1 D400; also in The Letters of George Henry Lewes (ed. Baker, 1995) vol. ii, pp.166f.
2 Cf. above, ch.iii.
3 In addition to his scientific and philosophical writings, George Henry Lewes (1817-78) was an early drama critic, wrote several undistinguished novels, founded and contributed voluminously to his weekly newspaper, the Leader, edited the radical Fortnightly Review during its initial year (1865-6) and wrote a highly successful Life of Goethe. See Ashton (1992) for a well-argued appraisal of Lewes’ many talents and Dale (1989) for a searching critique of Lewes’ place at the interface of early Victorian science and culture; and also Tjoa (1977) for a succinct, useful biography. More equitably than Leslie Stephen, Tjoa rates Lewes as “among the better practitioners of Victorian higher journalism” - and (p.135) as a critic second only to Matthew Arnold.
4 Cf. Cameron (1989) ch.i, for a comprehensive account (by an essentially fundamentalist writer) of Spinoza’s influence on the emergence of the higher criticism in England.
5 D400; and Baker (1995) p.167. Lewes seems to have gained an introduction to Smith through his friendship with J. F. McLennan, whom Smith had met at the Edinburgh Evening Club and who first stimulated Smith’s interest in anthropology. In a letter to Smith on 21.8.1871 (D451), McLennan writes: “Many thanks for your card to Lewes which he appreciates. I have a note from him today in which he says, ‘I was very pleased to be put in communication with Robertson Smith’ ".
6 Lewes’ ideas about attraction and repulsion were in fact fairly outmoded, being constructs of classical Newtonian physics and deriving mainly from Descartes and the school of Pierre de Laplace (1749-1827). See Maxwell’s Matter and Motion (1991) e.g. pp.2f. ; 41f.
7 D401; Baker (1995) pp.169f.
8 Ib. In Baker’s edition of Lewes’ letters, however, a complete page from the CUL Add. Ms D401 has inadvertently been omitted.
9 WRS to GHL, 25.9.71 (Eliot Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale). Lewes had written: “Or as Newton puts it: ‘As in algebra where affirmative quantities vanish & cease then negative ones begin so in mechanics where Attraction ceases there a Repulsive Virtue ought to succeed’ “.
10 Smith was entirely correct in this: Maxwell (whose seminal Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism was published two years later, in 1873) soon discarded the idea, which had never been intended as more than an ad hoc or “auxiliary” hypothesis.
11 Cf. Harman (1982, esp. pp.12-15) for a clear exposition of the notion of central forces and of the gradual transition during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from qualitative to “quantitative and mathematical treatment, a development that was fostered by improvements in the precision of scientific instruments and the increasing professionalism of physics”. We owe the standardisation of scientific units to the work of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the 1870s.
12 D462. Lewes begins: “The readiness with which you settled my difficulty about Repulsion some time ago prompts me again to trespass on your time by an appeal to your store of mathematical knowledge”.
13 In his reply dated December 19, 1872 (Eliot Collection, Beinecke Library) Smith explained that p was simply “the first letter of [the Greek] perpheria and so doubtless the first sign to suggest itself to anyone” – and hence was a “purely trivial” question. He goes on: “May I recommend to your notice De Morgan’s articles Incommensurable and Quadrature in the Penny Cyclopaedia”. In this, as in other matters, Lewes followed Smith’s advice.
14 Lewes found it hard to grasp Clifford’s concepts and wondered whether he was simply confusing the ideal nature of Euclidean geometry with the limitations of its practical application.
15 Smith had met the German mathematician and physicist, Christian Felix Klein (1822-88) in Bonn during each of his first three visits to Germany, in 1867, 1869 and 1871 (B&C p.115). They were by this time close friends. An intriguing comment in the theoretical section of the unattributed EB9 article “Knots” (vol.xiv, 1882, pp.127-29) indicates Smith’s hand: “Klein has proved the remarkable proposition that knots cannot exist in space of four dimensions”. Klein’s name is commemorated in a topological curiosity, the Kleinian “bottle”.
16 “The fact is that in this non-Euclidean geometry there is a good deal of juggling with words”.
17 D463. “In the work I am now engaged in [Problems of Life and Mind] I have to discuss among other psychological problems the empirical origin of Mathematics and I have argued that all mathematical proof depends on intuition of figures and ratios B assuredly not innate, nor connate, but evolved through experience. The new geometry seems to me analogous to many other metaphysical figments B the mind impatient of what is asks what would be were what is wholly other that it is. ‘Suppose that I were you & suppose that you were he, suppose that both were somebody else, I wonder what we should be’. This is the song of the metaphysician”.
18 Cf. Dale (1989) p.61: “[Mill] this most determined of anti-metaphysicians steadily drew Lewes away from his youthful flirtation with the Germans ”.
19 Cf. B&C, p.117.
20 D464.
21 Ib.
22 The whole enterprise had the general title, Problems of Life and Mind. What Smith received was volume one of the First Series: The Foundations of a Creed (1873). The Second Series (The Physical Basis of Mind) was published in 1877. The Third Series was issued in 1879, after Lewes’ death, and was seen through the press by George Eliot. Each Series was to comprise two volumes but the third (The Study of Psychology) was deprived of its second volume because of George Eliot’s death in 1880.
23 Cf. Problems of Life and Mind (1873) p.174 for a good instance of this (with which Smith himself might have concurred): “The great thinker is the secretary of his age. If his quick-glancing mind outrun the swiftest of his contemporaries, he will not be listened to: the prophet must find disciples. If he outrun the majority of his contemporaries, he will have but a small circle of influence, for all originality is estrangement”.
24 Dated January 7, 1874 (Eliot Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale).
25 Lewes’ irritation at the increasing compartmentalisation of scholarship and research is well illustrated in his comment (Problems I,i, p.85): “The same spirit which manages the affairs of the Nation too much through Parish Boards has parcelled out the Universe into ‘Sections’ of a British Association, and from those sections has carefully excluded not only Psychology, Ethics, Metaphysics, and Religion, but anything wearing the aspect of a general doctrine embracing all research”.
26 Postlethwaite (1984), in her useful account of the Lewes/Eliot/Spencer intellectual circle, is over-generous in describing Lewes as a “true Victorian polymath”.
27 His failure in this regard is betokened, for example, by the terse reference in Boring (1950, p.244): “[Lewes’] influence, however, has not been nearly so great as Herbert Spencer’s and we can afford to pass him by”. For Lewes, psychology was a “science of knowing” and Problems of Life and Mind is essentially an epistemological and methodological treatise.
28 Good examples, drawn from the introductory pages which Smith is likely to have perused most closely, are: “The pathway of Progress will still, as of old, bear traces of martyrdom; but the advance is inevitable” (p.4); “Fictions are potent; and all are welcome if they can justify themselves by bringing speculative insight within the range of positive vision” (p.47).
29 For example, Lewes writes on p (as a transcendental number having an “unexplored remainder”) without reference to its originator (pp.40f.); follows Smith in describing non-Euclidean geometry as “ingenious” (p.59) while doubting its validity (p.394); and qualifies his earlier allusions to the infinitesimal calculus (p.303): all in conformity with Smith’s advice.
30 Lewes (1873) p.425n; 426.
31 Ib., p.17.
32 Ib., p.18. The promiscuous capitalisation is a feature of Lewes’ style and already slightly out-dated for the period.
33 Ib., p.10. Lewes goes on (p.11) to cite Faraday as the classic example of a deeply religious scientist who “when asked by a friend how he could believe the astounding propositions current in the religious sect [Sandemanian] to which he belonged, replied, ‘I prostrate my reason in this matter; for if I applied the same process of reasoning which I use in matters of science I should be an unbeliever.’”
34 Ib., pp.1f.
35 Ib., p.22.
36 Ib., p.462.
37 E.g. ib., p.245: “[Mr Spencer shows] that the constant experiences of the race become organised tendencies which are transmitted as a heritage” (Lewes’ emphasis). It was this argument which enabled Lewes to come to terms with Smith’s seemingly a priori view of mathematical intuition as presented in his “Mill” paper – arguing (e.g. p.445): “A mathematical truth does depend on the intuition of the example intuited. Thus 2+2=4, is not proved by repeating the formula, or varying the numerical relations”. Smith had persuaded Lewes of the importance of intuition (however explained) in his letter of 30.12.72.
38 The penultimate paragraph of Lewes’ first volume of Problems of Life and Mind, after all, contained a statement of what was to become Smith’s golden rule: “To submit our conclusions to the rigorous test of evidence, and to seek the truth irrespective of our preconceptions, is the rarest and most difficult of intellectual virtues”.
39 Lewes’ letters to Smith tend to become gratuitously over-effusive, however, and this may well have grown to be a source of annoyance. Cf. D463 and Baker (1995) p.184: “Every line I see of yours makes me wish more for your personal acquaintance B I feel you would be such a storehouse for me! But alas! there are dimensions of space, real and not imaginary, between this & Aberdeen”.
40 A25.
41 EB9 vol.v (1876) pp.32-36.
42 Ib., p.34. In OTJC (p.5) Smith observes that allegorical (“typical or figurative”) interpretation is “no longer admitted in the Protestant Churches (unless perhaps for the Song of Solomon)”. In “Canticles”, he notes that there remains “a powerful prejudice in favour of an allegorical interpretation [of this book]”; and he continues: “ it would be false art in the allegorist to hide away his sacred thoughts behind a screen of sensuous and erotic imagery, so complete and beautiful in itself as to give no suggestion that it is only the vehicle of a deeper sense”.
43 WRS (EB9 vol.v., p.33) criticises J.D. Michaelis for lacking “delicacy of taste” in interpreting Canticles as a description of conjugal [sexual] pleasures: “The hints which Michaelis offered for the interpretation of the book on this principle showed a singular want of delicacy ”. Smith was well aware of the sensual element but preferred to treat the lyrics as romantic pastorals. This tension is evident throughout the article.
44 At most, Smith argues, it may be regarded as “amoeban lyric”: by which he means “alternately answering” (OED) or antiphonal. He acknowledges that there is no true action in the drama but maintains, by no means unconvincingly, that its motive force is the heroine’s “own inflexible fidelity and virtue” and the demonstration of “all that stubborn force of will which is characteristic of the Hebrews” (p.35). The debate on whether Canticles is a composite of independent lyrics or possesses an essential unity continues to the present day: cf. Falk (1982) and Landy (1983) for representatives of the opposing views.
45 Ib., p.36: “Thus it is not inconceivable that the sensual passage in chapter vii., which, if genuine, can only be an interlude of some unexplained kind, is nothing more than the insertion of an early reader à propos of the mention of the dance of Mahanaim”.
46 It would be wholly unjust to Smith, however, to ignore the evidence that he had been genuinely and deeply moved by the lyrical beauty of the Song – e.g. (p.33): “If the songs of Canticles were allowed to speak for themselves, they would need no theory to explain their meaning, no apology to justify their morality, no fiction of a typical or didactic purpose to commend them as pure, lovely and worthy of a place in a holy book”.
47 The first “source of confusion” regarding Canticles was, in Smith’s view, its uniqueness within the canon, together with its lexical peculiarities.
48 Ib., p. 35.
49 Ib.
50 Ib., p34 (on viii.6).
51 The novel came out in parts (in Blackwood’s) between December, 1871 and 1872. Subsequent editions of the complete book were swiftly issued in 1872, 1873 and 1874.
52 Unfortunately for Smith’s argument, George Eliot is known to have modelled her style consciously on Shakespeare’s: cf. (for example) Knoepflmacher (1965) p.119.
53 Smith’s views on art seem to have been conservative: clearly he did not approve of mid-nineteenth century réalisme - pace John Morrison (in Essays, pp.50-59) who argues that Smith’s friendship with a number of leading Scottish artists of the time (and George Reid in particular) put him in touch with “the cutting edge of British painting in the 1870s”.
54 Cf. B&C, p.67: “He seems to have shared the Rev. Mr Nicoll’s recorded aversion from fiction, and to have indulged himself with a novel once a year (in the Christmas holidays) as a sort of duty”. If the reference here is to the father of William Robertson Nicoll, it seems contradicted by Darlow (1925) in his not wholly reliable biography of the latter.
55 Cf. Bain, pp.75f.: “I still persisted in the same kind of analytic writing, and turned it upon Shakespeare – on whom I spent a great deal of study, and who helped me largely to psychological results, both intellectual and emotional. To reach the secret of his genius was a long-standing aim; he being, to my mind, the ne plus ultra of intellectual originality”.
56 The character of Casaubon in Middlemarch is in part based on Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and one of the contributors to Essays and Reviews. Pattison wrote a life of the prolific 17th century classical scholar, Isaac Casaubon, but (like the fictional Casaubon) spent thirty years abortively amassing material for a biography of the Renaissance scholar, J.J. Scaliger. His marriage to Frances Emily Strong (later Emilia, Lady Dilke) in 1862 was like that of Dorothea Brooke to Mr Casaubon destined to founder on temperamental differences and sexual incompatibility. Both Pattison and his wife made significant contributions to EB9. Cf. Green (1985) for an illuminating account of Pattison’s sexuality.
57 This is the charge levelled in Middlemarch against Casaubon by the young Doctor Lydgate, whose enthusiasm for scientific progress in the interests of society is unmistakably Tyndallic in character. The novel pre-dated Tyndall’s 1874 Belfast address but George Eliot and Lewes were both ardent readers of Tyndall’s work and Middlemarch is, in one aspect, a sincere Tyndallic ode to human progress and enlightenment. Cf. Carroll (1992) esp. pp.238f. for a perceptive analysis of the charcters of Lydgate and Casaubon, and their common search for “origins”.
58 Except of course by the anonymous author (“Scotulus”) of the 1894 Free Review article lampooning Smith’s “incessancy of detail work” just after his death.
59 Tulloch’s paper in the Contemporary Review some two years later gives a graphically grim (if biased) picture of a Free Church “not only orthodox but hyper-orthodox” defending the “pure confessional faith of Scotland against the miserable residuum of Moderates in the Established Church” (ContempRev, vol.xxix, 1876-7, p.538).
60 Cf. the interesting discussion in Morrison’s paper, “William Robertson Smith and the Academy of Old Deer” (in Essays, pp.50-59). Morrison challenges the implication in B&C (p.137) that Smith found Aberdeen less stimulating than Edinburgh. There can be little doubt, however, that the provincial social milieu (which Smith certainly enjoyed) did not prove adequately fulfilling in intellectual terms.
61 Middlemarch (Eliot, 1901) ch.7, p.45. James Begg, soon to become Smith’s arch-enemy and already leader of the reactionary “Beggite” faction within the Free Church, had a redeeming concern for housing reform within the Scottish mining communities.
62 Mill (1924) pp.117f. Mill’s metaphorical description of himself during his breakdown is reminiscent of George Eliot’s picture of Casaubon’s soul “fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying” (Middlemarch p.203).
63 The examples he quotes to Black are less than successful, as he concedes – for example: “These that rise betimes and make strong drink their quest/ That linger in the twilight (oh for gloaming!), their blood aglow with wine/ With harp & lute; with tabret & pipe is their carouse/ But the work of Jhvh they do not do/ The deeds of his hands they have not seen ” [Is.5:11f.].
64 Cf. Baker (1975) and Irwin (1996) for annotated editions of George Eliot’s notebooks, with their voluminous references to Jewish history, literature and culture.
65 Cf. Irwin (1996) ppxxvii-xxxii.
66 The first Jewish community in Aberdeen is believed to have comprised Ashkenazi refugees from eastern Europe and to have arrived in 1892 (personal communication from L. Shrago).
67 Their joint holiday diary (illustrated by Reid) was privately published in the same year as Notes and Sketches of W. Robertson Smith and George Reid. Cf. the references to this journal in the papers by Stefan Reif and John Morrison (in Essays).
68 Notes and Sketches, p.22. Cf. B&C, p.176ff. for a summary of the journey.
69 Ib., p.23..
70 Cf. Reif (Essays, pp.210-223) for a fuller and well-balanced discussion of his relations with Jewish colleagues in later days, especially Solomon M. Schiller-Szinessy. On Smith’s relationships with the Arabs, cf. B&C, pp.333ff.
71 Cf. OTJC, p.315: “Christian theology is interested in the Law as a stage in the dispensation of God’s purpose of grace. As such it is acknowledged by our Lord, who, though He came to supersede the Law, did so only by filling it up, and supplied in actual substance the good things of which the Law presented only a shadow and unsubstantial form”.
72 It is known that Smith had read the earlier George Eliot novels, including Romola and Adam Bede; but if he did read Daniel Deronda at all, it is likely to have been in the 1880s.
73 Cf. OTJC, p.14: “The method of revelation was a method of education. God spoke to Israel as one speaks to tender weanlings (Isa. xxviii. 9), giving precept after precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little”.
74 Leavis (1962) p,137: “As for the bad part of Daniel Deronda, there is nothing to do but cut it away”. Extraordinarily, Leavis wanted to excise all the Jewish elements and to rename the remainder Gwendolen Harleth. Knoeplfmacher (1965), as a direct disciple of Leavis, rates the book as it stands “a magnificent failure” (p.119) and Deronda himself a “lamentable failure” (p.127).
75 ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem (1980).
76 E.g. ib., pp.256f: “Daniel Deronda explores to the full the Feuerbachian equation of theology and pathology, with all the tensions that implies sexuality is gradually transmuted into spiritual experience; but in fact the vehicle of spiritual enlightenment remains sexual throughout The sexual pathology of marriage and the sexual pathology of Christianity are both revealed through the medium of an intense liaison between a married woman and a young man she chooses to make her ‘confessor’, and together form the basis of a searching analysis of the valid emotional sources of religious experience from which doctrine arises”.
77 Daniel Deronda opens, of course, with an episode in a gambling casino, where Gwendolen Harleth’s mind is “occupied in gambling”. The associated elements of “pawning” and “redemption” also figure early in Book I of the novel; while Book III is ironically entitled “Maidens Choosing”.
78 George Eliot’s view of indeterminacy is that an event such as the coming of Christ, however improbable, is possible – though not, of course, as a supernatural event. Much of her thinking is strikingly similar to that of T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets. Smith, in OTJC (p.138) takes a different stance: “ it requires insight and faith to see the hand of God in the ordinary processes of history, whereas extraordinary coincidences between conduct and fortune are fitted to impress the dullest minds”.
79 Probability theory and the modern concept of statistical measurement were only emerging in Britain at this time (cf. Mackenzie,1981, pp.8f) having been developed on the Continent by (for example) Gauss and the Belgian mathematician L.A.J. Quetelet, who died in 1874. Maxwell introduced the notion of indeterminacy into his molecular theory of gases in the early 1870s. Cf. Cassirer (1956) for a masterly exposition of the essential difference between randomicity and indeterminism. Cf. also the remark by Tuke in EB9, vol.xiii (1880) p.96, s.v. “insanity”, for the prevailing attitude to statistical analysis: “In the study of insanity statistics are of only slight value from the scientific point of view, and are only valuable in its financial aspects”.
80 Daniel Deronda (1995) p.509.
81 Ib., p.7: “ and whether our prologue be on heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out”.
82 Ib., p.501.
83 Ib., p.492. George Eliot’s glowing depiction of this scene has all the visual qualities of a Whistler Nocturne and, while one of the most famous of the latter is that of a different London bridge (Old Battersea), she might well have seen that picture (itself an artistic bridge between American Luminism and European Impressionism) in London or Brighton in 1875.
84 Ib., p.536.
85 Cf. Alderman (1992) p.63.
86 Leavis (1962) p.99 stigmatised the chapter as “wastes of biblicality and fervent idealism”.
87 Daniel Deronda, ch.42, pp.517-539. Cf. p.527: “I don’t deny patriotism,” said Gideon “I’m a rational Jew myself. I stand by my people as a sort of family relations, and I am for keeping up our worship in a rational way. I don’t approve of our people getting baptised, because I don’t believe in a Jew’s conversion to the Gentile part of Christianity. And now we have political equality, there’s no excuse for a pretence of that sort. But I am all for getting rid of all our superstitions and exclusiveness. There’s no reason now why we shouldn’t melt gradually into the population we live among. That’s the order of the day in point of progress. I would as soon my children married Christians as Jews”.
88 Ib., p.529.
89 Ib., pp.532f.
90 P.Is, pp.372f.
91 In Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) pp.313-357.
92 Ib., p.313.
93 Ib., p.332.
94 Ib., pp.328f.
95 Ib., p.331.
96 George Eliot wrote, “I share the spirit of the Zealots”; and one can hardly deny a similar zealotry in Smith.
97 Cf. OTJC, quoted above (n.73); and Eliot (1879) p.324: “ a people educated a people taught by many concurrent influences ”. Smith’s view of this was, of course, supernaturalistic, George Eliot’s naturalistic.
98 Eliot (1876) p.354.
99 Ib., p.355. The “book” was of course Mill’s essay On Liberty, published in 1859.
100 Ib., p,356.
101 Ib., p.357.