George Eliot and Europe

John Rignall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351934060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This book is based on a conference held in Warwick in July 1995. It is a collection of essays which explore various aspects of George Eliot's relation to the literature and culture of Continental Europe. The essays range widely over the novelist's life and work, examining her Journals and Impressions of Theophratus Such as well as her novels, and focusing on different countries and cultures, including not only France, Germany and Italy, but also Holland and Spain. Some essays examine the complex general issues of language and culture raised in her work, while others concentrate on her response to specific European writers and texts. There are investigations of intertextualities and possibilities of influence, as well as contextual discussions and comparative readings of her novels alongside works by European writers. The overall effect is to illuminate her writing by setting it in the wider European context which, with her knowledge of languages, her travels and her extraordinary wide reading, she knew so well.

1
What George Eliot Saw in Europe: The Evidence of her Journals

Margaret Harris

The title of this paper works both with the literal sense of ‘what George Eliot saw’ (at its most literal, detailed itineraries of her travels in Continental Europe), and with the more colloquial and analytic sense of ‘what she saw in Europe’: what she made of it, what it meant to her. Readers of her journals, from Henry James on, have taken the view that these journals are bland, offering not much more than lists of where she went and what, in the literal sense, she saw. Thus James reviewing George Eliot’s Life as related in her letters and journals, compiled by her widower John Cross:

The various journals and notes of her visits to the Continent are [...] singularly vague in expression on the subject of the general and particular spectacle - the life and manners, the works of art. She enumerates diligently all the pictures and statues she sees, and the way she does so is proof of her active, earnest intellectual habits; but it is rarely apparent that they have, as the phrase is, said much to her, or that what they have said is one of their deeper secrets.¹

James, always a creative reader of George Eliot, tacitly requires more conspicuous writerliness than he finds in the selections from her journals available to him. He apparently regrets that the journals are not the polished kind of travel-writing represented by his own Transatlantic Sketches (1875), which dwell on the alterity of the experience of travel, contrasting ‘abroad’ where imaginative and emotional energies are stimulated, with the authenticity of ‘home’, typified by the mundane and routine, at once stable and constraining.² Read complete, George Eliot’s travel journals, for all that they are ‘private’ writing, not prepared for publication, turn out to be texts as self-conscious as James’s own. Their piecemeal publication has distracted attention from the craft of their construction.

Extracts from the journals have been available in Cross’s version, and in selections included by George Eliot’s twentieth-century champion Gordon Haight in his magisterial edition of her letters. While Haight identified many of Cross’s editorial interventions (in addition to leaving out a good deal, Cross conflated letters, and also sections of letter with sections of joumal),³ naturally enough he treated the text of the journals as illustrative of or ancillary to the text of the letter. Thus while he includes in full in The George Eliot Letters some of the essay-type, set-piece journals such as ‘Recollections ofllfracombe’ and ‘How I came to write fiction’,⁴ for the most part, snippets from the journals appear as footnotes.

My argument about what George Eliot saw in Europe depends on a set of convictions about her journals, developed during the preparation of an edition of them. On the whole, the journals do not generate instant new insight into George Eliot’s life and work. Reading the journals, like reading any George Eliot text, is a matter of longterm rewards, not only of immediate gratifications. They can be read with and against other George Eliot texts: they complement such records as letters, as well as her fiction.⁵ In this essay, I am principally concerned to demonstrate her engagement with discourses of travel in the earliest extant journal material, dealing with her sojourn in Weimar in 1854, and in ‘Recollections of Italy. 1860’, her account of ‘one of those journies that seem to divide one’s life in two’ (Letters, III, 311).

The journals are a discontinuous text, and while together they are as close as George Eliot comes to autobiography, they are not straightforward self-writing (though the full text does restore George Eliot as the speaking subject, rather than the subject of Cross’s or Haight’s narration). There is a major instance of self-construction to be discerned as a consequence of seeing the journals entire: at one point the physical arrangement of the material within a manuscript volume enacts a version of the ‘split self of autobiography, as the journals provide a covert account both of the adoption of the pseudonym ‘George Eliot’, and of the surrender of the secret of the identity of Marian Evans Lewes with George Eliot.⁶ This is a particularly striking example of George Eliot’s exercise of authority and control in all her writing.

The journals include two kinds of writing: daily diary entries ranging from a phrase to a page or so, and longer essays, which in some cases re-write the diary and in others complement it.⁷ The journals and diaries run from the time of her union with George Henry Lewes in 1854 to her death in 1880: we know of a lost journal of the Spanish expedition of 1866-7, and the diary for 1878 is missing. However she used other notebooks concurrently: that edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth as George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook 1854-1879 covers pretty well the same timespan, and at any one time she was likely to have several volumes on the go (as she did while working on Middlemarch, for example).⁸ These various files reveal George Eliot’s deliberate division and disposition of her notes and memoranda, part of the justification of my claim for her particular kind of control even of her most private and informal writing.

The journals began in Europe, in the winter of 1849 which Marian Evans (not yet George Eliot) spent in Geneva after the Brays took her on tour following the death of her father. We have her word for the origin of the journal, at the end of the first diary:

This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva, in 1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that - despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.

June 19th 1861.

The extant text, however, dates from July 1854. It is assumed that Cross destroyed the earlier section (Letters, I, xv), so that the text now opens with Marian Evans (still not George Eliot) crossing again to Europe for the first time since her return from Geneva in 1850. On that occasion she was travelling after a major life crisis, and now there is another rite of passage: the journal begins with an elopement.

July 20th 1854

I said a last farewell to Cambridge street this morning and found myself on board the Ravensbourne, bound for Antwerp about 112 an hour earlier than a sensible person would have been aboard, and in consequence I had 20 minutes of tenible fear lest something should have delayed G. But before long I saw his welcome face looking for me over the porter’s shoulder, and all was well. The day was glorious and our passage perfect. Mr R. Noel happened to be a fellow-passenger. The sunset was lovely but still lovelier the dawn as we were passing up the Scheidt between 2 and 3 in the morning. The crescent moon, the stars, the first faint blush of the dawn reflected in the glassy river, the dark mass of clouds on the horizon, which sent forth flashes of lightning, and the graceful forms of the boats and sailing vessels painted in jet black on the reddish gold of the sky and water, made up an unforgettable picture. Then the sun rose and lighted up the sleepy shores of Belgium with their fringe of long grass, their rows of poplars, their church spires and farm buildings.

Haight quotes most of this passage, though not consecutively; Cross’s version runs: ‘I said a last farewell to Cambridge Street on 20th July 1854, and found myself on board the Ravensbourne, bound for Antwerp. The day was glorious and our passage perfect. The sunset was lovely’, and so on.⁹ This is characteristic of Cross’s editorial procedure. He retains the ‘tine writing’ of the description of dawn: though George Eliot the novelist does not yet exist, the descriptive powers of Marian Evans, journalist, can be demonstrated, but not her amused self-deprecation as she waits for Lewes (who is generally edited out where possible).

The journals, then, open as George Eliot embarks not only on the ‘Ravensbourne’, but on her life with Lewes-a union ended by his death in 1878. George Eliot’s diary during these months in Germany is full, and interesting; generally, its preoccupations persist in varying proportions in later journals. Her impressions of the places they go are sharp, suffused with happiness: she presents vignettes of fellow travellers, or of people glimpsed in passing, or of buildings or landscapes. Her descriptions of the Rubens paintings they see in Antwerp are the beginning of the commentary on art which later occupies a good deal of the journals. There is little political comment beyond a passing reference to the Crimean War. Similarly, there are some generalisations about national stereotypes, but no significant social comment. Neither is there significant economic comment, except on a domestic level, since concern about money is acute. There is a record of their ailments (a familiar refrain). Above all, their work-reading and writing is recorded. The professional purpose of this journey was Lewes’s research in Weimar and Berlin for his study of Goethe (published in 1855), and George Eliot -Dorothea-like? -assisted him in translation and other ways, as well as doing her own journalistic work and a translation ofSpinoza’s Ethics.

However, it is not only a case of what the writer tells us, since the journals also show the writer at work. There is evidence of her reworking the same material in different contexts: the diary at times has parallel texts in letters (the letter to Charles Bray from Weimar dated 16 August 1854, parallels and summarises the diary, by contrast with the self-justificatory one of 20 October to the same correspondent which exposes the anxiety about her reputation that finds no expression in the euphoric diary pages [Letters, II, 170-2 and 178-9]). Also, once in Berlin, she rewrote her Weimar diary as an essay called ‘Recollections of Weimar’. ‘Recollections’ provides more of a summary and an overview than the diary; impressions are assimilated and organised, modifying the narrator’s initial unfavourable impression of Weimar (this narrator is never identified, nor even gendered). The essay emphasizes the travellers’ reactions to the place and the people they met, and obscures the working aspect of their visit which is so strongly marked in the diary. Though the focus is on the cultured environment in Weimar-hearing Liszt play is a high point -and on the customs and characteristics of the people, the pleasures of the flesh are not disregarded. There is a good deal of comment on food (uncommon elsewhere in George Eliot’s journals, and indeed in her fiction), and on their walks- of which this picnic with wine and Keats is a notable example:

A beautiful walk through a beech-wood took us to the Mooshtitte where we rested on the rustic bench near the door and took our luncheon. Before this Mooshtitte stands the beech on which Goethe and his friends cut their names and from which Goethe denounced Woldemar. We could recognize some of the initials. The tree has been shattered by lightning and is protected by a piece of sheet-lead. We were very jolly over our luncheon and right glad of the small bottle of wine which we had felt it rather a corvee to carry. We rested an hour on the grass under the sh.;de of the beeches and then set off again, while the sun was still burning, on our way home. But we rested again and slept when we got among the trees, then took another stage, and sat down on the grass to read Keats. I read aloud St Agnes’ Eve, and at another resting place, part of Hyperion. The solemn pine forest looked still grander than in the morning, and we richly enjoyed it in spite of our weariness. About half past five, hot, aching and adust, we entered Weimar and found a glass of cold water from a pump by the roadside delicious as nectar.

(Cross published only a few lines relating to the Goethe pilgrimage; Haight nowhere printed any of this idyll.)

There are further versions of ‘Recollections of Weimar’, which George Eliot recast into two articles in a recognisable strain of travel writing published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1855.¹⁰ In their presentation of the exotic culture to an indigenous readership are discernible already the characteristic emphases of George Eliot’s prose, which suggest that on any matter there can be different points of view, perhaps equally valid. These essays include elements of both entertainment and instruction, and with her translations and some major reviews form her contribution to the propagation of German culture in Britain.¹¹ There are inevitably intertextualities with Goethe; perhaps also with Thackeray, whose Pumpernickel is very different from George Eliot’s Weimar. These are unique instances of journal material going fairly direct to print (there is another smaller but engaging instance when Lewes apparently borrowed some descriptions of Ilfracombe for Sea-Side Studies).¹²

What, then, did George Eliot see in Weimar? (Facetiously, one might say that whatever she saw was through rose-coloured spectacles.) In the first place, she saw scenery, people, buildings and artefacts: Goethe was a determinant of what she saw, and in some measure of how she saw it. Certainly the Weimar where she spent three months was liberated and liberating: there is an important sense of the validity of different cultures and lifestyles, as well as the freer social code that countenanced irregular unions.

She saw also opportunities for writing: indeed at this time the journals are in an important sense where George Eliot-to-be is writing (and hence one interest of the various versions of the Weimar material). Of these 1854-5 journals, there is not much trace in the novels, though clearly this work, along with the major reviews like ‘The Natural History of German Life’, forms an important body of writing preparatory to the novels. Meanwhile Marian Evans, journalist, plied her trade, mindful of her mission on behalf of German culture, and the need to earn a living.

Before moving to ‘Recollections of Italy. 1860’, I must return George Eliot and Lewes from Europe to England to their post-honeymoon life together. Early in ‘Recollections of Berlin’, we find the following:

We were amused to hear that Carlyle said he should think no one could die at Berlin, for in beds without curtains what Christian could give up the ghost? To us, the lack of curtains was the smallest fault of German beds.

(Cross omits the second of these sentences.) Comment on German beds recurs in the closing section of ‘Berlin’ (bold type restores Cross’s omissions):

We soon became ill, and so were even thankful to see the cliffs ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 What George Eliot Saw in Europe: The Evidence of her Journals
• 2 Cultural Synthesis in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
• 3 George Eliot and the World as Language
• 4 George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and Comparative Anatomy
• 5 The Miserable Marriages in Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and Effi Briest
• 6 Mr Dagley’s Midnight Darkness: Uncovering the German Connection in George Eliot’s Fiction
• 7 George Eliot and the Germanic ‘Musical Magus’
• 8 Daniel Deronda and Allegories of Empire
• 9 ’The Interest of Spanish Sights’: From Ronda to Daniel Deronda
• 10 ’Animated Nature’: The Mill on the Floss
• 11 From Reality to Fiction: Benefits and Hazards in Continental Education
• 12 Renaissance and Risorgimento in Romola
• 13 Greek Scholarship and Renaissance Florence in George Eliot’s Romola
• 14 ’Too intensely French for my taste’: Victor Hugo as Read by George Eliot and George Henry Lewes
• 15 George Eliot, Balzac and Proust
• 16 Playing with Shawls: George Eliot’s Use of Corinne in The Mill on the Floss