George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture Delia da Sousa Correa

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George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

10.1057/9780230598010 - George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, Delia da Sousa Correa

Also by Delia da Sousa Correa

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THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL: Realisms (editor)

10.1057/9780230598010 - George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, Delia da Sousa Correa

Delia da Sousa Correa

10.1057/9780230598010 - George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, Delia da Sousa Correa

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George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

© Delia da Sousa Correa 2003

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–99757–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data da Sousa Correa, Delia. George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture / Delia da Sousa Correa. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–99757–3 1. Eliot, George, 1819–1880—Knowledge—Music. 2. Music—Great Britain— 19th century—History and criticism. 3. Wagner, Richard, 1813–1883—Friends and associates. 4. Music and literature—History—19th century. 5. Wagner, Richard, 1813–1883—Influence. 6. Musical fiction—History and criticism. 7. Music in literature. I. Title. PR4692.M87 S68 2002 82398—dc21 2002066324 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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For Richard and Gwendolen

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‘O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices?’ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1860)

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List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

viii ix

Introduction: ‘Concords and Discords, Cadences and Cries’ 1

Music, Science, Literature: The ‘Large Music of Reasonable Speech’ The origin and function of music The scientific debate ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ Musical literary criticism

2

Music and the Woman Question: The ‘Minister of Domestic Concord’ and ‘the Most Sensuous of Accomplishments’ Music and female education The ‘minister of domestic concord’ The ‘most sensuous of accomplishments’ Music and the woman writer

3

The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible to Music’ The ‘laws of attraction’ Music and memory Tragedy and hyperbole

4

Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’ Musical vocation and literary opera Female vocation Racial vocation Musical sympathies: ‘meeting streams’

1 11 12 31 45 52

59 61 66 77 91 102 110 118 126 130 131 145 169 177

Conclusion

192

Notes Bibliography Index

195 236 249 vii

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Contents

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 4.1

Musical manuscript in Eliot’s hand ‘The Opera Box’ ‘Not to be Beaten’ ‘English Songs and Melodies’ ‘The Awakening Conscience’ ‘Chant d’Amour’ Recital in an aristocratic home

viii 10.1057/9780230598010 - George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, Delia da Sousa Correa

3 45 62 69 85 114 138

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List of Illustrations

I am grateful to have had access to the resources of the Bodleian Library and for the assistance of the Upper Reading Room staff over the several years of research and writing for this book. More recently I have been glad of the support of my colleagues in the Literature Department at the Open University and for the efficient help of staff in the Arts Faculty and Library. Amongst these I should like especially to thank Trevor Herbert and Robert Samuels for advice on musical terminology, Audrey Linkman and Christine Love-Rodgers for help at the outset of my picture research and Yvonne Reynolds for help with clerical tasks. The Arts Faculty at the Open University made a generous grant towards the cost of illustrations for this book. Thanks are due to the Bridgeman Art Library, Mary Evans Picture Library, Tate Picture Library, John Burton, of the George Eliot Fellowship, and the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, for permission to reproduce images from their collections. I am grateful also to Emily Rosser and Rebecca Mashayekh at Palgrave Macmillan for their editorial assistance and to Keith Povey and Glynis Harris for copy-editing. Remaining errors are mine. I profited greatly from the guidance I received from Kate Flint in the first stages of this project. Robert Fox provided helpful advice on the History of Science at an early stage. Heartfelt thanks are due to Sally Shuttleworth and Dinah Birch for their valuable comments on the initial version of this book, also for their continued encouragement over the long time of its making, and for the example of their own fine scholarship. I am also grateful to Gillian Beer for her friendly interest and, like anyone working on Eliot in recent years, owe her an immense debt for the inspiration of her work. Sally Shuttleworth provided the opportunity for me to present a portion of the material later developed in Chapters 3 and 4 as a conference paper and I subsequently benefited from her editorial advice when this appeared in a special edition of Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Dinah Birch invited me to extend the thoughts on Ruskin contained here as an independent essay under her editorship and a part of Chapter 4 was originally published in essay form in George Eliot and Europe, edited by John Rignall. Special thanks go to Sarah Wood. I have benefited throughout this project from her incisive comments and invaluable friendship. ix 10.1057/9780230598010 - George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, Delia da Sousa Correa

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Rosamund Bartlett, Austin Gee, Barbara Heldt and Regula Hohl-Trillini kindly read the manuscript in part or whole at various stages. Other friends and family also deserve warm thanks for encouragement and support: Janice Acquah, Nigel Biggar, Josie Dixon, Katharine Ellis, Catriona Kelly, Carolyne Larrington, Francis O’Gorman, Wendy Robinson, Emma Smith, Linda Squire, Paolo Vaciago, Lucy Whitaker, Elizabeth Yates, my late mother Anna, my father David and my sisters Melissa and Sabine. Profound thanks go finally to Richard Mann for unfailing support of every kind, and to Gwendolen, who has yet to discover George Eliot, but whose delight in books and music is a daily inspiration. DELIA

DA

SOUSA CORREA

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x

Jubal . . . watched the hammer, till his eyes, No longer following its fall or rise, Seemed glad with something that they could not see, But only listened to – some melody, Wherein dumb longings inward speech had found, Won from the common store of struggling sound.1

George Eliot’s little-read but fascinating poem ‘The Legend of Jubal’ (1869–70) elaborates the Old Testament legend of the discovery of music. A companionship of creative energies gives rise to the invention of both industry and the arts. The sound of the hammer in the first forge inspires the invention of the lyre and song.2 Almost imperceptibly, the clanging of metal intimates the expressive potential of sound, and Jubal’s experience embodies a central and crucial desire that permeates George Eliot’s writing: the yearning for spiritual expansion and sympathetic experience:

Then, as the metal shapes more various grew, And, hurled upon each other, resonance drew, Each gave new tones, the revelations dim Of some external soul that spoke for him: The hollow vessel’s clang, the clash, the boom, ... To Jubal such enlargèd passion brought That love, hope, rage, and all experience, 1

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Introduction: ‘Concords and Discords, Cadences and Cries’

2

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Like the productive skills of agriculture and metalwork, music is discovered at the end of a Golden Age when death first enters human experience.4 Jubal travels the world to disseminate the power of music, returning at last to his homeland where, unrecognised, he is pushed aside by a procession singing in his praise. Music is a progressive force, but Eliot associates its discovery with death and human loss. Jubal ‘sows’ music like grain. It is a seed stock ‘For generations far beyond the Flood – / For the poor latebegotten human brood / Born to life’s weary brevity and perilous good’.5 The hammering of Jubal’s forge throbs in a rhythmic pulse beneath the poem’s stanzas, emphasising the oneness of artistic expression and the material conditions of life. Jubal does not discover the expressive power of music through solitary artistic experiment. It comes to him unawares as he labours in his forge amongst the ‘common store of struggling sound’. The reverberation of different forms as they make contact prophesies the future sympathetic resonance of this musical language. In Middlemarch, a very similar image describes Caleb Garth’s perception of work. For this skilled countryman, the sounds of ‘that myriadheaded, myriad-handed labour by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed’ are ‘sublime music’.6 Eliot said she wrote ‘as a person with an ear and a mind susceptible to the direct and indirect influences of music’.7 These influences manifest themselves in the profusion of musical tropes that pervade her essays, novels and poems. Amongst these are her descriptions of voice, characteristically an important feature of Victorian fiction: in Adam Bede, ‘Dinah’s mellow treble tones’ have ‘a variety of modulation like that of a fine instrument touched with the unconscious skill of musical instinct’.8 In Middlemarch, Dorothea’s beautiful speaking voice arouses memories of Handel’s Messiah for Caleb Garth, whilst her ‘melodious fragments’ of speech repeatedly remind Will Ladislaw of an aeolian harp.9 Voice is only one example of Eliot’s preoccupation with music. The concerted sounds of scythes, birdsong and voices in Adam Bede, the thrumming waterwheel in The Mill on the Floss, allow us to hear an undersong that permeates her writing. ‘The Legend of Jubal’ gives concentrated expression to the musical allusion that works across and between Eliot’s novels. In The Mill on the

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Were fused in vaster being, fetching thence Concords and discords, cadences and cries That seemed from some world-shrouded soul to rise, Some rapture more intense, some mightier rage, Some living sea that burst the bounds of man’s brief age.3

3

Floss, Maggie Tulliver desires a principle of transcendent harmony that will link inner and outer existence. This longing is mythically fulfilled in Jubal’s discovery of music through which ‘dumb longings inward speech had found . . . the revelations dim / Of some external soul that spoke for him’.10 The mystical face and voice which Jubal perceives at his death evoke a synaesthetic ‘moment’s freedom won / From in and outer’.11 In this poem, music resonates throughout material and human life with the same insistence with which it palpably haunts Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda. Almost at the close of Eliot’s oeuvre, music in Deronda suggests strange extremes of sympathy and unsettles individual identities. The many musical scenes in nineteenth-century novels testify to music’s importance as a source of literary allusion. They range from Mr Bennet’s sarcastic silencing of his musically ambitious daughter Mary in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (‘you have delighted us long enough’) to the manipulations of du Maurier’s Svengali.12 In this book I give an account of how music remained a vital source of reference and inspiration throughout Eliot’s development as a writer. I also explore connections between literary and musical cultures. Music occupied a place of far greater significance in Victorian culture in general than we now tend to recognise: ‘Jubal’ mythologises the origins of an art that was of urgent personal and contemporary importance. Frequent references in Eliot’s correspondence affirm that music was a uniquely enriching element in her existence. It provided lived fulfilment as well as a metaphor for the passionate longing which she shared with her character Maggie Tulliver – for life to offer ‘more instruments playing together’.13 At school, Mary Ann Evans had been the star pianoforte pupil. During her evangelical youth she went

Figure 1.1 Musical manuscript in Eliot’s hand, by kind permission of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry. Photograph courtesy of John Burton and the George Eliot Fellowship.

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Introduction

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

through a brief ascetic phase when she expressed disdain for musical forms other than hymns, but for the rest of her life Eliot loved attending concerts and the opera. She remained a keen pianist. ‘I look forward to playing duets with you as one of my future pleasures’, she wrote to Lewes’s son Charles Lee Lewes who was studying piano at school in Switzerland, ‘and if I am able to go on working, I hope we shall afford to have a fine grand piano’.14 Thus the purchase of this piano in 1861 marked an important milestone in her successful career. ‘Today our new grand piano came – a great addition to our pleasures’, she recorded in her journal.15 Thereafter, Eliot’s correspondence makes numerous references to the enjoyment and benefit she was deriving from ‘ardent practice’: ‘I have been playing energetically on the piano lately. . . It has given me a fresh kind of muscular exercise, as well as nervous stimulus, and, I think, has done its part towards making my health better’.16 She took lessons in accompaniment and sent Charles details of the Beethoven sonatas in her possession.17 ‘He is quite a passionate musician’, she reported after he had come to live in London, ‘and we play Beethoven duets with increasing appetite every evening’.18 She was particularly delighted when Charles married a woman with a lovely contralto.19 Eliot’s first happy months with George Henry Lewes coincided with a time when they gained direct experience of the latest developments in German music. In Weimar they made friends with Liszt, and Eliot’s journal entries from July to November 1854 record frequent breakfast and evening parties at Liszt’s house and the friendly talk when he joined them for dinner at the Erbprinz hotel.20 She was enchanted by the ‘real inspiration’ of his playing.21 Lewes and Eliot also heard Clara Schumann play and were introduced to Rubinstein and to the music of Wagner, whom they were to meet in person when he visited London the following year. Eliot’s personal response to Wagner’s music was equivocal, but her 1855 essay, ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’, for Fraser’s Magazine, discussed in the first chapter of this book, appears to have been the earliest appreciative account of his art to be published in the British press. Musical experiences continued to be amongst those most treasured on the Leweses’ many foreign travels. At home in London they braved the nauseating smell of gaslight to attend Philharmonic and Monday popular concerts where they sat in cheap shilling seats from which they could ‘hear to perfection’.22 Eliot’s letters are full of references to her enjoyment of such occasions and of the musical delights on offer at private social gatherings. Music also features as a consolation: ‘The

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5

opportunity of hearing some fine music is one of the chief benefits we hope for, to counterbalance our loss of the wide common and the field’, she wrote about her move from Wandsworth to a house nearer the city.23 Music remained central to her domestic existence. Late in Lewes’s life, when he was already seriously ill, John Cross discovered him giving enthusiastic renderings of ‘the great portion of the tenor part in the Barber of Seville – George Eliot playing his accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun’.24 The correlation between the importance of music in Eliot’s life and her use of musical tropes is not simple. Literary allusions to music inevitably express more about the writer’s own art than about music itself. Some of the most interesting moments in Eliot’s work occur in her frequent allusions to music explicitly as an analogy for literary composition. Jubal’s lyre heralds the invention of poetry as much as of music. However, music has a more than metaphorical importance in Eliot’s writing. She gave detailed attention to her readers’ experience of heard music, selecting specific musical allusions for her novels very carefully to avoid pieces to which she had previously referred.25 Her correspondence reveals an assumed sense of shared musical experience and the sense that something about the nature of such experience could be communicated in words.26 ‘At Dresden’, she wrote to her friend Sara Hennell, ‘we could hear thoroughly enjoyable instrumental music every evening for two-pence, and I owed so many thoughts and inspirations of feeling to that stimulus’.27 In comments such as this, Eliot expressly links her creativity – both intellectual and emotional – to her experience as a musical listener. Music nourished the ‘emotional intellect’ which Eliot so strongly valued.28 This book is concerned with Eliot’s response to music as it is transformed in her fiction. Her use of musical allusion enhances our awareness of the most exciting qualities of her writing; it also introduces an extraordinary range of intellectual and cultural contexts for her work. In this respect, my approach differs fundamentally from the only pre-existing full-length study of music in Eliot’s writing. Beryl Gray’s elegant account George Eliot and Music, published in 1989, focuses predominantly on Eliot’s own personal response to music as a context for interpreting musical allusion in her novels. Much of the present book centres on the suggestive relationship between Eliot’s writing about music and the scientific discourse of her day. Constant liaisons between music and science occurred in Eliot’s life as well as in her work. She described her delight at performances of Schubert songs by ‘the great anatomist’ von Siebold and his wife when

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Introduction

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

she visited them in Munich with Lewes (Lewes himself recorded a visit when a fascinating dissection of salamanders was followed by ‘tea and music’).29 Sunday afternoons and musical evenings at the Priory were attended by a combination of musicians and scientists, and many individuals were both. Eliot sent Charles Lewes an account of a ‘charming musical evening’ attended by several of Eliot’s and Lewes’s scientific acquaintance and the novelist Wilkie Collins: George Redford, a medical man with a fine baritone voice who also played the cello, sang Eliot’s favourite song, Beethoven’s ‘Adelaïde’.30 Her new grand piano was celebrated with a ‘Beethoven night’.31 Herbert Spencer and Lewes would join in the singing on these occasions, when such literary figures as Robert Browning would be of the company.32 These groups and individuals shared music as an activity and a topic of conversation. Whilst the details of their exchanges are lost, this unheard talk gives Eliot’s readers a more vivid sense of the array of connections that underpin allusions to music in her novels. We are left to uncover a wealth of written comment about the music in Victorian life and letters, which often emerges in unexpected profusion, as when musical sound itself overspills from a house into the street, or escapes the concert hall, surrounding and surprising us. This is therefore a study of music’s significance for Victorian culture, as well as of its importance for George Eliot. The value of music for Eliot indicates some of the ways in which it was central to her culture as a whole. Victorian social reformers often proclaimed music’s capacity to create a sense of community: a view of music that finds echoes in Eliot’s praise of ‘the sublime effect of the Handel choruses’ and throughout her work and letters.33 The amateur choral-singing movements, which gathered momentum from the 1840s onwards, were viewed as vital instruments of social improvement. Music also played a significant role in campaigns for the general improvement of education. Technical innovations in music printing revolutionised the cost and availability of sheet music, previously available only in expensive engraved editions or copied by hand, and enabled music to share in the contemporary burgeoning of mass print culture. Amongst Eliot’s scientific acquaintance, Herbert Spencer, the great populariser of social evolution, accorded musical expression a special place in human development. Spencer’s theories, which I discuss in the following chapter, inspired considerable debate about music’s origin and function. His work provoked Darwin, among others, to speculate about music in the light of theories of evolutionary inheritance. Reading Eliot’s allusions to music sheds new light on the ways in which her writing engages with contemporary science. Spencer sought to

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explain music as having evolved out of the elements of speech and saw inherited musical response as performing a vital role in enhancing the sympathetic communication necessary to social progress. He theorised the established concept of music as providing a ‘language of the emotions’ in evolutionary terms.34 The significance of such ideas is apparent everywhere in Eliot’s work. In Adam Bede, Eliot describes both ‘the mechanical instinct’ and ‘the keen sensibility to harmony’ as exemplifying ‘our best heritage’.35 In ‘Jubal’, music is ‘high heritage’, emblematic of human potential.36 The poem constructs a myth of music’s origins which sustains an evolutionary account of social and aesthetic development. The origin of music is linked to the development of language and with the expansion of sympathy. In Jubal’s enraptured recognition of a potential emotive voice, music refines and intensifies feelings into a new form of speech: ‘some melody, / Wherein dumb longings inward speech had found’.37 Jubal dreams of combining the different sounds that fill the air with an intensified form of human utterance, imagining the transformation if Those sounds which . . . Fill the wide space with tremors: were these wed To human voices with such passion fed As does but glimmer in our common speech, But might flame out in tones whose changing reach, Surpassing meagre need, informs the sense With fuller union, finer difference.38 Evolutionary conceptions of music inform Eliot’s work from her early journalism. They emerge in her valorisation of Wagner’s progressive account of opera, and in reviews where she appropriates musical analogies to invoke standards to which literary composition might aspire. In her novels, music acts as an indicator of personal and cultural development and, with increasing significance, as a metaphor for sympathy. Music is inseparable from her major artistic and philosophical concerns. Music is an intriguing area of reference, not least because it enjoys such a highly equivocal status. On the one hand there is music’s spiritual pre-eminence, emphasised especially by the legacy of Romantic aesthetics where music occupies the pinnacle in a hierarchy valorising the transcendent, the infinite and the unknowable. Conversely, since ancient times, music has also figured as a dangerous emotive force. This ambivalence gives music a peculiar status, especially in relation to women.

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Introduction

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Music resounds in Eliot’s complex feminism: her musical women are particularly striking – from Caterina Sarti in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ to the prima donna Alcharisi in Daniel Deronda. Eliot’s novels are peopled by women through whose musicality contemporary anxieties about woman’s nature emerge with particular intensity. Equivocal attitudes towards both woman and music make their association in nineteenthcentury literature especially interesting. Musical allusion frequently underpins issues of social power and commodification as well as of individual women’s creative fulfilment. In this respect, explorations of female musical performance and response in novels by Eliot and her contemporaries confront a number of the same preoccupations that appear in journals and advice books of the time where women’s musical activity was discussed as having the potential to enhance, or to detract from, their proper role. Music played a crucial role in women’s education and in their domestic life. However, music could be a dangerous sensual influence. Contradictory representations of music and woman mirror one another in literature of the period: both can be agents of domestic harmony or embody sexual mayhem. Long known as the most spiritual and yet most sensual art, the ambivalent status of music was reinforced in the mid-nineteenth century by psychological theories which explained emotion, including response to music, in physiological terms and which saw women as especially at the mercy of their bodies.39 Music vitally connects Eliot’s writing with the culture of her time. Research for this book brought to light a wealth of interrelated links with biological and social science, psychology, psychical research and domestic ideology, as well as with musical aesthetics. It became possible to establish previously unexamined connections between Eliot’s use of musical allusion and her intellectual context. I therefore begin with two contextual chapters, dealing respectively with music in scientific writing and in relation to debates about women. This material illuminates the way musical allusion works across literary texts. It is followed by chapters on Eliot’s two most musically imbued novels, The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda, where music provides a focus for reading the most innovative aspects of her work. Chapter 1, ‘Music, Science, Literature’, centres on the debate about the evolutionary significance of music initiated by Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. It investigates subsequent scientific and aesthetic discussions in relation to Eliot’s work, exploring specific influences such as Spencer, or the humanist Ludwig Feuerbach, whom Eliot translated, as well as wider cultural contexts. The second chapter, ‘Music and the

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Woman Question’, sets forth the lively Victorian disputes about the role of music in the education and social and domestic lives of women. These disputes are a vital context for representations of female musicality by Eliot and contemporary female novelists, and have a bearing on their own situations as women writers. The second half of the book goes on to raise more literary concerns. Chapter 3, ‘The Mill on the Floss: “A Mind Susceptible to Music”’, reads this novel in conjunction with contemporary theories of psychology. Eliot’s readers become aware of her as a writer who both recognises and confronts determinist expectations. She plays on music’s association with intense emotional expression in a way that expands and challenges the limits of literary realism. Eliot’s response to music’s pre-eminence within Romantic aesthetics and her interest in psychology and psychical research are jointly manifest in some of the most experimental moments in her novels. Her work revises Romanticism in the light of evolutionary science: this is dramatised by the musical seduction of her heroine in The Mill on the Floss. The final chapter, ‘Daniel Deronda: “The Other Side of Silence”’, analyses the exceptional range of musical allusion in Eliot’s last, most experimental, novel and draws together the central concerns of this study. In Daniel Deronda, musical allusion works to expand the limits of sympathetic communication, and to challenge familiar boundaries of time and identity to a degree which gives Eliot’s writing affinities with contemporary investigations of telepathy and hypnotism. Psychical research and the importance of the audial are of great interest to scholars today and Eliot’s work has not previously been studied in the light of the two concerns combined. Her use of musical allusion in her final novel also reveals important links, previously undiscussed, with German Romantic literature, including the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose uncanny tales were pervaded by his ardent engagement with music. Eliot, that ‘most formidably erudite of English novelists’, was consummately adept at evoking a plethora of connections.40 This book establishes new contexts within which to read her works. It takes inspiration from the increasing interdisciplinarity of recent work in Victorian Studies: a broadening of the range of resonances available to us. This book is for those who share some of Eliot’s own impassioned intellectual and emotional involvement with music, for musical experience is already part of the personal frame of reference within which they read her novels. The chapters that follow augment this, introducing musical ways of knowing and thinking to make audible the

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Introduction

10

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

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musical potential in the apparently non-musical. By considering music in Eliot’s work in relation to her preoccupations and those of her culture, they endeavour to enhance an appreciation of the ways – both like and unlike those we know today – in which music mattered to Eliot and her contemporaries.

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Music, Science, Literature: The ‘Large Music of Reasonable Speech’

When George Eliot included one of the first favourable critiques of Wagner in English in her 1855 article ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’, she discussed his art in terms of organic evolutionary development. Her account of Wagner’s work opens with a historical survey of the advance of opera in which Eliot speculates about the music of the future with a joke that calls on her readers’ familiarity with current debates about organic development: As to melody – who knows? It is just possible that melody, as we conceive it, is only a transitory phase of music, and that the musicians of the future may read the airs of Mozart and Beethoven and Rossini as scholars read the Stabreim and assonance of early poetry. We are but in ‘the morning of the times’, and must learn to think of ourselves as tadpoles unprescient of the future frog.1 The two contexts evident in this passage, Eliot’s engagement with contemporary science and with German culture, work together in her writing about music. Eliot was introduced to Wagner’s operas by Liszt on her first visit to Weimar in 1854. She heard Tannhäuser and read an account by Liszt of Der Fliegende Holländer.2 She also condensed and translated one of Liszt’s articles for publication in the Leader.3 Much of the detail of ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ clearly originates directly from her reading of German music literature and experience of German musical culture – as 11

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such, they are one of the earliest appearances of such material in the English press. Eliot’s sense of opera’s evolutionary development also has important affinities with contemporary scientific theory. She was prepared to defend Wagner’s theories about how music and drama should evolve despite the equivocal response of her own ears to his music. At the same time as organicist theory supplied a philosophical context for Eliot’s comments on Wagner, music itself was of growing and serious interest to a number of her scientific contemporaries. Amongst these were her close friend Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and the German physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz. Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary account of music and the scientific debate this provoked are especially significant for Eliot’s comments about music in her early journalism and subsequently in her fiction. His ideas about music may have encouraged Eliot’s favourable response to Wagner’s theories. During the early 1850s, when they were close friends, Spencer frequently took Eliot to the opera with him. These shared musical experiences were amid the circumstances in which she conceived her ultimately unreturned passion for the philosopher. Spencer’s theories about music clearly remained important to Eliot’s work. Mention of Spencer’s name today amongst scholars of nineteenth-century culture inevitably provokes grim amusement. We acknowledge his importance whilst agreeing that his work is quite unreadable. At the same time, we find the history of reading of ever-increasing interest, and it is one of the quirks of this history that Spencer’s contemporaries found his periodical articles and books eminently worth reading. There were jokes made at the expense of his unbending adherence to his Synthetic Philosophy (I cite examples by Huxley and by Eliot herself in chapter 3 of this book). Yet Spencer was the most influential contemporary populariser of evolutionary, or ‘development’, theory.4 There are others, some of whom are discussed later in this chapter, with whose work Eliot’s writing about music shows closer affinities of language and tone. However, Spencer’s work on music was crucial for both its generation and reception. It has continued to have a bearing on later discussions of musical aesthetics.

The origin and function of music In October 1857, Spencer published an article in Fraser’s Magazine on ‘The Origin and Function of Music’.5 The essay’s importance lies in its physiological explanation of musical response and evolutionary view of the history and future purpose of the art. Music, Spencer proclaimed, had originated in emotionally heightened speech, becoming gradually

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refined as a separate form of expression. As with the rest of his development theory, Spencer’s evolutionary analysis of music was based on a model drawn from embryology – that all development took place from homogeneous to heterogeneous states.6 ‘Dancing, poetry and music are connate’, he asserted, ‘are originally constituent parts of the same thing’.7 Music’s evolution into a distinct art illustrated his basic philosophical theory of progressive diversification. Spencer’s analysis of music’s evolution from speech rests upon his distinction in speech of two different elements, expressive and intellectual. Language comprises both words, which are the ‘signs of ideas’, and the ‘tones in which they are uttered’, which are the ‘signs of feelings’: an idea that he formulates as ‘cadence is the commentary of the emotions upon the propositions of the intellect’.8 Music, according to Spencer, arises as a refinement of the ‘language of emotion’ as opposed to the verbal ‘language of ideas’. Spencer’s claim that music followed, rather than preceded, speech follows from his conclusion that human language was at first entirely conceptual and only later became capable of emotional expression. In ‘Progress, Its Law and Cause’, published in April of the same year as his essay on music, he had discussed the origins of language and concluded: ‘That human language ever consisted solely of exclamations . . .we have no evidence, but that language can be traced down to a form in which nouns and verbs are its only elements, is an established fact’.9 His view of music as a form of emotionally charged expression superior to speech was similar to Rousseau’s. However, Spencer’s view of civilisation as representing evolutionary progress rather than degeneration from mankind’s ideal state encouraged him to reverse Rousseau’s assumption, in the Essai sur l’origine des langues (c. 1760), that music had preceded speech. ‘It is absurd to suppose’, Spencer exclaims, ‘that, along with the undeveloped verbal forms of barbarism, there existed a developed system of vocal inflections’.10 Rather, we should assume ‘that, along with the higher and more numerous verbal forms needed to convey the multiplied and complicated ideas of civilized life, there have grown up those more involved changes of voice which express the feelings proper to such ideas’.11 The two elements of speech have continued to develop simultaneously, the expressive range of the voice increasing along with the growth of vocabulary and of grammatical sophistication. The crucial function of music, according to Spencer, is in turn to influence the speech from which it has sprung, enhancing the communication of feeling essential to sympathetic human relations, and ultimately transforming society. As I suggest in my introduction, Eliot was to

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conjure a similar vision of the origin and function of music in her poem ‘The Legend of Jubal’. Eliot’s invocation in Romola of ‘the large music of reasonable speech’, quoted at the head of this chapter, also suggests a fertile interrelationship between language and music.12 Spencer was formulating his evolutionary theory of music at the time when Eliot was most closely associated with him. His ‘Origin and Function of Music’ was published two years later than Eliot’s essay on ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’. However, its fundamental tenets can be found in Spencer’s work of the early 1850s.13 Visits to the opera during this time must have provided numerous occasions for music to have been a topic of conversation with Eliot.14 Spencer published several periodical articles throughout the 1850s to publicise the principles that underlay his application of the development hypothesis to society and the arts. These articles established him as the main populariser of the theory that the laws of evolution must govern every sphere of existence. In ‘The Development Hypothesis’, published in the Leader in March 1854, and subsequent essays, Spencer mounted a defence of the ‘Theory of Evolution’, proclaiming its universal applicability: ‘the development of every faculty, bodily, moral, or intellectual’ being ‘all explicable on this same principle’.15 Spencer developed his scientific, social and aesthetic theories as interdependent aspects of evolutionary organicism. In an 1857 Westminster Review essay on ‘Progress, Its Law and Cause’, Spencer explained that he was taking theories of organic development from German embryologists, such as Wolff, Goethe, and von Baer, and applying them more generally to material, biological, social and mental life to show that ‘this law of organic progress is the law of all progress’.16 Universal progress from simple to complex states is for Spencer a ‘law exemplified’ from the ‘genesis of the solar system’ through the emergence of life forms and of human society, and ultimately to the ‘evolution of all products of human thought and action; whether concrete or abstract, real or ideal’.17 The development of language from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous may be traced in the ‘gradual multiplication of parts of speech’.18 Written language, painting and sculpture, Spencer claims, originally existed as ‘appendages’ of architecture.19 Poetry, music and dancing rose out of the originally identical rhythmic basis of speech, sound and motion – an idea that perhaps finds a poetic echo in the forging of poetry and music in Eliot’s ‘The Legend of Jubal’.20 The theory that ‘the law of organic development, is the law of all development’ was one that Eliot had already taken on board prior even

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to Spencer’s publication of his ‘Development Hypothesis’ article.21 In her much quoted first essay for the Westminster, a review of Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect (1851), she praised Mackay’s perception that religion is ‘co-extensive with the history of human development’, proclaiming the ‘invariability of sequence which is acknowledged to be the basis of physical science, but which is still perversely ignored in our social organization, our ethics and our religion’.22 Spencer’s close connections with Eliot make his work extremely important for the reading of her comments on musical development. It is tempting to speculate whether Eliot might, in turn, have had some influence on the development of Spencer’s thoughts about music during the 1850s (albeit that Spencer only records her assenting to his views).23 ‘Of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s friendship I have had the honour and advantage for twenty years’, Eliot was to write in 1875, ‘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’.24 Her novels continue to show her enlarging and clarifying the issues raised by his theory of music. Spencer began ‘The Origin and Function of Music’ with a detailed physiological account of musical response to establish that the affective power of music was explicable by the same physiological principles which accounted for all types of nervous excitement. Another of Spencer’s Leader essays, ‘A Theory of Tears and Laughter’, is an account of the ‘biological meaning’ of emotional expression.25 Emotional expression of all kinds creates the ‘natural language of the passions’.26 Spencer’s explanation of how the opposing extremes of emotional expression have their common source in ‘great mental excitement’ was elaborated further in ‘The Origin and Function of Music’.27 A physiological approach to music would not have been entirely startling to Spencer’s readers. Interest in the physical influence of music was already a feature of medical and advice literature dealing with both the beneficial and the potentially hazardous effects of the art. Amongst scientific writers, another associate of Eliot’s, Alexander Bain, sought, like Spencer, to unite psychology and physiology. In The Senses and the Intellect (1855), Bain drew on musical examples to illustrate the connections between sensation and thought.28 Both Bain and Spencer provided physiological accounts of association psychology.29 However, Spencer was unique in also providing it with ‘a whole new basis in evolutionary biology’.30 Spencer’s physiological theory of musical response was linked to a specifically evolutionary model by his conviction that musicality, like other faculties, had

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evolved via the processes of biological inheritance. His explanations of musical response in terms of physical inheritance and involuntary physiological reaction provide an important context for reading Eliot’s portrayal of musical response in her novels. In his essay, Spencer extended the physiological principle of ‘reflex action’ to account for emotional response as well as for sensation, asserting that: All feelings . . . sensations or emotions, pleasurable or painful – have this common characteristic, that they are muscular stimuli . . . there is a direct connection between feeling and motion; the last growing more vehement as the first grows more intense. Were it allowable here to treat the matter scientifically, we might trace this general law down to the principle known among physiologists as that of reflex action . . . mental excitement of all kinds ends in excitement of the muscles; and . . . the two preserve a more or less constant ratio to each other.31 Spencer saw this relationship as particularly relevant to his theory of music since he maintained that music was originally entirely vocal and ‘vocal sounds are produced by the agency of certain muscles’ which contract ‘in proportion to the intensity of the feelings’,32 the ‘different adjustment of the vocal organs’ involved in each of these muscular contractions ‘causing a change in the sound emitted’.33 The fact that different sounds, the natural means of emotional expression, can be shown to be the ‘physiological results of variations of feeling’ indicates to Spencer that ‘the explanation of all kinds of vocal expression, must be sought in this general relation between mental and muscular excitements’.34 This accounts for the ‘chief peculiarities in the utterance of the feelings’ which are identical with the major elements of music.35 Spencer presents a systematic and very lengthy account of the characteristics of ‘loudness, quality or timbre, pitch, intervals and rate of variation’36 to demonstrate that ‘all the leading vocal phenomena have a physiological basis. They are so many manifestations of the general law that feeling is a stimulus to muscular action’.37 These same characteristics are marshalled to provide a schematic account of musical expression, with, for instance, high loud notes expressive of a greater degree of passion than low soft tones.38 Our response to musical expression involves a mirroring of the physiological state that originated it. Vocal expression becomes a means of sympathetic communication as well as an innate and spontaneous reaction to emotion when:

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Having been conscious of each feeling at the same time that we heard ourselves make the consequent sound, we have acquired an established association of ideas between such sound and the feeling which caused it. When the like sound is made by another, we ascribe the like feeling to him; and . . . not only ascribe to him that feeling, but have a certain degree of it aroused in ourselves . . . Thus these various modifications of voice become not only a language through which we understand the emotions of others, but also the means of exciting our sympathy with such emotions.39 ’Have we not here, then, adequate data for a theory of music?’ Spencer demands.40 He finds that ‘These vocal peculiarities which indicate excited feeling, are those which especially distinguish song from ordinary speech’.41 Moreover, each vocal characteristic which has been shown to be the ‘physiological result of pain or pleasure, is carried to its greatest extreme in vocal music’.42 Music thus ‘employs and exaggerates the natural language of the emotions’ and ‘arises from the systematic combination of those vocal peculiarities which are the physiological effects of acute pleasure and pain’.43 Spencer’s view of these ‘systematic’ correlations of musical utterance and physiological response makes music the language of emotion in a very specific and scientifically explicable sense. He unequivocally rejects notions that music’s expressive power is based on the intrinsic qualities of particular sounds, or that it is simply a matter of convention. The only possible explanation of musical expression is that sounds which were originally instinctive reactions to emotion have become systematically organised to produce an ‘idealized language of emotion’.44 Spencer produces a variety of ‘historical’ proofs of his somewhat eccentric claim that music originated in speech. These reinforce the evolutionist nature of his deductions. He resorts to the practice, common among contemporary anthropologists, of identifying existing native tribes with primitive man. Support for his belief that music evolved in a ‘gradual and unobtrusive manner’ from speech is to be found in: the fact (not properly an historical one, but fitly grouped with such) that the dance-chants of savage tribes are very monotonous; and in virtue of their monotony are much more nearly allied to ordinary speech than are the songs of civilized races.45 To this Spencer adds ‘the fact that there are still extant among boatmen and others in the East, ancient chants of a like monotonous character’.46 He provides examples of how the speech of different nationalities was to

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be ordered according to his evolutionary criteria: ‘the Italians, among whom modern music was earliest cultivated, and who more especially practised and excelled in melody. . . speak in more varied and expressive inflections and cadences than any other nation’; however, ‘the Scotch’ who have been ‘confined almost exclusively. . . to their national airs . . . and therefore accustomed to but a limited range of musical expression . . . are unusually monotonous in the intervals and modulations of their speech’.47 Spencer’s musical hierarchy also applied to his view of class, as evident from observations he makes on the different speaking tones of a ‘servant girl’ and an ‘accomplished lady’.48 Its status as ‘improper’ historical evidence does not impede Spencer’s confident conclusion, ‘from the evidence furnished by existing barbarous tribes’, that ‘the vocal music of pre-historic times was emotional speech very slightly exalted’.49 His readers may be assured that subsequent development has entailed an intensification of emotional expression and consequent divergence between musical and speech forms, since ‘we see that the earliest vocal music . . . differed much less from emotional speech than does the vocal music of our days’.50 Spencer draws on theories about the origin of opera to substantiate his theory about music’s derivation from speech. His knowledge of the details of operatic history are apparently gleaned from Charles Burney’s account of the Florentine Camerata in his General History of Music (1776–89), which includes an account of the invention of opera from recitative.51 In its ancient origins, recitative must, Spencer explains, have arisen ‘by degrees out of emotional speech’.52 It thus follows that, ‘by a continuance of the same process song has arisen out of recitative’.53 Present-day opera offers Spencer a convenient microcosm of music’s historical development, the gradations between dialogue, recitative and aria corresponding to the degree of emotional excitement in the scene. The relatively small differences between these operatic forms confirm his theory ‘that the highest form of vocal music was arrived at by degrees’.54 Spencer also invokes the contemporary privileging of lyric poetry in support of his evolutionary account of the arts, for the different stages of vocal music had ‘a simultaneous and parallel genesis’ with their related poetic forms, recitative arising from epic which had grown from the ‘orations and legends of savages’ and in turn giving rise to lyrical music, just as lyrical poetry gradually developed from epic as the ‘appropriate vehicle’ for the ‘stronger passions’.55 ‘There is also a convenient parallelism of results’, Spencer adds, since both lyrical music and poetry differ from their parent forms chiefly in that ‘each still further intensifies the natural language of the emotions’.56

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Towards the end of his article, Spencer turns his attention to music’s social function: ‘the indirect benefits which accrue from music, in addition to the direct pleasure it gives’.57 The chief of these benefits arises from the relationship which Spencer establishes between music and speech. It was Spencer’s supposition that whilst evolution must, of necessity, involve a positive progression from more simple to more complex forms, these more complex forms in turn aided the continuing development of their originators. The two elements of speech can thus be seen as having maintained a mutually beneficial relationship, as with all the other originally homogeneous arts and sciences which ‘severally act and react on each other to their mutual advancement’.58 By suggesting the more effective use of the same expressive element of speech from which it arose, music has ‘all along been reacting upon speech, and increasing its power of rendering emotion’. Spencer proposes that ‘The complex musical phrases by which composers have conveyed complex emotions, may rationally be supposed to have influenced us in making those involved cadences of conversation by which we convey our subtler thoughts and feelings’.59 Music’s powerful effect on the mind can be envisaged as naturally ‘developing our perception of the meanings of inflections, qualities, and modulations of voice; and giving us a correspondingly increased power of using them’.60 In this capacity, music’s role becomes vital to social evolution: In its bearings upon human happiness, we believe that this emotional language which musical culture develops and refines, is only second in importance to the language of the intellect; perhaps not even second to it. For. . . modifications of voice produced by feelings, are the means of exciting like feelings in others . . . they give life to the otherwise dead words in which the intellect utters its ideas; and so enable the hearer not only to understand the state of mind they accompany, but to partake of that state. In short, they are the chief media of sympathy.61 Sympathy is crucial to human happiness and the precondition of the behaviour which distinguishes civilisation from barbarism. Thus the ‘agencies which communicate it can scarcely be overrated in value’.62 According to Spencer, the function of civilisation is to curb the aggressive characteristics of pre-social man, replacing them with altruistic desires. His evolutionary model of human society and psychology leads him to conclude that the progress of civilisation will increase the extent to which people express their emotions:

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The ‘language of sympathetic intercourse’ by which we communicate and share happiness develops simultaneously with the civilising process and this unfolding of ‘the sympathetic side of our nature’ is fundamental to the evolutionary process whereby we achieve ‘adaptation to the social state’.64 As Robert Young puts it, the ‘novel features of Spencer’s psychology arise from the union of the concepts of association and evolution and lead to a conception of psychology as a biological science of adaptation’.65 As civilisation progresses, the elevated state of feeling as yet limited to ‘a cultivated few’ – the musician chief amongst them – will become universal and promote ‘a corresponding development of emotional language into more involved forms’: Just as there has silently grown up a language of ideas, which, rude as it first was, now enables us to convey with precision the most subtle and complicated thoughts; so there is still silently growing up a language of feelings, which, notwithstanding its present imperfection, we may expect will ultimately enable men vividly and completely to impress on each other all the emotions which they experience from moment to moment.66 Spencer therefore insists that ‘it is the function of music to facilitate the development of this emotional language’ which will in turn allow the sympathetic communication essential to greater civilisation to take place.67 Eliot’s emphasis on the musical element in poetry in her literary criticism takes on additional significance in the light of Spencer’s analysis of the musical element of speech. So also does the importance placed in her novels on musicality of voice, both singing and speaking. An idea of music as denoting a privileged mode of sympathetic communication is fundamental to her use of musical allusion. Spencer’s view of music’s function accords with Eliot’s declaration that the arts should inspire the ‘extension of our sympathies’.68 His conviction that close interrelationships exist between stages of aesthetic and social evolution also has counterparts in Eliot’s accounts of music. In ‘Progress, Its Law and

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The habitual concealment of our feelings diminishing . . . in proportion as our feelings become such as do not demand concealment, we may conclude that the exhibition of them will become much more vivid than men now dare allow it to be; and this implies a more expressive emotional language.63

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Written language is connate with Painting and Sculpture; and at first all three are appendages of Architecture and have a direct connection with the primary form of government – the theocratic.69 A similar, if less schematic, correspondence between states of artistic, social and political development emerges in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda where the musician Klesmer fulminates against the taste for Bellini in fashionable British society as epitomising a ‘puerile’ stage of culture.70 Although no one before Spencer had applied the principles of evolutionary biological science to music, the history of music itself made it particularly amenable to description in terms of progressive development. Writers of music literature had also long based their observations on the assumption of music’s power over the emotions. In certain respects, Spencer’s theories provided an elaboration of accepted ways of viewing the history and function of music. Music historians, while conventionally paying a great deal of attention to what was known about the music of the ancient world, had, in the absence of any actual examples from that time, to work from their experience of the music of the past few centuries. It was common for changes in musical form and practice to be viewed in terms of continuous progress. This was encouraged, too, by the conditions in which music was realised. There were continual developments in instrument-building and this, of course, was a period before any widespread revival of Baroque music when performance practice favoured recently composed works. Nineteenth-century musicologists thus already viewed musical development as a kind of evolutionary progression of which the current period, as epitomised, for example, by recent improvements in the pianoforte, was the culmination.71 The advance of music was readily perceived to mirror the evolution of the human faculties in general. ‘The rude breathings of the perforated reed’, wrote Thomas Busby in the 1826 preface to his Grammar of Music: ‘the vague vibrations of the ill-distended string, were no doubt upon a par with the tuneless ear and undeveloped intellect’.72 In the 1870s, the Reverend Hugh Haweis was to proclaim in his Music and Morals that ‘Music, as distinguished from the various rude attempts of the past, is only about four hundred years old. Modern music, which alone is worthy of the name, is in fact the youngest of the arts’.73 Such views were long-standing. Charles Burney had regarded recent Italian opera as the climax of musical development, scorning English musical

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Cause’, Spencer had traced specific links between different stages of artistic and social development:

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dramas from before the introduction of Italian opera as mere ‘attempts’.74 He concluded his History of Music with an apology for the amount of space devoted to the history of ‘barbarous’ music compared with the compositions and performances of the present day in which ‘a certain road to full perfection in every department seems to have been attained’.75 ‘Many specimens of melody and harmony are given’, he explains, ‘not as models of perfection but reliques of barbarism, and indisputable vouchers that mankind was delighted with bad Music, before good had been heard’.76 Whilst Spencer was pursuing a more systematic and wide-ranging view of music’s purpose than the historians of music who preceded him, his praise of the musical progress of the present day at the conclusion of the ‘Origins and Function of Music’ follows established musical historiography.77 ‘That music is a product of civilization is manifest’, Spencer proclaims, ‘for though savages have their dance-chants, these are of a kind scarcely to be dignified by the title musical: at most, they supply but the vaguest rudiment of music, properly so called’.78 This statement clearly accords with conventional musicology as well as with contemporary anthropology. Spencer’s historicist views of both language and music in ‘The Origin and Function of Music’ place modern European culture at the head of the evolutionary hierarchy. Indeed, it is his view that the English language has reached a stage of developmental complexity ‘superior to all others’.79 The equation of music and emotional expression which Spencer develops in his article and his fundamental association of music with language also enjoy a long history. The affective power of music is discussed in Plato’s Republic and had been the basis of Aristotle’s theories of music in the Politics.80 During the Renaissance, the idea of music as an emotionally expressive language became common, as it became increasingly linked with the art of rhetoric rather than regarded exclusively as a science.81 The association of music and emotion, in both musical and literary writing, remained continuous during subsequent periods.82 In 1831, William Crotch, professor of music at Oxford, delivered a series of lectures in Oxford and London in which he stressed the expressive and affective power of music.83 In The Music of Nature (1832), William Gardiner, in agreement with Rousseau, saw music as related to the instinctive selfexpression of primitive man.84 Thomas Busby’s enthusiasm for music’s combination of the beauties of science with natural expressive powers is also typical. He described music as ‘a wild untutored ebullition of joy, grief, and exultation’, creating a language in which one hears ‘Religion ejaculated, mirth rejoiced, and misery wept, in regulated melody’.85

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Music’s acknowledged powers of expression had also long been considered to confer genuine benefits upon mankind. Musicologists were concerned to point out that both the complexity and the expressive power of music gave it a more elevated purpose than ‘that of indulging our capacity for the pleasures of sense’.86 More significantly, in the light of Spencer’s view of music’s role in social evolution, music’s expressive potential was championed by the leaders of important musical reforms. Joseph Mainzer, who published several highly successful books on musical education during the 1840s, persistently advocated music’s supremacy as the language of emotion (albeit illustrated here by electric current rather than by nervous response): By the admirable connexion existing between the ear and the heart of man, every emotion and passion, every feeling and state of the soul may be represented by sounds. Thus, joy, grief, tenderness, hatred, devotion, fear, hope, every one of these different moods of mind, can be readily interpreted in the varied combination of analogous sounds, which express with wonderful truth, the diversified shades of feeling of which the human heart is susceptible, and communicate them with the rapidity of an electric spark from soul to soul.87 A feature of nineteenth-century scientific debate about the function of music is therefore the extent to which it overlapped with wider cultural representation of the art. One of my concerns in this study is to probe the extent to which, in writing about music, scientific materialism and Romantic aesthetics meet. Despite his demystification of music as a transcendent art, the role which Spencer allotted music at the conclusion of ‘The Origin and Function’ effectively placed it in the same position at the head of the aesthetic hierarchy which it had occupied in Romantic aesthetics: music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts – as the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare. And thus, even leaving out of view the immediate gratifications it is hourly giving, we cannot too much applaud that progress of musical culture which is becoming one of the characteristics of our age.88 Spencer’s conception of music as an ‘idealized language of emotion’ still suggests some form of transcendence.89 The explanations of material science allowed for phenomena that were beyond conscious sensory

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The microscope and the telescope, by making realisable the plurality of worlds, scales, and existences beyond the reach of our particular sense organisation were a powerful antidote to that form of positivism which refused to acknowledge possibilities beyond the present and apparent world. They were permitting factors in that particular strain of Romantic materialism – a sense of the clustering mystery of a material universe – which is dominant in both the scientific writing and literature of the period.90 Significantly, the passage chosen by Beer to exemplify Eliot’s ‘“scientific” discourse’ is aural rather than visual: namely her famous invocation when pondering the ‘limits of sensibility’ in Middlemarch of ‘that roar which lies on the other side of silence’.91 The position occupied by music in Eliot’s writing echoes its status in both the literature of Romantic idealism and in scientific thought. It may therefore have been of some significance to her that Spencer, whilst eager to provide a scientific explanation of music’s apparent transcendent power, formulated his account in terms not incompatible with traditional representations of music’s mysterious effects. In my account of The Mill on the Floss in Chapter 3 of this book, I explore how Maggie Tulliver’s longing for music takes on a new significance in the light of Eliot’s consciousness of the physical processes at work within the individual’s experience of mysterious transcendence. Spencer invoked the extreme sensitivity of the musician to account for the apparently transcendent and visionary character of music. Possessed not of a heaven-sent gift but of the ‘extremely acute sensibilities’ contingent on a more responsive and highly developed nervous system, the musician’s more advanced grasp of the language of emotion could help explain the complex nature of musical expression: because of the general susceptibility which distinguishes him, [the musician] regards with emotion, events, scenes, conduct, character, which produce on most men no appreciable effect. The emotions so generated, compounded as they are of the simpler emotions, are not expressible by intervals and cadences natural to these, but by combinations of

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perception to be experienced as mysterious even when their nature was open to scientific explanation. Gillian Beer points out that Eliot’s writing shared the ‘imagery of transcendence, of the invisible world’ with much scientific writing of the time. She describes the ways in which scientific instruments such as

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Hence the musician’s ability, as a harbinger of the future development of less advanced mortals, to grant the listener experiences as yet beyond ordinary comprehension: thus we may in some measure understand how. . . music not only so strongly excites our more familiar feelings, but also produces feelings we never had before – arouses dormant sentiments of which we had not conceived the possibility and do not know the meaning; or, as Richter says – tells us of things we have not seen and shall not see.93 With this quotation from Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Spencer consciously places his work in relation to Romantic musical aesthetics. Jean Paul (1763–1835) wrote a number of novels where music features as both metaphor and drama – and especially as a metaphor for transcendence. Carlyle and De Quincey both admired his works and translated some of them into English. Numerous responses to Spencer’s work cite this same phrase from Jean Paul to describe music’s effects. The conception of the musician as possessing superior emotional sensibilities was of course widely to be found in Romantic literature. The idea is frequently alluded to by composers themselves: in Beethoven’s claims for the special status of the musical artist in his Heiligenstadt Testament, in the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Robert Schumann, and in Wagner’s assertions that he could never expect to be properly understood by the vulgar throng.94 It had also become a commonplace of popular literature.95 Spencer’s view of the musician stressed the greater sympathetic and moral capacity which creative sensitivity conferred, so emphasising the artist’s crucial role in society rather than the glorious isolation which apparently accompanied the Romantic view of artistic status. It is the musician after all, in Spencer’s view, whose more advanced development is to influence the expressive power of our daily speech. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s musical giant Julius Klesmer, with his pronouncements on the political seriousness of the artistic profession, might be seen as the epitome of the musician as agent of evolutionary progress: one of Spencer’s ‘cultivated few’ working for a more general development of expressive emotional language into increasingly ‘involved’ (thus evolved) forms.96 In Spencer’s account of a constantly evolving ‘idealized language of emotion’, music, via the superior sensibility of the musician, becomes

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such intervals and cadences: whence arise more involved musical phrases, conveying more complex, subtle, and unusual feelings.92

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we may regard music as an aid to the achievement of that higher happiness which it indistinctly shadows forth. Those vague feelings of unexperienced felicity which music arouses – those indefinite impressions of an unknown ideal life which it calls up, may be considered as a prophecy, to the fulfilment of which music is itself partly instrumental. The strange capacity which we have for being so affected by melody and harmony, may be taken to imply both that it is within the possibilities of our nature to realize those intenser delights they dimly suggest, and that they are in some way concerned in the realization of them. On this supposition, the power and the meaning of music become comprehensible; but otherwise they are a mystery.97 This passage is of relevance to Spencer’s incongruous marriage of scientific gradualism and political radicalism. He satisfies both, as John Burrow has pointed out, by promoting a sense that history is on the verge of opening the ‘last envelope’ in the evolutionary series.98 Spencer’s view of the importance of music implicitly places the musician in a position to break the seal. Many champions of music in Victorian Britain had also developed views of music’s function which transferred its significance from the realm of the infinite to the human and social sphere. Ideas about music’s power to transform society were finding direct application in British musical reforms, for example, as already mentioned, through the writing and teaching of Joseph Mainzer. Mainzer, a former priest, became a leading figure in the amateur choral-singing movement, first in Paris and then in Britain. He had originally trained as a mining engineer, which gave him a lasting sympathy with oppressed workers and a desire to do something on their behalf. From 1826, Mainzer was singing master at the seminary at Trier until police investigation of his political pamphleting caused him to flee to Paris. After a number of ventures in opera and journalism, he decided to employ his musical gifts for the benefit of Parisian workers. His free classes for labourers, begun in 1835, were extremely popular. Henry Chorley visited a class in 1837, and the phenomenon was reported in England via his account in the Athenaeum.99 Mainzer came to England in 1839 and soon established classes in centres throughout England and Scotland. He began the highly influential Musical Times, subsequently purchased and continued

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a prognostication of future human development rather than of mysterious spiritual realms:

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by Novello, through which both articles about music and printed music were disseminated, the publication sharing in the general expansion of the periodical press at this time. Mainzer’s declared object was to promote the diffusion of singing throughout Britain and he presented a formidable array of arguments for music’s therapeutic, educative and civic benefits. The campaign by Mainzer and others such as John Hullah and John Curwen to reform popular music education was thus an important dimension of the environment into which Eliot’s work was received.100 Mainzer championed the supremacy of music as a language of feeling. In his 1848 Music and Education, he described the nervous sensations aroused by music and its influence on memory, an indication of how, in principle at least, Spencer’s thoroughgoing physiological account had precedents in popular music literature as well as in scientific texts.101 At the same time, Mainzer insisted on the independent existence of a higher ‘poetic’ form of musical response which satisfied the intellect and imagination, reaffirming Romantic notions of musical transcendence.102 Nevertheless, as in Spencer’s analysis, music’s emotional powers and transcendent effects were viewed as a crucial element in human development and directed towards progressive social ends. Mainzer’s immediate object was to alleviate the empty misery of the workers’ existence but his vision extended, like Spencer’s, to viewing music as crucial for the future of mankind. Mainzer was also convinced that there was a direct relationship between the state of a civilisation and the condition of its music: ‘The music of a people depends upon their mental and moral development . . . The more the cultivation of the mind approaches perfection, the more complete will be the development of the musical taste’.103 His campaign for music education had the reformation of society as its ultimate goal: the object of music being quite simply the ‘perfectibility of mankind’.104 Mainzer’s writing apparently represents a democratisation of the German Romantic tradition of music writing. The elevating effects of music are no longer called upon to transport the unique artist into the realm of the infinite, as in the musical tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, or the musical criticism of Robert Schumann. Rather, as in Spencer’s account, they provide a vision of the future of all mankind. The concerted music-making advocated in Mainzer’s widely popular Singing for the Million (1841) was to foster human sympathy and provide the most effective aesthetic and moral education for the future adult population: The effect of united voices will . . . awaken in them a love for the Arts in general, and dislike for every thing trivial and frivolous, and will

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What better, what surer foundation . . . could be laid, to prepare those children for being in their after-life good men, good citizens, and elevated moral beings?105 Spencer’s theory of music was thus in many respects at home in contemporary musical, intellectual and social culture. His explanation of music as embodying the best potential of humanity is, moreover, akin to the humanist explanation of musical transcendence of a thinker of particular importance to George Eliot. In 1854 Eliot translated Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums expressing wholehearted endorsement of his views: ‘With the ideas of Feuerbach I everywhere agree’.106 A crucial aspect of Spencer’s theory of music, as far as she was concerned, may therefore have been the degree to which it combined the satisfaction of scientific criteria with confirmation of ideas about music and humanity which she had encountered in the course of her translation of Feuerbach’s work. Feuerbach links music with his advocacy of the primacy of feeling, describing music as the ‘language of feeling’.107 Music, he proposes, offers a ‘monologue of emotion’, in contrast (rather as Spencer was to distinguish the emotional and intellectual elements in speech) to the language of thought.108 His connection of the primacy of feeling with music gives music a crucial role as the medium by which emotion can be expressed: melody is audible feeling – feeling communicating itself . . . the man who is affected by musical sounds is governed by feeling; by the feeling, that is, which finds its corresponding element in musical sounds.109 ‘What, then, is it which acts on thee when thou art affected by melody? What dost thou perceive in it? What else than the voice of thy own heart?’110 The metaphorical status of music and emotion is interchangeable in Feuerbach’s work; he characterises emotion as ‘the musical power in man’. Extolling feeling as ‘a glorious divine power and perfection’, he proclaims music and feeling as jointly essential to humanity: ‘what would man be without feeling? It is the musical power in

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give to all their feelings a noble tendency. A delightful and dignified means of recreation is likewise provided for those young beings, which, through the effects of sympathetic attraction, favours concord amongst them, fosters a community of sentiment, and connects their young hearts by the sweetest ties.

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man. But what would man be without music?’ Indeed, for Feuerbach, music and feeling together define what is essentially human: ‘Just as man has a musical faculty and feels an inward necessity to breathe out his feelings in song; so by a like necessity, he in religious sighs and tears streams forth the nature of feeling as an objective, divine nature’.111 Eliot’s fiction constantly evokes such associations between music and feeling. In Adam Bede, music serves as a metaphor for Adam’s nature and his feelings towards Hetty Sorrel. Her effect on Adam is such that he is ‘wrought on by exquisite music’.112 Conjunctions of musical and religious metaphor which are particularly reminiscent of Feuerbach identify musical response with the religious love of mankind. Seth’s love for Dinah is described as ‘hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so?’ the narrator asks, ‘whether of woman or child, or art or music’.113 Feuerbach’s definition of ‘God’ as ‘pure, unlimited, free Feeling’ offered an alternative humanist object of transcendent experience which was not incompatible with the criteria of scientific rationalism.114 Feuerbach’s God was no separate entity but the objectified expression of the ‘Essential Nature of Man’ (the title of his first chapter): The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective . . . All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.115 Material and temporal existence are not denied in Feuerbach’s conception of the infinite but are essential to it: ‘Only in the realm of the senses, only in space and time, does there exist a being of really infinite qualities or predicates’.116 The apprehension of the infinite is therefore not the perception of something outside human nature but of something essential to it. Religion, the ‘consciousness of the infinite’, is ‘nothing else than the consciousness which man has of his own infinite . . . nature’.117 Our sense of a mysterious divinity is ‘therefore nothing else than the mystery of human nature considered as an infinitely varied, infinitely modifiable, but consequently, phenomenal being’.118 Feuerbach insisted that all human knowledge and attributes spring from the communication between individuals. All the ‘so-called powers of the soul are powers of humanity, not of man as an individual’.119 Music, as for Spencer, is the most powerful expression of mankind’s vital sympathetic power. It does not proffer a vision of a separate infinite sphere, but a sense of communion with the pure unlimited feeling

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inherent in combined human nature, a notion compatible with Spencer’s apprehension of music both as an indication of the best potentials of human nature and as instrumental in their realisation. Whilst writing as a philosopher rather than as a social reformer, the divinity of human nature when ‘freed from the limits of individual man’ was also implicitly linked by Feuerbach to social ideals: he defines his notion of the ‘infinite’ as the totality of individual human potential, stating that ‘In isolation human power is limited, in combination it is infinite’.120 The apparent transcendence of the finite human sphere is, as in Spencer’s analysis, effectively an awareness of the potential of human nature.121 Although not promoting explicitly progressionist views, Feuerbach’s view of human history lies comfortably alongside developmental models of inheritance and evolution. Whilst ‘The knowledge of a single man is limited’, Feuerbach wrote: reason, science, is unlimited, for it is a common act of mankind; and it is so, not only because innumerable men co-operate in the construction of science, but also in the more profound sense, that the scientific genius of a particular age comprehends in itself the thinking powers of the preceding age, though it modifies them in accordance with its own special character.122 Identical views were given a biological basis in evolutionary theories of inheritance. George Eliot was unusual amongst English writers, as she was well aware, in being so directly influenced by Feuerbach. She contrasted Feuerbach’s influence in Germany and England, writing to Sara Hennell that ‘Your impression of the book exactly corresponds to its effect in Germany. It is considered the book of the age there, but Germany and England are two different countries’.123 The degree to which Feuerbach’s ideas informed her writing makes them a significant aspect of her transmission of German thought into English culture. In Eliot’s references to music, the influence of Feuerbach gives a strong humanist inflection to ideas of the kind being popularised by Spencer. We can find correspondences with Feuerbach, and with Mainzer, who might be regarded as a practical representative of Feuerbachian ideals, in Eliot’s description in Middlemarch of the veneration for Handel choruses which underpins Caleb Garth’s portrayal as a custodian of community values. Eliot herself wrote of Handel that ‘there are few things that I care for more in the way of music than his choruses performed by a grand orchestra’, and, after a performance of Judas Maccabaeus, reports that ‘Handel’s music

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always brings me a revival’.124 This view of Handel was one that Eliot shared with many of her contemporaries. Handel’s music was widely revered for its social as well as its musical value. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Handel is the only major composer whose arias are sung by the blind singer Margaret in addition to the pieces of Mainzer-like simplicity composed by her teacher at the Mechanics’ Institute. Mary herself is saved from despair by hearing Margaret practising ‘Comfort Ye’ from the Messiah.125 Meanwhile, amateur choral societies put on performances of his oratorios which gave vast numbers of people the chance to sing together in the choruses. Accounts of music that convey shared emotion of the kind promoted by such performances are a feature of Eliot’s writing within the novels and elsewhere: in the feeling of ‘brotherhood’ that she reported after hearing the music in the Frauenkirche, for example, or the similar sense of communion experienced by her hero during a synagogue service in Daniel Deronda, or metaphorically as in the ‘expression of a common feeling by a large mass of men’ which moves her ‘like music’ having ‘the effect of a great religious rite, with pealing organ and full-voiced choir’.126 This sense of music’s communal significance was clearly not unrepresentative of views broadly current at the period when Eliot’s novels were written and published. At the same time, the original and current social value of music was increasingly becoming the subject of scientific debate.

The scientific debate Spencer’s theory of music provoked particular interest amongst his fellow scientists. Debate following ‘The Origin and Function of Music’ took place specifically within the context of evolutionary theory. Argument was initiated by Darwin’s contention, implicit in The Origin of Species (1859), and overtly made in The Descent of Man (1871), that the origins of music were primarily sexual.127 As far as the human race was concerned, music apparently no longer had any clear function: ‘As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life’, Darwin remarked, ‘they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed’.128 The only explanation Darwin has to offer for music’s otherwise baffling affective power is that music is the survival of a once important and still powerful mode of expression. Darwin was not the only scientist to be puzzled by the purpose of musical sensitivity. Bain, although he saw music as a pre-eminent

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expressive power, had commented on the lack of apparent purpose in the degree of musical excitement experienced by certain individuals.129 For Spencer this excess of expressive capacity was in itself an indication of music’s progressive importance, as it was for Eliot’s Jubal, with his vision of music as ‘surpassing meagre need’.130 Darwin discusses the importance of music in the context of its significance in the courtship rituals of animals in general and alludes to Spencer’s views on music’s origin and function. Having surveyed various characteristics of musical expression, including the fact that music most often ‘awakens the gentler feelings of tenderness and love, he concludes that the only feasible explanation of music’s origins is that ‘musical tones and rhythm were used by the half-human progenitors of man, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited by the strongest passions’.131 In a note on this discussion, Darwin comments: see the very interesting discussion on the Origin and Function of Music by Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his collected ‘Essays,’ 1858, p. 359. Mr. Spencer comes to an exactly opposite conclusion to that at which I have arrived. He concludes that the cadences used in emotional speech afford the foundation from which music has been developed; whilst I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex. Thus musical tones became firmly associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling, and are consequently used instinctively, or through association, when strong emotions are expressed in speech. Mr. Spencer does not offer any satisfactory explanation, nor can I, why high or deep notes should be expressive, both with man and the lower animals, of certain emotions.132 Whilst Darwin and Spencer differed over the origin and function of music, it is notable that both nonetheless discussed music as provoking a physical response which human beings shared with other animals. (Spencer begins ‘The Origin and Function of Music’ by describing a dog’s response to sound.) However, Darwin’s view of music as originating in the courtship rituals of a pre-human species makes its survival beyond the primitive stage of development a vestige of that earlier stage, rather than a factor of current evolutionary importance. It hence deprives music of the social usefulness conferred upon it by Spencer’s theory where music is both instrument and intimation of mankind’s

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future progress. If the musical faculty originated in ‘the strongest passions’ of mankind’s animal forbears, Darwin speculates, then we are likely to have inherited associations which will enable music to reawaken these passions in us.133 Darwin’s account puts the emphasis, not, as Spencer’s had done, on the physiological basis of individual threads of association, but on biologically inherited associations from our shared pre-human past. In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver is entranced by the ‘primitive sensations’ of musical intervals.134 When discussing Eliot’s novels, I shall be considering how music in her work functions as a vehicle for distant family and racial inheritance as much as for progressive development.135 Fascination with the evolutionary origins and purpose of musical expression coincided with a growing interest amongst scientists in physical acoustics. In this respect, the influence of the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz was of paramount importance. His 1862 treatise Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen was translated into English as On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music by Alexander J. Ellis in 1875. Ellis had also contributed a translation of an 1857 lecture on ‘The Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music’ to a collection of Helmholtz’s popular lectures published in 1873 and introduced by John Tyndall. Aware of the importance of Helmholtz’s discoveries, Tyndall had translated some of his articles into English during the 1850s.136 In 1874, the psychologist James Sully was able to allude to Helmholtz’s ‘now famous doctrine of upper tones’.137 By this date, the Tonempfindungen had passed through three German editions since its first publication in 1862, and Helmholtz’s polymathic achievements had received widespread appreciation. In 1873, Helmholtz was awarded a medal by the Royal Society in recognition for his published work on ‘the Conservation of Energy’, ‘the Theory of Music’, and ‘Physiological Optics’ and in general acknowledgement of his contributions to ‘nervous physiology, hydrodynamical theory, instruments (as the ophthalmometer and the ophthalmoscope) for exact measurement and medical examination of the eye, and other important subjects’.138 In his introduction to the 1873 translation of Helmholtz’s lectures, Tyndall extolled Helmholtz’s reputation as a populariser of science, explaining that ‘The evident aim of these Lectures is to give those “whose education has been mainly literary,” an intelligent interest in the researches of science’.139 Amongst Helmholtz’s more scientifically educated readership was Eliot’s partner G. H. Lewes, who owned a French translation of the Tonempfindungen. There are already signs of his familiarity with Helmholtz’s work in The Physiology of Common Life

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(1860), for instance, where Lewes suggests that the ‘effect of music on our emotions is an exaltation of the effect which all sounds produce, especially tones’.140 Eliot herself recorded reading ‘Helmholtz on music’ in February 1869.141 Helmholtz’s work on music, as its title suggests, aimed to establish a physiological basis, not simply for sound, but specifically for music. Like Spencer, Helmholtz established a physiological foundation for musical response by locating the apprehension of musical sound in nervous sensation.142 His treatise was also a pioneering work of physics in its analysis of the different partial tones which go into the composition of a single musical note. This enabled him to explain the physical nature of consonance and dissonance, and of phenomena such as sympathetic resonance. In 1868 Eliot and Lewes visited Helmholtz in Freiburg to witness a demonstration of his tuning forks. My chapter on The Mill on the Floss discusses the significance which the concept of sympathetic vibration already had in Eliot’s use of musical allusion. Her encounter with Helmholtz and reading of the Tonempfindungen may have encouraged the extraordinary elaboration of references to sympathetic vibration in Daniel Deronda that I discuss in my final chapter. Helmholtz commented on a number of the issues which exercised evolutionists. He discerned a general correlation between the progress of music and of civilisation and, like Spencer and others, saw the exceptional sensitivity of the musician as offering reassurance of humanity’s potential.143 Helmholtz also made important observations on the relationships between music, speech and emotional expression. He was prepared to endorse the commonly held view that ‘music in its initial state and simplest forms may have been originally an artistic imitation of the instinctive modulations of the voice that correspond to various conditions of the feelings’. However, he qualified this by stressing that music had subsequently developed well beyond a simple imitative role.144 Helmholtz’s acoustical expertise led him to distinguish both cultural and innate aspects within musical aesthetics. He concluded that systems of tonality were culturally evolved rather than inherent in music and analysed the diatonic system as having been in a state of evolution since the time of Pythagoras.145 However, he also asserted that musical sounds possessed certain intrinsic, acoustically explicable, qualities: the sensations of pleasure and displeasure associated with harmony and discord were partly explained by the fact that dissonant sounds set up uncomfortable vibrations in the ear.146 This view that musical sounds possessed innate formal qualities was in contrast with Spencer’s view that they were entirely acquired as the result of accumulated association.

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Helmholtz’s account implied that music had certain attributes of its own, independent of its operation as a vehicle for the emotions. This issue was important to many of those who responded to Spencer’s and Darwin’s work, albeit that none of those scientists who took immediate part in the debate as yet adopted the extreme formalist stance of aestheticism. In the decades following the publication of ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, scientific commentators debated the relative merits of Spencer’s and Darwin’s views on music’s origins and affective power. Notable amongst them were two friends of Eliot’s, the psychologist James Sully and Edmund Gurney, who incorporated the results of their study of Spencer, Darwin and Helmholtz into their work on musical expression. Sully’s work on aesthetics was undertaken within the framework of evolutionary theory. He was fervid throughout his work in his acknowledgement of the debt owed by psychology to physiological science.147 Sully drew on a combination of the theories of Spencer and Darwin and also of Helmholtz when developing his psychological analyses of musical response. He noted later that the incorporation of the fruits of his study of Helmholtz into his periodical articles gained praise from both Spencer and Lewes.148 A number of Sully’s periodical articles published during the early 1870s were subsequently reprinted in Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics (1874). The first essay of this work concentrates on ‘The Relation of the Evolutionary Hypothesis to the Human Psyche’.149 Sully compares Spencer’s and Darwin’s theories about the physiological basis of emotional expression, generally preferring Darwin’s work.150 In an 1872 article on ‘The Basis of Musical Sensation’ for the Fortnightly Review, he particularly objected to Spencer’s restrictive attempts to tie music to definite emotional content.151 Nonetheless Sully also elaborated aspects of Spencer’s theories of the aesthetic elements and origins of music, noting ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ resemblances between music and speech and suggesting that analogies between musical and vocal structures formed the basis of many of music’s expressive qualities.152 Like Helmholtz, Sully drew a distinction between ‘complex’ modern music and early song, maintaining that the development of music involves an idealisation of the original emotional utterance.153 When summarising Spencer’s and Darwin’s theories, Sully emphasises that differences between thinkers over the basis of musical expression are less significant than their common ‘conception of musical effect as a psychological product’.154 This has a significant bearing on Eliot’s

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descriptions of musical response in her fiction where she invokes contrasting accounts of music’s affective power that share this crucial psychological and physiological basis. Like Sully, Edmund Gurney summarised Darwin’s and Spencer’s respective positions, contributing an article to the Fortnightly Review in 1876 entitled ‘On Some Disputed Points in Music’. Gurney was more hostile to Spencer’s theories about music than Sully had been, although he admired other aspects of Spencer’s thought.155 He endorsed Darwin’s view that the musical organs, initially developed to assist procreation, had gradually become utilised for the purpose of pleasure.156 Darwin’s theory of inherited association was the only viable explanation for the emotional power of music.157 Gurney also drew on Helmholtz’s theories to support his criticisms of Spencer, asserting that the distinction between pleasant and unpleasant sounds arises primarily not from their emotional content but from their intrinsic qualities. Our response depends upon whether sounds are composed of vibrations whose regularity pleases the ear, or whose irregularity jars it ‘just as the body objects to the contact of hard irregular surfaces’.158 Only when the formal elements of music are to our satisfaction can we be open to the emotional impact of inherited associations.159 Moreover, Gurney concluded, these associations themselves incorporate traces of our ancestors’ ‘embryonic’ appreciation of form. Their need for formal arrangements of sound is indeed what explains the development, out of expressions of emotion, of music as an art. Formal and emotional elements were thus both involved from the outset of musical evolution: The melodic satisfaction of our semi-human or savage ancestors depended on some embryonic proportional and rhythmical element not extending perhaps beyond the recurrence of a sound at the moment when expected; but I believe that in the hidden mental processes of the modern musician we have merely an infinitely elaborated and complex development of the same proportional sense; the startling difference not being greater than some which have been indubitably worked by evolution in other mental and moral operations. And if the associations from the various passions were formed of old in connection with the satisfactory exercise of a rudimentary faculty, so with the developed faculty it would only be when the mind was satisfied by its hidden computative exercise (not where it was baulked and worried, as in a bad tune, by proportional defects) that the deep emotions, distilled from these passions throughout ages of inherited association, would be evoked. 160

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This, of course, still suggests a primarily physiological and evolutionary account of musical response. Like Sully, Gurney was more concerned to take issue with Spencer’s schematic correlations of language and musical expression than with his evolutionary analysis of music’s origins, or his identification of a common physical basis for emotional and musical response. Gurney’s articles refute Spencer’s formulaic analogies of emotional speech and song and his ‘ingenious’ derivation of music ‘from the emotional cadences of speech’ (his substantial book of musicology, The Power of Sound, was to reiterate this opposition to Spencer’s theory).161 Gurney endorses Helmholtz’s assertion that modern music has developed beyond its possible early origins in the modulations of emotive speech.162 Gurney was, in fact, convinced that the expressive sound from which music originated long preceded speech and the intellectual conceptions which accompanied it. He went further than Helmholtz in suggesting that they had evolved separately from a common origin rather than one from the other. He regarded this developmental divergence in itself as a powerful counter-argument to views of music as in any way analogous to verbal expression.163 Gurney repeatedly stressed that music had developed far beyond its early association with specific emotions to acquire an idealised existence independent of the articulation of individual feelings. Unlike Spencer, he found an emotional effect only in relation to the ‘force’ and ‘motion’ of musical sounds, and not in relation to every detail of pitch, volume, timbre and so forth. Throughout his work, Gurney was to stress the ‘independent and isolated position of the emotions caused by music’.164 Of central importance to Gurney was the way in which Helmholtz described musical expression as necessarily ambivalent, since it communicated not precise feelings, but states of mind which listeners interpreted according to their own experience. As Sully explained it, Helmholtz had concluded ‘that music produces not definite emotions but rather moods or emotional frames of mind (Gemüthsstimmungen)’.165 Different emotions, such as love and piety, might well involve identical physiological states, and be apprehended in the same music by different listeners. Thus, whilst music was an unparalleled mode of communication between consciousnesses, it was not to be thought of as conveying the emotion of love itself, so much as expressing, or, as Aristotle had proposed, of imitating, the ‘motions’ or mental states which love (or piety) produced.166 Gurney emphasised this aspect of Helmholtz’s analysis of musical expression to counter Spencer’s view of the relationship between music

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Music, Science, Literature

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

and emotion. He took particular note of how ‘Helmholtz derives the power of music to represent emotion from its resemblance to motion in space and its consequent power to adumbrate the forces which lie at the root of motion’.167 Gurney goes beyond Helmholtz in questioning the existence of any correlations at all between emotion and timbre: ‘We can yearn, triumph, and so on in purely musical regions’, he suggests, without necessary reference to external circumstances.168 However, because of the similar motion of musical and ‘psychical’ emotions, it is not surprising that their spheres overlap, nor that music has become a potent emotive force: ‘on this common ground’ and enhanced by our powers of association, ‘music is of course adapted to dramatic interpretation’.169 Gurney declared that ‘though often a most emotional language, it would be altogether misleading to call music a language for the emotions’ as it is too imprecise to function as a vehicle for definite ideas and feelings.170 An extreme version of Gurney’s position was supported by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) who adopted a more thoroughly formalist stance in her musical writings. These included an essay mocking the archetypal Romanticism of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s musical hero Johannes Kreisler, where, in a paraphrase of the Jean Paul quotation which pervades the debate about musical expression, Lee suggests that music seems to tell us of things ‘we shall never see’, but that it is ‘intellectually inscrutable because it is intellectually meaningless’.171 She condemns the notion that music and speech can usefully be considered as analogous. Like Gurney, she regards music and speech as having diverged in opposite directions since their common origin: We are apt to think of music as a sort of speech until, on examination, we find it has no defined meaning either for the speaker or for the listener. In reality, music and speech are as different and as separate as architecture and painting, as wholly opposed to each other as only those two things can be which, having started from the same point, have travelled in completely opposite directions, like the two great rivers which, originating on the same alp, flow respectively to the north, and to the south, each acquiring a separate character on its way . . . So as to speech and music: as long as both exist only in embryo in the confused cries and rude imitations of the child or of the primitive people, they cannot be distinguished; but as soon as they can be called either speech or music, they become unlike and increase in dissimilarity in proportion as they develop. The cry and the imitative sound become on the one hand, a word which, however rude, begins

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Vernon Lee’s essay is above all a critique of the ‘intellectual opium’ of Romanticism, with its failure to distinguish between music and poetry.173 Lee took this critique far further than the majority of her contemporaries, for affinities with Romantic views of music remain implicit in most of the material under discussion here. Gurney himself commented intriguingly on the relationship of his musical theory to idealist aesthetics. He suggested that his view that music had become differentiated from its originating emotive cries meant that his own evolutionary account should satisfy even a transcendentalist: ‘Those who believe in the expression of spirit through matter need find no difficulty in the sublimation of a spiritual language out of unspiritual associations’.174 ‘Spiritual language’ is a significant term: Gurney had developed a keen interest in psychical research at this time. He was to be a co-founder with F.W.H. Myers of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, which undertook research into spiritualism and thought transference. Gurney himself produced pioneering studies of telepathy and hypnotism. These interests may have inspired the emphasis he placed on the development of musical expression beyond its sensual origins. Like his work with Myers on hypnotism, thoughttransference and spiritualism, Gurney’s ideas on music can be seen as motivated by the desire, shared by numerous of his contemporaries, to push evolutionary theory beyond materialism and to assert the possibility of an independent life of mind and spirit. Indeed, A. R. Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the mechanism of evolution, persistently found in music’s ostensible lack of evolutionary function, proof of a power beyond natural selection.175 The mysterious power of music and its lack of obvious function made it the ideal embodiment for Wallace, a convinced spiritualist, of a spiritual existence independent of physical laws. Music seemed to show proof of the ‘spiritual nature of man’, that is, of the possession of intellectual and moral faculties which ‘could not possibly have been developed by means of the same laws which have governed the progressive development of the organic world in general, and also of man’s physical organism’.176 Such faculties could only be explained by an ‘unseen universe of Spirit’: a belief that allowed for our development as ‘spiritual beings capable of indefinite life and perfectibility’.177 Wallace regarded the musical along with the mathematical faculty as having ‘arisen as a result of social and intellectual advancement, not as a cause’, since ‘it is

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to have an arbitrary meaning, and, on the other hand, a song which, however uncouth, has no positive meaning.172

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

impossible to trace any connection between its possession and survival in the struggle for existence’.178 To Wallace, such faculties suggested the existence of ‘something . . . not derived from . . . animal progenitors – something which we may best refer to as being of a spiritual essence or nature’.179 A dualistic view of human consciousness is proposed as the best explanation of its otherwise mysterious attributes: On the hypothesis of this spiritual nature, superadded to the animal nature of man, we are able to understand much that is otherwise mysterious or unintelligible in regard to him, especially the enormous influence of ideas, principles and beliefs, over his whole life and actions . . . a higher nature which has not been developed by means of the struggle for material existence.180 This significant departure from Darwinian materialism and natural selection on the part of his co-evolutionist is less startling than it might seem. Darwin himself was less confident, in the absence of knowledge about genetics, that natural selection was the sole mechanism of evolution than his later disciples have been. Gurney asserted that his own spiritualised view of musical expression remained explicable within the confines of evolutionary law, as a refinement resulting from the ‘principle of inherited association’.181 Gurney uses the ubiquitous quotation from Jean Paul to illustrate this: Few who realise the principle of inherited association, and the readiness with which music lends itself to association, will doubt the power of music to have become wholly differentiated, to have been sublimated as it were out of the coarse definite passions and excitements . . . present during its early stages and so ‘to tell us of things we have not seen and shall not see’.182 Although Gurney was resistant to the widely accepted notion that music operated as a precise language for the emotions with direct moral effects, he nonetheless viewed music as offering a powerful social good. Ultimately, this makes his view of music’s function much closer to that promoted by Spencer or by popular proponents of music as a morally reforming force than his very different views on musical expression would suggest. Gurney was in support of efforts to provide popular and accessible forms of music.183 He objected to denigration of music as a merely useless survival of primitive instinct, and was adamant that it did have a social and philanthropic purpose.184 Truly ‘the people’s art’

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in that it had an instinctive appeal, and was memorable and rapidly diffused, music was independent of logical processes and of concepts foreign to the uneducated listener.185 It could promote the love of beauty to the ‘poorest dwellers in the dingiest cities’.186 Myers recorded that Gurney’s spiritualist researches were primarily motivated by a wish to discover that there was something better awaiting the poor than the daily misery of their lives.187 He clearly saw music as offering crucial alleviation of that misery meanwhile, and a unique access to spiritual experience. Not a precise language of emotion, nor an agent and harbinger of social evolution, music nonetheless could be appropriated to provide individual benefits and a sense of community that intimated a future progress of a spiritual kind. Most powerful in their effects over our feeling, in Gurney’s view, are natural forms of singing: where phenomena of absolute beauty can be presented as though part of the normal communication of man to man, and where in addition the use of the familiar words heightens this naturalness of address, and completes the directness and spontaneity of the effect. Many will attend when addressed in this way whose lives would otherwise lie wholly apart from the influence of beautiful and pure emotion. In the midst of this normal sad remoteness the effect of song on the masses is like a glimpse of infinite spiritual possibilities, and owing to the fewness of the moments where even the suggestion of a universal kinship in lofty sentiment appears possible, such occasions seem to have a very singular and impressive significance in human life.188 This passage brings to mind Eliot’s evocation in ‘Jubal’ of the consolatory force of music for ‘the poor late-begotten human brood / Born to life’s weary brevity and perilous good’.189 Sully and Gurney published much of their work after the composition of Eliot’s novels – however, Sully was a frequent caller at the Priory, and Eliot and Lewes recorded numerous visits by Gurney and his wife during the 1870s.190 Indeed, Gurney may have provided a model for the hero of Daniel Deronda, a novel where musical allusion invokes telepathic levels of sympathetic communication.191 Whilst Spencer’s evolutionary and physiological account of emotional response is crucial to Eliot’s work, there are frequent occasions when her employment of musical allusion has greater affinity with commentators such as Gurney, as with Sully and Darwin, than it has with Spencer’s schematic analysis. These affinities play an important part in my discussion of music in her novels.

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Music, Science, Literature

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Important differences of opinion about the origins and function of music emerge from the nineteenth-century debate. At one extreme, as his title Music and Morals suggests, the Reverend Hugh Haweis was confident that music exerted a beneficial moral influence. At the other extreme, Gurney was convinced that it was impossible to bridge the gulf between musical emotions and social conditions or to ‘turn artistic impressions into ethical promptings’.192 He found ‘Ethical’ explanations (such as Haweis’s) and ‘naturalistic’ accounts of musical expression (such as Spencer’s) equally absurd.193 Despite these differences, most theories of music shared the common psychological basis identified as crucial by Sully. They saw music as having some kind of significant relationship with emotion, and as offering a powerful social and individual good, whether or not this was progressive, or morally efficacious. Longevity allowed Spencer himself to provide footnotes to the debate about music’s origin and function. As late as 1891, he added a postscript to ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, answering Darwin and defending his views against Gurney’s criticisms.194 In Facts and Comments (1902), he countered attacks on his own explanation of the elements of music by stating that he had given an account of music’s origins, not of music as a fully developed art.195 Asserting the faith in the universal applicability of development theory which he had held since the 1850s, he reaffirmed that his ‘special theory of musical evolution’ was supported by its correspondence with ‘the general theory of evolution’.196 Regardless of the details of scientific debate, the assumption that music functioned in some way as a significant medium of emotional expression remained the dominant explanation of its affective power during the nineteenth century. The great popularity of Haweis’s Music and Morals which ‘passed through twelve editions in as many years’ illustrates this.197 Sully described Haweis’s work as a ‘slight yet suggestive analysis of the emotional side of music’.198 Haweis himself offered his work as a contribution to the ‘much neglected study of Musical Psychology’.199 He entitled the first part ‘Music, Emotion and Morals’ and approached the question of how music functioned as the language of emotion by examining the ‘points of resemblance’ between music and feeling in order to establish the ‘common ground, or kind of border-land, upon which internal emotion becomes wedded to external sound, and realises for itself that kind of concrete existence which it is the proper function and glory of art to bestow upon human thought and feeling’.200 Haweis even made an attempt to analyse the properties

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of emotion visually by creating line diagrams denoting variations in emotional intensity so that he could go on to illustrate how the symbolic language of musical notation brings ‘these emotional properties into direct communication with sound’, so enabling music to ‘announce herself as the royal Art-medium of Emotion’.201 Haweis wished to establish a common basis for music and feeling and saw music as not only emotionally expressive, but somehow analogous to the inner life of thought and emotion. In this respect his work represents a popularisation, albeit a fairly crude one, of Helmholtz’s view of musical expression as an imitation of human emotion. The problematic question of musical expression and the extent to which it can communicate emotion, or be compared with verbal language, continues to preoccupy many discussions of musical aesthetics in our own day. Spencer’s theories form part of the inheritance of later representatives of expressionist theory, such as Deryck Cooke.202 The theory popularised by Helmholtz and his followers that musical and emotional response shared a common formation was useful to early psychologists. The founder of Gestalt psychology, Wolfgang Kähler, used musical ‘dynamics’ to describe emotional and intellectual processes and their physiologically related manifestations in movement and speech.203 This correlation re-emerged in studies of musical aesthetics such as Susanne Langer’s discussion of the possibility of a shared morphology of music and feeling.204 In Philosophy in a New Key (1942), Langer surveyed a variety of theories on the connections between music, thought and emotion to arrive at conclusions not unlike those suggested by Gurney. Analogies between music and language are suspect because music cannot be tied directly or symbolically to any specific meaning. Nonetheless, music certainly has powerful emotional effects. These are best explained by regarding music and emotion as formally congruent. Hence ambivalent responses to the same piece of music are explicable (as in Helmholtz’s theory also) by the fact that different emotions may share the same morphology: ‘What music can actually reflect is only the morphology of feeling; and it is quite plausible that some sad and some happy conditions may have a very similar morphology’.205 Langer sees music’s lack of definite content as a strength, giving it a power to express contradictory emotions which language does not have.206 Current literary critics are unlikely fully to share Langer’s confidence in the ‘fixed connotation[s]’ of verbal language, which underpins this contrast, and this reopens and potentially enriches the issues surrounding analogies between music and language.207

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Music, Science, Literature

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

More recent studies of the relationship of music, language and emotion include Malcolm Budd’s Music and the Emotions, a comprehensive philosophical critique of attempts to analyse the basis of musical expression. Budd contests Langer’s theories and criticises the idea of music as mimicking the morphology of feeling. Equally he dismisses the idea that music expresses unique emotions, specific to it alone. His book examines the range of existing theories about music and the emotions, finding them all lacking. He ends by calling for a new theory of music, but does not assert one himself – a position that epitomises the apparent perpetual impasse confronted by musical aesthetics. Budd revisits Gurney’s The Power of Sound which he describes as the ‘most through and wide-ranging work of distinction written on the philosophy of music’.208 He discusses ways in which Gurney’s theory falls short, in his view, of providing an adequate formalist account of music, since Gurney paradoxically proposes that melody satisfies the ear independent of association, whilst assuming that music must have emotive effects in order to express anything, and remaining loyal to the Darwinian principle of inherited association.209 Numerous commentators have continued to probe music’s relationship with language. Connections with biological science continue to be of urgent interest in this field, involving investigation of overlapping connections between areas of the brain responsible for music and for verbal language.210 A Darwinian approach, whereby explanations of music’s expressive power are to be found by exploring its origins, has remained common, for example John Sloboda’s The Musical Mind, where he proposes that it is music’s mnemonic usefulness, rather than Darwin’s sexual explanation, which may have provided the original motivation for its subsequent development as a source of pleasure.211 Debates over developmental and expressive views of music certainly proved fertile ground for the authors of nineteenth-century scientific and literary texts. In Eliot’s case, her use of musical tropes is vastly complicated and enhanced by her intimate knowledge of developments in contemporary science. Her early journalistic essays, beginning with her article about Wagner, show her drawing on evolutionary theory as a basis for assessing music. In her literary reviews, music in turn supplies a terminology with which to assess literary standards of composition and describe the affective power of literary language. These essays foreshadow ways in which she was to employ musical allusion when she came to write her own fiction.

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Wagner’s theory that the arts should be revitalised by a mutually beneficial union certainly appealed to Eliot’s interest in progressive development. Her treatment of music in ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ is unique because she links her general interest in evolution with a specific awareness of the current development of German opera and operatic theory.212 Eliot’s essay for Fraser’s Magazine followed Wagner’s first visit to England in 1855 to conduct a series of concerts for the New Philharmonic Society. What was then known or supposed of his theories provoked the general hostility of the English press. Newspaper articles appearing at the time of Wagner’s visit reveal that professional music critics not only had different preoccupations and invoked different criteria, but at this point showed far less familiarity with Wagner’s thought and music

Figure 1.2 ‘The Opera Box’, Preliminary sketch for a wood engraving, by Daniel Maclise, 1806–70. Reproduced by kind permission of Tate Gallery Publications.

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‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

than Eliot had acquired during her visit to Weimar the previous year.213 ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ is therefore particularly important as one of the earliest introductions of Wagner’s ideas to the English public. In part a translation of an essay by Liszt, the article represents a direct transfer of recently published German music literature to an English readership. Despite a disclaimer at the beginning of ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ that she was not writing as a music critic, Eliot was in a privileged position in 1855, not simply in relation to other literary figures but in comparison with professional music critics, in that she was able to base her judgements on actual experience of Wagner’s music.214 She also had the benefit of Liszt’s expert elucidation of Wagner’s ideas.215 Very little of Wagner’s own music was known in England.216 Most critics concentrated on assessing his skill as a conductor, spicing their accounts with jokes at the expense of his alleged theories.217 The extent to which Eliot’s response to Wagner was shaped by her evolutionary aesthetic ideals can be appreciated by contrasting her essay with the responses of critics such as Chorley. As music critic for the Athenaeum, Chorley was vehement in his condemnation of Wagner.218 Despite being the only critic who seems to have heard both Tannhäuser and Lohengrin during his extensive travels in Germany in 1850 and 1852, Chorley limits himself to excoriation of Wagner’s conducting style, proposing that it is because Wagner likes only his own music that he conducts the compositions of others so badly.219 The fundamental importance of the principles of evolutionary science for Eliot’s work makes it particularly significant that Wagner’s account of opera’s past and his plans for its future were compatible with the criteria of organic unity and evolutionary change. This particularly sets her apart from the professional music critics writing about Wagner. Indeed, the very aspects of Wagner’s operatic theory that most appealed to Eliot – its commitment to organic unity and evolutionary progress – were selected for ridicule by the prominent music critic J. W. Davison, who wrote for The Times and was editor of the Musical World. Davison anticipated Wagner’s arrival with a lengthy parody of his philosophy and its likely musical results.220 Wagner’s writings were as little known as his music.221 His wish to give equal weight to the different elements of opera were understood not as attempts to achieve a unified art form but as the ridiculous elevation of the mundane and the expression of supreme egoism: Herr Wagner is his own poet, scene painter, decorator, costumier, machinist, dancing master, and musician. Like Hercules, he performs

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all the seven labours himself; and this is why he will not have any of the arts he represents ‘insulted’ by being made subordinate . . . Moreover Herr Wagner is his own chef-d’orchestre, and he knows how to conduct himself; and finally, being his own critic and historian, he is better able to give an account of himself and his works than any of the profound calumniators of the pen.222 The charge of egoism was extended to Wagner’s use of musical motif – appreciated by Eliot as a technique which contributed to the organic unity of his work: Every personage . . . moreover, must have a certain musical phrase, to mark his coming and his going . . . It is a pity Herr Wagner cannot add acting and singing to his accomplishments . . . He might then play all the parts, and a perfect Lohengrin be anticipated.223 Davison’s review of Wagner’s first concert with the London Philharmonic at which he conducted music by Haydn, Mozart, Spohr, Weber, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Marschner is one of the few, albeit scant, expositions of Wagner’s musical theories to appear in the British press.224 Davison gave an introductory account of Wagner’s biography and theoretical works and discussed selected aspects of his theory, emphasising his desire to elevate poetry to equal importance with music in opera and ‘his notion of tune’ as ‘melody spoken’.225 He suggests that ‘If in his own choruses Herr Wagner sets a word to every note, the effect must be at once monotonous and absurd, and the music simply obtrusive’. Davison concedes that ‘Nothing is known of his music in this country except the overture to Tannhäuser’; this however, he claims, ‘was heard with equal indifference by the public at the concerts of the new Philharmonic and M. Jullien and is, at the best, but a commonplace display of noise and extravagance’.226 A few days later, Davison published a strong attack on Wagner both as a conductor and as the ‘prophet’ of the new music.227 He described Wagner’s conducting manner as an assault upon the composers whom he wished to supplant: ‘The “Child” (Mozart), the “Erroneous” (Beethoven), the “Stupid” (Spohr), the “Old Wife” (Haydn), and the “Jew” (Mendelssohn), were beaten, as they never were before’.228 Davison was Jewish, and his critical hostility may have been partly fuelled by Wagner’s London host and supporter, Ferdinand Praeger, who sent articles to the New York Musical Gazette savagely criticising Davison and championing Wagner’s views, including his condemnation of Jewish music.229 There were clearly

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Music, Science, Literature

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

numerous factors that predisposed professional critics to dislike Wagner. In addition to feeling that the established musical canon and their own role alike were under threat from Wagner, they were apparently offended by Wagner’s refusal to obey the accustomed practice of calling on them upon his arrival in London.230 By contrast, Eliot’s essay endorses Wagner’s view of the progressive development of opera up to the present day, affirms his ideals about the organic unity necessary to art, and outlines the operatic reforms required for the realisation of this ideal. Her defence of Wagner is largely derived from an account of the operas of Scribe and Meyerbeer that appeared both in Adolf Stahr’s Weimar und Jena (1852) and as an article by Liszt published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.231 Eliot had based an 1854 article for the Leader entitled ‘The Romantic School of Music’ on the same piece.232 In ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’, Eliot translates passages from this material with interpolations that throw light on her own aesthetic preoccupations. ’Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ reflects the way in which Germany had increasingly become the representative of serious music in opposition to more frivolous Italian styles. Following her German model, Eliot describes the conflict between Wagner and his critics as being the same, but on a far more significant scale as ‘the old controversy between Gluck and Piccini, between the declamatory and melodic schools of music’ – the controversy later to be dramatised in Klesmer’s condemnation of Bellini in Daniel Deronda.233 In her survey of the development of opera, Eliot adopts Wagner’s definition of three major periods. During its initial stage ‘opera aimed simply at the expression of feeling through melody’.234 The second period which culminated in the ‘joint productions of Meyerbeer and Scribe’ saw a ‘heightening of dramatic movements which has led . . . to the predominance of the declamatory style and the subordination of melody’.235 Eliot’s own ideals of artistic realism made her even more critical than Liszt or Wagner of Meyerbeer’s inadequate methods of characterisation and provoked her to issue a statement of the standards to which she was to aspire in her own literary composition. Invoking development theory, she condemns the weakness arising when ‘the grand object is to produce a climax of spectacle, situation, and orchestral effects’ and ‘there is no attempt at the evolution [my italics] of these from the true workings of human character and human passions’.236 The characters of Robert (Robert Le Diable), and ‘Jean the Prophet’ (Le Prophète), are scorned as respectively ‘a nose of wax’ and ‘a feeble sketch’.237 Eliot’s comments here reflect her own experience of the operas in question, as do her succeeding judgements

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of Weber. She heard Der Freischütz for the first time in Weimar in 1854 and was comically dismissive, finding ‘The childish construction of the drama made still more apparent by the rude bug-a-boo style in which it was put on the stage’.238 Her article shows that she retained her opinion that ‘Even Weber’s enchanting music cannot overcome the sense of absurdity’ produced by the opera’s text.239 Hers was in fact the reverse of Wagner’s opinion of the opera. He had written a review in 1841 giving a humorous account of his ‘patriotic dismay’ at a Paris production of Der Freischütz in which he mocked the French desire for logic as a principle of dramatic action in opera: he ‘had always taken Der Freischütz in all its illogical entirety, exactly as it was’.240 Eliot, meanwhile, was not prepared to condone the degree of illogicality that she found in the action of Der Freischütz and commented on the shooting of Caspar as especially unconvincing. Wagner had singled out a more ‘logical’ rearrangement of this same incident in the Paris production as particularly ridiculous.241 Eliot is, in effect, judging Weber’s opera in the light of Wagner’s espoused ideals: she is particularly keen to endorse the dramatic standards proposed in Liszt’s article. When she comes to portray Wagner’s assessment of opera’s current phase of development, she emphatically invokes his views about tragedy and the ‘organic’ evolution of action out of character as measures by which to judge ‘the true musical drama’: An opera must be no mosaic of melodies stuck together with no other method than is supplied by accidental contrast, no mere succession of ill-prepared crises, but an organic whole, which grows up like a palm, its earliest portion containing the germ and prevision of all the rest.242 Wagner’s characters are to be no ‘warbling puppets’ with parts especially written to display their voices; singers ‘must be content with the degree of prominence which falls to them in strict consonance with true dramatic development and ordonnance’. ‘Such, so far as I understand it’, concludes Eliot, ‘is Wagner’s theory of the opera – surely a theory worth entertaining’.243 The organic coherence that Eliot praises in Wagner’s operas thus derives in part from an integrity of dramatic characterisation lacking in Meyerbeer. Eliot augments her appreciation of the ‘organic unity’ achieved by Wagner with a botanical metaphor to indicate that he shares the concept of tragedy that was to be vital to her own literary composition: the ‘collision of forces’ that forms the ‘germ of tragedy’

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Music, Science, Literature

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

develops in Wagner’s operas ‘just as the leaf of the plant is successively elaborated into branching stem and compact bud and radiant corolla’.244 This account foreshadows Eliot’s memorable description of the essence of tragedy as the ‘antagonism between valid claims’ in her essay on ‘The Antigone and its Moral’.245 In The Mill on the Floss, she was to invoke tragedy through another conjunction of musical and botanical imagery where the germ of Wagner’s organicist tragedies is generated as the ‘living plant – seed’ which, as the tragic consequence of Maggie Tulliver’s longing for elusive ‘music’, ‘will make way for [itself] in a shattering, violent manner’.246 Eliot’s opinion that Wagner has ‘admirably exemplified’ his own theories ‘so far as the libretto of his operas is concerned’ hints at some personal reservations about the musical, as opposed to the dramatic, element in his operas. In her Journal she recorded her mixed response to her first hearing of Tannhäuser in Weimar: The overture and the first and second acts thrilled me, but the third I felt rather wearisome. The tragedy of this act is very fine, but either I was too much fatigued to relish the music, or it is intrinsically monotonous and spun out beyond any but German patience.247 Notwithstanding these reservations, Eliot pays serious attention to the musical as well as to the dramatic composition of Wagner’s operas. She carefully translates Liszt’s account of how Wagner has developed Meyerbeer’s use of musical motif. Citing several examples of recurring melody in Meyerbeer’s work, she distinguishes between Meyerbeer’s employment of mere melodic repetition and Wagner’s far more complex and integral development of motif into: The artifice . . . of making certain contrasted strains of melody run like coloured threads through the woof of an opera, and also the other dramatic device of using a particular melody or musical phrase as a sort of Ahnung or prognostication of the approach of action of a particular character.248 She comments that Wagner ‘has carried out these devices much more completely, and, in the Fliegender Holländer and Tannhäuser, with very impressive effect’.249 Eliot’s description of Wagner’s development of musical motif indicates that the same organicism which was fundamental to her novels underlay her sense of musical structure. This helps us appreciate the degree to which music later provided a source of

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metaphor in her novels for the individual psyche and for relationships between individuals and between individuals and their material environment. Such adverse criticism as Eliot directs towards Wagner’s musical writing in Tannhäuser arises not because she perceives in it any failure to fulfil his declared aesthetic goals, but because she personally finds it lacking in melody, the musical element on which she has concentrated in her discussion of opera’s evolution. While she regrets the absence of melodic allure, her critical assessment is significantly informed by the criteria of evolutionary progress, as apparent in her conclusion, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that melody may simply be a ‘tadpole’ stage of musical evolution.250 This view is in contrast to Spencer’s assumption that melodic variety, as opposed to the more speech-like forms of recitative, was an indication of the highest stage of musical development and shows Eliot’s comments to be much more attuned to actual developments in music.251 Eliot also makes a gently ironic appeal to evolution to explain the nature of her own musical taste. Her personal stage of development may simply mean that she requires music to be melodic. Wagner’s music is as yet not an entirely comprehensible language to her. To hear a Beethoven quartet therefore is a Wordsworthian return to the ‘pregnant speech of men after a sojourn among glums and gowries’.252 Lewes likewise was to write that Wagner’s ‘music remains a language we do not understand’.253 Whilst Eliot would have agreed, from the standpoint of individual taste, with Davison’s prediction that Wagner’s theories must result in melodic monotony, her enthusiasm for Wagner’s ideas as representing the direction in which art should progress nonetheless prompted her to defend him against the condemnation of English critics. Lewes was later to give a sympathetic account of Wagner’s music in his 1875 work, On Actors and the Art of Acting, where he also invokes the criteria of evolutionary development, discussing Wagner as an example of the seriousness of German culture. In a section on ‘The Drama in Germany’, he praises the generally high quality of dramatic art in Germany, and lists the operas and plays in performance during his visit to Dresden with George Eliot in 1867: ‘“Oberon”, “Don Juan”, “The Huguenots”, “Robert the Devil”, “Masaniello”, “Lohengrin”, “Tannhäuser”, “Der Fliegende Holländer”, the only light operas being “L’Elisir d’Amore” and “Czar and Zimmermann”’.254 ‘The stage is still an intellectual amusement in Germany’, Lewes asserts.255 As a critic, Lewes finds Wagner’s ideas sufficiently crucial to the future of drama for a

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Music, Science, Literature

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

lengthy discussion of his work to conclude this account of the German theatre.256 Lewes contrasts the reception accorded to Wagner in his native land with the general condemnation levelled against him in England and he argues energetically for critics to take serious account of Wagner’s work. Excusing himself from pronouncing on whether Wagner’s music ‘is really destined to be the “music of the future”, or whether it is a pretentious and chaotic effort’, Lewes, like Eliot, places the responsibility for his negative response to Wagner’s music on the stage of development reached by his own musical taste: as far as my ear in its present state of musical education determines what is exquisite for it, the Wagner music wants both form and melody. But then a little reflection suffices to remind one how such negative judgements . . . are liable to complete reversal. It is not many years since Beethoven was laughed at, and Rossini sneered at as a flashy worthless tickler of the popular ear.257 Lewes concludes with an exhortation to the English public. The growth of an audience for Wagner in Germany, the great source of artistic standards, is reason enough to encourage a receptive attitude to his music and a suspension of judgement for the sake of the artistic future.258 Despite Lewes’s and Eliot’s dislike of Wagner’s music, devotion to the interests of evolutionary progress inspired Lewes to resume the defence of Wagner against the attacks of English critics twenty years after his first visit to London, when Eliot had championed him in her article for Fraser’s Magazine.

Musical literary criticism The year following the publication of ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ was that which preceded Eliot’s first writing of fiction. During 1856, she published a number of further articles in the Westminster Review in which the importance of music and theories about music for her writing is also apparent. The quotation from ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ with which I began this chapter shows Eliot drawing a literary comparison with poetic rhyme-schemes to make her point about the evolution of music: melody may receive the same attention in the future as do ‘the Stabreim and assonance of early poetry’. Many of her Westminster essays also illustrate her strong interest in musical topics and her habit of applying analogies from other art forms to her own. Eliot’s view of

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music was undoubtedly an integral part of her aesthetic and social thought at this time. Her articles on Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Browning’s Men and Women and ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ show her employing references to music in the course of detailed literary criticism. Her articles on Wilhelm von Riehl and ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ combine invocations of music as an indicator of artistic standards with social comment. Eliot’s review of the third volume of Modern Painters praises Ruskin’s effective ‘voice’ foreshadowing the importance to be given to the power of music ‘to compel . . . attention and sympathy’ in her own novels and poems: Very correct singing of very fine music will avail little without a voice that can thrill the audience and take possession of their souls. Now, Mr Ruskin has a voice, and one of such power, that whatever error he may mix with his truth, he will make more converts to that truth than less erring advocates who are hoarse and feeble. Considered merely as a writer, he is in the very highest rank of English stylists . . . The fine largo of his sentences reminds us more of De Quincy [sic] than of any other writer.259 Eliot emphasises that the teaching imparted by Ruskin’s prose is dependent upon its musical qualities, the compelling power of which tempts her to incessant quotation. In Eliot’s review of Browning’s Men and Women, musical terminology is used both to praise and criticise the qualities of his verse. The reader should expect to find ‘no melodious commonplace’, for: Turning from the ordinary literature of the day to such a writer as Browning, is like turning from Flotow’s music, made up of wellpieced shreds and patches, to the distinct individuality of Chopin’s Studies or Schubert’s Songs.260 However, Eliot finds that the music of Browning’s verse elicits an intellectual rather than an emotional response: Browning has no soothing strains, no chants, no lullabys; he rarely gives voice to our melancholy, still less to our gaiety; he sets our thoughts at work rather than our emotions. But though eminently a thinker, he is as far as possible from prosaic.261

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the greatest deficiency we feel in his poetry is its want of music. The worst poems in his new volumes are, in our opinion, his lyrical efforts; for in these, where he engrosses us less by his thought, we are more sensible of his obscurity and his want of melody. His lyrics, instead of tripping along with easy grace, or rolling with a torrentlike grandeur, seem to be struggling painfully under a burthen too heavy for them; and many of them have the disagreeable puzzling effect of a charade, rather than the touching or animating influence of song.262 The greatest poets, indeed the greatest artists of any kind, to Eliot’s mind, are those whose creativity most mirrors that of the musical composer. Browning does not take possession of our souls and set them aglow, as the greatest poets – the greatest artists do . . . Language with him does not seem spontaneously to link itself into song, as sounds link themselves into melody in the mind of the creative musician.263 Eliot’s first object remains nevertheless to foster appreciation of Browning’s verse. She maintains that whilst she does not regard him as a natural poet, she would much prefer to encounter his thought in verse medium than in prose.264 His avoidance of the prosaic contrasts favourably with her favourite poet: ‘Wordsworth is, on the whole, a far more musical poet than Browning, yet we remember no line in Browning so prosaic as many of Wordsworth’s’.265 Finally, Eliot concludes her review with a quotation chosen ‘By way of counterbalancing our judgement . . . from one of the most musical of the rhymed poems’.266 In an article published in the same issue of the Westminster, Eliot endorses Heine, by contrast with Browning, as a superlatively musical poet. She also peppers her review with references to specifically musical subject matter in Heine’s work. To illustrate the variety of Heine’s writing, she lists a sketch of Liszt and a caricature of Spontini.267 She recounts an anecdote of Heine’s about Paganini, translates a reference to Mendelssohn, and records a cutting comment on Meyerbeer that accords with her own reservations about his music: ‘Meyerbeer, who is

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The comparisons with Chopin and Schubert seem clearly intended therefore as indicators of Browning’s originality rather than of the musicality of his verse. Indeed, Eliot goes on explicitly to criticise this for its lack of music:

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universally known by his reputation, and who has been celebrated by the cleverest journalists’.268 This essay on Heine is important as one of the earliest English reactions to his poetry, just as ’Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ was one of the first detailed responses to Wagner’s thought and music.269 Given the superlative status of music in German aesthetics, it is very apt that music should come uppermost in the general statement of admiration for German culture with which George Eliot introduces her richly musical review of Heine’s poetry. Eliot extols the cultural achievements – notably in science and music – of the country which has fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, has produced the grandest inventions, has made magnificent contributions to science, has given us some of the divinest poetry, and quite the divinest music in the world.270 Musical analogy is employed to describe both Heine’s poetic stature and his lyric genius. Eliot discusses the musicality of Heine’s poetry in terms which anticipate Spencer’s views on the expressive musical element in speech. With Feuerbach’s conflation of music and emotion also in mind, there seems to be something more than the conventional association of music and poetry as ‘sister’ arts behind Eliot’s description of Heine’s poetry as ‘pure feeling breathed in pure music’.271 Comparing Heine with Goethe (and implicitly with Browning too), Eliot finds that Goethe’s writing shows ‘more thought mingled with . . . feeling’ and that ‘for this very reason, Heine touches our hearts more strongly; his songs are all music and feeling’.272 His poems ‘are so emphatically songs’, she writes, ‘that, in reading them, we feel as if each must have a twin melody born in the same moment and by the same inspiration’.273 A quotation from Tennyson’s In Memoriam illustrates her view of Heine as ‘essentially a lyric poet’.274 His poems are ‘Short swallow flights of song that dip / Their wings in tears, and skim away’.275 Her description of Heine as ‘a surpassing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious song’,276 also calls to mind the definition of lyric poetry that Spencer was to form in the ‘Origin and Function of Music’ where he describes it as the evolution of a more musical, hence more expressive, form than the epic poetry from which it evolved.277 Eliot’s assessments certainly link the musicality of Heine’s verses with their expressive power. She admires the ‘easy, rippling music’ of his style in conjunction with his mastery over the ‘imaginative expression of feeling’.278 A musical analogy conveys the emotional breadth of his

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Music, Science, Literature

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

poetry: ‘His song has a wide compass of notes ’; unlike Browning, ‘he can draw forth our tears by the voice he gives to our own sorrows’.279 In Adam Bede, Eliot was to use the same image of musical compass, this time to illustrate the inverse emotional range of Hetty Sorrel, whose soul had ‘only a very limited range of music’.280 Eliot’s emphasis on the musicality of Heine’s writing is underpinned by her translation of musically allusive passages from Heine’s prose where conjoined images of music and fire exemplify his ‘power in that kind of dithyrambic writing which, in less masterly hands, easily becomes ridiculous’: ‘reach me the lyre . . . I am all Joy and song, all sound and flame!’281 Heine’s melodious prose is hailed as a particular achievement, given Eliot’s opinion that the German language, ‘Like the ladies of the Middle Ages . . . is gracious and compliant to the Troubadours. But . . . generally appears awkward and unmanageable in the hands of prose writers’.282 Thus Heine receives special approbation for his ability to transfer the musical qualities of his poetry to prose of ‘crystalline definiteness and clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and . . . delicate precision’.283 A very different German prose work is under consideration in Eliot’s essay on Riehl, ‘The Natural History of German Life’. In this essay, Eliot draws the analogies between Dutch Realist painting and the writing of fiction which are often cited as a crucial statement of her literary values. The review also sheds light on her view of opera and its relation to literature. A comparison with ‘Opera peasants’ provides Eliot with an analogy by which to criticise the unreality of much contemporary fiction.284 This has led some commentators to suppose that Eliot was generally hostile towards opera.285 However it is an example which illustrates the distinctions as well as the analogies which Eliot establishes between various art forms. Eliot is, in fact, prepared to defend unrealistic opera peasants (here against Ruskin, who has condemned them). Despite her uncompromising condemnation of unrealistic characterisation in her article on Wagner, she suggests that this is more acceptable; indeed, such popular choruses are ‘one of the most effective elements’ in opera where there is no pretence at reality, so that ‘lyric rustics . . . are surely too frank an idealisation to be misleading’.286 However, it is a ‘pernicious . . . perversion’ of our powers of sympathy to allow such artificiality in ‘our social novels [which] profess to represent the people as they are’.287 She objects likewise to paintings which claim to illustrate English rural life but where ploughmen have the ‘exotic’ features of ‘a handsome primo tenore’.288 Opera thus becomes a term of criticism without automatically implying disapproval of opera itself. Operatic analogies with both positive and negative associations play

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a crucial role in much of her fiction and Eliot herself never ceased to enjoy operatic performances.289 Eliot’s musical critique of artistic standards in her essay on Riehl is accompanied by a comment on the significance of music in British popular culture. Whilst she is critical of the nostalgia for feudalism which leads to the imposition of ‘an artificial system of culture’, her objection to the growing prevalence of bad pianos, which ‘we can hardly enter the least imposing farm-house without finding’,290 and to changes in the speech of the farmers’ daughters who play them, signals nostalgia for older forms of culture. Her comment also indicates Eliot’s awareness of the considerable contemporary debate about the status of piano ownership. There was widespread condemnation of aspirations towards piano ownership, both as the object of social emulation, and, since pianos were very expensive, as a source of real financial hardship. Frequently, the desire to own a piano was represented as a sign that working-class and lower-middle-class women were being educated in accomplishments which left them unfit for their proper function, an aspect of the widespread debate about women and music which I discuss in the next chapter. 291 Eliot’s nostalgia for authentic forms of music and language is symptomatic of the conservatism which as much as her commitment to progress is revealed in the novels. Appealing to essentially Wordsworthian values, Eliot also criticises the destruction of the ‘music and . . . passion’ of rural speech.292 Like Wordsworth and other Romantics such as Rousseau in his lament for the pure speech of the Valois, Eliot represents rural communities as the repositories of authentic national culture. She declares that the speech, proverbs and songs of the peasantry ‘belong alike to the entire body of the people’.293 Efforts to simplify or rationalise language also clearly conjured up in Eliot’s mind her uncomfortable response to Wagner’s music, as she bewails their promise of a ‘melancholy “language of the future”’.294 Melancholy musical comparisons are also evoked by ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. This important review indicates how characteristic it was for Eliot’s mind to turn to music to illustrate her thoughts on the writing of fiction. Moreover, it confirms that she could expect her audience to appreciate such analogies. In her criticism of what she dubs the ‘white neck-cloth species’ of novel, Eliot expands the analogy between opera and fiction established in her Riehl article.295 This pious kind of novel, where ‘tender glances are seized from the pulpit stairs instead of the opera box’, is ‘an Evangelical substitute for the fashionable novel, as the May Meetings are a substitute for the Opera’.296

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Music, Science, Literature

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

While it was not until she wrote Daniel Deronda that Eliot was to create her most important musical characters, ‘Silly Novels’ and her other essays show Eliot using music in a way which foreshadows its thematic importance in her later writing and establishes music as a model for literary standards. A musical example illustrates the lack of self-criticism amongst novelists, ‘just as with a total want of musical ear people will sing out of tune, while a degree more melodic sensibility would suffice to render them silent’.297 The close of her review invokes the exacting criteria of musical performance to criticise a lack of rigour in the writing of fiction. The conditions of musical performance have the advantage that ‘Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered . . . Every art which has its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility’.298 The pretensions of bad novelists, though less easily recognisable as such, are really akin to ‘La Fontaine’s ass, who puts his nose to the flute, and, finding that he elicits some sound, exclaims, “Moi, aussi, je joue de la flute”’.299 The ‘absolute technique’ and high visibility of musical performance were later to contribute towards making musician figures particularly powerful in Eliot’s work.300 It is striking that music as an analogy for literary composition forms so evident a part in her earliest published writing. The technical demands made by music clearly underpinned Eliot’s sense of its evolutionary importance and influenced her formulation of standards for the development of her own art. The unavoidable necessity of long training and labour for the creation of music conveys a sense of the craftsmanlike effort and education essential to any sound artistic production. This remains an important concept throughout Eliot’s writing. It is expressed in her 1873 poem ‘Stradivarius’, where she stresses the value of the material skill which makes inspiring music possible, and is later manifested in the composer Klesmer’s tirade in Daniel Deronda about the ‘arduous unceasing work’ which constitutes the major part of musical genius.301 The connection between women writing and women musicians, which Eliot emphasises in this review of ‘Lady Novelists’, was also to be extensively dramatised in Eliot’s poetry and fiction. Eliot’s novels are peopled with a conspicuous array of musical women who constitute a trenchant commentary on standards of female education and creativity. As context for reading this aspect of her work, the following chapter discusses music’s vital role in the formation of Victorian domestic ideology, and in literary representations of women by Eliot’s contemporaries.

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Music and the Woman Question: The ‘Minister of Domestic Concord’ and ‘the Most Sensuous of Accomplishments’

In Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen, Mirah, Catherine Arrowpoint and Alcharisi represent a spectrum of contrasting female musicians. They have numerous predecessors in Eliot’s fiction. In Scenes of Clerical Life, Caterina Sarti is the ‘operatic’ heroine of ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ whose singing gives voice to the longing and despair which drive her to acts of revenge and ultimately destroy her. In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver is seduced by the potent singing voice of Stephen Guest. Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch epitomises the accomplished young lady whose ‘musical execution’ (if not understanding) ‘was quite exceptional’, and who thus charms Lydgate away from his single-minded devotion to medical science.1 George Eliot’s frequent allusion to the significance of music in relation to women’s experience and creativity draws on a familiar contemporary theme. Victorian domestic ideology has been much analysed in recent literary and cultural criticism. However, the central importance of music within this ideology has been largely overlooked. Music played a distinctive role in the lives of Victorian women, both in theory and in practice. It featured prominently in discussions of female education and in advice books and journals for women. Representations of music are 59

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thus bound up within the ongoing debate over woman’s proper sphere and enmeshed in the contradictions inscribed within domestic ideology: contradictions which the ambivalent status of music itself frequently mirrored. This ambivalence is epitomised by the quotation at the head of this chapter: music was the most spiritual and yet the most sensual of the arts; it offered unique advantages for domestic life but also dangerous distractions from home duties. Music formed part of a serious intellectual education but was also a frivolous or seductive accomplishment. It was an agent of social progress and a cause of sexual havoc. Comments about music’s role in women’s lives and education in advice manuals and journals published between 1840 and 1870 throw considerable light on the significance of musical reference in novels of the mid-nineteenth century. Debate about the place of music in women’s lives was closely related to discussions of woman’s nature and musical allusion is an important aspect of the fictional representation of gender. References to music play a role in critiques of the education and the position of women in numerous Victorian novels, including those by Anne and Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. Their works reflect and question current assumptions about women and music. Musical allusion also conveys the aspirations and anxieties of female authorship. An investigation of advice literature helps us to understand the extent to which George Eliot was engaging with a discourse that was well-entrenched by the time she began to write fiction. This is not to suggest that the sources examined here provide a homogeneous context for the reading of fictional musical allusion. As Mary Poovey notes, ‘the middle class ideology we most often associate with the Victorian period was both contested and always under construction’.2 Clearly there are also conflicts between different accounts of music which reflect diverse religious, educational and political agenda. However, it is the absence of stable attitudes towards the status of music in relation to women that is most striking in these texts, rather than differences between them. Recurrent contradictions within individual texts reveal equivocal attitudes towards music that are as widespread as those towards women themselves. These internal contradictions highlight the instability of the context within which a writer interested in music would have been working, where readers would have been aware of a variety of issues with regard to women and

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music, whilst holding highly ambivalent views about them. This chapter explores some of the roles which music played in the ‘woman question’ debate. It traces affinities between representations of music and of woman in Victorian advice literature that illuminate the complex argument over the role and education of women. It also considers ways in which many attitudes commonly expressed towards women and music in this mid-century debate were reinforced by the advent of evolutionary biology.

Music and female education Discussion of the place of music in women’s lives formed an aspect of wider debates about female education. Musical training featured in arguments over whether women should train for professional life or, if not, what kind of education or training was required to fit them for a life of domestic duty. Typically in these debates, music is listed alongside the traditional constituents of female education (drawing, a smattering of French and geography) to illustrate that they lacked intellectual content, or practical value. Despite attracting much criticism, music was rarely excluded from the vast array of proposals for the improvement of women’s education put forward during the Victorian period. As might be expected, the remarks of educational reformers varied according to whether they were discussing music as one component of a sound intellectual education or as emblematic of the useless and commodifying nature of conventional female training. Proponents of the radical reform of female education from Mary Wollstonecraft onwards reviled music as one of a set of conventional accomplishments which equipped women only for the marriage market.3 Wollstonecraft included music in her account of the limited education normally afforded women which led to the development of their emotional sensibilities but not of their reason: Novels, music, poetry, and gallantry, all tend to make women the creatures of sensation, and their character is thus formed in the mould of folly during the time they are acquiring accomplishments, the only improvement they are excited, by their station in society, to acquire. This overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Figure 2.1

‘Not to be Beaten’, Punch, 18 January 1873, p. 24.

powers of the mind, and prevents intellect from attaining that sovereignty which it ought to attain to render a rational creature useful to others, and content with its own station; for the exercise of the understanding, as life advances, is the only method pointed out by nature to calm the passions.4 An education aimed at the acquisition of feminine accomplishments left women the victims of passion unmediated by judgement. It encouraged the deceitful emotional manipulation which was the only power that women’s position in society made available to them: ‘Yet to their senses are women made slaves, because it is by their sensibility that they obtain present power’.5 Wollstonecraft was not, however, opposed to the arts forming part of a general education. In her proposals for an ideal school, ‘Dancing, music and drawing’ were to be ‘admitted as

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relaxations’ at a suitable stage.6 Her novel Mary (1798), portrays the heroine restored, at a point of crisis, to a reassuring state of meditation by playing Handel’s music.7 Wollstonecraft insisted that a rational education would foster a true aesthetic response rather than a conventional feminine preoccupation with trivia: ‘With what a languid yawn have I seen an admirable poem thrown down that a man of true taste returns to again and again with rapture’, she exclaims, ‘and whilst melody has almost suspended respiration, a lady has asked me where I bought my gown’.8 Wollstonecraft herself retained too scandalous a reputation for her ideas to be directly alluded to by respectable Victorian journals, but the issues that had concerned her remained central to nineteenthcentury debates about music’s place in female education. They recur in the statements on music of writers with a variety of agenda, and are clearly of particular importance for Wollstonecraft’s feminist successors. Amongst these, the American feminist Margaret Fuller declared that from the feminist point of view, the singer and actress were not good models for female achievement because their professional success rested partly on the conventionally admired feminine attributes of ‘beauty and grace’.9 However, the degree of general acceptance which music had already obtained as a female accomplishment could also be used to support arguments for widening the sphere of women’s activity. The fact that music already played a large part in female education and domestic life sometimes encouraged even the most radical educational reformers to invoke it as an example of how improvements in education need not endanger women’s maternal and domestic roles. Bessie Rayner Parkes advanced the examples of the singer and the actress as evidence that not merely improved education but also professional life were compatible with domesticity: Another objection to the adoption of professional life by women is thus expressed: How can fathers be expected to give their daughters expensive special educations, when the probability is that marriage will put a bar to their ever repaying it with success? To which we are fain only to ask what happens among the artistes; how is it that they continue to combine professional excellence with domestic life? Let it not be assumed in reply that in such cases domestic life is always sacrificed; many women have fulfilled both careers admirably well, and if actresses and singers have conquered the difficulty, in spite of their exciting vocation, surely the painter, the sculptor, and even the physician, might do likewise.10

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

As a feminist, Bessie Parkes rejected the notion that women should be content to restrict their social function to the relatively passive realm of ‘influence’ and advocated that they be allowed free entry into the professions.11 However, music also provided useful examples in favour of educational reform for campaigners who wished to reinforce, rather than reject, women’s ‘recognised sphere of action’.12 More typical of the views of moderate educational campaigners were those expressed by the Methodist educational reformer Mrs Bakewell. In an address to the College of Preceptors (founded in 1846 for the improvement of the teaching profession), the benefits of music and other accomplishments support her view that a more ‘genuine’ education for women, including formal examinations in academic subjects, is compatible with woman’s domestic function and even enhances it: We are most of us admirers of music, whether instrumental or vocal. How it cheers the domestic hearth, or the social circle! With what youthful, joyous feelings is its melody associated! How it soothes the troubled mind, or cheers the drooping spirit, when produced by the touch or voice of those we love! . . . We think a taste for the fine arts is well worth cultivating, for it tends to purify and spiritualize the mind: nor need this be at the sacrifice of more solid and intellectual acquirements. If both teachers and pupils know that they will be subjected to periodical examination by properly qualified and authorized professors, they will aim at acquiring correctness, skill, and taste in their performances, instead of wasting their valuable time in futile attempts.13 This passage illustrates how closely contemporary debate over women’s education was linked with the formation of domestic ideology. The same qualities which made music domestically useful could be invoked to emphasise a community of purpose between advocates of improved education and upholders of woman’s traditional role. A journal which provides a particularly useful resource for a wide range of attitudes towards the place of music in women’s lives is the British Mothers’ Magazine (later British Mothers’ Journal) which was founded in 1845. It was edited by Mrs Bakewell and ‘published under the immediate sanction of the London Central Maternal Association’.14 Whilst many contributors were Methodist, the magazine was not particularly sectarian and published extracts from a wide variety of books and other periodicals. Its discussions of women and music were similar to though more extensive than those in Anglican women’s magazines.15 The first issue of

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the British Mothers’ Magazine announced ‘To the Mothers of Great Britain and Ireland’ that it aimed ‘to direct attention to’ and ‘promote . . . education and fitness for’ the ‘high and important position the mothers of our country hold’.16 The magazine is notable for the wide variety of opinions which it published on the subject of women’s education. They range from the pronouncements of Hannah More, and of contributors who echoed her restrictive views on female aspiration, to outspoken pleas by leading reformers that women’s education should equal that of men. A non-conformist concern for the value of the individual spirit may have predisposed many of the arguments in favour of improved female education. As Mrs Bakewell’s involvement in the College of Preceptors illustrates, the magazine had links with other organisations engaged in the reform of women’s education and the professionalisation of at least the traditionally admissible female occupation of teaching. At the more radical end of the spectrum, the British Mothers’ Magazine published numerous extracts from the work of the educational reformer and political economist William Ballantyne Hodgson. Hodgson was a regular delegate at Social Science Congresses and secretary to the Liverpool Mechanics’ Institute where, in 1844, he arranged for the addition of a girls’ school.17 In 1848, the British Mothers’ Magazine published a series of articles by Hodgson on ‘The Education of Women’ in which he pointedly objected to the notion that ‘Abstract science was for boys only, music and drawing for girls only’. Woman’s inadequate education implied that she was to: live not for herself, but for him of the other sex who might be captivated into becoming a prop for her graceful debility; not to put forth and improve her own individuality. . . but wait to receive chance impress from without, or at most to please, attract, and charm by frivolous accomplishments, which might be laid aside when their end was gained – just as, when the house is let, the ticket may be taken down.18 Hodgson outspokenly described woman as ‘an end to herself as well as man’ and invoked essentially the same argument as J. S. Mill was later to employ against the illogical fears that equal education could eradicate ‘natural’ differences.19 Hodgson nonetheless underpinned his arguments in favour of women’s education by pointing to its benefits ‘even relatively considered, even in her relations to man’, for ‘If woman is to be man’s helpmate in any worthy sense, then she must be partaker of his higher tastes, and sympathize in his highest aspirations’.20

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

These ‘relative’ benefits were the predominant concern of the many contributors to the British Mothers’ Magazine who saw an improved education for women in the context of their role in society and adhered closely to the magazine’s declared mission to promote education for motherhood. Its first issue proclaimed that mothers needed a better education than the ‘so-called accomplishments acquired at our schools’.21 Most proponents of an improved education for women were keen to reassure their readers that ‘while the intellectual powers will be developed . . . the interest of the fireside and family board will not materially suffer’.22 They constantly emphasised that intellectual training was not merely compatible with the roles of wife and mother but vital for making women fit mates for their husbands, educators of their children, and thereby instruments of the future progress of society: The great object of all instruction should be to advance man in the scale of social, moral and intellectual being . . . The consummation so devoutly wished will be hastened by the education of woman being more cared for, by her moral aspect being changed. Home is the sphere of her actions, and from the seminary of the social affections are nations gathered.23

The ‘minister of domestic concord’ Authors of advice literature were at pains to define music’s value in relation to its purpose and context.24 For some, this could mean the rejection of all artificial music in favour of religious appreciation of the sounds of nature. To a woman who had cultivated a true taste for the arts, it was asserted, ‘nature singeth a perpetual hymn’.25 ‘The beauties of nature’ – ‘the little birds hymning their Maker’s praises’ – were to be valued above parties where ‘The evening is divided between frivolous conversation . . . various games, music and songs, and perhaps dancing’.26 However, unlike dancing, which, in the modern non-biblical age, was invariably profane, music could perform beneficial and sacred functions.27 In the British Mothers’ Magazine for 1846, the mother of a musical daughter sums up the advantages which music could offer. At the same time she expresses horror at the ‘perversion’ of musical talent whenever it leads women to abandon domestic limits. When questioned as to whether her condemnation of dancing ‘did not equally apply to singing?’ and whether she was ‘at all apprehensive, while

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We must distinguish, my love, between what is always an injurious amusement, and what may possibly become so. In my opinion, dancing and cards, as practised in society, are always evil; and we therefore keep our children at the greatest distance from both. Music, on the contrary, whether vocal or instrumental, is a source of innocent and exquisite pleasure to the performers and the auditors, softens the feelings, refines the taste, and, in devotional services, is allied to the highest and holiest emotions of our nature. It is essentially good, though, like every other talent possessed by man, capable of being perverted. It is abused, when it is made so important as to engross much time and money; when words are sung which we should ‘blush to hear spoken,’ or which are otherwise immoral; and when the gratification is sought in public assemblies, in which the company, the display, and the expense, are all objectionable.28 Female accomplishments, learned ‘for social display rather than for social service’ were widely condemned.29 They were seen as training women for ‘the great market of the world’, rather than fitting them for domestic and charitable duty.30 This abuse of musical training was contrasted to the contribution that accomplishments could make to domestic enjoyment – a contrast which manifests one of the many paradoxes inherent in the domestic ideal: woman’s natural role was as wife and mother, yet how was she ever to attain entry into this private domestic sphere unless she first made some sort of ‘public’ appearance and used her accomplishments to ‘sell’ herself on the marriage market? Mrs Fison, author of Hints for the Earnest Student, exhorted her readers to consider whether they cultivated their accomplishments ‘for the gratification of the dear home circle’ or ‘with the vain and selfish purpose of exciting admiration’.31 In music, as in every area of her life, ‘the good of the household and not selfish gratification, should be a woman’s aim’.32 ‘Any true-hearted woman’, affirmed Marianne Farningham, would claim that flattery ‘never made her half as happy as she afterwards felt while pouring out her husband’s tea, or singing a soothing lullaby to a little dimpled darling in her lap’.33 The image of the musical wife and mother providing spiritual refreshment and drawing the devout family circle together was a widely invoked example of how a woman should use her accomplishments. Indeed, it offered women a means of redeeming their musical performance (and themselves) from

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allowing Emily to cultivate her fine voice and ear, that she might be tempted to become a performer in public’, the mother replies:

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the early attainment of learning and knowledge will be found of more than tenfold importance now; because, in the first place, there will be no longer time for their acquisition; and in the next, they will be wanted every day, if not in their direct, in their relative exercise, to raise the tone of social intercourse around the domestic hearth. Music, painting, and poetry, taste, tact, and observation, may all be made conducive to the same desirable end; for if by the marriage vow, you hoped to unite yourself to an immortal mind . . . you must desire to sustain and cherish such a mind, in all its highest aspirations, and in all its noblest aims.35 Music’s acknowledged sympathetic powers made it an ideal instrument of domestic harmony and minister to religious enthusiasm for ‘home’ as the only possible source of earthly happiness, the subject and site of the most elevated ‘music’. ‘Verse has never found a more prolific theme, nor music sung a more enchanting lay’, enthused Ellis in Prevention Better than Cure (1847): ‘If there be one thing real in this life, it is the influence which home has exercised upon the heart, the conduct, and the experience of mankind’.36 The ‘hymn of domestic gladness, in which even infants learn to lisp their Maker’s praise’ must thus represent the highest form attainable by music: ‘not better music is there to the ears of Jehovah in the seraphim’s song than that concord of sweet sounds’, averred the Rev. J. A. James in an 1849 article on ‘Christian Earnestness in Family Religion’.37 Music’s association with spiritual elevation meant that mothers and daughters could put their skills to good use. The Rev. James also recommended ‘suitable hymns and tunes’ to mothers wondering how to occupy their children on Sundays.38 Other contributors agreed. The absence of music in religious families was even subject to reproof, for music is a ‘divine talent . . . one of the sweetest relics of paradise’; moreover, ‘we know that music will form one of the unending enjoyments and occupations of eternity’.39 The neglect of devotional music could be equated with the neglect of prayer.40 Mothers were encouraged to use music in the ‘moral

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a public, siren-like role: ‘If they have played and sung to attract the lover’, complained Mrs Roe, ‘why not sometimes play and sing to gratify the husband?’34 In The Wives of England (1843), Sarah Ellis, the well-known and prolific author of advice books, sharply criticised wives who stop playing after marriage when

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education’ of their children as a means of promoting religious awe, particularly in association with stimulation of a love for the sounds of nature.41 Specifically religious music was sometimes recommended as the only type suitable for domestic performance by strict evangelical and nonconformist writers who drew a division between the domestic hearth and ‘the world’ that mirrored the separation between Church and World.42 A moral vignette of 1849 gives the example of how a little girl is introduced to worldly music at an age when she is unable to discriminate between such base entertainment and songs of praise. She mistakes the music of a ‘soiree musicale’ for ‘singing to the praise and glory of God’: the dreadful result is that this ‘bright and beautiful little being, whose mind thus presented a fair page for inscribing the blessed truth of God’s word, having been introduced to the “juvenile world” thus early, is now in maturer age, fully devoted to those artificial pleasures for which a false taste had thus been cultivated’.43 However, music considered suitable for the promotion of domestic and spiritual feeling was frequently not overtly religious. Secular music

Figure 2.2 ‘English Songs and Melodies’, Headpiece for the Musical Supplement to the Illustrated London News, 24 January 1852.

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

featured in advice on how young people might most profitably spend time in society when other activities such as dancing, cards, gossip or even, as in ‘A Whisper to Our Elder Daughters’ by ‘A Maiden Lady’, fashionable needlework, were prohibited.44 The music described in an 1850 article on ‘Christmas Parties’ is educational rather than religious, consisting of ‘different sorts of national music, as well as music of different dates’.45 Music is listed as one of the ‘innocent and instructive pleasures’ encouraged in the home of a late secretary of the London Maternal Association, whose life is eulogised for its temperance.46 Musical interludes punctuate an evening of rational entertainment for young people described in the British Mothers’ Journal for January 1857 which culminates in a discussion of how the scientific investigation of nature illustrated religious faith in God’s design.47 Music, like natural science, could be seen as conducive to piety. In ‘Hints for our Elder Daughters’, musical interludes and the reading of an essay on music form parts of an exemplary party which is favourably contrasted to more frivolous entertainments, and found not to have diminished the daughters’ culinary skills!48 ‘When we consider how greatly singing adds to the cheerfulness and happiness of the home circle’, exclaimed Mrs Bakewell, ‘we cannot but urge the early and judicious cultivation of the voice, both for girls and boys’.49 Sarah Ellis acknowledged that attainments, including a training in instrumental music, ‘which in the crowded drawing-room were worse than useless in their display’, might ‘sometimes be accounted as actual wealth, to her who has the good feeling to render them conducive to the amusement or the happiness of her own fireside’.50 Crucially, women might invoke music’s consolatory powers to soothe their world-weary fathers and husbands, for ‘many a wearied businessman is cheered by the thought of the bright, smiling faces that will welcome him at eve, and of the sweet voices that will warble strains of harmony and love to cheer him after his day’s toil’.51 The economic structure of family life also influenced views of the proper sphere for the exercise of musical talent. The education of dependent daughters was an investment from which a father might expect some return: ‘Do we not see daughters on whom parents have lavished expense refusing to exert, for the amusement of those parents, the very acquirements which they have procured for them?’ lamented Sarah Lewis in Woman’s Mission.52 Sarah Ellis also reserved the greatest opprobrium for daughters who preferred to show off their expensive musical education in society, failing to recognise the self-evident fact that ‘the object of a daughter’

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should be ‘to soothe the weary spirit of a father when he returns home from the office or the counting-house, where he has been toiling for her maintenance’.53 Ellis pictured a daughter’s musical skill put to proper use in comforting her father and acting as the agent of reconciliation between estranged father and son. Here music’s combined sympathetic and spiritual powers are a potent agent of domestic piety: never does a daughter appear to more advantage, than when she cheerfully lays aside a fashionable air, and strums over, for more than the hundredth time, some old ditty which her father loves . . . The old man listens until tears are glistening in his eyes, for he sees again the home of his childhood...The brother too – the prodigal . . . In other lands, that fire-side music haunts his memory. . . . He says, ‘I will arise and go to my father’s home’ . . . so wide has been the separation, that a feeling of estrangement still remains . . . The sister feels this. She knows the power of music . . . she plays a low soft air. Her brother knows it well. It is the evening hymn they used to sing together . . . His manly voice is raised. Once more it mingles with the strain. Once more the parents and the children, the sister and the brother, are united as in days gone by.54 In an article appearing in the British Mothers’ Magazine for 1847 entitled ‘The Elder Children’, the sister’s role is similar and provides the frame for the introduction of a new hymn text. Her fervent prayers have failed to prevent her elder brother running away to sea, but at last he returns, and, ‘the first evening of his arrival, the pious sister sits down to her instrument to lead the hymn of praise she has herself composed for the occasion. What an interesting group is here! Angels might join the circle without contamination’; the words of the hymn follow.55 Such accounts stressed music’s domestic advantages rather than any benefit to women themselves. Unusually amongst advice authors, Maria Grey and Emily Shirreff also praised music in Thoughts on Self Culture (1850) as ‘peculiarly adapted to woman’s life of anxious solitary cares’, a substitute for the sympathy which she was to bestow but not to receive for herself: many a one whose performance is quite unfit for society. . . may find in it both solace and cheering for herself . . . the musical instrument is always ready. There, at first perhaps, the hand will wander listlessly over the notes, but the chords of some favourite air are struck almost

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Withdrawal into private experience is condoned here, albeit strictly within the controlled context of domesticity. The absorption of musical harmonies makes the woman once more fit to resume her responsibility for family concord.57 She was primarily to be not the beneficiary of harmony, but its agent. Analogies between the roles of woman and of music are frequent in advice material. It was woman’s role to be ‘the moral regenerator of society’58 and music, when correctly practised, was deemed ‘an instrument of important moral improvement and civilization’.59 ‘The sweet tones’ of a mother’s prayer ‘thrill like harp-notes continually on the ear, and lure the criminal away to purer and better scenes’.60 The combined influence of woman and music, albeit within subservience to the private sphere, could make a valuable contribution to social regeneration and improvement: Mothers! shall it not be that then he shall have something to remember of you? And while the recollections of infancy and home rush upon his imagination, and transport him to the days when he, with the young group, crowded around your knee, shall he not have to think of a pious mother’s prayers, and tears, and warnings, and thus be led to press on in that upper better path into which you directed his infant steps, while you sang to him one of the songs of Zion.61 The apposite musical education of their children was an obvious way in which women – ‘answerable for the character of the next generation’ – could exercise their influence on the future progress of society: Let them learn and hear touching strains of music; rejoice if you can succeed in making them weep. Though music has been cultivated to excess as a mere feminine accomplishment, its power as a means of stimulating the emotions, and calling forth sensibility, is not sufficiently estimated. That divine and universal instrument, the human voice, as well as artificial harmonies, should be cultivated in both sexes, and in every class of society.62

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unconsciously, and then gradually the languor is dispersed, the interest roused, and a whole new train of associations excited . . . the weight of care, or anxiety, or weariness, seems lifted off, and the mind restored to its tone, and fitted to turn with new alacrity and cheerfulness to whatever may require its attention.56

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Like many commentators, the author of this 1845 article on ‘The Principles of a Good Education’ identifies the issue of women’s education with that of general social improvement. She compares the limitations of traditional female education with the restrictions placed on educating the labouring classes, who like women were ‘considered to want very little knowledge’.63 Music is represented as having an important role in a progressive education designed to enable the ‘full exertion of all faculties and emotions’ of both the sexes, now that ‘the reign of this ignorance is happily passed away [and w]e begin to estimate rightly the human mind as destined to perpetual and endless progression’.64 Such accounts of music as the means of developing and refining the emotions indicate the degree to which the theories that Spencer articulated in his ‘Origin and Function of Music’ accorded with established views of the benefits derived from music’s affective power.65 Whilst mostly concerned with domestic music-making, journal articles on the education of women also referred to the philanthropic benefits which music might bestow. There was praise for hymn singing in missionary schools, for the use of music in the ‘Successful Moral Training’ of orphans and the reform of ‘irreligious and uneducated mothers’.66 Women were pictured putting their musical talents to charitable (if not public) as well as domestic use.67 Many commentators distinguished between the edifying music performed on such occasions and more decadent forms, contrasting serious, sacred, or simple popular music with the fashionable repertoire of contemporary popular concerts. Discounting such worldly entertainment from the definition of ‘music’ altogether, the author of ‘The Organ Grinder’ asks readers to consider the superior social benefits bestowed by the ragged organ grinder’s tunes. After dwelling on the importance of musical and metaphorical harmony, including that evoked by a devoted wife, she concludes: the world needs music, – the touching domestic song that tells in few words the loves, the trials, or the blisses of life; – the more sacred music that leads the soul to communion with God – it needs music; – its poor cry aloud for music; they are tired of the inharmonious din of toil – and a few sweet notes bring with them hours of pleasure to the weary and the world-forsaken.68 The role of musical women within domestic ideology thus echoes the reforming social role allotted to music in the writing of popular musical reformers of the time. The parallel is reinforced by the way in which prominent musical campaigners expressed enormous reverence for

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

domestic music. Joseph Mainzer, the leading figure in the amateur choral-singing movement discussed in the previous chapter, recounted how his own teacher had regarded the songs he composed as his ‘contribution to family devotion’.69 For Mainzer, music of this sort, ‘breathing domestic joy, domestic affection, repose and peace’, had the highest claim to sublimity, and he and others involved in the popular sight-singing movement produced music suitable for amateur singing classes and home performance. Woman’s much praised sympathetic nature and the sympathetic powers attributed to music made woman and music alike particularly suited to the domestic sphere. Some of the extracts already quoted exemplify the figurative affinities between woman and music which abound in advice literature, with musical metaphors used to reinforce ideals of femininity and female influence. These affinities are so close as to make ‘woman’ and ‘music’ interchangeable at times. Music’s sympathetic qualities, like woman’s, make its first purpose self-evidently domestic: music is the very art, which by its mastery over the feelings and affections, calls forth more tenderness than any other. Surely then the principle of love ought to regulate the exercise of this gift, in proportion to its influence upon the human heart. Surely it ought not to be cultivated as the medium of display, so much as the means of home enjoyment; not so much as a spell to charm the stranger, or one who has no other link of sympathy with us, as a solace to those we love, and a tribute of gratitude and affection to those who love us.70 This account by Sarah Ellis of music’s appropriate function in binding the links of domestic sympathy finds a parallel in Grey and Shirreff’s view of the natural predominance of the affections in woman which points out her mission among her fellow creatures; a mission of gentleness and consolation, of soothing and gladness. It is hers to make goodness beautiful, and to associate the love of virtue with man’s deepest and warmest affections. It is hers to bring peace, to gather up that golden chain of sympathy, which should bind the whole human race . . . Such is her appointed task, and a woman without active and tender sympathies and affections is a mere rebel against nature.71 The many arguments presented for music’s domestic benefits emphasise how widely music was characterised as both instrument and

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emblem for the powers of sympathy and intuition which were supposed to exist supremely in women. The life of a virtuous woman was ‘like one of Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words,” whose graceful melody and spiritual meaning are too deep for the expression of language’.72 She was ever to be the agent of domestic harmony: her ‘narrow sphere’ was really as ‘wide as eternity itself’, for in the education of future mothers and heroes ‘upon the moral battlefield of the world’, she could evoke ‘more transcendent harmony than that of a thousand trained orchestras’.73 While devoting most of her time to practical duties, she was never to become so preoccupied with them that she heard no ‘music’ in the ‘well-known footfall’ of her husband’s return home.74 Disagreeable daughters were chastised for having ‘no music in their voices’.75 They should be able ‘not only to wake sweet music on the harp and piano, but in the hearts of their parents – its soothing harmonies stealing through every avenue of the household’.76 Whilst there were to be no limits to woman’s metaphorical musicality, there was considerable anxiety about the boundaries of women’s actual musical experience. Quite different standards and repertoire from those suitable for public performance were required for domestic musical competence: In cases where true musical talent exists, a moderate degree of skill, such as is necessary to accompany a simple song or ballad for the recreation of the domestic circle, may be easily attained, without involving a sacrifice of the time required for other pursuits.77 Music was ideally to take its place as one of a range of domestic skills. ‘Good taste’ in the choice of appropriately modest music, and a quiet readiness to play when called upon, rather than ‘extraordinary skill in execution’ were what was required ‘to render music subservient to the purposes of social and domestic enjoyment’.78 Meanwhile, in contrast to music’s invaluable role in domestic life, it might be associated with the immoral hideousness of the indolent (working-class) mother: There she sits – the very picture of sloth and idleness. The abode of misery is situated in a filthy alley, and before the door the younger children are grovelling in the dirt . . . . The fat and indolent mother is sitting with her feet on the fender, sipping some warm ale, in which a portion of gin is mingled . . . and in her hand is a book of songs.

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

‘Look at her’, continues the writer of this article on ‘Domestic Industry’, ‘can you imagine a more miserable sight? One feels inclined to pay some industrious thrifty matron to cleanse and air the house, wash the poor baby, and throw the song book into the fire’.79 Class hostility obviously plays a part here: a working-class mother would not, moreover, have had much opportunity to put music to more acceptable domestic use. She certainly would not have had access to a piano around which to consolidate family harmony. However, it is with the lives of middle-class women that most advice material about music is primarily concerned and music also features frequently in hostile depictions of idle middle-class women who cultivate their talents but neglect family duties. Despite its usefulness in promoting domestic affection and family religion, music was not to be allowed to clash with other domestic or charitable obligations: ‘It is of far more importance to accustom a young girl’s fingers to the use of needle and thread, or the practice of knitting and netting, than to correct and rapid movements on the piano or harp’, asserted the author of an 1856 article on ‘Homely Duties’.80 Much stress was laid on the necessity for daughters to be educated in practical household ‘accomplishments’ as well as those which graced the drawing room: Great labour and much time have been devoted to music, painting, and dancing, because these are accomplishments which render even beauty more attractive; but very little care has been bestowed upon imparting what may be termed such knowledge as is wanted in the affairs of common life.81 Hannah More’s opinion that the end of women’s education should be ‘to qualify them for the practical purposes of life’ was much alluded to.82 The author of an 1865 pamphlet on ‘Public and Middle-Class Education’ provides the cautionary example of a woman accomplished in dancing and singing, but still unmarried at thirty because she is ignorant of housekeeping.83 Such views were particularly stressed with reference to less-well-off families and might be seen as reflecting a wish to establish distinctions between different ranks within the middle classes, as well as social concern. The latter, nonetheless, was significant. Aspirations to gentility in households with insufficient servants might produce a daughter who ‘strums a little upon the piano, does an inch of fancy work, takes down her back hair, and dresses it afresh, and so passes the day, while her mother, weak and weary, and worn out, toils and slaves alone, unhelped and uncheered from morning till night’.84

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Pianos and piano lessons were both major expenses and this may have underpinned such criticism.85 However, there were more than practical consequences at stake. Great skill in music as in any other activity was a ‘temptation to pride and vanity’ and might ‘be made to minister to sin, and to foster the natural evil of the heart’, warned ‘Agnes’ in ‘Woman: Her Position and Duty’.86 For both spiritual and social reasons, limited musical skill was to be advocated: ‘for who would wish a wife or daughter, moving in private society, to have attained such excellence in music as involves a life’s devotion to it’, writes Mrs Pullan in her Maternal Counsels (1855), whilst firmly advising women not to ‘attempt in a drawing room to perform some impossibility of Liszt’.87 Ellis’s complaint that ‘to play like a professor ranks amongst the highest attainments of female education’ suggests that strictures on women’s musical ambitions were frequently disobeyed in practice.88 Nonetheless, the fact that music is a performance art facilitated a measure of control over female musical practice and enabled emphasis to be placed upon its use in cementing family relationships. In this music contrasts with reading, which, other than when reading aloud, remains a far more private and individualising activity.89 Writers of advice books who were committed to the domestic categorisation of women, yet valued high intellectual and artistic standards, were obviously in a predicament when discussing female musical practice. Grey and Shirreff somewhat equivocally maintain that in women, the study of the arts was to be limited to the service of the lesser manifestation of the ‘love of the beautiful’ which ‘in its highest development inspires the poet and the artist; and in its lower degree draws forth, in our daily intercourse, all that is gentle and graceful in character’.90 Like much of the advice material discussed here, theirs is a serious work on female education. However, at moments like this they sound dangerously close to the position satirised through Mr Brooke in Eliot’s Middlemarch: ‘there is a lightness about the feminine mind – a touch and go – music, the fine arts, that kind of thing – they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know’.91

The ‘most sensuous of accomplishments’ Anxiety about the ways in which music might endanger woman’s domestic classification was not restricted to its potential to distract her from domestic duties. Criticism of music’s diversion of women’s time and aspirations was underpinned by fears about the influence on

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

women of music’s emotive influence. Ironically, the same material which emphasises the domestic benefits of women’s musical agency is preoccupied by a sense that women are perilously susceptible to music’s affective power. Concern about women’s emotional vulnerability was fomented by the tensions inherent in a view of their natures as governed by their reproductive function: women were prone to be dominated by the emotions, including sexual feeling, which threatened the very ideology that enshrined that function. On the one hand, a woman’s accomplishments were seen to give her greater influence in her role as the ‘moral regenerator of society’: music was after all the means by which women could not just metaphorically but literally win men from the contamination they suffered from their unavoidable contact with the world.92 In The Wives of England, Ellis concludes her description of how a wife’s musical skill might be used ‘to beguile a husband of his cares’ and ‘to win him from society which might divert his thoughts from home’; she asserts that this must be the end of ‘every intellectual attainment for there is much in the life of men, and particularly where business engages their attention, to lower and degrade the mind’.93 On the other hand, despite their much-proclaimed ‘intuitive sense of right and wrong’, and their role as moral arbiters for world-tainted men, women were described as morally vulnerable, possessing ‘a more rapid and delicate sensibility, and a wider range of sympathies, corresponding in variety and intensity with the exalted vital character of the general organisation’.94 Music’s ability to help foster the predominance in woman of the emotional sensibility essential to her role in the family made it a particularly dangerous influence. Authors of advice books and periodical articles invariably associated music’s pernicious influence over women with their particular susceptibility to feeling. Maria Grey and Emily Shirreff proclaimed that ‘great predominance of the affections is a constitutional peculiarity with women’ and named art and music as exemplifying influences which produced ‘passive impressions’ which were very dangerous, if the passions they aroused through their effect upon an untrained imaginsation became a ‘principle of action’ without the intervening agency of a rationally informed conscience.95 The purity of the emotions aroused by music and the arts was extolled, yet music was also one of the ‘pomps and vanities of this wicked world’ from which women’s fragile nature should be shielded: ‘The minister of domestic concord and the handmaid of devotion’ might ‘easily become, and unawares, the most sensuous of accomplishments’.96 It is in discussions of music’s emotive effect on women themselves that the most contradictory attitudes

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towards the art are revealed, and where the parallel representations of music and women are especially striking. The ambivalence of music’s affective power as the art which encourages aspirations after the highest ideals and yet fosters the most earthly passions readily makes it emblematic of equivocal attitudes towards women themselves. Concern over music’s potential to arouse sensual rather than spiritual feeling is especially apparent in frequent condemnations of dancing. These link music with an activity whose ‘tendency is immoral’ for ‘It excites the very emotions which most require restraint in youth’.97 While dancing, ‘the love of display, the passion for the admiration for the other sex, are prematurely excited’.98 Music, even when not specifically alluded to, implicitly operates as a stimulus to this ‘sensual action and exercise’ which offered a sure path to damnation: ‘Only let this accomplishment(?) be imparted to your daughter – let her, as she ought to do, excel in the art, and she will not, without the intervention of a miracle of grace, be preserved from the pestilence and perdition of the ball-room!’99 The ‘vanity’ and dissatisfaction ‘with the quiet, unobtrusive pleasures of home’ which Mrs Bakewell warns will result from dancing read as euphemisms for the sexual consciousness which this ‘captivating art’ was bound to foster, by the ‘feelings which it excites and the circumstances by which it is surrounded and the associations to which it leads’.100 The desire to contain energies dangerous to woman’s domestic function and also to prevent women becoming the powerless subjects of their own passions was frequently evident in debates about music, where the complexity of Victorian gender ideology is especially conspicuous. Although she endorsed music’s domestic usefulness, Ellis warns of the particular necessity of placing limits on women’s devotion to music in her chapter on ‘Music, Painting and Poetry’ in The Daughters of England. She sees musical study as without merit for those lacking skill and a ‘most dangerous’ seductive influence on those who are musically gifted: for such is its influence over them, that while carried away by its allurements, they scarcely see or feel like moral agents, so as to distinguish good from evil; and thus they mistake for an intellectual, nay, even sometimes for a spiritual enjoyment, the indulgence of that passion, which is but too earthly in its associations.101 There are, in fact, many examples in Ellis’s own moral fictions where musicality is a sign of her heroine’s spiritual refinement and her musical skill is exploited to generate romantic interest in the plot (albeit that

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

the heroine is generally portrayed as unconscious of the emotional impact of her musical performance on her listener).102 However, a fictional counterpart to the negative view of music expressed in The Daughters of England occurs in a story entitled ‘Confessions of a Maniac’ where extreme love of music characterises a woman of ungoverned passions who later falls prey to drink: Music . . . was a passion; for nothing else seemed to satisfy my soul. Music, however, though it satisfied me for a time, was apt to leave me melancholy and depressed; and the result of my various pursuits was only this – that all was vanity.103 Ellis, a dedicated campaigner against drunkenness, alleges that ‘an inordinate love of [music] may be compared to intemperance, in the fact of its inciting the passions of the human mind so much more frequently to evil than to good’.104 She acknowledges that her view of music is at variance with the ‘harmony of the spheres’ and ‘celestial choirs’ evoked by the ‘language of scripture’, but mankind’s fallen (and inebriate) state explains this apparent anomaly: ‘so long as temptation lurks beneath the rose-leaves of enjoyment, music will remain to be a dangerous instrument in the hands of those who are by nature and by constitution its willing and devoted slaves’.105 Ellis concedes that ‘when kept under proper restrictions, and regulated by right principles, music may have its use’; music’s potentially subversive power is thus absorbed into the wider issue of the regulation of women’s imaginative and emotional lives.106 Music in advice literature and elsewhere is a particularly overdetermined trope: emblematic of mental balance and domestic harmony, it simultaneously provoked extremes of emotional response. A passage translated from the French advice author Mme Necker (sister to Mme de Staël) which appeared in the British Mothers’ Magazine for 1846 exemplifies the conceptual and figurative entanglements which ensue when music’s ideal status comes up against anxiety over its inordinate influence: In human life, as in a symphony of a great master, the successive parts have each their proper speed . . . it appears to me, that in select society, where decency breathes throughout, where good taste obliges us to temper the expression of even the most modest joy, we might venture to allow music and other pleasing entertainments.107

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A contributor to the ‘Ladies’ Column’ of the Educational Times for 1853 also demonstrates this common discrepancy between music as a metaphor for elevated mental harmony and as a dangerous seductive power: ‘We have heard much of the music of the spheres’, he or she asserts, but ‘we have heard little of the music of the mind; and yet, if one string of the intellectual lyre be broken, or even unduly lengthened or shortened, it must interfere with every melody that is breathed from the instrument’.108 Simultaneously music provides a feminised emblem for the dangers of the uncultivated imagination, for ‘while she sings her syren song to the heedless navigator, she carries him on to hidden rocks, there to make shipwreck of faith and of a good conscience’.109 Disparity between views of women as agents and as victims of music’s affective power frequently contributes to this figurative confusion between images of music as arming women to wield siren-like power and as exacerbating their own susceptibility. Thus woman could be the instrument equally of the harmony and siren song described above. This was a dichotomy extensively to be elaborated by John Ruskin. Like one of the advice authors already mentioned, Ruskin invoked the category of ‘non-music’ to distinguish immoral from moral music – one of many ways in which his statements on music reflect his own religious education.110 Ruskin usefully coined the term ‘sirenic’ to describe the obverse of the Apollonian harmony of the muses, and, in a Fors Clavigera letter entitled ‘Cradle Song’, he dramatises this distinction between the ordered and instructive harmony of the muses and the salacious ‘music’ of the sirens.111 Ruskin evokes the matronly virtue of the woman ‘karolling’ in Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose: ‘For she was wont, in every place / To singen first, men to solace’.112 This he contrasts, in the course of an attack on the feminism of J.S. Mill, with the musical activity – inharmonious, undomestic and venal – of his female contemporaries: Mr John Stuart Mill would have set her to another craft, I fancy (not but that singing is a lucrative one, nowadays, if it be shrill enough); but you will not get your wives to sing thus for nothing, if you send them out to earn their dinners (instead of earning them yourselves for them), and put their babies summarily to sleep.113 A more positive contemporary example of female musicality is represented in The Cestus of Aglaia by a group of schoolgirls enraptured by Charles Hallé’s playing of ‘Home Sweet Home’: the melody Eliot, with such delicious irony, has Rosamond, who despises the song, play for her

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

uncle Featherstone’s pleasure, and the initial ensnarement of Lydgate.114 Ruskin’s sense of music’s role as essentially moral and woman’s domestic role as essentially ‘musical’ is clearly something which he shared with numerous authors of advice literature. Ruskin’s comments express a horror of professional female musicianship which he also shared with many of his contemporaries. Revulsion against women indulging in ‘public display’ and revealing their dormant sirenic powers clearly made professional musicianship for women, or their participation in the organisation of public musical life, problematic. In fact, while they played a prominent part in the organisation and performance of domestic music, the involvement of women in public concert life was extremely limited. In his comparative study of musical activity in London, Vienna and Paris, William Weber notes that the administration of formal concerts in London was particularly dominated by men. Upper-middle-class women exerted some informal influence on concerts of fashionable popular music, but this was tenuous and unacknowledged. Formal music societies were run entirely by men.115 Women were encouraged to sing and to play the piano (or harp) but not to play orchestral instruments; thus their participation in amateur concerts was also restricted.116 Although, or because, music was one of the few professions occasionally open to women, there was particularly virulent opposition expressed to the idea of women becoming professional performers. In the mid-nineteenth century, the majority of female performing musicians came from professional musical families in which they had received their training, although some singers, like Deborah Travers, the model for Margaret in Gaskell’s Mary Barton, came from the working classes.117 Music provided an extremely insecure livelihood even for the successful soloist. Cyril Ehrlich notes several examples of overturned fortunes as poignant as that of the singer of Eliot’s ‘Armgart’ who is faced with having to find an alternative career after the loss of her voice.118 However, this aspect of a musical career was not emphasised in advice literature which predominantly stressed the contravention of domestic ideals which such a career involved. It was generally on the grounds that the serious pursuit of music was a dangerous distraction away from domestic vocation that the utter impropriety of women aiming to become professional musicians was condemned. The prima donna provides a conspicuous emblem, as well as an example, of the dangers of female professionalism. ‘Do you’, exclaimed a contributor to the British Mothers’ Journal,

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gaze with a smile at the jewelled prima donna, and wish that for you rang forth such glorious strains: for you, men started to their feet and fair women waved their perfumed kerchiefs? . . . remember that the artist whom gaping wonder worships, the author who gathers laurels in every land, the mightiest of a nation’s great, are not worthy of as much honour as the noble mother who fits her sons and daughters to act nobly life’s great drama upon the stage of Time.119 Such explicit equations between female writers and singers are important in relation to works of fiction by women writers where musical allusion frequently conveys the anxieties and aspirations of female creativity. The prima donna also features along with the woman writer in the pitying view of ‘Female Distinction’ put forward in Mrs Ellis’s Young Ladies’ Reader. This concludes in a vein which particularly calls to mind Eliot’s portrayals of Alcharisi and Mirah, the Jewish singers in Daniel Deronda: What is genius to woman but a splendid misfortune! What is fame to woman but a dazzling degradation! She is exposed to the pitiless gaze of admiration; but little respect, and no love, blend with it. However much as an individual she may have gained in name, in rank, in fortune, she has suffered as a woman . . . She is a reed shaken by the wind; a splendid exotic nurtured for display; an ornament only to be worn on birth nights and festivals . . . she is the Hebrew whose songs are demanded in a ‘strange land;’ Ruth standing amid the ‘alien corn;’ . . . she is a jewelled captive, bright and desolate, and sad!120 Whilst the authors of published advice material may have been in an equivocal position when condemning women who raised their voices beyond their home circle, Bessie Rayner Parkes’s invocation in the English Woman’s Journal of the professional singer as an admirable type of womanhood, quoted earlier in this chapter, would scarcely have struck them as a recommendation of female professionalism. As we have seen, advice books offered copious examples of music’s pernicious influence wherever it was not kept strictly within domestic bounds. The very emphasis so often placed on music’s domestic virtues made its appropriation for gainful employment especially abhorrent. The professional singer potentially becomes linked to the fallen woman, not just because she is a publicly consumed commodity, but also because, like the prostitute, she performs for money offices which are strenuously defined as wifely and maternal. The prima donna practises the siren arts which

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

will lure a husband away from the domestic hearth. She represents the dangerous seductive powers of woman and music combined. Indeed, the rival society from which the musical woman was to protect her spouse or brother might more generally be one in which both elements featured: opera houses, music halls – their promenades prime sites for prostitution – and public houses, as well as competing sites of private social music-making. Paradoxically wives are both admonished for having practised the accomplishments necessary to obtain a husband and implicitly advised to retain sufficient of their own musical powers of seduction to dissuade husbands from straying: so perversely emphasising their own latent siren-hood. The siren figure does not simply exist in opposition to the domestic ideal, but is a contradiction within a domestic ideology which condemns sexualised femininity, whilst defining woman in terms of her capacity for sexual reproduction. Whilst concern about women’s own musical susceptibility was the avowed preoccupation of most comments in advice material, it equally reveals anxiety about the latent siren lurking within ordinary wives and mothers. The association of music with disruptive female sexuality is, of course, more widely familiar from the numerous scenes of musical courtship and flirtation in nineteenth-century fiction: Becky Sharp, Blanche Ingram, Rosamond Vincy, and the salacious mistresses portrayed in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to name a few. In Middlemarch, Rosamond, disillusioned by marriage to Lydgate, makes use of her musical skills for ends entirely opposed to marital harmony in her flirtation with her singing partner Will Ladislaw.121 Such literary portrayals might be seen as realisations of the siren figure lurking behind the concerns expressed in advice literature about music’s emotive effects. Holman Hunt’s famous narrative painting The Awakening Conscience (1854), so frequently reproduced to illustrate discussions of Victorian domestic ideology, superbly embodies the ambivalent status of both music and woman at the time. It evokes both music’s erotic influence (with the piano a favourite site for seduction) and its potential power of salvation. The painting’s musical allusions suggest the redemptive power of the kind of music which prompts memories of earlier associations. The woman starting to her feet from a piano where she has been sitting in her lover’s lap has been singing Thomas Moore’s ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’. Edward Lear’s setting of ‘Tears Idle Tears’, which similarly invokes past affections, lies on the floor.122 In the next chapter, I discuss how the power of music to arouse both sexual passion and memories of early affections plays an important role in Eliot’s portrayal of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. In contrast to advice literature accounts

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of the redemptive power of music which prompt memories of earlier associations in errant sons, Hunt’s subject, like Eliot’s, is the prodigal daughter. His highlighting of music’s power to awaken the conscience subverts any simple equation of destructive female passion and music. Even the fallen woman may potentially be redeemed.123 The wide

Figure 2.3 ‘The Awakening Conscience’, 1854, by William Holman Hunt (1827–1910). Reproduced by kind permission of Tate Gallery Publications.

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George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

currency of assumptions about music’s influence on the conscience is illustrated by the way they could be appropriated and turned to radical effect in Hunt’s painting. Contemporary readings of the painting, by Ruskin amongst others, overlooked Hunt’s emphasis on music’s saving power and assumed that the painting depicted the woman’s realisation that her fallen state would inevitably lead to her destruction. Such assumptions are hardly surprising given not only prevailing attitudes towards the fallen woman as irredeemable, but the fact that many commentators specifically saw music’s influence on female consciousness in an extremely negative light. Advice literature represents one dimension of a pervasive debate about music and women. It is especially illuminating read alongside scientific and medical literature which increasingly lent authority to views of music as a potentially overmastering emotive force to which women’s biological make-up would leave them especially susceptible. The previous chapter showed how musical response featured widely in the work of physiological psychologists as an example of involuntary physical reaction which illustrated the physical basis of sensation and emotion.124 The growing orthodoxy of physiological accounts of psychology increasingly helped underpin views of woman’s ‘nature’ as biologically ordained and more susceptible to emotional influence. In ‘A Theory of Tears and Laughter’, an account of the physiological basis of all emotion, Herbert Spencer comments that ‘We may cry, or, at least, women may, till hysterical laughter is produced’.125 The emotional life of women could be regarded as symptomatic of their peculiar mental and physical nature on the authority of contemporary science as well as of convention. Explicit emphasis on the musical susceptibility inherent in female nature was already an established feature of medical discourse by the time Spencer published his comments. In works of popular medical literature published in the 1840s and 1850s, for example, music featured in accounts of woman as dominated and defined by her reproductive function. In 1840, Thomas Laycock, MD selected music as the extreme example of a harmful preoccupation with accomplishment in female education. He regarded the exciting effects of music as a major cause of hysterical behaviour and a threat to woman’s reproductive capacity: The slow but powerful influences of music, dancing, vivid colours, and odours, on the nervous system, but especially on the reproductive system . . . is quite overlooked; three or four hours of severe application are occupied in the acquisition of a brilliant mechanical performance

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E. J. Tilt, MD voiced similar concerns in On the Preservation of the Health of Women During the Critical Periods of Life (1851). He warned of the potential for the listener to be physically ‘possessed’ by the combined influence in opera of the sensuous arts of music, dance, theatre and painting.127 The opera was, in his ‘humble opinion’, something which it would ‘be advisable to keep sensitive girls from . . . until they are married, or about to be married’.128 The first issue of the British Mothers’ Journal in 1856 included a physiological account of music’s ‘mischievous’ influence in an extract from R. Brudenelle Carter’s The Influence of Education on Diseases of the Nervous System.129 Its inclusion in the magazine indicates the degree of dialogue between advice literature and works of popular science. Brudenelle Carter asserted that ‘the sedulous cultivation of musical taste or talent, while ensuring improvement in the sensory organ, does not exert, of necessity, any good influence upon the judgement, or upon the higher faculties of the mind’.130 He gave an account of musical practice as encouraging a habitual physical response and maintained that ‘the diligent performance of exercises upon a musical instrument, by concentrating attention upon sensory impressions, and by accustoming the muscles to consensual action, has a direct tendency to impair the power of the will, and to liberate the whole system from its sway’.131 Herein lay the explanation of how music causes ‘hysterical and other disorders’.132 The operation of ‘consensual action’ makes music literally a ‘sensuous’ accomplishment. Carter advocated a ‘scientific’ training in the technical aspects of music to counteract its tendency to establish a habitual sensual response.133 The notion that a well-trained intellect provided the best defence against the tyranny of the passions was also crucial to advicebook authors such as Grey and Shirreff, who saw the issue of self-control as all the more important to women because of their natural emotional vulnerability. They defended the ‘cultivation’ of the imagination in women as a means of controlling its ‘natural power’: It is because women are naturally endowed with lively imagination that the latter particularly needs cultivation to give it a proper tone, and to maintain its due position in the mental economy. The restraints upon it must come from raising its character and strength-

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of some difficult and elaborate pieces of music on the piano-forte, which are forgotten as soon as possible after marriage when it would be least hurtful, or rather most useful.126

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Grey and Shirreff, as had Wollstonecraft, advocated a rational education as the means of preventing women from becoming enslaved to their senses. However, materialist models of psychology, such as those offered by Carter, emphasised the activity of the will whilst simultaneously raising doubts as to whether emotions based on involuntary physical processes could be subject to rational control. Grey and Shirreff themselves acknowledged that ‘our emotions are as involuntary as our sensations’.135 Their paradoxical assertions of both the need to control mental faculties and the impossibility of rational control of consciousness are expressive of contradictions widespread within Victorian psychology, where a culture of self-control coexists with materialist accounts of the mind which imply that voluntary mental control is impossible, and that women, by definition, are especially dominated by bodily forces.136 Appeals to the power of an improved education to remedy inequalities between the sexes increasingly had to contend with notions of woman’s nature as not only distinct from man’s, but essentially unamenable to the rational training advocated by writers such as Wollstonecraft. Debates over music and women therefore vividly highlight some of the difficulties confronted by proponents of educational reform when faced with ‘scientific’ endorsement of the ideology of the separate sphere. The notion that women’s reactions to music were of a different order to those of men inevitably encouraged distinct assessments of women’s aesthetic response and creative activity. The Reverend Hugh Haweis, a radical in many other respects, expounded his view that woman’s greater receptivity to music accompanied vastly inferior creative powers. In a section on ‘Women and Music’ in Music and Morals (1871), Haweis illustrated woman’s peculiar reflexive relation to music with an aeolian harp metaphor, in a passage culminating in a mawkish simile in the Homeric style. Whilst proffered as a positive depiction of musical response, this account presents the essentially passive image of emotional susceptibility which many commentators on music endorsed: The emotional force in women is usually stronger, and always more delicate, than in men. Their constitutions are like those fine violins which vibrate to the lightest touch . . . The wind has swept many an Aeolian lyre, but never such a sensitive harp as a woman’s soul. In

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ening the reason. While conduct remains habitually under the control of the latter, there is no danger from the activity of imagination; its utmost powers may be exerted, and they will delight, not dazzle, elevate but not mislead the mind.134

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listening to music, her face is often lighted up with tenderness, with mirth, or with the simple expansiveness of intense pleasure. Her attitude changes unconsciously with the truest, because the most natural, dramatic feeling. At times she is shaken and melts into tears, as the flowers stand and shake when the wind blows upon them and the drops of rain fall off. The woman’s temperament is naturally artistic, not in a creative, but in a receptive, sense.137 ‘A woman seldom writes good music, never great music’, continued the Reverend Haweis, ‘and, strange to say, many of the best singers have been incapable of giving even a good musical reading to the songs in which they have been most famous’.138 From Grisi to Trilby: it is but a short step from such views of woman’s receptive rather than creative powers to the hypnotised subject of du Maurier’s Svengali; Trilby has come to exemplify the most extreme manifestation of passive, feminine emotional response.139 George Upton’s Women in Music (1880) also draws on the established analogies between music and woman. Upton lists the qualities shared by music and women which, while they might lead one to expect women to excel in musical composition, actually explain, in his view, their failure in this field: woman’s emotional make-up fits her to be the interpreter of musical art but not for the rigours of compositional science; woman, having more of music within her, is less able to create it!140 Arguments about gender-based differences in musical competence certainly had severe practical impact on the lives of those women who were attempting to earn their living as musicians. Together with arguments about woman’s first duty to home and hearth, they provided a formidable barrage of resistance against the direct competition of women with male musicians. By 1861, women teachers of music in fact outnumbered men, although men continued to outnumber female performers, to whom orchestral work was not available.141 Later in the century, as more women became professional performers and were even able to train, in segregated classes, at the Royal Academy of Music and elsewhere, there was a growing concern that female musicianship would not only threaten domestic life but also men’s domination of the profession. This, as Cyril Ehrlich describes it, put women musicians in ‘the front line of the battle between the sexes’.142 As increasing numbers of women came to compete with men for jobs not only as teachers of music, but also as performing musicians, notions about differences in female physiology were used to provide spurious scientific arguments to reinforce long-held prejudices against female musicians despite ‘audible

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proof’ of their competence.143 Physiological argument could reach extraordinary heights of elaboration. Ehrlich quotes an article in the Orchestral Association Gazette for 1894 which maintains that women cannot equal men’s performing skill as they are missing a vital arm muscle.144 An article from the Musical News for 27 April 1895 concludes by recommending, in much the same way as had contributors to mid-century women’s magazines, that women should use their musical training to benefit future generations.145 The re-emergence of this argument specifically in the context of a discussion of professional musicianship is an explicit reminder of the economic dimension to the woman question debate as a whole. We certainly cannot discount the degree to which murky and paradoxical fears that women might realise a capacity for sensuality threatening to their domestic and reproductive labour may have overlapped with even stronger fears that they would come into direct economic competition with men unless carefully defined as unfitted for the task.146 Within a progressive model of social evolution, as expounded by Spencer and others, essentialist definitions of woman were, of course, also to foster beliefs that women represented an inferior stage of development. The view that women had a ‘naturally’ separate contribution, whether inferior or not, to make to the advancement of society was reinforced. The powers of sympathy and intuition which were supposed to exist supremely in women were invoked not only by the authors of advice books, but also by progressive thinkers like Henry Thomas Buckle who saw them as crucial to human advancement.147 Buckle provides one example of how campaigners for women’s rights themselves often exploited notions of an essential female nature. Claims for greater freedom were supported by fundamentally the same idea of woman’s ‘influence’ which many writers of advice literature invoked to advocate the restriction of woman’s sphere. As Flavia Alaya comments, ‘scientific popularizers, humanitarian reformers, and active feminists were seldom daunted by theoretical or philosophical inconsistencies when making pronouncements on the education or development of women’.148 Alaya points out that such appeals to ‘the genius of woman’ contributed to the way in which sexually specific notions of ‘woman’s nature’ were increasingly reinforced in the latter decades of the century and encouraged social scientists to allot woman a significant but unequal role in social development.149 The view of woman’s crucial role in biological evolution was, of course, adopted by certain later feminists, including eugenicists such as Sarah Grand who argued for the innate superiority of women. The

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relationship between representations of woman and of music during the Victorian period can thus be seen as increasingly complicated by the impact of materialist science in general and evolutionary biology in particular. At the same time as arguments derived from contemporary science augmented music’s long-standing practical and figurative association with a distinct feminine nature, anxiety over what was ‘natural’ to women was a pervasive concern for the woman writer, a concern which was frequently inflected through portrayals of women’s musical activity. In Eliot’s essay on ‘Silly Novels’, musical performance represents the rigorous standards to which Eliot aspires in literary composition. More equivocal attitudes towards female musicianship are dramatised in her novels. Ambivalent representations of music and musical women in the work of Eliot and her contemporaries inscribe their anxiety over the status of their own art: fictional portrayals of female musicians suggest both discomfort over public performance and a radical claim to a published voice.

Music and the woman writer ‘Through the still night air her voice rang out like that of an angel. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God” ’.150 In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Margaret is preparing for a concert performance. In the light of the female musician’s uncertain status, Gaskell’s portrayal of a professional working-class singer in Mary Barton is of particular significance. Gaskell manages to legitimise Margaret’s public performances; these are important not least because they earn Margaret a financial independence which is the envy of the novel’s heroine.151 Her professional exploitation of the sympathetic powers of music is a significant representation of the public (and gainful) employment of an ideally domesticated female skill. It thus forms part of Gaskell’s critique of gender roles and the ideology of separate spheres. Interestingly, despite the objections to public performance raised in advice books and periodicals, the public appearance of women as musicians, especially in the context, as in Margaret’s case, of the reforming amateur choral movement, was less problematic than the legal arena in which Mary Barton herself is compelled to give voice: an appearance followed by delirium and near-death.152 The way in which musical performance and writing, but not public speech, were considered acceptable for women was criticised by W. B. Hodgson:

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

In times not long past, for a woman to write and publish books, was as unfeminine as in the minds of some it is now for a woman to lecture; and even now many ladies who feel no compunction at beholding or hearing their sister-woman sing at public concerts, whose nerves it would not shake to hear her soundly hissed, shrink from encouraging a lady-lecturer.153 Margaret provides a good example of how, under particular conditions, musical performance was more easily condoned than other kinds of public appearance for women. This reminds us just how intricate the contradictions involved in negotiations of the ‘woman question’ were. The contrast between Mary’s and Margaret’s public appearances illustrates the complexity of Gaskell’s concern with the question of woman’s nature. To some degree, Margaret’s career, within the confines of reforming musical activity, represents a ‘domestication’ of the public sphere. A comparison may be drawn with the way in which Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing (1859) stressed the womanly, domesticated qualities inherent in that role. Nightingale emphasised the importance to nursing of ordinary housewifely skills of neatness and cleanliness. She represented nursing as something both compatible with domestic ideals of femininity and natural for women: ‘Every woman must, at some time or other of her life, become a nurse’.154 However, in her long-unpublished work ‘Cassandra’, Nightingale boldly criticises the crippling restrictions of domesticity and invokes the feminised Christ-figure which is implicit in her account of nursing and certainly central to her view of her own public activities.155 Gaskell’s fiction also makes potentially radical claims for the extension of ‘female’ influence into the public domain, proposing conventionally private activities as appropriate models for public roles. When singing before vast audiences of workers, Margaret is placed in the role of a female saviour of souls. This applies even when her singing plays a part in attracting a lover. The influence of her singing remains emphatically of a redeeming rather than sensuous nature. Moreover, her increasing blindness ensures that she avoids any flirtatious or self-conscious return of a commodifying male gaze. In Gaskell’s earlier novels, the social uselessness which musical accomplishment epitomises for middle-class women is often highlighted, as it was by numerous social reformers. In North and South (1854–5), Margaret Hale’s lack of performance skill is a positive attribute. It underpins her serious interest in social issues as opposed to her future sister-in-law Fanny Thornton, who is to be heard ‘practising up a morceau de salon’

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(badly) before her initial meeting with Margaret. Once she appears in person she talks of nothing but fashionable London music and dismisses Margaret because ‘she’s not accomplished . . . she can’t play’.156 Margaret’s cousin Edith is a more amiable caricature of the trivialising effect of conventional education: a child-bride, ‘a soft ball of muslin and ribbons and silken curls’ for whom ‘the difficulty of keeping a piano in good tune’ in Corfu was ‘a difficulty which Edith seemed to consider as one of the most formidable that could befall her in her married life’.157 The middle-class woman who spends her afternoon at the piano is the particular object of John Barton’s scorn in Mary Barton.158 He accuses Mary’s Aunt Esther of wishing to become ‘a do-nothing lady, worrying shopmen all morning, and screeching at her pianny all afternoon, and going to bed without having done a good turn to any one of God’s creatures but herself’.159 Barton’s indignation centres on Esther’s aspiration to a useless kind of feminine existence, preferring for his daughter the life of the working-class woman who earns ‘her bread by the sweat of her brow, as the Bible tells her she should do’.160 The way in which the wives of industrial masters spend their time exemplifies Barton’s view that the rich and poor live in separate worlds, despite the fact that the poor work to maintain the rich. The indolent lady’s pianoplaying exemplifies something worse than mere uselessness, for it relies upon the activity of ‘worrying shopmen’ and exploiting others who provide the necessary prosperity for such unproductive pastimes. It makes a stark contrast with the ‘hungry wails’ that make the ‘family music’ in a destitute household.161 The ephemeral preoccupations of Carson’s daughters in Mary Barton are highlighted by the fact that they are busy looking through a pile of new music and copying out manuscript when news reaches them of their brother’s death.162 In this scene, together with Barton’s accurate prediction that Esther will end up a ‘street walker’, musical reference suggests a link between the pernicious commodification of middle-class women, such as the Carson daughters, and of the prostitute.163 Wollstonecraft notoriously described the means by which women were encouraged to secure a husband as making them ‘legally prostituted’.164 Musical accomplishment, as one of the useless adornments acquired and exploited in order to attract men, was instrumental in this merchandising which, together with music’s potential to act as a sensual influence, linked it to the image of the fallen woman. Gaskell’s novel embodies both extremes of the musical–feminine dichotomy in the fallen Esther and the angelic Margaret with her redeeming talent, a dichotomy which by implication encompasses the

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

fears and aspirations of the published author. My final chapter discusses this as a crucial aspect of Eliot’s portrayal of different types of female musicianship in Daniel Deronda. Fictional portrayals of women’s musical performances clearly echo aspects of the condemnation of ‘self-display’ in advice tracts, and use musical accomplishment to question conventional feminine roles and training. In Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847), the governess-heroine’s account of her teenage pupil is reminiscent of much advice literature: the love of display had roused her faculties, and induced her to apply herself, but only to the more showy accomplishments . . . To music, indeed, she devoted too much of her time: as, governess though I was, I frequently told her.165 Gaskell’s last novel, Wives and Daughters (1866), provides a sustained critique of music’s role in the lives of middle-class women. Her heroine Molly loves music, but hates performing. In contrast, her stepsister Cynthia’s showy but careless brilliance demonstrates her lack of moral rigour. The novel presents music as an important source of self-fulfilment and the lack of a proper musical training epitomises the serious omissions in Molly’s education. At the same time, the ‘marketing’ value of musical performance and the way in which musical accomplishment serves as a substitute for an intellectual education is unambiguously criticised through the portrayals of Cynthia and her mother. The former governess Clare is equipped to teach the generally accepted sum of accomplishments for the education of upper-class women and is herself an example of the limited sensibilities and devious and manipulative behaviour which Wollstonecraft had insisted were the outcome of such an education. Like the women upbraided in advice literature, Clare neglects music once she has attained her object and ensnared Molly’s father into marriage.166 Clare and her daughter, like Rosamond Vincy, are representative of the education criticised by Maria Grey as evidence that women ‘are not educated to be wives, but to get husbands’; according to figures she has seen, girls devote ‘5,520 hours of their school life to music against 640 to arithmetic’.167 In Middlemarch, Eliot aims considerable irony at the failure to recognise the results of a training in music rather than mathematics when she has Lydgate suppose that Rosamond is: an accomplished creature . . . who would create order in the home and accounts with still magic, yet keep her fingers ready to touch the lute

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Eliot’s portrayal of Rosamond and Lydgate’s courtship shows the detrimental effects of both male and female education and emphasises the potential for men to suffer from the musical susceptibility usually attributed to female ‘nature’. Rosamond’s mermaid-Lorelei charms are the result of her perfect grooming which make her ‘always that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant-notewriting, private album for extracted verse and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date’.169 Lydgate mistakenly supposes that Rosamond’s talent is symptomatic of domestic sympathy. Meanwhile, in Rosamond’s eyes, his undiscriminating admiration of her music makes him an ‘emotional elephant’.170 Lydgate’s shortcomings are epitomised by the fact that the ‘distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardour, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women’, limitations which Eliot compares with those of a man ‘unable to go beyond Offenbach’s music’.171 In the chapters which describe Lydgate’s ‘intellectual passion’, Eliot therefore uses music to provide an ironic counterpoint to his enthusiasm, showing us the undermining effect of Rosamond’s musical charms on his single-minded dedication to science. Lydgate’s search for ‘primary webs or tissues’ involves investigation of the organic basis of emotional experience.172 However, whilst motivated by longing ‘to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurkingplaces of anguish, mania, and crime’, Lydgate fails to recognise the degree to which he is himself enmeshed in invisible systems of emotional response and social conditioning.173 Lydgate falls under the ‘enchantment’ of Rosamond’s music: Eliot here calls on a familiar fictional trope.174 Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) also scrutinise the role of music in the marriage market. In both novels, musical dexterity is the most powerful weapon the heroine’s rivals possess. In Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, Cynthia is also a siren figure threatening to Molly’s success in love.175 Jane Eyre’s rival Blanche Ingram outshines her equally in beauty and in musical skill, and her musical mastery is the more potent source of envy. It is advanced before Blanche has even arrived as a reason why she would make Rochester a suitable wife, and

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and transform life into romance at any moment; who was instructed to the true womanly limit and not a hair’s-breath beyond – docile, therefore, and ready to carry out behests which came from beyond that limit.168

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Miss Ingram, who had now seated herself with proud grace at the piano, spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude, commenced a brilliant prelude; talking meantime. She appeared to be on her high horse to-night; both her words and her air seemed intended to excite not only the admiration, but the amazement of her auditors.178 To Jane at least, Rochester seems highly likely to succumb to Blanche Ingram’s musical snares. In a parallel account near the beginning of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë has her narrator deride the lack of real expression in a typical piece of ‘musical’ courtship, which nonetheless clearly provides the opportunity for physical intimacy: She bridled her long neck and smiled, and suffered him to lead her to the instrument, where she played and sang, in her very best style, one piece after another; while he stood patiently by, leaning one hand on the back of her chair, and turning over the leaves of her book with the other. Perhaps, he was as much charmed with her performance as she was. It was all very fine in its way; but I cannot say that it moved me very deeply. There was plenty of skill and execution, but precious little feeling.179 Later, the scheming Annabella Wilmott uses her musical skill and the physical intimacy afforded by musical performance to seduce the heroine’s weak-willed husband. As in Jane Eyre, the dangerous potential of music’s power is recognised by a heroine whose limited musical skill is pitted against that of a talented rival. While Helen manages for the most part to ward off jealousy, the power which Annabella’s singing has over Huntingdon arouses this emotion sharply: But I confess I do feel jealous at times – most painfully, bitterly so – when she sings and plays to him, and he hangs over the instrument and dwells upon her voice with no affected interest; for then I know he is really delighted, and I have no power to awaken similar fervour.

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well before Jane sees her rival, she hears her singing.176 Jane then has to endure being audience to Blanche’s command that Rochester sing and to the flirtatious banter that surrounds the choice of music for them to perform together.177 Blanche’s talents are displayed in a way which immediately marks her out as detestable:

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The scene which convinces Helen of her betrayal also takes place at the piano where the physical proximity afforded when Huntingdon turns her pages provides Annabella with the ideal opportunity for seduction: It was on the night of the 4th, a little after tea, that Annabella had been singing and playing, with Arthur as usual at her side: she had ended her song, but still she sat at the instrument; and he stood leaning on the back of her chair, conversing in scarcely audible tones, with his face in very close proximity with hers.181 Taking a piece of music to the piano in order to interrupt this intimacy Helen finds Annabella ‘seated there, listening with what seemed an exultant smile on her flushed face, to his soft murmurings, with her hand quietly surrendered to his clasp’.182 Music’s alliance with depravity is reinforced by the portrayal of Huntingdon’s last mistress, Miss Meyers the ‘governess’, whose musical skill is the sole attribute of a scheming woman of pleasure: Her attainments were limited, her intellect noways above mediocrity. She had a fine voice, and could sing like a nightingale, and accompany herself sufficiently well on the piano; but these were her only accomplishments. There was a look of guile and subtlety in her face, a sound of it in her voice.183 Like Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847), Annabella Wilmott exploits her command of music to play on the sensual susceptibility of male characters. Whilst it is woman’s musical susceptibility which provides the overt basis for concern in most advice texts, these novels make overt their implicit anxiety about music’s power, and the dangerous power, over men, of music and women combined. Many of the musical seductions in nineteenth-century fiction simultaneously manifest the dangerous power in women’s musical affinity and question the notion of woman’s peculiar or exclusive emotional susceptibility by showing musical accomplishment as predominantly a mode by which men are seduced, thus making it an emblem of their sexual susceptibility. Often, the siren figure herself is authentically cold and immune to emotion.

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I can amuse and please him with my simple songs, but not delight him thus.180

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

In contrast to Rosamond’s pernicious musical execution, Dorothea in Middlemarch has a ‘slight regard for domestic music’; yet her recitativelike speech reminds Will Ladislaw of a sympathetically resonating aeolian harp.184 This reads as a sign of her inherent and non-sirenic musicality. Dorothea internalises musical principles rather than practising techniques of performance, so avoiding the role of entertainer which her uncle sees as fitting for the lightness of the feminine mind. Rather like Ruskin, Mr Brooke is an adherent of the notion that women should know how to play ‘a good old English tune’.185 Dorothea is dissociated from the conventional female training and domestic ideology which the novel ridicules. She is grateful that Mr Casaubon is unlikely to be always ‘asking her to play the “Last Rose of Summer” ’.186 Unlike Rosamond, or her sister Celia, she escapes being expected to provide endless renditions of ‘Home Sweet Home’. However, her internalised musicianship also evades the issue of what limits should be placed on woman’s artistic expression, an issue which is central to Daniel Deronda and to which I return in my final chapter. The question of woman’s sphere remains a problematic one, notwithstanding the degree to which Dorothea’s resistance to musical accomplishment emerges as a positive recommendation. In Jane Eyre, Jane’s limitations as a musician also count in her favour. The contrast between Jane and Blanche Ingram, like that between Dorothea and Rosamond, accords with widespread criticism of feminine ‘display’, but also contributes in Jane Eyre to a radical – albeit not unambivalent – protest against feminine ideals and the constricted social position of women. The piano provides a focus for criticism of the kind of relationship between the sexes which the novel wishes to reject. Like other trivial occupations, it is emblematic of the intolerable restrictions of enforced passivity which are placed upon women – especially women in the dependent role of governess such as Jane. In her famous speech of rebellion from the roof at Thornfield Hall, Jane rails against the opinion that women ‘ought to confine themselves to making puddings, and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags’.187 ‘You play a little, I see’, snorts Rochester, having at first assumed Jane’s disclaimer to be evidence of false modesty, ‘like any other English schoolgirl: perhaps rather better than some, but not well’.188 Later, during their engagement, Rochester loses patience with Jane’s bungling attempts to accompany him while he sings, and himself assumes the role of pianist.189 Jane’s ‘failure’ as a practising musician operates as an asset in her struggle for greater independence. Rather than being a humiliation, Rochester’s dismissal of her pianistic skill frees her from the subservient

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and powerless role which would otherwise fall to her as governess-accompanist (the role endured by Clare in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters). Meanwhile, Rochester’s ‘mellow, powerful bass’ finds a way ‘through the ear to the heart . . . there waking sensation strangely’.190 Jane’s sense of transport at hearing Rochester sing, even in the context of his courtship of her rival, dispels any impression that Brontë is representing music as having no significance beyond its social exploitation. Gaskell records that Brontë herself was deeply moved by music.191 However, in the relationship between Jane and Rochester, Rochester is the performer and Jane is thus saved from ‘self-display’ and commodification. She also avoids becoming a passive and powerless audience for Rochester’s performance, making specific efforts to repel him once he has become inflamed by his own singing.192 Their sparring at the piano thus forms part of Jane’s resistance to Rochester’s overbearing sexuality. The struggle to establish a less unequal relationship with Rochester entails rejection of the devious and indirect forms of behaviour which inequality of status and education usually led women to employ. Jane’s lack of musical skill sets her in opposition to the commodified status of either conventional wife or fallen woman. It distinguishes her from Blanche, who is essentially educated only for the marriage market. It also separates her from the opera singer Céline Varens, previously Rochester’s mistress, whose musicality survives in the coquettish singing and dancing of her daughter Adèle. In Brontë’s next novel, Shirley (1849), the heroine’s independent social position allows for her musical powers to be more actively employed. Although Shirley’s material independence does not ultimately protect her from patriarchal power, the contrast with Jane Eyre is illuminating. For Shirley musical performance is an authentic mode of self-expression and part of her rejection of the passive mould of acceptable femininity. Her musicianship contributes to the questioning of traditional sex-roles provoked by her generally androgynous portrayal. Shirley’s singing is explicitly contrasted to conventional female musical accomplishment and the individuality of her performance provokes censure from members of the local community: What made her sing so? They never sang so. Was it proper to sing with such expression, with such originality – so unlike a school-girl? Decidedly not: it was strange; it was unusual. What was strange must be wrong; what was unusual must be improper . . . The Misses Nunnely indulged in a prolonged screech, guiltless of expression, pure of originality, perfectly conventional and absolutely unmeaning.193

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Music and the Woman Question

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Brontë’s novels were written before the publication of Spencer’s or Darwin’s evolutionary texts. She therefore did not have to contend with the way in which evolutionary science gave particular authority to notions of an unalterably separate female nature, thus making these intensely troubling to later novelists like Eliot, whose response to evolutionary psychology is discussed in the following chapter. Indeed phrenology, the then dominant materialist theory of mind, advocated the controlled development of the individual’s mental faculties, regardless of sex. Women, Jane Eyre asserts, need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.194 Sally Shuttleworth has investigated the importance of phrenological theory for Brontë’s novels. She sees it as fundamental to Jane Eyre’s quest to attain a position of increased social power through the exercise of selfcontrol.195 This is exemplified by Jane’s efforts to remain in control of her response to Rochester’s singing, and to contain Rochester’s own musical response. As Shuttleworth’s work on Brontë’s relationship with contemporary psychology has shown, her resistance also entails protection of the self from the vulnerability which would attend an unguarded response to music’s affective power. Despite the potential empowerment that phrenology offered, the spectre of uncontrolled female musical response may still be seen to haunt Jane’s erotic contests with Rochester at the piano. As Shuttleworth points out, the fierce allegiance to self-determination in Jane Eyre coexists with alternative models of female nature as essentially beyond control.196 Phrenology itself contained contradictions, emphasising both self-control and a materialist and determinist model of mind.197 A view of the mind as consisting of separate faculties vying for fulfilment produced a model of the individual as made up of perpetually warring physical forces. These energies could be productively directed. Alternatively, individual ‘propensities’ could rage out of control, spilling over into madness. Bertha, Rochester records, was subject to ‘giant propensities’.198 Consciousness of how music was already widely implicated in conflicting representations of women greatly increases the musical resonance of Brontë’s novel. There are no explicitly musical links between Jane and Bertha, but awareness of other texts which link unrestrained musical response with female sexuality and emotional excess makes us aware of Jane’s response as linked with the anarchic potential that Bertha represents. There are, moreover, striking parallels between Bertha and the musical Blanche.199 Whilst many of the novels discussed here effectively emphasise the susceptibility of men rather than women to music’s siren charms, Brontë’s use of music

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implies an intense anxiety about woman’s susceptibility to physical influences. Rochester’s musical powers are representative of the overmastering passion which threatens to engulf Jane. In both Jane Eyre and Shirley, the need for legitimate self-expression, passionate fulfilment and even rebellion is coupled with a fear of disruptive energies which might lead to fragmentation and insanity. The views of woman’s particular susceptibility to the sensual influence of music discussed in this chapter show that the fundamental connections between music’s emotional power and involuntary physical response, on which Spencer based his theory of music, were widely entrenched. Eliot’s work dramatises issues which feature in the fiction of numerous other authors. Whilst the extent of her engagement with evolutionary science made Eliot’s use of musical allusion unique, the ideas and assumptions about the relationship between women and music examined in this chapter will have provided a context for many contemporary readings of Maggie Tulliver’s susceptibility to music in The Mill on the Floss, and for the different models of female musicianship in Daniel Deronda. Eliot shows her heroine in The Mill on the Floss as acutely susceptible to the influence of music and uses musical allusion to provide metaphors for both spiritual and sexual passion. Anxieties over the containment of music’s equivocal affective power are therefore particularly relevant for her portrayal of Maggie Tulliver’s musical seduction. The following chapter explores how, in this novel, musical allusion also embodies the overwhelming forces of biological law.

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Music and the Woman Question

The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible to Music’1

A yearning for some hidden soul of things, Some outward touch complete on inner springs.2

In The Mill on the Floss, music is both emblem and discourse of passion. It symbolises the object of Maggie Tulliver’s ‘passionate longings’ for beauty and knowledge: for ‘something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it’.3 Music also dramatises her relationships with Philip Wakem and Stephen Guest. The transcendent and sensual effects of music interact in ways which relate not only to the established ambivalence of its status as the most spiritual and yet most sensual of the arts, but more particularly to contemporary theories about the physiological basis of emotional response. While music is sometimes the emblem of unity, of the ‘unlearned secret of our existence’ (241), images of musical transcendence are especially associated throughout The Mill on the Floss with the conflict of passionate emotion. Musical allusion embodies the major tensions at work in the novel: between internal desire and external reality, between the individual and society, between remembered duty and spontaneous passion and between irreconcilable passions which fragment individual identity. Eliot’s use of music discloses some of the disturbing implications of physiology and psychology for the relationship of intellect and emotion and for progressive views of history. Her engagement with contemporary science also impinges on her relationship with literary Romanticism and her concept of tragedy. It is above all through her 102

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portrayal of musical response, or rather – in the light of Spencer’s and Lewes’s physiological descriptions of emotion – through her equation of musical and involuntary physical response, that Eliot reveals difficulties inherent in the alliance of social evolutionism and physiological psychology. Whilst her novel confronts the implications of evolutionary models, it also offers challenges to the conventions of realism with which scientific theories of determinism were closely linked.4 Early in the novel, musical allusion conveys Maggie’s desire to achieve a harmonious transcendence of time and place. It also embodies the conflicts between desire and reality and between desire and duty which are to be musically dramatised at the novel’s climax. A ‘creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her’, Maggie’s experience of actual music is always to feel it as a powerful transcendent influence which lifts her above her immediate circumstances (205). Each Christmas she hears singing under the windows after mid-night – supernatural singing, Maggie always felt, in spite of Tom’s contemptuous insistence that the singers were old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the church choir: she trembled with awe when their caroling broke in upon her dreams, and the image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust away by the vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. (135) The memory of this singing sets Christmas apart from the ‘fustian’ everyday world: ‘The midnight chant had helped as usual to lift the morning above the level of common days’ (135). Similarly, her Uncle Pullet’s musical snuffbox is the one redeeming feature of otherwise intimidating childhood visits to her relatives. It entrances Maggie with its ‘magic music’, her enchantment prefiguring her later sense of having been transported into a ‘brighter aërial world’ by Stephen Guest’s singing (81, 338). When Maggie is faced with a world offering her ‘[N]othing but poverty and the companionship of her mother’s narrow griefs’, music is used to signify the passionate desires which the ‘world outside the books’ so widely fails to meet (205). Musical allusions betoken both the object of her unfulfilled desires and the contending voice of selfabnegating duty which makes her find in Thomas à Kempis a ‘solemn music’ (253). Her experience of reading The Imitation of Christ is reminiscent of the supernatural midnight carols of her childhood (albeit

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A strange thrill of awe passed through Maggie while she read, as if she had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling of beings whose souls had been astir while hers was in stupor. She went on . . . hardly conscious that she was reading – seeming rather to listen while a low voice said, ‘Why dost thou here gaze about, since this is not the place of thy rest? In heaven ought to be thy dwelling, and all earthly things are to be looked on as they forward thy journey thither. All things pass away, and thou together with them. Beware thou cleave not unto them, lest thou be entangled and perish’. (253) In the chapters following, this ‘solemn music’ and ‘low voice’ of selfdenial are set against the more tempting music of earthly fulfilment. After her first sight of Philip Wakem since their childhood, Maggie seeks refuge from her strong desire to speak to him again in the forced recollection of actual ‘solemn music’. Eliot describes her attempting ‘to repress the rising wishes by forcing her memory to recall snatches of hymns, until she saw Philip and his father returning along the road, and she could go down again’ (262). The only actual music she hears at this time is the organ at church, the objective equivalent of à Kempis’s ‘solemn music’ (268). Meanwhile, her conflicting desire to engage in the world and especially to befriend Philip is ‘sweet music’ which Maggie struggles to repress, ‘Yet the music would swell out again, like chimes borne onward by a recurrent breeze’ (267). This image of sound spontaneously produced by the wind is suggestive of the aeolian harp metaphor which recurs later in the novel to describe the entrancing influence upon her of Stephen Guest’s resonant bass voice (380). Against this airborne music, the ‘voice’ of conscious duty is an ‘urgent monotonous warning’ (268). Maggie’s transgressive passion for Stephen and her future collision with the society of St Ogg’s are both prefigured in this musical contest. Eliot was later to speak of The Mill on the Floss in terms of a ‘collision’ between ‘older’ and ‘higher’ states of culture.5 By showing how the fate of an individual caught in this collision can be tragic, the novel destabilises the idea of history as progress to which Spencer’s social evolutionism laid claim. As Rosemary Ashton puts it, ‘The Mill on the Floss presents the most striking example from amongst George Eliot’s novels of an irreconcilable clash between intellectual optimism about

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that the ‘music’ is of a different quality and its purpose is to dismiss rather than enhance the worth of everyday existence):

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the progress of society – of “humanity” in general – and a melancholy perception of the sadness, futility, even tragedy experienced by individuals caught in the onward march of history’.6 The novel repeatedly defines itself as tragic, and effectively offers a new conception of tragedy in which evolution replaces or augments the Fates of classical tragedy. The sense of her heroine as helplessly caught in what Eliot terms ‘the onward tendency of human things’ suggests a view of individual destiny as relentlessly determined by evolutionary law: in stressing, as she does, ‘the suffering . . . which belongs to every historical advance of mankind’, Eliot compromises the whole notion of progress (238). She stresses the conflict entailed by evolutionary development, in contrast to Spencer’s optimistic emphasis, throughout his long career, on evolution as a process bringing the ‘outward and inward’ into the closer adjustment necessary to individual happiness. Music is an intimation of unobtainable desires even when providing temporary consolation for their lack of fulfilment. Whilst it appears to offer Maggie a means of satisfying all her wants, it simultaneously highlights the impossible gap between ‘inward impulse and outward fact’ (339, 241).7 Commenting upon Maggie’s longing for intangible ‘music’, Eliot compares the forces within her heroine with those inside a ‘living plant-seed . . . which will make way for themselves, often in a shattering, violent manner’.8 The employment of images of musical transcendence to illustrate the contrast between real and ideal worlds was well-established in Romantic literature, especially in the German Romantic literature with which Eliot was familiar. However, her exploitation of this contrast in conjunction with a botanical image intimating the ‘painful collisions’ which not surprisingly follow ‘this contrast between the outward and the inward’ diverges from the dominant use in Romantic literature of organic metaphors to illustrate harmony.9 It recalls her assessment of Wagner’s operas where her vision of organic unity is one which encapsulates conflict, also embodied in a botanical simile: Wagner has admirably fulfilled his own requisition of organic unity . . . there is a gradual unfolding and elaboration of that fundamental contrast of emotions, that collision of forces, which is the germ of the tragedy; just as the leaf of the plant is successively elaborated into branching stem and compact bud and radiant corolla.10 In The Mill on the Floss, these metaphors foreshadow the significance that music will have in the ‘volcanic upheavings’ of Maggie’s

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

‘imprisoned passions’ (257) and indicate how closely musical allusion is implicated in Eliot’s scrutiny of contemporary scientific thought. Her musical – botanical images convey a sense of the irreducible complexity of (inner and outer) life. In this they are in strong contrast with Herbert Spencer’s reductive certainties where, if the flowers failed to fit the theories, it was ‘tant pis pour les fleurs’.11 The disjunction of social and individual development entailed in the clash of ‘older’ and ‘higher’ cultures in Eliot’s novel is clearly depicted as a more intricate relationship than one of simple opposition. In her portrayal of her heroine’s response to music, Eliot indicates the extent to which Maggie’s social context produces an environment which is not only unreceptive to her more exceptional qualities but also unavoidably impinges upon her personal development. This is illustrated by her susceptibility to Stephen Guest’s singing. ‘Such things’, comments the narrator, ‘could have had no perceptible effect on a thoroughly welleducated young lady’, but Maggie is captivated by music sung in a ‘provincial, amateur fashion’, and Stephen’s repertoire also includes music which Eliot is known not to have admired (337). In one of the earliest studies to notice the importance of music in Eliot’s work, William Sullivan suggests that Philip’s condemnation of Stephen’s choice of Haydn’s The Creation as having a sort of ‘sugared complacency and flattering make-believe’ echoes the author’s own view (323).12 Whilst Sullivan takes this to mean that Maggie’s beguilement by her entry into Stephen and Lucy’s ‘Duet in Paradise’ demonstrates authorial condemnation of her heroine, there are many reasons for suggesting that the thematic significance of allusions to The Creation, as to Bellini’s La Sonnambula, are more subtle and interesting than this.13 Moreover, such allusions affirm that the personal evolution of Eliot’s heroine is inevitably subject to the conditions of her social context as well as being tragically at odds with them. It is fitting too, in the light of Eliot’s commitment to the notion of the tragedy within ordinary existence, that her heroine should be sufficiently vulnerable to her historical and social context to be moved by music representative of the time and place of the novel’s setting. Eliot envisages Maggie, straining after elusive harmony and containing potentially explosive forces within her, as one of many women ‘of no startling appearance . . . who will never be a Sappho or a Madam Roland or anything else that the world takes wide note of’.14 Her heroine is a woman of exceptional sensibilities, but, as some of the novel’s references to music serve to emphasise, not of such exceptional qualities as entirely to transcend the limitations of the ‘lower’ form of culture in

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which she lives. Maggie’s personal stage of development may be in conflict with that of her family and society, yet there is a sense that a vital part of her identity would be lost if she turned her back on these.15 Her stage of development is incompatible with, but not independent of, her social context. It is in this that her tragedy partly lies rather than in that her nature is simply at odds with the historical boundaries within which she is trapped. In contrast to Eliot, Spencer seemed untroubled by the fate of the individual within evolution. He regarded the conflict of the individual and society as essential to certain stages of historical advance, but nevertheless maintained an optimistic conviction that evolutionary progress was a harmonising process ultimately beneficial to the individual.16 Spencer declared that the first requisite of happiness was individual freedom.17 Progress, in fact, consisted in the increasing scope for individual fulfilment – the social organism’s response to the same ‘law of adaptation’ that determines the ‘tendency to individuation’ in the physical world: Hence . . . our advance must be towards a state in which this entire satisfaction of every desire, or perfect fulfilment of individual life, becomes possible. In the beginning it is impossible. If uncontrolled, the impulses of the aboriginal man produce anarchy. Either his individuality must be curbed, or society must dissolve. With ourselves, though restraint is still needful, the private will of the citizen . . . has more play. And further progress must be towards increased sacredness of personal claims, and a subordination of whatever limits them.18 ‘Yet must this highest individuation be joined with the greatest mutual dependence’ proclaims Spencer some pages later: ‘Paradoxical though the assertion looks, the progress is at once towards complete separateness and complete union’.19 His insistence that individual and corporate interests were ultimately identical means that ‘The ultimate man will be one whose private requirements coincide with public ones. He will be that manner of man, who, in spontaneously fulfilling his own nature, incidentally performs the functions of a social unit’.20 Personal fulfilment must thus take place in adherence to ‘the law of equal freedom’.21 Spencer outlines the consequences of disobedience of this law and emphasises that to act morally we are obliged to see our individual interests as identical to those of the social organism.22 This

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moral truth . . . proves to be a development of physiological truth; for the so-called moral law is in reality the law of complete life . . . Liberty to exercise the faculties being . . . the first condition of life, and the extension of that liberty to the furthest point possible being the condition of the highest life possible, it follows that the liberty of each, limited only by the like liberty of all, is the condition of complete life as applied to mankind at large.23 Spencer assumes that this identity of interest can be unambiguously identified and requires only ‘[f]idelity to conscience’ to be acted upon.24 The potential for clashes of equally valid sets of personal and social claims that concerned Eliot is not meditated upon. Spencer was confident that, ultimately, moral struggles could be resolved by virtue of the innate moral sense through which increasing adaptation of inner psychical states to the external world was achieved.25 ‘Spencer had a place for struggle’, writes Robert Young, ‘but it basked in the light of Progress’.26 Eliot’s fiction, by contrast, strikes him as ‘a deep exploration of the human meanings of the vicissitudes of naturalism’.27 Eliot employs musical allusion to dramatise the manifold consequences and contradictions of evolutionary organicism. Music lays bare tensions between individualism and the corporate ideals of positivist science. Moreover, as many of the examples I have discussed already indicate, it also symbolises the generation of discord within the individual. Eliot portrays her characters as subject not only to external conflict, but, more crucially, to internal conflict fuelled by their susceptibility to the involuntary and potentially dissonant forces of the physiology which formed the basis of Spencer’s theory of musical response and of his and Lewes’s physiological psychology.28 As J.S. Mill recognised, Spencer’s theory provided a physiological basis for associationism. Mill wrote to Spencer in 1864 to praise him for successfully ‘affiliating the conscious operations of the mind to the primary unconscious organic actions of the nerves’.29 The mind and body are shown in Spencer’s psychology to be as inextricably linked as the individual and society. The Christmas carols and the voice which Maggie hears as she reads à Kempis have an involuntary physical effect on her which, like the opposing influence of Stephen Guest’s singing, is consistent with Spencer’s accounts of physiological response as the basis for emotion. Musical tropes embody the conflicting forces within Maggie’s nature.

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conveniently is an inbuilt consequence of the physical laws which govern even morality:

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Eliot uses her heroine’s ‘sensibility to the supreme excitement of music’ to illustrate the ‘passionate sensibility which belonged to her whole nature and made her faults and virtues all merge in each other’ (352). The ambivalence of music’s affective status makes it an ideal metaphor for that nature and for the conflicting influences upon it. Musical allusion in The Mill on the Floss is both emblematic of conflicting passionate emotions and instrumental in their dramatisation. In the central chapters set in The Red Deeps, Philip’s alliance of music and passion as amongst the ‘strongest effects our natures are susceptible of’ is an intimation of how these two forces will coincide in the relationship between Maggie and Stephen Guest (268). Philip uses music as an analogue for the inexplicable influence Maggie has on him: ‘Certain strains of music affect me so strangely – I can never hear them without their changing my whole attitude of mind for a time, and if the effect would last I might be capable of heroisms’ (268). His description of musical response as involving both spontaneous feeling and a sense of transcendence is immediately comprehensible to Maggie. A joint appeal to her own need and to her powers of sympathy, it convinces her of the strength of his argument: ‘“Ah! I know what you mean about music – I feel so”, said Maggie, clasping her hands with her old impetuosity. “At least”, she added, in a saddened tone, “I used to feel so when I had any music”’ (268). By ironic contrast, her own ultimate ‘heroism’ will consist in renouncing the fulfilment of her musically fostered passion for Stephen Guest. Music’s association with the conflict between desire and reality is made explicit here by Maggie’s use of a musical metaphor to describe how her desires always outstrip any possibility of fulfilment, and are therefore better suppressed. Paradoxically, her figurative reference to music here arouses her longing to hear real music and immediately undermines its own renunciatory intention: ‘I was never satisfied with a little of anything. That is why it is better for me to do without earthly happiness altogether . . . I never felt that I had enough music – I wanted more instruments playing together – I wanted voices to be fuller and deeper. Do you ever sing now, Philip?’ she added abruptly, as if she had forgotten what went before . . . ‘O sing me something – just one song. I may listen to that, before I go.’ (288–9) Music forms an element in what Jonathan Arac identifies as the ‘hyperbolic pattern’ in the novel’s rhetoric. This disrupts patterns of ‘harmony

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

and completeness’ and takes the novel beyond the bounds of realism towards the literal flooding of desire at its conclusion: in this hyperbolic structure, ‘Maggie’s wish for “more” predominates’.30 The passage just quoted is also significant in the light of Eliot’s subsequent portrayal of how music’s affective power subverts her characters’ ‘conscious’ choice. Maggie’s response to Philip Wakem’s singing foreshadows events in Book Six when her passionate response to music and the growth of her passionate attraction to Stephen Guest become inseparable. These come into conflict with older loyalties as the clash between duty and passion which pervades the novel reaches its climax. Eliot elaborates the established ambivalence of music’s status to dramatise this conflict and explores some of the literary opportunities offered by scientific discourse to make her own written voice ‘fuller and deeper’.

The ‘laws of attraction’ In Book Six of her novel, Eliot shows her heroine falling helplessly under the spell of the musical performances that are ostensibly part of Stephen Guest’s courtship of her cousin Lucy. A series of musical encounters traces the increasing mutual attraction between Maggie and Stephen that culminates in their elopement on the river. The influence which Stephen and his singing have upon Maggie challenges her sense of duty to existing ties. Eliot thereby illustrates what she importantly terms ‘the shifting relation between passion and duty’ (437). Previously, meetings with Philip Wakem had conflicted with her duty to her family as Maggie struggled to resist the temptations of books, music and affection which he offered her. However, Philip’s musical agency now makes him appear as the representative of duty and a refuge from temptation. After all, the musical associations which strengthen the sense of her long-standing bond with Philip stretch back to the Edenic period of her childhood: ‘O sing me something . . . something you used to sing at Lorton on a Saturday afternoon, when we had the drawing-room all to ourselves, and I put my apron over my head to listen’ (289). As Stephen’s singing begins to exert a competing influence on the adult Maggie, Philip re-enters, and the novel becomes increasingly operatic. Philip reasserts his rival claim upon Maggie, singing an aria in which ‘the tenor is telling the heroine that he shall always love her though she may forsake him’ (366). Maggie has heard him sing this in the Red Deeps, and she acknowledges the validity of his petition. Now that the memory of his singing has become incorporated into her sense of duty to past ties, her ‘tranquil, tender affection for Philip, with its

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root deep down in her childhood’ offers ‘a sanctuary where she could find refuge from an alluring influence which the best part of her must resist’ (360, 361). Philip’s choice of an aria from Bellini’s La Sonnambula is intended as a warning to Maggie that her ‘dreamy reveries’ are part of a dangerous moral torpor (366, 338).31 Consciously remembered music has become allied to a sense of duty with which the unconscious ‘laws of attraction’, manifested in Stephen’s singing, violently clash (350). Eliot’s characters use music to communicate emotion and to provoke sympathy in their listeners, potentially demonstrating Spencer’s theory of music as a refined language of emotion. When Philip and Maggie meet at her cousin’s house, Philip comments, as he had done at their earlier meeting, on the empowering value of musical expression (268, 365). Through his singing he conveys ‘an indirect expression to Maggie of what he could not prevail on himself to say to her directly’ (366). In response, Maggie ‘understood the plaintive passion of the music’ and, in an ironic gloss on her emotional state, ‘wished she had assured him more distinctly in their conversation that she desired not to renew the hope of love between them, only because it clashed with her inevitable circumstances’ (367). Stephen in turn uses music as a means of ‘speaking to Maggie’ (403), and it is largely through music that Maggie’s passionate response to him is engendered. Alone at the piano, Maggie modifies Stephen’s songs to make them a more potent ‘language’ of self-expression: It was pleasant . . . to sit down at the piano alone, and find that the old fitness between her fingers and the keys remained and revived, like a sympathetic kinship not to be worn out by separation – to get the tunes she had heard the evening before and repeat them again and again until she had found out a way of producing them so as to make them a more pregnant, passionate language to her. The mere concord of octaves was a delight to Maggie, and she would often take up a book of Studies rather than any melody, that she might taste more keenly by abstraction the more primitive sensation of intervals. (352)32 Eliot’s portrayal of her heroine’s response to music indicates a far more complex sense of music’s influence than that expressed by Spencer in his ‘Origin and Function of Music’.33 Spencer saw musical expression as a means of communicating emotion more clearly, thus removing the grounds for misunderstanding between individuals and facilitating the future progress of society. The notion of any potential for conflict is altogether missing from his account of music: there is no scope within Spencer’s system for the competing moral and passionate

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

instincts which Eliot portrays in The Mill on the Floss. Between Maggie, Philip and Stephen, music certainly acts as a ‘language’ of emotional communication, but Eliot employs music to communicate and dramatise irreconcilably conflicting claims and emotions.34 It is in her dramatisation of Maggie’s earlier yearning in a musical discourse of sexual passion in Book Six of The Mill on the Floss that Eliot’s engagement with current physiological psychology becomes most apparent. At the time of the novel’s publication, Eliot’s portrayals of emotional response could shock with their physiological explicitness. A contemporary review of the novel criticised the frequency of her descriptions ‘of the physical sensations that accompany the meeting of hearts’.35 Eliot’s emphasis on physiological response, read in the light of contemporary suspicions about music’s sensual influence upon women, may help explain some of the critical hostility directed against the ‘gross passion’ portrayed in the novel.36 Eliot describes how ‘that passionate sensibility which belonged to [Maggie’s] whole nature . . . made her affections sometimes an impatient demand’ (her manuscript has ‘angry demand’).37 Connotations of bewitchment to denote Maggie’s possession by the influence of sound and her own consequent power to attract are aspects of the ‘hungry nature’ that connects Maggie with other demonic and siren-like portrayals of the sexualised, appetitive woman (338).38 Indeed, Eliot conceived of her own taste for music in terms of ‘passionate sensibility’ and hunger when she wrote of her piano playing with Lewes’s eldest son Charles in the year of The Mill’s publication: ‘He is quite a passionate musician, and we play Beethoven duets with increasing appetite every evening’.39 In her account of the influence of Stephen’s singing on Maggie, Eliot links her characters’ experience of music as a transcendent power with the awakening of physiologically described passion. After her first experience of hearing Stephen sing, Maggie is described as having been transported from the harsh sounds of the schoolroom and the memory of her ‘bare, lonely past’ into a ‘brighter aërial world’ (338). As in her childhood experience of music, it is the symbol of her longing to transcend her everyday world. Maggie herself regards music as offering the potential satisfaction or transcendence of all her desires: I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music. At other times one is conscious of carrying a weight. (339)40

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To music’s capacity to transcend time, place, and context is added the first conspicuous example in the novel of music as an emblem and medium of physical passion. Maggie has been pacing about her room in a state of ‘strong excitement’ in which ‘Her eyes and cheeks had an almost feverish brilliancy; her head was thrown backward, and her hands were clasped with the palms outward’. Eliot shows her heroine as physically possessed by the recollection of Stephen’s singing. He has been showing off a ‘fine bass voice’ and the power of Stephen’s voice and gaze augment one another as Maggie becomes ‘conscious of having been looked at a great deal . . . with a glance that seemed somehow to have caught the vibratory influence of the voice’ (337–8). The influence of Stephen’s voice and gaze have a hypnotic power which survives in the form of a physically continuing effect. Maggie does not merely remember but feels ‘the music . . . vibrating in her still’ (338). This description, as if Maggie were herself a musical instrument resonating ‘sympathetic’ vibrations, recalls some of the musical allusions which have a long-standing history in scientific writing, in particular the image of a vibrating string or reed to illustrate materialist accounts of nervous response. The German physiologist Müller, an important influence on Spencer and Bain, describes how The fibres of all the motor, cerebral, and spinal nerves may be imagined as spread out in the medulla oblongata, and exposed to the influence of the will like the keys of a piano-forte. The will acts only on this part of the nervous fibres; but the influence is communicated along the fibres by their action, just as an elastic chord vibrates in its whole length when struck at any one point.41 Eliot repeatedly realises metaphors of nervous vibration in Maggie. She has ‘little more power of concealing the impressions made upon her than if she had been constructed of musical strings’ (360). A little later, her ‘soul’ has become an instrument ‘played on by the inexorable power of sound’ (366). In The Physiology of Common Life, and later in his Problems of Life and Mind, Lewes employed the image of sympathetic sound vibrations to illustrate the equivalence, as physiological response, of sense impression and emotion: ‘When a note is sounded by one chord it will set vibrating any other chords which are in sympathy with it . . . It is thus also that external voices awaken sympathetic tones in us’.42 Lewes here specifically links the acoustic phenomenon of sympathetic vibration with the affective power of sound. The influence of Helmholtz’s

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Figure 3.1 ‘Chant d’Amour’, Sketch of Two Seated Figures, c. 1862–5, by Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98). Reproduced by kind permission of Tate Gallery publications.

pioneering work on sympathetic resonance is evident here. Helmholtz had specified that unconscious physiological sensation was fundamental to musical response. Our experience of any musical tone as a concord depends on a regular relationship of its upper partial tones, even though we are unaware of them: our response to melody is a question of sensation, not of consciousness.43 The similarity of Eliot’s descriptions of musical and passionate response in the novel strengthens the impression produced by her use of physiological terminology that she is proffering them as corresponding states. Not only is Maggie most powerless to resist the influence which Stephen has over her when she is listening to music, but her response to music and her attraction to Stephen are presented as identical spontaneous states of emotion whose intensity effectively questions the possibility of rational control. The sudden birth of passion which made Maggie feel that ‘life was revealing something quite new to her’ is an experience which, like music, both transcends the limitations of her ordinary existence and displaces rational thought, so that ‘she was absorbed in the direct, immediate experience, without any energy left for taking account of it, and reasoning about it’ (354). Music’s power over Maggie is highly ambivalent: a transcendent yet perilous influence. It has made her feel ‘the half-remote presence of

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a world of love and beauty and delight’ (338). But Maggie is unable to withstand the influence of Stephen’s voice despite her conscious attempts. The association of music with temptation throughout the novel, which is explicitly evoked in the title of Book Six, ‘The Great Temptation’, recalls some of the contemporary religious debate about music’s status. It is also reminiscent of Eliot’s own hostile comments about music during her evangelical youth when she recorded finding Mendelssohn’s oratorio St Paul blasphemous.44 The theological associations of musical reference at this point of the novel would have been clear to those of Eliot’s readers familiar with the sort of assessments of music’s value discussed in the previous chapter. Eliot’s equivocal representations of music as a simultaneously transcendent and sensual influence might well have been read in the light of established anxieties about the dangerous emotional effects of musical expression upon woman’s susceptible nature and fragile ‘conscience’. However, in Eliot’s case, the significance of these established concerns about music is transmuted by her ambivalent response to contemporary scientific theory. Eliot’s blending of the language of transcendence and of physiology in her depiction of musical response in The Mill on the Floss reveals the implications of the physical account of emotion on which Spencer’s evolutionary theory of music is based. It indicates that she was responding to the way an organicist theory of psychology extended the principle of ‘reflex action’ to account for emotional response as well as for sensation, so negating the possibility of intellectual autonomy and of conscious moral choice.45 When listening to Stephen and Philip singing, Maggie’s intentions to resist becoming absorbed are ‘lost in the vague state of emotion produced by the inspiring duet – emotion that’ – in an apparent inversion of Philip’s heroic view of music’s influence – ‘seemed to make her at once strong and weak: strong for all enjoyment, weak for all resistance’ (268, 366). The sciences of physiology and physics combine in Eliot’s account of Maggie’s musical seduction. Images of sympathetic vibration emphasise Maggie’s involuntary physical response: When the strain passed into the minor, she half-started from her seat with the sudden thrill of that change. Poor Maggie! She looked very beautiful when her soul was being played on in this way by the inexorable power of sound. (366) These images of overpowering musical response manifest the consequences of a scientific theory which explains emotion as involuntary

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

reflex action. As Stephen breaks into a saucy ditty, there is a prefiguration of Maggie’s literal drifting into sexual temptation when ‘in spite of her resistance to the spirit of the song and the singer, [she] was taken hold of and shaken by the invisible influence – was borne along by a wave too strong for her’ (367). The terms used to describe Maggie’s response to music show Eliot’s engagement with contemporary science impinging upon her relationship with literary Romanticism. Her repeated depictions of Maggie as a vibrating musical instrument are suggestive of the quintessentially Romantic figure of the aeolian harp. ‘The unexpected tones’ of Stephen’s voice shake Maggie ‘like the sudden accidental vibration of a harp close by her’ (380). In Maggie’s elevation to a ‘brighter aërial world’ by Stephen’s singing we see a coincidence of Romantic transcendence and physiological response. Maggie’s body becomes an aeolian harp which feels the vibration of Stephen’s voice ‘quivering through her whole frame’ (366). This emblem of artistic transcendence now holds resonances distinct from those which it has generally been considered to hold in Romantic literature. It is most explicitly employed to invoke not transcendent inspiration, but physical attraction. Eliot explicitly extends the analogy of sympathetic vibration to create a fusion of different sense impressions. Stephen transfixes Maggie with ‘a glance that seemed somehow to have caught the vibrationary influence of the voice’ (337–8) [my italics]. Another superlative moment of synaesthesia occurs when, fusing sound and sight impressions, Eliot describes ‘Something strangely powerful . . . in the light of Stephen’s long gaze’ which, although Maggie is looking elsewhere, magnetises her as if by powerful speech (387). ‘And’, Eliot asks, ‘does not a supreme poet blend light and sound into one, calling darkness mute, and light eloquent?’ (387). The specific supreme poet quoted here is Dante, in the Inferno, but Eliot’s comment also echoes the ‘light in sound’ and ‘sound-like power in light’ of Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’.46 Wordsworth’s ‘Images of Voice’ are here too from ‘On the Power of Sound’ which Eliot greatly admired, in which ‘A Voice to Light gave Being’.47 The constant evocations of synaesthetic faculties of perception and creative imagination in her favourite poet echo throughout her writing. However, in portraying the growth of passion between Stephen and Maggie, Eliot consciously combines the effects of seeing and hearing with repercussions beyond the Romantic synaesthetic imagery on which it builds. The passionate musical language which Maggie distils from Stephen’s songs ‘that she might taste more keenly . . . the . . . primitive sensation of intervals’ has already been evoked in terms of the sensations of taste and touch (352).

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Here Eliot’s narrative comment preludes a description of the beauty of Maggie’s bare arm and Stephen’s uncontrolled impulse to shower it with kisses. In her exploitation of synaesthesia, Eliot suggests an identity not simply of different sense impressions, but of sensual and emotional response. Such physical descriptions of emotion show Eliot revising Romanticism in the light of contemporary science. Maggie becomes the ‘subject lute’ of Coleridge’s ‘Eolian Harp’: a subject lute whose resonating strings have become emblematic of the workings of biology.48 Romantic tropes therefore come to play a crucial part in Eliot’s portrayal of the individual as subject to unconscious biological processes. In the chapter entitled ‘Illustrating the laws of attraction’, Stephen’s influence over Maggie banishes conscious reflection (350, 354). The term ‘laws of attraction’ comes from Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), an important influence on Eliot’s novel. In Goethe’s novel, music symbolises involuntary desire and preludes a literal drifting into temptation: the boating episodes in Die Wahlverwandtschaften were probably sources for Maggie’s elopement with Stephen and for her drowning.49 Goethe makes use of musical allusion to portray illicit magnetic attractions operating between two couples, drawing analogies with chemical affinities (unlike forces attract, like forces repel).50 In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot makes the ‘laws of attraction’ a matter of physiological rather than of chemical reaction. Lewes described Goethe’s novel as exemplifying the ‘tragedy arising from the collision of Passion and Duty, – of Impulse on the one hand, and on the other, of Social Law’.51 In The Mill on the Floss, the competing voices of Philip Wakem and Stephen Guest dramatise a conflict between conscious duty and spontaneous passion. While Stephen’s singing elicits a spontaneous passionate response, Maggie’s reaction to Philip’s aria is partly dictated by the remembered associations which are to surface in her rejection of Stephen’s ‘natural law’: ‘If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment’ (417). The musical rivalry between her passion for Stephen and Philip’s claim upon her older loyalties also dramatises the impossible dilemma contained within this statement. For Maggie’s ‘choice’ involves the loss either of her sense of moral (and indeed personal) identity or of passionate fulfilment. Maggie’s dilemma involves what Eliot described as the essence of tragedy in her 1856 Leader essay ‘The Antigone and its Moral’, namely, the ‘antagonism between valid claims’.52 On the one hand there are the claims of family loyalty and past ties, amongst which Philip is now incorporated. On the other, there are the urgent and pressing demands

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

of the ‘natural law’ of attraction which Stephen defends as imperative: ‘We have proved that the feeling which draws us towards each other is too strong to be overcome. That natural law surmounts every other, – we can’t help what it clashes with’ (417). The sexual energy embodied in Stephen Guest is most powerfully conveyed in the novel by the way in which his voice ‘seemed to make all the air in the room alive with a new influence’ (367). The contrasting descriptions of Philip’s voice underline their physical discrepancy. Philip who feels ‘rather oppressed . . . by Stephen’s bright strong presence and strong voice’ (364) has a ‘high, feeble voice’ (362) when speaking, and when singing, a ‘pleading tenor’ with ‘no very fine qualities as a voice’ (366). It is an unhappy irony that musical expression, which Philip experiences as allowing him to transcend his physical limitations, should effectively underline them. In contrast to Stephen’s voice reverberating within her, Maggie is ‘touched not thrilled’ by Philip’s singing which, Eliot writes, ‘suggested distinct memories and thoughts, and brought quiet regret in the place of excitement’ (367). The musical ‘language’ of remembered associations employed by Philip Wakem competes with the direct physical unison of sympathetic resonance between Maggie and Stephen. In Romola, Eliot invokes the same contrast as the difference ‘between the memory of music, and the sense of being possessed by actual vibrating harmonies’ (251).

Music and memory Yet, memory and oblivion are not the opposites they seem. Even this opposition is complicated and undermined in the novel. Music shows how forms of ‘memory’ are also at work within immediacy. Theories about memory were, in fact, essential to the explanations of music’s immediate affective power presented by Eliot’s scientific contemporaries. They were fundamental to Herbert Spencer’s theories about our personal and inherited reactions to musical expression. Spencer asserted an inevitable sequential progression from simple to complex states in the evolution of memory, as in everything else. Memory, he explained in The Principles of Psychology (1855), is at first a weaker version of its originating psychical state which, through repetition, becomes an automatic revival and so passes out of consciousness into ‘unconscious or organic memory’ (559–63). It is then replaced by more complex and advanced forms of consciousness until these likewise become automatic. In ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, Spencer had analysed

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musical response as a series of physiological revivals of previous reactions to sound. He explained music’s power as arising from remembered associations with cries of pleasure or pain.53 Similar sounds heard subsequently would awaken identical nervous responses to those evoked by the original expressive cry. Unconscious organic memory is therefore physiologically inherent in all musical response. In The Physiology of Common Life, written whilst Eliot was at work on The Mill on the Floss, Lewes also gives accounts of reflex action and unconscious sensation which he illustrates with a number of audial examples. As an instance of automatic memory, Lewes describes our apparent inapprehension of the sound made by a mill-wheel, once we have become accustomed to it: The mill-wheel, at first so obtrusive in its sound, ceases at length to excite any attention. The impressions on our auditory nerves continue; but although we hear them, we cease to think about them . . . It is held, indeed, that we cease to hear them, in ceasing to be ‘conscious’ that we hear them; but this is manifestly erroneous. Let the wheel suddenly stop, and there is an immediate corresponding sensational change in us; so much so, that if it occurs during sleep, we awake.54 Lulled by the ‘delicious rhythmic dip of the oars’ as she and Stephen elope, Maggie is wrapped in an ‘enchanted haze’ until Stephen stops rowing and ‘This sudden change roused Maggie’ (407–8). Of particular affinity also with the novel’s opening invocation of the ‘dreamy deafness’ inspired by the mill, Lewes’s account explains deafness as unconscious listening – oblivion as unconscious memory. The association of musical reference in the novel with spontaneous passion and with dream states and enchantment therefore suggests more than a moral sleep before the wakening of conscience.55 It emphasises that Maggie’s tragedy also lies in her susceptibility to psychological forces beyond her control. Eliot’s novel shows the potential of unconscious states to disrupt conscious intention. However, it resists any fixed alignment of Maggie’s feelings of duty with consciousness, or of passion with unconscious states. The novel constantly emphasises the ‘dim dreamy state’ induced in Maggie by the influence of Stephen Guest (358). Yet, strikingly, Maggie’s final renunciation of Stephen in favour of duty to memory is also described as an unconscious state: ‘Maggie was not conscious of a decision as she turned away . . . and walked out of the room: it was like an automatic action that fulfils

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

a forgotten intention’ (420). The memories on which Maggie bases her resistance to Stephen take on the quality of dream; they merge with a sleeping dream-vision of her childhood in which ‘Tom was not really angry’ (413). This conflation of dream and memory is prefigured in the opening of the novel where the two are indistinguishable. ‘I remember those large dripping willows. I remember the stone bridge’, intones the narrator whilst conjuring the ‘dreamy deafness’ induced by the thrumming of the mill-wheel – informing us on the next page that he or she has been ‘dreaming’ all the while (7, 8). Maggie’s loyalty to the past implies a dream return to Eden. This Edenic ‘memory’ seems more akin than opposed to the ‘dreamy reveries’ induced in her by Stephen’s singing (338). Conscious and unconscious states are dramatically opposed throughout the novel, but relations between them are as fluid as ‘the shifting relation between passion and duty’ (437). If both sexual passion and passionate allegiance to duty can provoke similar involuntary states, this throws an ironic gloss on Maggie’s experience of a conflict between spontaneous passion and a sense of duty founded on loyalty to the past. We have to wonder whether Maggie’s loyalty to past duty may be as involuntary as her attraction to Stephen Guest. In this way, the novel engages closely with the fear that physiological theories of psychology reduce the individual entirely to instinct. The operation of the laws of attraction is arguably but one amongst many of the unconscious processes to which Maggie is subject. Maggie invokes pity and faithfulness to memory against Stephen’s claims that the ‘laws of nature’ justify love between them. ‘Love is natural’, Maggie assents, ‘but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too’ (395). Equally ‘natural’ as the laws of attraction, consciously remembered duty emerges as potentially no more amenable to rational control (393, 394, 417, 418). Spencer’s and Lewes’s views of the processes of mind and body as organically linked imply the potential for an irreducible conflict of subjective states to coexist within the individual. Despite Spencer’s ready invocation of ‘fidelity to conscience’ in Social Statics, his psychology effectively undermines the possibility of an independent controlling conscience which could resolve the clash between duty and passion.56 Rather, sensual and moral passion apparently attain identical, if sometimes incompatible, status. In his chapter on ‘The Feelings’ in The Principles of Psychology, published in 1855, Spencer argued against the apparent autonomy of emotional and intellectual processes:

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Habitually contemplating the contrast between the cognitive and emotive faculties from a subjective point of view, we conclude that it is a strongly marked contrast; and to say that there is really no line of demarcation between reason, and sentiment or passion, will, by most, be thought a contradiction of direct internal perceptions. Nevertheless . . . if all mental phenomena are incidents of the correspondence between the organism and its environment . . . then, we may be certain, à priori, that the Feelings are not, scientifically considered, divisible from other phenomena of consciousness.57 Spencer’s fundamental conviction that the law of progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous governed all development meant that emotion and cognition were also organically linked through their common ontogenesis: that is, in both their origin and differentiation: as, in the beginning, Memory, Reason, and Feeling, are different sides of the same psychical phenomenon; so, though by the continuous differentiation which accompanies development, they become more distinguishable, yet they never cease to stand in this same fundamental relation.58 Spencer is most emphatic that ‘no act of cognition can be absolutely free from emotion’.59 The ‘relation between perception and sensation’ serves as a basic illustration of this. For perception and sensation can neither of them exist without the other . . . every sensation to be known as one, must be perceived, and must so be in one respect a perception; and . . . every perception must be made up of combined sensations, and must so be in one respect sensational.60 Spencer specifically points to musical response to demonstrate the ‘impossibility’, even from the ‘ordinary point of view’, of dissociating ‘the psychical states which we class as intellectual from those which we class as emotional’:61 Not only is it, that in the states of consciousness produced by music the two are inseparably united; but it is, that the state of consciousness produced by a single beautiful tone, presents cognition and emotion fused into one.62

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Spencer seemed unconcerned about the possibility that this physiological equivalence of intellect and emotion might pose difficulties, or that we might experience conflict arising out of unconsciously retained memories as well as those memories on which we base our conscious identity and morality. Eliot shows a level of conflict, unacknowledged by Spencer, to be inherent in his model of evolution. She conveys a sense of the inextricable conjunction of sensual and intellectual elements in musical response which makes music effectively analogous to conflicting psychological processes within the organically connected subject and potentially belies the feasibility of ‘that grand progression which is now bearing Humanity onwards to perfection’.63 Her depictions of musical response challenge Spencer’s assumptions about the inevitably progressive sequence of conscious and unconscious states, showing them as inadequate to account for the potential of unconscious memory to disrupt conscious states. Moreover, theories of evolution imply that the most immediate, apparently unreflecting musical response may involve recollections not merely of our individual past, but of our biological inheritance. In the first volume of his Problems of Life and Mind (1874), Lewes expands his earlier account of automatic action in The Physiology of Common Life, proclaiming that ‘Instinct, although in the individual it precedes Experience, is a product of what was experience in the ancestral organisms from which the individual has inherited his structure’.64 Lewes advocates Spencer’s ‘psychogenetical’ analysis of mental processes, and emphasises the inherited foundations of individual instincts. A view of instinct as hereditary is obviously fundamental to Spencer’s conception of progressively automised mental faculties: including those of memory and of musicality. Lewes explains our unconscious instincts as potential modes of response activated by individual experience, but inherited from ancestors for whom the same behaviour was conscious: ‘We learn by individual experiences, registrations of feeling, rendered possible by ancestral experiences’.65 Similar views of inheritance were asserted by Henry Holland, who, like Spencer, had published his views before Eliot began writing fiction. Eliot drew closely on his theories in The Lifted Veil – which she interrupted work on The Mill on the Floss in order to write.66 In his Chapters on Mental Physiology (1852), Holland discussed current ‘theories of transmutation’ under which ‘acquired habits, becoming hereditary, assume the character of specific instincts’ (226). Music’s association with memory in The Mill on the Floss suggests that Maggie might be seen as subject, not just to the conflicting influence of her individual musical associations, but to the inherited musical memories of past ancestors.

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Like Spencer, Charles Darwin provided a biological basis for a view of musical inheritance which speculated that music had developed from ancient modes of emotional expression.67 In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin comments that ‘The sensations and ideas excited in us by music, or by the cadences of impassioned oratory, appear from their vagueness, yet depth, like mental reversions to the emotions and thoughts of a long-past age’.68 He concludes that a significant part of music’s power is best understood as residing within our inherited memory of its original primary function, which was sexual. The emotional intensity and mysterious sense of remembering produced in us by musical expression become to a certain extent intelligible if we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by the half-human progenitors of man, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited by the strongest passions. In this case, from the deeply-laid principle of inherited associations, musical tones would be likely to excite in us, in a vague and indefinite manner, the strong emotions of a long-past age.69 This adds another dimension to Maggie’s pleasure in the ‘primitive sensation of intervals’ (352) (my italics). Musical sensibility, a quality of those representing a ‘higher’ stage of culture and, according to theorists such as Spencer, crucial to the advance of civilisation, is paradoxically traced back to atavistic sensuality. Darwin gleefully emphasises the evolution from memories of sexual display of all art forms employing the affective power of sound. His account of music concludes: The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely remote period, his half-human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent passions, during their mutual courtship and rivalry.70 In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot gives an almost Darwinian account of music, albeit in advance of Darwin’s statements concerning music’s function in The Descent of Man. Darwin had already written briefly about music in relation to sexual selection amongst birds in The Origin of Species (1859) which appeared whilst Eliot was writing The Mill on the Floss. Darwin describes the use of song by male birds competing for the

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

attention of females, and the female’s habitual selection of ‘the most melodious or beautiful males’.71 In Stephen Guest and Philip Wakem’s musical rivalry for Maggie, Eliot contrasts the mating call of a physically appropriate mate with the claims of the morally superior but crippled Philip. She provides a dramatic presentation of this ‘severest rivalry between the males . . . to attract by singing the females’.72 The operation of the ‘laws of attraction’, or of sexual selection, which draw Maggie to the ‘most melodious and beautiful male’ could therefore involve unconscious memories inherited from her animal ancestors. This is a particularly uncanny example of how the individual’s behaviour might be invisibly determined by the laws of inheritance. Evolution makes the workings of psychology both determined and mysterious. Darwin’s more extended account of music in The Descent of Man incorporates a similar description of how ‘the male pours forth his full volume of song, in rivalry with other males, for the sake of captivating the female’.73 Stephen’s musical seduction of Maggie invokes Darwin’s ‘inherited associations’ with the ‘animal’ passions of our ‘half-human progenitors’.74 Maggie, possessed by the music of Stephen’s voice, displays not just the physical continuance of sympathetic vibration, but biological connection, as Darwin says, with ‘the strong emotions of a long-past age’ (338).75 In her elevation to a ‘brighter aërial world’, Romantic transcendence and biologically inherited instinct coincide (338). Biological memory, in which past, present and future objectively connect, lends a new aspect to music’s eclipsing of time and of identity. With regard to personal identity, music conspicuously generates both coherence and disintegration. In The Mill on the Floss, unconscious memory is awakened by music in ways which both affirm and disturb the individual’s sense of self. Philip’s singing intensifies Maggie’s sense of integration with her past. Musical communion with Stephen disrupts the musical associations which help bind her conscious sense of identity. The sequential and harmonic structures of music might seem to offer analogues for the unified ordering of memory and identity; music also promises Maggie access to an underlying existential harmony, which might ‘link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it’ (205). Yet, paradoxically, musical memory disrupts the very sense of coherence it helps to build. Music, enacting and arresting time, plays a role in Maggie’s construction of what Eliot’s friend, the psychologist James Sully, was later to term memory’s ‘dramatic representation of our past history’ in an effort to ‘rise above the limitations of time’.76 Maggie’s rejection of Stephen is effectively an attempt to return to a timeless Eden. I have suggested that the

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Edenic ‘memories’, on which Maggie bases her conscious sense of duty and identity, are, in the end, akin (physiologically literally so) to the ‘dreamy reveries’ induced in Maggie by Stephen’s music (366, 338). They share in the same ‘enchanted haze’ from which consciousness of past and future are excluded (407). The sound of Stephen’s ‘deep thrilling voice’ lingers in visions of ‘easy floating in a stream of joy’ which haunt Maggie on her return journey to St Ogg’s (421). These echoes of Stephen’s voice resurrect the novel’s opening invocation of sound-imbued dreammemory in which the ‘low placid voice’ of the river and the thrumming of the mill provide ‘a curtain of sound’ excluding ‘the world beyond’ (7). Identity is rendered unstable by music’s affinity with dream and illusion: also by its transience. A precarious narrative of unified selfhood, as much as the claims of duty, impels Maggie’s return to St Ogg’s and the ties of memory. Well before Eliot began work on The Mill on the Floss, Spencer had emphasised some of the implications of his physiological psychology for conceptions of permanent individual identity and freedom of the will. In The Principles of Psychology, Spencer states that it is an ‘illusion’ to suppose ‘that at each moment the ego is something more than the composite state of consciousness which then exists’.77 Lewes later discussed the implications for ‘disputes respecting the unity of consciousness, the simplicity of the Ego’, of the fact that: ‘Although when viewed synthetically every sensation, every perception, every conception is a unit, viewed analytically, and genetically, it is a compound. There is no single sensation which is an element, i.e. irreducible’.78 Sully was later usefully to clarify the distinction between what may be termed the ‘objective’ physical continuity which science informs us we possess and our subjective sense of coherence, based on the largely fictionalised narratives of personal memory. He pays tribute to ‘modern physiology’ which, he maintains, ‘has done much towards helping us to understand the nervous conditions of memory’; the ‘biologist’ regards memory as a special phase of a universal property of organic structure, namely, modifiability by the exercise of function, or the survival after any particular kind of activity of a disposition to act again in that particular way. The revival of a mental impression in the weaker form of an image is thus, on its physical side, due in part to this remaining functional disposition in the central nervous tracts concerned. And so, while on the psychical or subjective side we are unable to find anything permanent in memory, on the physical or objective side we do find such a permanent substratum.79

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Music embodies memory as continuous biological inheritance, but, in relation to psychological identity, it more often figures conflict and dissolution. Our ‘objective’ physical continuity is, after all, the origin of rapidly changing mental states. ‘Even when listening to exactly the same tone’, writes Sully, ‘we do not maintain identical states of mind for a fraction of a second’.80 The changing valency of Maggie’s recollections of Philip Wakem’s singing, which variously represents temptation, passion and the claims of past duty, illustrates memory’s inconstancy. Her responses to music suggest that the coherence of Maggie’s conscious identity is constantly threatened by the ‘objective’ continuity of her biological being and inheritance. The very transient nature of musical expression makes it emblematic of the shifting constitution of the individual subject. Traces of ancestral experience within individual musical response make the hidden processes of the mind more, rather than less, uncanny. The mysterious and ancient origins of its mnemic and affective power make music – the ‘invisible influence’ that possesses Maggie – an appropriate analogue for the occult processes of the individual psyche (367). The mystery surrounding music’s origins connects it with the forgotten beginnings of (pre-)human existence, the irretrievable origins which shape our unknown future.81

Tragedy and hyperbole When contemplating Eliot’s portrayal of Maggie Tulliver’s inner conflicts, we acquire a sense of her destiny as entirely determined by internal psychological forces. But explanation is never so simple in George Eliot. She constantly emphasises the importance of both psychology and external conditions in the fate of her heroine. Throughout her musical portrayal of Maggie, Eliot affirms the significance of both psychology and social context. The musical references which reveal the implications of physiological psychology in Book Six continue also to illustrate the incompatible states of individual and social development emphasised by the earlier musical references in the novel. Eliot’s earlier employment of Maggie’s susceptibility to music to illuminate the conflicts within her character reinforces the important passage in which she qualifies Novalis’s dictum that ‘character is destiny’. For Maggie’s ‘history’ is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. ‘Character,’ says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms – ‘character is destiny.’ But not the whole of our destiny. (352–3)

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Musical allusion thus contributes to a vision of Maggie’s tragedy as arising both from the disjunction of social and individual development and from a conflict of irreconcilable and involuntary passions. The hyperbolic and mysterious nature of music conveys a vision of the imagination which would make the harmonious adjustment of inner to outer circumstances reductive. At the same time those outer circumstances remain crucial. Gillian Beer comments that ‘Throughout the book a sense of the “uncanniness” of inner life and the recalcitrance of outward circumstance have been equally maintained’.82 A complex conjunction of internal and external forces apparently determines the tragedy of Maggie’s life. In various and devastating ways, forces of social evolution, biological inheritance, sexual selection and physiology rule her destiny. Her inner psychical life is hopelessly fragmented by the forces of physiology and biological inheritance which give rise to a whirl of conflicting desires. Presumably only ignorance of unseen determining patterns gives her an illusory sense of free will, or even of continuous identity. Eliot revises the notion of Tragic Fate with Evolution operating as a more inexorable, more total, power of determination. Whereas Spencer’s idea of a tragedy, according to Huxley, was of ‘a deduction killed by a fact’, Eliot’s engagement with evolutionary theory in the novel reveals how scientific explanation can augment rather than diminish a sense of tragedy.83 Eliot’s claim for the importance of environment in Maggie’s fate is supported by a reference to Hamlet (353). Frequent allusions to classical and Shakespearian tragedy in the novel emphasise her view of Maggie as a tragic heroine.84 In her account of Maggie’s musical susceptibility, Evolution supersedes the Fates of classical tragedy in establishing the duality of fate and moral accountability which brings about her nemesis.85 The physiological basis of evolutionary theory entails her subjection to historical and biological forces which are beyond her control and which produce irresolvable conflict, yet somehow, impossibly, she remains morally responsible. The conflict of equally valid claims is even more fundamentally irreconcilable than it was for the original Antigone. The Mill on the Floss thus apparently offers an unflinching dramatisation of the law of consequences, or of ‘that necessity of sequence’ asserted in Eliot’s early review of Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect.86 The individual seems inescapably shaped by biological laws; the novel hauntingly represents the consequences of this and the conflicts which arise. Yet, Eliot’s novel can ultimately not be assimilated to even the most complex representation of scientific determinism.

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Music provides a discourse of desire which is constantly linked to the water imagery that culminates in the opening of the floodgates of desire at the novel’s end and which eclipses the forces of destiny. Musical allusion confounds as much as it exemplifies the conclusions of evolutionary science. In this it coheres with Arac’s reading of a hyperbolic pattern which works against our apprehension that the novel offers ‘a world of astonishing harmony and completeness, in which intuitions that we usually consider primitive are justified by the modern developments of science’.87 Musical allusion is implicated in the way in which, in Eliot’s heroines, as Virginia Woolf astutely described them, The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems . . . to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something – they scarcely know what – for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence.88 Earlier on in the essay from which this comment is taken, Woolf uses the phrase ‘the flood of memory’ to describe a quality which she identifies as imbuing all Eliot’s novels.89 This clearly has particular significance for music’s role in The Mill on the Floss, through which memory, dream and desire break their bounds in disregard of ‘the facts of human existence’. Maggie’s death may be tragic, but it also fulfils her longing to achieve reunion with Tom and so arguably allows her a desired recovery of the past, or at least a dream version of the past. The novel ends with the apparent attainment of Maggie’s passionate longing for unity, although for the reader, any sense of harmonious closure is likely to be qualified by the discomfort aroused by the novel’s closing Biblical epigram: ‘In their death they were not divided’ (2 Samuel 1:23). Nevertheless, in the melodramatic rushing flood with which the narrative ends, the novel apparently flouts utterly the constraints both of sober realist fiction and of scientific determinism. Eliot ignores the usual outcome of the ‘conflict between the inward impulse and outward fact’ which she describes as ‘the lot of every imaginative and passionate nature’ and allows the ‘inward impulse’ of desire, which music has embodied for much of the novel, to fashion the plot (241). Instead of a relentless tragedy of everyday life that confirms the grim necessity of confronting the present, the novel’s conclusion offers both grand tragic nemesis and the apparent endorsement of an overwhelming desire to recover the past. The Mill on the Floss thus both reveals and transcends the implications of scientific determinism. Our impression that Eliot is engaged in close

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dialogue with current scientific theory is balanced by acute awareness of that theory’s inherent contradictions and its limitations. The destabilising effect of her supple use of musical allusion in the novel certainly undermines any mode of explanation which does not acknowledge irreducible complexity.90 Eliot’s writing here stands as a passionate rejection of the lack of puzzlement which, as he records explaining to her in his Autobiography, left Herbert Spencer’s brow unfurrowed.91 Spencer did, in fact, speculate about the ultimate relativity and mystery of knowledge, but in practice his concerns were utterly and obsessively with the reduction of all obtainable knowledge to the single, comprehensive and comprehensible system of his synthetic philosophy.92 Eliot’s fiction explores the devastating implications of physiological explanations of music’s power. Her novel prompts an awareness of the fate of individuals caught up in the indifferent processes of biology and history, and inspires scepticism about available interpretations of these processes and about the inevitability of progress. Ultimately the enduring ambivalence of her use of musical allusion resists assimilation to any war of ideas. She has Philip Wakem preface his description of the effects of music by saying that ‘I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of’ (268). His statement of the impossibility of the intellect making a complete appraisal of human nature presages Eliot’s musical exposition of the relationship between intellect and emotion in the novel. The desire attributed to her heroine is not to rationalise but to ‘link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life and give her soul a sense of home in it’ (205). In ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, Spencer had been at pains to demystify the apparent transcendent effects of music. Eliot’s employment of musical reference in The Mill on the Floss leaves us with a sense of this mystery as much as of the relentlessness of physical laws. Merely to take recourse in the notion of irreducible mystery is clearly not an adequate response to the conceptual and rhetorical complexity of this novel. Yet we remember that it was whilst writing The Mill on the Floss that Eliot famously expressed the opinion, in response to Darwin’s Origin of Species, that ‘to me the Development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes’.93 ‘This mysterious life’, contemplated by Maggie Tulliver as she strains after unobtainable harmony, remains mysterious in George Eliot, despite, and because of, her interest in systems designed to explain it.

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The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible’

Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

We know there are a thousand tremors in the air which beat upon our ears unheard.1 Daniel Deronda is the most ‘musical’ of George Eliot’s novels. More than in any of Eliot’s earlier fiction, musical allusion and analogy contribute to its formal and thematic construction. ‘I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there’, wrote Eliot when discussing critical responses to her novel.2 Music plays a significant part in transmitting these relationships in Daniel Deronda where, as Gillian Beer remarks: ‘Even more than in Eliot’s previous books, parallel narratives are fleetingly condensed through allusion to opera, myth, legend, politics’.3 These fleeting connections contribute to the intense yet open-ended quality of the novel. Throughout Daniel Deronda, Eliot employs musical allusion to achieve a wide-ranging critique of national life. Music is dramatically and emblematically engaged in her scrutiny of artistic standards, and of personal and racial ‘vocation’. It is emblematic also of the aspirations and fears of the woman writer. At the same time, ‘musical’ dramatisation of individual consciousness and music’s association with sympathetic communication, empathy and transcendence are amongst the novel’s more patently experimental qualities. In my final chapter, I concentrate on how musical allusion and analogy play a role in Eliot’s preoccupation in Daniel Deronda with coincidence, ‘second sight’ and non-logical modes of communication, and in her exploration of the intricacies of individual identity and of language – all of which disturb notions of ‘realism’ and forestall unified readings of Eliot’s most innovative and challenging novel. 130

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[T]hat music which you sing is beneath you. It is a form of melody which expresses a puerile state of culture – a dandling, canting, seesaw kind of stuff – the passion and thought of people without any breadth of horizon. There is a sort of self-satisfied folly about every phrase of such melody: no cries of deep, mysterious passion – no conflict – no sense of the universal. It makes men small as they listen to it. Sing now something larger. And I shall see.4 The composer Klesmer’s condemnation of Gwendolen’s performance of an aria by Bellini reiterates the correlation between states of musical and social evolution which is implicit in Eliot’s early essay about Wagner.5 In Daniel Deronda, Eliot explores music as both an aspect and symbol of cultural life. Music plays a role in the contrast of British with European (particularly Germanic) culture and with the heritage of Judaism. Eliot frequently turns to music and the musician in her probing of the interaction of social, commercial and artistic activity in British society, and the ethical issues this involves. The portrayal of Klesmer, Eliot’s most important musician figure, is crucial to the novel’s scrutiny of aesthetic and moral values. Through her analysis of the status of music and of the professional musician, Eliot proposes alternative standards of evaluation for national and individual achievement, including authorship. Klesmer’s command to Gwendolen to ‘sing something larger’ is axiomatic of his role as a critic of bourgeois British culture. His subsequent pronouncements on the elevated role of the musician link issues of personal growth with the themes of public vocation, cultural value and racial identity that are explored in the novel. Alexander Welsh comments on the privileged position which music occupies in Daniel Deronda: ‘The novel makes much of music, and the degree to which characters are susceptible to music is a pretty good measure of their happiness and even of their authority’.6 Music seems opposed to the menacing, secretive knowledge which Welsh identifies in George Eliot and Blackmail as insidiously blighting public and private relationships in the novel: ‘Culture mediated by music is a kind of knowledge still unspoiled’.7 A ‘felicitous combination of the German, the Sclave, and the Semite’ (41), Klesmer provides, as Welsh points out, ‘a persistent reminder of English cultural impoverishment among the classes who can afford better’.8 Condemning English society’s poor estimation of art and the artist, Klesmer makes a Romantic claim to equal status with

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Musical vocation and literary opera

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

legislators. He establishes himself as the representative of cultural standards in the broadest sense whilst also endorsing the aesthetic hierarchy central to German Romanticism, in which music occupies the highest pinnacle. When Bult, a successful man of business and politics, comments that he appears to have ‘too much talent to be a mere musician’, Klesmer retorts: No man has too much talent to be a musician. Most men have too little. A creative artist is no more a mere musician than a great statesman is a mere politician . . . We help to rule the nations and make the age as much as any other public men. We count ourselves on level benches with legislators. And a man who speaks effectively through music is compelled to something more difficult than parliamentary eloquence. (224) Eliot presents Klesmer as both true artist and heroic personality. A performer, composer and thinker, he is as versatile and fascinating as a young Ulysses on a sufficient acquaintance – one whom nature seemed to have first made generously and then to have added music as a dominant power using all the abundant rest, and, as in Mendelssohn, finding expression for itself not only in the highest finish of execution, but in that fervour of creative work and theoretic belief which pierces the whole future of a life with the light of congruous, devoted purpose. (222) The comparison with Mendelssohn indicates that the ‘larger’ music which Klesmer represents is the music of the New German School. Mendelssohn’s reputation in Britain was extremely high both before and after his death. He was admired as much for his moral integrity as for his music.9 Eliot had read his letters in 1870 and praised ‘the sense they give of communion with an eminently pure, refined nature, with the most rigorous conscience in art’.10 Allusions to various other German musicians, both historical and fictional, confirm Klesmer’s ‘pedigree’ as the representative of Germanic musical culture. The plethora of possible models emphasises how important the figure of the Central European musician is as a medium of Romantic aesthetics within Eliot’s negotiation of musical and cultural value. ‘We shall so like to renew our acquaintance with Klesmer – whom we met at Weimar in ’54!’ wrote G.H. Lewes at the prospect of their dining with Anton Rubinstein. This was in 1876, whilst Eliot was finishing

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Daniel Deronda.11 Rubinstein was Jewish, Slav (Russian) and German by name.12 Eliot was originally introduced to him by Liszt and she also describes Klesmer as ‘not yet a Liszt’ (220). Klesmer, like Liszt, is a thoroughly cosmopolitan figure. Again like Liszt, whose playing enraptured Eliot, he performs his own compositions. Eliot’s journal records her response to Liszt’s personality and musicianship: My great delight was to watch Liszt and observe the sweetness of his expression. Genius, benevolence and tenderness beam from his whole countenance, and his manners are in perfect harmony with it . . . Then came the thing I had longed for – Liszt’s playing. I sat near him so that I could see both his hands and face. For the first time in my life I beheld real inspiration – for the first time I heard the true tones of the piano. He played one of his own compositions – one of a series of religious fantaisies. There was nothing strange or excessive about his manner. His manipulation of the instrument was quiet and easy, and his face was simply grand.13 Eliot goes on to discuss the portrait of Liszt by Scheffer as a ‘young magus’ and Klesmer’s role as a ‘musical magus’ is a vital aspect of his characterisation (46).14 The title of Klesmer’s fantasia Freudvoll, Leidvoll, Gedankenvoll is derived from Liszt’s setting of a poem from Goethe’s Egmont (43).15 Alan Walker comments on the portrayal of Klesmer in his study of Liszt, concluding that simply to read the words that Eliot puts into the mouth of Klesmer is surely enough. His ideas on talent, genius, musicality, and priestlike devotion to work are basically the ideas of Liszt, and Eliot had opportunity enough to hear them expounded many times by him during her nine-week stay in Weimar. Klesmer’s lofty dismissal of Bult’s stupid views on the nature of musical talent could not have been better phrased by Liszt himself; indeed, it is not impossible that George Eliot took them down from Liszt verbatim.16 Both Liszt and Rubinstein were promoting Wagner’s works during Eliot’s time in Weimar. Representative of advanced musical culture, Klesmer is clearly also to be associated with Wagner’s ‘music of the future’ (93). His criticism of Bellini is implicitly placed in the context of the battle ‘between the declamatory and melodic schools of music’ which Eliot had discussed in relation to Wagner’s music in ‘Liszt, Wagner and Weimar’.17 Here, Eliot’s interest in evolutionary development

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Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

had endorsed Wagner’s progressive organicist aesthetic.18 Klesmer’s condemnation of Gwendolen’s choice of Bellini in Daniel Deronda reiterates the correlation between states of musical and social evolution alluded to in her 1855 essay.19 The puerile state of development which enjoys Bellini’s music is satirised further in Gwendolen’s conversation with an admirer, whose only response to Klesmer is to deride his eccentric appearance, dismissing his judgement of Gwendolen’s singing with: ‘It is not addressed to the ears of the future, I suppose. I’m glad of that: it suits mine’ (93).20 This is perhaps a caricature of Eliot’s own self-conscious resistance to Wagner’s music as expressed in ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’, where she suggests that her musical taste is insufficiently evolved for her to appreciate his ‘music of the future’ as much as she admires his ideas.21 ‘Young Clintock’ prefers Gwendolen’s singing to Klesmer’s ‘tip-top playing’ which he cannot comprehend (43). Representing a culture which values sporting prowess above artistic talent, he is an enthusiast for croquet rather than for the music of the future: ‘depend upon it’, he assures her, ‘croquet is the game of the future’. ‘I shall study croquet to-morrow’, replies the selfmocking Gwendolen, ‘I shall take to it instead of singing’ (44). Klesmer’s description of the qualities lacking in the music of Bellini certainly sounds like a manifesto of German Romanticism: ‘no cries of deep, mysterious passion – no conflict – no sense of the universal’ (43). It evokes the passion, turbulence and sense of the infinite praised, for example, in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s account of Beethoven’s music.22 Like Hoffman’s persecuted Kapellmeister Kreisler, Eliot’s chimingly named Klesmer performs amid uncomprehending philistines. A parallel with Hoffmann’s beleaguered hero lends another aspect to Klesmer’s Germanic Romantic heritage. Eliot was familiar with Hoffmann’s work, and his stories, many of them translated by Carlyle, enjoyed considerable popularity in Britain.23 There are numerous parallels between Julius Klesmer and Johannes Kreisler apart from their shared initials and the assonance of their names. After suffering Gwendolen’s lamentable singing, Klesmer plays his own set of variations (43). Kreisler is ‘content to play the piano for hours, elaborating the most curious themes’.24 In the story ‘Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler’s Musical Sorrows’, he plays Bach’s Goldberg Variations, adding his own inspired improvisation. This follows an occasion when the daughters of his patrons have been persuaded to sing with considerably more feigned reluctance and distressing effect than Gwendolen. ‘Although she often sang a quarter of a tone flatter than the piano’, he writes of one of them, ‘she had such a pretty little face and such rosy lips that in the end one could put up

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with it’.25 Like Klesmer in Catherine Arrowpoint, Kreisler finds one truly musical young woman. Catherine Arrowpoint is ‘a thorough musician, and has a soul with more ears to it than you will often get in a musician’ (453). More general affinities with elements in Hoffmann’s writing also exist: Hoffmann’s fiction dwelt on the elevation of the artist and aimed merciless satire against the bourgeoisie, their amateurism and their failure to distinguish artistic and commercial value. Today, Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler is probably most frequently associated with Schumann’s Kreisleriana piano cycle. However, Murray Schafer maintains that for the artist, Kreisler rates as ‘the most influential fictional hero of his time’: for he ‘informed the world of the artist’s dreams, torments and hopes’.26 Kreisler became symbolic of the spirit of music. Brahms was to style himself ‘Johannes Kreisler Jnr’. Kreisler, Schafer notes, is the ‘archetype of a new social order in which musicians are distinguished from dilettantes and true musicians disinherited from society’.27 Kreisler was conceived before the days when such universally worshipped musical heroes as Liszt or Mendelssohn were proclaimed. Nevertheless, there are analogies between Hoffmann’s account of Kreisler’s idealist spirit clashing with German bourgeois society and Eliot’s view of near contemporary Britain. Like his successor, Kreisler is given to public pronouncements on the state of musical culture: ‘true Italian music has disappeared’, he proclaims one day – a judgement paralleled in Klesmer’s disparagement of Bellini.28 Similarly proud and insolent in the face of bourgeois obtuseness, Kreisler’s behaviour is always extravagant. When happy, ‘roguish irony spice[s] his conversation’; at other times he is given to ‘bizarre outbursts’.29 ‘What is it that rustles so miraculously, so strangely around me?’ he exclaims above a chord of A flat major on the piano.30 Confounding Bult, Klesmer’s ‘mysterious wind-like rush backwards and forwards on the piano’ as he proclaims ‘I am the wandering Jew’ is an especially Kreisler-like antic (224). Whatever echoes there may be in Klesmer’s playing of Eliot’s grave account of Liszt quoted above, a Hoffmannesque element has also crept into his characterisation. One could hardly claim that ‘There was nothing strange or excessive about [Klesmer’s] manner’.31 Klesmer’s behaviour and appearance have an element of the grotesque which is central to Hoffmann’s portrayal of Kreisler. Eliot does not shy away either from occasional gentle satire on Klesmer’s lofty Romantic status (and the obfuscating tendencies of German thought in general) as when, having dismissed Bellini’s degenerative melody, his own composition is described as ‘an extensive commentary on some melodic ideas not too grossly evident’ (43).32

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Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Klesmer’s appearance is at odds with the ‘perfect nullity of face and perfect tailoring’ of English gentlemen (92). His animated speech and un-English melodramatic gestures disturb also. Obviously, Klesmer is not as extreme a Romantic portrait as is Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister with his morbid hypersensitivity and incipient madness. Whereas the unhappy genius Kreisler appears, according to his friends, to be a failed experiment of nature, Klesmer is ‘one whom nature seemed to have first made generously and then to have added music as a dominant power’ (222).33 Eliot incorporates some of the enhanced stature of recent German musicians into her portrait of Klesmer. He seems a Kreisler figure appropriated into her more polemical narrative and given heroic stature and considerable powers of chastisement. I return to these Hoffmannesque aspects of Klesmer’s portrayal in the last part of my discussion of Daniel Deronda. Meanwhile, Klesmer’s eloquence against ‘the lack of idealism in English politics, which left all mutuality between distant races to be determined simply by the need of a market’ surprises Mr Bult, who has ‘hardly regarded [Klesmer] in the light of a serious human being who ought to have a vote’ (223). Klesmer’s objection to being labelled a ‘mere’ musician adds a protest against the commodification of art and the artist to his claims for their equal status with legislators. Klesmer’s tirade at Bult against the domination of market values in British society also implicitly condemns the commodifications of the marriage market. It follows an account of Bult’s commercial credentials as an appropriate suitor for the heiress Catherine Arrowpoint who ‘did not mind Miss Arrowpoint’s addiction to music any more than her probable expenses in antique lace’ (223).34 Klesmer nevertheless relies on the patronage of Mr Arrowpoint’s commercially acquired wealth and Eliot’s opposition of commercial and artistic value has been described by Deirdre David as hypocritical.35 It is certainly complex. There is clearly a tension inherent in the reliance of artists upon the materialist ethos they purport to reform. In this respect, the composer-musician provides an analogue for the novelist. Musical production, like literary production, was reshaped in the nineteenth century by changes in printing and marketing. It was thus subject to the same disjunctions arising from the increased ideological opposition between art and commerce that emerged even as closer material relationships between them were established.36 Klesmer’s outburst focuses on the reduction of artistic patronage to the same level as material purchase rather than on the fact that the need for professional remuneration makes artistic production to some extent dependent on commerce. The reordering of priorities which he

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demands cannot realistically entail the abandonment of all commercial activity. A degree of irony notwithstanding, the novel maintains a careful distinction between enlightened patronage, such as Klesmer exercises after his marriage, and the ignorant purchase of artistic talent to create a fashionable show. Catherine Arrowpoint affirms the reforming role to be played by artistic genius in establishing new social standards. To her mother’s criticism that it is not ‘en règle’ to bring someone so outside their set as Klesmer to an archery party, she replies that ‘Genius itself is not en règle; it comes into the world to make new rules’ (94). When her forthcoming marriage to Klesmer is discussed, the view is expressed by a member of the established aristocracy that there is not really any misalliance since ‘there’s no blood on any side’ (379). Daniel retorts that ‘If there were any mésalliance in the case, I should say it was on Klesmer’s side’, so proposing artistic rather than traditional criteria for nobility and affirming Klesmer as the representative of a more valuable ‘aristocracy’ than that of the society which hires him.37 Klesmer’s illustrious heritage lends weight to his criticism of English culture. When Gwendolen considers a professional musical or stage career, Klesmer’s advice to her combines eulogy of the artistic vocation with blistering criticism of the standards of education and application accepted in upper-class society. The ‘life of the true artist . . . is out of reach of any but choice organizations’ (236). Klesmer also stresses the ‘arduous unceasing work’ undergone by those ‘natures framed to love perfection and to labour for it’ (236). ‘Genius’, he concludes, ‘at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline’ (238). The inexacting standards which the upper classes, who are educated for ease, expect of themselves in artistic production – and by extension in public duty – leads Gwendolen to imagine that because her talents are admired from ‘the drawing-room standpunkt’ (237), she can don the life of an artist ‘as a livery’ rather than awaiting honour ‘from the inward vocation and the hard-won achievement’ of the committed professional (236). Eliot underlines this theme with a sardonic narrative comment on the arrogance of upper-class amateurism. Gwendolen, she observes, had moved in a society where everything, from low arithmetic to high art, is of the amateur kind politely supposed to fall short of perfection only because gentlem[e]n[38] and ladies are not obliged to do more than they like – otherwise they would probably give forth abler writings and show themselves more commanding artists than any the world is at present obliged to put up with. (244)

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Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

A further example of this attitude is provided by Gwendolen’s uncle ‘who would have sung finely if his time had not been too much taken up by graver matters’ (30). The provincial nature of these weighty concerns is emphasised by Mr Gascoigne’s ‘easy, pleasantly confident tone, which made the world in general seem a very manageable place of residence’ (28). Klesmer’s disparagement of Gwendolen’s musical education is of course also a specific criticism of the narrow training and social function of women in upper-class society. Until her encounter with Klesmer unsettles her confidence, leaving her ‘with a sinking of heart at the sudden width of horizon opened around her small musical performance’ (43), Gwendolen’s complacency rests largely on the fact that ‘About her French and music, the two justifying accomplishments of a young lady, she felt no ground for uneasiness’ (34–5). Eliot is repeatedly ironic about how helpless this education leaves her heroine in the face of ‘the musical magus who had so suddenly widened her horizon’ (46). The ‘musical magus’ Klesmer’s damning judgement of Bellini is one of a host of operatic references which, together with other theatrical allusions in the novel, are set against the ‘larger’ music which he advocates. Eliot creates several characters, other than Gwendolen, whose

Figure 4.1 Recital in an aristocratic home, Belgravia, London, 1872. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library.

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musicality makes them emblematic of the state of their culture. Klesmer describes Lush, for example, as ‘an amateur . . . too fond of Meyerbeer and Scribe – too fond of the mechanical-dramatic’ (105). Meyerbeer and Scribe are the composer and librettist criticised for their preoccupation with mere dramatic effect in Eliot’s article on Wagner, whom, by contrast, she praised for his belief that dramatic action should arise naturally from character.39 Her repeated portrayal of Lush as the ‘amateur too fond of Meyerbeer’ (518) is thus a foil to Klesmer’s Wagnerian status. Lush’s self-indulgent opportunism is associated with the dilettante musicianship which, in Klesmer’s speeches, serves as an analogy for the malaise of the British ruling classes. Lush is also connected with the even more debased form of opera than Meyerbeer’s: the opera buffa.40 The moral sloth of this ‘amateur of luxury and music’ (262) is summed up by way in which he regards everything which does not hinder ‘his particular pleasures’ as merely ‘ranking with the last murder and the last opera buffa, under the head of things to talk about’ (556–7). Eliot’s opposition in Daniel Deronda of the superficial dramatic forms of popular opera and authentically expressive music suggests a degree of continuity in her ideas about aesthetic value from the time of her early essays. In her article on Riehl, Eliot had famously maintained that fiction must aspire to standards higher than the creation of ‘opera peasants’.41 In Daniel Deronda she employs an analogy with the kind of opera Klesmer despises, and Lush enjoys, to emphasise that Gwendolen’s imagined knowledge of life, gleaned largely through novels and plays, leaves her singularly ill-prepared for encountering real immorality: Is that surprising? It is to be believed that attendance at the opéra bouffe in the present day would not leave men’s minds entirely without shock, if the manners observed there with some applause were suddenly to start up in their own families . . . What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! (140) Commentators on Eliot’s frequent reference to opera to denote theatrical artificiality have tended to see this as expressive of a lingering evangelical hostility towards the form.42 However, whilst persistent in criticising the dramatic shortcomings of much opera, Eliot was a great enthusiast for opera in general: ‘The opera is a great, great product’, she exclaimed in 1863 in a letter to Sara Hennell, ‘ – pity we can’t always have fine Weltgeschich[t]liche dramatic motives wedded with fine music,

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Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

instead of trivialities or hideousness’.43 Clearly certain operatic and theatrical references are used in the novel to oppose artificiality with worthwhile music and genuine expression, but Eliot uses operatic references with positive as well as negative connotations, as for example in her allusions to the air from Handel’s Rinaldo that forms part of Mirah’s repertoire (675, 677). In Daniel Deronda, the Meyrick women’s exemplary way of life includes the ‘grand treat of opera going (to the gallery) when Hans came home on a visit’ (180). Eliot’s own ‘theatrical’ employment of musical allusion also signals authentic emotional exchange, as when Klesmer himself sends ‘a storm through the piano’ to communicate his feelings for Catherine Arrowpoint, subsequently punctuating their conversation with ‘a melody which he had set to Heine’s “Ich Hab’ dich geliebet und liebe dich noch”’ (222, 225). Deronda and Mirah’s first meeting is effected via a fragment of Rossini’s Otello (171). The aesthetic hierarchies which Eliot constructs in the novel have often preoccupied those few critics specifically interested in her use of music. However, to give an account only of the opposition between different musical values is to miss much of the richness of Eliot’s use of musical allusion. Whilst Eliot’s comment on the relationship of opera to life in Daniel Deronda recalls the caveat in her Riehl article on the standards to be aspired to by the arts, especially her own, we see also Eliot’s considerable development of her conceptions of sympathy and realism since her early writing. In The Mill on the Floss and especially in Daniel Deronda, there is an ever greater concentration on psychological, rather than social ‘realism’. This shift is reflected in the greater emphasis on music than on painting in Daniel Deronda. Eliot’s exploitation of operatic analogy and other vocal performance, whether to satirise the artificiality of social theatre or as a means of dramatising genuine feeling and extraordinary levels of sympathetic communication, makes Daniel Deronda the most persistently ‘operatic’ of her novels.44 Opera is used both to explore issues of performance and to create moments of high drama in the text. Eliot mobilises the allusions which she has attached to different characters to generate formal analogies with different types of opera. Gwendolen is established as a soprano with decided theatrical aspirations at the beginning of the novel. She initially regards the world as a series of backdrops against which she can affect striking attitudes, such as St Cecilia at the organ on her arrival at Offendene, and later as Hermione in a theatrical tableau where music awakens her from her impressive statue pose (22, 53–4). Gwendolen’s preoccupation with appearance, which she shares with most of her class, is amongst the objects of Klesmer’s deflating criticism: ‘It is always

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acceptable to see you sing’ (42) (my italics). Her voice is compared with Jenny Lind’s, whose singing the Leweses were known not to admire (41).45 She plays opposite Grandcourt, similarly preoccupied with outward form. When commissioning Lush to hire a musician, Grandcourt insists that he should not be eccentric in appearance (112). Later in the novel, he forbids Gwendolen to take singing lessons on the grounds that she should not make herself ridiculous in public (546). Hans Meyrick says of Grandcourt, ‘He has the sort of handsome physique that the Duke ought to have in Lucrezia Borgia – if it could go with a fine baritone, which it can’t’ (525). This remark serves the dual purpose of emphasising Grandcourt’s lack of musicality, whilst nonetheless portraying him as an operatic character of the ‘mechanical dramatic’ kind. Eliot hints earlier at an analogy with a sinister opera character when describing Grandcourt speaking ‘in an adagio of utter indifference’ (282). Other theatrical and musical allusions employed to portray Grandcourt include Lush’s view of him as the ‘hero of a modern French drama, whose sudden start into moral splendour after much lying and meanness, leaves you little confidence as to any part of his career that may follow the fall of the curtain’ and the occasion where he accuses Grandcourt of ‘acting like the hero of a ballad, and making yourself absurd’ (261, 264). Meyrick’s reference to Lucrezia Borgia gives Grandcourt a part in the same kind of suspect musical drama as Lush.46 He renews his baritone comparison to sum up Grandcourt after his death: ‘Who can be fond of a jealous baritone, with freezing glances, always singing asides? – that was the husband’s rôle, depend upon it’ (676). Grandcourt’s moral and emotional bankruptcy in both private and public life is conveyed by his expressionless speaking voice and by his disdain for those ‘wanting to howl litanies’ of idealistic commitment (388). Deronda observes that Grandcourt is someone who ‘generally observes the forms; but he doesn’t listen much’ (403). Grandcourt has ‘two remarkably different voices’, both of them sinister: ‘a superficial interrupted drawl suggestive chiefly of languor and ennui’ and ‘subdued, inward, yet distinct tones’, which his factotum Lush has ‘long been used to recognise as the expression of a peremptory will’ (111–12). The richness of Deronda’s speaking voice highlights the contrast with Grandcourt, as it would do if he were a new character appearing on the opera stage: ‘His voice, heard now for the first time, was to Grandcourt’s toneless drawl, which had been in her ears every day, as the deep notes of a violoncello to the broken discourse of poultry and other lazy gentry in the afternoon sunshine’ (303). Unlike Grandcourt, Deronda possesses a genuine baritone voice, as once did Mordecai, the Jewish visionary

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Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

whose role Deronda inherits (170, 445). Interestingly, Eliot elaborates the musical contrast between Deronda and Grandcourt to make a brief but telling comment on contemporary colonial exploitation. The setting of this central part of the novel is contemporary with the controversy that divided British intellectuals following Governor Eyre’s brutal supression of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. Reactions to this event accentuated debates about the aftermath of slavery and were also highly expressive of contemporary political concerns and class anxieties within Britain, as Eliot’s satirical account of lunchtime conversation at Diplow makes plain (304). Between Grandcourt and Deronda, the conversation includes an important musical dimension. Having been established as discordant farmyard poultry to Deronda’s violoncello, Grandcourt describes the ‘Jamaican negro’ as ‘a beastly sort of baptist Caliban’ (303). Daniel’s retort is significantly couched in musical terms: ‘Deronda said he had always felt a little with Caliban, who naturally had his own point of view and could sing a good song’ (303–4). This brief exchange illustrates the way in which music is engaged in countless oblique, fleeting connections between different thematic strands in the novel. Deronda’s remark combines a specific comment on contemporary events in the West Indies with a more general reservation about assumptions of cultural superiority. Whilst ideas of cultural evolution were vital to Eliot’s thoughts on music, she shows no indication of sharing Spencer’s anthropological views on the music of other races. If anything, the reverse is suggested in Daniel Deronda by Deronda’s sympathy for Caliban – here representative of rebellious contemporary West Indians. Eliot neatly subverts Grandcourt’s attempt, representative of much contemporary comment on the West Indian question, to appropriate Shakespearian allusion to dehumanise black West Indians. This subversion is reinforced by reminding readers that Caliban possesses the quintessentially ‘civilised’ characteristic of musicality – which Grandcourt himself manifestly lacks. Meyrick’s suggestion that society can be seen as an operatic–theatrical display, where Gwendolen plays the role of a ‘Vandyke duchess’ and her husband is a ‘jealous baritone’, draws explicit attention to the satirical operatic and theatrical analogies which Eliot develops in her novel (519, 676). These are also highlighted by Mirah’s vision of fashionable society in theatrical terms: ‘It was like a new kind of stage-experience to her to be close to genuine grand ladies with genuine brilliants and complexions’ (521). Mirah initially sees her first singing engagement as part of the social ‘theatre’ and proposes to appear in an old black dress which ‘would be thought a very good stage-dress for me . . . in a part where

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I was to come on as a poor Jewess and sing to fashionable Christians’ (455). The Meyricks persuade her that ‘it looks a little too theatrical’ and that she should avoid the appearance of playing ‘a rôle of the poor Jewess’ (456). The role would of course be genuine enough. Ironically, Mirah is a skilled performer who hates acting. She comments on the inadequacy of theatre to express emotional conflict: ‘Acting is slow and poor to what we go through within’ (606). The public conditions inherent in professional musical performance entail a problematic but inevitable conjunction of authentic artistic expression and theatrical ‘self-display’. However, Mirah’s singing, ‘the melody . . . simply an effect of the emotion’, is set apart from the theatrical performances of other female musicians in the novel (524). Mirah is also distinguished by the repertoire she sings, which, with the exception of an aria by Rossini, generally excludes grand Italian opera in favour of predominantly Germanic composers and Jewish devotional music.47 To the extent that Gwendolen is associated with bel canto Bellini, she takes part with Lush and Grandcourt in a lesser social opera against which Mirah, Klesmer and Deronda assume heroic stature. Significant ‘musical’ exchanges, such as those between Gwendolen and Deronda, also parallel the contrast between Klesmer’s ‘larger’ music and the superficial music of Bellini, Meyerbeer and the opera buffa. Against the satirical use of theatrical–musical reference to denote the drama of outward action, Eliot constantly employs musical allusion to dramatise genuine emotional expression and as an analogy for cultural development and personal vocation. Klesmer’s speech to Gwendolen on the theme of artistic ‘vocation’ (236) introduces an issue of central importance in the novel: Gwendolen’s dilemma complements aspects of Deronda’s quest for an inspired course of action. Whilst Deronda is eventually to find a suitable channel for his restless aspirations, Gwendolen, like Dorothea in Middlemarch, represents the more widespread and insoluble problem, particularly for women, of aspiration unmatched by any particular talent or available sphere of action. Klesmer’s use of the term in the context of a singing career draws especially closely on the literal connotations of vocation with voice. A vocation for singing represents a proper calling in general and provides an analogy for other forms of artistic expression, including writing. The novel casts a stringent eye over the issue of authorial vocation. Rosemarie Bodenheimer finds ‘a renewed intensity of criticism concerning the production and circulation of bad literature’ in Eliot’s letters during the periods when she was writing Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.48 Deronda rejects authorship

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as a solution to his indecision about his profession as ‘a vocation which is understood to turn foolish thinking into funds’ (169). Eliot has Rex Gascoigne invoke musical and literary production to suggest that it is better to undertake a useful social role – such as his study of law, than to indulge in dilettante artistic activity: ‘Give me something to do with making the laws, and let who will make the songs . . . I don’t see that law-rubbish is worse than any other sort. It is not so bad as the rubbishy literature that people choke their minds with. It doesn’t make one so dull’ (656–7). Rex Gascoigne echoes Eliot’s conviction – famously expressed in connection with the campaign for better female education – that ‘the deepest disgrace is . . . to do work of any sort badly’.49 The novel frequently merges literal and metaphorical forms of vocation. Eliot heads the chapter which presages Deronda’s influence over Gwendolen’s struggling sense of vocation with a quotation from Walt Whitman: ‘Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow’ (299).50 Deronda represents music to Gwendolen as exemplifying the wider life outside the self with which she needs to engage. After Klesmer’s humiliating criticism of her singing, Gwendolen is nevertheless able to recognise the ‘real inspiration’ in his playing which lifts her above her own concerns, in contrast to the theatrical selfaggrandisement offered by Bellini: Gwendolen, in spite of her wounded egoism, had fulness of nature enough to feel the power of this playing, and it gradually turned her inward sob of mortification into an excitement which lifted her for the moment into a desperate indifference about her own doings. (43) She declares her intention to ‘never sing again’ since she has ‘not talent enough to make it worth while’ (383). Deronda’s response to this is to insist that ‘if you are fond of music, it will always be worth while in private, for your own delight’ (383): For my part . . . people who do anything finely always inspirit me to try . . . I can bear to think my own music not good for much, but the world would be more dismal if I thought music itself not good for much. Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world . . . We should have a poor life of it if we were reduced for all our pleasure to our own performances. (406–7) Klesmer’s injunction to Gwendolen to ‘sing something larger’ is thus the touchstone of her conversations with Deronda, although he also

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prescribes limits to amateur musicianship: ‘A little private imitation of what is good is a sort of private devotion to it, and most of us ought to practise art only in the light of private study – preparation to understand and enjoy what the few can do for us. I think Miss Lapidoth is one of the few’ (407). For the majority, the transcendence of self is to be achieved as sympathetic auditor, ‘singing as a listener’, to quote from Eliot’s 1868 dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy.51 Music is an emblem of the tasks faced by those who, like Deronda and Gwendolen, have ‘to struggle for . . . wisdom’, to find their way in the world without any exceptional gifts to guide them. It stands as a means to spiritual growth – vocation in the religious sense: I take what you said of music for a small example – it answers for all larger things – you will not cultivate it for the sake of a private joy in it. What sort of earth or heaven would hold any spiritual wealth in it for souls pauperized by inaction? . . . The refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something more than our own appetites and vanities. The few may find themselves in it simply by an elevation of feeling; but for us who have to struggle for our wisdom, the higher life must be a region in which the affections are clad with knowledge. (421) Deronda’s prescription is endorsed by the lofty voice of professional idealism when Klesmer echoes his advice to Gwendolen to have singing lessons from Mirah despite having opposed her plans to train for a public career (521).

Female vocation Musical vocation clearly has a particular significance in relation to the female characters in Daniel Deronda. Through parallels and contrasts between the musicianship of Gwendolen, Catherine Arrowpoint, Mirah and the Princess, Eliot scrutinises female artistic activity and contemplates the extent of women’s potential role in cultural life. She examines tensions between ideals of femininity and the needs of the female artist, and so comments on the wider theme of conflicts between women’s individual aspirations and their social roles. The fundamental contrasts between the different portraits of female musicianship in the novel are clear. Gwendolen’s superficial musical accomplishment is set against Mirah’s thoroughly professional attitude and training. Both Gwendolen

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and the Princess’s concern for theatrical effect and love of praise are contrasted with Mirah’s attitude to her art. Eliot’s portrayals of these musical women convey anxiety both about women’s lack of vocational opportunity and about whether women are commodified and corrupted by public achievement. Gwendolen defends her eventual desire to take lessons from Mirah by recourse to the argument, which sometimes appeared in contemporary defences of female musicianship, that music provides some compensation for the limitations on women’s existence.52 Grandcourt’s squashing of her attempt is emblematic of the spiritual deprivation forced upon her. Not only has her musical education left her insufficiently equipped to earn her independence but, following her marriage, ‘the husband to whom she felt that she had sold herself’ deprives her of more than musical consolation (623). Grandcourt prevents her from following Deronda’s prescription for personal growth and silences the crucial power of utterance which music represents for women.53 Having been at last persuaded to sing, Gwendolen is forbidden to do so. Her opportunities to talk to Deronda are also circumscribed. Their snatched discussions of music symbolise her need to overcome the silence imposed upon her as well as to expand her sympathies. Eliot returns to issues which she had explored in her impassioned portrayal of the singer in her 1870 poem ‘Armgart’. Gwendolen’s silent rage in the chapter where Grandcourt refuses her request to have singing lessons and then has Lush reveal the contents of his will parallels Armgart’s impotent fury after the loss of her voice. The ‘honeycomb[ed] . . . labyrinth’ through which Gwendolen’s anger runs without outlet recalls the ‘lava-mud to crust and bury me, / Yet hold me living in a deep, deep tomb, / Crying unheard for ever!’ which results from the failed ‘cure’ for Armgart’s failing voice (560).54 For Gwendolen, ‘her truthfulness and sense of justice’ are ‘throttled into silence’ by the man who has purchased them (623). Repressed thought becomes the ‘singing in her own ears’ of potential madness (560).55 This intimates a potential eruption of fury such as Armgart imagines when she . . . often wonders what her life had been Without that voice for channel to her soul She says, it must have leaped through all her limbs – Made her a Maenad – made her snatch a brand And fire some forest, that her rage might mount In crashing roaring flames through half a land, Leaving her still and patient for a while.56

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Gwendolen’s fear of the murderous desires which her oppression breeds, and which are to be realised in Grandcourt’s drowning, casts a different light on her earlier flippant admiration for the ‘desperate actions’ of the tragic heroines who are the ‘great poetic criminals’ of the theatre (48–9). It illustrates the way in which satirical references to the superficially dramatic are repeatedly transposed into a psychologically expressive register in Daniel Deronda. Gwendolen’s theatrical aspirations undergo a macabre transformation in her genuinely murderous emotion which takes shape in an inaudible internal music of thought and suppressed utterance. Drama certainly arises naturally out of character here as Eliot had maintained it should do in opera.57 Eliot’s opposition of silencing and giving voice indicates a further dimension to Klesmer’s comments about ‘inward vocation’ (236). It recalls Armgart’s pity for the voiceless woman which follows her evocation of maenad fury: ‘Poor wretch!’ she says, of any murderess – ‘The world was cruel, and she could not sing: I carry my revenges in my throat.’58 Given that the alternative for Gwendolen, ‘throttled into silence’, is murder, singing emerges as a more legitimate outlet of otherwise destructive feminine rage (623).59 This suggests both a radical concern with female expression and a more conventional anxiety about uncontrolled feminine ‘hysteria’. Eliot’s portraits of musical women in Daniel Deronda provide an extended exploration of the troubling subject of woman’s ‘nature’ in which the issue of women’s creative fulfilment comes up against questions about the proper spheres for female activity. Music’s ambivalent status makes it an especially appropriate context and metaphor for exploring the tensions between ideals of female achievement and ‘feminine’ behaviour. Eliot’s portrayal of Mirah can be seen as an uncomfortable attempt to harmonise aesthetic and feminine ideals. Her attitude towards having Klesmer judge her singing is portrayed as both modest and professional. She is used to the ‘unceasing work and . . . uncertain praise’ of the artist’s life which Klesmer tries to explain to Gwendolen (236): ‘I have been used to be frowned at and not praised’ (436). Brought up in the theatre, Mirah also has an instinctive distaste for that way of life in contrast to her early domestic memories: ‘the clapping and all the sounds of the theatre were hateful to me; and I never liked the praise I had, because it seemed all very hard and unloving: I missed the love

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and the trust I had been born into’ (197). She particularly despises the hypocrisy of ‘women looking good and gentle on the stage, and saying good things as if they felt them, and directly after I saw them with coarse, ugly manners’ (197). Deronda describes Mirah’s musicianship as offering a much needed ‘model of feminine singing’ (406). This is in contrast to the acerbic Lady Pentreath’s comment that ‘many of our girls nowadays want lessons not to sing’ (407). However, whilst Deronda advocates a better standard of expression, rather than silence, Mirah’s portrayal manifests a high level of anxiety over female performance. As great an emphasis is placed on Mirah’s feminine as on her professional credentials. She is clearly presented as offering a ‘good model’ not just of female artistry, but of femininity in general. The issue of commodification has double relevance in relation to the female artist where the exploitation of the artist and the objectification of woman coincide. Mirah’s account of the way in which her singing has been exploited echoes Klesmer’s and Daniel’s protests against the view of the musician as ‘a wonderful toy’ or as ‘puppets . . . who live in a box and look out on the world only when it is gaping for amusement’ (155, 224). Her father, she recalls, ‘boasted of me, and set me to sing for show at any minute, as if I had been a musical box’ (196). She is conscious of the way in which she is commodified by his attitude. After her voice has been declared unsuitable for an operatic career, she recognises that ‘his wishing me to sing the greatest music, and parts in grand operas, was only wishing for what would fetch the greatest price’ (200). On board their ship from New York to Hamburg, Mirah overhears a passenger describing her father as ‘one of those clever Jews – a rascal, I shouldn’t wonder’, adding, ‘I wonder what market he means that daughter for’ (199). When her father subsequently tries to sell her as a mistress to a lecherous count, the novel makes a clear link between exploitation in the theatrical market-place and prostitution (202). In Lady Mallinger’s drawing room, where Mirah is to sing, Lady Pentreath arouses Deronda’s anger by assuming that Mirah’s readiness to perform in public must make her modesty feigned: ‘Well, your Jewess is pretty – there’s no denying that. But where is her Jewish impudence? She looks as demure as a nun. I suppose she learned that on the stage’ (519). The irony of the last part of this comment is emphasised by Eliot’s theatrical descriptions of English upper-class society and the way in which Mirah herself sees the society for which she is singing in theatrical terms (517, 521). Deronda is described as

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As Eliot reminds us, awareness of such commodifying attitudes towards musicians lay behind Deronda’s hostile reaction as a child when asked whether he would like to become a professional singer. Painfully conscious of his uncertain birth, he knows that a musical career is ‘not thought of among possible destinations for the sons of English gentlemen’ and therefore in ‘spite of his musical gift, he set himself bitterly against the notion of being dressed up to sing before all those fine people who would not care about him except as a wonderful toy’ (154–5). Similar perils in musical performance, further complicated by her gender, now exercise his anxieties on Mirah’s behalf. In ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’, Eliot had already created a telling portrayal of a musically gifted outsider kept as the pet of her adoptive family.60 In Deronda’s own case, his adoptive social position would prevent his even attaining the status of an entirely professional musician. If this was no proper career for a gentleman, he could only have exercised his musical skill as an adornment in the fashion derided by both Klesmer and the narrator (237, 244). As a boy-singer, the context for his musical performance is identical to that in which most female musical performance takes place. This is one of the many respects in which Deronda’s vocational ordeals initially parallel more typically feminine experience. His empathy with Mirah marks another way in which Deronda is feminised in the novel. As Gwendolen makes her entrance at Lady Mallinger’s musical party, Deronda is described as feeling a momentary hostility towards her, ‘a feeling something like class animosity’ (519). The grandeur of her appearance makes Gwendolen the representative of the society which exploits women like Mirah: the woman as spectator connives in the commodification of the female artist. Yet this also is ironic. We know that Gwendolen herself has become a commodity in a life which is both unproductive and unhappy. Trapped in her own elegantly superficial role on the social stage, she envies Mirah the position of the struggling artist which she has not the talent or training to achieve: ‘it had been her ambition to stand as the “little Jewess” was standing, and survey a grand audience from the higher rank of her talent . . . Poor Gwendolen . . . had wanted to be a struggling artist herself’ (518, 522).

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beginning to feel on Mirah’s behalf something of what he had felt for himself in his seraphic boyish time, when Sir Hugo asked him if he would like to be a great singer – an indignant dislike to her being remarked on in a free and easy way, as if she were an imported commodity disdainfully paid for by the fashionable public. (519)

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Her exchanges with Klesmer have made it plain that Gwendolen has been equipped insufficiently for anything but the marriage market and that none of her ambitious proposals for independence will afford escape. Klesmer warns her about how the world sneers at untrained beauties who are considered to have embarked upon acting careers not from love of art, but in the hope of finding husbands (241). Ironically, Gwendolen herself speculates bitterly that Klesmer probably now considers her to have entered an appropriate way of life by having married and become ‘one of the ordinary crowd in silk and gems’ (518). In society’s eyes, she is indeed ‘on the right road now’, having sought the fate which Mirah evaded when she forestalled her father’s attempts to sell her to the dissolute Count. Gwendolen has allowed herself to be sold, with her uncle’s complicity, to a man known to have a disreputable past (518). This selling in marriage has previously aroused Deronda’s indignation on Gwendolen’s behalf (403).61 In music Gwendolen has achieved only the ornamental level of proficiency considered a part of the necessary plumage for attracting a mate (as exemplified in the obtuse praise of her croquet-besotted admirer). Gwendolen has been, if anything, more irredeemably commodified than has ‘the little Jewess’ by her paying public. Moreover, she has been silenced. Meanwhile, Deronda’s sense that the commodification of her artistic talent is responsible ‘for the undervaluing of Mirah as a woman’ raises complex issues (519). In Lady Pentreath’s comment on Mirah’s appearance, the novel makes the point, scornfully put by Armgart, that no woman appearing in public can escape being assessed as woman first, rather than as artist: The women whispered, ‘not a pretty face!’ The men, ‘Well, well, a goodly length of limb’: . . . – It were all the same Were I the Virgin Mother and my stage The opening heavens at the Judgement-day: Gossips would peep, jog elbows, rate the price Of such a woman in the social mart.62 Deronda’s joint disgust at the commodification of women by the marriage market and by the public consumption of artistic talent severely restricts the scope for their participation in artistic and public life. Whilst professional standards are worth aspiring to, the issue of a performing career for women is, to say the least, problematic. Professional independence and artistic dedication seem fully acceptable

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for women only within a very limited sphere, such as Mirah’s teaching and her barely admissible performances at private entertainments. Mirah’s career is in many respects one which accords closely with the restrictive domestic ideologies outlined in Chapter 2. Nevertheless, through Mirah and the Meyricks, Eliot explores the possibilities for respectable independence for women. Mirah’s desire for a decorous means of independence concurs with the ideals by which the women of the Meyrick family live. Their house is described as a cultured retreat, where the only objects of value are the piano and a collection of prints (179–80). They combine ideals of femininity with financial independence, earning sufficient through their teaching, drawing and sewing – activities traditionally open to women – to free their brother from the necessity of keeping them. Mirah is as keen as Mrs Meyrick is that she should also become self-supporting (207, 333). The assertion that women’s wish to be independent, albeit within narrow limits, demands respect, goes some way towards questioning domestic ideals of womanhood. Although their scope of activity is restricted, the emphasis on the dignity of the Meyricks’ way of life acknowledges the importance of material independence for women and makes it clear that, unlike the more fashionable women for whom they work, the Meyricks avoid being commodified. The repeated references to Mirah’s ability to earn her living through her singing and teaching recall Gaskell’s depiction of the crucial independence which Margaret’s musical talent earns her in Mary Barton (344, 406, 453, 454, 687).63 Eliot appropriates feminine ideals to proclaim the propriety of potentially radical ideas. It was no mean feat after all to portray a trained singer, who had acted on the public stage, as the epitome of feminine respectability, and it is hard to imagine how else Eliot could have done this than to make Mirah hate acting. In another important area, that of religion, Eliot is exploiting feminine ideals to claim respectability for a faith that did not accord with contemporary ideals of femininity, which generally assumed a specifically Christian mission for womankind. However, her portrayal of female musicians in Daniel Deronda undeniably suggests a highly equivocal attitude towards female public achievement. From Mirah’s first appearance in the novel, Eliot stresses that her musical proficiency and professional attitude to her work are of a part with a voice and personality which conform to conventional ideals of femininity. Her voice is repeatedly defined as unsuitable for public display: She was on the stage at Vienna; but she wants to leave that life, and maintain herself by teaching . . . Her voice was too weak. It is a deli-

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Her teacher in Vienna is recalled as commanding: ‘Don’t strain it further: it will never do for the public: – it is gold, but a thread of gold dust’ (199). Klesmer affirms this, pronouncing: Not for great tasks. No high roofs. We are no skylarks. We must be modest . . . I would not advise – I would not further your singing in any larger space than a private drawing-room. But you will do there. And here in London that is one of the best careers open. (452–3) Mirah herself is perfectly in accord with this, replying ‘I would rather get my bread in that way than by anything more public’ (453). In addition to its modesty, the softness of her voice, which makes Mab Meyrick think of Mirah as a nightingale, is suggestive of a sympathetic feminine nature: ‘Her voice is just perfect, not loud and strong, but searching and melting, like the thoughts of what has been’ (333). Mirah’s refusal to combine art with spectacle is also true to conventional ideals of woman’s mission. As with Dinah Morris and Dorothea Brooke, her predecessors in Eliot’s fiction, Mirah’s voice provides an analogue for the ‘womanliness’ of her nature. In Adam Bede, Eliot emphasises the lack of theatricality in Dinah’s preaching and the ‘total absence of self-consciousness in her demeanour’.65 Her audience is captivated ‘by the charm of Dinah’s mellow treble tones, which had a variety of modulation like that of a fine instrument touched with the unconscious skill of musical instinct’. 66 In Middlemarch, Dorothea’s beautiful speaking voice is notable for ‘The searching tenderness of her woman’s tones’.67 Lydgate is haunted by ‘the voice of deep-souled womanhood’ in her speech.68 Mirah is both ideal artist and ideal woman. Eschewing self-conscious and theatrical performance but singing ‘Per pietà non dirmi addio’69 ‘with that wonderful, searching quality of subdued song in which the melody seems simply an effect of the emotion’, she is a true artist achieving unmediated expression of her natural gift according to the Romantic ideal: an ideal coinciding here with the attributes of natural womanliness (524). For all Klesmer’s emphasis on professional training, this is of secondary importance to ‘instinct’ in Mirah’s case where ‘you might imagine her singing all came by nature’ (406). Though no soaring skylark, the nightingale too has an ‘unpremeditated art’70 which, when she first sings to Deronda, is at one with the voice of domestic affection:

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cious voice for a room . . . I imagine she would not object to sing at private parties or concerts. (406)64

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So far was this performance from any hint of the ‘self-display’ condemned both in fiction and advice literature that ‘Deronda began by looking at her, but felt himself presently covering his eyes with his hand, wanting to seclude the melody in darkness’ (344). The Jewish hymn which Mirah remembers her mother singing ends the performance on a sacred and domestic note, and ‘the voice in which she gave it forth had gathered even a sweeter, more cooing tenderness than was heard in her other songs’ (345). The guiding force in her life of early domestic memories, paramount amongst which is this Hebrew hymn, recalls the advice journal accounts discussed in Chapter 2, where the memory of maternal hymn singing is the influence which determines sons to keep to righteous paths (194). When she first sings to Klesmer, Mirah follows Leopardi’s patriotic ode with the songs of Gretchen – that epitome of tender femininity – from Goethe’s Faust. ‘Nothing in all literature’, wrote Cross of Eliot, ‘moved her more than the pathetic situation and the whole character of Gretchen. It touched her more than anything in Shakespeare’.72 Ultimately Mirah realises the position of domestic influence advocated by the Graf in ‘Armgart’ who infuriates the singer by regarding her voice as subject to her femininity. ‘I own / the magic of your nature given art / As sweetest effluence of your womanhood’, he asserts, whilst advocating that Armgart would achieve a state of ‘purer glory throned / As woman only’: . .. holding all your art As attribute to that dear sovereignty – Concentrating your power in home delights Which penetrate and purify the world.73 Whilst Mirah’s voice is of conveniently domestic proportions and is accompanied by a submissive nature (207), the Princess follows her poetic model Armgart, a disturbing portrait of the consequences of a less amenable kind of female genius. The Princess and Armgart both berate the fallacy of not according women’s artistic genius the same right of fulfilment as that of men. Armgart pours scorn on the notion that she should domesticate her talent: ‘What! leave the opera with my part

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She sang Beethoven’s ‘Per pietà non dirmi addio’, with a subdued but searching pathos which had that essential of perfect singing, the making one oblivious of art or manner, and only possessing one with the song. It was the sort of voice that gives the impression of being meant like a bird’s wooing for an audience near and beloved. (344)71

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illsung / While I was warbling in a drawing-room? / Sing in the chimney-corner to inspire / My husband reading news?’.74 She argues fiercely that genius and ambition are as natural to women as they are to men. Society can accommodate the ‘nightingale’ more happily than the ‘skylark’. Moreover, a persistent anxiety for Eliot herself seems to be that the public acclaim attendant on the singer’s success is a potentially corrupting influence (333, 452–3). The wish for worldly recognition is regarded by the mentor musicians Klesmer, and Leo in ‘Armgart’, as being at odds with true artistry.75 The claim for acknowledged statesmanhood belongs to the male composer, not, it seems, to the female performer – nor even to the female composer (224). (Catherine Klesmer’s is strictly a supporting role, although she is a superb musician in her own right and composes as well (41, 225).) Instead, the female artist’s ambitions seem likely to confer her with a siren-like status unless channelled into a redemptive teaching role as preferred by Mirah, and ultimately by Armgart also.76 Her portraits of professional female musicians clearly have implications for Eliot’s own position as a successful woman writer. The singer’s genius, her powers of expression and her ability to move her audience provide a positive analogy for the author. Rosemarie Bodenheimer comments that ‘it marks an important difference that her stage figures are not actresses, but musicians: at the heart of their performance lies an art that is valued not less, but more, than the art of writing’.77 On the negative side, reservations about public performance suggest the writer’s misgivings about the public ‘prostitution’ of her poetic talent.78 Eliot’s own publishing success prompts analogies with the Princess rather than with Mirah. Her novel suggests a concern that the corrupting influence of the writer/singer’s success may distance her from ordinary experience, undermining the sympathetic power of her performance, as well as commodifying the singer herself. ‘Armgart’ explores the ambivalent experience of the performing female musician. At the moment of artistic ecstasy in which she hears the first applause, Armgart thinks of herself as the vehicle of spiritual enrichment ‘whose only self / Was consciousness of glory wide-diffused, / Music, life, power – I moving in the midst / With a sublime necessity of good’.79 However there inevitably follows the prima donna’s love of public recognition, an innate peril in the ‘queenly work that paid itself / And yet was overpaid with men’s applause’.80 This egoistic entrapment and the danger that the successful artist may put herself beyond ordinary human claims and sympathies are in Armgart’s case overcome only by the loss of her voice.

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experience immediately passed into drama and she acted her own emotions . . . she felt – that is, her mind went through – all the more, but with a difference: each nucleus of pain or pleasure had a deep atmosphere of the excitement or spiritual intoxication which at once exalts and deadens. (586) Joseph Litvak sees musical allusion as part of Eliot’s mission to poeticise the theatrical in Daniel Deronda, commenting that as a ‘lyric actress’ (596), ‘The Princess’s particular operatic conjunction of poetry and theatricality inverts what the novel deems the proper hierarchical relationship between the two forms, and threatens to undo the realignment of singing with the former’.81 Conversely, Nina Auerbach sees the actress as central to Eliot’s achievement ‘as woman and artist’, viewing the Princess’s ‘sincere acting’ (586) as an essentially positive power of selfpresentation which questions the dichotomy between acting and sincerity.82 She concludes that the distinction made in Eliot’s work, from Adam Bede onwards, is not between acting and sincerity but between good and bad performances.83 The true heroines of Eliot’s novels, she suggests, are distinguished by a capacity to perform, which allows them (at least temporarily) to ‘transcend incarceration in the private, domestic sphere, as well as the constricting mediocrity [Eliot’s] own realistic aesthetic threatens to make inescapable’.84 Auerbach’s comments on the importance of performance in Eliot’s life and work are attractive. She defines a ‘successful’ performer as having the ‘ability to move an audience’ which enables one to link her analysis to many of Eliot’s views of artistic expression.85 However, the distinction between acting and sincerity does remain troubling as well as troubled. We have seen that Eliot’s own use of musical analogy makes any consistent dissociation of music from theatre impossible. Nevertheless, Eliot attempts significant, if problematic, distinctions between acting and musical performance. Unselfconscious musicality is portrayed as the medium of expression which allows her successful heroines to perform as themselves. In this respect, it is Mirah, rather than the Princess – whose talent for acting feelings not her own impedes direct self-revelation – who is the heir of Dinah’s and of Dorothea’s ‘artless’ yet nonetheless effective performances. Mirah declares herself unable to act except when ‘the

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The Princess, like Armgart, is an actress as well as a singer, and this complicates issues of feminine performance. The Princess describes herself as both actor and musician: ‘I was a great singer, and I acted as well as I sang’ (584). She now habitually acts even her own feelings:

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part was one that I could be myself in’ (201). The power of her singing is equivalent to Dinah’s ‘sincere, articulate, thrilling treble, with which she always mastered her audience’.86 Auerbach’s assumption that Eliot is anticipating Shaw’s ‘defense of the actor’s honesty’ in her portrayal of the Princess appears to overlook the degree to which Eliot, although less hostile to the theatre than many of her contemporaries, shares the deep ambivalence about the status of acting in general, and the actress in particular, which was prevalent at her time.87 Armgart rejects the suggestion that she could continue a career in acting alone.88 Eliot’s depiction of the Princess includes elements more akin to the negative view of acting in Wilkie Collins’s No Name – to which Auerbach opposes it – than Auerbach’s account would acknowledge.89 The Princess’s acting both ‘exalts and deadens’ her feelings, making her talent of ambiguous value (586). There are triumphant aspects to her depiction, but these are mixed with features reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s representation of the actress Vashti’s superlative but dangerous artistry in Villette, a novel which Eliot greatly admired.90 Brontë has Lucy Snowe criticise the way in which Vashti is judged ‘as a woman, not an artist’.91 At the same time, her text invites assessment of the figure of Vashti ‘as a woman’ in its explicit contrast between Vashti and a voluptuous portrait of Cleopatra, and in its mediation between the extremes for women of wasting self-repression and consumable and self-consuming ‘acting’.92 In a letter thanking the actress Helen Faucet for her performance in Sheridan’s School for Scandal, Eliot uses ‘music’ to embody the true femininity which she opposes to the ‘false ideals’ generally promoted by actresses: Some little sadness mingled itself with the charm of her bearing and the music of her movements? It was that the refinement and elevation which they give to comedy, often beyond the vision of the writer, should be felt by us to be unique, and without visible sign of spreading for the general benefit that deep benefit which comes from seeing a high type of womanly grace, to shame away false ideals.93 This comment has led Rosemarie Bodenheimer to conclude that ‘The problem of womanliness, rather than artistry, is foremost in the consciousness of this woman artist as she laments the absence of a truly moral theater’.94 Eliot’s anxieties about female performance are palpable. However, the danger of assuming that these allow us to make any

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unequivocal assertion of her attitude towards female public success is exemplified by the fact that Lewes records Eliot as having Helen Faucet specifically in mind when composing Klesmer’s comments on the lofty status of art and the artist.95 Eliot’s contrasting portrayals of female musicianship thwart attempts to categorise her attitudes towards female achievement. Fears over the effects of female ambition, and implications that female independence must be limited to be acceptable, savour of conventional feminine ideals and suggest Eliot to be a great deal less radical than the twenty-first century woman reader, or indeed some of her own contemporaries, would wish. Dread of the female as spectacle seems almost overwhelming in the novel’s accounts of the hazards of Mirah’s carefully confined exposure to publicity and the terrible punishment of the Princess’s fate. In other respects, however, as when voicing claims for the rights of female genius, or when intimating the rage produced by constraints on female ambition, Eliot can seem breathtakingly subversive. All these aspects are apparent in her portrayals of professional female musicians. Paradoxically, Eliot’s opera singer makes powerful claims for the recognition of female genius in a narrative fraught with apprehension over the public consumption of female talent, where the prima donna is destroyed as artist and woman, and even enthusiasm for Mirah’s more modest professional success is tempered by concern for her value ‘as a woman’ (519). Notwithstanding the relevance of these portrayals to Eliot’s own situation as a woman novelist, we also need to be aware both of their ambivalence and of the limitations of such analogies. No single one of the singers portrayed in Daniel Deronda can possibly be viewed as a complete parallel to the writer – with regard to either her aspirations or her practice. Together they dramatise different aspects of the writer’s circumstances. If, as Auerbach suggests, the Princess’s ‘sincere acting’ sometimes parallels Eliot’s mode of self-presentation in her life and writing, other aspects are more closely reflected in Mirah, who wants to teach rather than merely to perform.96 Eliot clearly fears the effects of ambition, yet the prima donna may represent a means of distinguishing the writer’s role as well as providing analogies for it. Her emphasis on the importance of maintaining sympathy with the ordinary woman, such as Walpurgia in ‘Armgart’, for example, could also be read as underlining the author’s commitment to finding a ‘voice’ which does not place her beyond sympathy with the voiceless woman. As in her Riehl article, Eliot exploits musical allusion both to construct parallels with the performative requirements she perceives for her own art and to distinguish its particular objectives.

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Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

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Rosemarie Bodenheimer has examined Eliot’s portrayal of female performance in her novels and poems in the light of the repeated anxiety expressed in her letters about her own ambitions and relationship to her audience. She suggests that we should read Eliot’s female musicians not as simple parallels for the writer, but as manifestations of a ‘long-standing conflict between ambition and prohibitive selfconsciousness’:97 George Eliot’s performing figures cannot, then, be read as simple images of female artists, displacements of the writer’s to the singer’s art. Rather, they must be read as projected images of the conflict itself, performances in which the narrative takes command of both the subjective state of the performer and the objectifying gaze of her audience in an attempt to measure and negotiate the gaps between talent and its social interpretations.98 In Mirah’s case, this negotiation entails containment of her talent within domestic and racial boundaries. Catherine Arrowpoint, also introduced as a musician of authentic talent, virtually disappears after her marriage to Klesmer. The narrative’s negotiations on behalf of the Princess, as is also the case with Armgart, are yet more drastic. Armgart becomes a teacher. Alcharisi (the Princess) marries: her loss of voice transpires to have been temporary, and she remains unreconciled to the loss of her career and resistant to any claims on her maternal tenderness. When Deronda has his first interview with his mother, she describes her repressive experience of being brought up as a Jewish woman. Deronda’s claim to sympathy with the ‘hardship of an enforced renunciation’ such as that demanded by his grandfather’s attempts to prevent his mother from becoming an artist provoke an angry outburst: No . . . You are not a woman. You may try – but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out – ‘this is the Jewish woman . . . a woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt’. That was what my father wanted . . . He hated that Jewish women should be thought of by the Christian world as a sort of ware to make public singers and actresses of. As if we were not the more enviable for that! That is a chance of escaping from bondage. (588–9)

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Alcharisi is first mentioned in the novel at Quecham Hall where her public fame is contrasted to Deronda’s account of Mirah’s musicianship. Sir Hugo Mallinger’s comment that Alcharisi’s husband was ‘a public robber’ shows how the female artist is regarded in the light of property and competed for by the representatives of public and private ownership (408). The same is true of Armgart, whose noble suitor desires private possession of goods of public worth. He expresses concern that ‘Too much ambition has unwomaned her’, but it is her power of transcendent artistry he wishes to curb rather than seeking to prevent her being commodified by public fame: ‘Could I choose, / She were less apt to soar beyond the reach / Of woman’s foibles’.99 The Graf is not opposed to the prima donna’s taste for worldly recognition, he admires the ‘innocent vanity’ of her ‘fondness for trifles’, in this case a diamond star sent her by a royal admirer at the end of a performance of Gluck’s Orfeo.100 The connection between this kind of recognition and the dangers of commodification inherent in the apparently preeminent position of the female singer is stressed by her teacher and mentor, the composer Leo, who describes the ornament as ‘quite an earthly star, / Valued by thalers’.101 However the poem never suggests that Armgart should renounce her right to artistic fulfilment, and domestic life is certainly not offered as a preferable alternative to a public career. The public evaluation of Armgart may be represented by a star of diamonds, but the Graf is no better in regarding Armgart as a ‘pearl’ for which he would like to make his home and not the public stage the setting.102 In Daniel Deronda, the Princess sees her father as wanting to commodify her as even lower stock than ‘as a sort of ware to make public singers and actresses of’ (589). He wants her as ‘a makeshift link’ in the male line of inheritance and an enslaved substitute for his desire for public power: ‘such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women’ (589).103 Alcharisi’s success is shown to have been achieved at the cost of her humanity, femininity and race. Eliot makes her love of her art exclude all other loves: ‘I did not want affection. I had been stifled with it. I wanted to live out the life that was in me, and not to be hampered with other lives’ (584). This contravenes not merely orthodox ideals of femininity, but the ideals about the inseparability of human and artistic value championed by Klesmer. The Princess’s coldness is portrayed as agonising for her son, who possesses the ‘feminine’ sympathetic powers she lacks: ‘It seemed

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Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what other women feel – or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others. (586) Armgart also derides the idea that ‘A woman’s rank / Lies in the fulness of her womanhood: / Therein alone she is royal’.104 Eliot has her articulate the sort of arguments used by Wollstonecraft and Mill against making conventional restrictions rather than nature the measure of woman’s capabilities. The singer’s uniquely female voice provides one especially effective ground on which to mock the idea of feminine unfitness for public achievement: Yes, I know The oft-taught Gospel: ‘Woman, thy desire Shall be that all superlatives on earth Belong to men, save the one highest kind – To be a mother. Thou shalt not desire To do aught best save pure subservience: Nature has willed it so!’ O blessed Nature! Let her be arbitress; she gave me voice Such as she only gives a woman child, . . . Men did not say, when I had sung last night, ‘Twas good, nay, wonderful, considering She is a woman’ – and then turn to add, ‘Tenor or baritone had sung her songs Better, of course: she’s but a woman spoiled’.105 In her 1855 essay on Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliot had selected passages from Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century which used musical metaphors to argue against artificial limitations on woman’s role. She commented that: some of the best things she [Fuller] says are on the folly of absolute definitions of woman’s nature and absolute demarcations of woman’s mission. ‘Nature’, she says, ‘seems to delight in varying the arrange-

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that all the woman lacking in her was present in him’ (615). Nevertheless, the Princess’s comments on her own lack of enthusiasm for motherhood are a telling protest against the imposition of a universal ideal of feminine nature:

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Eliot then quotes at length from Fuller, who frequently used musical imagery in her discussions of women. The passage reads appropriately alongside the contrasting models of ‘nightingale’ and ‘skylark’ musicianship in Daniel Deronda. Arguing that women should be free to fulfil any office they choose, and that many women will still choose to concentrate on motherhood, Fuller concludes that there is ‘no need to clip the wings of any bird that wants to soar and sing . . . The difference would be that all need not be constrained to employments for which some are unfit’.107 Armgart defends female talent as equal to men’s and therefore enjoying equal claims. Both she and the Princess refute the notion that artistic achievement and ambition are unnatural for women, mocking the irrationality of conventional constructions of woman’s ‘nature’: ‘I need not crush myself within a mould / Of theory called Nature’.108 The sexual ambivalence of the two roles which Armgart sings in Gluck’s Orfeo and Beethoven’s Fidelio, where the female singer is disguised in the character of a heroic man, emphasises women’s potential to act roles not usually open to them. These operas are especially significant since in the vast majority of opera libretti the female protagonist is ultimately the more or less passive victim of a ruinous fate. The reference to Orfeo serves in ‘Armgart’ explicitly to underline the power of her position in contrast to the way in which Caterina Sarti in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ is given one of Orpheus’s arias as a despairing expression of longing.109 The singer in Eliot’s poem doubly expands the notion of what is ‘natural’ to women because only she is born with the right voice for the roles she sings and because in her successful activity, within and beyond these particular opera plots, she is emblematic of woman’s potential. At their second meeting, the Princess demands and gains Deronda’s endorsement of the claims of her artistic genius. Showing him a miniature portrait of herself, she says: ‘The voice and the genius matched the face. Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist, though my father’s will was against it. My nature gave me a charter.’ ‘I do acknowledge that,’ said Deronda. (619) Armgart maintains that it is made impossible for the female artist to combine her career with the roles of wife and mother even should she

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ments, as if to show that she will be fettered by no rule; and we must admit the same varieties that she admits’. Again: ‘If nature is never bound down, nor the voice of inspiration stifled, that is enough’.106

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I am an artist by my birth – By the same warrant that I am a woman: Nay, in the added rarer gift I see Supreme vocation: if a conflict comes, Perish – no, not the woman, but the joys Which men make narrow by their narrowness.110 The Graf feels that he can offer marriage without demanding the sacrifice of Armgart’s singing career, but she is aware that his implicit devaluing of her vocation would mean that it was tolerated rather than properly endorsed: You are a noble, And have a high career; just now you said ’Twas higher far than aught a woman seeks Beyond mere womanhood. You claim to be More than a husband, but could not rejoice That I were more than wife. What follows, then? ... Our marriage asks concession, asks resolve To share renunciation or demand it. Either we both renounce a mutual ease, As in a nation’s need both man and wife Do public services, or one of us Must yield that something else for which each lives Besides the other. Men are reasoners: That premiss of superior claims perforce Urges conclusion – ‘Armgart, it is you’.111 Moreover, whilst Armgart witheringly refutes men’s superior claim, she tellingly also describes how more dangerous than the ironically termed ‘reason’ of this argument is the way in which women themselves become complicitous in suppressing their own fulfilment: Oh, your unspoken will Your silent tolerance would torture me

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wish this. She complains that the narrowness of men’s view of woman’s nature, which regards their artistic vocation as unnatural, forces them to make a choice between the two equally fundamental aspects of their being. That said, it is artistic vocation which enjoys the greater claim:

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In Daniel Deronda, the contrasting characters of the Princess, Mirah and Gwendolen dramatise tensions contained within the single woman artist in ‘Armgart’. Deronda and his mother’s discussion of Mirah brings the potential conflicts between female genius and domestic ideals of femininity into sharp focus: ‘Is she fond of her artist’s life – is her singing worth anything?’ ‘Her singing is exquisite. But her voice is not suited to the stage. I think that the artist’s life has been made repugnant to her.’ ‘Why, she is made for you, then. Sir Hugo said you were bitterly against being a singer, and I can see that you would never have let yourself be merged in a wife, as your father was.’ (620) Music is connected with a variety of conflicting claims: individual fulfilment, racial identity and contesting maternal and paternal inheritances. The Princess observes that it is easier for Mirah, whose experience of paternal tyranny has been the opposite of hers and has ruptured rather than enforced family and religious ties, to have ‘clung with all her affection to the memory of her mother and the fellowship of her people’ (620). With an ironic play on the novel’s use of theatrical allusion, the Princess sums up Mirah’s Jewish allegiance, based on little real experience of the life of Jewish women, as ‘fit to last through an opera night’ (620). Whereas Mirah opposes her father’s influence with the reverence for Judaism learned from her lost mother, the Princess realises a different feminine inheritance conferred by the maternal aunt who taught her to sing (590). Further undermining the notion of an ‘absolute’ and containable female nature is the fact that the Princess also realises an aspect of her paternal inheritance in pursuing her ambitions.113 It was ‘nature’, she insists, which thwarted his wish to rule her: ‘such men turn their wives and daughters into slaves . . . But nature sometimes thwarts them. My father had no other child than his daughter, and she was like himself’ (589). Alcharisi’s voice is both protest against, and product of, her paternity. Alcharisi’s severed career mirrors the way in which she sees herself as an unsuccessful heretic against patriarchal law. Her wish not to have her individuality subsumed as an inferior link in the male line, but to exercise the ‘right to seek my freedom from a bondage that I hated’, has not succeeded in cutting Deronda off from his paternal inheritance

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And on that rack I should deny the good I yet believed in.112

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(589, 584). The Princess sees Deronda’s allegiance to his Jewish heritage as the triumph of the paternal tyranny against which she had attempted to rebel (588). Moreover, by her second marriage she is condemned, like Erinna in the verse which Eliot uses as a chapter heading, to ‘insect labour, while the throng / Of gods and men wrought deeds that poets wrought in song’ (582). Heroic enterprise and its artistic expression are claimed as the preserve of men. The female poet is doomed to become the distaff spinner of her own poem, the singer to be silenced like many of the tragic heroines she has played, who inevitably receive punishment for the illegitimate passion to which they have given voice. Both the power and the vulnerability of the singer’s life are highlighted in the portraits of Armgart and Alcharisi. Armgart is powerful in contrast to the voiceless woman, but while her voice may grant her the power of utterance, a ‘channel to her soul’, and independence, the Graf describes singing as a fragile talent with which to realise grand ambition: ‘She bears / Caesar’s ambition in her delicate breast, / And nought to still it with but quivering song’.114 He warns Armgart of the precariousness of a public musical career: ‘Have you thought / How you will bear the poise of eminence / With dread of sliding?’115 This prediction is to be borne out. Hers is a dubious hold on power, a perilous vocation. Once the singing voice is gone, the woman will not be heard: ‘Although a body remains, and a voice still able to speak . . . that does not count’ as Catherine Clément has said of the failed opera singer.116 Armgart is ‘speechless’ without music: ‘Song was my speech’.117 In tragic opera, the prima donna rehearses her own fall. In fiction she also inscribes the female writer’s ‘dread of sliding’ and consequent loss of voice.118 Failure comes as a punishment for transgressing the bounds of the permissibly feminine. Shaken by a temporary ‘fit’ of ‘singing out of tune’ which damages her popularity, Alcharisi makes ‘a resolve taken in desperation’, marries a Russian nobleman and becomes an incarcerated princess (596). Entrapped and excluded, she becomes like the other ‘princess’ in the novel, Gwendolen, who is satirised as a ‘princess in exile’ and later becomes the ‘Vandyke duchess’ (20, 35, 519). Alcharisi is left Erinna-like ‘Gazing with a sad surprise / At surging visions of her destiny’ (582). Orpheus’s loss has been lurking beneath Armgart’s triumph all along. The poem, more vividly than the novel, makes us aware that the pleasures of music in this context may be treacherous, occluding meaning. ‘The music’, writes Catherine Clément, ‘makes one forget the plot’.119 The prima donna’s art deafens (or reconciles) the audience to

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The music makes one forget the plot, but the plot sets traps for the imaginary. The plot works quietly, plainly visible to all, but outside the code of the pleasures of the opera. It is totally dull, always setting in play vague philosophical premises, ordinary banalities, life–love–death; it is all familiar and forgettable. But, beyond the romantic ideology, lines are being woven, tying up the characters and leading them to death for transgression – for transgressions of familial rules, political rules, the things at stake in sexual and authoritarian power.121 Eliot’s exposure of the perils of the singer’s lot may be read as a critique of ideologies which apparently empower but actually destroy women, rather than as merely connivance in the repression of female ambition. Her operatic parallels offer an interesting perspective not only for students of nineteenth-century literature and culture, but for contemporary feminist musicology as it seeks ‘a thorough critique of the prestigious models we have inherited through opera’.122 How are these portrayals of the prima donna significant for reading the novel’s less gifted heroine? In her wish to rule and in her absence of marital and maternal aspirations, Gwendolen is an apparently pathetic parallel to the Princess and Armgart. Without the talent or training to exploit her musicianship in aid of her rebellion, she is all the more swiftly vulnerable to assimilation by the patriarchal power of her culture. The grand ladies in Mirah’s theatrical perception of society ‘impressed her vaguely as coming out of some unknown drama, in which their parts perhaps got more tragic as they went on’ (521). This is equally true of the singer–actress and of the grand lady in the social theatre. Like the Princess, Gwendolen has an affinity with the tragic women she once played at being. In Gwendolen’s story, the satirical musical references at the beginning of the novel are simultaneously prophetic of later tragedy. At the time of her greatest theatrical aspirations, Gwendolen provides a superficial, yet prophetic, defence for her high voice as more becoming to a tragic heroine, ‘when she does desperate actions’ (48). Whatever the derogatory associations with Jenny Lind, Bellini, and immoral operatic heroines committing

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the inexorable destruction which the operatic plot is all the while preparing: ‘Singing and wasting your breath can be the same thing’.120 Her success and the ‘romantic ideology’ of individual rebellion which she reformulates (on and off the stage) blinds the singer herself to the ‘plot’ of life outside the opera and the penalty which she will pay:

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desperate acts, hers promises to become the authentic voice of tragedy and despair. However, music is emblematic in Daniel Deronda of the potential strength as well as the plight of the unremarkable woman. Musical allusion is used to illustrate the baffling many-sidedness which Eliot emphasises within Gwendolen’s character. The vain performer of Bellini who professes admiration for the ‘great poetic criminals’ of the theatre is associated both with the prima donna and the demonic. She is described as a ‘Nereid’, ‘serpent’, ‘witch’ and as having ‘plenty of devil in her’ (7–9, 69, 85, 403).123 On being asked to sing, she quotes Mephistopheles (39). Deronda also finds ‘something of the demon’ in her which he comes to regard as opposed to her true ‘womanly’ nature (332, 385). But Gwendolen’s ambivalent characterisation is another refutation of ‘the folly of absolute definitions of woman’s nature’.124 The same Gwendolen who once ‘strangled her sister’s canary-bird in a final fit of exasperation at its shrill singing which had again and again jarringly interrupted her own’ also has ‘fulness of nature enough to feel the power of [Klesmer’s] playing’ or the quality of Mirah’s artistry, and to desire the moral condition which these represent (20, 43). Gwendolen represents neither the extraordinarily talented woman who can assert her claim for artistic fulfilment, nor the woman whose gifts and personality conveniently fall within the limits of current ideals of womanhood. She possesses no easily recognised means of expanding her experience. Nonetheless, insistence on her receptivity to music symbolises the potential of the ordinary entrapped woman and admits a fragile degree of hope for her future. In this, it is Gwendolen who is the successor to Armgart when she is forced by the loss of her voice to recognise her identity with ‘ruthless Nature’s chary average’.125 Like the Princess, Armgart at first bewails the insect labour, a paltry role in the patriarchal puppet theatre, to which she has been condemned by her loss of voice: What is my soul to me without the voice That gave it freedom? – gave it one grand touch And made it nobly human? – Prisoned now, Prisoned in all the petty mimicries Called woman’s knowledge, that will fit the world As doll-clothes fit a man. I can do nought Better than what a million women do – Must drudge among the crowd and feel my life Beating upon the world without response,

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Armgart paints a chilling picture of the life of a ‘middling’ superfluous woman, eking out a perilous living by giving music lessons for a lesser rate than a man could command.127 However, Walpurgia, Armgart’s cousin and servant, turns on her, asserting that the rights which she previously claimed were not those of the rebels but ‘Say rather, the deserter’s’.128 Walpurgia presents Armgart’s loss to her as offering a ‘new birth – birth from that monstrous Self’.129 The poem shows Armgart’s impairment as ultimately enabling her to sympathise more widely with other ‘ordinary’ women. Walpurgia suggests that such women are not inevitably trapped in the state of suppressed rage which Armgart imagines their powerlessness must produce, but capable of finding fulfilment in human fellowship.130 Armgart eventually resolves the apparently irreducible conflict between vocation and love, not through marriage, but by remaining faithful to her art as a teacher, and by recognising Walpurgia’s claims on her sympathy.131 She determines on a means of survival not, like Alcharisi, as a ‘pensioner in marriage’, but as an independent professional who can further the artistic ideals of her musical mentor Leo.132 The privatisation of Armgart’s talent may conform to a permissible pattern whereby it is acceptable for women to practise as teachers rather than as executant musicians, but her musicality is not merely domesticated. In both Armgart’s and Gwendolen Harleth’s cases, conventional paternalistic ‘protection’ (in reality commodification) has failed them. Armgart’s real mentors turn out to be Leo and Walpurgia, not the consuming male who promotes orthodox feminine ideals and socialisation. Her suitor actively manifests the hypocrisy of these when he no longer desires Armgart for his private possession once she has lost her public value.133 In Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen’s sale in marriage is overseen by her uncle. She too, albeit without any specific future vocation identified for her, achieves greater powers of sympathy and an independent will to survive through her musical mentors Klesmer and Deronda. Both mentor and a fellow struggler after wisdom, Deronda, with his feminine powers of musical sympathy, in many ways combines the roles of Leo and Walpurgia.134 Gwendolen is last shown in the novel uttering a repeatedly avowed determination to live and change: ‘I shall live, I shall be better’ (751). Like Armgart at the end of the poem, she is a woman who, having nurtured high aspirations, neither realises them, subsumes them in

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Beating with passion through an insect’s horn That moves a millet-seed laboriously.126

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neither Antigone nor Madonna. She is chastened to an understanding of the common lot of women and no longer wonders at her mother’s dullness. She discovers that ‘not acting as other women do’ may not in itself be creative. She does not marry Deronda, and must accept that she is peripheral to his plot. But she does not desire a ‘proper scale’ like Mirah with her perfect chamber music voice and her satisfaction with a private and supporting role.135 Beer sees Gwendolen’s survival and uncertain future as one of the ways in which Eliot is moving ‘beyond determinism’ in the novel.136 What Gwendolen particularly survives, as Beer notes, is the process of sexual selection.137 Her original musical training has prepared her as the essentially passive object of male selection, encouraging her to develop the primitive combination of music and appearance described by Darwin as the original female resource: Women are generally thought to possess sweeter voices than men, and as far as this serves as any guide we may infer that they first acquired musical powers in order to attract the other sex . . . In civilised life man is largely, but by no means exclusively, influenced in the choice of his wife by external appearance.138 In portraying her new kind of heroine, Eliot discards the long-established duality of domestic affection and destructive sexuality associated with feminine musicality. Gwendolen’s musical dialogue with Deronda leads neither to marriage nor to seduction, but promises access to a wider and more independent life. This distinguishes her from the annihilated heroines of other works of ‘operatic’ fiction. In Hoffmann’s ‘Don Juan’, the prima donna literally dies as, in the role of Donna Anna, she has prayed she will; and in ‘Rat Krespel’, disobedience of her father’s orders forbidding her to sing causes the heroine’s death.139 Flaubert’s Emma Bovary is another heroine of no particular gifts who is stifled by social constraints and for whom a visit to the opera preludes a decisive stage in her fall.140 Gwendolen is also distinguished from the female protagonists of Eliot’s own ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ or The Mill on the Floss. In Daniel Deronda, musical sympathy does not signal the heroine’s sexual fall and ultimate destruction, but her power to survive.

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marriage, nor is destroyed by them. Gwendolen’s survival makes her, as Gillian Beer has argued, ‘a new kind of heroine’ – her description would also fit Armgart:

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Peter Conrad has commented that Gwendolen’s fate seems to parallel the situations of Didon in Berlioz’s Les Troyens (1863) who remains stranded in ‘the private, inconsolable life of sentiment’ while Deronda/Enée ‘departs to confront his epic destiny’.141 ‘He is a force, she a mere individual’, Conrad concludes.142 But Gwendolen is an individual who transcends operatic ‘plot’. ‘I shall live’ reverses ‘let forsaken Dido die’,143 revoking the ‘Lasciatemi morir’ refrain sung by heroines of the Romantic operas which underlie the melodramatic moments of Gwendolen’s story.144 ‘I mean to live’: Gwendolen’s survival is nevertheless a question of gritted teeth – no triumph for Romantic rebellion (751). We are left to wonder, without any particularly strong anticipation, whether she will realise the hope of feminist opera criticism: that women might survive and sing.145

Racial vocation Whilst Gwendolen’s vocation remains uncertain, the novel employs music to provide a more optimistic, albeit not untroubled, vision of a Zionist future. Music provides Deronda with an emblem for the incarnation of racial heritage. In an image which unites concepts of spontaneous inspiration with biological inheritance, suggesting both the harp of David and the Coleridgean aeolian lyre, Deronda reflects that a people’s innate ‘ancestral life’ (like the inherited gift for painting in a blind person), even if unrecognised, would lie within them as a dim longing for unknown objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their inherited frames would be like a cunningly-wrought musical instrument, never played on, but quivering throughout in uneasy mysterious moanings of its intricate structure that, under the right touch, gives music. (697–8) Music becomes racially determined ‘vocation’. Deronda’s mentor, the visionary Mordecai, also calls upon musical imagery to denote how he feels reborn into the heritage of the Jewish martyrs, declaring that his soul ‘sang with the cadence of their strain’ (465). This audial imagery synaesthetically underpins his claims to the ‘second-sight’ by which he knows that he will be sent a successor to his work to revive Judaism. Meanwhile, Mirah is the living voice of ‘Jewish’ music in the novel. There are repeated references to the Jewish hymn which is treasured as her earliest link with her religion and race (194, 345). For Klesmer she sings ‘Leopardi’s grand ode to Italy:– O patria mia’, and the detailed

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a climax of devout triumph – passing from the subdued adoration of a happy Andante in the words – ‘Beatissimi voi, / Che offriste il petto alle nemiche lance / Per amor di costei che al sol vi diede’ – to the joyous outburst of an exultant Allegro in – ‘oh viva, oh viva: Beatissmi voi / Mentre nel mondo si favelli o scriva.’ (451–2) Although Joseph Leo, the composer of the musical setting for these words, is fictional, Verdi’s aria ‘O patria mia’ from Aida, popular in the 1870s, has been suggested as a model for Mirah’s aria.147 This would have identified the reference with a widely familiar patriotic piece of music (saved from anachronism by its fictional reattribution). There is also another potential parallel with Verdi. Whereas Eliot evokes Italian nationalism as symbolic of Zionist aspirations, Verdi’s 1842 opera Nabucodonosor (Nabucco), his first popular triumph, adopts the Old Testament account of the Hebrews of the sixth century BC longing for release from their captivity and enslavement in Babylon as symbolic of Italian longing for national freedom. At the opening of the third act, the chorus of Hebrew slaves mourning the loss of their native land sings ‘Va pensiero’, still the best-known music from the opera: Oh, mia patria si bella e perduta Oh, membranza si cara e fatal!148 Verdi’s early operas, written throughout the period of the struggle for Italian independence, were specifically intended to arouse fervent nationalist feeling. The significance of his historical theme for contemporary Italian politics was clear to Verdi’s audiences and was the reason for Nabucco’s initial success.149 The association of this musical allusion in Daniel Deronda emphasises a strongly performative as well as expressive view of music. There seems no evidence that Eliot heard Nabucco either in London or on any of her trips to the Continent,150 but, its political significance aside, the music from Nabucco would have been familiar from the numerous arrangements which were published for domestic performance – ‘Va pensiero’ being the most popular number.151 If Eliot had this earlier opera in mind, then the operatic associations of her reference are specifically Jewish as well as generally

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description of the music immediately invokes an analogue for the current loss and future revival of Israel (451–2).146 An opening recitative and ‘a mournful melody, a rhythmic plaint’ to the words ‘Ma la gloria non vedo’ are followed by

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patriotic. In Daniel Deronda the piece epitomises Mirah’s identity as an exiled Jewish heroine. She sings it again at the musical party, at which she has pictured herself appearing as a ‘poor Jewess’ singing to ‘fashionable Christians’, because Klesmer recommends it ‘as more distinctive of her than better known music’ (455, 517). As Deronda listens, the song comes to herald his own Zionist destiny as it awakens his memory of lines of the ode not included in the setting: ‘Non ti difende / Nessun de’ tuoi? L’armi, qua l’armi: io solo / Combatterò, procomberò sol io’. For this passage, Eliot is careful to provide her readers with a translation: ‘Do none of thy children defend thee? Arms! bring me arms! alone I will fight, alone I will fall’ (520). Musical allusion is also deployed in the novel to suggest a connection between Judaism and the rest of humanity. Klesmer seems to represent a homogeneous cosmopolitan ideal which complements the more specifically Jewish identities in the novel. He values art as a means of fostering ‘mutuality between distant races’ (223). With his own ‘felicitous combination of the German, the Sclave, and the Semite’ (41), he ‘looks forward to a fusion of races’ in contrast to Mordecai, whose vision is of ‘separateness with communication’ (224, 673).152 Music’s capacity to arouse both universal and nationalist identification is itself suggestive of communication between different racial identities. Deronda’s first experience of Jewish music, at the synagogue in Frankfurt, is evocative of both specific and universal identity.153 The entire service is described in musical terms, ending with a quotation from the Hebrew liturgy for the Day of Reconciliation: a lament which contains a musical image for the current lack of what Mordecai calls ‘the organic centre’ of Judaism (494): The whole scene was a coherent strain, its burthen a passionate regret, which, if he had known the liturgy for the Day of Reconciliation, he might have clad in its antithetic burthen: ‘Happy the eye which saw all these things; but verily to hear only of them afflicts our soul . . . Happy the eye that saw the fingers when tuning every kind of song; but verily to hear only of them afflicts our soul’. (339–40) Deronda’s ‘strength of . . . feeling’ in response to this is an intimation of his yet to be discovered Jewish identity: ‘a divine influx in the darkness, before there was any vision to interpret’ (339). While the music and chanting reinforces his sense of the ‘sublimely penetrating life’ beneath the ‘withered remnants’ of Judaic culture (337), the liturgical chanting simultaneously evokes a sense of non-sectarian

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gave himself up to that strongest effect of chanted liturgies which is independent of detailed verbal meaning – like the effect of an Allegri’s Miserere or a Palestrina’s Magnificat. The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of gladness, a Gloria in excelsis that such Good exists; both the yearning and the exultation gathering their utmost force from the sense of communion in a form which has expressed them both, for long generations of struggling fellow-men. (339) The effect of the entire service becomes a homogenised embodiment of Jewish history which accentuates the way in which it has, as Mordecai proclaims, ‘given a binding theory to the human race’ (683): The Hebrew liturgy, like others, has its transitions of litany, lyric, proclamation, dry statement and blessing; but this evening all were one for Deronda: the chant of the Chazan’s or Reader’s grand wideranging voice with its passage from monotony to sudden cries, the outburst of sweet boys’ voices from the little quire, the devotional swaying of men’s bodies backwards and forwards, the very commonness of the building and shabbiness of the scene where a national faith which had penetrated the thinking of half the world, and moulded the splendid forms of that world’s religion, was finding a remote, obscure echo – all were blent for him as one expression of a binding history, tragic and yet glorious. (339) Deronda’s ultimate declaration of Jewish allegiance rejects separatism. Music is emblematic of the ‘notion of separateness with communication’ that Deronda pledges himself to maintain (673). Despite an unsettling sense of tension between national and international ideals, Mordecai and Klesmer, complementary figures in the novel, represent complementary dimensions of future Judaic culture. Mordecai’s Zionist mission to revive the ‘organic centre’ has its counterpart in the musical ‘Wandering Jew’ (as Klesmer describes himself), who disseminates its ‘binding theory’ to the rest of the world (494, 224, 683).154

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transcendence and humanitarian communion, its universality stressed through repeated comparisons with familiar devotional music and liturgies. Deronda

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Clearly Eliot is proffering a view of the artist as having a crucial role to play in the world. It is notable that the early planning stage for Daniel Deronda coincided with her horrified reading of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) with its concluding invocation of ‘the love of art for art’s sake . . . for art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake’.155 Eliot found the book ‘quite poisonous in its false principles of criticism and false conceptions of life’.156 In a letter of the following year, she made a general attack on moral relativism and aestheticism: What sort of ‘culture of the intellect’ is that which, instead of widening the mind to a fuller and fuller response to all the elements of our existence, isolates it in a moral stupidity? – which flatters egoism with the possibility that a complex and refined human society can continue wherein relations have no sacredness beyond the inclination of changing moods? – or figures to itself an aesthetic human life than one may compare to that of the fabled grasshoppers who were once men, but having heard the song of the muses could do nothing but sing, and starved themselves so till they died and had a fit resurrection as grasshoppers; and ‘this’, says Socrates, ‘was the return the Muses made them’.157 Eliot is ostensibly responding to her correspondent’s description of the views of George Sand, but the allegory of the singing grasshoppers might also be read as a critique of Pater’s aestheticism. Eliot’s artistic mission is to enhance sympathetic connection. However, despite this, there are unexpected moments of kinship in her writing with Pater’s idea that we each exist within ‘the narrow chamber of the individual mind’ penetrated only by ‘impressions’ that are ‘unstable, flickering, inconsistent’.158 Pater’s use of audial imagery to signify the ‘thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced, on its way to us, or from us’ seems entirely opposed to Eliot’s championship of ‘vocation’.159 And yet an account of the subjective and limited nature of our perceptions runs alongside her interest in sympathy – limitations famously conjured in audial terms by the ‘roar . . . on the other side of silence’ that we most of us walk about too ‘well wadded with stupidity’ to hear.160 Eliot’s commitment is to engagement with ‘all the elements of our existence’ and to a future that extends beyond ‘moments for those moments’ sake’. However, there are also significant countermovements in her writing.

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It has been noted that Daniel Deronda apparently fails to offer its characters any concrete means with which to counter the degeneracy of English culture – as if Eliot ‘can find no place in English life for Deronda’s idealised moral consciousness’.161 Eliot has been specifically criticised for not indicating any potential arena in British political life for the artist to enact the values which Klesmer represents. Deirdre David feels that ‘by never demonstrating how Klesmer . . . might live a life which integrates social, political and artistic power she displaces herself from ever reconciling the artistic imagination with the voice of moral correction’.162 Even if one overlooks Klesmer’s lack of direct involvement in politics, his musicality apparently represents qualities essential to a regenerated political life, which none of the English characters are granted. The sense that English culture is irredeemable seems to be emphasised by the concentration of musical talent amongst the Jewish characters of the novel. Apart from these, only Catherine Arrowpoint directly adheres to the ‘new rules’ made by Klesmer, although Gwendolen might be seen as groping towards them. Furthermore, both these women’s activities are restricted to the private sphere. David reads the Zionist vocation in Daniel Deronda as a defection on Eliot’s part from dealing with the ills of her native culture. These certainly are not resolved by the novel’s plot, although it makes some difference if we read the Jewish element in the novel as an allegory of the regeneration vital for British culture as well as for its own. David herself analyses Gwendolen’s psyche as a metaphor for the British nation, yet does not read her receptivity to the redemptive musical experience offered by Klesmer, Deronda and Mirah as a glimmer of positive potential for the artistic imagination to widen the moral horizons around the ‘small drama’ of national, as of personal, life (421). We might see Eliot as proffering a tentative, if scarcely optimistic, promise that the cultural shortcomings, which Gwendolen mirrors, are reformable. Whilst she does not, as David notes, produce a definitive vision of how Klesmer might help ‘rule the nations and make the age’, his ideals are implicitly invoked here in a wistfully glimpsed vision of cultural harmony. Musical references, albeit tenuously, do integrate Zionism with the political and cultural future of Europe. However, it is true that the novel’s open-endedness does not permit any great confidence in the future impact of Mordecai’s ‘binding theory’ (683). Shirley Levenson has suggested that musical reference in Daniel Deronda contributes a degree of thematic unity to a novel often criticised for its divisions.163 Connections are indeed constantly proposed

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through musical allusion which increase our sense of the novel’s formal coherence. Nevertheless, they frequently dissolve and are rarely permitted narrative fulfilment. Music is involved in both the creation and disruption of narrative unity. Many of the tensions and contradictions within the individual which are musically embodied in The Mill on the Floss are extended into a more public sphere in Daniel Deronda. As in The Mill, music represents both the desire for concord and the impossibility of attaining it, indicating potential resolutions whilst preventing our acquiring any comfortable sense of certainty. Immediately after the extended descriptions of transcendent musical communion in the synagogue, which signal Deronda’s Jewish future and potential simultaneous transcendence of racial distinction, Eliot portrays him as gripped by doubt as to whether he has been alone in his emotion: But with the cessation of the devotional sounds and the movement of many indifferent faces and vulgar figures before him there darted into his mind the frigid idea that he had probably been alone in his feeling, and perhaps the only person in the congregation for whom the service was more than a dull routine. (340) Deronda’s doubts could simply stress Judaism’s need for revivification, but his ambivalence about this intense experience of communion undercuts the potential resolution of the novel’s political themes even more than the displacement of cultural issues beyond Britain, or divisions between the cultural visions of Klesmer, Mordecai, or Deronda’s grandfather. The resurrection of inherited racial memory does not preclude personal fragmentation. Deronda’s unsettling reflections on his response to the synagogue service undermine the sense which Eliot’s account of it has previously produced that music can reconcile specific and general sympathies. Closely allied to the question of finding a vocation in Deronda’s case is the novel’s exploration of how one is to mediate between the diffusive influence of broad sympathies and the single-minded ideological commitment necessary as a basis for taking any positive action. The tension between his specific Jewish vocation and his originally unbounded (but ineffective) sympathy can also in itself be seen as a challenge to Eliot’s ‘own steady faith in sympathetic understanding’.164 Deronda’s moment of doubt makes explicit tensions which have been observed in Eliot’s descriptions of transcendent sympathy elsewhere. D.A. Miller has examined the contradictions inherent in four major scenes in Middlemarch to conclude that ‘Without exception, the transcendence of such moments is shown to depend on not seeing all that is taking

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George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

place in them’.165 Dorothea’s famous moment of empathy as she looks down from the window, for example, is delusory, suggests Miller, because it overlooks the fact that her class places her at a distance from the people she observes and that she will never see anyone she knows closely working or passing on foot through the landscape in her view.166 Perhaps one could add one of the musical moments in Middlemarch to Miller’s list: Dorothea’s recollection of how the great organ at Freiburg made her weep, a passage which echoes an occasion in 1858 when Eliot heard the organ and choir at the Frauenkirche at Munich. In a letter to Sara Hennell she recorded standing ‘with a feeling of brotherhood . . . till the last note of the organ had died out’, a feeling which Deronda’s ‘sense of communion’ in the synagogue, though not his subsequent self-questioning, also echoes (339).167 ‘Apparently meant to demonstrate once and for all the reality of transcendence’, writes Miller, the moments of transcendent communion in Middlemarch actually ‘undermine the reality of their demonstration by basing it on an act of faith’.168 If, ‘In the full ambiguity of the phrase’, ‘the closures of Middlemarch “make-believe”’, those of Daniel Deronda might be said to lay their contradictions bare. With Deronda’s self-questioning, Eliot destabilises her metaphorical demonstration of Mordecai’s ‘separateness with communication’, thrusting upon the reader the chilling prospect of separateness without any communication at all (673). She exposes the possibility that the ‘sense of communion’ arising from a ‘self-oblivious lifting up of gladness’ which fulfils the ‘yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness’ might be one more subjective state (339). With its commonly acknowledged sympathetic powers, music raises this question in a particularly disturbing way. We should certainly hesitate before assuming that Eliot makes music an irreproachably privileged discourse. Culture mediated by music may often seem, as Alexander Welsh describes it, ‘knowledge still unspoiled’, but it is not always portrayed as unambivalently reliable knowledge.169 The passage describing Deronda’s reflections after the synagogue service is a good illustration of the way in which musical allusion in the novel conveys the alienating uncertainty of communication and knowledge as well as representing the power of sympathy. The illusion of authentic communication, ‘independent of detailed verbal meaning’, which may sometimes be all that music offers, goes side by side with the potential illusion of false ideological commitment (339).170 With its ambiguous, nearinexplicable expressive power, music is emblematic of both inspired sympathetic insight and the risk of potential error and delusion. The impact of Eliot’s use of musical allusion in these respects has been little

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commented upon, but, despite music’s privileged status in the novel, Deronda’s musings over the status of his experience of musical communication raise the spectre of false consciousness that will run adjacent to his growing commitment to Mordecai’s system.171 Such moments of irresolution are an aspect of the exploratory nature of Eliot’s text which eschews finality. They are involved in the way in which we experience the novel as resistant to harmonious or conclusive reading. Through the uncertain futures of British culture and Gwendolen’s individual life, as also of Deronda’s Zionist enterprise, we are made aware of the fictionality of myths of completion or futurity, just as the novel’s opening draws our attention to the ‘make-believe of a beginning’ (3).

Musical sympathies: ‘meeting streams’ In Deronda’s experience in the synagogue, musical sympathy takes on an intensity where transcendent experience becomes unsettling and strange. This is one of several moments in the novel where Eliot develops the notion of sympathy with uncanny effect. It exemplifies the fascinating and disquieting quality of Eliot’s writing in Daniel Deronda that her use of musical allusion ranges from precise social observation to experimental effects which are scarcely amenable to thematic reading. In this final section I concentrate more closely on her experimental use of musical analogy. Allusions to music of the kind developed in The Mill on the Floss acquire a new intensity in Daniel Deronda. Music becomes implicated in clairvoyant levels of sympathetic communication which, as much as the internal conflict portrayed in The Mill, disrupt notions of a unified subject. Music’s power to confound linear progressions of time becomes palpable at moments of prolepsis and synchronism through which it transcends expected boundaries of communication and consciousness. With its power also to convey ambiguous significance and contradictory mental states musical allusion is a crucial aspect of the way in which Eliot’s writing in Daniel Deronda challenges the parameters of the ‘realist’ novel. Eliot’s portrayal of the composer–musician Julius Klesmer epitomises the way in which these different levels of musical allusion coexist in her text. Klesmer is both the instrument of trenchant social and aesthetic criticism and a strange, somewhat disturbing figure, with strong, previously unexplored links with the uncanny elements in German Romantic literature as well as with its aesthetic ideals. Reading Eliot’s novel alongside E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fiction throws light not merely on his artistic importance, but on some of the more uncanny aspects of

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Eliot’s musical maestro. As Freud noted in his 1919 essay on ‘Das Unheimliche’, ‘Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature’.172 Klesmer is reminiscent not merely of Kapellmeister Kreisler, but of a whole array of mesmeric effects and magnetic characters which populate Hoffmann’s fiction including ‘The Magnetiser’ (1814), ‘The Automaton’ (1819) and ‘The Uncanny Guest’ (1820). Hypnotic powers in Hoffmann’s tales are signalled by piercing eyes or burning gaze. ‘Fire’ shows in Klesmer’s glances, and the effect of his eloquence is of ‘fireworks accidentally ignited’ (92, 223). Hoffmann’s interest in mesmerism accompanied his obsessive preoccupation with eyes and optical instruments, most famously in ‘The Sandman’ (1816). Klesmer’s peculiar visionary powers are emphasised by the glinting spectacles of ‘that wide glancing personage, who saw everything and nothing by turns’ (450, 104). ‘That young lady is musical, I see!’ he asserts of Mab Meyrick, striking her as ‘a dreadfully divining personage’. He strikes her sister as ‘Satan in grey trousers’ and prompts her mother to conclude that ‘He has magic spectacles and sees everything through them, depend upon it’ (453, 455). Mirah agrees with Klesmer that it is better to sing ‘vor den Wissenden’ – literally ‘before those who know’ (453). Clearly Klesmer is ‘knowing’ in more senses than one. Klesmer has uncanny powers of perception and his effect on Gwendolen is that of a magician who can suddenly shift horizons. Eliot’s account of his playing combines connotations of uncanny power with contemporary physiology. In an inversion of the musical instrument figure that scientists used to describe the nerves ‘spread out . . . and exposed to the influence of the will like the keys of a piano-forte’, Eliot turns the keyboard into a network of nerve fibres.173 Klesmer’s mastery over the piano displays ‘an imperious magic in his fingers that seemed to send a nerve-thrill through ivory key and wooden hammer and compel the strings to make a quivering lingering speech for him’ (43). His influence over Gwendolen is both salutary and frightening, suggestive of near-mesmeric power. Gisela Argyle has suggested that the name ‘Klesmer’ is intentionally rhymed with ‘Mesmer’ to convey the influence of Klesmer’s judgement as it unveils the philistinism of British culture.174 Certainly Klesmer’s extraordinary powers of vision have special significance in a novel preoccupied with second sight and neartelepathic powers of sympathy. Early in the novel, Klesmer’s intervention in the scene where Gwendolen poses as Hermione heralds some of the more enigmatic aspects of musical allusion in the novel. It establishes Klesmer, the unimpeachable representative of cultural value, as simultaneously an

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uncanny and somewhat disturbing figure who turns Gwendolen’s carefully contrived tableau of The Winter’s Tale into a moment of authentic terror. Klesmer dramatically proves his musical magicianship to be more than metaphorical. At Paulina’s ‘“Music, awake her, strike”’, when ‘Dear life redeems’ the original Hermione, Klesmer’s ‘thunderous chord’ causes a panel in the room to fly open presenting Gwendolen with the terrifying apparition – predictive of her future implication in Grandcourt’s death – of a figure fleeing from a corpse (54).175 Gwendolen’s humiliation at Klesmer’s original judgement of her singing and the subsequent influence upon her of his magical playing are depicted as lifting her above egotism. Here, his corrective influence transforms a contrived performance into a moment of genuine drama. Klesmer shows Gwendolen the prophetic picture of her own flight from her drowning husband which will haunt her after his death. He extends the broadening of her perceptual horizons to new extremes. Klesmer, we are told, brings his own ‘locus’ with him (450). Eliot leaves us undecided as to whether this is the classical ‘locus amoenus’ or the more uncanny ‘locus suspectus’ which Freud cites as the Latin equivalent of ‘Das Unheimliche’.176 Gwendolen has previously ordered the panel over the terrifying painting to be kept locked: the incident chimes precisely with Schelling’s definition, as quoted by Freud, of the uncanny as that which ‘ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light’.177 It reveals to Gwendolen her unacknowledged capacity for murderous desires. It is ‘Unheimlich’ in a more literal sense as well, disturbing Gwendolen in the very heart of home. The incident certainly involves her crossing a new threshold of vision, for it ‘showed Gwendolen in an unforeseen phase of emotion’ and ‘How it came about was at first a mystery’ (54). Gwendolen undergoes ‘a change of expression . . . terrifying in its terror’ (54). Eliot reverses the transformation undergone by the original Hermione as Gwendolen becomes ‘like a statue into which a soul of Fear had entered’ (54). She gives every sign of a mesmerised trance: ‘her pallid lips were parted; her eyes, usually narrowed under their long lashes, were dilated and fixed’ (54). Her uncle soon identifies the vibrations from Klesmer’s playing as the cause for the panel’s opening and thus the medium of Gwendolen’s mortification, but Klesmer’s role is no less uncanny for this explanation and its force in bringing her to a state of ‘spiritual dread’ (57) is even enhanced by the gentle mockery of spiritualism which the ‘mystery’ facilitates meanwhile: ‘It is very mysterious. It must be the spirits.’ ‘But there is no medium present.’

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A more prosaic ‘medium’ transpires to have been Gwendolen’s younger sister, Isabel, who had earlier failed to relock the panel over the painting (55). But it is Klesmer who causes it to fly open. Klesmer is one of a line of magnetic musical maestros running from Hoffmann’s Kreisler to du Maurier’s Svengali – literary counterparts to the mythologisation of the powers of historical musicians such as Paganini and Liszt. ‘Only the composer who knows how to use harmony to work on the human soul has truly mastered its secrets’, asserts Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler.178 In Hoffmann’s literature of terror, Kreisler’s playing can reveal the Devil himself, as it does at the conclusion of his story ‘Kreisler’s Musical–Poetical Club’.179 Ironically, Klesmer is initially described as being in ‘one of his placid silent moods’, and his agreeing to accompany Gwendolen’s tableau performance on the piano is depicted as simply a ‘good-natured’ act (53, 54). The terrifying, if improving, effect of his intervention suggests otherwise – or is his the silent passivity of the medium? Klesmer is an ‘Uncanny Guest’. The original Unheimliche Gast in Hoffmann’s story also immobilises the story’s heroine.180 Hoffmann’s work illuminates much in Daniel Deronda. It highlights how Klesmer, the apparently unassailable manifestation of serious culture, is an extremely ambiguous figure. He is last glimpsed in Hans Meyrick’s letter where he features as an eastern ‘genius’, showering Mirah with ‘oriental gifts’ and so completing his magician-like appearances in and disappearances from the text (601). (Kreisler, we are told, simply disappears one day without trace.) E.T.A. Hoffmann’s artist seeks only escape; George Eliot’s ‘comes into the world to make new rules’ (94). Eliot’s devotion to sympathy guarantees her commitment to the performative value of art: or does it? We cannot always be certain. Her equivocal artist–legislator, the musical magician, vanishes. Deronda’s Zionist enterprise perhaps evokes another Hoffmannesque archetype of the artist’s escape: that of Atlantis. In Hoffmann’s writing, music discloses an unknown world where a vision of the infinite is attained. Eliot’s resistance to egotism and solipsism emphasises a connection between moments of uncanny apprehension and increased powers of sympathy. Her dominant metaphors are of expansion rather than of vertical transcendence. The quality of sympathetic vision emphasised in Daniel Deronda is ultimately most akin to Wordsworth’s ‘eye made quiet by the power [o]f harmony’ by

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‘How do you know that? We must conclude that there is when such things happen.’ (55)

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which ‘We see into the life of things’ and apprehend ‘the still, sad music of humanity’.181 Nonetheless, the degree to which musical figures and figurative music are involved in uncanny effects that pressure the usual boundaries of perception and communication also gives Eliot’s writing a peculiar affinity with Hoffmann’s work. Music invariably features in Hoffmann’s narratives as a powerful agent of enhanced apprehension. In Daniel Deronda, the ‘deep, mysterious passion’, ‘conflict’, and ‘sense of the universal’ attested by Klesmer prepare the reader to think of allusions to music as signalling a heightened level of perception (43). Eliot’s preoccupation with the lifting of normal barriers of perception is most obviously manifest in The Lifted Veil, which she interrupted work on The Mill on the Floss in order to write. However, ‘conceptually and rhetorically’, as Nicholas Royle comments, it is a concern which ‘pervades and even dominates her work’.182 The Hermione tableau is a particularly striking example of how Eliot brings together her Romantic literary inheritance and her engagement with contemporary science, including psychical research. ‘Indications on claire-voyance witnessed by a competent observer are of thrilling interest and give me a restless desire to get at more extensive and satisfactory evidence’, she commented in 1852.183 By the time of Daniel Deronda’s publication, a systematic study such as she advocated was about to take place. Among the Leweses’ acquaintance was F.W.H. Myers, who, with Edmund Gurney (whose work on both music and spiritualism I discuss in chapter 1), was preparing to investigate the phenomena he christened ‘telepathy’, a term which largely came to replace what Eliot’s contemporaries knew as ‘sympathetic clairvoyance’.184 The psychologist James Sully, when describing Eliot herself in his memoirs, explicitly linked her capacity for sympathy with somewhat uncanny powers of perception: ‘George Eliot enfolded her auditors in an atmosphere of discriminative sympathy. She had a clairvoyant insight into mind and character, which enabled her to get at once into spiritual touch with a stranger’.185 We can see her elaboration of sympathy in Daniel Deronda as a new manifestation of the uncanny: a dramatisation, as Nicholas Royle has proposed, of ‘sympathetic clairvoyance’.186 Klesmer is a starting point; music shows us that the uncanny pervades Eliot’s text. The effects of music disturb categories of time and of identity. Music ‘awakens’ Gwendolen to exhibit the signs of a mesmerised state of terror which she can account for only as ‘a brief remembered madness’ (56). The memory which provokes this response remains unspecified, although the novel later makes explicit the proleptic significance of what was remembered. It is generally illustrative of her capacity for ‘spiritual dread’ (57). ‘Some feelings are like our hearing’, says Mirah

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Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

of this anticipatory audial power: ‘they come as sounds do, before we know their reason’ (201). ‘Second-sight’, as the narrator says in relation to Mordecai, ‘is a flag over disputed ground. But it is a matter of knowledge that there are persons whose yearnings, conceptions – nay, travelled conclusions – continually take the form of images which have a foreshadowing power’ (439). Musical allusion shows the degree to which Eliot’s concern with the ‘visionary’ pervades her text. Music, the most fleeting of the arts, exists only in time. Sequential memory – awareness of repetition and contrast – is intrinsic to our apprehension of music. Dependent on constructing rhythmically measured time for its very existence, music itself strangely alters our perception of time. The harmonic and melodic structures of music mean that our listening derives coherence from both memory of what has passed and anticipation of what is to come. This may be part of the reason why musical experience transcends our perceptions of linear sequence, so that, as with Gwendolen, we might be said to ‘remember’ the future. Music both establishes and suspends temporality. Music’s power to open doors onto both past and future is a metaphor literalised in the tableau of Hermione. This also reveals a divided Gwendolen, later to describe herself as ‘like two creatures’ (643). Her ‘liability . . . to fits of spiritual dread’ seems to her ‘an unexplained exception from her normal life’ (57, 56). ‘Two thoughts, or acts of memory . . . cannot be presumed to exist at the same instant’, maintained the psychologist Henry Holland.187 Eliot’s writing, by contrast, particularly in her final novel, asserts that ‘Macbeth’s rhetoric about the impossibility of being many opposite things in the same moment, referred to the clumsy necessities of action and not to the subtler possibilities of feeling’ (36). Frequently signalling the coexistence of antithetical mental states, music in Daniel Deronda not only reveals, as in The Mill on the Floss, the disunity inherent in physiological accounts of psychology, but challenges assumptions about necessary sequence in psychical life. Gwendolen ‘forgets’ herself in a fit of ‘remembered’ madness. Here, as in Deronda’s unconscious embodiment of his race, music brings memory into overt alliance with oblivion. The mesmeric effects which are implicit in Maggie Tulliver’s entrancement by Stephen Guest’s voice and gaze have also become more explicitly evoked. Klesmer exerts Svengalilike power over Gwendolen as Hermione, transforming her into ‘a statue’ (54). Later, when Mirah and Deronda meet, Mirah stands statuelike, arrested by Deronda’s singing. Music signals internal divisions and also the erasure of boundaries between individuals. When Mirah and Deronda encounter each other,

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a telepathic fusing of their identities with each other and with the surrounding landscape is saturated with musical correspondence. Eliot undertakes a particularly intriguing experiment in operatic analogy. Deronda is rowing on the Thames, singing the ‘gondolier’s song in the “Otello” where’, writes Eliot, ‘Rossini has worthily set to music the immortal words of Dante – “Nessun maggior dolore / Che ricordarsi del tempo felice / Nella miseria”’ (171). Two lines from Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’, which Eliot places at the head of the chapter, translate the refrain: ‘This is truth the poet sings, / That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things’ (169).188 In Rossini’s opera, Desdemona, grieving over Otello’s exile, hears a gondolier on the canal below singing of how present sorrow is increased by the memory of past happiness. For Mirah, who is about to drown herself, Deronda’s refrain represents her remembered past and present sorrow. As for Deronda, having seen Mirah first as ‘an impersonation of the misery he was unconsciously giving voice to’, he experiences an intense moment of sympathetic clairvoyance, becoming conscious of Mirah for a second time on his return up the river, and realising that she intends to drown herself (171). Eliot’s choice of epigram explicitly makes Deronda’s song the binding formal and thematic motif for the chapter. The gondolier’s refrain embodies Mirah’s personal and racial history. Prefiguring her state of feeling before she appears in the novel, it also foreshadows her imminent meeting with Deronda, their shared inheritance and joint personal and vocational future. It is the equivalent of Eliot’s own description in ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ of the use in opera of ‘a particular melody or musical phrase as a sort of Ahnung or prognostication of the approach or action of a particular character’.189 The repeated association with Mirah of ‘Per pietà’ and ‘O patria mia’ is also akin to the organic motivic development for which Eliot praises Wagner. Rossini’s refrain communicates between Deronda and Mirah before they have ‘spoken’. When Deronda prevents her drowning herself, it is with its words that Mirah recognises him: ‘I saw you before . . . nella miseria . . . It was you singing? . . . Nessun maggior dolore’ (174). She continues to explain herself in terms of the song: ‘The maggior dolore and the miseria have lasted longer than the tempo felice . . . Dolore – miseria – I think those words are alive’ (176). Daniel has not yet heard her sing, but their exchange is explicitly given a musical status: ‘The mere words themselves uttered in her sweet undertones seemed to give the melody to Deronda’s ear’ (174). At such moments, dramatic expressions of emotion function very much like arias that punctuate the quieter surrounding text.

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Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Deronda and Gwendolen also converse about and through music. Deronda’s musical empathy with Mirah and Gwendolen stands out in its intensity, and in contrast to the degree to which communication between them is suppressed. They are characters whose inner thoughts are otherwise habitually unspoken. Mirah’s feelings about Deronda are entirely expressed in song. As Gillian Beer observes, the altogether less vocal quality of Eliot’s writing in Daniel Deronda, compared with her previous novels, makes moments of communication more acute: The silence in which so much of Daniel Deronda takes place is a terrifying seal over the crowded and various discourses of the text . . . The characters act out much of their experience without speech. This has the effect of intensely dramatising encounter when it does occur. So snatched scenes of conversation between Deronda and Gwendolen are imbued with a hieratic value.190 Noting the difficulty of finding a language in which to discuss the novel’s portrayal of the relationship between Deronda and Gwendolen, Beer points out the imperfect correspondences with subsequent Freudian theory: Deronda’s role would, only a little later through the work of Freud, be institutionalised as that of the therapist. But there is no role in his society which can accept transference and not see it as seduction, and no already constituted language with which to express the difference, other than that of religion.191 It is possible to find in Eliot’s deployment of musical allusion something of an ‘already constituted’ psychological language, which has a role distinct from that of religion in literary composition, although it may have become even less familiar than the language of religion to post-Freudian generations. In a scene that parallels the musical interchange between Deronda and Mirah, music is the occasion for communication between Deronda and Gwendolen which is even more expressive than their other ‘snatched scenes of conversation’.192 Klesmer’s playing supplies the opportunity for Gwendolen to come into closer proximity with Deronda despite the jealous baritone’s scrutiny: she chose, under the pretext of getting farther from the instrument, not to go again to her former seat, but placed herself on a settee

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The ‘torrent-like confluences of bass and treble’ are emblematic of her fervent sympathy with Deronda: music not as a mere substitute for conversation but, as Hoffmann describes it, ‘a higher mode of expression than normal speech can provide’ (522).193 In comparison with the usual artificiality of her social intercourse, and the constrained ‘performances’ of her private conversations with Grandcourt and Lush, it seems ‘like a convulsion of nature, to cast the conduct of petty mortals into insignificance, and to warrant his sitting down’ (522–3). The immediacy of Gwendolen’s musical conversations with Deronda is in contrast both with the silent ‘music’ of thought which permeates the novel and with what Welsh terms the ‘commonplace and threatening exchange of information’.194 Mirah’s singing voice has already been emphatically established as a medium of direct emotional expression. When she sings ‘Per pietà non dirmi addio’, ‘with that wonderful, searching quality of subdued song in which the melody seems simply an effect of the emotion’, it functions as an expansion of the brief and partly constrained conversation between Deronda and Gwendolen: ‘In Deronda’s ear the strain was for the moment a continuance of Gwendolen’s pleading – a painful urging of something vague and difficult, irreconcilable with pressing conditions, and yet cruel to resist’ (524). Conflicting empathies merge in a single musical strain. The conjunction here of Gwendolen’s emotion and Mirah’s voice is a prognostication of the future conflict of claims made on Deronda’s feeling by Gwendolen on the one hand, and by Mirah and Mordecai on the other – a conflict with some affinities with the musically portrayed conflicts in The Mill on the Floss. Deronda experiences a ‘strain of excited feeling in him that went along with the notes of Mirah’s song’ (525). This keeps him at Gwendolen’s side, but, as with his reflections on his experience in the synagogue, the significance of this musical sympathy is not unclouded. Deronda is simultaneously aware of ‘a growing incompatible claim on him in her mind’ and feels the ‘foreshadowing of some painful collision’ (525). The musically presaged conflict between the claims of Gwendolen and Mirah is of course also that between the conflicting demands of the culture in which Deronda has been nurtured and that of his birth and future destiny. Here again, musical allusion compresses narrative connections. Before one of his later interviews with Gwendolen, Deronda realises that he is the same room where Mirah had sung and reflects on

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where she could only have one neighbour. She was nearer to Deronda than before: was it surprising that he came up in time to shake hands before the music began . . . ? (522–3)

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

the double significance of the moment when Gwendolen’s ‘appeal had seemed to melt into the melodic cry – ‘Per pietà non dirmi addio’. Now in love with Mirah, Deronda’s memory is transformed by the realisation that ‘the melody had come from Mirah’s dear voice’ (712). The telepathic effects of music are unsettling in themselves. They are rendered more strange by being fleeting and mutable. Elusive and intermittent, moments of musically induced memory and prolepsis generate a sense of the uncanny and leave us uncertain as to the nature of communication embodied in musical memory and its literary evocation. As in The Mill on the Floss, music’s dramatisation of conflict within the individual unsettles the idea of a unified psyche. Moreover, Eliot’s analysis of musical expression to suggest the erasure of boundaries between individual consciousnesses takes the experimental dissolution of individual identity (and thus of the literary construction of ‘character’) to new extremes. Music fuses individual identities not merely with each other but with their material surroundings. The first encounter between Deronda and Mirah takes place in Book Two, ‘Meeting Streams’. Deronda experiences a transcendent sense of identity with the surrounding landscape and a clairvoyant apprehension of Mirah (174). Music and rivers intertwine in Eliot’s invocations of consciousness. This makes us think back to Wordsworth’s River Derwent (blending itself with his nurse’s song in The Prelude) and also forward to Woolf’s ‘stream of consciousness’, in which boundaries between individual identities and inanimate nature are perpetually blurred.195 We are reminded that ‘stream of consciousness’ was a term in psychology and a concept in literature well before Modernism adopted it.196 As Deronda rows past, Mirah is transfixed by ‘the pianissimo fall of the melodic wail “nella miseria” [which] was distinctly audible on the brink of the water’ (171). She is unaware of the music as originating outside herself. This is a telepathic version of the mesmeric effect of Stephen Guest’s voice on Maggie Tulliver. The distinction between Mirah’s identity and her external surroundings is erased: Her hands were hanging down clasped before her, and her eyes were fixed on the river with a look of immovable, statue-like despair. This strong arrest of his attention made him cease singing: apparently his voice had entered her inner world without her having taken any note of whence it came, for when it suddenly ceased she changed her attitude slightly, and, looking round with a frightened glance, met Deronda’s face . . . it seemed to Deronda that she was only halfconscious of her surroundings. (171)

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Deronda’s own musical transcendence of ‘normal’ boundaries of sympathy in this scene effects a dissolution of his individual identity as he undergoes a musical blending of his inner consciousness with the outer world.197 This begins, as he rows back past Richmond Bridge, with a synaesthetic perception of the landscape which becomes an unfinished melody: the approach of his favourite hour – with its darkening masses of tree and building between the double glow of the sky and the river – disposed him to linger as if they had been an unfinished strain of music. (173) The landscape reconfigures the phrase of song which he unconsciously broke off on first seeing Mirah; drifting on the tide evokes melodic continuation. This affinity with the musical listener underpins a state of mind that challenges apparent opposites, fusing will and passivity, reason and instinct, conscious intellectual thought and unconscious feeling: It was his habit to indulge himself in that solemn passivity which easily comes with the lengthening shadows and mellowing light, when thinking and desiring melt together imperceptibly, and what in other hours may have seemed argument takes the quality of passionate vision. (172–3) ‘Argument takes the quality of passionate vision’: Eliot’s insistence on binding together moments of visionary insight and of intellectual analysis places a particular value on the perceptive powers of what she calls the ‘emotional intellect’ (478). In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver’s passionate longing is for knowledge and understanding as much as for affection. In Deronda’s exchanges with Gwendolen, music represents the power of ‘affections . . . clad with knowledge’ (421). The notion of a feeling intellect is pervasively elaborated in Daniel Deronda, so as thoroughly to unsettle our assumption about distinctions between rational and irrational modes of thought: ‘Who supposes that it is an impossible contradiction to be superstitious and rationalising at the same time?’ the narrator asks (15). In a fine conjunction of emotional and intellectual terms, Deronda’s later encounter with Mordecai will be a test of his ‘keenly perceptive sympathetic emotiveness which ran along with his speculative tendency’ (462). Here, his sudden sympathetic perception of Mirah’s

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Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

intention follows from a transcendence of the boundaries between self and world effected by these same sympathetic and speculative gifts. Resting in shadow at the river’s edge at the end of the evening, the subliminal becoming liminal, the landscape an ‘unfinished strain of music’ bridging thought and externality, Deronda is ‘forgetting everything else in a half-speculative, half-involuntary identification of himself with the objects he was looking at’. He reflects on how far it might be possible habitually to shift his centre till his own personality would be no less outside him than the landscape, – when the sense of something moving on the bank opposite . . . made him turn his glance thitherward. In the first moment he had a darting presentiment about the moving figure; and now he could see the small face with the strange dying sunlight upon it. (173) As in the tableau scene, memory and prophecy coincide. Deronda’s dawning recognition of Mirah is simultaneously a moment of premonition (173). Like Gwendolen, he appears to ‘remember’ the future. These musical scenes in Daniel Deronda, in which individual identities dissolve, are amongst some of the most striking instances of literary experimentation in Eliot’s last novel. They undermine distinctions between conscious and unconscious thought, and show her taking her preoccupation with sympathetic communication to unexpected extremes. The extent of sympathetic communication that music fosters and represents in Daniel Deronda ranges beyond the boundaries of ‘realism’, and music’s association with premonition and coincidence unsettles notions of causality and the absolute necessity of sequence. However, rather than simply opposing the structures of science to a claim for imaginative autonomy, Eliot’s continuing engagement with evolutionary theory, with our past and future inheritance, joins a growing preoccupation with telepathy and second sight. She intimates that the ‘forecasting ardour’, essential to science itself, partakes of Mordecai’s ‘visionary excitability’ and proclaims that ‘the sensibility of the artist seizes combinations which science explains and justifies’ (477–8). In portraying this musically induced telepathic melding of distinctions between individuals, and between individuals and their material environment, Eliot’s writing continues to interact with, as well as to challenge, scientific thought. As so often, there is a particular kinship with Lewes’s texts. In his essay on ‘Spiritualism and Materialism’ published the same year as Daniel Deronda, Lewes proposes that the subject/object distinction is logical rather than real, so intimating the

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Our inferences respecting it as Notself are by the hypothetical representations of the possible modes of Feeling which the Notself would excite in us under conceivable changes of relation. (479–80)198 At the end of ‘The Legend of Jubal’, Eliot had evoked a synaesthetic ‘moment’s freedom won / From in and outer’ (113). In Daniel Deronda, the existential harmony longed for by Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss – the ‘something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life’ – is momentarily achieved through dissolution of the individual subject. Eliot’s depictions of musically transmitted sympathy also remain closely related to scientific descriptions of musical expression and response.199 In the first volume of his Problems of Life and Mind, published in 1874, Lewes explained that the ‘sensible’ made up only a small portion of existence.200 There were also ‘extra sensible’ phenomena that existed beyond the limitations of our normal sensual experience. In my discussion of The Mill on the Floss I drew attention to how Lewes evoked the physical principle of sympathetic vibrations to provide a physiological explanation of emotional response to sound: ‘When a note is sounded by one chord it will set in vibration any other chords which are in sympathy with it . . . It is thus also external voices awaken sympathetic tones in us’. But, Lewes continues, we hear only a tiny proportion of the vibrations which exist, for our ‘limits are soon reached’: We know there are a thousand tremors in the air which beat upon our ears unheard; and if more sensitive organs [i.e. of animals] are capable of hearing some of these, there must be tremors which no organism can feel.201 Eliot uses a simile which closely recalls Lewes’s discussion to describe the operation of silent sympathy (if imperfect understanding) between Hans Meyrick and Mirah: It was impossible for him to give Mirah any direct sign of the way in which he had understood her anger, yet he longed that his speechless companionship should be eloquent in a tender, penitent sympathy . . .

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merging of identities invoked by Eliot. He suggests that the material world ‘ceases to be an alien’ once we realise that our knowledge of it is none other than ‘knowledge of our own affections’:

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Eliot’s engagement with scientific accounts of music pushes physical explanation to extremes where it acquires an affinity with the impulse of Romantic poetry to commune with uncanny presences in nature. Mordecai enjoys a Wordsworthian communion with the ‘messages of Earth and sky’ as he leans over the parapet of Blackfriars Bridge, a passage that echoes Deronda’s instant of half-conscious musical transcendence as he rows on the river (461).202 Deronda’s future appearance is anticipated – he already lodges in Mordecai’s memory as the embodiment of a long-held vision of a Zionist successor. He is about to row out of the dissolving haze on the river and again musical allusion preludes a moment of proleptic memory, as landscape and thought blend together ‘into a fine symphony to which we can hardly be said to listen’ (442).203 Mordecai’s thoughts, like Deronda’s, are ‘blent . . . indistinguishably’ with surrounding objects, colours, sounds (442). In all their strangeness and fragility, moments of musical sympathy make Lewes’s unheard ‘tremors in the air’ increasingly audible, reaching towards the ‘other side of silence’ which Eliot invokes in the famous passage in Middlemarch.204 Also the other side of science. Eliot’s novels demonstrate that music offers fertile ground for engagement with contemporary psychology and biological science. In particular, musical allusion is capable of reflecting some of the ways in which physical science of the time interested itself in psychical life as well as in readily demonstrable laws of development. In Daniel Deronda, analogies with scientific explanation are augmented rather than diminished as her narrative gathers strangeness. Through Mordecai, Eliot draws analogies between the work of the novelist, the experimental scientist and the visionary prophet. She promotes the claims of the visionary imagination, not by asserting its truth but by insisting that other forms of knowledge share its subjectivity. Insisting that ‘The driest argument has its hallucinations’, she shows that the uncanny haunts scientific explanation just as it pervades her text (478). In her employment of musical allusion, she utilises the uncanny potential of images of sympathetic vibration and evolutionary inheritance. She exploits music’s traditional associations with all things mysterious and profound and the degree to which it baffles rational accounts of its affective power. Both Darwin and Spencer acknowledged that music has a mysterious influence which ‘arouses dormant senti-

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Thus the two went side by side in a companionship that yet seemed an agitated communication, like that of two chords whose quick vibrations lie outside our hearing. (679)

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ments of which we had not conceived the possibility, and do not know the meaning’.205 Both scientists quote Jean Paul’s assertion that music ‘tells us of things we have not seen and shall not see’, an allusion that affirms a role for Romantic transcendence within musical experience.206 Spencer’s assertion that development theory could account for Romantic notions of mysterious musical transcendence does not make musical expression less uncanny. Deronda invokes the aeolian harp to figure ancestral inheritance. If the more advanced evolution of the musician’s sensibilities explains the unfamiliarity of what the listener hears, then the musician as an intimation of the future of humanity provides telepathic visions of our inherited potential: we hear our common future embodied in their memories.207 Such accounts provide a biological basis for the possibility of ‘remembering’ the future. Biological evolution operates in parallel with other uncanny effects of music in Daniel Deronda. In evolutionary accounts of music, our biological inheritance, which holds the seed of an undiscovered future, is rendered strange by the mystery of music’s origin and power. George Eliot’s evocations of music unite engagement with materialist science and with the uncanny. They help to take realist narrative, so closely associated in her work with scientific method, into unfamiliar and challenging territory.

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Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

Reading Daniel Deronda via musical allusion illuminates the extraordinary scope of Eliot’s writing in her final work. Music permeates her investigations of cultural and personal vocation, including the most extensive exploration of female creativity in her fiction. It links these with her invocations of uncanny sympathetic communication and with her unprecedented expansion of the boundaries of realism. We already see this in The Mill on the Floss, where musical allusion dramatises the entangled workings of inner and outer life. Musical allusion resounds throughout the elaborate textures of Eliot’s writing, in these two intensely musical novels and elsewhere in her work. It enlarges her relationship with her Romantic inheritance and with contemporary science and it accommodates her own literary innovations. To a remarkable extent, music supplies Eliot with a language with which to dramatise the interactions and inner lives of her characters and yields a fruitful source of analogy with writing – especially with the experience of the woman writer. Music has a privileged relation to the literary here because it offers a focus both for the writer’s experiments and for the reader’s interpretation. The research presented in this book offers an intriguing variety of contact with Eliot’s work and that of her contemporaries. The range of contexts for Eliot’s use of musical allusion highlights the enormous significance of music for nineteenth-century life and thought. It suggests critical latitudes beyond the scope of this project as well as disclosing the signal, but as yet largely unexplored, pertinence of music to many of the most interesting aspects of Eliot’s writing. Whilst music is an especially prominent topos in Eliot’s work, the significance of figures of sound and music for other nineteenth-century writers also remains to be discovered. Work on musical allusion offers 192

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Conclusion

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scope for critics whether their impetus is to investigate the social context for particular texts or to focus closely on their rhetoric. This clearly applies to writers regarded as Eliot’s particular successors. The humming telegraph wire running through Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean is connected to a lineage of nineteenth-century materialist explanations of nervous response as sympathetic vibration. It asks to be read in relation to Eliot’s probing of the ‘telegraphic’ sympathy involved in musical communication. Eliot was sometimes criticised by her contemporaries for the excessively scientific nature of her language. Certainly no other novelist developed such closely related engagements with music and with science. Reading her allusions to music uncovers ways in which Eliot’s knowledge of science engenders uncanny and unexpected literary effects. Nevertheless, in her employment of musical allusion, Eliot was also utilising a long-established and familiar terminology. In this she may be seen as acting on her own recommendation in her 1868 ‘Notes on Form in Art’ that ‘[T]he old phrases should not give way to scientific explanation, for speech is to a great extent like sculpture, expressing observed phenomena and remaining true in spite of Harvey and Bichat’.1 Like sculpture, music also embodies an old language ‘remaining true in spite of Harvey and Bichat’.2 The sculptural analogy accords with Eliot’s own use of musical allusion to communicate a sense of the substance of emotional, moral and creative life as extending beyond the scope of abstract explanation. Eliot demands an unreductive sense of the material conditions of imaginative life: the consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music . . . That every study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms.3 These remarks were addressed to a correspondent impressed by Eliot’s ability to combine her interest in science with human sympathy. For all the fragility of her portrayals of musical sympathy, her stress on ‘experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms’ resists both crude materialism and a Paterian abandonment to the movement, flux and discontinuity of ‘moments . . . for those moments’ sake’.4 She upholds a strange kind of continuity: a ‘peculiar history’ inflected by the singularity of aesthetic and emotional experience.

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Conclusion

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

Animated by connections with English and German Romanticism as well as with organicist science, Eliot’s employment of musical allusion calls on figures whose significance overflows with long-established literary associations. A remnant of the Romantic aesthetic which Eliot herself invoked in one of her earliest comments on music lurks within her references to music. In addition to its invocation of transcendence, her assertion that ‘Music arches over this existence, with another and a diviner’ anticipates her later analogy of speech and sculpture and echoes Schelling’s famous description of architecture as ‘frozen music’.5 These concrete images for language and music carry significance for Eliot’s practice as a writer as well as for her use of musical allusion. In the lines about Jubal hammering out the beginnings of music and poetry from which I quote at the beginning of this book, he hears ‘some melody / Wherein dumb longings inward speech had found’. Eliot echoes Browning’s evocation in his 1840 poem ‘Sordello’ of the forging of poetic language: ‘How he sought / The cause, conceived a cure, and slow re-wrought / That Language, – welding words into the crude / Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude / Armour was hammered out’.6 Aside from the specific figurative overlaps of hammering and speech, Eliot is also explicitly describing the forging of a particular kind of language. Her employment of musical figures in ‘Jubal’ and elsewhere revivifies the clichéd alliance of music and poetry as ‘sister’ arts to address questions about the formation of a literary language. Jubal watches the hammer in his forge until ‘his eyes . . . Seemed glad with something that they could not see, / But only listened to ’.7 The movement towards audial pre-eminence intimated here is realised in Daniel Deronda, the culmination of Eliot’s work as a novelist, where the hero’s Jewish ancestry is figured in an image of invisible musical inheritance, and music affords an ‘inward speech’ that works between and across individual identities.8 Through music, Eliot elaborates an established source of literary metaphor and analogy, the forms of which became imbued with new significance in her writing.

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Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16

17 18 19

20 21 22 23

George Eliot, ‘The Legend of Jubal’ (1869–70), Collected Poems, ed. Lucien Jenkins (London: Skoob, 1989), p. 98. Cited hereafter as Poems. Eliot, Poems, p. 91. Eliot, Poems, p. 98. See Eliot, Poems, pp. 94, 98, 106. Eliot, Poems, p. 106. Eliot, Middlemarch, [1871–2], ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 46. Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 100. Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 71. Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 246, 538–9, 203. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss [1860], ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 205. Eliot, Poems, p. 113. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice [1813] (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), p. 101. Eliot, The Mill, p. 288. Eliot to Charles Lee Lewes, 30 July [1859]. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), Vol. III, pp. 125–6. Cited hereafter as Letters. Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, eds Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 21, 1 October 1861. Cited hereafter as Journals. Letters, IV, p. 120. To Cara Bray, 4 December, 1863. Letters, IV, p. 127. To Mrs Richard Congreve, 19 January 1864. See also Letters, III, p. 456. To Sara Hennell and Cara Bray, 6 October 1861. Letters, III, p. 460. To Mrs Richard Congreve, 23 October 1861. Letters, IV, pp. 118–19. To Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 4 December 1863. Letters, III, pp. 177–8. To Charles Lee Lewes, 7 October 1859. Letters, III, p. 346. To Cara Bray, [18 September 1860]. Letters, IV, p. 156. To Sara Hennell, [25 June 1864]. Eliot also took a keen interest in the musical education of Beatrice Trollope whose singing she admired: see Letters, III, p. 419. To Charles Lee Lewes, 27 May 1861. See also Letters, III, p. 472. To Mr and Mrs Thomas Adolphus Trollope, [10 December 1861]. Eliot, Journals, pp. 21–9, 10 August–11 October 1854. Eliot, Journals, p. 21, 10 August 1854. Letters, III, p. 364. To Mrs Richard Congreve, 7 December 1860. Letters, III, p. 346. To Cara Bray, [18 September 1860]. 195

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Notes

Notes to pp. 5–13

24 Quoted in Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968) p. 512. 25 See Letters, VI, p. 184. To Charles Lee Lewes, 11 November 1875. 26 See, for example, Letters, III, p. 97. Sara Hennell to Eliot, 26 June 1859. 27 Letters, III, p. 71. To Sara Hennell, 21 May [1859]. 28 Eliot, Daniel Deronda [1876], ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), p. 478. 29 Letters, II, p. 454. To Sara Hennell, 10–13 May 1858. George Henry Lewes, Journal, 14 June 1858. in Letters, III, pp. 449–50, n. 2. 30 Letters, III, pp. 177–8. To Charles Lee Lewes, 7 October 1859. 31 Letters, III, p. 456. To Sara Hennell and Cara Bray, 6 October 1861. 32 See Haight, George Eliot, p. 442. 33 Letters, V, p. 173. To Mrs Peter Alfred Taylor, 2 August 1871. 34 Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, Vol. I (London: Longman, 1858), p. 369. 35 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 84. 36 Eliot, Poems, p. 106 37 Eliot, Poems, p. 98. 38 Eliot, Poems, p. 100. 39 The relationship of music and science to women is discussed by Phyllis Weliver in Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). This draws on some of the same contextual material investigated in my 1993 doctoral thesis and subsequent published articles, although it does not engage closely with my research. Weliver surveys a wide array of primary and theoretical texts with a central emphasis on the history of ideas. 40 John Rignall, ed., Preface to Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. vii.

1 1 2

3

4

5 6

Music, Science, Literature: The ‘Large Music of Reasonable Speech’ George Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 102. Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, eds Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 26, 24, 3 October and 20 September 1854. Cited hereafter as Journals. [Eliot], ‘The Romantic School of Music’, Leader, 5 (1854), pp. 1027–8. Eliot records condensing ‘Liszt’s article on Meyerbeer for the Vivian paper’ on 1st and 2nd October 1854, Journals, p. 26. Sally Shuttleworth describes Spencer as ‘the theorist most clearly responsible for popularising ideas of the social organism in England’: George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 9. Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, Vol. I (London: Longman, 1858), pp. 359–84. See Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 1–30. Robert M. Young points out that this is also a ‘view of life borrowed from Coleridge’: Mind, Brain and Adaptation

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14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28

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in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford and London: Clarendon, 1970), p. 156. Spencer quotes Coleridge in Social Statics: Or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London: Chapman, 1851), p. 436. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 371. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 379. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 15. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 379. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 379–80. Eliot, Romola [1863], ed. Andrew Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 328. Nancy Paxton notes that Eliot read some of Spencer’s early essays prior to publication and that she and Lewes continued frequently to read his essays in draft form: George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 16, 8. One such musical conversation is recorded by Spencer who relates how Eliot agreed with his idea that the immediate enjoyment of music is marred once one begins to analyse its effects: Spencer, Facts and Comments (London: Williams & Norgate, 1902), p. 33. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 391–2. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 2–3. Wolff was the originator of the theory of epigenesis which Goethe and von Baer popularised: see Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, p. 12. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 3, 6, 11, 15. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 15. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 16–17. Eliot, Collected Poems, ed. Lucien Jenkins (London: Skoob, 1989) p. 98. Cited hereafter as Poems. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 27. Pinney identifies Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33) as an important source of Eliot’s conception of the ‘uniformity in natural processes’, Essays, p. 31n. Eliot, Essays, pp. 30–1. See Spencer, Facts and Comments, p. 33. Eliot to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 13 August 1875. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), VI, pp 163–4. Cited hereafter as Letters. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 400. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 400. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 401. Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London: John W. Parker, 1855), pp. 202–9, 310–11, 347–8, 431. Eliot knew Bain in the 1850s and from 1865 he was a regular visitor at The Priory: see Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 389. For an account of how Bain and others established a physical basis for Hartley’s speculative theory of vibrations, see Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, pp. 94–120, 150–1, 161. Comte had also proclaimed the ‘Unity of the brain and nervous system’: Auguste Comte, Positive Philosophy: Freely Translated and Condensed by Harriet Martineau (London: Chapman,

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Notes to pp. 13–15

30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Notes to pp. 15–19 1853), p. 478. Eliot asked Bain to write an article on Comte for the Westminster, during the 1850s: Haight, George Eliot, p. 136. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, p. 151. For a recent account of how psychology was transmuted by Spencer’s emphasis on evolutionary biology and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and for comparisons between Spencer and Bain, see Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially pp. 220–1. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 361–2. (Spencer directs the reader to Alexander Bain’s Animal Instinct and Intelligence for more information on the principle of reflex action.) The direct connections between nervous action and sensation were also stressed by G.H. Lewes in the second volume of his The Physiology of Common Life (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1860), pp. 55–64, 165–225. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 362. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 362. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 363. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 363. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 363. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 368. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 363–7. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 368. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 368. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 368. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 368. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 369. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 376. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 371–2. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 372. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 381. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 381. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 372. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 372. Spencer makes only a general reference to Charles Burney’s work: Essays, I, p. 24. Vol. I of A General History of Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 4 vols (London: Burney, 1776–89), deals with ancient and particularly with Greek music. Vol. IV, pp. 13 ff., begins with a chapter about the invention of recitative and opera, in which Burney cites the intention of early operatic composers to ‘revive the melody of the ancient declamation’ (p. 19). Spencer, Essays, I, p. 373. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 373. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 374. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 373. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 373. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 378. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 378. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 380. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 380. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 382.

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62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

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Spencer, Essays, I, p. 382. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 383. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 383. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, p. 161. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 383. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 383. Eliot, Essays, p. 270. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 16–17. Eliot, Daniel Deronda [1876], ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), p. 43. See William Gardiner, The Music of Nature: Or, an Attempt to Prove that What is Passionate and Pleasing in the Art of Singing, Speaking and Performing upon Musical Instruments, is Derived from the Sounds of the Animated World: with Curious and Interesting Illustrations (London: Longman, 1832), p. 245. Thomas Busby, A Grammar of Music: To Which are Prefixed Observations Explanatory of the Properties and Powers of Music as a Science and of the General Scope and Object of the Work, 2nd edn (London: Printed for Geo. B. Whittaker, 1826), pp. iii–iv. Rev. H.R. Haweis, Music and Morals [1871] 3rd edn (London: Strahan & Co., 1875), p. 9. Burney, A General History of Music, IV, p. 194. Burney, A General History of Music, IV, pp. 683–5. Burney, A General History of Music, IV, p. 685. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 384. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 377. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 377. Aristotle, Politics and The Athenian Constitution, ed. and trans. John Warrington (London: Dent, 1959), pp. 223–33, especially pp. 227 ff. See also Warren Anderson, ‘Plato’, Grove, XIV, pp. 853–7. See Stephen Banfield, ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, The Romantic Age: 1800–1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley (London: Athlone Press, 1981), p. 456. Banfield, ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, p. 456. William Crotch, Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music, Read in the University of Oxford, and in the Metropolis (London: Longman, 1831), pp. 45–6. Gardiner, The Music of Nature, p. 31. Busby, A Grammar of Music, p. v. Busby, A Grammar of Music, p. iii. Joseph Mainzer, A Treatise on Musical Grammar, and the Principles of Harmony (London: Mainzer, 1843), p. 7. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 384. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 376. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 152. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 152, and see Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–2], ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 189. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 374–5. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 375. See Leon Plantinga, Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth Century Europe (New York: Norton, 1984), pp. 15–16. Richard Wagner to

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Notes to pp. 19–25

95

96 97 98 99

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101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

Notes to pp. 25–30 Franz Liszt, Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, trans. Francis Heuffer, 2 vols (London: Crevel, 1854–61), II, p. 50. As established in Lynn Binstock’s account of the heroes of popular musical romances: Lynn Ruth Binstock, ‘A Study of Music in Victorian Prose’, D Phil dissertation (Oxford, 1985), pp. 250, 252–72. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 383. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 376, 383–4. J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 227. H.F. Chorley, ‘Foreign Correspondence’, Athenaeum, 527 (1837), p. 881. For accounts of Mainzer’s activities in Britain see Bernarr Rainbow, ‘Mainzer, Joseph’, Grove, XI, pp. 539–40 and introduction to Mainzer’s Singing for the Million: A Practical Course of Musical Instruction, Adapted from its Pleasing Simplicity and Rapid Effect to Render Musical Reading and Singing Familiar to all Ages, Capacities and Conditions [1841], repr. in Classic Texts in Music Education, 9 (Kilkenny: Boethius Press, 1984), pp. 2–5. John Hullah (1812–84), whose History of Modern Music (London: Longman, 1875) Eliot read when writing Daniel Deronda, established the first sol-fa singing classes in London just four months before Mainzer’s own. He had visited Paris with Chorley intending to observe Mainzer’s classes but these had been closed down by the Paris police. Hullah instead visited similar classes run by G.L. Bocquillon Wilhem, whose rival sol-fa method thus became the basis of his singing classes in England. John Curwen developed an independent sol-fa method and founded the highly successful Tonic Sol-fa Society; see Herbert A. Simon, Songs and Words: A History of the Curwen Press (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973); Rainbow, John Curwen: A Short Critical Biography (Sevenoaks: Novello, 1980). Mainzer, Music and Education (London: Longman, 1848), pp. 9–13. Mainzer, Music and Education, p. 14. Mainzer, Music and Education, pp. 7, 15. Mainzer, Music and Education, p. 14. Mainzer, Singing for the Million, p. xxi. Letters, II, p. 153. To Sara Hennell, 29 April 1854. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans [1854] (New York: Harper, 1975), pp. 3–4. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 9. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, pp. 4–6. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 9. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 63. Eliot, Adam Bede [1859], ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 399. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 81. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, pp. 10–11. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 14. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 23. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 2. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 23. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 83. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, pp. 14, 83.

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121 Cf. Bernard Paris quoting Josiah Royce on Eliot’s religious humanism in which ‘the infinite is conceived and known only in this world of fellow beings’. Paris himself emphasises the significance for Eliot of Feuerbach’s identification of religious and human feeling: Bernard J. Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965), pp. 98, 100. 122 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 83. 123 See Letters, II, p. 137. To Sara Hennell, 18 January 1854. 124 Letters, III, pp. 70–1. To Sara Hennell, 21 May [1859]. Letters, IV, p. 134. To Mrs Peter Alfred Taylor, 3 March 1864. Eliot retained her particular enthusiasm for Handel’s choral writing, commenting in a later letter to Mrs Peter Alfred Taylor on 2 August 1871, ‘I remember . . . the sublime effect of the Handel choruses, and the total futility of the solos’: Letters, V, p. 173. 125 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life [1848], ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 142. 126 Letters, II, p. 452. To Sara Hennell, 17 April 1858. See Daniel Deronda, p. 339; Letters, IV, p. 196. To Mrs Peter Alfred Taylor, 10 July 1865. 127 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871), II, pp. 336–7. 128 Darwin, Descent, II, p. 333. 129 Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, p. 311, and see p. 429, where Bain describes ‘the features, respiratory and vocal organs’ as ‘the parts first acted on by feeling’ and thus ‘by pre-eminence the organs of expression’. 130 Eliot, Poems, p. 100. 131 Darwin, Descent, II, pp. 335–7. 132 Darwin, Descent, II, p. 336, n. 33. 133 Darwin, Descent, II, p. 337. 134 Eliot, The Mill on the Floss [1860], ed. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 352. 135 Darwin, Descent, II, pp. 336–7. 136 See Tyndall’s introduction to Helmholtz’s Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, ed. E. Atkinson (London: Longman, 1873), pp. xv–xvi, where he records translating Helmholtz’s famous 1847 lecture, ‘Die Erhaltung der Kraft’ (p. xv) published as ‘On the Conservation of Force’ in Scientific Memoirs, ed. William Francis and John Tyndall (London: Taylor & Francis, 1853), pp. 114–62. 137 James Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King, 1874), p. 58. 138 Alexander J. Ellis, introduction to Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music [1862], trans. Ellis (London: Longman, 1875), p. v., n. 1. 139 Helmholtz, Popular Lectures, p. xvi. 140 Lewes, Physiology of Common Life, II, pp. 322–3. 141 Eliot, Journals, p. 135, 24 February 1869. 142 See Helmholtz, Popular Lectures, pp. 80, 104, 105; Sensations of Tone, pp. 11, 94, 572–4. 143 Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, pp. 358–61, 382, 576–7, 570. 144 Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, pp. 576–7. 145 Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, pp. 382, 568. 146 Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, pp. 358, 563, 564, 568; see also Popular Lectures, p. 105.

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Notes to pp. 30–5

Notes to pp. 35–40

147 See for example, Sully, Illusions: A Psychological Study (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), p. 236. 148 Sully, My Life and Friends: A Psychologist’s Memories (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1918), p. 145. 149 Sully, Sensation and Intuition, pp. 1–22. 150 Sully, Sensation and Intuition, pp. 23–36. 151 Sully, Sensation and Intuition, pp. 186–219. 152 Sully, Sensation and Intuition, pp. 225–6, 229–39; and see Banfield, ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, p. 461. 153 Sully, ‘On the Nature and Limits of Musical Expression’, Contemporary Review, 23 (1874), p. 587. See also Sensation and Intuition, pp. 241–3 154 Sully, ‘Nature and Limits of Musical Expression’, p. 573; Sensation and Intuition, p. 222. 155 See, for example, his praise of Spencer’s ‘evolutional explanation’ of our capacity to admire landscape: Edmund Gurney, ‘On Music and Musical Criticism’, II, Nineteenth Century, 5 (1879), p. 1077. 156 Gurney, ‘On Some Disputed Points in Music’, Fortnightly Review, 34 (1876), pp. 107–8. 157 Gurney, ‘On Music and Musical Criticism’, I, Nineteenth Century, 4 (1878), p. 55. 158 Gurney, ‘Disputed Points’, pp. 107–8. 159 Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, I, p. 57. 160 Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, I, pp. 56–7. 161 Gurney, ‘Disputed Points’, p. 107. ‘The Speech Theory’, pp. 476–97 of The Power of Sound (London: Smith, Elder, 1880), is a rebuttal of Spencer’s ‘Origin and Function’ thesis. 162 Gurney, ‘Disputed Points’, pp. 108, 116. 163 Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, I, p. 61. 164 Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, I, p. 51. 165 Sully, Sensation and Intuition, p. 232. 166 Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, pp. 385–7. Helmholtz cites Aristotle’s conclusion that music resembles feelings because rhythm and melody are motions, comparable to actions. 167 Gurney, ‘Disputed Points’, p. 109. 168 Gurney, ‘Disputed Points’, p. 118. 169 Gurney, ‘Disputed Points’, pp. 120, 109, 120. 170 Gurney, ‘Disputed Points’, p. 118. 171 Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], ‘Hoffmann’s Kreisler: The First of Musical Romanticists’, Fraser’s Magazine (1878), pp. 842–80, repr. as ‘Chapelmeister Kreisler: A Study of Musical Romanticists’, in Belcarro (London: W. Satchell, 1881), pp. 106–7. 172 Lee, Belcarro, pp. 114–15. 173 Lee, Belcarro, pp. 109, 127–8. 174 Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, I, p. 58. 175 See A.R. Wallace, Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1899), pp. 467–78. 176 Wallace, Darwinism, p. 475. 177 Wallace, Darwinism, pp. 478, 477. 178 Wallace, Darwinism, p. 468. 179 Wallace, Darwinism, p. 474.

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Wallace, Darwinism, p. 474. Gurney, ‘Disputed Points’, p. 116. Gurney, ‘Disputed Points’, p. 116. Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, II, p. 1063. Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, I, p. 61; II, p. 1063. Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, II, p. 1060. Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, II, p. 1078. F.W.H. Myers, ‘Edmund Gurney’s Work in Experimental Psychology’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 5 vols (1882–89), V, pp. 361–2. Gurney, ‘On Song’, Fraser’s Magazine, 19 (1879), p. 224. Eliot, Poems, p. 106. Letters, VI, pp. 333–4. To James Sully, 19 January 1877. Letters, VII, p. 12, n. 1. Lewes to Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon [31 January 1878]. See also Lewes, Diary, 30 March 1877, 31 May–4 June 1877, 14 April 1878, in Letters, VI, p. 360, VI, p. 380, VII, p. 21. Letters, VI, p. 396. Lewes to the Misses Cross, 31 July [1877]. Letters, VI, p. 398. To Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 2 [August] 1877. Lewes, Diary, 8 March 1874, in Letters, IX, p. 118, n. 2. ’I have always fancied – though without any evidence – that some touches in Deronda were drawn from one of her friends, Edmund Gurney, a man of remarkable charm of character, and as good-looking as Deronda’: Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, English Men of Letters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1902), p. 191. Gurney also had a fine voice and sang with a choir convened by Jenny Lind which Eliot heard perform: Letters, VI, p. 321. To Cara Bray, 21 December 1876. Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, p. 71. Gurney, ‘Music and Musical Criticism’, p. 70. Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, Library Edition, 3 vols (London: Williams & Norgate, 1891), II, pp. 426–51. Spencer, Facts and Comments, p. 40. Spencer, Facts and Comments, p. 50. Banfield, ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, p. 460. Sully, Sensation and Intuition, p. 233n. Haweis, Music and Morals, p. 10. Haweis, Music and Morals, p. 9. Haweis, Music and Morals, pp. 22, 23. Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1959). See also Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1956). Quoted in Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), p. 226 and see p. 227 n. 46. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 226–38. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 238. Langer does not explicitly mention Gurney or Helmholtz’s ideas in her discussion. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 233, 243. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 228. Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 53. Budd, Music and the Emotions, pp. 59–64.

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Notes to pp. 40–4

Notes to pp. 44–6

210 John A. Sloboda, The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 265. 211 Sloboda, The Musical Mind, p. 268. Meanwhile, Anthony Storr suggests that music offers us a unique opportunity to achieve mental order: our auditory system, ‘originally designed to inform us of spatial relationships’ has become ‘incorporated and transformed into a means of structuring our inner world’: Music and the Mind (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 41. Both theories propose that music is the result of the structural capacity of the human brain, rather than the reflection of an external natural order. Sloboda has explored parallels between the linguistic theories of Chomsky and works of musicology: The Musical Mind, pp. 11–17; see also Storr, Music and the Mind, pp. 51, 64. Our ability to remember sequences of sound suggests the apprehension of underlying structures equivalent to those fundamental to all languages: Sloboda, The Musical Mind, p. 246. 212 [M.S. Moseley]’s ‘Lyric Feuds’, Westminster Review, 32 (1867), pp. 119–60, was in favour of Wagner’s music and theory, but Wagner did not become generally popular until two decades after Eliot’s article. 213 Binstock, ‘A Study of Music in Victorian Prose’, pp. 161–86, gives a survey of ‘Victorian Reactions to Wagner’. 214 Eliot, Essays, p. 100. Wagner apparently missed opportunities to make literary contacts during his London visit: C.F. Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, trans. Ellis, 6 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1900–8), V, pp. 127–9. 215 There is no evidence of her having read any of Wagner’s own publications. Eliot records meeting Joachim Raff, and mentions that he is the author of a recent book ‘called Wagnerfrage’, but not whether she has read it: Journals, p. 21, 10 August 1854. See also Anthony McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1982), p. 29. Raff’s book, published during the same year in which Eliot met him, was on Lohengrin: Die Wagnerfrage: Kritisch beleuchtet von Joseph Raff (Brunswick: Friedrich Vieweg, 1854)). 216 A pirated piano arrangement of the Tannhäuser march was the first piece of Wagner’s to be performed in England, at a concert of the Amateur Musical Society in March 1854; the overture was performed later during the year at a concert of the New Philharmonic and at two or three of Jullien’s concerts: Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner, 4 vols (London: Cassell, 1933–47), II, p. 438. 217 Such favourable reviews as there were concentrated exclusively on Wagner as a conductor: see Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, pp. 167–9. 218 See Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 182. 219 Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, pp. 126, 418n., 183. 220 Quoted in Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, pp. 115–17. 221 At the beginning of his article Davison calls for a translator for Wagner’s books. He concludes with a mock desperate plea to Wagner’s champion Liszt for enlightenment: Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 118. Davison also refers to Eduard Sobolewski’s Reactionary Letters [Reaktionare Briefe (Königsberg, 1854)], which may have been his main source of information about Wagner: Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 116. Later during Wagner’s visit, Davison ran a translation of Opera and Drama in the Musical World: see Newman, Life, II, p. 442.

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222 Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 115. 223 Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 116. 224 Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 167 gives full detail of the programme for the concert on 12 March 1855 and quotes Davison’s review on pp. 170–2. 225 Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 172. 226 Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 172. 227 Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 178. 228 Quoted in Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, p. 178. 229 ’Das Judenthum in der Musik’ had been published pseudonymously in Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1850, and was not known as Wagner’s in England. Davison’s were apparently the first references to Wagner’s anti-Semitism in the English press: see Glasenapp, Life of Richard Wagner, V, pp. 177–9. 230 Newman, Life, II, p. 431. 231 Adolf Stahr, Weimar und Jena, 2 vols (Oldenburg, 1852); see McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters, p. 246. Franz Liszt, ‘Scribe’s und Meyerbeer’s Robert der Teufel’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 40:25 (1854), pp. 261–9. 232 [George Eliot], ‘The Romantic School of Music’, Leader, 5 (1854), pp. 1027–8. There is some disagreement about in exactly which directions the original borrowings went. Pinney, Essays, p. 101, n. 18, describes Eliot’s article as a ‘paraphrase’ of Liszt’s article, and Eliot herself records condensing an article by Liszt in her Journal for 1st and 2nd October 1854: Journals, p. 26. However, McCobb maintains that Stahr (whose book Eliot read in Berlin, immediately following her stay in Weimar) was probably Eliot’s source as she was also indebted to him for much of the material in her ‘Three Months in Weimar’ article: ‘Either Stahr simply included Liszt’s original article or George Eliot’s adapted article in later editions of [Weimar und Jena] or they both copied from Stahr’: McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters, p. 30, n. 62. 233 Eliot, Essays, p. 100, and see Daniel Deronda, pp. 42–3. 234 Eliot, Essays, p. 100. 235 Eliot, Essays, p. 101. 236 Eliot, Essays, p. 101. 237 Eliot, Essays, p. 101. 238 Eliot, Journals, p. 28, 18 October 1854. 239 Eliot, Essays, p. 101. 240 See Richard Wagner, Wagner Writes from Paris: Stories, Essays and Articles by the Young Composer, eds and trans. Robert L. Jacobs and Geoffrey Skelton (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), p. 151. 241 Eliot, Essays, p. 101. Wagner, Wagner Writes from Paris, p. 151. 242 Eliot, Essays, pp. 101–2. See Liszt, ‘Scribe’s und Meyerbeer’s Robert der Teufel’, p. 263. 243 Eliot, Essays, pp. 101–2. 244 Eliot, Essays, p. 104. 245 Eliot, Essays, p. 264. The passage also recalls the image used in Eliot’s review of Mackay to describe religion as ‘the delicate corolla’ of philosophy: Essays, p. 31. 246 Eliot, The Mill, p. 206, n. 7; see Chapter 3 below. 247 Eliot, Journals, p. 26, 3 October 1854.

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Notes to pp. 46–50

Notes to pp. 50–5

248 Eliot, Essays, p. 104. Eliot refers to Meyerbeer’s use of the ‘recurring hymn of Marcel in the Huguenots, or the strain of the Anabaptists in the Prophète, which is continually contrasted with the joyous song or dance of the rustics’ as examples of the use of motif other than Wagner’s. She was probably unaware of Wagner’s reciprocal influence on Meyerbeer: see John Warrack, ‘The Musical Background’, in The Wagner Companion, eds Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), pp. 85–114. 249 Eliot, Essays, p. 104. 250 Eliot, Essays, p. 103. 251 See Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 371–2, 381. 252 Eliot, Essays, p. 103. 253 Lewes, Diary, 6 October 1872, quoted in Haight, George Eliot, p. 457. 254 Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting (London: Smith, Elder, 1875), p. 229. 255 Lewes, On Actors, pp. 229–30. 256 Lewes, On Actors, pp. 230–4. Haight, George Eliot, p. 502, quotes Lewes’s diary for 17 May 1877 where he describes Wagner giving a reading of Parzival ‘which he did with great spirit and like a fine actor’. A copy of Francis Heuffer’s Richard Wagner and the Music of the Future, which first appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1872, was amongst the books in the Leweses’ library: see William Baker, The Libraries of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1981) p. 45. 257 Lewes, On Actors, pp. 230–1. 258 Lewes, On Actors, pp. 232–4. 259 Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, eds A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 368–9. 260 Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 349, 350. Friedrich Flotow (1812–83) was a fashionable German composer. 261 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 350. 262 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 356. 263 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 356. 264 ‘He has chosen verse as his medium; but of our greatest poets we feel that they had no choice: Verse chose them. Still we are grateful that Browning chose this medium: we would rather have “Fra Lippo Lippi” than an essay on Realism in Art; we would rather have “The Statue and the Bust” than a three-volumed novel with the same moral; we would rather have “Holy Cross-day” than “Strictures on the Society for the Emancipation of the Jews”’: Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 356. 265 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 356. 266 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 356. The quotation is from Browning’s ‘By the Fireside’, line 21. 267 Eliot, Essays, p. 237. 268 Eliot, Essays, p. 229 and see p. 231. 269 See Eliot, Essays, p. 216, where Pinney cites claims that Eliot’s essay did more than any other single work in introducing Heine to England. 270 Eliot, Essays, pp. 222–3. 271 Eliot, Essays, p. 249. 272 Eliot, Essays, p. 248. 273 Eliot, Essays, p. 247. 274 Eliot, Essays, p. 247. 275 Eliot, Essays, p. 247.

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Eliot, Essays, p. 223. Spencer, Essays, I, p. 373. Eliot, Essays, p. 249. Eliot, Essays, p. 248. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 241. Eliot, Essays, pp. 234–5; see also pp. 249–50 where Eliot quotes a stanza from ‘Deutschland’ which evokes the ‘singing flames’ of Dante’s ‘terza rima’. Eliot, Essays, p. 250. Eliot, Essays, p. 250. Eliot, Essays, p. 270. See William Joseph Sullivan, ‘George Eliot and the Fine Arts’, PhD dissertation (Wisconsin, 1970), pp. 9–16. Eliot, Essays, p. 270. Eliot, Essays, pp. 270–1. Eliot, Essays, p. 268. For example, see Eliot writing to Mrs Richard Congreve on 27 January 1865: ‘We enjoyed our visit to Paris greatly . . . going to the theatre or opera nearly every night’: Letters, IV, p. 176. Eliot, Essays, pp. 272–3. For an account of this debate and of the social and economic implications of piano ownership in nineteenth-century England see C[yril] Ehrlich, Social Emulation and Industrial Progress: The Victorian Piano (Belfast: Queens University Press, 1975) and The Piano: A History (London: Dent, 1976). Eliot, Essays, p. 288. Eliot, Essays, p. 275. Eliot, Essays, p. 288. Eliot, Essays, p. 317. Eliot, Essays, pp. 317, 318. Eliot refers to the Church of England Missionary Society’s annual meetings at Exeter Hall. For nineteenth-century readers the name of Exeter Hall would have conjured up the sort of music approved of by evangelical reformers. The hall was opened in 1831 for the use of religious and charitable organisations. From 1834, the Sacred Harmonic Society was permitted to use the hall for performances of oratorios and other suitable works. In 1841 Hullah’s national singing movement began here. For details of this movement see Rainbow, The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church: 1839–1872 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970), pp. 42, 47, 97, 128, 234. Eliot, Essays, p. 323. Eliot, Essays, p. 324. Eliot, Essays, p. 324. Eliot, Essays, p. 324. Eliot, Poems, pp. 155–9; Daniel Deronda, p. 236.

Music and the Woman Question: The ‘Minister of Domestic Concord’ and ‘the Most Sensuous of Accomplishments’ 1 George Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–2], ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 94.

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Notes to pp. 55–9

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14 15

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Notes to pp. 60–6 Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian Britain (London: Virago, 1989), p. 3. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792], ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 152. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 152. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 153. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 289. Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman [1788] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 46, n. 2. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 284. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (London: H.G. Clarke, 1845), p. 41. Bessie Rayner Parkes, ‘On the Adoption of Professional Life by Women’, English Woman’s Journal, 2 (1859), p. 9. Parkes, Remarks on the Education of Girls (London: Chapman, 1854), p. 17. Maria G. Grey and Emily Shirreff, Thoughts on Self Culture, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1850), I, p. 17. [M. Bakewell], ‘Address to the Ladies’ Branch of the College of Preceptors by Mrs Bakewell, MRCP’, Educational Times, 6 (1853), p. 99. The College of Preceptors issued the first number of the Educational Times in 1847. This was intended primarily for ‘professional educators’, but was also described as of interest to ‘parental educators’: Editor, [Bakewell], ‘What is the ‘Royal College of Preceptors?’, British Mothers’ Magazine, 6 (1850), p. 18. Cited hereafter as BMM. BMM, 1 (1845), [dedication page]. Such as the Englishwoman’s Magazine and Christian Mother’s Miscellany, edited in the 1850s by Mrs Milner, the wife of a Westmorland vicar and author of works on Anglican history. Although music features in this magazine less frequently than in the British Mothers’ Magazine, it evokes a similar mixture of enthusiastic and condemnatory comment. ‘To the Mothers of Great Britain and Ireland’, BMM, 1 (1845), p. 2. Hodgson’s works include The Education of Girls: and the Employment of Women of the Upper Classes Educationally Considered, 2nd edn (London: Trübner, 1869). W.B. Hodgson, ‘The Education of Women’, BMM, 4 (1848), p. 228. Hodgson, BMM, 4 (1848), p. 260. Hodgson, BMM, 4 (1848), p. 259. ‘To the Mothers of Great Britain and Ireland’, BMM, 1 (1845), p. 2. ‘C.M.’, ‘Is Woman Properly Educated?’, BMM, 1 (1845), p. 124. T.P. Grinstead, ‘The Education of Woman: Its Paramount Importance in Aiding Universal Progress, No. 3’, Educational Times, 7 (1854), p. 346; 8 (1855), pp. 9–10, 77. See [Bakewell] ‘On Dancing’, BMM, 1 (1845), pp. 51–5. Mrs M.T. Richards, ‘The Culture of Taste an Important Element in Female Education: Its Personal Advantages’, BMM, 11 (1855), p. 275. See also ‘A Mother’, ‘What Should Mothers Teach Their Children to Love?’, BMM, 1 (1845), p. 27. ‘Mary’, ‘To Christian Mothers: Social Parties’, BMM, 8 (1852), pp. 56–7. See also Beecher, ‘On a Taste for the Fine Arts’, British Mothers’ Journal, 4 (1859),

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p. 281. Cited hereafter as BMJ. See also Mrs William [Margaret] Fison, Hints for the Earnest Student: Or, A Yearbook for the Young (London: Seeleys, 1850), p. 280. ‘P.H.B.’, ‘Dancing’, BMM, 3 (1848), pp. 129–30; David Gunton, ‘Ancient and Modern Dancing’, BMM, 9 (1853), p. 251. ‘P.’, ‘Amusements’, BMM, 2 (1846), pp. 204–5. Mrs Roe, A Woman’s Thoughts on the Education of Girls (London: F. Pitman, 1866), p. 18. ‘The Physical Education of Girls’, BMM, 2 (1846), p. 92. Fison, Hints for the Earnest Student, p. 285. ‘Ann Jane’, ‘Domestic Industry’, BMM, 2 (1846), p. 123. Marianne Farningham [Mary Anne Hearne], Girlhood (London: James Clarke, 1869), p. 23. Roe, A Woman’s Thoughts, p. 19. Mrs [Sarah Stickney] Ellis, The Wives of England: Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations (London: Fisher, 1843), p. 61. Ellis, Prevention Better than Cure: Or, The Moral Wants of the World We Live In (London: Fisher, 1847), p. 258. Rev. J.A. James, ‘Christian Earnestness in Family Religion’, BMM, 5 (1849), p. 64. James, ‘Christian Earnestness’, BMM, 5 (1849), p. 65. ‘J.F.P.’, ‘On Music as a Profession’, BMJ, 5 (1860), p. 12. Thomas Hastings, ‘Religious Music in Christian Families’, BMM, 9 (1853), pp. 235–6. Richard T. Evanson, MD and Henry Maunsell, MD, ‘On Moral Education’ (From a Treatise on the Management and Diseases of Children), BMM, 4 (1848), p. 219. See ‘Juvenile Parties’, BMM, 7 (1851), p. 55. ‘Grace Helen’, ‘Singing to the Glory of God’, BMM, 5 (1849), p. 116. ‘A Maiden Lady’, ‘A Whisper to Our Elder Daughters’, BMJ, 3 (1858), pp. 87–9. ‘Laura’, ‘Christmas Parties’, BMM, 6 (1850), p. 11. ‘Memoir of Mrs Dr. Fox of Hackney: Late Secretary of the London Maternal Association’, BMM, 3 (1847), pp. 25–6. ‘E.W.P.’, ‘The Young People’s Party’, BMJ, 2 (1857), pp. 9–12. ‘S.’, ‘Hints for our Elder Daughters’, BMJ, 2 (1857), pp. 18–20. Bakewell, The Mother’s Practical Guide, p. 137. Ellis, Wives of England, p. 97. ‘Kate’, ‘The Power of Consistency’, BMJ, 6 (1861), p. 109. [Sarah Lewis], Woman’s Mission, in Ellis, The Young Ladies’ Reader (London: Grant & Griffith, 1845), p. 156. Ellis, The Daughters of England: their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities (London: Fisher, 1842), p. 104. Ellis, Daughters, pp. 104–5. For very similar accounts see ‘Ann Jane’, ‘The Flight of Time from Mothers’, BMM, 3 (1847), p. 38; and ‘The Elder Children’, BMM, 2 (1846), p. 147. ‘Ann Jane’, ‘The Elder Children’ (An Address to a Maternal Association), BMM, 2 (1846), p. 147. Grey and Shirreff, Thoughts on Self Culture, II, pp. 228–9.

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Notes to pp. 66–72

Notes to pp. 72–6

57 Shirreff subsequently moved beyond the notion of ‘self culture’ to claim that, whilst not abandoning the domestic sphere, women should receive a well-taught intellectual education for its own sake. Music again features ‘as a solace in hours of sadness or solitude’: Intellectual Education: Its Influence on the Character and Happiness of Women (London: John W. Parker, 1858), p. 184. In 1871 Grey and Shirreff founded the National Union for the Improved Education of Women of All Classes. Shirreff was also a supporter of Girton College. 58 ‘E.E.’, ‘On the Progress of Female Education’, BMM, 9 (1853), p. 173. 59 Fison, Hints for the Earnest Student, p. 279. 60 Rev. William Oliver, ‘A Mother’s Duties and Advantages’, BMM, 6 (1850), p. 275. 61 ‘Ann Jane’, ‘The Flight of Time from Mothers’, BMM, 3 (1847), p. 38. 62 Mrs L.H. Sigourney, ‘Female Education’, BMM, 5 (1849), p. 185; ‘P.’, ‘The Principles of a Good Education’, BMM, 1 (1845), p. 220. 63 ‘P.’, ‘Good Education’, BMM, 1 (1845), p. 217. 64 ‘P.’, ‘Good Education’, BMM, 1 (1845), p. 217. 65 Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, Vol. I (London: Longman, 1858), pp. 359–84. 66 ‘E.W.P.’, ‘The Morning Visit: Part II’, BMJ, 6 (1861), pp. 25–7; ‘Instances of Successful Moral Training’, BMM, 11 (1855), p. 269; ‘H.M.’, ‘What Can Be Done for the Benefit of Irreligious and Uneducated Mothers?’ BMM, 4 (1848), p. 109. 67 [Bakewell], ‘The Uses of a Young Lady’s Acquirements’, BMJ, 8 (1863), p. 276. 68 ‘C.W.D.’, ‘The Organ Grinder’, BMJ, 8 (1863), pp. 209–10. See also Fison, Hints for the Earnest Student, pp. 278–83. 69 Joseph Mainzer, Musical Athenaeum: Or, Nature and Art, Music and Musicians, in Germany, France, Italy and Other Parts of Europe (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1842), pp. 39, 40. 70 Ellis, Daughters, pp. 106–7. 71 Grey and Shirreff, Thoughts on Self Culture, I, p. 59. 72 ‘Lucretia’, ‘A Study for Our Elder Daughters: Mary Lundie Duncan’, BMJ, 1 (1856), p. 55. 73 ‘What Not’, ‘A Narrow Sphere’, BMJ, 4 (1859), p. 116. 74 ‘Ann Jane’, ‘Domestic Industry’, BMM, 2 (1846), p. 124. 75 Farningham, Girlhood, p. 100. 76 ‘Ed.’, ‘Work of All Sorts Must be Done’ (from the American Mothers’ Journal), BMM, 10 (1854), p. 44. 77 T. Herbert Baker, ‘Early Education’, BMM, 7 (1851), p. 245. 78 Ellis, Daughters, p. 106. 79 ‘Ann Jane’, ‘Domestic Industry’, BMM, 2 (1846), p. 102. 80 ‘Homely Duties’, BMJ, 1 (1856), p. 213; ‘E.E.’, ‘An Address to Mothers on Mental Culture’, BMM, 6 (1850), pp. 9–11; ‘The Importance of Training Daughters to a Practical Acquaintance with Household Duties’, BMM, 10 (1854), pp. 10–11. 81 ‘J.W.C.’, ‘Female Education’, BMM, 10 (1854), p. 231. 82 Hannah More, ‘The End of Female Education’, BMJ, 4 (1859), p. 280. 83 ‘A Practical Man’, Public and Middle-Class School Education (London: Virtue Brothers, 1865), p. 64. 84 Farningham, Girlhood, pp. 33–4.

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Cyril Ehrlich has examined how hostility towards piano ownership in nineteenth-century Britain increased as the piano gradually lost its exclusivity as an index of social status and also as the economic hardship resulting from systems of hire purchase for shoddy (but not cheap) instruments became apparent: Social Emulation and Industrial Progress: The Victorian Piano. An Inaugural Lecture (Belfast: Queen University Press, 1975), pp. 8–10. ‘Agnes’, ‘Woman: Her Position and Duty, No. IV’, Englishwoman’s Magazine, 6 (1851), pp. 407, 406. Mrs [Matilda Marian] Pullan, Maternal Counsels (London: Darton, 1855), p. 81. Ellis, Daughters, p. 100. See Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 100. Grey and Shirreff, Thoughts on Self Culture, II, p. 219. Sarah Lewis acknowledged, in Woman’s Mission (1839), that restricting woman if she was morally and intellectually man’s equal involved a contradiction, but saw this state of things as providentially ordained: quoted in Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder, eds, The Woman Question: Defining Voices, 1837–1883, Vol. I of The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883, 3 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 8–9. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 64. ‘E.E.’, ‘On the Progress of Female Education’, BMM, 9 (1853), p. 173. Ellis, Wives of England, pp. 99–100. ‘L.A.S.’, ‘The Intellectual and Moral Character of Woman’, BMM, 7 (1851), p. 45; ‘On the Difference, Intellectual and Physical between the Sexes’, BMJ, 3 (1858), p. 61. Grey and Shirreff, Thoughts on Self Culture, II, p. 215; I, pp. 82, 84. Mrs M.T. Richards, ‘The Culture of Taste an Important Element in Female Education: Its Personal Advantages’, BMM, 11 (1855), p. 276; ‘Kate’, ‘Coming Out’, BMM, 5 (1849), p. 41; Williams, ‘The Social Position and Culture Due to Women’, BMM, 6 (1850), p. 233. ‘P.’, ‘Amusements in Christian Families’, BMM, 2 (1846), p. 204. ‘Laura’, ‘Christmas Parties’, BMM, 6 (1850), p. 280. Gunton, ‘Ancient and Modern Dancing’, BMM, 9 (1853), p. 252. [Bakewell], ‘On Dancing’, BMM, 1 (1845), p. 54. Ellis, Daughters, p. 102. See, for example, Ellis, Pictures of Private Life, 2nd edn (London: Smith, Elder, 1933), pp. 138–41, 155–7; Look to the End: Or, the Bennets Abroad, 2 vols (London: Fisher, 1845), I, p. 82; Prevention Better than Cure, pp. 197–8; The Mother’s Mistake (London: Houlston & Stoneman, 1856), pp. 71, 72, 83, 93; Family Secrets: Or, Hints to Those Who Would Make Home Happy, 3 vols (London: Fisher, 1841), III, pp. 12, 15. Ellis, ‘Confessions of a Maniac’, Family Secrets, I, pp. 98, 104. Ellis, Daughters, p. 103. Ellis, Daughters, p. 103. Ellis, Daughters, p. 103. [Necker], ‘The Introduction of Daughters to the World’, BMM, 2 (1846), pp. 183–4.

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Notes to pp. 77–80

Notes to pp. 81–8

108 Miss M.A. Stodart, ‘Imagination’, Educational Times, 7 (1853), p. 31. 109 Stodart, ‘Imagination’, p. 31. 110 For a discussion of the role of music in Ruskin’s work see my essay, ‘Goddesses of Instruction and Desire: Ruskin and Music in the 1870s’, in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford, 1999), pp. 111–30. 111 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1902–12), XXIX, pp. 261–2, 178. See also XVII, pp. 211–12. 112 Ruskin, Works, XXVII, p. 433. 113 Ruskin, Works, XXVII, p. 434. 114 Ruskin, Works, XXIX, pp. 78–9; Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 113. 115 William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), pp. 36, 53–5, 69. 116 For an account of prejudice against female violinists see Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 157. 117 See Ehrlich, Music Profession, p. 12. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, [1848] ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 74, and see p. 74, n. 19. 118 Ehrlich, Music Profession, pp. 15–16. 119 ‘What Not’, ‘A Narrow Sphere’, BMJ, 4 (1859), p. 116. 120 ‘The Enthusiast’, ‘Female Distinction’, from Ellis, The Young Ladies’ Reader, pp. 277–8. 121 Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 760–6. 122 For an account of the significance of these songs in the iconography of Hunt’s painting and quotation of their lyrics, see Kate Flint, ‘Reading The Awakening Conscience Rightly’, in Pre-Raphaelites Re-viewed, ed. Marcia Pointon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 48–9. 123 See Flint, ‘Reading The Awakening Conscience’, pp. 55–6. 124 See Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 359–62, and G.H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, First Series, The Foundation of a Creed, Vol. I (London: Trübner, 1874), p. 255; see also Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1859, 1860), II, pp. 319–25. 125 Spencer, Essays, I, p. 401. 126 Thomas Laycock, A Treatise on the Nervous Diseases of Women: Comprising an Inquiry into the Nature, Causes and Treatment of Spinal and Hysterical Disorders (London: Longman, 1840), pp. 140–1. 127 E.J. Tilt, On the Preservation of Health of Women During the Critical Periods of Life (London: John Churchill, 1851), p. 39. 128 Tilt, Preservation of Health, p. 40. 129 R. Brudenelle Carter, ‘Accomplishments’ (from The Influence of Education on Diseases of the Nervous System), BMJ, I (1856), p. 78. 130 Carter, ‘Accomplishments’, BMJ, 1 (1856), p. 77. 131 Carter, ‘Accomplishments’, BMJ, 1 (1856), p. 77. 132 Carter, ‘Accomplishments’, BMJ, 1 (1856), p. 77. 133 Carter, ‘Accomplishments’, BMJ, 1 (1856), p. 78. 134 Grey and Shirreff, Thoughts on Self Culture, II, p. 218.

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135 Grey and Shirreff, Thoughts on Self Culture, I, p. 84. 136 For a discussion of phrenology in this respect, see Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 69–70. 137 Rev. H.R. Haweis, Music and Morals [1871], 3rd edn (London: Strahan, 1875), p. 112. 138 Haweis, Music and Morals, p. 112. By ironic contrast, Bessie Parkes selected Grisi, the ‘great queen of the musical drama’, as the embodiment of ‘intellectual energy’ and a ‘realisation of the physical type of womanhood’ notable for ‘matured dignity’: Remarks, p. 8. 139 George du Maurier, Trilby (London: Osgood, McIvane, 1894). Phyllis Weliver, Woman Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot; Ashgate, 2000), p. 257, emphasises that we have tended to overlook the degree to which Trilby is complicitous in her own entrancement in the novel. Nevertheless, Trilby, like Svengali himself, has taken on this cultural resonance beyond the covers of du Maurier’s text. 140 George P. Upton, Women in Music [1880], 2nd edn (London: Stanley Paul, 1909), pp. 18–32. Flavia Alaya, ‘Victorian Science and the Genius of Woman’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 34 (1977), p. 274, quotes a passage from Havelock Ellis’s Man and Woman concurring with this view. 141 Ehrlich, Music Profession, p. 53. 142 Ehrlich, Music Profession, p. 157. 143 Ehrlich, Music Profession, p. 157. 144 Ehrlich, Music Profession, p. 158. 145 Ehrlich, Music Profession, p. 125. 146 Sally Shuttleworth has suggested that much of the debate over woman’s nature is not necessarily evidence of anxiety over the containment of her dangerous sexual energies but may be a reaction to the increasing social division of labour amongst men. If women could be defined as more subject to biological forces, men could better see themselves as free agents. Shuttleworth points out that there was no actual increase in female licentiousness to inspire domestic ideology as a panic-stricken attempt to control it: Shuttleworth, ‘Female Circulation: Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-Victorian Era’, in Body Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, eds Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 53–5. 147 See Henry Thomas Buckle, ‘The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge’, Fraser’s Magazine, 57 (1858), pp. 395–407. 148 Alaya, ‘Victorian Science’, p. 262. 149 See Alaya, ‘Victorian Science’, pp. 264–5, 269–75. She also points out, on p. 269, that the tendency of evolutionary social theory to promote the general rather than the individual good provided an added interest in stressing the generic nature and role of woman. 150 Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 142. 151 Gaskell, Mary Barton, pp. 136–7, 191. 152 Gaskell, Mary Barton, pp. 388–95, 401–3. 153 Hodgson, ‘The Education of Women’, BMM, 4 (1848), pp. 278–9. Hannah More had specified that woman was not to become ‘an orator or a pleader’

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Notes to pp. 88–92

154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167

168 169 170 171

172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186

Notes to pp. 92–8 and Mrs Roe begins her address on female education with an apology for her presumption in ‘standing up to address an audience’: More, ‘The End of Female Education’, BMJ, 4 (1859), p. 280; Roe, A Woman’s Thoughts, [p. 1]. Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing (London: Harrison, 1859), p. 3. Nightingale, Cassandra and other Selections from Suggestions for Thought, ed. Poovey (London: Pickering, 1991), pp. 122, 230. Gaskell, North and South [1854–5], ed. Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 77, 97, 142. Gaskell, North and South, p. 5. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 44. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 44. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 9. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 96. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 255. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 43. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 151. Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey [1847], eds Hilda Marsden and Robert Inglesfield (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 62. Gaskell, Wives and Daughters [1864–66], ed. Angus Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 514. Maria Georgina Grey [Mrs William Grey] ‘On the Education of Women’ (1871), quoted in Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), p. 178. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 344. Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 569, 262. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 261. Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 157–63, 147. Cf. Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, (London: Smith, Elder, 1875), p. 228: ‘The shop windows of Berlin are unhappily variegated with the photographs of actresses who have more bust than talent, more impudence than accomplishment; and the lively licentiousness of Offenbach’s musical farces draws crowds to the hundredth performance’. Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 145–6. Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 145–6, 162. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 261. Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, pp. 231, 281–4. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [1847], eds. Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), pp. 199, 210–11. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, pp. 225. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 224. Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall [1848], ed. Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 37. Anne Brontë, Wildfell Hall, p. 230. Anne Brontë, Wildfell Hall, p. 233. Anne Brontë, Wildfell Hall, p. 233. Anne Brontë, Wildfell Hall, p. 388. Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 64, 246, 538–9, 203. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 64, and see p. 81 above. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 64.

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187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195

196 197 198 199

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Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 133. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 151. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, pp. 341–2. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 225. Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1857), I, p. 187, II, p. 289. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, pp. 343–5. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley [1849], eds. Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), pp. 619–20. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 133. Shuttleworth, ‘Physiological Definition and Social Power: Phrenology in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë’, in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900, eds John Cristie and Sally Shuttleworth (Manchester, 1989), pp. 121–51. For an account of the importance of phrenology in encouraging the formation of later physiological theory see Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford and London: Clarendon, 1970) especially pp. 121–33, 150–61. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë, p. 54, see also p. 31. Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë, pp. 69–70. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 391. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 389. Shuttleworth suggests that some of Rochester’s comments on Blanche Ingram convey male fear of the sexuality lurking within respectable Englishwomen: Charlotte Brontë, p. 169.

The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible to Music’ 1 ‘Without pretending to be a musical critic, one may be allowed to give an opinion as a person with an ear and a mind susceptible to the direct and indirect influences of music’: George Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge, 1963) p. 100. 2 Eliot, Collected Poems, ed. Lucien Jenkins (London: Skoob, 1989), p. 95. Cited hereafter as Poems. 3 Eliot, The Mill on the Floss [1860], ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980) p. 205. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 4 For discussion of the ending of The Mill on the Floss in this respect see Gillian Beer, ‘Beyond Determinism’, in Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 126. 5 Eliot to Jane Crow, 21 August, 1869. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1954–78), VIII, pp. 465–6. Cited hereafter as Letters. 6 Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 46. See also Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The MakeBelieve of Beginning, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 57, 59. 7 See also Eliot, The Mill, p. 206, n. 7. 8 Eliot, The Mill, p. 206, n. 7. This passage appears in Eliot’s manuscript but is deleted from the proof of the first edition: see Eliot, The Mill, p. 206, n. 7. Current editions vary as to whether they include the passage in the main body

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Notes to pp. 98–105

9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29

Notes to pp. 105–8 of the novel text. It is included in the Penguin Classics edition edited by A.S. Byatt (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 320, but is not in the Clarendon text. As, for example, in Goethe’s celebration of Gothic architecture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’ [1770], in Der junge Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Vol. II, ed. Gerhard Sauder (Münich: Hanser, 1987), pp. 418–21. Eliot, Essays, p. 104. Letters, II, p. 40. Describing an expedition with Spencer to Kew to inspect the flora to Sara Hennell, [29 June 1852]. William Joseph Sullivan, ‘George Eliot and the Fine Arts’, PhD dissertation, Wisconsin, 1970, p. 66. This is something of an overstatement; see Letters, VII, p. 44: ‘About Mozart, I am at one with you when I think of him in comparison with Handel, Beethoven and Schubert and some more modern composers – that is, I feel his kinship to the Italian “sugared” view. But I find him, Haydn, and the Italians a welcome rest from more searching music’. To Sara Hennell, 4 December 1880. ‘Duet in Paradise’ is the title of the first chapter of Book Six of The Mill on the Floss. Eliot, The Mill, p. 206, n. 7. See Eliot, The Mill, p. 436. See, for example, Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: Or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of them Developed (London: Chapman, 1851), p. 433; J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 222–3. Spencer, Social Statics, p. 103. Spencer, Social Statics, p. 434. Spencer, Social Statics, p. 441. Spencer, Social Statics, p. 442. Spencer, Social Statics, p. 443. Spencer, Social Statics, pp. 445–6. Spencer, Social Statics, p. 461. Spencer, Social Statics, p. 475. See Spencer, Social Statics, p. 442; An Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904), II, p. 11. See also Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context From Gall to Ferrier (Oxford and London: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 155–9. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 51. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor, p. 125. Sally Shuttleworth discusses how the application of organic models of development to psychology disrupted the organic theory of history from which they were derived. The organically constructed subject ‘possesses different levels of consciousness which do not all coexist within the same linear continuum of time’; this ‘undermine[s] the reconciliation the organic model seeks to achieve between individual and social demands’ and ‘undercuts notions of unified history’: George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, pp. 67–9, 57. John Stuart Mill to Herbert Spencer (1864), quoted in Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, p. 150. Mill is also paying tribute to Alexander Bain.

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30 Jonathan Arac, ‘Rhetoric and Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Hyperbole in The Mill on the Floss’, in K.M. Newton, ed., George Eliot (London and New York: Longman, 1991), pp. 67, 71. Arac observes that ‘The Floss and its floods make an important part in the hyperbolic pattern of the book’ and draws attention to hyperbole’s derivation from the verb hyperbállo, which has ‘a specialised sense with regard to water, “to run over, overflow”’: p. 70. Arac also includes ‘perceptual hyperbole’ as part of this pattern, a term which might be applied to the quality of Maggie’s musical response: p. 71. 31 In Bellini’s 1831 opera, the heroine, ‘La Sonnambula’ of the title, suffers from the involuntary condition of sleep-walking. She wanders into the bedroom of a count staying at the local inn and is falsely accused of infidelity and rejected by her lover and the local community. Her innocence is proved and she is rehabilitated after the entire village has witnessed her sleep-walking, persuaded by the count’s explanation that people who sleep-walk are capable of apparently conscious actions. The Mill on the Floss presents us with a realist inversion of this romantic opera plot, since Maggie Tulliver is also innocent of sexual transgression (if not of desire), but, on awakening from her somnambulist state, cannot be rehabilitated by the ‘older’ culture with which she is in conflict. 32 This scene echoes ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ where Caterina vents her passionate feelings by playing ‘massive chords’ on the harpsichord: Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life [1858], ed. Thomas A. Noble (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 153. 33 Herbert Spencer, Essay: Scientific, Political and Speculative, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1858) pp. 359–84. 34 Amusingly enough, Spencer’s experience of moral struggle is figured in musical terms in a letter received by Eliot during the time she was writing The Mill on the Floss. In the letter, Sara Hennel describes a Handel chorus performed at the Sydenham festival: ‘The piece that has made the deepest impression of all was that singularly appropriate one that came on Wednesday after all those painful details you had been giving me about H[erbert] S[pencer] the day before . . . the Chorus out of Saul, Envy, elder-born of hell’. ‘Poor, dear, great Herbert Spencer’, she concludes, ‘and Thackeray – and how many more! And after this came the inexpressible sighs of the Dead March. I wish it had occurred to me at the time to consider this as the echoes from the battlefield of moral conflict!’: Letters, III, p. 97. 26 June 1859. 35 Haight, Introduction to The Mill on the Floss, The World’s Classics edn. (Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 1981), p. xiv. 36 Haight, Introduction to The Mill on the Floss, p. xiii. 37 Eliot, The Mill, p. 352, n. 8. 38 For a discussion of this aspect of Maggie Tulliver’s portrayal see Nina Auerbach, ‘The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver’, in Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York and Guildford: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 230–49. 39 Letters, III, p. 346. To Cara Bray, [18 September 1860]. 40 The idea that music offers alleviation of the shortcomings of material existence is one to which Eliot frequently refers in her correspondence. On several occasions she describes music as a substitute for sunshine. See Letters, IV, p. 134: ‘I hope you are less abjectly under the control of the skiey influences

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Notes to pp. 110–12

41

42

43

44

45 46

47

48 49 50 51 52

Notes to pp. 112–17 than I am. The soul’s calm sunshine in me is half made up of the outer sunshine. However, we are going on Friday to hear the “Judas Maccabeus”, and Handel’s music always brings me a revival’. To Mrs Peter Alfred Taylor, 3 March 1864. See also Letters, III, p. 472: ‘Having no sunshine, one needs music all the more’. To Mrs Adolphus Trollope, [10 December 1861]. Johannes Müller, Elements of Physiology [1838–40], trans. William Baley (1838, 1842), quoted in Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, pp. 116–17. Similar imagery is employed by Erasmus Darwin (in turn an influence on Müller), and by the Associationist philosopher David Hartley. G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, First series: The Foundation of a Creed, 2 vols (London: Trübner, 1874, 1875), I, p. 255; see also The Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1859, 1860), II, pp. 319–25. Hermann L.F. Helmholtz, ‘The Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music’, Lecture delivered in 1857 in Bonn, trans. Alexander J. Ellis, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, ed. E. Atkinson (London: Longman, 1873), p. 105; On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, (1862), trans. Alexander J. Ellis (London: Longman, 1875), pp. 95, 570–2. Letters, I, pp. 9–10. To Martha Jackson, [4] September 1838. See also Letters, I, p. 13. To Maria Lewis, 6–8 November 1838. See also Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 1968), pp. 18, 22–4. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 359–62. Haight supplies references to Dante’s Inferno: Eliot, The Mill, p. 387, n. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1795), line 28, The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), I, p. 101. William Wordsworth, ‘On the Power of Sound’ (1835), lines 34, 209, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. 323–30. See Letters, I, p. 68. To Maria Lewis, 1 October 1840. John Hollander considers the interpenetration of sight and sound in Wordsworth’s poetry in ‘Wordsworth and the Music of Sound’, New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. G. Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 41–84. In Poetry and Repression, Harold Bloom discusses the ‘the interplay of hearing and seeing’ in Romantic poetry, particularly in ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge . . . longed for a composite, originary sense . . . The joy of what they considered to be a fully active imagination expressed itself in both poets in a combined or synaesthetic sense of seeing-hearing’: Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 59, 57. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’, line 43, Poetical Works, I, p. 102. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities [1809], trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 110–11, 262. Goethe, Elective Affinities, pp. 79, 116, 288; see also pp. 24, 36. Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe: With Sketches of his Age and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London: D. Nutt, 1855), II, p. 374. Eliot, Essays, p. 264. In George Eliot and Music (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), Beryl Gray concludes that Eliot’s use of music endorses the claims of Maggie Tulliver’s past loyalties and her renunciation of the musical ‘temptation’ proffered by Stephen Guest: p. 15. Eliot’s own declared

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67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

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view of tragedy as involving irresolvable conflict would suggest that this reading takes insufficient account of the subtlety of Eliot’s use of music or of the depth of tragedy in the novel. Spencer, Essays, I, pp. 359–84. Lewes, Physiology of Common Life, II, p. 59; see also pp. 57, 58. Cf. Sullivan, ‘George Eliot and The Fine Arts’, pp. 61–7. Spencer, Social Statics, p. 475. Spencer, The Principles of Psychology (London: Longman, 1855), p. 584. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, p. 585. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, p. 586. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, p. 586. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, p. 585. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, pp. 585–6. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, p. 620. Lewes, Problems, I, p. 227. Lewes, Problems, I, p. 239. Sally Shuttleworth has identified significant parallels between Holland’s ideas and Eliot’s portrayal of Latimer in The Lifted Veil: ‘“The Malady of Thought”: Embodied Memory in Victorian Psychology and the Novel’, Australian Victorian Studies Journal, 2 (1996), pp. 5–6. She notes that Lewes made extensive use of Holland’s Chapters on Mental Physiology in The Physiology of Common Life which he was working on contemporaneously with Eliot’s composition of both The Lifted Veil and The Mill on the Floss. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871) II, pp. 333–7. Darwin, Descent, II, p. 336. Darwin, Descent, II, pp. 336–7. Darwin, Descent, II, p. 337. Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 89. Darwin, Origin, p. 89. Darwin, Descent, II, pp. 336–7. Darwin, Descent, II, pp. 336–7. Darwin, Descent, II, p. 337. James Sully, Illusions: A Psychological Study (London: Kegan Paul, 1881) pp. 231–2. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, pp. 617–18. Lewes, Problems, I, p. 144. Sully, Illusions, p. 237. Sully, Illusions, p. 252. Gillian Beer discusses the impact of Darwin’s emphasis on oblivion and forgetting in her essay on ‘Origin and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative’, in Arguing with the Past, pp. 20–1. Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 97–8. Spencer, Autobiography, I, p. 403. Maggie’s dream that a composite Tom/Philip character is pursuing her as she elopes with Stephen Guest (412–13) seems obliquely reminiscent of Dido’s dreams in Book IV of the Aeneid: see The Aeneid of Virgil, ed. R.D. Williams

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Notes to pp. 117–27

85

86 87 88 89 90 91

92 93

4

Notes to pp. 127–32 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1972), Book IV, lines 9–29, 465–73. Virgil presents Dido as retaining responsibility for the ‘crime’ which Juno and Venus determine that she commit. In Adam Bede [1859], ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 83–4, Eliot invokes ‘Nature, that great tragic dramatist’ underpinning this with the example of musical inheritance as she laments that the ‘father to whom we owe our best heritage, – the mechanical instinct, the keen sensibility to harmony . . . galls us’. Eliot, Essays, pp. 30–1. Arac, ‘Rhetoric and Realism’, p. 67. Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, in The Common Reader, 1st ser. (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), p. 217. Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, p. 211. See Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, pp. 60, 61. Eliot asked him why he had such a smooth forehead, to which Spencer replied ‘because I am never puzzled’; Eliot declared this explanation ‘the most arrogant thing I ever heard uttered’: Spencer, Autobiography, I, p. 399. Spencer, First Principles [1862] (London: Williams & Norgate, 1863), pp. 43–97. Letters, III, p. 277. To Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 5 December 1859. See also Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 44.

Daniel Deronda: ‘The Other Side of Silence’

1 G.H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, First Series: The Foundation of a Creed, 2 vols (London: Trübner, 1874, 1875), I, p. 255. 2 George Eliot to Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 2 October 1876. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), VI, p. 290. Cited hereafter as Letters. 3 Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), p. 214. 4 Eliot, Daniel Deronda [1876], ed. Graham Hardley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 42–3. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 5 See Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 96–122, especially pp. 101–4. Eliot herself (like Wagner) did not entirely despise Bellini and frequently attended his operas: see Letters, I, p. 233. To Sara Hennell, 30 April 1847; Letters, II, p. 28. To Cara and Charles Bray, 24 May 1852; Letters, V, p. 144. George Henry Lewes to Charles Lee Lewes, [26 April 1871]. 6 Alexander Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 267–8. 7 Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail, p. 268. 8 Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail, p. 300. 9 The posthumous adulation of Mendelssohn features in Elizabeth Sara Sheppard’s novel Charles Auchester, 3 vols (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1853); the hero is a romanticised portrait of the composer. Extolled by Disraeli and highly successful at the time, the novel diametrically opposes music to all commercial and theatrical entertainment. Disraeli wrote to Sheppard of his

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conviction that ‘No greater book will ever be written upon music’: Stephen Banfield, ‘The Artist and Society’, in The Romantic Age: 1800–1914, ed Nicholas Temperley (London: Athlone, 1981), p. 22. Banfield discusses Charles Auchester (a useful index of ‘middle class attitudes to art music’), alongside his account of the sterilising effect which Mendelssohn’s music had on British composition when it was approached with a ‘middle class romanticised view of the artist’ as ‘hermetically sealed from society’; he cites Parry as a composer initially influenced by his reading of the novel, although he was eventually to find it ‘foolish and mistaken’ and to develop his own musical aspirations differently: pp. 22–3; for further comments on the appreciation of Mendelssohn in Britain see also Temperley, ed. The Romantic Age, pp. 306, 403, 419, 502. Letters, V, p. 107. To the Hon. Mrs Robert Lytton, 8 July 1870. Letters, IX, pp. 176–7. Lewes to Mrs F. Lehmann, [8 May 1876]. Gordan S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 489–90, suggests Rubinstein as the model for Klesmer. Eliot met Rubinstein in Weimar in 1854 where he was preparing a production of his own opera The Siberian Huntsman and presenting the Wagner operas which Eliot heard: ibid., p. 156. Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, eds Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 21–2, 10 August 1854; also quoted in Letters, II, p. 170. Eliot, Journals, pp. 22, 10 August 1854. Franz Liszt, ‘Freudvoll und Leidvoll’ (Goethe), song for voice and piano, dedicated to A. Scheffer, 25 June 1844 (published Vienna, 1847, rev. 1860), in F. Liszt, Musikalische Werke, eds F. Busoni, P. Raabe et al. (Leipzig, 1907–36). For MS examples of 1844 and 1860 versions see Peter Raabe, Liszt’s Schaffen, 2nd rev. edn (Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1968), p. 344. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, 2 vols (London: Faber, 1989), II, The Weimar Years 1848–1861, p. 250, n. 74. To the extent to which Klesmer is a portrayal of Liszt, he forms a counter-balance to the depiction of Liszt in Marie d’Agoult’s novel Nélida (1845), where Liszt’s former lover pilloried him in the guise of the painter Guermann: see Walker, Franz Liszt, pp. 396–401. Liszt used his transformation into a painter to joke that d’Agoult was really criticising her current admirer, the painter Lehmann – a joke which he repeated to Eliot when Nélida was discussed during her visit to Weimar: Journals, p. 21, 10 August 1854; also quoted in Letters, II, p. 169. Walker, p. 401, n. 47, points out striking similarities between Nélida and George Sand’s novel Lucrezia Floriani (1846), which satirises Chopin. It is therefore possible to see in Klesmer some reference to a tradition of romans à clef based on real musical characters (including of course Elizabeth Sheppard’s novel Charles Auchester: see note 9 above). Eliot, Essays, p. 100. Eliot, Essays, pp. 96–122. Eliot, Essays, pp. 101–4. Eliot, Essays, pp. 102–3. Eliot, Essays, pp. 102–3. E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumentalmusik’, Poetische Werke, 12 vols (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1957), I, p. 46; trans. in R. Murray Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press,

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26 27 28 29 30

31 32

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Notes to pp. 134–6 1975), pp. 84–5, see also ETA Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: ‘Kreisleriana’, ‘The Poet and the Composer’, Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 97–8. Eliot’s portrait of Klesmer may also owe something to Schopenhauer’s delineation of genius in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung which she noted having read in the early 1870s and where Schopenhauer theorised many of the aesthetic ideals of the German literary Romantics with whose work Eliot had long been familiar. See Anthony McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1982), p. 125. See also McCobb, ‘The Morality of Musical Genius: Schopenhauerian Views in Daniel Deronda’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 19 (1983), pp. 327–30. A familiarity also indicated in Middlemarch, p. 36, where Eliot’s comment about the perspective of ‘Murr the cat’ is surely an allusion to Hoffmann’s novel Kater Murr of which Kreisler is also the hero. The Clarendon Edition of Middlemarch glosses ‘Murr’ as a ‘Scots dialect form of purr’! (p. 36, n. m). For more on parallels with Hoffmann, see my essay, ‘George Eliot and the Germanic “Musical Magus”’, in George Eliot and Europe, ed. John Rignall (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 98–112. Hoffmann, Kreisleriana, Poetische Werke, I, p. 26; see Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, p. 80, see also Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, p. 114. Hoffmann, ‘Johannes Kreislers des Kapellmeisters Musikalische Leiden’, Poetische Werke, I, pp. 29–30; Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, p. 122, see also Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, p. 82. Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, p. 119. Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, p. 119. Hoffmann, Poetische Werke, I, p. 25; Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann Music, p. 113, see also Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, p. 79. Hoffmann, Poetische Werke, I, p. 26; Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, p. 114. see also Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, p. 80. Hoffmann, ‘Kreisler’s Musikalisch-Poetischer Klub’, Poetische Werke, I, p. 353; Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music p. 146, see also Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, p. 132. See Haight, George Eliot, p. 156. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana describes Kreisler ‘elaborating the most curious themes with elegantly contrapuntal devices and imitations and highly ingenious passage work’: ‘ideas not too grossly evident’ perhaps? Poetische Werke, I, p. 26; Hoffmann’s Musical Writings p. 80, see also Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, p. 114. Interestingly, Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s song settings for Egmont including ‘Freudvoll und Leidvoll’ with which Klesmer’s composition is associated, criticises them as ‘much too elaborate’: Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, pp. 346, 348. Hoffmann’s review first appeared in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, 15:21 (July 1813), pp. 437–81. Hoffmann, Poetische Werke, I, p. 25; Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, p. 113, see also Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, p. 79. Cf. Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–2], ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 567: ‘it was clearly worthwhile for Rosamond to take pains with her music and the careful selection of her lace’; see also Eliot’s definition of a philistine critic as ‘the personification of the spirit which judges everything

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from a lower point of view than the subject demands’: Gisela Argyle, German Elements in The Fiction of George Eliot, Gissing and Meredith (Frankfurt, Berne, Cirencester: Peter Lang, 1979), p. 72. 35 Deirdre David, Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels: North and South, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Deronda (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981), pp. 188–9. 36 A contradiction within literary production discussed by Rachel Bowlby in Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 8–9. 37 In Ranthorpe (London: Chapman & Hall, 1847), Lewes’s narrator extols the ‘Aristocracy of Intellect’, the ‘haughty aristocracy of mind’, which arose in ‘antique times side by side with this most haughty aristocracy of birth’ and is now regaining its power: pp. 107, 108–9. Rosemary Ashton discusses this aspect of Ranthorpe in G.H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 36. See also Eliot, ‘Armgart’ (1870): ‘I am an artist as you are a noble / I ought to bear the burthen of my rank’: Collected Poems, ed. Lucien Jenkins (London: Skoob, 1989), p. 127. Cited hereafter as Poems. In his novel, Lewes, like Eliot, derides commercially gained status: ‘strip your banker-lord of his wealth – and where is his nobility?’: Ranthorpe, 0p. 109. Lewes had made the commercialism of Bult-like English attitudes to art the object of heavy sarcasm in the opening to his article on ‘Hegel’s Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art’, British and Foreign Review, XIII (1842), p. 1: It is a mistake to assert, as is so often heedlessly done, that the English have no system of Aesthetics – no genuine philosophy of art – a serious mistake, implying reflections on our ‘commercial character’ which amount to insult. We have a system; a definite, tangible, perfectly practical one; it lies written in the weighty volumes of Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations,’ Macculloch’s ‘Commercial Dictionary,’ and De Morgan ‘On the Differential Calculus.’ Art may not with us be a ‘revelation of the Infinite,’ but it is a very positive branch of trade, and subject to all the fluctuations of market and fashion, in common with every other produce of refined civilization.

38 The Clarendon edition reads ‘gentleman’; the Penguin Classics edition of Daniel Deronda, ed. Barbara Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 307 has the obviously correct ‘gentlemen’. 39 Eliot, Essays, p. 100. 40 Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 557, see also pp. 105, 262, 518. In the eighteenth century the opera buffa had been distinguished from opera seria by its generally simpler, shorter forms, its use of sung recitative instead of speech and its connections with popular comic drama. In the nineteenth century formal distinctions between the two types of opera were reduced. Although Bellini’s operas fall into the seria or semiseria rather than buffa category, the opposition indicated in Eliot’s novel is between serious German music and popular Italian music more generally, notwithstanding her own evident enjoyment of the latter: see Letters, VII, p. 92: ‘I am glad that Mrs Combe has so pleasant a distraction as the Italian opera. It is the one I like best myself’. To George Combe, 23 December 1853. 41 Eliot, Essays, p. 270. 42 See William Joseph Sullivan, ‘George Eliot and the Fine Arts’, Ph D dissertation, Wisconsin, 1970, pp. 9–16. 43 Letters, IV, p. 92. To Sara Hennell, 11 July 1863. This letter also gives an account of the wide array of operatic and dramatic performances which Eliot

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Notes to pp. 136–40

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Notes to pp. 140–9 had recently attended: ‘We are going this evening to see the French actress in Juliet . . . Last night we saw Ristori, the other night heard the Faust, and next week we are going to hear the Elisir d’Amore and Faust again!’ A week later she wrote that the high standards of musical and dramatic performance in the second performance of Gounod’s Faust had increased her liking for that work: see Letters, IV, p. 93. To François d’Albert-Durade, 18 July 1863. The link between opera and melodrama has been pointed out by Gillian Beer who comments that the novel ‘achieves and uses in the scene of the diamonds, the expressiveness of opera’, ‘“Coming Wonders”: Uses of Theatre in the Victorian Novel’, in English Drama: Forms and Development, Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, eds Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 173. See Sullivan, ‘The Allusion to Jenny Lind in Daniel Deronda’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 29 (1974), pp. 211–14. Eliot heard Donizetti’s opera in 1857: see Haight, George Eliot, p. 241. Mirah’s repertoire includes Beethoven (344, 524, 720), Schubert (345), works by the fictional Viennese composer Leo (451–2, 519–20), an aria from Handel’s Rinaldo (677), a setting of words from Goethe’s Faust (452), Tuscan songs by the contemporary Italian composer Gordigiani (345), and a Jewish hymn (345). Rosemarie Bodenheimer, ‘Ambition and its Audiences: George Eliot’s Performing Figures’, Victorian Studies, 43 (1990), p. 19. Letters, IV, p. 425. To Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, [28? March 1868]. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass No. 21, (3rd edn. Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860), p. 240. Eliot may also have known the poem as ‘Voices’, the title it acquired in 1871; in 1881 it was joined to another poem ‘Oratists’ under the title ‘Vocalism’, see Whitman, Leaves of Grass, eds Richard Maurice Bucke, Thomas B Harned and Horace L. Traubel (New York: Doubleday, 1919) p. 224. Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Poems, p. 212. For example see Maria G. Grey and Emily Shirreff, Thoughts on Self Culture, 2 vols (London: Edward Moxon, 1850) II, pp. 228–9. See also Rev. H.R. Haweis, Music and Morals [1871] 3rd edn (London: Strahan, 1875), pp. 38, 113–15. See Beer, George Eliot, pp. 203–9, for a discussion of the importance of ‘voice’ for women in Eliot’s writing. Beer notes that whilst writing Daniel Deronda, Eliot read the musical reformer John Hullah’s The Duty and Advantage of Learning to Sing, in which he advocates that women develop the capacity to use their ‘natural voices’. Eliot, Poems, p. 136. See Beer, George Eliot, p. 222: ‘The imagery of singing becomes self-enclosed, allied with madness’. Eliot, Poems, p. 117. Eliot, Essays, pp. 101–2. Eliot, Poems, p. 117. Bodenheimer, ‘Ambition’, p. 24, notes that music is a ‘transformative and legitimate channel for female emotional violence’ in both ‘Armgart’ and ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’. Caterina is repeatedly nicknamed ‘little monkey’ or described as a pet singing bird: Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, [1858], ed. Thomas A. Noble (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), pp. 90, 95, 96, 98, 104, 117, 123, 179.

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61 A theme pursued with musical associations by Tolstoy in his story ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ (1889), which condemns the marriage of girls to debauched but wealthy men: ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, in The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, trans. David McDuff (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 41–2; see also p. 52. 62 Eliot, Poems, p. 120. 63 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life [1848], ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 86, 137. 64 Deronda’s voice also turns out to be conveniently unsuitable for the singing career he rejected in childhood. His voice, ‘merely a high baritone’, as suggested by his fine physique as he rows on the river towards his first meeting with Mirah, is ‘no rare and ravishing tenor such as Nature reluctantly makes at some physical sacrifice’ (170). Joseph Litvak sees this as vital to the evasion of the ‘feminizing objectification’ which threatens to disinherit Deronda from his masculine birthright: Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 168. 65 Eliot, Adam Bede [1859], ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 67, 66. 66 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 136. 67 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 752. 68 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 579. Dorothea’s voice is also compared with the purity of a ‘young chorister chanting a credo’, a contrast to the singing of the ‘accomplished mermaid’ Rosamond: Middlemarch, pp. 379, 569. 69 Beethoven, from Opus 65, ‘Ah, perfido’, scena and aria, from Achille in Sciro (Metastasio), soprano solo and orchestra (vocal score, Leipzig, 1795–6). 70 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘To a Skylark’ (1820), line 5, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), p. 602. 71 Cf. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 68, where Dinah preaches in a ‘moderate tone as if speaking to some one quite near her’. 72 J.W. Cross, ed., George Eliot’s Life: As Related in her Letters and Journals, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1885), III, p. 421. It is interesting that Eliot focused on the most human aspect of Goethe’s drama rather than the metaphysical issues which have preoccupied many subsequent critics. 73 Eliot, Poems, pp. 128–9. Lewes’s son Charles married a woman with a ‘splendid contralto voice, which was educated for some time with the idea of her having a professional career – an idea since given up. Altogether “Pater” and I rejoice’: Letters, IV, p. 156. To Sara Hennell, [25 June 1864]. The sequence of phrases in this letter tempts one to speculate as to whether Eliot rejoiced in the abandoned career as well as in Charles’s happiness and in the addition of a fine new voice to their musical circle. See also Letters, VI, p. 184, where the postscript may indicate a connection between Mirah and Gertrude in Eliot’s mind since she follows discussion of sources for Mirah’s songs in Daniel Deronda with an enquiry after Gertrude’s voice. To Charles Lee Lewes, 11 November 1875. Eliot may have found a further source for some of Mirah’s characteristics in the famous contralto/mezzo Pauline Viardot-Garcia, the sister of Malibran. She was not Jewish, but considered a very spiritual singer who worked only when she chose. 74 Eliot, Poems, p. 129.

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Notes to pp. 150–4

Notes to pp. 154–9

75 Eliot, Poems, pp. 409, 541–2. 76 ‘Men followed me from one country to another’: Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 584. 77 Bodenheimer, ‘Ambition’, p. 10. 78 Catherine Gallagher has discussed anxiety over commercial literary publication in ‘George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question’, Sex, Politics and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore, Md: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 44–5. It could be argued that, despite its long-standing association with poetry, music was more like the novel in the degree to which it had been influenced by industrialised processes and mass consumption, whilst poetry remained an art whose integrity might seem somewhat better protected by a more limited readership (although female poets, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, were also concerned about the ‘prostitution’ involved in publication of their work). 79 Eliot, Poems, p. 122 80 Eliot, Poems, p. 146. 81 Litvak, Caught in the Act, p. 190. 82 Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and other Glorified Outcasts (New York and Guildford: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 267, 256. 83 Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment, p. 260. 84 Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment, p. 260. 85 Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment, p. 262. 86 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 136. 87 Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment, p. 256. 88 Eliot, Poems, p. 150. 89 Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment, p. 255. 90 Charlotte Brontë, Villette [1853], eds Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 23–31. Lewes describes Rachel, on whom the figure of Vashti is based, in On Actors and the Art of Acting (London: Smith, Elder, 1875), pp. 23–31. Lewes wrote enthusiastic praise of Rachel’s powerful artistry, but commented on her lack of womanliness: ‘she was a panther . . . she had little tenderness, no womanly caressing softness’: pp. 23–4. For a discussion of his account see Beer, ‘“Coming Wonders”’, p. 182. Litvak contrasts Brontë’s and Eliot’s treatment of the actress, arguing that: ‘Whereas Lucy Snowe, and Charlotte Brontë as well, take the uncanny doubleness of the imperiously suffering Vashti as an example or model for their own activities as writers, Daniel Deronda, and George Eliot, make an example of this later “Rachelesque heroine,” punishing her for her deconstructive artistry’: Caught in the Act, p. 189. 91 Brontë, Villette, p. 373 92 Brontë, Villette, p. 371. 93 Letters, VI, p. 25. To Mrs Theodore Martin, 3 March 1865. 94 Bodenheimer, ‘Ambition’, p. 9. 95 Haight, George Eliot, p. 471. 96 See Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment, pp. 253–9. 97 Bodenheimer, ‘Ambition’, p. 14. 98 Bodenheimer, ‘Ambition’, pp. 14–15. 99 Eliot, Poems, pp. 117, 123.

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100 Eliot, Poems, p. 123. 101 Eliot, Poems, p. 123. Cf. Catherine Clément, Opera: Or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing [1988] (London: Virago, 1989), p. 5: ‘Women are [opera’s] jewels . . . the ornament indispensable for every festival. No prima donna, no opera. But the role of jewel, a decorative object, is not the deciding role; and on the opera stage women perpetually sing their eternal undoing’. 102 Eliot, Poems, p. 126. 103 This adds another dimension to the metaphorical relationship between women and nations in the novel. Drawing a parallel between the poeticisation of the theatre and the privatisation of women, Litvak argues that the Princess ‘articulates the novel’s strongest feminist refusal of the poetic therapy of patriarchal Jewishness’: Caught in the Act, p. 188. 104 Eliot, Poems, p. 128. 105 Eliot, Poems, p. 128. 106 Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems and other writings, eds A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 335. Fuller’s assertion of the natural variety found amongst women accords with Eliot’s own critique in Middlemarch of the uniformity imposed by social and literary convention: ‘the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favourite love-stories in prose and verse’: Middlemarch, p. 4. 107 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 336. 108 Eliot, Poems, pp. 129–30. 109 Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, pp. 96, 183. 110 Eliot, Poems, p. 129. 111 Eliot, Poems, p. 131. 112 Eliot, Poems, p. 132. 113 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 335. 114 Eliot, Poems, p. 116. 115 Eliot, Poems, p. 127. 116 Clément, Opera, p. 31. 117 Eliot, Poems, p. 150. 118 Eliot herself made this connection as Rosemarie Bodenheimer observes: ‘Four years later George Eliot misquoted the line to Blackwood as she agonized over the composition of Deronda’: Bodenheimer, ‘Ambition’, pp. 22–3. To John Blackwood Eliot wrote on 8 August 1874: ‘As to confidence in the work to be done I am somewhat in the condition suggested to Armgart, “How will you bear the poise of eminence, With dread of falling?”’: Letters, VI, p. 75. 119 Clément, Opera, p. 10. 120 Clément, Opera, p. 11. 121 Clément, Opera, p. 10. Cf. Peter Conrad, Romantic Opera and Literary Form (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1977), p. 69: ‘Perhaps romantic music and tragedy are incompatible, because melody is always consoling and uplifting’. In a somewhat inverted version of Clément’s view of operatic plot, Conrad suggests that we forgive, rather than forget, Violetta in La Traviata because ‘she has sung beautifully’: p. 51.

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Notes to pp. 159–65

Notes to pp. 165–9

122 Susan McClary, ‘The Undoing of Opera: Towards a Feminist Criticism of Music’, foreword to Betsy Wing’s translation of Clément, Opera, p. xviii. 123 See also Eliot, Daniel Deronda, pp. 69, 85, 385. Blackwood’s letter of 25 May 1875, in response to reading the first parts of the manuscript of Daniel Deronda, is peppered with references to Gwendolen as ‘the mermaid witch’ and ‘a fascinating witch’: Letters, VI, p. 144. 124 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 335. 125 Eliot, Poems, p. 146. 126 Eliot, Poems, p. 144. 127 Eliot, Poems, p. 143. 128 Eliot, Poems, p. 146. 129 Eliot, Poems, p. 148. 130 Eliot, Poems, pp. 145, 148. 131 Katherine Blake also makes this point in ‘Armgart: George Eliot on the Woman Artist’, Victorian Poetry, 18 (1980), pp. 75, 80. 132 Eliot, Poems, p. 140. 133 Eliot, Poems, p. 142. 134 Beer compares Deronda’s role to that of the ‘mother soul’ in the Kabbalah: George Eliot, pp. 216–17. 135 Beer, George Eliot, pp. 223–4. 136 Beer, Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 117–37. 137 Beer, Arguing with the Past, p. 131. 138 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871), II, pp. 337, 338, quoted in Beer, Arguing with the Past, p. 122. As Beer points out, ‘Darwin assumes that among humans, as opposed to other species, it is always the men who do the selecting’: p. 122. In Darwin’s account of the courtship of birds it is the male of the species who possesses the superior voice and plumage in order to attract the selecting female. Quoting from Jenner Weir’s Ornithological Dictionary (1833), Darwin affirms that ‘males of song birds and of many others do not in general search for the female, but, on the contrary, their business in the Spring is to perch on some conspicuous spot breathing out their full and amorous notes, which by instinct, the female knows, and repairs to the spot to choose her mate’: Descent, II, p. 52. 139 Hoffmann, ‘Don Juan’, Poetische Werke, I, p. 88; ‘Rat Krespel’, Poetische Werke, V, p. 56. 140 Beer sees Emma Bovary as ‘always alluded to in Gwendolen’: George Eliot, p. 223. She also discusses Gwendolen’s ‘I will live’ as an inversion of Clarissa’s death wish: ibid., pp. 224–6. This fits well with Sir Hugo’s description of Deronda as an inverted Lovelace: Eliot, Daniel Deronda, pp. 332–3. 141 Conrad, Romantic Opera, p. 21. 142 Conrad, Romantic Opera, p. 21. 143 Nahum Tate, libretto for Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, first performance London, 1689. This aspect of the novel challenges the neatness of Anthony McCobb’s thesis that what Daniel Deronda presents us with is a Schopenhauerean movement through musically induced sympathy to ultimate resignation of the mere ‘Will to Live’: McCobb, ‘The Morality of Musical Genius’, especially p. 330.

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144 See Clément, Opera, pp. 3, 11, 12, et passim. 145 See McClary, in Clément, Opera, p. xvii. 146 For comments on parallels with the Risorgimento in Romola and Daniel Deronda, see John Goode, ‘“The Affections Clad with Knowledge”: Women’s Duty and the Public Life’, Literature and History, 9 (1983), pp. 45–6. 147 See Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Hardy, p. 540, n. 1. 148 ’Oh, my land so lovely and lost! Oh, memory so sweet and despairing!’, as translated in Leon B. Plantinga, Schumann as Critic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 300. 149 Bouquets in the colours of the future Italian flag were thrown at performances (in the presence of Austrian officers) and the cry of ‘VERDI’ became an acronym for ‘Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia’. After an 1847 revival at the Carcano, the conductor Mariani was threatened with imprisonment for giving the score a ‘too openly rebellious expression’: see Andrew Porter, programme note for the London Opera Society production of Nabucco, 1968. For an account of the political significance of Verdi’s operas see also George Martin, ‘Verdi and the Risorgimento’, in The Verdi Companion, eds William Weaver and Martin Chusid (London: Gollancz, 1980), pp. 13–42. 150 The opera remained extremely popular in Italy, with only Ernani and Il Trovatore rivalling it by the end of the century. Nabucco was first performed in London at Her Majesty’s Theatre on 3 March 1846. Operas on biblical themes were not acceptable and so it was given as Nino re d’Assyria with the exiled Jews transformed into Babylonians. A performance as Anato was given at Covent Garden on 30 May 1850. Eliot was probably not in London at the time: see Haight, George Eliot, p. 79. 151 The British Library has 100 examples of selections and arrangements of music from the opera from before 1876, almost all published in London. These of course represent only a fraction of the total published and there would have been numerous foreign editions available too. Of the 100 pre1876 editions surviving in the British library, 27 are arrangements of ‘Va Pensiero’. These include arrangements of the chorus as a drawing-room ballad, as an aria with guitar accompaniment, as a vocal duet, for piano and for flute. Another 21 of the British Library collection published before 1876 are ‘fantasias’, ‘pot-pourris’ and ‘bouquets’ for piano or piano and violin based on a combination of airs from the opera. 152 In one of her earlier comments on Jewishness, Eliot herself had looked forward to a fusion of the races and dismissed Disraeli’s ideas about racial purity: Letters, I, pp. 246–7. To John Sibree Jr, 11 February 1848. This however was before she had met Emmanuel Deutsch or undertaken her detailed study of Jewish history. 153 Eliot and Lewes visited a synagogue in Mainz (where Deronda eventually obtains his grandfather’s chest of papers) in 1873 and were ‘delighted with the singing’: see Haight, George Eliot, p. 472. Eliot apparently continued to take a serious interest in connections between Jewish and Christian music beyond the publication of Daniel Deronda. Amongst the Leweses’ books now housed in the Dr Williams Library, London, is Francisco Salvador Daniel’s La Musique Arabe: ses rapports avec la musique grecque et le chant grégorien (Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan, 1879) which draws parallels between the vocal and instrumental music of the Hebrews, Greeks and Arabs. A footnote about a

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Notes to pp. 169–71

154

155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165

166 167 168 169 170

171 172

173

174

Notes to pp. 171–8 famous Jewish musician in Algiers on p. 32 has been marked in pencil, perhaps by Eliot herself. Barbara Bodichon seems the likely donor of the book since she spent part of each year in Algiers. The essays in Daniel’s book first appeared in the Revue Africaine between 1862 and 1863, so it is just possible that Eliot may have been sent them before writing her novel. Both, in effect, carrying forward the ideals of the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (grandfather of the composer), who believed that Jews could share in the cultural and intellectual life of Christian Europe without giving up their own traditions. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873) p. 213. Letters, V, p. 455. To John Blackwood, 5 Nov. 1873. Letters, VI, p. 99. To Mrs Henry Ponsonby, 10 December 1874. Pater, Studies in the Renaissance, p. 209. Pater, Studies in the Renaissance, p. 209. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 189. David, Fictions of Resolution, p. xi. David, Fictions of Resolution, p. 190. Shirley Frank Levenson, ‘The Use of Music in Daniel Deronda’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, xxiv (1969), pp. 317, 334. Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail, p. 302. D.A. Miller, ‘George Eliot: “The Wisdom of Balancing Claims”’, in Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton, NJ, 1981), reprinted in George Eliot, ed. K.M. Newton (London and New York: Longman, 1991), p. 190. Miller, ‘George Eliot’, pp. 194–6. Letters, II, p. 452. To Sara Hennell, 17 April 1858. Miller, ‘George Eliot’, p. 190. Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail, p. 268. Miller, ‘George Eliot’, p. 190. Cf. Romola’s election of ‘the large music of reasonable speech, and the warm grasp of living hands’ rather than the ‘vision[s]’, ‘phantoms’ and ‘disjointed whispers’ of foreboding – despite ‘the voice of foreboding’ having ‘proved’ itself ‘[t]rue’: Eliot, Romola, [1863], ed. Andrew Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 328. Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail, pp. 330–2, gives an interesting account of the possibility of false consciousness as it emerges in Daniel Deronda. Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Art and Literature: Jensen’s ‘Gravida’, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, Vol. XIV of The Pelican Freud Library, ed. Albert Dickenson (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 355. Mueller, Elements of Physiology [1883–40], trans. William Baley (1838, 1842), quoted in Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford and London: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 116–17. She connects this association with ‘Mesmer’ with a consequent rhyme, ‘mésalliance’, which exposes further ‘philistine prejudices’ when applied to the marriage of Klesmer and Catherine Arrowpoint: see Gisela Argyle, German Elements in the Fiction of George Eliot, Gissing and Meredith (Frankfurt, Berne Cirencester: Peter Lang, 1979), pp. 79–80. The name Klesmer of course literally means ‘musician’ in Yiddish.

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175 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale [1623], V, iii, 98, ed. J.H.P. Pafford (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 159. Litvak, Caught in the Act, pp. 186–7, comments on this scene as one where Klesmer’s ‘timely musical intervention’ both ‘places and repairs the spectacle [Gwendolen] embodies: he forces that spectacle to resonate with the humiliating but therefore redemptive note of a presumably authentic privacy, before which what starts out as the spectator’s “unrest” gives way to gratifying intimations of Gwendolen’s capacity for “spiritual dread”’. See Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 171. 176 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, p. 341. 177 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, p. 345. Freud here traces transitions in the meaning of ‘heimlich’ from ‘homely’, thus ‘private’, thus ‘hidden’, until it denotes its opposite: ‘secret’ and ‘unheimlich’. See also ‘The Uncanny’, in An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory: Key Critical Concepts, by Andrew Bennet and Nicholas Royle (London: Prentice-Hall, 1995), p. 37. 178 Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumentalmusik’, Poetische Werke, I, p. 51; Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, p. 88. See also Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, p. 102. 179 Hoffmann, ‘Kreisler’s Musikalisch-Poetischer Klub’, Poetische Werke, I, p. 355; Schafer, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music, pp. 147–8. See also Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, pp. 134–5. 180 By confronting her with a pair of mesmerising eyes. Hoffmann, ‘Der Unheimliche Gast’, Die Serapionsbrüder III, Poetische Werke, VII, p. 126. The story is translated by Alexander Ewing, The Serapions Brethren, 2 vols (London: George Bell, 1886), II, pp. 96–149, see p. 118. 181 Wordsworth, ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798), lines 48–50, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, eds James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 117. 182 Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 86. 183 Letters, VIII, p. 45. To George Combe, 22 April 1852. 184 Accounts of research by Myers and his colleagues are presented in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 5 vols (London: Trübner, 1882–9). Eliot’s literary experiments in Daniel Deronda preceded the experiments in telepathy and other psychical phenomena conducted by the SPR which was founded in 1882. However both Myer’s and Gurney’s interest in spiritualism dated from the late 1870s. They attended spiritualist meetings but soon felt disenchanted with spiritualism as an appropriate subject of scientific investigation and turned their attention to the more promising phenomena of thought-transference and hypnotism. Gurney’s combined interest in music and in psychical phenomena lends weight to Stephen’s idea that he formed a model for Deronda. So too may Gurney’s strong social sympathies and extraordinary vocational restlessness: in addition to writing works of musicology, Gurney had trained in both medicine and law before devoting himself to psychical research. He certainly seems to embody the diffusive sympathies for which Deronda finds a channel in Zionism. For further comment on Gurney’s connection with George Eliot, see John Beer, Providence and Love: Studies in Wordsworth, Channing, Myers, George Eliot and Ruskin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), especially pp. 119–200 and 200n. 185 James Sully, My Life and Friends: A Psychologist’s Memories (London: T. Fisher Urwin, 1918), pp. 263–4.

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Notes to pp. 179–81

Notes to pp. 181–6

186 Royle, Telepathy and Literature, p. 4. 187 Henry Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiology (London: Longman, 1852), p. 58. 188 Providing a note to the lines of Italian quoted in the text, Eliot spells out the correspondence: ‘Dante’s words are best rendered by our own poet in the lines at the head of the chapter’ (171n.). Litvak sees these poetic references as emphasising the process of poeticisation by which operatic references are associated with lyric poetry rather than with performance, enabling Deronda and Mirah to escape the ‘theatrical frame’: Caught in the Act, p. 177. As in the case of the opera singer, it becomes very difficult unequivocally to dissociate music and drama. Moreover, opera itself was increasingly occupied with ‘poetic’ expression of interior psychology rather than with ‘the exterior life of action’, according to Peter Conrad, who sees the interiority of the nineteenth-century novel as providing the ideal to which romantic opera increasingly aspired: Romantic Opera, p. 1. In the light of his analysis, the claim that this scene (to be privately ‘performed’ in the process of reading) is ‘operatic’ could even suggest that Eliot is able to fulfil the ideals of opera better than could actual opera, materially trapped within the theatrical frame. 189 Eliot, Essays, p. 104. 190 Beer, George Eliot, p. 214; see also Arguing with the Past, p. 130: ‘The book’s surface is clandestine. The characters dwell in a formidable state of passivity amidst the buzz of unspoken obsession’. 191 Beer, George Eliot, p. 217. In Telepathy and Literature, Nicholas Royle asserts that what Daniel Deronda presents us with is not to be assimilated by later methods of psychoanalysis. Instead he proposes ‘telepathy’ as a more appropriate post-1870s concept for analysing what Eliot’s text offers: ‘Daniel Deronda seems to open up the possibility of something else altogether: telepsychology, or a radically literary, non-subject-centred telepathology of everyday life’: p. 110. 192 Beer, George Eliot, p. 214. 193 ‘[D]as Bedürfnis eines höhern Ausdrucksmittels, als die gewöhnliche Rede gewähren kann’: Hoffmann, ‘Der Dichter und der Komponist’, in Vol. I of Die Serapionsbrüder I, Poetische Werke, V, p. 102 (my translation). A translation of this story is included in Hoffman’s Musical Writings, pp. 188–209. 194 Welsh, George Eliot and Blackmail, p. 306. 195 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Book I, lines 269–71, The Fourteen Book Prelude, ed. W.J. Owen (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 35. John Hollander explores the long association of music with liquidity in Renaissance and Romantic poetry in, ‘Wordsworth and the Music of Sound’, New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. G. Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 48, 54–60, 72–3, 75–6. 196 The origin of ‘stream of consciousness’ is often attributed to William James’s use of the term in Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), Vol. I, p. 239. (This attribution is replicated by Phyllis Weliver, for example, in Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, p. 279).) However, ‘stream of consciousness’ was a term in use by psychologists before 1890. James Sully was using it in print

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by 1881, see Illusions: A Psychological Study (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), p. 241. 197 The effect is something like a conflation of Schopenhauer’s account of the effects of music and of the free aesthetic contemplation of landscape. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer placed music at the head of the aesthetic hierarchy as the art form by which, because of its unrepresentational nature and affective power, we gain unmediated access to ‘the innermost kernel preceding all form, or the heart of things’. Shopenhauer described how contemplation of the landscape could also result in the transcendence of object existence to allow the individual momentarily to become the ‘pure will-less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’. In this elevated state: We lose ourselves entirely . . . we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as a clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception . . . Time, place, the individual that knows, and the individual that is known, have no meaning. (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans E.F.J. Payne, 2 vols (New York, Toronto and London: Dover, 1966), I, pp. 263, 178–9)

Anthony McCobb discusses parallels between Eliot’s representations of transcendence of self through music and Schopenhauer’s philosophy in ‘The Morality of Musical Genius’, pp. 323–7. However, whilst Eliot’s writing here suggests certain parallels with Schopenhauer’s depiction of loss of self and transcendence of causality and space, her concern is more emphatically with an increase of sympathy following a movement outside the sense of self than with achieving a moment of pure knowledge. Schopenhauer, The World, I, p. 264, discussed music as conveying emotions which were abstract and thus distanced from pain whereas Eliot portrays it as a direct expression of particular emotions and thus engaged in the fostering of specific sympathies. Schopenhauer also qualified his valorisation of music which despite according us moments of transcendence could ultimately only encourage the ‘mere wish to live’ rather than the total resignation which he advocated. In this respect, Gwendolen’s dogged survival, to which music is crucial, is entirely at odds with Schopenhauer’s philosophy. It is surely going too far to see Schopenhauer as the vital key to reading the novel, as McCobb suggests: see ‘The Morality of Musical Genius’, pp. 323–30. 198 Lewes, ‘Spiritualism and Materialism’, Fortnightly Review, 112 (1876), p. 480. Lewes expressed similar views in the first volume of Problems of Life and Mind, for example on p. 188. Sally Shuttleworth discusses Lewes’s work as providing appropriately complex psychological models for Eliot: see George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 192–4. 199 A contemporary review noted ‘the frequent introduction of physiological psychology couched in Spencerian phraseology’: Joseph Jacobs, review of Daniel Deronda, in Macmillan’s Magazine (1877), repr. in Critics on George Eliot, Readings in Literary Criticism, ed. William Baker (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), pp. 34–43.

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Notes to pp. 186–9

Notes to pp. 189–94

200 Lewes, Problems, I, p. 254. 201 Lewes, Problems, I, pp. 254–5. 202 Royle, Telepathy and Literature, p. 103, discusses the significance of bridges and sound in this passage as examples of aposiopesis as part of his exploration of ‘telepathy’ in Eliot’s text. 203 The passage also bears signs of descent from what John Hollander identifies as the ‘water–sound–music figure’ which evokes a blending of sense-impressions in Romantic poetry; especially as it combines this ‘water–sound– music figure’ with the ‘Romantic theme’ of sound heard over distance: see ‘Wordsworth and the Music of Sound’, pp. 49, 58. Harold Bloom emphasises that ‘Wordsworth valued most highly in poetry “those passages where things are lost in each other and limits vanish”’: see ‘Ruskin as Literary Critic’ [1965], in The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 179. Nicholas Royle observes that Wordsworth’s poetry, ‘in particular its representations of forms of sympathy, haunts Daniel Deronda perhaps more acutely than any other Eliot text’: Telepathy and Literature, p. 102. 204 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 189. 205 Darwin, Descent, II, p. 336. 206 Darwin, Descent, II, p. 336. 207 Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, Vol. I (London: Longman, 1858), pp. 374–5. See Chapter 1 above.

Conclusion 1 George Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, eds A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1990), p. 235. William Harvey (1578–1657) was the physician who first described the function of the heart and circulation of the blood. The French anatomist Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) was Lydgate’s inspiration in his search for the primitive tissue in Middlemarch. 2 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 235. 3 Eliot to the Hon. Mrs Henry Ponsonby, 10 December 1874. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 Vols (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1954–78) VI, p. 99. Cited hereafter as Letters. Cf. Lewes’s emphatic and ‘musical’ rejection of limited physical and chemical explanations of complex organic phenomena. The organicist ‘no more assigns the phenomena to these alone, than he explains a symphony by enumerating the stringed and wind instruments of the orchestra, and the mathematical laws of sound’: G.H. Lewes, ‘Spiritualism and Materialism’, Fortnightly Review, XXV (1876) p. 714. 4 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), p. 213. 5 Letters, I, p. 247. To John Sibree, [11 February 1848]. 6 Robert Browning, Sordello, Book II, lines 573–7, The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, eds. Ian Jack and Margaret Smith, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), Vol. II, p. 273. The significance of Browning’s use of musical tropes has already been noted by a number of critics, including John Hollander: see

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234

Notes to p. 194

235

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‘Robert Browning: The Music of Music’, in Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays, eds Harold Bloom and Adrienne Munich (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 100–22. 7 Eliot, Collected Poems, ed. Lucien Jenkins (London: Skoob, 1989) p. 98. Cited hereafter as Poems. 8 Eliot, Poems, p. 98.

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accomplishments, 60–79, 84, 99, 138, 145; see also women and music acoustics, 33; see also Helmholtz actress, 63, 150, 154–7, 214n.171, 226n.90; see also prima donna aeolian harp, 2, 116–17, 169, 191; see also sympathetic vibration Alaya, Flavia, 90, 213n.149 Arac, Jonathan, 109–10, 217n.30 Argyle, Gisela, 178 aristocracy of talent, 131–2, 137, 223n.37; compare philistinism Aristotle, 22, 37, 202n.166 Ashton, Rosemary, 104–5 associationism, 15–16, 108, 197n.29, 218n.41; see also inheritance, psychology Auerbach, Nina, 155–6, 157, 217n.38 Austen, Jane, 3 authorship, 131, 143–4; see also woman writer Bakewell, Mrs (M.), 64, 70, 79 Bain, Alexander, 15–16, 31–2, 113, 197n.28, 197n.29, 198n.31, 201n.129, 216n.29 Banfield, Stephen, 221n.9 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 4, 6, 25, 47, 51, 52, 134, 152–3, 161, 224n.47 Beer, Gillian, 24, 127, 130, 168, 184, 215n.4, 219n.81, 224n.44, 224n.53, 224n.55, 226n.90, 228n.138, 228n.140, 232n.190 Beer, John, 231n.184 Bellini, Vincenzo, 48, 106, 111, 131, 133, 134, 135, 138, 143, 144, 217n.31 Berlioz, Hector, 169 Bichat, Marie François Xavier, 193, 234n.1 Binstock, Ruth Lynn, 200n.95 Bloom, Harold, 218n.47, 234n.203

Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 143, 154, 156, 158, 224n.59, 227n.118 Bowlby, Rachel, 223n.36 Brahms, Johannes, 135 British Mothers’ Magazine, later British Mothers’ Journal, 64–6 Brontë, Anne, 60, 84, 94, 95, 96–7 Brontë, Charlotte, 60, 84, 95–6, 98–9, 100–1, 156, 226n.90 Browning, Robert, 6, 53–4, 55, 194, 206n.264, 234–5n.6 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 90 Budd, Malcolm, 44 Burney, Charles, 18, 21–2, 198n.51 Burrow, John, 26 Busby, Thomas, 21, 22 Caliban, 142 Carlyle, Thomas, 134 Carter, R. Brudenelle, 87–8 Chopin, Frédéric, 53, 54 choral-singing movement, 6, 26, 27, 57, 91, 200n.100, 207n.296 Chorley, Henry Fothergill, 26, 46, 200n.100 clairvoyance, 177; sympathetic clairvoyance, 181, 183, 186–8; see also second sight, sympathy, telepathy Clément, Catherine, 164–5, 227n.101 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 116, 117, 169, 196–7n.6, 218n.47 Collins, Wilkie, 6, 156 Compte, Auguste, 197–8n.29 Conrad, Peter, 169, 227n.121, 232n.188 Cooke, Deryck, 43 Crotch, William, 22 Curwen, John, 27, 200n.100 dancing, 62, 66, 67, 70, 79 Dante, Alighieri, 116, 183, 207n.281, 232n.188 249

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Index

Darwin, Charles, 31, 32, 33, 40, 44, 123–4, 129, 168, 190–1, 228n.138 Darwin, Erasmus, 218n.41 da Sousa Correa, Delia, 212n.110, 222n.23 David, Deirdre, 136, 174 Davison, J.W., 46–8, 204n.221 De Quincey, Thomas, 53 determinism, 103, 127, 128–9, 168, 215n.4; see also evolution, tragedy development theory, see under evolution du Maurier, George, 3, 89, 180, 182, 213n.139 Dido, 169, 219–20n.84 domestic ideology, 59–60, 66–7, 72–4, 75–6, 81, 82, 83, 84, 147–54, 156, 157, 158, 161–3, 167, 168–9, 213–4n.153; see also women and music Ehrlich, Cyril, 82, 89, 90, 207n.291, 211n.85, 212n.16 Eliot, George importance of music to, 3–6, 4–5, 207n.289, 217–8n.40 music and literary experimentation in, 5, 9, 102–3, 109–10, 128, 130, 177–91, 192, 193; see also evolution, physiology, sympathetic vibration music as source of literary standards in, 7, 44, 52–8, 130, 131, 139–40, 143–4 transmission of German culture by, 11, 46, 48, 51, 55–7, 131, 132–6, 206n.269 Eliot, George, works Review of Progress of the Intellect (R.W. Mackay) (1851), 15, 127 ‘The Romantic School of Music’ (1854), 196n.3, 205n.232 ‘Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar’ (1855), 4, 11–12, 14, 45–52, 55, 56, 131, 133–4, 183 ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ (1856), 53, 57–8, 91 ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (1856), 53, 56–7, 140

‘The Antigone and its Moral’ (1856), 117 ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ (1858), 8, 59, 149, 161, 168, 217n.32 Adam Bede (1859), 2, 7, 29, 56, 152, 155–6, 220n.85 The Lifted Veil (1859), 122, 181 The Mill on the Floss (1860), 2–3, 9, 24, 33, 34, 50, 59, 84, 101, 102–29, 140, 168, 181, 182, 185, 186, 187, 189, 192 Romola (1863), 14, 230n.170 The Spanish Gypsy (1868), 145 ‘The Legend of Jubal’ (1869–70), 1–3, 7, 14, 32, 41, 189, 194 ‘Armgart’ (1870), 82, 146–7, 153–4, 157, 159, 160, 161–2, 163, 224n.59 Middlemarch (1871–2), 2, 24, 30, 59, 77, 84, 94–5, 98, 143, 152 ‘Stradivarius’ (1873), 58 Daniel Deronda (1876), 3, 8, 9, 31, 34, 41, 48, 94, 98, 101, 130–91, 192, 194; see also Klesmer Ellis, Alexander J., 33 Ellis, Mrs (Sarah Stickney), 68, 70, 74, 78, 79–80, 83 embryology, 14, 197n.16 emotion, 9, 12–14, 15–17, 19–20, 22, 23, 27, 28–30, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 41, 42–4, 202n.166; in women, 78–80, 88–91, 99; in Eliot’s novels, 95, 99, 111, 102, 108–9, 110–12, 114, 115–17, 140, 152–3, 183, 185–6, 187, 202n.166; see also language, physiology, sympathy evolution: in Spencer, 6–7, 8, 12–21, 24–6, 27, 28, 31–44, 90, 107–8; in Eliot, 7, 9, 11, 14, 20, 23–4, 25, 32, 33, 44–52, 103, 104–8, 115, 118–26, 126–7, 131, 133–4, 139, 142, 147, 169, 188–91, 192, 193, 194, 220n.85; see also Darwin, Gurney, Helmholtz, Wagner Faucet, Helen, 156, 157 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 8, 28–30, 200–1n.121 Flaubert, Gustave, 168, 228n.140

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Gallagher, Catherine, 226n.78 Gardiner, William, 22 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 31, 60, 82, 91, 92–4, 95, 151 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von, 159, 161 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 55, 117, 133, 153, 216n.9, 224n.47, 225n.72 Grand, Sarah, 90 Gray, Beryl, 5, 218–19n.52 Grey, Maria Georgina, 71–2, 77, 78, 94 Gurney, Edmund, 36–44, 202n.155, 203n.191, 231n.184 Handel, George Frederic, 2, 6, 30–1, 91, 140, 201n.124, 224n.47 Hardy, Thomas, 193 Hartley, David, 218n.41 Harvey, William, 193, 234n.1 Haweis, Rev H.R., 21, 42–3, 88–9 Haydn, Joseph, 47, 106, 216n.12 Heine, Heinrich, 53, 54–6, 140, 206n.269, 207n.281 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 33–5, 43, 113–14, 202n.166 Hennell, Sara, 5, 217n.34 Hodgson, William Ballantyne, 65, 91–2 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 9, 25, 27, 134–6, 168, 177–8, 180–1, 222n.23, 222n.32, 231n.180 Holland, Henry, 122, 182, 219n.66 Hollander, John, 218n.47, 232n.195, 234n.203, 235n.6 ‘Home Sweet Home’, 81–2, 98 Hullah, John, 27, 200n.100, 224n.53 Hunt, Holman, 84–6, 212n.122 Huxley, Thomas, 127

hyperbole, 109–10, 127, 217n.30 hypnotism, 9, 39, 113, 178, 231n.184; see also psychical research, mesmerism identity, 102, 107, 108, 124–6, 163, 177, 181, 182–3, 186–9, 194, 234n.203; see also memory, psychology inheritance, 6–7, 15–16, 30, 32–3, 36, 40, 44, 118, 122–6, 127, 159, 163–4, 169, 175, 183, 188, 191, 194; see also evolution, memory Jean Paul, 25, 38, 40, 191 Judaism, 131, 135, 142–3, 151, 153, 183, 185, 224n.47, 229n.152, 229–30n.153, 230n.154; and women, 158, 159, 163–4, 169–72; Zionism, 169–72, 174, 175, 176–7, 181, 190, 231n.184 Kähler, Wolfgang, 43 Kempis, Thomas à, 108 Klesmer, Julius, 25, 48, 131–9, 143, 144, 145, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159, 174, 177–81, 184, 221n.16, 221–2n.22, 222n.23, 230n.174; see also Daniel Deronda Kreisler, Johannes, 134–6; see also Hoffmann Langer, Susanne, 43 language, 7, 9, 12–14, 17, 18, 19–20, 23, 37, 38–9, 40, 43–4, 51, 55, 57, 111–12, 128, 130, 176–7, 178, 184, 185, 193, 194, 204n.211, 230n.170 Laycock, Thomas, 86 Lear, Edward, 84 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 38–9 Levenson, Shirley Frank, 174 Lewes, Charles Lee, 4 Lewes, George Henry, 4, 5, 6, 33–4, 51–2, 103, 113–14, 117, 119, 120, 122, 125, 132, 188, 189, 193n.31, 223n.37, 226n.90, 233n.198, 234n.3 Lewis, Sarah, 70, 211n.90

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Flint, Kate, 211n.89, 212n.122 Flotow, Friedrich, 53, 206n.260 Freud, Sigmund, 178, 179, 184, 231n.177 Fuller, Margaret, 63, 160–1 function of music, 12, 19–20, 23, 26, 27, 31, 44, 73, 204n.211

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Lind, Jenny, 141, 203n.191, 224n.45 Liszt, Franz, 4, 11, 46, 48, 50, 77, 133, 135, 180, 205n.232, 221n.16 Litvak, Joseph, 155, 226n.90, 231n.175, 232n.188 Lyell, Charles, 197n.21 McCobb, Anthony, see Schopenhauer Mackay, Robert William, 15, 127 madness, 100–1, 146–7, 181, 224n.55, 244n.59 Mainzer, Joseph, 23, 26–8, 30, 74, 200n.100 materialism, 23–4, 39–40, 188–9, 193, 234n.3; see also evolution, physiology; compare Romanticism, transcendence Mechanics’ Institutes, 31, 65 memory, 44, 102, 103, 110–11, 118–26, 120–2, 128, 181, 182, 186, 188, 190, 191; see also inheritance; compare prolepsis Mendelssohn, Felix, 47, 75, 132, 135, 220–1n.9 mesmerism, 178, 179, 181, 230n.174, 231n.180; see also hypnotism Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 48, 49, 50, 54–5, 139, 143, 206n.248 Mill, John Stuart, 65, 81, 108, 160 Moore, Thomas, 84 More, Hannah, 65, 76, 213–4n.153 Müller, Johannes, 113, 218n.41 music ambivalent status, 7–8, 59–60, 78–81, 84–6, 102; see also emotion, musician, transcendence and community, 2, 30, 31, 40–1, 171–2, 176; see also Feuerbach, Mainzer, Spencer as consolation, 2, 4–5, 41, 70, 105, 217–18n.40 and politics, 25, 136, 142, 174–5 and the psyche, 51, 109, 126, 130, 186, 204n.211; see also psychical research, physiology, psychology, Sully, uncanny, unconscious and social progress, 19–22, 23, 26, 34, 60, 72–4, 104–5; see also evolution

in Victorian culture, 2, 3, 4–6, 8–9, 10, 192–3; see also choral-singing movement, evolution, piano, women and music musician, 24–5, 27, 34, 92, 131–2, 136, 137, 148, 149; see also under prima donna, women and music Myers, F.W.H., 39, 41, 181, 231n.184 Necker, Mme, 80 Nightingale, Florence, 92 Novalis, (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 126 Offenbach, Jakob, 95, 214n.171 opera, 18, 45–52, 56–7, 148, 159, 161, 163, 164–5 Eliot on, 48–9, 139–40, 207n.289, 216n.12, 223n.40, 223n.43 operatic analogy, 56–7, 110–11, 130, 139–41, 142–3, 155, 163, 164, 168–9, 183–6, 224n.44, 232n.188 opera buffa, 139, 143, 223n.40 see also prima donna, theatricality, Wagner origin of music 1, 7, 12–13, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 44, 204n.11 Orpheus, 159, 161, 164 Paganini, Niccolò, 180 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 172 Pater, Walter Horatio, 173, 193 Parkes, Bessie Raynor, 63–4, 83, 213n.138 philistinism, 174, 131–2, 134–5, 136–9, 141–2, 178, 222n.34, 230n. phrenology, 100, 213n.136, 215n.195 physiology, 15–17, 32, 34, 86, 89, 102–3, 108, 112, 113, 114–17, 119, 125, 129, 178, 182, 198n.31, 233n.199; see also evolution, psychology, sympathetic vibration, women and music piano, 4, 6, 57, 76–7, 84, 93, 96–7, 98–9, 111, 133, 184, 207n.291, 211n.85 Plato, 22

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Poovey, Mary, 60 Praeger, Ferdinand, 47 prima donna, 63–4, 82, 99, 148, 153–60, 161–6, 169, 213n.138, 227n.101 prolepsis 25–6, 177, 179, 181–2, 183, 186, 188, 190, 191; compare memory prostitution, 84–6, 93, 99, 148, 154, 225n.61 psychical research, 9, 39, 181, 231n.184 psychology, 9, 15, 42–3, 86, 100–1, 103, 108, 112, 116–19, 129, 182, 184, 190, 232–3n.196, 233n.198, 233n.199; see also Holland, psychical research, Spencer, Sully Pullan, Mrs (Matilda Marian), 77 Raff, Joachim, 204n.215 realism, 9, 56, 103, 128, 130, 140, 177, 188, 191, 192, 217n.31 religion, 3–4, 57, 64, 66, 68–9, 71, 72, 73, 74, 83, 84–6, 93, 103–4, 115, 139, 145, 151; see also Judaism Riehl, Wilhelm von, 53, 56–7, 140 Roe, Mrs, 68, 214n.153 Romanticism, 7, 23–4, 25, 27, 29, 102, 116–17, 131–2, 134–6, 152, 169, 177, 181, 190–1, 192, 194, 218n.47, 232n.195, 234n.203; see also transcendence; compare materialism Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio, 140, 143, 183 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 13, 57 Royle, Nicholas, 181, 232n.191, 234n.202, 234n.203 Rubinstein, Anton, 4, 132–3 Ruskin, John, 53, 56, 81–2, 86, 212n.110 Rylance, Rick, 198n.30 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm von, 179, 194 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 222n.22, 228n.143, 233n.197 Schubert, Franz, 53, 54, 224n.47 Schumann, Clara, 4

253

Schumann, Robert, 25, 27, 135 science and music, see under acoustics, evolution, psychology, physiology, sexual selection, sympathetic vibration, psychical research second sight, 130, 169, 182, 188; see also clairvoyance, prolepsis, visionary imagination sexual selection, 110–11, 112, 117, 118, 123–4, 150, 168, 228n.138 Shakespeare, William, 142, 153, 178–9, 182 Shaw, George Bernard, 156 Sheppard, Elizabeth Sara, 220–1n.9 Shirreff, Emily, 71–2, 77, 78, 88, 210n.57 Shuttleworth, Sally, 100, 196n.4, 213n.136, 213n.146, 215n.199, 216n.28, 219n.66, 233n.198 siren, 68, 81, 83, 84, 95–7, 154 Sloboda, John, 44, 204n.211 somnambulism, 111, 119, 217n.31 Spencer, Herbert, 7, 12, 14, 15, 20, 41, 55, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107–8, 111, 120–2, 125, 127, 129, 197n.13, 197n.14, 233n.199; see also evolution, function of music, language, memory, origin of music, Romanticism, sympathy, transcendence spiritualism, 39, 179–80, 231n.184 Stahr, Adolf, 48, 205n.232 Stephen, Leslie, 203n.191, 231n.184 Storr, Anthony, 204n.211 stream of consciousness, 186, 232–3n.196 Sullivan, William, 106, 216n.12, 223n.42 Sully, James, 33, 35–6, 41, 42, 124–6, 181 Svengali, see du Maurier sympathetic vibration, 2, 33–4, 98, 113–14, 115, 116, 118, 124, 178, 179, 189–90, 193 synaesthesia, 3, 116, 169, 187, 189, 218n.47

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Index

Index

sympathy, 1–3, 7, 13, 16–17, 19, 20, 74, 75, 91, 94–5, 98, 109, 110–12, 130, 140, 146, 152, 154, 157, 159–60, 173, 175–93, 231n.184, 233n.197, 234n.203; see also sympathetic vibration, clairvoyance, second sight, telepathy telepathy, 9, 39, 41, 178, 181, 186, 188, 191, 231n.184, 232n.191, 234n.202 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 55, 183, 232n.188 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 84, 97 theatricality, 138, 139, 140, 142–3, 145–6, 147–8, 150, 151, 154–6, 163, 165–6, 232n.188; see also actress, prima donna, opera Tilt, E.J., 87 Tolstoy, Count Lev Nikolaevich, 225n.61 tragedy, 49–50, 104–5, 127 transcendence, 3, 23–6, 27, 28, 29–30, 41, 102, 103, 109, 112–13, 114–15, 116, 124, 128, 130, 145, 159, 172, 175–7, 177, 180, 186, 187, 188, 190–1, 194, 233n.197 Tyndall, John, 33, 201n.136 uncanny, the, 9, 24, 124, 126, 127, 177–82, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 231n.177 unconscious, the, 36, 108, 111, 114, 117, 118–20, 122, 124–5, 126, 188; see also inheritance, physiology Upton, George, 89 Verdi, Giuseppe, 149, 150, 151, 170, 229n.146 visionary imagination, 169, 178, 180–2, 187–8, 190–1 voice, 2, 53, 141–2, 143, 144, 152, 153, 154, 224n.53, 225n.64, 225n.68 vocation, 130, 131, 143–9, 162–3, 167, 169, 173, 192, 231n.184 Wagner, Richard, 4, 11, 25, 44–52, 57, 131, 133–4, 206n.248; see also Eliot, ‘Liszt, Wagner and Weimar’

Walker, Alan, 133 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 39–40 water imagery, 125, 128, 186, 190, 217n.30, 232n.195, 234n.203; see also stream of consciousness Weber, Carl Maria von, 49 Weliver, Phyllis, 196n.36, 213n.139 Welsh, Alexander, 131, 176, 185 Whitman, Walt, vi, 144, 224n.50 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 61–3, 88, 160 woman’s ‘nature’, 65, 78, 88–9, 91, 92, 95, 147, 152, 153–4, 156, 160–1, 163, 166, 213n.146, 213n.149, 227n.106; see also domestic ideology, women and music; compare prima donna, siren woman writer, 57–8, 60, 83, 93–4, 145, 154, 156–8, 192, 226n.78, 227n.118 women and music, 7–8, 56–9, 59–101, 145–69; see also domestic ideology commodification of women musicians, 92, 99, 146, 148–51, 157, 159, 222n.34, 225n.64, 227n.101; see also prostitution, woman writer education, 60, 61–6, 72–3, 87–8, 94–5, 137, 138, 208n.13 figurative affinities, 60–1, 72, 74–5, 80–2, 84, 227n.103 medicine, 86–8 performance, 8, 58, 67–8, 75, 79–80, 82, 91–2, 94, 96, 98, 99, 138, 148, 149, 150–1, 152–3, 154–8, 169, 179, 213–14n.153, 231n.175 professional musicianship, 63–4, 82–4, 89–90, 147–65; see also prima donna, vocation; compare actress, woman writer science, 61, 86, 90–1; see also physiology, sexual selection self-expression, 99, 101, 111, 146–7, 150, 152–3, 155; see also emotion, prima donna

10.1057/9780230598010 - George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, Delia da Sousa Correa

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

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Index

Wordsworth, William, 51, 54, 57, 116, 180, 186, 190, 218n.47, 232n.195, 234n.203 Young, Robert Maxwell, 106, 196–7n.6, 197n.29, 198n.30, 215n.195

10.1057/9780230598010 - George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture, Delia da Sousa Correa

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

susceptibility to influence, 77–81, 84, 86–91, 101, 112; see also physiology, sexual selection, sympathetic vibration, women’s nature; compare siren Woolf, Virginia, 128, 186

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