SOURCE: Thompson, Andrew. “George Eliot, Dante, and Moral Choice in Felix Holt, The Radical.” Modern Language Review 86, no. 3 (July 1991): 553-66.

[In the following essay, Thompson evaluates Eliot's many references and allusions to Dante in Felix Holt.]

In his introduction to George Eliot—A Writer's Notebook 1854-1879, Joseph Wiesenfarth draws attention to the ‘substantial body of allusion’ to the Divina Commedia of Dante in Felix Holt, the Radical. In particular Wiesenfarth notes the use of Inferno Canto xiii (the Wood of the Suicides), which Eliot uses to make Transome Court ‘akin to a circle of Dante's Hell’ and to create ‘an atmosphere of hopeless suffering caused by Mrs Transome's sins’, in which she is tortured by her ex-lover, Jermyn, and her son, Harold.¹ Wiesenfarth also notes how in the novel ‘growth through suffering … seems peculiarly susceptible to presentation in terms of Dantean imagery’ (Notebook, p. xxxviii). In this article, I shall examine these observations and argue that Eliot's use of Dante was rather more extensive, yet at the same time more specific, than the outline given by Wiesenfarth suggests.

George Eliot makes specific reference to Dante on three occasions within Felix Holt, the Radical, and uses lines from the Divina Commedia as epigraphs to two chapters.² The first reference comes in the introduction, and likens Sampson, the driver of the coach on which the author imagines us to be travelling through the English countryside, to Dante's Virgil: ‘The coachman was an excellent travelling companion and commentator on the landscape; he could tell the names of sites and persons, and explained the meanings of groups, as well as the shade of Virgil in a more memorable journey’ (Felix, p. 6).³ The second reference to Dante, also in the introduction, and the one Wiesenfarth gives in full, is the allusion to Canto xiii:

The poets have told us of a dolorous enchanted forest in the under world. The thorn bushes there, and the thick-barked stems, have human histories hidden in them; the power of unuttered cries dwells in the passionless-seeming branches, and the red warm blood is darkly feeding the quivering nerves of a sleepless memory that watches through all dreams. These things are a parable.

(Felix, p. 8)

Wiesenfarth gives a useful gloss on the above passage, which will serve as a starting-point for further analysis:

The parable is evident in the novel when Eliot presents Mrs Transome as one of the ‘passionless-seeming branches’ living with the power of ‘unuttered cries’ in the hell of Transome Court; there she suffers the fate of a sinful queen who has failed to achieve happiness. …

She took Jermyn as her lover, and he fathered Harold whom she loves. Now it is Jermyn and Harold who torture her most cruelly. Harold sits down beside her with ‘the unmanageable strength of a great bird’ (ch. 1), and Jermyn turns ‘tenderness into calculation’.

(Notebook, pp. xxxi-xxxii)

Wiesenfarth picks up the reference to the harpies in Harold's ‘unmanageable strength of a great bird’, and the savage image of Jermyn's words to Mrs Transome being ‘as pleasant to her as if it had been cut into her bared arm’, which echoes the character of Dante's injury to the tree from which he snaps a twig at the behest of Virgil. Transome Court, hidden behind a thick belt of trees, is strongly reminiscent of Dante's Hell, in which a monotonous cycle of events repeats itself. Eliot uses the Wood of the Suicides as a metaphor for Mrs Transome's attenuated existence. ‘She had contracted small rigid habits of thinking and acting’ (Felix, p. 21), and ‘she objects to changes’ (p. 37). Her husband spends his life in the fruitless occupation of repeatedly rearranging his collection of insects. In a Dantean contrappasso, he is defined by his choice, and comes to resemble that which he has chosen. ‘Your father has slept there for years. He will be like a distracted insect, and never know where to go, if you alter the track he has to walk in’ (Felix, p. 17). Yet it is perhaps too easy to equate the hell of Transome Court with Dante's Wood of the Suicides in Canto xiii, and to assume that Eliot employs the Dantean imagery simply as an objective correlative for Mrs Transome's mental life, or to elicit pity for her. The references to Dante are very specific and function in various ways at different levels of the text to support Eliot's own moral universe. For, as in the Divina Commedia, there is a strong element of judgement present in Eliot's novel. Piero delle Vigne, to whom Dante speaks in Canto xiii, is a paradigm of intransigence. Unable to tolerate an image of himself created by those who accused him of treason, he commits suicide. Mrs Transome's oppressive dread is, in part, a fear of any such altered image of herself. She, too, finds herself powerless to stop the revelation of the truth of her own past conduct, while her failure to give any meaning to her suffering, to make it a vehicle for repentance and forgiveness, makes her, like Piero, an ‘imprisoned spirit’ (Inferno, xiii. 87).⁴

The third of the direct references to the Divina Commedia comes late on in Felix Holt: ‘There is heroism even in the circles of hell for fellow-sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate’ (Felix, p. 372). Wiesenfarth comments that Jermyn ‘does nothing but recriminate’ (Notebook, p. xxxii). The passage is a direct reference to Canto v of the Inferno, where in the circle of the lustful Dante meets the souls of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, who, in Wiesenfarth's opinion, are evoked by Eliot as ‘an ideal’ in comparison with Jermyn and Mrs Transome (Notebook, p. 170). In the notebook edited by Wiesenfarth, there are two quotations from Inferno, v.⁵ The first of these reads:

A vizio di lussuria fu sì rotta,
                    che libito fè licito in sua legge
                    per tòrre il biasmo in che era condotta.

(l. 55)

(With the vice of luxury was she so broken, that she made lust and law alike in her decree, to take away the blame she had incurred.)

These words, spoken by Virgil, refer to Semiramis, legendary queen of Assyria (Inferno, v. 58), and in Felix Holt we read of Mrs Transome that ‘unlike the Semiramis who made laws to suit her practical licence, she loved, poor soul in the midst of desecrated sanctities, and of honours that look tarnished in the light of monotonous and weary suns’. This comment prefigures the reference to the ‘fellow-sinners who cling to each other’, in the way that Semiramis comes before Paolo and Francesca (‘quei due che 'nsieme vanno’ (‘these two that go together’) Inferno, v. 74) in the procession of souls blown on the winds of passion, the ‘bufera infernal’. Canto v is of particular importance thematically. It acts as a subtext with direct bearing not only on the stories of Mrs Transome and Jermyn but also on those of each of the other major characters.

The most obvious connexion between the stories of Mrs Transome and Jermyn and Francesca and Paolo is that both pairs were lovers. Dante's lovers were discovered and killed in the very act of sinning, whereas the sins of Eliot's lovers emerge years after, and much of Mrs Transome's tragedy happens in the interval between the deed and its discovery. The parallels between Mrs Transome and Francesca are quite specific, however.

In the character of Francesca, Dante shows the power of literature to affect and influence the reader, and in particular the effect of the Rime of the dolce stil nuovo, which Dante had himself practised earlier in life. It becomes evident that Francesca is steeped in such romantic literature when she attempts to justify her actions using the erroneous ideologies embodied in this poetry, and in language which, in its obsession with amor, imitates the poetry of the Stilnovisti:

Amor, ch'al cor gentil ratto s'apprende,
                    prese costui della bella persona
                    che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende.
Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona,
                    mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
                    che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona.
Amor condusse noi ad una morte.

(Inferno, v. 100)

(Love, which quickly lays its claim to tender hearts, seized hold of him through the beauty that was later taken from me; and the way in which it happened still afflicts me. Love, which will not permit one who is loved not to love in turn, seized hold of me through the pleasures I had from him, so that, as you can see, it still has not left me. Love led us to a single death.)

In a similar fashion, Mrs Transome has herself been the victim both of an inadequate education and of morally questionable literature which nurtures an inherent tendency in her character towards egoism:

When she was young she had been thought wonderfully clever and accomplished, and had been rather ambitious of intellectual superiority—had secretly picked out for private reading the lighter parts of dangerous French authors—and in company had been able to talk of Mr. Burke's style, or of Chateaubriand's eloquence—had laughed at the Lyrical Ballads and admired Mr. Southey's ‘Thalaba’. She always thought that the dangerous French writers were wicked, and that her reading of them was a sin; but many sinful things were highly agreeable to her, and many things which she did not doubt to be good and true were dull and meaningless. She found ridicule of Biblical characters very amusing, and she was interested in stories of illicit passion … the notion that what is true and, in general, good for mankind, is stupid and drug-like, is not a safe theoretic basis in circumstances of temptation and difficulty.

(Felix, pp. 25-26)

Words must constantly be analysed, and neither Francesca nor Mrs Transome does this. Each allows literature to provide a structure for her emotions, and to impose an order on her own experience.

Like Francesca, Mrs Transome is living in a state in which the past is for ever reasserting itself, or eternally present. Both are irrevocably linked to the choices they have made (‘questi, che mai da me non fia diviso’ (‘this man who never shall be parted from me’) Inferno, v. 135). Eliot leaves us in no doubt that this choice stems ultimately from character. Throughout Mrs Transome's life ‘there had vibrated the maiden need to have her hand kissed and be the object of chivalry’ (Felix, p. 106), and Jermyn, with ‘a selfishness which then took the form of homage to her’, fulfilled this need (p. 368).

As Francesca is condemned to remain always with Paolo, so Mrs Transome is for ever united with Jermyn through her son, Harold. Though they have been estranged as lovers for twenty years when the novel begins, there is a symbolic acknowledgement of their indivisibility when the past is suddenly made present:

After a few moments' silence she said, in a gentle and almost tremulous voice—

‘Let me take your arm.’

He gave it immediately, putting on his hat and wondering. For more than twenty years Mrs. Transome had never chosen to take his arm.

(Felix, p. 107)⁶

Part of Mrs Transome's tragedy lies in her inability to understand the nature of her sin, resulting, in Dante's and Eliot's terms, in failure as a moral being. Francesca's words apply again in the case of Mrs Transome:

Nessun maggior dolore
          che ricordarsi del tempo felice
          nella miseria.

(Inferno, v. 121)

(There is no greater sadness than recalling a happy time when in the throes of misery.)

Although she is bitter towards Jermyn in her misery, Mrs Transome's own ‘happy time’ is only indicated as the time before Harold was born:

‘Denner,’ she said, in a low tone, ‘if I could choose at this moment, I would choose that Harold should never have been born.’

‘Nay, my dear … it was a happiness to you then.’

‘I don't believe I felt the happiness then as I feel the misery now.’

(Felix, p. 347)

We find that Mrs Transome ‘was not penitent. She had borne too hard a punishment’ (Felix, p. 434). She feels remorse, it is true, but her refusal to acknowledge her own transgression, or to see the bearing of moral law upon her own circumstances, precludes all possibility of moral growth.

Eliot is concerned with Dante's pity, and refers to it in her notebook, in a note on Canto xiii:

To balance Dante's severity, there are many instances of tenderness and compassion: e.g. in the wood of suicides Canto xiii, 84, he begs Virgil to ask questions for him of Pietro de' Vigni—‘Ch' io non potrei: tanta pietà m'accora.’—Again, in C. xiv at the beginning, he cannot go away from the Florentine transfixed as a tree without gathering up the scattered leaves & giving them back to the poor trunk.

(Notebook, p. 43)

and again: ‘Throughout the Inferno I find only three instances of what can be called cruelty in Dante. Everywhere else the sufferings of the damned fill him with pity’ (p. 44).

Within Felix Holt, George Eliot is concerned to balance her own severity in assigning Mrs Transome to the hell of the author's own creating, with tenderness and compassion. This becomes clear from a particularly ‘Dantesque’ passage in the novel, which comes soon after the discovery of Mrs Transome's past relationship with Jermyn, and Harold's true parentage:

All had been stillness hitherto, except the fitful wind outside. But her ears now caught a sound within—slight, but sudden. She moved near the door, and heard the sweep of something on the matting outside. It came closer and paused. Then it began again, and seemed to sweep away from her. Then it approached, and paused as it had done before. Esther listened, wondering. The same thing happened again and again, till she could bear it no longer. She opened her door, and in the dim light of the corridor, where the glass above seemed to make a glimmering sky, she saw Mrs Transome's tall figure pacing slowly, with her cheek upon her hand.

(Felix, p. 432)

The ‘fitful wind’, with its connotations of spent or curbed passion, the sound of the repeated sweeping past of Mrs Transome in the confined space of the corridor, and the monotony and loneliness of her life are all strongly suggestive of Dante's vision. Mrs Transome is, in fact, coming to Esther for comfort in her sorrow. Her own isolating pride is beginning to melt, and she wishes for compassion and love from Esther. Yet, as in Inferno, v, where the souls do not appear to be able to come of their own accord, Mrs Transome ‘might have gone on pacing the corridor like an uneasy spirit without a goal, if Esther's thought, leaping towards her, had not saved her from the need to ask admission’ (Felix, p. 435). In Inferno, v, Dante describes the effect of his call to the sinners in the following terms:

Quali colombe, dal disio chiamate,
                    con l'ali alzate e ferme al dolce nido
                    vengon per l'aere dal voler portate;
cotali uscir della schiera ov' è Dido,
                    a noi venendo per l'aere maligno,
                    sì forte fu l'affetuoso grido.

(l. 82)

(Just like doves, called by desire, guided by instinct return to their nests gliding through the air on outstretched, motionless wings, they left the squad where Dido is coming towards us on the malignant air; such was the power of my loving cry.)

In the upper circles of Dante's Inferno, we still sense the essential humanity of the sinners. We are made aware of the common problems of the human condition, of the ties which link the damned to other human beings and often to Dante himself. In Canto v, the image of Dante's call bridging the spatial distance between himself and the sinners is symbolic of this partial identification with them. Eliot uses a similar image when she describes Esther's ‘thought leaping towards’ Mrs Transome saving her ‘from the need to ask admission’ (Felix, p. 435). Both authors are concerned to show the effect of pity in binding human beings together. This powerful, altruistic emotion is the converse of that selfish passion by means of which both Dante's and Eliot's characters were brought to the ‘doloroso passo’.⁷ Esther has ‘a passionate desire to soothe this suffering woman’. Here however, the passion and desire are constructive, healing qualities, and this contrast highlights the Dantean precept that the sins of incontinence (those of the flesh) are essentially an excess of perversion of some good human quality.

Both the character Dante, within the Inferno, and Esther in Felix Holt show extreme emotional reactions in the face of the suffering of the sinners. Of Dante we are told

                                                  sì che di pietade
                    io venni men così com'io morisse;
e caddi come corpo morto cade.

(Inferno, v. 140)⁸

(so that out of pity I grew faint as though I was dying, and I fell like a dead body falls.)

The reason for Dante's reaction here may be the knowledge that he was himself implicated in the sin of Paolo and Francesca, through his writings in the dolce stil nuovo, which were similar in content to the literature of romance which contributed to their damnation. Esther ‘found it difficult to speak. The dimly-suggested tragedy of this woman's life, the dreary waste of years empty of sweet trust and affection, afflicted her even to horror’ (Felix, p. 436).

Her ‘horror’ arises, I think, partly from the realization that she, too, might easily have suffered the same fate as Mrs Transome. Like her, Esther was fond of morally questionable literature. Felix Holt acts as Eliot's commentator on Esther's reading-matter. Byron's heroes are the ‘most paltry puppets that were ever pulled by the strings of lust and pride’ (Felix, p. 64), and Réné ‘is idiotic immorality dressed up to look fine’ (p. 113). The reading (and writing) of such literature is associated by Eliot with moral irresponsibility, and with the dissipation of intelligence. Esther is accused of giving her ‘soul up to trifles’ (p. 113), and of being happy only when she can ‘get rid of any judgement that must carry grave action after it’ (p. 114). It is in the context of moral choice that Esther is described in terms of the bird imagery, which, in Dante's fifth Canto, is associated with the moral lightness of sin (Inferno, v, 74-75). On her arrival at Transome Court Esther appears to little Harry like ‘a new sort of bird’ (Felix, p. 348) and Felix tells her ‘You don't care to be better than a bird trimming its feathers, and pecking about after what pleases it’ (p. 114). There is a deliberate note of ambiguity in Eliot's choice of image, however. For whilst it is intended by Felix as a criticism of Esther's moral seriousness, it also has a predictive quality. Dante uses the same image in Purgatorio, ii:

Come quando, cogliendo biado e loglio,
                    li colombi adunati alla pastura,
                    quieti sanza mostrar l'usato orgoglio,
se cosa appare ond'elli abbian paura,
                    subitamente lasciano star l'esca,
                    perch'assaliti son da maggior cura;
così vid'io quella masnada fresca
                    lasciar lo canto, e gire inver la costa,
                    com'uom che va, nè sa dove riesca:
nè la nostra partita fu men tosta.

(l. 124)

(As when doves are feeding together, picking up corn and tares, quietly, with none of their usual proud strutting; if then something appears which scares them, they abandon their feed at once because assailed by a greater care; thus I saw the band which had just arrived leave their song and move off towards the slope, like people who go not knowing where they will end up: nor was our own departure any less speedy than theirs.)

Esther, too, will shortly be ‘assailed by a greater care’, and ‘leave the song’ of rejected literature behind. Eliot then links the bird image directly with Esther's moment of moral choice, in a deliberate echo of lines from Dante's fifth Canto of Inferno: ‘That young presence which had flitted like a white new-winged dove over all the saddening relics of Transome Court, could not find its home there. Harold heard … that she loved some one else, and that she resigned all claim to the Transome estates’ (Felix, p. 437). Esther is herself ‘called by desire’, but unlike the sinners in Canto v, in her the image is reinstated in its proper context. Dante had used the dove, Christian symbol of peace, love, and gentleness, in the incongruous setting of the Inferno to heighten the pathos of the sinners' plight once we realize that, although condemned for their sin, they too partake of those valuable qualities conveyed by the dove image.

George Eliot creates a ‘moral landscape’ in Felix Holt, the Radical, which sometimes closely parallels that of Dante in the Divina Commedia, and indeed, Esther's own journey echoes that of the Dante-character. Towards the end of the novel several references to this journey reinforce the opening allusion to Sampson the coachman. Esther ‘had come to a new stage in her journey … and her young, untired spirit was full of curiosity’ (Felix, p. 342). Her father tells her that she has been ‘led by a peculiar path, and into experiences which are not the ordinary lot of those who are seated in high places’ (p. 359). Her stay at Transome Court becomes a ‘moral descent’ (p. 397), and she comes to feel that ‘in accepting Harold Transome she left the high mountain air, the passionate serenity of perfect love forever behind her’ (p. 394). She stood ‘at the first and last parting of the ways’ (an image reminiscent of the geography of Virgil's underworld), facing the choice which would give unity and definition to her life, and her reflections at this point are strongly evocative of the seventh Canto of Dante's Purgatorio, where the sinners are constrained to submit their own desire to progress upwards to a higher will, which rules that they may not move on by night, but must wait and watch in darkness:

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes all things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.

(Felix, p. 431)⁹

We get confirmation of her decision only at the very end of the novel, but in terms of the Dantean moral landscape, the choice has been made earlier. Esther's own journey echoes Dante's when he emerges from Hell and reaches the foot of Mount Purgatory. For Esther, Felix was ‘like the return of morning’ (p. 400) after her stay at Transome Court. She breaks down in tears (‘it was an unspeakable relief to her after all the pent-up stifling experience’ (p. 396)) at the thought that she might never see Felix again after his trial, and finally dries her own and then her father's eyes, in a gesture echoing Virgil's tenderness towards Dante when he washes the poet's tear-stained cheeks (‘guance lacrimose’, Purgatorio, i. 124-27) when they emerge from Hell.

Felix himself takes on some of the characteristics of a Virgil figure. Esther's relationship to Felix has rightly annoyed some feminist critics.¹⁰ I believe, though, that Eliot was trying to parallel the Virgil-Dante relationship in her portrayal of the humble disciple Esther and the enlightened mentor Felix. Eliot comments that Esther ‘went towards him with the swift movement of a frightened child towards its protector’ (Felix, p. 403) in a deliberate evocation of the attitude of the Dante-character towards his own guide, teacher, and protector, Virgil, in the lower regions of Hell.¹¹ Several times in Inferno Dante relies on Virgil for protection. Eliot chooses a similar image to the one used by Dante in Purgatorio xxx:

volsimi alla sinistra col rispitto
                    col quale il fantolin corre alla mamma
                    quando ha paura o quando elli è afflitto,
per dicere a Virgilio

(l. 43)

(I turned round to my left with that trust with which a small child runs to its mother when afraid or distressed, to say to Virgil.)

One critic has noted that ‘the novels of George Eliot's maturity re-enact her own emancipation’.¹² This implies a strong autobiographical content, and raises the problem of the relationship of the author to the characters in her novels: in this case between George Eliot and Esther in Felix Holt. I believe the relationship is a particularly close one in a number of ways. Esther experiences many of the same emotional crises and problems as her author, choosing as she does to disappoint expectation and flout convention by rejecting social advantage in marriage for a socially far less acceptable alternative, Felix. The strongly present father-figure in the novel does not, however, appear to relate closely to the facts of George Eliot's own life: she quarrelled with her own father over her loss of religious faith, and the breach between them was never fully repaired. Along with Felix Holt, Esther's stepfather, Mr Lyon, takes on something of the qualities of a Virgil figure. Like Virgil, whose journey to the underworld Dante repeats in the Inferno, Mr Lyon has already completed the journey which Esther is now taking. (His story of moral choice and resistance to social convention, which prefigures Esther's own, is recounted as a narrative in Chapter 6 of the novel.) The father-figure appears here to be fully integrated into the pattern of the Dantean analogy in a kind of wish-fulfilment (‘she wished to go back to her father (Felix, p. 437)) rather than, as in Eliot's life, as a source of conflict, regret, and sorrow.

In Felix Holt, the Radical Eliot is, I suggest, recasting her own experience. By the time she wrote Felix Holt she had come through a period of turmoil and struggle, to achieve both equanimity and security in her own life. Marian Evans-Lewes had the same conviction about her own life as her narrator in Felix Holt had about Esther's: ‘I will only say that Esther has never repented’ (Felix, p. 443). The heroine's choices are seen to be the right ones: she achieves a ‘difficult blessedness’ (p. 213), thereby completing the pre-existing pattern of Dante's Commedia. Through Esther (and Esther's identification with the Dante-character), the text presents us with a justification of the author's own course of action, though the elements of her struggle are, I believe, distanced sufficiently for the explanatory and justificatory functions of the text to remain on a subliminal level.

Eliot gives us a further Dantean ‘vision’ of the hell from which Esther escapes in the scene where Jermyn reveals his true relationship to Harold:

‘Mr. Transome, I must speak to you in private.’ …

He started and looked round into Jermyn's eyes. For an instant which seemed long, there was no sound between them, but only angry hatred gathering in the two faces. Harold felt himself going to crush this insolence: Jermyn felt that he had words within him that were fangs to clutch this obstinate strength, and wring forth the blood and compel submission. He said in a tone that was rather lower, but yet harder and more biting—

‘You will repent else—for your mother's sake.’

At that sound, quick as a leaping flame, Harold had struck Jermyn across the face with his whip. The brim of his hat had been a defence. Jermyn, a powerful man, had instantly thrust out his hand and clutched Harold hard by his clothes just below the throat, pushing him slightly so as to make him stagger. …

‘Let me go, you scoundrel! or I'll be the death of you’

‘Do,’ said Jermyn, in a grating voice; ‘I am your father.’ …

The two men had got very near the long mirror. They were both white; both had anger and hatred in their faces; the hands of both were upraised. As Harold heard the last terrible words he started at a leaping throb that went through him, and in the start turned his eyes away from Jermyn's face. He turned them on the same face in the glass with his own beside it, and saw the hated fatherhood reasserted.

(Felix, pp. 422-23)

This passage brings together allusions to and images from two Cantos of the Inferno (xxxii and xxxiii), those of the betrayers in Lake Cocytus. The description of hatred and rage in Jermyn's words, which become ‘fangs to clutch’ evokes Dante's description of Count Ugolino encased in the ice of the lake:

la bocca solevò dal fiero pasto
                    quel peccator, forbendola a' capelli
                    del capo ch'elli avea di retro guasto.

(xxxiii. 1)

(That sinner raised his mouth from his savage meal, wiping it on the hair of that head, the back of which he had destroyed.)

In Dante's account Ugolino, who betrayed his own city of Pisa, and was in turn betrayed by his accomplice, Archbishop Ruggiero, whose head he now gnaws in Cocytus, was imprisoned in a tower with his children, and was driven by hunger to eat their flesh after their deaths. The Dantean echo in Felix Holt serves to point up, and to focus our attention on, the nature of the ‘crimes’ of betrayal involved. The reference is even more specific, however, for Jermyn, too, has been feeding off the estate of his own child for years, and it is this which has induced Harold to ‘set the dogs on’ him (Felix, p. 178).¹³ Eliot's use of the mirror in the confrontation scene between father and son is an interesting reworking of elements from Dante's Canto xxxii:

Per ch'io mi volsi, e vidimi davanti
                    e sotto i piedi un lago che per gelo
                    avea di vetro e non d'acqua sembiante.

(Inferno xxxii. 22)

(And so I turned round, and saw before me, beneath my feet, a lake which was so frozen over that it looked more like glass than water.)

The betrayers are compelled to look upon their own reflections, which expose to them the truth of their sins in the ice eternally. One of them asks Dante, ‘Perchè cotanto in noi ti specchi?’ (‘Why do you stare at us so hard?’) (xxxii. 54) and he, in turn, asks to know the names of the two sinners who are pressed so close together in the ice that the hair of their heads intermingles:

                    E quei piegaro i colli;
                    e poi ch'ebber li visi a me eretti,
li occhi lor, ch'eran pria pur dentro molli,
                    gocciar su per le labbra, e 'l gelo strinse
                    le lacrime tra essi e riserrolli.
Con legno legno spranga mai non cinse
                    forte così; ond'ei come due becchi
                    cozzaro insieme, tanta ira li vinse.

(xxxii. 44)

(And they craned their necks, and when they had lifted their faces towards me, their eyes, which till then had contained their tears, dripped them down onto their lips, and the cold froze those tears in their eyes and sealed them up once more. No bolt ever fastened wood to wood more firmly; and so it was that in their fury they butted their heads together like a pair of goats.)

The two are unable to speak, but their rage finds expression in frozen tears and animal aggression towards each other. As with Ugolino, blood relations are involved. These two sons of a Tuscan nobleman disputed their inheritance and subsequently killed each other. Eliot re-creates Dante's visual image of blood relatives locked in struggle. Jermyn ‘was suffering the torment of a compressed rage, which, if not impotent to inflict pain on another, was impotent to avert evil from himself’ (Felix, p. 421). Like the sinners in Cocytus, who cannot wait to betray each other to Dante, we are aware that Jermyn is himself something of a habitual betrayer, who has previously betrayed Bycliffe, Esther's true father. He has been condemned and imprisoned by his own actions, and is reduced to the state of brute desperation and anger of the sinners in Dante's Lake Cocytus.¹⁴ Eliot uses these parallel scenes to highlight the betrayal by Jermyn, but also that by Harold, who according to the Dantean scheme of Inferno is guilty of betraying a guest, Esther, in that he uses the human affections as an instrument to achieve his own advantage.¹⁵ Eliot uses Dante to provide paradigms of the crimes of which her characters are guilty. If we are sensitive to these concealed allusions, they serve to remind us of the issues and to clarify them in a world where, in its multiplicity and multiformity of relations, perspective and moral resolve can easily be eroded by currents of action. For ‘these things which are easy to discern when they are painted for us on the large canvas of poetic story become confused and obscure even for well-read gentlemen when their affection for themselves is alarmed by pressing details of actual experience’ (Felix, p. 372). Eliot's reworking of elements and themes present in Dante's Cocytus represents her own rejection of the sterile ‘waste-land’ of Transome Court. The theme cannot be pursued any further, and as for Dante, there is nowhere left for Esther to go, but to follow the road through to the other side: ‘She resigned all claim to the Transome estates. She wished to go back to her father’ (p. 437). Like Dante, George Eliot is a determinist, and this facilitates her integration of the Dantean elements into her novel. For Dante, it was the heavens which determined the character of a man, whereas for Eliot it was the sum of past experiences, actions, and reflections upon experience. Yet both acknowledge man's power to influence his own destiny: Dante through man's free will, and Eliot through the determinist position that a man is himself one of the causes of what he becomes.¹⁶ Thus freedom becomes the freedom to obey a higher law: Divine Law for Dante, and a commonly agreed moral code, justifiable in purely human terms, for Eliot. The consequences of transgressing this code are made abundantly clear in the moral world of Felix Holt. Jermyn ‘had sinned for the sake of particular concrete things, and particular concrete consequences were likely to follow’ (Felix, p. 109). This comment by Eliot might also be allowed to stand for the whole of Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio.

Both writers acknowledge that the will is often swayed by the passions and often extend their pity to those who fail in the struggle. Yet the full realization of man's humanity remains inextricably linked to the possession of freedom as they defined it, and upon knowledge of the higher laws. In Felix Holt this is the crux of the matter. For Esther ‘made a deliberate choice’ (p. 439). Mrs Transome and Jermyn, however, ‘had seen no reason why they should not indulge their passion and their vanity’ and ‘the reasons had gradually been unfolding themselves ever since’ (p. 205). For both Dante and Eliot, the mind must be an active agent operating at the crucial moments of decision. The passivity of Dante's Francesca, whose special pleading consists of the assertion that she was powerless in the face of forces which were too strong for her, becomes merely a means of abdicating responsibility. This passivity is present in Eliot's characters too. Mrs Transome ‘must put up with all things as they are determined for me’ (p. 320) and believes herself to be ‘too old to learn to call bitter sweet and sweet bitter’ (p. 108), and Jermyn reflects that ‘perhaps if he had not allowed himself to be determined (chiefly, of course, by the feelings of others, for of what effect would his own feelings have been without them?) into the road he actually took, he might have done better for himself’ (p. 366).¹⁷ The two Dantean scenes in Felix Holt, the encounters between Esther and Mrs Transome and between Jermyn and Harold, reflect Dante's division in Inferno between the sins of the flesh (incontinence) and those of the fraudulent, who abuse the intellect. In the lower region of Inferno, the emphasis is thrown upon the use and abuse of language, and the theme of the status of language itself (a recurrent one for Dante throughout the Commedia), is particularly clearly focused in the Cantos of the betrayers, where there is a strong contrast between the use of language for the lowest moral purposes, and Dante's own insistence on truth:

‘Omai' diss'io ‘nonvo’ che tu favelle,
                    malvagio traditor: ch'alla tua onta
                    io porterò di te vere novelle.’

(Inferno, xxxii. 109)

(‘Now [I know your name]’ I said, ‘I don't want you to speak, you filthy traitor, for to your shame I'll take back with me real news about you.’)

The same theme also runs through Eliot's novel. She comments near the beginning of the book that ‘there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life’ (Felix, p. 45). Language acts as a mediator between the private and public spheres in the novel, and, as the means by which the individual may be judged by society, it tends to sanction the established moral code. Mrs Transome's dread is essentially fear of exposure through language, and the consequences of such an exposure. We repeatedly witness various degrees of the perversion of language. In the election campaign, Felix finds his ‘own serious phrases, [his] own rooted beliefs, caricatured’ by the political agent Johnson (p. 127), who then accuses Felix of misrepresenting his words: ‘I call it a poor-spirited thing to take up a man's straight-forward words and twist them. What I meant to say was plain enough’ (p. 128). Harold uses language to conceal his motives in courting Esther, and Jermyn betrays Mrs Transome to her son. Within the novel, those who transgress the moral code thereby choose alienation, become isolated from society, and as in the Divina Commedia, are shown as regressing into an animal state.¹⁸ Language, for George Eliot, is an essential instrument in allowing access to accepted moral truths—in Felix's words, ‘the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful’ (p. 274). Felix insists that Mr Lyon should ‘teach any truth you can, whether it's in the Testament or out of it. It's little enough anybody can get hold of, and still less what he can drive into a pence-counting, parcel-tying generation, such as mostly fill your chapels’ (p. 60). In other words, the already fragile higher moral truths, which for Eliot were justifiable in purely human terms and upon which any truly ‘human’ organization must depend, were made more vulnerable by the fact that they must be filtered through the medium of language, which, as we see in the novel, easily distorts. For the author, as for her character Felix, language assumes even greater importance in a world in which morality is threatened by emerging economic, social, and political forces, by the breakdown of established religion and by the human implications of Darwin's theory. For Eliot, then, truthfulness in her own use of language becomes a moral imperative. As a novelist, mediating between her own private and the ‘wider public life’, it became incumbent on her to use language constructively to safeguard morality through sustained effort and continual striving to achieve clarity of expression in the representation of her own vision of truth without distortion. There was a constant need to guard against the possibility that fiction might become merely deceit. Eliot, like Dante, realized the difficulties involved in working with a fallible medium. ‘Speech’, she said, ‘is but broken light upon the depth ❙ Of the unspoken.’¹⁹ Yet with Eliot, I believe, such an acknowledgement merely serves to underline her own moral imperative in the use of language.

We can look to George Eliot's essays for further evidence of her moral outlook and for the strong affinities which, as Eliot herself realized, her moral vision had with that of Dante. In a ‘godless’ society, where the only sanctions are those of human morality: ‘Our civilisation, considered as a splendid material fabric, is helplessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments or ideal feelings. And it is this invisible police which we had need, as a community, strive to maintain in efficient force.’²⁰ It was with this sense of moral responsibility that Eliot wrote her novels, for she, like Dante, saw literature as a force either for truth or lies, good or evil.²¹ She implicitly links her own activity in writing with Dante's:

I respect the horsewhip when applied to the back of Cruelty, and think that he who applies it is a more perfect human being because his outleap of indignation is not checked by too curious reflection on the nature of guilt—a more perfect human being because he more completely incorporates the best social life of the race, which can never be constituted by ideas that nullify action. This is the essence of Dante's sentiment (it is painful to think that he applies it so cruelly)—

‘E cortesia fù, lui esser villano.’

and it is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one's kinship with all frailties and vices undermines the active heroism which battles against wrong.

Eliot, like Dante, passes judgement on her characters within her own moral framework, and her conception of character is very Dantean:

When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind in the sane body, the final test of completeness seems to be a security of distinction between what we have professed and what we have done; what we have aimed at and what we have achieved; what we have invented and what we have witnessed or had evidenced to us; what we think and feel in the present and what we thought and felt in the past.

(‘How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials and Believe in Them’ (Theophrastus Such, pp. 122-23, 125))

Dante is used as a ‘moral touchstone’, providing parallels and contrasts with the content of Felix Holt. Eliot uses the concrete, physical landscape of Dante's moral universe to point and direct our judgements as well as our sympathies. She could have expected a good proportion of her readers to be familiar with the Divina Commedia, and thus to pick up the buried allusions within the text, especially those to the great love and the great hatred of Francesca and Ugolino respectively, but also perhaps those to the Purgatorio and Paradiso. There is, too, a strong suggestion that Dante is there to counter any tendency towards ‘a too curious reflection of the nature of guilt’ and Eliot's own ‘intense consciousness of … kinship with all frailties and human vices’.

Notes

1. Joseph Wiesenfarth, A Writer's Notebook 1854-1879 (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1981), p. xxxi. (Hereafter cited as Notebook).

2. Eliot loosely translates lines from Dante as the epigraphs to Chapters 15 and 22 of Felix Holt. The epigraph to Chapter 15 reads: ‘And doubt shall be as lead upon the feet ❙ Of thy most anxious will.’ The source for this is Paradiso, xiii. 112-14:

   E questo ti fia sempre piombo a' piedi,
                       per farti muover lento, con' uom lasso,
                       E al sì e al no, che tu non vedi;

   The epigraph to Chapter 22 reads: ‘Her gentle looks shot arrows, piercing him ❙ As gods are pierced, with poison of sweet pity.’ Here, the source is Inferno, xxix. 43-44: ‘Lamenti saettaron me diversi, ❙ che di pietà ferrati avean gli strali’ (see Notebook, pp. 43, 46, 171, and 173).

3. George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (first published 1866) (London, 1909; reprinted 1983). (Hereafter cited as Felix).

4. I have provided my own translation of the Divina Commedia throughout, except where Eliot has translated lines herself (see note 2).

5. See also note 7.

6. Jermyn, too, finds the past returning upon him. He mistakenly identifies the figure of his daughter with Mrs Transome, ‘another tall white-wrapped figure which had sometimes set his heart beating quickly more than thirty years before’ (Felix, p. 205).

7. George Eliot transcribed Dante's comment on the sinners in Canto v into her notebook: ‘Oh, lasso, ❙ Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio ❙ Menò costoro al doloroso passo!’ (l. 112). (Oh, the pity of it, that such sweet thoughts, such desires, should lead them to that grievous step!) (see Notebook, p. 43).

8. See also note 2, on Eliot's epigraph to Chapter 22 of Felix.

9. See Divina Commedia, Purgatorio, vii. 40-60.

10. See, for example, B. Zimmermann, ‘Felix Holt and the True Power of Womanhood’, ELH, 46 (1979), 432-51.

11. See also Inferno, viii. 97-102; x. 29-30; xvii. 85-99, and Purgatorio, viii. 40-42. The relationship between Felix and Esther cannot always be fixed in this way however. At times, Esther assumes some of the qualities of Dante's Beatrice. She is associated with the Dantean symbols of light and the rose of Paradiso, albeit in a disguised form, even before she appears: ‘There was a delicate scent of dried rose-leaves; the light … was a wax-candle in a white earthenware candlestick, and the table on the opposite side of the fireplace held a dainty work-basket frilled with blue satin’ (Felix, p. 54), and at the close of the novel, she ‘mean[s] to go on teaching’ Felix. Esther is shown as moving towards a ‘difficult blessedness’ (p. 213) which for George Eliot consists in an inner moral growth along with ‘the mutual subjection of soul’ between a man and a woman (George Eliot, Letter to Emily Davis, 8 August 1868, The George Eliot Letters, edited by G. S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, Connecticut, and London, 1954-78), iv, 468), and her progress is marked by an increasing physical beauty. She becomes transfigured by the knowledge and expression of truth. Here, Eliot may be attempting to give physical embodiment to a moral vision in the same way that Beatrice becomes transfigured for Dante in the Vita Nuova. As with Beatrice, Esther's humility, which is beyond doubt by the later stages of the novel, is given expression through her physical poise (Felix, pp. 329, 386, and 415).

12. Quentin Anderson, ‘George Eliot in Middlemarch’, in The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Volume 6: From Dickens to Hardy, edited by B. Ford (London, 1958); reprinted in George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by George R. Creeger (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1970), p. 159.

13. An echo of Inferno, xiii. 109-29; see also note 14.

14. ‘And a man may reach a point in his life in which his impulses are not distinguished from those of a hunted brute by any capability of scruples’ (Felix, p. 421).

15. In retrospect, and in the light of the Cocytus allusion, Eliot's comment on Mrs Transome that ‘a woman's love is always freezing into fear’ (Felix, p. 345) has a predictive quality, for it associates her with both her own betrayal of her husband and that by Jermyn, of which she herself will be the victim. Eliot's ‘love freezing into fear’ parallels Dante's frozen tears, for both negate or deny basic human qualities.

16. See George Levine, ‘Determinism and Responsibility’, PMLA, 77 (1962), 268-79.

17. Of his betrayal of Esther's true father, Bycliffe, Jermyn says: ‘I should never have done it if I had not been under an infatuation such as makes a man do anything’ (Felix, p. 369).

18. A further indication of this dehumanization is given in Eliot's use of the embrace or the failed embrace, again drawn from Virgil and Dante. In the Underworld of Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas tries three times to embrace his father Anchises; similarly, Dante tries three times to embrace Casella in Purgatory (ii. 76-81). George Eliot uses the failure to embrace her son as a measure of Mrs Transome's isolation. She had expected to ‘clasp her son again’ but was prevented by the realization that ‘this son who had come back to her was a stranger’ (Felix, p. 13). By contrast, Eliot uses the device to point to the power of human love and compassion binding individuals together on four occasions. Esther embraces her father, Felix, and Mrs Transome at moments of deep emotion.

19. George Eliot, ‘The Spanish Gypsy’, Works of George Eliot, 12 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1901), xi, 82.

20. George Eliot, ‘Debasing the Moral Currency’, in Impressions of Theophrastus Such; Essays and Leaves from a Note-Book (Edinburgh and London, 1901), p. 100. (Hereafter cited as Theophrastus Such.)

21. Eliot saw in much contemporary literature a lowering of ‘the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm and elevation of our social existence’. This, she thought, was often achieved through a ‘greedy buffoonery’ which ‘debases all historical beauty, majesty, and pathos’ (Theophrastus Such, p. 98).