IN 1885 William Hale White wrote a letter to the Athenœum in response to John Walter Cross’s recently published Life of his dead wife, George Eliot.1 It is worth quoting in full.
As I had the honour of living in the same house, 142, Strand, with George Eliot for about two years, between 1851 and 1854, I may perhaps be allowed to correct an impression which Mr Cross’s book may possibly produce on its readers. To put it very briefly, I think he has made her too ‘respectable’. She was really one of the most sceptical, unusual creatures I ever knew, and it was this side of her character which was to me the most attractive. She told me that it was worthwhile to undertake all the labour of learning French if it resulted in nothing more than reading one book – Rousseau’s Confessions. That saying was perfectly symbolical of her, and reveals more completely what she was, at any rate in 1851–4, than page after page of attempt on my part at critical analysis. I can see her now, with her hair over her shoulders, the easy chair half sideways to the fire, her feet over the arms, and a proof in her hands, in that dark room at the back of No. 142, and I confess I hardly recognize her in the pages of Mr Cross’s – on many accounts – most interesting volumes. I do hope that in some future edition, or in some future work, the salt and spice will be restored to the records of George Eliot’s entirely unconventional life. As the matter now stands she has not had full justice done to her, and she has been removed from the class – the great and noble church, if I may so call it – of the Insurgents, to one more genteel, but certainly not so interesting.
It is this George Eliot – sceptical, unconventional, addicted to the daring, risqué, nakedly self-revelatory and subversive Confessions – whose presence can be sensed in the essays and reviews in this collection. She went to live in No. 142 Strand in 1851, when she was thirty-two, to lodge in the household of John Chapman, publisher and new owner of the Westminster Review. Chapman had already published her translation of David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus in 1846, and made her acquaintance in Coventry. Chapman was passionately addicted to women, and his family included his mistress, Elisabeth Tilley, as well as his wife, Susanna. Both women became very jealous of Miss Evans, and it is clear that there was good cause for this; her first visit to No. 142 lasted from January to March 1851, when a series of angry scenes and disputes culminated in her tearful departure. Chapman recorded in his diary, ‘M. departed today. I accompanied her to the railway. She was very sad and hence made me feel so. She pressed me for some intimation of the state of my feelings. I told her that I felt great affection for her, but that I loved E. and S. also though each in a different way. At this avowal she burst into tears.’2
Chapman’s offer for the Westminster Review was accepted in May 1851, and the deed of sale was signed in October of that year. He decided that the powerfully intelligent Marian Evans would be an ideal assistant; Susanna and Elisabeth were resolutely set against her return to No. 142 or indeed to London at all. For some months the two corresponded and Chapman negotiated with the other women. In September it was agreed that Marian Evans might return as a lodger; she lived there, apparently amicably, for the next two years.
She became, in effect, the secret editor of the Westminster Review. Chapman was known as chief editor; the letter sent out with the Prospectus referred to ‘the Editors’ and Marian Evans told Chapman, ‘In regard to the secret of the Editorship, it will perhaps be the best plan for you to state, that for the present you are to be regarded as the responsible person, but that you employ an Editor in whose literary and general ability you confide.’3
Thomas Carlyle, who called himself ‘clear for silence at present’, wrote to Robert Browning, suggesting that Browning contribute, and said Chapman had ‘an able Editor (name can’t be given) and such an array of “talent” as was seldom gathered before’.4 She edited ten numbers of the periodical; Gordon Haight tells us the Westminster reviewed about a hundred volumes in each of these ten.5 The reviews were arranged at first under the heading of ‘Contemporary Literature’ of England, America, Germany and France; later, at Herbert Spencer’s suggestion, they were rearranged under subject headings. The long articles were compilations of reviews by various authors: Marian Evans was responsible for running these together, editing and cutting. But it is not thought she wrote much herself, and some earlier attributions have been disproved. She did advise on the choice of authors and subjects, and was responsible for proofs and printing. She seems to have been paid nothing for all this work, but it transfigured her life. Chapman gave regular literary parties and took her to more; she met thinkers, poets and writers whose work she reviewed, such as R. W. Mackay and W. R. Greg, as well as Giuseppe Mazzini and Karl Marx. Her letters at the time are lively, incisive and busy. For a young woman from a merely respectable provincial family this was an immense increase of freedom and life. She mixed with others of her own kind – the Insurgents; like herself, they were not part of the established social and religious hierarchy, but were liberal, questioning, free-thinking, interested in reform.
The Westminster Review had a distinguished history. It was founded in 1824 by James Mill, with financial support from Jeremy Bentham. John Stuart Mill edited it from 1837–40, when it gained its highest reputation for intellectual excitement and radical thought. The Prospectus Chapman and Evans wrote for their first issue (January 1852) declared itself committed to advocating ‘organic change’ according to the Law of Progress, whilst respecting the ‘variety of forms’ in which ‘the same fundamental truths are apprehended’.6 It would not ignore ‘the widespread doubts in relation to established creeds and systems’ and would ‘fearlessly examine’ ‘the elements of ecclesiastical authority and of dogma’; it would discuss ‘without reservation, the results of the most advanced biblical criticism’. It advocated progress towards universal suffrage and reform of the judiciary, and a national system of education. There was to be an ‘Independent Section’ to provide freedom for the expression of views that opposed those of the editors, though this section was found to be impracticable and abandoned after the second number. The Westminster, under its anonymous editor, printed J. H. Froude on Tudor England, J. S. Mill on William Whewell’s philosophy and Herbert Spencer’s theory of evolution.
Herbert Spencer’s Psychology included a footnote thanking George Eliot for the happy phrase ‘Things which have a constant relation to the same thing have a constant relation to each other.’7 When he first met the ‘translatress of Strauss’, he described her as ‘the most admirable woman, mentally, I have ever met’.8 In 1852 they spent much time together, and were rumoured to be engaged. Her letters to him, kept secret until 1985, reveal a woman passionately and self-abasingly attached, begging for crumbs of attention, if not love. Spencer, who remained a bachelor, declined her affections and let it be known that this was because she was ugly. It says much for her generosity of spirit that she remained on good terms with him, even confiding in him that she was the ‘George Eliot’ who had written Scenes of Clerical Life, a confidence he unwisely betrayed to the garrulous Chapman.
By the turn of the year, however, she had shifted her affections to Spencer’s friend, G. H. Lewes, whom at first she suspected of being flippant and lightweight. In 1850 Lewes was co-founder, with Thornton Leigh Hunt, of the Leader, a weekly newspaper, which, with the Westminster, published the bulk of George Eliot’s reviews. Thornton Leigh Hunt was the father of the fifth son of Lewes’s wife, Agnes (and subsequently of three more). Lewes was devoted to his own sons, and acknowledged this fifth one, thus rendering himself unable to seek a divorce, since he had condoned the adultery. But his marriage was over, and he was free, emotionally, to love Marian Evans. In September 1853 she moved from No. 142 Strand to lodgings in Cambridge Street. Her translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity was written in the next few months and finally appeared in July 1854. It was in the same month that Marian Evans left for Germany with Lewes and embarked on the ‘marriage’ that was to last his lifetime and lead directly to the work of George Eliot. This step also led directly to the writing of the major essays printed in this collection, which were written between 1854 and 1857, and published in the Westminster Review. They were written for money, but they were also written with a new intellectual authority, freedom and sense of excitement. It is usual for critics of George Eliot to look for the weighty, the sibylline and the scrupulously just. But these essays are also at times savagely ironic, often very funny, and have a speed and sharpness that is less frequently remarked on.
It is possible to find in them hints of her private preoccupations at that time, and also thoughts about human nature, art and societies that will later form essential parts of the fiction of George Eliot. In the rest of this essay I shall discuss some of these and relate them to the development of her thought in the other non- fictional work in this collection – the translations, the poems, the correspondence with Frederic Harrison, and the ‘Notes on Form in Art’ (unpublished before Thomas Pinney’s 1963 collection).
It is perhaps worth remarking at this stage, however, how much of her writing at this time drew its life from a kind of ferocious, witty and energetic rejection. The great essays on John Cumming and Edward Young are rejections of her own earlier religious and literary enthusiasms. ‘Woman in France: Madame de Sablé’ questions English conventional ideas about female virtues and the nature of marriage. ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ offers a radical rejection of the aims and moral vision of the novels currently being written by women, and ends with a statement of what women novelists could do, powered by anger as well as by hope. She was free, she was clearing the ground.
This is perhaps also the best point at which to discuss, at least briefly, the complex question of Eliot’s attitude to ‘the woman question’. At the height of her fame she was cautious, even ambivalent, in her support of Girton College and women’s suffrage; she wrote, ‘there is no subject on which I am more inclined to hold my peace and learn, than on the Woman Question. It seems to me to overhang abysses, of which even prostitution is not the worst… I have been made rather miserable lately by revelations about women, and have resolved to remain silent in my sense of helplessness.’9 These inexplicit ‘abysses’ seem related in their anxiety to her earlier fear of becoming ‘earthly sensual and devilish’ at her father’s death, and the removal of ‘that purifying, restraining influence’.10 She wrote brilliantly and passionately about the pain of thwarted intelligence, or artistic power, in women, but also insisted, throughout her life, on the importance of recognizing the differences between the sexes. The ‘feminine’ virtues of tenderness, sympathy and patience were to her real virtues, to be desired and respected as feminine. But at the same time she saw very clearly that to live only for personal affections was dangerously narrow: she wrote to a woman friend in 1870,
We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gift we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life – some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of sweet women when their affections are disappointed – because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defence against passionate affliction even more than men.11
Some feminists have criticized Eliot for accepting stereotyped ideas of ‘feminine’ characteristics. Others have criticized her for trying too hard to have what they think of as the ‘male’ patriarchal qualities of rationality and intellect (thus falling into the stereotyping trap themselves). She was a complex woman, at once freely independent and timidly clinging, powerfully intelligent and full of a compelled artistic ambition that sprang both from ‘feeling’ and the mind.
In the essay on Madame de Sablé (1854) she argued strongly both for the specificity of female talents and sensibilities and for ‘unions formed in the maturity of thought and feeling, and grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction’, as opposed to the ‘quiescence and security of the conjugal relation’. In 1855, reviewing Thomas Keightley’s Life of Milton, she supported Milton’s plea for divorce, and drew the analogy between Milton’s plight and the campaign of Caroline Norton, which brought attention to the iniquities suffered by women, because of the divorce law. Milton’s personal experience, she said, could be traced in his descriptions of the ‘baleful muteness of a virgin’ hiding ‘all the unliveliness and natural sloth which is really unfit for conversation’.12 Her own personal pleading can be traced in the essay on Madame de Sablé, which ends with the lines, ‘Let the whole field of reality be laid open to woman as well as to man, and then that which is peculiar in her mental modification, instead of being, as it is now, a source of discord and repulsion between the sexes, will be found to be a necessary complement to the truth and beauty of life.’13
Eliot’s sense of the ‘discord and repulsion’ caused by the deformations and distortions of the female self uneducated is as constant as her sense of the importance of the relations between the sexes. In an essay on Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft she remarks that ‘while men have a horror of such faculty or culture in the other sex as tends to place it on a level with their own, they are really in a state of subjection to ignorant and feeble-minded women’.14 She goes on to quote Margaret Fuller’s description of the ‘petty power’ of the ‘ignorance and childish vanity’ of uneducated women. Here is the hint of the beginning of both Rosamund Vincy in her complacent and destructive prettiness, and Gwendolen Harleth in the aimless power-mongering of her fatal coquetry. Eliot saw both Fuller and Wollstonecraft as mirrors for her sense of herself. She wrote in 1852, ‘It is a help to read such a life as Margaret Fuller’s. How inexpressibly touching that passage from her journal – “I shall always reign through the intellect, but the life, the life! O my god! shall that never be sweet?” I am thankful, as for myself, that it was sweet at last.’15 And in 1871, writing to the Jewish scholar Emanuel Deutsch, who was ill and despairing, she used Mary Wollstonecraft as an example of hope, comparing her to her own painful, youthful, hopeless self. ‘Remember, it has happened to many to be glad they did not commit suicide, though they once ran for the final leap, or as Mary Wollstonecraft did, wetted their garments well in the rain, hoping to sink the better when they plunged.’16
Out of this sympathetic feeling for the young Mary Wollstonecraft and the despairing Jew came the suicide attempt of Mirah, the woman artist in Daniel Deronda who lived to be happy, in contrast to the fiercely separate and ambitious Alchirisi, Daniel’s mother, who sacrificed her affections to her art, and told her son, ‘You can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.’17 In Daniel Deronda the problems of Fuller, Wollstonecraft and the author of the essay on Madame de Sablé are studied with a novelist’s fullness and sceptical passion in Gwendolen, Mirah, the Alchirisi and also Catherine Arrowpoint, an intelligent and gifted heiress who gives up rich English philistinism for German-Jewish genius and seriousness. In her poetic drama, Armgart, part of which is reprinted in this collection, Eliot studied (in an earlier version) the conflict between female genius and the domestic and affectionate virtues; the singer rejects her suitor’s definition of married love as her highest fulfilment, only to lose her voice, and learn how much egoism there was in her devotion to her talent. But the young woman who wrote the essays of the 1850s was, for the first time, happy as a woman, and full of new ambition as a writer. ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ was written immediately before her own first attempt at fiction, and its lightness of tone is partly a result of her desire not to ‘undertake an article that would give me too much trouble’.18 The story she was beginning was ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton’, and it is easy to see in it a revision (in the Jamesian sense of re-vision, new looking at) the works she characterized as the ‘white neck-cloth’ school of evangelical fiction. ‘Why can we not have pictures of religious life among the industrial classes in England, as interesting as Mrs Stowe’s pictures of religious life among the negroes?’ she asked, and went on, in ‘Janet’s Repentance’ and Silas Marner, to provide just such pictures. Gwendolen Harleth and Dorothea Brooke, with their very real human limitations, can in one sense be seen as corrective revisions of the beautiful, proficient, high-minded mind-and-millinery heroine, who, despite being ‘the ideal woman in feelings, faculties and flounces’, as often as not ‘marries the wrong person to begin with and suffers terribly from the plots and intrigues of the vicious baronet’. Gwendolen, with hideous irony, indeed resembles the type heroine, not an heiress, who ‘has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end’. Gwendolen’s jewels are a torturing crown of iniquity, and she learns the Eliot lesson that resignation and suffering do not produce ‘compensation’ and some divine reward for virtue. Eliot began this essay out of a desire to review the novel Compensation, and ‘fire away at the doctrine of Compensation, which I detest’.19
The ‘realism’ of Eliot’s fiction is partly a moral realism, rejecting ‘compensation’ and other consoling doctrines, and partly a related technical realism, a desire for accuracy. At the end of ‘Silly Novels’ Eliot observed, ‘No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements – genuine observation, humour and passion.’
It is time to look at her ideas about the forms of art.
REALISM
Eliot’s review of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Vol. III was published in April 1856; in the summer of that year, at Tenby, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton’ was begun. In the essay on Ruskin, Eliot wrote, ‘The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality.’20
In the journal she kept at Ilfracombe earlier the same summer (see pp. 214 ff.), she writes of her observation of the countryside in terms of both art and nature-study. It is ‘a “Hunt” picture’ and inspires in her a very clear linguistic ambition. ‘I never before longed so much to know the names of things as during this visit to Ilfracombe. The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas. The mere fact of naming an object tends to give definiteness to our conception of it – we have then a sign that at once calls up in our minds the distinctive qualities which mark out for us that particular object from all others.’
In the essays, particularly those on Cumming and Young, she comments again and again on inaccurate language. She says of Young that one of his most striking characteristics was
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…
His hand the good man fixes on the skies,
And bids earth roll, nor feels her idle whirl, –
may, perhaps, pass for sublime with some readers. But pause a moment to realize the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man’s grasping the skies, and hanging habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously bids the earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested so unnatural a conception… Examples of such vicious imagery, resulting from insincerity, may be found, perhaps, in almost every page of the Night Thoughts. But simple assertions or aspirations, undisguised by imagery, are often equally false. No writer whose rhetoric was checked by the slightest truthful intentions, could have said, –
An eye of awe and wonder let me roll,
And roll for ever.
Abstracting the more poetical associations with the eye, this is hardly less absurd than if he had wished to stand for ever with his mouth open.
In the essay on Cumming, she is even more uncompromising about the connection between accurate language and morality.
A distinct appreciation of the value of evidence – in other words, the intellectual perception of truth – is more closely allied to truthfulness of statement, or the moral quality of veracity, than is generally admitted. There is not a more pernicious fallacy afloat in common parlance, than the wide distinction made between intellect and morality. Amiable impulses without intellect, man may have in common with dogs and horses; but morality, which is specifically human, is dependent on the regulation of feeling by intellect.
Cumming, she says, is imprisoned, as an intellect, by the doctrine of verbal inspiration that deprives his mind of ‘its proper function – the free search for truth’. Cumming’s religious statements, as she wittily and devastatingly demonstrates, are a series of overblown untruths.
In Cumming’s case it is the freedom of the intellect and philosophical truth that is at stake. In Lord Brougham’s, whose style she also attacks, it is Art. (It is interesting in this context that she defines Dr Johnson’s Wit, in the essay on Heinrich Heine, as ‘reasoning raised to a higher power’. Wit, she says, has an affinity with ratiocination, and the higher the species of wit, the more it deals ‘less with words and superficialities than with the essential qualities of things’.) She wrote to Charles Bray, defending her attack.
The article on Lord Brougham was written conscientiously, and you seem to have misunderstood its purpose, in taking it for mere word quibbling. I consider it criminal in a man to prostitute Literature for the purposes of his own vanity, and this is what Lord Brougham has done. A man who has something vitally important to mankind to say, may be excused for saying it in bad English. In such a case criticism of style is irrelevant. But Literature is fine art, and the man who writes mere literature with insolent slovenliness is as inexcusable as a man who gets up in a full drawing-room to sing Rossini’s music in a cracked voice and out of tune. Because Lord Brougham has done some services to the public it does not follow that he is to be treated with anything else than justice when he is doing injury to the public, and I consider his Lives, bad and injurious.21
She was not herself afraid of clear distinct statements. There is a splendid letter from her to Chapman, criticizing his style, again on grounds of illogic and inaccuracy. ‘I have a logical objection to the phrases “it would seem”, “it would appear”, “we would remark”. Would – under what condition? The real meaning is – it does seem, it does appear, we do remark. These phrases are rarely found in good writers, and ought never to be found.’22 As editor and essayist, she kept her own rules.
Also as novelist. Her early letters to her publisher about her fiction defend the precision of the detail in terms of accuracy. John Blackwood told her he would have liked to see, in her account of the confirmation in ‘Janet’s Repentance’, ‘some allusion to the solemn and affecting sight that a confirmation ought to be’.23 Eliot replied,
My own impression on rereading very carefully the account of the confirmation is, that readers will perceive, what is the fact – that I am not in the least occupying myself with confirmation in general, or with Bishops in general, but with a particular confirmation and a particular Bishop.
Art must be either real and concrete, or ideal and eclectic. Both are good and true in their way, but my stories are of the former kind. I undertake to exhibit some things as they have been or are, seen through such a medium as my own nature gives me.
This clear statement also raises the problem of the relations between ‘realist’ art and the philosophical distinction between idealism and realism. This, in its turn, leads on to a consideration of the religious and scientific ideas (the two are inextricably interlinked) in Eliot’s writings.
DEVELOPMENT, POSITIVE SCIENCE AND INCARNATION
Eliot’s first review for the Westminster, that of Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect, was published in 1851, before she became an editor. In it can be found clear statements of her own beliefs, which resonate throughout her work. The essay is also important as her first reference to the work of Auguste Comte. Comte’s Positive Philosophy was uncompromisingly realist. He held that the age of scientific discovery had succeeded the earlier stages of human thought, the Theological and the Metaphysical, which explained the facts of the universe in terms of ‘direct volitions of beings, real or imaginary, possessed of life and intelligence’ (Theological) and of ‘realized’ abstractions, forces, or occult qualities such as Nature, or Vital Principles’ (Metaphysical).24 The age of Positive Science had understood that the world was governed by undeviating law – ‘that invariability of sequence which is acknowledged to be the basis of physical science, but which is still perversely ignored in our social organization, our ethics and our religion’.25 Duty, Eliot says here, is ‘comprised in the earnest study of this law and patient obedience to its teaching’. In F. W. H. Myers’s famous account of his conversation with the sibylline author in Trinity College garden, he quotes her discourse on God, immortality and duty, and her saying how ‘inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’.26 At the time of the Westminster Review essays Eliot was negotiating a book on the ‘Idea of a Future Life’ with Chapman (as well as her translation of Feuerbach) that might have addressed itself both to the untenable idea of ‘Compensation’ for suffering or virtuous self-denial, and to the requirement of obedience to duty for itself alone. Eliot shared the Comtean belief that scientific truth had superseded the truths of revelation or philosophical intuition, but she was sceptical of his later doctrinaire recipes for happiness. Comte saw the laws of evolution of human society as laws of the same nature, once established, as those of physics – which makes the Positivist precept of ‘obedience’ to these unavoidable laws a somewhat slurred and irrational idea.
Eliot quotes with approval Mackay’s statements on faith.
Religion and science are inseparable. No object in nature, no subject of contemplation, is destitute of a religious tendency and meaning… Faith is to a great extent involuntary; it is a law or faculty of our nature, operating silently and intuitively to supply the imperfections of our knowledge. The boundary between faith and knowledge is indeed hard to distinguish… Faith as an inference from knowledge, should be consistently inferred from the whole of knowledge… Faith naturally arises out of the regular and the undeviating.
Eliot’s own description of ‘our civilization, and yet more our religion’ in this essay is one of ‘an anomalous blending of lifeless barbarisms, which have descended to us like so many petrifactions from distant ages, with living ideas, the offspring of a true process of development’. She calls Mackay’s book ‘perhaps the nearest approach in our language to a satisfactory natural history of religion’.
The idea of natural history is central, both to the thought of Eliot’s time, and to her own work as a novelist. The phrase ‘the natural history of religion’ combines the ideas of objective science, the human past, the development of ideas and the study of morality conceived as a developing sequence of observations and ‘living ideas’. The natural history of the earth included Charles Lyell’s geology and Darwin’s study of the Origin of Species. The ‘natural history’ of societies sought to supersede a history that concentrated on the isolated acts of great men, or decisions of rulers, to study the whole structure and interrelations of families and groups as though they were organisms. Nineteenth-century work on philology and mythology sought to study the thoughts and beliefs, and acts and agriculture, of men as they developed speech and tales to describe themselves to themselves. Eliot’s essay on Wilhelm von Riehl (‘The Natural History of German Life’) makes clear her enthusiastic acceptance of these ideas. As with Mackay’s ‘natural history’ of religion, Eliot stresses Riehl’s interest in the life of the German people as ‘incarnate history’, and, as in the Mackay essay, she warns against any attempt to detach ahistorical precepts or descriptions from it.
[Riehl] 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.
Here the ‘inherited internal conditions’ of men are presumably both biological and mental. Eliot goes on to say specifically ‘The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of language’ and to discuss the ‘subtle shades of meaning and still subtler echoes of association’ that ‘make language an instrument which scarcely anything short of genius can wield with definiteness and certainty’. She contemplates a future universal language constructed on a rational basis, ‘patent, deodorized and nonresonant’, perfect and rapid as algebraic signs, a kind of prevision of computer language, made of ticks and dots. She uses a characteristic physiological analogy to reinforce her sense that the organism and its history must be respected.
The sensory and motor nerves that run in the same sheath, are scarcely bound together by a more necessary and delicate union than that which binds men’s affection, imagination, wit and humour, with the subtle ramifications of historical language. Language must be left to grow in precision, completeness, and unity, as minds grow in clearness, comprehensiveness, and sympathy. And there is an analogous relation between the moral tendencies of men and the social conditions they have inherited.
This passage – and the succeeding paragraphs – are crucial to understanding Eliot’s thought, and also the nature of her fictive world, which she sees as a developing organism, incarnate history, much as Riehl sees his world. She continues with an approving quote from Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Vol. IV about the continuity between old ruins, the ancient world and more recent buildings: ‘all is continuous; and the words “from generation to generation” understandable here’.27 And then she expresses a conservative scepticism about the generalizations of Social Science, using the Comtean terms of progression ‘from the general to the special, from the simple to the complex, analogous to that which is found in the series of the sciences, from Mathematics to Biology’. Social Science must study particular organisms. ‘A wise social policy must be based, not simply on abstract social science, but on the Natural History of social bodies.’ She approves Riehl’s ‘social-political-conservatism’, as opposed to ‘communistic theories which he regards as “the despair of the individual in his own manhood, reduced to a system” ’. And in the Riehl essay her arguments for the specificity of Natural History are also used for artistic realism: there is a moral obligation to depict peasants as they are, not in a pastoral idealization. ‘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. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life.’
Images of natural history are intrinsic to her own art. One that foreshadows the natural-historical metaphors for the community of St Ogg’s in The Mill on the Floss is to be found in the ‘Ilfracombe Journal’, where she describes Lantern Hill.
In hilly districts, where houses and clusters of houses look so tiny against the huge limbs of Mother Earth one cannot help thinking of man as a parasitic animal – an epizoon making his abode on the skin of the planetary organism. In a flat country a house or a town looks imposing – there is nothing to rival it in height, and we may imagine the earth a mere pedestal for us. But when one sees a house stuck on the side of a great hill, and still more a number of houses looking like a few barnacles clustered on the side of a great rock, we begin to think of the strong family likeness between ourselves and all other building, burrowing house-appropriating and shell-secreting animals. 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.
Some such analogy as this underlies her description, in her 1855 review, of Lewes’s Life of Goethe as such a ‘natural history of his various productions as will show how they were the outgrowth of his mind at different stages of its culture’. And the same set of analogies and beliefs is at work in her review of Wilhelm Meister, where she describes Goethe himself, who ‘quietly follows the stream of fact and of life; and waits patiently for the moral processes of nature as we all do for her material processes’.
The use of the word ‘incarnation’ in phrases such as ‘incarnate history’ calls up, of course, the whole problem of Christian theology and its partial, progressive and dubious abandonment. Many religious men and theologians clung to various forms of the idea of Christ as perfect or exemplary Man, or Ideal Man, even when they had conceded that the Bible as historical document was open to question, that the eyewitness evidence of the Miracles and the Resurrection were contradictory and unsupported, and that these were in conflict with the somehow more energetic and compelling universal and invariable laws of mind and matter. The young George Eliot was an evangelical Anglican; the growing George Eliot, compelled by Charles Hennell’s Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity, by Strauss and by Feuerbach, was resolutely anti-Christian; the mature George Eliot saw Christian belief and morality as forms of human experience that must be studied and valued as part of our natural history. Nietzsche, in his only reference to Eliot (Twilight of the Idols, 1888), counted her among the English, who clung to the half-life of Christianity.
G. Eliot. – They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality: that is English consistency, let us not blame it on little bluestockings à la Eliot. In England, in response to every little emancipation from theology, one has to reassert one’s position in a fear-inspiring manner as a moral fanatic. That is the penance one pays there. – With us it is different. When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality.28
Nietzsche, according to his translator, R.J. Hollingdale, probably knew about Eliot only from hearsay. It is interesting to juxtapose the views he attributes to her with the letter she wrote to Chapman in 1852, in the days of her editorial work.
I feel that I am a wretched helpmate to you, almost out of the world, and incog. so far as I am in it. When you can afford to pay an Editor, if that time will ever come, you must get one. If you believe in Free Will, in the Theism that looks on manhood as a type of the godhead and on Jesus as the Ideal Man, get one belonging to the Martineau ‘school of thought’ and he will drill you a regiment of writers who will produce a Prospective on a larger scale, and so the Westminster may come to have ‘dignity’ in the eyes of Liverpool.
If not – if you believe as I do, that the thought which is to mould the Future has for its root a belief in necessity, that a nobler presentation of humanity has yet to be given in resignation to individual nothingness, than could ever be shown of a being who believes in the phantasmagoria of hope unsustained by reason – why then get a man of another calibre and let him write a fresh Prospectus, and if Liverpool theology and ethics are to be admitted, let them be put in the ‘dangerous ward’, alias, the Independent Section.
The only third course is the present one, that of Editorial compromise.29
INCARNATION
The long nineteenth-century debate about the precise meaning, or lack of meaning, of the Christian concept of the Incarnation, the meeting-point of the divine and the human, the infinite and the finite, is inextricably connected, consciously and unconsciously, to the development of the form of the novel. As the biblical narrative ceased to be privileged as unique truth, and became associated with partial histories of other kinds, or what Froude in The Nemesis of Faith calls ‘Wonder Tales’, so there arose, for certain kinds of speculative minds, an interest in the nature of the individuals and the values they represented, as portrayed in secular narrative. If Piers Plowman in a religious culture is a Type of Christ, what is Adam Bede, breaking bread and drinking wine before Hetty Sorrel’s trial and condemnation in the fiction of a writer who explicitly rejected, in the letter I have just quoted, ‘the Theism that looks on manhood as a type of the godhead, and on Jesus as the Ideal Man’? George Eliot’s nature, like Dorothea Brooke’s, was both ardent and theoretic, and, like Margaret Fuller’s, intellectual and sensuous, both analytic and observant, both idealizing (theorizing) and realist.
She was also the translator of two of the most influential documents in the Higher Criticism and the demythologizing of Christianity: Strauss’s The Life of Jesus and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. The passages from these translations reprinted in this collection were chosen to illustrate their thinking on the meaning of the incarnation and its narrative, in the belief that, as well as being interesting in themselves, they illuminate the way in which Eliot thought about human nature and human stories.
The passages from Strauss are taken from the introduction and conclusion of his work. Strauss explains the biblical narrative as a series of ‘mythi’ analogous to those of other religions. He rejects the historical claims of the Bible on the ground that individual acts of divine intervention in human affairs are inconsistent with the modern conviction ‘that all things are linked together by a chain of causes and effects which suffers no interruption’. He also tries to distinguish myths from lies and deceptions, by making an analogy with poetry and quoting the mythologist, Otfried Müller. ‘How,’ says Müller, ‘shall we reconcile this combination of the true and the false, the real and the ideal, in mythi, with the fact of their being believed and received as truth? The ideal, it may be said, is nothing else than poetry and fiction clothed in the form of a narration.’ Strauss then argues that this fiction cannot have one originator, but must be, in some now unimaginable way, the product of a common consciousness.
At the end of his book, Strauss discusses various ways in which philosophers have tried to preserve the meaning and importance of the concept of Incarnation, whilst acknowledging the fictiveness of a particular historical divine intervention. He examines the ideas of Spinoza and Kant, who believed that the ideal Christ, the eternal ‘wisdom of god’ or ‘idea of moral perfection’ could be believed; Strauss himself (see pp. 453–4) comes to a complicated definition of the union of idea and reality (infinite and finite) not in one historical individual but in the species.
This is indeed not the mode in which Idea realizes itself; it is not wont to lavish all its fullness on one exemplar, and be niggardly towards all others – to express itself perfectly in that one individual and imperfectly in all the rest: it rather loves to distribute its riches among a multiplicity of exemplars which reciprocally complete each other – in the alternate appearance and suppression of a series of individuals. And is this no true realization of the idea? is not the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures a real one in a far higher sense, when I regard the whole of mankind as its realization, than when I single out one man as such a realization?
The connection of this description of ‘the alternate appearance and suppression of a series of individuals’ – with the word ‘suppression’ universalizing and naturalizing the tragedy of the Passion – is a good description of the moral, even religious sense we have of Eliot’s world. Lydgate and Dorothea, Maggie and Adam Bede, are invested, in their limited individuality, with the religious value that has been displaced from the incarnate Man to the succession of human beings. They are Types and individuals. Our sense of the way in which Eliot saw the relationship between their general humanity and their particular identity is made more subtle and precise by considering Feuerbach’s idea of the Incarnation.
‘With the principles of Feuerbach I everywhere agree,’ Marian Evans wrote to Sarah Hennell, though she went on to add, ‘but of course I should, of myself, alter his phraseology considerably.’30 Feuerbach’s book is still exciting to read, and her translation reads easily and urgently. The essential argument of The Essence of Christianity is that men invented religion – including the Persons of god, the sacraments and the Church – in order to be able to contemplate and worship their own nature. The book unravels the human needs that give rise to the particular beliefs it analyses, and passionately pleads for a recognition that mankind itself is the proper object of veneration and adoration. ‘Not abstract beings – no! only sensuous living beings are merciful. Mercy is the justice of sensuous life,’31 he argues, in her words, and with sentiments that are apparent throughout her works. It is also Feuerbach who proposes that we should celebrate real bread and real wine, not as symbols of flesh and blood, alienated from their true nature, but for themselves. ‘Water is the purest, clearest of liquids; in virtue of this its natural character it is the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In short, water has a significance in itself, as water.’ ‘But as religion alienates our own nature from us, and represents it as not ours, so the water of baptism is regarded as quite other than common water.’ U. C. Knoepflmacher has argued that Adam Bede’s meal is a Feuerbachian ‘natural’ sacrament in this sense.32
Both the passages from The Essence of Christianity included in this collection are concerned with the reinterpretation of the Incarnation. In the first, the chapter ‘The Mystery of the Cosmogonical Principle in God’, Feuerbach identifies the Son – ‘i.e., God thought by himself, the original reflection of God’ – with the principle of the imagination, the ‘middle term’ between the mind and the Other, the maker of images. God making the world is ‘the mystic paraphrase of a psychological process’, that is, human self-consciousness, the imagination of the self as an other.
The psychological truth and necessity which lies at the foundation of all these theogonies and cosmogonies, is the truth and necessity of the imagination as a middle term between the abstract and the concrete. And the task of philosophy, in investigating this subject, is to comprehend the relation of the imagination to the reason – the genesis of the image by means of which an object of thought becomes an object of sense, of feeling.
Thus if Christ is for Strauss the Idea present in the succession of particular individuals who make up the race, he is, at least as the Son of the Creator, for Feuerbach, related to the Romantic Imagination, the creative principle that ‘bodies forth the forms of things unknown’,33 that makes concrete and particular images in order to know and understand itself. ‘Consciousness of the world is consciousness of my limitation’ Feuerbach goes on to say, a sentiment that is echoed in much of his translator’s later commentary on human life. ‘The consciousness of my limitation stands in contradiction with the impulse of my egoism towards unlimitedness.’ She was the great analyst of egoism.
The other passage selected from Feuerbach echoes Strauss’s belief that the Species is the true object of our moral and religious attention – but he adds to this the idea that the essence of the species is contained in the relation between the sexes, in the recognition of the Other, and in the sensuous passion of the flesh. ‘Flesh and blood is nothing without the oxygen of sexual distinction. The distinction of sex is not superficial, or limited to certain parts of the body; it is an essential one: it penetrates bone and marrow.’ (Here, perhaps, among other interesting thoughts, is one possible reason for George Eliot’s conviction that the ‘woman question’ must not lose sight of the essential difference between the sexes.) ‘Man is different in intercourse from what he is when alone. Love especially works wonders, and the love of the sexes most of all. Men and women are the complement of each other, and thus united they first present the species, the perfect man.’ ‘In love, the reality of the species, which otherwise is only a thing of reason, an object of mere thought, becomes a matter of feeling, a truth of feeling.’ If the young George Eliot rejected Christ as ideal Man and believed in resignation to individual nothingness, she was at the same time involved in translating a work that substituted sexual love, the union of the sexes, as ‘the perfect man’. And again, in love, thought becomes transmuted into feeling.
It is with these ideas in mind that we should look at the correspondence with Frederic Harrison that took place in 1866–8 (see pp. 237–57). It contains one of Eliot’s best-known artistic statements of intent. What Harrison requires of her is to create a narrative that will embody ‘the idealization of certain normal relations’, which is ‘the task of all art’. (‘Normal’ here must be read as closer to ‘normative’ than to usual or humdrum.) Harrison wants her to describe a society, and a political, religious and moral state of affairs that will show the ‘Positivist relations’ of its people. Eliot replied that he laid before her ‘a tremendously difficult problem’ of which he saw the difficulties,
though they can hardly press upon you as they do on me, who have gone through again and again the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit. I think aesthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely aesthetic – if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram – it becomes the most offensive of all teaching.
The language here, in terms of the Positivist beliefs, is clearly related (as the language of Positivism itself was) to the revalued Christian concepts discussed above. Eliot saw her work as making incarnate certain ideas that she apprehended in the flesh, i.e., sensuously, materially, through feeling. I want to come back to the way in which in Middlemarch she dealt with Harrison’s proposals, but first I want to write briefly about a related set of ideas that arises in the correspondence and in ‘Notes on form in Art’, which was written about the same time.
The correspondence opens with Harrison praising Felix Holt for having ‘the subtle finish of a poem’ and being ‘a romance constructed in the artistic spirit and aim of a poem’. Eliot went on to write The Spanish Gypsy, which was published in 1868, before returning to fiction with Middlemarch. Harrison welcomes The Spanish Gypsy, as the statement he had been looking for. ‘I need not say I am sure what pleasure it gives me to recognize the profound truths and sacred principles which [that which] we call the Faith of the Future is preparing, for the first time truly idealized.’ But his distress at the characters of Zarca and Fedalma, in their idealism, reads comically in its honesty. They are idealizations of love of the Species, the Race, Humanity. Fedalma’s sacrifice of her personal love in her devotion to her race is a precursor of Daniel Deronda’s, and both have their roots in Eliot’s sense of Duty, which we have discussed, as ‘obedience’ to the ‘laws’ of social organisms. Harrison’s instincts are surely right. Zarca and Fedalma are strained, horrible and unreal. They, and the correspondence, tell us something about what happened to Eliot when she shifted too far from one pole of the debate between idealism and realism towards the other.
In 1862 and 1863 Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote a series of articles in Blackwood’s in which he opposed an aesthetic doctrine of idealism in art to the current realism. ‘The artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth [Bulwer’s italics].’34 As Hegel well observes, ‘That which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general.’ Characters in novels, as Richard Stang points out, ‘as embodiments of ideals created by the human imagination from the new facts of experience, are not individuals but types or symbols’.35 Stang suggests that Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘general truths’ seem ‘dangerously near a kind of never-never-land to which he periodically escaped to forget all about unpleasant reality’. Gordon Haight thinks that Bulwer-Lytton’s Leila; or the Siege of Granada (1838) is an unacknowledged source for The Spanish Gypsy.
Eliot’s ‘Notes on Form in Art’, dated 1868, the year of The Spanish Gypsy, can be seen, in one light, as a continuation of her thought about the ideal and the real, the particular and the universal, and incarnation; indeed, she begins with a discussion of ‘the philosophic use of the word “Form” in distinction from Matter’. Her idea of Form is intricately bound up with a series of images of organisms: she distinguishes between the ‘accidental’ form of a stone and the ‘outline defining the wholeness of a human body’ that is ‘due to a consensus or constant interchange of effects among its parts’. It is part of the process of incarnation. Her definition of poetry is Feuerbachian. ‘Poetry begins when passion weds thought by finding expression in an image; but poetic form begins with a choice of elements, however meagre, as the accordant expression of emotional states.’ Poetic form grows like ‘the beautiful expanding curves of a bivalve shell’, to go back to the imagery of Ilfracombe and Lewes’s Seaside Studies. And earlier she writes a precise, clear sentence about the range of poetry that varies widely in the way it combines ‘emotive force’ with ‘sequences that are not arbitrary and individual but true and universal’. Poetry combines the particular with the ideal, the ‘true and universal’ in its rhythms, its images, its sequences. Poetry, she says, has been defined to mean fiction, but fiction itself is only the expression of predominant feeling in ‘an arrangement of events in feigned correspondences’ – i.e., in constructed images, such as those by which Feuerbach’s imagination recognized its limitations and the existence of the other. Form in its ‘derivative meaning of outline’ is ‘the limit of that difference by which we discriminate one object from another’.
It could be argued that Eliot took to writing poetry because her interest shifted from the exactness and definiteness of her earlier realism to the system of correspondences, and general truths, and similarities and connections that make up the general reality. If her poem is a failure, her thoughts about poetic form surely affect the nature of the last two novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The poetic web of metaphors in Middlemarch is unlike the forms of language in her earlier work. In the penultimate paragraph of ‘Notes on Form in Art’ she says, ‘The old phrases should not give way to scientific explanation, for speech is to a great extent like sculpture, expressing observed phenomena, and remaining true in spite of Harvey and Bichat.’
The desire for the solid and perceptually particular language expressed here is reminiscent of her defence, in the essay on Riehl, of ‘the subtle ramification of historical language’. In the Riehl essay she opposed this to a new universal scientific ‘deodorized’ code of scientific language. William Harvey and Marie François Bichat, the discoverers of the circulation of the blood and the hypothetical ‘universal tissue’ that made up all particular organs, can be seen as representing, in the incarnate organism, the kind of informing principle of life that takes on particular individual forms. (Something also like Noam Chomsky’s ‘deep structure’ of language?) Bichat was one of Comte’s heroes, and also the ideal of Lydgate, the Comtean scientist in Middlemarch. Bichat’s universal tissue forms part of the recurring web of metaphors in Middlemarch that links and combines the diverse parts of the social organism in the novel. And that self-conscious web of metaphor itself is a conscious poetic strategy of universalization.
Which brings us back to what Eliot made of Harrison’s prescription for an idealizing work of art. It has been pointed out, in subtle detail, just how far the plot of Middlemarch corresponds with Harrison’s sketched plot.36 We have the decayed and failing aristocracy and Church (Mr Brooke, Casaubon); we have the new ‘positive’ forces of scientist and capitalist (Lydgate and Bulstrode) combining to improve things (the hospital); we have in Dorothea the female influence Comte thought indispensable (which, according to him, must have no other role than maternity, no inheritance and no power that might corrupt its purity). If we look at Harrison’s enthusiastic piety and the very dubious and bleak moral triumphs of Middlemarch, it seems clear that the novelist was actuated by something akin to the spirit of irony and contradiction that brought realism out of the genres described in ‘Silly Novels’ and truth out of the rejection of Cumming and Young. The moral and artistic triumphs of Middlemarch are ultimately more Feuerbachian than Comtean, and have to do with a moral sense of finite human limitations rather than with the March of Humanity. Dorothea has to learn the Feuerbachian lesson: the ‘genesis of the image by means of which an object of thought becomes an object of sense, of feeling’.37 Eliot’s intelligence combined thought and feeling in a new form of poetic but ironic realist fiction.
The voice of the narrator of Middlemarch is more measured than that of the brilliant essayist; it speaks with a universalizing ‘we’ for the organic community, whereas the essayist (vide ‘Madame de Sablé’ or ‘Heinrich Heine’) often poses as a witty male. But the continuity is strong, and the essays and translations tell us vital things about the tone of the art.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling – an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects – that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.38
NOTES
1. Athenœum, 28 November 1885.
2. See Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman (1940 edition), p. 22.
3. Letters, Vol. VIII, p. 23.
4. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman, pp. 41–2.
5. Life, p. 97.
7. Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology (1855), p. 162.
8. Herbert Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. I (1904), pp. 394–5.
9. Letters, Vol. V, p. 58.
10. Letters Vol. I, p. 284.
11. Letters, Vol. V, p. 106.
12. Thomas Pinney, Essays of George Eliot, p. 157.
15. Letters, Vol. II, p. 15.
16. Letters Vol. V, pp. 160–61.
17. Daniel Deronda, Chapter 51.
18. Journal, 12 September 1856 (Pinney, p. 301).
19. Letters, Vol. II, p. 258.
21. Letters, Vol. II, p. 210.
22. Letters, Vol. II, p. 205–7.
23. Letters, Vol. II, p. 362.
24. See J. S. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), pp. 9ff.
26. Life, p. 464, citing Century Magazine, vol. 23 (November 1881), pp. 62–3.
27. Modern Painters, Vol. IV, Part 5, Chapter 1, Section 5.
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889), Penguin edition, p. 69.
29. Letters, Vol. II, pp. 48–9.
30. Letters, Vol. II, p. 153.
31. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, translator Marian Evans, end of Chapter 3. The phrase translated as ‘the justice of sensuous life’ is ‘Das Rechtsgefuhl der Sinnlichkeit’.
32. U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (1965), pp. 55ff.
33. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1, lines 12–17.
34. Quoted in Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England 1850–70 (1959), p. 154.
35. ibid.
36. See James F. Scott, ‘George Eliot, Positivism and the Social Vision of Middlemarch’ in Victorian Studies, vol. 16 (September 1972), pp. 59–76, and Martha Vogeler, ‘George Eliot and the Positivists’ in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 36 (1980), pp. 406–31.
38. Middlemarch, Chapter 21, Penguin edition, p. 243.