George Eliot's Intellectual Life

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GEORGE ELIOT’S INTELLECTUAL LIFE

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

GEORGE ELIOT’S INTELLECTUAL LIFE AVROM FLEISHMAN

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521117364 © Avrom Fleishman 2010 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13

978-0-511-69110-2

eBook (NetLibrary)

ISBN-13

978-0-521-11736-4

Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

for Felicia Bonaparte, doyenne of Eliot studies, with gratitude

Contents

Acknowledgements Preface

page viii ix

Introduction

1

1

The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture

12

2

The Apostate: moving beyond the Christian mythos

24

3

The Journalist: editing, reviewing, shaping a worldview

44

4

The Germanist: balancing the counterweight of German thinkers

72

5

The Novelist: mixing realism, naturalism and mythmaking

93

6

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

112

7

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

140

8

The Encyclopedist: transcending the past in Middlemarch

161

9

The Visionary: transmitting ideals in Daniel Deronda

190

10 The Intellectual: cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such

218

Notes Works cited Name index

252 282 292

vii

Acknowledgements

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

viii

Preface

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

x

Preface

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

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

Introduction

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

(letter of August 13, 1875)

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

(letter of November 13, 1860)

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

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

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

2

George Eliot’s Intellectual Life

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

Introduction

3

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

4

George Eliot’s Intellectual Life

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

Introduction

5

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

6

George Eliot’s Intellectual Life

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

Introduction

7

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

8

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

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

Introduction

9

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

10

George Eliot’s Intellectual Life

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

Introduction

11

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

chapter 1

The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture

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

The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture

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

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George Eliot’s Intellectual Life

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

The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture

15

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

16

George Eliot’s Intellectual Life

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

The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture

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

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George Eliot’s Intellectual Life

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

The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture

19

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

20

George Eliot’s Intellectual Life

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

The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture

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

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

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

chapter 2

The Apostate: moving beyond the Christian mythos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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31

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 3

The Journalist: editing, reviewing, shaping a worldview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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historical methods.13 Although the possibility of a social science is firmly established (book VI, ch. vi) and careful attention paid to the operations and conditions of each of these approaches, the proper study of the social world emerges as both heroically comprehensive and markedly limited: We can never either understand in theory or command in practice the condition of a society in any one respect, without taking into consideration its condition in all other respects. There is no social phenomenon which is not more or less influenced by every other part of the condition of the same society, and therefore by every cause which is influencing any other of the contemporaneous social phenomena … unless two societies could be alike in all the circumstances which surround and influence them, (which would imply their being alike in their previous history,) no portion whatever of the phenomena will, unless by accident, precisely correspond; no one cause will produce exactly the same effects in both … We can never, therefore, affirm with certainty that a cause which has a particular tendency in one people or in one age will have exactly the same tendency in another, without referring back to our premises, and performing over again for the second age or nation, that analysis of the whole of its influencing circumstances which we had already performed for the first. The deductive science of society will not lay down a theorem, asserting in an universal manner the effect of any cause; but will rather teach us how to frame the proper theorem for the circumstances of any given case. It will not give the laws of society in general, but the means of determining the phenomena of any given society from the particular elements or data of that society. (VI, ix, 899–900)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 4

The Germanist: balancing the counterweight of German thinkers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 5

The Novelist: mixing realism, naturalism and mythmaking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chapter 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(p. 36)

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

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

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

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

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

(Book IV, pp. 221–22, ll. 158–83)

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

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

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

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is off to Africa with scant hopes of success22 – but also by the bystanders, innocent or not. Although Eliot shows her characteristic sympathy with all idealistic aspirations, she regards them under the aspect of tragedy, in which the loss of personal freedom, loving union, and rootedness in a culture (even a secondarily acquired one) are the concomitants. When reckoning the catastrophic consequences of inter-racial or international encounters in The Spanish Gypsy, it is strange that it has been so often read for “the elevation of communal interests over private ones,” and that it is seen as anticipating that in her later works “Eliot would stand fast not by the liberal views of Silva, but by the creed of blood and birth she had placed in the mouths of Zarca and Sephardo.”23 What did Eliot, after all, think about race? An answer must come from her nonfictional rather than her fictional writings, and is to be found, curiously enough, in a brief essay, “A Word for the Germans.”24 After reviewing the prejudices regarding “John Bull” in the stereotypes circulated in other lands, she drops the received notions of German cloudiness in her earlier essays and declares Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason “not in the least cloudy” (p. 388) – a highly unconvincing example, given the persistence of efforts to fully understand it. Acknowledging real differences among peoples, she explains: “the hum