Memory and history in George Eliot: transfiguring the past

Memory and History in George Eliot Transfiguring the Past

Hao Li

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Memory and History in George Eliot

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Transfiguring the Past Hao Li Assistant Professor of English University of Toronto

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Memory and History in George Eliot

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–67595–9 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22834–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Li, Hao, 1960– Memory and history in George Eliot : transfiguring the past / Hao Li. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22834–1 (cloth) 1. Eliot, George, 1819–1880—Knowledge—History. 2. Literature and history— England—History—19th century. 3. Historical fiction, English—History and criticism. 4. Autobiographical memory in literature. 5. History in literature. 6. Memory in literature. I. Title. PR4692.H5 L5 1999 823'.8—dc21 99–046744 © Hao Li 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

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To my parents

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Contents viii

Note on Editions, Abbreviations, References and Italics List of Abbreviations

xii

Introduction: Memory, History and George Eliot 1

xi

1

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’: Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede

15

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency in The Lifted Veil, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner

40

The Moment in History: The Temporal Sense of Emotional Development in Romola

69

4

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

97

5

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

121

6

National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

150

2 3

Epilogue: Historical Consciousness and the Intellectual

187

Notes

196

Index

220

vii

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Acknowledgements

To acknowledge here the debt I have accumulated during the writing of this book I can in no way express the deep gratitude I feel towards those who have helped and supported me. My greatest debt is to Dr Stefan Collini of the University of Cambridge, who guided and supported my work from the beginning and inspired me with his example of dedication and serious understanding. With characteristic thoughtfulness and sharp insight, he also commented on the final version of this manuscript. I am also deeply indebted to Professor Dame Gillian Beer for suggesting this fascinating topic in the first place and for following up with invaluable advice and encouragement. Over the years, the inspiration of both of them has always been matched by their unfailing support. Without their help, understanding, and generosity, I would never have been able to finish the book, let alone publish it. I only wish I could have written a book more worthy of their kindness and example. I am also very grateful to Professor Rosemary Ashton, who made valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this work, parts of which have been incorporated here. Her advice has greatl helped to refocus my argument; to Professors Jonathan Hart and Gary Kelly for urging me to publish the manuscript and for their professional advice; and to Professors W. David Shaw and Alan Bewell for taking time from their busy schedules to read the entire manuscript at its final stage, offering not only encouragement and reassurance but also incisive advice and suggestions. Thanks are also due to the following friends, teachers, and colleagues who have helped me more than they realize by commenting on individual chapters or giving me other help and encouragement: Dr Mary Hamer, Professors John Baird, John Beer, Susan Hamilton, John Hunter, Linda Hutcheon, Jill Matus, Juliet McMaster, Rowland McMaster, Shirley Neuman, Ted Pitcher, Will Robins, Sara Stambaugh, Chris Wiesenthal, and Arlette Zinck; thanks, in particular, to Professor Ted Bishop, who insisting on keeping his promise, and read one of the chapters with good humour even while he was confined in a body cast following an accident. The work of many George Eliot scholars has been and continues to be of immense value. My references in the notes section represent only an inadequate indication of my indebtedness to them. viii

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Acknowledgements

ix

Charmian Hearne has been the most supportive editor an author can hope for. I benefited enormously from her faith in the project, her understanding and thoughtfulness. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader of Macmillan for timely criticisms and suggestions; Keith Povey for carefully preparing the manuscript for publication; Jean Richardson and Carolyn Lee, who assisted my research during 1996–7, for speedy help; the students of my graduate seminar at the University of Toronto on memory and history in Victorian literature for their intellectual stimulation; and the staff of the English Faculty Library at Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Dr Williams’s Library in London, The New York Public Library, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, for making my visits enjoyable and fruitful. The staff at the Inter-Library Loans Department, Robarts Library, University of Toronto, have been most obliging, meeting my voluminous requests for nineteenth-century sources with good spirits and speedy searches over North America and Britain. I am grateful to Jonathan Ouvry, great-great-grandson of George Henry Lewes, and holder of the George Eliot copyright, for kind permission to reproduce and quote from manuscript materials of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes; and to Professor Simon During for allowing me to quote from his unpublished doctoral dissertation. I would also like to thank the curators and trustees of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and of the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, for permissions to consult and quote from their manuscript holdings; and Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce excerpts from the Clarendon Edition of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Romola and Scenes of Clerical Life.* Permission is also granted by the Director of Dr Williams’s Library in London on behalf of the Trustees to quote from George Eliot’s marginalia from books in the George Henry Lewes Library owned by Dr Williams’s Trust. The writing of this book has been financially supported at various stages by the following institutions and foundations: Trinity College, Cambridge; Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University; Chancellor’s Fund, University of Cambridge; Committee of ViceChancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom; the Izaak Walton Killam Foundation; the University of Alberta; and the Connaught Fund, University of Toronto. These supports are here gratefully acknowledged.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

In dedicating this book to my parents, I thank them for first introducing me to literature and then helping me, through their own example, to understand the humility and gratification of criticism and scholarship. If this book has any merit at all, it is in large measure due to the generosity and support of all these people and institutions; I, of course, am entirely responsible for the errors and inadequacies that remain. Hao Li *The author and publishers are grateful to Oxford University Press for permis-

sion to reproduce selections as indicated from the following titles from The Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot: Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble (1985) © Thomas A. Noble 1985. Reprinted from George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, 1985) by permission of Oxford University Press. The Mill on the Floss, edited by Gordon S. Haight (1980) © Oxford University Press 1980. Reprinted from George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Gordon S. Haight (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, 1980) by permission of Oxford University Press. Romala, edited by Andrew Brown (1993) © Andrew Brown 1993. Reprinted from George Eliot, Romala, edited by Andew Brown (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, 1993) by permission of Oxford University Press. Felix Holt, The Radical, edited by Fred C. Thompson (1980) © Fred C. Thomson 1980. Reprinted from George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical, edited by Fred C. Thomson (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, 1980) by permission of Oxford University Press. Middlemarch, edited by David Carroll (1986) © Oxford University Press 1986. Reprinted from George Eliot, Middlemarch, edited by David Carroll (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot,1986) by permission of Oxford University Press. Daniel Deronda, edited by Graham Handley (1984) © Oxford University Press 1984. Reprinted from George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, edited by Graham Handley (Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, 1984) by permission of Oxford University Press.

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1

2

3

4

5

All references to George Eliot’s novels and stories are to the Clarendon Edition. For those works where this edition is not available, the Cabinet Edition is used instead. For details, see the List of Abbreviations. All references to George Eliot’s novels and stories are given in brackets in the text, and consist of abbreviated titles of individual works, followed by numbers of book, chapter and page which are separated by colons. Where only two figures appear, they denote the numbers of chapter and page, except in the case of The Spanish Gypsy, where they denote the numbers of book and page. References to certain works by George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, Auguste Comte, George Henry Lewes and Herbert Spencer are also given in brackets in the text, and consist of abbreviated titles of individual works, the volume number where applicable, and the page number. For George Eliot’s holograph notebook Miscellanies, folio numbers are used instead. Except for those titles which appear in the List of Abbreviations, full details of publication for books and articles cited will be given at their first appearance in this book, and subsequently given only in a short form. All italics in quotations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

xi

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Note on Editions, Abbreviations, References and Italics

List of Abbreviations George Eliot, Adam Bede, Cabinet Edition, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London, [1878]). ‘Address’ George Eliot, ‘Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt’, as ‘Appendix C’, in Felix Holt, the Radical, edited by Fred C. Thomson, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1980), pp. 412–22. ‘Barton’ George Eliot, ‘Amos Barton’, in Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1985), pp. 5–72. CP George Eliot, Collected Poems, edited with an introduction by Lucien Jenkins (London, 1989). Cross George Eliot, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, arranged and edited by J. W. Cross, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1885). DD George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, edited by Graham Handley, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1984). E George Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney (London, 1963). EC Auguste Comte, The Essential Comte, Selected from Cours de Philosophie Positive by Auguste Comte, edited and with an introduction by Stanislav Andreski, translated and annotated by Margaret Clarke (London, 1974). FC George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, First Series: The Foundations of a Creed, 2 vols (London, 1874–75). FH George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, edited by Fred C. Thomson, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1980). GEN George Eliot, Some George Eliot Notebooks: An Edition of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library’s George Eliot Holograph Notebooks, MSS 707, 708, 709, 710, 711, edited by William Baker, 4 vols (Salzburg, 1976–85). ‘GL’ George Eliot, ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’, in Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1985), pp. 73–187. ITS George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh and London, [1880]). ‘JR’ George Eliot, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, in Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1985), pp. 189–334. xii

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AB

L LV

M MF Misc

OED PLM3

PP PPAC

R SG

SM

SP

SPP

WTC

xiii

George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, 1954–78). George Eliot, The Lifted Veil, in Silas Marner, The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob, Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh and London, [1878]), pp. 275–341. George Eliot, Middlemarch, edited by David Carroll, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1986). George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Gordon S. Haight, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1980). George Eliot, Miscellanies, holograph notebook, Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. The Oxford English Dictionary, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 20 vols, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1989). George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series (Continued), Problem the Second: Mind as a Function of the Organism; Problem the Third: The Sphere of Sense and Logic of Feeling; Problem the Fourth: The Sphere of Intellect and the Logic of Signs (London, 1879). Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 2nd edn (1855; London and Edinburgh, 1870–2). Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau, 2 vols (London, 1853). George Eliot, Romola, edited by Andrew Brown, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1993). George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy, in Collected Poems, edited with an introduction by Lucien Jenkins (London, 1989), pp. 201–456. George Eliot, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, in Silas Marner, The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob, Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh and London, [1878]), pp. 1–273. George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, Third Series, Problem the First: The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope and Method (London, 1879). Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity, or Treatise on Sociology, Instituting the Religion of Humanity, translated by J. H. Bridges et al., 4 vols (London, 1875–77). Thomas Carlyle, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, edited by Henry Duff Traill, 30 vols (London, 1896–9).

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List of Abbreviations

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Clio was figured by the ancients as the eldest daughter of Memory, and chief of the Muses; which dignity, whether we regard the essential qualities of her art, or its practice and acceptance among men, we shall still find to have been fitly bestowed. (Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History’, WTC, XXVII, 83) In Chapter 18 of Adam Bede, the narrator describes Adam Bede’s thoughts during the church service and highlights how ‘a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility’. To justify such a blending, the narrator points out that ‘the secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past’ (AB, 18:300). In her novels and other writings, George Eliot returns time and again to this theme of the formation of relations in time – ‘a continual stream of rhythmic memories’ (MF, 4:3:256) – but it is the predominant sense of the collective that from the very beginning defines the meaning of these memories. The collective scope is never confined to the communities imagined in the fictional works; it always has implications for the society in which Eliot herself was historically situated. This study explores ‘memory’ in the work of George Eliot primarily as communal memory, though personal memory is treated as a related issue. ‘Communal memory’ here means forms, both fictional and real, of collective mentality and moral consciousness, shared feelings, manners, rituals, customs as well as verbal expressions, which have evolved over generations. They constitute the deep-running continuity of human life. To individual communal members, they can be forms of knowledge both from and 1

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Introduction: Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

of the past. To understand the term ‘communal memory’ in this way is not to deny or underestimate the importance or relevance of personal contributions, but to recognize that communal memories are not reducible to a mere sum total of personal memories. The term ‘collective memory’ is sometimes used to emphasize the aggregating nature of communal memory. Communal memory is, in many ways, fundamental to Eliot’s understanding of the amenability of the past. For her, while our connection with the past may provide a solid basis for the present, that connection is formed mostly by way of memory. Memory, both as process and result, thus becomes one of the pivotal means by which a perception of the past can be effected and the past can help to shape an understanding of the present. She valued society and tradition but also wanted to change them. Communal memory is for her more a form of tradition full of tensions and conflicts than an a priori morally privileged and unified inheritance. Her ambivalence and scepticism underlie, in varying degrees, all her stories and novels. While it is never just, in Carlyle’s words, ‘the true fountain of knowledge’ (‘On History’, WTC, XXVII, 89), or an example for ‘illustrating our own poor Century’ (Past and Present, WTC, X, 39), communal memory both maintains historical continuity and generates from within the need for reform. It helps to determine Eliot’s own interpretation of history, a sense of history which is also the focus of this study. The aim of this study is thus not to investigate the specific forms of communal memory per se, but to understand her conception of the mechanisms and functions of such a memory by focusing on its relation to history. In her novels and stories, communal memory often takes the form of collective knowledge carried over from previous generations. Such knowledge may include ‘conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish’. The characters’ ‘moral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no standard beyond hereditary custom’ (MF, 4:1:238). Eliot understood this condition to be the ‘natural history’ of her characters’ consciousness. ‘[These] beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life’ (R, 36:329). Her interest moved gradually from investigating how this hereditary force acts upon the lives of individuals to exploring how reform can be initiated against such determinism. In spite of the fact that individual characters have been ‘tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts’, she was interested in anticipating the direction in which they would react ‘in the onward

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tendency of human things’ (MF, 4:1:238). This notion of communal memory needs to be distinguished from the personal memory of individual characters. We may regard personal memory as voluntary or involuntary individual recollection, and communal memory as a framework of knowledge and presupposition consciously or often unconsciously inherited and shared. There has been much critical discussion on memory in Eliot, primarily as an personal, rather than a collective, notion. Personal memory is no doubt an important aspect in her representation of memory, but it is presented largely to reveal an individual’s relations to a communal way of life and thus needs to be understood essentially in terms of its interactions with communal memory. If we focus primarily on personal memory, we may overlook her emphasis on communal memory as shaping and giving meaning to personal memory. Her representation of memory is concerned with a complex of relations. While personal experience cannot but come under the pervasive regulatory effect of communal memory, personal memory is not identical with communal memory. Maggie Tulliver, for example, may still have recollections that are not completely filtered through the representation of her community. This makes it possible for an individual to think differently about, or initiate the reform of, a specific collective tradition. On the other hand, communal memory itself does not result essentially from the lived experience of a single generation. It may have its own raison d’être, its own mysterious form of existence, like the spirit of the legendary St Ogg that perpetually walks the streets in town. The formation of communal memory may differ substantially from that of personal memory; the notion of communal memory thus ought to be understood both within and without the realm of personal memory. This memory is different from the Jungian concept of the ‘Collective Unconscious’. While it does involve a subconscious and perhaps unconscious inheritance of moral sentiments, communal memory does not exclude the characters’ conscious awareness of social relations and practices that help both to form and sustain that memory; nor does it write off any enthusiastic or wilful efforts within a community to make its members aware of the shared mentalities, the ultimate political expression of such efforts being nationalism.1 Communal memory can be enriched and modified by the particular experiences of individual members, which intimate an interaction between the Jungian concepts of the ‘Collective Unconscious’ and the ‘Personal Unconscious’.2 Fundamental to Eliot’s conception is the

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Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

belief that communal memory in a broader sense is capable of producing a secular form of religion – the Religion of Humanity. To subsume such a belief under the Jungian term will undoubtedly limit and alter the meaning of communal memory in Eliot. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the historical dimensions of communal memory, not the Jungian archetypes that are basically ahistorical.3 To use the Jungian term would, therefore, diminish the nineteenthcentury connotation of the idea of memory, memory either as a psychological concept or as an emotional medium that helps to cultivate moral confidence so as to mitigate the troubling effects of industrialization on Victorian society. Of course, one might argue that communal memory is a form of historical consciousness and that, in terms of approach, to separate them too neatly will overcomplicate the issue. Communal memory is, undoubtedly, closely connected to a sense of history, but to take it as mere historical sense will obscure the meaning of memory. The very process of ‘remembering’ essential to the notion of communal memory occurs in the present and as the present, with the past being implied or incorporated. A sense of history, on the other hand, indicates an understanding of the past with a view to its significance for the present. The subjects of a historical past are, as Maurice Halbwachs reminded us long ago, usually people indirectly related to those who maintain a sense of history. Therefore, a sense of history may suggest a more distanced and objective perspective about the past than communal memory does. It is thus possible to differentiate between a historical consciousness that sometimes tends to be neutralized and ‘official’ and a form of communal memory that can be intensely personal and emotional.4 Furthermore, the fictional forms of the characters’ memory are conditioned by Eliot’s own attitude towards the past, which evokes a backward-looking perspective shared by many thinkers contemporaneous with her. The contextual references in this study to these thinkers’ interest in history are another reason why communal memory is not identical with historical consciousness. The term ‘historical consciousness’ may thus highlight their awareness of the evolutionary nature of communal memory and the implications that Eliot’s representation of memory may have for her contemporary readers. On the other hand, different as they are, to separate communal memory and historical consciousness too neatly is to overlook the interrelations between them. To invoke historical consciousness here is an imperative approach, for communal memory is so intrinsically related to historical consciousness that without the

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latter the former would have nothing to bear upon. Thus, instead of treating communal memory and historical consciousness as two separate themes, this study focuses on the symbiotic relationship between them. Eliot’s novels and stories offer us a wonderful gallery where the subtle intricacies and concatenations of this relationship are displayed with full cogency. The issues dealt with extensively in these works appeal to us with their intense modernity: for example, the relations between memory as events and as narrative; the dialectics of memory and oblivion; the power of memory as the conscious, subconscious and unconscious; the temporal sense of memory in relation to the historical meaning of memory; the determining effect of group mentality on the reform of such a mentality; the historicity of mythologizing modern events; the relations between an intellectual and his or her community; memory and the formation of personal, communal and national identities. Although I draw upon the larger intellectual context by using writings of Eliot’s contemporaries, my discussion is not strictly contextual or historical as such. Instead of trying to restore her to some now supposedly forgotten or neglected context, I focus on particular themes in her novels and stories and on their dialectical connections and tensions. To support such thematic discussions, I have not refrained from using, eclectically for the most part, nineteenthcentury sources, including scientific writings and archival materials; but above all I use her novels and stories as the main sources of my discussion. The close readings and critical analyses offered here are primarily meant to illustrate certain possibilities in her works. I make no claim to completeness in my account of her views, nor to a critique of her intellectual development per se, but aim for a rereading of her novels and stories and, through this, a reappraisal of her understanding of the dialectics of memory and history in the light of my chosen themes. A full-scale critique would no doubt have given the structure of this study a more systematic appearance, but it may also have unintentionally played down the specific difficulties that she encountered in writing. In my view, Eliot does not merely offer metaphorical ideas of socio-historical conditions. The language of her novels and stories, precisely because it is fictional, offers us ideas for a more adequate comprehension of memory and history. For this reason, to trace the development of her conception becomes a matter of clarifying thoughts which were considered and transformed within her own field of language. My approach is thus consciously eclectic. I have found very helpful general works by such writers as Michael

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Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

Oakeshott, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Terdiman, Mary Warnock and Hayden White, but I do not base my approach essentially on these works. For nineteenth-century sources, I concentrate on several thinkers whose approaches to communal memory, like that of Eliot, reflect the ‘romantic-historical and the positivist approaches to society’.5 Their epistemological and philosophical writings explore how human feelings can become an important source of knowledge and a possible substitute for Christian faith. The ‘positivist’ nature of Eliot’s thinking has been widely examined in relation to the writings of Auguste Comte, French philosopher, of George Henry Lewes, Victorian ‘man of letters’ and Eliot’s companion, and of Herbert Spencer, philosopher and Eliot’s friend.6 Yet the relevance of their theories of communal memory has not been sufficiently explored. More importantly, to take these ‘scientists’ as the only contextual sources would impoverish the complexity of Eliot’s conception, for she wrote also within the ‘romantic-historical’ tradition and made significant contributions to it. This second tradition is, most typically, though not exclusively, illustrated by Carlyle’s historical imagination in general and his conception of memory as history in particular. This tradition is akin to Wordsworth’s conception of affective memory, which had a lifelong influence on Eliot, an influence that was refocused, if not reshaped, in her by a fusion of the transcendental meaning of the collective and the immediacy of specific social and intellectual concerns. It is important to evoke this second tradition in order to gauge the full implications of her historical consciousness. Reading her novels and stories through the ideas and categories of analysis belonging to both traditions will reveal how their coexistence and tension have caused her many conceptual difficulties. It is only within the context of both Carlyle and the ‘scientists’ that she can be seen to have cherished at once a ‘scientific’ and a transcendental view towards life. It is highly necessary, therefore, to read her within a less restrictive context in which the above two strands of thought are deliberately brought into dialectical tension and mutual illumination. The ‘romantic-historical’ tradition is represented, among others, by the young Carlyle and his early radicalism. His writings of this stage aim to establish history as a secular religion against the ‘inorganic’ and ‘pulpy’ ‘Industrial Ages’ (Past and Present, WTC, X, 249). What he saw as the transcendental meaning in historical events ‘rouses in others’, observed Eliot in her essay on Carlyle, ‘the activities that must issue in discovery’ (E, 213). His form of idealism, particularly that in Sartor Resartus, gave a whole generation a sense of secularized hope.7

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What Eliot shared with Carlyle was, in A. J. O. Cockshut’s words, the aspiration to ‘separate the feelings, attitudes and duties which religion had fostered from the doctrines which it preached’. Yet she did not accept his way of seeing everything as the manifestation of the absolute and the divine. She had maintained, following Feuerbach and the biblical critics, that ‘the feelings were the original stuff of religious experience, and the doctrines, including belief in God, had followed from the feelings’.8 The influence of German biblical criticism is germane to this study, particularly Feuerbach’s view that human consciousness is necessarily a form of species consciousness. Existing criticism on this subject is highly detailed and sophisticated and I shall make use of these studies where necessary.9 The developmental hypothesis of the German critics concerning the origin and essence of religion had a long-term impact on Eliot’s understanding of the meaning of history. And here it is precisely where the definition of history and the historiographical approach represented by, among others, Carlyle and the nineteenth-century historian J. R. Green may also be brought in as part of the context.10 To evoke Green may seem arbitrary and somewhat anachronistic, for his major work, A Short History of the English People, was not published until 1874 when Eliot had completed most of her novels. However, the intellectual vogue that he helped to create and, in particular, the mode of historical imagination that he represented were part of the context of her works. In fact, she was acquainted with Green’s Short History and History of the English People,11 but in spite of the similarity in historical imagination between Eliot and Green, it would be misleading to focus on their actual historical connection. Carlyle’s natural supernaturalism is compounded with an ‘essentially cyclic and also discontinuous conception’ of history.12 He and Green, among others, clearly showed a historiographical interest in the natural mode of common life. Their imaginative style of writing tends to bring out the emotional, religious and more traditional aspects of collective life. For both of them, to interpret history is to recognize its implications for the present. Similarly, the historical past in Eliot’s novels and stories is, to borrow Michael Oakeshott’s formulation, not just ‘a recollected or a consulted past’, but almost always ‘an historically understood past’.13 Yet unlike Carlyle who used the past mainly as a ready standard against which to judge contemporary society, Eliot often evoked the past in order to diagnose and understand the present. On the other hand, she also shared his sensitivity to the natural sequence of remembering and forgetting that consti-

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Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

tutes the sequence of history. If history consists in the dialectical relations between continuity and discontinuity, then memory and oblivion are its interpretative means. She recognized the aim of his imaginative writing as ‘[awaking] men from their indifference to the right and the wrong’ (E, 213). While her moral conception is fundamentally intuitional, it has an empirical basis informed by the evolutionary theories of Lewes, Comte and Spencer.14 ‘Comte’s model of social development’, as Sally Shuttleworth has pointed out, ‘was one which sustained both a psychological theory of determinism and a moral theory of historical allegiance’.15 William Myers has further observed, ‘if man’s moral sensibilities are closely related to his primitive life’, and ‘if the emotions themselves are inextricably involved in the reactions and sensations of the body, then simple, primordial experiences of mind and body have immense moral importance’.16 Comte’s theory appealed to Eliot to the extent that it fell in line with her early influence of Evangelicalism, with the belief that human impulses are guided ‘by the intellect of human beings who have gone before them’ (E, 166). The Comtean Religion of Humanity emphasized the necessity of a spiritual power in society, which Comte did not find all critical philosophers ready to accept. Sympathy as a form of emotional development ought to be able to replace the function of the Christian spirit. The sense of continuity in such a ‘religion’, particularly in Comte’s conception of altruism as the development of human feelings, may help us to clarify Eliot’s understanding of the moral significance of communal memory. In this respect it is important to note that his theory of the nature of affective states is just as important as his much better-known analysis of the three stages of social evolution. Her acceptance of these theories was not unqualified; she often tried, wherever necessary, to make modifications. To bring Lewes’s theories of memory into our discussion of Eliot can be a most intricate task. While his theories are confirmed time and again in Eliot’s works, a close reading of these works often yields fine distinctions between their understandings of affective memory. The elements of agreement in their works are most valuable as they demonstrate significant convergences and overlaps in their thinking, yet their differences are just as important. It would be misleading, of course, to conflate their interests and views. Lewes based his psychological theories on both instinct and experience and recognized the importance of the unconscious, unlike Comte who based his theory of mind only on human instinct.17 His psychological theories attempt to

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integrate two preexistent traditions: metaphysical speculations on sensation and associationism by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British philosophers and physiological psychology which became influential in the early and mid-nineteenth century. But he was able to move beyond them in his organicist, anti-atomist approach. Lewes’s own contribution is to find an evolutionary basis in this complex of ideas about mind and body. His theory of memory has three principles. First, he highlighted the historical factor in the transmission and inheritance of collective habits and traditions, what might be called, in Oakeshott’s words, ‘an encapsulated past’. The relation of these inherited feelings to the present ‘does not in any way depend upon its being recollected’.18 Second, he specified the process in which residua of experience are organized into intuitions and perceptions. On any ‘fresh excitation the past feelings are revivable’ and thus lead to the formation of experiences (SP, 34). In common with James Mill and Herbert Spencer, he saw a difference between a sensation in the past and the awareness or recollection of such a sensation, though, unlike James Mill who saw memory as only ‘an image of the sensation’, Lewes differentiated the stages of how sensation leads to consciousness and thought.19 These theories continue to advance the tradition of philosophical accounts of recollection by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and David Hartley, among others,20 especially since the Lockean notion of association already includes self-reflection or self-interpretation.21 The third emphasis in Lewes’s theory was on the social factor in the development of human faculties and on the relationship between different elements in the interpretation of experience (SP, 32). He was aware of the limits of the introspective method. ‘Mind’ and ‘life’ could not be separated. Memory consists in both sentient ‘Mechanism’ and ‘Experience’ (SP, 32) whose interactions are designed to ‘reconcile the à priori intuitional with the experiential theory’ (SP, 144). His adaptational understanding of ‘the General Mind’ (SP, 159) is substantiated by his notions of ‘Memory’, ‘residua’ and the ‘field of personal experience’ (PLM3, 113, 115, 116; original emphases). He saw in human relations the essence of communal memory. Ideas like these are broached and tested in Eliot’s novels and stories. Human experience was a historical factor in Spencer’s earlier ideas. In this, he ‘effectively merged an empiricist account of knowledge with evolutionary theory’.22 Spencer saw the physiological as a necessary basis of psychology and scientific psychology as significant in interpreting social phenomena. Particularly relevant to this study are

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Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

his theories of the instinctive nature of moral sentiment and of the inheritance of moral experience. Regarding the ‘characteristics which could be inherited’, his Lamarckianism is much less restrictive than the theory of Alexander Bain23 and forms a meaningful point of reference for similar concerns in Eliot. In addition, his intention to compound and reconcile rational and determining laws with traditional values of human experience also characterizes Eliot’s basic position. ‘Scientists’ like Spencer and Lewes contributed significantly to the general interest of their time in a variety of evolutionary theories. Together with Charles Darwin, they helped to place an unprecedented emphasis on the concept of the species and the sense of recapitulation.24 Their concern with the nature and function of memory becomes not just a philosophical but a social, psychological, and historical quest. The study of the inner world and affective memory was Eliot’s paramount concern, whose lineage can be more immediately traced back to Wordsworth, among others. The subjective act of the mind always preoccupied her and was frequently explored for its role in the formation of a sense of self. Thus in trying to reconcile the need for free will and her belief in scientific laws, Eliot resembles neither H. T. Buckle, the nineteenth-century British historian, who saw in history the abstract manifestations of universal laws, nor Carlyle, who saw history as divine embodiment. While she believed that the prediction of history could be based on knowledge of the past, she also maintained that the interiority of the human mind might not always be accessible to a general study of historical laws. For her, historical phenomena could not always be adequately accounted for. This results in her intense interest in mystery and prevision, clearly evident in her short story The Lifted Veil. ‘Our angel Reason’ has its limits and therefore needs to be supplemented by ‘Memory’ (SG, 2:348). Nevertheless, Eliot’s moral commitment, which far surpasses that of ‘scientists’ such as Lewes, makes memory into a special kind of knowledge, a knowledge which, as Mary Warnock speaks of Wittgenstein’s similar notion, has ‘a particular meaning or sense of its own’. It is a memory that ‘refers to the past … and we interpret it as containing that reference’.25 The two strands of thought outlined above do not necessarily contradict each other in every way. They ought to be taken, in J. S. Mill’s words, as ‘the two systems of concentric circles’ for what they share.26 Yet it is also true that the diverse and sometimes inconsistent perspectives that they provide intimate a ‘co-habitation’ that is far from harmonious. These strands of thought, judged by definitions

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commonly accepted today, seem to belong to several disciplines. The cross-disciplinary nature of this study is necessary, since in the period under discussion the demarcation between history, sociology, moral philosophy and psychology was not as distinct or well-defined as it is now.27 Only a ‘combined’ approach can help to bring out the complexity of Eliot’s intellectual ‘milieu’. Most of the figures mentioned had a direct or indirect influence on her intellectual formation; Lewes and Spencer had close relationships with her. Yet it would be misleading to assume that these relationships necessarily establish actual historical ‘influence’. It might also be objected that Lewes’s theories seem to have been backdated to an earlier time for reconstructing an intellectual context.28 Yet Lewes himself indicated that he had begun to investigate the ‘physiological mechanism of Feeling and Thought’ in 1862 (FC, I, vi). Many of the ideas expressed in his Study of Psychology were already present in his Physiology of Common Life published in 1859–60, a period during which Eliot’s early fictional works were published. Given the fact that over the next twelve years or so his theories were developed while he was living with Eliot, references to these theories should not pose problems to our sense of chronology. The use of Lewes’s theory of memory in this study is also supported by the fact that the Third Series of his Problems of Life and Mind, in which such theories are most fully developed, was edited and completed by Eliot after his death on the basis of his notes.29 I have chosen a thematic structure for this study, but I have also tried generally to follow the chronology of Eliot’s writings, so as to bring out in each chapter, as much as possible, the close connection between the theme and form of each novel or story. Occasionally I use the terms ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ to help to distinguish two perceptible stages of George Eliot’s writing. I am borrowing Ferdinand Tönnies’s terminology only, not his theories of society. The two terms are used to make a loose distinction between traditional and modern aspects of social life and thus to serve heuristic functions.30 The term ‘Gemeinschaft novels’ is applied loosely to the earlier works: Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner; and the term ‘Gesellschaft novels’ to the later novels: Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The nature of human relations in these works, particularly the impersonal, contractual and individual relations in some of the second group, will, I believe, support such a classification.31 This is not to suggest, though, that communal memory does not constitute a focus of attention in the ‘Gesellschaft

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Memory, History and George Eliot

Memory, History and George Eliot

novels’. The ‘Gemeinschaft novels’ offer Eliot’s initial positions across the diverse earlier patterns of her conception. Starting from Romola, the more traditional way of communal life gives way to the ‘social’ mode, and this changes the framework in which communal memory is explored and reflected on. The earlier works demonstrate an intense interest in the terms and issues central to Eliot’s conception of memory and to the argument of this study: ‘feeling’, ‘environment’, ‘inheritance’, and so on. Her fictional exploration reveals a dialectical relationship between memory as a narrative of interpretation and invention and memory with its ‘immovable roots’ in the past. The complexity of her interest in these two aspects lies, however, in her ambiguous answer to the general questions of how to take a communal past as a prehistory to the present, and of how to preserve this heritage in a spiritually disinherited age. These works intimate an ambivalent attempt both to endow her characters’ ‘environment’ with a supportive role and to question the validity of this environment as a source of ‘self’ as its strong power may constrain and paralyse the moral agency of her characters. Up to Romola, this supportive role is not fundamentally questioned. This is most evident in the unfolding of the characters’ emotional development in a time of drastic social change. As a narrative interacting with collective traditions, Romola brings to bear on intense moments of moral struggle interpretative modes that belong to two distinctive models of historical continuation, thus throwing into relief the altered conception of history in Renaissance Florence. The significant turn in Eliot’s understanding of the moral function of communal memory starts with Felix Holt, where the titular hero seriously explores the possibility of renovating a communal tradition. However, his attempt to modify this tradition with an alternative tradition of culture poses questions about notions such as ‘origin’ and ‘inheritance’ and about his own identity as a reformer. Middlemarch is more concerned with the question of establishing a faith through altruistic aspirations. Yet in exploring the function of altruism as a new spirituality, Middlemarch reveals tensions between an impersonal grounding essential to the concept of ‘humanity’ and the need for personal access to it as a way of self-realization. In mythologizing Dorothea’s spiritual sentiments, the novel reveals a unique capacity of the metaphorical mode of shared insights: such mythologizing may historicize memory without postulating historical distance and may restore a figurative dimension to history without reducing history to mere memory. Daniel Deronda makes a vigorous attempt at recon-

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structing a secular religion. Its study of national consciousness ties together threads of important issues explored in other novels and thus constitutes a very important stage of Eliot’s conception. The imagined nature of Jewish ‘corporate existence’ (ITS, 261) and the mode in which such a tradition may renew or reinvent itself point up the possibility of having a transcendental form of communal memory. The relationship of Jewish national consciousness to English social life becomes evident in the novel’s comments, both implicit and explicit, on English national character. Eliot’s representation of the Jewish nationalist leaders is compounded by a topical concern with the station and duty of the intellectual. The paradoxical relationship between the intellectual and the community is the fundamental problem with which Eliot herself has to grapple; a natural and in some ways inevitable outcome of her lifelong investigation into the role of communal memory.

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Memory, History and George Eliot

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’: Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede

The point is not to possess the past, but to understand the force of its claim upon the present without thereby supposing that such a claim is sovereign, or that contemporaneity is simply swamped or displaced by memory. (Richard Terdiman, Present Past, p. 356; original emphases) ‘Memory’, observes George Henry Lewes, ‘may be best comprehended as a reinstatement of Feeling’ (PLM3, 160). The ‘reinstatement’ of the mentality of English rural communities, particularly the mode in which communal feelings formulate and transmit themselves over generations, is a predominant theme in Eliot’s early fictional works. For the characters, memory as process may mean being seized by these feelings and interpreting them, and memory as result the moral meaning of such specific interpretations. Together they constitute an important aspect of Eliot’s study of the natural history of English rural life. Memory in both senses, like memory in general, is now no longer regarded, as Peter Burke summarizes, as ‘the innocent activities they were once taken to be’: ‘[we] are learning to take account of conscious or unconscious selection, interpretation and distortion’.1 This interpretative and sometimes inventive nature of memory figures prominently in Eliot’s novels and short stories. Yet it is rarely isolated from feelings conceived as an ineradicable link to a past, a past that has been lived through by ancestral and present generations and exerts an inexorable claim on the present. Just as the act of remembering may organize the past, so the formation of happenings in that past – both feelings and events – may shape and condition the 15

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process of narrating the past for the present. To emphasize this inexorable link is to highlight the empirical validity of what David Carr calls ‘human events, or more particularly . . . events that are humanly experienceable’.2 The dialectical relations between memory as interpretative narrative and memory as an indelible link form the focus of this chapter. These relations spell out the complex denotation of the word ‘natural’ in Eliot’s understanding of ‘natural history’. W. J. Harvey has noted that Eliot understood how akin ‘our most serious beliefs may be to the passions of our primitive ancestors’.3 Such an understanding recalls a heated discussion of her time about how moral feelings are formulated and inherited. Several key notions need to be clarified before we discuss the fictional works in detail. These terms are essential to the arguments of this book as a whole and thus deserve careful examination here. Terms such as ‘feeling’ may evoke uses that are important for their epistemological resonance. In the latter part of the nineteenth century in Europe, observes Ian Hacking, ‘The sciences of memory were new … what would previously have been debates on the moral and spiritual plane took place at the level of factual knowledge’.4 This observation offers a contextual clue to the need for Eliot to negotiate between the broadly termed intuitionist and positivist models of knowledge in her understanding, which, however, defies being reduced to either, as is the case with several of her contemporary thinkers.

‘Two systems of concentric circles’ In Eliot’s use of the term ‘fellow-feeling’ (AB, 21:349), the word ‘feeling’ stood for both emotion and moral thinking. It denoted not only the capacity or readiness to feel but also a fact or state of self-reflective and moral consciousness. She was not alone in this. Though not necessarily taken as interchangeable, ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ were evoked more often for the overlap or convergence of their meanings than for their sharp distinction in the writings of a number of thinkers. In so far as the capacity or readiness to feel promises and necessitates interpretation and invention, the fact or state of consciousness seems to be implicated in the perceptual or psychological structure of an awareness of the past, sometimes in the very physical presence of the past. In Comte, ‘emotions’ both suggested moral values and connoted the possibility of being developed or cultivated into a secular religion. In the later writings of Spencer, the conscious operations of thought were set ‘within a naturalistic framework of explanation which presents

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thinking as being only different in degree from feeling’.5 Alexander Bain found that the three terms ‘Feeling, Emotion, and Consciousness’ were hardly distinguishable and might ‘express one and the same fact or attribute of mind’.6 In Lewes’s The Problems of Life and Mind: Third Series, ‘Feeling’ was ‘understood as involving Consciousness’, and ‘very generally the term [Consciousness] is synonymous with Feeling, i.e., Sentience’ (PLM3, 143). J. S. Mill observed that ‘Feeling, in the proper sense of the term, is a genus, of which Sensation, Emotion, and Thought, are subordinate species’.7 Eliot had a clear understanding of how feelings can be associated with thought by way of memory. She was particularly interested in how memory may enrich and develop the moral awareness of her characters. Similarly, altruistic emotions are essential to Comte because, in ordering both feelings and reason, they can perform the role of religion when they triumph over egoistic impulses. In Comte, the preponderant power in human conduct belongs to instincts and emotions. Comtean positivism was, however, further developed by Lewes, as he ‘[added] Bain’s associational psychology and Spencer’s views on evolution and heredity to a basically Comtean methodology and morality’,8 in contrast to Comte who reduced psychology to physiology and, as Lewes pointed out, ‘denied a place among the fundamental sciences to a Psychology pursued on’ ‘the Introspective Method’ (SP, 54). Lewes’s theories open up a wide range of interpretative possibilities. He believed that ‘states of consciousness, whatever their origin, are feelings capable of being re-felt in the forms of images and memories’ (SP, 88; original emphasis) and feelings are the agent that may associate incongruous ideas and images. This theory of memory exemplifies the ‘fundamental law of mental action’, the process in which some ‘neural tremors’ group themselves into ‘a definite sensation’, sensations into ‘perception’, perceptions into ‘conception’ and conceptions into ‘judgments’ (PLM3, 159). The significance of this theory may be better appreciated with the help of the ‘compost heap’ metaphor that Stuart Hampshire uses to distinguish between the two major models of memory: the associational and the organic. He compares the second model to a heap ‘in which all the organic elements, one after another as they are added, interpenetrate each other … each ingredient being at least modified, even transformed, by later ingredients’.9 Around the time Eliot wrote Scenes of Clerical Life, apart from the eighteenthcentury metaphysical model of the mind, which was continued by Sir William Hamilton, among others, phrenology also offered a materialist model of ‘scientific’ interpretation that would seem to overcome 10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

overly imaginative interpretations. In the brain are located not just the intellectual faculties but feelings as well, a view that influenced Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and W. B. Carpenter.10 Yet writings by physiological ‘scientists’ such as Bain were forming a more important tradition as his physiological theory accommodates the view that knowledge of the past experienced by individuals may be coloured by ‘the specific or personal interest’ that belongs to past moments, and that recollection of a past through ‘the narrative of others . . . is modified by the circumstances affecting verbal adhesion’.11 For all his physiological emphasis, W. B. Carpenter also claimed that ‘reminiscence . . . represents, not the actual occurrence, but the modified trace of it. And this is the source of an enormous number of “fallacies of testimony,” which recent experiences of Mesmerism and Spiritualism have brought into strong light.’12 Lewes’s conception, as he points out at the beginning of The Study of Psychology, fuses the tradition of ‘Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Condillac, Hartley, and James Mill’ and that of ‘Cabanis, Gall, and recent physiologists’, both ‘the introspective analysis of the phenomena in their mental aspect’ and ‘the physical aspect’ with ‘the biological conditions’ (SP, 4). He was not the only one to attempt this argument. J. S. Mill, for example, claimed both traditions to be valuable in his A System of Logic. Yet Lewes was able to specify stages in the act of memory and considered their interactions morally meaningful. Of course, to associate memory with morality was nothing new. Ancient philosophers such as Aristotle emphasized this and so did later critical philosophers such as Locke, or natural philosophers such as David Hartley who advanced Locke’s theory by endowing associations with values. Samuel Rogers, writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, explicitly commented on such a connection in his Pleasures of Memory (1792),13 as did Thomas Brown, the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind.14 Lewes’s theory is significant to the extent that he upheld the associative function of images without letting it become the limit of their capacities. Lewes also recognized that ‘The Relativity of Feeling’ becomes ‘the basis of the Relativity of Knowledge’ (FC, I, 255), since the formation of feeling involves ‘Sensible Impressions, i.e., definite Sensations’ and ‘Inferences, which are the reproductions and recombinations of such Impressions’ (FC, I, 256). Spencer, though holding on to a physiological basis of sense experience, does recognize ‘The Relativity of Relations between Feelings’, to the extent that our understanding of the external world does not necessarily correspond to the reality of that world. Yet, unlike

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Eliot and Lewes who look for correlation between the two, Spencer assumes that feelings ‘have no resemblance to the agents beyond consciousness which cause them’ (PP, I, 210) and believed, according to Lewes, that ‘a change in the point of view alters the character of the events, and that psychological facts cease to be facts of the organism when they are viewed subjectively’ (SP, 60). Eliot appreciated the enormous potential that memory offered for interpretation. Lewes’s theory can best support her understanding of how memory is evoked and mediated by images and words. Both of them were very sensitive to the nuances and depths of the human psyche evoked by images and words. She went even further. For her, verbal narration of communal feelings cannot ensure that such feelings will necessarily be passed on in the same way as scientific knowledge, which is not as susceptible to subjective alteration. These feelings may transcend such scientific formulations as the ‘psychological evolution of sociological material’ (FC, I, 134). The point of outlining the process of association is thus to see how memories of early life may ‘still live in us, and transform our perception into love’ (MF, 1:5:36). Her understanding may best be elucidated with Michael Polanyi’s more recent distinction, even when the imaginative nature of science in her day is allowed for: traditionalism, which requires us to believe before we know, and in order that we may know, is based on a deeper insight into the nature of knowledge and of the communication of knowledge than is a scientific rationalism that would permit us to believe only explicit statements based on tangible data and derived from these by a formal inference, open to repeated testing.15 As Eliot herself observed in 1868, ‘The old phrases should not give way to scientific explanation, for speech is to a great extent like sculpture, expressing observed phenomena & remaining true in spite of Harvey & Bichat’ (E, 436). In contrast to the Comtean insistance on ‘that necessary and permanent subordination of imagination to observation’ (EC, 139), her attitude is less ‘scientific’ in that she is sensitive to both the literal and metaphorical natures of communal feelings. This perhaps explains why Comte can be seen to represent the only ‘nonreligious morality’ that is ‘a system in a low key; a little common sense, a little axiom about human nature and its power of doing good, and a little incentive – all quickly intelligible, and rational in easily explicable terms’.16

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Of course, memory has been associated with interpretation or invention from ancient times onward. As early as the eighth century BC, Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek poets, already used in his epic Theogony the allegory of Mnemosyne, who was presented as both the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses. Carlyle reminded his readers in 1830 of the same affinity in his essay ‘On History’, though later in 1843 in his Past and Present, this claim was balanced by his anxious need to ascertain the physicality of memory, as ‘traces still existing will verify’ (WTC, X, 51) the incidents in the history of ‘St. Edmund’s Town and Monastery’ (WTC, X, 50; original emphasis).17 In 1858, the year in which Scenes of Clerical Life was published and Adam Bede was in the making, Thomas Brown, while linking this ‘happy allegorical illustration’ to ‘the Virtues’, showed a full awareness of Mnemosyne’s relationship to ‘the Muses’ being the result of ‘all the exercises of fancy and the understanding’.18 Carlyle’s acute awareness of such a mode of remembering parallels Eliot’s perception of memory as metaphorical. This is significant because it was only during the late 1860s and early 1870s that ‘the implications of [Dugald] Stuart’s point [made in 1792] that memory always involves the reinvention of the past were felt’, at a time when the existence of the material traces of memories in the brain was increasingly questioned;19 it appears that, before this time, Eliot had already engaged with this issue in detail in some of her early works. Similar interest followed later as, for example, in F. H. Bradley who in 1874 saw this imaginative connection with the past in terms of ‘a process of constant and habitual corrected recollection’ and ‘a mediated sequence of phenomena’. His attempt to transcend the intuitionist–positivist dichotomy has its own subtlety; for him the ‘mediated’ past as ‘historical fact … is never the fiction of a random invention’.20 Although ‘all things’, as Carlyle observes, ‘have two faces’ (WTC, X, 57), the romantic-historical attitude towards natural history in Eliot’s works, when expressed in a language resonant with positivist associations, creates its own ambiguities. The mere suggestion that moral or racial feelings may be transmitted or, to use a word of more cachet in her time, ‘inherited’, would cause anxiety in her readers, as this was an unsettled issue.21 What exactly does ‘inherit’ mean? How can one have an ‘inherited share in the hard-won treasures of thought, which generations of painful toil have laid up for the race of man’ (MF, 4:3:252)? Spencer would uphold, à la the French biologist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, an unconscious physiological transmission, the ‘a priori truth’ that ‘[implies] cognitions that have been rendered

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organic by immense accumulations of experiences, received partly by the individual, but mainly by all ancestral individuals whose nervous system he inherits’.22 Memory, when tethered to physiology, seems to defy attempts of imaginative invention. In Lewes, on the other hand, moral intuition can be regarded as ‘à priori intuitional doctrine’ (SP, 151): ‘Experiences become organised as Instincts, and generalised as Knowledge; Knowledge itself, in its highest stages, becomes organised as Intuitions and Logical Forms, which have the facility and necessity of Instinct’ (PLM3, 89). Yet ‘its explanation lies in the principles of experience’ (SP, 151). The examples that Lewes uses either prove or disprove the Lamarckian hypothesis – he does recognize the transmission of tendencies but is not very precise about the extent to which moral feelings can be inherited. His notions of ‘organised impressions’, ‘residua’ and ‘habits’ consist in both the ‘acquired dispositions of experience’ and the ‘connate dispositions of the mechanism which we inherit’ (PLM3, 54). Eliot was informed by all these theories. Instances suggesting various possibilities abound in her novels, in which we often hear the bell of a priori knowledge ringing, though faint and modest.23 In ‘Amos Barton’, the narrator suggests metaphorically that Milly Barton ‘did not take all her love from the earth when she died. She had left some of it in Patty’s heart’ (‘Barton’, ‘Conclusion’:71). The legacy of Milly Barton has a philosophical overtone as well. Fellow-feeling in general springs from ‘the sympathetic impulses that need no law’ (R, 9:101). It is part of the character’s habit and can be ‘a sweet habit of the blood’ (DD, 3:18); otherwise, ‘how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?’ (SM, 1:4). Such notions seemed important to Eliot, as she found in H. T. Buckle’s History of Civilization in England ‘some strangely unphilosophic opinions’ such as his belief that ‘there is no such thing as race or hereditary transmission of qualities’ (L, II, 415; original emphases). Nevertheless, the uncertain prospect of transmission still seemed troubling. ‘It must be remembered’, as one historian reminds us, ‘that until the development of genetics the details of how and why mutations are produced remained extremely vague.’ 24 While it is true that in the Darwinian age the term ‘inherit’ or ‘heredity’ might yield an immediate association with things derived physiologically and that Eliot’s own discovery later in the 1870s of Darwin’s concern with inheritance called her attention to the physiological implications that heredity may have for animals and plants,25 the Darwinian myth could have in fact overridden the other side of what equally charac-

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

terizes the age ‘when “a fact is not quite a scientific fact at all” and when “the remnant of the mythical” is at its most manifest’. Moreover, ‘in the then current state of genetic knowledge many of the processes of inheritance were beyond explanation’.26 Physiological transmission was taken to be a possibility, not necessarily a universal truth. And ‘the transmission of environmentally-induced traits to the next generation is just what does happen in culture—it is a truism to say it’.27 Lewes’s illustrations to support his argument for inheritance reflect precisely such a situation. They often concentrate on the moral consequences of physiological transmission instead of the mode of such transmission (SP, 147–8). The same interest in the ‘mental aspect’ must have been one of the reasons for Eliot to read Darwin’s book on emotions. In her early novels and short stories, such an interest has already started to show. She was perhaps conscious of the ambiguity of the word ‘hereditary’ when she explained some time later that the subject of her dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy was ‘a symbol of the part which is played in the general human lot by hereditary conditions in the largest sense, and of the fact that what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions’ (Cross, III, 43). The sense of physiological inheritance did not lead Eliot to ignore the persistent impact of experience. She did take note in her readings of the idea that ‘inherited experience is a sort of pre-existence’ (GEN, II, 73). Yet, unlike Thomas Hardy’s narrator who more than three decades later was definite about Tess’s ‘incautiousness of character inherited from her race’,28 Eliot’s characters send out mixed messages (for example, Deronda, Tito, Fedalma, Esther Lyon and Maggie Tulliver). Deronda is a special case with his ‘inherited yearning’ (DD, 63:697), who has the yearning commensurate with his descent before his racial or communal identity is revealed. For Maggie, her awareness of fellow-feeling is preceded by a knowledge of her affinity with her community. It is this knowledge that enables her to absorb communal insights and beliefs. If she leaves St Ogg’s, she will be ‘cut off from the past’ (MF, 7:2:436) and break ‘the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on earth’ (MF, 6:14:417). Not surprisingly, in the classroom of the night school, Adam Bede feels ‘a momentary stirring of the old fellow-feeling’, a sympathy for those rough men ‘humbly labouring through their reading lesson’ (AB, 21:349). The unconscious governing of these feelings compels the characters to cling to their ‘medium’ much beyond their own choosing. Eliot’s uses of the words ‘inheritance’ and ‘hereditary’ thus connote a broad cultural sense, which may include a physiological connection

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as well as the result of living together and being influenced in the process. The loose application of the word ‘hereditary’ and, for that matter, the notion ‘to inherit’, is not only typical of, but central to, her depiction of the characters’ concrete and historical environment. If the characters inherit feelings, they obtain the affective states largely because of, not in spite of, their familial or communal lineage. The validity of the notion of ‘inherited feeling’ thus lies in the context of its use.29 Because the ordinary and ‘scientific’ uses of the word ‘hereditary’ in her time drew their distinctions somewhat differently from modern usage, the notion of ‘hereditary’ or ‘inherit’ provided her with ample opportunities to address both the intuitionist and positivist connotations. This dual perspective also defines what Spencer calls the ‘all-essential’ influence of ‘environing actions and relations’ (PP, I, 391). In the definitions of the word ‘environment’ current in Eliot’s time, these actions are essential and unavoidable; yet they are unpredictable and latent as they condition and shape the characters emotionally. They may ‘[take] the form’, as with Adam Bede, ‘of principle in his mind’ and are ‘knowledge to be acted on, as much as the knowledge that damp will cause rust’ (AB, 19:316). To the Victorians, the term ‘environment’ would have sounded differently from the way it can sound today. It hardly meant any material or economic conditions, but already had a modern connotation derived from its basic sense of being surrounded: it stood for ‘the conditions under which any person or thing lives or is developed; the sum-total of influences which modify and determine the development of life or character’ (OED). Reading through all the examples cited under this sense in the OED, we shall not be surprised to find that the organicist, holistic and developmental senses are exclusively Victorian. In the second edition of his Principles of Psychology (1870–2),30 Spencer discussed ‘the division of the environment into two halves, soil and air’ (PP, I, 301). In 1874, Henry Sidgwick indicated in The Method of Ethics that ‘The organism is continually adapted to its environment’ (‘environment’, OED). The sense of ‘environment’ implied in J. S. Mill’s theory of ethology, or the ‘science’ of character formation, is another case in point. Comte used the word in a similar way: ‘The harmony between the living being and the corresponding medium (as I shall call its environment) evidently characterizes the fundamental condition of life’ (PPAC, I, 360; original emphasis). It is possible that this modern connotation was the very reason why Eliot suspected an inconsistency in Comte’s understanding, apropos of the influence of the environment, that ‘the living are

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

“de plus en plus dominés par les morts”’, and that ‘the influence of the environment on Man is a continually decreasing one, his reaction on the world greater & greater’ (GEN, I, 184). In this case, much depends on which senses of the words ‘environment’ and ‘world’ are meant. The earliest use of this modern sense which dates back to 1828 can be traced to Carlyle when he talked in his essay on Goethe about ‘an environment of circumstances’ (‘environment’, OED).31 In his essay ‘Diderot’, Carlyle found it ‘a great truth’ that man ‘by necessity takes his complexion, vesture, embodiment, from these [Circumstances], and is in all practical manifestations modified by them almost without limit’ (WTC, XXVIII, 229). Carlyle’s novel use had a great impact upon his readers. The three-dimensional, historical and concrete nature of ‘environment’ found its way into the thinking mode of a generation. When Lewes talked about external conditions, what he really meant was ‘the collective accumulations of centuries, condensed in knowledge, beliefs, prejudices, institutions, and tendencies’ (FC, I, 124). Lewes’s definition suggests that these new senses take ‘environment’ as a kind of external knowledge that may be, as with Eliot, internalized through imagination and memory. The potential of ‘de-condensing’ these ‘collective accumulations’ for interpretation is something easily overlooked in the other Victorian uses of the term mentioned above. Yet the function of such accumulations also asserts an almost inalienable raison d’être of their own, since any change in their influence may inevitably reshape the recollecting perspective of individuals growing up in a given environment. ‘A human being in this aged nation of ours’, observes one of Eliot’s narrators, ‘is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences’ (M, 40:399).

Interpretability and ‘material links’ The interpretative capacity hidden in the ‘environing actions’ is extensively explored in Eliot’s early works. What is, for instance, the nature of an ‘environment’ such as Milby and Hayslope? In ‘Janet’s Repentance’, the narrator constantly talks about Milby as if it has a concerted ‘mind’. The ‘Milby mind’ (‘JR’, 3:217), like all average minds, thinks, interprets, and is, furthermore, capable of resorting to its memory to single out someone like Mr Tryan, the new evangelical parson, as ‘a great anomaly’ (‘JR’, 3:217). It defines for itself what constitutes communal knowledge, ranging from incidents and experiences to spiritual belief. ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’ provides insight into

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how such a ‘mind’ works. ‘The parishioners who were old enough to remember [Mrs Gilfil’s] arrival were not generally gifted with descriptive powers’ (‘GL’, 1:84). As a result, the life force that sustains memory within the village rests in someone like Mrs Patten, who is the ‘one exception … whose strong memory and taste for personal narrative made her a great source of oral tradition in Shepperton’ (‘GL’, 1:85). Being able to evoke descriptive details from the past thus becomes a creative act, for events alone will not suffice for and as knowledge; only when events are transformed by a ‘personal narrative’ can memories acquire a lasting power to become knowledge. Likewise, Mr Irwin is quick to find Mrs Poyser ‘quite original in her talk … one of those untaught wits that help to stock a country with proverbs’ (AB, 33:93). The narrator in Adam Bede is eager to send us back to how words and images may provoke memories. ‘The finest language’, the narrator tells us, ‘is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as “light,” “sound,” “stars,” “music,” … it is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful … stirring the long-winding fibres of your memory, and enriching your present with your most precious past’ (AB, 50:310–11). This particular power of words and images is best demonstrated by the dramatic illustration later in Romola, where Baldassarre at the garden party is desperate to ‘[hold] all things in the grasp of language’. As soon as the words start to make sense to him, Baldassarre acquires full access to his memory ‘like one who enters on a great inheritance’ (R, 38:339): ‘He saw a name, and the images of deeds rose with it; he saw the mention of a deed, and he linked it with a name’ (R, 38:340). They are ‘the magic signs that conjure up a world’ (R, 38:339). The purpose of tracing this process is to see how sensations lead to feelings and eventually give rise to struggling perceptions or thoughts. This view advances contemporary psychological theories such as Bain’s that see the function of the ‘recal [sic] of names by things and of things by names’ as ‘bringing in additional links to aid a feeble tie’ in memory.32 Words and images thus open up the possibility of making past mental states more intimately discerning through its cognitive significance. We may recall Lewes’s idea that ‘Perception is the Logic of Sensations’ (PLM3, 457). Perception here is not just the consequence of recollection, but also the organizing element that makes recollection meaningful.33 Eliot regards such memory as superseding the normal recollection of past events, since potentially it can clarify experience and provide knowledge. In Lewes’s words, ‘Each perception is itself

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

the revival of many past experiences, and is by them apperceived’ (PLM3, 106–7; original emphasis). While Mrs Patten can indulge in her free description of Mrs Gilfil in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’, Adam Bede is able to understand the recollection of the past as valuable because it brings with it ‘a sense of added strength’ (AB, 54:365). Likewise, in Middlemarch, the past comes back to Dorothea ‘with larger interpretation’ (M, 62:621). Language can act as a medium of transmission because social groups are themselves, as Paul Connerton points out, ‘made up of a system, or systems, of communication’.34 This emphasis on language, however, begs one question. While words may sustain a vaguely felt moral tradition of a community, they are not always the tradition itself. Adam Bede’s understanding of how notions and feelings work differently highlights this important aspect: ‘It isn’t notions sets people doing the right thing—it’s feelings. It’s the same with the notions in religion as it is with math’matics’ (AB, 17:272). Yet, it is equally true in Adam Bede that the move from notions to feelings is precisely the move of interpretation and understanding. In terms of the sources of the moral sense, Eliot is more willing than Lewes is to reconcile organic experience and intuitive sensation.35 Nevertheless, while they both give some thought to ‘[the] tendency of feeling and expression to react upon one another’,36 neither of them sufficiently spells out the specific forms of this interaction. This is perhaps why language is not the only means by which one can have access to the past. Memory depends on sympathy and love as well. The love of Humanity, predominant in Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, is largely couched in the terms of Christian love. This love is like a ‘fountain’ or ‘as kindly a warmth as the morning sunlight’ (‘JR’, 8:247). For Caterina Sarti, love can grow only if it is ‘nourished by memories as well as hopes’ (‘GL’, 19:180); even for someone like Robert Dampster, memory of his mother’s love for him in childhood remains ‘a nucleus of healthy life in an organ hardening by disease’ (‘JR’, 7:237). Hence ‘there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues’ (‘JR’, 7:233). Memory in Eliot is, both literally and metaphorically, revivable with accompanying feelings which are open to further interpretation. Sympathy is bemused as ‘the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love’ (AB, 50:302). Interpretability may nevertheless generate a sense of relativity and unpredictability in meaning – a mode of ‘inbuilt interpretation’, as Frank Kermode calls it.37 Emotional anticipation and recapitulation may entail an uncertainty in the construction of moral meaning. They

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also direct towards alternatives and possibilities.38 If, by addressing ‘illimitable’ interpretability (M, 3:24), Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede permit diverse extensions of meaning and allow for relativity and uncertainty, they also demonstrate that moral meaning does have a firm hold on emotional life. If the truth that we derive from collective insights is relative so that ‘Life cradles within Life’ and ‘the Present becomes the matrix of the Future, as the Past was of the Present’,39 the certainty of and about a past can only come from these diverse sources. Eliot is preoccupied with the emergence, accidental or inevitable, of what is certain from what is uncertain. This is the very process through which moral truth can be striven for and validated. If communal insights are recast in and reshaped by a present perspective of narration, to what extent can one have access to the village past? If imagination, as the narrator declares in Adam Bede, ‘is a licensed trespasser’ (AB, 6:103), is it then a free spirit that in trespassing on the past subsumes it in the present and necessarily turns it into the present? Eliot wanted to be not only precise but also concrete in her study of natural history. Around 1857, in her essay ‘History, Biography, Voyages and Travels’, she called for more attention to ‘life outside of courts, and senates, and battle-fields’.40 For her, as for Carlyle and other nineteenth-century historians such as J. R. Green, the physicality of a place can be a symbolic shorthand that both conceals and reveals the formation of human history, and is vital to, in Carlyle’s words, ‘recording the presence, bodily concrete coloured presence of things’.41 He was not an average man. Yet such men as he are reared here and there in every generation of our peasant artisans—with an inheritance of affections nurtured by a simple family life of common need and common industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in skilful courageous labour … Their lives have no discernible echo beyond the neighbourhood where they dwelt, but you are almost sure to find there some good piece of road, some building, some application of mineral produce, some improvement in farming practice, some reform of parish abuses, with which their names are associated by one or two generations after them. (AB, 19:320–1) Green’s conception of the experiential basis of memory is equally emphatic. In his Stray Studies, he attaches great importance to the history of the common people. Their story has to be located in an overwhelming array of details and events: 10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

there is hardly better historic training for a man than to set him frankly in the streets of a quiet little town like Bury St. Edmunds, and bid him work out the history of the men who lived and died there. In the quiet, quaintly-named streets, in the town-mead and the market-place, in the lord’s mill beside the stream, in the ruffed and furred brasses of its burghers in the church, lies the real life of England and Englishmen … It is just in the pettiness of its details, in its commonplace incidents, in the want of marked features and striking events, that the real lesson of the whole story lies.42 It is only in this sense of physical presence that the narrator of Adam Bede reminds us: ‘There are faces which nature charges with a meaning and pathos not belonging to the single human soul . . . but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations’ (AB, 26:430). The physical presence of the past, nevertheless, also suggests that there is more to memory than just interpretation. In her review of R.W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect, Eliot lamented over the futility of ‘retaining the spirit along with the forms of the past’ (E, 29). In Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, that general idea is very much tested. Without negating that earlier position altogether, these works present how various forms of the village past may reappear with its spirit. These forms of the past are never simply subsumed in, or superseded by, the present effort to select or interpret. The narrator of Adam Bede is insistent on this point: ‘Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force’ (AB, 50:302). In Eliot’s early novels, one’s affinity with one’s ‘land’ and ‘place’, or the ‘medium’ in which one moves about, is an experiential connection that contains an ineradicable claim from the past. Adam Bede provides a philosophical outline of the symbiotic interdependence of the physical reality of one’s environment and the sediments of human feelings that give meaning to it. We hear Mrs Poyser protesting: ‘but I should be loath to leave th’ old place, and the parish where I was bred and born, and father afore me. We should leave our roots behind us, I doubt, and niver thrive again’ (AB, 32:91). Any change in habitual life will be threatening to the Poysers, for their ‘habitat’ Hall Farm is not just a dwelling place, but the location of their habitual life. The extent of psychological discomfort caused by such displacement may vary for each character, but the experience of discomfort itself is perhaps an undeniable outcome. Eliot offers an interesting simile for the persistence of such a discomfort: ‘Our habitual life is like a wall hung with pictures, which has been shone on by

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the suns of many years: take one of the pictures away, and it leaves a definite blank space, to which our eyes can never turn without a sensation of discomfort’ (‘JR’, 10:254). More crucially, apart from causing psychological trauma, the removal of physical continuity may put an end to narrative continuity. This theme continues into The Mill on the Floss. When he is prompted to buy Mr Tulliver’s Dorlcote Mill in The Mill on the Floss, Mr Wakem knows, as much as Tulliver does, that this is taking away most of the physical reality of Tulliver’s life, which, predictably, sends him to the family Bible to search for the certainty of shared continuity. Memory thus needs such locations to take shape and dwell in: this idea can be clarified with the narrator’s comment in Silas Marner on Marner’s exile from the church in Lantern Yard, which is supposedly ‘the fostering home of his religious emotions’ (SM, 2:21): ‘Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life … on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land’ (SM, 2:20). Earlier in Adam Bede, the seasonal changes, as many critics have pointed out, suggest a movement of life punctuated by rhythms and rituals such as birth and death, marriage and harvest supper. Moreover, these archetypal activities are capable of sustaining their own continuation in history. Timeless in themselves, they have helped to sustain the presence of a past that not only subsists, but must also be experienced on its own terms, in the present. They acquire the role of historical witness, analogous to that of the permanent presence of architecture described by John Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture as maintaining a ‘sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable’, which ‘connects forgotten and following ages with each other’.43 While rituals tend to be registered in physical sensations, the evocation of sensation becomes primary, with or without interpretation, so that, for Eliot’s narrator, ‘The keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtle nerve filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations’ (‘JR’, 11:259).

Dialectical relations The rhythms of external events are not external to the characters; the regular rituals and festivities tend to regulate the emotions of the Hayslope community but without limiting its development. These events may structure the orders of future narratives, but may not

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

exhaust all of their significance, which depends on the speaker or listener who will further proliferate such memory. The intrinsic connections between memory as retrospective narrative and memory as an inexorable link to the past constitute the mode of natural history of village life. The tangible nature of the funeral service for his father in the church forms part of Adam Bede’s memory: ‘the church service was the best channel he could have found for his mingled regret, yearning, and resignation … its recurrent responses and the familiar rhythm of its collects, seemed to speak for him as no other form of worship could have done’ (AB, 18:300). When Hetty’s story gets told in the future, the pattern of past happenings provides a certain sequential order for narrating them and conditions the plot design. The rhythm of the villagers’ emotional changes is thus counterpointed to the rhythm of the pastoral landscape; there is only limited presence of time in that landscape but there are numerous prescriptive means of measuring it. Such rhythm also provides the narrator with the opportunity of highlighting the monotony of predictability in such a landscape. The language of seasonal movement is, nevertheless, fundamental to the presentation of the characters’ moral lives. In spite of the fact that what has happened to Hetty, Adam, and Dinah is new to the memory of their community, the marriage bells keep on reiterating age-old conventions, or, rather, keep alive the spirit of the past, which can only be revered, but must not be dispossessed. In this sense, the meaning of Hetty’s story has little interpretative privilege over this ‘environing’ presence. Adam’s final report on Arthur provides an apt description that captures such a persistence: ‘Why, he’s altered and yet not altered’ (AB, ‘Epilogue’:376). The subsisting presence is capable of externalizing the meaning of new events. The archetypal rituals lend a universal form to the stories of Hetty, Adam and Arthur, while their personal interpretation rescues the stories from being merely predictable, what would simply prove Mrs Poyser’s time-tested wisdom. The Poysers and the Bedes need Hetty’s child-murder to arrive at a renewed understanding of their own way of life. But for moral insights to become and remain insights, such renewed understanding needs to be mediated through the language of village memory. The grammar, if not the semantics, of such a ‘language’ still resides in the regular rituals, reconfirmed in the chapter headings of Adam Bede – ‘Church’, ‘Going to the Birthday Feast’, ‘Dinner-Time’, ‘The Health-Drinking’, ‘The Games’, ‘The Dance’, ‘The Betrothal’, ‘The Harvest Supper’ and ‘Marriage Bells’. Carlyle was attracted to the connection between these two natures of

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memory and asked: ‘Has the mind its cycles and seasons like Nature, varying from the fermentation of werden to the clearness of seyn; and this again and again; so that the history of a man is like the history of the world he lives in?’44 The language of the narrator poignantly captures such a correlation when anticipating Hetty’s tragedy in ‘[perfect] weather’ in July: ‘Nature seems to make a hot pause just then—all the loveliest flowers are gone; the sweet time of early growth and vague hopes is past; and yet the time of harvest and ingathering is not come, and we tremble at the possible storms that may ruin the precious fruit in the moment of its ripeness’ (AB, 22:373). As a form of representation, this language is beyond choice; ‘These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes . . . these furrowed and grassy fields … such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination’ (MF, 1:5:36). What demands to be remembered may condition how we remember, though not entirely what we remember. Such, it appears, is also the meaning of parades and ceremonies in Eliot’s other novels. Yet an analogy in ‘The Harvest Supper’ chapter in Adam Bede may help us to appreciate better the regulatory yet flexible nature of such ritualistic rhythms: ‘Now, the great ceremony of the evening was to begin—the harvest-song, in which every man must join: he might be in tune, if he liked to be singular, but he must not sit with closed lips. The movement was obliged to be in triple time; the rest was ad libitum’ (AB, 53:350; original emphasis). The emphasis on physical presence indicates that what is at issue is not whether the past still exists as an event or entity, but rather whether the link with the past depends on such an event or entity to be visibly and palpably established when it subsists in the moral meaning and interpretation of the present.45 This is a point made clearly in ‘Janet’s Repentance’, concerning how present interpretation inevitably relies on the physical registration of past experience: ‘Do not philosophic doctors tell us that we are unable to discern so much as a tree, except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations … our discernment of men’s motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience’ (‘JR’, 11:258). Our ‘cunning’ may be ‘unconscious’, but this is precisely how ‘past and separate sensations’ make their presence discernible and known. No wonder to an imaginative landscape gardener in The Mill on the Floss, ‘it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid’ (MF, 2:1:134).

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Such ‘immovable’ certainty (MF, 2:1:133) and the reorganizing narrative often ‘mutate’ into each other. Impressions may have the potential of solidifying into events, when repeated memory is believed by the characters to have acquired the certainty of reality.46 The ‘transmutation’ is instrumental to knowledge on both communal and personal levels. Hetty’s chiasmic wish is typical: all the warmth of family and familiar fields ‘was what she would like to wake up to as a reality’ and ‘all the feverish life she had known … a short nightmare’ (AB, 36:125). In ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’, Caterina is most hurt when she believes that Anthony Wybrow has deserted her for Miss Assher: Wybrow ‘can forget everything: how he used to say he loved me’ (‘GL’, 5:124). For Caterina, her memory and his forgetfulness are largely subjective, so much so that she herself knows that his forgetfulness is only her speculation. ‘“Oh, it is cruel, it is cruel!” she burst out again aloud, as all those love-moments in the past returned upon her’ (‘GL’, 5:124). Here ‘by repeatedly picturing’ past experiences, Caterina is able to entertain ideas that attain what to W. B. Carpenter is ‘a force and vividness which equals or even exceeds that which the actual memory of them would afford’.47 The reader of course knows that her memory of cruelty is adolescent because her love depends very much on fantasy. For this cruelty to mature, it needs to be mellowed through intention, resolution and fulfilment, stages in the visible momentum of consequentiality. Caterina’s memory of cruelty lacks the profuse presence of melodrama essential to tragedy, for tragedy depends on both the agony of human predicament and adverse forces: Wybrow has hardly responded to her anguish. Yet when she believes she has stabbed Wybrow, there is something tragic about it, generating enough pathos that she has been dealt a cruel hand. What happens in between? It appears that common sense and shared assumptions – all the follies of wisdom – have blurred the boundaries between an interpretative and an actual link to the past. The blurring lends a touch of ingenuity to the plot. Mr Gilfil’s sense of justice and love for Caterina have convinced him, even when evidence is thin, that Wybrow is taking advantage of Caterina’s feelings. After all, Wybrow is the one who has gone to Sir Christopher to push for Gilfil’s marriage to Caterina. Caterina adopts Mr Gilfil’s view without further questioning, relying on his ‘clerical’ judiciousness and his trustworthiness as a friend. Mr Bates’s innocent remark about the supposedly forthcoming wedding of Wybrow and Miss Assher only further strengthens Caterina’s assumption when there is little for her to verify. The skirmishes and confrontations between Miss Assher and

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Caterina have been set off and spurred on by a recollected congeries of incidents, misreadings and pretences. When we find Caterina no longer able to bear all this, the fictional narrative itself enacts the movement of her mind: it starts with a combination of a certainty and an assumption but ends with the effects of taking interpretation as existing conditions, thus covertly conferring on Caterina’s belief a materiality in the process: ‘Miss Assher’s beauty, and the nearness of the wedding, had come upon her like the pressure of a cold hand, rousing her from confused dozing to a perception of hard, familiar realities’. This is why to characters like her ‘words are facts, and, even when known to be false, have a mastery over their smiles and tears’ (‘GL’, 7:132). The impact of the actual link to the past may be seen more clearly in its absence. When Janet, worn out by her battered life, slips into sleep, ‘that uneasy slumber … is only better than wretched waking, because the life we seemed to live in it determines no wretched future, because the things we do and suffer in it are but hateful shadows, and leave no impress that petrifies into an irrevocable past’ (‘JR’, 16:279–80). The mental suspension of such a past points toward the capacity of this lived past ‘to ground or norm interpretations, so that [their] relativism might be brought into contact with a principled and nuanced complex of constraints’.48 When memory consists of vague impressions and has to be filtered through the lens of the present, the continuation of memory may rely on external presences. When Amos Barton is forced to leave Shepperton by the Revd Mr Carpe’s decision to replace him, the narrator tells us with good-humoured sympathy that ‘Amos was one who clung to all the material links between his mind and the past. His imagination was not vivid, and required the stimulus of actual perception’ (‘Barton’, 9:69). Here, ‘the material links’ are Shepperton, the ‘friends who knew his sorrows’ (‘Barton’, 9:69) and his wife Milly’s grave. He is brought to ruins by poverty and the exacerbating overstay of Countess Czerlaski, which together lead to Milly’s death from hardship. His suffering is, in a way, caused by the entrenched ‘insights’ of villagers like Mr Fellowes, Mr Ely and Mr Cleves, who misread his supposedly ‘ambiguous’ relationship with the Countess. Ironically, these people have contributed to both his past miseries and present consolation since they are the very community that in the end turn around to sympathize with him once they know the true story. What is striking here is that sorrow itself is apt to fade into oblivion if not turned into tangible presence. Consciousness of past sorrows cannot provide a version of the past unless such a past

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

reincarnates itself in material forms such as friends or graves. Yet still, for Amos, these links matter not just because they are a physical means to retrieve the narratable past, but rather because they are the object of his ‘actual perception’ (‘Barton’, 9:69) that can enable him to ward off the threat of uprootedness, both mentally and physically: he needs the certainty of the present so that his connection with the past can be a blending of materiality and imagination, opaque yet comfortable and comforting. The narrator returns to his need for this physical certainty again when observing Amos’s visit to Milly’s tomb years later: ‘He stood a few minutes reading over and over again the words on the tombstone, as if to assure himself that all the happy and unhappy past was a reality’ (‘Barton’, 10:71). The narrator is insightful in recognizing how material presence may be wilfully transformed into a means of imagining the past. Emphasizing the need for such presence may marginalize the mental process of reconstructing its physicality. The risk is, however, worth taking. Instead of being a mere relic from the past, the tombstone appears to Barton, as to Proust, as ‘something … common both to the past and to the present’, which nevertheless ‘is much more essential than either of them’.49 Eliot also warns against the danger in mere verbal claim to a direct access to the past, as such claim may empty this accessibility of its essence. ‘Janet’s Repentance’, for example, starts by dismissing the naive ‘wisdom’ in asserting such a connection as a ‘fact’. The warning is necessary because, as Gillian Beer points out, ‘The axis of the factual and the marvellous was balanced curiously for the Victorians. In their use of the word fact they often combine the idea of performance with that of observation … Moreover, fact in much Victorian writing partakes still of the heroic connotations of its cognate form, feat.’50 The breaking down of a direct link is vividly presented when Robert Dempster and Luke Byles argue over the different etymologies of the word ‘Presbyterian’ that each believes to be correct. To Mr Tomlinson, who tries to pacify the confrontation, ‘history was a process of ingenious guessing’ (‘JR’, 1:192). Mr Byles, unable to tolerate this woolly attitude, insists right away that his understanding of who the Presbyterians were is a ‘fact’: ‘It’s not a question of likelihood; it’s a known fact’ (‘JR’, 1:192). Robert Dempster thinks that either his version must be right or there will be no fact, because as someone who is ‘known through the county, entrusted with the affairs of half a score parishes’, he should have the authority to override whatever has already been circulating as a known fact (‘JR’, 1:192). These different attitudes effectively distinguish between memory based on events and

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memory based on expedient invention. Although Mr Byles has never doubted the absolute authority of what he believes to be facts, when the seriousness of all three characters is deflated by the comic relief of dramatic irony, the narration shifts its emphasis. What prompts Mr Byles to action is the rhetorical power of being able then and there to claim memories as facts – a triumph of the moment; because of this, whether his version is true to the past is no longer the issue.51 His recollection may very well be correct; yet the melodrama of rhetorical exchanges has marginalized, if not devalued, the authority of his knowledge. What the narrator is more interested in is the extent to which Byles and Dempster care about the subjective control over what will go down as the insights of their grand local community. This exemplifies the need to transcend mere rhetoric, and thus to follow, in the words of one of Eliot’s narrators, ‘a higher logic than the verbal’ (MF, 6:2:335). This is a sense of transcendence that offers a more measured understanding of rhetorical power than the understanding of Carlyle’s ‘Editor’ in Past and Present who asks, ‘Who can doubt, after what we have said [about the history of St Edmundsbury], that there was a Monastery here at one time?’ (WTC, X, 52). Likewise, the physical presence of the past may not guarantee its meaningfulness for the present. We are told that Mr Dempster’s playbill for his ‘memorable campaign against the Tryanites’ (‘JR’, 10:252) ‘ought by all means to be preserved amongst the materials of our provincial religious history’ (‘JR’, 9:249). To this purpose, the narrator would ‘subjoin a faithful copy’ (‘JR’, 9:249). The phrase ‘faithful copy’ here is effective. If ‘faithful’ means being true to the original (as in recapturing the essence of its material presence), then the use of the word ‘faithful’ weighs down the playful tone of the narrator which has up to then successfully whipped up the melodrama of Robert Dempster’s ‘mischief’. It is only when whether this copy of the playbill is faithful or not becomes inessential that irony can be clearly generated out of the whole scene. Eliot is adroit in deflating the rhetoric of unalterable presence so as to be true to characterization: instead of detracting from her commitment to imagination, such presence is very much responsible for it. This position provides the terms for us to understand why, in her review of Ruskin’s Modern Painters (Volume III) in 1856, Eliot saw Ruskinian realism as ‘the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature’,52 and why she pronounced in Adam Bede, apropos of Dutch paintings, that ‘[falsehood] is so easy, truth so difficult’ (AB, 17:267–8). Truth is difficult to achieve because it is often couched in

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

interpretation, augmentation and invention; falsehood is easy not because it may easily appear to be true but because it may stem from an ossified, reductive and therefore superficial presence of what is true and real. She thus emphasizes the need to observe humble lives ‘as they have appeared in different ages, and under various social conditions’ (E, 336). This is not to deny that such a tenet is hard to sustain. Stories, when presented as events, may exert a persistent presence, which may challenge, or even become an obstacle to, their representation. The moral ‘enlightenment’ in Caterina is achieved by replacing a short-term memory with a long-term one – short-term for making sense of immediate conditions and long-term for its enduring possibility of being transformed into sympathy and fellow-feelings. In Chapter 15, after she ‘kills’ Captain Wybrow in the Rookery, Caterina rushes to tell Sir Christopher the news and falls fainting on the floor. When she comes to, ‘the present is visible, but only as a strange writing, and the interpreter Memory is not yet there’ (‘GL’, 15:159). The narrator tries to direct our reading: ‘There’, we are told, ‘was the link at which the chain of consciousness had snapped, and the events of the morning were beginning to recur dimly like a half-remembered dream’ (‘GL’, 15:159; original emphasis). Yet, ‘At the sight of Anthony lying dead, her nature had rebounded from its new bias of resentment and hatred to the old sweet habit of love’, a love that is ‘[the] earliest and the longest [that] has still the mastery over us’ (‘GL’, 15:160). What makes this sudden change of sentiments problematic is the following explanation: ‘She forgot the interval of wrong and jealousy and hatred—all his cruelty, and all her thoughts of revenge—as the exile forgets the stormy passage that lay between home and happiness, and the dreary land in which he finds himself desolate’ (‘GL’, 15:160). Unlike saying this about the more mature Janet who wilfully suppresses her past sufferings to ‘the dark and unfrequented chambers of memory’ (‘JR’, 15:275), to apply such a ‘theory’ of sympathy to the flippant Caterina (at least at this moment) can only suggest that either love comes as easily as it goes or good old oblivion is brought in to make way for the desirable triumph of love so that Caterina may ‘shake off the haunting vision of the past’ (‘GL’, 20:182). Thus the presence of Wybrow, which should bring back a certain degree of short-term memory, does not do so; short-term memory as bona fide knowledge from the past disappears when love needs to be elevated into renewed knowledge from a more remote past despite the fact that such a feeling started as a volatile emotion. This representation unsettles the meaning of the

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narrator’s assertion that love is ‘nourished by memories as well as hopes’ and for love ‘perpetual repetition is not a weariness but a want’ (‘GL’, 19:180). A similar tension exists in the sustaining power of Adam Bede’s sufferings. In the first two-thirds of Adam Bede, Hetty’s infanticide as a past event elicits sorrow and disgrace for both Adam and Hetty. Near the end of Chapter 54, there seems to be a message undermining this carefully established link. Before meeting Authur Donnithorn after a lapse of eight years, Adam is no longer confident about standing up to the occasion: ‘memory gets sadly diluted with time, and is not strong enough to revive us’ (AB, 54:363) and ‘no story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters’ (AB, 54:364). Yet one cannot easily take these words, though true, as conclusive: eight years later, ‘Adam could never cease to mourn over that mystery of human sorrow which had been brought so close to him … “Evil’s evil, and sorrow’s sorrow, and you can’t alter it’s natur by wrapping it up in other words”’ (AB, 54:364–5). The narrator quickly glosses over this persistence with a ‘sense of enlarged being’ in Adam’s mind and ‘the initiation into a new state’ (AB, 42:209). Nevertheless, Adam’s keen sense of misery here repeats the process that he goes through in Chapter 48 when he tells Arthur: ‘There’s a sort o’ damage, sir, that can’t be made up for’ (AB, 48:270). The fact that after many years he still has to feel this way suggests that these sufferings may not be redeemable by the cultivation of loving fellow-feelings. Much as he wants to forget events in the past, Adam knows full well how they have etched themselves in the consciousness of his village. Since he has suffered so much, naturally (as the narrator has told us) he finds it impossible to let go of the past, with its ‘stirring’ constantly working on him (AB, 48:267). The strong upbeat note of the final chapters can be justified by the happy ending of Adam’s marriage and the contentment of the gentle folks in the village, yet it leaves important questions unanswered. The loose ends of ‘that mystery of human sorrow’ have lent a melancholy tone to Adam’s joy on his wedding day: ‘There was a tinge of sadness in his deep joy’ (AB, 55:372). His sorrows seem to constitute part of that ‘new state’ that cannot easily be altered, either by words or through time. So Arthur Donnithorne’s wish has been to ‘lessen the evil consequences of the past, which is unchangeable’ (AB, 48:268). The Mill on the Floss also ends on this note of ‘the irretrievable wrong’ (MF, 7:4:448): ‘To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair’ (MF, 7:‘Conclusion’:459). The

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

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Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’

Pardon? Penitence? When they have done their utmost, still beyond Out of their reach stands Injury unchanged And changeless. (SG, 5:447) However, back in Adam Bede, for the moral triumph to take place in the end, the villagers of Hayslope have to be seen to show their ‘eager interest’ (AB, 55:371) in the marriage of Dinah and Adam, ‘for nothing like Dinah and the history which had brought her and Adam Bede together had been known at Hayslope within the memory of man’ (AB, 55:371). Such memories undoubtedly include Authur Donnithorn and Hetty Sorrel who have to be sacrificed through exile and the Poysers who have to be deeply traumatized. None of them have a chance to rewrite the past. Though referred to, they are marginalized and almost ‘forsaken’ in the final chapters, much in contrast to Adam who is transformed, retrieved and remembered by the fictional narrative. The lingering tone of pathos at the end that emerges from the sentiments of the narrator only proves that no matter how their stories will be rewritten by future generations, something unchangeable will persist in that ‘history of man’. This persistence may, perhaps, in the end become the only force that can lend moral authority to the sharp-tongued wisdom of the countless Mrs Poysers to come. The novel ends happily, but its ending cannot override a narrative of anguish, dilemmas and sufferings that sustains the story’s emotional power. Tragedy after all needs finality to be tragic. Eliot’s exploration into the dialectics between memory as narrative and memory as a link to the ‘immovable roots’ continues throughout her writing career. Her understanding of this issue is well-matched by that of Carlyle, who sees a more intrinsic relationship between narrative and the past when in his ‘On History’ he claims: Our very speech is curiously historical. Most men, you may observe, speak only to narrate; not in imparting what they have thought, which indeed were often a very small matter, but in exhibiting what they have undergone or seen, which is a quite

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same question is raised again in Silas Marner, when Godfrey Cass asks Nancy Lammeter, ‘would you never think the present made amends for the past?’ (SM, 11:162) and in The Spanish Gypsy, when Don Silva asks rhetorically,

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Carlyle is able to see narrative as shaping a sense of historical reality and at the same time determining its representation. What he describes here is a world of both the subjective and the objective. As Edmund Burke reminds us, we both belong to and act in this world.53 Memory as narrative is often meaningful only when read with reference to its ‘immovable roots’ in the past, physical or otherwise, as a type of historical or experiential ground. Separating the two may make memory seem more coherent and monolithic than it actually is.

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unlimited one, do talkers dilate … Thus, as we do nothing but enact History, we say little but recite it: nay rather, in that widest sense, our whole spiritual life is built thereon. (WTC, XXVII, 84)

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency in The Lifted Veil, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner

There is a loss and a waste, which can never be repaired, if we lead our lives always facing outwards towards the shared and commonplace business of the world, and always turning our backs on the intimate emotions and perceptions, which are our own peculiar contributions to the sum of human experience. (Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, pp. 128–9) Personal memory in Eliot is an intersection of narratives of communal memory. She shares the views of several contemporary thinkers on this.1 In her novels, communal values, assumptions and narratives need to be internalized to condition the characters effectively. The process may be carried out consciously, through the intervention of shared feelings in the process of moral conflicts, or more significantly, unconsciously, when the characters are little aware of the collective origins of their feelings. This process may be clarified with the help of Michael Polanyi’s notion of ‘interiorization’ or ‘indwelling’: ‘To interiorize is to identify ourselves with the teachings in question, by making them function as the proximal term of a tacit moral knowledge, as applied in practice. This establishes the tacit framework for our moral acts and judgments.’2 In The Mill on the Floss, the family traditions of the Dodsons and the Tullivers condition the personalities of Tom and Maggie. Maggie inherits the private and introvert Tulliver traits that account for her ‘imaginative and passionate nature’ (MF, 4:2:241), whereas Tom has the Dodson sense of respectability. Facing the same kind of family misfortune, Maggie would take its impact more as guilt than Tom as shame. In Silas Marner, a certain practice 40

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passed on through history becomes a sufficient reason why it should be properly observed. The regulatory and disciplinary authority of communal feelings lies not so much in the validity of the assumptions or principles as in the need of compliance with the authority embedded in them. These internalized assumptions from ‘the praiseworthy past’ (MF, 4:1:240) are regarded in her early novels as the ‘irreversible laws’, which, ‘governing the habits, [become] morality and, developing the feelings of submission and dependence, [become] religion’ (MF, 4:3:252). Yet these assumptions are not reducible to laws. While providing enough general tendencies in the eyes of the ‘scientists’, they become what Lionel Trilling calls ‘a culture’s hum and buzz of implication’ or ‘that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value’.3 Just as to Carlyle, ‘not by material, but by moral power, are men and their actions governed’ (‘Voltaire’, WTC, XXVI, 400), so to Eliot such shared conventions and sentiments may involuntarily and unconsciously condition the rural communities. Yet Eliot’s interest in this internalized dialogic process of ‘interchanging influences’ (M, 40:399), or, in Charles Taylor’s words, ‘a web of interlocution’, also lies in the junctures and disjunctures from which emerge the sense of self and moral agency.4 The focus of The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner is still the Comtean Positivist formulation of ‘[this] permanent conflict between Personality and Sociality’, which Comte believes to be ‘the natural basis of a true general theory of Emotional life’.5 Yet unlike Comte who understands the personal largely in terms of the communal, Eliot calls for the need to recognize and value personal conditions. Unlike Sir Walter Scott who finds the basis of moral authority in collective practice, and unlike William Wordsworth who finds it in personal memory,6 Eliot locates it in the process in which the communal is transformed into the personal: not only the demarcation between the two sides of the conflict but also the change of sides reside within the characters when ‘one shadowy army [fights] another’ (MF, 5:2:271).7 The ‘painful collisions’ (MF, 3:5:206) are rarely between any single individual with a unified moral position and a community as a separate moral system, and they involve the conscious, subconscious and unconscious. The self is never a simple unitary self. It is in this sense that a character’s moral ‘disposition’ may have a considerable implication for his or her decisions. Personal memory in Eliot may thus consist of two aspects: specific internalized communal memories and a totality of such memories

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

understood from a personal perspective. The second aspect is invariably unique to a specific character; it cannot be replaced by, or reduced to, mere internalized communal memories. In the rest of this chapter, for the sake of finer distinction, ‘communal memory’ will be used to refer to the first aspect and ‘personal memory’ to the second. This is to say that communal feelings become personal knowledge only when mediated through and informed by a person’s recollection, both mental and physiological, or rather only when negotiated, contested and understood with reference to the history of specific personalities. The narrator of The Mill on the Floss tells us, ‘we have no master-key that will fit all cases … moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot’ (MF, 7:2:437–8). As Stuart Hampshire has reminded us, ‘we cannot in fact understand a person as a composition of influences’, since the singularity of a person can never be produced by repeating the same composition.8 In this, memory may merge the domains of the personal and the communal, the private and the public. Eliot attempts to call attention to personal memory without severing such memory from many of its collective sources. Her conception of this relationship thus avoids the ‘mode of treatment’ in the later writings of Carlyle which, in T. H. Green’s words, ‘puts personal character in the boldest relief’.9 Consequently, in her early novels, much as internalized communal feelings and, for that matter, narratives constitute the sources of the self, they may not necessarily invalidate the individual basis of moral agency. The real issue is the extent to which a private self may still exist. A particular aspect regarding this issue is shared, in some ways, by the main characters in The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner: the overwhelming influence of internalized communal memory often depletes the characters of moral energy, so they are unable to choose or act; as a result, moral agency can only emerge from the moments when they have sufficient space and time to recapitulate a past unique to themselves, though often with the communal as a system of reference. Exploring the impact of such influence as the main focus of this chapter is not to invalidate the supportive role of community that Eliot tries very hard to establish, but to understand its complexity that cannot be reduced to the epithet ‘supportive’.10 There is always a tension between the overt affirmation of this supportive role and the covert undermining effect of its representation. Such covert effects may be more damaging to the characters’ psyche than the obvious

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‘oppressive narrowness’ (MF, 4:1:238) of the fictional communities (gossip, blackmail and so on) that critics have analysed so thoroughly. This is because the ‘supportive’ role and its undermining effect are incorporated into and lend moral power to, each other. The resulting Bildungsroman mode is most trying. It is easy for her readers, both then and now, to take a character’s failure to conform to the communal as alienation; both Latimer in The Lifted Veil and Silas Marner offer good examples in this respect. Yet this view tends to presuppose an invariable autonomy of the personal and a value judgement privileging the communal. The sense of autonomy only pertains to the extent to which the understood totality of internalized communal memories is personal. For this reason, to read the stories of Latimer and Marner as narratives of ‘alienation’ takes the communal as a better-defined opposing entity than it actually is. Again, the self that issues in moral agency does not emerge out of a passive reaction to the communal ‘other’ but takes shape with reference to the communal which helps to constitute but does not completely control personal consciousness. To understand the complexity of these issues, it may be helpful for us to look first at Eliot’s short story The Lifted Veil, to see especially how memory and prevision join forces to drain away Latimer’s passion and energy and to render his self vulnerable at both the conscious and subconscious levels. The word ‘subconscious’ was used in Eliot’s time primarily to mean being partly or imperfectly aware. The terms ‘conscious’, ‘subconscious,’ and ‘unconscious’ were used as separate categories in psychological writings by Lewes and his contemporaries such as J. D. Morell and James Sully. To these ‘scientists’, the differences among the three states were more of degree than of kind. Nevertheless, this distinction brings into relief the exploration of the complex relations of these states in Eliot’s works and anticipate similar interests and concerns of a later age.11

Latimer’s ‘prevision’ and ‘voice’ The Lifted Veil is a story often seen as different from Eliot’s other fictional works. She herself described it as ‘a slight story of an outré kind—not a jeu d’esprit, but a jeu de mélancolie’. Her publisher John Blackwood ‘would strongly advise’ the deletion of ‘the revivifying experiment’ at the end of the story because it was something he did not expect from the author of Adam Bede and he ‘[disliked]’ it. Much as Lewes and Eliot would like to have the author’s name ‘affixed to “Lifted Veil”’, they had to accept the publisher’s suggestion to omit it

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

so that the story’s publication would not ‘fritter away the prestige’ of Eliot.12 What is so unsettling about the story? It is true that Latimer the hero has a morbid personality and that Bertha Grant, his wife, is a generic femme fatale. There are in it also intrigue, attempted murder and fantasy, as Charles Meunier, Latimer’s ‘scientist’ friend, tries to resurrect Mrs Archer, the murdered maid, through blood transfusion. There are, in addition, Latimer’s previsions that are constantly realized – something that causes him persistent distress and melancholy. Why would Eliot write a story like this? The epigraph that she added in 1873 for republication,13 fourteen years after its initial edition, gives us the best clue: ‘Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns To energy of human fellowship; No powers save the growing heritage That makes completer manhood.’ (Cross,

III,

195)

One might argue, of course, that in 1873, with the hindsight of most of her novels, Eliot was trying to impose a moral framework on the initial ‘slight story’, perhaps too heavy for it to bear. Yet, if we examine the ways in which Latimer’s consciousness is exposed to the outside world, the epigraph becomes most relevant, a relevance reiterated in The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, though tailored there to the lives of individual characters. Latimer is not born morbid. He remembers well his mother’s love. He has longed for human fellowship, which he has been denied. His only means of relating to the outside world is what he calls ‘my double consciousness’ (LV, 2:340): he has constant prevision and is able to read other people’s thoughts. His unfailing ability to anticipate Bertha’s intrigues drives him into despair. This frame of mind, nevertheless, is more existential than circumstantial and has less to do, for instance, with Bertha’s aggressive and selfish nature per se than with the innate conflict between his need for fellowship and the paralysing effect of such company once obtained. His impaired ‘self’ is not the cause but the result of this underlying conflict. Yet in what way is his prevision germane to our discussion of memory and why memory when it strikes Latimer only as ‘stale repetition’ (LV, 1:287)? Recollecting a series of previsions is the backbone of his sense of being. The story is structured on such recollection.14 These previsions themselves also consist of recollected visions, enabling him to see, from

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the present point of view, both a past present and a past future. In addition, every moment at which a prevision is realized entails not only recognition but also recollection. Recollecting becomes the narrative mode in which Latimer remains conscious of the continuity of events. Not surprisingly, the narrative beginning of the story is its chronological ending and the use of flashbacks becomes imperative. His recollection ushers in the beginning of his own death, another long familiar sight already anticipated in his prevision. Everything becomes déjà vu; the date on which he dies, which has just been written, looks as if it were ‘a long familiar inscription’ (LV, 2:341). In recollection as in prevision, his consciousness is constantly exposed to other people’s thoughts. Latimer provides a unique vocabulary to describe how internalized external conditions may upset one’s mental balance. He longs for a ‘community of feeling’ (LV, 1:285) but uses the epithet ‘diseased’ for his ‘participation in other people’s consciousness’ (LV, 1:301). To what extent is this ‘participation’ true human interaction? ‘In The Lifted Veil’, observes Gillian Beer, ‘insight is intransitive. There is no replenishing reciprocity between Latimer and the world.’15 Latimer keeps his insights to himself. Yet, his susceptibility to, and participation in others’ consciousness seem to suggest a degree of reciprocity. Bertha’s face evokes in Latimer a perverse subconscious need for self-affliction, perhaps more so because he knows that she enjoys inflicting pain on him while he feels powerless to put an end to this agony. In the first few flashbacks, Bertha’s dominance, partly caused by Latimer’s fascination with her, diminishes his sense of existence. Being able to foresee her mind has ‘helped to intoxicate me’ but it is also ‘a delicious torment’ (LV, 1:300) with ‘the novelty and intensity of the pleasures and pains I underwent’ (LV, 1:301). His ‘involuntary intrusion’ (LV, 1:301) is often self-invasive: instead of actively reaching out, or positively receiving, his insights are constantly ‘assaulted’ by external consciousness. Envisaging Bertha ‘entering’, he shudders: ‘I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart and would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away’ (LV, 1:304). He feels Bertha’s ‘pitiless soul … [clothes] me round like an air I was obliged to breathe’ (LV, 1:304). No wonder his pride ‘winced’ at his brother’s ‘small patronising ways’ (LV, 1:305) as an ‘offence’ and ‘an intruding mote’ (LV, 1:306). One might argue that his relationship with Bertha is meant to show only their opposite personalities: a ‘spirit of intrigue’ versus ‘a poetic passion’ (LV, 1:298). Yet such opposites are not the main significance of the metaphors. What gets across is a sense of

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

futility and impotence in intoxication: ‘this warm-breathing presence again possessed my senses and imagination like a returning syren melody’ (LV, 2:314). The internalized pressure is best seen in the fact that, for most of the time, he understands himself in external terms. When he calls his sensibility ‘my diseased sensibility’ (LV, 1:305), ‘diseased’ shows his own inscription of what he himself would have been thought of by others. If his prevision is ‘this hideous vision’ (LV, 1:305), the implied reason behind the epithet is ambiguous; the word ‘hideous’ may describe, respectively, Bertha, the (re)visitation of his vision and having a vision at all. In the end, it must be hideous from any point of view not to be able to get out of his mental impasse. Such a double consciousness bothers Latimer, as he loathes his ‘old insight’ and ‘the curse of insight’ (LV, 2:340). The real power of his constant recollection lies in its ability to reach the subconscious, interwoven with the threatening consciousness of others in his previsions. It is a process not completely accessible to his conscious mind, something he can intuitively but only vaguely tell that is bothering him. Recurrence is the key; without such ‘reproduction of past states of Consciousness’, memory would have become what to W. B. Carpenter is ‘the succession of fantasies’.16 A recollected or reminded insight is worse than a new insight. It is tantamount to a retrogression much against his own will to avoid it. Each recollection becomes a renewed assault, creating new wounds by opening old ones. It is, therefore, more powerful and damaging than just prevision. Conversely, the significance of his recollection accrues in the content, sequence and intensity of his prevision. Scenes such as that of Bertha holding the candle walking in with the emerald brooch ‘recurred constantly, with all its minutiae, as if they had been burnt into my memory’ (LV, 1:305). He dreads when ‘the recollections of the past become contracted in the rapidity of thought’ till they bear no more resemblance to ‘the external reality than the forms of an oriental alphabet to the objects that suggested them’ (LV, 2:328–9). Latimer finds memory of other people’s ‘invasive’ consciousness threatening as it presents a past that has supposedly taken place; in contrast, vision or prevision, by definition, only shows what is yet to happen and, until it happens, lacks the certainty of recalled ‘reality’. He knows the distinction well: ‘The future, even when brought within the compass of feeling by a vision that made me shudder, had still no more than the force of an idea’ (LV, 1:306) and ‘this last hideous glimpse of the future was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and had no relation to external realities’ (LV, 1:305). Yet when repeated

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prevision forces him to recall the dreadful reality of experiencing that prevision, he longs, though subconsciously, for preventing such prevision from becoming reality. Just as memory can provide imagery and structure for a new vision – his mind ‘was full of German lyrics’ (LV, 1:291) which help him to see Bertha as ‘the daughter of an aged river’ (LV, 1:291) before she appears on the scene – so vision depends on future recollection to be reinstated as reality of the present, which accounts for his obsession with verifying his remembered visions. This is why during their family’s visit in Prague, Latimer chooses to leave the party to walk home after they have been to the Jewish quarter. He wants to confirm a detail almost subconsciously retained from his vision to end the suspense: ‘I was in search of something—a small detail which I remembered with special intensity as part of my vision’ (LV, 1:309). The confirmation adds to his fear that his previsions in the future, no matter what dreadful prospect they may bring, are destined to be realized. Here we can detect the Wordsworthian convention of confirming the imaginative by the real, yet it is given a dark twist as both imagination and reality are bound by memory.17 Remembered prevision becomes the source and cause of his distress. Hayden White, in a different context, describes ‘a seizing of a past by consciousness in such a way as to make of the present a fulfillment … rather than merely an effect’.18 For Latimer, though, such a present is not only an effect of the past, a fulfilment confirming that the future will be certain, but also a destiny. It keeps alive his visionary ability well beyond his wish and control. In synthesizing recollection and prevision and in merging the conscious with the subconscious, he collapses the boundaries between a remembered past and a future realized as the present. The connection that Gillian Beer makes between ‘replenishing’ and ‘reciprocity’ is most instructive here, for the seeming ‘reciprocity’ in Latimer’s mind is hardly beneficial to his moral being. While intensifying his imagination, it depletes all his emotional and moral strength. He wants to idealize his childhood which ‘perhaps seems happier to me than it really was’: ‘For then the curtain of the future was as impenetrable to me as to other children’ (LV, 1:280). He agonizes over losing ‘that unequalled love’ from his mother which ‘soon vanished out of my life’ (LV, 1:280). He can only come to the stark conclusion that not only ‘my nature was of the sensitive, unpractical order’, but ‘it grew up in an uncongenial medium, which could never foster it into happy, healthy development’ (LV, 1:283–4). Bertha’s is the last company that Latimer needs, precisely because he

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

‘perpetually [craves] sympathy and support’ (LV, 1:297). In the ‘denouement’, memory throws much emotional weight upon his resentment of Bertha: ‘I remember—how should I not remember?— the time when that dependence and hope utterly left me’ (LV, 2:322). As a result, his inclination to extend sympathy to others is forced to close in further on himself. The lack of ‘replenishing’ reciprocity drives him towards a sense of self that hardly has any autonomy, since there is little recollection of choice and growth. In the end, it is only by jettisoning much of his personal memory and thus the continuity of his consciousness that he becomes more sympathetic to ‘every living thing’ that is ‘surrounded with possibilities of misery’ (LV, 2:331). The sympathy is awakened by a reminder of his pre-Bertha days – Charles Meunier’s letter ‘expressed that keen remembrance of an early regard … which is inseparable from nobility of character’ (LV, 2:331). Gaining such sympathy thus presupposes the loss of an internalized consciousness of trauma, which has paralysed his ability to articulate his self.19 Not surprisingly, the story ends on a poignant and elegiac note. The moment at which Latimer is stirred by the need to voice his self is the very moment at which he is losing his clairvoyance into other consciousnesses: ‘All that was personal in me seemed to be suffering a gradual death, so that I was losing the organ through which the personal agitations and projects of others could affect me’ (LV, 2:329). His identity is truncated not by the lack of other human presence in his consciousness but by the destructive action of such consciousness finally coming to an end. He is ‘entirely free from insight, from [his] abnormal cognisance of any other consciousness than [his] own and instead of intruding involuntarily into the world of other minds, was living continually in [his] own solitary future’ (LV, 2:330). The firstperson narrative of recollection has all along maintained his voice; his mode of telling externalizes a need to open up and to resist desperately any enclosure: ‘telling the strange story of my experience’ and ‘fully [unbosoming] myself to any human being’ (LV, 1:278). The impotence and agony of losing a personal voice may be better understood if we see him as the ‘alter ego’ of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Latimer believes that he ‘was held to have a sort of half-womanish, half-ghostly beauty’ (LV, 1:295); this in large part anticipates Ganymede, that ‘girlishly handsome precocious youth’ in the essay ‘So Young!’ in Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a collection of eighteen loosely connected essays (ITS, 177). What makes Gray different from Latimer is that while Gray’s sense of self depends on the

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manifestations of the image (picture) that Basil Hallward has painted for him, Latimer’s depends on the efficacy of his own voice. Latimer admits that the portrait-painters have asked him to sit as ‘the model of a dying minstrel in a fancy picture’ (LV, 1:295). The picture, though fanciful to his eyes, does not become truly fanciful until it is redefined, in the same way as with Gray, by the reality of Latimer’s life. What emerges is a paradox that empties the minstrel image of its essential identifying feature of singing: silent not because he is not supposed to sing given its identifying image, but because the loss of Latimer’s personal memory in the end metaphorically deprives the minstrel image-persona of its ability to find a voice, to tether itself to a voice, let alone to sound through the image-mask. Latimer’s silence symbolically completes the fantastic nature of the picture by relegating the minstrel image forever to the realm of imagination. In the end, Latimer’s sensations cannot be articulated as thought. For all his newly felt sympathy, he has only ‘the poet’s sensibility without his voice—the poet’s sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny bank’ (LV, 1:284). The irony remains: only by losing his voice does he come to feel the agitations of a self within him; yet now that he no longer has a voice, there is no way to articulate such agitations. The loss of personal memory leads to the loss of voice, which signifies the loss of self as a potential moral agent.

Maggie Tulliver’s ‘ties’ and ‘roots’ If Latimer internalizes other consciousnesses as a result of his unwanted ‘talent’ of prevision, Maggie Tulliver internalizes shared values and feelings because this is a way of life into which she is born. Her life manifests how memories, both personal and communal, may interact with each other and generate ambiguities of moral agency. The communal is essential in Eliot’s understanding of how childhood memories may acquire meanings. If the Wordsworthian love for childhood and home finds a parallel in both The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, it is the collective scope that marks the difference between Eliot and Wordsworth since his focus is primarily on the personal and the individual. Nevertheless, the collective scope has also made Eliot’s treatment of childhood experience paradoxically Wordsworthian. In Wordsworth, as Paul Hamilton has observed, ‘Indeterminacy of meaning in the spots of time … cleverly keeps the expression of childhood experience free of hindsight, while linking it to maturer efforts to create a significant environment’.20 Likewise, in The Mill on the

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Floss, childhood memory is deliberately made a moment that initiates some tendency for future understanding, but not for any specific meaning. ‘Childhood’, she wrote to Sara Sophia Hennell about sixteen years before in March 1844, ‘is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown’ (Cross, I, 126). But in The Mill on the Floss, the point of realizing this is to see that ultimately personal memory will be given a meaning by one’s changing life in a collective milieu: ‘Every one of those keen moments has left its trace and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood’ (MF, 1:7:57). When Maggie faces ‘the great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty’ (MF, 7:2:437), the internalized communal feelings are more powerful than the invasive consciousness that Latimer has to sustain because they have a higher moral claim and are harder to resist. How much do these internalized feelings stand for those of the community and how much for Maggie’s own? Blurring their boundaries creates ambiguities for self-knowledge and interpretation and calls into question the basis of Eliot’s characters as moral agents. Rarely do we get a satisfactory distinction between what Stuart Hampshire calls the ‘one universal moral requirement that touches conceptions of the good’ and ‘the singularity of persons, the individual essence’.21 Maggie’s personal memory becomes problematic when it is silently encroached upon by the collective. While the personal and the communal are clearly demarcated in the consciousness of Tito in Romola in order that they may be seen to be at strife, Maggie often ends up meaning the communal when the personal is referred to and vice versa. The slippery and ambiguous nature of the first-person ‘we’ and ‘I’ is best illustrated in the following scene where Maggie tries to reason with Stephen that they should not pursue their ‘love’ for each other. This is one of the few moments where she uses ‘I’ to pronounce on an issue tremendously important to her: ‘O it is difficult—life is very difficult! It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling;—but then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us—the ties that have made others dependent on us—and would cut them in two … But I see—I feel it is not so now … that I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others.’ (MF, 6:11:395)

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Here ‘we’ can refer to both ‘I’ and a communal and almost universal ‘we’ that includes everyone. ‘We’ can also mean just Maggie and Stephen, but the ‘I’ near the end is a moralized ‘I’, aligning itself with, if not appropriating, the communal as the universal. When Tom appeals to her moral sense as ‘your natural feelings of gratitude and honour’ (MF, 7:1:427), these ‘feelings’ mean more a shared culture than a personal disposition. Again, when Maggie argues for renouncing the moment ‘for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us—for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives’ (MF, 6:14:418–9), the viewpoint of ‘we’ takes priority over that of ‘I’, though seemingly representing it. She is transformed from someone with a reasonable degree of freedom for moral deliberation into someone who subconsciously and unconsciously subscribes to the communal.22 This internalization is particularly evident when Maggie reflects on the incident of sailing down the river with Stephen and comes to recognize ‘the sense of contradiction with her past self in her moments of strength and clearness’ (MF, 7:5:453). What is this ‘past self’ then? A few lines over, the narrator adds, ‘the long past came back to her and with it the fountains of self-renouncing pity and affection, of faithfulness and resolve’ (MF, 7:5:453). This ‘long past’ here means essentially a morally selected past, obliterating her undesirable ‘past self’ of passion and need. For the narrator, only in this way can communal memory be seen as personal. Yet, if to Maggie ‘the real tie lies in the feelings and expectations we have raised in other minds’ (MF, 6:11:394), the metaphor of ‘tie’ is hardly sufficient, for instead of connecting Maggie to something else, it is transformed to become part of her, the internalized ‘roots’. When he comments on Maggie’s ‘elopement’ with Stephen, Philip Wakem highlights the issue without knowing it: ‘the strong attraction which drew you together proceeded only from one side of your characters, and belonged to that partial, divided action of our nature which makes half the tragedy of the human lot’ (MF, 7:3:442), implying thereby that the other morally more responsible side of Maggie is by no means, while it should be, instinctive. This blurring of boundaries conditions the meaning of a range of notions such as ‘past’, ‘memory’ and ‘yesterday’. By Chapter 14 of Book VI, hardly any validity is given to Maggie’s long-held ardent desires. Her past as the internalized communal also becomes constricting: ‘The yesterday, which could never be revoked’; ‘her past life was grasping her in this way’ (MF, 6:14:413). Because of this, it becomes

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

problematic when the narrator describes in real earnest Stephen’s ‘uneasy consciousness that he had robbed her of perfect freedom yesterday’ (MF, 6:14:414). What exactly does this freedom mean? What can Maggie be free from? – certainly not from communal feelings and ‘insights’ given their constrictive nature. Then in what way can such ‘freedom’ be ‘perfect’? Being able to decide to do whatever one wants? The narratorial message becomes clear by now that such freedom should not exist. The narrator tries to maintain a distance from the illusion of freedom by attributing it to Stephen’s ‘too much native honour in him’. Nevertheless, when Maggie is ‘too conscious of fatal weakness in herself’ (MF, 6:14:414) and then declares, after she and Stephen have reached Mudport, that ‘I will not begin any future . . . with a deliberate consent to what ought not to have been’ (MF, 6:14:416), the internalized communal is in full action. She may be conscious of her own fatal weakness, but the ‘I’ who has yet to begin a future remains mostly a communal ‘I’. It is with regard to this ‘I’ that we should examine a few central metaphors used frequently for communal support. These metaphors recommend as much a way of describing the collective ‘milieu’ as of understanding it. When the supportive capacity of the ‘environment’ is affirmed as dependability, advice, care and benevolence, Maggie does believe in its efficacy; yet the metaphorical and contextual resonance often carries within itself an integral backlash that thwarts personal aspirations. The most ambiguous metaphor is that of ‘binding’. It brings out the double-edged nature of communal memory, both as necessary attachment and as inevitable constraint.23 In the same way, Maggie’s past life becomes a ‘tightening clutch’ when she has to make a moral choice (MF, 6:14:413). ‘There are memories, and affections . . . that have such a strong hold on me’ (MF, 6:14:418). Maggie’s reliance on the communal becomes a reliance on an idea of it. On the other hand, the constraining overtone recalls a passage from William Lecky’s The Influence of Rationalism that Eliot read: ‘it is the special evil of intolerance that it entwines itself around the holiest parts of our nature, and becomes at last so blended with the sense of duty’ (GEN, II, 157, n. 3). Furthermore, the ‘social’ in the Victorian period is said to ‘[continue] to be governed by a self uneasy about a social [sic] progressively becoming not just a system, but a kingdom of its own, with its own rules in which the responsibility once exercised by the self was becoming subordinated’.24 Spinoza’s ‘spirit of tolerance’, particularly his opposition to social and religious factionalism, had a great influence on Eliot.25 Since she did accept the Comtean

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idea of determinism, she could have been equally concerned with the inertia of the primitive nature of the collective that prevents itself as a form of knowledge from evolving into the polytheist stage. This ambiguous position about communal support, however, invests new meanings into other metaphors. It also renders the metaphors of ‘uprooting’ and ‘deep immovable roots in memory’ (MF, 2:1:133) double-edged. The metaphor of roots is predicated on the ‘tree’ metaphor, by which St Ogg’s is described. The town impresses one as ‘a continuation and outgrowth of nature … a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree … It is a town “familiar with forgotten years”’ (MF, 1:12:101). The Wordsworthian phrase at the end of the quotation indicates, indirectly, that in ‘roots’ the sense of what lies below the surface symbolizes the unconscious acceptance of the communal. Nevertheless, the implied constraints in the other metaphors discussed above also deflect this sense from what the roots are there for: attaching the trunk or branches to the earth, supporting them, conveying nourishment in the course of growing. They release an undercurrent of thought as if justifying a severance from one’s moral resource. But this is not to deny that, despite this tension, the dominant message remains ‘that the light abandonment of ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had ceased to be pleasant, was the uprooting of social and personal virtue’ (R, 56:474). However, if the communal becomes one’s ‘root of piety’ (‘Brother and Sister’, CP, 87), then the question remains as to how far an individual can act out of his or her own initiative or make his or her own decision. This question becomes the most significant challenge to the novel’s explicit moral teachings. Maggie’s unconventional behaviour is often seen by critics as a sign of her rebellious self, a rupture in the moral framework that implicitly allows for it. But this is a more complicated issue. In Maggie’s subconscious we get a glimpse of what is not easily subsumed into a past ‘self’ desirable only to an authorial moral agenda. Yet how far is that ‘individual experience’ a real breakthrough? Before she is ‘Borne Along by the Tide’, Maggie is immersed in an intense mental struggle. When she is led down the river to the boat and sails away with Stephen, we see a suspension of her moral awareness; her action also deviates from Eliot’s usual position that ‘Feeling Is Energy’ (E, 450). And they went. Maggie felt that she was being led down the garden among the roses, being helped with firm tender care into the boat,

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

having the cushion and cloak arranged for her feet and her parasol opened for her (which she had forgotten)—all by this stronger presence that seemed to bear her along without any act of her own will, like the added self which comes with the sudden exalting influence of a strong tonic—and she felt nothing else. Memory was excluded. (MF, 6:13:407) The careful building-up before the paragraph creates an aura, a dreamy vertigo, in which the characters do not have their usual consciousness of being themselves. The rhythm there is one of the slowest in the narration. The pondering progression of the narrative deliberately anticipates an impending event, the long-awaited decision from Maggie: to go or not to go. The moment, however, never comes. Maggie does go with Stephen; but in contrast to pages of inner struggles, she leaves within a seven-line paragraph. In a fraction of a second, she ‘was being led down the garden’, ‘being helped with firm tender care’, ‘having the cushion arranged for her feet’. The syntactic movement is entirely dominated by the passive voice which tends to efface the agent of the action and by the present participles which help to dramatize the urgency of a succession of actions. One would assume that the syntactical passiveness signals a moral passiveness, a lack of full consciousness. Up to this point, the reader’s attention has been directed to the sequence of the action when the narrator unexpectedly, though parenthetically, or, rather, emphatically, intrudes with the clause, ‘which she had forgotten’.26 This climatic intrusion brings the sequence to a sudden stop, only to be resumed and recapitulated across a dash that announces the agent – not Maggie – but the impersonal ‘this strong presence’ that seems to bear her along. It is only a ‘presence’, not a distinct image of any person; it only ‘seemed to bear her along’, but not really. It is ‘like the added self’ and ‘she felt nothing else’. The diction here denotes Maggie’s mental state, a swirling semi-consciousness. The narrator seems still too worried that the reader may not notice this and cannot but exclaim ‘[it was] without any act of her own will’. Not quite willing to end just there, the narrator eventually concludes at the end of the paragraph – a place normally reserved for emphasis: ‘Memory was excluded’. On this short paragraph of a long chapter, and the most important paragraph at that, hinges the immediately preceding and subsequent narration. The paragraph is most crucial for an understanding of Maggie’s moral agency: it is not a conscious choice and perhaps not a choice at all. Only at this point do internalized commu-

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nal feelings, which have accompanied her both before and after the event, supposedly loosen their grip. The passive voice forms a sharp contrast to the active sense of the following chapter heading, ‘Waking’. The contrast is reinforced by Maggie’s own remarks to Stephen: ‘You have wanted to deprive me of any choice. You knew we were come too far’ (MF, 6:13:409). ‘I have never consented to it with my whole mind’ (MF, 6:14:418). Maggie’s accusation suggests that this moment is for her the absence of moral choice. In this instance, what Lewes calls the ‘moral causation’ as different from ‘physical causation’ (SP, 107) at best retreats to the subconscious, if not the unconscious. It is in this context that we should understand the narratorial comment: ‘She had reproached him for being hurried into irrevocable trespass—she, who had been so weak herself’ (MF, 6:13:409). This moment recalls Latimer’s similar weakness at the invasion of external consciousness. However, can we rely on such a reading? Is Eliot able to exclude such a moment, which is psychologically passive, mentally subconscious and supposedly devoid of one’s own will, from the realm of moral agency? In the subsequent chapter ‘Waking’, Maggie’s thought about the incident is described through the voice of the narrator in terms of ‘the wayward choice of her own passion’, ‘a choice of the lower’, ‘a choice … of conscious cruelty and hardness’ (MF, 6:14:413). Maggie’s acquiescence may imply partial awareness, though not necessarily full consciousness, yet the subconscious here is treated as having the same power of leading to moral action as the conscious realm. The question is: does relegating the subconscious to a moral realm make her action a moral decision? To gauge accurately the authorial perspective on this issue, we need to avoid confining our thinking to just the question of conscious intention or decision. This is no longer a matter of whether moral agency does or does not depend on conscious choice. Maggie is not exactly like Latimer; there is physical action in her case, a coalescence of Lewes’s ‘moral causation’ and ‘physical causation’. When her conscious memory is absent, the subconscious allows bodily memory to ‘spring into action’, fulfilling her pent-up longing to follow her own passion and instincts. This recalls Lewes’s use of the ‘palimpsest’ metaphor for the effects of a series of recollections on the ‘sensitive subject’ (FC, I, 162). The significance of Lewes’s metaphor lies in the residue of previous memory: personal memory may override the imprint or imposition of communal memory. This is a ‘bodily’ memory in the sense that what Maggie does obeys the order of her

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

‘physical causation’. Certain needs in Maggie’s subconscious can thus be answered by activating this unconscious bodily memory. As Bergson puts it, ‘These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares’.27 The following quotation plays, again, on this ambiguous sense of the absence of memory. Here Maggie complies with Stephen’s request for her to get up so that he may ‘raise the cloak over [her] shoulder’: ‘Maggie was hardly conscious of having said or done anything decisive. All yielding is attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistance; it is the partial sleep of thought; it is the submergence of our own personality by another’ (MF, 6:13:410). In this case, ‘it is this body’, to borrow Edward S. Casey’s formulation, ‘as actually felt in casual efficacy that gives to it its seminal importance in matters of memory’.28 It appears that to the narrator, when the subconscious allows for the unconscious bodily memory to be reinstated, mental passiveness has moral implications. For this reason, both the subconscious and the unconscious are treated in the same way as a fully conscious moral decision.29 A moment immediately after the incident is a case in point. Maggie manages to struggle away from Stephen’s expression of passion and leaves him in despair: ‘Maggie was not conscious of a decision as she turned away from that gloomy averted face, and walked out of the room: it was like an automatic action that fulfils a forgotten intention’ (MF, 6:14:420). Her consciousness is hardly present if her action is ‘automatic’; yet the bodily movements may have resulted from ‘a forgotten intention’. A plausible explanation seems to be that Maggie has submerged herself so totally in the new moral paradigm that she acts automatically – no doubt a sign of the successful dominance of communal insights. As in the river bank scene, the implied presence of unconscious forces at this moment is meant to suggest not only the latent function of a previous mental state, but also a capacity in the unconscious for action and perhaps judgement. Around the 1840s, there existed two distinctive explanations of the sources of unconscious forces. The first explanation consisted of a number of views that all attributed such forces to irrational sources, be it the Kantian noumena, God, or an unknown mental state. The second, rising against and predominating over the first view, was J.S. Mill’s radical conception of ‘a rational unconscious mind’, according to which, summarizes Edward S. Reed, ‘there are non-conscious mental processes which are identical with, or at least resemble, the process of drawing inferences and making judgements’.30 Eliot’s representation could have drawn on both of these explanations.

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The connection thus established between the subconscious, the unconscious and moral degeneration is striking. Eliot’s treatment of subconscious and unconscious moments is important to our understanding of how she conceives of the power of memory. Unlike E. S. Dallas, a former student of Sir William Hamilton and proponent of ‘the science of criticism’, who believed that memory ‘belongs even more to the unconscious than to the conscious mind’ as it preserves things ‘beyond our knowledge and without our understanding’,31 Eliot thinks that such power belongs to their interactions and only this mnemonic power can make both morally meaningful. Moral agency, seemingly absent, is only hidden but fully in action in subconscious and unconscious terms. In this, Eliot differs from Lewes. She seems to have a stronger conviction than Lewes does as to how ‘[while] obeying the prevailing impulse, we are conscious and subconscious of simultaneous solicitations in different directions’ (SP, 104–5; see also 150–1). The narratorial insistence on taking bodily memory as conducive to moral action perhaps accounts for Eliot’s objection to Lewes’s using the word ‘lapse’ to describe subconscious actions.32 It is not surprising that each time Maggie forgets her present situation and returns to childhood memory, trouble knocks at her door, which usually leads to a diminished sense of moral responsibility. The moment when ‘Maggie quite forgot her troublous life in a childlike enjoyment of that half-rustic rhythm which seems to banish pretentious etiquette’ (MF, 6:10:386), Stephen happens to make his advances. However, Eliot’s interest in personal memory goes well beyond merely moralizing the subconscious or the unconscious. She recognizes the need as much for personal internalization of collective insights as for personal memory to remain a private experience. The representation of the characters can reveal the continuity of their consciousness as a link to a personal, especially childhood, past that does not always measure itself according to the moral imperatives of the communal. When their personal memory is defined and organized by their own ‘field of personal experience’ (PLM3, 116; original emphasis), these characters may sometimes be able to become themselves and to take moral positions with sufficient consciousness. Personal memories in the form of Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’ can remain, to quote from Eliot’s poem ‘I Grant You Ample Leave’, ‘a shifting otherness’, a ‘Phantasmal flux of moments’, or ‘the core, the centre of your consciousness’ (CP, 185). As telling signs of ‘the mystery that lies under the processes’ (Cross, II, 148), without which

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

‘the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning’ (MF, 3:6:209), these moments illustrate an individual’s recollection that is hardly shared by other characters and yet remains meaningful to a ‘blended life’ (SG, 1:307). The immediacy and energy in ‘an intimate penetration’ and ‘a revived consciousness’ (MF, 1:7:58) that accompany these moments of recollection further define this personal memory. In 1876, sixteen years after The Mill on the Floss was published, Eliot wrote to Dr Joseph Frank Payne that she became ‘more and more timid—with less daring to adopt any formula which does not get itself clothed for [her] in some human figure and individual experience’ (L, VI, 216–17). This thought had already appeared in The Mill on the Floss. Personal memory as the understood totality of internalized memories is the moving force behind the plot: almost every major character is relentlessly pursued by memory – for example, Maggie by her friendship and love for Philip, Tom by that relationship and his father’s grudge against Wakem, Maggie by her father’s death and her oath before Tom not to see Philip any more, Maggie by her resignation which is always mingled with desire and Tom by his own desire which leads to his distrust of Maggie. After the family loses its fortune to the bailiffs, Tom withdraws into himself to survive. It is determination, humiliation and expectation that forge in him a new identity, shaped by family tradition but sustained by his own will. Whenever she ‘slips’ into memories not sanctioned by the communal, Maggie may interpret them beyond the terms set by the paralysing pressure of the communal. It is only in this sense that we should understand the moral overtones of memory being a private chamber, as ‘an opening in the rocky wall which shut in the narrow valley of humiliation’ (MF, 5:3:285) or as ‘a sweet relief’ (MF, 5:4:295). Childhood memory becomes a relief because it is not always subject to the same commitment and judgement that one acquires as an adult. It is full of secrecy and longing because it is safe, reclusive and can be revisited at will; it is supposedly safe also because one does not have to regard it as reality, knowing full well that it is derived from reality: Maggie tells Philip, ‘I have made up my mind—it is right that we should give each other up, in everything but memory’ (MF, 5:3:286). Her attitude parallels Feuerbach’s belief in how feeling inextricably belongs to one’s essential being.33 Yet equally important, this former self will not absolve Maggie of the consequences of present thinking. She can’t help assuming that Philip would argue back that ‘it is other people’s wrong feelings that make concealment necessary’ (MF, 5:3:286). She

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knows very well that such an escape becomes an escape precisely because it is a position taken in the larger ‘field’ of communal values. The lack of external moral intervention is only relative. Only by connecting a moment in her present with a personal past is she able to maintain her orientation which paradoxically releases her from the constant need to confront or deny the internalized communal within her.34 If The Mill on the Floss seems to suggest here and there that internalized communal memories should override the personal memories of Tom and Maggie, its ending sends us a most powerful message, contrary to the critical view that sees the ending as an impasse for resolving the plot: when the flood is about to ‘swallow’ them both, Tom reverses to his childhood address to Maggie as ‘Magsie’. In a moment of life and death, he returns, much out of his own choosing, not to his childhood itself, supposedly ‘a sort of sacred place, a sanctuary’ (MF, 6:7:361) with much less pressure of the ‘burden’ of duty, but to his connection with that childhood past, from the present moment of peril, which locates him in relation to Maggie and to his own entire adult life.

Marner’s ‘web’ and ‘chasm’ If Maggie’s sense of self is ‘bound’ and ‘tied’ by and ‘rooted’ in, communal memories, then to what extent can Marner ‘the Weaver’35 weave a self out of his life in the ‘neighbourly’ (SM, 10:120) village of Raveloe? This metaphor of web best embodies Eliot’s idea that personal memory is constituted through internalized shared feelings, as it evokes the Darwinian ‘web’ of affinities and progeny. It can also symbolize the mode of both the Comtean formative function of society and the Carlylean natural ‘governing’ of historical life. The metaphorical potential is further demonstrated in such related Carlylean metaphors as the web-like spreading of disease or ‘Organic Filaments’ (WTC, I, 194) which is used in Sartor Resartus to describe a society held together by language, custom, climate, and so on. The web metaphor in Lewes’s formulation of the physiological subject in his Foundations of a Creed further indicates its dual function: ‘The Present is to him a complex web, with threads of the Past and threads of the Future inextricably interwoven’ (FC, II, 123). Essentially a synchronic metaphor, such a ‘web’ can have its diachronic application as well. In addition, ‘for Victorian people, woven fabric seems to have been the predominant reference’,36 rather than the spider’s web. For this reason, in spite of its resonance of a trapping device of ‘small social

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

conditions and their frustrating complexity’ (M, 18:176), the metaphor can also suggest solidarity, communion and the capability of extending itself continuously. Eliot’s Gemeinschaft novels abound in such metaphors: ‘fibres of their hearts’ (MF, 4:1:238), ‘a sufficiently subtle moral fibre’ (AB, 5:98), ‘the threads of ordinary association’ (MF, 7:5:455), ‘the long-winding fibres of your memory’ (AB, 50:311), the ‘tissue of vague dreams’ or ‘all the threads of thought and emotion . . . absorbed in the woof of her actual daily life’ (MF, 5:4:296). The emphasis on the interwoven state of relations tends to give way to one on the action of morally weaving into the ‘woof’ of the whole web of communal feelings. Only in doing so can a character come to claim his or her affinity and become ‘neighbourly’ (SM, 10:121). The metaphorical intersection of these diachronic and synchronic meanings is where Marner comes into contact with the Raveloe village life. His handicraft helps to change his ‘eccentric habits which belong to a state of loneliness’ (SM, 1:5). The supportive function of such a web ‘environment’, symptomatic of Eliot’s nostalgia for ‘the remedial influences of pure, natural human relations’ (Cross, II, 290), is again Wordsworthian, as she praises the uncorrupted existence of countrymen and laments the destruction of a mode of organic life missing in the modern world. The web, though it hangs on nothing, appears to have become the anchorage of Marner’s life. Its meaning is defined by its latency and promise. Hope seems to be high for Marner of getting the consolatory remedial fellow-feelings that Latimer has been denied and that Marner himself could not get in Lantern Yard. Yet to what extent can the ‘web’ truly support and sustain him? Eliot’s awareness of the ambiguities of village support is more sophisticated and subtle here than in either Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss. She tackles the difficulty of accepting the communal past as a support while at the same time recognizing its limited capacity.37 Marner represents those displaced city-dwellers who roam the villages for work. It is with these ‘remnants of a disinherited race’ (SM, 1:3) and their lack of affinity with local communities that the novel begins: ‘No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin’ (SM, 1:4). A more immediate reason for his displacement, however, is that the church assembly in Lantern Yard promises no justice when he has been framed up. Marner offers a very intricate case, for being displaced from his original community has positioned him to merge into another supposedly more friendly one. Severance here becomes primary and vital for the possibility of developing fellowship. What kind of community has he moved to then? In

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Raveloe, the villagers initially regard ‘emigrants from the town into the country’ as aliens (SM, 1:4–5). Of all the major characters in Eliot’s novels, Marner, as an outcast from an Evangelical community, seems to be the one whose psyche is damaged most. Correspondingly, the healing power of natural relations should have been the most desirable and its effects the easiest to show. Yet Marner’s dealings with the villagers are never simply a matter of his losing faith in God and finding religious communion in them. Their mentality is limited though not unsympathetic: ‘the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery’ (SM, 1:4). Superstition seems to be the prevailing mode of understanding and they lack ‘any enthusiastic religious faith’ (SM, 1:6). The narrator’s sense of humour accentuates the ‘neighbourly’ side of such a life – a humour that is tantamount to a peculiar way of admiration: for the villagers, ‘[going] to church every Sunday in the calendar would have shown a greedy desire to stand well with Heaven, and get an undue advantage over their neighbours’ (SM, 10:122). The villagers’ initial contact with Marner intimates a sense of uncomfortable encroachment. It is simplistic to say that since he prefers to keep everything to himself, he would find any sympathetic response invasive. Mr Macey wants him to ‘come to church’ so as to be ‘a bit neighbourly’ (SM, 10:121). When she is aware of Marner’s isolation, it is Dolly Winthrop’s nature ‘to seek out all the sadder and more serious elements of life, and pasture her mind upon them’ (SM, 1:123). A significant distinction arises when it is not Dolly Winthrop, nor other villagers, but the sight of the child that initially awakens his tenderness and brings him back from oblivion to the surrounding world. This seems as much to celebrate the human tenderness in the child as to show up the failure of pagan theology to ‘convert’ Marner. ‘By seeking what was needful for Eppie … he had himself come to appropriate the forms of custom and belief which were the mould of Raveloe life’ (SM, 16:213). Thus the arrival of the child forces him to ‘seek’ the villagers’ help: he has no other choice once he decides to keep Eppie. Moreover, the communal mentality is presented not as the end of his opening up but the means to another end. The word ‘appropriate’ implies some degree of alienness and expediency. Two telling phrases in the following narratorial comment spell out the externality of such village influences: there are no longer ‘angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction … But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs . . . so that they look no more backward’ (SM,

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

14:201). The hand is ‘put into theirs’; they themselves have not searched and then found it. The lack of initiative is again implied. The narrator does focus on Marner’s efforts to establish relations when describing his contact with the villagers in terms of how ‘his history became blent in a singular manner with the life of his neighbours’ (SM, 2:31). However, the expression ‘became blent’ obscures the agent of action. In some ways, Marner is forced to open up to the community by circumstances. Initially, it is circumstances that relate him to the villagers. Curing the cobbler’s wife Sally Oates has certainly offered ‘a possibility of some fellowship with his neighbours’ (SM, 2:24). He is taken to have the same magic as that of ‘the Wise Woman at Tarley’ who ‘had charms as well as “stuff”’ (SM, 2:25) and who has died and taken all her magic to the grave. Such assumptions are so entrenched that ‘no one believed [Marner] when he said he knew no charms and could work no cures’ (SM, 2:26). His answer only ‘heightened the repulsion between him and his neighbours’ (SM, 2:26). For over fifteen years, ‘he was regarded by his neighbours in Raveloe’ with ‘the mixture of contemptuous pity, dread, and suspicion’ (SM, 5:62). When the villagers’ sympathy is reawakened by his misfortune of losing his money, Marner does feel a ‘faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill’ (SM, 10:124). Nevertheless, their goodwill is not sufficient to bring his mind to peace. Why cannot Marner in the end love the villagers the way Dolly loves him? Dolly takes events in the village in terms of natural phenomena and tries to convince Marner that he should accept them in the same terms: ‘like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest’ (SM, 14:186). This is how Dolly tries to ‘convert’ him: ‘I can never rightly know the meaning o’ what I hear at church, only a bit here and there, but I know it’s good words’ (SM, 16:215). Marner seldom accepts Dolly’s ‘exposition’ of ‘the Raveloe theology’. Still overpowered by his original religion, Marner replies, ‘you’re i’ the right … there’s dealings with us—there is dealings’ (SM, 16:218). Dolly can let go of the origins of events but Marner cannot. Yet not knowing origins is only the beginning of his agony; the real agony lies in his inability to find them out. Even after he goes back into the village ‘fold’, he is still haunted by his conviction derived from his traumatic experience in Lantern Yard. He is still all left to himself; no deity is taking care of him. The religion of Raveloe is very much a pagan ‘religion’ that depends on customs, assumptions and practices. The support for Marner may come in the form of narratives of superstition. ‘Mr Macey … was of

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opinion that when a man had done what Silas had done by an orphan child, it was a sign that his money would come to light again’ (SM, 16:211). Mr Macey is of course always right. In the Conclusion, Mr Macey has to make an appearance for this very purpose. Even when confined to a wheelchair, he has the ‘final say’: ‘I’ve lived to see my words come true. I was the first to say there was no harm in you … and I was the first to say you’d get your money back’ (SM, ‘Conclusion’:272). Marner knows that what Macey predicts is right, but that things happen not just because he has predicted them. Marner lives in an environment where the need for the cultivation of fellowship becomes so overwhelming that there is always the danger of invalidating the vital link between communal convention and moral support. Christmas becomes an occasion to reiterate custom and express goodwill. Ironically, when the narrator deliberately makes clear that the neighbours’ ‘kindlier feeling’ at Christmas is not adulterated, namely, the kindness ‘took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical’ (SM, 10:118, 119), one does detect an overtone that threatens the very convention of Christmas. Even without Christmas, the ‘kindlier feeling’ would be continuously available given some other accidental outlet or impetus. Marner thus strikes us as an autonomous outsider in Raveloe, facing all the neighbourly sympathy and persuasion. Yet this is not a question of his resisting ‘integration’ into Raveloe simply by internalizing communal memory from another time and place and thus protecting his sense of self from being fragmented by the integrating process. The communal mentality of fear in Lantern Yard ‘had bred no fancies in him that could raise the phantasm of appetite’ (SM, 1:6). His self is both shaped and fragmented by his implicit and ambivalent understanding of such an ethos. In the organic life of Raveloe, his self is paradoxically ‘reassembled’ back together against the essentially intransitive mode of sympathy so abundantly available there. The tension between a belief in the emotional support of village life and the fact that specific forms of this life may not deliver the support reveals itself further in the representation of altruism in Silas Marner. The natural status of human relations (as part of the pastoral environment here) is evoked, as in Comte, for reaching altruism in its most basic form: being good to others, being concerned for others. Nevertheless, the narratorial emphasis on his lack of orientation helps to conjure up in Marner, unintentionally, an altruism manqué. The crux here lies in the important role that consciousness plays. Lewes conceives of altruism as ‘determined by the fullest conscious-

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

ness—emotional and cognitive—of relations’ (FC, II, 27). He is not alone in highlighting this generative capacity of consciousness. The same capacity is to some degree also crucial in the Feuerbachian understanding of ‘feeling’, according to which, ‘Man has the consciousness not only of a spring of activity, but also of a spring of suffering in himself’.38 In contrast, Spencer sees altruism as an ‘unconscious or conscious’ action that ‘involves expenditure of individual life to the end of increasing life in other individuals’.39 For Eliot, the consciousness of relations does not mean mere physical connection with a community, something Marner and the villagers in relation to him have achieved. While communal custom and belief supposedly ‘reawaken’ his sensibilities and memories, he finds himself time and again disoriented. In the case of Maggie Tulliver, such disorientation or discontinuity is more ambivalent. She flies from the bondage of her community but eventually returns to die there. In this, the fact of merely belonging to a community hardly guarantees any moral support. If the idea of ties, of duty and of personal links with community is reaffirmed in Silas Marner, it indicates the inadequacy of sheer obedience and should therefore be taken as a warning against any indiscriminate acceptance or internalization of tradition. Communal feelings alone cannot become the medium through which altruism is formulated if there is a lack of consciousness of relations in an individual character. In this sense, a communal mode of life is only the condition for realizing altruism but is never altruism itself. Ironically, though cataleptic trances send Marner ‘into a mysterious rigidity and suspension of consciousness’ (SM, 1:11), neither his displaced status in Raveloe, nor his severance from life in Lantern Yard, nor his cataleptic oblivion to his surroundings, makes his isolation any worse. Unlike the subconscious moments in The Mill on the Floss, such oblivion is most sympathetically depicted. It has no selfish impetus behind it, nor does it entail any consequences that would hurt other people’s feelings. The direction of Marner’s moral progress reveals itself clearly by the end of the novel. It is symbolic that he brings Eppie to visit Lantern Yard: the name of the town is never mentioned; Lantern Yard has been destroyed; yesterday is nowhere to be found. It seems that memory has no location when the physical space that confirms it is removed; he is forced to fall back on his new community. But will he? He is able to connect his past and present by not giving up his personal perspective, which places everything new in relation to his memory of sufferings in Lantern Yard, a past primarily and meaningfully framed by his move to Raveloe. What makes the characterization

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of Marner so appealing and charming is the extent to which his perspective may survive the Raveloe mentality and he manages to avoid being reduced to just another villager. His own sense of self relies not just on ‘a continual stream of rhythmic memories’ (MF, 4:3:256), but on his understanding of their relevance to his life. Disunified as it may be, his personal perspective has thus become the site of his memory. The need for maintaining a viable personal self, even if it is discordant with public expectation, heralds an important theme to which Eliot frequently returns in her Gesellschaft novels. Her own quotation from Comte made after she finished Daniel Deronda also captures her position at this early stage of her writing career: The historical spirit has a natural tendency to make us disdain sentiment from constantly dwelling on results without taking account of intentions. It might thus so far misunderstand its true mission as to procure a sort of systematic sanction for those most mischievous corrupters of society who think to magnify the importance of public life by disparaging that of private life. (GEN, I, 175) Yet in the portrayal of Marner, there is an underlying tension between the narratorial effort to establish a continuous self for him and his own sense of continuity generated out of authorial characterization. This tension invokes the question whether this self consists primarily in a remembering consciousness or a continuous longing for oblivion that allows the unconscious to become not a way of escaping moral dilemmas, but a realm that is instrumental in recapitulating one’s sense of being. The narrator tends to overemphasize memory at the expense of oblivion. Anticipating similar remarks in Daniel Deronda, the narrator declares: ‘This is the history of Silas Marner, until the fifteenth year after he came to Raveloe’ (SM, 2:30). Marner does have a need for continuity. He collects the guineas, crowns and half-crowns even when he knows he will have no use for them, but there is the other side. With Janet Dempster, in contrast, social relations are essential to interpreting a personal past. ‘[In] her utmost loneliness … she gazed at her own past, almost losing the sense that it was her own’ (‘JR’, 15:276). This is the opposite of Marner. Janet has a considerable degree of continuity by way of memory, but is on the verge and thus afraid, of losing it; Marner has it but wants to lose it. The narrator of ‘Janet’s Repentance’, like that of Silas Marner, is very

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

eager to assert: ‘We have all of us considerable regard for our past self’ (‘JR’, 12:265), suggesting that this self is ultimately made up of the sequence of memories that would bridge chasms of oblivion. For Marner, oblivion of the past is the only way to remain himself precisely because oblivion and, for that matter, cataleptic trances are called for by too much debilitating memory, ‘a sense of crowding remembrances from which he turned away timidly’ (SM, 14:193). In such a sequential need for oblivion and the unconscious, his self is constantly reassured.40 While oblivion is his form of ‘remembrance’, it is, instead of being mere oblivion, always mingled with his fear of an uninvited and unconquerable memory. Cathy Caruth’s observation about ‘the traumatized’ may help to explain this need: ‘they recover a past that encounters consciousness only through the very denial of active recollection’.41 The unconscious may make up, to borrow Lewes’s words, ‘the larger part of our psychical activity’ (PLM3, 139). The idea of ‘chasm’ in this novel shows again the contrast between a self based on the character’s own needs and one imposed by the narrator. The narrator tells us that Marner weaves so as ‘to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life’ (SM, 2:23) and correlates the painful past and the alien present from an external point of view: ‘he had begun to ponder over the elements of his old faith, and blend them with his new impressions, till he recovered a consciousness of unity between his past and present’ (SM, 16:213). This process of recollection is designed mainly to combat the forgetful impact of exile and to extend the possibility of what is declared at the beginning of Silas Marner: ‘Marner’s inward life had been a history and a metamorphosis’ (SM, 1:10). This narratorial position makes his perpetual longing for oblivion morally not recommendable: ‘Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile’ (SM, 2:20). The past will remain painful to him and to someone like him, say, Dickens’s Miss Havisham, who is perhaps one of the most memorable characters who cling to their personal memories. For Marner, to forget the past is to live wilfully in the present. So his cataleptic trance is both involuntary and voluntary, both physiological and mental. For Miss Havisham, the past has to be close by to reassure her of her own identity, to the extent that the past has to be perpetuated in Estella. Without oblivion, life for Marner will just be all memories. It would be reductive to take his traumatic psyche after the ‘fall’ as a mere continuation or expansion of his personality. He is, before the incident, ‘believed to be a young man of exemplary life and ardent faith’ (SM, 1:10–11). ‘He loved the

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purpose then’ (SM, 2:24; original emphasis), but after the incident all purpose is gone for him. Like Maggie’s past in the St Ogg’s community, his past claims too many ties, too much obligation, but no support. Only the ‘chasm’ can sever him from effects of the past. In a sense, he weaves so as to forget about the past, not for connection or reaching out, but for the necessity of oblivion and for the hope of a new self. The narrator’s ambiguous use of the notion of ‘the past’ inadvertently highlights the same need: the painful component of the past is often suppressed so that a happier moment from the past can be enhanced. Treating Sally Oates has, according to the narrator, restored his ‘sense of unity’ (SM, 2:25): the ‘once familiar herbs … belonged to the past, from which his life had shrunk away’ (SM, 2:31). However, the ‘past’ here, selected by the narrator, is a past where Marner could watch his mother relieving other people’s pains, which is different from the traumatic past that constantly bothers him. By selecting this happier past, the agony of the other past is bypassed. The story would have missed its point if the past that matters to him does not include the unhappy memory that defines much of his sense of self. Nevertheless, the contrast between these two perspectives – the narrator’s and the character’s – conjures up a central position in Eliot’s early writings, very similar to that of Wordsworth. Paul Hamilton, for example, has pointed out that the individuality of Wordsworth’s characters who are ‘inmates of the household of man’ ‘consists in living outside the community’. For Wordsworth, ‘those who are in some way socially disabled or disinherited are especially qualified to be the bearers of an uncensored imagination’; yet, in spite ot this, ‘the inheritance of social restraints and inhibitions cannot be given up’.42 It is in this sense that a personal perspective in the unhistoric act of an individual character becomes significant. Marner’s need for oblivion and for a retreat to the unconscious highlights Eliot’s view, more clearly defined in Middlemarch, that individual acts can be complicated and not easily accessible. Just as for Carlyle, ‘History is the essence of innumerable Biographies’ and aspects of these ‘Biographies’ will remain ‘unintelligible to us’ (‘On History’, WTC, XXVII, 86), so for Eliot, personal lives are the inaudible and silent side of social life. As the narrator of ‘Janet’s Repentance’ reminds us, ‘spiritual truths … are only to be won by long wrestling with [one’s] own sins and [one’s] own sorrows’ (‘JR’, 10:256–7). This may also explain why in 1857 Eliot told Charles Bray, ‘My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy’ (Cross, I, 472).

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Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Sources of the Self and Moral Agency

Like Eliot’s other works, The Lifted Veil, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner deal with the relations between personal memory and communal memory. Nevertheless, each work has its own distinctive concern, sets up a new situation, which is defined by the dilemmas and difficulties specific only to the particular characters. Taken together, they conjure up the depth and range of selves defined both with and against communal memory at the conscious, subconscious and unconscious levels. None of the three characters discussed in this chapter starts with an exclusive and closed personal consciousness. Latimer remembers well his mother’s love, though short-lived; Maggie, unlike Hetty and Dinah, both orphans, starts with a reasonably secure childhood among families and relations; and Marner initially belongs to a religious fellowship and is ‘highly thought of’ in his church assembly. Relations with people close to them have led them to retreat to their recollection of an enclosed past. Latimer’s consciousness is, with or without his acquiescence, ‘invaded’ by previsions of Bertha who is stark, forceful, cunning and violent; Maggie’s consciousness initially by family members’ disapproval of her behaviour and later by the overwhelming values of St Ogg’s, though internalized as her own moral sanctions; Marner’s consciousness by the wrongful accusation that reduces him to ‘the remnants of a disinherited race’ (SM, 1:3). Their enchanting and disenchanting tales spell out for us not only how they try to be communal to survive, but the traumatic processes of making such attempts. In the end, hardly has Latimer’s heart gone out towards ‘the men and women and children whose faces were becoming familiar to [him]’ (LV, 2:340) when his personal history drives him away ‘to live continually with the one Unknown Presence’ (LV, 2:340). Marner fares best since the village does try to take him in. Yet it is also in Marner that we get the strongest signal of scepticism, a note of caution that questions the apparent harmony of village support and yet confirms the possibility and validity of a personal perspective even when it is so burdened with the collective. All three works explore the question of how essentially a self depends on personal memory taken as the lived totality of one’s incorporation of communal memory into personal identity. Yet it is only in relation to the complex representation of communal memory that personal memory assumes a voice and space and it is only in this sense that together both such memories help to sustain the moral agency of the characters.

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The Moment in History: The Temporal Sense of Emotional Development in Romola

Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history … the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action. (George Eliot, DD, 16:149) While researching for the background of Romola, Eliot noted in her diary on Sunday 7 July 1986: ‘Read the Introduction to Savonarola’s poems … Busied myself with a plan of rational mnemonics in history’.1 The phrase ‘rational mnemonics in history’ hits upon a crucial aspect of Romola as a historical novel: the emotional development of the characters is enacted by a narrative of remembering, which is approached from a historical point of view. Like the Gemeinschaft novels, Romola shows a primary concern with the ways in which assumptions behind customs, legends and mythological systems are gradually transformed into moral principles and with how they may condition the psychology of characters. Nevertheless, as a novel explicitly concerned with history and its uses, it finally confronts an issue that has gathered momentum up to Romola: whether the past is part of a cyclic and recurrent history, or a stage out of which the present may grow. Put differently, this is also an issue about whether the past is valuable in itself or only in the meaning it may hold for the present. In Eliot’s earlier works, we can often detect narratorial efforts to correlate these aspects of continuity and discontinuity and the attendant difficulties of doing so: the narrator often contrasts the past with the present while trying to accommodate a strongly held belief that 69

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Romola and the Moment in History

intense moments of moral struggle in the past are hardly meaningful until one sees them as enlightening for the present. The Mill on the Floss is particularly indicative of such a tension. The history of St Ogg’s seems encapsulated in the metaphor of ‘millennial tree’ (MF, 1:12:101), which suggests a primarily linear model with its apocalyptic revelation of the future. The syntactical movement of the lengthy description of the town at the beginning of the novel, with its repeated uses of the present perfect tense, tends to subsume the past in the present. However, the imaginative journey down the Rhône and the Rhine on a summer’s day suggests an equally valid model of contrast. In addition, while much attention is given to the thriving and palpable nature of life within St Ogg’s, one can always detect the presence of a more constant and static communal existence looming in the background: ‘The mind of St Ogg’s did not look extensively before or after. It inherited a long past without thinking of it’ (MF, 1:12:103). It is against this background that the ‘Saxon hero-king’, the ‘heathen Dane’, and the civil wars busily enter and exit the stage of history (MF, 1:12:101). The sense of contrast in the opening remarks of ‘Journeying down the Rhône’ and the ‘Rhine’ recalls the nostalgic beginning of ‘Amos Barton’ and anticipates a whole series of similar remarks such as those in the Introduction to Felix Holt. Occasionally, this appreciation of the rural past, which makes Eliot turn to the Gemeinschaft setting in the first place, may dissipate the focus of themes such as ‘growth’ and ‘outcome’ and of how the past still lives in the present. An atmosphere of pastoral life where time seems frozen may equally marginalize the developmental senses of the concept of ‘environment’. At the beginning of Adam Bede, the perspective of contrast soon slides into a description of the timeless. As the emotions of the characters are ‘frozen’ and eternalized in a pastoral past, the narratorial focus is shifted from the implications of imagining a past to the imagined past itself, since the implications depend on historical changes for their raison d’être. This is not to deny, though, that this mesmerizing ‘spell’ of the pastoral is often ‘broken’ by the narratorial awareness of the connection between the past and the present, an awareness that dissociates the narrator from the apparent timelessness of pastoral life and reveals a preoccupation with moral dilemmas in the face of progress and change. So just as a historicist perspective has highlighted a sense of distance if not severance, a focus on the effect of communal feelings may retrieve a collective history primarily for its topical value. Here I use ‘historicist’ strictly in the sense defined by the Oxford

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English Dictionary as the tendency ‘to see . . . historical thinking as the most important type of thought, because of its interest in the concrete, unique, and individual’ (sense 2). The same tension is further intensified in Romola. Eliot’s novels are said to contain ‘two unreconciled temporal perspectives’: ‘that emanating from passionate present experience and that arising from a judicious overview’.2 Given her initial conception of the ‘mnemonic’ enterprise, to discuss Romola in these terms may not be enough. Renaissance Florence marks an intense moment of self-reflection, a moment that consciously links the past with the present and the future. It may thus be more fruitful to understand such ‘mnemonics in history’ in terms of the temporal senses implied in the two major models of history identified by some of Eliot’s contemporaries: history as recurrent, cyclic and, to a certain extent, discontinuous and history as essentially evolutionary and teleological. The critical point here is to see how relevant these temporal senses are to moments of emotional conflicts in Romola and how the ‘mnemonic’ representation in Romola may in turn test the efficacy of these models of history. A moment in Chapter 20 (‘The Day of the Betrothal’) illustrates this relevance. On that day, the wedding party of Tito and Romola forms a ‘dignified little procession … [passing] along the Ponte Rubaconte towards Santa Croce’ (R, 20:203) when it finds itself facing ‘an invention of Piero di Cosimo’ – the masque of ‘a huge and ghastly image of Winged Time with his scythe and hour-glass, surrounded by his winged children, the Hours’, forming a dark crowd (R, 20:204). Here, the intersection of the two processions indicates that, while each is meaningful in itself, their juxtaposition forms a charged moment of significance. The wedding procession observes the ceremonial ritual of old times; its externalized performance repeats and incorporates a past that is acted out as the present. The masque of the ‘Winged Time’ and his children, though also an externalized performance, is invented for the present moment by Piero di Cosimo by modelling on conventions – the masque was a fantasy that Eliot rescued from Italian history.3 The masque initiates an important stage in Romola’s emotional struggle, yet its meaning is predicated on the wedding procession. These ‘apparitions floating through the air’ (R, 20:204) confirm half of her brother Dino’s vision of her unhappy future, which includes both a similar ‘troop of the sheeted dead gliding above blackness’ (R, 20:204) and the nuptial ritual. They intimate to her that what she thinks to have left behind – ‘that past on which she was going to turn her back for ever’ (R, 36:324) – is catching up on her. The ‘Winged Time’

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

perturbs her, not because it can fly, but because it suggests possibilities of directions which may not always be within her expectation or control. Expanding further on the senses of time, Tito’s recipe for alleviating the ‘cold horror’ for Romola is to ‘look only at the images of our happiness now’, confirmed and secured by repeated rituals (R, 20:204). For Romola, concentration on their ‘happiness now’, or, rather, her wilful obliteration of the masque, only intensifies the implication that this moment may have for her future. Such an intersection of the processions turns memories from the past into anxieties of the present and omens for the future. Juxtaposing these two processions has enabled Eliot to address the dialectics of temporality and continuity, of constancy and change and of recurrent and linear senses of history.

‘With ancient yet with modern eyes’: two models of history What exactly, then, does the temporal sense of emotional development mean? It includes the intersecting points of psychological and historical times, psychological since time can only be registered in human affective understanding and historical because time past is necessarily implied in the psychological moment. The processions serve to point up a pattern in Romola: the sense of time in the characters’ moral reflections is registered in the metaphors and allusions that evoke a daunting array of forms and concatenations from different stages of Western history.4 The first piece of information that Tito reveals about himself is his declaration to Bratti, ‘I am no Hebrew’ (R, 1:13). The placing of Tito in Renaissance Florence as ‘a Greek stock planted in Italian soil’ (R, 3:29), as he himself later tells Nello the barber, epitomizes the recurring patterns of pagan mentality and suggests that moral development means a constant negotiation with the feelings that one has inherited. Historical time may thus help to interpret psychological time and vice versa. Time becomes what Ricoeur calls ‘human time’, or rather moral time, in the sense that this time consists in the ‘remembering’ of the past at a given moral moment. It is also in this sense that emotional development may pose itself as a psychological counterpart to chronological time. While moral evolution is registered in the mode of remembering, memory becomes both a measure of history and an epic in itself.5 Eliot’s understanding of the characters’ emotional development is thus both representational and epistemological.

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This understanding expands the Comtean notion of moral progress, which does not include psychology. For Eliot, it is ultimately emotional moments that turn chronology into history. She once quoted in her notebook a lengthy passage from Ernst Curtius’s Griechische Geschichte, which explicates why events and happenings, if devoid of human psychology, constitute only chronology and not history. Thus the ancient Egyptians ‘haben Chronologie, aber keine Geschichte im vollen Sinne des Worts’ (‘possess a chronology, but no history in the full sense of the word’; GEN, II, 72).6 Lewes says as much: ‘history … in its highest form is not the chronicle of events’, but ‘the Life of Humanity as evolved by human beings’.7 The concern of Eliot and Lewes with this internal time seems to reflect a crisis typical of their period. Like their contemporaries such as Ruskin and Arnold, they were deeply disturbed by unsettling social changes when their own position in historical time was in question, no longer organically placed nor rationally accountable.8 This emphasis on human involvement and participation already appeared in 1856 in Eliot’s often quoted review essay ‘The Natural History of German Life’. In this, she also shared the Romantic feeling in mid-Victorian England for the obscure and the provincial, reflecting one of the two models of historical time already mentioned. Historians who entertained such Romantic feelings, as Edward Augustus Freeman said of Green, would look on a town ‘as a whole with a kind of personal history’.9 Carlyle was acutely aware of the changing forms of ‘the LIFE OF MAN in England: what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its outward environment, its inward principle’ (‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, WTC, XXVIII, 81). Historians of this persuasion sought to establish a historiographical principle in marked contrast to the rationalist approach to chronicle history dominant in the eighteenth century. They believed that such human aspects of common life can be imaginatively reconstructed and represented. Their approach illustrates what John Burrow describes, with respect to Carlyle, as ‘the romantic intensification of antiquarianism into a kind of imaginative archaeology’.10 This imaginative appeal is readily found in Carlyle’s depiction of medieval England, especially in his nostalgia for the sedimentary charm of ancient Bury St Edmunds. Eliot also made, according to John Blackwood, a ‘distinction between what is called the real and the imaginative’. She believed that ‘[any] real observation of life and character must be limited and the imagination must fill in and give life to the picture’ (L, III, 427). For her, ‘all these grand elements of history

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

require the illumination of special imaginative treatment’ (E, 446), which calls for a historiographical principle that places an unprecedented emphasis on the moment of events. She especially praised Carlyle’s ‘masterly power of close delineation’ in a review of his The Life of John Sterling (E, 51). The purpose of Carlyle’s insistence on the need for ‘individualizing sensory detail’ and on a concrete and imaginative presentation is to revive the ‘distinctive inward spirit’ of the past.11 In one of his letters to Emerson, he observes that ‘[there] is no use of writing of things past, unless they can be made in fact things present: not yesterday at all, but simply to-day and what it holds of fulfilment and of promises is ours’.12 Here the phrase ‘things present’ seems deliberately ambiguous: ‘things past’ can be made through imagination vividly present to the consciousness of modern readers, so that ‘things past’ can be made ‘things present’.13 Carlyle’s endeavour to revivify the past moment thus leads him to appreciate qualities inherent in the past present. This fascination may be better understood with the help of his idea of the present: The Past is a dim indubitable fact: the Future too is one, only dimmer; nay properly it is the same fact in new dress and development. For the Present holds it in both the whole Past and the whole Future;—as the LIFE-TREE IGDRASIL, wide-waving, many-toned, has its roots down deep in the Death-kingdoms, among the oldest dead dust of men, and with its boughs reaches always beyond the stars; and in all times and places is one and the same Life-tree! (Past and Present, WTC, X, 38; original emphasis) Carlyle’s metaphor, unlike Herder’s evocation of history as growing like seeds and plants ‘blossoming’,14 has its emphasis on constancy, rather than metamorphosis and on all history as a single tree, or the self-revelation of an immanent ‘LIFE-TREE’. The metaphor here of ‘holding’ is a complex one, embracing connotations of ‘supporting’, ‘containing’, ‘possessing’ and ‘owning’. An important meaning of ‘holding’ can be elucidated by his idea of ‘contiguity’. In 1840, he used the word ‘contiguity’ in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History where he indicated how ‘it related, with a wondrous new contiguity and perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Present in time and place’. ‘Contiguity’ here means ‘of non-physical contact’ and ‘proximity of impressions or ideas in place or time’ (‘contiguity’, OED); the sense of distance is invariably implied. What he highlighted is that in spite of the distance between the past and the

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present, we still feel their closeness through our imagination. As John Rosenberg perceptively puts it, ‘for Carlyle the contrary of history is not fiction but oblivion, the unravelling of the collective human memory that holds, [sic] civilization together’.15 The Comtean concept of history equally relates the tangible details of the specific moment to history, though for an ultimately different epistemology from Carlyle’s: the meaning of these moments lies primarily in the part that they may play for understanding future development. In the very early stage of his career, Carlyle borrowed the idea of historical periodicity from the Saint-Simonians (Comte being an important member of the group) who saw history as cyclic but ultimately progressive.16 Carlyle’s philosophy was in particular given shape by the Comtean concept of continuity17 – ‘the Centuries’, writes Carlyle in Past and Present, ‘are all lineal children of one another’ (WTC, X, 39). However, his philosophy does not necessarily imply a single, linear continuation, or a smooth or coherent one. Once professing to be in ‘entire sympathy’ with the Saint-Simonians, he eventually fell out with them18 and came to see history as an apocalyptic and sometimes abrupt mode of continuity.19 Continuity can be taken as implied in the ‘holding’ mode between two disastrous periods, which may imply gaps and inconsequence. Historical periods alternate between ‘belief’, ‘unbelief’, ‘nature’, ‘culture’ and ‘transition’ or ‘anarchy’. It is only in this sense that one dark age may be meaningful to a later greater age. In contrast to thus seeing a past moment as a manifestation of the recurrent decay and renewal in history, the Comtean model takes such a moment as the manifestation of a history that is essentially developmental and teleological. Comte’s own definition of ‘Humanity’, which Eliot noted down in her reading of his System of Positive Polity as ‘[the] continuous whole formed by the Beings which converge’ (GEN, I, 173), is intrinsically temporal. ‘It is the slow and gradual but continuous accumulation of these successive changes that constitutes the social movement of which each generation marks a step’ (EC, 164). Spencer also implies the sense of history when he realises that the adjustment of internal human relations to the external world ‘involves both Time and Space’ (PP, I, 321). Comte sees in history periods of vigour and decadence as well. Yet if one historical moment is left behind by, and thus discontinuous with, the next, it is, for most of the time, a useful oblivion that makes development possible. J. S. Mill thus describes the Saint-Simonian conception as a ‘connected view’.20 Comte and some of the other nineteenthcentury ‘scientists’ such as Spencer believed that items of data

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

belonging to a particular moment should ‘undergo a certain preparation … in order to pass from the concrete to the abstract state, by being stripped of the purely individual and adventitious circumstances of climate, locality, etc., without its essential and general part being altered’ (EC, 204).21 This is necessary because retrogression can result from ‘a too minute observation’ of history (SPP, III, 60). Again, this is not to say that Carlyle’s conception does not allow for local developments. In 1829, he regarded his age in ‘Signs of the Times’ as progressive since ‘[knowledge and] education are opening the eyes of the humblest; are increasing the number of thinking minds without limit’ (WTC, XXVII, 80). Yet to him, development becomes such only to the extent that it constitutes parts of an overall cyclic pattern: ‘Old England too has had her share of such frenzies and panics’ and ‘the distemper is of pretty regular recurrence’ (‘Signs of the Times’, WTC, XXVII, 57). As John Burrow points out, ‘Essentially in Carlyle there is not sequence but only the cyclic assurance of the retribution that waits for forms from which the spirit has departed, and the endless self-renewal of the latter’. It is mainly ‘a recurring pattern, not a consummation’.22 On the other hand, though, it is inaccurate to take linear and teleological development as the only temporal sense in Comte. Although ‘institutions and doctrines’ to him ‘always manifested a progressive and never a retrograde character’ (SPP, IV, 575), this model of social development is not identical with his epistemological model: ‘In place of saying: the past, the present and the future, we should say the past, the future, and the present. In truth it is only when we have conceived the future by the aid of the past that we can with advantage revert to the present so as to seize its true character’ (SPP, IV, 563).23 The temporal senses in both Carlyle and Comte may be seen to characterize the moral struggles of the characters in Romola. The Comtean understanding, already present in Eliot’s early novels, becomes in Romola more systematic, systematic in the same sense as defined by Comte: ‘A real knowledge then of the Laws of Mind can only be furnished by the Positive study of the whole course of human development’ (SPP, III, 39–40). It is also more focused. One of the major themes is to seek ‘that hidden knowledge which would break through the barrier of man’s brief life, and show its dark path … to be an arc in an immeasurable circle of light and glory’ (R, ‘Proem’:3). The scope of the evolution of human feelings is much wider, not just in the context of cultivating altruism, but in the epic evolution of human feelings. Whether Eliot was self-consciously mapping out this ‘whole course’ is not the point here. What is important is that she

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engaged with the notion. She read Comte’s Philosophie Positive while writing Romola and told Sara Sophia Hennell in July 1861 that she had been reading ‘the Survey of the Middle Ages contained in the fifth volume’ and ‘to my apprehension few chapters can be fuller of luminous ideas’: ‘I am thankful to learn from it’ (Cross, II, 310). Further, her disagreement with Comte over the remedial function of ‘the living’ can best be seen in her understanding of this ‘whole course’. Comte in his Positive Polity regarded Humanity ‘as composed essentially of the dead; these alone being fully amenable to our judgment… If the living are admitted it is, except in rare instances, only provisionally’. Eliot, however, asked, ‘If our duties are towards “Humanity” how are the living & those who are to come to be excluded?’ (GEN, I, 164). Her letter in 1880 to Frederic Harrison who had repeatedly advised her on Positivism for her novel-writing may help us to see this difference better. Eliot located for him a quotation from Wordsworth’s The Prelude for an apt understanding of humanity: ‘There is One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the noble Dead.’ (Cross,

III,

389)

The life-long influence of Wordsworth on her which, according to Cross, has been strong ‘to the day of her death’ (Cross, I, 61) must have sustained her Romantic conception even when such a position is challenged by the Comtean notion. This interest in reconstructing the past so as to evaluate the present is shared by many of her contemporaries. In Romola, the allegorical old Florentine finds the city essentially the same for all its recent changes. His observation reminds us of the narrator’s dictum in ‘Janet’s Repentance’: ‘History, we know, is apt to repeat herself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume’ (‘JR’, 10:252). Eliot shares Carlyle’s nostalgia for and allegiance to the past, though not necessarily his preference for medieval order and hierarchy. From the standpoint of Carlyle’s anti-rationalism, the unconscious governing of communal tradition can sufficiently suggest why the past generates the present. Eliot further holds the view that, instead of setting the standards for the present, the past is there ‘to revive us’ (AB, 54:363). She values what she calls, in her review of R. W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect, ‘a nature which combines … a high appreciation of the genius of antiquity, with a profound belief in the progressive character

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

of human development’. Such a nature has ‘valuable qualities … “antithetically mixt”’ (E, 29) and can be defined as, to borrow Carlyle’s words, seeing history ‘with ancient yet with modern eyes’ (Past and Present, WTC, X, 107).24 Her historicist sense tends to override the influence of the sociologists, for she maintains that we must ‘allow, especially in the earlier periods, for something incalculable by us from the data of our present experience’: ‘Even within comparatively near times & in kindred communities how many conceptions & fashions of life have existed to which our understanding & sympathy has no clue!’25 The Romantic sense of mystery and incomprehension is almost always intermingled in Eliot with the search for scientific laws. It is possible that she did not entirely accept Comte’s scientific doctrine because it could not satisfy her belief in the profound complexity of human emotion and sentiment. Carlyle’s imagination may thus come as a counter-force to redress the balance. Such a position is best described by John Burrow, with regard to several historians in Victorian England, as a belief in ‘the close relationship between the comforts of continuity and the consolations of nostalgia’.26 In a letter to the critic R. H. Hutton, Eliot confided that she was conscious of the ‘imperfect degree in which I have been able to give form to my ideas’ in writing Romola (Cross, II, 360). The phrase ‘imperfect degree’ suggests the existence of a counter-force that hinders the full implementation of a formal design. In the present context, if the historiographical emphasis exemplified by Carlyle and Green is historicist, then this historicist approach, when compounded with the evolutionary perspective, would have made writing Romola doubly difficult. In short, historicism as such requires a perspective less present-oriented and less teleologically developmental than that of the nineteenth-century evolutionists. The evolutionary approach of the ‘scientists’ can be reductive because of its primary emphasis on laws and linearity, despite Comte’s call for more contextualization and diverse patterns of time and his admission that ‘temporary disorder must disorientate evolution in [the moral] sphere more than in any other’ (EC, 169). The revivifying imagination represented by Carlyle’s writings pays more attention to the past moment and consequently can allow for discontinuity. In Comte, continuity becomes imperative. He is, according to Karl Löwith, ‘blind to the perpetual possibility and actuality of historical losses, reversions, and catastrophes’.27 In Carlyle, there is a greater sense of historical cycle – renewal and revival – whereas the Comtean understanding has a greater sense of connection and relation. Carlyle recognizes the divergence and

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convergence of events and people and can take both as single entities, valid in their own right. Details or incidents possess as much value as a major event does and equally represent the spirit of their time. For Comte and for Spencer as well, changes are the real substance of science. If details, events or particular human actions do not fit the general pattern, they must be ‘dismissed as incidental’ or partial for the sake of deriving historical laws.28 The point of focusing on the specific moments of moral conflicts in Romola is thus to see how the representation of emotional time may be better understood in the light of both the Carlylean and Comtean models.

Imagining synergy The temporal sense in Romola’s emotional development is premised on the constant and continuous nature of ‘tender fellow-feeling for the nearest’ (R, 61:508). Tender feelings are part of ‘the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history’ (R, ‘Proem’:3) and part of ‘a likeness in human building that will be broader and deeper than all possible change’ (R, ‘Proem’:4). Eliot believes that they can be ‘transformed … into an enthusiasm of sympathy with the general life’ (R, 44:389). Just as for Green, in G. P. Gooch’s summary, ‘Dynasties come and go, battles are won and lost, but the people remain’,29 so in Romola events take place, society changes, but the recurrent pattern of human longings and susceptibilities remains constant. Tender feelings appear at struggling moments for Romola. Social environment is thus more temporal than human feelings, yet it is under the workings of that environment that these feelings are sustained and developed. Momentary manifestations of essential human feelings are often evoked by social events. Romola is set in a time when ‘Lorenzo was dead, Pope Innocent was dying and a troublesome Neapolitan succession, with an intriguing, ambitious Milan, might set Italy by the ears before long: the times were likely to be difficult’ (R, 8:84). The dynamics of such an evocation is explored with much finesse. At the crucial point when Romola is compelled to denounce Camilla Rucellai’s fanatic vision, which requires Romola to betray in the name of God her godfather who is condemned for being a Medicean, Romola is torn between two forces: ‘On the side from which moral energy came lay a fanaticism from which she was shrinking with newly startled repulsion; on the side to which she was drawn by affection and memory, there was the presentiment of some secret plotting, which her judg-

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

ment told her would not be unfairly called crime’ (R, 52:450). The two obligations make a metaphorical crucifix that she has to bear; she is at the crossroads where moral justification is not supported by emotional commitment. She shrinks from both options, but the trying nature of this dilemma characterizes a fundamental question raised in Romola about ‘where the duty of obedience ends and the duty of resistance begins’ (R, 55:462). Here, the two duties are not absolute because they are established on what appear to be equally valid grounds. Similarly, Romola has to decide, upon the Excommunication of Savonarola, Prior of the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence, whether she accepts the Church as ‘a living organism instinct with divine power to bless and to curse’ or whether she should remain sympathetic to Savonarola simply out of her instinctive tenderness and kind feelings. The narrator is clearly aware of the entangled forces in her. She was not raised on ‘the traditional associations of the Christian community’ (R, 55:462); her relation to the Church is mainly mediated through Savonarola. Yet the power of the Christian associations lies, in many ways, in their appeal to basic human feelings, whereas Savonarola influences her largely through his interpretation, if not appropriation, of the Church for the moment in which he himself is situated and for the social conditions he has to live against. Here, we may recall what Comte understands as ‘intermediary conceptions’: in the ‘gradual transition’ of history, these conceptions ‘of a bastard nature’ are necessary (EC, 23). At each crucial turn of moral evolution, tender feeling is the connecting element that sustains continuity and makes every movement towards the next step organically possible. Although to the narrator, ‘tender fellow-feeling for the nearest has its danger too’ (R, 61:508), what makes each stage of emotional development possible is the basic feeling of sympathy. For the same reason, while her pagan education compels her to denounce Dino’s Christian dogmatism, Romola’s innate susceptibility to love and kindness has helped her to remain open-minded about his emotions. On his death bed, she softens towards the ideas that he tries to pass on. Such susceptibility also explains why at the execution of her godfather ‘she looked with the eyes of personal tenderness and he with the eyes of theoretic conviction’ (R, 61:508; original emphases). Her sympathy helps to bridge the gaps between different versions of love – pagan tenderness, Christian benevolence and Renaissance humanism. In this sense, sympathy belongs both to the moment and to history as it represents a present by means of fusing the past and

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the future. Sympathetic feelings are valuable for their capacity as a medium: ‘the widening influence of ideas … would hardly be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling’ (R, 52:449–50). For Romola, tender feeling is thus constantly retrievable and is likely to be felt at any given moment; changes in emotional development are, for the same reason, not drastic changes, but are happening all the time. Seen from the opposite direction, though, such a conception undermines the idea of development and saves Romola from being a mere textbook Positivist priestess. In Comte, cultivating sympathy and, for that matter, altruism primarily means overcoming one’s egoistic instincts. In Romola this issue amounts to retrieving dormant human feelings for their potentialities. Before meeting Savonarola, ‘the larger possibilities of her nature … lay folded and crushed like embryonic wings’ (R, 27:250). Dorothea Barrett has clarified an important aspect of Eliot’s engagement with Comtean Positivism. Eliot’s is ‘a synthesis of polytheism and monotheism rather than as the end of a linear progress’ and ‘the synthesis … is not the actualization of Comte’s religion of humanity … but rather the hazily-envisioned better world towards which, throughout [her] canon, George Eliot gestures’.30 When Romola is about to move away from the narrow Christian doctrines of Savonarola and to leave Tito as well, it is hardly the Religion of Humanity alone that causes the move. She rebuts Tito in the following terms: ‘the law that should make us one can never be obeyed. I too am a human being. I have a soul of my own that abhors your actions’ (R, 58:489). She returns to a moral sense that her initial pagan education, which, in Tito’s words, has ‘a touch of fanaticism’ (R, 27:256), would be sufficient to shape. Even when her ‘tenderness and keen fellow-feeling for the near and the loved’ are described as ‘the main outgrowth of the affections’ (R, 36:325), her pagan tenderness for father, husband and brother is retained in her, both as a Christian Madonna who accepts womanly labours so as to care for her fellow citizens and as a Positivist humanist who sees things in terms of love for humanity. The emphasis on the constant, though often dormant, tender feelings has given prominence to their pagan origins, which, though instrumental in moral evolution, imply little evolution in themselves. So the question remains: to what extent is her moral journey really a journey of development? Eliot believes that ‘[our] lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race’ (R, 39:353). The representation of these two moral tradi-

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

tions is more problematic than the analogy suggests. The marriage between Romola and Tito is a marriage of cultures, of historical moments and, in particular, of qualities allegorized by themselves: virtue, trust, heroism, egotism and evil. Marriage as such weakens the need for developing moral feelings in either of the two characters, though such a development is inevitable and imperative according to the narrator. The most intricate case is the character portrayal of Tito. The formation of Tito’s immoral thoughts is clearly traced in ways quite different from the Gemeinschaft novels where egoistic inclinations are identified not so much by their history as by their present manifestations. Such a disposition gives him a better chance than Romola for emotional cultivation, but not development, since, for Eliot as well as Comte, development should move in the direction of altruism instead of egoism. The process is rarely punctuated by retribution, which does not happen until the end of the novel. To sustain such a suspense, Tito’s moral dilemma in the first half of the novel is compounded with his sympathy, which turns him into a far more credible and accessible character than Romola. He ‘sold all his jewels, except the ring he did not choose to part with’ (R, 9:96). Even after he resolves to ‘disown’ his father, witnessing how Baldassarre fails to prove his identity at the garden supper can still incite in him tender reactions. Justice, though ruthlessly done, is not seen to be done until close to the end of the novel when Tito is killed by Baldassarre. Tito’s Dionysian nature makes him a man of the moment, a moment that is nevertheless recurrent and almost timeless. His inner struggles are explained accordingly. ‘Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had won no memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling’ (R, 39:353). He wants to live in the moment without being too much caught up in its constraints. He ‘had gone on following the impulses of the moment’ (R, 9:98). He always wants to disown the past so as ‘to be free from any hidden shackles that would gall him, though ever so little, under his ties to Romola’ (R, 18:186). To Bernardo ‘he is one of the demoni, who are of no particular country’ (R, 19:195). His ‘adventure’ also unhinges him from chronological time and space. The real point of being a devil is that not only is he of no particular country, he is of no particular time either. Yet ultimately, he is not entirely devoid of his own historicity. Being a devil registers him in moral time framed by the plot and the presence of other characters. He does not fear so much the claim of old sentiments as recognition – in the momentary yet momentous drama of anagnorisis. He is more afraid of

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immediate and external threat: suspense would mean impending danger. The separate roles played by Romola and Tessa can be taken as testing out different aspects of Tito’s moral character, in theoretical and homely terms. It may be more pertinent to see the characters as being there to anchor his moral weightlessness. In the same way, when Tito and Baldassarre are both found dead together – ‘It was not possible to separate them’ (R, 67:555) – the moment is symbolic due to what each represents: rootless floating wheeling–dealing ‘anchored’ by a strong moral and emotional claim based on love, virtue and duty. The lack of immediate punitive response may be attributed to the historicist assumption in Romola that ‘in strictness there is no replacing of relations: the presence of the new does not nullify the failure and breach of the old’ (R, 69:568). Nevertheless, it reveals a more fundamental conceptual inadequacy: why are altruistic emotions in Romola presented as necessarily overcoming egoistic instincts when basic human nature comprises the contending claims of egoism and altruism? For Eliot, they are both of moral significance in the evolution of feelings. Yet, Tito’s egoistic emotions function largely as a sounding-board against which Romola’s altruistic emotions may be seen to come into being and validate themselves. The intensity of his egoism is diffused once conflicts of the moment are resolved. By contrast, Romola’s altruistic emotions are always given priority for their presence and particularly for their latent effects – her story is often determined or dictated by remembered history. The difference in how memory affects them is mostly a difference between two types of morality, which according to Michael Oakeshott are ‘a habit of affection and behaviour’ and a ‘reflective application of a moral criterion’.31 The narrator seems frustrated by the need to justify the necessary triumph of altruistic feelings in moments of emotional conflicts. With a light touch of irony, we are reminded that ‘to have once acted nobly seems a reason why we should always be noble’ (R, 39:353). This unaccounted-for triumph of altruistic feelings over egoistic emotions is a problem embedded in Comte’s own theory of altruism, for he often only asserts but hardly argues for such a triumph. Lewes seems to perceive a physiological basis for moral teleology, but his argument is not fully developed either (SP, 144–5). Spencer develops his theory about the cultivation of altruistic feelings by ‘corresponding the evolutionary end of greatest happiness to its moral end’. He does distinguish between ‘a moral psychology and a moral science’. But in his understanding, the two lead to the same outcome. He

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

explains the production of certain ‘innate tendencies toward altruistic behaviour’32 by arguing that ‘thus commenced, and survival of the fittest tending ever to maintain and increase it, it will be further strengthened by the inherited effects of habit’ (PP, II, 561). This is an example of his ‘immutability of belief’33 that can also sometimes be found in Eliot’s conception. Earlier in Adam Bede, the damning criticism of the ‘loving nature’ of Arthur, for whom ‘[deeds] of kindness were as easy to him as a bad habit’ (AB, 29:33), suggests that human nature can be initially egoistic. Eliot’s own statement is more explicit: ‘All emotions in the beginning are egoistic’.34 None of these ideas indicate that memories ought to result in a willing control of one’s egoistic instincts so as to help to form a natural inclination towards altruism. Romola lacks a valid explanation as well, despite its awareness of the need to justify this theory. Altruism becomes the ultimate moral criterion and thus the moral end, even when the narrator’s sympathy and unintended justification for Tito have undercut the privileged evolutionary triumph of altruistic feelings. The juxtaposition of an intense moment as in itself significant and its location in history resembles the Carlylean zooming in The French Revolution, where Carlyle uses ‘contrasts of scale, of close-up and distant landscape’.35 In Chapter 61 (‘Drifting Away’), the attempt to combine the cyclic and the evolutionary is best seen in a metaphor that in effect warns against any simplistic understanding of linearity, for linearity may imply cyclic pattern as well: ‘Fruit is Seed’ (R, 31:279). Results therefore are a new beginning. Based on this pattern, the cyclic or recurrent model of history becomes a dialectical concept since it seeks permanence in change and explains change through permanence. Valerie A. Dodd has rightly observed that Carlyle ‘merged concepts’ and ‘reconciled notions of continuity and change’.36 But to understand Eliot’s position we need to go a step further. The ‘merged concepts’ in Romola consist not in how to maintain essence in a time of change but in how to understand drastic historical change with a view to the continuity of basic human nature. This temporal dialectic of recapitulation also shows the immanent connections between continuity and discontinuity. Worried about the threat posed by the strange military move of the French, Goro, whom we first meet in Nello’s shop as the leek buyer and a man in the street, amuses us with a seemingly casual but in essence automatic reaction: ‘San Giovanni defend us!’ (R, 22:216). The imminence of the French invasion serves as an instance of how sentiments are not only evoked but also conditioned by changes of the moment. The popular

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conviction that this invasion marks a crucial historical moment rests ‘less on the necessarily momentous character of a powerful foreign invasion than on certain moral emotions to which the aspect of the times gave the form of presentiments’ (R, 21:209). Nevertheless, the need to worship deities is soon followed up with efforts to defend Florence with its craft and coffers. The ‘struggle between the old patron and the new’ gives a strong sense of modernity to traditional values (R, 8:81). The characters’ long-held beliefs have to accommodate each new wave of change. It is in this sense that we should understand why Tito refuses to reveal his origins initially. He wants to play down or up various elements in his origins according to what works best for him at a particular moment. The moral of his story, though, suggests that events of the moment will condition his sentiments: they enable the mark of his origins to become his identity, no matter how much he moves geographically or how much he plays around the needs of a specific historical situation. For the same reason, the narrator comments on Savonarola’s forced confession under torture by asking rhetorically: ‘perhaps this confession, even when it described a doubleness that was conscious and deliberate, really implied no more than that wavering of belief concerning his own impressions and motives which most human beings who have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must be liable to under a marked change of external conditions?’ (R, 71:579). The humanly shared basis was part of Eliot’s concern since she initially meant to follow this up with another example of Romola.37 The strong emphasis on basic human sentiments provides the best terms in which to define the nature and meaning of Savonarola’s reform of ‘public virtue and spiritual purity’ (R, 55:462). Reform must target the cyclic manifestation of shared mentalities. It also places Savonarola in the realm of continuous history which is occasioned by, though hardly confined to, specific changes. Thus he can take advantage of the fact that as an individual of a specific historical moment, he may appeal to a long communal history by appearing to represent these sentiments, ‘emotions which had found a very remarkable utterance in the voice of a single man’ (R, 21:209). Seen in such terms, his reform of civil virtues ought to have been, though it is not, a most sustainable remedy for the moral chaos of Florence, because it would have located the root of the problem in sentiments rather than their expressions, which are only transitory religious or political institutions of the moment. The target of Savonarola’s reform is still the age-old deficiencies in human nature, almost exact to biblical specifications: ‘lust and

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

obscenity, lying and treachery, oppression and murder … tyranny, avarice, and lasciviousness’ (R, 21:210), but the Florentine conditions place them back in secular time without unhinging them altogether from the Christian trope of apocalypse. As for himself, what ‘had driven him into the cloister’ is ‘the contradiction between men’s lives and their professed beliefs’. The divine structure of his belief rests largely on a personal and almost pagan thrust of feelings and passion, ‘his own burning indignation at the sight of wrong’, in spite of the fact that entering the Church may paradoxically prove that ‘his appetite for the world’ has been destroyed (R, 21:211). He still relies on biblical terms to indicate the nature of his reform, his ‘labyrinthine allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures’ (R, 25:237) and looks in ‘the Sacred Book’ for ‘a record of the past in which might be seen as in a glass what would be in the days to come’ (R, 21:211). ‘I tell you the French King with his army is the minister of God’, he tells his congregation (R, 24:230). He needs to convince his congregation that he is simply living out a prophecy, predetermined and anticipated. This is perhaps why in his preaching ‘there were strains that appealed to the very finest susceptibilities of men’s natures, and there were elements that gratified low egoism, tickled gossiping curiosity, and fascinated timorous superstition’ (R, 25:237). Such a double-edged practice makes his voice touch the pagan heart of Baldassarre and ‘[possess]’ (R, 25:234) him who, at the end of his sermon, ‘burst into a sob with the rest’ (R, 24:233). Not surprisingly, ‘the false certitude’ (R, 25:238) of his sermons has won him a very ‘heterogeneous’ (R, 25:237) audience, from enemies to disciples. The winning act may not be a real success because to the narrator it may remain an external force. It may work as music that moves such listeners as Romola, but it creates no ‘sense of being possessed by actual vibrating harmonies … and lies quite outside the inner chamber and sanctuary of her life’ (R, 27:251). The narrator successfully grounds Savonarola’s seemingly transcendental rhetoric back in history by passing judgements on his appropriation of biblical language to interpret contemporary events and to justify his civic reform. His prophecy finds authority in the recurrence of the ‘strong attestation from the peculiar conditions of the age’ (R, 21:210): ‘the faith in a supreme and righteous Ruler became one with the faith in a speedy divine interposition that would punish and reclaim’ (R, 21:211). ‘As long as four years ago he had proclaimed … that a scourge was about to descend on Italy, and that by this scourge the Church was to be purified … and … that he had a mission like that of the

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Hebrew prophets, and that the Florentines amongst whom his message was delivered were in some sense a second chosen people’ (R, 21:209–10). The true nature of his grand scheme of interpretation is made clear by way of narratorial irony: he himself stands out ‘conspicuously as a grand exception’ from others whose ‘gift of prophecy was very much like a farthing candle illuminating small corners of human destiny with prophetic gossip’ (R, 21:210). It is the precision and profundity with which he is able to understand the complexity of his moment that have made his failure of reform all the more tragic. The reader has to wonder in the end whether he fails because of the limits of his ‘grand’ vision or because of his inability to reshape public sentiments due to the unabridgeable chasm between his biblical and worldly readings of human psychology. Eliot’s effort in Romola to historicize the transcendental goal promises an organic interdependence between recurrence and change. It also implies that without organic fusion coexistence offers no emotional benefit, as coexistence only allows for a mere alternating between two entities. In Savonarola, ‘opposing tendencies co-exist in almost equal strength’ but ‘alternated in him with a keen perception of outward facts and a vigorous practical judgment of men and things’ (R, 64:531). It is this relational perspective that enables the narrator to stop short of making every event teleological and to exhibit much intellectual acumen and virtuosity. This view allows Savonarola’s reform to become, in one sense, a one-off occurrence, which can be overlooked if we merely focus on his reform as a legend to posterity. The reform fails and ends with Savonarola seeking ‘the rapture and glory of martyrdom without its agony’ (R, 24:232). His attempts may have facilitated Romola’s inner conflicts, yet the raison d’être of these attempts certainly does not reside merely in that function. The morally chaotic moment of Florentine sentiments, of which Savonarola’s reform is only a symptom rather than a cure, also exemplifies the Carlylean concept of disruption in history which is largely discontinuous. Bardo, not surprisingly, sees recent happenings in Florence in Carlylean terms: ‘our manners have degenerated somewhat from that noble frugality which … is the parent of true magnificance’ (R, 12:126). Moments of anarchy and lack of spiritual force may call for retribution in history, but not necessarily always. When Romola questions Savonarola about the rigidity of Christianity, the narrator hastens to add: ‘Our relations with our fellow-men are most often determined by coincident currents of that sort’ (R, 59:493). The fact that ‘perfect scheming demands omniscience’ (R, 63:526)

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

only indicates that details of the moment may sometimes defy any direct relation to teleology and purposefulness. Although Savonarola holds a very important position in Italian history, the failure of his reform may be regarded, in one sense, as a moment not rescued in the history represented in Romola. It becomes history to the extent that it has been a historical event; yet the intensity accompanying moments of moral struggle is maintained largely, though not exclusively, by a mechanism of oblivion. To understand the complexity of such oblivion as a necessary part of history, we need to come back to the limits of narrative.

Transcending the limits of narrative This representation of the dialectics between ever-present continuity and the moment of historical accidents overcomes the limits of Positivist religion. The implied relations between these two models of time also transcend the limits of narrative. J. Hillis Miller has highlighted ‘the way linear terminology and linear form used to discuss realistic fiction subverts itself by becoming “complex”’.38 Linear or otherwise, the narrative sequence may not always be able to capture the intensity of the moment, since intensity demands drama and concentration, which necessitates an oblivion to what it may hold for development. Moreover, the moment consists in a multidimensional performance. Narrative duration is fundamentally different from this multiplicity because, even when it is absorbed in its own drama of the moment, such absorption has to generate an impetus for the future to become possible. This returns us to the weaving function of memory and forgetfulness. In Romola, the ‘web’ of psychological movements intimates ways in which different feelings may collide head-on with each other. While giving an added dimension to linear sequence, these movements may form a centrifugal force that preserves the complex nature of communal memory with its potential for inconsequence and unpurposefulness. The significance of bringing out the non-linear dimension is to see multidimensional human experience through the limits of narrative. These limits are best described in Carlyle’s observation that ‘[an] Historian must write (so to speak) in lines; but every event is a superficies; nay if we search out its causes, a solid: hence a primary and almost incurable defect in the art of Narration’,39 and that historians must face the ‘ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being’ (‘On History’, WTC, XXVII, 88). Yet oblivion implies sequence,

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Memory and Oblivion, like Day and Night, and indeed like all other Contradictions in this strange dualistic Life of ours, are necessary for each other’s existence: Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness. As with man and these autobiographic Annual-Registers of his, so goes it with Mankind and its Universal History, which also is its Autobiography: a like unconscious talent of remembering and of forgetting again does the work here. (‘On History Again’, WTC, XXVIII, 173; original emphasis) Oblivion is necessary in Romola in bringing memory into existence. If in Carlyle, it is by way of difference that oblivion draws memory onto itself as memory draws oblivion onto itself,40 in Romola it is by way of ‘transmutation’. Without always seeing memory as necessarily entailing oblivion, Romola presents both as unstable since one may easily assume the role of the other. To recognize discontinuous oblivion as an integral part of continuous memory is to transcend the limits of the direction and duration of sequence. It is in this sense that the intensity of absence becomes a way of recovering a forgotten past. The meaning of the one will only be revealed through the other, even when oblivion is not recoverable.41 While the intensity of a character’s moral awareness depends on the ebb and flow of his or her ability to recognize and remember, memory itself, especially involuntary memory, may become a means to sever the past from the present moment and to negate any course of teleology. In presenting this ‘tangled web’ (R, 36:329), Romola offers us a unique genre: the present moment may be obliterated by moral meanings from the past; in this obliteration or oblivion moral meanings lose their teleology for they have nothing to bear upon. Once Romola comes to know Baldassarre’s past, she is ‘too entirely possessed by the images of the past to take any note of Baldassarre’s question’ (R, 53:453). Oblivion here does not mean deliberate ignorance but the strong sensation caused by memory which disrupts Romola’s orientation in the present. It is an interesting reversal of Lewes’s theory that memory may help to form new perceptions. In Lewes, such perception

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too. Carlyle was able to perceive an intrinsic connection between mental continuity and the shape of history and uses the counterpointing metaphors of memory and oblivion to address the issue:

Romola and the Moment in History

is rarely transformed back into sensation. This ‘reversed’ sensation works on Romola: ‘That heart-cutting comparison of the present with the past urged itself upon Romola till it even transformed itself into wretched sensations: she seemed benumbed to everything but inward throbbings’ (R, 36:326). Such a mental process also complicates the teleology of the Bildungsroman conventions. Memory of a past incident, when transformed into a perception, is subject to the workings of other formative influences, which may unsettle the moral meaning of that perception. Unlike in Adam Bede where the understanding of events in the past usually takes the form of a deepening thought that may enhance or extend the moral meaning of the original events, in Romola it is by substantially altering, if not negating, such meaning that an individual character may arrive at a new understanding of past events. The night before she leaves Florence after Tito breaches her trust, Romola looks for the key that locks away the crucifix that Dino has made a point of leaving with her. The key brings back memories ‘with the new vividness that remembered words always have for us when we have learned to give them a new meaning’ (R, 36:327); yet, ‘while its remembered images pressed upon her almost with the imperious force of sensations, they raised struggling thoughts which resisted their influence’ (R, 36:327–8). This is a crucial moment which reveals Romola’s limitation. Her more deep-seated memories have cancelled out her momentary sympathy with Dino’s doctrine. ‘All the instruction, all the main influences of her life had gone to fortify her scorn of that sickly superstition’ (R, 36:329). Yet, her perception is not totally dominated by this limitation; it leaves some openness, since ‘she was conscious of something deeper than that coincidence of words’: ‘If there were much more of such experience as his in the world, she would like to understand it’ (R, 36:329). Likewise, once Baldassarre suspects that Tessa’s absent husband is Tito and her baby Tito’s child, this ‘sudden question appealing to his memory, had a paralysing effect, and in that moment he was conscious of nothing but helplessness’ (R, 33:303). He wants to, but cannot, put this new discourse into perspective by linking it to all his findings about Tito so far. Once again, the emotional charge of the moment may change the moral course set by a teleological past. This is not to deny that the past often needs the intensity of the moment to take shape and become articulatable. One way to register an emerging new perception of the past before the perception takes full shape, so as to prevent it from slipping into oblivion, is to compound it with new sensations. Romola is disillusioned by Tito’s

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betrayal and puts on the serge mantle for her departure from Florence: ‘as she thrust her soft white arms into the harsh sleeves … and felt the hard girdle of rope hurt her fingers as she tied it, she courted those rude sensations: they were in keeping with her new scorn of that thing called pleasure which made men base’ (R, 36:323–4). Her resentment towards Tito needs a focus. The need is implied in the word ‘courted’. In such a sensation her disappointment is turned into anger and in turn released by it. Yet if anger is left unrecovered, it is because it will only remain an emotional reaction, articulated only hazily, but not sufficiently to be developed into a judgement. The discontinuity of oblivion deprives Romola of an emotional anchorage. She wants to escape from memories that ‘hung upon her like the weight of broken wings’ (R, 61:511) and leaves herself in a boat drifting on the sea. And so she lay, with the soft night air breathing on her while she glided on the waters and watched the deepening quiet of the sky. She was alone now: she had freed herself from all claims, she had freed herself even from that burden of choice which presses with heavier and heavier weight when claims have loosed their guiding hold. (R, 61:510) Freedom here means obliterating demanding obligations, yet freedom may lose its raison d’être in oblivion, as oblivion marginalizes what freedom breaks away from. It is not that drifting is free of eventful drama, but that eventfulness which seems to be without constraints will find its limits in its own momentariness. Well before the drifting the narrator is quick to warn us: ‘The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and then for ever passed her by’ (R, 61:507), meaning ‘[the] bonds of all strong affection were snapped’ (R, 61:507). For this reason, momentary changes make sense only when memory is at hand and when it is interpreted in emotional terms. The word ‘stirrings’ is frequently used in Romola, as in the early novels, to describe the unpredictable and involuntary memory of communal feelings, which suggests more a disruption from than a connection with the past. The unpredictable effect of such disruption is often toned down by turning the involuntary state into a voluntary act, which no longer denotes spontaneous recollection, or what has an active claim on the present, but something that must be memorized, an obligation to the future. This sense of obligation turns a Wordsworthian emphasis – memory having the power to select those

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

images that are worth remembering – into a moral imperative. In doing so it adds a particular type of teleological, because consequential, dimension to such a selective power. This shift of emphasis is, considered from another angle, a question concerning an individual’s will. A moral conflict of the moment acquires a historical meaning by way of action. Memory thus depends on the intervention of the will to have an interpretative continuity. Romola may wilfully transform past memory into present concealment, even when its moral implications remain unchangeable. This happens to her in Chapter 59 when she revisits San Marco to see her confessor and is reminded of the death of Dino: ‘Once more looked at by those sad frescoed figures which had seemed to be mourning with her at the death of her brother Dino, it was inevitable that something of that scene should come back to her … She gave no space for the remembrance to become more definite, for she at once opened the handbills’ (R, 59:493). The intervention of the will adds a specific edge to Comte’s conception of the educative function of the conflict between altruistic and egoistic emotions. By stressing necessary memorization, the novel has brought into relief the moral implication of voluntary oblivion, which differs from the case of oblivion in Silas Marner, for example. The deliberate repression marks a moment at which forgetfulness is no longer seen as a mere malfunction of memory. It also suggests that oblivion is the only means by which to write off not memory itself but the impact of memory. As with Janet Dempster, oblivion becomes ‘the one refuge of despair’ (‘JR’, 15:275). Wanting to escape the same impact, Tito time and again wilfully obliterates the claim of the past, especially when he wishes that his father’s face could simply disappear. To him, his voluntary oblivion is his only means of seemingly liberating himself from external judgement. ‘He had sold himself to evil, but at present life seemed so nearly the same to him that he was not conscious of the bond’ (R, 12:120). But paradoxically, Tito’s voluntary oblivion may also be seen as an inadvertent effort to establish the continuum of emotional development: the very obliterating act becomes one of the few moments at which he himself is forced to see the moral meaning of his own story, an act through which he comes to own up to his history. A similar mental process is deftly captured by the speaker in George Meredith’s Modern Love: Methinks with all this loss I were content, If the mad Past, on which my foot is based, Were firm, or might be blotted: but the whole

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This act of moral enlightenment surpasses Lewes’s theory that forgetfulness is ‘the disruption of the links whereby present feelings are associated with’ the whole ‘field of personal experience’ (PLM3, 116–7; original emphasis). It also reveals a subtler understanding of history as it invokes the hermeneutic function of oblivion to reveal a deeprunning connection in a seemingly discontinuous relation. Elizabeth Ermarth has perceptively noted in Eliot ‘the paralysing effects of faulty memory’ and ‘the preemptive errors preventing characters from accumulating the experience that feeds memory and hence understanding’.43 The function of Tito’s own will here has highlighted a more intricate type of ‘faulty memory’. The emphasis on human will puts across the message that the historical meaning of the present may not exist until the present is set in relation and in reference to the past. Conversely, the past’s relevance to the present lies not just in the presence of such a past in the present, but in the morally meaningful uses of it. Critics often find that the essential quest in the moral drama in Romola is for a personal fulfilment that will also contribute to the harmonious development of the larger social whole. However, the notion of ‘harmonious development’ can be ambiguous in itself, because, from Comte to Spencer, the connotation of the term varies. Spencer regards the state of social harmony as a preconceived ideal or a supposed end-product of history, whereas Eliot seems to emphasize the very process that leads to the altruistic stage. She entertains the idea that this harmony may be naturally generated by good human nature, in spite of her constant and firm belief that a moral act usually involves a decision that calls for the intervention of the will. Romola feels that ‘the sanctity attached to all close relations, and, therefore, pre-eminently to the closest, was but the expression in outward law of that result towards which all human goodness and nobleness must spontaneously tend’ (R, 56:473–4). Apropos of why he prefers the notion ‘development’ to ‘progress’ of humanity, Comte explained that ‘it indicates a spontaneous unfolding, gradually seconded by an appropriate culture’ (EC, 170). What the statement does not state explicitly is the teleology that spontaneity is not unlimited, but is the only result to be encouraged morally. What differentiates Eliot from Comte concerns not the origin of human sympathy, whether as the

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Of life is mixed: the mocking Past will stay: And if I drink oblivion of a day, So shorten I the stature of my soul.42

Romola and the Moment in History

synthesis or result of moral development, but the less rigid frame within which sympathy has to be understood. Both the historicist notion of human psychology and the scientific understanding of evolution presuppose such spontaneity, though subject to different conditions. In Romola, such spontaneity elevates the circumstantial to an epic scale; it constitutes a necessary step towards the cultivation of moral sense into an acquired nature or the Carlylean ‘natural constitution of man’, regulatory and yet personal: ‘The rudest peasant has his complete set of Annual Registers legibly printed in his brain; and, without the smallest training in Mnemonics, the proper pauses, subdivisions and subordinations of the little to the great, all introduced there’ (WTC, XXVIII, 172–3). The need for narratorial forgetfulness illustrates the ‘spontaneous’ mode of fictional narrative in Romola. By the end of the ‘Proem’, the narrator drives home the message that forgetting the present time is of primary importance in reaching a specific point on the arch of human history. ‘I will go down and hear’ (R, ‘Proem’:9). This ‘ability to forget’ was certainly discussed in Eliot’s time. It was celebrated in Carlyle, who stresses the historian’s ‘necessity of cultivating the unconscious mind in recovering the collective past’.44 What Carlyle values is a special type of willing control, a kind of passiveness, a suspended mind, or some ‘wise oblivion’ (Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, WTC, VI, 8) which ‘puts to momentary rest the conscious, ratiocinative mind’ of the historian.45 Eliot shares this idea in her review of Lecky, commending ‘that patient watching of external fact, and that silencing of preconceived notions, which are urged upon the mind by the problems of physical science’ (E, 413). In this respect, what John Rosenberg says about Carlyle is equally applicable to her: ‘Carlyle’s power of endowing the past with extraordinary “presence” is enhanced by his complementary genius for undermining the actuality of the here and now’. Eliot, like Carlyle, appreciates the idea of ‘moving back in time in order to obliterate time’.46 Yet, this is not to deny that Eliot is aware, as is F. H. Bradley later, that a historian is necessarily an observer and a participant in the past he or she studies.47 Narratorial forgetfulness in Romola is not so much for recovering a past without a framing of the present as for properly positioning such a frame by restraining it from over-colouring every reading of that past. The historical concern in the ‘Proem’ in Romola and the variations upon the same theme in the main text show a backward movement that is hardly disturbed by any direct reference to the time of the writing itself. The narration thus illustrates ‘that world of

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memory in which the distant seems to grow clearer and the near to fade’ (R, 12:129). Behind this strategy lies an urge to transcend temporal narrative and to elevate the story of Romola into a general truth that is almost outside time. The strategy enhances, rather than diminishes, the intensity of the moment. Such a feat of achieving action by way of inaction bespeaks Eliot’s inward understanding of the interpretative nature of memory, which depends on the interconnection between what Oakeshott has termed the ‘present–past’ and the ‘present–future’, that is, between what is recognized as ‘survivals, vestiges … fragments of a conserved past’ and the ‘present in practical understanding’.48 The emphasis on spontaneity also explains why the final stage of Romola’s emotional development needs to be ushered in by a prolonged duration in oblivion: Chapter 61 serves as a deus ex machina. Only through this oblivion, which is a kind of ‘passive existence’ that ‘is itself a Lethe’ (R, 68:557), can the implied modern frame of mind, which is backdated into Romola’s consciousness, be phased in. The last eleven chapters create an aura of serenity. The Madonna figure of benevolence and salvation is devoid of its Christian spirit. It symbolizes a secular ideal of humanitarianism that belongs more to nineteenth-century England than to fifteenthcentury Florence. This is to say that the appearance of the historical moment is not as important as its historicity, which resides in the moment but addresses itself to history. The process of writing Romola must have given Eliot the satisfaction of both nostalgia and idealization, a satisfaction which she might not have derived from either the Comtean theory of emotional development or the Carlylean conception of history. The fictional narrative itself becomes a recollection process. It puts the drama of moral development in historical perspective and makes actions ‘intelligible’ by way of ‘enacted narratives’.49 It thus allows for the reversal of time in a narrative sequence, what Ricoeur calls ‘an alternative to the representation of time as moving from the past forward into the future, according to the well-known metaphor of the arrow of time’: thus narrative ‘establishes human action not only within time … but within memory’.50 This reenacting process manifests Eliot’s own understanding of the movement of history and sheds light on why she adopted ‘the clothing of the past’ (Cross, II, 442) in the first place. Without reducing the moment to history, she makes the moment in history account for the Carlylean ‘superficies’ or ‘solid’ and for the historicity of events that calls for narrative in the first place, inadequate as it may be. Eliot attempts to present what she calls in her

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Romola and the Moment in History

Romola and the Moment in History

fragment on ‘Historic Imagination’ ‘brief, severely conscientious reproductions’, ‘something different from the schemed picturesqueness of ordinary historical fiction’ (E, 447). Judged in terms of her efforts in Romola to balance the two temporal models, the ideal of ‘conscientious reproductions’ becomes a process of experiment and compromise, which arise out of her complex argument with herself at both literary and intellectual levels. The complexity of her mind helps to create a historical imagination which is best described in her own words as ‘a wonderful intuition of the mental conditions of past ages with an ardent participation in the most advanced ideas and most hopeful efforts of the present’ (E, 29). The temporal sense of emotional development reveals how memory and oblivion may provide interpretative access to the dialectic between continuity and discontinuity in history. It is a tension that has characterized the thinking of many of her contemporaries, who had an ‘ambivalence towards a past transcended and discarded, yet also passionately enhanced or yearned for’.51

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

… the reason why societies change slowly is, because individual men and women cannot have their natures changed by doctrine and can only be wrought on by little and little. (George Eliot, L, VII, 346) At the end of the ‘Introduction’ to Felix Holt, after briefing the reader on the sad fortunes of Transome Court, the self-referring ‘author’ moves on to lament the fact that ‘[many] an inherited sorrow … has been breathed into no human ear’ and observes that ‘[these] things are a parable’ (FH, ‘Introduction’:11). The word ‘parable’ puts the moral of the story into perspective. The history of Transome Court – its ‘woeful progeny’ – manifests the powers of ‘will and destiny’ (FH, ‘Introduction’:11). As a moral, this theme of retribution and determinism should have a bearing on the rest of Felix Holt, especially the other main plot, the electoral reform. Nemesis does not favour only those who are seen to be unfortunate. A representative critical point of view sees the story of reform as belonging to the Zeitgeist of the 1860s, characterized by ‘the antithesis between political radicalism and cultural conservation’ that recalls ‘Arnold and Carlyle’, with ‘the social groupings of Felix Holt … oddly akin to Arnold’s’.1 To what extent do the workings of determinism condition this antithesis? This chapter attempts to answer the question by focusing on Eliot’s study of the mentality of two major social groups in Felix Holt, the Dissenting community and the working men, especially her presentation of how such mentality may dictate their reaction under specific historical conditions. This issue of determinism is significant enough to have turned electoral reform into moral reform. Eliot’s engagement 97

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

with the debate on moral reform is extensive. Where she differs from critics such as Carlyle, Arnold and J. S. Mill, she makes her own contributions. It is in this sense of reform that Felix Holt forms a crucial stage in the conceptual development of her understanding of collective memory.

‘Radical’ reform A word needs to be said about chronology before we discuss the novel’s representation of reform. Some of the writings by cultural critics such as Mill and Arnold, which our discussion will draw upon, postdate the writing of Felix Holt. Nevertheless, the idea of moral reform that they expressed had existed before the publication of those writings. The concern with suffrage, particularly with the need to improve the quality of moral life, was nothing new by 1865. The rise of the idea, according to Patrick Brantlinger, was mainly due to the fact that ‘[disillusionment] with Benthamite and with other theories of social reform grew during the depression of 1836–1842 and was reinforced by Carlyle and Dickens, who were advocates of social reform but who, in contrast to the Benthamites and the Owenites, believed that moral reform has to come first’.2 As early as 1833, Edward Bulwer Lytton claimed, ‘Reformed opinion precedes reformed legislation … no reform is final, save the reform of mind’.3 In 1849, Charles Kingsley already warned his readers to the same effect in Alton Locke. Similar anxieties appear to have accounted for the emergence of working men’s manuals such as Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance (1859). In addition, Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy was first published as articles in 1866–8, but his main argument was anticipated in his earlier essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864). While writing Felix Holt, Eliot was keeping up with Arnold’s latest work.4 Mill’s On Liberty (1859) was published some seven years earlier than Felix Holt. His objection to the tyranny of the majority is very likely to have caught Eliot’s attention. It may thus be reasonable to say that by the time she started writing about the passing of the first Reform Bill and the subsequent elections, the political atmosphere had already been characterized by a revival of various ideas of moral reform. Within the Eliot canon, Felix Holt marks a turning point in her conception of the moral functions of communal memory. We may recall briefly how she developed her ‘conservative–reforming’ intellect over the years.5 She was concerned about the closed and short-sighted

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mentality of ‘the working-classes’ long before she started writing her novels. In her review essay ‘The Natural History of German Life’, she criticized ‘the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want; or that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein everyone is caring for everyone else, and no one for himself’ (E, 272; original emphasis). Analogously, ‘The idea of constitutional government lies quite beyond the range of the German peasant’s conceptions’ (E, 285). If these German peasants did complain, ‘there was no glimpse in their petition of the “universal rights of man,” but simply of their own particular affairs as Saxon peasants’ (E, 283). In opposition to the Benthamite proposal of institutional intervention, she found such intervention a weak starting point as organic societies would hardly be receptive to it. For her, moral character becomes the most urgent issue because it determines the political potential of working men’s groups, and reforming such character requires an endeavour of communication commensurate with the formation of their moral standards. So the ‘roots’ of organic society should ‘remain undisturbed while the process of development is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which carries with it a life independent of the root’ (E, 288). The need for transcending the constraints of moral inheritance is put forward and considered in her essays and early novels. Yet even in Romola, with all the drama surrounding Savonarola’s reform of civil virtues, collective tradition is presented mostly as a reliable moral resource. In Felix Holt, for the first time in her novels, inherited standards of moral behaviour need to be reformed fundamentally and through the efforts of a titular hero. Holt ‘the Radical’ is created specifically for implementing such a reform. Eliot’s anxiety over the latent adverse effect of communal sentiments was not developed only then. She once hailed the enthusiasm of the crowd in the revolution in France in 1848 as she was then encouraged by its transformative power. Her initial attitude was less sceptical than her predecessors such as Coleridge who saw the danger of vox populi turning into vox diaboli. Yet just as Carlyle hailed the revolution then, but feared in 1867 the dangerous prospect of democracy in his ‘Shooting Niagara: And After?’, so she keenly felt the potentially devastating effect of the ‘mob’ in Felix Holt.6 If the working men follow people like the Liberal candidate Harold Transome, their potential behaviour will inevitably lead to corruption and riot. This is why the question of enfranchisement becomes a question of whether the electors are morally sound

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

enough to be given the vote and a question of understanding what makes them decide whom to vote for. It is in this context that the epithet ‘radical’ for Holt becomes ironic, given the modest expectation of his reform. ‘Radical’, nevertheless, refers less to the extremity of reform; it suggests the scope of the reform needed. Although ‘radical’ can mean ‘one who holds the most advanced views of political reform on democratic lines, and thus belongs to the extreme section of the Liberal party’, it can also mean ‘going to the root or origin; touching or acting upon what is essential and fundamental; thorough’ (OED). It is under this second sense that the notion of ‘radical reform’ is defined as ‘a thorough reform; esp. as a phase of English politics in the end of the 18th and early part of the 19th century’ (‘radical’, OED). This sense truly characterizes Holt’s focus, going to the foundation of inherited tradition. For this reason, he can be portrayed as a ‘radical’ but with anti-reform ideas and illusions. Another textual consideration to support this reading is that in Chapter 8 ‘radical’ is differentiated from ‘Liberal’: ‘How Harold Transome came to be a Liberal in opposition to all the traditions of his family, was a more subtle inquiry than he had ever cared to follow out’ (FH, 8:96). In the manuscript, Eliot first used the word ‘Radical’ but later replaced it with the word ‘Liberal’ (FH, 8:96, n. 4). Apparently, the word ‘Radical’ does not quite bring out, in that context, the policies of the Liberal Party precisely because it tends to highlight the extent of Harold Transome’s reform while diminishing its specific proposals. To say that being ‘radical’ is ‘in opposition to all the traditions of his family’ would have flattened out the sharpness of the contrast. The Latin root meaning of the word, ‘root or origin’, is evoked several times in the novel and with much irony. In Chapter 3, Mr Lingon, Harold’s uncle, is worried that if Harold stands as a Radical ‘it looks awkward—it’s not what people are used to—it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down’ (FH, 2:39). Old Mr Lingon warns Harold that he has to be good at the classics to beat young Debarry and wants to be reassured that Harold does not want to ‘uproot’ the establishment. Harold plays on the ambiguities right there: ‘Of course, of course. I am a Radical only in rooting out abuses’ (FH, 2:39). Holt himself is very clear about what the word should mean. When Rufus Lyon observes that Holt ‘[glories] in the name of Radical, or Root-andbranch man’ (the sense used in the Nonconformist tradition), he responds, ‘A Radical—yes; but I want to go to some roots a good deal lower down than the franchise’ (FH, 27:226). The novel thus needs to balance the urgent need to establish a viable tradition of ‘knowledge’

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and of ‘wisdom and virtue’ (‘Address’, 413; 412) with Eliot’s long-held belief in an organic moral tradition. Reform for her is never a mere replacement of existing conventions and consciousness, for the new tradition should be derived from the legacy of collective history, without which ‘we fall into ridiculously inconsistent estimates of actual movements, condemning in the present what we belaud in the past, and pronouncing impossible processes that have been repeated again and again in the historical preparation of the very system under which we live’ (E, 447). Without the high-handed expectation of George Eliot’s narrator in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, who calls for ‘the spiritual police of sentiments or ideal feelings’ (ITS, 153), Felix Holt attempts to keep a balance between the inevitable psychological reactions to moral reform and the efficacy of modifying such an inevitability with moral ‘enlightenment’. The need for such a balance recalls Lewes’s theory of cultural inheritance expressed in the Third Series of his Problems of Life and Mind. Cultural inheritance as ‘a complex of habitual relations and dispositions’ (FH, 39:313) not only makes reiterative claims on us, but also has a built-in formative momentum. Collective knowledge and tendencies, in the form of ‘residua’ and ‘habits’, help to constitute the ‘acquired dispositions of experience’ (PLM3, 54) and have substantial bearing on every perception of an individual: ‘Habits, Fixed Ideas, and what are called Automatic Actions, all depend on the tendency which a sensation has to discharge itself through the readiest channel’. In learning new things, ‘the channels through which each sensation has to pass have not become established’. Yet when frequent repetitions cut a pathway, the difficulty will soon vanish. Like the Dissenters in Felix Holt, ordinary people are likely to follow their ‘old associations’ and ‘old beliefs’ which are not easily ‘to be displaced’.7 In this sense, the aim of reform can thus be taken as establishing new channels. It can be argued that Eliot’s change of attitude towards tradition is effected essentially to keep up with the political enthusiasm of the age, that it should be treated only as a response necessitated by and specific to the political setting of her writing, and that it is not a change in her understanding of the function of group mentality. It is true that all the political people among her friends were committed to reform,8 and that political concern is intrinsic to her argument in the novel. Nevertheless, Felix Holt is more than just a political novel: it focuses on the moral effects of political changes, rather than the changes themselves. The events around the election help to sustain the narrative sequence and provide space for the surviving vitality of

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

communal sentiments and the scope of their reform to be seen to define each other. It is in this sense that Felix Holt is still a study of the psychology of English provincial community, very much in line with the early novels like Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss. The story of Mrs Transome still belongs to that of communal history. This is to say that although external pressures may influence the votes of the working men – particularly pressures that come from manoeuvres among the Liberal movement and the election system itself – the internal force or the determining effect of their mentalities poses a more immediate problem.

How much determinism? The covert wish to relate the two stories implied in the word ‘parable’ at the end of the ‘Introduction’ is not sufficient proof that the stories are necessarily relevant to each other, or that the underlying motif of determinism in relation to retribution is necessarily the structural juncture that enables the Transome story to bear upon that of the reform. The determining effect of communal mentality is a theme that is centred most visibly on Mrs Transome and Transome Court.9 Yet many textual details suggest that the Transome tragedy is set up as a sequence counterpointing the development of the story of election, so that the latter may be seen as ‘a long-ripening retribution’ (FH, 36:293) as well. The anxiety over determinism and inevitability is registered prominently in the structure of the novel. Several studies have shown that Felix Holt is most likely to have germinated from the nucleus of the self-contained Transome story;10 that the ‘Introduction’, which concludes on a ‘parable’, is likely to have been added to the beginning after the first few chapters were finished;11 and that starting from Chapter 3 the thematic focus on election and on Felix Holt shows a ‘veering of emphasis’.12 Nevertheless, as the reform story unfolds, the authorial allusion to what Virgil and Dante describe as the ‘dolorous enchanted forest in the under world’ and ‘hidden’ human histories (FH, ‘Introduction’:11) can hardly be considered incidental or peripheral. The theme of determinism forms an underlying leitmotif elaborated by chapter epigraphs, which, at first sight, may look like a ‘heap of fragments’ (FH, 15:152). The epigraph of Chapter 42 draws on both Electra and Ajax.13 Shakespeare’s tragedies are also called upon to enhance the determinist aura of emotional struggles. The epigraphs never merely set the keynote of each chapter or act as a chorus to the

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events in it. The epigraph of Chapter 9 is typical in lending a personal voice to the agony of Mrs Transome’s memories. Twelve chapters later, the epigraph of Chapter 21 reinforces the ominous overtone of inescapability in more general terms. Near the climax of the novel in Chapter 48, the theme is again illuminated by its epigraph, a quotation from Agamemnon which universalizes the accruing power of inevitability: ‘’Tis law as steadfast as the throne of Zeus— / Our days are heritors of days gone by’ (FH, 48:383). Although these chapters are concerned with the nemesis of Mrs Transome’s memory or the history of Transome Court, the multi-layered point of view thus set up offers an intricate pattern of development to universalize her destiny. The reform story echoes with similar epigraphs. Chapter 17, for example, is devoted entirely to the dispute between Felix Holt, Harold Transome and Jermyn the lawyer over the effect of Mr Johnson’s debasing speech on the working men drinking in the Sproxton pub. Its epigraph warns ominously against the consequences which will result from the moral immaturity of the working men. Detailed narration of the reform story also elaborates on this leitmotif set up in the epigraphs, as in Chapter 28, where Mr Pink’s shrewd remark carries a mysterious undertone: ‘there was a Nemesis in things which made objection unsafe, and even the Reform Bill was a sort of electric eel which a thriving tradesman had better leave alone’ (FH, 28:228). The two stories come together in Chapter 16, the second chapter of Volume II, in the narrator’s comment on Harold Transome, ‘who was trusting in his own skill to shape the success of his own morrows, ignorant of what many yesterdays had determined for him beforehand’ (FH, 16:161–2). This is a moment at which Harold Transome has just come through dramatic events detailing his connections with Transome Court; what lies ahead of him are electoral incidents through which he intends to realize his ambition as a Liberal candidate. This is also a crucial moment for the plot development. The first volume centres primarily on the fierce impact of Mrs Transome’s hidden memories, despite the fact that Harold Transome’s electoral intention always looms behind, or that in Chapter 11 Mr Johnson comes to the Sugar Loaf, the pub at Sproxton where Felix Holt is also talking with the working men, to campaign for Harold Transome. The second volume is devoted largely to major characters important to the electioneering business in Treby Magna, including Felix Holt. Precisely at this point, we have one of the few narratorial intrusions. The determinist note thus starts the reform story and resurfaces later as ‘that mutual influence of dissimilar destinies which we shall see

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

gradually unfolding itself’ (FH, 3:45–6). The same note underlies the argumentation in Eliot’s essay ‘Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt’ published two years later: ‘The nature of things in this world has been determined for us beforehand’ (‘Address’, 417); one has to obey ‘the supreme unalterable nature of things’ (‘Address’, 421). This argument reminds us of A. L. Le Quesne’s description of Carlyle who saw history ‘as a record of the relationship of human societies with the transcendent justice … that overrules them’.14 It is possible that these instances of internal evidence do not sufficiently convince us that a thematic connection is more than perfunctory or incidental.15 To clarify this issue, we may briefly examine the extent to which the language of determinism and inevitability in both the Transome and the reform stories draws upon a contemporary vocabulary concerning the inevitable effect of extending voting rights to urban artisans, ‘factory hands’ and ‘labourers of all sorts’ (‘Address’, 413). Take, for example, the forward-looking perspective that characterizes both Felix Holt and selected writings by Carlyle, Mill and Arnold. In Mill’s A System of Logic, which Eliot read again in March 1866 (L, IV, 233), this perspective underlines his study of the causal relationship between human ‘motives’, ‘character and disposition’ and the ‘manner in which [a person] will act’.16 Mill’s perspective aims for the certainty of scientific laws while allowing for the contingency of human conditions: ‘whenever it is sufficient to know how the great majority of the human race, or of some nation or class of persons, will think, feel, and act, these propositions [of prediction] are equivalent to universal ones’. Nevertheless, he is aware that ‘the data are never all given, nor ever precisely alike in different cases’.17 Attempts like Mill’s at ‘the laws of mind’ can help to define the underlying interest in the study of group mentality in Felix Holt.18 Yet Eliot’s sense of mystery and unpredictability is less positivist. A personal history such as Maggie’s ‘is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within’ (MF, 6:6:352). The inevitable ‘lot’, or the unavoidable fate, of Mrs Transome, for instance, is not something one should simply obey or succumb to. Although she has been ‘full of fears all [her] life—always seeing something or other hanging over [her] that [she] couldn’t bear to happen’ (FH, 1:26), Mrs Transome is still convinced that ‘[the] best happiness [she] shall ever know, will be to escape the worst misery’ (FH, 1:29). The same sense of struggle with, and the wish for breaking out of, the determinist mould characterize the novel’s exploration into the possibility of reshaping the moral

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consciousness of the Treby Magna community. The momentary response of the Dissenters and the working men is predictable only up to a point. Certainty, if there is any, resides for Eliot only in the general inevitability of consequences, but the timing and import of these consequences may depend on some not just unknown, but probably unknowable, factors. In this, she also differs from Lewes, who in 1874 wrote to their friend Albert Druce: ‘The experience which tells us that a thing is what it is, tells us that it must be what it is universally so long as the conditions are unaltered’ (L, VI, 39; original emphases). His appreciation of the mystery of the world rests not on a biological perception but on a metaphysical one.19 In such terms, the ‘Extrasensible’ Cosmos is ‘beyond all practicable extension of Sense’ (FC, I, 260; 261). Given the irrational and unpredictable nature of historical changes, Carlyle similarly regards the ‘deep foundations’ of human society not as ‘sequence’ but as ‘a tissue, or superficies of innumerable lines, extending … with a complexity, which will foil and utterly bewilder the most assiduous computation’ (‘Voltaire’, WTC, XXVI, 399). Like Carlyle, Eliot sees those mysteries more as inherent in one’s worldview than as a dispensable alternative to it. The outlook of these critics has been conditioned by the different approaches that each of them takes. Mill views the issue of determined human dispositions in terms of civil liberty and maintains that it ‘profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence’. There thus needs to be ‘protection … against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling’.20 In his essay ‘Shooting Niagara: And After?’, Carlyle speculates about what might happen only ‘in a limited time, say fifty years hence’ (WTC, XXX, 2) and anticipates it with despair, a despair that is the hallmark of this essay. In contrast, the tone of anxiety in Felix Holt is more cautious and yet more positive. What it shares with Mill’s, though, is the concern that the inherited moral standards of the working men may develop into ‘médiocrités indisciplinables’, a condition highlighted by Mill and noted down by Eliot in her ‘Quarry’ for Felix Holt.21 This is because, as indicated in her ‘Address to Working Men’, ‘any large body of men is likely to have more of stupidity, narrowness, and greed than of farsightedness and generosity’ (‘Address’, 415). Arnold harbours the same anxiety over the defect of the turbulent masses on a more practical level, because ‘the working class is so fast growing and rising at the present time’.22 When he argues for the need to reform the threatening force of uniformity, especially ‘the confusion and perplexity in which our society now labours’, he nominates Dissenting nonconfor-

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

mity as the successor to Puritan parochialism: ‘So, while we praise and esteem the zeal of the Nonconformists in walking staunchly by the best light they have, and desire to take no whit from it, we seek to add to this what we call sweetness and light, and to develop their full humanity more perfectly’.23 Mill’s agenda also evokes a more specific moment of moral reform in Felix Holt, a moment that is underpinned by a quotation from his Representative Government (1861) in Eliot’s ‘Quarry’ for Felix Holt: ‘A people may be unprepared for good institutions; but to kindle a desire for them is a necessary part of the preparation’.24 This proposal to ‘incite them to demand’ good institutions25 recognizes the positive potential of establishing what John Vincent calls a ‘community of sentiment’, which is the initial but essential stage of setting up a political organization. The electoral activities centring on the Liberal candidate in Felix Holt also demonstrate this underlying mechanism. This is because at the time of the Liberal reform, a ‘community of sentiment’ ‘had to exist before organization could be possible: where such community existed, not much organization was necessary. The real units of opinion and organization remained the mill, union, pub, street, high street, estate, farmers’ ordinaries, and so on’.26 Because of such a historical condition, moral reform in Felix Holt is ultimately not a matter of creating this community by means of politics, but of mobilizing the existing sentiment (including popular morality) of the Dissenters or the working men, which is not necessarily political in nature. Such a prospect appears to have also made historians and critics such as Walter Bagehot and John Morley aware, though to various degrees, that much as liberal principles aim to shape the political influence of public opinion, such opinion may not meet the expectations of these principles or follow their tenets.27 Eliot quoted further from Mill in her notebook to the effect that whoever undertakes the task of setting up such a community should ‘avoid if possible stirring up a desire too much in advance of the capacity’.28 This task should be undertaken carefully also because of the nature of public opinion, what to Carlyle is ‘that far subtler and stronger Police’ (‘Signs of the Times’, WTC, XXVII, 78) and to Mill ‘despotism of Public Opinion’.29 The power of both the Dissenters and the working men lies in their potential to remould and control such opinion which will in turn affect the process of election. This understanding is in sharp contrast to the Comtean position that starts with ‘true general ideas’ which establish for a revolution its ‘methods of reasoning’ (SPP, IV, 576). It is in this context that we should place Holt’s strong belief that

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‘[a] majority has the power of creating a public opinion’ (‘Address’, 413) and that ‘public opinion’ is ‘the greatest power under heaven’ (FH, 30:250) it is ‘the steam that is to work the engines’ (FH, 30:250). He understands the inner logic of such a ‘community of sentiment’ and thus discerns ‘bad auguries for this election’ (FH, 32:260). For the same reason, he knows that there are just as many conditions that may avert the potential violence. In Mill, new communities of sentiment are needed for a more institutionally-based protection against the stupidity of the majority and in Arnold, for introducing a tradition of ‘high’ culture. Mill’s tone is characterized by an underlying sense of anxiety and fear, a tone which is impersonal, indifferent and serious, while Arnold’s is more casual and relaxed, though equally external, as he assumes the voice of a ‘sage’. In Arnold’s condescending, patronizing and detached voice there is a tinge of complacency and unkindness, as if saying ‘we don’t aim at getting rid of the dissenting tradition; we only want to improve it’. Both Mill and Arnold help to throw into relief the subtle and complex narratorial attitude in Felix Holt, which is less imposing in its study of the feasibility of reform, more ambiguous in its critical stance and more willing to take a closer look at the nature of group mentality and its historical formation. A sympathetic and historical attitude characterizes the whole novel. The narrator persistently interprets Mrs Transome’s psychology in a wider social context. ‘For thirty years she had led the monotonous narrowing life which used to be the lot of our poorer gentry’ (FH, 1:27). Even when Jermyn complains of Mrs Transome’s obstinacy – ‘She objects to changes; she will not have a new style of tenants; she likes the old stock of farmers who milk their own cows’ (FH, 2:38) – few readers reading it within this context will neglect the situation of her social group or take it merely as her own idiosyncrasy. For the townspeople, a person’s identity is often defined by that of his or her group. What the working men care about a candidate above all else is his trade, from which they could then infer his character. For an individual like Harold Transome, different mentalities of more than one social identities clash in his mind. In Chapter 50 we are given lengthy accounts of how his pride confronts his filial love. In the case of the Dissenting community, instead of starting from the state into which specific social groups should ultimately be remoulded, the novel first examines the historical sediments in their habitual dispositions. With Rufus Lyon, the momentum and formative power of sectarian conventions grow out of his nostalgia. These conventions become an inheritance that he constantly attempts to

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

retrieve and rely on, rather than a mere reference to the past or an antithesis to the present. Any change in the direction of the Dissenters’ concern comes only ‘when political agitation swept in a great current through the country’ (FH, 3:43). Thus the conservative rector thinks that people like Lyon ‘make the ignorant multitude the judges of the largest questions, both political and religious’ (FH, 23:199). The narratorial observation about the limits of that tradition is highly suggestive. Valentine Cunningham has indicated that on Rufus Lyon hinge two irreconcilable roles: ‘a relic of days goneby’ and a post-1832 ‘political dissenter’.30 The irreconcilable roles may demonstrate Eliot’s keen interest, evident in her notebook entries, in how effectively Lyon’s deep-rooted memory may sustain him as a Nonconformist,31 which serves to illustrate a characteristic of their tradition – how ‘one man’s voice [can] suffice to create a “local church” powerful enough to survive doctrinal splits’.32 She is also concerned that their radical attitude is further reinforced by their adherence to such ‘days goneby’. Rufus Lyon is very much aware that ‘to an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep’ (FH, 41:327). His studies ‘have gone somewhat curiously into prophetic history’ (FH, 41:327). The intensity of such memory affects his personal life considerably. It always makes him uneasy about his life with Esther’s mother, and consequently he longs to ‘no more err by concealment’ (FH, 26:218). His account to Esther of that past becomes a ‘confession’ and a ‘revelation’ (FH, 26:216). Personal life is interwoven with religious life. It is by dint of the overwhelming intensity of commitments like this that the Dissenting tradition is kept alive. When Esther faces the prospect of inheriting Transome Court, Rufus Lyon ‘was so accustomed to the impersonal study of narrative, that even in these exceptional moments the habit of half a century asserted itself, and he seemed sometimes not to distinguish the case of Esther’s inheritance from a story in ancient history’ (FH, 38:306). It can be argued that it is only natural and inevitable for Eliot to criticize and satirize sectarian traditions, given her own estrangement from Evangelism early in her life. Nevertheless, the criticism in Felix Holt lacks no sympathy. The Nonconformist Review, for example, found the portrayal of Rufus Lyon untypical but ‘generous in tone’.33 Although in 1859, seven years before Felix Holt was published, Eliot was already talking about no longer having ‘any antagonism towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves’ and her sympathy ‘predominates over all argu-

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mentative tendencies’ (L, III, 231), her position in Felix Holt is more complex than what she herself believed it to be then, a position comprising both disapproval and generosity. A staunch wilfulness to believe in the ‘glorious truth’ of their ‘entrance into a higher initiation in the Divine scheme’ (FH, 24:207) is the primary animating force behind the vitality of the Dissenting tradition. Their commitment to ‘[retaining] most of pure and primitive discipline’ (FH, 41:328) is described in terms of an ‘unenviable inheritance’ (FH, 3:43). Lyon has a ‘habitual lack of interest in personal details’ (FH, 25:212) and searches for one moral law ‘for all men … written on all hearts’, a law that would be ‘the very structure of all thought’ and ‘the principle of all action’ (FH, 13:131). His world is projected by his own thoughts with little interference from alternative viewpoints. Yet, the irony of the narrator is most subtle and ungrudging in describing the minister’s psychology before the adjourned debate in Chapter 24 between himself and the Reverend Debarry’s curate Theodore Sherlock. For Lyon, ‘copious speech was not a difficulty but a relief’ (FH, 15:148). He ‘never lacked argument, but only combatants and listeners’ (FH, 15:148). Such a temperament is ‘his native medium’: ‘The disappointment of not contending with the Rector in person, which had at first been bitter, had been gradually lost sight of in the positive enjoyment of an opportunity for debating on any terms’ (FH, 24:203). Eliot’s critical attitude towards the excessive sectarian memories of the minister suggests a remedial function of amnesia rarely present in the novels discussed so far. To Philip Debarry and the rector, Rufus Lyon is someone who ‘evidently feels himself in company with Luther and Zwingle and Calvin’ (FH, 23:200). When Lyon observes and passes judgement on the world, ‘he was too little used to high principle quite dissociated from sectarian phraseology’ (FH, 5:55). To him, ‘Our great faith … is the faith of martyrs’ (FH, 37:297). One might dismiss this ridicule of excessive memory as some incidental but unfair comment that does not quite reflect the minister’s actual mentality. But the same note is reinforced in a number of descriptions showing how communal memories have managed to define themselves against other social groups as a way to strengthen the group’s own identity. Lyon thus prepares himself for the debate: How had that man of God and exemplary Independent minister, Mr Ainsworth, of persecuted sanctity, conducted himself when a similar occasion had befallen him at Amsterdam? He had thought of nothing but the glory of the highest cause, and had converted

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

The irony here makes amnesia a remedy for the Dissenters so that they may achieve a balanced frame of mind. Too much indulgence in the sectarian past is simply not healthy as such memory only feeds on itself. This suggestion regarding collective amnesia indicates a reconsideration of the dialectical relationship between memory and oblivion. The past seems to have little rationale on its own when it is not summoned up for a just cause. On the other hand, in contrast to the ironic descriptions of Lyon’s parochial psychology, the narrator is quick to justify, alongside the ridicule, the significance of his challenge to strong conventions. The narrator differentiates between Lyon’s own expectation, courage and instinct and the shared desire of his congregation to cling to an established social attitude: ‘Mr Lyon will perhaps seem a very simple personage, with pitiably narrow theories; but none of our theories are quite large enough for all the disclosures of time’ (FH, 6:77). The following narratorial ‘confession’ is also striking: I never smiled at Mr Lyon’s trustful energy without falling to penitence and veneration immediately after. For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities—a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces—a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life … Let us rather raise a monument … to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious. (FH, 16:161) While maintaining a critical stance with candour and subtlety, the narratorial sympathy also risks undermining an intended criticism. This dual position characterizes almost all the calls, explicit or implicit, for moral reform in the Dissenting community. Although Eliot shares Arnold’s view about staging outward and inward reforms, the novel tends to suggest that, if the Dissenters follow Arnold’s advice to get rid of parochialism and to get ‘into contact with the main current of national life’,35 they may lose something equally valuable. This undercutting tone manifests a counter-force inherent in Eliot’s ambivalence towards moral reform. When she commented on

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the offer of recompense into a public debate with a Jew on the chief mysteries of the faith. Here was a model … (FH, 15:149)34

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this issue again about seven years later, she spoke with much qualification: ‘it seems to me that those who have no definite conviction which constitutes a protesting faith, may often more beneficially cherish the good within them and be better members of society by a conformity, based on the recognised good in the public belief, than by a nonconformity which has nothing but negatives to utter’ (Cross, III, 216–7).

Reforming the working men The representation of moral reform of the working men expands significantly the meaning of determinism. George Levine has perceptively observed, especially with regard to the influence of German biblical criticism, that in spite of her understanding of determinism Eliot believes that ‘man remains responsible for his action’. This means that ‘man is … an active force with some power to choose among a number of possible alternatives’.36 Like Eliot, J. S. Mill also built into his understanding of philosophical necessity the belief in our ‘power of altering our character’,37 as did F. H. Bradley decades later when he rejected the view in 1874 that accepting the causal mechanisms of human nature as universal laws necessarily means the denial of free will.38 For Eliot, if the psychology of habits is a ‘law by which human lives are linked together’ (‘Address’, 414), this law may justify Felix Holt’s intention to change the behaviour of the working class by ‘converting them somewhat to habits of soberness and to a due care for the instruction of their children’ (FH, 46:372), or by a figurative ‘transmission of an improved heritage’ (FH, 24:207). Yet the working men’s habits are so entrenched that Holt may not be able to change them at will. So to what extent can such notions as ‘knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’ be made meaningful to the working men? How susceptible are the working men to the power of Holt’s rhetoric? How far is it possible for Holt to convince them that it is worthwhile to restrain themselves for the sake of those generations rather than the present one? A customary critical point of departure about moral reform in Felix Holt is to analyse the severance between a tradition of ‘high’ culture and existing collective mentalities. This severance is often attributed to the complications arising out of Eliot’s absorption of the Arnoldian discourse of culture. Nevertheless, what is also significant is how Eliot modifies some of the central ideas and notions in such a discourse and consciously tests out their limits by raising important questions.

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

It is true that by the time Eliot wrote Felix Holt, ‘[unlike] the earlier values of charity and fellow feeling, culture does not grow out of commonplace events. Ordinary people do not produce it in their daily events’.39 Eliot herself held this view, too. Nevertheless, this does not mean that ‘ordinary people’ should not or could not ‘absorb’ culture. The point made by nineteenth-century critics such as Arnold has less to do with the specifics of moral reform than with establishing a new moral authority which he conceived to be an abiding power comparable to that derived from existing collective traditions. It is this emphasis on a shared authority that is beyond the working men’s comprehension. This sense underlines various notions of ‘high’ culture in both Felix Holt and the ‘Address’: ‘that treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and manners, great memories, and the interpretation of great records, which is carried on from the minds of one generation to the minds of another’ (‘Address’, 418). ‘Culture’ is, as Eliot explained to Frederic Harrison in 1867, ‘a verbal equivalent for the highest mental result of past and present influences’ (L, IV, 395). It is also ‘the common estate of society’ (‘Address’, 419). This prescriptive notion of ‘high’ culture did not constrain Eliot from using a more descriptive sense of culture elsewhere. But here, the prescriptive tone in this conception of culture depends on such a culture having the weight and justification of any moral tradition, which may transcend the boundaries of locality and be strengthened by the gravity of history intimated in the ‘Introduction’: one can make sense of the actual journey through the rural Midlands only in terms of the symbolic Dantesque journey. The concept of ‘culture’ equally presupposes a span of time far beyond the lifetime of any individual, including that of the reformer. Arnold’s conception of culture is similar.40 He begins his Culture and Anarchy by declaring that ‘culture’ is ‘a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know … the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically’.41 This perspective suggests that, as Ricoeur puts it, ‘when we speak of becoming … we imply an indefinite extension of duration both backward and forward’ and that ‘no authentic anticipation of what we may “have to be” is possible without borrowing from the resources of what we already “have been”’.42 Arnold does make an effort, though, to overcome the enormity of time-span implied in his definition, for he considers ‘our stock notions and habits’ in conjunction with the ‘fresh and free thought’.

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Instead of dogmatically following the Arnoldian dicta, Felix Holt shows a subtle and astute exploration into the mechanism that determines whether the working men may understand and accept such a ‘high’ culture or, for that matter, any moral guidance. The novel clearly shows that the working men are not yet ready for this culture and signals the self-conscious need for an urgent reconsideration as much of the concept of culture as of its implementation. We are constantly warned of the danger in imposing such a reform. Holt is aware that it is too soon for the working men to accept what he preaches. He must take it upon himself: ‘Not to waste energy, to apply force where it would tell, to do small work close at hand, not waiting for speculative chances of heroism, but preparing for them’ (FH, 30:245). Why do the working men support certain candidates instead of others? They are easily deceived by the candidates’ agents. Their deference or hatred to a large extent follows those who influence them. Harold Transome’s campaign is more effective because Mr Johnson appeals to the working men’s immediate interests. Johnson starts his first speech by declaring that Transome is neither a Tory nor a Whig but works for the working men. The narrator points this out explicitly in the trial scene in Chapter 46: ‘No one else knew—the witnesses themselves did not know fully—how far their strong perception and memory on these points was due to a fourth mind, namely, that of Mr John Johnson’ (FH, 46:369). In contrast, Holt appeals to the working men’s sense of duty. Authorial scepticism about the ineffective practice of Holt is clear in Chapters 30 and 32. In Chapter 30, Holt debates with Mr Johnson and elucidates his own viewpoints in front of the working men at the corner of a side street in Duffield. Only two chapters later, the working men become a devastating mob in the riot. They are ‘animated by no real political passion or fury against social distinctions’ (FH, 33:268). Apparently, if he wants to instil a moral awareness in the working men, Holt has to address, as other candidates do, the working men’s credulity and their unaccounted-for deference. Their habits certainly corroborate Lewes’s theory of automatic response, of habits of mind that are devoid of any adequate understanding of the meaning of their actions. Yet this credulity may not be the sufficient reason why they cannot absorb culture. It is conceded in the novel that ‘Felix Holt had his illusions’ (FH, 11:115). His attempts to impose himself as a moral authority are presented as utopian, a feature reflected in the self-conscious rhetorical patterns of his speeches persuading the colliers to change their habits, so that they would ‘spend their wages better’ (FH, 11:114). These rhetor-

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

Ignorant power comes in the end to the same thing as wicked power; it makes misery. It’s another sort of power that I want us working men to have, and I can see plainly enough that our all having votes will do little towards it at present. I hope we, or the children that come after us, will get plenty of political power some time. I tell everybody plainly, I hope there will be great changes, and that some time, whether we live to see it or not, men will have come to be ashamed of things they’re proud of now. (FH, 30:249) However, his assertions lend his speech an authority more argumentative than moral. On the other hand, in contrast to his confidence in confronting opportunists who manipulate the working men’s ignorance, Holt’s appealing tone sometimes vacillates between self-apology, self-righteousness and patronization. The ‘Address’ also typifies such a vacillation. It sounds as if the speaker is constantly questioning his own position. All the switching movements of transition, affirmation and oscillation are tied up at the end of the ‘Address’ by one anxious confession that strikes a self-defeating note: ‘The solution comes slowly, because men collectively can only be made to embrace principles, and to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching of the world’s events’ (‘Address’, 421). People such as Rufus Lyon understand the sincerity of Holt’s intention, but question the probability of his success. To the colliers, the strong first-person point of view may distance them from the speaker, if not putting them off altogether. The clause ‘whether we live to see it or not’, though meant as a way of accommodating Holt’s audience, must have been a disastrous undercutting to the persuasiveness of his speech. In contrast, Mr Johnson knows how to manipulate what he believes to be the working men’s memory ‘to tell them what they don’t understand; and … to tell them what they’re used to’ (FH, 17:165). He knows very well ‘the effect of uncomprehended words’; consequently, ‘the colliers were thrown into a state of conviction concerning they did not know what, which was a fine preparation for “hitting out,” or any other act carrying a due sequence to such a conviction’ (FH, 11:119). Eliot observed in a letter to her friend Mrs Elma Stuart that ‘the reason why societies change slowly is, because individual men and women cannot have

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ical patterns, in a way, determine the meaning of culture that is to be understood by his audience.43 He modifies his tone to accommodate the ‘taste’ of his audience and tries to claim some familiarity with them:

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their natures changed by doctrine and can only be wrought on by little and little’ (L, VII, 346). Holt’s argument in the ‘Address’ seems to depend too much on defending his doctrines. His predominant wish to assert the value of his version of ‘culture’ may be regarded as an authorial caveat against the contemporary inclination to fall back on principles and institutions so as to hold society together. However, such shortcomings in execution may not entirely account for Holt’s failure, since he also fails to distinguish between his moral convictions and the sense of authority that they imply, thus making it impossible for him to gauge the extent to which his audience may understand such an authority. The massive span of history implied in Holt’s speech creates a paradox: his appeal to a better fatherhood gains readier access to the working men’s limited awareness of history, but the moral authority that gives meaning to the desired awareness is in fact a precondition for them to appreciate his appeal. Arnold addresses a real problem in a well-established tradition; the Dissenting community in Felix Holt falls into that category. The Dissenters are harder to reform because their resistance comes from their awareness that any reform will pose the threat of not just a new idea but a new moral imperative. Such resistance intimates the nature of reform needed – the necessity of not only gauging the inertia of a highly organized tradition but also transforming such inertia without cancelling out the existing need for moral authority. In the end, Holt’s rhetoric returns us to a more fundamental issue: whether the working men have any analogous system of tradition among themselves to facilitate their understanding of the moral authority of Holt’s ‘preaching’, that is, whether they share in their existing memories an intrinsic authority. The mental habits of the working men are not comparable to the unified and tenacious mentality of the Dissenters. Although the novel suggests that social change will inevitably render some past knowledge and accomplishments valueless and peripheral, the need for reforming the working men’s habits cannot be explained away in these terms. The term ‘working men’ itself is problematic.44 The status of their identity is not well-defined. Holt’s audiences are still ‘a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences’45 and need ‘to know a little truth about [themselves]’ (‘Address’, 412). Thus the question remains: will moral reform modify their existing habits, or does it simply replace their habits with an alternative ‘memory’? Holt’s congregation has a mixed identity and hence a mixed communal inheritance at work, which may not necessarily be reflected in their shared habits. In addition, Eliot’s ‘Introduction’ reminds us that

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

mines and colliers had by 1831 just started to appear around Sproxton and Treby Magna. It was a time when ‘working man’ as a profession had not yet properly emerged. Again, around 1832, working men such as those depicted in the novel had not really developed into a class. Even as late as the 1860s, there was little consensus on the definition of ‘a working man’. The working men were composed of so many different kinds of manual workers that ‘it becomes difficult to believe in the mid-Victorian existence of one overarching economically (let alone politically) coherent working class’.46 As a result of these factors, their moral sense was limited, uneven and heterogeneous. Indeed, there is in the novel little to say about their collective memory. The narrator observes, ‘A capitalist was held worthy of pious honour as the cause why working men existed’ (FH, 30:244). In this sense, for the working men to accept Holt’s guidance is no longer a matter of assimilation, or of ‘reform’, but of forming an adequate sense of collective identity. The failure of Holt’s idealism also warns against any presumption that the presence of the workers’ heterogeneous tradition, however little of it they may have, whatever origins it may have, is of no importance. This perhaps explains the novel’s self-conscious presentation that the prospect of the working men having a disrupted or discontinuous identity poses no problem for Holt. Such constant irony and scepticism about his idealism point up the importance of balancing an organic collective memory and the need for reform. Yet a solution to this problem remains elusive even in the ‘Address to the Working Men’, an essay, according to Haight, ‘probably read more by conservatives than by “us working men”’.47 The failure of Holt’s idealism indicates that Eliot is well-aware of the limits of ‘high’ culture but finds the available means of implementing it even more limited. It may still be argued, though, that by choosing to reform this particular group, the novel seems to suggest that to weaken or marginalize existing collective memory is a prerequisite. This impression could have originated from an impasse of a different nature. Why does Eliot choose this ‘unit’ (in Carlyle’s sense) as the object of reform? It appears that portraying activities on a public scale and considering organic social roots in a political context are still too demanding for her, precisely because of her underlying wish to renovate social life while keeping its organic nature intact. In spite of the fact, as explained in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, that the Dissenters do not need guidance as urgently as the ‘turbulent’ masses, by selecting the working men, Eliot has avoided an otherwise head-on confrontation between the determining function of a communal tradition and the

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‘alien’ wisdom or knowledge to be introduced. The weak identity of the working men also throws into relief a problem in Holt’s characterization – a similar lack of determining effects in his memory, both communal and personal. In the end, the question of his identity becomes that of defining what a reformer should be like while accommodating Holt’s relations to his ‘community’. Holt’s abandonment of his father’s practice of quack medicine is seen by critics as an act of renouncing his immediate inheritance, but reestablishing a discontinued family tradition of working men.48 Holt considers himself as coming from a working man’s background and is quick to forestall the possible contention that his quack doctor father disqualifies him as the descendant of a working man: ‘I have the blood of a line of handicraftsmen in my veins’ (FH, 27:224). He himself tries to clarify his own relationship to the working men. ‘I’m a working man myself, and I don’t want to be anything else’ (FH, 30:249). This is the position that he assumes throughout the whole event of election. He is, by blood, ‘rooted’ and located in a working men’s background. The question here is what role this ‘genealogy’ is supposed to play in Eliot’s portrayal of Holt the reformer. His position reflects his wish and need for a community of origin, which is necessary as much for his cultural agenda as for his cultural identity. How far does he remain a working man with his ‘peculiar stamp of culture’ (FH, 30:248)? In other words, can Eliot portray a reformer with as much sophistication as she portrays other more common characters? There is insufficient ground in narrative terms on which he can claim to be at once a working man and a reformer. When the major characters are introduced one by one in the beginning chapters, they all enter with an almost melodramatic story about their past, which constitutes a memory of their own personal lives and substantiates their claims of communal affiliation. Holt is the only person who does not have such a substantial story to fall back on, or to anticipate from. At one stage, Eliot deleted two sentences highlighting Holt’s lowly background.49 His years in Glasgow are also a ‘missing link’ in the narrative, which could have accounted for his ‘enlightened’ education.50 Ironically, the portrayal of his counterpart, the fake radical Harold Transome, is more successful. Transome’s identity is also a limited one; the reader knows very little about his years abroad and would therefore find it difficult to predict his response to the reform upon his return to England. This is compensated for by connecting him to the history of Transome Court, particularly to the relationship between Mrs Transome and Jermyn, and by the longwinded narratorial account of his earlier life in Chapter 8. The ensuing

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

lengthy analysis is also necessary to offset speculations on his character by local newspapers. The analysis turns out to be one of the longest introductions to a single character in this novel (FH, 8:96–8). Harold Transome’s mentality is made to develop convincingly out of his own experience. He remains consistent by being a man of ‘practical mind’ (FH, 1:23), a trait compounded with his care about his own ‘character of gentleman’ (FH, 48:383). He wants both, and believes that he has ‘achieved’ both, though with much difficulty and irony. Seen in this light, the forcefulness of Holt’s assertions of his origins seems more like his anxiety to make up for his lack of solidity. This inadequacy should not, however, be taken primarily as a conceptual limitation on Eliot’s part. Holt does have an identity. Given his ‘nobleness of character’ (FH, 43:350), he is a reformer with a mixed identity. He is strangely located in the working men’s community, located only in the sense that any reformer from outside would not be able to claim Holt’s knowledge of such a community or Holt’s family origin in that community. When he resolves to remould the potential political power of the working men, he self-consciously accentuates his difference as a reformer. Asked by Rufus Lyon why he goes to the pub, he hastily declares, ‘Somebody must take a little knowledge and common sense to them in this way, else how are they to get it?’ (FH, 5:65). He may be rude, but he does not have ‘anything vulgar about him’ (FH, 10:106). He has a ‘habitual preoccupation with large thoughts and with purposes independent of everyday casualties’ (FH, 30:243). He knows better than any other ‘reformers’ the physical or psychological meaning of being a working man, yet his sense of affinity is not sufficient to dominate the general make-up of his consciousness. In the end, he strikes us as less partisan, very much free from the limitations of his community. But is this necessarily Eliot’s ideal of a reformer? What does Eliot try to say with this predominantly ‘disinterested’ positioning? Arnold has offered an interesting definition of what he means by a class ‘alien’. Class aliens are persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection … In almost all who have it, it is mixed with some infusion of the spirit of an ordinary self, some quantity of class-instinct, and even, as has been shown, of more than one class-instinct at the same time; so that, in general, the extrication of the best self, the predominance of the humane instinct, will very much depend upon its meeting, or not, with what is fitted to help and elicit it.51

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Arnold is here, however, talking of an alien in a sense somewhat different from Eliot’s. His emphasis is on the identity of a cultural priest, who does not fit into his classification of ‘Barbarians’, ‘Philistines’ and ‘Populace’. Holt’s similar utopian ‘floating’ offers a counter-example, which illustrates Eliot’s warning that a class ‘alien’, while having a superior sensibility and intelligence, should not be uprooted from his or her own community. Such a cultural ‘alien’ would not be able to justify using ‘working man’ as an expedient identity. Hence so much irony about Holt’s apparent connection with his ‘community’. This connection is also presented as his conscious choice when he could have sought, as Mr Lyon suggests, ‘some higher situation as clerk or assistant’ (that might have got him ‘into the middle class’: ‘I mean to stick to the class I belong to’ (FH, 5:57). While the narrator reminds us that choice ‘gives unity to life’ (FH, 44:360), the choice that Esther Lyon makes in her life, improbable as it may strike us, at least undermines the validity of Holt’s choice. With her, ‘choice’ means choosing her social position against her birth or blood. Esther’s observation of Holt highlights an inadequate aspect of his identity: his idealistic way of life is certainly ‘very high’ but ‘would prevent any one from classing him according to his education and mental refinement’ (FH, 22:191). Seen from a different angle, Holt’s act of reform is also presented as a product of his individual traits which might have saved him from being a mere effigy of culture, so to speak. Such an act has little to do with what social group he comes from. As part of his personality, Holt likes to engage with people in public speech. Esther rightly perceives that ‘preaching is [his] vocation’ (FH, 10:110) and he enjoys ‘the pleasure of quarrelling with [Johnson]’ (FH, 13:128), and that public speech is something ‘he would very likely have done without being asked’ (FH, 30:248). Yet this trait undermines his cultural identity. While Arnold’s ‘alien’ does not belong to any class, there is still, in the mind of such a person, a likely encounter between various forms of thought. This encounter is at best dormant, if not absent, in Holt’s characterization. We have stories of external conflicts in general between Holt and the working men. But there is no depiction of internal psychological struggle over his immediate relationship to this community, nor over his relationship to his ‘intellectual’ community, if there is any. Such a relationship does not pose any problems for Rufus Lyon, since the spirit of his original community and that of his intellectual community are more harmonious. This is where Eliot’s difficulty lies. Holt’s identity, therefore, should

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Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

Determinism and Moral Reform in Felix Holt

not be regarded as a failure in terms only of character portrayal or of his intellectual identity. Eliot’s idea of a reformer is not entirely identical with Arnold’s class ‘alien’. For her, the reformer needs to be well rooted in his or her inherited memory so that such memory may engage with his or her intellectual thinking. Holt’s portrayal highlights, by way of counter-example, the need for such an inward understanding and engagement, but to devise this need or the lack of it in fictional terms remains a representational challenge for Eliot. In this, Eliot is far more successful with her portrayal of Lydgate. As a medical reformer grounded in his community, he falls not only because of the strength of his enemies but also because of the weakness of his own character, and his defeat is thus made all the more poignant and tragic. In Felix Holt, we are left with at least one repeated message: ‘The solution comes slowly’ (‘Address’, 421). Thus, addressing the latent power of communal sentiments becomes the primary and initiating move towards moral reform.

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

… the highest form of existence is Altruism, or that moral and intellectual condition which is determined by the fullest consciousness—emotional and cognitive—of relations. (George Henry Lewes, FC, II, 27) In Felix Holt, the process of renovating a communal tradition already involves a search for a new form of moral guidance; the same search continues in Middlemarch. In particular, the novel shows a constant effort to bring Dorothea’s altruistic aspirations, especially her ardent preoccupation with ‘the world’s misery’ (M, 9:76), to bear on the question of establishing a spiritual faith. This interpretative relevance is achieved in part by embodying Dorothea’s earthly experience in a language of communal insights such as hagiographic and mythological allusions. The novel thus starts with the life of Saint Theresa of Avila, which prepares the stage for the arrival of the later-born ‘Saint Dorothea’: ‘That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning’ (M, ‘Prelude’:3).1 The everyday dimension of Dorothea’s spiritual pursuit has been discussed, often with great insight, in terms of the ‘personal’ and the ‘interpersonal’.2 Yet, a strong tendency towards ‘impersonality’ is also evident in the language of such a secular religion which is defined by Dorothea as ‘not what you know about religion, but the belief that helps you most’ (M, 39:383). Often the moral implications of altruistic acts may not directly affect a character’s psychology when such an effect is suggested or implied in the narration. But this lack of psychological access will reveal itself only when examined with reference to the novel’s representation of the personal and the interpersonal, since this impersonality is mostly shown through its relations to both. In a 121

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

larger context, this impersonal dimension can also understood in terms of Eliot’s attempt to uphold a Carlylean secular religion of work ethic and to accommodate the Comtean notion of altruism, while taking account of the physiological psychological theories concerning recollection in a communal context. In particular, in the light of how the Comtean notion of altruism presupposes social relations, as it is supposed to arise out of a more communal if not Catholic structure originally, the issue of impersonality becomes that of the efficacy of the language of altruism in cultivating a secular religion in a reading public moulded perhaps more by a Protestant personal relationship with God than by a spiritual communion arising out of a strong collective system. On a different level, the use of mythological systems in Middlemarch, including hagiography, has helped to create a modernday myth of Dorothea’s altruistic acts that addresses itself to the real world, both within and without the novel. Critics agree that in Eliot ‘the creation of myth was a continual process, inseparable from the writing of history’, that her writing tends to link classical myth and social ideal,3 and that in Eliot’s world ‘science and mythology perform humanist functions’.4 In this sense, evoking Saint Theresa can no longer be seen as an unadulterated use of hagiography. More specifically, linking Saint Theresa and Dorothea transforms hagiography into a myth, which consequently has a much wider cultural meaning, both Christian and pagan, and acquires the capacity to address religious as much as secular history, especially ‘the history of man’ who ‘behaves under the varying experiments of Time’ (M, ‘Prelude’:3). Such an integration generates a language that bridges the gap between memory and history, that is, between religious sentiments as collective insights and such sentiments reconfigured as a ‘historicized’ myth. It is a language that draws on the affective vocabulary of Christian religion to transcend its narrow reason and dogma; in doing so, it retains the sensuousness of memory in a study of ‘the history of man’. The reconfiguration through myth also restores the metaphorical nature of such a study and saves it from being merely ‘scientific’ (in the Rankean sense).5 This attempt shows not only an inward understanding of the interactions between memory and history but also an imagination that overcomes the drawback of confining each to its limitations. Here, I used the concept ‘myth’ in the sense defined by Peter Burke to differentiate it from the concept ‘history’: myth is used ‘not in the positivist sense of “inaccurate history” but in the richer, more positive sense of a story with a symbolic meaning, made

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Altruism in its time Lord Acton once spoke of Eliot’s novels as ‘the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief’.7 The cultivation of Dorothea’s altruistic feelings can be taken as a search for ‘a binding theory which could bring her own life and doctrine into strict connexion with that amazing past, and give the remotest sources of knowledge some bearing on her actions’ (M, 10:84). Dorothea’s endeavours are so treated that her life in the 1830s has been recognized by critics as raising questions about the issue of faith important to people of the early 1870s.8 Some of the first readers of Middlemarch did in fact realize that the novel not only dealt with conditions which were determined by past ages but also addressed ‘the tangled threads of our consciousness and of our new conditions’.9 Seen in this light, one of the messages most forcefully conveyed in the novel is that to search for a belief is tantamount to creating one. It is to find ‘a religion without the aid of theology’ (M, 24:246). To Dorothea, ‘by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil’ (M, 39:382). This proposition recalls Carlyle’s belief in the possibility of achieving spirituality through hard work and a love of duty and virtue: ‘properly speaking, all true Work is Religion’ (Past and Present, WTC, X, 200). It also puts into perspective Eliot’s interest, not just in the Religion of Humanity, but in secular religion in general. Eliot maintained, particularly in the latter half of her writing career, a Feuerbachian view that ‘the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human’ (Cross, III, 245). Thus, ‘He who has an aim, an aim which is in itself true and essential, has, eo ipso, a religion’.10 Dorothea’s altruistic feelings indicate such an anxiety over spirituality, particularly if they are seen with reference to the historical development of the notion of altruism. The question of spiritual confidence was posed differently at different times during the midnineteenth century. Harriet Martineau’s freely translated and condensed version of Comte’s Positive Philosophy did not appear until 1853, nor did the first English translation (by the then Marian Evans)

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up of stereotyped incidents and involving characters who are larger than life’.6 To understand these issues in detail, we need to outline very briefly the forms of thinking behind such a representation of Dorothea’s altruistic acts.

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity until 1854. By the 1870s, the meaning of several moral concepts had also changed. When Carlyle upheld a ‘love of Virtue’ (‘Signs of the Times’, WTC, XXVII, 78) and duty in the 1830s, his audience took the words more or less in the same sense as he meant. But they might have sounded differently in the 1870s. Take the word ‘duty’ as an example: ‘Formerly it had simply meant the obligation to fulfil one’s calling: everyone was “to do his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him.” But that was alien to both the principles and the temper of the new era. “To push on, to climb vigorously on the slippery steps of the social ladder, to raise ourselves one step or more out of the rank of life in which we were born, is now converted into a duty.”’11 In Middlemarch, there is a recognition of this sense of formation and development. From the point of view of Dorothea’s fellow communal members, they need to remind her that ‘it is an anachronism for you to have such thoughts’ (M, 22:215); on the other hand, the narrator needs to remind the reader that ‘[in] those days the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by forty years than it is at present’ (M, 19:183). The underlying rationale of encouraging altruistic propensities seems to be that ‘religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed’ (M, 61:607). In the context of changing theories of evolutionary psychology, especially Lewes’s theory that psychological operations such as ‘Intuition’, which underlie spiritual desiring, ‘always carry Belief’ (FC, I, 170), this view in Middlemarch can be seen as an attempt to highlight the importance of altruism by evoking its spiritual potential. This effort to seek ‘the ideal of a goodness entirely human’ (L, VI, 98) recalls the ‘common-place book’ function of God outlined by Feuerbach: God is for man the common-place book where he registers his highest feelings and thoughts, the genealogical tree on which are entered the names that are dearest and most sacred to him. It is a sign of an undiscriminating good-nature … to gather together and then to preserve tenaciously all that we have gathered, not to trust anything to the waves of forgetfulness, to the chance of memory … and learn to know what really has value for us.12 The representation of altruistic acts in Middlemarch becomes a language that not only generates but also registers and preserves a shared sense of belief and spirituality. The narrator always seems to be

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anxious to see ‘the idealistic in the real’ (M, 22:209), so as to reach, as did Carlyle, both the ‘idealistic’ and its ‘incarnations’. The use of hagiography and other systems of communal insight ought to be taken as what Eliot calls ‘signs of a mental state’ (E, 435). Although such a form of representation recalls the mythical nature of biblical language, it is actually more akin to a form of thinking shared by several of Eliot’s contemporary thinkers. It is perhaps best exemplified by the historical imagination of Carlyle, for whom, as Gerald L. Bruns summarizes, every idea must be understood to possess a double meaning by virtue of its double relationship to an order of speculations and to an order of events, from which it follows that the full comprehension of the idea will require not only the recovery of its abstract content but prior to this the recovery of the sequence of mental acts by which the idea was originally generated.13 The story of Teufelsdröckh and the character’s structural relationship to the ‘Editor’ in Sartor Resartus best demonstrate Carlyle’s strenuous efforts to achieve a ‘full comprehension of the idea’. Lewes’s Foundations of a Creed also explains the physiological subject as someone who ‘lives a double life and has a double world—the world of Feeling and the world of Thought, that of sensations and images and that of abstract ideas’ (FC, II, 122–3). In Middlemarch, the specific ‘inconsistency and formlessness’ in the unheroic life of the ‘later-born Theresas’ (M, ‘Prelude’:3) can be seen as the corresponding ‘order of events’, configured by mythological characters such as Antigone and Ariadne. The ‘spiritual grandeur’ of Saint Theresa’s heroism and idealism can be seen as moving towards a more abstract idea of altruism. The earthly but ‘religious’ events involving Dorothea are most likely informed by Eliot’s understanding of the psychological theory regarding the formation of sympathetic emotions and the Comtean idea of altruism. She wrote Middlemarch at a time when Lewes was working on his Problems of Life and Mind.14 Unlike Comte who puts a general emphasis on the cultivation of altruistic emotions, Eliot develops that idea to include a specific function of memory: the mediation of ‘memories of human sympathy’ (R, 61:511), that is, memories of other people’s sufferings that may remind a character of the need to cherish sympathy. Yet it is necessary to point out in the present context of secular religion that she did not hold an unchangeable view that such theories of ‘science’ would necessarily benefit an understanding of

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

religion. In her 1850 review of Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect, she sanctioned his view that ‘Religion and science are inseparable … If [religion] be the ascensio mentis in Deum per scalas creatarum rerum, the evolving the grounds of hope, faith, and duty from the known laws of our being and the constitution of the universe; a religion may be said to include science as its minister’ (E, 33).15 Later, however, when writing Daniel Deronda, Eliot explained in her letter to Mrs Henry Frederick Ponsonby in January 1875: I should urge you to consider your early religious experience as a portion of valid knowledge … And I think we must not take every great physicist—or other ‘ist’—for an apostle … if his exposition strands us on results that seem to stultify the most ardent, massive experience of mankind, and hem up the best part of our feelings in stagnation. (Cross, III, 253) This guarded position suggests a scepticism towards the dogmatic uses of science. Chronologically speaking, her letter to Mrs Ponsonby more likely served as an impetus to her keener interest in Daniel Deronda in a moral solution that is transcendental in nature, though often scientific in specifications. It provides a useful point of reference for our realization that, back in Middlemarch, Eliot still aims to achieve a scientific explanation of religious feelings in everyday social life. This double nature is reflected in what Dorothea wants to fill her life with: some ‘action at once rational and ardent’ (M, 10:85). This is also clear in Eliot’s recognition that ‘Renan … could be characterized, like herself, by the combination of “science” and “faith”’.16 On the other hand, while Lewes’s theory of emotions may illuminate Dorothea’s characterization, the dual order overcomes the limits of his notion of the moral ‘types’ (FC, I, 293). A moral type, summarizes Simon During, ‘embodies moral laws, it is not a real person, rather it is a being such as may be described as acting under ethical principle’.17 By contrast, the ‘order of events’ consists of stories of an individual that move beyond the confines of such moral types. Middlemarch manifests an attempt to achieve the coalescence of both the sensibility of a romantic and the insight of a scientist. This is indeed significant when one remembers that it was a time when even evolutionary theory had achieved, in some way, ‘a power over man’s imagination like that of a myth in a period of belief’.18 This is to say that Eliot does not want to ‘[look] at the world entirely from the studio point of view’ (M, 21:201).

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Forms of impersonality Middlemarch displays a new emphasis on representing the formation of fellow-feeling within the heroine’s inner workings. We may here compare the following two passages: She awoke from that vivid dreaming which makes the margin of our deeper rest: She was in a boat on the wide water with Stephen, and in the gathering darkness something like a star appeared, that grew and grew till they saw it was the Virgin seated in St Ogg’s boat, and it came nearer and nearer, till they saw the Virgin was Lucy and the boatman was Philip—no, not Philip, but her brother, who rowed past without looking at her; and she rose to stretch out her arms and call to him, and their own boat turned over with the movement, and they began to sink, till with one spasm of dread she seemed to awake, and find she was a child again in the parlour at evening twilight, and Tom was not really angry. From the soothed sense of that false waking she passed to the real waking … soon the whole terrible truth urged itself upon her. Stephen was not by her now: she was alone with her own memory and her own dread. The irrevocable wrong that must blot her life had been committed: she had brought sorrow into the lives of others—into the lives that were knit up with hers by trust and love. (MF, 6:14:412–13). It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining. (M, 80:777)

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Middlemarch searches for a form capable of both demonstrating and epitomizing the cultivation of altruistic feelings. In this sense, mythologizing Dorothea becomes a matter of mythologizing altruism.

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

These are two crucial and decisive moments that the heroines reach after reflecting on the unexpected shock they have just gone through. When Maggie Tulliver lies in the boat after being ‘Borne Along by the Tide’ with Stephen, the subconscious recollections in her dream are memories of people who have a close relationship to her, memories that add much agony to her inner struggle after she wakes up. By contrast, what brings Dorothea to an awareness of the need for sympathy includes impersonal and hardly identifiable human movements which are not entirely the results of poor lighting: ‘a man’ with ‘a bundle’ and ‘a woman’, plus ‘figures moving’. This scene in Middlemarch has been regarded as a most demonstrative instance of Eliot’s conception of ‘humanity’ achieved through the formation of altruistic feelings.19 For Dorothea, despite all the ‘dim lights and tangled circumstance’ (M, ‘Prelude’:3), ‘all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance’ (M, 80:776). This seems to demonstrate how altruistic feelings may be elevated into a sympathy for the humanity. Lewes tries to account for this kind of impersonal distance of emotion in the following way: while we cannot be said to be conscious of what passes in the mind of another, we can and do, through Observation and Inference, and that sympathetic inward movement which may be called mental contagion, receive it as an element in our Experience; and the experiences of millions of men co-operate in the determination of the thoughts and acts of the individual. (SP, 92) Dorothea’s response to ‘the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance’ recalls Adam Smith’s view that ‘it is by the imagination only’ that we achieve sympathy. It also anticipates F. H. Bradley’s similar idea that we may ‘imaginatively’ appropriate new experience so as to expand our experience.20 Yet, given the external, sketchy and, to a certain extent, objectified presence of fellow human beings, it is arguable how effective such a ‘mental contagion’ may be. The word ‘contagion’ appearing in a medical context around 1860–1, as in Florence Nightingale’s Nursing, already strongly emphasized ‘the communication of disease from body to body by contact direct or mediate’ (OED). By contrast, even when the figurative range is allowed for such a term, the sense of distance and lack of immediacy implied in Lewes’s theory, and illustrated in the window scene, may still leave one wondering whether

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impersonal humanity is not just a theoretical proposition. To what extent, one may ask, does Dorothea’s perception of such distant relations truly and naturally lead to her altruistic feelings? Are her ‘memories of sympathy’, which consist in recollecting her relations to others, the sufficient means of reaching the Religion of Humanity’? How to handle such a sense of distance is particularly important to the representation of secular religion in Middlemarch. If we trace the origins of the Comtean Religion of Humanity, we will realize that it grew out of a Catholic social ‘milieu’ where Saint Theresa fits well but not Dorothea. This is not to reduce Eliot’s understanding of altruism merely to a Comtean precept, but to gauge precisely how different her understanding is vis-à-vis Comte as a reference point. In the Catholic sentiment of close-knit brotherhood, ‘members of different positions and nationalities became fellow-citizens of Christendom’.21 Comte himself is said to have been convinced that to improve Catholic social organization is to exclude from it both Christian faith and Christian doctrine, so as to arrive at a belief ‘in the Catholic system without faith in Christ, and in human brotherhood without a common father’.22 So the communal cohesion is fundamental. It is true that there are in Middlemarch ‘some hints of the growth of Anglo-Catholicism, or at least of a religion more favorable to forms and traditions than the conventional low-church Anglicanism of Dorothea’.23 Nevertheless, with ‘an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell’ (M, 1:7) and with a ‘hereditary strain of Puritan energy [that] glowed alike through faults and virtues’ (M, 1:9), Dorothea’s ‘work ethic’ more likely recalls the Carlylean (and Calvinist) model whose typical form of belief is not well-attuned to a mythological meaning grounded essentially in hagiography, which was more of a Catholic practice. When evoked, though not predominantly followed, in Dorothea’s need for spiritual enlightenment, this ‘Puritan’ tradition focuses more on one’s relationship with a personal deity. In this, selfinterest is realized through a spiritual act, with or without one’s actual relationship with others. The personalized relationship depends less on forms of collective spiritual experience than on keeping a faith at all. The language of Dorothea’s spiritual journey thus has a resonance of these two different traditions. Consequently, Eliot would have had to address the potential, because habitual, need in her predominantly Protestant audience for a direct and personal relationship with this ‘humanity’ if it were to become a secularized God. This need may marginalize the interdependent and interpersonal relationship originally implied in the Comtean concept. To what extent can this

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

relationship be direct for Dorothea? When the difference of distances – of the nearby road and the ‘field beyond’ – is collapsed by way of the undifferentiated human figures, the remoteness embedded in the notion of ‘humanity’ forms a sharp contrast to the intensity of interpersonal relations in the novel, which mostly accounts for direct access to the character’s psychology. The interpersonal is an essential aspect of Middlemarch life and is consciously presented as a fertile soil that nurtures Dorothea’s altruistic feelings. For Eliot, to move from Felix Holt to Middlemarch is to return to depict the life of a more closely-knit community, a switch back to ‘those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence’ (M, 11:93). To Eliot’s contemporaries such as F. W. H. Myers, ‘Life has come to such a pass,—now that there is no longer any God or any hereafter or anything in particular to aim at,— that it is only by coming into contact with some other person that one can be oneself’.24 Likewise, Dorothea’s striving for recovering a faith is presented as a longing for a constant extension of her relations to others. This general situation helps to explain the fact that in many Victorian novels ‘the characters are aware of themselves in terms of their relations to others’.25 The interpersonal has also become the cornerstone of Lewes’s definition of altruism: ‘that moral and intellectual condition which is determined by the fullest consciousness— emotional and cognitive—of relations’ (FC, II, 27). One particular aspect of interpersonal relations in Middlemarch may certainly be used, if this is thought to be relevant, to justify as its corollary the presence of impersonality in Dorothea’s ‘humanism’: Middlemarch communal life is becoming increasingly ossified, exclusive and unprogressive, precisely because individual communal members cling unthinkingly to the outdated forms of such a way of life, to the extent that such a mode of life shows a strong tendency towards an inevitable impersonality. In Chapter 47, for example, the scene of the assembling congregation accentuates the extent of such ossification. Will Ladislaw ‘looked round at the group of rural faces which made the congregation from year to year within the whitewashed walls and dark old pews, hardly with more change than we see in the boughs of a tree which breaks here and there with age, but yet has young shoots’ (M, 47:463). The shift of tone at the end of this quotation rules out the possibility of a renewal, let alone the generation of a spiritual faith or a new religion. The ossification is also evident in the fact that words concerning inherited feelings and moral

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standards are taken literally. Each person’s views may only repeat the views that belong to the class of his or her birth. Lydgate has the country gentry’s interpretation of life. ‘He walked by hereditary habit’ in other aspects of his life, except for ‘medical reform and the prosecution of discovery’ (M, 36:340). Mrs Farebrother prefers to ‘go upon experience’ and adheres to what she calls ‘a few plain truths’ or ‘our catechism’ (M, 17:166), for things were so in the old times. The caricature of Mr Brooke serves as a most illustrative instance. All his superficial acceptance of the most up-to-date ideas and slogans of reform hardly has any real effect on him simply because, consciously or unconsciously, he sticks to his aristocratic frame of mind. Only his personal experience and personality seem to account for his ‘too rambling habit of mind’ (M, 1:8). Eliot’s deft demonstration of how the thrust of such impersonal power of communal sentiment may effectively penetrate individual psychology is impressive. While the cultivation of noble feelings, duty and love of virtue is tantamount to a limited reform, the communal resistance to such reform takes effect by virtue of an impersonal space which is a psychological space between the individual and the community, a space that is often a precondition for the existence of public opinion and for this opinion to take effect on an individual’s psychology. To remain active and effective, public opinion does not need the thinking of individuals but only their compulsion to repeat and reproduce assumptions unreflectively. It thrives on the ambiguities that it creates by merging the impersonal with the interpersonal. Impersonal coercion becomes more powerful than direct interpersonal intervention precisely because the former has an abiding affinity with, and is thus reinforced by, the latter. Public opinion is, in Eliot’s own words, ‘a poor cement between human souls’ (Cross, II, 118). As a collective mind, as Mill observes, it ‘does not penetrate below the surface, but it sees all the surface’.26 Such opinion bulks large in the ‘huge whispering-gallery’ (M, 41:402) of Middlemarch because of the seemingly effortless manner in which it is passed around. ‘News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar’ (M, 59:585). Likewise, the comfort of gossiping comes from the fact that it does not need to be verified through interpersonal exchange or confrontation. The power of gossip increases and persists when it cannot be verified. The process of its circulation always has a snowballing effect.27 Sir James’s attempt to expel Will Ladislaw from the Middlemarch community can

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

be seen as a typical instance of active and deliberate manipulation of public opinion. Recalling a similar metaphor of ‘chains of our own forging’ that Carlyle uses in his essay ‘Signs of the Times’ for ‘our spiritual maladies’ which ‘are but of Opinion’ (WTC, XXVII, 80), the metaphor of ‘iron’ in the epigraph of Chapter 4 brings out the crushing power generated out of such an impersonal space: 1st Gent. 2d Gent.

Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves. Ay, truly: but I think it is the world That brings the iron. (M, 4:34)

If Eliot’s originality consists in her presentation of such an impersonal power as paradoxically facilitating intrusion into individual psychology, to what extent is the same true of the impersonal nature of Dorothea’s sense of duty and noble feelings? The vague and unidentifiable images in the window scene of Chapter 80 are supposedly there not to tell Dorothea about other people’s lives but to remind her of their existence, to prompt her to imagine the feelings of others, and to endow a self-enlightening meaning on her earlier reflections – reflections on her selfish anger over what she has thought to be Will Ladislaw’s betrayal of her. Yet ‘humanity’ as such has undeniably made her ensuing emotions pertain more to the unknown collective. In Adam Smith, when facing the suffering of ‘our brother … upon the rack’, ‘we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body … and thence form some idea of his sensations’.28 There is little evidence regarding this episode that such emotions possess the same kind of penetration, moral intensity and immediacy as personal experience. We may recall Eliot’s love for the Wordsworthian human spirit to see this more clearly. In a letter to Frederic Harrison in 1880, she quoted from Book VIII (‘The Retrospect’) of The Prelude: ‘The human nature unto which I felt That I belonged, and reverenced with love, Was not a punctual presence, but a spirit Diffused through time and space …’ (Cross,

III,

388)

The Wordsworthian speaker’s sense of affinity is fundamentally different from Dorothea’s. Both result from retrospection but move towards

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incomparable ends. In Wordsworth, human nature is more particular and forms part of personal identity. Yet it is ‘not a punctual presence’, nor a ‘spot of time’ localized, or rather, confined to the moment or the personal. Its capacity to ‘[diffuse] through time and space’ intimates a dialectic that transcends the particular without displacing it. This dialectic is missing in Dorothea. Her understanding is presented as an epiphanic opening-up that displaces her retrospection when her existence is generalized into part of anthropological ‘humanity’. The clearing of the present becomes a blockage of the past, trading the personal relevance of humanity for the objectified figures in the fields. Dorothea’s glimpses into the undefined image may be supported by the evolutionary basis implied in Lewes’s understanding of moral knowledge: ‘[The] impersonal experiences of Tradition [accumulate] for each individual a fund of Knowledge, an instrument of Power which magnifies his existence’ (SP, 80). ‘By it the personal relations are raised into impersonal conceptions: the moral life becomes the social life’ (SP, 139–40). The ‘General Mind’ is ‘an impersonal objective influence’ (SP, 161). Although Eliot herself maintained while writing Middlemarch that ‘it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to attain great intensity’ (Cross, III, 116), collective scope in this context resembles the ‘impersonal genetic continuity’ intimated in Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘Heredity’.29 This is reflected in Dorothea’s awkward and dogmatic adherence to belief which accounts for her compassion for earthly incidents of wail and sorrow – an existence that seems to ‘beat with a lower pulse than her own’ (M, 28:269). While the historically established Evangelical tradition and Dorothea’s inherited values of her class cannot give her any sense of moral certainty, neither can altruism provide for her the same authority as that of a naturally evolved collective memory precisely due to its transcendent needs. It only distances her and even isolates her from people around her, thus diminishing the force of her moral example to other people and falling short of the ‘full consciousness of relations’ strongly required in Lewes’s theory of altruism. The ideas of duty and noble feelings in Daniel Deronda and The Spanish Gypsy are, by contrast, part of a tradition culturally acquired and inherited by the characters. Both Deronda and Fedalma have to sever some of their existing ties to join the communities to which they are related by blood. Dorothea’s idea of duty is that of an internal experience that leads to, but does not equal, the discovery of the external world. Perhaps that is why her contact with people who embody collective conventions is somewhat less frequent and more limited than that of the other characters in the

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

novel. Dorothea’s understanding of altruism is therefore more akin to a scientific–psychological concept, which inevitably impairs any prospect of successfully representing it as a coherently evolved moral development. Failing to achieve the direct psychological effect of interpersonal relations, can Dorothea’s altruistic longings provide a personal access to spirituality and thus overcome the limits of impersonal ‘humanity’? Details abound in her portrayal which accommodate a sense of impersonality with the ‘manifestation of a variously manifesting Self’ (SP, 106). Again, Lewes’s theory of memory and recollection can help to clarify this self-presence: ‘In Memory, images and ideas arise spontaneously … and intrude themselves into the current of thought’. They are, therefore, ‘unbidden’. But ‘in Recollection’, ‘there is an effort, a search, and a finding’ (PLM3, 119) and there is ‘the intervention of the we’ (SP, 106; original emphasis). Because of this, recollection is not just a mechanical association, but an association with reference to ‘the general stream of simultaneous excitations’ which help to constitute ‘the vague massive feeling known as the feeling of existence, the sense of personality’ (PLM3, 197; original emphases).30 Dorothea’s moral ‘wake-up’ in the window scene demonstrates how remembering consists in the interplay between the personal and the impersonal. What precedes that moment and makes its impersonality relevant is an act of recollection as defined by Lewes: Dorothea ‘began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately again, forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible meaning’ (M, 80:776). In this context, the indispensable individual endeavour in Dorothea makes her memory memory par excellence. However, this participation of the personal does not answer on a moral level a fundamental question raised in the concept of altruism in Romola. For someone like Tito, ‘care for another’s suffering’ means caring less ‘for his own’ (R, 11:118). The concern about self-realization also recalls the type of idealism in Fichte and Carlyle which contrasts with the Comtean emphasis on the malleability of the individual by social environment. If Dorothea’s altruistic aspirations are a step towards establishing a faith for herself, how does such a sense of altruism accommodate self-need? Critics have agreed that Dorothea, ‘foundress of nothing’ (M, ‘Prelude’:4), has practically found a ‘vocation’ in helping others. If self-need is thus fulfilled, does the novel merely show an accommodation or does it move towards a positive assertion of self-presence? Eliot must have been thinking over this question while writing Middlemarch. She wrote to Sara Sophia Hennell

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in 1869: ‘theoretically speaking, it seems to me that the conception of religion as chiefly valuable for the personal consolations that may be extracted from it, is among the most active sources of falsity. The test of a higher religion might be, that it should enable the believer to do without the consolations which his egoism would demand’ (L, V, 68–9). Critical views on this issue of self-need differ: some see altruism as an annihilation of the ‘self’, others as an affirmation of the ‘ego’.31 Rosemary Ashton has pointed out that Spinoza, whose Ethics Eliot finished translating in 1856, has a theory that allows for altruism and self-interest to coincide and that ‘egoism and altruism are part of the same process’ in Dorothea.32 Ashton’s argument can also explain the fact that from very early on Dorothea’s self-need and altruistic yearnings also define each other. She longs for ‘that submergence of self in communion with Divine perfection’ (M, 3:24). When Will Ladislaw explains to Dorothea, ‘But I am a rebel: I don’t feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t like’, Dorothea replies, ‘But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing’ (M, 39:383). The whole cognitive process that results in altruism can be corroborated by Lewes’s theory that ‘Cognition has here its impulse in desire, and judgment is the satisfaction of the impulse’ (PLM3, 101; original emphasis). Dorothea is so confined by her social environment, or by the ‘gentlewoman’s oppressive liberty’ (M, 28:268), that to have emotional and spiritual aspirations is for her the only way to achieve self-fulfilment without selfish motives.33 In this sense, the irony of Dorothea’s quixotic sympathy and philanthropic nature, as evidenced at the beginning of Chapter 82, seems to be deliberate, so as to intensify this particular condition. The narratorial descriptions and comments also have such an implication. ‘Neither law nor the world’s opinion compelled her [Dorothea] to this’ (M, 48:472). ‘All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along’ (M, 10:85). This altruistic yearning forms a contrast with that of Lydgate, who is humorously described as ‘an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of fellowship’ (M, 15:142). It is in this context that, as a way to spirituality, altruism in Middlemarch differs from the Comtean Religion of Humanity. While the notion of altruism in Comte often needs to defend itself against the overwhelming power of individual need, in Middlemarch it needs to be defined with it. The message is that, to be altruistic, one does not have to renounce one’s own self, or rather, the personal need for altruistic acts can be regarded as a channel for the moral energy of the self. Hence the irony in the good-humoured description of Miss Noble, who

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

is ‘a wonderfully quaint picture of self-forgetful goodness’ (M, 50:486). If in the early novels attention is drawn to the importance of recovering the humdrum side of personal lives, the same theme is treated with a different emphasis in Middlemarch: what is likely to be overlooked is the self supposedly realized through an act usually taken to be selfannihilating.34 One further distinction needs to be made. Lewes distinguishes between ‘Thought as Intention’ and ‘Thought as mere succession of images and ideas’ (PLM3, 249). The implication this distinction may have for our present discussion is that altruism as a knowledge acquired through the mental association of racial feelings is not the same as altruistic needs considered from the standpoint of personal intention. Neither alone is sufficient. True altruism should, therefore, be a process of altruistic intention developing into a moral cognition of the nature of ‘humanity’ through a personal perspective. Such a conception can only stem from a mind that is, in Lydgate’s words, ‘continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass’ (M, 63:628). Yet it is hard to put it in fictional terms. Eliot’s representation of Dorothea’s altruism has already overcome one major shortcoming in Lewes’s theory of recollection. Lewes is more inclined to interpret the complex mental activities of individuals in terms of basic affective states. This reduction often ignores motives and acts conditioned by specific circumstances and moral imperatives.35 However, self-realization in Dorothea is often undercut by the impersonal nature of the transcendental and unknown collective. The following two contrastive instances illustrate such a difficulty. In order to make Dorothea’s ‘self’ credible, altruistic desire needs to be bred and sustained by a long cherished personal memory, with feelings unique to herself. In Chapter 9, Dorothea, Celia and Mr Brooke come to have a look at Lowick, Dorothea’s future home. When they consider if Dorothea should take the bow-windowed room, the following conversation takes place: ‘Yes,’ said Mr Brooke, ‘this would be a pretty room with some new hangings, sofas, and that sort of thing. A little bare now.’ ‘No, uncle,’ said Dorothea, eagerly. ‘Pray do not speak of altering anything. There are so many other things in the world that want altering—I like to take these things as they are…’ (M, 9:73) In contrast, in Chapter 21, when Will Ladislaw talks with Dorothea about Casaubon’s study in search of the ‘Key to all Mythologies’and the more

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advanced research in this area in Germany: ‘Dorothea raised her eyes, brighter than usual with excited feeling, and said in her saddest recitative, “How I wish I had learned German when I was at Lausanne! There were plenty of German teachers. But now I can be of no use”’ (M, 21:202). Dorothea’s remark in the first instance illustrates not the idealist nature of her self but Eliot’s awkward handling of such a misplaced idealism. It is out of place because of a recollection of ‘so many other things in the world’. We cannot find enough personal feelings in that reply to justify Dorothea’s reaction or a sense of ‘self’ to sustain her moral awareness. In the second scene, not only the concreteness of Dorothea’s memory but also her tone of regret are both at work, injecting a vividness of intoxication into her personal recollection. They ‘revive’ her ‘noble’ willingness to sacrifice herself, but a willingness proffered primarily from her own point of view. It is in such a spontaneous response that one can feel how deeply the regret touches her and how it helps to bring her nascent sense of self into focus. The formation of remorse can also illustrate how recollecting past experiences may have only a limited moral meaning for her psychology. When Dorothea learns about the injustice done to Ladislaw’s grandmother by the Casaubon family and about Casaubon’s ‘care’ for Ladislaw’s well-being, she shows exactly how ‘the educated tracing of hurtful consequences to others is associated with a sympathetic imagination of their suffering’. She further experiences ‘the agonised sense, the contrite contemplation, of the wound inflicted on another’ (SP, 150), which in this case is on someone who has an interpersonal relation with her. Yet, what prompts this remorse is a sympathy achieved not on her own account but through imagining herself as being part of the Casaubon family and consequently through feeling as though she herself had played a part in the injustice. Unlike the situation in Chapter 80, where she feels the presence of an impersonal collective feeling but still from her own point of view, her perspective here is twice removed from that of her ‘self’ despite the interpersonal basis of her sympathy. The seemingly interpersonal relations are appropriated, if not blatantly replaced, by an indirect form of sympathy that is on the verge of becoming impersonal knowledge. Although Eliot tries to incorporate the sense of recollection into that of remorse, the lack of personal relevance in the moral meaning of Dorothea’s ‘recollection’ is undeniable; it can be seen more clearly when contrasted with the memory of Bulstrode: intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame. (M, 61:601) His passion for wealth and scrupulous calculation are defined as ‘a sort of worldly-spiritual cliqueism’ (M, 17:172), a personal obsession that is predicated on interpersonal relations. The whole past comes back ‘in burning memory’ (M, 61:604); his past ‘had risen and immersed his thought as if with the terrible irruption of a new sense’ (M, 61:605). To accommodate Dorothea’s self-interest within her altruistic understanding based on impersonal humanity plays down the potential confrontation between such a self and interpersonal conflicts – the core of the Comtean conflict between altruistic and egoistic emotions. The lack of psychological impact in Dorothea’s remorse may also help us to become more sensitive to similar limitations in other discussions on sympathy such as in Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect. Sympathy to Bain is ‘an idea’ that ‘[acts] itself out’; there is ‘no reality corresponding’ to the ‘idea of pain’, ‘but yet this idea will induce us to act as if it represented a reality of our own experience’.36 The tensions discussed so far regarding Dorothea’s ‘memories of human sympathy’ should be considered carefully if we want to clarify the difficulty facing Eliot in constructing a new spiritual faith in Middlemarch and in seeing it as different from the mode of belief in Protestant religion. Eliot herself argues in a letter of 1874 to her friend Mrs Elma Stuart that ‘righteousness is salvation—and is not to be sought in metaphysical refinements about a “personal God” but is to be found in our idealization of human relations and human needs’ (L, VI, 87). If the ‘God-like’ position of Christian religion gradually gives way to that of ‘human relations and needs’, these ‘relations and needs’ are more socially based in Comte. In Middlemarch, they are replaced by a humanity that changes the terms of the Protestant worship from an accessible and personal deity to an aloof and impersonal deity. Altruism in Middlemarch hardly resides in the interpersonal relations. It has limited relevance to the web of communal relations in which Dorothea finds herself caught. The interplay of the impersonal with the interpersonal demonstrates the difficulty of establishing a secular religion through communal life. In addition, although personal interest is accommodated in Dorothea’s help for others, the lack of psychological access in the fictional representation of such an interest

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Mythologizing altruism This issue of impersonality should not, however, prevent us from further exploring the historical meaning of the affective nature of secular religion in Middlemarch. While events are meant to provide the conditions that give rise to altruistic emotions, the hagiographic and other mythological allusions constitute the link between the two realms, figuring the ideal and idealizing the real. Such a language may not just signify but become itself a signification of shared insights. This is to say that the secular need finds an apt form in hagiography when hagiography can be transformed into a new mythology in history. Just as ‘hagiographers taught theology through concrete examples rather than abstract theorizing’,38 so myth in turn provides a figuring mode for religious feelings unconstrained by orthodox dogma. Transcending the limited theological trope of hagiography, the religious sentiments of Saint Theresa may bring into relief the concrete feelings mythologized in the person of Dorothea. The nature of such mythologizing can be clarified with the help of Strauss’s understanding of ‘mythus’ in his Life of Jesus: ‘mythus is the creation of a fact out of an idea’; it is ‘an image of that origin, coloured by the light of existing ideas … cast upon the dark wall of the past’ and is thus ‘a magnified reflex of existing influences’.39 Dorothea needs the community as a medium in which the modern myth may become visible: ‘Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among neighbours who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame’ (M, 15:144). Her idealism has to be thwarted by problems in the actual world, incarnated through carefully set-up incidents, and enriched by allusions to contemporary concerns.40 This figuring capacity of myth lends a particular meaning to Eliot’s principles of portraying ‘the history of man’ (M, ‘Prelude’:3): it is good that the narrator should … if possible follow the example of those greatest painters who not only painted the finest ideal types they were capable of beholding, but also painted severely veracious likenesses, taking their models as they were with all their facial irregularities & wrinkles & presenting them in their habit as they lived.41

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may prevent ‘humanity’ from becoming in essence, though not necessarily in form, an internalized, or, in Feuerbach’s words, ‘a subjective, personal God’.37 If Dorothea gains access to a deeper truth, she often does so at the expense of maintaining the capacity of an individual.

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

This belief recalls Lewes’s constant objection to ‘the notion of a possible source of Knowledge transcending Experience’ (FC, I, 203). This is particularly true of the ‘religious’ nature of Dorothea that justifies her genealogical link to Saint Theresa. She is seen by people around her as a religious person. Celia finds her ‘too religious for family comfort’ (M, 2:21); Sir James can only explain away the fact that she would care for someone like Casaubon as a care ‘in a religious sort of way’ (M, 2:22). Her marriage to Casaubon is described by the narrator in religious terms. She has the self-image of a saint and speaks in a tone of being one. Her religion is seen by others as ‘too unusual and striking’ (M, 1:10) and her idealist nature ‘the fanaticism of sympathy’ (M, 22:214). While in Rome, her ‘magnificent pose’ (M, 19:184) impresses Naumann, Will Ladislaw’s artist friend, as ‘a sort of Christian Antigone—sensuous force controlled by spiritual passion’ (M, 19:185). The narrator characterizes her feelings as follows: ‘The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent’, much beyond any ‘narrow teaching’ (M, 3:28). The three epithets defining the ‘largesse’ of her teaching or secular religion – ‘ardent’, ‘theoretic’ and ‘intellectually consequent’ – hold the key to the representational value of Dorothea as a modern-day myth modelled on but transcending the Catholic hagiography of Saint Theresa: ‘ardent’ because, like the affective language of Christian religion, emotions and instincts may carry belief, but here the emphasis is on palpable conviction; ‘theoretic’ because the affective experience of the senses ought to be elevated into a theoretical perspective of it, which can no longer be adequately provided for by a rigid system of theological dogma; ‘intellectually consequent’ not just because such a perspective may have a bearing on the historical conditions of Dorothea, but also because it has an interpretative potential that may endow a metaphorical dimension on the otherwise distant and speculative perspective of a study of ‘the history of man’ (M, ‘Prelude’:3). Mythologizing altruism as a secular religion thus has an important implication for understanding the relations between communal insights and provincial history. For the Victorians, according to Owen Chadwick, ‘to be religious was to be like a man inheriting a trust from the past, to be converted was to accept a bequest from the past’.42 In translating Strauss and Feuerbach, Eliot gained a good understanding of how essential mythical language is to Christian religion, especially when divine records take on the functions of myths.43 German biblical criticism was partly responsible for the secularization

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of such biblical myths, a process she recognized as ‘[the] introduction of a truly philosophic spirit into the study of mythology’ (E, 36). Dorothea’s tangible aspirations, as the salient features of a modernday myth, are conjured up by the affective vocabulary conventionally used in religion. Like hagiography, the power of such a language lies not in the ideas it explains but in the concrete experience required to understand it.44 Dorothea’s verdict on the men in her life are meant to elaborate on this issue. In a well-known essay W. J. Harvey notes that ‘Casaubon’s intellectual life has nothing at all to do with either his religious life … or with his position in society’.45 It is undeniable, however, that Casaubon is presented as a man who ‘held himself to be … a believing Christian’ (M, 42:415) and who is ‘understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history’ (M, 1:11). His limits do not lie in a failure to profess any interest in religious traditions, but in his inability to understand the world in terms suggested by a religious language: to keep alive the experiential dimensions of feelings. Out of her own passion and informed by Ladislaw’s observation of the limits of Casaubon’s work, Dorothea comes to see such work as ‘shattered mummies … a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child’ (M, 48:469). Here, ‘shattered mummies’ have only bodies that have already disintegrated, without any life left or the possibility of any life being revived; whatever is ‘already withered in the birth’ has little capacity for life in itself. This verdict is sanctioned by the narrator: ‘What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge’ (M, 20:191). When Mary Garth seeks advice from Mr Farebrother about Fred, we are again reminded of such affective expressions of religion which in her case are largely secular. Mr Farebrother thinks that she should give up on Fred because ‘your action made no real difference to Fred’s lot … So, on that score, you may feel your mind free’. ‘“Thank you, Mr Farebrother,” said Mary, earnestly. “I am grateful to you for remembering my feelings”’ (M, 52:505). What bothers Mary is not her ‘mind’ but her feelings. What she gets from him is a perspective on those feelings. The ‘feat’ of feelings is defined for Dorothea as ‘an idea wrought back to the directness of sense’ (M, 21:205). Bodily sensations may constitute the demonstrable process of registering an idea. Scenes such as old Featherstone’s funeral ‘always afterwards came back to [Dorothea] at the touch of certain sensitive points in memory’ and

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

they ‘make a part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness’ (M, 34:318). Perhaps for the very importance of such a registering capacity, sensations are carefully differentiated from ‘sensitivity’. Casaubon is delighted at the prospect of marrying Dorothea, but is ‘sensitive without being enthusiastic’ and ‘too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight’ (M, 29:273). On the other hand, the mentality of Bulstrode, who likes to pass as a man with inherited Christian belief, shows how doctrinal conviction devoid of its sensational basis entails no spiritual development. Even when he is aware of the ‘total absence of merit in himself’, ‘that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory’ or revive ‘the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse’ (M, 53:511). Unlike him, Rosamond begins to understand Ladislaw’s agony over the likelihood that Dorothea may no longer believe in him now that she sees them together only when ‘[what] another nature felt in opposition to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness’ (M, 78:768). Here we see the coalescence of sensual retention and moral insight. Ladislaw also recognizes that all knowledge without feelings is not enough. When he tells her about the nature of poets and poetry, Dorothea can only admit that ‘knowledge passing into feeling … seems to be just what I experience’ (M, 22:218). Thus, in this modern-day mythology, affective experience has the potential for a visible recording of understanding. Conversely, such an affective language is limited if it does not evolve into spiritual enlightenment. Ladislaw, regretting Dorothea’s marriage, would therefore like ‘to wait and watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly and ingenuously’ (M, 21:203). Not only heart and soul must be brought together, but such a conjoining must be seen in full action, palpable and alive. The possession of feelings, though, is not the same as the gaining of faith: when Dorothea received Casaubon’s letter of proposal, ‘She could not pray; under the rush of solemn emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated uncertainly’ (M, 5:43). But before long, she was ‘humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium’ (M, 20:192). For the same reason, the effect of Raffles’s blackmail can endow Bulstrode’s past with a corporeal power but fails to generate any conscience in him: ‘as if by some hideous magic, this loud red figure had risen before him in unmanageable solidity—an incorporate past which had not entered into his imagination of chastisements’ (M, 53:513). The narrator in

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Romola has also warned the reader that one needs ‘the larger aims without which life cannot rise into religion’ (R, 61:508). Consequently, while the figuring capacity of affective language is distinguished from speculative reasoning in reflecting on one’s experiences, such a capacity is also needed to configure reasoning. Ideas alone are not sufficient for fulfilling one’s spiritual needs. ‘Lydgate has lots of ideas’ (M, 10:91), but he fails in his reform. Casaubon offers a most interesting case. Although he sees in his own work on mythology a ‘[calling]’, which needs ‘steady application’ and ‘careful reasoning’ (M, 9:80–1), he understands that ‘human reason may carry you a little too far’ and ‘pulled up in time’ out of his own initiative (M, 2:17). He has no problem, though, with deftly using figurative language to express his resentment towards the world around him. He sees in Dorothea ‘a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the ill-appreciated or desponding author’ (M, 20:196). The focus in Middlemarch on the figuring and configuring capacity of myth in general and affective language in particular also locates the novel in a larger context of the meaning of language. Eliot’s understanding differs from Edward Tylor’s conception of myth as anthropomorphism rather than moral teachings and from F. Max Müller’s conception that treats myth as a corruption of language.46 The difference between these two views recalls the two essential aspects of language that have become dissociated in history. ‘In Homer’, as Kenneth Burke notes, ‘the word for “word” is mythos. In later Greek, it gave way to logos.’47 Current criticism seems to be more interested in restoring one of these functions, so as to redress a previously excessive emphasis on the other. But what interests us here is precisely their connection. These two aspects are combined ingeniously in Middlemarch when mythologized sensations and emotions become a medium for reasoning. Casaubon’s knowledge of the origins of myth repeats Müller’s view almost verbatim: ‘all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed’ (M, 3:23). The point made in Middlemarch is less about getting back to such origins through myth than about the potential for both the figurative and rational functions of myth to interact, that is, about their potential for interpretation. In retaining the figuring process of myth without neglecting its configuring capacity for reasoning, Eliot points up a fundamental aspect of historical representation, such as described by Ernst Cassirer: ‘myth and language play similar roles in the evolution of thought from momentary experience to enduring conceptions, from sense impression to

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

formulation, and … their respective functions are mutually conditioned’.48 In Middlemarch, this interpretative mode plays a most important role in establishing Dorothea as a modern-day Saint Theresa. As the narrator puts it, ‘Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable … starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be’ (M, 3:24–5). Through such interpretation, myth addresses itself directly to the secular needs in history. Eliot was well-acquainted with the mythical mode of interpretation. German biblical criticism focuses on the moral implications that such an interpretation may entail. In this sense, the figurative nature of emotions in Middlemarch enables the study of ‘the history of man’ to be more than just a detached recounting of the past but turns the present into ‘embodied histories’ (FC, I, 360). It drives home the idea, as recorded by Eliot in one of her notebooks, of ‘Verba propter res, non res propter verba’ (‘Words for the sake of things, not things for the sake of words’) (GEN, II, 56, 163). The nature of this study is best illustrated through a scene in Chapter 22, where Casaubon comes to sit as a model for a sketch of St Thomas Aquinas. He is listening to Ladislaw’s remarks about his friend Naumann: ‘I have been making some oil-sketches under him,’ said Will. ‘I hate copying. I must put something of my own in. Naumann has been painting the Saints drawing the Car of the Church, and I have been making a sketch of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Driving the Conquered Kings in his Chariot. I am not so ecclesiastical as Naumann, and I sometimes twit him with his excess of meaning. But this time I mean to outdo him in breadth of intention. I take Tamburlaine in his chariot for the tremendous course of the world’s physical history lashing on the harnessed dynasties. In my opinion, that is a good mythical interpretation.’ Will here looked at Mr Casaubon, who received this offhand treatment of symbolism very uneasily, and bowed with a neutral air. ‘The sketch must be very grand, if it conveys so much,’ said Dorothea. ‘I should need some explanation even of the meaning you give. Do you intend Tamburlaine to represent earthquakes and volcanoes?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Will, laughing, ‘and migrations of races and clearings of forests—and America and the steam-engine. Everything you can imagine!’ ‘What a difficult kind of shorthand!’ said Dorothea, smiling

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The irony about Dorothea’s gullibility and Ladislaw’s nonchalance does not diminish the preponderant concern here with the interpretability inherent in the materiality of ‘physical history’. This passage presents at a single stroke the significance that will justify the narrator’s use of mythological traditions, which, to borrow Ladislaw’s words in describing Naumann, may ‘not only [revive] but [expand] that grand conception of supreme events as mysteries at which the successive ages were spectators, and in relation to which the great souls of all periods became as it were contemporaries’ (M, 22:207). This is particularly significant. Almost thirty years before Middlemarch was published, Carlyle in a different context had already spelt out the need to ‘prefigure’ the future, and to ‘figure and form it into a seen fact!’ Although he had in mind the figuring power of ‘the united intelligence and effort’ of men, he did trace the source of such power to ‘rules already known’ and the ‘grand “outline”’ of the past (Past and Present, WTC, X, 249). Eliot, however, was able to recognize the creative power inherent in the process of figuring the present. The mythological traditions act as an effective means both to traverse different periods in history and to enable historical implications to be derived from newly figured and configured experiences. These collective insights, what Lewes calls the ‘residues of a wider experience’ (PLM3, 99), are the very means by which to lend a figurative dimension to Dorothea’s spiritual search and thus its interpretative potential. The figurative potential inherent in mythology is consciously made relevant to history in Middlemarch. Will Ladislaw is able to derive a living spirit from mythological images in Rome and ‘the fragments stimulated his imagination and made him constructive’ (M, 22:206). Eliot’s anxiety over highlighting this capacity can be seen in the alterations she made in the manuscript. The original emphasis on achieving unity and wholeness has been significantly toned down: Rome had given him quite a new sense of history as a <whole> unity:—that might seem paradoxical, but fragments stimulated the imagination, and set him constructing. (M, 22:206, n. 4)

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towards her husband. ‘It would require all your knowledge to be able to read it.’ (M, 22:207–8)

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

The shifted emphasis on constructiveness is set off by the contrastive validity of fragmentary and contradictory points of views celebrated more overtly in the second half of the novel. The evocation of this constructive potential draws attention to Eliot’s own attempts at creating in Dorothea a new symbolic language or Carlylean ‘mythus’ for her own society. Such a ‘mythus’ differs from conventional myth in its modernity of communal and moral structuring. While the sense of origins in mythological systems often entails the realization that ‘everything [one] does or intends to do has already been done, at the beginning of time’,49 this new ‘mythus’ is predicated on the religious need of the present. Given the view in Middlemarch that ‘to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter’ (M,16:158), the origins of conventional mythology may shed light on this new ‘mythus’ because origins do not just reside in what is believed to be the beginning, but come into being constantly in history. The emphasis in Middlemarch on shared insights and their inherent configuring and refiguring modes advances Lewes’s general theory that ‘Sentiment only passes into Science when it is capable of being translated into objective signs’ (FC, I, 471; original emphasis). The constructive capacity of these insights brings to light ‘the shadowy region where human souls seek wisdom apart from the human sympathies which are the very life and substance of our wisdom’ (R, 15:164). Only in this sense do mythological systems become what Lewes calls ‘the means of continuous evolution’ (SP, 139) or the ‘sources of a higher truth than can be gained through individual experiences’ (FC, I, 163). The evolutionary implication of this ‘common-place book’ function may thus make meaningful the novel’s recognition of what still subsists in the present from the past: ‘Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement’ (M, 11:93). ‘In fact, much the same sort of movement and mixture went on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who also, in telling what had been, thought it well to take a woman’s lot for his starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparently beguiled by attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Brooke’ (M, 11:94). Carlyle, too, uses myth ‘not as the antithesis of history but as its inevitable accompaniment, as the necessary modality by which the human imagination figures and interprets its past’.50 In Eliot, however, the point of retrieving the past so as to overcome a collective oblivion, with its ‘signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation’ (M, 20:188), is at the same time not to lose the perspective for demystifying the modern-day myth of secular religion. Sustained by the whole framework of an anonymous tradi-

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tion, Dorothea’s altruistic actions are given a historical and collective meaning. They help to establish a new mythical archetype which is never devoid of its own historicity. In Romola, the ‘romantic and symbolical elements’ (L, IV, 104) of a Madonna figure who saves Florence provide a modern version of an old mythological story. In Chapter 68 of Romola, the Holy Mother in a village of pestilence remains essentially a biblical allegory. The faint chorus of starved women in the street blessed her ‘in much the same tone as that in which they had a few minutes before praised and thanked the unseen Madonna’ (R, 44:388). The spirituality of Dorothea, on the other hand, represents a more earthly faith more to be emulated than revered and thus historicizes the religion of humanity. This historicity makes her spiritual journey less absolute than either that of a devout Christian or that of Casaubon and Lydgate – both searching for an answer to the ‘absolute’ question of origins, Lydgate in the one primitive tissue and Casaubon with the ‘Key to all Mythologies’. The formation of her altruistic inclinations also differs significantly from the Comtean relation between secular religion and history. As Karl Löwith points out, Comte ‘insists on the historical necessity of the theological way of thinking’.51 This is why the ultimate secular spiritual power he advocates is ‘entirely independent of the temporal’ (PPAC, II, 468). For Eliot, in contrast, the value of the new mythology of spirituality lies in its being kept alive in history, contingently, not absolutely. The configuring power of mythology also lies in the present participation of the individual. During their honeymoon in Rome, Casaubon finds Raphael’s ‘Cupid and Psyche’ only ‘highly esteemed’ whereas Dorothea is more concerned with whether ‘you care about them’ (M, 20:191). A similar emphasis can be found at the level of narratorial comments: ‘To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world’ (M, 20:188). The historicity of the narrator as ‘mythographer’ is also of significance in this regard. Many of Eliot’s readers, living in an age of doubt and uncertainty, most likely found it convenient and perhaps consoling to turn to the writer-as-mythographer for prophetic wisdom. ‘Even the novelists, notably George Eliot, had their followers, and many a Victorian sought his personal code of laws from “fictitious histories … in place of drawing it direct and pure from the Catechism or the Gospel”’.52 As a result, the narra-

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

tor holds a privileged position befitting Lydgate’s description: ‘one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too’ (M, 16:162). We only need to recall the much debated twentieth-century polarity between memory and history to see Eliot’s intellectual virtuosity in so consistently relating memory to history.53 The narrator, who goes by the self-reflexive term ‘[we] belated historians’ (M, 15:138), is aware of the inevitable sense of distance in the observations of such ‘historians’. The opening sentences of Chapter 40 are most unequivocal in this regard: ‘In watching effects … it is often necessary to change our place and examine a particular mixture or group at some distance from the point where the movement we are interested in was set up’ (M, 39:389). This sense of inevitable distance, however, captures only part of the narrator’s perspective, whose total purview borders on, but scarcely identifies itself with, the position of a story-teller and a ‘professional’ historian as understood in mid-nineteenth-century England. The conventional perspective of many nineteenth-century historians, other than those in the Carlylean tradition, usually involves a more external point of view. Events thus conceived tend to unfold ‘within an artificial duration having no reality for the groups from which these events are borrowed’. In Paul Connerton’s formulation, such history is ‘a historically tutored memory’.54 Their perspective may run the risk of creating what is called in Daniel Deronda ‘the severance of past and present history’ (DD, 19:190). The double perspective of the narrator in Middlemarch both allows for the constant recovery of the palpability of memory that is in danger of being ‘[sunk] unwept into oblivion’ (M, ‘Prelude’:3) and becomes itself part of a refigured history, never distanced enough to be detached from the past. In one of her Middlemarch notebooks, Eliot makes the following entry: ‘Poetry & history, says Aristotle are distinguished in this: that the historian tells how things did happen; the poet, how they might happen’ (GEN, II, 81). Eliot does not necessarily endorse this famous distinction. Time and again in her writing, she accentuates the important notion of ‘incarnate history’. Ambiguous as it is, this formulation at least suggests that the sense of history resides in the process of incarnation. It breaks down the boundaries set up in the Aristotelian distinction and points up the intrinsic connection between the supposed qualities of the ‘poet’ and the historian. This fusion justifies her move away from Christianity, a religion which, in Mircea Eliade’s words, is ‘a theology of history’,55 to mythologizing secular religion, which in Middlemarch becomes a historicized memory in its recogni-

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tion of the secular ontology of religious sentiments. If Carlyle’s notion of the ‘Chaos of Being’ (‘On History’, WTC, XXVII, 88) aims to ‘[release] historical consciousness from the kind of determinism which had driven the historical thought of Enlightenment rationalism into Irony and Satire’, and if Carlyle puts the emphasis, especially later in his life, ‘on the novel and emergent, rather than on the achieved and inherited’,56 Eliot moves in the same direction but never goes that far. She constructs the emergent from the achieved and inherited. This difference may have saved Eliot from an oft-noted epistemological contradiction in Carlyle, who denies the validity of a ‘scientific’ interpretation of history but regards his ‘absolute truth’ and ‘order’ as being intrinsic to the realm of phenomena.57 Her understanding of the study of history is best summarized in the essay, ‘How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials, and Believe in Them’ in her Impressions of Theophrastus Such: powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations of human existence. (ITS, 197) The language of secular religion in Middlemarch thus sends us all the way back to how memory may figure and configure history, a modus operandi such as implied in the temporal frames in Hesiod’s concept of memory, according to which Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, knows ‘all that has been, all that is, all that will be’.58 In configuring the story of Dorothea as a new mythology, Eliot has successfully linked bodily manifestations of affective memory to the evolution of altruistic thinking. The representation of Dorothea thus demonstrates how collective insight may function as a way of registering and perpetuating spiritual enlightenment. For all its limitations and ambiguities, this new secular mythos of altruism is capable of addressing its own historicity. Without detracting from Dorothea’s spiritual journey, such historicity is in every sense responsible for it.

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The Language of Secular Religion in Middlemarch

National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Thou fill’st from the winged chalice of the soul Thy lamp, O Memory, free-winged to its goal. (Dante Gabriel Rossetti*) The dynamics of Judaism in relation to its Zionist commitment in Daniel Deronda has always been a critical focal point. Various studies have recognized Judaism as capable of ‘[inspiring] the moments with a past, a present, and a future, and [giving] the sense of corporate existence’ (ITS, 261). They have provided much insight into the secular significance of Judaic ‘religion’ in Daniel Deronda, its interpretative mode and its affinity with the Hebrew origin of Christian sentiment.1 The nationalist implications of Judaism have been well-summarized by the narrator of Impressions of Theophrastus Such: ‘The eminence, the nobleness of a people, depends on its capability of being stirred by memories and of striving for what we call spiritual ends—ends which consist not in immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul’ (ITS, 264–5). Such shared memory plays an important role in shaping and defining Jewish national consciousness in Daniel Deronda and it deserves a more focused and pointed investigation than has hitherto been given. The Jewish sentiment in the fictional community in Daniel Deronda is defined by both its modes of imagining and its futuristic tendencies. These forms of epistemology are located in memory: instead of informing, enriching or even expanding a moment of imagining, memory constitutes imagination and imagination as such becomes essential in understanding national existence.2 This relationship transforms the Wordsworthian capacity for articulating personal imaginative activities by way of memory3 into the basis of a national 150

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consciousness. Eliot’s treatment of the modal connections between memory and imagination reveals an extraordinary sensitivity to the limits of such memory as narrative and rhetorical strategies.4 In the process of unravelling how imagining a shared Jewish past may help to maintain a common will, the novel conjures up, not what some critics have observed to be ‘an ideal myth of community’,5 but, rather, a problematic state of mind among its Jewish characters, or a disunified consciousness that results from the interpretative margins of narrative and rhetorical strategies. This is to say that the present becomes meaningful not just in the present need of interpreting traditional values and sentiments, but in the amenability of the past to present needs. The future is determined not primarily by the intrinsic latency of the specific ways of interpreting the past inherent in Jewish communal tradition. Eliot sees this future in terms of national regeneration. ‘Recalling’ the Jewish collective past in this complex manner has been the result, rather than the starting point, of Eliot’s painstaking efforts to search for a transcendental answer to the contemporary question of how to achieve moral confidence – ‘a deeply felt, deeply desired transcendence’.6 The point for Eliot of presenting the Jewish tradition is also to put English national consciousness in perspective. The reflections and comments in the novel, both implicit and explicit, on English national character bring out the diverse nature of this seemingly unitary national consciousness. In this sense, the English plot becomes more than just a counterpart. Since the thematic concern of ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, one of the most important essays in her Impressions of Theophrastus Such, forms an integral part of her conception of national consciousness, this essay will be discussed together with Daniel Deronda.

Cultural nationalism The notion of ‘national consciousness’ is crucial to the argument of this chapter. It is also central to the development of Eliot’s understanding of the concept of ‘humanity’, particularly in its Comtean sense, which goes through a significant modification up to and around the writing of Daniel Deronda. She comes to realize that we need to see national life and national consciousness as a necessary medium through which the nobleness of an individual can be achieved. Eliot’s notebook entries indicate that around the time of her writing of Daniel Deronda she had been reading Comte’s System of Positive Polity, part of which had just been translated and published in

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

English. She also read Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830–42) and its English translation. In one of her Daniel Deronda notebooks,7 Eliot quotes from Comte’s System of Positive Polity: ‘[it is] true that no coherence no dignity have been or are possible for the individual unless in subordination to some larger & composite existence’ (GEN, I, 173). Later, she continued to transcribe with minor variations: ‘The conception of Fatherland, at one time co-extensive with that of Home, is now in danger of being swallowed up in that of Humanity’ (GEN, I, 187). Of course, this does not mean that Eliot necessarily agreed with Comte on this point,8 but it is interesting that she did not continue to quote the next sentence in Comte: ‘this error can only be remedied by Positivism’ (GEN, I, 296). It is significant that, while on the whole the positivist sense of ‘humanity’ gives little consideration to the concept of nation, Eliot singled out the above quotations in her reading. More telling is the fact that the main gist of these quotations reappears in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ and in the Third Series of Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind, to which Eliot made significant changes when preparing it for publication. In The Study of Psychology, the following remark appears before a reiteration of the Comtean idea that the past dominates the present: ‘A nation, a tribe, a sect is the medium of the individual mind, as a sea, a river, or a pond is the medium of a fish: through this it touches the outlying world, and is touched by it; but the direct motions of its activity are within this circle’ (SP, 165). It is also stated in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ that ‘not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the presence of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each individual citizen’ (ITS, 266). The publication of both Impressions of Theophrastus Such and Lewes’s Study of Psychology postdated that of Daniel Deronda. Yet, in the novel, an awareness of the need for the ‘preservation of national memories’ (ITS, 260) and for nationhood surfaces time and again, as, for instance, when Mordecai quotes from a Jewish philosophical work, the Khusari: ‘Each nation has its own work, and is a member of the world, enriched by the work of each’ (DD, 42:492).9 The first paragraph of the chapter about the discussion at the ‘Hand and Banner’ pub is based on a quotation from Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters by Leopold Zunz, a Jewish historian in Germany whose works Eliot read. With regard to how Jews suffer at the hands of Christians, the original paragraph reads, ‘If there be an ascending scale of sufferings, Israel reached its highest degree … a tragedy which extends over fifteen centuries’. Eliot revised that into ‘Israel takes precedence of all the nations’ and ‘what shall we say to a National

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Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years’ (DD, 42:480).10 This shifted emphasis on the national ‘medium’ comes out all the more clearly if we juxtapose Daniel Deronda with some of Eliot’s other works. In The Spanish Gypsy, a general sense of ‘humanity’ has already been narrowed down to the racial level as Fedalma faces a claim on her allegiance by the gypsy community from which she was removed when she was very young. Yet the emphasis there is on a general reverence for racial affinity defined primarily in terms of blood relations and the obligations that such relations necessarily impose. In Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s attention is centred on the impact of the animating power of a national ‘mind’ and on the formation of a national identity. For the rural communities in Adam Bede and Silas Marner, the medieval city state in Romola and the provincial town life of Middlemarch, Eliot’s uses of the notion ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ embrace people of whatever origin or religious denomination. In Daniel Deronda, instead of regarding themselves as ‘citizens of the world’ (DD, 3:18), the Jewish characters believe themselves to be citizens of a promised nation. The form of social cement in the other novels – Christian feelings such as ‘family affectionateness’ (ITS, 279) which give shape to Eliot’s early conception of collective memory and are instrumental in her conception of religious humanism of the middle period – also provides the foundation for Judaism in Daniel Deronda. Nevertheless, these feelings are more specific and concrete than the corporate sense of national existence and become categories in their own right. Nationalism as a new form of social cement can be achieved, as Hans Kohn has suggested, only through some cultural medium that transmits ‘the emotional warmth of concreteness’ of a heritage on a national scale.11 Of course, one might argue that to note this shift of perspective from ‘General Humanity’ to a particular nation is at best a twentieth-century reading of nationalism back into a nineteenth-century text, but this is not so. David Kaufmann, a Jewish scholar and Eliot’s contemporary, had already realized when commenting on Daniel Deronda that ‘the idea of Nationality has reappeared in all its antique sharpness of outline’.12 He argues that ‘it must be noted that the Jews themselves have begun to recognise a nationality in Judaism—and a nationality which cannot be laid aside like a garment’.13 This may help to explain why in Daniel Deronda the personal destiny of the major Jewish characters merges with the destiny of Israel. We can approach Eliot’s conception of nationalism in terms either of collective consciousness or of its more visible or palpable institu10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

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Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

tional expressions. To establish a common territory, to seek political independence and security, or to politicize the collective awareness of sharing a common heritage, these are actions that fall into the realm of nationalism. Yet the characteristics of a national spirit, the devotion to a vague but entrenched conviction and its related cultural practices, equally deserve the term and are probably even more essential in understanding its meaning.14 According to Benedict Anderson, forms of nationalism can be regarded as ‘cultural artefacts of a particular kind’;15 or as John Plamenatz maintains, ‘what distinguishes a people from other peoples in their own eyes consists of ways of thinking, feeling and behaving which are, or which they believe to be, peculiar to them’.16 Gerald Newman claims that the ‘ultimate goals’ of nationalism, ‘like its roots, are cultural and psychological’.17 Such a distinction between cultural and political forms of nationalism is not clearly suggested in Daniel Deronda. However, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ defines this cultural emphasis as ‘this living force of sentiment in common which makes a national consciousness’ (ITS, 265). Theophrastus Such summarizes the major characteristics of this ‘sentiment’ by recalling those who are ‘endowed with uncommon tenacity, physical and mental, feeling peculiarly the ties of inheritance both in blood and faith, remembering national glories, trusting in their recovery, abhorring apostasy, able to bear all things and hope all things with the consciousness of being steadfast to spiritual obligations’ (ITS, 273). Eliot’s praise for the Jewish ‘divine gift of a memory’ (ITS, 261) does not reach its crescendo until this essay. Yet it is in Daniel Deronda that her reflections demonstrate a much subtler understanding of the complexity of ‘corporate existence’. She not only examines the status of such an existence, but also questions the insubstantial nature of current observances among ordinary Jews in the fictional community. Her reserved and somewhat cautious, if not sceptical, attitude forms a contrast with the narratorial outcries of a ‘Zealot’ in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ and with the more explicit expressions to the same effect in her letters. Furthermore, Daniel Deronda is proportionally more devoted to the theme of cultural than political nationalism. The question of creating a national and geographic centre hardly becomes a major issue until about Chapter 42. It is not addressed extensively until Chapter 63 and is forcefully summarized by Deronda in Chapter 69, which is already the penultimate chapter. It is thus reasonable to infer that the most important question that preoccupies Eliot is the extent to which a national consciousness may become a living enterprise, especially the degree in which it may generate and transmit

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itself even before it is finally institutionalized into a political apparatus. Its formative stage, therefore, is what needs to be isolated for a more focused and detailed examination. The term ‘national consciousness’ used in this chapter thus concentrates primarily on the states of mind, the sentiments and ideas inherited and shared among a group of people who have a common descent, history and tradition: in short, ‘a form of living that is more complex than “community”; more symbolic than “society”; more connotative than “country”; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of State; more mythological than ideology’.18 The institutional prospect of this notion will only be a point of reference where necessary. With regard to Jewish national consciousness in Daniel Deronda, what has often been overlooked is the fact that Judaism is more a way of life than a religion.19 As a result, the social function of Jewish communal memory is often played down, especially since it has been contrasted more with Christian communal consciousness than with English traits. This is also due to Eliot’s interest, expressed in one of her letters to Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1876 (L, VI, 302) and in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, in the affinity between Christianity and Hebraism. However, the peculiar nature of Judaism in Daniel Deronda, more an ethnic habit of mind and way of life than a religious awareness, cannot be sufficiently captured by the umbrella term ‘religion’, or its derivative expression ‘being religious’, if we understand the term simply as ‘a particular system of faith and worship’ or ‘action or conduct indicating a belief in, reverence for and desire to please, a divine ruling power’ (‘religion’, OED). This emphasis on a shared way of life is not determined merely by the intrinsic nature of Jewish tradition itself but is an intended emphasis on Eliot’s part. She herself was acquainted with conflicting views among Jewish historians. Although around the time she wrote Daniel Deronda she had noted from Isaac Marcus Jost’s ten-volume Geschichte der Israeliten (1820–47) that ‘the history of the Jews for Jost is not that of a national entity, but of a religious group struggling to maintain its religious rights and values’ (GEN, III, 174),20 she had also learned through Ludwig Geiger’s Johann Reuchlin sein Leben und seine Werke (1871) that there was some opposition to ‘the parasitic growths that have almost always clung around the Cabbala: divination, Alchymy & Astrology’ (GEN, III, 105).21 The same distinction can be found in David Kaufmann who maintains that ‘Judaism has, certainly, at all times been more than a mere religion for its adherents. It has been for them … their rallying-point in dispersion and the necessary condition of their existence as a state,

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

shattered, indeed, but secretly living on in exile’.22 In fact, the religious sense of Judaism is pushed to the periphery in the ‘Hand and Banner’ debate. Mordecai is ‘not a strictly orthodox Jew’ (DD, 46:528). Mirah Lapidoth ‘does not half know her people’s religion’ (DD, 32:334). Although Deronda and Mordecai often use the word ‘religion’, the fictional account of their lifestyle is presented in such a way that Jews as a people do not see themselves as a religious community in the same way as Christians do. The concept of Jewish unity there may involve ‘people who have many different religious beliefs, or none at all’. To the Jews, according to Nicholas de Lange, ‘religious beliefs are secondary to their corporate allegiance’. Their faith in their common heritage or tradition is precisely a result due to their ‘lack of a credal basis’ and ‘the lack of a central religious authority’.23 This is very close to the root meaning of ‘religion’: the root word which is - means ‘to bind’ (‘religion’, OED). It is commonly regarded as religare thus not the religious sense of Judaism per se, but its effect as a way of life that, without as yet becoming a political institution, is essential to holding the community together. Jewish national consciousness includes, but exceeds, the realm of religion; religion is only one of the elements of which Jewish nationalism is made. By taking Jewish collective consciousness as a way of life, Eliot in effect evokes two different concepts of nationalism that had become more or less distinct by 1876. The cultural concept of nationalism is largely derived from Herder’s idea of Volksgeist which stands for a natural, spontaneous and non-political tradition. Such a concept subordinates political criteria to ties of inheritance and stresses natural development. As a contrast, the political concept of nationalism, while concerned with the idea that an individual should contribute to the collective, equally focuses on the need for individual right and freedom to be carefully balanced and maintained within a collective framework.24 Eliot was familiar with Herder’s work as early as 1849 and she and Lewes had several of his works in their collection (L, I, 293). When Eliot was writing Daniel Deronda, there were other interests in the study of national consciousness as a cultural and ethnic tradition. The French psychologist Théodule A. Ribot, who worked extensively on psychological theories of memory, devoted in his L’hérédité not only a chapter to ‘L’hérédité de la mémoire’ but also one to ‘L’hérédité et le caractère national’. The library of Eliot and Lewes now held in Dr Williams’s Library in London contains a copy of L’hérédité (1873), which after its publication was soon translated into English and published in England.25 Lewes even mentioned in 10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

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his letter of 1 May 1876 to Mark Pattison that he received a ‘bearer of a letter of introduction … from M. Ribot’ (L, VI, 243). Daniel Deronda has a preponderant tendency towards the cultural concept with its high valuation of the psychological effect of the individual’s loyalty to the national community. The identity of a people depends on ‘its dialect, its phraseology, its proverbs and its songs, which belong alike to the entire body of the people’ (E, 275). Eliot thus more resembles Herder in attitude. She believes in general that ‘Every nation of forcible character—i.e., of strongly marked characteristics, is so far exceptional’ (ITS, 267). This emphasis on cultural traits defines the oft-noted unwavering belief in cultural ‘separateness with communication’ (DD, 60:673) in Daniel Deronda. This is not to say, of course, that Daniel Deronda has no concern for the political sentiment in nationalism. Eliot is interested primarily in the matrix out of which this sentiment takes shape. Her study of the Risorgimento period of Italian nationalism in general and her translation of the Italian term in particular also testify to this interest. Instead of expressions such as ‘rising again’ and ‘resurgence’, Eliot chooses ‘regeneration’ for its translation.26 She thus focuses on the organic conditions that generate the uprising. It is in this sense that we should understand Deronda’s reference to Giuseppe Mazzini in the context of national revival. Eliot’s emphasis on cultural and communal traits differs from the major concern in some of the writings about Jewish history by German scholars, including Heinrich Graetz, which she read for the writing of Daniel Deronda. The writings by German Jewish scholars had ‘a tendency to see history as the history of the state and of the actions of statesmen’.27 Her emphasis is not identical, either, with the Whig interest prevalent at home in approaching constitutional history as English national history. This approach centres on the idea of the English as a free people and sees English nationalism as distinguished by the political idea of individual liberty.28 It is this idea that underlines J. S. Mill’s claim that ‘the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections’ are among the strongest forces in creating a nationality.29 For an illustration of such a mentality, we need to go back to Felix Holt where Harold Transome is determined ‘to be a thorough Englishman’ with ‘the habit of considering all his conclusions with reference to English politics and English social conditions’ (FH, 8:97–8). Tracing sentiments and traits that gave rise to nationalism has historiographical implications as well. Eliot comes close to J. R. Green, especially in his emphasis on how, apart from administrative patterns

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it is with a reverence such as is stirred by sight of the headwaters of some mighty river that one looks back to these village-moots of Friesland and Sleswick. It was here that England learned to be a ‘mother of Parliaments’ … talk is persuasion and persuasion is force, the one force which can sway freemen to deeds such as those which have made England what she is.31 Green was acutely aware of the nationalistic sympathies which were reshaping nineteenth-century Europe. His account of how the Puritan theory of ‘the Lord’s people’ ‘became necessarily the chief qualification for public employment’ is illustrative of his historiographical approach.32 ‘If we pass from the English University to the English Town we see a progress as important and hardly less interesting’.33 Thus in his Short History of the English People he praises Matthew Paris as ‘the greatest … of our monastic historians’, because ‘the new national tone of his chronicle is but an echo of the national sentiment which at last bound nobles and yeomen and churchmen together into a people resolute to wrest freedom from the Crown’.34 In Daniel Deronda Eliot is strongly interested in the political implications of cultural features and in how these features bring about political changes ‘as a basis for true development’ (L, IV, 13). She does not just raise the issue of English national character or recognize the level at which any change in substance has to be initiated. Through the Jewish contrast, she argues that the ultimate source of national regeneration has to be sought essentially in one’s own native tradition. The theme of renewal forms a vital link between the Jewish and English plots.

The Jewish ‘heritage of memory’ What interests Eliot is a specific quality of the Jewish community, ‘the continuity of that national education (by outward and inward circumstance) which created in the Jews a feeling of race, a sense of corporate existence, unique in its intensity’ (ITS, 270).35 The rhetorical and narrative strategies of this ‘education’ are called for by the physical distance created by diaspora: ‘the consciousness of having a native

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of communities, collective values and styles of thought account for the civic emphasis in national identity. His histories become, as Rosemary Jann points out, ‘“spiritual” biographies of national life’.30 For him,

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country, the birthplace of common memories and habits of mind, [exists] like a parental hearth quitted but beloved’ (ITS, 279). In this sense, it seems, memory, while designed to constitute a narrative in history as in Romola and to provide an impetus of sympathy and altruism as in Middlemarch, may form in Daniel Deronda the basis of solidarity. However, to what extent is this true? Various psychological effects of communal remembrance determine the possibility of success of this ‘imagining’ across time and space. In The Problem of Christianity, Josiah Royce has described such effects in the following terms: The psychological unity of many selves in one community is bound up, then, with the consciousness of some lengthy social process which has occurred, or is at least supposed to have occurred. And the wealthier the memory of a community is, and the vaster the historical processes which it regards as belonging to its life, the richer—other things being equal—is its consciousness that it is a community, that its members are somehow made one in and through and with its own life.36 Royce’s argument seems very illuminating in the present context. Nevertheless, when the ‘lengthy social process’ is only ‘supposed to have occurred’, the collective belief in the process, which is relived time and again in the imagining practice, might in time weaken the meaning of holding such a belief. The Jewish characters are aware that their common origin does exist ‘in the past, in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored’ (ITS, 265). The repetitive nature of habits may, however, marginalize or cancel out their own historicity.37 To characterize the forms of nationalism, including the affinity shared by diasporic ethnic groups, Benedict Anderson has more recently made the distinction between ‘horizontal’ community and ‘contemporaneous community’. What Anderson, following Walter Benjamin, highlights in the second model is a kind of ‘homogeneous, empty time’, ‘marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar’.38 The formation of Jewish communal memory in Daniel Deronda does not quite correspond to either model; it consists of an immanent interdependence of the two. That ‘empty time’ is defined by a sense of purposefulness and fulfilment and by a mindset, but short of a full understanding, of destined solidarity. Thus clock and calendar, though measuring the continuous flow of this ‘empty

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

time’, depend paradoxically on their meaningful association with Judaic destiny in history for their raison d’être. Ernest Renan once commented on how this non-teleological existence of ‘empty time’ has become an essential feature of a nation, which in effect tells of a collective forgetfulness: ‘The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things’.39 Daniel Deronda has moved a step beyond Renan in its perception of the connection between memory and forgetfulness. The Jewish ‘heritage of memory’ (DD, 42:484) is, as the narrator in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ puts it, primarily ‘the organised memory of a national consciousness’ (ITS, 289); yet it is organized necessarily with an inbuilt indifference, an unavoidably fading spirit and a persistent amnesia in order to sustain artificially a will in common.40 This means that memory becomes a corrective to forgetfulness inasmuch as forgetfulness is constitutive of memory. The specific forms of Jewish recollection have, in many ways, originated from the notes that Eliot made for the writing of Daniel Deronda. Her notebook Miscellanies contains numerous notations in the form of factual records of Jewish customs, rites, traditions, the ‘strongly marked characteristics’ (ITS, 267).41 They are used in the novel to show how these conventions function. The surface messages in Daniel Deronda always tend to suggest that the Hebrew language, written or oral, is the chief means of prolonging the Jewish tradition, but the psychological effects of these ‘concurrent influences’ (ITS, 268) often reveal the failure of this tradition to sustain effectively its own purposefulness. The Jewish ‘national education’ finds its most obvious vehicle in the learning of its language and Eliot made detailed notes about the features of Hebrew. In Daniel Deronda, however, the politics of sharing a language becomes an important issue. The boundaries of Christian or secular communities in Eliot’s other novels can in no way be delimited by the use of English. By contrast, the Jewish way of life in Daniel Deronda corroborates the assumption, shared by Lewes, that ‘[language] belongs essentially to the community by whom and for whom it is called into existence’. An individual Jew cannot think the thoughts of his group ‘so long as his experiences refuse to be condensed in their symbols’ (SP, 161; 160). Therefore, while for Mordecai, ‘English is my mother-tongue, England is the native land of this body’ (DD, 40:464), he is acutely aware of the fact that ‘[if he] could write now and used English, [he] should be as one who beats a board to summon those who have been used to no signal but a bell’ (DD, 40:466). How language can be brought to bear on the question

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of communal identity becomes crucial when Deronda asks Mordecai, ‘“Have you written entirely in Hebrew, then?” … “Yes—yes,” said Mordecai, in a tone of deep sadness’ (DD, 40:465). From Mordecai’s point of view, the learning of language is often crucial for the latent power of verbal expressions. The ‘game of imitating unintelligible words’ for little Jacob is necessary because the hymns will be ‘engraved within him’ and ‘rule him some day’ (DD, 38:444). In stark contrast, however, Jacob’s father Ezra Cohen, who hardly comprehends this practice, shows by default that such a ‘future’ cannot be expected. He knows that the ‘game’ is necessary, but as for its significance: ‘Ay, ay, Jacob’s learning ’ill all wear out of him’ (DD, 38:534). The narrator’s awareness of the failing prospect of memory is best thrown into relief by an entry in another of Eliot’s notebooks, which is unambiguous about the success of such a practice: ‘Mother singing Hebrew prayers & texts over her sleeping infant. How a language may sleep & wake again!’ (GEN, III, 64). In Miscellanies, Eliot noted down how ‘the Mischna’ was first passed on in oral form and then at what time it was written down (Misc, 108v). In particular, she made numerous notes on the antiquity of written and oral traditions. The use of the collective chanting of Jewish melodies in Daniel Deronda is probably due to her knowledge that ‘much “national melody” is of high antiquity’ (GEN, I, 147). In her reading of Volume IV of Heinrich Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden, she also made marginal linings concerning ‘verbal memory’.42 Her study of Graetz includes notes on the origin of the Talmud, ‘that traditional interpretation which was the nucleus of the “oral law”’ (Misc, 124), as well as the meaning, origin and deviations of ‘the Mischna’, which is a ‘study of the Oral Law’, being ‘essentially a matter of memorizing and recapitulation’.43 For the Jewish characters, the ancientness of these texts is often used as a much needed metaphor, while the specific time at which they originated becomes hardly relevant. More specifically, for them, to create and reinforce the ancient authority of these teachings depends on borrowing or appropriating their power, but not their specific doctrines, for a modern situation. In Chapter 62, when Mordecai tries to relate to Deronda ‘the lot of Israel’ upon the reappearance of Mirah’s father, the narrator explicitly tries to control the meaning of such an action: ‘The surroundings were of Brompton, but the voice might have come from a Rabbi transmitting the sentences of an elder time to be registered in Babli—by which affectionate-sounding diminutive is meant the vast volume of the Babylonian Talmud’ (DD, 62:691). Here, the modernity of the context

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Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

manifests the power of and an anxiety over, a collective oblivion of specific teachings; yet only this modernity can serve as the hermeneutic means by which memories of the past may become relevant, meaningful and purposeful. In Daniel Deronda, ordinary Jews normally do not have a good knowledge of the specific doctrines of their tradition. This may account for their apathy for the antiquity of their tradition and for their vague and inarticulate talk about their collective inheritance. If the Kabbalah is evoked with all its mystery, for those who do not understand its meaning but are only reverential towards its ancientness, mysticism often leads to incomprehension. It is perhaps for the same reason that there is always a touch of scepticism about the extent to which Jewish characters really feel the meaning of their words when they speak of their sympathy for their people, or their patriotic feelings towards their group. Mirah, like Cohen, is on the whole a sketchy character, pale and flat. She is always ready to come up with instant exclamations like ‘Oh, they are dear good people; I feel as if we all belonged to each other’ (DD, 50:576). Likewise, Jewish music and canonical teachings depend on contextual power and bodily awareness, rather than their intrinsic content, to take effect. The prerequisites for appreciating such music and teachings are faith and trust. Eliot made notes on Hebrew music, including ‘Music in the Synagogue’ (Misc, 165; original underlining). In Daniel Deronda, when Mirah recollects the Hebrew hymns which her mother sang to her, she has to admit that ‘because I never knew the meaning of the words they seemed full of nothing but our love and happiness’ (DD, 20:194). With the learning of hymns she is overwhelmed more by the feelings of affinity normally attached to the context in which the hymns were produced than by the verbal meaning which she has hardly learned, let alone forgotten. A different emphasis appears in The Spanish Gypsy, where Sephardo speaks of ‘that wise spirit of listening reverence / Which marks the boldest doctors of our race’ (SG, 2:348). The ‘listening’ act is in Daniel Deronda replaced by the need for ‘reverence’. This may help to explain why Eliot has been criticized for overemphasizing the emotional power of ‘Babli’.44 It is true that the emotional power of national feeling is so intense that it may make onlookers identify themselves with the group. ‘The Hebrew liturgy … has its transitions of litany, lyric, proclamation, dry statement and blessing; but this evening all were one for Deronda’. The commemorative chanting of all the voices, ‘the devotional swaying of men’s bodies backwards and forwards, the very commonness of the building and shabbiness of the scene … —all were blent for him as one expression

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of a binding history, tragic and yet glorious’ (DD, 32:339).45 Yet the presentness of incorporating a tradition may obliterate, in the present performing of such a ritual, the pastness of an imagined history that the ritual is supposed to substantiate and make present, though the sense of discontinuity presumed in this indulgence of the present is paradoxically necessary to make the continuity of history seem credible, palpable and communicable. What is ‘blent’ for Deronda is a seeming fusion of the present and the past, whose liminality makes it almost impossible for him to locate himself either in that ‘binding history’ or in the actual present. The power of a make-believe in the present existence of the past is remarkable. The psychological movement of Deronda in Chapter 41 best demonstrates this: ‘Feelings had lately been at work within him which had very much modified the reluctance he would formerly have had to think of himself as probably a Jew’ (DD, 41:479). How should we then understand the faith upon which Jewish communal memory depends for its ‘recollectibility’? Faith in this sense largely defines the oft-noted religious sense of that memory. When Mordecai considers ‘the spirit of our religious life’ to be ‘one with our national life’ (DD, 42:498), the shared faith in the sacredness of their heritage is only a state of mind defined and revived by an ‘allpresupposing fact’ (DD, 1:3). The nature of that trust is well-described in David Kaufmann’s critical observation: the Jews ‘accepted their destiny as a dark necessity; they did not ask—why? They had a task; they were forced to live and to transmit downwards as an inheritance the inviolable legacy left them by the nations’. As a result, ‘they have adhered to their doctrines with absolute and unwavering fidelity, but without a definite consciousness of their national vocation. They have defended a trust, the future of which is raised and established in their eyes beyond all doubt, without subtilising concerning its peculiarities’.46 We may, of course, understand Jewish ‘religion’ in Daniel Deronda in a broader sense so that, as Elinor Shaffer has argued, it maintains ‘the ideal forms of conscience, a landscape of images in which hallucination and delirium flourish and assume both their social form of wayward passion and their private form of rootless devotion seeking new rites’.47 The differences between these specific forms of communication and interaction within the Jewish community and those in a Christian church also tend to reveal the enduring power of Jewish national consciousness. The social relations in the Jewish community are, according to de Lange, generally much looser. They are essentially sustained by a faith but not a belief in the 10.1057/9780230598607 - Memory and History in George Eliot, Hao Li

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Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

Christian sense of the word. The Jewish belief is a matter of ‘belief in’ rather than ‘belief that’, the latter being the general religious mode of the English Christian community.48 Mirah likes to begin her sentences with structures such as ‘I was sure that … ’ or ‘I felt that … ’, which often emphasize only a personal attitude to that common heritage. Eliot is also aware through her reading that such reverence and acceptance can become unquestioning. For Abaji, a distinguished Jewish figure in history quoted in Eliot’s notebook, ‘I teach this tradition, the ground of it I know not’ (GEN, IV, 22). Mordecai finds that ordinary Jews such as Ezra Cohen and his family ‘have the heart of the Israelite within them, though they are as the horse and the mule, without understanding beyond the narrow path they tread’ (DD, 42:483). It is only faithfulness in this sense that binds the Jewish community together. It underlies Mordecai’s definition of ‘the character of a nationality’ as ‘the fulfilment of the religious trust that moulded them into a people’ (DD, 42:496). The understanding of memory thus takes a different turn from that in Romola where in Chapter 38 Baldassarre is deprived of his consciousness of personal history simply because he fails to remember and identify a passage from the Periegesis of Pausanias. Words, for him, are the object of his memory; yet memory cannot but elicit other sensations, sentiments and eventually names that lead to the reconstruction of earlier experiences. In Daniel Deronda, the written scripts and hymns are not only the carrier and custodian of the Jewish national heritage, but are supposed to be memories in themselves and thus may absolve the present generation of a responsibility to recover past experience. This is also true of the convention, crucial when one becomes a Jew, of ‘[acknowledging] an attachment to this historic experience’ and acquiring a sense of belonging.49 The significance of this dual obligation is called into question in Daniel Deronda when the link breaks down between the learning of communal memory and a consent and pledge of acceptance of the Judaic tradition. Two forms of traditional teaching, ‘kabbalah’ and ‘Massorah’, are particularly important in explaining this obligation. Eliot noted down the distinction between these two while reading C. D. Ginsburg’s The Kabbalah (1863) (GEN, I, 109–16). According to Ginsburg, while ‘kabbalah’ means not just the doctrines inherited but ‘the act of receiving’ and accepting such doctrines, ‘Massorah’ signifies ‘the act of giving over’ and ‘surrendering’ (GEN, I, 236). In Daniel Deronda, both concepts are important to Deronda’s characterization. However, making a ritualistic and ceremonious acceptance of communal memory becomes a sufficient

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condition of becoming a Jew while his physical or cultural link to this memory is only a necessary condition. Deronda eventually acquires a Jewish learning, which Kalonymos has professed to be essential. But his learning from and investigation of the East End Jews is much bereft of its meaning by the very need in Chapter 60 for him to go through the ceremonial ‘motions’ of solemnly pledging his willingness so as to make his Jewish identity come into existence. Joseph Kalonymos wants Deronda to confirm that he is ‘no longer shrinking in proud wrath from the touch of him who seemed to be claiming you as a Jew’: ‘You come with thankfulness yourself to claim the kindred and heritage that wicked contrivance would have robbed you of. You come with a willing soul to declare, “I am the grandson of Daniel Charisi.” Is it not so?’ ‘Assuredly it is,’ said Deronda. (DD, 60:670) His identity is finally achieved, both in terms of symbolical meaning and of narrative structure, only through his accepting from Kalonymos the scripts left to him by his grandfather. That this act of acceptance has become a sufficient condition for him to claim his Jewish identity is further confirmed as his grandfather had made it a point during his lifetime that Deronda should receive it so that he knows his origin. His Jewish identity can only take shape in the very ‘incorporating’ process in Kalonymos’ office,50 even if by then, with the help of Mordecai, he has already acquired the memory in a less symbolic but more engaging way. Deronda’s deprivation of origin is, to Jews like Kalonymos, a ‘robbery’ to Deronda and to ‘our people’ (DD, 60:670). Eliot is likely to have used these expressions in the sense that she noted down in one of her Daniel Deronda notebooks: ‘Robbery of man is worse than robbery of God’ (GEN, I, 119).51 With Kalonymos, the real issue lies in the act of robbery instead of the object of robbery. In The Spanish Gypsy, by contrast, the meaning of such robbery concerns not who commits the robbery but who is the victim of such robbery, since only the victim can eventually right the wrong by choosing his or her own community. When Fedalma’s birth father Zarca comes to claim her, he sees the claim ‘[not] from the Spaniard, not from him who robbed, / But from herself’ (SG, 1:298), out of the fear that she would be ‘[choosing] forgetfulness’ and ‘hating the truth’ that she was ‘born a Zíncala’ (SG, 1:301).

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

To bring into relief the undue separation between the consent and pledge of acceptance on the one hand, and the historical study of Jewish learning on the other, indicates an acute authorial interest in a more historical approach to Judaic doctrines. In the nineteenth century, the rabbis, as Bernard Lewis has observed, ‘were custodians of the oral law … For them therefore an historical approach to law was dangerous … it could call their authority into account or even dangerously undermine it’.52 The reformers, on the other hand, wanted to explicate the Torah which was in the Orthodox view a ‘timeless, immutable divine instruction’.53 Reading Salomon Munk’s Palestine (1845) and marking the following passage, Eliot was well aware of this difference: ‘La masse du peuple croyait par tradition et pratiquait par habitude, sans trop s’enquérir de l’origine de ses croyances et de ses pratiques; mais parmi les scribes ou docteurs, qui scrutaient et examinaient, les opinions se divisèrent’.54 The implied inseparability between consent and historical learning thus confirms not only Eliot’s ‘adherence to the earlier German mythological school culminating in Strauss, whose analysis rested on the unity of the text understood as the religious experience of a community’,55 but also her willingness to confront these complications and to pass judgement on them. She does not just examine but also clarifies the problematic nature of Jewish received wisdom, which, as implied in such terms as ‘the divine Unity’ (DD, 42:494) and ‘covenant nation’, assumes that the Jewish community has inherited a unified consciousness of their historical origin and solidarity. If the materiality of a nation rests on a formalistic perpetuation of imagined memory, it raises the question as to whether this ‘imagined memory’ is capable of renewing itself from within.

The promise of national regeneration Given the ‘disunifying’ implications that rhetorical and narrative strategies may have for the inheritance of Jewish communal memory, how is it that Jewish national consciousness in Daniel Deronda still appears to be capable of regenerating itself and directing the Jewish community to a visionary goal? Eliot endorses the view that ‘the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving nationality’ and that ‘every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword’ (ITS, 260). Yet such a view begs a crucial question: ‘preservation’ and

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‘revival’ may suggest only a recovery of what existed before without altering much of its essence. If ‘national greatness’ consisted only in such a recovery, Mordecai and Deronda would have been mere ‘heroic [defenders]’ and ‘patriotic [restorers]’. This, we know, is not the case. Where exactly, then, lies the possibility of a national regeneration? Through her readings, Eliot becomes aware of what for her would have been a more specific and refreshing form of national revival, which is an inbuilt element in the Jewish imagined memory: ‘He who is able to recreate the past, certainly possesses the power to reform the future’ (GEN, IV, 64). Indeed, Eliot never uses the past merely as a rhetoric of legitimation for a political stance. Instead, she resorts to a discourse of Jewish national revival to create a new ‘language’, a language that exists in the narrative space between the literal senses of such notions as ‘reviving’, ‘restoring’ or ‘preserving’ and the reinventive potential inherent in various forms of Judaic teachings, thus enabling the futuristic commitment to emerge from and subsist in, such a ‘mnemonic’ language. The end result is a language of her own, a language of re-creation, reinterpretation and renewal, whose implications and potentials are not always totally prescribed or determined by a supposedly recoverable past. In many ways, such a transcendental reinvention preempts, for the characters, the strong teleological sense in the Jewish notions of ‘retrieving’ the past and ‘prefiguring’ the future. The process of reinvention also highlights the fact that the seemingly centripetal force of the Jewish tradition may not come from the existence of a unifying memory but from a call for a unifying outcome. Savonarola and Mordecai both go back to their inherited history, Christian and Judaic respectively, for modes of interpretation. While Savonarola depends on the past largely for revelation and appropriation, Mordecai depends on the past for reformulation which in Eliot’s treatment becomes the most essential means of transfiguring the past without displacing it. The message in Daniel Deronda is clear about the Jewish ‘reexperiencing of paradigmatic moments’56: it is in the process of re-creating that past that both the present and the future are given shape. Only in this sense can the Jewish characters find energy and hope in their communal memory, in what Ricoeur formulates as ‘the diachronic process of reinterpretation that we call “tradition”’.57 The act of retrieving, recovering and restoring the past is less predictable and straightforward than is commonly assumed. It centres most crucially on Deronda’s discovery of Jewish feelings and the revelation of his origin. This fusion of discovery and revelation forms a

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

chiasmus, a remembrance and revelation in one, so to speak. This dual nature of memory has not been sufficiently recognized in existing critical studies. The two elements, though moving in seemingly opposite directions, constitute the same process through inversion: while Deronda’s quest for origin forms a suspense that draws the narrative forward, the propelling force of the narrative is sustained by his restless search back into the past. Memory thus takes a forward, rather than backward, direction of chronological movement. This uncommon conception is Eliot’s own. Deronda’s story bears some resemblance to that of Josaphat, a tale that she recorded in her notebook. In the original story, Josaphat has no intimation of his origin, only its straightforward revelation.58 More importantly, the sense of secrecy and unfolding in his search serves as a defining metaphor for the Jewish mode of imagination, which is very much couched in messianic expressions: expressions such as ‘prevision’, ‘foreshadow’ or ‘prefigure’ denote mysterious vision, revelation or latent fulfilment and confirmation. Such words may even involve a ‘strangely-disclosed relation … founded on an illusion’ (DD, 40:460). Instead of anticipating revelation, secrecy draws the future towards itself. Because the future is disclosed to satisfy a past-seeking yearning, it moves not as progression that leaves the past behind; rather, in Mordecai’s remark, ‘the future stretches towards me the appealing arm of children’ (DD, 42:491). The Jewish apocalyptic imagination is revealed when Mordecai says to Deronda that ‘the consciousness discerns remote stirrings. As thoughts move within us darkly, and shake us before they are fully discerned—so events—so beings’ (DD, 40:468). The topicality of the Jewish question also redefines the prefiguring nature of the past. By the time that Daniel Deronda was published, efforts to recover and restore the Jewish past, including returning to the Land of Israel, could have suggested several positions. It could be a search, according to David Vital, for a counter-narrative to, or a refuge from, ‘the disastrous and ineluctable effects of the Emancipation’ of Jews living in Western society – modernism and secularism. They might also indicate, as a result of the same Emancipation, a positive recognition of the value of Judaic heritage and of ‘the historical, geological, geographical and mythological rather than mystical Ere z-Israel’. It was a time when ‘the anti-Semitic . movement was not yet of the dimensions it was to reach in Germany and Austria-Hungary in the last two decades of the century and all seemed set fair for the continued integration and assimilation of the Jews’.59 The recovery and restoration of the Jewish past may have also

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paralleled a more general interest in national regeneration. In 1862, Lord Acton had already pointed out in his essay ‘Nationality’, though in a more political context, that the theory of nationality ‘is the richest in promise of future power’.60 This notion of ‘re-creation’ in Daniel Deronda thus inevitably acquires new meanings in its metaphorical complexity. The re-creating possibility offered by memory and revelation in one can be understood in terms of Eliot’s belief that ‘[our] finest hope is finest memory’ (FH, ‘Epilogue’:398). Memory promises hope by means of the implications of its revelation. Thus for Deronda, ‘I never before possessed anything that was a sign to me of so much cherished hope and effort’ (DD, 60:671). The sense of latency is redefined through the ‘seed’ image (DD, 42:493) with which Deronda and Mordecai describe Jewish national history. In her early review essay ‘The Progress of the Intellect’, Eliot is already keenly aware of the ‘value’ of ‘a free poetical impulse in the figurative language of the Hebrews’ (E, 42). The ‘seed’ allows for much extension of meanings when the principle of their race grows out of it. For Mordecai, any ‘remnant of national consciousness’ may lead to ‘a new stirring of memories and hopes which may inspire arduous action’ (DD, 42:497). Deronda’s relationship with Mordecai is also important in this context. The suggestion of the turning of souls between them, seldom found in Eliot’s other novels, is a very special form of transmission and communication of collective insights.61 Instead of mere ‘reinstatement’ (PLM3, 111), there is not much actual experience being passed on or received. It is a matter of perception and transcendental intimation, rather than of a prescribed speculation about the future. It consists of a moment of epiphany. The transcendental mode also suggests an effort on Eliot’s part to rethink the question of Lamarckianism. The apocalyptic telling of the past does not merely predict the future; rather, it creates history by drawing characters into futuristic commitments. Although Mordecai is touched when ‘a recovery of impressions’ makes him ‘quiver as with a presentiment’ (DD, 40:459), the need for Deronda to ‘take the inheritance’ (DD, 40:466) becomes more than a simple relay. Memory thus transcends recovery to embody a spiritual rebirth beyond the hereditary sense in Eliot’s other works. The relationship between Deronda and Mordecai is largely defined by such concurrences – ‘this question of the family likeness among the heirs of enthusiasm’ (DD, 41:475). Yet this likeness is not presented merely as a matter of hereditary transmission. Deronda initially knows ‘hardly anything about modern Judaism or the inner Jewish history’ and ‘had

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form’ (DD, 32:334), even when the ‘family likeness’ has an inbuilt demand on him to carry on the torch of ‘enthusiasm’. Mordecai’s claim on Deronda could have been ‘justifiably dismissed as illusory and even preposterous’ if judged by the influence of the English ‘rational way’ (DD, 41:475) on Deronda. In fact, Deronda accepts Mordecai’s appeal not because of such an inherent demand, but because of his sympathy, which may have resulted, though not exclusively, from his Jewish ‘memory’, a memory not yet disclosed at this stage but already interacting with his English upbringing. Consequently, their relationship will not be mere continuation but transformation. The touches of Lamarckianism are seriously questioned in Daniel Deronda; the reader is repeatedly reminded that Deronda has some ‘inherited yearning’ (DD, 63:697) and ‘inborn lovingness’ (DD, 16:156). Even his mother shares with him the inherited sense of affinity though she herself does not want to face up to it: ‘what my father called “right” may be a power that is laying hold of me … I cannot go into the darkness without satisfying him’ (DD, 51:593). Nevertheless, equally persuasive is Princess Halm-Eberstein’s disavowal of her own origin and her rebellious spirit, which provide a counter-example of the latency of inheritance. Her rebellious spirit is then given an ironic twist when forsaken by Deronda. Past memory cannot always predict or determine its future outcome. The possibility of a less determined future lends a new meaning to the formulation of ‘resolved memory’ (DD, 42:499) for Mordecai and Deronda. It also reveals a fundamental idea in Eliot’s conception, best summarized in a line from her poem ‘The Legend of Jubal’: ‘That past unchangeable, from change still wrought’ (CP, 112). In Chapter 42, with reference to ‘the things that have been’, Mordecai clarifies this theme as ‘[possessing] a hope built on an unchangeable foundation’ (DD, 42:493). If change is by nature presupposed in any sense of historical development, it must inevitably be the essence of any regeneration and renewal in the future. This notion is more sophisticated than the general statement in The Study of Psychology that the ‘culture of the age’ is a ‘historical growth’ (SP, 156), for ‘growth’ emphasizes primarily an internal force generating itself, whereas ‘change’ not only allows for such a sense of ‘growth’ but also denotes the intervention of forces which may be both internal and external. In this respect, Eliot also resembles Herder who ‘did not look back to an ancient mythology and the sentimental revival of supposed customs of the past’ but ‘looked around him and found in the living reality vital forces of the past pointing towards the future’.62

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This sense of active intervention implied in the notion of change also defines the meaning of hermeneutical gaps essential to interpreting Jewish canonical doctrines. The second half of Miscellanies shows Eliot’s most concentrated study of how the ‘transmitters’ and ‘interpreters’ (Misc, 114) function and how Hebrew scriptures are interpreted. When Mordecai understands that ‘[the] native spirit of our tradition was … to use records as a seed’, the seed is not left to grow on its own. Instead, he recognises the need to ‘draw out the compressed virtues of law and prophecy’ (DD, 42:493). The decompressing process is where the present ‘change’ may take place and where this ‘change’ can be purposefully made possible. Entries in her Miscellanies indicate that Eliot was well-aware of the three methods of teaching ‘the Mischna’: namely, ‘to communicate the traditional enactments quite simply & briefly in the name of an ancient authority’, ‘to gather the traditional material from the written text according to certain rules’ and ‘the application of rules to new cases’. The second is ‘Midrasch’ and the third, ‘Talmud’ (Misc, 108). In Daniel Deronda for most of the time, only the third method is used for its potential for further interpretation. Eliot was also aware that both ‘Mischna & Talmud’ had become ‘a living commentary of the Scriptures’ (Misc, 147v). Another entry indicates that she was particularly interested in how later generations interpret primary texts according to their own needs and conditions, noting in particular ‘a mode of interpretation which sacrifices the plain meaning of the text in accommodation to opinions’ (Misc, 150v). Likewise, in her copy of Salomon Munk’s Palestine, she marked two ways of interpreting canonical Jewish scriptures which also reflect the presentness of change. For some people, leur système d’interprétation avait l’avantage de donner la vie et le mouvement à la lettre morte, de revêtir d’une autorité divine certaines doctrines utiles et même nécessaires qui n’étaient pas explicitement énoncées dans l’Écriture, et de favoriser le progrès et le développement perpétuel du judaïsme; car les docteurs de chaque époque pouvaient se servir de ce même principe de l’interprétation pour accommoder le culte et les institutions aux besoins et à l’esprit de leur temps. Les autres, à la vérité, cherchèrent à conserver le mosaïsme dans sa pureté, comme le faisaient aussi les Samaritains; mais ils le rendirent stationnaire et le dépouillèrent des germes de développement qui y étaient déposés.63

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

Again in reading Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden, Eliot was evidently attracted to Talmudic Judaism and to a particular ‘form of exegesis— the allusive or homiletic, in which present circumstances were regarded as the kernel of ancient texts’. In fact, in the actual copy she used, she made a comment against this passage: ‘Compare the Puritans’.64 Although she knew that the explanation of the Torah can be either ‘that of strict grammatical interpretation’, or that of ‘the mystical & the haggadistic’ (Misc, 167v), the former rarely appears in the novel. Such a selective approach, whether deliberate or not, focuses on re-creation, rather than recovery, in the act of interpretation. The continuity of a tradition is maintained but the proposed renewal is bound to entail either deviation from, or amplification of, what is laid down in the original texts. For Eliot, it is only in this sense of change that the Jewish nation ‘was everlasting’ (Misc, 114). To reinterpret inherited history for a nationalist purpose is for Mordecai an important part of his duty; such a duty is premised on an individual Jew’s freedom in interpreting traditional Jewish doctrines. Such freedom originates from and depends mostly on the way in which a new order can be founded on the old. The process of interpretation becomes the process of imaginatively applying those doctrines. Apropos of Deronda’s sense of tradition, Joseph Kalonymos comments: ‘you argue and you look forward’ (DD, 60:674). This specific function of interpretation is an integral part of the Jewish way of reviving their own spirit. Zunz distinguished in his Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters (1855) between the task of the prophet and that of the psalmist since ‘the prophet interprets history and looks forward’.65 It is equally true that Mordecai as a Jewish nationalist leader looks back and prophesies on the basis of his interpretation. Such a stance overcomes the limitations and lack of substance in ‘all reverence and gratitude for the worthy Dead on whose labours we have entered’ (ITS, 28). It also suggests that an individual perspective is indispensable to the Jewish understanding of the divine revelation of the future. Yet how far is it possible that the Jewish nationalist leaders can reconstitute their imagined past through interpretation? For them, it is a question of bridging the gap between the remembrance they want to rise above and their own nascent nationalist ideology. The task becomes of necessity an interpretation of interpretations. The interpretation of Mordecai is intrinsically determined and made meaningful by the condition of his own historicity. The Jewish tradition of interpretation provides such a basis. The Midrash, writes Frank Kermode, enables

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the interpreter to bridge the gap between ‘an original and a modern audience’.66 It is also due to the convention of using such a mode that in Chapter 42 Mordecai is able to draw on De Corona (On the Crown or, In Defence of Ctesiphon) to remind his listeners of the struggle for Athenian national liberation (GEN, I, 52–4). But here, bridging the gap is no longer the issue, for the importance of interpretation for the national purpose far exceeds the meaning of the original text. In Daniel Deronda, the narrator emulates such a mode of interpretation as well. In Chapter 38, the narrator quotes a Hebrew verse ‘with a meaning something like this’: ‘Away from me the garment of forgetfulness, Withering the heart; The oil and wine from presses of the Goyim, Poisoned with scorn. Solitude is on the sides of Mount Nebo, In its heart a tomb: There the buried ark and golden cherubim Make hidden light: There the solemn faces gaze unchanged, The wings are spread unbroken: Shut beneath in silent awful speech The Law lies graven. Solitude and darkness are my covering, And my heart a tomb; Smite and shatter it, O Gabriel! Shatter it as the clay of the founder Around the golden image.’ (DD, 38:445) With regard to the sources of this poem, Barbara Hardy has pointed out that ‘much of the imagery is from the common source of the Old Testament, but the idea of the buried life of the Jews and the prayer amongst the Gentiles (Goyim) is typical of the medieval poet [Halevi] … Imagery and structure are faithfully imitated’.67 The point of making such an imitation also lies in the apparent vagueness in the introductory remark ‘with a meaning something like this’. The remark must be deliberate, for it reveals an awareness of different sources of imagery and idea and their discrepancy. The discrepancy is probably what Eliot wants to play with so that the two strands may interact with each other. In the poem, the imagery only highlights the essen-

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

tial Hebraic assumption of solitude and eternity, but, through the idea of a buried life, the narrator alludes to Mordecai’s anxiety over the dying consciousness of a national history and over the need for a nationalist revival. The image in the first line, ‘the garment of forgetfulness’, defines at the beginning the modern relevance of such an interaction and deflects attention from the lack of weight in the recent origin of this ‘re-formed’ narrative.68 The metaphor that Mordecai uses for the Jewish national life is ‘a growing light’ (DD, 42:498). ‘A growing light’ promises a more enlightened and enlightening future and provides us with a new clue to the much-noted narratorial device of setting off in medias res. The first chapter, which is the chronological middle point of the plot, may be taken as a watershed at which the past and the future move on different scales. What chronologically happens before is thus only recounted but not enacted. The narrator’s recollection of Deronda’s history before the start of the novel only projects a movement towards the future but hardly defines that future, since the revelation of Deronda’s origin is withheld: ‘This was the history of Deronda, so far as he knew it, up to the time of that visit to Leubronn’ (DD, 20:209). This limited and insufficient knowledge of Deronda’s past gives him much freedom to accept Judaic influence. The direction of his development does not depend much on his English upbringing or education. Again, the narration of Deronda’s history is intrinsically a linear movement in anticipation, intensely maintained until Chapter 20, which, as the end of the flashback, contains Mirah’s story that ushers in a new thematic phase:69 it forms the starting point from which Jewish communal life gradually overwhelms Deronda and entangles him in its very centre. From then on, the linear narrative of his personal history becomes very much interwoven with, rather than unilaterally determines, the various directions of his development in both the English and Jewish communities. Two-thirds into the story, Deronda’s future is more or less off the linear course. He thus symbolically gains more freedom to formulate a future both for himself and for his own people. Deronda, like his grandfather, is eager to find his anchorage in ‘those written memorials which, says Milton, “contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are”’ (DD, 60:670). Yet, to live up to this ‘growing light’, he has to, as Mordecai does in Chapter 42, give woe ‘to the men who see no place for resistance in this generation’: ‘I believe in a growth, a passage, and a new unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect’ (DD, 42:488–9). In

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contrast, the same anchorage is presented in The Spanish Gypsy in terms of ‘the yoke’ (SG, 4:420) for Fedalma whose own affection for Don Silva may be ‘[pressed] backward by the force of memories’ (SG, 5:446). The binding force of communal memories is not the real issue for Mordecai or Deronda. What they cannot tolerate is when that force leads to no consequence – when a Jew has ‘no memories that bind him to action’ and when their heritage becomes ‘mere stuff for a professorship’ (DD, 42:491). This forms the focus of contention during the disputes at the Hand and Banner pub. The ‘unity of Israel’ thus becomes for them the only hope for ‘an outward reality’ (DD, 42:494) so that they may secure their identity not only on a cultural level, but on a political level as well: to expand their ‘inborn half of memory’ into a ‘visible community’ (DD, 42:497).70 Instead of seeing Jewish nationalism as a result of Judaism, we should thus regard it as the political form of Judaism. But even in the political context, memory remains for the Jews a means of communion and a framework of communication. Mirah and Mordecai, brother and sister, ‘were meeting first in memories, compared with which touch was no union’ (DD, 67:541). The Jewish ‘community of feeling’ (ITS, 291) thus becomes a ‘community of memory’, which, for Eliot, is in essence a ‘community of expectation’,71 a community of imagination and vision. It is only through this reinvented language of self-renewal and regeneration that we come to understand why for Eliot national consciousness can be ‘A Fine Excess’ and why ‘Feeling Is Energy’ (E, 450). For Mordecai, ‘Unless nationality is a feeling, what force can it have as an idea?’ (DD, 42:487). The past as reality exists as present imagination and future resolution. Communal memory helps to inspire and galvanize national consciousness, even if the former also needs the latter to make itself relevant and meaningful to the historical project of the present.72

Englishness: ‘the usual eccentricity of their nation’ It is in this context of the attempted renewal of Jewish national consciousness that we now discuss Eliot’s comments on English national character. In October 1876, Eliot confirmed in her letter to Mme Eugène Bodichon that in Daniel Deronda she ‘meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there’ (Cross, III, 291). In 1877, she thanked David Kaufmann for his ‘clear perception of the relation between the presentation of the Jewish element and those of English Social life’ (L, VI, 379). Indeed, ever since F. R. Leavis’s sugges-

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

tion about keeping the ‘good half’ and renaming the novel ‘Gwendolen Harleth’, the search for that relation has seemed to become more important now than it was to the novel’s first readers.73 Eliot was interested in the epistemological value of discerning comparison and contrast. In her reading, she marked Locke’s idea that ‘knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement between two ideas’.74 The affinities between the two plots in Daniel Deronda have been extensively studied in the light of Eliot’s criticism of antiSemitism during the 1870s or in terms of the Arnoldian appreciation of Hebraism and Hellenism.75 However, the contrast between the two plots, implied in Leavis’s comments, deserves just as much attention, if not for the reason he suggested, certainly for the novel’s own thematic concern about reforming English national character. This contrast is designed to accentuate the need for such a reform. The matrix of English national character – the common sentiments and assumptions – are in Daniel Deronda brought into focus by characters of other nationalities. Mrs Meyrick is introduced as someone with a ‘happy mixture of Scottish caution with her Scottish fervour and Gallic liveliness’ (DD, 64:527) and Herr Klesmer as ‘a felicitous combination of the German, the Sclave, and the Semite’ (DD, 5:41). The Jews and the English have equally entrenched traditions. The English community does not lack what the Jews have, ‘the sentiments and ideas which constituted their distinctive character’ (ITS, 273). As far as the location of the English national centre is concerned, ‘[most] of us feel this unreflectingly’ (ITS, 266). However, the Jewish sense of belonging is, according to Kaufmann, manifested ‘in wishes and in hopes, not in deeds and strivings’.76 For Mirah, ‘it comforted me to believe that my suffering was part of the affliction of my people … that has been going on through ages and ages’ (DD, 20:199). The English characters do not have such a sense of consolation, though ironically their pretension presupposes a sense of being English. Thus speaks Theophrastus Such in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’: ‘It is possible to be too arrogant about our blood or our calling, but that arrogance is virtue compared with such mean pretence’ (ITS, 280). Precisely because of this confidence, it has not become a serious issue to the English community that this national sentiment could also be problematic. Carlyle diagnosed such moral complacency of the English in 1843: ‘Not by levity of floating, but by stubborn force of swimming, shalt thou make thy way’ (Past and Present, WTC, x, 160). In 1867, Frances Power Cobbe, a social activist, also criticized the seemingly commendable self-deprecation which prevented genuine

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self-critique. In her Hours of Work and Play, she laments the subtlety of English humour: ‘Real fun ought to give the side-ache to everybody and the heart-ache to nobody’ and proclaims that ‘[pain] must be given in this world, alas!’77 In contrast to her belletristic comfort of savouring humours of various nations, the criticism in Daniel Deronda, more akin to the rigorous critique of Carlyle, is focused on the question of whether the emotional resources of English national character are healthy enough. While it is possible to revive Jewish national character with the help of shared memories, it may not be so straightforward for the English. Although Deronda, who has been brought up as a proper English gentleman, finds that the English do have a national centre, he still questions from the very beginning the grounds of his own emotions. What is lacking in the case of the English is thus an emotional and spiritual authority comparable to Jewish national feeling. This does not mean that the Jewish community is necessarily more unified in its ethos; its shared memories can give rise to a political vision largely because of the uniform ‘bent’ of their mind and sensibility (DD, 32:336). They do feel unified and ‘naturally are not indifferent to themselves’ (L, VI, 321), regardless of the extent to which they are unified. The Jewish element thus forms a backdrop against which English national character becomes more readily identifiable and assumes a more salient pattern of characteristics which would otherwise have remained overly fluid and indeterminate. Yet a comparative or contrastive approach along these lines may play down the emphasis on internal diversity in Eliot’s representation, since it presupposes a notion of national consciousness as a more unitary entity than is presented in the novel. It is true that the Jew was at the time taken to be ‘a denigrated racial other’, as is implied by Ernest Renan, for example, in his theory of two Caucasian language families.78 Nevertheless, Daniel Deronda sets a contrast with Jewish national consciousness at a much deeper level. The Jewish characters, including the East End Jews, are also English and as such they bring out more sharply the seemingly inclusive but in fact exclusionary formation of English national consciousness, as they are made to see their own presence as the ‘other’ within another ‘self’. The early 1870s saw the end of a period when Jews were struggling to end their exclusion from public life in England. They were only just able to remove their political and civil disadvantages at the institutional level.79 Such a paradoxical relation transcends an apparent contrast between the two national groups. It lends the Jewish origins of Deronda a greater sense of urgency and

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Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

meaningfulness. Daniel Deronda shows more critical acumen and less naivety of condemnation than ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’. The fundamental morphology of the double plot is thus best summarized by the modes of reasoning evoked in the opening sentence of ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’: ‘To discern likeness amidst diversity’ and to ‘[discern] diversity amidst general sameness’ (ITS, 259). The chiasmic relations between ‘diversity’ and ‘likeness’ intimate Eliot’s sophisticated understanding of English national character: the boundaries of a unified and unifying national consciousness, however artificially maintained, are never fixed or stable. Equally indeterminate are the relations of this consciousness to its own internal divisions and differences. For Eliot, this indeterminacy necessarily conditions any critique or reform of national character. Some of her contemporaries shared this awareness of diversity and unity, especially the extent to which English national character and the mentalities of various groups (based on class, religion and so on) are mutually definable, groups that may be considered under the general rubric of ‘English’. Benjamin Disraeli’s speech on Conservative principles and his Crystal Palace speech, both delivered in 1872, anticipate Daniel Deronda in this respect. In formulating his ‘national principles’, Disraeli evokes a national perspective but moves deftly from speaking for ‘the people of England’ to speaking ‘especially’ for ‘the working classes of England’ and other social groups of class and religion.80 From a different angle, Matthew Arnold, according to Robert Young, formulates a culture for British society ‘to counter the disintegrating tendency of its class war and move it towards the nation state’. Unlike Disraeli, whose interest lies mostly in constitutional history and political institutions, or Arnold, who identifies the Jews as Hebraic and the Englishmen as the chosen people,81 Eliot focuses on the shifting of categories from the local (ethnicities, classes, religions) to the national or vice versa while guarding against identifying one with the other. In Daniel Deronda, there is a constant scepticism about what constitutes ‘Englishness’. ‘Englishness’ can hardly bridge the gap between different sentiments, practices or cultural traits of individual social groups, even though they are all parts of English life: the landowning aristocracy, the middle class of genteel origin, the East End Jews and so on. Without losing sight of its ‘national’ nature, the novel sets out to criticize ‘Englishness’ at a more local level such as that of class discourse. In the Brackenshaw Archery Club, ‘The timehonoured British resource of “killing something” is no longer carried on with bow and quiver’ (DD, 10:90). For Grandcourt, ‘being an

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Englishman was naturally so at home on the sea, that he could manage a sail with the same ease that he could manage a horse’ (DD, 54:634). Here, aristocratic hobbies such as sailing and horses are generalized to be the attributes of a proper ‘Englishman’, though not just any Englishman. ‘Sailing’ also evokes the rhetoric that feeds the fancy of an island notion for adventure and conquest, much akin to the empire ethos.82 The terms in which the English and Jewish characters locate people in their social life are most germane here. For the English characters, terms and expressions such as ‘gentleman’ (DD, 16:157), ‘rank’, or being ‘related to grand people’ (DD, 20:208) constantly appear in their daily conversations, whereas the Jewish characters mostly speak of each other as ‘my own people’. Notably, Mirah switches to speak in terms of ‘high rank’ when asking the Meyrick sisters about Deronda’s background (DD, 20:208). Such an interest in class distinctions may also put ‘the Jewish question’ in perspective. Deronda’s confrontation with Sir Hugo who warns him against becoming a potential admirer of Gwendolen is a case in point: ‘I suppose pedigree and land belong to a fine match,’ said Deronda, coldly. ‘The best horse will win in spite of pedigree, my boy. You remember Napoleon’s mot—Je suis ancêtre,’ said Sir Hugo, who habitually undervalued birth, as men after dining well often agree that the good of life is distributed with wonderful equality. (DD, 15:147) The irony in the narratorial comments is unmistakable. Sir Hugo has ‘a defensive measure … to mingle purposeless remarks with the expression of serious feeling’ (DD, 50:577). This purposelessness is, however, circumscribed by the underlying seriousness that is supposed to be a stereotype of the English. If pedigree is inessential in winning the game, poor pedigree will undoubtedly lighten the gravity of the winning act by bringing in too much melodrama and too few recognizable qualities of this accomplishment, which will send every judgement back to the importance of pedigree. Only in this way can Sir Hugo afford to ‘undervalue’ birth, which in Deronda’s case, as Sir Hugo is aware, is an issue not only of class but of Jewishness, since Jewishness would probably generate the same degree of disdain as class, a disdain that plays down their categorical difference. Moreover, class discourse that constitutes ‘Englishness’ in the novel is itself never monolithic and can appropriate a sense of power from other forms of

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language, from religious language, for example, with its usual claim of transcending class distinctions. Words evocative of the Puritan spirit are used to describe Grandcourt and Gwendolen in Italy: ‘This handsome, fair-skinned English couple [manifests] the usual eccentricity of their nation, both of them proud, pale, and calm, without a smile on their faces, moving like creatures who were fulfilling a supernatural destiny—it was a thing to go out and see, a thing to paint’ (DD, 54:634). The sight is worth watching because the temperamentally unspectacular becomes a spectacle – the ‘usual’ becomes the ‘eccentric’ as much as the ‘eccentric’ has always been the ‘usual’. Being English, as well as Puritan, may suddenly become unsettling in a contrastive Italian and Catholic context.83 If we focus on the various attitudes towards ‘duty’ in the novel, we are apt to find that for Mordecai duty is almost a mission, but for Catherine Arrowpoint’s middle-class parents, it is a rhetoric that they use for coercing their daughter into abandoning Klesmer whom they condemn as ‘a gypsy, a Jew, a mere bubble of the earth’ (DD, 22:228). However, if Eliot feels uncomfortable with such a class-cum-religious discourse, it is primarily because of her concerns for the ‘national’ sentiment, not out of a set political agenda to reform a specific class system. In the novel, the acute need to reconstruct new moral values becomes increasingly felt throughout English social life, but is, again, articulated with reference to specific social mores. The ‘studious, deliberate forms of insincerity’ (ITS, 83–4) in which one indulges ‘under the stress of social intercourse’ (ITS, 83) typify upper-class mentality and social manners in general. Sir Hugo is ‘unselfish’ only to the extent that he cares more about his ‘chivalrous’ values than about Gwendolen’s emotional welfare which supposedly validates those values. Philistine mentality and manners are transmitted and adopted through life in the drawing-room. This is hinted at when Klesmer bluntly tells Gwendolen: ‘you must unlearn all that’ (DD, 23:237). When Sir Hugo relishes the prospect that Deronda may ‘[doff] some of our national prejudices’, he is paradoxically confident enough as an aristocrat to believe that these prejudices are not so easy to be cast away (DD, 16:168). Such an attack on ‘insincerity’ was not new in Eliot. In her essay ‘Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young’, she found in Young ‘the type of that deficient human sympathy’ and ‘impiety towards the present’ (E, 385). Yet there class or national traits are not her main focus. In a larger historical context, this ‘fictitiousness of the social self’, the ‘near universality’ of pretence, ‘moral dissolution’, ‘the abandonment of national character’ and

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‘collective decline’ were the butts of attack by artists and intellectuals from the third quarter of the eighteenth century onwards.84 Such attacks form a tradition in which ‘French’ aristocratic habits are contrasted with more genuine ‘English’ virtues,85 hence giving much significance to the practice of transforming class terms into those of national consciousness. This contextual interest puts in perspective Klesmer’s stringent and merciless standards in art. His standards merge aesthetic, class and national categories. To the narrator, his continental ‘foibles of arrogance and vanity did not exceed such as may be found in the best English families’ (DD, 22:222). Aesthetic principles are thus pitted against middle-class prejudice. On the other hand, while the aesthetic values of Klesmer as an artist determine how he is seen as a European, his aesthetic or, for that matter, cosmopolitan values do not displace or replace the category of nationality (as implied in the notion of liberal cosmopolitanism). His Jewish origin defines his presence throughout the novel so that his Jewishness and artistic principles may be seen to define each other. The same sense of instability of the boundaries between the local and national perspectives is suggested when the narrator concedes with irony; ‘it must be admitted that our prevailing expression is not that of a lively, impassioned race, preoccupied with the ideal and carrying the real as a mere make-weight. The strong point of the English gentleman pure is the easy style of his figure and clothing … he also objects to looking inspired’ (DD, 10:92). To move from the term ‘English’ to ‘the English gentleman pure’ is to reveal the specific in the general by collapsing the general into the specific while holding both in dialectical tension or suspension. The confused Gwendolen is symptomatic of this lack of idealistic enthusiasm. Short of a straightforward contrast, Mirah is emotionally more self-sufficient, yet no less naive, as long as she moves about in her own Jewish ‘medium’. Sir Hugo’s fear of emotional intensity and commitment also reflects a type of smooth veneer well-maintained in English social life, which is anything but elevating. When Deronda realizes that being a Jew is going to have ‘a momentous influence on my life’, Sir Hugo becomes uncomfortable: ‘don’t go into any eccentricities! … keep clear of melodrama … you might easily be led arm in arm with a lunatic’ (DD, 59:667). Here, the words ‘eccentricities’, ‘melodrama’ and ‘lunatic’ refer to a code of behaviour that is emotionally uninspiring and are meant, again, as a criticism of both class and national sentiments. The narratorial diagnosis of such a lack of passions is often given as an analytical criticism or a general observation. ‘Grandcourt’s passions were of the intermittent, flickering kind: never flaming out strongly. But a great deal of life goes on

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

without strong passion’ (DD, 15:141). Or again: ‘a man … may be supposed … to have his reserves on science, a strong though repressed opinion on politics, and all the sentiments of the English gentleman, at a small expense of vital energy’ (DD, 15:141). Without being unduly critical simply to be reactionary, the narrator goes on to analyse the complexity of Grandcourt’s make-up: ‘The correct Englishman, drawing himself up from his bow into rigidity … suggests a suppressed vivacity, and may be suspected of letting go with some violence when he is released from parade’ (DD, 11:97). Eliot is most adroit in treading this fine line between emotional poverty and violence, what is not only tolerated but perhaps fostered by the upper-class ethos as attributes of the ‘correct Englishman’. The same emotional state, when ‘suppressed’, may become ‘vivacity’, but, when overly ‘suppressed’, that is, beyond one’s capacity for bearing with it, may turn into violence and appear only as ‘letting go’ or ‘release’. Such an analysis brings out the complexity of ‘the English fondness for reserve’. Likewise, the ‘lack of idealism in English politics’ (DD, 22:223), for example, is treated as a manifestation of a preexisting sentiment rather than of the limits of politics itself. Sir Hugo is ironically dubbed ‘an accomplished Whig’ (DD, 17:169). Such comments are not really aimed at one aspect of the ‘Whig tradition’ – ‘to cherish the past while denying it binding force’ – nor at ‘a central Whig sentiment’ of the time that focuses largely on English constitutional history as a national heritage of the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, or the Parliamentarian tradition, but at Sir Hugo’s lack of emotional commitment to such a tradition.86 Hans’s limited understanding of Mirah’s emotions is, again, subtly revealed: ‘who ever heard in tale or history that a woman’s love went in the track of her race and religion?’ (DD, 61:680). The narratorial reservation is not about Hans’s lack of knowledge of another race but about his discomfort with, if not resistance to, the direction in which one’s emotion may develop. The most striking feature of life in the English community – a lack of centripetal force in their emotion – accounts for the dismal prospect for a national revival from within. Seen as a malaise in the modern world, this inadequacy was singled out by Eliot as early as December 1865. Part of her poem ‘In a London Drawingroom’ recalls the Waste Land world of T. S. Eliot: All hurry on and look upon the ground, Or glance unmarking at the passers by The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages All closed, in multiplied identity. (CP, 41)

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Through the voice of Deronda and recalling Carlyle’s criticism in the chapter ‘The English’ in his Past and Present, Eliot in effect says through the voice of Deronda: ‘I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could any one find an intense interest in life? And many do’ (DD, 35:383). Because of this concern with national character, Protestantism is invoked, as in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, not just for religious reasons, but for criticizing the nature and orientation of those political attitudes in Eliot’s own society that hide behind the Parliamentarian tradition of individual liberty, taken to be at the time an established English tradition. To quote Theophrastus Such, ‘we have a peculiar destiny as a Protestant people … fitted as possessors of the most truth and asserting [our] liberty to restrain tyrants’ (ITS, 270). This concern moves beyond the civic manifestations of a national tradition to the sentiments that have shaped this tradition.87 What Eliot condemns as the injustice of Protestant brutalism, ‘the inconsistencies in [its] zealous adhesions’ or its ‘labyrinthine self-delusions’ (ITS, 5), is deliberately brought to bear on her criticism of those ‘philosophic thinkers and discriminating critics’ who ‘maintain themselves in moral alienation from the peoples with whom they share citizenship, and are destitute of real interest in the welfare of the community and state with which they are thus identified’ (ITS, 277). The unstable boundaries between the local and the national may further complicate the role the Jewish plot may play for reforming English national character. As Eliot’s narrator comments in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’: ‘We have not been noted for forming a low estimate of ourselves in comparison with foreigners, or for admitting that our institutions are equalled by those of any other people under the sun’ (ITS, 270). The diverse nature of English national character recalls the problematic status of Jewish national consciousness, already discussed in the previous sections. Given the attempt in the novel to transcend the contrastive mode, it is not surprising that the double plot does not issue in a clear moral choice. Criticizing the limits of Englishness does not necessarily point to a solution in emulating the Jewish tradition, the ‘other’ that ‘Englishness’ has accommodated if only by way of internal separation. Deronda himself exemplifies a failure of the fusion of national traits; the seeming blending in him is never that of real substance. At any one time, either trait can be a cover, a veneer, almost to the extent suggested by the Carlylean clothes metaphor. He is made of ‘quick, responsive fibre’ and is yet ‘under that mantle of self-controlled reserve’ (DD, 55:636):

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Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

‘under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervour which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life’ (DD, 19:189). He has a ‘dignified ease … And his ardent clinging nature had appropriated it all with affection’ (DD, 16:154). His English traits can only be mere ‘mantle’, ‘exterior’, something ‘appropriated’; no wonder he is considered, at Eton and Cambridge, two renowned seats of character-building, not ‘pushing’ or worldly enough (DD, 16:164). He thus dreads ‘that dead anatomy of culture which turns the universe into a mere ceaseless answer to queries’ (DD, 32:336). The real meaning of Eliot’s often quoted criticism of ‘a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity—which is still the average mark of our culture’ (Cross, III, 295) thus needs further clarification. Daniel Deronda appears to show much interest in an antidote of cosmopolitanism to the narrow mental horizon of the English community.88 News in the Offendene neighbourhood ‘had no reference to the results of the American war’ (DD, 9:81). The ignorant and selfish Gwendolen needs to connect to a less parochial perspective through Deronda. Yet, overcoming this ‘intellectual narrowness’ does not necessarily imply subscribing to the liberal position.89 Eliot is more interested in ‘improving’ Englishness without turning it into something else – in understanding other cultures, rather than appropriating them and in the extent to which such an understanding may in turn strengthen the singularity of one’s own national character, even when that character may have to wrestle with Jewish national consciousness as an internal force. For the same reason, she warns against the danger of forcing liberal cosmopolitanism on the Jews: ‘If they [the Jews] drop that separateness which is made their reproach, they may be in danger of lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and of missing that inward identification with the nationality immediately around them’ (ITS, 278–9). She sees a paradox in ‘these liberal gentlemen’ and in the insincerity of their political agenda: ‘minds so panting for advancement in some directions that they are ready to force it on an unwilling society’ (ITS, 278).90 The satire on Sir Hugo’s brand of ‘disinterested culture’ (DD, 16:162) also needs to be understood in this light. Deronda thus dreads ‘a reflectiveness that threatened to nullify all differences’ (DD, 32:337). For all the recommendations Deronda makes to Gwendolen for a pluralist perspective, the narratorial insistence on the need for ‘differences’ also intimates from the opposite direction that Eliot in no way suggests discarding ‘Englishness’ altogether for what it is. While

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the problematic nature of Jewish national memory calls for a regeneration from within, the English can turn to no other culture for a fundamental solution to redress inadequacies in their national character. She opposes unceasingly the Utilitarian advocacy of universal standards and values and the popular notion of ‘fellow-citizens of all time and places’ and ‘all nations professing liberal opinions’.91 Nevertheless, if the novel seeks the possibility of reforming ‘the social ethics inherited from the aristocratic past’92 or of regenerating national consciousness to integrate a wider spectrum of social groups, what Eliot finds is largely a degree of psychological comfort. The novel’s criticism of ‘Englishness’ and, for that matter, its vision of national excellence, recall Arnold’s criticism of ‘the intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional narrowness of English society’.93 ‘Englishness’ and national excellence resemble the central terms of his cultural criticism such as the ‘prison of Puritanism’. What Stefan Collini observes of Arnold applies, mutatis mutandis, to Eliot: ‘it is not always clear how far “Puritanism” here is intended to stand for some ideal–typical set of qualities and how far it is supposed to refer to a particular historical embodiment of those qualities’.94 Because of such ambiguity and uncertainty, Eliot can only grope tentatively for specific qualities that she believes to be subsisting somewhere in the national tradition, which may be seen to promise an internal reform. In this respect, not recommending a cultural fusion does not make her position necessarily ‘segregationist’ – the specific qualities are often invoked by the Jewish characters not because they are ‘Jewish’ qualities. These qualities therefore cannot be reduced to existing categories of cultural criticism such as cosmopolitanism or Hebraism. Eliot does see sincerity and ‘genuine love’ (E, 385) as antidotes to the moral malaise. Given the assumptions thought to be operative in the tradition of English nationalism, this notion of sincerity could mean ‘innocence, honesty, frankness, originality’ and ‘moral independence’.95 The national relevance of such ‘sincerity’ explains why she later deplores ‘our inertness’, ‘our carelessness of excellence, our willing ignorance of the treasures that lie in our national heritage, while we are agape after what is foreign, though it may be only a vile imitation of what is native’ (ITS, 284) and why there may be ‘a too rapid effacement of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the national genius’ (ITS, 285).96 The vagueness of this criticism of an unwholesome envy of anything foreign or any shallow imitation of outlandishness appears to have resulted from Eliot’s attempt to break out of the language of a narrowly defined national-

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National Consciousness in Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda and National Consciousness

ism. What emerges from such an effort is a genuine appreciation of what she considers to be national ‘memory’. ‘In meeting the national evils which are brought upon us by the onward course of the world’, the ‘immediate hope or resource’ is ‘that of striving after fuller national excellence’ (ITS, 285): Because there is something specifically English which we feel to be supremely worth striving for, worth dying for, rather than living to renounce it. Because we too have our share—perhaps a principal share—in that spirit of separateness which has not yet done its work in the education of mankind, which has created the varying genius of nations and, like the Muses, is the offspring of memory. (ITS, 286) It is only in this sense that, as Deronda tells Gwendolen, ‘To delight in doing things because our fathers did them is good if it shuts out nothing better’ (DD, 35:388). It is primarily in her exploration of cultural nationalism that we see her renewed trust in, care and love for, a collective heritage that cannot be unjustifiably dismissed because of its inadequacies or deficiencies. In this sense, to entrust the task of reforming national character to the intellectual persons within a given community forms her genuine attempt to reconceptualize one particular problem: how to reconcile the individuality of the reformer and the general needs of a national tradition. The position and role of an intellectual in relation to historical consciousness will be the focus of the Epilogue, which will try to put into perspective Eliot’s own role as an artist–intellectual.

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We must be patient with the inevitable makeshift of our human thinking, whether in its sum total or in the separate minds that have made the sum. (George Eliot, DD, 41:478) National consciousness, Eliot believes, is the medium of the individual mind. The word ‘medium’ can mean both a ‘[pervading] or enveloping substance … one’s environment, conditions of life’ and an ‘intermediate agency, means, instrument or channel’ (OED). It is when national consciousness is understood in both these senses that Deronda can develop and realize his cultural ambition. To re-create through reforming existing tradition defines the vital role that Eliot sets for the Jewish national leaders, unsatisfactory though their oftcriticized characterization may be. This is to say that the reviving capacity of Jewish communal memory relies primarily on ‘a number of distinct selves capable of social communication’.1 In many ways, Mordecai and Deronda are the true bearers of their national heritage, and perhaps the only individuals within the fictional Jewish community who are in the position to shape or reshape it. Their commitment takes the form of ‘action, choice, resolved memory’, what may ‘help to will our own better future’ (DD, 42:499). Daniel Deronda thus continues Eliot’s lifelong exploration into the propensities and potentialities of individuals vis-à-vis communal traditions by which they are inexorably determined – what Comte calls ‘[the] organization of the reaction of will against Necessity’ (GEN, I, 170). It is an interest which continued from her early engagement with Strauss and Feuerbach and persisted even after she finished this novel. In this final section, the Jewish nationalist leaders’ relationship with their community in 187

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Epilogue: Historical Consciousness and the Intellectual

Historical Consciousness and the Intellectual

Daniel Deronda will be looked at primarily to clarify Eliot’s view of the position and role of the intellectual and the significance of herself writing as an intellectual.2 These issues give prominence to Eliot’s understanding of the synergy and discordance between memory and history that we have been discussing so far. In her time, as ‘a precondition of social health’, an intellectual’s role could have several alternative emphases such as ‘a mediating role’ as defined by Coleridge, ‘a challenging role’ as defined by J.S. Mill, or ‘a renewing and conserving role’ as defined by Arnold.3 As ‘intellectual characters’, Mordecai, Deronda and, to some extent, Klesmer, are not really ordinary members of their community.4 Yet what these people actually communicate is affected by both the influence of their community, which can be ambiguous or contradictory, and their own social attitudes. Deronda is aware of the connection between ‘the hidden tokens’ of his birth and ‘its inheritance of tasks’ (DD, 41:479). In his case, however, such tasks hardly arise coherently out of the collective mentality that he has ‘inherited’ or is to ‘inherit’. It is true that before he discovers his origin, he ‘was unable to make himself … an organic part of social life’. He could only roam in it ‘like a yearning disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague social passion, but without fixed local habitation to render fellowship real’ (DD, 32:336). After his origin is revealed, his upbringing and the particular need of the Jewish cause make his problem all the more complicated. Mordecai is an example seen from another direction. From the very beginning, it is quite clear to what cause he is committed. But his reliance on his people is questioned when he, with his clairvoyance of a nationalist leader, becomes dissatisfied with the ‘multitudes of our people’ who are ‘ignorant, narrow, superstitious’ (DD, 42:494). To him, ‘they have no vision … their observances are as nameless relics’ (DD, 42:494). The possibility of a nationalist revival seems to depend largely on the capacity of such ‘intellectual characters’ to re-create a national ‘memory’ out of their problematic national consciousness. Thus, the need to break individual bondage through sharing an emergent national consciousness and at the same time to liberate oneself from its rigid determination forms a tension that runs throughout Daniel Deronda. This tension is evident in Mirah’s objection to Mordecai’s interpretation that the Jewish maiden’s decision to die for the love of the Gentile king in the later Midrash results from ‘the surpassing love, that loses self in the object of love’ (DD, 61:683). It is further intensified especially in the second half of the novel. In order to keep the national spirit alive, one must feel the collective

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emotions ‘when his soul is moved like theirs’ (SP, 160). Mordecai feels immersed ‘in the flood of a glorious life, wherein my own small yearcounted existence seemed to melt’, and wishes ‘to mingle with the ocean of human existence, free from the pressure of individual bondage’ (DD, 43:502–3). While the conventional metaphor of ‘flood’ suggests the powerful sweep of an urgent collective commitment, the phrase ‘individual bondage’ betrays Eliot’s own implicit advocacy of a more heroic and transcendental conception, as she replaces in her manuscript the weaker and more neutral ‘a personal lot’ with ‘individual bondage’ (DD, 43:503, n. 4). What is also at issue is how far it is possible for the individual to be successfully freed from the conditioning effect of a communal spirit. This is hardly treated in the discussion of ‘The General Mind’ in Lewes’s The Study of Psychology, where he states that one must obey laws of society when ‘confronting Society’ (SP, 161). Lewes’s discussion concedes that the individual is not ‘passive’, but its emphasis is on the extent to which the individual should be ‘directed’ by his nation and his sect (SP, 165). The personal experience of Solomon Maimon, an accomplished scholar of Jewish origin living in London and whose Autobiography is mentioned in the novel, may have helped to bring to Eliot’s attention the enormous communal constraints that an individual Jew might encounter in struggling against Judaic obligations so as to break away from ghetto boundaries as an intellectual. This need for individual contribution also characterizes the modification she made to Lewes’s understanding of the emotional sense of duty when editing his The Study of Psychology.5 The position of these ‘intellectual characters’ thus implies a paradox. To confirm their ethnic identity and to have a point of view for their reflections, they must first of all feel themselves belonging to the particular community from which they come. Nevertheless, their reflections often lead to prophetic visions that may estrange them from their inherited communal mind. Yet such an estrangement is one of the essential conditions for saving their individuality from being submerged in the mediocrity of collective consciousness. In this paradoxical position lies their raison d’être. The intellectual thus sees himself as ‘a lonely exile’.6 According to T. W. Heyck, ‘The Victorian concept of the function of the most highly cultivated minority retained its element of active social commitment and cultural leadership’.7 But after the mid-century, a sense of alienation increased. Eliot’s own case seems to demonstrate the complex ambivalence with which many Victorian intellectuals situated themselves in relation to the consciousness of their communities.8 Of course, none of Eliot’s

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Historical Consciousness and the Intellectual

Historical Consciousness and the Intellectual

characters is in a similar position to hers. Her wish for intellectual integration is far subtler: it is a matter more of perceptions and points of view than of direct intervention in society. Socially Eliot was rarely at the centre and she never truly belonged to the so-called Establishment.9 Her own style of being an intellectual is not that of a social activist. Yet before she became a full-time novelist, Marian Evans had been firmly established as an accomplished ‘woman of letters’ in her own right, having translated intellectual works from German and worked as editor, reviewer and essayist for the Westminster Review. The paradox is that, though writing mostly incognito in those capacities, she participated actively in the intellectual life of her time. The fact that she tended to keep her more substantial essay-type journal entries in a separate section of her diary, apart from her day-to-day diary entries, also suggests that she was, as Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson observe, ‘making an effective separation of her “public” and “private” selves in her journal’.10 In this sense, at least psychologically, Eliot was very much at the centre. Intellectually, even in her novel-writing, she always assumed a central point of view and showed a sense of authority such as is found in the writings of other intellectual luminaries of the so-called Establishment.11 It is true that in her views one does detect a clairvoyance that distances herself from the dominant mentality of her society. Yet, for Eliot as for her characters in Daniel Deronda, there is a double paradox: the very process of estrangement can make one realize all the more clearly one’s affinity with the communal consciousness. For the most part, it is self-estrangement, rather than marginalization or alienation in a simple external sense.12 The same paradox seems to have initiated the writing of Daniel Deronda. The implications of Jewish national identity for English national character can be taken to confirm her ‘local habitation’ or ‘spiritual parentage’, and at the same time to validate her own conviction that as a modern intellectual she also had an ‘inheritance of tasks’. At one point in the novel, it is as if Deronda is answering back for Eliot, ‘Don’t ask me to deny my spiritual parentage’ (DD, 63:699). The argument put forward three years later by Theophrastus Such in ‘Looking Inward’ captures the impulse in all her novels to seek a station in a collective tradition: ‘the more intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?’ (ITS, 5). Yet, the use of a persona in that essay is a strong indication that she wants to detach herself from the views expressed. The distance between the speaker and his community is all too clear: ‘Though

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continually in society, and caring about the joys and sorrows of my neighbours, I feel myself, so far as my personal lot is concerned, uncared for and alone’ (ITS, 8). If, as Sheldon Rothblatt points out, ‘George Eliot herself inclined to the view that it was preferable to be “unattached” in order to retain a sense of independence’,13 her characters often suggest otherwise. This ambivalence is implanted into Deronda’s mind through the narratorial observation that only the disclosure of his origin can ‘make his life a sequence which would take the form of duty’: ‘Still more he wanted to escape standing as a critic outside the activities of men, stiffened into the ridiculous attitude of self-assigned superiority’ (DD, 37:437). Without imputing to her the position of one of her characters, novel-writing can be seen as providing Eliot with an indirect but sophisticated way of using collective memory for the reconstruction of one’s own ‘self’. The representation of the Jewish nationalist leaders thus forms a subtle contrast with both the Carlylean and Comtean ideas of spiritual leadership. Carlyle’s worship of heroes and great men has an absolutism of priesthood that is absent in Eliot but present in Comte. In Comte, such an absolutism is characterized by the supremacy of a spiritual realm separated from the political. By contrast, in Carlyle’s Past and Present and On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (WTC, X, 27–33; WTC, V, 154–95), the social condition of England and the prospect of recovering its greatness is the very point of establishing a ‘clerisy’. For Eliot, time and moral agency are of primary importance, for the spiritual has a political implication as well. Such a sense of historicity saves her conception from the extremity of social power in Carlyle’s heroes. Her ‘heroes’ are often troubled by weak moments, as when Deronda is called upon to be the council for Gwendolen after Grandcourt’s drowning: ‘He dreaded the weight of this woman’s soul flung upon his own with imploring dependence’ (DD, 56:642). Gwendolen’s narrative of trauma, nevertheless, brings out the therapeutic function, in both psychological and spiritual terms, expected of him as a cultural ‘priest’. The essential role of an intellectual is for Eliot both to preserve and renew a cultural heritage. The Jewish nationalist leaders’ commitment to a more moral and social enterprise and their use of a collectively remembered past help to highlight several basic elements which are the cornerstones of Eliot’s understanding of the task of the intellectual. Regarding her own role as an intellectual, the central relevance of her thinking and writing is primarily manifested in her overriding concern with what is vitally present, that is, those values which truly maintain

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that of so presenting our human life as to help my readers in getting a clearer conception and a more active admiration of those vital elements which bind men together and give a higher worthiness to their existence; and also to help them in gradually dissociating these elements from the more transient forms on which an outworn teaching tends to make them dependent. (L, IV, 472) Early in her career, she already contended in her review essay ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming’: ‘So long as a belief in propositions is regarded as indispensable to salvation, the pursuit of truth as such is not possible, any more than it is possible for a man who is swimming for his life to make meteorological observations on the storm which threatens to overwhelm him’ (E, 167; original emphasis). Between science and religion Eliot felt no compulsion to choose either. Though attracted to both at different stages of her intellectual development, she had serious reservations about the exclusive claims of either. Outside of an overarching framework of religious or scientific authority, Eliot clearly conceived of the role of an intellectual as engaged in the examination of those cultural values of the past which have shaped the present. As such it takes the form of an immanent critique of the values and assumptions of the present. An examination or elaboration of these values and assumptions will be at the same time a critique of them. Seen from this point of view, Eliot seldom sought to transcend her own historical position in society, with all the social and political constraints entailed by such a position. In Eliot’s conception, if an intellectual is concerned with the examination of ideas and values which constitute the framework of thinking and feeling in a given society, he or she is not exclusively concerned with ideas alone or with the discussion of ideas for ideas’ sake. Rather, he or she must take as a point of departure some deeply felt moral or intellectual dilemma inherent in a given historical period. The only worthwhile project of moral and intellectual reconstruction is thus that which is based on that deeply felt inadequacy. Her position can be traced back to her letter to Sara Sophia Hennell in 1843: ‘with individuals, as with nations, the only safe revolution is one arising out of the wants which their own progress has generated’ (Cross, I, 122–3; original emphasis). In spite of her position as a

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a dynamic continuity in culture and society, as opposed to those values which are either transient or ossified. Eliot’s ‘inspiring principle’ is

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Victorian ‘liberal intellectual’, Eliot had an acute awareness of her historical rootedness.14 Her historical consciousness is here the primary factor. The past is not just the object of nostalgia or reflection, but functions as part of a larger complex in which the present is necessarily implicated. Historical consciousness does not merely denote a ‘sense of the past’, but aims to bring into focus the meaning of the whole temporal complex of which the present is a part. Thus present politics is for Eliot a product of past history, for she was more concerned with the matrix of political reform and progress than with any institutionalized formulas. As Rothblatt acutely observes, ‘Politics was part of the problem of modern society, not its solution’.15 For Eliot there is no clear-cut demarcation between politics and history. The question is not whether politics can mobilize or reform a community, but whether and how politics can be created and sustained by a community having a ‘heritage of memory’ (DD, 42:484). Against the ahistorical or even anti-historical critique of institutions in utilitarian philosophy, she urged a historical diagnosis and understanding of present problems and prospects. She has often been characterized as a ‘conservative reformer’. In a sense this is true. Yet she may with more justice be called a ‘radical conservative’, in that the kind of reform she had in mind involved a fundamental and radical rethinking about social and moral history.16 Eliot would never have felt comfortable in upholding the notion of preservation alone. She fully recognized that the best way to preserve a tradition is to transform it by radical reinterpretation. In many ways, this synthetic impulse is typical of mid-Victorian intellectuals as a whole. Eliot was sceptical about the power of the intellect alone accurately to perceive and formulate moral problems and dilemmas, let alone its power to solve these problems effectively. Intellect, to be fruitful and responsible, must be ‘closely allied to truthfulness of statement, or the moral quality of veracity’ (E, 166). There must be no separation between intellect and morality. For this reason, Eliot found in her review of Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect a need for British thinkers to have ‘the largeness of view’ necessary to give systematic thinking ‘a practical bearing’ (E, 29). She aimed to achieve a holistic mode of thinking whose basis is moral feeling. Eliot was sceptical about the possibility of ‘human souls [seeking] wisdom apart from the human sympathies which are the very life and substance of our wisdom’ (R, 15:164). Thus the novel becomes an excellent medium in which such wisdom can be attained and attested. ‘Speculative truth’ often seems to her to be ‘but a shadow of individual minds’: ‘Agreement between

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And since the unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathematical dreamland where nothing is but what is not, perhaps an emotional intellect may have absorbed into its passionate vision of possibilities some truth of what will be—the more comprehensive massive life feeding theory with new material, as the sensibility of the artist seizes combinations which science explains and justifies. At any rate, presumptions to the contrary are not to be trusted. (DD, 41:478) It is true that there was in Eliot a strong organist ‘predisposition to see all of society as a “whole”, as interconnected, all problems as interrelated, all events and outcomes as mutually interdependent’,17 yet she did not feel any need to reach for a totalized and systematic theory of human society. ‘We must be patient with the inevitable makeshift of our human thinking, whether in its sum total or in the separate minds that have made the sum’ (DD, 41:478). The fundamental need for moral feelings, which promise a ‘passionate vision of possibilities’ (DD, 41:478), is the key to Eliot’s understanding of the function of the novel itself and of how a novelist can also be an intellectual.18 In this she shares Comte’s understanding of the aesthetic faculties: The aesthetic faculties are, in a manner, intermediate between the moral and intellectual faculties; their end connecting them with the one, and their means with the other. By acting at once on the mind and the heart, their development must become one of the most important agents of education, intellectual and moral, that we can conceive. (PPAC, II, 217) In this light, Eliot’s turn to novel-writing can be seen as a conscious attempt to extend and move beyond her earlier work as reviewer, translator and essayist, which is more straightforwardly rational and intellectual. Her novels thus become an indispensable medium through which she could explore and work out her own role both as a rational ‘scientific’ inquirer and as a ‘public moralist’. The ensuing tension between these two aspects of her self-conception as an intellectual is precisely what makes Eliot unique among Victorian

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intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union’ (Cross, I, 122; original emphasis). This idea is most lucidly summarized in Daniel Deronda:

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intellectuals. In this sense, she was a distinctive intellectual because she could write as a novelist, and an exceptionally gifted novelist because she had the perspective of an intellectual. She was preoccupied with the ‘illimitable’ interpretability of language and other symbolic languages such as myth. But precisely because of this interpretability, the inherent ambiguities of language constitute the very process through which moral meanings may be validated. Though deeply concerned with the individual’s relation to the social whole, Eliot equally recognized the importance of the individual’s expression of desires and values, and of his or her transformation of social and collective meanings. She thus consciously explored the possibilities of language, by means of narrative, to render the complex inner workings of individuals at precisely those points where historically sedimented social and collective meanings may both constitute the identities of individuals and in turn be transformed by them.

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Notes

1 For a concise account of the Jungian concept of the ‘Collective Unconscious’, see Anthony Storr, Jung (London, 1973), pp. 39–61, and A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, edited by Andrew Samuels, Bani Shorter and Fred Plaut (London, 1986), pp. 26–8, 31–2, and 155–7. Jung believes that ‘the mass as a whole is incapable of consciousness’ (Jungian Analysis, p. 32), whereas for Eliot, as with the Jewish community in Daniel Deronda, the mass is capable of consciousness though it might not be so at a specific moment in history. 2 According to Jungian Analysis, the ‘personal unconscious’ refers to ‘a repository of repressed, infantile, personal experience’, and the ‘collective unconscious’, ‘a locus of psychological activity which differed from and was more objective than personal experience … it related directly to the phylogenetic, instinctual bases of the human race’ (p. 155). 3 For this emphasis in Jung, see Storr, Jung, p. 39. 4 Collective Memory, translated by Francis J. Ditter Jr and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York, 1980), pp. 78–83. 5 I borrow this distinction in nineteenth-century thought from J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge, 1966), p. xv. 6 Several critics have presented detailed and lucid accounts of the influence of Comte, Lewes, and Ludwig Feuerbach. See especially the following: Bernard J. Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (Detroit, 1965); Basil Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (1949; Harmondsworth, 1964); U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler (Princeton, 1965); and George Levine, ‘Intelligence as Deception’, in George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by George R. Creeger (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1970), pp. 107–23. This study builds on these valuable pioneering works, but will attempt to further clarify certain important issues by focusing on the mechanism of memory. Wherever necessary I shall use important materials in the Eliot notebooks to achieve a fuller and more accurate account of her conception of communal memory. The chief merits of the more recent critical studies lie in their excellent insights into the historiographical significance of her concern with communal consciousness. Their historical contexts are, however, not identical with mine, though there is some overlap. Moreover, these critical studies usually address a larger issue. For examples, see Elinor Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’: The Mythological School of Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge, 1975); Felicia Bonaparte, The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination (Brighton, 1979); Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers

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Introduction

7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19

20 21

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and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, 1980); William Myers, The Teaching of George Eliot (Leicester, 1984); Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge, 1984); Gillian Beer, ‘Origins and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative’, in her Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (London, 1989), pp. 12–33; David Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations: A Reading of the Novels (Cambridge, 1992); Jim Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (London, 1993); Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (Oxford, 1994). See Ashton, German Idea, pp. 70–1, and John D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History (Oxford, 1985), pp. 9–10 and 49–50. ‘Faith and Doubt in the Victorian Age’, in The Victorians, edited by Arthur Pollard (London, 1987), pp. 25–49 (p. 46). See Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’, pp. 225–91; W. J. Harvey, ‘The Intellectual Background of the Novel: Casaubon and Lydgate’, in ‘Middlemarch’: Critical Approaches to the Novel, edited by Barbara Hardy (London, 1967), pp. 25–37; Bernard J. Paris, ‘George Eliot and the Higher Criticism’, Anglia, 84 (1966), pp. 59–73; and Ashton, German Idea. I am indebted to the following studies for my discussion of Carlyle: John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London, 1953); George Levine, The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman (Princeton, 1968); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore, 1973); Peter Allan Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold and Pater (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Ashton, German Idea; Rosenberg, Carlyle; J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981); and Gillian Beer, ‘Carlylean Transports’, Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (London, 1989), pp. 74–98. See L, VII, 6 and VII, 22; and GEN, I, 189 and III, 118. Burrow, Liberal Descent, p. 252. On History and Other Essays (Oxford, 1983), pp. 15 and 33. In terms of social evolution, the English interest in Comte predates the impact of Darwin. See Burrow’s account of the ‘awakening of English interest in Comte in the eighteen-forties and eighteenth-fifties’ in his Evolution and Society (p. 80). George Eliot, p. 11. The Teaching of George Eliot, p. 9. As a man of letters with enormous interest in the ‘science’ of the mind, Lewes was influenced by the German idealist tradition and was always aware of the ideal and mystic in the universe. On History, p. 15. See Mary Warnock, Memory (London, 1987), p. 15. James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) was circulating among Eliot’s friends in 1852 and Lewes read it in 1869 (L, II, 38 and L, V, 33). See Warnock, Memory, pp. 15–21 and 32, for an account of this tradition. Two studies have particularly highlighted this very important aspect of the Lockean concept. See David Rapaport, ‘Locke: The Borderland of Sensualism and Empiricism’, in his The History of the Concept of Association

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Notes

22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29

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Notes of Ideas (New York, 1974) and Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Baltimore, 1991), especially pp. 1–43. Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason: A Study in NineteenthCentury Thought (Baltimore, 1971), p. 219. Lewes in fact published a favourable review of Spencer’s Principles of Psychology in the Saturday Review in 1856 (see Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford, 1991), p. 171). Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason, p. 232. For an examination of Eliot’s writings in the light of Darwinian evolutionary theory, see Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London, 1983). Memory, p. 27; original emphasis. ‘Bentham’, Collective Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by J. M. Robson et al., 33 vols (Toronto, 1963–91), X, pp. 75–115 (p. 78). See, for example, Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge and Paris, 1988). The first volume of his Problems of Life and Mind was not published until 1874 when Eliot had finished most of her novels. It would be misleading to take these views merely as hers; there is a notice at the beginning of the first volume of the Third Series announcing that the book ‘has been printed from his [Lewes’s] manuscript with no other alterations than such as it is felt certain that he would have sanctioned’ (SP, frontispiece). For the changes of substance that Eliot made in editing, see K. K. Collins, ‘G. H. Lewes Revised: George Eliot and the Moral Sense’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1978), pp. 463–92. See Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (London, 1967), pp. 71–9, for a discussion of Tönnies’s distinction. A good account of the complexity and ambiguity of Tönnies’s terminology can be found in Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, 1993), pp. 42–5. For a discussion of Eliot’s novels primarily in terms of Tönnies’s distinction, see Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 14–17 and 94–149. For a similar contemporary distinction, see Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845): ‘There is no community in England; there is aggregation, but aggregation under circumstances which make it rather a dissociating, than an uniting, principle’ (Sybil or the Two Nations, edited by Thom Braun (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 94).

Chapter 1 1 ‘History as Social Memory’, in Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, edited by Thomas Butler (Oxford, 1989), pp. 97–113 (p. 98). Here Burke is referring to both memory and the writing of history. This summary defines a position shared, in various ways, by many literary critics, historians and philosophers of history. See, for example, Louis Mink, Historical Understanding (Ithaca, 1987) and Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987). 2 Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, 1986), p. 54. 3 ‘Idea and Image in the Novels of George Eliot’, in Critical Essays on George

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Eliot, edited by Barbara Hardy (London, 1970), pp. 151–98 (p. 172). 4 Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, 1995), p. 198. Hacking is here tracing the art of memory from the High Middle Ages to late nineteenth-century Europe. For the range of contemporary discussions of memory, see [Anon.], ‘Memory’, Fraser’s Magazine, 29 (1844), pp. 546–7; Alexander Bain, ‘The retentive power of the mind in its bearing on education’, Fortnightly Review, n.s. 4 (1868), pp. 237–49; James Sully, ‘Illusions of memory’, Cornhill Magazine, 41 (1880), pp. 416–33; James Sully’s critical notice of Th. Ribot’s ‘Les Maladies de la Mémoire’, Mind, 6 (1881), pp. 590–2; and Anne Mozley, ‘Memory’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 128 (1880), pp. 421–35. 5 J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (London, 1971), p. 120. 6 The Senses and the Intellect (London, 1855), p. 1. 7 A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, Collected Works, VII-VIII (VII, 51). 8 T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 1986), p. 58. 9 Innocence and Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 121. 10 Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Obscure recesses: locating the Victorian unconscious’, in Writing and Victorianism, edited by J. B. Bullen (London, 1997), pp. 137–79 (p. 145). 11 The Senses and the Intellect, pp. 443–4. 12 Principles of Mental Physiology (London, 1874), pp. 456–7; original emphasis. 13 Rogers analyses his own poems in these terms: ‘The associating principle … is no less conducive to virtue than to happiness; and, as such, it frequently discovers itself in the most tumultuous scenes of life. It addresses our finer feelings, and gives exercise to every mild and generous propensity’ (Pleasures of Memory With Some Other Poems, 7th edn (London, 1795), p. viii). 14 Brown: ‘it is by our remembrances that we are truly moral beings, because we owe to them the very conception of every thing which can be the object of morality. Without them there could be no esteem, no gratification for kindness received, no compassion for those who are in sorrow, no love of what is honourable and benevolent’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 19th edn (Edinburgh, 1851), p. 269). 15 The Tacit Dimension (London, 1967), pp. 61–2. 16 Owen Chadwick in his The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975) finds this ‘non-religious morality’ symbolized in Comte (p. 232). 17 For Carlyle’s remark from ‘On History’, see the epigraph to the Introduction of this book. 18 Brown, Lectures, p. 269. 19 Bourne Taylor, ‘Obscure recesses’, p. 154. See, for example, Frances Power Cobbe’s Hours of Work and Play (London, 1867) where she discusses the ‘fallaciousness’ of memory, ‘one of our chief faculties’ (p. 88). 20 F. H. Bradley, The Presuppositions of Critical History, edited with introduc-

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Notes

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24 25 26 27 28 29

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31 32 33

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Notes tion and commentary by Lionel Rubinoff (1874; Chicago, 1968), pp. 90 and p. 93. For Carlyle’s appeal to the ‘idealist’ philosophers in Victorian Britain, including Bradley, T. H. Green, and Edward Caird, and for their attempt to differentiate themselves from the ‘intuitionists’ of Scottish philosophy, see Sandra M. den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought (Oxford, 1996). See Paris, Experiments in Life, pp. 207–8; Neil Roberts, George Eliot: Her Beliefs and Her Art (London, 1976), pp. 46–8; and K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist. A Study of the Philosophical Structure of Her Novels (London, 1981), pp. 60–1. The First Principles, 6th edn (1904), p. 139n. Although this explanation did not appear in the first edition, in the 1904 edition it is part of Spencer’s annotation to clarify his concept of ‘à priori [cognition]’ which was discussed in the first edition (First Principles (London, 1862), p. 245). See also PP, I, 470 and Peel, Herbert Spencer, pp. 142–3. We may need to differentiate this a priori notion from its Kantian namesake, whose tenet insists on the a priori organizing power of the mind in conceiving the world of reality. Eliot does not accept the Kantian notion of a priori ideas. See her essay ‘The Future of German Philosophy’ (E, 150). Peel, Herbert Spencer, pp. 142–3. For her reading of Darwin’s The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals, see GEN, III, 13. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, pp. 4 and 8. Peel, Herbert Spencer, p. 143. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford, 1988), p .96. For general Victorian usage of the term, see George W. Stocking Jr, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York, 1968), pp. 184–6 and 239–42. The second edition is used in this book because Spencer revised and expanded the first edition so extensively that the first edition no longer sufficiently represents the fundamentals of his psychological theories. According to Rosenberg, Carlyle, p. 178, the OED ‘misdates 1827 instead of 1828’. The Senses and the Intellect, p. 552. This is in contrast to Alexander Bain’s view, with regard to mental association, that ‘it is but seldom that the re-induced currents are equal in energy to those of direct stimulation at first hand’ (Mind and Body: The Theories of Their Relation, 2nd edn (London, 1873), p. 91). How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989), p. 38. See also Richard Terdiman’s astute account of Bakhtinian ‘dialogism’ as a ‘memory model’ that ‘seeks to recall the semantic and social history carried by a culture’s language, but which tends to be forgotten, to be blanked’ (Past Present, p. 45; original emphasis). Eliot also cherished a preponderant interest in how social relations help to develop language. By linking social formation with that of language, she resembles W. D. Whitney, the nineteenth-century American philologist, in recognizing the organic nature of language and seeing language as the depository of the collective mind. For a detailed discussion of this reconciliation within the context of the

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36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

47 48 49

50 51

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nineteenth-century intuitive and utilitarian controversy, see Collins, ‘G. H. Lewes Revised’. Lewes, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, Being an Exposition of the Principles of the Cours de Philosophie Positive of Auguste Comte (London, 1853), p. 231. Essays on Fiction, 1971–82 (London, 1983), p. 137. Barbara Hardy’s Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London, 1963) remains one of the most thoroughly conducted formal studies of these devices; see pp. 135–54. Lewes, Studies in Animal Life (London, 1862), p. 7 and pp. 6–7. Westminster Review, 67 (1857), pp. 288–306 (p. 293). Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, edited by C. R. Sanders and K. H. Fielding (Durham, NC, 1970), IX, p. 15; original emphasis. Stray Studies from England and Italy (London, 1876), pp. 218–19. Seven Lamps of Architecture, in Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London, 1903–12), VIII, p. 234. Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle: from 23d March 1822 to 16th May 1832, edited by Charles Eliot Norton (New York, 1898), p. 132. Mary Warnock has convincingly argued for the meaning of such continuity – ‘the implicit feeling of continuity’ – in her ‘Memory: The Triumph over Time’, MLN, 109 (1994), pp. 938–58 (p. 944). Compare Daniel Deronda, for whom remembered imaginings can be more real than reality: ‘he had lived through so many ideal meetings with his mother, and they had seemed more real’ than the actual meeting (DD, 51:582). Principles of Mental Physiology, p. 455; original emphasis. Terdiman, Present Past, p. 352. Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin; and by Andreas Mayer, 3 vols (Harmondsworth, 1983), III, p. 905. Darwin’s Plots, p. 81; original emphases. Ian Hacking sees a paradox in such a claim: ‘These redescriptions may be perfectly true of the past; that is, they are truths that we now assert about the past. And yet, paradoxically, they may not have been true in the past, that is, not truths about intentional actions that made sense when the actions were performed’ (Rewriting the Soul, p. 249). ‘Art and Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review (April 1856), in George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879, and Uncollected Writings, edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville, 1981), pp. 272–4 (p. 273). David Bromwich summarizes this well: ‘Burke aims to defend the possibility of our being attached to a continuous true story of human actions. But this implies the necessity of our realizing, even as we change or retell its episodes, that all moral knowledge derives from a sense of ourselves as actors in that story’ (‘Burke, Wordsworth, and the Defense of History’, in A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 43–78 (p.47)).

Chapter 2 1 Like Comte, Eliot finds a parallel between individual and social develop-

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2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10

11

Notes ment; in Comte’s words, ‘The existence of the individual is dependent on the existence of society’ (SPP, II, 49). Spencer also believes that in living beings there is the continuous ‘adjustment of certain inner relations to certain outer relations’ (PP, I, 444). Similarly, the young Carlyle proposes in his essay ‘Characteristics’ to ‘look beyond the individual man and his actions or interests and view him in combination with his fellows’: ‘It is in Society that man first feels what he is; first becomes what he can be’ (WTC, XXVIII, 10). The Tacit Dimension (London, 1967), p. 17. ‘Manners, Morals and the Novel’, The Liberal Imagination (Oxford, 1981), p. 194. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 36. Lewes, Comte’s Philosophy, p. 218. For a discussion of both, see Bromwich, ‘Burke, Wordsworth and the Defense of History’, especially pp. 48–9. He further discusses the complexity of personal memory in Wordsworth in his Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s (Chicago and London, 1998). For Eliot’s allegiance to Wordsworth, see Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago, 1986), pp. 120–52 and Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford, 1998). Shuttleworth provides a good discussion of how social contradictions internalized by the individual create a division within the self (George Eliot, p. 19). Innocence and Experience, p. 123. Works of Thomas Hill Green, edited by R. L. Nettleship, 3 vols (London, 1885–8), III, p. 277. It is important here to recall Henry Auster’s caveat that we should not take the hostile elements in such an environment simply as Eliot’s dislike of that environment (Local Habitations: Regionalism in the Early Novels of George Eliot (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 145). The meaning of the subconscious in Eliot’s time bears some resemblance to the Freudian understanding of the ‘preconscious’ or ‘subconscious’ as ‘a state just below the threshold of consciousness’, though not necessarily to its other connotations. In addition, according to Bourne Taylor, the Victorians’ ‘prevailing conception of the unconscious … hovered between what Freud would term the “preconscious” … and what he saw as the unconscious proper’ (‘Obscure recesses’, pp. 140–1). Simon During has observed that Lewes’s understanding of the unconscious anticipates the Freudian formulation. See During, ‘Daniel Deronda and Psychology: A Contextual Study’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1982), pp. 52–3. The discussion later in this chapter about Maggie’s inner conflicts at the subconscious and unconscious levels also shows how Eliot sees physical memory as conditioning bodily articulations, a view very much resonant with Julia Kristeva’s theory of how ‘certain semiotic articulations are transmitted through the biological code or physiological “memory” and thus form the inborn bases of the symbolic function’ (Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller

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203

(New York, 1984), p. 29). 12 Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), pp. 295, 296 and 297. 13 The epigraph was reprinted in the Cabinet Edition with one alteration to the third line which reads ‘No powers beyond the growing heritage’ (LV, frontispiece). 14 It is not until page 316 (the 39th page out of 64 pages – the main text runs from page 277 to page 341) that prevision starts to give way to reality and the plot development takes a dramatic turn. Only on page 320 does the narrator decide to ‘hurry through the rest of my story, not dwelling so much as I have hitherto done on my inward experience’ (LV, 3:320). The new maid, Mrs Archer, often taken to be instrumental to the plot development, does not enter the scene until page 328. 15 ‘Myth and the single consciousness: Middlemarch and The Lifted Veil’, in This Particular Web: Essays on ‘Middlemarch’, edited by Ian Adam (Toronto, 1975), pp. 91–115 (p. 96). 16 Principles of Mental Physiology, p. 454. 17 For a discussion of this convention in Wordsworth, see Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca and London, 1980), p. 219. 18 The Content of the Form, p. 149. 19 This anticipates Samuel Butler’s idea that ‘Life is the being possessed of a memory—the life of a thing at any moment is the memories which at that moment it retains’ (Unconscious Memory (London, 1880), p. 272). 20 Wordsworth (Brighton, 1986), p. 91. 21 Innocence and Experience, pp. 117 and 118. 22 To see this more clearly, we may recall the narrator’s observation in Adam Bede that Adam and Arthur are ‘drawn thither by a common memory’ (AB, 48:264), that is, a memory of misery and bitterness. To what extent is it really ‘common’? Each of them has a very different experience with Hetty and memories of strikingly varied resonance. If they share anything, it is perhaps the moral code of the community that paradoxically labels both of their memories as miserable and bitter by marginalizing, if not annihilating, any personal relevance. 23 The ambiguous ‘binding’ mode recalls a different metaphor earlier in Adam Bede: ‘men’s lives are thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe’ (AB, 41:205). While air may keep one alive, it also takes away one’s independence and choice. 24 Patrick Joyce, Democratic subjects: The self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994), p. 15. 25 For Spinoza’s influence on Eliot, see Ashton, German Ideas; Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’; Ermarth, George Eliot (Boston, 1985), pp. 32–9 and Dorothy Atkins, George Eliot and Spinoza (Salzburg, 1978). 26 In the novel the narrator frequently emphasizes Maggie’s amnesia. 27 Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell (New York, 1911), p. 5. 28 Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, 1987), p. 176; original emphasis. 29 To condone such passiveness seems too much for Eliot and herein lies her moral dilemma, for she cannot promise, either, that separating Maggie

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30

31 32

33

34

35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42

Notes from Stephen and sending her back to Philip will necessarily be morally justifiable. Precisely because of the terms of bodily memory in which the relationship between Maggie and Stephen is set up, even if Maggie fulfils her moral mission and goes back to Philip, there will be problems. The narrator is aware of the charitable and obligatory action that Maggie takes during the brief scene when they recollect their childhood affection for each other, ‘A keen remembrance and keen pity impelled Maggie to put her hand in Philip’s’ (MF, 6:10:390). Maggie takes on Philip largely as a moral mission, against her subconscious reluctance. Edward S. Reed, ‘The separation of psychology from philosophy: Studies in the sciences of mind 1815–1879’, in The Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume VII: The Nineteenth Century, edited by C. L. Ten (London and New York, 1994), pp. 297–356 (pp. 329 and 330). The Gay Science, 2 vols (London, 1866), I, pp. vii, 209 and 216. See Eliot’s marginal comments on their copy of Lewes’s Foundations of a Creed, George Henry Lewes library, Dr Williams’s Library in London (FC, I, 141). Feuerbach: ‘I feel; and I feel feeling … as belonging to my essential being and, though the source of all sufferings and sorrows, as a glorious, divine power and perfection’ (The Essence of Christianity, translated by Marian Evans (London, 1854), p. 62). This is akin to Stuart Hampshire’s description of a unique insight in Proust: ‘The true and singular self of each individual is buried below the reach of introspection and of conscious attention’. There are thus, as in Proust, ‘the revelations of our real nature, concealed by our social role’ (Innocence and Experience, p. 128). This identifying apposition is part of the novel’s title. The image of the handloom weavers appears as early as in ‘Amos Barton’. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 168. For the limited communication of feelings through words in the Raveloe community, see John Preston, ‘The Community of the Novel: Silas Marner’, Comparative Criticism, 2 (1980), pp. 109–30, especially pp. 115–19. The Essence of Christianity, p. 62. The Principles of Ethics, 2 vols (London, 1892–93), I, p. 201. See Sally Shuttleworth’s article on how Silas Marner both challenges and reinforces nineteenth-century psychological understanding of the continuity of self: ‘Fairy Tale or Science? Physiological Psychology in Silas Marner’, in Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, edited by L. J. Jordanova (London, 1986), pp. 244–88. ‘Recapturing the Past: Introduction’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, 1995), pp. 151–7 (p. 152). Wordsworth, p. 47.

Chapter 3 1 The Journals of George Eliot, edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson (Cambridge, 1998), p. 97. 2 Philip M. Weinstein, The Semantics of Desire: Changing Models of Identity from Dickens to Joyce (Princeton, 1984), p. 82.

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3 This is not an episode that ‘turns out’ to be crucial. Eliot herself invested it with much meaning. According to Andrew Sanders, Vasari’s account of the fantastic floats designed for the Florentine Carnival by Piero di Cosimo was the source of this masque. ‘The particular fantasy … was not produced until 1511, but George Eliot was clearly so impressed by the account that she determined to use the masque thematically as the fulfilment of Dino’s prophesy and as an effective end to the first volume of the novel’ (Romola, edited by Andrew Sanders (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 711, n. 10). 4 Bonaparte’s The Triptych and the Cross remains the most thorough interpretation of these systems in Romola. 5 This view anticipates Walter Benjamin’s idea that ‘[memory] is the epic faculty par excellence’ (Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (London, 1970) p. 97). 6 Compare Henri Bergson’s distinction between clock time and duration or ‘lived’ time. Unlike Bergson, however, Eliot sees human participation more in collective than in personal terms. 7 ‘The State of Historical Science in France’, British and Foreign Review, 16 (1844), pp. 72–118 (p. 74). 8 See Terdiman, Present Past, pp. 3–32 for an account of this crisis. 9 Quoted in Burrow, Liberal Descent, p. 179. 10 Liberal Descent, p. 67. In her 1848 letter to Sara Sophia Hennell, Eliot understood a ‘Romanticist’ to be ‘one who, in literature, in the arts, in religion or politics, endeavours to revive the dead past’ (Cross, I, 192). Again, ten years later, she wrote to Mrs Charles Bray: ‘It is impossible ever to revive the past … But that doesn’t hinder the past from being sacred and belonging to our religion’ (L, VIII, 200). 11 The quoted phrase is from John Burrow, ‘The Sense of the Past’, in The Victorians, edited by Laurence Lerner (London, 1978), pp. 120–38 (p. 122). According to G. P. Gooch’s History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1913), Green’s writing has ‘the living interest of a biography and the dramatic unity of an epic’ (p. 354). Green was both praised and criticized for his ‘imaginative faculty’ (p. 357). 12 The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson 1834–1872, 2 vols (London, 1883), II, pp. 6–7; original emphasis. 13 Ruskin shares this position in his understanding of architectural remembering when he adds in his manuscript of The Seven Lamps of Architecture: ‘remember, that is to say, with the full revivifying sense of the past’ (The Works of John Ruskin, VIII, p. 224, n. 2). 14 Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason, p. 58. 15 Carlyle, p. 15. It will be misleading, though, to take this connection of the moment to history as exclusive to the Carlylean model. About sixteen years later, the same paradoxical sense of distance and closeness in ‘contiguity’ became central to Lewes as a psychological concept, though he appeared to have taken its sense largely from Bain’s influential principle of association, especially his ‘Law of Contiguity’ in Mental and Moral Science, in which Bain recognizes that the same principle ‘has been described under various names’ by philosophers such as Sir William Hamilton (‘contiguity’, OED). 16 Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century

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Notes

English Literature (London, 1971), pp. 131–3. 17 For a detailed account of Carlyle’s indebtedness to Comte, see Hill Shine, Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians: The Concept of Historical Periodicity (Baltimore, 1941) and A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven, 1985), pp. 50–4 and 61–4. 18 Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History, p. 53. 19 For a subtle and elegant account of this aspect of Carlyle, see Burrow, Liberal Descent, pp. 254–5. 20 Autobiography, Collected Works, I, pp. 1–290 (p. 171). 21 Robert C. Scharff believes that ‘laws’ in Comte have to be taken on Comte’s terms: the sense of ‘invariability’ includes the need for laws to be recontextualized. See Comte after Positivism (Cambridge, 1995), p. 99. 22 Liberal Descent, p. 254. 23 This epistemological model is drawn from Scharff, Comte after Positivism, pp. 172–3. 24 Eliot told Sara Sophia Hennell in 1863 that ‘[the] various strands of thought I had to work out forced me into a more ideal treatment of Romola than I had foreseen at the outset’ (L, IV, 104; original emphasis). 25 Quoted in K. K. Collins, ‘Questions of Method: Some Unpublished Late Essays’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980), pp. 385–405 (p. 390). 26 Liberal Descent, p. 252. This dual conception also recalls Ruskin and Morris who are ‘in defence of a doctrine of reverence for antiquity and continuity through time’. Their radicalism ‘was accompanied by a feeling not just for medieval models but for continuity and the effects of time’. See Burrow, ‘The Sense of the Past’, p. 134. 27 Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), p. 89. 28 Peel, Herbert Spencer, p. 162. 29 Gooch, History and Historians, p. 354. 30 Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines (London, 1991), pp. 83 and 84. 31 Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London, 1962), pp. 61 and 66. 32 Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago, 1987), pp. 308, 328 and 310. 33 Richards, Darwin, p. 279. 34 Quoted in Collins, ‘G. H. Lewes Revised’, p. 472. 35 A. L. Le Quesne, Carlyle (Oxford, 1982), p. 38. 36 George Eliot: An Intellectual Life (London, 1990), p. 144. 37 In the manuscript, Eliot deleted the following sentence: ‘Romola remembered how she herself had been subject to continual fluctuations in surveying her own impulses and conduct in the years she had lived through with Tito’ (R, 71:579, n. 9). 38 Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, 1992), p. 17. 39 Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle, p. 124; original emphases. 40 For Carlyle, ‘Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible’ (WTC, VI, 8). 41 For an excellent study of the historical conception of Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad in relation to what cannot be retrieved or articulated, see Reilly, Shadowtime. 42 Modern Love, 12.11–16, in George Meredith, Poems, 2 vols (Westminster, 1898), I, p. 14.

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43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

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Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton, 1983), p. 44. Rosenberg, Carlyle, p. 19. This point is drawn on in Rosenberg, Carlyle, p. 19. Carlyle, pp. 24 and 20. For Bradley’s position, see Lionel Rubinoff, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Bradley, Presuppositions, p. 48. On History, p. 28. I borrow the formulation from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London, 1981), pp. 199 and 197. ‘Narrative Time’, Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980–81), pp. 169–90 (p. 180). David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985), p. 96.

Chapter 4 1 Valentine Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 1975), p. 180. For similar viewpoints, see Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism, pp. 60-71, and Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 112–19. 2 The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832–1867 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 1–2. 3 England and the English, 2 vols (London, 1833), II, p. 278. 4 Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against, p. 179. 5 See Willey, Nineteenth-Century Studies, p. 217, for his definition of this formulation. 6 Joseph Butwin, ‘The Pacification of the Crowd: From “Janet’s Repentance” to Felix Holt’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980), pp. 349–71. 7 Lewes, Physiology of Common Life, pp. 58–9. 8 Michael Wolff, ‘The Uses of Context: Aspects of the 1860’s’, Victorian Studies, 9 (1965), ‘Supplement’, pp. 47–63. For this point see p. 57. 9 Eliot’s readings for Felix Holt and a number of epigraphs she prepared for the novel are centred on the causation of good and evil and on retribution. For examples, see Wiesenfarth, Notebook, p. 167, entry 77, n. 2, and p. 199, entry 222, n. 2. 10 Thomson, ‘The Genesis of Felix Holt’, PMLA, 74 (1959), pp. 576–84, and ‘Introduction’ to FH, pp. xiii–xxii, particularly pp. xvii and xxii. 11 Thomson, ‘The Genesis of Felix Holt’, p. 581. 12 Thomson, ‘Introduction’ to FH, p. xxii. 13 See Wiesenfarth, Notebook, pp. 154–5. Eliot was also reading Agamemnon in 1865 (Thomson, ‘Introduction’, p. xx). For the influence of Greek tragedy on Eliot, see Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980), pp. 112–32. 14 Carlyle, p. 92. 15 Eliot is not immune from criticism, by F. R. Leavis on Daniel Deronda for instance, for being incompetent in incorporating organically parallel stories. 16 Collected Works, VII–VIII (VIII, pp. 836–7). Eliot had been acquainted with Mill’s Logic at least since 1849 (L, I, 310). For Felix Holt, Eliot again read Comte in Harriet Martineau’s translation (Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against, p. 143).

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Notes

17 Collected Works, VIII, p. 847. 18 Collected Works, VIII, p. 849. 19 As Lewes says, ‘When we say something happens by chance, we do not mean that it had no conditions; we mean that the conditions are unforeseen, unknown, out of the regular order of appearance’ (SP, 103; original emphasis). 20 On Liberty, Collected Works, XVIII, pp. 217, 220. 21 See the unpublished portion of her Notebook of memoranda, statistics, historical notes and quotations collected in preparation for writing Felix Holt, The Spanish Gypsy [1861], Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Register IV.10, p.16. 22 Culture and Anarchy, with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays, edited by R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1965), p. 138. 23 Culture and Anarchy, p. 236. For ‘the importance of Arnold’s response to Dissent in shaping his social criticism’, see Stefan Collini, Arnold (Oxford, 1988), pp. 79–80. 24 ‘Appendix A’, in FH, p. 405. 25 Eliot, Notebook, Beinecke, GE–GHL IV.10, p. 16. 26 The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–1868 (London, 1966), p. xxxi. 27 J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1988), pp. 51–76. See also Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991). 28 ‘Appendix A’, in FH, p. 405. Alexander Welsh has observed a paradox in Mill who addresses ‘the danger to individual freedom from public opinion but believed very strongly in public opinion as a force for progress in the first place, and preferred it to legislation’ (George Eliot and Blackmail (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. v). 29 ‘Bentham’, Collected Works, X, p. 107. Later in Middlemarch, public opinion can be a ‘ready, fatal sponge which so cheaply wipes out the hopes of mortals’ (M, 31:293). 30 Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against, pp. 175, 176; see also p. 188. 31 Eliot did some readings about the emergence of Dissenting congregations (Wiesenfarth, Notebook, p. 179). 32 Elizabeth Jay, Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (London, 1986), p. 88. 33 Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against, p. 174. 34 Eliot draws the debate from her reading of Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans (Wiesenfarth, Notebook, p. 201). 35 Culture and Anarchy, p. 245. 36 Levine, ‘Determinism and Responsibility’, pp. 350 and 357. For a spirited study of this theme in Eliot, see also William Myers, The Teaching of George Eliot. 37 Collected Works, VIII, p. 841. 38 See Presuppositions, p. 99. 39 Gallagher, ‘The Failure of Realism: Felix Holt’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980), pp. 372–84 (p. 378). 40 See Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism, for a discussion of Arnold’s idea of ‘a consciousness of history and an awareness of prophetic destiny, a dual method of looking backward and forward’ (p. 66). See also Collini,

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Arnold, pp. 85–7. 41 Culture and Anarchy, pp. 233–4. 42 ‘Narrative Time’, p. 181. 43 Patrick Joyce has argued for the connection in the nineteenth century between culture, be it low or high, and ‘a powerful logic connecting custom, history and language’ (Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), especially pp. 27–55). 44 Eliot was not confident about the historical details of the working men; she did, at one stage, seek advice from Frederic Harrison, whose ‘interest in the Working Men’s college and in problems of industrial co-operation made his advice peculiarly useful’ (Haight, George Eliot, p. 383). In November 1865, more than six months before she finished Felix Holt, she was reading Henry Fawcett’s The Economic Position of the British Labourer which was published in the same year (The Journals of George Eliot, edited by Harris and Johnson, p. 126). 45 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 11. 46 K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation: 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), p. 64. For a different view, see Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. 47 Haight, George Eliot, p. 395. 48 Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago, 1985), pp. 237–49 (p. 258). 49 ‘[He] was a raw-looking student with clumsy boots and large hands innocent of gloves; he had never handled a silver fork in his life, or ridden anything better than a butcher’s hack, or drunk anything more exquisite than beer or whiskey’ (FH, 3:46, n. 8). 50 For an interesting study of the influence that Holt could have received in Glasgow, see Judith Wilt, ‘Felix Holt, the Killer: A Reconstruction’, Victorian Studies, 35:1 (1991), pp. 51–69. 51 Culture and Anarchy, p. 146; original emphases.

Chapter 5 1 Several studies trace the sources of these allusions back to Anna Jameson’s books on Christian legends, fairy tales and saints. See for example, Beer, ‘Myth and Single Consciousness’, and Susan Stiritz, ‘An Enigma Solved: The “Theresa” Metaphor’, in Perspectives on Self and Community in George Eliot: Dorothea’s Window, edited by Patricia Gately, Dennis Leavens and D. Dole Woodcox (Lewiston, NY, 1997), pp. 58–101. 2 See, for instance, Hardy, ‘Middlemarch: Public and Private Worlds’, in Particularities, pp. 104–25; J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith and Hardy (Notre Dame, 1968), pp. 93–6 and 113–25. 3 Shuttleworth, George Eliot, p. 166. 4 Beer, ‘Myth and Single Consciousness’, p. 96. My discussions in the rest of this chapter are helped by the following studies of mythological representation and interpretation in Middlemarch: Beer, ‘Myth and Single

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5

6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

Notes Consciousness’; Knoepflmacher, ‘Fusing Fact and Myth: The New Reality of Middlemarch’, in This Particular Web: Essays on ‘Middlemarch’, edited by Ian Adam (Toronto, 1975), pp. 43–72; Harvey, ‘Intellectual Background’; Brian Swann, ‘Middlemarch and Myth’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 28 (1973), pp. 210–14; and Joseph Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking (Heidelberg, 1977), pp. 186–209. For Eliot’s own readings on ancient myth and fables, see Carroll, ‘Introduction’ to M, p. xx, and GEN, II, 104–6, 149–50, 156. F. H. Bradley’s view best accounts for this position: ‘[historical] material’ as ‘scientific evidence is a human phenomenon which in itself is not scientific’ (Presuppositions, p. 111; original emphasis). ‘History as Social Memory’, pp. 103–4. George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, edited by David Carroll (London, 1971), p. 463. On this analogy, see Carroll, ‘Unity Through Analogy: An Interpretation of Middlemarch’, Victorian Studies, 2 (1959), pp. 305–16, and Michael York Mason, ‘Middlemarch and History’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1971), pp. 417–31. For the relation of the Saint Theresa story to the character of Dorothea, see Hilary S. Fraser, ‘St. Theresa, St. Dorothea and Miss Brooke in Middlemarch’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 40 (1986), pp. 400–11; Myers, Teaching of George Eliot, pp. 203–6; Jill Matus, ‘Saint Teresa, Hysteria, and Middlemarch, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1:2 (1990), pp. 215–40; and Stiritz, ‘An Enigma Solved: The “Theresa” Metaphor’. George Barnett Smith, ‘George Eliot’, The Saint Paul’s Magazine, 12 (1873), pp. 592–616 (p. 593). Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, p. 63. W. E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1957), p. 187, where he quotes from J. A. Froude’s ‘England and Her Colonies’. Essence of Christianity, pp. 62–3. ‘The Formal Nature of Victorian Thinking’, PMLA, 90 (1975), pp. 904–18 (p. 907). Carroll, ‘Introduction’ to M, p. xvii. ‘… If [religion] be the ascent of the mind towards God by way of the ladder of creation …’. I am indebted to Will Robins for helping me with this translation. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’, p. 274. ‘Daniel Deronda and Psychology’, p. 58. For a good discussion of these aspects of Eliot, see Beer, ‘Myth and Single Consciousness’, p. 91. See, for example, Miller, Form of Victorian Fiction, pp. 120–1. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. MacFie (1759; Oxford, 1976), p. 9; Rubinoff, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Bradley, Presuppositions, pp. 1–72 (p. 42). Löwith, Meaning in History, p. 77. Löwith, Meaning in History, p. 83. Mason, ‘Middlemarch and History’, p. 424. Letter to Eliot, 8 December, 1872 (quoted in Haight, George Eliot, p. 451). Miller, Form of Victorian Fiction, p. 5.

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26 ‘Bentham’, Collected Works, X, p. 91. 27 See Beer, ‘Circulatory Systems: Money, Gossip and Blood in Middlemarch’, in Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (London, 1989), pp. 99–116. 28 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 9. 29 See Beer, ‘Origins and Oblivion’, p. 21. 30 Lewes regards this recollection as the ‘higher form of Memory’ which ‘may safely be said to be exclusively human’ (PLM3, 119). Lewes thus provides an evolutionary and moral framework for a distinction already made in the late eighteenth century by Thomas Reid who equally emphasizes the presence of self: ‘Memory is a kind of habit … Reminiscence … includes a will to recollect something past, and a search for it’ (Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh, 1785), p. 355). Reid is here also discussing Aristotle’s similar distinction with a view to whether one needs to recollect an idea if one wills the idea first. Both distinctions, though made in very different intellectual contexts, anticipate Henri Bergson’s notion of memory that emphasizes recollection as opposed to habit. 31 See Calvin Bedient, Architects of the Self: George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster (London, 1972), p. 13; Michael York Mason, ‘Middlemarch and Science: Problems of Life and Mind’, Review of English Studies, 22 (1971), pp. 151–69 (pp. 168–9); Elizabeth Ermarth, George Eliot (Boston, 1985), p. 29. 32 ‘The Intellectual “Medium” of Middlemarch’, Review of English Studies, 30 (1979), pp. 154–68 (p. 164). 33 In the manuscript, Eliot tried several times to define this turn of phrase: the ‘liberty <not filled with the ruminant joy>’ (M, 28:268, n. 6). 34 The same paradox appears in Chapter 69 of Daniel Deronda, where Deronda’s own self-assertion takes the form of, and is only achieved through, the renunciation of his present status. 35 During, ‘Daniel Deronda and Psychology’, pp. 53–61 and Chapter 3, where he makes very perceptive analyses of Lewes’s theory of the moral types in the context of nineteenth-century evolutionary theories. 36 The Senses and the Intellect, 3rd edn (London, 1868), p. 344; these quotations are not in the first edition. 37 Essence of Christianity, p. 165. The personal relation between a devout Christian and his God exists in such a way that ‘the imagination does not wander, left to itself; it follows the leadings of the heart; it describes a circle, whose centre is feeling’ (p. 147). 38 Stiritz, ‘An Enigma Solved: The “Theresa” Metaphor’, p. 76. 39 D. F. Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, translated by Marian Evans, 3 vols (London, 1846), I, p. 42; original emphasis. 40 Nineteenth-century critics of novel-writing were particularly concerned with the unity of fiction. There was some insistence on dramatic unity as against thematic unity. See Victorian Criticism of the Novel, edited by Edwin M. Eigner and George J. Worth (Cambridge, 1985), p. 6. 41 Reprinted in Collins, ‘Questions of Method’, p. 391.

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Notes

Notes

42 Secularization, p. 113. 43 See Strauss, The Life of Jesus, I, pp. 1–87; III, pp. 426–30. 44 According to J. Samuel Preus, ‘a sensible interpretation is that rather than innate ideas, there is an innate religious sense that accounts for religion’s very existence’ (Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud, (New Haven, 1987), p. 28). 45 ‘The Intellectual Background of the Novel’, p. 28. 46 Eliot had a strong background in contemporary studies of mythology. Around the time of writing Middlemarch, she read Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language (including materials on mythology) with great interest. See Wiesenfarth, A Writer’s Notebook: 1854–1879 and Uncollected Writings (Charlottesville, 1981), p. xxxii. For Eliot’s interest in Müller’s work, see Collins, ‘Questions of Method’, pp. 396–8. For a detailed discussion of Eliot’s interest in the evolution of language, and of similar interests during the nineteenth century in general, see Beer, Darwin’s Plots, especially pp. 120–3, and 177–9. 47 The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley, 1970), p. 14n. 48 Language and Myth, translated by Susanne K. Langer (New York, 1946), p. 43. 49 Eliade, Myth and Reality (London, 1964), p. 124. 50 Rosenberg, Carlyle, p. 42. 51 Meaning in History, p. 71. Yet the philosophical basis of Comte’s system is that ‘the relative character of scientific conceptions is inseparable from the true idea of natural laws, just as the chimerical inclination for absolute knowledge accompanies every use of theological fictions and metaphysical entities’. See PPAC, II, p. 70. 52 Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, p. 102, where he quotes from W. R. Greg’s ‘False Morality of Lady Novelists’. 53 In ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), pp. 7–25, Pierre Nora discusses how memory has been ossified into objects of historical study, that is, ‘lieux de mémoire’, and argues that memory and history ‘appear … to be in fundamental opposition’ (p. 8): ‘Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects: history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative’ (p. 9). Further, ‘At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory’ and the ‘true mission’ of history ‘is to suppress and destroy’ memory (p. 9). Eric Hobsbawm in his introduction to The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), has a different take on the artificial relations between memory and history developed mostly in the twentieth century. He explores how rituals and ceremonies as forms of shared memory may be created or appropriated for political purposes and are thus turned into an ‘invented tradition’. 54 How Societies Remember, p. 16. 55 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated by Willard R. Trask (New York, 1959), p. 112. 56 White, Metahistory, p. 149. 57 See Joseph W. Childers, ‘Carlyle’s Past and Present, History, and a Question of Hermeneutics’, Clio, 13 (1983–4), pp. 247–58 (p. 248).

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58 Hesiod, Theogony; quoted in Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 120.

*

1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

Rossetti’s inscription for his painting Mnemosyne (1876–81). Quoted in Virgian Surtees, The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols (Oxford, 1971), I, p. 156. See Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’, pp. 225–345 (p. 244); Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism; Baker, ‘The Kabbalah, Mordecai, and George Eliot’s Religion of Humanity’, Yearbook of English Studies, 3 (1973), pp. 216–21 and George Eliot and Judaism (Salzburg, 1975); Mary Wilson Carpenter, George Eliot and the Landscape of Time: Narrative Form and Protestant Apocalyptic History (Chapel Hill, 1986), pp. 131–53; Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Nations and Novels: Disraeli, George Eliot and Orientalism’, Victorian Studies, 35:3 (1991–92), pp. 255–75; Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, pp. 121–7. My discussion of the mode of ‘imagining’ is indebted to Michael Oakeshott’s notion of ‘an imaginary ancestral past’ (On History, p. 17), and to the main argument in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), p. 15, though Anderson’s emphasis is not on relating this mode so closely to the mechanism of collective memory. For an excellent discussion of this capacity in Wordsworth, see Charles Sherry, Wordsworth’s Poetry of the Imagination (Oxford, 1980). For the notion of narrative strategy in relation to nationalism, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), p. 140. See, for example, Graver, George Eliot and Community. Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London, 1974), p. 73. For the difficulty in dating these notebooks, see GEN, I, 8–29. According to Spencer, Eliot’s interest in Comtean positivism was on the decline shortly before she died: ‘she was veering a good deal away from Comte’ (An Autobiography, 2 vols (London, 1904), II, p. 364). According to Baker, Khusari is a philosophical prose work by Yehuda Halevi (GEN, I, 242). Baker, ‘George Eliot’s Readings in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Historians: A Note on the Background of “Daniel Deronda”’, Victorian Studies, 15 (1972), pp. 463–73 (p. 465). See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1944), pp. 8–9 (p. 8). George Eliot and Judaism: An Attempt to Appreciate ‘Daniel Deronda’, translated by J. W. Ferrier, 2nd edn (Edinburgh and London, 1878), p. 10. George Eliot and Judaism, p. 14; original emphasis. For a ‘cultural’ definition of nationalism, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983), pp. 7 and 56. Imagined Communities, p. 13. ‘Two Types of Nationalism’, in Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, edited by Eugene Kamenka, corrected edition (London, 1976), pp. 23–36 (p. 24). The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (London,

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Chapter 6

Notes

1987), p. 159. 18 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 140. 19 For the view that Judaism is essentially a way of life, see Nicolas de Lange’s Judaism (Oxford, 1986). 20 See also Baker, ‘George Eliot’s Readings’, p. 467. 21 In Daniel Deronda, Eliot spells ‘Kabbalah’ as ‘cabbala’, but I shall use the more commonly accepted spelling ‘Kabbalah’. 22 George Eliot and Judaism, p. 9. 23 Judaism, pp. 19 and 24. 24 This distinction is drawn on Kohn, Idea of Nationalism, p. 358. Sandra M. den Otter has given a clear account of how ‘idealist’ and ‘scientific empirical’ philosophers in Victorian England view the political and social functions of the state (British Idealism and Social Explanation, pp. 149–204). 25 For the important position Ribot holds in the study of memory in late nineteenth-century France, see Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, especially pp. 205–7. 26 Andrew Thompson, George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento (Basingstoke, Hampshire and London, 1998), p. 6. 27 Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton, 1975), p. 29. 28 For an excellent discussion of the tradition, see Burrow, Liberal Descent. See also Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism. 29 Collected Works, XIX, p. 546. 30 The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus, Ohio, 1985), p. 147. 31 Green, ‘Two New Books on English History’, The Times, 4 February 1882, p. 4. 32 A Short History of the English People (London, 1874), p. 588. 33 History of the English People, 4 vols (London, 1877–80), I, p. 206. 34 Short History of the English People, pp. 142 and 143. 35 The underlying assumption here still seems to be the Comtean idea of continuity, which stresses, according to Eliot, that continuity should pass ‘from a mere fact into a motive’ (quoted in Thomas Pinney, ‘More Leaves from George Eliot’s Notebook’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 29 (1965–6), pp. 353–76 (p. 371)). 36 The Problem of Christianity (1918; Chicago, 1968), pp. 243–4; original emphasis. 37 According to de Lange, ‘Judaism has no obvious starting-point, and the term “pre-Jewish” is not used’ (Judaism, p. 2). Franz Rosenzweig also points out that for the Jewish people, ‘the memory of its history’ cannot ‘become a measure of time … the memory of its history does not form a point fixed in the past’; ‘It is a memory … eternally present’ (The Star of Redemption, translated by William W. Hallo (Boston, 1970), p. 304). 38 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 16, 132, and 30. 39 ‘What is a nation?’, translated and annotated by Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha (London, 1990), pp. 8–22 (p. 11). 40 In Spencer, we have a more physiological understanding of this mode of organization: ‘on the one hand, Instinct may be regarded as a kind of organized memory; on the other hand, Memory may be regarded as a kind of

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incipient instinct’ (PP, I, 445). 41 For examples of these accounts, see Misc, fols 106–9, fols 130–5, and GEN, III, 61, 63, 68, 107 and IV, 18, 59. 42 Geschichte der Juden von ihren Uranfängen (um 1500) bis zum Tode des Königs Solomo (um 977 vorchr. Zeit): nebst synchronistischen Zeittafeln, 11 vols (Leipzig, 1863–75). George Eliot made marginal linings on her copy (IV, 211), Dr Williams’s Library, George Henry Lewes Library. 43 ‘Mishnah’, Encyclopaedia Judaica, edited by Cecil Roth et al., corrected edition, 17 vols (Jerusalem, n.d.). 44 Kaufmann corrected Eliot that ‘“Babli” … cannot be called an “affectionate sounding diminutive”’ (George Eliot and Judaism, p. 83). 45 Eliot and Lewes visited the synagogues in Amsterdam in 1866; ‘The chanting and the swaying about of the bodies’ struck them as a ‘faint symbolism of a religion of sublime, far-off memories’ (Cross, II, 439). Such a psychological effect is, in Geoffrey Hill’s words, ‘both liturgical and extraliturgical, telling of a rhythm of social duties, rites, ties and obligations’. See ‘Redeeming the Time’, in The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London, 1984), pp. 84–103 (p. 89). 46 George Eliot and Judaism, pp. 5 and 9; original emphases. 47 Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’, pp. 264–5. 48 De Lange, Judaism, p. 4; original emphases. 49 De Lange, Judaism, p. 20. 50 For a different view of Deronda’s identity as a Jew, see Cynthia Chase, ‘The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda’, PMLA, 93 (1978), pp. 215–27, and K. M. Newton, ‘Daniel Deronda and Circumcision’, Essays in Criticism, 31 (1981), pp. 313–27. 51 According to William Baker, it comes from the Talmudic Tract ‘Kiduschin’, in G. Levi, Parabeln, Legenden und Gedanken aus Thalmud und Midrash. In her copy, Eliot marked this aphorism with an asterisk (GEN, I, 247). 52 History: Remembered, Recorded, Invented, p. 19. 53 Robert M. Seltzer, ‘History: Jewish Views’, The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade et al., 16 vols (New York and London, 1987), VI, pp. 390–4 (p. 394). 54 Palestine: Description géographique, historique et archéologique (Paris, [1845]), p. 512 (Dr Williams’s Library, GHL; original emphases).(‘The mass of people believed through tradition and practised their faith out of habit, without inquiring much about the origin of their beliefs and observances; but among the scribes and scholars, who scrutinized and examined, opinions were divided’. I would like to thank Will Robins for checking this translation and another one in note 63 of this chapter.) 55 Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’, p. 237. 56 Seltzer, ‘History: Jewish Views’, p. 391; see also Ernst Breisach, ‘Historiography: An Overview’, The Encyclopedia of Religion, VI, pp. 370–83 (p. 374). 57 ‘The Creativity of Language’, in Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage. Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert Macuse, Stanislas Breton, Jacques Derrida (Manchester, 1984), pp. 17–36 (p. 25). 58 See GEN, I, 125. Eliot paraphrases this story from The Book of Ser Marco Polo

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Notes

59 60 61

62 63

64

65 66 67 68

69

70

71 72

Notes The Venetian Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, translated and edited with notes by Sir Henry Yule (GEN, I, 257). The Origins of Zionism (Oxford, 1975), pp. 7–9. Essays on Freedom and Power, selected and with a new introduction by Gertrude Himmelfarb (Gloucester, Mass., 1972), p. 144. For Eliot’s interest in the Jewish concept of transmigration of souls, see GEN, I, 110–12, 238–41. For a study of apocalyptic history in Daniel Deronda and of Jewish messianism in a religious context, see Carpenter, George Eliot and the Landscape of Time, pp. 132–53, particularly pp. 142–4. Kohn, Idea of Nationalism, p. 441. Palestine, p. 512 (Dr Williams’s Library, GHL). (For some people, ‘their system of interpretation had the advantage of lending life and movement to the dead letter, of investing certain useful and even necessary doctrines, which were not explicitly formulated in Scripture, with a divine authority, and of encouraging the progress and continual development of Judaism; for the scholars of each age could make use of this same principle of interpretation to accommodate the creed and the institutions to the needs and spirit of their time. The others, to tell the truth, sought to preserve Mosaism in its purity, as the Samaritans also did; but they made it stationary and deprived it of its seeds of development which were deposited therein’.) Geschichte der Juden von ihren Uranfängen (um 1500) bis zum Tode des Königs Solomo (um 977 vorchr. Zeit), IV, p. 17. For her quotation, see Miscellanies, fol. 107; for her marginal annotation, see the copy she used (Dr Williams’s Library, GHL). Baker, Eliot and Judaism, p. 145. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. x. Daniel Deronda, edited with an introduction by Barbara Hardy (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 896. Yael Zerubavel has commented, in a different context, on the nature of invented tradition as counter-narratives: ‘the concept of invented tradition suggests a more conscious attempt to produce new cultural forms that seem as if they are of older origin … But invented tradition can be successful only as long as it passes as tradition, with little or no concern about its relatively new origins’ (Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995), p. 232). The change of direction can be corroborated by the fact that this chapter was meant to be the ending of Part Two but for a suggestion from Lewes (Graham Handley, ‘Introduction’ to DD, pp. xv–xvi). I do not think a sense of geographical rootedness, though often mentioned in the novel, is in George Eliot’s view as essential as that of psychological rootedness. For a different view, see Sara M. Putzell-Korab, The Evolving Consciousness: An Hegelian Reading of the Novels of George Eliot (Salzburg, 1982), pp. 129–30. I borrow the two terms from Royce, Problem of Christianity, p. 248. Such a focus on the rise of nationalism constitutes Eliot’s own contribution to the literary convention of memory as hope in Victorian literature. For a discussion of this literary convention, started by William Hazlitt and

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73

74 75

76 77 78 79

80

81 82

217

transformed by, among other Victorian writers, William Morris and Walter Pater, see John Reed, Victorian Conventions (Columbus, Ohio, 1975), pp. 411–16. See the chapter on Eliot in F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (1948; Harmondsworth, 1962) and his ‘Gwendolen Harleth’, in The Critic as Anti-Philosopher: Essays & Papers, edited by G. Singh (London, 1982), pp. 65–75. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 26th edn (London, 1828), p. 385; original emphasis (Dr Williams’s Library, GHL). For example, see Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’, pp. 282–91, for the connection with Puritanism; Knoepflemacher, Religious Humanism, for Hebraism as a religious belief; Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Nations and Novels: Disraelis, George Eliot and Orientalism’, and Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” & English National Identity (Durham and London, 1995), pp. 260–90, for a contextual study of anti-Semitism. Nancy Henry, in her carefully argued article ‘Ante-Anti-Semitism: George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such’, explores the extent to which the etymology of ‘antiSemitism’ may complicate our reading of ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ (Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature, edited by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (New York, 1996), pp. 65–80). George Eliot and Judaism, p. 10. Hours of Work and Play (London, 1867), p. 235. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York, 1995), p. 84. In his Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven and London, 1994), David Feldman traces this process very carefully and offers insights into the interrelations between Jewish presence and English national life in nineteenth-century England. Selected Speeches of the Earl of Beaconsfield, edited by T. E. Kebbel, 2 vols (London, 1882), II, p. 527. Disraeli’s move cannot hide the fact that his brand of ‘national principles’ can be an obligatory ‘ideology’ to the diverse social and ethnic groups it is supposed to encompass; on the other hand, it is precisely against the background of the social and cultural distinctiveness of these groups that these principles may have succeeded in lending a sense of singularity to ‘Englishness’. For both observations of Arnold, see Young, Colonial Desire, pp. 56 and 58. The narrator in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ is certainly aware that ‘we are a colonising people’ (ITS, 264). The practical expediency in fantasizing about the ‘empire’ is adroitly depicted. If Gwendolen ‘would rather emigrate than be a governess’ (DD, 21:216), the advantage of emigration perhaps lies in not having to compromise her newly acquired class status overmuch even if it means subjection to the same hardship as that of a governess. The prospect of joining the colonizers becomes an alternative that may confirm such status while celebrating a national sentiment. After all, she has all along entertained the possibility of commanding her social circles like ‘winning empire’ (DD, 6:57). No wonder when he is distressed, Rex readily finds consolation in declaring ‘I should like to go to the colonies’ (DD, 8:78); ‘I will go to Canada, or somewhere of that sort’ (DD,

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Notes

83

84 85 86 87

88

89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96

Notes 8:76). Apparently, childish and simplistic fantasy has its roots in shared assumptions. The uncertainty of empire-building is to Rex mitigated by the familiarity of rhetoric and the consolation of unrealized imagining. This is why in the word ‘colonies’ Rex finds ‘the vagueness of the phrase prudential’; it ‘necessarily [embraces] more advantages, and being less capable of being rebutted on a single ground than any particular settlement’ (DD, 8:78). According to one of Eliot’s notebook entries, Gwendolen Harleth’s first name has a national connotation: ‘Gwen is considered as the British Venus’ and ‘Gwendolen … was, it seems, an ancient British Goddess, probably the moon’ (GEN, I, 101). Gwendolen can be taken, in a sense, as representing the typical traits of the English that Eliot wants to criticize. Only, such traits are for Eliot best explored in terms of personal agonies and sorrows. The reader is also expected to anticipate the latent clashes between Deronda’s English and Jewish identities. This recalls the method of psychological study advocated in Lewes’s ‘The General Mind’. One should not regard general characteristics as only an abstraction and allow no room for a further examination of the manifestation of the general in the individual. Generalities should be applied to all particulars, so as ‘to note in how far they accord with the generalities’ (SP, 163). Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, pp. 140 and 59; original emphasis. Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, pp. 139–45. Burrow, Liberal Descent, p. 102. For an account of this tradition, see p. 242. For Eliot, as for Lewes, ‘Society is far more modifiable than Nature; and its Ruling Powers, namely, Passions, Sentiments, and Ideas, may be modified both by direct appeals and by indirect action on their generating causes’ (SP, 41). For various attitudes to British national heritage assumed by political parties at the time, including liberal cosmopolitanism, see Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, pp. 127–43. For a different view, see Amanda Anderson, ‘George Eliot and the Jewish Question’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 10:1 (1997), pp. 39–61. For the problematic nature of the attempt by English liberalism to assist the cultural integration of the Jews in the later nineteenth century, see Feldman, Englishmen and Jews. Kohn, Idea of Nationalism, p. 460. Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, p. 145. Collini, Arnold, p. 78. Collini, Arnold, pp. 78–9. Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, p. 145. Eliot believes that ‘a universal social policy has no validity except on paper, and can never be carried into successful practice’ (E, 289; original emphasis).

Epilogue 1 Royce, Problem of Christianity, p. 255. 2 According to T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London, 1982), pp. 11–17, the term and concept of the ‘intellectual’ did not come into general currency until the 1870s. Although Eliot

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3 4 5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

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did once in a letter of 1852 refer to a meeting of a group of writers and scientists as an ‘assemblage of intellectuals’ (quoted in Haight, George Eliot, p. 110), there is a case for dating the usage later. I use the term ‘intellectual’ in the sense defined by Stefan Collini in his Public Moralists to refer to ‘function and identity rather than occupation and belief’. In this sense, intellectuals are those ‘who are marked out by their involvement in the business of articulating reflections on human activities and exercising some kind of cultural authority acknowledged by the attentions of the wider society’ (p. 28). Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1978), p. 7. I borrow the term ‘intellectual characters’ from Beer, ‘Myth and Single Consciousness’ (p. 102). Collins, ‘G. H. Lewes Revised’, p. 476. Newman, Rise of English Nationalism, p. 56. See also Jean Sudrann, ‘Daniel Deronda and the Landscape of Exile’, English Literary History, 37 (1970), pp. 433–55. Transformation of Intellectual Life, pp. 192–3. For a full examination of Eliot in terms of intellectual alienation, see Sheldon Rothblatt, ‘George Eliot as a Type of European Intellectual’, History of European Ideas, 7 (1986), pp. 47–65. For a discussion of the concept of intellectual alienation, see Melvin Richter, ‘Intellectual and Class Alienation: Oxford idealist diagnoses and prescriptions’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 7 (1966), pp. 1–26, especially pp. 9–12 and 16–17. Rothblatt, ‘George Eliot’, p. 59. The Journals of George Eliot, p. viii. For discussions of Victorian intellectuals as ‘public moralists’ in relation to their audience, see Collini, Public Moralists, especially p. 58. See also Richter, ‘Intellectual and Class Alienation’, for a parallel discussion of self-estrangement in T. H. Green and others (pp. 16–7) who attempt ‘to unify their originally divided selves’ (p. 16). For Richter, this is alienation ‘in the Hegelian sense’ (p. 23). ‘George Eliot’, p. 48. For a different view, see Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis, 1987), p. 25. ‘George Eliot’, p. 53. For a discussion of the notion of ‘radical’ and its political and cultural implications, see Chapter 4 in this book. Rothblatt, ‘George Eliot’, p. 53. For a perceptive discussion of the tension between abstract moral teaching and novel-writing in Eliot, see David Carroll, ‘George Eliot: The Sibyl of Mercia’, Studies in the Novel, 15 (1983), pp. 10–25.

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Notes

Acton, Lord, 123, 169 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 103 Ajax (Sophocles), 102 altruism, 8, 12, 17, 83–4, 92, 99, 122 and consciousness, 63–4 its formation, 93 its impersonal representation, 127–30, 132–4, 136–9 modes of representing, 123–7 mythologized, 127, 139–48 and self-need, 81, 134–7 and social relations, 122 see also egotism Anderson, Benedict, 154, 159, 213 anti-Semitism, 168, 217 Arnold, Matthew, 73, 97, 98, 104, 105–6, 107, 110, 112–13, 115, 118, 178, 185 Culture and Anarchy, 98, 112, 116, 208, 209 ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, 98 Ashton, Rosemary, 135 association, mental, 17, 18–19 and images and words, 18–19, 25–6 see also memory Bagehot, Walter, 106 Bain, Alexander, 10, 17, 18, 25, 138 Mind and Body, 200 ‘The retentive power of the mind in its bearing on education’ (Fortnightly Review), 199 The Senses and the Intellect, 138, 199, 200, 211 Baldassarre (Romola), 25, 82, 83, 86, 89, 90, 164 Barrett, Dorothea, 81 Barton, Amos (‘Amos Barton’), 33–4 Beer, Gillian, 45, 47 Benjamin, Walter, 205 Bentham, Jeremy, 98, 99 Bergson, Henri, 56, 205

Creative Evolution, 203 Berkeley, George, 18 Bildungsroman, 90 Blackwood, John, 43, 73 Bonaparte, Felicia, 205 Bourne Taylor, Jenny, 202 Bradley, F. H., 20, 94, 111, 128, 207, 210 and Carlyle, 200 The Presuppositions of Critical History, 199 Brantlinger, Patrick, 98 Bromwich, David, 201 Brooke, Dorothea (Middlemarch), 121, 122–3, 125, 126, 127–9, 130, 132–40, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149 Brown, Thomas, 18, 20 Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 18, 199 Buckle, T. H., 10, 21 Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 98 England and the English, 207 Bruns, Gerald L., 125 Burke, Kenneth, 143 Burke, Peter, 15, 122 Burrow, John W., 73, 76, 78, 196 Butler, Samuel, 203 Unconscious Memory, 203 Caird, Edward, 200 Carlyle, Thomas, 6–8, 20, 24, 27, 38–9, 73–5, 76, 78–9, 84, 88–9, 94, 105, 106, 123, 125, 132, 145, 176, 183, 191, 202 and clothes metaphor, 183 and Comte, 75, 206 and heroes, 191 and mythus, 146 and secular religion, 6–7, 122, 123, 124, 129 works: ‘Boswell’ Life of Johnson’, 73; ‘Characteristics’, 202; The French 220

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Revolution, 84; On Heroes, HeroWorship and the Heroic in History, 74, 191; ‘On History’, 1, 2, 20, 38–9, 67, 88, 149; ‘On History Again’, 89, 94; Past and Present, 2, 6, 20, 74, 75, 78, 123, 145, 176, 183, 191; Sartor Resartus, 6, 59, 125; ‘Shooting Niagara’, 99, 105; ‘Signs of the Times’, 76, 106, 124, 132; Two Note Books, 201, 206; ‘Voltaire’, 41, 105 Carpenter, W. B., 18 Principles of Mental Physiology, 199, 201, 203 Carr, David, 16 Caruth, Cathy, 66 Cassirer, Ernst, 143 Chadwick, Owen, 140 class aliens in George Eliot, 119–20 in Matthew Arnold, 118–19, 120 see also Felix Holt; intellectual Cobb, Frances Power, 176–7 Hours of Work and Play, 176–7, 199 Collini, Stefan, 185, 219 colonial sentiment and Englishness, 217–18 Comte, Auguste, 8, 16, 19, 23, 65, 73, 75–7, 78–9, 80, 82, 93–4, 106–7, 122, 125, 134, 194 Cours de Philosphie Positive, 152 Philosophie Positive, 77, 123 The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 23, 147, 194, 212 System of Positive Polity, 75, 76, 77, 151, 152, 202 Condillac, E. B. de, 18 Connerton, Paul, 26, 148 consciousness, 43, 45–6, 54 and altruism, 63–4 and bodily memory, 56 and moral agency, 56–7 see also self consciousness, English national, 176–86, 217, 218 and class, 178–80 its diverse nature, 178, 179–81, 183 and Judaism, 175–9, 183, 217, 218 its limitations, 180–5

221

and religious sentiment, 179–80, 183 and its reform, 183–6 see also Judaism consciousness, Jewish national see Judaism consciousness, national and cosmopolitanism, 184 its diverse nature, 151 and the individual, 151–2 interest in: 156–8; in Benjamin Disraeli, 178; in George Eliot, 150–86; in Herder, 156, 157; in J. R. Green, 157–8; in J. S. Mill, 157; in Matthew Arnold, 178; Théodule A. Ribot, 156; in Whig politics, 157 its renewal: 166–75; and Englishness, 183–6; George Eliot’s interest in, 166–7, 187; and Judaism, 166–75; by way of interpretation, 171–5 see also cultural nationalism continuity and discontinuity in collective history, 69–72, 75–9, 84–5, 87–8 in personal history, 53–7, 65–7, 82–3, 89–90, 91, 92–3 cosmopolitanism, 181, 218 Cunningham, Valentine, 108 Dallas, E. S., 57 The Gay Science, 204 Dante, 102 Darwin, Charles, 10, 21, 22, 197 de Lange, Nicholas, 156, 214 Deronda, Daniel (Daniel Deronda), 156, 162–3, 164–5, 167–8, 169–70, 172, 174–5, 179, 181, 183–4, 185, 186, 188–9, 190, 191, 201, 215 see also Mordecai determinism, see communal memory diaspora, see communal memory Dickens, Charles, 66, 98 Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters (Leopold Zunz), 152, 172 Disraeli, Benjamin, 178, 198, 217 Dissenting community, the, 101,

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Index

104, 105, 106, 107–11, 115, 116 During, Simon, 126, 202, 211 The Economic Position of the British Labourer (Henry Fawcett), 209 egotism, 82–3, 84, 92, 138 see also altruism, and self-need Electra (Euripides), 102 Eliade, Mircea, 148 Eliot, George, 1–13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 40, 64, 69, 71, 73, 76–8, 81, 82, 85, 93, 94, 95–6, 97–8, 101, 104, 105, 108–9, 110–12, 114–15, 116, 117–18, 119–20, 125–6,.132–3, 136, 146, 148–9, 151–3, 154–5, 156–8, 162, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171–2, 173–14, 175–8, 182, 183, 184–6, 187–92, 193–5, 206, 207, 208, 209, 212, 213, 215, 218 essays, reviews and letters: ‘Address to Working Men’, 104, 105, 112, 115, 116, 120; ‘Art and Belles Lettres’, 35, 201; Essays of George Eliot, 6, 8, 19, 28, 36, 77–8, 94, 96, 99, 101, 126, 141, 157, 169, 180, 192, 193; ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming’, 192; ‘Future of German Philosophy’, 200; ‘Historical Imagination’, 95; ‘The Influence of Rationalism’, 52, 94; ‘[Life of Sterling]’, 74; ‘The Natural History of German Life’, 73, 99; ‘[The Progress of the Intellect]’, 28, 77, 169, 193; ‘Worldliness and OtherWorldliness’, 180; George Eliot Letters, 58, 73, 97, 105, 108–9, 134–5, 138, 192, 206; George Eliot’s Life (John Cross), 22, 50, 57, 60, 67, 77, 78, 95, 111, 123, 126, 132, 133, 184, 192, 193–4, 205; ‘History, Biography, Voyages and Travels’, 27; Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 48, 101, 150, 151, 217; ‘How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials’, 149; ‘The Modern Hep! Hep!

Hep!’, 151, 152, 154, 176, 178, 183, 217; ‘So Young!’, 48 notebooks and journals: George Eliot Notebooks, 22, 24, 52, 65, 73, 75, 144, 148, 152, 155, 161, 164, 165, 167, 170, 173, 215; Journals of George Eliot, 190, 204, 209; Miscellanies, 160, 161, 162, 171, 214; Quarry for Felix Holt, 105, 208 novels and stories: Adam Bede, 1, 11, 20, 25–31, 32–9, 60, 70, 84, 90, 102, 153, 203; ‘Amos Barton’, 21, 33–4, 70; Daniel Deronda, 11, 13, 65, 69, 126, 133, 150–86, 187–9; 190, 194, 211, 216; Felix Holt, 22, 12, 70, 97–120, 12, 130, 157, 209; ‘Janet’s Repentance’, 24, 31, 33–5, 65–6, 77, 92; The Lifted Veil, 10, 43–9, 68, 203; Middlemarch, 11, 12, 26, 67, 121–49, 153, 159, 211; The Mill on the Floss, 11, 29, 31, 37, 40, 42, 44, 49–59, 60, 68, 70, 102; ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’, 24–6, 32, 36–7; Romola, 11, 12, 25, 50, 69–72, 76–96, 134,. 147, 153, 159, 164, 206; Scenes of Clerical Life, 11, 17, 20, 26, 27, 28, 32–7; Silas Marner, 11, 29, 40–1, 42, 44, 49, 59–68, 153; see also individual characters poetic works: ‘I Grant You ample Leave’, 57; ‘The Legend of Jubal’, 170; ‘In a London Drawingroom’, 182; The Spanish Gypsy, 22, 28, 133, 153, 162, 165, 174–5 Eliot, T. S., 182 Englishness, see English national consciousness environment, 28 concept of, 22, 23–4, 70 and human feelings, 79 Ermarth, Elizabeth, 93 experience, as a priori instinct, 21, 200 feeling and intellect, 193–4 its figuring capacity, 141–3 and memory, 15, 16–19, 26, 28,

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141–2, 153 and speculative reasoning, 143 fellow-feeling, 16, 21, 22, 60, 63, 127 Christian, 79–81 pagan, 79–81 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 7, 64, 124, 140, 187 Essence of Christianity, 124, 204, 210, 211 Fichte, Johann, 134 Florence, Renaissance, 71, 72, 85 forgetfulness, see oblivion Freeman, Edward Augustus, 73 Freud, Sigmund, 202 Gall, Franz Joseph, 18 Gallagher, Catherine, 208 Gellner, Ernest, 213 George Eliot’s Life (John Cross), see George Eliot George Henry Lewes Library, Dr Williams’s Library, 156, 204, 215, 216, 217 German biblical criticism, 7, 111, 140–1, 144, 166, 197 Geschichte der Israeliten (Marcus Isaac Jost), 155 Geschichte der Juden (Heinrich Graetz), 157, 161, 172 Goethe, J. W. von, 24 Gray, Dorian (The Picture of Dorian Gray), 48–9 Green, J. R., 7, 27, 73, 78, 79, 157–8, 205 History of the English People, 7 A Short History of the English People, 7, 158 Stray Studies, 27 Green, T. H., 42 and Carlyle, 200 Griechische Geschichte (Ernst Curtius), 73 Hacking, Ian, 16, 199, 201 Haight, Gordon, S., 116 Halbwachs, Maurice, 4 Hamilton, Paul, 49, 67 Hamilton, Sir William, 17, 57 Hampshire, Stuart, 17, 40, 42

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Hardy, Thomas, 22, 200 Harrison, Frederic, 77, 112, 132, 209 Hartley, David, 9, 18 Harvey, W. J., 141 Hazlitt, William, 216 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 74, 156, 157, 170 heredity, 21–4 Hesiod, 20, 149 Theogony, 20, 58 history approaches to: positivist, 71–2, 75–79, 80–96; romantic-historical, 6–8, 20, 74–79, 80–96; see also intuitionism as biographies, 67 and contiguity: in Carlyle, 74–5; in Alexander Bain, 205; in George Henry Lewes, 205 as cyclic or discontinuous, 7–8, 71–2, 74–6, 77–95 as evolutionary or teleological, 71–2, 75–95 and imagination, 73–5, 77–9, 95–6 and the moment, 59, 71–5, 79–81, 82–3, 84–5, 87–95, 205 and moral authority, 112 see also memory, its relation to history Hobbes, Thomas, 9 Hobsbawm, Eric, 212 Holt, Felix (Felix Holt), 100, 107, 111, 113–20, 209 humanity, concept in Comte, 77 in Middlemarch, 128–9 in George Eliot, 151–3 Hume, David, 9, 18 Hutton, R. H., 78 imagination, see memory intellectual, 187–95, 218–9 alienation of, 219 and historical consciousness, 193–5 and paradoxical relations to community, 188, 189–91 role of: in Coleridge, 188, 191; in George Eliot, 189, 190–5; in J. S. Mill, 188; in Matthew Arnold, 188

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Index

usage of term, 218–9 and spiritual leadership: 191; in Carlyle, 191; in Comte, 191; in George Eliot, 191 see also class aliens; Daniel Deronda; Felix Holt; Mordecai intuitionism, 20, 21, 23, 26 Jameson, Anna, 209 Jann, Rosemary, 158 Johann Reuchlin sein Leben und seine Werke (Ludwig Geiger), 155 Judaism its antiquity and modernity, 161–2, 163 and becoming a Jew, 164–6 in Daniel Deronda, 158–75 as different from Christian religion, 156, 164 discordant elements in, 159–66 and Englishness, 175–9, 183 its messianism, 168, 216 and nationalism, 150, 175 its oral tradition, 161, 162 its psychological effects, 159, 160–6 its renewal, 160–75 its rituals, 160–1, 162 and transmigration of souls, 169, 216 as a way of life and as religion, 155–6, 214 kabbalah, 164 The Kabbalah (C. D. Ginsburg), 164 Kaufmann, David, 153, 155, 163, 175, 215, 217 Kermode, Frank, 26, 172 Khusari (Yehuda Halevi), 213 Kingsley, Charles, 98 Knopflmacher, U. C., 208 Kristeva, Julia, 202 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste de, 20 Lamarckianism, 10, 20–1, 169, 170 Latimer (The Lifted Veil), 43–9, 50, 55, 68 Leavis, F. R., 175–6 Le Quesne, A. L., 104 Levine, George, 111

Lewes, George Henry, 8–9, 15, 17, 18, 21, 24, 25–6, 55, 57, 73, 101, 124, 125, 133, 134, 135, 136, 156–7, 211 The Foundations of a Creed, 18, 24, 55, 121, 125, 126 Physiology of Common Life, 11 Problems of Life and Mind: Third Series (continued), 11, 21, 25, 26, 134, 135, 136 ‘The State of Historical Science in France’, 205 Studies in Animal Life, 201 The Study of Psychology, 11, 18, 55, 57, 133, 152; and George Eliot, 189 Lewis, Bernard, 166 Locke, John, 9, 18, 176 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 217 Löwith, Karl, 78, 147 Lyon, Rufus (Felix Holt), 108–11, 119 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, see Bulwer Lytton, Edward MacIntyre, Alastair, 207 Maimon, Solomon, 189 Autobiography, 189 Mandelbaum, Maurice, 198 Marner, Silas (Silas Marner), 59–68 Martineau, Harriet, 123 Massorah, 164 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 157 Melema, Tito (Romola), 50, 72, 82, 82–3, 85, 90, 91, 92–3, 134 memory and the allegory of Mnemosyne, 20, 149, 186, 213 and consciousness, 46 differentiated from recollection, 134 and feeling, 15, 16–19, 26, 28, 141–2, 153 as hope, 216–17 and imagination, 150–1, 159 as inexorable link to the past, 15–16, 30–9 and interpretability, 24–39, 95 as interpretation, 15–16, 20, 50, 92, 171–5, 195

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and intervention of will, 92–3; see also voluntary memory involuntary, 89, 91; see also voluntary memory; recollection its location, 28–9, 64–5, 216 and ‘memories of human sympathy’, 125, 129, 138 and moral agency, 42, 47–50, 54–8 and moral consequence, 18, 89, 92 and narrative, 88–96 and oblivion, 65–7, 88–9, 160 as palimpsest, 55 its paralysing effect, 89–90 and perception, 90 and physical presence, 27–9, 31, 33–4 and revelation, 167–8, 169 and rhetoric, 34–5 and science, 41, 104, 125–6 and sensation, 89–91, 141–2, 164 short-term and long-term, 36–7 and the subconscious, 46, 53–7 its temporal sense, 30, 72–4, 76–7, 79, 82–3, 94–5, 159–60; psychological time and chronological time, 72–4; see also history, and the moment and trauma, 48, 66, 67 two models of (associational and organic), 17–18 and the unconscious, 53–7 voluntary, 91–2 see also recollection; oblivion memory, bodily, 55–7 memory, childhood, 47, 49–50, 57, 58–9 memory, communal, 1–5, 6, 11–13 its ambiguous support for individuals, 49–53, 60–5 its determinism, 52–3, 97, 102–11, 113–20 and diaspora, 158–9 distinguished from personal memory, 3, 41–3, 58–9, 64–5, 196 distinguished from the Jungian ‘Collective Unconscious’, 3–4 and faith, 163–4 and historical consciousness, 2, 4–5, 12–13, 29, 112, 122, 188

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its impersonality, 130–1, 133 and the individual, 52, 53, 55, 64, 65, 93, 151–2, 156, 188–90; see also intellectual internalized, 40, 51 Jewish, see Judaism and language, 160–1 as mental habits, 94, 101, 110, 113 and moral authority, 112–13, 114, 115 and moral reform, 98–102, 105–20, 151, 218 myth as, see myth as ‘natural constitution of man’, 94 and rituals and ceremonies, 29–31, 71–2, 160, 161, 162 memory, personal, 1–2, 3, 40–68 its relation with communal memory, 3, 40–3, 49–68 see also memory and feeling ‘Memory’ (Anne Mozley), 199 Midrasch, 171, 172 Mill, J. S., 10, 17, 18, 23, 56, 75, 78, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111, 157 ‘Bentham’, 198, 208, 210 On Liberty, 98, 208 Representative Government, 106 A System of Logic, 18, 104, 199 Mill, James, 9, 18, 197 Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 197 Miller, J. Hillis, 88 Mink, Louis, 198 Mischna, 161, 171 Modern Love (George Meredith), 92–3 moral agency, see memory moral authority, see communal memory moral reform, see communal memory Mordecai (Daniel Deronda), 156, 161, 163, 164, 165, 169–70, 172–3, 174, 188–9 Morell, J. D., 43 Morley, John, 106 Morris, William, 216 Müller, F. Max, 143, 212 Lectures on the Science of Language, 212

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Index

Myers, F. W. H., 130 Myers, William, 8 myth, 69, 121 its reconfiguring capacity, 121–2, 143–5 and interpretation, 144–5 historicized, 139, 145–9 and George Eliot, 144, 146, 147, 212 the present as, 139–149; and hagiography, 139, 140, 141 narrative linear and non-linear, 84, 88 and memory, 38–9, 88–96 and oblivion, 88–9, 94–5 see also oblivion, and narrative nationalism, cultural, 153–5, 156, 157; and political nationalism, 153–5 Nora, Pierre, 212 Oakeshott, Michael, 5, 7, 9, 83, 95 oblivion, 32, 54, 61, 64, 66, 93, 203 in Carlyle, 75, 89, 206 involuntary, 66 and memory, 65–7, 88–9, 92, 160 and moral consequence, 57, 64–5, 92–3 as moral remedy, 110 and moral teleology, 89–90, 91 and narrative, 54, 88–9, 94–5 and nationalism, 160, 162, 163 and sensation, 89–91 and sense of self, 65–7 voluntary, 66, 72, 92 Palestine (Salomon Munk), 166, 171, 215, 216 Parabeln, Legenden und Gedanken aus Thalmud und Midrash (G. Levi), 215 past its relations to future, 47, 70 its prefiguring capacity, 168 its relations to present, 47, 59, 69–72, 74, 89, 93, 163, 164 see also continuity and discontinuity pastoral, 30, 70 Pater, Walter, 216–17

perception and recollection, 25–6 and sensation, 90–1 phrenology, 17 physiological psychology, 17, 18 Polanyi, Michael, 19, 40 Poysers, the (Adam Bede), 25, 28, 30, 38 prevision, see recollection Protestantism, 122, 138 as different from Catholicism, 122, 129–30, 138, 180 and national consciousness, 179–80, 183 Proust, Marcel, 34, 204 Remembrance of Things Past, 201 public opinion, 106, 107, 131–2 Radical, meaning of in Felix Holt, 100 recollection, 45 differentiated from memory, 134 and faith, 163–4 and the future, 47 and perception, 25–6 and prevision, 44–7 and remorse, 137 and the subconscious, 46 subjective intervention in, 134 Reid, Thomas, 211 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 211 Religion, of Humanity, 4, 8, 81, 128, 129–30, 135 Renan, Ernest, 160, 177 Ribot, Théodule A., 156 and George Henry Lewes, 156–7 L’hérédité, 156 Ricoeur, Paul, 6, 72, 95, 112 Risorgimento, 157 rituals, see communal memory Rogers, Samuel, 18, 199 Pleasures of Memory, 18, 199 Romola (Romola), 72–3, 79–83, 87, 89–91, 95 rootedness, psychological, and geological rootedness, 28–9, 216 Rosenberg, John, D., 75, 94, 200, 207 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 150 Rothblatt, Sheldon, 191, 193

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Royce, Josiah, 159 Ruskin, John, 29, 35, 73, 205 The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 29, 205 Saint-Simonians, 75 Sarti, Caterina (‘Mr Gilfil’s LoveStory’), 32–3, 36–7 Savonarola, Girolamo (Rimola), 69, 80, 81, 85–8, 167 Scott, Sir Walter, 41 self articulation of, 48–9 and sequence, 65–7 fragmentary, 41, 48–9, 50–3, 65 sense of, 44, 51, 54, 64–7 sources of, 42, 51 and subconscious, 53 and the unconscious, 65–6 Self-Help (Samuel Smiles), 98 Shaffer, Elinor, 163 Shakespeare, William, 102 Shuttleworth, Sally, 8, 202, 204 Sidgwick, Henry, 23 The Method of Ethics, 23 Smith, Adam, 128, 132 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 210, 211 Spencer, Herbert, 9–10, 11, 18–19, 20, 64, 75, 79, 83, 93, 213, 214 An Autobiography, 213 The First Principles, 200 Principles of Ethics, 204 Principles of Psychology, 19, 23, 59, 75, 200, 201; reviewed by G. H. Lewes, 198 Spinoza, 52, 135, 203 Ethics, 135 Strauss, David Friedrich, 139, 140, 187 Life of Jesus, 139, 212 Stuart, Dugald, 20 subconscious, the, 43, 64, 202 and bodily memory, 56 and moral agency, 55–7 and recollection, 46

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and sense of self, 53 Sully, James, 43 ‘Illusions of Memory’ (Cornhill Magazine), 199 ‘[Ribot’s] Les Maladies de la Mémoire’ (Mind), 199 sympathy, 48, 80 its formation, 125, 128, 137–9 its impersonal nature, 128 see also memory and ‘memories of human sympathy’ Talmud, 161, 171 Taylor, Charles, 41 Terdiman, Richard, 6, 15 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 11, 198 trauma, see memory Tulliver, Maggie (The Mill on the Floss), 3, 49–59, 64, 68, 104, 128, 203–4 Tylor, Edward, 143 unconscious, the, 43, 202 and bodily memory, 56 and moral judgement, 56–7 and sense of self, 65 Utilitarianism, 185, 193 Vincent, John, 106 Virgil, 102 Warnock, Mary, 6, 10, 201 Westminster Review, 190 White, Hayden, 6 Whitney, W. D., 200 Wilde, Oscar, 48 see also Gray, Dorian Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10 Wordsworth, William, 6, 10, 49, 57, 67, 77, 91–2, 132–3, 150–1, 202 The Prelude, 77, 132 working men in Felix Holt, 99, 105, 106, 111–20 its formation, 115–6 Young, Robert, 178

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Index