[In the following essay, Knoepflmacher investigates the origins of “The Lifted Veil” and considers the story essential to Eliot's development as a philosophical novelist.]

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many did he move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Among this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

—Shelley, “Sonnet” (1818)

[H]orror was my familiar, and this new revelation was only like an old pain recurring with new circumstances.

—“The Lifted Veil” (1859)

Six months after the publication of Adam Bede there appeared in the July 1859 issue of Blackwood's an anonymous horror tale entitled “The Lifted Veil.” By this time the second impression of Adam Bede was under way, and, despite her previous hesitations and against the advice of her publisher, George Eliot divulged the secret of its authorship. To her elation, the writer, who could now openly sign “Marian Evans Lewes” in her letters to John Blackwood, found that her book's popularity was not greatly affected by this revelation.¹ Busily at work on her next novel, she wrote in October of 1859 to an old Swiss acquaintance, François D'Albert Durade, in order to apprise him of her recent success:² “I have turned out to be an artist—not, as you are, with the pencil and pallet, but with words. I have written a novel which people say has stirred them very deeply—and not a few people, but almost all reading England. It was published in February last, and already 14,000 copies have been sold. The title is ‘Adam Bede’; and ‘George Eliot,’ the name on the title page, is my nom de plume. I had previously written another work of fiction called, Scenes of Clerical Life, which had a great literary success, but not a great popular success, such as Adam Bede [h]as had. Both are now published by Tauchnitz in his series of English novels.” (GEL [The George Eliot Letters, Gordon Haight, ed. (Oxford, 1956)], III, 186.)

It is noteworthy in this exuberant account of her good fortunes that the new novelist who had captured “almost all reading England” should suppress any reference to “The Lifted Veil.” Indeed, almost until the very end of her career, both she and John Blackwood thought it best not to acknowledge the authorship of that strange tale about a diseased visionary cursed with the power of seeing beyond the “veil” of reality. On arranging for an edition of her works in 1866, Blackwood advised against including the story “in the recognized series of your works. I remember the Lifted Veil was published when Adam Bede was in the full blaze of fame, and I thought it better not to accept Lewes' kind offer to put your name to it in the Magazine” (GEL, IV, 322). In 1873, it was George Eliot's turn to refuse permission to reprint it in an anthology of the best stories from Blackwood's. Not until its inclusion in the Cabinet Edition of her works, in 1877, was this unreal tale finally acknowledged as being the work of England's foremost “realist.” Soon after, a French painter, H. É. Blanchon, exhibited a lurid composition depicting the one scene which Blackwood had once pleaded, unsuccessfully, that George Eliot omit.³

In 1859, however, few readers other than Blackwood or Lewes were aware that “The Lifted Veil” was by the author of Adam Bede. And, had not her publisher reported that “the Bedesman” showed definite promise of “coming in a winner” in that year's great literary derby (GEL, II, 28), it is doubtful that George Eliot would even have ventured to submit her fantasy tale for public scrutiny. Since then, except for a brief article in 1962 stressing its modernity,⁴ little critical attention has been devoted to the story's intrinsic meaning or to its place in the development of George Eliot's ideas and art. With a curious disregard for this supernatural tale's important English antecedents and its American or Continental counterparts, most students of George Eliot have dismissed “The Lifted Veil” contemptuously as being “mixed up with too much ‘spook stuff’ to make the piece of more than passing interest.”⁵

A TALE NEARLY ANONYMOUS

George Eliot's own reticence about “The Lifted Veil” has unquestionably contributed to its neglect. Her first allusion to the story came on March 31, 1859, and was unusually self-deprecatory: she told Blackwood that she had written “a slight story of an outré kind—not a jeu d'esprit, but a jeu de melancolie, which I could send you in a few days for your acceptance or rejection as a brief magazine story—of one number only. I think nothing of it, but my private critic says it is very striking and original” (GEL, III, 41). After Blackwood's brief reassurances, she promised to have it ready “in a few days” (GEL, III, 44), but not until April 29 did she send him the manuscript with the curt comment, “herewith the dismal story” (GEL, III, 60). Lewes had meanwhile readied Blackwood for a slight shock: “You must prepare for a surprise with the new story G.E. is writing. It is totally unlike anything he has written yet. The novel [The Mill on the Floss] will be a companion picture to Adam Bede; but this story is of an imaginative philosophical kind, quite new and piquant. As usual he is unwilling to believe that anyone will see anything in it.” (GEL, III, 55.)

“G.E.” was correct. For Blackwood saw little in the tale beyond evidence of the same morbidness which he had deplored in “Janet's Repentance.” Still, he accepted it for publication and worded his answer as diplomatically as he could: “It is a very striking story, full of thought and most beautifully written. I wish the theme had been a happier one, and I think you must have been worrying and disturbing yourself about something when you wrote. Still, others are not so fond of sweets as I am, and no judge can read “The Lifted Veil” without deep admiration.” (GEL, III, 67.) Blackwood's perception that the story quite possibly embodied some highly personal preoccupations was hardly destined to elicit any revelations from his correspondent. It was only many years later, on asking her permission to reprint it in the anthology, that he unintentionally drew from her a comment about its aims. By telling her that he still found it a “striking although horribly painful story” (GEL, V, 379), Blackwood may well have stirred George Eliot into defending a tale she had once professed to think nothing of:

I care for the idea which it embodies and which justifies its painfulness. A motto which I wrote on it yesterday⁶ perhaps is a sufficient indication of that idea:—

“Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns

To energy of human fellowship;

No powers save the growing heritage

That makes completer manhood.”

But it will be well to put the story in harness with some other productions of mine, and not send it forth in its dismal loneliness. There are many things in it which I would willingly say over again, and I shall never put in any other form. The question is not in the least one of money, but of care for the best effect of writing, which often depends on circumstances much as pictures depend on light and juxtaposition.

(GEL, V, 380)

Although “The Lifted Veil” was eventually sandwiched in the Cabinet Edition between Silas Marner and “Brother Jacob” (George Eliot's only other short story), the “light and juxtaposition” it demands must be afforded by Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. George Eliot insisted that her fiction be regarded as “successive mental phases” in her development as an artist. Therefore her incursion into a mode so utterly at odds with the “realism” she had previously expounded deserves closer scrutiny. Her movement from the pastoral mode of Adam Bede, set in the semi-idyllic past of eighteenth-century Loamshire, to the “tragedy” of Sister Maggie, set in the era when Mr. Deane's harnessed steam threatens to undermine the old rural order, is far more comprehensible if we regard “The Lifted Veil” as a short, but highly revealing, intermediate “phase” between the two novels. Unlike the fiction immediately before and after it, “The Lifted Veil” is nearly contemporary; its narrator ends his account on the day of his death, September 20, 1850. In its proximity to the author's own present, the story differs significantly from all of George Eliot's rural novels, resembling Daniel Deronda, which also is set in the near-present, on the Continent as well as in England.

The composition of “The Lifted Veil” could easily have overlapped with George Eliot's work on either the concluding portions of Adam Bede or the opening chapters of The Mill [The Mill on the Floss.]. She finished Adam Bede at Richmond on November 16, 1858, after laboring on it during her stay on the Continent from April to August of that year. In “The Lifted Veil” she clearly draws on her European visit. The localities visited by Latimer, the story's narrator—Munich, Vienna, Prague, and Dresden—before his return to England in the second half of the story, correspond exactly to the itinerary of George Eliot and Lewes after their departure from Munich. And the crucial description of the Jewish cemetery at Prague, which ends the first half of the story, contains details factually recorded by the two tourists in their journals.⁷

Since “The Lifted Veil” draws on some of the external details of George Eliot's European visit, it also may reflect the inner turmoil she seems to have experienced during her three-month sojourn in Munich. Her sensibilities heightened by the composition of Adam Bede, George Eliot regarded Munich with mistrust: gauche allegorical paintings, insensible Bavarian beer drinkers, eminent German scientists like Liebig and von Siebold, provided impressions which could hardly have been transferred into the pastoral novel she was then writing.⁸ Loamshire had been invented to assert the restorative powers of love in a world marked by toil and suffering. Though mythical, its reality was carved out of the solid Warwickshire life George Eliot had known and yet abandoned. Her German surroundings could only have accentuated her sense of isolation from that native reality and led her to question the power of her art. How “true” was Loamshire? In her novel, George Eliot stressed her reluctance to falsify experience, her desire to maintain “this precious quality of truthfulness.” Yet in the distant rural world which supported Adam and his second Eve she had created a reality as it ought to be or might have been and not as it was.⁹ Munich she found to be devoid of the communal spirit she had celebrated in her novel. The city, she claimed, lacked the organic sense of “community” she had detected in the medieval remnants of Nürnberg. Accordingly, the jovial Lewes speculated, “Who knows but some day we may have a Nürnberg novel, as the product?” (GEL, II, 449.) Instead, George Eliot only seemed to have stored up a darker mood, a vision revived months later in England, when her sister's death brought to the fore again her deep sense of desolation.

When Lewes abruptly left Munich for a week's visit to Switzerland, she felt miserable and lonely. Her dependence on him became as painfully evident during this short absence as it was to be many years later upon his death: “I suffered a great deal in thinking of the possibilities that might prevent him from coming,” she wrote in her journal after his safe return (GEL, II, 467). Uncertain of her own future, at work on a novel in which she asserted that temporal man should prefer his limited vision, the unusual image of a seer capable of foreseeing his destiny might then have impressed itself for the first time in her imagination. In Munich she alternately complained about “the inconvenience of climate,” felt at odds with a society as stolid as Milby or St. Ogg's, and claimed to be without energy to write to her few friends in England (GEL, II, 460, 464). Even Lewes' scientific activities, which she normally would have shared with zeal and interest, may have jarred her overexcited mind. The revivification experiment at the end of “The Lifted Veil” (which probably owes more to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and other Gothic romances than, as Blackwood later intimated, to Lewes' “experiments on some confounded animalcule” [GEL, III, 67]) may well have been stimulated by those “wonders” which the delighted Lewes observed in the dissecting rooms of the Munich Academy (GEL, II, 454). The travelers at last left southern Germany “with ungrateful alacrity” (and the still unfinished manuscript of Adam Bede). Lewes probably spoke more for his partner than for himself when he claimed to carry away “no pleasant memories” (GEL, II, 465). Ahead—as in Latimer's journey—lay Vienna, Prague, Dresden, and, beyond, an uncertain future in England.

Yet, though the impetus for the first—the “Continental”—half of “The Lifted Veil” stems from George Eliot's stay in southern Germany, the composition of both halves of the tale could not have been undertaken until some time between the tourists' return to Richmond in September 1858 and their possession of Holly Lodge at Wandsworth on February 6, 1859. Three days before she sent the completed story to Blackwood—April 28, 1859—George Eliot recorded in her journal: “Finished a story—‘The ‹Hidden› Lifted Veil’—which I began one morning at Richmond as a resource when my head was too stupid for more important work” (GEL, III, 60). This more “important work” was either Adam Bede or, more likely, the projected companion piece she speaks of in her next paragraph: “Resumed my new novel, of which I am going to rewrite the first two chapters. I shall call it provisionally ‘The Tullivers,’ for the sake of a title quelconque, or perhaps ‘St. Ogg's on the Floss.’”¹⁰

It is therefore quite possible that the first portion of the tale—with its emphasis on a romantic isolato whose gift of vision sets him apart from his fellow mortals, but finds no outlet in art—was stimulated by George Eliot's isolation in Munich, but not begun till she was at Richmond, during a period in which she was wracked by doubts that she would ever again be capable of producing a work as “true” as Adam Bede.¹¹ The second portion could then have been finished at Wandsworth as a “jeu de mélancolie,” designed to clear the air for the work on “The Tullivers,” which she had projected since January 12, 1859. More important, however, both halves of the story hide or “veil” highly personal preoccupations, some of which also were to enter The Mill on the Floss, commonly regarded as George Eliot's most autobiographical work. Only a month before she first mentioned “The Lifted Veil” to Blackwood, the novelist became “weary and ailing and thinking of a sister who is slowly dying” (GEL, III, 24). Though the sisters had remained on friendly terms for some time after Marian's elopement with Lewes, Chrissey (Mrs. Edward Clarke) finally had followed brother Isaac's example by breaking off relations in 1857; but upon becoming aware of her fatal illness, she had written to seek forgiveness. George Eliot had welcomed this return of “a naturally just and affectionate mind,” apparently hoping that the restoration of sisterly love would also pave the way for a reconciliation with Isaac, whose “external influence” she correctly blamed for Chrissey's previous silence. She wanted to banish “the idea of alienation” altogether, to resume only those bonds of affection which had once united the Evans family: “The past is abolished from my mind—I only want her to feel that I love her and care for her” (GEL, III, 26). Yet her sister's death blasted whatever expectations she might have had for a gradual reconciliation with a brother even more intransigent than Tom Tulliver was to be.

“The Lifted Veil” can be read on several related planes. On one, it is a highly private work in which the stable and sane commentator whom we have falsely come to regard as equivalent to George Eliot herself, is replaced by the morbid narrator, Latimer, a projection as much a part of Marian Evans as that sage public voice we hear in Middlemarch. Latimer, the “I” of this tale, enacts some of George Eliot's innermost doubts and feelings of guilt. Just as the self who is Maggie Tulliver was destined from the beginning to drown in the flooding waters of the Floss, so this young man—who, unlike Maggie, cannot even find solace in his childhood memories of rural England—is predetermined to die an extraordinary death. The date of his death, September 20, 1850, may even have held a private meaning for his creator. If so, that meaning remains a secret, for her journal for that year has been destroyed. Yet some clues remain. Latimer's father, so unlike his feminine, sickly, artistic son, is thoroughly British: “a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits” (“LV” [“The Lifted Veil”], chap. 1, p. 281). Robert Evans, who fitted this description, had died in 1849. It was in 1850, upon her return from Geneva and after visits to Isaac and Chrissey, that Marian Evans, more and more compelled to find an outlet for her unique powers of intellect, concluded that she no longer had any “motive for living” among her provincial kin. Melchisedec, she vowed with bitter irony, was “the only happy man,” for of him it was said that he was without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life (GEL, I, 356). Later that year, in November, she left Warwickshire for London, to become the “infidel esprit” of the Westminster Review. Her past self died in that year (possibly, in her mind, on September 20th); yet it would be revived in her later fiction in figures as disparate as the rebellious Maggie and the detached, satirical Mary Garth of Middlemarch.

Whatever its exact origins in George Eliot's personal life, “The Lifted Veil” clearly holds a special position in her canon as a novelist. In its terrifying presentation of “our alienation, our repulsion from each other” (chap. 2, p. 324), this anonymously published story yields a nihilistic vision which its author would never have expressed as relentlessly in her acknowledged fiction. By resorting to a mode as fantastic as that of Coleridge's “Ancient Mariner” or Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, George Eliot gave prominence to anxieties which she had barely allowed to surface in the stories of Janet Dempster and Adam Bede. Yet, though it relies on the irrational mode of the fantasy tale, “The Lifted Veil” nonetheless displays the conscious effort to master all that is anarchic and irrational which is so characteristic of George Eliot's art. In Adam Bede, the novelist punished Hetty Sorrel to assuage her own apprehension over an erratic and amoral universe; in “The Lifted Veil,” where the idealistic narrator uncovers an even more frightening vision of cosmic evil and meaninglessness, she likewise tries to conquer the nihilism to which Latimer succumbs by blaming him for excessive despair. In its intensity, however, Latimer's disillusionment is all too convincing. Like Maggie Tulliver, this character is less a victim of his own faults than of his creator's uncertainties and deep misgivings about the reality she hoped to vindicate. In the discussion which follows, I shall first focus on the horror dramatized by the allegory of “The Lifted Veil” in order to proceed then to George Eliot's more conscious attempts to subdue the doubts she had unveiled.

PRIVATE ALLEGORY: THE UNVEILING OF HORROR

Like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which had been composed during its author's sojourn in Switzerland in 1816, “The Lifted Veil” is a fantasy which partly stems from a highly imaginative Englishwoman's metamorphosis of an alien European environment. George Eliot had been in Europe on two occasions before her 1858 stay in Munich. Both of the earlier visits had led to important turning points in her life. After returning from Geneva in 1850 (a visit on which she clearly draws in “The Lifted Veil”), she decided to cut the ties of her provincial past and become a member of London's intelligentsia. Her second European residence marked an even more momentous in its severance: in July 1854 Marian Evans and Lewes eloped to Germany, fully aware of the probable repercussions of their decision. Two years later Lewes encouraged Marian to write fiction. The moderate success of Scenes of Clerical Life promised, just as her editorial work on the Westminster had, a new way toward her intellectual fulfillment. Thus, unlike Mary Shelley, George Eliot was already at work on a full-scale novel—an English novel—when a Continental environment again intruded on her imagination.

From Munich, George Eliot had written to Sara Hennell, who had recently lost her mother: “All the serious relations of life become so much more real to one—pleasure seems so slight a thing, and sorrow and duty and endurance so great” (GEL, II, 465). In Adam Bede, the serious-minded Adam comes to share this insight; he and Dinah impose meaning and direction on the potentially anarchic existence represented by Hetty and Arthur. Yet Hetty, even more than Arthur, bears the brunt of her creator's desire to justify the purposiveness recognized by Adam and Dinah. Though Hetty becomes the vehicle for Adam's and Dinah's understanding, she also is removed from their order of experience. Uncomprehending and childlike, this English country lass must face terrors unknown to the other characters: “the horror of this cold, and darkness, and solitude—out of all human reach” (AB [Adam Bede], chap. 37, p. 147). Killed offstage, Hetty must pay for her lovelessness: her place is taken by one who trusts in the pulsations of “Love” even among the dreary blankness of Stonyshire.

In Adam Bede, Hetty's vision of horror is not allowed to disturb the novel's positive ending. In “The Lifted Veil,” however, the horror informs the entire tale. Its vehicle is not an uncomprehending country girl, but a curiously un-English, Continentally educated visionary who resembles Dinah Morris, rather than Hetty, both in his idealism and his ability to foresee the future. Unlike Hetty, Latimer is essentially guiltless. He is betrayed by his blonde wife and by his extraordinary capacities of insight and foresight—faculties developed, significantly enough, during his sojourn in Europe. Whereas the animalistic Hetty never understands the implications of her own deed, the imaginative Latimer deliberately underscores the most terrible implications of the story he narrates in his own voice.

Adam Bede had relied on the correlatives of Milton and Wordsworth; “The Lifted Veil” harks back to a somewhat different tradition. Like Frankenstein, the story uses a mixture of European and English settings. But, while Mary Shelley's romance ranges from the Swiss Alps and a “solitary isle” in Scotland to Russia and a British vessel bound for the arctic North, George Eliot's horror story is neatly apportioned between the opposing atmospheres of the Continent and England. In Frankenstein, the heterogeneous backgrounds of the two main characters are deliberately fused: Walton the English narrator, a seafarer nourished on “The Ancient Mariner,” finds that his hunger for higher knowledge unites him to the Genevese scientist Victor Frankenstein. Gradually, as in Conrad's “The Secret Sharer,” the two dissimilar men identify with each other; together they defy the arctic chills in order to hunt down Frankenstein's creature. The affection both men deny the monster nonetheless binds them together. Eventually, English caution triumphs over foreign yearning for a higher consciousness. It is in England significantly, that Frankenstein decides not to duplicate his monster; it is the English Walton (named after the prudent Puritan angler) who finally turns to safer waters and thus avoids the self-destruction that consumes both Frankenstein and his monster. The scientist (whose creature has read Paradise Lost) echoes Raphael's warning to Milton's Adam: “Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition.”¹² Like George Eliot's Adam Bede, Walton presumably will find his tranquility in ordinary English life: “But I journey towards England, and I may there find consolation” (chap. 24, p. 207). The disastrous, self-annihilating Prometheanism of his Swiss counterpart has destroyed innocent lives; concerned with the safety of his crew, Walton turns his ship back from the cracking ice to the sanity and limitations of normal existence. He shall, as he promised, “kill no albatross” (Letter 2, p. 20). The monster and his creator, who dared to emulate God, are left behind. In Milton's allegorical scheme, Walton has accepted the reduced visionary scope that Adam acknowledges after his fall; in Romantic terminology, Walton has rejected the quest for a Coleridgean transcendence, Blakean emanation, or Shelleyean epipsyche. In Freudian parlance, his ego has withstood the allurements of irrational opposites; id (the monster) and superego (Frankenstein's aspirations) have been mutually destructive. Walton alone survives.

Despite its far more fantastic setting, the conclusion of Frankenstein resembles the resolution of Adam Bede, where George Eliot wants to stress Adam's acceptance of ordinary existence by disposing of the excesses represented by the libidinous Hetty and by Dinah's yearning for a suprarational transcendence. But for Latimer such a compromise with reality is impossible. Like Walton an Englishman by birth, he too is a poet manqué who possesses “the poet's sensibility without his voice” (“LV,” chap. 1, p. 284). Yet, unlike Walton, Latimer cannot simply turn from poetry to the study of physical science. Sent to Switzerland to be educated (like Dorothea in Middlemarch), he soon shrinks from his scientific studies and identifies instead with Continental prototypes like Rousseau and Novalis. Although, like Walton, he does befriend a scientist, Charles Meunier (whose later ability to confer life to cadavers clearly resembles Frankenstein's achievement), the bond between the men differs considerably from that which had joined Walton and Frankenstein. Latimer and Meunier have not experienced familial affection; they do not share a desire for higher knowledge. Instead, they are attracted to each other only by loneliness and their rejection by others. They are to be separated again when Latimer's powers—bestowed on him capriciously against his will, not developed consciously as were Walton's or Frankenstein's—first manifest themselves. Latimer is alone. While his predecessor in Mrs. Shelley's romance writes his strange story to a beloved and happily married English sister, Latimer records his adventures solipsistically, merely for the sake of unburdening himself. His readers are unknown to him; he expects little or no sympathy from them while he is alive: “I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead” (chap. 1, pp. 278-279).

Latimer's pessimism is justified. Even before his gift of vision allows him to penetrate the heart of darkness lurking in the actual world, he has been spurned by his English family and friends. Describing himself as a “shrinking, romantic, passionate youth” whose mind is too “full of German lyrics,” he finds himself in deep antipathy with his conservative British father and his broad-chested, fox-hunting elder brother Alfred, a Philistine whose “self-complacent soul” is reminiscent of Tom Tulliver's in The Mill on the Floss and Arthur Donnithorne's in Adam Bede. The arctic cold which Walton resists successfully in the faraway North, Latimer finds in England itself. Sitting in his isolated room, he foresees his death by suffocation and ponders the “icy unanswering gaze” which has met his yearning for love, even his longing “for brotherly recognition,” and which will meet him again in death (chap. 1, p. 279). In retrospect, his childhood seems happier to him than it actually was; for then, at least, he had still not fathomed the selfishness and puerility of other minds. But Europe, too, reveals only horrors. For it is there that he first develops his dire gift of vision. The “barren worldliness” which he later glimpses in the soul of his future wife, first is revealed through a vision of Europe's historical past. At Geneva, after an illness, Latimer experiences what he innocently regards as a “happy change,” the removal of “some dull obstruction” (chap. 1, p. 289). A casual allusion to Prague, a city he has never seen, forces on his mind a curious landscape. The long descriptive passage bears quotation in its entirety:

My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he left my mind resting on the word Prague, with a strange sense that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad sunshine of a long-past century arrested in its course—unrefreshed for ages by the dews of night, or the rushing raincloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold-inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual mid-day, without the repose of night or the new birth of morning.

(chap. 1, p. 287)

At first Latimer exults in his unexpected powers of vision: “was it the poet's nature in me, hitherto only a troubled, yearning sensibility, now manifesting itself suddenly as a spontaneous creation? Surely it was in this way that Homer saw the plain of Troy, that Dante saw the abodes of the departed, that Milton saw the earthward flight of the Tempter” (chap. 1, pp. 288-289). Yet, like fallen Troy, the Inferno, or Satan's Pandemonium, this visionary landscape carries terrifying implications still unfathomed by Latimer. Coleridge's “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice,” though also ominous, is at least beautiful and tempting; this city, where eternal sunshine beats down on frozen men, is repulsive. Sterile, dead, irretrievable, it is a past composed of “the stale repetition of memories,” at odds with George Eliot's usual emphasis on those temporal props by which “the world of memory and thought / Exists and is sustained.”¹³

In “Janet's Repentance,” Janet Dempster overcame her despair over the “sun-dried, barren tract” of her present. In later novels such as Romola or Middlemarch, the dusty and parched past will be identified with antiquarian figures like the blind Bardo or Mr. Casaubon and will be carefully disassociated from figures like Romola, Dorothea, or Caleb Garth who animate the past by channeling its currents into the present and the future. Yet, in “The Lifted Veil” this city of the dead, so similar to the static realm portrayed by Tennyson in “The Lotos-Eaters,” becomes an emblem for the death-in-life which Latimer will find in his own present and future. History, he will realize, instead of moving toward a better future, reveals but a successive casting-off of values. Ideals held in the past become petrified by time. Arnold's Empedocles, another seer capable of piercing “mysteries”¹⁴ hidden from ordinary men, cynically views a similar past:

                                                                      We scrutinize the dates
                                                                      Of long-past human things,
                                                                      The bounds of effaced states,
                                                                      The lines of deceased kings;
We search out dead men's words, and works of dead men's hands.(15)

Like Empedocles, Latimer will succumb to despair over the flux which can deaden all ideals. The stony inhabitants of his vision, as “doomed to be old and undying” as Tennyson's Tithonus, seem to him to be “the real inhabitants of the place.” His later experiences will only confirm his suspicion. The impotence of the mummified inhabitants stems from the shifting, mutable reality of “the busy trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro”—the reality of the time-bound world which George Eliot had first tried to vindicate in “Amos Barton.” For Yeats, the stasis of saints and kings frozen in their “regal gold-inwoven tatters” was to represent a desirable, ideal refuge from the world of flux; for that self of George Eliot who is Latimer, this same stasis only represents the cruelty of that flux. Dinah Morris, who was able to pierce the “soft, liquid veil” which enveloped Hetty, complained of a “strange deadness to the Word” (AB [“Amos Barton.”], chap. 9, p. 146; chap. 8, p. 134). But, whereas Dinah's vision could be adjusted to her creator's hopeful belief in a temporal order moving towards the realization of “Love,” Latimer's vision of the lovelessness that lies beneath mutability is confirmed when, in Prague, actuality corresponds to his dream.

Yet before he encounters the stony saints prefigured by his imagination, Latimer faces still another confrontation. He enters the city's medieval synagogue and is terrified by it:

But, as I stood under the blackened, groined arches of that old synagogue, made dimly visible by the seven thin candles in the sacred lamp, while our Jewish cicerone reached down the Book of the Law, and read to us in its ancient tongue,—I felt a shuddering impression that this strange building, with its shrunken lights, this surviving withered remnant of medieval Judaism, was of a piece with my vision. Those darkened dusty Christian saints, with their loftier arches and their longer candles, needed the consolatory scorn with which they might point to a more shrivelled death-in-life than their own.

(chap. 1, p. 309)

Like Daniel Deronda, who would witness a similar scene at Frankfort, Latimer perceives only the withered remains of a once-vibrant faith; but unlike Deronda's, his conclusions seem correct. Deronda is likewise repelled by the external shabbiness of worshipers who seem condemned to a stale repetition of memories; yet that later hero discovers that by lifting the veil of ordinary life he can find the Ideal. Latimer, on the other hand, by lifting that same veil, is denied all illusions. On leaving the Jewish quarters he faces the scene prefigured in his trance at Geneva; he turns “cold under the mid-day sun” (chap. 1, p. 309).

Gradually, Latimer shrinks away from human contact. His insight into the meanness of others robs life of all positive meaning. His powers of insight allow him to detect the mendacity lurking in all human hearts, while his powers of foresight allow him to anticipate the awful circumstances of his own death. Like Swift, whose epitaph he cites with grim relish, this disciple of Rousseau will become paralyzed, impotent, denied by his own servants. Although George Eliot implies that Latimer's contempt for his fellow beings is excessive, she also makes it clear that it is warranted by his unusual predicament. The savage indignation which lacerates this former Rousseauvian's heart could only have been avoided through those “serious relations of life” she mentions in her letter to Sara Hennell. Latimer could have been saved through contact with one of those “rarities” mentioned by the narrator of Adam Bede—someone of a higher nature, like Mr. Tryan or Dinah Morris or a golden-haired child like the one who rescues Silas Marner from misanthropy and despair. Early in the story, Latimer is soothed by the “simple, waking prose” of his servant; later, however, he avoids and is avoided by those simpler human beings like Mrs. Hackit or Mrs. Poyser or Dolly Winthrop who might have given him the benefit of their native shrewdness and sympathy.

No such creatures cross Latimer's way. When Charles Meunier reappears at the end of the story, Latimer feels a flicker of hope: “his presence,” he decides, “would be to me like a transient resurrection into a happier preexistence” (chap. 2, p. 331), a return to an era of trust and innocence such as Tom and Maggie experience shortly before their death. But the “resurrection” that awaits him is not one of feeling. Instead, by resuscitating the dead Mrs. Archer, Meunier contributes more to Latimer's final disillusion. The lifting of the veil of death by the man of science only verifies the horrors already unveiled by the unscientific seer. Meunier's experiment leads to the ultimate horror. In Middlemarch, the “dead hand” of neither Casaubon nor Featherstone can affect the living; but in “The Lifted Veil” the hand of the dead Mrs. Archer revengefully points at Latimer's wife, and accuses her of murder. Human hatred extends even beyond the grave. Panic-stricken, Latimer cries out: “Good God! Is this what it is to live again … to wake up with our instilled thirst upon us, with our unuttered curses rising to our lips, with our muscles ready to act out their half-committed sins?” (chap. 2, p. 339).¹⁶ Even Meunier looks paralyzed: “life for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem for him,” as it will be for that other physician in Middlemarch who must adjust his scientific view of woman.

Mrs. Archer's accusation reveals to Latimer the evil of the creature he had romanticized as a “Water-Nixie.” The cleared vision of his own past ends what the vision of the dead city had begun. By admitting to himself the full depravity of his wife, he is stripped of his very last illusion and brought to the “Center of Indifference.” Like Adam Bede, he has willfully deluded himself by loving a creaure incapable of love. But the blind Adam is rescued from his infatuation with Hetty; he is allowed to marry the soulful Dinah. The all-seeing Latimer, however, has married Bertha Grant, fully aware of her contempt for him. If Hetty is made to seem too insignificant to be Adam's wife, Bertha is of a piece with this surrealistic tale. She is “a cruel immortal, finding her spiritual feast in the agonies of a dying race” (chap. 2, p. 337). Far more openly than Hetty, she represents her creator's deep fears of the natural world's hostility to ideals, to all conscious striving towards goodness and perfection. Like the stony figures in Latimer's vision of Prague, this cruel immortal typifies imperviousness and destructiveness; she is the “real” inhabitant of this world, and it is her horrible reality which defeats Latimer and drains him of his last hopes. Dressed in green leaves and wearing a green emerald, this Lamia epitomizes, as poor ordinary Hetty never could, a serpentine vision of the world-as-evil. In Adam Bede, Hetty was ejected from her green English garden, and Adam was granted another Eve. In “The Lifted Veil,” Bertha's sting poisons Latimer and forces him into exile; robbed of his one love, he becomes aimless, anticipating yet fearing the approaching death which will relieve him of his too oppressive existence.

Like Frankenstein or “The Ancient Mariner,” George Eliot's “The Lifted Veil” belongs to that mode which Walter Pater in his essay “Coleridge” defined as “that taste for the supernatural, that longing for le frisson, a shudder, to which the ‘romantic’ school in Germany and its derivation in England and France, directly ministered.”¹⁷ George Eliot's adoption of this mode has roots which are both personal and philosophical. Latimer represents a state of mind which clearly corresponds to that nihilism which all of her fiction was designed to resist: “For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the utterly miserable—the unloving and the unloved—there is no religion possible, no worship, but a worship of devils” (chap. 2, pp. 329-330).¹⁸ In Latimer, torn between two outlooks, two cultures, yet belonging to neither, his creator dramatized some of her own self-divisions: Europe and England, Rousseau and Swift, poetry and science, subjectivity and objectivity, trust and doubt, were the polarities which she herself tried to master and combine. Yet, whereas in her other novels she tried to connect and balance opposing categories in order to be true to a “reality” that could equally encompass her belief in objective veracity and her faith in ideals, she deliberately dispensed with all such restrictions in this tale. Latimer is confounded by the temporal reality which offers solace to Adam Bede. Yet his creation was obviously as necessary to George Eliot's well-being as Maggie Tulliver's mutilation of her dolls. Cut off from the past, finding the present as intolerable as the future he foresees, Latimer dies, not as Frankenstein had, for merely daring to lift the veil of nature, but rather for learning afterwards that the reality he has uncovered is unbearable without “mystery” or the “delicious illusion” of love.

It may be pointless to enumerate the personal elements which went into this disturbing vision: to insist that Latimer's “yearning for brotherly recognition” corresponds to George Eliot's deep need for acceptance by her brother Isaac and to speculate why the cursed “gift” of vision which separates the suffering Latimer from England and the English should first manifest itself, after an illness, in Geneva, where Marian Evans first breathed the freedom of an unencumbered intellectual life.¹⁹ To schematize the story by saying that in it the novelist turned against both the English ties she had lost and the Continentally inspired values she had adopted, is to simplify. As we shall see, “The Lifted Veil” is much more than a personal allegory; it is, as Lewes declared, also a poignant story of a “philosophical kind,” perfectly self-consistent and compatible with the rest of George Eliot's fiction. Yet it is significant, nonetheless, that she had to resort to this private fantasy tale in order to accommodate Latimer's horror of existence. By writing out his story, she perhaps hoped to avoid a recurrence of the dream he was condemned to repeat: “The more I lived apart from society … the more frequent and vivid became such visions as that I had had of Prague—of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations” (chap. 2, p. 329). For once in her fiction, the parched landscape of the city that “looked so thirsty” could not be overcome by her insistence on the redemptive power of love.

PUBLIC PARABLE: THE DENIAL OF DOUBT

When George Eliot sent Blackwood her epigraph for “The Lifted Veil” fourteen years after its composition, she was neither trying to impose a new meaning on it nor to disguise whatever personal relevance this dark tale might have held for her back in 1859. The positive “idea” which she expounded in that motto, with its emphasis on the need for the “energy of human fellowship,” was implicit in the story's negations. Although Latimer acts out a nihilism which George Eliot at her most pessimistic quite obviously shared, he also becomes the vehicle for the moralism always present in her fiction.

Like Janet Dempster, Adam Bede, and Maggie Tulliver, this idealist confronts an Everlasting No. But unlike them, he is a Diogenes who cannot rise above denial and despair. Like Arnold's Empedocles, he seeks out his own isolation. Although he even lacks the will by which his Greek counterpart could leap into the crater, he is, in his way, just as suicidal. Deliberately painted as most unattractive, his morbid personality contains the seeds for its own destruction. Thus, even though George Eliot partakes of Latimer's negative vision, she simultaneously brands it as an extreme and denies him the very means by which ordinary mortals—bound by time and space—can be saved from anarchy and destruction. In Arnold's “Empedocles,” the despairing philosopher shuns his double, Pausanias the physician, who, like Walton, can “live free from terror” (II, ii, 26); in George Eliot's story, Latimer seals his doom when he proves himself incapable of trusting his friend Meunier, also a medical man. In each case, the protagonist is no more a spokesman for the author's views than those other nineteenth-century malcontents, Hawthorne's Reverend Mr. Hooper or Melville's Captain Ahab are the mouthpieces of their creators.

Like all of these figures, Latimer is the creation of an anti-Romantic romantic. For those English Romantics at the beginnings of the nineteenth century who regarded time and space as purely subjective forms of the intelligence, the phenomenal world was but a “veil” preventing man's highest fulfillment. Thus, to penetrate the illusory veil that Blake personified as “Vala” was both a glorious and a necessary task. In “The Destiny of Nations: A Vision,” Coleridge extolled human freedom as being not only the full exercise of all “the powers which God for use had given,” but also the power to reach out at the Deity, “Effulgent, as though clouds that veil his blaze” (ll. 14, 17). Yet even the Romantics found it increasingly difficult to approach an Ideal which was blocked out by the actuality of the temporal world. Wordsworth was accused by both Coleridge and Blake of mistaking the veil for the higher reality behind it. When Wordsworth asserted in “The Recluse” that man's individual mind was perfectly attuned to “the external World,” and, conversely, that “the external World is fitted to the mind” (ll. 65, 68), he invoked Blake's apocalyptic wrath: “You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted I know better & Please your Lordship.”²⁰ For Blake, “This World ‹of Imagination› is Infinite & Eternal whereas the world of Generation or Vegetation is Finite & [for a small moment] Temporal.”²¹ But to link this finite and temporal world to the eternal, beneficent order beyond it became more and more problematic. Keats and Shelley, those potential Victorian poets, emphasized the dangers of transgressing into the unreality beyond the “veil.” In “Mont Blanc” Shelley echoes the question mark which ends “The Ode to a Nightingale”: “Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled / The veil of life and death? or do I lie / In dream … ?” (ll. 53-54.) In his 1818 sonnet, he describes the predicament of those who, like Alastor or Frankenstein, have dared to lift “the painted veil which those who live / Call Life.”

Yet even for Shelley, with whom Latimer may have been vaguely identified in George Eliot's mind,²² the Promethean seer was still a figure of awesome proportions, a hero who dared to uncover the sublime. For those post-Romantic novelists who feared there might be nothing beyond the veil of actuality, however, this seeker bore quite different implications. Hawthorne's Mr. Hooper, the veiled Puritan minister, and Melville's Ahab, the frenzied monomaniac, like Latimer, recognize a reality other than that which protects ordinary men. Mr. Hooper wears his black veil to signify his recognition of universal evil; Ahab hunts the White Whale in order to rend the veil of a malevolent deity. In its nihilism, Latimer's vision resembles theirs: “I saw that darkness had hidden no landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall” (chap. 2, p. 323). Like them, he is consumed by the same evil he attributes to others: “The quick thought came, that my selfishness was even stronger than [Alfred's]—it was only a suffering selfishness instead of an enjoying one” (chap. 2, p. 312). Thus, although the “horror” that Latimer comes to recognize is partially correct, he also contributes to its perpetuation and perishes unloved because unloving.

For Latimer lacks the qualities which allow an Ishmael to resist that fascination with horror which draws his antitype into the vortex of destruction. Instead, he becomes a captive of his vision, engulfed by the city of the dead. The landscape he has seen turns out to be an emanation of his own self. In Romola, the heroine's brother Dino conjures up a ghastly vision of a city with gaping graves; in Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen Harleth beholds, “with a change of expression that was terrifying in its terror” (chap. 6, p. 86), the dreadful picture of an uplifted dead face. These omens correspond to a “reality” which is potentially true, representative of the spiritual emptiness of a diseased Florence and a diseased England; in both cases also, this reality must be surmounted if men are to retain a will to live, to believe in values which can save them from the nihilism of sheer despair.

The diseased Latimer lacks that will; he cannot accept life amidst an actuality which he has emptied of meaning. He is “perpetually exasperated” by his brother and despises the “coarse, narrow nature” of all such men: “This man needed no pity, no love; those fine influences would have been as little felt by him as the delicate white mist is felt by the rock it caresses” (chap. 2, pp. 312-313). The egotism of Bertha only makes him more passive and condescending: “she found herself powerless with me, except to produce in me the chill shudder of repulsion—powerless, because I could be acted on by no lever within her reach. … I lived under influences utterly invisible to her” (chap. 2, p. 324). The thought that his wife might respond to a lever within his own reach does not occur to him; he makes no effort to overcome the alienation that has crept into his marriage. The idea that Bertha, too, might “really be pitiable to have such a husband” momentarily crosses his mind, but he dismisses it sarcastically by attributing such “regard and pity” to those lesser beings who cannot fathom her true nature. His kindness to his servants, he feels bitterly, has provoked no such regard. Their “shrinking, half-contemptuous pity” he rejects with a fully contemptuous epigram: “They judge of persons as they judge of coins, and value those who pass current at a high rate” (chap. 2, pp. 324-325). Like Swift, Latimer cannot give his love to that fallible creature called man.

On one occasion only does Latimer feel resurgence of the affection that had once bound him to Charles Meunier. After his brother's accidental death, which, unlike Bertha's evil, he was unable to predict, he senses “the presence of a new element” which for a while unites him to his father, “as we had never blent before” (chap. 2, p. 316). This new element is the same which, under different circumstances, had brought Adam Bede the “completer manhood” denied to Latimer. It is, quite simply, suffering. His father's pain arouses in Latimer “the first deep compassion I had ever felt.” But his sympathy is short-lived. At the same time that he feels attracted to his father's grief, he is also repelled by the old man's “mortified sense that fate had compelled him to the unwelcome course of caring for me as an important being” (chap. 2, p. 317). Once again, Latimer's insight into the motivations of others proves to be a curse.

Latimer therefore can never move beyond the self-pity which paralyzed Adam Bede for only a brief spell. At the high point of his despair Adam had blamed an unjust God for Hetty's irreparable evil; but, by recognizing the sympathy which even a woman-hater like Bartle Massey could muster, Adam turned again into a man of action willing to embrace his creator's creed of “sorrow and duty and endurance.” Latimer, however, chooses to remain in the slough of despond. He asks for sympathy, but can give none. Meunier's return leads him to consider whether, “I might possibly bring myself to tell this man the secrets of my lot. Might there not lie some remedy for me, too, in his science?” (chap. 2, p. 332.) But he shrinks away from an act demanding trust in man, faith in life. Sure that sympathy is an illusion, Latimer rejects the opportunity for a confession such as that which liberates Janet Dempster, in “Janet's Repentance,” or which will alleviate Lydgate's bondage in Middlemarch to a creature so similar to Latimer's own blonde water nixie. Janet and Lydgate disparage their confessors before yielding “to the exquisite sense of leaning entirely on a generous sympathy, without any check of proud reserve” (M [Middlemarch], chap. 76, p. 353). Latimer does not dare to trust a proven friend. His lack of faith in human nature thus contributes to his destruction: “The horror I had of again breaking in on the privacy of another soul, made me, by an irrational instinct, draw the shroud of concealment more closely around my own, as we automatically perform the gesture to be wanting in another” (chap. 2, pp. 332-333).

Thus it is that this “miserable ghost-seer,” like Hawthorne's Mr. Hooper, creates a new veil as illusory as that which he has lifted. His self-imposed veil becomes a shroud which separates him from the living and denies him the possibility of salvation in life. He has had “one chance / One few years' term of gracious life,”²³ but in his fear he refuses to test his vision. George Eliot goes out of her way to make it clear that Meunier might well have given Latimer the sympathy he wishes for but is afraid to request. There is no reason to suppose that his former friend, whose “large and susceptible mind” even Latimer praises, lacks charity. He is never tried. In the early days of their friendship Latimer's powers of insight had not yet manifested themselves; when he sees Meunier again, he has lost them: “My insight into the minds of those around me was becoming dimmer and more fitful, and the ideas that crowded my double consciousness became less and less dependent on personal contact” (chap. 2, p. 329). More personal contact might have led Latimer, like that other misanthrope, Silas Marner, to detect light among darkness. But Latimer has lost the ability to trust. He universalizes the evil he finds in his wife and ceases to search “among my fellowbeings [for] the blessed possibility of mystery, and doubt, and expectation” (chap. 2, p. 322). By fearing to test the possibility of his old friend's sympathy, Latimer has denied himself the opportunity of being saved. He has lifted the “veil that shrouded Bertha's soul,” but the “shroud of concealment” which he now draws around himself is the shroud that marks his extinction as a human being and consigns him to the dreadful city of his vision.²⁴

Bereft of the faith of the orthodox Christian or of the Romantic believer in a higher order beyond the veil of nature, Latimer perishes because of his inability to believe in man. He is, to be sure, more a victim than a sinner. Like Adam Bede, he is beset by forces beyond his control; like Maggie or Tom Tulliver, he is the sacrificial victim of capricious circumstances, created in order to validate the author's humanist ideals. But Maggie's death seems unsatisfactory in a novel where George Eliot again pretended to adopt the standards of probability observed in Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life; in “The Lifted Veil,” where improbability is the rule, we cannot question the capriciousness of the circumstances leading to Latimer's ruin: capable of foreseeing some events, he fails to foresee others; free to see depravity, he is denied an opportunity to see altruism and love. This arbitrariness is deliberate: his negative conclusions must be founded on a partial vision of reality.

Latimer's “horror of [the] certitude” he has experienced falsely leads him to abandon the pursuit of “that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath” of the souls of more ordinary men (chap. 1, p. 306; chap. 2, p. 318). Though appropriating Swift's motto of “Sweetness and Light” for his own purposes in Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold accused the Dean of possessing too much light and too little sweetness; George Eliot's Swiftian narrator, who regards the “vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance” as the “loud activity of an imprisoned insect,” is likewise too much of a spider and too little a honeybee. He rips apart the motives of men with a cruel light: “the kindly deeds which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision, that showed all the intermediate frivolities, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent makeshift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap” (chap. 1, p. 295). Too certain of the meanness of human existence, Latimer denies life its “honey of probability” (chap. 2, p. 318).

Read in that fashion, “The Lifted Veil” becomes a celebration of doubt. Through Latimer's despair George Eliot represented the same state of mind which still another eminent Victorian had tried to overcome, some years before, in his verses:

O life as futile, then, as frail!
                    O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
          What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Like Tennyson, George Eliot had dramatized the plight of one of the two voices within her. Latimer, too, was a projection of that self who had once trusted “God was love indeed / And love Creation's final law,” a self who could no longer find a corroboration of that love in a visible universe foreshortened in “the tract of time.” Tennyson's betrayed idealist gradually works himself out of his despair; George Eliot's succumbs to the certitude of his disbelief.

Yet “The Lifted Veil” is but a demonstration a contrario of the same faith in “honest doubt” which Tennyson reached in In Memoriam: in the face of an inhospitable reality, man can only trust in doubt itself. One of the stanzas which Tennyson placed as an introduction to his poem—

We have but faith: we cannot know
          For knowledge is of things we see;
          And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

—is quite analogous in its implications to the epigraph George Eliot sent to John Blackwood:

Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers save the growing heritage
That makes completer manhood.

Tennyson's doubter finds faith in his uncertainty; Latimer finds that the light of certainty incapacitates him from living a life which must be based on trust, a life which must be spent in that opaque veil or web whose texture George Eliot chose to analyze in her more realistic novels.

Far from being a curious anomaly, “The Lifted Veil” is as central to a century obsessed with epistemology as it is to the preoccupations of its author. George Eliot's epigraph could easily have been appended to either Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss, both of which deal with the relation between knowledge and faith in the temporal world. Her Adam, like Milton's, learns to accept an existence in which man can no longer be “illumined” by God's celestial light: Maggie, who wants “some explanation of this hard, real life,” is partly punished for nibbling like Eve at “this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge” (MF [The Mill on the Floss], Bk. IV, chap. 3, pp. 28, 29). Adam finds fulfillment in the penumbra of that veil “which those who live / Call Life”; Latimer shrinks from its imperfections: “nor was there aught / The world contains, the which he could approve”; Maggie must die in order to inspirit St. Ogg's with the higher beams of “Love.”

As an important “mental phase,” “The Lifted Veil” is essential to our grasp of George Eliot's development as a philosophical novelist. It demonstrates primarily the extent of her own self-division: “Are you unable to imagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing on like two parallel streams that never mingle their waters and blend into a common hue?”²⁵ In recent years we have come to regard George Eliot's fiction as but the even exposition of one “Religion of Humanity,” and have paid insufficient attention to her own doubts in the efficacy of her prescriptions. These doubts found expression through her experimentations with various fictional forms. Without the unreality of a tale like “The Lifted Veil,” George Eliot might never have been able to channel the “two parallel streams” which led her, in novels like Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, and Daniel Deronda, to create double plots which stressed salvation as well as extinction, regeneration as well as denial. Even the partial fulfillment she granted, in the greatest of her novels, to that other Swiss-educated idealist whose “nature, like the river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name,” might not have come about without Latimer's relegation to the parched city crossed by a metallic river.

More specifically, George Eliot's horror tale allows us to appreciate the differences between the novels immediately before and after it. In Adam Bede, Dinah Morris claims that she “could sit all day long with the thought of God overflowing my soul—as the pebbles lie bathed in the Willow Brook” (chap. 8, p. 131). Yet the negativism which lies half-submerged in the idyllic atmosphere of Loamshire, surfaced again in The Mill on the Floss. Critics who have correctly deplored the unsatisfactory conclusion of the latter novel might do well to reappraise “The Lifted Veil.” For it is no coincidence that in The Mill on the Floss, though she returned to the rules of probability observed in Adam Bede, George Eliot should have used an apocalyptic flood to purge St. Ogg's of its hostility and indifference. The thirsty city seen by Latimer was destined to remain a part of her own completer vision.

Notes

1. The sales of Adam Bede were only slightly impaired. A provincial lady vowed that she would prove from internal evidence that the novel was written by a woman of loose morals; and Major Blackwood, always more pessimistic than his brother John, predicted that the “circulation in families” of the novelist's future works might drop considerably. But the harassment expected by George Eliot and Lewes never materialized. See GEL, III, 221n, 221.

2. Durade, at whose house in Geneva Marian Evans had lodged from October 1849 to March 1850, had painted her portrait; the narrator of “The Lifted Veil” also poses for “the portrait-painters, who are thick as weeds in Geneva.” D'Albert Durade later translated five of George Eliot's novels into French and may, as Professor Haight points out, “have suggested some traits for Philip Wakem, the shy, deformed young lover of Maggie Tulliver,” who is also a painter (GEL, I, lxiv).

3. The painting, “La Transfusion du Sang,” depicted the moment when the resuscitated Mrs. Archer accuses her mistress. George Eliot commented caustically: “Perhaps that hits the dominant French taste more than anything else of mine” (GEL, VII, 163).

4. Elliot L. Rubinstein, “A Forgotten Tale By George Eliot,” NCF [Nineteenth Century Fiction], XVII (September 1962), 175-183.

5. Jerome Thale, The Novels of George Eliot (New York, 1959), p. 13. Had the story been written by Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, or James (it bears comparison particularly to Hawthorne's “The Minister's Black Veil”), or even by Pushkin, Gautier, or Mérimée, it would undoubtedly by now have a sizable body of commentary by American and English critics. It seems to be more popular in other countries, where perhaps the image of George Eliot as a mere copyist of ordinary English life has never been as deep-rooted a prejudice. There is, for instance, a Japanese critical edition of the tale, though none exists in England or America.

6. The motto was used as an epigraph for the story in the Cabinet Edition.

7. See GEL, II, 469, note.

8. There is one significant exception in chapter 35 of Adam Bede, where she contrasts Loamshire to those rural scenes in “foreign countries” where man-made crucifixes stand amidst the natural landscape.

9. Cf. George Eliot's later remarks about Adam Bede: “As to my indebtedness to facts of locale, and personal history of a small kind, connected with Staffordshire and Derbyshire—you may imagine of what kind it is, when I tell you that I never remained in either of those counties more than a few days together, and of only two visits have I more than a shadowy, interrupted recollection.” (GEL, III, 176.)

10. J. W. Cross, George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (Edinburgh and London, 1885), II, 103.

11. “Shall I ever write another book as true as ‘Adam Bede’? The weight of the future presses on me, and makes itself felt even more than the deep satisfaction of the past and present.” (Ibid., II, 101.)

12. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1965), chap. 24, p. 206; subsequent references are given in the text. After rebuking Adam for aspiring to know truths reserved for God's omniscience, Raphael enjoins him: “Be strong, live happy, and love, but first of all / Him whom to love is to obey …” (Paradise Lost, VIII, 633-634); the same advice is repeated by Michael after the Fall: “only add / Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith, / Add Virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love, / By name to come call'd Charity” (XII, 581-584).

13. The Prelude, VII, 464-465.

14. See Arnold's manuscript outline, Yale Papers, reprinted by C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (London, 1950), p. 291. Arnold's description of Empedocles fits Latimer: “He sees things as they are—the world as it is—God as he is: in their stern simplicity. The sight is a severe and mind-tasking one: to know the mysteries which are communicated to others by fragments, in parable.”

15. “Empedocles on Etna,” I, ii, 322-326.

16. It is noteworthy that what is a question in the 1877 version of the story was originally a declaration in the 1859 version, which reads, “Good God! This is what it is to live again …” (Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, LXXXIX [July 1859], 47).

    By coincidence, the same issue of Blackwood's also contained Lewes' article on “The Novels of Jane Austen” and an anonymous review of H. L. Mansel's Limits of Religious Thought. In his otherwise very perceptive discussion of Jane Austen, Lewes alludes to her “sympathy with ordinary life,” apparently for the sole purpose of slipping in “a striking passage from one of the works of Mr. George Eliot, a writer who seems to us inferior in the art of telling a story, and generally in what we have called the ‘economy of art’; but equal in truthfulness, dramatic ventriloquism, and humour, and greatly superior in culture, reach of mind, and depth of emotional sensibility” (p. 104). Few readers would have suspected at the time that the writer thus puffed was appearing in the same issue. Gifted with hindsight, modern readers of the magazine can savor a further irony: George Eliot, whose description of Amos Barton's homeliness (“in no respect an ideal or exceptional character”) was instanced by Lewes as evidence for “his” sympathy with ordinary life, had also created the exceptional Latimer, whose visions transcended the very “limits of the human mind” which Mansel discussed in his treatise (p. 48) and which Jane Austen had exploited in her fiction.

17. Walter Pater, “Coleridge,” Appreciations, Library Edition (London, 1910), p. 96.

18. The reviewer in Blackwood's (William Henry Smith, the philosopher) who attacked Mansel for constricting the limits of human understanding to such an extent “as to render a system of revealed religion impossible,” may well have read the tale which ended on the same page where his article began. If so, Smith would have seen that by “lifting” the epistemological restrictions which Smith had deplored in Mansel's philosophical outlook the author of the tale had only found religion to be an even greater impossibility.

19. Cf. George Eliot's second letter to D'Albert Durade, December 6, 1859: “When I was at Geneva, I had not yet lost the attitude of antagonism which belongs to the renunciation of any belief—also, I was very unhappy and in a state of discord and rebellion towards my own lot. Ten years of experience have wrought great changes in that inward self.” (GEL, III, 231.)

20. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, comm. Harold Bloom (Garden City, 1965), p. 656.

21. Ibid., p. 545.

22. Latimer approvingly quotes the Latin inscription on Swift's epitaph; on visiting Shelley's tomb in April 1860, George Eliot claimed: “it was like a personal consolation to me to see that simple outward sign that he is at rest, where no hatred can ever reach him again. Poor Keats' tombstone, with that despairing bitter inscription, is almost as painful to think of as Swift's” (GEL, III, 288). Like Ladislaw in Middlemarch, who is openly identified with Shelley, Latimer is an outcast who can find no fulfillment in England.

23. James Thomson, “The City of Dreadful Night,” ll. 807-808.

24. His predicament is very much like that of the speaker in Thomson's poem: “This chance was never offered me before; / For me the infinite Past is blank and dumb. / This chance recurreth, never, nevermore; / Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.” (ll. 823-826.)

25. The passage bears contrasting to Coleridge's famous statement in his notebooks: “I have read of two rivers passing their streams wholly distinct—if I mistake not, the Rhone and the Adar, through the Lake of Geneva. In a far finer distinction, yet in a subtler union, such, for the contemplative mind, are the streams of knowing and being. The lake is formed by two streams in man and nature as it exists in and for man; and up this lake the philosopher sails on the junction-line of constituent streams, still pushing upward and sounding as he goes, toward the common fountain-head of both, the mysterious source whose being is knowledge, whose knowledge is being—the adorable I AM IN THAT I AM.” (Animae Poetae, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge [London, 1895], pp. 261-262.)

Abbreviations

Abbreviation First Published

FAB “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” 1857

GLS “Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story” 1857

JR “Janet's Repentance” 1857

SCL Scenes of Clerical Life (book form) 1858

AB Adam Bede 1859

LV “The Lifted Veil” 1859

MF The Mill on the Floss 1860

SM Silas Marner 1861

R Romola 1862-1863

BJ “Brother Jacob” 1864

FH Felix Holt, The Radical 1866

SG The Spanish Gypsy 1868

M Middlemarch 1871-1872

DD Daniel Deronda 1876

IT Impressions of Theophrastus Such 1879

Citations in this book refer to the Cabinet Edition (Edinburgh, n. d.) of George Eliot's novels.