DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

'Even Our Failures are a Prophecy': The Mill on the Floss and the 1860s*

Authors

Marilyn Orr

Date of this Version

2011

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 42 (2011)

Comments

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

Abstract

My title comes from a poem, 'A Minor Prophet' " written by George Eliot in 1865, and I want to enlist its help in showing in this paper how the failures she experienced during the decade following the publication of The Mill on the Floss turned into a prophecy that shaped an aesthetic for the rest of her career.

Also known as 'My Vegetarian Friend’, this poem traces many of the important ideas that Eliot has been working with from the start of her career. It begins as a humorous characterization of 'a vegetarian seer', who anticipates a glorious 'Millennium' in which animals, along with all other 'meaner brutes', will no longer be required: 'By dint of diet vegetarian! All will be harmony of hue and line! Bodies and minds all perfect, limbs well-tuned! And talk quite free from aught erroneous'. In response, his friend the narrator (aka George Eliot one would have to think) declares his own contrary penchant for 'nature's blunders, evanescent types/ Which sages banish from Utopia'. The narrator assures his interlocutor that he worships 'with the rest' in beauty's temple but adds, 'by my hearth I keep a sacred nook' for 'the dear imperfect things'. Here then, the poem reworks the aesthetic credo most cogently expressed in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede, which argued for the equal rights of women peeling carrots and Madonnas as subjects for art. Eliot again reasserts here the need for the artist to love beauty and the commonplace. And she goes on to argue throughout her career that the beautiful are ethically obliged to love the ugly outcast.

But the poem identifies a further imperative: not only are the beautiful people under an ethical obligation to love the ugly, they need to do so in order to promote the sympathy that underlies human relations and so that they themselves might become good. The narrator expresses 'pity' for 'future men', who, living in a perfect world 'will not know/ A keen experience with pity blent! The pathos exquisite of lovely minds/ Hid in harsh forms - '. So the practice of compassion is as beneficial to the giver as to the receiver, and, further, there must be ugliness in order for there to be goodness. The poem thus identifies a 'paradox' that pervades Eliot's whole career - her love for beauty, along with her longing for a better world in which love, peace, and justice prevail, counterbalanced always by her conviction that it is the desire for good, dependent upon the existence of its opposite, that constitutes the best of human nature.