Critical Essays on George Eliot

Barbara Hardy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317296317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

This title, first published in 1970, consists of essays on the individual tales and novels of George Eliot, with two general essays that discuss the novels as a whole and cuts across the individual works. The primary concern of these studies is to see what the limits of George Eliot's greatness are, to consider the purpose and end of the technical brilliance, and to attend to what she has to say to us across a century of change and developing historical and psychological consciousness. This book will be of interest to students of literature.

IX
Idea and Image in the Novels of George Eliot¹

W. J. Harvey

I

IN HIS Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel² Professor U. C. Knoepflmacher pays tribute to recent critics of George Eliot, but maintains that:

They have somehow perpetrated the illusion that George Eliot's art and ideology are best examined in separation, that two divorced 'principles' govern her novels, and that these principles, the one artistic and the other intellectual, must remain irrevocably apart.

We must certainly agree that it is vital to understand how George Eliot blends art and ideology; we may also agree that this is likely to prove a difficult and delicate task. Just how difficult and delicate Professor Knoepflmacher illustrates in one of the appendices to his study; if I seem to turn his evidence against him this must be understood as an oblique tribute to his largely pioneering endeavours. In this appendix he writes of Middlemarch:

The metamorphosis of Rosamond and of Lydgate himself is presented through a kind of evolution in reverse which shows the extent of George Eliot's scientific preparation. In 1864 T. H. Huxley had proved conclusively 'that many extinct reptiles had bird characteristics and many extinct birds, reptilian characteristics' and had argued that consequently both species should be classified as' sauroids' (William Irvine, Apes, Angels and Victorians (Jordan, 1955) p. 240). In Middlemarch, where the archiac 'Dodo' Brooke triumphs over the 'scientific phoenix Lydgate', a 'creature who had talons, but Reason too, George Eliot turns Huxley's biological insight on Lydgate through a gradual metaphoric alteration of his wife.

He then goes on to analyse Rosamond in terms of the bird-like and reptilian images that characterize her. In doing so he exemplified, I think, two dangers inherent in any discussion of the way art blends with ideology. The first danger is aesthetic; that of over-ingenuity, of reading too much into too little. We may well feel that he rides his evidence too hard. The evidence itself is striking but very slender. Even in the passage I have quoted we may feel that he is dragooning with too cavalier a spirit Dorothea's nickname 'Dodo' into the service of his argument. Can we really make the jump from a nickname to an extinct bird and thence to a contrast with a fabulous creature, the phoenix, in order to delineate the contrast between the two characters? Do we need to? Phoenixes, certainly, are hardly to be brought within the terms of any biological theory! And can we really, in any sense that rings true to the novel, speak of Dorothea triumphing over Lydgate? Moreover, in the whole appendix, Professor Knoepflmacher is very selective in his choice of images; the reference to birds and reptiles must surely be taken in march.

The second danger is much more likely to be encountered by the historian of ideas rather than by the critic. This is the assertion of too narrow, too specific a relationship between intellectual cause and aesthetic effect. Certainly T. H. Huxley's temperament and philosophic outlook has many striking general resemblances to that of George Eliot. There is no good reason to suppose, however, that this proof of 1864³ was the specific source of this kind of imagery and idea in Middlemarch. For what Huxley does is to adduce evidence reinforcing a more general idea, something that was almost commonplace in Victorian biological thought and which was, therefore, generally accessible to George Eliot. It is just barely possible, I suppose, that Huxley may have led George Eliot to put a slightly heavier stress on birds and reptiles, but this is a far cry from showing 'the extent of George Eliot's scientific preparation' or from proving that George Eliot in any conscious way 'turns Huxley's biological insight on Lydgate'. It is just possible, but I doubt in fact whether there is anything in her terms to suggest a particular debt to Huxley. I would maintain, on the contrary, that, in order to appreciate the aesthetic expression of ideology, we need to operate on the level of the general commonplace rather than on the level of specific example, to state the controlling idea in as broad and as inclusive a fashion as possible. Stated in this broad, commonplace way, the idea is that we are the sum of our origins and development. If we desire a more closely biological statement of this idea, then we can conveniently cite Haeckel's formulation in 1866 of his fundamental law of biogenesis:

The organized individual repeats during the rapid course of his own development the more important phases through which its ancestors passed in the course of their long palaeontological evolution.

Or, more briefly, in the dictum that Freud transferred from biology to psychology, 'Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'.

Stated in this general way, the idea gives a resonance, not merely to particular images, but also to some of George Eliot's most deeply felt convictions; to her statement in Adam Bede, for example, that:

A certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility.... The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.

(ch. 18)

This conviction is part of the tap-root of George Eliot's 'ideology'; it reverberates throughout all her novels; it colours her whole vision of human nature. It is at this level rather than at the level of particular images that the recapitulation theory is likely to have stirred her consciousness.

The recapitulation theory was already well formed before Haeckel's classic formulation of it in 1866, and I believe that we could find distorted echoes of it in Victorian authors before George Eliot began to write. There seems no need to establish a precise causal relation between her and Huxley. Indeed, we may in general ask what are the conditions which have to be fulfilled before we can assert such a specific causal relationship between idea and artistic expression. Leaving aside the possibility of the author's explicit acknowledgement of indebtedness, we must surely have as a minimum, one of the following conditions.

• (a) The idea must not be a commonplace, but must be an odd, exceptional, or particularly striking idea. Or it must be an odd, exceptional, or striking collocation and structure of commonplace ideas.
• (b) The idea, if not exceptional, must be illustrated by striking and particular examples, which are then repeated by the artist.
• (c) There must be extremely close verbal similarities in the formulation of the idea.

Let me take an example which illustrates chiefly the first two of these conditions. Consider the idea formulated in the passage from Adam Bede that I quoted earlier; or, better, consider this more detailed formulation from The Mill on the Floss:

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet – what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows – such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.

(I. 5)

Set beside this a passage from Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology :

The cawing of rooks usually produces pleasurable feelings – feelings which many suppose to result from the quantity of the sound itself. Only the few who are given to self-analysis are aware that the cawing of rooks is agreeable to them because it has been connected with countless of their greatest gratifications – with the gathering of wild flowers in childhood; with Saturday-afternoon excursions in schoolboy days; with midsummer holidays in the country, when books were thrown aside and lessons were replaced by games and adventures in the field; with fresh, sunny mornings in after-years, when a walking excursion was an immense relief from toil. As it is, this sound, though not causally related to all these multitudinous and varied past delights, but only often associated with them, rouses a dim consciousness of these delights; just as the voice of an old friend unexpectedly coming into the house, suddenly raises a wave of that feeling which has resulted from the pleasures of past companionship.

Let us suppose, as I indeed do, that Herbert Spencer was a powerful influence on that ideology which George Eliot transmuted into art. None of us I trust, would wish to assert that the passage I have just quoted was, in any sense, the source of the passage from The Mill on the Floss. Both are responding independently, though in somewhat similar terms, to the same commonplace. Let us suppose that we could find – as I think we could – scores of such vaguely parallel passages in Spencer and in George Eliot. All that we would then have established is a sympathy between their two minds, a similarity of tone and feeling in their responses, such as to suggest a possible predisposition on the part of George Eliot to be influenced by Spencer. We should still have to be extremely cautious in going from the general to the particular, in asserting a specific causal relationship between idea and artistic expression. Let me illustrate by an absurdity. Professor Knoepflmacher, in his advocacy of Huxley, cites as one of his supporting ideas that fact that Lydgate 'begins to flinch from his wife's "torpedo contact" (The actual phrase in Middlemarch is: 'The very resolution to which he had wrought himself by dint of logic and honourable pride was beginning to relax under her torpedo contact.') Suppose, then, that I adduced as a source for this sentence the following passage from Spencer's Principles of Psychology:

But for the accidental observation of Galvani, the suspicion that the nerve-force is electric or quasi-electric, would probably never have been entertained; and it should have been abandoned as soon as it was found that the other disturbing agents, physical and chemical, work just the same effects. The conception has, indeed, been kept alive by the discovery that electricity is generated by certain fishes. But the supposed support is wholly imaginary. It, because the Torpedo evolves electricity by the help of nerves ramifying through its electric organ, is inferred that the nerve-force is sensible motion, because it generates sensible motion in the muscles.

I should, I hope, be hooted out of court; in Spencer's own words, 'the supposed support is wholly imaginary'. My intellectual history would be just as absurd as Spencer's science in the passage I have just quoted. But, I fear, equal absurdities are often to be found when the historian of ideas attempts to explain the transmutation of ideology into art.

We have moved, so far, from a few particular images to the more general notion that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny'. This idea, I have suggested, may be widely applied to areas of experience remote from embryology and can be varyingly expressed. 'The child is father to the man' is, for example, one formulation of such an idea.

If, then, it is difficult to trace a causal relationship between so relatively precise an idea and the fiction which may embody it, how much more difficult must it be delineate the impact on George Eliot of the whole of evolutionary theory of which this idea is just one part. Consider, first, the evidence we have concerning George Eliot's relation to Darwin and the Origin of Species.

The first mention of it that we have comes in George Eliot's journal for 23 November 1859:

We began reading Darwin's work on 'The Origin of Species' tonight. It seems not to be well-written: though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive for want of luminous and orderly presentation.

Two days later she mentions it in a letter to Charles Bray – just one odd paragraph in a letter full of other matters:

We are reading Darwin's Book on Species, just come out, after long expectation. It is an elaborate exposition of the evidence in favour of the Development Theory, and so, makes an epoch.

(Letters, iii. 214)

This is expanded in a letter to Barbara Bodichon, written on 5 December:

We have been reading Darwin's Book on the 'Origin of Species' just now: it makes an epoch, as the expression of his thorough adhesion, after long years of study, to the Doctrine of Development – and not the adhesion of an anonym like the author of the 'Vestiges', but of a long-celebrated naturalist. The book is ill-written and sadly wanting in illustrative facts – of which he has collected a vast number, but reserves them for a future book of which this smaller one is the avant-courier. This will prevent the book from becoming popular, as the 'Vestiges' did, but it will have a great effect in the scientific world, causing a thorough and open discussion of a question about which people have hitherto felt timid. So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty! But to me the Development Theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes.

(Letters, iii. 227)

While George Eliot recognizes the importance of Darwin's work ('it makes an epoch'), this evidence surely points to a fairly cool and unsurprised reaction on her part. It is not that, for her, Darwin is saying anything strikingly new; his importance rather is that he will promote franker discussion of issues she already takes for granted. If The Origin of Species had by itself any effect on her creative imagination, it cannot have been much greater than that of the recapitulation theory – the effect of sharpening and pointing a few specific images. This happens most in The Mill on the Floss, and Professor Haight has summarized the evidence very judiciously in the Introduction to his edition of that novel; further we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• I ‘SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE’ : THE DIAGRAM AND THE PICTURE
• II ‘ADAM BEDE’
• III ‘THE MILL ON THE FLOSS’
• IV ‘SILAS MARNER’
• V ‘ROMOLA’ AS FABLE
• VI ‘FELIX HOLT THE RADICAL’
• VII ‘MIDDLEMARCH’ : A NOTE ON GEORGE ELIOT’S ‘WISDOM’
• VIII ‘DANIEL DERONDA’ : GEORGE ELIOT AND POLITICAL CHANGE
• IX IDEA AND IMAGE IN THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT
• X THE PASTORAL OF INTELLECT
• INDEX