INTELLIGENCE AS DECEPTION

Intelligence as Deception:The Mill on the Floss
George Levine

With only small exceptions, The Mill on the Floss can be seen as adequately representative of even the most mature of George Eliot's art-morally energetic yet unsentimentally perceptive about the meaning of experience. Like all of her works, it is thoroughly coherent and gains its coherence from a unified vision. But the vision, here as elsewhere, is, I would argue, incomplete. There were elements in experience, that is, which she was never fully able to assimilate and which, as was true of most of the major Victorian writers, she was genuinely unable to see. She pushed the bound­aries of Victorian experience as far as any of her contemporaries and moved to the brink from which one can observe the modern sensibility, but inevitably she pulled back.
The point at which she stopped is the point at which The Mill onthe Floss—which remains one of the very great novels of the period‐goes wrong. The difficulty, I would suggest, is not merely George Eliot's excessive moral energy nor even, exclusively, her too close identification, criticised by F. R. Leavis, with her heroine. Rather, it seems to me to result from a complex mode of self-deceit—from a combination of high intelligence with powerful moral revulsion from what that intelligence tended to reveal.


I
It is important, at the outset, to remember that George Eliot's in­telligence was at home with several highly elaborated intellectual systems which, she believed, could largely-if not entirely-account for the ex­perience being narrated. Of course, her works cannot be reduced simply to any one set of rationally coherent ideas; but it is certainly true that her empirical and rationalist biases (modified though they were by her total commitment to "truth of feeling") demanded an explanation of experi­ence consistent with reason, and that the explanation she accepted influ­enced certain crucial elements in her novels. Determinism is the central and dominant explanation of the facts of the experience; the moral direc­tion of those facts is controlled largely by many ideas which might betraced to Comte and Feuerbach. All of these ideas are woven inextricably into the very texture of The Mill on the Floss, but I shall argue that there came a recognizable point at which, especially in her use of Feuerbach, George Eliot employs them in such a way as to help her escape the implications of her own most deeply felt insights.
To begin with, then, it is necessary to clarify what the informing ideas of The Mill on the Floss meant to George Eliot. For her, determinism,as I have explained elsewhere, entailed a total commitment to the notion that every action has its causes, and only by a meticulous examination of those causes can any action be seen as comprehensible. She also argued,however, that determinism does not entail belief in inefficacy of the will. Since, that is, a man's character is always an element in his choice, he must be seen as responsible. Finally, whatever the intellectual formulation might be, to excuse a man on the basis of an abstract theory of deter­minism is altogether irrelevant to his evil; as Adam Bede remarks, "I see plain enough we shall never do it without a resolution, and that's enough for me."
All the major themes of The Mill on the Floss, as well as its structure, are related to determinism. It is a commonplace that the novel develops as Tom and Maggie grow: it sets them within the framework of a family and society which extensively determine what they become, shows the inevitable development of their characters according to the pressures of heredity and irrevocable events, and traces their destinies chronologically from love, to division, to unity in death. The simple narrative progres­sion is incremental and stresses the ineluctable dependence of every act and thought on acts and thoughts which preceded them.

Both in its personal drama and in its vividly imagined description of a period of social transition the novel seems illustrative also of many of Comte's and Feuerbach's notions of social and moral growth. In a letter to John Blackwood comparing Adam Bede to The Mill on the Floss, which was then in progress, George Eliot noted that the characters in the latter "are on a lower level generally." Quite deliberately, she was creating a society which has not as yet moved beyond the egoism of man's animal beginnings to the sympathy and benevolence which Feuer­bach and Comte believed would grow out of egoism. Among other things, the frequency with which all the characters are compared to insects and animals makes plain that George Eliot does not see them as ready for any but the slightest advance toward the full intellectual and moral development from egoism to intelligent sympathy towards which she aspired.

Aside from working out George Eliot's characteristic theme of "the adjustment of our individual needs to the dire necessities of our lot,"Maggie's story is also a dramatization of Feuerbach's religion of suffer­ing—the "suffering, whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to every historical advance of mankind" (bk. 4, chap. 1). Through suffering the"obscure vitality" of the "emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers" will be transcended, will be "swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers," and man will move slowly towards his full human­ity. The immersion in water, which in the final chapter is the form which the suffering takes, is, in Feuerbach's view, an annihilation of conscious­ness : it is the first step towards regeneration, but the regeneration itself must be active, not passive, the assertion of "the power of mind, of consciousness, of man. " Maggie's world lacks the moral guidance Comte insisted was necessary for that regeneration or for the achievement of a satisfactory society: it had "no standard but hereditary custom" (bk. 4,chap. 1).
Ideas such as these form the intellectual framework of The Mill on the Floss. The ideas and the experience, however, are two aspects of the same thing. Here at least one feels no tension between the two halves of the almost schizophrenic (intellectual vs. emotional) George Eliot that critics have taken to creating.
For all but a brief section of the book the experience itself seems a necessary and convincing source of the ideas; although the world the novel describes is entirely deterministic and largely positivistic, the "system" does not distort the experience.