, Eliot remained moralistic, or at least attentive to her readers’ moralistic taste, by acknowledging Heine’s occasional “coarseness” as a defect. As if to acknowledge that only the ipsissima verba will make her preference prevail, she closes the essay, already stocked with ample quotations from Heine, with a few more of his bons mots. What can we say of this essay as an account not of Heine but of Eliot? Her evident enjoyment of his wit suggests that he had given her some pleasures she had appeared previously to lack. The question whether these are more strictly called constituents of the comic or of the tragic sense of life must remain suspended until we come to the fiction that would soon follow. Heine clearly helped develop her sense of humor, in the colloquial not the sophisticated sense in which she defines humor in the essay. Prior to this time, her expressions of fun and ridicule were limited to the occasional lame jokes that she passed along to her correspondents, most often to Sara Hennell. (It’s possible that her sense of humor was stimulated by associating with Lewes, but the retailed jokes in his correspondence aren’t much above the level of hers.) This comic sense would be drawn upon and amply forthcoming in the fiction.20 What was she thinking in her German Wanderjahr? The addition of comedy to George Eliot’s mental repertoire was only one of her significant acquisitions in Germany. A book on Greek comedy by a Frenchman, Guillaume Guizot’s Ménandre: Étude historique et littéraire sur la comédie et la société grecque (1855), provided the further insight, in her Leader review,21 that comedy was “tragedy in the disguise of mirth” – Coleridge had previously spread the word that the two are reciprocals of each other. Another Germanic acquisition was her idea of tragedy, if not of the tragic sense of life she was to develop. There are certainly fresh ideas in her essays on Goethe and Heine, though not so marked as to constitute deeply original thinking. But in her essay on Sophocles’s Antigone, she began to respond creatively to German ideas in the philosophy of art. In addition, the Grecian

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Geist that was one of the chief resources of German Kultur made its impression on her through the art-historical writings of J. J. Winckelmann, Adolf Stahr and Ludwig Ross. Eliot’s review of a school edition of Sophocles’s Antigone, “The Antigone and its Moral,”22 marks a point of entry for German ideas into England, of the same kind as those effected by Coleridge and Carlyle before her. The brief review begins with a reference to A. W. Schlegel’s Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 1809), setting the stage for a theory not found in his work but part of the intensive German discussion of Greek tragedy in this period. Correcting the anonymous editor’s introductory view that the play’s central concern is with “‘reverence for the dead and the importance of the sacred rites of burial’” (p. 263), Eliot makes a new point in English dramatic criticism: “The turning point of the tragedy is … the conflict between these and obedience to the State. Here lies the dramatic collision: the impulse of sisterly piety which allies itself with reverence for the Gods, clashes with the duties of citizenship; two principles, both having their validity, are at war with each [other]” (pp. 262–63). This is argued like a German, and indeed it is a German idea, given new force in Eliot’s version. The idea is well established as a Hegelian one,23 but it has other provenances. There is no indication in the sources that Eliot read any of Hegel’s works, though an early reference to his ideas about the power of sound (Letters I, 247) suggests that she had some access to them. Her source was more likely Philip August Böckh’s scholarly edition and translation, Der Sophokles Antigone: Griechisch und deutsch (1843), for the review makes two references to him. In the first, he is coupled with one of his scholarly antagonists in a somewhat condescending way (“fine tragedies can never become mere mummies for [J. G. J.] Hermanns and Böckhs to dispute about” [p. 262]); in the second, his authority is accorded due respect: “The best critics have agreed with Böckh in recognising this balance of principles, this antagonism between valid claims …” (p. 264). The scholar’s reputation as the “‘chief representative’ of the view later identified with Hegel” (p. 264n.) is thereby validated.24 Eliot goes, however, beyond her German sources: they generally regard it [“this balance, this antagonism”] as springing simply from the polytheistic conception, according to which the requirements of the Gods often clashed with the duties of man to man. But, is it the fact that this antagonism of valid principles is peculiar to polytheism? Is it not rather that the struggle between Antigone and Creon represents the struggle between elemental tendencies and established laws by which the outer life of man is gradually and painfully being


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brought into harmony with his inward needs. Until this harmony is perfected, we shall never be able to attain a great right without also doing a wrong. (p. 264)

So there it is, as pithy a summation of the tragic sense of life as one may require. It is a Weltanschauung, a worldview, if ever there was one, and pervades the fiction to follow. Man is a multiply divided creature, split within by “elemental tendencies” and without by universal conditions of existence, although he’s “gradually and painfully” approaching a greater harmony. There is progress toward a better life, but it must be paid for in the coin of the moral realm. Eliot’s conclusions on the ethical and political consequences of this viewpoint are worth quoting in full: Reformers, martyrs, revolutionists, are never fighting against evil only; they are also placing themselves in opposition to a good – to a valid principle which cannot be infringed without harm. Resist the payment of ship-money, you bring on civil war; preach against false doctrines, you disturb feeble minds and send them adrift on a sea of doubt; make a new road, and you annihilate vested interests; cultivate a new region of the earth, and you exterminate a race of men. Wherever the strength of a man’s intellect, or moral sense, or affection brings him into opposition with the rules which society has sanctioned, there is renewed the conflict between Antigone and Creon; such a man must not only dare to be right, he must also dare to be wrong – to shake faith, to wound friendship, perhaps, to hem in his own powers. Like Antigone, he may fall a victim to the struggle, and yet he can never earn the name of a blameless martyr any more than the society – the Creon he has defied, can be branded as a hypocritical tyrant. Perhaps the best moral we can draw is that to which the Chorus points – that our protest for the right should be seasoned with moderation and reverence, and that lofty words – megaloi logoi [in Greek letters in the original] – are not becoming to mortals. (pp. 264–65)

It is this somber sense of life – the often fatal duplicity of human thought, intention and action – that made George Eliot the first and perhaps the greatest of tragic novelists. In the decades after Eliot’s time, the English novel, comedic from its origins, would be opened to a vision given to English poets from Shakespeare to Yeats, in the hands of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad.25 It is in this context that the most famous – or at least most often quoted – essay by Eliot must be read. “The Natural History of German Life”26 has frequently been cited not only for Eliot’s developing sense of realism, preparatory to her writing fiction, but also for its critique of sociological abstractions. The ideological implications of the ascribed ideas will bear further scrutiny. We may first consider the author of the two books

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reviewed, Wilhelm Heinrich [von] Riehl (1823–97), more closely. A journalist with a peripatetic bent, Riehl became an immensely popular author with Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (Civil Society) (1851, with further editions to 1887), Land und Leute (Land and People) (1854, with five more editions up to 1861), and Die Familie (The Family) (1855), all parts of a four-volume Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutsche Sozialpolitik (Natural History of the People as the Foundation of a German Social Politics).27 So valuable, indeed, was he in the eyes of the Elector of Bavaria that he became professor (and later rector) at the University of Munich, director of the National Museum, and member of the Bavarian nobility (hence the “von”) – even Geheimrat (Privy Councilor). Reflecting this rags-to-riches success story is Riehl’s passage from revolutionary in the 1848 period to arch-conservative member of a royal court. He was neither a historian nor a sociologist by training but closer to being a political ideologue. His thinking lies in the tradition of Romantic idealism, as his essay on his (literally) pedestrian method of intuiting the spirit of a local population, in preference to inspection of data, makes clear. The strength of his method lies in allowing awareness of regional and local differences in Germany’s varied regions and of their significance as the course of nineteenth-century development transformed the country. It was this transformation he was sent on earth to resist, holding to folk values not only as a precious cultural but also as a useful political resource. As such, he is an important link in the chain of thinkers from Herder and other Romantics to the modern anthropologists who lament the loss of such values and varieties.28 The originality but also the downside of Riehl’s contribution lies in his sociology of class. Going beyond his horizontal, geographical view of German society, he developed a vertical account of the classes imposing themselves on the deeply rooted peasantry, his protégés. These – the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and a new “fourth estate” – make him an early opposite number to Marx, working at the same time and with many of the same materials, but arriving at very different conclusions. (Some of their parallels are striking: both were Rhinelanders, journalists, expatriates, amateur sociologists, devotees of class analysis, etc.) Particularly noteworthy is his insight into the formation of a distinct class of intellectuals, journalists, political hacks, et al. – anticipations of what is today known in sociological circles as the New Class. But his political insight was colored by sentimental predispositions, so that the thrust of his call to action was an appeal to the aristocracy to show greater social responsibility, while his anticipation of the future was the emergence of the peasantry as the progressive class (!). On his


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vehemence against social outsiders and its relevance to the anti-Semitic application of his writings, I defer comment. Suffice to say that his historical significance as pillar of the Bavarian court and defender of regional differences would be rendered nugatory by the unification of Germany which Bismarck effected in the years following his main publications. How does “The Natural History of German Life” square with these characteristics of Wilhelm von Riehl? While it constitutes a review of the first two volumes of his Natural History, it is also the occasion for Eliot to lay down a set of ideas on society and on knowledge of society. The difficulty in interpreting the essay lies in distinguishing her own thoughts from his; the difficulty is compounded by her unscholarly practice of quoting him without quotation marks. Thus, for example, a paragraph on page 274 of the Essays volume begins, “In Germany, perhaps more than in any other country, it is among the peasantry that we must look for the historical type of the national physique” – a translation of Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft, Book I, section I, chapter 1, p. 58 in the new German edition (p. 156 of the translation cited above). With minor modifications, Eliot’s translation continues on to the sentence ending, “must seek his models among the peasantry.” The remainder of the paragraph, on the cheerful uniformity of peasants (“Hans” and “Kunz”), is based on the next paragraph but one of Riehl’s text, where several generations of Hanses make a showing. This practice of intermittent unmarked translation continues for extensive segments of the essay29 and raises the question, did Eliot believe all these things about German peasants and social theory or was she merely presenting Riehl’s views in a somewhat misleading manner? To answer, we must take stock of these views, especially where Eliot gives signs of approval. Thus, “Riehl well observes that the feudal system, which made the peasant the bondman of his lord, was an immense benefit … – rescued the peasant from vagabondage, and laid the foundation of persistency and endurance in future generations” (p. 278). Whatever we may think of these virtues in face of most peasants’ sustained immiseration, there is no denying that this is a defense of, or at least an apology for, serfdom, which could readily be applied to the benefits of slavery for the slave. Did Eliot believe this? It is hard enough to grasp that Riehl did. Similarly, “To the mind of the peasant, law presents itself as the ‘custom of the country,’ and it is his pride to be versed in all customs … Riehl justly urges the importance of simplifying law proceedings, so as to cut off this vanity at its source …” (p. 279). The argument recalls the typical populist one against excessive complexity in legal systems – here turned into a patronizing desire to protect the peasant from excessive pride or vanity in

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mastering such “customs.” And Eliot approves, her evident condescension toward the intellectually backward overmastering her normal sympathy for the disadvantaged. What is the provocation of her expressing this normally subdued snobbery? A hint of its roots emerges in Eliot’s distaste for the sophisticated sentimentality typical in artistic portrayals: “The German novelists who undertake to give pictures of peasant-life fall into the same mistake as our English novelists; they transfer their own feelings to ploughmen and woodcutters, and give them both joys and sorrows of which they know nothing” (pp. 279–80). Eliot makes an implicit claim to know, not only what the peasants don’t feel, but what they do: “no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no sense of beauty beams, no humour twinkles, – the slow utterance, and the heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal the camel … That delicious effervescence of the mind which we call fun, has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart pot” (p. 269). This is not Riehl but Eliot speaking: she shows not his reverence for but her despair of the peasantry as a moral community. How does this knowledge of or attitude toward the peasantry color Eliot’s politics? Before venturing an answer, we must distinguish her political views from Riehl’s. In reporting the political implications of his work, she is careful to ascribe them to him:30 He sees in European society incarnate history, and any attempt to disengage it from its historical elements must, he believes, be simply destructive of social vitality. What has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. The external conditions which society has inherited from the past are but the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both. (p. 287)

Notable in this often quoted passage are the conservative argument against social revolution, based on the primacy of historical continuity; the historicist principle of historical change as following “necessary laws”; the idealist view that “external conditions” are the manifestation of “internal conditions,” rather than the materialist’s other way round; and the organicist metaphor for the interrelation and development of personal and social conditions. Beyond the counter-revolutionary argument, familiar from at least Edmund Burke on down, there is no warrant for taking these to be


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Eliot’s own fundamental ideas; historicist laws and idealist metaphysics are foreign to her thinking, while organicism operates for her as a metaphor but not as the vitalist reality current in the German tradition. Eliot’s version of the conservative argument against revolution carries a different emphasis: “The nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of development is going on … This vital connection with the past is much more vividly felt on the Continent than in England … for though our English life is in its core intensely traditional, Protestantism and commerce have modernized the face of the land and the aspects of society in a far greater degree than in any continental country …” (p. 288). This view of England’s more progressive character balances the necessity of preservation with the opportunities for development. She goes on to quote Ruskin, from the currently appearing Modern Painters IV, on cultural continuity on the Continent, to support her view that England is more open to progress. Thus while her view of the English peasantry as a progressive class is markedly lower than Riehl’s of the German equivalent, Eliot is quite open to social change in ways that that social thinker resists. To grasp Eliot’s own political inclinations, we find them growing out of her derogatory but also sympathetic attitudes toward not only the peasantry but the working class. Novelists like Dickens and Eugene Sue are guilty of “encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want; or that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein everyone is caring for everyone else, and no one for himself” (p. 272). This acknowledgement of the limitations placed on the lower classes – their inability to afford the luxury of altruism – leads to an excoriation of reactionary plans for their improvement: “the dream that the uncultured classes are prepared for a condition which appeals principally to their moral sensibilities, – the aristocratic dilettantism which attempts to restore the ‘good old times’ by a sort of idyllic masquerading, and to grow feudal fidelity and veneration as we grow prize turnips, by an artificial system of culture …” (p. 272). The Essays’ editor correctly points out in a note that her direct allusion is to Disraeli’s “Young England” movement of the preceding decade, but her scythe cuts down the broader growth of medievalist nostalgia. She is equally unsympathetic to the Liberal or Radical politics of social progress, the belief that “all social questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbours may be settled by algebraic equations, – … none of these diverging mistakes can co-exist with a real knowledge of the People, with a thorough study of

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their habits, their ideas, their motives” (p. 272). Yet while skeptical of statistical analyses and predictive solutions, the scene she views is open to less deterministic political approaches to improvement. Social progress demands intimate social knowledge, then, and since the “precious observations” of the “landholder, the clergyman, the mill-owner, the mining-agent” tend to be neglected, another source of knowledge is the desideratum. Calling for a “man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth,” not blinkered by a “professional point of view,” to report on “the natural history of our social classes, especially the small shop-keepers, artisans, and peasantry, – the degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious teachers, and the degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the interaction of the various classes on each other … in a book well nourished with specific facts, his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer” (pp. 272–73). It should be observed that the principle of factually well-informed consultation for the guidance of the “social and political reformer” is fully consistent with the doctrine of the necessary application of scientific inquiry to politics that Eliot found in Mill’s Logic. But the man of “moral and intellectual breadth” to write such a study would be very different from the reactionary and polemical amateur sociologist she is reviewing here. Eliot calls this desired work the “natural history” of social classes, in accord with the title of her essay and with Riehl’s comprehensive title; the term is also used in a passage on science generally, one that bears close scrutiny. The passage offers a review of Comte’s hierarchy of the sciences, probably based on Lewes’s brief exposition in his Biographical History of Philosophy, as the Essays’ editor helpfully notes. But a comparison of her text with Lewes’s source, the second chapter of the Cours de philosophie positive, yields some interesting deviations from that orthodoxy. After running through the Comtean progression from mathematics and physics to chemistry and biology, Eliot gets to the point where “the conditions of life in general [the object of biology] branch out into its special conditions, or Natural History … And in this series or ramification of the sciences, the more general science will not suffice to solve the problems of the more special” (p. 290). Eliot is trenching on Comte’s distinction between “two classes of natural science. The first consists of the abstract or general sciences, whose object is the discovery of the laws regulating the different classes of phenomena in all conceivable cases. The other group comprises the concrete, special, or descriptive sciences … whose function consists in applying these laws to the actual history of the different existing beings.”31


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We can guess which kind of science a rationalist like Comte would prefer: “The abstract sciences are, therefore, fundamental ones, and our studies in this course are concerned with them alone.” He compares his distinction with the “distinction which is usually made in nearly all scientific works between theoretical physics and natural history, properly so called.” The distinction is, then, between what Comte calls “theoretical physics” (a broader category than what we would mean by the term today) and “natural history”; the latter is exemplified by zoology and botany, as branches of biology, and by mineralogy as contrasted with chemistry. But this is not, apparently, what Eliot means by “natural history.” She continues: “So Social Science, while it has departments which in their fundamental generality correspond to mathematics and physics, namely, those grand and simple generalizations which trace out the inevitable march of the human race as a whole, and, as a ramification of these, the laws of economical science, has also, in the departments of government and jurisprudence, which embrace the conditions of social life in all their complexity, what may be called its Biology, carrying us on to innumerable special phenomena which outlie the sphere of science, and belong to Natural History” (p. 290). Although Eliot bases her distinction on the Comtean notion of the advance of science “from the general to the special, from the simple to the complex” (p. 290), and offers examples of the Comtean version of sociology (“those grand and simple generalizations” of “the inevitable march of the human race as a whole”) and economics, on the one hand, and of government (which today we call “political science”) and jurisprudence on the other, she ends up, via the confusing metaphor of “Biology,” beyond the realm of science altogether – “carrying us on to innumerable special phenomena which outlie the sphere of science” – the sphere of Natural History. A summary of this mélange of terms and examples may be useful: Comte: general science (= “theoretical physics”) for example, biology, sociology special science (= “natural history”) for example, zoology, mineralogy Eliot: “more general science” for example, biology, sociology, economics “more special” science, for example, government, jurisprudence (= social science’s “Biology”) Natural History (the study of “special phenomena which outlie the sphere of science”) [= social history?] What are we to make of this deviation from Comtean orthodoxy? Just as he favors the theoretical sciences, Eliot clearly directs attention to the

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“concrete, special, or descriptive sciences,” to use Comte’s phrase. In a letter of this period (Letters II, 403), she adds further thoughts on the importance of “individual suffering and individual joy” in such studies, although she grants that issues concerning the collective mind – “religious ideas and the moral tendencies” – are open to social science. But her attention to personal experience goes so far as to exclude some of its potential subject matter from the reach of science. We may infer that this concept of science and its limits accounts for her favoring the “natural history of our social classes” (p. 272), so that in place of social science she would prefer social history, as it is called today. In hindsight, we can see that Eliot has anticipated much of the argument in philosophical hermeneutics on the distinction between the natural and the human sciences, and uncannily predicted the current ascendancy of social history in historiography and of “thick description” in anthropology. She also suggests that particularistic attention to the complexity and subtlety of the common life may lie beyond scholarly accounts altogether, calling for another mode of writing. The Riehl essay has often been read as a program for Eliot’s own fiction, so a close inspection of it as a challenge to herself is in order. She begins: “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist [i.e., that the artist gives us] is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but 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” (p. 270). We should note that Eliot isn’t discounting appeals for social progress based on “generalizations and statistics,” but holds that since these require “a moral sentiment already in activity,” the “pictures of human life such as a great artist can give” are more effective in enlisting the “trivial and the selfish” into concern for “what is apart from themselves.” For this rhetorical task, realist representation self-consciously comes into play: “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People” (p. 271). (Not art alone is venerated here but also the “life of the People”; the capitalization is curious, given the essay’s distaste for abstractions.) Thus the artist’s task is set in a Romantic oxymoron: “We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness” (p. 271). “Taught to feel” – like Matthew Arnold’s “Who … can make us feel?” – implies realist depiction


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with emotional and moral effect, not directed merely toward the immediate object of sympathy but stimulating in the reader a habit of mind and heart. It is quite a challenge, and her subsequent challenge to Dickens to undertake such a program is ultimately addressed to herself. What can we say of “The Natural History of German Life” as a review of Riehl’s books, as an essay on the representation of lower-class life, and as an ars poetica for the budding novelist? A just balance in evaluating it ought to proceed under the terms of the double vision of human enterprises quoted above from the Antigone essay. There is no gainsaying the value for Eliot and for ourselves in her setting out here an approach to fiction that would inform her efforts in the genre. There also lies some value in discovering the depth of Eliot’s contempt for the country people among whom she was raised, and the evidently heroic effort that must have gone into presenting such people with sensitivity and respect. But there is a distressing aspect to her promotion of the ideas of Wilhelm von Riehl, even after taking into account the modifications and special stresses we have observed. Surely one may praise the virtues of the peasantry without the baggage of the Volksgeist (popular-spirit) ideology with which his account is freighted.32 This tradition, beginning with Herder and running through a number of important nineteenth-century thinkers in various fields, became in the twentieth a ground for the emergent fascist ideology of racial exclusiveness, reactionary traditionalism and anti-Semitism. The historian George L. Mosse, in The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich,33 accords Riehl pride of place in his gallery of proto-fascists – pride here deriving from his greater distance from later entrants in the field. After reviewing Riehl’s roots in the Völkisch tradition descending from the German Romantics, Mosse focuses on his special contribution to the ideology, his targeting of the new class of rootless people he called the “proletariat”: “This group was a part of the contemporary population which could never sink roots of any permanence. In its ranks was the migratory worker[,] … the journalist, the polemicist, the iconoclast who opposed ancient custom, advocated manmade panaceas, and excited the people to revolt against the genuine and established order. Above all, there was the Jew, who by his very nature was restless. Although the Jew belonged to a Volk, it occupied no specific territory and was consequently doomed to rootlessness” (p. 22). Mosse’s judgment is cautious but severe: “Although the statements of many famous men were misconstrued and their thought distorted by extremists in the later Volkish movement, he was not among them … References to Riehl and restatements of his ideas are found throughout the history of the Volkish movement” (p. 23).

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Neither Riehl nor, of course, Eliot could have predicted the use that was to be made of his ideas as the rationale (sic) of exclusionary and eventually exterminationist programs. Yet there rises a taste of gall and wormwood when one recalls Eliot’s tragic words: “Wherever the strength of a man’s intellect, or moral sense, or affection brings him into opposition with the rules which society has sanctioned … such a man must not only dare to be right, he must also dare to be wrong – to shake faith, to wound friendship, perhaps, to hem in his own powers.” These caveats apply not only to social rebels but to upholders of antiquated tradition like Riehl and even to cautious progressives like Eliot. May we say the same of her excursions into Germany and Germanic thinking – that in the process she was led into racialist generalizations while invoking Heine’s irony, into derogation of the peasantry while envisioning a better appreciation of them, into a flirtation with organicist ideology in which her hardy empiricist principles kept her straight?34

chapter 5


In a brief memoir, “How I Came to Write Fiction,”1 George Eliot puts forward a familiar writerly topos, the notion that the writer was always disposed to become one, i.e., that the vocation is somehow part of his character or destiny: “It had always been a vague dream of mine that some time or other I might write a novel …” (p. 289). She grants that the idea showed stages of growth: “my shadowy conception of what the novel was to be, varied, of course, from one epoch of my life to another” (p. 289). Other indications of a subtle process at work are given in the account of Lewes’s encouragement, approving of an earlier exercise and saying, “‘You must try and write a story’” (p. 289). This encouragement has led to his reputation as the “onlie begetter” of Eliot’s fiction, but I venture the supposition that his stimulus, equally laudable and potent, was of another kind. They needed the money. Returning from Germany in March, 1856, the Leweses (to give them a fictional but convenient name) found themselves without steady jobs: she had long before resigned her editorship at the Westminster Review and his relation to the Leader had fallen into abeyance. Both still had work to do on current projects, he to polish and publish his Life of Goethe, she to finish her translation of Spinoza’s Ethics. The latest new element in Eliot’s life was that she had become a mother, a step-mother to be sure, but one sharing her husband’s responsibilities for his three young sons – his relations with his legal spouse having deteriorated.2 The solution in this delicate situation was to send them off to boarding school, but that required Gelt – to use a word that must have been on their recently German-speaking lips. Never before mercenary – having accepted shabby remuneration for her translations with hardly a murmur – Eliot was now a member of the journalistic profession in an altered light. And she acknowledged her new interest not only in reward but reputation: “I am a very calculating person now – valuing approbation as representing guineas” (Letters II, 287).3 Her first impulse at this pass must have been to publish the Ethics, but fortunately she didn’t get far as a professional translator, since Lewes’s 93

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falling-out with its prospective publisher left that pathway closed. Her recourse was to do some reviewing, and she dutifully set about reviewing over 200 books in the Westminster Review, The Leader and elsewhere over the course of 1856–57. (The full record of these books will be found in Reading List.) But this enterprise, whatever its remuneration, was clearly unsustainable. Although the books reviewed included many worthy items, among loads of dross, the work must have been stultifying. Her essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,”4 reviewing six such works, attests not only to her particular distaste for them but to a general disdain for run-of-the-mill publications, later to be vigorously satirized in her last book. So she turned to fiction, writing a story, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” as the first in a projected series to be called Scenes of Clerical Life. Lewes, already a professional writer, proposed it (or rather, sent it, and a separate letter) to the editor-publisher of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, one of the foremost semi-popular journals in the land (or lands). Within a week came the reply: it “will do” (Letters II, 269, 272). In the month following came the check for fifty guineas, more than half Eliot’s yearly income from her inheritance. Lewes reciprocated for this windfall by forbidding her to do further reviewing (Letters II, 289). It would do, indeed.5 There are other strands in the process that turned Eliot to fiction. A subtler one was science. Lewes, too, was taking up a second career (if all his literary pursuits are counted as one): zoologist specializing in marine biology, on his way to making himself a physiological psychologist. Eliot accompanied him in the spring and summer of 1856 to the Devon coast and to the Channel (and other) Islands in the following spring and summer – trips recalled with pleasure in her “Recollections of Illfracombe” and “Recollections of the Scilly Isles and Jersey.”6 Beyond conjuring up the fetching mental image of George Eliot with her skirts hiked up, picking crustaceans off the rocks, these pieces provide a trial run for the brand of realism she was to develop in fiction.7 A typical passage: The difference between a man with his house and a mollusc with its shell lies in the number of steps or phenomena interposed between the fact of individual existence and the completion of the building. Whatever other advantages we may have over molluscs and insects in our habitations, it is clear that their architecture has the advantage of ours in beauty – at least considered as the architecture of the species. Look at man in the light of a shell-fish and it must be admitted that his shell is generally ugly, and it is only after a great many more “steps or phenomena” that he secretes here and there a wonderful shell in the shape of a temple or a palace. (Journals, p. 265)


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There are many previous examples of this kind of comparison – to the advantage of the other animals – in the philosophical and literary tradition of primitivism, but it is startling to find Eliot in this company. Her humanism reasserts itself, however, for the other animals’ natural advantage is dissipated by the human power to make “wonderful shell[s]” through the artificial means of culture. The scientific element in Eliot’s fiction may be finely discriminated among the esthetic modes of realism. In reviewing Modern Painters III, Eliot indicated her approval of Ruskin’s version: “The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be obtained by a humble and faithful study of nature…”8 The quality praised here is precision and honesty of description, achieved by devoted and unblinkered observation. It is this commitment that Eliot expressed by her repeated reference to Dutch painting, first in a letter of this period (Letters II, 347–48) and more expansively in Adam Bede (ch. xvii). Yet one may distinguish another element in her thinking on realism, the scientific, which in her fiction appears as naturalism.9 The common strain in all naturalisms is awareness of science as a mode not merely of description but of dispassionate and non-judgmental explanation, especially of human behavior. Social conditioning, inevitable consequences, invariable laws are variously invoked; none of these is definitive for the category, nor do they appear in unequivocal ways in Eliot’s fiction. But the primacy in her novels of regrettable consequences stemming from dubious actions and mind-sets strikes a clearly naturalist note. Eliot’s foray into literary naturalism came just as she and Lewes were practicing the profession of “naturalist,” as the word was used in contemporary parlance, especially regarding field researchers.10 The novice scientist and the budding novelist show some overlap. There is a deeper sense, however, in which Eliot’s fiction is marked by traits of the naturalist tradition, within the broader domain of realism. Despite her qualms about the ethical borders of Balzac’s fiction, as quoted in Chapter 4, she read him, not as devotedly as she had earlier read George Sand but with some regularity.11 Not merely Eliot’s willingness to cross the lines of “good taste” (see her frequent sallies with her otherwise well disposed publisher on this score), but her enlarged moral tolerance are hallmarks of her work, attesting to an affinity to Balzac and other naturalists. These connections are not sufficient to establish Eliot’s status as a naturalist novelist – only close inspection of the novels might establish that. We may find that their detached and lofty narrative voice derives from a scientific perspective on the human condition, anticipating the visions of Hardy, Gissing and Conrad later in the century and on into the next.12

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Eliot didn’t achieve the objectivity and detachment of either realism or naturalism all at once. Despite the declaration of the narrator of “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” – “I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles …” (Scenes of Clerical Life, vii, 50) – there is an indelibly fanciful element in the donnée of a countess overstaying her visit to a country clergyman, its meager plausibility resting on the fact that she’s almost broke. This provokes in the parish the unworthy thought that he might be sleeping with her under his own roof – a scandal which even his infinitely tolerant wife could not have ignored. The comic aspect of the situation is conveyed in the prose: “she was in the extremely inconvenient predicament of having quarreled [with her potentially supportive brother], not indeed with her bread and cheese, but certainly with her chicken and tart …” (vii, 50). The novella’s passages of the comic and the sentimental – the aura surrounding the saintly Milly Barton, getting up before dawn to darn her children’s stockings – are sufficient to distract from the realist intention to focus on “commonplace troubles.” Much the same imbalance dogs “Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story,” the next of the Scenes. The sentiment surrounding the Italian immigrant heroine and Rev. Gilfil’s love for her is set beside the chilly aristocratic doings at Cheverel Manor without great conviction, and the looming fall into melodrama threatened by the genteel milieu in the form of a seductive rake is achieved by his sudden and mortal heart attack and by the heroine’s death, shortly after brief marital happiness. The gestures at realism lie at the level of represented peasant speech – “‘Well, that theer’s whut I coall a pictur’” (xxi, 164) – while displays of fine writing are tainted with the bathos that suffuses the concluding extended metaphor of men and trees.13 The closest approach to realism, even to naturalism, in these novellas comes in “Janet’s Repentance” with the portrayal of an unhappy marriage, the first in a long line of such marriages in Eliot’s oeuvre. Here the clergyman is, like the eponymous heroine, the victim of a vehement sadist, her husband; Eliot makes her first foray into depicting pathology. The tale has been praised for accurately showing the strained relations within the Church of England between Evangelicals, like Rev. Tryan, and the more complacent churchgoers – but the depicted resort to violence, which she recalled occurring at nearby Nuneaton during her childhood (Letters II, 347), was surely a rare case. The tale makes, however, a worthy first run at subjects later to be writ large in her fiction, for example, analysis of collective opinion in gossipy conversations and mass hysteria among crowds. The villain’s demise in delirium tremens, rendered in broken utterances approximating stream of consciousness technique, anticipates a similar scene in


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Middlemarch. There is also a scene of sympathetic consultation between the curate and the wife, who has been thrown out of her house. It stands as the model for a series of such encounters in Eliot’s fiction – one may call it the religion-of-humanity scene, in which one character opens him- or herself to another, so that both can overstep egoistic limitations and become more fully human. With all its stumbles, Scenes of Clerical Life makes a worthy beginning in the process of becoming a novelist.14 Yet apart from its anticipations of a great career, it would have fallen into neglect, except by specialists in Victorian literary history. It may be mentioned in passing that although Eliot’s portrayal of her clergymen was fully attentive to her publisher John Blackwood’s sensitivity about any denigration of that august calling, he recognized that the “clergymen with one exception are not very attractive specimens of the body” (Letters II, 272). The three of Scenes include one distinguished as a père de famille but comically ineffectual as master of his domain; one whose life is given over to pining for, briefly winning, and long mourning his true love; and only one shown in his role as spiritual shepherd. The “not very attractive specimens” persist throughout Eliot’s oeuvre.15 Anglican ministers are regularly shown to fail to bring solace or improvement to their parishioners in moral need. The list includes Revs. Irvine of Adam Bede, Kenn of The Mill, Crackenthorp of Silas Marner, the mixed bag of Cadwallader, Casaubon and Farebrother of Middlemarch, and Gascoigne of Daniel Deronda. The Evangelical curate Tryan is the one exception among Anglicans, standing alone with the Low Church preacher, Dinah Morris, of Adam Bede. And then there is Savonarola, a medieval Catholic monk, to be discussed. Throughout this study, a question has been implicit: how did George Eliot’s intellectual development, which prepared her for a number of vocations, prepare her to become a novelist? We now face the question in approaching the novels themselves. How did Eliot employ her abundant literary and intellectual resources, i.e., by what strategies and techniques did she employ them in creating these works? Adam Bede, to which Eliot next turned, stands as a successful first novel.16 It lacks, unfortunately, central characters of compelling interest, and so will never compete with her later works for pride of place in her oeuvre. It is also made problematic by its mixture of modes, not in itself a liability but a difficult exercise that only a more practiced novelist can successfully bring off. The novel exhibits passages of realism, literariness and naturalism in unequal proportions, none of them lacking in interest but together presenting the fictional equivalent of the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions.”

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The bread and butter of the novel is its realism, especially its characterization of country people of all classes. Name the novel and most of its readers will think of Mrs. Poyser and her sharp-tongued earthy wit; her husband, their dairy, and the rustic milieu will not be far behind. The same is true of the Bede family of artisans, although the portrait of the eponymous character is more psychologically complex than a simple description of a village craftsman. This intimacy with a social system previously unavailable to novelists is what initially made George Eliot a new quantity in English literature; other novelists who introduced country folk mainly offered stage peasants, although many of Scott’s rural figures achieve vividness. She was performing the same function in prose as Wordsworth had done in verse; as the novel’s epigraph puts it, quoting The Excursion: “So that ye may have / Clear images before your gladden’d eyes / Of nature’s unambitious underwood …,” leading to “something more / Than brotherly forgiveness.”17 Like Wordsworth, Eliot offered more than a slice of life, more than a new cut of that beast. Adam Bede is a highly conventional novel, making full use of literary resources, almost to the point of imitation. In a sense, it is a rewriting of Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian – Scott being, as is well known, a favorite of Eliot’s from and beyond her childhood. If its plot elements (or narremes, as they’re called in narratology) are listed, the comparison is inevitable. There are mothers of illegitimate children, infanticides, saintly heroines, overland journeys (by the mother in one case, by the heroine in the other), tender prison visits, last-minute reprieves, etc. The illegitimate mother’s antecedents in literature (including Wordsworth) are of course innumerable; the most recent before the novel’s publication was the heroine of Mrs. Gaskell’s Ruth (1853). And to enforce its literariness, the novel features a self-referential passage, the famous chapter xvii, in which realism is highly recommended to writers and readers alike. As Valentine Cunningham succinctly puts it, in his introduction to the Clarendon/World’s Classics edition (which I shall quote below), “The distinction of Adam Bede is to tell a story, and also to tell about telling a story. This is a novel about obscure lives, and also about how to be a novel about obscure lives” (p. vii).18 This ars poetica, like many a literary manifesto, was largely preaching to the choir. The novels of the 1840s had firmly established realism as the law of fiction, and Thackeray had established himself beside Dickens as king of the cats. But Eliot and Lewes, in their frequent reviews of current fiction, were making a moral issue of it, championing realism as opposed to “falsism,” the literary conventions of which they disapproved. In this, they were following Ruskin’s lead in the field of art criticism, making the


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same rhetorical moves he was making in promoting Turner’s preImpressionist art – taking a new set of conventions as more honest, more virtuous than another set. (The difference between them is that the couple did not allow their morality of art to distort their judgment of artists and periods, as Ruskin allowed his to do.) Informed readers in our own day are better prepared to recognize the artful techniques employed in creating the reality-effect (Roland Barthes’s “effet du réel ”) than were the Victorians. The final constituent of this mixture of modes is the novel’s naturalist passages. These are self-contained units that have little or no function in developing plot or character, going beyond the realist project of faithfulness in representing them. The first of these is the account, occupying almost all of chapter ii, of the heroine’s performance as a Methodist field preacher. Insofar as the passage establishes Dinah Morris, it functions, of course, as characterization, but this extended account is clearly offered for its own sake, as a piece of ethnographic data to fill out a picture of provincial England at the time of the novel’s action (1799–1803 or shortly after). Her actions are closely followed by a passing gentleman known simply as “the traveller,” who pauses in curiosity as he passes a knot of townsfolk gathered on the green (ch. ii, p. 17). (We are naturalistically instructed not to “imagine them gathered in a knot. Villagers never swarm …” [ii, 19] – a quasi-entomological observation.) He stays to listen to Dinah’s sermon on the green, with purely self-educational motives: “He knew but two types of Methodist – the ecstatic and the bilious. But Dinah walked as simply as if she were going to market …” (ii, 22). There is an evident erotic component in his attention – “the traveller had been chained to the spot against his will by the charm of Dinah’s mellow treble tones” (ii, 27) – yet he is at least temporarily attentive to the content of her discourse: “The stranger, who had been interested in the course of her sermon, as if it had been the development of a drama … now turned his horse aside and pursued his way …” (ii, 32). This solitary horseman has been compared to the more dramatic figures of that ilk who regularly open the novels of G. P. R. James, another of Eliot’s childhood favorites, but I would compare him to an anthropological fieldworker come upon a piece of folk behavior worth noting at length in his research. He serves as Eliot’s construct for focusing otherwise indifferent attention, allowing her to set down this material as a display of genuine religious behavior, a collective phenomenon bearing instruction for readers of this fictional work. Another section in which content and narrational approach approximate that of the social sciences is that recounting the communal festivities celebrating the coming of age of the grandson and heir to the local lord of the

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manor, who is also the novel’s closest approximation of a villain. The whole of the novel’s third book (of six) is a follow-up to chapter xviii (the second of Book II), “Church.” All classes are put in their place, from the gentry at the top (the senior Donnithorne and his nephew Arthur), professionals – the rector, Mr. Irwine, and the schoolmaster, Bartle Massey – and tenant farmers (the yeomanry) in the middle, down to the agricultural laborers. There a clear separation between dining “upstairs with the large tenants” and dining with the hoi polloi “in the cloisters below” (xxiii, 258): the farmers in principle arrange themselves according to the amount of land they rent – although other alternatives are suggested and a comic one finally agreed upon (xxiii, 260). The landowners are differentiated by generation, “the old Squire” being a terror to his tenants, while the heir apparent has dreams of showing “good-will” to them (improved husbandry is mentioned), a sentiment to which they heartily respond (xxiv, 263–64). Then there are the games (a list is given) and the dancing (songs are named), during which the only significant narreme in the episode is given – as the seduced milkmaid Hetty drops Arthur’s gift locket, perceived only by her other suitor, Adam, who rationalizes its significance away. There is even a discussion, between the rector and his mother, of the genetic endowment of the lower class, in which Irwine moderately contends, “The common people are not quite so stupid as you imagine” (xxv, 274). In this, as in other such passages, Eliot indulges in the nostalgia of all expatriates from country to city, especially in later, decadent ages: “That merry stamping, that gracious nodding of the head, that waving bestowal of the hand – where can we see them now? … it would be a pleasant variety to see all that sometimes, instead of low dresses and large skirts, and scanning glances exploring costumes, and languid men in lackered boots smiling with double meaning” (xxvi, 283). This contrast is developed in a later riff on “Old Leisure,” a personification of the Tory image of the lost past: “Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure: he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of the irresponsible …” (lii, 514). But in this and similar folkways accounts – especially the “Harvest Supper” that Poyser throws for his laborers, where beef replaces beer as the chief desideratum (we are given several stanzas of the “harvest song” [liii, 519–20]) – there is nothing of the organicist doctrines that have been ascribed to Eliot, nothing of the reverential attitude toward the peasantry some have traced to Riehl. Eliot’s early prejudices are still apparent; the high point of popular interest is the cask of ale put by at Arthur’s birth, to be tapped at his majority (xxii, 247). Neither is there reverence toward the gentry, represented here by a narrow curmudgeon and his feckless heir. Mrs. Poyser’s relationship to


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old Donnithrone is paradigmatic; when he’s unusually polite to her, “she whispered to her husband, ‘I’ll lay my life he’s brewin’ some nasty turn against us. Old Harry [i.e., the devil] doesna wag his tail so for nothin’” (xxvi, 282). The sentiment is generally shared: “the farmers had found out, after long puzzling, that this polish was one of the signs of hardness” (xxvi, 282). If this be the Gemeinschaft society of organic class relations sometimes projected onto Eliot, one might well look forward to the Gesellschaft society to come (and to be explored in Eliot’s later novels). In the denouement, Eliot abandons the naturalist mode and develops a style adequate to the quasi-tragic drama. The long geographic and psychological tracking of the pregnant Hetty’s quest for her lover, off on maneuvers, which ends in the murder of her newborn, is one of the great set-pieces of English fiction, on a dramatic and expressive level with the similar journey in quest by another fallen woman in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). (Eliot makes use of the alternating present-tense narration of that novel in describing Hetty’s limited thought stream [xxii, 249–50].) And the climactic visit by Dinah to Hetty in prison is a sublime religion-of-humanity scene, following the trial run in “Janet’s Repentance.” One cannot regard Adam Bede as a major work of fiction, but it establishes a solid foundation for a great career. Eliot’s next novel, The Mill on the Floss, was begun even before the last was fully published, completed with the same dispatch, and published in 1860. It will bear, and has borne, scrutiny from several points of view: as a rare example of a female Bildungsroman; as an autobiographical novel;19 as a tragic novel, with its cataclysmic ending arousing numerous objections and defenses; etc. I propose two other aspects for consideration: as a bourgeois novel, that is, a novel about the bourgeoisie; and as a mythic novel, in which its vision of England derives from a founding myth. (We have already considered several of its key passages in Chapter 3 above.) The one is approached by the other: “In order to see Mr and Mrs Glegg [the heroine’s uncle and aunt] at home, we must enter the town of St Ogg’s …,” the twelfth chapter begins, and in order to enter provincial urban England as it is or was in the early nineteenth century, we must go back to origins, particularly to its fabulous name: “It is one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature; … a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp on the hill-side, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce eager eyes at the fatness of the land” (I, xii, 115–16). Saxon, Dane and Norman are severally invoked, Norman

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and Gothic architecture distinguished, and a particular example focused on as “a remnant of the original chapel dedicated to St Ogg, the patron saint of this ancient town, of whose history I possess several manuscript versions” (p. 116) – whereupon his myth is recounted. He is clearly a saint not in the Catholic communion but in the religion of humanity; not only does the narrator coyly refer to “my private hagiographer,” but his sanctification proceeds from his motto, “‘I will ferry thee across: it is enough that thy heart needs it’” (p. 116). The virginal figure to whom these words are addressed responds in kind: “‘Ogg the son of Beorl, thou art blessed in that thou didst not question and wrangle with the heart’s need, but wast smitten with pity, and didst straightway relieve the same’” (p. 117). And much more, in imitation of the language of hagiography. The pocket history of England then continues, through the Civil Wars down to early nineteenth-century prosperity, when the “Catholics, bad harvests, and the mysterious fluctuations of trade, were the three evils mankind had to fear …” (p. 118: referring to the controversy of the 1820s over Catholic Emancipation). Through all changes, the town mellows with age, with “no incongruous new-fashioned smartness, no plate-glass in shop windows, no fresh stucco-facing or other fallacious attempt to make fine old red St Ogg’s wear the air of a town that sprang up yesterday” (p. 117). This is all very pretty, in the organic style, but traditional culture produces cultural stagnation: The mind of St Ogg’s did not look extensively before or after. It inherited a long past without thinking of it, and had no eyes for the spirits that walk the streets … the present time was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant forces that used to shake the earth are for ever laid to sleep. The days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change it … for a long while it had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of men … Protestantism sat at ease … (p. 118)

The connection of this “antimythological myth” (to borrow a phrase from W. H. Auden) to the novel’s action is deferred to the finale, when the heroine does duty as a salvific boatman on the model of the saint. But the connective sentence, “This was the general aspect of things at St Ogg’s in Mrs Glegg’s day, and at that particular period in her family history when she had her quarrel with Mr Tulliver” (p. 119), leads to immediate consequences. The quarrel will be found, in the event, to begin the process of Tulliver’s bankruptcy, his daughter Maggie’s loss of even her meager cultural opportunities, and the decline into the tragic denouement. But the more immediate linkage is to the realist account of the middle classes that occupies much of the novel’s first half.20


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The satirical force of these extended accounts of bourgeois narrowness is on a level with Balzac, or with the near-contemporaneous Madame Bovary. What distinguishes it among such exercises in épater le bourgeois is Eliot’s keen sense of class distinctions, even within the bourgeoisie. In contrast to the naturalist excursuses of the preceding novel, these realist portraits and the distinctions among them are integrated into, even determinative of, the novel’s action. For in passing from the lower-middle-class or yeomanry status of her parents, through her negative encounters with the rentier aunts and uncles Pullet and Glegg, to a romance with the son of a professional, lawyer Wakem, and on to another among the local magnate Deanes and Guests, Maggie makes an ascent through the class structure as upwardly mobile and as precarious as that of Thackeray’s Becky Sharpe before her. The fact that her advancement is measured in cultural rather than material or status terms makes it no less a social process and no less a disastrous one. To begin with the four Dodson sisters: Jane, the eldest, married to a Mr. Glegg, a retired “wool-stapler” or wholesale merchant, and living in a town house with views from front and back parlors (p. 119). We’re not advised of the birth order of the other sisters, so I’ll take them by order of rank: Susan, the deceased wife of a Mr. Deane, first manager and then junior partner in the firm of Guest & Co., commodity factors and bankers; Sophy (Sophia), spouse of Mr. Pullet, “gentleman farmer,” who is also placed among the “extinct class of British yeomen” (I, vii, 70); and Betsy (Elizabeth), the long-suffering wife of a miller who also holds land, encumbered by heavy mortgages. (The middle-class gallery also includes a lawyer, John Wakem, whose comfortable lifestyle is not given in detail: he is a widower who has raised a cultivated son alone.) At the bottom of this middling hierarchy are the Tullivers, the miller speaking an ungrammatical and accented English that betrays his rustic origins, out of his depth not only in planning an education for his son but also in business dealings, conscious and resentful of his inferiority among the genteel, and close enough to the stratum beneath to be vulnerable to sentiment in financial dealings with his struggling farmer brother-in-law. The family’s cultural assets are limited to the few books named in Maggie’s repertoire, and although the family bible serves as an archive and even as the repository of a curse, its religion is of a dubious kind: Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers were of too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively, from the statement that they were part of the Protestant population of Great Britain. Their theory of life had its core of soundness, as all theories must have on which decent and prosperous families have been reared and have flourished; but it had the very slightest tincture

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of theology … Their religion was of a simple, semi-pagan kind, but there was no heresy in it … The religion of the Dodsons consisted in revering whatever was customary and respectable … The same sort of traditional belief ran in the Tulliver veins, but it was carried in richer blood, having elements of generous imprudence, warm affection, and hot-tempered rashness. (IV, i, 273–74)

The effects of this mixture show themselves in the novel’s plot, particularly in the curse associated with the “semi-pagan” religion that is expressed as an inscription in the family bible, in a “Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet,” to cite the chapter-title in which it is enacted. A step up from the scene of Maggie’s origin (which gives the novel its title) is the Pullet household, a country retreat known as Garum Firs. An instance of Maggie’s childhood visits there is given in Book I, ch. ix; it’s the one that climaxes in Maggie’s pushing her cousin Lucy into the mud (a euphemism for worse). The gentleman farmer’s ménage is appropriately genteel: “All the farmyard life was wonderful there …” (p. 87) – the wonder evidently Maggie’s as she encounters relatively rare fowl and other animals, both live and stuffed. The home is not devoid of traditional culture: Maggie is “fascinated, as usual, by a print of Ulysses and Nausicaa, which uncle Pullet had bought as a ‘pretty Scripture thing,’” and his musical snuff-box plays a tune from Handel’s Acis and Galatea (pp. 92, 93). But the home’s deepest cultural commitment is to clothes; Mrs. Pullet’s unveiling of her latest bonnet resembles an approach to a holy of holies (p. 89). The satire here is more delicate than that of the Gleggs (Book I, ch. xii). The husband is an amateur gardener on a less extensive but more intensive scale than his brother-in-law, and his menagerie consists largely of caterpillars, slugs and insects, but his interest in “natural history” is more intellectual: he “had an unusual amount of mental activity, which, when disengaged from the wool business, naturally made itself a pathway in other directions” (I, xii, 120). Of the wife’s mental balance or imbalance we receive a full sampling in her fight with Tulliver, leading to the first serious threat to his financial stability, her threatened calling in of her loan to him. The ruling passion of both Gleggs is greed, or its lesser version, miserliness, and we get an extended discourse on the “habit of saving, as an end in itself, belong[ing] to the industrious men of business of a former generation,” which “constituted them a ‘race,’ which is nearly lost in these days of rapid money-getting” (p. 121). It is this bond between them that allows the husband to allay the wife’s assault on him for failing to stand up for her in the Tulliver fight, by his mention of the ample provision made for her in his will – he had “done the right thing by her, notwithstanding his numerous poor relations” (p. 126), she finds. So Tulliver is temporarily spared recall of the loan, since


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husband convinces wife that she can get only 4 per cent on her money elsewhere (p. 127). At the top of this tree sit the Deanes. The penultimate Book VI, “The Great Temptation,” is largely given over to – and largely discussed as – the drama of Maggie’s succumbing to the charms of Stephen Guest, but the scene of temptation and at least part of its temptingness are rarely mentioned. For Maggie has now made it into the upper-middle class, at least by temporary acceptance into the Deane household for an extended stay, after two years’ reduction in class as a teacher in a “third-rate school.” (Practically a servant, she has even had to mend the children’s clothes.) The house is in town, but on the banks of the Floss, with a “pleasant outlook down a sloping garden to a boat-house” (VI, i, 363) and the usual appurtenances. In the “well-furnished drawing room” stands the “open grand piano,” the operative word being “open,” since this is a music-loving and musicperforming family. The chief ornament of the scene is Lucy, Maggie’s cousin and former schoolmate, all but engaged to Stephen Guest, the scion of her father’s firm’s chief. Readers are usually attentive to Stephen’s decorative touches – the “diamond ring, attar of roses, and air of nonchalant leisure” – but less so to their source, the “largest oil-mill and the most extensive wharf in St Ogg’s” (VI, i, 363), the firm also operating as a bank. Mr. Deane, as junior partner in the firm, in the course of hiring Tom Tulliver, partly from family connections but also because he sees a competent and devoted employee on the make, takes the occasion to impart his business philosophy: “You see, Tom … the world goes on at a smarter pace now than it did when I was a young fellow. Why, sir, forty years ago, when I was much such a strapping youngster as you, a man expected to pull between the shafts the best part of his life, before he got the whip in his hand. The looms went slowish, and fashions didn’t alter quite so fast: I’d a best suit that lasted me six years. Everything was on a lower scale, sir – in point of expenditure, I mean. It’s this steam, you see, that has made a difference: it drives on every wheel double pace, and the wheel of fortune along with ’em … Trade, sir, opens a man’s eyes; and if the population is to get thicker upon the ground, as it’s doing, the world must use its wits at inventions of one sort or another … Somebody has said it’s a fine thing to make two ears of corn grow where only one grew before; but, sir it’s a fine thing, too, to further the exchange of commodities, and bring the grains of corn to the mouths that are hungry. And that’s our line of business; and I consider it as honourable a position as a man can hold, to be connected with it.” (VI, v, 395–96)

One can imagine much the same kind of discourse in a present-day firm revolving the idea of profits from the latest technological revolution, but

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a number of features of Deane’s talk are specific to the 1820s. There is the reference to the Industrial Revolution, powered by steam (and the unmentioned coal to generate it), the enlarged scale of operations as well as the raised tempo of industrialization, the population explosion (and unmentioned urbanization) that goes along with them, the changed patterns of employment and advancement within firms, etc. Deane’s specific point is, however, to make a case for the honor of purely exchange operations, rather than technological and productive activities – he speaks for the secondary businesses of finance, transportation and distribution, the Guest lines. It is the bourgeois spirit rampant. On this broad base, the delicate filigree of the Deanes’ culture is established. That culture is predominantly musical; the other arts and religion are barely mentioned. In a curious way a sign of this absence is the young people’s favoring of Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation.21 Musically, this is well enough, so long as one isn’t expecting Bach or Handel, but the text is open to some smirks, which Eliot doesn’t fail to provide. The duet that Lucy and Stephen sing features Eve’s immortal line, “And from obedience grows my pride and happiness” (VI, i, 367) – directed to Adam, not to God – and the musical Affekten decorating Raphael’s enumeration of the animals in the garden leads Lucy to compliment Stephen’s performance: “You do the ‘heavy beasts’ to perfection” (VI, i, 368). Musical taste in this establishment is somewhat better than this satire implies, with Stephen’s performance of Purcell’s songs – “Purcell’s music, with its wild passion and fancy” (VI, iii, 385) – drawing special praise. (Purcell’s music for The Tempest is performed later on [VI, vii, 418].) The same is said for Bellini’s La sonnambula: the “plaintive passion of the music” (VI, vii, 417) beautifully conveys Philip Wakem’s reproachful love to Maggie. But much of the repertoire consists of light opera tunes from Balfe and Auber (The Maid of Artois and Masaniello/La muette de Portici, respectively), while other songs, like a setting of a George Wither sonnet, “Shall I, wasting in despair, / Die because a woman’s fair?” (VI, vii, 418), barely rise above the level of show tunes. Stephen’s singing is particularly suspect: he sings the Wither sonnet “with saucy energy” (p. 418) and delivers a Ben Jonson song, “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” in “pianissimo falsetto” (VI, xiii, 460).22 There is, of course, more than music in this culture. The inhabitants read – Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, Southey’s Life of Cowper, and a Bridgewater treatise of “natural theology” (one that Eliot had read in her youth) are mentioned (VI, ii, 374, 380). But it is a culture markedly superficial and well bred, in the worst sense. It makes, nevertheless, a terrific impression on Maggie, starved for cultural uplift of any kind, and it suffuses


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her growing infatuation with Stephen, undermining her defenses against his oily charm. The entire escapade may be read as yet another instance of the inadequacy of bourgeois society to provide scope for the development of a potentially creative woman – someone like Eliot herself. “You could not live among such people,” the narrator says (IV, i, 272) – to whom? It should be obvious from the above account that Eliot has left behind the technique of intercalating extended passages of the quasi-ethnographic description associated with naturalism, which bear only tangential reference to plot development or characterization. Each of these stages in Maggie’s progression through the middle classes is marked by direct effects on her not only of the aunts, uncles and cousins but, with them, of the cultural assets they carry. This is realism at its best, where sociological description is a function of characterization, and there is little detail left over, as it were. Eliot shows herself in The Mill on the Floss the master of her art, and whatever one’s position on the problematic denouement, there can be no doubt of the novelist’s triumph. The Mill returns briefly to the mythical mode at its conclusion. At the point when her entanglements have brought her to social ostracism and potential exclusion, the heroine prays, “O God, if my life is to be long, let me live to bless and comfort” (VII, v, 515), and is forthwith granted, as flood waters rise to her knees, the opportunity to play the rescuing boatman, St. Ogg. Her efforts are not as successful or as sanctified as her avatar’s, however, the world having been markedly reduced in aura, as we have seen. The overtones of legend come, moreover, too little, too late to raise the realistic treatment of straitened bourgeois culture to mythic generality. This somewhat patchy fusion of modes may partially account for the dissatisfaction felt by many a reader in the abrupt denouement. Yet the sustained accomplishments of The Mill in portraying the mental limitations of the provincial bourgeoisie provide solid grounding for its tragic process, the grinding down of a potentially cultivated and creative young woman. As if by way of relief, Eliot’s next work of fiction was a playful experiment in a lighter mode. “Brother Jacob,” a comic story of the comeuppance offered to egotism by the weight of primitive love, offers rewards in its lightness of touch, but represents a wayward moment in the writer’s career. During the writing of The Mill she had published a Gothic short story – not without psychological interest – “The Lifted Veil,” in a similar diversion from the work at hand and from her main line of development. But her next work, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), became a full immersion in the stream of mythmaking. In considering her efforts to transform elements of beliefs that can no longer be found adequate into fictional

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functions that convey another kind of religious meaning, we must try to assess not only the novella’s double plot but the mythic mode itself. In the first plot, Silas’s loss of faith after expulsion from his Dissenting community on a false charge confirmed by casting of lots, and his subsequent redemption from avarice and isolation through love and caring for a child more-or-less literally left on his doorstep, becomes validation of a profound truth: belief in the power and necessity of human love is a better religion than a divine one. The difficulty with reading this development as a shift in religious belief is that Silas hasn’t lost faith in the divine will but only in its beneficence; his declaration to his community is explicit on this point: “‘there is no just God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears witness against the innocent’” (i, 12). The protagonist is still thoroughly mystified, giving God the primacy in human affairs, not only during his years in the wilderness but in his response to good fortune – if that is what the acquisition of a child to love amounts to. The novella’s main plot is not, then, as simple as a Feuerbachian parable of the true meaning of religious love. The secondary plot, with widely divergent streams of action coming together at the climax, makes an even more difficult set of mythological implications. Godfrey Cass’s redemption through some kind of moral turning is equally laden with ambiguities. His redemption comes through acknowledging past sins of commission and omission – not only his unacknowledged wife and child but, even more, his failure to recognize the latter after the mother’s death. Godfrey’s redemptive confession to his wife of his past marriage and unacknowledged fatherhood is occasioned by the discovery of his criminal brother’s corpse and the painfully accumulated gold stolen from Silas, but what exactly is his motivation in confessing to his dereliction upon discovering another’s? It may be posited that the shock of recognition is sufficient to undo his long defenses, but this must be argued on psychological grounds, which the novella fails to provide. The issue then becomes, what kind of a tale is it that takes two stories from different realms of experience, develops a running parallel between them, and brings them together crucially at a climactic juxtaposition – the now-grown child’s choice between her biological and adoptive fathers – thus triumphantly enforcing its love-theme? In particular, how does it square with Eliot’s later comment that she began it as a “legendary tale” but “became inclined to a more realistic treatment” (Letters III, 382)? Answers must lie not only in the criteria one brings to bear on the subject of realist fiction, but in the evaluation of the quasi-legendary materials in the mythological mode. The strongest treatment of these issues that I know of is David R. Carroll’s “Silas Marner: Reversing the Oracles of Religion”23 – the


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phrase is Feuerbach’s. Carroll’s way of resolving the double plot’s turnings is to claim that Eliot “demands that we perform a kind of demythologizing, removing the myths, the superstitions, and the miracles, until we get to the essential core of human meaning” (p. 173). But the novella performs this task rather peculiarly, climaxing as it does in nothing short of a miracle – the immediate provision of a golden-haired child as a substitute for lost gold – and with twists and turns of plot operating throughout in, I would contend, the mythic mode. The same waywardness in demythologizing occurs in the characters’ development: it’s not Spinozistic objectivity or Feuerbachian humanism that Silas and Godfrey learn and espouse as characters; they are placeholders in a legend-like plot that conveys the moral theme. In the finale, the now-grown child’s choice of her adoptive rather than her biological father, we have a return to a poignant realism, yet Silas Marner remains for most of its span in the “legendary” or mythic mode, an apologue in the manner of Dickens’s Hard Times – a fine exercise in moral demonstration but inadequate as a novel, hence the better term for it, novella, which suggests a leaner elaboration. There is, however, a phase of Carroll’s essay that’s important in understanding the work’s mythic mode. In the concluding section he posits that the characters’ development in this work is a process of remythologizing themselves: “The subject of the novel is the different ways in which we create myths, valid and invalid, to bridge this gap” in a mysterious universe (p. 196). There is, he claims, “a clearly defined area of mystery at the center of the novel in which the protagonists can exercise their myth-making faculties” (p. 196): “The reader watches omnisciently to see how the two characters will react to these mysterious interventions in their lives. They react, inevitably, by creating their own mythical explanations” (p. 197). If my reading is accepted, it’s not surprising that the still mystified characters react to legend-like “mysterious interventions” by creating mythic explanations of their own. So mythmaking will prevail after all; the question becomes, how do we distinguish between the “valid” as opposed to the “invalid” myths? Four examples are offered. In the first pair, “when his gold is stolen, [Silas] assumes that the all-powerful, alien God of Lantern Yard [his Calvinistic sect’s milieu] has again intervened in his life” (p. 197); but when Eppie comes on to replace the gold, “he begins to suspect that there is an order present in the universe in which he can trust” (p. 197). Are we to understand that the one belief is an invalid, the other a valid myth about an ordered universe which one can trust to replace lost gold? Silas’s formula, “the gold had turned into the child” (xiv, 120; quoted on p. 197), is hardly convincing as an “attempt to

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find an order and a logic in events” (p. 197). The same dubious distinction is applied to a second pairing, Godfrey’s new belief that the uncovering of his brother’s guilt is “the judicial act of an all-powerful God,” in preference to his earlier belief that his second marriage’s childlessness is a retribution for his sins regarding his first wife and child. Carroll’s effort to explain the new belief via Feuerbach – his “all-powerful God was, in fact,… his own love for his wife acting surreptitiously” (p. 198) – makes it hard to see how personal love translates into a judicial God who does such wonders in exposing the guilty. So on to the ideological conclusion of this essay: “George Eliot demonstrates that valid myths of order are a direct expression of love, while invalid myths of chance result from an absence of love … as love turns into God, we have the ultimate reversal of the oracles of religion in the novel” (pp. 198–99). This might prove true if one could point to any valid myths, but the examples offered are not encouraging. Whatever point Eliot was making in this apologue, it can’t have been to support belief in Silas’s Eppie-myth or Godfrey’s judicial God, although these characters may be stuck at that level of understanding. It remains clear only that personal love is an encouragement to overcome resentment and misanthropy in Silas, and helps Cass in confessing his guilty secrets to his wife. We must perform the rather tricky exercise of taking away limited realistic conclusions from a work in the mythic mode, and the paucity of its implications attests to the novella’s marked limits both as realism and as apologue. A similar temptation to indulge in mythologizing occurs when the novel’s raisonneuse, Dolly Winthrop, is given full scope to express her theological views, climaxing in a declaration that “‘all as we’ve got to do is to trusten, Master Marner – to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For … we may be sure as there’s a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know …’” (xvi, 140–41). As a portrayal of a character’s “myth-making faculties,” this is exemplary, but as one of the “valid myths of order” – projecting “a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know” – it cannot pass muster. Yet Eliot’s respectful portrayal of simple people’s faith makes Dolly an appealing exponent. Appreciation of her folk wisdom is made no easier, however, by the narrator’s insistence, regarding Silas’s attachment to his hearth, that “The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots” (xvi, 137). Tolerance is indeed in order, but it is for a primitive religious mode, fetishism, that Eliot’s anthropological readings would lead her to recognize and place. The narrator is less bombastic when validating another form of the uncultivated mind: “Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings; and this


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breath of poetry had surrounded Eppie …” (xvi, 142). The danger in this sentiment is that “poetry” may be confused with religious aura, as in Matthew Arnold’s conflation of the two, which another Eliot, following T. E. Hulme, described as “spilt religion.” The mythological elements in the novella aren’t limited to Eliot’s insight into the human tendency toward myth-construction (a), but are present in suggestions of the power of myth to reach valid ideas about reality (b). Though myth (a) is her strongest suit, myth (b) is, in the long run, alien to her, I believe, yet in Silas Marner she risks conflating or confusing the two. Ultimately, she would carry the mythic mode to a new level, discovering in fictional art the power to design myth-like scenes that convey deep human truths (c). She would go on to undertake such an enrichment in her next novel, Romola – not with entire success. But in her last two novels, she would create climactic scenes in which realism and myth are all but indistinguishable. We are now in a better position to assess the effect of George Eliot’s literary and intellectual experiences on her fiction. The effect is broad and diffuse, rather than concentrated in a select number of strands that might be called influences. The force of her early Evangelical belief and reading was transformed into an intense interest in the ways of religion in action in her first fictions. Not only were there specific sources – for example, “my aunt’s story” in Adam Bede, the anti-Evangelical agitation of “Janet’s Repentance” – but also a keen awareness of the strength and failings of religious guidance in life’s moral crises. The impressions drawn, too, from Eliot’s journalistic career as editor and reviewer were both positive and negative: she gained from examples as widely distributed as Scott, Sand and Balzac models of fiction’s range and power, and learned from the “silly novels” how not to write one. Her experience of Germany and German culture was equally broad and subtly influential: in an alien space, she could begin to grasp the total scope and complexity of a social system, while reflecting on the peculiar aspects of her own society brought to mind by contrast. Again, her reading and activity in science made few direct inroads in her writing but provided norms of close observation and description – a realism at times resembling naturalism. Without gainsaying the quantum leap made by Eliot in her entry into fiction, it is possible to see myriad strands of intellectual and literary experience there for her to draw on, according to the formula, reculer pour mieux sauter (draw back, the better to leap forward).

chapter 6

The Historian: tracking ideals – utopian and national – in Romola and The Spanish Gypsy

i George Eliot became an artist with a strong sense that this was her personal salvation: she discovered grounds for “hoping that my writing may succeed and so give value to my life …” (Letters II, 416). But her becoming a writer didn’t make her any less formidable as a reader: “There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day …” (Letters II, 412). She was also inclined to indulge another cultural hunger, continental travel; even before Adam Bede was finished, she was off to Germany again, spending almost three months at Munich and a month and a half at Dresden. While working on the novel in these places, she went devotedly to the museums – of modern German art at Munich and of art history at Dresden.1 She didn’t care much for the former – “It is for the most part elaborate lifelessness” (Letters II, 454) – although critics have made much of a scene in Middlemarch featuring an artist of the local school, the Nazarenes, which produced such art. But she greatly enjoyed the latter: “our society is strictly limited to Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Veronese, and the other ‘gents’ [giants?] of painting” (Letters II, 474). A similar sequence followed with her next novel, but this time she waited for its completion. She finished The Mill on the Floss on March 21, 1860, and left three days later for Italy – a momentous choice. This was a briefer stay, at Rome, Naples and Florence, but in the course of that spring and summer, Lewes, upon acquiring a new biography of Savonarola, suggested the Renaissance figure as a fictional subject. She forthwith planned an Italian novel, but implementing the decision wasn’t as simple. It required preparation, as historical novels do, and Eliot went about it in her characteristic way, by reading almost everything available on the subject. In the process, she converted herself not merely into a historical novelist but into something of an historian. Her interruptions, writing not only Silas Marner but a short story, “Brother Jacob,” suggest, perhaps, not her diffidence about the 112

The Historian: Romola and The Spanish Gypsy

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project but the need to write something during the research period before undertaking the novel itself. The research may seem to the distant observer to have become a delaying action, but it should be noted that she was more than usually dragged down by illnesses during this period, including what must be recognized as depression. She read in Italy and she read in London, eventually resorting to the British Museum (now the British Library) for documentation. Not only did she read the classics of Italian literature – Dante (making extensive extracts in her Notebooks), Boccaccio (whose complete works she later acquired), Petrarch, Cellini, Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli, Pucci, Pulci, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Poliziano – but many lesser lights of the Renaissance (including a collection of “novelle” by Franco Sacchetti) as well as a selection of later Italian authors: Goldoni, Alfieri, Agostino Ademolo.2 She also read historical novels of the period, including Thomas A. Trollope’s La Beata and Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi.3 She read art history, of course, from Vasari down to Jean Coindet, Richard Duppa and Anna Jameson. (She had read Franz Kugler’s Handbook of Painting earlier – of which, more is to be said.) And she also read literary history: G. G. Gervinus, Pierre Ginguené, Antonio Panizzi and D. G. Rossetti. Approaching her main object, she read Savonarola, the sermons, dialogues and revelations, but also the poems and the “Discourse on Government.” With the spate of contemporary interest expressed in numerous biographies, she read those of F. T. Perrens, Karl Meier and Pasquale Villari – which had significant influence of her view of the Frate. (Of course, she read the near-contemporaneous biography by Pacifico Burlamacchi.) In addition, she read modern histories of various aspects of the period by Pierre Helyot, Charles Montalembert, Philarète Chasles, William Roscoe and Pietro Coletta, and the comprehensive histories by J. C. L. S. de Sismondi. The most impressive part of her labors was her reading in period sources, the Italian (mainly Florentine) Renaissance chroniclers. The list is imposing; I give only the sum total of these works: twenty-five.4 Not included in this number are the historians she read in the volumes of the Archivio storico compilation, as well as the classic by Francesco Guicciardini. Having established her credentials in the field of history as well as of historical fiction, she had to establish something further: a point of view. Among the many aspects she considered, she was largely guided in her view of Savonarola by Villari’s biography, which emphasizes his political importance, going well beyond the standard views of his puritanical domination of the city for a short period and his spectacular fall and execution. Villari’s Storia di Fra Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi (History of Fra Girolamo

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Savonarola and of His Times; 1859–61) has been closely studied by Gennaro A. Santangelo, who establishes that Eliot extracted extensively from the biography, which “can be best seen as a source for both idea and structure.”5 Moreover, Santangelo continues, “To Villari, Savonarola was a hero of Italian freedom who proposed a republican government based on moral responsibility … While accepting the liberal and moral tendencies in the Frate’s program, Villari rejects the vestiges of medievalism which encumbered effective political and moral action” (p. 119). These characteristics, the political idealism and the burden of inherited ideology, must have drawn Eliot’s attention, but Santangelo oversimplifies her viewpoint when he aligns her with Villari’s liberal rationalist critique of his shortcomings: Villari’s view is that “belief in the validity of his visions was the weak point in his program and character … [Eliot] could see that his tragic failure was the product both of his moral strength and of his prejudiced weakness in believing his own visions” (pp. 120–21). We shall see that Eliot’s Savonarola – even in his weakness and failure – was a more complex figure than a nineteenth-century secularist liberal could fully comprehend. Eliot’s research tells us what she knew about the period and its culture, and something of what she saw in her main focus, Savonarola. But it doesn’t tell us much about her approach to the period or to history itself. The only writer I know of who has taken Eliot seriously as a historian is a historian of ideas, J. B. Bullen, in The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing, which devotes a chapter to her view of history and to the novel.6 To quote only the most sweeping and perspicacious lines of this account: the metahistory of Romola is not one which subscribes to the theory of a coherent period called the Renaissance. On the contrary, the image of the fifteenth century, as it appears in this novel, is divergent; it is one of difference, and contradiction. Indeed, it is those very differences which propel the narrative forward. The stresses between conflicting moral ideas, the collision of political positions, the clash of antithetical human temperaments, and the struggle between religious belief and humanism are precisely the forces which bring about the fictional “awakening” of Romola … [Eliot’s] achievement in Romola was not so much that she had made the past live, but that in writing a historical novel she exposed the inner structure and meaning of the historical process and in doing so made the present more comprehensible.

I shall follow out the implications of these wise generalizations and estimates in what follows. The Proem to Romola instantiates precisely this sense of contradiction, complexity, conflict and process. After invoking the Spirit of a Renaissance Florentine, who returns to survey his city and senses the past still highly


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visible in the urban fabric, the Proem turns to the many changes that would astonish the revenant, suggesting that “it is easier and pleasanter to recognize the old than to account for the new” (p. 5). The doubled perspectives in play are multiple: that of the modern narrator and that of the Spirit; the Spirit’s own dual sense of continuity and of change; and the duality within the Renaissance mentalité itself. The Spirit is still medieval in his devotion to “Unseen Powers” to explain phenomena, although partially transformed by the historical perspective brought into play by the rebirth of ancient learning (p. 7). In the course of this implied comparison of a past worldview with that of the present, a remarkable summary of the contradictions of the Renaissance is offered: “Our resuscitated Spirit was not a pagan philosopher, nor a philosophizing pagan poet, but a man of the fifteenth century, inheriting its strange web of belief and unbelief; of Epicurean levity and fetichistic dread; of pedantic impossible ethics uttered by rote, and crude passions acted out with childish impulsiveness; of inclination towards a self-indulgent paganism, and inevitable subjection to that human conscience which, in the unrest of a new growth, was filling the air with strange prophecies and presentiments” (pp. 7–8). One may anticipate from this introductory piece that the fictional recreation of this past period will be as complex and conflicted as the subject-matter itself. In addition to the Proem’s doubled views, acknowledging the past’s unique values and the necessity of change, accepting the past’s persistence and development beyond it, a third perspective, which blends aspects of the others, is suggested at the close: “These things have not changed. The sunlight and shadows bring their old beauty [to the Florentine walls]; the little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty, and men still yearn for the reign of peace and righteousness – still own that life to be the highest, which is a conscious voluntary sacrifice. For the Papa Angelico is not come yet” (pp. 9–10). This peculiar combination of an ahistorical, nothing-new-under-the-sun sentiment with a forward-looking but disappointed orientation toward “the reign of peace and righteousness” is probably closest to Eliot’s own mind and heart and will be discerned in the novel. Perhaps the most interesting historiographical element in Romola is something that doesn’t appear there, the key history of the period that had been published in the same decade, Jakob Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860). Could Eliot have known Burckhardt and merely omitted considering his powerful book? It is only later, in her Notebooks of 1868–71 (closer attempts at dating are perhaps unwise), that she writes: “Vide … Burkhard, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien”

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(Notebooks, p. 80; at least she got the title’s spelling right). There is no indication in the sources of whether and when she actually did so, i.e., read it. But the appearance of the book in the very year in which Eliot set about to write a Renaissance novel makes it difficult to believe that she was entirely ignorant of its existence. She was, moreover, made aware of Burckhardt’s presence in the field by his 1847 edition of Kugler’s Handbook, “adding material of his own.”7 Eliot did not require Burckhardt to make the cultural history of Florence the chief context for the action of her novel, but the paradoxes of Renaissance man that are visible in her characterizations stand at an angle to the historian’s glowing account of “The Development of the Individual[:] Personality, Glory, Ridicule and Wit” (part two) and “The Discovery of the World and of Man” (part four).8 Eliot doesn’t idealize the Renaissance, despite its high cultural achievements, but instead takes it as a particularly rich and complex field of social and political conflict, i.e., as a good example of the human condition in history generally. The drama of the novel lies in inserting into this nest of vipers a visionary with aspirations to bring the Kingdom of God to the world, or at least to this favored city-state. In presenting Romola’s intellectual content, then, I shall concentrate on the two main forces in this dramatic interaction, the structure of Florentine politics and the ways in which Savonarola is shown in his power and ultimate inefficacy.9 Even when Eliot’s reading is brought to bear on her views of the Renaissance at large and of Savonarola in particular, it remains to be seen what her general ideas of history were. For this, there is no recourse to her readings but only to her writings. There is, however, a time lapse in her formulation of these ideas; perhaps they emerged only with, and in reflection on, the writing of her novel. In any case, she reviewed William E. H. Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1865) for Lewes’s latest venture in editing, the new Fortnightly Review.10 In sharply criticizing Lecky’s impressive volumes, she took the occasion to outline her own ideas on the subject. The first thing to recognize about Lecky’s History is that, despite its demonstration of rigorous rationality in undercutting the varied forms and stages of mystification – magic, witchcraft, belief in miracles, persecution of unbelievers, etc. – his is a thoroughly mystified ideology, relying on the concept of spirit (cf. Germanic Geist) not only in its title but in repeated references. Eliot does not fail to quote some of them with evident skepticism: regarding the rise of modern demystification, for example, “this momentous change, it is Mr. Lecky’s object to show, is due to that concurrence of conditions which he has chosen to call ‘the advance of the


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Spirit of Rationalism’” (pp. 411–12). (She also singles out his recourse to that hoary abstraction, “the spirit of the age” [p. 400].) She is severe with such mystified abstractions: “There is a fatiguing use of vague or shifting phrases, such as ‘modern civilisation,’ ‘spirit of the age,’ ‘tone of thought,’ ‘intellectual type of the age,’ … and the spirit of rationalism is sometimes treated as if it lay outside the specific mental activities of which it is a generalised expression” (p. 412). For Eliot, the theoretical challenge is to specify this “concurrence of conditions” that make for cultural change, and she does not stint refining historiographical methodology: “‘Mental attitudes,’ and ‘predispositions,’ however vague in consciousness, have not vague causes, any more than the ‘blind motions of the spring’ in plants and animals” (p. 413, quoting Tennyson). What, then, does she conceive the specific causes to be? the sum of conditions resulting from the laws of material growth, from changes produced by great historical collisions shattering the structures of ages and making new highways for events and ideas, and from the activities of higher minds no longer existing merely as opinions and teaching, but as institutions and organisations with which the interests, the affections, and the habits of the multitude are inextricably interwoven … the tremendous facts of the increase of population, the rejection of convicts by our colonies, the exhaustion of the soil by cotton plantations … urge even upon the foolish certain questions, certain claims, certain views concerning the scheme of the world, that can never again be silenced … railways, steam-ships, and electric telegraphs … are demonstrating the interdependence of all human interests, and making self-interest a duct for sympathy. (p. 402)

There may be differences between this discourse on the interrelation between material and intellectual culture in explaining change and that of historical materialism, but I fail to detect them. There is here, of course, no simplistic relationship between economic “base” and cultural “superstructure,” no preference for the former as determining the latter, but neither is there this in the more enlightened late Marxist formulations in this tradition. Indeed, Eliot’s position on at least one of the determining forces in historical change is one that combines aspects of the material and the intellectual. In answering the question she has implicitly put to Lecky, how to account for the “Declining Sense of the Miraculous” (p. 399), she has no hesitation in positing the rise of modern science: The supremely important fact, that the gradual reduction of all phenomena within the sphere of established law, which carries as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous, has its determining current in the development of physical science, seems to have engaged comparatively little of his attention … The great conception of universal regular sequence, without partiality and without caprice – the

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conception which is the most potent force at work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical form given to our sentiments – could only grow out of that patient watching of external fact, and that silencing of preconceived notions, which are urged upon the mind by the problems of physical science. (p. 413)

This kind of explanation of historical change might seem to put Eliot in the camp of Whiggish, progressive historians, content to point to the spread of scientific enlightenment as the guarantor of progress, but her stance is not, of course, a simple one. She had only disdain for a current proponent of reductive progressivism, Henry T. Buckle, whose History of Civilization in England (1858–62) was appearing at this time. “I am very far behind Mr. Buckle’s millennial prospect,” she wrote, “which is, that men will be more and more congregated in cities and occupied with human affairs, so as to be less and less under the influence of Nature, i.e., the sky, the hills, and the plains; whereby superstition will vanish and statistics will reign for ever and ever” (Letters III, 417).11 In the same vein, she disdained Enlightenment rationalism, not only in the essay discussed above but in a letter: “I hope we are well out of that phase in which the most philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of human folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be the one who could sympathize with no age but the age to come” (Letters III, 437). At the same time, she was contemptuous of James Fitzjames Stephen’s anti-rationalist Toryism, particularly his attack on Comte.12 If we ask, then, what was Eliot’s philosophy of history, a complex web emerges, adequate to the complex web she saw in history itself. It includes a balance of opposite values, as in a letter of the time in which she looks wryly back on “a period when brains were untroubled by difficulties and the lacteals [i.e., lymph ducts] of all good Christians were in perfect order,” while in the next sentence but one she honors “an age of earnest faith, grasping a noble conception of life and determined to bring all things into harmony with it” (Letters III, 442). These attitudes correspond to the first two points of view in the Proem to Romola, valuing the uniqueness of past epochs while recognizing the necessity to move beyond them. The one constant in her vision of the past is a sense of interaction, not only of individuals among themselves and of groups within their social structures, not only between material and ideational forces, but between the individual and his social environment: “It is the habit of my imagination to strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a character moves as of the character itself ” (Letters IV, 97). This “habit of … imagination” is the source not only of her historical sense but of her approach to fictional characterization; as she continues, “The psychological causes which prompted me to give such


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details of Florentine life and history as I have given, are precisely the same as those which determined me in giving the details of English village life in ‘Silas Marner,’ or the ‘Dodson’ life, out of which were developed the destinies of poor Tom and Maggie.” In this perspective, her aim was not to reduce the individual to the forces acting upon him, as would the historical materialist, but to project his larger dimensions. Successfully conveying this perspective would constitute “proof that my work has been seen to have some true significance by minds prepared not simply by instruction, but by that religious and moral sympathy with the historical life of man which is the larger half of culture” (Letters IV, 97). A test case for this project was the writing of Romola. The letter quoted above was addressed to R. H. Hutton, the reviewer for the Spectator and Eliot’s foremost contemporary critic – along with E. S. Dallas of the Times. To him, she makes her striving for contextualization even more specific: “You have seized with a fulness which I had hardly hoped that my book could suggest, what it was my effort to express in the presentation of Bardo and Baldassarre; and also the relation of Florentine political life to the development of Tito’s nature” (Letters IV, 97). This is not as self-evident a proposition as first appears: what was the “relation of Florentine political life to the development of Tito’s nature”? We are speaking of a political context for a moral process, surely a difficult, not to say questionable, relationship to establish. To answer would require defining or at least describing the structure of Florentine politics, and this Eliot has done in great – for some, excessive – detail. The parties to this political matrix are not summarily named, but must be culled from passing references for the structure to emerge. The most readily apprehended party is the aristocratic group that gathers for a pre-Christmas feast at the home (strictly speaking, the garden) of Bernardo Rucellai – one of the most beautiful of Florence’s palazzi.13 These Bigi (plural of biga [chariot], suggesting their magnificence) are antiquarian (dining on peacock and learnedly commenting on the recipe from an ancient Roman cookbook), philosophical (comparing types of skepticism within their cohort), classconscious (gauging their actions, as one of them puts it, “‘as a man of family who has faith to keep with his connections’” [ch. xxxix, p. 328], conservative but not reactionary (as Rucellai says, “‘I myself might be content with a restoration of the old order of things; but with modifications – with important modifications’” [xxxix, 328], and pragmatic: sensing their relative weakness, one of them proposes that “‘the only safe and wise policy for us Mediceans to pursue is to throw our strength into the scale of the Frate’s party’” (xxxix, 326) – that is, alliance with the popular party, which has Savonarola as its guide.

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These aristocrats aren’t the only ones in town: there are the Arrabbiati (rabid) anti-Mediceans whose distinguishing feature seems only to be competitive hatred of the Medici and their followers (partly derived from previous and famous conflicts in the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici). And these are to be distinguished from the Compagnacci (from compagno [comrade]), a younger set addicted to violence, particularly directed against the puritanical aspect of Savonarola’s influence. Their leader is Dolfo Spini, whom a modern reader has no difficulty in anachronistically identifying as a protofascist. Their nihilistic tendencies are specified: Eliot translates their name as “Evil Companions – that is to say, … all the dissolute young men belonging to the old aristocratic party, enemies of the Mediceans, enemies of the popular government, but still more bitter enemies of Savonarola” [xlv, 370). Spini becomes the natural deep connection (and eventual undoer) among Tito Melema’s widely distributed intrigues – of which, more later. The “popular party” is only partly identical to the Piagnoni, the primarily religiously oriented followers of Savonarola. The shifting constituents of this party are carefully distinguished: among these various disciples of the Frate were scattered many who were not in the least his disciples. Some were Mediceans who had already, from motives of fear and policy, begun to show the presiding spirit of the popular party a feigned deference [following the proposal made at the Rucellai garden]. Others were sincere advocates of a free government, but regarded Savonarola simply as an ambitious monk – half-sagacious, half-fanatical – who had made himself a powerful instrument with the people, and must be accepted as an important social fact. There were even some of his bitter enemies: members of the old aristocratic anti-Medicean party [the Arrabbiati] – determined to try and get the reins once more tight in the hands of certain chief families; or else licentious young men, who detested him as the kill-joy of Florence [i.e., even some Compagnacci]. (xxv, 222)

The structure of politics among these parties includes several levels of contention. On the broadest front, there are opposed international alliances to be made and wars to be fought. The Italian scene is neatly summarized: Ludovico Sforza … holding the ducal crown of Milan in his grasp … was much afraid of the Spanish-born old King Ferdinand and the Crown Prince Alfonso of Naples, who, not liking cruelty and treachery which were useless to themselves, objected to the poisoning of a near relative for the advantage of a Lombard usurper [Ludovico]; the royalties of Naples again were afraid of their suzerain, Pope Alexander Borgia; all three were anxiously watching Florence, lest with its midway territory it should determine the game by underhand backing; and all four, with every small state in Italy, were afraid of Venice – Venice the cautious, the stable, and the strong, that wanted to stretch its arms not only along both sides of the Adriatic but across to the ports of the western coast. (xxi, 200)


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On the last of these knotty points: Venice’s expansion could have represented a stranglehold on Florence’s overseas ambitions and necessities; later in the novel, a blockade on Leghorn is described as leading to famine and crisis in Florence. Amidst this mare’s nest, Savonarola’s practical politics stand out, if not for entire probity, at least for imaginativeness: he puts faith in the invasion of the peninsula by the French king, Charles VIII, as the “instrument elected by God … and all men who desired good rather than evil were to rejoice in his coming. For the scourge [i.e., Charles’s army] would fall destructively on the impenitent alone” (xxi, 201). And so an elaborate reception of the occupiers is staged (ch. xxi and following), inspired by Savonarola and the popular party but to the disgust of independence-minded republicans. And Charles does not fail to fail Savonarola’s expectations of secular redemption. In local politics, the Frate’s religious discourse is the alien element that disturbs and realigns the existing structure. Previously, the Medici family of bourgeois bankers, who were to become the chief aristocratic power (and eventually to become hereditary ducal rulers), have given way to the internecine oppositions outlined above; the current head of the family, Piero de’ Medici, “had been fairly pelted out … and in that act of energy the spirit of the Republic had recovered some of its old fire” (xxi, 201). But the specific issue in governance is debate over the proposal to alter the intricate and frequently modified constitution on a somewhat more democratic basis, in which the propertied adult male populace would elect a council of eight, who would then select the entire body of administrators, judiciary, etc. – “or, was it to be governed on a narrower and less popular scheme, in which the hereditary influence of good families would be less adulterated with the votes of shopkeepers?” (xxxv, 298–99). This formal proposal carried with it a broadening of the franchise, as opposed to the “good families’” inclination to an oligarchy on the Venetian model, yet the point of this class conflict is all but lost amid the intense rivalries that govern the debate. One has the impression that the great principles of politics have given way to partisan bickering and temporary advantage. True to form, Savonarola misses the class basis of the controversy and favors the scheme for “giving an expression to the public will large enough to counteract the vitiating influence of party interests; it was a plan that would make honest impartial public action at least possible. And the purer the government of Florence … the nearer would the Florentine people approach the character of a pure community, worthy to lead the way in the renovation of the Church and the world” (xxxv, 299). These anti-partisan political ideas (minus the churchly renovation) are close to Eliot’s own, as

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we shall see, but she clearly exposes their fragility and irrelevance to the dynamics of fragmented partisanship. (We shall encounter similar class interests and classless ideals when discussing Felix Holt in Chapter 7.) The promise of Savonarola’s investment in non-partisan political reform is, however, struck down by the Signoria when his fortunes vis-à-vis the papacy come a cropper. To make Florentine politics fully coherent is out of my power, but distinctive features include: dense social complexity in so confined a space; class conflict but also conflict within classes; tenuous alliances and self-defeating commitments; unstable political bases with changing supremacies; external connections threatening undue influence and potential domination; political-religious interactions and complications of the two mutual influences; public anxiety reaching states of hysteria; detached cynicism even among the wiser observers (as in the intercalated barbershop debates); and resort to violence, internally and externally applied. All this at the height of the city’s artistic activity and immortal achievement. Yet politics as conceived in Romola casts a longer shadow on life than in the political sphere alone. Among the many political actors, it is only Savonarola and Tito whose complex motivations are stringently analyzed, but the attention given them more than makes up for the narrow selection. Before considering Savonarola’s domestic positions, I return to the question of how Florentine politics provides a context for Tito’s moral development or degeneration. Let us review the stages of his almost magical career. The magic is explained by the state of Florence summarized above: in such a complex and unsettled society, it becomes possible to acquire connections, shift allegiances, and move up and down the power ladder with alacrity. Tito begins in a small way as a courier and spy for the Medicean Bigi; indeed, the narreme of his recruitment provides the justification for the extensive account of that party’s party in the Rucellai gardens (xxxix, 329–30). He then branches out into a plot with Spini’s Compagnacci to entrap Savonarola outside the city walls (xlvi, 378–79) – although he seems also to be engaged in a double-cross that involves saving the Frate from capture. (This is the impression he gives Romola when she challenges him on it [xlvi, 382–83], and it may actually be true.) Aside from his regular job as secretary to the Signoria, specifically to Francesco Valori, leader of the Piagnoni – for which he has beaten out no less a competitor than Niccolò Machiavelli – he becomes engaged in a “triple game”: “He had been strengthening his influence at Rome and at Milan, by being the medium of secret information and indirect measures against the Frate and the popular party; he had cultivated more assiduously than ever the regard of


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this party by showing subtle evidence that his political convictions were entirely on their side; and all the while, instead of withdrawing his agency from the Mediceans, he had sought to be more actively employed and exclusively trusted by them” (lvii, 445). (Tito’s omnicompetence or omnipresence leads to some plot absurdities, like his assuming the role of herald of the city’s relief from famine with the opening of the Leghorn port.) But his “triple game” shows signs of playing out when he’s involved in the uncovering and punishing of a Medicean plot to return Piero de’ Medici to power; as the price for covering himself, retaining his secretaryship and hushing up his complicity, he sells out one of the conspirators, Bernardo del Nero (lvii, 446–47) – who happens to be his wife’s godfather. Little wonder, then, that he has made plans to leave Florence and has placed funds abroad, dropping his inconvenient wife in the process (xlviii, 393). But his involvement with Spini’s Compagnacci proves too entrammeling a relationship, and he’s caught up in the rioting by that group – leading to the loss of his portable funds, his jump into the Arno, and his washing up (in both senses of the term) by his cast-off adoptive father on the far bank. Since Tito is involved with almost every party in Florence, we can see him as the epitome of its political dynamics – and not a favorable example, given his atrociously low morality in personal as well as political life. So the relation between the individual and the community manifested in the Tito plot of the novel is one of metonymy: Tito is Florentine politics embodied and in action. As an outsider to the community, a Greek immigrant, he is free of inherited commitments to one side or another, and can take up, internalize and externalize the full scope of that state’s degeneracy. Outsiders aren’t always favorably portrayed in Eliot’s fiction. To say that Tito is Renaissance Florence in nuce is to color that city with a very dark brush. But the text permits us to do so when we gather his views on the politics around him: “And what motive could any man really have, except his own interest? Florentines whose passions were engaged in their petty and precarious political schemes might have no self-interest separable from family pride and tenacity in old hatred and attachments; … fanatics who believed in the coming Scourge and Renovation might see their own interest in a future palm branch and white robe; but no man of clear intellect allowed his course to be determined by such puerile impulses or questionable inward fumes” (lvii, 449). (As the question-mark and other linguistic signs in this passage show, it is an example of Eliot’s use of the technique of free indirect style.) Thus, with two exceptions – the old families, whose motives are the irrational ones of pride, hatred and personal

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attachments, and the religious followers of Savonarola – the men of clear intellect who contend and govern by raison d’état set the prevailing tone of the city’s political life. There’s nothing new in political philosophy here, nor anything particularly Utilitarian; even Machiavelli, whose writing of The Prince would shortly follow the events portrayed in the novel, was not the first to argue, as the Athenians had done to the Melians before annihilating them, that politics is a matter of interests. The deepest level of political history to be found in Romola lies at the level of consciousness – a penetration that modifies but does not dispel Eliot’s debts to historical materialism. One manifestation of that consciousness is Savonarola’s, and in examining the mind of an actual person so closely, Eliot performs a feat of historical imagination that may stand beside that of Tolstoy with Marshall Kutuzov or of Dostoyevsky with Peter Verkhovensky (i.e., the historical Nihilist, Netchayev). That this exercise is part and parcel of the novel’s central impulse is made clear in the narrator’s statement that “the problem before [Romola] was essentially the same as that which had lain before Savonarola – the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended and where the sacredness of rebellion began. To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the face of a law which is not unarmed with divine lightnings …” (lvi, 442). To reach this point of understanding the twin protagonists, the one in the personal, the other in the historical sphere, the reader must appraise the numerous scenes of meditation they engage in, as well as the numerous meditations on them in which the narrator engages. The first of the Savonarola meditations follows his dramatic sermon in the cathedral: Perhaps, while no preacher ever had a more massive influence than Savonarola, no preacher ever had more heterogeneous materials to work upon. And one secret of the massive influence lay in the highly mixed character of his preaching … In Savonarola’s preaching there were strains that appealed to the very finest susceptibilities of men’s natures, and there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous superstition. His need of personal predominance, his labyrinthine allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures, his enigmatic visions, and his false certitude about the Divine intentions, never ceased, in his own large soul, to be ennobled by that fervid piety, that passionate sense of the infinite, that active sympathy, that clear-sighted demand for the subjection of selfish interests to the general good, which he had in common with the greatest of mankind … No man ever struggled to retain power over a mixed multitude without suffering vitiation: his standard must be their lower needs, and not his own best insight. (xxv, 222–23)


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This tells us more than the obvious fact that the Frate was, like even the greatest of mankind, a mixed character; it makes a more specific point about the nature of political power. That point may be obvious, too, but is nonetheless a powerful one: political ideals must be translated into the terms of political realities, the idealistic theorist necessarily declines in becoming a worldly actor, and the lofty orator must adapt to the limitations of his audience. This is not simply a perception of the disparity between the ideal and the real that Friedrich Schlegel defined as Romantic irony; it is the application of the tragic sense of life in the realm of politics. The first stage of the Frate’s descent into the political miasma comes with his taking a position on the proposed institution of a Grand Council: “he was rapidly passing in his daily sermons from the general to the special – from telling his hearers that they must postpone their private passions and interests to the public good, to telling them precisely what sort of government they must have in order to promote that good – from ‘Choose whatever is best for all’ to ‘Choose the Great Council,’ and ‘the Great Council is the will of God’” (xxxv, 299). The next step is to raise the sound level and promised rewards in his sermons: the belief in the French deliverer [Charles VIII], who had turned his back on his high mission, seemed to have wrought harm; and hostility, both on a petty and on a grand scale, was attacking the Prophet [Savonarola] with new weapons and new determination. It followed that the spirit of contention and self-vindication pierced more and more conspicuously in his sermons; that he was urged to meet the popular demands not only by increased insistence and detail concerning visions and private revelations, but by a tone of defiant confidence against objectors; and from having denounced the desire for the miraculous, and declared that miracles had no relation to true faith, he had come to assert that at the right moment the divine power would attest the truth of his prophetic preaching by a miracle. (lii, 416)

The resort to miracles or the promise of miracles was a sore point with the secularist biographer Villari, and Eliot makes no allowance for its willful mystification of his followers, despite her usual sympathy with genuine religious veneration. Indeed, Romola intuits that Savonarola’s refusal to “denounce the pretended revelations” of a hysterical “seer,” Camilla Rucellai, lies in his “consciousness that such revelations were not, in their basis, distinctly separable from his own visions” (lii, 419). A summary of the novel’s exposition of Savonarola’s historical significance comes, appropriately, in the wake of its account of his execution, after the city – not just the government but the populace as well – has yielded to the pope’s urgent desire to burn him at the stake. Under torture, the Frate

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wavers in his responses. First confessing to the charges against him, then retracting his confession and affirming divine inspiration, he brings the observer, Romola, to the expectation that he will utter the final truth at the final moment – “‘a last decisive word. I will be there’” (lxxii, 542). But he doesn’t. The bathos of this denouement is relieved only by the traditional associations with a yet greater man at the pillory: “she only heard what he was hearing – gross jests, taunts, and curses” (lxxii, 544). We are already well advanced in describing the heroine’s arc of association with this historical figure. In mourning for the death of her father and brother, finding her marital faith in Tito undone by his appropriation and sale of the Humanist’s great and laboriously established library, she first tries to don the mantle of a “Pinzochera,” a sister of the third order of St. Francis, “living in the world but specially devoted to deeds of piety” (xxxvi, 303; subsequent citations in this paragraph are to this chapter, by page number alone). The religious guise doesn’t quite fit: “her whole air and expression were as little as possible like those of a sister whose eyelids were used to be bent and whose lips were used to move in silent iteration” (p. 307). She’s still under the influence of her father’s Humanism and thinks of her troubles in Stoic rather than Christian terms (p. 305) – followed by a vague impulse to appeal to the “most learned woman in the world, Cassandra Fedele, at Venice, and ask her how an instructed woman could support herself in a lonely life there” (p. 307). But the influence of Christianity is equally strong, as she recalls in a vision-dream of her brother, the monk Dino, prophesying ill of her marriage on his deathbed (p. 308). The “tangled web” (p. 309) of her emotions and intellectual resources is temporarily unknotted by her retrieval of a crucifix that Dino had given her and that Tito had locked away.14 So she makes her first flight from Florence, “free and alone” (p. 314), anchored securely neither in Christian nor in Humanist ideology. Enter Savonarola, appearing out of nowhere (in both the literal and critical senses of the phrase) on the road. The long debate they maintain (ch. xl; citations below by page number alone) ends in renewed inspiration not only to maintain the marriage and the sanctified commitment it carries (a dubious application of the principle of personal commitment to established relationships that Eliot elsewhere recommends), but also to live for others in the form of political identification with her community: as the Frate tells her, “‘you, a Florentine woman, should live for Florence’” (p. 341). The prospect is appealing to one inclined as she is to a religion of sorrow and self-denial; as he continues: “‘See, then, my daughter, how you are below the life of the believer who worships that image of the Supreme Offering, and feels the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that offering was


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made, and beholds the history of the world as the history of a great redemption in which he is himself a fellow-worker, in his own place and among his own people!’” (p. 342). It is a powerful temptation, combining as it does the full array of religion-of-humanity topoi: interpreting the god’s self-sacrifice as the model for a human one (re-reversing the “oracles of religion,” as it were), upholding the common life of mankind on a par with the attachment to one’s place and people, and perhaps above all offering something to do, as a fellowworker in the project of a great redemption. Romola ultimately seizes the offer, but small signs of doubt or doubtfulness in the proposition show up. She points out that her brother had forsaken family ties in his choice of monastic life, but Savonarola quibbles, “‘That was a special vocation’” (p. 343). He enforces this with a rather demeaning remark: “‘You have no vocation such as your brother had. You are a wife’” (p. 343). He knows how to appeal, too, to her masochistic tendencies: “‘sorrow has come to teach you a new worship’” (p. 344), and she directly responds to this “new fellowship with suffering” (p. 344). Finally, she makes the point that she no longer loves her husband (for return to Florence requires return to Tito), and the Frate rather glibly answers that “‘there is a bond of a higher love’” (p. 344 – i.e., that she should uphold the marital sacrament and live with Tito for Christ’s sake). As a final worm in this apple, he asks rhetorically, ‘“Your husband is not a malefactor?’” (p. 344), with the implication that that would be acceptable grounds for divorce. Romola, who to this point knows Tito only as a rotter, the despoiler of her father’s patrimony, doesn’t know of his many earlier and later crimes and answers in the negative. By this point, the Frate’s final injunction, “‘Live for Florence’” (p. 345), sounds a hollow note. Once she is back in the city, personal and political experience undermines Romola’s rootedness in her community. She takes up Savonarola’s politics along with his religious guidance – “the wearisome visions and allegories from which she recoiled in disgust when they came as stale repetitions from other lips than his” (xliv, 366). It is particularly the epic scale of his politics that attracts her: “His special care for liberty and purity of government in Florence, with his constant reference of this immediate object to the wider end of a universal regeneration, had created in her a new consciousness of the great drama of human existence in which her life was a part …” (xliv, 367). But her unfavorable intuitions (eventually confirmed) about Tito’s relation to Baldassarre, whom she has succored, Tito’s threats against her godfather, Bernardo del Nero (xlviii, 390, 393), and the tangled web of actual political life drag her down: Tito “had alarmed her affection and her conscience by the shadowy image of consequences [i.e., his not-so-veiled threats against her godfather], he had arrested her intellect by

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hanging before it the idea of a hopeless complexity in affairs, which defied any moral judgment” (xlviii, 393). She is in the classic position of the politically over-sophisticated, who lack the single-minded interestedness to place themselves unequivocally in one or another camp: “On the side from which moral energy came [i.e., Savonarola’s party] lay a fanaticism from which she was shrinking with newly startled repulsion; on the side to which she was drawn by affection and memory [i.e., del Nero’s Mediceans], there was the presentiment of some secret plotting” to return the Medici to power (lii, 421). The break occurs when del Nero is implicated in the Medici restoration plot and, when he faces death, Savonarola refuses to intervene on his behalf; “Seated in his [monastery] cell, correcting the sheets of his ‘Triumph of the Cross,’ it was easier to repose on a resolution of neutrality … ‘I meddle not with the functions of the State, my daughter … I keep away my hands from particular affairs, which it is the office of experienced citizens to administer’” (lix, 459). This eventually reaches a climax for two voices: “‘The cause of my party is the cause of God’s Kingdom … God’s Kingdom is something wider – else, let me stand outside it with the beings that I love’” (lix, 464). It is at this point that Romola makes her second flight from Florence, from politics and from history. It is also at this point that the narrator uses the term for the concept that I have suggested is regulative for the novel’s proceedings, tragedy: “Savonarola had that readily roused resentment towards opposition, hardly separable from a power-loving and powerful nature, accustomed to seek great ends that cast a reflected grandeur on the means by which they are sought … at this moment such feelings [of chagrin at Romola’s opposition to him] were nullified by that hard struggle which made half the tragedy of his life – the struggle of a mind possessed by a never-silent hunger after purity and simplicity, yet caught in a tangle of egoistic demands, false ideas, and difficult outward conditions, that made simplicity impossible” (lix, 462–63). The passage is careful to point out that the Frate isn’t merely a man of power-hunger and egoism, although these are surely present; nor are the pressures of material conditions lacking in any just weighing of his stature. But the nature of political life is clearly structured as a tragic opposition, in the Hegelian sense that we have observed Eliot to echo: the purity and simplicity of high ideals juxtaposed with the stern demands of reality, both historical and personal – the opposition, here, not of two ideals but that of the timeless idealist and his historical limits. This is not the narrator’s final word on the matter; there never is a final word on such matters. Reflecting on Romola’s rebuke to Savonarola’s “cause of God’s Kingdom” as mixed with her “personal tenderness” towards


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him and her awareness of the “ring of egoism” in him, the narrator says: “Perhaps such words have rarely been uttered without that meaner ring in them; yet they are the implicit formula of all energetic belief. And if such energetic belief, pursuing a grand and remote end, is often in danger of becoming a demon-worship … tender fellow-feeling for the nearest has its danger too, and is apt to be timid and sceptical towards the larger aims without which life cannot rise into religion” (lxi, 472; “religion” here includes, of course, the religion of humanity). So there we are, with Romola, in the tragic condition where no ethical principle is without its caveats and no human action is free of taint. No cause for despair; we must keep on seeking justice, for “Justice is like the Kingdom of God – it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning” (lxvii, 517). And so farewell to Savonarola, inscribed in the pages of history as a thwarted idealist and political failure: “But therefore he may the more fitly be called a martyr by his fellow-men to all time” (lxxi, 541; emphasis in the original). Romola has many a fault, which critics from the first have not failed to point out: it is over-learned and over-written; its domestic plot verges on melodrama, with a melodramatic villain given his due in the grotesque manner (not fully redeemed by its Dantesque associations); its resolution in the heroine’s departure from (and, in an Epilogue, later return to) the scene of historical action to become the “madonna” of a plague-stricken community is bathetic (my own view); etc. It is also a political-historical novel of the highest order, worthy to rank with those of Scott, the Russians, Conrad, and a very few others in that subgenre. It achieves this stature only partly by its mastery of the details of Florentine history and its keen accounts of political varieties and their motivations. It does so by engaging with the ideal as well as the real, by its keen accounts of ethical aspiration and impossible transcendence. Like Conrad’s Nostromo, this novel details the political and class structure of an entire society, yet has in view the larger frames of that society in world history and in the human condition. There is no sense of progress here, only of another stage in the long struggle for justice, still beyond us as a “great yearning.” In terms of Eliot’s career, it also provides the models for idealistic men and women, Savonarolas and Romolas, like Felix Holt, Dorothea Brooke Casaubon and Daniel Deronda, fellow workers in the field who must gather its wheat and tares. ii In taking up Eliot’s other historical creation, The Spanish Gypsy (out of sequence, for she began it before but finished it after Felix Holt), I begin by

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commenting on an accompanying text, “Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General,” published by her second, legal husband, John W. Cross, in editing her papers.15 These “four or five pages of MS.” (Cross’s cavalier statement of the number is disconcerting) were apparently not intended for publication and it is hard to tell whom they were written for, if not for an ideal reader. They tell us (as we approximate that standard) how to read her verse drama and, once we know this accurately, it escapes much of the commentary upon it by critics from the earliest to the present day.16 They have generally taken it to be a statement about race and nation, a piece of symbolic doctrine, yet Eliot tells us, “In order to judge properly of the dramatic structure, it must not be considered first in the light of doctrinal symbolism, but in the light of a tragedy representing some grand collision in the human lot” (p. 36). So that we may understand her tragedy she tells us not only what tragedy is but also something about the human lot. The relation of the idea of tragedy here to that which we have previously canvassed is consistent, though somewhat modified. Making the effort to grasp her intention by closely reading these “Notes” will not only dispel the fog of commentary but will also make it easier to live with this somewhat rebarbative poetic drama. I apologize for restating ideas about the human condition that may be all too obvious, yet certain of these ideas are likely to seem wrong-headed if not distressing, as they did to some of Eliot’s contemporaries. Chosen. Most commentators who employ the “Notes” begin with Eliot’s account of the scene of her inspiration, the Venetian setting for her view of an Annunciation, “said to be by Titian,”17 which “brought a new train of thought”: “A young maiden, believing herself to be on the eve of the chief event of her life – marriage – about to share in the ordinary lot of womanhood, full of young hope, has suddenly announced to her that she is chosen to fulfil a great destiny, entailing a terribly different experience from that of ordinary womanhood” (p. 34). With her characteristic empathy, Eliot imagines how such a proceeding might feel to the chosen one, granting the sacred event a human dimension not lost on the innumerable painters of Annunciations and numerous composers of Magnificats from the Middle Ages on. Eliot continues: “She is chosen, not by any momentary arbitrariness, but as a result of foregoing hereditary conditions: she obeys. ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’” (pp. 34–35). What are these “hereditary conditions”? Is the author alluding broadly to Mary’s Jewish status, which opened her to the prophetic expectations of a Messiah, now to come through her participation, or specifically to her family origins in the House of David, a particular requirement in Hebrew and Christian expectations? We are not told, but the question will be advanced in what follows.


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Tragic subject. “Here, I thought, is a subject grander than that of Iphigenia, and it has never been used” (p. 35) – an odd way to speak of a subject so much used, but Eliot is thinking of the situation as a tragic one, comparing it to that of Iphigenia (Goethe’s as well as Euripides’s). What does it mean to take Mary’s situation as a tragedy, and not a celebratory and redemptive occasion? The author decides not to write the Annunciation itself as tragedy but to take it as archetypical – thereby requiring her to find another such situation in human experience, preferably in history: she meant to “give the motive [of a woman chosen] a clothing in some suitable set of historical and local conditions” (p. 35). She decides on the “moment in Spanish history when the struggle with the Moors was attaining its climax [i.e., 1492, when Granada, the last Moorish city-state, fell and also the year that Jewry was expelled from Spain], and when there was the gypsy race present under such conditions as would enable me to get my heroine and the hereditary claim on her among the gypsies” (p. 35). The somewhat awkward phrasing exposes an authorial strain: she must “get [her] heroine … among the gypsies,” i.e., take her from whatever ideal realm she imagines her in and symbolically place her in history. And now the clinching point: “I required the opposition of race to give the need for renouncing the expectation of marriage” (p. 35). The “opposition of race” isn’t chosen to convey “doctrinal symbolism,” but is instrumental in a plot – a heroine’s renunciation of marriage – and in a larger pattern, the individual’s tragic choice between imposed collective commitments and personal fulfillment. Gipsies. “I could not use the Jews or the Moors, because the facts of their history were too conspicuously opposed to the working out of my catastrophe” (p. 35), i.e., these groups were expelled from Spain and continued their diaspora or were repatriated to the Maghreb, while Eliot wanted a chosen expatriation and an open ending to her heroine’s group destiny. Eliot was interested in gipsies, as their appearance in The Mill on the Floss attests; in the run-up to writing the play, she of course read George Borrow’s best-seller, The Zincali: or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain, but also Heinrich M. G. Grellmann’s foundational study, Die Zigeuner [Gipsies]: Ein historischer Versuch … and August F. Pott’s more modern scholarship, Die Zigeuner in Europa und Asie. (Her reading on Spain and in Spanish was, by comparison with her preparation for Romola, unusually light; see the Reading List for items during the years of working on the play.) But her raising the option of using the Jews or the Moors suggests that this is not a work about gipsies but about communities whose representatives tend to single out individuals to carry out their collective aims – any one of these might do. Jews and gipsies do, however, share a special status in Eliot’s

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scheme of things: they are outsiders and thereby susceptible to gaining the solicitude that individual outsiders gain in her writings. The gipsies, like the Jews, also make the best examples of communities maintaining themselves over the centuries and surviving persecution by the power of cultural tradition alone, in the absence of land and state. The human lot. “I saw [the subject] might be taken as a symbol of the part which is played in the general human lot by hereditary conditions in the largest sense, and of the fact that what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions …” (p. 35). What are “hereditary conditions in the largest sense”? They include two broad types of inheritance, natural and cultural; natural inheritance we now call genetic endowment, cultural we tend to call social conditioning. Examples of the former include physical and mental character traits and capacities; of the latter, examples are of the widest range and include class position, family situation, institutional connections, and personal relationships that people begin with and that continue to operate throughout life. Race, class and gender are the most popular inheritances today, but nation, religion and family also count. Eliot tells us what she thought of the relation of these heritages to the individual who inherits them: “what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions.” This is a balanced statement of the influence of both genetic endowment and social or ideological formation on the individual’s ethical norms: interpersonal and group obligations, the duties in life as he or she conceives them, are “entirely” generated by the combination of these inherited conditions.18 Rebellion. But not always: “even in cases of just antagonism to the narrow view of hereditary claims, the whole background of the particular struggle is made up of our inherited nature” (p. 35). So there are occasions when there is “just [i.e., justified] antagonism” between an individual and “hereditary claims.” (There is also a catch-22 in that even the rebel’s background is “made up of our inherited nature.”) We recall that the issue was posed in Romola as “the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended and where the sacredness of rebellion began” (III, lvi, 442). In terms of Eliot’s earlier definition of tragedy, the conflict of sacred obedience and sacred rebellion was posed as the conflict of two equally valid ethical principles, and so it will be again – but first, a thought experiment: Adjustment to necessity. “Suppose for a moment that our conduct at great epochs was determined entirely by reflection, without the immediate intervention of feeling which supersedes reflection, our determination as to the right would consist in an adjustment of our individual needs to the dire necessities of our lot, partly as to our natural constitution, partly as sharers of life with our fellow-beings” (pp. 35–36). Note the power allotted both to


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reflection or intelligence and to the power of feeling that is said to supersede it. The wise, pragmatic course, based on self-preservation and social compatibility, would be to make a calculation of external forces and personal weakness and adjust to social necessity, i.e., give in or give up. But not everyone can or will do so, if only because the “intervention of feeling” upsets such calculations. Tragedy. “Tragedy consists in the terrible difficulty of this adjustment – ‘The dire strife Of poor Humanity’s afflicted will, Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny.’”

(p. 36)

The quotation from the play and accompanying comment yield two ideas of tragedy: one, the human condition in which mankind struggles in vain with “ruthless [i.e., pitiless] destiny”; the other, the form of a drama to convey this universal pattern. She continues: “Looking at individual lots, I seemed to see in each the same story, wrought out with more or less of tragedy, and I determined the elements of my drama under the influence of these ideas” (p. 36). The tragic hero is only doing what we all do in lesser degree: rebellion, inward or outward, followed by submission or destruction. Anticipating the form of her drama, she implies what we eventually find, that not only the heroine but the two main additional figures are under the same tragic pattern of choice and necessity. The tragic hero. “A good tragic subject … to be really tragic … must represent irreparable collision between the individual and the general (in differing degrees of generality). It is the individual with whom we sympathise, and the general of which we recognize the irresistible power” (p. 36). Modifying the earlier opposition between two equally valid ethical principles, the conflict now is more personal: between the individual as a focus of our identification and the communal or other large imposer of duties. Race and nation are only two of the sources of absolute duties: Greek tragedy provides other examples of power-mongers, from a universecontrolling Zeus in Prometheus Bound to an irrepressible life force in Bacchae. The essay goes on to give a pocket history of tragic literature, adding to the range of conflictual types. The Spanish Gypsy. “It might be a reasonable ground of objection against the whole structure of ‘The Spanish Gypsy’ if it were shown that the action is outrageously improbable … It is not a reasonable ground of objection that [the protagonists] would have done better to act otherwise …” (p. 37). There’s a hint of entirely appropriate authorial defensiveness here because the play’s action is, if not “outrageously improbable,” improbable. But the

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defense is ultimately of the hero and heroine, who ultimately submit to the claims of others and fail. This last twist is made in the final phrase of a later sentence: “A tragedy has not to expound why the individual must give way to the general: it has to show that it is compelled to give way, the tragedy consisting in the struggle involved, and often in the entirely calamitous issue in spite of a grand submission” (p. 38). The protagonists. Silva, the heroine’s lover, “presents the tragedy of entire rebellion: Fedalma [the heroine] of a grand submission, which is rendered vain by the effects of Silva’s rebellion: Zarca, the struggle for a great end, rendered vain by the surrounding conditions of life” (p. 38). She later adds: “In Silva is presented the claim of fidelity to social pledges; in Fedalma, the claim constituted by an hereditary lot less consciously shared” (p. 40). One notes (a point to which I shall return) that in a play often read as a tract for national revivals, the vanity both of the nationalist leader’s enterprise and that of his recruit should introduce a note of caution. The important literary point is that there are three tragic figures in the drama, a complexity that would obviate any monolithic doctrinal symbolism. We are now at the point of considering the play itself, to see what Eliot’s stated intentions came to in practice. I regretfully leave unremarked her remarkable further reflections on the individual lot, hereditary claims, women, love and art. What do we see in the dramatic action that corresponds to Eliot’s views on these fundamental subjects? I shall draw only a few of the possible inferences, without the certainty that Eliot would herself have drawn them: (a) There is no necessity for much that passes as necessity, although many inherited conditions may well be called Nemesis. Both individuals and their communities make choices – else how would the chosen be chosen? – and claim that they’re acting by necessity. Zarca’s pressure on his daughter to join the gipsy movement is an act of will – to consider it otherwise would be to reduce him from the tragic stature that Eliot assigns him to a mere ideologue. (b) Race and nation, despite the power they wield as controlling forces – among the “inherited conditions” amounting to “necessity” – are transmitted interpersonally, as when individuals purporting to act for the community seek to impose on others whom they claim on these ideological grounds.19 (c) Family is often the transmission point of such ideologies to the individual. As national identity functions in Zarca’s overtures to Fedalma, it is as cultural a factor as her other (Christian, Spanish) inheritances – Zarca merely claims it takes precedence since it came first. (d) Since individuals are free as well as bound, they have the capacity at least temporarily to rebel, before external forces impose their power. The chosen are free


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to choose, to accept or reject the proffered identity. Fedalma, resembling Iphigenia rather than Antigone, succumbs to her father’s will, her willed selfsacrifice becoming the source of her tragic stature. These considerations must enter our judgment of the play – if it is even a closet drama, given the narrative introductory and intercalated passages in its five Books (Eliot doesn’t bother to divide it into numbered acts and scenes). In the absence of a fully plausible plot (although she was sure the actions were possible), our attention is more fully occupied with its characterization. (I forbear to consider the versification, mainly humdrum blank verse, with occasional songs of no little banality.) Although Zarca makes two tragic choices – to become the leader of a people’s exodus and to induce his daughter’s cooperation – he is not as interesting a tragic figure as Silva. Fedalma’s lover in his turn makes two choices: first to renounce his vows in a Christian knighthood in order to join his beloved in her enterprise, and eventually to return to the fold when circumstances render his continued relation to her impossible (after he kills her father in battle). Silva’s decisions are more dramatically enacted than those of the other protagonists and provide the forefront of the play’s action. Fedalma, the substitute in Eliot’s Notes for the Virgin Mary as the chosen one, becomes like her avatar a less decisive dramatic agent than the others. She makes only one choice, of duty over love, and sticks to it with Virginlike devotion, thereby being left behind in the increasing complexity of the play’s thought and action. In another play, like Sophocles’s Antigone, her harping on one string might have come off better. There are also some questionable features in her development, if it can be called that. She intuits her gipsy origin even before it is revealed, she dances with an innate (racial?) virtuosity, and she speaks of herself in the language of metempsychosis; examining a necklace given her by her fiancé, she muses on the jewels: They seem to speak to me as writing would, To bring a message from the dead, dead past[.] What is their secret? Are they characters? I never learned them; yet they stir some sense That once I dreamed – I have forgotten what. Or was it life? Perhaps I lived before In some strange world where first my soul was shaped …20

In providing her with such mental traits, Eliot risks suggesting a mystical fatality to the drama of choice and its consequences.

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That leaves Silva to occupy the center, to whom sympathy comes more readily than to the obsessive Zarca or to the mystified Fedalma. Surrounded as he is by their imperatives and by other ideologues – his Inquisitor uncle Isidor, dying to add another heretic to his bonfire, and his Jewish friend, the scholar Sephardo, as racially exclusive as his prospective father-in-law – his frustrations may excuse at least part of his excesses. Our final view of him is on his way to Rome, another Tannhäuser, seeking absolution from the pope for his betrayal of his Christian knighthood – perhaps with a sigh of relief in reverting to a simpler ideology. In Silva’s great internal monologue – narrated rather than soliloquized – in Book IV (pp. 219ff.) on his abandonment of his heritage, the most psychologically sophisticated section of the text, the full range of that heritage is enumerated: Now the former life Of close-linked fellowship, the life that made His full-formed self, as the impregnant sap Of years successive frames the full-branched tree – Was present in one whole; and that great trust His deed had broken turned reproach on him From faces of all witnesses who heard His uttered pledges; … faces human all, And some divine as well as human: His Who hung supreme, the suffering Man divine Above the altar; Hers, the Mother pure Whose glance informed his masculine tenderness With deepest reverence; the Archangel armed, Trampling man’s enemy: all heroic forms That fill the world of faith with voices, hearts, And high companionship, to Silva now Made but one inward and insistent world With faces of his peers, with court and hall And deference, and reverent vassalage, And filial pieties – one current strong, The warmly mingled life-blood of his mind …

(Book IV, pp. 221–22, ll. 158–83)

While other commentators have put their finger on Silva’s rationalizations – “he idly played / With rules, beliefs, charges, and ceremonies” – the thrust of the passage is to enforce the rich complex of culture on the mind, a mélange of religious presences, social connections, personal ties and institutional commitments. In breaking with this cultural endowment, Silva


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commits a deeper wound perhaps than does any apostate to a racial-national cause: Such revenge Is wrought by the long travail of mankind On him who scorns it, and would shape his life Without obedience. (Book IV, p. 222, ll. 186–89)

Focusing on Silva is a means of access to another, perhaps an even more resonant aspect of The Spanish Gypsy, its place in a long tradition of works in which not only the gipsies play a prominent role but in which their interaction with surrounding societies is foregrounded. A recent study, The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession, by Lou CharnonDeutsch,21 places Eliot’s drama well past the Ur-text, Cervantes’s novella, “La Gitanilla” of the Exemplary Novels, and amid a host of nineteenthcentury works on similar themes. These include Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen (together with its offspring, Georges Bizet’s opera) and George Sand’s La Filleule. In this context, Eliot can be seen recycling a host of well-worn topoi regarding gipsies and plot narremes of their social interactions. As might be expected, she will be found turning some of these on their heads, not only removing the sting from the typical gipsy associations – shiftless, thieving, passionate, etc. – but ironically reversing a favorite situation: instead of the Christian child stolen by gipsies, we have a gipsy child stolen by Christians. More closely in the tradition, however, is her version of a standard narreme: “the ‘arcane power’ of Gypsy women to influence men ‘to perform acts they would not normally commit’” (p. 2; it’s not clear whom the author is quoting here). When we remember Carmen’s effect on Don José, this formulation smacks of understatement; the more salient way of putting the matter is: “In the vast majority of stories the mismatched union consists of a man, superior in many ways but often repressed, who is attracted to a woman whose carefreeness and sensual faculties are magnified by comparison … The consequences of this demolition of walls are often catastrophic …” (p. 240). Without assessing the cultural baggage that Charnon-Deutsch assembles, and without delving into the inviting territory of psychosexual explanation, one can appreciate the “demolition” that takes place in this Spanish Gypsy in a new light. The tragedy is not about the irrefrangible imperatives and utopian rewards that stem from national redemption, but about the heavy costs that will be incurred from all such movements. These costs will be paid not only by the participants – Zarca is killed in the rebellion and Fedalma

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is off to Africa with scant hopes of success22 – but also by the bystanders, innocent or not. Although Eliot shows her characteristic sympathy with all idealistic aspirations, she regards them under the aspect of tragedy, in which the loss of personal freedom, loving union, and rootedness in a culture (even a secondarily acquired one) are the concomitants. When reckoning the catastrophic consequences of inter-racial or international encounters in The Spanish Gypsy, it is strange that it has been so often read for “the elevation of communal interests over private ones,” and that it is seen as anticipating that in her later works “Eliot would stand fast not by the liberal views of Silva, but by the creed of blood and birth she had placed in the mouths of Zarca and Sephardo.”23 What did Eliot, after all, think about race? An answer must come from her nonfictional rather than her fictional writings, and is to be found, curiously enough, in a brief essay, “A Word for the Germans.”24 After reviewing the prejudices regarding “John Bull” in the stereotypes circulated in other lands, she drops the received notions of German cloudiness in her earlier essays and declares Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason “not in the least cloudy” (p. 388) – a highly unconvincing example, given the persistence of efforts to fully understand it. Acknowledging real differences among peoples, she explains: “the human race has not been educated on a plan of uniformity, and it is precisely that partition of mankind into races and nations, resulting in various national points of view or varieties of national genius, which has been the means of enriching and rendering more and more complete man’s knowledge of the inner and outer world” (p. 388). In addition to the typical conflation of race and nation, to the utter confusion of such categories, there is here an anticipation of the doctrine – preached not by the narrator of Daniel Deronda but by one of its protagonists – that racial or national differences may redound to the benefit of mankind as a whole. We may call this, cosmopolitan nationalism: diversity is not a good in itself but only as it contributes to the greater good of humanity. Even when offering this justification of racial-national diversity, Eliot continues in the stereotyping mode with a characterization of “the German mind.” After singling out “largeness of theoretic conception, and thoroughness in the investigation of facts” (p. 389), she returns to the downside: “It is true the German rarely writes well, rarely arranges his matter well, or manages it with economy, and therefore seldom produces a good book in the fullest sense of the word” (p. 389). It is hard to move from this to her conclusion that German literature is one of the three “greatest literatures of the world” (p. 390). But enough – it is clear that Eliot was infected with


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the virus that comes to all who engage in exercises of racial or national essentialism when trying to account for cultural differences. The best that can be said for her ideas of race and nation is that they are ideal conceptions, but, as in The Spanish Gypsy, the point may be that falling short of certain ideals in reality may not be such a bad thing.

chapter 7


George Eliot’s next major work, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), emerges within several biographical contexts – her personal history, her intellectual milieu and her historical surroundings. I shall rehearse them in that order, without privileging any one of them, for their importance will be found to be illuminating but not determinative. Since Eliot was at times a political novelist – at large in Romola and Felix Holt and in part in her later works – the question arises, what were her politics? A review of her political opinions yields the following data. In 1848, at the time of continental nationalist and left-wing revolutions, she wrote: I should have no hope of good from any imitative movement at home. Our working classes are eminently inferior to the mass of the French people. In France, the mind of the people is highly electrified – they are full of ideas on social subjects … Here there is so much larger a proportion of selfish radicalism and unsatisfied, brute sensuality (in the agricultural and mining districts especially) than of perception or desire of justice, that a revolutionary movement would be simply destructive – not constructive. Besides, it would be put down. Our military have no notion of “fraternizing.” … the aristocracy have got firm hold of them. Our little humbug of a queen is more endurable than the rest of her race because she calls forth a chivalrous feeling, and there is nothing in our constitution to obstruct the slow progress of political reform … But we English are slow crawlers. (Letters I, 254)

The tone of this statement to John Sibree, Jr., who invited her to join him in “happiness about the French Revolution” of 1848 (Letters I, 252), is remarkable on several counts: there is a shared assumption that political change is necessary and desirable; there is the long-view caution we might expect and are subsequently to find writ large in a comprehensive mind; there is a keen perception of class factors affecting revolutionary activity (worthy of a Marxist strategist); there is moderate contempt for royalty and other British institutions; in sum, there is a preference for the “slow progress of political reform” over immediate revolution in England. As for other 140


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nations, “I should not be sorry to hear that the Italians had risen en masse and chased the odious Austrians out of beautiful Lombardy. But this they could hardly do without help, and that involves another European war” (Letters I, 255). Again, caution, but approval of revolution, in this case with national liberation in view. Another letter of this period expresses sympathy for Louis Blanc, one of the leaders of the 1848 revolution, upon his fall from power: “Poor Louis Blanc! … The day will come when there will be a temple of white marble where sweet incense and anthems shall rise to the memory of every man and woman who has had a deep ‘ahnung,’ a presentiment, a yearning, or a clear vision of the time when this miserable reign of Mammon shall end …” (Letters I, 267). She goes on to quote (approximately and approvingly) from the revolutionist’s L’Organisation du travail (1841), a tract for his socialistic program of national workshops. Eliot was no socialist, but her sympathy with idealistic and progressive social actors lay deep. Her acute disdain for many aspects of English society was vivid before she came to find novelistic means of channeling it: “You will wonder what has wrought me up into this fury – it is the loathsome fawning, the transparent hypocrisy, the systematic giving as little as possible for as much as possible that one meets with here at every turn. I feel that society is training men and women for hell” (Letters I, 267).1 We wait long for another such political-moral outburst, till the 1860s in fact, and by then the opinions are moderated. Among these is a note of satisfaction in Union (“Federal”) successes in the American Civil War (Letters IV, 139) – a position at variance with the majority of Englishmen, whose Cavalier sympathies and cotton-manufacturing interests lay with the South. She shows greater caution regarding political rebels – even highly idealistic ones like the Italian freedom-fighter Mazzini, for whom she expresses “real reverence” (Letters IV, 200) – while rejecting an appeal to contribute to a fund in his behalf, citing the possibility that the money could be diverted to the “promotion of conspiracy” (Letters IV, 199).2 Closer to home, her view of the growing movement for Irish Home Rule is positive: “All protests tell, however slowly and imperceptibly, and a protest against the doctrine that England is to keep Ireland under all conditions was what I had wished to be made” (Letters IV, 430). On English party politics, the evidence of her opinions is slim. Eliot gave signs of affinity with John Stuart Mill’s left wing of the Liberals; she writes in 1865 to Mrs. Peter A. Taylor, the wife of a Liberal MP (with whom she also shared pro-Union views): “I agree with you in your feeling about Mill. Some of his works have been frequently my companions of late,3 and

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I have been going through many actions de grâce towards him. I am not anxious that he should be in Parliament: thinkers can do more outside than inside the House. But it would have been a fine precedent, and would have made an epoch, for such a man to have been asked for and elected solely on the ground of his mental eminence. As it is, I suppose it is pretty certain that he will not be elected” (Letters IV, 196). This was a rare instance of Eliot’s lack of political sagacity, for Mill, despite misgivings and qualifications comparable to Eliot’s about his running, was elected and served from 1865 to 1868. What can we take away from these brief opinions on social questions, national independence movements, revolution and reform? The summary view must be that Eliot was a moderate liberal, no Liberal in party affiliation, nor liberal in the nineteenth-century sense of economic laissez faire, but progressive and reformist. But a set of opinions does not a politics make, and her position cannot be so neatly summarized. We must pursue the intellectual context for her thinking and writing on the subject. Frederic Harrison, Eliot’s Positivist friend, was, it is universally acknowledged, the chief “influence” on Felix Holt, for he largely invented and guided her through the impossibly complex legal plot which she felt, for reasons that will emerge, necessary for her project. He was also the conduit for the main intellectual influence on her politics in the novel, conveying what we may call applied Comtism. Eliot’s most direct statement of support for Harrison’s politics came in response to his article, “Industrial Co-operation,” for Lewes’s Fortnightly Review.4 She writes with unaccustomed enthusiasm for a social policy: “I have had it in my mind to write to you for many days … of the delight and gratitude I felt in reading your article on Industrial Co-operation. Certain points admirably brought out in that article would I think be worth the labour of a life if one could help in winning them thorough recognition … it is of consequence to me when I find your energetic writing confirm my own faith” (Letters IV, 214). What did Harrison write to draw forth this rare political eulogy and testament of “faith”? The article is ostensibly about the co-operative movement that was growing in this period; to summarize Harrison’s views: although consumer co-ops are useful, industrial co-ops don’t improve the workers’ situation, because they’re run like any other business exploiting its workers, even though the latter are company participants. They have, moreover, a bad moral effect by fostering acquisitive values among previously innocent worker-participants – who must hire managers anyway, since they lack administrative skills. And their track record is poor – they tend to fail.


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The article is curious, however, in citing only one instance of such failure, the famous Rochedale works; in the same vein, it offers no evidence of bad moral influence, nor does it consider the equally theoretical possibility that co-operative activity might have positive moral influence. Harrison’s conclusion, that only moral and mental education can improve the worker’s lot, is a well-worn and rather lame one in this context, for learning-by-doing would seem an excellent form of education. One’s conclusion can only be that the approach is a glaringly paternalistic one: you men can’t improve your condition by your own efforts, but should take instruction from those with an excellent (Comtean) program.5 Harrison’s paternalism was only in part a personal failing; like many intellectual vices, it was the result of a system, in this case, the doctrines of his master, Auguste Comte. In an illuminating study of English Positivism, Brains and Numbers,6 Christopher Kent has outlined Comte’s theory of intellectuals and its bearing on the Positivists’ politics. Tracing the idea of an intellectual leadership for England back to Coleridge’s idea of a clerisy, a secular intelligentsia on the model of the religious clergy, Kent follows the tale through the university reform movement of the mid-century, in which many of the principles of such a leadership group were articulated. Turning to the Positivists, he notes the formation in 1865, by Harrison and his barrister-journalist cohort, of the Century Club, “in Harrison’s words, ‘a kind of Caucus to effect definite political, social and ecclesiastical reforms, without distinctions of class …’” (p. 32). While the club was ecumenical in including both Oxford and Cambridge men, professors and nobility, “higher journalists” like R. H. Hutton and “at least five Times leader writers” (p. 33), it had difficulty in recruiting working people, beyond a few “prominent working-class leaders” (p. 33). While the Positivists in this set couldn’t take the obvious next step of creating a journal for their program – precluded by Comte’s rejection of journalists and journalism tout court – they did contribute to a pair of essay collections on the issue of the day, electoral reform. Hutton, not a Positivist but a follower of F. D. Maurice’s Christian socialist coterie (one can hardly call it a movement), in his essay, “The Political Character of the Working Classes,” was hopeful for their enfranchisement: “No other class of English society was ‘so open to the influence of great ideas, and so willing to make sacrifices for those ideas’ … Rather than seeing them as instruments of class war, Hutton urged his readers to see how trade unions demonstrated the aptitude of the people for political discipline and the respect for ‘collective life’” (p. 37). Despite his closeness to George Eliot as an insightful reviewer and correspondent, his hopeful view of lower-class enfranchisement was not

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shared by her, and she was more disposed (for reasons on which I will speculate below) to take up the Positivists’ more guarded welcome to workers’ access to political life. The Comtist view of political change is sketched by Kent with an emphasis on his peculiar idea of the proletariat: “The reconciliation of order and progress [Comte’s main desiderata, and the terms in the title of Harrison’s book on the subject] would be effected by the dissolution of the lower middle class, whose ambitions he believed were the chief source of social disturbance, into the proletariat (Comte’s own term). Unsettling aspirations to social mobility would be eliminated with the classes themselves. There would be only one class, the proletariat, governed by two auxiliary elites – the spiritual power exercising intellectual authority and the temporal power exercising administrative authority” (p. 59). Although this happy state – static and hierarchical – must have seemed far off, there would be work to do on the way to its achievement: “The new society,” Kent writes, “was to be attained without revolution, by moral rather than political means – by education, in fact” (p. 59). This gave the Comtist intellectuals something to do: to contend with other intellectuals to be the preferred political educators. Here was paternalism erected as an institution, fortunately remaining a speculative one. The Positivists’ program was, then, a policy without a politics,7 yet they tried hard to be chosen by the newly constituted electorate following the enactment of the Reform Bill in 1867 – presumably to move Parliament toward a similar non-political model. The results of their 1868 electioneering were, as might be expected, disappointing; only one of the reform essayists was successful, and even the model of the intellectual-in-politics, Mill, was defeated. As Kent sums up their despair, “post-second reform act politics promised to be even less accessible to the independent intellectual” (p. 50).8 So energetic a man as Harrison wasn’t finished, of course, and he continued his proselytizing and publishing into the next century. (His later writings, together with the fortunes of the English Positivist movement or cult, are set out by Kent in useful fashion.) But there is one further stage of his busy career that merits attention for its potential effect on Eliot – if not on her novel, already published, then on the essay which followed in 1868 – his crossing of swords with Matthew Arnold.9 The events date from Harrison’s “Our Venitian Constitution” in the Fortnightly Review of March 1867, which led Arnold to include him among the enemies of culture in the Cornhill Magazine in July of that year, followed by Harrison’s witty stealing of Arnold’s thunder in a satirical pseudodialogue in the November


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Fortnightly Review – all of this provoking Arnold to write five more essays in the next year’s Cornhill Magazine, which, together with “Culture and Its Enemies,” became Culture and Anarchy (1869). The issue they were concerned with, the relation of culture to politics, is dramatized by their evident competition in professing a leadership role in the intelligentsia of the time. Along with other intellectuals engaged in this discourse, they agree that men of their ilk (and perhaps everyone else) should rise above politics (politics being invariably placed low), and especially class politics – a particular bête noire, impeding the free play of mind. “What if we tried,” Arnold asks, “to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State” – defining the State (usually capitalized and italicized) as “the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals.”10 In this invocation of the Germano-Coleridgean idea (in Mill’s phrase) of the collective social being as opposed (in both senses) both to class and to individual interests, Arnold’s culture wields a special kind of power, that of an idealizing rhetoric: “Culture is then properly described … as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good” (p. 91). The key to Arnold’s dispute with Harrison is, then, not on the almost exclusive desirability or efficacy of mental training and dissemination in social progress, but only on the kind of knowledge to be marshaled in this pursuit, and on who is to marshall it. Harrison stands as the exponent of the Comtist emphasis on applying science, especially the budding social sciences, to social problems – not merely as a “passion for pure knowledge” – while Arnold’s study of perfection is a study of the “best that has been known and said in the world,” i.e., humanistic culture. Anticipating the next century’s contention between the “two cultures,” it is two kinds of intellectuals, who maintain distinct drives to knowledge and who both claim power to supersede politics, who are in contention here.11 How far does Eliot enter into this discourse of intellectuals in and on politics? She had read Arnold’s “Culture and Its Enemies” and commented upon it obliquely when approving of her friend Harrison’s riposte in “Culture: A Dialogue”: “I have not been able to find Matthew Arnold’s article again, but I remember enough of it to appreciate the force of your criticism. Only in one point I am unable to see as you do. I don’t know how far my impressions have been warped by reading German, but I have

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regarded the word ‘culture’ as a verbal equivalent for the highest mental result of past and present influences” (Letters IV, 395). Germanic Bildung is compatible with the cultural tradition that Arnold upholds, but there is no sign here or elsewhere that Eliot thought it a worthy contributor to political guidance. Nor does she commit herself to Harrison’s Comtist dedication to social science as the key to political progress. Neither Arnold’s appropriation of culture for politics nor Harrison’s facile dismissal of culture as a political concern could animate her political thinking. Neither an elite informed by humanistic tradition nor one representing the other of the two cultures could serve her as a model for the intellectual in politics and, as we shall see in a closing chapter, she showed little faith in or approval of the contemporary intelligentsia as a class. Culture was for the “highest mental result of past and present influences”; how it would in turn spread its influence remained an open question. A third context for the making of Felix Holt is the historical events of the 1860s that Eliot could hardly have helped knowing about – although on political infighting she may be excused from familiarity. Some of these she found important enough to mention in her letters, like the defeat of Austria by Prussia at Sadowa in 1866 (Letters IV, 292), leading to Germany’s dominance in Central Europe and providing a prelude to its thumping defeat of France in 1870. Others, like the first national Trade Union Conference in 1864, or the formation of the first Communist International, the International Workers’ Association, in London in 1864, or the founding of the Irish Fenian movement in 1865, or the start of the University Extention lectures for working men in 1867, she passed over without comment. Harrison did inform her of his work as a member of the Royal Commission on Trades-Unions in 1868 – as a representative of the unions! (paternalism in action) (Letters IV, 483). She did not respond, at least in correspondence, to this information. Another progressive movement she certainly knew in detail, the beginnings of the campaign for women’s suffrage and other rights, for several of her friends were engaged in it and tried to recruit her to the cause.12 Even here she omits to mention some of the signal steps in the advance of women: the first woman admitted to classes in medicine at a British university (Edinburgh) in 1869, the first residence for women students at a British university (Cambridge) in 1871, the founding of the Women’s Trade Union League in 1874. She does mention Mill’s On the Subjection of Women (1869), without enthusiasm (Letters VIII, 458). What accounts for this apparent indifference to the advancement of people with whom she had such obvious sympathy?


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A clue to solving this conundrum lies in a curious piece of information, her mention of spending an entire evening (eight hours) at a parliamentary debate on, of all subjects, Abyssinia. Her only comment on the event or its subject was to recount some personal repartee by a government spokesman (Letters IV, 404–05). What was it all about? In 1867, the Christian king of Abyssinia (later called Ethiopia) appealed to Britain for material aid in his struggles with his Muslim neighbors, only to be ignored by the Foreign Office. He reacted by taking the British consul and other colonials as hostages, awaiting a reply to his request. Gladstone and his then ruling Liberal party were reluctant to intervene in any imperial ventures, including this one, but the jingo press played up the fact that women and children were among the hostages. After the Tory party took power (when the Liberals’ reform bill was defeated), it responded to the crisis by sending an expeditionary force, which, after heroically penetrating an almost impassable terrain, stormed the Abyssinian stronghold and freed the hostages. Where did Eliot’s interest lie in all this? It could only have been in the fate of the hostages, especially the women and children. If this choice of focus is indicative, we may arrive at an answer to our question about her priorities. Although broadly sympathetic to progress and reform, Eliot was largely indifferent to matters of political struggle – except where it bore a human face. Further aspects of her views and feelings about people and politics will emerge as we turn to her ostensibly political novel. The question that now arises is: what kind of political novel can come from an apolitical writer? To anticipate: it would be an apolitical, even an antipolitical, political novel. The standard view of Felix Holt, the Radical is, I take it, represented by Fred C. Thomson’s introduction to his edition of the novel.13 After declaring that “Felix Holt is not a political novel as the genre is ordinarily understood” (p. viii), he proceeds to assess Eliot’s politics as given in the later essay, “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt,” and finds it illustrated in the novel’s tilt “distinctly towards the conservative side” (p. ix). In this view, she is not only dubious about Reform in the specific sense but about reform generally, for she “cherish[ed] the established order in national institutions” (p. ix). Eliot is presumably thought by some to benefit from this assessment in two ways, by being spared the opprobrium of partisanship and by being seen as a conservative traditionalist.14 Instead of assuming, as the standard view implies, that Eliot had a politics to convey in the novel, we may inquire how she described characters – in this case, political actors – and their behavior. That is, after all, why we read novels, even political novels, and a descriptive account may clarify the political conclusions to be drawn from this one.

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Much attention has been given to the Introduction to Felix Holt, a stagecoach rider’s moving panoramic view of the typical Midlands scene of the action, making careful placements of agricultural, mining and light industrial activities, distinguishing between Treby Magna and Little Treby (the seats of politically opposed clergymen), and between the aristocratic demesne of the Debarrys as distinct from the gentry Transome Court, the troubled home of one of the Radical protagonists – in all, a class-riven and politicized landscape. Similar attention has been lavished on the third chapter, in which a temporal view is applied, emphasizing the economic and social changes that have accumulated before the novel’s action, at the time of the first Reform Act (1832) – and not, as in other Eliot works, the changes that have taken place between the novel’s setting in the past and the extra-fictional present. Rich as these sections of the novel are in the data of social structure and change, they smack of the lamp and of what I’ve called naturalism, standing outside as they do the fictional action that conveys political mentalities and their consequences in behavior. For these we must turn to the chapters in which three different political parties or social groups are shown in action. That they are distributed according to the chief classes of this region is not incidental to Eliot’s view of the political scene. To begin with the Tories and the evocation of the classes they represent. At the top of this tree are the landed aristocrats, the Debarrys, to whom are ascribed the usual Tory politics and moderated vehemence appropriate to this stratum. But the rank-and-file Tories are of a different breed, approximately that of the upper-middle class. At their semi-official pub and inn, the Marquis of Granby, they congregate for a pre-election “market dinner” (ch. xx, p. 174). The intellectual leader of this assemblage is one Baruch Nolan, a retired London hosier (now presumably a rentier), whose background is lightly sketched in. Nolan’s claim to authority is his past association with the leading figures in the country: not only has he measured Prime Minister Pitt for his stockings in a “particular interview” (xx, 177) but he has “been acquainted with the nude leg of the Prince Regent” (xx, 175). On the strength of this experience, Nolan is “always listened to with interest” (xx, 175), and his political philosophy is clear enough: “‘Trade makes property … and property is Conservative’” (xx, 177); “‘Government requires an Opposition. The Whigs should always be in opposition, and the Tories on the ministerial side’” (xx, 179); and in what can only be a parody of organicist political style, “‘It’s all one web, sir. The prosperity of the country is one web’” (xx, 177). Further constituents of the local Tory group are, as expected, farmers, i.e., renters and cultivators of agricultural land from large landholders – represented at Treby by the Debarrys and Transomes – but also a number of


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manufacturers and merchants like Nolan, belying the Tory reputation of standing only for the agricultural interest. They include Wace, a brewer, whose predominant sentiment is, “‘And if Church and King, and every man being sure of his own, are things good for this country, there’s a God above will take care of ’em’” (xx, 176); Timothy Rose, a “gentleman farmer” from Leek Malton, but earlier described as a rich butcher (xx, 176, 174), with appropriately porcine cheeks; Sircome, a “great miller” (xx, 178); and Salt, a wool factor (xx, 179). Their politics are the expected ones, from another farmer’s maxim that “a man should vote for his landlord” (xx, 178) to the butcher’s bottom line of lower taxes (xx, 178). In sum, we get a satire of the Tories as, in Mill’s immortal phrase, the stupidest party (a comparative term), along with novelistic touches that resemble the travesties of bourgeois platitude by Flaubert and Balzac. Another scene for presenting the mentality and behavior of a class, this at the opposite end in rank and political inclination, is the preliminary electioneering at a nearby hamlet of “colliers” or “butties” (miners) and “navvies” (canal construction laborers) (ch. xi). As political action, this meeting is doomed from the first, for the participants are not a group of potential voters but a mass of the unenfranchised. The field is open to those who can and will exploit the sentiments and energies of this mass for political ends, namely the advance men (as we now call them) for Liberal and Radical candidates – the Tories wouldn’t even try for their support. The scene is carefully set: there is a pub (two others are mentioned), the Sugar Loaf (also called the New Pits or Chubb’s), which in default of a “public institute” (or government-created community center) serves the “more modern and lively nucleus of the Sproxton hamlet” (xi, 107), i.e., the younger workers, not yet worn down into somnolent acquiescence. The participants include the publican Chubb, distinguished by his clear mental structure: there is “one fundamental division for all opinion – ‘my idee’ and ‘humbug’”; “his political ‘idee’ … was, that society existed for the sake of the individual, and that the name of that individual was Chubb” (xi, 108). In the shadows behind the scene lies Spratt, the hated manager of the mine, and behind him in turn lies Peter Garstin, the head of the company that works the mine (xi, 108). Harold Transome’s entry into the field as a Radical (then a wing of the Whigs or Liberals) has led to a realignment of the structure of politics, with the Liberal candidate, Garstin, now paired or “coalesced” with the Tory Debarry (while a “poor baronet” in the race has withdrawn) (xi, 109). Chubb readily falls in with Transome’s political operative, Johnson, and the campaign talk at the pub comes down to

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promises of “treating,” supplying liquor for the men upon their showing up for electioneering mischief. The workers themselves are given superficial characterization: there is Mike Brindle (not his real name – “each collier had his sobriquet” [xi, 110]; he is identified, when giving testimony at the eventual trial, as Michael Brincey [xlvi, 372]), who is primarily interested in getting “beer for nothing” (xi, 112); “a big, red-whiskered man, called Dredge,” who credits the new availability of free drinks to the Reform Act (xi, 112); and the more skeptical “stalwart man called Old Sleck” (xi, 113). Dredge is also credited with pronounced religious views: “‘I’ve been aforced to give my wife a black eye to hinder her from going to the [Dissenting] preachin’’” (xi, 113). Johnson’s extended speech is thus highly appreciated; it ends with the time-honored expressions of many an appeal to the working class: “‘You know what a Tory is – one who wants to drive the working men as he’d drive cattle … A Whig wants to knock the Tory down and get the whip, that’s all. But Transome’s neither Whig nor Tory; he’s the working man’s friend …’” (xi, 118). A final organizational move is to recruit a miner named Pack as the “‘shepherd’ of this new flock” (xi, 118) for its subsequent mass action. Eliot here extends the low opinion of agricultural laborers displayed in her Riehl essay to industrial workers, labor agitators, and other canaille. While the working-class scene is set up to represent the social base, or base society, of the Radical party, the scene for presenting Radical politics is a strangely listless affair. As given in chapter xix, it is a street rally in front of the Ram’s Inn, caddy-corner to the Tories’ Marquis of Granby. The limitation on this set-piece is that the principal text is that of the candidate’s introducer, Transome’s uncle Lingon, the rector of Little Treby. “Parson Jack,” as he’s known, is a classic “muscular Christian,” as they were called, given to field sports and booze, and he is a Radical only because his nephew is running under that rubric. His introductory speech is, then, a travesty of politics – “‘he’ll go in for making everything right – Poor-laws and Charities and Church – he wants to reform ’em all’” (xix, 171). Some of his remarks are aimed at disarming the prevailing sentiment against reformers: “‘he comes of a Tory breed, you know … The best sort of Tory turns to the best sort of Radical’” (xix, 170). Further elements of the Radical position are not mentioned, and the candidate’s speech that follows is equally devoid of specifics. One might assume that the reformist tendency would appeal to the Low Church interest, based on hopes for a better deal under a Radicalinfluenced government. But the Dissenters in town, of whom Rev. Rufus Lyon, the heroine’s stepfather, is the only one developed, are ambivalent about their affiliation, for their deeper sentiment is a pietistic quietude.


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(Lyon’s position is given in ch. xvi.) Transome himself is presented as going through the motions of campaigning: “Harold’s speech ‘did’” (xix, 171). A fuller articulation of Radical politics is made by a speaker at the campaign rally for Transome during the nominations held at a nearby city, who is described as a “grimy man in a flannel shirt, hatless and with turbid red hair … whose bare arms were powerfully muscular, though he had the pallid complexion of a man who lives chiefly amidst the heat of furnaces” (xxx, 244). A characteristic worker, in short. (Felix, observing, likes his looks, which in some respects resemble his own.) His speech is the only clear political program in the novel; it’s based on egalitarian principle – “‘the greatest question in the world is, how to give every man a man’s share in what goes on in life’” (xxx, 245) – and emphasizes political participation, not mere benefits: “‘we want a freeman’s share, and that is to think and speak and act about what concerns us all’” (xxx, 245). He is not at all satisfied with the first Reform Bill, which enfanchised only the remainder of the middle class and not at all the lower; for him, it is only a “‘trick – … bribing some of the people with votes to make them hold their tongues about giving votes to the rest’” (xxx, 245). (He’s also skeptical about official religion – “‘a religion that gives us working men heaven, and nothing else’” [xxx, 246].) The list of his demands is short and clear, although it constitutes only a selection from the Chartist program of the time: universal (or at least male) suffrage, annual Parliaments, population-based redistricting, and voting by ballot (i.e., secret ballot, secure from punitive consequences). His election pitch comes down to this: “‘I don’t believe much in Liberal aristocrats; but if there’s any fine carved gold-headed stick of an aristocrat will make a broomstick of himself, I’ll lose no time but I’ll sweep with him … vote for Transome’” (xxx, 246). The only false note in the Chartist’s discourse is in defining Transome as an aristocrat; from his perspective, even the gentry merit that sobriquet. Felix interrupts: “‘No! – something else before all that’” (xxx, 246). And so we come to the titular Radical of the book, presumptively meriting that title by going to the root of politics, the “something else before all that.” He has positioned himself in class as a craftsman (xxvii, 223), having abandoned his father’s quack-medicine business to become a watch and clock repairer. He is a classic autodidact; it’s not clear whether he’s ever had formal schooling but he seems moderately well informed. He’s a highly independent cuss, and both charms and bores his beloved and eventual wife – as he does a number of his readers. To a present-day audience he is familiar as a typical dropout from social categories and connections, as well as from large social concerns. He is also a characteristic Eliot hero, joining a long list of

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what we can only call willing outsiders, from Dinah Morris (an outsider by her vocational choice, apart from her sectarian position) through Maggie Tulliver (a partly involuntary outsider) and Romola, to Will Ladislaw and Dorothea Casaubon of Middlemarch, Mordecai Cohen of Daniel Deronda, and eventually Daniel himself. But what are Felix’s politics? In this scene, he takes the hustings to deliver a program of sorts: “‘I want the working men to have power … But there are two sorts of power. There’s a power to do mischief – to undo what has been done with great expense and labour … It’s another sort of power that I want us working men to have, and I can see plainly enough that our all having votes will do little towards it at present. I hope we, or the children that come after us, will get plenty of political power some time’” (xxx, 247). So Felix believes in workers’ political power, but not just yet, not till we’re ready for it. His immediate support comes from the Tories in the audience – “Hear, hear” (xix, 248) – who seize an advantage when they see it. When a voice from the crowd asks, “‘But how are we to get the power without votes,’” the weakness of this approach becomes manifest: “‘I’ll tell you what’s the greatest power under heaven,’ said Felix, ‘and that is public opinion – the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful’” (xxx, 248). The usual gambit in this discourse – the workers must first be educated, must first acquire culture – is now supplemented by reliance on a power outside them, the community’s mentalité – “‘That’s the steam that is to work the engines’” (xxx, 248). We can detect the roots of this concept of political change in the sketch of historical progress which Eliot had made in the Lecky review, but the paternalism of the approach in relation to public opinion is even more manifest. The lower class may share political power when their betters think they’re ready for it. As Felix continues, another aspect of his politics (if that’s what it is) emerges: “‘And while public opinion is what it is – while men have no better beliefs about public duty – while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace – while men are not ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty private ends, – I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our condition’” (xxx, 248). The proposed deferral of working-class enfranchisement to an elevation of public opinion makes it dependent in turn on a utopian condition, the moral reformation of society. It would be easy to dismiss this as a secular version of the kingdom of God, earnestly desired but without immediate expectations, but its rhetoric can lead us to an insight into what Felix is really talking about. It isn’t politics at all but


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ethics; we have here a classic case of category error or confusion of discourses. Felix is talking – and he is surely speaking for his author – about a root-and-branch transformation of a society and its institutions that he and she find deplorable. His reference is to the social world of the 1830s, but there seems to be little difference between this and her view of England in 1866. Felix fulfills his sobriquet, the Radical, not in political terms, requiring action in this world, but in idealistic terms, involving the vision of a better one. The novel’s wayward approach to rendering an account of Radical politics is perhaps justified in the event. Instead of a summary assemblage, as with the Tories, the Radicals are presented piecemeal, in keeping with their semi-official state as a provisional parliamentary grouping. They include a base of resentful, unsophisticated workers, a selection of wouldbe reformers ranging from the opportunistic to the idealistic, and a lone politically sagacious and articulate working man. Broadly considered, from the aristocrats and gentry down through the bourgeoisie to the workers, all classes, indeed all but one or two men and a lone woman, are seen as corrupt or foolish in this novel. It is from this condition of society that the political behavior depicted is derived. Little wonder that the election, conducted in duplicity, ends in anarchy. The depiction reveals not merely the author’s distaste for politics but her thorough disdain for the political community. The authorial point of view is made explicit: At that time, when faith in the efficacy of political change was at fever-heat in ardent Reformers, many measures which men are still discussing with little confidence on either side, were then talked about and disposed of like property in near reversion. Crying abuses – “bloated paupers,” “bloated pluralists,” and other corruptions hindering men from being wise and happy – had to be fought against and slain. Such a time is a time of hope. Afterwards, when the corpses of those monsters [“bloated paupers,” “bloated pluralists”] have been held up to the public wonder and abhorrence, and yet wisdom and happiness do not follow, but rather a more abundant breeding of the foolish and unhappy, comes a time of doubt and despondency. (xvi, 153)

It would be hard to express political despair more vividly. Eliot’s usual disposition in favor of social and cultural advancement here comes up against a painful awareness of the crooked timber of humanity, in Kant’s phrase. If Felix Holt is an apolitical or anti-political political novel, what kind of novel is it? It has been suggested by Thomson, in his introduction and elsewhere, that it is a tragic novel, and there are certainly tragic elements in

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it, sounded in the echoes of Nemesis surrounding Mrs. Transome’s youthful adultery and the descent of its consequences upon her son Harold. Less clearly tragic are the inherited inconveniences of the Transome family’s financial doings in the eighteenth century that descend upon their heirs in the nineteenth. It is hard to take Harold as a tragic figure, as is made explicit in his opportunistic courtship of Esther, where comedy comes closer to mind (xliii, 351). This is clearly a family in degeneration rather than decline, the image of which is the senile husband and putative father and the acting out of which is the heir apparent’s financial and political bankruptcy, from the former of which he is relieved by an unexampled act of renunciation by the actual heiress, Esther. It is hard to make much of this as tragic drama, though it accords well with the generally somber tone of the work as a whole. But what is the deep structure of the work as a whole? And what is the function of the tediously convoluted legal plot that gave Eliot and gives her readers so much trouble? If the novel’s title makes a statement, it is that Felix Holt, among the novel’s radicals, is the true radical. Transome is the negative version: “‘I am a Radical only in rooting out abuses’” (ii, 38). Felix is the positive one: “‘I’m a Radical myself, and mean to work all my life long against privilege, monopoly, and oppression’” (xvi, 155). The plot must, then, bring it about that the negative be cast down and the positive emerge triumphant, though in the muted tones we have come to expect from this novelist. She accomplishes this through a love-plot, in which the (only apparently) rich and morally dubious suitor for the innocent heroine is rejected in favor of the poor-buthonest one. The heroine is not merely the beneficiary but the executor of a reversal of worldly fortunes, which sees the high made low and the low high: Esther is revealed as the true heiress of her rich suitor’s fortune, then renounces it in his favor as part of her moral elevation at the hands of her poor-but-honest one. She is also the moving force in getting the latter off his fully merited punishment of four years’ hard labor for manslaughter (through his well-meaning but reckless actions during the election-day riot); her character-witness speech in court attracts the sympathy of the Debarrys, whose influence with higher powers for clemency is successful. She certainly lives up to her biblical name as a swayer of the mighty (while her namesake’s cousin Mordecai will be recycled for further use in a later novel). The result of these manipulations is to bring the novel close to the genre, not of tragedy, but of romance. How well does this romance pattern elide with the political/apolitical one? Not very well, one must conclude. If we consider the characters at large, passing over the purely political operatives and class spokesmen, we’re


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left with a collection of grotesques. Harold’s father is a doddering old man who today would be diagnosed by various euphemisms; his elder brother has died of a mixture of cretinism and profligacy. Harold himself has some highly dubious features: not only has he made himself a returned colonial or Nabob (the term “Oriental” is applied), but he thoroughly neglects his son, the product of a marriage to a Greek woman whom he has apparently treated as something like a concubine.15 His biological father, the lawyer Matthew Jermyn, is also a bundle of eccentricities: from his poetry-spouting youth he has descended to become, after an affair with Mrs. Transome and a thorough milking of her estate, the prosperous father of three daughters. His machinations throughout move the subterranean plot along, but the only excuse for his melodramatic portrayal might be that he’s inspired by another manipulative lawyer, Dickens’s Tulkinghorne of Bleak House. Rev. Lyon is a more palatable specimen, who also considers himself a Radical, but his political and other forms of naiveté are hard to take in large doses. That leaves us with the heroic couple, Felix and Esther, with the tragic Mrs. Transome for darker coloring. It is not a pretty picture, though it corresponds to the pessimistic political perspective and low view of humanity that is generally evoked. One might speculate on the aftermath of this dark novel: what do Felix and Esther do after their escape from Treby – with her stepfather in tow (Epilogue, p. 397)? Felix’s determination to be poor might leave us in some anxiety for them, but his wife hopes to bring in two pounds per week through French lessons (li, 395), which would put them in the lower-middle class. But what work beyond occasional watch repairs will he actually do, while seeking opportunities to educate workers and stand up against injustice? One solution to this extra-fictional conundrum may lie in Eliot’s reuse of him in another publication of the following years, “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt.”16 He must have kept busy, all those intervening years, writing his speech. The “Address” is such an unusual document that some rhetorical analysis is required for reading it. It is a fictive statement (i.e., not made by a historical person) ascribed to a fictional character, and published in a journal that did not designate authorship, but which was owned and edited by John Blackwood. So only John Blackwood is personally responsible for it – a position his enthusiastic letters to George Eliot make clear he was comfortable with, for example, “I am satisfied that what you propose to say and have said to the Working Men will hit the nail on the head and may possibly be of great service” (Letters IV, 401–02) – the question being, of course, service to whom? Though she proposed that he add a note

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disclaiming personal responsibility, he did not (Letters IV, 404). Why the disguise? Eliot surely was aware that she, though a professional writer, was not a working man or woman (defined in the “Address” as “we who work for wages” [p. 416]). Yet she sought to address workers as one of them, a standard rhetorical ploy to remove the taint of patronizing one’s audience, the besetting vice of the Positivists and other culture critics.17 What was her audience? Certainly not members of the working class, who were either illiterate or had no libraries in which they could access Blackwood’s (they obviously couldn’t afford a subscription), and who were unlikely in any case to refer to the staid, conservative journal. So the audience could only be the usual Blackwood’s readers, upper and middle class, educated and conservative. We are dealing with a fictive statement by a fictional worker, ostensibly to real workers, made by an authoress operating under a double pseudonym and actually addressing people of a quite different class. What could this arrangement possibly communicate? The explicit message of the “Address” calls for cultural and ethical development for the working class before it can properly exercise the franchise, now that a portion of it has the vote. This message could only be of reassurance to Blackwood’s readers, suggesting that though their franchise may be somewhat diluted by the admixture of a limited number of lower-class ballots, the barbarians only appear to be at the gates. So long as we, the cultured and comfortable, can read in one of the publications we take that the lower orders need such improvement, and that serious writers (for the ascription to a worker-author is to be taken with a grain of salt) in serious journals are recommending this, the second Reform need not disturb our complacency. (A possible implication that the educated should work for the education of the uneducated is neither urged nor to be understood.) That is, indeed, the point taken by at least a few reported readers; Blackwood quotes one of his cronies as saying that he, “whether a Radical or not, agrees with every word of it” (Letters IV, 414). And Blackwood declares himself a Radical of the old Tory stamp (reminiscent of Ruskin’s similar genealogical discovery). It seems the mere reading of a statement that the workers need cultural and moral improvement can lead conservative intellectuals to believe that they themselves are Radicals. Thus we arrive at the anomalous situation in which conservative readers of the time believed that the text and they themselves were really Radical, while many would-be radical readers of our own day believe that this “Radical” essay is actually conservative. Yet the messages, both ostensible and implicit, of the “Address” may not have been entirely reassuring. Eliot’s opening suggests that things are rotten


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in the state of England: “We should have had better members of Parliament, better religious teachers, honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues … it is not possible for any society in which there is a very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society is …” (pp. 416–17); “we are justified in saying that many of the evils under which our country now suffers are the consequences of folly, ignorance, neglect, or self-seeking in those who, at different times have wielded the powers of rank, office, and money” (p. 418). In contrast, worker organizations and social protest are praised and encouraged: “What else is the meaning of every flag we carry, every procession we make, every crowd we collect for the sake of some protest on behalf of our body as receivers of wages, if not this: that it is our interest to stand by each other …” (p. 419). Yet more: “It is clear that if any particular number of men get a particular benefit from any existing institution, they are likely to band together, in order to keep up that benefit and increase it, until it is perceived to be unfair and injurious to another large number, who get knowledge and strength enough to set up a resistance” (p. 420). This reads like a justification of trades unions, towards which Eliot is normally cool. After these concessions to and approbations of lower-class solidarity and the right of resistance to exploitation, a number of caveats appear: since “any large body of men is likely to have more of stupidity, narrowness, and greed than of farsighteness and generosity, it is plain that the number who resist unfairness and injury are in danger of becoming injurious in their turn” (p. 420). Although the numerical logic is unconvincing, we may take this as the equivalent of a universal principle, comparable to “power corrupts.” We come then to a “so long” sentence: “So long as there is selfishness in men; so long as they have not found out for themselves institutions which express and carry into practise the truth, that the highest interest of mankind must at last be a common and not a divided interest; so long …; so long …; so long Class Interest will be in danger of making itself felt injuriously” (pp. 420–21). That is, permanently: Eliot merely gestures at a utopian future in which such goals could be accomplished, while her tragic sense of life knows well its ideal nature. What to do before or without the millennium? The closing thrust of the discussion of Class Interest provides a project: “the turning of Class Interests into Class Functions or duties” (p. 421). We are returned to The Republic and its corporate statist progeny: “each class should be urged by the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large …” (pp. 421–22). Both the masses and the classes (to use a Victorian phrase) have their

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responsibilities – the word “should” tells us the linguistic register of this prescription. It is elaborated in the only statement in the essay that contemplates a historical process: “Now changes can only be good in proportion as they help to bring about this sort of result: in proportion as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance, and fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course of that substitution class distinctions must inevitably change their character; and represent the varying Duties of men, not their varying Interests” (p. 422). To unpack this sequence: after fundamental changes in the “surrounding conditions” encourage public opinion in a new sense of “responsibility to the nation at large,” a set of “substitution[s]” follows (knowledge for ignorance, fellow-feeling for selfishness). From the moral changes, a change in the character of class distinctions and a political substitution of duties for interests results. One might dismiss this program out of hand as both gratuitously materialistic (everything follows from a change in “surrounding conditions”) and naively idealistic, for it proposes that political change will follow from moral changes. But its particular flaw lies in the thrust of the recommended mental changes: “each class should be urged by the surrounding conditions” suggests that both masses and classes must change their minds, but only upper- and middle-class readers are here addressed and it is not as clear that they are required to change, as it is that the lower class is so required. The essay’s ethical burden perhaps amounts to this: you readers should be more sympathetic toward the lower classes and some day they’ll be more sympathetic toward you. As a policy, much less a politics, this comes down to a prescription comparable to the appeal by the worker-hero of Dickens’s Hard Times to “coom together more.” For the rest, the “Address” goes through the motions of recommending to the Blackwood’s readership that the working class be patient in anticipating change for the better (p. 424); reminding them of the cultural capital possessed by the upper classes that the workers might aspire to, even more than to their material capital (p. 425);18 making a plaidoyer [plea] pour les intellectuels as the bearers of this cultural capital (p. 426); and introducing the rather oblivious idea that one of the unions’ functions might be to encourage their members to let their children stay in school instead of sending them out to work at an early age – as though this were a matter of preference rather than necessity (p. 428). Then comes a peroration directed both to actual and hypothetical readers of the piece: If the claims of the unendowed multitude of working men hold within them principles which must shape the future, it is not less true that the endowed classes,


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in their inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without which no worthy, noble future can be moulded. Many of the highest uses of life are in their keeping; and if privilege has often been abused, it also has been the nurse of excellence. Here again we have to submit ourselves to the great law of inheritance. If we quarrel with the way in which the labours and earnings of the past have been preserved and handed down, we are just as bigoted, just as narrow … as we accuse those of being, who quarrel with the new truths and new needs which are disclosed in the present. (p. 429)

So there is a progressive role for culture after all, though it lies only indirectly in the political sphere: culture is an inheritance that conveys the highest uses of life, the ideals “without which no worthy, noble future can be moulded.” The “endowed classes” are reminded of their responsibilities as possessors of this heritage, while the unendowed are counseled to be resigned in face of their betters’ past and continuing abuses of it. Both classes are told to open themselves to the “new truths and new needs” that may lead to a better future. The only problem here is the precise “great law of inheritance” to which not only workers but all men must submit. We’ve seen this conjuncture before, regarding The Spanish Gypsy, of biological and cultural inheritance, but here the references have changed from race and nation to class. The cultural capital long possessed by the upper classes obviously can’t be transmitted by direct inheritance, nor should their stewardship be challenged on legalistic grounds (“quarrel[ling] with the way in which the labours and earnings of the past have been preserved and handed down” [p. 429]); the sharing of this wealth must take place by some other process. One can only speculate that Eliot is hinting at a policy of social progress through education and culture. But the essay focuses on what the working class needs and not how it might fill those needs. Eliot’s view of lower-class educability is sufficiently indicated in her brief essay, “Servants’ Logic,”19 which offers the following advice to upper- and middle-class readers: “In reasoning with servants we are likely to be thwarted by discovering that our axioms are not theirs. For example, they presuppose that an effect may exist without a cause, that like causes will constantly produce unlike effects, that all may mean only some, that there is no difference between little and none, that any two or more circumstances which can be mentioned will account for a given fact, and that nothing is impossible, except that they can have been in the wrong” (p. 392). From this it follows that “wise masters and mistresses will not argue with their servants, will not give them reasons, will not consult them … Authority and tradition are the chief, almost the only safe guides

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of the uninstructed – are the chief means of developing the crude mind, whether childish or adult” (pp. 395–96). The root, then, of Eliot’s political despair and lack of attention to a program for improvement may be as simple as this sense of futility in confronting the deficiencies of workingclass people. It is the element of her tragic sense of life with which modern readers are likely to feel the least sympathy.

chapter 8


George Eliot prepared to write her next novel, eventually titled Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), in a number of ways. She undertook a program of re-reading much that she had read in world literature.1 She filled a number of gaps in minor literature, as well as, by habit, extending her hold on the Greek and Roman classics. She researched the period of the first Reform Act beyond what she had done for Felix Holt. Her main new field for exploration was social science, and she continued to peck away at the natural sciences. The virgin field for her speculation was, however, esthetic theory, the record of which is “Notes on Form in Art” (1868).2 The essay begins in extreme abstraction: “Form, as an element of human experience, must begin with the perception of separateness …; … things must be recognized as separate wholes before they can be recognized as wholes composed of parts …” (p. 432). The psychological principle that we recognize wholes before parts is surely true, but the perception of separate wholes as a judgment of form is probably not what one thinks of as “form.” (Eliot will later come to a definition closer to what is ordinarily understood by the word.) The abstractness continues in the next step: after repeating that form “must first depend on the discrimination of wholes & then on the discrimination of parts” (p. 432), the issue is posed negatively: “Fundamentally, form is unlikeness, as is seen in the philosophic use of the word Form in distinction from Matter; & in consistency with this fundamental meaning, every difference is form” (pp. 432–33). Concision here obscures a fairly obvious point: matter is presumably originally undifferentiated and, when differentiation occurs, it produces form(s). The next step balances the positive and negative aspects of form: “But with this fundamental discrimination is born in necessary antithesis the sense of wholeness or unbroken connexion in space & time …” (p. 433). Proceeding from perception of difference, its dialectical antithesis is derived – the “sense of wholeness” – and the whole is now understood not merely as separation but also as integration (“unbroken connexion”). 161

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From the dual aspect of any single thing, an additional duality develops: knowledge “arrives at the conception of wholes composed of parts more & more multiplied & highly differenced, yet more & more absolutely bound together by various conditions of common likeness or mutual dependence” (p. 433). The language and concept are familiar in the biological theories of Spencer and Lewes, which stress the twin tendencies of living things (including personal and social existence) toward increased differentiation and toward complex unity. We begin to sense the potential application of these abstractions to esthetic theory: the idea of organic unity in the artwork.3 The climax: “And the fullest example of such a whole is the highest example of Form: in other words, the relation of multiplex interdependent parts to a whole which is itself in the most varied & therefore the fullest relation to other wholes” (p. 433). Although Eliot explicitly applies this view to the human organism, that is only one among highly complex organisms; she is reaching toward the “fullest example … the highest example of Form,” which is not only highly differentiated and organized in itself but is also in the “fullest relation to other wholes.” In addition to human beings in their individual and social existence, this set of conditions applies to works of art, in their internal organization and external relationships. Eliot is here working out for herself what she aspires to achieve in her next novel, which became, after further labors, Middlemarch. The essay’s next paragraph turns to art directly, and begins by dissociating her new idea of form from the “Dutch realism” which was the prevailing Victorian mode and with which she had associated her fiction. In esthetic terms, she rescues form from “mere imitation of outline” (plastic arts) and “bare delineation of landscape or figures” (poetry, taken in the comprehensive sense of verbal art) (p. 433). Eliot makes clear that she is talking about intentionally organized forms rather than natural ones alone: “the choice & sequence of images & ideas – that is, of relations & groups of relations – are more or less not only determined by emotion but intended to express it” (p. 434). Emotion here is to be understood broadly as a mental state involving a total response, rather than in the limited sense of feeling, to which she will later refer. That this is so is implicit in her terms for artistic intention: “the sequence of mental states in the constructor, or … the preconception of a whole which he has inwardly evolved” (pp. 433–34). Although the artist as well as the artwork are implicated in this esthetic, there is an evident tendency toward formalism in its argumentation and application. Speaking of the human organism in terms which readily apply to the artwork, she posits that “what is called fitness, beauty or harmony in … outline & movements is dependent on the inward balance” (p. 434).


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This might seem to focus attention on the internal characteristics of the artwork, with only secondary interest in its derivation from conscious authorial processes; yet, the work is an “arrangement of events or feigned correspondences according to predominant feeling” (p. 434), where “feeling” is not a transient but an organized state of mind. Moreover, the organically unified work extends outward to its “fullest relation to other wholes” (p. 433), including conscious effort in that direction. A summary sentence emphasizes this dimension: “The highest Form, then, is the highest organism, that is to say, the most varied group of relations bound together in a wholeness which again has the most varied relations with all other phenomena” (p. 433). The artwork is organic, then, not merely in its internal structure but in its relation to that larger organism, the universe (“all other phenomena”). We are a short step from the maxim on esthetic reference declared in Middlemarch itself (although there it is an apologia for necessary limitations on the novel’s scope): “I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe” (ch. xv, p. 139). The essay concludes with a standard of esthetic value and a set of specifics on verbal art. On the former subject: “By this light, forms of art can be called higher or lower only on the same principle as that on which we apply these words to organisms; viz. in proportion to the complexity of the parts bound up into one indissoluble whole” (p. 435). The criteria for artistic achievement and critical judgment thus include not only the degree of complexity, the parts’ multiplicity and internal organization, but also the maintenance of an “indissoluble whole” – and the greater the complexity, the greater the achievement in maintaining this unity. To put it a bit more palatably: the more complex the artwork, the greater it is, so long as it remains unified – esthetic value consisting not in mere size or complication but in the integration of rich content. On the latter subject, verbal art: “Form begins in the choice of rhythms & images as signs of a mental state …” (p. 435). So rhythms and images, not only in music and pictures but in language as well, are symbolic of mental states, which in turn respond to external reality – this advance beyond naive realism to what is today a truism (that images represent mental states, not things themselves) is made here almost in passing. Language’s signs are, moreover, conventional, not iconic: “Poetry – [again, in the wider sense] has this superiority over all the other arts, that its medium, language, is the least imitative …” (p. 435). Eliot hasn’t, of course, anticipated all that was to

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proceed from Ferdinand de Saussure’s postulation of the arbitrariness of verbal signs, which are meaningful only in a differential system or code. But she has made the signal insight that its freedom from the materiality of its represented world is the source of language’s great advantage as a signifying system – its representational power depends on being “the least imitative” medium. Further points about verbal art follow: “Poetry [here, in the specific sense of versified language] begins when passion weds thought by finding expression in an image …” (p. 435); its force derives from “repetition, i.e., rhythmic persistence in proportion as diversifying thought is absent …” (p. 435); various poetic genres derive from primitive ritualistic behavior – including “tragic & comic drama” (pp. 435–36) – anticipating the turn-ofthe-century discourse of the Cambridge school of classical anthropology. There is also a closing account of the decline of literary periods and implied suggestions for their continued vitality: “A Form being once started must by & by cease to be purely spontaneous: the form itself becomes the object & material of emotion, & is sought after, amplified and elaborated by discrimination of its elements till at last by the abuse of its refinement it preoccupies the room of emotional thinking; & poetry, from being the fullest expression of the human soul, is starved into an ingenious patternwork …” (p. 436). Beyond this formula for a history of art, there is the ideal: “living words fed with the blood of relevant meaning, & made musical by the continual intercommunication of sensibility & thought” (p. 436). “Notes on Form in Art” may not be the most comprehensive esthetic ever devised, but, given the complexity and coherence of the matter in its brief form, it represents an example of the kind of artistry it is about. In the next year (1869), Eliot began preparations for writing her new novel.4 As mentioned above, she read a fair amount in the sciences, especially the history of medicine. These works include: Renouard’s Histoire de la médecine, Thomson’s biography of William Cullen, Russell’s History and Heroes of Medicine, Daremberg’s Histoire des sciences médicales, Southwood Smith’s Treatise of Fever, Littré’s Médecine et médecins, Watson’s Principles and Practice of Physic and Ware’s History and Treatment of Delirium Tremens (the most specific source of information for events in the novel, where it is cited). In the physical sciences she read: a life of Faraday (either Tyndall’s Faraday as a Discoverer or Jones’s official Life and Letters – although the latter’s date renders it improbable) – Grove’s On the Correlation of Physical Forces, a group of titles listed in Lewes’s diary that she, too, may have read (these include works by Balmes, Herschel, Haeckel, Reis, Hirn, Opzoomer, Wundt, Bossut, Bayma, Delboeuf and Bertrand),


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Raspail’s Chimie organique, Tyndall’s Fragments of Science, Davy’s Agricultural Chemistry and Louis’s Gastro-enterité. (I include only booklength works.) The new note in Eliot’s reading is her entry into the social (and related) sciences. She had read the first series of Max Müller’s Science of Language in 1862 and the second series in 1864; she added his Chips from a German Workshop essays in 1868, and now came upon his History of Sanskrit Literature (that is, of the religious tradition). She read Donaldson’s Varronianus… the Ethnography of Ancient Italy, Maine’s Ancient Law (as well as other works, to be discussed below), Taine’s De l’intelligence, Delepierre’s Livre des visions, Lubbock’s Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man, Weber’s History of Indian Literature (again, of the religious tradition), Wallace’s Malay Archipelago, Tylor’s Primitive Culture, Geiger’s Menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft (Human Speech and Reason) and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Of course, the book she paid closest attention to, probably assisting in its formulation, was the first volume of Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind, subtitled The Foundations of a Creed. (To be discussed in Chapter 10, covering the period when she completed the later volumes.) Eliot’s reading in English, continental and classical literature followed her accustomed omnivorous pattern; only a few general histories need be mentioned: Nisard’s of French literature, Chassang’s of the novel, Taine’s of English literature, and the Brockhaus encyclopedia volume on Greece. Additional items in this vein include: Haslewood’s anthology of English Renaissance essays on poetry, Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du lundi (Monday Chats), Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer, Grimm’s German grammar, Karl and Theodor Müller’s edition of Fragmenta historicum graecorum, March’s Anglo-Saxon grammar, biographies of Blake, Keats and Dickens, Dindorf’s scholia for the Odyssey, Curtius’s history of Greece, David Strauss’s Essais d’histoire religieuse and Sheddon-Ralston’s Songs of the Russian People. (Her first venture into Russian literature also came at this time, with Turgenev’s stories, to be followed by other works by him in French translation – her only means of access.) And she went on filling gaps: Ovid’s Fasti, Plutarch’s Moralia, lesser Greek dramas, minor English Renaissance plays, recent French theater, a multi-volume collection of German novellen – even Kompert’s tales of German-Jewish life, a foretaste of things to come. What did Eliot make of her scientific learning? It is time to confront the issue of science in Middlemarch, which was anticipated in the Introduction to the present work. Two powerful statements of Eliot’s view of science have

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been presented, Sally Shuttleworth’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning and Diana Postlethwaite’s Making It Whole: A Victorian Circle and the Shape of their World.5 Shuttleworth’s subtitle and the beginning of her first chapter take up the opening sentences of Eliot’s next novel, Daniel Deronda: “Man can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought.” Interpreting this reference to the novelist’s need for a startingpoint in the midst of an ongoing action as the basis of a comparison between fiction and science, Shuttleworth finds that Eliot’s “comparison rests not on the common commitment of the novelist and scientist to the objective recording of external fact, but on their shared need for imaginative construction … The scientist does not merely record; he actively constructs a schema within which his observations are placed. Such an act of ‘makebelieve,’ or heuristic construction, threatens the comforting conception of science as the unquestionable transcription of the unchanging external world” (Shuttleworth, p. 1). In order to make this threat stick, Shuttleworth would have to produce people with more than a rudimentary education who are comforted by the notions that science “merely record[s],” that its “transcription[s]” are “unquestionable,” and that the external world is unchanging. Since there may be some difficulty in doing so, the idea that science operates by “imaginative construction” (i.e., Charles Peirce’s “abduction” or imaginative hypothesis formation), that it employs “schema[s]” to organize its observations, and that it “can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning” – if that refers merely to the invention of a calibration system – may be less threatening than supposed. Indeed, Eliot’s dictum presupposes that science, by constructing hypothetical schemas and employing conventional systems, for example, mathematics, can reach solid though modifiable truths. Science thus stands as a model for human exploration – indeed, for poetry, its “less accurate grandmother” (Daniel Deronda, p. 1) – rather than being reduced to a merely fictive enterprise. These reflections may explain what I take to be a rhetorical mismatch (or mishmash) between Eliot’s opening and Shuttleworth’s. The narrator of the novel is apologizing for his arbitrary fictional beginning by saying that even science, which yields truths, does this, while the critic is intent on taking science down a peg, to the level of imagination and arbitrariness of fiction – and literary criticism. Perhaps the fog of this discourse may be cleared by introducing another discourse. Eliot’s position on arbitrary starting-points and, perhaps, Shuttleworth’s on imaginative schemas may be restated in


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terms of Godel’s theorem: no formal system can, from within itself, logically determine its starting-points. As Godel was at pains to reassure his friend, Einstein, this limitation doesn’t disturb science’s methods, laws or conclusions – it simply makes conventional measuring systems a necessary fact of operational life.6 Eliot did not, of course, have the benefit of Godel’s proof, nor could she anticipate that science would establish the starting-point for “sidereal clock[s]” at the Big Bang, 13.73 billion years ago (plus or minus 120 million years: New York Times, March 9, 2008) – obviating the pretense of time’s “Nought.” What did she have to say in Middlemarch on these issues? The locus classicus is the passage on her scientist-protagonist Lydgate’s vocation; it derives from an account of Lydgate’s model, Marie F. X. Bichat, a local hero still revered when Lydgate attended the University of Paris: That great Frenchman first carried out the conception that living bodies, fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally; but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues, out of which the various organs – brain, heart, lungs, and so on – are compacted … there was still scientific work to be done which might have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat’s. This great seer did not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the living organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis; but it was open to another mind to say, have not these structures some common basis from which they have all started … Of this sequence to Bichat’s work, already vibrating along many currents of the European mind, Lydgate was enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure, and help to define men’s thought more accurately after the true order … What was the primitive tissue? In that way Lydgate put the question – not quite in the way required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of the right word befalls many seekers. And he counted on quiet intervals to be watchfully seized, for taking up the threads of investigation – on many hints to be won from diligent application, not only of the scalpel, but of the microscope, which research had begun to use again with new enthusiasm of reliance. (xv, 146–47)

Shuttleworth’s chapter on Middlemarch begins (on its second page) with a portion of this passage, on the organic relation of bodily organs rather than a “federal” association, and makes this the “key to George Eliot’s social theory and narrative practice in Middlemarch” (Shuttleworth, p. 143; she also makes the enthusiastic statement that “Middlemarch is a work of experimental science” [ibid.]). She does not, unfortunately, pursue this idea in Bichat’s writings but switches to another experimental physiologist of later date, Claude Bernard, for its extended development. She seems to want to make the case that Bernard’s ideas were influential on Eliot, but her documentation

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cites only Lewes’s familiarity with his writings (Shuttleworth, pp. 226–27). By changing the subject, this discussion avoids dealing with what the passage says about Bichat and about Lydgate.7 What was Bichat’s primitive approach to tissue? It was apparently anatomical, examining samples under the microscope – “which research had begun to use again with new enthusiasm”8 – and drawing up their differing structures. From these structures and their differences, a connection with the functions of their respective organs was inferred and, from a medical standpoint, possible treatments of their malfunctions could be pursued. I follow authority in a field beyond my scope: Bichat’s “goal, as far as visible phenomena are concerned, was to achieve an orderly concept (a) of overt structure, (b) of overt function, and (c) of the relations existing between the former and the latter. All this he achieved with outstanding success; … this endeavor produced the tissue theory and … launched a new science, histology. But when Bichat took the next step – when, behind each visible tissue, he inferred an invisible ‘property’ or ‘properties’ – the result proved … scientifically controversial.”9 Bichat was, then, a master of experimental observation, but succumbed to the tendency, already known to Molière, to ascribe sleep-inducing powers to dormative “properties.” Indeed, Bichat’s belief in “vital properties” led him to think that not only each organ but each kind of tissue had a “‘life’ of its own” (p. 128; Hall ascribes this idea to Aristotle and Galen as well). Lacking a molecular level of analysis, Bichat’s chemistry was “diagnostic rather than physiological,” but “such procedures … did not readily permit the recognition of relationships between the constitution of the tissues and the vital phenomena they exhibit” (p. 131). Bichat became a transitional figure when the emergent cell “came to replace the tissue as the basic organizational unit” (p. 132). But clarifying the cell’s importance “was scarcely possible until after about 1830 … partly because of the inadequacy of the microscopes available until that time. But with the achromatic lens systems introduced in the late twenties, new discoveries followed very quickly” – namely, the “theory that the cell represents the basic life unit” (p. 179). Small discoveries were made by several researchers, leading to the decisive formulations of M. J. Schleiden in 1838 and Theodor Schwann in 1839 (pp. 188–89; Schleiden’s life story suggests a novel in its own right). Even after this high point, with further work “before the middle of the century – Schwann’s picture of the cell was progressively redrawn by others until a ‘new cell’ emerged that was almost unrecognizable as the one depicted by him” (p. 195). And so, onward to the “modern idea of the cell” (p. 190), which is undoubtedly being modified


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even as I write. The key word in this brief history is “progressively”: each of these small steps were giant steps for mankind, each inexact, each necessary, each quintessentially scientific. Did Eliot appreciate this view of science? Her scientific hero certainly did, for he hopes to make his small contribution: “there was still scientific work to be done” (xv, 146), and he aims to “make a link in the chain of discovery” (xv, 144). But there are several impediments to his research. For one, his positioning of himself as a small-town doctor places him outside the “currents of the European mind” (xv, 147), to which he had direct access in London, Edinburgh and Paris. For another, he can do research only part time, as a “twin object with the assiduous practice of his profession” of doctor (xv, 145). The role is not impossible; the narrator cites examples of “great originators” like Herschel who came out of obscurity and “‘broke the barriers of the heavens’” (xv, 144). But is Lydgate the man for this role? His commendable concern for his patients – “his flesh-and-blood sense of fellowship” – makes still another hurdle to be overcome: it “withstood all the abstractions of special study” (xv, 143). His well-known “spots of commonness,” particularly with respect to women, and even his concern for the individuals whom he treats, may be impediments to devoted research: “He cared not only for ‘cases,’ but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth” (xv, 143). In sum, although “Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures …” (xv, 143), he becomes one, at least as far as scientific research goes. (His marital troubles are another, but similar, story.) His defeat in Middlemarch is far more to the community’s discredit than to his, and he actually goes on to do quite well as a doctor to the wealthy, specializing in gout (thought to be an upper-class disease). But the Lydgate plot of Middlemarch is, far from being an example of the ideal, imaginative life of science, an exhibition of the career of a scientific failure. Given his high ambitions both for “intellectual conquest” and for promoting the “social good” (xv, 143) and the integrity he displays in his conflicts with the Middlemarch social and professional establishment, we are in the presence of a tragic figure, perhaps the first example of the type among scientific intellectuals – a classic case of the ideal falling short of the real, both in science and society. Lydgate is praised by critics like Shuttleworth for exercising the imaginative element in science, as described in the following passage: “Fever had obscure conditions, and gave him that delightful labour of the imagination which is not mere arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power – combining and constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance

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with impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its own work” (xvi, 162). As a description of scientific method, this account can still pass muster, at least for many experimental procedures, combining as it does the imaginative formation of hypotheses (Peirce’s “abduction”), induced from initial data, with rigorous testing of each hypothesis, involving blind or double-blind controls (“standing aloof”).10 The question remains, however, is Lydgate’s work a good example of the imagination in science? One must submit that it is precisely imagination that he lacks: having learned about tissues from Bichat, he seeks yet another tissue, a primary one, instead of going outside or beyond that framework to seek a more elementary constituent or unit of tissue. Imagination is surely an element of the scientific tool kit, but Lydgate may offer at best a negative example of its action. Despite a less high-flown provenance, the more plodding approach to scientific advancement, the incremental process of progressive modification, is not only closer to the way nature itself operates – at least in areas open to evolution – but is also more consistent with the collective, institutional structure of most scientific discovery. Diana Postlethwaite’s book on science and its theory in George Eliot avoids some of the thickets met with above and leads into byways from which emergence into light is possible. This study is exemplary in eschewing the usual formula for intellectual influence – thinker X directly influenced writer Y – by ranging through an entire intellectual milieu, the true unit of almost all worthwhile inquiry. In this way, Comte, Spencer and Lewes – along with such lesser lights as the phrenologist George Combe, the determinist Charles Bray, and the omnipresent and omnicompetent Harriet Martineau – are brought together in a coherent discourse, into which Eliot is plausibly inserted. Yet with one misstep, Postlethwaite both makes an error of omission and suggests a revised focus on a key element of Eliot’s thinking. Making It Whole begins with a summary of Coleridge’s essay, “Theory of Life,” and challenges the reader to compare it with Eliot’s “Notes on Form in Art” (p. 12). When one fulfills this obligation, one finds a subtle but important difference. Coleridge’s account of an individual organism runs: “The unity will be more intense in proportion as it constitutes each particular thing a whole in itself; and yet more again, in proportion to the number and interdependence of the parts, which it unites as a whole. But a whole composed, ab intra, of different parts, so far interdependent that each is reciprocally means and end, is an individual, and the individuality is most intense where the greatest dependence of the parts on the whole is combined with the greatest dependence of the whole on its parts” (quoted


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in Postlethwaite, p. 12). For Eliot’s equivalent, Postlethwaite chooses this passage (I select only the relevant portion): knowledge “arrives at the conception of whole[s] composed of parts more & more multiplied & highly differenced, yet more & more absolutely bound together by various conditions of common likeness or mutual dependence. And the fullest example of such a whole is the highest example of Form: in other words, the relation of multiplex interdependent parts to a whole which is itself in the most varied & therefore the fullest relation to other wholes” (Essays, p. 433, quoted in Postlethwaite, pp. 12–13). It is this last phrase that is crucial: Eliot is defining not only the organism but its relation to other organisms, for it is an inter-individual rather than a purely individual system that she has in mind.11 (It may be possible to read such a conception out of other passages in Coleridge’s works, but that isn’t done here.) This system in the sphere of public life might lead to an organic conception of society, and Postlethwaite in another place cites Eliot’s response to Riehl – though the inter-individual aspect of organic society doesn’t appear in Riehl, so far as I’ve observed. Postlethwaite develops at some length the Comte–Spencer–Lewes idea of the relation of the individual life to its medium, but nowhere in this discussion is it clear that in human society the medium consists largely of other individuals.12 People aren’t related to other people as their medium in the same way that a mollusc is related to the nutrient-rich fluid that is its medium. Individuals are related to each other in a super-organism, an organism of organisms, so that a society that makes some people merely instrumental to the life of others is prima facie an unjust one because it is a morbid one. In the sphere of art, which is Eliot’s immediate concern in the notes in question, this idea leads not merely to an esthetic of organic form, as seen above, but to a theory of the novel. For the novel is preeminently the form in which individual characters are related to others in, ideally, an organic relation, leading to a conception of the whole work as an organism of organisms, a super-organism. Every novel does, in the nature of the case, relate some individuals to others in a plot or plots, but few – certain Dickens and Dostoyevsky novels stand out in this respect – pursue almost all of them with the same intensity or bring them together in a complex interaction. By way of Postlethwaite’s clearing of the ground and even by way of her omission, one arrives at an approach to writing and reading a novel of the scale and complexity of Middlemarch. It is a preeminent example of superorganic form, in which a great diversity of characters and social contexts is allowed to develop partially overlapping interrelations, while developing a wholeness that accords with Eliot’s idea of form in art.13

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Before attempting this demonstration, we may consider the question, what did George Eliot make of her readings in the social sciences? It is difficult to trace specific infusions of social scientific ideas in her writings, whether fictional or nonfictional. I have adverted broadly to the application of views of the social organism similar to Spencer’s and Lewes’s biological and sociological ones in the complex form of Middlemarch. Several equally general carry-overs from social science to fiction may be observed. Eliot’s consistent interest in Max Müller’s studies of universal myth and mythic religions lie in the background of her increasing turn toward mythic symbolism in her later works. Her awareness of Edward B. Tylor’s foundational efforts in the field of anthropology were part of her sharpened awareness of what he called “survivals” in the history of culture – holdovers in more highly evolved societies of earlier customs, beliefs and dispositions.14 But it was the work of a less-known social scientist, Sir Henry J. S. Maine, that suggests a more fundamental meeting of minds, without being directly reflected in particular observations in her writings. The designation of Maine as a social scientist is not without ambiguity; his specialty was the history of law and his most famous work, Ancient Law (1861), lies in that field, but he continued to develop the anthropological implications of his initial project, as the titles of his later works attest.15 Eliot’s interest in Maine extended beyond the years of her Middlemarch preparations and shows their continued fascination for her. She read Village Communities in the East and West, Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, and his article, “South Slavonians and Rajpoots.”16 This was no passing curiosity. What could Eliot have taken from Maine’s anthropology and sociology? The key to an answer may be found in the phrase most often associated with Maine’s influence in these fields: “from status to contract.” His account of Roman legal institutions centers, as does much of his later research, on property law, but the decisive idea for his account is the emphasis on status or customary relations as governing not only such holdings but also the organization of labor to work agricultural property – matters, then, not only of law but of social structure. In contrast, Maine’s account of more modern accommodations is centered on the term “contract,” i.e., written legal codes as governing property rights and social relationships. We have here a legal version of the concepts that were to inform sociology at the turn of the century and beyond: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, to use Tönnies’s terms. Yet Maine’s lasting insight into these social systems may be detected neither in the term “status” nor in the term “contract” but in the words


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“from” and “to.” For he is at pains to point out the inherent contradictions, tensions and instabilities in the social systems he studies, which lead to their gradual replacement by other arrangements. It would be too much to claim for him the credit for converting social statics into social dynamics, for the mechanism of social change remains somewhat obscure in his theory. But his consistent focus on both the organic unity of traditional societies and their tendency to break down and become something else is the realm in which his thought and Eliot’s, although not identical, meet. For Middlemarch, I shall maintain, is not a novel about what England was in the first third of the nineteenth century but a novel about how that society showed the marks of coming to an end and opening itself to become something else – roughly speaking, the story of how pre-Victorian England came to be what it was at the time of writing. Since Middlemarch is a strong candidate to be named the greatest English novel – though perhaps not the greatest novel written in English, for that title may belong to Ulysses – it has attracted critical attention probably exceeding that accorded any other. Whole books have been written about it (discounting college study guides) – of which Jerome Beaty’s composition study, Middlemarch: From Notebook to Novel, is indispensable and Kerry McSweeney’s the most critically rewarding – and collections made both of original and reprinted essays (edited by Barbara Hardy, by Patrick Swinden and, most recently, by Karen Chase). It would be foolhardy to try to integrate all these approaches to the novel – although by the laws of super-organic form, it would be appropriate to do so, if possible. I shall therefore confine my observations to two aspects, one of form and the other of content. In form, I consider Middlemarch as a multi-plot novel that for all its multiplicity is integrated by a number of literary modes. For content, I develop the action of the novel as a series of expositions of the strengths and weaknesses of English society in the first third of the century, with indications of the route by which it advanced beyond that condition to its late Victorian, also flawed, state. To begin with form. Middlemarch is, as is well known, a classic example of the Victorian multi-plot novel, and the same degree of intellectual complexity that we’ve observed in its portrayal of a scientist’s failed professional career and marriage attaches to its other main plots. These include the Edward Casaubon–Dorothea Brooke Casaubon–Will Ladislaw marital plot, the comedy surrounding the political ambitions of Dorothea’s uncle, Arthur Brooke, and the Nicholas Bulstrode– Ladislaw–John Raffles–Lydgate financial melodrama, though one might exempt the Volpone-like Featherstone subplot and the Fred Vincy–Mary

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Garth–Camden Farebrother romance of a wastrel finally becoming worthy of his beloved. There is also a remarkable likeness of the plot as a whole to that involving the character-types of Greek New Comedy and its Roman and later continuations: the senex (old man: Casaubon), the miles gloriosus (braggart warrior: Brooke), the miser (Featherstone), the pedant (Casaubon, Brooke), the hypocrite (Bulstrode), etc. – together forming what Northrop Frye calls a “blocking society” that temporarily impedes the standard young lovers’ erotic fulfillment.17 What do these disparate characters and the social classes they represent have to do with each other, beyond coming together in Middlemarch and Middlemarch? It will be observed that each of the main plots is motivated or moved forward by a character’s drive toward mastery in a field of his somewhat misplaced choice. This, it seems to me, is a more precise description of the frequently observed similarity among the searches for a totalizing key in one or another field than the usual suggestion that all such quests are bound to fail. (This latter interpretation follows from our prevailing skepticism with regard to totalizing systems, but that skepticism ignores Eliot’s positive view of the idealism involved in at least some such quests.) The evident flaw in these drives toward mastery is clearly the egoism that largely motivates them: Casaubon’s prickly vulnerability as a scholar is well known to reveal both his narrow mentality and his emotional barrenness, while Bulstrode’s domineering tendencies, barely covered by a veneer of religiosity, are the motive force in his charitable work to found a new hospital for his adoptive city. It would seem that the amateurish Brooke is somewhat relieved of this charge, but what else can we call his desire to put himself forward as a leader of his nation, given his manifest incapacity and hypocrisy? I shall consider the social implications of these egoistic drives toward mastery in discussing the novel’s content below. We are on the verge of moving to the content side of a Middlemarch exposition, but before doing so, a few further considerations of its form are in order. The formally most indicative of the titles of its eight parts is not “Three Love Problems” (part 4) or “Two Temptations” (part 7), but “The Dead Hand” (part 5) – la manomorta or mortmain, legal terminology with the figurative sense of posthumous control over property – the dead hand of the past. Used as a part-title, it refers denotatively to Casaubon’s will, through which he hopes to bind Dorothea to himself, even in death, or at least prevent her passing to another, by encumbering her inheritance from him. It is, of course, a futile gesture, given his wife’s nature – but he has never troubled himself to know his wife’s nature – since she will ultimately have the strength to accept public opprobrium by marrying Will (the loss of


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this inheritance made easier by her having a fortune of her own, from her parents). But the dead hand works its way into the present, in good society’s unsympathetic and contemptuous attitudes to the high-born lady for linking herself to an outsider – one who is so in every sense of the word. Her break with the past – her counter-myth to the dead hand, if you will – comes not simply in taking an undesirable as a husband but in defiantly acquiring outsider status herself, in lending credence to her presumed infidelity to her first husband and by relating herself to a disreputable and penniless man, the “Italian with white mice” or vagabond that the Middlemarchers take Will to be. The outsider functions in the other main plots in similar though less central ways. In the Brooke episode, Will is the campaigner’s advance man or political operative – drawing down on himself the disdain attached to such con-men that we have seen in Felix Holt – although he has little success in making this scatterbrained windbag a plausible candidate and quickly retires from the field. In the Bulstrode plot, he is restricted to rejecting the ill-gotten gains (profits from a fencing business) with which the dead hand of the past proposes to compensate him, after robbing him of them. Although Will keeps quiet about Bulstrode’s criminality in appropriating his mother’s inheritance, he is tangentially involved, through his friendship with the Lydgates, in fall-out from the banker’s exposure and undoing. Will is thus embroiled in each of the three main plots involving masterful men of the past seeking to extend their power into the present, and in each case his active or passive resistance to them helps in the opening of a future free of their oppression. The eventual transformation of his brief journalistic vocation into a political one is left deliberately vague, but it is not too much to speak of his emergence in the public sphere as having begun in his Middlemarch connections. Despite her doubts about reform in general and Radical reformers in particular, Eliot makes Will a political reformer – not on a national scale, to be sure, but “remarkably fluent on the prospects of Municipal Reform” (Finale, p. 820; the Municipal Corporations Act came in 1835). But then, Will was “working well in those times when reforms were begun with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days …” (Finale, p. 819) – the tribute to youthful idealism tinged with Eliot’s late world-weariness. Will’s brand of reformism runs: “‘Wait for wisdom and conscience in public agents – fiddlestick! The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims … I support the man who supports their claims; not the virtuous upholder of the wrong’” (xlvi, 459). That Eliot was able to state so pungently a view with

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which she probably disagreed is yet another testimony to her comprehensiveness of mind. An archetypal level of plot is here to be discerned. The novel’s frequent references to the myth of Bacchus and Ariadne – especially Dorothea’s identification with the sculpture of the reclining Ariadne in the Vatican Museum during her Roman honeymoon – have been much commented on, with an emphasis on Dorothea’s similarly bereft and dormant state, later to be relieved by the vitality of her young lover. This classical association underwrites Will’s larger dimension as a figure of renewal and reinvigoration. Bacchus/Will comes to liberate and fructify not merely the bereft Ariadne/Dorothea but also the dormant society in which she becomes the foremost example of wasted potentiality. This is a lot to burden an unwhelped eiron, but Will holds up fairly well to the challenge. It should be noted that Eliot handles these archetypal associations with characteristic wit and deftness; she even applies the Ariadne treatment to the rather unlikely Rosamond Lydgate: “Poor Rosamond lost her appetite and felt as forlorn as Ariadne – as a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxes full of costumes and no hope of a coach” (xxxi, 296). This and similar displays of wit in deploying Middlemarch’s archetypal and structural plots are tokens of another form that these plots assume: comedy. It may seem odd to account this so serious and, I shall venture to claim, tragic novel as also a comic one, but reading at least the first tenth of it must give rise to many a hearty laugh – indeed, that is the way Will Ladislaw responds in his first encounter with Dorothea and her prospective husband, along with her absurd uncle (ix, 78). The inherently comic aspect of a May and December marriage is, of course, not long to change into tragic disaster, but Eliot doesn’t make her project to depict this change any easier by filling these early pages with a barrage of jokes. One need not depend on the malicious Mrs. Cadwallader to supply vitriolic but funny observations about Casaubon – for example, “‘Somebody put a drop [of his blood] under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses’” (viii, 69). The narrator is equally pointed: for example, Dorothea’s devotion to the ideal in marrying a specimen of the ideal like Casaubon is described as “her own sad liability to tread in the wrong places on her way to the New Jerusalem” (iv, 37). And then there are the repeated witticisms about her conceiving of the pedant as another Milton, another Locke, another Pascal. We are witnessing a quixotic young woman who, like Don Quixote, is at once an idealistic hero and an unrealistic fool; also like the Don, she gains in stature even in her doomed endeavors, but unlike him, she can get beyond her initial mystification. (Further discussion of quixotism will follow.) For


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Dorothea is aiming, if not at something so grandiose as becoming another Saint Theresa, which the Prelude assures us is no longer possible, at least at the chance “‘to lead a grand life here – now – in England’” (iii, 28). That she eventually gets somewhat closer to that goal is not so much a dismissal of the comic element in the novel as its fulfillment. What can we say about the plot of Middlemarch that would be true to its multiple lines, their conjuncture, and its implications? Conveniently, Eliot has provided the terms for a somewhat adequate statement. It is not only the individual characters who are organisms but their plot relationships as well, and these plots are related to each other organically, so as to form the superorganic whole that is the novel. The organic relation of the plots to each other requires demonstration. Dorothea is not only the wife of one dead hand but the niece of another – as well as the sister-in-law of a local aristocrat, Sir James Chettam, who cannot exercise a like constraint on her but would sorely like to do so, having been amorously inclined toward her and remaining jealous of her spousal choices. Her uncle Brooke is not so much a dead hand for her as an object lesson in social hypocrisy, espousing reformist ideas but irresponsible toward the agricultural laborers on his estate. (Dorothea is, on the other hand, much given to projecting improvements of their hovels – with consequences to be discussed below.) She isn’t involved in the Bulstrode–Ladislaw relationship, but does intervene on behalf of Lydgate when he becomes tainted by Bulstrode’s lethal mistreatment of the man who can expose his past crimes. As we shall see, she functions as a constrained but active force in bringing the various aspects of Middlemarch’s moribundity to some better state. As indicated above, Will’s complex relationships bring about a similar continuity of the multiple plots in which he is involved. These latter are not added on, one to the other, as in most Victorian multi-plot novels (Dickens’s Bleak House may be an exception), but their structural similarities and tangential connections grow into genuine organic relation. Turning from form to content, and returning to the parallel drives toward mastery in three protagonists, we may consider them not only as demonstrations of egoistic personality and intellectual error, but as signal instances of the decadence of English culture in the early nineteenth century. Dorothea marries an independent scholar who has devoted his life to the pursuit of a disinterested intellectual project – surely a good thing? Dorothea’s uncle, a comfortable landholder and self-professed liberal, wants to carry his benign dispositions into Parliament and presumably make them effective for social progress. Bulstrode, a former clerk in a London fencing operation, who has acquired capital through manipulation of the business

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and criminal suppression of its rightful heir, wants to bring his capital and religious enthusiasm to bear on the welfare institutions of his adoptive city. All these seem like potentially progressive activities, leading to increased knowledge, political change and social improvement. But they are each flawed by a regressive or, at best, static tendency: in Casaubon, to uphold the truths of a religion already showing signs of irrelevance or worse; in Brooke, to recycle the political myths of the Romantic period; in Bulstrode, to make his evangelical religion dominant in the medical and other establishments of the city. Such masterful men are perhaps desirable when they exert a progressive influence, but not when they become the ideological equivalents of the character traits of New Comedy – pedantry, braggartly preening and authoritarian manipulation. To put it baldly, the power wielders in Middlemarch are, in the middle of their march, going in the wrong direction: this is a society that is barely stable, in the wake of economic stresses that will be mentioned below, and shows tendencies toward decadence. Rev. Edward Casaubon wants to write a study in which all pagan mythologies will be found to be debased versions of Christian truth – for of course he doesn’t place the latter on the same plane as another mythology: the “arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed [was] that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences” (iii, 23–24). The methodological errors of this approach are plain to see: the Christian myth is taken as a standard, based on a revelation not universally shared; the world’s mythologies are treated not as meaningful in their own right and in their own cultures but as “corruptions” of something alien to them; the “luminous … reflected light” smacks of devotional rather than scholarly intention. Casaubon’s “mastered” position is, then, neither a warning against a typical totalizing system nor a charge against comparative or even reductive mythologies – witness Eliot’s abiding interest in Max Müller’s solar reductionism – but the exposure of a Christian intellectual tradition in extremis. What’s wrong with the “key to mythology” is neither its ignorance – not all the Germanic scholarship that Will points out is lacking (xxi, 205) would bring this doomed project around – nor its arrogance in subsuming all cultures to its privileged interpretation, but its lame defense of Christian truth in the language and methodology of eighteenth-century would-be scholarship. As Will also points out (xxi, 219), Casaubon’s work is an extension of Jacob Bryant’s A


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New System, or An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774–1807), a book that grew from one to six volumes as more and more data were shoveled into it. For there is inherently no limit to Bryant’s or Casaubon’s enterprise: everything in the world can go into it, and it can never be finished. Not comparative mythological study but Christian apologetics shows its feebleness in Casaubon’s project. In much the same way, Brooke’s political ambitions exhibit the exhaustion of an intellectual force in early nineteenth-century English culture. For he is, strange to say, a latter-day Romantic, not merely in his fond anecdotes of Wordsworth and glib comparisons of Will to Shelley, but in his habits of mind. To call him a Romantic must seem an egregious slur on that literary movement, but the attribution will be more acceptable if it’s recognized that his culture is largely that of the Romantic period, just concluding as the novel begins. Although he bears marks of the eighteenth century, even there his references are “pre-Romantic,” in the usual periodization; he quotes Edward Young, Eliot’s early love and later bête noire, and reads the Whiggish Edinburgh Review. He has picked up and watered down many of the catch-phrases of the period – for example, “‘Everything is symbolical, you know – the higher style of art’” (xxxiv, 326). And his politics features a broad reformism that can only be called “liberal,” although it lacks the precision of the term when it is applied to nineteenthcentury economic principles or to twentieth-century social engineering. His silly version of politics and culture makes him often sound like a character in a Peacock novel, and he is one of Eliot’s best specimens of intellectual satire. But he must be taken seriously as a social type of his time and, with appropriate modifications, of ours. For his impulse to flinch from the rigors of change in specific areas of society (electoral reform, improving substandard housing) while espousing one or another catch-phrase panacea is a general tendency in Romanticism, broadly conceived.18 Brooke’s first step in his election campaign is to acquire a newspaper to support him, and his second to hire Will as his mouthpiece. Will’s doubtless unsigned editorial for the “Pioneer” – “which had a motto from Charles James Fox and was in the van of progress” – runs: ours is a time “when the crying needs of the country might well counteract a reluctance to public action on the part of men whose minds had from long experience acquired breadth as well as concentration, decision of judgment as well as tolerance, dispassionateness as well as energy – in fact, all those qualities which in the melancholy experience of mankind have been the least disposed to share lodgings” (xxxvii, 353–54). As a rationale

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for and ironic description of Brooke, this is precious – almost as good as his approval of Will’s formulations: “‘I want that sort of thing – not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them’” (xlvi, 454). But Will is quite unsuccessful in getting Brooke to make his support of anything so definite as the Reform Bill explicit, and when hecklers at his rally insist on “the Bill,” he is driven from the hustings. (Rotten vegetables and a ventriloquist’s puppet’s derision also propel him.) This is a not so rare example of an apparent force for social progress showing itself as an expression of the dead hand of the past. The scandal of Brooke’s standing for Parliament with the meager intellectual resources he commands is compounded by the hint that he actually attains a seat in the aftermath of the Reform Act: “Mr. Brooke on this occasion [Dorothea’s coming marriage to an over-compensated clergyman] little thought of the Radical speech which, at a later period, he was led to make on the incomes of the bishops … To think with pleasure of his niece’s husband having a large ecclesiastical income was one thing – to make a Liberal speech was another thing …” (vii, 64–65). Not merely Brooke’s characteristic hypocrisy is exposed here but his instancing of the continued unrepresentativeness of English politics. Brooke’s “‘enthusiasm for liberty, freedom, emancipation – a fine thing under guidance – under guidance, you know’” (xxxvii, 356) doesn’t rise above the level of the status quo. The third of the masterful enterprisers of Middlemarch, Bulstrode, gives grounds for thinking of him as Eliot’s display of Low Church or evangelical ascendancy and its discontents.19 He is not merely a religious hypocrite on the Chadband or Slope model but an ideologue, whose moral line gives him added power in his institutional dealings. There’s no ambiguity about his sect – beginning with his membership in a “Calvinistic dissenting church at Highbury” (lxi, 606) and remaining “doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself” (liii, 514) – or his ideological stridency. Rev. Farebrother, whom he rejects as hospital chaplain, says that rejection derives from a failure to “‘teach his opinions – which he calls spiritual religion’” (xvii, 174). The combination of his charitable activities and his will to power is artfully exposed in the paragraph detailing his public and private charities, which employs the word “power” three times (xvi, 153). This thrust of Low Church expansionism into the complacent realm of Middlemarch’s institutional boards generates resistance, an “outburst of professional disgust at the announcement of the laws Mr. Bulstrode was laying down for the direction of the New Hospital” (xlv, 446). The climactic scene of his repudiation by the hospital board is a tissue


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of accusations and counter-charges couched in Christian terms (lxxi, 716–17), leading to a sense that not only personal scandal and personality conflicts are the motive forces but that various Christian ideologies are simply covers for a more basic power struggle. We are on the way toward seeing the traditional religious inspiration in charitable institutions as being a drain on rather than a furtherance of their effectiveness. With clergymenintellectuals like Casaubon, politicians like Brooke, and philanthropists like Bulstrode, Middlemarch’s institutional life is in dead hands, indeed – but they are not unopposed. What sort of a social organism is Middlemarch, after all? It is not a rural village like Hayslope or a town like St. Ogg’s but a Midlands manufacturing city, with numerous industries, social institutions and, to judge by the extent of the dramatis personae of the novel, considerable population – rather like the young Eliot’s Coventry.20 Its mayor, Walter Vincy, is a prosperous manufacturer (silk cloth is mentioned) and his family is related to the urban elite: “For who of any consequence in Middlemarch was not connected or at least acquainted with the Vincys? They were old manufacturers, and had kept a good house for three generations, in which there had naturally been much intermarrying with neighbours more or less decidedly genteel” (xi, 94–95). We are given the Vincy–Bulstrode connection through the mayor’s sister, the Vincy–Featherstone connection through his sister-in-law’s marriage to the latter, and the Vincy–Lydgate connection through his daughter’s marriage – eventually, we’ll even get a Vincy–Garth connection. This system of intermarriages would seem to offer social stability on a par with the city’s apparent economic prosperity, but neither the marriage-system nor the prosperity is without points of friction. As for the latter, Vincy complains repeatedly about his business troubles, and we are inclined to read this as a tight-wad father resisting his children’s pecuniary demands on him, but the reference to the economic downturn of this period – “the general depression of trade” (lxviii, 678) – makes financial stability in the society dubious. As for the marriage system, his son-in-law and daughter are more or less forced out of town by his involvement with Bulstrode’s machinations, and his sister has all she can do to shore up her crumbling husband. His son Fred will come off rather better, but only by allying the family with that of an estate manager of an obviously lower class. (Vincy himself had descended a peg in his marriage to an innkeeper’s daughter.) It is, moreover, the narrator’s view that Middlemarch, like other societies, is not a static but a changing – evolving or devolving – organism, in line with the thinking of the social scientists discussed above:

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any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another … Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand. Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls … but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing … Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connexion … Settlers, too, came from distant counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive advantage in cunning. (xi, 93–94)

The gradual change in perhaps all urban societies is by no means a new phenomenon, as the narrator’s following reference to Herodotus suggests, but it should be recalled as a corrective to seeing Middlemarch as anything but a society in transition. The best justification for placing the action at the time of the first Reform Act is that period’s very instability: The doubt hinted by Mr Vincy whether it were only the general election or the end of the world that was coming on, now that George the Fourth was dead, Parliament dissolved [June 1830], Wellington and Peel generally depreciated and the new King apologetic, was a feeble type of the uncertainties in provincial opinion at that time. With the glow-worm lights of country places, how could men see which were their own thoughts in the confusion of a Tory Ministry passing Liberal measures, of Tory nobles and electors being anxious to return Liberals rather than friends … (xxxvii, 353)

Whether its development is to be part of the march of progress, in the frequent metaphor of the time, or toward a limit or boundary, as its name also suggests (“march” in this sense derives from Old English mearc, a mark or border), is as open a question as anything Eliot would predict for her characters. With characteristic irony about moral progress, even while recording the changes and potential changes in a society, Eliot’s narrator says: “As to any provincial history in which the agents are all of high moral rank, that must be of a date long posterior to the first Reform Bill …” (xxxv, 337). In such a massive and slow-moving organism, what room is there for individual organisms to distinguish themselves, to assert heroic freedom? Despite the modern world’s lack of scope for women to reform or found religious orders, like Saint Theresa, or do other world-historical deeds, the novel’s heroine is given several opportunities to respond heroically, and Dorothea doesn’t fail to seize them. Her performance in the denouement is, moreover, heroic not merely in personal relations but in the three deadhand cultural, political and philanthropic spheres that have framed much of


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the action. Going beyond her personal support of Lydgate, in believing in and financially backing him when others suspect and shun him; beyond her painful overcoming of passionate jealousy by returning to comfort Rosamond, her apparent rival for Will; beyond her strained but successful gesture to create a breakthrough in her thwarted love-affair – she intervenes decisively in all three of the dead-hand spheres. Dorothea’s first such action is purely negative, but nevertheless a refreshing one. Casaubon has set her up in his afterlife not only as a chaste widow (at least in relation to Will) but also as the editor and producer of his never organized mythography, but she resolutely puts paid to the latter ambition, just as she eventually does to the former: “One little act of hers may perhaps be smiled at as superstitious. The Synoptical Tabulation, for the use of Mrs Casaubon, she carefully enclosed and sealed, writing within the envelope, ‘I could not use it. Do you not see now that I could not submit my soul to yours, by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in? – Dorothea’” (liv, 531). The superstition lies only in her addressing the dead; intellectual integrity is the more salient trait manifested here. By closing up Casaubon’s scholarly shop, Dorothea isn’t able to halt the entire churchly enterprise of shoring up a crumbling religious culture, but she contributes her mite to that end. In her response to her uncle’s political rise and fall, Dorothea is equally circumspect but more positive than in reaction to Casaubon. After vainly attempting to inspire him to do his duties as a landlord to his abject tenants by improving their living conditions and agricultural equipment, she herself steps fully into the role when her newly inherited assets allow. When the latter are diminished by her choice of Will and loss of Casaubon’s estates, her influence remains operative on her brother-in-law, Sir James, and the latter’s improvement program – abetted by the practical planning of the redoubtable Caleb Garth – is being realized at the close. Dorothea is not to have a direct role in politics – although she will serve as a helpmeet to her eventual second husband in his political career – but she is in the camp of the social reformers. Dorothea’s role in the religious-financial-philanthropic plot is less evident, but it contributes to a happy outcome nonetheless. After her loan allows Lydgate to disengage from Bulstrode and after the latter’s disgrace and expulsion from the hospital board, his turn toward at least heavenly redemption is channeled into doing something for his wife’s family – especially after Harriet exhibits a compassion and love rarely seen in the Middlemarch bourgeoisie. Having acquired the Featherstone estate when its inheritor, the illegitimate son Joshua Rigg, callously sells it off, Bulstrode makes Harriet’s nephew, Fred Vincy, the estate manager of Stone Court,

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with the potentiality, ultimately fulfilled, to work his way into proprietorship. Dorothea’s influence in this deferred transfer of ownership into the hands of the prospective heir – who was foolish in expecting it but who eventually earns the right to it by his faithful labor – is a coincidental one, to be sure. But by allowing Lydgate to pay off Bulstrode, she frees the latter to undertake another benefaction for his wife’s nephew (this one without strings attached). This is the remotest of the ramified effects of Dorothea’s actions; her more direct social and personal interventions allow her to claim the title of heroine of Middlemarch and of Middlemarch. Having said this much, and having left unsaid much more, what can one say about the total form of Middlemarch and about its social content? An answer to the first part of the question may come via Northrop Frye’s theory of fiction. His Anatomy of Criticism, literary scholars will recall, offers a typology of four forms of prose fiction: novel, romance, confession (or autobiography) and anatomy – equivalent to the classical form called Menippean satire. The Menippean satire “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior.”21 It should be noted that in Middlemarch the disembodied ideas and professionals of Menippean satire are – like the romance and comic figures that are fully characterized – concretely embodied in novelistic detail, so that we are dealing with a hybrid form, like those Frye summarizes (pp. 312–13, with a reference to Eliot’s novels). Frye goes on to consider “encyclopaedic form,” “normally a scripture or sacred book in the mythical mode” (p. 315). Middlemarch, for all its glory, cannot stand in this company. But Frye makes a weaker use of the term: “the constant tendency to be encyclopaedic and exhaustive both in technique and in subject matter, and to see both in highly intellectualized terms” (p. 313). This usage occurs in his account of Ulysses, and it will serve for Middlemarch as well. Frye’s fuller description of Ulysses includes a claim that it combines all four of the fictional types – novel, romance, confession and anatomy – so as to constitute a “complete prose epic” (p. 314; Ulysses as romance is not self-evident). This claim cannot be made for Middlemarch, lacking as it does the confessional or autobiographical component, but the omission doesn’t significantly reduce its credentials to stand as an encyclopedic fiction. After such abstract theorizing, it is in order to provide some substance for this abundant terminology. We have already considered the romance form of the work when discussing its mythological and classical strata (and with


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respect to the Mary and Fred plot); its novelistic qualifications need not detain us. The anatomy aspect remains to be inspected – a daunting task. I shall employ a restricted body of evidence for this demonstration, rather than rehearsing the large body of information – historical, political, sociological, biological, mythographic, etc. – running through the work. This body of evidence is the epigraphs to the work’s eighty-six chapters. Of these, it is surprising, given George Eliot’s competence in classical languages and literature, that none are from the ancient world – except two from the Apocrypha (Ecclesiasticus for ch. 69 and Tobit for ch. 74). These are best placed with four folk proverbs (for chs. 7, 46, 62 and 84) as traditional expressions. The Middle Ages are also barely represented: two from Dante (for chs. 19 and 54) and five from Chaucer (for chs. 12, 21, 26, 50 and 65) – the latter making the largest concentration from any author other than Shakespeare. Renaissance authors, particularly the English, are the most fully represented: thirty, of which Shakespeare provides eleven. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers number eleven, with Goldsmith, Wordsworth and Blake represented twice. That leaves thirtytwo for Eliot to fill and she responds in ample fashion: her snatches of dialogue from unwritten plays – “1st Gent. … 2nd Gent.” – being one thing about the novel that even recalcitrant student readers carry away from the book. These data are not fully interpretable without a chapter-by-chapter analysis of their applicability, a major and worthwhile project that will not be undertaken here. Some of Eliot’s own maxims are detachable and memorable, for example, Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are.

(for ch. 70)

But the most resonant of all is perhaps the quotation from Faust that follows hard upon Dorothea’s great meditation scene in chapter 80, in which she transcends egoistic emotions by drawing on “sympathetic experience [that] returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance” (lxxx, 775; the epigraph to this chapter is from Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty”). The chapter closes with her opening the curtains of her equivalent of a religious meditation closet and beholding the spectacle of the eternal family, man, woman and baby (which has been compared to a Positivist symbol) – leading to a renewed resolve to participate in life according to the religion of humanity. This is the symbolic climax of the novel and of its intellectual anatomy, to be followed by the dramatic climax, her liberation

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from all dead hands by willing her union with Will (ch. 83). In between comes her highly charged scene with Rosamond, in which she performs the astonishing feat of getting even that paragon of egoism to reach something like sympathetic self-transcendence. It is in this context that the Goethe epigraph to chapter 81 does its work: “Du Erde warst auch diese Nacht beständig, Und athmest neu erquickt zu meinen Füssen, Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben, Du regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschliessen Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.”22

This is from the opening of the drama’s second part, after Faust’s débâcle in the first which sends Gretchen to her death, and marks his determination to do better – or at least to operate on a larger scale – in future. To sum up its content: “One more night has passed without the earth’s having dissolved into chaos … The freshness of the earth at dawn is compared with the refreshed new vigor of an awakened sleeper … as the dawn becomes day, the earth reveals to Faust reasons for rejoicing … regst und rührst Taken together mean ‘inspire, arouse’ … zum höchsten Dasein ‘to the perfection of existence.’”23 The only irrelevances to Dorothea’s condition are that she hasn’t seduced and betrayed anyone, nor has she slept through the night. One epigraph does not make an encyclopedic work but, with appropriate examination, other epigraphs of Middlemarch will be found to constitute an important part of its intellectual anatomy. This may prove especially true of those that Eliot herself composed, for they involve a direct application of her thought to the action. Some of these have already been subjected to critical scrutiny and a comprehensive account would be a valued scholarly achievement. There is another literary category that must be applied for a global estimation of Middlemarch: the tragic mode – if not the generic form of tragedy. The applicability of this concept is inseparable from the presence in the work of the tension between the real and the ideal, which we have encountered as early as Romola, if not before. I approach so imposing a conjuncture by way of the quixotic theme, mentioned in passing above. Dorothea is explicitly yoked to the Don by Casaubon: “‘She is ready prey to any man who knows how to play adroitly either on her affectionate ardour or her Quixotic enthusiasm …’” (xlii, 415); and by Lydgate: he “did not stay to think that she was Quixotic: he gave himself up, for the first time in his life, to the exquisite sense of leaning entirely on a generous sympathy …” (lxxvi, 751). (It may be


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noted that Casaubon here displays – or conceals – deeper insight into his wife than on any other occasion, while Lydgate omits the Quixote analogy because he is on his way to comparing Dorothea to the Virgin Mary.) The profound ironies of Cervantes’s novel-romance-anatomy are in play in these reflections: both protagonists are idealistic naïfs unable or unwilling to see obvious and unavoidable realities; they are also more selfless, more noble than the ordinary mortals who limit themselves to such realities; on select occasions, they can do justice and mercy that others cannot even conceive. Their errors are thus the bread-and-butter of comedy: the inability, as one Shakespearean heroine puts it, to “see a church at midday.” They stand also in the ranks of the great tragic heroes, from Antigone onward, since they are inevitably defeated, doomed, or merely reduced to living in the ordinary world. It is in this context that we may approach some of the most elevated passages in Middlemarch. One such is the often discussed account of Dorothea’s comic situation on her honeymoon in discovering that her beloved isn’t what the naive bride thought him. The sly suggestion is made: “Nor can I suppose that when Mrs Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic” (xx, 191–92). The narrator is at pains to enforce the idea that such situations are “not unusual,” but are nonetheless tragic: “we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind …” (xx, 192). From this the passage proceeds to the famous comparison of a “keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life” with the capacity to hear the growing grass and the squirrel’s heartbeat – with consequent death from the “roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Examination of this beautiful prose doesn’t often extend to the next paragraphs, in which Dorothea’s entry into “that new real future which was replacing the imaginary” is proposed. In this scene, she begins her work of examining the details of her courtship and weighing the concrete particulars that make up unideal life. Eventually, this work becomes a mental discipline which allows her in the climactic chapters to overcome pride, jealousy and misperception (of the relation between Will and Rosamond), to see things from points of view other than her own, and to resolve on action to relieve others’ troubles. Another passage on tragedy allows a further step toward grasping the intimacy of tragedy and comedy, as of the ideal and the real, in this work. When Casaubon calls in Dr. Lydgate for an estimate of his remaining lifespan, his governing concern is for the completion and publication of his

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life’s work. There is an inveterate comic element in this somber situation, for we know what the Key to All Mythologies is worth, and the sad description of the sick man is tinted with the ludicrous: “the inward conflict implied in his formal measured address, delivered with the usual sing-song and motion of the head” (xlii, 417). But the passage continues: “Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life …? … But there was nothing to strike others as sublime about Mr Casaubon …” (xlii, 417). This estimation of him has already been taken when the German idealist painter Naumann measures him up as a model for a picture including St. Thomas Aquinas: “‘I so seldom see just what I want – the idealistic in the real’” (xxii, 212). This mixture of the real and ideal, and of the tragic and comic, is the prevailing mode of Middlemarch. Its world is one where it is not simply that reality can never measure up to the ideal, but where the ideal is carried, incompletely realized, in the baseness, narrowness, smallness of human beings. Where else could it reside? For Eliot, lacking the godhead, mankind is the only repository of the ideal. That is our tragedy; it is also what makes us comic, in always falling short. Can we put this knowledge (if that’s what it is) together with the formal issues raised by thinking of Middlemarch as an encyclopedic fiction? This form, to judge by its avatars, tends toward tragicomedy: from Don Quixote to Ulysses, its occasional appearances convey that fulness, that ambiguity. If we consider the fates of the heroes of the present work, their mixed outcomes reinforce the suggestion that life as here conceived tends, among the idealistic, toward mischievous diminution. Will’s outsider status places him always on the defensive: after losing one fortune through his family’s harshness toward his grandmother for her choice of a Polish outsider, he is led to renounce another fortune, a tainted one from his mother’s family, even after learning of its misappropriation. The one constant in life, his love for Dorothea, is hedged with wayward career options – from his artistic inclinations to his political journalism to prospective “eating his dinners” as a law student. He is even put into the humiliating and somewhat comic position of making not one but two painful leave-takings from Dorothea. That he finally wins her and becomes an MP in the van of progress is testimony to his eventual good luck as well as to his basic soundness, but he lacks the depth to make a more heroic impact in his life. As for Dorothea, we have observed her overcoming her mistaken or vague enthusiasm by achieving productive fellow-feeling through imaginative contact with others in their misery. Yet the security of her position limits her critical testing – put it down to her parental inheritance of £700 a year,


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which makes giving up one inheritance and being threatened with the loss of another24 much easier. Given her own limitations, as well as those of her society, it is distressing but not inappropriate that she is left not entirely out of place as a domestic helpmeet rather than a public high achiever.25 And Lydgate, an idealistic researcher with an “intellectual passion,” becomes as much an example of professional error and marital mistake as his fellow intellectual, Casaubon. What else can we call a fiction with such flawed heroes and limited triumphs but tragicomic? The comic component of Middlemarch, with its vision of historical change, is one that we should be happy to embrace, given the work’s generally dour tone and sorry proceedings. Its Finale has, as could be anticipated, disappointed not only feminist critics, for the helpmeet role it assigns the heroine in subsequent life, but the common reader, for a somewhat bathetic tidying-up and a homiletic closing paragraph. Yet this concluding gesture may be read as a measured affirmation, despite its repeated negatives, its reminder of inevitable partial achievements, and its last accent on “rest in unvisited tombs.” For, from the perspective of a novelist addressing a late Victorian audience, if not from a perspective more common in our own day, “the growing good of the world” is a given and that “things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been” is a matter for self-congratulation. Eliot shares in this Victorian sense of progress, if not in the specifically Whig or liberal idea of history, and is guarded in her asperity regarding her own times, just as she is in her hopes. Middlemarch traces the first steps in the ways in which “the effect of [Dorothea’s] being on those around her was incalculably diffusive,” and leaves to our imagination the continued diffuse effects. It also suggests that a requirement for exerting beneficial influence is to “ live … faithfully” even a “hidden life,” and offers the heroine’s example of what being faithful to one’s idealism might mean.

chapter 9


Middlemarch all but ends with the sentence: “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.” George Eliot’s next novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), opens with the sentence, “Man can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.” Something has happened to make Eliot believe that to make a new beginning, it is necessary not merely to take up from the previous limit but to introduce a “make-believe,” a new, even arbitrary constituent dropped into the super-organism. It is another resource of Middlemarch to provide us with a hint of her procedure here. That encyclopedic fiction did for the totality of an English society (not the one present at time of writing but a past one) what Balzac before and Zola afterward required a whole shelf of novels to do. After such fulfillment, it would be necessary to go beyond prior achievement in a new mode. An additional, even alien element was needed for a novel that might deal with the England of the present as its predecessor had done for the past. Why not an Englishman who discovers he’s not English at all or entirely, but an outsider, an “Italian with white mice” or, to use the pungent phrase of one Middlemarcher, “a grafting of the Jew pawnbroker” (lxxi, 707). A somewhat arbitrary beginning, but pregnant with possibilities. Setting up an external perspective by way of an outsider allows comparative judgment of what’s inside, and Daniel Deronda is not only a comprehensive view of English society in the last third of the nineteenth century but also a highly judgmental one. The donnée of the English gentleman who’s really a Jew is designed to provide perspective on England at least as much as to provide an alternative to it. Hence the necessity for both plots of the novel, the so-called English part and Jewish part.1 How to prepare for such a new beginning? For an Eliot, the aim would be to limit the arbitrary as much as possible by learning as much about the outsider’s cohort as they themselves knew and certainly more than the justdiscovered Jew would know about his roots. And so: Jewish learning, an extended course in Jewish history, religion, literature, mores, language, etc. 190


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This course has been effectively set out in an edition of Eliot’s treasure-trove on the subject, Jane Irwin’s George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks.2 Eliot’s reading for Daniel Deronda over a period of years may be categorized as follows (see Reading List for details). She read Jewish history, from the biblical to the modern period, her primary authority for the former being G. H. A. von Ewald and for the remainder Heinrich Graetz, but also consulting A. A. Berliner, Abraham Geiger, H. H. Milman and James Picciotto (for English Jewry). She read religious literature and commentary – the Mishna and Maimonides coming under both heads – including works by C. D. Ginsburg, Ignaz Goldziher, Abraham Kuenen, G. R. Levi, David Rothschild and Leopold Zunz. She read literary works by or about Jews, including the autobiographies of Ludwig Kalisch and Solomon Maimon, collections of stories by Leopold Kompert, and a novel by Erckmann and Chatrian, Le Juif polonais,3 as well as studies of Hebrew literature by F. J. Delitsch, Moritz Steinschneider and Zunz. She was especially studious of Jewish mores and verbal expression, in works by A. T. Hartmann, R. Hirschfeld, Hyam Isaacs, Moritz Oppenheim (with illustrations by Leopold Stein), Wolf Pascheles and A. M. Tendlau. She was also interested in literary anti-Semitism, reading traditional texts by J. A. Eisenmenger and J. C. Wagenseil. Raising a fascinating but unfulfilled possibility, she read Salomon Munk’s Palestine and an article in the Academy for 1874, “Notes on Travel: Jerusalem.” And she had Hebrew lessons from Emanuel Deutsch, brushing up on previous study during her Higher Criticism period. Deutsch’s relation to Daniel Deronda, primarily as a putative model for Mordecai, has been much commented, but her access to his abundant scholarship has been less closely observed. Eliot read his review-articles on the Mishna in the Quarterly Review for 1867 and on Islam in the Quarterly for 1869, as well as his brief articles on Jewish poetry in a German journal and on “Fuad Pasha’s Confession” in the Pall Mall Gazette for 1867. Deutsch, an assistant librarian at the British Museum, was the type of the partially assimilated Jewish scholar who could bridge the gap between cultures by dint of his high expertise. His learning and, apparently, his personality were found impressive by others besides Eliot: the aristocratic Emily Strangford edited his literary remains after his death. We don’t know as much about Deutsch as we would like, but friendship with him evidently offered an alternative image of what a deeply cultured Jew and devoted scholar could be. Although Eliot’s donnée for the novel and her procedure for preparing it are predictable from what had come before, her audacity in writing a novel about Jews was and remains astonishing. The debatable term here is “novel

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about Jews,” for the Jews in previous fiction had either been pretentious spokesmen for their maker’s ideology – Disraeli’s Sidonia in Coningsby and Tancred – or fabular versions of traditional bogeymen like Dickens’s Fagin or of traditional sages like Riah of Our Mutual Friend. Her decision to create characters who were distinctly Jewish but also recognizably human was unprecedented; Trollope created characters in this category, Melmotte and Breghert in The Way We Live Now and Lopez in The Prime Minister, but these came into the world concurrently with the writing and serial publication of Daniel Deronda (and two of them retain traces of the traditional Jewish villain). Although critical attention has been devoted almost exclusively to Daniel and his mentor, Mordecai, an equally remarkable originality lies in presenting a family of ordinary Jews, the Cohens of the East End. Eliot knew what she was doing in going not only against social assumptions about Jews but also against literary conventions in their portrayal. To savor her thinking in the matter, we must draw upon letters that come after rather than before the novel’s publication. She wrote to a number of its early admirers that she was surprised by the favorable responses and not at all surprised by the unfavorable ones. Since her statements to her publisher John Blackwood and to Harriet Beecher Stowe are frequently cited, I submit her letter to Abraham Benisch, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle: “You are probably better aware than I am that the elements in ‘Daniel Deronda’ which have called forth your generously appreciative words have met in the ordinary public chiefly with an ignorant surprize and lack of sympathy. This was what I expected. But I did not expect the cordial encouragement [by] which you and other instructed men have given me to believe that my anxious effort at a true presentation is not a failure, and may even touch the feeling of your people to welcome issues” (Letters VI, 317). While to Blackwood and Stowe she expressed her expectation that the widespread and fashionable anti-Semitism of the genteel would work against the novel, Eliot here suggests that an additional block was the ignorance and indifference of ordinary English readers.4 Beyond hinting at a special (Zionist?) inspiration that Benisch’s “people” might derive from the novel, she suggests that “instructed men” in general may be able to transcend “ignorant surprize and lack of sympathy.” Although instructed preparation and capacity for sympathy are at a premium in reading any Eliot novel, a heightened awareness and imagination are called for here. In another letter of the period, Eliot suggests these desiderata: “I confess that I had an unsatisfied hunger for certain signs of sympathetic discernment, which you only have given. I may mention as one instance your clear


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perception of the relation between the presentation of the Jewish element and those of English Social life” (Letters VI, 379). This is to David Kaufmann, professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Budapest and rather an unlikely perceiver of the relation between the “Jewish element” and “English social life.” That this was the focus of Eliot’s concern is shown in her praise of Kaufmann’s “George Eliot und das Judenthum” (later expanded into a book, George Eliot and Judaism) as “an article which must be written by a Jew who showed not merely sympathy with the best aspirations of his race, but a remarkable insight into the nature of art and the processes of the artistic mind.” That Kaufmann was capable of this intuition is, therefore, an indication that neither sympathy with the Jews nor thorough acquaintance with English society is by itself – or even taken together – sufficient. While it is no more necessary to subscribe to a particular social philosophy than it is to be a philo-Semite to appreciate this novel, it is desirable that one be inclined to yield to the picture of English social relations that Eliot creates and to the suggestions of an alternative conception of society. For Daniel Deronda is a work of systematic social criticism and at the same time a visionary, even utopian novel, acidly etching what is real and, in close juxtaposition, imagining what is possible. It is the mixture of “realistic” social depiction and the prophetic (if not the fantastic) that has given grounds for the soundest negative criticism of the novel. For those who reject such a mixture of modes, a criterion of generic purity is the implied esthetic norm. Yet when we look closely at the “realistic” part, it is no such thing, if measured by the canons of verisimilitude. One of the novel’s earliest defenders was quick to seize on this astonishing lapse in the “Gwendolen” camp’s notion of realism: “A Grandcourt[,] whose nature is one main trunk of barren egoism from which all the branches of fresh desire have withered off, is recognized forthwith to be human. But Deronda, sensitive at every point with life … – Deronda is a pallid shadow rather than a man!”5 The perception conveyed in these canny lines is that of Grandcourt’s utterly unrealistic mode of depiction. Dukes of Ferrara have come and gone in literature, and cool, blond sadists have tortured many a soul in marriage, but repeated reptilian allusions and vigorous anathemas against the unredeemable villain do not conduce to a satisfying psychological study according to realistic conventions. Grandcourt is far inferior as a creation to Tito Melema of Romola and belongs in the contemporary mode of American romance, if not in a Gothic novel. Gwendolen is better as a sustained psychological study, but not much is gained by its portrait of sublime egoism to mark an advance beyond

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Rosamond Vincy of Middlemarch. Both are figures of the low mimetic mode, rendered incapable by their self-centeredness of grasping the busy world of action and idea around them. In short, Gwendolen’s story works well as an exemplum of the world that Daniel rejects, but that exhibition is not immune to the charge of satiric reduction, if not of prejudicial distortion. For the Grandcourts and Gascoignes and Arrowpoints (with exceptions among their younger stock) make so shabby a showing that an impartial social observer may be led to resent the opprobrium directed at genteel English society. What redeems the unremitting dissection of the dominant culture in Daniel Deronda is the progressive revelation of a philosophic stance on which that severe judgment is formed. One of the non-Jewish works that Eliot was probably reading during the build-up to writing was Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), of which (as we have seen above) she had read only the periodical introduction previously.6 One of Arnold’s governing categories, “Philistinism,” has been observed at work in Daniel Deronda, in an epigraph and in its closing quotation of a chorus from Milton’s Samson Agonistes, marking the biblical hero’s tragedy but also his defeat of the Philistines.7 But the larger structure, Philistines versus Israelites, has not as clearly emerged. Barbara Hardy in the notes to her edition of the novel (Penguin, p. 886) is on the verge of this structure, noting the “longstanding nonconformist equation of [the Philistines] with false values and false gods, particularly relevant in a novel where the associations can be remade in allusion to actual Jews.” If we make explicit the implied equations, we find the Jews of the novel the descendants of the Israelites, standing in opposition (symbolic, not physical) to the English equivalents of their ancestral enemies, the Philistines. It is possible to read Daniel Deronda as a fictional enactment of at least one of the oppositions set out in Culture and Anarchy, not the Hellenism– Hebraism contrast (although this hovers in the background) but the classification of the British by sociocultural classes: “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace” (the title of chapter 3). Of these, the middle classes or Philistines are characterized by their resistance to the humanizing influences of culture or, as Arnold’s phrase-making puts it, they are “the enemy of the children of light or servants of the idea” – “children of light” referring unmistakably to the Israelites and the idea of god they bound themselves to serve.8 Arnold first used the term in his essay on Heine (1863): “Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of light” (III, 112) – where the duality with the Jews is explicit. Eliot’s own use


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of the term is yet earlier; in the Riehl review-essay, she writes, “We imagine the Philister is the personification of the spirit which judges everything from a lower point of view than the subject demands – which judges the affairs of the parish from the egotistic and purely personal point of view – which judges the affairs of the nation from the parochial point of view, and does not hesitate to measure the merits of the universe from the human point of view” (Essays, p. 297). While Arnold accounts for this resistance to culture as the residue of Puritan anti-intellectualism in the nonconformist bourgeoisie, he reserves his greatest scorn for the aristocracy of Barbarians, who have never risen even to a principled anti-intellectualism and who are characterized by the “passion for field-sports,” often capped by fulfilling the desire of “killing something.” Overriding his distinction between Barbarians and Philistines, Arnold emphasizes their common pursuit of the principle of individualism, which he labels “doing as one likes” (the title of chapter 2). Tracing the origins of the middle class’s Philistine individualism in the nonconformist tradition – whose slogan is “the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion” – Arnold traces the principle for the Barbarians back to the roots of aristocracy: “The Barbarians brought with them that staunch individualism, as the modern phrase is, and that passion for doing as one likes, for the assertion of personal liberty, which appears to [be] the central idea of English life, and of which we have, at any rate, a very rich supply” (V, 140–41). It is to this proudly English individualism, bourgeois and aristocratic together, that Arnold opposes the values of culture, not as an esthetic withdrawal from the crude world but as a civilizing force that has not yet completed its work. In a passage that summarizes his key ideas and pet phrases, he juxtaposes culture to Philistinism/Barbarism in a way that returns us to Daniel Deronda: But in each class there are born a certain number of natures with a curiosity about their best self, with a bent for seeing things as they are, for disentangling themselves from machinery, for simply concerning themselves with reason and the will of God, and doing their best to make these prevail; – for the pursuit, in a word, of perfection … Natures with this bent emerge in all classes, – among the Barbarians, among the Philistines, among the Populace. And this bent always tends to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing characteristic not their Barbarianism or their Philistinism, but their humanity. They have, in general, a rough time of it in their lives … (pp. 145–46)

The introduction of an oppositional or outsider element in Arnold’s picture of the English cultural scene accords well with the dramatic structure of

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Daniel Deronda. For here Eliot sets up a hero driven by curiosity about himself – if not his “best self” – and his origins, who goes outside or beyond his class and even his society, and who aspires to realize his “humanity” in ways that may result in a “rough time of it” in life. We may strongly suspect that Eliot was struck with this conjuncture of ideas and terms in a way only rarely experienced in reading the work of others. It is not the Jews alone who are depicted in this novel as carriers of a cultural ideal but the English as well. For all Gwendolen’s mental sneer at Philistines in the opening chapter (i, 7), she and her set fall under that rubric. Despite the psychological richness of her characterization, she, too, is a cultural-historical study, as much a demonstration of what happens to people under the impress of one ideology as Daniel and Mordecai are as exponents of another. This ideology, whose philosophic roots lie in the empiricist tradition and which is politically grounded in Whig liberalism, is that of radical individualism, expressed in practice simply as “doing as one likes,” which Arnold balefully denominated the “central idea of English life.” Eliot sees to it that Gwendolen is quite explicit in her pronouncements of this ideology; when under assault by Grandcourt’s marriage proposals, she anticipates her inevitable subjugation to his personal dominance: This subjection to a possible self, a self not to be absolutely predicted about, caused her some astonishment and terror: her favourite key of life – doing as she liked – seemed to fail her, and she could not foresee what at a given moment she might like to do. The prospect of marrying Grandcourt really seemed more attractive to her than she had believed beforehand that any marriage could be: the dignities, the luxuries, the power of doing a great deal of what she liked to do … But was she going to fulfil her deliberate intention? She began to be afraid of herself, and to find out a certain difficulty in doing as she liked. (xiii, 114–16)

The entire Gwendolen plot – her egoistic motivations in choosing a husband, the conflict of wills in her marriage, and the partly conscious wish-fulfillment in her failure to try to save her husband from drowning – both in psychic and overt action conveys an object lesson for the ideology of doing as one likes. Gwendolen’s career may also be read as a systematic study of the difficulty of knowing what one likes (that is, what will give lasting satisfaction) and of doing it when associated with others who do only what they like. It also registers the ironic and belated discovery that better rewards are obtained from doing what others like or, at least, what may be good for others. It is thereby a critique of utilitarian ethics and the calculus of pleasure and pain, still the prevailing school of British ethical theory, though beginning to suffer contentious analysis and subtle modification.9 We are


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in the presence of the entry into fiction of an ethical debate that was animating British philosophy in the last third of the century, leading to the emergence of a competing, idealist school, the Oxford Neo-Hegelians led by F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green. There is no sign that Eliot entered this theoretical contention, though she regularly visited Oxford during this period, but the foregrounding of this, among other elements of the dominant liberal ideology (“liberal” in extending economic laissez faire to behavioral individualism), in her fiction is a sign of the times.10 While Gwendolen’s story may serve as an illustration of Philistine– utilitarian–liberal ideology and its breakdown in practice, Grandcourt may serve as an allegory (or gargoyle) of the ideology as a systematic way of life. His tawdry sadism is credible only as a reduction to the absurd of the individualist ethos: the pleasure not simply in doing as one likes but in doing it by means of others’ not doing as they like. It would be too much to claim that Eliot indicts in the person of Grandcourt the competitive and utilitarian strain dominant in Victorian society, but he does suggest the perfect adjustment of the aristocratic or Barbarian class to the prevailing philistinism of the time. Another watchword of Grandcourt’s requires attention in an assessment of Eliot’s ideological critique. For him, marriage is a contract, and the use of this word by a man given neither to the sanctity of marriage (or anything else) nor to excessive legalism supports a reading of the term’s wider connotations. Here is the locus classicus of his doctrine: And Grandcourt might have pleaded that he was perfectly justified in taking care that his wife should fulfil the obligations she had accepted. Their marriage was a contract where all the ostensible advantages were on her side … he had won her by the rank and luxuries he had to give her, and these she had got: he had fulfilled his side of the contract. And Gwendolen, we know, was thoroughly aware of the situation. She could not excuse herself by saying that there had been a tacit part of the contract on her side – namely, that she meant to rule and have her own way. (liv, 573)

What is at stake here, although not directly invoked, is the contract theory of the state that accompanies the ideology of individualism, laissez faire and utilitarianism. This philosophy of government is ornamented by the greatest names in British thought from Hobbes and Locke on down. It is also a prime target of the countermovement that descends from Burke and Coleridge and makes its way into Scott’s and, later, Conrad’s fiction.11 The tenets of the contract theory, aside from debating points made in connection with the claims for popular sovereignty in the civil wars and later political crises, come down to these: what really exists are individuals and

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the state is only a fiction or instrument created by them; the initial act (either temporally or logically) in establishing the state is the contractual surrender of part of the individual’s otherwise absolute rights to the state or sovereign, for purposes of maintaining the peace and for the common benefits that flow from it; the tenuous balance of society rests on this legal fiction, that individuals are artificially associated by a contract that keeps them from perpetual war on each other, as their original condition would cause or their rights would allow. Small wonder, then, that Grandcourt, like other great individualists, becomes especially incensed by his wife’s failure to keep up her part of the marriage contract – the social contract in nuce – for he has made the disagreeable surrender of his rightful wish to be her absolute master in mind and body and contents himself with exerting only the mastery which the contractual system allows him.12 Where did Eliot stand on the issues of contractualism in political theory and the countervailing organicism of Burke and Coleridge that was being revived by the Oxford Neo-Hegelians? There is no record of her explicit dealings with either set of ideas; the closest she ever came was in her exposition of Riehl but, as we have seen (Chapter 5), her formulations convey his, without necessary commitment to them. Similarly, the nationalistic strain in the organicist tradition, celebrating a collective entity, the people or Volk, is sounded by characters in The Spanish Gypsy, but not without her inveterate tendency to expose its excessive demands and tragic consequences (see Chapter 6). There is, especially, no hint in Eliot’s writings of sympathy for the growing outcome of organicist thought in a conception of the nation or state as a collective entity – the State with a capital S that Arnold was trumpeting in Culture and Anarchy and elsewhere. In her fullest political novel, Felix Holt, there is no reference to this concept, and none in the follow-up essay, “Address to Working Men” (see Chapter 7). The fullest influence of organicist thinking on Eliot derives from the scientific element in her intellectual milieu – Lewes, Spencer, et al., in the wake of Comte, in this respect – as Postlethwaite and others have shown (see Chapter 8). Here the development of the individual organism is vitally linked to its medium, largely consisting of other organisms. In human terms, this organicist thinking, the basis of Spencer’s sociology and Lewes’s physiological psychology, provides a view of historical development for the phenomena of social and individual life. Here Eliot can be said to be in accord with Riehl, as she improves on his ideas in her review-essay: “What has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. The external conditions which society has inherited from the past are but the manifestation of inherited internal


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conditions in the human beings who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both” (Essays, p. 287). It is this historical sense in organicist theory – of collective experience as the source of political development – rather than the static social model of an organic community, that Eliot draws on in the Jewish milieu of Daniel Deronda, to contrast with the liberal-individualist ethos of the English milieu. The sources of Eliot’s thought in furnishing the Jewish milieu of Daniel Deronda are, however, more diverse. Shortly after completing the novel, Eliot wrote an essay, to be included in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, entitled “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” on the Jewish problem. The essay isn’t about the Jews but about the problem, the still prevalent anti-Semitism in the English mentality, somewhat muted since the days when the rallying cry of the title was an invitation to a pogrom. (I shall consider the essay in the context of the intellectual critique undertaken in Theophrastus Such, in Chapter 10.) Only in closing does the essay turn to the Jews, in a gambit the least to be expected as an approach to Jews: A modern book on Liberty has maintained that from the freedom of individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world may be enriched. Why should we not apply this argument to the idiosyncrasy of a nation, and pause in our haste to hoot it down? There is still a great function for the steadfastness of the Jew: not that he should shut out the utmost illumination which knowledge can throw on his national history, but that he should cherish the store of inheritance which that history has left him. The effective bound of human action is feeling, and the worthy child of a people owning the triple name of Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew, feels his kinship with the glories and the sorrows, the degradation and the possible renovation of his national family. Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and call his doctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding superstition – the superstition that a theory of human wellbeing can be constructed in disregard of the influences which have made us human.13

The “modern book on Liberty” was, of course, Mill’s of that title, and she cites it approvingly on the potential benefits of personal idiosyncrasy. (The “theory of human wellbeing” that disregards feeling cannot be Mill’s version of utilitarianism, for his rationalism was highly inclusive in that category.) Eliot is neither belaboring utilitarianism nor celebrating the Romantic wisdom of the heart here, except in a very specific sense. Mill is employed to set down the major premise of a syllogism: individuals have idiosyncrasies that may be beneficial to the world. Groups or nations also have

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idiosyncrasies that may be of benefit to the world. Ergo, those idiosyncratic Jews may have a “great function” for humanity. Eliot was writing within a cultural tradition that thought certain things about Jews and she would have to shift its prejudices by working on their own ground. The standard view of Jews included (a) their “steadfastness,” i.e., their consistency in refusing to accept Christianity; (b) their backwardness in maintaining a view of their history and of much else derived from long-obsolete data in their traditional texts; and (c) their self-satisfaction in possessing the truth, amounting to an intolerable sense of superiority to the goyim. Eliot subtly shifts the “steadfastness” (a) and the traditionalism (b) to an admirable virtue and a potential boon to others. It will, however, be necessary for them to become up-to-date in (b) “knowledge” of their “national history,” i.e., to become somewhat assimilated by adjusting themselves to modern scholarship – overriding their limited conceptions (c). Turning to the value of feeling: in this case, feeling means specifically the non-rational mentality of the Jews – both their religious beliefs and their persistent faithfulness in upholding them, despite persecution and diaspora over the millennia. Here, too, Eliot makes a subtle reappraisal: the Jew’s feeling is based on historical memory – he “feels his kinship” with past generations. It is a kinship in both “glories” – presumably, the introduction of monotheism to the world, as well as various impressive cultural achievements – but also in “sorrows” and “degradation,” i.e., kinship in persecution itself. As for the “possible renovation of his national family,” Eliot is alluding to the age-old hope for return to the promised land as a family, not to the political state envisaged by Zionism; the former, the familial hope, is a worthy feeling and, since the latter hadn’t as yet been formulated, takes on the character of proto-Zionism. 14 Eliot’s version of the idea of a beneficial influence of distinct groups on the universal community (which I shall call cosmopolitan nationalism) may only partially be accounted to her usual intellectual resources. Feuerbach suggested a concept (derived from Kant and Hegel) of humanity as a philosophic whole and laid the religions of the world under contribution to its developing self-consciousness. But, as we have seen (Chapter 4), he assigned Judaism a lower role by reason of its worship of nature, of the separate tribe, and of “Utilism” (as Eliot translates his equivalent not of Utilitarianism but of materialistic greed).15 The so-called social evolutionists – Spencer, Edward Tylor, John F. M’Lennan – whom she was reading during this period laid little stress on the diversity of human groups, envisioning instead a fairly uniform worldwide development of sociocultural


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forms, independent of the unique traits of specific groups that may have spread by diffusion. (Eliot’s position in this debate will be treated in Chapter 10.) It becomes necessary to seek beyond Eliot’s normal intellectual range to find ideas of a potential Jewish contribution to humanity cognate with those espoused by Mordecai in the novel and by Theophrastus Such after it. One of the earliest formulations of the long-standing idea of Israel as a light unto the Gentiles is in the medieval Jewish poet Judah Halevi’s philosophic dialogue, The Kuzari, which Eliot quoted in The Spanish Gypsy. There, Israel is figured as the heart (along with other vital members) of the collective body of humanity: for example, “Israel / Is to the nations as the body’s heart: / Thus writes our poet Jehuda …,” says the traditionalist scholar, Sephardo (Book II, p. 149, ll. 881–83). In Daniel Deronda, Mordecai gives the idea this form: “‘Each nation has its own work, and is a member of the world, [which is] enriched by the work of each. But it is true, as Jehudaha-Levi first said, that Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love, and the reverence for the human body which lifts the needs of our animal life into religion, and the tenderness which is merciful to the poor and weak and to the dumb creature that wears the yoke for us’” (xlii, 452–53). In this version of the idea, the Jewish tradition is credited with fostering the quasifamilial bonding of its participants, with a non-ascetic attitude to physical life, and with a prophetic moral compassion for the lowly – even with a trace of animal rights doctrine. (The novel also includes an imitation of Halevi’s verse [xxxviii, 409].) Whether the specifics of Eliot’s ideas of cosmopolitan nationalism were derived by her from the Jewish tradition or from the philosophical tradition in which Feuerbach stands (and in which Kant is the great exponent), there were in the period a number of non-Germanic, non-Jewish racial theorists who posited a similar relation between the Semites and other “races.” Eliot had been reading Ernest Renan steadily for years, from his Études d’histoire religieuse in 1861 to his Averroës et l’averroïsme in 1867 – including, of course, his Vie de Jesus as well as articles and reviews along the way. In his Histoire générale et système comparée des langues sémitiques, which she read in 1864, and in later lectures, Renan credits the Semites with a prime and almost unique contribution to civilization: “Nous leur devons la religion. Le monde entier, si l’on excepte l’Inde, la Chine, le Japon et les peuples tout a fait sauvages, a adopté les religions sémitiques.”16 In line with widespread views at the time, Christianity is to be considered an organic advance on Judaism, developing qualities compensating for its defects.

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Another pertinent late nineteenth-century stream of thought is echoed in Mordecai’s discourse: a variant of the great-man theories that descend from German Romantic philosophy, best known in England in their formulation by Carlyle. In a valuable article on Eliot’s sources among eight historians of the Jews, William Baker has emphasized this aspect of her dependence on Heinrich Graetz, the most important of these historians and still a major guide in Jewish studies. While reviewing the broad contribution of these sources, Baker singles out the element of hero-worship: “Graetz tends to look at Jewish history as consisting of powerful personalities who have been keeping Jewish history alive … Spiritual forces are dominant structures in Graetz’ work. He concentrates on charismatic leaders who are important carriers of these forces.” And Baker nails the point home by citing Eliot’s marginal note in her copy of the history: “Beside Graetz’ explanation of these methods of preservation, George Eliot wrote in the margin, ‘Transmitters’ (Geschichte der Juden, IV, 17).”17 This is the ideational bridge to Mordecai’s encomium of the “‘great Transmitters, who laboured with their hands for scant bread, but preserved and enlarged for us the heritage of memory, and saved the soul of Israel alive as a seed among the tombs’” (xlii, 445). I shall in what follows trace this idea in the novel’s action. One further source of material may be mentioned as shaping Eliot’s conception of the novel: reports of the events taking place in her time of the resettlement of Palestine by Jews. One can take Edward Said’s anti-Zionist point that the area was not uninhabited, but the issue is rather more complicated than is dealt with by an acknowledgement of Arab habitation. The region retained a Jewish presence and was visited by Jews throughout diaspora history, and in the later nineteenth century was the focus of repatriation even before the formulation of Zionist ideology by Theodor Herzl in the 1890s. By mid-century there were more than 10,000 Jews in Palestine, mainly engaged in Torah study; there were already efforts by Sir Moses Montefiore, the English philanthropist, and others to fund agricultural settlements – designed as much to help these scholars living off charity to establish a financial basis as to establish a Jewish state.18 A curious point of contact between these efforts and Eliot lies in her acquaintance with Laurence Oliphant, whose book on his diplomatic travels in Asia she read as early as 1860. Oliphant, a friend of John Blackwood and a potential collaborator with Lewes in founding the Fortnightly Review, was also an enterprising colonialist. Although it came too late to inform Eliot in writing her novel, his book, The Land of Gilead (1880), an account both of the country and of his efforts to establish agricultural settlements under the toleration of Ottoman control, was presented to her by William Blackwood,


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after his brother’s death. But Oliphant’s Palestinian activities date from 1870 and her contacts with those close to him would have put her in the picture. As she reminded John Blackwood in 1879, “There is a great movement now among the Jews towards colonising Palestine, and bringing out the resources of the soil. Probably Mr. Oliphant is interested in the work, and will find his experience in the West not without applicability in the East” (Letters VII, 109, curiously referring to his diplomatic activities in Asia).19 She seems quite sanguine about the prospect. When her publisher, John Blackwood, expressed mild discomfort with her character, Mordecai – he was “puzzling and thinking over that phase of the Tale” during its composition (Letters VI, 222) – Eliot replied: “I thought it likely that your impressions about Mordecai would be doubtful … The effect that one strives after is an outline as strong as that of Balfour of Burley [of Scott’s Old Mortality] for a much more complex character and a higher strain of ideas” (Letters VI, 223).20 And her expectations of readers since have not been disappointed, for Mordecai remains one of the most rebarbative protagonists in literature. One incisive critic’s negative response does, however, single out (if only by inadvertence) several cardinal traits in this character; W. J. Harvey writes: “He is the purest example in George Eliot’s work of an almost entirely theoretical character … He shares with Dinah [the Methodist preacher of Adam Bede] the difficulties that a special rhetoric impose[s] … We do not feel the Jewishness of Mordecai since to be realized as a Jew he must first be realized as a human being …”21 This view singles out details that, with minor adjustments, hold up under scrutiny: Mordecai is a “theoretical character” in that he lives almost entirely by theory; his “special rhetoric” is one of the most powerful forces in the novel, not because we are to be swayed by the doctrines it conveys but because the hero is so swayed; his Jewishness is indeed difficult to recognize, since after the Middle Ages there have been few Jews who hold certain of his beliefs. (There was a revival of Jewish mysticism in eighteenth-century Poland and occasional sallies at other times and places, but not in Western Europe and America.) Learning to love Mordecai may be more than human nature can be asked to do, but learning to listen to him may not be too much to expect. To compare her character to the fanatical Covenanter (die-hard Presbyterian) leader in Old Mortality was to suggest that appreciating him would be difficult, and Mordecai, at least in this respect, doesn’t disappoint. For one thing, he is ill, and not only ill but febrile, moribund; by the novel’s close, he is dead. We have scant patience with such unwholesome people, even though Dostoyevsky and, later, Henry James would put such characters on the map.22 But the dynamics of audience response cannot be

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ignored; we are asked to take Mordecai in (“tolerate” would be an awkward word), whether or not we like him or his ideas.23 We are to perceive illness and prospective death as part of Mordecai’s identity, for they are motive forces behind his immediate project: creating a successor for his visionary enterprise, the “ingathering of the exiles” (as the return to Palestine has long been known). In this respect, he exceeds the role of Zarca in The Spanish Gypsy by recruiting a chosen one to be not merely his replacement but his avatar. Despite its spiritualistic burdens, however, Mordecai’s messianism departs from traditional conceptions, for it centers not on a godlike or even divinely inspired leader who will restore the dispossessed to their promised land and renew the prescribed worship at the Temple, but instead on a leader of national revival without deeply religious basis or content. In place of a renewed theocracy and/or monarchy, Mordecai is explicit in requiring a republic. His own version of Jewishness is also idiosyncratic: while learned in the traditional texts, he rarely cites the Bible – the “Shma Yisrael” from Deuteronomy is an exception and is his only theological assertion (the Lord is one) – and while he refers frequently to the “Masters” of rabbinical commentary, his references are generally to their humane insight rather than to points of doctrine. While he is certainly a believer, offering semi-silent prayer at moments of high intensity, the word “god” or one of its cognates doesn’t spring readily to his lips. While his perorations draw on the longstanding identification of diaspora Jews with their inheritance of the land by divine covenant – an expression of the organic memory that Eliot could join him in approving – he has no stipulations for the form of the social community that is to emerge in his utopian republic. While he cites the medieval poet Judah Halevi, on the vocation of Israel as a light unto the gentiles – employing the metaphor of Israel’s function as a heart for the body of humanity (as discussed above) – he is not explicit on the ideas or actions that this function would entail. He is, then, closer to being the spokesman of a religion of humanity, Jewish division, than he is to being either a representative of the age-old Jewish anticipations of a messianic restoration or a predecessor of the political Zionism that emerged later in the century. (In common with the latter, however, he emphasizes the value of a state in legitimizing and protecting Jews at home and abroad on the same basis as other states do for their citizens – that is, a secular and pragmatic objective.) What does Mordecai in fact believe? Well, he believes in the reincarnation of the soul, through an extended process involving other individuals and a divine scheme of things. In his often discussed but rarely examined exposition of the Cabbala (ch. xliii), he outlines this process: “souls are born


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again and again in new bodies”; they are in some way “perfected and purified”; the soul is then “liberated from a worn-out body”; it may then join with a “fellow-soul that needs it”; they may be “perfected together”; their “earthly work accomplished,” they “depart from the mortal region,” leaving place for new souls to be born. This replacement furthers the goal of the entire process, the advent of the “Messianic time.” (It seems that the new souls are less of an impediment to this advent than the already existing ones: “It is the lingering imperfection of the souls already born into the mortal region that hinders the birth of new souls and the preparation of the Messianic time …” [xliii, 461].) While Mordecai may not believe this literally – he speaks of it as “truth, though it were only in parable” (xliii, 461) – he is willing to draw conclusions from it regarding Daniel and himself: “When my long-wandering soul is liberated from this weary body, it will join yours, and its work will be perfected” (xliii, 461). Mordecai’s anticipations are sanguine, but his assumption that he has passed successfully through the second, purifying stage of the process, so as to undertake the next steps, suggests a spiritual complacency akin to that of predestinarians who believe themselves elect.24 A similar mixture of cosmic spectacle and personal reference is present when he explains the significance of his fabulous but literal vision of Daniel at Blackfriars Bridge: “It is a meeting-place for the spiritual messengers. It is true – what the Masters said – that each order of things has its angel: that means the full message of each from what is afar. Here I have listened to the messages of earth and sky … But this time just about sunset was always what I loved best. It has sunk into me and dwelt with me – fading, slowly fading: it was my own decline: it paused – it waited, till at last it brought me my new life – my new self – who will live when this breath is all breathed out.” (xl, 423)25

This somewhat disjointed sequence may mean that Mordecai’s moments of ecstasy at sunset are occasions at which not only the sun’s decline and his own are fused but in which angels meet and pass on messages, so that “it” – the antecedent can only be “this time just about sunset” – brings him a new life and self in the shape of Daniel. Together with his claim to have awaited Daniel at this spot and under like circumstances for five years (xl, 423) and his preternatural anticipation that the latter would be rowing downstream at this precise time (not knowing in advance that he was at Chelsea that afternoon), Mordecai shows indications not merely of giving credence to mystical tracts but of being himself a would-be practitioner of mystical arts. The question arises: why would George Eliot, a longstanding secularist in religion and other aspects of life, have made the second protagonist of

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her novel not a Jew but a special kind of Jew – or rather a Jew like almost no other since the Middle Ages? An obvious answer would be that this otherworldly figure contrasts vividly and even favorably with the thoroughly worldly English milieu. An alternative aspect is that the character is not merely an outsider in the world at large but even in his own community (although the Cohen family shelters and respects him, in accordance with traditional attitudes toward pious outsiders).26 To enforce this image, the following traits are stipulated: he is almost exclusively an intellectual, for his only remunerative work is giving Hebrew lessons to the Cohens’ son in exchange for room and board (perhaps with additional earnings from tending the bookshop across the way);27 he is so poor as to count as déclassé, at the opposite end of the social hierarchy from the English gentry; and though he is English by birth, his orientation toward Palestine is strong enough to make English citizenship and lifestyle irrelevant to him. In a symbolic scheme of things, Mordecai’s selfless spirituality places him at the diametrical extreme from Grandcourt’s approximation of the diabolic. But this plausible theoretical design would allow the novel to verge on allegory, and while symbolic and mythic overtones are common features of Eliot’s fiction, they are not elsewhere allowed to become as foregrounded as this. She must have had in mind an interpersonal drama to be enacted in the wake of such an unworldly character’s entry into – one might say, intrusion into – a realistic fictional space. I shall maintain that Mordecai is there to take part in a drama of transmission, the transmission of life-changing ideas from one “theoretical character” or idealistic intellectual to another. He will act out the role of the “great Transmitters” that Eliot learned of from Graetz. Given his febrility, what Mordecai urgently needs is a successor to carry on his ideas, now in the form of action. He locates such a figure among the men of his own country and generation – indeed, despite the manifest improbability, among one of the high and mighty of the Gentiles. A fair part of the novel’s space is devoted to the scenes in which he conveys his program not merely to the mind but to the spirit of a prospective follower. Annoyance often shifts to Eliot for taking such an enterprise seriously as a major part of her novel and, going further, in creating a plot that allows his unaccountable hopes for Daniel to be fulfilled by revealing the latter to be a Jew and thereby competent to pursue the project. Though readers may be disappointed to find a charismatic leader in the dress of an English gentleman, Mordecai himself is, surprisingly, not so, and this lack of astonishment may yield clues to Eliot’s conception of both characters. For Mordecai is actually pleased that his great man has appeared clean-shaven and urbane:


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“‘Rather, it is a precious thought to me that he has a preparation which I lacked, and is an accomplished Egyptian’” (lii, 563). The unspoken comparison here is to Moses, if not to Joseph; the biblical archetype of the disguised hero, ascendant in an alien kingdom, who ultimately leads his own people’s return, is here given new imaginative life. “Was Moses an Egyptian?” asked Freud in Moses and Monotheism, and beyond the speculative derivation of his monotheism from the short-lived pharaoh Akhenaten, the question points to a hard fact: when founding a nation, it’s useful to have a leader with some experience in international politics. We have here another version of the longstanding play in Eliot’s work of a disjunction between the ideal and the real, now with a more promising outcome than previously. For Mordecai, with all his idealistic spirit and high-flown rhetoric, has frankly political ambitions for his Egyptian and despite the fancifulness of his aspirations is quite successful in this phase of his project. At the novel’s close, Daniel is off to the Middle East to assess the condition of Jewish communities there, presumably in view of jump-starting their migration. Mordecai’s molding of Daniel to his enterprise is accomplished in a series of encounters that we may call scenes of transmission. The first follows their meeting at Blackfriars Bridge and the autobiographical excursus that follows. When Daniel pragmatically offers to help publish his writings, the idea is dismissed: “‘That is not enough … You must be not only a hand to me, but a soul – believing my beliefs – being moved by my reasons – hoping my hopes – seeing the vision I point to – beholding a glory where I behold it!’” (xl, 428). Daniel’s muted response is remarkably generous: “The peculiar appeal to his tenderness overcame the repulsion that most of us experience under a grasp and speech which assume to dominate” (xl, 429). He thinks to blunt this force by reminding the other that he’s not Jewish, but the unworldly Mordecai is quite a psychologist and plays on his uncertainty about his origins, forcing him into painful confession of his limited information on that score. The narrator’s comment on the situation rings a bell: “It seemed as if Mordecai were hardly overrating his own power to determine the action of the friend whom he had mysteriously chosen” (xl, 430). “Chosen,” as we recall from Eliot’s “Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General,” is the word for such assaults on the innocent in calling them to a destiny beyond their ordinary scope and even beyond their will. Mordecai already has Daniel half in his power. The next scene of transmission is partly in and partly following a public forum but is nonetheless personally influential. At the Hand and Banner pub, where a group of working-class intellectuals meets under the rubric, “The Philosophers,” Mordecai delivers his most strenuous version of his

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proto-Zionist project. The response of all in the audience but Daniel is silence and dispersal; after some crossing of swords with assimilationists in the group, no one has a reply to such impassioned rhetoric. He begins with a prophetic alarm and a metaphoric cluster that can only invite curiosity: “‘Woe to the men who see no place for resistance in this generation! I believe in a growth, a passage, and a new unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect, more charged with the elements that are pregnant with diviner form’” (xlii, 449). There follows a withering anathema of the assimilated: “‘What is the citizenship of him who walks among a people he has no hearty kindred and fellowship with, and has lost the sense of brotherhood with his own race? … He is an alien in spirit, whatever he may be in form; he sucks the blood of mankind, he is not a man’” (xlii, 450). (Anyone who believes that the character speaks for the author in such tirades has forgotten her feeling for outsiders.) He moves through the tenets of his cosmopolitan nationalism – “‘Each nation has its own work, and is a member of the world, enriched by the work of each,’” heightened by the Halevi metaphor of the heart of mankind’s body (xlii, 452–53) – and expands it into a pocket history of Jewish interaction with other nations (xlii, 453–54). This history turns into a lament for the effects of the diaspora on the “multitude” (Spinoza’s faintly derogatory term): “‘What wonder that multitudes of our people are ignorant, narrow, superstitious? … [but] In the multitudes of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the divine Unity [the “Shma Yisrael”], the soul of Judaism is not dead’” (xlii, 454). At this point, the oratorical climax resounds: “‘Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality’” (xlii, 454). There follows the outline of a political action program: “‘Let the wealthy men, the monarchs of commerce, the learned in all knowledge, the skilful in all arts, the speakers, the political counsellors, who carry in their veins the Hebrew blood … – let them say, “we will lift up a standard …”’” (xlii, 456). This issues in a cursory sketch of the envisaged state: a republic, able to offer defense of Jews persecuted abroad, “‘a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West’” (xlii, 456). After these lapses into the real world, Mordecai returns to the imagery and imperatives of his opening: “‘What is needed is the leaven – what is needed is the seed of fire … Let the torch of visible community be lit!’” (xlii, 457). When challenged by his interlocutors, he comes down a peg in his designs: “‘I cherish nothing for the Jewish nation, I seek nothing for them, but the good which promises good to all the nations’” (xlii, 458). But his modest internationalism gives way to a higher vision: “‘The sons of Judah


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have to choose[,] that God may again choose them. The Messianic time is the time when Israel shall will the planting of the national ensign … The vision is there; it will be fulfilled’” (xlii, 459). (I have, of course, omitted much from this extended discourse, but the broad rise and fall of the rhetoric may be educed from these excerpts.) This is a coherent argument for a political movement, bolstered by inspirational tropes and elegant metaphors in the same vein as much political speechifying, especially during nineteenth-century European and later Third World movements for national revival. But its swoops into messianic and organic terminology insure that it will have little or no influence on its immediate audience of rationalistic working-class intellectuals. Yet Mordecai has a stronger effect on what is perhaps his primary audience, Daniel, where its mix of rhetorical afflatus and pragmatic proposals work well together. At the point when the assimilationist Pash – “a small, dark, vivacious, triple-baked Jew” (xlii, 446) – begins to offer sarcastic barbs at the “‘idea of nationalities; I dare say the wild asses are snuffing it …’” (xlii, 448)28 and is seconded by other voices, Daniel intervenes mildly, though off the point: “‘Nations have revived. We may live to see a great outburst of force in the Arabs, who are being inspired with a new zeal’” (xlii, 448). He then engages in a side-show with a proponent of social evolutionism, who propounds: “‘The laws of development are being discovered, and changes taking place according to them are necessarily progressive …’” (xlii, 449). Daniel holds out for the importance of free will: “‘There will still remain the degrees of inevitableness in relation to our own will and acts, and the degrees of wisdom in hastening or retarding; there will still remain the danger of mistaking a tendency which should be resisted for an inevitable law that we must adjust ourselves to …’” (xlii, 449). (These views are close to Eliot’s own, and will be discussed in Chapter 10.) When Pash returns to the sarcastic mode, he intervenes again with greater force and relevance to Mordecai’s position: “‘If we look back to the history of efforts which have made great changes, it is astonishing how many of them seemed hopeless to those who looked on in the beginning. Take what we have all heard and seen something of – the effort after the unity of Italy … Look into Mazzini’s account of his first yearning … As long as there is a remnant of national consciousness, I suppose nobody will deny that there may be a new stirring of memories and hopes which may inspire arduous action’” (xlii, 457). To this reasonable and historically grounded assent to his vision, Mordecai offers an amen and a renewed outburst of metaphoric enthusiasm. But he will not be satisfied with so cool and sensible a follower – “‘what is needed is the seed of fire’” (xlii, 457).

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The chapter closes with the bathos of the Philosophers’ withdrawal from the scene, but the transmission continues into the following chapter. It is here that Mordecai reveals his eschatological theory, based on the Cabbala, which we have scrutinized above. Daniel’s response to its spectacular vision and the extravagant demand placed on him is suitably sensitive and cautious: “‘Everything I can in conscience do to make your life effective I will do’” (xliii, 461). The transmission process now takes other channels: Mordecai turns to a continuation of his autobiographical reflections (earlier inspired by the encounter at Blackfriars Bridge), and in the course of it reveals not only his own first name, Ezra – the name of the rescued Mirah’s brother, whom Daniel has been seeking – but the family name of Mirah and himself. The information comes wrapped in the story of Mordecai’s nearly executed plan to emigrate to Palestine, its interruption by a letter announcing his mother’s abandonment by her husband and the need to return to support her, and the miserable journey home during which he acquired the tubercular infection that is now killing him. In short, mystical vision and personal experience are conveyed to Daniel in a package, a continuity that gives grounding to the one and ideal elevation to the other. The final scene of transmission occurs late in the novel’s action and is enmeshed with that action in much the same way that previous such scenes have been. This is the dramatic moment when Daniel reveals to his anticipating friend and to the woman he loves that he has become eligible to fulfill the hopes of the former and to fulfill his own hopes of winning the latter. His revelation is a multiple one: that he is Jewish by birth, that his ancestral family “‘has ardently maintained the fellowship of our race’” (lxiii, 640), and that he possesses documents that manifest their having done so, in the contents of a chest passed on from his grandfather via his mother to her father’s friend, Joseph Kalonymos (li, 546). He doesn’t, at this juncture or within the scope of the novel, reveal his real name: Daniel Charisi – the name of his maternal grandfather (lxiii, 640), whom his father, also a Charisi (li, 546), named him after. Mordecai’s response is equally multi-sided: it includes a providential explanation of personal events (“‘all things are bound together in that Omnipresence which is the place and habitation of the world …’” [lxiii, 641]); an educational view of life-experience (“‘it seems that the erring and unloving wills of men have helped to prepare you, as Moses was prepared, to serve your people the better …’” [lxiii, 641]); and a formula for an ideal community to follow: “‘a people can be blessed only by having counsellors and a multitude whose will moves in obedience to the laws of justice and love’” (lxiii, 641). This scene differs from the preceding ones in making


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Daniel as much a driving force in the exchange as Mordecai. He first expresses recognition of his friend’s preparatory role in his willing acceptance of his heritage: “‘it has been the gradual accord between your mind and mine which has brought about that full consent’” (lxiii, 642). He becomes more specific: Mordecai’s “inspiration” has “‘given shape to what, I believe, was an inherited yearning – the effect of brooding, passionate thoughts in many ancestors …’” (lxiii, 642) – a biological inheritance version of his friend’s mystical ideas of racial memory. Daniel is, moreover, able to bring this idea down to the personal level: “‘I have always longed for some ideal task, in which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude …’” (lxiii, 642) – i.e., a boyhood dream of “social captainship” now fulfilled. He also introduces a project of his own, passed on from Mordecai’s discourse but not as a specific goal: “‘You have raised the image of such a task for me – to bind our race together in spite of heresy. You have said to me – “Our religion united us before it divided us …” I mean to try what can be done with that union …’” (lxiii, 642). There is a suggestion here of a role in the cultural sphere, beyond the more prominent engagement with political renewal. This religious revival may prove difficult for a secular intellectual to inspire. Mordecai’s response to this is, as might be expected, a new round of mystical imagery: “‘It has begun already – the marriage of our souls. It waits but the passing away of this body, and then they who are betrothed shall unite in a stricter bond …’” (lxiii, 643). His prescriptions for Daniel’s activity are, though vaguely put, more disturbing: “‘I have judged what I have written, and I desire the body that I gave my thought to pass away as this fleshly body will pass; but let the thought be born again from our fuller soul which shall be called yours’” (lxiii, 643). While Mordecai was unwilling to have Daniel publish his own writings, he now looks forward to Daniel’s (re)writing them. His metaphor obscures the point: while the body of his writings, the texts, will pass away, their spirit or thought will be born again in Daniel’s writings. Daniel’s reaction is the most vigorous and spontaneous one he makes to any of Mordecai’s imperatives: “‘You must not ask me to promise that … I must be convinced first of special reasons for it in the writings themselves’” (lxiii, 643). For all the lavish outpouring of his visions and beliefs, for all the powerful work of his rhetoric, for all the sympathy and love that their relationship has generated, Mordecai has not succeeded in molding Daniel into a version of himself. The mystic has not inspired another to mysticism, the messianic anticipation has not entered the program of political activity, the vision of a restored community has been only lightly

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engraved in another mind – for Daniel’s idea of religiously reunited Jewry was not uppermost in Mordecai’s mind. The transmission process has turned into one of translation, for every mind capable of receiving the influence of high ideals is also inclined to work on these, with outcomes unlikely to duplicate them exactly.29 Mordecai has in some sense succeeded in his project, but it behooves us to take stock of his accomplishment. In doing so, we may hope to approach closer to the broader impulses of the novel. If what has been said above rings true, it should not be difficult to accept that the messages to be taken from Daniel Deronda do not require its readers, past or present, to believe in or approve a Zionist solution to the Jewish problem. Nor does the Zionist discourse represent a solution to what might be called the English problem, as set forth in the account of the English milieu. Here one would agree with the strictures of Graham Martin: “Where does the world of Deronda’s extensive aspirations offer a strong imaginative challenge to the one he has to leave? The answer surely is that it never does … The outsider-critics (Deronda, Mordecai) are not only Jews, but European Jews, who look elsewhere than England for their origins … The choice of Zionism has the effect of removing the ideal aspirations associated with Deronda from any effective engagement with the English scene.”30 Despite the slight involved in dismissing the twin protagonists as “European Jews” – Mordecai is English-born, and Daniel, while Italian-born, has been raised in England from infancy – the critic is quite right that the “choice of Zionism” has little or no bearing on the English scene. Nothing that Eliot projects can arrest the English decadence, unless it is the operation of idealism in action, as exhibited in the scenes of transmission we have observed. When Englishmen begin to convey their higher ideals to each other in the way these intellectuals do – in their own idiom and with their own content, of course – there may be hope. (Eliot’s views of the English intellectual scene, as a potential space for such encounters, must be deferred to Chapter 10.) In some degree, the process traced in the scenes of transmission is one that occurs in varied forms in all secular cases of what is called personal inspiration, the passing of the spirit of one (or more) person’s ideas and ideals on to another.31 It constitutes a case study in the history of the transmission of ideas. But the special circumstances of these interlocutors are such as to make this a special case. Mordecai’s circumstances we have addressed: he is an outsider, alienated in his own birthplace, living on the margins of society, dying of incurable disease; he is also an intellectual, and his need for a maintainer of his ideas is pressing. What are Daniel’s circumstances and attendant needs? He is raised a gentleman in an aristocratic


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house, passing through the stages of a gentleman’s education – Eton, Cambridge (which he leaves before graduation, to “study abroad” [xvi, 152]) and, if not the “grand tour,” extended holidays on the Continent, during one of which he encounters Gwendolen. It is suddenly revealed to him that he is a Jew, and he is prepared to receive this information with full acceptance, not only by an act of will but with some self-confidence. What has prepared this totally assimilated Jew to declare and feel himself a Jew – what, but Mordecai’s discourses? To run down the list of Daniel’s acquisitions from Mordecai: images from Jewish medieval poetry; lessons from the “Masters” of the rabbinical compilations; conceptions of Jewish history; fantasies of the mystics; projects of the proto-Zionists; attitudes toward family, especially devotion toward mothers and sisters (both of which he has lacked); a variety of speech styles, from the polemical to the visionary – the list could be extended. He has been subtly but insistently exposed to the elements of Jewish culture and in the process been provided with the resources to disassimilate. The effects of Mordecai’s discourses are not to be measured by Daniel’s beliefs, although he does subscribe to the former’s proto-Zionism. Yet for all his sympathy with Mordecai’s idealism, his orientation toward his Jewishness isn’t political but cultural. While it may not have been Eliot’s intention to represent it, Daniel’s experience represents in fact a movement or trend contemporary with the novel’s appearance, which has been called “cultural Zionism.” The revival of attraction to Jewish culture among partially assimilated European Jews took several forms, including proto-Zionism, of course; interest in making the Hebrew language a living one again, with new poetry by J. L. Gordon and new fiction by Abraham Mapu; a flowering of Yiddish literature (Shalom Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Seforim, et al.). Indeed, many of the works that Eliot read in her preparations were key elements of this trend: Leopold Zunz’s literary history, Moritz Steinschneider’s bibliographies of Jewish holdings in European libraries, Salomon Munk’s JudeoArabic studies, and of course Graetz’s compendious history. (See Reading List for details of Eliot’s encounter with them.) This tendency corresponds to Eliot’s ideas of cultural renewal – not particularly nationalistic, not specifically Zionist, but redemptive in their own right. She looked toward renewed personal as well as national continuity with the past, best developed through cultural memory and renewed creativity. Indeed, Daniel’s acquisition of Jewish culture corresponds in some respects to her own, with the less flamboyant scholar, Emanuel Deutsch, serving in something of Mordecai’s role; though she couldn’t do with it what Daniel

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presumably does, she seems to have found such acquisition by a non-Jew sufficiently inspiriting. Yet cultural Zionism had its drawbacks as a force for collective renewal. These have been well described by a savant working outside his field, Leo Strauss: Those who were seeking a solution to the Jewish problem other than the disappearance of the Jews [at that time, by assimilation; later, by genocide] had to accept not only the territory hallowed by Jewish tradition but its language, Hebrew, as well. They were forced to accept, furthermore, Jewish culture. Cultural Zionism became a very powerful rival of political Zionism. But the [religious] heritage to which cultural Zionism had recourse rebelled against being interpreted in terms of culture or civilization, meaning, as an autonomous product of the genius of the Jewish people. That culture or civilization had its core in the Torah, and the Torah presents itself as given by God, not created by Israel. Thus the attempts to solve the Jewish problem by purely human means ended in failure.32

Strauss is speaking of the resistance of the orthodox to the secularists of cultural Zionism, but he also suggests an indigenous worm at the heart of such efforts of identification by the assimilated to the Jewish community. Not only does Daniel have still to learn the languages and more of the culture of this community, but he must acquire subtler characteristics of its lifestyle. It is a pleasant thought to imagine Daniel among the Jews, especially Eastern European Jews and among religious Jews more generally. For there is no indication in the novel that Daniel has, or plans to have, a religious faith. His future is, moreover, likely to be not that of a chalutz or pioneer in the land, but that of a nationalist intellectual, promoting the ideology of yishuv or return. He is likely to speak for the Jews, but not from them. This account must seem a deflation for anyone seeing or seeking a Zionist import in Daniel Deronda, but it need not disturb a reader attuned to the motives Eliot is likely to have had in writing it. Despite the substantial interest of the content of Mordecai’s discourses, she was more interested in creating a certain kind of character – another Balfour of Burley, but a less deranged idealist for her times. And by creating in Daniel a revised and expanded version of the Scott hero, the young man exploring the world and exposed to some of the powerful ideologies of his time, she projected a protagonist who could display a strong distinction from the model Englishmen of the period. For Daniel, too, is an idealist, seeking some higher purpose in life, and scrupulously self-denying, in contrast to the individualist ethos and low egoism of the age. Although critics like Martin are correct to complain of the lack of direct bearing in the discourse and outcomes in the Jewish milieu on the troubled


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English milieu, there is more formal relation between the two than may at first appear. Each moves beyond its initial focus to another center of interest. The English plot begins with the entanglements of Gwendolen’s courtship adventures, first with Rex Gascoigne and later with Grandcourt, involving her with his mistress, Lydia Glasher, then narrows down to the misery of the marriage and the Daniel–Gwendolen all-but-love-affair. The Jewish plot moves from a focus on an intellectualized form of wooing by Mordecai of Daniel to the personal sensitivities of the participants in the love-triangle of Daniel, Hans Meyrick and Mirah. In furtherance of parallel structure, Daniel is called upon to do for Gwendolen something of what Mordecai has done for him: to give her a raison d’être, after an entry into mature life marked by a terrible error in her case, vagueness in career and other life-choices in his. Yet Daniel is something of a disappointment as an educator. This is partly a matter of style: he is an awful sobersides, with none of the impassioned rhetoric of his master. He can give only stilted encouragement to Gwendolen – on the order of “‘The refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life …’” (xxxvi, 387) – which evokes the deathless response, “‘I will try. I will think’” (xxxvi, 388). But he can’t say or do much more, given the suspicions his intimacy with her arouses in her husband and the rumors circulating in his set – the latter threatening his relations with Mirah. Indeed, his personal connections and needs serve as additional impediments to full responsiveness to Gwendolen’s guilt-ridden state after her husband’s death. Yet Eliot shows some sympathy, probably based on personal experience, for the reluctant regulator of others’ lives: “He was conscious of that peculiar irritation which will sometimes befall the man [or woman] whom others are inclined to trust as a mentor – the irritation of perceiving that he is supposed to be entirely off the same plane of desire and temptation as those who confess to him” (xxxvii, 397).33 After the shadowy disengagement from provincial society at the end of Middlemarch, Eliot comes in this work to disengage from England. It is not that the English have been found unredeemable when measured against, for example, the artist Klesmer: “His foibles of arrogance and vanity did not exceed such as may be found in the best English families …” (xxii, 204). It is rather that, as he points out, English Philistinism offers no scope for a revival of true culture, given the prevailing ideology of liberal individualism. Little wonder that a Mr. Bult, “an esteemed party man who … had the general solidity and suffusive pinkness of a healthy Briton on the central table-land of life,” is “a little amazed at an after-dinner outburst of Klesmer’s on the lack of idealism in English politics, which left all mutuality

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between distant races to be determined simply by the need of a market …” (xxii, 205). Bult’s response, fumbling with the notion that Klesmer’s is a purely political view, is to call him a Pan-Slavist; the musician (that is what his name means in Yiddish) delivers as rejoinder, “‘No; my name is Elijah. I am the Wandering Jew’” (xxii, 206). We cannot take this as expressing identification with the Jews, any more than we can take his fiancée’s apologetic, “‘He looks forward to a fusion of races’” (xxii, 206), as a full statement of his politics. For Klesmer seizes as his symbol a traditional figure of alienation, of eternal quest, and of exclusion from the social life of Western nations. If so much is true, that the artist finds an adequate symbol of his alienation from the dominant culture in the figure of the Wandering Jew, it is not far to a complementary inference: the figure of the Jew in the novel is a symbol of the outsiders – artists, idealistic intellectuals, minor prophets – in Western society. With this interpretation, one would not like to diminish the immediate force of the symbol and its reference to the Jews’ actual condition and prospects for the future. But if this were simply “George Eliot’s Zionist novel,” as it has been called, it would remain an excrescence at the end of her career, instead of being a fulfillment of the treatment of idealistic aspiration from The Mill on the Floss to Middlemarch. The view I wish to take – without stinting the novel’s special tone and subjectmatter – is that Zionism is a metaphor for the pursuit of a higher culture and that by the lack of some such ideal the culture of England is judged and found wanting. Part of the resistance to the novel’s conclusion derives from its flight from England, as Deronda is seen not as going to another place on earth but straight off into the clouds. Another part derives from the happy-ending aspect of the finale, his marriage to Mirah – complete with amiable weddingfeast and expensive presents – as the culmination of a strain on realism throughout. A measure of resistance derives from its storybook atmosphere, the hero winning the immediate struggles and well equipped to go out into the world. It is true that Daniel is lucky; an avatar of all the seekers in Eliot’s fiction, he chances on what they fail to find – a potential community, a vocation, an ideal cause amid the constricted opportunities for heroism in the modern world. Though his vocation leads to proto-Zionist activity, his research in the contents of his family chest will surely lead to further “communion” with his ancestral community by tracing the ramified branches of its experience in history. Already a gentleman, he will become a scholar, an intellectual capable of influencing others as he has been influenced.


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George Eliot’s “Jewish novel,” as it has been called, is, then, less about Jewish national revival, an alternative to the state of the English nation, or even the idea of a nation, than it is about how such ideas are transmitted in history through minds acting on each other. In extended discourse situations, it enacts the processes not of political reason but of inherited ideals and personal idealism that constitute what may be called political inspiration. In this way, it stands as a high example, in a class with those of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, of the subgenre known as the novel of ideas.

chapter 10

The Intellectual: cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such

i With the publication of Daniel Deronda in 1876, George Eliot’s career as a major novelist comes to an end. There exist notes she made toward another novel, set in the Napoleonic period, but not detailed enough to tell us much of what she had in mind.1 She continued an active publishing career, not only in the essays of Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1878) but in editing the last volumes of Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind from his manuscripts after his death in 1878. But a note of exhaustion, already sounded in Deronda, is perceptible, and we may excuse an author who has accomplished so much in a relatively brief career for narrowing his or her sights. She now began a new phase of her career, as an intellectual critic, in a sense to be defined. Eliot had, of course, always been an intellectual during her mature years, in the several categories named by the titles of the preceding chapters. As some of these terms are not invariably associated with intellectuals, I shall revert to the discussion of them in the Introduction in hopes of clarifying their nature. It will be recalled (although after the many intervening pages, it may be worth repeating) that I’ve invoked Stefan Collini’s three definitions: intellectuals honorifically defined as people with ideas (the “subjective” sense of the term), functionally defined by their playing necessary roles in any society (the “sociological” sense), and dynamically defined as exerting influence in public contexts (the “cultural” sense).2 To summarize these descriptions, one might draw a distinction between what they are or possess (their intelligence), where they stand (their status) and what they do (their activity) – although these are intersecting realms, with, for example, status depending on intelligence and expressing itself in activity. I’ve tried to present Eliot as functioning as an intellectual in all these ways (without calling attention to them as such): in her learning, her quarry as a writer of fictional and nonfictional works; in her early careers as translator and 218

Cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such

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journalist, before her growing stature as a novelist; and in her influential presentation of ideas on various matters of public interest. It is required, in describing the stage of life she had now reached, to develop an additional aspect of intellectual life, derived from the third aspect, to be sure. Intellectuals not only influence broad or restricted publics but struggle with other intellectuals to do so. The concept of struggle, derived from the Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci’s emphasis on ideological conflict, may be extended to all those activities taken as normal not only in intellectual life but in the public sphere: the direct confrontations of reviewing books and articles, panel discussions in academic and media settings, and all works designed to set out what really is the case, correcting what has been taken to be the case in other works. Intellectual life as conflict has been going on a long time, but attains positive self-recognition in John Stuart Mill’s lifelong insistence on the social value of competing ideas and the necessary freedom for expression of idiosyncratic ones (as Eliot was aware and as cited in Chapter 9). The liberal value (here I employ the current sense of the term) of open circulation of ideas is the basis of a relatively free society; in idealist terms, it is the dialectic at work; in economic terms, it is competition driving out inferior by producing superior ideas. To return for a moment to clarify the third aspect, the intellectual’s influence. He or she may address many audiences with ideas. The largest is the general public, but despite many intellectuals’ desire for such an audience, few achieve it, except occasionally in the political sphere. It comes when members of the learned professions run for and win seats in legislative bodies or are drawn to posts in public service. The more usual sphere of intellectual influence lies within a stratum of society which may be called the intelligentsia, consumers rather than producers of ideas. They go on, of course, to employ these ideas in various ways, which may be called applied ideas.3 Intellectuals regularly address the teachers, professionals, public-interest workers, artists and arts-support personnel, and it is among them that they may claim the title of “public intellectual.” Yet a third audience lies among other intellectuals, and it is in this realm that the main struggle described above takes place.4 In this last sphere, an even more refined activity emerges: the discussion of ideas as such, of their transmission, and of other intellectuals and the use they make of ideas. The burgeoning literature on intellectuals in history and theory is the product of this activity, which may be called the metaintellectual sphere. After a lifetime of influencing others among the general public (with her novels) and the intelligentsia (with her nonfictional

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writings), it is this sphere that George Eliot chose to enter in her final phase, with her last book, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. For this collection of essays, which has never, to my knowledge, been taken as a connected whole, is a systematic critique of the intellectual condition of England. What else was left for her to do, after harrying the country on other grounds in her last great novels? Before turning to Theophrastus, her persona (“narrator” is not the operative term here), a review of Eliot’s intellectual activities in the 1870s is in order. The first of these to draw one’s attention is her (admittedly passing) involvement with an interesting project in academic journalism. A new journal, The Academy, was begun by Charles E. Appleton, under the aegis of Eliot’s friend, Mark Pattison, in 1869, designed to cover systematically all the branches of learning both in England and on the Continent. This was an elaboration of Eliot’s own project as functional editor of the Westminster Review in the 1850s, when she organized the review columns to cover a variety of fields at home and abroad – not as exhaustively as The Academy aimed to do but substantially. When the journal changed from a monthly to a weekly, the editor sent her several copies for distribution to her friends and for comment. She replied on January 7, 1874, with specific remarks on the reviews and general appreciation of “your excellent first number [i.e., of the new series] of which both Mr. Lewes and I think very highly” (Letters VI, 4). But the scope of this project and of Eliot’s interest in it go beyond the establishment of a comprehensive and competent review. As Diderik RollHansen shows in his excellent study of the journal, his subtitle, Victorian Intellectuals in Revolt, is highly appropriate.5 The aim was not simply at quantity of coverage but at quality: this was “an ambitious attempt to establish a cultural authority in intellectual matters” (p. 12). The January 5, 1878, issue,6 for example, contained in the “Literature” section (obviously a misnomer) reviews of books on anthropology, Catholicism, Houdini’s magicianship, jurisprudence, parish registers, and of a Margaret Oliphant novel, as well as of a volume of letters between Comte and Mill. There were also shorter reviews of works on exploration, military statistics and money, along with a William Cullen Bryant poem. The “Notes and News” column detailed literary events and newly announced publications, topped off by “Notes on Travel,” “Magazines and Reviews,” a list of “Selected Books” and correspondence. This was the Literature section; then came Science, Fine Art, “The Stage” and Music, with the same sweep of coverage, although less detail. Quality was maintained by a stable of reviewers mainly with academic credentials; for a sampling of their names, I refer the reader to Roll-


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Hansen’s two chapters on “The Idea of an Intellectual Elite” in The Academy, 1869–1879: Victorian Intellectuals in Revolt. If The Academy’s structure and function seem an alien growth on English soil, that is because the concept of its subject-matter derived from no less foreign a source than Hegel. Appleton, and, to a degree, Pattison, were Hegelian in their conception of knowledge as a global phenomenon, in both senses of the word. In line with the rising tide of neo-Hegelianism at Oxford in this period, the editor and his mentor had high aspirations not only toward cultural improvement but more specifically toward university reform – particularly in a polemical campaign against the universities’ religious establishment: “The idea of an academic elite was formulated by the university liberals as an offensive weapon in their struggle against the orthodox party … Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln College and the most dangerous enemy of orthodoxy at [Oxford], made this idea the centre of his pleas for a reform of English universities. German scholarship supplied both him and Appleton, his disciple, with a standard against which they measured English academic achievement” (p. 13). It is plain to see that a lone journal could hardly hope to accomplish so much, but it was a step in that direction. While the review was never a commercial success, it managed to weather the storms raised by its publisher, John Murray, and continued on after Appleton’s death in 1879, in decline, until 1916. Eliot never was called upon to enter these debates, but she was close to Pattison and must have been aware of them. She was also an occasional visitor to Oxford in these years, invited by no less a figure than Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College from 1870 (of whom, more in a moment). And she was aware of Pattison’s remarkable ability lucidly to summarize a subject so abstruse as “Philosophy at Oxford.”7 Writing to him in appreciation, she saw its deeper aim: “Not only is it a valuable contribution to the history of our time but will help to form sound ideas on that most important of all reforms – reform of the theory of Education” (Letters VI, 202).8 As for Eliot’s university visits, these occurred with some regularity just before and during this decade. She visited Cambridge in 1868 (as guest of Oscar Browning), Oxford in 1870 (as guest of Pattison), Cambridge in 1873 (as guest of F. W. H. Myers, who introduced her to his fellow Fellow of Trinity, Henry Sidgwick) and Cambridge again in 1877 (as guest of Sidgwick), but it was her visits to Jowett in 1873, 1875 and 1878 that stand out. To characterize these visits in the above order (of Pattison, we have spoken): the Browning visit was recorded in his biography of Eliot (1890): “she talked to me solemnly about the duties of life, about the shallow

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immorality of believing that things would turn out for the best, and the danger of fixing our attention too much on the life to come, as likely to distract us from doing our duty in this world.”9 The Myers visit is memorable from his often quoted report of her oracular statement on the Kantian antinomies – “the words, God, Immortality, Duty, – pronounced with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing Law.”10 She evidently came to the universities to teach, as well as to learn. (I postpone Sidgwick for the moment.) In her visits to Jowett, their relative frequency suggests a meeting of minds, if only on the subject of his expertise, Plato’s dialogues. But there must have been much besides to cause her to respect him. When William H. Mallock, an academic pundit of the time, published a Peacockian satire, The New Republic, in 1877, which contained a mild but effective caricature of Jowett, she was indignant: having read The New Republic I think it one of the most condemnable books of the day; not simply because the Master of Balliol is a friend for whom I have a high regard. If I had known nothing of Mr. Jowett personally, I should equally have felt disapprobation of a work in which a young man who has no solid contribution of his own to make, sets about attempting to turn into ridicule the men who are most prominent in serious effort to make such contribution … I think that kind of direct personal portraiture … is a bastard kind of satire that I am not disposed to think the better of because Aristophanes used it in relation to Socrates. (Letters VI, 406–07)

If anyone were to do a higher kind of intellectual satire, it would be she. Eliot’s visits to Sidgwick, Professor of Moral Philosophy and author of one of the chief Victorian contributions to ethical theory, as well as his and his wife’s visits to the Leweses in London, are a subject of discussion in John Beer’s Providence and Love,11 which also prints thirteen previously unpublished or newly transcribed letters by Eliot, all but two to Sidgwick and the other two to his wife. Unfortunately, these are not terribly interesting, consisting mainly of invitations and acknowledgements. (The only substantive matters concern a passage in the prospective Daniel Deronda on Cambridge fellowships that she wanted to check with the don, and the creation of a science research fellowship honoring Lewes after his death, appropriately at Cambridge, given its better acceptance of modern science.) But, like the Pattison, Myers and Jowett visits and letters, they testify to the footing she had established with the high and mighty intellectuals of the land.


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In the 1870s, a new asperity enters Eliot’s attitude toward intellectuals and intellectual practices. The author of the 1850s essays on Rev. Cumming, the poet Young and “lady novelists” cannot be accused of habitually softpedaling intellectual deficiencies, but her normal personal delicacy and intellectual modesty were proof against the equally normal vitriolic tone of much intellectual debate. Yet signs of impatience with the normal become detectable. A case in point is her estimate of her longstanding friend, Herbert Spencer. After years of defending him against the sensitivity of her even longer friend, Sara Hennell, as to his attitudes toward women,12 and after a more recent Papierkrieg in The Academy, in which she took his side,13 a new note enters her estimation of him. In the course of a series of letters to a Mrs. Ponsonby, who was suffering not from her loss of faith but from the ensuing metaphysical depression – failure of the will not to act morally but merely to act, in the absence of divine presence – she inserts an unexpected criticism of Spencer: “I have known him for more than twenty years & have the greatest respect for him, but in studying his works you must bear in mind that his share of human fallibility depends in a high degree on an inadequate endowment of emotion. (I except the emotions which sustain an energetic antagonism.) Hence in spite of his eminent powers, his integrity, & his elevation of purpose, there is a vast amount of human experience to which he is as good as dead … to a certain extent he himself would acknowledge this.”14 Other indications of distaste for elements of the intellectual scene emerge from letters of the period. Writing to the scholarly Emanuel Deutsch, whom we encountered in the preceding chapter, she remarks in passing, “We had thought of going to Scotland next month, but we shall not do so, my health not being strong enough for me to incur the fatigues of the journey and the literary mob” (Letters V, 161; the reference is probably to people engaged in journalism and publishing rather than creative writers). Similarly, in the same year (1871), she returns to a longstanding disapproval of literary reviewing: “I think there is more than enough literature of the criticising sort urged upon people’s attention by the periodicals. To read much of it seems to me seriously injurious: it accustoms men and women to formulate opinions instead of receiving deep impressions, and to receive deep impressions is the foundation of all true mental power” (Letters V, 155). It would be too much to claim that Eliot was finding new intellectual value in emotion and “deep impressions,” for these were long part of her own apparatus, but the tone of these remarks hints at her perception of something lacking in the prevailing culture of intellectuals.

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A further indication of a new asperity in her view of the intellectual scene is her response to a new entrant on that scene, Walter Pater, and his promotion of purely esthetic sensibility – not just “love of art for its own sake” but art for exquisite emotions’ sake. Her response, to John Blackwood, in his capacity as editor of Blackwood’s: “I agreed very warmly with the remarks made by your contributor this month on Mr. Pater’s book, which seems to me quite poisonous in its false principles of criticism and false conceptions of life” (Letters V, 455). The contributor was the novelist Margaret Oliphant, reviewing Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance in Blackwood’s 114 (Nov. 1873), who makes strenuous charges against the then scandalous conclusion and its view of esthetic experience as “burn[ing] always with this hard, gemlike flame.” Eliot had been at table with Pater during her 1870 visit to Oxford (Letters V, 100; from her journal), but the encounter left no recorded impression until the appearance of his book. It is hard to be specific about the thrust of her disagreement, but the word “poisonous,” with an obvious ethical ring, is not a frequent one in Eliot’s critical vocabulary. Nor is the distaste likely to be for all esthetes; William Morris (who was of that ilk at the time) was at the same table on that occasion, and she received his poems and prose more welcomingly. It is the amoral character of the Aesthetic Movement in art and literature that is in question here, and Eliot lines up squarely with the “Victorians.” One fruit of Eliot’s visits to Oxbridge was a long poem, “A College Breakfast-Party,”15 published in Macmillan’s in 1878 but written in 1874. She first called it “A Symposium,” and was rather diffident about it and the prospect of publishing it, but eventually came round. The philosophic dialogue is in blank verse, largely unencumbered by poetic tropes; it is, nevertheless, an interesting poem, less as a representation of the Oxbridge scene than as a philosophical critique of several currents in later Victorian thought. Despite its dramatic form, in which these movements are allowed to speak for themselves by way of student interlocutors, “A College Breakfast-Party” is a fairly clear expression of Eliot’s speculative position on such issues. The poem’s speakers are seven: six undergraduates, with names drawn from Hamlet, and an unnamed Catholic priest. The date and college are unspecified, but time and place are lightly indicated: undergraduate rooms (probably Hamlet’s since he, princely, has the best cigars, which his friends furiously smoke), and a mid-day brunch. (After speaking, the Priest notices that it’s noon and leaves for another engagement, so it’s likely not to be a Sunday morning, when he would be otherwise occupied.) Hamlet and


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Horatio may be taken as typical young men in search of a belief or way of life, but the others represent distinct positions. Osric speaks for Aestheticism, Rosencranz for a skepticism drawn from Hume (but not Schopenhauer, whom Eliot read only later, in 1878), the Priest for Newman’s version of fideism, and Laertes and Guildenstern for a humanism akin to Eliot’s own – Laertes’s of the more rebellious variety. Osric’s is the first position taken; belaboring philosophical discussion per se, he uses the imagery of butterflies and bubbles to protest that it’s all – both reality and speculation about it – a fleeting mirage (ll. 56–72). Eliot begins with the phenomenalism that underlies Pater’s estheticism, while the corrosive aspect of the position emerges only later when Osric scorns the humanist position as in bad taste (ll. 326–41). After Laertes’s vigorous protest against being called a butterfly, the Priest takes up the pragmatic implications of phenomenalist skepticism to offer the Church’s relief (ll. 102–99): the certitude of faith in place of the unavailable certainty of philosophical and scientific truth, with the added benefit of order, both spiritual (l. 178) and, by implication, social.16 At this point, Rosencranz, “intolerantly sceptical” (l. 349), submits the longest speech in the poem (ll. 350–457) – curiously, the knowledge that we have no sure knowledge takes the longest to state. The best articulation of this skepticism occurs, however, in a brief poem that Bernard Paris has demonstrated originally made part of this speech.17 I grant you ample leave To use the hoary formula “I am” Naming the emptiness where thought is not; But [if you] fill the void with definition, “I” Will be no more a datum than the words You link false inference with, the “Since” & “so” That, true or not, make up our atom-whirl. Resolve your “Ego,” it is all one web With vibrant ether clotted into worlds: Your subject, self, or self-assertive “I” Turns nought but object, melts to molecules, Is stripped from naked Being with the rest Of those rag-garments named the Universe. Or if, in strife to keep your “Ego” strong You make it weaver of the ethereal light, Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time – Why, still ’tis Being looking from the dark, The core, the centre of your consciousness, That notes your bubble-world: sense, pleasure, pain, What are they but a shifting otherness, Phantasmal flux of moments? – –

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As discursive poetry, this requires explication of its rhetoric and metaphors, but its content is clear enough: not simply knowledge is put in question but the knower, ego or consciousness, and even his sensations (“sense, pleasure, pain”), since there is no demonstrable subject for whom these are attributes. There is Being, to be sure, though it goes naked; the Universe is a set of rag-garments by which, apparently, it makes its appearance (Carlyle is echoed here), but the Kantian and scientific postulates of space, time, motion, etc. are left in the dark. By the same token, there is thought, for the “I” is a name for “the emptiness where thought is not”; operating by negation, Rosencranz fails to take up the Cartesian gambit of deriving the ego and existence from the fact that thought occurs. We are left, instead, in the “Phantasmal flux of moments” – a world closer to that of Paterian phenomenalism than the speaker would perhaps appreciate. The humanist position follows hard upon this skepticism, moved by the challenge of its nihilistic implications. Laertes, in character, is indignant: But this I hold: that he who takes one gift Made for him by the hopeful work of man, Who tastes sweet bread, walks where he will unarmed, His shield and warrant the invisible law, Who owns a hearth and household charities, Who clothes his body and his sentient soul With skill and thoughts of men, and yet denies A human good worth toiling for, is cursed With worse negation than the poet feigned In Mephistopheles.

(ll. 500–09)

Eliot here relies on her sense of the human community and its cultural achievement to undercut the skepticism that takes a lofty position on the impossibility of knowledge while respecting its practical implications and enjoying its products in social life. Guildenstern develops a similar case more systematically (ll. 515–86), challenging skeptical epistemology on its own ground: All sacred rules, imagined or revealed Can have no form or potency apart From the percipient and emotive mind. God, duty, love, submission, fellowship, Must first be framed in man, as music is, Before they live outside him as a law. And still they grow and shape themselves anew, With fuller concentration in their life Of inward and of outward energies Blending to make the last result called Man…

(ll. 528–36)


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The thought here is difficult only because it is circular, but not the less compelling for that: man makes culture and all its “sacred rules”; he is also constituted by the culture he has made. The “percipient and emotive mind” (Eliot is here following the concepts of Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind) supplies “form and potency” to ideas or rules “imagined or revealed” (the possibility of a divine source is allowed). The process is internal before the formed ideas are externalized as laws or other codes. These externalized ideas then act on the minds that have made them (as well as on other minds), grow and are reshaped, become more concentrated as human energies fuel them in life, and finally constitute their own maker, man. A greater poet was to put the matter this way: Whatever flames upon the night Man’s own resinous heart has fed.18

There is more, of course, in the remaining 300 lines of the poem, but this may be sufficient to indicate its stature. “A College Breakfast-Party” has qualities that put it outside the normal lines of discussion, whether in the context of particular Eliot novels or as an item in the history of Victorian poetry, but it is a strong piece of criticism of the intellectual culture of its time and a powerful statement of Eliot’s own epistemology, rooted in a theory of culture. The most substantial evidence of Eliot’s sense of her intellectual milieu is a group of manuscript essays and notes published posthumously and titled by the original editor, her step-son Charles L. Lewes, as “Leaves from a Note-Book” (reprinted in Essays, pp. 437–51; citations are given parenthetically in text). As Lewes points out, the date of composition is uncertain, but the notebook in which they were set down also contains material used in Theophrastus Such, so their dating as well as their context can be approximated. The longest piece is titled “Authorship” (pp. 437–42), and is followed by “Judgments on Authors” (pp. 442–44) and “Story-Telling” (pp. 444–46). Their drift is unmistakable: Eliot is here applying the lessons of what she had been doing most of her life to the current intellectual and literary scene. An earlier version of her thoughts on these subjects is to be found in a letter of 1870: To write effectively, one must care for the subject one writes about … It has always seemed to me that a great deal of plain but painstaking writing is wanted, to show people in some detail the injury that is done to every member of society, by bad, careless work of all kind, from the merest hammering or clod-breaking to the most subtle sort of work demanded by a high position … there still needs much

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thundering about the infamy (as it ought properly to be held) of taking work higher than the native powers of a man or woman warrant. For in spite of all that may be said about the difficulty of testing capabilities before hand, there is an obvious egoism & unscrupulousness, in the prevalent ambition to take what is called higher work quite apart from any signs of peculiar endowment.19

Eliot’s target is clearly not a specific development in English culture but a more deeply rooted condition, intellectual incompetence. What can one do about it? “There still needs much thundering” – but she wasn’t given to thundering, à la Carlyle, whose animadversions regarding shoddy work of all kinds this passage recalls. “Authorship” takes up the same theme but at a deeper level, to grasp its sources: Among those callings which have not yet acquired anything near a full-grown conscience in the public mind is Authorship. Yet the changes brought about by the spread of instruction and the consequent struggles of an uneasy ambition, are, or at least might well be, forcing on many minds the need of some regulating principle with regard to the publication of intellectual products, which would override the rule of the market: a principle, that is, which should be derived from a fixing of the author’s vocation according to those characteristics in which it differs from the other bread-winning professions … The guidance wanted is a clear notion of what should justify men and women in assuming public authorship, and of the way in which they should be determined by what is usually called success. (Essays, p. 438)

The ideal of a “full-grown conscience” in public opinion on Authorship is brought to earth by the recognition that literary activity is actually followed according to the “rule of the market,” that its outcome is conceived as a “product,” and that it constitutes one among the “bread-winning professions.” Given these conditions, what are the chances for “some regulating principle … which would override the rule of the market” – some “guidance” to “justify men and women in assuming public authorship”? To undertake this self-imposed challenge, Eliot proceeds analogically, comparing literary production with other kinds of production, to see what follows. She posits two manufacturers, one, of calicoes, who produces them “as long and as fast as he can find a market for them,” and another, who markets a commodity “coloured with a green which had arsenic in it that damaged the factory workers and the purchasers” (p. 439). “The first manufacturer we will suppose blameless,” she posits, and asks, “Is an author simply on a par with him, as to the rules of production?” (p. 439). She follows out the extended metaphor: “The author’s capital is his brainpower – power of invention, power of writing … Here is the first grand difference between the capital which is turned into calico and the brain


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capital which is turned into literature … That there should be large quantities of the same sort in the calico manufacture is an advantage: the sameness is desirable …” (p. 439). She doesn’t bother to spell out the obvious “grand difference,” that sameness of this sort in literary production is stultifying. Yet what if it sells? Her next step raises that issue. The more devastating comparison is with the second manufacturer: “But man or woman who publishes writings inevitably assumes the office of teacher or influencer of the public mind [as good a thumbnail definition of the intellectual as any]. Let him protest as he will that he only seeks to amuse … – he can no more escape influencing the moral taste, and with it the action of the intelligence, than a setter of fashions in furniture and dress … he should have a belief that his wares have nothing akin to the arsenic green in them, and also that his continuous supply is secure from a degradation in quality …” (p. 440). Varying the metaphor, the next paragraph is a one-liner: “And bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin” (p. 440). Among the implications of this exercise in what today we call the sociology of art is a subtle suggestion that the rise of bad literature is connected to the “spread of instruction and the consequent struggles of an uneasy ambition” (as quoted above). It is not the enlargement of an educated (or semi-educated) audience that is addressed here but the rise of educated and semi-educated authorial cadres. She continues: how or on what principle are we to find a check for that troublesome disposition to authorship arising from the spread of what is called Education, which turns a growing rush of vanity and ambition into this current? The well-taught, an increasing number, are almost all able to write essays on given themes, which demand new periodicals to save them from lying in cold obstruction. The illtaught – also an increasing number – read many books, seem to themselves able to write others surprisingly like what they read, and probably superior, since the variations are such as please their own fancy … (p. 441)

Eliot here precedes a succession of modernist critics of mass culture who locate the source of the stultifying proliferation of shoddy publications in “what is called Education,” even when its products “read many books” and try to improve on their models. Yet it is the “well-taught” that Eliot especially challenges: “As to these illtaught, whatever medicines of a spiritual sort can be found good against mental emptiness and inflation – such medicines are needful for them … But what is to be said to the well-taught, who have such an alarming equality in their power of writing ‘like a scholar and a gentleman’?

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Perhaps they, too, can only be cured by the medicine of higher ideals in social duty, and by a fuller representation to themselves of the processes by which the general culture is furthered or impeded” (p. 442). Hence the need for “higher ideals” – always in short supply – but also for increased selfconsciousness, perhaps to be stimulated by what I have called metaintellectuals, those who write about intellectuals and their influence, one of whom Eliot implicitly proposes to become. If the reader detects notes in Eliot’s account of nineteenth-century British culture that strike chords today, he or she will find a whole symphony in “Judgments on Authors.” In dealing with contemporary reviewing, she employs the traditional rhetorical rhythm that builds from modest beginnings to a climax: In endeavouring to estimate a remarkable writer who aimed at more than temporary influence, we have first to consider what was his individual contribution to the spiritual wealth of mankind? … This is not the common or easy course to take in estimating a modern writer. It requires considerable knowledge of what he has himself done, as well as what others had done before him, or what they were doing contemporaneously … An easier course is to notice some salient mistakes, and take them as decisive of the writer’s incompetence; or to find out that something apparently much the same as what he has said … had been said by somebody else …; or to pronounce from the point of view of individual taste that this writer for whom regard is claimed is repulsive, wearisome, not to be borne except by those dull persons who are of a different opinion … And it is this sheeplike flock who have no direct impressions, no spontaneous delight, no genuine objection or selfconfessed neutrality in relation to the writers become classic – it is these who are incapable of passing a genuine judgment on the living. Necessarily. (pp. 442–43)

Never has a single-word sentence like the last expressed such utter contempt. Eliot takes the incompetence of literary reviewers so seriously because she finds them contributing to a broad cultural decadence: “there must clearly be a limit to such mental submission, else we should come to a stand-still … When the assimilation of new matter ceases, decay must begin” (p. 443). “Story-Telling” opens in the same bland manner but doesn’t rise to a peroration like its opposite numbers on authorship in general and reviewing. “What is the best way of telling a story?” it begins, and the succeeding remarks on the sources of story-telling modes are very general and not at all pertinent to intellectual critique. But the piece closes in a striking manner, given Eliot’s reputation as an unenterprising realist of presentation as well as of subject-matter: “Why should a story not be told in the most irregular fashion that an author’s idiosyncrasy may prompt, provided that he gives us what we can enjoy?” (p. 446). This encouragement of narrational


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experiment offers that perennial favorite example of the “irregular” – or, as Conrad and Ford Madox Ford would later call it, “impressionist” – method, Tristram Shandy. The other pieces in “Leaves from a Note-Book” all have their interest – especially “Historic Imagination” (pp. 446–47) – but don’t contribute to the cultural critique under way in this collection. A possible exception to this judgment lies in the title and one or two sentences of the last piece, “‘A Fine Excess.’ Feeling is Energy.” Quoting herself, or her own heroine in The Spanish Gypsy: “Fedalma says – The grandest death! to die in vain – for Love Greater than [death] sways the forces of the world.

(Eliot slightly misquotes in punctuation and capitalization, and she hasn’t resolved the peculiar syntax of the sentence.) Her comment: “I really believe and mean this, – not as a rule of general action, but as a possible grand instance of determining energy in human sympathy … the generous leap of impulse is needed too to swell the flood of sympathy in us beholders, that we may not fall completely under the mastery of calculation, which in its turn may fail of ends for want of energy got from ardour” (p. 451). It should be clear from this that, in rejecting the infusion of sensuous or purely esthetic energy into Victorian culture from the Aesthetic Movement, Eliot was not gainsaying that culture’s need for new sources of idealistic, sympathetic energy. Two additions to the corpus of Eliot’s writings have been made since the publication of the Essays. Its editor, Thomas Pinney, discovered that Charles Lewes, the initial editor of Leaves from a Note-book, had unaccountably omitted a number of quotations, notes, and a substantial essay, “Historic Guidance,” from his publication. Pinney prints these in “More Leaves from George Eliot’s Notebook.”20 The thrust of several of the notes is toward a broadening of the recognized sources of knowledge; thus, one paragraph is headed, “‘Feeling is a sort of knowledge’” (p. 364), while the longer note on “Moral Freedom” states: “Life & action are prior to theorizing, & have a prior logic in the conditions necessary to maintain them. To regard any theory which supplants that logic as having supreme intellectual authority is a contradiction …” (p. 365). Lest one jump to the conclusion that Eliot is here abandoning theory in favor of spontaneous practice, one might recall that the relevant section of Mill’s Logic is titled, “The Logic of Practice, or Art.” Her equivalent is: “Life & action … have a prior logic …,” i.e., are coherent modes of being in the world (Pierre Bourdieu would call this habitus), whose logic can be studied and

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subsumed under rules of art, but which cannot be neglected by theories of human nature or behavior. Another longish note attempts the perennial esthetic question of taste, bringing it into a matrix familiar to Eliot’s readers: “It is only by regarding Taste as having this broad basis – congruity with the fullest knowledge directing sympathetic feeling, that we can get any satisfactory standard …” (p. 366). An even longer note on “Conformity” weighs the two sides of this issue, hearing out a “‘member of a community where certain habits of feeling & conduct which are the most beneficent outgrowths of human culture are wedded to beliefs & observances becoming more & more irreconcilable with the advance of knowledge & the reformatory changes that should be consequent on that advance’” (p. 367), who opts to “‘maintain the benefits of the existing order’” (p. 368). To the question raised by this traditionalist’s choice, “Are we to regard it as our duty, for the sake of the community, to uphold & sanction by our presence the persistence of forms thus saturated with what our highest conscience pronounces to be false as statement, & debasing as sentiment?” (p. 369), she pronounces a firm no. Her independent spirit in religious matters hadn’t lost its vigor. The longish note on “Origins” (pp. 369–71) takes up the issue of race in an oblique way. After initially distinguishing between a “pragmatical” and a “psychological” approach to the “sociological origins (of religions, arts, governments)” (p. 369), and opting for a necessary combination of both approaches, the example of “resemblances in the customs & fables of the various Aryan peoples” is offered. These are “clearly due to recurrent intercourse, & to analogous development, as well as to original identity” (p. 369), i.e., to historical diffusion as well as to racial origins. In addition, the phrase, “analogous development,” indicates Eliot’s acceptance of the social evolutionists’ position on uniform processes at work around the globe in the early development of the species. (The issue will be pursued below.) The piece in “More Leaves” that clearly qualifies as an essay, “Historic Guidance” (pp. 371–76), begins by affirming Comte’s twin concepts of continuity and solidarity as “facts of human existence” (p. 372), before raising the question, “How shall that idea or recognized fact shape our procedure?” (p. 372). The first problem in procedure to be raised is the justification of revolution: The criticism on radical, revolutionary schemes, that they are a breach of continuity, has to be justified by showing that they are made futile by the continuous existence of conditions resulting from the past which either obstinately oppose themselves to the immediate amelioration of things … or else carry in solution precious sentiments & habits of mind which would make it socially pernicious to


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expunge them. And yet the critic may himself look forward with hope to the gradual disappearance of these inherited conditions, many of them being simply reducible to massive ignorance & low moral tone. Thus Continuity is a guide in the adaptation of systematic reforms but cannot in itself directly guide our systematizing[,] which must immediately depend on our discrimination of the facts which constitute its elements. (p. 373)

In addition to being a direct rebuke of Comte’s absolutism regarding revolutionary change, the thinking here is typically progress-oriented, pragmatic and knowledge-centered: in order to determine whether revolution in a specific case is justified, one must learn the facts of the case and balance the good and evil in both the status quo and the prospective change. The longstanding Burkian–Coleridgian arguments against revolution are also set aside by noting that the cherished traditions it would trample may be “simply reducible to massive ignorance & low moral tone.” But Eliot isn’t through with Comte: “And here comes in the critical estimate to be made of Auguste Comte’s views concerning the separation of the temporal & spiritual powers …” (p. 373). The critique begins with his approbation of this separation in the Middle Ages (in volume V of the Cours, which Eliot had been reading), but extends to his proposed twin governing elites in the society of his dreams. Taking Comte’s “spiritual” elite or ruling intelligentsia in the Système as a secular equivalent of the disused priesthood, Eliot asks Are we to reproduce a priesthood differing from the old only in the initial abstinence from sacramental claims? … which shall give forth intellectual and moral judgments as placita of authority & shall be liable to no control except the threat of disapprobation in minds over which it exercises the sole spiritual direction … It has yet to be shown that the human being modified into a philosopher – still more a vast body of men so modified – will be exempt from the temptations or warping influences which have hitherto made corporations [i.e., bodies of men] disposed to amplify their power even to tyranny… (p. 375)

This dual reaction to Comte – warm reception of his historical interpretations and utter disdain for his political theory – is consistent with earlier remarks cited above. With what does she replace his sanguine anticipations of a future of social control? Her approach to utopia is one that might be expected of her by now: “these & the like questions, it appears, must be resolved by the reciprocal play & onward movement of actual conditions which it is impossible to arrest & supersede” (p. 376). The next note but one in the original sequence of the “Leaves” must be quoted in full: “A Transcendental Tailor. / There was once a tailor who

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thought so highly of his vocation that he declined to make any clothing except jackets for the sunbeams & trowsers for the running waters. He made them systematically, by an ideal evolution. This he called religious tailoring & the other sort secular” (p. 376). No comment is required. The second addition to Eliot’s collection of essays (or quasi-essays) is a manuscript notebook, published by K. K. Collins in “Questions of Method: Some Unpublished Late Essays.”21 He correctly places the first essay (actually, the only piece that qualifies as an essay, as the other two are each less than a page in length) in the context of social evolutionism, but seizes on apparent deviations from its tenets to conclude that Eliot “does not share the evolutionist belief in widely covering historical laws, nor does she suggest that laws of this generality exist” (p. 400). While undoubtedly true, these claims obscure the point Eliot is arguing here, regarding biologically based rather than historically developed cultural phenomena in the early stages of the species. The first piece takes off from a German proverb to posit that the physiological limits of any species – the proverb refers to trees not growing into the sky – may “not be overpassed” (p. 387). Two broad ranges of human limitation are instanced: Imagination “finds herself beaten by discovery [i.e., science] & sits amazed,” while science itself “under the name of knowledge has long been recognized as a mere parenthesis in a context of irremovable darkness” (p. 387). This ultimate – though only ultimate – skepticism refers, then, to every mental process, and accords with Eliot’s tragic view of the human condition. Her view of human limitations then instances early cultural phenomena: “a being like man, having a certain shape, certain modes of movement, certain forms of sense, & certain unchangeable wants must continue to be determined & limited by these in all his inventions, however far the progress of the ages may carry him, & also that different groups of human beings, though in the very beginning of their existence sundered from each other, must inevitably fall upon the same devices for self-preservation, communication & analogical representation” (pp. 387–88). This view of early culture is consistent with a social evolutionary perspective that specifies distinct stages of human beings’ development, but it refers only to “the very beginning of their existence.” The essay then takes up language in a pre-Chomskian view: “their languages would be to a good extent translatable … Their grammar must have corresponding elements, however differently rendered, since the main elements of grammar are simply indispensable facts of human existence …” (p. 388). The last phrase leaves open the question as to the source of linguistic similarity, whether in uniform response to natural conditions of


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existence or in neurological structure. Emphasis on the first option occurs in the treatment of clothing that follows: “It would be the same with their clothing where climate forced them into clothing” (p. 388). When going beyond her observations on prehistoric man to claim that “while the human race lasts, there will be no wide departure from the typical long or short tunic,” etc. (p. 389), she exceeds her writ. She next turns to myth and contemporary theories of myth, rejecting “that irrational exclusiveness of theory which insists on interpreting all resemblances between the mythologies & legends of different peoples as a result of tradition or identity of descent” (p. 389). The two theories excluded are cultural diffusion and genetic endowment, for similarities in all sorts of artifacts, practices and beliefs are to be “found all over the world without, surely, compelling us to the supposition that they all proceeded from one nest of speech & practice” (p. 389). To make the distinction more specific to myth and language, she instances a number of “stories of cunning arising independently [which] would be likely to have corresponding incidents” (p. 389): “I should have more confidence in the probability that this idea would spontaneously arise in many different communities than I should have in the circuitous tracing of etymological derivations through mutations of vocal sounds …” (p. 390).22 The essay closes with a display of the characteristic inclusiveness of Eliot’s thinking, here on the varied explanations of the origin of myth: “Surely it is as unreasonable to explain mythologies exclusively by the personification of natural forces as by the deification of kings & heroes or the symbolical exoteric teaching of priests; but in considering the tendencies of man in society an unprejudiced judgment sees ground for accepting all these agencies in various proportions according to time & circumstance” (p. 390). This essay offers no systematic explanatory theory, beyond the idea of parallel worldwide responses to similar natural conditions, but it does indicate Eliot’s adherence to at least the first stage of the social evolutionist sequence, without commitment to Comtean, Spencerian or contemporary anthropological views of necessary and progressive stages. In another sign of Eliot’s refinement of long-held assumptions, the next notebook item offers a challenge to uniformitarianism in the geological sphere. After missing Sir Charles Lyell’s importance in her first reading of his Principles of Geology (see Chapter 1 above), she later fell in with his position that all geological changes have occurred through the operation of invariant physical laws, “agencies still at work,” as this piece puts it (p. 390). But the next sentence questions this premise and opens a new and wider perspective: “Or must we allow, especially in the earlier periods, for

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something incalculable by us from the data of our present experience?” (p. 390). The question is a scientifically appropriate one, as physical conditions in the early stages of the earth’s formation and the resulting geological changes may well be fully explicable only with modifications of the science of presently observable processes.23 Eliot’s wider view extends to anthropological and sociological phenomena: “Even within comparatively near times & in kindred communities how many conceptions & fashions of life have existed to which our understanding & sympathy has no clue!” (p. 390). This is the only point at which Eliot, with her habitual reference to better information as a basis for social improvement, seems to throw up her hands and say, we can never know enough about the peculiar ways in which people behave. The third piece, a bit longer than the preceding one, takes up the old story of realistic vs. idealized representation in art and, by implication, in literature. While leaving room for “ideal portraits” in paintings on sacred themes and for “ideal types” in a painter’s repertoire, if it also includes the ability to offer “severely veracious likenesses” (p. 391), the piece comes down squarely on the side of realism, not only in art but in life, concluding, “we are the better off for knowing better the nature of fishes & storms & acting according to that knowledge” (p. 392). There is, indeed, nothing remarkable in the high value placed on knowledge and in the specific questions about science and social science raised in these pieces, but they indicate a mind still occupied with the nature of truth and truthful representation in life and literature. ii It is in this intellectual context that Impressions of Theophrastus Such can be appreciated as a whole and in detail. To create distance from the current scene, Eliot had first to prepare herself to write intellectual satire. Beyond the eponymous author of miniature portraits or “characters” of standard human types, her classical resources – Aristophanes, Horace, Juvenal, et al. – were already in train, but she extended her reach to rather recondite items like Marcus Minutius Felix’s Octavius, Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, Athenaeus of Naucratis’s Deipnosophistae and Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers – all cited in the Impressions.24 The eighteen essays – or should one call them “impressions”? – in the Impressions may be divided into sequential phases. The opening “Looking Inward” and “Looking Backward” stand as introductions not only to the work but to its putative author, Eliot’s persona. The next phase begins with


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“How We Encourage Research” and moves from one character or vice to the next in the body of the work (the “how we” formula is repeated with “How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials, and Believe in Them”). Finally, a miscellaneous group of two items, “Shadows of the Coming Race” (the title recalling Bulwer-Lytton’s futuristic romance, The Coming Race [1871]) and “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” already alluded to in the discussion of Daniel Deronda above. (The question of what this critique of anti-Semitism is doing in this galère will find an answer in the event.) Most critical attention has been directed toward the opening pair, as it seems to provide characterization of the author herself; I shall sidestep this issue by considering Theophrastus solely as an intellectual, or more precisely a meta-intellectual in the definition given above.25 Other categories may be applied to these essays so as to bring out their more specific subjects. Intellectual misbehavior is the subject of “How We Encourage Research” (essay 3), “The Watch-Dog of Knowledge” (8), “The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb” (11), “How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials …” (13), “The Too-Ready Writer” (14) and “Diseases of Small Authorship” (15). Misbehavior in the intelligentsia or reading public includes “A Man Surprised at His Originality” (4), “A Too Deferential Man” (5) and “‘So Young!’” (12). On contemporary intellectual life in general, we have “Looking Backward” (2), “Debasing the Moral Currency” (10), “Moral Swindlers” (16) and “Shadows of the Coming Race” (17). A special group is devoted to the vices of high society: “A Political Molecule” (7), “A Half-Breed” (9) and “The Modern Hep!” (18, on fashionable anti-Semitism). Nancy Henry, in the introduction to her edition of the work, has cannily eked out the significance of the persona’s name: not simply Theophrastus as founder of the “character” genre – popular in the seventeenth century, not only in France with La Bruyère but in England with a host of imitators – but “Such” as an allusion to the Greek author’s invariable opening formula for his sketches: toiontos tis hoios (such a type who) (p. xviii; she goes on to deny that Such is a “literal patronym” [p. xix]). She follows the persona’s development as a character in his own right, with traces of the author herself along the way. The autobiographical element is surely relevant to Eliot’s critique of intellectuals, for she could not fail to include her self-awareness in the process – this is the theme of the first essay, “Looking Inward.” (One recalls her answer to the query, where she got her idea of Casaubon, by pointing to her own breast.) But the confessional impulse is secondary to a broader selfconsideration: she is here reviewing her near-thirty-years’ relationship to her audience and making a summary judgment of that audience’s severe

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limitations. Henry makes the shrewd suggestion that her learned allusions and often murky prose are designed to select out a better audience, fit though few (p. xxxi). To begin with the first grouping, failings of the intellectuals. “How We Encourage Research” tells a story among the most frightening to a scholar that can be told, yet it should be equally alarming to all who benefit from scholarly research. A small intellectual, if one may so modify the category, finds a new idea in the interstices of a big scholar’s work and publishes his corrections and innovation. The big scholar mounts the full battery of artillery to dispel what he takes as an attack, and succeeds in driving his competitor from the field – and into somewhat exaggerated ruin. He then publishes revised versions of his work, silently incorporating the criticism and new idea. The most frightening part is the small intellectual’s certainty (though only by inference) that “his very opponents who had knowledge enough to be capable judges were aware that his book, whatever errors of statement they might detect in it, had served as a sort of divining rod, pointing out hidden sources of historical interpretation …” (p. 38). So the tale is not merely about (dis)encouraging researchers but about the failure of the research community to make honest judgments – although the ironic conclusion suggests that truth is great and will prevail. The character of scholars themselves is more directly addressed in “The Watch-Dog of Knowledge,” where the intellectual is admirable, ardent, “public-spirited, affectionate, and able to find the right words in conveying ingenious ideas or elevated feeling” (p. 67). He has only one fault, “which demands that none but the monarchs of thought shall have an advantage over him, and in the presence of contradiction or the threat of having his notions corrected, he becomes astonishingly unscrupulous and cruel …” (p. 67). Aside from sketching a character of the bad-tempered man of ideas, the portrait suggests an implicit hierarchy in the structure of intellectuals: “monarchs of thought,” those on a level with the subject, and inferiors. The fact that the bad-tempered intellectual takes up the fight only with his equals and inferiors suggests another character-flaw undoing the scholarly enterprise: not simply egoism, irascibility and unscrupulousness but pusillanimity. The piece goes on to point out the unevenness in the mind of specialists and concludes that even intellectuals are men – and, pari passu, women – of mixed character. “The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb” is ostensibly an exposé of plagiarism, the vice that takes so much of teachers’ attention regarding their students, among intellectuals themselves. But it goes about this relatively simple task by an argument with a resonance among postmodern ideas that


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Eliot could not have predicted. Theophrastus takes up an interesting defense of such borrowing by an approximation of the death-of-the-author dogma, with its related Derridian theory of dissemination: it is the plagiarist’s habit to talk with a Gallic largeness and refer to the universe: he expatiates on the diffusive nature of intellectual products, free and all-embracing as the liberal air; on the infinitesimal smallness of individual origination compared with the massive inheritance of thought on which every new generation enters; on that growing preparation for every epoch through which certain ideas or modes of view are said to be in the air … so that every one may be excused for not knowing how he got them. Above all, he insists on the proper subordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea … (p. 88)

The persona and his maker will have none of this: “One may admit that such considerations carry a profound truth … I protest against the use of these majestic conceptions to do the dirty work of unscrupulosity …” (p. 89; the following sentence contains an early use of the term, “intellectual property”).26 The discussion then morphs into a consideration of that great intellectual force, reputation: “our prior confidence or want of confidence in given names is made up of judgments just as hollow as the consequent praise or blame they are taken to warrant …” (p. 96). The corresponding vice among the famous is drawing upon this credulity to make acquisitions: “happening to have the ear of the public, [they] give other people’s ideas the advantage of appearing under their own well-received name, while any remonstrance from the real producer becomes an unwelcome disturbance of complacency …” (p. 96). It would be interesting to know which major figures Eliot had in mind. “How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials, and Believe in Them” is concerned with the intellectual’s version of a universal selfdelusion. Theophrastus’s way of dealing with this endemic vice is to hold the mirror up not to nature but to the ideal: “To correct such selfflatterers … it is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh [sic] wholes; … a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations of human existence” (p. 110). Eliot’s persona is, of course, defining her own practice; s/he is

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relieved of the charge of self-flattery by the fact that what s/he says is probably true of that practice. “The Too-Ready Writer” begins with a comparison to the person who talks too much and is universally scorned: “Why is there a different standard of judgment with regard to a writer who plays much the same part in literature as the excessive talker plays in what is traditionally called conversation?” (pp. 112–13). Rhetorical questions butter no parsnips, to coin a phrase; a more effective exposé comes with a portrait of the subject: “He is already to be classed as a ‘general writer,’ corresponding to the comprehensive wants of the ‘general reader’…: he finds himself under an obligation to be skilled in various methods of seeming to know; … his interest in all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has not made a mistake … the impulse [to achieve the unattempted] has hardened into ‘style,’ and into a pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in the presence of other men’s failures is turning into the official arrogance of one who habitually issues directions which he has never himself been called on to execute …” (p. 115). And the “character” gets worse, both in its rhetoric and in the persons covered by it. Beyond the personal flaws exposed, the essay is a broad characterization of a certain stratum of the “literary calling” or “professional writing” in general. “Diseases of Small Authorship” (a category akin to my label of small intellectuals) could be expected to take up lighter equipment to put smaller fry in their place, and indeed the satire runs more lightly here. The “authoress of a book entitled ‘The Channel Islands, with Notes and an Appendix’” (p. 121) cannot be taken too seriously, but to resist the imputation that this is a specifically feminine genre of books and authors, the persona finds that “the male could assert his superiority and show a more vigorous boredom. I have known a man with a single pamphlet … produce a more powerful effect of shuddering at his approach than ever Vorticella did …” (p. 126). So the female is vindicated, after all: “Depend upon it, vanity is human, native alike to men and women; only in the male it is of denser texture, less volatile, so that it less immediately informs you of its presence, but is more massive and capable of knocking you down if you come into collision with it; while in women vanity lays by its small revenges as in a needle-case always at hand” (p. 127). The prose here combines the tones of Pope’s “Dunciad” and “Rape of the Lock.” These essays make up a characterization of what, on the model of Thomas Kuhn’s term, “normal science,” may be called normal literary publishing. Eliot doesn’t take up the higher level of the scholarly and publishing scenes, beyond the brief vision of what it might ideally be in


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“False Testimonials.” She is not here directed toward the ideal, just as she isn’t primarily interested in personal vices or even generic human behavior, but rather seeks to build up a picture of the prevailing intellectual scene. So, although Theophrastus Such may securely be catalogued under “satire,” it may also claim credentials in the realm of sociology of knowledge. The pieces discussed here contribute to a comprehensive view of what, anticipating Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field, may be called the intellectual field, with its own codes, binary structures, and laws of change if not of development.27 In the intellectual field, an intelligentsia is, of course, required; otherwise intellectuals would have only each other to influence. Eliot’s provision for this part of the field is slim, but is structured so as to suggest its contours. “A Man Surprised at His Originality” is a modest account of an apparently modest member of the reading public. “Accustomed to observe what we think an unwarrantable conceit,” the persona says, recalling the behaviors described above, “we are not on the alert to detect the egoistic claims of a more exorbitant kind often hidden under an apparent neutrality or an acquiescence in being put out of the question” (p. 41). This insight is applied to one Lentulus, named for a Roman consul thought rather slow by Cicero: “The majority of his acquaintances, I imagine, have always thought of him as a man justly unpretending and as nobody’s rival; but some of them have perhaps been struck with surprise at his reserve in praising the works of his contemporaries, and have now and then felt themselves in need of a key to his remarks on men of celebrity in various departments” (pp. 41–42). The key to his egoism is subtly revealed here: it is one thing to have reserved opinions if one reserves them, but systematically making deflating remarks is merely a form of self-aggrandizement. As the description of this character-type develops, it becomes clear that he is surprised not so much by his own originality as by the existence of other minds more capable than his own, and that his habitual tactic is to shun them. But he retains a saving grace, to the extent he honors it: “Peace be with Lentulus, for he has left us in peace. Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact …” (p. 48). If this subtly negative mode of response among the intelligentsia is one component of its structure, “A Too Deferential Man” represents a simpler mode: “He is the superlatively deferential man, and walks about with murmured wonder at the wisdom and discernment of everybody who talks to him” (p. 49). The revealing word is, of course, “everybody”: they can’t all be wise and discerning. The portrait is that of the archetypal

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flatterer, but the persona probes deeper: “What is the reason of all this subdued ecstasy …?” (p. 53). He undercuts the supposition that flatterers are motivated by “carefully apprised end[s]” (p. 53), i.e., that they are hypocrites: “society is chiefly made up of human beings whose daily acts are all performed either in unreflecting obedience to custom or routine or from immediate promptings of thought or feeling …,” i.e., impulse (p. 54). So the flatterers develop a kind of social repertoire, “tricks or habits gradually formed under the successive promptings of a wish to be agreeable …” (p. 54). The tendency toward self-effacement has an ironic twist: “But one cannot be an Englishman and gentleman in general: it is in the nature of things that one must have an individuality, though it may be of an often-repeated type” (p. 55). So the social flatterer develops a distinct personality after all. Between these poles lie an undifferentiated mass of people who can’t make up their minds, for good reason. Eliot cannot exhaust this apparently inexhaustible clan, so she offers a fairly typical example, “‘So Young!’” The essay is deceptively framed: it seems to offer yet another portrait, in this case of an intellectual typed in youth as a remarkably young achiever, who can’t divest himself of that reputation in later life. Yet the real target is the mindless behavior of the intelligentsia, who can’t divest themselves of that sobriquet in describing the man in question. The obvious comic possibilities are exploited – the middle-aged man still subjected to the same clichéd terms and canned reactions that make up most responses in this realm. It almost makes one willing to assent to the neo-Marxist idea that people are “interpellated” or called upon by the ideological system to behave like automata. Eliot expands her survey of the intelligentsia by adding a number of types in high society: literate people who are only occasionally members of the reading public. Two are haut bourgeois; she has apparently given over the aristocratic class of “barbarians” to Arnold. “A Political Molecule” is simply a cotton manufacturer, lifelong Liberal free-trader, who is, ironically, credited for performing in the public interest by his pursuit of personal and class interest: “A small mind trained to useful occupation for the satisfying of private need becomes a representative of genuine classneeds … his need for a change in legislation [the first Reform Bill and repeal of the Corn Laws are instanced], being shared by all his neighbors in trade, ceased to be simply selfish, and raised him to a sense of common injury and common benefit” (p. 66). The piece goes beyond this confirmation of Adam Smith’s thesis (with Bernard de Mandeville’s poetic fable in the background) that private vices can become public virtues by adjoining


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this political animal to the intelligentsia: “Yet he aspired to what he regarded as intellectual society, willingly entertained beneficed clergymen, and bought the books he heard spoken of … But some minds seem well glazed by nature against the admission of knowledge, and Spike’s was one of them” (p. 65). The intelligentsia is seen as characterized by people who buy the books and artworks in fashion, cannot learn from or respond to them, yet play a necessary support role in the intellectual field. The manufacturer’s paired number is a “capitalist” – Eliot uses the term in its precise designation of a financial manipulator of capital. But she isn’t simply filling out the ranks of the bourgeoisie: this specimen has a distinct origin in evangelical piety, hence, “A Half-Breed.” Formerly, he “thought himself a young man of socially reforming ideas … he looked forward to a use of his riches chiefly for reforming and religious purposes. His opinions were of a strongly democratic stamp, except that even then, belonging to the class of employers, he was opposed to all demands in the employed that would restrict the expansiveness of trade. He was the most democratic in relation to the unreasonable privileges of the aristocracy and landed interest; and he had also a religious sense of brotherhood with the poor” (p. 75). The change in opinions and behavior that comes with age and success to many a young progressive is then spelled out. An additional twist is given in an account of his salon: he “entertains with splendour the half-aristocratic, professional, and artistic society which he is proud to think select. This society regards him as a clever fellow in his particular branch, seeing that he has become a considerable capitalist, and as a man desirable to have on the list of one’s acquaintance … what he happens to think is not felt by his esteemed guests to be of any consequence, and what he used to think with the ardour of conviction he now hardly ever expresses” (p. 78). The pathos of his rise or fall goes beyond a failure of expression to a failure of identity: “Indeed, hardly any of his acquaintances know what Mixtus really is, considered as a whole – nor does Mixtus himself know it” (p. 80). The portrait of the ex-progressive who acquires the “bitterness which capitalists and employers often feel to be a reasonable mood towards obstructive proletaries” (p. 80) gains additional force from the association of this political type with the salon intelligentsia he cultivates. The essay most difficult to place with others in Theophrastus Such is, indeed, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” in part because it is more obviously an essay than the satirical portraits (it is almost twice as long as the longest of them) and in part because of its subject, anti-Semitism. Its specific subject and its relevance to Daniel Deronda speak for themselves, but I would call attention to its focus on broader English political and social

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attitudes, of which fashionable anti-Semitism is only one. Beyond filling out the picture of the high-society stratum of the intelligentsia, the essay suggests a keenness of political judgment that one might not have anticipated from Eliot’s anti- or apolitical stance. The larger subject is nationalism, and the essay deserves to be treated with full attention to its context in late nineteenth-century thought and action in that sphere. The defense of Jewish nationalism narrows to a comparison with English nationalism: comparing things whose similarities are usually unnoticed is its first order of business, and the “mental sloth” (p. 143) that omits doing so is its first charge against the English mind. It is then a short step to a celebration of the historical virtues “which belong to us as Englishmen” (p. 145). Yet the anticipated respect for national identity is only temporary: “The time is not come for cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than for communism to suffice for social energy” (p. 147). But the dark side of this heritage is not stinted; unlike the Jews, “We do not call ourselves a dispersed and a punished people: we are a colonising people, and it is we who have punished others” (p. 146). In this anti-imperialist vein, the persona exclaims, “I am not bound to feel for a Chinaman as I feel for my fellow-countryman: I am bound not to demoralise him with opium, not to compel him to my will by destroying or plundering the fruits of his labour …” (p. 147). (The allusion is to the Opium Wars of 1839–42, in which China tried to resist foreign domination by excluding British opium exports [to China!], and was forced to adopt an “Open Door” policy toward British and, later, other European trade.) There is nationalism and nationalism, it seems, and the English version, expressed in the aggressions of imperial expansion and equally in exclusiveness toward Jews and other outsiders, is of the less savory kind. The essay adds another, more specifically intellectual or cultural reflection on English attitudes towards Jews. Making a scathing comparison of these attitudes with those of Southern planters and their English supporters toward black slaves, Theophrastus concludes, “And this is the usual level of thinking in polite society concerning the Jews. Apart from theological purposes, it seems to be held surprising that anybody should take an interest in the history of a people whose literature has furnished all our devotional language …” (p. 161). The failure to respect and even to be interested in the Jews is a failure to appreciate a key part of the nation’s cultural heritage, i.e., it is an intellectual as well as a moral deficiency. The final and most sweeping appraisal of the English intellectual scene is made in a group of pieces devoted to the theory and practice of modernity. “Looking Backward” begins with the perennial habit of


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devaluing one’s own age in favor of a past one or of the past in general. It goes on to make an exception for the early nineteenth century (“Three quarters of a century ago”: p. 14), indulging in a nostalgic account of the persona’s father, a Tory country parson – equivalent to Eliot’s Tory estatemanager father – while acknowledging the traditional upper classes’ lack of “contact with various classes on their own level”: “that entail of social ignorance had not been disturbed as we see it now” (p. 19). In the midst of this reverie, the modern point of view is stated: “Many ancient beautiful things are lost, many ugly modern things have arisen; but invert the proposition and it is equally true. I at least am a modern with some interest in advocating tolerance, and notwithstanding an inborn beguilement which carries my affection and regret continually into an imagined past, I am aware that I must lose all sense of moral proportion unless I keep alive a stronger attachment to what is near, and a power of admiring what I best know and understand” (p. 18). If the persona’s utterance may be ascribed directly to its author, it states her attitudes more clearly than do the many critical remarks on Eliot’s devotion to the period of her childhood, where Romantic values reign. Hers is a disciplined modernity, in which nostalgia is not permitted to override an acknowledgement of progress – here, the increased contact and knowledge of classes is singled out – and a commitment to attending to and improving its remaining shortcomings. This balanced view she calls “moral proportion.” The moral element in the modern temper is, however, found to be under attack in two essays with that word in their titles: “Debasing the Moral Currency” and “Moral Swindlers.” The first deals with mass culture, or with a particular element in it, “the burlesquing spirit which ranges to and fro and up and down on the earth, seeing no reason (except a precarious censorship) why it should not appropriate every sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme which serves to make up the treasure of human admiration, hope, and love” (p. 83; the Wordsworthian echo is doubtless deliberate).28 Cultural critique continues in ethical terms: “This is what I call debasing the moral currency: lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm and elevation of our social existence …” (p. 84). Theophrastus concludes with perhaps the most sharply observed portrait in this gallery: “And I confess that sometimes when I see a certain style of young lady, who checks our tender admiration with rouge and henna and all the blazonry of an extravagant expenditure, with slang and bold brusquerie intended to signify her emancipated view of things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, I am sorely

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tempted to hiss out ‘Pétroleuse! ’” (p. 86; the allusion is to the culturedestroying lady incendiaries of the Paris Commune). The title of “Moral Swindlers” has a double reference: the literal one, to financial swindlers like the individual first discussed, who are considered in polite society to be moral by virtue of their approved family values, and the metaphoric one, in which judgments of this type are a form of swindle. Here ethical skepticism is found to be a disabling component of the modern temper: “many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are far to seek for the grounds of social duty, and without entertaining any private intention of committing a perjury which would ruin an innocent man … feel themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their dissatisfaction with all answers to this ‘Why?’” (p. 131). Along with the tendency toward ethical skepticism, if not nihilism, goes the trend toward debased language: “And among the influences that must retard a right public judgment, the degradation of words which involve praise and blame will be reckoned worth protesting against by every mature observer” (p. 132). (The persona fails to acknowledge that some mature observers participate in the degradation of normative words.) Returning to the piece’s original thrust against the loose use of “moral” regarding swindlers, tyrants, et al., the persona takes the occasion to define the meaning of morality: “the conduct which, in every human relation, would follow from the fullest knowledge and the fullest sympathy – a meaning perpetually corrected and enriched by a more thorough appreciation of dependence in things, and a finer sensibility to both physical and spiritual fact …” (p. 135). In face of the prevailing skepticism, Theophrastus holds out for the value, indeed, the imperative of knowledge – along with sensibility and sympathy, to be sure – in the ethical sphere. The last essay devoted to the broad subject of the modern temper is “Shadows of the Coming Race.” The persona takes the inspiration of Bulwer-Lytton’s sci-fi novel to indulge the perennial fear that robotics will lead to technological unemployment. The essay proceeds in the ways dictated by the genre, with a show of mock-terror – “‘Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race?’” (p. 138) – and brings in a raisonneur who tries to calm the persona’s fears, even promising that the “‘subtly refined powers of machines will react in producing more subtly refined thinking processes which will occupy the minds set free from grosser labour’” (p. 139) – a preview of the promises held out in the computer age. But Theophrastus’s anxiety persists: “‘As to the breed of the ingenious


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and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race …’” (p. 141) – that is, the masses, whose minds will degenerate from disuse but whose machine control will sustain their dominance (a version of Marx’s use of the Hegelian “master and servant” dialectic). Here we have the ultimate intellectual nightmare, that intellectuals will no longer be needed, will be dominated rather than dominating, and will become “overwrought,” mentally degenerate in their turn. The persona turns from this horrific vision with a skillful use of bathos: these “premises” or predictions “‘seem to be flying about in the air with other germs … Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or walking fast to catch the train’” (p. 142). Having dispelled the intellectual’s anxiety along with the self-indulgence of futuristic fantasies, the piece closes with aplomb – except for that peculiar analogy of “real belief” with “running away from an explosion.” What can we say of Impressions of Theophrastus Such as a whole? Is it a coherent work of satirical imagination and cultural criticism? Written in a scant six months (from June through November 1878), it is remarkably homogeneous in tone and scope – with the partial exception of “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” Its comprehensiveness on its overarching subject, the condition of the intellectuals and intelligentsia of late nineteenthcentury England, has, I trust, been demonstrated. But how good is it in getting at the roots of the situation? Or to put the question another way, where does Eliot rank among the Victorian social critics, whom Stefan Collini has labeled “public moralists”?29 She is clearly no Carlyle or Ruskin, lacking as she does the elevated rhetoric, mainly invective, that has led them to be called Victorian prophets or sages. Nor is she an Arnold in the invention of barbed catch-phrases to skewer the deficiencies of her compatriots in various classes. I would rank her with Mill, in his social criticism, which can be quite withering about stupidity and arrogance in politics and elsewhere but is inspired by lofty idealism regarding the potentialities of the human spirit, male and female. The more obvious difference between this satirical work and others in the genre like Mallock’s New Republic is that its satire is directed not at personalities but at the deeper aspects of the society’s cultural condition. Again we find in Eliot the tragic balance between progressive inclination and recognition of degenerative tendencies – a balance unavailable to Carlyle and Ruskin. At this point, George Eliot’s creative intellectual life all but comes to an end. Other aspects of her life do, of course, continue for a season. Her

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personal life received its greatest shock when, a week after sending the manuscript of Theophrastus off to her publisher, Lewes abruptly died, sending her into a prostration from which she recovered by falling in love and marrying again, only to be herself struck down after a few months of marriage. She continued to read, now often in company with her beau and later husband, and to write letters, almost entirely on personal matters. Her professional life continued, too, as she had to see her last book through the press and, turning from her own work, undertook to put the final volumes of Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind into publishable shape. Eliot is explicit on her role in this process: “Our son Charles gave you a very erroneous idea if he said that I was engaged in ‘finishing’ a work of my husband. I am simply revising and putting in order for the press such portions of his manuscript as are at all in a state for publication” (Letters VII, 115). The question of her contribution to the published work remains, however, debated, as is its relation to her own thinking. K. K. Collins has studied the manuscripts of her revisions at the Huntington Library and confirms that of “over three hundred alterations in Lewes’s text … most of these involve abridgements of repetitious passages, improvements of hasty sentences, and corrections of erroneous citations.”30 Collins also prints in parallel columns the original and revised versions of two passages that Eliot substantially rewrote. The more extensive of these, on the “Moral Sense,” he reads as showing Eliot’s deviation from Lewes’s “utilitarian” or empiricist view on the formation of moral dispositions, in favor of an “intuitionist” or Kantian view that such dispositions are innate. The contrast of views is, however, not as clear-cut as this: while Lewes believed that some dispositions are acquired in personal experience, he also employed Spencer’s theory that others are culturally induced in each society and that these, if advantageous to the species, may be passed on genetically – in line with the later disproven belief that acquired characteristics are heritable.31 So there is a measure of innatism, if not of intuitionism, amidst Lewes’s empirical approach to morality, and these strains may be traced in Eliot as well. Collins interprets the following passage – part of the only one he exhibits as thoroughly rewritten – to say that Eliot diverged from Lewes’s empiricist views toward an intuitionist one: “the Moral Sense, which, in the first instance, was moulded under the influence of an external approbation and disapprobation, comes at last, in the select members of a given generation, to incorporate itself as protest and resistance, as the renunciation of immediate sympathy for the sake of a foreseen general good, as moral defiance of material force, and every form of martyrdom” (quoted from


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Collins’s text, p. 477; the passage in context is given on p. 486). While the passage clearly states that moral dispositions in general are formed “under the influence” of social experience, “external approbation and disapprobation,” it raises the Spencerian option of their incorporating themselves – i.e., bodily, physiologically – which Collins understands “in strongly Kantian terms,” “as if autonomously” (loc. cit.).32 The socially acquired and then incorporated dispositions singled out here are described as neither heritable nor universal; they come only to “select members of a given generation,” who resist the prevailing social ethos, render their protest, renounce “immediate sympathy” with their community in pursuing their own ideas of the “general good,” defy material force, and tend to become martyrs. Eliot is offering an instance of Lewes’s idea that moral dispositions, after being socially induced (“in the first instance”), can be individually modified (“at last”). She does so to uphold the existence of heroic outsiders, almost always her favorites (Tito was an outsider, too), who assert moral freedom in face of social constraints. The question then becomes, how do these exceptional individuals acquire moral dispositions at variance with their societies? An answer might begin with the recognition that the process of their doing so forms the dramatic action of her major novels. The issues in play go well beyond the immediate question of Eliot’s divergence from Lewes’s text in the course of revision, and even beyond the contention over her philosophical position. If her thinking were intuitionist or innatist, it would be impossible to account for the working of a number of her novels, and ultimately to account for her achievement as a novelist. In certain of these, a modicum of what is called learning by experience takes place without great fanfare. To reduce her complex characterizations to a common tendency: Adam Bede learns to prefer a deeply sympathetic and spiritual woman to an empty-headed and emptyhearted one; Silas Marner learns to prefer nurturous parenting to fetishistic acquisition; Esther Lyon learns to prefer life with an eccentric but idealistic working man to conventional mores and comforts. But in her greatest novels, a special kind of learning takes place: Maggie learns to take heroic action in order to “bless and comfort,” even while succumbing to the pressures of her narrow bourgeois society;33 Romola learns to do much the same under equivalent constraints, translated into Renaissance terms on a wider social scene; and Dorothea learns how to direct her energies on behalf of others despite the limited resources and limiting conditions of contemporary society and its representatives. With Daniel Deronda and, to some degree, with Will Ladislaw, learning is largely self-identification, and expresses itself in choosing a vocation as a cultural and/or political

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leader. One may generalize from these outcomes and, after reflecting on the tortuous course by which each of these dispositions is developed and ultimately reached, conclude that Eliot’s standing as a novelist, her achievement as a creative artist, is inseparable from an empiricist ethical position. It is only by this dramatic learning process that the exceptional individual comes to refuse “to violate in his own person the dignity of humanity” – to employ Kant’s phrasing. The capacity of Eliot’s heroes and heroines to transcend themselves in the course of their experience may strike us as inexplicable except as evidencing an exceptionally vigorous moral sense. If this is posited, it would be an endowment to be estimated differentially, i.e., by reference to the corresponding endowments of other mortals (or their fictional equivalents), who share this in varying degree. What makes her heroes and heroines exceptional is a partially innate learning facility in the ethical sphere.34 A comparison is suggested to the endowment of general intelligence, another partly genetic and partly social one, which is likewise expressed in enhanced or restricted learning ability. Eliot’s protagonists are characterized by high moral intelligence, by superior learning capacity in dealing with often bitter experience. Fiction tracing the careers of these better learners is designed to challenge the moral intelligence of us her readers to better performance in our own ethical spheres. The reader may recall Eliot’s resolution to avoid specific moral codes, whether inherited or newly devised, in favor of pursuing “experiments in life.” The often cited phrase occurs in a letter written during the concluding stages of creating Daniel Deronda, declaring her purpose to dramatize life as a developmental process: “But my writing is simply a set of experiments in life – an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of – what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better after which we may strive – what gains from past revelations and discipline we must strive to keep hold of as something more sure than shifting theory” (Letters VI, 216). The specific ethical principle she chose to uphold was the unavailability of ethical norms other than those developed in the course of experience, i.e., empirically worked out responses to specific cruxes and the cumulative effect of such responses in developing character. It will also be noted that the learning described here is an exercise requiring “thought and emotion” and a variety of motives, i.e., that moral, like other kinds of intelligence, involves a number of faculties. Like Tolstoy, like Dostoyevsky, Eliot teaches nothing less than how to live, but she does so without overarching conceptions of the human condition in relation to anything beyond it. As the great historian of religion,


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Owen Chadwick, put it, in historical perspective: “the fact which her novels represent is of the first importance in the history of English society. Morality and religion were seen to be not necessarily inseparable. The perception was not true of most of Victorian society.”35 Although this perception may have come as a shock to many a Victorian, it was not unprecedented in the history of ethical thought. From Aristotle down to Mill and beyond, humanistic ethicists have looked to the reasoned working out of experiential problems as the basis of moral will, guided by no norms other than an informed conception of the nature of human reality and disciplined investigation of specific cases. In this tradition, Eliot’s fiction claims a place even higher than its standing in the “great tradition” of the English novel. Although her individual life was at an end, George Eliot’s residual intellectual life was only beginning, in the cultural equivalent of secular immortality, the humanistic belief in which she shared. After her eminence in the Victorian period was reduced during the ascendancy of modernist style and taste, Eliot has regained her reputation at the summit of English fiction. Her influence as an intellectual is, of course, bound up with the abundant critical response to and widespread teaching of her novels. The reading of her nonfictional writings has, quite properly, been directed toward literary interpretation, yet with the result that they lack appreciation as a body of thought in its own right. If the present work can further the dissemination of her residual intellectual life, it shall have conferred on its author the honor and privilege of even remote association with so nobly idealistic a tragic humanist.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9vv. (New Haven and London, 1954–78), VI, 163–64; III, 359; II, 9n.; to be cited parenthetically in the text as Letters. 2. The Haight work, based on his monumental edition of the letters, is George Eliot: A Biography (New York and Oxford, 1968); to be cited parenthetically in the text as Haight. For a partial survey of work on Eliot, see Ira B. Nadel, “George Eliot and her Biographers,” in George Eliot: A Centenary Tribute, ed. Gordon S. Haight and Rosemary T. Van Arsdel (Totowa, NJ, 1982), pp. 107–21. 3. “George Eliot and the Novel of Ideas,” in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti et al. (New York, 1994), pp. 429–55. 4. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006), pp. 46–47. 5. The only sociological description known to me of Eliot as an intellectual is Sheldon Rothblatt, “George Eliot as a Type of European Intellectual,” History of European Ideas 7 (1986), 47–65 – a highly original and rewarding effort in interdisciplinary study. 6. Nietzsche’s penetrating though wrongheaded comments on Eliot are found in Gotzendämmerung (The Twilight of the Idols), in a section marked with her name. 7. Catherine M. Cox et al., Genetic Studies of Genius, vol. II (Stanford, Calif., 1926). 8. Combe’s journal is excerpted in Letters VIII, 27–28. He later modified his opinion, thinking her a madwoman when she eloped with Lewes. 9. William Hale White, in a review of Cross’s biography in The Athenaeum; quoted in Tim Dolin, George Eliot (Oxford, 2005), pp. 2–4. 10. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Garden City, NY, 1954 [1924]), pp. 227–28. 11. U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler (Princeton, 1965) and K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist: A Study of the Philosophical Structure of Her Novels (Totowa, NJ, 1981); the quotation from Isaiah Berlin that follows is made by Newton on p. 2. 12. In explanation of Eliot’s apparent disclaimer of indebtedness to Mill and Spencer in the quotations used as epigraphs above, it might be deduced that 252

Notes to pages 8–17

13. 14. 15.

16.

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Mill’s writings produced no “marked epoch in my life” because her disposition in a compatible direction – “every main bias of my mind,” as she puts it with regard to Spencer – had already been taken. The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot, ed. Antonie G. van den Broek (consulting ed. William Baker) (London, 2005), I, 177–78. I quote the definitive Clarendon Edition’s paperback version (Oxford, 1998 [1860]), Book VII, chapter ii, page 497; citations to Eliot’s novels will be to this edition, in the above number sequence when necessary. Eliot’s ideas on tragedy are given in a review, “The Antigone and Its Moral,” reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London, 1963), pp. 261–65 (to be cited parenthetically in the text as Essays); and in the manuscript “Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General,” published in John W. Cross, ed., George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (Edinburgh and London, 1885), III, 31–37; to be cited parenthetically in the text as Cross. A useful exposition of the English scene in relation to Eliot is Dolin, George Eliot, with chapters on social and political issues, literary and cultural contexts, the “woman question,” religion, science, etc. CHAPTER

1

1. The irony of this first intimate interlocutor’s sharing a surname with her later most extensive interlocutor is precious. 2. The plan to publish came to nothing when it was anticipated by another such chart, one of many on behalf of numerological apocalyptic prediction. See Mary W. Carpenter, George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and Protestant Apocalyptic History (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1986), pp. 7ff. on Eliot’s project and its context; but there is no indication she had apocalypse in mind in this project. 3. The distinction between moderate and extreme Evangelicals has been drawn on the basis of the latter’s “pre-millenarianism,” the belief that “the Second Coming must precede the thousand-year reign of felicity on earth”: Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988), p. 10. 4. In the later letter quoted above, she recalls that she was a Calvinist at this time, and still thinks the Arminian position “illogical” (Letters III, 174). 5. Anthony Armstrong, The Church of England, the Methodists and Society: 1700–1850 (Totowa, NJ, 1973), p. 3. While, this historian continues, “Some of the parts of this hypothesis seem secure now, others shaky,” I accept it as a general account, open to qualification. 6. The phrase is Ford K. Brown’s in Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge, 1961). See also Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (New York, 1976), especially the discussion of Eliot’s fictional Evangelical ministers, pp. 66–67. 7. Evangelicalism’s politics and economics have been studied in Hilton, The Age of Atonement and elsewhere.

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8. G. M. Ditchfield, The Evangelical Revival (Canterbury, 1998), pp. 26–27, developing the categories of David Bebbington. Further quotations are cited parenthetically in text. 9. Dale, “one of the most popular preachers in the capitol,” was “sometimes characterized as a ‘high-church evangelical’ on account of his advocacy of frequent communion”: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 14:938. Haight’s footnote on Craig (Letters I, 7n.) is not informative on this point. 10. For documentation of George Eliot’s reading, see my “George Eliot’s Reading: A Chronological List,” George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies 54–55 (2008), 1–106; hereafter cited as “Reading List.” 11. William G. McLoughlin, introduction to his edition of Revivals of Religion (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. vii. 12. Hoppus was an Independent (i.e., Congregational) minister of distinction, holding the Chair of Philosophy and Logic at University College, London, and his anonymously published book responded to a prize-giver’s requirement that it lead readers “to perceive a schismatical spirit, where it exists, in Creeds, Formularies, or Laws,” with the aim of “promoting brotherly union between Christians of different denominations.” 13. Eliot’s friend, Mrs. John Cash, the daughter of the Coventry Independent (Congregational) minister, John Sibree, reported, “From the impression made on my own mind by [Taylor’s] unfavourable facts about ‘The Fathers,’ and from her own subsequent references to this work, I am inclined to think it had its influence in unsettling her views of Christianity” (Letters I, 64n., citing Cross’s presentation of Mrs. Cash’s account). 14. Harcourt’s argument is typical of the species: etymology shows that all nations have some knowledge of early events; all mythologies have stories of a great flood, a mountain, and the aftermath; ergo, the biblical narrative is literally true; geological evidence of the longer formation of the earth refers to a precreation (? !). 15. Smith’s book did something to prepare Eliot for reading Strauss’s Life of Jesus by referring to it as “that masterpiece of evil” (p. xxx).

CHAPTER

2

1. Here and throughout this study (except when discussing the Renaissance in Chapter 6), I use the term, “Humanism,” to refer to a non-institutional but distinct train of religious thought in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English and American culture. So varied are the formulations of its participants that a common denominator must be provided by its astutest critic, T. S. Eliot. This Eliot’s essays, “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt” and “Second Thoughts about Humanism,” are collected in Selected Essays (New York, 1964 [1932]), pp. 419–38. Although they have not lost their reputation as an attack on the tendency, in them Eliot makes clear his own roots in it (p. 429) and his appreciation for a “correct and necessarily vague Humanism” (p. 437), i.e.,


2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

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one that “will not set up humanism as a substitute for philosophy and religion” (p. 436). Identifying its sources in “very liberal Protestant theology of the nineteenth century” (p. 422) and characterizing it as bearing “the imprint of the academic man of letters” (p. 433) – as valid, indeed, for “a very small minority of individuals,” an “‘intellectual aristocracy’” (p. 437) – he lists its cultural values and theoretical limitations in a useful summary (pp. 436–37). His most pungent characterization is: “a Comtism from which all the absurdities had been removed” (p. 430). The formulation quoted from one of its spokesmen is perhaps more adequate: “‘it hesitates to pass beyond its experimental knowledge to the dogmatic affirmations of any of the great religions … Nevertheless, it agrees with religion in its perception of the ethical will as a power above the ordinary self, an impersonal reality in which all men may share despite the diversity of personal temperament and towards which their attitude must be one of subjection’” (pp. 430–31; “subjection” in the sense of “humility”). George Eliot’s adherence to the “experimental knowledge” principle and her version of its ethical implications will emerge in what follows. The story of biblical criticism has been told many times; I have found Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven and London, 1974) the most challenging version. I quote the third edition of the Inquiry, bound with Hennell’s Christian Theism (London, 1870), p. v. Further quotations are cited parenthetically in text. Hennell was not the first, of course, to question the compatibility of the fourth Gospel; in the second edition he reports recent acquaintance with Carl G. Bretschneider’s Probabilia de Evangelii (1820) to the effect that the Evangelist’s “ignorance of the geography, customs, and modes of thought of Judea” indicates that “the writer was not even a native of Palestine” (p. 157n.). Hennell concluded that he was an Ephesian and was thereby in touch with Alexandrian Platonism. The reference to “Jewish notions” is similar to other freethinkers’ expressions of distaste during this period for the morality of the Old Testament; it also accords with stinging remarks by Eliot about Jews and Judaism during her youth. Her early anti-Semitism was later converted to a staunch philo-Semitism. F. A. G. Tholuck, Die Glaubwürdigkeit der evangelischen Geschichte, zugleich ein Kritik des Lebens Jesu von Strauss (Hamburg, 1837) and Carl Ullmann, Historisch oder mythisch? Beiträge zur Beantwortung den gegenwartigen Lebensfrage der Theologie (Hamburg, 1838). Reading Vinay inspired her, however, to wish to become its translator – her first project in the vocation of translating, though it was unfulfilled (Letters I, 136). Eliot’s point seems to be that Christianity offers the sinner salvation in exchange for faith, irrespective of his moral development through suffering, whereas a morality true to human experience would value the sinner’s suffering and punishment as leading to personal purification. The tricky phrase here is Christianity’s “enlargement of the spirit,” which, I think, refers not to a qualitative change but to the equivalent of spatial change in escaping from the “prison” of the sinful world.

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9. Although Eliot uses idealist terms and ideas of this kind in this period, there is no record – beyond a possible reference to a Hegelian idea on a minor issue (see Reading List) – of her reading the German post-Kantians who promulgated them. 10. I am not in accord with Valerie A. Dodd, George Eliot: An Intellectual Life (London, 1999), pp. 15–16, 77–78, 144–45, 192–93, on the extent and depth of Carlyle’s influence. Eliot read Chartism in 1840 (Letters I, 71) and was moved by its social criticism; Sartor Resartus in 1841 (Letters I, 122–23) and found his soul “a shrine of the brightest and purest philanthropy” (the last word one would associate with this misanthrope); Past and Present in 1846 (Letters VIII, 11) – “that thrilling book”; and The Life of John Sterling in 1851 (Letters I, 370), quoting the inimitable style of his characterizations; her readings of his historical works came later. In none of these encounters does one detect an affinity with his transcendentalism or his violent conservatism. Indeed, in 1859 she recalled her pleasure in a domestic scene in Sartor, while finding that a hostile review of his “mirage philosophy” in History of Frederick the Great was “not unjustly severe” (Letters III, 23). 11. The Manzoni work was his Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (Rome, 1834), a portion of which was translated anonymously as Vindication of Catholic Morality (London, 1836); her reading of his great historical novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), would wait some years. 12. The book may, of course, have been one of Spinoza’s shorter works, such as “On the Improvement of the Understanding.” 13. The work was published anonymously, for reasons that will become obvious, in 1670. I follow the Victorian translation by R. H. M. Elwes (1883), conveniently reprinted as a Dover Publications paperback (1951). 14. Spinoza calls this the “natural Divine law” (e.g., p. 61), an apparent solecism but in accord with his monistic philosophy, which collapses the ideal and material worlds into one. For the rhetorical tactics of Spinozistic redefinitions, including those in religious discourse, see Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill., 1952), ch. v. 15. This position, apparently heterodox and reductive, approximates the position of literalist (!) schools of biblical interpretation to the present day; see Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco, 2005), which recounts the author’s theological and critical training at a fundamentalist Bible institute, which maintained that the “Bible is the inerrant word of God. It contains no mistakes” (p. 4), yet “we don’t actually have the original writings of the New Testament … None of the copies is completely accurate, since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally changed them in places” (pp. 4–5); “one of the most pressing of all tasks, therefore, was to ascertain what the originals of the Bible said, given the circumstances that (1) they were inspired and (2) we don’t have them” (p. 5). The perhaps unconscious ironies of this approach rival Spinoza’s fully conscious ones. 16. The story is told in Haight (pp. 52–53), quoting Sara Hennell’s and other letters. There were other translations before and after Eliot’s, probably in the wake of rising Victorian agnosticism and atheism.


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17. The translation has recently been available as a Sigler Press paperback (Philadelphia, 1972), with a useful introduction by Peter C. Hodgson. Hodgson is also the author of a religious interpretation of Eliot, Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot: The Mystery behind the Real (London, 2001), which does less service to her than his comments on and corrections of her translation. My quotations will be from his edition of Strauss, cited parenthetically in text. Note that the current publication is reset from the second English edition (1892). 18. His biblical criticism resembles recent literary criticism in its attention to linguistic aporias, authorial blind spots that betray (reveal and undermine) intended meaning, and the unachieved unity of texts both fictional and historical. 19. Eliot’s translation has been corrected by its recent editor, Peter Hodgson (pp. 796–97); the chapter title should read, “Necessary Transition of Criticism to Dogma,” i.e., transition from criticism of the Gospels’ historicity to criticism of Christian dogma. 20. Strauss was, of course, persecuted for his indiscretions in publishing the book, to the extent of losing any chance for a teaching post in German higher education or, obviously, a ministry. In the third edition, he backtracked considerably, but in the fourth, the one Eliot translated, he returned to his original positions. The need to “re-establish” dogma discussed here is not, therefore, part of his temporary conciliation. 21. For Eliot’s uses of mythology, numerous articles by Felicia Bonaparte may be consulted, and particularly her book The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination (New York, 1979). See also Joseph Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking (Heidelberg, 1977), for a return to Christian mythography. 22. How have the approaches of Hennell and Strauss fared in later scholarship and in contemporary opinion? The history of biblical interpretation after them runs through the liberal Protestant theology of Adolf von Harnack, for whom the Kingdom of God and other concepts were reduced to moral metaphors; on to the turn-of-the-century emphasis of Albert Schweitzer, following Strauss’s lead, on Jesus and his contemporaries’ mentality of imminent apocalypse; to the rise in biblical studies of “form-criticism,” applying literary-genre analysis to texts avant la lettre (here Rudolf Bultmann is the great name, reaching Straussian conclusions about the mythological aspect of Christianity). This approach was followed by a shift to “redaction criticism,” in which the several “trajectories” of the Evangelists’ role in editing their texts from earlier materials were followed out (here a hypothetical early wisdom book termed “Q” was the center of attention). Toward century’s end, attention again shifted to Jesus’s contemporary Jewish context, typified by Geza Vermes’s Jesus the Jew (1973) – here, too, underscoring Strauss’s emphasis. More recently still, discoveries of Gospel writings beyond the canonical four have led to reconceiving the tangled origins of Christianity, with Jesus emerging in John D. Crossan’s work as a prophet of peasant egalitarianism. Clearly the work of Hennell and Strauss has been left behind by these and other interpreters too

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numerous to mention, yet they remain honorable antecedents of these lines of inquiry. 23. Publication of these pieces ran from December 4, 1846, to February 19, 1847. (Eliot also published brief reviews in the Herald both before and after these dates.) The texts have been republished in Essays, under the title, “Poetry and Prose, from the Notebook of an Eccentric”; quotations below are cited parenthetically. 24. I cannot confirm Haight’s statement that she read this many; see Reading List for documented references. Her devotion to Sand’s works is explained as follows: “I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human passion and its results” (Letters I, 278). For the full story of their impact, see Daniel Vitaglione, George Eliot and George Sand (New York, 1993). CHAPTER

3

1. Haight, p. 80; I follow Haight’s narrative for the details of this encounter, with further citations given parenthetically in text. See also Rosemary Ashton, 142 The Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (London, 2006) for the wider context. 2. Eliot’s devising of and maintaining a program to cover the entire output of England, France and Germany (with occasional nods to the United States) in fiction, poetry and non-fiction was a journalistic advance on the traditional British quarterlies, gaining further significance as a precursor of the journal even more systematically devoted to such a program, The Academy of the 1870s and beyond. The latter will be discussed in a later chapter, in which her relations with its editor and with Mark Pattison, its guiding spirit, will be the subject. 3. The proper context for understanding Mackay’s work is that of Victorian mythography, as indicated by the title and contexts of Janet Burstein, “Victorian Mythography and the Progress of the Intellect,” Victorian Studies 18 (1975), 309–24, esp. pp. 316–20. 4. I cite the first edition (London, 1850), I, 137; further citations will be given parenthetically in text. 5. Westminster Review (to be abbreviated WR) 54 (Jan. 1851), 353–68, reprinted in Essays, pp. 27–45; I quote p. 29 of the latter version, with further citations to be given parenthetically in text. 6. The term will be discussed in Chapter 4, in the context of Eliot’s review of Wilhelm von Riehl’s “sociology.” 7. Eliot’s reading of Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker [Ancient Peoples] (1810–12) and of Bryant’s A New System, or An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774–1807) is undocumented. In this review she also refers to Karl O. Müller’s Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen [Scientific] Mythologie (1825); she read other books by K. O. Müller, more authoritative than those of Bryant and Creuzer, in later years.


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8. Sept. 20, 1851; pp. 897–99; reprinted in Joseph Wiesenfarth, ed., George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879 and Uncollected Writings (Charlottesville, Va., 1981), pp. 229–37; henceforth this volume will be cited as Notebook. Citations below will be to the latter version and will be made parenthetically in text. 9. The first in WR 64 (Oct. 1855), 436–62, reprinted in Essays, pp. 158–89; the second in WR 67 (Jan. 1857), 1–42, reprinted in Essays, pp. 335–85; both reprinted versions to be cited parenthetically in text. 10. For Cumming’s participation in the contemporary discourse of millenarianism, see Carpenter, George Eliot and the Landscape of Time, pp. 17ff. 11. Other religious and mythographic works reviewed by Eliot during this period include: Jules Michelet’s La Reforme in The Leader 6 (Sept. 15, 1855), 592; Wolfgang Menzel’s Zur deutschen Mythologie I: Odin in The Leader 6 (Sept. 22, 1855), 917–18, and in WR 64 (Oct. 1855); Peter von Bohlen’s Die Genesis in The Leader 7 (Jan. 12, 1856), 41–42 (reprinted in Essays, pp. 255–60); C. F. Kahnis’s Internal History of German Protestantism in The Leader 7 (Feb. 19, 1856), 140–41; Johann K. Gieseler’s Kirschengeschichte der neuesten Zeit (Church History of the Most Recent Period) in The Leader 7 (April 5, 1856), 331–32; Ernst Meier’s Geschichte der poetischen National-literatur der Hebraer in “Belles Lettres,” WR 66 (Oct. 1856); and Thomas M’Crie’s History of the … Reformation in Italy and History of the … Reformation in Spain in “History, Biography, Voyages and Travels,” WR 67 (Jan. 1857). 12. She also, with characteristic gusto for learning, heard Faraday lecture at the Royal Society (Letters I, 341–42), attended F. W. Newman’s course on geometry at the Ladies’ (later: Bedford) College (Letters I, 343), and met scientists like Sir David Brewster (discoverer of the polarization of light) in social settings (Letters I, 367). 13. I quote the Collected Edition of the Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto and London, 1974), vol. VIII, book VI; further citations will be to this volume and will be parenthetical in text, by book, chapter and page numbers. My grasp of the argument has been guided by R. P. Anschutz, “The Logic of J. S. Mill,” Mind 58 (July 1949), reprinted in Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jerome Schneewind (Garden City, NY, 1968), pp. 46–83. 14. The most thorough study is T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 1986), where, as the subtitle indicates, the field is narrowed to Comte’s influence. 15. Cambridge, 1963; I quote the selections from the book in Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 329–53, to be cited parenthetically in text. The essay that follows in this collection, R. J. Halliday’s “Some Recent Interpretations of John Stuart Mill” (pp. 354–78; orig. pub. Philosophy, 43/163 [Jan. 1968]), is a worthwhile critique of some of Cowling’s points, without undercutting his central thesis. 16. Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in NineteenthCentury Thought (Baltimore and London, 1971), pp. 113ff. 17. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks, ed. Jane Irwin (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 188–89; this volume is hereinafter cited as DD Notebooks. This communion is the subject of Eliot’s most famous poem, “O May I Join the Choir Invisible.”

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18. For an instance of a critic putting some distance between Eliot and Comte, see Brenda McKay, George Eliot and Victorian Attitudes to Racial Diversity (Lewiston, ME, Queenston, Canada, and Lampeter, UK, 2003), pp. 16–17, on her willingness to approve national distinctiveness as against his universalism. 19. On Liberty (in 1865: Letters IV, 208); Considerations on Representative Government (in 1866: Letters IV, 232); The Subjection of Women (in 1869: Letters VIII, 458); Utilitarianism (in 1869; see George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks, ed. J. C. Pratt and V. A. Neufeldt [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1979], p. 285; hereinafter cited as M Notebooks); the Autobiography (in 1873: Letters V, 461); and Three Essays on Religion (probably in 1874: Letters VI, 93). 20. The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge, 1998), p. 81; hereinafter cited as Journals. 21. In this account, I follow the neutral description by Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, in place of the classic critique in Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism, with its more polemical thrust. 22. To summarize this logic: “humanity (the collective organism) evolved progressively not because individual human nature changed, but because human nature could only attain its final and proper functioning, its ideal fulfillment, through remaking the forms of social organization”: Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, p. 68. 23. British Quarterly Review 20 (1854), 108–62. 24. Christopher Kent, Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England (Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1978), p. 59. Given the current state of basic theory in astrophysics, this analogy seems a frail reed. 25. Detroit, 1965; references will be given parenthetically in text. Paris has recently repudiated his earlier work in Rereading George Eliot: Changing Responses to her Experiments in Life (Albany, 2003), in accordance with his later psychological esthetics or anti-esthetics. 26. N.p. [Leicester], 1984; references will be given parenthetically in text. 27. Quoted in Thomas Pinney, “More Leaves from George Eliot’s Notebook,” Huntington Library Quarterly 29 (1966), 375. The essay will be considered further in Chapter 10. 28. Princeton University, 1958. I shall not rehearse this work’s painstaking and coherent systematization, perhaps over-systematization, of Eliot’s thinking – restricting myself to wonderment that it did not achieve publication. 29. I here quote the first edition (London, 1846), ch. IV, p. 248; citations for this and the later editions will be given parenthetically in text. 30. The issue of Lewes’s improvement on Comte’s guarded inclusion of Psychology was a rather hot one; Harriet Martineau was scornful of him on that account (Letters II, 54). 31. London, 1897 [1853]; citations will be given parenthetically in text. 32. “The Future of Philosophy in Germany,” The Leader 6 (July 28, 1855), 723–24; reprinted in Essays, pp. 148–53; my citations of the latter will be given parenthetically in text. 33. The article appeared in WR 60 (Oct. 1853), 513–50.


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34. “Liberal” has also become a highly charged word, partly due to its ambiguity in referring both to laissez-faire economics and left-wing politics; I shall henceforth use the word in the former, its nineteenth-century sense. 35. I quote the recent edition published (New York, 1970) by one of the many societies and foundations established over the years in adherence to Spencer’s economic principles and wider thought. Citations will be given parenthetically in text. 36. Spencer’s relation to utilitarian ethics is a complex one, for he trounces the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number as resolving itself into “the ultra-democratic dogma – all men have equal rights to happiness” (p. 184), while using the standard of maximum happiness as his own ethical criterion. 37. It was in these years that Spencer began to formulate his defining contribution to evolutionary thought, in “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” WR 67 (1857), 445–85. His evolutionary ideas are treated in Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Paleontology in Victorian London, 1850–1875 (Chicago and London, 1982), pp. 95ff., in the context of pre-Darwinian scientific discourse; and in Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago and London, 1987), pp. 244ff., on his thinking in a Darwinian context. Despite claims to the contrary, I find scant evidence of a reliance on evolution in Eliot’s thinking, although she later developed ideas in keeping with the social evolutionism that became prominent in the emergent social sciences in later decades (see below, in Chapter 10). Her remarks on the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) mix appreciation (it “makes an epoch” [Letters III, 214]) and chilly reception: “it is not impressive, from want of luminous and orderly presentation” (Journals, p. 82).

CHAPTER

4

1. In Hans Mayer, Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters, trans. D. M. Sweet (Cambridge and London, 1982 [1975]), the literary tradition extends from Prometheus and Antigone through Don Quixote and Don Juan to Captain Ahab and Henry Miller. 2. The former was published in Fraser’s Magazine 51 (June 1855), 699–706, and reprinted in Essays, pp. 83–95; the latter was published in Fraser’s Magazine 52 (July 1855), 48–62, and reprinted in Essays, pp. 96–122. 3. It has been published in recent years: Thomas Deegan, ed. (Salzburg, 1981). The translation has been studied in Dorothy Atkins, George Eliot and Spinoza (Salzburg, 1978). 4. It is worth noting, in light of many misapprehensions, that this move, the basis of the Ethics’s metaphysics, constitutes philosophic monism, obviating the differences between idealism and materialism, and quite distinct from the varied religious perspectives called “pantheism,” in which a spirit pervading nature is an object of worship. 5. See also Strauss’s Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York, 1965 [1930]).

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6. The rather loose formulations of Spinoza on this point by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio are given a stricter philosophical form in Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford, 2005). 7. Elizabeth D. Ermarth’s view that The Essence of Christianity, along with Spinoza’s Ethics, serves as an introduction to Eliot’s concept of human freedom – George Eliot (Boston, 1985), ch. 2 – is apt in that both works were important to her without being sources of her specific ideas. I would quibble with Ermarth’s taking Spinoza’s non-purposive or non-directional universe as warrant for equanimity or passivity – perhaps for Spinoza but not for Eliot. On the relation between such acceptance and the equally powerful imperative of resistance, see the discussion of her “Notes on the Spanish Gypsy” in Chapter 6. 8. A paperback edition of Eliot’s translation has been issued (New York, Evanston and London, 1957); citations are given parenthetically in text. 9. She also read Feuerbach’s Das Wesen der Religion (1845) – translated by Ralph Manheim as Lectures on the Essence of Religion (New York, 1967) – without comment other than to say that it contained “the same fundamental ideas as the ‘Wesen des Christenthums’” (Letters II, 144); the variation in spelling of the last word is permissible. 10. Feuerbach’s anti-Semitism may not be decisively dismissed as a point of disagreement with Eliot at this stage, given the sharp things she said about Jews earlier in life, and given her approval of Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect, in which Old Testament religion figures as a primitive form before later developments, but both her sense of the classics and her empirical spirit could not have opened fully to the extravagant claims for science’s exclusive debt to polytheism. 11. For full bibliographical details and the references to these works in the Eliot sources, see Anthony McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters (Salzburg, 1982), an admirable work of bibliographical research. To select the German works she read, saw or reviewed in the period 1854–57, I have used my Reading List. 12. Wilhelm Meister (1795–96) is usually considered the foundation of this genre, despite the earlier appearance of Christoph M. Wieland’s Agathon (1767). Comparable English works like Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) begin even earlier, but develop from a different literary tradition. 13. Quoted in Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton, 1977). p. 17. The quotation from Hegel’s Aesthetics that follows is from p. 20 of this work. 14. Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford (London, Toronto and New York, 1930 [1836–37]), p. 84; June 10, 1823. 15. According to Caroline Bray’s diary, cited in McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters, under his rubric as E322. 16. The Leader 6 (July 21), 703; reprinted in Essays, pp. 144–47; citations will be given parenthetically in text. 17. Quoted in Swales, The German Bildungsroman, pp. 20–21. The citations to Swales below will be given parenthetically in text.


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18. WR 65 (Jan. 1856), 1–33; reprinted in Essays, pp. 217–54. Citations of the latter will be given parenthetically in text. 19. Another aspect of the racialist thinking displayed in this essay comes with her reference to Heine’s tragedy, Almansor: “The tragic collision lies in the conflict between natural affection and the deadly hatred of religion and of race – in the sacrifice of youthful lovers to the strife between Moor and Spaniard, Moslem and Christian” (p. 229). The relationship of this work to Eliot’s closet drama, The Spanish Gypsy, has not to my knowledge been explored. 20. Full disclosure: Eliot also wrote three brief reviews on or of Heine, more in the nature of reviews than the discursive “German Wit” in the Westminster Review. These are: “Heine’s Poems,” The Leader 6 (Sept. 1, 1855), 843–44 (reprinted in Notebook, pp. 256–57), reviewing a translation of the Reisebilder – Pictures of Travel, which anticipates the “witty German” and “Hebrew … German” paradoxes; “Heine’s Book of Songs,” Saturday Review 1 (April 26, 1856), 523–24 (reprinted in Notebook, pp. 268–71), reviewing a translation of the Liederbuch, and opening with a comparison of the collection and Tennyson’s In Memoriam; and “Recollections of Heine,” The Leader 7 (Aug. 23, 1856), 811–12, reviewing a reminiscence by Alfred Meissner, in which Heine is quoted on the subject of Jews: “they appear to me at once ridiculous and venerable … ” – ideas that will attain modification and amplification in Eliot’s last novel. 21. Vol. 6 (June 16, 1855), 578–79; reprinted in Notebook, pp. 249–52. There are also remarks on comedy in her review of Saint-Marc Girardin’s Cours de littérature dramatique (1855) in The Leader 6 (Aug. 25, 1855), 820–21; reprinted in Notebook, pp. 253–59. 22. The Leader 7 (March 29, 1856), 306; reprinted in Essays, pp. 261–65. Citations of the latter will be given parenthetically in text. 23. For a convenient collection of his writings on this score, see Hegel on Tragedy, ed. Anne and Henry Paolucci (Garden City, NY, 1962); the passages are taken from the Philosophy of Fine Art, the Phenomenology of Mind, the Philosophy of History, etc. 24. For an account of Böckh that relates him to Schleiermacher rather than to Hegel, see The Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York, 2002), p. 132, followed by a selection from Böckh’s theories of interpretation and criticism. For his career as a historian and his Papierkrieg with Hermann, see G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (Boston, 1959 [1913]), pp. 28ff. 25. The great Russians were Eliot’s only contemporaries in this field; she could not as yet know Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Russian not being one of her languages, though she read numerous novels by Turgeniev in French translation. After Conrad, the tragic novel remained rare in England, with only Graham Greene showing an aptitude for it. It became, however, a strong tradition in German fiction – Fontane, Thomas Mann, Broch and perhaps Hesse may be mentioned. 26. WR 66 (July 1856), 51–79; reprinted in Essays, pp. 267–99; citations will be given parenthetically in text. 27. This information and what follows is derived from David J. Diephouse, the editor and translator of The Natural History of the German People (Lewiston,

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ME, Queenston, Canada, and Lampeter, UK, n.d.), esp. pp. 12–13. There is also a relatively new edition of Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft, ed. Peter Steinbach (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna, 1976). 28. Gerhard Loose, “The Peasant in Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl’s Sociological and Novelistic Writings: A Contribution to the Problem of Primitivism,” Germanic Review 15 (1940), 263–72, examines Riehl’s own efforts in fiction, according him “priority in the field of the kulturhistorische Novelle” (p. 269), and distinguishing him from the writers of Dorfgeschichten (village stories) on the basis of his resistance to “literary provincialism” (p. 268). Eliot, on the other hand, had a taste for at least one among the latter school, Berthold Auerbach, whom she not only read extensively but adapted-translated in one of her Leader pieces, “A Tragic Story” (July 19, 1856), p. 691. 29. The presently considered section continues to p. 286; there is a similar treatment of Land und Leute, pp. 291–94, followed by a return to Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft, according to this practice. 30. It is precisely here that she rather lamely excuses the lack of punctuation for her quotations: “in our statement of Riehl’s opinions, we must be understood not as quoting Riehl, but as interpreting and illustrating him” (p. 287n.). She also takes him to be without “party prepossessions” (p. 286) and his opinions to be of a “thoroughly philosophical kind” (p. 287). 31. I quote the Introduction to Positive Philosophy, ed. Frederick Ferre (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1988), which translates the first chapters of the Cours, pp. 42–43, with further quotations from p. 43. 32. For a convenient summary of this tradition, see the article in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York, 1973 [1968]), IV, s.v. “Volksgeist.” 33. New York, 1964, pp. 19–24; citations given parenthetically in text. The issue is also ably discussed in Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (New York and Oxford, 1994), pp. 50ff. 34. This assessment of her organicist metaphors runs counter to a long line of Eliot studies, of which the fullest and best informed is Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1984), where organicism is placed in dialectical relation with modern progress by applying Ferdinand Tönnies’s well-known dichotomy of Gemeinschaft (traditional, agricultural, communal) societies and Gesellschaft (urban, industrial, individualist) ones – a plausible but anachronistic contextualization.

CHAPTER

5

1. Included in Journals, pp. 289–91; further citations are given parenthetically in text. 2. Agnes Lewes was now fully the mistress of her paramour, Thornton Hunt, Lewes’s erstwhile partner at the Leader, and the new ménage she was a-making with him left her earlier brood in Lewes’s domain.


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3. Cf. “Writing is part of my religion … At the same time I believe that almost all the best books in the world have been written in the hope of getting money for them” (Letters II, 377). As an explanation of the first of these sentences, cf. her “hoping that my writing may succeed and so give value to my life …” (Letters II, 416). Among the alternative ways of telling this story, Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca and London, 1994) stands out in psychological penetration. 4. WR 66 (Oct. 1856), pp. 442–61; reprinted in Essays, pp. 300–24. 5. Those who would discount the importance of these considerations must reckon with (or re-reckon) the periodic and detailed inventories Eliot made of her receipts, from 1855 to the end of her life: summarized in an appendix to Letters VII, 358–64; it adds up, incidentally, to an impressive sum: 64,571 pounds twelve shillings and eight pence for some twenty years’ work (if my calculation is correct – it’s hard to follow her subtotals). 6. These are included in Journals, pp. 262–73 and 276–82. The result of these field trips was the publication of Lewes’s Sea-side Studies in 1858. 7. There are also curious anticipations of novelistic details, for example, “Little Gyp,” a local dog, who accompanied them on their walks (Journals, p. 271) and made his way into Adam Bede. 8. In an omnibus review, “Art and Belles Lettres,” WR 65 (April 1856), 626. For her mixed views on Ruskin, see Letters II, 422. 9. The term as a rubric for a certain kind of late nineteenth-century fiction, is, like all such literary categories, an embattled one; see the second section of Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George J. Becker (Princeton, 1963) for the varieties. 10. Her reading during her research trips was largely devoted to naturalists in this sense of the word, like Philip Gosse (destined to become the goat of Edmund Gosse’s memoir, Father and Son) and David Landsborough (author of A Popular History of British Sea-weeds) – supplemented by more theoretical works like those of Henri Milne-Edwards and A. Quatrefages de Quincy (though she was still poking into the anatomist-phrenologist Franz Gall). 11. She took down a quotation from “Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées” from Scènes de la vie privée in 1854 (Notebooks, p. 6); she read “César Birotteau” from Scènes de la vie parisienne (Journals, p. 63) and referred to Le Curé de Tours in a review in 1856; in later years, she read Père Goriot in 1859 (Journals, p. 81) and Illusions perdus in the early 1870s (an undated item in M Notebooks, p. 279). For an account of his influence, see Walter Kendrick, “Balzac and British Realism: Mid-Victorian Theories of the Novel,” Victorian Studies 20 (1976), 5–24. The Balzacian sweep of his collective titles found its way into Eliot’s title for her set of scenes. 12. Eliot’s version of determinism has been the subject of extensive critical discussion; like other philosophic antinomies, its issues are, ironically, indeterminable. I defer considering Eliot’s stance on science itself until arriving at Middlemarch. 13. In partial compensation, the narration at several points (e.g., xii, 135–36; xiv, 142–43; xvi, 146–47) employs the sophisticated technique of rendering a character’s thought called free indirect style, largely fallen into disuse after Jane

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Austen but revived in modern fiction. See W. Siward Atkins, “Free Indirect Style and the Rhetoric of Sympathy in The Mill on the Floss,” in Perspectives on Self and Community in George Eliot: Dorothea’s Window, ed. Patricia Gately, Dennis Leavens and D. Cole Woodcox (Lewiston, ME, Queenston, Canada, and Lampeter, UK, 1997), pp. 163–95. 14. After serial publication in Blackwood’s, the set was published by Blackwood in 1858, with a satisfactory reception, its notoriety furthered by a contre-temps over the claims of authorship by someone other than the pseudonymous Eliot. 15. See Oliver Lovesey, The Clerical Character in George Eliot’s Fiction (Victoria, Canada, 1991), passim. 16. The writing was begun in 1857 and the work was published serially in 1858–59, appearing as a book in 1859. Its public reception was sensational. 17. The Wordsworthian element in Eliot’s fiction, especially in Adam Bede, has been set out in U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968) and by others in his wake. 18. This edition includes the sensational reports of the child-murder case said to be Eliot’s source, as well as discussion of “my aunt’s story,” the reminiscence by her Methodist preacher aunt of ministering to a child-murderess in prison. See also Cunningham’s Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 1975), pp. 147–71, for fuller detail on these source materials. 19. An approach to which I have myself contributed in Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983). 20. Starting from another point of view, Margaret Homans, “Dinah’s Blush, Maggie’s Arm: Class, Gender and Sexuality in George Eliot’s Early Novels,” Victorian Studies 36 (1993), 155–78, treats class relations in both novels with acumen. 21. Eliot had heard the oratorio performed on two occasions, and herself sang parts of it with the Brays. 22. These musical tropes are taken up in two books on Eliot’s lifelong love, performance and literary use of music: Beryl Gray, George Eliot and Music (New York, 1989) and Delia da Sousa Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (Houndsmills and New York, 2003). 23. Literary Monographs I (1967), 165–200, 312–14; citations to be made in text. Carroll expanded his view of the work in George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations: A Reading of the Novels (Cambridge, 1992). CHAPTER

6

1. The full record of Eliot’s art appreciation and appropriation is Hugh Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven and London, 1979). 2. For details of these readings, as of the chroniclers to be listed below, see the Reading List, which relies partly on the notebook for Romola edited by Andrew Thompson, “A George Eliot Holograph Notebook: An Edition,”


3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

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George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies 50–51 (2006), 1–109. I have also consulted other notebooks listed in Andrew Brown’s edition of the novel, the Clarendon/World’s Classics (p. 549), whose apparatus provides a guide for research. For a study of the latter novel’s relation to her work, see Hugh Witemeyer, “George Eliot’s Romola and Bulwer Lytton’s Rienzi,” Studies in the Novel 15 (1983), 62–73. The broader influence of Italian literature is surveyed in Andrew Thompson, George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento (London and New York, 1998). Again, I propose the Reading List for further details, s.v., Ammirato, Biono, Bistici, Corniani, Dati, Giambullini, Giannotti, Guicciardini, Lasca, Lastri, Litta, Manni, Marchese, Muratori, Nardi, Nerli, Paulus Jovius, Pitti, Quadri, Rinuccini, Rossi, Stefani, Tiraboschi, Varchi and Villani. A few of these histories are conveniently excerpted in Images of Quattrocento Florence, ed. Stefano U. Baldassarri and Arielle Saiber (New Haven and London, 2000). Insightful remarks on many of them are to be found in Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge, 1997). But the fullest summary of them I know is by Eliot’s friend, Thomas A. Trollope (brother of the novelist), in an appendix to his biography, The Girlhood of Catherine de’ Medici (London, 1856), which Eliot reviewed in “History, Biography, Voyages and Travel,” WR 67 (Jan. 1857), 288–306. “Villari’s Life and Times of Savonarola: A Source for George Eliot’s Romola,” Anglia 90 (1972), 119, further citations are given parenthetically in text. Villari’s work was translated by his daughter, Linda (London, 1899), and has recently been reissued. For a comprehensive survey of writings on the subject, see Ronald M. Steinberg, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, Florentine Art, and Renaissance Historiography (Athens, OH, 1977). Eliot’s decision to focus on the Frate may seem outré, but he was a subject of interest to her English contemporaries, for example, Walter Savage Landor created a dialogue between him and a fellow prior (first published in 1860 and included in Imaginary Conversations). Oxford, 1994; the quotation below is from pp. 209–10. Bullen’s treatment of the novel here is broader than in an earlier article, “George Eliot’s Romola as a Positivist Allegory,” Review of English Studies 26 n.s. (1975), 425–35, which suffers the failings of all allegorical interpretation of novelistic fiction. A valuable part of the book’s chapter is its discussion of the Catholic and Protestant views of Savonarola in the works Eliot read; Bullen’s conclusion is that their influence was nil, since her portrayal lacks the ideological features they assign to him. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, p. 529. This remarkable world history of historiography, covering a limited period, to be sure, remains the best – the only? – work in its field. For Burckhardt’s current standing in historiography, see Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 2006 [1995]), which accepts most of the criticisms of his approach yet retains him as central to the study of the subject.

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9. For aspects of the novel not considered in the present study, see a valuable collection of essays, From Author to Text: Re-reading George Eliot’s Romola, ed. Caroline Levine and Mark W. Turner (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT, 1998). I, too, have considered the novel from a critical perspective, in The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore and London, 1971). 10. Vol. I (May 15, 1865), 43–55; reprinted in Essays, pp. 397–414 – one of her few exercises in the review-essay after her years of drudgery in the genre. Citations of the Essay version are given parenthetically in text. Lecky is also the author of other massive works, the History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869) and History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1878–90). 11. Cf. Lewes’s “Buckle’s Scientific Errors,” Blackwood’s 90 (Nov. 1861), 436–42. Nevertheless, Buckle may have been right about our life-patterns, if not their ability to dispel superstition. 12. “The Study of History,” Cornhill 4 (July 1861), 25–41. In the process she clarified her attitudes to Positivism and the Positivist: she regarded the former as “one-sided; but Comte was a great thinker” (Letters III, 439). 13. The timing of this event is confused by the insertion of a paragraph on the regular November 13 meetings of the Platonic Academy with which Rucellai was associated; Eliot’s effort to add background material caused this digression and resulting confusion. 14. For the allegorical aspect of this choice, Romola’s disavowal of association with the myth of Bacchus and Ariadne on a painted tabernacle, in favor of the crucifix which she hangs around her neck (p. 311), see Felicia Bonaparte, The Triptych and the Cross, pp. 82ff. et passim. 15. Cross III, 34–40; citations given parenthetically in text. 16. The list of such readers ranges from Frederic Harrison, her friend and persistent proselyte for Positivism – along with his associates, Richard Congreve and John Morley – to learned historians like Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, who finds it a tract for racial identity and nationalism pure and simple, and critics like Brenda McKay, George Eliot and Victorian Attitudes, who offers a more complicated view but retains the focus on racial heritage. 17. The attribution has recently been confirmed after restoration work on the painting. Eliot was undoubtedly correct in recalling that it was this beautiful work in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco that fired her imagination, yet she may not have recalled the impression made on her by a far greater image of the biblical scene: Tintoretto’s enormous Annunciation elsewhere in the building, in which the Virgin is seated in a humble, indeed decaying space to receive the Word of the angel, the dove of the Holy Ghost and a swarm of cherubs – the invasion of the heavenly into the earthly realm being here dramatized as never before or since. The locus classicus of the Virgin’s difficult challenge is a painting Eliot must have seen at the Uffizi in Florence, Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi’s Annunciation, in which the woman’s facial expression and body language show her as anything but pleased by the honor conferred. The Titian painting’s relation to the play is discussed in James Krasner,


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“‘Where no man praised’: The Retreat from Fame in George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy,” Victorian Poetry 32/1 (1994), 55–73; but the comparison of the painting with Tintoretto’s works in the Scuola omits his great Annunciation. 18. On heredity as potentiality and as inclination, see Felicia Bonaparte, Will and Destiny: Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot’s Novels (New York, 1975), pp. 62ff., and on tragedy passim. 19. Recent studies of the history of nationalism have made this view widespread in cultural studies, though it has not as yet become prevalent in discussions of race. 20. The Spanish Gypsy by George Eliot, ed. Antonie G. van den Broek (consulting ed. William Baker) (London, 2008), Book I, p. 83, ll. 2272–78. Citations will be to this, the very welcome modern edition, and will be parenthetical in text. The volume also contains the “Notes on the Spanish Gypsy” quoted above, as well as Eliot’s notes on Gipsies, Spain and the Inquisition from various sources. 21. University Park, Pa., 2004; citations to be made parenthetically in text. 22. The gipsy revolution is doomed from the outset; even before embarking on their African adventure, Zarca’s – now Fedalma’s – 500 followers find their ranks decimated: “Already Hassan and two bands, / Drawn by fresh baits of gain, had newly sold / Their service to the Moors …” (Book V, p. 255, ll. 90–92). 23. Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, p. 117. Sephardo is rather more interesting than Zarca as a racialist ideologue, but his doctrine comes hedged about with his astrological and alchemical lore (Book II, p. 146, l. 801) – he even casts Silva’s horoscope, which the latter rejects (Book II, p. 148, stage directions) – pointing up its archaic aspect. 24. Pall Mall Gazette 1 (March 7, 1865), 201; reprinted in Essays, pp. 386–90; citations are given parenthetically in text.

CHAPTER

7

1. The rhetoric here, along with the heightened emotion, recalls that of Carlyle’s “Gospel of Mammonism” in Past and Present (1843), which Eliot was apparently acquainted with (Letters II, 415) though she doesn’t record reading it. 2. The historian Lord Acton is quoted in a note as holding Eliot’s attitude toward Mazzini a “grave delinquency … a criminal matter” – not an uncharacteristic sentiment at the time. 3. She was rereading the Political Economy (Journals, p. 124), and read On Liberty (Journals, p. 126) and Considerations on Representative Government (Letters IV, 232), as well as his article(s?) on Comte – in the month after inscribing, “I have begun a novel,” i.e., Felix Holt (Journals, p. 124). 4. Vol. 3 (Jan. 1, 1866), 477–503. Lewes had by this time resigned his editorship, in favor of the quasi-positivist John Morley. 5. The actual course of worker self-education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been brilliantly established in Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London, 2001). Working with

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6. 7. 8.

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10. 11.


materials scarcely considered by other historians, with the addition of datacollection schemes of his own devising, Rose assembles the evidence of nearly 2,000 autobiographies of “ordinary people.” The result is to provide answers to such questions as: how did they educate themselves?, what was the quality of their education?, who were their intellectual leaders?, what did they read?, what role did music, art, etc. play in their lives? Rose’s conclusion is that they didn’t emulate middle-class values, as inculcated by their “betters,” and tended to be radical in politics and trade-union organization – both outcomes a bitter pill for the intellectuals who sought to direct them. This approach opens a new direction for research in intellectual history. Kent, Brains and Numbers; citations will be given parenthetically in text. For the distinction between these terms, I rely on Max Weber’s essay, “Politics as a Vocation,” many times reprinted. For an account of the legislative process by which the Reform Bill came to be passed – including the (in)famous “Ten Minutes Bill” version – see Robert Blake, Disraeli (Garden City, NY, 1968 [1967]), ch. 21. It should be enough to dissuade intellectuals from entering politics, while it enforces the notion of progress through inadvertence. I follow Martha Salmon Vogeler’s “Matthew Arnold and Frederic Harrison: The Prophet of Culture and the Prophet of Positivism,” Studies in English Literature 2 (1962), 441–62, for the stages of their Papierkrieg. See also Vogeler’s edition of Harrison’s Order and Progress (Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck, NJ, 1975 [1875]). Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1965 [1869]), pp. 134, 117; subsequent citations are given parenthetically in text. Recent literary scholars have performed a salutary role in seeing through to the ideological bases of this and related contentions, though some are apt, when hearing the word “culture,” to reach for their theoretical weaponry. Thus Daniel Cottom’s Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis, 1987) places some of the writers described above in a category of “liberal intellectual”: “the social figure who takes the ideal of intellectual discourse to be the reality of society” (p. xxi). Unfortunately, lack or misuse of historical context for these observations works against their often penetrating critique. Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago and London, 1985) claims that “John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold directly inspired George Eliot’s political fiction of the 1860s, and Felix Holt’s formal anomalies and achievements can only be understood with reference to their contributions to the theory of representation” (p. 228), but the vagaries of the theory of representation educed are not those that intentionally or directly animated these worthies. For a less theoretical but more apt detection of disjunctions in the novel, here among its plot connections, see Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca and London, 1988), pp. 207ff.


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12. The letters in which she evasively responds to these appeals have been well examined in feminist writings and need not be rehearsed here. The most comprehensive statement of her position is to Emily Davies, a founder of Girton College, Cambridge (Letters IV, 467–68). 13. I quote, and cite parenthetically in text, the Clarendon/World’s Classics edition – but there is a serious distortion in my copy of the latter version: eleven lines of text correctly placed on p. 370 have also been inserted on p. 369, replacing another eleven lines that should be there; one trusts that this has been corrected in later printings. 14. Thomson has, however, performed yeoman service in two articles: “The Genesis of Felix Holt,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 74 (1959), 576–84, provides the gist of Eliot’s notebook in preparation for writing (which has come to be known as “Quarry for Felix Holt”); and in “The Legal Plot in Felix Holt,” Studies in English Literature 7 (1967), 691–704, he has done as much as can be done to render the subject intelligible. 15. There is also a strange suggestion that he may have done away with her upon returning with her to England: “Harold preferred a slow-witted large-eyed woman, silent and affectionate, with a load of black hair weighing much more heavily than her brains. He had seen no such woman in England, except one whom he had brought with him from the East” (xxxvi, 290). Even without a murder, the terms for the taste ascribed to him are sufficiently repugnant. 16. Blackwood’s 103 (Jan. 1868), 1–11; reprinted in Essays, pp. 415–30; citations, from the latter, are given parenthetically in text. 17. Though the association of the essay/speech with a novel by George Eliot would seem to reveal its author, this remained ambiguous: implied attributions to others had been made on publication of Scenes of Clerical Life, orally by one, Liggins, and in print by the prospective publisher of a sequel. Moreover, the style employed in the essay differs markedly from that of the novel’s hero. 18. By making the analogy between material and cultural inheritance, Eliot anticipates the concept of cultural capital developed by the twentieth-century sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. 19. Pall Mall Gazette 1 (March 17, 1865), 310–11; reprinted in Essays, pp. 391–96. CHAPTER

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1. The notebooks in which she kept extracts for this project have been designated above as M Notebooks. There is also an edition of a notebook in which she made sketches and plans for the novel: Anna T. Kitchel, ed., Quarry for Middlemarch (Berkeley, Calif., 1950). 2. This essay, in another notebook, was first published in Essays, pp. 431–36; citations will be given parenthetically in text. This notebook also contains an essay, “Versification,” connected to the poems she was writing at the time – some of which are also included there. I omit discussion of these short and medium-length poems, as they seem off the main line of Eliot’s intellectual

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4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

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development. Exceptions are “A Minor Prophet,” quoted in the Introduction above, and “A College Breakfast-Party,” to be discussed in Chapter 10. The poems were published in The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874; expanded edn in 1878). Among numerous studies of Spencer and Lewes in relation to Eliot, the work that makes greatest effort to bring them to bear on her esthetics is Peter A. Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison, Wisc., and London, 1989), pp. 77ff. et passim. Eliot’s terminology and emphases in her esthetics are closer to Spencer’s and Lewes’s biologism than to Coleridge and his German sources, as I shall instance below. The clearest exposition of Spencer’s biologism I have found is Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories. As explained in Reading List (which see for further details on the items listed below), although the works excerpted in her notebooks would seem to follow each other more or less in the order of her reading, it is usually not possible to determine the date of reading. I therefore take the items in M Notebooks for 1869–72, the years of her preparation for and writing of Middlemarch, as a group, irrespective of precise date. Items in the D Notebooks that may have been read as early as these years are included in the same grouping. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, 1986 [1984]); Making It Whole (Columbus, OH, 1984). References to these works will be by the author’s name, to be made parenthetically in text. A fuller statement of Godel’s “incompleteness theorem” runs: “The complete set of mathematical truths will never be captured by any finite or recursive list of axioms that is fully formal”: Palle Yourgrau, A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein (New York, 2005), p. 3. There is a second incompleteness theorem, into which I shall not enter. These conceptual and methodological errors, as I take them to be, do not affect the astute discussions of Eliot’s novels in Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science. A subject pursued in Mark Wormald, “Microscopy and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50 (1996), 501–24. Thomas S. Hall, History of General Physiology: 600 BC to AD 1900 (Chicago and London, 1969), II, 121; further citations are given parenthetically in text. Another helpful account of this research is: John A. Moore, Science as a Way of Knowing: The Foundations of Modern Biology (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1993), ch. 12. The issue of inductive method is a much labored one in the history of science: see Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination (Madison, Wisc., and London, 1994). Much of the Victorian controversy was caused by setting up Bacon’s inadequate idea of induction as the standard one, and one to be repudiated. But with Mill’s entry into the field, the storm abated and induction remains part of what Mill called the hypothetico-deductive method.


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11. The “super-organic” concept in Eliot must be distinguished from its later use by Émile Durkheim in sociology, by A. L. Kroeber in anthropology and by E. O. Wilson in sociobiology, for these omit the organic nature of the individuals (except in the biological sense) of whom the social whole is composed. 12. Bernard Paris, in Experiments in Life, makes the point explicitly: “The positivists depicted society as an evolving organism composed of interacting organs which are themselves organisms” (p. 42); but neither he nor the Positivists develop the idea in its political consequences or relevance to art. 13. I believe these claims can withstand the skeptical approach in articles by J. Hillis Miller and other deconstructionist critics, which vividly point out textual aporias, but without fundamentally disturbing the novel’s unity. For an excellent discussion of this approach, see Suzy Anger, “George Eliot and Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. George Levine (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 76–97. 14. In addition to reading his basic work, Primitive Culture, in 1872, she went on to read his Researches into the Early History of Mankind in 1874 (Letters VI, 90). 15. Maine’s achievement as a social scientist has become the object of close attention among historians of ideas, as in the essays collected in The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: A Centennial Reappraisal, ed. Alan Diamond (Cambridge, 1991). For an incisive account of Maine’s thought, see J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1966), ch. 5; the accounts of Tylor and Spencer that follow are equally rewarding. 16. Nineteenth Century 2 (Dec. 1877); these are quoted in Some George Eliot Notebooks: An Edition of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library’s George Eliot Holograph Notebooks, MSS 707, 708, 710, 711, 4vv., ed. William Baker (Salzburg, 1976–85); the references may be checked through the index to vol. IV. 17. Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” or its development in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York, 1968 [1957]), pp. 163–86. In this context, it is possible to see Ladislaw as a hypercritical eiron-figure: “the dramatist tends to play him down and make him rather neutral and unformed in character” (p. 173) – a partial explanation of the dissatisfaction with him some readers have expressed. In the 1850s Eliot read a number of critical works on classical comedy, as mentioned above. 18. For a typology of the Romantic forms of ambivalence toward social change, see Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC, and London, 2001), pp. 57–83. The characterization of “Reformist Romanticism” there could aptly be applied to Brooke: it is “convinced that the old values could come back. However, the measures reformist Romantics advocated to reach that goal were limited to … legal reforms [and] an evolution of the consciousness of the ruling classes. In this type of Romanticism, we thus often find a striking contrast between the radicalism of the critique and the timidity of the solutions imagined” (p. 71).

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19. The familiar mislabeling of Low Church sectarians as “Evangelical” rather than “evangelical” occurs among the Middlemarchers: Bulstrode’s moral bullying is “attributed by some to his being a Pharisee, and by others to his being Evangelical” (xiii, 122). 20. That much of the action takes place not in town but at the country homes of the principal characters – Chettam’s Freshitt Hall, Brooke’s Tipton Grange, Casaubon’s Lowick Manor, Featherstone’s and later Bulstrode’s Stone Court – doesn’t detract from the novel’s urban character, particularly as at least some of these residences are within easy walking distance of town, as Dorothea shows on at least one occasion. 21. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 309. While this concentration is clearly present in English fictions from Swift to Peacock, it is diluted by vast stores of other kinds of information in satires from Rabelais to John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy. Hence a preference for the term “anatomy,” derived from Robert Burton’s title, The Anatomy of Melancholy, “a dissection or analysis, [which] expresses very accurately the intellectualized approach of his form” (p. 311). 22. Part II, Act I, scene xxviii (of the combined drama), ll. 4681–85; I have kept Eliot’s version of the text in order to convey her italicization of the final line. A literal translation might run: You, too, Earth, were present on this night / And, newly refreshed, breathe beneath my feet, / [You] already begin to surround me with Joy; / You stir and move a powerful resolution: / always to strive for the highest [level of] Being. 23. I quote the notes of the edition by R.-M. S. Heffner, Helmut Rehder and W. F. Twaddell (Madison, Wisc., 1975 [1950]), vol. II, unpaginated. 24. Brooke enjoys teasing her with the threat of making her nephew his heir, until her brother-in-law Chettam flatly rejects the suggestion. 25. A bundle of recently discovered and still unpublished Eliot letters to Jane Senior (daughter-in-law of the redoubtable Nassau Senior, workhouse reformer) is discussed in Barbara Hardy, George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (London and New York, 2006), pp. 118ff., prompting the critic to see her as “prompt, not prototype” for Dorothea (p. 130). Perhaps the most significant overtone of the relationship, beyond Eliot’s interest in Mrs. Senior’s evident high-mindedness and public service in writing a parliamentary report, “Education of Girls in Pauper Schools” (1874), is the failure of her criticism of the system and suggestions for improvement to escape hostile reception – yet another disappointment of the idealistic reformer. CHAPTER

9

1. F. R. Leavis famously had no compunction in labeling these parts the “good half” and the “bad half”: “George Eliot (IV): Daniel Deronda and The Portrait of a Lady,” Scrutiny (Dec. 1946), 102; incorporated in The Great Tradition (London, 1948) and reprinted in George Eliot: Critical Assessments, ed. Stuart Hutchinson, 2vv. (Mountfield near Robertsbridge, UK, 1996), II, 187. This view led to the suggestion, apparently seriously intended, that the English half might


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3. 4. 5. 6.

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be rescued from the Jewish and printed separately. (Leavis also found this, on the whole, anti-English novel quintessentially English.) Subsequent discussion of the novel divides into two phases: in the first, predominantly English critics focused on the English part; in the second, predominantly American critics focused on the Jewish part. Neither of these approaches is, for obvious reasons, any better than Leavis’s. To avoid acceding to Leavis’s idea that the novel breaks into two parts, whether or not a good and a bad one, I shall use the terms “English milieu” and “Jewish milieu.” Cambridge, 1996. This is an edition of the Berg Collection notebook in the New York Public Library and of three of the notebooks in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, New York. While William Baker’s edition of the full Pforzheimer set (Some George Eliot Notebooks) may be more useful in dealing with Middlemarch, it is appropriate to switch to Irwin’s edition for Daniel Deronda, as it organizes the Jewish material thematically for that novel. She read several others by this team. A minor character in Daniel Deronda reads Erckmann and Chatrian’s anti-war novel, Histoire d’un conscrit, aloud to her family (ch. xviii). Here and elsewhere in this chapter I draw on material from my Fiction and the Ways of Knowing: Essays on British Novels (Austin, Tex., and London, 1978), ch. 7. Edward Dowden, “Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda,” Contemporary Review 29 (1877), 348–69; reprinted in George Eliot: Critical Assessments, ed. Hutchinson, I, 419. The probable reading of Culture and Anarchy during her research for the novel is borne out by a letter of 1873, which begins, “There was plenty of ‘sweetness and light’ in our country home …” (Letters V, 460–61). The casual way in which she makes this passing reference – she is clearly not stretching for its earlier use in Swift’s “Battle of the Books” – suggests that the phrase and the book in which it is so often repeated had become part of the everyday discourse of her set. The epigraph in question is to ch. xxiii (p. 213), in which the biblical phrase “to cast [one’s] shoe over Edom” is used; its continuation in Psalm 108 runs, “over Edom will I cast my shoe, over Philistia will I triumph.” Complete Prose Works V, 140; further citations will be given parenthetically in text. A work in this tradition, Alexander Bain’s Logic, is quoted in Pforzheimer Notebook 711. The first of W. Stanley Jevons’s three critiques of the theory, “John Stuart Mill’s Philosophy Tested,” Contemporary Review (Dec. 1877), was much discussed in Eliot’s circle; see Letters IX, 211, 217. But Lewes, for one, was pleased with their friend G. C. Robinson’s reply to Jevons, “which is calmly crushing” (loc. cit.). Jevons’s critique, it should be noted, was only a partial modification of utilitarianism and remained within its discourse. It should also be recalled that the closest analyst of and most broadening influence on utilitarian ethics was Mill himself. Many previous Victorian novelists had expressed distaste for greed, selfishness and similar moral failings, but only in Dickens’s Hard Times and the novels of Bulwer-Lytton does this rise to an ethical-philosophic level.

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11. I have outlined the counter-contract political tradition in Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore, 1967), ch. 3. A more authoritative discussion of organicist and related modes of thought is Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, pp. 143ff. et passim. 12. Other aspects of the concept of contract are relevant to the novel, particularly the covenant theology in Jewish and other national traditions; for a reading of this version in deconstructive terms, see Irene Tucker, A Probable State: The Novel, Contract, and the Jews (Chicago and London, 2000). 13. I quote the edition by Nancy Henry (Iowa City, 1994), pp. 164–65. The essay was probably written in 1878; the collection was published in 1879. 14. The distinction between “proto-nationalism” and the full Monty is made in E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1992 [1990]), pp. 64ff., which concludes: “There is no historical continuity whatever between Jewish proto-nationalism and modern Zionism” (p. 76). This is perhaps the last word in the current trend to consider nationalist movements as inventors of the national entities they celebrate and foster. More plausible versions are Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983) and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). 15. Essence of Christianity, p. 113; on Judaism, pp. 112–19. 16. “We owe them religion. The entire world, with the exception of India, China, Japan and entirely savage peoples, has adopted the semitic religions.” I quote Renan’s lecture, De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation (Paris, 1875), p. 28. The exceptions are rather daunting for this grand claim. Beyond noting Eliot’s relation to Renan, Haight adds her reading of another racial theorist, Adolphe Pictet (Haight, p. 469), but I have not been able to confirm this unsupported reference. 17. “George Eliot’s Readings in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Historians: A Note on the Background of ‘Daniel Deronda,’” Victorian Studies 15 (1972), 471, 472. Baker’s George Eliot and Judaism (Salzburg, 1975) is a rich mine on the broader subject. 18. Cecil Roth, A Short History of the Jewish People (London, 1959 [1936]), pp. 407ff. 19. Eliot had in 1860 read Oliphant’s account of accompanying a British imperial venture in Asia, Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan. In my earlier study of Daniel Deronda (Fiction and the Ways of Knowing: Essays on British Novels [Austin, Tex., and London, 1978], pp. 86–109), I made much (as have others) of the similarities between Moses Hess’s and Eliot’s versions of proto-Zionism. I now find the evidence for her contact with Hess’s ideas too thin to lean on. 20. After making this comparison, Eliot goes on to make another, negative one: “Doubtless the wider public of novel-readers must feel more interest in Sidonia than in Mordecai. But then, I was not born to paint Sidonia” (Letters VI, 223). This is one of the rare instances in which Eliot scorns her audience’s taste (along with Disraeli), rather than merely doubting its sympathy. 21. The Art of George Eliot (London, 1963), p. 184.


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22. Daniel Deronda has been compared to The Wings of the Dove in this respect, yet I think it closer to The Tragic Muse with respect to their portraits of singers. Its intertextual relation to The Portrait of a Lady has been thoroughly explored by Leavis in The Great Tradition. James’s responses to Eliot’s novels as they appeared, and especially to Daniel Deronda, have been much commented. 23. On this direct assault upon the audience, see Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore and London, 1996), ch. 11: “Mordecai’s Consumption.” 24. A quite different use than mine of the Cabbalistic material in the novel is made in Saleel Nurbhai and K. M. Newton, George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism (Basingstoke and New York, 2002), which portrays George Eliot’s use of mystical ideas with perhaps excessive enthusiasm. On another Deronda crux, Newton has performed yeoman service (In Defense of Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice [London, 1987], pp. 197–98) with scholarship dispelling the crude inferences of Steven Marcus’s remarkable discovery that Daniel had long overlooked the evidence of his circumcised penis when in quest of his identity. 25. “Earth has not anything to show more fair”: Wordsworth’s sonnet was composed at a nearby bridge but its implication is similar – lighting effects at a framed intersection of water, earth and sky bring about a sense of otherworldly presence. Mine is, of course, a naturalistic explanation. 26. It is not entirely at random that the book Daniel buys from Mordecai at the bookshop he tends is Solomon Maimon’s autobiography, the story of an almost picaresque intellectual who receives similar treatment from Jews in the course of his wanderings. 27. In keeping with his individualistic version of Jewish tradition, he uses texts like his own poetry and the “New Hebrew poetry after the model of Jehuda ha-Levi” (xxxviii, 409). His pedagogic methods also leave something to be desired: when little Jacob frisks during lessons, he roundly curses his generation (xxxviii, 410), sending the child into tears. The educational theory involved is similar to his propaedeutic with Daniel; he reads lines of poetry aloud and has the student repeat after him, on the expectation that “‘The boy will get them engraved within him … My words may rule him some day’” (xxxvii, 408–09). To Jacob this is a “fascinating game of imitating unintelligible words” (xxxvii, 408–09). The word “rule” suggests another aspect of Mordecai’s relation to those whom he influences. 28. Pash’s apparent good sense is now to be seen as in its turn hopelessly naive: “‘with us in Europe the sentiment of nationality is destined to die out … The whole current of progress is setting against it’” (xlii, 448). 29. The differences between Mordecai and Daniel have been ably set out in Amanda Anderson, “George Eliot and the Jewish Question,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10/1 (1997), 39–61 (later taken up in her study of literary cosmopolitanism, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment [Princeton, 2001]). While her views of Mordecai as an organicist thinker and of Daniel as a cosmopolitan are inexact, in my view, they lead to

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worthwhile observations on the resistance the latter offers to the impositions of the former. 30. “‘Daniel Deronda’: George Eliot and Political Change,” in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (New York and London, 1970), pp. 147–49. 31. This aspect of the transmission process has been well described by Robert Preyer: George Eliot “never tired of exhibiting the way ‘influences’ pass across racial, class, age, and sex boundaries, reaching us when we least expect them to, and at the deeper levels of being. She believed that these influences, and what we did with them, were of the first importance. In all this there is nothing especially ‘spiritual’ or ‘magical’”: “Beyond the Liberal Imagination: Vision and Unreality in ‘Daniel Deronda,’” Victorian Studies 4 (1960), 46. 32. An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit, 1989 [1975]), pp. 256–57. 33. Those dissatisfied with the bathos of their final scenes should consider that Eliot might have done worse: an anonymous American novelist wrote a sequel entitled Gwendolen (Boston, 1878), in which Daniel returns from the East, reaffirms Christianity, and marries the girl named in the title; see Robert A. Colby, “An American Sequel to ‘Daniel Deronda,’” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 12 (1957), 231–35. CHAPTER

10

1. William Baker, “A New George Eliot Manuscript,” in George Eliot: Centennial Essays and an Unpublished Fragment, ed. Anne Smith (London and Totowa, NJ, 1980), pp. 9–20, reprints the outline and summarizes it as follows: a “story of misspent youth, a foolish marriage, and a long-lost son standing to inherit much, combined with the espionage, Napoleonic War and Irish themes …” (p. 10). 2. Collini, Absent Minds, pp. 46–47. 3. My usage derives from the original sense of the term in Russian history; an intelligent was simply an educated person, and the intelligentsia was the grouping of such persons. A concept closer to English experience is Coleridge’s idea of a “clerisy” of educated secular people, on the model of the clergy or the educated religious. 4. I have commented on intellectual influence in the cultural sphere in New Class Culture: How an Emergent Class is Transforming America’s Culture (Westport, Conn., and London, 2002). The literature on intellectuals is, of course, voluminous; titles may be sampled from the bibliography of the above-mentioned work. 5. The Academy, 1869–1879: Victorian Intellectuals in Revolt (Copenhagen, 1957); subsequent references are given parenthetically in text. 6. Eliot was still reading the journal, at least occasionally, in 1878 (Letters VII, 3). This was in contrast to her late practice of taking only The Times and The Athenaeum, the latter only for literary advertisements (Letters VII, 165). 7. Mind 1 (Jan. 1876) [the first issue of this now venerable journal], 82–97. 8. This aspect of Eliot’s relation to Pattison seems more important than the frequent speculation on his serving as a model for Casaubon, on the grounds


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that he had written a book on the Renaissance scholar, Isaac Casaubon, and that he had a youngish wife. 9. Quoted in Haight, p. 408. 10. Century Magazine 23 (Nov. 1881), 62–63; quoted in Haight, p. 464. The terms partially echo Kant’s triad of God, freedom and immortality – presuppositions rationally necessary for morality – and deny at least two-thirds of it. On duty, she and Kant were closely aligned. 11. Subtitled Studies in Wordsworth, Channing, Myers, George Eliot and Ruskin (Oxford, 1998), ch. 5: “George Eliot and the Cambridge Ethos.” The references below are to pp. 207–08 and 223–24. 12. This aspect of the relationship is traced in Nancy L. Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender (Princeton, 1991). 13. The debate was over the value of his financial and organizational investment in a would-be conflation of all sociological knowledge, the Descriptive Sociology, reviewed adversely in the journal; her sympathy with his position is stated in Letters VI, 15. She also sided with him in his crossing of swords with the mathematician John F. Moulton (Letters VI, 15, with note on the publishing details of the controversy). 14. The Letters of George Henry Lewes, ed. William Baker (Victoria, Canada, 1999), III, 83; this volume contains a number of George Eliot letters discovered after Haight’s edition. This one is dated February 11, 1875. 15. Complete Shorter Poetry, II, 25–50; citations by line numbers, in text below. Publishing history and references to the letters in which she expressed her intentions for it are found in the editorial headnote. The only extended critical attention the poem has, to my recollection, received is in an article by Bernard J. Paris discussing it in connection with a previously unpublished poem: “George Eliot’s Unpublished Poetry,” Studies in Philology 56 (1959), 554–58. 16. The Priest’s defense of the social and intellectual value of obedience to authority (ll. 175–76) recalls that in Ivan Karamazov’s dream of the Grand Inquisitor; there is no indication that Eliot even knew of Dostoyevsky’s work, but the appearance of The Brothers Karamazov in 1879–80, only a year after the publication of this poem, is preternatural. 17. “George Eliot’s Unpublished Poetry,” pp. 554–55. 18. W. B. Yeats, The Resurrection, final lines. 19. Letters of George Henry Lewes, III, 57; July 14, 1870. 20. Huntington Library Quarterly 29 (1966), 353–76, with the excerpts on pp. 362–76; citations in text below. As with the “Leaves” volume, dating is established by the presence in the notebook of essays to be included in Impressions of Theophrastus Such. 21. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35 (1980), 385–408; the contents of the notebook are given on pp. 387–92; citations are given parenthetically in text. The dating of this notebook is less certain than with the “Leaves” volume but it may be placed in the early 1870s, as Collins effectively shows.

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22. Collins’s note correctly references Max Müller in the last sentence, but his setting up of Tylor as a target of Eliot’s critique depends on catching him in deviations from social evolutionist theory. 23. The issue was discussed in Eliot’s circle during this period: in articles in the first issues of Mind (1876), Alexander Bain considered the possibility of altered natural laws, while Lewes allowed the possibility while maintaining the methodological principle; see Hock Guan Tjoa, George Henry Lewes: A Victorian Mind (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1977), p. 122 and note. 24. The second- or third-century philosophic dialogue, Octavius, an early Christian apologia, is written with urbane Roman intellectual sophistication. The secondcentury Attic Nights fills twenty books with brief essays on language, textual criticism, anecdotes (e.g., of Socrates), antiquarian lore, and notes on manners and morals. The second- or third-century Deipnosophistae, “Sophists at Dinner” or “Connoisseurs in Dining,” takes the Socratic banquet setting of Plato’s Symposium as its model and fills its fifteen books with discourse on food and everything else in ancient Rome. The third-century Diogenes Laertius’s Lives is, of course, a chief source for knowledge of classical philosophers and philosophies. 25. The best available edition is that by Nancy Henry (Iowa City, 1994 [1878]) – although a full textual treatment is called for. The only attempts, to my knowledge, to consider the work as a whole, beyond Henry’s introduction and essays elsewhere, are: G. Robert Stange, “The Voices of the Essayist,” NineteenthCentury Fiction 35 (1980), 312–30; and Andrew H. Miller, “Bruising, Laceration, and Lifelong Maiming; or, How We Encourage Research,” ELH [English Literary History] 70 (2003), 301–18; both essays apply interesting contexts – in the former, the moral essay tradition, in the latter, recent “virtue ethics” philosophy – without centering on the work’s sustained intellectual targets. Henry’s essays include studies of specific aspects of the book: “AnteAnti-Semitism: George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such,” in Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (London, 1996), pp. 65–79; and “George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and Comparative Anatomy,” in George Eliot and Europe, ed. John Rignall (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT, 1997), pp. 44–63. 26. A more specific scholarly fault is taken up regarding the “history of ideas” gambit (she uses that term, too [p. 90]) of ascribing ideas on the basis of “‘He must have known,’ or ‘He must have read.’ I marvel that this facility of belief on the side of knowledge can subsist under the daily demonstration that the easiest of all things to the human mind is not to know and not to read” (p. 92). My own occasional lapses into this kind of attribution are perhaps redeemed by the fact that Eliot is likely to have known and read. 27. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, Calif., 1996 [1992]). 28. Gilbert and Sullivan’s first operetta, Thespis, was produced in 1871; HMS Pinafore dates from 1878 and The Pirates of Penzance from 1879. The confluence of dates is, perhaps, not accidental.


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29. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991). The copious literature on Victorian intellectuals includes Joseph Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven and London, 1965); T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London, New York and Sydney, 1982); and Peter Allen, “The Meanings of ‘An Intellectual’: Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury English Usage,” University of Toronto Quarterly 55 (1986), 342–58. 30. “G. H. Lewes Revised: George Eliot and the Moral Sense,” Victorian Studies 21 (1978), 465; further citations will be given parenthetically in text. 31. For extended discussion of Lewes’s ideas on this score, and for references to their appearance in Problems of Life and Mind, see Tjoa, George Henry Lewes, pp. 97–98, 125–26. 32. Collins draws support for his Kantian interpretation from Eliot’s insertion in Lewes’s text of a sentence from Kant: “Man refuses to violate in his own person the dignity of humanity” (quoted on p. 476 and in context on p. 490). It isn’t clear where or when Eliot came upon this aphorism (from Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [Foundations of the Metaphysic of Morals], as identified by Collins); the only indication that she read Kant comes from a review of translations, including one of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), in 1855 (The Leader 6 [Oct. 20], pp. 1014–15; excerpted in Essays), which shows signs of respect rather than affinity and is largely confined to praise of the translation. 33. Of course, as in the test for witches in her favorite childhood reading of Defoe’s History of the Devil, she is doomed in either case. 34. In Eliot’s time, as it does today, the mix of nature/nurture took various forms: some, like Darwin, posited a number of moral instincts (not the whole of morality), while others, like his supporter in other matters, T. H. Huxley, followed the so-called “veneer” theory, for which morality is an artificial overlay on thoroughly selfish, not to say, predatory, instincts. Mill resolved this crux by arguing, in effect, that the cultural overlay was itself a natural growth. Some formulation of genetics and culture, like that for general intelligence, is the current approach to the ethical sphere among evolutionary biologists, neurologically oriented psychologists, and social anthropologists who have compiled a “human universals” list of values and behaviors. 35. The Victorian Church (New York, 1966–70), II, 120.

Works cited

I have omitted works read by George Eliot; see my “George Eliot’s Reading: A Chronological List” (listed below) for details on these works and her reading of them. PRIMARY TEXTS

(These items are grouped by type, not listed alphabetically) Scenes of Clerical Life. Ed. Thomas A. Noble. Oxford and New York, 1988 (1985). [The Oxford World’s Classics paperback, reprinting the text in the Clarendon Edition. The texts of the novels that follow are also in this series. Dates of first publication are given in the chapters above.] Adam Bede. Ed. Valentine Cunningham. Oxford and New York, 1998 (1996). The Lifted Veil [and] Brother Jacob. Ed. Helen Small. Oxford and New York, 1999. [Unlike the others in the World’s Classics series, this volume does not reprint a Clarendon Edition.] The Mill on the Floss. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. Oxford and New York, 1998 (1980). Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe. Ed. Terence Cave. Oxford and New York, 1998 (1996). Romola. Ed. Andrew Brown. Oxford and New York, 1998 (1994). Felix Holt, the Radical. Ed. Fred C. Thomson. Oxford and New York, 1998 (1980). Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Ed. David Carroll. Oxford and New York, 1998 (1988). Daniel Deronda. Ed. Graham Handley. Oxford and New York, 1998 (1984). Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Ed. Nancy Henry. Iowa City, 1994. The Spanish Gypsy. Ed. Antonie G. van den Broek. Consulting editor William Baker. London, 2008. The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot. 2vv. Ed. Antonie G. van den Broek. Consulting editor William Baker. London, 2005. Paris, Bernard J. “George Eliot’s Unpublished Poetry.” Studies in Philology 56 (1959), 539–58. Essays of George Eliot. Ed. Thomas Pinney. London, 1963. “Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General.” In George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, ed. John W. Cross. 3vv. Edinburgh and London, 1885. Vol. III, pp. 34–40. 282

Works cited

283

Pinney, Thomas. “More Leaves from George Eliot’s Notebook.” Huntington Library Quarterly 29 (1966), 353–76. Collins, K. K. “Questions of Method: Some Unpublished Late Essays.” NineteenthCentury Fiction 35 (1980), 385–405. George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879 and Uncollected Writings. Ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth. Charlottesville, Va., 1981. Some George Eliot Notebooks: An Edition of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library’s George Eliot Holograph Notebooks. 4vv. Ed. William Baker. Salzburg Studies in English Literature 46. Salzburg, 1976–85. George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks: A Transcription. Ed. John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1979. Quarry for Middlemarch. Ed. Anna T. Kitchel. Berkeley, 1950. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks. Ed. Jane Irwin. Cambridge, 1996. Thompson, Andrew, ed. “A George Eliot Holograph Notebook: An Edition,” George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies 50–51 (2006), 1–109. Baker, William. “A New George Eliot Manuscript.” In George Eliot: Centennial Essays and an Unpublished Fragment. Ed. Anne Smith. London and Totowa, NJ, 1980. Pp. 9–20. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. 9vv. New Haven and London, 1954–78. The Letters of George Henry Lewes. 3vv. and forthcoming. Ed. William Baker. Victoria, Canada, 1995–. The Journals of George Eliot. Ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston. Cambridge, 1998. Strauss, David Friedrich. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Trans. George Eliot. Ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Philadelphia, 1972. Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Trans. George Eliot. New York, Evanston, Ill., and London, 1957. Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics. Trans. George Eliot. Ed. Thomas Deegan. Salzburg Studies in English Literature 102. Salzburg, 1981.

BIOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashton, Rosemary. 142 The Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London. London, 2006. Baker, William. The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of Their Books at Dr. Williams’s Library, London. New York and London, 1977. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction. Ithaca and London, 1994. Dodd, Valerie A. George Eliot: An Intellectual Life. London, 1990. Fleishman, Avrom. “George Eliot’s Reading: A Chronological List.” George Eliot– George Henry Lewes Studies 54–55 (2008), 1–106. Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot: A Biography. New York and Oxford, 1968.

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Works cited

Hardy, Barbara. George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography. London and New York, 2006. McCobb, Anthony. George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters. Salzburg Studies in English Literature 102:2. Salzburg, 1982. Nadel, Ira B. “George Eliot and Her Biographers.” In George Eliot: A Centenary Tribute. Ed. Gordon S. Haight and Rosemary T. Van Arsdel. Totowa, NJ, 1982. Pp. 107–21.

CRITICISM

(BOOKS)

Atkins, Dorothy. George Eliot and Spinoza. Salzburg Studies in English Literature 78. Salzburg, 1978. Baker, William. George Eliot and Judaism. Salzburg Studies in English Literature 45. Salzburg, 1975. Beaty, Jerome. Middlemarch from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot’s Creative Method. Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 47. Urbana, Ill., 1960. Beer, John. Providence and Love: Studies in Wordsworth, Channing, Myers, George Eliot, and Ruskin. Oxford, 1998. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction. Ithaca and London, 1988. Bonaparte, Felicia. The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination. New York, 1979. Will and Destiny: Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot’s Novels. New York, 1975. Carpenter, Mary Wilson. George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and Protestant Apocalyptic History. Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1986. Carroll, David. George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations: A Reading of the Novels. Cambridge, 1992. Charnon-Deutsch, Lou. The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession. University Park, Pa., 2004. Correa, Delia da Sousa. George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture. Houndsmills and New York, 2003. Cottom, Daniel. Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation. Minneapolis, 1987. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. George Eliot. Boston, 1985. Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867. Chicago and London, 1985. Graver, Suzanne. George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1984. Gray, Beryl. George Eliot and Music. New York, 1989. Harvey, W. J. The Art of George Eliot. London, 1963 (1961). Hodgson, Peter C. Theology in the Fiction of George Eliot: The Mystery Behind the Real. London, 2001.

Works cited

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Hutchinson, Stuart, ed. George Eliot: Critical Assessments. 4vv. Mountfield near Robertsbridge, UK, 1996. Kaufmann, David. George Eliot and Judaism: An Attempt to Appreciate “Daniel Deronda.” Trans. J. W. Ferrier. Edinburgh and London, 1978. Knoepflmacher, U. C. George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968. Religious Humanism in the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler. Princeton, 1965. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. Garden City, NY, 1954 (1948). [Another version of the George Eliot chapter is in Hutchinson, above.] Levine, Caroline and Mark W. Turner, eds. From Author to Text: Re-reading George Eliot’s Romola. Aldershot, 1998. Lovesey, Oliver. The Clerical Character in George Eliot’s Fiction. ELS Monograph Series 53. Victoria, Canada, 1991. McKay, Brenda. George Eliot and Victorian Attitudes to Racial Diversity, Colonialism, Darwinism, Class, Gender and Jewish Culture and Prophesy. Lewiston, ME, Queenston, Canada, and Lampeter, UK, 2003. McSweeney, Kerry. Middlemarch. London, Boston and Sydney, 1984. Myers, William. The Teaching of George Eliot. N.p. [Leicester], 1984. Newton, K. M. George Eliot: Romantic Humanist: A Study of the Philosophical Structure of Her Novels. Totowa, NJ, 1981. In Defence of Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice. London, 1987. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. In Walter Kaufmann, ed. The Portable Nietzsche. New York, 1954. Nurbhai, Saleel and K. M. Newton. George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism. Basingstoke and New York, 2002. Paris, Bernard J. Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values. Detroit, 1965. Rereading George Eliot: Changing Responses to her Experiments in Life. Albany, 2003. Paxton, Nancy L. George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender. Princeton, 1991. Semmel, Bernard. George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance. New York and Oxford, 1994. Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge, 1986 (1984). Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore and London, 1996. Thompson, Andrew. George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to Risorgimento. London and New York, 1998. Tucker, Irene. A Probable State: The Novel, Contract, and the Jews. Chicago and London, 2000. Vitaglione, Daniel. George Eliot and George Sand. New York, 1993. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. George Eliot’s Mythmaking. Heidelberg, 1977. Witemeyer, Hugh. George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven and London, 1979.

286

Works cited CRITICISM

(ARTICLES)

Anderson, Amanda. “George Eliot and the Jewish Question.” Yale Journal of Criticism 10:1 (1997), 39–61. Anger, Suzy. “George Eliot and Philosophy.” In The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Ed. George Levine. Cambridge, 2001. Pp. 76–97. Atkins, W. Siward. “Free Indirect Style and the Rhetoric of Sympathy in The Mill on the Floss.” In Perspectives on Self and Community in George Eliot: Dorothea’s Window. Ed. Patricia Gately, Dennis Leavens and D. Cole Woodcox. Lewiston, ME, Queenston, Canada, and Lampeter, UK, 1997. Pp. 163–95. Baker, William. “George Eliot’s Readings in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Historians: A Note on the Background of ‘Daniel Deronda.’” Victorian Studies 15 (1972), 463–73. Beer, Gillian. “George Eliot and the Novel of Ideas.” In The Columbia History of the British Novel. Ed. John Richetti, et al. New York, 1994. Pp. 429–55. Bullen, J. B. “George Eliot’s Romola as a Positivist Allegory.” Review of English Studies 26 n.s. (1975), 425–35. Carroll, David. “Silas Marner: Reversing the Oracles of Religion.” Literary Monographs 1 (1967), 165–200, 312–14. Colby, Robert A. “An American Sequel to ‘Daniel Deronda.’” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 12 (1957), 231–35. Collins, K. K. “G. H. Lewes Revised: George Eliot and the Moral Sense.” Victorian Studies 21 (1978), 463–92. Dowden, Edward. “Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.” Contemporary Review 29 (1877), 348–69. Henry, Nancy. “Ante-Anti-Semitism: George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such.” In Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in NineteenthCentury Literature. Ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys. London, 1996. Pp. 65–79. “George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and Comparative Anatomy.” In George Eliot and Europe. Ed. John Rignall. Aldershot and Brookfield, Vt., 1997. Pp. 44–63. Homans, Margaret. “Dinah’s Blush, Maggie’s Arm: Class, Gender, and Sexuality in George Eliot’s Early Novels.” Victorian Studies 36 (1993), 155–78. Kendrick, Walter. “Balzac and British Realism: Mid-Victorian Theories of the Novel.” Victorian Studies 20 (1976), 5–24. Krasner, James. “‘Where no man praised’: The Retreat from Fame in George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy.” Victorian Poetry 32/1 (1994), 55–73. Martin, Graham. “‘Daniel Deronda’: George Eliot and Political Change.” In Critical Essays on George Eliot. Ed. Barbara Hardy. New York and London, 1970. Pp. 133–50. Miller, Andrew H. “Bruising, Laceration, and Lifelong Maiming: or, How We Encourage Research.” ELH [English Literary History] 70 (2003), 301–18.

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Preyer, Robert. “Beyond the Liberal Imagination: Vision and Unreality in ‘Daniel Deronda.’” Victorian Studies 4 (1960), 33–54. Santangelo, Gennaro A. “Villari’s Life and Times of Savonarola: A Source for George Eliot’s Romola.” Anglia 90 (1972), 119–31. Stange, G. Robert. “The Voices of the Essayist.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35 (1980), 312–30. Thomson, Fred. “The Genesis of Felix Holt.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 74 (1959), 576–84. “The Legal Plot in Felix Holt.” Studies in English Literature 7 (1967), 691–704. Vogeler, Martha Salmon. “Matthew Arnold and Frederic Harrison: The Prophet of Culture and the Prophet of Positivism,” Studies in English Literature 2 (1962), 441–62. Witemeyer, Hugh. “George Eliot’s Romola and Bulwer Lytton’s Rienzi.” Studies in the Novel 15 (1983), 62–73. Wormald, Mark. “Microscopy and Semiotic in Middlemarch.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50 (1996), 501–24.

INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT

Allen, Peter. “The Meanings of ‘An Intellectual’: Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury English Usage.” University of Toronto Quarterly 55 (1986), 342–58. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London, 1983. Armstrong, Anthony. The Church of England, the Methodists and Society: 1700–1850. Totowa, NJ, 1973. Arnold, Matthew. The Complete Prose Works. Ed. R. H. Super. 11vv. Ann Arbor, 1960–77. Ashton, Rosemary. The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought: 1800–1860. Cambridge, 1980. George Henry Lewes: A Life. Oxford, 1991. Baldassarri, Stefano U. and Arielle Saiber, eds. Images of Quattrocento Florence. New Haven and London, 2000. Blake, Robert. Disraeli. Garden City, NY, 1968 (1967). Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford, Calif., 1996 (1992). Bradley, Ian. The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians. New York, 1976. Brown, Ford K. Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce. Cambridge, 1961. Bullen, J. B. The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford, 1994. Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch. Basel, 1869 (1860).

288

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Burke, Peter. Varieties of Cultural History. Cambridge, 1997. Burrow, J. W. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. Cambridge, 1966. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. Cambridge, 1981. Burstein, Janet. “Victorian Mythography and the Progress of the Intellect.” Victorian Studies 18 (1975), 309–24. Burtt, Edwin A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Garden City, NY, 1954 (1924). Chadwick, Owen. The Victorian Church. 2vv. New York, 1966–70. Collini, Stefan. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford, 2006. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930. Oxford, 1991. Comte, Auguste. Introduction to Positive Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Frederick Ferre. Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1988. Cox, Catherine M. et al. Genetic Studies of Genius, vol. II. Stanford, Calif., 1926. Dale, Peter Allan. In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age. Madison, Wisc., and London, 1989. Desmond, Adrian. Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London: 1850–1875. Chicago and London, 1982. Diamond, Alan, ed. The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: A Centennial Reappraisal. Cambridge, 1991. Ditchfield, G. M. The Evangelical Revival. Canterbury, 1998. Dolin, Tim. George Eliot. Oxford, 2005. Ehrman, Bart D. Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. San Francisco, 2005. Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. New York, 1964 (1932). Feldman, Burton and Robert D. Richardson, eds. The Rise of Modern Mythology: 1680–1860. Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1975 (1972). Fleishman, Avrom. New Class Culture: How an Emergent Class is Transforming America’s Culture. Westport, Conn., and London, 2002. Frei, Hans W. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven and London, 1974. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford, 1983. Gooch, G. P. History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. Boston, 1959 (1913). Hall, Thomas S. History of General Physiology: 600 BC to AD 1900. Chicago and London, 1969. Hamburger, Joseph. Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals. New Haven and London, 1965. Hampshire, Stuart. Spinoza and Spinozism. Oxford, 2005. Harrison, Frederic. Order and Progress: Thoughts on Government[;] Studies of Political Crises. Ed. Martha S. Vogeler. Rutherford, Madison and Teaneck, NJ, 1975 (1875). Hennell, Charles C. An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity. London, 1870 (1838).

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Heyck, T. W. The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England. New York, London and Sydney, 1982. Hilton, Boyd. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865. Oxford, 1988. Hobsbawm, E. J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge, 1992 (1990). Kent, Christopher. Brains and Numbers: Elitism, Comtism, and Democracy in Mid-Victorian England. Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1978. Loose, Gerhard. “The Peasant in Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl’s Sociological and Novelistic Writings.” Germanic Review 15 (1940), 263–72. Lowy, Michael and Robert Sayre. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Trans. Catherine Porter. Durham, NC, and London, 2001. Mackay, Robert W. The Progress of the Intellect, as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews. 2 vv. London, 1850. Mandelbaum, Maurice. History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought. Baltimore and London, 1971. Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. In Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vv. 7–8. Ed. J. M. Robson. Toronto, 1974. Moore, John A. Science as a Way of Knowing: The Foundations of Modern Biology. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1993. Mosse, George L. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York, 1964. Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, ed. The Hermeneutics Reader. New York, 2002. Nauert, Charles G. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. Cambridge, 2006 (1995). Paolucci, Anne and Henry, eds. Hegel on Tragedy. Garden City, NY, 1962. Postlethwaite, Diana. Making It Whole: A Victorian Circle and the Shape of their World. Columbus, OH, 1984. Renan, Ernest. De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation. Paris, 1875. Richards, Robert J. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago and London, 1987. Riehl, Wilhelm von. Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Ed. Peter Steinbach. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna, 1976. The Natural History of the German People. Ed. and trans. David J. Diephouse. Lewiston, ME, Queenston, Canada, and Lampeter, UK, n.d. Roberts, David. Paternalism in Early Victorian England. New Brunswick, NJ, 1979. Roll-Hansen, Diderik. The Academy, 1869–1879: Victorian Intellectuals in Revolt. Copenhagen, 1957. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven and London, 2001. Roth, Cecil. A Short History of the Jewish People. London, 1959 (1936).

290

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Rothblatt, Sheldon. “George Eliot as a Type of European Intellectual.” History of European Ideas 7 (1986), 47–65. Schneewind, Jerome, ed. Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays. Garden City, NY, 1968. Smith, Jonathan. Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Madison, Wisc., and London, 1994. Spinoza, Benedict de. A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise. Trans. R. H. M. Elwes. New York, 1951 (1883). Steinberg, Ronald M. Fra Girolamo Savonarola, Florentine Art, and Renaissance Historiography. Athens, OH, 1977. [Strangford, Emily, ed.] Literary Remains of the Late Emanuel Deutsch. New York, 1874. Strauss, Leo. An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays. Ed. Hilail Gildin. Detroit, 1989 (1975). Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, Ill., 1952. Spinoza’s Critique of Religion. Trans. E. M. Sinclair. New York, 1965 (1930). Tjoa, Hock Guan. George Henry Lewes: A Victorian Mind. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1977. Trollope, Thomas A. The Girlhood of Catherine de’ Medici. London, 1856. Wiener, Philip P., ed. Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. 5vv. New York, 1973 (1968). Wolff, Michael. “Marian Evans to George Eliot: The Moral and Intellectual Foundations of Her Career.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1958. Wright, T. R. The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain. Cambridge, 1986. Yourgrau, Palle. A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein. New York, 2005.

LITERARY CONTEXT

Becker, George J., ed. Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton, 1963. Cunningham, Valentine. Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel. Oxford, 1975. Fleishman, Avrom. Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore, 1967. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore and London, 1971. Fiction and the Ways of Knowing: Essays on British Novels. Austin, Tex., and London, 1978. Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. New York, 1968 (1957). Goethe. Faust. Ed. R.-M. S. Heffner, Helmut Rehder and W. F. Twaddell. 2vv. Madison, Wisc., 1975 (1950).

Works cited

291

Kendrick, Walter, “Balzac and British Realism: Mid-Victorian Theories of the Novel,” Victorian Studies 20 (1976), 5–24. Mayer, Hans. Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters. Trans. D. M. Sweet. Cambridge and London, 1982 (1975). Swales, Martin. The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse. Princeton, 1977.

Name index

“Adam Bede” 59, 249 Ademolo, Agostino 113 Aimé-Martin, Louis 14, 19, 21–2 Aleichem, Shalom 213 Alfieri, Vittorio 113 Appleton, Charles E. 220, 221 Aristophanes 236 Arnold, Matthew 50, 80, 90, 111, 144–6, 194, 195, 196, 198, 242, 247 Athenaeus of Naucratis 236 Auerbach, Berthold 76 Bacon, Francis 19 Baker, William 202 Balzac, Honoré de 10, 95, 103, 111, 149, 190 Barthes, Roland 99 Beaty, Jerome 173 Bechstein, Ludwig 76 Beer, Gillian 2 Beer, John 222 Beethoven, Ludwig van 76 Benisch, Abraham 192 Berliner, A. A. 191 Bernard, Claude 167 Bichat, Marie-F. 66, 167, 168 Bickersteth, Edward 18 Bizet, Georges 137 Blackwood, John 97, 155, 192, 202, 203, 224 Blackwood, William 202 Blake, William 165, 185 Blanc, Louis 141 Boccaccio, Giovanni 113 Böckh, Philip August 82 Börne, K. L. 76, 80 Borrow, George 131 Boswell, James 19 Botta, Carlo 18 Bourdieu, Pierre 231, 241 Bourl’honne, Pierre x, 59 Brabant, Robert H. 35 Bradley, F. H. 197

Bray, Caroline (“Cara”) 24, 30, 33, 35, 36 Bray, Charles 24, 25, 40, 52, 170 Browning, Oscar 221 Brunn, Heinrich 75 Bryant, Jacob 47, 178–9 Bryant, William Cullen 220 Buber, Martin 75 Buckland, William 18, 21 Buckle, Henry T. 118 Bucknill, William S. 23 Bullen, J. B. 114 “Bulstrode” (Middlemarch) 180–1 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 18, 113, 237, 246 Burckhardt, Jakob 115–16 Burke, Edmund 32, 86, 197, 198, 233 Burlamacchi, Pacifico 113 Burt, Mary Anne 76 Burtt, Edwin A. 6 Byron, Lord George 18 Caesar, Gaius Julius 18 Call, Wathan M. W. 59 Carlyle, Thomas 25, 32, 42, 73, 82, 202, 226, 247 Carroll, David R. 108–9 “Casaubon” (Middlemarch) 7, 46, 47, 173, 174, 178–9, 187–8, 237 Cellini, Benvenuto 113 Cervantes, Miguel de 18, 137 Chadwick, Owen 251 Chapman, John 35, 44–5, 59, 69, 72 Charnon-Deutsch, Lou 137 Chase, Karen 173 Chasles, Philarète 113 Chassang, Alexis 165 Chaucer, Geoffrey 185 Coindet, Jean 113 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 46, 81, 82, 143, 170, 171, 197, 198, 233 Coletta, Pietro 113 Collini, Stefan 2, 218, 247 Collins, K. K. 234, 248–9

292

Name index Combe, George 5, 52, 170 Comte, Auguste x, 6, 7, 10, 22, 40, 52, 54, 58, 59–68, 71, 88, 89, 143, 144, 170, 171, 198, 220, 232–3, 235 Conrad, Joseph 83, 95, 129, 197, 231 Cowling, Maurice 57, 58 Cowper, William 18, 23 Coxe, William 18 Craig, Edward 18, 19 Creuzer, Georg F. 47 Cross, John W. 130 Cullen, William 164 Cumming, John 50–1, 52, 223 Cunningham, Valentine 98 Curtius, Ernst 165 Dale, Thomas 18 Dallas, E. S. 119 “Daniel Deronda” 205, 206–13, 214, 215, 249 Dante 185 Daremberg, Charles 164 Davy, Humphry 165 Defoe, Daniel 18 Delepierre, Octave 165 Delitsch, F. J. 191 Deutsch, Emanuel 191, 213, 223 Dickens, Charles 91, 98, 101, 109, 155, 158, 165, 171, 177, 192 “Dinah Morris” (Adam Bede) 99, 101, 203 Dindorf, Wilhelm 165 Diogenes Laertius 236 Disraeli, Benjamin 87, 192 Dodd, Valerie x “Dolly Winthrop” (Silas Marner) 110 Donaldson, John William 165 “Dorothea Brooke” (Middlemarch) 9, 46, 63, 173, 174–5, 176–7, 182–4, 185–6, 186–7, 249 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich 124, 171, 203, 217, 250 Duppa, Richard 113 East, John 19 Eckermann, J. P. 77 Einstein, Albert 167 Eisenmenger, J. A. 191 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 32, 42, 52 Erckmann–Chatrian (Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian) 191 “Esther Lyon” (Felix Holt) 59, 249 Evans, Mary Anne (later George Eliot) 2–3, 12, 25, 33 Evans, Robert 5, 6, 25, 30 Ewald, G. H. A. von 191 Faraday, Michael 164 “Fedalma” (The Spanish Gypsy) 134

293

Felix, Marcus Minutius 236 “Felix Holt” 59, 151–3, 154 Feuerbach, Ludwig 35, 40, 52, 74–5, 109, 200, 201 Finney, Charles G. 14, 19, 20 Flaubert, Gustave 149 Ford, Ford Madox 231 Fox, Charles James 179 Freiligrath, Ferdinand 76 Freud, Sigmund 207 Froude, J. A. 42, 71, 73 Frye, Northrop 174, 184 Gall, Franz J. 66 Gaskell, Elizabeth 98 Geiger, Abraham 165, 191 Gellius, Aulus 236 Gerstäcker, Friedrich 75 Gervinus, G. G. 75, 113 Ginguené, Pierre 113 Ginsburg, C. D. 191 Gissing, George 95 Gladstone, William Ewart 17, 147 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 76 Gödel, Kurt 167 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 10, 64–5, 76, 77–9, 80, 81 Goldoni, Carlo 113 Goldsmith, Oliver 185 Goldziher, Ignaz 191 Gordon, J. L. 213 Gottschall, R. G. 75 Graetz, Heinrich 191, 202, 206, 213 Gramsci, Antonio 219 “Grandcourt” (Daniel Deronda) 193, 197, 198 Green, T. H. 197 Greg, William R. 49–50 Grellmann, Heinrich M. G. 131 Gresley, William 20, 22 Grimmelhausen, J. J. C. von 76 Grimm, J. L. K. 165 Grove, W. R. 164 Gruppe, Otto F. 67–8, 71, 73, 76 Guicciardini, Francesco 113 Guizot, François 33 Guizot, Guillaume 81 “Gwendolen” (Daniel Deronda) 9, 193, 196–7, 215 Haight, Gordon 2, 5, 12, 14, 25, 33, 43 Halevi, Judah 201, 204 Hallam, Henry 18 Halm, Friedrich 76 Harcourt, L. Vernon 13, 19, 21 Hardy, Barbara 173, 194 Hardy, Thomas 9, 83 Harris, John 19, 22

294

Name index

Harrison, Frederic 142–3, 144–6 Hartmann, A. T. 191 Harvey, W. J. 203 Haslewood, Joseph 165 Heber, Reginald 18 Hegel, G. W. F. 39, 42, 60, 77, 82, 200, 247 Heine, Heinrich 79–81, 92 Helyot, Pierre 113 Hemans, Felicia 18 Hennell, Caroline, see Bray Caroline Hennell, Charles 3, 24, 26–9, 49, 50 Hennell, Elizabeth Brabant (“Rufa”) 35 Hennell, Sara Sophia 30, 31, 35, 36, 61, 68, 223 Henry, Nancy 237–8 Herbert, George 18 Herder, J. G. 91 Hermanns, J. G. J. 82 Herschel, William 169 Herzl, Theodor 202 “Hetty Sorrel” (Adam Bede) 9, 100, 101 Hewlett, John G. 19, 22 Hirschfeld, R. 191 Hobbes, Thomas 197 Hoffman von Fallersleben, A. H. 76 Hoppus, John 19, 20 Horace 18, 236 Hugo, Victor 137 Hulme, T. E. 111 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 77 Hume, David 225 Hutton, R. H. 119, 143 Huxley, T. H. 66, 72 Irving, Edward 14 Irwin, Jane 191 Isaacs, Hyam 191 Jacobi, F. H. 76 James, G. P. R. 18, 99 James, Henry 203 Jameson, Anna 13 Johnson, Samuel 19 Josephus 18 Jowett, Benjamin 221, 222 Juvenal 236 Kalisch, Ludwig 191 Kant, Immanuel 39, 138, 200, 201, 250 Kaufmann, David 193 Keats, John 165 Keble, John 19, 23 Kent, Christopher 143–4 Kompert, Leopold 165, 191 Kotzebue, August von 76 Kuenen, Abraham 191

Kugler, Franz 113, 116 Kuhn, Thomas 240 Lecky, William E. H. 116–17 Leibnitz, G. W. 73 Leighton, Robert 19 Le Sage, Alain-René 18 Lessing, G. E. 76 Levi, G. R. 191 Lewald, Fanny 76 Lewes, Charles L. 227, 231, 248 Lewes, George Henry 1, 3, 49, 61, 64–7, 69, 74, 76, 88, 93, 94, 112, 164, 165, 168, 170, 171, 172, 198, 218, 220, 222, 227, 248–9 Lewis, Maria 12, 18, 24, 25, 26 Liszt, Franz 72–3, 76 Littré, M. P. E. 164 Locke, John 197 Lockhart, J. G. 19 Louis, P.-C.-A. 165 Lubbock, Sir John 165 “Lydgate” (Middlemarch) 167, 169–70 Lyell, Sir Charles 21, 235 Macaulay, T. B. 17, 42 Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernando dei 113, 124 Mackay, Robert W. 44, 45–9, 71 McSweeney, Kerry 173 “Maggie Tulliver” (The Mill on the Floss) 3, 9, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 102–7, 249 Maimon, Solomon 191 Maine, Sir Henry J. S. 165, 172–3 Mallock, William H. 222, 247 Mandeville, Bernard de 242 Manzoni, Alessandro 33 Mapu, Abraham 213 March, F. A. 165 Martin, Graham 212, 214 Martineau, Harriet 59, 72, 170 Martineau, James 45, 71 Marx, Karl 60, 84, 247 Maurice, F. D. 143 Mazzini, Giuseppe 141 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 113 Meir, Karl 113 Mendele Mocher Seforim 213 Menzel, Wolfgang 75 Mérimée, Prosper 137 Meyer, Martin 76 Michelet, Jules 42 Mill, John Stewart x, 1, 5, 10, 42, 44, 52–9, 54, 62, 64, 67–8, 71, 88, 141–2, 144, 149, 199, 219, 220, 247 Milman, H. H. 191 Milner, Joseph 19 Milton, John 18, 194

Name index M’Lennan, John F. 200 Molière 18, 168 Montalembert, Charles 113 Montefiore, Sir Moses 202 “Mordecai” (Daniel Deronda) 203, 204–12 More, Hannah 18 Morris, William 224 Mosse, George L. 91 Müller, F. Max 7, 46, 47, 165, 172, 178 Müller, Karl 165 Müller, Theodore 165 Munk, Salomon 191, 213 Murray, John 221 Myers, F. W. H. 59, 63, 221, 222 Newman, F. H. 71 Newman, John Henry 17, 24, 225 Nichol, John P. 19 Niebuhr, B. G. 72 Nisard, D. 165 Novalis 77 Oliphant, Laurence 202, 203 Oliphant, Margaret 220, 224 Oppenheim, Moritz 191 Ovid 18, 165 Oxenford, John 72 Panizzi, Antonio 113 Panzer, Friedrich 76 Paris, Bernard x, 59, 62–3, 225 Parkes, Bessie 1 Pascal, Blaise 13, 18, 50 Pascheles, Wolf 191 Pater, Walter 224, 225 Pattison, Mark 220, 221, 222 Pears, Mrs. Abijah H. (née Bray) 25, 26 Pearson, Christiana (mother of George Eliot) 5–6 Pearson, John 19 Perrens, F. T. 113 Petrarch 18, 113 Picciotto, James 191 Pico della Mirandola 113 Pinney, Thomas 231 Plato 222 Platter, Thomas 19 Plötz, J. E. von 76 Plutarch 165 Poliziano, Angelo 113 Pope, Alexander 240 Postlethwaite, Diana 166, 170–1, 198 Pott, August F. 131 Pucci, Antonio 113 Pückler-Muskau, H. L. H. von 75 Pulci, Luigi 113

295

Quinet, E. 42 Raspail, F. V. 165 Renan, Ernest 201 Renouard, P.-V. 164 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich von 10, 84–6, 90, 91, 92, 100, 171, 195, 198 Roll-Hansen, Diderik 220–1 “Romola” 9, 59, 63, 126–9, 249 Roscoe, William 113 Ross, Ludwig 75, 82 Rossetti, D. G. 113 Rothschild, David 191 Rousseau, J. J. 32 Ruskin, John 87, 95, 98–9, 247 Russell, Richard 164 Ryland, John 19, 23 Sacchetti, Franco 113 Said, Edward 202 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de 42, 60, 63 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 165 Sand, George 10, 43, 95, 111, 137 Santangelo, Gennaro A. 114 Saussure, Ferdinand de 164 Savonarola, Girolamo 112, 113, 114, 119–22, 124–9 Schelling, F. W. J. 32 Scherr, Johannes 75 Schiller, J. C. F. 18, 76, 77 Schlegel, A. W. von 76, 82, 125 Schleiden, M. J. 168 Schleiermacher, F. E. D. 39 Schopenhauer, A. 72, 225 Schrader, August 75 Schwann, Theodor 168 Scott, Walter 10, 18, 19, 98, 111, 129, 197, 203 Shakespeare, William 15, 185 Sheddon-Ralston, William 165 Shelley, P. B. 18, 23 Sheppard, John 19, 22 Shuttleworth, Sally 166, 167–8, 169 Sibree, John 32, 140 Sibree Cash, Mary 32 Sidgwick, Henry 221, 222 Sidney, Edwin 19 “Silas Marner” 59, 108–10, 249 “Silva” (The Spanish Gypsy) 134, 136–7, 138 Sismondi, J. C. L. S. de 113 Smith, Adam 165, 242 Smith, John P. 18, 21 Smith, Southwood 164 Somerville, Mary 19 Sophocles 81–2 Southcote, Joanna 14 Southey, Robert 18

296

Name index

Spencer, Herbert 1, 3, 7, 52, 56, 61, 68–71, 170, 171, 172, 198, 200, 223, 235 Spenser, Edmund 18 Spinoza 33–5, 39, 49, 73–4, 93 Staël, Germaine (Madame de) 18, 75 Stahr, Adolf 73, 75, 82 Stein, Leopold 191 Steinschneider, Moritz 191, 213 Stephen, James Fitzjames 118 “Stephen Guest” (The Mill on the Floss) 55, 105, 107 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 192 Strangford, Emily 191 Strauss, David F. 3, 4, 30, 35–40, 44, 49, 73, 165 Strauss, Leo 73, 214 Swinden, Patrick 173 Taine, Henri 165 Tasso, Torquato 18 Taylor, Isaac 19, 20 Taylor, Mrs. Peter A. 141 Tendlau, A. M. 191 Tennyson, Alfred 117 Tertullian 28 Thackeray, William M. 98, 103 “Thephrastus Such” 237, 239 Tholuck, F. A. G. 30 Thomson, Fred C. 147 “Tito” (Romola) 119, 120, 122–3, 127 Tolstoy 124, 217, 250 Trollope, Anthony 192 Trollope, Thomas A. 113 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich 165 Tylor, Edward B. 165, 172, 200 Tyndal, John 165

Uhland, Ludwig 76 Ullmann, Carl 30 Varnhagen von Ense, K. A. 73, 75 Vasari, Giorgio 113 Vehse, K. E. 75 Villari, Pasquale 113, 114, 125 Vilmar, A. F. C. 75 Vinet, Rodolph A. 30 Virgil 18 Voltaire 42, 73 Wagenseil, J. C. 191 Wagner, Richard 72, 76 Wallace, A. R. 165 Ware, John 164 Watson, Thomas 164 Watts, Alaric 19 Watts, Isaac 19, 23 Weber, Max 165 Wilberforce, William 14, 18 “Will Ladislaw” (Middlemarch) 175, 176, 249 Winckelmann, J. J. 75, 82 Wolf, F. A. 37, 165 Wolff, Michael x, 64 Wordsworth, William 18, 42, 98, 185 Young, Edward 18, 50, 51, 52, 179, 223 “Zarca” (The Spanish Gypsy) 134, 138 Zola, Émile 190 Zunz, Leopold 191, 213

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