Abstract
A yearning for some hidden soul of things, Some outward touch complete on inner springs.2
‘Without pretending to be a musical critic, one may be allowed to give an opinion as a person with an ear and a mind susceptible to the direct and indirect influences of music’: George Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge, 1963) p. 100.
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Notes
Eliot, Collected Poems, ed. Lucien Jenkins (London: Skoob, 1989), p. 95. Cited hereafter as Poems.
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss [1860], ed. Gordon S. Haight (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980) p. 205. Subsequent page references are given in the text.
For discussion of the ending of The Mill on the Floss in this respect see Gillian Beer, ‘Beyond Determinism’, in Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Wool f to Sidney (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 126.
Eliot to Jane Crow, 21 August, 1869. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1954–78), VIII, pp. 465–6. Cited hereafter as Letters.
Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 46. See also Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe o f Beginning, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 57, 59.
Eliot, The Mill, p. 206, n. 7. This passage appears in Eliot’s manuscript but is deleted from the proof of the first edition: see Eliot, The Mill, p. 206, n. 7. Current editions vary as to whether they include the passage in the main body of the novel text. It is included in the Penguin Classics edition edited by A.S. Byatt (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 320, but is not in the Clarendon text.
As, for example, in Goethe’s celebration of Gothic architecture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Von deutscher Baukunst’ [1770], in Der junge Goethe, Sdmtliche Werke: Nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Vol. II, ed. Gerhard Sauder (Munich: Hanser, 1987), pp. 418–21.
Letters, II, p. 40. Describing an expedition with Spencer to Kew to inspect the flora to Sara Hennell, [29 June 1852].
William Joseph Sullivan, ‘George Eliot and the Fine Arts’, PhD dissertation, Wisconsin, 1970, p. 66. This is something of an overstatement; see Letters, VII, p. 44: ‘About Mozart, I am at one with you when I think of him in comparison with Handel, Beethoven and Schubert and some more modern composers — that is, I feel his kinship to the Italian “sugared” view. But I find him, Haydn, and the Italians a welcome rest from more searching music’. To Sara Hennell, 4 December 1880.
See Spencer, Social Statics, p. 442; An Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904), II, p. 11. See also Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context From Gall to Ferrier (Oxford and London: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 155–9.
Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 51.
Sally Shuttleworth discusses how the application of organic models of devel-opment to psychology disrupted the organic theory of history from which they were derived. The organically constructed subject ‘possesses different levels of consciousness which do not all coexist within the same linear con-tinuum of time’; this ‘undermine[s] the reconciliation the organic model seeks to achieve between individual and social demands’ and ‘undercuts notions of unified history’: George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, pp. 67–9, 57.
John Stuart Mill to Herbert Spencer (1864), quoted in Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, p. 150. Mill is also paying tribute to Alexander Bain.
Jonathan Arac, ‘Rhetoric and Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Hyperbole in The Mill on the Floss’, in K.M. Newton, ed., George Eliot (London and New York: Longman, 1991), pp. 67, 71. Arac observes that ‘The Floss and its floods make an important part in the hyperbolic pattern of the book’ and draws attention to hyperbole’s derivation from the verb hyperbállo, which has ‘a specialised sense with regard to water, “to run over, overflow” ‘: p. 70. Arac also includes ‘perceptual hyperbole’ as part of this pattern, a term which might be applied to the quality of Maggie’s musical response: p. 71.
In Bellini’s 1831 opera, the heroine, ‘La Sonnambula’ of the title, suffers from the involuntary condition of sleep-walking. She wanders into the bed-room of a count staying at the local inn and is falsely accused of infidelity and rejected by her lover and the local community. Her innocence is proved and she is rehabilitated after the entire village has witnessed her sleep-walk-ing, persuaded by the count’s explanation that people who sleep-walk are capable of apparently conscious actions. The Mill on the Floss presents us with a realist inversion of this romantic opera plot, since Maggie Tulliver is also innocent of sexual transgression (if not of desire), but, on awakening from her somnambulist state, cannot be rehabilitated by the ‘older’ culture with which she is in conflict.
This scene echoes ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ where Caterina vents her passion-ate feelings by playing ‘massive chords’ on the harpsichord: Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life [1858], ed. Thomas A. Noble (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 153.
Herbert Spencer, Essay: Scientific, Political and Speculative, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1858) pp. 359–84.
Amusingly enough, Spencer’s experience of moral struggle is figured in musi-cal terms in a letter received by Eliot during the time she was writing The Mill on the Floss. In the letter, Sara Hennel describes a Handel chorus performed at the Sydenham festival: ‘The piece that has made the deepest impression of all was that singularly appropriate one that came on Wednesday after all those painful details you had been giving me about H[erbert] S[pencer] the day before … the Chorus out of Saul, Envy, elder-born of hell’. ‘Poor, dear, great Herbert Spencer’, she concludes, ‘and Thackeray — and how many more! And after this came the inexpressible sighs of the Dead March. I wish it had occurred to me at the time to consider this as the echoes from the battlefield of moral conflict!’: Letters, III, p. 97. 26 June 1859.
Haight, Introduction to The Mill on the Floss, The World’s Classics edn. (Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 1981), p. xiv.
For a discussion of this aspect of Maggie Tulliver’s portrayal see Nina Auerbach, ‘The Power of Hunger: Demonism and Maggie Tulliver’, in Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York and Guildford: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 230–49.
The idea that music offers alleviation of the shortcomings of material exis-tence is one to which Eliot frequently refers in her correspondence. On sev-eral occasions she describes music as a substitute for sunshine. See Letters, IV, p. 134: ‘I hope you are less abjectly under the control of the skiey influences than I am. The soul’s calm sunshine in me is half made up of the outer sun-shine. However, we are going on Friday to hear the “Judas Maccabeus”, and Handel’s music always brings me a revival’. To Mrs Peter Alfred Taylor, 3 March 1864. See also Letters, III, p. 472: ‘Having no sunshine, one needs music all the more’. To Mrs Adolphus Trollope, [10 December 1861].
Johannes Muller, Elements of Physiology [1838–40], trans. William Baley (1838, 1842), quoted in Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation, pp. 116–17. Similar imagery is employed by Erasmus Darwin (in turn an influence on Miiller), and by the Associationist philosopher David Hartley.
G. H. Lewes, Problems o f Li fe and Mind, First series: The Foundation o f a Creed, 2 vols (London: Trübner, 1874, 1875), I, p. 255; see also The Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1859, 1860), II, pp. 319–25.
Hermann L.F. Helmholtz, ‘The Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music’, Lecture delivered in 1857 in Bonn, trans. Alexander J. Ellis, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, ed. E. Atkinson (London: Longman, 1873), p. 105; On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, (1862), trans. Alexander J. Ellis (London: Longman, 1875), pp. 95, 570–2.
Letters, I, pp. 9–10. To Martha Jackson, [4] September 1838. See also Letters, I, p. 13. To Maria Lewis, 6–8 November 1838. See also Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 1968), pp. 18, 22–4.
Haight supplies references to Dante’s Inferno: Eliot, The Mill, p. 387, n. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’ (1795), line 28, The Complete Poetical Works o f Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vols, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), I, p. 101.
William Wordsworth, ‘On the Power of Sound’ (1835), lines 34, 209, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. 323–30. See Letters, I, p. 68. To Maria Lewis, 1 October 1840. John Hollander considers the interpenetration of sight and sound in Wordsworth’s poetry in ‘Wordsworth and the Music of Sound’, New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth, ed. G. Hartman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 41–84. In Poetry and Repression, Harold Bloom discusses the ‘the interplay of hearing and seeing’ in Romantic poetry, particularly in ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge… longed for a composite, originary sense … The joy of what they considered to be a fully active imagination expressed itself in both poets in a combined or synaesthetic sense of seeing-hearing’: Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 59, 57.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ElectiveA ffinities [1809], trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 110–11, 262.
Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe: With Sketches of his Age and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London: D. Nutt, 1855), II, p. 374.
Eliot, Essays, p. 264. In George Eliot and Music (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), Beryl Gray concludes that Eliot’s use of music endorses the claims of Maggie Tulliver’s past loyalties and her renunciation of the musical ‘temptation’ proffered by Stephen Guest: p. 15. Eliot’s own declared
view of tragedy as involving irresolvable conflict would suggest that this reading takes insufficient account of the subtlety of Eliot’s use of music or of the depth of tragedy in the novel.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871) II, pp. 333–7.
Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 89.
Gillian Beer discusses the impact of Darwin’s emphasis on oblivion and forgetting in her essay on ‘Origin and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative’, in Arguing with the Past, pp. 20–1.
Maggie’s dream that a composite Tom/Philip character is pursuing her as she elopes with Stephen Guest (412–13) seems obliquely reminiscent of Dido’s dreams in Book IV of the Aeneid: see The Aeneid of Virgil, ed. R.D. Williams
(Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1972), Book IV, lines 9–29, 465–73. Virgil presents Dido as retaining responsibility for the ‘crime’ which Juno and Venus determine that she commit.
In Adam Bede [1859], ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), pp. 83–4, Eliot invokes Nature, that great tragic dramatist’ underpinning this with the example of musical inheritance as she laments that the ‘father to whom we owe our best heritage, — the mechanical instinct, the keen sen-sibility to harmony … galls us’.
Eliot asked him why he had such a smooth forehead, to which Spencer replied ‘because I am never puzzled’; Eliot declared this explanation ‘the most arrogant thing I ever heard uttered’: Spencer, Autobiography, I, p. 399.
Letters, III, p. 277. To Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 5 December 1859. See also Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 44.
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© 2003 Delia da Sousa Correa
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da Correa, D.S. (2003). The Mill on the Floss: ‘A Mind Susceptible to Music’. In: George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598010_4
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