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 K. M. Newton

George
Eliot
Twenty
for the

- First
Century LITERATURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
POLITICS
George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century
 K. M. Newton

George Eliot for the

Twenty-First Century
Literature, Philosophy, Politics
K. M. Newton
University of Dundee
Dundee, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-91925-6    ISBN 978-3-319-91926-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946149

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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For Jessica, Will, Emily-Rose, Ferne, Jamie
 Acknowledgements

An earlier version of Chap. 4 was published in Essays in Criticism: ‘George

Eliot and the Ethical’, 63:3 (2013), 298–316. I am grateful to the editors
and publisher, Oxford University Press, for permission to publish this
revised version here. I am also grateful to Cate Newton for reading the
whole text and suggesting numerous improvements.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George Eliot Past,

Present and Future   1

2 The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot  17

3 Critical Encounters: Hardy, Bonaparte, Miller  51

4 Eliot and the Reinterpretation of the Ethical  77

5 Eliot as Psychological Novelist  97

6 The Mill on the Floss and the Revision of Tragedy 137

7 Daniel Deronda and the Novel of the Future 161

8 Eliot and the Politics of Modernism 205

Index 225

ix
 About the Author

K. M. Newton is Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of

Dundee, Scotland. Among his publications are:

Interpreting the Text. Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990.

George Eliot: A Critical Reader. (Edited with Introduction, commentary,
notes, bibliography). Longman, 1991.
Theory into Practice: A Reader in Modern Literary Criticism. (Edited with
Introduction, commentary, notes). Macmillan Press, 1992.
Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. (Edited with Introduction,
commentary, notes). Macmillan Press (2nd edition). 1997.
George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism. (Joint
author with Saleel Nurbhai). Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Modern Literature and the Tragic. Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Intellectual, Proto-­
Modernist, Cultural Critic. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.

xi
 List of Abbreviations1

AB Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford

World’s Classics, 1996.
DD Daniel Deronda (1876), ed. Graham Handley. Oxford: Oxford
World’s Classics, 2014.
FH Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), ed. Fred C. Thomson. Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 1988.
ITS Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), ed. Nancy Henry.
London: Pickering, 1994.
M Middlemarch (1872), ed. David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1997.
MF The Mill on the Floss (1860), ed. Gordon S. Haight. Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 1996.
R Romola (1863), ed. Andrew Brown. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1998.
SCL Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), ed. Thomas A. Noble. Oxford
World’s Classics, 2009.
SG The Spanish Gypsy; The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and
New. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, n.d.
SM Silas Marner (1861), ed. Terence Cave. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1996.

xiii
xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Essays Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1968.
Letters The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight. 9 vols., New
Haven and London, 1954–1956, 1978.

Note
1. Page references to George Eliot’s writings—fiction and non-fiction—are
included within the text.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George

Eliot Past, Present and Future

I
It is fairly certain, as the bicentenary of Eliot’s birth approaches and pro-
motes reflection on her writing, that her literary reputation in 2019 will be
very different from what it was on the centenary of her birth in 1919. In
that year the decline of interest in and regard for her work that had been
evident towards the end of the Victorian era had not yet been halted, and
little notice was taken of the centenary outside of Nuneaton and Coventry.
It was clearly not regarded as a significant event in the literary world gen-
erally, as press comments show: ‘comparatively few among the present
generation read the works of this great Victorian novelist’; ‘George Eliot
has, I fear, no message for the twentieth century’ (Harris 2007, 42).1
Identified with the high-mindedness, high seriousness and moralism
which were widely seen as characteristic of the Victorian sensibility, the
general view seems to have been that she could be safely relegated to the
nineteenth century along with Lytton Strachey’s set of ‘eminent
Victorians’. Though there has been a major change in Eliot’s reputation
from the low point of a hundred years ago, it is likely that, while her bicen-
tenary will be generally celebrated, doubts about whether her high literary
status is deserved may again be raised in certain circles, such as critics
outside of academia and literary journalists. It may be unlikely that one
could encounter, ‘George Eliot has, I fear, no message for the twenty-first
century’, but in the light of the vicissitudes there have been in critical
judgements of her literary status and reputation she may not be

© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. M. Newton, George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_1
2 K. M. NEWTON

i­nvulnerable. It may not be difficult to show that past denigration of Eliot

now has little credibility, but this book aims to go much further and show
that few nineteenth-century writers in the next hundred years are likely to
be seen as more essential in terms of both their art and thought than Eliot.
Though Eliot’s reputation may still have been in steep decline a hun-
dred years ago, 1919 did suggest a turning point since Virginia Woolf
published, though anonymously, her now famous essay on Eliot in the
Times Literary Supplement in which Middlemarch was proclaimed as ‘the
magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English
novels written for grown-up people’ (Haight 1965, 187), a judgement
now often printed in paperback editions of the novel. One should remem-
ber, however, that Woolf also wrote in that essay that the ‘movement of
her mind was too slow and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy’; that
readers ‘have good reason’ to ‘fall foul’ of her on account of the fact that
her heroines ‘bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places,
make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar’ and that ‘she
had little verbal felicity’ (Haight 1965, 186, 187, 188), most if not all of
which are, at the very least, highly disputable. One had to wait until the
1940s before criticism took a more solidly positive turn, most notably
with F. R. Leavis’s inclusion of her as a central figure in his study of the
English novel, The Great Tradition (1948). The question as to whether
her fiction could be persuasively defended in terms of its form and art
remained a contentious issue, but with the publication of Barbara Hardy’s
The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (1959) and W. J. Harvey’s The
Art of George Eliot (1961), some of the objections made by Henry James
and modern critics influenced by him2 were confronted. From this point
on, Eliot’s reputation as a major novelist was largely restored, and for most
academic critics at least her literary importance was assured and beyond
serious question.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, that assurance
may have appeared fragile. Various critical schools were negative in their
attitudes to her fiction, and it may have seemed likely that her reputation
was again going to be subject to serious questioning. Some critics commit-
ted to a modernist aesthetic saw her fiction as flawed at its root. She was,
for example, identified with the ‘traditional novel’ which ‘assumes that the
world and the world as we are made conscious of it are one’, whereas the
modernist novel of Woolf and Proust ‘emphasiz[es] the will to form that is
characteristic of consciousness’ (Josipovici 1971, 139). Critics influenced
by Marxism such as Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton associated her
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 3

fiction with a conservative ideology, fundamentally supporting the socio-

economic status quo with its class divisions and inequalities, and exposed
what they saw as the contradictions inherent in her ideological position,
and newer forms of materialist criticism have tended to support that
stance.3 The major challenge, however, came from the most influential
‘isms’ of recent times: structuralism and post-­ structuralism, feminism,
post-colonialism. Critics influenced by Roland Barthes, such as Colin
MacCabe, have reinforced the modernist critique: ‘The conviction that the
real can be displayed and examined through a perfectly transparent lan-
guage is evident in George Eliot’s Prelude to Middlemarch … [T]his lan-
guage of empiricism runs though the text’ (MacCabe 1978, 18).
Feminist critics of the 1970s found her fiction unsympathetic to femi-
nist political aims and its representation of female characters often unin-
spiring and conservative in viewpoint, one critic notoriously proclaiming
that ‘Middlemarch can no longer be one of the books of my life’ (Edwards
1972, 238). Debate centred on Eliot among feminist critics has continued
since then, but with negative criticism generally more nuanced and
defences of her from a variety of points of view common.4 Post-colonial
critics have been even more severe in their attacks on what they see as her
conservative politics and sympathy with colonialism and imperialism, find-
ing Daniel Deronda and Impressions of Theophrastus Such particularly
problematic: ‘For Disraeli’s Tancred and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the East
is partly a habitat for native peoples (or immigrant European populations),
but also partly incorporated under the sway of empire’ (Said 1993, 63).5
None of these critiques has, however, significantly affected her status as
a major novelist. Criticism that operates outside of the more committed
perspectives outlined above has continued to devote much attention to
her writing. Historically focused criticism that aims to be non-ideological
and highlights the social and psychological themes of her novels has been
a recurrent feature of critical commentary. There have also been many
readings which exploit the breadth of Eliot’s intellectual interests, focus-
ing on her relationship to such literary figures as Goethe, Schiller, Scott,
Austen, Dickens, Woolf, and she has been linked to various thinkers and
philosophical positions, such as Comtean positivism, Mill, Spinoza. Since
the 1970s her work has aroused the interest of critics associated with
deconstructionist or psychoanalytical critical theory, notably J. Hillis
Miller and Neil Hertz whose writings on Eliot call into question the view
that her language is conventionally mimetic by focusing on her intricately
metaphoric language and what Hertz refers to as ‘complicating … strands
of figuration’ (Hertz 2003, 8).6
4 K. M. NEWTON

II
As Eliot will soon move beyond the bicentenary of her birth, are signifi-
cant new perspectives on her and her fiction emerging? Around the
beginning of the twenty-first century, a group of US critics, all with a
strong interest in Eliot, emerged, who wish to break away from the
dominant critical perspectives of the late twentieth century, such as con-
ventional historical and thematic criticism, criticism grounded in iden-
tity politics and post-structuralist theory. Theory however remains
central for these critics but in place of theory driven by ‘ideology cri-
tique’, often just referred to as ‘critique’ or the ‘hermeneutics of suspi-
cion’ and predominantly favoured by various forms of post-structuralism,
there is what has been called by Rita Felski ‘postcritical reading’, strongly
influenced by Habermas, Stanley Cavell, and various Anglo-American
thinkers with strong connections to liberalism.7 A central aim of ‘post-
critical reading’ is to break with ‘critique’ or the ‘hermeneutics of suspi-
cion’ and make literary criticism at the present time have greater cultural
engagement, impact and existential relevance. A possible revival of ‘the-
ory wars’ may make Eliot one of the most significant writers at the pres-
ent time since her writing has been a major interest both to critics
associated with post-­structuralism such as J. Hillis Miller and Neil Hertz
and also to critics strongly committed to ‘postcritical reading’ with a
major interest in Eliot, such as Amanda Anderson, Harry E. Shaw and
Andrew H. Miller.8
This search for an alternative to ‘critique’ that favours ‘unsuspicious’
readings is not only an American phenomenon. A very recent study of
Eliot by British critic Philip Davis is perhaps the most impressive dem-
onstration yet of ‘postcritical reading’ in practice. Though his book The
Transferred Life of George Eliot is categorized as a biography, it collapses
generic distinctions by refusing to separate the biographical and the lit-
erary, life and art and creates powerful humanist readings which reveal
both the power of literary language and complexities of meaning even
in texts—such as the three stories which make up Scenes of Clerical
Life—that have tended to be viewed by critics as primarily exercises in
realism and so of limited critical interest: ‘This, then, is an attempted
imaginative recognition of all that George Eliot was in mind and heart,
as though she were indeed a real and achieved person and not just a
pseudonym or an omniscient narrator made out of words and syntax on
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 5

a piece of paper’(Davis 2017, 3). Though highly relevant to current and

future critical debate, a danger is that readings of Eliot’s work may tend
to be shaped by the theoretical or critical perspective her critics happen
to favour. In my view Eliot’s mind and therefore her writing is generally
resistant to a logic of either/or. Critical discussion and interpretation in
this book will attempt to take due account of that resistance by trying
not to be overly committed in advance of reading practice to a ‘suspi-
cious’ or ‘unsuspicious’ hermeneutics.
Are there any comparable critical developments and tensions in recent
British criticism? I shall suggest that there may be intimations of those in
an aspect of Eliot that first aroused my interest in her and her work: the
intellectual continuity between her and her partner G. H. Lewes, one
which went beyond his merely influencing her or she him.9 I do not think
that Eliot can be adequately understood unless it is taken into account.
This book will argue that Eliot as artist and intellectual possessed a mind
that was different and exceptional, and far from being the ‘Last Victorian’,
as one biographer styles her,10 she is one of the few writers of the past who
is ‘our contemporary’ in that her mind and work speak to readers in the
twenty-first century more powerfully than any other Victorian writer.
Lewes’s magnum opus, the five volume Problems of Life and Mind
(1974–1979), was left unfinished. Lewes suspected that he might not live
to complete it and light-heartedly suggested to the publisher John
Blackwood that Eliot, Dorothea-like, might have to finish what he called
his ‘Key to all Psychologies’.11 This came to pass when Lewes died with
the last two volumes still incomplete. Eliot duly went into virtual seclusion
to complete them. Lewes’s Problems is vast in ambition, scope and intel-
lectual range, but it has been generally neglected until relatively recently
and completing it was not merely a matter of Eliot writing up Lewes’s
notes. Her letters show that she embarked on some serious study while
working on it and it would not be going too far to see the final two vol-
umes, at least, as in effect a collaboration with Lewes. Her journal records,
for example, that she read or more likely reread Alexander Bain as part of
her work on it as the entry for 25 March 1879 shows: ‘Read Bain on the
Nervous System’ (Harris and Johnston 1998, 167),12 and she was still
reading Bain on 20 April. Bain was one of Lewes’s oldest friends to whom
he was close intellectually, both having been disciples of John Stuart Mill
in the 1840s and eventually moving on to a different form of empiricism.
Eliot would have been generally familiar with Bain’s ideas and well aware
6 K. M. NEWTON

of Lewes’s intellectual affinities with him. Bain (unusually accompanied by

his wife) was a regular attender of Eliot’s and Lewes’s Sunday afternoons
at their London house. That she was capable of completing this work sug-
gests her close familiarity not only with Lewes’s work but also with his
immediate intellectual circle, which included not only Bain but also
Herbert Spencer, whose Principles of Psychology (1855) she and Lewes
especially admired.
Rick Rylance, in his book, Victorian Psychology and British Culture
1850–1880 (2000), breaks new ground in treating Eliot, Lewes, Spencer
and Bain as a distinct group, discussing them both separately and together
with some analyses of passages from Eliot’s fiction. However, he sees them
all essentially as operating within the sphere of positivism, rather than as
radical empiricists, a form of empiricism that owes much to Humean phi-
losophy. Eliot has been identified with empiricism—as in the quotation
from Colin MacCabe referred to earlier—which alludes to empiricism in
the positivist or scientific rationalist sense, not in the Humean sense. As
one critic points out: ‘The roots of positivism lie in the same empiricism
from which Hume’s work derived, but, the practical success of natural sci-
ence in explaining natural phenomena and predicating the laws according
to which these phenomena relate to one another took empiricism beyond
Hume’s radical sense of the word to the point at which it seemed possible
to formulate a rational order uniting all natural phenomena’ (Dale 1989,
10).13 This positivist empiricism is founded on a confidence that external
reality can be viewed as separable from human consciousness and objec-
tively measured. MacCabe and others see this as the source of a transpar-
ency of language in her fiction which has as its aim to reflect external
reality in a mirror-like fashion: ‘Realism offers itself as transparent’ (Belsey
1980, 51). When she is described as a realist and empiricist, that is what is
generally meant. For Hume-influenced empiricists in contrast, objectivity
and materialism cannot be divorced from epistemology since reality is
always mediated through human perception and consciousness and only
accessible via the senses and the ideas and impressions they generate.
Metaphysics is rejected but not replaced by conventional materialism.
If Eliot’s empiricism has continuities with the more radical Humean
form which can be found in the work of Lewes, Spencer and Bain, her
realism takes on quite a different complexion from one based on conven-
tional ideas of empiricist positivism generally identified with scientific
rationalism or traditional materialism. What distinguishes Lewes and Eliot
in particular from such ideas is that mind or psychology cannot be excluded
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 7

when considering how human beings engage or interact with external

reality. The claim of positivistic science that it can reveal the true structure
of reality in purely objective terms independent of the senses and ideas is
called into question by Eliot in the epigraph to Chap. 1 of Daniel Deronda:
‘Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe
unit, and must fix a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal
clock shall pretend that time is at Nought’ (DD, 3). It would be a mistake
to read this as rejecting the existence of the atom in its modern scientific
conception, almost certainly the ‘make-believe unit’ that is referred to, but
when that novel was written atoms only existed in the realm of concepts
or ideas. The idea of the atom as the fundamental unit of matter beyond
which one cannot go is, for a thinker such as Lewes, an ‘ideal construc-
tion’ that has instrumental value for the development of science, but the
claim that the atom existed as the fundamental unit of matter was still
unproven. Though the existence of the atom was eventually established in
scientific terms, it is no longer seen as the fundamental unit of matter as it
is divisible into more fundamental particles and new ‘ideal constructions’
such as protons or quarks—a word coined by Joyce in Finnegans Wake—
have emerged, and one may doubt whether this process will ever arrive at
a secure end point. For a radical empiricist such as Lewes, science’s inven-
tion of and need for ‘ideal constructions’ does not undermine its credibil-
ity or lead to the scepticism exemplified in Nietzsche’s famous comment
that truth is only a ‘mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropo-
morphisms’, but Lewes and Eliot insist that human perception and think-
ing—in broad terms psychology—cannot be excluded from any conception
of the nature or structure of reality. In Middlemarch, the narrator asserts
that ‘we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors,
and act fatally on the strength of them’ (M, 83), using a metaphor in
warning of the dangers of such entanglement and thus showing that it is
virtually impossible to avoid metaphor in relating to reality in human
terms. Nietzsche suggests the same in referring to ‘worn out’ metaphors
as ‘coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no
longer as coins’ (Nietzsche 1954, 47).
Eliot uses the phrase ‘ideal constructions’ in an ironic context in rela-
tion to Lydgate in Chap. 27 of Middlemarch: ‘The reveries from which it
was difficult for him to detach himself were ideal constructions of some-
thing else than Rosamond’s virtues, and the primitive tissue was still his
fair unknown’ (M, 270). The phrase probably mystified its first readers
who would have been unaware of its context in Lewes’s radical empiricist
8 K. M. NEWTON

philosophy. But whereas the atom turned out to be a scientifically produc-

tive ‘ideal construction’ whose ‘real’ existence was eventually given scien-
tific legitimacy, Lydgate’s ‘primitive tissue’ in contrast turned out to have
no more substance than Rosamond’s virtues, though in science failed
‘ideal constructions’ can be seen as essential to the scientific enterprise as
a process.14 Significantly a major appeal of the ‘primitive tissue’ for Lydgate
is its association in his mind with the idea of the ‘fair unknown’, a particu-
lar mode of mediaeval romance. I use the word association advisedly.
Associationism is a central element of radical empiricism. It might be
argued that there has been a general prejudice against it, perhaps a reac-
tion to its widespread influence in the Victorian period and its being seen
as a mechanistic process and alien to the modern concept of the ‘organic’,
promoted by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817) and influential
thereafter in literary critical circles. Gillian Beer and Sally Shuttleworth are
two major British critics of Eliot’s intellectual background and influences,
her connections with science in particular, and they are the authors of two
of the most cited studies of Eliot,15 but Beer does not, I think, mention
associationism in Darwin’s Plots, her best known book, and Shuttleworth
directly disconnects Eliot from it by identifying it with ‘the mechanistic
cosmology of the preceding two centuries’. In Eliot’s work, she claims,
there is ‘a distinct theory of character and action which departs from the
earlier mechanistic conceptions of associationist psychology’ (Shuttleworth
1984, 2, 72). Lewes does express his commitment to ‘organicism’—which
Shuttleworth sees as overturning associationism—but to assume that his
concept of ‘organicism’ is irreconcilable with ‘associationism’ is simplistic
and would be to ignore his long intellectual relationship with Bain, the
major proponent of associationism in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. A passage like the following from Middlemarch would seem to go
beyond a merely general use of the word ‘association’:

Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbours’ lot are but the back-
ground of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they
become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a
part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.
This dream-like association of something alien and ill-understood with the
deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense of loneliness
which was due to the very ardour of Dorothea’s nature. (M, 322)

A potential appeal of associationism for radical empiricists such as Eliot

and Lewes is that it can be seen as an important corollary to Darwin’s
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 9

c­ oncept of natural selection. The latter had called into question metaphys-
ics on a number of levels, particularly the most powerful metaphysical argu-
ment for the existence of God, the argument from design. Associationism
undermined an equally powerful metaphysical idea, that of the self or mind
as a kind of ‘ghost in the machine’—to use Gilbert Ryle’s phrase in his
attack on Cartesian dualism—which transcends any empirical account of its
existence. Lewes, however, deviated from Mill, Bain and Spencer in argu-
ing that there needed to be some ordering force that provides structure for
the myriad impressions and sensations that bombard the senses, an empiri-
cist equivalent to Kant’s categories or pure concepts of the understanding.
Such a force, Lewes argued—influenced in part by the work of the German
physiologist Helmholtz—was supplied by biology and physiology since
‘forms of thought’ or ‘forms of consciousness’ have emerged within the
human organism as part of the evolutionary process through natural selec-
tion. Thus association interacts with ‘forms of consciousness’ so that sensa-
tions and impressions are not atomistic but form structures and patterns
which are accessible through memory and continually accumulate so that a
distinctive self or consciousness emerges as a result, but a self that no longer
needs to be conceived of in metaphysical terms.
Two recent studies are very pertinent to any discussion of Eliot’s links
with radical empiricism and associationism: Cairns Craig’s Associationism
and the Literary Imagination (2007) and Peter Garratt’s Victorian
Empiricism (2010). Eliot is discussed relatively briefly in these studies, but
they point to a significant departure from the assumptions of previous
Eliot critics. Garratt writes: ‘… a tradition of associationism can be traced
from Hume … and finally to the theorists contemporaneous with George
Eliot’; ‘… Lewes’s own later psychological theories … would revitalize
associationism by grounding its processes in the knowing body and by
framing its physiological ideas in the context of the new evolutionary the-
ory’ (Garratt 2010, 67, 70). Craig argues that it is a caricature of associa-
tionism, for which Coleridge was primarily responsible, to see it as
mechanistic, atomistic, passive and offering little scope for the imagina-
tion: ‘The priority that association theory gave to the imagination—since
association itself is nothing other than an operation of the imagination—as
well as to the passions made it rapidly appealing in discussions of the origin
and effects of art’ (Craig, 11) and argues strongly in Chap. 2 of his book
that Wordsworth’s associationist theory of poetry in his ‘Preface’ to Lyrical
Ballads (1800) is more powerful and coherent than Coleridge’s organicist
theory, influenced by German idealism, in Biographia Literaria.
10 K. M. NEWTON

Significantly Wordsworth, who was Eliot’s favourite Romantic poet, dis-

agreed with Coleridge and did not abandon associationism. Both Eliot
and Lewes were also great admirers of Spinoza’s Ethics, Eliot having trans-
lated it, and as Garratt discusses, association was a central element of
Spinoza’s monist philosophy (Garratt 2010, 136–8).
Though Rick Rylance sees Eliot, Lewes, Bain and Spencer as a distinct
group, this does not mean that there were not differences and disagree-
ments among all of them, even Lewes and Eliot though not to a serious
degree. What makes Eliot and Lewes stand apart—he the biographer of
Goethe and she the translator of Strauss—was their stronger links with
German thought, particularly with post-Kantian and post-Hegelian
­anti-­metaphysical thinkers who emerged to some degree out of the more
radical side of German Romanticism, obviously Feuerbach in Eliot’s case
while Lewes’s radical empiricism has some continuities with German post-­
Kantianism as exemplified in the work of such figures as Hans Vaihinger,
aspects of Nietzsche, and Ernst Mach. Lewes’s attempt to overcome, at
least partially, the division between the empiricist and the Kantian tradi-
tions was probably one of the reasons why Bain had doubts about Lewes’s
philosophical project in his Problems, perhaps a step too far for him (Ashton
2000, 243). Lewes also believed his most important intellectual contribu-
tion was ‘the discovery of the social factor in Psychology’ (Ashton 2000,
271), and it would not be surprising if Eliot had considerable influence on
this aspect of his thought, which significantly distinguishes them from
Bain and Spencer.

III
Eliot’s relation to radical empiricism is not however the main focus of this
book though it will be implicit in some of its aspects and discussed more
directly in the last section of Chap. 5. Though I have argued the case
for Eliot’s radical empiricism, which most previous critics have either dis-
counted or neglected and which potentially alters critical perspectives on
Eliot, I believe it can be critically counter-productive to identify her work
too directly with specific influences so that her work tends to become defined
in terms of a particular external framework. This is not to deny the usefulness
of studies that have connected her work closely with such thinkers as Comte,
Mill, Feuerbach, Spinoza, among others, but Eliot is not a writer whose
writing can be easily decoded by being identified with one particular thinker
or one school of thought. There are diverse intellectual influences on her
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 11

writing, including those referred to above which one should be aware of, but
they should be seen as existing within the distinctive mix that constitutes
Eliot’s own unique mental mapping of reality and life and her fundamental
concern with the art of her fiction. But an important reason for drawing
attention to her affinities with radical empiricism, especially with Lewes’s
philosophical and psychological thinking, is to raise questions about the
common general identification of her with a positivistic conception of
empiricism founded on Enlightenment-­influenced rationalism and scientific
materialism. The greater part of this book is focused on a closer reading of
her writing at the textual and linguistic level than her writings normally
receive, together with detailed exploration of human situations and issues
and their wider intellectual significance in terms of philosophy, psychology
and politics, mediated through the art of the novel.
In the second chapter, it will be argued that the otherness of her mind-
set as a person living in the Victorian era as artist and intellectual—espe-
cially given the constraints of her Victorian situation and context—has not
been sufficiently recognized and explored. Discussion in this chapter will
focus on a close reading of some of her non-fiction, especially its concern
with issues that have been controversial in Eliot criticism: her personal and
existential choices in life, her relation to feminism, her politics. The third
chapter engages with the critical perspectives of three of her major critics
and, while respecting them highly, also subjects them to scrutiny. All Eliot
critics need to challenge or be challenged by alternative critical perspec-
tives. The following four chapters concentrate on her fiction, especially in
relation to such major Eliot concerns as the ethical, psychology, tragedy,
temporality. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda dominate discussion
though Silas Marner is discussed in Chap. 4, Romola briefly in Chap. 3,
and Chap. 6 focuses on The Mill on the Floss and its challenging view of
tragedy. Middlemarch is the prime focus in relation to the ethical and psy-
chology in Chaps. 4 and 5; Daniel Deronda is seen as her most ambitious
novel, one in which she aspires most self-consciously to integrate her roles
as both literary artist and intellectual, while experimenting with literary
form in terms of its narrative. It may be seen as anticipating aspects of
modernist fiction. The final chapter discusses some of the reasons why
Eliot is still conventionally identified with a Victorian ethos despite her
connections with modernism in a wider context and also explores what
relation she has to modernism’s problematic politics. A feature of past
criticism of Eliot—and I do not exclude some of my own previous criti-
cism from this—is that some general thesis or interpretive paradigm has
12 K. M. NEWTON

tended to dictate how she is read so that the particularity of the text has to
submit to the paradigm’s power, and as a consequence subtleties in the
writing or in the situations being depicted have tended often not to be
sufficiently noticed or even ignored. I hope in this book to subject the
force of the general perspective to sufficient degree of constraint so that
the complexities in her art and thought may receive due recognition and
acknowledgement, while at the same time suggesting that she is not only
the greatest ever female writer but on an equal level to that elite group of
writers who are generally regarded as being in the highest echelon of the
literary canon.

Notes
1. Margaret Harris, ‘The George Eliot Centenary of 1919’ (2007), 42.
George Saintsbury in his A Short History of English Literature, first pub-
lished in 1898 and much reprinted, refers to the ‘extravagant heights’ of
her earlier reputation followed by the critical backlash after her death and
comments: ‘This factitious height she can never recover in the estimation
of a competent judgment’ (Saintsbury 1960, 753).
2. The influence of Henry James in terms of theory of the novel perhaps cul-
minates in Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), though Eliot is
only mentioned in passing.
3. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), and Terry
Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory
(London, 1976). See also Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation
of English Fiction (1985), and Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property:
Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 1994).
4. Debates among feminist critics continue, with more balanced positions on
Eliot since the 1970s generally adopted. See Gillian Beer, George Eliot
(1986); Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and
the Novel of Development (1993); and most recently June Skye Szirotny,
George Eliot’s Feminism: The Right to Rebellion (2015).
5. See also Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and
Representation (1996).
6. See also J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: ‘Adam Bede’ and
‘Middlemarch’ Revisited’ (2011), which is discussed in detail in Chap. 3.
7. See Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015).
8. See Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of
Theory (2005); Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot
(1999); Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and
Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2008). For the origin
INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 13

of the phrase the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, see Paul Ricoeur’s essay ‘The
Conflict of Interpretations’, in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in
Interpretation (1970), 20–35.
9. See K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (1981, especially
5–10, 57–64).
10. See Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London, 1999).
11. ‘The shadow of old Casaubon hangs over me and I fear my “Key to all
Psychologies” will have to be left to Dorothea’ (Letters, V, 291). See also
Letters, V, 350.
12. Catherine Gallagher has argued that the influence of the psychophysiology
of Bain in The Emotions and the Will (1865) is evident in Daniel Deronda.
See her chapter on Deronda in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and
Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Gallagher 2006,
esp.134–5, 146–7).
13. Though critics such as Rylance and Dale place Eliot within a positivist
context, this does not mean that they and other critics such as Gillian Beer
and Sally Shuttleworth who do not see her as a radical empiricist have not
made a valuable contribution to Eliot criticism. For example, Shuttleworth
(in George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science) and Dale show that
Eliot’s relationship to positivism is not straightforward, Shuttleworth
revealing links between Lewes’s philosophy of science and that of Claude
Bernard and arguing persuasively that Bernard’s influence is reflected in
Eliot’s writing, and Dale suggestively discusses how the intellectual divi-
sion between Comte and Mill is relevant to Eliot and Lewes, Comte plac-
ing greater stress on the role of hypotheses in science and scientifically
based thinking and working with them provisionally prior to verification
whereas for Mill hypotheses had to be verified before one could make a
positive use of them. Lewes and almost certainly Eliot would have sup-
ported Comte against Mill on this issue, but on the other hand Lewes
supported Mill’s critique of Comte for dismissing psychology and again
Eliot almost certainly would have agreed with him. Dale also convincingly
shows the influence on Lewes of the work of the German physiologist
Helmholtz. Another pertinent study of Eliot and Lewes is George Levine’s
essay, ‘George Eliot, Conrad, and the Invisible World’, Chap. 12 of his
book, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady
Chatterley. Though essentially situating Eliot within scientific rationalism,
Levine recognizes that, in what he sees as her later writing and thinking,
her earlier positivism comes under some stress through ‘honoring the com-
plexities of the new reality and the new epistemologies’ (Levine 1983,
261), so that it is fruitful to connect Eliot and Conrad in terms of their
work and thought.
14 K. M. NEWTON

14. For discussion of the primitive tissue and Lydgate’s connection to Bichat
(M, 146), see W. J. Harvey, ‘The Intellectual Background to the Novel’, in
Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel, ed. Barbara Hardy, 35–6,
and also Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life, 168.
15. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983); Sally Shuttleworth, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Belief of a Beginning
(1984).

Bibliography
Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes: An Unconventional Victorian (London: Pimlico,
2000).
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
———, George Eliot (Brighton; Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986).
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980).
Cairns Craig, Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal
Chaos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the
Victorian Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Philip Davis, The Transferred Life of George Eliot: The Biography of a Novelist
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory
(London: New Left Books, 1976).
Lee Edwards, ‘Women, Energy, and Middlemarch’, Massachusetts Review, 13
(1972), 223–8.
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of
Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse
and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
———, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the
Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Peter Garratt, Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain,
Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot (Madison: Fairley Dickinson University Press,
2010).
 INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 15

Gordon S. Haight, ed., A Century of George Eliot Criticism (London: Methuen,

1965).
Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (Athlone Press, 1959).
———, ed., Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel (London: Athlone
Press, 1967).
Margaret Harris, ‘The George Eliot Centenary of 1919’, George Eliot Review, 38
(2007), 32–48.
Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, eds., The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
W. J. Harvey, The Art of George Eliot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961).
Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2003.
Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1999).
Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction (London:
Macmillan Press, 1971), 139.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1948).
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to
Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (5 vols.) (London: Trübner, 1874–9).
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation
(London: Routledge, 1996).
Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: Cape, 1921).
Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan
Press, 1978).
Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-­
Century British Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: ‘Adam Bede’ and ‘Middlemarch’ Revisited’
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (London: Macmillan Press,
1981).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Viking, 1954).
Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Conflict of Interpretations’, in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay
in Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1970), 20–35.
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).
George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (London: Macmillan,
1960).
16 K. M. NEWTON

Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1999).
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Belief
of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
June Skye Szirotny, George Eliot’s Feminism: The Right to Rebellion (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2015).
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus,
1973).
 CHAPTER 2

The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot

I
The critical orthodoxy for many years in regard to George Eliot was that
there was little that is ‘radical’ about her as writer, philosopher or political
thinker.1 As a novelist she may have been one of the major English realists but
according to her critics the content of her fiction was not ‘radical’, in contrast
to writers such as Dickens and Zola, nor did she in her novels attempt to
experiment with form or style in the manner of Flaubert or Henry James or
Joseph Conrad, not to mention modernists such as Virginia Woolf and James
Joyce. As an intellectual she was not considered to be an original thinker but
as a writer primarily influenced by the major thinkers of her age, such as John
Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte. Politically she was regarded
as conservative though she went through a liberal phase when younger but
showed little support for some of the major causes of her time, such as
extending the suffrage, especially for women, or giving greater political
power to the working class if that was likely to lead to a breakdown in social
order. She was seen as a gradual reformist at best. These assumptions had
considerable influence on thinking about Eliot during much of the twentieth
century even after there was a substantial recovery of her literary reputation.
If one considers more recent criticism, some of these critical attitudes have
been seriously called into question.2 This book, however, will argue and try
to show that despite advances in criticism the radical nature of Eliot’s mind
has still not been sufficiently appreciated and the critical assumptions men-
tioned above continue to retain some force. The book will argue that Eliot

© The Author(s) 2018 17

K. M. Newton, George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_2
18 K. M. NEWTON

possessed a ‘radical’ mindset that makes her stand apart from virtually all of
her Victorian contemporaries (and also from many notable writers who have
followed her in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) as literary artist,
intellectual and socio-political thinker.

II
It is useful to start at a personal level by focusing on some of the significant
choices Eliot made in her life as much negative criticism has been directed
at these choices on the grounds of their being inconsistent, incoherent or
morally or socially questionable, and these judgements have often been
carried over to the interpretation of her mental outlook and by extension
to her writing. A common perception has been that there is a lack of con-
tinuity between her early political radicalism in the 1840s and her later
thinking and the choices and actions it generated. I shall suggest that her
critics tend to operate with a conventionally defined or ideologically influ-
enced concept of consistency that Eliot calls into question. Political critics
of liberal or left-wing leanings, for example, generally admire her rebellion
against Victorian conventions by choosing to live with a married man
knowing that it would cause a scandal. Even friends who held feminist
views, such as Bessie Rayner Parkes, were shocked at her decision to live
openly in a non-marital relationship as G. H. Lewes was widely perceived
as having a disreputable past, one which Eliot would have been well aware
of. But for many of her post-Victorian feminist and liberal critics she did
not carry this social rebellion through, so that her apparent rejection of
Victorian values and assumptions in regard to what is perceived as proper
and respectable conduct, especially as applied to women, is seriously com-
promised. She insisted, for example, on being called ‘Mrs Lewes’ and
referred to G. H. Lewes as her ‘husband’ as if she were a conventional
married woman. Even worse was to follow after the death of Lewes when
she married the friend of both herself and Lewes, John Walter Cross, also
her financial advisor, in a church wedding and adopted the name ‘Cross’.
Many of her biographers find her actions difficult to come to terms
with.3 Marrying Cross, though from one point of view a conventional act,
from another was as unconventional and transgressive as choosing to live
‘in sin’ with Lewes, Cross being some twenty years younger than she was.
Whether acting ‘unconventionally’ or ‘conventionally’, Eliot shocked and
unsettled both her contemporaries and also later commentators in regard
to the choices she made in her life, it being not quite clear whether her
 THE ‘RADICAL’ MINDSET OF GEORGE ELIOT 19

relationship with Lewes and her marriage to Cross were conforming to

notions of respectability or transgressing them. She thus subverts standard
assumptions as to what is radical or what is conservative. Thomas Carlyle
is I think well justified in calling her a ‘strong minded woman’ in contrast
with the influential view promoted by her major biographer Gordon
Haight that she always needed someone to lean upon. Regarding her
elopement with Lewes, she claimed to be ‘entirely indifferent’ as to how it
was judged, asserted that ‘I have done nothing with which any person has
a right to interfere’ and found the phrase ‘“run away” as applied to me …
simply amusing—I wonder what I had to run away from … I have done
nothing with which any person has a right to interfere’ (Letters, VIII,
123–4).
She can be seen as both rebel and pragmatist at the same time. She
rebelled against Victorian marriage in choosing to live with Lewes outside
wedlock but made sure she showed respect for marriage as a concept and
social institution—a respect one should stress which was sincere—by tak-
ing the ‘married’ name of ‘Mrs Lewes’. Almost certainly she would have
married Lewes if he had been free. Marriage had human value despite the
existence of bad marriages—a significant presence in her fiction—but non-­
legal ‘marriages’ could have equal value. There is no sign that she had a
fixed position in regard to marriage or sexual relationships, rejecting both
that sexual relationships were only justifiable within marriage and that
marriages should be maintained even if they had irretrievably broken
down. Her comment on Jane Eyre in regard to Rochester’s marital situa-
tion is significant: ‘All self-sacrifice is good—but one would like it to be in
a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man
soul and body to a putrifying carcase’ (Letters, I, 268). But she had no
animus towards those who held conventionally respectable views about
marriage and evinces few indications of resentment at being ostracized by
society for being a ‘fallen woman’.
Many of her critics and biographers have expressed some shock or con-
sternation at her positive response to her brother Isaac’s letter of con-
gratulation following her marriage to John Cross, after Isaac had been
estranged from her for choosing to live with Lewes for more than a quar-
ter of a century. But Isaac Evans was a respectable Victorian who held
standard Christian beliefs, and his severing of connections was therefore to
be expected. She had chosen a different path from her brother and rejec-
tion by him was one of its inevitable consequences and no blame could
therefore be attached to him. She was prepared to pay such a price in order
20 K. M. NEWTON

to have a loving relationship with Lewes. But she seems not to have even
thought of spurning Isaac’s congratulation. Negative responses to her
brother have clearly influenced the many unsympathetic critical judge-
ments of Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, distorting interpretation of
the novel in my view.
Her pragmatism can be seen as a means of defusing social disapproval of
her transgressive acts. Calling herself ‘Mrs Lewes’ was a rational way of
controlling scandal as far as possible as retaining her own name would have
only prolonged it. The name ‘Mrs Lewes’ implied that she did not reject the
idea of marriage as such, which may have placated to some degree conven-
tional opinion. Why did Lewes not divorce his wife and marry her? In a
biography of Eliot that questions many of the assumptions of previous
biographers, Nancy Henry has argued that Lewes would have been able to
seek a divorce even though he had condoned his wife’s adultery,4 in contrast
to what Gordon Haight claimed in his biography. According to Henry,
Lewes would have chosen not to do so as a legal divorce would have caused
a greater scandal than his and Eliot’s living together outside of marriage as
details of their own adulterous relationship would have been disclosed,
exposing her publically as a ‘fallen woman’. Her self-declared marriage
allowed her to live with the man she loved yet not place herself completely
beyond the pale of respectable society because she did not display contempt
for marriage in the manner of certain bohemian artists. If she had flaunted
her status as a ‘fallen’ woman, it is doubtful whether she would have suc-
ceeded in Britain as a novelist.
Marrying Cross was controversial in her own time among her friends
and remains so among modern critics and biographers. Though she and
Cross were free to marry, the fact that she chose to do so in church despite
her agnosticism or atheism could be, and has been, seen as a distasteful
reaching out for acceptance by conventional society. Yet the mature Eliot
had long valued religious ceremonies and rituals even if she did not accept
their metaphysical bases. What this ‘conventional marriage’ shows is that
transgression is always determined by context. Both her self-proclaimed
‘marriage’ and her ultra-conventional real marriage were transgressive in
their particular contexts. There was also unstated but implied transgres-
sion as she gave no sign of rejecting the views of social rebels who applied
concepts of freedom or liberty to marriage or social conventions or reli-
gious doctrines, such as those who had adopted something of a bohemian
lifestyle, like John Chapman, who shared a home with both his wife and
his mistress. Eliot lodged with him briefly and may have had a sexual liai-
son with him before wife and mistress forced her out. She was also happy
Another random document with
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naval warfare
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: Mahan on naval warfare

Selections from the writing of Rear Admiral Alfred T.
Mahan

Author: A. T. Mahan

Editor: Allan F. Westcott

Release date: December 14, 2023 [eBook #72412]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Little, Brown, 1890

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Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
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by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAHAN ON

NAVAL WARFARE ***
Transcriber’s Note:
New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.
MAHAN ON NAVAL WARFARE
 The Writings of

Rear Admiral ALFRED T. MAHAN

The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783.

The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and
Empire, 1793–1812. 2 vols.
Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812. 2 vols.
The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future.
The Life of Nelson, the Embodiment of the Sea Power of
Great Britain. 2 vols.
Types of Naval Officers.
Retrospect and Prospect.
Lessons of the War with Spain, and other Articles.
The Problem of Asia, and Its Effect upon International
Policies.
Some Neglected Aspects of War.
Naval Administration and Warfare.
The Interest of America in International Conditions.
Naval Strategy.
The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American
Independence.
The Harvest Within.
Rear Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, U.S.N.
 MAHAN ON NAVAL WARFARE

SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF REAR

ADMIRAL ALFRED T. MAHAN

EDITED BY
ALLAN WESTCOTT, Ph.D.
INSTRUCTOR, UNITED STATES NAVAL ACADEMY

WITH MAPS AND DIAGRAMS

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1918
Copyright, 1890, 1892, 1897, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1905, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911,
By A. T. Mahan.

Copyright, 1918,
By Ellen Lyle Mahan.
All rights reserved
 ALFRED THAYER MAHAN

In his volume of reminiscences, “From Sail to Steam,” Rear Admiral

Mahan gives us his father’s opinion and his own later judgment
regarding his choice of the navy as a life work. “My father told me he
thought me less fit for a military than for a civil profession, having
watched me carefully. I think myself now that he was right; for
though I have no cause to complain of unsuccess, I believe I should
have done better elsewhere.”[1]
The father, Dennis Hart Mahan, was a graduate of West Point, in
later life a distinguished professor of engineering at the Military
Academy, and thus well qualified to weigh his son’s character and the
requirements of a military career. The verdict of both father and son,
moreover, may appear borne out by the fact that, while the name of
Mahan is more widely known to-day than that of any other American
naval officer, his fame rests, not on his achievements as a ship or
fleet commander, but as a great naval historian and student of naval
warfare.
Whatever the apparent wisdom of the choice at the time, it was in
the event fortunate both for himself and for the naval profession. His
long and varied service as an officer afloat and ashore gave him an
invaluable background for the study of naval history and
international affairs. On the other hand, his writings have brought
home to every maritime nation the importance of sea power, and
have stimulated in his own profession an interest in naval history
and naval science which has helped to keep it abreast the progress of
the age. This direct bearing of his professional experience upon his
writings adds significance to the details of his life in the navy.
Alfred Thayer Mahan entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis,
Maryland, September 30, 1856. Born at West Point, September 27,
1840, he was at the time of his entrance but three days above sixteen.
Like many another candidate for the navy, he solicited his own
appointment, obtaining it finally through the influence of Jefferson
Davis, who had studied under his father at West Point, and was at
this time Secretary of War. Having attended Columbia College for
two years preceding, the boy was permitted—by a concession of
which this is believed to be the only instance in the annals of the
Academy—to omit the first year’s work and enter with the
“Youngster” class, or “class of ’55 date,” according to the
nomenclature then used. Up to the year 1851 the midshipmen’s
course had consisted of five years at sea followed by one at the
Academy. Mahan entered in the autumn after the graduation of the
last class under the old scheme; and it was to the more mature, “sea-
going” character of former classes that he attributes the total absence
of hazing in his day. The practice was “not so much reprobated as
ignored.” It came in later, when the Academy was moved to Newport
during the Civil War, and “new ideals were evolved by a mass of
schoolboys, severed from those elder associates with the influence of
whom no professors nor officers can vie.”[2]
In the dusty files of Academy registers for that period one may
read the names of boys famous in later years. George Dewey was a
class ahead of Mahan; Schley and Sampson were respectively one
class and two classes behind. On graduation, Dewey stood fifth in a
class of fifteen; Mahan second in a class of twenty, with a record
apparently very close to the leader’s; and Sampson stood first. In his
last year the future historian was first in seamanship, physics,
political science, and moral science, third in naval tactics and
gunnery, fourth in “steam engine,” and fifth in astronomy and
navigation. The year before he had excelled in physics, rhetoric, and
Spanish. The details are noteworthy chiefly as they show the subjects
of the old-time curriculum, in which so-called practical branches
were less predominant than they are to-day. Of Mahan’s class, which
numbered forty-nine at the time of entrance, twenty-nine had
dropped back or resigned before the end of the course.
After a cruise in South American waters in the old frigate
Congress, Mahan at once received his commission as lieutenant,
August 31, 1861, and soon afterward an appointment as second in
command of the steam corvette Pocahontas, then in the Potomac
flotilla. It illustrates the rapid promotion of those war-time days that
each member of his class received similar advancement in the first
year of the war. In the Pocahontas he came under fire in the attack
on Port Royal, and afterward spent many weary months in blockade
duty, first in the Pocahontas off the south Atlantic coast, and later in
the Seminole off Sabine Pass, Texas. This latter station, Mahan
remarks, “was a jumping-off place, the end of nowhere.” “Day after
day we lay inactive—roll, roll.” The monotony was broken by a
pleasant eight months at the Naval Academy in Newport and a
“practice cruise” to England in the Macedonian; and in the last year
of the war he saw more varied service on the staff of Rear Admiral
Dahlgren, again on the Atlantic coast blockade.
Commissioned lieutenant commander in 1865, Mahan passed the
ensuing twenty years in the customary routine of alternate sea and
shore duty. In 1867–1869, a long cruise in the steam frigate Iroquois
to Japan, via Guadeloupe, Rio, Cape Town, Madagascar, Aden, and
Bombay, gave opportunity, unusual even in the navy, to see the
world, and brought him to Kobe in time to witness the opening of
new treaty ports and the last days of medieval Japan.
In 1885, when he had reached the rank of captain and was forty-
five years of age, he had yet had little opportunity to display the
distinctive talents which were to win him permanent fame. Partly,
perhaps, in consequence of a book by his pen entitled “The Gulf and
Inland Waters” and published two years before, but more likely as a
result of the shrewd estimate which naval officers form regarding
their fellows in the service, he was requested at this time to give a
series of lectures on naval history and tactics at the Naval War
College, then just established at Newport, Rhode Island. His
acceptance of this duty marks a turning point in his career.
The call reached him in the Wachusett off the west coast of South
America. It was nearly two years later, in August, 1886, when he took
up his residence at the college, succeeding Rear Admiral Luce as
president. A change of political administration in the meantime had
brought about a less favorable policy toward this new departure in
naval education, with the result that, to quote Mahan again, the
college “was reefed close down, looking out for squalls at any
moment from any quarter,” for the next four or five years. It bears
evidence to his tact and tenacity, and it was not the least of his
accomplishments for the navy, that he piloted the institution safely
through this crucial period, with scant appropriations or none at all,
in the face of a hostile Secretary of the Navy and a lukewarm service.
After seven years devoted chiefly to the War College, Mahan went
to sea for the last time as commander of the cruiser Chicago in the
European squadron. At this time “The Influence of Sea Power upon
History” had already been published, and the volume on the French
Revolution and Empire was nearly ready for the press. Upon
requesting postponement of sea duty until its completion, he was
informed by his superior in the Bureau of Navigation that it was “not
the business of a naval officer to write books.” The remark was
narrow, for the naval or any other profession would soon stagnate
without the stimulus of free discussion and study, which finds its
best outlet through the press; and it showed slight recognition of the
immense value to the navy and the nation of Mahan’s writings. Still it
was well for the author that he made this last cruise—his only
experience with a ship of the new fleet. If the importance of his first
book was not realized at home—and it is stated that he had great
difficulty in finding a publisher—it was fully recognized abroad. His
arrival in England was taken as an opportunity to pay a national
tribute of appreciation, of which the degrees conferred by both
Oxford and Cambridge were but one expression. There is a slightly
humorous aspect to the competition of American universities to
award similar honors upon his return.
Retiring in 1896 after forty years of service, he was recalled to act
as a member of the Naval War Board from May 9, 1898, until the
close of the War with Spain. His fellow members were Rear Admiral
Montgomery Sicard and Captain A. S. Crowninshield. This board
practically controlled the naval strategy of the war. Of its
deliberations and the relative influence of its members we have no
record; but the naval dispositions were effective, and, aside from the
location of the “Flying Squadron” at Hampton Roads as a concession
to the fears of coast cities, they are fully approved by Mahan in his
writings.
His choice a year later as one of the American delegates to the first
Peace Conference at The Hague was eminently fitting in view of his
thorough knowledge of international relations and the rules
governing naval warfare. In determining the attitude of the American
delegation, he took a strong stand against any agreement that would
contract our freedom of action with regard to the Monroe Doctrine,
and against immunity of private property at sea. The arguments
against this latter policy he afterward stated effectively in print[3] and
in a memorandum to the Navy Department. With the fulfillment of
this duty, his public services, aside from his work as a writer, came to
a close.
In the navy, as in other walks of life, an incompatibility is often
assumed—and often unjustly—between mastery of theory and skill in
practice, between the thoughtful student and the capable man of
action; and there is no denying that among his contemporaries this
assumption was current with regard to Mahan. While a conclusion is
difficult in such a matter, the case may well rest on the following
statement by a friend and fellow officer: “Duty, in whatever form it
came, was sacred. Invariably he gave to its performance the best that
was in him. That he distinguished himself pre-eminently on
shipboard cannot be claimed. Luck or circumstances denied him the
opportunity of doing things heroic, and his modesty those purely
spectacular. As a subordinate or as captain of a single ship, what he
did was well done. No further proof of his qualities in this respect is
needed than the fact that, at the outbreak of the Civil War, when
finishing his midshipman’s cruise, he was asked by a shipmate, an
officer who expected a command, to go with him as ‘first lieutenant.’
To his colleagues of the old navy this invitation was the highest form
of professional approval. The fates decreed that the wider field
should not be his wherein, as commander-in-chief of a fleet in war
time, he could have exhibited the mastery he surely possessed of that
art with which his name will forever be indissolubly linked.”[4]
From the same source may be taken a passage of more intimate
portrayal. “In person Mahan was tall, spare, erect, with blue eyes,
fair complexion, hair and beard originally sandy. He respected the
body as the temple of his soul, and he paid it the homage of
abstemious living, of outdoor games and abundant exercise. In
manner he was modest to excess, dignified, courteous. Reticent in
speech with people in general, those who enjoyed the rare privilege
of his intimacy knew him to be possessed of a keen sense of humor
and a fund of delightful anecdotes. To such friends he was a most
charming companion, so different from the grave, self-contained
philosopher he appeared to the rest and less favored of his
acquaintance. His home life was ideal.”
The lectures delivered at the Naval War College were the basis of
“The Influence of Sea Power upon History.” The author tells us how
the central idea came to him in the library of the English Club at
Lima, Peru, while reading Momsen’s “History of Rome.” “It suddenly
struck me ... how different things might have been could Hannibal
have invaded Italy by sea, as the Romans often had Africa, instead of
by the long land route.” A year later, when he returned to the United
States, the plan of the lectures was already formed: “I would
investigate coincidently the general history and the naval history of
the past two centuries with a view to demonstrating the influence of
the events of the one upon the other.” Written between May and
September of 1886, and delivered as lectures during the next four
years, the book was carefully revised before its publication in the
spring of 1890.
This book exerted at the time, and has continued to exert, a
widespread influence; and while its author’s reputation has been
increased by his later writings, it remains his best known and
greatest work. One reason for this is that it states his fundamental
teaching, and in a form easy to grasp. The preface and the first
chapter, which cover but eighty-nine pages, survey rapidly the rise
and decline of great sea powers and the national characteristics
affecting maritime development. The rest of the book, treating in
detail the period between 1660 and 1783, reinforces the conclusions
already stated.
Timeliness also contributed to its success. The book furnished
authoritative guidance in a period of transition and new departures
in international affairs. For nearly twenty years, under Bismarck,
Germany had been consolidating the empire established in 1871.
When William II ascended the throne in 1888, the ambitions of both
ruler and nation were already turned toward colonial expansion and
world power. A German Admiralty separate from the War Office was
established in 1889; Heligoland was secured a year later; the Kiel
Canal was nearing completion. In England, the Naval Defense Act of
1889 provided an increase of seventy ships during the next four
years. The rivals against whom she measured her naval strength were
still France and Russia. In the United States, Congress in 1890
authorized three battleships, the first vessels of this class to be added
to the American navy. During the following ten years the rivalry of
nations was chiefly in commercial and colonial aggrandisement,
marked by the final downfall of Spain’s colonial empire and a greatly
increased importance attached to control of the sea.
For the nations taking part in this expansion, Mahan was a kind of
gospel, furnishing texts for every discussion of naval policy. “After
his first book,” says a French writer, “and especially from 1895 on,
Mahan supplied the sound basis for all thought on naval and
maritime affairs; it was seen clearly that sea power was the principle
which, adhered to or departed from, would determine whether
empires should stand or fall.”[5]
To Great Britain in particular the book came as a timely analysis of
the means by which she had grown in wealth and dominion. This was
indeed no discovery. Nearly three centuries earlier Francis Bacon
had written, “To be master of the sea is an abridgment [epitome] of
monarchy ... he that commands the sea is at great liberty, and may
take as much and as little of the war as he will.”[6] Before and after
Bacon, England had acted upon this principle. But it remained for
Mahan to give the thesis full expression, to demonstrate it by
concrete illustration, and to apply it to modern conditions. “For the
first time,” writes the British naval historian, Sir Julian Corbett,
“naval history was placed on a philosophical basis. From the mass of
facts which had hitherto done duty for naval history, broad
generalizations were possible. The ears of statesmen and publicists
were opened, and a new note began to sound in world politics.
Regarded as a political pamphlet in the higher sense—for that is how
the famous book is best characterized—it has few equals in the
sudden and far-reaching effect it produced on political thought and
action.”[7]
Germany was not slow to take to heart this interpretation of the
vital dependence of world empire on sea power. The Kaiser read the
book, annotated its pages, and placed copies in every ship of the
German fleet.[8] It was soon translated not only into German but into
French, Japanese, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. This and later
works by the same author were perhaps most diligently studied by
officers of the Japanese navy, then rising rapidly to the strength
manifested in the Russian war. “As far as known to myself,” writes
Mahan, “more of my works have been done into Japanese than into
any other one tongue.”[9] The debt of all students of naval warfare is
well expressed by a noted Italian officer and writer,—“Mahan, who is
the great teacher of us all.”[10]
What has been said of “The Influence of Sea Power upon History”
applies in varying degrees to the sixteen historical works and
collections of essays which appeared in the ensuing twenty-five
years. While extending the field covered by the earlier book, they
maintained in general its high qualities. The most important of these,
“The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and
Empire,” covers the period from 1793 to 1812. This and the studies of
the American Revolution and the War of 1812 form with his first
book a continuous historical series from 1660 to 1815. The “Life of
Nelson” and “Life of Farragut” are standard professional biographies
of these two commanders, who, if we accept Mahan’s opinion, rank
respectively first and second among naval leaders. The best of his
thought on contemporary naval warfare is gathered up in his “Naval
Strategy,” published in 1911. Based on lectures first delivered in 1887,
and afterward frequently expanded and modified to meet changing
conditions, this book, while invaluable to the professional student,
lacks something of the continuity and clearness of structure of the
historical works.
The authoritativeness of these writings, it may be repeated, was
strengthened by the author’s technical equipment and long years of
practical experience. Moreover, as Mr. Roosevelt has said, “Mahan
was the only great naval writer who also possessed the mind of a
statesman of the first class.”[11] His concern always was not merely
with the facts of history but with the “logic of events” and their
lessons for to-day.
Following his retirement, Admiral Mahan wrote more frequently
and freely on problems of the present and future. Of the subjects
treated, some were distinctly professional—the speed and size of
battleships, the size, composition, and disposition of fleets,
modifications in the international codes affecting naval warfare,
naval events in contemporary wars. Others entered the wider field of
world politics, voicing the author’s sincere belief in American
colonial expansion and active participation in world affairs, in the
need of a navy sufficient to make our influence felt, in the limitations
as well as the usefulness of arbitration, in the continuance of force as
an important factor in international relations.
In such discussions, he wrote without the slightest trace of
jingoism or sensation mongering; and it would be a fanatic advocate
of immediate disarmament and universal arbitration who would
deny the steadying and beneficent effect of his opposition, with its
grip on realities and steadfast respect for truth. Whatever he wrote
was not only backed by firm conviction but inspired by the highest
ideals.
His style naturally varied somewhat with the audience and the
theme. His historical writings have been justly described as
burdened with qualifications, and marked by a laborious fullness of
statement, which strains the attention, while it adds weight and
dignity to the presentation. This in general is true of the histories;
but there are many passages in these where the subject inspires him
to genuine eloquence. In the “Life of Nelson” and “Types of Naval
Officers” there is little of the defect mentioned, and there are few
more entertaining volumes of naval reminiscence than “From Sail to
Steam.” “The besetting anxiety of my soul,” writes the author
himself, “was to be exact and lucid. I might not succeed, but my wish
was indisputable. To be accurate in facts and correct in conclusions,
both as to application and expression, dominated all other
motives.”[12] One might dispense with reams of “fine writing” for a
page of prose guided by these standards.
On December 1, 1914, Rear Admiral Mahan died suddenly of heart
failure. A month before, he had left his home at Quogue, Long Island,
and come to Washington to pursue investigations for a history of
American expansion and its bearing on sea power. His death,
occurring four months after the outbreak of hostilities in Europe,
was perhaps hastened by constant study of the diplomatic and
military events of the war, the approach of which he had clearly
foreseen, as well as America’s vital interest in the Allied cause. It was
unfortunate that his political and professional wisdom should have
been lost at that time.
His work, however, was largely accomplished. By his influence on
both public and professional opinion, by prevision and warm
advocacy, he had done much to further the execution of many
important naval and national policies. Among such may be
mentioned the peace-time concentration of fleets in preparation for
war, the abandonment of a strictly defensive naval policy, the
systematic study of professional problems, the strengthening of our
position in the Caribbean, the fortification of Panama. “His interest,”
writes Mr. Roosevelt, “was in the larger side of his subjects; he was
more concerned with the strategy than with the tactics of both naval
war and statesmanship.” In this larger field his writings will retain a
value little affected by the lapse of time.

Allan Westcott.

United States Naval Academy,

June, 1918.