As is a cautious, optimistic creed, best expressed by Saul Bellow: “There » may be truths on the side of life.” I keep on waiting, but I don’t think I’m going to grow out of it.
Introduction Zadie Smith New York, 2009
forestr: midmanager part 1
allowing Forster to approach the congenital anti-intellectualism of the English from an oblique angle, one that flatters them with complicity. Here he is, up to the same thing with D. H. Lawrence: Much of his work is tedious, and some of it shocks people, so that we are inclined to say: “What a pity! What a pity to go on about the subconscious and the solar plexus and maleness and femaleness and African darkness and the cosmic battle when you can write with such insight about human beings and so beautifully about flowers.
Have you had that thought? Don’t worry if you have; so has E. M. Forster. Still, it’s a mistake:
You can’t say, “Let’s drop his theories and enjoy his art,” because the two are one. Disbelieve his theories, if you like, but never brush them aside. .. . He resembles a natural process much more nearly than do most writers … and one might as well scold a flower for growing on a manure heap, or a manure heap for producing a flower.
It’s a gentle correction, but a serious one, aimed democratically at both listener and speaker. And like this, pursuing a gentle push and pull, iron fist hidden in velvet glove, Forster presses on in his determined, middling way. He’s educating you, but surreptitiously, and unlike the writings of his child- hood hero, Matthew Arnold, it never feels painful. The leggerezza of his prose lightens every load. Speaking on the twentieth of June, 1945, Forster outlines Arnold’s more muscular approach:
One of his complaints against his countrymen was that they were eccen- tric and didn’t desire to be anything else. They didn’t want to be better informed or urbane, or to know what is great in human achievement. They didn’t want culture. And he flung at them another of his famous accusations: Philistines. The philistine is the sort of person who says “I know what I know and I like what I like, and that’s the kind of chap I am.” And Matthew Arnold, a Victorian David, slung his pebble bang in the middle of Goliath’s forehead.
Forster was no pebble slinger. For him, not only the means but also the aims were to be different. It really didn’t matter to Forster if a fellow had read Lawrence or not (he is consistently sentimental about the unlettered: peasants, sailors, gardeners, natives). But to deny Lawrence, because he was not to your taste, or to deny poetry itself, out of fear and incomprehension— that mattered terribly. The only philistinism that counted was the kind that deformed the heart, trapping us in an attitude of scorn and fear until scorn and fear are all we know. On the twelfth of February 1947, recommending Billy Budd, Forster finds an unlikely ally in Melville:
He also shows that… innocence is not safe in a civilization like ours, where a man must practice a “ruled undemonstrative distrustfulness” in order to defend himself against traps. This “ruled undemonstrative dis- trustfulness” is not confined to business men, but exists everywhere. We all exercise it. I know I do, and I should be surprised if you, who are lis- tening to me, didn’t. All we can do (and Melville gives us this hint) is to exercise it consciously, as Captain Vere did. It is unconscious distrustful- ness that corrodes the heart and destroys the heart’s insight, and prevents it from saluting goodness.
Occasionally his image of the general reader is almost too general to recognize. Who dreads philosophy so much they need easing into Plato like this? The word Plato has rather a boring sound. For some reason or other “Plato” always suggests to me a man with a large head and a noble face who never stops talking and from whom it is impossible to escape. Who’s (this) afraid of The Magic Flute?
It’s a lovely book,? I implore you to read it, but rather unluckily it’s based on an opera by Mozart. I say “unluckily” not because the opera is bad, it is Mozart’s best, but because many readers of the book won’t have heard of the opera, and so won’t catch on the allusions. You’ll have to be prepared for some queer names.
No one reading these words, perhaps. On the other side of the class and educational divide – a line that so preoccupied Forster — it’s easy to forget . what it’s like not to know. Forster was always thinking of those who did not know. He worries that simply by having this one-way conversation he pushes the Alec Scudders in his audience still further into the shadows. Frequently he asks the (necessarily) rhetorical question “And what do you think?” We can be sure that Eliot, in the next booth over, never asked that. But isn’t there a point where empathy becomes equivocation? Can’t you hear Henry Wilcox, fuming: “Good God, man, it’s not what I think that matters! I’m paying my license fee to hear what you think!”
Henry would want a few strong opinions, the better to repeat them to his wife and pass them off as his own. Forster does have strong opinions to offer. At first glance, they seem the sort of thing of which Henry would approve:
I like a novel to be a novel. I expect it to be about something or some- one… . I get annoyed. It is foolish to get annoyed. One can cure oneself, and should. It is foolish to insist that a novel must be a novel. One must take what comes along, and see if it’s good.
But halfway through that paragraph Forster has given Henry the slip.
In the foreword to this volume, P. N. Furbank calls Forster “the great-simplifer.” It’s true he wrote simply, had a gift for the simple expression of complex ideas, but he never made a religion of simplicity itself, He understood and defended the expression of complexity in its own terms. He was E. M. Forster: he didn’t need everyone else to be like him. Which would appear the simplest, most obvious principle in the world—yet how few Eng- lish novelists prove capable of holding it! In English fiction, realists defend realism and experimentalists defend experimentalism; those who write simple sentences praise the virtues of concision, and those who are fond of their adjectives claim the lyrical as the highest value in literature. For- ster was different. His recommendation of Paul Valéry’s An Evening with Monsieur Teste is representative:
Well, the first line is illuminating. “La bétise n’est pas mon fort.” Stupid- ity is not my strong point. No it wasn’t. Valery was never never stupid. If he had been stupid sometimes, he would no doubt have been more in touch with the rest of us, who are stupid so frequently. That was his limitation. Remember on the other hand what limitations are ours, and how much we lose by our failure to follow the action of a superior mind.
Forster was not Valéry, but he defended Valéry’s right to be Valéry. He understood the beauty of complexity and saluted it where he saw it. His own preference for simplicity he recognized for what it was, a preference, linked to a dream of mass connection. He placed no particular force behind it:
Is it inelasticity that drives English writers to religion (Greene, Waugh, Eliot), to an anticulture stance (Wells, K. Amis, Larkin), to the rejection of accepted modes of literary seriousness (Wodehouse, Greene)? Better, I think, to credit it to a healthy English perversity, a bloody-minded war against cliché. It’s a cliché to think liking Keats makes you cultured (Larkin and Amis defaced their college copy of The Eve of St. Agnes{footnote: Next to the phrase “into her dream he melted” was written “You mean he fucked her, do you?”}, a commonplace to think submission to God incompatible with intellectual vitality. Then again, it’s hard to deny that in many of these writers a calcification occurs, playful poses become rigid attitudes. Forster feared the sea change. In the year Forster fin- ished broadcasting, in the same BBC studios, Evelyn Waugh submits to an interviewer interested in his “notable rejection of life”: Recognizing that “humanism has its dangers; the humanist shirks responsibility, dislikes making decisions, and is sometimes a coward,” he was anyway determined to hold faith with the “failed” liberal values so many of his peers now jettisoned. “Do we, in these terrible times, want to be humanists or fanatics? I have no doubt as to my own wish, I would rather be a humanist with all his faults, than a fanatic with all his virtues.” Forster, an Edwardian, lived through two cataclysmic wars, watched England’s transformation from elegant playground of the fortunate few to the mass factory of everybody. And still he kept faith with the future. In the greatest of his broadcasts, “What I Believe,” a much longer piece absent from this volume, he sympathizes with our natural reactionary instincts but doesn’t submit to them: “This is such a difficult moment to live in, one can- not help getting gloomy and also a bit rattled, and perhaps short-sighted.” As our present crop of English novelists get a bit rattled, Forster’s example begins to look exemplary.
But Forster was clever about even this kind of literary insincerity: “The simple view is that creation can only proceed from sincerity. But the facts don’t always bear this out. The insincere, the half sincere, may on occasion contrib- ute.” Lucky for the English that this should be so. On the third of October 1932, Forster considers a critical study of Wordsworth, a writer who, like Amis, “moved from being a Bolshie . . . to being a die-hard.” The study argues that Wordsworth “had a great deal to cover up,” having had an affair and an ille- gitimate child with a French woman, Annette Vallon, all of which he kept hidden. Back in England he made a hypocritical fetish of his own puritanism and lived “to be a respectable and intolerant old man.” Something calcified in Wordsworth: he ended up hating the France he’d loved as a youth, becom- ing a “poet of conventional morality,” more concerned with public reputation than with poetry itself. Forster too had a good deal to hide and kept it hidden; one feels in his attention to the Wordsworth story the recognition of a moral- ity tale.
The twenties and thirties of this century were unsatisfactory, Mr Adams thinks, because they contributed nothing positive; they pricked holes in the old complacency (like Sinclair Lewis) or indulged in private fantasies (like James Branch Cabell) or played about frivolously like Scott Fitzgerald. Here’s the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth. Con- demned cliques become halcyon “movements,” annoying young men, august geniuses. Unlike Adams, Forster had the gift of recognizing good writing while it was still young.1
Enthusiastically he hails Rosamond Lehmann, Wil- liam Plomer, Christopher Isherwood. And it’s only 1932! He defends their modern quality against English nostalgia: “If they still believe in what Keats called the holiness of the heart’s imagination, then aren’t we with them, and does it make any difference to us that they don’t use Keats’ words?” Which reminds us of the simplest and greatest pleasure of this book: For- ster gets it right, often. He’s right about Strachey’s Queen Victoria, right about the worth of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West and Aldous Huxley; right about Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. Sitting on, a 1944 panel titled “Is the novel dead?” he is right to answer in the negative.* The editors of this volume, making heavy weather of it, claim “Forster’s talks engaged and helped shape British culture.” I imagine Forster would have been surprised by that statement and perplexed by their concern for his liter- ary status. He thought the words highbrow and lowbrow “responsible for more unkind feelings and more silly thinking than any other pair of words I know.” He was not the sort to get riled up on that subject. He was a popular novelist. . Who could say he didn’t know his craft? And not in the workaday way Som- erset Maugham knew his. There’s magic and beauty in Forster, and weakness, and a little laziness, and some stupidity. He’s like us. Many people love him for it. We might finish with what Forster himself would say about these talks, what in fact he did say: “There is something cajoling and ingratiating about them which cannot be exorcised by editing, and they have been the devil to reproduce.” But Forster was always a little too humble, a tad disingenuous. His talks are humane and charming, like everything he wrote, and on top of that, they’re good fun to read, and if net quite right for a lecture hall, they’re perfect for a lazy afternoon in an armchair. The title again, for those who missed it:
The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster. The price is $59.95. The other panelists: Desmond MacCarthy, Rose Macaulay, Graham Greene
forester pt ii
In the taxonomy of English writing, E. M. Forster is not an exotic crea- ture. We file him under Notable English Novelist, common or garden variety. Yet there is a sense in which Forster was something of a rare bird. He was largely free of vices commonly found in novelists of his generation—what’s unusual about Forster is what he didn’t do. He didn’t lean rightward with the years or allow nostalgia to morph into misanthropy; he never knelt for the pope or queen, nor did he flirt (ideologically speaking) with Hitler, Stalin or Mao; he never believed the novel was dead or the hills alive, continued to read contemporary fiction after the age of fifty, harbored no special hatred for the generation below or above him, did not come to feel that England had gone to hell in a handbasket, that its language was doomed, that lunatics were run- ning the asylum or foreigners swamping the cities.
Still, like all notable English novelists, he was a tricky bugger. He made a faith of personal sincerity and a career of disingenuousness.
In a letter to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Forster lays out his casual aesthetics, casually:
All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn’t leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn’t add some permanent treasure to the world, isn’t worth doing….This is my “theory,” and I maintain it’s sentimental—at all events it isn’t Flaubert’s. How can he fag himself to write “Un Coeur Simple”?
To his detractors, the small, mild oeuvre of E. M. Forster is proof that when it comes to aesthetics, one really better be fagged: the zeal of the fanatic is what’s required. “E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot,” thought Katherine Mansfield, a fanatic if ever there was one. “He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there aint going to be no tea.”
relegated not quite to the lesser lights of modernism, but perhaps to the “middle lights,” if we might invent this term.! Conscientious editors, they defend their subject fiercely and at length. It feels incongruous, for never was there a notable English novelist who wore his status more lightly: To love Forster is to reconcile oneself to the admix- ture of banality and brilliance that was his, as he had done himself. In this volume that blend is perhaps more perfectly represented than ever before. Whether that’s a good thing or not is difficult to say. At any rate, what we have here is a four-hundred-page selection of the talks Forster delivered over the wireless. The great majority of them were about books (he titled the series Some Books); a quarter of them concern—and were broadcast to—India and its people. Scattered among the remainder is a miscellaneous hodgepodge of topics that tickled Forster’s fancy: the Great Frost of 1929, the music of Benjamin Britten, the free wartime concerts given in the National Gallery, and so on. The tone is resolutely conversational, frothy and without academic pretension (“Now you have to be cool over Yeats. He was a great poet, he lived poetry, but there was an element of bunkum in him.” “What is the use of Art? There’s a nasty one”), the sort of thing one can imagine made T. S. Eliot— also broadcasting for the BBC during this period—sigh wearily as he passed Forster’s recording booth on the way to his own. Eliot was very serious about literary criticism; Forster could be, too, but in these broadcasts he is not, at least not in any sense Eliot would recognize. For one thing, he won’t call what he is doing literary criticism, or even reviewing. His are “recommendations” only.
In place of Eliot’s severe public intellectual we have Forster the chatty librar- ian, leaning over the counter, advising you on whether a book is worth the bother or not—a peculiarly English aesthetic category. It’s a self-imposed role entirely lacking in intellectual vanity (“Regard me as a parasite,” he tells his2 audience, “savoury or unsavoury who battens on higher forms of life”), but it’s a mistake to think it a lazy or accidental one. Connection, as everyone knows, was Forster’s great theme; between people, nations, heart and head, labor and art. Radio presented him with the opportunity of mass connection. It went against his grain to put any obstacle between his listeners and himself. From the start, Forster’s concern—to use the parlance of modern broadcasting— was where to pitch it. Essentially it was the problem of his fiction, writ large, for he was the sort to send one manuscript to Virginia Woolf, another to his good friend the policeman Bob Buckingham, and fear the literary judgment of both. On the air, as on the page, Forster was never free from the anxiety of audience. *His rupture from his modernist peers happens here, in his acute conception of audience, in his inability not to conceive of an audience. When Nora Barnacle asked her husband, “Why don’t you write sensible books that people can understand?” her husband ignored her and wrote Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s ideal reader was himself—that was his purity. Forster’s ideal reader was a kind of projection, and not one entirely sympathetic to him. | think of this reader as, if not definitively English, then of a type that abounds in England. Lucy Honeychurch (A Room with a View) is one of them. So are Philip Herriton (Where Angels Fear to Tread) and Henry Wilcox (Howards End) and Maurice Hall (Maurice). Forster’s novels are full of people who’d think twice before borrowing a Forster novel from the library. Well—they’d want to know—is it worth the bother or not? Neither intellectuals nor phil- istines, they are the kind to “know what they like” and have the “courage of their convictions,” though their convictions are not entirely their own and their courage mostly fear. They are capable of cruelty born of laziness, but also of an unexpected spiritual greatness born of love. The right book at the right moment might change everything for them (Forster only gave the credence of certainty to Love). It’s worth thinking of these cautious Eng- lish souls, with their various potential for greatness and shabbiness, love and spite, as Forster’s radio audience: it makes his approach comprehensible.
Think of Maurice Hall and his groundskeeper lover, Alec Scudder, set- tled by their Bakelite radio waiting for the latest installment of Some Books. Maurice, thanks to his superior education, catches the literary references but, in his suburban slowness, misses much of the spirit. Alec, not having read - Wordsworth, yet grasps the soul of that poet as he listens to Forster recount a visit to the Lake District, Wordsworth country: “Grey sheets of rain trailed in front of the mountains, waterfalls slid down them and shone in the sun, and the sky was always sending shafts of light into the valleys.” Early on, Forster voiced his determination to plow the middle course: “I’ve had nice letters from people regretting that my talks are above them, and others equally nice regretting that they are below; so hadn’t I better pursue the even tenor of my way?” Well, hadn’t he?
I’ve made up an imaginary person whom I call “you” and I’m going to tell you about it. Your age, your sex, your position, your job, your training—I know nothing about all that, but I have formed the notion that youre a person who wants to read new books but doesn’t intend to buy them. But here Forster is too humble: he knew more of his audience than the contents of their passports. Take his talk on Coleridge of August 13, 1931. A new Collected is out, it’s a nicely printed edition, costs only three shillings sixpence, and he’d like to talk to you about it.
But he senses that you are already sighing, and he knows why:
Perhaps you’ll say “I don’t want a complete Coleridge, I’ve got “The Ancient Mariner’ in some anthology or other, and that’s enough. “The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ and perhaps the first half of ‘Christabel’— that’s all in Coleridge that really matters. The rest is rubbish and not even good dry rubbish, it’s moist clammy rubbish, it’s depressing.” So if I tell you that there are 600 pages in this new edition, you’ll only reply “I’m sorry to hear it.”
Still—600 pages makes one think.
say, happiness arrives a good deal more dogmatically (though no less pleasurably), But it is always Forster’s game by Forster’s rules. In radio, though, each man’s con- sciousness is his own. There are no Lucy Honeychurches to play with—only nameless, faceless listeners whose sensibilities can only be guessed at, only assumed. In the anxiety of this unfamiliar situation, a comic novelist, with his natural weakness for caricature, is apt to assume too much. The broadcasts suffer from empathic condescension: Forster is unconvinced that we might also, like him, be capable of a broad sympathetic sensibility. Recommending two memonrs, one by Sir Henry Newbolt (a patriotic, public-school adventurer with “a touch of the medieval knight about him”), and another by Mr. Grant Richards ( a “gay and irresponsible” fin de siécle journalist who “loves Paris with a fervour”), he predicts two camps of readers, split by sensibility, unable to understand each other:
There is an element of the nervous party host in Forster; he fears peo- ple won’t speak to each other unless he’s there to facilitate the introduc- tion. Occasionally his image of the general reader is almost too general to recognize. Who dreads philosophy so much they need easing into Plato like this?
The word Plato has rather a boring sound. For some reason or other “Plato” always suggests to me a man with a large head and a noble face who never stops talking and from whom it is impossible to escape.
forestr ends
Occupying “a midway position” between the aristocrat’s memoir and that of the bohemian, Forster recommends As We Are, the memoir of Mr. E. F- - Benson (“The book’s uneven—bits of it are perfunctory, but bits are awfully good”). He finds one paragraph particularly wise on “the problem of growing old” and quotes it:
Unfortunately there comes to the majority of those of middle age an ine- lasticity not of physical muscle and sinew alone but of mental fibre. Expe- rience has its dangers: it may bring wisdom, but it may also bring stiffness and cause hardened deposits in the mind, and its resulting inelasticity is crippling.
Henry James and George Eliot
In 1873, the young Henry James reviewed George Eliot’s Middlemarch. An odd review, neither rave nor pan. Eliot represented the past—James hoped to be the future. “It sets a limit,” he wrote, “to the development of the old-fashioned English novel.” James’s objection to Middlemarch is familiar: there’s too much of it. He found “its diffuseness makes it too copious a dose of pure fiction.” He would have preferred a more “organized, moulded, bal- anced composition.” Such a lot of characters! And so often lacking the grander human qualities. With one exception: Dorothea. She alone has an “indefin- able moral elevation” and “exhales a sort of aroma of spiritual sweetness.” It is of the “career of [this] obscure St. Theresa” that he should have liked to read more. Finding Dorothea the most admirable character, he imagines she “was to have been the central figure.” He wonders what went wrong. Certainly the doctor Lydgate is interesting enough, but his story “yields in dignity” to Dorothea’s, and as for hapless Fred Vincy—why are we presented with such a “fullness of detail” on “this common-place young gentleman, with his somewhat meagre tribulations and his rather neutral egotism”? A famous query opens chapter 29 of Middlemarch: “But why always Dor- othea?” It’s neat that James’s complaint—essentially “But why always Fred?”— should be the inverse reflection of it. You might say of Henry and George what the novel says of Lydgate and Rosamund: between him and her indeed there was that total missing of each other’s mental track. . . . James can’t understand why Middlemarch should stray so far from Dorothea, lingering on Lydgate, Fred and the rest. Cautiously he asks: was it an unconscious instinct or a deliberate plan?
it seems to focus not simply on those who are most good, or most attractive or even most interesting, but on those who are “there.” Uncon- scious instinct or deliberate plan? That Lydgate and Dorothea’s stories existed separately, that Dorothea’s story came second, points firmly at deliberation. Yet to say so is to give a question of fiction a factual answer, and the proper rebuff to James comes from a different place, not the place of fact, but the seat of feeling. James mistakes the sensibility of the novel:
The reader is sometimes tempted to complain of a tendency which we are at a loss exactly to express—a tendency to make light of the serious ele- ments of the story and to sacrifice them to the more trivial ones.
To James, Dorothea is a serious element, Fred a trivial one. It’s strange to see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man’s certainty of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant. But then, Middlemarch is a book about the effects of experience that changes with experience. It gets better as you age, being, as Woolf knew, “One of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”
Dorothea is, in large part, a satirical self-portrait) and clinical self-knowledge. She is able to identify her own mistake:
The first impulse of a young and ingenuous mind is to withhold the slightest sanction from all that contains even a mixture of supposed error. When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.
The young Eliot could exult only in the perfect truths we glean from cer- tain books in our libraries; the mature Eliot had learned to have sympathy for the stumbling errors of human beings. These days, when reading critically, the fashion is to remain aloof from the human experiences of novelists. Eliot herself was less squeamish. It was her contention that human experience is as powerful a force as theory or revealed fact. Experience transforms perspective, and trans- formations in perspective, to Eliot, constitute real changes in the world. “Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects,” she wrote, “must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work the life and death struggles of separate human beings.” Experience, for Eliot, was a powerful way of knowing. She had no doubt that she had learned as much from loving her partner George Lewes, for example, as she had from translating Spinoza. When Dorothea truly becomes great (only really in the last third of the novel, when she comes to the aid of Lydgate and Rosamund), it is because — she has at last recognized the value of emotional experience:
Once she saw through a glass, darkly, now she is the less deceived. . . . Of how many Victorian novels could that sentence serve as shorthand. One of the reasons we idolize the nineteenth-century English novel is the way its methods, aims and expression seem so beautifully integrated. Author, char- acters and reader are all striving in the same direction. Eliot, speaking of Dorothea’s mind, describes the process this way: “The reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth; the least partial good.” It is a fine description of what all good novelists try to do, after their own fashion. But Eliot made a religion of this process; it replaced the old-time religion in which she was raised. Her imagination was particularly compelled by those moments when, as we have it in the vernacular, “the scales fall from our eyes.” Bulstrode realizing the true nature of his choices, Rosamund real- izing other people exist as she does, Lydgate realizing he has mistaken his wife in every particular, Dorothea realizing the very same of her own husband (“Having embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin”), … With a scalpel Eliot dissects degrees of human velleity, finding the conscious action hidden within the impulse hidden within the desire hidden within the will tucked away deep inside the decision that we have obfuscated even from ourselves. (She is very modern in this; she articulates the obsessive circles of self-consciousness and self-deception as sharply as that other master of diffusion, David Foster Wal- lace. Or maybe we should say that David Foster Wallace is very Victorian.) She pulls it all into the light, as Christ determined to pluck our sins even from our souls. Eliot is the secular laureate of revelation. I love that ecstatic final conversation between Dorothea and her sister:
Here she is, post-Middlemarch, replying to a young male correspondent (who had written asking for advice on a personal matter, as many did, post-Middlemarch), assuring him that even the simplest aspects of his problem and of her advice to him are of interest to her:
“You should share my reliance on those old, old truths which shallow, drawing-room talk contemptuously dismisses as “commonplaces”, though they have more marrow in them, and are quite as seldom wrought into the mental habits as any of the subtleties that pretend to novelty.”
For the young Henry James, who has not yet patience for the commonplace, it is a mystery why there must be Fred (or so much Fred). But Fred, to Eliot, is a member of “mixed and erring humanity”—her favorite Goethe quote. She always hoped that her work would demonstrate the “reme- dial influences of pure, natural human relations.” Still, it took a great deal of Art to arrange Middlemarch so that it might resemble Nature in all its” diffusion, all its naturalness. Eliot’s Nature is a thing highly stylized, highly intellectual. She was a writer of ideas, maybe more so than any novelist in our canon. In order to be attentive to Fred, Eliot had to take the long way round. It was a philosopher, Spinoza, who first convinced her of the importance of experience. It was theory that brought her to practice. These days, writer of ideas has become a term of abuse: we think “Ideas” are the opposite of some- thing we call “Life.” It wasn’t that way with Eliot. In fact, her ability to ani- mate ideas is so acute she is able to fool the great Henry James into believing Fred Vincy a commonplace young man who has wandered into Middlemarch with no purpose, when really nothing could be further from the truth.
Yet to Eliot all [characters] were equal, and of equal interest, and worthy of an equal number of pages. All her people are striving toward the fullest truth, the least partial good. Except when Eliot thought of striving, she had more in mind than Austen’s hope of happy marriages, or Dickens’s dream of resolved mysteries. She was thinking of Spinoza’s
kind of striving, conatus. From Spinoza, Eliot took the idea that the good we strive for should be nothing more than “what we certainly know will be useful to us,” not a fixed point, no specific moral system, not, properly speaking, a morality at all. It cannot be found in the pursuit of transcendental reward, as Dorothea believes it to be, or in one’s ability to conform to a set of rules, as Lydgate attempts when he submits to a conventional marriage. Instead, wise men pursue what is best in and best for their own natures. They think of the good as a dynamic, unpredictable combination of forces, different, in practice, for each of us. It’s that principle that illuminates Middlemarch. Like Spinoza’s wise men, Eliot’s people are always seeking to match what is good in them- selves in joyful combinations with other good things in the world. In Ethics, the book Eliot spent years trying to translate (she never finished), the wise walk in gardens, see plays, eat pleasantly, do work that is meaningful to them and so on, as their sensibilities allow and demand. They love and are attentive to the laws of nature, because these alone are eternal and therefore an attribute of the Supreme Good. All of this was the riposte Eliot needed to the arid rigors of her family’s Methodism; she responded passionately to the idea of worldly striving, of cleaving to those qualities in others, and in the world, that complemented one’s own strengths. It was what she herself had done. And it cast two things for which she cared deeply—natural science and human relationships—in a new, holy light. Spinoza seemed to understand Marian’s way of being in the world. Her shocking common-law “marriage of true minds” to George Lewes (who also translated Spinoza) was exactly the right kind of conatus: a power-strengthening union characterized by joy. Her rejection of the organized church, so horrifying to her family, was really a turning away from false, abstract moral values. Her interest in the new natural sciences was, in Spinozian terms, a form of worship. When Marian found Spinoza she found the closest philosophical expression of her own experiences:
Indeed, the human body is composed of a great many parts of different natures, which require continuous and varied food, so that the whole body may be capable of doing everything which can follow from its nature, and consequently, so that the mind may also be equally capable of conceiving many things.
Fred is in love with a good girl, a girl who does not love him because he is not worthy; Fred agrees with her. Maybe the point is this: of all the people striving in Middlemarch, only Fred is striy- ing for a thing worth striving for. Dorothea mistakes Causabon terribly, as Lydgate mistakes Rosamund, but Fred thinks Mary is worth having, that she is probably a good in the world, or at least, good for him (“She is the best girl I know!”)—and he’s right. Of all of them Fred has neither chosen a chimerical good nor radically mistaken his own nature. He’s not as dim as he seems. He doesn’t idealize his good as Dorothea does when she imagines Causabon a second Milton, and he doesn’t settle on a good a priori, like Lydgate, who has long believed that a doting, mindless girl is just what a man of science needs. What Fred surmises of the good he stumbles upon almost by accident, and only as a consequence of being fully in life and around life, by being open to its vagaries simply because he is in possession of no theory to impose upon it. In many ways bumbling Fred is Eliot’s ideal Spinozian subject. Here is Gilles Deleuze on Spinoza’s wise man; he could just as well be speaking of Fred:
That is why Spinoza calls out to us in the way he does: you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know before- hand what a body or mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrange- ment, a given combination.
Fred has no idea what he is capable of. His moral luck is all encounter, arrangement, combination. Mary Garth is that encounter; she is Fred’s reason to be good. It is through her, and for her, that he is able to change: Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the being they love best. “The theatre of all my actions is fallen,” said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best. Certainly it would have made a considerable difference to Fred at that time if Mary Garth had had no decided notions as to what was admirable in character. Simply put, if Fred didn’t love Mary, he’d be half the man he is (and Fred is also the occasion to soften some of Mary’s hard dogmatic edges, for it surprises her, too, that she could love someone like Fred). And the rigors of love combine with other duties and redouble themselves. Because Fred loves Mary, when he recklessly borrows money from her family and is unable to pay it back, he finds the weight of his misdeed surprisingly heavy upon him. This is not biblical morality but practical morality: Fred has done something wrong in the world, and his true punishment lies not in the next world but in this one. It’s in the pain he has caused:
Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted almost entirely in the sense that he must have been dishonourable, and sink in the opinion of the Garths: he had not occupied himself with the incon- venience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for this exercise of the imagination on other people’s needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen. Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women of their savings.
In Middlemarch love enables knowledge. Love is a kind of knowledge. If Fred didn’t love Mary, he would have no reason to exercise his imagination on her family. It’s love that makes him realize that two women without their sav- ings are a real thing in the world and not merely incidental to his own sense of dishonor. It’s love that enables him to feel another’s pain as if it were his own. For Eliot, in the absence of God, all our moral tests must take place on this earth and have their rewards and punishments here. We are one another’s lesson, one another’s duty. This turns out to be a doctrine peculiarly suited to a certain kind of novel writing. Middlemarch is a dazzling dramatization of earthly human striving, of conatus in combination. Eliot’s complex structure allows for so many examples—each reader will have his or her favorite—but there is one in particular, dropped deep into the middle of the novel like a pebble in a great pond, that seems to me the most beautiful, for its ripples fan outward and outward and reveal the unity in Eliot’s diffusion. When the vicar Farebrother decides, for the sake of his good friend Fred, to give up the hope of ever marrying Mary Garth (for he loves her, too), a sage little apergu occurs to him:
“To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!”
Farebrother’s satisfaction here, like all the satisfactions Middlemarch offers, is not transcendental, but of the earth. Eliot has replaced metaphysics with human relationships. In doing this she took from Spinoza—whose metaphysics are, in fact, extensive—what she wanted and left what she couldn’t use. To make it work, she utilized a cast of saints and princes but also fools and criminals, and every shade of human in between. She needed Fred quite as much as Dorothea.
MIDDLEMARCH
If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
We are moved that it should pain Eliot so to draw a border around her attention, that she is so alive to the mass of existence lying unnarrated on the other side of silence. She seems to care for people, indiscriminately and in their entirety, as it was once said God did. She finds it a sin to write always of Dorothea! As literary atonement, Eliot fills her novel with more objects of attention than a noyel can comfortably hold. Because we must give Henry his due: Middle- ‘march is messy, decentered, unnerving. It seems to hint at those doubts of the efficacy of narrative that were to follow in the next century. Why always Dorothea, why heroes, why the centrality of a certain character in a narrative, vhy narrative at all? Eliot, being a Victorian, did not go all the way down that road. For Eliot, in 1870, people are still all that people really have; our knowledge of, and feelings for, one another. A hopeful creed that has bonded readers to Eliot for over a century. Doesn’t she seem to solve the head/heart schism of our literature? Neither as sentimental as our popular novelists, nor as dryly cerebral as our experimentalists.
Under the influence of Spinoza, via an understanding of Fred, she thought with her heart and felt with her head. It’s a fictional procedure perfectly described by one of her creations, Will Ladislaw:
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only
For where is our fiction, our twenty-first-century fiction? We glimpse it here and there. Certainly not as often as you might expect, given the times we live in. As writers and readers and critics, we English remain terribly proud of our conservative tastes. Every year the polls tell us Middlemarch is the country’s favorite novel, followed by Pride and Prejudice, followed by Jane Eyre (sometimes this order is reversed). Oh, the universality of the themes. Oh, the timelessness of the prose. But there is a misunderstanding, in England, about the words universality and timelessness as they relate to our canon. What is universal and timeless in literature is need—we continue to need novelists who seem to know and feel, and who move between these two modes of operation with wondrous fluidity. What is not universal or timeless, though, is form. Forms, styles, structures— whatever word you prefer—should change like skirt lengths.
They have to; otherwise we make a rule, a religion, of one form; we say, “This form here, this is what reality is like,” and it pleases us to say that (especially if we’re English) because it means we don’t have to read anymore, or think, or feel. Eventually we become like Mr. Brooke, and Literature something we “went into a great deal, at one time. . . .” George Eliot: now, there was a writer. Why don’t they write ’em like that anymore? Except the George Eliot of today—so alive to every shade of human feeling, so serious about our dependence on one another—she won’t be like the George Eliot of yesterday. Her form will be quite different. She won’t be writing the classic nineteenth-century novel. She might not even be English. She might be like Mary Gaitskill, say, or Laura Hird, or A. L. Kennedy. George Eliot may look cozy and conservative from a century’s distance, but she was on the border of the New—so will her descendants be. In her essay “Silly Novels By Lady Novelists,” Eliot laid out her radical program for great fiction, radical because it was no program at all: “Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful.” What twenty-first-century novelists inherit from Eliot is the radical free- dom to push the novel’s form to its limits, wherever they may be. It’s a mistake to hate Middlemarch because the Ichabods love it. That would be to denude oneself of one of those good things of the world that Spinoza advised we cling to. Feeling into knowledge, knowledge into feeling . .. When we say Eliot was the greatest of Victorian novelists, we mean this process worked more fluidly in her than anyone else.