ELIOT FIRST met Frederic Harrison (1831–1923) in 1860 at the house of Richard Congreve (1818–99), a leading figure in the Positivist movement. Congreve had been his tutor at Oxford. For Harrison, Positivism, defined as the ‘reorganization of life, at once intellectual, moral, and social, by faith in our common humanity’ (DNB), was almost a religion. According to Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, human thought passes through three stages: Theological, Metaphysical and Positive. In the positive stage the universe is viewed as an ordered organism governed by necessary laws. This entails the abandoment of theistic religion in favour of an organized religion of humanity, complete with a priesthood and rituals, famously defined by T. H. Huxley as ‘Catholicism minus Christianity’. Eliot’s poem ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’ was adopted as one of its hymns.
Although a barrister by profession, Harrison’s principal interest lay in social reform, and he was a lifelong supporter of many liberal causes. He contributed articles on trade unions to the Fortnightly Review, which was edited by Lewes, and was the person to whom Eliot turned when she required detailed legal advice during the writing of Felix Holt. He read parts of the manuscript for her, as well as the proofs, and provided much invaluable assistance.
It was on the basis of this acquaintance that he wrote to her in 1866, suggesting the outline of a story that would illustrate, in its completeness, what ‘a Positive system of life would be’. The ensuing correspondence is interesting for both the quality and content of Eliot’s response: her tactful scepticism about Positivism and, more importantly, her very clear statement of some of her central aesthetic principles. For a detailed account of her (ironized) assimilation of Harrison’s suggestions, see James F. Scott’s ‘George Eliot, Positivism and the Social Vision of Middlemarch’ in Victorian Studies, vol. 16 (September 1972), pp. 59–76.
In May 1868 Eliot wrote to Harrison to tell him that she had made arrangements for a copy of The Spanish Gypsy to be sent to him during her absence in Germany ‘to express my value for the help and sympathy you gave me two years ago’. Undoubtedly the poem, described by Congreve as ‘a mass of Positivism’, fell far short of Harrison’s expectations. He had hoped that she would use her art to promote the ideal of ‘healthy moral control over societies’ (Letters, Vol. IV, p. 289). His disappointment found a further outlet in his review of J. W. Cross’s George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, where he wrote that although she possessed ‘mental equipment of the first order, her principal instrument was art. And so she played a double part – as the most philosophical artist, or the most artistic philosopher in recent literature… But the question comes in, and it must be answered, “Could she play the double part perfectly?” ’ The answer, of course, was no. ‘It is given only to the one or two of the greatest to interpret the profoundest thought, to embody the ripest knowledge, in the inimitable mystery of art’ (‘The Life of George Eliot’ in Choice of Books, 1887, pp. 215–16).
In later life Harrison noted, more charitably, his further reflections on Eliot’s attitude to Positivism as she expressed it in this correspondence. ‘George Eliot,’ he wrote, ‘had been a careful student of all his [Comte’s] works for many years, and through the Congreves she was familiar with every phase of the Positivist ideal, with the general idea of which she had entire sympathy.’ As far as her response to his suggestion for a tale set in ‘a beautiful part of Northern France’ was concerned, he wrote, ‘She was no doubt quite right. She shrank from any Utopia in which there was a danger that “the picture might lapse into the diagram” ’ (Memories and Thoughts, 1906, pp. 146–7).