George Eliot's intellectual life
a picture of human life such as a great artist can give
This is the first 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.
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
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).