SOURCE: Viera, Carroll. “‘The Lifted Veil’ and George Eliot's Early Aesthetic.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 24, no. 4 (autumn 1984): 749-67.

[In the following essay, Viera asserts that many of Eliot's aesthetic theories found in her early letters and essays are manifest in fictional form in “The Lifted Veil.”]

Richard Stang's observation that “George Eliot was perhaps unique in that she formulated her ideas about life and art before she started to write her first novel”¹ has received unqualified acceptance. But despite their interest in George Eliot's early aesthetic,² critics have neglected its links to her third work of fiction, “The Lifted Veil.”³ This neglect is curious since “The Lifted Veil” contains the only artist-protagonist in the fiction of an author who, throughout her career, remained intensely concerned with the function of art and who created many artists and artist figures.⁴ Thus, “The Lifted Veil” occupies a prominent position in the George Eliot canon; closely linked with the author's biography and other fiction, as scholars like U. C. Knoepflmacher, Ruby V. Redinger, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Susan Gubar have demonstrated, it is also integrally related to early expressions of her critical theory.

Two clusters of George Eliot's non-fiction illuminate “The Lifted Veil”—a series of essays published in 1846 and 1847 in the Coventry Herald and Observer and an assortment of letters and essays of the 1850s. Many of the concepts of art expounded in this prose not only reappear in “The Lifted Veil” but also are often restated in almost identical terms. These similarities suggest that in writing “The Lifted Veil” George Eliot may have been attempting to synthesize her evolving critical precepts by transmuting them into fictional form. The failure of the attempt was perhaps inevitable, for George Eliot's richly complex—sometimes ambiguous and even contradictory—aesthetic eludes easy reduction to a simple formula. Perhaps in writing “The Lifted Veil” George Eliot herself came to perceive the impossibility of neatly reconciling the many facets of her aesthetic, for although most of the problems confronted in this story reappear in the novels, only here is her aesthetic the central issue.

I

Thirteen years before submitting “The Lifted Veil” to John Blackwood, George Eliot published five essays in the Coventry Herald and Observer. Later reprinted as Poetry and Prose from the Notebook of an Eccentric,⁵ these essays consist of an “Introduction” to an eccentric named Macarthy and four articles purported to be Macarthy's posthumous publications. Here, long before her first serious attempts at fiction, George Eliot created three adumbrations of Latimer, the protagonist of “The Lifted Veil.” Macarthy, Adolphe, and Idione of Poetry and Prose, in fact, share such pronounced affinities with Latimer that “The Lifted Veil” seems to be a conscious return to materials she had first used more than a decade earlier.

Latimer's and Macarthy's kinship begins with superficial characteristics, such as having one special boyhood friend, being happier as children than as adults, forming no close friendships after age twenty, traveling abroad, and foreseeing their own deaths. Other resemblances are described in passages so identical that they might easily be interchanged. One set of parallel passages recounts their love of nature. Macarthy “would lie on the grass gazing at the setting sun, with a look of intense yearning, which might have belonged to a banished Uriel” (E [Essays of George Eliot], p. 16). Similarly Latimer recalls that in Geneva “the first sight of the Alps, with the setting sun on them … seemed to me like an entrance into heaven,”⁶ and he remembers that he would often “lie down in my boat … while I looked up at the departing glow leaving one mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire were passing over them on its way to the home of light” (“LV” [“The Works of George Eliot”], pp. 284-85). For both Romantics, this veneration of nature is more Byronic than Wordsworthian: Macarthy “felt a delight in the destructive power of the elements” (E, p. 16); and as a student Latimer enjoys “a perpetual sense of exaltation … at the presence of Nature in all her awful loveliness” (“LV,” p. 284). More important, both are endowed with a keen sensitivity and perception of truths indiscernible to others. Macarthy's “soul was a lyre of exquisite structure” (E, p. 14); Latimer suffers “the exquisite tortures of sensitiveness” (“LV,” p. 312), finding the emotions of his acquaintances discordant “like an importunate, ill-played musical instrument” (“LV,” p. 294). Macarthy has “a morbid sensitiveness in his feeling of the beautiful” (E, p. 15); Latimer has an “abnormal sensibility” (“LV,” p. 294), “a morbidly sensitive nature” (“LV,” p. 297), and he bears “the stamp of a morbid organization, framed for passive suffering” (“LV,” p. 295). Macarthy “seemed to have a preternaturally sharpened vision, which saw knots and blemishes, where all was smoothness to others” (E, p. 15). Similarly, Latimer's visionary power, which plummets him into a catatonic-like trance, “was like a preternaturally heightened sense of hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where others find perfect stillness” (“LV,” p. 301). These sensibilities induce both men to lead retiring lives. Macarthy “seemed, indeed, to shrink from all organized existences” (E, p. 16), and Latimer, rationalizing his refusal to unburden himself to his only friend, confesses that “The horror I had of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me … draw the shroud of concealment more closely around my own” (“LV,” pp. 332-33).

The second essay from Poetry and Prose, “How to Avoid Disappointment,” introduces a Frenchman, Adolphe, who comprises a variant of Macarthy and another prefiguration of Latimer. Like Macarthy and Latimer, Adolphe is an artist; and the quality of his life, like theirs, corresponds to the quality of his art. But, whereas Latimer's connections with Macarthy are underscored in numerous analogous passages, his affinity with Adolphe lies in his experience with Bertha Grant, which is the narrative focus of “The Lifted Veil” and which echoes the “great calamity” (E, p. 19) of Adolphe's life. In fact, Adolphe's explanation of his trauma might easily be ascribed to Latimer. It was “not the blighting of ambition, not the loss of any loved one, but a far more withering sorrow; I have ceased to love the being whom I once believed that I must love while life lasted. I have cherished what I thought was a bright amethyst, and I have seen it losing its lustre day by day, till I can no longer delude myself into a belief that it is not valueless” (E, p. 19).

Latimer's kinship with Macarthy and Adolphe suggests that George Eliot returned in “The Lifted Veil” to ideas about art and the artist first articulated in Poetry and Prose. She had, in the interim, developed and modified her aesthetic in essays she contributed to the Westminster Review. But she was unprepared to incarnate them in a story until she had engaged in her first full-fledged attempts at fiction in Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede. It is interesting, in this connection, that the writing of Poetry and Prose coincides with a period in which George Eliot seemed to be considering efforts at fiction: shortly before the publication of the essay on Macarthy, Sara Hennell suspected that George Eliot “must be writing her novel.”⁷ Although Gordon Haight maintains that this remark could not apply to material written for the Herald and Observer,⁸ he does not explore the possibility that George Eliot may have abandoned an early work of fiction, salvaged parts of it for the newspaper, and returned to her original design many years later. And whether or not ““The Lifted Veil” emerges as a symbolic expression of George Eliot's last serious battle with the dynamics of the creative process,” as Ruby Redinger suggests,⁹ it is undeniably an attempt at a fictional rendition of an aesthetic formulated over more than a decade.

George Eliot modified and enlarged her aesthetic throughout her career, but she never discarded its nucleus. This nucleus, derived from romantic critical theory and tentatively explored in the essays of Poetry and Prose, reappears in many of her later essays and becomes the basis of Latimer's character. Like the Romantic hero/poet, Latimer is endowed with a uniqueness that is both his glory and his doom. Set apart from the common lot of humanity by acute sensitivity, he enjoys from childhood a special relationship with the natural world. His view of the beauty and/or grandeur in nature inspires sensitive responses that lead in two directions—inwardly, to intense introspection and, outwardly, to an awareness of the complexities of humanity and to meditation on the mystery of the universe. As Latimer penetrates this mystery, George Eliot displaces his Wordsworthian traits with resemblances to the more awesome Romantic heroes and personae of writers like William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy and Mary Shelley.¹⁰

Moreover, like the Romantics, George Eliot exploits the metaphoric potential in the theme of visual and visionary powers, powers which she contemplated long before writing “The Lifted Veil.” “When a sort of haziness comes over the mind making one feel weary of articulated or written signs of ideas,” she had written to Maria Lewis in 1841, “does not the notion of a less laborious mode of communication, of a perception approaching more nearly to intuition seem attractive?” (L [The George Eliot Letters], 1:107); and four years later, while translating Das Leben Jesu, she had conferred with Sara Hennell on the meaning of the term Doppel-Gänger, “a double-sighted person, i.e. one who sees more than is visible to healthy organs” (L, 1:201). Like the Romantics, George Eliot links heightened powers of perception to the intensity of experience and feeling, but she increasingly and emphatically also associates them with the attributes of sincerity and sympathy. Thus, the digressions on the function of art in Scenes of Clerical Life (especially in chapter 5 of “Amos Barton” [“The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”]) and in Adam Bede (especially in chapter 17) argue that enlarged vision leads to extended comprehension and tolerance; in these famous passages, George Eliot evades her earlier intimations that heightened vision may be unhealthy. Her unwavering conviction that an artist must be true to his own inward vision, however, perhaps finally forced her to confront and explore the destructive potential of the Doppel-Gänger, a courageous exploration for a writer whose credo was founded upon morality. In Latimer George Eliot provides her fullest exploration of the hypothesis that visionary powers may lead, not to sincerity and sympathy, but to disenchantment and creative impotence.

The potential collision between vision and morality delineated in “The Lifted Veil” is implicit in Poetry and Prose. “Had his nature been less noble, his benevolence less God-like,” Macarthy's mourner says of him,

he would have been a misanthropist, all compact of bitter sarcasm, and therefore no poet. As it was, he was a humourist,—one who sported with all the forms of human life, as if they were so many May-day mummings, uncouth, monstrous disguises of poor human nature, which has not discovered its dignity. While he laughed at the follies of men, he wept over their sorrows; and while his wit lashed them as with a whip of scorpions, there was a stream of feeling in the deep caverns of his soul, which was all the time murmuring, “Would that I could die for thee, thou poor humanity!”

(E, pp. 15-16)

Latimer, endowed with “the poet's sensibility without his voice” (“LV,” p. 284), is what Macarthy, deprived of his noble nature and God-like benevolence, would have been. Only once—when his brother dies—does Latimer display the sympathy continually practiced by Macarthy,¹¹ an experience which George Eliot renders in one of her characteristic images of sight and insight: “As I saw into the desolation of my father's heart, I felt a movement of deep pity towards him, which was the beginning of a new affection” (“LV,” p. 317). But while recognizing that his own “softened feeling … made this the happiest time I had known since childhood” (“LV,” p. 317), after his father's death a few years later, he makes no further attempt to establish bonds of sympathy with other human beings.

The final moments of Macarthy's and Latimer's lives, moments recounted in images of perception, are also antithetical. Macarthy, whose empathy with humanity had assuaged his suffering, dies in the presence of a friend, who detects a “bright spirit which now gleamed with augmented intensity from his deep-set eyes, as if glowing at the prospect of deliverance from its captivity” (E, p. 17). Latimer, however, dies in solitude, unable to summon even his servants, his vision of death as “Darkness,—darkness … nothing but darkness” (“LV,” p. 278) reflecting his unalleviated despair. Death to both men is an extension of their visions of life.

Additional visual imagery appears in Poetry and Prose in Adolphe's account of his disenchantment when the amethyst loses its lustre and in “The Lifted Veil” in Latimer's account of his “complete illumination” (LV, p. 323). But the two men respond to analogous revelations in dissimilar ways. Adolphe finds fulfilment in a commitment to art, a commitment which enables him to see life as a meaningful whole. Latimer, however, turns increasingly inward.

Latimer's marriage to Bertha creates an irreparable gulf between him and his artistic potential, for he has focused upon an unworthy object. Such misdirected purpose defies the artistic credo defined by Macarthy and exemplified by Adolphe: the process by which the artist employs the progressive accumulation of detail to reconstruct the whole which exists in his imagination

is an image of what our life should be,—a series of efforts directed to the production of a contemplated whole. … The kind of purpose which makes life resemble a work of art in its isolated majesty or loveliness, is not the attempt to satisfy that inconvenient troop of wants which metamorphose themselves like the sprites of an enchantress. … It is to live for the good, the true, the beautiful, which outlive every generation, and are all-pervading as the light which vibrates from the remotest nebula to our sun.

(E, pp. 18-19)

Latimer's purpose has been his own gratification by securing a “troop of wants” exemplified by Bertha, whose image has, in Adolphe's language, metamorphosed itself like the sprite of an enchantress. In fact, her capacity for enchantment is further suggested by images of the German Water Nixie and the Greek sirens,¹² symbols of damnation which contrast with the mystical symbols of vision applied to Adolphe: “His eye has not that restless, irresolute glance, which tells of no purpose beyond the present hour: it looks as you might imagine the eye of Numa to have looked after an interview with Egeria; the earnest attention and veneration with which it gazed on the divine instructress still lingering in its expression” (E, p. 19).¹³

Increased stress on vision appears in another essay from Poetry and Prose, “A Little Fable with a Great Moral,” a tale of two Hamadryads who gaze into a lake. Idione focuses on her own reflection and frowns continually when she realizes she is aging; finally she becomes so ugly that she isolates herself in the hollow of her tree, where she dies. Hieria, however, who contemplates the reflection of the heavens and loves the water lilies, never realizes that she is growing old and dies quietly in her sleep.

“The Lifted Veil” resembles “A Little Fable” in its allegorical account of the senseless destructiveness of egoism. Latimer recalls his sensitivity to nature in terms applicable to Hieria: “I could watch [the water] and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles, and bathing the bright green water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to know why it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very beautiful” (“LV,” p. 283). But like Idione, he is destroyed by an egoism objectified as a preoccupation with unsightly physical features: “I thoroughly disliked my own physique, and nothing but a belief that it was a condition of poetic genius would have reconciled me to it. That brief hope was quite fled, and I saw in my face now nothing but the stamp of a morbid organisation, framed for passive suffering—too feeble for the sublime resistance of poetic production” (“LV,” p. 295). The self-absorption of these two egoists creates vicious cycles, cycles which illustrate George Eliot's famous law that “Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds” (Adam Bede, ch. 29).

In “A Little Fable” George Eliot denotes the nature of creative powers. The mind, she suggests, has the capacity to shape outward reality. Inward vision modulates the perceptions of the physical eye, thus modifying the objective world. Idione's response to her perceptions of her decaying features unnecessarily exacerbates her deterioration, and Latimer's “fatal solitude of soul” (“LV,” p. 284) is established well before his clairvoyant powers manifest themselves, not as a result of these powers, which are objective correlatives for a pre-existing inward condition. In addition, by contrasting the young Latimer with the poet who “believes in the listening ear and answering soul” (“LV,” p. 284), George Eliot calls attention to the early existence of his deficiency.

Latimer's visionary powers, as well as his brief period of physical blindness during childhood, are thus merely extensions of his moral obtuseness, though, like Idione's perceptions, they take on objective reality. The circumstances of Latimer's and Idione's deaths underscore the terrible nature of the worlds they have created: Idione dies “lonely and sad” in the hollow of her tree; Latimer retreats to his “Devonshire nest to die” (“LV,” p. 340), unable in his final moments to summon even his servants.

Thus, in the 1840s George Eliot introduces many elements of the aesthetic which is the focal point of “The Lifted Veil.” Macarthy and Adolphe share Latimer's potential for unfulfilment but are redeemed by their responses to their visions of life, visions with strong Romantic overtones. Macarthy, a prodigious author, has created in orthodox Romantic fashion “productions, some of which have been carefully meditated, others apparently thrown off with the rapidity of inspiration” (E, p. 17). In one of his essays, “The Wisdom of the Child,” he quotes from Wordsworth's poetry and contends “that the proper result of intellectual cultivation is to restore the mind to that state of wonder and interest with which it looks on everything in childhood” (E, p. 19). Adolphe's purpose, “to live for the good, the true, the beautiful” (E, p. 18), is predicated upon the Keatsian assumption that the good, the true, and the beautiful are the same. But in Poetry and Prose George Eliot retreats from a full exploration of the potentially devastating effects of Macarthy's role as a Doppel-Gänger and of Adolphe's great trauma; only Idione, whose mythological character relieves her story of acutely painful associations, shares Latimer's despondent vision. Latimer's story, however, is infinitely more complex than Idione's, not only because humans are more complex than hamadryads but also because George Eliot's aesthetic in 1859 is more complex than it is in 1848.

II

In her first two contributions to the Westminster Review, George Eliot returns to and enlarges upon the ideas introduced in Poetry and Prose. In the first, a review of Robert William Mackay's The Progress of the Intellect, she asserts unequivocally a tenet implied in her comments on Adolphe: “he who believes, whatever else he may deny, that the true and the good are synonymous, bears in his soul the essential element of religion” (E, p. 42); and in the second, a review of Thomas Carlyle's The Life of Sterling, she reiterates the essential link between proper vision and creative fulfilment: a perfect biography, she contends, can be created only by “a loving and poetic nature which sees the beauty and the depth of familiar things, and the artistic power which seizes characteristic points and renders them with life-like effect” (E, p. 49). Here, in addition to reaffirming the importance of the artist's faculties of perception, George Eliot introduces her concern with realism, which was to become one of the most significant components of her aesthetic. Though sometimes misinterpreted as mere copying of what the artist perceives in the external world, George Eliot's view of realism never excluded an acceptance of more imaginative representation, as passages from other essays of the mid-fifties demonstrate.¹⁴

In “Three Months in Weimar,” for example, she comments on the relative merits of several examples of statuary. Her reactions to a statue of Goethe by Steinhausser and to a bust of Gluck by Houdon initially suggest that her appreciation is correlated directly to the sculptor's exact imitation of physical detail, for she denounces the representation of Goethe as a naked Apollo because it seems “a caricature,” while she finds the bust of Gluck, with its small-pox scars, its pug nose, and its common mouth, “a striking specimen of the real in art” (E, p. 88). But she also contends that Trippel's bust of Goethe as Apollo, though an idealization of its subject, is “also fine in its way” (E, p. 88). Steinhausser's art is inferior, not because it does not imitate external reality, but because “The execution is as feeble as the sentiment is false” (E, p. 86). Here George Eliot expands an idea introduced in Poetry and Prose and to be more fully scrutinized in “The Lifted Veil”: the source for the highest art lies in the sentiment of the artist; if his feeling is untrue, his productions will also be false. Moreover, the feeling of the artist is inextricably linked with his capacity for vision. The busts and portraits of Goethe in Weimar, she maintains, prove “how inevitably subjective art is, even when it professes to be purely imitative—how the most active perception gives us rather a reflex of what we think and feel, than the real sum of objects before us” (E, p. 89).

The topic of the second Weimar essay, “Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar,” affords an opportunity for more extensive statements on art. This essay contains a significant analysis of the origins of artistic inspiration, a process George Eliot describes in Romantic terminology: “Now, the greatest painters and sculptors have surely not been those who have been inspired through their intellect, who have first thought and then chosen a plastic symbol for their thought; rather, the symbol rushes in on their imagination before their slower reflection has seized any abstract idea embodied in it. Nay, perhaps the artist himself never seizes that idea, but his picture or his statue stands there an important symbol nevertheless” (E, p. 104). Although here George Eliot speaks of the painter and sculptor, she applies the same principles to the composer; and the same month in her “Belles Lettres” section in the Westminster Review she laments, “It seemed too long since we had any of that genuine description of external nature, not done after the poet's or the novelist's recipe, but flowing from spontaneous observation and enjoyment” (E, p. 125).

In these passages, George Eliot traces the inspiration for the highest art to its source in a kind of divine afflatus to which she later attributed some of the best writing.¹⁵ This process is identical to the manner in which Latimer's visions arise. On the occasion of his first vision, he even suspects the poet's nature “manifesting itself suddenly as spontaneous creation” (“LV,” p. 289) and compares his experience to the imaginative processes of Homer, Dante, and Milton; but the arrogance of the comparison is underscored by George Eliot's allusion to the great Puritan writer in “Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar”:

the genius who can leave permanent creations behind him knows that he shall live for the next age more emphatically than for his own—an ideal life, if you will, but happily one which is felt to be more real by many a noble soul than the pudding and praise of the present hour. Fame is but another word for the sympathy of makind with individual genius, and the great poet or the great composer is sure that that sympathy will be given some day, though his Paradise Lost will fetch only five pounds, and his symphony is received with contemptuous laughter.

(E, pp. 98-99)¹⁶

Latimer's literary bequest consists exclusively of his morbid autobiographical sketch; thus, just as his mental telepathy is an extension of his wilful abuse of his moral vision, his previsions are grotesque distortions of the inspired previsions of the genuine artist.

The inferior artist, in contrast to a Milton, suffers limitations which George Eliot describes as a spiritual deficiency. Her description of Charles Kingsley, for example, as lacking “that awful sense of the mystery of existence which continually checks and chastens the denunciations of the Teufelsdröckh” (E, p. 127) echoes her assertion in Poetry and Prose that “the wonder of the wise man is the result of knowledge disclosing mystery” (E, p. 20).

This sense of mystery is again linked to a capacity for perception, which in her review of Kingsley George Eliot describes in scientific imagery that anticipates some of the imagery of Middlemarch. Kingsley, she contends, is not “a teacher in the sense in which every great artist is a teacher—namely, by giving us his higher sensibility as a medium, a delicate acoustic or optical instrument, bringing home to our coarser senses what would otherwise be unperceived by us” (E, p. 126), nor does he have “that piercing insight which every now and then flashes to the depth of things” (E, p. 127). But if artists like Kingsley are spiritually deficient, those like Latimer are spiritually defunct. For in addition to being spontaneous, the artist's perception, George Eliot believes, in its penetration into “the depth of things” must ultimately apprehend beauty. In “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister,” however, she qualifies her earlier equation of the beautiful, the true, and the good as the only acceptable subject for art by allowing the artist a freer range if he ultimately affirms these values: if art is truthful, its sphere “extends wherever there is beauty either in form, or thought, or feeling” (E, p. 146). The image that illustrates this contention—“A ray of sunlight falling on the dreariest sandbank” (E, p. 146)—anticipates an image in Latimer's otherwise colorless vision of Prague: “a patch of rainbow light on the pavement transmitted through a coloured lamp in the shape of a star” (“LV,” p. 288). Though George Eliot repeats this image of hope when Latimer uses his recognition of the patch of light to confirm the validity of his visionary powers,¹⁷ its promise is ironic, for Latimer is drawn to the blackness which surrounds it and which characterizes his subsequent visions. By contrast, George Eliot contends, Goethe is a truly moral artist who focuses on the redeeming features of human nature (that is, the ray of sunlight) without glossing over human limitations.

The highest poet, George Eliot asserts in reviewing Tennyson's “Maud,” accepts responsibility for seeing this light and for translating it into art; he “has received—/ Aus Morgenduft gewebt und Sonnenklarheit / Der Dichtung Schleier aus der Hand der Wahrheit” (E, p. 191). Goethe's use of the veil and its relationship to poetic fulfilment, clarity, and truth perhaps suggested to George Eliot the configuration of associations which provide the central imagery for developing Latimer. Here she sets up this configuration as an evaluative measure for the highest poet and then demonstrates the deviation of “Maud” from this ideal in part “because its tone is throughout morbid; it opens to us the self revelations of a morbid mind, and what it presents as the cure for this mental disease it itself only a morbid conception of human relations” (E, p. 192). The month that this review was published George Eliot wrote to Cara Bray that “it is not healthy to dwell on one's own feelings and conduct, but only to try and live more faithfully and lovingly every fresh day” (L, 2:215).

Her recurring concern with the deleterious inward tendencies of double vision—a concern alluded to in her 1845 letter to Sara Hennell and reasserted in Poetry and Prose—shows George Eliot's continued interest in ideas that flowered into her conception of Latimer. At the same time, her non-fiction begins to stress the importance of diverting the inward directions of such a vision. The most effective writer, she argues in an essay on Carlyle, “looks out on the world with so clear and loving an eye, that nature seems to reflect the light of his glance upon your own feeling” (E, p. 214), and “he glances deep down into human nature” (E, p. 215). The efficaciousness of the artist's insights is assimilated into George Eliot's notion of realism, for “his greatest power lies in concrete presentation” (E, p. 215).

These links are reaffirmed in George Eliot's appraisal of Robert Browning, who is Latimer's antithesis: “There is nothing sickly or dreamy in him; he has a clear eye, a vigorous grasp, and courage to utter what he sees. … His keen glance pierces into all the secrets of human character, but, being as thoroughly alive to the outward as to the inward, he reveals those secrets, not by a process of dissection, but by dramatic painting.”¹⁸

George Eliot's indictment of Latimer is a result of her increased emphasis by the mid-fifties on the ethical responsibility of the writer, especially his obligation to enlarge the reader's sympathy and to avoid falsification. This emphasis dominates the last essays she wrote before beginning her career as a novelist.¹⁹

Though she had already introduced the issue of the artist's responsibility, in “The Natural History of German Life” George Eliot fully develops the relationship between sympathy and realism. Here she censures the idealization of rustics in art, especially in fiction, as “a grave evil” (E, p. 270) because it undermines sympathy. Her famous dictum on art follows:

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions … but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one.

(E, p. 271)

Again she maintains that true art demands an acute perception of the artist. Riehl displays such perception because he “is not a man who looks at objects through the spectacles either of the doctrinaire or the dreamer” (E, p. 286).

Lack of sympathy, George Eliot contends in “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” results in fulsome diction, melodramatic plots, and pseudo-philosophy—serious violations of realism as practiced by great writers, who “have thought it quite a sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are” (E, p. 310).²⁰ Again George Eliot correlates the value of art and the morality of the artist; the deficiencies of silly novels are due as much to moral as to intellectual limitations.

“Worldliness and Other—Worldliness: The Poet Young” is George Eliot's most sustained denunciation of egoism and falsism in the artist. Young's poetry fails, she contends, because, like the infamous silly novels, it is designed to elicit preconceived responses rather than to set forth the poet's own vision. Only fidelity to inward vision produces true art, and only an artist devoid of egoism possesses a vision unblemished by falsifying proclivities. Great art issues

from the immediate prompting of innate power which we call Genius, and not from laboured obedience to a theory or rule; and the presence of genius or innate prompting is directly opposed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is imperious, and excludes the reflection why it should act. In the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, i. e., has affinity with Art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule.

(E, p. 379)

Though Latimer has a capacity for spontaneity (he is indifferent to why the water runs and his visions are independent of his will), his poetic potential never flourishes because it has no moral foundation. His only work, his morbid autobiography, is designed to elicit rather than give sympathy. Thus, his didacticism, like Young's, arises from a belief “that it is good for other men to be moral, than from any overflow of moral feeling in himself” (E, p. 379). His failure, also like Young's, derives from this belief, not from his extravagant imagination, for in “Worldliness and Other—Worldliness” George Eliot reasserts that “The fantastic or the boldly imaginative poet may be as sincere as the most realistic: he is true to his own sensibilities or inward vision, and in his wildest flights he never breaks loose from his criterion—the truth of his own mental state” (E, p. 367).

III

G. H. Lewes's interpretation of “The Lifted Veil” acknowledges that Latimer's perceptions are incomplete: “the moral is plain enough … the one-sided knowing of things in relation to the self—not whole knowledge because ‘tout comprendre est tout pardonner’” (L, 9:220). But while censuring Latimer for his egoism, George Eliot seems to impose this egoism on him in order to resolve her attempt to probe the hypothesis that the true, the beautiful, and the good may not be equivalents. Employing her characteristic technique of plunging a fully-conceived character into a particular environment and then tracing his reactions, George Eliot records Latimer's affection for his mother, his sensitivity to nature, and his poetic aspirations—commendable Wordsworthian virtues. But by subjecting him to nihilistic visions, by abandoning her stress upon his sensibilities, and by endowing him with intolerable egoism, she evades a frank confrontation with the issues she has raised.

Thus, in condemning Latimer, George Eliot exposes the ambiguities of her aesthetic. Though she claims sympathy for suffering humanity, she also nearly excludes the egoist from this claim. Though she gives no signals that Latimer's acquaintances are better than his insights suggest, she also reproves his withdrawal from society and his wilful disregard of the warning visions of his marriage. More important, she attempts to fuse in Latimer two potentially irreconcilable contrarieties—a Romantic freedom and spontaneity and a Victorian discipline and sense of duty. Her inability to effect this fusion reaffirms George Creeger's designation of her as one of the “legatees of European romanticism who had explored too deeply the hidden landscape of the psyche … to accept with complacency the rational and optimistic shibboleths of the age.”²¹

George Eliot herself may have recognized her inability to synthesize the complex implications of her critical theory. Such a recognition would illuminate her most puzzling comment of “The Lifted Veil”: “I care for the idea which it embodies and which justifies its painfulness. … There are many things in it which I would willingly say over again, and I shall never put them in any other form” (L, 5:380).²²

Intrusions on the function of art, so conspicuous in Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, play a less obtrusive role in the fiction following “The Lifted Veil,” a difference which probably cannot be attributed solely to increasing narrative sophistication. As Hugh Witemeyer points out, in Adam Bede “the aesthetic and the moral remain compatible,”²³ but not because George Eliot had never reflected on their potential incompatibility. Only after the success of Adam, perhaps, could she reconsider questions thrust aside after her early essays; only then, perhaps, could she acknowledge that the aesthetic expounded in the Scenes of Clerical Life and in Adam may have been incomplete and thus distorted—two misrepresentations in art she had repeatedly denounced. In this acknowledgement, as Knoepflmacher, Redinger, and Gilbert and Gubar have shown,²⁴ George Eliot undoubtedly, consciously or subconsciously, was attempting to resolve ambivalent feelings about her own role as an artist. Perhaps because her attempt was largely unsuccessful, in her subsequent fiction she avoided contradictory statements about art in her own voice but instead relied upon the commentary of characters with artistic temperaments to displace her narrative intrusions. Even her later fiction, however, contains suggestions that she remained troubled by a fear that artistic vision embodied destructive as well as creative forces.

In The Mill on the Floss, for example, Philip's reverence of poetry, art, and knowledge as “sacred and pure” (bk. 5, ch. 1) must be evaluated against the more complex responses of Maggie, whose interior life is almost universally interpreted as a fictional rendition of George Eliot's. After all, poetry, art, and knowledge belong to Stephen's world, which comprises Maggie's Great Temptation. Thus, when Maggie returns The Pirate to Philip “as if to say ‘avaunt’ to floating visions” (bk. 5, ch. 1), she reflects her own, as well as her creator's Coleridgean awareness of the frightening latent properties in art that have eluded her artistic friend.²⁵ The same ambiguity and ambivalence pervade the famous chapter “A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet,” one of the few lengthy intrusions on art which George Eliot allowed herself after “The Lifted Veil,” a chapter in which she alludes to the grandeur, and thus the implicit attractiveness and appeal, of the barons of the Rhine, who “represented the demon forces for ever in collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life.” This collision is dramatized in the soul of Maggie, whose intensity and passion are at war with her propensity for renunciation, virtue, and a gentle life, and whose repeated association with demonic imagery²⁶ links her with this digression. Thus, despite Philip's sensitive feminine temperament and sheltered boyhood, it is Maggie, more than he, who is Latimer's fictional descendant. Her death precludes the reconciliation of beauty and virtue with the vital forces of intensity and passion.

In Romola George Eliot again confronts the ambiguities of her aesthetic. Here, however, she suggests the delusory power of beauty by concentrating its force in Tito, the joyous embodiment of Hellenism who inspires Nello's echo of George Eliot's early essays: “I shall never look at such an outside as that without taking it as a sign of a lovable nature” (ch. 6), a mistaken assumption shared by Latimer. But Hebraism, in its visionary zeal and its rejection of beauty, offers no satisfactory alternative. At its best, in Savonarola, its ideals become entangled in egoism; at its worst, in Camilla Rucellai, its outcome is wanton destructiveness. Even Dino's visions are ineffectual, for, like Latimer's, they arise from “the shadowy region where human souls seek wisdom apart from the human sympathies which are the very life and substance of our wisdom” (ch. 15). Significantly, it is the artist, Piero di Cosimo, whose penetrating vision both pierces the deceptive appearance of Tito and perceives the irony of Romola's defense of the burning of the classics. It is he who mitigates against the severity of the conclusion, which, like the conclusion of the Mill [The Mill on the Floss], seems weighted in favor of renunciation—renunciation of art and beauty as well as egoism. As the novel ends, Lillo holds a copy of Petrarch and Piero arrives with a bouquet of flowers. Although this conclusion may not resolve all of the aesthetic issues of the novel, it is another instance of George Eliot's need, despite her persisting fears, to reassert the redeeming capacity of art.

In Felix Holt comments on art are limited, but in Middlemarch aesthetic complexities again emerge as an important theme. Despite their differences, Will Ladislaw is perhaps Latimer's closest kinsman in George Eliot's novels. Like Latimer, he desires mystery in life, he is a Shelleian figure, and he bases his responses on perception, rejecting Dorothea's “fanaticism of sympathy” (ch. 22) and embracing a creed of loving “what is good and beautiful when I see it” (ch. 39). As Joseph Wiesenfarth points out, George Eliot conceives of Ladislaw as Dorothea's tutor in aesthetics.²⁷ Nevertheless, Ladislaw and Dorothea's last conversation on art is replete with the problematic issues of “The Lifted Veil.” Moved by Dorothea's belief “that by desiring what is perfectly good … we are part of the divine power against evil,” Ladislaw seems to find her creed superior to his own. And though Dorothea reminds him that “if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing,” his response, “Now you are subtle” (ch. 39) leaves unanswered the question of whether beauty and goodness are altogether coextensive and thus suggests George Eliot's awareness of ambiguities within his aesthetic. Furthermore, their conversation immediately precedes the account of Mr. Brooke's inauspicious visit to the Dagleys of Freeman's End. By concluding the chapter with this episode, George Eliot points to a possible flaw in Ladislaw's scheme: the beauty and morality of art notwithstanding, the Dagleys are still with us, crying out for “the Rinform.” Perhaps for this reason, after stressing the role of art in the first half of the novel, George Eliot abandons the subject. As Wiesenfarth concedes, “It is very difficult, if not impossible, to talk about Puritanism and aesthetics because they are hostile to each other.”²⁸ Nevertheless, both Puritanism and aesthetics had long been part of George Eliot's psychological make-up. The tenacity of the Puritan impulses may explain her transformation of Ladislaw into a politician.

Perhaps Julius Klesmer in Daniel Deronda is George Eliot's most successful amalgamation of the many strands of her aesthetic, though, in this novel, the theme of art is again subordinate to other concerns. Like Latimer and Ladislaw, “clear-seeing Klesmer,” with “his terribly omniscient eyes,” has unmistakable Shelleian affinities: artists, he contends, “help to rule the nations and make the age as much as any other public men. We count ourselves on level benches with legislators” (ch. 23). His gypsy flamboyance and intensity recall the demon forces that trouble Latimer and Maggie Tulliver, forces which he has channeled into the service of art. But even in Deronda the morbid potential of heightened sensibility and of double consciousness recurs in another artist, Alcharisi, whose artistic and ethical impulses have remained unreconciled.

The reverberation in the later novels of the aesthetic tenets examined in “The Lifted Veil” suggests that George Eliot never thoroughly resolved their ambiguities to her own satisfaction. Their subordination to other themes also suggests that her attempt in “The Lifted Veil” to sort out the implications of these tenets led her to Mr. Brooke's conclusion that “pigeon holes will not do” (Middlemarch, ch. 2). But whatever her final consensus, “The Lifted Veil” is inseparably related to George Eliot's aesthetic; thus, it merits attention as more than an eccentric aberration in the canon. “The attempt at an innovation reveals a want that has not hitherto been met,” George Eliot wrote in “Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar,” “and if the productions of the innovator are exaggerated symbols of the want … still they are protests which it is wiser to accept as strictures than to hiss down as absurdities” (E, pp. 99-100).

Notes

1. Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England: 1850-1870 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), p. 40.

2. Several significant studies are Gordon S. Haight, “George Eliot's Theory of Fiction,” VN 10 (Autumn 1956): 1-3; William J. Hyde, “George Eliot and the Climate of Realism,” PMLA 72 (March 1957):147-64; Alice R. Kaminsky, “George Eliot, George Henry Lewes and the Novel,” PMLA 70 (December 1955):997-1013; Darrel Mansell, Jr., “George Eliot's Conception of Form,” SEL 5 (Autumn 1965):651-62; James D. Rust, “The Art of Fiction in George Eliot's Reviews,” RES ns 7 (April 1956):164-72; and Stang, pp. 40-45 and passim.

3. Not until U. C. Knoepflmacher's George Eliot's Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968) was “The Lifted Veil” reclaimed from obscurity despite Elliot Rubinstein's earlier attempt, “A Forgotten Tale by George Eliot,” NCF 17 (September 1962):157-83. For recent analyses of art in this story see Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York: Knopf, 1975), pp. 400-405; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 468-77; and Charles Swann, “Déjà vu: Déjà lu: ‘The Lifted Veil’ as an Experiment in Art,” Literature and History 5 (Spring 1979):40-57.

4. Artist here designates one with artistic sensibilities. As Rubinstein (p. 180) points out, Latimer is actually an “artist manqué.”

5. Thomas Pinney, ed., Essays of George Eliot (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 13-26. Hereafter cited as E.

6. The Works of George Eliot, 24 vols. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1978), 3:284. Hereafter cited as LV.

7. Gordon S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954-1978), 1:223n. Hereafter cited as L. If George Eliot was working on a novel, it was not her first attempt. See Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 15. Hereafter cited as Haight.

8. Haight, p. 61.

9. P. 403. My italics.

10. See Knoepflmacher, pp. 149-50, 152-54, and Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 454ff.

11. Latimer discounts his friendship with Charles Meunier, apparently because it derived from a “sympathetic resentment” (LV, p. 285).

12. This water nixie/siren/naiad image cluster reappears in George Eliot's portraits of Hetty Sorrel, Esther Lyon, Rosamond Vincy, and Gwendolen Harleth.

13. Macarthy again suggests divine inspiration in praising Adolphe for “the artist's eye, so wrapt and unworldly in its glance” (E, p. 18).

14. Even this endorsing of a “life-like effect,” accommodates a flexible definition of realism, for George Eliot implies that in penetrating the beauty and depth of familiar things the creator transcends the limitations of the finite world. In praising Ruskin in “Art and Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review (American edn.) 65 (April 1856):344, she quotes from Modern Painters to reiterate that realism is based on true sentiment rather than on mimesis: “Great art dwells on all that is beautiful; but false art omits or changes all that is ugly” (p. 344). For a discussion of realism, see George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981).

15. J. W. Cross, ed. George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, 3 vols. (Boston: Dana Estes, 1885), 3:343-44.

16. The year that “The Lifted Veil” was published, George Henry Lewes reiterated this point in reviewing Ernest Renan's Essais de Morale et de Critique. See Alice Kaminsky, Literary Criticism of George Henry Lewes (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 42.

17. John Vincent Reishman points out this traditional symbolism in “Six Moral Fables: A Study of the Redemptive Vision in George Eliot's Short Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Virginia, 1971), p. 100. Actually, George Eliot divests the rainbow of traditional implications by identifying it as a product of optical phenomena in an echo of Shelley's “Lines: ‘When the Lamp is Shattered,’” an echo which reinforces Latimer's Shelleian affinities. Also, by placing its first appearance within a vision, she, like many Victorians, traces it to a subjective human source. For a discussion of the rainbow in Victorian art and literature, see George P. Landow, “The Rainbow: A Problematic Image,” Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), pp. 341-69. George Eliot's more familiar Rainbow—the tavern in Silas Marner—also functions ironically, for Silas tries but fails to recover his gold there.

18. George Eliot, “Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review (American edn.) 65 (January 1856):161.

19. “Worldliness and Other-Worldliness” was interrupted by “Amos Barton” (see Pinney, pp. 335-36); but since the essay was begun before “Amos,” it belongs with George Eliot's other expressions of her aesthetic at the outset of her fictional career. In these materials George Eliot shows increasing concern with the function specifically of the writer rather than the artist in general.

20. G. H. Lewes's comment on realism in 1858 sums up George Eliot's stance: “its antithesis is not Idealism, but Falsism” (Kaminsky, p. 87).

21. George Creeger, “Introduction,” George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970), p. 3. In The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 210-12, Donald D. Stone relates German Romanticism specifically to “The Lifted Veil.”

22. It is curious, however, that George Eliot made a similar comment about Scenes of Clerical Life: “there are ideas presented in these stories about which I care a good deal, and am not sure I can ever embody again” (L, 3:240).

23. Hugh Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 150.

24. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot's Early Novels, pp. 133-39; Redinger, pp. 401-405; Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 447-57.

25. Maggie's reaction recalls George Eliot's adolescent letter to Maria Lewis, in which she denounced novels and regretted having used their materials “for building my castles in the air” (L, 1:22). These castles, as Gordon Haight notes, included her attempts to write out Waverly when she was unable to finish reading the book (L, 1:22n). Paradoxically, however, in the letter to Miss Lewis, Scott's name appears among those of the few exceptional authors spared from banishment. Maggie's attraction-repulsion conflict over Scott, therefore, seems to have an autobiographical source; furthermore, in the mature George Eliot, ambivalent responses to art survive, though in a more complex and sophisticated form.

26. Nina Auerbach, “The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver,” NCF 30 (September 1975): 150-71.

27. Joseph Wiesenfarth, “Middlemarch: The Language of Art,” PMLA 97 (May 1982):363-77.

28. P. 365.