CO > UJ
m< OU_1 58585 >m
THE GREAT TRADITION
By the sat <e. Author
REVAI J/ tlON
EDUCATION AND TIJE UNIVERSITY
NEW BEARINGS IN ENGLISH POETRY
THE
GREAT TRADITION
GEORGE ELIOT HENRY JAMES
JOSEPH CONRAD
F. R. Leavis
Fellow of Downing College
Cambridge
GTS
GEORGE W. STEWART, PUBLISHER INC.
New York
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
SECOND IMPRESSION : 1950
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Contents
I THE GREAT TRADITION page i
II GEORGE ELIOT
i The Early Phase 28
ii Romola to Middlemarch 47
iii Daniel Deronda and The Portrait of a Lady 79
III HENRY JAMES
i To The Portrait of a Lady 126
ii The Later James 154
IV JOSEPH CONRAD
i Minor Works and No^romo 173
ii Victory, The Secret Agent, Under Western
Eyes, and Chance 201
V ' HARD TIME'S ' : An Analytic Note 227
APPENDIX
Daniel Deronda : A Conversation 249
Acknowledgments
The greater part of this book appeared first in Scrutiny,
and for permission to >use this matter I am indebted to the
Editors. The second part of the critique of Henry James
appeared in the issue for March, 1937. That of Conrad
appeared in June and October, 1941, and that of George Eliot
in 1945 and 1946. I have also to thank Messrs. John
Farquharson, acting on behalf of the Henry James' estate,
for kind permission to reprint Daniel Deronda: A Con-
versation, aj an Appendix to this volume.
My sense of my immeasurable indebtedness, in every page
of this book, to my wife cannot be adequately expressed,
and I cannot express it at all without an accompanying
consciousness of shortcomings no one but myself has any
part in them that makes me insist at the same time on
my claim to all the responsibility.
F. R. L.
1 1 know how hard it is. One needs something to make ones mood
deep and sincere. There are so many little frets that prevent our
coming at the real naked essence of our vision. It sounds boshy,
doesnt it? I often think one ought to be able to pray, before one.
works and then leave it to the Lord. Isnt it hard, hard work to
come to real grips with one's imagination throw everything over-
board. I always feel as if I stood naked for thejire of Almighty
God to go through me and it's rather an awful feeling. One has
to be so terribly religious, to be an artist. I often think of my dear
Saint Lawrence on his gridiron, when he said, " Turn me over,
brothers, I am done enough on this side 91 . 9
To ERNEST COLLINGS. FEB. 24, 1913
THE LETTERS OF D. H. LAWRENCE
I
THE GREAT TRADITION
' . . . not dogmatically but deliberately . . .'
JOHNSON : Preface to Shakespeare
great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot,
A Henry James and Joseph Conrad to stop for the moment at
that comparatively safe point in history. Since Jane Austen, for
special reasons, needs to be studied at considerable length, I confine
myself in this book to the last three. Critics have found me narrow,
and I have no doubt that my opening proposition, whatever I may
say to explain and justify it, will be adduced in reinforcement of
their strictures. It passes as fact (in s^ite of the printed evidence)
that I pronounce Milton negligible, dismiss 'the Romantics', and
hold that, since Donne, there is no poet we need bother about except
Hopkins and Eliot. The view, I suppose, will be as confidently
attributed to me that, except Jane Austen, George Eliot, James and
Conrad, there are no novelists in English worth reading.
The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit
oneself to any critical judgment that makes an impact that is, never
to say anything. I still, however, think that the best way to pro-
mote profitable discvss'on is ',o be as clear as possible with oneself
about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential
discriminations in the given field of interest, and to state them as
clearly as one can (for disagreement, if necessary). And it seems to
me that in the field of fiction some challenging discriminations are
veiy much called for ; the field is so large and offers such insidious
temptations to complacent confusions of judgment and to critical
indolence. It is of the field of fiction belonging to Literature that I
am thinking, and I am thinking in particular of the present vogue of
the Victorian age. Trollope, Charlotte Yonge, Mrs. Gaskell, Wilkie
Collins, diaries Reade, Charles and Henry Kingsley, Marryat,
Shorthouse * one after another the minor novelists of that period
1 The novelist who has not been revived is Disn^tf. Yet, though he is no t
one of the great novelists, he is so alive and intelligent as to deserve permanent
currency, at any rate in the trilogy Coningsfy, Sybil and Tancredi his
THE GREAT TRADITION
are being commended to our attention, written up, and publicized
by broadcast, and there is a marked tendency to suggest that they
not only have various kinds of interest to offer but that they are
living classics. (Are not they all in the literary histories ?) There
are Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, Scott, 'the Brontes', 1 Dickens,
Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope and so on, all, one gathers,
classical novelists.
It is necessary to insist, then, that there are important distinctions
to be made, and that far from all of the names in the literary his-
tories really belong to the realm of significant creative achieve-
ment. And as a recall to a due sense of differences it is well to start
by distinguishing the few really great the major novelists who
count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not
only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers,
but that they are significant : u terms of the human awareness they
promote; awareness of the possibilities of life. 2
interests as expressed in these books the interests of a supremely intelligent
politician who has a sociologist's understanding of civilization and its move-
ment in his time are so mature.
1 See note 'The Brontes', page 27 below.
2 Characteristic of the confusion I am contending against is the fashion (for
which the responsibility seems to go back to Virginia Woolf and Mr. E. M.
Forster) of talking of Moll Flanders as a 'great novel*. Defoe was a remark-
able writer, but all that need be said about him as a novelist was said by Leslie
Stephen in Hours in a Library (First Series). He made no pretension to prac-
tising the novelist's art, and matters little is an influence. In fact, the only
influence that need be noted is that represented by the use made of him in the
nineteen-twenties by the practitioners of the fantastic conte (or pseudo-moral
fable) with its empty pretence of significance.
Associated with this use of Defoe is the use that was made in much the same
milieu of Sterne, in whose irresponsible (and nasty) trifling, regarded as in
some way extraordinarily significant and mature, was found a sanction for
attributing value to other trifling.
The use of Bunyan by T. F. Powys is quite another matter. It is a mark
of the genuine nature of Mr. Powys's creative gift (his work seems to me not
to have had due recognition) that he has been able to achieve a kind of tradi-
tional relation to Bunyan especially, of course, in Mr. Westons Good Wine.
Otherwise there is little that can be said with confidence about Bunyan as a/i
influence. And yet we know him to have been for two centuries one of the
most frequented of all classics, and in such a way that he counts immeasurably
in the English-speaking consciousness. It is, perhaps, worth saying that his
influence would tend strongly to reinforce the un-Flaubertian quality of the
line of English classical fiction (Bunyan, Lord David Cecil might point out
see p. 8 below was a Purican), as well as to co-operate with the Jonsonian
traction of morally significant typicality in characters.
2
THE GREAT TRADITION
To insist on the pre-eminent few in this way is not to be indiffer-
ent to tradition ; on the contrary, it is tlu way towards understand-
ing what tradition is. 'Tradition', of course, is a term with many
forces and often very little at all. There is a habit nowadays of
suggesting that there is a tradition of 'the English Novel', and that
all that can be said of the tradition (that being its peculiarity) is that
'the English Novel' can be anything you like. To distinguish the
major novelists in the spirit proposed is to form a more useful idea
of tradition (and to recognize that the conventionally established
view of the past of English fiction needs to be drastically revised).
It is in terms of the major novelists, those significant in the way
suggested, that tradition, in any serious sense, has its significance.
To be important historically is not, of course, to be necessarily one
of the significant few. Fielding deserves the place of importance
given him in the literary histories, but he hasn't the kind of classical
distinction we are also invited to credit him with. He is important
not because he leads to Mr. J. B. Priestley but because he leads to
Jane Austen, to appreciate whose distinction is to feel that life isn't
long enough to permit of one's giving much time to Fielding or
any to Mr. Priestley.
Fielding made Jane Austen possible by opening the central tradi-
tion of English fiction. In fact, to say that the English novel began
with him is as reasonable as such propositions ever are. He com-
pleted the work begi'n by Th^ Tatler and The Spectator, in the pages
of which we se^ the drama turning into the novel that this develop-
ment should occur by way of journalism being in the natural course
of things. To the art of presenting character and mceurs learnt in
that school (he himself, before he became a novelist, was both
playwright and periodical essayist) he joined a narrative habit the
nature of which is sufficiently indicated by his own phrase, 'comic
epic in prose'. That the eighteenth century, which hadn't much
lively reading to choose from, but had much leisure, should have
found Tom Jones exhilarating is not surprising ; nor is it that Scott,
and Coleridge, should have been able to give that work superlative
praise. Standards are formed in comparison, and what opportuni-
ties had they for that ? But the conventional talk about the ' perfect
construction' of Tom] ones (the late Hugh^Walpole brought it out
triumphantly and you may hear it in almost any course of lectrres
3
THE GREAT TRADITION
on 'the English Novel') is absurd. There can't be subtlety of organ-
ization .without richer matver to organize, and subtler interests, than
Fielding has to offer. He is credited with range and variety and it
is true that some episodes take place in the country and some in
Town, some in the churchyard and some in the inn, some on the
high-road and some in the bed-chamber, and so on. But we haven't
to read a very large proportion of Tom Jones in order to discover the
limits of the essential interests it has to offer us. Fielding's attitudes,
and his concern with human nature, are simple, and not such as to
produce an effect of anything but monotony (on a mind, that is,
demanding more than external action) when exhibited at the length
of an 'epic in prose'. What he can do appears to best advantage in
Joseph Andrews. Jonathan Wild, with its famous irony, seems to me
mere hobbledehoydom (much as one applauds the determination to
explode the gangster-hero), and by Amelia Fielding has gone soft.
We all know that if we want a more inward interest it is to
Richardson we must go. And there is more to be said for Johnson's
preference, and his emphatic way of expressing it at Fielding's ex-
pense, than is generally recognized. Richardson's strength in the
analysis of emotional and moral states is in any case a matter of
common acceptance ; and Clarissa is a really impressive work. But
it's no use pretending that Richardson can ever be made a current
classic again. The substance of interest that he too has to offer is in
its own way extremely limited in ran^e and \ anety, and the demand
he makes on the reader's time is in proportion and absolutely so
immense as to be found, in general, prohibitive (though I don't
know that I wouldn't sooner read through again Clarissa than A la
recherche du temps perdu). But we can understand well enough why
his reputation and influence should have been so great throughbut
Europe; and his immediately relevant historical importance is
plain : he too is a major fact in the background of Jane Austen.
The social gap between them was too wide, however, for his
work to be usable by her directly : the more he tries to deal with
ladies and gentlemen, the more immitigably vulgar he is. It was
Fanny Burney who, by transposing him into educated life, made
it possible for Jane Austen to absorb what he had to teach her.
Here we have one of the important lines of English literary history
Pdchardson-Fanny Burney-Jane Austen. It is important because
4
THE GREAT TRADITION
Jane Austen is one of the truly great writers, and herself a major fact
in the background of other great writers. Not that Fanny Burney
is the only other novelist who counts in her formation ; she read all
there was to read, and took all that was useful to her which wasn't
only lessons. 1 In fact, Jane Austen, in her indebtedness to others,
provides an exceptionally illuminating study of the nature of origin-
ality, and she exemplifies beautifully the relations of 'the individual
talent' to tradition. If the influences bearing on her hadn't com-
prised something fairly to be called tradition she couldn't have found
herself and her true direction ; but her relation to tradition is a
creative one. She not only makes tradition for those coming after,
but her achievement has for us a retroactive effect : as we look back
beyond her we see in what goes before, and see because of her,
potentialities and significances brought 6ut in such a way that, for
us, she creates the tradition we see leading down to her. Her work,
like the work of all great creative writers, gives a meaning to the past.
Having, in examinatiou-papers and undergraduate essays, come
much too often on the proposition that 'George Eliot is the first
modern novelist', I finally tracked it down to Lord David Cecil's
Early Victorian Novelists. In so far as it is possible to extract anything
clear and coherent from the variety of things that Lord David Cecil
says by way of explaining the phrase, u is this : that George Eliot,
being concerned, not to offer 'primarily an entertainment', but to
explore a significant theme a theme significant in its bearing on
the 'serious problems and preoccupations of mature life' (p. 291)
breaks with 'those fundamental conventions both of form and
matter within which the English novel up till then had been con-
structed' (p. 288). What account, then, are we to assume of Jane
Austen ? Clearly, one that appears to be the most commonly held :
she creates delightful characters ('Compare Jane Austen's character-
ization with Scott's' 2 a recurrent examination-question) and lets
J * For the relation of Jane Austen to other writers see the essay by Q. D.
Leavis, A Critical Theory of Jane Austen s Writings, in Scrutiny ', Vol. X, No. I.
2 Scott was primarily a kind of inspired folk-lorist, qualified to have done
in fiction something analogous to the ballad-opera:, the only live part of
Redgauntlet now is * Wandering Willie's Tale', ahd 'The Two Drovers'
remains in esteem while the heroics of the historical novels can no longer
command respect. He was a great and very intelligent man; but, not having
the creative writer's interest in literature, he made 1 no serious attempt to work
5
THE GREAT TRADITION
us forget our cares and noral tensions in the comedy of pre-
eminently civilized life. The idea of 'civilization' invoked appears
to be closely related to that expounded by Mr. Clive Bell. 1
Lord David Cecil actually oofhpares George Eliot with Jane
Austen. The passage is worth quoting because the inadequate ideas
of form ('composition') and moral interest it implies ideas of the
relation between 'art* and 'life' as it concerns the novelist are very
representative. (Its consistency with what has been said about
George Eliot earlier in the same e^say isn't obvious, but that doesn't
disturb the reader by the time he has got here.)
'It is also easy to see why her form doesn't satisfy us as Jane
Austen's does. Life is chaotic, art is orderly. The novelist's
problem is to evoke an orderly composition which is also a con-
vincing picture of life. T t is Jane Austen's triumph that she
solves this problem perfectly, fully satisfies tne rival claims of
life and art. Now George Eliot does not. She sacrifices life to
urt. Her plots are too neat and symmetrical to be true. We do
not feel them to have grown naturally from their situation like
a flower, but to have been put together deliberately and calcu-
latedly like a building.' (p. 322.)
out his own form and break away from the bad tradition of the eighteenth-
century romance. Of his books, TLe Heart of Midlothian comes the nearest
to being a great novel, but hardly Is that : too many allowances and deductions
have to be made. Out of Scott a bad tradition ^ame. It spoiled Fenimore
Cooper, who had new and first-hand interests and the makings of a distin-
guished novelist. And with Stevenson it took on * literary* sophistication and
fine writing.
1 *"As for the revolt against Nature", he continued, "that, too, has its
uses. If it conduces to the cult of the stylized, the conventionalized, the
artificial, just for their own sakes, it also, more broadly, makes for civilization."
"'Civilization?'* I asked. "At what point between barbarism and decad-
ence does civilization reign ? If a civilized community be defined as one where
you find aesthetic preoccupations, subtle thought, and polished intercourse,
is civilization necessarily desirable? Aesthetic preoccupations are not in-
consistent with a wholly inadequate conception of the range and power of art;
thought may be subtle and yet trivial; and polished intercourse may be
singularly uninteresting**.* L. H, Myers, The Root and the Flower, p. 418.
Myers hasn't the great novelist's technical interest in method and present-
ment; he slips very easily into using the novel as a vehicle. That is, we feel
that he is not primarily a novelist. Yet he is sufficiently one to have made of
The Root and the Flowef a very remarkable novel. Anyone seriously inter-
ested in literature is likely to have found the first reading a memorable experi-
crke and to have found also that repeated re-readings have not exhausted the
interest.
THE GREAT TRADITION
Jane Austen's plots, and her novels iirgeneral, were put together
very 'deliberately and calculatedly ' (if not 'like a building'). 1 But
her interest in 'composition' is not something to be put over against
her interest in life ; nor does she 3ffer an 'aesthetic* value that is
separable from moral significance. The principle of organization,
and the principle of development, in her work is an intense moral
interest of her own in life that is in the first place a preoccupation
with certain problems tnat life compels on her as personal ones. 2
She is intelligent and serious enough to be able to impersonate her
moral tensions as she strives, in her art, to become more fully con-
scious of them, and to learn what, in the interests of life, she ought
to do with them. Without her intense moral preoccupation she
wouldn't have been a great novelist.
This account of her would, if I had rared to use the formula, have
been my case for calling Jane Austen, and not anyone later, 'the first
modern novelist'. In applying it to George Eliot, Lord David Cecil
says: 'In fact, the laws ^conditioning the form of George Eliot's
novels are the same laws that condition those of Henry James and
Wells and Conrad and Arnold Bennett.' I don't know what Wells
is doing in that sentence ; there is an elementary distinction to be
made between the discussion of problems and ideas, and what we
find in the great novelists. And, tbi all the generous sense of com-
mon humanity to be found in his best work, Bennett seems to me
never to have been disturbed enough by life to come anywhere near
greatness. But it would certainly be reasonable to say that ' the laws
conditioning the form of Jane Austen's novels are the same laws that
condition those of George Eliot and Henry James and Conrad*.
Jane Austen, in fact, is the inaugurator of the great tradition of the
English novel and by 'great tradition' I mean the tradition to
which what is great in English fiction belongs.
The great novelists in that tradition are all very much concerned
with 'form' ; they are all very original technically, having turned
their genius to the working out of their own appropriate methods
and procedures. But the peculiar quality of their preoccupation
3
1 See 'Lady Susan* into 'Mansfield Park 9 by "'Q. D. Leavis in Scrutiny,
Vol. X, No. 2. 1
2 D. W. Harding deals illuminatingly with this matter in Regulated
Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen (sie Scrutiny, Vol. VIII, No. 4).
THE GREAT TRADITION
with 'form' may be brcright out by a contrasting reference to
Flaubert. Reviewing Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Vene&ig, D. H.
Lawrence * adduces Flaubert as figuring to the world the 'will of the
writer to be greater than and undisputed lord over the stuff he
writes'. This attitude in art, as Lawrence points out, is indicative of
an attitude in life or towards life. Flaubert, he comments, 'stood
away from life as from a leprosy'. For the later Aesthetic writers,
who, in general, represent in a weak kind of way the attitude that
Flaubert maintained with a perverse heroism, 'form' and 'style' are
ends to be sought for themselves, and the chief preoccupation is
with elaborating a beautiful style to apply to the chosen subject.
There is George Moore, who in the best circles, I gather (from a
distance), is still held to be among the very greatest masters of prose,
though I give my own lirrited experience for what it is worth
it is very hard to find an admirer who, being pressed, will lay his
hand on his heart and swear he has read one of the ' beautiful' novels
through. 'The novelist's problem is to e\ olve an orderly composi-
tion which is also a convincing picture of life' this is the way an
admirer of George Moore sees it. Lord David Cecil, attributing
this way to Jane Austen, and crediting her with a superiority over
George Eliot in 'satisfying the rival claims of life and art', explains
this superiority, we gather, L / a freedom from moral preoccupations
that he supposes her to enjoy. (George Eliot, he tells us, was a
Puritan, and earnestly bent on instruction. 2 )
As a matter of fact, when we examine the formal perfection of
Emma, we find that it can be appreciated only in terms of the moral
preoccupations that characterize the novelist's peculiar interest in
life. Those who suppose it to be an 'aesthetic matter', a beauty of
'composition' that is combined, miraculously, with 'truth to life',
can give no adequate reason for the view that Emma is a great novel,
and no intelligent account of its perfection of form. It is in the same
way true of the other great English novelists that their interest in
their art gives them the opposite of an affinity with Pater and George
Moore ; it is, brought to an intense focus, an unusually developed
1 Phoenix^ p. 308.
2 She is a moralist and a highbrow, the two handicaps going together.
' Ht humour is less affected by her intellectual approach. Jokes, thank heaven,
need not be instructive.' E^rly Victorian Novelists, p. 299.
8
THE GREAT TRADITION
interest in life. For, far from having anything of Flaubert's disgust
or disdain or boredom, they are all distinguished by a vital capacity
for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked
moral intensity.
It might be commented that what I have said of Jane Austen and
her successors is only what can be said of any novelist of unqualified
greatness. That is true. But there is and this is the point an
English tradition, and these great classics of English fiction belong to
it; a tradition that, in the talk about 'creating characters' and
'creating worlds', and the appreciation of Trollope and Mrs. Gaskell
and Thackeray and Meredith and Hardy and Virginia Woolf,
appears to go unrecognized. It is not merely that we have no
Flaubert (and I hope I haven't seemed to suggest that a Flaubert is
no more worth having than a George Moore). Positively, there is
a continuity from Jane Austen. It is not for nothing that George
Eliot admired her work profoundly, and wrote one of the earliest
appreciations of it to be published. The writer whose intellectual
weight and moral earnestness strike some critics as her* handicap
certainly saw in Jane Austen something more than an ideal contem-
porary of Lytton Strachey. 1 What one great original artist learns
from another, whose genius and problems are necessarily very
different, is the hardest kind of 'influence' to define, even when we
see it to have been of the profoundest importance. The obvious
manifestation of influence is to be seen in this kind of passage :
'A little daily embroidery had been a constant element in Mrs.
Transome's life ; that soothing occupation of taking stitches
to produce what neither she nor any one else wanted, was then
the resource of many a well-born and unhappy woman.'
'In short, he felt himself to be in love in the right place, and
was ready to endure a great deal of predominance, which, after
all, a man could always put down when he liked. Sir James
had no idea that he should ever like to put down the predomin-
ance of this handsome girl, in whose cleverness he delighted.
1 It is perhaps worth insisting that Peacock is more than that too. He is
not at all in the same class as the Norman Douglas of South Windw& They
Went. In his ironical treatment of contemporary jfociety and civilization he
is seriously applying serious standards, so that hjs books, which are obviously
not novels in the same sense as Jane Austen's, have a permanent life as light
reading indefinitely re-readable for minds with mature interests.
9
THE GREAT TRADITION
Why not ? A man's mind what there is of it has always the
advantage of being masculine, as the smallest birch-tree is of
a higher kind than the most soaring palm and even his ignor-
ance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have origin-
ated this estimate ; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest
personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition,'
The kind of irony here is plainly akin to Jane Austen's though
it is characteristic enough of George Eliot ; what she found was
readily assimilated to her own needs. In Jane Austen herself the
irony has a serious background, and is no mere display of ' civiliza-
tion'. George Eliot wouldn't have been interested in it if she hadn't
perceived its full significance its relation to the essential moral
interest offered by Jane Austen's art. And here we come to the
profoundest kind of influence, that which is not manifested in like-
ness. One of the supreme dtbts one great writer can owe another
is the realization of unlikeness (there is, of course, no significant
unlikeness without the common concern and the common serious-
ness of concern with essential human issues). One way of putting
the difference between George Eliot and the Trollopes whom we
are invited to consider along with her is to say that she was capable
of understanding Jane Austen's greatness and capable of learning
from her. And except for Jane Austen there was no novelist to
learn from none whose work had any bearing on her own essen-
tial problems as a novelist.
Henry James also was a great admirer of Jane Austen, 1 and in his
case too there is that obvious aspect of influence which can be
brought out by quotation. And there is for him George Eliot as
well, coming between. In seeing him in an English tradition I am
not slighting the fact of his American origin ; an origin that doesn't
make him less of an English novelist, of the great tradition, than
Conrad later. That he was an American is a fact of the first import-
ance for the critic, as Mr. Yvor Winters brings out admirably in his
book, Maules Curse. 2 Mr. Winters discusses him as a product of the
1 He can't have failed to note with interest that Emma fulfils, by anticipa-
tion, a prescription of his own : everything is presented through Emma's
dramatized consciousness, and the essential effects depend on that.
2 New Directions, Norfolk, Conn. (1938). To insist that James is in the
English tradition is not to deny that he is in an American tradition too. He
is in t the tradition that includes Hawthorne and Melville. He is related to
Hawthorne even more closely than Mr. Winters suggests. A study of the very
10
THE GREAT TRADITION
New England ethos in its last phase, when a habit of moral strenu-
ousness remained after dogmatic Puritanism had evaporated and the
vestigial moral code was evaporating too. This throws a good deal
of light on the elusiveness that Attends James's peculiar ethical sensi-
bility. We have, characteristically, in reading him, a sense that
important choices are in question and that our finest discrimination
is being challenged, while at the same time we can't easily produce
for discussion any issuer that have moral substance to correspond.
It seems relevant also to note that James was actually a New
Yorker. In any case, he belonged by birth and upbringing to that
refined civilization of the old European America which we have
learnt from Mrs. Wharton to associate with New York. His bent
was to find a field for his ethical sensibility in the appreciative study
of such a civilization the ' civilizatior ' in question being a matter
of personal relations between members of a mature and sophisticated
Society. It is doubtful whether at any time in any place he could
have found what would have satisfied his implicit demand: the
actual fine art of civilized social intercourse that would have justified
the flattering intensity of expectation he brought to it in the form
of his curiously transposed and subtilized ethical sensibility.
History, it is plain, was already leaving him Aeradnt in his own
country, so that it is absurd to censure him, as some American
critics have done, for pulling up his roots. He could hardly become
deeply rooted elsevhere, but the congenial soil and climate were in
Europe rather than in the country of his birth. There is still some
idealizing charm about his English country-house l in The Portrait
early work shows Hawthorne as a major influence as the major influence.
The influence is apparent there in James's use of symbolism; and this use
develops into something that characterizes his later work as a whole.
1 Though it has in justice to be remembered that the inhabitants of the
house in The Portrait of a Lady, the Touchetts, are Americans, and that there
is critical significance in the difference between the atmosphere of intellectual
aliveness they establish and the quite other English atmosphere of the War-
burton home. Moreover, Isabel rejects the admirable Lord Warburton for
reasons much like those for which the heroine of An International Episode
rejects the nice English lord, who, by Touchett standards (shall we say ?), is
not good enough. And in story after story James, with the exasperation of an
intellectual writer, expresses his disdainful sense of the utter unintellectuality
of the country-house class. He always knew th^tlie hadn't really found the
ideal civilization he looked for; so that there is something like a tragic signifi-
cance in the two juxtaposed notes of this passage from an early letter:
'But don't envy me too much; for the, British country-house has at
II
THE GREAT TRADITION
of a Lady, but that book is one of the classics of the language, and
we can't -simply regret the conditions that produced something
so finely imagined. It is what The Egoist is supposed to be. Com-
pare the two books, and the greatness of Henry James as intellectual
poet-novelist l of 'high civilization* comes out in a way that, even
for the most innocently deferential reader, should dispose of Mere-
dith's pretensions for ever. James's wit is real and always natural,
his poetry intelligent as well as truly rich, and there is nothing bogus,
cheap or vulgar about his idealizations : certain human potentialities
are nobly celebrated.
That he is a novelist who has closely studied his fellow-craftsmen
is plain and got from them more than lessons in the craft. It is
plain, for instance, in The Portrait of a Lady that he sees England
through literature. We krow that he turned an attentive pro-
fessional eye on the French masters. He has (in his early mature
work) an easy and well-bred technical sophistication, a freedom
from any marks of provinciality, and a quiet air of knowing his way
about the world that distinguish him from among his contem-
poraries in the language. If from the English point of view he is
unmistakably an American, he is also very much a European.
But there could be no question of his becoming a French master
in English, and the help he could get from the Continent towards
solving his peculiar problem was obviously limited. 2 It was James
moments, for a cosmopolitanized American, an insuperable natness. On the
other hand, to do it justice, there is no doubt of its being one of the ripest
fruits of time ... of the highest results of civilization.'To Miss Alice James,
ijth Dec. 1877: The Letters of Henry James^ Vol. I, p. 64.
1 See p. 128 below.
2 * Your remarks on my French tricks in my letters are doubtless most just,
and shall be heeded. But it's an odd thing that such tricks should grow at a
time when my last layers of resistance to a long-encroaching weariness and
satiety with die French mind and its utterance has fallen from me like a
garment. I have done with 'em, forever, and am turning English all over. I
desire only to feed on English life and the contact of English minds I wish
greatly I knew some. Easy and smooth-flowing as life is in Paris, I would
throw it over to-morrow for an even very small chance to plant myself for a
while in England. I have got nothing important out of Paris nor am likely
to. ... I know the Theatre Francais by heart !
" Daniel Deronda (Dan'i himself) is indeed a dead, thougn amiable, failure.
But the book is a large affair: I shall write an article of some sort about it.
All desire is dead within me to produce something on George Sand.' To
William James, 29th July 1876 : The Letters, Vol. I, p. 5 1.
12
THE GREAT TRADITION
who put his finger on the weakness in Madame Bovary : the discrep-
ancy between the technical (' aesthetic'} intensity, with the implied
attribution of interest to the subject, and the actual moral and human
paucity of this subject on any mature valuation. His own problem
was to justify in terms of an intense interest in sophisticated ' civiliza-
tion* his New England ethical sensibility. The author who offered
a congenial study would have to be very different from Flaubert.
It was, as a matter of fart, a very English novelist, the living repre-
sentative of the great tradition a writer as unlike Flaubert as
George Eliot.
George Eliot's reputation being what it is, this suggestion won't
recommend itself to everyone immediately. 'Like most writers,
George Eliot could only create from the world of her personal ex-
perience in her case middle- and low^r-class rural England of the
nineteenth-century Midlands.' 1 Moreover, she was confined by a
Puritanism such as James (apart from the fact that he wasn't lower-
middle-class) had left a generation or two behind him : 'the en-
lightened person of to-day must forget his dislike of Puritanism
when he reads George Eliot'. Weighty, provincial, and pledged to
the 'school-teacher's virtues', she was not qualified by nature or
breeding to appreciate high civilization, even if she had been
privileged to make its acquaintance. These seem to be accepted
commonplaces which shows how little even those who write
about her have read her work.
Actually, though 'Puritan' is a word used with many intentions,
it is misleading to call her a Puritan at all, 2 and utterly false to say
1 All the quotations in this paragraph are from Lord David Cecil
2 Unless you specify that, of the definitions Lord David Cecil gives us to
choose from, the one you have in mind is that given here: *But the moral
code founded on that Puritan theology had soaked itself too deeply into the
fibre of her thought and feeling for her to give it up as well. She might not
believe in heaven and hell and miracles, but she believed in right and wrong,
and man's paramount obligation to follow right, as strictly as if she were
Bunyan himself. And her standards of right and wrong were the Puritan
standards. She admired truthfulness and chastity and industry and self-
restraint, she disapproved of loose living and recklessness and deceit and self-
indulgence.' I had better confess that I differ (apparently) from Lord David
Cecil in sharing these beliefs, admirations and disapprovals, so that the reader
knows my bias at once. And they seem to me favourable to the production
of great literature. I will add (exposing myself completely) that the enlighten-
ment or aestheticism or sophistication that feels an amused superiority to them
13
THE GREAT TRADITION
that her 'imagination had to scrape what nourishment it could from
the bare bones of Puritan ethics'. There was nothing restrictive or
timid about her ethical habit ; what she brought from her Evan-
gelical background was a radically reverent attitude towards life, a
profound seriousness of the kind that is a first condition of any real
intelligence, and an interest in human nature that made her a great
psychologist. Such a psychologist, with such a relation to Puritan-
ism, was, of all the novelists open to his study, the one peculiarly
relevant to James's interests and problems. That, atany rate, becomes
an irresistible proposition when it is added that, in her most mature
work, she deals and (in spite of the accepted commonplaces about
her) deals consummately, with just that 'civilization' which was
James's chosen field. To say this is to have the confident wisdom
of hindsight, for it can be shown, with a conclusiveness rarely
possible in these matters, that James did actually go to school to
George Eliot. 1
That is a fair way of putting the significance of the relation be-
tween The Portrait of a Lady and Daniel Deronda that I discuss in my
examination of the latter book. That relation demonstrated, nodi-
ing more is needed in order to establish the general relation I posit
between the two novelists. James's distinctive bent proclaims itself
uncompromisingly in what he does with Daniel Deronda (on the
leads, in my view, to triviality and boredom, and that out of triviality comes
evil (as L. H. Myers notes in the preface to The K ot and the Flower, and
illustrates in the novel itself, especially in the sections dealing with the
'Camp').
1 So the footnote on p. 12 above takes on a marked significance a signifi-
cance confirmed very strikingly by Percy Lubbock's summary of letters
written at about the same time: 'In Paris he settled therefore, in the autumn
of 1875, taking rooms at 29 Rue du Luxembourg. He began to write The
American, to contribute Parisian Letters to the New York Tribune, and to
frequent the society of a few of his compatriots. He made the valued acquaint-
ance of Ivan Turgenev, and through him of the group which surrounded
Gustave Flaubert Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Mau-
passant, Zola and others. But the letters which follow will show the kind of
doubts that began to arise after a winter in Paris doubts of the possibility of
Paris as a place where an American imagination could really take root and
flourish. He found the circle of literature tightly closed to outside influences ;
it seemed to exclude all culture but its own after a fashion that aroused his
opposition; he speaks sarcastically on one occasion of having watched
Turgenev and Flaubert seriously discussing Daudet's/<zc, while he reflected
thalt none of the three had read, or knew English enough to read, Daniel
Deronda! The Letters of Henry James, Vol. I, p. 41.
14
THE GREAT TRADITION
good part of whicii I call it Gwendolen Harleth The Portrait of a
Lady is a variation ; for the plain fact I point out amounts to that).
The moral substance of George Eliot's theme is subtilized into some-
thing going with the value James sets on 'high civilization' ; her
study of conscience has disappeared. A charming and intelligent
girl, determined to live * finely', confidently exercises her 'free
ethical sensibility' (Mr. Winters' phrase) and discovers that she is
capable of disastrous misvaluation (which is not surprising, seeing
not only how inexperienced she is, but how much an affair of in-
explicitnesses, overtones and fine shades is the world of discourse
she moves in). It is a tragedy in which, for her, neither remorse is
involved, nor, in the ordinary sense, the painful growth of conscience,
though no doubt her * ethical sensibility' matures.
Along the line revealed by the contrast between the two novels
James develops an art so unlike George Eliot's that, but for the fact
(which seems to have escaped notice) of the relation of The Portrait
of a Lady to Daniel Deronda, it would, argument being necessary,
have been difficult to argue at all convincingly that there was the
significant relation between the novelists. And I had better insist
that I am not concerned to establish indebtedness. What I have in
mind is the fact of the great tradition and the apartness of the two
great novelists above the ruck of Gaskells and Trollopes and Mere-
diths. Of the earlier novelists it was George Eliot alone (if we
except the minor relevance of Jane Austen) whose work had a
direct and significant bearing on his own problem. It had this
bearing because she was a great novelist, and because in her maturest
work she handled with unprecedented subtlety and refinement the
personal relations of sophisticated characters exhibiting the * civil-
ization' of the 'best society', and used, in so doing, an original
psychological notation corresponding to the fineness of her psycho-
logical and moral insight. Her moral seriousness was for James very
far from a disqualification ; it qualified her for a kind of influence
that neither Flaubert nor the admired Turgenev could have.
Circumstances discussed above made James peculiarly dependent
on literature ; the contact with George Eliot's distinctive kind of
greatness was correspondingly important for him. It is significant
that Madame de Mauves (1874), the early story in which he uses
something like the theme of The Portrait of a Lady, has a wo*.dy
15
THE GREAT TRADITION
quality premonitory (one can't help feeling) of the cobwebbiness
that afflicted him in his lace phase. We can't doubt that George
Eliot counts for something in the incomparably superior concrete-
ness of The Portrait of a Lady. In that book, and in its successor, The
Bostonians, his art is at its most concrete, and least subject to the
weakness attendant on his subtlety. It is not derivativeness that is in
question, but the relation between two original geniuses. 'We
cannot attempt to trace/ says Mr. Van Wyck Brooks in The Pilgrim-
age of Henry James, 'the astonishing development of a creative
faculty which, in the course of a dozen years, transcended the simple
plot-maker's art of The American, the factitious local-colourism of
Roderick Hudson, and rendered itself capable of the serene beauty of
The Portrait of a Lady, the masterly assurance of The Bostonians, the
mature perfection of Washington Square. 9 It is more than a guess
that, in that development, George Eliot had some part.
The reader is likely to comment, I suppose, on the degree in
which my treatment of James is taken up with discussing his limita-
tions and the regrettable aspects of his later development. Since it
will also be noted that, of my three novelists, he, in terms of space,
gets least attention, it might be concluded that a corresponding rela-
tive valuation is implied. I had, then, perhaps better say that there
is no such relation intended between valuation and length of treat-
ment. I will not, however, deny that, of the three, James seems to
me to give decidedly most cause for dissatisfaction and qualification.
He is, all the same, one of the great. His registration of sophisticated
human consciousness is one of the classical creative achievements :
it added something as only genius can. And when he is at his best
that something is seen to be of great human significance. He creates
an ideal civilized sensibility ; a humanity capable of communicating
by the finest shades of inflection and implication : a nuance may
engage a whole complex moral economy and the perceptive re-
sponse be the index of a major valuation or choice. Even The
Awkward Age, in which the extremely developed subtlety of treat-
ment is not as remote as one would wish from the hypertrophy that
finally overcame him, seems to me a classic ; in no other work can
we find anything like that astonishing in so astonishing a measure
successful use of sophisticated 'society* dialogue.
In considering James's due status, in fact, it is not easy to say just
16
THE GREAT f RAt>ITIOtf
where the interest of the classical artist turns into the interest of the
classical 'case*. But it seems to me obvious that the 'case* becomes
in some places boring to the point of unreadableness. Yet there is
a tacit conspiracy to admire some of the works that fall, partly, at
any rate (whoHy, one must conclude, for the admirers who risk
explanatory comment on them), under this description. And here
is sufficient reason why an attempt to promote a due appreciation
of James's genius should give a good deal of discriminatory atten-
tion to the tendencies that, as they develop, turn vital subtlety into
something else.
When we come to Conrad we can't, by way of insisting that he is
indeed significantly 'in' the tradition in and of it, neatly and con-
clusively relate him to any one English novelist. Rather, we have
to stress his foreignness that he was a Pole, whose first other lan-
guage was French. 1 I remember remarking to Andre Chevrillon
how surprising a choice it was on Conrad's part to write in English,
especially seeing he was so clearly a student of the French masters.
And I remember the reply, to the effect that it wasn't at all surpris-
ing, since Conrad's work couldn't have been written in French.
M. Chevrillon, with the authority of a perfect bilingual, went on
to explain in terms of the characteristics of the two languages why
it had to be English. Conrad's themes and interests demanded the
concreteness and action the dramatic energy of English. We
might go further and say that Conrad chose to write his novels in
English for the reasons that led him to become a British Master
Mariner.
I am not, in making this point, concurring in the emphasis gener-
1 * The politeness of Conrad to James and of James to Conrad were of the
most impressive kind. Even if they had been addressing each other from the
tribunal of the Academic Fran9aise their phrases could not have been more
elaborate or delivered more ore rotundo. James always addressed Conrad as
"Mon cher confrere**, Conrad almost bleated with the peculiar tone that the
Marseillais get into their compliments "Mon cher maitre*' . . . Every thirty
seconds. When James spoke of me to Conrad he always said : '* Votre ami, le
jeune homme modeste**. They always spoke French together, James using
an admirably pronounced, correct and rather stilted idiom such as prevailed
in Paris in the 'seventies. Conrad spoke with extraordinary speed, fluency
and incomprehensibility, a meridional French wiJi as strong a Southern
accent as that of garlic in alolL . . . Speaking English he had so strong a
French accent that few who did not know him well could understand h'm
at first.' Ford Madox Fordj Return to Yesterday, pp. 23-4.
B 17
THE GREAT TRADITION
ally laid on the Prose Laureate of the Merchant Service. What
needs to be stressed is the great novelist. Conrad's great novels, if
they deal with the sea at all, deal with it only incidentally. But the
Merchant Service is for him both a spiritual fact and a spiritual
symbol, and the interests that made it so for him control and animate
his art everywhere. Here, then, we have a master of the English
language, who chose it for its distinctive qualities and because of the
moral tradition associated with it, and whose concern with art he
being like Jane Austen and George Eliot and Henry James an
innovator in 'form' and method is the servant of a profoundly
serious interest in life. To justify our speaking of such a novelist as
in the tradition, that represented by those three, we are not called on
to establish particular relations with any one of them. Like James,
he brought a great deal from outside, but it was of the utmost im-
portance to him that he found a serious art of fiction there in English,
and that there were, in English, great novelists to study. He drew
from English literature what he needed, and learnt in that peculiar
way of genius which is so different from imitation. And for us,
who have him as well as the others, there he is, unquestionably a
constitutive part of the tradition, belonging in the full sense.
As being technically sophisticated he may be supposed to have
found fortifying stimulus in James, whom he is quite unlike (though
James, in his old age, was able to take a connoisseur's interest in
Chance and appreciate with a professional eye the sophistication of
the * doing'). 1 But actually, the one influence at ail obvious is that
of a writer at the other end of the scale from sophistication, Dickens.
As I point out in my discussion of him, Conrad is in certain respects
so like Dickens that it is difficult to say for just how much influence
1 Here is the testimony of Conrad's collaborator, Ford Madox Ford:
' Conrad had the most unbounded, the most generous and the most under-
standing admiration for the Master's work but he did not much like James
personally. I imagine that was because at bottom James was a New Englander
pur sang, though he was actually born in New York. James on the other hand
liked neither Conrad nor his work very much. . . . James on the other hand
never made fun of Conrad in private. Conrad was never for him "poor dear
old" as were Flaubert, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Meredith, Hardy or Sir Edmund
Gosse. He once expressed to me as regards Conrad something like an
immense respect for his character and achievements. I cannot remember his
exact words, but they were something to the effect that Conrad's works im-
prersed him very disagreeably, but he could find no technical fault or awk-
wardness about them/ Return to Yesterday, p. 24.
18
THE GREAT TRADITION
Dickens counts. He is undoubtedly there in the London of The
Secret Agent, though except for the unfortunate macabre of the
cab-journey, and one or two local mannerisms he has been trans-
muted into Conrad. This co-p r esence of obvious influence with
assimilation suggests that Dickens may have counted for more in
Conrad's mature art (we don't find much to suggest Dickens in the
early adjectival phase) than seems at first probable : it suggests that
Dickens may have encouraged the development in Conrad's art of
that extraordinary energy of vision and registration in which they
arc akin. ('When people say that Dickens exaggerates', says Mr.
Santayana, 'it seems to me that they can have no eyes and no ears.
They probably have only notions of what things and people are ;
they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value.') We
may reasonably, too, in the same way see ^ome Dickensian influence,
closely related and of the same order, in Conrad's use of melodrama,
or what would have been melodrama in Dickens ; for in Conrad
the end is a total significance of a profoundly serious kind.
The reason for not including Dickens in the line of great novelists
is implicit in this last phrase. The kind of greatness in question has
been sufficiently defined. That Dickens was a great genius and is
permanently among the classics is certain. But the genius was that
of a great entertainer, and he had for the most part no profounder
responsibility as a creative artist than this description suggests.
Praising him magnificently in a very fine critique, 1 Mf. Santayana,
in concluding, says : 'In every English-speaking home, in the four
quarters of the globe, parents and rhildren would do well to read
Dickens aloud of a' winter's evening.' This note is right and signi-
ficant. The adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge
to an unusual and sustained seriousness. I can think of only one of
his books in which his distinctive creative genius is controlled
throughout to a unifying and organizing significance, and that is
Hard Times, which seems, because of its unusualness and compara-
tively small scale, to have escaped recognition for the great tiling it
is. Conrad's views on it, supposing it to have caught his attention,
would have been interesting ; he was qualified to have written an
apt appreciation.
It has a kind of perfection as a work of art that we don't associate
1 See Soliloquies in Englard.
19
THE GREAT TRADITION
with Dickens a perfection that is one with the sustained and com-
plete seriousness for which among his productions it is unique.
Though in length it makes a good-sized modern novel, it is on a small
scale for Dickens : it leaves no room for the usual repetitive over-
doing and loose inclusiveness. It is plain that he feJt no temptation
to these, he was too urgently possessed by his themes ; the themes
were too rich, too tightly knit in their variety and too commanding.,
Certain key characteristics of Victorian civilization had clearly come
home to him with overwhelming force, embodied in concrete
manifestations that suggested to him connexions and significances he
had never realized so fully before. The fable is perfect ; the sym-
bolic and representative values are inevitable, and, sufficiently plain
at once, yield fresh subtleties as the action develops naturally in its
convincing historical way.
In Gradgrind and Boundcrby we have, in significant relation, two
aspects of Victorian Utilitarianism. In Gradgrind it is a serious
creed, devoutly held, and so, if repellent (as the name conveys), not
wholly unrespectable ; but we are shown Gradgrind as on the most
intimate and uncritical terms with Josiah Bounderby, in whom we
have the grossest and crassest, the most utterly unspiritual egotism,
and the most blatant thrusting and bullying, to which a period of
'rugged individualism* gave scope. Gradgrind, in fact, marries his
daughter to Bounderby. Yet he is represented as a kind of James
Mill ; an intellectual who gives his children, 0.1 theory, an education
that reminds us in a very significant way of the Autobiography of the
younger Mill. And it is hardly possible to question the justice of
this vision of the tendency of James Mill's kind of Utilitarianism, so
blind in its onesidedness, so unaware of its bent and its blindness.
The generous uncalculating spontaneity, the warm flow of life,
towards which Gradgrindery, practical and intellectual, must be
hostile, is symbolized by Sleary's Horse-riding.
The richness in symbolic significance of Hard Times is far from
adequately suggested by this account. The prose is that of one of
the greatest masters of English, and the dialogue very much a test
in such an undertaking is consummate ; beautifully natural in its
stylization. But thexe is only one Hard Times in the Dickensian
ctuvre.
Though the greatness of Hard Times passed unnoticed, Dickens
20
THE GREAT TRADITION
couldn't fail to have a wide influence. We have remarked his
presence in The Secret Agent. It is there again, in a minor way, in
George Eliot, in some of her less felicitous characterization ; and it
is there in Henry James, most patently, perhaps, in The Princess
Casamassima, but most importantly in Roderick Hudson. 1 It is there
once more, and even more interestingly, in D. H. Lawrence, in The
Lost Girl. The ironic humour, and the presentation in general, in
the first part of that book bear a clear relation to the Dickensian, but
are incomparably more mature, and belong to a total serious
significance.
I take the opportunity, at this point, to remark parenthetically,
that, whereas Dickens's greatness has been confirmed by time, it is
quite otherwise with his rival. 'It is usual', says Mr. Santayana,
' to compare Dickens with Thackeray, v hich is like comparing the
grape with the gooseberry ; there are obvious points of resemblance,
and the gooseberry has some superior qualities of its own ; but you
can't make red wine of it.' It seems to me that Thackeray's plrce
is fairly enough indicated, even if his peculiar quality isn't precisely
defined, by inverting a phra:e I found the other day on an exam-
ination-paper : 'Trollope is a lesser Thackeray'. Thackeray is a
greater Trollope ; that is, he has (apart from some social history)
nothing to offer the reader whose demand goes beyond the 'creation
of characters' and so on. His attitudes, and the essential substance of
interest, are so limi^d that (though, of course, he provides incident
and plot) for the reader it is merely a matter of going on and on ;
nothing has been done by the close to justify the space taken
except, of course, that time has been killed (which seems to be all
that even some academic critics demand of a novel). It will be fair
enough to Thackeray if Vanity Fair is kept current as, in a minor
way, a classic : the conventional estimate that puts him among the
great won't stand the touch of criticism. The kind of thing that
Thackeray is credited with is done at a mature level by James's
friend, Howard Sturgis, in Belchamber, a novel about Edwardian
society (it is, with an appropriateness not always observed in that
series, included in The World's Classics).
To come back to Conrad and his major quality : he is one of those
creative geniuses whose distinction is manifested in their beinq;
1 See pp. 130-140 below
21
THE GREAT TRADITION
peculiarly alive in their t : me peculiarly alive to it; not 'in the
vanguard* in the manner of Shaw and Wells and Aldous Huxley,
but sensitive to the stresses of the changing spiritual climate as they
begin to be registered by the most conscious. His interest in the
tradition of the Merchant Service as a constructive triumph of the
human spirit is correlative with his intense consciousness of the de-
pendence, not only of the distinctive humanities at all levels, but of
sanity itself and our sense of a normal outer world, on an analogous
creative collaboration. His Robinson Crusoe cannot bear a few
days alone on his island, and blows out his brains. We are a long
way from Jane Austen, for whom the problem was not to rescue the
highly conscious individual from his isolation, but much the con-
trary. Conrad, of course, was a deradnt, which no doubt counts for
a good deal in the intensity with which he renders his favourite
theme of isolation. But then a state of something like deracination
is common to-day among those to whom the question of who the
gtjat novelists are is likely to matter. Conrad is representative in
the way genius is, which is not the way of those writers in whom
journalist-critics acclaim the Zeitgeist. (It is relevant to note here
that in the early hey-day of Wells and Shaw Conrad wrote Nostromo
a great creative masterpiece which, among other things, is essenti-
ally an implicit comment on their preoccupations, made from a
very much profounder level of preoccupation than theirs. And it
is also relevant to venture that in Mr. Arthur Koestler's very dis-
tinguished novel, Darkness at Noon, we have the work of a writer
also, we note, not born to the language who knows and admires
Conrad, especially the Conrad of Nostromo and Under Western Eyes.
Conrad is incomparably closer to us to-day than Hardy and Mere-
dith are. So, for that matter, is George Eliot. I specify Hardy and
Meredith because they are both offered to us among the great
novelists, and they are both supposed to be philosophically profound
about life. It will have been gathered that I think neither can sup-
port his reputation. On Hardy (who owes enormously to George
Eliot) the appropriately sympathetic note is struck by Henry James :
'The good little Thomas Hardy has scored a great success with Tess
ofthed'Urbervilles, which is chock-full of faults and falsity, and yet
has a singular charm/ This concedes by implication all that properly
can be conceded unless we claim more (orjude the Obscure, which,
22
THE GREAT TRADITION
of all Hardy's works of a major philosophic-tragic ambition, comes
nearer to sustaining it, and, in its clumsy way which hasn't the
Tightness with which the great novelists show their profound sure-
ness of their essential purpose is impressive. 1 It is all the same a
little comic th?t Hardy should have been taken in the early nineteen-
twenties the Chekhov period as pre-eminently the representative
of the 'modern consciousness' or the modern 'sense of the human
situation'. As for Meredith, I needn't add anything to what is said
about him by Mr. E. M. Forster, 2 who, having belonged to the
original milieu in which Meredith was erected into a great master,
enjoys peculiar advantages for the necessary demolition-work.
Is there no name later than Conrad's to be included in the great
tradition? There is, I am convinced, one: D. H. Lawrence.
Lawrence, in the English language, wa? the great genius of our time
(I mean the age, cr climatic phase, following Conrad's). It would
be difficult to separate the novelist off for consideration, but it was in
the novel that he committed himself to the hardest and most sus-
tained creative labour, and he was, as a novelist, the representative
of vital and significant development. He might, he has shown
conclusively, have gone on writing novels with the kind of 'char-
acter creation' and psychology that the conventional cultivated
1 Arthur Mizener's essay, "Jude the Obscure as a Tragedy*, in the Thomas
Hardy Centennial Issue of The Southern Review (Summer 1940), puts inter-
estingly the case for a s, jnous estimate of the book.
2 See Aspects oj the Novel. And here is James on Lord Ormont and his
Aminta : 'Moreover, I have vowed not to open Lourdes till I shall have closed
with a furious final bang the unspeakable Lord Ormont, which I have been
reading at the maximum rate of ten pages ten insufferable and unprofitable
pages a day. It fills me with a critical rage, an artistic fury, utterly blighting
in me the indispensable principle of respect. I have finished, at this rate, but
the first volume whereof I am moved to declare that I doubt if any equal
quantity of extravagant verbiage, of airs and graces, of phrases and attitudes,
of obscurities and alembications, ever started less their subject, ever contri-
buted less of a statement told the reader less of what the reader needs to
know. All the elaborate predicates of exposition without the ghost of a
nominative to hook themselves to; and not a difficulty met, not a figure
presented, not a scene constituted not a dim shadow condensing once either
into audible or into visible reality making you hear for an instant the tap
of its feet on the earth. Of course there are pretty things, but for what they
are they come so much too dear, and so many of thi profundities and tortuos-
ities prove when threshed out to be only pretentious statements of the very
simplest propositions/ To Edmund Gosse: The Letters of Henry Jares,
Vol. I, p. 224.
23
THE GREAT TRADITION
reader immediately appreciates novels that demanded no un-
familiar effort of approach. He might if his genius had let him.
In nothing is the genius more manifest than in the way in which,
after the great success and succes d'estime of Sons and Lovers he
gives up that mode and devotes himself to the exhausting toil of
working out the new tilings, the developments, that as the highly
conscious and intelligent servant of life he saw to be necessary.
Writing to Edward Garnett of the work that was to become Women
in Love he says : 'It is very different from Sons and Lovers : written
in another language almost. I shall be sorry if you don't like it, but
am prepared. I shan't write in the same manner as Sons and Lovers
again, I think in that hard, violent style full of sensation and
presentation/ 1
Describing at length wha" he is trying to do he says :
'You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the
character. There is another ego, according to whose action the
individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were,
allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've
been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single
radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are
the same pure simple element of carbon. The ordinary novel
would trace the history of the diamond but I say, "Diamond,
what ! This is carbon". And my diamond might be coal or
soot, and my theme is carbon.) v ou must not say my novel
is shaky it is not perfect, because I am not expert in what I
want to do. But it is the real tiling, say what you like. And I
shall get my reception, if not now, then before long. Again
I say, don't look for the development of the novel to follow the
lines of certain characters : the characters fall into the form of
some other rhythmic form, as v.hen one draws a fiddle-bow
across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines un-
known/ 2
He is a most daring and radical innovator in 'form', method, tech-
nique. And his innovations and experiments are dictated by the
most serious and urgent kind of interest in life. This is the spirit
of it:
'Do you know Casrandra in Aeschylus and Homer ? She is
1 The Letters ofD. H. Lawrence, p. 172. 2 Letters, p. 198.
24
THE GREAT TRADITION
one of the world's great figures, and what the Greeks and
Agamemnon did to her is symbolic of what mankind has done
to her since raped and despoiled her, to their own ruin. It is
not your brain that you must trust to, nor your will but to
that fundamental pathetic faculty for receiving the hidden
waves that come from the depths of life, and for transferring
them to the unreceptive world. It is something which happens
below the consciousness, and below the range of the will it is
something which is unrecognizable and frustrated and de-
stroyed/ 1
It is a spirit that, for all the unlikeness, relates Lawrence closely to
George Eliot. 2 He writes, again, to Edward Garnett 3 :
'You see you tell me I am half a Frenchman and one-eighth
a Cockney. But that isn't it. I have /ery often the vulgarity
and disagreeableness of the common people, as you say Cock-
ney, and I may be a Frenchman. But primarily I am a passion-
ately religious man, and my novels must be written from the
depth of my religious experience. That I must keep to, because
I can only work like that. And my Cockneyism and common-
ness are only when the deep feeling doesn't find its way out, and
a sort of jeer comes instead, and sentimentality and purplism.
But you should see the religious, earnest, suffering man in me
first, and then the flippant or common things after. Mrs.
Garnett says I have no true nobility with all my cleverness
and charm. Bn f that is not true. It is there, in spite of all the
littlenesses and commonnesses.'
It is this spirit, by virtue of which he can truly say that what he
writes must be written from the depth of his religious experience,
that makes him, in my opinion, so much more significant in relation
to the past and future, so much more truly creative as a technical
inventor, an innovator, a master of language, than James Joyce. I
know that Mr. T. S. Eliot has found in Joyce's work something that
recommends Joyce to him as positively religious in tendency (see
After Strange Gods) . But it seems plain to me that there is no organic
principle determining, informing, and controlling into a vital whole,
the elaborate analogical structure, the extraordinary variety of
1 Letters, p. 232. 2 Lawrence too has been called a Puritan.
3 Letters, p. 190.
25
THE GREAT TRADITION
technical devices, the attempts at an exhaustive rendering of con-
sciousness, for which Ulysses is remarkable, and which got it
accepted by a cosmopolitan literary world as a new start. It is
rather, I think, a dead end, or at least a pointer to disintegration
a view strengthened by Joyce's own development (for I think it
significant and appropriate that Work in Progress Finnegans Wake,
as it became should have engaged the interest of the inventor of
Basic English).
It is true that we can point to the influence of Joyce in a line of
writers to which there is no parallel issuing from Lawrence. But I
find here further confirmation of my view. For I think that in these
writers, in whom a regrettable (if minor) strain of Mr. Eliot's in-
fluence seems to me to join with that of Joyce, we have, in so far as
we have anything significant, the wrong kind of reaction against
liberal idealism. 1 I have in mind writers in whom Mr. Eliot has
expressed an interest in strongly favourable terms : Djuna Barnes of
Nightwood, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell of The Black Book. In
these writers at any rate in the last two (and the first seems to me
insignificant) the spirit of what we are offered affects me as being
essentially a desire, in Laurentian phrase, to 'do dirt* on life. It
seems to me important that one should, in all modesty, bear one's
witness in these matters. 'One must speak for life and growth,
amid all this mass of destruction and disintegration/ 2 This is
Lawrence, and it is the spirit of all liis work. It is the spirit of the
originality that gives his novels their disconcerting quality, and
gives them the significance of works of genius.
I am not contending that he isn't, as a novelist, open to a great
deal of criticism, or that his achievement is as a whole satisfactory
(the potentiality being what it was). He wrote his later books far
too hurriedly. But I know from experience that it is far too easy to
conclude that his very aim and intention condemned him to artistic
unsatisfactoriness. I am thinking in particular of two books at
which he worked very hard, and in which he developed his d ; s-
concertingly original interests and approaches The Rainbow and
Women in Love. Re-read, they seem to me astonishing works of
genius, and very much more largely successful than they did when
1 See D. H. Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious y especially Chapter XI.
2 The Letters ofD. H. Lawrence, p. 256,
26
THE GREAT TRADITION
I read them (say) fifteen years ago. I still think that The Rainbow
doesn't build up sufficiently into a whole. But I shouldn't be quick
to offer my criticism of Women in Love, being pretty sure that I
should in any case have once more to convict myself of stupidity
and habit-blindness on later re-reading. And after these novels
there comes, written, perhaps, with an ease earned by this hard work
done, a large body of short stories and nouvelles that are as indubit-
ably successful works of genius as any the world has to show.
I have, then, given my hostages. What I think and judge I have
stated as responsibly and clearly as I can. Jane Austen, George
Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence : the great tradi-
tion of the English novel is there.
NOTE: 'THE BRONTES'
It is tempting to retort that there is only one Bronte. Actually,
Charlotte, though claiming no part in the great line of English
fiction (it is significant that she couldn't see why any value should
be attached to Jane Austen), has a permanent interest of a minor
kind. She had a remarkable talent that enabled her to do some-
thing firsthand and new in the rendering of personal experience,
above all in Villette.
The genius, or course, was Emily. I have said nothing about
Wuthering Heights because that astonishing work seems to me a kind
of sport. It may, all the same, very well have had some influence of
an essentially undetectable kind : she broke completely, and in the
most challenging way, both with the Scott tradition that imposed
on the novelist a romantic resolution of his themes, and with the
tradition coming down from the eighteenth century that demanded
a plane-mirror reflection of the surface of 'real' life. Out of her a
minor tradition comes, to which belongs, most notably, The House
with the Green Shutters.
II
GEORGE ELIOT
(i) The Early Phase
*T""<HEBJE is general agreement that an appraisal of George Eliot
X must be a good deal preoccupied with major discriminations
that the body of her work exhibits within itself striking differences
not merely of kind, but between the more and the less satisfactory,
and exhibits them in such a way that the history of her art has to be
seen as something less happy in its main lines than just an unfolding
of her genius, a prosperous development of her distinctive powers,
with growing maturity. L is generally assumed that this aspect of
her performance is significantly related to the fac.. of her having dis-
played impressive intellectual gifts outside her art, so that she was a
distinguished figure in the world of Herbert Spencer and the West-
minster Review before she became a novelist. And there is something
like a unanimity to the effect that it ic distinctive of her, among
great novelists, to be peculiarly addicted to moral preoccupations.
The force of this last what it amounts to or intends, and the
significance it has for criticism is elusive ; and it seems well to
start with a preliminary glance at what, from his hours with the
critics, the reader is likely to recall as a large e^blished blur across
the field of vision. Henry James seems to me to have shown finer
intelligence than anyone else in writing about George Eliot, and he,
in his review of the Cross Life of her, tells us that, for her, the novel
'was not primarily a picture of life, capable of deriving a high value
from its form, but a moralized fable, the last word of a philosophy
endeavouring to teach by example'. 1 The blur is seen here in that
misleading antithesis, which, illusory as it is, James's commentary
insists on. What, we ask, is the * form ' from which a * picture of life '
derives its value ? As we should expect, the term 'aesthetic', with
its trail of confusion, turns up in the neighbourhood (it is a term the
literary critic would do well to abjure). James notes, as character-
izing 'that side of Geurge Eliot's nature which was weakest', the
'absence of free aesthetic life', and he says that her 'figures and
1 Partial Portraits, p. 50.
28
THE EARLY PHASE
situations' are 'not seen in the irresponsible plastic way*. But, we
ask, in what great, in what interesting, novel are the figures and
situations seen in an 'irresponsible plastic way* (a useful determina-
tion of one of the intentions of 'aesthetic') ? Is there any great
novelist whose preoccupation witn 'form' is not a matter of his
responsibility towards a rich human interest, or complexity of
interests, profoundly realized ? a responsibility involving, of its
very nature, imaginative sympathy, moral discrimination and judg-
ment of relative human value ?
The art distinguished by the corresponding irresponsibility might
be supposed to be represented by the dreary brilliance of Salammbo
and La Tentation. But we know that this is so far from James's
intention that he finds even Madame Bovary, much as he admires it,
an instance of a preoccupation with 'form' that is insufficiently a
preoccupation with human value and moral interest. 1 In fact, his
verdict on Madame Bovary may fairly be taken to be of ho very
different order from that implied when George Eliot finds Le Pere
Goriot 'a hateful book' the phrase that, curiously enough, provides
the occasion for James's remarks about her lack of 'free aesthetic
life'. 2
That the antithesis I quote from Henry James is unsatisfactory
and doesn't promote clear thinking is no doubt obvious enough.
And the reader may note that James's essay dates sixty years back.
Yet his handling of t*ie matter seems to me representative : I don't
know of anything written about George Eliot that, touching on this
matter of her distinctive moral preoccupation, does anything essenti-
ally more helpful towards defining the distinctive quality of her art.
James, then, is a critic one reads with close attention, and, coming
1 See his essay on Flaubert in Notes on Novelists.
2 I had better say that my judgment of Le Pere Goriot clearly differs from
Henry James's. The impressiveness of the famous passions Balzac presents
seems to me to be too much of the order of Shelley's
BEATRICE (wildly) O
My God 1 Can it be possible . . . etc.
Balzac's art here seems to me an essentially rhetorical art in a pejorative sense
of the adjective : romantic rhetoric is the life and spirit of the sublimities and
degradations he exhibits. They depend for the ; r effect, that is, not on any
profound realization of human emotions, but on excited emphasis, top-lf :el
assertion and explicit insistence.
29
GEORGE ELIOT
on so challenging a formulation in so intelligent a context, one is
provoked to comment that, while, among the great novelists,
George Eliot must certainly have her difference, it can hardly be of
the kind such an antithetical way of putting things suggests. Though
such formulations may have their colourable grounds, there must,
one reflects, be something more important to say about the moral
seriousness of George Eliot's novels ; otherwise she would hardly
be the great novelist one knows her to be. There are certain condi-
tions of art from which she cannot be exempt while remaining an
artist.
A tentative comparison or two may help to define the direction
in which the appraising critic should turn his inquiries. Consider
her against, not Flaubert, but two novelists concerning whose great-
ness one has no uneasy sense of a need to hedge. In her own
language she ranks with Jane Austen and Conrsd, both of whom,
in their different ways, present sharp contrasts with her. To take
Conrad first : there is no novelist of whom it can more fitly be said
that his figures and situations are seen, and James would have testified
to his intense and triumphant preoccupation with 'form'. 1 He went
to school to the French masters, and is in the tradition of Flaubert.
But he is a greater novelist than Flaubert because of the greater
range and depth of his interest in humanity and the greater intensity
of his moral preoccupation : he is not open to the kind of criticism
that James brings against Madame tiovary. tJostromo is a master-
piece of 'form* in senses of the term congenial to the discussion of
Flaubert's art, but to appreciate Conrad's 'form' is to take stock of a
process of relative valuation conducted by him in the face of life :
what do men live by? what can men live by? these are the
questions that animate his theme. His organization is devoted to
exhibiting in the concrete a representative set of radical attitudes, so
ordered as to bring out the significance of each in relation to a total
sense of human life. The dramatic imagination at work is an in-
tensely moral imagination, the vividness of which is inalienably a
judging and a valuing. With such economy has each 'figure' and
'situation* its significance in a taut inclusive scheme that Nostromo
might more reasonably than any of George Eliot's fictions except
* Actually James salutes Chance in The New Novel, an article written in
1914 (see Notes on Novelists).
30
THE EARLY PHASE
Silas Marner (which has something of the fairy-tale about it, and is
in any case a minor work) be called a * moralized fable'.
What, then, in this matter of the relation between their moral
interests and their art, is the difference between Conrad and George
Eliot ? (Their sensibilities, of course, differ, but that is not the
question.) I had better here give the whole of the sentence of
James's, of which above I quoted a part :
'Still, what even a jotting may not have said after a first per-
usal of Le Pere Goriot is eloquent; it illuminates the author's
general attitude with regard to the novel, which, for her, was
not primarily a picture of life, capable of deriving a high value
from its form, but a moralized fable, the last word of a philo-
sophy endeavouring to teach by example.'
To find the difference in didactism doesn't take us very far ; not
much to the point is said about a work of art in calling it didactic
unless one is meaning to judge it adversely. In that case one is
judging that the intention to communicate an attitude hasn't become
sufficiently more than an intention ; hasn't, that is, justified itself as
art in die realized concreteness that speaks for itself and enacts its
moral significance. But whatever criticism die weaker parts of
George Eliot may lie open to no one is going to characterize her by
an inclusive judgment of that kind. And it is her greatness we are
concerned with.
James speaks of a * philosophy endeavouring to teach by ex-
ample' : perhaps, it may be suggested, the clue we want is to be
found in the ' philosophy ' ? And the context shows that James does,
in attempting to define her peculiar quality, intend to stress George
Eliot's robust powers of intellectual labour and her stamina in the
realm of abstract thought he speaks elsewhere of her 'exemption
from cerebral lassitude '. But actually it is not easy to see how, in so
far as her intellectual distinction appears in the strength of her art, it
constitutes an essential difference between her and Conrad. She has
no more of a philosophy than he has, and he, on the other hand, is,
in his work, clearly a man of great intelligence and confirmed
intellectual habit, whose 'picture of life' embodies much reflective
analysis and sustained thought about fundamentals.
What can, nevertheless, be said, with obvious truth, is that Conrad
31
GEORGE ELIOT
is more completely an artist. It is not that he had no intellectual
career outside his art that he did nothing comparable to translating
Strauss, Spinoza and Feuerbach, and editing The Westminster
Review. It is that he transmutes more completely into the created
work the interests he brings in. No doubt the two facts are related :
the fact that he was novelist and seaman and not novelist and high-
level intellectual middleman has a bearing on the fact that he
achieved a wholeness in art (it will be observed that the change of
phrase involves a certain change offeree, but the shift is legitimate,
I think) not characteristic of George Eliot. But it must not be con-
cluded that the point about her is that her novels contain unabsorbed
intellectual elements patches, say, of tough or drily abstract think-
ing undigested by her art. The relevant characteristic, rather, is apt
to strike the reader as something quite other than toughness or
dryness ; we note it as an emotional quality, something that strikes
us as the direct (and sometimes embarrassing) presence of the
author's own personal need. Conrad, we know, had been in his
time hard-pressed ; the evidence is everywhere in his work, but, in
any one of the great novels, it comes *x> us out of the complex im-
personalized whole. There can, of course, be no question of saying
simply that the opposite is true of George Eliot : she is a great
novelist, and has achieved her triumphs of creative art. Nor is it
quite simply a matter of distinguishing between what is strong in
her work and what is weak. At her best sne has the impersonality
of genius, but there is characteristic work of hers that is rightly
admired where the quality of the sensibility can often be felt to have
intimate relations with her weakness.
That is, the critic appraising her is faced with a task of discrimina-
tion. I began by reporting general agreement to this effect. The
point of my comparison is to suggest that the discriminating actually
needing to be done will be on different lines from those generally
assumed.
And that is equally the conclusion prompted by a comparative
glance at Jane Austen. Though the fashionable cult tends to suggest
otherwise, she doesn't differ from George Eliot by not being
earnestly moral. Tiu, vitality of her art is a matter of a preoccupa-
tion with moral problems that is subtle and intense because of the
pressure of personal need. As for the essential difference (leaving
32
THE EARLY PHASE
aside the differences in the nature of the need and in range of
interests), is it something that can be related to the fact that Jane
Austen, while unmistakably very intelligent, can lay no claim to a
massive intellect like George Eliot's, capable of maintaining a
specialized intellectual life ? Perhaps ; but what again strikes us in
the intellectual writer is an emotional quality, one to which there is
no equivalent in Jane Austen. And it is not merely a matter of a
difference of theme and interest of George Eliot's dealing with
(say) the agonized conscience and with religious need as Jane Austen
doesn't. There could be this difference without what is as a matter
of fact associated with it in George Eliot's work : a tendency to-
wards that kind of direct presence of the author which has to be
stigmatized as weakness.
But this is to anticipate.
The large discrimination generally made in respect of George
Eliot is a simple one. Henry James's account is subtler than any
other I know, but isn't worked out to consistency. He says 1 (though
the generalization is implicitly criticized by the context, being in-
adequate to his perception) :
'We feel in her, always, that she proceeds from the abstract
to the concrete ; that her figures and situations are evolved, as
the phrase is, from her moral consciousness, and are only in-
directly the products of observation.'
What this gives us is, according to the accepted view, one half of
her the unsatisfactory half. The great George Eliot, according to
this view, is the novelist of reminiscence ; the George Eliot who
writes out of her memories of childhood and youth, renders the
poignancy and charm of personal experience, and gives us, in a
mellow light, the England of her young days, and of the days then
still alive in family tradition. Her classics are Scenes of Clerical Life,
Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. With these
books she exhausted her material, and in order to continue a novelist
had to bring the other half of herself into play to hand over, in
fact, to the intellectual. Romola is the product of an exhausting and
1 Partial Portraits, p. 51.
c 33
GEORGE ELIOT
misguided labour of excogitation and historical reconstruction (a
judgment no one is likely to dispute). Felix Holt and Daniel
Deronda also represent the distinguished intellectual rather than the
great novelist ; in them she 'proceeds from the abstract to the con-
crete', 'her figures and situations are evolved from her moral con-
sciousness', they 'are deeply studied and massively supported,
but . . .' Henry James's phrases fairly convey the accepted view.
It should be said at once that he is not to be identified with it (he
discriminates firmly, for instance, in respect of Daniel Deronda).
Still, he expresses for us admirably what has for long been the
current idea of her development, and he does in such passages as this
endorse the view that, in the later novels, the intellectual gets the
upper hand :
'The truth is, perception and reflection at the outset divided
George Eliot's great talent between them ; buc as time went on
circumstances led the latter to develop itself at the expense of
the former one of these circumstances being apparently the
influence of George Henry Lewes.'
And we don't feel that he is inclined to dissociate himself to any
significant extent when, in the Conversation 1 about Daniel Deronda,
he makes Constantius say :
' She strikes me as a person who certainly has naturally a taste
for general considerations, but wLo has Lltan upon an age and
a circle which have compelled her to give them an exaggerated
attention. She does not strike me as naturally a critic, less still
as naturally a sceptic ; her spontaneous part is to observe life and
to feel it to feel it with admirable depth. Contemplation,
sympathy and faith something like that, I should say, would
have been her natural scale/
At any rate, that gives what appears to be still the established notion
of George Eliot.
It will have been noted above that I left out Middlemarch. And
it will have been commented that Middlemarch, which, with Felix
Holt between, comes in order of production after Romola and
doesn't at all represent a reversion to the phase of 'spontaneity', has
for at least two decades been pretty generally acclaimed as one of
1 See Appendix, p. 249 below.
34
THE EARLY PHASE
the great masterpieces of English fiction. That is true. Virginia
Woolf, a good index of cultivated acceptance in that period, writes
(in The Common Reader, first series) :
'It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is
at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book
which, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English
novels written for grown-up people.'
This judgment, in a characteristic and not very satisfactory essay on
George Eliot, must be set to Mrs. Woolf 's credit as a critic ; there is
no doubt that it has had a good deal to do with the established
recognition of Middlemarch.
But Mrs. Woolf makes no serious attempt at the work of general
revision such a judgment implies, and die appreciation of George
Eliot's ceuvre has not been put on a critical basis and reduced to con-
sistency. For if you think so highly of Middlemarch^ then, to be
consistent, you must be more qualified in your praise of the e^rly
things than persisting convention recognizes. Isn't there, in fact, a
certain devaluing to be done ? The key word in that sentence
quoted from Mrs. Woolf is 'mature'. Her distinguished father
(whose book on George Eliot in The English Men of Letters has his
characteristic virtues) supplies, where their popularity is concerned,
the key word for the earlier works when he speaks of a 'loss of
charm' involved in her development after The Mill on the Floss. At
the risk of appearing priggish one may suggest that there is a tend-
ency to overrate charm. Certainty charm is overrated when it is
preferred to maturity.
Going back in one's mind over the earlier works, what can one
note as their attractions and their claims ? There is Scenes of Clerical
Life, which is to-day, perhaps, not much read. And indeed only
with an effort can one appreciate why these stories should have
made such an impact when they came out. One of them, Mr. Gi7/if $
Live-Story, is charming in a rather slight way. Without the charm
the pathos would hardly be very memorable, and the charm is char-
acteristic of the earlier George Eliot : it is the atmospheric richness
of the past seen through home tradition and the associations of child-
hood. Of the other two, The Sad Fortune* of the Rev. Amos Barton
and. Janet's Repentance, one feels that they might have appeared in
35
GEORGE ELIOT
any Victorian family magazine. This is unfair, no doubt; the
imaginative and morally earnest sympathy that finds a moving
theme in the ordinariness of undistinguished lives there we have
the essential George Eliot ; the magazine writer would not have
had that touch in pathos and humour, and there is rome justice in
Leslie Stephen's finding an 'indication of a profoundly reflective
intellect' in 'the constant, though not obtrusive, suggestion of the
depths below the surface of trivial life'. But Scenes of Clerical Life
would not have been remembered if nothing had followed.
George Eliot did no more prentice-work (the greater part of the
Scenes may fairly be called that) : Adam Bede is unmistakably quali-
fied to be a popular ckssic which, in so far as there are such to-day,
it still is. There is no need here to offer an appreciation of its
attractions ; they are as plain as they are genuine, and they have had
full critical justice done them. Criticism, it seeias to me, is faced
with the ungrateful office of asking whether, much as Adam Bede
deserves its currency as a classic (and of the classical English novels
it has been among the most widely read), the implicit valuation it
enjoys in general acceptance doesn't represent something more than
justice. The point can perhaps be made by suggesting that the book
is too much the sum of its specifiable attractions to be among the
great novels that it is too resolvable into the separate interests that
we can see the author to have started with. Of these, a main one,
clearly, is given in Mrs. Poyser and that mellow presentation of
rustic life (as George Eliot recalled it from her childhood) for which
Mrs. Poyser's kitchen is the centre. This deserves all the admiration
it has received. And this is the moment to say that juxtaposition
with George Eliot is a test that disposes finally of the ' Shakespearean'
Hardy : if the adjective is to be used at all, it applies much more
fitly to the rich creativeness of the art that seems truly to draw its
sap from life and is free from all suspicion of Shakespeareanizing.
George Eliot's rustic life is convincingly real even when most
charming (and she doesn't always mellow her presentation of it
with ckarm).
We have another of the main interests with which George Eliot
started in Dinah, that idealized recollection of the Methodist aunt.
D : nah, a delicate undertaking, is sufficiently successful, but one has,
in appraising her in relatiDn to the total significance of the book, to
36
THE EARLY PHASE
observe, with a stress on the limiting implications of the word, that
the success is conditioned by the 'charm* that invests her as it does
the world she moves in and belongs to. She is idealized as Adam is
idealized ; they are in keeping. Adam, we know, is a tribute to her
father ; but h^ is also the Ideal Craftsman, embodying the Dignity
of Labour. He too is r&tssi, but compare him with George Eliot's
other tribute to her father, Caleb Garth of Middlentarch, who is in
keeping with his context, and the suggestion that the idealizing
clement in the book named after Adam involves limiting judgments
for the critic gets, I think, an obvious force.
Mrs. Poyser, Dinah and Adam these three represent interests
that George Eliot wanted to use in a novel. To make a novel out
of them she had to provide something else. The Dinah theme
entails the scene in prison, and so there had to be a love-story and a
seduction. George Eliot works them into her given material with
convincing skill ; the entanglement of Arthur Donnithorne with
Hetty Sorrel the first casual self-indulgence, the progressive yield-
ing to temptation, the inexorable Nemesis involves a favourite
moral-psychological theme of hers, and she handles it in a personal
way. And yet does one want ever to read that large part of the
book again ? does it gain by re-reading ? doesn't this only confirm
one's feeling that, while as Victorian fiction a means of passing the
time the love-story must be granted its distinction, yet, judged by
the expectations wii.li which one approaches a great novelist, it offers
nothing proportionate to the time it takes (even if we cut the large
amount of general reflection) ? Satisfactory at its own level as the
unity is that the author has induced in her materials, there is not at
work in the whole any pressure from her profounder experience to
compel an inevitable development ; so that we don't feel moved to
discuss with any warmth whether or not she was right to take
Lewes's suggestion, and whether or not Dinah would really have
become Mrs. Adam Bede. We are not engaged in such a way as
to give any force to the question whether the marriage is convincing
or otherwise ; there is no sense of inevitability to outrage. These
comments of Henry James's seem to me just :
4 In Silas Marner, in Adam Bede, the quality seems gilded bv
a sort of autumn haze, an afternoon light, of meditation, whick
37
GEORGE ELIOT
mitigates the sharpness o r the portraiture. I doubt very much
whether the author herself had a clear vision, for instance, of
the marriage of Dinah Morris to Adam, or of the rescue of
Hetty from the scaffold at the eleventh hour. The reason of
this may be, indeed, that her perception was a perception of
nature much more than of art, and that these particular inci-
dents do not belong to nature (to my sense at least) ; by which
I do not mean that they belong to a very happy art. I cite them,
on the contrary, as an evidence of artistic weakness ; they are
a very good example of the view in which a story must have
marriages and rescues in the nick of time, as a matter of course.'
James indicates here the relation between the charm and what he
calls the 'art'. They are not identical, of course ; but what I have
called 'charm' and described as an idealizing element means an
abeyance of the profounder responsibility, so that, without being
shocked, we can have together in the same book the 'art* to which
Jarres refers the vaguely realized that draws its confidence from
convention and such genuinely moving things as the story of Hetty
Sorrel's wanderings. And here I will anticipate and make the point
that it is because the notorious scandal of Stephen Guest in The Mill
on the Floss has nothing to do with 'art', but is a different kind of
thing altogether, that it is interesting and significant.
It is a related point that if 'charm' prevails in Adam Bede (and, as
Henry James indicates, in Silas Marner), there should be another
word for what we find in The Mill on the Floss. The fresh directness
of a child's vision that we have there, in the autobiographical part,
is something very different from the 'afternoon light' of reminis-
cence. This recaptured early vision, in its combination of clarity
with rich 'significance', is for us, no doubt, enchanting; but it
doesn't idealize, or soften with a haze of sentiment (and it can't
consort with 'art'). Instead of Mrs. Poyser and her setting we have
the uncles and aunts. The bearing of the change is plain if we ask
whether there could have been a Dinah in this company. Could
there have been an Adam ? They both belong to a different world.
In fact, the Gleggs and the Pullets and the Dodson clan associate,
not with the frequenters of Mrs. Poyser's kitchen, but with the tribe
that forgathers at Stone Court waiting for Peter Featherstone to die.
The intensity of Maggie's naive vision is rendered with the con-
38
THE EARLY PHASE
vincmg truth of genius ; but the render! ig brings in the intelligence
that goes with the genius and is of it, and the force of the whole effect
is the product of understanding. This is an obvious enough point.
I make it because I want to observe that, although the supremely
mature mind of Middlemarch is not yet manifested in The Mill on the
Floss, the creative powers at work here owe their successes as much
to a very fine intelligence as to powers of feeling and remembering
a fact that, even if it is an obvious one, the customary stress never-
theless leaves unattended to, though it is one that must get its full
value if George Eliot's development is to be understood. I will
underline it by saying that the presentment of the Dodson clan is of
marked sociological interest not accidentally, but because of the
intellectual qualifications of tHe novelist.
But of course the most striking qualit/ of The Mill on the Floss is
that which goes wi Ji the strong autobiographical element. It strikes
us as an emotional tone. We feel an urgency, a resonance, a per-
sonal vibration, adverting us of the poignantly immediate presence
of the author. Since the vividness, the penetration and the irresist-
ible truth of the best of the book are clearly bound up with this
quality, to suggest that it also entails limitations that the critic cannot
ignore, since they in turn are inseparable from disastrous weaknesses
in George Eliot's handling of her themes, is perhaps a delicate busi-
ness. But the case is so: the emotional quality represents some-
thing, a need or hunger in George Eliot, that shows itself to be
insidious company for her intelligence apt to supplant it and take
command. The acknowledged weaknesses and faults of The Mill
on the Floss, in fact, are of a more interesting kind than the accepted
view recognizes.
That Maggie Tulliver is essentially identical with the young Mary
Ann Evans we all know. She has the intellectual potentiality for
which the environment into which she is born doesn't provide much
encouragement ; she has the desperate need for affection and in-
timate personal relations ; and above all she has the need for an
emotional exaltation, a religious enthusiasm, that shall transfigure
the ordinariness of daily life and sweep her up in an inspired devo-
tion of self to some ideal purpose. There is, however, a difference
between Maggie Tulliver and Mary Ann Evans : Maggie is bea 1 *-
tiful. She is triumphantly beautiful, after having been the ugly
39
GEORGE ELIOT
duckling. The experience of a sensitive child in this latter role
among insensitive adults is evoked with great poignancy : George
Eliot had only to remember. The glow that comes with imagining
the duckling turned swan hardly needs analysing ; it can be felt in
every relevant page, and it is innocent enough. Bin it is intimately
related to things in the book that common consent finds deplorable,
and it is necessary to realize this in order to realize their nature and
significance and see what the weaknesses of The Mill on the Floss
really are.
There is Stephen Guest, who is universally recognized to be a sad
lapse on George Eliot's part. He is a more significant lapse, I think,
than criticism commonly allows. Here is Leslie Stephen (George
Eliot, p. 104) :
'George Eliot did not herself understand what a mere hair-
dresser's block she was describing in Mr. Stephen Guest. He is
another instance of her incapacity for portraying the opposite
sex. No man could have introduced such a character without
perceiving what an impression must be made upon his readers.
We cannot help regretting Maggie's fate ; she is touching and
attractive to the last ; but I, at least, cannot help wishing that
the third volume could have been suppressed. I am inclined
to sympathize with the readers of Clarissa Harlowe when they
entreated Richardson to save Lovelace's soul. Do, I mentally
exclaim, save this charming Maggie from damning herself by
this irrelevant and discordant degradation.'
That the presentment of Stephen Guest is unmistakably feminine
no one will be disposed to deny, but not only is the assumption of a
general incapacity refuted by a whole gallery of triumphs, Stephen
himself is sufficiently 'there* to give the drama a convincing force.
Animus against him for his success with Maggie and exasperation
with George Eliot for allowing it shouldn't lead us to dispute that
plain fact they don't really amount to a judgment of his unreality.
To call him a 'mere hairdresser's block' is to express a valuation a
valuation extremely different from George Eliot's. And if we our-
selves differ from her in the same way (who doesn't ?), we must be
careful about the implication of the adjective when we agree that
her valuation is surprising. For Leslie Stephen Maggie's entangle-
40
THE EARLY PHASE
ment with Stephen Guest is an 'irrelevant and discordant degrada-
tion*. Irrelevant to what and discordant with what ?
'The whole theme of the book is surely the contrast between
the "beautiful soul" and the commonplace surroundings. It is
the awakening of the spiritual and imaginative nature and the
need of finding some room for the play of the higher faculties,
whether in the direction of religious mysticism or of human
affection.'
It is bad enough that the girl who is distinguished not only by
beauty but by intelligence should be made to fall for a provincial
dandy ; the scandal or incredibility (runs the argument) becomes
even worse when we add that she is addicted to Thomas i Kempis
and has an exalted spiritual nature. Renunciation is a main theme
in her history and m her daily meditations ; but when temptation
takes the form of Mr. Stephen Guest ! It is incredible, or insuffer-
able in so far we have to accept it, for temptation at this level can
have nothing to do with the theme of renunciation as we have
become familiar with it in Maggie's spiritual life it is 'irrelevant
and discordant*. This is the position.
Actually, the soulful side of Maggie, her hunger for ideal exalta-
tions, as it is given us in the earlier part of the book, is just what
should make us say, on reflection, that her weakness for Stephen
Guest is not so surprising after all. It is commonly accepted, this
soulful side of Maggie, with what seems to me a remarkable absence
of criticism. It is offered by George Eliot herself and this of course
is the main point with a remarkable absence of criticism. There is,
somewhere, a discordance, a discrepancy, a failure to reduce things
to a due relevance : it is a characteristic and significant failure in
George Eliot. It is a discordance, not between her ability to present
Maggie's yearnings and her ability to present Stephen Guest as an
irresistible temptation, but between her presentment of those yearn-
ings on the one hand and her own distinction of intelligence on the
other.
That part of Maggie's make-up is done convincingly enough ; it
is done from the inside. One's criticism is that it is done too purely
from the inside. Maggie's emotional and spiritual stresses, her ex-
altations and renunciations, exhibit, naturally, all the marks of
GEORGE ELIOT
immaturity ; they invor* c confusions and immature valuations ;
they belong to a stage of development at which the capacity to make
some essential distinctions has not yet been arrived at at which
the poised impersonality that is one of the conditions of being able
to make them can't be achieved. There is nothing against George
Eliot's presenting this immaturity with tender sympathy ; but we
ask, and ought to ask, of a great novelist something more. 'Sym-
pathy and understanding' is the common formula of praise, but
understanding, in any strict sense, is just what she doesn't show. To
understand immaturity would be to ' place ' it, with however subtle
an implication, by relating it to mature experience. But when
George Eliot touches on these given intensities of Maggie's inner
life the vibration comes directly and simply from the novelist, pre-
cluding the presence of a maturer intelligence than Maggie's own.
It is in these places that we are most likely to make with conscious
critical intent the comment that in George Eliot's presentment of
Maggie there is an element of self-idealization. The criticism
sharpens itself when we say that with the self-idealization there goes
an element of self-pity. George Eliot's attitude to her own im-
maturity as represented by Maggie is the reverse of a mature one.
Maggie Tulliver, in fact, represents an immaturity that George
Eliot never leaves safely behind her. We have it wherever we have
this note, and where it prevails her intelligence and mature judg-
ment are out of action :
'Maggie in her brown frock, with her eyes reddened and
her heavy hair pushed back, looking from the bed where her
father lay, to the dull walls of this sad chamber which was the
centre of her world, was a creature full of eager, passionate
longings for all that was beautiful and glad ; thirsty for all
knowledge ; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died
away and would not come nearer to her ; with a blind, uncon-
scious yearning for something that would link together the
wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul
a sense of home in it.' l
This 'blind, unconscious yearning' never, for all the intellectual
contacts it makes as M?ggie grows up and from which it acquires a
1 The Mil on tfe Floss, Book III, Chapter V, the end.
42
THE EARLY PHASE
sense of consciousness, learns to understand itself: Maggie remains
quite naive about its nature. She is quite incapable of analysing it
into the varied potentialities it associates. In the earlier part of the
book, from which the passage juct quoted comes, the religious and
idealistic aspect of the yearning is not complicated by any discon-
certing insurgence from out of the depths beneath its vagueness,
J3ut with that passage compare this :
'In poor Maggie's highly-strung, hungry nature just come
away from a third-rate schoolroom, with all its jarring sounds
and petty round of tasks these apparently trivial causes had
the effect of rousing and exalting her imagination in a way that
was mysterious to herself. It was not that she thought dis-
tinctly of Mr. Stephen Guest, or dwelt on the indications that
he looked at her with admiration ; it was rather that she felt the
half-remote presence of a world of love and beauty and delight,
made up of vague, mingled images from all the poetry she had
ever read, or had ever woven in her dreamy reveries/ l
The juxtaposition of the two passages makes us revert to a sen-
tence quoted above from Leslie Stephen, and see in it a hint that he,
pretty plainly, missed :
'It is the awakening of the spiritual and imaginative nature
and the need of finding some room for the play of the higher
faculties, whether in the direction of religious mysticism or of
human affection/
For the second alternative we need to couple with 'religious
mysticism* a phrase more suggestive of emotional intensity than
Leslie Stephen's. And we then can't help asking whether the 'play
of the higher faculties' that is as intimately associated with a passion
for Stephen Guest as the two last-quoted paragraphs together bring
out can be as purely concerned with the 'higher' as Maggie and
George Eliot believe (unchallenged, it seems, by Leslie Stephen).
Obviously there is a large lack of self-knowledge in Maggie a
very natural one, but shared, more remarkably, by George Eliot.
Maggie, it is true, has the most painful throes of conscience and they
ultimately prevail. But she has no sense that Stephen Guest (apart,
of course, from the insufficient strength of moral fibre betrayed
1 Book VI, Chapter III, third paragraph.
43
GEORGE ELIOT
under the strain of temp ation and it is to Maggie he succumbs) is
not worthy of her spiritual and idealistic nature. There is no hint
that, if Fate had allowed them to come together innocently, she
wouldn't have found him a pretty satisfactory soul-mate ; there, for
George Eliot, lies the tragedy it is conscience opposes. Yet the
ordinary nature of the fascination is made quite plain :
'And then, to have the footstool placed carefully by a too
self-confident personage not any self-confident personage, but
one in particular, who suddenly looks humble and anxious, and
lingers, bending still, to ask if there is not some draught in that
position between the window and the fireplace, and if he may
not be allowed to move the work-table for her these things
will summon a little of the too-ready, traitorous tenderness into
a woman's eyes, compelled as she is in her girlish time to learn
her life-lessons in very trivial language.' (Book VI, Chapter
VII.)
And it is quite plain that George Eliot shares to the full the sense
of Stephen's irresistibleness the vibration establishes it beyond a
doubt :
'For hours Maggie felt as if her struggle had been in vain.
For hours every other thought that she strove to summon was
thrust aside by the image of Stephen waiting for the single word
that would bring him to her. She did not read the letter : she
heard him uttering it, and the voice shook her with its old
strange power. . . . And yet that promise of joy in the place of
sadness did not make the dire force of the temptation to Maggie.
It was Stephen's tone of misery, it was the doubt in the justice
of her own resolve, that made the balance tremble, and made
her once start from her seat to reach the pen and paper, and
write "Come".'
There is no suggestion of any antipathy between this fascination
and Maggie's 'higher faculties', apart from the moral veto that
imposes renunciation. The positive counterpart of renunciation in
the 'higher* realm to which this last is supposed to belong is the
exaltation, transcending all conflicts and quotidian stalenesses, that
goes with an irresistibly ideal self-devotion. It is significant that the
passages describing such an exaltation, whether as longed for or as
attained and there are many in George Eliot's works have a close
44
THE EARLY PHASE
affinity in tone and feeling with this (fron: the chapter significantly
headed, Borne along by the tide) :
'And they went. Maggie felt that she was being led down
the garden among the roses, being helped with firm tender care
into the boat, having the cushion and cloak arranged for her
feet, and her parasol opened for her (which she had forgotten)
all this by the stronger presence that seemed to bear her along
without any act of her own will, like the added self which
comes with the sudden exalting influence of a strong tonic
and she felt nothing else/ (BooL VI, Chapter Xffl.)
The satisfaction got by George Eliot from imaginative participa-
tion in exalted enthusiasms and self-devotions would, if she could
suddenly have gained the power of analysis that in these regions she
lacked, have surprised her by the association of elements it repre-
sented.
The passage just quoted gives the start of the expedition with
Stephen in which chance, the stream and the tide are allowed,
temporarily, to decide Maggie's inner conflict. It has been remarked
that George Eliot has a fondness for using boats, water and chance
in this way. But there are distinctions to be made. The way in
which Maggie, exhausted by the struggle, surrenders to the chance
that leaves her to embark alone with Stephen, and then, with inert
will, lets the boat carry her down-stream until it is too late, so that
the choice seems takeu from her and the decision compelled all
this is admirable. This is insight and understanding, and comes
trom the psychologist who is to analyse for us Gwendolen Harleth's
acceptance of Grandcourt. But the end of The Mill on the Floss
belongs to another kind of art. Some might place it under the * art*
referred to by Henry James. And it is certainly a * dramatic* close
of a kind congenial to the Victorian novel-reader. But it has for
the critic more significance than this suggests : George Eliot is,
emotionally, fully engaged in it. The qualifying * emotionally' is
necessary because of the criticism that has to be urged : something
so like a kind of daydream indulgence we are all familiar with could
not have imposed itself on the novelist as the right ending if her
mature intelligence had been fully engaged, giving her fiill self-
knowledge. The flooded river has no symbolic or metaphorical
value. It is only the dreamed-of perfect accident that gives us the
45
GEORGE ELIOT
opportunity for the drcamed-of heroic act the act that shall
vindicate us against a harshly misjudging world, bring emotional
fulfilment and (in others) changes of heart, and provide a gloriously
tragic curtain. Not that the sentimental in it is embarrassingly
gross, but the finality is not that of great art, and the significance is
what I have suggested a revealed immaturity.
The success of Silas Marner, that charming minor masterpiece, is
conditioned by the absence of personal immediacy ; it is a success of
reminiscent and enchanted re-creation : Silas Marner has in it, in its
solid way, something of the fairy-tale. That 'solid' presents itself
because of the way in which the moral fable is realized in terms of a
substantial real world. But this, though re-seen through adult
experience, is die world of childhood and youth the world as
directly known then, and what is hardly distinguishable from that,
the world as known through family reminiscence, conveyed in anec-
dote and fireside history. The mood of enchanted adult reminis-
cence blends with the re-captured traditional aura to give the world
of Silas Marner its atmosphere. And it is this atmosphere that condi-
tions the success of the moral intention. We take this intention
quite seriously, or, rather, we are duly affected by a realized moral
significance ; the whole history has been conceived in a profoundly
and essentially moral imagination. But the atmosphere precludes
too direct a reference to our working standards of probability that
is, to our everyday sense of how doings happen ; so that there is an
answer to Leslie Stephen when he comments on Silas Marner in its
quality of moral fable :
'The supposed event the moral recovery of a nature re-
duced by injustice and isolation to the borders of sanity strikes
one perhaps as more pretty than probable. At least, if one had
to dispose of a deserted child, the experiment of dropping it
by the cottage of a solitary in the hope that he would bring it
up to its advantage and to his own regeneration would hardly
be tried by a judicious philanthropist/
Leslie Stephen, of course, is really concerned to make a limiting
judgment, that which is made in effect when he says :
'But in truth the whole story is conceived in a way which
makes a pleasant conclusion natural and harmonious/
46
THE EARLY PHASE
There is nothing that strikes us as false aSout the story ; its charm
depends upon our being convinced of its moral truth. But in our
description of the satisfaction got from it, * charm* remains the
significant word.
The force of the limiting implication may be brought out by a
comparative reference to another masterpiece of fiction that it is
jiatural to bring under the head of * moral fable* : Dickens's Hard
Times. The heightened reality of that great book (which combines
a perfection of 'art* in the Flaubertian sense with an un-Flaubertian
moral strength and human richness) has in it nothing of the fairy-
tale, and is such as to preclude pleasantness altogether ; the satis-
faction given depends on a moral significance that can have no
relations with charm. But the comparison is, of course, unfair :
Hard Times has a large and complex theme, involving its author's
profoundest response to contemporary civilization, while Silas
Marner is modestly conscious of its minor quality.
The unfairness may be compensated by taking up Leslie Stephen's
suggestion that * Silas Marner is ... scarcely equalled in English
literature, unless by Mr. Hprdy's rustics in Far from the Madding
Crowd and other early works'. Actually, the comparison is to
George Eliot's advantage (enormously so), and to Hardy's detri-
ment, in ways already suggested. The praises that have been given
to George Eliot for the talk at the Rainbow are deserved. It is
indeed remarkable thr t a woman should have been able to present
so convincingly an exclusively masculine milieu. It is the more
remarkable when we recall the deplorable Bob Jakin of The Mill on
the Floss> who is so obviously and embarrassingly a feminine product.
Silas Marner closes the first phase of George Eliot's creative life.
She finds that, if she is to go on being a novelist, it must be one of a
very different kind. And Romola, her first attempt to achieve the
necessary inventiveness, might well have justified the conviction
that her creative life was over.
(ii) 'Romola* to ' Middlemarch'
If we hesitated to judge that in Romola George Eliot 'proceeds
from the abstract to the concrete' it would be because 'proceed*
might seem to imply 'attain*. Of this monument of excogitation
47
GEORGE ELIOT
and reconstruction Henry James himself says : 'More than any of
her novels it was evolved from her moral consciousness a moral
consciousness encircled by a prodigious amount of literary research*.
The 'figures and situations' are indeed 'deeply studied and massively
supported', and they represent characteristic preoccupations of the
novelist, but they fail to emerge from the state of generalized
interest : they are not brought to any sharp edge of realization. Tito
Melema, developing a mere mild insufficiency of positive unselfish-
ness into a positive and lethal viciousness, illustrates a favourite
theme, moral and psychological, but he remains an illustration,
thought of, thought out, and painstakingly specified ; never be-
coming anything like a prior reality that embodies the theme and
presents it as life. The analogous and worse failure in respect of
Savonarola is fairly suggested by such passages of laborious analytic
prose as Leslie Stephen quotes (George Eliot, p. 134), with the
comment :
'this almost Germanic concatenation of clauses not only puts
such obvious truths languidly, but keeps Savonarola himself at
a distance. We are not listening to a Hamlet, but to a judicious
critic analysing the state of mind which prompts "to be or not
to be".'
There is no presence, that is ; the analysis serves instead.
Romola herself Leslie Stephen judges more favourably indeed,
very favourably. And it is true that she represents something other
than the failure of a powerful mind to warm analysis into creation ;
she is a palpably emotional presence : Romola, in fact, is another
idealized George Eliot less real than Maggie TulUver and more
idealized. While patrician and commandingly beautiful, she has
also George Eliot's combination of intellectual power, emancipation,
inherent piety, and hunger for exaltations.
'The pressing problem for Romola just then was ... to
keep alive that flame of unselfish emotion by which a life of
sadness might still be a life of active love.'
With 'Maggie' substituted for 'Romola', that might have come
as a patently autobiographical note from The Mill on the Floss. And
if is the immediate presence of the yearning translator of Strauss
that we feel in such situations as this :
48
ROAfOL^l TO MIDDLEMARCH
'Romola, kneeling with buried fact on the altar step, was
enduring one of those sickening moments when die enthusiasm
which had come to her as the only energy strong enough to
make life worthy, seemed to be inevitably bound up with vain
dreams and wilful eye-shutting/
And when we read that 'tender fellow-feeling for the nearest has
its danger too, rmd is apt to be timid and sceptical towards the larger
aims without which life cr,nnot rise into religion* we know that we
are in direct contact with the 'pressing problem' of the nineteenth-
century intellectual, contemporary of Mill, Matthew Arnold and
Comte. So that we can hardly help being pryingly personal in our
conjectures when, going on, we read :
' No one who has ever known what it is thus to lose faith in
a fellow man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced,
will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible
Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the
dignity of life sinks too : we cease to believe in our own better
self, since that also is part of the common nature which is
degraded in our thought ; and all the finer impulses of the soul
are dulled/
Dr. John Chapman ? we ask.
The answer, of course, doesn't matter The point we have to
make is that this closeness of relation between heroine and author
is no more here than elsewhere in George Eliot a strength. Romola,
in fact, has none of the reality associated with Maggie Tulliver, but
she brings in the weakness, associated with Maggie, that embarrasses
us in The Mill on the Floss.
The passage just quoted opens the episode in which Romola,
lying down in an open boat, abandons herself to the winds and tides
'To be freed from the burden of choice when all motive was
bruised, to commit herself, sleeping, to destiny which would either
bring death or else new necessities that might rouse a new life in
her*. 'Had she', she asks, as she lies in die gliding boat, 'found
anything like the dream of her girlhood ? No.' But she is to find
now, in alleged actuality, something embarrassingly like a girlhood
dream. She drifts ashore at the plague-stricken village, and, a
ministering Madonna 'the Mother with the glory about her
tending the sick' is a miracle for the villajers. It is a miracle for
D 49
GEORGE ELIOT
her too, rescuing her from her 'pressing problem* with a 'flame of
unselfish emotion', provided by a heaven-sent chance out of the
void.
Few will want to read Romola a cecond time, and few can ever
have got through it once without some groans It is indubitably the
work of a very gifted mind, but of a mind misusing itself; and it is
the one novel answering to the kind of account of George Eliot that
became current during the swing of the pendulum against her after
her death.
Yet Romola has habitually been included in the lists of cheap re-
prints, and probably a good many more readers have tackled it than
have ever taken up Felix Holt. In writing Felix Holt, which brings
us back to England, George Eliot did look up The Times for 1830 or
thereabouts ; but there was no tremendous and exhausting labour
of historical reconstruction. What called for the most uncongenial
hard work on her part was the elaboration of the plot work (it
strikes us to-day) about as perversely, if not as desiccatingly, mis-
directed as that which went to evoking life at Florence in the time
of Savonarola. The complications of the thorough-paced Victorian
plot depend, with painful correctness (professional advice having
been taken of the Positivist friend, Frederic Harrison), on some
esoteric subtleties of the law of entail, and they demand of the reader
a strenuousness of attention that, if he is an admirer of George Eliot,
he is unwilling to devote.
It is in the theme represented by the title of the book that the
'reflective' preponderance of the 'moral consciousness', working
from the 'abstract* without being able to turn it into convincing
perception, notably manifests itself. Felix Holt is the ideal working
man. Though educated, he is who! 1 y loyal to his class (to the extent
of remaining shaggy in appearance and manners), and dedicates his
life to its betterment ; but, while proposing to take an active part
in politics, he refuses to countenance any of the compromises of
organized political action. He denounces the Radical agent for
fighting the constituency in the usual way. Rational appeal to un-
alloyed principle that alone can be permitted ; the time-honoured
methods of party warfare, defended as practical necessities for party
s-"xess, debase and betray the people's cause, and there must be no
truck with them. Felix is as noble and courageous in act as in ideal,
50
ROMOLA TO MIDDLEMARCH
and is wholly endorsed by his rreator. That in presenting these
unrealities George Eliot gives proof of a keen interest in political,
social and economic history, and in the total complex movement of
civilization, and exhibits an impressive command of the facts, would
seem to confirm the deprecatory view commonly taken of the
relation between intellectual and novelist. Here is the way Felix
Holt, Radical, calks :
'"Oh, yes, your ringed and scented men of the people! I
won't be one of them. Let a mm throttle himself with a satin
stock, and he'll get new wants and new motives. Metamor-
phosis will have begun at his neck-joint, and it will go on till it
has changed his likings first and then his reasoning, which will
follow his likings as the feet of a hungry dog follow his nose.
I'll have none of your clerkly gentility. I might end by collect-
ing greasy pence from poor men to buy myself a fine coat and
a glutton's dinner, on pretence of serving the poor men. I'd
sooner be Paley's fat pigeon than a demagogue all tongue and
stomach, though" here Felix changed his voice a little "I
should like well enough to be another sort of demagogue, if I
could."
'"Then you have a strong interest in the great political
movements of these times ? " said Mr. Lyon, with a perceptible
flashing of the eyes.
'"I should think so. I despise every man who has not or,
having it, doesn't try to rouse it in other men".'
Here he is addressing a young lady at their first meeting :
'"Oh, your niceties I know what they are," said Felix, in
his usual fortissimo. "They all go on your system of make-
believe. * Rottenness ' may suggest what is unpleasant, so you'd
better say 'sugar-plums', or something else such a long way off
the fact that nobody is obliged to think of it. Those are your
roundabout euphuisms that dress up swindling till it looks as
well as honesty, and shoot with boiled pease instead of bullets.
I hate your gentlemanly speakers".' l
The consequences of general intention combined with inexperi-
1 Compare this later address of his to Esther: '"I wonder", he went on,
still looking at her, "whether the subtle measuring ot forces will ever come
to measuring the force there would be in one beauaful woman whose mind
was as noble as her face was beautiful who made a man's passion for her
rush in one current with all the great aims of his life".'
51
GEORGE ELIOT
cnce are disastrously plain. The idealizing bent se^n to be so marked
in Adam Bede when we compare him with Caleb Garth of Middle-
march is not really a strength ; but George Eliot knew the country
artisan at first hand and intimately. In offering to present the
Dignity of Labour in the ideal town working-man she is relying on
her 'moral consciousness* unqualified by first-hand knowledge.
Felix Holt's very unideal mother, though not the same kind of
disaster (she's only a minor figure, of course), is not much more con-
vincing ; she seems to be done out of Dickens rather than from life.
The Reverend Rufus Lyon, the Congregationalist minister, heroic-
ally quaint reminder of the heroic age of Puritanism (and inspired,
one guesses, by Scott), is incredible and a bore to say which is a
severe criticism, since his talk occupies a large proportion of the
book. Esther, the beautiful and elegant young lady passing as his
daughter, is interesting only in relation to other feminine studies
of the author's, and to her treatment in general of feminine
charm.
But there is an element in the novel as yet untouched on. It is
represented by this, where the dialogue is so different in quality
from that in which Felix Holt figures, and the analysis of so different
an order (and in so different a prose) from that characteristic of
Romola :
'"Harold is remarkably acute Lnd clevei", he began at last,
since Mrs.Transome did not speak. " If he gets into Parliament,
I have no doubt he will distinguish himself. He has a quick eye
for business of all kinds."
"'That is no comfort to me", said Mrs. Transome. To-day
she was more conscious than usual of that bitterness which was
always in her mind in Jermyn's presence, but which was care-
fully suppressed because she could not endure that the degrada-
tion she inwardly felt should ever become visible or audible in
acts or words of her own should ever be reflected in any word
or look of his. For years there had been a deep silence about the
past between them : on her side, because she remembered ;
on his, because he more and more forgot.
'"I trust he is aot unkind to you in any way. I know his
opinions pain you ; but I trust you find him in everything else
disposed to be a good son."
Oh, to be sure good as men are disposed to be to women,
52
ROMOLA TO MIDDLEMARCH
giving them cushions and carriages, and recommending them
to enjoy themselves, and then expecting them to be contented
under contempt and neglect. I have no power over him
remember that none."
'Jermyn turned to look in Mrs. Transome's face : it was long
since he had heard her speak to him as if she were losing her
self-command.
'"Has he shown any unpleasant feeling about your manage-
ment of the affairs ?"
* " My management of the affairs ! ' ' Mrs. Transome said, with
concentrated rage, flashing a fierce look at Jermyn. She
checked herself: she felt as if she were lighting a torch to flare
on her own past folly and misery. It was a resolve which had
become a habit, that she would never quarrel with this man
never tell him what she saw him tj be. She had kept her
woman's pride and sensibility intact : through all her life there
had vibrated the maiden need to have her hand kissed and be
the object of chivalry. And so she sank into silence again,
trembling.
'Jermyn felt annoyed nothing more. There was nothing in
his mind corresponding to the intricate meshes of sensitiveness
in Mrs. Transome's. He was anything but stupid; yet he
always blundered when he wanted to be delicate or magnani-
mous ; he constantly sought to soothe o diers by praising himself.
Moral vulgarity cleaved to him like an hereditary odour. He
blundered now.
'"My dear Mrs. Transome", he said, in a tone of bland
kindness, "you are agitated you appear angry with me. Yet
I think, if you consider, you will see that you have nothing to
complain of in me, unless you will complain of the inevitable
course of man's life. I have always met your wishes both in
happy circumstances and in unhappy ones. I should be ready
to do so now, if it were possible. '
'Every sentence was as pleasant to her as if it had been cut
in her bared arm. Some men's kindness and love-making are
more exasperating, more humiliating than others' derision, but
the pitiable woman who has once made herself secretly depend-
ent on a man who is beneath her in feelirg must bear that
humiliation for fear of worse. Coarse kindness is at least better
than coarse anger ; and in all private quarrels the duller nature
is triumphant by reason of its dulness. Mrs. Transome knew
53
GEORGE ELIOT
in. her inmost soul that those relations which had sealed her lips
on Jermyn's conduct in business matters, had been with him a
ground for presuming that he should have impunity in any lax
dealing into which circumstances had led him. She knew that
she herself had endured all fhe more privation because of his
dishonest selfishness. And now, Harold's long-deferred heir-
ship, and his return with startlingly unexpected penetration,
acitivity, and assertion of mastery, had placed them both in the
full presence of a difficulty which had been prepared by the
years of vague uncertainty as to issues/
It should be plain from the quality of this that the theme it handles
is profoundly felt and sharply realized. This theme concerns Mrs.
Transome, her son Harold, and the family lawyer, Matthew
Jermyn. It is utterly different in kind from anything else in Felix
Holt and from anything earlier of George EHot's, and when we
come to it we see finally that Henry James's antithesis, 'perceptive*
and 'reflective', will not do. For if we ask how this art is so
astonishingly finer and maturer than anything George Eliot had
done before, the answer is in terms of a perception that is so much
more clear and profound because the perceiving focuses the pro-
found experience of years experience worked over by reflective
thought, and so made capable of focusing. What we perceive
depends on what we bring to the perceiving ; and George Eliot
brought a magnificent intelligence, functioning here as mature
understanding. Intelligence in her was not always worsted by
emotional needs ; the relation between the artist and the intellectual
in her (with the formidable 'exemption from cerebral lassitude')
was not always a matter of her intellect being enlisted in the service
of her immaturity.
The beneficent relation between artist and intellectual is to be seen
in the new impersonality of the Transome theme. The theme is
realized with an intensity certainly not inferior to that of the most
poignant autobiographical places in George Eliot, but the directly
personal vibration the directly personal engagement of the novelist
that we feel in Maggie Tulliver's intensities even at their most
valid is absent here. 'The more perfect the artist, the more com-
pletely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind
which creates' : it is in the part of Felix Holt dealing with Mrs.
54
ROMOLA TO MIDDLEMARCH
Transome that George Eliot becomes one of the great creative
artists. She has not here, it will be noted, a heroine with whom
she can be tempted to identify herself. Mrs. Transome is County,
and how unlike she is to the novelist appears sufficiently in this
account of he*- :
'She had that high-born imperious air which would have
marked her as an object of hatred and reviling by a revolution-
ary rhob. Her person was too typical of social distinctions to
be passed by with indifference by anyone : it would have
fitted an empress in her own right, who had had to rule in spite
of faction, to dare the violation of treaties and dread retributive
invasions, to grasp after new territories, to be defiant in desper-
ate circumstances, and to feel a woman's hunger of the heart for
ever unsatisfied. . . .When she was young she had been thought
wonderfully clever and accomplished, and had been rather
ambitious of intellectual superiority had secretly picked out
for private reading the lighter parts of dangerous French
authors and in company had been able to talk of Mr. Burke's
style, or of Chateaubriand's eloquence had laughed at the
Lyrical Ballads and admired Mr. Southey's Thalaba. She
always thought that the dangerous French authors were wicked
and that her reading of them was a sin ; but many sinful things
were highly agreeable to her, and many things which she did
not doubt to be good and true were dull and meaningless. She
found ridicule of Biblical characters very amusing, and she was
interested in stories of illicit passion ; but she believed all the
while that truth and safety lay in due attendance on prayers and
sermons, in the admirable doctrines and ritual of the Church of
England, equally remote from Puritanism and Popery ; in fact,
in such a view of this world and the next as would preserve the
existing arrangements of English society quite unshaken, keep-
ing down the obtrusiveriess of the vulgar and the discontent of
the poor.'
The treatment of Mrs. Transome is not, as this description may
suggest, ironical. The irony, a tragic irony, resides in her situation,
which is presented with complete objectivity though with
poignant sympathy, unlike as her strains arid distresses are to the
novelist's own. In this sympathy there is not a trace of self-pi *y
or self-indulgence. Mrs. Transome is a study in Nemesis. And,
55
GEORGE ELIOT
although her case is conceited in an imagination that is profoundly
moral, die presentment of it is a matter of psychological observation
psychological observation so utterly convincing in its significance
that the price paid by Mrs. Transome for her sin in inevitable
consequences doesn't need a moralist's insistence, and there is none ;
to speak of George Eliot here as a moralist would, one feels, be to
misplace a stress. She is simply a great artist a great novelist,
with a great novelist's psychological insight and fineness of human
valuation. Here is one aspect of Mrs. Transome's tragedy :
'The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting
all other sensibilities ; it is an expansion of the animal existence ;
it enlarges the imagined range for self to move in : but in after
years it can only continue to be joy on the same terms as other
long-lived love that L, by much suppression of self, and
power of living in the experience of another. Mrs. Transome
had darkly felt the pressure of that unchangeable fact. Yet she
had clung to the belief that somehow the possession of this son
was the best thing she lived for ; to believe otherwise would
have made her memory too ghastly a companion.'
Mrs. Transome, of course, is not capable of recognizing the
'unchangeable fact' of which she 'darkly feels the pressure'. She
cannot alter herself, and for her the worth and meaning of life lie in
command, and the imposition of her will. This is shown to us, not
with any incitement to censure, but as making her, in its inevitable
consequences, tragically pitiable. For her feeble-minded husband
she can feel little but contempt". That the unsatisfactory elder son
who took after him is dead is matter for rejoicing : Harold, the
second and quite other son, now becomes the heir, and, returning
home from the Levant where Iv* has made a fortune, will be able
to put the encumbered family estate on a new footing, so that,
belatedly, the lady of Transome Court will assume real dominion,
and take her due place in the County. That dream, for many
starved years the reason for living, dies as soon as they meet, and
the despairing bitterness that engulfs her as she realizes that he is
indeed her son, 1 and that for him too command and the exercise of
will are the meaning of life, is evoked (notably in the exchanges with
1 ' Under the shock of discovering her son's Radicalism Mrs. Transome had
no impulse to say one thirg rather than another; as in a, man who has just
56
RCMOLA TO MIDDLEMARCH
Denner, her maid) with an astringently moving power unsurpassed
in literature.
To the tormenting frustration and hopelessness is soon added fear.
It is not only that Harold, with his poised kindness that is so utterly
unaware of her, frustrates her social hopes by proclaiming himself a
Radical, and, at home, supersedes her authority, her raison d'etre ;
he terrifies her by proposing to follow up his suspicions concerning
Matthew Jermyn's custodianship of the family interests. The mine
waiting to be detonated will blast them all three. For Harold is also
Jermyn's son.
It is remarkable and it is characteristic of George Eliot's mature
art that the treatment of Mrs. Transome's early lapse should have
in it nothing of the Victorian moralist. In the world of this art the
atmosphere of the taboo is unknown ; Hiere is none of the excited
hush, the skirting round, the thrill of shocked reprobation, or any
of the forms of sentimentality typical of Victorian fiction when
such themes are handled. There is instead an intently matter-of-
fact directness : this is human nature, this is the fact and these are the
inexorable consequences. A.part from the fear, the worst face, as
Mrs. Transome sees it, of regret for the past is what we have here (it
follows on the first long quotation made above from Felix Holt) :
'In this position, with a great dread hanging over her, which
Jermyn knew, and ought to have felt that he had caused her,
she was inclined tu lash him with indignation, to scorch him
with the words that were just the fit names for his doings
inclined all the more when he spoke with an insolent blandness,
ignoring all that was truly in her heart. But no sooner did the
words "You have brought it on me" rise within her than she
heard within also the retort, "You brought it on yourself".
Not for all the world beside could she bear to hear that retort
uttered from without. What did she do? With strange
sequence to all that rapid tumult, after a few moments' silence
she said, in a gentle and almost tremulous voice
'"Let me take your arm". . . .
'As she took away her hand, Jermyn let his arm fall, put
been branded on the forehead all wonted motives would be uprooted. Harold,
on his side, had no wish opposed to filial kindness, but his busy thoughts
were imperiously determined by habits which had no reference to ary
woman's feelings. . . .'
57
GEORGE ELIOT
both his hands in his pockets, and shrugging his shoulders said,
"I shall use him as he uses me".
'jermyn had turned round his savage side, and the bland-
ness was out of sight. It was this that had always frightened
Mrs. Transome : there was a possibility of fierce insolence in
this man who was to pass with those nearest to her as her in-
debted servant, but whose brand she secretly bore. She was as
powerless with him as she was with her son.
' This woman, who loved rule, dared not speak another word
of attempted persuasion/
Mrs. Transome has, and can have, no impulse towards what the
moralist means by repentance :
' She had no ultimate analysis of things that went beyond
blood and family th^ Herons of Fenshore or the Badgers of
Hillbury. She had never seen behind the canvas with which
her life was hung. In the dim background there was the
burning mount and the tables of the law ; in the foreground
there was Lady Debarry privately gossiping about her, and
Lady Wyvern finally deciding not to send her invitations to
dinner/
She is herself here in her reaction to Jermyn's suggestion that he
shall be saved by her telling Harold :
'"But now you have asked me, I will never tell him ! Be
ruined no do something mure dastardly to save yourself.
If I sinned, my judgment went beforehand that I should sin
for a man like you"/
This limitation is of the essence of her tragedy ; it goes, as George
Eliot presents her, with her being an impressive and sympathy-
commanding figure. Here we have her enduring the agonized
helplessness of a moment of tension :
'When Harold left the table she went into the long drawing-
room, where she might relieve her restlessness by walking up
and down, and catch the sound of Jermyn's entrance into
Harold's room, which was close by. Here she moved to and
fro amongst the rose-coloured satin of chairs and curtains the
great story of this world reduced for her to the little tale of her
own existence dull obscurity everywhere, except where the
keen light fell on the narrow track of her own lot, wide only
58
ROMOLA TO MIDDLEMARCH
for a woman's anguish. At last she heard the expected ring and
footstep, and the opening and closing door. Unable to walk
about any longer, she sank into a large cushioned chair, helpless
and prayerless. She was not thinking of God's anger or mercy
but of her son's. She was thinking of what might be brought,
not by death, but by life.'
There is no touch of the homiletic about this ; it is dramatic con-
statation, poignant and utterly convincing, and the implied moral,
which is a matter of the enacted inevitability, is that perceived by
a psychological realist. As the strain develops for her, our sym-
pathetic interest is painfully engaged, so that when we come to the
critical point (Chapter XLII) at which Jermyn says, 'It is not to be
supposed that Harold would go against me ... if he knew the whole
truth', we feel the full atrocity the prop >sition has for her. Further,
we take the full force and finality of the disaster represented by her
now breaking her life-long resolve never to quarrel 'with this man
never tell him what she knew him to be'.
The man is perfectly done. For him Nemesis has a face corre-
sponding to his moral quality ; it is something he contemplates 'in
anger, in exasperation, that Harold, precisely Harold Transome,
should have turned out to be the probable instrument of a visitation
that would be bad luck, not justice ; for is there any justice when
ninety-nine men out of a hundred escape ? He found himself begin-
ning to hate Harold . . .'. by delicate touches the resemblance
between father and son is conveyed to us, and the discrimination
made between their respective egoisms.
If we agree that the two men are 'women's men', it is not in any
sense that detracts from their convincingness ; it is rather in the
sense that the penetrating and 'placing' analysis of their masculinity
is something, we feel, that it took a woman to do. Jermyn's case
is Tito Melema's ; this time not thought out in an effort to work
from the abstract to the concrete, but presented in the life, with
compelling reality ; he is unquestionably 'there* in the full concrete,
and unquestionably (as Tito, in so far as he exists, is not) a man
one of 'those who are led on through the years by the gradual
demands of a selfishness which has spread its fibres far and wide
through the intricate vanities and sordid cares of an everydav
existence'.
59
GEORGE ELIOT
As for Harold, he has 'the energetic will, the quick perception,
and the narrow imagination which make what is called the "prac-
tical mind".' He is a 'clever, frank, good-natured egoist*.
' His very good-nature was unsympathetic : it never came
from any thorough understanding or deep respect for what
was in the mind of the person he obliged or indulged ; it was
like his kindness to his mother an arrangement of his for the
happiness of others, which, if they were sensible, ought to
succeed/
He cannot, of course, help his parentage ; the ironic element of
Nemesis in his disaster is given here : l
'"Confound the fellow with his Mrs. Jermyn! Does he
think we are on a footing for me to know anything about his
wife?"'
It is characteristic of George Eliot that she can make such a man
the focus of a profoundly moving tragedy : for Harold unquestion-
ably becomes that for us at the point when, turning violently on
Jermyn, who has been driven to come out with, 'I am your father ! ',
he catches sight, in the ensuing scuffle, of the two faces side by side
in a mirror, and sees 'the hated fatherhood reasserted'. This may
sound melodramatic as recapitulated here ; that it should come with
so final a rightness in the actual text shows with what triumphant
success George Eliot has justified iierhigh ragic conception of her
theme. It is characteristic of her to be able to make a tragedy out of
'moral mediocrity'. The phrase is used to convey the redeemed
Esther Lyon's sense of life at Transome Court, and Esther has been
represented earlier as reflecting: 'Mr. Transome had his beetles,
but Mrs. Transome ? ' There is nothing sentimental about George
Eliot's vision of human mediocrity and 'platitude', but she sees in
them matters for compassion, and her dealings with them are asser-
tions of human dignity. To be able to assert human dignity in this
way is greatness : the contrast with Flaubert is worth pondering.
1 '"Why do you wish to shield such a fellow, mother?" . . . Mrs. Tran-
some's rising temper was turned into a horrible sensation, as painful as a
sudden concussion trom something hard and immovable when we have
struck out with our fist, intending to hit something warm, soft and breathing
like ourselves. Poor Mrs. Transome's strokes were sent jarring back on her
by a hard unendurable pas*.'
60
MIDDLEMARCH
Felix Holt is not one of the novels that cultivated persons are
supposed to have read, and, if read at all, it is hardly ever men-
tioned, so that there is reason for saying that one of the finest things
in fiction is virtually unknown. It is exasperating that George
Eliot should have embedded some of her maturest work in a mass
that is so much other though Felix Holt is not, like Romola, 'un-
readable', and the superlative quality of the live part ought to
have compelled recognition. It is exasperating and it is, again,
characteristic of her. Only one book can, as a whole (though not
without qualification), be said to represent her mature genius. That,
of course, is Middlemarch.
The necessary part of great intellectual powers in such a success as
Middlemarch is obvious. The sub-title of the book is A Study of
Provincial Life, and it is no idle pretension. The sheer informedness
about society, its mechanism, the ways in which people of different
classes live and (if they have to) earn their livelihoods, impresses us
with its range, and it is real knowledge ; that is, it is knowledge
alive with understanding. George Eliot had said in Felix Holt 9 by
way of apology for the space she devoted to 'social changes' and
'public matters' : ' there is no private life which has not been deter-
mined by a wider public life'. The aim implicit in this remark is
magnificently achieved hi Middlemarch, and it is achieved by a
novelist whose genius manifests itself in a profound analysis of the
individual. We can see that here indeed Beatrice Potter, training
herself to become a 'sociological investigator', might have looked
without disappointment for what che failed to find in the text-
books. 1
The intellectual, again, is apparent in the conception of certain of
the most strikingly successful themes. Only a novelist who had
known from the inside the exhaustions and discouragements of
long-range intellectual enterprises could have conveyed the pathos
of Dr. Casaubon's predicament. Not that Casaubon is supposed
to have a remarkable intellect ; he is an intellectual manqut :
'Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than
the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work
1 * For any detailed description of the complexity of human nature ... I
had to turn to novelists and poets . . .' : B. Webb, My Apprenticeship, p. 138.
6l
GEORGE ELIOT
which has been all the significance of its life a significance
which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no
man has need of them ? But there was nothing to strike others
as sublime about Mr. Casaubon, and Lydgate, who had some
contempt at hand for futile scholarship, felt a litUp amusement
mingling with his pity He was at present too ill acquainted
with disaster to enter into the pathos of a lot where^ every thing
is below the level of tragedy except the passionate egoism of
the sufferer/
Actually, the pathos that Casaubon enacts 'below the tragic level'
is not quite what this passage by itself might suggest ; egoism plays
a part more like that which it plays in Mrs. Transome's tragedy.
The essential predicament in both cases involves the insulation of
the egoism from all large or heroic ends. Not only is Casaubon s
scholarship futile ; he himself inwardly knows it to be so, and is
more preoccupied with saving himself from having to recognize
the fact than with anything else. To have communicated mov-
ingly the pathos of such a situation is the more remarkable in that
Lydgate's amused contempt is clearly not altogether unlike some-
thing that is strongly felt by the novelist : she does more than hint
at the potentialities of comedy in Casaubon, and of a comedy more
critical than sympathetic. This, for instance, is extraordinarily like
something of the early satiric felicities of Mr. E. M. Forster :
'Mr. Casaubon, as might be expected, spent' a great deal of
his time at the Grange in these weeks, and the hindrance which
courtship occasioned to the progress of his great work the
Key to all Mythologies naturally made him look forward the
more eagerly to the happy termination of courtship But he
had deliberately incurred the hindrance, having made up his
mind that it was now time for him to adorn his life with the
graces of female companionship, to irradiate the gloom which
fatigue was apt to hang over the intervals of studious labour
with the play of female fancy, and to secure in this, his culmin-
ating age, the solace of female tendance for his declining years.
Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feel-
ing, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly
shallow rill it was. As in droughty regions baptism by immer-
sion could only be performed symbolically, so Mr. Casaubon
found that sprinkling *vas the utmost approach to a plunge
62
MIDDLEMARCH
which his stream would afford him ; and he concluded that the
poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion.
Nevertheless, he observed with pleasure that Miss Brooke
showed an ardent submissive affection which promised to fulfil
his most agreeable previsions of mamage. It had once or twice
crossed his mind that possibly there was some deficiency in
Dorothea to account for the moderation of his abandonment;
but he was unable to discern the deficiency, or to figure to
himself a woman who would have pleased him better ; so that
there was clearly no reason to fall back upon but the exaggera-
tions of human tradition.'
Compare that with the account of Mr. Pembroke's proposal in
The Longest Journey, and it is difficult not to suspect that this is in a
different class from the general resemblances that relate Mr. Forster
by way of George Eliot and Jane Austen back to Fielding, and that
we have a direct relation of reminiscence here. However that may
be, the point to be made regards the critical quality of George
Eliot's irony. Here we have the note again :
'He had done nothing exceptional in marrying nothing but
what society sanctions and considers an occasion for wreaths
and bouquets. It had occurred to him that he must not any
longer defer his intention of matrimony, and he had reflected
that in taking a wife, a man of good position should expect and
carefully choose a blooming young lady the younger the
better, because more educable, and submissive of a rank equal
to his own, of religious principles, virtuous disposition, and
good understanding. On such a young lady he would make
handsome settlements, and he would neglect no arrangement
for her happiness : in return, he should receive family pleasures
and leave behind him that copy of himself which seemed so
urgently required of a man to the sonneteers of the sixteenth
century. Times had altered since then, and no sonneteer had
insisted on Mr. Casaubon's leaving a copy of himself ; more-
over he had not yet succeeded in issuing copies of his mytho-
logical key ; but he had always intended to acquit himself by
marriage, and the sense that he was fast leaving the years behind
him, that the world was getting dimmer and that he felt lonely,
was a reason to him for losing no more time in overtaking
domestic delights before they too were left behind by the years.
63
GEORGE ELIOT
'And when he had seen Dorothea he believed that he had
found even more than he demanded : she might really be such
a helpmate to him as would enable him to dispense with a hired
secretary, an aid which Mr. Casaubon had never yet employed
and had a suspicious dread of (Mr. Casaubon was nervously
conscious that he was expected to manifest a powerful mind.)
Providence, in its kindness, had supplied him with the wife he
needed. A wife, a modest young lady, with the purely appre-
ciative, unambitious abilities of her sex, is sure to think her
husband's mind powerful. Whether Providence had taken
equal care of Miss Brooke in presenting her with Mr. Casaubon
was an idea which could hardly occur to him. Society never
made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much
about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy
as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man
could choose not only his wife but his wife's husband ! Or as
if he were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own
person! When Dorothea accepted him with effusion, that
/as only natural ; and Mr. Casaubon believed that his happi-
ness was going to begin.'
By now the torture has begun for Mr. Casaubon, and is felt as
such by us. For all the tone that has just been sampled, we feel his
torment of isolation, self-distrust having, with terrible irony, been
turned by his marriage into a peculiarly torturing form of solitary
confinement :
'We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliat-
ing confessions how much more by hearing in hard distinct
syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused mur-
murs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they
were the oncoming of numbness ! And this cruel outward
accuser was there in the shape of a wife nay, of a young bride,
who, instead of observing his abundant pen-scratches and
amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of an elegant-
minded canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spy watching
everything with a malign power of inference. Here, towards
this particular point of the compass, Mr. Casaubon had a sensi-
tiveness to match Dorothea's, and an equal quickness to imagine
more than the fact. He had formerly observed with approba-
tion her capacity for< worshipping the right object ; he now
64
MIDDLEMARCH
foresaw with sudden terror that this capacity might be re-placed
by presumption, this worship by the most exasperating of all
criticism that which sees vaguely a great many fine ends, and
has not the least notion what it costs to reach them.'
It is not only an intellectual, it is a spirit profoundly noble, one
believing profoundly in a possible nobility to be aimed at by men,
that can make us, with her, realize such a situation fully as one for
compassion. Close upon the longer ironic passage quoted above
she says :
'It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught
and yet not to enjoy : to be present at this great spectacle of
life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering
selfnever to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never
to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the
vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of
an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious
and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted/
Such a passage reminds us and the prompt recognition is a wise
insurance when paying tribute to George Eliot's nobility that her
nobility is not altogether a simple subject. The reminder is effected
by something in the mode of expression ; something adverting us
that Dorothea isn't far away. George Eliot tends to identify herself
with Dorothea, though Dorothea is far from being the whole of
George Eliot. When 'nobility' is mentioned in connection with
George Eliot it is probable that mos*- people think of the Dorothea
(or Maggie Tulliver) in her. I want at the moment to insist (post-
poning the consideration of Dorothea, who doesn't represent her
author's strength) that what we have in the treatment of Casaubon
is wholly strong.
The other character of whom pre-eminently it can be said that he
could have been done only by someone who knew the intellectual
life from the inside is Lydgate. He is done with complete success.
'Only those', his creator tells us, '. . . who know the supremacy of
the intellectual life the life which has a seed of ennobling thought
and purpose in it can understand the grief of one who falls from
that serene activity into the absorbing soul- casting struggle with
worldly annoyances ' . Lydgate's concern w th ' ennobling thought
E 65
GEORGE ELIOT
and purpose* is very different from Dorothea's. He knows what he
means, and his aim is specific. It is remarkable how George Eliot
makes us feel his intellectual passion as something concrete. When
novelists tell us that a character iz a thinker (or an artist) we have
usually only their word for it, but Lydgate's 'triumphant delight in
his studies' is a concrete presence: it is plain that George Eliot
knows intimately what it is like, and knows what his studies are.
But intensely as she admires his intellectual idealism, 1 and horrify-
ingly as she evokes the paralysing torpedo-touch of Rosamond, she
doesn't make him a noble martyr to the femininity she is clearly
so very far from admiring the femininity that is incapable of in-
tellectual interests, or of idealism of any kind. He is a gentleman in
a sense that immediately recommends him to Rosamond he is 'no
radical in relation to anything but medical reform and the prosecu-
tion of discovery'. That is, the 'distinction' P.osamond admires is
inseparable from a 'personal pride and unreflecting egoism' that
George Eliot calls 'commonness'. In particular, his attitude to-
wards women is such as to give a quality of poetic justice to his
misalliance : * he held it one of the prettiest attributes of the feminine
mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without too precise a know-
ledge of what it consisted in'. This insulation of his interest in the
other sex from his serious interests is emphasized by our being given
the history of his earlier affair with the French actress, Laure. As a
lover he is Rosamond Vincy's complement.
The element of poetic justice in the relationship is apparent here
(they are now married) :
'He had regarded Rosamond's cleverness as precisely of the
receptive kind which became a woman. He was now begin-
ning to find out what that cleverness was what was the shape
into which it had run as into a close network aloof and inde-
pendent. No one quicker than Rosamond to see causes and
effects which lay within the track of her own tastes and interests :
she had seen clearly Lydgate's pre-eminence in Middlemarch
society, and could go on imaginatively tracing still more agree-
able social effects when his talent should have advanced him ;
but for her, his professional and scientific ambition had no other
1 The medical profession, he believes, offers 'the most direct alliance
between intellectual conquest and social good '.
66
MIDDLEMARCH
relation to these desirable effects than if they had been the
fortunate discovery of an ill-smelling oil. And that oil apart,
with which she had nothing to do, of course she believed in her
own opinion more than she did in his. Lydgate was astounded
to find in niimberless trifling matters, as well as in this last
serious case of the riding, that affection did not make her
compliant/
The fact that there is nothing else in Rosamond beside her egoism
that which corresponds (as it responded) to Lydgate's 'common-
ness* gives her a tremendous advantage, and makes her invincible.
She is simple ego, and the concentrated subtlety at her command is
unembarrassed by any inner complexity. She always knows what
she wants, and knows that it \s her due. Other people usually turn
out to be 'disagreeable people, who only think of themselves, and
do not mind how annoying they are to her'. For herself, she is
always ' convinced that no woman could behave more irreproach-
ably than she is behaving'. No moral appeal can engage on her ;
she is as well defended by nature against that sort of embarrassment
as she is against logic. It is of no use accusing her of mendacity, or
insincerity, or any kind of failure in reciprocity :
'Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the
consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature
an actress of parts that entered into her physique : she even
acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it
to be precisely her own.'
If one judges that there is less of rympathy in George Eliot's pre-
sentment of Rosamond than in her presentment of any other of her
major characters (except Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda), one goes
on immediately to note that Rosamond gives sympathy little lodg-
ment. It is tribute enough to George Eliot to say that the destructive
and demoralizing power of Rosamond's triviality wouldn't have
seemed so appalling to us if there had been any animus in the pre-
sentment. We are, from time to time, made to feel from within
the circumference of Rosamond's egoism though we can't, of
course, at any time be confined to it, and, there being no potential
nobility here, it is implicitly judged that this case can hardly, by
any triumph of compassion, be fel' as tragic.
To say that there is no animus in the presentment of Rosamond,
67
GEORGE ELIOT
is perhaps misleading if one doesn't add that the reader certainly
catches himself, from time to time, wanting to break that graceful
neck, the turns of which, as George Eliot evokes them, convey both
infuriating obstinacy and a sinister hint of the snake. But Rosamond
ministers too to our amusement ; she figures in some of the best
exchanges in a book rich in masterly dialogue. There is that be-
tween her and Mary Garth in Book I, Chapter XII, where she tests
her characteristic suspicion that Mary is incerested in Lydgate. The
honours go easily to Mary, who, her antithesis, may be said to offset
her in the representation of her sex ; for Mary is equally real. She
is equally a woman's creation too, and equally feminine ; but
femininity in her is wholly admirable something that gives her in
any company a wholly admirable advantage. Her good sense, quick
intelligence and fine strength of character appear as the poised liveli-
ness, shrewd good-humoured sharpness and direct honesty of her
speech. If it were not a part of her strength to lack an aptitude for
errotional exaltations, she might be said to represent George Eliot's
ideal of femininity she certainly represents a great deal of George
Eliot's own characteristic strength.
Rosamond, so decidedly at a disadvantage (for once) with Mary
Garth, is more evenly matched with Mrs. Bulstrode, who calls in
Book III, Chapter XXX, to find out whether the flirtation with
Lydgate is, or is not, anything more than a flirtation. Their en-
counter, in which unspoken inter-appreciation cf attire accompanies
the verbal fence, occurs in the same chapter as that between Mrs.
Bulstrode and Mrs. Plymdale, * well-meaning women both, know-
ing very little of their motives'. These encounters between women
give us some of George Eliot's finest comedy ; only a woman could
have done them. And the comedy can be of the kind in which the
tragic undertone is what tells most on us, as we see in Book VIII,
Chapter LXXIV, where Mrs. Bulstrode goes the round of her
friends in an attempt to find out what is the matter with her
husband :
'In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that
the town held a bad opinion of her husband. No feminine
intimate might carry her friendship so far as to make a plain
statement to the wife of the unpleasant fact known or believed
about her husband ; but when a woman with her thoughts
68
MIDDLEMARCH
much at leisure got them suddenly employed on something
grievously disadvantageous ^o her neighbours, various moral
impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utter-
ance. Candour was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch
phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your
friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their cap-
acity, their conduct, or their position ; and a robust candour
never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again, there
was the love of truth. . . . Stronger than all, there was the regard
for a friend's moral improvement, sometimes called her soul,
which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom,
uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the
furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not
tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her
hearer/
The treatment of Bulstrode himself is a triumph in which the
part of a magnificent intelligence in the novelist's art is manifested
in some of the finest analysis any novel can show. The peculiar
religious world to which Bulstrode belongs, its ethos and idiom,
George Eliot knows from the inside we remember the Evangelical-
ism of her youth. The analysis is a creative process ; it is a penetrat-
ing imagination, masterly and vivid in understanding, bringing the
concrete before us in all its reality. Bulstrode is not an attractive
figure :
'His private minor loans were numerous, but he would
inquire strictly into the circumstances both before and after. In
this way a man gathers a domain in his neighbours' hope and
fear as well as gratitude ; and power, when once it has got into
that subtle region, propagates itself, spreading out of all pro-
portion to its external means. It was a principle with Mr.
Bulstrode to gain as much power as possible, that he might use
it for the glory of God. He went through a great deal of
spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust his
motives, and make clear to himself what God's glory required.'
This looks like a promise of satire. But George Eliot's is no
satiric art; the perceptions that make the satirist are there right
enough, but she sees too much, and has too much the humility of the
supremely intelligent whose intelligence involves self-knowledge,
69
GEORGE ELIOT
to be more than incidentally ironical. Unengaging as Bulstrode is,
we are not allowed to forget that he is a highly developed member
of the species to which we ourselves belong, and so capable of acute
suffering ; and that his case is not as remote from what might be
ours as the particulars of it encourage our complacency to assume. 1
When his Nemesis closes in on him we feel his agonized twists and
turns too much from within that is the effect of George Eliot's
kind of analysis not to regard him with more compassion than
contempt :
' Strange, piteous conflict in the soul of this unhappy man
who had longed for years to be better than he was who had
taken his selfish passions into discipline and clad them in severe
robes, so that he had walked with them as a devout quire, till
now that a terror had risen among them, and they could chant
no longer, but threw out their common cries ^or safety/
George Eliot's analysis is of the 'merciless' kind that only an
intelligence lighted by compassion can attain :
'At six o'clock he had already been long dressed, and had
spent some of his wretchedness in prayer, pleading his motives
for averting the worst evil if in anything he had used falsity and
spoken what was not true before God. For Bulstrode shrank
from the direct lie with an intensity disproportionate to the
numbers of his more indirect mLdeeds. Hut many of these
misdeeds were like the subtle muscular movements which are
not taken account of in the consciousness, though they bring
about the end that we fix our mind on and desire. And it is
only what we are vividly conscious of that we can vividly
imagine to be seen by Omniscience.'
1 *His doubts did not arise from the possible relations of the event to
Joshua Rigg's destiny, which belonged to the unmapped regions not taken
under the providential government, except perhaps in an imperfect colonial
way; but they arose from reflecting that this dispensation too might be a
chastisement for himself, as Mr. Farebrother's induction to the living clearly
was.
*This was not what Mr. Bulstrode said to any man for the sake of deceiving
him; it was what he said to himself it was as genuinely his mode of explain-
ing events as any theory of yours may be, if you happen to disagree with
him. For the egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their
sincerity; rather the more our egoism is satisfied the more robust is our
belief.'
70
MIDDLEMARCH
Here he is, struggling with hope and temptation, by the bedside
of his helpless tormentor :
'Bulstrode's native imperiousness and strength of deter-
mination served him well. This delicate-looking man, himself
nervously perturbed, found the needed stimulus in his strenuous
circumstances, and through that difficult night and morning,
while he had the air of an animated corpse returned to move-
ment without warmth, holding the mastery by its chill impassi-
bility, his mind was intensely at work thinking of what he had
to guard against and what wou 1 4 win him security. Whatever
prayers he might lift up, whatever statements he might in-
wardly make of this man's wretched spiritual condition, and the
duty he himself was under to submit to the punishment divinely
appointed for him rather than to wish for evil to another
through all this effort to condense words into a solid mental
state, there pierced and spread with irresistible vividness the
images of the events he desired. And in the train of those
images came their apology. He could not but see the death of
Raffles, and see in it his own deliverance. What was the re-
moval of this wretched creature ? He was impenitent but
were not public criminals impenitent ? yet the law decided on
their fate. Should Providence in this case award death, there
was no sin in contemplating death as the desirable issue if he
kept his hands from hastening it if he scrupulously did what
was prescribed. E^en here fhere might be a mistake : human
prescriptions were fallible things : Lydgate had said that treat-
ment had hastened death why not his own method of treat-
ment ? But, of course, intention was everything in the question
of right and wrong.
'And Bulstrode set himself to keep his intention separate
from his desire. He inwardly declared that he intended to obey
orders. Why should he have got into any argument about the
validity of these orders ? It was only the common trick of
desire which avails itself of any irrelevant scepticism, finding
larger room for itself in all uncertainty about effects, in every
obscurity that looks like the absence of law. Still, he did obey
the orders/
Here is the commentary on his move to square Lydgate :
'The banker felt that he had done something to nullify one
cause of uneasiness, and yet he was scarcely the easier. He did
71
GEORGE ELIOT
not measure the quantity of diseased motive which had made
him wish for Lydgate's goodwill, but the quantity was none the
less actively there, like an irritating agent in his blood. A man
vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow.
Is it that he distinctly means to break it ? Not at all ; but the
desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and
make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in
the very moments when he is telling himself over again the
reasons for his vow. Raffles, recovering quickly, returning to
the free use of his odious powers how could Bulstrode wish
for that ? '
It is a mark of the quality of George Eliot's presentment of
Bulstrode that we should feel that the essential aspect of Nemesis for
him is what confronts him here, in the guise of salvation, as he waits
for the death he has ensured ensured by disobeying, with an in-
tention that works through dark indirections and tormented inner
casuistries, Lydgate's strict 'doctor's orders' :
'In that way the moments passed, until a change in the
stertorous breathing was marked enoagh to draw his attention
wholly to the bed, and forced him to think of the departing life,
which had once been subservient to his own which he had
once been glad to find base enough for him to act on as he
would. It was his gladness then which impelled him now to be
glad that the life was at an end.
'And who could say that the death of Raffles had been
hastened ? Who knew what would have saved him ? '
Raffles himself is Dickensian, and so is Mr. Borthrop Trumbull,
the auctioneer, to say which is to suggest that, while adequate to
their functions, they don't exhibit that peculiar quality of life which
distinguishes George Eliot's own creativeness. There is abundance
of this quality in the book as a whole ; we have it in the Garths,
father, mother and daughter, the Vincy family, Mr., Farebrother,
the Cadwalladers, and also in the grotesquerie of Peter Featherstone
and his kin, which is so decidedly George Eliot and not Dickens.
The weakness of the book, as already intimated, is in Dorothea.
We have the danger-signal in the very outset, in the brief Prelude,
with its reference to St. Theresa, whose 'flame ... fed from within,
soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which
72
MIDDLEMARCH
would never justify weakness, which would reconcile self-despair
with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self*. 'Many
Theresas', we are told, 'have been born who found for themselves
no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant
action. . . .' In the absence of a 'coherent social faith and order
which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently
willing soul' they failed to realize their aspiration : 'Their ardour
alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of
womanhood . . .' Their failure, we gather, was a case of 'a certain
spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportun-
ity ' It is a dangerous theme for George Eliot, and we recognize
a far from reassuring accent. And our misgivings are not quieted
when we find, in the close of the Prelude, so marked a reminder of
Maggie Tulliver as this :
'Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the duck-
lings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in
fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there ir
born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-
beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are
dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-
recognisable deed/
All the same, the first two chapters make us forget these alarms,
the poise is so sure and the tone so right. When we are told of
Dorothea Brooke that 'her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its
nature after some lofty conception of the world which might fairly
include the parish of Tipton, and her own rule of conduct there*, we
give that 'parish of Tipton' its full weight. The provinciality of
the provincial scene that George Eliot presents is not a mere foil for
a heroine ; we see it in Dorothea herself as a callowness confirmed
by culture : she and her sister had 'both been educated ... on plans
at once narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and
afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne. . . .' This is an education
that makes little difference to Maggie Tulliver who is now, we
feel, seen by the novelist from the outside as well as felt from within.
Dorothea, that is to say, is not exempted from the irony that informs
our vision of the other characters in these opening chapters Celia,
Mr. Brooke, Sir James Chetham and Mr. Casaubon. It looks as if
73
GEORGE ELIOT
George Eliot had succeeded in bringing within her achieved
maturity this most resistant and incorrigible self.
Unhappily, we can't go on in that belief for long. Already in
the third chapter we find reasons for recalling the Prelude. In the
description of the 'soul-hungei' that leads Dorothea to see Casau-
bon so fantastically as a 'winged messenger* we miss the poise that
had characterized the presentment of her at her introduction :
'For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefinite-
ness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over
all her desire to make her life greatly effective. What could she
do, what ought she to do ? ... The intensity of her religious
disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one
aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually
consequent : and with such a nature struggling in the bands of
a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed
nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of
small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike
others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency.'
Aren't we here, we wonder, in sight of an unqualified self-
identification ? Isn't there some tiling dangerous in the way the
irony seems to be reserved for the provincial background and cir-
cumstances, leaving the heroine immune ? The doubt has very soon
become more than a doubt. WLen (in Chapter VII) Dorothea,
by way of illustrating the kind of music she enjoys, says that the
great organ at Freiberg, which she heard on her way home from
Lausanne, made her sob, we can't help noting that it is the fatuous
Mr. Brooke, a figure consistently presented for our ironic contem-
plation, who comments: 'That kind of thing is not healthy, my
dear*. By the time we see her by the 'reclining Ariadne' in the
Vatican, as Will Ladislaw sees her
'a breathing, blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the
Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish grey drapery ; her long cloak,
fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from the arms, and
one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing
somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a
sort of halo to her fr.ce around the simply braided dark-brown
hair '
74
MIDDLEMARCH
we are in a position to say that seeing her here through Will's
eyes involves for us no adjustment of vision : this is how \#e have
been seeing her or been aware that we are meant to see her. And
in general, in so far as we respond to the novelist's intention, our
vision goes on being Will's.
The idealization is overt at the moment, finding its licence in the
surrounding statuary and in Will's role of artist (he is with his
German artist friend). But Will's idealizing faculty clearly doesn't
confine itself to her outward form even here, and when, thirty or so
pages further on, talking with her and Casaubon, he reflects, 'She
was an angel beguiled', we arc clearly not meant to dissociate our-
selves or the novelist. In fact, he has no independent status of his
own he can't be said to exist ; he merely represents, not a dramatic-
ally real point of view, but certain of George Eliot's intentions
intentions she has failed to realize creatively. The most important
of these is to impose on the reader her own vision and valuation of
Dorothea.
Will, of course, is also intended it is not really a separate matter
to be, in contrast to Casaubon, a fitting soul-mate for Dorothea.
He is not substantially (everyone agrees) 'there', but we can see well
enough what kind of qualities and attractions are intended, and we
can see equally well that we are expected to share a valuation of
them extravagantly higher than any we can for a moment coun-
tenance. George Eliot's valuation of Will Ladislaw, in short, is
Dorothea's, just as Will's of Dorothea is George Eliot's. Dorothea,
to put it another way, is a product of George Eliot's own 'soul-
hunger' another day-dream ideal self. This persistence, in the
midst of so much that is so other, of an unreduced enclave of the
old immaturity is disconcerting in the extreme. We have an alter-
nation between the poised impersonal insight of a finely tempered
wisdom and something like the emotional confusions and self-
importances of adolescence.
It is given us, of course, at the outset, as of the essence of Doro-
thea's case, that she is vague in her exaltations, that she 'was
oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a
thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly
effective*. But the show of presenting this liaze from the outside
soon lapses ; George Eliot herself, so far as Dorothea is concerned,
75
GEORGE ELIOT
is clearly in it too. That is peculiarly apparent in the presentment
of those impossibly high-falutin" tete-a-tete or soul to soul ex-
changes between Dorothea and Will, which is utterly without irony
or criticism. Their tone and quality is given fairly enough in this
retrospective summary (it occurs at the end of Chapter LXXXII) :
'all their vision, all their thought of each other, had been in a world
apart, where the sunshine fell on tall white lilies, where no evil
lurked, and no other soul entered*. It is Will who is supposed to be
reflecting to this effect, but Will here as everywhere in his attitude
towards Dorothea is unmistakably not to be distinguished from
the novelist (as we have noted, he hardly exists). 1
There is, as a matter of fact, one place where for a moment
George Eliot dissociates herself from him (Chapter XXXIX) :
'For the moment Will's admiration was accompanied with a
chilling sense of remoteness. A man is seldom ashamed of feel-
ing that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain
greatness in her ; nature having intended greatness for men.'
What she dissociates herself from, it will be noted, is not the valua-
tion ; the irony is not directed against that, but, on the contrary,
implicitly endorses it. To point out that George Eliot identifies
herself with Will's sense of Dorothea's 'subduing power, the sweet
dignity, of her noble unsuspicious inexperience', doesn't, perhaps,
seem a very damaging criticism. But wlicn it becomes plain that
in this self-identification such significant matters of valuation are
involved the criticism takes on a different look.
'Men and women make such sad mistakes about their own
symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for
genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty
love.'
The genius of George Eliot is not questioned, but what she
observes here in respect of Rosamond Vincy has obvious bearings
on her own immature self, the self persisting so extraordinarily in
company with the genius that is self-knowledge and a rare order of
maturity.
1 Though, significantly, it is he alone who is adequate to treating Rosa-
mond with appropriate ruthlessnesa see the episode (Chapter LXXVIII)
in which he * tells her straight' what his author feels about her.
7 6
MIDDLEMARCH
Dorothea, with her 'genius for feeling nobly', that 'current* in her
mind 'into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later
to flow the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards
the fullest truth, the least partial good' (end of Chapter XX), and
with her ability to turn that current into a passion for Will Ladis-
law, gives us Maggie's case again, and Maggie's significance : again
we have the confusions represented by the exalted vagueness of
Maggie's 'soul-hunger' ; we have the unacceptable valuations and
the day-dream self-indulgence.
The aspect of self-indulgence is most embarrassingly apparent in
Dorothea's relations (as we are invited to see them) with Lydgate,
who, unlike Ladislaw, is real and a man. Lydgate's reality makes
the unreality of the great scene intended by George Eliot (or by
the Dorothea in her) the more disconceiting : the scene in which
to Lydgate, misunderstood, isolated, ostracized, there appears, an
unhoped-for angelic visitation, Dorothea, all-comprehending and
irresistibly good (Chapter LXXVI) :
' " Oh, it is hard ! " said Dorothea. "I understand the diffi-
culty there is in your vindicating yourself. And that all this
should have come to you who had meant to lead a higher life
than the common, and to find out better ways I cannot bear
to rest in this as unchangeable. I know you meant that. I
remember what you said to me when you first spoke to me
about the hospital. There is no sorrow I have thought more
about than that to love what is great, and try to reach it, and
yet to fail."
'"Yes", said Lydgate, feeling that here he had found room
for the full meaning of his grief. . . .
'"Suppose", said Dorothea meditatively. "Suppose we
kept on the hospital according to the present plan, and you
stayed here though only with the friendship and support of the
few, the evil feeling towards you would gradually die out;
there would come opportunities in which people would be
forced to acknowledge that they had been unjust to you, be-
cause they would see that your purposes were pure. You may
still win a great fame like the Louis and Laennec I have heard
you speak of, and we shall all be proud of you", she ended,
with a smile.'
We are given a good deal in the same vein of winning sim-
77
GEORGE ELIOT
plicity. Such a failure in touch, in so intelligent a novelist, is more
than a surface matter ; it betrays a radical disorder. For Lydgate,
we are told, the 'childlike grave-eyed earnestness with which Doro-
thea said all this was irresistible blent into an adorable whole with
her ready understanding of higli experience * . And lest we shouldn't
have appreciated her to the full, we are told that
'As Lydgate rode away, he thought, "This young creature
has a heart large enough for the Virgin Mary. She evidently
thinks nothing of her own future, and would pledge away half
her income at once, as if she wanted nothing for herself but a
chair to sit in from which she can look down with those clear
eyes at the poor mortals who pray to her. She seems to have
what I never saw in any woman before a fountain of friend-
ship towards men a n.an can make a friend of her .
What we have here is unmistakably something of the same order
as Romola's epiphany in the plague-stricken village ; but worse
or at any rate, more painfully significant. Offered as it is in a con-
text of George Eliot's maturest art, it not only matters more ; it
forces us to recognize how intimately her weakness attends upon
her strength. Stressing the intended significance of the scene she
says, in the course of it :
'The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes,
ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us : we begin to see
things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that
we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our char-
acter/
This is a characteristic utterance, and, but for the illustration we
are being offered, we should say it came from her strength the
strength exhibited in her presentment of Casaubon, Rosamond,
Lydgate and Bulstrode. It is certainly her strength as a novelist to
have a noble and ardent nature it is a condition of that maturity
which makes her so much greater an artist than Flaubert. What
she says of Dorothea might have been said of herself :
* Permanent rebellion, the disorder of a life without some
loving reverent resolve, was not possible to her.'
But that she says it of Dorothea must make us aware how far
78
DANIEL DERONDA
from a simple trait it is we are considering, and how readily the
proposition can slide into such another as this :
'No life would have been possible for Dorothea that was
not filled with emotion/
Strength, and complacent readiness to yield to temptation they
are not at all the same thing ; but we see how insidiously, in George
Eliot, they are related. Intensely alive with intelligence and imagin-
ative sympathy, quick and vivid in her realization of the 'equivalent
centre of self in others even in Casaubon or a Rosamond, she is
incapable of morose indifference or the normal routine obtuseness,
and it may be said in a wholly laudatory sense, by way of character-
izing her at her highest level, that no life would have been possible
for her that was not filled with emotion her sensibility is directed
outward, and she responds from deep within. At this level, 'emo-
tion* is a disinterested response defined by its object, and hardly
distinguishable from the play of the intelligence and self-knowledge
that give it impersonality. But the emotional 'fulness* represented
by Dorothea depends for its exalting potency on an abeyance of
intelligence and self-knowledge, and the situations offered by way
of 'objective correlative* have the day-dream relation to experience ;
they are generated by a need to soar above the indocile facts and
conditions of the real world. They don't, indeed, strike us as real
in any sense ; they have no objectivity, no vigour of illusion. In
this kind of indulgence, complaisantly as she abandons herself to the
current that is loosed, George Eliot's creative vitality has no part.
(iii) 'Daniel Deronda* and 'The Portrait of a Lady'
In no other of her works is the association of the strength with the
weakness so remarkable or so unfortunate as in Daniel Deronda. It
is so peculiarly unfortunate, not because the weakness spoils the
strength the two stand apart, on a large scale, in fairly neatly
separable masses but because the mass of fervid and wordy un-
reality seems to have absorbed most of the attention the book has
ever had, and to be all that is remembered of it. That this should be
so shows, I think, how little George Eliot's acceptance has rested
upon a critical recognition of her real strength and distinction, and
79
GEORGE ELIOT
how unfair to her, in effect, is the conventional overvaluing of her
early work. For if the nature of her real strength had been appreci-
ated for what it is, so magnificent an achievement as the good half
of Daniel Deronda could not have failed to compel an admiration
that would have established it, not the less for the astonishing bad-
ness of the bad half, among the great things in fiction.
It will be best to get the bad half out of the way first. This can
be quickly done, since the weakness doesn't require any sustained
attention, being of a kind that has already been thoroughly dis-
cussed. It is represented by Deronda himself, and by what may be
called in general the Zionist inspiration. And this is the point at
which to mention a work of George Eliot's that preceded Middle-
march The Spanish Gypsy. It is a drama in verse, the action of
which is placed in mediae /al Spain. The heroine, when on the eve
of marriage to her lover, a Spanish noble, is plmiged into a conflict
between love and duty by the appearance of a gypsy who (to quote
Leslie Stephen's summary) 'explains without loss of time that he is
her father ; that he is about to be the Moses or Mahomet of a gypsy
nation ; and orders her to give up her country, her religion, and her
lover to join him in this hopeful enterprise'. The conflict is resolved
by her embracing this duty with ardour, and feeling it as an exalted
and exalting passion or Cause :
Father, my soul is not too base to *ing
At touch of your great thoughts; nay, in my blood
There streams the sense unspeakable of kind,
'As leopard feels at ea e e with leopard.
... I will wed
The curse that blights my people.
'Why place the heroine among conditions so hard to imagine?'
asks Leslie Stephen. He gives no answer, but the analysis we have
arrived at of her weakness points us to one and a more interesting
one than that which his smile at a great novelist's bluestocking
caprice seems to suggest.
George Eliot was too intelligent to be able to offer herself the
promptings of Comtism, or of the Victorian interest in race and
heredity, as providing the religious exaltations she craved too in-
telligent, that is, to offer them directly as such. But imaginative art
80
DANIEL DERONDA
provided her with opportunities for confusion ; she found herself
licensed to play witn daydream unrealities so strenuously as not to
recognize them for such. Author-martyr of Romola, she pretends,
with painful and scholarly earnestness, that they are historical and
real ; but the essential function of the quasi-historical setting is one
with that of the verse form : it is to evade any serious test for reality
(poetry, we know, idealizes and seeks a higher truth).
We see how incomparably better were the opportunities offered
her by Zionism. She didn't need to reconstruct Anti-Semitism or
its opposite : the Jews were thert in the contemporary world of
fact, and represented real, active and poignant issues. All her
generous moral fervour was quite naturally and spontaneously en-
gaged on their behalf, and, on the other hand, her religious bent and
her piety, as well as her intellectual energies and interests, found a
congenial field in Jewish culture, history and tradition. Advantages
which, once felt, were irresistible temptations. Henry James in his
Conversation' on Daniel Deronda speaks (through Constantius) of
the difference between the strong and the weak in George Eliot as
one between ' what she is by inspiration and what she is because it is
expected of her'. But it is the reverse of a * sense of the author
writing under a sort of external pressure' (Constantius) that I myself
have in reading the bad part of Daniel Deronda. Here, if anywhere,
we have the marks of 'inspiration' : George Eliot clearly feels her-
self swept along on a warm emotional flow. If there is anything at
all to be said for the proposition (via Constantius again) that 'all the
Jewish part is ?t bottom cold', it must be that it can be made to
point to a certain quality in that part which relates it to the novel in
which D. H. Lawrence tries, in imaginative creation, to believe that
the pre-Christian Mexican religion might be revived The Plumed
Serpent, the one book in which Lawrence falls into insincerity.
The insincerity, of the kind he was so good at diagnosing and
defining, lies, of course, in the quality that leads one to say 'tries'
though it is flow rather than effort one is conscious of. And there
is certainly something of that quality in Daniel Deronda something
to provoke the judgment that so intelligent a writer couldn't, at that
level, have been so self-convinced of inspiration without some inner
connivance or complicity : there is an elem< nt of the tacitly v oulu.
But this is not to say that George Eliot's intellect here prevails
F 81
GEORGE ELIOT
over the spontaneities, or that there isn't a determining drive from
within, a triumphant pressure of emotion ; thcie is, and that is the
trouble. The Victorian intellectual certainly has a large part in her
Zionist inspirations, but that doesn't make these the less fervidly
emotional ; the part is one of happy subordinate rlliance with her
immaturity. We have already seen that this alliance comes very
naturally (for the relation between the Victorian intellectual and the
very feminine woman in her is not the simple antithesis her critics
seem commonly to suppose) ; it comes very naturally and insidi-
ously, establishing the condition: in which her mature intelligence
lapses and ceases to inhibit her flights flights not deriving their
impulsion from any external pressure. A distinguished mind and a
noble nature are unquestionably present in the bad part of Daniel
Deronda, but it is bad; ",nd the nobility, generosity, and moral
idealism are at the same time modes of self-indulgence.
The kind of satisfaction she finds in imagining her hero, Deronda
(if he can be said to be imagined), doesn't need analysis. He, de-
cidedly, is a woman's creation 1 :
'Persons attracted him ... in proportion to the possibility of
his defending them, rescuing them, telling upon their lives with
some sort of redeeming influence ; and he had to resist an in-
clination to withdraw coldly from the fortunate.' (Chapter
XXVIII.)
1 But this about his experience at Cambridge is characteristic of the in-
numerable things by the way that even in George Eliot's weaker places remind
us we are dealing with an extremely vigorous and distinguished mind, and
one in no respect disabled by being a woman's :
"He found the inward bent towards comprehension and thoroughness
diverging more and more from the track marked out by the standards
of examination: he felt a heightening discontent with the wearing
futility and enfeebling strain of a demand for excessive retention and
dexterity without any insight into the principles which form the vital
connections of knowledge.'
This goes well with her note on Lydgate's education :
'A liberal education had of course left him free to read the indecent
passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy
and obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left his
imagination quite unbiassed, so that for anything he knew his brains
lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of repre-
senting to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead
of gold.'
82
DANIEL DERONDA
He has all the personal advantages imagined by Mordecai, the con-
sumptive prophet, for the fulfiller of his dream, the new Moses :
'he must be a Jew, intellectually cultured, morally fervid in
all this a nature ready to be plenished from Mordecai's ; but his
face and frame must be beautiful and strong, he must have been
used to all the refinements of social life, his life must flow with
a full and easy current, his circumstances must be free from
sordid need : he must glorify the possibilities of the Jew. . . .'
(Chapter XXXVIII.)
We feel, in fact, that Deronda was conceived in terms of general
specifications, George Eliot's relation to him being pretty much that
shown here as Mordecai's, whose own show of dramatic existence
is merely a licence for the author to abound copiously in such
exaltations and fervours as the Dorothea in her craves.
Her own misgivings about the degree of concrete presence she
has succeeded in bestowing upon Deronda is betrayed, as Henry
James points out, in the way she reminds us again and again of the
otherwise non-significant trick she attributes to him the trick of
holding the lapels of his coat as he talks. And when he talks, this
is his style :
'"Turn your fear into a safeguard. Keep your dread fixed
on the idea of increasing that remorse which is so bitter to you.
Fixed meditation may do a ^reat deal towards defining our
longing or dread. We are not always in a state of strong emo-
tion, and when we are calm we can use our memories and
gradually change the bias of our fear, as we do our tastes. Take
your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing. It may
make consequences passionately present to you. Try to take
hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like
vision". ' (Chapter XXXVI.)
It is true that he is here speaking as lay-confessor to Gwendolen
Harleth ('her feeling had turned this man into a priest'), but that,
in George Eliot's conception, is for him the most natural and self-
expressive of roles. 1 And the style of talk sorts happily (if that is
1 Here he is in ordinary drawing-room conversation: "'For my part,**
said Deronda, "people who do anything finely always inspirit me to try. I
don't mean that they make me believe I can do it as well. But they make the
thing, whatever it may be, seem worthy to be done. I can bear to think my
83
GEORGE ELIOT
the word) with the style in general of the weak half of the book
though one would hardly guess from this specimen of Deronda's
speech alone how diffusely ponderous and abstract George Eliot can
be, and for pages on end (pages among her most embarrassingly
fervid, for the wordiness and the emotionality go together). A
juxtaposition of specimens of the worst dialogue and the worst
prose with specimens of the best (of which there is gieat abundance
in the book) would offer some astonishing contrasts. But it would
take up more room than can be spared, and an interested reader will
very easily choose representative specimens for himself.
The kind of satisfaction George Eliot finds in Deronda's Zionism
is plain. ' " The refuge you are needing from personal trouble is the
higher, the religious life, which holds an enthusiasm for something
more than our own appetites and vanities". ' But since poor Gwen-
dolen is not in a position to discover herself a Jewess, and so to find
her salvation in Deronda's way, she might in time when Deronda
ha c gone off to Palestine with Mirah come to reflect critically upon
the depth and general validity of his wisdom. We, at any rate, are
obliged to be critical of the George Eliot who can so unreservedly
endorse the account of the 'higher, the religious life' represented by
Deronda. A paragon of virtue, generosity, intelligence and dis-
interestedness, he has no * troubles' he needs a refuge from ; what
he feels he needs, and what he yearns after, is an 'enthusiasm' an
enthusiasm which shall be at the same time a 'duty'. Whether or
not such a desire is necessarily one to have it both ways needn't be
discussed; but it is quite plain, that the 'duty' that Deronda em-
braces '"I considered it my duty it is the impulse of my feeling
to identify myself. . . with my hereditary people'" combines
moral enthusiasm and the feeling of emotional intensity with
essential relaxation in such a way that, for any 'higher life' pro-
moted, we may fairly find an analogy in the exalting effects of
alcohol. The element of self-indulgence is patent. And so are the
confusions. There is no equivalent of Zionism for Gwendolen, and
even if there were : the religion of heredity or race is not, as a
own music not good for much, but the world would be more dismal if I
thought music itself not ijood for much. Excellence encourages one about
life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world".' (Chapter
XXXVI.)
84
DANIEL DERONDA
generalizable solution of the problem, one that George Eliot herself,
directly challenged, could have stood by. In these inspirations her
intelligence and real moral insight are not engaged. But she is
otherwise wholly engaged how wholly and how significantly
being brought airther home to UL when we note that Deronda' s
racial mission finds itself identified with his love for Mirah, so that
he is eventually justified in the 'sweet irresistible hopefulness that
the best of human possibilities might befall him the blending of a
complete personal love in one current with a larger duty. . . .'
All in the book that issues from this inspiration is unreal and
impotently wordy in the way discussed earlier in connexion with
Dorothea though Middlemarch can show nothing to match the
wastes of biblicality and fervid idealism ('Revelations') devoted to
Mordecai, or the copious and drearily comic impossibility of the
working-men's club (Chapter CXLII), or the utterly routing Shake-
spearean sprightliness of Hans Meyrick's letter in Chapter LII. The
Meyricks who, while not being direct products of the prophetic
afflatus, are subordinate ministers to it, are among those elements in
George Eliot that seem to come from Dickens rather than from life,
and so is the pawnbroker's family : the humour and tenderness are
painfully trying, with that quality they have, that obviousness of
intention, which relates them so intimately to the presiding solem-
nity they subserve.
No more need be said about the weak and bad side of Daniel
Deronda. By way of laying due stress upon the astonishingly con-
trasting strength and fineness of the large remainder, the way in
which George Eliot transcends in it not only her weakness, but what
are commonly thought to be her limitations, I will make an asser-
tion of fact and a critical comparison : Henry James wouldn't have
written The Portrait of a Lady if he hadn't read Gwendolen Harleth
(as I shall call the good part of Daniel Deronda), and, of the pair of
closely comparable works, George Eliot's has not only the distinc-
tion of having come first ; it is decidedly the greater. The fact, once
asserted, can hardly be questioned. Henry James wrote his 'Con-
versation' on Daniel Deronda in 1876, and he began The Portrait of a
Lady 'in the spring of 1879'. No one who considers both the in-
tense appreciative interest he shows in Gw 'ndolen Harleth and the
extraordinary resemblance of his own thene to George Eliot's (so
85
GEORGE ELIOT
that The Portrait of a Lady might fairly be called a variation) is likely
to suggest that this resemblance is accidental and non-significant.
Isabel Archer is Gwendolen and Osmond is Grandcourt the
parallel, in scheme, at any rate, is very close and very obvious. As
for the individual characters, that Osmond is Grandcourt is a pro-
position less likely to evoke protest than the other. And there are
certainly more important differences between Isabel and Gwendolen
than between Osmond and Grandcourt a concession that, since
the woman is the protagonist and the centre of interest, may seem
to be a very favourably significant one in respect of James's origin-
ality. The differences, however, as I see them are fairly suggested
by saying that Isabel Archer is Gwendolen Harleth seen by a man.
And it has to be added that, in presenting such a type, George Eliot
has a woman's advantage.
To say that, in the comparison, James's presentment is seen to be
sentimental won't, perhaps, quite do ; but it is, I think, seen to be
partial in both senses of the word controlled, that is, by a vision
that is both incomplete and indulgent ; so that we have to grant
George Eliot's presentment an advantage in reality. Here it may
be protested that James is not presenting Gwendolen Harleth, but
another girl, and that he is perfectly within his rights in choosing a
type that is more wholly sympathetic. That, no doubt, is what
James intended to do in so far as he had Gwendolen Harleth in mind.
But that he had her in mind at all consciously, so that he thought of
himself as attempting a variation on George Eliot's theme, seems to
me very unlikely. The inspiration, or challenge, he was conscious
of was some girl encountered in actual life :
'a perfect picture of youthfulness its eagerness, its presump-
tion, its preoccupation with icself, its vanity and silliness, its
sense of us own absoluteness. But she is extremely intelligent
and clever, and therefore tragedy can have a hold on her.'
This, as a matter of fact, is James's description of Gwendolen
(given through Theodora, the most sympathetic of the three
personae of the ' Conversation', who is here as the style itself shows
endorsed by the judicially central Constantius) : there seems no
need to insist further th it there is point in saying that Isabel Archer
is Gwendolen Harleth seen by a man or that Gwendolen is Isabel
86
DANIEL DERONDA
seen by a woman. For clearly, in the girl so described there must
have been (even if we think of her as Isabel Archer in whom
James doesn't see vanity or silliness) expressions of her ' preoccupa-
tion with self and her * sense of her own absoluteness' justifying
observations and responses more cricical and unsympathetic than any
offered by James. It isn't that George Eliot shows any animus
towards Gwendolen ; simply, as a very intelligent woman she is
able, unlimited by masculine partiality of vision, and only the more
perceptive because a woman, to achieve a much completer present-
ment of her subject than James of his. This strength which mani-
fests itself in sum as completeness affects us locally as a greater
specificity, an advantage which, when considered, turns out to be
also an advantage over James in consistency. And, as a matter of
fact, a notable specificity marks the strength of her mature art in
general.
This strength appears in her rendering of country-house and
'county' society compared with James's. Here we have something
that is commonly supposed to lie outside her scope. Her earlier life
having been what it was, and her life as a practising novelist having
been spent with G. H. Lewes, ' cut off from the world' (' the loss for
a novelist was serious', says Mrs. Woolf), what can she have known
of the ' best society where no one makes an invidious display of
anything in particular, and the advantages of the world are taken
with that high-bred depreciation which follows from being accus-
tomed to them' (her own words) ? The answer is that, however
she came by Ler knowledge, she can, on the showing of Daniel
Deronda, present that world with such fulness and reality as to
suggest that she knows it as completely and inwardly as she knows
Middlemarch. James himself was much impressed by this aspect of
her strength. Of the early part of George Eliot's book he says
(through Constantius) : 'I delighted in its deep, rich English tone,
in which so many notes seemed melted together/
The stress should fall on the 'many notes' rather than on the
'melted', for what James is responding to is the specificity and com-
pleteness of the rendering, whereas 'melted' suggests an assimilating
mellowness, charming and conciliating the perceptions ; a suffusing
richness, bland and emollient. George Eliot's richness is not of that
kind ; she has too full and strong a sense of the reality, she sees too
8?
GEORGE ELIOT
clearly and understandingly, sees with a judging vision that relates
everything to her profoundest moral experience : her full living
sense of value is engaged, and sensitively responsive. It isn't that she
doesn't appreciate the qualities that so appeal to Henry James : she
renders them at least as well as Le renders them better, in the sense
that she 'places' them (a point very intimately related to the other,
that her range of 'notes' is much wider than his). It is true that, as
Virginia Woolf says, ' She is no satirist* . But the reason given, ' The
movement of her mind was too slow and cumbersome to lend itself
to comedy', shows that Mrs. Woolf hadn't read Daniel Deronda
and can't have read other things at all perceptively. If George Eliot
is no satirist it is not because she hasn't the quickness, the delicacy of
touch and the precision. And it certainly is not that she hasn't the
perceptions and responses that go to make satire. Consider, for
instance, the interview between Gwendolen and her uncle, the
Reverend Mr. Gascoigne ('man of the world turned clergyman'),
in Chapter XIII :
'This match with Grandcourt presented itself to him as a sort
of public affair ; perhaps there were ways in which it might
even strengthen the Establishment. To the Rector, whose
father (nobody would have suspected it, and nobody was told)
had risen to be a provincial corn-dealer, aristocratic heirship
resembled regal heirship in excepting its possessor from the
ordinary standard of moral judgments, Grandcourt, the almost
certain baronet, the probable peer, was to be ranged with public
personages, and was a match to be accepted on broad general
grounds national and ecclesiastical. . . . But if Grandcourt had
really made any deeper or more unfortunate experiments in
folly than were common in young men of high prospects, he
was of an age to have finished them. All accounts can be suit-
ably wound up when a man has not ruined himself, and the
expense may be taken as an insurance against future error.
This was the view of practical wisdom ; with reference to
higher views, repentance had a supreme moral and religious
value. There was every reason to believe that a woman of
well-regulated mind would be happy with Grandcourt.'
* * * * * *
'"Is he disagreeable to you personally ?"
'"No."
88
DANIEL DERONDA
"'Have you heard anything of him which has affected you
disagreeably ? " The Rector thought it impossible that Gwen-
dolen could have heard the gossip he had heard, but in any case
he must endeavour to put all things in the right light for her.
'"I have heard nothing about him except that he is a great
match," said Gwendolen, with some sauciness; "and that
affects me very agreeably."
'"Then, my dear Gwendolen, I have nothing further to say
than this : you hold your fortune in your own hands a for-
tune such as rarely happens to a girl in your circumstances a
fortune in fact which almost takes the question out of the range
of mere personal feeling, and makes your acceptance of it a
duty. If Providence offers you power and position especially
when unclogged by any conditions that are repugnant to you
your course is one of responsibility, Into which caprice must
not enter. A man does not like to have his attachment trifled
with : he may not be at once repelled these things are matters
of individual disposition. But the trifling may be carried too
far. And I must point out to you that in case Mr. GrandcouU
were repelled without your having refused him without
your having intended ultimately to refuse him, your situation
would be a humiliating and painful one. I, for my part, should
regard you with severe disapprobation, as the victim of nothing
else than your own coquetry and folly."
* Gwendolen became pallid as she listened to this admonitory
speech. The ideas it raised had the force of sensations. Her
resistant courage would not help her here, because her uncle
was not urgmg her against her own resolve ; he was pressing
upon her the motives of dread which she already felt ; he was
making her more conscious of the risks that lay within herself.
She was silent, and the Rector observed that he had produced
some strong effect.
' " I mean this in kindness, my dear." His tone had softened.
"'I am aware of that, uncle," said Gwendolen, rising and
shaking her head back, as if to rouse herself out of painful
passivity. "I am not foolish. I know that I must be married
some time before it is too late. And I don't see how I could
do better than marry Mr. Grandcourt. I mern to accept him,
if possible." She felt as if she were reinforcing herself by speak-
ing with this decisiveness to her uncle.
'But the Rector was a little startled ty so bare a version of
89
GEORGE ELIOT
his own meaning from those young lips. He wished that in her
mind his advice should be taken in an infusion of sentiments
proper to a girl, and such as are presupposed in die advice of a
clergyman, although he may not consider them always appro-
priate to be put forward. He wished his niece prrks, carriages,
a title everything that would make this world a pleasant
abode ; but he wished her not to be cynical to be, on the
contrary, religiously dutiful, and have warm domestic affec-
tions.
'"My dear Gwendolen", he said, rising also, and speaking
with benignant gravity. "I trust that you will find in marriage
a new fountain of duty and affection. Marriage is the only true
and satisfactory sphere of a woman, and if your marriage with
Mr. Grandcourt should be happily decided upon, you will have
probably an increasing power, both of rank and wealth, which
may be used for the benefit of others. These considerations
are something higher than romance. You are fitted by natural
gifts for a position which, considering your birth and early
prospects, could hardly be looked forward to as in the ordinary
course of things ; and I trust that you will grace it not only by
those personal gifts, but by a good and consistent life."
'"I hope mamma will be the happier", said Gwendolen, in
a more cheerful way, lifting her hands backward to her neck,
and moving towards the door. She wanted to waive those
higher considerations/
This is Samuel Butler's matter, and taken by itself, not, in effect,
altogether remote from Samuel Butler's mode. The presentment
of the Rector here is directly satirical at any rate, it might very
well have come from a satirical novel. But even within the passage
quoted there are signs (notably in the short narrative passage de-
scribing Gwendolen's state of mind) adverting us that the author
isn't a satirist. And we know from his appearances elsewhere that
her total attitude towards Mr. Gascoigne is very far from being
satirical ; she shows him as an impressive and, on the whole, admir-
able figure: 'cheerful, successful worldliness', she tells us, 'has a
false air of being more selfish than the acrid, unsuccessful kind,
whose secret history is summed up in the terrible words, " Sold, but
not paid for".' And Mr. Gascoigne not only has strong family
feeling and a generous sense of duty, but shows himself in adversity
90
DANIEL DERONDA
not only admirably practical, but admirably unselfish, George
Eliot sees too much and has too sarong a sense of the real (as well as
too much self-knowledge and too adequate and constant a sense of
her own humanity) to be a satirist.
The kind of complexity and completeness, the fulness of vision
and response, represented by her Mr. Gascoigne characterizes her
rendering in general of the world to which he belongs. Henry
James's presentment of what is essentially the same world is seen, in
the comparison, to have entailed much excluding and simplifying.
His is a subtle art, and he has his irony ; but the irony doesn't mean
inclusiveness an adequacy to the complexities of the real in its
concrete fulness ; it doesn't mark a complex valuing process that has
for upshot a total attitude in which all the elements of a full response
are brought together. His art (in presenting this world in The
Portrait of a Lady, I mean) seems to leave out all such perceptions as
evoke the tones and facial expressions with which we register the
astringent and the unpalatable. The irony is part of the subtlety of
the art by which, while being so warmly concrete in effect, he can,
without challenge, be so limited and selective, and, what is an
essential condition of his selectiveness, so lacking in specificity com-
pared with George Eliot. His world of 'best society* and country-
house is, for all its life and charm, immeasurably less real (the word
has a plain enough force here, and will bear pondering) than George
Eliot's. He idealizes, ~nd his idealizing is a matter of not seeing, and
not knowing (or not taking into account), a great deal of the reality.
And it seems to me that we have essentially this kind of idealizing
in his Isabel Archer ; she stands to Gwendolen Harleth as James's
'best society' does to George Eliot's.
In saying this, of course, I am insisting on the point of comparing
Gwendolen with Isabel. The point is to bring out the force of
James's own tribute (paid through Constantius) to the char-
acteristic strength of George Eliot's art as exhibited in her
protagonist :
' And see how the girl is known, inside out, how thoroughly
she is felt and understood. It is the most inteVAgent thing in all
George Eliot's writing; and that is saying much. It is so
deep, so true, so complete, it holds such i wealth of psycho-
logical detail, it is more than masterly/
91
GEORGE ELIOT
It would hardly be said of Isabel Archer that the presentment of her
is complete ; it is characteristic of James's art to have made her an
effective enough presence for his purpose without anything ap-
proaching a 'wealth of psychological detail'. Her peculiar kind of
impressiveness, in fact, is condir'oned by her not being known inside
out, and we have to confess it could not have been achieved by
George Eliot : she knows too much about that kind of girl. For it
is fair to say that if James had met a Gwendolen Harleth (at any rate,
an American one) he would have seen Isabel Archer ; he immensely
admired George Eliot's inwardness and completeness of rendering,
but when he met the type in actual life and was prompted to the
conception of The Portrait of a Lady, he saw her with the eyes of an
American gentleman. One must add an essential point that he
saw her as American.
It is, of course, possible to imagine a beautiful, clever and vital girl,
with ' that sense of superior claims which made a large part of her
consciousness' (George Eliot's phrase for Gwendolen, but it applies
equally to Isabel), whose egoism yet shouldn't be as much open to
the criticism of an intelligent woman as Gwendolen's. But it is
hard to believe that, in life, she could be as free from qualities in-
viting a critical response as the Isabel Archer seen by James. Asking
of Gwendolen, why, though a mere girl, she should be everywhere
a centre of deferential attention, George Eliot says (Chapter IV) :
'The answer may seem to lie quite on the surface : in her beauty,
a certain unusualness about her, a decision of will which made itself
felt in her graceful movements and clear unhesitating tones, so that
if she came into the room on a rainy day when everybody else was
flaccid and the use of things in general was not apparent to them,
there seemed to be a sudden reason for keeping up the forms of life.'
James might very well have been glad to have found these phrases
for his heroine. But George Eliot isn't satisfied with the answer :
she not only goes on, as James would hardly have done, to talk about
the girl's 'inborn energy of egoistic desire', she is very specific and
concrete in exhibiting the play of that energy the ways in which
it imposes her claims on the people around her. And it is not
enough to reply that James doesn't need to be specific to this effect
even granting, as we nay, that the two authors are dealing with
different girls : it is so plain that George Eliot knows more about
92
DANIEL DERONDA
hers than he about his, and that this accounts for an important part
of the ostensible difterence.
And in so far as the ostensible difference does, as we have to grant
it does, go back to an actual difference in the object of the novelist's
interest, then we must recognize, I think, that George Eliot's choice
one determined by the nature of her interests and the quality of
her interestedness of a Gwendolen rather than an Isabel is that of
someone who knows and sees more and has a completer grasp of
the real ; and that it is one that enables the novelist to explore more
thoroughly and profoundly the distinctive field of human nature, to
be representative of which is the essential interest offered by both
girls though the one offers a fuller and richer development than
the other. Difference of actual type chosen for presentment, differ-
ence of specificity and depth in presenting it isn't possible, as a
matter of fact, to distinguish with any decision and say which
mainly we have to do with. Isabel, a beautiful and impressive
American girl, is in the habit of receiving deferential masculine
attention ; she would certainly be very extraordinary if she were
not in the habit of expecting something in the nature of homage.
Here is George Eliot on Gwendolen (Chapter XI) :
'In the ladies' dining-room it was evident that Gwendolen
was not a general favourite with her own sex ; there were no
beginnings of intimacy between her and the other girls, and in
conversation they rather noted what she said than spoke to her
in free exchange. Perhaps it was that she was not much inter-
ested in them, and when left alone in their company had a sense
of empty benches. Mrs. Vulcany once remarked that Miss
Harleth was too fond of the gentlemen ; but we know that she
was not in the least fond of them she was only fond of their
homage and women did not give her homage.'
James tells us nothing like this about Isabel ; in fact, he shows us her
receiving homage from women as well. But we can't help remem-
bering that James himself is a gentleman and remembering also as
relevant (without, of course, imputing silliness to James) George
Eliot's description of Herr Klesmer being introduced, by Mrs.
Arrowpoint, to Gwendolen (Chapter V) : his alarming cleverness
was made less formidable just then by a certain softening air of
93
GEORGE ELIOT
silliness which will sometimes befall even Genius in the desire of
being agreeable to Beauty/
George Eliot's genius appears in the specificity with which she
exhibits the accompaniments in Gwendolen of the kind of conscious
advantage she resembles Isabel m enjoying. There is the conversa-
tion with Mrs. Arrowpoint that comes just before Herr Klesmer
has the opportunity to produce that 'softening air of silliness', a
conversation that illustrates one of the disabilities of egoism : * self-
confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary duhiess in others ;
as people who are well off speak In a cajoling tone to the poor, and
those who are in the prime of life raise their voice and speak arti-
ficially to seniors, hastily conceiving them to be deaf and rather
imbecile*. We have hardly here a writer the movement of whose
mind is 'too slow and cumbersome for comedy' and whose 'hold
upon dialogue is slack'. When she is at her best, as she is on so large
a scale in Gwendolen Harleth, there is no writer of whom these
criticisms are less true. Nowhere is her genius more apparent than
in tne sensitive precision of her 'hold on dialogue* ; a hold which,
with the variety of living tension she can create with it, is illustrated
below (see page 100) in the scene between Gwendolen and her
mother that follows on the arrival of Grandcourt' s self-committing
note, and (see page 103) ; n the decisive tete-a-tete with Grandcourt.
It is essentially in her speech that Gwendolen is made a concrete
presence Gwendolen, whose 'ideal it was tw be daring in speech
and reckless in braving danger, both moral and physical' ; of whom
it is hard to say whether she is more fitly described as tending to act
herself or her ideal of herself ; 'whose lively venturesomeness of
talk has the effect of wit' ('it was never her aspiration to express
herself virtuously so much as cleverly a point to be remembered in
extenuation of her words, which were usually worse than she was').
Here she is with her mother before the anticipated first meeting
with Grandcourt :
'Mrs. Davilow felt her ears tingle when Gwendolen, sud-
denly throwing herself into the attitude of drawing her bow,
said with a look of comic enjoyment
"'How I pity all the other girls at the Archery Meeting all
thinking of Mr. Gran icourt ! And they have not a shadow of
a chance."
94
DANIEL DERONDA
'Mrs. Davilow had not presence of mind to answer immedi-
ately, and Gwendolen turned quickly round towards her, say-
ing, wickedly, " Now you know they have not, mamma. You
and my uncle and aunt you all intend him to fall in love
with me."
'Mrs. Davilow, piqued into a little stratagem, said, "Oh,
my dear, that is not so certain. Miss Arrowpoint has charms
which you have not." /
'"I know; but they demand thought. My arrow will
pierce him before he has time for thought. He will declare
himself my slave I shall send aim round the world to bring
me back the wedding-ring of a happy woman in the mean-
time all the men who are between him and the title will die of
different diseases he will come back Lord Grandcourt but
without the ring and fall at my feet. I shall laugh at him
he will rise in resentment I shall laugh more he will call for
his steed and ride to Quctcham, where he will find Miss Arrow-
point just married to a needy musician, Mrs. Arrowpoint tear-
ing her cap off, and Mr. Arrowpoint standing by. Exit LoH.
Grandcourt, who returns to Diplow, and, like M. Jabot, change
de tinge."
' Was ever any young witch like this ? You thought of
hiding things from her sat upon the secret and looked inno-
cent, and all the while she knew by the corner of your eye that
it was exactly five pounds ten you were sitting on ! As well
turn the key to keep out the damp ! It was probable that by
dint of divination she already knew more than any one else did
of Mr. Grandcourt. That idea in Mrs. Davilow' s mind
prompted the sort of question which often comes without any
other apparent reason than the faculty of speech and the not
knowing what to do with it.
'"Why, what kind of man do you imagine him to be,
Gwendolen ?"
'"Let me see !" said the witch, putting her forefinger to her
lips with a little frown, and then stretching out the finger with
decision. "Short just above my shoulder trying to make
himself tall by turning up his mustache and keeping his beard
long a glass in his right eye to give him an air of distinction
a strong opinion about his waistcoat, but uncertain and trim-
ming about the weather, on which he will try to draw me out.
He will stare at me all the while, and the glass in his eye will
95
GEORGE ELIOT
cause him to make horrible faces, especially when he smiles in
a flattering way. I shall cast down my eye., in consequence,
and he will perceive that I am not indifferent to his attentions.
I shall dream at night that I am looking at the extraordinary
face of a magnified insect and the next morning he will make
me the offer of his hand ; the sequel as before"/
With such sureness of touch does George Eliot render the kind
of lively, Venturesome' lightness it is something more than a
second nature in Gwendolen to affect that one's mind reverts again
and again to the peculiar reputation enjoyed by Congreve. That
kind of praise applies more reasonably to the perfection achieved by
George Eliot ; to the unfailing Tightness with which she gets, in all
its turns and moods, her protagonist's airy self-dramatizing sophis-
tication in which there is a great deal more point than in the
alleged 'perfection of style' Congreve gives to Millamant, since
Gwendolen's talk is really dramatic, correspondingly significant,
and duly 'placed'. We are not offered wit and phrasing for our
admiration and the delight of our palates.
It is in the scene between Gwendolen and Grandcourt that George
Eliot's mastery of dialogue is most strikingly exhibited. We have
it in the brush that follows, in Chapter XI, on their being intro-
duced to each other. It is shown in the rendering of high dramatic
tension in Chapter XIII, where Gwendolen takes evasive action
in the face of Grandcourt's clear intent to propose. I will save
quotation for the marvellously economical passage (reference
to it will be in place later) in which she finds that she has
placed herself in a position in which she can't not accept, and
acceptance seems to determine itself without an act of will.
There is a good example of light exchange between them in the
following Chapter (XXVIII).
At the moment, what has to be noted is that, though James's
Pulcheria of the 'Conversation' says 'they are very much alike' ('it
proves how common a type the worldly, pinde, selfish young
woman seemed to her'), Gwendolen is decidedly not another
Rosamond Vincy : her talk is enough to establish that ; as Theodora
says, she is intelligent. It is with Mrs. Transome that she belongs,
being qualified in the s,.me kind of way as Mrs. Transome had been
in youth to enact the role of daringly brilliant beauty : 'she had
96
DANIEL DERONDA
never dissociated happiness from personal pre-eminence and falat.' l
She is intelligent in Mrs. Transome's way :
'In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that
strong starch cf unexplained rules and disconnected facts which
saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness ; and what
remained of all things knowable, she was conscious of being
sufficiently acquainted with through novels, plays and poems.
About her French and music, the two justifying accomplish-
ments of a young lady, she felt no ground for uneasiness ; and
when to all these qualifications, negative and positive, we add
the spontaneous sense of capability some happy persons are born
with, so that any subject they turn attention to impresses them
with their own power of forming a correct judgment on it,
who can wonder if Gwendolen felt ready to manage her own
destiny/ (Chapter IV.)
It is only when compared with George Eliot herself that she is
(like Mrs. Transome) to be classed with Rosamond Vincy : none
of these three personae is at all like Dorothea, or represents any
possibility of the Dorothea relation to the novelist. As James's
Theodora says, she is intelligent, 'and therefore tragedy can have a
hold on her'. She is a young Mrs. Transome, in whom disaster
forces a development of conscience ; for, in George Eliot's phrase,
'she has a root of consaence in her'. It is there from the beginning
in her dread of 'the unpleasant sense of compunction towards her
mother, which was the nearest approach to self-condemnation and
self-distrust she had known'. We are told also : 'Hers was one of
die natures in which exultation invariably carries an infusion of
dread ready to curdle and declare itself.' This, which is dramatically
exemplified in the episode of the suddenly revealed picture of the
dead face during the charades (in Chapter VI), may seem a merely
arbitrary Aonnie. Actually, in a youthful egoist, dreading com-
punction and intelligent enough to dread also the unknown within
the anarchic movement of impulse with its irrevocable conse-
quences, it can be seen to be part of the essential case ; especially
when the trait is associated with an uneasy sense of the precarious
1 * Church was not markedly distinguished in her mind from the other
forms of self-presentation. . . .' (Chapter XL VIII.)
G 97
GEORGE ELIOT
status of egoistic 'exultation' and egoistic claims a sense natural to
an imaginative young egoist in the painful impressionableness of
immaturity. 'Solitude in any wide scene', we are told, 'impressed
her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from
her, in the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting
herself/ It all seems to me imagined with truth and subtlety, and
admirably analysed. So that when we are told, 'Whatever was
accepted as consistent with being a lady she had no scruple about ;
but from the dim region of what was called disgraceful, wrong,
guilty, she shrank with mingled pride and terror', then a whole
concrete case is focussed in the summary. The potentiality
in Gwendolen of a seismic remorse is concretely established
for us.
Here, of course, we have a difference between her and Isabel
Archer : remorse it doesn't belong to James's conception of his
young woman that she shall have any need for that. She is merely
to make a wrong choice, the wrongness of which is a matter of an
error in judgment involving no guilt on her part, though it involves
tragic consequences for her. As Mr. Yvor Winters sees it in his
essay on him in Maules Curse, James is roncerned, characteristically,
to present the choice as free to present it as pure choice. 'The
moral issue, then, since it is primarily an American affair, is freed in
most of the Jamesian novels, and in all of the greatest, from the
compulsion of a code of manners.' This ceicainly has a bearing on
the difference between Gwendolen and Isabel ; between the English
young lady in her proper setting of mid- Victorian English 'best
society', one who in her 'vcnturesomeness' 'cannot conceive her-
self as anything else than a lady', 1 and the 'free' American girl, who
moves on the Old World stage as an indefinitely licensed and privi-
leged interloper. But there is a more obviously important differ-
ence : 'The moral issue is also freed from economic necessity . . .
Isabel Archer is benevolently provided with funds after her story
opens, with the express purpose that her action shall thereafter be
unhampered/
1 'She rejoiced tc feel herself exceptional; but her horizon was that of a
genteel romance where the heroine's soul poured out in her journal is full of
vague power, originality and general rebellion, while her life moves strictly
in the sphere of fashion ; and if she wanders into a swamp, the pathos lies
partly, so to speak, in her naving on satin shoes.' (Chapter VI.)
DANIEL DERONDA
The contrast offered by George Eliot's preoccupation is extreme*
All her creative power works to the evoking of a system of pressures
so intolerable to Gwendolen, and so enclosing, that her final accept-
ance of Grandcourt seems to issue, not from her will, but from
them ; if she acts, it is certainly not in freedom, and she hasn't even
the sense of exercising choice. Economic necessity plays a deter-
mining part. In the earlier phase of the history she has, as much as
Isabel Archer in respect of Lord Warburton and Gilbert Osmond,
a free choice in front of her : does she, or does she not, want to
marry Grandcourt ? But after the meeting with Mrs. Glasher and
Grandcourt's children she recoils in disgust and horror from the idea
of marriage with him ; she recoils from the wrong to others, and
from the insult (she feels) offered herself Then comes the financial
disaster, engulfing her family. The effect on Gwendolen, with her
indocile egoism and her spoilt child's ignorance of practical realities,
and the consequences for her these are evoked with vivid particu-
larity. There is, pressed on her by the kind and efficient Rector,
her uncle, as a duty that is at the same time a gift of fortune she can't
fail to accept with grateful gladness, the situation of governess with
Mrs. Mompert, the Bishop's wife who, as a woman of 'strict
principle' such as precludes her from * having a French person in the
house', will want to inspect even the Rector's nominee before
appointing her: the sheer impossibility of such a 'situation' for
Gwendolen is something we are made to feel from the inside. The
complementary kind of impossibility, the impossibility of her own
plan of exploiting with tclat her talents and advantages and becoming
a great actress or singer, is brought home to her with crushing and
humiliating finality by Herr Klcsmer (Chapter XXIII). It is im-
mediately after this interview, which leaves her with no hope of
an alternative to Mrs. Mompert and the 'episcopal penitentiary',
that Grandcourt's note arrives, asking if he may call. No better
illustration of George Eliot's peculiar genius as a novelist a kind of
genius so different from that she is commonly credited with can
be found for quoting than the presentment of Gwendolen's re-
actions. Here we have the most subtle and convincing analysis
rendered, with extraordinary vividness and economy, in the con-
crete; the shifting tensions in Gwendolen are registered in her
speech and outward movements, and the whole is (in an essentially
99
GEORGE ELIOT
novelistic way) so dramatic that we don't distinguish the elements
of description and commentary as such :
'Gwendolen let it fall on the floor, and turned away.
' "It must be answered, darling," said Mrs. Davilow, timidly.
<rri1
The man waits.
' Gwendolen sank on the settee, clasped her hands, and looked
straight before her, not at her mother. She had the expression
of one who had been startled by a sound and was listening to
know what would come of it. The sudden change of the
situation was bewildering. A few minutes before she was
looking along an inescapable path of repulsive monotony, with
hopeless inward rebellion against the imperious lot which left
her no choice : and lo, now, a moment of choice was come.
Yet was it triumph sh~ felt most or terror ? Impossible for
Gwendolen not to feel some triumph in a tribute to her power
at a time when she was first tasting the bitterness of insignifi-
cance : again she seemed to be getting a sort of empire over her
own life. But how to use it ? Here came the terror. Quick,
quick, like pictures in a book beaten open with a sense of hurry,
came back vividly, yet in fragments, all that she had gone
through in relation to Grandcourt the allurements, the vacilla-
tions, the resolve to accede, the final repulsion ; the incisive
face of that dark-eyed lady with the lovely boy ; her own
pledge (was it a pledge not to marry him ?) the new disbelief
in the worth of men and things for which that scene of dis-
closure had become a symbol. That unalterable experience
made a vision at which in the first agitated moment, before
tempering reflections could suggest themselves, her native
terror shrank.
'Where was the good of choice coming again ? What did
she wish ? Anything different ? No ! and yet in the dark seed-
growths of consciousness a new wish was forming itself "I
wish I had never known it ! " Something, any tiling she wished
for that would have saved her from the dread to let Grandcourt
come.
'It was no long while yet it seemed long to Mrs. Davilow,
before she thought it well to say, gently
' " It will be necessary for you to write, dear. Or shall I write
an answer for you which you will dictate ? "
'"No, mamma," said Gwendolen, drawing a deep breath.
"But please lay me out the pen and paper."
100
DANIEL DERONDA
'That was gaining time. Was she to decline Grandcourt's
visit close the shutters no*, even look out on what would
happen ? though with the assurance that she should remain
just where she was ? The young activity within her made a
warm current through her terror and stirred towards some-
thing that would be an event towards an opportunity in
which she could look and speak with the former effectiveness.
The interest of the morrow was no longer at a deadlock.
'"There is really no reason on earth why you should be so
alarmed at the man's waiting for a few minutes, mamma/'
said Gwendolen, remonstrantly, as Mrs. Davilow, having pre-
pared the writing materials, looked towards her expectantly.
"Servants expect nothing else than to wait. It is not to be
supposed that I must write on the instant."
' " No, dear," said Mrs. Davilow, in die tone of one corrected,
turning to sit down and take up a bit of work that lay at hand ;
"he can wait another quarter of an hour, if you like."
'It was a very simple speech and action on her part, but it was
what might have been subtly calculated. Gwendolen felt a
contradictory desire to be hastened : hurry would save her
from deliberate choice.
*"I did not mean him to wait long enough for that needle-
work to be finished," she said, lifting her hands to stroke the
backward curves of her hair, while she rose from her seat and
stood still.
"'But if you don't feel able to decide ?" said Mrs. Davilow,
sympathizingly.
'"I must decide," said Gwendolen, walking to the writing-
table and seating herself. All the while there was a busy under-
current in her, like the thought of a man who keeps up a
dialogue while he is considering how he can slip away. Why
should she not let him come ? It bound her to nothing. He
had been to Leubronn after her : of course he meant a direct
unmistakable renewal of the suit which before had been only
implied. What then ? She could reject him. Why was she to
deny herself the freedom of doing this which she would like
to do?
' "If Mr. Grandcourt has only just returned from Leubronn,"
said Mrs. Davilow, observing that Gwendolen leaned back in
her chair after taking the pen in her hand "I wonder whether
he has heard of our misfortunes."
101
GEORGE ELIOT
'"That could make no difference to a man in his position,"
said Gwendolen, rather contemptuously.
'"It would, to some men," said Mrs. Davilow. "They
would not like to take a wife from a family in a state of beggary
almost, as we are. Htre we are at Offehdene, with a great shell
over us as usual. But just imagine his finding us at Sawyer's
Cottage. Most men are afraid of being bored or taxed by a
wife's family. If Mr. Grandcourt did know, I think it a strong
proof of his attachment to you."
'Mrs. Davilow spoke with unusual emphasis: it was the
first time she had ventured to say anything about Grandcourt
which would necessarily seem intended as an argument in
favour of him, her habitual impression being that such argu-
ments would certainly be useless and might be worse. The
effect of her words now was stronger than she could imagine :
they raised a new set of possibilities in Gwendolen's mind a
vision of what Grandcourt might do for her mother if she,
Gwendolen, did what she was not going to do. She was so
moved by a new rush of ideas, that like one conscious of being
urgently called away, she felt that the immediate task must be
hastened : the letter must be written, else it might be endlessly
deferred. After all, she acted in a hurry as she had wished to
do. To act in a hurry was to have a reason for keeping away
from an absolute decision, and to leave open as many issues as
possible.
'She wrote: "Miss Harleth presents hei compliments to
Mr. Grandcourt. She will be at home after two o'clock
to-morrow".'
Reading this, it is hard to remember that George Eliot was con-
temporary with Trollope. What later novelist has rendered the
inner movement of impulse, the play of motive that issues in speech
and act and underlies formed thought and conscious will, with more
penetrating subtlety than she ? It is partly done through speech and
action. But there is also, co-operating with these, a kind of psycho-
logical notation that is well represented in the passage quoted above,
and is exemplified in ' Quick, quick, like pictures in a book beaten
open with a sense oi hurry . . .', and 'yet in the dark seed-growths
of consciousness a new wish was forming itself. . .' and 'The young
activity within her mado a warn: current through her terror . . /,
and 'All the while there was a busy under-current in her, like the
102
DANIEL DERONDA
thought of a man who keeps up a dialogue while he is considering
how he can slip away* and so much else. This notation is one of
the distinctive characteristics of her mature style, 1 doing its work
always with an inevitable Tightness and Daniel Deronda (with
Middlemarch) was written in the ea~lier 'seventies. But remarkable
as it is, and impressive as would be the assemblage of instances that
could be quickly brought together, it is better not to stress it without
adding that, as she uses it, it is inseparable from her rendering of
'psychology' in speech and action. It doesn't seem to me that her
genius as exhibited in these ways has been anything like duly re-
cognized.
The passage last quoted is not the work of a 'slow and cumber-
some mind'. As for the 'hold on dialogue', here is the proposal
scene (Chapter XXVII again quotation must be at length) :
'In eluding a direct appeal Gwendolen recovered some of her
self-possession. She spoke with dignity and looked straight at
Grandcourt, whose long, narrow, impenetrable eyes met hers,
and mysteriously arrested them : mysteriously ; for the subtly-
varied drama between man and woman is often such as can
hardly be rendered in words put together like dominoes, ac-
1 The record of Gwendolen's later days of desperation is rich in quotable
instances, e.g. : * The thought of his dying would not subsist : it turned as
with a dream-change into *he terror that she should die with his throttling
fingers on her neck avenging that thought. Fantasies moved within her like
ghosts, making no break in her more acknowledged consciousness and find-
ing no obstruction in it: dark rays doing their work invisibly in the broad
light/ (Chapter XL VIII.)
And here is Grandcourt (Chapter XXVIII): 'Grandcourt's thoughts this
evening were like the circlets one sees in a dark pool continually dying out
and continually started again by some impulses from below the surface. The
deeper central impulse came from the image of Gwendolen. . . .'
Or take this from Middlemarch (Vol. I, Chapter XXI the end) :
'We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to
feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that
stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote
herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and
wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection
but feeling an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity
of objects that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and
shadows must always fall with a certain difference.'
The reader will have noted a phrase for which Ivlr. T. S. Eliot might have
been grateful in the days when he was calling attention to the 'felt thought*
in seventeenth-century poetry.
103
GEORGE ELIOT
cording to obvious fixed marks. The word of all work, Love,
will no more express the myrial modes of mutual attraction,
than the word Thought can inform you what is passing through
your neighbour's mind. It would be hard to tell on which side
Gwendolen's or Grandcourt's the influence was more
mixed. At that moment his strongest wish was to be com-
pletely master of this creature this piquant combination of
maidenliness and mischief: that she knew things which had
made her start away from him, spurred him to triumph over
that repugnance ; and he was believing that he should triumph.
And she ah ! piteous equality in the need to dominate ! she
was overcome like the thirsty one who is drawn towards the
seeming water in the desert, overcome by the suffused sense
that here in this man's homage to her lay the rescue from help-
less subjection to an oppressive lot.
'All the while they were looking at each other ; and Grand-
court said, slowly and languidly, as if it were of no importance,
other things having been settled
'"You will tell me now, I hope, that Mrs. Davilow's loss of
fortune will not trouble you further. You will trust me to
prevent it from weighing upon her. You will give me the
claim to provide against that."
* The little pauses and refined drawlings with which this speech
was uttered, gave time for Gwendolen to go through the dream
of a life. As the words penetrated her, they had the effect of a
draught of wine, which suddenly makes all things easier, desir-
able things not so wrong, and people in general less disagree-
able. She had a momentary phantasmal love for this man who
chose his words so well, and who was a mere incarnation of
delicate homage. Repugnance, dread, scruples these were
dim as remembered pains, while she was already tasting relief
under the immediate pain of hopelessness. She imagined
herself already springing to her mother, and being playful
again. Yet when Grandcourt had ceased to speak, there was an
instant in which she was conscious of being at the turning of
the ways.
"'You are very generous," she said, not moving her eyes,
and speaking wi Ji a gentle intonation.
'"You accept what will make such things a matter of
course ? " said Grandcourt, without any new eagerness. "You
consent to become m/ wife ?"
104
DANIEL DERONDA
'This time Gwendolen remained quite pale. Something
made her rise from her seat in spite of herself and walk to a
little distance. Then she turned and with her hands folded
before her stood in silence.
'Grandcouit immediately rose too, resting his hat on the
chair, but still keeping hold of it. The evident hesitation of
this destitute girl to take his splendid offer stung him into a
keenness of interest such as he had not known for years. None
the less because he attributed her hesitation entirely to her
knowledge about Mrs. Glasher. In that attitude of preparation,
he said
'"Do you command me to go ?" No familiar spirit could
have suggested to him more effective words.
'"No," said Gwendolen. She could not let him go : that
negative was a clutch. She seemed to herself to be, after all,
only drifted towards the tremendous decision : but drifting
depends on something besides the currents, when the sails have
been set beforehand.
'"You accept my devotion ?" said Grandcourt, holding his
hat by his side and looking straight into her eyes, without other
movement. Their eyes meeting in that way seemed to allow
any length of pause ; but wait as long as she would, how could
she contradict herself? What had she detained him for ? He
had shut out any explanation.
' "Yes/* came as gravely from Gwendolen's lips as if she had
been answering to ner name in a court of justice. He received
it gravely, and they still looked at each other in the same
attitude. Was there ever before such a way of accepting the
bliss-giving "Yes" ? Grandcourt liked better to be at that
distance from her, and to feel under a ceremony imposed by
an indefinable prohibition that breathed from Gwendolen's
bearing.
'But he did at length lay down his hat and advance to take
her hand, just pressing his lips upon it and letting it go again.
She thought his behaviour perfect, and gained a sense of free-
dom which made her almost ready to be mischievous. Her
"Yes" entailed so little at this moment, that there was nothing
to screen the reversal of her gloomy prospects : her vision was
filled by her own release from the Momperts, and her mother's
release from Sawyer's Cottage. With a happy curl of the lips,
she said
105
GEORGE ELIOT
' "Will you not see mamma ? I will fetch her."
'"Let us wait a little," said Grandcourt, in his favourite
attitude, having his left forefinger and thumb in his waistcoat-
pocket, and with his right caressing his whisker, while he stood
near Gwendolen and looked at her not unlike a gentleman
who has a felicitous introduction at an evening party.
'"Have you anything else to say to me ?" said Gwendolen,
playfully.
'"Yes I know having things said to you is a great bore,"
said Grandcourt, rather sympathetically.
'"Not when they are things I like to hear."
'"Will it bother you to be asked how soon we can be
married?"
'"I think it will, to-day," said Gwendolen, putting up her
chin saucily.
'"Not to-day, then, but to-morrow. Think of it before I
come to-morrow. In a fortnight or three weeks as soon as
possible."
'"Ah, you think you will be tired of my company," said
Gwendolen. "I notice when people are married the husband
is not so much with his wife as when they are engaged. But
perhaps I shall like that better too."
' She laughed charmingly.
'"You shall have whatever you like," said Grandcourt.
'"And nothing that I don't like ? please say that, because
I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like,"
said Gwendolen, finding herself in the woman's paradise where
all her nonsense is adorable.'
It will be noted how beautifully the status of Gwendolen's spon-
taneously acted self is defined by her relieved and easy assumption
of it once the phase of tense negativity has issued in 'Yes'. And it
was clearly not this self that pronounced the 'Yes' ; nor does it
come from a profound integrated self. George Eliot's way of
putting it is significant : ' "Yes" came as gravely from Gwendolen's
lips as if she had been answering to her name in a court of justice.'
This is a response that issues out of something like an abeyance of
will ; it is determired for her. No acquiescence could look less like
an expression of free choice. Yet we don't feel that Gwendolen is
therefore not to be judged as a moral agent. The 'Yes' is a true
expression of her moral economy ; that the play of tensions should
106
DANIEL DERONDA
have as its upshot this response has been established by habits of
valuation and by essential choices lived. ' She seemed to herself to
be, after all, only drifted towards the tremendous decision : but
drifting depends on something besides the currents, when the sails
have been set beforehand. ' Even before what she saw as a moral
objection arose to confront her, she had had no sense of herself as
able to settle her relations with Grandcourt by a clear and free act
of choice:
'Even in Gwendolen's mind that result was one of two likeli-
hoods that presented themselves alternately, one of two deci-
sions towards which she was being precipitated, as if they were
two sides of a boundary-line, and she did not know on which
she should fall. This subjection to a possible self, a self not to
be absolutely predicted about, caused hjr some astonishment
and terror : her favourite key of life doing as she liked
seemed to fail her, and she could not foresee what at a given
moment she might like to do.' (Chapter XIII.)
But we aren't inclined to think of her as being then any the les^ a
subject for moral evaluation. We note rather, as entering into the
account, that she gets a thrill out of the surrender to tense un-
certainty, and that it is not for nothing that at her first introduction
to us, in the opening, she figures as the gambler, lost in the intoxica-
tion of hazard. The situation, in respect of Gwendolen's status as
a moral agent, isn't essentially altered by the reinforcement, in con-
flicting senses, of the pulls and pressures bearing on the act of choice :
the supervention of a powerful force, represented by Mrs. Glasher,
carrying Gwendolen in recoil from Grandcourt, which is countered
by a new pressure towards acceptance the economic one (translat-
able by Gwendolen into terms of duty towards her mother). 1
1 *The cheque was for five hundred pounds, and Gwendolen turned it
towards her mother, with the letter.
'"How very kind and delicate!" said Mrs. Davilow, with much feeling.
"But I really should like better not to be dependent on a son-in-law. I and
the girls could get along very well."
'"Mamma, if you say that again, I will not marry him," said Gwendolen,
angrily.
'"My dear child, I trust you are not going to marry only for my sake,'*
said Mrs. Davilow deprecatingly.
' Gwendolen tossed her head on the pillow away from her mother, and let
the ring lie. She was irritated at this atten.pt to take away a motive.' (Chapter
XXVIII.)
107
GEORGE ELIOT
We note, with regard to Gwendolen's attitude towards what she
sees as the strong moral ground for refusing Grandcourt, that 'in
the dark seed-growths of consciousness a new wish was forming
itself*'! wish I had never known it".' There is much concrete
psychological notation to this effect, deriving from the insight of a
great novelist ; that it has a moral significance, a relation to that
ostensibly mechanical and unwilled ' Yes ', is plain. But it is possible
to overstress Gwendolen's guilt in the matter of Mrs. Glasher, a
guilt that is so very conscious. George Eliot's appreciation of the
moral issues doesn't coincide wi Ji that of her protagonist or of the
conventional Victorian moralist. For George Eliot the essential
significance of Gwendolen's case lies in the egoism expressed here
(the passage follows immediately on that kst quoted, in which she
'could not foresee what at a given moment she might like to do') :
'The prospect of marrying Grandcourt really seemed more
attractive to her than she had believed beforehand that any
marriage could be : the dignities, the luxuries, the power of
doing a great deal of what she liked to, which had now come
close to her, and within her power to secure or to lose, took hold
of her nature as if it had been the strong odour of what she had
only imagined and longed for before. And Grandcourt him-
self? He seemed as little of a flaw in his fortunes as a lover and
husband could possibly be. Gwendolen wished to mount the
chariot and drive the plunging liorses herself, with a spouse by
her side who would fold his arms and give her his countenance
without looking ridiculous.'
It is again a case of Hubris with its appropriate Nemesis. What first
piqued her into turning on 'this Mr. Grandcourt' a quality of inten-
tion no other man had exacted from her was that 'he seemed to feel
his own importance more than he did hers a sort of unreasonable-
ness few of us can tolerate'. She had a similar attraction for him.
When, too late, she knows to the full the mistakenness of her
assumptions and finds herself beaten at her own game, the great hold
Grandcourt has over her lies in her moral similarity to him : 'For
she too, with her melancholy distaste for things, preferred that her
distaste should include admirers'. And the best she can do is 'to
bear this last great gambling loss with perfect self-possession'.
'True, she still saw tliat she "would manage differently from
108
DANIEL DERONDA
mamma" ; but her management now only meant that she would
carry her troubles with an air of perfect self-possession, and let none
suspect them/ As for what she takes to be her guilt, pride in her
overrides remorse : what she most cares about is that Grandcourt
shall not know that she knew of Mrs. Glasher before accepting him
(though, ironically, he has, all along, known, and his knowledge
had added to Gwendolen's attractiveness for him). The conse-
quent torment reminds us closely of Mrs. Transome s Nemesis :
'now that she was a wife, the sense that Grandcourt was gone to
Gadsmere [his home for Mrs. Glasher and his children] was like red
heat near a burn. She had brought on herself this indignity in her
own eyes this humiliation of being doomed to a terrified silence
lest her husband should discover with what sort of consciousness she
had married him ; and as she had said to Deronda^ she "must go
on' 1 .' And 'in spite of remorse, it still seemed the worse result of
her marriage that she should in any way make a spectacle of herself ;
and her humiliation was lightened by her thinking that only Mrs.
Glasher was aware of the fact that caused it.'
So much pride and courage and sensitiveness and intelligence fixed
in a destructive deadlock through false valuation and self-ignorance
this is what makes Gwendolen a tragic figure. And as George
Eliot establishes for our contemplation the complexities of inner
constitution and outer conditions that make Gwendolen look so
different from babel Archer, she is exhibiting what we recognize
from our own most intimate experience to be as much the be-
haviour of a responsible moral agent, and so as much amenable to
moral judgment, as any human behaviour can be. Not, of course,
that our attitude is that of the judge towards the prisoner in the
dock ; but neither is it that of tout comprendre, cest tout pardonner.
It is, or should be (with George Eliot's help), George Eliot's own,
which is that of a great novelist, concerned with human and moral
valuation in a way proper to her art it is a way that doesn't let
us forget that what is being lit up for us lies within.
And turning once more to Isabel Archer, we may ask whether,
in this matter of choice, she is as different from Gwendolen as
Mr. Winters' account suggests : isn't her appearance of being so
much more free to choose with her 'ethical sensibility' largely
illusion e She herself must look back on her treasured freedom of
109
GEORGE ELIOT
choice with some irony when, after her marriage, she has learnt of
the relations between her husband and Madame Merle, and of the
part played by Madame Merle in her 'choosing' to marry Osmond.
But for us it is the wider significance of the revelation that needs
dwelling on. It is not surprising that so young a girl, and one so
new to this social climate, should have been unable to value at their
true worth either Madame Merle or Osmond ; and how could, in
any case, anyone so little experienced in life, knowing so little about
herself, and (inevitably) so vague about what in concrete terms the
'fineness' she means to achieve m life might amount to how could
such a girl exercise a choice that should be essentially more than
Gwendolen's a free expression of ethical sensibility ?
And isn't this (comes the comment on Mr. Winters' account) just
James's point ? Yet we are, by that account, made to reflect on a
distinctive quality of James's art a quality that makes it possible
for an intelligent critic to slight the irony and see the book as Mr.
Winters does. Isn't there, in fact, something evasive about James's
inexplicitness ; something equivocal about his indirectness and the
subtlety of implication with which he pursues his aim of excluding
all but the 'essential' ? What, we ask, thinking by contrast of the
fulness with which we have Gwendolen, is the substance of Isabel's
interest for us ? In spite of such things as the fine passage in Chapter
XLII of The Portrait of a Lady that evokes her finding 'the infinite
vista of a multiplied life to be a dark alley with a dead wall at the
end', we see that James's marvellous art is devoted to contenting us
with very little in the way of inward realization of Isabel, and to
keeping us interested, instead, in a kind of psychological detective
work keeping us intently wondering from the outside, and con-
structing, on a strict economy of evidence, what is going on inside.
And, if we consider, we find that die constructions to which we are
led are of such a kind as not to challenge, or to bear with comfort,
any very searching test in terms of life. The difference between
James and George Eliot is largely a matter of what he leaves out.
The leaving out, of course, is a very positive art that oilers the com-
pensation. But it is not the less fair to say that what James does with
Gwendolen Harleth throws a strong light on the characteristic work-
ing of that peculiar moral sense which Mr. Winters discusses in rela-
tion to the New England background a light in which its limiting
no
DANIEL DERONDA
tendency appears as drastic indeed. The Portrait of a Lady belongs to
the sappiest phase of James's art, when the hypertrophy of technique
hadn't yet set in ; but, in the light of the patent relation to Gwendolen
Harleth, we can see already a certain disproportion between an in-
tensity of art that has at the same tirre an effect of moral intensity and
the actual substance of human interest provided. That James should
have done this with what he found in George Eliot, and done it
with such strenuously refined art ! that registers our reaction.
Actually, we can see that the trouble is that he derives so much
more from George Eliot than he suspects : he largely mistakes the
nature of his inspiration, which is not so much from life as he
supposes. He has been profoundly impressed by the irony of
Gwendolen's married situation, and is really moved by a desire to
produce a similar irony. But he fails to produce the fable that gives
inevitability and moral significance. He can remain unaware of his
failure because he is so largely occupied (a point that can be illus-
trated in detail) in transposing George Eliot, whose power is due to
the profound psychological truth of her conception, and the con-
sistency with which she develops it.
Isabel Archer, for all James's concern (if Mr. Winters is right) to
isolate in her the problem of ethical choice, has neither a more
intense nor a richer moral significance than Gwendolen Harleth ;
but very much the reverse. If this way of stating James's interest in
her seems obtuse, and we are to appreciate a fully ironical intention
in his presentment of the irony of her case, and are to say (as surely
we are) that he intends an ironical 'placing' of her illusion, the
adverse criticism of James still holds. For we can still see Mr.
Winters' excuse for stating things in his way : beyond any question
we are invited to share a valuation of Isabel that is incompatible
with a really critical irony. We can't even say that James makes an
implicit critical comment on the background of American idealism
that fostered her romantic confidence in life and in her ability to
choose : he admires her so much, and demands for her such ad-
miration and homage, that he can't be credited with 'placing* the
conditions that, as an admirable American girl, she represents.
James's lack of specificity favours an evasiveness, and the evasiveness,
if at all closely questioned, yields inconsistency of a kind that partly
empties the theme of The Portrait of a Lady of moral substance.
in
GEORGE ELIOT
He exempts Isabel from the conditions that engage our sympathy
for Gwendolen of whom we arc nevertheless not expected to be
uncritical : economic pressure, and the pressure (for, where Grand-
court's suit is in question, it is more than mere approval that Mr.
Gascoigne enacts) brought qua e i-paternally to bear on her by her
uncle, die representative of the approving expectation of the society
that constitutes her world. For the 'free' Isabel it can't even be
urged that she is the victim of bad advice or a tacit general con-
spiracy that favours Madame Merle's designs ; on the contrary, all
those whose judgment Isabel has most reason to respect Ralph
Touchett, Mrs. Touchett, Lord Warburton argue cogently against
Osmond by their valuation of him. That she shouldn't be led by
their unanimity to question her own valuation convicts her of a
notable lack of sense, not to say extremely unintelligent obstinacy
(which nothing we are shown mitigates) at least, one would think
so ; but James doesn't let us suppose that he shares this "view. After
the marriage she is shown to us enjoying, in her proudly dissimu-
lated desolation, the admiring pity due to a noble victim who is
above criticism.
These inconsistencies, these moral incoherences, which become
apparent when we ponder the story, pass undetected at first because
of the brilliant art with which James, choosing his scenes h faire,
works in terms of dramatic presentation. His dramatic triumphs
often turn out to have been prompted (without, one judges, his
recognizing the fact) by felicities of dramatic presentation in George
Eliot ; but his art is his own. All the same, when we make the
comparison, we find that her art is not less remarkable than his for
command of the dramatic that she enjoys here, in fact, a character-
istic superiority. With her advantage in specificity, she is certainly
not inferior in vividness and immediate power ; and when we
reflect critically and relate the scene to what goes before and what
comes after we discover more and more reason for admiring her
moral and psychological insight, and the completeness with which
she has grasped and realized her theme.
In what James does with Gwendolen Harleth there is something
premonitory. Again and again in his later work we find ourselves
asking : What is the moral substance ? what, definable in terms of
human interest, is there to justify this sustained and strenuous sugges-
112
DANIEL DERONDA
tion that important issues are involved, important choices are
to be made ? His kind of preoccupation with eliminating the
inessential clearly tends to become the pursuit of an essential that
is illusory.
If any doubt should linger as to whether one is justified in talking
about 'what James does with Gwendolen Harleth 9 , it should be
settled finally by a consideration of Osmond in relation to Grand-
court : Osmond so plainly is Grandcourt, hardly disguised, that the
general derivative relation of James's novel to George Eliot's be-
comes quite unquestionable. It is true that Grandcourt is no
aesthetic connoisseur, but Osmond's interest in articles of virtb
amounts to nothing more than a notation of a kind of cherished
fastidiousness of conscious, but empty, superiority that is precisely
Grandcourt's : 'From the first she had noticed that he had nothing
of the fool in his composition but that by some subtle means he
communicated to her the impression that all the folly lay with other
people, who did what he did not care to do.' That might very well
be an account of the effect of Osmond on Isabel, but it comes from
George Eliot. Grandcourt, as an English aristocrat whose status
licenses any amount of languid disdain, doesn't need a symbolic
dilettantism :
'He himself knew what personal repulsion was nobody
better : his mind was much furnished with a sense of what
brutes his fellow-creatures were, both masculine and feminine ;
what odious familiarities they had, what smirks, what modes of
flourishing their handkerchiefs, what costumes, what lavender-
water, what bulging eyes, and what foolish notions of making
themselves agreeable by remarks which were not wanted. In
this critical view of mankind there was affinity between him
and Gwendolen before their marriage, and we know that she
had been attractingly wrought upon by the refined negations
he presented to her.' (Chapter LIV.)
This equally describes Osmond, of whom it might equally well be
said that 'he is a man whose grace of bearing has long been moulded
on an experience of boredom', and that 'he has worn out all his
healthy interest in things'. All either cares about is to be assured
that he feels superior ; and the contemptible paradox of a superiority
H 113
GEORGE ELIOT
that is nothing unless assured of itself by those whose judgment it
affects to despise is neatly 'placed' by George Eliot here :
'It is true that Grandcourt went about with the sense that he
did not care a languid curse for any one's admiration ; but this
state of not-caring, just as much as desire, required its related
objectnamely, a world of admiring or envying spectators :
for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons, the
persons must be there and they must smile a rudimentary
truth which is surely forgotten by those who complain of man-
kind as generally contemptible, since any other aspect of the
race must disappoint the voracity of their contempt.'
In Grandcourt, of course, we have as elsewhere her strength, her
advantage, of specificity. Our sense of the numbing spell in which
his languidly remorseless domination holds Gwendolen doesn't
depend upon suggestive inexplicitnesses, sinister overtones and
glimpses from a distance. 'Grandcourt had become a blank un-
certainty to her in everything but this, that he would do just what
he willed' : we don't feel him as less sinister and formidable than
Osmond because we see him deliberately working to produce this
effect (of which we understand perfectly the conditions) in a
number of dramatic scenes that have all George Eliot's explicitness
and fulness of actuality. Such scenes are that in which he lets her
know that he understands perfectly why she had made the surrep-
titious call on Miss Lapidoth from which he catches her returning ;
that in which he tells her that she is to learn about his will from the
hated Lush ; and that, very short, but with an extraordinary power
to disturb, in which he surprises her with Deronda the scene that
ends, with reference to the announced yachting cruise which she
sees as blessedly releasing her to her mother's company : 'No, you
will go with me.' (All these are in Chapter XL VIII.)
In these scenes the sharpness of significant particularity with
which the outward action is registered is very striking.
'She was frightened at her own agitation, and began to un-
button her gloves that she might button them again, and bite
her lips over the pretended difficulty/
The whole is seen, and the postures and movements are given with
vivid precision. James's Constantius, contrasting George Eliot with
114
DANIEL DERONDA
Turgenev he the 'poet', she the * philosopher* says : 'One cares
for the aspect of things and the other cares for the reason of things'.
Nowhere is this characterization more patently wide of the mark
than in those places where her supreme intelligence is most apparent.
It is precisely because she cares for the * reason' of things that she can
render the aspect so vividly ; her intelligence informs her perception
and her visual imagination. The vividness of the rendering is
significance.
As fine a sustained example of this power of hers is to be found in
Chapter XXX, where Grandcoi rt visits Gadsmere in order to tell
Mrs. Glasher of the coming marriage and to get from her the
diamonds for Gwendolen. Not only is Mrs. Glasher afraid of him,
he is afraid of her, for 'however he might assert his independence of
Mrs, Glasher's past, he had made a past for himself which was a
stronger yoke than any he could impose. He must ask for the
diamonds which he had promised Gwendolen'. The inner drama
in each as they act upon each other is so vividly present to us in
outer movement that we seem to be watching a play ; till *x\mid
such caressing signs of mutual fear they parted'.
The diamonds, it may be noted at this point, exemplify George
Eliot's characteristic subtle and inevitable use of symbolism. They
are his mother's diamonds, 'long ago' given Lydia to wear. His
demanding them back for Gwendolen is his means of announcing
to Lydia that the relations they symbolize marital, virtually are
to cease. But he can't force her to give them up when she refuses ;
her strength is that they were given to her as his wife, and she has
been that, in all but legal form and social recognition. ' Her person
suited diamonds, and made them look as if they were worth some
of the money given for them' the natural validity of the relation
is suggested there. They come to Gwendolen on the night of her
wedding-day with the enclosed message that turns them to poison
(Chapter XXXI) : 'I am the grave in which your chance of happi-
ness is buried. . . .' Gwendolen has a hysterical fit : the diamonds
are for her the consciousness of that past of Grandcourt's with Lydia
which precludes any possibility of good married relations between
him and herself.
'Shall you like to stand before your husband with these
diamonds' on you, and these words of mine in his thoughts and
GEORGE ELIOT
yours ? Will he think you have any right to complain when he
has made you miserable ? You took him with your eyes open.
The willing wrong you have done me will be your curse.
The first glimpse we have of Gwendolen in public after her marriage,
she is wearing the diamonds. We are told that her * belief in her
power of dominating had utterly gone ' . And again and again, with
inevitable naturalness, they play their pregnantly symbolic part.
They come to represent Nemesis: they are what Gwendolen
married Grandcourt for, and her punishment is having to wear
them.
James's use of symbols, famous as he is for it, looks weak in com-
parison with George Eliot's. They are thought out independently
of the action and then introduced. We have an instance in the
valuable coffee-cup, * precious' to Madame Merle but 'attenuated',
that Osmond, in the show-down scene with Madame Merle
(Chapter XLIX), picks up and observes, 'dryly', to be cracked. It
symbolizes very obviously, in its ad hoc way, the relations between
the two, the crack being the resentment Osmond feels against
Madame Merle for the 'service' she had done him in marrying him
to Isabel. And here, it is worth noting, we have the first form of
the celebrated Golden Bowl symbol, which, in the novel called
after it, is used for so many purposes, but which, for all the modish
esteem it enjoys, is always applied elaborately from the outside,
with an effect of strain. The introduction of George Eliot's
diamonds arises naturally from the social drama, and they play a
natural part in the action. The turquoise necklace that represents
Gwendolen's relations with Deronda is a symbol of the same order.
Lydia Glasher (to revert to her) is one of the admirably done
subordinate characters in the book, which, when we have cut away
the bad half, is not left thinly populated. Mrs. Davilow, the
Gascoigne family, Gwendolen's bete noire Mr. Lush ('with no active
compassion or good-will, he had just as little active malevolence,
being chiefly occupied in liking his particular pleasure'), Mrs.
Arrowpoint, Miss Arrowpoint (near kin to Mary Garth) these are
all there with a perfect Tightness of presence, and with a quality of
life that makes them George Eliot characters and no one else's.
And then there is Herr Klesmer, who, though a minor actor, has,
for us, a major significance. Pointing to him, we can say : here we
116
DANIEL DERONDA
have something that gives George Eliot an advantage, not only over
Jane Austen (against whom we feel no challenge to press the point),
but also over Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady. The point is so
important that a generous measure of illustration seems in place.
Here, then, is Herr Klesmer's incongruous presence at the Archery
Meeting :
'We English are a miscellaneous people, and any chance fifty
of us will present many varieties of animal architecture or facial
ornament ; but it must be adnr tted that our prevailing expres-
sion is not that of a lively, impassioned race, preoccupied with
the ideal and carrying the real as a mere make-weight. The
strong point of the English gentleman pure is the easy style of
his figure and clothing ; he objects to marked ins and outs in
his costume, and he also objects to looking inspired.
* Fancy an assemblage where the men had all that ordinary
stamp of the well-bred Englishman, watching the entrance of
Herr Klesmer his mane of hair floating backward in massive
inconsistency with the chimney-pot hat, which had the look of
having been put on for a joke above his pronounced but well-
modelled features and powerful clean-shaven mouth and chin ;
his tall, thin figure clad in a way which, not being strictly
English, was all the worse for its apparent emphasis of inten-
tion. Draped in a loose garment with a Florentine berretta on
his head, he would have been fit to stand by the side of Leon-
ardo da Vinci ; but how when he presented himself in trousers
which were not what English feeling demanded about the
knees ? and when the fire that showed itself in his glances and
the movements of his head, as he looked round him with
curiosity, was turned into comedy by a hat which ruled that
mankind should have well-cropped hair and a staid demeanour,
such, for example, as Mr. Arrowpoint's, whose nullity of face
and perfect tailoring might pass everywhere without ridicule ?
One sees why it is often better for greatness to be dead, and to
have got rid of the outward man.
' Many present knew Klesmer, or knew of him ; but they had
only seen him on candle-light occasions when he appeared
simply as a musician, and he had not yet that supreme, world-
wide celebrity which makes an artist great to the most ordinary
people by their knowledge of his great expensiveness. It was
literally a new light for them to see him in presented un-
117
GEORGE ELIOT
expectedly on this July afternoon in an exclusive society : some
were inclined to laugh, others felt a little disgust at the want
of judgment shown by the Arrowpoints in this use of the
introductory card.
'"What extreme guys those artistic fellows usually are!"
said young Clintock to Gwendolen/
The foreigner at English social and sporting functions, intrinsic-
ally ludicrous because of his ignorance of what's done or, rather,
what isn't done, what isn't said, and what isn't worn has always
been a familiar figure in Punch. George Eliot doesn't miss the comic
element in Klesmer's appearance, but she uses him to 'place' the
Philistinism x of English society, and the complacent unintelligence
of its devotion to Good Form. James, in The Portrait of a Lady, can
exhibit no such freely critical attitude towards the country-house
and its civilization.
George Eliot's use of Herr Klesmer is the more effective because
her attitude is so complete and balanced : she sees what is genuinely
laughable in the Teutonic Intellectual and licensed and conscious
Artist :
' . . . Gwendolen had accepted Kleomer as a partner ; and
that wide-glancing personage, who saw everything and nothing
by turns, said to her when they were walking, "Mr. Grand-
court is a man of taste. He likes to see you dancing."
"'Perhaps he likes to look at what is against his taste," said
Gwendolen, with a light laugh : she was quite courageous
with Klesmer now. "He may be so tired of admiring that he
liked disgust for a variety."
"'Those words are not suitable to your lips," said Klesmer,
quickly, with one of his grand frowns, while he shook his hand
as if to banish the discordant sounds.
"'Are you as critical of words as of music ?"
1 We can guess where, in relation to Philistinism on the one hand and the
'social* values on the other, she would have placed the complacent confidence
and radical provinciality of this : 'Moreover, like all Victorian rationalists, she
is a Philistine. She pays lip-service to art, but like Dorothea Brooke con-
fronted with the Statres of the Vatican, she does not really see why people
set such a value on it.' (Lord David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists, p. 322.)
We have to confess that she doesn't know the kind of thing the best people
to-day say about 'art'. But on the other hand, reading what is written about
her (and other novelists) by the critic for whom this makes her a Philistine,
we can't help asking why he should suppose he puts a high value on literature.
118
DANIEL DERONDA
'"Certainly I am. I should require your words to be what
your face and form are always among the meanings of a noble
music."
' "That is a compliment as well as a correction. I am obliged
for both. But do you know I am bold enough to wish to
correct you, and require you to understand a joke ?"
One may understand jokes without liking them," said the
terrible Klesmer. "I have had opera books sent me full of
jokes ; it was just because I understood them that I did not like
them. The comic people are ready to challenge a man because
he looks grave. 'You don't set the witticism, sir ?' 'No, sir,
but I see what you meant/ Then I am what we call ticketed
as a fellow without esprit. But, in fact," said Klesmer, suddenly
dropping from his quick narrative to a reflective tone, with an
impressive frown, ' I am very sensible to wit and humour."
"'I am glad you tell me that," said Gwendolen, not without
some wickedness of intention. But Klesmer's thoughts had
flown offon the wings of his own statement, as their habit was,
and she had the wickedness all to herself. "Pray, who is trrt
standing near the card-room door ? " she went on, seeing there
the same stranger with whom Klesmer had been in animated
talk on the archery-ground. " He is a friend of yours, I think."
'"No, no ; an amateur I have seen in town : Lush, a Mr.
Lush too fond of Meyerbeer and Scribe too fond of the
mechanical-dramatic/ '
' "Thanks. I wanted to know whether you thought his face
and form required that his words should be among the mean-
ings of a noble music ?" Klesmer was conquered, and flashed
at her a delightful smile which made them quite friendly until
she begged to be deposited by the side of her mamma.'
The Teutonic trait is beautifully got in that 'But, in fact, I am
very sensible to wit and humour'. Yet the balance of this exchange,
which is managed with so flexible a sureness, hardly lies against
Klesmer.
But perhaps, in the light of our present interest, the richest
episode in which he figures is that with Mr. Bult (perfect name
how good George Eliot's names are) :
'Meanwhile enters the expectant peer, Mr. Bult, an esteemed
party man who, rather neutral in private life, had strong
opinions concerning the districts of the Niger, was much at
119
GEORGE ELIOT
home also in the Brazils, spoke with decision of affairs in the
South Seas, was studious of h*s parliamentary and itinerant
speeches, and had the general solidity and suffusive pinkness of
a healthy Briton on the central table-land of life. Catherine,
aware of a tacit understanding that he was an undeniable hus-
band for an heiress, had nothing to say against him but that he
was thoroughly tiresome to her. Mr. Bult was amiably con-
fident, and had no idea that his insensibility to counterpoint
could ever be reckoned against him. Klesmcr he hardly re-
garded in the light of a serious human being who ought to have
a vote ; and he did not mind Miss Arrowpoint's addiction to
music any more than her probable expenses in antique lace. He
was consequently a little amazed at an after-dinner outburst
of Klesmer's on the lack of idealism in English politics, which
left all mutuality between distant races to be determined simply
by the need of a market : the crusades, to his mind, had at least
this excuse, that they had a banner of sentiment round which
generous feelings could rally : of course, the scoundrels rallied
f>o, but what then ? they rally in equal force round your ad-
vertisement van of "Buy cheap, sell dear". On this theme
Klesmer's eloquence, gesticulatory and other, went on for a
little while like stray fireworks accidentally ignited, and then
sank into immovable silence. Mr. Bult was not surprised that
Klesmer's opinions should be flighty, but was astonished at his
command of English idiom and his ability to .put a point hi a
way that would have told at a constituents dinner to be
accounted for probably by his being a Pole, or a Czech, or
something of that fermenting sort, in a state of political refugee-
ism which had obliged him to make a profession of his music ;
and that evening in the drawing-room he for the first time
went up to Klesmer at the piano, Miss Arrowpoint being near,
and said
'"I had no idea before that you were a political man."
'Klesmer's only answer was to fold his arms, put out his
nether lip, and stare at Mr. Bult.
c "You must have been used to public speaking. You speak
uncommonly well, though I don't agree with you. From what
you said about sentiment, I fancy you are a Panslavist."
No ; my name is Elijah. I am the Wandering Jew," said
Klesmer, flashing a smile at Miss Arrowpoint, and suddenly
making a mysterious wind-like rush backwards and forwards
120
DANIEL DERONDA
on the piano. Mr. Bult felt this buffoonery rather offensive
and Polish, but Miss Arrowpoint being there did not like
to move away.
'"Herr Klesmer has cosmopolitan ideas," said Miss Arrow-
point, trying to make the best of the situation. "He looks
forward to a fusion of races."
'"With all my heart," said Mr. Bult, willing to be
gracious. "I was sure he had too much talent to be a
mere musician."
'"Ah, sir, you are under some mistake there," said Klesmer,
firing up. "No man has too much talent to be a musician.
Most men have too little. A creative artist is no more a mere
musician than a great statesman is a mere politician. We are
not ingenious puppets, sir, who live in a box and look out on
the world only when it is gaping for amusement. We help to
rule the nations and make the age as much as any other puolic
men. We count ourselves on level benches with legislators.
And a man who speaks effectively through music is compelled
to something more difficult than parliamentary eloquence."
'With the last word Klesmer wheeled from the piano and
walked away.
'Miss Arrowpoint coloured, and Mr. Bult observed with his
usual phlegmatic solidity, "Your pianist does not think small
beer of himself."
'"Herr Klesmer is something more than a pianist," said Miss
Arrowpoint, apologetically. "He is a great musician, in the
fullest sense of the word. He will rank with Schubert and
Mendelssohn."
'"Ah, you ladies understand these things," said Mr. Bult,
none the less convinced that these things were frivolous because
Klesmer had shown himself a coxcomb/ (Chapter XXII.)
What we see here is not a novelist harmed, or disabled, by the
intellectual of The Westminster Review. The knowledge and interest
shown, the awareness of the political world, is that of the associate
of Spencer and Mill. But the attitude is not theirs. Bult is a far
more effective 'placing' of a prevailing Victorian ethos than Pod-
snap : George Eliot really understands what she is dealing with
understands as well as the professional student of politics and the
man of the public world ; and more, understands as these cannot.
In short, it is her greatness that she retains ail the provincial strength
121
GEORGE ELIOT
and virtue while escaping, as no other Victorian novelist does, the
limitations of provinciality.
As for the bad part of Daniel Deronda, there is nothing to do but
cut it away in spite of what James, as Constantius, finds to say
for it :
'The universe forcing itself with a slow, inexorable pressure
into a narrow, complacent, and yet after all extremely sensitive
mind that is Gwendolen's story. And it becomes completely
characteristic in that her supreme perception of the fact that
the world is whirling past her is in the disappointment not of a
base but of an exalted passion. The very chance to embrace
what the author is so fond of calling a " larger life" seems re-
fused to her. Sh^s punished for being "narrow", and she is
not allowed a chalice to expand. Her finding Deronda pre-
engaged to go to the East and stir up the race-feeling of the
Jews strikes me as wonderfully happy invention. The irony of
the situation, for poor Gwendolen, is almost grotesque, and it
mikes one wonder whether the whole heavy structure of the
Jewish question in the story was not built up by the author for
the express purpose of giving its proper force to this particular
stroke/
If it was (which we certainly can't accept as a complete account
of it) built up by the author for this purpose, then it is too dis-
astrously null to have any of the intended force to give. If, having
entertained such a purpose, George Eliot had justified it, Daniel
Deronda would have been a very great novel indeed. As things are,
there is, lost under that damning title, an actual great novel to be
extricated. And to extricate it for separate publication as Gwendolen
Harleth seems to me the most likely way of getting recognition for
it. Gwendolen Harleth would have some rough edges, but it would
be a self-sufficient and very substantial whole (it would by modern
standards be a decidedly long novel) . Deronda would be confined
to what was necessary for his role of lay-confessor to Gwendolen,
and die final cut would come after the death by drowning, leaving
us with a vision of Gwendolen as she painfully emerges from her
hallucinated worst conviction of guilt and confronts the daylight
fact about Deronda's intentions.
It has seemed necessary to carry this examination so much into
122
DANIEL DERONDA
detail in order to give due force to the contention that George
Eliot's greatness is of a different kind from that she has been gener-
ally credited with. And by way of concluding on this emphasis I
will adduce once again her most intelligently appreciative critic,
Henry James :
* She does not strike me as naturally a critic, less still as natur-
ally a sceptic ; her spontaneous part is to observe life and to
feel it, to feel it with admirable depth. Contemplation, sym-
pathy and faith something like that, I should say, would have
been her natural scale. If she had fallen upon an age of en-
thusiastic assent to old articles of faith, it seems to me possible
that she would have had a more perfect, a more consistent and
graceful development than she actually had/
There is, I think, a complete misconception here. George Eliot's
development may not have been 'perfect' or 'graceful', and 'con-
sistent' is not precisely the adjective one would choose for it ; yet
she went on developing to the end, as few writers do, and achieved
the most remarkable expression of her distinctive genius in her last
work : her art in Gwendolen Harleth is at its maturest. And her
profound insight into the moral nature of man is essentially that of
one whose critical intelligence has been turned intensively on her
faiths. A sceptic by nature or culture indeed no ; but that is not
because her intelligence, a very powerful one, doesn't freely illumin-
ate all her interests and convictions. That she should be thought
depressing (as, for instance, Leslie Stephen thinks her) always sur-
prises me. She exhibits a traditional moral sensibility expressing
itself, not within a frame of 'old articles of faith' (as James obviously
intends die phrase), but nevertheless with perfect sureness, in judg-
ments that involve confident positive standards, and yet affect us as
simply the report of luminous intelligence. She deals in the weak-
ness and ordinariness of human nature, but doesn't find it contempt-
ible, or show either animus or self-deceiving indulgence towards it ;
and, distinguished and noble as she is, we have in reading her the
feeling that she is in and of the humanity she presents with so clear
and disinterested a vision. For us in these days, it seems to me, she
is a peculiarly fortifying and wholesome author, and a suggestive
one : she might well be pondered by those who tend to prescribe
123
GEORGE ELIOT
simple recourses to suppose, say, that what Charlotte Yonge has
to offer may be helpfufly relevant in face or the demoralizations
and discouragements of an age that isn't one of 'enthusiastic assent
to old articles of faith*.
As for her rank among novelists, I take the challenge from a
representative purveyor of currency, Oliver Elton : what he says
we may confidently assume that thousands of the cultivated think
it reasonable to say, and thousands of students in 'Arts' courses are
learning to say, either in direct study of him, or in the lecture-room.
He says, 1 then, in discussing the 'check to George Eliot's reputation'
given by the coming 'into fuller view' of 'two other masters of
fiction' Meredith and Hardy: 'Each of these novelists saw the
world of mem and women more freely than George Eliot had done ;
and they brought into relief one of her greatest deficiencies, namely,
that while exhaustively describing life, she is apt to miss the spirit of
life itself/ I can only say that this, for anyone whose critical educa-
tion has begun, should be breath-taking in its absurdity, and affirm
m> conviction that, by the side of George Eliot and the compari-
son shouldn't be necessary Meredith appears as a shallow exhibi-
tionist (his famous 'intelligence' a laboured and vulgar brilliance)
and Hardy, decent as he is, as a provincial manufacturer of gauche
and heavy fictions that sometimes have corresponding virtues. For
a positive indication of her place and quality I think of a Russian ;
not Turg&nev, but a far greater, Tolstoy who, we all know, is
pre-eminent in getting 'the spirit of life itself. George Eliot, of
course, is not as transcendently great as Tolstoy, but she is great, and
great in the same way. The extraordinary reality of Anna Karenina
(his supreme masterpiece, I think) comes of an intense moral interest
in human nature that provides the light and courage for a profound
psychological analysis. This analysis is rendered in art (and Anna
1 A Survey of English Literature, 1830-1880, Vol. II, Chapter XXIII. This
chapter, ' George Eliot and Anthony Trollope ', is very representative of Elton
who is very representative of the academically esteemed * authority*. It
contains a convenient and unintentionally amusing conspectus of the ideas
about George Eliot I have been combating. He exemplifies the gentleman's
attitude towards Gwendolen: 'The authoress drops on her a load of brick-
bats, and seems to wish to leave the impression that Gwendolen deserved
them. She is young, and rather too hard, sprighdy and rather domineering.'
(He says of Middlemarch; *This r almost one of the great novels of the
language/)
124
DANIEL DERONDA
Karenina, pace Matthew Arnold, is wonderfully closely worked) by
means that are like those used by George Eliot in Gwendolen Harleth
a proposition that will bear a great deal of considering in the
presence of the text. Of George Eliot it can in turn be said that her
best work has a Tolstoyan depth and reality.
125
Ill
HENRY JAMES
(i) To 'The Portrait of a Lady'
I HAVE said enough about the part played in James's development
by George Eliot, and what I have said has not, I'm afraid, tended
to convey that The Portrait of a Lady is an original masterpiece. That,
however, is what I take it to be ; it is one of the great novels in the
language. And what I propose to do in the earlier part of the space
I devote to James is, in effect, to discuss the conditions that enabled
him to make of a variation on Gwendolen Harleth a description I
think I have justified something so different, positively, from that
work, and so different from anything George Eliot could have done.
By conditions I mean the inner conditions largely determined as
they are by outer. I mean the essential interests and attitudes that
characterize his outlook on the world and his response to life.
This seems to me a good course to set in embarking on a brief
treatment of James. It ensures that a major stress shall be laid on
achievement. I am very conscious of the danger that, for various
reasons, the stress shouldn't be laid sufficiently there. James was so
incredibly productive over so long a period, and offers so many
aspects for study, that nothing short of a book on him, and a book
of formidable length, could pretend to adequacy. I have also in
mind the way in which the cult of James of the last quarter of a
century (a cult that, to judge by what has been written on them,
doesn't seem to have involved intensive cultivation of the works
admired) makes him pre-eminently the author of the later works.
We are asked to admire The Ambassadors (1903) ; and The Ambas-
sadors seems to me to be not only not one of his great books, but to
be a bad one. If, as I was on the point of saying, it exhibits senility,
then senility was more than setting in at the turn of the century in
The Sacred Fount. It is as a matter of fact a more interesting disease
than senility.
This is not to deny that there are achieved works in distinctively
'late' styles. Critical admirers of The Awkward Age (1899), that
astonishing work of genius (about which they will have reserves on
some points), and of What Maisie Knew (which is perfect), will
126
TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
know of many fine short stories and nouvelles. But they will also
be largely occupied, where this later work is concerned, with sifting,
rejecting, qualifying and deploring : that is, they are faced inescap-
ably with James's 'case' with the question of what went wrong in
his later development ; for something certainly did go wrong. The
phase when his genius functioned with freest and fullest vitality is
represented by The Portrait of a Lady (1881), together with The
Bostonians (1885). That is my position, and that seems to me the
right emphasis for a brief appreciation. And in discussing the
interests that meet to condition supreme achievement in The Por-
trait of a Lady, I aim at finding my illustrations in other works that,
for all the lack of recognition, are classical in quality. One can in
this way hope to suggest the nature of James's achievement in
general, while frankly avowing inadequacy of treatment and a
drastic selectiveness of attention.
By 'interests' I mean the kinds of profound concern having the
urgency of personal problems, and felt as moral problems, more
than personal in significance that lie beneath Jane Austen's art, and
enable her to assimilate varied influences and heterogeneous material
and make great novels out of them. It is not for nothing that, like
George Eliot, he admired Her immensely, and that from him too
passages can be found that show her clear influence. For he goes
back to her, not only through George Eliot, but directly. Having
two novelists of that kind of moral preoccupation in his own
language to study, he quickly discovered how much, and how little,
the French masters had to teach him, and to what tradition he
belonged. Hence the early and decisive determination a surpris-
ing one (if they knew of it) for the modish Gallophils of our time
against Paris.
His interests, of course, are very different from Jane Austen's,
being determined by a contrasting situation. His problem was not
to balance the claims of an exceptional and very sensitive individual
against the claims of a mature and stable society, strong in its un-
questioned standards, sanctions and forms. The elements of his
situation are well known. He was born a New Yorker at a time
when New York society preserved a mature and refined European
tradition, and when at the same time any New Yorker of literary
and intellectual bent must, in the formath e years, have been very
127
HENRY JAMES
much aware of the distinctive and very different culture of New
England. Here already we have an interplay likely to promote a
critical attitude, and an emancipation from any complete adherence
to one code or ethos. Then there was the early experience of
Europe and the final settling in England. It is not surprising that,
in the mind of a genius, the outcome should be a bent for com-
parison, and a constant profound pondering of the nature of civil-
ized society and of the possibility of imagining a finer civilization
than any he knew.
It was the profundity of the pondering that I had in mind when I
referred to him as a 'poet-novelist' : his 'interests' were not of the
kind that are merely written about. Here is an apt passage from the
Preface to The Golden Bowl :
'. . . the whole growth of one's " taste ": a blessed compre-
hensive name for many of the things deepest in us. The
"taste" of the poet is, at bottom and so far as the poet in him
prevails over everything else, his active sense of life : in accord-
ance with which truth to keep one's hand on it is to hold the
silver clue to the whole labyrinth of his consciousness/ l
James's use of the word 'poet* to cover the novelist, and his associat-
ing it in this explanatory way with the term 'taste', indicates the
answer to the not uncommon suggestion that his work exhibits
taste trying to usurp the function of a moral sense. In calling him
'poet-novelist' I myself was intending to convey that the deter-
mining and controlling interests in his art engage what is 'deepest
in him' (he being a man of exceptional capacity for experience),
and appeal to what is deepest in us.
This characteristic of his art manifests itself in his remarkable use
of symbolism -see, for instance, The Jolly Corner, The Figure in the
1 The passage (which I had marked years before) is quoted by Mr.
Quentin Anderson in an essay in The Kenyan Review for Autumn, 1946,
which arrived as I was correcting my typescript. In this essay, * Henry
James and the New Jerusalem/ Mr. Anderson argues, very persuasively, that
James was deeply influenced by his father's system and symbolism (the
nature of which may be indicated by saying that Swedenborg counts for
something in it). What Mr. Anderson doesn't appear to recognize suffici-
ently is that a preoccupation with such interests wouldn't necessarily be
identifiable with the novelist's true creative preoccupation. But I look
forward to Mr. AndersonV promised book. (Essays also in Scrutiny, XIV, 4,
and XV, i.)
128
TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Carpet and The Great Good Place (I specify these as obvious instances
and obviously successful). But to stress the symbolism too much
would tend to misunderstanding : the qualities of his art that derive
from the profound seriousness of his interest in life it is these in
general that one stresses in calling him a poet, and they are to be
found widely in forms and places tnat the reference to his use of
symbolism doesn't immediately bring up for attention. When
these qualities are duly recognized it becomes ridiculous to save the
word 'poet' for the author of The Waves and The Years works
that offer something like the equivalent of Georgian poetizing.
(Even To the Lighthouse, which may be distinguished among her
books as substantially justifying her so obviously 'poetical' method,
is a decidedly minor affair it is minor art.) 'Hawthorne', says
James in the early study he wrote for the English Men of Letters
series, 'is perpetually looking for images which shall place them-
selves in picturesque correspondence with the spiritual facts with
which he is concerned, and of course the search is of the very essence
of poetry '. James's own constant and profound concern with spLit-
ual facts expresses itself not only in what obviously demands to be
called symbolism, but in the handling of character, episode and dia-
logue, and in the totality of the plot, so that when he seems to offer a
novel of manners he gives us more than that, and the ' poetry ' is major.
And here, prompted by James, we have to recognize a great debt
to Hawthorne, that original genius (for, whatever the limitations of
his achievement, he is that) whom it is difficult to relate to any
earlier novelist unless we are to count Bunyan one. With James
and Melville he constitutes a distinctively American tradition. The
more we consider James's early work (and his early work in relation
to the later), the more important does Hawthorne's influence appear.
With none of James's sophistication or social experience, and no
interest in manners, Hawthorne devotes himself to exploring pro-
foundly moral and psychological interests in a poetic art of fiction.
It is an art at the other extreme from Jane Austen's, for whom moral
interests are intimately bound up with manners. Hawthorne's
approach to morals is psychological, and his psychology, a striking
achievement of intuition, anticipates (compare Tolstoy and Law-
rence) what are supposed to be modern findings. His influence on
James can be seen to have countered hers, and must have had much
I 129
HENRY JAMES
to do with James's emancipation from the English tradition we may
represent by Thackeray. It clearly counts wich George Eliot's in
his renunciation of France (see pp. 12 and 14 above).
I think it well to start with this emphasis on James's greatness
because of the almost inevitable way in which any brief survey of
his work that is focussed on what is most significant in it tends to be,
in effect, unjust. As I have said, the very bulk of the ceuvre (he had
in a very remarkable degree the productivity of genius) leads to a
centring of attention upon development, rather than upon the
achieved thing as such. Let me *nsist, then, at once, on the striking
measure of achievement that marks even the opening phase of his
career as a novelist.
In fact, his 'first attempt at a novel', Roderick Hudson (1874), in
spite of its reputation, is a very distinguished book that deserves
permanent currency much more so than many novels passing as
classics. It is the work of a writer with mature interests, who shows
himself capable of handling them in fiction. The interests are those
of a very intelligent and serious student of contemporary civiliza-
tion. Suppose, James asks himself, there were an American genius
born in a small town of pristine New England : what would be the
effect of Europe on him Europe, the culture of the ages, tradition,
Rome ? There is a weakness in the book that James, retrospectively,
puts a finger on : the artist's decay the break-up in dissipation at
Baden-Baden and the end in suicide is accomplished too rapidly.
But Roderick Hudson is essentially a dramatic study, evaluative and
exploratory, in the interplay of contrasted cultural traditions (a
glimpsed ideal being at the centre of James's preoccupation), and the
sustained maturity of theme and treatment qualifies the book as a
whole to be read at the adult level of demand in a way that no novel
of Thackeray's will bear.
As might have been guessed from what I said above about the use
of symbolism and from James's relevant remark about Hawthorne
though the instances I gave were from a much later period the
influence of Hawthorne is very apparent in some of James's earliest
stories. But the influence we note in Roderick Hudson is not that of
Hawthorne. Here is a passage from Chapter X :
'Mr. Leaven worth was a tall, expansive, bland gentleman,
with a carefully-brushed whisker and a spacious, fair, well-
ISO
TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
favoured face, which seemed somehow to have more room in
it than was occupied by a smile of superior benevolence, so that
(with his smooth white forehead) it oore a certain resemblance
to a large parlour with a very florid carpet, but without mural
decoration. He held his head high, talked impressively, and
told Roderick within five mirutes that he was a widower
travelling to distract his mind, and that he had lately retired
from the proprietorship of large mines of borax in the Middle
West. Roderick supposed at first that under the influence of
his bereavement he had come to order a tombstone ; but
observing the extreme benevolence of his address to Miss
Blanchard he credited him with a judicious prevision that on
the day the tombstone should be completed a monument of
his inconsolability might appear mistimed. Mr. Leavenworth,
however, was disposed to give an Order to give it with a
capital letter.
"'You'll find me eager to patronize our indigenous talent,"
he said. " You may be sure that I've employed a native archi-
tect for the large residential structure that I'm erecting on the
banks of the Ohio. I've sustained a considerable loss ; but are
we not told that the office of art is second only to that of
religion e That's why I have come to you, sir. In the retreat
that I'm preparing, surrounded by the memorials of my wan-
derings, I hope to recover a certain degree of tone. They're
doing what they can in Paris for the fine effect of some of its
features ; but the effect I have myself most at heart will be that
of my library, filled with well-selected and beautifully-bound
authors in groups, relieved from point to point by high-class
statuary. I should like to entrust you, can we arrange it, with
the execution of one of these appropriate subjects. What do
you say to a representation, in pure white marble, of the idea
of Intellectual Refinement ?"
'. . . the young master good-naturedly promised to do his
best to rise to his client's conception. "His conception be
hanged !" Roderick exclaimed none the less after Mr. Leaven-
worth had departed. "His conception is sitting on an india-
rubber cushion with a pen in her ear and the lists of the stock-
exhange in her hand. It's a case for doing, cf course, exactly
as one likes yet how can one like, by any possibility, anything
that such a blatant humbug as that possibly can ? It's as much
as one can do to like his awful money. I don't think/' our
HENRY JAMES
young man added, "that I ever swallowed anything that wanted
so little to go down, and I'm doubtless on my way now to any
grovelling you please"/
The influence of Dickens is plain here. It is the Dickens, not, as
in The Princess Casamassima, of Little Dorrit, but of Martin Chuzzle-
wit. This passage of Roderick Hudson, of course, couldn't possibly
have been written by Dickens : something has been done to give
the Dickensian manner a much more formidable intellectual edge.
We feel a finer and fuller consciousness behind die ironic humour,
which engages mature standards and interests such as Dickens was
innocent of. It is quite personal, a remarkably achieved manner for
a first novel. Roderick Hudson, in fact, is a much more distinguished,
lively and interesting work than, at the prompting of the retro-
spective James, is generally supposed.
What I offer this passage as illustrating is not merely James, in the
way I have suggested earlier in this book, seeing life through litera-
ture and English literature. More importantly, what we have
here is a good instance of the way in which a great original artist
learns from another. Incomparably more mature in respect of
standards as James was than Dickens, his debt to Dickens involves
more than a mere manner ; he was helped by him to see from the
outside, and critically place, the life around him.
To bring out the full force of this point I will jump forward a
dozen years and quote, for comparison, a passage from one of
James's acknowledged masterpieces, The Bostonians :
'Towards nine o'clock the light of her hissing burners smote
the majestic person of Mrs. Farrinder, who might have con-
tributed to answer that question * of Miss Chancellor's in the
negative. She was a copious, handsome woman, in whom
angularity had been corrected by the air of success ; she had a
rustling dress (it was evident what she thought about taste),
abundant hair of a glossy blackness, a pair of folded arms, the
expression of which seemed to say that rest, in such a career as
1 '. . . in a career in which she was constantly exposing herself to laceration
her most poignant suffering came from the injury of her taste. She had tried
to kill that nerve, to persuade herself that taste was only frivolity in the guise
of knowledge; but her susceptibility was constantly blooming afresh and
making her wonder whethc~ an absence of nice arrangements were a necessary
part of the enthusiasm of humanity/
132
TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
hers, was as swpet as it was brief, and a terrible regularity of
feature. I apply that adjective to her fine placid mask because
she seemed to face you with a question of which the answer
was preordained, to ask you how a countenance could fail to
be noble of which the measurements were so correct. You
could contest neither the measurements nor the nobleness, and
had to feel that Mrs. Farrinder imposed herself. There was a
lithographic smoothness about her, and a mixture of the
American matron and the public character. There was some-
thing public in her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet ; it
had acquired a sort of exposed icticence from the habit of look-
ing down from a lecture-desk, over a sea of heads, while its
distinguished owner was eulogized by a leading citizen. Mrs.
Farrinder, at almost any time, had the air of being introduced
by a few remarks. She talked with great slowness and distinct-
ness, and evidently a high sense of responsibility ; she pro-
nounced every syllable of every word and insisted on being
explicit. If, in conversation with her, you attempted to take
anything for granted, or to jump two or three steps at a time,
she paused, looking at you with a cold patience as if she knew
that trick, and then went on at her own measured pace. She
lectured on temperance and the rights of women ; the ends she
laboured for were to give the ballot to every woman in the
country and to take the flowing bowl from every man. She
was held to have a very fine manner, and to embody the
domestic virtues and the graces of the drawing-room ; to be a
shining proof, in short, that the forum, for ladies, is not neces-
sarily hostile to the fireside. She had a husband, and his name
was Amariah.'
This, in itself, would perhaps not have suggested a relation to
Dickens, but when it is approached by way of the passage from
Roderick Hudson the relation is plain. What we have now, though,
is pure James. And, as we find it in the description of Miss Birdseye,
the un-Dickensian subtlety the penetrating analysis and the im-
plicit reference to mature standards and interests is pretty effectu-
ally disassociating :
* She was a little old lady, with an enormous head ; that was
the first thing Ransom noticed the vast, fair, protuberant,
candid, ungarnished brow, surmounting a pair of weak, kind,
tired-looking eyes, and ineffectually balanced in the rear by a
133
HENRY JAMES
cap which had the air of falling backward, and which Miss
Birdseye suddenly felt for while she talked, with unsuccessful
irrelevant movements. She had a sad, soft, pale face, which
(and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been
soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow
dissolvent. The long practice of philanthropy had not given
accent to her features ; it had rubbed out their transitions, their
meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had
wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of
time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually
washing away their sharpness, their details. In her large
countenance her dim little smile scarcely showed. It was a
mere sketch of a smile, a kind of instalment, of payment on
account ; it seemed to say that she would smile more if she had
time, but that you could see, without this, that she was gentle
and easy to 'beguile/
We are a long way from Dickens here. And the subtlety is never
absent. Nevertheless, it remains obviously right in suggestion to
say that, in his rendering of the portentous efflorescences of Ameri-
can civilization, as represented by the publicists, the charlatans, the
cranks, the new-religionists, the feminists, and the newspaper-men,
he gives us Martin Chuzzlewit redone by an enormously more
intelligent and better educated mind. The comedy is rich and
robust as well as subtle.
But when we come to Olive Chancellor, New England spinster
and representative of the earnest refinement of Boston culture, we
have something that bears no relation to anything Dickens could
have done, though it bears an essential relation to this comedy.
James understands the finer civilization of New England, and is the
more effective as an ironic critic of it because he is not merely an
ironic critic. He understands it because he both knows it from
inside and sees it from outside with the eye of a professional student
of civilization who has had much experience of non-Puritan cultures
Here, in the opening of the book, are the reflections of Basil Ransom :
'What her sister had imparted to him about her mania for
"reform" had left in his mouth a kind of unpleasant after-taste ;
he felt, at any rate, that if she had the religion of humanity
Basil Ransom had read Comte, he had read everything she
134
TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
would never understand him. He, too, had a private vision
of reform, but the first principle of it was to reform the
reformers.'
The easy reference to Comte is significant ; James, we are sure,
has a right to the ease. Not that v r e suppose him to have made a
close study of Comte or to have needed to. But he brings to the
business of the novelist a wide intellectual culture, as well as, in an
exceptionally high degree, the kind of knowledge of individual
humans and concrete societies that we expect of a great novelist
knowledge that doesn't favour enthusiasm for such constructions as
the religion of humanity . We are not to identify him with Ransom,
but we don't suspect him of enthusiasm for that religion, and it is
made very plain that he shares Ransom's ironical vision of the
'reformers'.
In fact, The Boston <ans has a distinct political interest. James deals
with the feminist movement with such dispassionate lightness and
sureness, with an insight so utterly unaccompanied by animus, if not
by irony, that Miss Rebecca West couldn't forgive him (in her book
on James she can find nothing to say in favour of The Bostonians).
The political interest, it is tiue, is incidental ; but to that it owes its
provocative strength : James's preoccupation is centred in the pre-
sentment of Miss Chancellor and of her relations with the red-haired
and very Americanly vital and charming girl, Verena Tarrant,
whom she is intent on saving from the common fate of woman
love and marriage and dedicating to the Cause. And James's genius
conies out in a very remarkable piece of psychological analysis, done
in the concrete (and done, it is worth noting, decades before the
impact of Freud had initiated a general knowingness about the
unconscious and the subconscious).
The relation of Miss Chancellor to Verena is at bottom, and
essentially, a very painful matter, but it provides some very fine
psychological comedy. Here, for instance, is Miss Chancellor deal-
ing with one of her most difficult problems :
'A day or two after this, Mr. Henry Burrage left a card at
Miss Chancellor's door, with a note in which he expressed the
hope that she would take tea with him on a certain day on
which he expected the company of his mother. Olive re-
135
HENRY JAMES
spondee! to this invitation, in conjunction with Verena ; but in
doing so she was in the position, singular fcr her, of not quite
understanding what she was aoout. It seemed to her strange
that Verena should urge her to take such a step when she was
free to go without her, and it proved two things : first, that she
was much interested in Mr. Henry Burrage, and second, that
her nature was extraordinarily beautiful. Could anything, in
effect, be less underhand than such an indifference to what she
supposed to be the best opportunities for carrying on a flirta-
tion ? Verena wanted to know the truth, and it was clear that
by this time she believed Olh e Chancellor to have it, for the
most part, in her keeping. Her insistence, therefore, proved,
above all, that she cared more for her friend's opinion of Henry
Burrage than for her own a reminder, certainly, of the re-
sponsibility that Olive had incurred in undertaking to form this
generous young mind, and of the exalted place that she now
occupied in it. Such revelations ought to liave been satisfac-
tory ; if they failed to be completely so, it was only on account
of the elder girl's regret that the subject as to which her judg-
ment was wanted should be a young man destitute of the worst
vices. Henry Burrage had contributed to throw Miss Chan-
cellor into a "state", as these young ladies called it, the night
she met him at Mrs. Tarrant's ; but it had none the less been
conveyed to Olive by the voices of the air that he was a gentle-
man and a good fellow.
'This was painfully obvious when the visit to his rooms took
place ; he was so good-humoured, so amusing, so friendly and
considerate, so attentive to Miss Chancellor, he did the honours
of his bachelor-nest with so easy a grace, that Olive, part of the
time, sat dumbly shaking her conscience, like a watch that
wouldn't go, to make it tell her some better reason why she
shouldn't like him. She saw that there would be no difficulty
in disliking his mother ; but that, unfortunately, would not
serve her purpose nearly so well.'
And after the charming tea-party :
"'It would be very nice to do that always just to take men
as they are, and not to have to think about their badness * . . so
that one could sit there . . . and listen to Schubert and Mendels-
sohn. They didn't care anything about female suffrage ! And
I didn't feel the want of a vote to-day at all, did you ? ' Verena
136
TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
inquired, ending, as she always ended in these speculations,
with an appeal to Olive.
'This young lady thought it necessary to give her a very firm
answer. " I always feel it everywhere night and day. I feel
it here 99 ; and Olive laid her hand solemnly on her heart. "I
feel it as a deep, unforgettable wrong ; I feel it as one feels a
stain that is on one's honour/*
'Verena gave a clear laugh, and after that a soft sigh, and
then said, "Do you know, Olive, I sometimes wonder whether,
if it wasn't for you, I should feel it so very much !"
'"My own friend," Olive replied, "you have never yet said
anything to me which expressed so clearly the closeness and
sanctity of our union/ 5
'"You do keep me up," Verena went on. "You are my
conscience".'
On the relation of the feminism to the conscience James is very
good the New England conscience, of course, is for him a central
theme. In Olive Chancellor he relates the conscience, the feminism,
the culture and the refinement. 'Olive almost panted' when she
proposed to herself as the ideal happiness 'winter evenings under the
lamp with falling snow outside, and tea on a little table, and success-
ful renderings, with a chosen companion, of Goethe' (Entsagen
sollst du, sollst entsagenl being the text immediately in question),
'almost the only foreign author she cared about ; for she hated the
writings of the French in spite of the importance they have given to
women'. As for vulgarity : ' Olive Chancellor despised vulgarity
and had a scent for it which she followed up in her own family. . . .
There were times, indeed, when every one seemed to have it;
every one but Miss Birdseye (who had nothing to do with it she
was an antique) and the poorest, humblest people* . . . 'Miss Chan-
cellor would have been much happier if the movements she was
interested in could have been carried on only by the people she
liked, and if revolutions, somehow, didn't always have to begin
with one's self with internal convulsions, sacrifices, executions/
It is her representative plight, of course, that she has to take the
impact of vulgarity in its most fantastically gross forms. She has,
for instance, to receive a visit, being unable to keep him out, from
Mr. Matthias Pardon (Chapter XVII), whom Verena's parents
137
HENRY JAMES
favour as a parti. 'For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction
between the person and the artist had ceased to exist ; the writer
was personal, the person food for newsboys, and everything and
every one were every one's business/ The unsnubbable, invulner-
able, and hardly conscious impudence of the American newspaper-
man, servant of a 'vigilant public opinion', is rendered with a force
so much surpassing Dickens's (we remember the theme in Martin
Chuzzlewit) because of the so much greater subtlety of James's art
and the significance drawn from the whole context. The cold,
forbidding distinction of the w^ll-born Boston spinster goes for
nothing here. ' She thought Mr. Pardon's visit a liberty ; but if she
expected to convey this idea to him by withholding any suggestion
that he should sit down, she was greatly mistaken, inasmuch as he
cut the ground from under her feet by himself offering her a chair.
His manner represented hospitality enough for both of them. . , .'
I specify this scene (as I might equally well have specified a
number of others) for its typical value. This play of contrasts thin
refinement against confident vulgarity, fastidiousness against ex-
pansive publicity, restrictive scruple against charlatanism in tropical
luxuriance runs all through James's rendering of the New England
aspect of American civilization. 1 The Bostonians is a wonderfully
rich, intelligent and brilliant book. I said that it is an acknowledged
masterpiece, but I don't in fact think that it has anything like the
reputation it deserves. It could have been written only by James,
and it has an overt richness of life such as is not commonly associated
with him. It is incomparably witty and completely serious, and it
makes the imputed classical status of all but a few of the admired
works of Victorian fiction look silly. It is one of James's achieved
major classics, and among the works that he devoted to American
life it is supreme.
He wrote, of course, other 'American' classics. Not to speak of
short-stories and things of less than novel-length, there is Washing-
ton Square (1880). It is on a smaller scale than The Bostonians, and
very different in kind. It is not in the same sense a 'study' of
1 The clash represented by the impact of the American newspaper-man,
invulnerable in his nationally sanctioned office of unrestricted and unscru-
pulous publicity, is a recu. rent then,e in James. We find it notably in The
Reverberator^ a nouvelle of 1888.
138
TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
American civilization, but the New York setting gives James an
opportunity for such a record of the mceurs of a past age as he alone
could have done. Washington Square is a 'tale of silent suffering'
that very obviously recalls Eugenie Grandet to say which doesn't
mean that it isn't a very original and very characteristic creation,
fine in a way that is beyond Balzac. Its unlikeness in excellence to
The Bostonians evinces strikingly the flexibility and range as well as
the maturity that James commanded in the early eighteen-eighties.
This summary dismissal of so fine a work as Washington Square
illustrates the impossibility of beir g fair to James in any directed
and limited survey. I have, as anyone must have in dealing with
an author so voluminous, so complex and of so interesting a de-
velopment, a given exploratory line in view. I must accordingly
hark back at once from The Bostonians to an earlier book that comes
between it and Roderick Hudson: The Europeans (1878). In this
book, as the title suggests, the 'international situation' appears. But
the Europeans, the visiting cousins, are there mainly to provide a
foil for the American family, a study of the New England etnos
being James's essential purpose.
'The sudden irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of
the Wentwbrths of an element not allowed for in its scheme of
usual obligations, required a readjustment of that sense of re-
sponsibility which constituted its principal furniture. To con-
sider an event, crudely and baldly, in the light of the pleasure
it might bring them, was an intellectual exercise with which
Felix Young's American cousins were almost wholly un-
acquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely
pursued in any section of human society. The arrival of Felix
and his sister was a satisfaction, but it was an extension of duty,
of the exercise of the more recondite virtues. . . /
Of Felix we are told :
' It is beside the matter to say he had a good conscience ; for
the best conscience is a sort of self-reproach, and this young
man's brilliantly healthy nature spent itself in objective good
intentions which were ignorant of any test save exactness in
hitting their mark/
The 'irruption' is beneficent. Felix confirms Gertrude, the
younger daughter, in her dawning realization that she is no Puritan,
139
HENRY JAMES
and doesn't belong here (he carries her off), and helps in various
ways,. by his warm and electric presence, to vindicate the claims of
life against the constrictions of the braced conscience. Nevertheless
James's irony is far from being unkind ; he sees too much he ad-
mires in the ethos he criticizes to condemn it. The reaction he
attributes here (not, of course, as a permanent one) to the worldly
Baroness is made more than plausible :
'There were tears in her eyes. The luminous interior, the
gentle, tranquil people, the simple, serious life the sense of
these things pressed upon her with an overmastering force, and
she felt herself yielding to one of the most genuine emotions
she had ever known. "I should like to stay here," she said.
"Pray take me in".'
And the advantage isn't wholly on the side of the Europeans here :
'Mr. Wentworth also observed his young daughter.
1 "I don't know what her manner of life may have been," he
said ; " but she certainly never can have enjoyed a more refined
and salubrious home."
'Gertrude stood there looking at them all. " She is the wife
of a Prince," she said.
'" We are all princes here," said Mr. Wentworth ; "and I
don't know of any palace in this neighbourhood that is to let". '
This compares interestingly with the passages quoted above from
Roderick Hudson and from The Bostonianszs illustrating the relation
to Dickens. We remark the distinctively American note both of
Mr. Wentworth's observation and of his retort ; but we notice also
that the attitude towards him, which might appear to be simply
Dickensian, shifts as we pass from the one to the other, and in shift-
ing makes one of James's essential discriminations. When a wooden
house, 'eighty years old', is thus exalted we can't doubt the in-
tention ; we know that we are to feel an ironical amusement at a
characteristic American complacency characteristically expressed,
and that the nicely chosen adjectives/ refined' and 'salubrious',
register, on James's part, a critical irony induced by certain elements
of the New Engknd ethos. But if we have been giving the atten-
tion demanded (and deserved), we perceive, when we come to the
retort, that Mr. Wentworth at this point has his creator's backing,
and, opposed as he is here to the Baroness, stands for an American
140
TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
democracy that James offers, with conviction, as an American
superiority.
The Baroness and her brother, we shall have noted, are them-
selves opposed in value to one another ; as representative Europeans,
they are complementary, and establish, in their difference, another
essential discrimination for James. In fact, all the figures in the book
play their parts in this business of discriminating attitudes and values,
which is performed with remarkable precision and economy ; the
total effect being an affirmation, made with the force of inspired
art. James is not condemning or endorsing either New England or
Europe ; separating in both what he prizes from what he dislikes,
he is defining an imagined satisfying positive. The Europeans (as the
very names of the characters suggest) is a moral fable. It has
suffered the same fate as Hard Times for, we have to conclude, the
same reasons ; the critical tradition regarding 'the English novel'
if 'critical' is the word deals in the 'creation of real characters',
measures vitality by external abundance, and expects a loosely
generous provision of incident and scene, but is innocent of any
adult criterion of point and relevance in art. (It can give us Thack-
eray as a major novelist.) So when it is offered concentrated signi-
ficance close and insistent relevance to a serious and truly rich
theme, it sees merely insignificance : Hard Times passes unnoticed,
and The Europeans is dismissed as 'slight'. Yet this small book,
written so early in James's career, is a masterpiece of major quality. 1
He had already, in respect of the 'international situation' (for it
is to this that we must now turn), taken a positively American line.
The American (1875) is the novel that follows on Roderick Hudson,
and it inaugurates the long series of works in which James may be
said to offer his native country its revenge for Martin Chuzzlewit.
Unfortunately he chooses, in this book, as the representative of
American decency and genuineness, a type of which he knows vir-
tually nothing the business-man and offers us a quite incredible
1 It may be suggested that a comparison with The Europeans helps us to
define the unsatisfactoriness of The Spoils of Poynton (1896), a novel that
contains so much that is strikingly good. In this later book James has not
been closely enough controlled by his scheme of essential significance, but
has allowed himself to over-develop partial interests, and to go in for some
free that is, loose * representation'. (Hard Tines is analysed, pp. 227 ff,
below).
141
HENRY JAMES
idealization. Christopher Newman, having started from nothing,
emerges from making his pile in the post-Civil-War decade crude
(in the sense of being socially innocent) but unworldly, and finely
sensitive to moral values ; and because of this is at a disadvantage in
dealing with the corrupt and subtle French aristocrats who victimize
him. It is romantic, unreal and ridiculous.
To say, however, that Newman is a romantic conception is not
enough. As his name suggests, he represents a very positive and
significant intention on James's part. His Christian name recalls
Christopher Columbus, and 'Newman* explains itself: James, that
is, intends him to have a peculiar symbolic value. He is the answer
to the question : What, separating off and putting aside that which
comes from Europe die heritage brought across can we offer as
the distinctively American contribution ? That James should so trans-
figure the type he first presented, in Roderick Hudson, as Mr. Leaven-
worth shows both the urgency with which he felt the question, and
the difficulty of finding a satisfactory answer. The 'new man',
beLig without the refinements of European culture, is to be also
without its corruptions ; he is to represent energy, uncompromising
moral vitality and straightforward will. We meet him again as
Caspar Goodwood in The Portrait of a Lady ; we find him in the
extremely sophisticated later art, and he culminates in Adam Verver
of The Golden Bowl In The Ivory Tower we have him in the
significantly named Frank Betterman.
The American is in many ways an interesting book, but it is not
one of James's successes. He deals more impressively with the inter-
national theme in a story a nouvelle, not a novel dated a year
earlier, Madame deMauves (1874). The heroine, an American heiress,
having idealized into real human distinction the 'high' descent of a
fortune-hunting French aristocrat, and married him, shows in the
resulting disillusionment her own invincible superiority of spirit.
Madame de Mauves' situation clearly foreshadows Isabel Archer's,
and there is a further likeness represented by the young American
whom, worthily devoted as he is, her own self-idealization forbids her
to accept as a lover. The story deserves to be read for its fine quali-
ties, though it has obvious weaknesses and the reader may feel in the
close a possible ambiguity in James's total attitude ; for Madame de
Mauves remains unyielding, not only towards the young American,
142
TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
but, when her husband repents and is 'converted* (incredibly this,
we feel, is romantic), towards him too, the consequence being that
he blows his brains out.
There is no ambiguity about Daisy Miller (1878). It offers a
variant of a favourite theme of James's : the superiority of the
American girl to all the world. Tae story is a master's work, and
we can see why it enjoyed an immediate success. But it has to be
classed with The American as giving us a James who takes an
American stand on insufficient ground. Daisy Miller's freedom in
the face of European social conventions is of a kind that would make
her insufferable in any civilized society. She belongs with the
characteristics of the American scene that are ironically presented
by James in The Bostonians. She is utterly uneducated, and no in-
telligent man could stand her for long since there could be no
possible exchange of speech with her : she has nothing to recommend
her but looks, money, confidence and clothes (James must have
been told that only the American girl knows how to dress). And,
whatever there may be in my suggestion about Isabel Archer (a
very different case), it is plain that the sympathetic vision of Daisy
Miller presented by James depends on her being seen through the
eyes of an American gentleman at not so close a range that he is
committed to personal or social relations with her.
Daisy Miller, in significance, is closely related to Christopher
Newman. Her incomparably greater reality only serves to empha-
size the poverty of the answer she represents answer to the same
question that produced Newman. James offers us something more
interesting in the Pandora Day of Pandora (1884), which, though
not among the best known, is one of his finer nouvelles. Pandora,
from the Middle- Western Utica, hasn't even beauty ; she has
nothing but her American vitality, initiative, 'freedom* and con-
fidence, and in her person American democracy is very effectively
vindicated (for she preserves an unashamed loyalty to her early
connexions) as against what is represented by the German diplo-
matist Count Vogelstein. But the attempt to isolate and exalt the
distinctively and uniquely American is on the showing of the
consequences in James's art misconceived. He had, for creative
impulse driving at something over and above mere representation,
a more valid ideal positive before him. The 'Americanism* results
143
HENRY JAMES
ultimately (to consider now James's women) in a feebleness and in a
perversity of valuation we may figure by Milly Theale of The Wings
of the Dove. An American heiress, merely because she is an Ameri-
can heiress, is a Princess, and such a Princess as, just for being one,
is to be conceived as a supreme moral value : that is what it amounts
to. And, in bearing this significance, Milly Theale has, in the
Jamesian ceuvre, a sufficient company of other examples.
Madame de Mauves has a real moral superiority, combined with
a distinction of manners. And what, with an eye on James's de-
velopment, we find interesting i his evident glimpse of a possible
'civilization' in which the manners belonging to a ripe art of social
intercourse shall be the index of a moral refinement of the best
American kind and a seriousness that shall entail a maturity of
humane culture. The preoccupation defines itself further in an
admirable story that is to be found in the Daisy Miller volume An
International Episode. This story shows us Bessy Alden, the 'Boston
sister* of a New York 'society hostess', finding herself attracted b)
the /isiting Lord Lambeth. She is intelligent, sophisticated socially 3
and serious as well (*at concerts Bessy always listened') :
'She was perfectly conscious, mo r eover, that she liked to
think of his more adventitious merits that her imagination
was excited and gratified by the sight of a handsome young
man endowed with such large opportunities opportunities she
hardly knew for what, but, as she supposed, for doing great
things for setting an example, for exerting an influence, for
conferring happiness, for encouraging the arts. She had a kind
of ideal of conduct for a young man who should find himself
in this magnificent position, and she tried to adapt it to Lord
Lambeth's deportment, as you might attempt to fit a silhouette
in cut paper upon a shadow projected upon a wall. But Bessy
Alden's silhouette refused to coincide with his Lordship s
image ; and this want of harmony sometimes vexed her more
than she thought reasonable/
This is when, with her sister, she had come to England and met him
again. Lord Lambeth is nice, and not stupid, but he is utterly
without intellectual interests :
* If Lord Lambeth should appear anywhere, it was a symbol
that there would be no poets and philosophers ; and in conse-
144
TO THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
quence for it was almost a strict consequence she used to
enumerate to the young man these objects of her admiration.
'"You seem to be awfully for.d of that sort of people/' said
Lord Lambeth one day, as if the idea had just occurred to him.
' "They are the people in England I am most curious to see,"
Bessy Alden replied.
'"I suppose that's because you have read so much," said
Lord Lambeth, gallantly.
4 "I have not read so much. It is because we think so much
of^hemathome."
*' Oh, I see ! " observed the young nobleman. "In Boston."
'"Not only in Boston; everywhere," said Bessy. "We
hold them in great honour; they go to the best dinner-
parties."
*"I daresay you are right. I can't say I know many of
them".'
As Bessy Alden takes in the fact, settling down to it as undeniably
a fact, that the curious and offensive preoccupation with precedence
distinguishing Lord Lambeth's world goes with a complete rnd
complacent Philistinism, we have James's criticism of English society
a criticism that he was to go on making throughout his life,
often with a bitterly contemptuous accent. When Lord Lambeth's
mother and sister call to exhibit their patrician insolence and warn
her off, she has already decided against him. She rejects him and
leaves England at once, without regret. 1
1 In Lady Barlarina (1888), which is in many ways the most interesting of
the anti-English stories of cultural comparison (as they may be called), we
have a kind of inversion of the theme of An International Episode. Jackson
Lemon, an American doctor of keen scientific interests, whose father*s
suddenly acquired wealth makes the young man a desirable partly marries
Lady Barb (named with a kind of suggestiveness often found in James, but
not always noticed *Barbarina' suggests Arnold's * Barbarian* and 'Barb*
the equine thoroughbred) because he sees in her 'the beautiful mother of
beautiful children in whom the appearance of "race" should be conspicuous*.
He insists on taking her back to New York and settling there. She, for whom
life has no meaning except in terms of hunting and the English social code,
can, in New York society, find nothing to keep interest alive, for though her
* social traditions were rich and ancient* she is incapable of conversation the
poor Doctor had hoped to initiate an American salon. She succeeds in getting
him back to England for a visit, their indefinite stay settles into permanence,
and his life, which is bound up with his profession and his feeling for his
native land, lapses into futility. At the end of the story he is seen scanning his
infant daughters face for 'the look of race 1 but apprehensively.
K 145
HENRY JAMES
We observe, then, a marked complexity in James's attitude
towards the international theme not to speak of inconstancy and
inconsistency. He exhibits a variety of tendencies. In Roderick
Hudson, aided by Dickens, he has already achieved a maturely
poised 'placing' irony in the treatment of certain characteristics of
American life. He can, all the same, offer us in the immediately
following novel, The American, his Christopher Newman, a master-
ful, self-made business-man, as the representative of American
superiority over a corrupt, materialistic, and therefore victoriously
self-seeking Europe. He is capable, too, of exalting the American
girl in the guise of Daisy Miller. Yet he can criticize the moral and
intellectual culture of New England by bringing to bear his know-
ledge of a maturer civilization, and further, in The Bostonians, do
again more devastatingly the work of Martin Chuzzlewit. And
he can, on the other hand, show us, as characteristically American,
conscience and seriousness joined with a superiority of true in-
tellectual culture and a fineness of manners. We have further an
intimation that, in the depths of his mind, in the interplay between
the diverse actualities of his experience, there is forming an imagined
ideal positive that is not to be identified with any one of them. And
this brings us to The Portrait of a Lady.
But, before going on to consider that book, I will, briefly and by the
way, guard against appearing to slight his remarkable achievement
in the rendering of actualities. Pound says 1 that James 'has put
America on the map . . . giving to her a reality such as is attained
only by scenes recorded in the arts and the writing of masters/
'No one but an American', he says, 'can ever know, really know,
how good he is at bottom, how good his America is.' But an Eng-
lish reader can know how well James renders essential character-
istics of English civilization and representative English types (though
these, we sometimes find, are seen as, for instance, Lord Warburton
is distinctly through the eyes of an outsider). And any reader,
English or American, can see that he is, more generally, an incom-
parable master at differentiating national tones and qualities the
indices of radical differences of temper, tradition and moral outlook.
After the Americans and the English, of course, he pays most atten-
tion to the French, and there are some French types finely observed
1 In Make it New.
146
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
and done as early as The American. He gives us Italians too. Ger-
mans are not frequent presences in his books, but they are to be
found, and, in their 'doing', exhibit his usual penetration. Within
a decade after 1870 he gives us the new Herrenvolk German see
A Bundle of Letters (and there is another German type, * a Junker
of Junkers', in the not much later Pandora).
It was to The Portrait of a Lady that the argument had brought
me. The greatness of that book, it seems to me, is essentially condi-
tioned by the inclusive harmony (or something approaching it) that
it represents the vital poise between the diverse tendencies and
impulsions I have noted. In Isabel Archer we have again the
supremacy of the American girl ; but in her we can recognize a real
superiority, even if, pondering it critically, we judge it to depend
on a large measure of idealization. Her freedom in the face of
English conventions appears and she is a firmly realized presence
for us as a true emancipation of spirit. Unlike Daisy Miller she
has her own superior code, in her scruple, her self-respect and her
sensitiveness ; she is educated and highly intelligent. She is n A ore
idealized, it is true, than Bessy Alden. Nevertheless, however
idealized, and whatever I may have said in comparing her with
Gwendolen Harleth, she is convincing and impressive : the ideal-
ization stands for a true fineness, worthily imagined by James.
Lord Warburton, on the other hand, is very much superior to
Lord Lambeth of An International Episode. He is far from stupid or
impermeable to ideas ('he had a lively grey eye'), and he sees the
order to which he belongs as standing for something more than
precedence and privilege. In fact, that order is still in some ways
idealized ir The Portrait of a Lady, and the presentation of it has a
mellow fulness that has much to do with the effect of rich beauty
characterizing the book. The opening scene, on the lawn, giving
us, with a ripe and subtle art that at once proclaims a great master,
the old American banker and his company against the background
of country-house, sets the tone. He admires and respects Lord War-
burton and Lord Warburton's world, while, at the same time, the
quite different standards he himself represent? (he remains an
American after thirty successful years in England), and the free play
of mind and spirit that, with his son, he introduces into that world,
constitutes, as I suggested earlier, an implicit criticism of it. We
H7
HENRY JAMES
have here a sufficient hint at the way in which, in the total effect of
the book, the idealization and the criticism are reconciled.
The admirableness of Lord Warburton and the impressiveness of
his world, as we are made to feel them, are essential to the signifi-
cance of Isabel's negative choice. That her rejection of them doesn't
strike us as the least capricious, but as an act of radically ethical
judgment, is a tribute to the reality with which James has invested
her (she is not, we must concede, Gwendolen Harleth) :
'At the risk of adding to the evidence of her self-sufficiency
it must be said that there had been moments when this possi-
bility of admiration by a personage represented to her an
aggression almost to the degree of an affront, quite to the degree
of an inconvenience. She had never yet known a personage ;
there had been no personages, in this sense, in her life ; there
were probably none such at all in her native land. When she
had thought of individual eminence she had thought of it on
the basis of character and wit of what one might like in a
gentleman's mind and in his talk. She herself was a character
she couldn't help being aware of that ; and hitherto her
visions of a completed consciousness had concerned themselves
largely with moral images things is to which the question
wpuld be whether they pleased her sublime soul. Lord War-
burton loomed up before her, largely and brightly, as a collec-
tion of attributes and powers, which were not to be measured
by this simple rule, but which demanded a different sort of
appreciation an appreciation that the girl, with her habit of
judging quickly and freely, felt she lacked the patience to
bestow. He appeared to demand of her something that no one
else, as it were, had presumed to do. What she felt was that a
territorial, a political, a social magnate had conceived the design
of drawing her into the system in which he rather invidiously
lived and moved. A certain instinct, not imperious, but per-
suasive, told her to resist murmured to her that, virtually, she
had a system and an orbit of her own.'
James goes on immediately to tell us that there was 'a young man
ktely come from America who had no system at all'. This, in the
guise of Caspar Goodwood from New England, is the American
business-man. He represents what America has to offer Isabel
stark unpliant integrity and self-reliant practical will, as opposed to
148
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
'system* and the civilized graces. 'His jaw was too square and set
and his figure too straight and stiff: these things suggested a want
of consonance with the deeper rhythms of life.' l But in spite of this
promising description he is sentimentalized in so far as he is 'there*
at all and he is one of the weaknesses of the book. However, the
ineffectualness of the intention he stands for leaves Isabel's rejection
of Lord Warburton all its significance.
This significance is beautifully intimated in such touches as the
lapse (it is not unique) that Lord Warburton is guilty of on the
occasion of Mrs. Touchett's forbidding Isabel to stay up alone with
the gentlemen (Chapter VII) : .
'"Need I go, dear aunt ? I'll come up in half an hour."
'"It is impossible I should wait for you/' Mrs. Touchett
answered.
'"Ah, you needn't wait! Ralph will light my candle,"
Isabel gaily engaged.
'"I'll light your candle ; do let me light your candle, Miss
Archer!" Lord Warburton exclaimed. ".Only I beg it shall
not be before midnight."
'Mrs. Touchett fixed her bright little eyes upon him a mo-
ment and transferred them to her niece.'
Warburton would not have used this tone to an English girl.
Perceiving that she has the American freedom where the English
convenances are concerned, he immediately classifies her as 'an
American girl', and slips into a manner that would have been in
place with Henrietta Stackpole, the bright young journalist who
habitually 'walks in without knocking at the door'. It shocks us,
such is the power of James's art. It shocks us more than it shocks
Isabel, and it serves none the less for that to bring to a concrete point
for us the rightness of her decision against him. For it reveals to us
an obtuse complacency, in assuming which for a moment Lord
Warburton seems to reveal the spirit of the 'system' he belongs to.
This passage has its retroactive parallel in the later exchange
(Chapter X) between Ralph Touchett and Henrietta, in which he
1 This description represents a kind of subtlety, expressive of a profundity
of interest in life such as is not suggested by the phrase * novelist of manners ',
that is highly characteristic of James's notation. It is a character of 'style*
that derives from the same radical bent as his stronger uses of symbolism.
149
HENRY JAMES
pretends, to her confusion, to think that she is making love to him.
Ralph's 'lapse' doesn't matter. It merely leads us to say that he
knows how to treat Henrietta, just as he knows how to treat every-
one. For Ralph Touchett is the centre, the key-figure, of James's
'system' the poise or harmony I have spoken of as characterizing
The Portrait of a Lady. He is neither American nor English or he
is both : that is, he combines the advantages, while being free from
the limitations. He can place everyone, and represents the ideal
civilization that James found in no country. 1
He understands why Isabella likes Henrietta, but, when told that
Henrietta carries in her garments 'the strong, sweet, fresh odour* of
her great country, he replies : she * does smell of the Future it
almost knocks one down. !' For her he is just another expatriate,
like Osmond. And when Isabel asks the Parisian Americans, whom,
in their obviousness, she can place, 'You all live this way, but what
does it lead to ?', Mrs. Touchett, placing herself, 'thought the ques-
tion worthy of Henrietta Stackpole'. The discriminations, in fact,
are established with beautiful precision all along the scale. Isabel
herself notices that Ralph seems to resemble Osmond in having a
fastidious taste and that yet there is a difference. Ralph himself,
in placing Osmond for her (she, of course, doesn't take it in, and
that is the tragic irony), explains what it is : 'He has a great dread
of vulgarity ; that's his special line ; he hasn't any other that I know
of. He places Madame Merle too again without effect :
'"Ah, with Madame Merle you may go anywhere de con-
fiance" said Ralph. " She knows none but the best people". '
This will suffice to indicate the kind of essential organization that
makes The Portrait of a Lady, for all the critical points I made about
it in discussing George Eliot, a great book. Its greatness derives
from his peculiar genius and experience, and it embodies an organ-
1 We have here, in fact, th positive ideal that we can see to be implied in
this passage from a letter of 1888 to his brother :
'. . . I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an
outsider to say whether I am at a given moment an American writing about
England or an Englishman writing about America (dealing as I do with both
countries), and so far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be
exceedingly proud of it, f6r it would be highly civilized.* Letters, Vol. I,
P- '43-
150
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
ization of his vital interests. These interests inform everything in
it : the wit, the dialogue, the plot, the characterization.
The creative wealth of the book is all distinctively Jamesian.
Madame Merle, for instance, couldn't have been done by George
Eliot. The vision here is Isabel's, who hasn't yet seen through her :
* She had become too flexible, too useful, was too ripe and
too final. She was in a word too perfectly the social animal
that man and woman are supposed to have been intended to be ;
and she had rid herself of every remnant of that tonic wildness
which we may assume to hav^ belonged even to the most
amiable persons in the ages before country-house life was the
fashion. Isabel found it difficult to think of her in any detach-
ment or privacy, she existed only in her relations, direct or
indirect, with her fellow-mortals. One might wonder what
commerce she could possibly hold with her own spirit. One
always ended, however, by feeling that a charming surface
doesn't necessarily prove one superficial ; this was an illusion
in which, in one's youth, one had but just escaped being
nourished. Madame Merle was not superficial not she.
She was deep.
She represents, that is, a social 'civilization* ('the great round
world itself) that is not of the kind James himself is after (just as
she is, with Osmond, the complete expatriate who has none of
the American virtues). The contrasting Mrs. Touchett reminds us
of an American type we meet in some of Lawrence's best work
(St. Mawr, for instance). James presents her with his characteristic
wit which, as I have said, is no mere surface-habit of expression :
'The edges of her conduct were so very clear-cut that for susceptible
persons it sometimes had a knife-like effect'. Henrietta Stackpole
is another American type, perfectly done marvellously escaping
the effect of caricature, and .remaining for all her portentous repre-
sentativeness, sufficiently sympathetic. Then there is Osmond's
sister, the Countess Gemini, 'a lady who had so mismanaged her
improprieties that they had ceased to hang together at all ... and
had become the mere floating fragments of a wrecked renown,
incommoding social circulation', and who would plunge into a
lucid conversation 'as a poodle plunges after a thrown stick*.
The Countess Gemini, though so well done, is a weakness in the
HENRY JAMES
book, in the sense that she is too simply there to serve as a piece of
machinery. She alone can reveal to Isabel the clandestine relations
of Osmond and Madame Merle, and the fact that Pansy is their
daughter, and she is given no sufficient motives for performing the
service. Pansy herself raises the question of James's attitude toward
the pure protected jeunefille (die 'blank page'), a type to which he
seems curiously drawn. In The Awkward Age he shows the good
little Aggie, the foil to Nanda, developing after marriage into
something approaching, at the level of Edwardian smart society, a
vulgar trollop : and we readily accept the implication that, in such a
milieu, the development follows naturally out of such 'innocence*.
In The Ambassadors he seems to confirm this implication by giving
the decidedly not innpcent Madame Vionnet another carefully
guarded 'blank page* for daughter.
Though Pansy serves obvious functions as machinery in the rela-
tions between Isabel and Osmond, her presence in the book has, in
addition, some point. As a representative figure, 'the white flower
of cultivated sweetness', she pairs in contrast with Henrietta Stack-
pole, the embodiment of a quite different innocence a robust
American innocence that thrives on free exposure to the world.
She brings us, in fact, to the general observation that almost all the
characters can be seen to have, in the same way, their values and
significances in a total scheme. F,pr though The Portrait of a Lady
is on so much larger a scale than The Europeans, and because of its
complexity doesn't invite the description of 'moral fable', it is
similarly organized : it is all intensely significant. 1 It offers no
largesse of irrelevant ' life ' ; its vitality is wholly that of art.
This is clearly why it has had nothing like due recognition in an
age when Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and the rest are being revived.
And the same explanation covers the neglect of the masterpieces
that keep it company. The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The
Europeans, Washington Square, not to speak of the shorter things
how can this magnificent group of classics have missed being
1 What he says abfout Maisie in the Preface to What Maisie Knew he might
have said about Pansy; the kind of 'economy ' he so characteristically and
significantly describes here is his constant preoccupation: 'so that we get,
for our profit, and get by an economy of process interesting in itself, the thor-
oughly pictured creature, the striking figured symbol/
152
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
acclaimed as placing the novelist in established pre-eminence with
Jane Austen and George Eliot ? They are not difficult of approach,
and they present no appearance of esotericism, while they have overt
attractions that might seem to qualify them for popularity. The
answer is that the real pre-eminence neither of Jane Austen nor of
George Eliot, for all the general acceptance they have enjoyed, has
in fact succeeded in getting itself really and generally recognized.
The tradition of ' the English novel' is such that even critics who are
too sophisticated to gubscribe to the view that The Cloister and the
Hearth is a great novel have expjctations that prevent them from
distinguishing, in fiction, the signs of serious art. It is a disastrous
tradition.
It undoubtedly accounts for the misdirection and waste of much
talent. It probably accounts for the fact that Gissing, who showed
his powers in his one memorable novel, New Grub Street, in which
the pressure of personal experience served him well, produced no
other, though he produced many negligible ones. To pass from
talent to genius, it accounts for the neglect ultimately disastrous
for his art suffered by James himself. It accounts for the neglect
that embittered Conrad's life as a writer. It meant that Lawrence,
after Women in Love, had to give up wrestling with his creative
problems, as had been his habit, in an intensive and prolonged pro-
cess of writing and re-writing slowly shaped major work, and,
instead, dashed off and published novel after novel in quick succes-
sion, turned his genius to journalism, and confined his finished art
to short stories.
However, the point to emphasize is that, for all the discourage-
ment he suffered, even in his early phase, James produced in it a
cluster of achieved masterpieces. The Portrait of a Lady is a great
novel, and we can't ask for a finer exhibition of James's peculiar
gifts than we get there and in The Bostonians (they seem to me die
two most brilliant novels in the language). The later development
brings extraordinary subtleties of art and poetic triumphs such as
the method by which in The Lesson of the Master James dramatizes
the complexities oFhis own attitude towards his career (about which
he was clearly given to radical self-questioning) but, for all the
interest of the development, with its ricji product of masterly
tales, we can hardly follow it unregretting.
(ii) The Later James
THE cue for the low current estimation of Roderick Hudson seems,
I have remarked, to have been given, in his Preface to it, by
James himself. But the James cf the Prefaces the famous prefaces
that he wrote for the 'New York* edition of his works is so much
not the James of the early books that he certainly shouldn't be taken
as a critical authority upon them, at any rate where valuation is
concerned. The interest of the Prefaces is that they come from the
mind that conceived the late work which is to say that, if they
are not in any sense critically satisfying, they have distinct critical
bearings.
In bringing them together in The Art of the Novel Mr. R. P.
Blackmur did something worth doing : James is so decidedly one
of the very great, and such documents ought to be conveniently
accessible. (It is very good news that the notebooks are at last going
to b: edited by Mr. F. O. Matthiessen.) Yet, if we find Mr. Black-
mur's Introduction disappointing, we have, after reading the book
through, to recognize that the disappointment goes back to the
Prefaces themselves.
* Criticism has never been more ambitious, nor more useful.
There has never been a body of work so eminently suited to
criticism as the fiction of Henry James, and there has never been
an author who so saw the need and had the ability to criticize
specifically and at length his own work. He was avid of his
opportunity and both proud and modest as to what he did
with it. " These notes*', he wrote in the Preface to Roderick
Hudson, "represent, over a considerable course, the continuity
of an artist's endeavour, the growth of his whole operative
consciousness. . . /"
If this is high promise, it is a promise answering to our expecta-
tion, to our general sense of Henry James.
Mr. Blackmur, in the succeeding thirty pages of his Introduc-
tion, disappoints because, though besides classifying the Prefaces and
enumerating James's themes he also summarizes and comments, he
conveys no effect of vigorous and lucid argument, of issues clearly
perceived and decisively set forth : the Introduction, in fact, seems
154
THE LATER JAMES
laboured and unenlightening. If we at first think this due to exces-
sive modesty or lack of ambition in Mr. Blackmur to his having
confined himself too much to listing and grouping, we afterwards
discover that to have done anything more satisfying he would have
to have been very much the reverse of modest and unambitious : he
would have to have done what Henry James has not. And if we
have finally a criticism to pass against him it is that he encourages us
to expect what we are not, in fact, given.
For such a failure (as I judge it) to come to the necessary recogni-
tion there is a great deal of excuse : the Prefaces make not merely
difficult but unrepaying reading. The extraordinary distinction of
the mind they come from is apparent in them, and this distinction
asserts itself in the very difficulty ; the impressed, modest and tired
reader conies away crediting James with achievement that is not
really there. If Mr. Blackmur, as we must grant, is an unusually
well-qualified reader, he is also a specialist, and a formal introducer
preoccupied with establishing his author's claims to attention.
Mr. Blackmur has certainly read the Prefaces and knows diem
through and through. It is characteristic of the contemporary cult
of Henry James (if it can be called that), and evidence of a real need
for re-stating his claims in general to attention, that several of the
contributors to the Henry James number of the Hound and Horn
(April-June 1934) in which Mr. Blackmur's Introduction first ap-
peared expose themselves as not having read, or having not been
able to read, the works they write about. The Portrait of a Lady is
not of the late, difficult period (to which the Prefaces very much
belong), but one critic (H. R. Hays, writing on Henry James the
Satirist) tells us that the situation it presents *is resolved into a con-
ventional happy ending with a divorce and a rescue by the American
business man/ It is difficult to believe that anyone who had actually
read, however carelessly or incompetently, to the end could have
made that of it. But then it is difficult to believe that anyone capable
of making anything at all of Henry James could pronounce as an-
other contributor, Mr. Stephen Spender, does : * A third of this book
is taken up with brush work which has nothing to do with the story,
but much to do with James's determination that he would really
present Isabel Archer to us/ After that we are hardly surprised
when Mr. Spender tells us that 'there is something particularly
155
HENRY JAMES
obscene about What Maisie Knew, in which a small girl is, in a rather
admiring way, exhibited as prying into the sexual lives of her very
promiscuous elders' hardly surprised, though the consummately
'done* theme of What Maisie Knew is the incorruptible innocence
of Maisie ; innocence that not merely preserves itself in what might
have seemed to be irresistibly corrupting circumstances, but can
even generate decency out of the egotistic squalors of adult personal
relations. The intention described by James in the Preface is, in the
story, realized :
'No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of
the confusion of life, the close connexion of bliss and bale, of
the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before
us for ever that bright hard metal, of so strange an alloy, one
face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other some-
body's pain and wrong. To live with all intensity and per-
plexity and felicity in its terribly mixed little world would thus
be the part of my interesting small mortal ; bringing people
together who would be at least more correctly separate ; keep-
ing people separate who would be at least more correctly
together ; flourishing, to a degree, at the cost of many conven-
tions and proprieties, even decencies, really keeping the torch of
virtue alive in an air tending infinitely to smother it ; really in
short making confusion worse confounded by drawing some
stray fragrance of an ideal across the scent of selfishness, by
sowing on barren strands, through the mere fact of presence,
the seed of the moral life.'
It would, one would have thought, be possible to read The Por-
trait of a Lady quite lazily, 'for the story', without missing the whole
point as completely as Mr. Spender misses it. What Maisie Knew,
on the other hand, does certainly demand of the reader a close and
unrelaxed attention, an actively intelligent collaboration ; it never
permits us to find it 'as easy to read as a novel'. Nevertheless, that
the general nature of the theme could, on any perusal, escape recogni-
tion still seems remarkable. Yet it is not very especially remarkable
in the criticism and appreciation of James's later work. For instance,
as respectable a critic as Mr. Van Wyck Brooks can write l : 'A
young man who is represented as "a gentleman, generally sound
1 The Pilgrimage of Henry James, p. 133.
156
THE LATER JAMES
and generally pleasant", straightway appears without any adequate
explanation as engaged in the most atrocious of conspiracies (Merton
Densher in The Wings of the Dove]' That would appear to amount
to nothing better than the reading given us by H. R. Hays in the
Hound and Horn : 'The villain, Merton Densher, or Kate, in The
Wings of the Dove, Madame Merle in the Portrait. . . /
Now, wherever The Wings of the Dove may fail, it is not in the
presentment of Kate Croy and Merton Densher. All the subtleties,
obliquities and indirections of Henry James's art are devoted,
triumphantly, to showing us Densher being drawn, resisting and
never acquiescing, into a position in which he cannot but, in spite
of himself, be a party to a conspiracy & conspiracy which he has
never connived at or countenanced. He is in love with Kate they
are 'in love' in the full common sense of the phrase, and the direct
strength with which the attraction between the lovers is conveyed
(a strength not common, it must be confessed, in James, whose lack
of freedom with the physical Mr. Spender finds 'vulgar') makes the
presentment of Densher's unwilling complicity the more convin-
cing. And even Kate Croy, whose resolute intention constitutes the
conspiracy, is not presented as a villain if 'villain' denotes a char-
acter whose 'wicked' behaviour we simply, without any motions
of sympathy, condemn. Her resoluteness, as a matter of fact,
appears to us as partly admirable: the pressures driving her
her hateful outlawed father, the threatening fate represented by
her married sister's overwhelming domestic squalors, the inflexible
ambition of her magnificently vulgar aunt, Mrs. Lowder are con-
veyed with such force as to make them seem, for a person of such
proud and admirable vitality, irresistible. Henry James's art, that is,
has a moral fineness so far beyond the perception of his critics that
they can accuse him of the opposite. This fineness, this clairvoyant
moral intelligence, is the informing spirit of that technique by the
indirections and inexplicitnesses of which these critics are baffled.
This fineness it is that, at James's best, the technique serves and
expresses. But The Wings of the Dove is nevertheless not a successful
work ; it does not as a whole show James at his Be t st. The great, the
disabling failure is in the presentment of the Dove, Milly Theale.
As he says in the Preface,
'the case prescribed for its central figure sick young woman,
157
HENRY JAMES
at the whole course of whose disintegration and the whole
ordeal of whose consciousness one would have quite honestly
to assist/
But later in the Preface he notes (finding it on re-perusal of the book
'striking, charming and curious')
'the author's instinct everywhere for the indirect presentation of
his main image. I note how, again and again, I go but a little
way with the direct that is, with the straight exhibition of
Milly ; it resorts for relief, this process, whenever it can, to
some kinder, more merciful indirection : all as if to approach
her circuitously, deal with her at second hand, as an unspotted
princess is ever dealt with ; the pressure all round her kept easy
ifor her, the sounds, the movements, regulated, the forms and
ambiguities made charming/
James was deceived. A vivid, particularly realized Milly might for
him stand in the midst of his indirections, buc what for his reader
these skirt round is too much like emptiness ; she isn't there, and the
fuss the other characters make about her as the 'Dove' has the effect
of an irritating sentimentality. 1
This inveterate indirectness of the later James, this aim of present-
ing, of leaving presented, the essential thing by working round and
behind so that it shapes itself in the space left amidst a context of
hints and apprehensions, is undoubtedly a vice in the Prefaces ; it
accounts for their unsatisfactoriness. It appears there, in criticism, as
an inability to state an inability to tackle his theme, or to get any-
thing out clearly and finally. Not that the Prefaces don't contain a
good deal that arrests the reader and that is particularly impressive
in quotation; but the developed and done is exasper?tingly dis-
proportionate to the laboured doing and the labour of reading.
Still, the novels are another matter. Criticism is not the art of
fiction, and James's technical preoccupations, the development of
his style and method, are obviously bound up with his essential
genius ; they are expressions of his magnificent intelligence, of his
intense and delicate interest in human nature. No direct and per-
emptory grasp could handle the facts, the data, the material that
concerned him most ; and the moral situations that seemed to him
i
She was associated for him with his beloved and idealized cousin, Minny
Temple, who died young ; out that doesn't give her any more substance for us.
158
THE LATER JAMES
most worth exploring were not such as invited blunt and confident
judgments of simple 'good 1 and 'bad*. Mr. Edmund Wilson,
writing for the memorial number of the Hound and Horn what is
by far the most distinguished contribution, calls his theme The
Ambiguity of Henry James. After giving an original and extremely
persuasive account of The Turn of the Screw, he goes on to argue
that, as the later manner developed, the subtleties of James's tech-
nique, the inexplicitnesses and indirections of his methods of present-
ment, tended to subserve a fundamental ambiguity ; one, that is,
about which he was not himself clear. For instance, of the central
figure in The Sacred Fount we are left asking: 'Is the obnoxious
week-end guest one of what used to be called the elite, a fastidious
highly civilized sensibility, or is he merely morbid and a bore?'
And Mr. Wilson suggests that James himself doesn't really know.
The explanation ?
'In Henry James's mind, there disputed all his life the Euro-
pean and the American points of view ; and their debate, I
believe, is closely connected with his inability sometimes to Se
clear as to what he thinks of a certain sort of person.'
Now it is certainly true that James's development was towards
over-subtlety, and that with this development we must associate a
loss of sureness in his moral touch, an unsatisfactoriness that in some
of the more ambitious late works leads us to question his implicit
valuations. But this unsatisfactoriness at its worst at any rate at
its most important seems to be something more decided than the
ambiguity that Mr. Wilson illustrates from The Sacred Fount. It is
what we have in The Golden Bowl, for example, which is one of the
late 'great' novels, and, beyond any question, representatively on
the line of his development. There James clearly counts on our
taking towards his main persons attitudes that we cannot take with-
out forgetting our finer moral sense our finer discriminative feeling
for life and personality. Adam Verver, the American plutocrat,
and his daughter Maggie 'collect' the Prince in much the same
spirit as that in which they collect their other 'pieces'. James is
explicit about it :
'Nothing perhaps might strike us queerer than this applica-
tion of the same measure of value to sirch different pieces of
159
HENRY JAMES
property as old Persian carpets, say, and new human acquisi-
tions ; all the more, indeed, that the amiable man was not
without an inkling that he was, as a taster of life, economically
constructed. He put into his own little glass everything he
raised to his lips ' (Vol. I, p. 175.)
He acquires later Charlotte Stant, another fine ' piece * acquires her
as a wife in order to settle the uneasiness that Maggie feels about the
difference made in his life by her own marriage (though actually father
and daughter seem to be as constantly and completely together as
before). Thisishowheseesthemintheconcludingsceneofthenovel :
'The two noble persons seated in conversation and at tea fell
then into the splendid effect and the general harmony : Mrs.
Verver and the Prince fairly "placed" themselves, however
unwittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture
required estheticaUy by such a scene. The fusion of their pres-
ence with the decorative elements, their contribution to the
triumph of selection, was complete and admirable ; though
tc a lingering view, a view more penetrating than the occasion
really demanded, they might have figured as concrete attesta-
tions of a rare power of purchase/ (Vol. II, p. 317.)
And yet, though James can on occasion come to this point of
explicitness, our attitude towards the Ververs isn't meant to be
ironical. We are to feel for and with them. We are to watch with
intense sympathy Maggie's victorious struggle to break the clan-
destine relation between her husband and Charlotte, establish the
pretence that nothing has occurred, and get Charlotte safely packed
off under a life-sentence to America, the penal settlement. Actually,
if our sympathies are anywhere they are with Charlotte and (a little)
the Prince, who represent what, against the general moral back-
ground of the book, can only strike us as decent passion ; in a stale,
sickly and oppressive atmosphere they represent life. That in our
feelings about the Ververs there would be any element of distaste
Henry James, in spite of the passages quoted, seems to have had no
inkling. *
Mr. Wilson, o course, might find here another illustration for
his theme of ambiguity. But actually what we have in this aspect
of The Golden Bowl vrould sefcm to be, rather than any radical
160
THE LATER JAMES
ambiguity in James, a partial inattention an inadvertence. It is as
if his interest in his material had been too specialized, too much
concentrated on certain limited kinds of possible development, and
as if in the technical elaboration expressing this specialized interest
he had lost his full sense of life and let his moral taste slip into abey-
ance. 1 The Ambassadors too, which he seems to have thought his
greatest success, produces an effect of disproportionate 'doing' of
a technique the subtleties and elaborations of which are not suffici-
ently controlled by a feeling for value and significance in living.
What, we ask, is this, symbolized by Paris, that Strether feels him-
self to have missed in his own life ? Has James himself sufficiently
inquired ? Is it anything adequately realized ? If we are to take the
elaboration of the theme in the spirit in which we are meant to take
it, haven't we to take the symbol too much at the glamorous face-
value it has for Strether ? Isn't, that is, the energy of the 'doing'
(and the energy demanded for the reading) disproportionate to the
issues to any issues that are concretely held and presented ?
It is characteristic of Henry James's fate that, while it should ,be
generally agreed that something went wrong with his development,
it should at the same time be almost as generally agreed that the
books we ought to know the books he ought to be known by
are the three last long novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The
Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1905). The Ambassadors
in particular has probably, since Mr. Percy Lubbock picked on it
in The Craft of Fiction (Mr. E. M. Forster confirmed him in Aspects
of the Novel), been the book most commonly attempted by those
wishing to qualify in Henry James. This is to be deplored, since not
only is The Portrait of a Lady much more likely, once started, to be
read through and read with unfeigned enjoyment ; it is much more
worth reading. At any rate, as I have said, it seems to me to be
James's finest achievement, and one of the great novels of the
English language.
The Portrait of a Lady (1881) belongs to his early maturity. Just
before and after come Washington Square and The Bostonians. The
two last named aro wholly American in theme and setting, and all
three have the abundant, full-blooded life of well-nourished organ-
1 The kind of interest in symbolism discussed by Mr. Quentin Anderson
would have the same tendency.
L l6l
HENRY JAMES
isms. It is, of course, in terms of his deracination that Henry James's
unsatisfactory development is commonly explained. The theory is
what we find, in its most respectable statement, advanced by Mr.
Van Wyck Brooks in The Pilgrimage of Henry James. The less
delicate expositions more or less bluntly censure James for not
having stayed in America and become a thoroughly American
novelist. He should have devoted his genius to his own country
and inaugurated modern American the first truly American
literature.
What, we ask, when the theory becomes explicit to this point,
does it mean ? That Henry James ought to have forestalled the
work of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis ? That he ought to have devoted
himself to preparing the way for a much earlier Dos Passos ? It
means that he ought at any rate to have been a totally different kind
of writer from what he actually, either by endowment or through
early life and environment, was.
For his essential interests were inseparable from an interest in
highly civilized manners, in the refinements of civilized intercourse.
The social civilization that in America might have yielded him (or
seemed to yield) what he needed was, as Mrs. Wharton, in her auto-
biographical book, A Backward Glance, points out, vanishing with
his youth. England had certainly more to offer him than America
had. But, says Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, ' England was impenetrable/
'Granting that he had lost the immediate sense of life and
character, that America had faded from his mind and that he
knew that he could never write of English manners with the
intimacy and freedom which his conception of the novelist's
task necessitated . . /
But how, remembering (for instance) The Awkward Age (1899)
and What Maisie Knew (1897), can we grant this last proposition ?
The author of these two masterpieces, which were written after that
notorious dividing phase, the sustained and frustrate attempt upon
the theatre (during which, as a matter of fact, he turned out a steady
succession of stores), hardly suffered from any sense that he was not
qualified to write of English manners with freedom and intimacy.
Rather he knew English manners too well ; he had penetrated too
thoroughly.
162
THE LATER JAMES
The obvious constatation to start from, when the diagnosis of his
queer development is in question, is that he suffered from being too
much a professional novelist : being a novelist came to be too large
a part of his living ; that is, he did not live enough. His failure in
this respect suggests, no doubt, some initial deficiency in him.
Nevertheless, the peculiarities in terms of which it demands to be
discussed are far from appearing as simple weakness. It is no doubt
at first appearances odd that his interest in manners should have gone
with such moral-intellectual intensity. But the manners he was
interested in were to be the outward notation of spiritual and
intellectual fineness, or at least to lend themselves to treatment as
such. Essentially he was in quest of an ideal society, an ideal civil-
ization. And English society, he had to recognize as he lived into
it, could not after all offer him any sustaining approximation to his
ideal. Still less, he knew, could America. So we find him develop-
ing into something like a paradoxical kind of recluse, a recluse living
socially in the midst of society.
But a real recluse, living in unmetaphorical retreat, is just what
we cannot imagine him. In saying this we are, no doubt, touching
on certain limiting characteristics of his genius. It was not the
explorer's or the pioneer's, and it had nothing prophetic about it.
It was not of a kind to manifest itself in lonely plumbings of the
psyche or passionate questionings of the familiar modes of human
experience. It was not, in short, D. H. Lawrence's or anything
like it. James had no such immediate sense of human solidarity,
no such nourishing intuition of the unity of life, as could make
up to him for the deficiencies of civilized intercourse : life for
him must be humane or it was nothing. There was nowhere in
his work that preoccupation with ultimate sanctions which we
may call religious. 1 (There comes to my mind here the sig-
nificant badness of The Altar of the Dead, that morbidly
sentimental and extremely unpleasant tale which it is, of
course, late also illustrates poor James's weary, civilized lone-
liness of spirit.) It was to the artist as such that die discrepancy
1 This statement will have to be reconsidered in the light of Mr. Quentin
Anderson's argument, when this is fully accessible (see footnote, p. 128,
above). But I suspect that what will turn out to be required will be not so
much withdrawal as a less simple formulation.
163
HENRY JAMES
between the desiderated civilization and English society was
peculiarly brought home :
'The artist may, of course, in wanton moods, dream of some
Paradise (for art) where the direct appeal to the intelligence
might be legalized; for to such extravagances as these his
yearning mind can scarce hope ever completely to close itself.
The most he can do is to remember they are extravagances/
James has already remarked in this Preface (it is that to The
Portrait of a Lady) that the novelist
'is entitled to nothing, he is Lound to admit, that can come to
him, from the reader, as a result on the latter's part of any act
of reflexion or discrimination/
These bitter ironies abound in the Prefaces, which, he wrote to
W. D. Howells,
'are, in general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination,
for Appreciation on other than infantile lines as against the
o almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these tilings ;
which tends, in our general trade, it seems to me, to break the
heart. . . /
The comments in the Preface to The Lesson of the Master on the
story called The Figure in the Carpet are especially significant.
Speaking of his great unappreciated author James says :
'I came to Hugh Vereker, in fine, by this travelled road of a
generalization ; the habit of having noted for many years how
strongly and helplessly, among us all, what we call criticism
its curiosity never emerging from the limp state is apt to stand
off from the intended sense of things, from such finely attested
matters, on the artist's part, as a spirit and a form, a bias and a
logic, of his own/
He has already referred with less detachment to
'the poor man's attributive dependence, for the sense of being
understood, on some responsive reach of critical perception that
he is destined ne^ver to waylay with success.
And the force of that attribution comes out unmistakably in the
eloquent reticence of this :
'As for the ingenious Figure in the Carpet, let me perhaps a
164
THE LATER JAMES
little pusillanimously conclude, nothing would induce me to
come to close quarters with you on the correspondences of this
anecdote. . . . All I can at this point say is that if ever I was
aware of ground and matter for a significant fable, I was aware
of them in that connexion/
He was indeed ; and if he could have foreseen the criticism and
appreciation, starting with Miss Rebecca West's characteristic
tribute, his work would receive in the two decades following his
death he would hardly have been consoled.
The same conditions, then, that drove him back on his art made
him profoundly aware that his art wasn't likely to be appreciated
by many besides himself. 1 So he came to live in it and not the
less so for living strenuously the life of a spiritual recluse ; a recluse
in a sense in which not only no novelist but no good artist of any
kind can afford to become one. His technique came to exhibit an
unhealthy vitality of undernourishment and etiolation. His tech-
nical preoccupation, to put it another way, lost its balance, and, in-
stead of being the sharp register of his finest perceptions, as informed
and related by his fullest sense of life, became something that took
his intelligence out of its true focus and blunted his sensitiveness.
That is the mischief of what he discusses in the Prefaces as a possible
tendency in himself towards ' overtreatment'. Correlated with this
tendency is that manifested in tht extraordinarily specialized living
of his characters :
'The immensity didn't include them ; but if he had an idea
at the back of his head she had also one in a recess as deep, and
for a time, while they sat together, there was an extraordinary
mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision
of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision.' 2
1 Cf. what the author says to his young visitor in The Author of Beltraffio :
'If you're going into this kind of thing there's a fact you should know before-
hand ; it may save you some disappointment. There's a hatred of art, there's
a hatred of literature I mean of the genuine kinds. Oh the shams those
they'll swallow by the bucket ! * '
2 What Maisle Knew, p. 163 (Pocket Edition). Cf. 'There were other
marble terraces, sweeping more purple prospects, on which he would have
known what to think, and would have enjoyed thereby at least the small
intellectual fillip of a discerned relation between z> given appearance and a
taken meaning.' The Golden Bowl, I, 318.
165
HENRY JAMES
This last aspect of his development is the more significant
significant in the sense suggested in that he was, it seems, quite
unaware of it. Mrs. Wharton records (A Backward Glance, p. 191) :
* Preoccupied by this, I one day said to him : " What was your
idea in suspending the four principal characters in The Golden
Bowl in the void ? What sort of life did they lead when they
were not watching each other, and fencing with each other ?
Why have you stripped them of all the human fringes we
necessarily trail after us through life ?"
'He looked at me in surprise, and I saw at once that the
surprise was painful, and wished I had not spoken. I had
assumed that his system was a deliberate one, carefully thought
out, and had been genuinely anxious to hear his reasons. But
after a pause of reflection he answered in a disturbed voice :
"My dear I didn't know I had ! " and I saw that my question,
instead of starting one of our absorbing liteiary discussions, had
only turned his startled attention on a peculiarity of which he
had been completely unconscious/ 1
Of the peculiarities of his later style, with its complexities and
exhausting delicacies and its incapacity for directness ('her vision of
his vision of her vision' and ' the small intellectual fillip of a discerned
relation between a given appearance and a taken meaning 'James
himself is the complete Jamesian character), he cannot have been
wholly unconscious. That there really was incapacity, essential loss
of a power, that something had gone wrong in his life, Mrs. Whar-
ton brings amusingly home to us. She rektes an episode showing
him unable to ask the way so as to be understood. 2 The author of
The Portrait of a Lady most certainly was not like that.
The nature of the change comes out notably in James's imagery
1 Mrs. Wharton goes on: 'This sensitiveness to criticism or comment of
any sort had nothing to do with vanity ; it was caused by the great artist's
deep consciousness of his powers, combined with a bitter, a life-long dis-
appointment at his lack of popular recognition.'
2 ' *' My good man, if you'll be good enough to come here, please ; a little
nearer so," and as the old man came up : "My friend, to put it to you in
two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough ; that is to say,
to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our
way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our
point of departure; and* the darkaess having overtaken us, we should be
much obliged if you would tell us where we are now in relation, say, to the
166
THE LATER JAMES
his metaphors, analogies and so on. There is an extraordinary
wealth of these in the earlier style, where they strike us with their
poetic immediacy and their Tightness to feeling as well as their wit.
They are to be found at any opening of The Portrait of a Lady, and
it would be easy to illustrate; but illustration, by taking each
natural unobtrusive effect out of the easy flow in which it comes,
would convey a false impression (unless one quoted the sustained
passage in Book II, 1 in which we are for the first time shown Isabel
realizing the 'dark, narrow alley with a drab wall at the end' into
which her marriage has trapped her) . Things of the same kind may
be found in the later books, but what goes characteristically with
the developed Jamesian style is a more deliberate and elaborated
kind of figure, the kind exemplified at its most elaborate by the
famous pagoda that opens Book II of The Golden Bowl or by the
caravan later on in the same volume (p. 209). We are conscious in
these figures more of analysis, demonstration and comment than of
the realizing imagination and the play of poetic perception. Be-
tween any original perception or feeling there may have been and
what we are given there has come a process of judicial stock-taking ;
the imagery is not immediate and inevitable but synthetic. It is
diagrammatic rather than poetic. And that is so even when it
makes a show of sensuous vividness, as here :
'Just three things in themselves, however, with all the rest,
with his fixed purpose now, his committed deed, the fine pink
High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving
on^the left hand the turn down to the railway station."
'I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and
a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have
James go on: "In short" (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explan-
atory ramifications), "in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a
word is this : supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have)
driven past the turn down to the railway station (which, in that case, by the
way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right), where
are we now in relation to . . ."
"'Oh, please," I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through
another parenthesis, "do ask him where the King's Rpad is."
4 " Ah T: ? The K-in g' s R oad? Just sol Quite right 1 Can you, as a
matter of fact, my good man, tell us where in relation to our present position
the King s Road exactly is ? "
'"Ye're in it," said the aged face at tfc window.'
1 See p. 166 et seq., the Pocket Edition. '
167
HENRY JAMES
glow, projected forward, of his ships, behind him, definitely
blazing and crackling this quantity was to push him harder
than any word of his own coald warn him. All that she was
herself, moreover, was so lighted, to its advantage, by the pink
glow/
This hasn't the concrete immediacy of metaphor l ; it is, rather,
coloured diagram.
The trouble with the late style is that it exacts so intensely and
inveterately analytic an attention that no sufficient bodied response
builds up : nothing sufficiently approaching the deferred concrete
immediacy that has been earned is attainable. Of Henry James him-
self we feel that the style involves for him, registers as prevailing in
him, a kind of attention that doesn't favour his realizing his theme,
in the whole or locally, as full-bodied life. The relation between
deficiency of this order (a deficiency in spite of the tremendous
output of intellectual energy represented by each work in vitality)
and the kind of moral unsatisfactoriness that we have observed in
Thk Golden Bowl should be fairly plain. James himself suggests it
well enough in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady :
'There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth in
this connexion than that of the perfect dependence of the
"moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life con-
cerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obvi-
ously, to the kind and degree of the artist's prime sensibility,
which is the soil out of which his subject springs/
We do not feel in the late style a rich and lively sensibility freely
functioning.
But qualifications impose themselves at once. It will not do to
suggest that there are not, in the late period, admirable successes,
1 As the following, also from The Go! Jen Bowl y has : * Ah then it was that
the cup of her conviction, full to the brim, overflowed at a touch ! There was
his idea, the clearness of which for an instant almost dazzled her. It was a blur
of light in the midst of which she saw Charlotte like some object marked by
contrast in blackness, saw her waver in the field of vision, saw her removed,
transported, doomed. And he had named Charlotte, named her again, and
she had made him which was all she had needed more : it was as she had
held a blank letter to the fire and the writing had come out still larger than
she had hoped.' The anak>gy in the" last sentence brings out by contrast the
metaphorical immediacy of what goes before.
168
THE LATER JAMES
works in which distinctively late and difficult characteristics appear
merely or mainly as achieved subtlety and fineness. Of these the
most notable are The Awkward Age and What Maisie Knew. Of the
latter something has already been said. Though it occupies only
part of a volume, it might, with its packed and intensively organized
three hundred pages, stand as a novel. The Awkward Age occupies
a whole volume and may (though it doesn't occupy two) fairly be
considered one of James's major achievements. It seems unlikely,
however, to gain general acceptance as such : it was received at its
first appearance, James tells us, wi:h 'complete disrespect', and the
critics who have written about it seem to have found it not worth
the extremely close and alert reading it demands. So qualified a
critic as Mr. Edmund Wilson, for instance, opines that 'James could
never have known how we should feel about the gibbering dis-
embowelled crew who hover around one another with sordid
shadowy designs in The Awkward Age 9 . Actually, the various ways
in which we are to feel about the various characters are delicately
but surely defined ; and the whole point of the book depends ujpon
our feeling a strong distaste for some of the characters and sharing
with James a critical attitude towards most of them. Yet for the
general complete misreading James possibly bears some responsi-
bility responsibility other than that of having merely been difficult
and subtle. When, for exampK Mr. Percy Lubbock in The Craft
of Fiction sees the ' highly sophisticated circle of men and women,
who seem so well practised in the art of living that they could never
be taken by surprise' (p. 191) as an admirable coterie to which one
would be proud to belong ('Their intelligence counts for every-
thing ..." 'It is a charmed world . . .') he might reasonably point
to the Preface for his warrant. And he might reasonably invoke
the same authority for his account of James's theme :
'The girl Nanda, supposedly a helpless spectator, takes con-
trol of the situation and works it out for her elders. She is the
intelligent and expert and self-possessed one of them all ; they
have only to leave everything to her light manipulations, ana
the awkwardness which is theirs, not hers is surmounted.
By the time she has displayed all her art the story is at an
end ; her action has answered tfye question and provided the
issue.'
169
HENRY JAMES
That is the notion of the theme one gets from the Preface. It is
an ironical commentary on the significance and drift of James's
later technical preoccupation that, discussing ten years after having
written The Awkward Age the triumphant tour deforce that it was for
him (a novel completely dramatized, 'triumphantly scientific', 'the
quantity of finish it stows away'), he should have forgotten to say
anything about his essential theme about the intense moral and
tragic interest that here justifies his technique and is justified by it.
For The Awkward Age, though it exhibits James's genius for social
comedy at its most brilliant, is a tragedy ; a tragedy conceived in an
imagination that was robustly, delicately and clairvoyantly moral.
The dialogue (and The Awkward Age is nearly all dialogue) is
marvellously good, an amazing exhibition of genius. It is in this
life of the dialogue that The Awkward Age differs most obviously
from the late 'great', conventionally admired novels, where, while
granting the author's right to stylize, we have to complain that his
characters speak in a stylization that is too often intolerably like the
author's own late style. And this life of the dialogue, fascinating
in itself, also means a subtle, vivid and varied life of character.
Nevertheless, perhaps even The Awkward Age, brilliant success as it
is, represents a disproportionate amount of 'doing', a dispropor-
tionate interest in technique. Certainly Nanda, the tragic heroine,
is a more rarefied presence than Isabel Archer. To say which, of
course, is to invite the reply that James didn't intend either to give us
Isabel again or to give us with the same relative fulness anyone. Yet
it still seems a fair comment that a James who had as much fulness of
life to impart as informs The Portrait of a Lady couldn't have chosen
to restrict himself by so 'triumphantly scientific' and so excluding a
method of presentment as that of The Awkward Age. Interest in
technique is usurping here upon the interest that, in the greatest art,
technique subserves.
'Ah, aren't we very much the same simple lovers of life ?
That is of the finer essence of it which appeals to the conscious-
ness !'
This is said by one of the characters in The Awkward Age. The
phrase, 'the finer essence . . . which appeals to the consciousness ',
suggests very well the nature of James's own preoccupation. In The
170
THE LATER JAMES
Portrait of a Lady, we may say, he seeks the essence of a very much
richer life than in The Awkward Age. In connexion with the latter
book 'consciousness* takes on a limiting suggestion: it suggests
something too close to what is represented by the witty and sophisti-
cated conversation into which the theme is distilled. And the reading
that The Awkward Age exacts is, strcngly sympathetic as are the feel-
ings generated towards Nanda, Mr. Longdon and Mitchy, too inten-
sively and predominantly a matter of the 'wits', in a limiting sense,
to permit of the profoundest and most massive imaginative effect.
Isabel Archer, who in The Portrait of a Lady, loving life, seeks * the
finer essence of it that appeals to the consciousness', may be said to
symbolize for James that essence at his richest apprehension of it.
It is not for nothing that a whole volume is required to present,
place and duly charge Isabel before the 'story', in Mr. Stephen
Spender's sense, begins ; or that the process involves the evocation of
a rich and varied environment and background. And convincingly
'there' as scene and persons are, and though the imagination that
makes them so present to us is ironically perspicacious and supremely
intelligent, there is something of James's ideal civilization about the
England he evokes. Manners, the arts of social intercourse, do, in
that mellow and spacious world the world of Lord Warburton
and his sisters, Ralph Touchett, and the old American banker his
father seem to express something truly and maturely humane, a
spiritual fineness. That element of warm faith, or illusion, dis-
appears from James's work along with the generous fulness of
actuality as the 'scientific' elaborateness of 'doing' comes in. It is
significant too that we cannot believe that the later James the
James of The Golden Bowl would have dealt so mercilessly, would
not have dealt at least a little complaisantly, with Gilbert Osmond,
the aesthetic dilettante to whom Isabel falls a prey.
This development might suggest critical reflections regarding the
essential nature and conditions of James's concern for 'the finer
essence'. So peculiar an intensity of concern for consciousness
might perhaps be seen as in itself an index of some correlated
deficiency an index of something, from the beginning, not quite
sound, whole and thriving within and below. True, The Bostonians,
with the poised wisdom of its comedy, and its richness of substance,
derived from the experience and observation of childhood and
171
HENRY JAMES
youth, doesn't encourage such reflections. But even of The Portrait
of a Lady it might perhaps be suggested that its effect of rich vitality
isn't quite simply an expression of rich and free first-hand living. 1
The young American in The Author ofBeltraffio says of the Author's
house :
'there was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pic-
tures and books, in the garden behind it, where certain old
brown walls were muffled in creepers that appeared to me to
have been copied from a masterpiece of one of the pre-
Raphaelites. That was the way many things struck me at that
time in England as reproductions of something that had existed
primarily in art or literature. It was not the picture, the poem,
the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy ; these things were
the originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people
was fashioned in their image.'
Something of the effect of The Portrait of a LaJy is suggested there.
And when, as in The Princess Casamassima (which brings so little
comfort to those who would like to justify James by his interest in
the class-war), he offers, uncharacteristically, something like an
earthy and sappy vitality, it derives, significantly, from Dickens.
But this is not the note to end on. It is a measure of our sense of
the greatness of Henry James's genius that discussion should tend
to stress mainly what he failed to do with it. But what achievement
in the art of fiction fiction as a completely serious art addressed to
the adult mind can we point to in English as surpassing his?
Besides The Europeans, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, Wash-
ington Square, The Awkward Age and What Maisie Knew, there is an
impressive array of things novels, nouvelles, short stories that
will stand permanently as classics.
1 It is relevant here (and see pp. 162-3 above) to note that, for such an
upbringing as that of the young Jameses, there was a price. Never allowed
to become rooted in any milieu, one would be remarkable indeed to develop
a strong sense of society as a system of functions and responsibilities. H. J.'s
interest in 'civilization' betrays, tested by his actual selectiveness in the con-
crete field before him, a grave deficiency. * He didn't know the right people/
* Q* once said to me, discussing James's criticism of the country-house. A fair
point : after all, the admirable types, the public spirit and the fine and serious
culture we come on when we study, e.g., the milieu of Henry Sidgwick (in-
tense and intelligent admirer of George Eliot) were characteristic products
of the England of the ' besj familiest in James's time. Why does he seem
to know nothing about this real and most impressive best ?
172
IV
JOSEPH CONRAD
(i) Minor Works and 'Nostromo'
N announcement once appeared in a quarterly, against the
. name of the present writer, of an article to be entitled Conrad,
the Soul and the Universe. The exasperation registered in this for-
mula explains, perhaps, why the article was never written. For that
Conrad has done classical work is as certain as that his classical status
will not rest evenly upon his whole ceuvre, and the necessary dis-
criminations and delimitations, not being altogether simple, clearly
oughtn't to be attempted in any but a securely critical frame of
mind. He has, of course, long been generally held to be among the
English masters ; the exasperation records a sense that the greatness
attributed to him tended to be identified with an imputed pro-
fundity, and that this 'profundity* was not what it was taken tq be,
but quite other, and the reverse of a strength. The final abandon-
ment of the article may have been partly determined by Mr. E. M.
Forster's note on Conrad tKat appeared in Abinger Harvest :
'What is so elusive about him is that he is always promising
to make some general philosophic statement about the universe,
and then refraining with a gruff disclaimer. ... Is there not also
a central obscurity, something noble, heroic, beautiful, inspiring
half-a-dozen great books, but obscure, obscure e . . . These
essays do suggest that he is misty in the middle as well as at the
edges, that the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour
rather than a jewel ; and that we needn't try to write him down
philosophically, because there is, in this direction, nothing to
write. No creed, in fact. Only opinions, and the right to throw
them overboard when facts make them look absurd. Opinions
held under the semblance of eternity, girt with the sea, crowned
with stars, and therefore easily mistaken for a creed/
This might well have gratified the exasperatjon, and made its
expression seem unnecessary.
Mr. Forster, however, doesn't attempt discriminations or pre-
cisions (his note is a reprinted review of Notes on Life and Letters).
173
JOSEPH CONRAD
And he doesn't suggest those manifestations of the characteristic
he describes in which we have something simply and obviously
deplorable something that presents itself, not as an elusively noble
timbre, prompting us to analysis and consequent limiting judgments,
but as, bluntly, a disconcerting weakness or vice. Consider, for
instance, how Heart of Darkness is marred.
Heart of Darkness is, by common consent, one of Conrad's best
tilings an appropriate source for the epigraph of The Hollow Men :
'Mistah Kurtz, he dead*. That utterance, recalling the particularity
of its immediate context, represer ts the strength of Heart of Darkness :
'He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision he
cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath
"The horror! The horror !"
'I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were
dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the
manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance,
which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that
peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depth of his mean-
ness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the
lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the
manager's boy put his insolent face in the doorway, and said in
a tone of scathing contempt
'"Mistah Kurtz he dead."
* All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on
with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous.
However, I did not eat much. There was a lamp in there
light, don't you know and outside it was so beastly, beastly
dark/
This passage, it will be recognized, owes its force to a whole wide
context of particularities that gives the elements here the pilgrims,
the manager, the manager's boy, the situation their specific values.
Borrowing a phrase from Mr. Eliot's critical writings, one might
say that Heart of Darkness achieves its overpowering evocation of
atmosphere by means of Objective correlatives'. The details and
circumstances of tli voyage to and up the Congo are present to us
as if we were making the journey ourselves and l(chosen for record
as they are by a controlling imaginative purpose) they carry speci-
ficities of emotion and suggestiqn with them. There is the gunboat
dropping shells into Africa :
MINOR WORKS AND MOSTROMO
There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the
bush. It appears Jie French had one of their wars going on
thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag ; the muzzles
of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull ; the
greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, sway-
ing her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky and
water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns ; a small flame would
dart and vanish, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech
and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a
touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious
drollery in the sight ; and it was not dissipated by somebody on
board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives he
called them enemies ! hidden out of sight somewhere.
'We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship
were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on.
We called at some* more places *with farcical names, where the
merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy
atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb. . . .'
There is the arrival at the Company's station :
'I came upon a boiler "wallowing in the grass, then found a
path leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and
also for an undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with
its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as
the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of decay-
ing machinery, a stack of rusty nails. To the left a clump of
trees made a shady spot, where dark things seemed to stir feebly.
I blinked, the "path was steep. A horn tooted to the right, and
I saw bUck people run. A heavy, dull detonation shook the
ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all.
No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were
building a railway. The cliff was not in the way of anything ;
but this objectless blasting was all die work going on.
'A slight clanking behind me made me turn my head. Six
black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked
erect and slow, balancing small baskets full, of earth on their
heads, and the dink kept time with their footsteps. Bkck rags
were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind
waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of
their limbs were like knots in a rope ; each had an iron collar
175
JOSEPH CONRAD
on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose
bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. Another
report from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of
war I had seen firing into a continent. It was the same kind of
ominous voice ; but these men could by no stretch of imagina-
tion be called enemies. They were called criminals. . . /
There is the grove of death :
'At last I got under the trees. My purpose was to stroll into
the shade for a moment ; but no sooner within it than it seemed
to me that I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno.
The rapids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong,
rushing noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove, where
not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound
as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly
become audible.
'Black shapes crouched, lay, sat beneath the trees, leaning
against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half
effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, aban-
donment, and despair. Another mine of the cliff went off,
followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The
work was going on. The work ! And this was the place where
some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.
' They were dying slowly it was very clear. They were not
enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly
now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation,
lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. . . . These moribund
shapes were free as air and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish
the gleam of the eyes under the trees. There, glancing down,
I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full
length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eye-
lids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and
vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs,
which died out slowly/
By means of this art of vivid essential record, in terms of things
seen and incidents experienced by a main agent in the narrative, and
particular contacts and exchanges with other human agents, the
overwhelming sinister and fantastic 'atmosphere' is engendered.
Ordinary greed, stupidity and moral squalor are made to look like
behaviour in a lunatic asylum against the vast and oppressive mys-
tery of the surroundings, rendered potently in terms of sensation,
176
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
This mean lunacy, which we are made to feel as at the same time
normal and insane, is brought out by contrast with the fantastically
secure innocence of the young harlequin-costumed Russian ('son of
an arch-priest . . . Government of Tambov'), the introduction to
whom is by the way of that copy of Tower's (or Towson's) Inquiry
into Some Points of Seamanship, symbol of tradition, sanity and the
moral idea, found lying, an incongruous mystery, in the dark heart
of Africa.
Of course, as the above quotations illustrate, the author's com-
ment cannot be said to be wholly implicit. Nevertheless, it is not
separable from the thing rendered, but seems to emerge from the
vibration of this as part of the tone. At least, this is Conrad's art
at its best. There are, however, places in Heart of Darkness where
we become aware of comment as an interposition, and worse, as
an intrusion, at times an exasperating one. Hadn't he, we find
ourselves asking, overworked 'inscrutable', 'inconceivable', 'un-
speakable' and that kind of word already ? yet still they recur. Is
anything added to the oppressive mysteriousness of the Congo ,by
such sentences as :
'It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention' ?
The same vocabulary, the same adjectival insistence upon inexpress-
ible and incomprehensible mystery, is applied to the evocation of
human profundities and spiritual horrors ; to magnifying a thrilled
sense of the unspeakable potentialities of the human soul. The
actual effect is not to magnify but rather to muffle. The essential
vibration emanates from the interaction of die particular incidents,
actions and perceptions that are evoked with such charged con-
creteness. The legitimate kind of comment, that which seems the
inevitable immediate resonance of the recorded event, is represented
here:
'And then I made a brusque movement, and one of the
remaining posts of that vanished fence leaped into the field of
my glass. You remember I told you I had beon struck at the
distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remark-
able in the ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a
nearer view, and its first result was to makt me throw my head
M 17?
JOSEPH CONRAD
back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to
post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. Those round knobs
were not ornamental but symbolic ; they were expressive and
puzzling, striking and disturbing food for thought and also
for the vultures if there had been any looking down from the
sky ; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough
to ascend the pole. They would have been even more im-
pressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been
turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was
facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The
start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of
surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you
know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen and there
it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids, a head that
seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken
dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, waa smiling
too, smiling continuously at some endless ?nd jocose dream of
that eternal slumber.
'I am not disclosing any trade secrets. In fact, the manager
^aid afterwards that Mr. Kurtz's methods had ruined the dis-
trict. I have no opinion on that point, but I want you clearly
to understand that there was nothing exactly profitable in those
heads being there. They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked
restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was
something wanting in him some small matter which, when
the pressing need arose, could Hot be found under his magni-
ficent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself
I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last only
at the very last, but the wilderness had found him out early, and
had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion.
I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he
did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took
counsel with this great solitude and the whisper had proved
irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he
was hollow at the core. ... I put down the glass, and the head
that had appeared near enough to be spoken to seemed at once
to have leaped away from me into inaccessible distance/
That the 'admirer of Mr. Kurtz,' the companion of the narrator
here, should be the fantastically sane and innocent young Russian is
part of the force of tho passage.
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
By such means as it illustrates we are given a charged sense of the
monstrous hothouse efflorescences fostered in Kurtz by solitude and
the wilderness. It is a matter of such things as the heads on posts
a direct significant glimpse, the innocent Russian's explanations,
the incidents of the progress up the river and the moral and physical
incongruities registered ; in short, of the charge generated in a
variety of highly specific evocations. The stalking of the moribund
Kurtz, a skeleton crawling through the long grass on all fours as he
makes his bolt towards the fires and the tom-toms, is a triumphant
climax in the suggestion of strange and horrible perversions. But
Conrad isn't satisfied with these means ; he feels that there is, or
ought to be, some horror, some significance he has yet to bring out.
So we have an adjectival and worse than supererogatory insistence
on 'unspeakable rites', 'unspeakable secrets', 'monstrous passions',
'inconceivable mystery', and so on. If it were only, as it largely is
in Heart of Darkness, a*matter of an occasional phrase it would still be
regrettable as tending to cheapen the tone. But the actual cheapen-
ing is little short of disastrous. Here, for instance, we have MarV>w
at the crisis of the episode just referred to :
'I tried to break the spell the heavy, mute spell of the
wilderness that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the
awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of
gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced,
had driven him out to the edge of the forest, towards the gleam
of the fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incanta-
tions ; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the
bounds of permitted aspirations. And, don't you see, the terror
of the position was not in being knocked on the head though
I had a very lively sense of that danger too but in this, that I
had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name
of anything high or low . . . I've been telling you what we
said repeating the phrases we pronounced but what's the
good? They were common everyday words the familiar
vague sounds exchanged on every waking day of life. But
what of that ? They had behind them, to my^mind, the terrific
suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of ph/rases spoken in
nightmares. Soul ! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul,
I am the man. And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic either
But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had
179
JOSEPH CONRAD
looked within itself, and, by heavens ! I tell you, it had gone
mad. I had for my sins, I suppose to go through the ordeal
of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so
withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sin-
cerity. He struggled with himself too, I saw it I heard it. I
saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint,
no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.'
Conrad must here stand convicted of borrowing the arts of the
magazine-writer (who has borrowed his, shall we say, from Kipling
and Poe) in order to impose on his readers and on himself, for thrilled
response, a 'significance* that is merely an emotional insistence on
the presence of what he can't produce. The insistence betrays the
absence, the willed 'intensity' the nullity. He is intent on making a
virtue out of not knowing what he means. The vague and un-
realizable, he asserts with a strained impressiveness, is the profoundly
and tremendously significant :
'I've been telling you what we said repeating the phrases
we pronounced but what's the good ? They were common
everyday words the familiar vague sounds exchanged on
every waking day of life. But what of that ? They had behind
them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard
in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares/
What's the good, indeed ? If he cannot through the concrete
presentment of incident, setting and image invest the words with
the terrific something that, by themselves, they fail to convey, then
no amount of adjectival and ejaculatory emphasis will do it.
'I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul,' etc.
That, of course, is an ambiguous statement. I see that there is a
mystery, and it remains a mystery for me ; I can't conceive what it
is ; and if I offer this inability to your wonder as a thrilling affair of
'seeing an inconceivable mystery', I exemplify a common trait of
human nature. Actually, Conrad had no need to try and inject
'significance' into his narrative in this way. What he shows him-
self to have successfully and significantly seen is enough to make
Heart of Darkness a disturbing presentment of the kind he aimed at.
By the attempt at injection he weakens, in his account of Kurtz's
death, the effect of thit culminating cry :
i So
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
'He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision he
cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath "The
horror! The horror !" '
The 'horror' there has very much less force than it might have
had if Conrad had strained less.
This final account of Kurtz is associated with a sardonic tone, an
insistent irony that leads us on to another bad patch, the closing
interview in Brussels with Kurtz's 'Intended' :
'The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad
light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead.
This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed sur-
rounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out
at me. Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and
trustful. * She carried her sorrowful head as though she were
proud-of that sorrow, as though sKe would say, I I alone know
now to mourn for him as he deserves.'
It is not part of Conrad's irony that there should be anything
ironical in this presentment of the woman. The irony lies in the
association of her innocent nobility, her purity of idealizing faith,
with the unspeakable corruption of Kurtz ; and it is developed (if
that is the word) with a thrilled insistence that recalls the melo-
dramatic intensities of Edgar Allan Poe :
'I felt like a chill grip on my chest. "Don't," I said in a
muffled voice.
'"Forgive me. I I have mourned so long in silence in
silence. . . . You were with him to the last ? I think of his
loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have
understood. Perhaps no one to hear. ..."
'"To the very end," I said shakily. "I heard his very last
words. ..." I stopped in a fright.
'"Repeat them," she murmured in a heart-broken tone.
'"I want I want something something to live with."
'I was on the point of crying at her "Don't you hear them ?"
The dark was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around
us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly, like the first
whisper of a rising wind. "The horror ! the horror !"
"'His last words to live with," she insisted. "Don't you
understand I loved him I loved him I loved him !"
181
JOSEPH CONRAD
'I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
"'The last word he pronounced was your name."
'I heard a light sigh and th^n my heart stood still, stopped
dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of in-
conceivable triumph and of an unspeakable pain.
'"I knew it I was sure !" . . . She knew. She was sure/
Conrad's 'inscrutable', it is clear, associates with Woman as it does
with the wilderness, and the thrilling mystery of the Intended's
innocence is of the same order as the thrilling mystery of Kurtz's
corruption : the profundities are complementary. It would appear
that the cosmopolitan Pole, student of the French masters, who
became a British master-mariner, was in some respects a simple soul.
If anyone should be moved to question the propriety of this way of
putting it, perhaps the following will be found something of a
justification :
'Woman and the sea revealed themselves to me together, as
it were : two mistresses of life's values. The illimitable great-
ness of the one, the unfathomable seduction of the other, work-
ing their immemorial spells from generation to generation fell
upon my heart at last : a common fortune, an unforgettable
memory of the sea's formless might and of the sovereign charm
in that woman's form wherein there seemed to beat the pulse
of divinity rather than blood/
This comes from a bad novel, one of Conrad's worst things, The
Arrow of Gold. It is a sophisticated piece of work, with a sophistica-
tion that elaborates and aggravates the deplorable kind of naivety
illustrated in the quotation. Not that the author's talent doesn't
appear, but the central theme and the pervasive atmosphere is
the 'unfathomable seduction' of the 'enigmatic' Rita ; a glamorous
mystery, the evocation of which (though more prolonged and elab-
orated) is of the same order as the evocation of sinister significance,
the 'inconceivable* mystery of Kurtz, at the close of Heart of Dark-
ness. If any reader of that tale had felt that the irony permitted a
doubt regarding Conrad's attitude towards the Intended, the pre-
sentment of Rita, should settle it.
'Woman' figures in The Rescue, the book that in publication pre-
ceded The Arrow of Gold (both came out just after the 1914 war,
though The Rescue belongs essentially to Conrad's early period).
182
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
The glamour here is a simpler affair less sophisticated and more
innocent. But if The Rescue lacks the positive badness of The Arrow
of Gold, it is, on a grand scale, boring in its innocence. The seduc-
tion of Woman as represented by Mrs. Travers is less insistently and
melodramatically 'unfathomable' than in the later book, but cannot
sustain the interest Conrad demands Tor it ; so to say that it is, in the
formal design, adequate to balancing Heroic Action as represented
by Lingard King Tom, idealized seaman-adventureris not to say
anything very favourable about the whole. The Rescue, in short, is
an Academy piece 'sombre, colourful, undeniably a classic* the
reviewers may have said, and its Grand Style staging of the conflict
between Love and Honour (a kingdom at stake) against a sumptu-
ously rendered ddcor of tropical sea, sunset, and jungle is, in its slow
and conscientious magnificence, calculated to engender more defer-
ence than thrill, and so can't even be recommended as good boy's
reading though it offers little to adults. The book, in fact, is not
altogether a surprising kind of thing to have come from a sailor of
pertinacious literary talent and French literary education. The
reason for bringing it in just here is to enforce the point that Conrad,
for all his sophistication, exhibits a certain simplicity of outlook and
attitude. About his attitude towards women there is perceptible,
all the way through his literary career, something of the gallant
simple sailor.
The sailor in him, of course, is rightly held to be a main part of
his strength. It is not for nothing that Heart of Darkness, a pre-
dominantly successful tale, is told by the captain of the steamboat
told from that specific and concretely realized point of view :
appraisal ofahe success of the tale is bound up with this consideration.
But the stress up till now has fallen upon Conrad's weaknesses. It
is time to ask where the strength may be found in its purest form.
There will, I think, be general approval of the choice of Typhoon
as a good example. But I am not sure that there is as general a
recognition of just where the strength of Typhoon lies. The point
may be made by saying that it lies not so much in the famous
description of the elemental frenzy as in the presentment of Captain
MacWhirr, the chief mate Jukes and the chief engineer Solomon
Rout at the ^opening of the tale. O( course, it is a commonplace
that Conrad's distinctive genius comprises a gift for rendering the
183
JOSEPH CONRAD
British seaman. But is it a commonplace that the gift is the specific
gift of a novelist, and (though the subtler artist doesn't run to
caricature and the fantastic) relates Conrad to Dickens ? Consider,
for instance, this :
'He was rather below the medium height, a bit round-
shouldered, and so sturdy of limb that his clothes always looked
a shade too tight for his arms and legs. As if unable to grasp
what is due to the difference of latitudes, he wore a brown
bowler hat, a complete suit of a brownish hue, and clumsy
black boots. These harbour togs gave to his thick figure an air
of stiff and uncouth smartness. A thin silver watch-chain
looped his waistcoat, and he never left his ship for the shore
without clutching in his powerful, hairy fist an elegant umbrella
of the very best qualit/, but generally unrolled. Young Jukes,
the chief mate, attending his commander to the gangway,
would sometimes venture to s?y, with the greatest gentleness,
"Allow me, sir," and, possessing himself of the umbrella
deferentially, would elevate the ferrule, shake the folds, twirl a
mat furl in a jiffy, and hand it back : going through the perform-
ance with a face of such portentous gravity, that Mr. Solomon
Rout, the chief engineer, smoking his morning cigar over the
skylight, would turn away his head in order to hide a smile.
"Oh! aye! The blessed gamp. . . . Thank 'ee, Jukes, thank
'ee," would mutter Captain MacWhirr heartily, without
looking up.'
Consider the exchanges between Captain MacWhirr and Jukes
over the Siamese flag, deplorably, poor Jukes feels (' Fancy having
a ridiculous Noah's ark elephant in the ensign of one's ship'),
substituted for the Red Ensign. Consider the accounts of the home
backgrounds of MacWhirr and the chief engineer.
It is to be noted further that these backgrounds in their contrast
with the main theme of the tale afford a far more satisfactory irony
(it is, in fact, supremely effective) than that, in Heart of Darkness, of
the scenes at Brussels. At the same time it is to be noted that there
is in Typhoon no sardonic Marlow, commenting on an action that
he is made to project ; whereas, though Heart of Darkness is given
from the point of view of the captain of the steamboat, that captain
is Marlow Marlow, for whom Conrad has more than one kind of
use, and who is both feiore and less than a character and always
184
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
sometning other than just a master-mariner. For comment in
Typhoon we have the letters home of Solomon Rout, the chief
engineer, and the letter of Jukes to his chum. In short, nothing in
the story is forced or injected ; the significance is not adjectival,
but resides in the presented particulars the actors, the incidents and
the total action : we are given the ?hip, her cargo and her crew of
ordinary British seamen, and the impact on them of the storm.
The ordinariness is, with a novelist's art, kept present to us the
whole time ; the particular effect of heroic sublimity depends on
that.
'And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feeble,
but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous dis-
cord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace
beyond the black wastes of the gale ; again he heard a man's
voice the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to
carry an infinity of thought, resolution and purpose, that shall
be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when heavens
fall, and justice is done again he heard it, and it was crying to
him, as if from very, very far " All right". '
Conrad can permit himself this, because the voice is that of the
unheroically matter-of-fact Captain Mac Whirr, whose solid specific
presence, along with that of particularized ordinary sailors and
engineers, we are never allowed to forget :
'A lull had come, a menacing lull of the wind, the holding
of a stormy breath and he felt himself pawed all over. It was
the boatswain. Jukes recognized these hands, so thick and
enormous tha* they seemed to belong to some new species of
man.
'The boatswain had arrived on the bridge, crawling on all
fours against the wind, and had found the chief mate's legs with
the top of his head. Immediately he crouched and began to
explore Jukes' person upwards, with prudent, apologetic
touches, as became an inferior.'
Or take this :
' The boatswain by his side kept on yelling. " What ? What
is it?" Jukes 'cried distressfully; and the pther repeated,
"What would my old woman say if she saw me now ?'
'In the alleyway, where a lot of water had got in and
splashed in the dark, the men were stiH as death, till Jukes
185
JOSEPH CONRAD
stumbled against one of them and cursed him savagely for being
in the way. Two or three voices then asked, eager and weak,
"Any chance for us, sir ? "
' "What's the matter with you fools ? " he said brutally. He
felt as though he could throw himself down amongst them and
never move any more. But they seemed cheered ; and in the
midst of obsequious warning. "Lookout! Mind that manhole
lid, sir," they lowered him into the bunker. The boatswain
tumbled down after him, and as soon as he had picked himself
up he remarked "She would say, 'Serve you right, you old
fool, for going to sea'."
'The boatswain had some means, and made a point of allud-
ing to them frequently. His wife a fat woman and two
grown-up daughters kept a greengrocer's shop in the East-end
of London.'
The seamen are their ordinary selves, the routine goes forward in
the engine-room, and the heroic triumphs of the Nan-Shan emerge
as matters-of-fact out of the ordinariness :
'"Can't have . . . fighting . . . board ship",'
says Captain Mac Whirr through the typhoon, and down into the
'tween-deck, into the human hurricane of fighting coolies, go Jukes
and his men as a routine matter-of-fact course, to restore order and
decency :
'"We have done it, sir," he gasped.
'"Thought you would," said Captain MacWhirr.
'"Did you ?" murmured Jukes to himself.
'"Wind fell all at once," went on the Captain.
'Jukes burst out : "If you think it was an easy job "
'But his captain, clinging to the rail, paid no attention.
'"According to the books the worst is not over yet".'
And the qualities which, in a triumph of discipline a triumph of
the spirit have enabled a handful of ordinary men to impose sanity
on a frantic mob are seen unquestionably to be those which took
Captain MacWhirr, in contempt of 'Storm-strategy', into the
centre of the typhoon. Without any symbolic portentousness the
Captain stands there the embodiment of a tradition. The crowning
triumph of the spirit, iA the guise of a matter-of-fact and practical
186
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
sense of decency, is the redistribution ship devastated, men drop-
ping with fatigue of the gathered-up and counted dollars among
the assembled Chinese.
In The Shadow Line, also in common recognition one of Conrad's
masterpieces (it is, I think, superior to Heart of Darkness and even
to Typhoon), we have the same art. It has been acclaimed as a kind
of prose Ancient Mariner, and it is certainly a supremely sinister and
beautiful evocation of enchantment in tropic seas. But the art of
the evocation is of the kind that has been described ; it is not a
matter of engendering 'atmosphere* adjectivally, by explicitly
'significant' vaguenesses, insistent unutterablenesses, or the thrilled
tone of an expository commentator, but of presenting concretely a
succession of particulars from the point of view of the master of the
ship, who, though notably sensitive, is not a Marlow, but just a
ship's master ; an actor among the other actors, though burdened
with responsibilities towards the crew, owners and ship. The dis-
tinctive art of a novelist, and the art upon which the success of the
prose Ancient Mariner essentially depends, is apparent in the ren4er-
ing of personality, its reactions and vibrations; the pervasive
presence of the crew, delicately particularized, will turn out on
analysis to account for the major part of the atmosphere. The
young captain, entering the saloon for the first time and sitting in
the captain's chair, finds he is looking into a mirror :
'Deep within the tarnished ormolu frame, in the hot half-
light sifted through the awning, I saw my own face propped
between myjiands. And I stared back at myself with the per-
fect detachment of distance, rather with curiosity than with any
other feeling, except of some sympathy for this latest repre-
sentative of what for all intents and purposes was a dynasty ;
continuous not in blood, indeed, but in its experience, in its
training, in its conception of duty, and in the blessed simplicity
of its traditional point of view on life. . . .
'Suddenly I perceived that there was another man in the
saloon, standing a little on one side and looking intently at me.
The chief mate. His long, red moustache determined the
character of his'physiognomy, which struck me as pugnacious
in (strange to say) a ghastly sort of way.'
The disobliging and disturbing oddity 6f the mate turns out
187
JOSEPH CONRAD
to be due to the sinister vagaries and unseemly end of the late
captain :
'That man had been in all essentials but his age just such
another man as myself. Yet the end of his life was a complete
act of treason, the betrayal of a tradition which seemd to me as
imperative as any guide on earth could be. It appeared that
even at sea a man could become the victim of evil spirits. I felt
on my face the breath of unknown powers that shape our
destinies/
The sinister spell that holds the ship is characteristically felt in terms
of contrast with the tradition and its spiritual values, these being
embodied in the crew, a good one, who carry on staunchly against
bad luck and disease. The visiting doctor himself is 'good* in the
same way. The story ends, it will be noted, on the urexpected
parting with the faithful Ransome, the exquisitely rendered seaman
with a voice that is 'extremely pleasant to hear* and a weak heart :
'"But, Ransome," I said, "I hate the idea of parting with
you."
'"I must go/' he broke in. "I have a right !" He gasped
and a look of almost savage determination passed over his face.
For an instant he was another being. And I saw under the
worth and the comeliness of the man the humble reality of
things. Life was a boon to him this precarious, hard life
and he was thoroughly alarmed about himself.
'" Of course I shall pay you off if you wish it."
******
'I approached him with extended hand. His eyes, not
looking at me, had a strained expression. He was like a man
listening for a warning call.
'"Won't you shake hands, Ransome ?" I said gently. He
exclaimed, flushed up dusky red, gave my hand a hard wrench
and next moment, left alone in the cabin, I listened to him
going up the companion stairs cautiously, step by step, in
mortal fear of starting into sudden anger our common enemy it
was his hard fate tc\ carry consciously within his faithful breast/
These things are worth many times those descriptions of sunsets,
exotic seas and the last plunge of flaming wrecks which offer them-
selves to the compilers of prose anthologies.
188
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
This is at any rate to confirm the accepted notion of Conrad to
this extent : that his genius was a unique and happy union of sea-
man and writer. If he hadn't actually been himself a British seaman
by vocation he couldn't have done the Merchant Service from the
inside. The cosmopolitan of French culture and French literary
initiation is there in the capacity for detachment that makes the
intimate knowledge uniquely conscious and articulate. We are
aware of the artist by vocation, the intellectual who doubles the
seaman, only when we stop to take stock of the perfection of the
rendering and the subtle finish of jhe art.
But this fine balance, this identity, isn't always sustained. In
Mario w, who (as remarked above) has a variety of uses, the detach-
ment is separated off. As a main participant in events though, by
his specific role as such, a detached one, he gives his technical
function a dramatic status in the action, and the author a freedom of
presence that, as we have seen, constitutes a temptation. Elsewhere
Mario w is frankly a method of projection or presentation one that
we learn to associate with Conrad's characteristic vices and w^ak-
nesses. In Youth, for instance, one of the best-known of the tales,
though not one of the best f he goes with the cheap insistence on the
glamour, and with that tone which, here and in other places, makes
one recall the formula of the early reviewer and reflect that the prose
laureate of the British seaman does sometimes degenerate into a
'Kipling of the South Seas'. (And this is the point at which to
note that Conrad can write shockingly bad magazine stuff see the
solemnly dedicated collection called Within the Tides.)
In Lord Jim Marlow is the means of presenting Jim with the
appropriate externality, seen always through the question, the
doubt, that is the central theme of die book. Means and effect are
unobjectionable ; it is a different matter from the use of Marlow
elsewhere to pass off a vaguely excited incomprehension as tre-
mendous significance. But Lord Jim doesn't deserve the position of
pre-eminence among Conrad's works often assigned it : it is hardly
one of the most considerable. There is, in fact, much to be said
in support of these reviewers who (Conrad tetys us) 'maintained
that the work starting as a short story had got beyond the writer's
control', so that what we have is neither a very considerable novel,
in spite of its 420 pages, nor one of Conrad's best short stories.
189
JOSEPH CONRAD
The presentment of Lord Jim in the first part of the book, the
account of the inquiry and of the desertion of the Patna, the talk
with the French lieutenant these are good Conrad. But the
romance that follows, though plausibly offered as a continued
exhibition of Jim's case, has no inevitability as that; nor does it
develop or enrich the central interest, which consequently, eked
out to provide the substance of a novel, comes to seem decidedly
thin.
The eking out is done mainly from the world oAlmayer's Folly,
An Outcast of the Islands, and Tales of Unrest, those excessively
adjectival studies in the Malayan exotic of Conrad's earliest vein.
Those things, it had better be said here, though they are innocuous,
and no doubt deserved for their originality of setting some respectful
notice when they came out, will not be urged by judicious admirers
of Conrad among his claims to classical rank. In their stylistic
eloquence, which suggests a descent from Chateaubriand, their
wearying exoticism, and their 'picturesque' human interest, they
aren't easy to re-read.
No, Lord Jim is neither the best of Conrad's novels, nor among
the best of his short stories. If, on the other hoid, his most con-
siderable work had had due recognition, it would be known as one
of the great novels of the language. For Nostromo is most certainly
that. And it complicates the account of Conrad's genius in that it
doesn't answer to the formula arrived at above. He is not here the
laureate of the Merchant Service, the British seaman happily doubled
with the artist an artist whose 'outsideness' with regard to the
Merchant Service is to be constated only in the essential degree of
detachment involved in an adequately recording art. In Nostromo
Conrad is openly and triumphantly the artist by me'tier, conscious of
French initiation and of fellowship in craft with Flaubert. The
French element so oddly apparent in his diction and idiom through-
out his career (he learnt French before English) here reveals its full
significance, being associated with so serious and severe a conception
of the art of fiction.
The controlling conception of the novelist's art is severe, but the
novel is luxuriant in its magnificence: it is Conrad's supreme
triumph in the evocation of exotic life and colour. Sulaco, standing
beneath snow-clad Higuerota, with its population of Indians, mixed-
190
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
bloods, Hidalgos, Italians and English engineers, is brought before
us in irresistible reality, along with the picturesque and murderous
public drama of a South American State. This aspect of Conrad's
genius in Nostromo has had full recognition ; indeed it could hardly
be missed. What doesn't seem to be a commonplace is the way in
which the whole book forms a rich and subtle but highly organized
pattern. Every detail, character and incident has its significant
bearing on the themes and motives of this. The magnificence re-
ferred to above addresses the senses, or the sensuous imagination ;
the pattern is one of moral significances.
Nostromo has a main political, or public, theme, the relation be-
tween moral idealism and 'material interests'. We see the Gould
Concession become the rallying centre for all in Costaguana who
desire peace and order the constitutionalists, the patriotic idealists,
the Robin Hood of the oppressed, the representatives of the financial
power of Europe and North America. The ironical end of the book
shows us a Sulaco in which order and ideals have triumphed, Pro-
gress forges ahead, and the all-powerful Concession has become the
focus of hate for workers and the oppressed and a symbol of crushing
materialism for idealists and defenders of the spirit. This public
theme is presented in terms of a number of personal histories or, it
might be said, private themes, each having a specific representative
moral significance.
The Gould Concession is in the first place the personal history of
its inheritor, Charles Gould and the tragedy of his wife. He, like
the other main characters, enacts a particular answer to the question
that we feel working in the matter of the novel as a kind of inform-
ing and organizing principle : what do men find to live for what
kinds of motive force or radical attitude can give life meaning,
direction, coherence ? Charles Gould finds his answer in the ideal
purpose he identifies with the success of the Gould Concession :
'What is wanted here is law, good faith, order, security.
Anyone can declaim about these things, but I pin my faith to
material interests. Only let the material interests once get a
firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on
which alone they can continue to exist. That's how your
money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and
disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands
191
JOSEPH CONRAD
must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will
come afterwards. That's your ray of hope *
Charles Go-ild's faith is parodied by his backer, the American
financier Holroyd, whose interest in furthering a 'pure form of
Christianity' and whose rhetorical faith in the manifest destiny of
the United States cannot without irony be said to give ideal signi-
ficance to his love of power. Charles himself is absorbed by the
Concession that killed his father, and Emilia Gould, standing for
personal relations and disinterested human svmpathy, looks on in
starved loneliness at the redeeming triumph that is an ironical
defeat of the spirit.
Nostromo, picturesque indispensable to his patrons and popular
hero, has no ideal purpose. He lives for reputation, 'to be well
spoken of for his reflection in the eyes of others, ?nd when,
tempted by the silver, he condemns himself to clandestine courses
the mainspring of his life goes slack. His return to find the new
lighthouse standing on the lonely rock hard by his secret, and his
consequent betrayal into devious paths in love, are magnificent and
characteristic triumphs of symbolism. His appropriately melo-
dramatic death is caused by the silver -md occurs during a stealthy
visit to it.
Martin Decoud, intellectual and * dilettante in life', Nostromo's
companion in that marvellously rendered night of the Gulf (it is
one of the most vivid pieces of sensuous evocation in literature), also
has no ideal purpose. The voice of sceptical intelligence, with 'no
faith in anything except the truth of his own sensations', he enjoys
conscious advantages, and has no difficulty in summing up Nos-
tromo :
'Decoud, incorrigible in his sceptisicm, reflected, not cynic-
ally but with general satisfaction, that this man was made
incorruptible by his enormous vanity, that finest form of ego-
ism which can take on the aspect of every virtue/
He can also place Charles Gould, that 'sentimental Englishman' who
'cannot exist without idealizing every simple desire or achieve-
ment. He could not believe his own motives if he did not
make them first a part of some fairy tale/
192
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
Decoud himself, contemptuously free from the 'sentimentalism of
the people that will rever do anything for the sake of their passion-
ate desire, unless it comes to them clothed in the fair robes of an
ideal', is frankly moved by his passion for Antonio Avellanos, and
that alone, when he initiates the step through which the mine is
saved and the aims of the patriots and idealists achieved. In this
respect he provides a criticism of Charles Gould's subtle infidelity
to his wife. Yet, even apart from his passion, he is not quite self-
sufficient. At a moment when we might have expected him to be
wholly engrossed in practical considerations we find him, signi-
ficantly, illustrating an essential human trait :
'all the objectless and necessary sincerity of one's innermost
life trying to react upon the profound sympathies of another's
existence.'
For
'In the most sceptical heart there lurks at such moments^ when
the chances of existence are involved, a desire to leave a correct
impression of the feelings, like a light by which the action mry
be seen when personality is gone, gone where no light of in-
vestigation can ever reach the truth which every death takes
out of the world. Therefore, instead of looking for something
to eat, or trying to snatch an hour or two of sleep, Decoud was
filling the pages of a large pocket book with a letter to his
sister.'
Marooned on the Great Isabel (site of the subsequent lighthouse)
he discovers th^f his self-sufficiency is indeed radically qualified :
' Solitude from mere outward condition of existence becomes
very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectations of irony and
scepticism have no place. It takes possession of the mind, and
drives forth the thought into the exile of utter unbelief. After
three days of waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud
caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own individuality.
It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural
forces and forms of nature. . . .
' ... He had recognized no other virtue than intelligence and
had erected passions into duties. Both his intelligence and his
passion were swallowed up easily in the great unbroken solitude
of waiting without faith.
N 193
JOSEPH CONRAD
He shoots himself. The whole episode is given in painful im-
mediacy.
Of all the characters the one nearest to self-sufficiency is Dr.
Monygham, the, disliked and distrusted, and he, for all his sardonic
scepticism about human nature, does hold to an ideal. His sceptic-
ism is based on self-contempt, for his ideal (he is, in fact, a stronger
and quite unequivocal Lord Jim) is one he has offended against ; it
is an exacting ideal of conduct. He oilers a major contrast with
Nostromo too, since his success in the desperate venture that saves
the situation and rehabilitates him (in his own eyes he expects
death) depends upon his having no reputation except for 'unsound-
ness' and a shady past, and his being ready to be ill-spoken of and
ill-thought of. His ideal, of course, isn't merely personal it is of
the same order as the moral idea of the Merchant Service (he is 'an
officer and a gentleman') : it owes its strength to a traditional and
social sanction ; and he has an outer stay in His devotion to Mrs.
Gould.
Perhaps the completest antithesis to Decoud is Giorgio Viola, the
serene old Garibaldino, also self-sufficient, or very near it he by
reason of his libertarian idealism, the disinterestedness of which is
above all question. He represents witn monumental massiveness
the heroic age of the liberal faith of Songs before Sunrise and the
religion of humanity, and so provides a contrasting background for
the representatives of Progress in Costaguana politics (by the end of
Nostromo the Marxists are on the scene). He is commandingly real ;
but it is part of the irony of the book that the achievements he stands
for should have produced the South America we are shown.
Captain Mitchell represents the Merchant Service. He is sane
and stable to the point of stupidity. His inability to realize that he,
Joe Mitchell ('I am a public character, sir'), has anything to fear
from a ridiculously menacing Dago whose ruffians have stolen his
presentation pocket-chronometer actually cows the all-powerful
Dago into restoring both chronometer and freedom :
'The old sailor, with all his small weaknesses and absurdities,
was constitutionally incapable of entertaining for any length of
time a fear of his personal safety. It was not so much firmness
of soul as the lack of a certain kind of imagination the kind
194
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
whose undue development caused intense suffering to Seftor
Hirsch ; that sort of imagination which adds the blind terror of
bodily suffering and of death, envisaged as an accident to the
body alone, strictly to all the other apprehensions on which
the sense of one's existence is based. Unfortunately, Captain
Mitchell had not much penetration of any kind ; characteristic,
illuminating trifles of expression, action, or movement, escaped
him completely. He was too pompously and innocently aware
of his own existence to observe that of others. For instance, he
could not believe that Sotillo had been really afraid of him, and
this simply because it would never have entered into his head to
shoot anyone except in the most pressing case of self-defence.
Anybody could see he was not a murdering kind of man, he
reflected quite gravely/
These traits, it will be seen, qualify him for an essential function in
the presentment of "he action, 1,0 which he is related in a way
symbolized by his triumphant sense a sense uninformed by any
comprehension of what is going forward of being at the centre of
things, whence history is directed, as he sits, an habitue*, in Mrs.
Gould's drawing-room.
On the significance of the other characters there is no need to
enlarge : Sefior Avellanos, the liberal idealist, who dies of dis-
appointment, and the sheets of whose Fifty Years of Misrule are * fired
out as wads for trabucos loaded with handfuls of type' during the
'democratic* meute\ the fanatical Father Corbe&n; Hirsch, the
embodiment of fear, and so on. Instead, a negative point had better
be made by way of stressing the distinctive nature of the impressive-
ness of Nostromo. The impressiveness is not a matter of any pro-
fundity of search into human experience, or any explorative subtlety
in the analysis of human behaviour. It is a matter rather of the firm
and vivid concreteness with which the representative attitudes and
motives are realized, and the rich economy of the pattern that plays
them off against one another. To suggest, as Edward Garnett does
in his introduction to Conrad's Prefaces, that perhaps this or that
character wouldn't really have behaved just as he does in the book is
misdirected criticism. The life-like convincingness of Conrad's
persons (which is complete as we read, and undisturbed by properly
critical reflection) doesn't entitle us to psychologize them as lives
195
JOSEPH CONRAD
existing outside the book. I am reminded of certain remaxks of
T. S. Eliot's :
'A "living" character is not necessarily "true to life". It
is a person whom we can see and hear, whether he be true or
false to human nature as we know it. What the creator of
character needs is not so mucn knowledge of motives as keen
sensibility ; the dramatist need not understand people, but he
must be exceptionally aware of them/
It is an Elizabethan dramatist Eliot has in tront of him ; and it
strikes me that there is something that recalls the strength of Eliza-
bethan drama about the art ofNostromo something Shakespearean,
in fact. The keen sensibility and the exceptional awareness are
apparent in the vividness with which we see and hear Conrad's
persons, and there is nothing about them that, on reflection, we find
untrue to human nature as we know it. But the seeing and hearing
is adequate understanding : they are present to us and are plainly
wh?t they are ; and to try, by way of appreciation or criticism, to
go behind that is to misunderstand what the book offers us. There
is plainly no room in Nostromo for the kind of illustrated psychology
that many critics think they have a right to demand of a novelist
(and of Shakespeare). Consider the number of personal centres of
moral interest, and the variety of themes. Consider the number of
vivid dramatic scenes and episodes. Consider the different strands
that go to the totality of the action. There is the private tragedy of
the Goulds ; there is Nostromo's history, involving that of the
Viola family ; there is the story of Decoud and Antonia ; there is
that of Dr. Monygham and his self-rehabilitation ; and all these and
so much else are subsumed in the public historical drama the study,
concretely rendered, of the play of moral and material forces,
political and personal motives, in the founding of die Occidental
Republic.
Clearly, Conrad's study of motives, and of the relation between
the material and the spiritual, doesn't depend for its impressiveness
on any sustained analytic exhibition of the inner complexities of the
individual psyche. The impressiveness lies in the vivid reality of
the things we are made to see and hear, and the significance they
get from their relations in a highly organized and vividly realized
196
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
whole. It lies in such effects as that of the presence of Decoud and
Nostromo in the lighter as it drifts with its load of silver and of
Fear (personified by the stowaway Hirsch) through the black night
of the Gulf ; and that of the unexpected nocturnal encounter be-
tween Nostromo and Dr. Monygham, two sharply contrasted con-
sciousnesses, in the vast deserted Custom House, and their discovery
that the Shapeless high-shouldered shadow of somebody standing
still, with lowered head' seen on the wall through a doorway, is
thrown by the hanging body of the tortured Hirsch. We have it
characteristically when Charles Gould, going out from his interview
(consummate satiric comedy) with Pedrito Montero, would-be Due
de Morny to the new Napoleon, runs into the 'constitutionalist*
deputation he has refused to support ('The acceptance of accom-
plished facts may save yet the precious vestiges of parliamentary
institutions') :
' Charles Gould on going out passed his hand over his fore-
head as if to disperse the mists of an oppressive dream, whose
grotesque extravagance leaves behind a subtle sense of bodily
danger and intellectual decay. In the passages and on the stair-
cases of the old palace Montero *s troopers lounged about insol-
ently, smoking and making way for no one ; the clanking of
sabres and spurs resounded all over the building. Three silent
groups of civilians in severe black waited in the main gallery,
formal and helpless ; a little huddled up, each keeping apart
from the others, as if in the exercise of a public duty they nad
been overcome by a desire to shun the notice of every eye.
These were the deputations waiting for their audience. The
one from the Provincial Assembly, more restless and uneasy in
its corporate expression, was overtopped by the big face of Don
Juste Lopez, soft and white, with prominent eyelids and
wreathed in impenetrable solemnity as if in a dense cloud. The
President of the Provincial Assembly, coming bravely to save
the last shred of parliamentary institutions (on the English
model), averted his eyes from the Administrador of the San
Tom mine as a dignified rebuke of his little faith in that only
saving principle/
Charles Gould's quiet unyieldingness in the face of Pedrito's
threats and blandishments has already invested him for the moment
197
JOSEPH CONRAD
with a larger measure of our sympathy than he in general commands.
The brush with the deputation confirms this eftect, while at the same
time reinforcing dramatically that pattern of political significance
which has a major part in Nostromo a book that was written, we
remind ourselves in some wonder, noting the topicality of its
themes, analysis and illustrations, in the reign of Edward VII.
Again, we have the symbolic pregnancy of Conrad's dramatic
method in such a representative touch as this (the context is the
flight of aristocrats and adherents of 'law and order' to the pro-
tection of the 'master of the Campo') :
'The emissary of Hernandez spurred his horse close up.
'"Has not the master of the mine any message to send the
master of the Campo ?"
'The truth of the comparison struck Charles Gould heavily.
In his determined purpose he held the mine and the indomitable
bandit held the Campo by the same precarious tenure. They
were equals before the lawlessness of the land. It was impos-
sible to disentangle one's activities from its debasing contacts/
There is the adjective proposes itself at this point something
rhetorical, in a wholly laudatory sense, about Conrad's art in
Nostromo. One might add, by way of insisting further on the
Elizabethan in it, that it has a certain robust vigour of melodrama.
The melodrama, of course, is completely controlled to the pattern
of moral significance. Consider, for instance, how the climax of the
public drama is given us : it is a thrilling nick-of-time peripeteia,
but it is given in retrospect through the pompous showmanship and
uncomprehending importance of Captain Mitchell ('Fussy Joe').
The triumphs of the Progress he hymns are already assured and
commonplace, and already (a few pages on) Dr. Monygham is
asking :
'"Do you think that now the mine would march upon the
town to save their Seftor Administrador ? Do you think
that? 1 "
He has just pronounced :
"'There is no peace and no rest in the development of
material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But
it is founded on expediency, and it is inhuman ; it is without
198
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be
found only in a moral principle"/
This is only one instance of that subtle play of Jie order of pre-
sentment against the time-order which the reader finds himself
admiring in the book as a whole subtle, yet, once taken stock of,
appreciated as inevitable. It is characteristic of Conrad's method, to
take another instance, that we should have seen, in a prospective
glimpse given us at the very opening of the book, the pitiable
dlbacle of the Riblerist dictatorship of 'reform' before we are
invited to contemplate the hopes and enthusiasms of its supporters
at the inauguration.
It will probably be expected, after so much insistence on the
moral pattern of Nostromo, that something will be said about the
total significance. What, as the upshot of this exhibition of hurftan
motive and attitude, do we feel Conrad himself to endorse ? What
are his positives ? It is easier to say what he rejects or criticizes.
About the judgment on Decoud's scepticism we can have no doubt.
And even Decoud concedes that the illusions 'those Englishmen*
live on 'somehow or other help them to get a firm hold of the
substance'. To this concession we can relate the observations of
the engineer-in-chief :
'"Upon my word, doctor, things seem to be worth nothing
by what they are in themselves. I begin to believe that the only
solid thing about them is the spiritual value which everyone
discovers in his own form of activity "
'"Bah!" interrupted the doctor.'
The engineer has in mind Holroyd the millionaire and his pre-
occupation with a 'pure form of Christianity'. But although Dr.
Monygham, himself devoted to a moral idea, is as such clearly not
disapproved by the author, he is made to seem Quixotic, and it is
difficult to feel that the ironic light in which the 'spiritual values'
discovered by the other main characters in their forms of activity are
shown is less essentially dissociating than the irony focussed upon
Holroyd. In fact, though Decoud is so decisively dealt with in the
action, he remains at the centre pf the book, in the sense that his
consciousness seems to permeate it, .even to dominate it. That
consciousness is clearly very closely related to the author's own
199
JOSEPH CONRAD
personal timbre, that which becomes representable in quotation in
such characteristic sardonic touches as :
'They had stopped near the cage. The parrot, catching the
sound of a word belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to
interfere. Parrots are very human.
'"Viva Costaguana !" he shrieked. . . /
It is not a question of a 'philosophy* ; Conrad cannot be said
to have one. He is not one of those writers who clear up their
fundamental attitudes for themselves in such a way that we may
reasonably, in talking of them, use that portentous term. He does
believe intensely, as a matter of concrete experience, in the kind of
human achievement represented by the Merchant Service tradition,
discipline and moral ideal ; but he has also a strong sense, not only
of the frailty, but of the absurdity or unreality, in relation to the
surrounding and underlying gulfs, of such achievement, a sense so
strong that it often seems very close to Decoud's radical scepticism,
whHi is, in the account of those last days, rendered with such
significant power. In fact, Decoud may be said to have had a
considerable part in the writing ofNostromo ; or one might say that
Nostromo was written by a Decoud who wasn't a complacent dilet-
tante, but was positively drawn towards those capable of 'investing
their activities with spiritual value' Monygham, Giorgio Viola,
Seflor Avellanos, Charles Gould.
At any rate, for all the rich variety of the interest and the tightness
of the pattern, the reverberation ofNostromo has something hollow
about it ; with the colour and life there is a suggestion of a certain
emptiness. And for explanation it is perhaps enough to point to
this reflection of Mrs. Gould's :
'It had come into her mind that for life to be large and full,
it must contain the care of the past and of the future in every
passing moment of the present.
That kind of self-sufficient day-to-dayness of living Conrad can
convey, when writing from within the Merchant Service, where
clearly he has known it. We are made aware of hostile natural
forces threatening his seamen with extinction, but not of meta-
physical gulfs opening under life and consciousness: reality on
200
MINOR WORKS AND NOSTROMO
board ship is domestic, assured and substantial. 'That feeling of
life-emptiness which had made me so restless for the last few
months', says the young captain of The Shadow-Line, entering on
his new command, 'lost its bitter plausibility, its evil influence'.
For life in the Merchant Service there is no equivalent in Nostromo
no intimate sense conveyed of the day-by-day continuities of
social living. And though we are given a confidential account of
what lies behind Dr. Monygham's sardonic face, yet on the whole
we see the characters from the outside, and only as they belong to
the ironic pattern figures in the futilities of a public drama, against
a dwarfing background of mountain and gulf.
This kind of vision, this sense of life, corresponds, there can be no
doubt, to something radical in Conrad. All his readers must have
noticed how recurrent and important the theme of isolation is in his
work. And they must have noticed too the close relation between
the Decoud consciousness and the sympathetic hero of Victory, the
English-speaking Swede, Axel Heyst.
(ii) 'Victory,' 'The Secret Agent/ f Under Western
Eyes/ and 'Chance*
Heyst, 'uprooted' (his own word) and unattached, formed by a
philosophically disillusioned father,
'in solitude and silence had been used to think clearly and
sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering
delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deception, of
an ever-expected happiness/
Having, in spite of himself, contracted a tie (the novel deals with
his unwilling involvements and their consequences), he finds that
'that human being, so near and still so strange, gave him a greater
sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life*.
Victory is a study of Heyst's case ; he is indisputably at the centre of
the book. While he is wholly sympathetic in his scepticism, as
Decoud is not, that scepticism presents itself as specifically condi-
tioned, and, in the upshot of the action, it is renounced. A certain
ambiguity does all the same attend it : Heyst's irony is dramatically
201
JOSEPH CONRAD
rendered, yet it merges into .he author's own an intimate Delation
becomes at times unmistakable :
'The young man learned to reflect, which is a destructive
process, a reckoning of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who
rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a
blessed, warm mental fog, which the pitiless cold blast of the
father's analysis had blown away from the son.'
That is the author's own voice, and the tone is characteristic. Of
Schomberg's infatuation we are told, a page later, by a Conrad
whose relation to Heyst's father is plain :
'Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in
defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the
sinister valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill. For every
age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and
the human race come to an end.'
Schomberg is in every way unadmirable : what we recognize in
thh tone is the Heyst-Mac Whirr or Decoud-Mitchell antithesis an
antithesis that is implicit in the characteristic Conradian irony.
However, Conrad in Victory doesn't rest at that antithesis. In-
telligence and fine consciousness in Heyst are represented as very
specially conditioned ; perverted, in fact, by the influence of a
father who is a kind of genius of disillusion, and the 'victory* is a
victory over scepticism, a victory of life. The tragic irony that
makes it come too late and identifies it with death doesn't make it
less a victory ; it is unequivocal :
'"Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not
learned while young to hope, to love and to put its trust in
life".'
The process, a progressive self-discovery through relations with
others, by which Heyst arrives here is rendered with poignant
insight and convincing subtlety. To avoid the indignities, follies
and illusions of involvement in life he has prescribed for himself an
aloof self-sufficiency :
'Heyst was not conscious of either friends or of enemies.
It was the essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accom-
plished not by hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and
202
VICTORY
immobility, but by a system of restless wandering, by the
detachment of an impermanent dweller amongst changing
scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of passing
through life without suffering and almost withouc a single care
in the world invulnerable because elusive !'
But the wisdom of this scheme turns out to be inadequate, and life
convicts Heyst of lack of self-knowledge. With his intelligence and
moral fastidiousness goes a sensitive quickness of sympathy :
'No decent feeling was ever scorned by Heyst/
That is the author's way of putting it. But Heyst is precluded from
realizing the significance of this part of his make-up by habit, the
persisting influence of his father, which may be represented by this :
'"You still believe in something, then," he said in a clear
voice, which had been growing feebler of late. "You believe
in flesh and blood, perhaps? A full and equable contempt
would soon do away with that too. But since you have not
attained to it, I advise you to cultivate that form of contempt
which is called pity".'
Moved by an irresistible sympathetic impulse that is of the essence
of the self-respect that qualifies him for * contempt', Heyst comes to
the rescue of the cornered Morrison, and the history it is at first a
comedy of his unwilling involvement begins. Morrison, himself
a quixotically sensitive and generous man (an admirable piece of
Conradian characterization, realized in a physical presence with
Conrad's Dickensian vividness 'He was tall and lantern-jawed
and clean-shaven, and looked like a barrister who had thrown his
wig to the dogs'), is overcome with the thought of his inability to
repay Heyst :
'Poor Morrison actually laid his head on the cabin table, and
remained in that crushed attitude while Heyst talked to him
soothingly with the utmost courtesy. The Swede was as much
distressed as Morrison, for he understood the other's feelings
perfectly. No decent feeling was ever scorned by Heyst. But
he was incapable of outward cordiality of manner, and he felt
acutely his defeat. Consummate politeness is not the right
tonic for an emotional collapse. They must have had, both of
them, a fairly painful time of it in the cabin of the brig/
203
JOSEPH CONRAD
The tragi-comedy of their regions is given as foreshortenec, with
admirable economy. When, early in the book, the second stage of
Heyst's re-education opens we find him among the forlorn vestiges
of the Tropical Coal Belt Company, the optimistic commercial
enterprise that his combined generosity, indifference, and inexperi-
ence of mutuality in personal Delations have made him unable to
resist being drawn into. He is troubled with a sense of remorse over
Morrison's death, which was the merest matter of ill-chance, and
this sense associates intimately with a hurt feeling of having betrayed
nis own life, ' which ought to have been a master-piece of aloofness'.
In fact, his long-established equilibrium has been permanently upset ;
his uneasiness is an obscure recognition of radical discrepancies be-
tween his 'scheme' and the necessities of his own nature. Having
resolved to keep himself out of reach of further involvements, he
discovers with surprise that he now feels lonely :
'Where could he have gone to after all these years ? Not a
single soul belonging to him lived anywhere on earth. Of this
fp ct no t such a remote one, after all he had only lately become
aware ; for it is failure that makes a man enter into himself and
reckon up his resources. And though he had made up his mind
to retire from the world in hermit fashion, yet he was irration-
ally moved by this sense of loneliness which had come to him
in the hour of renunciation. It hurt him. Nothing is more
painful than the shock of contradictions that lacerate our in-
telligence and our feelings.'
It is in this state that Heyst, making a winding-up call at Soura-
baya, finds himself exposed once more to a claim on his humanity.
The inevitability of the plunge that he once more take:, this time
before our eyes, is brought poignantly home to us. The whole
episode, with its circumstances and setting, is rendered in irresistible
immediacy : the torrid desolation of the hotel, the malicious asin-
inity of the manly bearded Schomberg, hotel-keeper and Officer of
the Reserve, the limp subjection of his poor charmless rag of a wife,
the squalidly sinister Zangiacomos, with their travelling concert-
party, and die hopeless isolation of the girl-member who has the
ill-luck to touch offSchomberg's inflamedimportunities the present
reality of all this gives us at the same time the contained sensitiveness
and aloof distinction of Heyst who registers it all, and his action
204
VICTORY
comes as the one possible issue of the pressures evoked. He carries
die girl off to the island that was to have been his hermitage.
'He had no illusions about her, but his sceptical mind was
dominated by his heart/
That is the account of his relations with her that he gives himself
at the outset. The development of those relations and of his sense
of them is the process of self-discovery. In spite of the limiting
suggestion of the account just quoted, the tenderness he feels towards
die girl carries with ic, we have seen, 'a greater sense of his own
reality than he had ever known in all his life'. And on this follows
a discovery that he is not so self-sufficient morally as he had sup-
posed. To the delicately solicitous Davidson he has said :
'"I took this course of signalling to you, because to preserve
appearances might be of the utmost importance. Not to me,
of course. I don't care what people may say, and of course no
one can hurt me. I suppose I have done a certain amount of
harm, since I allowed myself to be tempted into action. It
seemed innocent enough, but all action is bound to be harmful.
It is devilish. That is why the world is evil upon the whole.
But I have done with it ! I shall never lift a little finger again". '
He is to discover, not only that he has not done with the world and
with action, but that he cares so much what the world may say as to
limit his capacity for action when the urgent need confronts him.
Unarmed, and menaced by the sinister intruders upon the island,
he deliberates :
' "But what about that crowbar ? Suppose I had it ! Could
I stand in ambush at the side of the door this door and
smash the first protruding head. . . . ? Could I ? On suspicion,
without compunction, with a firm and determined purpose ?
No, it is not in me. . . ."'
Then:
'"Do you know what the world would say 2"
'"It would say that I that Swede after luring my friend
and partner to his death from mere greed of money, have
murdered those unoffending shipwrecked strangers from mere
funk. That would be the story whispered perhaps shouted
205
JOSEPH CONRAD
certainly spread out, and believed and believed, my Hear
T l
Lena!
That is the effect on Heyst or having learnt earlier from Lena,
the girl, Schomberg's slanderous account of the death of Morrison.
True, he says that the ruthless action ('And who knows if it isn't
really my duty ?') isn't 'in' him ; but that he should associate his
own scruple and inhibition with what people might say and believe
is significant of the development he is undergoing.
Melodramatic as is the action of the latter nart of the book (and
so seen and this is true of the whole book as to invite the cinema-
tographer), the focus of interest rests upon the subtleties of Heyst's
relations with Lena. He finds himself committed to the establish-
ment of a mutuality that is alien to the habit of a life-time a habit
concretely present in his voice and speech, which we heir as if we
knew him :
'Heyst's tone was light, with the flavour of playfulness which
seasoned all his speeches and seemed to be of the very essence
of his thought.'
This tone and manner baffle and alarm the girl ; but Heyst is the
prisoner of his habit, and his efforts to escape constitute a poignant
comedy. Attempting intimacy, he tells her about Morrison (this is
before her shattering disclosure of Schomberg's account) :
'"You saved a man for fun is that what you mean ? Just
for fun?"
'"Why this tone of suspicion e " remonstrated Heyst. "I
suppose the sight of this particular distress was disagreeable to
me. What you call fun came afterwards, when it dawned on
me that I was for him a walking, breathing, incarnate proof of
the efficacy of prayer. I was a little fascinated by it and then,
could I have argued with him ? You don't argue against such
evidence, and besides, it would have looked as if I wanted to
claim the merit. Already his gratitude was simply frightful.
Funny position, wasn't it ? The boredom came later, when we
lived together on board his ship. I had, in a moment of
inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to define it pre-
cisely I don't know. One gets attached in a way to people one
has done something for. But is that friendship ? I am not sure
206
FICTOHY
what it was. I only know that he w : io forms a tie is lost. The
germ of corruption has entered into his soul"/
In so far as she understands, this can serve only to heighten Lena's
painful sense of insecurity her doubt regarding his side of their
relations with one another : he is a gentleman, he acted from pity
on what, then, can she build ? His difficulty is not merely one of
finding a suitable mode of expression ; that he can talk like this in
attempting intimacy gives us a measure of his inability to keep her
realized as a concrete individual sentience to be communicated with
he is the old self-communing if sympathetic Heyst of * kindness
and scorn' :
'"I don't even understand what I have done or left undone
to distress you like this."
'He stopped, struck afresh by the physical and moral sense
of the imperfection of their relations a sense which made him
desire her constant nearness, before his eyes, under his hand,
and which, when she was out of his sight, made her so vague,
so illusive and illusory, a promise that could not be embraced
and held.
'"No ! I don't see clearly what you mean. Is your mind
turned towards the future ?", he interpellated her with marked
playfulness, because he was ashamed to let such a word pass
his lips. But all his cherished negatives were falling from him
one by one.'
Upon this situation supervenes, as if precipitated by his 'Nothing
can break in on us here ', the sinister invasion the visit of the world,
represented by the languid Jones, his 'secretary' Ricardo and the
anthropoid follower :
"'Here they are, the envoys of the outer world. Here they
are before you evil intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in
arm. The brute force is at the back".'
If doubts should arise about the melodramatic boldness of this art
(it is deliberately conceived
"'No! Let it come!" Ricardo said viciously [of the
thunderstorm that coincides with the dramatic crisis]. "I am
in the humour for it ! " '),
it seems in place to refer back to considerations thrown out above
207
JOSEPH CONRAD
regarding the 'Elizabethan' qualities of Conrad's art in Ncrtromo.
It is true that Victory, which aoesn't pretend to the weight and scope
ofNostromo, has nothing corresponding to its packed and patterned
structure of sig.iificances. Heyst is studied at length ; yet it may be
argued that, convincing as he is, the extreme case that he is offered
as being really amounts to a kind of Morality representation of the
human potentialities he embodies, so that he is fittingly brought up
against these embodiments of counter-potentialities. (Of Ricardo
we are told that to Lena 'He was the embodied evil of the world'.)
And they too are convincing (except for Ricardo's love-talk, and
a speech of Jones's) ; they belong to that aspect of Conrad's art
which makes us think of Dickens a Dickens qualified by a quite
un-Dickensian maturity : they exist in strict subservience to Con-
rad's quite un-Dickensian theme and to their function, which is to
precipitate Heyst's predicament to an issue in a conclusive action.
At the worst we might say about uie resolution thus brought about
that it hasn't the finer inevitability that which is never lacking in
the incomparably more complex and ambitious Nostromo : it is
possible to reflect, on the one hand, that Heyst had shocking bad
luck in the coincidence of Jones and Ricardo with Schomberg ; and,
on the other, that the antithesis of lust in Ricardo and woman-
loathing in Jones on which the denouement depends has no irresistible
significance in relation to Conrad's main theme.
But in any case the upshot of the action is to bring that theme to
a poignant crystallization. Lena, mortally wounded (though un-
aware of it), but in triumphant possession of the dagger of which
she has disarmed Ricardo, dies 'convinced of the reality of her
victory over death*. Her relation with Heyst, whom she doesn't
understand and who doesn't understand her, has been enough to
nerve her for her dealings with the killer \ 'she was no longer alone
now ... she was no longer deprived of moral support.' Heyst, who
knows her so little that he can immediately before the end assume
her to have betrayed him, seduced by Ricardo's male fascinations,
had nevertheless got from his relation with her that new sense of
reality, and now. after her death, makes to Davidson his tragic
pronouncement in favour of trust in life, before firing the bungalow
and himself dying in the flames. It is an ironical victory for life,
but unequivocally a victory.
208
THE SECRET AGENT
The characteristic Conradian sensibility is that of the creator of
Heyst ; that of the writer so intimately experienced in the strains
and starvations of the isolated consciousness, and so deeply aware
of the sense in which reality is social, something established and
sustained in a kind of collaboration ('I have lived too long within
myself/ says Heyst, 'watching the mere shadows and shades of
life'). And complementary to Heyst, we realize, are Morrison and
Davidson, upright, sensitive and humane individuals, in whom
seems to be present a whole background of routine sanity and
decency * we sailors', the feeling is ; for Conrad is as much and as
significantly there as in Heyst. It is this background (which is rein-
forced, in his own way, by Wang, the Chinaman) which makes the
intention of the 'victory* unequivocal. The voice that winds up
the story in a brief account of the tragic end is Davidson's
Davidson's 'placid voice'.
If a work of so deridedly a Lsser order than Nostromo has been
given what may seem a disproportionate amount of space, that is
because of the relation of Heyst to Decoud and to the distinctive
tone of the great masterpiece, and the consequent advantage afforded
the critic for the analysis of Conrad's sensibility. Victory is, at the
same time, among those of Conrad's works which deserve to be
current as representing his claim to ckssical standing ; and of the
novels (as distinguished from nouvelks and tales) in that class it is
the one that answers most nearly to the stock notion of his genius
though even Victory is neither about the Malayan jungle nor
about the sea.
The Secret Agent, the one I come to next (not chronologically,
of course it appeared in 1907, and Victory in 1915), is much more
indubitably a classic and a masterpiece, and it doesn't answer to the
notion at all which is perhaps why it appears to have had nothing
like due recognition. If we call it an ironic novel, it is with the
same intention of the adjective as when Jonathan Wild is called an
ironic novel. To note this is to be reminded, with a fresh shock,
of the inertia of conventional valuation that makes Jonathan Wild
a masterpiece and the classic of its genre. Foi? The Secret Agent is
truly classical in its maturity of attitude and the consummateness
of the art in which this finds expression ; in the contrast there is
nothing for it but to see Jonathan Wild us the clumsy piece of
o 209
JOSEPH CONRAD
hobbledehoy dom, artistic ai d intellectual, that it is. The irony of
The Secret Agent is not a matter of an insistent and obvious * signi-
ficance' of tone, or the endless repetition of a simple formula. The
tone is truly rubtle subtle with the subtlety of the theme ; and
the theme develops itself in a complex organic structure. The effect
depends upon an interplay of contrasting moral perspectives, and
the rich economy of the pattern they make relates The Secret Agent
to Nostromo : the two works, for all the great differences between
them in range and temper, are triumphs of the same art the aim of
The Secret Agent, of course, confmes the range, and the kind of irony
involves a limiting detachment (we don't look for the secrets of
Conrad's soul in The Secret Agent).
The matter, the 'story', is that of a thriller terrorist conclaves,
embassy machinations, bomb-outrage, detection, murder, suicide ;
and to make, in treating such matter with all the refinements of his
craft, a sophisticated moral intere. t the controlling principle is, we
recognize, characteristic Conrad. His irony bears on the egocentric
naiveties of moral conviction, the conventionality of conventional
moral attitudes, and the obtuse assurance with which habit and self-
interest assert absolute rights and wrongs. The pattern of the book
is contrived to make us feel the different actors or lives as insulated
currents of feeling and purpose insulated, but committed to co-
existence and interaction in what they don't question to be a com-
mon world, and sometimes making disconcerting contacts through
the insulation.
The Verlocs, husband and wife, take their mutual insulation so
for granted as to be mainly unconscious of it. What Mr. Verloc
is becomes plain to us very early on. We see him leaving behind
him the shop, fly-staled and dusty, with its display of revolutionary
literature and pornographic goods, and making his way westward
towards the Embassy of a Foreign Power. Conrad's London bears
something of the same kind of relation to Dickens as Henry James's
does in The Princess Casamassima. The direct influence of Dickens
is unmistakable in certain minor lapses into facetious humour (see,
for instance, in the account of Verloc's walk, the bit about No. i
Chesham Square) from the characteristic astringent dryness. There
is also, later, a major instance of obvious and unfortunate indebted-
ness to Dickens in the fantastic slow-motion macabre of the cab-
210
THE SECRET AGENT
journey to the almshoase. But The S cret Agent (unlike The Princess
Casamassima) is one of the author's most successful works ; its
strength is something so utterly outside Dickens's compass as to
have enabled Conrad to be influenced by him to pi rely Conradian
ends. And the essential relation to Dickens, it should be plain, is
not a matter of being influenced for good or ill, but lies in that
energy of vision and characterization which, we have seen, is some-
times as apt to make us say 'Shakespearean* as 'Dickensian*.
We have it in the interview between Verloc and Mr. Vladimir,
First Secretary of the Embassy. The dialogue and this is so
throughout the book, for all the uncertainty about points of English
usage apparent on practically every page of Conrad to the end is
consummate in its blend of inevitable naturalness with strict econ-
omy of relevance, and the whole is so dramatically realized that we
are hardly aware of shifts to description, stage directions or reported
thought : it all seems to be enaued before us.
'In the pause Mr. Vladimir formulated in his mind a series
of disparaging remarks concerning Mr. Verloc's face and figure.
The fellow was unexpectedly vulgar, heavy and impudently
unintelligent. He Iooke4 uncommonly like a master plumber
come to present his bill. The first Secretary of the Embassy,
from his occasional excursions into the field of American
humour, had formed a special notion of that class of mechanic
as the embodiment of fraudulent laziness and incompetency/
Mr. Valdimir himself we see with a vision heightened by Verloc's
consternation and disgust :
'This anger was complicated by incredulity. And suddenly
it dawned upon him that all this was an elaborate joke. Mr.
Vladimir exhibited his white teeth in a smile, with dimples on
his round, full face posed with a complacent inclination above
the bristling bow of his neck-tie. The favourite of intelligent
society women had assumed his drawing-room attitude accom-
panying the delivery of delicate witticisms. Sitting well for-
ward, his white hand upraised, he seemed to hold delicately
between his thumb and forefinger the subtlety of his suggestion.*
J
What he has enjoined upon Verloc, not as a joke but seriously, as
a means of waking up the English police to a sense of their European
responsibilities, is a bomb-attack upon Greenwich Observatory.
211
JOSEPH CONRAD
Verloc, threatened in Irs ro ,tine comfort and indolence, fc els not
only helpless anger but a sense of moral outrage too :
'"It will cost money," Mr. Verloc said, by a sort of instinct.
'"That cock won't fight," Mr. Vladimir retorted, with an
amazingly genuine English accent. "You'll get your screw
every month, and no more till something happens. And if
nothing happens very soon you won't get even that. What's
your ostensible occupation? What are you supposed to
live by?"
'"I keep a shop," answered Mr. Verloc.
'"A shop ! What sort of shop ?"
'"Stationery, newspapers. My wife "
'"Your what?" interrupted Mr. Vladimir in his guttural
Central Asian tones.
"'My wife," Mr. Verloc raised his husky voice slightly. "I
am married."
'"That be damned for a yarn," exclaimed the other in
unfeigned astonishment. "Married! And you a professed
anarchist, too ! What is this confounded nonsense ? But I
suppose it's merely a matter of speaking. Anarchists don't
marry. It's well known. They can't. It world be apostasy". '
Actually Verloc is most respectably married. It is a triumph of
the irony that we not only see him as a sympathetic character com-
pared with Mr. Vladimir, but find ourselves on the point of saying
that he is in all essentials an ordinary respectable citizen, concerned
like any other to maintain himself and his wife in security and
comfort : the shop, with its squalid trade and anarchistic frequenta-
tion, and the complicated treacheries of his profession, we see with
him as matters of habit and routine, means to the end. In the final
scene with his wife, when he tries to make her understand the full
enormity of Mr. Vladimir's conduct, he says with righteous ex-
asperation and with all the unction of an outraged moral sense :
'"There isn't a murdering plot for the last eleven years that
I haven't had my finger in at the risk of my life. There's scores
of these revolutionaries I've sent off, with their bombs in their
blamed pocket:, to get themselves caught on the frontier. The
old Baron knew what I was worth to his country. And here
suddenly a swine conies along an ignorant, overbearing
swine
212
THE SECRET AGENT
Wh it Mrs. Verloc is comes out onl; bit by bit the perfection of
the structure of the book shows itself aotably in the way in which
we are put in possession of the necessary knowledge about her at the
right time. We see her serving in the shop with intimidating
aplomb, taking the frequentations of the revolutionists as a matter
of course, and, placid good wife to i good husband, being tactfully
solicitous about his health and comfort. His business, she knows,
entails these and other associates, late absences from home, and
occasional trips to the Continent ; further, she doesn't inquire :
'Mrs. Verloc wasted no portion of this transient life in seek-
ing for fundamental information. This is a sort of economy
having all the appearances and some of the advantages of
prudence. Obviously it may be good for one not to know too
much. And such a view accords very well with constitutional
indolence.'
Her mother, who lives with them, and who isn't given to asking
questions either, sometimes wonders why Winnie, an attractive girl,
married Mr. Verloc. It was, as a matter of fact, for the very reason
that leads the mother to withdraw to an almshouse, there to spend
in loneliness the remainder of her life : concern for the future of
Stevie, the half-witted younger brother. One of the most poignant
touches of irony in the book is when Winnie says :
'"That poor boy will miss you something cruel. I wish
you had thought a little of that, mother".'
They had both, as a matter of fact, sacrificed themselves for
Stevie. And Winnie now, with concealed anxiety, sets to work to
impress Verloc with Stevie's devotion to him. Verloc is lost in the
obsessing dreads and perplexities associated with the face of Mr.
Vladimir ; but, with Stevie's existence thus forced on his notice, he
realizes Stevie's useful potentialities and is inspired with a timely
idea. The result is the violent disintegration of Stevie when he
stumbles with the bomb in Greenwich Park, and the immediate
bringing home of the responsibility to Verloc by reason of the label,
discovered among the rags and fragments by the police, that Winnie
has sewn under the collar of Stevie's overcoat in case he should get
lost.
213
JOSEPH CONRAD
There follows one of the E .ost astonishing triumphs of geuius in
fiction, the final scene betwe *n Verloc and his wife. To put it in
this way, however, is misleading, since the effect of the scene
depends upon what comes before depends upon the cunning
organization of the whole book. We have been put in a position in
which we can't fail to realize that, by the sudden knowledge of the
death into which Verloc had led Stevie (' might be father and son',
she had fondly remarked, seeing them go off together), Winnie's
'moral nature had been subjected to a shock of which, in the
physical order, the most violent earthquake of history could only
be a faint and languid rendering'. And we appreciate to the full
the moral insulation that has kept the Verlocs, in their decent
marital domesticity, strangers to each other,
'"Do be reasonable, Winnie. What would it have been if
you had lost me ! " '
Here we have the assumption on which Verloc, with magnani-
mous restraint (for did she not, without telling him, sew in that
label which has done the mischief?), undertakes to help his wife to
achieve a more reasonable attitude towards the misadventure.
'In his affairs of the heart Mr. Verloc had always been care-
lessly generous, yet always with no other idea than that of being
loved for himself. Upon this matter, his ethical notions being
in agreement with his vanity, he was completely incorrigible.
That this should be so in the case of his virtuous and legal con-
nection he was perfectly certain. He had grown older, fatter,
heavier, in the belief that he lacked no fascinadon for being
loved for his own sake.'
It is extraordinary ironic comedy ; the tension is deadly and is
to end in murder, but the ways in which Verloc's moral feeling
exhibits the naiveties of its relation with his egotism are irresistibly
comic. He has intense righteous indignation to work off:
"'It wasn't the old Baron who would have had the wicked
folly of getting me to call on him at eleven in the morning.
There are two or three in this town that, if they had seen me
going in, would have made no bones about knocking me on the
head sooner or later. It was a silly, murderous trick to expose
for nothing a man like me".'
214
THE SECRET AGENT
The development is rich, surprising ; nd inevitable, and disturbing
in its reality :
'For the first time in his life he was taking that incurious
woman into his confidence. The singularity of the event, the
force and importance of the personal feelings aroused in the
course of this confession, drove Stevie's fate clean out of Mr.
Verloc's mind. The boy's stuttering existence of fears and
indignations, together with the violence of his end, had passed
out of Mr. Verloc's mental sight for a time. For that reason,
when he looked uj/ he was startled by the inappropriate char-
acter of his wife's stare. It was not a wild stare, and it was not
inattentive, but its attention was peculiar and not satisfactory,
inasmuch that it seemed concentrated upon some point beyond
Mr. Verloc's person. The impression was so strong that Mr.
Verloc planced over his shoulder. There was nothing behind
him : there was just the whitewashed wall. The excellent
husband of Winnie Verloc saw no writing on the wall. He
turned to his wife again.
It is 'the note of wooing' ('"Come here," he said in a peculiar tone
from his relaxed posture on the sofa') that finally gives the signal
for the plunge of tae knife between his ribs. That knife and its use,
by the way, provide an illustration of the economy of form and
pattern that gives every detail its significance. Not only does
Verloc make (from his wife's point of view 'This man took the
boy away to murder him' is the refrain running through her head)
offensively insensitive use of it when, during the scene, he carves
and grossly devours lumps of cold meat ; he actually refers to the
possibility of a 'stab in the back' and so prompts her obsessed mind
to the action. And early in the book Winnie, whose likeness to
Stevie is significantly touched on from time to time, has had to
'take the carving knife away from the boy', who 'can't stand the
notion of any cruelty' and has been excited by the atrocity literature
kept for sale.
Upon the stabbing follows a gruesomely farcical coda in which
the gallows r haunted Winnie, whose turn it now is to suppose her-
self loved for her own sake, clings round the neck of the gallant
Comrade Ossipon, who is quite prepared to succeed to Comrade
Verloc's bank-account, but is terrified when he discovers to what
possibilities of suspicion he has laid himself open.
215
JOSEPH CONRAD
The scene between Verloc and his wife is balanced (to simplify
with an inevitable crudeness, or the pattern is richly packed as well
as subtle, and there can be no pretence of suggesting it fairly in
summary) by tl e earlier scene between Chief Inspector Heat of the
Special Crimes Department and the Assistant Commissioner. Heat
is a magnificently done type, the higher-grade policeman, repre-
sentative par excellence of Law and Order. ' Why not leave it to
Heat?' asks Sir Ethelred, the great Personage, of the Assistant
Commissioner.
' "Because he is an old departmental hand They have their
own morality. My line of inquiry would appear to him an
awful perversion of duty. For him the plain duty is to fix the
guilt upon as many prominent anarchists as he can on some
slight indications he had picked up in the course of his investiga-
tions on the spot ; whereas I, he would say, am bent upon
vindicating their innocence".'
Actually the Chief Inspector's morality is more interesting than
thai. When the discovery of the label on the singed rag brings the
Greenwich bomb-affair home to Verloc, Heat is faced with a pro-
blem : luck having years before put Verloc in his way, he has been
using this valuable source of information privately, and with great
profit in respect of reputation and promotion. To follow up the
clue would bring out all kinds of things and certainly destroy the
source.
The incomplete explicitness of the motives in play an incom-
pleteness that may be said to take the positive form of a kind of
resonance of righteous feeling is rendered with fine ironic subtlety :
' He no longer considered it eminently desirable all round to
establish publicly the identity of the man who had blown him-
self up that morning with such horrible completeness. But he
was not certain of the view his department would take. A
department is to those it employs a complex personality with
ideas and fads of its own. It depends on the loyal devotion of
its servants, and the devoted loyalty of trusted servants is associ-
ated with a certain amount of affectionate contempt, which
keeps it sweet, as it were. By a benevolent provision of Nature
no man is a hero to his valet or else the heroes would have to
brush their own clothes. Likewise ao department appears
216
THE SECRET AGENT
perfectly wise to the intimacy of i s workers. A department
does not know so much as some o * its servants. Being a dis-
passionate organism, it can never be perfectly informed. It
would not be good for its efficiency to know too much. Chief
Inspector Heat got out of the train in a state of ttioughtfulness
entirely untainted with disloyalty, but not quite free of that
jealous mistrust which so often springs on the ground of perfect
devotion, whether to women or to institutions/
During his interview with his chief, the Assistant Commissioner,
to whom he listens 'with outward deference (which means nothing,
being a matter of duty) and inwardly with benevolent toleration',
he settles down to the resolution of bringing the trail of suspicion
home to Michaelis, a ticket-of-leave ex-convict who happens to be
the only thoroughly sympathetic member of the revolutionary
group :
' "There will be no difficulty in getting up sufficient evidence
against him," he said with virtuous complacency. "You may
trust me for that, sir"/
He can take this line with the complete assurance of his moral
judgment.
'It was perfectly legal to arrest that man on the barest sus-
picion. It was legal and expedient on the face of it. His two
former chiefs would have seen the point at once ; whereas this
one, without saying either yes or no, sat there, as if lost in a
dream. Moreover, besides being legal and expedient, the arrest
of Michaelis solved a little personal difficulty which worried
Chief Inspector Heat somewhat. This difficulty had its bearing
upon his reputation, upon his comfort, and even upon the
efficient performance of his duties. For if Michaelis no doubt
knew something about this outrage, the Chief Inspector was
fairly certain that he did not know too much. This was just as
well. He knew much less the Chief Inspector was positive
than certain other individuals he had in his mind, but whose
arrest seemed to him inexpedient, besides being a more com-
plicated matter, on account of the rules of the game. The rules
of the game did not protect so much Michaelis who was an
ex-convict. It would be stupid not to take advantage of legal
facilities. . . /
JOSEPH CONRAD
When the Assistant Commisj ioner disconcerts him with an onde-
partmental scepticism (' Now /hat u it you've got up your sleeve ? '),
Heat is not only very annoyed (' "You, my boy," he said to himself
. . . "you, my bey, you don't know your place, and your place won't
know you very long either, I bet'"), he is morally outraged :
'He had discovered in this affair a delicate and perplexing
side, forcing upon the discoverer a certain amount of insincerity
which, under the names of skill, prudence, discretion, turns up
at one point or another in most human affairs. He felt at the
moment like a tight-rope artist might feel if suddenly, in the
middle of the performance, the manager of the Music Hall were
to rush out of the proper managerial seclusion and begin to
shake the rope/
His indignation responds musically, as it were, to that of Comrade
Ossipon (along with a great deal else) when he hears of the bomb-
explosion, and exclaims that 'undei the present circumstances it's
nothing short of criminal'.
Heat has a further reason for not following up the clue. He has
just, in one of the most memorable of the many vivid and pregnant
scenes and episodes in the book, had his chance meeting in the
narrow by-street with the Professor, who made the bomb. The
Chief Inspector is not in any case in his element where revolutionists
are concerned :
4 At the beginning of his career Chief Inspector Heat had been
concerned with the more energetic forms of thieving. He had
gained his spurs in that sphere, and naturally enough had kept
for it, after his promotion to another department, a feeling not
very far removed from affection. Thieving was not a sheer
absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed,
but still an industry exercised in an industrious world ; it was
work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries,
in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour,
whose practical difference from the other forms of labour con-
sisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or
lead-poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be
briefly defined in its own special phraseology as "Seven years
hard." Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not insensible to
the gravity of moral differences. But neither were the thieves
he had been looking alter. They submitted to the severe sanc-
218
UNDER WESTERN EYES
tiors of a morality familiar to CMef Inspector Heat with a
certain resignation They were his ellow-citizens gone wrong
because of imperfect education Chief Inspector Heat believed ;
but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind
of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the in-
stincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the
instincts of a police officer. Bota recognize the same conven-
tions and have a working knowledge of each other's methods
and of the routine of their respective trades. They understand
each other, which is advantageous to both, and establishes a sort
of amenity in their relations. Products of the same machine,
one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the
machine for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness
essentially the same/
The Professor, physically insignificant, but happy in the superiority
given him by the bomb he always carries on his person and by his
reputation for a reckless readiness to touch it off rather than be
arrested, represents revolutionary abnormality in its most discon-
certing and repugnant form :
'After paying this tribute to what is normal in the constitu-
tion of society (for the idea of thieving appeared to his instinct
as normal as the idea of property), Chief Inspector Heat felt
very angry with himself for having stopped. . . .
'The encounter did not leave behind with Inspector Heat
that satisfactory sense of superiority the members of the police
force get from the unofficial but intimate side of their inter-
course with the criminal classes, by which the vanity of power
is soothed, and the vulgar love of domination over our fellow-
creature: is flattered as worthily as it deserves.
' The perfect anarchist was not recognized as a fellow-creature
by Chief Inspector Heat. He was impossible a mad dog to be
left alone. . . . This being the strong feeling of Inspector Heat,
it appeared to him just and proper that this affair should be
shunted off its obscure and inconvenient track, leading goodness
knows where, into a quiet (and lawful) siding called Michaclis.'
Conrad 'himself shows an unmistakable dislike of revolutionists.
In The Secret Agent he explains them mainly in terms of indolence
(though the Professor and Michaelis are contrasting and comple-
mentary special cases). In Under Western Eyes (1911), which comes
210
JOSEPH CONRAD
up for notice next, his revolt tionists are Russians, and, wh ; le his
presentment is hardly more fl ttering, his general reflections are on
different lines :
' "... in a real revolution not a simple dynastic change or a
mere reform of institutions in a real revolution the best char-
acters do not come to the fronf . A violent revolution falls into
the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypo-
crites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious
intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the
leaders. You will notice that I Lave left out the mere rogues.
The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted
natures ; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a move-
ment but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders
of a revolution. They are its victims : the victims of disgust,
of disenchantment often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely be-
trayed, ideals caricatured that is the definition of revolution-
ary successes. There have been in every revolution hearts
broken by such successes"/
Tlieuold teacher of languages, the presence in the story of 'western
eyes', is here warning Natalia, sister of Haldin the heroic assassin;
and the revolutionists we are shown
'"Bearers [comments Razumov] of the spark to start an
explosion which is meant to change fundamentally the lives of
so many millions in order that Peter Ivanovitch should be the
head of a state" '
leave no room for doubt that he speaks for Conrad. In Peter
Ivanovitch, 'the heroic fugitive', eloquent, woman-exploiting
egoist, and 'Russian Mazzini', we have, we suspect, an actual
historical person.
The space given to The Secret Agent doesn't leave much for
Under Western Eyes. But The Secret Agent is one of Conrad's two
supreme masterpieces, one of the two unquestionable classics of the
first order that he added to the English novel, and, in its own way,
it is like Nostromo in the subtle and triumphant complexity of its
art like, too, in not having had due critical recognition. Under
Western Eyes cannot be claimed with the same confidence for that
order, though it is a most distinguished work, and must be counted
among those upon which Conrad's status as one of the great English
220
UNDER WESTERN EYES
masters securely rests. It is related to The Secret Agent not only by
the revolutionists, but by the theme of isolation (for this figures a
great deal in that book Winnie Verloc jumps to her death from the
night Channel-steamer at least as much to escape the void in which
Stevie's death followed by Ossipon's desertion has left her as from
fear of the gallows). Under Western Eyes has for theme moral isola-
tion as represented by the case of the Russian student Razumov.
Never having known parents, and without connexions, Razumov
even at the outset of the history is 'as lonely in the world as a fish
swimming in the sea'. He is wholly bent on his career, and we are
told characteristically :
'There was nothing strange in the student Razumov's wish
for distinction. A man's real life is that accorded to him in the
thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love/
His prospects are destroyed by the uninvited confidence shown in
him by Haldin, a student revolutionist, who, having brought off a
political assassination, takes refuge in Razumov's rooms. From the
moment of finding him there Razumov is doomed to endure a
trapped and tormented conscience in utter loneliness :
'Who knows what true loneliness is not the conventional
word, but the naked terror ? To the lonely themselves it wears
a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or
some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may
lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human
being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going
mad.
' Razumov had reached that point of vision/
This is his state as he tramps the streets in the winter night, crystal-
lizing his decision to give Haldin up.
'Indeed, it could hardly be called a decision. He had simply
discovered what he had meant to do all along. And yet he Felt
the need of some other mind's sanction/
Giving Haldin up doesn't save Razumov's career. He is involved,
and the police have a use for him. He seeks to terminate his inter-
view with Councillor Mikulin, a creepily convincing Russian
22T
JOSEPH CONRAD
bureaucrat, by asserting his ' /ight to be done once for all wi<~h that
man', and 'to retire simply to retire' :
'An unhurried voice said
'"KiryloSidorovitch."
'Razumov at the door turned his head.
'"To retire," he repeated.
'"Where to ?" asked Councillor Mikulin softly.'
Razumov's mental conflicts and stresses during the Part I that
ends on this note are rendered from the inside with extraordinary
power. We are thus put in a position to appreciate the observations
from the outside recorded through the English teacher of languages
at Geneva, where Razumov, now a spy among the revolutionists,
complicates his problem by falling in love with Haldin's sister. The
earlier inside account of his tormented consciousness shows the in-
fluence of Dostoievsky, and the effc " is to bring out the antipathetic
detachment of Conrad's radical attitude from all that Dostoievsky
stands for. If Conrad knows his Dostoievsky, he sees him through
'western eyes', and sees him, along with 'the lawlessness of auto-
cracy and lawlessness of revolution', as among the 'moral condi-
tions ruling over a large part of this earth's surface' that the old
language teacher, in telling Razumov's story, perceives himself to
be rendering.
Having, by confession to Haldin's sister and to the revolutionists,
escaped at last from the worst of his moral isolation, Razumov ends,
a cripple, his ear-drums deliberately burst by the champion revolu-
tionary killer, in the less intolerable isolation of stone deafness.
Moral isolation is again the theme of Chance (1914); which is,
again, a very different kind of book different from Under Western
Eyes and from the other novels. Flora de Barral, daughter of the
great de Barral, grand-style financial adventurer, suffers first, at the
time of her father's deb&cle, the shock of a fiendish moral assault
from her governess (Flora having no mother having no one but
her father) ; then, her father in jail, suffers further bad luck in the
form of odious relatives, and has bad luck again even in her good
luck: her rescue by the chivalrous Captain Anthony, 'son of the
poet'.
We have, in fact, a variant of the Heyst-Lena situation : while
222
CHANCE
each needs, neither knows, the other, and the nature and circum-
stances of the rescue leave each exquiitely and inhibitingly scrupu-
lous about taking advantage of the o Jier's helplessness or chivalry.
The woman is not, this time, the minor focus of interest, but rather
the reverse Flora is the central character of the cook ; and An-
thony, on the other hand, reintroduces the Lord Jim theme :
'The inarticulate son had set up a standard for himself with
that need for embodying in his conduct the dreams, the passion,
the impulses the poet puts into the arrangements of verses,
which are dearer to him than his own self and may make his
own self appear sublime in the eyes of other people, and even
in his own eyes.
'Did Anthony wish to appear sublime in his own eyes ?'
Again :
'If Anthony's love had been as egoistic as love generally is
it would have been greater than the egoism of his vanity or of
his generosity, if you like.'
In any case, 'She beat him at his own honourable game'. The
question about h<*r is givep here (the pilgrimage is a rendezvous
with Anthony in the East End) :
'She had had an ugly pilgrimage, but whether of love or
necessity, who could tell.'
The technical distinction of Chance has not lacked recognition.
That no doubt is because Chance invites the description 'technical
triumph* in a way which Nostromo and The Secret Agent do not.
One's sense that the 'doing' (see the significant terms of Henry
James's appreciation in the essay called The New Novel, 1914, to be
found in Notes on Novelists) was not so strictly as in their case a
preoccupation with getting the essential theme or themes 'done* is
perhaps not fair not fair, expressed so. The fact is that Conrad's
essential interest here didn't yield him anything like so rich a pattern
as in either of those two books, and the theme indicated by the title,
ingeniously exploited as it is in the mode of> presentation, has no
essential relation with the main theme : chance' plays no notably
different part from that it must play in any story offering a novelist
a study of human nature, and Conrad (it may be suggested) by
223
JOSEPH CONRAD
calling the novel Chance aixd insisting a great deal on the word
implicitly concedes the critic 1 point in question : the point regard-
ing the difference between Chance and the other two.
One tends to make the point a little unfairly because of irritation
with Marlow, who is essential to the presentation
' "But we, my dear Marlow, have the inestimable advantage
of understanding what is happening to others'* '
but is also, in a way touched on earlier, too easy a convenience :
'Marlow emerged out of die shadow of the book-case to get
himself a cigar from a box which stood on a little table by my
side. In the full light of the room I saw in his eyes that slightly
mocking expression with which he habitually covers up his
sympathetic impulses of mirth and pity before the unreasonable
complications the idealism of mankind puts into the simple but
poignant problem of conduct on this earth/
This suggests well enough the kind of direct injection of tone and
attitude that Marlow licenses, and the consequent cheapening effect.
Nevertheless, the view from the outside, the correlated glimpses
from different angles, the standing queries and suspended judgments
this treatment, applied by means of Marlow and the complication
of witnesses, is, quite plainly, the kind dejnanded by the essential
undertaking of the book. And it is applied successfully ; even the
most difficult part of all, the rendering of the 'tension of the false
situation* on board the Ferndale, comes off pretty well (though there
is a touch of sentimentality about the handling of Flora).
The genius is amply apparent in Chance. It is most apparent in
the force of realization with which the characters are evoked, and
which has led above to the mention of Dickens. That which
suggests Dickens in Chance and there is a great deal of it ic all
strongly characteristic Conrad. There is the Shipping Office and
old Powell-Socrates, with his ' tall hat very far at the back of his head
... a full unwrinkled face, and such clear-shining eyes that his grey
beard looked quite false on him, stuck on for a disguise* ; there
are the Fynes the comedy of Mario w's intercourse with them is
characteristic and good ; the great deBarral himself; Flora's odious
relative, the cardboard box manufacturer, who 'had all the civic
virtues in their meanest form' ; Franklin the mate
224
CHANCE
' The mate who, on account of his peculiar build, could not
turn his head quite freely, twisted Hs thick trunk slightly, and
ran his black eyes in the corners to vards the steward.'
There we have an illustration of the vivid particularity with which
things are seen. For another, here is the sinister old de Barral :
' gliding away with his walk which Mr. Powell described to me
as being as level and wary as his voice. He walked as if he
were carrying a glass full of water on his head/
The solemn little Fyne, irreproachable Civil Servant, is epitomized
in the picture of him escaping with his gravity from under the noses
of the dray-horses :
'He skipped wildly out of the way and up on the curbstone
with a purely instinctive precision ; his mind had nothing to do
with his movements. In the middle of his leap, and while in
the act of sailing gravely tiirough the air, he continued to
relieve his outraged feelings.'
The distinction of mind is as apparent in Chance as this kind of
vitality ; it is certainly a remarkable novel.
There is no other that need be discussed. The Rover, the latest
one finished, with its pathos of retrospect and its old man's sense of
the unreality of life, comes plainly from a mind conscious of being
at the end of its own days : it has a remote vividness, but no central
energy. The unfinished Suspense so little lives up to its title that
the published part of it is hard to get through. But Nostromo, The
Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Chance, Victory it is an impressive
enough tale of books (all produced within a decade and a half) for
any man to have to his credit. And not to the credit of English
literary culture or English criticism it went, the evidence obliges
us to conclude, without recognition. True, Conrad enjoyed a
vogue in the early nineteen-twenties, when he was bringing out a
series of inferior novels ; and he had been for some time an estab-
lished name. But for all the odd success of Chance he had too
good reason to feej that he was regarded as the author of Lord Jim ;
the writer of stories about the sea, the jungle and the islands, who
had made some curious ventures outside his beat, but would yet,
one hoped, return to it. Perhaps what may be found against his
p 225
JOSEPH CONRAD
calling the novel Chance an.d insisting a great deal on the word
implicitly concedes the critic.- 1 point in question : the point regard-
ing the difference between Chance and the other two.
One tends to make the point a little unfairly because of irritation
with Marlow, who is essential to the presentation
'"But we, my dear Marknv, have the inestimable advantage
of understanding what is happening to others'"
but is also, in a way touched on earlier, too easy a convenience :
'Marlow emerged out of the shadow of the book-case to get
himself a cigar from a box which stood on a little table by my
side. In the full light of the room I saw in his eyes that slightly
mocking expression with which he habitually covers up his
sympathetic impulses of mirth and pity before the unreasonable
complications the idealism of mankind puts into the sinaple but
poignant problem of conduct on this earth/
This suggests well enough the kind of direct injection of tone and
attitude that Marlow licenses, and the consequent cheapening effect.
Nevertheless, the view from the outside, the correlated glimpses
from different angles, the standing queries and suspended judgments
this treatment, applied by means of Marlow and the complication
of witnesses, is, quite plainly, the kind demanded by the essential
undertaking of the book. And it is applied successfully ; even the
most difficult part of all, the rendering of the 'tension of the false
situation* on board the Ferndale, comes off pretty well (though there
is a touch of sentimentality about the handling of Flora).
The genius is amply apparent in Chance. It is most apparent in
the force of realization with which the characters are evoked, and
which has led above to the mention of Dickens. That which
suggests Dickens in Chance and there is a great deal of it k all
strongly characteristic Conrad. There is the Shipping Office and
old Powell-Socrates, with his ' tall hat very far at the back of his head
... a full unwrinkled face, and such clear-shining eyes that his grey
beard looked quite false on him, stuck on for a disguise* ; there
are the Fynes the comedy of Marlow' s intercourse with them is
characteristic and good ; the great de Barral himself ; Flora's odious
relative, the cardboard box manufacturer, who 'had all the civic
virtues in their meanest form' ; Franklin the mate
224
CHANCE
'The mate who, on account of his peculiar build, could not
turn his head quite freely, twisted Hs thick trunk slightly, and
ran his black eyes in the corners to vards the steward/
There we have an illustration of the vivid particula r ity with which
things are seen. For another, here is the sinister old de Barral :
' gliding away with his walk whicii Mr. Powell described to me
as being as level and wary as his voice. He walked as if he
were carrying a glass full of water on his head/
The solemn little Fyne, irreproachable Civil Servant, is epitomized
in the picture of him escaping with his gravity from under the noses
of the dray-horses :
'He skipped wildly out of the way and up on the curbstone
with a purely instinctive precision ; his mind had nothing to do
with his movements. In the middle of his leap, and while in
the act of sailing gravely tnrough the air, he continued to
relieve his outraged feelings/
The distinction of mind is as apparent in Chance as this kind of
vitality ; it is certainly a remarkable novel.
There is no other that need be discussed. The Rover, the latest
one finished, with its pathos of retrospect and its old man's sense of
the unreality of life, comes plainly from a mind conscious of being
at the end of its own days : it has a remote vividness, but no central
energy. The unfinished Suspense so little lives up to its title that
the published part of it is hard to get through. But Nostromo, The
Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Chance, Victory it is an impressive
enough tale of books (all produced within a decade and a half) for
any man to have to his credit. And not to the credit of English
literary culture or English criticism it went, the evidence obliges
us to conclude, without recognition. True, Conrad enjoyed a
vogue in the early nineteen-twenties, when he was bringing out a
series of inferior novels ; and he had been for some time an estab-
lished name. But for all the odd success of Chance he had too
good reason to feeji that he was regarded as the author of Lord Jim ;
the writer of stories about the sea, the jungle andf the islands, who
had made some curious ventures outside his beat, but would yet,
one hoped, return to it. Perhaps what may be found against his
p 225
JOSEPH CONRAD
name in the new Concise Cambridge History of English Literature gives
what is still the prevalent view.
But he was not only by fai the greatest of the Edwardians ; there
is more to be said than that. Scott, Thackeray, Meredith and Hardy
are commonly accounted great English novelists : if the criterion
is the achievement in work addressed to the adult mind, and capable
as such of engaging again and again its full critical attention, then
Conrad is certainly a greater novelist than the four enumerated.
This, which may seem a more striking claim to some critics than to
others, is merely a way of insisting on the force of the judgment
that Conrad is among the very greatest novelists in the language
or any language.
226
V
'HARD TIMES'
An Analytic Note
TTARD TIMES is not a difficult work ; its intention and nature
JTjL are pretty obvious. If, then, it is the masterpiece I take it for,
why has it not had general recognition ? To judge by the critical re-
cord, it has had none at all. If there exists anywhere an appreciation,
or even an acclaiming reference I have missed it. In the books and
essays on Dickens, so far as I kncrv them, it is passed over as a very
minor thing ; too slight and insignificant to distract us for more
than a sentence or two from the works worth critical attention.
Yet, if I am right, of all Dickens's works it is the one that has all the
strength of his genius, together with a strength no other of them
can show that of a completely serious work of art.
The answer to the questio* asked above seems to me to bear on
the traditional approach to 'the English novel'. For all the more
sophisticated critical currency of the last decade or two, that ap-
proach still prevails, at any rate in the appreciation of the Victorian
novelists. The business of the novelist, you gather, is to ' create a
world', and the mark of tlie master is external abundance he gives
you lots of 'life'. The test of life in his characters (he must above
all create 'living' characters) is that they go on living outside the
book. Expectations as unexacting as these are not when they en-
counter significance, grateful for it, and when it meets them in that
insistent form where nothing is very engaging as 'life* unless its
relevance is fully taken, miss it altogether. This is the only way in
which I can account for the neglect suffered by Henry James's The
Europeans, which may be classed with Hard Times as a moral fable
though one might have supposed that James would enjoy the
advantage of being approached with expectations of subtlety and
closely calculated relevance. Fashion, however, has not recom-
mended his earlier work, and this (whatever appreciation may be
enjoyed by The Ambassadors) still suffers from the prevailing ex-
pectation of redundant and irrelevant 'life'.
I need say no more by way of defining the moral fable than that
in it the intention is peculiarly insistent, so that, the representative
significance of everything in the fable character, episode, and so
on is immediately apparent as we read. Intention might seem to
be insistent enough in the opening of Hard Times, in that scene in
227
HARD TIMES
Mr. GradgrincTs school. Bui then, intention is often very insistent
in Dickens, without its being taker up in any inclusive significance
that informs and organizes a * oherent whole ; and, for lack of any
expectation of an organized whole, it has no doubt been supposed
that in Hard Times the satiric irony of the first two chapters is merely,
in the large and genial Dickensian way, thrown together with
melodrama, pathos and humoiu and that we are given these in-
gredients more abundantly and exuberantly elsewhere. Actually,
the Dickensian vitality is there, in its varied characteristic modes,
which have the more force because they are free of redundance :
the creative exuberance is controlled by a profound inspiration.
The inspiration is what is given in the title, Hard Times. Ordin-
arily Dickens's criticisms of the world he lives in are casual and
incidental a matter of including among the ingredients of a book
some indignant treatment of a particular abuse. But in Hard Times
he is for once possessed by a comprehensive vision, one in which
the inhumanities of Victorian civib' Cation are seen as fostered and
sanctioned by a hard philosophy, the aggressive formulation of an
inhumane spirit. The philosophy is represented by Thomas Grad-
grird, Esquire, Member of Parliament for Coketown, who has
brought up his children on the lines of the experiment recorded by
John Stuart Mill as carried out on himself. What Gradgrind stands
for is, though repellent, nevertheless respectable ; his Utilitarianism
is a theory sincerely held and there is intellectual disinterestedness in
its application. But Gradgrind marries his eldest daughter to Josiah
Bounderby, * banker, merchant, manufacturer', about whom there
is no disinterestedness whatever, and nothing to be respected.
Bounderby is Victorian 'rugged individualism* in its grossest and
most intransigent form. Concerned with nothing but self-assertion
and power and material success, he has no interest in ideals or ideas
except the idea of being the completely self-made man (since, for
all his brag, he is not that in fact). Dickens here makes a just
observation about the affinities and practical tendency of Utilitarian-
ism, as, in his presentment of the Gradgrind home and the Grad-
grind elementary school, he does about the Utilitarian spirit in
Victorian education.
All this is obvious enough. But Dickens's art, while remaining
that of the great popular entertainer, has in Hard Times, as he renders
his full critical vision, a stamina, a flexibility combined with con-
sistency, and a depth that he seems to have had little credit for.
Take that opening scene in the school-room :
228
DICKENS
'"Girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing
with his square forefinger, "I don't know that girl. Who is that girl ?"
"' Sissy Jupc, sir," explained number twenty, blushing, standing up,
and curtsying.
"'Sissy is not a name," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Don't call yourself
Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia."
'"It's father as call me Sissy, sit," returned the young girl in a
trembling voice, and with another curtsy.
' " Then he has no business to do it," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Tell him
he mustn't. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father ?"
'"He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir."
'Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling
with his hand.
'"We don't want to know anything about that here. You mustn't
tell us about that here. Your father breaks horses, don't he ?"
'"If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break
horses in the ring, sir."
'"You mustn't tell us about the ring here. Very well, then. De-
scribe your father as a horse-breaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare
say?"
"Oh, yes, sir!"
'"Very well, then. He is ! a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horse-
breaker. Give me your definition of a horse."
(Sissy Jupe thrown in:o the greatest alarm by this demand.)
'"Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!" said Mr. Grad-
grind, for the general benefit of all the little pitchers. "Girl number
twenty possessed of no facts in reference to one of the commonest
animals ! Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours."
'"Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four
grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring ;
in marshy countries, sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to
be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and
much more) Bitzer.'
Lawrence himself, protesting against harmful tendencies in
education, never made the point more tellingly. Sissy has been
brought up among horses, and among people whose livelihood
depends upon understanding horses but 'we don't want to know
anything about that here'. Such knowledge isn't real knowledge.
Bitzer, the model pupil, on the button's being pressed, promptly
vomits up the genuine article, 'Quadruped. Graminivorous', etc. ;
229
HARD TIMES
and 'Now, girl number twenty, you know what a horse is'. The
irony, pungent enough locally, is richly developed in the subsequent
action. Bitzer 's aptness has *ts evaluative comment in his career.
Sissy's incapacity to acquire this kind of 'fact* or formula, her un-
aptness for education, is manifested to us, on the other hand, as part
and parcel of her sovereign and indefeasible humanity : it is the
virtue that makes it impossible tor her to understand, or acquiesce
in, an ethos for which she is 'girl number twenty', or to think of
any other human being as a unit for arithmetic.
This kind of ironic method might seem to commit the author to
very limited kinds of effect. In Hard Times, however, it associates
quite congruously, such is the flexibility of Dickens's art, with very
different methods ; it co-operates in a truly dramatic and profoundly
poetic whole. Sissy Jupe, who might be taken here for a merely
conventional persona, has already, as a matter of fact, been estab-
lished in a potently symbolic role : she is part of the poetically-
creative operation of Dickens's gei/ *s in Hird Times. Here is a
passage I omitted from the middle of the excerpt quoted above :
'The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on
Bitzer, perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sun-light
which, darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely white-
washed room, irradiated Sissy. For the boys and girls sat on the face
of an inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a
narrow interval ; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny
side, came in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at
the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught
the end. But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired that
she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun
when it shone upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that
the self-same rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he
ever possessed. His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the
short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contras*
with something paler than themselves, expressed their form. His
short-cropped hair might have been a mere continuation of the sandy
freckles on his forehead and face. His skin was so unwholesomely
deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut,
he would bleed white.'
There is no need to insist on the force representative of Dickens's
art in general in Hard Times with which the moral and spiritual
differences are rendered here in terms of sensation, so that the sym-
bolic intention emerges out of metaphor and the vivid evocation of
230
DICKENS
the concrete. What may, perhaps, be emphasized is that Sissy
stands for vitality as well as goodness- -they are seen, in fact, as one ;
she is generous, impulsive life, finding self-fulfilment in self-forget-
fulness all that is the antithesis of calculating self-interest. There
is an essentially Laurcntian suggestion about the way in which 'the
dark-eyed and dark-haired' girl, contrasting with Bitzer, seemed
to receive a 'deeper and more luscrous colour from the sun', so
opposing the life that is lived freely and richly from the deep
instinctive and emotional springs to the thin-blooded, quasi-
mechanical product of Gradgrindery.
Sissy's symbolic significance is Hound up with that of Sleary's
Horse-riding, where human kindness is very insistently associated
with vitality. Representing human spontaneity, the circus-athletes
represent at the same time highly-developed skill and deftness of
kinds that bring poise, pride and confident ease they are always
buoyant, and, ballet-dancer-like, in training :
'There were two o*. three !.cuidsome young women among them,
with two or three husbands, and their two or three mothers, and their
eight or nine little children, who did the fairy business when required.
The father of one of the families was in the habit of balancing the father
of another of the families on the top of a great pole ; the father of the
third family often made a pyramid of both those fathers, with Master
Kidderminster for the apex, and himself for the base ; all the fathers
could dance upon rolling casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and
balls, twirl hand-basins, ride upon anything, jump over everything,
and stick at nothing. All the mothers could (and did) dance upon the
slack wire and the tight-rope, and perform rapid acts on bare-backed
steeds ; none o^them were at all particular in respect of showing their
legs ; and one of them, alone in a Greek chariot, drove six-in-hand into
every town they came to. They all assumed to be mighty rakish and
knowing, they were not very tidy in their private dresses, they were
not at all orderly in their domestic arrangements, and the combined
literature of the whole company would have produced but a poor
letter on any subject. Yet there was a remarkable gentleness and child-
ishness about these people, a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp
practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserv-
ing often of as much respect, and always of as much generous construc-
tion, as the every-day virtues of any class of people in the world/
Their skills have no value for the Utilitarian calculus, but they
express vital human impulse, and they minister to vital human needs.
The Horse-riding, frowned upon as frivolous and wasteful by Grad-
HARD TIMES
grind and malignantly scorned by Bounderby, brings the nwchine-
hands of Coketown (the spirit-quenching hideousness of which is
hauntingly evoked) what the/ are starved of. It brings to them, not
merely amusement, but art, and the spectacle of triumphant activity
that, seeming to contain its end within itself, is, in its easy mastery,
joyously self-justified. In investing a travelling circus with this kind
of symbolic value Dickens expresses a profounder reaction to in-
dustrialism than might have been expected of him. It is not only
pleasure and relaxation the Coketowners stand in need of; he feels
the dreadful degradation of life that would remain even if they were
to be given a forty-four hour week, comfort, security and fun.
We recall a characteristic passage from D. H. Lawrence.
'The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of
Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs, glisten-
ing their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet
and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through
everything. The utter negation of naiu/al beaaty, the utter negation
of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely
beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human
intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocers' shops,
the rhubarb and lemons in the greengrocers' ! the awful liats in the
milliners all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster and gilt
horror of the cinema with its wet picture anouncements, "A Woman's
Love,*' and the new big Primitive chapel, primitive enough in its stark
brick and big panes of greenish and raspberry glass in the windows.
The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick and stood
behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational chapel,
which thought itself superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and had
a steeple, but not a very high one. Just beyond were the new school
buildings, expensive pink brick, and gravelled playground inside iron
railings, all very imposing, and mixing the suggestion of a chapel and a
prison. Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson, just finishing
the la-me-do-la exercises and beginning a "sweet children's song."
Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible
to imagine : a strange bawling yell followed the outlines of a tune. It
was not like animals : animals mean something when they yell. It was
like nothing on earth, and it was called singing. Connie sat and
listened with her heart in her boots, as Field was filling petrol. What
could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living
intuitive faculty was dead as nails and only queer mechanical yells and
uncanny will-power remained ?'
DICKENS
Dickens couldn't have put it in just those terms, but the way in
which his vision of the Horse-riders insistb on their gracious vitality
implies that reaction.
Here an objection may be anticipated as a way of making a
point. Coketown, like Gradgrind and Bounderby, is real enough ;
but it can't be contended that the Horse-riding is real in the same
sense. There would have been some athletic skill and perhaps some
bodily grace among the people of a Victorian travelling circus, but
surely so much squalor, grossness and vulgarity that we must find
Dickens's symbolism sentimentally false? And 'there was a re-
markable gentleness and childishness about these people, a special
inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice' that, surely, is going
ludicrously too far ?
If Dickens, intent on an emotional effect, or drunk with moral
enthusiasm, had been deceiving himself (it couldn't have been
innocently) about the nature of the actuality, he would then indeed
have been guilty of sentimental falsity, and the adverse criticism
would have held. But the Horse-riding presents no such case. The
virtues and qualities that Dickens prizes do indeed exist, and it is
necessary for his critique of Utilitarianism and industrialism, and for
(what is the same thing) his creative purpose, to evoke them vividly.
The book can't, :n my judgment, be fairly charged with giving a
misleading representation of human nature. And it would plainly
not be intelligent critidsm to suggest that anyone could be mis-
led about the nature of circuses by Hard Times. The critical
question is merely one of tact : was it well-judged of Dickens
to try to do that which had to be done somehow with a
travelling circus ?
Or, rather, tae question is : by what means has he succeeded ?
For the success is complete. It is conditioned partly by the fact that,
from the opening chapters, we have been tuned for the reception of
a highly conventional art though it is a tuning that has no narrowly
limiting effect. To describe at all cogently the means by which this
responsiveness is set up would take a good deal of 'practical
criticism' analysis analysis that would reveal an extraordinary flexi-
bility in the art of Hard Times. This can be seen very obviously in
the dialogue. Some passages might come from an ordinary novel.
Others have the ironic pointedness of the school-room scene in so
insistent a form that we might be reading a ^ork as stylized as
Jonsonian comedy : Gradgrind's final exchange with Bitzer (quoted
below) is a supreme instance. Others again are 'literary', like the
HARD TIMES
conversation between Grandgrind and Louisa on her flight home
for refuge from Mr. James Harthouse's attentions.
To the question how the reconciling is done there is much more
diversity in Hard Times than these references to dialogue suggest
the answer can be given by pointing to the astonishing and irresist-
ible richness of life that characterizes the book everywhere. It
meets us everywhere, unstrained and natural, in the prose. Out of
such prose a great variety of presentations can arise congenially with
equal vividness. There they are, unquestionably 'real'. It goes
back to an extraordinary energy of perception and registration in
Dickens. 'When people say that Dickens exaggerates', says Mr.
Santayana, 'it seems to me that tney can have no eyes and no ears.
They probably have only notions of what things and people are ;
they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value'.
Settling down as we read to an implicit recognition of this truth, we
don't readily and confidently apply any criterion we suppose our-
selves to hold for distinguishing varieties of relation between what
Dickens gives us and a normal 'real . His flexibility is that of a
richly poetic art of the word. He doesn't write 'poetic prose' ; he
writes with a poetic force of evocation, registering with the re-
sponsiveness ofa genius of verbal expression what he so sharply aees
and feels. In fact, by texture, imaginative mode, symbolic method,
and the resulting concentration, Hard Times affects us as belonging
with formally poetic works.
There is, however, more to be said about the success that attends
Dickens's symbolic intention in the Horse-riding; there is an
essential quality of his genius to be emphasized. There is no Hamlet
in him, and he is quite unlike Mr. Eliot.
The red-eyed scavengers are creeping
From Kentish Town and Golders Green
there is nothing of that in Dickens's reaction to life. He observes
with gusto the humanness of humanity as exhibited in the urb?n
(and suburban) scene. When he sees, as he 'sees so readily, the
common manifestations of human kindness, ana the essential virtues,
asserting themselves in the midst of ugliness, squalor and banality,
his warmly sympathetic response has no disgust to overcome. There
is no suggestion, for instance, of recoil or of distance-keeping
from the game-eyed, brandy-soaked, flabby-surfaced Mr. Sleary,
who is successfully made to figure for us a humane, anti-Utilitarian
positive. This is not sentimentality in Dickens, but genius, and a
genius that should be f6und peculiarly worth attention in an age
234
DICKENS
when, as D. H. Lawrence (with, as 1 remember, Mr. WyndAam
Lewis immediately in view) says, 'My God ! they stink', tends to
be an insuperable and final reaction.
Dickens, as everyone knows, is very capable of sentimentality.
We have it in Hard Times (though not to any seriously damaging
effect) in Stephen Blackpool, the good, victimized working-man,
whose perfect patience under inflation we are expected to find
supremely edifying and irresistibly touching as the agonies are piled
on for his martyrdom. But Sissy Jupe is another matter. A general
description of her part in the fable might suggest the worst, but
actually she has nothing in common with Little Nell : she shares
in the strength of the Horse-riding. She is wholly convincing in
the function Dickens assigns to her. The working of her influence
in the Utilitarian home is conveyed with a fine tact, and we do really
feel her as a growing potency. Dickens can even, with complete
success, give her the stage for a victorious tete-a-tete with the well-
bred and languid elegant, Mr James Harthouse, in which she tells
him that his duty is to leave Coketown and cease troubling Louisa
with his attentions :
* She was not afraid of him, or in any way disconcerted ; she seemed
to have her mind entirely preoccupied with the occasion of her visit,
and to have substituted that consideration for herself.'
The quiet victory of disinterested goodness is wholly convincing.
At the opening of the book Sissy establishes the essential distinc-
tion between Gradgrind and Bounderby. Gradgrind, by taking her
home, however ungraciously, shows himself capable of humane
feeling, however unacknowledged. We are reminded, in the
previous school-room scene, of the Jonsonian affinities of Dickens's
art, and Bounderby turns out to be consistently a Jonsonian char-
acter in the sense that he is incapable of change. He remains the
blustering egotist and braggart, and responds in character to the
collapse of his marriage :
"Til give you to understand, in reply to that, that there unquestion-
ably is an incompatibility of the first magnitude to be summed up in
this that your daughter don't properly know her husband's merits,
and is not impressed with such a sense as would become her, by George !
of the honour ot his alliance. That's plain speaking, I hope.'"
He remains Jonsonianly consistent in his last testament and death.
But Gradgrind, in the nature of the fable, Has to experience the con-
235
HARD TIMJS
futaiion of his philosophy, and to be capable of the change involved
in admitting that life has proved him wrong. (Dickens's art in
Hard Times differs from Ben Jonson's not in being inconsistent, but
in being so very much more flexible and inclusive a point that
seemed to be worth making because the relation between Dickens
and Jonson has been stressed of late, and I have known unfair
conclusions to be drawn from f he comparison, notably in respect
of Hard Times.)
The confutation of Utilitarianism by life is conducted with great
subtlety. That the conditions for it are there in Mr. Gradgrind
he betrays by his initial kindness, ungenial enough, but properly
rebuked by Bounderby, to Sissy. 'Mr. Gradgrind', we are told,
'though hard enough, was by no means so rough a man as Mr.
Bounderby. His character was not unkind, all things considered ;
it might have been very kind indeed if only he had made some
mistake in the arithmetic that balanced it years ago'. The in-
adequacy of the calculus is beautifully exposed when he brings it
to bear on the problem of marriage in the consummate scene with
his eldest daughter :
'He waited, as if he would have been glad that she said somethirg.
But she said never a word.
'"Louisa, my dear, you are the subject of a proposal of marriage
that has been made to me.*'
'Again he waited, and again she answered not one word. This so
far surprised him as to induce him gendy to repeat, "A proposal of
marriage, my dear." To which she returned, without any visible
emotion whatever :
'"I hear you, father. I am attending, I assure you."
'"Well !" said Mr. Gradgrind, breaking into a smile, after being for
the moment at a loss, "you are even more dispassionate than I expected,
Louisa. Or, perhaps, you are not unprepared for the announcement
I have it in charge to make ?"
'"I cannot say that, father, until I hear it. Prepared or unprepared,
I wish to hear it all from you. I wish to hear you state it to me, father."
'Strange to relate, Mr. Gradgrind was not so collected at this moment
as his daughter was. He took a paper knife in his hand, turned it over,
laid it down, took it up again, and even then had to look along the
blade of it, considering how to go on.
'"What you say, my dear Louisa, is perfectly reasonable. I have
undertaken, then, to let you know that in short, that Mr. Boun-
derby
236
DICKENS
His embarrassment by his own avowal is caused by the perfect
rationality with which she receives his overture. He is still more
disconcerted when, with a complete! 1 * dispassionate matter-otfact-
ness that does credit to his regime, she gives him the opportunity to
state in plain terms precisely what marriage should mean for the
young Houyhnhnm :
' Silence between them. The deadly statistical clock very hollow.
The distant smoke very black and heavy.
'"Father/* said Louisa, "do you think I love Mr. Bounderby?"
'Mr. Gradgrind was extremel/ discomforted by this unexpected
question. "Well, my child," he icturned, "I really cannot take
upon myself to say."
'"Father," pursued Louisa in exacdy the same voice as before, "do
you ask me to love Mr Bounderby ?"
'"My dear Louisa, no. I ask nothing."
'"Father," she still pursued, "does Mr. Bounderby ask me to love
him?"
'"Really, my dear," said Mr. Gradgrind, "it is difficult to answer
your question "
'"Difficult to answer it, Yes or No, father ?"
'"Certainly, my dear. Because" here was something to demon-
strate, and it set him up again "because the reply depends so materi-
ally, Louisa, on the sense in which we use the expression. Now, Mr.
Bounderby does not do you the injustice, and does not do himself the
injustice, of pretending to anything fanciful, fantastic, or (I am using
synonymous terms) sentimental. Mr. Bounderby would have seen
you grow up under his eye to very little purpose, if he could so far
forget what is Jue to your good sense, not to say to his, as to address
you from any such ground. Therefore, perhaps, the expression itself
I merely suggest this to you, my dear may be a litde misplaced."
'"What would you advise me to use in its stead, father ?"
' "Why, my dear Louisa," said Mr. Gradgrind, completely recovered
by this time, "I would advise you (since you ask me) to consider the
question, as you have been accustomed to consider every other ques-
tion, simply as one of tangible Fact. The ignorant and the giddy may
embarrass such subjects with irrelevant fancies, and other absurdities
that have no existence, properly viewed reallv no existence but it
is no compliment* to you to say that you know better. Now, what are
the Facts of this case ? You are, we will say in round numbers, twenty
years of age ; Mr. Bounderby is, we will say in round numbers, fifty.
There is some disparity in your respective years, but . . ."'
23*1
HARD TIMES
And at this point Mr. Giadgrind seizes the chance for a happy
escape ijito statistics. Bat Louisa brings him firmly back :
'"What do you recommc id, father?" asked Louisa, her reserved
composure not in the least affected by these gratifying results, "that I
should substitute for the term I used just now ? For the misplaced
expression?"
'"Louisa," returned her father, "it appears to me that nothing can be
plainer. Confining yourself rigidly to Fact, the question of Fact you
state to yourself is : Does Mr. Bounderby ask me to marry him ?
Yes, he does. The sole remaining question tben is : Shall I marry
him ? I think nothing can be plainer than that."
'"Shall I marry him ?" repeated Louisa with great deliberation.
'"Precisely."'
It is a triumph of ironic art. No logical analysis could dispose of
the philosophy of fact and calculus with such neat finality. As the
issues are reduced to algebraic formuKtion they are patently emptied
of all real meaning. The instinct-free rationality of the emotionless
Houyhnhnm is a void. Louisa proceeds to try and make him un-
demand that she is a living creature and therefore no Houyhnhnm,
but in vain ('to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the
artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting between
himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude
the utmost cunning of algebra, until the last trumpet ever to be
sounded will blow even algebra to wreck').
'Removing her eyes from him, she sat so long looking silently
towards the town, that he said at length: "Are you consulting the
chimneys of the Coketown works, Louisa ?"
'"There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous
smoke. Yet, when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father!" she
answered, turning quickly.
' " Of course I know that, Louisa. I do not see the application of th-
remark." To do him justice, he did not at all.
' She passed it away with a slight motion of her hand, and concen-
trating her attention upon him again, said, "Father, I have often
thought that life is very short". This was so distinctly one of his
subjects that he interposed :
'"It is short, no doubt, my dear. Still, the average duration of
human life is proved to have increased of late years. The calculations
of various life assurance and annuity offices, among other figures which
cannot go wrong, have established the fact."
238
DICKENS
'"I speak of my own life, father."
' '* Oh, indeed ! Still," said Mr. Gradgrinu, "I need not point out to
you, Louisa, that it is governed by the laws which govern lives in the
aggregate."
'" While it lasts, I would wish to do the little I can, and the little I
am fit for. What does it matter ?"
'Mr. Gradgrind seemed rather at a loss to understand the last four
words ; replying, "How, matter ? What matter, my dear ?"
'"Mr. Bounderby," she went on in a steady, straight way, without
regarding this, "asks me to marry him. The question I have to ask
myself is, shall I marry him ? That is so, father, is it not ? You have
told me so, father. Have you not ?"
'"Certainly, my dear."
"'Let it be so."'
The psychology ot Louisa's development and of her brother
Tom's is sound. Having no outlet for her emotional life except in
her love for her brother, sh^ 1 ;ves for him, and marries Bounderby
under pressure from Tom for Tom's sake ('What does it
matter ?'). Thus, by the constrictions and starvations of the Grad-
grind regime , arc natural affection and capacity for disinterested
devotion turned to ill. As for Tom, the regime has made of him a
bored and sullen whelp, and 'he was becoming that not unpre-
cedented triumph of calculation which is usually at work on number
one' the Utilitarian philosophy has done that for him. He
declares that when he goes to live with Bounderby as having a post
in the bank, 'he'll have his revenge'. 'I mean, I'll enjoy myself a
little, and go about and see something and hear something. I'll
recompense myself for the way in which I've been brought up'.
His descent into debt and bank-robbery is natural. And it is natural
that Louisa having sacrificed herself for this unrepaying object of
affection, should be found not altogether unresponsive when Mr.
James Harthouse, having sized up the situation, pursues his oppor-
tunity with well-bred and calculating tact. His apologia for genteel
cynicism is a shrewd thrust at the Gradgrind philosophy :
"'The only difference between us and the professors of virtue or
benevolence, or philanthropynever mind the nameis, that we
know it is all meaningless, and say so ; while they know it equally,
and will never say so."
'Why should she be shocked or warned by this reiteration ? It was
not so unlike her father's principles, and her early training, that it need
startle her.'
259
HARD TIMUS
"When, fleeing from temptation, she arrives back at her father's
house, tells him her plignt, and, crying, 'All I know is, your phil-
osophy and your teaching wiU not save me', collapses, he sees *the
pride of his heart and the triumph of his system lying an insensible
heap at his feet'. The fallacy now calamitously demonstrated can
be seenfocussed in that 'pride', which brings together in an illusory
oneness the pride of his system and his love for his child. What
that love is Gradgrind now knows, and he knows that it matters to
him more than the system, which is thus confuted (the educational
failure as such being a lesser matter). There is nothing sentimental
h^re ; the demonstration is impressive, because we are convinced
of the love, and because Gradgrind has been made to exist for us as
a man who has 'meant to do right' :
'He said it earnestly, ind, to do him justice, he had. In gauging
fathomless deeps with his little mean excise rod, and in staggering over
the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do
great things. Within the limits of hi "hort *ether he had tumbled
about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of
purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company lie kept.'
The demonstration still to come, that of which the other 'triumph
of his system', Tom, is the centre, is sardonic comedy, imagined
with great intensity and done with the sure touch of genius. There
is the pregnant scene in which Mr. Gradgrind, in the deserted ring
of a third-rate travelling circus, has to recognize his son in a comic
negro servant ; and has to recognize that his son owes his escape
from Justice to a peculiarly disinterested gratitude to the oppor-
tunity given him by the non-Utilitarian Mr. Sleary, grateful for
Sissy's sake, to assume such a disguise :
'In a preposterous coat, like a beadle's, with cuffs and flap: exagger-
ated to an unspeakable extent ; in an immense waistcoat, knee breeches,
buckled shoes, and a mad cocked-hat ; with nothing fitting him, and
everything of coarse material, moth-eaten, and full of holes ; with
seams in his black face, where fear and heat had started through the
greasy composition daubed all over it ; anything so grimly, detestably,
ridiculously shameful as the whelp in his comic livery, Mr. Gradgrind
never could by any other means have believed in, weigh able and
measurable fact though it was. And one of his model children had
come to this !
'At first the whelp would not draw any nearer but persisted in re-
maining up there by himself. Yielding at length, if any concession so
240
DICKENS
sullenly made can be called yielding, tc the entreaties of Sissy for
isv. he disowned altogether he came c'own, bench by bench,
until he stood in the sawdust, on the verge of the circle, as far as
possible, within its limits, from where LJ father sat.
'"How was this done?" asked the father.
'"How was what done ?" moodil/ answered the son.
'"This robbery," said the father, raising his voice upon the word.
1 "I forced the safe myself overnight, and shut it up ajar before I went
away. I had had the key that was found made long before. I dropped
it that morning, that it might be supposed to have been used. I didn't
take the money all at once. I pretended to put my balance away every
night, but I didn't. Now you know all about it."
*"If a thunderbolt had fallen on me," said the father, "it would have
shocked me less than this !"
'"I don't see why," grumbled the son. "So many people are
employed in situations of trust ; so many people, out of so many, will
be dishonest. I have heard you talk, a hundred times, of its being a
law. How can I help laws ? * ou have comforted others with such
things, father. Comfort yourself!"
'The father buried his face in his hands, and the son stood in his dis-
gra~eful grotesqueness, biting straw : his hands, with the black partly
worn awa) inside, Booking Wee the hands of a monkey. The evening
was fast closing in ; and, from time to time, he turned the whites of his
eyes restlessly and impatiently towards his father. They were the only
parts of his face that showed any life or expression, the pigment upon
it was so thick.'
Something of the rich complexity of Dickens's art may be seen
in this passage. No simple formula can take account of the various
elements in the vvhole effect, a sardonic-tragic in which satire con-
sorts with pathos. The excerpt in itself suggests the justification for
saying that Hard Times is a poetic work. It suggests that the genius
of the writer may fairly be described as that of a poetic dramatist,
and that, in our preconceptions about 'the novel', we may miss,
within the field of fictional prose, possibilities of concentration and
flexibility in the interpretation of life such as we associate with
Shakespearean drama.
The note, as we have it above in Tom's retort, of ironic-satiric
discomfiture of th<? Utilitarian philosopher by the rebound of his
formulae upon himself is developed, in the ensuing scene with
Bitzer, the truly successful pupil, the real triumph of the system.
He arrives to intercept Tom s flight :
Q 241
HARD TIMES
'Bitzer, still holding the paralysed culprit by the collar, stood in the
Ring, blinking at his olc patron through the darkness of the tw Jight.
'"Bitzer," said Mr. Gradgrind, broken down, and miserably sub-
missive to him, "have you a near:?"
'"The circu^tion, sir," returned Bitzer, smiling at the oddity of the
question, "couldn't be carried on without one. No man, sir, ac-
quainted with the facts established by Harvey relating to the circulation
of the blood, can doubt that I have a heart."
'"Is it accessible," cried Mr. Grandgrind, "to any compassionate
influence?"
'"It is accessible to Reason, sir," returned the excellent young man.
"And to nothing else."
'They stood looking at each other ; Mr. Gradgrind's face as white as
the pursuer's.
'"What motive even what motive in reason can you have for
preventing the escape of this wretched youth," said Mr. Gradgrind,
"and crushing his miserable father ? See his sister here. Pity us !"
'"Sir," returned Bitzer in a very bu^Jiess-iike and logical manner,
"since you ask me what motive I have in reason for taking young
Mr. Tom back to Coketown, it is only reasonable to let you know . . .
I am going to take young Mr. Tom back to Coketown, in ordei to
deliver him over to Mr. Bounderby. Si*., I have ro doubc whatever
that Mr. Bounderby will then promote me to young Mr. Tom's
situation. And I wish to have his situation, sir, for it will be a rise to
me, and will do me good."
'"If this is solely a question of self-interest with you " Mr. Grad-
grind began.
'"I beg your pardon for interrupting you, sir," returned Bitzer,
"but I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of
self-interest. What you must always appeal to is a person's self-
interest. It's your only hold. We are so constituted. I was brought
up in that catechism when I was very young, sir, as you are aware."
'"What sum of money," said Mr. Gradgrind, "will you set agains;
your expected promotion ?"
'"Thank you, sir," returned Bitzer, "for hinting at the proposal;
but I will not set any sum against it. Knowing that your clear head
would propose that alternative, I have gone over the calculations in my
mind ; and I find that to compound a felony, even on very Ugh terms
indeed, would not be as safe and good for me as my improved pros-
pects in the Bank."
'"Bitzer," said Mr. Gradgrird, stretching out his hands as though
242
DICKENS
he would have said, See how miserable 1 am ! "Bitzer, I have but cne
chance left to soften you. You were many years at my school. If, in
remembrance of the pains bestowed upon you there, you can persuade
yourself in any degree to disregard your present interest and release my
son, I entreat and pray you to give him the benefit of that remem-
brance."
'"I really wonder, sir," rejoined the old pupil in an argumentative
manner, "to find you taking a position so untenable. My schooling
was paid for ; it was a bargain ; and when I came away, the bargain
ended."
'It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy, that
everything was to be paid for. Nooody was ever on any account to
give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase.
Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were
not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to
death, w^s to be a bargain across the counter. And if we didn't get to
Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had
no business there.
'"I don't deny," added Bitzer, "that my schooling was cheap. But
that comes right, sir. I was made in the cheapest market, and have to
dispose of myself in the dearest."'
Tom's escape is contrived, successfully in every sense, by means
belonging to Dickensian high-fantastic comedy. And there follows
the solemn moral of tae whole fable, put with the tightness of
genius into Mr. Sleary 's asthmatic mouth. He, agent of the artist's
marvellous tact, acquits himself of it characteristically :
'"Thquire, you don't need to be told that dogth ith wonderful
animalth."
'" Their instinct," said Mr. Gradgrind, "is surprising."
'"Whatever you call it and I'm bletht if I know what to call it"
said Sleary, "it ith athtonithing. The way in which a dog'll find you
the di'thtanthe he'll come !"
'"His scent," said Mr. Gradgrind, "being so fine."
'"I'm bletht if I know what to call it," repeated Sleary, shaking his
head, "but I have had dogth find me, Thquire . . ."'
And Mi. Sleary proceeds to explain that Sissy's truant father is
certainly dead because his performing dog, who \vould never have
deserted him living, has come back to the Horse-riding :
'"he wath lame, and pretty well blind. He went round to our chil-
243
TIM2S
dr ?n, one after another, ath if he wath a theeking for a child he knowed ;
and then he come to me, . nd thro wed hithelf up behind, and thtcod on
his two fore-legth, weak as he wath, and then he wagged hith tail and
died. Thquire, that dog was Merrylegth." '
The whole passage has to be read as it stands in the text (Book III,
Chapter VIII). Reading it there we have to stand off and reflect at a
distance to recognize the potentialities that might have been realized
elsewhere as Dickensian sentimentality. There is nothing senti-
mental in the actual effect. The profoundly serious intention is in
control, the touch sure, and the structure that ensures the poise
uiiassertively complex. Here is :he formal moral :
"'Tho, whether her father bathely detherted her; or whether he
broke hith own heart alone, rather than pull her down along with
him ; never will be known now, Thquire, till no, not till we know
how the dogth fmdth uth out !"
'"She keeps the bottle that he sent her for, to this hour; and she
will believe in his affection to the last moment of her life," said Mr.
Gradgrind.
'"It theemth to prethent two thingth to a perthon, don't it,
Thquire ?" said Mr. Sleary, musing as he looked down into the depJis
of his brandy-and-water : "one, that there ith a love in the world, not
all Thelf-interetht after all, but thomething very different ; t'other, that
it hath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating, whith thome-
how or another ith at leatht ath hard to give a name to, ath the wayth
of the dogth ith!"
'Mr. Gradgrind looked out of the window, and made no reply.
Mr. Sleary emptied his glass and recalled the ladies/
It will be seen that the effect (I repeat, the whole passage must be
read), apparently so simple and easily right, depends up on a subtle
interplay of diverse elements, a multiplicity in unison of timbre and
tone. Dickens, we know, was a popular entertainer, but Flaubet
never wrote anything approaching mis in subtlety of achieved art.
Dickens, of course, has a vitality that we don't look for in Flaubert.
Shakespeare was a popular entertainer, we reflect not too ex-
travagantly, we can surely tell ourselves, as we ponder passages of
this characteristic quality in their relation, a closely organized one,
to the poetic whole.
Criticism, of course, has its points to make against Hard Times.
It can be said of Stephen Blackpool, not only that he is too good and
qualifies too consistently for the martyr's nalo, but that he invites
244
DICKENS
an adaptation of the objection brought, from the negro point of
view, against Uncle Tom, which was to the effect that he was a
white man's good nigger. And certainly it doesn't need a working-
class bias to produce the commenu that when Dickens comes to the
Trade Unions his understanding of the world he oilers to deal with
betrays a marked limitation. There were undoubtedly professional
agitators, and Trade Union solidarity was undoubtedly often
asserted at the expense of the individual's rights, but it is a score
against a work so insistently typical in intention that it should give
the representative role to the agitator, Slackbridge, and make Trade
Unionism nothing better than the pardonable error of the m:>
guided and oppressed, and, as such, an agent in the martyrdom of
the good working man. (But to be fair we must remember the
conversation between Bitzer and Mrs. Sparsit :
'"It is much to be regretted," said Mrs. Sparsit, making her nose
more Roman and her eyebrows more Coriolanian in the strength
of her severity, "thai the ^nted masters allow of any such class
combination."
'"Yes, ma'am," said Bitzer.
'"Being united themselves, they ought one and all to set their faces
against employing any mar. who is united with any other man," said
Mrs. Sparsit.
'"They have done that, ma'am," returned Bitzer; "but it rather
fell through, ma'am."
"'I do not pretend t6 understand these things," said Mrs. Sparsit with
dignity. "... I only know that those people must be conquered, and
that it's high time it was done, once for all.'")
Just as Dickens has no glimpse of the part to be played by Trade
Unionism in bettering the conditions he deplores, so, though he
sees there are many places of worship in Coketown, of various kinds
of ugliness, he has no notion of the part played by religion in the life
of nineteenth-century industrial England. The kind of self-respect-
ing steadiness and conscientious restraint that he represents in
Stephen did certainly exist on a large scale among the working-
classes, and this is an important historical fact. But there would
have been no such fact if those chapels described by Dickens had
had no more relation to the life of Coketown than he shows them
to have.
Again, his attitude to Trade Unionism is not the only expression
of a lack of political understanding. Parliament for him is merely
245
HARD TIMES
the national dust-yard', where the 'national dustmen' entertain
one another 'with a great many noisy little fights among them-
selves', and appoint commissions which fill blue-books with dreary
facts and futile statistics of a kind that helps Gradgrind to 'prove
that the Good Samaritan was a bad economist*.
Yet Dickens's understanding of Victorian civilization is adequate
for his purpose ; the justice and penetration of his criticism are un-
affected. And his moral perception works in alliance with a clear
insight into the English social structure. Mr. James Harthouse is
necessary for the plot ; but he too has his representative function,
lie has come to Coketown as P prospective parliamentary candi-
date, for 'the Gradgrind party wanted assistance in cutting the
throats of the Graces', and they * liked fine gentlemen; they pre-
tended that they did not, but they did ' . And so the alliance between
the old ruling class and the 'hard' men figures duly in the fable.
This economy is typical. There is Mrs. Sparsit, for instance, who
might seem to be there merely for db- plot. But her 'husband was
a Powler', a fact she reverts to as often as Bounderby to his mythical
birth in a ditch; and the two complementary opposites, when
Mr. James Harthouse, who in his languid assurance of class-
superiority doesn't need to boast, is added, form a trio that suggests
the whole system of British snobbery.
But the packed richness of Hard Times is almost incredibly varied,
and not all the quoting I have indulged ir suggests it adequately.
The final stress may fall on Dickens's comnand of word, phrase-,
rhythm and image : in ease and range there is surely no greater
master of English except Shakespeare. This conies back to saying
that Dickens is a great poet : his endless reSource in felicitously
varied expression is an extraordinary responsiveness to life. His
senses are charged with emotional energy, and his intelligence plays
and flashes in the quickest and sharpest perception. That is, his
mastery of 'style* is of the only kind that matters which is not to
say that he hasn't a conscious interest in what can be done with
words ; many of his felicities could plainly not have come if there
had not been, in the background, a habit of such interest. Take
this, for instance :
'He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town,
which was neither town nor country, but either spoiled . . .'
But he is no more a stylist than Shakespeare ; and his mastery of
expression is most fairly suggested by stressing, not his descriptive
246
DICKENS
evocations (there are some magnificent ones in Hard Times- -the
varied dtcor of the action is made vividly present, you can feel the
velvety dust trodden by Mrs. Sparsit in her stealth, and feel the
imminent storm), but his strictly dramatic felicities. Perhaps, how-
ever, 'strictly* is not altogether a good pointer, since Dickens is a
master of his chosen art, and his mastery shows itself in the way in
which he moves between less direct forms of the dramatic and the
direct rendering of speech. Here is Mrs. Gradgrind dying (a cipher
in the Gradgrind system, the poor creature has never really been
alive) :
' She had positively refused to take to her bed ; on the ground that,
if she did, she would never hear the last of it.
'Her feeble voice sounded so far away in her bundle of shawls, and
the sound of another voice addressing her seemed to take such a long
time in getting down to her ears, that she might have been lying at the
bottom of a well. The poor lady was nearer Truth than she ever had
been : which had mucii to d / with it.
'On being told that Mrs. Bounderby was there, she replied, at cross
purposes, that she had never called him by that name since he had
m xried Louisa ; and that pending her choice of an objectionable
name, she had called him J ; and that she could not at present depart
from that regulation, not being yet provided with a permanent sub-
stitute. Louisa had sat by her for some minutes, and had spoken to her
often, before she arrived at a clear understanding who it was. She then
seemed to come to it all at once.
'"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Gradgrind, "and I hope you are going
on satisfactorily to yourself. It was all your father's doing. He set his
heart upon it. And he ought to know."
"'I want to hear of you, mother ; not of myself."
'"You want to hear of me, my dear ? That's something new, I am
sure, when anybody wants to hear of me. Not at all well, Louisa.
Very faint and giddy."
"'Are you in pain dear mother ?"
'"I think there's a pain somewhere in the room," said Mrs. Grad-
grind, "but I couldn't positively say that I have got it."
'After this strange speech, she lay silent for some time.
"'But there is something not an Ology at all that your father has
missed, or forgotten, Louisa. I don't know what it is. I have often
sat with Sissy near me, and thought about it. I shall never get its name
247
HARD TIMES
now. But your father may. It makes me rcstlrss. I want to write to
him, to find out, for God's sake, what it is. Give me a pen, gi/e me
a pen/'
'Even the power of restlessness was gone, except from the poor
head, which could just turn from side to side.
'She fancied, however, that her request had been complied with,
and that the pen she could not Irve held was in her hand. It matters
little what figures of wonderful no-meaning she began to trace upon
her wrappers. The hand soon stopped in the midst of them ; the
light that had always been feeble and dim behind the weak trans-
parency, went out; and even Mrs. Gradgrind, emerged from the
shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain, took
upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and patriarchs.'
With this kind of thing before us, we talk not of style but of
dramatic creation and imaginative genius.
248
Appendix
DANIEL DERONDA: A Conversation
By HENRY JAMES
Theodora, one day early in tLe autumn, sat on her verandah
with a piece of embroidery, the design of which she made up as
she proceeded, being careful, however, to have a Japanese screen
before her, to keep her inspiration at the proper altitude. Pulcheria,
who was paying her a visit, sat near her with a closed book, m a
paper cover, in her lap. Pulcheria was playing with the pug-dog,
rather idly, but Theodora was stitching, steadily and meditatively.
'Well', said Theodora at last, 'I wonder what he accomplished in
the East'. Pulcheria took the little dog into her lap and made him
sit on the book. ' Oh' she replied, * they had tea-parties at Jerusalem
exclusively of ladies and he sat in the midst and stirred his tea
and made high-toned remarks. And then Mirah sang a little, just
a little, on account of her voice being so weak. Sit still, Fide', she
continued, addressing thelittle dog, 'and keep your nose out of my
face. But it's a nice little nose, all the same', she pursued, 'a nice
little short snub nose and not a horrid big Jewish nose. Oh, my
dear, when I think what a collection of noses there must have been
at that wedding!' At this moment Constantius steps upon the
verandah from within, hat and stick in hand and his shoes a trifle
dusty. He has some distance to come before he reaches the place
where the ladies are sitting, and this gives Pulcheria time to murmur,
'Talk of sHub noses!' Constantius is presented by Theodora to
Pulcheria, and he sits down and exclaims upon the admirable blue-
ness of uhe sea, which lies in a straight band across the green of the
little lawn ; comments too upon the pleasure of having one side of
one's verandah in the shade. Soon Fido, the little dog, still restless,
jumps off Pulcheria's lap and reveals the book, which lies title
upward. 'Oh', says Constantius, 'you have been finishing Daniel
Deronda*.' Then follows a conversation vhich it will be more
convenient to present in another form.
THEODORA. Yes, Pulcheria has been reading aloud the last chap-
ters to me. They are wonderfully beautiful.
249
APPENDIX
CCNSTANTIUS (after a moment's hesitation). Yes, they are very
beautiful. I am sure yea read well, Pulcheria, to give tLe fine
passages their full value.
THEODORA. She reads well when she chooses, but I am sorry to
say that in some of the fine passages of this last book she took quite
a false tone. I couldn't have read them aloud myself; I should have
broken down. But Pulcheria would you really believe it ? when
she couldn't go on it was not for tears, but for the contrary.
CONSTANTIUS. For smiles ? Did you really find it comical ? One
of my objections to Daniel Deronda is the absence of those delight-
fully humorous passages which enlivened the author's former works.
PULCHERIA. Oh, I think there are some places as amusing as any-
thing in Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss : for instance where, at
the last, Deronda wipes Gwendolen's tears and Gwendolen wipes
his.
CONSTANTIUS. Yes, I know what you mean. I can understand
that situation presenting a slightly ridiculous image ; that is, if the
current of the story don't swiftly carry you past.
PULCHERIA. What do you mean by the current of the story * I
never read a story with less current. It is not a river ; it is a series of
lakes. I once read of a group of little uneven ponds resembling,
from a bird's-eye view, a looking-glass which had fallen upon the
floor and broken, and was lying in fragments. That is what Daniel
Deronda would look like, on a bird's-eye view.
THEODORA. Pulcheria found that comparison in a French novel.
She is always reading French novels.
CONSTANTIUS. Ah, there are some very good ones.
PULCHERIA (perversely). I don't know; I think these are some
very poor ones.
CONSTANTIUS. The comparison is not bad, at any rate. I know
what you mean by Daniel Deronda lacking current. It has almost as
little as Romola.
PULCHERIA. Oh, Romola is unpardonably slow ; it is a kind of
literary tortoise.
CONSTANTIUS. Yes, I know what you mean by that, but I am
afraid you are not friendly to our great novelist.
THEODORA. She likes Balzac and George Sand and other impure
writers.
250
DANIEL DERONDA
CONST ANTIUS. Well, I must say I understand that.
PULCHERIA. My favourite novelist is "Tiackeray, and I am ex-
tremely fond of Miss Austen.
CONSTANTIUS. I understand thac too. You read over The New-
comes and Pride and Prejudice.
PULCHERIA. No, I don't read them over now ; I think them over.
I have been making visits for a long time past to a series of friends,
and I have spent the last six months in reading Daniel Deronda aloud.
Fortune would have it that I should always arrive by the same train
as the new number. I am accounted a frivolous, idle creature ; I am
not a disciple in the new school of embroidery, like Theodora ; so
I was immediately pushed into a chair and the book thrust into my
hand, that I might lift up my voice and make peace between all the
impatiences that were snatching at it. So I may claim at least that
I have read every word of the work. I never skipped.
THEODORA. I should hop^ not, indeed !
CONSTANTIUS. And do you mean that you really didn't enjoy it ?
PULCHERIA. I found it protracted, pretentious, pedantic.
CONSTANTIUS. I see ; I can understand that.
THEODORA. Oh, you understand too much ! This is the twen-
tieth time you have used that formula.
CONSTANTIUS. What will you have ? You know I must try to
understand ; it's my *rade !
THEODORA. He means he writes reviews. Trying not to under-
stand is what I call that trade !
CONSTANTIUS. Say then I take it the wrong way ; that is why it
has never madt my fortune. But I do try to understand ; it is my
-my (He pauses).
THEODORA. I know what you want to say. Your strong side.
PULCHERIA. And what is his weak side ?
THEODORA. He writes novels.
CONSTANTIUS. I have written one. You can't call that a side.
It's a little facet, at the most.
PULCHERIA. You talk as if you were a diamond. I should like to
read it not aloud !
CONSTANTIUS. You can't read it softly enough. But you, Theo-
dora, you didn't find our book too 'protracted' ?
THEODORA. I should have liked it to continue indefinitely ; to
251
APPENDIX
kcef coming out always; to be one of the regular things of
life.
PULCHBRIA. Oh, come here, little dog ! To think that Daniel
Deronda might be perpetual when you, little short-nosed darling,
can't last at the most more than pine or ten years !
THEODORA. A book like Daniel Deronda becomes part of one's
life ; one lives in it, or alongsidt of it. I don't hesitate to say that I
have been living in this one for the last eight months. It is such a
complete world George Eliot builds up ; it is so vast, so much-
embracing ! It has such a firm earta and such an ethereal sky. You
can turn into it and lose yourself in it.
PULCHBRIA. Oh, easily, and die of cold and starvation !
THEODORA. I have been very near to poor Gwendolen and very
near to that sweet Mirah. And the dear little Meyricks also ; I
know them intimately well.
PULCHERIA. The Meyricks, I grant you, a-e the best thing in the
book.
THEODORA. They are a delicious family; I wish they lived in
Boston. I consider Herr Klesmer almost Shakespearean, and his
wife is almost as good. I have been near .0 poor, prand Mordecai
PULCHERIA. Oh, reflect, my dear ; not too near !
THEODORA. And as for Deronda himself I freely confess that I am
consumed with a hopeless passion for him. He is the most irresist-
ible man in the literature of fiction.
PULCHBRIA. He is not a man at all.
THEODORA. I remember nothing more beautiful than the de-
scription of his childhood, and that picture of his lying on the
grass in the abbey cloister, a beautiful seraph-faced b^y, with a
lovely voice, reading history and asking his Scotch tutor why the
Popes had so many nephews. He must have been delightfully
handsome.
PULCHERIA. Never, my dear, with that nose ! I am sure he had a
nose, and I hold that the author has shown great pusillanimity in her
treatment of it. She has quite shirked it. The picture you speak of
is very pretty, but a picture is not a person. And why is he always
grasping his coat-collar, as if he wished to hang himself up ? The
author had an uncomfortable feeling that she must make him do
something real, something visible and sensible, and she hit upon
252
DANIEL DERONDA
that clumsy figure. I don't see what you mean by saying you have
been njar those people ; that is just what r.ne is not. They produce
no illusion. They are described and analysed to death, but we don't
see them nor hear them nor touch chem. Deronda clutches his coat-
collar, Mirah crosses her feet, Mordecai talks like the Bible ; but
that doesn't make real figures of them. They have no existence
outside of the author's study.
THEODORA. If you mean that they are nobly imaginative I quite
agree with you ; and if they say nothing to your own imagination
the fault is yours, not theirs.
PULCHBRIA. Pray don't say they are Shakespearean again. Shake-
speare went to work another way.
CONSTANTIUS. I think you are both in a measure right ; there is a
distinction to be drawn. There are in Daniel Deronda the figures
based upon observation and the figures based upon invention. This
distinction, I know, is r ather a rough one. There are no figures in
any novel that are pure observation, and none that are pure inven-
tion. But either element may preponderate, and in those cases in
wlrch invention has preponderated George Eliot seems to me to
have achieved at the best but so many brilliant failures.
THEODORA. And are you turning severe ? I thought you admired
her so much.
CONSTANTIUS. I defy any one to admire her more, but one must
discriminate. Speaking brutally, I consider Daniel Deronda the
weakest of her books. It strikes me as very sensibly inferior to
Middlemarch. I have an immense opinion of Middlemarch.
PULCHERIA. r lot having been obliged by circumstances to read
Middlemarc^ to other people, I didn't read it at all. I couldn't read
it to myself. I tried, but I broke down. I appreciated Rosamond,
^ut I couldn't believe in Dorothea.
THEODORA (very gravely). So much the worse for you, Pulcheria.
I have enjoyed Daniel Deronda because I had enjoyed Middlemarch.
Why should you throw Middlemarch up against her ? It seems to
me that if a book is fine it is fine. I have enjoyed Deronda deeply,
from beginning to end.
CONSTANTIUS. I assure you, so have I. I can read nothing of
George Eliot's without enjoyment. I even enjoy her poetry, though
I don't approve of it. In whatever she writes I enjoy her intelli-
253
APPENDIX
genc^ ; it has space and air like a fine landscape. The intellectual
brilliancy of Daniel Dercnda strikes me as very great, in e:.cess of
anything the author has done. In the first couple of numbers of the
book this ravished me. I delighted in its deep, rich English tone,
in which so ma^iy notes seemed melted together.
PULCHERIA. The tone is not English, it is German.
CONSTANTIUS. 1 understand that if Theodora will allow me to
say so. Little by little I began to feel that I cared less for certain
notes than for others. I say it under my breath I began to feel an
occasional temptation to skip. Roughly speaking, all the Jewish
burden of the story tended to weary me ; it is this part that produces
the poor illusion which I agree with Pulcheria in finding. Gwen-
dolen and Grandcourt are admirable Gwendolen is a masterpiece.
She is known, felt and presented, psychologically, altogether in the
grand manner. Beside her and beside her husband a consummate
picture of English brutality refined and distfUed (for Grandcourt is
before all things brutal), Deronda, Mordecai and Mirah are hardly
more than shadows. They and their fortunes are all improvisation.
I dou't say anything against improvisation. When it succeeds i' has
a surpassing charm. But it must succeed. With Geoige Eliot it
seems to me to succeed, but a little less than one would expect of
her talent. The story of Deronda's life, his mother's story, Mirah's
story, are quite the sort of tiling one finds in George Sand. But
they are really not so good as they would be in George Sand.
George Sand would have carried it off with a lighter hand.
THEODORA. Oh, Constantius, how can you compare George
Eliot's novels to that woman's ? It is sunlight and moonshine.
PULCHBRIA. I really think the two writers are very *nuch alike.
They are both very voluble, both addicted to moralizing and
philosophizing a tout bout de champ, both inartistic.
CONSTANTIUS. I see what you mean. But George Eliot is solid,
and George Sand is liquid. When occasionally George Eliot
liquefies as in the history of Deronda's birth, and in that of Mirah
it is not to so crystalline a clearness as the author of Consuelo and
Andrt. Take Mirah's long narrative of her adventures, wnen she
unfolds them to Mrs. Meyrick. It is arranged, it is artificial, ancien
jeu, quite in the George Sand manner. But George Sand would
have done it better, lae false tone would have remained, but it
254
DANIEL DERONDA
would have been more persuasive. It would have been a fib but
the fit would have been neater.
THEODORA. I don't think fibbing neatly a merit, and I don't see
what is to be gained by such comparisons. George Eliot is pure and
George Sand is impure ; how can you compare thorn ? As for the
Jewish element in Deronda, I think it a very fine idea ; it's a noble
subject. Wilkie Collins and Miss Lraddon would not have thought
of it, but that does not condemn it. It shows a large conception of
what one may do in a novel. I heard you say, the other day, that
most novels were so trivial thit they had no general ideas. Here
is a general idea, the idea interpreted by Deronda. I have never
disliked the Jews as some people do ; I am not like Pulcheria, who
sees a Jew in every bush. I wish there were one ; I would cultivate
shrubbery. I have known too many clever and charming Jews ;
I have known none that were not clever.
PULCHERIA. Clever, Hut not charming.
CONSTANTIUS. I quite agree with you as to Deronda's going in
for the Jews and turning out a Jew himself being a fine subject, and
this quite apart from the fact of whether such a thing as a Je wish
revival be at all a possibility. If it be a possibility, so much the
better so much the better for the subject, I mean.
PULCHERIA. A la bonne heure!
CONSTANTIUS. I rather suspect it is not a possibility ; that the
Jews in general take themselves much less seriously than that. They
have other fish to fry. George Eliot takes them as a person outside
of Judaism aesthetically. I don't believe that is the way they take
themselves.
PULCHEP T \. They have the less excuse then for keeping them-
selves so dirty.
THEODORA. George Eliot must have known some delightful
Jews.
CONSTANTIUS. Very likely ; but I shouldn't wonder if the most
delightful of them had smiled a trifle, here and there, over her book.
But that makes nothing, as Herr Klesmer would say. The subject
is a noble one. The idea of depicting a nature able to feel and
worthy to feel the sort of inspiration that takes possession of
Deronda, of depicting it sympathetically, minutely and intimately
such an idea has great elevation. Thereas something very fasti-
255
APPENDIX
natir g in the mission that Deronda takes upon himself. I don't quite
know what it means, I don't understand more than half o r Mor-
decai's rhapsodies, and I don't perceive exactly what practical steps
could be taken. Deronda coulu go about and talk with clever
Jews not an unpleasant life.
PULCHERIA. All that seems to me so unreal that when at the end
the author finds herself confronted with the necessity of making
him start for the East by the train, and announces that Sir Hugo
and Lady Mallinger have given his wife 'a complete Eastern outfit',
I descend to the ground with a ludicrous jump.
CONSTANTIUS. Unreal, if you please ; that is no objection to it;
it greatly tickles my imagination. I like extremely the idea of
Mordecai believing, without ground of belief, that if he only wait,
a young man on whom nature and society have centred all their
gifts will come to him and receive from his hands the precious
vessel of his hopes. It is romantic, but it is not vulgar romance ; it
is finely romantic. And there is something very fine in the author's
own feeling about Deronda. He is a very liberal creation. He is,
I thiiJc, a failure a brilliant failure ; if he had been a success I should
call him a splendid creation. The audio- meant to do tilings very
handsomely for him ; she meant apparently to make a faultless
human being.
PULCHERIA. She made a dreadful prig.
CONSTANTIUS. He 15 rather priggish, and one wonders that so
clever a woman as George Eliot shouldn't see it.
PULCHERIA. He has no blood in his body. His attitude at
moments is like that of a high-priest in a tableau viv int.
THEODORA. Pulcheria likes the little gentlemen in fhe French
novels who take good care of their attitudes, which are always the
same attitude, the attitude of 'conquest' of a conquest th?t tickles
their vanity. Deronda has a contour that cuts straight through the
middle of all that. He is made of a stuff that isn't dreamt of in their
philosophy.
PULCHERIA. Pulcheria likes very much a novel which she read
three or four years ago, but which she has not forgotten. It was by
Ivan Turg&iiefF, and it was called On the Eve. Theodora has read
it, I know, because she admires Turgenieff, and Constantius has
read it, I suppose, because he had read everything.
256
DANIEL DERONDA
CONSTANTIUS. If I had no reason but that for my reading, it
would je small. But Turgenieff is my man.
PULCHERIA. You were just now praising George Eliot's general
ideas. The tale of which I speak contains in the portrait of the hero
vecy much such a general idea as you find in the portrait of Deronda.
Don't you remember the young Bulgarian student, Inssaroff, who
gives himself the mission of rescuing his country from its subjection
to the Turks ? Poor man, if he had foreseen the horrible summer
of 1876 ! His character is the picture of a race-passion, of patriotic
hopes and dreams. But what a: difference in the vividness of the
two figures. Inssarofi is a man ; nc stands up on his feet ; we see
him, hear him, touch him. And it has taken the author but a couple
of hundred pages not eight volumes to do it.
THEODORA. I don't remember Inssaroff at all, but I perfectly
remembei the heroine, Helena. She is certainly most remarkable ;
but remarkable as she is, I should never dream of calling her as
wonderful as Gwendolen.
CONSTANTIUS. Turgemcft is a magician, which I don't think I
shorld call George Eliot. One is a poet, the other is a philosopher.
One cares ibr the aspect of things and the other cares for the reason
of things. George Eliot, in embarking with Deronda, took aboard,
as it were, a far heavier cargo than Turgenieff with his InssarofF.
She proposed, consciously, to strike more notes.
PULCHERIA. Oh, consciously, yes !
CONSTANTIUS. George Eliot wished to show the possible pictur-
csquencss the romance, as it were of a high moral tone. Deronda
is a moralist a' moralist with a rich complexion.
THEODORA. It is a most beautiful nature. I don't know anywhere
a more complete, a more deeply analysed portrait of a great nature.
\Ve praLc novelists for wandering and creeping so into the small
corners of the mind That is what we praise Balzac for when he
gets down upon all fours to crawl through Le Pere Goriot or Les
Parents Pauvres. But I must say 1 think it a finer thing to unlock
with as firm a hand as George Eliot some of the greater chambers of
human character. Deronda is in a manner ar ideal character, if you
will, but he seems to me triumphantly married to reality. There
are some admirable things said about him ; nothing can be finer
than those pages of description of his moral temperament in the
R 257
APPENDIX
fourdi book his elevated way of looking at things, his impartiality,
his universal sympathy, and at the fame time his fear of their turning
into mere irresponsible indifference. I remember some of it verb-
ally : 'He was ceasing to care for knowledge he had no ambition
for practice unless they could be gathered up into one current
with his emotions/
PULCHERIA. Oh, there is plenty about his emotions. Everything
about him is 'emotive*. That bad word occurs on every fifth page.
THEODORA. I don't see that it is a bad word.
PULCHERIA. It may be good German, but it is poor English.
THEODORA. It is not German at all ; it is Latin. So, my dear !
PULCHERIA. As I say, then, it is not English.
THEODORA. This is the first time I ever heard that George Eliot's
style was bad !
CONSTANTIUS. It is admirable ; it has the most delightful and the
most intellectually comfortable suggestions But it is occasionally
a little too long-sleeved, as I may say. It is sometimes too loose a
fit for the thought, a little baggy.
THEODORA. And the advice he gives Gwendolen, the thing' he
says to her, they are the very essence of wisdom, of warm human
wisdom, knowing life and feeling it. 'Keep your fear as a safe-
guard, it may make consequences passionately present to you/
What can be better than that ?
PULCHBRIA. Nothing, perhaps. But what can be drearier than a
novel in which the function of the hero young, handsome and
brilliant is to give didactic advice, in a proverbial form, to the
young, beautiful and brilliant heroine ?
CONSTANTIUS. That is not putting it quite fairly. Tlie function
of Deronda is to make Gwendolen fall in love with him, to say
nothing of falling in love himself with Mirah.
PULCHBRIA. Yes, the less said about that the better. All we know
about Mirah is that she has delicate rings of hair, sits with her feet
crossed, and talks like an article in a new magazine.
CONSTANTIUS. Deronda's function of adviser to Gwendolen does
not strike me as so ridiculous. He is not nearly so ridiculous as
if he were lovesick. It is a very interesting si tuation that of a man
with whom a beautiful woman in trouble falls in love and yet whose
affections are so preoccupied that the most he can do for her in
258
DANIEL DERONDA
return is to enter kindly and sympathetically into her position, pity
her ai d talk to her. George Eliot always gives us something that is
strikingly and ironically characteristic of human life ; and what
savours more of the essential crookedness of our fate than the sad
cross-purposes of these two young people ? Poor Gwendolen's fall-
ing in love with Deronda is part of her own luckless history, not
of his.
THEODORA. I do think he takes it to himself rather too little. No
man had ever so little vanity.
PULCHERIA. It is very inconsistent, therefore, as well as being
extremely impertinent and ill-mannered, his buying back and send-
ing to her her necklace at Leubronn.
CONSTANTIUS. Oh, you must concede that; without it there
would have been no story. A man writing of him, however, would
certainly- have made him more peccable. As George Eliot lets
herself go, in that quarter, she becomes delightfully, almost touch-
ingly, feminine. It is like her making Romola go to housekeeping
with Tessa, after Tito Melema's death ; like her making Dorothea
m?rry Will Ladislaw. If Dorothea had married any one aftor her
misadventure with Casaufcon, she would have married a trooper.
THEODORA. Perhaps some day Gwendolen will marry Rex.
PULCHERIA. Pray, who is Rex ?
THEODORA. Why, Pulcheria, how gan you forget ?
PULCHERIA. Nay, how can I remember? But I recall such a
name in the dim antiquity of the first or second book. Yes, and
then he is pushed to the front again at the last, just in time not to
miss the falling of the curtain. Gwendolen will certainly not have
the audac'*y to marry any one we know so little about.
CONSTANTIUS. I have been wanting to say that there seems to me
to be f.vo very distinct elements in George Eliot a spontaneous
one and an artificial one. There is what she is by inspiration and
what she is because it is expected of her. These two heads have been
very perceptible in her recent writings ; they are much less notice-
able in her early ones.
THEODORA. You mean that she is too scientific ? So long as she
remains the great literary genius that she is, how can she be too
scientific ? She is simply permeated with the highest culture of
the age.
R* 259
APPENDIX
PU T .CHBRIA. She talks too much about the 'dynamic quality' of
people's eyes. When she uses such a phrase as that in tLe first
sentence in her book she is not a great literary genius, because she
shows a want of tact. There can't be a worse limitation.
CONST ANTIUS. The 'dynamic quality' of Gwendolen's gknce has
made the tour of the world.
THEODORA. It shows a very low level of culture on the world's
part to be agitated by a term perfectly familiar to all decently edu-
cated people.
PULCHERIA. I don't pretend to be decently educated ; pray tell
me what it means.
CONSTANTIUS (promptly). I think Pulcheria has hit it in speaking
of a want of tact. In the manner of the book, throughout, there is
something that one may call a want of tact. The epigraphs in verse
are a want of tact ; they are sometimes, I think, a trifle more pre-
tentious than really pregnant ; the importunity of the moral re-
flections is a want of tact ; theverydiffusenessisawantoftact. But
it comes back to what I said just now about one's sense of the author
writLig under a sort of external pressure. I began to notice it in
Felix Holt ; I don't think I had before, ohe strikes me as a person
who certainly has naturally a taste for general considerations, but
who has fallen upon an age and a circle which have compelled her
to give them an exaggerated attention. She does not strike me as
naturally a critic, less still as naturally a sceptic ; her spontaneous
part is to observe life and to feel it to feel it with admirable depth.
Contemplation, sympathy and faith something like that, I should
say, would have been her natural scale. If she had fallen upon an
age of enthusiastic assent to old articles of faith, it seems to me
possible that she would have had a more perfect, a more consistent
and graceful development than she has actually had. If she liad cast
herself into such a current her genius being e^ual it might have
carried her to splendid distances. But she has chosen to go into
criticism, and to the critics she addresses her work ; I mean the
critics of the universe. Instead of feeling life itself, it is * views ' upon
life that she tries to feel
PULCHBRIA. She is the victim of a first-class education. I am so
glad!
CONSTANTIUS. Thanks to her admirable intellect she philoso-
260
DANIEL DERONDA
phizes very sufficiently ; but meanwhile she has given a chill <x> her
geniul. She has come near spoiling an ?rtist.
PULCHERIA. She has quite spoiled one. Or rather I shouldn't say
that, because there was no artist to spoil. I maintain that she is not
an. artist. An artist could neverjiave put a story together so mon-
strously ill. She has no sense of form.
THEODORA. Pray, what could be more artistic than the way that
Deronda's paternity is concealed till almost the end, and the way
we are made to suppose Sir Hugo is his father ?
PULCHERIA. And 'Mirah his Sister. How does that fit together ?
I was as little made to suppose h was not a Jew as I cared when I
found out he was. And his mother popping up through a trap-door
and popping down again, at the last, in that scrambling fashion !
His mother is very ba*d.
CONST^NTIUS. I think Deronda's mother is one of the unvivified
characters ; she belongs to the cold half of the book. All the Jewish
part is at bottom cold ; that is my only objection. I have enjoyed
it because my fancy often warms cold things ; but beside Gwen-
do^n's history it is like the empty half of the lunar disk beside the
full one. It is admirably studied, it is imagined, it is understood,
but it is not embodied. One feels this strongly in just those scenes
between Deronda and his mother; one feels that one has been
appealed to on rather an artificial ground of interest. To make
Deronda's reversion to his native faith more dramatic and pro-
found, the author has given him a mother who on very arbitrary
grounds, apparently, has separated herself from this same faith and
who has been kept waiting in the wing, as it were, for many acts,
to conic en and make her speech and say so. This moral situation
of hers we are invited retrospectively to appreciate. But we hardly
care to do so.
PULCHERIA. I don t see the princess, in spite of her flame-coloured
robe. Why should an actress and prima-domia care so much about
religious matters ?
THEODORA. It was not only that ; it was the Jewish race she hated,
Jewish manners and looks. You, my dear, ojight to understand that.
PULCHERIA. I do, but I am not a Jewish actress of genius; I am
not what Rachel was. If I were I should have other things to think
about.
261
APPENDIX
corsiANTius. Think now a little about poor Gwendolen.
PULCHERIA. I don't care to think about her. She was a scjond-
rate English girl who got into a flutter about a lord.
THEODORA. I don't see that she is worse than if she were a
first-rate American girl who should get into exactly the same
flutter.
PULCHERIA. It wouldn't be the same flutter at all ; it wouldn't be
any flutter. She wouldn't be afraid of the lord, though she might
be amused at him.
THEODORA. I am sure I don't perceive whom Gwendolen was
afraid of. She was afraid of her misdeed her broken promise
after she had committed it, and through that fear she was afraid of
her husband. Well she might be ! I can imagine nothing mor^
vivid than the sense we get of his absolutely clammy selfishness.
PULCHERIA. She was not afraid of Deronda when, immediately
after her marriage and without any but the mnst casual acquaintance
with him, she begins to hover about him at the Mallingers' and to
drop little confidences about her conjugal woes. That seems to me
very indelicate ; ask any woman.
CONSTANTIUS. The very purpose of the author is to give us an
idea of the sort of confidence that Deronda inspired its irresistible
potency.
PULCHERIA. A lay father-confessor horrid (
CONSTANTIUS. And to give us an idea also of the acuteness of
Gwendolen's depression, of her haunting sense of impending
trouble.
THEODORA. It must be remembered that Gwendolen was in love
with Deronda from the first, long before she knew it. She didn't
know it, poor girl, but that was it.
PULCHERIA. That makes the matter worse. It is very disagreeable
to see her hovering and rustling about a man who is indifferent
to her.
THEODORA. He was not indifferent to her, since he sent her back
her necklace.
PULCHERIA. Of all the delicate attention to a charming girl that I
ever heard of, that little pecuniary transaction is the most felicitous.
CONSTANTIUS. You must remember that he had been en rapport
with her at the gaming-table. She had been playing in defiance of
262
DANIEL DERONDA
his observation, and be, continuing to observe her, had been : n a
measure*responsible for her loss. 'There w;>s a tacit consciousness of
this .between them. You may contest the possibility of tacit con-
sciousness going so far, but that is nbt a serkn;s objection. You may
potnt out two or three weak spot* in detail ; the fact remains that
Gwendolen's whole history is vividly tojd. And see how the girl
is known, inside out, how thoroughly she is felt and understood.
It is the most intelligent thing in all George Eliot's writing, and that is
saying much. It is so deep, so true, so complete, it holds such a
wealth of psychological detail, it is more than masterly.
THEODORA. I don't know where the perception of character has
sailed closer to the wind.
^ULCHERIA. The portrait may be admirable, but it has one little
fault. 4 You don't care a straw for the original. Gwendolen is not
an interesting girl, and when the author tries to invest her with a
deep tragic interest she loqs-so at the expense of consistency. She
has made her at the outset too light, too flimsy ; tragedy has no hold
on such a girl.
TK2OPORA. You are hard to satisfy. You said this morning that
Dorothea was toc\ heavy, nd now you find Gwendolen too light.
George Eliot wished to give us the perfect counterpart of Dorothea.
Having made one portrait she was worthy to make the other.
PULCHERIA. She has committed the fatal error of making Gwen-
dolen vulgarly, pettily, drily selfish. She was personally selfish.
THEODORA. I know nothing more personal than selfishness.
PULCHERIA. I am selfish, but I don't go about with my chin out
like that ; at lease I hope I don't. She was an odious young woman,
and one can't care what becomes of her. When her marriage turned
out ill she would have become still more hard and positive ; to
make hei soft and appealing is very bad logic. The second Gwen-
dolen doesn't belong* to the first.
CONSTANTIUS. She is perhaps at the first a little childish for the
weight of interest she has to carry, a little too much after the pattern
of the unconscientious young ladies of Miss Yonge and Miss Sewell.
THEODORA. Sin,ce when is it forbidden to make one's heroine
young ? Gwendolen is a perfect picture of youthfulness its eager-
ness, its presumption, its preoccupation with itself, its vanity and
silliness, its sense of its own absoluteness.* But she is extremely
263
APPENDIX
intelligent and clever, and therefore tragedy can have a hold upon
her. Her conscience doesn't make the tragedy ; that is an eld story
and, I think, a secondary form of suffering. It is the tragedy that
makes her conscience, which chei. reacts upon it ; and I can think of
nothing more powerful than the way in which the growth of her
conscience is traced, nothing more touching than the picture of its
helpless maturity.
CONSTANTIUS. That is perfectly true. Gwendolen's history is
admirably typical as most things are with George Eliot : it is the
very stuff that human life is made of. What is it made of but the
discovery by each of us that we are at the best but a rather ridiculous
fifth wheel to the coach, after we have sat cracking our whip and
believing that we are at least the coachman in person ? We think
we are the main hoop to the barrel, and we turn out to be but a very
incidental splinter in one of the staves. The universe foicing itself
with a slow, inexorable pressure into a narrow, complacent, and yet
after all extremely sensitive mind, and making it ache with the pain
of the process that is Gwendolen's story. And it becomes com-
pletely characteristic in that her supreme perception of the fact- that
the world is whirring past her is in the disappointment not of a base
but of an exalted passion. The very chance to embrace what the
author is so fond of calling a 'larger life' seems refused to her. She
is punished for being narrow, and she is not allowed a chance to
expand. Her finding Deronda pre-engaged to go to the East and
stir up the race-feeling of the Jews strikes me as a wonderfully happy
invention. The irony of the situation, for poor Gwendolen, is
almost grotesque, and it makes one wonder whether the whole
heavy structure of the Jewish question in the story was not built up
by the author for the express purpose of giving its proper force to
this particular stroke.
THEODORA. George Eliot's intentions are ^xtremely complex.
The mass is for each detail and each detail is for the mass.
PULCHERIA. She is very fond of deaths by drowning. Maggie
Tulliver and her brother are drowned, Tito Melema is drowned,
Mr. Grandcourt is drowned. It is extremely unlikely thaf Grand-
court should not have known how to swim.
CONSTANTIUS. He did, of course, but he had a cramp. It served
him right. I can't imagine a more consummate representation of
264
DANIEL DERQNDA
the most detestable kind of Englishman the Englishman who
thinks* j** low to articulate. An<J in Grandcourt the type and the
individual are so happily met : the type with its sense of the pro-
prieties and the individual with h* aUsence of all sense. He is the
apotheosis of dryness, a human expression ot 'the simple idea of the
perpendicular.
.THEODORA. Mr. Casaubon, in Middlemarch, *vas very dry too ;
and yet what a genius it is that can give us two disagreeable husbands
who are so utterly different !
PULCHERIA. You must countnhe two disagreeable wives too
Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen* They are very much alike. 5 r
know the author didn't mean it ; it proves how common a type the
worldly, pincte, selfish young woman seemed to her. They are both
disagreeable ; you cant get over that.
CONSTAHTIUS. There is something in that, perhaps, I think, at
any rate, that the secondary people here are less delightful than in
Middlemarch ; there is notning so good as Mary Garth and her
father, or the little old lady who steals sugar, or the parson who is
in love with Mary, or the country relatives of old Mr. Featherstpne.
Rex Gascolghe is not so good as Fred Vincy.
THEODORA. Mr. Gascoigne is admirable, and Mrs. Davilow is
charming.
PULCHERIA. And y</u must not forget that you think Herr
Klesmer * Shakespearean'. Wouldn't ' Wagnerian' be high enough
praise ?
CONSTANTIUS. Yes, one must make an exception with regard to
the Klesmers ard the Meyriqjcs. They are delightful, and as for
Klesmer himself, and Hans Meyrick, Theodora may maintain her
epithet. Shakespearean characters are characters that are born of the
verf>ou: of observation characters that make the drama seem
multitudinous, like life. Klesmer comes in with a sort of Shake-
spearean 'value', as a painter would say, and so, in a different tone,
does Hans Meyrick. They spring from a much-peopled mind.
THEODORA. I think Gwendolen's confrontation with Klesmer one
of the finest things in the book.
CONSTANTIUS. It is like everything in Ge6rge Eliot ; it will bear
thinking of.
PUtCHERiA. All that is very fine, but you jcannot persuade me that
265
APPENDIX
Deronda is not a very ponHe*ous and ill-made? story. It has nothing
that one can call a subject. A silly young girl and a solemn, sapient
young man who doesn't fall in love with lie/ ! That is the djnnte
of eight monthly volumes. I call it very fLt. Is that what the
exquisite art of Thar <^eray *.nd Miss Austen and Hawthorne has
come to ? I would as soon read a German novel outright.
THEODORA. The*e is something higher than form there is spirit.
CONSTANTIUS. I cm afraid Pulcheria is sadly aesthetic. She had
better confine herself to Merimee.
PULCHERIA. I shall certainly to-dry read ov^r La Double Mfyrise.
THEODORA. Oh, my dear, y pnsez-vous*
CONSTANTIUS. Yes, I think there is little art in Deronda, but I think
there is a vast amount of life. In life without art you can find your
account ; but art without life is a poor affa ; r. The book is full of
the world.
THEODORA. It is full of beauty and knowledge, and that is quite
art enough for me.
PULCHERIA (to the little dog). We are silenced, darling, but we
are not convinced, are we ? (The pug begins to bark.) No, we
are not even silenced. It's a young woman with two ^a^
THEODORA. Oh, it must be our muslins !
CONSTANTIUS (rising to go). I see what you mean !
1876.
266
Printed in Great Britain
at Hopetoun Street, Edinburgh,
by T *nd A. CONSTABLE LTD
Printers to the University ot Edinburgh
With the aid ofthf;
ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
1949
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11