serialist vanishes: Producing belief in George Eliot, The

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1999 by Payne, David

III.

In a Century Magazine commemorative profile of 1881, Frederic Myers began the circulation of one of the most familiar anecdotes of George Eliot's career, how years before in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity College, Cambridge she had delivered the philosophical verdict that if "God" was "inconceivable" and "Immortality" likewise "unbelievable," the category "Duty" nonetheless remained "peremptory and absolute":

I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates .... I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls,-on a sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God. (F. Myers 62)

The conquering rationalist can only gape at a plundered Holy of Holies; an aura of transcendence uncannily persists at the very pronouncement of its absence. In the same article, Myers also describes the scene at the Sunday afternoon salons gathering momentum from the late sixties: the "thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, the earnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gaze moving from one face to another with a grave appeal." Such physical signs seemed to Myers the "transparent symbols of a wise benignant soul," the manifestations of a will not only "to utter words which should remain as an active influence for good," but also to mark the limit beyond which even literary language must not go, to convey "the mystery of a world of feeling that must remain untold" (61, emphasis added).

In such public appearances, then, George Eliot found it necessary to mystify her text's message of disaggregation and disenchantment by means of an extralinguistic theatre of sympathy. Such theatre could break out at any gathering of the haute bourgeoisie-at a St. James's Hall concert of 1874, for example, when the Leweses, in the company of Llewelyn Davies and his wife Emily, allowed an elderly woman to kiss George Eliot's hand, only to be faced with a younger and more ardent woman who, after kissing the same apostolical hand, declared herself only "one of the many thousands" of such devotees (Letters 6: 27n3). We might identify this theatrical practice as a form of Max Weber's "charisma of illumination," by which George Eliot sought to transmit a typically Christian "ethic of brotherliness" and to forestall inquiries into the fashioned status of her own authority-inquiries which the leader is certain to condemn as "the misleading and deceptive surrogates which are given out as knowledge by the confused impressions of the senses and the empty abstractions of the intellect" (Weber 341, 352). By late 1871, the Leweses had already begun a series of relationships which emphasize the charismatic nature of George Eliot's cultural authority.

One of the first of these was a correspondence with an admirer from the Scottish coast named Alexander Main, who lived with his mother and spent entire days reading his favorite author aloud at the seashore. Having responded to her first thanks for his interest with a long outpouring on Romola, and continuing to show what Marian called "perfect insight" in a letter on the Spanish Gypsy, Main was duly rewarded with permission to publish a selection of her narratorial interventions eventually entitled Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse. Lewes's response to Main's proposal shows the former in a perpetual search for new markets: