George Eliot's intellectual life

a picture of human life such as a great artist can give

This is the second part of a short series of pieces about Middlemarch, which recently went viral on Substack. As well as these essays, I have a podcast available with Clare Carlisle, who wrote a really wonderful biography of Eliot recently. And if there is enough interest, I will run a zoom session for paid subscribers too.

The first piece traced the major themes of Middlemarch. In this instalment, I will look at the origins of these ideas—their roots in German theology and in Spinoza, whom Eliot translated. Finally, I will write a piece about the historical context.

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Let us endeavour always to look at the virtues and good qualities that we find in others, and to keep our own great sins before our eyes, so that we may see none of their failings. This is one way of working; and although we may not be able to manage it perfectly at once, we shall acquire one great virtue by it: we shall consider everyone else better than ourselves. Then, with God’s grace — which is always necessary, since when we do not have it all efforts are useless — we shall begin to progress. At the same time we must beg Him to grant us this particular virtue, which He denies to no one who makes efforts himself.

from The Life of Saint Teresa

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Before she was a novelist, George Eliot was an intellectual. The young Marian Evans had no aspirations to fiction: she read philosophy, learned German, became interested in the nature of God. Though she was raised by middle-of-the-road establishment Anglicans, in what she called “fat central England”, she became evangelical, with Puritan tendencies, frowning on the theatre. She was like an owl, she said, full of piety. When she was sixteen, her mother died, painfully, of cancer.

Piety succumbed to curiosity. She emerged from her devout cocoon into Shakespeare and Schiller, Carlyle and Cervantes. The Bray family, a set of free-thinking neighbours, took an interest in her, and Marian began reading about the history of the Bible. At twenty-two she read Charles Hennell’s Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity and began to feel that Christianity was a mingled affair, full of both truth and fiction, fact and fantasy. Aged twenty-three, she refused to go to church, angering her father. He did not speak to her for several months.

When she was twenty-four, Charles Hennell got married, and Marian took over from Hennell’s new wife the task of translating David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus. Strauss investigated the gospel stories, and found them to be not historical events, but myths.

The Brays introduced her to London, where she met John Chapman, publisher of The Westminster Review. The Review had originally been a liberal organ, edited by J.S. Mill, founded in the twenties to advance the cause of reform. Marian became the editor. She also wrote many reviews and essays, of which the most important is ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in which she wrote:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

This idea sits at the heart of Eliot’s work. “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying our experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” She was turning from philosophy to realistic narrative as the means by which hearts and minds might be changed. In Felix Holt (a novel that alternates between moments of splendour and tracts of dullness), she developed this idea (with an analogy she may have drawn from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments).

Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments.

She had also recently translated Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which argues that human love is sacred. In her letters, Eliot wrote,

The fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependant on conceptions of what is not man; and that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human i.e. an exaltation of the human.

She had come a long way from her Puritan youth and the emotional disaster of reading Strauss.

Her new humanistic philosophy of art was also, in part, Spinozan. Spinoza proposed that humans are not discrete and self-sufficient entities, but are constantly being formed by the world around them. Eliot was strongly influenced by his ideas, being temperamentally suited to them after her youth that was dominated by religious influences, the death of her mother, and the domination of her father.

And one of the last things Eliot did as an intellectual, before she set to writing novels, was to translate Spinoza’s Ethics. In her introduction to Eliot’s translation (which had never been translated before), Clare Carlisle writes:

The great divide in the universe of George Eliot’s novels is not between darkness and light but between restriction and expansion, between those who are narrow and those who are wide—between the Aunt Pullets of this world, fixated on their linen cupboards, and the Maggie Tullivers, hungry for knowledge and for new experiences. Much of the comedy in her novels consists of a parody of human ignorance, perceived as the absurd pettiness and futility of human vision. But many of George Eliot’s heroes… limited though they are, allow their horizons to expand and their souls to stretch and open. These dramatic divisions and developments in her novels mirror, in important ways, Spinoza’s distinction between heaven’s bondage and heaven’s freedom… She followed Spinoza in rejecting the idea of an anthropomorphic God who, like a parent or a secular judge, rewards or punishes people for their good deeds or transgressions. Spinoza’s insistence that virtue is its own reward, and vice its own punishment, points to a naturalistic moral law... He condemned as “superstition belief in a God who intervenes in the natural order whether mental or physical.” In Silas Marner, George Eliot wrote of “the orderly sequence,” in the moral sphere, “by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind,” and throughout her novels she tended to let her characters’ fates unfold according to such an order of cause and effect. We see her characters suffering, or reaping benefits, as a natural consequence of their own actions, while the wise, all-seeing narrator looks on compassionately.

To say that George Eliot was Spinozist makes her sound like an apostle. But she was a true original. When I asked Clare Carlisle about this, she told me.

That interconnectedness of all things and the idea that individuals are really constituted by their relations is, I think, a Spinozan insight that George Eliot drew on very deeply and dramatized in her fiction. I think it's there all through her fiction, but it becomes quite explicit in Middlemarch where she talks about, she has this master metaphor of the web… at the end of the novel, Eliot leaves us with a vision of the way Dorothea's life has touched other lives and in ways that can't be calculated, can't really be recognized. Yet, she has these effects that are diffused.

She uses this word, diffusion or diffuseness. The diffuseness of the effects of Dorothea's life, which seep into the world. Of course, she's a woman. She's not a great hero in this Carlyle or Emerson sense. In all these ways, I think this is a very different way of thinking about individuality, but also history and the way the world is made… in this more Spinozist kind of way, rather than by these heroic representative men who stand on the world stage. That's not Spinoza's, that's Eliot's original thinking. She's taking a Spinozist ontology, a Spinozist metaphysics, but really she's creating her own vision with that, that's, of course, located in that 19th-century context.

It is common for Eliot’s readers to admire, perhaps with astonishment, her great capacity for sympathy. This was surely a natural talent, one that she was not only born with, but which developed in her youth. But it was also the result of her life as an intellectual. No-one could work out so carefully, observantly, and at such scale, the operation of sympathy among many people in a small town during a time of reform by mere instinct and natural feeling alone. To be George Eliot the novelist, she had to first be Marian Evans the intellectual.

Portrait of the artist asa young woman.