In Chapter 21 of Adam Bede, the narrator remarks upon the quiet “drama” of three laborers learning to read: “It was almost as if three rough animals were making humble efforts to learn how they might become human” (281). Commentators on Eliot's novel frequently single out this evocation of an obscure struggle against mystery and dispossession: it has “unmistakably the quality of an allegorical panel,” as one critic remarks.¹ But a tribute to the humanizing power of literacy is curiously discordant in a work which so strenuously insists on the inadequacies of formal education. Adam, after all, is not made any more human by his literacy: that hopeful view is gently parodied in Bartle Massey's lament that the catastrophe “might never have happened,” if Adam, “poor fellow,” had “gone into the higher branches” of mathematics (463). Moral education—that which makes one truly human—rests instead on the “lesson” of sympathy, which is transacted in a very different language, under the silent, often inchoate tutelage of suffering. “That is a long and hard lesson,” the narrator remarks after Thias Bede's funeral, “and Adam had at present only learned the alphabet of it in his father's sudden death” (255). Formal literacy is thus subordinated to a language whose “alphabet” has no phonic counterpart, nor any established script.

In an earlier epoch, such language was the province of religious doctrine and ceremony. But for Eliot, it is the novelist who must take up the burden of representing the ineffable—of rendering in words the experience of suffering and moral redemption. Eliot's moral design in Adam Bede thus offers peculiar challenges to the novelist. If, as the novel eloquently insists, what is most precious in human experience is that which cannot be articulated—“something unspeakably great and beautiful”—then the largest significance of formal education and eloquence, whether spoken or written, will be ironic. Eloquence, like literacy, calls attention to the complexity and significance of that which it cannot adequately articulate. Although it represents a uniquely human power, literacy thus confirms in addition a pronounced bond between man and “rough animals.” Indeed, what might seem one of the novel's more hackneyed motifs, the uncannily precocious dog population of Hayslope, is but one facet of Eliot's sustained mediation upon the powers and limits of human expression. In the dogs, Eliot portrays creatures who seem to possess a rudimentary inner life, but who, since they lack speech, must struggle to find an outlet for that life in other forms of expression. Whatever their sentimental value, “the dumb creatures,” as Mrs. Poyser calls them, thus assume the role of mute choric figures offering oblique commentary on the eminently human struggle to find an adequate language for feeling. That human predicament is most obviously embodied in the form of Adam's dog Gyp, the devoted companion who lacks a tail, and is thus “destitute of that vehicle for his emotions.”

In stressing the limits of human expression, however, Eliot also engages in a Carlylean celebration of the ineffable that tends to render eloquence inherently suspect. If what is most truly and richly “human” are those states of mind that resist articulation, then those who trust to eloquence or “notions” to represent their experience are not only doomed to frustration; they are destined to seem emotionally impoverished, insufficiently responsive to the integrity of human feeling, which ultimately can be respected only by silence. Conversely, utterance which is inarticulate and incoherent may confirm the authority of the feeling it cannot directly express. Gyp's missing tail, after all, makes its own eloquence felt in the consequent pathos of Gyp's struggle to express his emotions, a struggle whose intensity humanizes him beyond any other dog in the novel. With a tail, Gyp would be less emphatically the object of “fellow-feeling.” The inability to articulate one's most profound feelings and thoughts may be an obstacle to heightened consciousness—as Eliot would obviously have it in the case of Hetty Sorrel; yet the same failure may also be evidence of the depth of one's feelings, and thus of one's capacity for sympathy.

Such a stance obviously places peculiar and strenuous burdens on the novelist. More precisely, the mistrust of eloquence lends extraordinary pressure to the problematics of realistic representation. Eliot's rejection of religious doctrine, which impels her appeal to the authority of experience, also renders morally (not merely ontologically) suspect the reliance on language to conjure up “experience” as a realm of immediate, external presence. This tension informs a feature of Adam Bede often explained away as an awkward device of the inexperienced novelist: the reliance on historical present, which is frequently conjoined with exhortations that the reader “see” the scenes being described. Eliot's predicament as a narrator, along with the moral problematic informing it, is thus projected with particular complexity in the figure of Dinah Morris. Celebrated as the vehicle of a profound sympathetic understanding, Dinah is effectively silenced after her marriage to Adam, when she must renounce her preaching. The ending is frequently criticized as a failure of nerve, a capitulation to the pressures of novelistic convention and male sentiment.² But however one accounts for the outcome, Dinah's silencing articulates the novel's equivocal view of eloquence. As an evangelical preacher, Dinah is of all the characters the most vulnerable to the suspicion of eloquence; she is also the most obvious surrogate of a novelist notorious for her moral commentary on the action she narrates. The logic which silences Dinah is central to a novel which, in its effort to faithfully represent the complexities of moral experience, is in effect constantly trying to write itself into silence.

Jane Welsh Carlyle, writing to the as-yet-unknown author of Adam Bede in 1859, praised the novel in these words:

In truth, it is a beautiful most human Book! Every Dog in it, not to say every man woman and child in it, is brought home to one's “business and bosom,” an individual fellow-creature! (Eliot Letters III: 18)

The canine population of Hayslope may recall the devoted hounds that are a sentimental fixture of Victorian genre painting. But Mrs. Carlyle—no mere sentimentalist—here seizes upon a central concern of the novel. The peculiar emotional sensibility of Hayslope dogs (notable even by mid-Victorian standards) places them within Eliot's sustained exploration of what it means to be a “fellow-creature.” Their choric role is established in the novel's opening chapter, where Adam's dog Gyp alerts us to the distinctive features of his master's voice. Lest we miss the connection, Seth Bede is there to call it to our attention. “Thee’st like thy dog Gyp,” he tells Adam, “thee bark’st at me sometimes, but … thee allays lic’st my hand after.” Gyp's subsequent entrance offers the narrator occasion to elaborate the analogy:

... no sooner did Adam put his ruler in his pocket, and begin to twist his apron round his waist, then Gyp ran forward and looked up in his master's face with patient expectation. If Gyp had had a tail he would doubtless have wagged it, but being destitute of that vehicle for his emotions, he was like many other wordly personages, destined to appear more phlegmatic than nature had made him.

“What! Art ready for the basket, eh, Gyp?” said Adam, with the same gentle modulation of voice as when he spoke to Seth.

Gyp jumped and made a short bark, as much as to say, “Of course.” Poor fellow, he had not a great range of expression. (54)

The narrator's commiseration offers a coy but nonetheless suggestive gloss on the distinct limits to Adam's own “range of expression.” Adam conveys his rigid sense of duty with a ready eloquence, both in his impatient attack on wiry Ben's mockery, and in his lengthy, impromptu credo—“sarmunt,” Ben calls it—extolling a religion of hard work. The forthright vehemence of Adam's speech is faithful to his Carlylean creed, but, as Gyp's presence emphasizes, it allows little outlet for an awkward tenderness in his character that is suggested by his words to Seth and Gyp. Adam's subsequent ordeal softens his “iron will” and nurtures his tenderness into a richer and more comprehensive sympathy. That moral development is charted in a struggle to find a more adequate vehicle for his more complex emotions. Ultimately, he arrives at a new form of eloquence that can acknowledge the claims not only of personal duty but of human frailty.

Adam's growth is paradigmatic of the novel's moral action, in which the central characters undergo a kind of Feuerbachian baptism: through suffering, they are led to “a regeneration, the initiation into a new state,” which Eliot summarizes as the experience of sympathy, “the one poor word that contains all our best insight and our best love” (531).³ This “lesson,” as the narrator describes it, involves the mastery of a new form of language, and in each of the central characters the new understanding is confirmed by a shift in patterns of speech. This transformation is most starkly presented in the figure of Hetty, whose persistent silence through most of the novel reflects her utter incapacity for sympathetic participation in the world around her. Adam's range of expression may be limited, but Hetty's mute egoism is a powerful emblem of her isolation from other human beings. During her bewildered flight from the exposure of her pregnancy, the narrator's imagery reduces her being almost to the level of a frightened animal; after her arrest, she can only reconfirm her humanity by being brought to speak, to confess her responsibility in a human moral order.

Hetty's ordeal confirms the narrator's tribute to Bartle Massey's students: the mastery of language signifies a new level of humanity. Elsewhere, however, enlarged moral awareness is confirmed by the faltering of a former eloquence. Arthur Donnithorne is Hetty's partner in egoism and vanity, but by virtue of his sex and social position he embodies in more complex fashion the relation between insight and eloquence. Arthur is rarely at a loss for words, but his speech, even in his patronizing tenderness towards Hetty, is a tissue of superficial and evasive pleasantries, the language of a gentleman eager to maintain the regard of himself and others. Of his private thoughts, his vague moral qualms and self-mistrust, he cannot bring himself to speak, even with Mr. Irwine. Arthur's eventual acknowledgment of responsibility obviously parallels Hetty's confession, but since his disgrace has destroyed the foundations of his public rhetoric, he can only convey his new insight through a faltering of his former eloquence, as he struggles to master a vocabulary of sincerity he has never before called upon.

Adam's forthright speech—“I speak plain, sir, but I can’t speak any other way” (207)—jars the decorum sustained in Arthur's urbane evasions. But Adam's frankness is the expression of an unyielding sense of duty that similarly limits the capacity to acknowledge the complexities of moral experience. His eloquence, after all, draws its conception of human experience from arithmetic: “Life's a reckoning we can’t make twice over; there’s no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right” (247). This trope chimes with Eliot's insistence on the irrevocability of action, but it also represents a stance that cannot easily adapt to unexpected complexity in human experience.⁴ As suffering calls into question the adequacy of Adam's moral arithmetic, his eloquence, like Arthur's, begins to falter. With the discovery that Hetty has murdered her infant, his rigid, “hard” speech finally gives way to broken sobs, and he vows to Bartle Massey, ”I’ll never be hard again.” Finally, “with hesitating gentleness,” he even manages to forgive Arthur (455, 475, 516).

Dinah at first glance stands outside this pattern: her immense fund of ready sympathy seems to require no correction or expansion. Yet she, too, ultimately enacts the pattern of faltering eloquence. Throughout most of the novel the conviction and support she derives from her sense of vocation are registered in the unwavering calm of her voice. Her appearance at Stoniton jail is typical: “There was no agitation visible in her, but a deep concentrated calmness, as if, even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support” (492). Even in response to Seth's declaration of love Dinah retains her composure, as the narrator quietly emphasizes: she replies “in her tender but calm treble notes” (79). Adam's presence alone disturbs this self-possession. Initially she greets him as she does Seth, “in her calm treble,” but under the scrutiny of Adam's “dark, penetrating glance” she abruptly experiences “for the first time in her life … a painful self-consciousness” (163). As the novel approaches its close, this self-consciousness infuses her voice. When Dinah visits Adam after her night in the prison with Hetty, she recalls their first meeting, and speaks with “a trembling in her clear voice” (501). Later at the farm, when the conversation turns to her future, she speaks, “trying to be quite calm”; with Adam in the cottage, she is “trembling, but trying to be calm;” when he finally proposes, even her tears are “trembling” in response (501, 523, 536).

Dinah's peculiar susceptibility to Adam may seem the stuff of those “silly novels by lady novelists” that Eliot attacked. Still, the motif answers to a more strenuous moral design: Eliot clearly wants to enrich Dinah's character by complicating the forces that govern her single-minded existence. Yet this complication is prepared from the very outset as a resistance to Dinah's vocation, which is made to seem—like Adam's very different sense of vocation—“hard” and peremptory in its demands. So receptive to the divine Word that she strives to convey to her listeners, Dinah is less responsive to the claims of more mundane human needs. Mrs. Poyser seizes upon this theme in exasperation at her inability to persuade Dinah to remain with her relatives in Loamshire: “I might as well talk to the running brook and tell it to stand still” (123). Shortly afterwards, Irwine's conversation with Dinah prompts a similar analogy: “he must be a miserable prig who would act the pedagogue here,” Irwine thinks, “one might as well go and lecture the trees for growing in their own shape” (136). While they pay tribute to the integrity of Dinah's vocation, both judgments also align that vocation with the profoundly equivocal character of nature itself. The bounties of Dinah's sympathy, they suggest, are bound up with a spiritual allegiance that, like natural forces, may be utterly indifferent to human needs.⁵

The faltering of Dinah's eloquence thus comes to mark a resistance to the specific character of Dinah's vocation. Such resistance is hardly surprising, inasmuch as she is, after all, a Methodist preacher in a novel permeated by Eliot's own rejection of doctrinal religion. That rejection is most obviously embodied in Irwine, who is largely the mouthpiece of a remarkably secular sympathy. “If he had been in the habit of speaking plainly,” the narrator informs us,

he would perhaps have said that the only healthy form religion could take in such minds was that of certain dim but strong emotions, suffusing themselves as a hallowing influence over the family affections and neighbourly duties. He thought the custom of baptism more important than its doctrine, and that the religious benefits the peasant drew from the church where his fathers worshipped and the sacred piece of ground where they lay buried were but slightly dependent on a clear understanding of the Liturgy or the sermon. Clearly, the rector was not what is called in these days an “earnest” man. (112)

No, but he sounds remarkably like the novel's narrator—even to the gently patronizing note in “such minds.”⁶ Not surprisingly, Irwine's assessment is borne out by Lisbeth Bede's comic quibbles over interpretation of “the tex”—“thee allays makes a peck o’ thy own words out o’ a pint o’ the Bible's,” she tells Seth, Dinah's fellow Methodist (90). The same “healthy” independence of theology is exemplified in the community's church services, at which elderly worshippers who cannot read nonetheless sit contented, “following the service without any very clear comprehension indeed, but with a simple faith in its efficacy to ward off harm and bring blessing” (242).

Most importantly, however, this aversion to religious doctrine is seconded by Adam. His endorsement was evidently of some importance to Eliot: in the famous Chapter 17, the narrator offers it through the fiction of an encounter with Adam in old age—a cumbersome device, but one which exempts Adam's judgment from qualification by the novel's subsequent action:

I’ve seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un’, as religion's something else beside notions. It isn’t notions sets people doing the right thing—it’s feelings. … There’s things go on in the soul, and times when feelings come into you like a rushing mighty wind, as the scripture says, and part your life in two almost, so as you look back on yourself as if you was somebody else. Those are things as you can’t bottle up in a “do this” and “do that;” and I’ll go so far with the strongest Methodist ever you’ll find. That shows me there’s deep, speritial things in religion. You can’t make much out wi’ talking about it, but you feel it. (226-27)

Adam thus identifies Dinah's predicament: “talking about it” is precisely her vocation. In presenting her Eliot must confront the problem of separating Dinah's sympathetic power from her doctrinal language, and, more generally, of rendering her an authoritative moral presence in spite of the vocation by which she defines her very identity.

Throughout the novel Eliot strives to soften the force of Dinah's Methodism by obscuring its particulars—much in the way Irwine blurs Anglican theology. In every instance, moreover, the resistance to theology entails a check upon her preaching. Thus the narrator dwells on, for example, Dinah's respect for the “mystery” of feeling, which informs her instinctive understanding of when to remain silent, and the sympathetic power she conveys even in that silence. But the most subtle means to this avoidance of doctrine is the description of Dinah's speech as a form of music—most arrestingly, in the account of her sermon on the Hayslope common:

Hitherto the traveller had been chained to the spot against his will by the charm of Dinah's mellow treble tones, which had a variety of modulation like that of a fine instrument touched with the unconscious skill of musical instinct. The simple things she said seemed like novelties, as a melody strikes us when we hear it sung by the pure voice of a boyish chorister, the quiet depth of conviction; with which she spoke seemed in itself evidence for the truth of her message. (71)

This passage tellingly interrupts—and displaces—that portion of Dinah's sermon exhorting her audience to fear damnation. The musical analogy, along with the subsequent shift into oblique oration, directs the reader's attention away from Dinah's sermon to its effect on her listeners, and refers that effect not to the specific content of her words but to the very sound of her voice. Indeed, “the traveller”—“chained to the spot, against his will”—seems to be introduced here, as elsewhere in the novel, to further register the visceral, sensory impact of the scene before him.⁷

Music in this passage has a particular tactical value rarely noted in all the attention given to music in Eliot's novels.⁸ In the account of Dinah's preaching, music incarnates a critical norm much like that ratified in Pater's dictum that all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music (The Renaissance 106). Of course Eliot does not share Pater's formalism, but here she clearly does wish to minimize, in Pater's terms, “the mere matter” of Dinah's sermon. Dinah's preaching, the figure urges, resembles music in its expression of exquisite feeling unalloyed by discursive content. The force of Dinah's sympathetic “music” is subsequently borne out when she visits Lisbeth Bede in Chapter 10. Lisbeth's response to Dinah's “nice way o’ talkin’”—“it puts me i’ mind o’ the swallows” (157)—is exemplary in being scrupulously divorced from any clear comprehension of Dinah's “earnest prayer”:

Lisbeth, without grasping any distinct idea, without going through any course of religious emotions, felt a vague sense of goodness and love, and of something right lying underneath and beyond all this sorrowing life. She couldn’t understand the sorrow; but, for these moments, under the subduing influence of Dinah's spirit, she felt she must be patient and still. (159)

Dinah's presence thus comes to nourish a “simple faith” of rustic parishioners like Lisbeth, a faith that Eliot celebrates as a vital, enduring emotional sustenance abstracted from any distinctly religious conception. That celebration is a consummately Victorian tribute to continuity in the face of social and spiritual upheaval. It also exemplifies the submergence of theology in psychology that Eliot's critics typically refer to the influence of Feuerbach. On this point, however, Adam Bede seems equally responsive to Carlyle, whose example T. H. Huxley memorably summed up: “Sartor Resartus led me to know that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology.”⁹ The congruence is suggestive, because Eliot's tributes to such a “deep sense of religion” in Adam Bede articulate a dynamic strikingly akin to Carlyle's mistrust of self-consciousness. In the novel, a Carlylean aversion to “notions,” as Adam puts it, readily passes into an exaltation of precisely those states of mind that cannot be articulated, or even comprehended. Sympathy, that is, can only be understood as one of those intricate complexes of thought and emotion that must remain, in Eliot's resonant adjective, “unspeakable.” We’re once again recalled to Gyp's predicament, which embodies a similar gap between feeling and language. But rather than standing as a mark of human inadequacy, Gyp's missing tail begins to seem a sign of moral depth. Hence the unexpected complexity of a passage, for example, that describes Adam “waiting for [Hetty's] kind looks as a patient trembling dog waits for his master's eye to be turned upon him” (399). What purports merely to give words to the reader's disdain for Adam's blind devotion manages at the same time to pay tribute to the depth of his emotional being and to the pathos of a seemingly universal inability to find adequate language for one's feelings. As Kenny Marotta has remarked, “Precisely in Adam's inarticulateness is his closeness to the truth of feeling” (59). The opening chapter's juxtaposition of man and “the dumb creatures” in this sense establishes a kinship that is confirmed, rather than transcended, through moral education.

Early in the novel, Mrs. Poyser broaches this topic comically: “Oh, sir,” she tells Arthur, “the men are so tongue-tied—you’re forced partly to guess what they mean, as you do wi’ the dumb creaturs” (315). A few pages later her barb takes on a more somber resonance when Irwine defends the villagers from his mother's genteel contempt:

The common people are not quite so stupid as you imagine. The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in their presence. The man may be no better able than a beast to explain the influence the more refined beauty has on him, but he feels it. (320)

Dinah, however, most eloquently seizes upon the affinity; characteristically, she describes it not in condescension but as the recognition of a common bond. When Adam points out Gyp's friendly response to her presence—“he’s very slow to welcome strangers”—Dinah's own response confirms the emblematic moral resemblance between Adam and Gyp established in the opening chapter. “Poor dog,” she says, patting Gyp,

I’ve a strange feeling about the dumb things as if they wanted to speak, and it was a trouble to ’em because they couldn’t. I can’t help being sorry for the dogs always, though perhaps there’s no need. But they may well have more in them than they know how to make us understand, for we can’t say half what we feel, with all our words. (163)

Illuminated by Dinah's sympathy, “the dumb things” become emblems of a fundamental human predicament. In acknowledging the inadequacy of human speech, Dinah calls attention to the richness and complexity of the feelings it cannot articulate—to those experiences which, as she tells Irwine, “I could give no account of, for I could neither make a beginning nor ending of them in words” (135).

Yet this same insistence on the richness of the ineffable also redounds upon the authority of Dinah's vocation. Even more than the specific doctrinal content of her preaching, a suspicion of eloquence per se ultimately compromises Dinah's authority as an agent of moral redemption. If, as the novel continually suggests, the most profound moments of human experience are those that elude speech, then any verbal eloquence claiming moral authority becomes vaguely suspect. Adam's musings in Chapter 17 make this transition more explicitly. Initially Adam questions only the adequacy of “notions” as a source of motivation; after repeating his objection, however, he goes on to suggest that notions reflect a fundamental poverty of experience:

I’ve seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something else besides doctrines and notions. I look at it as if the doctrines was like finding names for your feelings, so as you can talk of ’em when you’ve never known ’em, just as a man may talk ’o tools when he knows their names, though he’s never so much as seen ’em, still less handled ’em. (226-27)

Dinah's preaching may aspire to the condition of music, but her words stubbornly continue to denote, to operate as the “names” Adam mistrusts. Under the pressure of Adam's sentiment, Dinah's preaching not only reinforces her status as an alien in Hayslope; it subtly undermines her claim to moral authority within the novel. The novel's epilogue, in which Dinah marries Adam and gives up her preaching, may ratify popular convention, but it also confirms the logic inherent in the novel's celebration of sympathy.

In her essay, “The Natural History of German Life,” Eliot emphasizes the significance of a rural community's dialect as a vehicle of continuity with the past. “This provincial style of the peasant is again, like his physique, a remnant of the history to which he clings with the utmost tenacity” (Essays 275). This essay is often cited as a rehearsal of the concerns that govern Adam Bede, and certainly the novel bears witness to Eliot's care in depicting this “historical language.” (Mr. Casson, for example, seems almost wholly designed to underscore Hayslope's linguistic integrity: “I’m not this countryman, you may tell by my tongue sir” [59].) In the novel, however, the history embodied in particular lives and a particular language is ultimately subordinated to the universal language of sympathy, “binding together your whole being past and present in one unspeakable vibration … blending your present joy with past sorrow and your present sorrow with all your past joy” (399). It is the inchoate, “unspeakable” experience of sympathy that links the unity of an individual life with the fundamental continuity of human existence itself. When Adam responds to the “language” of Hetty's face, or Dinah acknowledges the claims of Adam's love, a character submits to a knowledge beyond what words, or “notions,” can convey.¹⁰ And the novel seems to aim at a precisely congruent transformation in the reader, who would submit to the authority of a sympathy derived from participation in the experience of suffering represented in the novel. In this sense, the entire novel aspires constantly towards the condition of music—music, that is, conceived as the emblematic language of sympathy. If Eliot turned to the life and language of a rural community to affirm moral and spiritual continuity in the face of change, the novel discovers that assurance in a language beyond words.

In its celebration of the ineffable, Adam Bede complicates received views of Eliot's intellectual allegiance, and does so by locating in Dinah's vocation an image of the novelist's. “He who cannot express himself is a slave,” writes Feuerbach, in a comment that, Robert Kiely argues, characterizes Eliot's attitude to the significance of language (103-123). Certainly the claim elucidates the narrator's comment on Bartle Massey's students, as well as the emblematic significance of Hetty's silence. But the rhetoric of silence in Adam Bede responds to a very different view of language, a view modeled less on Feuerbach than on the Logos of St. John. To be sure, Eliot's later novels increasingly abandon this divided allegiance, subordinating the theological paradigm to a view of language as, in Kiely's words, “the regulated product of civilization” (Kiely's essay, significantly, deals almost entirely with Middlemarch.) But Adam Bede helps to explain this trajectory by suggesting at once the attraction and the costs of the older view. Most obviously, to exalt a language beyond words imposes an enormous burden on the novelist: like Gyp, she lacks an adequate vehicle of expression. Indeed, in the effort to convey moral authority in writing, Eliot is exposed to the very suspicion that implicates Dinah's eloquence. Moreover, the novelist must likewise reconcile her evocation of sympathy with a peculiarly “hard,” unsympathetic doctrine of her own—Eliot's central tenet that “consequences are unpitying.”¹¹

But the affiliation of preacher and novelist, along with the peculiar challenges both confront, is most suggestively conveyed in the various passages where the narrator pauses to call attention to the challenges of representation. Much as Dinah in her preaching attempts, through words, to bring an unseen reality before her listeners' eyes—exhorting her audience to “see” an image of the Lord shining through the visible landscape—so the narrator of Adam Bede exhorts readers to “see” a world beyond the printed page: “Let me take you into that dining-room. …” “See there in the bright sunshine... what do you see?” “See, he has something in his hand” (98,507). The novelist's technique thus mimes the Methodist style so closely reproduced in Dinah's sermon.¹² Much as this device has exasperated some of Eliot's critics, it is not a mere gesture of sympathetic participation in local color. Rather such exhortation crystallizes a central impulse of the novel's moral design, and indeed of Eliot's aesthetic: it appeals to readers to respond to the words on the page as to experience itself, that language whose “alphabet” is human feeling, and whose “lesson” is the experience of sympathy.¹³

Of course, this appeal is at odds with the strenuous distancing of the subject matter that Eliot cultivates through historical setting and pastoral tradition.¹⁴ So formulated, moreover, the appeal to the reader may seem crudely naive. Indeed, in the novel's opening sentences Eliot wryly acknowledges the leap of faith it embodies. “With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance-comers far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader” (49). In a sense, Eliot thus preempts all grammatological critics by conceding that the moral authority of her text is a “sorcery” founded on absence, that the “alphabet” of experience has no existence apart from writing. But what the narrator thus demystifies is more than the awkward yearning of the first novelist, or even the particular moral project undertaken in Adam Bede. The appeal to experience so plangently made in Eliot's use of the authorial present is, after all, an appeal made with varying degrees of urgency and explicitness in all realistic novels. Gyp's missing tail might thus stand for the problematics of representation that attend the project of “realism” in the broadest sense. The novelist always lacks an adequate vehicle for representing a realm located outside of language.

But Gyp's tail—like the tale it so curiously animates—has a more precise historical significance. In “the first major exercise in programmatic literary realism in English literature,” as John Goode has called Adam Bede, a familiar Victorian crisis of moral and religious authority assumes a form more far-reaching in its significance than conventional literary history has recognized.¹⁵ The urgency of the moral dilemma informing Adam Bede, and the explicitness with which Eliot dwells upon it, allows the novel to encapsulate in unusually suggestive form a historically momentous logic, which leads from a mistrust of specifically religious “notions” to a far more comprehensive and radical skepticism concerning the authority of language. Through a skeptical dynamic central to the realistic novel at large, the authority of the general claim or maxim is subordinated to the more particularized forms of an extra-linguistic “experience,” which—as Adam Bede so powerfully illustrates—in turn urges the novelist towards a still greater restriction of linguistic authority. The particular, immediate apprehension of particular, concrete fact becomes the only truth to which the novelist can appeal. Of course the specifically religious concern recedes in Eliot's subsequent novels, along with the bald appeals to the reader's sympathetic participation. But the raw urgency of the moral burden in Adam Bede issues in a rhetoric that marks a powerful bridge between Eliot's writings and the work of novelists we are accustomed to consider far more “modern” in outlook and technique. The yearning of Eliot's narrator to make us “see” the reality of the novel's action will be echoed, for example, in James's elaborate insistence on presentation and “solidity of specification,” and in Conrad, in his more emphatic claim in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see” (XIV). The fictional worlds of Conrad and James may seem remote from that of Adam Bede. But the novelist's struggle to convey a reality beyond words testifies to the persistent eloquence of Gyp's missing tail.

Notes

1. Herbert 422. The panel, Herbert adds, “makes a powerful comment on the large question of man's relation to Nature.” Other critics who comment on Massey's students include: John Goode, “Adam Bede,” in Barbara Hardy (ed.) Critical Essays on George Eliot (London: RKP, 1970), p. 22; Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1953), 177; Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, P, 1987), 12.

2. The ending was G. H. Lewes's suggestion, and has been roundly condemned as inconsistent with what precedes it; an exception is Barnard Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Quest for Values (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1965).

3. U. C. Knoepflmacher analyzes the Feuerbachian structures of the novel in Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965), 52-59.

4. On Adam's arithmetic, see Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone, 1985), 41-45, and Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 37-38.

5. This seeming intractability links Dinah to Adam, who is similarly characterized by Seth: “You may's well try to turn a wagon in a narrow lane” (51). On the crucial significance of “nature” in the novel, see Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels, 117-18; Herbert, “Preachers and the Schemes of Nature,” 419-427, and Philip Fisher, Making Up Society: The Novels of George Eliot (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1981), 43-45.

6. “The very slackness of Irwine's doctrine is the sign in him of an almost saintly moral excellence,” remarks Herbert, “Preachers and the Schemes of Nature,” 417—an overstatement, but salutary in stressing the inverse relation between doctrine and moral authority.

7. Eliot's crucial appeal to the reader on this point is overlooked by critics who see Dinah's sermon as a departure from her normal patterns of speech. See, for example, Herbert, “Preachers and the Schemes of Nature,” 415-16, and Goode, “Adam Bede,” 38-39.

8. A recent book on the subject by Beryl Gray, George Eliot and Music (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), makes no reference to this tactic.

9. Cited in William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians: Darwin, Huxley, and Evolution (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), 131. Eliot sent a copy of Adam Bede to Jane Welsh Carlyle, expressing her hope that “the philosopher” would receive from it a pleasure like that which she had received from Sartor Resartus (The George Eliot Letters, III, 23); Mrs. Carlyle responded in the letter quoted above.

10. Of course, the “natural” language embodied in beauty is not always readily legible, and can be deceptive; see Dianne Sadoff, “Nature's Language: Metaphor in the Text of Adam Bede,” Genre 11 (1978), 411-426.

11. As Jay Clayton has suggestively argued, in “Visionary Power and Narrative Form: Wordsworth and Adam Bede,” ELH 46 (1979), 645-72, the ending of the novel seems an effort to soften and humanise this doctrine, by in effect breaking the rigorous chain of “unpitying” consequences, passing from narrative to the evocation of sympathetic vision. Clayton's fine reading identifies what might be seen as a narratological counterpart of the repeated faltering of eloquence I have been discussing. But the formalistic bent of Clayton's argument impoverishes the significance of Dinah, who becomes “the representation of an absence … an attempt to place within the hard bonds of the narrative the author's choice to disrupt that narrative” (660). Dinah seems more richly viewed as Eliot's representation of the equivocality of moral (as well as narrative) authority in mid-Victorian discourse.

12. Valentine Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 151-61, studies Eliot's reliance on the Methodist idiom. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels, 105, notes in this appeal Dinah's resemblance to the novelist, but sees it as an appeal to an audience's “relation to universals” outside of sensuous perception—an explanation which obscures the link between Dinah's appeals and those of the novelist attempting to conjure up an emphatically visible image.

13. W. J. Harvey, who finds the technique “all the more infuriating because it is unnecessary,” nonetheless gestures towards this rationale in noting that Eliot “generally juggles her tenses in this way to introduce us to a new aspect of her subject” (more precisely, to impress upon us a new scene) “or to give greater force to a moment of crisis or climax” (The Art of George Eliot, 78). The gentleman spectator—which may seem a similarly extraneous device—is likewise designed to register the palpable sensuousness of a particular moment.

14. On such distancing, see Steven Marcus, “Literature and Social Theory: Starting In With George Eliot,” in Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Random House, 1975), 183-213.

15. John Goode, “Adam Bede,” 37. “The final interest of Adam Bede is that it casts its shadow before it,” Ian Gregor has urged, although he locates that historical significance (as do most commentators) in the image of the narrating consciousness conveyed in the famous “pier-glass” passage in Chapter 17. (The Moral and the Story [London: Faber, 1962], 30-32.

Works Cited

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Conrad, Joseph. The Nigger of the Narcissus in Complete Works vol. 23. Garden City: Doubleday, 1925.

Cottom, Daniel. Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History and Literary Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

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Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Ed. Stephen Gill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.

———. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight, New Haven: Yale UP.

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———. The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form. London: Athlone, 1985.

Herbert, Christopher. “Preachers and the Schemes of Nature in Adam Bede.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29 (1975): 412-27.

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———. Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965.

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Sadoff, Dianne. “Nature's Language: Metaphor in the Text of Adam Bede.” Genre 11 (1978): 411-26.

Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Holt, 1953.