limits of human senses thus:
The wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all, due only to the dullness of our hearing; and could our ears catch the murmur of those tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city.
The 'myriads of living cells' are here conceived as individuals straining within the organic form of the tree, the intensity of individuated life producing a silent hubbub that would buffet the ears. Huxley moves from the «dullness» of our hearing to a recognition that we would be equally dulled, 'stunned,' by access to the sounds beyond our senses, 'the roar which lies on the other side of silence.'
The passage also includes a degree of allusion to Eliot's own early story 'The Lifted Veil' (1859), in which insight produced macabre disillusionment. (And, of course, the Huxley passage may harbor a reminiscence of that story.) Eliot broke off from the writing of her most confessional novel, The Mill on the Floss, to write 'The Lifted Veil.' Latimer has the power of seeing into others' minds, but this proves a malign gift:
The rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and 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 suppressed egoism, all the struggling chaos of puerilities, meanness, vague capricious memories, and indolent make-shift thoughts, from which human words and deeds emerge like leaflets covering a fermenting heap.
Here insight is destructive of human community and analysis proves to be a form of repudiation. Latimer's life is fatally encumbered and vitiated by his preternatural identifications. The writer's own dread of discovering- when all the magic of narrative has been expended-only the humdrum, or worse, behind outer appearances seems to haunt the tale.
How scornful, then, is the final phrase of the Middlemarch passage? The emphasis on how the quickest of us walk 'well wadded with stupidity' draws not only on Huxley ('the dullness of our hearing') but also on the story of the Princess Parizade in 'The Two Sisters' in The Arabian Nights. Parizade undertakes a perilous journey after her two brothers fail because they were drawn aside by threatening voices: -440- 'innumerable voices, bursting out as it seemed from under the earth. Of these, some ridiculed, some abused, and others threatened him… in voices calculated to inspire shame, anger, and dismay.' Parizade stops her ears with cotton so that 'all she perceived was one confused noise.' She pursues her journey courageously and, undeflected, gains the talking bird, the golden water, and the singing tree, the signs of joy, sex, and learning. This tale became for the young George Eliot an emblem of her own hoped-for career, and a talisman between herself and her great friend Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. (The two women allude to the tale in their letters to each other.)
The longing to sympathize is matched by the need to ironize: and so it is in her own writing. The passage sets in motion both these perceptions, though its own inclination is toward empathy. The reading, and self-reading, at work in George Eliot's fiction allows for a multifariousness that is not chaotic, an openness that is not simplistic. And the ability to perceive general systems working within ordinary instances frees her from the grind of denotative realism. Yet it exacts a price: how to sustain complexity without collapsing into contradiction or inertia. Deirdre David suggests that 'the conflicts in Eliot's texts are sometimes so disjunctive that they lead to a confrontation of equally autonomous ideologies whose only dissolution seems to be an implicit cancellation of ideology itself.'
Ideas are generated out of everyday life-sometimes forced out of it-and shape it too. Indeed, the worst that can befall a thinking person in her fiction is to fail to make the crossover between the impassioned work of thinking and the impassioned work of living. One of George Eliot's most telling insights is the debilitating difficulty experienced by many of her most powerful characters in moving between professional and other aspects of life. So in Middlemarch Lydgate, in particular, fails to apply his intelligence to other aspects of life outside the scientific: that failure combines with his false expectations of what women should be expected to provide emotionally for men. Driven by debt to consider returning the wedding present he gave to his wife Rosamond, Lydgate's imagina-441- tion at last begins to work on his marriage: 'Having been roused to discern consequences which he had never been in the habit of tracing, he was preparing to act on this discernment with some of the rigour (by no means all) that he would have applied in pursuing experiment.' In Romola, and again most pervasively in Middlemarch, that problem besets characters-most of them, revealingly, male. Though, for different reasons, a woman like Rosamond has scarcely any crossover capacity at all, so locked is she face to face with that projected self-image enjoined on her by society: the perfect lady. Intriguingly, in My Literary Life, Lynn Linton spoke of George Eliot herself, with a denied but present sexual double entendre, as 'a made woman,' a product of a glacial self-fashioning that withdrew the possibility of spontaneity.
A short letter to her longtime friend Sara Hennell in January 1862 shows the typical melding of diverse reading and experience that George Eliot herself enjoyed: she writes of Max Muller's 'great and delightful book' Lectures on the Science, of Language, of Trollope's Orley Farm, of Herbert Spencer's First Principles and of his hypochondria ('The very watching against disease is becoming a disease in itself'). And she ends the letter with a dashingly revealing remark that opens up more than it quite knows it contains: 'I am going to be taken to a pantomime in the day-time, like a good child, for a Christmas treat, not having had my fair share of pantomime in the world.'
The glow of childishness, the hedonism of one 'who has not had her fair share of pantomime in the world,' casts light on the exactingness of the novels and their ripple of humor. She finds her ease in unexpected places. It may seem that Dickens is more at home in pantomime and George Eliot in opera, yet within her novels we encounter a constantly renewing eagerness that expresses itself in a profusion of metaphors-those lateral encounters that slip past the guard of logic and illuminate alternative perceptions and desires.
Before ever she began to write fiction herself, Eliot brooded on the relations between feeling and language, and on the degree to which feeling is shaped, balked, enacted within the conditions of a particular society's linguistic terms. As she does so often, she uses an anatomical image to express the predicament and to emphasize the inescapability of a society's terms: 'The sensory and motor nerves that run in the same sheath, are scarcely bound together by a more necessary and delicate union than that which binds men's affection, imagination, wit, and humour, with the subtle ramifications of historical language.' -442-
George Eliot started her career as a translator and literary journalist. In this period of her life she worked anonymously, following the grain of another's thought and silently noting the gaps and crevices within argument and feeling. Each of the books she translated challenged orthodoxies of religious belief. Doing without God is hard for the novelist who seeks a providential form. When, much later, in Middlemarch, Eliot eschews the largesse of Fielding, with his theistic overview of all the fortunes in his world, she yet demurringly includes 'the range of relevancies called the universe' even as she professes herself unable to engage with them because she must focus her experimental instruments on a particular place and company. One reason that she can so confidently effect this double task of attention and inattention is because, as translator in her youth of Feuerbach and Spinoza, she had lived through and controlled a particular kind of humanistic argumentation. In the activity of translating German historical criticism in Strauss's Life of Jesus and humanistic philosophy in Feuerbach, and in her work on Spinoza, she learned the relations between empathy and precision. The activity of close translation necessitated teasing out the nuances of meaning and transposing them to another readership, a different culture.
If translation enforces immersion, it may also provoke resistance-and indeed Eliot wearied of Strauss's limitations. Similarly, the activity of reviewing across a wide range of current writing not only was immensely educative in giving her access to diverse views but provoked an emulous wish to do as well, to do differently, to utter all that was not contained in the works that she must study. Because this early phase of her career was performed anonymously it allowed for bravura exposition of philosophical ideas without her being undermined by the assumption on the part of her readers that this was an untrained woman writing. It allowed also a cavalier disregard of the niceties of sisterhood, so that she dispraised women's 'silly novels' because, she held, such works undermined the seriousness of professional writing by women and battened on the condescension of readers willing to believe women empty-headed. And she had fun dispraising them.
She characterizes the heroine of a «mind-and-millinery» novel as 'usually an heiress':
