[In the following essay, Holtze examines Aristotelian tragic influences in Adam Bede and the errors or “hamartia” committed by Adam, Arthur, and Hetty.]

In 1855 George Eliot wrote a review entitled “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister” in which she concludes:

... the tragedian may take for his subject the most hideous passions if they serve as the background for some divine deed of tenderness or heroism, and so the novelist may place before us every aspect of human life where there is some trait of love, or endurance, or helplessness to call forth our best sympathies.¹

Eliot was defending the morality of Goethe's work at a time before she herself became a novelist. When she began to write fiction two years later, her work reflected some of the ideas suggested in the earlier review: that the proper subject matter for novels is all human life, the common as well as the noble; that the novel can, and should, teach moral lessons; and that there is a kinship between the genres of novel and tragedy.

The last idea is perhaps the most striking. Nevertheless, again and again, in both her letters and her novels, Eliot suggests that she is writing tragedy: “And again, it is my way, (rather too much so perhaps) to urge the human sanctities through tragedy—through pity and terror as well as admiration and delights.”² No one can read these carefully chosen words without thinking of Aristotle, and how different in form are the novels of Eliot and the plays of the three great Greek dramatists. The subject matter is also different. Eliot's insistence upon the tragedy of common experience does not measure up to the standard of magnitude Aristotle sets by which the protagonist must be a hero or ruler, someone who involves a multitude of others in his fall. Nevertheless, in her first fiction, Amos Barton, Eliot dares to explain the actions of the frivolous, superficial Countess Czerlaski by quoting a Greek couplet from Sophocles (ch. 4), and on the next page speaks of “the tragedy … of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes …” (ch. 5). Eliot's biographer, Gordon Haight, lists the classical tragedies she read in Greek between 1855 and 1858: Antigone, Ajax, the Oedipus trilogy, Electra, Philoctetes, and the Oresteia.³ In addition, Eliot was primarily concerned with moral problems; she shows a kind of suffering that is not an end in itself, but pain through which the sufferer gains knowledge about himself and his relationship with others.⁴

In the year she was reading the three plays of the Oresteia, George Eliot was writing her first full-length novel, Adam Bede. The novel examines the relationships of three characters: Adam of the title, an upright carpenter; Arthur Donnithorne, a young gentleman with expectations; and the pretty, frivolous girl they both love, Hetty Sorrel. Each of these three makes mistakes and suffers unforeseen consequences. At the beginning of Adam Bede, Eliot says Nature is “the great tragic dramatist” (ch. 4). How closely does she allow her three protagonists, each more a child of the rural countryside than a hero of classical times, to conform to the Aristotelian model for tragedy?

In addition to requiring a hero of some stature who acts in a plot with reversal and recognition, Aristotle says that “the change in the hero's fortunes must be … from happiness to misery; and the cause of it must lie not in any depravity, but in some great error on his part …”⁵ The word translated as “error” is hamartia. I take this word to mean “mistake” rather than “sin” or “culpable offence,” a “mental error” which often (but not necessarily) leads to a “wrong action” (hamartêma), committed in ignorance of its objects, its circumstances, or its consequences.⁶ All three of Eliot's protagonists make a mental error that later results in wrong actions, which in turn have disastrous and far-reaching effects. Each of the three is predisposed to make the mistake because each in a different way takes too little care for the people close to him. Arthur, the young squire, is self-indulgent, presuming that he can please himself without taking responsibility for his actions; Adam is self-assured, setting an inflexible and too harsh standard by which he judges himself and others; and Hetty is self-absorbed, a girl who spends hours in her bed-chamber in front of her mirror, “bent on her peculiar form of worship” (ch. 15).

Hetty is by far the least Aristotelian of the three. She is lovely, with “a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks” (ch. 7), and emptyheaded. “A simple farmer's girl, to whom a gentleman with a white hand was dazzling as an Olympian god” (ch. 9), she feels, and reacts, but does not think. She errs when she thinks Arthur will marry her, take her out of the dairy at Hall Farm, and dress her in lace and linen. Her hamartia becomes hamartêma when she and Arthur begin their dalliance. Hetty is a fatal combination of weakness and pride when she leaves her home in an attempt to escape the shame of bearing Arthur's illegitimate child. The child, born during her wandering, dies of neglect and exposure, but only the court, which sentences her to death, blames more than pities Hetty. When she is awaiting execution and eager for forgiveness from Adam and her family, Hetty still is capable of only a limited understanding of responsibility and consequences. Any knowledge Hetty may have gained from her suffering is of a very limited sort, and both her own suffering and the suffering she causes others are out of all proportion to her mistake, the dream of becoming gentry. Her suffering from the time she sets out to find Arthur until her stay of execution is so relentless, so disproportionate that pity alone results. George Eliot foreshadows Hetty's fate in a metaphor that combines the terrible fates of Arachne and Glauce:

it is too painful to think that she is a woman, with a woman's destiny before her—a woman spinning in young ignorance a light web of folly and vain hopes which may one day close round her and press upon her, a rancorous poisoned garment, changing all at once her fluttering, trivial butterfly sensations into a life of deep human anguish. (ch. 22)

Adam Bede is more promising material for a tragic protagonist. Even though he does not have the stature of a king, Adam is idealized, “tall, upright, clever, brave Adam Bede” (ch. 9). He is considerably more substantial than any of the protagonists in the earlier Scenes of Clerical Life. In addition, Eliot was so convinced of the pervasive “tragedy of human life” (ch. 33), and of the inextricable nature of evil and pain that she felt the tragedy affecting the most lowly human beings inevitably affected many others. No tragedy could be limited or contained. Evil, like spilled ink, spread and stained all it touched. Mr. Irwine tells Adam:

There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can’t isolate yourself and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease. (ch. 41)

Adam's tragedy—or even Hetty's—is more than personal.

Adam's hamartia is his self-assured inflexibility: he sets harsh standards by which he judges himself and others, and refuses to change his opinions. He early recognizes this rigidity in himself: “But it isn’t my way to be see-saw about anything: I think my fault lies th’ other way. When I’ve said a thing, if it’s only to myself, it’s hard for me to go back” (ch. 16). Most commentators agree with Adam, and some even use the weighted word “flaw” to describe his failing.⁷

Another word charged with meaning in Eliot's works is “error.” “Error” is a common translation for hamartia, a closer translation than “flaw,” and George Eliot uses it at significant points to describe Adam's (and Arthur Donnithorne's) mistaken thoughts and deeds. Before the climactic chance meeting of Adam and Arthur in the woods, the narrator pauses to discuss Adam's character:

Perhaps here lay the secret of the hardness he had accused himself of: he had too little fellow-feeling with the weakness that errs in spite of foreseen consequences. Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to get enough patience and charity towards our stumbling, falling companions in the long and changeful journey? And there is but one way in which a strong determined soul can learn it—by getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he must share not only the outward consequence of their error, but their inward suffering. (ch. 19)

Adam begins to learn this lesson through grieving over his father's death, but it is in his relationships with Arthur Donnithorne and Hetty Sorrel that the real testing comes.

At the mid-point of the novel's fifty-six chapters, George Eliot calls Chapter 27 “A Crisis.” Adam, walking home from work, surprises Arthur and Hetty in the woods and sees their parting kiss. Adam's trust in two of the people he cared about most is severely shaken. He refuses to be taken in by the cavalier Arthur's explanation. He knows “what isn’t honest does come t’ harm” and forces Arthur to acknowledge the wrongful nature of his conduct. Nevertheless, he remains deceived by both Arthur and Hetty about the exact nature of their flirtation despite considerable evidence to the contrary. He wants to believe Arthur is more like himself than unlike, capable of honorable actions and incapable of deceitful ones; he wants to believe Hetty really loves him. He continues under both misconceptions until Mr. Irwine stuns him with the news that Hetty has been imprisoned, charged with murdering her newborn child (ch. 39). There is both reversal and recognition in Chapter 39, a coincidence of plot admired by Aristotle when it was also probable and necessary.⁸ Adam recognizes the truth about the characters and actions of Arthur and Hetty. There is also the actual reversal of his emotional fortune when all hope of marriage to Hetty is given up forever, and the imminent reversal of his professional fortunes, since neither he nor Hetty's family at Hall Farm could continue to work for the man responsible for such disgrace.

Chapters 41 and 42 continue Adam's education in sorrow. He reaches the nadir of his pain when he groans, “… I thought she loved me … and was good …” (ch. 42). At this point he also recognizes that he cannot allow himself the luxury of being an Orestes. His first reaction to the news of Hetty's misdeeds was a wish to make Arthur suffer: “I’ll make him go and look at her misery—he shall look at her till he can’t forget it—it shall follow him night and day—as long as he lives it shall follow him—he shan’t escape wi’ lies this time—I’ll fetch him, I’ll drag him myself” (ch. 39). Adam, however, listens to Mr. Irwine, who says, “It is not for us men to apportion the shares of moral guilt and retribution” (ch. 41). He passes by the opportunity to cause further evil by exacting revenge on Arthur Donnithorne, and somehow reconciles himself to the great waste and unhappiness that cannot be changed or ameliorated. In doing so, Adam changes and grows. George Eliot describes the process as “a regeneration, the initiation into a new state”: “Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity” (ch. 42).

Awe and pity are not the equivalents of Aristotle's pity and fear, but Adam is not the one of the three protagonists whose intellectual forebearers are most Hellenic. That one is Arthur Donnithorne. Early in the novel he is compared to the planet Jupiter (ch. 5) and an Olympian god (ch. 9); he swears “by Jove” (ch. 5), and feels “very heroic” (ch. 12). Those who meet this very engaging young man think well of him, but like the Athenians with Alcibiades, Mrs. Irwine uses criteria that are too superficial when she says, “You’ll never persuade me that I can’t tell what men are by their outsides” (ch. 5).

Certainly Arthur's “outsides” are exceptionally attractive. The narrator, however, does not fall into the simplistic mistake of Mrs. Irwine:

We use round, general, gentlemanly epithets about a young man of birth and fortune; and ladies, with that fine intuition which is the distinguishing attribute of their sex, see at once that he is “nice.” The chances are that he will go through life without scandalizing anyone; a seaworthy vessel that no one would refuse to insure. Ships, certainly, are liable to casualties, which sometimes make terribly evident some flaw in their construction that would never have been discoverable in smooth water; and many a “good fellow”, through a disastrous combination of circumstances, has undergone a like betrayal.

But we have no fair ground for entertaining unfavorable auguries concerning Arthur Donnithorne. … (ch. 12)

So surrounded by epithets and auguries, George Eliot obliquely suggests that Arthur, like the ship, may hide some “flaw.” That flaw combines with circumstance⁹ to thrust Arthur into the tragedy that will affect so many in Hayslope and set Arthur himself on the path from koros to hubris, atê, and nemesis.

Arthur has a more than ample share of self-satisfaction (koros) from the beginning. He sees himself as a fine fellow; but he is too self-indulgent, and he presumes to amuse himself without admitting the responsibility for his actions. Arthur's hamartia is his belief that there are no consequences of his flirtation with Hetty beyond his ability to make right. He continues under this misapprehension until almost the end of the novel. Because of Eliot's interest in the psychology of the character of Arthur Donnithorne, the reader sees much of Arthur's struggles against temptation and his persistent, mistaken belief that no serious harm can result (hamartia); the reader sees comparatively little of Arthur and Hetty together (hamartêma).

Arthur does not continue in his error for lack of warnings. He himself is uneasy about his inability to resist seeing Hetty. Arthur seeks to soothe his conscience by visiting the Rector, Mr. Irwine, an easy remedy because, as the narrator explains, “We take a less gloomy view of our errors now our father confessor listens to us over his egg and coffee” (ch. 16). On the way, Arthur chances to meet Adam and the two talk about temptation. Arthur says, “We may determine not to gather cherries and keep our hands sturdily in our pockets, but we can’t prevent our mouths from watering” (ch. 16). Adam the realist replies that it is no use looking upon life as if it were the Treddleston Fair, an array of treats waiting to be chosen. That, however, is exactly how Arthur has been acting, and he repeatedly overestimates his ability to keep his hands sturdily in his pockets.

Arthur's second, stronger warning follows immediately. He finds the Rector at breakfast with the first volume of the Foulis Aeschylus at his elbow (ch. 16). Mr. Irwine tells Arthur that he always likes to have a “favorite book” available at the breakfast hour. The conversation between the two men is heavy with irony. Mr. Irwine thinks that mornings are conducive to seeing things more clearly, but he does not see Arthur's guilty secret. Arthur, on his part, tells his mentor that, “It was a tempting morning for a ride before breakfast,” but he cannot bring himself to confess what his real temptation is. Arthur says, “But I don’t think a knowledge of the classics is a pressing want to a country gentleman.” He will soon feel the lack of the knowledge he might have gotten from Mr. Irwine, whom the narrator describes as “little better than a pagan!” (ch. 17). Even Arthur winces when the Rector tells him that his godmother, Mrs. Irwine, has been talking about the kind of woman he might marry; the whole conversation has had the “disagreeable effect of a sinister omen” (ch. 16). Mr. Irwine himself reminds Arthur that the chorus in the Prometheus warns against imprudent marriages. When Arthur tries to turn the conversation to generalized comments about good intentions somehow gone astray, Mr. Irwine refuses to excuse the hypothetical wrongdoer with an argument reminiscent of Eliot's comments on the ship at harbor with an undetected flaw: “A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action.” When Arthur asks if Mr. Irwine thinks the man who struggles against temptation is as bad as the man who never tries to resist, Mr. Irwine answers:

No, certainly; I pity him in proportion to his struggles, for they foreshadow the inward suffering which is the worst form of Nemesis. Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. (ch. 16)

Arthur passes up the chance to confess his temptation. The next time the two men talk, Mr. Irwine again refers to Greek tragedy: “Ah, my boy, it is not only woman's love that is [aperotos eros,] as old Aeschylus calls it. There’s plenty of ‘unloving love’ in the world of a masculine kind” (ch. 22). By this time Eliot does not need to show us Arthur wince: the reader knows that when Hetty dressed that same day for the birthday feast, she concealed under her clothes the enamel and gold locket Arthur had given her.

Discovery of the liaison occurs when Adam happens upon the lovers kissing in the wood. Hetty hurries away, but Arthur is left to confront Adam. Arthur, unaware that Adam loves Hetty, is sure that he can pass off the incident. He is full of careless self-confidence, but when Adam demands an explanation, Arthur passes from koros to hubris in his actions toward his loyal friend and retainer: “A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side, and in the confusion of his irritation and alarm there entered the feeling that a man to whom he had shown so much favor as to Adam was not in a position to criticize his conduct” (ch. 27). In quick succession Arthur realizes Adam has silently loved Hetty, recognizes his own conduct as ignoble, and comes to “regard Adam's suffering as not merely a consequence, but an element of his error.” Neither Adam nor Arthur can contain such overwhelming emotions for long, and the two men fight until Arthur is knocked unconscious.

The physical confrontation discharges some of the tension between the two men but removes none of the problems. Arthur finds himself “in the wretched position of an open, generous man who has committed an error which makes deception seem a necessity” (ch. 28). He deliberately deludes Adam about the extent to which he and Hetty are involved; he adopts a self-serving attitude that goes so far as to presume to forgive Adam for Adam's injustice to him. Later, in the farewell letter Adam forces him to write to Hetty, he talks of his wrong and his fault, but only in the most complacent language (ch. 31). The reader feels that, in his heart, Arthur is sure that he suffers the most, gives up the most, and in doing so is acting with noblesse oblige. It is true that his own conscience and Adam's refusal to shake hands bother him, but not enough: “Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences—out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused: There is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon” (ch. 29).

Arthur moves from hubris to atê when he still refuses to recognize the irrevocable nature of his wrongdoing. He balms his conscience by dreaming of the favors he can bestow upon Hetty in future years and concludes, “So good comes out of evil.” Adam has already denied the validity of this specious doctrine, and will do so again later.¹⁰ Even the simple Mr. Poyser, as much as his fingers ached to hurry the harvest, would never work on a Sunday because “work on sacred days was a wicked thing” and “money got by such means would never prosper” (ch. 18). But Arthur moves and acts under the delusion that good can and will come from his mistakes, and continues under the influence of that delusion for a long time.

There is a terrible coercion in our deeds, which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver and then reconcile him to the change, for this reason—that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right. The action which before commission has been seen with that blended common sense and fresh untarnished feeling which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterwards with the lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike. Europe adjusts itself to a fait accompli, and so does an individual character—until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive retribution. (ch. 29)

The “convulsive retribution” overtakes Arthur last of the three protagonists. Hetty is already in prison and Adam sees what he had previously refused to see while Arthur is still lulled by Mr. Irwine's letter telling of Hetty's betrothal to Adam. In ignorance and dreaming of his future as beneficent squire, Arthur travels home to his grandfather's funeral. When he does think of “that affair last summer,” he dismisses it: “That was an ugly fault... but the future will make amends” (ch. 44).

When Arthur arrives at his estate and he reads Mr. Irwine's brief note, he, like Adam, experiences a simultaneous reversal and recognition. His ignorance of the consequences of his actions changes to knowledge, and at the same time all his dreams of playing the role of magnanimous squire on the estate he finally inherited are ruined. Adam is not Arthur's Nemesis, although more than once he threatened to take on that role. The magnitude of the suffering caused to Adam, Hetty, and all their relatives and friends at Hayslope is such that Nemesis now can forge a sword out of Arthur's own conscience. His subsequent actions—obtaining Hetty's pardon, going away for years—are actions finally motivated by what will most ease the insupportable situations of those he has hurt. He is no longer trying to appear good; he is no longer concerned with himself. Arthur the squire is the king of Hayslope. Only by going far away and leaving Mr. Irwine to manage the estate does he prevent the further sorrow that would have been caused if the Poysers and the Bedes had felt compelled by honor to leave his lands.

Arthur stays away for seven long years. He returns tired and ill. He is still troubled by his Nemesis. The novel closes with Adam telling Dinah, his wife, what Arthur has said about Hetty:

“The first thing he said to me, when we’d got hold o’ one another's hands was, ‘I could never do anything for her, Adam—she lived long enough for all the suffering—and I’d thought so of the time when I might do something for her. But you told me the truth when you said to me once, “There’s a sort of wrong that can never be made up for.”’” (Epilogue)

Arthur has learned through suffering, just as the chorus in the Agamemnon says man must.¹¹ But the lesson that “There’s a sort of wrong that can never be made up for” is not the only thing Arthur learns. The reader comes away with the impression that this older Arthur will care less about looking good and more about being good. Arthur, and Adam, and even perhaps Hetty learn to look outside themselves. If evil is to be avoided as much as possible, man must learn sympathy for his fellow human beings. Man must have sympathy and seek to do right, not because he will be rewarded, but because it is right. George Eliot wished her novels to teach moral lessons. In the same year she published Adam Bede, she wrote to a friend:

If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally. I have had heart-cutting experience that opinions are a poor cement between human souls; and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.¹²

The genre in which Eliot worked is, like Homeric epic, more expansive than tragedy. The novel Adam Bede, for example, contains material for more than one dramatic tragedy. Eliot also had more than one literary antecedent in mind, as parallels to Miltonic epic and the pastoral tradition demonstrate.¹³ Nevertheless, the classical allusions, the vocabulary of the Poetics, and the pattern of Adam's and Arthur's actions make comparisons to tragedy compelling. Adam Bede is tragedy if a noble carpenter or a frivolous country squire who experiences a reversal of fortune because of a hamartia is sufficiently noble to be a tragic protagonist. It is tragedy without actors or a stage, without the unities of time, place, and action, without a chorus. It is tragedy in so far as Eliot sought, like the Greeks, to exalt the nobility of man and show that suffering may bring wisdom. And for Eliot, at this early point in her development as a novelist, the wisdom taught by suffering is a moral truth outside the limits of conventional religion, a sympathy and love for all “struggling erring human creatures.”

Notes

1. “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister,” reprinted from the Leader, VI (21 July, 1855), 703 in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York, 1963), p. 146.

2. In the manuscript, the word “urge” replaced “teach,” which was crossed out. “Letter to Frederic Harrison,” London, 15 August [1866], in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon Haight (New Haven, Conn., 1954-55), IV, 301.

3. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), p. 195. For an extensive review of George Eliot's use of Greek and Latin literature, see Vernon Rendall, “George Eliot and the Classics,” Notes and Queries, 192 (13 and 27 December, 1947), 544-46, 564-65; and Notes and Queries, 193 (3 April, 26 June 1948), 148-49, 272-74, reprinted in A Century of George Eliot Criticism, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston, 1965), pp. 215ff.

4. See “The Unheroic Tragedy” and following chapters in Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot (New York, 1959; rpt. 1963); Felicia Bonaparte, Will and Destiny: Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot's Novels (New York, 1975); and William E. Buckler, “Memory, Morality and the Tragic Vision in the Early Novels of George Eliot,” in The English Novel in the Nineteenth Century: Essays on the Literary Mediation of Human Values, ed. George Gordin (Urbana, Ill., 1972), pp. 145-63.

5. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and tr. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941; rpt. 1966), 1453a13-16.

6. See Donald Stump, “Sidney's Concept of Tragedy and the Function of Hamartia in the Arcadia,” Ph.D. Diss. (Cornell University, 1978), pp. 146-56.

7. See R. T. Jones, A Critical Commentary on George Eliot's ‘Adam Bede’ (New York, 1968), p. 9: “This is the flaw (not a fatal one) in Adam's innocence: his confidence that he is righteous and that it is not too hard for anyone to be so. …” See also Hardy, p. 38: “In Adam, as later in Dorothea, egoism is no less a flaw which tragedy has to mend because it happens to take the form of a vision of duty. …”

8. See Poetics, 1452a22-b13. Reversal is translated “Peripety” and recognition “Discovery” by McKeon. Adam Bede's recognition is more psychological than the examples mentioned by Aristotle, which usually involve disguised identities, tokens, plain facts, and the like.

9. See The Mill on the Floss, Bk. 6, ch. 6: “For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. ‘Character,’ says Novalis in one of his questionable aphorisms ‘—character is destiny.’ But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet's having married Ophelia and got through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies and some moody sarcasms towards the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.”

10. Adam to Arthur: “It takes the taste out o’ my mouth for things, when I know I should have a heavy conscience after ’em. I’ve seen pretty clear, ever since I could cast up a sum as you can never do what’s wrong without breeding sin and trouble more than you can ever see. It’s like a bit o’ bad workmanship—you never see th’ end o’ the mischief it’ll do” (ch. 16).

    Adam to Arthur: “I don’t know what you mean by flirting, … but if you mean behaving to a woman as if you loved her, and yet not loving her all the while, I say that’s not th’ action of an honest man, and what isn’t honest does come t’ harm” (ch. 27).

    Adam to Bartle Massey: “Good come out of it! … That doesn’t alter th’ evil: her ruin can’t be undone. I hate that talk o’ people, as if there was a way o’ making amends for everything. They’d more need be brought to see as the wrong they do can never be altered. When a man's spoiled his fellow-creatur's life, he’s no right to comfort himself with thinking good may come out of it. Somebody else's good doesn’t alter her shame and misery” (ch. 46).

    Adam to Arthur: “A man should make sacrifices to keep clear of doing a wrong; sacrifices won’t undo it when it’s done. When people's feelings have got a deadly wound, they can’t be cured with favours” (ch. 48).

11. See Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ed. and tr. Richmond Lattimore in Greek Tragedies, Vol. I (Chicago, 1960), 11. 176-83:

    Zeus, who guided men to think,
    who has laid it down that wisdom
    comes alone through suffering.
    Still there drips in sleep against the heart
    grief of memory; against
    our pleasure we are temperate.
    From the gods who sit in grandeur
    grace comes somehow violent.

12. “Letter to Charles Bray,” Wandsworth, 5 July 1859, in The George Eliot Letters, III, 110-11.

13. See “Pastoralism and the Justification of Suffering: Adam Bede,” in U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 89-127.