[In the following essay, Leavis discusses how the failure of Felix Holt led to the success of Middlemarch.]

In our time when literary criticism has been generally discarded for the fashionable mechanics of structuralism and post-structuralism, George Eliot's novels can still raise extreme responses. The Jewish sections of Daniel Deronda or the ‘failed St. Theresa’ emphasis on Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch still find their admirers,¹ while those hating her writing can reject even her best novels, labelling her as an infuriatingly emotional Victorian encumbered with a heavy pedantic style and often breaking into the sustained didacticism of the self-educated. Robert Liddell's The Novels of George Eliot (London, 1977) would appear to exemplify much of the previous account of an extreme hostility to her art, and while the present writer would not endorse the spirit of his book, when faced with the mass of her oeuvre the roots of his charge are perhaps more understandable than the uncritical acceptance of pure adulation. Among those who care for literature rather than for literary theory, it does seem an accepted view of sanity that George Eliot's art contains disturbing extremes of quality.

A survey of the complete novels shows a uniquely distinguished writer who was highly intellectual but who developed a creative expression that easily transcended mere Westminster Review intellectuality, whose habits were towards pungent irony in analysis, but who could be anti-critical in her descents into self-indulgence and cloying emotionalism. It is significant that before her late-development into great art, her earlier works tended to seek refuge in a conventional melodramatic form. In George Eliot, Her Beliefs and her Art (London, 1975), a study attempting to relate George Eliot's intellectual thought and beliefs to her art,² Neil Roberts was not the first to make the valid point that from early on in the creative writing characteristics can be observed that foreshadow lapses of her maturity.

In fact the great creative writer who mastered a profound realism was even at the height of her powers a victim of Victorian pressures combined with her private vulnerability, so that her considerable intelligence could be defeated. A distinction must be continually made in her writings between what is ‘felt’ and what is schematic, and in a definition of what is ‘felt’ the true and profound has to be separated from the emotionally spurious. Dickens seems more in control and healthier in his melodrama (excepting certain excesses) than George Eliot in hers. An example of the discrepancies in her personality taken from outside her art are these extracts from two letters (from the forbiddingly large body of her collected letters) both written in 1874. The first is from a letter to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Ponsonby, and argues a case against moral paralysis induced by the discoveries of science, with the force and cogency of a great novelist's intelligence, the intelligence that understood the grounds of human behaviour in Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda:

As to the necessary combinations through which life is manifested, and which seem to present themselves to you as a hideous fatalism, which ought logically to petrify your volition—have they, in fact, any such influence on your ordinary course of action in the primary affairs of your existence as a human, social, domestic creature? And if they don't hinder you from taking measures for a bath, without which you know you cannot secure the delicate cleanliness which is your second nature, why should they hinder you from a line of resolve in a higher strain of duty to your ideal, both for yourself and others? But the consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms.

The second is to James Thomson on reading his poem full of the squalors of urban industrialism, The City of Dreadful Night, and presumably is an expression of an aspect of her idealism that inspired her to write the weakest parts of Daniel Deronda or the conclusion of Middlemarch. Perhaps this was her way of coping with the horror of the problems of the Victorian present; her novels are set in the past. Certainly it is recognisably Victorian in its religious stress on the unity of social order and on human good, and (alas!) is more characteristic of the letters than the previous example:

Dear Poet

I cannot rest satisfied without telling you that my mind responds with admiration to the distinct vision and grand utterance in the poem which you have been so good as to send me.

Also, I trust that an intellect informed by so much passionate energy as yours will soon give us more heroic strains with a wider embrace of human fellowship in them—such as will be to the labourers of the world what the odes of Tyrtaeus were to the Spartans, thrilling them with the sublimity of the social order and the courage of resistance to all that would dissolve it. To accept life and write much fine poetry, is to take a very large share in the quantum of human good, and seems to draw with it necessarily some recognition, affectionate and even joyful, of the manifold willing labours which have made such a lot possible.

However, the main interest of this study of George Eliot's novels is not on an investigation of the unevenness of her writing (readers can find ample illustration of this elsewhere) but on an attempt in outlining her progress as a novelist to explain the abrupt change in the order of her art after the publication of Felix Holt.

George Eliot first tried creative writing³ as a change from her Westminster Review work, in an experiment for Lewes to see if she could succeed with conversation between characters. This was done at the advanced age for a creative writer (usually the start comes much earlier) of 36, and judging from ‘Amos Barton’ and the rest of the sketches in Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) she adhered to the style and ambition of Mrs. Gaskell for her model. ‘Amos Barton’ and ‘Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story’ are half-comic and quaint depictions of situations characteristically set in the past, reeking of Mrs. Gaskell's literary mannerisms, and the more ambitious ‘Janet's Repentance’ is marked by a heavy emotionalism, allied to the explicit diagnostic commentary of a confirmed intellectual. In a letter of 11 November 1859 replying to a tribute paid to her by Mrs. Gaskell, she expresses gratitude for her indebtedness to that writer:

I had indulged the idea that if my books turned out to be worth much, you would be among my willing readers; for I was conscious, while the question of my power was still undecided for me, that my feeling towards Life and Art had some affinity with the feeling which had inspired Cranford and the earlier chapters of Mary Barton. That idea was brought the nearer to me, because I had the pleasure of reading Cranford for the first time in 1857, when I was writing the Scenes of Clerical Life, and going up the Rhine one dim wet day in the spring of the next year, when I was writing Adam Bede, I satisfied myself for the lack of a prospect by reading over again the earlier chapters of Mary Barton.

That critics may take this as evidence that Cranford has the structure and moral framework of the mature George Eliot is surely a mistaken view, and a case of ‘the tail wagging the dog’. Immature George Eliot, who could only find her mature identity with great effort entailing many false directions, has her beginnings in a feminine literary genre of mannered social observation and melodrama.

Neil Roberts has interestingly suggested that especially in ‘Janet's Repentance’ lie traces of the interest of the later George Eliot. Episodic and schematic attempts at a concentration on a diagnosis of society these ‘traces’ certainly are, for their nature is literary, and they are not fleshed out in sustained art. So this passage from ‘Janet's Repentance’ on the medical profession in Milby may point to an interest that is finally expressed in the study of the doctors in Middlemarch, but is here only a local episode that lacks the scale and three-dimensional concreteness of the mature novel:

Pratt was middle-sized, insinuating, and silvery-voiced; Pilgrim was tall, heavy, rough-mannered, and spluttering. Both were considered to have great powers of conversation, but Pratt's anecdotes were of the fine old crusty quality to be procured only of Joe Miller; Pilgrim's had the full fruity flavour of the most recent scandal. Pratt elegantly referred all diseases to debility, and, with a proper contempt for symptomatic treatment, went to the root of the matter with port-wine and bark; Pilgrim was persuaded that the evil principle in the human system was plethora, and he made war against it with cupping, blistering, and cathartics. They had both been long established in Milby, and as each had a sufficient practice, there was no very malignant rivalry between them; on the contrary, they had that sort of friendly contempt for each other which is always conducive to a good understanding between professional men; and when any new surgeon attempted, in an ill-advised hour, to settle himself in the town, it was strikingly demonstrated how slight and trivial are theoretic differences compared with the broad basis of common human feeling. There was the most perfect unanimity between Pratt and Pilgrim in the determination to drive away the obnoxious and too probably qualified intruder as soon as possible. Whether the first wonderful cure he effected was on a patient of Pratt's or Pilgrim's, one was as ready as the other to pull the interloper by the nose, and both alike directed their remarkable powers of conversation towards making the town too hot for him …

In Middlemarch one can see the parallel situation of the established doctors resenting Lydgate, the idealistic intruder, but the earlier publications up to and including Felix Holt all miss the essential ingredient of a created background of the full workings of practical reality of society which eludes simple irony or a politically tinged commentary.

On the other hand Scenes of Clerical Life illustrates a persistent weakness of the emerging novelist. The emotionalism of ‘Janet's Repentance’, with its death-bed scene, previews George Eliot's emotional excesses. The lack of self-knowledge that classes the feelings with which Janet Dempster grasps the dying Mr. Tryan's hand, and kisses him, under a religious category without recognising the profane thrill is typical both of George Eliot and so many other Victorian writers, especially female ones:

‘No … no … I shall be there … God will not forsake me.’

She could hardly utter the words, though she was not weeping. She was waiting with trembling eagerness for anything else he might have to say.

‘Let us kiss each other before we part.’

She lifted up her face to his, and the full life-breathing lips met the wasted dying ones in a sacred kiss of promise.

Whatever can be said against Scenes of Clerical Life, one must be grateful that both G. H. Lewes and the reading-public gave the novelist the confidence to continue writing. However, had the writer died shortly after the publication of her first creative work, one could only have concluded that she was a minor talent in the Gaskell ‘emotional’ school.

Elements of melodrama are present in Scenes of Clerical Life, such as the picture of Tryan's sudden conversion through encountering the body of the woman that he had set on the path to ruin, but this could be seen as natural in a Victorian writer finding her feet. The pastoral Adam Bede (1859), the first full-length novel, clearly continues her process of finding her feet, and contains much powerfully melodramatic stuff obviously inspired both by her adaptation of her reading of Greek tragedy and of Hawthorne. The Donnithorne-Dimmesdale correspondence shows her use of Hawthorne, her admiration of the American writer producing more results with the Reverend Rufus Lyon in Felix Holt.⁴ The strengths of the dialect spoken in the novel and the characterisation of the Poysers, or the treatment of the Methodist Dinah Morris or of Adam himself, admired by favourable critics, do not appeal to this reader. The writer's nostalgic treatment of the past plunges her into meandering characterisation which causes irritation through its attention-drawing nature, and the novel revolves round a ‘moral drama’ amounting to melodrama. These early works all have a purely emotional basis and so lack any coherent intellectual centre. The world of St. Ogg's of The Mill on the Floss (1860) lacks subtlety and spontaneity, though her analysis of the Dodson spirit at least embodies a desire to depict the impulses behind Victorian assumptions. A main characteristic of The Mill on the Floss has been defined so often, in the autobiographical aspect of George Eliot's involvement; her memories of her childhood, and the curious refraction of her guilt at living with Lewes in the situation of Maggie Tulliver with her ‘soul-hunger’. F. R. Leavis's analysis in The Great Tradition signals the pressures behind George Eliot's writing which led to the wrong kind of involvement:

To understand immaturity would be to ‘place’ it, with however subtle an implication, by relating it to mature experience. But when George Eliot touches on these given intensities of Maggie's inner life the vibration comes directly and simply from the novelist, precluding the presence of a maturer intelligence than Maggie's own. It is in these places that we are most likely to make with conscious critical intent the comment that in George Eliot's presentment of Maggie there is an element of self-idealization. The criticism sharpens itself when we say that with the self-idealization there goes an element of self-pity. George Eliot's attitude to her own immaturity as represented by Maggie is the reverse of a mature one.

Maggie Tulliver, in fact, represents an immaturity that George Eliot never leaves safely behind her.

Silas Marner (1861) is the most successful novel of her formative period. Its relative success rests on the work being contained within a restricted form, a poetic ‘moral fable’, depending on literary influences drawn from Wordsworth and from Bunyan. Within this limited scale of art the history of Silas Marner's emotional development is impressively affecting, and the climactic confrontation scene of Chapter 19 between Silas and Eppie on the one hand and Godfrey Cass and Nancy on the other is powerful and unsentimental. For those wishing to trace aspects of the great George Eliot of the two last novels in the earlier works, there appears to be more substantial evidence in this novel, where for instance this insight of the delineation of Godfrey Cass's weak character does point forward to a dramatic competence which one takes for granted in the great artist:

Godfrey was too painfully preoccupied to feel a twinge of self-reproach at this undeserved praise. He walked up and down, unconscious that he was plunging ankle-deep in snow, unconscious of everything but the trembling suspense about what was going on in the cottage, and the effect of each alternative on his future lot. No, not quite unconscious of everything else. Deeper down, and half smothered by passionate desire and dread, there was the sense that he ought not to be waiting on these alternatives; that he ought to accept the consequences of his deeds, own the miserable wife, and fulfil the claims of the helpless child. But he had not moral courage enough to contemplate that active renunciation of Nancy as possible for him: he had only conscience and heart enough to make him for ever uneasy under the weakness that forbade the renunciation. And at this moment his mind leaped away from all restraint toward the sudden prospect of deliverance from his long bondage.

The scene that follows where the baby looks momentarily at its natural father;

The wide-open blue eyes looked up at Godfrey's without any uneasiness or sign of recognition: the child could make no visible audible claim on its father; and the father felt a strange mixture of feelings, a conflict of regret and joy, that the pulse of that little heart had no response for the half-jealous yearning in his own, when the blue eyes turned away from him slowly, and fixed themselves on the weaver's queer face …

contains a depth of psychological insight that is free of mechanical plotting though clearly controlled within an artistic whole.

However, it must be repeated that the success of the book is within a limited allegorical framework which makes one read it quite differently from the greatness of Middlemarch, which is rooted in a grasp of the reality of everyday lives and general behaviour. While George Eliot does not omit to hint at the narrowness of village conventions (we see, for example, the village desire to blame a passing pedlar for the theft of Silas's gold, and the hope for a warrant against him merely because he is ‘odd’), there is a sense that the village community especially in their talk in the Rainbow is several degrees less stimulating than the writer appreciates. Compared with the miners' talk of Chubb's in Felix Holt, which was obviously intended as an industrial version of the village-scenes of Silas Marner, the earlier novel is far superior, but Joseph Conrad made a valid corrective when he deliberately adapted Silas Marner to produce his short story Amy Foster. Conrad's story portrays the brutal stifling side of (admittedly a far less attractive) village life in the drama of the rejection and destruction of the alien Yanko ‘Goorall’, an Austrian castaway. The tale demonstrates that in a hostile environment the outsider is driven to invest all his emotions in his child, causing the final tragedy of his own death. Yanko is too ‘far-sighted’ (a mountaineer) for the claustrophobic villagers, in contrast with the short-sighted Silas. Yanko dies utterly deserted (unlike Silas, who comes to adapt to his environment), and Conrad uses a sardonic echo⁵ of the allegory in Silas Marner in the narration of his tragic history:

I had often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold can be found lying ready to be got for the trouble of picking up … But sometimes, cocking his hat with a little conquering air, he would defy my wisdom. He had found his true gold. That was Amy Foster's heart; which was ‘a golden heart, and soft to people's misery’, he would say in the accents of overwhelming conviction.

The simple Amy acting on her primitive instincts turns against her husband and behaves in accordance with the village prejudices which have been instilled in her.

If one ignores Romola (1863) as a step in a false direction, being an attempt to create a dramatic historical novel exploring moral issues set in a past (of a foreign country) very remote from the pre-industrial past of her childhood, so inevitably suffering from a schematic moral didacticism and the labours of B. M. research, then the direct connection in the development of her art (rather than her thought) is between Silas Marner and Felix Holt (1866). Felix Holt is a key novel in George Eliot's development not because of its own merits, but because of its failure in fundamental issues that establish the success of her next novel, Middlemarch. In Silas Marner the allegory followed the story of a man cut off from human contact redeemed by a violent change in his situation. After the theft of his gold the agent for the reawakening of his sympathies was a foundling baby-girl. The girl, Eppie, later resisted a claim by her natural father and chose to remain with her foster parent, and marries below the class of her ‘real’ parent. In the would-be realism of the plot of Felix Holt a foster child is treated as a subject of emotional and moral development in a position distantly relating to Silas's. Esther Lyon who has been transplanted into an alien environment learns to love her foster-father (Mr. Lyon) and chooses to resist the claims of marriage to the landed class. Renouncing her newly-revealed position as an heiress, she marries (well below the class suggested by her possibilities) into poverty. Eppie to her credit (unlike Esther) did not marry a so-called radical militant, but an unaffected village boy, while she exhibited in her behaviour no inherited characteristics. Eppie is dignified and natural after the manner of the Shakespearian heroine Perdita of The Winter's Tale without bearing her stamp of royalty.

George Eliot has reconsidered the theme of the adopted child transplanted out of her environment, but in a muddled way characteristic of Felix Holt clearly has not decided on the question of hereditary behaviour in her heroine, especially as the case in the novel of Harold Transome does involve inherited qualities. In the ‘superior melodrama’ of his dealings with his real father, Jermyn, we are meant to see a reflection of some of the father's traits in the son. Esther Lyon's mother was a French Catholic lady (‘daughter of a French officer of considerable rank, who had fallen in the Russian campaign’). Some of Esther's upper-class ‘affectations’ may come from her mother's side, though what we see of Annette Ledru (the mother) is ‘one of those angelic-faced helpless women who take all things as manna from heaven’, a woman not prone to frivolous French Catholic vanity. However Esther as a child was sent by Mr. Lyon to a French Protestant school where she picked up bad habits:

It was understood that Esther would contract no papistical superstitions, and this was perfectly true; but she contracted, as we see, a good deal of non-papistical vanity.

Her subsequent vanities of behaviour seem to be ascribed to school-girl posturing and to her short period as a governess ‘witnessing the habits of a well-born and wealthy family’. She is potentially more interesting than Rosamond Vincy of Middlemarch who comes from a lower-middle-class background and has been transformed as a star pupil of a finishing-school into a finicky piece of man-catching egotism. One charge against Felix Holt is that the possibilities of Esther's situation and behaviour (for she is a girl of refined inherited sensibilities caught up in the dull life in the house of a Dissenting minister) are negated. In place of a novelistic study of the clash of refinement and education with an alien environment, we find merely a crude moralistic diagram. The diagnosis is of a girl of frivolous anti-puritanical tendencies whose wit and liveliness are not to be admired, and who becomes mortified by Felix Holt's gibes at her follies. She has to choose between two suitors, one a landed gentleman who will confirm her in her social superiority, and the other whom if she chooses, we are made to understand will lead her to a better self.

A Rosamond Vincy would never have had any problem with this decision (would never have been interested in Felix in the first place!), and George Eliot has to delineate a side of Esther's character that tends to self-renunciation and towards ‘truth’—a solution as given in the terms of the novel that is unacceptable on a moment's consideration. It is as if a clumsy simplification of Dorothea Brooke and a variant of Rosamond Vincy were to exist in the same character, an absurd combination bearing no connection with any reality. The established complexity of the terms of Gwendolen Harleth's treatment in Daniel Deronda would be needed to realise the enterprise.

The opening sketch of Esther Lyon's position follows the pattern of Margaret Hale's situation in Mrs. Gaskell's North and South (1854-5):

But she was not contented with her life: she seemed to herself to be surrounded with ignoble, uninteresting conditions, from which there was no issue; for even if she had been unamiable enough to give her father pain deliberately, it would have been no satisfaction to her to go to Treby church, and visibly turn her back on Dissent. It was not religious differences, but social differences, that Esther was concerned about, and her ambitious taste would have been no more gratified in the society of the Waces than in that of the Muscats. The Waces spoke imperfect English and played whist; the Muscats spoke the same dialect and took in the Evangelical Magazine. Esther liked neither of these amusements. She had one of those exceptional organisations which are quick and sensitive without being in the least morbid; she was alive to the finest shades of manner, to the nicest distinctions of tone and accent; she had a little code of her own about scents and colours, textures and behaviour, by which she secretly condemned or sanctioned all things and persons.

However, unlike Margaret Hale's dissatisfaction with the industrial North there is no sympathy for Esther's sense of difference, which is dismissed as sheer snobbery. Her frustrated generosity towards her step-father is only to foreshadow a later change towards him, and is not part of any analytic investigation of behaviour. Her undisguised sense of superiority is resented by the community of Treby Magna:

Wise Dissenting matrons were divided between fear lest their sons should want to marry her and resentment that she should treat those ‘undeniable’ young men with a distant scorn which was hardly to be tolerated in a minister's daughter …

Felix Holt's boorish assaults on her dignity and his mockery of her love of Byron's poetry reduce her to a more satisfactory condition in the eyes both of George Eliot and of the community:

Some few shook their heads; could not quite believe it; and thought there was ‘more behind’. But the majority of honest Trebians were affected somewhat in the same way as happy-looking Mr. Wace was, who observed to his wife, as they walked from under the churchyard chestnuts, ‘It's wonderful how things go through you—you don't know how. I feel somehow as if I believed more in everything that's good’.

If in North and South the reader feels suspicious of Margaret Hale's marriage to Mr. Thornton, then Esther's acceptance of the role of dutiful wife looking up to Felix ‘as a husband greater and nobler’ than she is, is the outrageous result of a programme depending only on contrivances.

The ‘Dorothea Brooke’ aspect of Esther's components emerges through her desire to appear better in Felix's eyes, and is first marked by her softening towards Mr. Lyon. Here the momentous stress of the writing can be contrasted with the quite different level of the substantial dramatisation of Dorothea's enlargement of sympathies through marital sufferings:

When Esther was lying down that night, she felt as if the little incidents between herself and her father on this Sunday had made it an epoch. Very slight words and deeds may have a sacramental efficacy, if we can cast our self-love behind us, in order to say or do them. And it has been well believed through many ages that the beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life; that the mind which sees itself blameless may be called dead in trespasses—in trespasses on the love of others, in trespasses on their weakness, in trespasses on all those great claims which are the image of our own need.

(Felix Holt, Chapter 13)

and;

‘I think it is time for us to dress,’ he added, looking at his watch. They both rose, and there was never any further allusion between them to what had passed on this day.

But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born. To-day she had begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

(Middlemarch, Chapter 20)

Esther Lyon, then, is conditioned by George Eliot's designs on the novel using Felix Holt. She is not the only character to be compared with him, and to suffer in the workings of the plot. Harold Transome is a character of potentially more interest than Esther herself (an interest that has nothing to do with the discovery of his true father), but is intended to be viewed in a disreputable light when the ‘gothic’ Felix looms in his direction. The opposition between the suitors is a black and white one, demanding that social polish and the mastery of practical affairs in politics bear the taint of moral dubiousness. Harold's attitude to women, in his overbearing behaviour to his mother and the history of his choice of a wife—the presence of his son is like an albatross round his neck—reveal the tyranny of a male egotist. The wooden plot of the novel has him come to admire Esther, a girl of a different stamp from his previous conception of women, too late in his doomed career for a possible reversal of it. The reader may feel that Felix is no valid alternative, but even more telling is the dishonesty of the author in her picture of Harold's values in life.

The political side of the novel is offered as a refutation of Disraeli's kind of political thinking in Coningsby and Sybil where a new Toryism accepts the new conditions of society but assimilates them to the old traditions. Hence George Eliot is consistently hostile in depicting the beliefs of a man with political instincts who has to work practically using the mechanics of a political system with its abuses. Harold's view is that as a man of ambition who could use power for some good, he must choose the most suitable party to advance his career in politics. This view of a man with clearly-defined political aims is seen by Felix and the author as morally reprehensible. Felix's response is to opt out of reform politics altogether and to join the author in a Romantic conservatism, where the working-class should never be allowed under the present conditions to get the vote.

While the function of the character of Felix Holt is sinister in affecting the treatment of Esther and Harold, the presentation of Felix's character only evokes embarrassment and disbelief in the reader. That the miners in the scene where Felix harangues them are seen as a hopelessly uneducated mass, ready like sheep to be led by any plausible argument, has offended some critics. What is more important is that neither they nor Felix exist.

While the issues attempted in Felix Holt are wider than in Silas Marner, it cannot compare with the earlier novel. Yet we have seen that George Eliot attempted to re-use certain themes from the allegorical form in a more realistic mode of writing. Unfortunately the conclusion must be that the mode of Felix Holt with its riot and trial scenes and rival suitors lies firmly within the conventions of Victorian melodrama. It is interesting that in her progress up to Middlemarch the writer has produced so many different varieties of minor novel; from the pastoral melodrama of Adam Bede to the melodramatic ‘political’ Felix Holt which pretends to be a ‘social problem’ novel.

Middlemarch (1871-2) achieves a new level of art on a scale unattempted by any of her earlier novels, and in contrast to them has its roots in an apprehension of the real, being undogmatic and unschematic in its moral seriousness. It seems a justified conclusion to view this revolutionary undertaking and the fruition of her art as the result of a conscious decision by George Eliot. The enormous gap between Felix Holt and Middlemarch does not however appear to be discussed in any surviving material from her various ‘quarries’, notebooks, or letters; the workings of her mind can only be inferred. It is known that the Lydgate story formed the basis of the beginnings of Middlemarch. This strand of the novel must have been prompted by a reconsideration of the relationships between Esther Lyon and Felix Holt, and between Esther and Harold Transome. The character and professional dedication of Lydgate provides a study of a convincing practical idealism to be valued by the reader; exactly that which Felix Holt did without. The obvious re-working of the terms of Felix Holt results in the ideals of a gifted man being thwarted by his lack of a grasp of practical reality in his life outside his professional interests and by his choice of a highly unsuitable wife. In this way the novel is a rebuff to the terms of the composition of Felix and Harold, Felix being the admired impractical idealist and Harold the corrupt realist. Lydgate during his unwilling involvement in the voting for the choice of hospital chaplain shows his contempt for ‘other people's practical affairs’, but unlike Felix in his impatience at other people's failings, he is to be criticised. His is the arrogance of immaturity, for he cannot hide his contempt for mediocrity, understandably antagonising Ned Plymdale (a rival suitor) and also his medical competitors in Middlemarch. Mr. Farebrother exhibits a wisdom and modesty through his ability to learn from experience which Lydgate finds hard to understand.

Rosamond Vincy is a successful clarification of a side of Esther Lyon, and is consistent without being a cliché for a puritan Victorian reading-public. She represents conventional bad taste in forming an ideal of feminine behaviour, and is seen by the men of the neighbourhood as an ideal wife; even the intelligent Farebrother does not see through her. While some of the mothers resent her for being ‘too big for her boots’, she is a social representation of values in her society that Esther is not in Treby. Her natural egotism is reinforced by her bourgeoise assumptions and her finishing-school training, and her abilities are concentrated on social performance:

Rosamond played admirably. Her master at Mrs. Lemon's school (close to a county town with a memorable history that had its relics in church and castle) was one of those excellent musicians here and there to be found in our provinces, worthy to compare with many a noted Kapellmeister in a country which offers more plentiful conditions of musical celebrity. Rosamond, with her executant's instinct, had seized his manner of playing, and gave forth his large rendering of noble music with the precision of an echo. It was almost startling, heard for the first time. A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamond's fingers; and so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter.

She is a gifted mimic who has an actress's sense of what an audience expects. Her piano-playing and singing are tasteless because she can only reflect other people's tastes, having none of her own. Here we enter a discussion by the novelist of the nature of artistic accomplishment (which is developed in Daniel Deronda) to which Felix Holt in its treatment of Esther was unaccommodatingly hostile.

Unlike Esther, Rosamond cannot be changed significantly by any breakdown in her defences; her moment of openness with Dorothea is only short-lived; she is a ruthless egotist rather than a ‘delicate plant’ to be reformed by a good man, the grace of her swan-neck and her delicate ‘infantine blondness’ making her a tropical man-eating flower.

The second story George Eliot also began independently, that of Dorothea Brooke, which she soon connected to that of Lydgate. She reverts to a period of her own life as she had done in The Mill on the Floss, but it is a history written with a new mastery. The dangers of self-identification with her heroine reveal themselves in Middlemarch as in the earlier novel; the sympathetic dramatisation combined with the diagnosis of a representative case are new. This study of a girl emotionally maturing during a time of crucial social change in English life dwarfs any social-historical interest in the earlier works. Dorothea may reflect George Eliot's own period of Evangelicalism, but the opening chapters of the novel are part of an investigation into religious beliefs which form the values of her own society. Dorothea has a puritan inheritance which affects the expression of her desire to be different from the norm for girls of her station, causing her to be regarded by her society as a freak. Puritanism entails a lack of self-knowledge and a theoretic rejection of physical and aesthetic enjoyment. The contrast with her phlegmatic and conventional sister Celia exhibits the effects of her puritan repressions; she reacts to what can be called affection or love with violent disgust:

‘But you have been so pleased with him since then; he has begun to feel quite sure that you are fond of him’.

‘Fond of him, Celia! How can you choose such odious expressions?’ said Dorothea passionately. ‘Dear me, Dorothea, I suppose it would be right for you to be fond of a man whom you accepted for a husband’.

‘It is offensive to me to say that Sir James could think I was fond of him. Besides, it is not the right word for the feeling I must have towards the man I would accept as a husband’.

This last definition of the feeling that Dorothea must have in order to marry a man is reached here through a negative reaction; her adoration of Casaubon is the positive result of the puritanism of her ideal to prove superior to the social norm for women. The analysis in the picture of her marriage-motives and of the consequences reverses the self-sacrificing ideal of Esther Lyon, who was praised for looking up to her husband.⁶

Nevertheless, Dorothea's ambition to help in social reform and charity, embodied in her model cottage plans, is a serious portrayal of her ideals in an examination that introduces the question of art as a factor in the education of human feelings. Her Evangelicalism directs her to charitable idealism, but also is responsible for the cultural bankruptcy of her education. In Middlemarch the formation of aesthetic taste affects an individual's perceptions of humane and moral considerations, a drastic change from the crude terms of Felix Holt. Dorothea as a young bride has her honeymoon in Rome, the Catholic capital of European art and culture. The traumas of her marriage-experiences are explicitly linked by George Eliot to Dorothea's being overwhelmed by an alien environment:

To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed traditions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot. The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions.

Naumann, the distinguished German artist (whom Dorothea meets in Rome), is a brief sketch to be taken up more convincingly with the musical genius Klesmer of Daniel Deronda, and Will Ladislaw functions as an ambassador from the world of culture, a dilettante who can act as a guide to an area that has been a blank to Dorothea. On any other level it is hard to find much interest in Ladislaw.

It has already been stated that Middlemarch is rooted in the world of the concrete, and that society and the individual are conveyed with an immediacy that transcends any moral reduction. Local politics in Middlemarch may have its Hawleys and other unsavouries, the practical politics of doctors, lawyers and clergymen may be abrasive, but the vividness of the world of action is not repellent. The lives of the individuals are involved in a felt texture that eludes prescriptive generalisations, and in this sense Middlemarch is ‘a study of provincial life’! Lydgate's ambition is destroyed by his involvement in Middlemarch society, which is as much his fault as that of the society he enters—critics are wrong who wish to ascribe to the author a purely negative view of society. Mrs. Cadwallader with her highly eccentric aristocratic behaviour is treated affectionately as an enriching presence—we are a long way from the socially and politically slanted commentaries of Silas Marner and Felix Holt.

Lastly, the nature of tragedy in the lives of her characters is at best divorced from the melodramatic scenes of Felix Holt (however inwardly drawn the suffering may be, as with Mrs. Transome), and is depicted on a muted level, linked with a self-effacing pathos. Casaubon's plight is an ‘ordinary’ one,⁷ sub-heroic but not the less affecting for being so:

In Mr. Casaubon's ear, Dorothea's voice gave loud emphatic iteration to those muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to explain as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness: always when such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without, they are resisted as cruel and unjust. We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness! And this cruel outward accuser was there in the shape of a wife—nay, of a young bride, who, instead of observing his abundant pen-scratches and amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spy watching everything with a malign power of inference. Here, towards this particular point of the compass, Mr. Casaubon had a sensitiveness to match Dorothea's, and an equal quickness to imagine more than the fact. He had formerly observed with approbation her capacity for worshipping the right object; he now foresaw with sudden terror that this capacity might be replaced by presumption, this worship by the most exasperating of all criticism,—that which sees vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them.

We come finally to the rarified atmosphere of the last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876). The real centre of the novel is set in upper-class society and concentrates on Gwendolen Harleth. She is a victim of her wilful vanity and of the laziness in her use of her abilities to glitter socially, yet she is vivacious, intelligent, and highly sensitive—in some ways morbidly so, despite the egoistic control she exerts on herself. The sense of the ‘real’ comes to her through Herr Klesmer and Daniel Deronda, and despite herself she can never be contented with less than ‘the real thing’. Against her moral instincts, her own vanity and resentment at her failure trap her into marriage to Grandcourt, a malignant social nullity. She finds herself paralysed by the menace of a husband she fears and loathes. Gwendolen has no false idealism to misdirect her as Dorothea has, and is educated into an awareness of real values through her ability to respond to them, as much as by her humiliation by figures whom she can't keep from respecting.

The line of interest that started with the botched attempt of Esther Lyon has reached a peak of refinement. After Middlemarch and its discovery of art as a corrective to moralistic theory we come with Klesmer to a dedication to the values of artistic self-criticism as a corrective to superficiality in a highly social society, and perhaps to a stage nearer ‘art for art's sake’:

‘You are a beautiful young lady—you have been brought up in ease—you have done what you would—you have not said to yourself, “I must know this exactly”, “I must understand this exactly”, “I must do this exactly”’—in uttering these three terrible musts, Klesmer lifted up three long fingers in succession. ‘In sum, you have not been called upon to be anything but a charming young lady, whom it is an impoliteness to find fault with’.

He paused an instant; then resting his fingers on his hips again, and thrusting out his powerful chin, he said—

‘Well, then, with that preparation, you wish to try the life of the artist; you wish to try a life of arduous, unceasing work, and—uncertain praise. Your praise would have to be earned, like your bread; and both would come slowly, scantily—what do I say?—they might hardly come at all’.

This tone of discouragement, which Klesmer half hoped might suffice without anything more unpleasant, roused some resistance in Gwendolen. With a slight turn of her head away from him, and an air of pique, she said—

‘I thought that you, being an artist, would consider the life one of the most honourable and delightful. And if I can do nothing better?—I suppose I can put up with the same risks as other people do’.

‘Do nothing better?’ said Klesmer, a little fired. ‘No, my dear Miss Harleth, you could do nothing better—neither man nor woman could do anything better—if you could do what was best or good of its kind. I am not decrying the life of the true artist. I am exalting it. I say, it is out of the reach of any but choice organisations—natures framed to love perfection and to labour for it; ready, like all true lovers, to endure, to wait, to say, I am not yet worthy, but she—Art, my mistress—is worthy, and I will live to merit her. An honourable life? Yes. But the honour comes from the inward vocation and the hard-won achievement: there is no honour in donning the life as a livery’.

When one appreciates the delicacy of the novel in its structure round the definition of social and artistic values, and sees the organised patterns of thematic treatment so different from the heavier authorial pointing of Middlemarch, it seems entirely natural that it should have suggested so much to Henry James for his The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Daniel Deronda seems in places almost Jamesian, and not only because James made use of congenial material from it. The archery contest where Gwendolen beats her arch-rival Miss Arrowpoint without in fact winning the contest (Juliet Fenn, a ‘middling’ ugly girl, wins it on consistency), is a stylized symbolic heightening of the issues that involve our heroine.⁸ Archery is an amateur social sport for upperclass young ladies, and her defeat of ‘the insignificant-looking’ Miss Arrowpoint (whose name has a charged meaning) is a hollow victory, because the latter opts out of social competition by rejecting it in her subsequent engagement to Klesmer.

Already in the opening of Chapter 6 of Book I Miss Arrowpoint makes a telling impression on Gwendolen:

She would not have chosen to confess how unfortunate she thought herself in not having had Miss Arrowpoint's musical advantages, so as to be able to question Herr Klesmer's taste with the confidence of thorough knowledge; still less, to admit even to herself that Miss Arrowpoint each time they met raised an unwonted feeling of jealousy in her: not in the least because she was an heiress, but because it was really provoking that a girl whose appearance you could not characterise except by saying that her figure was slight and of middle stature, her features small, her eyes tolerable and her complexion sallow, had nevertheless a certain mental superiority which could not be explained away—an exasperating thoroughness in her musical accomplishment, a fastidious discrimination in her general tastes, which made it impossible to force her admiration and kept you in awe of her standard. This insignificant-looking young lady of four-and-twenty, whom any one's eyes would have passed over negligently if she had not been Miss Arrowpoint, might be suspected of a secret opinion that Miss Harleth's acquirements were rather of a common order; and such an opinion was not made agreeable to think of by being always veiled under a perfect kindness of manner.

In art the ‘middling’ never comes near distinction, as Klesmer makes it painfully plain to Gwendolen in disabusing her of her ambitions to enter the world of music or drama. Here he uses values that oppose those of the archery contest:

You would have to bear what I may call glaring insignificance: any success must be won by the utmost patience. You would have to keep your place in a crowd, and after all it is likely you would lose it and get out of sight. If you determine to face these hardships and still try, you will have the dignity of a high purpose, even though you may have chosen unfortunately. You will have some merit, though you may win no prize. You have asked my judgment on your chances of winning. I don't pretend to speak absolutely; but measuring probabilities, my judgment is:—you will hardly achieve more than mediocrity.

James in calling his heroine of The Portrait of a Lady Isabel Archer suggests that he has responded directly to this section of the novel.

Through Daniel Deronda, who is successful in the role of an observer and as the agent of moral values affecting Gwendolen Harleth, we can connect up her developing moral values with her recognition of aesthetic values. The skill and intelligence George Eliot employs in this psychological drama of a wilful girl facing a growing dissatisfaction remedies in great art what has been unacceptable in Felix Holt's bullying of Esther Lyon. In fact George Eliot in her discussion of morality and art in Daniel Deronda makes an attempt to include politics within her frame of reference; the conversation in Chapter 33 of Book 4 between Deronda and Sir Hugo Mallinger seems a curious backward glance at Felix Holt:

‘I am sorry not to do what would gratify you, sir’, said Deronda. ‘But I cannot persuade myself to look at politics as a profession’.

‘Why not? If a man is not born into public life by his position in the country, there's no way for him but to embrace it by his own efforts. The business of the country must be done—her Majesty's Government carried on, as the old Duke said. And it never could be, my boy, if everybody looked at politics as if they were prophecy, and demanded an inspired vocation. If you are to get into Parliament, it won't do to sit still and wait for a call either from heaven or constituents’.

‘I don't want to make a living out of opinions’, said Deronda; ‘especially out of borrowed opinions. Not that I mean to blame other men, I daresay many better fellows than I don't mind getting on to a platform praising themselves, and giving their word of honour for a party’.

‘I'll tell you what, Dan’, said Sir Hugo, ‘a man who sets his face against every sort of humbug is simply a three-cornered, impracticable fellow. There's a bad style of humbug, but there is also a good style—one that oils the wheels and makes progress possible. If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas; and I agree with the Archbishop at Naples who had a St. Januarius procession against the plague. It's no use having an Order in Council against popular shallowness. There is no action possible without a little acting’.

‘One may be obliged to give way to an occasional necessity’, said Deronda. ‘But it is one thing to say, “In this particular case I am forced to put on this foolscap and grin”, and another to buy a pocket foolscap and practise myself in grinning. I can't see any real public expediency that does not keep an ideal before it which makes a limit of deviation from the direct path. But if I were to set up for a public man I might mistake my own success for public expediency’.

One is happier with the background of the reality of life in Middlemarch.

Notes

1. Professor G. S. Haight in making his one volume Selections from George Eliot's Letters (New Haven, 1985) as an authority on her writings felt safe to remark in his introduction to his section on Daniel Deronda (p. 421); ‘Letters of fervent gratitude came to G. E. from Jews all over the world, including the Chief Rabbi, for her depiction of Jewish life. For others this was “the bad part” of the book; as late as 1948 F. R. Leavis wrote “there is nothing to do but cut it away”. Sounder critics soon showed the unity of G. E.'s novel. Some rank it higher than Middlemarch’.

2. In dealing with the influences of thinkers such as Comte and Feuerbach on George Eliot, Dr. Roberts demonstrates—perhaps even more than he recognises—that their creeds and philosophies are too simplistic to be included in the terms established by the greatness of her art.

3. Other than an earlier introductory chapter to a novel describing a Staffordshire village and the life of neighbouring farm houses, mentioned in the entry for 6 December 1857 of her Journal.

4. The history of Mr. Lyon's attachment to the Catholic Annette Ledru which interferes with his Congregationalist duties stands out as being written in another style from the rest of the novel, and surely derives from George Eliot's reading of The Scarlet Letter, with perhaps the influence of congenial Scott.

5. Conrad also follows George Eliot's interests in a clash of religious cultures between Silas and the villagers by showing in his version the Catholic Yanko's blankness in the face of Protestant institutions: ‘He became aware of social differences, but remained for a long time surprised at the base poverty of the churches among so much wealth. He couldn't understand why they were shut up on weekdays. There was nothing to steal in them. Was it to keep people from praying too often? The rectory took much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies attempted to prepare the ground for his conversion. They could not, however, break him of his habit of crossing himself, but he went so far as to take off the string with a couple of brass medals the size of a sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of scapulary which he wore round his neck. He hung them on the wall by the side of his bed, and he was still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord's Prayer, in incomprehensible words and in a slow, fervent tone, as he had heard his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and little, on every evening of his life’.

6. Dorothea after the death of her husband cannot bring herself to dedicate the rest of her life to the futility of working on his research, showing that she has grown out of Victorian self-sacrificial conceptions.

7. Adam Bede showed George Eliot clearly applying a formula of tragedy that while deriving from her knowledge of Greek tragedy, expressed itself in melodrama in the emotional emphasis of the novel. This heightened dramatic expression we meet at best in the theatrical projection of Mrs. Transome in Felix Holt. Certainly no writer can work satisfactorily through an application of mere formulae, and the formula of a drama of the ordinary and unheroic does not in itself ensure automatic success in Middlemarch. It is only a more suitable conceptual starting point for the artist.

8. In Chapter 13 of Book 2 when Gwendolen tours the grounds of Diplow with Grandcourt, or the scene of the acting disturbed by the opening panel in Chapter 6 of Book I, a comparison can be made with scenes in Mansfield Park, demonstrating how George Eliot in her intellectual handling of psychological interest has developed the art of novel-writing to a stylized dramatic extreme. The ponderous emphases in parts of the novel on the thematic use of ‘gambling’ or ‘ghosts’ are the less admirable side of this undertaking.