The Year of Henry James

by David Lodge

  It is true that the character of Amos’s wife, Milly, is very much a Victorian ‘Angel in the House’, somewhat idealised by the narrator, but this is not allowed to falsify her speech or behaviour, and her death, although as an action it can be paralleled a hundred times in Victorian fiction, achieves a rare pathos by the restraint and sensitivity with which it is treated. Particularly effective is the description of the younger children’s naïve, uncomprehending response. ‘They cried because mamma was so ill and papa looked so unhappy; but they thought, perhaps next week things would be as they used to be again.’ And at the funeral, as the officiating minister, Mr Cleves, pronounces the final prayers at the graveside, ‘Dicky stood close to his father, with great rosy cheeks, and wide open blue eyes, looking first up at Mr Cleves and then down at the coffin, and thinking he and Chubby would play at that when they got home.’ These touches are not put in just to wring our hearts; they show that death is more bitter and more meaningful to the adult mind which comprehends its finality, but at the same time they give a sense of life going on, lifting the oppression of the sad occasion. Unlike his children, Amos cannot express and control his grief through play. When he returns to the bleak, empty vicarage (one of those recurrent interior settings in George Eliot’s fiction which Barbara Hardy has aptly categorised as ‘the disenchanted day-lit room’)21 he feels nothing but the sense of loss and the sense of regret:

  . . . now she was gone; the broad, snow-reflected daylight was in all the rooms; the Vicarage again seemed part of the common working-day world, and Amos, for the first time, felt that he was alone . . . she was gone from him; and he could never show her his love any more, never make up for omissions in the past by filling future days with tenderness.

  ‘Perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable,’ says the narrator early in the tale, ‘a man who was . . . palpably and unmistakably commonplace.’ Amos Barton is indeed a man hard to like, and easy to ridicule. Like the Fat Lady in J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, he is the acid test of love. ‘It is only the largest souls who will be able to appreciate and pity him – who will discern and love sincerity of purpose amid all the bungling feebleness of achievement.’ The only such soul in the world of the story is the liberal-minded clergyman Mr Cleves. The other members of the community, in varying degrees, mock, despise, slander and exploit Amos, until his suffering shocks them into fellowship and sympathy, a process that is likely also to be enacted in the reader’s response. Thus the story’s structure – vignettes of Amos’s life, alternating with the choric comments of his parishioners and other acquaintance – and the gradual modulation of its tone from ironic humour to pathos, are perfectly adjusted to its theme.

  Every new writer, however ‘original’, is inevitably influenced by his or her precursors, and George Eliot was no exception. In her first story we can discern an indebtedness to the two, very different, novelists she loved best: Jane Austen and Walter Scott. From Jane Austen she surely learned the art of exposing, without explicit emphasis, the selfishness and insincerity of a character like the Countess Czerlaski, who battens on the indigent Bartons, and the ability to hit off a minor character with a few well-chosen words – the old widow Mrs Patten, for instance, who:

  . . . used to adore her husband, and now she adores her money, cherishing a quiet blood-relation’s hatred for her niece Janet Gibbs, who, she knows, expects a large legacy, and whom she is determined to disappoint.

  From Scott, George Eliot probably derived the technique of playing off various social strata against one another, contrasting earthy dialect speech with the language of the gentry and professional classes, and also the tone of her authorial voice, genial, reminiscent and a little ponderous. If the narrator’s knowing high-cultural allusions, and efforts to wring humour out of elaborate circumlocution, seem at times excessive, it must be remembered that George Eliot was consciously affecting a male persona – and very successfully: Blackwood, and most of her other early readers, were completely taken in.

  Just as Scott, adopting the stance of an enlightened modern looking back upon a picturesque but fanatical past, achieved an objectivity which he could scarcely have brought to bear on the political issues of his own day, so George Eliot used the reminiscent narrator as a means of taking the theological heat out of her treatment of Evangelicalism. ‘Amos Barton’ begins with an evocation of Shepperton as it was well before that zealous but tactless pastor appeared on the scene, and the narrator seeks to draw his audience into a wistful nostalgia for the good old days when religion was a social bond rather than the cause of controversy and dissension. In this way George Eliot establishes a position within the story from which she can distinguish between Amos’s doctrines and his ministry, gently satirise the former without appearing to discredit religion itself, and convey to a largely Christian audience an essentially humanist set of values. It is very subtly done, and one scarcely notices that the bereaved clergyman is never observed to pray or to derive any consolation from his belief in an afterlife. ‘No outward solace could counteract the bitterness of [his] inward woe. But outward solace came’, says the narrator, neatly sidestepping the possibility of inward solace. ‘Cold faces looked kind again, and parishioners turned over in their minds what they could best do to help their pastor.’

  At the heart of the story is a paradox, passed off as a joke in Chapter 5, at the time of Milly’s first illness: ‘as matters stood in Shepperton, the parishioners were more likely to have a strong sense that the clergyman needed their material aid, than that they needed his spiritual aid.’ The primary source of Barton’s troubles is economic: his stipend of eighty pounds a year is simply not enough to support his wife and family. The size of the family – six children, of whom the oldest is nine – is of course also a factor. Frequent childbearing, combined with the stress of trying to run a household with inadequate means, is what breaks Milly’s health. George Eliot makes the point through Mrs Hackit’s prophetic remark, when Milly becomes pregnant again, ‘That poor thing’s dreadful weak and delicate; she won’t stan’ havin’ many more children.’ We know that George Eliot and Lewes, having made a decision not to have children, used some form of birth-control,22 but that was something neither the Bartons nor the readers of Blackwood’s could have contemplated. So the overt cause of Amos’s sad fortunes is his genteel poverty, which is exacerbated when the Countess becomes his uninvited guest. Not only does she add to the expenses of the household without contributing to them, but the scandal she creates further alienates the parishioners from their pastor. Only when the Countess is sent packing through the intervention of the household’s loyal maid-of-all-work, and Milly herself becomes fatally ill, does the community rally round the stricken family with material and practical help. A more typical Victorian tale would end on this upbeat note, of good coming out of evil in the new solidarity between pastor and people, but George Eliot avoids this easy resolution by having poor Amos unfairly removed from the parish just as he is beginning to recover from his bereavement, and obliged to accept a curacy in a grim-sounding distant industrial town. ‘It was another blow inflicted on the bruised man.’ The prophet Amos gave his name to one of the books of the Old Testament. George Eliot’s Amos, as the title of her story suggests, is more like Job, but a modern, demythologised Job, denied the biblical patriarch’s sublime patience and divine reward. Blackwood said, ‘the conclusion is the lamest part of the story’.23 He was wrong. It was the boldest and most original part of the story.

  Blackwood published the first part of ‘Amos Barton’ in the January 1857 number of his magazine, and George Eliot was able to supply him with instalments of the other two stories promptly enough to maintain unbroken continuity throughout the year. The publisher did not know the identity of his new author during this period, or her sex. He was obliged to communicate with her via Lewes, who pretended the writer of the Scenes was a rather shy male friend who wished to hide behind a nom de plume. As Kath
ryn Hughes observes, there were several motives for the adoption of a pseudonym. Blackwood’s was a family magazine of conservative values, and Lewes knew that the publisher would hesitate to run the work of a woman notorious in metropolitan circles for living openly with a married man. (Indeed there is evidence that Blackwood, after correctly guessing the identity of ‘George Eliot’, preferred to be kept officially in ignorance for this reason, and played along with the deception.) Another reason was that if George Eliot failed as a writer of fiction, Marian Evans’s reputation as a journalist and writer of serious non-fiction would not be damaged. Several women writers – most famously the Brontë sisters – had adopted male pen names in the hope of getting a more respectful reception, but it is unlikely that this consideration weighed strongly in the case of George Eliot. A masculine pseudonym made a better disguise than a female one, and it had a functional appropriateness to the subject matter of Scenes. She explained late in life that the name was chosen because ‘George was Mr Lewes’s Christian name, and Eliot was a good, mouth-filling word’.24

  John Blackwood, the son of the original founder of the magazine, was a shrewd and efficient editor, with an intuitive feeling for literary quality tempered by a businessman’s caution and a certain conventionality of taste. His mild criticisms of the work George Eliot submitted to him elicited some characteristic and revealing defences of her artistic aims and methods, which Blackwood invariably accepted with good grace. In the first episode of ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’, the heir to Cheverel Manor, Wybrow, is shown trifling with the affections of Caterina, the young Italian girl adopted by Sir Christopher and Lady Cheverel, and loved by the young clergyman Mr Gilfil. Blackwood commented:

  It is not a pleasant picture to see a good fellow loving on when the lady’s heart is openly devoted to a Jackanapes . . . I think the objection would be readily met by making Caterina a little less openly devoted to Wybrow and giving a little more dignity to her character.

  George Eliot sternly replied:

  My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently respectable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity and sympathy. And I cannot stir a step aside from what I feel to be true in character.25

  Blackwood’s suggestion that it would be more decorous if, at the climax of the story, Caterina dreamed of stabbing Wybrow instead of actually intending to do so, met with the sharp and absolutely typical retort, ‘it would be the death of my story to substitute a dream for the real scene. Dreams usually play an important part in fiction, but rarely, I think, in actual life.’26

  Even without Blackwood’s suggested emendations, ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ seems a little insipid after its predecessor. The opening evocation of Mr Gilfil in his later years, as a crusty old clergyman whom none of his parishioners would suspect of having had a tragic romantic experience in early life, is well done in the style of ‘Amos Barton’, but the focus of the retrospective narrative that follows is not on Mr Gilfil at all, but on Caterina, a character who all too obviously derives from ‘fiction’ rather than ‘actual life’. This is evident from the narrator’s over-anxious appeals to the reader to appreciate the intensity of the heroine’s emotions:

  See how she rushes noiselessly, like a pale meteor, along the passages and up the gallery stairs! Those gleaming eyes, those bloodless lips, that swift silent tread, make her look like the incarnation of a fierce purpose, rather than a woman.

  Altogether ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’, though it has considerable charm as a period piece, was a regression from ‘Amos Barton’ in terms of fictional technique. Thought is often represented in long, rather theatrical soliloquies, and there is an over-reliance on the pathetic fallacy in descriptions of the weather. An elaborate strand of animal imagery applied to Caterina foreshadows George Eliot’s later and more subtle use of metaphorical symbolism in the depiction of character. Sir Christopher’s pet-names for her – ‘singing-bird’ and ‘little monkey’ – are frequently repeated and taken up by the other characters and by the narrator, and she is on occasion compared to a marmoset, a kitten, a frog, a stock-dove, a puppy, a linnet, a Blenheim spaniel, a grasshopper and a mouse, expressing a wide range of attitudes towards the girl: that she is appealing, vulnerable, attractive in an unconventional way, somewhat wild and untamed, slightly odd and out of place, foreign, of low birth. These images make her into an object, something less than human, a pet. Wybrow, trying to allay his fiancée’s jealous suspicions, makes this explicit. ‘She has always been the pet of the house,’ he says; and a little later, ‘One thinks of her as a little girl to be petted and played with’ – a telling betrayal of his essentially narcissistic and exploitative character. Sir Christopher, too, is guilty in a lesser degree, as he himself finally acknowledges, of stereotyping her as a kind of pet, and failing to perceive the intensity of her emotional life. Unfortunately the moral implications of this imagistic pattern are blurred by the fact that the nominal hero, Mr Gilfil, is himself associated with it. We are told that he became fond of Caterina in childhood because he ‘was an affectionate lad, who retained a propensity to white rabbits, pet squirrels, and guinea-pigs, perhaps a little beyond the age at which young gentlemen usually look down on such pleasures as puerile’. Possibly George Eliot had not fully worked out her own attitude to her pretty but rather empty-headed heroine, a type for which she never had much real sympathy.

  The eponymous heroine of ‘Janet’s Repentance’ is more rooted in observed reality than Caterina, but the strengths of this story, which contains some of the finest writing in Scenes, are again in the framing and general composition of the picture rather than in the treatment of its central subject. Janet is the abused wife of the bullying, hard-drinking lawyer Dempster, leading opponent of the charismatic Evangelical clergyman Mr Tryan in the town of Milby. She seeks escape from her miserable existence in drink, which causes her to be shunned in the community; but in the depths of despair she turns for help to the target of her husband’s hatred, and Tryan, by sharing with her his own personal experience of sin and redemption, restores her faith in religion and herself. There is a suggestion of romantic attraction between the two, but although Dempster’s accidental death sets Janet free, Tryan dies not long afterwards from consumption, leaving her to seek fulfilment, like him, in serving others. George Eliot’s gifts are most evident in her evocation of the social background against which the drama of Janet’s repentance is played out. The first three chapters of the tale are superb: the bar-room bluster of Dempster and his cronies at the Red Lion in the first, contrasted with the more genteel but competitive chat of the gathering of ladies, all admirers and disciples of Tryan, who are assembling a library of religious books in the third, separated by the narrator’s subtly ironic but scrupulously realistic account of Milby and its inhabitants (closely based on Nuneaton) in the second chapter. As Lewes observed in a letter to Blackwood, ‘One feels the want of a larger canvas so as to bring out these admirable characters, Old Mr Jerome, – the Linnets – and the rest’,27 and one can indeed see that George Eliot was now poised on the brink of her career as a novelist. Perhaps she was rationalising an instinctive eagerness to tackle the expansive form of the full-length Victorian novel when she said she would write no more ‘Scenes’ because she was disappointed by Blackwood’s want of sympathy for the first two parts of ‘Janet’s Repentance’.

  Blackwood was certainly disconcerted by the uninviting setting of the story, nervous about the treatment of the religious parties there, and not too happy at having an alcoholic as a heroine. George Eliot made a few revisions of her text in response, but defended herself in characteristic style:

  There is nothing to be done with the story, but either to let Dempster and Janet and the rest be as I see them, or to renounce it as too painful . . . Art must be either real and concrete, or ideal and eclectic. Both are good and true in their way, but my stories are of the former kind. I undertake to exhibit nothing
as it should be; I only try to exhibit some things as they have been or are, seen through such a medium as my own nature gives me. The moral effect of the stories of course depends on my power of seeing truly and feeling justly . . .28

  As U. C. Knoepflmacher has observed,29 there is a certain ambiguity at the heart of George Eliot’s aesthetic, as to whether her power of seeing truly and feeling justly was enough to guarantee the moral effect of her stories without the help of an element of idealisation. Her reply to Blackwood’s first letter about this story is revealing:

  Everything is softened from the fact, so far as art is permitted to soften and yet remain essentially true. The real town was more vicious than my Milby; the real Dempster was more disgusting than mine; the real Janet, alas! had a far sadder end than mine, who will melt away from the reader’s sight in purity, happiness and beauty.30