gentlemen'.'
-- Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom 1847–1863. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958.
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George Eliot and the Novel of Ideas
SO powerful is George Eliot's writing and presence in our retrospect of the nineteenth- century British novel that she seems to guarantee a whole tradition: that of ideas realized in fiction. Yet if we imagine her absence, a remarkable remapping occurs. Who are the novelists of ideas then? Bulwer Lytton, George Meredith, Samuel Butler, perhaps Grant Allen: inventive writers all, but writers also whose intelligence often seems ill matched to the fictions they shape. In most of their works there is a sense of strain, of reach, of flouting. The human figures of such fictions appear intermittent; the insights work free of the plots. At their most successful, ideas brace the work and surpass in interest the characters, who function to represent and interlock them. All these other writers of novels of ideas dwell within a particular understanding of how the mind best works. They are bravura writers, driving often obsessionally across a gap experienced between ordinary life and the aspirant intellect. This is not to belittle them: with such writers the reader experiences vertiginous pleasures and revelations. These often have to do with the varying tempo at which insight is allowed. The exhilarating skid and pounce as Meredith deflects the expected climaxes in Diana of the Crossways (1885) or the ingenuity of Butler's inversions of taken-for-granted morality in Erewhon (1872) are matched by Grant Allen's quasi-anthropological fantasy about British self-aggrandizement, seen backward from a twenty-sixth-century vantage point, in The British Barbarians (1895).
In George Eliot's writing, however, there is little fantasy and little transcendence except as they are generated within everyday experience -429- by individuals' needs that never can be quite gratified. George Eliot's novels have a passion for the commonplace-by which, her fiction leads us to understand, is meant not only the phatic repetitions but also the hidden ferment of others' daily life to which no one can have access, save through the form of fiction. That paradox asserts the value of, and simultaneously brings into question, mimesis. Eliot, more perhaps than any other nineteenth-century novelist, muses on the ironies of persuasion. The reader, silently reading, seems to share incommunicable secrets and to work upon those secrets with an analytical insight granted for the occasion. That process of analysis is fueled by reference to an extraordinary range of thought systems and philosophical positions. Yet it is tempered by a feeling for the manifest, for the awkward, even paltry daily circumstance whose determining strength is felt only when it is resisted.
Eliot's fiction does not pretend that people are all preoccupied with sequences of abstraction, but from the start of her career with Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), her writing marks the turns of phrase, the silences, the mind's images, through which in daily experience insights and resistances are performed. These descriptions she amplifies by a range of discursive effects that call on the reader's self-awareness and will not allow us to unloose ourselves from the ineptness of ordinary event, ordinary feeling. It is this insistence at once on the marred and the eager that gives her writing its charge. Abstract systems and intimate feelings are not kept in separate boxes in her writing: the effect of reading Middlemarch is (as she said of the banker Bulstrode's dread of disclosure) 'distinct and inmost as the shiver and the ache of oncoming fever when we are discussing abstract pain.'
All George Eliot's novels except Daniel Deronda are set back in time, allowing an overview to writer and first readers. Her first novel-or collection of novellas- Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) looks back a couple of generations into a time that is assumed to be less sophisticated than the reader's own. Many of the novels are very precisely placed at moments of manifest social change. Adam Bede (1859) opens in 1799 and closes with the decision of the Methodists not to allow women to preach any more; The Mill on the Floss (1860) looks back to the period of Eliot's own girlhood-and, she later told Emily Davies, 'In The Mill on the Floss, everything is softened, as compared with real life. Her own experience she said was worse'; Silas Marner (1861) opens 'in the days when the spinning wheel hummed busily in the farmhouses'; Felix Holt -430- (1866) and Middlemarch (1872) both center upon the period leading up to the first Reform Bill in 1832, which much extended the franchise. Romola's (1863) first sentence dates the book precisely: 'More than three centuries and a half ago, in the mid spring-time of 1492… ' Only Daniel Deronda (1876) is ranged more or less alongside writer and first reader, embroiled directly in their own current concerns and thus giving no easy interpretative advantage.
Most of the novels are, moreover, set in social circumstances purporting to be just below those of the assumed reader-or at least of their aspirant reading habits and fictional identifications:
Considering these things, we can hardly think Dinah and Seth beneath our sympathy, accustomed as we may be to weep over the loftier sorrows of heroines in satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by yet more fiery passions.
Poor Seth! he was never on horseback in his life except once, when he was a little lad, and Mr. Jonathan Burge took him up behind, telling him to 'hold on tight.' (Adam Bede)
As readers we are subjected here to an exposure that forces us to dissociate from the factitious habits of the fictive reader and instead identify with Seth, whose memories we enter in that loop of reminiscence from his childhood and the direct utterance, 'Hold on tight.' But the effort of identification is felt; the reader is implicitly complimented on her or his success in crossing the social divide. The effect here is ostentatious, not subtle. In her later career Eliot shifts more sinuously between the reader's imputed activities and free indirect style, in which narration and inner experience are enacted at once and without clear bounds. So her works both distance and grip close the participant. The effect is not vacillation but an assessing intimacy, seeking always to avoid falsity of scale-though, in the early novels particularly, not always evading condescension.
George Eliot shared the developmental views of her intellectual contemporaries which likened cultural and racial process to the individual's growth to adulthood. She believed herself to have been the first to use the word meliorism (though the dictionary records earlier examples). But she also more and more brought the easy identification between «development» and «progress» into contention. In Middlemarch one of the overarching themes proves to be how little the first reader in 1870s society can claim superiority or point to secure advances over the 1830s -431- described-despite all the ironic efforts of the narration. This double impulse within George Eliot's thinking-to assimilate ideas and to assay them-constantly extends the scope of her material and troubles her interpretative values.
George Eliot was a prodigious reader-and thinker with her reading, a rather different matter-but it is exactly the range and eclecticism of her intellectual life that makes it hard to descry any binding system or single progenitor beyond the fiction. Indeed, that is what distinguishes her as a novelist of ideas. The great span and simultaneity of
