Eliot's Essays

Tradition and the Individual Talent, The Metaphysical Poets and other such work were among T.S. Eliot's finest work and epoch-making but two or three generations earlier, the essays of George Eliot were no less rigorous and more progressive in their way.

Time was something the C19th had more of for writing and reading and 30 pages of Penguin paperback, around 12000 words, is not uncommon for a review in The Westminster Review, some of them taking a page worth of text to cite as a thoroughgoing example.

She's never less than lively, uncompromising in her dismissals of the unworthy but not gratuitous. The put-downs are always explained by a comprehensive dismantling of the work in question. Perhaps the best-known, and one of the most entertaining, is Silly Novels by Lady Novelists from 1856, showing little sympathy for those genre writers incapable of the scope of Middlemarch, who are by now only preserved as victims of her disapproval.

The devout preacher, Dr. Cumming, is reduced to matchwood in Evangelical Teaching:Dr. Cumming whose thesis seems to depend on little more than his own 'faith' and, in particular, that no action is worthwhile unless it is in the service of 'the glory of God'. Ms. Eliot refers to the story of Grace Darling who,

when she took a boat in the storm to rescue drowning men and women, was not good if it was only compassion that nerved her arm and impelled her to brave death for the chance of saving others; it was only good if she asked herself  - Will this redound to the glory of God?

The extracts from her correspondence with Frederic Harrison, 1866-70, include some discussion of Auguste Comte and Positivism, believing in the natural rather than the supernatural, which came before A.J. Ayer and Logical Posivism, that scientific knowledge was the only kind of factual knowledge although, it seemed to me, always fell back on some a priori which might as well be 'faith' or 'God'. One is glad of the brief introduction to that section which quotes T. H. Huxley's summary of Positivism as 'Catholicism minus Christianity' which succinctly shows it's only half a job achieved.

But, as in their turn, Marxists learned their scriptures, recited their doctrines and depended for everything on dogma, 'faith' was a ricketty thing in the mid-C19th under the scrutiny of such a fierce intelligence as Ms. Eliot's and she remains as relevant now as she was then.

It was only a few years ago that I heard the idea that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch which seemed to me some sort of progress on the idea that The Bible was the word of God. Theology hasn't ever been a major subject of mine. It turns out that Ms. Eliot was well aware of that idea about 170 years ago and equally able to show how it could not be, so that accreditation was short-lived.

It's by no means all theology, though, and there are wise words on Notes on Form in Art, where 'form' means 'shape' rather than rhyme and metre. Perhaps 'form' is 'art', the way that elements in a work relate to each other to make a coherent whole. But she anticipates Modernism in a way,

for even the ravings of madness include multitudinous groups and sequences which are parts of common experience,

so perhaps some of the disjunctures so admired in Dali, T.S. Eliot, Charlie Parker (and provide your own examples) had been forEseen some decades ahead of them being seen as revolutionary.

It might seem odd to us now that Beethoven 7 was seen as an offence to music and that T.S. Eliot described Donne's technique as,  'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together' but in between times George Eliot saw no reason to find such things incoherent. It's only a matter of seeing beyond fashion and orthodoxy and then not being taken in by any 'shock value'. Being any good depends on more than some perceived novelty. That's been done before.

In her review of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, she suggests,

We all begin life by associating our passions with our moral prepossessions, by mistaking indignation for virtue, and many go through life without awaking from this illusion.

The £3.50 I paid for this book would have been money well-spent for that sentence alone. Not all writers have had their reputations enhanced by having their small print read, those other writings beyond the titles that they are famous for. I think it's unlikely there's anything to be found that would besmirch the reputation of George Eliot.

Ironically, for someone who had their doubts about all the accoutrements of religion, she might have made a good saint but 'saint' is one of those titles you shouldn't be awarded if you'd accept it and I'm sure she would have appreciated the irony.