Notes

ESSAYS

Woman in France: Madame de Sablé

(Westminster Review, October 1854, pp. 448–73)

Eliot was with Lewes in Weimar when, on 5 August 1854, she received a letter from Chapman, suggesting that either she or Lewes should review Victor Cousin’s Madame de Sablé for the Westminster. She replied, ‘On reading your letter we determined to get Cousin’s book and to unite it with several others as a subject for an article by me on “French Writers on Women”… I happen to have the material at hand to make such an article piquant and fresh, which are perhaps the qualities likely to be most welcome to you’ (Life, p. 158). The article was finished by the end of the month, but it seemed in need of revision. On 30 August she wrote to Chapman, ‘I had made up my mind to send you my article – that is, to dispatch it from this place – on Monday next, but I think I can make it more satisfactory by rendering the introductory part fuller… I have just read the part to which I refer to Mr Lewes, and he thinks the ideas are crowded and would impress the reader more if they were diluted a little’ (Letters, Vol. II, p. 172). The article was dispatched to London on 8 September.

Victor Cousin (1792–1867), French philosopher and writer. Here Eliot is reviewing his Madame de Sablé: Études sur les femmes illustres et la société du dix-septième siècle, as well as Portraits de femme by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69) and Les Femmes de la révolution by Jules Michelet (1798–1874). Madame de Sablé, whose full name was Magdeleine de Laval-Montmorency, Marquise de Sablé (c. 1599–1678), was hostess of a famous literary salon. Apart from Cousin’s book, the main source of information about her life is Nicolas Ivanoff’s La Marquise de Sablé et son salon (Paris, 1927).

1. the priest in Don Quixote. The Señor Licentiate Pero Pérez, who burnt Don Quixote’s books ‘that they may not lead some other who reads them to follow the example of my good friend’ (Don Quixote, Part 1, Chapter 5).

2. Richardson’s Lady G. Charlotte, Lady Grandison, in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4).

3. Madame de Sévigné. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626–96), best known for her Letters to her daughter (published 1725 and later) concerning the daily life of the French nobility.

4. Madame Dacier. Anne Dacier (c.1654–1720), Hellenist and Latinist. She was the translator of Aristophanes, Plautus and Terence, and also translated the Iliad and the Odyssey.

5. Madame de Staël. Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Madame de Staël (1766–1817), novelist and miscellaneous writer. Her novels Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807) deal with the isolation of the intellectual woman.

6. Madame Roland. Marie-Jeanne Philipon, Madame Roland (1754–93). Her salon was a meeting place for the Girondins.

7. George Sand. Pseudonym of Lucile-Aurore Dupin (1804–76), novelist. In 1846 Eliot read her novel Jacques and wrote to Sarah Hennell, ‘I should never dream of going to her writings as a moral code or text-book. I don’t care whether I agree with her about a marriage or not – whether I think the design of her plot correct or that she had no precise design at all but began to write as the spirit moved her and trusted to Providence for the catastrophe, which I think the more probable case – it is sufficient for me as a reason for bowing before her in eternal gratitude to that “great power of God” manifested in her – that I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human passion and its results – (and I must say in spite of your judgement) some of the moral instincts and their tendencies – with such truthfulness such nicety of discrimination such tragic power and withal such loving gentle humour that one might live a century with nothing but one’s own dull faculties and not know so much as those six pages suggest’ (Letters, Vol. I, pp. 277–8).

8. Jean Jacques. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), philosopher. In the same 1846 letter to Sarah Hennell she wrote, ‘Rousseau’s genius has sent that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has awakened me to new perceptions, which has made man and nature a fresh world of thought and feeling to me – and this not by teaching me any new belief. It is simply that this rushing mighty wind of his inspiration has so quickened my faculties that I have been able to shape more definitely for myself ideas which had previously dwelt as dim Ahnungen in my soul.’

9. Richelieu. Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal et Duc de Richelieu (1585–1642), Chief Minister to Louis XIII.

10. Marquise de Rambouillet. Catherine de Vivonne (1588–1665), Marquise de Rambouillet. Her salon at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, active from 1618 to 1650, was the meeting place of many influential thinkers and writers, and the model for those that followed.

11. Précieuses ridicules and Les Femmes savantes. Topical and satirical comedies by Molière. They were produced in 1659 and 1672 respectively, not 1660 and 1673 as Eliot claimed.

12. Madelon and Cathos. Daughters of Gorgibus in Molière’s Précieuses ridicules who are infatuated with the affected speech and manners of French society. Cathos is misprinted as ‘Caltros’ in the Westminster.

13. Mademoiselle Scudéry. Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701). Her Le Grand Cyrus (1649–53) and Clélie (1654–60) offer satirical portraits of her contemporaries.

14. bouts rimés. Set rhymes.

15. Mademoiselle d’Orleans. Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier (1627–93), known as ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’ because of her height.

16. Madame de la Fayette and La Rochefoucauld. Marie-Madeleine, Comtesse de La Fayette (1634–93), novelist, and François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1699–1777), moralist.

17. La Bruyère. Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96), author of Caractères de Théophraste traduits du grec, avec les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle (1688).

18. Wednesday dinner at Madame Geoffrin’s, with d’Alembert, Mademoiselle de l’Espinasse Grimm, and the rest. Marie-Thérèse Rodet, Madame Geoffrin (1699–1777), had a literary salon that met on Wednesdays. Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83), mathematician and philosophe. Julie-Jeanne-Éléonore de Lespinasse (1732–76). Her salon was a meeting place for the encyclopédistes. Frédéric-Melchior, Baron de Grimm (1723–1807), writer and literary critic.

19. Condorcet and his lovely young wife. Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), mathematician, philosopher, politician and revolutionary. His wife, Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822), was said to have been one of the most beautiful women of her time.

20. Madame d’Epinay. Louise-Florence, Madame d’Épinay (1726–83), protectress of Rousseau. In his Confessions he wrote, ‘She was very thin, very pale, her breast was as flat as my hand. This defect alone would have been sufficient to freeze me’ (Book 9, 1756).

21. Bossuet and Massillon. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), priest and theologian. Jean-Baptiste Massillon (1663–1742), Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand and preacher at the Court of Versailles.

22. a volume on the youth of the Duchesse de Longueville. His La Jeunesse de Madame de Longueville (1853).

23. Conrart. Valentin Conrart (1603–75), man of letters and a founder of the Académie Française.

24. ‘un heureux mélange de raison, d’esprit, d’agrément, et de bonté’. The line translates as ‘a happy mixture of reason, wit, charm and kindness’.

25. Mademoiselle de Bourbon. Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon (1619–79), afterwards Duchesse de Longueville.

26. Madame de Motteville. Françoise Bertaut, Madame de Motteville (1621–89), lady-in-waiting to Anne of Austria and author of Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Anne d’Autriche (1643–66).

27. Tallemant de Réaux. Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux (1619–92) wrote 376 Historiettes (1834), anecdotal and often scandalous memoirs of his contemporaries.

28. lèse-amitié. Injured friendship.

29. galimatias. Nonsense, or confused language.

30. Malheureuse… le savoir. ‘Ignorance is unfortunate:/More unfortunate is knowledge.’ Jean Bertaut (1552–1611), Court poet to Henri III and Henri IV.

31. Princesse de Paphlagonia. That is, the Princesse de Paphlagonie. For ‘Reine de Mionie’ read ‘Reine de Misne’.

32. Port-Royalists. A community of scholars and intellectuals established in 1633 at the abandoned convent of Port-Royal des Champs near Versailles. It was dispersed in 1660 by Louis XIV in a wave of anti-Jansenism (see also note 48).

33. ‘En vérité… me saigner?’ ‘In sooth, I believe I could do no better than to leave everything, and to go and live there. But what would become of those fears of not having physicians to choose from, nor any surgeon to bleed me?’

34. friandise. Delicacies.

35. bonnes bouches. The best bits.

36. ‘Je vous demande… j’en ai scrupule’. ‘I beg you in the name of God not to prepare any dainty dish of food especially for me. Above all, do not give me a feast. In the name of God, let there be nothing but what one can eat, for you know it is of no use to me; moreover, I have qualms of conscience about that.’

37. La non… très fine. ‘The peerless Bois-Dauphine./Among ladies the most real pearl.’ Paul Scarron (1610–60), burlesque writer and a rebel against the preciosity of his literary contemporaries.

38. frondeurs. Members of the Fronde, that is, the party opposed to Mazarin and the Court of France during the minority of Louis XIV. A general term for malcontents.

39. ‘vaquer enfin à son aise aux soins de son salut et à ceux de sa santé’. She could ‘at last attend to her heart’s content, to the duties of her salvation and the cares of her health’.

40. ‘Vous savez… les replis du cœur.’ The French here is somewhat garbled. The correct version is to be found in the Œuvres Complètes of La Rochefoucauld (Martin-Chauffier and Marchand, eds., Paris, 1964, p. 634). It translates as ‘You know that I believe that only you are to be trusted on certain chapters, and above all about the secret places of the heart.’

41. Je crois… inviolablement, madame, votre, etc. ‘I believe I am the only person capable of doing so well the exact opposite of what I mean to do, for it is true that there is not anybody I honour more than you. And I have acted in such a way as to make it impossible for you to believe it. To have failed for so long to write to you was not enough to persuade you of my being unworthy of your favour and remembrance: I still had to delay for another fortnight the allowing myself the honour of answering your letter. In sooth, madam, it makes me look such a culprit that were not my offence against you I would rather be actually guilty than attempt such a hard task as the vindication of my conduct. But I feel so innocent in my heart and I profess so much regard, respect and affection for you, that it seems to me that it must be obvious to you a hundred miles off, although I do not say a word about it to you. That is what gives me the courage to write to you at the present hour, but it is not that which has prevented me from doing it so long. I first had no alternative but to fail you under the pressure of many troubles, and since then it has been through shame, and I confess that if I now were without the confidence you gave me by your reassurance and that which I draw from my own feelings for you, I would never presume to try and have you remember me. But I trust in your forgetting my faults on my assuring you that I shall never allow myself to be hardened in them again, but I shall remain inviolably, madam, yours etc.’

42. Nicole and Domat. Pierre Nicole (1625–95), moralist and theologian. Jean Domat (1625–96), jurist.

43. Rohault. Jacques Rohault (1620–75), French physicist and leading advocate of French Cartesianism. His major work is the Traité de physique (1671). He was the first to observe capillary action in narrow glass tubes.

44. ‘L’envie de faire des maximes se gagne comme le rhume.’ ‘The desire to make maxims is caught like a cold in the head.’

45. ‘Voilà tout… un ragoût de mouton.’ ‘Here are all the maxims I have, but since I give nothing for nothing, I ask you for a soup of carrots and a mutton stew.’

46. ‘On ne pourroit faire… mon libérateur’. ‘No instructions more proper to a catechumen might be written to win over to God both his mind and his will. Even though there were only this piece of writing in existence in the world, and the Gospel, I would still want to be a Christian. The one would teach me how to obtain knowledge of my afflictions, and the other how to beseech my saviour for release.’

47. Je vous envoie… Mandez-moi ce qu’il vous semble de ce dictum. ‘I am sending you what I succeeded in wringing from my brains to put them in the Journal des savants. I have put in that part you feel so much about, with a view to overcoming the embarrassment which made you put in [Eliot has mettre; the original reads donner au public] the preface without striking anything out – nor did I scruple to do so, as I am confident that you will not have it printed even though everything else in it proved agreeable to you. I can assure you that I shall be more grateful if you treat it as something belonging to you, and correct it or throw it in the fire, than if you do to it an honour it does not deserve. We great authors are too rich to fear the loss of anything of our own making. Let me know how you like this dictum.’ Eliot abridged the French somewhat in this case. The original can be found in the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld (J. Truchet, ed., Paris, 1967, pp. 580–81).

48. Jansenism. A reforming (or heretical) movement within the Roman Catholic Church, in France associated with the struggle against Richelieu and Louis XIV. They took their name from Cornelius Otto Jansen (1585–1638).

49. I one day asked M. Nicole… count them. From Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits de femmes.

Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming

(Westminster Review, October 1855, pp. 436–62)

Dr John Cumming (1807–81) was the Minister of the evangelical Scottish National Church, London, from 1832 to 1879, and a prolific author on the subject of biblical prophecy.

Eliot had begun preparing this article in June of 1855. Cumming’s work, as Haight remarked, ‘offered Marian ample ammunition for an annihilating account of the beliefs she had held so earnestly in girlhood’ (Life, p. 186). According to Cross’s biography, it was this article that convinced Lewes of ‘true genius in her writing’ (Cross, p. 384). Shortly after its publication, she wrote to Charles Bray, who had guessed that she was the author: ‘Since you have found out the “Cumming”, I write by today’s post just to say, that it is mine, but also to beg that you will not mention it as such to anyone likely to transmit the information to London, as we are keeping the authorship a secret. The article appears to have produced a strong impression, and that impression would be a little counteracted if the author were known to be a woman. I have had a letter addressed to “the author of article No. 4”, begging me to print it separately for “the good of mankind in general” ’ (Letters, Vol. II, p. 218).

The books by Cumming reviewed here are: The Church before the Flood; Occasional Discourses; Signs of the Times; or, Present, Past, and Future; The Finger of God; Is Christianity from God? or, a Manual of Christian Evidence, for Scripture-readers, City Missionaries, Sunday-school Teachers, etc.; Apocalyptic Sketches; or, Lectures on the Book of Revelation, first and second series; and Prophetic Studies; or, Lectures on the Book of Daniel.

1. Goshen. Ironic reference to the region of Egypt occupied by the Israelites before the Exodus. A place of plenty.

2. predestination… latitudinarian… pre-millennial Advent. Belief in predestination is a cornerstone of Calvinism. It is the action of God by which certain persons are assured of salvation. For its biblical source see Romans 8:28–30. Latitudinarian is a term of seventeenth-century origin that was used to describe a group of Anglicans who attached little importance to dogma. Its more general meaning refers to toleration in religious matters. The pre-millennial Advent is the Second Coming of Christ.

3. Moore’s Almanack. An annual publication, begun in 1700 by Francis Moore, containing predictions of events.

4. ‘horn that had eyes’, ‘the lying prophet’, and the ‘unclean spirits’. Respectively Daniel 7:8, Revelation 16:13 and Revelation 9:10.

5. Amphitryon. A host, or entertainer to dinner, from Plautus’s comedy of the same name.

6. Puseyites. After Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882), High Anglican and leading member of the Oxford Movement.

7. Dr Chalmers and Mr Wilberforce. Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), Scottish Presbyterian preacher and theologian. From 1843 he was the first Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, having been influenced towards evangelicalism by reading A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System (1797) by William Wilberforce (1759–1833), evangelical and abolitionist.

8. Robert Hall, Foster the Essayist, or Isaac Taylor. Robert Hall (1764–1831) and John Foster (1770–1843), Baptist preachers. Isaac Taylor (1787–1846), evangelical Anglican.

9. ‘clouts o’ could parritch’. Andrew Fairservice’s description of degenerate preaching in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy.

10. little horn, the river Euphrates, or the seven vials. The ‘little horn’ is referred to in Daniel 7:8. The Euphrates was one of the rivers of Eden. The ‘seven vials’ are mentioned in Revelation 21:9.

11. Christianitatem, quocunque modo, Christianitatem. ‘Christianity, by any means, Christianity.’

12. Amiable impulses… rank of laws. Omitted in the 1884 edition.

13. that professor of Padua. Francesco Sizi (or Sizzi) attacked Galileo with this argument in his Dianoia Astronomia (1610).

14. Though gay… I quit the scene. From ‘On this day I Complete My Thirty-sixth Year’ (1824).

15. Leland. More probably Charles Leslie (1650–1722), author of A Short and Easie Method with the Deists (1698). Eliot may have been thinking of a work by John Leland (1691–1766), A View of the Principal Deistical Writers That Have Appeared in England during the Past and Present Centuries (1754–6).

16. the bachelors of Salamanca. Don Quixote, Part 2, Chapter 33.

17. sunt quibus non credidisse honor est, et fidei futurœ pignus. ‘There are some for whom it is an honour not to have believed, and their unbelief is a guarantee of future faith.’

18. ‘perplext in faith… deeds’. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, 96.

19. David Hume (1711–76), Scottish philosopher. His views on religion are expressed in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) and in his essay ‘Of Miracles’ in Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).

20. Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer. ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ Voltaire (François Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) in his À L’Auteur du livre des trois imposteurs.

21. the vulgar fables about Voltaire’s death. That he died in a state of terror and despair.

22. in majorem gloriam Dei. ‘For the greater glory of God.’

23. the author of the Vestiges. Robert Chambers (1802–71), author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). The book contains an early statement of the theory of evolution.

24. of the whole Bible… criterion of its meaning. Omitted in the 1884 edition.

25. Boanerges. A name given to James and John, the sons of Zebedee, because they threatened to call down ‘fire from Heaven’ to consume the Samaritans for not receiving Jesus Christ. It translates as ‘sons of thunder’ or better as ‘sons of tumult’ (Luke 9:54 and Mark 3:17).

26. Cardinal Wiseman. Nicholas Patrick Stephen Wiseman (1802–65), a leading figure in the Catholic revival in England, became a cardinal in 1850.

27. ‘Whether we live… unto the Lord.’ Romans 14:8.

28. A closer walk… heavenly frame. From William Cowper (1731–1800), ‘Walking with God’, in the collection known as the Olney Hymns (1779).

29. the prophecy concerning the Man of Sin. Second Epistle to the Thessalonians 2:4.

30. ‘cathedrize here… pray yonder’. Matthew 26:37. The Revised Version reads ‘Sit ye here while I go yonder and pray.’

31. Grace Darling. Grace Darling (1815–42), joint keeper, with her father, of the Longstone Lighthouse. She achieved considerable fame when, in 1838, she rowed a mile in a small boat in stormy conditions to rescue the occupants of a wrecked ship.

32. Let knowledge grow… But vaster. From Tennyson’s Prologue to In Memoriam.

German Wit: Heinrich Heine
Westminster Review, January 1856, pp. 1–33)

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), German poet and writer. Eliot had probably become interested in him during her trip to Germany with Lewes in 1854. While in Berlin they had read aloud the Geständnisse. ‘The wit burns low after the first fifty pages,’ she wrote, ‘and the want of principle and purpose make it wearisome’ (Life, p. 193). Pinney noted that S. L. Wormley, in his Heine in England (1943), claimed that this essay ‘probably did more than any other single work in introducing to English-speaking peoples the genius that was Heine’s.’

Here Eliot is reviewing Vermischte Schriften von Heinrich Heine (1854) and Heinrich Heine’s Sammtliche Werke (1855). She had previously reviewed his Reisebilder in the Leader of 1 September 1855, and subsequently reviewed his Buch der Lieder in the Saturday Review of 26 April 1856, and Recollections of Heine in the Leader of 23 August 1856.

1. ‘Nothing,’ says Goethe, ‘is more significant… laughable.’ In Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1808–9).

2. The history and literature… wit in others. Omitted in the 1884 edition.

3. a Chamfort or a Sheridan. Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort (1741–94), French man of letters.

4. In fact they… subsequent races. ‘It was their lot to live seriously through stages which to later generations…’ 1884 edition.

5. amiable looking pre-Adamite amphibia… their kindred. Richard Owen (1840–92), naturalist, had supervised in 1854 the construction (from brick, iron and stucco) of twenty-nine prehistoric creatures at Crystal Palace Park in London. They are still there.

6. lex talionis, as in Reineke Fuchs. Lex talionis is the law of retaliation: ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Reineke Fuchs (1794) is Goethe’s redaction of Reynard the Fox.

7. the old Mysteries. The biblical dramas of the English medieval period.

8. good and beautiful on this earth. In the 1884 edition, ‘better and more beautiful’.

9. Charles Lamb’s. Charles Lamb (1775–1834), English man of letters.

10. Micromégas. Voltaire’s imitation of Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1792. Its eponymous hero is the gigantic inhabitant of a planet revolving around Sirius.

11. Chanticleer. Chanticleer is a traditional name for a cockerel. The reference here is probably to the cockerel in Reynard the Fox.

12. Jean Paul. Pseudonym of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), German satirist.

13. Identität. Identity.

14. Empirismus. Empiricism.

15. Vetter Michel. Eliot probably meant Deutscher Michel, a proverbially easy-going, good-natured and simple-minded stock figure. The archetypal German peasant.

16. Barclay’s treble X. A particularly strong beer brewed by the London firm of Barclay, Perkins & Co.

17. Proteus’s joke… Shakspearian wit. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act I, Scene 1. The section from ‘and one of these…’ to ‘his facial muscles’ was omitted in the 1884 edition.

18. Lessing. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), German dramatist credited with introducing modern dramatic techniques to the German theatre.

19. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. A collection of Lessing’s commentaries on theatrical problems and dramatic techniques, published 1767–8.

20. Phidian statue. Phidias (c. 500-c. 430 BC), Greek sculptor who worked in various metals, including gold.

21. Talents. See Matthew 25:14–30.

22. 1799. Heine was born in 1797. This error was not corrected in the 1884 edition.

23. Wie mächtig auch mein stolzer… Liebe. The first extract is from the sonnet ‘An Meine Mutter B. Heine, Geborne van Geldern’ and translates as ‘However strongly my mind puffs itself up,/in your blessedly sweet, familiar presence/A humble timidity often seizes me.’ The second extract translates as ‘And ever I wandered after Love, ever/After Love, but Love found I never,/And came back home, sick and sad./But then you came towards me/And ah! what was swimming in your eye/That was the sweet, the long-sought Love.’

24. Elise von Hohenhausen… Chamisso, Varnhagen, and Rahel (Varnhagen’s wife). Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838), German poet and botanist. Karl August Varhagen von Ense (1785–1858), German writer, diplomat and a leading figure in the Berlin salon that became a centre of intellectual debate. Eliot and Lewes had met them during their visit to Germany in 1854. Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833) was a Jewess who led a most remarkable life. Hannah Arendt wrote a biography of her, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1957).

25. ‘Paris vaut bien une messe’… ‘Berlin vaut bien une prêche.’ ‘Paris is certainly worth a mass’… ‘Berlin is certainly worth a sermon.’

26. Hegel. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), German philosopher.

27. Meyerbeer. Giacomo Meyerbeer (orig. Jakob Liebmann Beer; 1791–1864), German operatic composer.

28. Johnson’s advice to Hannah More. In Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (S. C. Roberts, ed., 1932).

29. Börne. Ludwig Börne (orig. Löb Baruch; 1786–1837), German writer who believed that the function of literature was to further political causes. Heine’s biography was published in 1840 and caused such offence that he was slightly injured in a resulting duel.

30. Spontini, or Kalkbrenner. Gaspare Spontini ( 1774–1851), Italian operatic composer. Frédéric Kalkbrenner (1785–1849), French musician of German extraction.

31. Short swallow… skim away. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, 48.

32. She dwelt alone… to me. Eliot is misquoting again. William Wordsworth wrote ‘She lived unknown’.

33. Kennst du die Hölle des Dante nicht… Zu solcher Hölle verdammen. This translates as ‘Knowest thou not Dante’s Hell/ The terrible terza rima?/ He whom the Poet cast therein/No God can redeem again./No God, no Saviour, frees him ever/ From out these singing flames!/Take care for yourself, that we do not/Condemn you to such a hell.

34. One more quotation… only one eye. Omitted in 1884 edition.

The Natural History of German Life

(Westminster Review, July 1856, pp. 51–79)

This essay was written during Eliot’s stay at Ilfracombe in May and June of 1856, and is, in part, a review of Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (1851) and Land und Leute (1853) by Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl (1823–97), German journalist, folklorist and cultural historian. The essay is a crucial statement of her views on society, and of her doctrine of ‘sympathy’, and thus foreshadows her subsequent fictional concerns. For a useful discussion of its relation to her novels, see Simon Dentith’s George Eliot (1986), Chapter 2.

1. a ‘Bradshaw’. George Bradshaw began issuing his Monthly Railway Guide in 1841.

2. Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo. David Teniers the Younger (1610–90), Flemish painter, chiefly of genre scenes of peasant life. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–82), Spanish painter, chiefly of religious subjects.

3. Even one of the greatest painters… ornaments. William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) exhibited this painting at the Royal Academy in 1852. It is now in the Manchester City Art Gallery.

4. L.E.L. Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–38), poet and novelist. She was a favourite of Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch (see Chapter 27). The painting ‘Cross Purposes’ remains unidentified.

5. Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr Ruskin’s indignation. In Modern Painters Vol. IV, published in April 1856, John Ruskin wrote, ‘If all the gold that has gone to paint the simulacra of the cottages, and to put new songs in the mouths of the simulacra of the peasants, had gone to brighten the existent cottages, and to put new songs in the mouths of the existent peasants, it might in the end, have turned out better so, not only for the peasant, but even for the audience’ (Part 5, Chapter 19).

6. Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage. Luckie Mucklebackit is a character in The Antiquary (1816).

7. Alton Locke gazing yearningly… ever saw. In Alton Locke (1850), Chapter 11.

8. Hornung. Joseph Hornung (1792–1870), Swiss painter.

9. Mrs Plornish’s colloquial style. In Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, then being published in monthly parts (December 1855–June 1857).

10. ‘Boots’. A generic name for the servant in hotels responsible for cleaning boots and shoes. Probably a reference to Cobbs, the boots in Dickens’s ‘The Hollytree Inn’ (1855).

11. Eugène Sue’s idealized proletaires. Marie Joseph (Eugène) Sue (1804–57), French novelist and journalist, whose reputation was built on his tales of Parisian low life, particularly Les Mystères de Paris (1842–3).

12. altruism. A term coined by Auguste Comte. It was introduced into English usage by Lewes in his Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences (1853).

13. the relations of men to their neighbours… artificial system of culture. References to Jeremy Bentham’s ‘felicific calculus’ and to the Young England movement outlined in Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844).

14. Lusatia. A region of Germany around Dresden.

15. Dandie Dinmont’s importunate application to Lawyer Pleydell… worse hands. In Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815). Eliot’s reference to ‘the peasant’s inveterate habit of litigation’ recalls Mr Tulliver’s behaviour in The Mill on the Floss.

16. Mr Saddletree. In Scott’s Heart of Midlothian (1818).

17. Triptolemus Yellowley’s application of the agricultural directions in Virgil’s Georgics to his farm in the Shetland Isles. In Scott’s The Pirate (1822).

18. Ihr mögt mir immer ungescheut… Ich von Philister-netzen. Translates as ‘You may, without shame, still put up a monument to me,/Similar to Blücher’s!/He freed you from the French,/I from the nets of the Philistines.’

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

(Westminster Review, October 1856, pp. 442–61)

In July 1856 Eliot wrote to John Chapman, ‘I wonder what the story called “Compensation” is. I have long wanted to fire away at the doctrine of Compensation, which I detest, considered as a theory of life’ (Letters, Vol. II, p. 258). Two weeks later she wrote to him again: ‘I think an article on “Silly Women’s Novels” might be made the vehicle of some wholesome truth as well of some amusement. I mentioned this to Mr Lewes last night and he thought the idea a good one’ (Letters, Vol. II, p. 258).

The writing of the article was made more difficult by persistent and severe toothache. She wrote to Charles Bray that she had written to Chapman, ‘begging him to let me off and get a substitute, but he cruelly wrote back that he must have the article. So here I am on this blessed first of September with this odious article to write in a hurry and with Mr Lewes coming home to reduce my writing time to the minimum’ (Letters, Vol. II, p. 261). It was finished by 12 September. Eleven days later she noted in her journal, ‘Began to write “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton”, which I hope to make one of a series called Scenes of Clerical Life’ (Life, p. 210).

1. Compensation. Compensation: A Story of Real Life Thirty Years Ago (1856) by Henrietta Georgiana Marcia Lascelles, Lady Chatterton (1806–76).

2. Ossianic. Bombastic or magniloquent, after Ossian (or Oisin), legendary Gaelic bard.

3. ‘Agape’. Brotherly love.

4. Creuzer. Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858), German philologist and archaeologist.

5. Laura Gay. Anonymous (1856).

6. Miss Wyndhams and Mr Redfords abound. Characters in Laura Gay.

7. Almack’s, Scotch second-sight, Mr Rogers’s breakfasts. Almack’s was a suite of fashionable assembly rooms in Saint James’s, London. Scotch second-sight is a reference to the alleged prophetic abilities of the Scots. Mr Rogers’s breakfasts were breakfasts hosted by Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) and attended by leading social and literary figures.

8. Rank and Beauty. Rank and Beauty; or, the Young Baroness, anonymous (1856).

9. Puseyites. After Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882), High Anglican and leading member of the Oxford Movement.

10. The Enigma. The Enigma: A Leaf from the Archives of Wolchorley House, anonymous (1856).

11. Dr Cumming to Robert Owen… Spirit-rappers. For Dr Cumming and Robert Owen, see Eliot’s essay on Cumming and her review, ‘Lord Brougham’s Literature’, note 5. Spiritualism had enjoyed a great deal of attention in England following the visit in 1855 of the American Spiritualist Daniel Dunglas Home. In 1869 Eliot wrote to Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘so far as “spiritualism” (by which I mean, of course, spirit communications by rapping, guidance of the pencil, etc.) has come within reach of my judgement on our side of the water, it has appeared to me either as degrading folly, imbecile in the estimate of evidence, or else as impudent imposture’ (Letters, Vol. V, pp. 48–9).

12. Pleaceman X. We have been unable to identify this allusion.

13. May Meetings. The Church of England Missionary Society’s annual meetings at Exeter Hall, London.

14. Church of the United Brethren. The Moravian Brethren, a Protestant sect characterized by their strict discipline.

15. Orlando. Rosalind’s lover in As You Like It.

16. The Old Grey Church. By Caroline Lucy Scott, Lady Scott (1856).

17. Mrs Stowe’s pictures of religious life among the negroes? Eliot reviewed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred in the same issue of the Westminster. It is reprinted here on pp. 379ff.

18. Jannes and Jambres… Sennacherib… Demetrius the silversmith. For Jannes and Jambres, see 2 Timothy 3:8. Sennacherib was King of Assyria, 705–681 BC. For Demetrius the silversmith, see Acts 19:24ff.

19. Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst. From Goethe’s Faust, Part 1, ‘Nacht’, 577–9. The lines translate as ‘What you call the spirit of the age/Is but the Critic’s spirit, in whose page/The age itself is darkly glassed.’

20. Adonijah: A Tale of the Jewish Dispersion. By Jane Margaret Strickland (1856).

21. Miss Sinclair. Catherine Sinclair (1800–1864), Scottish popular novelist.

22. Dr Daubeny, Mr Mill, or Mr Maurice. Charles Giles Daubeny (1795–1867), chemist. John Stuart Mill (1800–1873), philosopher and economic theorist. Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–72), Professor of Theology at King’s College, London.

23. Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs Gaskell. Harriet Martineau (1802–76), novelist and miscellaneous writer. Currer Bell, pseudonym of Charlotte Brontë (1816–55), novelist. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810–65), novelist.

24. La Fontaine’s ass. This reference remains unidentified.

Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young

(Westminster Review, January 1857, pp. 1–42)

Edward Young (1683–1765), cleric, poet and dramatist, became Rector of Welwyn in 1730. Eliot had been a great admirer of his poetry when young. According to Haight (Life, pp. 216–17), she had greatly admired his Night Thoughts and committed long passages of it to memory. In August 1838 she wrote to Maria Lewis, ‘I know you do not love quotations so I will not give you one but if you do not distinctly remember it, do turn to the passage in Young’s “Infidel Reclaimed” beginning O vain vain vain all else, Eternity! and do love the lines for my sake’ (Letters, Vol. I, p. 7). Under review here are Young’s Works (1767); Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (ed. Peter Cunningham, 1854); Life of Edward Young, LL D by John Doran, prefixed to Night Thoughts; the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1782; Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes, Vol. I; and Spence’s Anecdotes.

Eliot made extensive revisions to this essay before it was reprinted in 1884.

1. a creation of peers. A reference to Young’s relentless seeking after preferment.

2. the profligate Duke of Wharton. Philip, Duke of Wharton (1698–1731), President of the Hell Fire Club, gambler, and, according to the DNB, indirectly responsible for the death of Earl Stanhope (from a burst blood vessel) after a particularly lively parliamentary exchange.

3. And no man… spiritualities. Omitted in 1884 edition.

4. ‘an ornament of religion and virtue’. From Herbert Croft’s biography in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, Vol. III (Peter Cunningham, ed., 1854, p. 310).

5. ‘Oui, mais faîtes comme si je ne le savais pas.’ From Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), Act II, Scene 4. The line translates as ‘Yes, but proceed as though I didn’t know it.’ This whole paragraph was omitted in the 1884 edition.

6. 1681. 1683.

7. ‘kissed, with dignified emotion… namesake’. In the Life of Edward Young, Vol. I (1854), p. xiii, by John Doran (1807–78), miscellaneous writer. Eliot’s italics. The words ‘We may confidently assume… gown and band’ were omitted in the 1884 edition.

8. chyme and chyle. Chyme and chyle are food at different stages of digestion.

9. Tindal, the atheist. Matthew Tindal (1653–1733), described as a theist in the DNB.

10. ‘a foolish youth… poets’. Quoted in Johnson’s Lives, ‘Croft’.

11. ‘he gives her Majesty praise… to earth’. In Johnson’s Lives, ‘Croft’.

12. Here, as throughout this article, Eliot’s quotation from Young is peppered with inaccuracies. The lines should read, ‘While other Bourbons rule in other lands,/And if man’s sin forbids not, other Annes.’

13. BCL. Bachelor of Civil Law.

14. a dedication attributing to the Duke all virtues. The Duke reciprocated with a gift of £2,000.

15. each gift of Nature and of Art… an honest heart. In the ‘Epistle to Cobham’, lines 192–3.

16. Christopher Pitt. Christopher Pitt (1699–1748), poet and translator.

17. ‘far superior to the French poet… repartees’. Doran, Life, p. xxxiii.

18. 1725 and 1726. In fact, they span the period 1725–8 so that, as Pinney noted, the coincidence mentioned in the next paragraph ‘is of Eliot’s manufacture’.

19. that royal hog’s. ‘that monarch’s’ in the 1884 edition.

20. MADAM, – I know… more than any. From Johnson’s Lives, ‘Croft’.

21. 1741 and 1745. 1742–6.

22. ‘I have great joy… declared his surprise.’ In Doran, Life, pp. lxiii–lxv.

23. Colley Cibber. Colley Cibber (1671–1757), actor and dramatist.

24. ‘I had some talk with him… I should have done it.’ In Johnson’s Lives, ‘Croft’. Eliot’s comment in the last sentence of the paragraph was omitted in 1884.

25. ‘Mrs Hallows… improved by reading’. Gentleman’s Magazine (1782).

26. ‘She was a very coarse woman,’ says Dr Johnson. Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785).

27. The letters that follow are from John Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century.

28. Dr Birch. Thomas Birch (1705–76), historian and biographer.

29. Clearly… forwarded poultry too. Omitted in the 1884 edition.

30. seven years later, namely, in 1782. Eliot means ‘seventeen’.

31. ‘the interests of religion… Dr Young’. In Johnson’s Lives, ‘Croft’.

32. Good Dr Young,… THO CANT. In Johnson’s Lives, ‘Croft’.

33. The impertinence… and reserve. In Doran, Life, p. lxxii.

34. That there was an air of benevolence… his expectations. In James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791).

35. Pope said of Young… common sense. In Johnson’s Lives, ‘Croft’.

36. embonpoint. In good condition or, in its secondary sense, plump and well-nourished.

37. that ‘Gothic demon’… thunder in rhyme. From Young’s ‘Conjectures on Original Composition’ in The Complete Works, Vol. II (1854), p. 566.

38. Pope’s characters of Sporus and Atticus. In Pope’s ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, Sporus is a satirical representation of Lord John Hervey, and Atticus is a satirical representation of Joseph Addison.

39. ‘have but few books… live in the country’. In ‘The Man of Ton: A Satire’ by John Wilson under the pseudonym of ‘Christopher North’ (1785–1854).

40. ‘the hand of God hath touched’. Job 19:21.

41. Again… towards the stars. Omitted in the 1884 edition.

42. Wherever abstractions appear… deficient feeling. Omitted in the 1884 edition.

43. And I should say… enthusiasm for music. Omitted in the 1884 edition.

44. Thus far… ‘virtue with immortality expires’. This was rewritten to read, ‘Thus far the man who “denies himself immortal” might give a warrantable reply to Young’s assumption of peculiar loftiness in maintaining that “virtue with immortality expires.” ’

45. the extension and intensification… plurality of worlds. Amended in 1884 to read, ‘the widening and strengthening of our sympathetic nature, – it is surely of some moment to contend, that they have no more direct dependence on the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs on the plurality of worlds’.

46. Do writers of sermons… honesty and good-will? Omitted in the 1884 edition.

47. We can imagine… evolution is ensured. This was changed in the 1884 edition to read, ‘We can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply may have a dread of common springs; but for those who only share the general need there cannot be too great a security against a lack of fresh water – or of pure morality. It should be a matter of unmixed rejoicing if this latter necessary of healthful life has its evolution ensured.’

48. Dr Whewell. William Whewell (1794–1866), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and prolific author. The remark is made in his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (1852).

49. excludes. ‘supersedes’ in the 1884 edition.

50. has affinity with Art. Omitted in the 1884 edition.

51. pre-eminently didactic. ‘predominantly didactic’ in the 1884 edition.

52. Dr Watts, or James Montgomery. Isaac Watts (1674–1748), hymn writer. James Montgomery (1771–1854), minor Scottish poet.

53. Waller. Edmund Waller (1606–87), reported in Joseph Spence’s Anecdotes. The whole section from ‘A certain poet… in himself’ was omitted in 1884.

54. ‘pathetic fallacy’. In John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Vol. III, reviewed in the Westminster, April 1856.

55. Cowper. William Cowper (1731–1800), poet, in The Task (1785).

The Ilfracombe Journal
(8 May–26 June 1856)

1. It stands the maestrie… western land. From ‘On the Same’ (i.e., the church of Saint Mary Redcliffe) by Thomas Chatterton (1752–70), poet, who wrote Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal (1768), but claimed to have discovered it in the church of Saint Mary Redcliffe. The lines quoted begin, ‘Thou seest this maestrie’.

2. Gosse recommends in his Devonshire Coast. Philip Henry Gosse (1810–88), naturalist. His A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast was published in 1853.

3. Two and a half lines were deleted here.

4. an article on Riehl’s books. ‘The Natural History of German Life’, which was published in the Westminster in July 1856.

5. the Curate Mr Tugwell. George Tugwell (1830–1910), curate of Ilfracombe from 1853 to 1869. Lewes reviewed his Manual of the Sea Anemones of the English Coast (1856) in the Leader of 25 October 1856.

6. Lloyd. W. Alford Lloyd was a naturalists’ supplier.

7. Landsborough’s book. David Landsborough the Elder (1779–1854), author of A Popular History of British Seaweeds (1849).

8. Corporal Nym’s philosophy. In Henry V, Act II, Scene 1, line 19.

9. Gosse’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast (see note 2 above).

10. Trench’s Calderon. Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–86), Irish poet, theologian and philologist. His translation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Life’s a Dream: The Great Theatre of the World was published in 1856.

11. the ratification of the Peace. The Peace with Russia was declared at the end of April 1856.

12. Rosinantes. After Don Quixote’s horse.

13. ‘the race is not to the swift’. Ecclesiastes 9:11.

14. a ‘Hunt’ picture. William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), Pre-Raphaelite painter.

Notes on Form in Art

1. Harvey and Bichat. William Harvey (1578–1657), English physician, the first to demonstrate the function of the heart and the circulation of the blood. Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), French anatomist. Auguste Comte saw Bichat as the pioneer of positive biology, with his theory that ‘referred the properties of organs to the general laws of component tissues’ (J. S. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism [n.d.], p. 51). Bichat was Lydgate’s ideal in Middlemarch.

2. άναγνώρισις (anagnorisis) and περιπέτεια (peripeteia). Eliot misspelt this in the MS, peripateia. ‘Recognition’ and ‘irony of events’ or ‘dramatic irony’, terms from Aristotle’s Poetics, Chapter 11, lines 2 and 4. ‘The best form of Recognition is coincident with a Reversal of Intention, as in the Oedipus… This recognition [of persons] combined with Reversal [peripeteia] will produce either pity or fear; and actions producing these effects are those which, by our definition, Tragedy represents’ (Butcher’s translation).

THE GEORGE ELIOT-FREDERIC HARRISON CORRESPONDENCE

1. Lord Cranbourne. Sir Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne Cecil (1830–1903) became Viscount Cranborne in 1865.

2. Bekker’s Charicles. Charikles, oder Bilder altgriechischer Sitte (1840) by Wilhelm Adolf Becker (1796–1846).

3. At present I am going to take up again a work which I laid down before writing Felix. Eliot was referring to The Spanish Gypsy.

4. International Essays. Harrison had edited and contributed to International Policy (1866).

5. fifty pages of a bluebook, and finally left the printer only yesterday. Harrison was a member of the Royal Commission on Trades Unions. The ‘blue book’ referred to was an appendix to a minority report on legislation.

6. ήθος. Ethos.

7. ‘The Positivist Problem’. Harrison’s article in the Fortnightly Review (1 November 1869, pp. 469–93) was both explanatory and defensive in tone. At the end of the article (p. 491) Harrison twice alluded to his schism with Congreve concerning Positivism’s religious pretensions. He then went on to urge its claims as a social and political panacea.

REVIEWS

Brothers in Opinion; Edgar Quinet and Jules Michelet

(Coventry Herald and Observer, 30 October 1846, p. 2)

This is the earliest review definitely attributed to Eliot, although Haight (Life, p. 61) referred to ‘a number of anonymous articles for the Herald’. The Coventry Herald had been purchased by her friend Charles Bray in June of 1846 to counter the conservative influence of its rival, the Coventry Standard. Her translation of Das Leben Jesu had been published on 15 June in the same year.

Edgar Quinet (1803–75), French historian and political philosopher and apostate from Protestantism. He was appointed Professor of Literature at the Collège de France in Paris in 1842 but was hounded from his Chair after four years because of his antagonism to Catholic authoritarianism in general, and to the Jesuits in particular, and for his vocal support of republicanism. Christianity in Its Various Aspects, from the Birth of Christ to the French Revolution is the translation of his 1846 work under review.

Jules Michelet (1798–1874), historian, was, like Quinet, a republican who incurred the disapproval of the Catholic Church. Priests, Women and Families, the translation of his 1816 work reviewed here, was placed on the Index of prohibited books shortly after its publication.

1. Loyola. Saint Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.

2. ut cadaver… senis baculus. ‘As a dead body’ and ‘old man’s staff’.

3. From Michelet’s Priests, Women and Families, pp. 190–91.

J. A. Froude’s The Nemesis of Faith

(Coventry Herald and Observer, 16 March 1849, p. 2)

James Anthony Froude (1818–94), historian and man of letters, and younger brother of the Tractarian R. H. Froude, was a student of Oriel College, Oxford, during the late 1830s, where he fell briefly under John Henry Newman’s influence, contributing a biography to his series ‘Lives of the English Saints’. But Froude subsequently underwent a religious change of heart, and the furore surrounding the publication of the partly autobiographical The Nemesis of Faith in 1849 (the book was publicly burned in Oxford) prompted his resignation from his Fellowship of Exeter College.

Eliot was so enthusiastic about the book, a copy of which had been sent to her by John Chapman, that she sent Froude a note of thanks, signing herself ‘The Translator of Strauss’. Froude replied via Chapman, and subsequently Caroline Bray wrote to Sarah Hennell in March of 1849, reporting Eliot’s excitement at his reply, and adding that, ‘He says he recognized her hand in the review in the Coventry Herald, and if she thinks him a fallen star, she might help him to rise, “but he believes he has only been dipped in the Styx, and is not so much the worse for the bathing”. Poor girl! I am so pleased she should have this little episode in her dull life, but I suppose she won’t continue the correspondence’ (Letters, Vol. I, p. 279n). For subsequent events, see Haight’s Life (pp. 68–9).

1. bright particular star. All’s Well that Ends Well, Act I, Scene 1, line 97.

2. ‘son of the morning’. Isaiah 14:12, ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O day star, son of the morning.’

3. From The Nemesis of Faith (with slight inaccuracies), pp. 6–34 passim.

4. ibid., p. 43.

R. W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect

(Westminster Review, January 1851, pp. 353–68)

Robert William Mackay (1803–82) trained as a lawyer before turning his attention to the study of philosophy and theology. The Progress of the Intellect, as Exemplified in the Religious Development of Greeks and Hebrews was his first book. Frances Power Cobbe claimed (Life of Frances Power Cobbe, 1894) that Mackay was the model for the character of Casaubon in Middlemarch. He is not the only possible model, but there is certainly a touch of the Casaubon in Mackay’s work.

The Progress of the Intellect was published by John Chapman in 1850 and presented to Eliot for review in October of that year. This was to be her first contribution to the Westminster, the journal of which she became editor in the following year.

1. Auguste Comte. Auguste Comte (1798–1857), French social theorist and founder of Positivism. According to Pinney (Essays, p. 28n) this is Eliot’s first recorded allusion to Comte’s influential work.

2. ‘awful eye’. Milton, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, ‘The Hymn’, line 59.

3. idola theatri. From Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605). The ‘Idols of the Theatre’ are habits of mind to do with received systems of thought.

4. Cudworth. Ralph Cudworth (1617–68), Anglican divine and leading member of the Cambridge Platonists. His book The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) had been republished in 1845.

5. theory of practice and duty. Mackay reads ‘theory and practice of duty’.

6. sensibility. Mackay reads ‘insensibility’.

7. natural. Mackay reads ‘notional’.

8. ascensio mentis in Deum per scalas creatarum rerum. This translates as ‘the ascent of the mind towards God on the ladder of created things’.

9. external. Mackay reads ‘substantial’.

10. opposite extreme of incredulity. Mackay reads ‘opposite irrational extremes’.

11. Elder Scripture… uncorrupt by man. We have been unable to identify this quotation.

12. Bryant. Jacob Bryant (1715–1804). Among his works is A New System; or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774–6).

13. O. Müller. Karl Otfried Müller (1797–1840), author of the Prolegomena zu einer Wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (1825).

14. Creuzer. Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858), historian of religion and author of Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders bei den Griechen (1810–12). Another possible model for Casaubon.

15. High instincts… guilty thing surprised. William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, lines 150–51.

16. rerum natura. In the natural order.

17. Philo… Origen. Philo (c. 20 BC–AD 40), philosopher. Origen (c. 185–c. 235), theologian.

18. the cunning trickery of Jacob. Genesis 27: 18ff.

19. the savage cruelties of Joshua. Joshua 8:1–29.

20. God plagued Pharaoh and Abimelech. Genesis 12:10–20 and Genesis 20 respectively.

21. ‘eat of the prey… of the slain’. Numbers 23:24.

22. παρρησία. Plain-speaking.

23. To rise in science… of the skies. We have been unable to identify this quotation.

W. R. Greg’s The Creed of Christendom

(Leader, 20 September 1851, pp. 897–9)

William Rathbone Greg (1809–81), essayist, made a living contributing articles on political and economic subjects to various quarterlies. Eliot wrote to John Chapman in February 1851, offering to review Greg’s The Creed of Christendom: Its Foundation and Superstructure, which he had just published, ‘not for money, but for love – of the subject as connected with the Inquiry [Charles Christian Hennell’s Inquiry Concerning the Origins of Christianity (1838)]’. However, the editor of the Westminster Review did not want to take the review, claiming that there would not be room for it, and that the subject was not suitable. When Chapman bought the Westminster later that year, it was on condition that William Hickson, the outgoing editor, publish Eliot’s review, but it was James Martineau’s notice that appeared instead (Westminster Review, vol. 55, July 1851). This review thus became her first contribution to the Leader, a weekly paper founded by Lewes and Thornton Leigh Hunt in 1850 in offices just around the corner from Chapman.

In his Preface, Greg wrote, ‘The three conclusions which I have chiefly endeavoured to make clear, are these: – that the tenet of the Inspiration of the Scriptures is baseless and untenable under any form or modifications which leaves to it a dogmatic value; – that the Gospels are not textually faithful records of the sayings and actions of Jesus, but ascribe to him words which he never uttered, and deeds which he never did; – and that the Apostles only partially comprehended, and imperfectly transmitted, the teaching of their great master’ (pp. viii–ix).

Eliot wrote to Sarah Hennell in October 1851 that ‘Mr Greg thought the Review “well done and in a kindly spirit”, – but thought there was not much in it – dreadful true, since there was only all his book. I think he did not like the apology for his want of theological learning – which, however, was just the thing most needed, for the Eclectic [vol. 94, 1851, p. 410] trips him up on that score’ (Letters, Vol. I, p. 369).

1. Mr Newman’s Phases of Faith. Francis Newman (1805–97) (brother of John Henry Newman) had published his autobiographical Phases of Faith; or, Passages from the History of My Creed the previous year.

2. principles. Greg reads ‘principles of investigation’.

3. Strauss, Hug, Schleiermacher, and Hennell. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), German theologian and New Testament critic. Eliot’s translation of his Life of Jesus had been published in 1846. Johann Leonhard Hug (1765–1846), Catholic biblical scholar who held firmly to the historicity of the New Testament. His Introduction to the New Testament was translated into English in 1827. Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher (1768–1834), German Protestant theologian with a Romantic hostility to the rational and deistic Christianity of the eighteenth century. Charles Christian Hennell (1809–50) undertook a study of the New Testament in order to confirm his own Christian beliefs and found that the process undermined them instead. His Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity was instrumental in shaking the foundations of Eliot’s Christian belief (see Life, p. 39ff) and was translated into German at the instigation of Strauss.

4. in limine, in the language of Algernon Sydney, ‘No consequence… a truth’. In limine means ‘on the threshold’. Algernon Sidney (1622–83) was the author of Discourses Concerning Government (1698).

5. Locke. John Locke (1632–1704), philosopher. Author of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1619) and the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).

6. Beyond the verge… secrets lie. We have been unable to identify this quotation.

7. ‘the possibility of the rare made real’. Matthew Parker (1504–75), Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘Race’ is misprinted as ‘rare’ in the Leader.

8. This mention of Hennell allows Eliot to pay tribute to the book that had helped precipitate her break with Christianity. Greg wrote to Eliot about her criticism of his unacknowledged indebtedness to Hennell. She, in turn, wrote to Caroline Bray (Letters, Vol. I, p. 363) to ‘tell Sara especially that Greg wishes the writer of the notice in the Leader to know that he did not intend to omit Hennell for whose work he has a high esteem’.

9. a periodical which has recently bestowed elaborate praise on The Creed of Christendom. A reference to James Martineau’s review in the Westminster of July 1851 (vol. 55, pp. 429–53).

10. ‘La terre tourne… tournez avec elle’. From Blaise Pascal (1623–62), mathematician and philosopher.

Thomas Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling

(Westminster Review, January 1852, pp. 247–51)

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Scottish historian and social critic.

John Sterling (1806–44), Scottish poet, novelist and essayist. His memory survives mainly through Carlyle’s Life, in which Carlyle wrote, ‘a more perfectly transparent soul I have never seen’. In October 1851 Eliot wrote to the Brays that ‘I have been reading Carlyle’s Life of Sterling with great pleasure – not for its presentation of Sterling but of Carlyle. There are racy bits of description in his best manner and exquisite touches of feeling’ (Letters, Vol. I, p. 370).

This review appeared in the first number of the Westminster to be edited by Eliot.

1. The melodies abide/ Of the everlasting chime. From John Keble, The Christian Year (1827), ‘Saint Matthew’, lines 27–8.

2. curiosa felicitas. ‘Careful facility’ or ‘beauty of phrase’.

3. ‘ana’. A collection of table-talk, gossip or anecdotes.

4. a Teufelsdröckh still, but humanized by a Blumine worthy of him. A reference to the subject of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and his Beatrice.

5. fata morganas. Mirages or illusions.

6. Archdeacon Hare. A reference to Julius Hare’s earlier biographical essay on Sterling (1848), which treated him principally as a cleric and passed over more controversial issues, including the correspondence between Sterling and Hare on the subject of David Friedrich Strauss.

7. that friend of Arnold’s. John Keble. The Arnold in question is Thomas, father of Matthew. The incident is recounted in Dean Stanley’s Life of Arnold, Vol. I (1844), pp 21–2.

Lord Brougham’s Literature

(Leader, 7 July 1855, pp. 652–3)

Lord Henry Peter Brougham (1778–1868), Scottish statesman, lawyer and historian. He became a Member of Parliament in 1810 and achieved fame in 1825 as defender of Queen Caroline when she was accused of adultery by George IV. He later became one of the founders of London University. His Lives of Men of Letters and Science Who Flourished in the Time of George III was published in six volumes in 1845. For Eliot’s defence of this review, see the Introduction to this edition.

1. Hoby. An expensive shoe shop in Saint James’s Street, London.

2. Crispin. Patron saint of shoemakers.

3. To blunt a moral and to spoil a tale. From Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). The quotation is actually ‘To point a moral, or adorn a tale’.

4. Sydney Smith’s verdict on Scotch ‘wut’. ‘Their only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of this electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of WUT, is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals’ (in A Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith, Vol. I, by Elizabeth Vassall Fox, Lady Holland, 1855, P. 25).

5. Dr Cumming, or planned by Robert Owen. For Eliot’s opinion of Dr Cumming, see her essay in this volume. Robert Owen (1771–1858) was a socialist thinker of whom she also had a low opinion. In 1843 she wrote to Sarah Hennell, ‘I saw Robert Owen yesterday… and I think if his system prosper it will be in spite of its founder, and not because of his advocacy’ (Letters, Vol. I, p. 161).

6. Christo et Musis… Edinenses. This translates as ‘The Citizens of Edinburgh have dedicated this temple to Christ and the Muses’.

The Morality of Wilhelm Meister

(Leader, 21 July 1855, p. 703)

Eliot had spent the late summer and autumn of 1854 with Lewes in Weimar, where he had been collecting material for the biography of Goethe that she was later to review in the Leader.

Rosemary Ashton remarked of this article that it was ‘an important one, both as being unmistakably by the tolerant observer who later provided the guiding consciousness in the novels, and as indicating how public attitudes to Goethe had and had not changed over thirty or forty years… [It showed] how George Eliot, in criticizing Wilhelm Meister, which still needed explaining to English readers, found expression for those basic beliefs about realism, observation, imagination, and sympathy which informed her writings from then till her death’ (The German Idea, 1980, pp. 169–71).

The translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship reviewed here is by R. Dillon Boylan.

1. passionless Mejnour. A character in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842). At one point he says, ‘If happiness exists it must be centred in a SELF to which all passion is unknown.’

2. ‘insupportables justes, qui du haut de leurs chaises d’or narguent les misères et les souffrances de l’humanité’. This translates as ‘the intolerable just ones, who from the height of their golden seats, look dismissively down on the miseries and sufferings of mankind’. We have not found the source for this quotation.

3. ‘publicans and sinners’. Mark 2:16.

Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!

(Westminster Review, July 1855, pp. 288–94)

Charles Kingsley (1819–75), novelist, poet, Anglican clergyman, later Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Kingsley used his writing as a didactic vehicle for the religious views of his friend F. D. Maurice, and for the social gospel of Thomas Carlyle. His Westward Ho! or The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight… appeared in 1855.

Eliot reviewed Westward Ho! twice, the first time in the Leader in May of 1855. The Westminster review is rather more hostile than that in the Leader, in which she wrote, ‘When we say that the “art of the book suffers” we mean that the preacher overcomes the painter often, which, though creditable to the writer’s earnestness and honesty, injures his work as a mere work of art. It is as if a painter in colour were to write, “Oh you villain!” under his Jesuits or murderers; or to have a strip flowing from the hero’s mouth, with “imitate me, my man!” on it. No doubt the villain is to be hated, and the hero loved, but we ought to see that sufficiently in the figures of them. We don’t want a man with a wand, going about the gallery and haranguing us. Art is art, and tells its own story’ (Leader, 19 May 1855, pp. 474–5).

Two years later Kingsley wrote to Maurice after a book of his had been savaged in the Westminster, advising him, ‘I do hope you will not bother your soul about what the Westminster says. The woman who used to insult you therein – and who I suppose does so now – is none other than Miss Evans, the infidel esprit fort, who is now G. H. Lewes’s concubine – I met him yesterday, and lucky for me that I had not had your letter when I did so; or I certainly should have given him (he probably being the co-sinner for he pretends to know all about the philosophers, and don’t) a queer piece of my mind to carry home to his lady. Let them be’ (see R. B. Martin, The Dust of Combat, London, 1959, p. 181). In fact, the review in question was written by H. B. Wilson.

1. O, Mary!… the sands of Dee. Misquoted from Walter Scott’s ‘The Sands of Dee’. The lines should read, ‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,/ And call the cattle home,/ And call the cattle home,/ Across the sands of Dee.’

2. ‘carpet consideration’. In Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene 4, line 258, Sir Toby Belch describes Sir Andrew Aguecheek as a ‘knight, dubbed with unhatched rapier, and on carpet consideration’, i.e., knighted at court and not on the battlefield.

3. Kiss’s Amazon. August Kiss (1802–65), German sculptor, exhibited his ‘Mounted Amazon Attacked by a Tiger’ at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

4. Boanerges. A name given to James and John, the sons of Zebedee, because they threatened to call down ‘fire from Heaven’ to consume the Samaritans for not receiving Jesus Christ. It translates as ‘sons of thunder’ or better as ‘sons of tumult’ (Luke 9:54 and Mark 3:17).

5. the denunciations of the Teufelsdröckh. In Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1838).

6. a vehement disclaimer of all heterodoxy. A reference to Kingsley’s letter to the Guardian in 1851 in which he defended himself against an attack on the morality of his novel Yeast. He wrote, ‘whosoever henceforth, either explicitly or by insinuation, says that I do not hold and believe ex animo, and in the simple and literal sense, all the doctrines of the Catholic and Apostolic Church of England, as embodied in her Liturgy or Articles, shall have no answer from me but Father Valerian’s Mentiris impudentissime [a reference to a Capuchin in the fifteenth of Pascal’s Provincial Letters]’.

7. ‘will hear, or whether they will forbear’. Ezekiel 2:5, 2:7 and 3:11.

8. Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and the rest. Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540–96), circumnavigated the world 1577–80. Sir John Hawkins (1532–95), naval commander and slave-trader. Sir Martin Frobisher (c. 1535–94), explorer of Canada’s north-east coast.

9. Humboldt. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), German scientist and explorer.

Geraldine Jewsbury’s Constance Herbert

(Westminster Review, July 1855, pp. 294–6)

This review was written only a few weeks after Eliot had come to London to live with Lewes, having established that there was no possibility of a reconciliation between him and his wife. Haight suggested (Life, p. 182) that Eliot’s personal interest in Jewsbury’s theme led her to give the novel more space than it merited.

Geraldine Jewsbury (1812–80), novelist and reviewer, with a lifelong interest in ‘the woman question’. She reviewed Adam Bede for the Athenœum in 1859, describing it as ‘a work of true genius… a novel of the highest class’.

1. Miss Grace Lee. Eponymous heroine of a novel by Julia Kavanagh (1855).

2. a melancholy Viola. In Twelfth Night.

Saint-Marc Girardin’s Love in the Drama

(Leader, 25 August 1855, pp. 820–21)

Saint-Marc Girardin (1801–73), French writer and sometime Professor of French Poetry at the Sorbonne. His principal work, the first three volumes of which are reviewed here, was the Cours de littérature dramatique, ou l’usage des passions dans le drame (fifteen volumes, 1843–68).

1. ‘Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat’. Attributed to Samuel Johnson in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, entry for June 1784.

2. Amadis. The Amadis de Gaule, a massive (24-volume) chivalric romance of mixed Portuguese and Spanish ancestry, translated into French prose between 1540 and 1615.

3. Astrée. A prose romance by Honoré d’Urfé (1567–1625), published between 1610 and 1627. Its prose form and thinly disguised portraits of real people make it a putative ‘realist’ text.

4. Clélia. Clélie, a romantic roman-à-clef in ten volumes by Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701), French novelist, published between 1654 and 1660.

5. la galanterie honnête. Honourable gallantry.

6. Madame Deshoulières. Antoinette Deshoulières (1638–94), French lyric poet.

7. Nul n’est content/de son esprit. ‘No man is satisfied with his fortune or discontented with his wit.’

8. Luigi da Porto. Italian novelist (1485–1529). His story of Giulietta e Romeo is one of the source texts for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

9. gynaeceum. A building set aside for women, or the women’s quarters in a household.

10. ‘world of sighs’. Othello, Act I, Scene 3, line 159.

11. ‘overthrown more than his enemies’. As You Like It, Act I, Scene 2, line 266.

12. One half of me is yours… And so all yours! The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene 2.

13. the Edith Bellendens, Alice Bridgworths, and Miss Wardours. Characters from, respectively, Old Mortality, Peveril of the Peak and The Antiquary.

14. mare magnum. Great sea.

Ashford Owen’s A Lost Love and C. W. S. Brooks’s Aspen Court

(Westminster Review, October 1855, pp. 610–11 and pp. 611–12)

Ashford Owen was the pseudonym of Anna C. Ogle (1832–1918), novelist.

(Charles William) Shirley Brooks (1816–74), editor of Punch (from 1870), playwright and novelist. As Eliot pointed out, Aspen Court: A Story of Our Own Time had originally been published in parts in Bentley’s Miscellany, a monthly magazine that ran from 1837 to 1868.

Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft

(Leader, 13 October 1855, pp. 988–9)

Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1810–50), feminist author and critic, Transcendentalist and revolutionary. The extracts from her Women in the Nineteenth Century, and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties of Woman in this review have a close bearing on the character of Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch. It is also probable that Margaret Fuller was a model for Dorothea Brooke (see ‘Margaret Fuller and Dorothea Brooke’ by Patricia Derry in Review of English Studies, vol. 36, 1985, pp. 379–85).

Eliot had reviewed the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli in the Westminster in April 1852. There she wrote, ‘In conversation she was as copious and oracular as Coleridge, brilliant as Sterling, pungent and paradoxical as Carlyle; gifted with the inspired powers of a Pythoness, she saw into the hearts and over the heads of all who came near her; and, but for a sympathy as boundless as her self-esteem, she would have despised the whole human race! Her frailty, in this respect, was no secret either to herself or her friends. She quizzed them and boasted of herself to such an excess as to turn disgust into laughter – yea, so right royally did she carry herself that her arrogance became a virtue, worshipful as the majesty of the gods’ (Westminster, April 1852, p. 665).

1. Parasitic forms… distinctive womanhood. From Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess (1847), 7, lines 253–8.

2. Rights of Woman. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), English radical and feminist, published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.

3. Mrs Malaprop. In Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), hence ‘malapropism’.

4. Fourier. Charles Fourier (1772–1837), French social theorist, whose ideal of co-operative communities was actually implemented in neo-Utopian agricultural communities in France and America. He was regarded as insane by some.

5. If she be small… shall men grow? Tennyson, The Princess, 7, lines 249–50.

Translations and Translators

(Leader, 20 October 1855, pp. 1014–15)

Here Eliot is reviewing Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn, and Specimens of the Choicest Lyrical Productions of the Most Celebrated German Poets, translated into English verse by Mary Anne Burt.

1. Charles Honeyman. Foolish incumbent of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel, Mayfair, in William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1853–5).

2. Can teach all people… no part of speech. From Hudibras, Part 1, Canto 1, lines 660–62 by Samuel Butler (1612–80).

3. Für andre wächst… zeigen soll? An alternative translation is, ‘For others shall your glorious light shine brightly/I neither can nor will my talent hide/I should not for your revelations long/If they were not to all men to belong’ (from Goethe’s Poems, trs. Dyrsen, 1878).

4. Freiligrath. Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–76), German lyric poet and translator of, among other things, Hiawatha.

5. the famous speech of Lorenzo to Jessica. The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1. Eliot’s concern about August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s choice of the word Tasten may be partly misplaced, as the ‘touches’ of the original relates to the playing or fingering of a musical instrument.

Thomas Carlyle

(Leader, 27 October 1855, pp. 1034–5)

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Scottish historian and social critic. Eliot is reviewing Passages Selected from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle by Thomas Ballantyne.

1. the reading of Sartor Resartus was an epic in the history of their minds. Eliot had first read Carlyle in 1841. At the time she wrote to Martha Jackson, ‘Have you, dear Patty, read any of Thomas Carlyle’s books? He is a grand favourite of mine, and I venture to recommend to you his Sartor Resartus… His soul is a shrine of the brightest and purest philanthropy, kindled by the live coal of gratitude and devotion to the Author of all things. I should observe that he is not “orthodox” ’ (Letters, Vol. I, pp. 122–3).

2. a Joshua who is to smite the wicked… going down of the sun. See Joshua, passim.

3. On the whole… question of questions. From On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841).

4. What we call ‘Formulas’… habitation in this world. Also from Lectures on Heroes.

5. Perhaps few narratives… numerous in our day. From Past and Present (1843).

Robert Browning’s Men and Women

(Westminster Review, January 1856, pp. 290–96)

Robert Browning (1812–89). Eleven years after writing this review, Eliot wrote to Frederic Harrison, ‘My conscience made me a little unhappy after I had been speaking of Browning on Sunday. I ought to have spoken more of the veneration I feel for him, and to have said that in his best poems – and by these I mean a large number – I do not find him unintelligible, but only peculiar and original’ (Letters, Vol. IV, pp. 395–6).

1. Heinsius. Daniel Heinsius (1586–1655), Dutch classical scholar and editor of Aristotle’s Poetics.

2. M. Arago. A particularly obscure reference. There are several possible candidates. The two most likely are Étienne Arago (1802–92) and Jacques-Étienne-Victor Arago (1790–1855), but we have been unable to locate any reference to Daniel Heinsius by either of them.

3. Flotow. Friedrich Flotow (1812–83), German composer.

4. He stood and watched… expect as much. ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ (1855), lines 23–35 (Eliot’s italics).

5. Dogberrys. An ignorant and inconsequential official (from the foolish constable in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing).

6. My perfect wife, my Leonor… Whatever rocks obstruct. From ‘By the Fireside’, 21.

Peter von Bohlen’s Introduction to the Book of Genesis

(Leader, 12 January 1856, pp. 41–2)

Peter von Bohlen (1796–1840), sometime Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature at Königsberg. His Die Genesis historisch-kritisch erläutert (1835) was translated into English in 1855 and edited by James Heywood.

1. Dr Pye Smith. Nonconformist divine and tutor at Homerton College, Cambridge. Eliot had read his Relation between the Holy Scripture and Some Points of Geological Science (1839) in 1841. At the time she wrote to Martha Jackson, ‘there is very much that is valuable in it, and the main subject of the work, the interpretation of the Mosaic records, is fully satisfactory to me’.

2. Menu. Author of the Laws in Hindu mythology.

3. the Hymn of Cleanthes. Cleanthes (c. 331–c. 232 BC), Stoic philosopher. His ‘Hymn to Zeus’ is one of his few surviving works.

4. Eleusinian mysteries. Religious rites of ancient Greece, focusing on the goddess Demeter.

5. Vedas or the Zendavesta, or the fragments of Manetho and Sanchoniathon. The Vedas are the sacred scriptures of the Hindus. The Zend-Avesta is the sacred book of the Parsees, the collected writings of Zoroaster or Zarathustra. Manetho was an ancient historian of Egypt (c. third century BC). Sanchoniathon was an ancient historian of Phoenicia.

6. Professor Tuck’s Commentary on Genesis. Johann Christian Friedrich Tuch (1806–67), author of the Kommentar Über die Genesis (1838).

7. Pococke. Edward Pococke (1604–91), traveller and orientalist.

The Antigone and Its Moral

(Leader, 29 March 1856, p. 306)

Eliot is reviewing the Oxford Pocket Classics edition of The Antigone of Sophocles.

1. the production of the Antigone at Drury Lane. Pinney noted that this occurred on 1 May 1850. Eliot was not in London at the time.

2. Hermanns and Böckhs. Johann Gottfried Jacob Hermann (1772–1848), classical scholar and philologist. August Böckh (1785–1867), archaeologist and philologist.

3. E’en in their ashes live their wonted fires. Slightly misquoted from Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’ (1750).

4. O γρ τι νν γε καχθς… ξοτου φνη. From Sophocles’ Antigone, lines 456–7. The lines translate as ‘not now, nor yesterday’s, they always live, and no one knows their origin in time’ (from the translation of Elizabeth Wyckoff in David Grene and Richmond Lattimore’s The Complete Greek Tragedies, Chicago, 1954)

5. μεγλoι λóγοι. Lofty words.

John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Vol. III

(Westminster Review, April 1856, pp. 625–33)

Eliot was a great admirer of John Ruskin (1819–1900). In February of 1856 she wrote to Sarah Hennell, ‘We are delighting ourselves with Ruskin’s third volume, which contains some of the finest writing I have read for a long time (among recent books)’ (Letters, Vol. II, p. 228). In June of the same year she wrote to Barbara Leigh Smith, ‘What books his two last are! I think he is the finest writer living.’ This review is a crucial statement of her views on realism.

In July 1856 she reviewed Modern Painters, Vol. IV in the Westminster (pp. 274–8). She wrote, ‘It has all the transcendent merits and all the defects of its predecessor; it contains an abundance of eloquent wisdom and some eloquent absurdity; it shows a profound love and admiration for the noble and the beautiful, with a somewhat excessive contempt or hatred for what the writer holds to be the reverse of noble and beautiful.’ She then goes on to quote extensively from Ruskin’s passages on mountain scenery (Modern Painters, Vol. IV in the Works of John Ruskin, E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds., 1903–9, p. 441) on the influence of the Warwickshire topography on Shakespeare’s genius: ‘He seems to have been sent essentially to take universal and equal grasp of the human nature; and to have been removed, therefore, from all influences which could in the least warp or bias his thoughts. It was necessary that he should lean no way; that he should contemplate, with absolute equality of judgement, the life of the court, cloister, and tavern, and be able to sympathize so completely with all creatures as to deprive himself, together with his personal identity, even of his conscience, as he casts himself into their hearts’.

1. De Quincy. Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), English essayist, critic and opium addict.

2. ‘the great and general ideas only inherent in universal nature’. From Chapter 1 of Modern Painters, Vol. III. The line reads ‘the great and general ideas fixed and inherent in universal nature’.

3. ‘For the artist… persons represented.’ Chapter 3, Section 9.

4. This is usually done… mist of pride. Chapter 3, Section 11.

5. The corruption of the schools… fades into fatuity. Chapter 3, Sections 13–15.

6. that all great art… arrow plume. Chapter 3, Section 20 (Eliot’s italics).

7. And now, finally… greatest ideas. Chapter 3, Section 24.

8. Take a very important instance… Greek philosophers. Chapter 4, Section 16.

9. They rowed her in… crawling foam. Chapter 12, Section 5. The lines from Charles Kingsley are from Alton Locke (1850).

10. As far as I recollect… fountains in pipes. Chapter 13, Section 16.

11. To invent a story… self-examining verse. Chapter 16, Section 29.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, Charles Reade’s It is Never Too Late to Mend and Frederika Bremer’s Hertha

(Westminster Review, October 1856, pp. 570–73, pp. 573–5 and pp. 575–8)

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96), American writer and philanthropist. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp was published in 1856. Eliot greatly admired Stowe, and they corresponded in the 1860s.

Charles Reade (1814–84), novelist and dramatist. It is Never Too Late to Mend: A Matter of Fact Romance was published in 1856.

Frederika Bremer (1801–65), Swedish novelist. The English translation of Hertha appeared in 1856. Eliot had met Bremer when she visited England in 1851. At the time she wrote to Charles Bray, ‘I don’t advise you to come to see Frederika Bremer – she is old – extremely ugly, and deformed – I should think she is nearly sixty. Her eyes are sore – her teeth horrid’ (Letters, Vol. I, p. 365). But three day later she wrote to Sarah Hennell, ‘Altogether I am beginning to repent of my repugnance’ (Letters, Vol. I, p. 367).

1. Fadladeens. Fadladeen is a character in Thomas Moore’s Lallah Rookh (1817) an infallible judge of everything.

2. Uncle Tom. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

3. Augustin Thierry, Jacques Nicholas Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), French his torian.

4. frotté de civilisation. On whom civilization has rubbed off.

William Lecky’s The Influence of Rationalism

(Fortnightly Review, 15 May 1865, pp. 43–55)

In December 1864 Frederic Chapman (of Chapman & Hall) and Anthony Trollope came to dinner to discuss the editorship of a new periodical to be called the Fortnightly Review, which would ‘remove all those restrictions of party and editorial “consistency” which in other journals hamper the full and free expression of opinion’ (Saturday Review, 25 March 1865). Lewes agreed to become its editor. One revolutionary feature of the new journal was to be the abandonment of anonymity by its contributors. As Anthony Trollope later wrote, ‘Much of the literary criticism which we have now is very bad indeed; so bad as to be open to the charge both of dishonesty and incapacity. Books are criticized without being read… If the names of the critics were demanded, editors would be more careful’ (Autobiography, Oxford, 1980, p. 192).

To the first issue Eliot contributed her (signed) review of History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, along with a brief notice of The Grammar of Ornament on pp. 124–5. On 18 May she wrote to Sarah Hennell, ‘We have nothing to do with the Fortnightly as a money speculation. Mr Lewes has simply accepted the post of editor, and it was seemly that I should write a little in it. But do not suppose that I am going into periodical writing’ (Letters, Vol. IV, p. 193). In fact, it was her last piece of work as a reviewer.

1. Yet no less a person than Sir Thomas Browne. Thomas Browne (1605–82), English physician and writer, in Religio Medici (1643), Part 1, Section 30.

2. ‘Those that, to refute their incredulity… to convert them.’ From Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1643), Part 1, Section 30 (Eliot’s italics). The original reads ‘confute’.

3. ‘Crescit cum magia hœresis, cum hœresi magia.’ Translates as ‘Heresy increases with magic, and magic with heresy.’ In Louis Ferdinand Maury (1817–92) La Magie et l’astrologie dans l’antiquité at au moyen âge (Paris, 1860).

4. We do not share Mr Buckle’s opinion… terrified subjection. In Chapter 4 of History of Civilization in England, Vol. III (1861) by Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–62).

5. Jean Bodin. Jean Bodin (1530–96), French political economist, author of Six livres de la République (1576).

6. ‘a store of arguments… countrymen.’ From Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1837–9), Part 2, Chapter 4, Sections 47–75, by Henry Hallam (1777–1859), barrister and (later) historian.

7. ‘en une presse où les fols surpassent de tant les sages en nombre’. From Montaigne’s Essais, Vol. III, 11. The line translates as ‘in a crowd in which fools so largely outnumber wise men’.

8. ‘Ils passent par dessus les propositions… courent aux causes.’ Montaigne’s Essais, Vol. III, 11. Montaigne reads ‘Ils examinent curieusement les conséquences’. The lines translate as ‘They disregard the antecedents, but carefully examine the consequences’ (Eliot’s italics).

9. Après tout… tout vif. ‘After all, it is placing a very high value on one’s conjectures to cause a man to be burned alive because of them.’

10. our own Glanvil. Joseph Glanvil(1) (1636–80). His Scepsis Scientifica was published in 1665.

11. Peut on nier… le Papisme? In Lecky, Vol. II, p. 49n, quoted from Pierre Jurieu’s Droit des deux souverains en matière de religion, la conscience, et l’expérience (Rotterdam, 1678). (Eliot’s italics.) The lines translate as ‘Can it be denied that paganism declined in the world through the authority of the Roman emperors? We can assent without temerity that paganism would still be on its feet, and that three quarters of Europe would still be pagan, if Constantine and his successor had not used their authority to abolish it. But, I ask you, what paths did God make use of to re-establish true religion in the West? The Kings of Sweden, of Denmark, of England, the governing magistrates of Switzerland, the Low Countries, the free cities of Germany, the Electors and other sovereign princes of the Empire – have they not used their authority to bring down Popery?’

12. Mr Curdle’s famous definition… ‘a sort of a general oneness’. In Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9), Chapter 24.

13. There is not room here to explain… second volume. This paragraph was cut from the 1884 edition.

POEMS

From The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

1. (A calm earth-goddess… and vines). This line was omitted in the Cabinet edition.

2. Pant dumbly… dreams of youth. This line was omitted in the Cabinet edition.

3. Cybele. Asiatic goddess of earth and fertility, often depicted with a crown of turrets.

4. The martyred sage. Socrates, possibly Demosthenes.

5. the vine-wreathed god. Dionysus.

6. Rising… the silence. This line was omitted in the Cabinet edition.

FROM IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH (1879)

Debasing the Moral Currency

1. ‘Il ne faut… qui instruise.’ We should not impose the ridiculous where there is none to be found; that is to harm our taste, and to corrupt our judgement and that of others. But whatever is ridiculous anywhere, should be seen, and pointed out gracefully, in a manner which both pleases and instructs’ (La Bruyère, Caractères de Théophraste, ‘Des Ouvrages de l’esprit’).

2. Dugald Stewart. Scottish philosopher (1753–1820).

3. Pliny. ‘The only malady to which it [the lion] is liable is that of distaste for food; in this condition it can be cured by insulting treatment, the pranks of monkeys tied to it driving it to fury; and then tasting their blood acts as a remedy’ (Pliny, The Natural History, Book 8, Chapter 14).

4. admiration, hope, and love. Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book 4, line 763.

5. Circe’s herd. The enchantress Circe turned visiting sailors, including the followers of Odysseus, into swine after feasting them.

6. assignats, or greenbacks. Assignats were paper money issued in 1790 by the revolutionary government of France on security of the state lands. Greenbacks were one of the legal tender notes of the US, so called from the devices in green ink printed on the back; they were first issued in 1862.

7. the Apology. Both Plato and Xenophon wrote works with this title, recording Socrates’ defence of himself against the charge of impiety. Plato’s account is more likely here, as it is more eloquent, and more concerned with spiritual values.

8. Sainte-Beuve. This passage is from Les Causeries du lundi, Vol. I, ‘De la Question des théâtres et du théâtre-français en particulier’, Monday, 15 October 1849. Eliot abridged and slightly altered this passage. The line of Latin verse is from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 6, line 663. The translation of what Eliot wrote is ‘Nothing quicker to go down than civilization in crises like this one; in three weeks the achievement of several centuries is lost. Civilization, indeed life, is something learned and invented, let it be well understood: “Or who ennobled life by arts discovered.” Men after a few years of peace too easily forget this truth; they come to believe that culture is innate, that it is the same thing as nature. Savagery is always there, two steps away, and the moment one slows down, it starts up again.’

9. a dangerous ‘Swing’. Captain Swing was an imaginary person to whom about 1830–33 were attributed a number of outrages against farmers who had adopted the use of agricultural machinery.

10. Peter’s visionary lesson. Acts 10:12–15. Peter sees a visionary vessel containing ‘all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, ‘Rise, Peter; kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘Not so, Lord, for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.’ And the voice spake unto him again, the second time, ‘What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.’

11. Athenœus. We have been unable to trace this reference.

TRANSLATIONS

David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1846)
From ‘Introduction: Development of the Mythical Point of View in Relation to the Gospel Histories’

1. For an excellent discussion of these matters, see Elinor Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (1975), passim, but particularly the chapters on A Death in the Desert and Daniel Deronda.

2. Otfried Müller. Karl Otfried Müller (1797–1840), influential thinker on the nature and origin of myth. Strauss refers us to the Prolegomena zu einer Wissenschaftlichen Myihologie, from Section 110 onwards..

From ‘Concluding Dissertation: The Dogmatic Import of the Life of Jesus’

1. Kant’s point of view. ‘According to Kant also, it ought not to be made a condition of salvation to believe, that there was once a man who by his holiness and merit gave satisfaction for himself and for all others; for of this the reason tells us nothing; but it is the duty of men universally to elevate themselves to the ideal of moral perfection deposited in the reason, and to obtain moral strength by the contemplation of this ideal. Such moral faith alone man is bound to exercise, and not historical faith.

‘Taking his stand on this principle, Kant proceeds to interpret the doctrines of the Bible and the Church as symbols of the ideal. It is humanity, or the rational part of this system of things, in its entire moral perfection, that could alone make the world the object of divine Providence, and the end of creation. This idea of a humanity well-pleasing to God, has existed in God from all eternity; it proceeds from his essence, and is therefore no created thing, but his eternal Son, the Word, through whom, that is, for whose sake, all things were created, and in whom God loved the world. As this idea of moral perfection has not man for its author, as it has been introduced into him even without his being able to conceive how his nature can have been susceptible of such an idea, it may be said to have come down to us from heaven, and to have assumed the human nature, and this union with us may be regarded as an abasement of the Son of God. This idea of moral perfection, so far as it is compatible with the condition of a being dependent on necessities and inclinations, can only be conceived by us under the form of a man’ (Strauss, The Life of Jesus, pp. 426–7).

2. the Ebionites. A body of heretics of the first and second centuries who held that Jesus was a mere man and that the Mosaic law was binding upon Christians.

3. Schleiermacher. Friedrich Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), German theologian.

4. duplex negatio affirmat. A double negative is affirmative.

Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854)
The Mystery of the Cosmogonical Principle in God

1. the so-called seven Sages. A name given in ancient tradition to seven men of practical wisdom, statesmen, lawgivers and philosophers, of the period 650–550 BC. Their teaching was handed down in aphorisms such as ‘Nothing in excess’, ‘Know thyself’, etc. See The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature.

2. Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), Part 1, Chapter 4, ‘Of Speech’. Hobbes connects understanding to spoken language. ‘When a man, upon the hearing of any Speech, hath those thoughts which the words of that Speech, and their connexion, were ordained and constituted to signifie; Then he is said to understand it: Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by speech.’