dwelling on this since the episode broaches issues to which I shall return later in this essay.
The eight-year-old Maggie, on her self-liberating (and colonizing) trip, is artfully led to compare herself to Columbus. She offers to exchange knowledge for food with the young gypsy woman whose camp she has entered. In her fantasy she expects to become the gypsy queen and educate them ('Everything would be quite charming when she had taught the gypsies to use a wash-basin, and to feel an interest in books'). But she finds herself disoriented while she prates of geography, ignorant of 'the world we live in,' among actual people of another tribe, men, women, and children. She is at the mercy of a strong family who speak a tongue she cannot understand and live their lives in ways that frighten her. Her colonizing notions have all to be given up and she is only thankful to be taken home by them. The satire on racial notions of superiority is marked yet never underscored. The subject of 'the wandering tribes,' and their supposed inferiority to «settled» communities, was a subject aired across a range of Victorian writings, after Blumenbach's earlier racial taxonomies, through to the ethnologist James Prichard and to Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, which was appearing serially during the 1850s. It is intriguing to see Eliot's witty work with it here. The topic of the racial or cultural «other» became crucial to her late work.
Maggie has arrived among the gypsies as a result of a passionate quarrel with her brother, in which her «pink-and-white» cousin Lucy has become the sacrificial victim. Having been excluded spitefully by her brother from sight of the water-snake, Maggie pushes Lucy into 'cow-trodden mud.' 'There were passions at war in Maggie at that moment to have made a tragedy, if tragedies were made by passion only.' But, Eliot continues, using the Greek in her text (which I here translate into English), 'a certain largeness' is lacking to the possible action: 'The utmost Maggie could do, with a fierce thrust of her small brown arm, was to push poor little pink-and-white Lucy into the cowtrodden mud.' The furious struggles for power in which so much of childhood is wasted, or spent, yield to Eliot both comedy and a sense that what actually takes place as event in human life depends largely on the register of action available. Maggie, with her 'small Medusa face,' -436- experiences murder as desire. George Eliot is closer here to postFreudian and particularly Kleinian emphasis on the paranoid Grand Guignol of babyhood and childhood than to the more usual view among her contemporaries that childhood was a period of some calm.
Throughout the book Eliot emphasizes that tragedy does not require rulers to enact it. In contrast to Thackeray's manner in Vanity Fair of giving a tug on the strings of his novel and drawing our attention to his presence as puppeteer, George Eliot elevates her characters against the odds by invoking comparisons with heroic fates. The first book of the novel ends: 'Mr. Tulliver had a destiny as well as Oedipus, and in this case might plead, like Oedipus, that his deed was inflicted on him rather than committed by him.' The effect here is yet not quite unlike that of Thackeray: by such invocations the reader's sense of scale is unsettled and the characters are pushed away in a manner that we might now like to think postmodern were it not so manifestly premodern.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the prodigious scope of her learning, a sense of the partial and even the captious haunts George Eliot throughout her creative life. It is there already long before she became a novelist in a letter of 1840 where she speaks of her own knowledge as
an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern, scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth and Milton, newspaper topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology and chemistry, reviews and metaphysics, all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast thickening every day accession of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations.
It would prove later that the everyday would be the mulch out of which grew fiction and learning. But the feeling for (and anxiety toward) «assemblage» persists-as does the pressure of the circumstantial.
George Eliot entered the world of learning at a different angle from her educated male contemporaries: for them it represented first of all a dutiful adherence to the expectations of their social group. For her it was an 'active love,' 'an experience springing out of the deepest need.' So there need be no gap between the passional and the intellectual in her writing. Instead there is a constant multiplying of subject positions. Shifting registers of speech within the sentence, though not so rebarbative as in Hardy, are characteristic of George Eliot's mode of exploration in her novels. Her description of how knowledge grows in 'Notes on Form in Art' (1868), written while she was working on Middle-437- march, articulates her own experience and at the same time gives an acute description of the taxonomy of that novel, where the characters are bunched together under titles such as 'Three Love Problems' and 'Waiting for Death,' and then are more and more discriminatingly explored in their differences and in the subtle divergence of their lots one from the other.
And as knowledge continues to grow but its alternating processes of distinction and combination, seeing smaller and smaller unlikenesses and grouping or associating these under a common likeness, it arrives at the conception of wholes composed of parts more and more multiplied and highly differenced, yet more and more absolutely bound together by various conditions of common likeness or mutual dependence.
The processes of Middlemarch, in its nine-hundred-odd pages, tease out and disturb this compacted argument into the sufferings, denials, and interpenetrating social, political, and emotional lives of some-relatively few-inhabitants of the town of Middlemarch. The unwritten complexity of further lives surrounds and at times bears down on the «sample» she has chosen. And the figures in the work, living out their lives in the provinces, are connected not only with their peers and neighbors but with national and epistemological changes they know nothing about, or understand ill, or live in the midst of without perceiving their significance. The coming of the railway and the Reform Bill, evolutionary theory and thermodynamics, germ theory, mythography, the education of women and women's position, Greek tragedy, and life sciences: ordinary activities instantiate, but cannot sufficiently stand in for, all these systems of understanding and of social change. Ideas in the later work of George Eliot surpass, but can only find their actuality in, individual lives. Perhaps in the light of this it becomes less surprising that a central grand theme of her work is failure-a theme in which characters and composition are alike ensnared and fulfilled.
Scholars and critics have explored her response to influential contemporaries: in particular, Auguste Comte, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and her own life companion, the biographer, dramatist, psychologist, and experimental scientist G. H. Lewes. Each of those critical explorations has demonstrated how thoroughly George Eliot engaged with the implications of others' ideas and engrossed them in her own fiction. But she does not always take the most evident patterns -438- from others' arguments: so, Daniel Deronda reassesses the idea of evolutionary diversification and origins in the light of Talmudic hermeutics, and Middlemarch can be read as a riposte to Frederic Harrison's urging her to write a positivistic novel.
Equally, George Eliot's reading among the Greek tragic dramatists produces a particular tragic inflection within her own fiction: as she cites Sophocles or Euripides in relation to run-of-the-mill lives she insists on the reach of emotion, the meagerness of outlet and expression, possible to her figures. That is the particular style of modern tragedy as she perceives it: that the humdrum curtails what in ritualized literature had scope to declare itself completely.
But her work suggests that the contraction has to do with a communal refusal to participate in others' experiences, not with any person's inability to feel her or his own extremity. The business of her art is to release the observer (the reader) from the stupidity of seeing only the sameness in things. The circumstantial becomes crucial to interpretation. Yet the works indicate also how necessary to survival is the capacity to blot out, at least intermittently, others' needs. That capacity may lead to villainy, as for Tito in Romola, but the absence of any power of blocking may destroy, as it does Latimer in 'The Lifted Veil' and threatens to do Deronda in Daniel Deronda. In a famous passage in Middlemarch the narrative aligns writer, reader, and society on a common charge: 'We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.' The passage itself is engagingly direct and yet freighted with an extraordinary range of reading:
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with supidity.
Eliot's diverse reading lies latent for the reader to raise to the surface at will: Wordsworth, ('the grass I seemed to hear it growing'), T. H. Huxley, The Arabian Nights, all are allusively present-and pulling in different directions, so that the passage is forthright and yet flexible.
It may be revealing to pay attention to at least two of those allusions since the movement of the paragraph demonstrates the the degree to which ideas are implicated, rather than displayed, in Eliot's composi-439- tion. In 'The Physical Basis of Life,' an essay published in the Westminster Review in February 1869, Huxley illustrated the
