recollection of early experience a moral influence from nature, an organic process.
The complex inwardness of Romantic poetry here reaches the novel, a form largely
shaped by theatrical outwardness, especially in novels dealing with social questions.
Mary Ann Evans too held that nature nourishes moral emotions through the imag-
ination, but doubted that ‘One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more
of man, / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can’ (Wordsworth, ‘The
Tables Turned’). She read all the sages, and became one. She thirsted for understand-
ing, and all her life educated herself in ancient and modern literature, religious
history, philosophy and science. At 21 she lost the passionate literal belief of the
Evangelicalism which had seized her in childhood. She sought then to reinterpret
human life and history by the light of a humane imagination and the human
sciences, retaining Christian values of love, sympathy and duty.
Determination and mental stamina enabled her to translate Strauss’s Life of Jesus
(1846) and Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854), radical new works reducing
Christianity to history and psychology. She helped to edit The Westminster Review,a
learned journal founded by J. S. Mill. She became emotionally attached to its
publisher, John Chapman, and then to Herbert Spencer, the apostle of scientism,
before forming a lifelong union with the versatile G. H. Lewes, biographer of Goethe
and advocate of the positivistphilosophy of Comte, and of phrenology. Lewes, a
married man with several children, could not divorce his wife, having acknowledged
a son of hers conceived in adultery with a friend of his. Miss Evans found the illegal-
ity of her union painful, and called herself Mrs Lewes. George Eliot was loved by
readers, including the Queen, but Mary Ann, or Marian, Evans was not asked to
dinner. Gradually the great world came to call on her and Lewes on Sunday after-
noons in their London home. Her beloved brother Isaac, however, never spoke to
her;he wrote to her only when she married, after Lewes’s death in 1878. She died
soon after.
The intellectual who had grown up on Walter Scott began to write stories herself,
encouraged by Lewes. In a set of the Waverley novels which he gav e her, Lewes
described Scott as ‘her longest-venerated and best-loved Romancist’. When Scenes of
Clerical Life appeared in 1857, ‘George Eliot’ was thought to be a clergyman, or a
clergy wife.There followed Adam Bede (1859),The Mill on the Floss (1860),Silas
Marner (1861),Romola (1862–3),Fe lix Holt, The Radical (1866),Middlemarch
(1871–2),Daniel Deronda (1874–6), and the short story, ‘The Lifted Veil’. All but
Deronda and Romola are rooted in provincial England;Romola is set in 15th-century
Florence. At her death, Eliot was admired, even revered. After a reaction against the
intellectuality of the later novels, she has been accounted one of the two or three
great 19th-century novelists, and Middlemarch the classic Victorian realist novel.
The passage above from The Mill on the Floss suggests George Eliot’s commitment
to the experience of living, and the earnestness of her effort to understand its
processes and convey its value. The final words ‘... the sunshine and the grass of the
far-off years which still live in us and transform our perception into love’ echo
Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. This formulation, which is also close to the mood of
Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the terms of Arnold’s Dover Beach, trusts to a scien-
tific metaphor: the sunlight stored in memory has transforming moral power. As
value and meaning become problematic, the need to define them becomes urgent,
and the vocabulary more complex, elaborate and provisional.
Dickens and Thackeray begin with Sketches, George Eliot with Scenes.
Thereafter she named five of her seven novels after their protagonists, adopting the
THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVEL 301positivism The creed of
Auguste Comte (1789–1857),
who taught that sociology and
other human sciences would
lead to definitive knowledge
which would explain human
behaviour, as the physical
sciences explained matter.
Captains of industry would
rule, the religion of humanity
would be established, women
would encourage the growth
of altruism.