Crisis and Recovery: Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Silas Marner

PETER SIMPSON Crisis and Recovery: Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Silas Marner The close affinity between Wordsworth and George Eliot has long been recognized but has never been adequately spelled out. Eliot's early novels with their rural settings and humble characters are obviously broadly analogous to Wordsworth's early narrative poems and to the aesthetic principles promulgated in the Preface to Lyrical Bal/ads. There is a less obvious but equally substantial affinity between Wordsworth's life history as depicted in The Prelude and Eliot's emergence as a novelist, as Basil Willey has pointed out: In a sense her early novels are her Prelude, that is, the means by which she pierced below the hard crust formed by the years of translating, reviewing and mental overforcing, to the quickening beds of heartfelt rnemOlY which lay beneath. I Silas Marner, the last of the early novels, synthetises both these Wordsworthian aspects of Eliot's work. It combines the social truth of the lyrical ballads with the deep psychological truths of The Prelude. For Silas Marner is not merely a simple tale of English rural life, embodying 'the remedial influences of pure natural human relations.'2 It is also a displaced autobiography, a fable which not only dramatizes the circumstances of its own gestation but also offers a fictional version of George Eliot's own life history. In particular it explores the pattern of crisis and recovery which was the central event in her own past life as it was in Wordsworth's; hence the depth of her engagement with his work. Before discussing Silas Marner I shall comment briefly on these more general affinities between the two writers. There is ample evidence of the influence of Wordsworth on Eliot's art and thought, notably in the frequent and enthusiastic references to Wordsworth in her letters and journals, and in the use of quotations from his poems either as epigraphs to her novels (Adam Bede, Silas Marner) or embedded within the text. More important, though, is the profound affinity of sensibility and conviction between the two writers, an affinity UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLVIII, NUMBER 2 , WINTER 1978/9 0042-°247179/0200-0095 $01.50/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORQNTO PRESS 1979 independent of any direct influence and, in turn, the condition of such influence. Eliot was aware of this affinity as early as her twentieth birthday, when she wrote to Maria Lewis that she had bought a sixvolume edition of Wordsworth and had already consumed the first three volumes: What 1 could wish to have added to many of my favourite morceaux is an indication of less satisfaction in terrene objects, a more frequent upturning of the soul's eye. 1never before met with so many of my own feelings, expressed just as I could like them. (Letters, I, 34) Before Eliot was to find her own means of artistic self-expression, however , she had to resolve certain inward contradictions (so nakedly evident in this quotation), a process which was to take a further twenty years. As it happens, the complex changes she went through before eventually finding her artistic vocation were to become a vital and continuing source of her art. Having 'arrived' as an artist, Eliot continued to reflect upon the long hard journey which preceded her arrival, and this is perhaps the most profound aspect of her likeness to Wordsworth. Like Wordsworth's, her art is 'recollected in tranquillity' and is decisively shaped by the metamorphosis which culminated in its corning into being. Furthermore, the pattern which Eliot retrospectively discovered in her own past is almost identical in general outline (though the details are of course widely divergent) with the pattern that infonns Wordsworth's life as bodied forth in his great retrospective self-analysis, The Preillde.' Broadly speaking, the mental and spiritual development of Wordsworth and Eliot, up to the time they began their major creative work, falls into a quadruple pattern, each new phase being initiated by a crisis and a sudden change of direction. The first phase is childhood and youth, ending with a conversion. In Wordsworth's case his 'conversion' was to the cause of the French revolution during his residence in France...