Felix Holt

by George Eliot

  Compromise, in Eliot’s moral world, is always dangerous; ‘where compromise broadens, intellect and conscience are thrust into narrower room,’ states Rufus Lyon, and the implications of this are clear in Harold’s attitudes to the ‘treating’ of the miners at Sproxton, as in his justification of ‘an active industrious selfishness’ above merely ‘idle selfishness’ in political action. Neither is tenable from Felix’s point of view. ‘If the mob can’t be turned back, a man of family must try and head the mob, and save a few homes and hearths, and keep the country up on its last legs as long as he can,’ says Jack Lingon, summing up Harold’s adoption of radical principles early in the novel. But it is of course through Harold’s own agency that the far from metaphorical mob will need turning back, and it will be Felix, and not Harold, who will in reality venture to do so.

  If Harold takes it upon himself to justify ‘active selfishness’, Felix is used to explore active selflessness, and not only in his actions in attempting to head off the riot at Treby. Closely aligned with Eliot’s own political sympathies, he serves as an unlikely radical, countering demands for universal male franchise and the secret ballot (‘No! – something else before all that’) with his own emphasis on education and understanding so that the vote, when given, may be used wisely:

  … the great question was how to give every man a man’s share in life. But I think [the trades-union speaker] expects voting to do more towards it than I do. I want the working men to have power … But there are two sorts of power. There’s a power to do mischief – to undo what has been done with great expense and labour, to waste and destroy, to be cruel to the weak, to lie and quarrel, and to talk poisonous nonsense. That’s the sort of power that ignorant numbers have … Ignorant power comes in the end to the same thing as wicked power; it makes misery. (Ch. XXX, p. 292)

  Felix’s radicalism is of a different kind, based in truth, ‘honest labour’, and (extending the metaphor used by Harold himself) the determination ‘to go to some roots a good deal lower down than the franchise’. His, as E. S. Dallas recognized in an early review, is ‘the Radicalism that rages against the meanness, the misery, and the ignorance of those who, being of the lower classes, are lower than they need be. The hero of the tale, therefore, is rather a moral and a social than a political reformer.’ Morality and politics bear an uneasy relationship, however, as Harold is to find; Felix, characteristically, prioritizes the former, seeing through the dissimulations of propaganda and those (such as Jermyn’s agent, Johnson) who deliberately trade in miscommunication to achieve their ends.17 He acts instead as a self-proclaimed ‘demagogue’, secure in his own integrity. ‘His life is like his words,’ realizes Esther at the end of the novel, and the implications of this conjunction are important. ‘Teach any truth you can’ is Felix’s adopted creed and his own adherence to truth is manifest in both individual and social terms, as in his refusal to ‘turn the best hopes of men into by-words for cant and dishonesty’. The same correlations between life and words are evident, though less advantageously, in others. Johnson warns the miners against those radicals who are ‘all words and no substance’, but the same words can rebound upon those whose cause he seeks to advocate. That ‘unsympathetic good nature’ which permeates Harold Transome’s speech is inseparable from his life, and indeed his politics, as Esther is also to perceive: ‘His very good-nature was unsympathetic: it never came from any thorough understanding or deep respect for what was in the mind of the person he obliged or indulged; it was like his kindness to his mother – an arrangement of his for the happiness of others, which, if they were sensible, ought to succeed. And an inevitable comparison which haunted her, showed her the same quality in his political views.’

  It is in this sense that Felix assumes the political and moral ascendancy, and in the same way both succeeds and fails as the hero of the novel. As one reviewer of Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life had noted, ‘A hero is easier to make (so all historians have found) than a man’, and something of the same undoubtedly holds true for Felix Holt whose ‘large-eyed, strong-limbed person’ and ‘energetically sympathetic’ nature are regularly held up for our commendation. Resolute in his rejection of self-advancement and the superficial trappings of the ‘gentleman’, and equally firm in his adherence to the ordinary life of mankind (‘I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labour and common burthen of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the push and the scramble for money and position’), Felix offers a version of heroism which, although rooted in common life rather than the drawing-room heroes of the popular novel, veers perhaps rather too close to idealization, jarring at times with Eliot’s statements of her artistic beliefs. ‘My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgement, pity, and sympathy,’ she wrote to John Blackwood in 1857. Evident in her depiction of Mrs Transome and Esther Lyon, and of Harold Transome in the temptations and truths with which he too is faced,18 Eliot’s treatment of Felix himself nevertheless remains problematic, even where she attempts to draw attention to his faults:

  The weak point to which Felix referred was his liability to be carried completely out of his own mastery by indignant anger. His strong health, his renunciation of selfish claims, his habitual preoccupation with large thoughts and with purposes independent of everyday casualties, secured him a fine and even temper, free from moodiness or irritability … his energies served to make him gentle; and now, in this twenty-sixth year of his life, they had ceased to make him angry, except in the presence of something that roused his deep indignation. When once exasperated, the passionateness of his nature threw off the yoke of a long-trained consciousness in which thought and emotion had been more and more completely mingled, and concentrated itself in a rage as ungovernable as that of boyhood. (Ch. XXX, pp. 284–5)

  Criticism takes on the nature of justification, and Felix tends to remain at one remove from the common mass of humanity. Eminently humane, vigorous in word and deed, and endowed with a clear sense of right and wrong (as well as of the dangers of compromise in ways which Harold is not), his failings tend to be not so much within himself as within his presentation, as he signally fails to become one of the ‘mixed human beings’ which Eliot strove to bring to life in the pages of her fiction.

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  In spite of such recurrent interventions of the ideal, Felix does nevertheless provide a clear exposition of the entirely realistic principle that heroes are to be found in unlikely places, and not necessarily (as Esther Lyon must learn) in Byron. Versions of heroism, just as much as versions of radicalism, prove particularly illuminating in the novel, and not least in Esther’s education into realism from romance. Forming another index of contrasted values, recurrent references to heroism appear throughout Felix Holt: Felix comes into unlikely juxtaposition with ‘Byronic-bilious’ heroes of Esther’s chosen reading, while Esther herself comes to appreciate, and to understand, the heroism of the humble Rufus Lyon (‘that little man’s heart was heroic’), as well as gaining a new and clearer understanding of the fallibilities of the ‘gentleman’ heroes who once inhabited her dreams. Esther’s initial preferences are, however, located firmly in the romantic, her copy of Byron appropriately concealed beneath the blue satin of her work-basket and, still more appropriately, knocked flying by Felix as he pushes back his chair. In this context, Felix is to prove a textual demagogue too and, just as Esther prides herself upon being ‘a critic of words’, so does Felix offer forthright criticisms of the merits of Byron and Chateaubriand: ‘ “Byron’s Poems!” he said, in a tone of disgust … “ ‘The Dream’ – he’d better have been asleep and snoring” ’; ‘ “His corsairs and renegades, his Alps and Manfreds, are the most paltry puppets that were ever pulled by the strings of lust and pride.” ’19

  Criticism of this order is motivated by considerations apart from the purely literary. As Felix stresses, the values such heroes
espouse, with their melancholy introspection and contemplation of the infinite above the actual, are fundamentally antithetical to his own. ‘More given to idle suffering than to beneficent activity’, he points out, and as such, they form an appropriate foil to his own heroic ideal: ‘the finest fellow of all would be the one who could be glad to have lived because the world was chiefly miserable, and his life had come to help some one who needed it’. Altruism and egoism are again contrasted, their conflict informing Esther’s shifting viewpoints on the texts she once preferred but which, in the light of the ‘inward revolution’ she undergoes, come to seem ‘like last night’s decorations seen in the sober dawn’. Reassessment and re-evaluation, of literature as of life, form another sphere of reform, while references to texts and narrative types work meaningfully in the novel, for heroines as much as for heroes.

  Whereas Felix presents himself as a ‘roughly-written page’, Esther Lyon comes at one point to see her life as a text: ‘Esther found it impossible to read in these days; her life was a book which she seemed herself to be constructing’. A range of literary paradigms repeatedly intervene, whether in terms of Esther’s early dreams of ‘gentlemen’ and ‘ladies’ (which in outline bear remarkable parallels to the tales ironically summarized by Eliot in her essay on ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’),20 or in the references to ballads, fairytales and novelettes which elsewhere appear, offering alternative readings (and endings) for the story of her life. The formula of the ‘silly novel’ is foregrounded in particular, the plot of this ‘mind-and-millinery’ species of literature (as Eliot terms it) often dealing with a certain type of heroine who, endowed with ‘superior instincts’ and refined sensibilities, is unfortunately deprived of advantage in other respects: ‘it may be that the heroine is not an heiress – that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears the family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end’.21

  It is on this pattern that Esther’s early ideals of wish-fulfilment run as she constructs herself as a lady manquée in Malthouse Yard with atta-of-roses and a satin work-basket, assiduously cultivating the ‘refined’ sensibilities which might indicate ‘superiority’. ‘My daughter … is so delicately framed that the smell of tallow is loathsome to her,’ as Rufus Lyon feels obliged to explain to Felix in justification of the wax candle he employs. Liberally endowed with social consciousness if not a social conscience, Esther is well versed in the literary conventions of this genre: ‘her mind had fixed itself habitually on the signs and luxuries of ladyhood, for which she had the keenest perception. She had seen the very mat in her carriage, had scented the dried rose-leaves in her corridors, had felt the soft carpets under her pretty feet … and she had had several accomplished cavaliers all at once suing for her hand – one of whom, uniting very high birth with long dark eyelashes and the most distinguished talents, she secretly preferred.’ Eliot, however, prefers its subversion, for though Esther is indeed discovered to be a ‘born lady’ with ‘good blood in her veins’, as well as an heiress of far more than dreams had ever suggested, it is realism which ultimately triumphs over the Utopia her inheritance seems to bring. As Eliot points out, Utopias are ‘filled with delightful results, independent of processes’, but it is nevertheless in these often neglected ‘processes’, and their associated implications, that true interest lies.

  Esther’s daydreams prove as inadequate as the Byronic heroes of her early reading, and realism and romance take up an unlikely conjunction: ‘now that fancy was becoming real, and the impossible appeared possible, Esther found the balance of her attention reversed: now that her ladyhood was not simply in Utopia, she found herself arrested and painfully grasped by the means through which the ladyhood was to be obtained’. Other processes thus disrupt the simplistic formulae of the ‘silly novel’, as does the emergent sense of a ‘superiority’ which does not merely depend upon the superficial orderings and hierarchies of society, or upon conventional assumptions about one’s ‘betters’. In the education Esther undergoes, once accepted social signifiers are questioned and found wanting, and notions of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’, ‘lady’ and ‘gentleman’ all shift the values which they had once held for her. ‘Securing the best’, as in Eliot’s account of narrative closure for the conventional heroine of the ‘silly novel’, begins to take on an air of greater complexity than Esther had previously envisaged.

  Esther’s indices of superiority originally seem firm, vested in her concern for ‘social differences’ which rest purely in notions of status, and a ‘consciousness’ which delights in the outward markers of refinement.22 Upon the irruption of the brusquely-spoken Felix into her social world (‘I thank Heaven I am not a mouse to have a nose that takes note of wax or tallow’), such certainties begin to be disturbed. In his rejection of conformity with social expectation, for both dress and occupation, Felix signally fails to comply with the neat categorizations of Esther’s preconceived social ordering: ‘… he speaks better English than most of our visitors. What is his occupation?’ she asks her father after Felix’s first visit. Her reaction is one of disappointment upon being told the truth: ‘Dear me,’ says Esther, ‘I thought he was something higher than that.’

  Longer acquaintance nevertheless brings not consolidation of this point of view but instead a fundamental reorientation within Esther’s evaluative schema. Felix’s education and mental refinement ‘certainly are very high’, she is forced to admit, as a new ‘consciousness’ emerges which is not dependent upon externals or the presence of cambric handkerchiefs. As Esther begins to realize, there are other standards in the world and although she longs at first for the security of those she had previously held as true, her notions of superiority and inferiority are nevertheless to change. ‘I don’t know – if I saw him by the side of a finished gentleman,’ she muses in Chapter X, wishing ‘that finished gentleman were among her acquaintances: he would certainly admire her, and make her aware of Felix’s inferiority’. By Chapter XXII, her original assumptions are reversed: ‘It seemed to her as if her inferiority to Felix made a great gulf between them.’ As in the dreams of luxury and of ease granted in the shape of Transome Court, wish-fulfilment in this context too brings surprising results; Esther does indeed see Felix Holt and Harold Transome side by side in the trial scene but, contrary to her earlier assumptions, it is the ‘finished gentleman’ who comes off the worse in her newer, and truer, vision.

  ‘Gentlemen’ to be truly such must be constructed of more than ‘finish’, and Eliot’s careful phrasing points the difference between veneer and veracity, outer and inner refinement. Though the distinction is one which escapes much of Treby (‘She has despised his betters before now,’ comments Mrs Muscat, watching Esther and Felix together), Esther is clear on this matter: Felix possesses ‘the highest gentlemanliness, only it seems in him to be something deeper’. Conversely, while Harold Transome is endowed with the conventional outward markers of the ‘gentleman’, there is nevertheless ‘a light in which he was vulgar compared with Felix’. As Esther realizes to her own surprise, falling in love with a ‘gentleman’ can and does take on an entirely different nature from her original and simplistic conceptions. It is this which, ultimately, leads to the inversion of the ‘silly novels’ formula as the inheritance is rejected, along with its ‘silken bondage’, and Esther returns to Malthouse Yard.

  Esther as a result takes up another literary role, that of the ‘ballad heroine’ which Harold Transome had refused to believe she would become (‘Esther was too clever and tasteful a woman to make a ballad heroine of herself, by bestowing her beauty and her lands on this lowly lover’). Redolent of the popular and the people, the ballad provides an apt metaphor for Esther’s return into that ‘larger world’ outside Transome Court in which Harold no longer appears as a candidate for the gentleman hero of her one-time dreams. ‘You are quite in another genr
e,’ she tells him, more suitable for ‘genteel comedy … where the most thrilling event is the drawing of a handsome cheque’. In a similar way, though the family stories which Mrs Transome tells initially have their interest, they too are to be reassessed, and recognized as ‘like so many novelettes’, full of insubstantial incident but no enduring worth. Images of fairy-tale too are dispelled, and Esther’s early construction as a ‘Cinderella’ by the fireside who, unknown to her at that point in time, will indeed be carried away to the abode of her dreams, is to shift accordingly. The ‘enchantment’ ends, the ‘Giaour’ is rejected, and Esther refuses to be the ‘fairy’ which Harold playfully calls her, fleeing instead back to the fireside which is, appropriately, where Felix encounters her again after his release from prison.