Witcraft in 1801 and 1851, starring William Hazlitt and Marian Evans - she came to suspect him of ‘excès de raison’, and began to lose interest

The 1801 and 1851 chapters of Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English are both built around writers I do not normally think of as philosophers, William Hazlitt in 1801 and Marian Evans in 1851.  Hazlitt, in 1801, is trying to become a painter, but his first book, The Principles of Human Action, will appear in 1805, read by almost no one except, eventually, John Keats.  Evans in 1851 was the author of one philosophical work, a translation of David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1846 for the translation), with a translation of Feuerbach in the near future.  So, at this point, philosophers, and more importantly they were reading every important book and meeting a high proportion of the important people.  And their own stories are interesting.

Who else is in the 1801 chapter?  English philosophy has up to this point, and well past it, been hard to separate from religion, and many of the 1801 stars are dissident Protestant clergymen working on religious problems, usually some kind of idealized “rational” Christianity, with philosophical tools.  Hazlitt’s father, the Reverend William Hazlitt, is one of them, along with the genially oblivious Joseph Priestly, one of the great pedagogical hacks:

Liberal Education [which argued that education should be useful and for ordinary people] was published by Johnson in 1765, and Priestly became the mainstay of his business, supplying him with almost 100 works over the next thirty years, ranging from textbooks for use in schools, and elaborate chronological wall charts (a hugely successful innovation), to original works of natural science, politics and theology.  But whatever the topic, Priestly kept returning to [David] Hartley’s themes of necessity, association of ideas and progress toward perfection.  (219)

Yes, this is the same Priestly who discovered oxygen, invented carbonated water, and so on.  These are amazing people.  William Burke, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge introduces the era’s hot foreign craze, “’the most unintelligible Emanuel Kant’” (264, Coleridge’s words).  A number of translations of selections from Kant, along with attempts to explicate them, began to appear beginning in 1793.

Hazlitt would soon enough become one of the greatest English essayists and literary critics, but Witcraft skips all that.

The use of Marian Evans in the 1851 chapter is similar, except Rée cannot resist a joke.  The chapters are getting long – 88 pages for 1851 – and the name “George Eliot” does not appear until the last page.  I guess Rée assumes you know?  I mean, I knew.  Anyway, you do not need to know.  The novels, like Hazlitt’s essays, are all later.

In 1851, Evans for the first time published an essay, on history, progress, and religion, in the prestigious Westminster Review, and much of the chapter is about the functioning of the magazine, first as it was run by John Stuart Mill and then by others, including, for a couple of years, by George Eliot – sorry, Marian Evans, who was the “secret editor.”

Mill leads to Thomas Carlyle – “Mill was baffled too: ‘Carlylism’ was a ‘vice of style’, he said, and he ‘made little of it’” (290) – and Sartor Resartus leads to the continuing and expanding reception of Immanuel Kant, from the goldsmith Thomas Wirgman’s summary of Kant in a “map” (292, see left) to Thomas De Quincey’s frequent mockery of Kant and Kantians.  “De Quincey would never forgive the ‘disenchanter’ who infected him with cynicism when he was not yet twenty years old” (294).

Who else is here?  Tocqueville, Emerson – it is nice to read about writers who I have read myself – oh no, Herbert Spencer.  Evans, to use an anachronism, dated Spencer for a while, and it is a testament to her character that she became sick of him.  “After several more excursions, however… she came to suspect him of ‘excès de raison’, and began to lose interest” (357).

Tomorrow, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein wrap up Witcraft.

In a much earlier (1987), much shorter book, Philosophical Tales: An Essay on Philosophy and Literature, Rée writes “It would perhaps be possible to present the history of thought as a succession of integral histories, of the stories which intellectuals have told about their place in history,” an “integral history” being what I call “Whig history,” the story of how everything leads up to right now this minute, with every side path dismissed as unimportant.  Rée’s method in Witcraft, the use of figures like Hazlitt and Evans and the arbitrary fifty-year frame, is that each chapter becomes to the extent possible its own “now,” the story, told again and again, of how the past’s philosophers were fools and lunatics but now we’re finally getting it right.  He’s been carrying this idea around for thirty years.

“I see you’re reading ‘Middlemarch.’” - William Dean Howells divides people into groups

I am early in the marriage plot of The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).  Corey, from Boston society and 18th century money, will perhaps marry Irene Lapham, daughter of the new-money Vermont paint baron.  Penelope is the other daughter:

But after Corey greeted Irene he glanced at the novel under his eye, and said, in the dearth that sometimes befalls people at such times: “I see you’re reading ‘Middlemarch.’  Do you like George Eliot?”

“Who?” asked the girl.

Penelope interposed.  “I don’t believe Irene’s read it yet.  I’ve just got it out of the library…  I wish she [Eliot] would let you find out a little about the people for yourself,” she added.  But here her father struck in:

“I can’t get the time for books.”  (Ch. 7)

Middlemarch (1871) is a recurring motif the Howells novel.  It is used as a stand-in for culture in general.  The nouveau entrepreneur has no time for culture, while everyone in Boston society reads Middlemarch as soon as it is published, and in between is Penelope, capable of matching the old money intellectually, but in the cultural rearguard, reading Middlemarch late, reading a library copy; then there’s poor Irene.

The events of Silas Lapham suggest that it is set sometime after 1873, when the Long Depression begins – rough times for a commercial paint manufacturer.  This idea that reading the library book, reading the novel a couple of years late (“’I didn’t know it was so old.  It’s just got into the Seaside Library,’” Ch. 9) is a genuine point of division between the social levels of the two families, and also between the two daughters, the one who reads and the one who does not.  Chapter 9, the source of the proceeding injured protest, includes an excruciating scene where Irene asks Corey for advice on stocking the library of their new million dollar (in 2016 $) mansion.  Poor Irene.

It is not at all clear that all of those cultured readers of Middlemarch, a book of great ethical depth and artistic complexity, have gotten much out of it.  As Corey’s mother, a Middlemarch reader, comments:

“I suppose it’s the plain sister who’s reading ‘Middlemarch.’”  (Ch. 8)

The major temperamental division turns out, though, to be different than who has  read what but rather who is an ironist and who is not, and to what degree.    The entrepreneur is the model of sincerity – he has faith in his paint – although one daughter, the reader, is an ironist, “satirical” as Corey calls her.  The old money characters have been corrupted by irony to the point of dysfunction.  The useless father of that family is even Wildean at times:

His father shook his head with an ironical sigh.  “Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth.  It strikes at the root of the whole feudal system.”  (Ch. 5)

That really should be read as if Mr. Corey is Aunt Augusta in Earnest.  On the other side is the strange, blunt episode in Chapter 17 where Reverend Howells – I mean Reverend Sewell – preaches the Gospel of Common Sense to the paint maker and his wife; the scene is either a flop or a brutal form of counterpoint.  After all, Howells is an ironist, too.  These hilarious lines – paragraphs – close a chapter:

“Well, we must stand it, anyway,” said Mrs. Lapham, with the grim antique Yankee submission.

“Oh yes, we’ve got to stand it,” said Penelope, with the quaint modern American fatalism.  (Ch. 9)

If only he’d let me find out a little about the people for myself.

I’ll fight alone, I’ll fall alone - Giacomo Leopardi inspires Daniel Deronda

A poem of Giacomo Leopardi made a surprising appearance in Daniel Deronda (1876).  I mean I was surprised.  The beautiful Jewish singer Mirah is shown, to the extent a novel can show such a thing, as performing a single song, a setting of Leopardi’s 1818 “To Italy” (“All’Italia”), his first published poem.  He was twenty at the time and had mostly written and published, as teens do, works of Greek philology.

In chapter 39, Mirah runs through a fictional music setting – if that means anything – we can’t hear it regardless – of “some words” of Leopardi’s poem:

O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi
        E le colonne e i simulacri e l’erme
        Torri degli avi nostri
        Ma la gloria non vedo

Or in Jonathan Galassi’s translation (Canti, 2010, p., 3) – Eliot of course just has the untranslated Italian:

   O my country, I can see the walls
and arches and the columns and the statues
and lonely towers of our ancestors,
But I don’t see the glory;

The title of the poems tells us that Leopardi is writing about Rome and Italy, but Eliot appropriates the lines to invoke the Jews exile from their homeland.  The lyrics link to a later episode about a painting set in the ruins of Jerusalem.

Deronda later hears Mirah perform the song at a concert:

He knew well Leopardi's fine Ode to Italy (when Italy sat like a disconsolate mother in chains, hiding her face on her knees and weeping), and the few selected words were filled for him with the grandeur of the whole, which seemed to breathe an inspiration through the music…  Certain words not included in the song nevertheless rang within Deronda as harmonies from the invisible –

            ‘Non ti difende
  Nessun de’ tuoi?  L'armi, qua l'armi: io solo
  Combatterò, procomberò sol io’ –

they seemed the very voice of that heroic passion which is falsely said to devote itself in vain when it achieves the god-like end of manifesting unselfish love.   (Ch. 45, boldface mine)

I don’t know anything about Leopardi’s reception in English, but I found this scenes curious.  Deronda already knows the poems so well that hearing it evokes lines that are not in the song!

        None of your own defend you?
To arms!  Bring me my sword:
I’ll fight alone, I’ll fall alone.   (ll.36-38, Galassi again)

The removal of the Italian context is slyly done here, as Deronda unconsciously (at this point) shifts “you” from Italy to Mirah and her people.   To Deronda, the song creates “the vivid image of a man dying helplessly away from the possibility of battle.”  At the end of the novel, he will have launched himself into battle, no longer alone.

Leopardi makes a strange move in his ode (which is five pages long, thus the “few selected words” in the song) – he shifts the action and point of view to the Spartans at Thermopylae.  What first looks like a patriotic poem in the tradition of Alfieri (tyrants are overthrown) and Foscolo (tombs are embraced) becomes more strangely personal, with Leopardi imagining himself as a soldier in the service of antiquity.  Italian patriotism is, as with Foscolo, cultural and literary. 

If only I were down below with you,
and this sweet earth were wet with my blood, too.
But if my fate is unlike yours,
and will not let me shut my eyes
dying fallen on the field of Greece,
still may the modest glory of your bard,
if the gods allow it,
endure as long as yours
in times to come.  (ll. 132-140)

I’ll spend a couple more days seeing how the bard did.

Eliot mocks the philistines

No, I have changed my mind.  I will write that post about Eliot’s humor.

It is a funny book; Eliot is a funny writer.  The Jewish side of the book is close to humorless, another knock against it.  And the Gwendolen Harleth side loses its humor, too, understandably given the story, which means that the first third of the novel has a lot of humor and the rest very little.  Maybe this is the imbalance that leads to so much disappointment.

A joke:

Music was soon begun.  Miss Arrowpoint and Herr Klesmer played a four-handed piece on two pianos, which convinced the company in general that it was long…  (Ch. 5)

Or the one I mentioned a couple of days ago, where Gwendolen’s Aunt Gascoigne is describing the advantages of a possible marriage for her:

“Only think: there is the Grandcourt estate, the Mallinger estate, and the baronetcy, and the peerage,” – she was marking off the items on her fingers, and paused on the fourth while she added, “but they say there will be no land coming to him with the peerage.”  It seemed a pity there was nothing for the fifth finger.  (Ch. 28)

That last line is the one that I thought was worthy of and as mean as the heartless Evelyn Waugh; it might be thought uncharacteristic of Eliot by a reader not familiar with the “Mrs. Tulliver’s Terpahim” and “The Family Council” chapters of The Mill on the Floss.

The two preceding jokes have in common that they are both mocking the philistines in Gwendolen’s family.  It was only just over twenty years since Matthew Arnold had drafted the German (and Biblical) word “philistine” into English as a term for self-satisfied bourgeois anti-intellectualism.  Eliot set up her novel as a war between the Jews and the Philistines, with the former the defenders of thought and creators of beauty and the latter interested only in status and money.  Eliot is merciless about Aunt Gascoigne, for example,  even to her name – “[her husband] had once been Captain Gaskin, having taken orders and a diphthong but shortly before his engagement” (Ch. 3).

Vladimir Nabokov’s essay “Philistines and Philistinism” begins:

A full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.  I have said “full-grown” person because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron.  (Lectures in Russian Literature, p. 309)

Daniel Deronda is about two not yet full grown people (Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth) moving towards heronness.  Neither have quite gotten there by the novel’s end, although Daniel is pretty close, and I have hope for Gwendolen.  One of Eliot’s daring moves – this is an aside – is to write a Bildungsroman where the character barely changes, but where every tiny movement counts for a lot.

So the two main characters are on a different path, and the Jewish characters are off in a different aesthetic world.  But the families of the protagonists, the confirmed vulgarians – Eliot gives it to them but good, and it is a pleasure to watch her do it.

All right, given how badly I read it, that is more than enough about Daniel Deronda.

Want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity - Daniel Deronda's narrator takes sides

In a comment to a Levi Stahl post on Daniel Deronda, Mark Marowitz advances the crackpot idea that the villainous husband Grandcourt is actually “the most misunderstood hero in the English novel…  a good man, a very good man!”  And that the lively, suffering Gwendolen Harleth is a murderer and  “one of the great villains in literature.”  I could argue with a couple of points – I disagree with the bit about the dogs – but the evidence is drawn from the text, even omitting some evidence that helps his case, like the strange business in Chapter 6 (Stahl and his co-blogger had already mentioned it) where Harleth is freaked out by a spooky picture, looking “like a statue into which a soul of Fear had entered,” whatever that looks like.

What evidence against his case does Marowitz omit?  How do I know that his interpretation is wrong?  Because the omniscient narrator tells me so, again and again.  I wish I had written down better bits about Grandcourt, but this gives the idea:

There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to corresponding stupidity.  Mephistopheles thrown upon real life, and obliged to manage his own plots, would inevitably make blunders.  (Ch. 48)

Want of sympathy is a great sin in Eliot’s fiction.  The narrator says almost the same thing a few chapters earlier:

Grandcourt could not indeed fully imagine how things affected Gwendolen: he had no imagination of anything in her but what affected the gratification of his own will; but on this point he had the sensibility which seems like divination.  What we see exclusively we are apt to see with some mistake of proportions; and Grandcourt was not likely to be infallible in his judgments concerning this wife who was governed by many shadowy powers, to him nonexistent.  (Ch. 44)

You are thinking: “I thought this was the realistic, non-German part of the novel.”  I know – divination, shadowy power – Mephistopheles!

Similarly, I can be sure that Gwendolen Harleth is not so bad, even when she appears to be even more cruel, snobbish and spoiled than I realized:

It was her temper that framed her sentences under this entirely new pressure of evils: she could have spoken more suitably on the vicissitudes in other people's lives, though 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.  (Ch. 24)

How Harleth’s lack of sympathy is any better than her future husband’s is unknown, but it is, “usually.”  The narrator feels she has not made her case, that many readers will still find Harleth quite awful, so she intervenes again a few pages later, trying again:

That where these [money and status] threatened to forsake her, she should take life to be hardly worth the having, cannot make her so unlike the rest of us, men or women, that we should cast her out of our compassion; our moments of temptation to a mean opinion of things in general being usually dependent on some susceptibility about ourselves and some dullness to subjects which every one else would consider more important.

Why, she is just like me!  Like heck she is.  I lose sympathy for Gwendolen because in adversity she proves to have a bad character.  The narrator also lacks sympathy for people with bad character, as I would show if I wrote that post about Daniel Deronda as a satirical novel that I was thinking about.  The narrator can be scathing, as mean and even funny as Evelyn Waugh when she wants.  Look for the paragraph that ends “It seemed a pity there was nothing for the fifth finger” in Chapter 28 for an example.

It seems that the narrator is not just describing her heroine but justifying her, even pleading for her, and also against Grandcourt.  The narrator has taken sides.  Why should I trust her judgment?  Perhaps because she is omniscient, but then why is she unable to tell me what went on in the boat, in the action behind Chapter 55?  Somehow her omniscience fails her there.

I have spent a lifetime of reading fiction learning to distrust narrators.  Here I am identifying the heart of my struggle with Daniel Deronda.  Eliot gives me a surprising number of reasons to distrust this narrator.  Am I supposed to read the novel this way?  No, I suppose not.

Thanks, Mr. Marowitz, for pointing me to your comment, which I had missed at the time.

Real life was as interesting as ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ – Daniel Deronda's Real and Ideal

The second big innovation or experiment in Daniel Deronda is the one readers dislike so much, the joining of two stories written in discordant styles.  Last spring Levi Stahl and Maggie Bandur wrote an interesting series of pieces on the novel, put together as they were reading the book, in which they both follow the usual path (in fourteen detailed posts): delight at Eliot’s charming, ambiguous recasting of Emma followed by disillusion at the direction the Jewish part of the novel eventually takes, especially its wooden characters.  The word that they both use is “believe” – they do not believe in Deronda’s side of the novel, suggesting they in some way believe in Gwendolen Harleth’s side.

Stahl and Bandur are right, that one set of characters is lifelike and rounded (and fun) while another set – “We should stamp every possible world with the flatness of our own inanity” says Deronda in a not entirely unrelated context (Ch. 36).  Many readers respond: “You’re telling me!”  But I’ll argue that although “flat” is accurate, “inane” is not.  What looks at first like a failure of execution is in fact a success, but of concept.  Perhaps the concept is a failure.  I thought it worked all right.

Crudely, the marriage half of the novel is Realism, the Jewish half Idealism.  The former is English, the latter German.  Daniel Deronda is a fairy tale hero, the boy of dubious parentage who after trials discovers that he is a prince.  In one sense, I mean what he learns about his heritage, and in another I mean that although he is not actually a prince his mother turns out to be a princess, which, since I was on to the pattern by this point, was almost rubbing it on a little thick.

Deronda slips into fairy tale world when he rescues a princess (there are several instances where he crosses a threshold into Jewish Wonderland).  He gives her shelter in some kind of fairy cave, inhabited by Queen Mab – the fairy who presents the princess with the “tiny felt slippers” that are like “sheaths of buds.”  These slippers are too large for the princess, even though the fairies are themselves tiny, “all alike small, in due proportion with their miniature rooms…  All four, if they had been wax-work, might have been packed easily in a fashionable lad’s traveling trunk”  (Ch. 18).  That is one strange sentence.  But these characters, the Meyrick family, are meant to be a kind of wax-work. 

They so thoroughly accepted Deronda as an ideal, that when he was gone the youngest set to work, under the criticism of the two elder girls, to paint him as Prince Camaralzaman.  (Ch. 16)

They have moved to the Arabian Nights, but you see what I am talking about.  This is before we get to Mordecai, who a kind of philosophical or mystical Ideal.  Or see Chapter 37, in which the prince, princess, and little fairy women try to define the Ideal, but in aesthetic terms:

“If people have thought what is the most beautiful and the best thing, it must be true. It is always there.”

“Now, Mirah, what do you mean?” said Amy.

“I understand her,” said Deronda, coming to the rescue.  “It is a truth in thought though it may never have been carried out in action.  It lives as an idea.”

It is possible that this kind of scene is not well suited to the novel as we now think of it.  Try the long debate in the Philosopher’s Club, Ch. 42, for an even more dubious example.

I obviously have my own doubts about how some of this works, although I question specific scenes, not the notion of combining such clashing aesthetic ideas.  This was not my problem with Eliot.  I don’t actually believe in any of the characters.  They are all waxworks to me, some molded to fool the eye, some more abstract.  Eliot’s characterization in the Jewish Daniel Deronda is no different, in principle or execution than that in the idealist German fiction of Goethe, Stifter, or Hoffmann.  Mordecai and the fairy sisters are as well-rounded as the wizard and his snake daughters in The Golden Pot.

This would be the time to note the curious similarities between Hoffmann’s recurring musician Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler and Daniel Deronda’s musician named Musical Instrument (Klesmer), both of whom are able to move between the real world and the magical world presumably somehow by means of their special status as musicians.

I don’t always enjoy what Eliot is doing with all this, but it is a bold move.

The post’s title is from Chapter 4.  The joke is that most readers now - almost all - would find Jane Austen's (and apparently Gwendolen Harleth's) favorite novel to be the most boring novel ever written.

The make believe of a beginning - George Eliot bends time

George Eliot was a great formal innovator.  This is not the way I think about her, nor the way I usually see her described, yet it is true.  Much of the real clumsiness of her fiction comes from her struggle with received fictional form.  Like Dickens, she solves problems in her next novel.  Few writers would write a book as formally perfect as the fairy tale novella Silas Marner (1861) and then never try to write another book like it (until, in a way, Daniel Deronda).  Why do it again; what is the point?  Eliot is in that category of artist, whatever you call it.  The kind who has to write a book to know what book she is writing.

So when Eliot invents a form that seems perfectly suited for her strengths, the long eight part novel with branching plots  that is Middlemarch (1871-2), she keeps part of it but pushes against and perhaps even breaks other parts in her next book, Daniel Deronda (1876).  She would have repaired the damage, but created more problems, in her next novel, which sadly we do not have.

One of my struggles with Eliot is that I put a high value on formal perfection, a category of little interest to Eliot, even though temperamentally, as is obvious at Wuthering Expectations, I am much like her in this regard.  Of course I highly value what I am not, although if it were as simple as that I would attach a lot more value to Eliot’s wisdom.

Daniel Deronda is a sequel to Middlemarch in that it is another exploration of what a good, meaningful life looks like, with a shallow heroine replacing the preternaturally wise Dorothea Brooke – despite the difference they make not the same but analogous mistakes – and a hero paralyzed by doubts about his identity in place of the mistakenly confident Dr. Lydgate.  The eight volume novel is employed again, simplified from a triple plot to a double plot.  Where are the innovations?

First, the temporal structure of the book.  Daniel Deronda begins not in the middle, but close to it, with a flash-forward to the first time the protagonists, Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth, meet.  I did not know it was a scene out of place at first, even though Eliot specifically says it is in the baffling epigraph* at the beginning of Chapter 1, almost the first words of the book after a doom-laden poem (“vengeance…  slow death… pallid pestilence”) and Book One’s title (“The Spoiled Child,” who turns out to be an adult, and the heroine).  “Men can do nothing without the make believe of a beginning” – an odd way to begin a novel.  “No retrospect will take us to the true beginning.”  Eliot even uses the term “in media res,” which I did not notice or understand.

Soon, the novel moves into Harleth’s past, not just filling in the history as Trollope does when he introduces a character but working it out in scenes, with dialogue and description and all of the usual stuff, eventually taking me back to the opening scene, after which Eliot resets time again, going back even farther to cover Deronda’s childhood, education , and early flailing.

This was the history of Deronda, so far as he knew it, up to the time of that visit to Leubronn in which he saw Gwendolen Harleth at the gaming-table.  (end of Ch. 20)

If I were not so immersed in 19th century fiction, I would not have noticed how radical this is.  No one else was doing this, telling their story with the scenes out of order.  Even Wuthering Heights (1847) straightens out fast after a twisty start.  The device is so common now that I hardly notice it.  Everyone does it.  Unbroken, the Laura Hillenbrand bestseller, begins this way: three crashed American airmen are on a raft in the Pacific; a plane approaches; they are saved! – but no, the plane opens fire!  Then a jump way back to tell us who the men are and how they ended up on that raft.

Eliot uses her other temporal device, too, where the point of view suddenly leaps into the future for a sentence or two, a device that she was using as far back as Adam Bede (1859) and which I do not remember seeing anywhere else but Jane Eyre (1847 – see the tombstone of Helen Burns).

The monotony of time in pre-Modernist fiction can get old, but that was not a problem in Daniel Deronda.

OK, that was one big innovation.

*  These epigraphs are mostly a mystery to me, a layer of complexity that I have not tried to understand.  As Sir Thomas Browne wrote, or as Eliot claims he wrote, “Festina lente – celerity should be contempered with cunctation” (epigraph to Chapter 15).

First chop! - George Eliot's extreme bijou world-nausea

Having read the novel badly, I do not want to waste time making an argument about Daniel Deronda.  Mostly I just want to mess around with the book.  Poke at passages like this one:

It was Mab who carried her breakfast and ushered her down – with some pride in the effect produced by a pair of tiny felt slippers which she had rushed out to buy because there were no shoes in the house small enough for Mirah, whose borrowed dress ceased about her ankles and displayed the cheap clothing that, moulding itself on her feet, seemed an adornment as choice as the sheaths of buds.  The farthing buckles were bijoux. (Ch. 20)

I think I need to make one argument to get anywhere, and this passage supports it, not the surprising last sentence but rather Queen Mab and her felt slippers clothing the Jewish fairy princess.

But not today.  How about:

The exterior [of an ancient church converted into a stable] was much defaced, maimed of finial and gurgoyle, the friable limestone broken and fretted, and lending its soft gray to a powdery dark lichen; the long windows, too, were filled in with brick as far as the springing of the arches, the broad clerestory windows with wire or ventilating blinds.  (Ch.  35)

Maimed of Finial and Gurgoyle would be a good name for a metal band.  The next sentence I dislike (“pleasure on its piquant picturesqueness”) but the rest of the description has lots of nice colors and details.  “’Oh, this is glorious!’ Gwendolen burst forth,” and it is quite good, although the scene is essentially the description of an imaginary genre painting, Eliot imitating a Salon description (e.g., the puppy).

“She had a world-nausea upon her, and saw no reason all through her life why she should wish to live,” in Chapter 24; I love that, “world-nausea.”

These are the fairy girls again: “Their faces seemed full of speech, as if their minds had been shelled, after the manner of horse-chestnuts, and become brightly visible” (Ch. 18).  I have a lot of trouble with Eliot’s imagery, or really the complex things she does with it, but that’s a terrific line, although not as good as “the restlessness of vulgar furniture” (Ch. 12).  I do not understand why that is not a maxim, nor why it was not the title of a Belle and Sebastian album.

I hardly expected a George Eliot novel to have so much slang:

“That girl is like a high-mettled racer,” said Lord Brackenshaw to young Clintock, one of the invited spectators.

“First chop! tremendously pretty too,” said the elegant Grecian, who had been paying her assiduous attention; “I never saw her look better.”  (Ch. 10)

Clintock is nobody, a decorative character, but he lets Eliot show off her ear for what I assume is horsey talk, unless she is making the slang up; how would I know.  Clintock gets off an even better one a couple of pages later:

“What extreme guys those artistic fellows usually are?” said young Clintock to Gwendolen.

Slang is apparently cyclical.

One of the oddest lines in the novel soon follows:

Klesmer's verdict on her singing had been an easier joke to her since he had been struck by her plastik.

I read Daniel Deronda in Barbara Hardy’s Penguin Classics edition, so I had the honor of badly reading the novel in the company of Eliot’s best reader.  In her footnote, plastik “seems to be a rather odd usage by George Eliot” (p. 888).  But I am sure that for Hardy, as for me, some of the pleasure in Eliot – in any great writer – comes from her odd usages.

Yes, the German-Jewish musician is named Klesmer.  Please file that with the fairy slippers for later use.  The entire Jewish part of the novel is something of an odd usage.

The effect that clung and gnawed was a sense of imperfect mastery – reading Daniel Deronda badly

If I had more sense I would set Daniel Deronda (1876) aside and not write about it as I did with Middlemarch (1871-2) when I read it several years ago.  I read Daniel Deronda quite badly, with a real and irritating sense of struggle.  Eliot, in her two final masterpieces, challenges some of the assumptions I have about what makes great fictional art.  Arguments about great art, I would like to say, but I have some doubts.

I was reading the novel better in the middle than in the beginning, and even better by the end (850 pages allows a lot of room for improvement), so what the heck, I thought, take a run at the book, who knows what might happen.

Daniel Deronda has double plots that do not interweave but merely touch.  The one is about the sparkling Gwendolen Harleth and her bad marriage; the other about the title character and his search for identity, let’s say, which involves a number of Jewish characters.  The standard problem with the novel, one that even preceded its publication, is that many readers dislike the “Jewish” half of the novel so strongly that they fantasize about a semi-imaginary novel titled Gwendolen Harleth.  See The Great Tradition (1948) by F. R. Leavis for an example.  Henry James apparently agreed, since he chose to write something very much like that novel just a few years after reading Daniel Deronda, calling it The Portrait of a Lady.  I had figured this out by the 150 page mark, and I have not even read the James novel, but Leavis says it is his discovery (“which seems to have escaped notice,” p. 15 still – I have not actually read this book).  Fine, whatever.  So obvious.  I am sure many people had noticed before.  Leavis has always gotten on my nerves.  See above, aesthetic assumptions.

My introduction to Daniel Deronda was in The New Republic twenty plus years ago, a long review article of what book I do not remember dealing with the Jewish Question in Eliot’s novel and treating it with great seriousness.  I only vaguely knew that the marriage plot was in the book, but rather was predisposed to take it as a serious philosemitic treatment of Jewish issues of continuing interest.

Which it is.  But then the Gwendolen Harleth side has a terrifically alive and fizzy heroine, as good as – who are Eliot’s liveliest?  Young Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss? – as good as her best, and an outstanding brute of a villain, alive in his own way, and a handful of fine, often comic, supporting characters.  There were times when I had the idea that Eliot could have worked in Golden Age Hollywood, writing zippy dialogue for Claudette Colbert.  On Daniel Deronda’s side of the novels, characters are idealized, ideas are more important, and there is a lot less zip.  Sometimes the zip dries up completely.

I guess I see the point of the Gwendolen Harleth people.  None of this has much to do with any struggles I had, though.  The two halves are meant to clash a bit.  The dissonance is interesting, and perhaps new.  Maybe I will write about that.  I will just do my usual rummage through the book.  There is certainly plenty to look at.

For example, cat mummies in Chapter 32:

Yet how distinguish what our will may wisely save in its completeness, from the heaping of cat-mummies and the expensive cult of enshrined putrefactions?

Useful advice for a book blogger.  I read this book badly, but I’ve done worse.

The title, in context the thoughts of the terrible husband, is from the end of Chapter 30.

A whiff of the providential - Austen and Eliot, for example, changed my life

Today I look at two recent books that directly mix memoir and criticism, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014) and William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter (2011).  Maybe I should omit the subtitle so as not to prejudice readers of Wuthering Expectations, who are mostly thinking “yuck.”  Not the target audience.

I have not read the entirety of either book, but have rather spot-checked them.  I do have them at hand, so you cannot just say “Well, the part you did not read is completely different.”  I can check.

Deresiewicz’s book is organized with a chapter per Austen novel, while Mead has a chapter per Middlemarch chapter.  Mead loved her book from childhood and finds that the meaning of the novel deepens as life goes on, while Deresiewicz despised Austen until he had a graduate school epiphany, after which he became an Austen scholar and began learning various lessons from Austen.

Love, I saw, is a verb, not just a noun – an effort, not just another precious feeling.  (158)

Sorry, I did it again, as if I am trying to sabotage the book.  Let me get this out of the way.  Deresiewicz is writing a graduate school memoir, which in and of itself is a mistake.  Graduate students are the worst (the link is to a 30 Rock clip).  Then the structure of linking the events of his life to a particular novel, followed by a series of character-improving lessons, is bizarrely constricting, even if true – no, especially if true.  Deresiewicz presents himself as one strange bird.

If I just ignore the memoir, though, it turns out that his writing about the Austen novels is excellent.  His plot summaries are outstanding, his character portraits swift and vivid.  They are clear, efficient, and expert at deploying details and quotations from the text with enough elegance that I at first did not notice how many little slivers of the book he was really using.  The above “love” passage is preceded by a one-page run through the importance of the words “exertion,” “duty,” and especially “useful” in Mansfield Park (157-8).  If I had written that page as a blog post, I would have been pleased.

He does this first-rate close reading, and then writes about how he began to hang out with some wealthy Brooklynites, which made him appreciate Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and learn that rich people can be jerks.  I don’t get it.

Deresiewicz’s book is memoir plus close reading (with some biography) – Deresiewicz constantly links himself to Austen characters.  Rebecca Mead’s book is really a short Eliot biography with her autobiography and some criticism folded in, so she more often makes connections with Eliot herself.  In the old days, if a New Yorker writer wanted to write an Eliot book, all of the memoir would have been compressed into the foreword or afterword.

This is Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Chace Family Professor of English at Yale, reviewing Mead’s book in the April 24, 2014 New York Review of Books:

What is nonetheless a bit disheartening about My Life in Middlemarch is the apparent assumption that literary criticism and even biography will be most appealing to contemporary readers when packaged as memoir.  In George Eliot’s novel, few words carry a more consistently ironic charge than “Providence” or “providential”…  Though Mead is scarcely under such a delusion, there is still a whiff of the providential about some of the connections she traces between her own history and Eliot’s.  (59)

Or, less politely, the memoiristic passages should have been cut, some of the connections are inventions, and the fault is likely that of an agent or publisher (true for Deresiewicz, too, I’ll bet).  The review is otherwise pretty glowing, although it is mostly about how deeply interesting Eliot is.  And really, at this point, Eliot vs. Mead is not a contest, right?

I think I will just point towards Rohan Maitzen’s recent review for more, including lots of useful quotations that show Mead’s skill and some of her better and worse attempts to justify the exercise.

Neither of these books is a bad book, and I can imagine plenty of readers getting a lot out of them.  But I can also imagine the shadow books where the authors got out of the way, with all of the autobiography moved to the end, for example, so the artificial demand for connections is relaxed.  Those books seem like they would be better.

Next I want to look at Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (2010), which does much of what I am complaining about here, but I think with more success.  That will have to wait until Monday.

The Best Books of 1863 - how very few of these / Poor little busy poet bees / Can we expect again to hum

Ow, my eyes.  You can see the 1863 “Birth of Venus” by Alexandre Cabanel in the flesh – or in the marzipan (see the Zola quotation at the following link) –  at the Musée d’Orsay, although I do not know why you would, since that museum has so many good paintings.

The Best Books of 1863 were better than this painting.  But it was the year of the second-rate.

I would pick The Cossacks, Leo Tolstoy’s clear-eyed look at the desire to romanticize other cultures, as the best book of the year, but it is not quite first-rate Tolstoy.  Now that is an absurd standard, but the fact is that The Cossacks is dragged along behind Tolstoy’s great masterpieces.  It is read as much as it is, and will continue to be read, because of other books.

My list of surviving English novels for 1863 looks like this:

Romola, George Eliot
The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley
Salem Chapel, Margaret Oliphant
Rachel Ray, Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington, Trollope, in the middle of its serialization.

Boy, there is always plenty of Trollope in the 1860s.  I have only read two of the five.  We see  some of the same phenomenon here, I think, certainly with Romola, possibly with the Trollope novels.  The exercise is to imagine that Romola were the only George Eliot novel.  Would anyone still read it?  The exercise is preposterous, so I will move on.  The English class of 1863 seems a little weak, is all I am saying.  Go to those links, though, the ones not to Wuthering Expectations.  A good case is made for every one of those books.

No idea what was going on in French literature this year (or Spanish, or Italian, or German).  American literature was almost put on hold by the Civil War.  Without a doubt, the great American work of the year is a speech, the Gettysburg Address, elegant, forceful, rhetorically brilliant, and now, in its way, one of the key  texts  of the United States.

Louisa May Alcott’s charming Hospital Sketches and Henry Longfellow’s Tales from a Wayside Inn can hardly stand that kind of competition, although both are enjoyable books.  The Longfellow book contains “The Birds of Killingworth,” a bizarre and superb poem of ecological apocalypse.

One more novel was not even second-rate artistically, but was all too significant, Nikolai Chernyshevksy’s What Is to Be Done?, a radical Utopia, written in prison, smuggled out, published illegally, eventually becoming a founding text of the Russian Revolution.  So if not such a great year for novels, 1863 was unusually well equipped with important political literature.

I wrote a bit about the Chernyshevsky novel while discussing Fathers and Sons, where I was startled to see a number of people declare that they wanted to read What Is to Be Done?  Are you all nuts?  But I will suffer along with the rest of you.  I should organize a readalong – it would be the least popular book blog event since the readalong of Herman Melville’s Clarel a few years ago.  And if it turned out a fifth  as well, that would be something.

I wonder what I am missing?  I never mean these posts to be completely comprehensive, and how could they be, but I do hope that any additional suggestions sound a bit desperate and little-read  – Walter Savage Landor’s last book of poems, how about that one?

Come to think of it, I have read that book.  Landor, eighty-eight years old in 1863, was a fine poet; it is a fine book.  But that is hardly my point here, as Landor knows:

The Poet Bees
There are a hundred now alive
Who buz about the summer hive,
Alas! how very few of these
Poor little busy poet bees
Can we expect again to hum
When the next summer shall have come.

One hundred and fifty years is a long lifespan for a book.  Seven novels, the Alcott book, the Longfellow poems, one of the greatest funeral orations, not bad, really.

A Salem Chapel this & that, with jokes, light effects, un-anxious influence - whatever I could think of

Since I do not want to write about Salem Chapel all week, I will resort to unconnected numbered points.

1.  Yesterday I suggested that Salem Chapel should have written from the bewildered, teary point of view of the “pink and plump” Phoebe Tozer, the butterman’s daughter.  In a comment, followed by a chain of post reading, Desperate Reader reminded me that thirteen years later Oliphant would publish Phoebe Junior, in which the title character is Phoebe Tozer’s daughter.  I have not read this one, but based on the Desperate description, I can see that Oliphant’s own thoughts were not so far off from mine. (Also, see Desperate Reader on Salem Chapel here).

2.  Oliphant was a sponge.  The Carlingford novels and their clergymen are openly derivative of Trollope’s Barchester series, which still had two novels to go when Salem Chapel was published.  Then there is her use of the sensation plot, a genre only three years old, although melodrama is as old as the hills.

Maybe even more interesting is the clear evidence that Oliphant had been carefully reading the hot new novelist of 1859, George Eliot, author at this point of Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner, so not our Eliot but a smaller one, the author of tragicomedies about rural carpenters and mill owners, creator of scenes in which a small town’s tradesmen argue about the breed of a cow or who gets the family china.  Salem Chapel’s comedic plot features the same class of people in a somewhat more urban setting.

The Perpetual Curate moves up a notch or two in social class, so I had not made the connection, but the Tozers and Tullivers could comfortably exist in each other’s novels.

Penelope Fitzgerald claims, in her fine introduction to the Virago Salem Chapel, that the anonymously serialized novel was sometimes thought to actually be by George Eliot,  which “caused Oliphant an indescribable mixture of pleasure and annoyance.”

3.  One example of Oliphant’s humor.  The congregation has just heard a guest pastor:

… they were wedded to one [Vincent]; but the bond of union between themselves and their pastor was far from being indissoluble, and they contemplated this new aspirant to their favour with feelings stimulated and piquant, as a not inconsolable husband, likely to become a widower, might contemplate the general female public, out of which candidates for the problematically vacant place might arise.  (Ch. 21)

4.  And an example of Oliphant’s descriptive powers:

… it was to look at a female figure which came slowly up, dimming out the reflection on the wet stones as it crossed one streak of lamplight after another.  (Ch. 9)

Maybe she had been reading Dickens, too.

5.  I have complained about the dull plottiness of part of the novel.  Near the end of the novel, Oliphant recognizes my complaint.  Adelaide Tufton is a superb minor character, the invalid daughter of the previous minister who spends her life sitting next to a giant geranium knitting and collecting gossip.  She is enjoyably free from social constraint.  Vincent almost accidentally visits her in Chapter 41, within a few pages of the end of the novel, where he is horrified to hear her reduce everything he is suffering, every trial he has encountered throughout the novel, including an entirely separate Persuasion-like underplot I have not even mentioned, to small town chatter. 

The poor minister thrust back his chair from the table, and came roughly against the stand of the great geranium, which had to be adjusted and covered his retreat…  she did not show any pleasurable consciousness of her triumph; she kept knitting on, looking at him with her pale blue eyes.

Well, I got a lot of pleasure from it.  Well done, Miss Tufton.  Well done, Mrs. Oliphant.

The Best Books of 1861 - Yet if ye will but stay, whom I accost, And listen to my words a little space

What an amazing run the Victorian novel had from 1859 to 1861, or, really, from 1847 ( the annus Brontëus) through the 1870s.  Amazing in the quantity and quality of books of books that are still read, and not that the French and Russian and even, finally, American literatures of the period are insufficiently bulky.

This is only partly due to the irritatingly productive Anthony Trollope, who finished Framley Parsonage in 1861 and began serializing Orley Farm.  I am not sure how often the latter is read, but the former has survived pretty well.  Charles Dickens finished Great Expectations.  George Eliot published Silas Marner.  Margaret Oliphant wrote her first Carlingford stories.  This is a good haul, I would say, without having to resort to – I am on Wikipedia, 1861 in Literature – Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne or Thackeray’s Adventures of Philip.

One more wonderful piece of English, or semi-English, literature dates from 1861, the first version of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Early Italian Poets, a book of translations of 13th and 14th century poems.  The centerpiece of the book is a complete translation of La Vita Nuova, Dante’s – the other Dante, the Dante-Dante – peculiar blend of prose and poetry celebrating his love for and mourning his loss of Beatrice:

Yet if ye will but stay, whom I accost,
  And listen to my words a little space,
    At going ye shall mourn with a loud voice.
It is her Beatrice that she hath lost;
  Of whom the least word spoken holds such grace
    That men weep hearing it, and have no choice.

NYRB has kept Rossetti’s version of The New Life in print.  Much of it, I would guess, is unsurpassable.

Let’s see.  Emily Dickinson was writing energetically, to the knowledge of no one.  Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs, now one of the most-read slave narratives, is from this year.  Frankly, the Civil War seems to have done in American literature for a few years.

I have no idea what was good in the French literature of 1861.  That Wiki page includes George Sand’s wacky Consuelo, but that is wrong by almost 20 years.  Come back next year for 1862.  Good, good French stuff in 1862.

Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and the Injured in Russia (I have not read this one).  The symbolic patriotism of Gottfried Keller’s The Banner of the Upright Seven in Switzerland (I have read it, and recommend it to the most dedicated readers of Keller).  Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg, the Estonian national epic.  Sorry, the what?  Now I am itching, ridiculously, to read the thing.

I expect most of these books to still be on this list when I repeat this exercise 50 years from now.  In the face of books as strong as Great Expectations and Silas Marner, 50 years does not sound so long.

The 1861 painting up top is John Morgan’s “Gentlemen of the Jury,” borrowed from Wiki.

Too much dialogue

When I wrote, or did not write, about Middlemarch last month, I offhandedly complained that the novel had too much dialogue.  I am in an explainin’ kind of mood, so I will spend some time baring my prejudices.  Or – what is a more positive way to say that? – explicating my critical principles.  Better stick with prejudices.

Many readers rejoice to come across an unexpected patch of dialogue in a complex novel, like hikers in a dense forest emerging into a meadow full of wildflowers, butterflies, and a clearly marked trail.  Look at all of that white space!  The pages suddenly turn so quickly, as if the ink of the extra words had actually been weighing down the page.  I am not above this feeling, but the vagaries of my mental state while reclining with a book is about as far from a critical principle as I can get.  Reading Middlemarch, or any great book, writing about it, I want to be able to push back as hard as I can.  The novel can handle the pressure.

The problem with certain passages of dialogue in Middlemarch is not that they are bad, or even mediocre, or even merely good.  The dialogue is consistently quite good.  The voices of the characters are distinguishable, the conversations further both the action and themes of the novel, and the dross of ordinary conversation has been artfully trimmed.

My prejudice is not that an author should not solve the problems of her novel with dialogue, but rather that good, even very good dialogue, is a common virtue of fiction writers.  Not universal, but easy to find.  Writers with a fifth of the talent of Eliot write dialogue of similar quality all the time.  Dialogue is a problem that most professional writers solve quickly.  Imagery and structure take longer, or are always problems.  Genuine human insight is rare; genuine ideas almost endangered.  Valuing what is unique, or at least rare, I grow restless when a writer of Eliot’s power solves the problems of her novels with a device or a passage that I can find all over the place.  “Good” is not a high enough standard.

I do not know why I keep talking about Middlemarch, since it is Anthony Trollope’s lesser Framley Parsonage (1860-1) that I have in front of me.  A sample of Trollope, from what is, I have read, the greatest novel in the English language:

‘Do you remember that day, Lucy?’ he said again.

‘Yes, I remember it,’ she said.

‘Why did you say it was impossible?’

‘Did I say impossible?’  She knew that she had said so.  (Ch. 48)

And then another page or so in this vein.  In context, we are a few pages from the end of the novel, and are likely racing forward in order to finish the book, not putting too much pressure on any particular word or sentence or phrase, so this ordinarily good dialogue writing, which lets us eavesdrop on the central romantic couple, for whom we presumably, at this point, have significant sympathy and interest, works just how it ought to work.  Trollope has to do something to let the lovebirds spend some time together under our invisible gaze, and his standard solution (discuss and resolve an earlier courtship difficulty) is effective.  It is just not as artful or surprising as the non-standard solution, whatever that might be.

All of this is just a backwards preface to some further writing I want to do about Framley Parsonage.  The single most surprising chapter, the one that impressed me the most, is almost entirely in dialogue.

I make strong claims only in order to prove myself wrong.

Books were of no use. Thinking was of no use. - not writing about Middlemarch

If I were not going on vacation next week, I would likely spend it writing about Middlemarch (1871-2), puzzling over it, whining about it.  Perhaps I would be wise enough to minimize the whining, but a week of posts would be a struggle, and a good challenge.  Middlemarch is a complex book, the most complex Victorian novel I have read.

I keep comparing it, for better and worse, with a couple of its peers, Madame Bovary (1856) and Anna Karenina (1877).  The novels of Flaubert and Eliot are like theatrical foils – Flaubert’s exquisitely worked surface makes Eliot’s sentences look plain; Eliot’s moral sensibility makes Flaubert look as hollow as I fear he is.  Anna Karenina serves as a nice fusion – rich in sensory detail, yet ethically serious.

Middlemarch and Madame Bovary are complex in such different ways.  Speaking roughly, Flaubert works from the outside in – the rich and surprising descriptions of objects and places create a set of images around the characters which become part of the structure of the novel.  Eliot moves from the inside out, not just thoroughly describing the thoughts and feelings of her characters but employing recurring images and metaphors that are associated with the characters but are not part of the physical world of the novel.

For example, Eliot’s varied water metaphor:

In this way, the early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult – whether that of a shrimp-pool or of deeper waters – which afterwards subsides into cheerful peace. (Ch. 20)

Eliot is describing the early days of Dorothea Brooke’s marriage to Casaubon.  The character is in an apartment in Rome; the startling shrimp-pool is not something Dorothea has seen or thought of.  It belongs entirely to the narrator, who repeatedly returns to water when she is spending time with Dorothea, and who uses water to link scenes that are scattered throughout the novel.  Or so it appears to me – as if I have tracked through them!

In Madame Bovary, the shrimp-pool would be forbidden – the metaphors have to come from the outside, from something the characters experience.  Thus, the recurring horse theme in Madame Bovary, which, like Eliot’s water theme, creates surprising correspondences among otherwise disconnected scenes.  But Flaubert’s horses are external, “real,” while the water is all in the imagination of Eliot the narrator.

Both devices for converting imagery into structure are artful, and both can be as complex as the writer can make them.  Somehow, though, I am more comfortable with the sensory images, with Flaubert.  More experience with that kind of fiction, I guess.  I do not understand the supposedly intrusive Eliot narrator so well, how she functions.

That narrator, the wise and serious aphoristic Eliot, also violates every Flaubertian principle, and thank goodness.  The last thing I want to read is the wisdom of Gustave Flaubert.  How appalling!  George Eliot, unlike almost every other writer in the history of written thought, actually seems to be wise, to possess not just insights and intelligence but wisdom.  I have to reach back to Goethe or Montaigne or someone like that.  The incessantly ironic intrusions of Thackeray are no help.  Strike ironic – Eliot can be ironic.  The outrageous lies and false humility of Thackeray’s intrusions are not the right model.

What else might I write about?  I would complain about the dialogue, that there is too much of it.  This should be a week on its own, my indictment of dialogue, which is hardly a problem limited to George Eliot.  But (every complaint would be followed by “but”) Eliot constructs a series of scenes that are almost choral, minor characters discussing the events of the novel, that looks new to me.  I saw hints of it in earlier Eliot novels.  How are they used?  That would be something to think about.

Wisdom, narrator, imagery, dialogue, choral scenes, structure.  What else?  The unusual branching plots, maybe.  These are the topics I might have written about, or perhaps will write about when I re-read Middlemarch, whenever that might be.

My title is wrenched from Chapter 48.

Surprised into sympathy - Trollope and Eliot on sympathy

No novel is anything, for purposes either of comedy or tragedy unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose name we find upon the page.  Let the author so tell his tale as to touch his reader’s heart and draw his reader’s tears, and he has so far done his work well. (295)

Anthony Trollope is wrong about this, obviously.  Novels can serve many purposes and work in many ways and touch neither the heart nor the tear ducts and yet be well-done work.  Set that aside, because Trollope’s 1879 essay “Novel-Reading” is a catholic, expansionary essay.  Trollope is defending sensation novels (“If there be such truth, I do not know that a novel can be too sensational”), not limiting novel-reading but extending it.  That he has not quite absorbed Zola or The Good Soldier is not relevant.

Trollope, author, by this point of how many novels?, is telling us what he is trying to do in his own novels.  Sometimes they have scheming villains and tricky plots, but sometimes, and I’m thinking of The Warden (1855), since I recently reread it, he does without villains or external obstacles of any sort.  A clergyman has a crisis of conscience.  He has to work his way through it.  That’s the story.  The Trollopean reader will find himself at least a bit sympathetic with every character, except, possibly, hilariously, guest stars Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens.

In this way, George Eliot resembles Trollope, at least in her early novels.  Maitzen excerpts what looks like the non-dull portion of “The Natural History of German Life” (1856), written just as Eliot is turning to fiction herself.  The essay is a defense of fictional realism, particularly regarding peasants and rural life, and an attack on “idealized proletaires.”  She has some justifiably sharp words for Dickens – “his frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and courtezans” (124).  Since she cannot yet offer Adam Bede or Silas Marner as evidence, she turns to the finest scene in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) to show us the way the life of the poor should be handled in fiction.  Rohan is reading The Antiquary for the Scotch Challenge now, so let me save that.

What’s interesting here, actually, is that Eliot’s notion of realism is directly tied to some idea of sympathy. True realism, including coarseness, selfishness, and whatever other ugly qualities are part of the portrait are the only path to true sympathy.  “Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment; already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment” (123).  The trivial and selfish person here is, unfortunately, me, the reader.  I think this is the right path, that we are often surprised into sympathy in fiction.  What a complication – we need not the artist, but the great artist.

I have identified Eliot as a leading figure of the International Sympathy Project, in which novelists around the world developed the techniques necessary to surprise the selfish reader into sympathy.  The writers in The Victorian Art of Fiction barely seem to know that the rest of the world exists, aside from occasional mentions of Dumas or Sue or Hawthorne.  In the last two essays, by Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, the fog in the Channel has finally lifted, so Turgenev and Flaubert are as likely to be mentioned as Dickens and Thackeray.  I don’t blame the earlier writers for having more parochial concerns.  I just want companion anthologies: English Writers on Non-English Fiction. Non-English Writers on English Fiction.  More, more.

Monday is Memorial Day, so Wuthering Expectations will take the day off.

Let's read The Victorian Art of Fiction, ed. Rohan Maitzen

This week’s text will be The Victorian Art of Fiction: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the Novel, Broadview Press, 2009, ed. Rohan Maitzen.  We all know Rohan as the proprietor of Novel Readings, but here we have a book she edited, an anthology of twenty-two Victorian magazine essays on the English novel.  Rohan has supplied footnotes and deftly trimmed the essays.  I was never too curious about what was under those ellipses, which I take as a sign of good trimming.

The authors range from major novelists (Eliot, Trollope, James, Stevenson) to the scintillating A. Nonymous.  The dates cover 1848 to 1884.  The essays are diverse but not comprehensive.  A story emerges, a debate takes place.  Are novels good or bad?  Meaning, novels as a whole – should one waste any time reading novels – and specific novels.  Perhaps Charlotte Brontë is bad for you and George Eliot is good for you.  Not that this debate has entirely ended, but we know which side won.  The Victorian Art of Fiction helped me see the path of the argument.

If novels are immoral, or if reading them is immoral, it is likely because so many are written by ladies.  Or not.  So a subtheme of the book is The Lady Novelist, with George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) and Margaret Oliphant’s “Modern Novelists – Great and Small” (1855), and others, pursuing the idea.  Of course, the deck is stacked, with two not-so-silly lady novelists at the beginnings of their own careers surveying the field, thinking about not what lady novelists should do, but what Eliot and Oliphant should do.

In later essays, George Eliot becomes an exemplar for the seriousness of the novel as an art form, and as a morally useful form.  In the anthology, she becomes the foil for Charlotte Brontë, a writer who made critics nervous.  Are her books good or bad, helpful or harmful?  Emily Brontë is barely mentioned in these essays.  Charlotte is apparently a sufficiently difficult problem.  I’m going to write more about this theme, if for no other reason than to gape at Leslie Stephen’s baffling 1877 attempt on Brontë's books.

The essays often work in pairs.  They are chronological, so Rohan will have to tell us how that worked. George Eliot’s sly “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) is followed by W. R. Greg’s “False Morality of Lady Novelists” (1859), who at first sounds as bad as his title, but improves.  Anthony Trollope’s celebratory, even valedictory, “Novel-Reading” (1879) is followed by John Ruskin’s scathing, hilarious, utterly bonkers “Fiction – Fair and Foul” (1880), which functions in this anthology as the final scream of the “novels rot your brain” argument.  And we end with Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson civilly discussing what the novel can do (anything) and how, exactly, it can do it (now there’s the difficulty), two master craftsmen who could not take the novel more seriously.  They win.

The truth of midnight does not exclude the truth of noonday - George Eliot does her best for Bysshe Vanolis

James Thomson sent George Eliot a copy of The City of Dreadful Night.  He sent it to Carlyle, too.  M. E. Lewes, as she signed the letter, was a big figure at this time, with Middlemarch three year behind her.

Eliot admires the poem's "distinct vision and grand utterance" but hopes that Vanolis will produce something with "a wider embrace of human fellowship."  Eliot concluded what I concluded yesterday, that the quality of the poem vitiated its message:

To accept life and write much fine poetry, is to take a very large share in the quantum of human good, and seems to draw with it necessarily some recognition, affectionate and even joyful, of the manifold willing labours which have made such a lot possible.  (May 30, 1874, p. 53)

Thomson's replies (two to the same letter) are hilarious, or perhaps sad, or both.  He tells Eliot that he has "no Byronic quarrel with my fellows" but sees "all alike crushed under the iron yoke of Fate."  He says he admires a physician who saves a life, even though it were better if the patient had died.  "But it is not for me to introduce such thoughts to you."  Good one, Bysshe.

Thomson writes that he sent his poem to Eliot because her works suggest to him a "character and intellectual destiny akin to those of that grand and awful Melancholy of Albrecht Dürer."  I have no idea what he means by that.

Two days later, Thomson decided his bizarre "no, I really mean it" letter to Eliot was either too weird or not weird enough, because he sent a short followup, saying that:

the poem in question was the outcome of much sleepless hypochondria.  I am aware that the truth of midnight does not exclude the truth of noonday, though one's nature may lead him to dwell in the former rather than in the latter.

For some reason, Eliot did not reply to these letters.  You become a famous writer, this is what you get to deal with.

Thomson's letters are from June 18 and 20, 1874, pp. 60-1.

All references are to Haight, Gordon S., ed., The George Eliot Letters: Volume VI 1874-1877, 1955.  Yale University Press.

The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2009

Three extra-large Humiliations were crossed off my list: Walden, The Scarlet Letter, and The Flowers of Evil, all highly rewarding.  Let's set those aside, though. 

Some fleeting highlights:

1. Thoreau recommends the "rich sweet cider" of the frozen-thawed apple.  "Your jaws are the cider-press."  ("Wild Apples").

2.  Charles Baudelaire smashes an itinerant glass saleman's backback of samples with a flower pot, just to hear the smash ("as of lightning striking a crystal palace"), to introduce some beauty into this ugly world of ours. "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!"  (Paris Spleen, "The Bad Glazier").

3. We spend eighteen hours or so sitting next to Judge Pyncheon.  Hawthorne tells us about the Judge's big day.  They're going to nominate him for Governor!  Why won't Judge Pyncheon move?  "Rise up, Judge Pyncheon!" (Chapter 18 of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables).

4. A Kazakh railroad worker battles his prize bull camel.  We gaze upon a sturgeon; the sturgeon gazes upon us.  (Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years).

5.  All that Yiddish literature, so much, so good.  The futile attempt of I. L. Peretz's poor student to come up with a story that's not about the blood libel. ("Stories").  Hodl's farewell to her father, Tevye the Dairyman.  "Let's talk about something more cheerful.  Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?" (Sholem Aleichem, "Hodl," Tevye the Dairyman).

6.  Arthur Hugh Clough can't get milk for his coffee.   ("Amours de Voyage").

7.  Cranford, Silas Marner, Villette.  Three perfect novels, allowing for some variety in one's standards of perfection.  The methods varied, too: Eliot compressed, Gaskell tied up loose ends, and Brontë pushed, hard.  If I end up marvelling more at Villette, it's because it is so complex, and because after just a bit of looking at secondary souces I have developed the crackpot notion that I possess an original idea about the novel.  Forthcoming in 2010, if I can bring myself to do the work, which I mightn't.

8.  The moment in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" when they put the stuffed parrot - no, you'll have to go see for yourself.  Is this story the best thing Flaubert ever wrote?  Talk about perfection.

I just want to keep going.  The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan.  Edouard Mörike's  Mozart's Journey to Prague.  Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie.  "The benediction of the air."  John Galt!

I should skip this last part.  No, it's eating at me, since I just read it.  Worst of the year:  the second half of A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel.  The Holmes-free Utah section is so, so bad, an undramatic jangle of clichés.  It's not only terribly written on its own, but once we return to Holmes, its dreadfulness has somehow even soaked into Watson's journal, tainting the rest of the novel.  The first half was all right!

The Sympathy Project

How crazy is it to say this: The development of the idea of sympathy in 19th century literature was one of the great achievements of the time.  I'm slighting the 18th century Germans.

The success of Pamela (1740), the first modern novel, depended on a very crude idea of sympathy.  Richardson identified or chanced upon a new audience, newly literate female servants who were primed for a story with a female servant for the heroine, with a protagonist just like me.  For non-servant readers, the new experience was to identify so strongly with someone not like me. Not that it's so easy to identify with Pamela today.

I don't think, though, it was until the 19th century that many writers discovered just how powerful the novel was, just how easy it was to direct readers' sentiments towards or away from almost any character. And more importantly, just how artistically and ethically effective these techniques could be when employed by a really skilled writer.

I'm thinking, for example, of Dickens, and especially Hugo.  The condemned murderer in The Diary of a Condemned Man (1829), the Gypsy and hunchback in Notre Dame of Paris (1831), the whole range of urchins, orphans, and thieves in Les Miserables (1862): Hugo wanted action from his readers. Political reform at most, copious tears at the minimum.  The reader was really supposed to regard various categories and behaviors of his fellow man differently after closing the novel.

By mid-century, most of the great writers were working on The Sympathy Project.  Not just Hugo and Dickens: George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Theodor Storm, Adalbert Stifter, Henry James, Mark Twain ("All right, then, I'll GO to hell"), Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky.  All of those Naturalists.   Poets and playwrights, too.  Not everyone.  But an unbelievable amount of artistic and intellectual effort was devoted to creating these incredibly complex patterns of human fellow-feeling.  Excrutiatingly complex, thinking of certain works by Henry James.  The careful reader's sympathetic response to Anna Karenina, for example, ought to be complex.

In Silas Marner (1861), George Eliot carefully directs her reader into the thoughts of every major character, including the candidate for "villain."  We are likely to end up with more understanding of everyone, regardless of their mistakes, eccentricities, or bad actions.  But Eliot is also making an argument about sympathy, enforcing some limits.  The villain crosses a moral line, and we're not with him when he does, a minor key variation on poor pregnant Hetty's "Journey of Despair" in Adam Bede (1859), where the reader and the author are with Hetty, really with her sympathetically - but only up to a point.  Sympathy is withheld, and she's on her own.

I know an English professor, an 18th century specialist, who taught a Jane Austen seminar that, he said, was a complete failure.  He could not penetrate his students' love, love, love for Austen and her characters.  For some reason, he never has this problem with the Vicar of Wakefield, also a likeable fellow.  As Rohan Maitzen suggested a couple of days ago, sympathy can be as bad for the reader as antipathy.  Both can inhibit critical thought.  Elizabeth Bennett, wonderful, amazing Elizabeth Bennett, is not allowed to be ethically compromised.  What, then, do these loving readers make of the last part of Pride and Prejudice? On the other hand, she is one of the greatest creations of imaginative literature.

I was thinking this would be a good place to discuss Gustave Flaubert's A Simple Heart (1877), perhaps his single serious attempt at a sympathetic character, an amazing character, created using the exact same techniques he uses on his horrible people. But I think I've written enough.  The 19th century International Literary Sympathy Project is beginning to look to me like one of the great achievements of civilization.  But literature can do other things, too.  That's all I'm saying.