This is a philosophy of power, a philosophy of power for people who combine extreme conviction with extreme self-skepticism.
CHAPTER 7
LOVE
“A human life, I think,” George Eliot wrote, “should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.”1
Eliot’s native spot was in Warwickshire, in the middle of England, a gentle, soft, unremarkable landscape. From her home she could see both the ancient rolling farmland and also the new and grimy coal mines, the economic clash that gave the Victorian era its special intensity. She was born with the name Mary Anne Evans on November 22, 1819.
Her father began as a carpenter but rose through self-discipline and an eye for opportunity and ended up as a very successful land agent. He supervised other people’s properties and became moderately rich in the process. She adored him. When she became a novelist, she would use his traits—practical knowledge, unlettered wisdom, a loyal devotion to his work—as the basis for several of her more admirable characters. After he died she kept his wire-rimmed glasses as a reminder of his watchful eyes and his perspective on the world.
Her mother, Christiana, was in ill health through most of Mary Anne’s girlhood. She lost twin boys eighteen months after Mary Anne’s birth, and she sent her surviving children away to boarding schools to spare herself the physical effort of raising them. Mary Anne seems to have felt the loss of her mother’s affection acutely, responding with what one biographer, Kathryn Hughes, calls “an infuriating mix of attention-seeking and self-punishing behavior.”2 She was, on the surface, a precocious, strong-willed, somewhat awkward girl, more comfortable in the company of adults than with other children, but there was something deeply needy about her.
Hungry for affection and terrified of being abandoned, she turned her attention, as a young girl, to her older brother, Isaac. When he returned on visits from school she followed him about, badgering him with questions about every particular of his life. For a time he returned her love, and they enjoyed “little spots of time,” perfect days playing in the grass and streams. But then he grew older, got a pony, and lost interest in the bothersome little girl. She was left weeping and abandoned. This was a pattern—her desperate need for love and some man’s exasperated refusal—that would dominate the first thirty years of her life. As her final husband, John Cross, would put it, “In her moral development she showed, from the earliest years, the trait that was most marked in her all through life—namely the absolute need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and to whom she should be all in all.”3
In 1835 her mother fell ill with breast cancer. Mary Anne, who had been sent away to boarding school at age five to spare her mother’s health, was called back at age sixteen to tend to it. There’s no record that she suffered any great grief when her mother finally succumbed to the disease, but her formal education was over, and she took over the role of supervising the household, almost as her father’s surrogate wife.
In her famous preface to Middlemarch, Eliot writes about the crisis of vocation that many young women feel. They experience a great yearning inside, she wrote, a spiritual ardor to devote their energies in some substantial, heroic, and meaningful direction. They are propelled by moral imagination, the urge to do something epic and righteous with their life. These young women, “fed from within,” soared after some “illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.” And yet Victorian society provided so few avenues for their energy that their “loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattainable goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed.”
Mary Anne was driven by that moral ardor, that spiritual perfectionism. In her late teens and early twenties, she became something of a religious nut. She came of age in a time when society was in great religious tumult. Science was beginning to expose cracks in the Church’s description of human creation. The spread of unbelief made morality a problem; many Victorians clung more ferociously to stern moral precepts even as their doubts about the existence of God increased. Among the faithful, there were efforts to make the church more vibrant and more spiritual. John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement tried to return Anglicanism to its Catholic roots, tried to restore a sense of reverence for tradition and medieval ritual. The evangelicals democratized the faith, creating more charismatic services and emphasizing individual prayer, individual conscience, and each individual’s direct relationship with God.
During her teenage years, Mary Anne was caught up in the religious fervor and, in her self-centered immaturity, came to embody many of religion’s most priggish and unattractive aspects. Her faith was long on self-admiring renunciation and short on delight or humane sympathy. She gave up reading fiction, believing that a morally serious person should focus on the real world and not imaginary ones. She forswore wine and as manager of her household forced those around her into abstinence as well. She adopted a severe and puritanical mode of dress. Music, which had once been a source of great joy, was now, she decided, permissible only when it accompanied worship. At social events she could be counted on to disapprove of the vulgar humanity and then to fall into fits of weeping. At one party, she wrote a friend, “the oppressive noise that accompanied the dancing” made it impossible for her to “maintain the Protestant character of a True Christian.”4 She developed a headache, slipped into hysterics, and vowed to reject “all invitations of a dubious character.”
D. H. Lawrence once wrote, “It was really George Eliot who started it all. It was she who started putting the action inside.” In her teenage years, Mary Anne lived melodramatically and narcissistically, full of solitary internal anguish, struggle, and resignation. She was trying to lead a life of martyrdom and surrender. But she was artificially narrowing herself, amputating every humane and tender piece that didn’t fit into a rigid frame. Her behavior was filled with affectation, less about being a saint than about getting herself admired for being a saint. There was a painful and ostentatious self-consciousness in her letters from this period, and even in her bad early poetry: “Oh Saint! Oh would that I could claim / The privileg’d, the honored name / And confidently take my stand / Though lowest in a saintly band!” One biographer, Frederick R. Karl, sums up the common view: “Except for her high intelligence, Mary Ann, in 1838, at close to nineteen, sounds intolerable.”5
Fortunately, her roving mind couldn’t be contained for long. She was too intelligent not to be able to observe herself accurately. “I feel that my besetting sin is the one of all others most destroying, as it is the fruitful parent of them all, Ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures,” she wrote in a letter. “This seems the center whence all my actions proceed.”6 At some level she understood that her public righteousness was just a play for attention. Furthermore, she was just too curious to stay in a self-imposed mental strait-jacket for very long. She was too hungry for knowledge. Her reading could not be contained within narrow banks.