The Art of Conduct, The Conduct of Art and The 'Mixed Science' of Eliot's Ethics: ' Sympathetic Impulse' and 'The Scientific Point of View' in The Mill on The Floss

Authors

Simon Calder

Date of this Version

2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 41 (2010)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

The Mill on the Floss is full of keys and clues. Most famously, Maggie Tolliver, following her father's bankruptcy, 'wanted some key that would enable her to understand and, in understanding, endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart.' 1 In chapter three of Book Four of Eliot's novel, Maggie believes herself to have found just such a key in Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ (MF, 298):

Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets ... [F]or the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own desires, of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. (302)

George Eliot was, of course, highly suspicious of the endeavour to discover master keys:2 opposed to Casaubon's search for the Key to all Mythologies, she could hardly have wholly supported Maggie's belief in a Kempisian key to existence. In the final chapter of Book Six however, it becomes clear that Maggie has discovered something in Kempis. What she has actually found, suggests Eliot's narrator, is not a key but a 'clue'. In the following quotation from 'Waking', we find Maggie engaged in a process of discovery: 'soon the whole terrible truth urged itself upon her' (491). Maggie is shown to be coming to know that to rend such 'ties' as give 'meaning' to 'duty' is irrevocably 'wrong';

Her life with Stephen could have no sacredness: she must forever sink and wander vaguely, driven by uncertain impulse; for she had let go the clue of life - that clue which once in the far off years her young need had clutched so strongly. (491; my italics)

I want to suggest that Eliot's account of Maggie's development itself includes some crucial clues to her own ideas about the symbiotic relation between ethics (the art of conduct), aesthetics (the conduct of art) and epistemology (the art or science of coming to know). In The Mill on the Floss, Maggie's initial response to The Imitation of Christ is not entirely separable from her later discovery that she is just one 'part' of a more complex 'whole', which includes both Philip and Lucy. In turn, Maggie's aesthetic response to Kempis and her epistemological discovery (of the 'terrible truth') are deeply related to her ethical decision, to return home. My reason for applying these philosophical terms to Eliot's fiction is to highlight how different her perspective is from those of some of the figures with whom she is regularly associated. As Martha Vogeler highlighted in a Special 'George Eliot' Issue of Nineteenth Century Fiction published in 1980, positivists like Frederic Harrison staunchly believed that ethics, aesthetics and epistemology ought first to be clearly separated, before being set back together again:

Just as Positivist philosophy established the [epistemologically] True, and Positive polity defined the [ethically] Good, so Positivist art should present the [aesthetically] Beautiful.