I recently put my worn boot into an online conversation when
someone bashfully confessed they were trying to read Middlemarch, the
better-known doorstop by George Eliot (known to real people as Marian Evans). “That
awful book,” belched one conversant. “Horrible colonial imposition on our
African sensibilities,” griped an academic. “Why?” queried a third, “stodgy
sleep-inducing Victorian irrelevance!” (I’m paraphrasing – but these are common
responses.)
Woah, I encouraged, slow down. Shelve the stereotypes for a
minute. Allow yourself to linger on those limber sentences, tease them out. You’ll
find there a subtle worldliness, refined characterisation, and a wealth of resounding
implication. Let the gifted phrase surface. 1870s England might seem distant
from us all, but its portrayal offers both challenges to our own mores as well
as startling commonalities.
At 4.10 I open Daniel Deronda about halfway through,
at Chapter 35. At my current rate of reading and vulnerability to distraction
it’ll take me until 2026 to finish it, but who cares? Time is just time. John
Steinbeck wrote something interesting about big books, in relation to his
equally monumental blockbuster, East of Eden. A short book was a bit
like a stiletto blade going in and out, he said: quick, exciting, and soon
healed over. A really big book, however, was like a wooden wedge being slowly
hammered into the flesh, which is obliged to grow around it, and so will be
changed forever. (I’m paraphrasing. Again.) Anyway, I’m enjoying Deronda,
partly because Gwendolyn Harleth is such a bewitchingly complex, infuriating
and beautiful character, also because I find myself quite identifying with
Daniel Deronda himself. (I’m that vain I probably identify with anyone
named Daniel.)
Chapter 35 opens with a sort of epigraph. Many of the book’s
epigraphs are attributed to other writers, but this one isn’t: presumably it’s
Eliot herself, despite sporting the odd “hath” and “whoso”, I suppose to lend
it a sense of Biblical sonority. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but bear with me.
Were uneasiness of conscience
measured by extent of crime, human history had been different, and one should
look to see the contrivers of greedy wars and the mighty marauders of the
money-market in one troop of self-lacerating penitents with the meaner robber
and cut-purse and the murderer that doth his butchery in small with his own
hand. No doubt wickedness hath its rewards to distribute: for whoso wins in
this devil’s game must needs be baser, more cruel, more brutal than the order
of the planet will allow for the multitude born of woman, the most of these
carrying a form of conscience – a fear which is the shadow of justice, a pity
which is the shadow of love – that hindereth from the prize of serene wickedness,
itself difficult of maintenance in our composite flesh.
Pwoaar, that’s meaty, entangled stuff. But let’s take it bit
by bit. The very least we can say is that Eliot, in this novel, has her sights
not merely on a suffocatingly narrow botched marital choice – though there is
that – but on the entire gamut of human history and behaviour. Here she’s homing
in on the exercise of “wickedness”, from the grandest scale (“contrivers of greedy
wars” – what a phrase to describe Bad Vlad Putin!) to the meanest pickpocket (“cut-purse”).
But she’s not just bluntly condemning wickedness. The passage is probing a
darker and more complex philosophical issue: the relationship between
conscience and crime. Instantly we can see this is no easy matter: we probably
all know of individuals who commit crimes with not the slightest “uneasiness of
conscience”, while others are racked by remorse. Who feels, who doesn’t, and
why? How is the conscience created in the first place? Addressing this, Eliot
realises, lies at the very core of any system of justice and punishment – not
to mention everyday social behaviour.
Notice that she begins this passage with a conditional: If
there were some direct relation or ratio between conscience and extent of
the crime, history would be different. The implication: actual history
shows there is no such direct correlation. Miscreants are evidently not
all joined in one troop “self-lacerating”, punishing themselves with the whips
of their own consciences. (In effect, state systems are trying to do it for
them, whether with fines or canes, jail-time or the threat of the gallows. The
results, as we know, are mixed: some miscreants are incorrigible, others “see
the light” and turn to good deeds. Distinguishing who is beyond reform and who
isn’t, who has a conscience to address or develop and who doesn’t, remains to
this day a fundamental problematic in any judicial system.)
Moreover, Eliot notes, wickedness has its attractions. It
has its “rewards to distribute”. Think of gang bosses or warlords who do offer
certain protections, stabilities and patronage in the absence of state
efficacy. Think of the arms manufacturers profiting on the back of Putin’s war.
Such rewards are perhaps most common, as well as subtly dispensed, by those
Eliot calls the “marauders of the money-market”. (Relish that alliterative
phrase – mmm!) We know of plenty of those, of course, from the Murdochs to the
Musks: they arguably rule the world. Conscience-free wickedness can even be
seen as a “prize”; today we have whole television series apparently exalting
the unscrupulous corporate raider.
For there are, Eliot observes, at least some people who can
be quite “serene” in their wickedness. It’s a “devil’s game” out there
(invoking the devil, with all its Christian associations; and characterising it
as a game, each carries an almost infinite burden of implication). Those
who want to win in that game have to be “baser, more cruel, more brutal” than
the next guy. Still, Eliot says a little hopefully, the “order of the planet”
militates against such characters. Is there really such a metaphysical order? The
stuff of utopias. Thankfully, pure evil is rare: the “multitude” retains some “form
of conscience”.
Yet more subtlety emerges here: conscience isn’t just one
thing. There are different forms of it, and not all of those forms are equally
satisfactory, hints the parenthetical aside: “a fear which is the shadow of
justice, a pity which is the shadow of love”. One form of conscience, then, is
born not of some inherent or independent power, but of fear – fear of punishment
or recrimination. This is only a “shadow” of justice. “Shadow” might bear a
double meaning: as a secondary, weak manifestation; or as a dark underside.
Both readings work. Another weak form of conscience arises from “pity”, which
in Eliot’s view (as it was in William Blake’s) is only the “shadow” of selfless
and committed love. Again, you could go on and on exploring the ramifications
of those limpidly balanced phrases.
Is this just a political deviation from the domestic drama?
Far from it: it sets a matrix for the private, daily operations of conscience.
Deronda hovers between pity and deep love; Grandcourt, Gwendolyn’s husband,
leans towards a detached lack of conscience; Gwendolyn herself oscillates
between unthinking hurtfulness and a maturing considerateness. This is why
Eliot writes at the end of the passage of our “composite flesh”: we are made of
many parts, intertwined threads not infrequently at odds with each other.
Far from being over-wordy, as many shallowly assume of Eliot,
this is astoundingly compact: highly complex issues broached and woven
together, raising endless implications. I do not know of a novelist who is more
intelligently probing.
It’s 4.35 a.m. I’ve read the passage several times, puzzling
it out. Siberia has returned, purring, completely free of either wickedness or
conscience. Sleep feels far away, my head buzzing with the first draft of an
over-wordy blog …
*****
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