SOURCE: “Arthur's Misuse of the Imagination: Sentimental Benevolence and Wordsworthian Realism in Adam Bede,” in English Studies in Canada, Vol. IV, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 41-59.

[In the following essay, Harris examines Arthur's class consciousness and the psychology of his seduction of Hetty as they are revealed through Eliot's use of Wordsworthian realism.]

Because Adam Bede is “a country story—full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay,”¹ it seems to invite oversimplified interpretations. Critics assume that George Eliot's first novel lacks the complexity of her later work, or at least that any complexity it possesses must be in conflict with its pastoral elements. Part of the problem in getting a clear perspective on this novel arises from a tendency to concentrate critical attention on the rather idealized Adam and Dinah as representatives of the author's values, while passing over Arthur, who does not belong to the pastoral community and whose affair with a tenant farmer's niece almost destroys it, as a rather ordinary seducer treated with conventional Victorian moralism. In a recent book on George Eliot, Neil Roberts expresses a widely-held view of the novel when he says that it presents a “static moral drama” enacted in an “absence of social and historical analysis” because Arthur's sin is only “a matter of private morality” unrelated to his grandfather's acquisitiveness as landlord.²

I shall argue that this seduction is very much a matter of class, and that Eliot's sense of historical process, if somewhat muted by nostalgia, is still active in the novel. A close study of the psychology behind Arthur's crime will show the vital thematic use Eliot makes of his aristocratic status and his participation in the literary taste of the later eighteenth century (Arthur turns twenty-one in 1799). As the well-intentioned heir to his grandfather's estate, Arthur reveals much about the influence of unconscious snobbery in rationalizing the exploitation of social inferiors, while as a reader of fashionable fiction who scorns the first edition of Lyrical Ballads he provides a contrast to the narrator's Wordsworthian realism, revealing what the imagination should not be both in art and life.

This contrast also suggests a turning point in the history of taste and sensibility. The moral vision of Adam, Dinah, and their author has something in common with the Romantic concept of the imagination (in Dinah's case mixed with the best aspects of the religious revival), while Arthur, thoroughly imbued with the aristocratic taste and social attitudes of his period, reflects the limitations of the old order and thus helps to show how the novel's narrative vision looks forward to the needs of Eliot's own time as well as celebrating the virtues of the past.

The timing of the action, with a leisurely account of the rustic community through the summer of 1799, while crime, suffering, and new insight come in the winter and spring of 1800, suggests a sense of transition between past and present. Hetty, the “lost lamb,” is rejected by the rustic community but rescued by Dinah, whose Methodism has been nurtured in a bleak industrial town and who recognizes no distinctions of rank.³ Again, the new insight which enables Adam to bear the pain of Hetty's fall foreshadows Eliot's mid-Victorian religion of humanity.⁴ On the other hand, Arthur's ideal vision of his future reign as Squire is based on the world-view of a ruling class soon to become obsolete.

In her depiction of the semi-feudal community of Hayslope, Eliot makes much of the dignity of labour as manifested in the Poysers' farm and Adam's workshop, while old Squire Donnithorne, whose income derives from possession of fields which others till, represents the least admirable aspect of this society; as Mrs Poyser angrily remarks to the Squire, “I know there’s them as is born t’own the land, and them as is born to sweat on’t” (353). The limitations of the aristocratic world-view are most clearly revealed not through the stingy Squire, but through his amiable grandson Arthur, who intends to improve everything upon inheriting but remains unaware of the injustice implied in Mrs Poyser's distinction.

Squire Donnithorne, who has no sympathy for his tenants but always spoke “in the same deliberate, well-chiselled, polite way, whether his words were sugary or venomous” (350), seems the product of an earlier and harsher period of the eighteenth century. However, his grandson Arthur has become a “man of feeling”—both in taste and sentiment he emulates the humanitarian ideal of a later day: “he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, warm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian … he couldn’t bear to see anyone uncomfortable … his aunt Lydia herself had the benefit of that softness which he bore towards the whole sex” (124-25). This seems almost a paraphrase of the virtues of Tom Jones, whose moral sensibility arises from his “good nature” and who, unlike the crafty Blifil, has only “the vices of a warm disposition.”⁵ Of course, one difference would be that Tom is not aware of being so virtuous while this is the way Arthur sees himself—as he analyzes his moral nature, he regards with satisfaction “his well-looking British person reflected in one of the old-fashioned mirrors” (124). Tom unconsciously stands for his author's concept of virtue, while Arthur admires himself as the epitome of a literary ideal, extending his “love of patronage” to social inferiors, especially his future tenants and the opposite sex.

Perhaps Arthur's story implies some criticism of Fielding's hero: Hetty's ruin might be more typical of the fate of lower-class females pursued by the Squire than Tom's happy resolution of his affair with Molly Seagrim. Tom's “violent animal spirits” tend to amorous entanglement but his sympathetic concern for the lady makes all well in the end, “for though he did not always act rightly, yet he never did otherwise without feeling and suffering for it.”⁶ Arthur claims a similar virtue for himself: “I’m a devil of a fellow for getting myself into hobbles, but I always take care the load shall fall on my own shoulders,” to which Eliot remarks that “unhappily there is no poetic justice in hobbles” (125). Later Arthur refuses to contemplate the possibility that Hetty might become pregnant because he has “a sort of implicit confidence … that he was really such a good fellow at bottom, Providence would not treat him harshly” (322), but the plot of Eliot's novel lends no providential assistance to the young Squire's good intentions. Hetty flees Hayslope to escape the shame of unwed motherhood, abandons her child, and is tried for its murder.

The “gratitude” and “compassion” Tom feels for Molly correspond to Arthur's conscious attitude towards Hetty, but an ironic reduction occurs when Eliot describes him as “a handsome generous young fellow—who … if he should happen to spoil a woman's existence, will make it up to her with expensive bon-bons, packed up and directed by his own hand” (126). After marrying Sophia, Tom continues his generous financial support of Molly and her family; when Arthur decides to end his affair with Hetty he reflects that “she would owe the advantage of his care for her in future years to the sorrow she had incurred now. So good comes out of evil. Such is the beautiful arrangement of things!” (320). Eliot's sarcasm in the last two sentences seems directed at that eighteenth-century notion of cosmic harmony which justifies the social order—and is manifested in the “poetic justice” of the plot of Tom Jones.⁷

Eliot has not told us exactly what she thought of Fielding, but she probably liked him; at least in Middlemarch she admires the “lusty ease of his fine English” (Book I, Chapter XV). As Thomas A. Noble has demonstrated, Eliot is the direct heir of those eighteenth-century thinkers who founded ethics on “the relationship of sympathy and imagination”⁸—a tradition which also inspired Tom Jones. Eliot and Fielding both believe that virtue springs from sympathetic identification with others; that, as Fielding puts it, “good nature” consists of a “benevolent and amiable temper of mind which disposes us to feel the misfortunes and enjoy the happiness of others” without assistance from “any abstract contemplation on the beauty of virtue, and without the allurements or terrors of religion.”⁹

However, Eliot escapes the limitations of upper-class benevolence by endowing this humanistic morality with a psychological dimension that seems absent in Fielding and his more sentimental successors. Walter E. Houghton observes that Eliot is not a sentimentalist because for her sympathetic feeling must be accompanied by a real understanding of the other person: in her fiction effective sympathy “originates in a clear and compassionate perception of human suffering … The sentimental indulgence of pity and love is really self-centered … George Eliot's benevolence presupposes a forgetfulness of self in the recognition of our common humanity.”¹⁰ No character in Eliot's fiction illustrates self-centered benevolence as clearly as Arthur, for whom “deeds of kindness were as easy … as a bad habit; they were the common issue … of his egoism and his sympathy. He didn’t like to witness pain, and he liked to have grateful eyes beaming on him as the giver of pleasure” (317-18). Fielding's formula does not in itself enable us to distinguish between true sympathy and gratification derived from the “grateful eyes,” a shortcoming even more evident in the sentimental fiction of Arthur's day. On the other hand, Arthur's complete identification with his social rank obscures awareness of the “common humanity” he shares with Hetty and thus he fails to appreciate the emotional and physical consequences their romance might inflict on her.

Sentimental benevolence is a transaction that can be carried out entirely within the self: it does not require a distinction between experiencing the other as a “thou”—an individual consciousness different from one's own—or merely as an object of warm-hearted charity. As it appears in eighteenth-century fiction (and many Victorian novels), benevolence usually depends on and is protected by a sense of social superiority to the recipient of one's kindness.

Arthur's dream of future patronage reveals his class-oriented view of his relation to Hayslope and humanity in general. He compensates for his present sense of bored aimlessness by imagining himself as a Squire Allworthy-to-be:

He was nothing if not good-natured; and all his pictures of the future, when he should come into the estate, were made up of a prosperous, contented tenantry, adoring their landlord, who would be the model of an English gentleman—mansion in first-rate order, all elegance and high taste—jolly housekeeping, finest stud in Loamshire—purse open to all public objects—in short, everything as different as possible from what was now associated with the name of Donnithorne. (125)

His vision of the future actually represents the way he relates to people in the present; this picture of a perfect Squire surrounded by adoring dependents allows no place for the intrusion of an equal. To maintain his ideal self he cannot acknowledge any motive incompatible with “good nature” and thus must convince himself that his interest in Hetty consists only of generous concern for her welfare.

Arthur's “pictures of the future” also ignore the economic basis of his class. The old Squire's wealth must be at least partly the result of his cold-blooded meanness with his tenants, while Arthur, in his “model” world, intends to maintain an expensive establishment while being worshipped because he has so improved his tenants' farms. (The tenants imagine that when he inherits there is to be “a millenial abundance of new gates, allowances of lime, and returns of ten percent” [85].) When Irwine points out that Arthur's neighbour Gawaine has made himself unpopular with his improvements and that one must choose between “popularity or usefulness,” Arthur objects: “O! Gawaine is harsh in his manners; he doesn’t make himself personally agreeable to his tenants. I don’t believe there’s anything you can’t prevail on people to do with kindness” (173).¹¹ In this definition of “kindness” the emphasis falls entirely on “manners,” on being “personally agreeable,” which rather easy form of benevolence also seems a method for insuring that one's inferiors will do “anything” one wishes.

Arthur is as interested as any other Squire in having his way with his tenants but imagines that because he means well he can get what he wants through charm rather than intimidation. He intends to be “different” yet manages to disguise as benevolence a pursuit of a tenant's pretty niece which is quite typical of young Squires. On the other hand, his sentimental vision really does make him a more sympathetic fellow than his grandfather; while his soft-heartedness can rationalize the seduction, it also prevents him from responding to the result with the usual callousness of his class.

In Arthur's drift towards seducing Hetty, Eliot presents her first extensive study of unconscious motivation. She asks whether his failure to confess to Irwine was not due to a “motive … which had a sort of backstairs influence? Our mental business is carried on in much the same way as the business of State: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged” (176). Early in the novel we discover the real motive behind Arthur's pursuit of Hetty; he complains that “It’s a desperately dull business being shut up at the Chase in the summer months, when one can neither hunt nor shoot, so as to make oneself pleasantly sleepy in the evening” (63). (Hunting is out of season, and Arthur's physical activity is further curtailed by a broken arm.) If Arthur admitted to himself that frustrated sex was keeping him awake nights, he might also have been more realistic about the consequences of fornicating with the Poysers' niece, but he sublimates this natural need into sentimental musing over Hetty and thus can never acknowledge his real object.

Unable to hunt, Arthur pursues Hetty instead and the horse he rides becomes associated with his runaway feelings. He gallops out to dispel his frustrations: “Nothing like ‘taking’ a few bushes and ditches for exorcising a demon; and it is really astonishing that the Centaurs, with their immense advantages in this way, left so bad a reputation in history” (129). The Centaurs' famous crime was their attempt to ravish the Lapith women, resulting in a battle which the ancient Greeks considered symbolic of the struggle between rational and animal elements in human nature. When Arthur loses a bout in his own struggle by returning prematurely from his ride, his horse suddenly seems to be controlling him. Eliot remarks that “it is the favorite stratagem of the passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us” (129), and in the next chapter he feels that when he gallops back to meet Hetty after resolving not to, “it was as if his horse had wheeled round from a leap and dared to dispute his mastery” (139). This imagery suggests a disjunction in Arthur's being: he is, like the Centaur, both horse and rider, with the horse secretly in control. The sexuality he sublimates into sentiment takes over at crucial moments, prompting actions opposed to his conscious intent.

We have seen that Arthur, a university man, is concerned to maintain not only high living but “high taste” in his future establishment. In the latter point his imagination has been shaped by the taste of his age—Neo-classical esthetic plus exotic fiction. Eliot subtly relates Arthur's false taste to his capacity for rationalization.

We have already noted that dividing the action between 1799 and 1800 suggests transition between two centuries, and that Dinah's evangelicalism presents one form of new sensibility. A casual reference by Arthur early in the novel reveals a literary event of the previous year which, for Eliot especially, would be of great importance in shaping the thought and feeling of the new era:

I’ve got a book I meant to bring you, godmamma. It came down from London the other day. I know you are fond of queer, wizard-like stories. It’s a volume of poems, “Lyrical Ballads:” most of them to be twaddling stuff; but the first is in a different style—“The Ancient Mariner” is the title. I can hardly make head nor tail of it as a story, but it’s a strange, striking thing … and there are some other books that you might like to see, Irwine—pamphlets about Antinomianism and Evangelicalism, whatever they may be. (64)

Wordsworth is always an important influence on Eliot's fiction; this novel in particular, with its rustic setting and lower-class characters, seems to partake of his belief that the depiction of ordinary life could serve the highest purpose of art.¹² Eliot marks her affinity with Wordsworth's kind of realism by prefacing her novel with a quotation from The Excursion that promises “Clear images … Of nature's unambitious underwood / And flowers that prosper in the shade.” Both Eliot and Wordsworth refuse to separate art from life: the emphasis both place on the value of everyday experience makes the classical dictum that serious literature must deal with an exalted subject in a heightened style seem not only artistically wrong, but also immoral in its implied contempt for the lives of ordinary people. In her first full-length novel Eliot, already an experienced critic of fiction, is concerned with setting an example of how novels should be written. By emphasizing the importance of the commonplace and pointedly eschewing the exotic, she seeks to exercise the same influence on fiction that Wordsworth had on poetry; her essay on realism in Chapter Seventeen could be taken as the “Preface” to her own career.¹³

In her first novel Eliot provides a striking example of her fondness for using styles of painting as a metaphor for perception.¹⁴ She describes the Wordsworthian esthetic in terms of visual art in that famous passage in Chapter Seventeen where she extols the

rare, precious quality of truthfulness … in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise … I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel, and her stone jug, and all those common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her. (180)

Eliot's affection for the jug, spinning-wheel, and other “common things” recalls Wordsworth's description of the rustic interior, supper, and fireside work in Michael (lines 80-141). The image of clear light illuminating everyday objects recurs many times in Adam Bede; it is associated with clear vision and the “light of heaven” (182) which falls on the ordinary world “in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work” (179).¹⁵ The subjects turned away from—“prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors”—are the stock in trade of that Neo-classical style which dominated Arthur's age but which Eliot, as heir to Wordsworth, would find particularly sterile.¹⁶

When Arthur, blindly following the taste of his age, dismisses Lyrical Ballads, he excludes from literature (and from the realm of the serious in general) the whole motivation behind Eliot's novel—before becoming sadder and wiser he would probably have found Adam Bede as “twaddling” as Wordsworth. Furthermore, his separation of the imagination from everyday life is of great assistance in rationalizing the pursuit of Hetty; a close look at his vision of nature and his literary taste will help explain how he could manage a seduction so opposed to his conscious ideals.

After admiring Hetty at the Poysers' butter churn, Arthur describes her in terms of Neo-classical art: “She’s a perfect Hebe; and if I were an artist, I would paint her” (102). Irwine replies, “I have no objection to your contemplating Hetty in an artistic light,” but in fact there may be some danger if this is the deceptive light of unreality, at furthest remove from the “noonday light” of Dutch painting.

Arthur arranges a meeting with Hetty in

the delicious labyrinthine wood … called Fir-tree Grove … It was a wood of beeches and limes, with here and there a light, silver-stemmed birch—just the sort of wood most haunted by the nymphs: you see their white sunlit limbs gleaming athwart the boughs, or peeping behind the smooth-sweeping outline of a tall lime; you hear their soft liquid laughter—but if you look with a too curious sacrilegious eye, they vanish behind the silvery beeches, they make you believe their voice was only a running brooklet, perhaps they metamorphose themselves into a tawny squirrel that scampers away and mocks you from the topmost bough. (130)

Such a depiction of nature represents Arthur's consciousness rather than Eliot's; as Reva Stump points out, this is one of those scenes associated with Arthur and Hetty “where light is used to heighten shadows, point up darkness, and create a haze—where, in short, it distorts rather than assists vision.”¹⁷ Further, it should be noted that contrary to Eliot's usual practice, the actual wood is not described but only used as a backdrop for fantasy—“seeing” here is making-believe—and that the literary imagery seems far-removed from real nature. In a review of Ruskin's Modern Painters, Eliot insists that “all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality.”¹⁸ Arthur's vague nymphs arise from the wrong kind of imagination.

The main force of this description of Fir-tree Grove stems not from what is seen, but from something beneath the surface, an underlying sensuality which the imagery intimates while glossing over. Arthur sees the wood only as a backdrop for his mood, for his real interest lies elsewhere: as he “strolled along carelessly, with a book under his arm … his eyes would fix themselves on the distant bend in the road, round which a little figure must surely appear before long” (131, Eliot's italics). The motion of the eyes suggests an involuntary element in Arthur's search; he is not free to look about in a disinterested manner.

On the other hand, the brooklet and scampering squirrel possess a life and motion lacking in the imaginary nymphs, but these genuine aspects of the scene can be perceived only by the “too curious sacrilegious eye” which would disrupt this Temple of Nature (later Arthur, trying to deceive Adam, calls it the “sacred grove” [303]) and discover a real nature that “mocks” the fantasist. Arthur is embarking on a love-affair which will result in the birth of a child, but no anticipation of this natural process can intrude on his sentimental view of Hetty.

Eliot's strategy here is to entrance the reader for a moment and then awaken him with the rather blunt observation that on such an afternoon “destiny disguises her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant veil … and poisons us with violet-scented breath” (131), a process repeated more subtly at a later meeting with Hetty which Arthur has arranged in order to explain that he does not mean anything serious. He quickly forgets his good intentions: “Ah, he doesn’t know in the least what he is saying. This is not what he meant to say … his lips are meeting those pouting child-lips, and for a long moment time has vanished. He may be a shepherd in Arcadia for aught he knows, he may be the first youth kissing the first maiden, he may be Eros himself kissing the lips of Psyche—it is all one” (138).

This pagan paradise, independent of space, time, and experience, suggests the mood of a certain style of Neo-classical painting. The breathless prose represents Arthur's state of mind, in which we are temporarily caught up only to come down again when we pause to consider the incongruity of the myth of Eros and Psyche in such a context. With the advent of Freud this myth of Love leading the Soul towards perfection has lost its impact, but it played a significant role in the imagination of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and seems to have interested Eliot, who uses it again in Middlemarch.¹⁹ Here, however, Psyche is only the mask for an everyday seduction; in Arthur's imagination Hetty seems to have graduated from Hebe the wine-girl to the beloved of the God of Love.

Cupid and Psyche fascinated Neo-classical artists as a symbol of the ideal, but also underwent a rapid deterioration as decorative pornography, Divine Love being a most acceptable excuse for getting voluptuous representations of naked lovers inside the house. In both Arthur's time and Eliot's the pair could frequently be found embracing not only on canvas, but also in bronze on mantelpieces and over the tops of clocks. Arthur is an ordinary fellow and the “artistic light” in which he views Hetty reveals this lower, more popular use of the myth. The most famous and widely-copied example of this genre, the painting of Cupid and Psyche done by Gérard in 1798, with its pretty surface and sensuous undertones, would be a good example of Arthur's consciousness (as different as possible from Dutch realism).²⁰

Two months later, as Adam walks through the woods towards a chance encounter with Arthur and Hetty, his carpenter's vision of the Grove becomes an equivalent to realist painting. He views the Grove under

the magnificent changes of the light … What grand beeches! Adam delighted in a fine tree of all things; as the fisherman's sight is keenest on the sea, so Adam's perceptions were more at home with trees than with other objects. He kept them in his memory as a painter does, with all the flecks and knots in their bark, and all the curves and angles of their boughs. (301-2)

As he pauses to examine a tree more closely, Adam catches sight of the lovers “in the eastern light,” understanding their relation with a clarity with which they have never seen themselves. Arthur, somewhat befuddled with wine, tries to “laugh the thing off’ and throw “dust … in honest Adam's eyes,” but the “strange evening light” shows things too clearly and Adam experiences an inner illumination: “a terrible scorching light showed him the hidden letters that changed the meaning of the past” (303). Here Adam represents the author's vision as well; the contrast between Adam's Grove and Arthur's could be taken as the difference between true and false perception.²¹

Arthur's taste in literature also has some relevance to the ease with which he yields to temptation. There are signs of interest in the Gothic and exotic: he plans to restore the last remaining “piece of the old abbey” (261) and Hetty succumbs in a summer-house in the Grove dubbed “the Hermitage,” in which monastic retreat Adam is surprised to find a “snug room” equipped with brandy and showing “all the signs of frequent habitation” (310). Arthur remarks that as a child “I used to think that if ever I was a rich Sultan, I would make Adam my grand-visier. And I believe now, he would bear the exaltation as well as any poor man in an Eastern story” (61). (The Sultan's ministers were also his slaves.) Arthur enacts this fantasy when he rather fulsomely bestows the management of the woods on Adam at the Birthday Feast (272).

Eliot insists that her novel will have no “heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions” (36), “romantic criminals,” or other exotic characters who are not “half so frequent as your common labourer …” (182). However, Arthur, who sometimes rides his grandfather's horses rather hard, seems to enjoy stories of romantic crime and passionate violence.

On the morning of his first secret encounter with Hetty, Arthur decides to spend a week fishing instead, but as he strides towards the stables he sings in his “loudest ringing tenor … his favorite song from the ‘Beggar's Opera,’ ‘When the heart of man is oppressed with care.’ Not an heroic strain; nevertheless Arthur felt himself very heroic …” (124). The second line of this song happens to be “The mist is dispelled when a woman appears.” It is sung by Macheath, the heroic highwayman, who observes in the same soliloquy, “What a fool is a fond wench! … I must have women. There is nothing unbends the mind like them,” and reflects on his prowess in turning virgins into ladies of the town (Act II, Scene iii). Arthur's resolve to ride away from temptation seems half-hearted from the beginning. (After discovering that his favorite horse is lame, Arthur decides to keep away from Hetty by riding to visit his friend Gawaine. This resolution also fails in the “Centaur” episode already discussed.)

A significant reference to Arthur's reading occurs at the crucial moment when he rationalizes spending the afternoon in the Grove where he knows Hetty will pass: “it was just the sort of afternoon for lolling in the Hermitage, and he would go and finish Dr. Moore's Zeluco there before dinner” (130)—this is the book under his arm during his first tryst with Hetty. Moore's tale of criminal adventure was published in 1786 and went through several editions, remaining popular into the nineteenth century—another edition came out in 1810. Its main interest lies in the persistent wickedness of the title character, the degraded heir of a noble Sicilian family. Handsome and eloquent, but driven by the lowest passions, which he always indulges without restraint, Zeluco perpetrates an extraordinary series of seductions and betrayals, finally tricking a pure and beautiful maiden into marriage against her will. He abuses her outrageously and strangles their infant in a fit of rage, after which she goes mad, becoming unable to accuse him of the crime: the intrigues which arise from this situation provide the climax of the novel. Moore pauses occasionally to present some flat moral commentary of the kind Eliot deplored in fiction.

In his circumstances Zeluco has some resemblance to Arthur—both are fatherless, spoiled, rich, idle, and go into the army. Their story also concerns seduction and child-murder followed by madness. However, the point is not that Arthur failed to heed Moore's warning, but that such fantastic tales can have no kind of moral impact. Arthur could never identify with the exotic crimes of such a villain, nor learn anything from him about impulses to self-indulgence that might lurk in good intentions. The allusion to Zeluco contains a double irony: the novel does foreshadow Arthur's fate but also makes it seem impossible in the real world.²²Zeluco seems a good example of those “frantic novels,” designed to gratify a “craving for extraordinary incident,” which Wordsworth cites in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” as evidence of degraded taste in contemporary literature.

U. C. Knoepflmacher has pointed out the many links between Hetty and Martha Ray of “The Thorne,” another tale of seduction, infanticide, and madness—and also one of the homeliest of Wordsworth's narratives in Lyrical Ballads.²³ Arthur enjoys Zeluco while refusing to read a book which contains a realistic representation of his own future sin. Later, in a mood for serious meditation on his problem with Hetty, he comments on the moral relevance of exotic fiction by flinging “Zeluco into the most distant corner” (134).

The lovers seem to kiss in a static Arcadia but they are not free from social or biological consequences; as Eliot notes, it is only “for a long moment that time has vanished.” When he returns to the temporal world of cause and effect Arthur ponders the incompatibility of their social rank:

To flirt with Hetty was a very different affair from flirting with a pretty girl of his own station: that was understood to be an amusement on both sides; or, if it became serious, there was no obstacle to marriage. But this little thing would be spoken ill of directly … And even if no one knew anything about it, they might get too fond of each other, and then there would be the misery of parting after all. No gentleman, out of a ballad, could marry a farmer's niece. There must be an end to the whole thing at once. It was too foolish. (139-40)

The thought of “parting” shows that he has descended from the timeless realm of Eros and Psyche. The reality to which he returns is quite prosaic; his undemocratic concept of a “gentleman” takes absolute class-barriers for granted. Romance with a girl of his “station” might become “serious” but his affair with Hetty can only be seen as entertainment, a “little thing” and “too foolish.” His phrase “out of a ballad” makes an ironic contrast to Lyrical Ballads. By “ballad” Arthur means the opposite of Wordsworth—a fantastic tale (like the plot of Zeluco) in an exotic setting (this aspect of “The Ancient Mariner” seems to appeal to him).²⁴ Since he takes his role in the social hierarchy for granted, any romantic breaching of class-barriers could occur only in a fantasy of no account in the real world. For Arthur literature is an amusement, yet he often behaves as though he were in a ballad instead of out of one, maintaining a separation between the two states of mind as distinct as his separation of art from life. It is a peculiar element in Arthur's tragedy that he foresees in lucid moments the disaster he seems powerless to avoid—“he should hate himself if he made a scandal of that sort” (140).

Arthur's unconscious often works through his imagination, which for him is the realm of unreal “fancy”:

The desire to see Hetty rushed back like an ill-stemmed current; he was amazed at the force with which this trivial fancy seemed to grasp him: he was even rather tremulous as he brushed his hair—pooh! it was riding in that break-neck way. It was because he had made a serious affair of an idle matter, by thinking of it as if it were of any consequence. He would amuse himself by seeing Hetty today … (130)

A surprising force drives him towards an impossible breach of his social mores, but once relegated to the imagination, or “trivial fancy,” this impulse becomes only a leisure amusement, an “idle matter” of “no consequence” which can safely be indulged. Arthur could imagine “serious consequences” with a “girl of his own station,” but a pastoral milkmaid can only be the object of artistic appreciation and pleasing sentiment.

When they embrace Arthur is not “sensible just then that Hetty wanted … signs of high breeding” (113). The “just then” indicates that he is in a special state of mind cut off from normal consciousness; he will later think of this deficiency as the most important aspect of their relationship. The thought of a second meeting that evening can be indulged in the imagination precisely because it is not possible, but then becomes possible after being reduced to sentimental fancy: “He made up his mind not to meet Hetty again; and now he might give himself up to thinking how immensely agreeable it would be if circumstances were different … How beautiful her eyes were with the tear on their lashes! He would like to satisfy his soul for a day with looking at them, and he must see her again” (135). He resolves to “set things right with her by a kindness which would have the air of friendly civility” (137), but he shall satisfy more than his soul.

Through Arthur, Eliot distinguishes between sentimentalism and genuine feeling. While hardly an intellectual Arthur does see himself as a cultivated “man of feeling”; with his upper-class education and leisure he has developed something of a literary imagination, along with some excess emotion to be indulged in it when hunting is out of season. His sharp distinction between art and “fancy” on the one hand, and everyday life on the other, cuts off communication with his emotional nature, which can find expression only in trivial second-hand disguises.

His separation of art from life results in a split consciousness in which he can alternate between fantasies disconnected from the real world and a reality where such fantasies are, of course, impossible. Yet his exalted fantasy permits the satisfaction of a sexual need his sentimental ego refuses to admit. Arthur's imagination does not express feeling but rather provides a disguise under which it operates as an “agent not acknowledged,” prompting actions which he does not have to face up to because they are relegated to an imaginary world. What he does with Hetty in the realm of Eros and Psyche remains separate from time and consequence.

In a moment of clarity Arthur decides to make further flirtation impossible by confessing to his friend Parson Irwine: “There was but one resource. He would go and tell Irwine—tell him everything” (140). For Eliot, the Sacrament of Confession had great psychological value because one's feelings revealed their true nature when given objective existence in the consciousness of another person.²⁵ However, as Arthur forms this resolve he makes the fatal assumption that “the mere act of telling it would make it seem trivial” (140).

When face to face with Irwine, Arthur decides not to mention his problem because “the conversation had taken a more serious tone than he had intended—it would quite mislead Irwine—he would imagine there was a deep passion for Hetty, while there was no such thing” (176). Arthur justifies his pursuit of Hetty by convincing himself that their relationship is “trivial,” yet knows that objectively considered it will seem “serious.” By refusing to communicate his feelings he reveals the insincerity of his excuse, while keeping it intact so he can see Hetty again.

Arthur depends on the approbation of others rather than an inner sense of self, and it is only through Adam's rudeness, his refusal to be talked round after seeing Arthur and Hetty together, that Arthur experiences himself as seen disapprovingly through the eyes of another: “The discovery that Adam loved Hetty was a shock that made him for the moment see himself in the light of Adam's indignation … All screening self-excuse … forsook him for an instant …” (315). While Irwine is restrained by good manners from enquiring too far into Arthur's conscience, Adam assumes a moral equality which enables him to disregard class-barriers.²⁶

However, Arthur's “instant” of vision is only “for the moment.” Later he fends off this humiliating encounter with a fantasy that smacks of droit du seigneur. When after his grandfather's death he returns, still unaware of Hetty's disaster, to become master of the estate, he contemplates his intended generosity to the husband of his cast-off mistress: “they were soon to be married: perhaps they were already married. And now it was in his power to do a great deal for them” (450).

In a final encounter in the Grove after Hetty's reprieve, Adam forces Arthur to acknowledge the reality of his victims' feelings. Arthur performs his first genuine service to his former ideal when he pleads with Adam to help him sacrifice himself to keep the community intact: “one of my reasons for going away is, that no one else may leave Hayslope—may leave their home on my account” (477). Adam grimly insists that he has seen through Arthur's benevolence—“When people's feelings have got a deadly wound, they can’t be cured with favours”—and will give in only when Arthur explicitly renounces it: “if you would talk to the Poysers … I know, of course, they would not accept any favour from me: I mean nothing of that kind” (479). Here Arthur belatedly receives that enlightenment through exposure to the vision of an equal which he rejected in his first confrontation with Adam.

For Eliot, the highest purpose of the imagination is to put oneself in another's shoes and foresee the effect of one's actions on his consciousness. An interesting link between Wordsworth and Eliot's kind of agnostic humanism appears in one of G. H. Lewes's last and best books, The Study of Psychology, which she edited after his death. Lewes discusses the evolution of morality, both in the race and the individual, from shame and fear of divine punishment to that highest achievement of civilized man, the sympathetic imagination: “In a mind where the educated tracing of hurtful consequences to others is associated with a sympathetic imagination of their suffering, Remorse has no relation to an external source of punishment for the wrong committed: it is the agonized sense, the contrite contemplation, of the wound inflicted on another.”²⁷ In revising Lewes's manuscript, Eliot adds “Wordsworth has depicted a remorse of this kind,” and quotes the following lines from The Excursion:²⁸

                                                            Feebly they must have felt
Who in old times, attired with snakes and whips
The vengeful Furies. Beautiful regards
Were turned on me—the face of her I loved;
The wife and mother, pitifully fixing
Tender reproaches, insupportable!

(Book III, lines 850-55)

Arthur, preoccupied with the approbation of others, has a moral sense based mainly on shame, and does not get the point when Irwine warns him that for a sensitive man “inward suffering … is the worst form of nemesis” (175). Arthur fails to foresee Hetty's doom and thus shall be “educated” by agony and contrition after the fact.

As we have seen, Zeluco and Wordsworth's “The Thorn” both comment ironically on the seduction of Hetty. Arthur's education through remorse seems foreshadowed in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the only poem in Lyrical Ballads that arouses his interest. The association Eliot establishes between hunting and Arthur's pursuit of Hetty suggests that he downs her in the same sportive spirit in which the Mariner shot the albatross. Arthur is attracted to the Gothic trappings of Coleridge's poem—“it’s a strange, striking thing”—but complains that he “can hardly make head nor tail of it as a story”; he cannot grasp the theme of sin, guilt, and repentance which binds together its apparently illogical events.

The Mariner returns to his “own countree” physically much the worse but spiritually enlightened. After Hetty's trial and reprieve, Arthur joins the army in India instead of assuming his long-anticipated role as Squire. In the “Epilogue” Adam describes him when he returns seven years later: “he’s altered and yet not altered … his colour’s changed, and he looks sadly. However, the doctors say he’ll soon be set right in his own country air. He’s all sound in th’inside; it’s only the fever shattered him so. But he speaks just the same, and smiles at me just as he did when he was a lad” (550). Wordsworthian Nemesis has wrought a change on an “inside” of which Arthur was not aware before his fall. The return of his childhood smile suggests innocence regained, in this case bought dear by becoming sadder and wiser through experience of sin—and its consequences. In “The Ancient Mariner” Coleridge uses the supernatural not merely as a Gothic device, but to create a symbolic vision of the inter-relatedness of an organic universe, a vision in itself emblematic of the Romantic imagination.²⁹ Both the Mariner and Arthur sin carelessly against the complex relationships of their world and both learn the real nature of these relationships through remorse. Unlike the Mariner, Arthur already knows a good deal about the community he violates, but unfortunately his imagination only provides escape from the social structure he otherwise takes for granted.³⁰

Through a subtle web of imagery and allusion, Eliot links Arthur to the main themes of the novel and to her concept of the moral purpose of fiction. She introduces Lyrical Ballads as a precedent for the realism discussed in Chapter Seventeen, and as a standard by which to judge Arthur's false vision; in turn, Arthur illuminates her realism by way of contrast. The complexity of his motives shows the uselessness of melodramatic villains and refutes the reader of “enlightened opinions and refined taste” who in Chapter Seventeen demands of the novelist: “Let your most faulty characters always be on the wrong side, and your virtuous ones on the right” (179). Arthur's escapist fantasy reflects on Eliot's belief that the imagination should be used to explore the real world, while the egoism concealed in his “love of patronage” underlines her insistence on a perception which can transcend social barriers.

Eliot's conservative respect for tradition has caused some critics to overlook her effort to free the sympathetic imagination from the limits of class. In terms very like Neil Roberts's interpretation of Adam Bede, Arnold Hauser states that “George Eliot regards as an essentially psychological and moral problem what is in reality a sociological problem, and looks in psychology for the answer to questions which can only be answered sociologically.”³¹ Two Marxist-oriented critics, Ian Milner and John Goode, are attracted by the appearance of class-conflict in Arthur's crime, but become frustrated by Eliot's failure to develop this theme consistently.³² We must remember that as heir to Wordsworth Eliot could combine a tendency to conservative (and sometimes rather confused) politics with an insistence on democratic vision in art.³³ The social contradictions Eliot shies away from on the political level often receive a subtle development in the psychology of her characters.

It is characteristic of Eliot's technique that she concentrates on the details of Arthur's state of mind during his first meetings with Hetty, and yet never lets us forget that he is a prospective landlord committing an offense against a tenant-farmer. Thus as we explore the psychology of sentimental benevolence we also become aware of its limitations as an attitude of the upper class towards the lower. Arthur dreams of replacing his grandfather's avarice with an ideal generosity to his tenants, but we know that this can only consist of giving back a small portion of the wealth derived from their labor.³⁴ A good part of the income from his estate must go to keep the “mansion in first-rate order, all elegance and high taste—jolly housekeeping, finest stud in Loamshire” (125). This giving which is also a taking appears at its worst in a benevolence towards Hetty which disguises a typical aristocratic use of farm-girls. Through Arthur, Eliot demonstrates to the reader of “enlightened opinions and refined taste” that naive complacency in one's social status is incompatible with genuine sympathy for those who must sweat on fields which others own.

We can conclude that Arthur's story is not a “static moral drama,” and that it seems quite different from the usual treatment of seduction in Victorian novels. His error arises not from sexual desire in itself, but from misrepresenting it as sympathetic concern and esthetic appreciation. Eliot cannot be accused of punishing the lovers for their sexual vitality: Hetty is a self-obsessed social-climber and Arthur pursues her in a pseudo-pastoral dream fabricated out of second-hand imagery.³⁵ His escapist notion of literature and his class-bound belief in “high taste” excuse him from any attempt to understand the subjective consciousness of his victim or the economic reality of her class.

On the other hand, the narrator shows us everything Arthur cannot see and speaks out against the fashionable taste in literature he represents, along with the refined reader of Chapter Seventeen. In her first novel Eliot develops her own version of the difference between fancy and imagination. Convinced that the “ill-stemmed current” of his “desire to see Hetty” is only a “trivial fancy” (130), Arthur sublimates his emotional needs into his vision of himself as ideal Squire, while the narrator combines psychological analysis with social concern by revealing the tragic interaction between Arthur's divided self and the class-divisions of the world he is about to inherit.

Notes

1. The George Eliot Letters, ed Gordon S. Haight (New Haven 1954-56), II, 387. The page references which appear throughout are from Adam Bede, ed Gordon S. Haight (New York 1967).

2. Neil Roberts, George Eliot: Her Beliefs and Her Art (Pittsburgh 1975), pp 63-67.

3. Hayslope represents the past, while Dinah's milieu anticipates social problems of the nineteenth century. She complains of a “deadness to the Word” in the country and says that her religion flourishes amid the industrial privation of “great towns like Leeds” (92). She works in a cotton mill in Snowfield, which is also a mining town.

4. A. O. J. Cockshut notes Adam's mid-Victorian quality and describes him as “a convincing portrait of the serious agnostic in the making” (The Unbelievers [New York 1966], p 47).

5. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Book X, xiii.

6. Ibid, Book IV, vi.

7. John Goode also finds an affinity between Tom Jones and Arthur—“Adam Bede,” Critical Essays on George Eliot (New York 1970), pp 24-25. This essay has many insights but I strongly disagree when Goode argues that Eliot was influenced by Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism.

8. Thomas A. Noble, George Eliot's ‘Scenes of Clerical Life’ (New Haven 1965), p 57.

9. Henry Fielding, “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” The Complete Works of Henry Fielding (New York 1967), XVI, 285.

10. Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven 1957), p 278.

11. There is a contradiction in the concept of improvement. Irwine says, “Gawaine has got the curses of the whole neighbourhood upon him about that enclosure.” Enclosure was an important aspect of that consolidation of land for “improved” farming which was rapidly eliminating the small tenant farmer and thus the whole feudal community which forms the basis of Arthur's “pictures of the future.” Arthur has been influenced by Arthur Young, who strongly supported enclosure but changed his mind dramatically in 1800 when he discovered that it was being applied exclusively in the interests of the landowners.

12. For Eliot's general interest in Wordsworth, see Thomas Pinney, “George Eliot's Reading of Wordsworth: The Record,” VN [Victorian Newsletter], 24 (1963), 20-22, and “The Authority of the Past in George Eliot's Novels,” NCF [Nineteenth Century Fiction], 21 (1966), 131-47. Jerome Thale, in The Novels of George Eliot (New York 1959) and U. C. Knoepflmacher, in George Eliot's Early Novels (Berkeley 1968), both discuss the peculiarly Wordsworthian quality of Adam Bede. Michael Squires provides a more general discussion of Wordsworth's influence on English fiction in The Pastoral Novel: Studies in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence (Charlottesville 1974). To my knowledge, the best and fullest discussion of Wordsworth's influence on Eliot's early fiction is Robert Dunham's unpublished dissertation, “Wordsworthian Themes and Attitudes in George Eliot's Novels” (Stanford 1971). I am indebted to Professor Dunham for revealing the importance of Wordsworth for the interpretation of Eliot's fiction.

13. Eliot's argument in Chapter Seventeen also seems to parallel Book Thirteen of The Prelude, where Wordsworth rejects fashionable elitism and turns to the depiction of humble rustic characters.

14. See Hugh Witemeyer, “George Eliot, Naumann, and the Nazarenes,” VS [Victorian Studies], 18 (1974-75), 145-58, and “English and Italian Portraiture in Daniel Deronda,” NCF, 30 (March 1976), 477-94.

15. In an essay entitled “Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young” Eliot attacks Edward Young's grandiose, abstract verse, and presents William Cowper as an example of good poetry (described in terms of clear light): “How Cowper's exquisite mind falls with the warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail and investing every detail with beauty”—Essays of George Eliot, ed Thomas Pinney (New York 1963), p 382. Here Eliot uses Cowper as an eighteenth-century representative for Wordsworth. In his Principles of Success in Literature (Boston 1894) G. H. Lewes quotes extensively from Eliot's criticism of Young but compares him to Wordsworth rather than Cowper (pp 68-72).

    The painting of the old woman closely resembles Interior with Old Woman Peeling Apples by David Teniers the younger, a painter noted for his treatment of light and his detailed depictions of peasant life. Eliot saw and admired the work of some Dutch painters, Teniers among them, when she was writing this part of Adam Bede—see Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford 1968), p 259.

16. In a hostile review of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, Southey said that “The Idiot Boy” “resembles a Flemish picture in the worthlessness of its design and the excellence of its execution. From Flemish artists we are satisfied with such pieces: who would not have lamented if Corregio or Rafaelle had wasted their talents in painting Dutch boors or the humours of a Flemish wake?” (The Critical Review, vol 24, October, 1798). This review may have suggested Eliot's reference to Dutch painting, and Southey is probably included among the “lofty-minded people” who despise it. Eliot considered Southey an example of the bad taste of the period (see note 30). In Chapter Seventeen Eliot pays tribute to “divine beauty of form” but demands recognition for “that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.” Arthur sees Hetty entirely in terms of “beauty of form.”

17. Reva Stump, Movement and Vision in George Eliot's Novels (Seattle 1959), p 18. I am indebted to Stump's excellent discussion of this scene.

18. George Eliot, Westminster Review, 65 (April 1856), 626.

19. See U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Fusing Fact and Myth: The New Reality of Middlemarch,” This Particular Web: Essays on ‘Middlemarch’, ed Ian Adam (Toronto 1975), pp 56-57.

20. See Hugh Honour, Neo-classicism (Harmondsworth 1968), p 171.

21. Hetty, who never distinguishes between fantasy and the real world, cannot see the Grove at all. As she walks through the Grove, Eliot describes the light-effects she fails to see because of her preoccupation with an imaginary future (136-37).

22. Irving Buchen—“Arthur Donnithorne and Zeluco: Characterization via Literary Allusion in Adam Bede,” VN, 23 (1963), 18-19—and Jerome Thale—“Adam Bede: Arthur Donnithorne and Zeluco,” MLN, 70 (1965), 263-65—both assume that Eliot blames Arthur for not heeding Moore's message about the awful fate of seducers. In fact, the novel's seductions are far more interesting than its moral passages, and Eliot disapproves of Arthur for preferring this tale to Wordsworth. Also most Victorian readers would have known that in the preface to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron refers to his sin-wearied hero as “A poetical Zeluco.” Byron, a poet whom Eliot intensely disliked, stands for everything she opposes in Chapter Seventeen.

23. U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels, p 95.

24. Arthur's reference to gentlemen making improbable marriages in ballads suggests a romantic story like “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid” in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (an enlarged edition was published in 1794). Also Gothic tales in ballad form were very popular in this period. Many translations of Gottfried Bürgher's “Lenore” were published, the best known being William Taylor's “Ellenore,” in the Monthly Magazine, 1796.

25. See Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans George Eliot (New York 1957), pp 78-79 and 122-24. The most impressive confession-scenes in Eliot's fiction are Janet's confession to Mr. Tryan in “Janet's Repentance,” Hetty's to Dinah in Adam Bede (xlv), and Lydgate's to Dorothea in Middlemarch (lxvi).

26. It is interesting to note that in Chapter Fifteen Dinah, also a member of the working-class, disregards social propriety in a forceful attempt to awaken Hetty's conscience, while in the next chapter Irwine fails through excessive politeness to elicit Arthur's confession.

27. G. H. Lewes, The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope, and Method (Boston 1879), p 150.

28. See Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford 1968), p 527. In “George Eliot's Reading of Wordsworth: The Record,” Thomas Pinney states that Lewes and Eliot read The Excursion aloud to each other during the composition of Adam Bede.

29. See Humphrey House's interpretation of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in Coleridge: The Clark Lectures 1951-52 (London 1953). Eliot was certainly capable of understanding the poem on this level.

30. A taste for the exotic seems to be associated with snobbery in Eliot's fiction. In Felix Holt, Esther Lyon reads Byron and dreams of genteel romance, while Mrs. Transome in her youth laughed at Lyrical Ballads, admired Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (an Arabian fantasy of incredible plot), and married for rank and money. (I am indebted to Dunham's “Wordsworthian Themes and Attitudes in George Eliot's Novels” for the reference to Southey.) Rosamond Vincy, the social climber of Middlemarch, copies passages out of Lalla Rookh, a series of Oriental romances by Thomas Moore. Lydgate, unconscious snob and Rosamond's victim, has given up reading literature for science, but takes a sentimental view of women and imagines that life with Rosy will bring “ideal happiness (of the kind known in the Arabian Nights, in which … everything is given to you and nothing claimed) …” (xxxvi). In this case sentimentalism makes the man vulnerable to exploitation.

31. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York 1957), IV, 136.

32. Ian Milner, “The Structure of Values in Adam Bede,” Philologica Pragensia, 9 (1966), 281-91, and John Goode, “Adam Bede,” Critical Essays on George Eliot. What Eliot has to offer a Marxist-oriented approach can best be appreciated if we first analyze her fiction in terms of her own values and only then attempt to assess the limitations of her vision—the latter problem is beyond the scope of the present essay.

33. For perceptive discussion of Eliot's ambivalence towards political reform, see Graham Martin, “‘Daniel Deronda’: George Eliot and Political Change,” Critical Essays on George Eliot, and Linda Bamber, “Self-Defeating Politics in George Eliot's Felix Holt,” VS, 18 (1975), 419-35.

34. Raymond Williams finds a similar problem in the celebration of aristocratic munificence in the English pastoral tradition—The Country and the City (London 1975), pp 38-47. In “The Natural History of German Life,” Eliot attacks the sentimental treatment of “the working classes” by contemporary authors and insists that the artist must obliterate the “vulgarity of exclusiveness” through accurate depiction of lower class characters (Essays of George Eliot, pp 268-71). This aspect of Eliot's realism is emphasized by the contrast between Arthur's idyllic view of Hetty and the narrator's account of her pathetic naiveté and hopeless flight.

35. Ian Gregor—“The Two Worlds of ‘Adam Bede,’” The Moral and the Story (London 1962)—and Michael Squires—The Pastoral Novel—both view Arthur's affair with Hetty as a genuine pastoral idyll. Many readers have assumed that Eliot was passing a Puritan judgment on sexuality in having the affair end in disaster—most recently Calvin Bedient in Architects of the Self (Berkeley 1972).