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Intelligence as Deception: The Mill on the Floss

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

George Levine
George Levine*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Extract

With only small exceptions, The Mill on the Floss can be seen as adequately representative of even the most mature of George Eliot's art—morally energetic yet unsentimentally perceptive about the meaning of experience. Like all of her works, it is thoroughly coherent and gains its coherence from a unified vision. But the vision, here as elsewhere, is, I would argue, incomplete. There were elements in experience, that is, which she was never fully able to assimilate and which, as was true of most of the major Victorian writers, she was genuinely unable to see. She pushed the boundaries of Victorian experience as far as any of her contemporaries and moved to the brink from which one can observe the modern sensibility, but inevitably she pulled back.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1965 , pp. 402 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 See The Great Tradition (New York: Anchor Books, 1954), p. 58. “In George Eliot's presentment of Maggie there is an element of self-idealisation.” This is obviously, but only partially, true. Indeed, the whole thematic development of the book depends on a careful rendering of Maggie's limitations. See in this connection Jerome Thale's note on Maggie in The Novels of George Eliot (New York, 1959), and William Steinhoff, “Intent and Fulfillment in the Ending of The Mill on the Floss,” in The Image and the Work (Berkeley, Calif., 1955), pp. 235–251. Mr. Steinhoff's analysis runs parallel to my own but does not overlap. He too, however, emphasizes George Eliot's insistence on Maggie's limitations.

2 George Eliot, like the thinkers she consciously followed, recognized that feeling not thought was the major source of action and that cultivation of the intellect without cultivation of the sensibilities was morally dangerous. Her most famous statement of the notion comes in a fairly early letter: “The first impulse of a young and ingenuous mind is to withhold the slightest sanction from all that contains even a mixture of supposed error. … But a year or two of reflection and experience of our own miserable weakness which will ill afford to part even with the crutches of superstition must, I think, effect a change … and we turn to truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union. We find that the intellectual errors we once fancied were a mere incrustation have grown into the living body and that we cannot in the majority of cases wrench them away without destroying vitality” (The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 7 vols., New Haven, 1954–56, i, 162).

3 One of the central concerns of this essay, to trace the relation of the thematic content of The Mill on the Floss to Feuerbach and Comte, was largely inspired by a brief essay by U. C. Knoepflmacher, “George Eliot, Feuerbach, and the Question of Criticism,” Victorian Studies, vii (1964), 306–309. I am also greatly indebted to Bernard Paris, “George Eliot's Religion of Humanity,” ELH, xxix (1962), 418–443.

4 For a useful and compact survey of the relation of the ethical ideas of Comte and Feuerbach to those of George Eliot, I am indebted to the fourth chapter of Michael Wolff's unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Marian Evans to George Eliot: The Moral and Intellectual Foundation of her Career,” microfilm (Princeton, 1958). It should be noted here that determinism has moral implications of its own and is an element of Positivism. John Stuart Mill goes so far as to say that “Whoever regards all events as part of a constant order, each one being the invariable consequent of some antecedent condition, or combination of conditions, accepts fully the Positive mode of thought” (Auguste Comte and Positivism, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961, p. 15).

5 “Determinism and Responsibility in the Works of George Eliot,” PMLA, lxxvii (1962), 268–279.

6 Adam Bede, ch. xvii. All quotations from George Eliot's works, unless otherwise noted, are from the Cabinet Edition, 24 vols. (London and Edinburgh, n.d.).

7 The George Eliot Letters, iii, 133.

8 J. W. Cross, George Eliot's Life, Bk. iii, ch. xv.

9 The Mill on the Floss, Bk. iv, ch. i. All quotations from this novel will be from Gordon S. Haight's careful edition (Boston: Riverside Editions, 1961). See Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, transi. George Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957): “Man has the consciousness not only of a spring of activity, but also of a spring of suffering in himself. I feel; and I feel feeling (not merely will and thought, which are only too often in opposition to me and my feelings), as belonging to my essential being, and, though the source of all sufferings and sorrows, as a glorious divine power and perfection” (p. 63). It is, by the way, precisely the unity of thought and feeling, with feeling predominating, which Comte aspired towards. See Comte's A General View of Positivism, transi. J. H. Bridges (Stanford: Academic Reprints, n.d.), and Wolff, pp. 204–211.

10 Feuerbach, p. 277.

11 Miriam Allott, “George Eliot in the 1860's,” Victorian Studies, v (1961), 105.

12 See her now famous statement: “My love of the childhood scenes made me linger over them; so that I could not develop as fully as I wished the concluding book in which the tragedy occurs, and which I had looked forward to with attentive premeditation from the beginning” (The George Eliot Letters, iii, 374).

13 The George Eliot Letters, iii, 320.

14 See Wolff, pp. 214–215.

15 See Paris, p. 435.

16 Comte, p. 29.

17 Paris, p. 424.

18 This point is taken up briefly by Basil Willey in Nineteenth Century Studies (New York, 1949), p. 228, and Gordon Haight, George Eliot and, John Chapman (New Haven, 1940), p. 80.

19 Comte, p. 153.

20 Feuerbach, p. 63.

21 Wolff, p. 228. See Feuerbach, p. 321; “To the man of noble feeling, the noble action is natural: he does not place it in the scales of choice; he must do it. Only he who acts so is a man to be confided in.” Clearly, Maggie never approaches this seemingly instinctive nobility until her last heroic act.

22 Mill, p. 11.

23 See her famous letter to Frederic Harrison rejecting his proposal that she write a novel presenting the ideal Positivist community (The George Eliot Letters, iv, 300).

24 Cross, iii, xv.

25 “Preface” to the 1853 edition of his poems. Reprinted in Mixed Essays, Irish Essays, and Others (New York, 1883), p. 488.

26 An entry in her Journal for 12 Jan. 1859 records that “we went into town today and looked in the Annual Register for cases of inundation” (The George Eliot Letters, iii, 33). The internal evidence that the flood was part of her conception from the first is sufficiently clear: the insistence on the Floss, the legend of St. Ogg, whose behavior foreshadows Maggie's, the constant allusions to past floods and future ones.

27 Knoepflmacher, pp. 307–309. I am grateful to Gordon Haight for calling to my attention an excellent essay by George R. Creeger, “An Interpretation of ‘Adam Bede’,” ELH, xxiii (1956), 218–238, in which a similar point is made. See esp. p. 234. Creeger, who rightly refuses to regard the novel as “fictionalized philosophy,” supplies in his footnotes a good many other parallels between Feuerbach's thought and the meaning of Adam Bede.

28 Feuerbach, p. 276.

29 Feuerbach, p. 275.

30 See Barbara Hardy's discussion of the uses of coincidence in the novels in The Novels of George Eliot (London, 1959), esp. chs. vi and vii.

31 Allott, p. 106.