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Enterprises

The Hinge of Possibility

… Men have hitherto made little use of their faculties, and none at all of art, in the investigation of things. And this assertion, if carefully attended to, is proved from the form of logical induction, for finding and examining the principle of the sciences; which form being absolutely defective and insufficient, is so far from perfecting nature, that it perverts and distorts her.
— Francis Bacon: The Advancement of Science, ch.2.

In August, 1871, George Henry Lewes wrote to Robertson Smith,1 congratulating him on his “very instructive and suggestive paper on Hegel’s criticism of Newton”2 and regretting not having read it before completing the chapter on Hegel in the fourth edition of his Biographical History of Philosophy. He went on:

My own mathematics being somewhat of a “vanishing quantity” I would not, without your aid, have seen his [Hegel’s] worthlessness in this direction; but what he says of Biology – a subject I do know – is sufficiently preposterous to warrant your sentence about the metaphysical standpoint from which subjects may be discussed without further study. In fact, the radical worthlessness of Hegelianism lies in the complete absence of any pathway from the abstract to the concrete so that verification is impossible in general, and it is only when by accident Hegel is caught venturing within scientific range that one can appreciate how absurd he is.

Lewes remains an intriguing, complex and, in many ways, underrated Victorian figure. Leslie Stephen, in his DNB entry on Lewes, somewhat uncharitably categorised him as a “miscellaneous writer” and it is true that the very diversity of his interests, as well as the prodigality of his literary output, prejudiced the quality of his work as a whole.3 There were more cogent reasons, however, for his failure to achieve wholehearted acceptance within the higher social, academic and intellectual ranks of Victorian England. Like Alexander Bain, Lewes was largely self-educated and lacked the accepted credentials of birth, education or background for ready admission to the London salons. His unorthodox liaison with Marian Evans (George Eliot) from 1854 served to raise further misgivings as to his character but it was the long-term consequences of that relationship, as George Eliot’s own fame grew steadily greater and outshone her partner’s less highly-regarded talents, which diminished Lewes’ literary and intellectual reputation. A fervent (though not uncritical) admirer of Comte, Lewes used his editorship of the Leader to foster a popular awareness of Comtean thought in England, maintaining throughout his life an unshakeable faith in the principles of scientific positivism and in their applicability to social and moral issues. Both he and George Eliot were responsible moreover for reawakening interest in the life and work of Spinoza, whose influence lay so powerfully behind the emergence of the higher criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4

Having relished Robertson Smith’s robust attack on Hegel’s criticisms of Newton and recognising the young Scot’s intellectual stature, Lewes grasped the chance of soliciting his advice on a variety of issues in mathematics and physics. The blunt approach was entirely characteristic of Lewes’ personality:

May I seize the opportunity of this letter to ask your aid on a speculative difficulty? According to the law of Attraction and the law of Repulsion these two forces increase & decrease together with the inverse squares. Therefore when the distance becomes insensible Attraction ought not suddenly to cease (as we are told) & give place to Repulsion, but to continue its triumphant suppression of Repulsion. If Attraction so overpowered Repulsion at one inch as to render it practically nil, how can it in turn be overpowered by Repulsion when the distance is insensible? We are told that bodies cannot come into contact because of the energy of Repulsion (a very metaphysical explanation) but this energy is overcome by Attraction at all sensible distances & by the law of Attraction the energy of it encreases [sic] as the distances diminishes. Surely we require either a new formula for the law of Attraction or the summary dismissal of Repulsion altogether – a dismissal I for one have no hesitation in urging tho’ I should like to know how its adherents explain the contradictions I have hinted at.5

Smith responded fully, initially flattered perhaps by the older man’s respect, and this elicited a second letter in September:

Many thanks for your interesting and instructive letter and the offer to give further illustration which I at once ruthlessly avail myself of.
It is a surprise, & gratification, to me to learn from you that physicists no longer accept the monster Repulsive Force – though surely in saying physicist you mean yourself and a few advanced thinkers known to you.6 Because as far as my imperfect knowledge goes physicists seem either to believe a Repulsive Force inherent in Ponderable Matter, or in Ether. The first glimpse of the kinetical theory banished all doubt from my own mind though as long ago as 1859 I vainly tried to reduce Attraction & Repulsion to one.7

Lewes goes on, however, to beg further elucidation, adding:

Be patient with me if I am talking nonsense! When a man ventures to deal with questions of which he has not thoroughly mastered the elements, he not only mistakes nonsense for insight, but has no standards to tell him how far he is departing from truth. I have no right to speak on mathematical questions – nor should I do so in public – but my mind desires clearness above all things & this Repulsion is a fog.8

The earliest extant letter from Smith to Lewes is dated 25 September, 1871, although this is clearly not the first. Very politely and patiently, Smith sets about explaining the apparent paradox in the phenomena of attraction and repulsion, while offering the caveat that:

I am not quite sure that I shall be at all able to answer your questions to your satisfaction – not because I acknowledge any real contradiction in the views held by sound mathematicians with regard to the ultimate constitution of matter, but because I suspect we are to some extent at cross purposes. The doctrine you reject is no doubt self-contradictory, but I do not think it is the doctrine of any mathematician. It is certainly not implied in the quotation from Newton which you sent me.9

It was an error, wrote Smith, to conceive of opposing forces, “attractive” and “repulsive”, existing side by side and each varying as the inverse square of the distance (of two objects from one another). That notion implied an arbitrary distinction between matter and force which could not be sustained: it was rather the effects of motion which were observed (as attraction or repulsion). Such (molecular) motion, so far as current physics could determine, was “of a vortex character” and, as Maxwell had proposed, might act according to “some higher law than the [inverse] square”:

I am not aware that our experiments are such as to make it possible to say what higher law would best suit. In these difficult matters our results are as yet qualitative rather than quantitative. The inverse 5th power is however a convenient power to assume: and so far as I can speak without having Maxwell’s work before me, I do not presume that he gave it out for anything more.10
I think you will allow that this process is sufficiently philosophical & does not go beyond the ground of fair hypothesis. I may add that there are known and unquestioning instances of central forces varying by quite other laws than that of the [inverse] square. Attractions according to higher powers occur in various electrical problems. All that is known is that, if the perpetual motion is impossible, all forces in nature are central according to some law… What the real process is which goes on when two bodies impinge we cannot know till we know what matter is.

And Smith concludes his letter with a detailed diagrammatic and verbal explanation of Newton’s mechanistic concept of repulsive forces.11 More than a year later, Lewes resumed the correspondence,12 asking whether Euler should be credited with introducing the symbol p for the relationship between a circle’s circumference and diameter;13 and inviting Smith’s opinion on Clifford’s discussion of non-Euclidean geometry at the 1872 B.A. meeting.14

In his nine-page response, WRS explained that he had had the misfortune “neither to hear Clifford’s lecture nor to see it reported”, having been in the Tyrol at the time of the B.A. meeting, but that his holiday companion there, Professor Klein,15 “is one of the most rising men in the School to which Clifford belongs and we had many discussions on the non-Euclidean Geometry on our way through the Alps”. While confessing to some personal scepticism,16 WRS proceeded to give Lewes his own interpretation of the concept – a remarkable feat at this early date:

Suppose that the universe in moving continuously from one to another point of (boundless or bounded) space also underwent continuous slight deformation in figure. Suppose further that these deformations were so connected with the position in space which each point of the material universe at each moment occupies that one mathematical form could be got to cover both the motion in space and the accompanying distortion – then the mathematical form would be in the form of non-Euclidean space.

Smith proceeds to explain, with brilliant lucidity, how the new concept (which he thinks somewhat fallacious) involves four or more dimensions and hence offers a more generalised conception of space than that of traditional Newtonian mathematics:

Thus it is quite easy to conceive a geometric formula which would convey the idea of a universe just like ours except that as time rolls on or as the universe moves through vacant space every thing gets deformed on a definite principle but so slowly that the change could only appear in millions of years… The fallacy is the usual one that mathematical proof is independent of actual intuition of the figure. Their ideas wd be inconceivable unless they built up figures to themselves in our space; but this done they throw away the scaffolding & boast of their formula not merely as a series of steps which it is, but as the exponent of a new space which it is not.

Once more, Lewes had cause to thank Robertson Smith for his rapid and “intensely helpful” answers, since these were of direct assistance in his current work.17 In his letters, Lewes makes no attempt to conceal his intense mistrust of unreconstructed metaphysics18 but gives no indication whatsoever that his own positivist views might trouble his Free Church correspondent. For his part, Smith continued to respond just as amicably, forwarding Lewes, amongst other material, a copy of the translation of his “Mill” paper from the Revue des Cours Scientifiques.19 Relations between the two men were sufficiently frank for Lewes to query whether the tone of the paper were not “somewhat needlessly contemptuous?” and he continues:

The neglect of Intuition – both by the a priori and the empirical schools – is worth emphasizing and the prejudice that a generalized intuition can have greater validity than a particular intuition runs through Philosophical speculation.20

Lewes then sent Smith, in manuscript form, a first instalment of his forthcoming chef d’oeuvre, Problems of Life and Mind, and in a detailed response WRS is generally approving:

I have perused your MS with much interest. Of course one cannot pretend to form a final or allsided judgment on an essay which is only a fragment of a larger whole. But my own scientific experience leads me to homologate very thoroughly your general position that the sciences differ only in method… The same thing holds good for those higher branches of philological, historical and other research, which are really scientific.21

What Smith found particularly appealing in Lewes’ approach was its sustained emphasis on adopting the “scientific method” for the elucidation of all problems, including those hitherto regarded as metaphysical. The first volume of Lewes’ work22 was published in 1873 and Smith received a complimentary pre-publication copy from the author, together with a request for details of any other “articles or memoirs” he (WRS) might have written. Lewes further solicited his advice on suitably illuminating texts that might aid him in studying the philosophy of mathematics:

Of course, if I were a trained mathematician I should be able to extricate the philosophy myself, as all thinking mathematicians do; but it would be a great kindness if men of your calibre would give us outsiders the benefit of your meditations.

The self-deprecating tone is characteristic of Lewes, his reference to “us outsiders” reflecting in particular a lifelong sense of inferiority exacerbated rather than mitigated by living in the shadow of George Eliot.23

In his letter of thanks to Lewes,24 Smith explains that he had not as yet read the entire volume:

I must therefore content myself with thanking you for the pleasure and instruction which I have derived from [reading] isolated developments in your system, without professing to have been able to make clear to my own mind how far I should be ready to accept your position as a whole … [and] tho’ at first sight I find myself very frequently ready to accept all you say, I am on the other hand pretty confident that I am also ready to accept as matters of scientific discussion many things which you are likely to call metempirical.
I believe I am as averse as any one to the sacrificio del intelletto. I am also persuaded that there is but one scientific method. I believe the point on which we should on further discussion be found to diverge most widely is the determination of the true state of the ultimate facts which science has to explain… In particular the question of the teloV must I imagine be that on which your main battle with usual metaphysic [sic] must fall to be fought.

With this qualified approbation, Smith’s correspondence with Lewes somewhat tantalizingly comes to a close: yet this limited exchange of letters constitutes the sole extant example of a continuing dialogue on such matters between WRS and a non-theological correspondent, and what emerges of exceptional interest is the extent to which each influenced the other.

Lewes’ ambitious enterprise had many flaws and failed to make a significant impact on late Victorian thinking for a number of reasons. Intellectually, Lewes fell some way short of his mentors, Auguste Comte and J.S. Mill. The time had passed, moreover, when it was possible for one man to write authoritatively on the whole sweep of human knowledge.25 Lewes had been honest to Smith in revealing the limitations of his own learning, yet made a strenuous effort to be polymathic in an age when specialisation had become an inevitable requirement in both scholarship and scientific research.26 Lewes was primarily a biologist by training but now sought, unsuccessfully, to achieve recognition as a pioneer in developing a psychology which would prove all-encompassing.27 In Problems of Life and Mind, Lewes undoubtedly over-reaches himself and he becomes a prey to prolixity and repetition – faults partly redeemed, however, by the clarity of his argument and his frequently strikingly epigrammatic style.28

Lewes’ main thesis is readily summed up. The “Scientific Method” is paramount; it offers the only effective pathway towards the development of human understanding of the cosmos; and it is as capable of solving metaphysical problems as it is of providing enlightenment in the physical sciences. Coming at the very time when Robertson Smith had been invited to write for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Lewes’ rallying-call to espouse the scientific method in all areas of investigation could scarcely have failed to exercise a compelling influence on the young Scotsman. The book that Smith received was shot through with echoes of the topics discussed in the correspondence between the two men – and Smith’s advice is always studiously followed by Lewes.29 WRS would neither have sought nor expected direct acknowledgement of his assistance; but he must have valued the approving references (in the main text as well as in footnotes) to his own paper on Mill.30

Lewes set out to demonstrate that all metaphysical questions could be brought within the ambit of scientific research; and his solution, as he points out, is “simple”. By coining the term “metempirical” to refer to “whatever lies beyond the limits of possible experience”,31 Lewes could then enunciate the principle that by rigorously subtracting whatever is metempirical – or unknowable through experience – the “known remainder” may then be studied scientifically:

The metempirical region is the void where Speculation roams unchecked; where Sense has no footing; where Experiment can exercise no control; and where calculation ends in Impossible quantities. In short, Physics and Metaphysics deal with things and their relations, as these are known to us, and as they are believed to exist in our universe; Metempirics sweeps out of this region in search of the otherness of things: seeking to behold things, not as they are in our universe – not as they are to us – it substitutes for the ideal constructions of Science the ideal constructions of Imagination.32

Unfortunately, Lewes fails adequately to address the question of whether anything worthy of scientific research is left when the metempirical is subtracted from the metaphysical; and this omission must have been apparent to all his readers, including Smith. Indeed, Lewes is frequently apt to forget his careful distinction between metaphysics in general and metaphysics without its metempirical elements, so that when he cautiously comes to treat of theology, it is dealt with simply as a component of metaphysics:

The continuation of the metaphysical Method is a serious evil, and is evitable [sic]. It sustains and fortifies those theological conceptions which would seem to be preposterous, were it not for the dialectical dexterity which presents them in a light assuredly no less rational than that in which many metaphysical conceptions are presented. It is this which causes the adhesion of so many eminent men of science to theological dogmas flagrantly at variance with their positive knowledge. Renouncing all hope of a rational solution, yet unable to release their minds from the pressure of certain problems, they fly to Faith for refuge.33

No matter how cursory his reading of Lewes’ book, Robertson Smith would certainly have discerned the clear challenge presented to himself in the text: indeed, many of Lewes’ observations are, in retrospect, chillingly prophetic of the tribulations which were to beset Smith within little more than a year’s time. On the one hand, Lewes painted an alluring prospect of gradual progress (through science) towards human enlightenment:

Science is penetrating everywhere, and slowly changing men’s conception of the world, and of man’s destiny. Doctrines which once were damnable are now fashionable, and heresies are appropriated to faith… The great desire of this age is for a Doctrine which may serve to condense our knowledge, guide our researches, and shape our lives, so that Conduct may really be the consequence of Belief.34

On the other hand, there was the ominous threat of reactionary obscurantism as implied by the precedents of history:

Philosophy… is a tradition of that theological spirit which, terrified at the free exercise of Doubt, yet conscious of the necessity of Doubt for the activity of Reason, excommunicated the Intellect as an heresiarch, after vilifying this life as a theatre for Satan… The tradition still lingers; and a vague horror hangs over all “prying into the mysteries of the universe”. It may be noticed at almost every scientific lecture not addressed to students.35

Unless Smith’s reading of Lewes’ book was cursory in the extreme (which would have been most uncharacteristic) he could hardly have accepted some of the author’s strictures on religious belief:

When we see men holding certain theological opinions which are flatly contradictory of their scientific opinions, we are not, on this ground alone, to conclude them to be hypocrites. Each position may be held in perfect sincerity, though not with perfect logicality. The one set of conceptions being in a great measure the expression of their emotions, Sentiment not Reason weaves the web of argument. The other set of conceptions being impersonal, objective, unconnected with emotions, Reason is left free to estimate the objective relations.36

Lewes is at his most impressive when thus giving free rein to his rhetorical gift; but he is also expert in restating the tenets of Comtean positivism in terms suited to the 1870s: his lucid analysis of hypotheses (“real”, “auxiliary” and “illegitimate”) is particularly shrewd, while his critiques of both Kant and Hegel would, for the most part, have received Smith’s full approbation. His limitations lay in his restricted grasp of mathematics and physics (which he acknowledged) and also of psychology (which he did not). Even more evident, from a modern standpoint, is Lewes’ pre-Darwinian concept of evolution, traceable to his profound dependence upon Herbert Spencer’s Lamarckianism. Thus, in his attempts to account for the origins of human intuition, Lewes persistently falls back upon the belief that intuition (and indeed language) is a learned skill, transmitted genetically to successive generations.37

What appears, at the outset of the correspondence, to be no more than a conventional appeal from one scholar to another for assistance on certain minor technical matters, proves to have been of far greater significance, at least from Lewes’ perspective. Smith’s modest and undogmatic suggestions were everywhere taken up by their recipient and were woven closely into the fabric of the text. Lewes’ influence on Robertson Smith cannot be demonstrated with the same exactitude; but the whole tenor of the book, with its constantly reiterated and, at times, emotionally eloquent advocacy of a scientific approach to all areas of research, so mirrored Smith’s personal cast of thought that it can hardly have failed to reinforce and confirm his resolve not to sacrifice the work of the intellect to the narrow interests of confessional orthodoxy.38

From George Lewes to George Eliot

Smith relished all exchanges with men who shared his wide interests, and Lewes was no exception.39 With the possible exception of his mother, no woman was ever accorded the privilege of intellectual intimacy with Smith and it is disappointing that the link established with Lewes failed to engender any encounter (epistolary or otherwise) between George Eliot and Robertson Smith. Some clues to the nature of the problem are to be found in one of the most self-revelatory of Smith’s letters, written from Aberdeen in February, 1874, to J.S. Black. It begins:

My Dear Black,

I am not in a very cheerful mood tonight, having made but little headway in my work for the last day or two. One begins to feel the heaviness of the last month of the Session already. So I have dropped work for half an hour & shall try to refresh myself by converse with you – I was very glad to get your letter – in fact I had for some time been marvelling what had become of you & was on the point of writing myself.40

In later years, particularly at Cambridge during vacations, there came to be many such cries of loneliness, whenever Smith lacked the stimulus of congenial company. In his letter, he goes on to express pleasure that Black has begun to learn Hebrew and then abruptly changes tack:

I am amused that you ask whether I see Emmie Yule. If you had asked whether I have seen her I should answer, “yes once in the street”. But I have not called tho’ she asked me to do so. I indeed have had no possibility of doing so. Tis a long way to the Gym: & my Saturdays are otherwise engaged for the most part.

If this warrants being construed as a spark of interest on Smith’s part in the opposite sex, the dramatic and wholly preoccupying events of the subsequent six years were effectively to extinguish it completely. As it was, Smith clearly gave a greater priority to keeping fit at the gym than to embarking on a relationship with Emmie Yule. Familiar though he was with the company of his sisters – Nellie had kept house for him in Edinburgh and accompanied him to Germany in 1872 – he seems generally to have treated women as a race apart and, in all his writings, only one passage touches at all upon the theme of romantic love between man and woman. That occurs in the article “Canticles”, written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica between 1874 and 1875,41 where Smith dismissed the traditional allegorical and spiritualising interpretation of the erotic poetry within the Song of Solomon and favoured instead Herder’s view of Canticles as “the transparently natural expression of innocent and tender love”.42 Indeed, the very detailed exegesis provided by Smith in his article, while not at all denying the “sensual language” of the text, places a greater emphasis on the pastoral and romantic elements.43 Smith proceeds to offer a detailed and vigorously personalised reading of the text, which he regarded as a rudimentary drama, rather than a composite of independent lyrics.44 Wooed by King Solomon, the fair Shulamite remains constant in her love for the “plebeian lover” from whom she is parted. The alternation of monologue and dialogue affords a vehicle for the heroine to recount the virtues of her country swain from northern Palestine and to contrast these with the material assets of her suitor, King Solomon, and with the corruption of the royal court. Structural and linguistic anomalies are plausibly attributed by Smith to corruptions in the text, while the one passage (vii, 1-9) which, in WRS’s eyes, “can hardly be freed from a charge of sensuality” is “so loosely attached as to imply interpolation”.45

Even allowing for the understandably inhibiting influence of contemporary attitudes, Robertson Smith’s article betrays a considerable degree of sexual repression and this may go some way to account for his habitual avoidance of female society. That being so, it may seem strange that Smith chose to tackle this particular Biblical text; but it is clear that he accepted the task primarily as an intellectual challenge and that his scholarly labours (as much as his regular attendance at the gym) were, superficially at least, an effective means of sublimating whatever sexual urges he experienced as a young adult.46 The article displays Smith at his most characteristic: while substantially agreeing with what he calls Ewald’s “admirable exposition”, Smith cites an impressive array of more than twenty-five patristic and modern commentators; and each is found wanting in one or other respect. Not only was Smith determined, as ever, to present “a new thing” to his readers, but he was intent to do so in as thorough and scholarly a fashion as possible. Canticles indeed provided an admirable opportunity to demonstrate the weaknesses of conventional hermeneutics. After observing at the outset that Canticles is an exceptional Old Testament book by virtue of its style and content, Smith establishes the thrust of the entire article in his subsequent assertion: “The power of tradition has been the second great source of confusion of opinion about the Song of Solomon”.47

As a tour de force of erudition, analytic perspicacity and psychological penetration, “Canticles” is entirely representative of the young Robertson Smith’s intellectual brilliance and power. Beyond this, however, the article itself is unique amongst Smith’s Encyclopaedia Britannica articles as a specimen of literary criticism worthy of being ranked alongside such contributions as those from Matthew Arnold, R.L. Stevenson, Swinburne or George Saintsbury. Who but Smith, for example, could so ably have explained the violent juxtapositions of place, time, reality and fantasy within the Song, in terms of a “fault of perspective” which is nevertheless completely natural in “such early art”?48 And who else, at this period, could so convincingly have written of the need for “a right appreciation of the psychology of the love which the poem celebrates”?49 And, whatever his natural inclinations towards the opposite sex, Smith’s translation of the Song’s concluding paean on love50 – for love is strong as death, its passion as inflexible as the grave, its fire a divine flame which no waters can quench or floods drown – hardly admits of any other view than that Robertson Smith in some sense acknowledged within himself the force of that emotion.

A “morally bad” book

The languid tone of Smith’s letter to Black continues for a few lines further (“I have as good as nothing to say about myself having been very stagnant under pressure of routine work”) before abruptly switching to a new and unexpected topic:

I have been reading Middlemarch.51 But it has not refreshed me. It is a bad book I think. In the first place it is bad art. For the characters all need commentary. No doubt this commentary is given with much psychological ability. But contrast the work of an artist like Shakespeare. His characters evince their reality and consistency of themselves.52 Anatomy may be all right in itself. But your anatomical novel is as abominable as painting of the school which is determined to show it knows all about bones and muscle.53

Smith’s antipathy towards novel-reading is well-documented54 and no doubt stemmed in large part from the literary prejudices both of his father and of Alexander Bain at Aberdeen University;55 even so, his off-the-cuff criticism of George Eliot’s Middlemarch is decidedly eccentric, especially in its inappropriate comparison with Shakespeare’s dramatic technique of revealing character (on stage) necessarily through speech and action. Smith’s denunciation of “your anatomical novel” seems to suggest a fundamental misconception of George Eliot’s narrative style – and perhaps also a degree of genuine apprehension at her penetrating psychological insight into the male character.

Smith had further animadversions to offer for Black’s edification:

Then the book is morally bad. I don’t say very bad. Still it is not well that an authoress should show so very hollow a world. I don’t object to the individual characters. But the whole lesson of the book is that the world is without any true moral unity & purpose. Any idealism there is is false. Only some of the secondary characters are really human in a good sense. The book smacks of J.S. Mill’s Autobiography. In short it makes me angry.

It is characteristic of Smith’s self-discipline that he should have persisted to the end with a book which made him so angry; but the strength of his negative reaction to Middlemarch can hardly be explained other than by inferring some personal hyper-sensitivity; and it seems plausible that George Eliot’s psychologically astute but decidedly caustic depiction of Edward Casaubon, with his obsessive but sterile accumulation of material towards the Key to all Mythologies and his failure to possess any real insight into the female mind, came too close for comfort to Robertson Smith’s own self-image.56 Though the charge of “futile scholarship”57 is one that was rarely laid against Smith,58 yet it is not inconceivable that, subconsciously at least, he was beginning to dread some such possibility in 1874, immured as he was within that outpost of extreme Presbyterian orthodoxy59 into which his juvenile convictions and aspirations had cast him – perhaps for a lifetime.60 At any rate, George Eliot’s satirical thrusts at the Victorian divorce between disinterested learning and social consciousness could hardly have failed to prove intensely irritating:

Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her [Dorothea Brooke] a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory? Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary – at least the alphabet and a few roots – in order to arrive at the core of things, and judge soundly on the social duties of the Christian.61

Evidently too, John Stuart Mill’s self-analysis was no less repugnant to Robertson Smith than George Eliot’s “anatomising”. Mill’s Autobiography had been published posthumously in 1873, the year of his death, and it would have been entirely contrary to Smith’s nature to have admitted to any such neurotic depression as Mill had suffered in his youth – far less to have subjected such personal distress to intense and open scrutiny of the kind displayed in the Autobiography:

I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but with no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else… These were the thoughts which mingled with the dry, heavy dejection of the melancholy year of 1826-7. During this time I was not incapable of my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically, by the mere force of habit, I had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental exercise, that I could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone out of it.62

Mill conceded that such feelings were neither “respectable” nor capable of eliciting sympathy; indeed they could only be acknowledged retrospectively from a secure position of immense prestige and in the glow of consummate achievement. Smith, at the age of 28, could confess to nothing beyond a temporary sense of ennui and, in his letter to Black, proceeds to a distinctly intemperate joint anathematisation of George Eliot and her consort:

And I am not sure that she [George Eliot] was not quite right to marry G.H. Lewes. I mean that that man is good enough for her, which is not the general notion. Curiously enough that is the impression which the book leaves – an impression purely about the writer. I have noticed the same in her other books. And it is the best proof that she is not a great artist. We are a ridiculous people. We have far too great a faculty for admiring our contemporaries. And we are all too restless & morbid and anatomical to be really aesthetic. I don’t know why everybody raved about Middlemarch. Or rather I am sure that what people admired was mainly certain very sloppy effects. Celia & her baby, Mrs Cadwallader, Brooke. They may say what they please but I maintain that George Elliot [sic] has a great deal about her that is parallel to Dickens – a sort of vulgarity (refined in her case) in her apprehension of character which catches the vulgar.

The perverse accusation of “refined” Dickensian vulgarity appears to be WRS’s coup de grâce so far as Middlemarch is concerned; and the distinctly ungracious disparagement of Lewes and his partner certainly exemplifies the kind of offensive prejudice which Smith was capable of articulating at times of stress throughout his life. It seems fair therefore to interpret this extraordinary letter to Black as the poignant reflection of a personal disaffection with his own situation in life at Aberdeen. After a final change of topic (to his efforts at translating Isaiah 5 into verse63) Smith concludes candidly:

Well! What a long letter! & what an ill-tempered one! But I feel better of writing & I hope to hear from you soon. I don’t think I shall go abroad in Spring but I hope to go abroad in Summer perhaps. I am thinking of doing a little collation of MSS. but hope also for some holiday. I wish I were on the Alps – with you & Gibson or you and Menzies.

Judaism, Smith and Daniel Deronda

George Eliot’s deep interest in all aspects of Judaism is well-known64 and offers a further illuminating point of comparison between herself and Robertson Smith. In addition to acquiring the elements of Hebrew, GE was widely read in Rabbinical and Cabbalistic literature, had visited (with Lewes) the Jewish quarter and synagogue in Frankfurt, had closely read Heinrich Graetz’ History of the Jews as it came out in German, and was intimate with Jewish scholars such as Emanuel Deutsch and David Mocatta.65 In her last novel, Daniel Deronda, she was thus able to provide a highly convincing picture of contemporary Jewish life in its London setting and in all its multiform character: Jewish writers praised the book’s verisimilitude while Catholic critics deplored its sympathetic bias. Robertson Smith, for all his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, possessed nothing remotely approaching George Eliot’s wide-ranging and comprehensive understanding of Judaism as it existed in the nineteenth century. Within Scotland, Jewish communities had only become significant in Edinburgh and Glasgow: neither Dundee nor Aberdeen is known to have possessed a settled Jewish population at all in the 1870s.66 All that Robertson Smith knew therefore of Jewish culture at that time came to him at second hand, refracted through the medium of some eighteen centuries of Christian apologetics.

Smith’s first close encounter with any representative of the Jewish race (and with live anti-Jewish prejudice) appears to have been in 1876, during his Continental trip with the artist George Reid.67 The account of this episode (written by WRS) is entertaining and revealing:

From Fuerth we had the company of a young Jewish Rabbi engrossed in a Hebrew essay on the Radiation of light and heat in the current number of a popular Jewish magazine. The Hebrew was very clever but the science was doubtful and somewhat Tyndallic. The Rabbi was a nice fellow with metaphysical tastes and a great regard for Kant and Geiger (the philosopher, not R. Abraham).68

They are joined in the railway carriage by a “prim, broad-faced, bucolic-looking young Prediger” with his newly-wedded wife with whom he is so affectionately engrossed that Reid is embarrassed. The Prediger demands that the carriage windows be kept shut, which annoys WRS and simultaneously makes the Rabbi feel unwell:

The other very coldly replied that in that case we must change our carriage as fresh air made him ill. Of course W.R.S. was indignant and at once let down the sash. The Saxon rose in fierce wrath, gesticulating and claiming to have his rights in his own country. W.R.S. stuck to the window strap and cited the Reglement. The train got up to full speed and rocked violently while the Prediger, steadying himself with one hand, stood in the middle of the carriage and declaimed against us in his “Kazel-ton”, declaring that this was the fruit of the unrighteous emancipation of the Jews.69

Smith is characteristically ironic about the young Rabbi’s reading matter but is implicitly critical of the German preacher’s anti-Semitism – even though that is only a secondary element in his indignation. Prediger and Rabbi alike are presented as little more than fairly ridiculous specimens of an alien culture and, while Smith always showed, in his later years at Cambridge, a cultivated respect for Jewish colleagues, he plainly felt a greater spontaneous sympathy for those Arabic Semites whom he encountered.70

It was inevitable that Smith should have shared the contemporary Christian view of Judaism as an outworn creed to which its adherents clung, with a fiercely perverse intransigence, in the face of that unimpeachable revelation given through Christ by God for all humanity.71 We have no means of knowing whether WRS ever read Daniel Deronda;72 had he done so, it is unlikely that he would have consciously reciprocated the humanist views expressed by George Eliot in her final novel, given his deep-rooted conviction that the Christian revelation had been the true and perfect culmination of the long process of divine education recorded within the Hebrew Bible.73 Yet the differences between Robertson Smith and George Eliot are much less extreme than might appear at first glance. Both, above all, sought an escape from the stifling narrowness of religious dogmatism and both were zealots in their respective causes.

Over the past century, Daniel Deronda has proved a rich mine for interpretative speculation of the most diverse kind. Smith’s amateur prejudice against Middlemarch may readily be excused, given for example the misconceived criticisms of Daniel Deronda by F.R. Leavis, which established a normative view of the novel for a generation and more: that it was a book of two parts and that the “bad part” (all that dealt with Judaism) could only be heroically amputated74 if George Eliot’s reputation were to be saved. Even E.S. Shaffer, in what is possibly the finest analysis of the links between Victorian secular literature and biblical criticism,75 seems over-concerned to establish the book’s central theme as a Feuerbachian preoccupation with the ultimate identification of religion and sexual pathology.76

To challenge this view is not to deny the important presence of such elements within Daniel Deronda; rather, it is to question whether Schaffer’s analysis achieves that highest level of inductive “generality” which Lewes (following J.S. Mill) argued for in Problems of Life and Mind. On the other hand, George Eliot’s recurring allusions to chance or indeterminacy, which (when noticed at all by critics) have been regarded simply as one amongst many of the novel’s leitmotivs, do warrant being identified as the major unifying theme of the whole book, linking both “Jewish” and “English” components. Just as marriage – and indeed life itself – is a lottery,77 or a game of chance, so (at a more general level) the most improbable events, provided they are possible, not only may occur but will inevitably do so at some point. Hence the long concatenation of seemingly improbable encounters and outcomes in Daniel Deronda, against which the book’s critics protested strenuously, is central to George Eliot’s thesis: that our lives are ruled by the laws of probability – or (more accurately) by the laws of indeterminacy; that we must lay ourselves open to the operation of such chance factors, recognising and accepting them as such; and that these laws not only act occasionally to our detriment but may constitute the springs of unique and world-shaking events.78

This theme underpins the entire action of the book,79 yet is seldom if ever explicitly discussed in the text; instead, it is repeatedly signalled in the chapter epigraphs – notably that of chapter 41, where George Eliot quotes Aristotle’s Poetics:

This, too, is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: “It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen”.80

Motifs of time and measurement abound. The (self-written) epigraph of the opening chapter notes how “Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit …” and goes on to discuss the relativity of time.81 There is a precise demarcation of time throughout the novel but this only serves to emphasise the meaninglessness, sub specie aeternitatis, of absolute time. Events occur within a strictly defined temporal framework, yet transcend those limits through their links with past, present and future:

The world grows, and its frame is knit together by the growing soul; dim, dim at first, then clearer and more clear, the consciousness discerns remote stirrings. As thoughts move within us darkly, and shake us before they are fully discerned – so events – so beings: they are knit with us in the growth of the world. You have risen within me like a thought not fully spelled: my soul is shaken before the words are all there. The rest will come – it will come.82

These are the words of the latter-day Jewish mystic, Mordecai, to Deronda, during the pivotal episode of the book – chapter 40 – when Daniel, sculling down the Thames towards Blackfriars Bridge in the gathering dusk, catches sight of the other’s face – “a well-remembered face looking towards him from the parapet of the Bridge”.83 The growing relationship between the two men – against all the odds, as it appears – forms the central theme of the so-called “Jewish” plot, but is wholly constructed within the novel’s over-arching context of causal indeterminacy. Nothing could be conceived more unlikely than that a young English gentleman of leisure should meet up with, and be attracted to, an impoverished and consumptive London Jew; nor that the visionary’s seemingly equivocal dialectic should come to possess Deronda, heart and soul; nor that he should ultimately embrace his dying friend’s dream of recovering Jewish nationhood:

Let the torch of visible community be lit! let the reason of Israel disclose itself in a great outward deed, and let there be another great migration, another choosing of Israel to be a nationality whose members may still stretch to the ends of the earth, even as the sons of England and Germany, whom enterprise carries afar, but who have a national hearth and a tribunal of national opinion.84

The year 1874 had seen the admission of the first Jew, Saul Isaac, to the Conservative benches of the House of Commons under the new Disraeli administration, though Jewish political emancipation dates from 1858, when Lionel Rothschild had, after much wrangling, been enabled to take his seat as a Liberal MP.85 The question of Jewish rights was therefore much in the air and the idea of a Jewish nation state in Palestine was already being actively discussed. In the celebrated “Hand and Banner” chapter of Daniel Deronda,86 the whole issue is debated at considerable length, the arguments for gradual cultural assimilation of the race (through baptism and intermarriage) being set out in detail by Mordecai’s more pragmatic friends, Pash and Gideon,87 whose rationalistic but often self-contradictory views are set in strong contrast to their compatriot’s steadfast and uncompromising prophetic strain, uttered in “a moment of spiritual fulness”, in which he attacks the others’ betrayal of their heritage with withering irony:

… let [the Jew] laugh that his nation is degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of his law which carried within its frame the breath of social justice, of charity, and of household sanctities – let him hold the energy of the prophets, the patient care of the Masters, the fortitude of martyred generations, as mere stuff for a professorship. The business of the Jew in all things is to be even as the rich Gentile.88

Mordecai’s hope is for a re-unified Israel, not by miracle, but through a renewed sense of purpose and personal self-sacrifice:

… the soul of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West – which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories.89

It would be foolhardy to speculate how Robertson Smith might have assessed George Eliot’s attempt to convey the passionate affirmations and reprobations of Hebraic prophecy, yet some of his own writing – not least in the concluding words of The Prophets of Israel – rings with the same highly-wrought and fervent tone that George Eliot sought to capture:

It is no mere religion of legal obedience that these words [Micah 6:2ff.] proclaim. Jehovah requires of man not only to do but to love mercy. A heart that delights in acts of piety and loving-kindness, the humility that walks in lowly communion with God,—these are the things in which Jehovah takes pleasure … Thus in the deepest darkness of that age of declension which sealed the fate of ancient Israel, when the true prophet could no longer see any other end to the degenerate nation than a consuming judgment that should leave the land of Canaan a desolation and its inhabitants a hissing and a reproach among the nations … the voice of spiritual faith rises high above all the limits of the dispensation that was to pass away, and sets forth the sum of true religion in words that can never die. The state of Israel perished; the kingdom of Judah and all the hopes that had been built upon it crumbled to the dust; but the word of the God of Israel endureth for ever.90

In the very last of her essays, George Eliot made explicit what she had conveyed to her novel-reading public with greater delicacy and circumspection. “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”,91 is a ringing plea for the recognition of “likeness amidst diversity”;92 for an end to that cruel prejudice and “wolfish hypocrisy”93 which has characterised Christian attitudes towards the Jews over the centuries; and for an attempt to perceive our mutual failings and strengths as elements of a common humanity:

And the just sympathy and admiration which we give to the ancestors who resisted the oppressive acts of our native kings, and by resisting rescued or won for us the best part of our civil and religious liberties—is it justly to be withheld from those brave and steadfast men of Jewish race who fought and died, or strove by wise administration to resist, the oppression and corrupting influences of foreign tyrants, and by resisting rescued the nationality which was the very hearth of our own religion? At any rate, seeing that the Jews were more specifically educated into a sense of their supreme moral value, the chief matter of surprise is that any other nation is found to rival them in this form of self-confidence.94

George Eliot’s words are cruelly denunciatory – “All this to avenge the Saviour of mankind, or else to avenge a Master whose servants showed such beneficent effects of His teaching”95 – but her impassioned affirmation of liberty of thought is no different in essence from that of Robertson Smith’s.96 Both saw cultural development as an educative process capable of taking a diversity of forms;97 a process moreover that was fundamental for personal and national growth. With Lewes’ death in 1878 and the close of her own life imminent, George Eliot’s education was complete; that of Robertson Smith had yet far to go. Writing, in “The modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” of the improbable yet conceivable re-establishment of Jewish nationhood, George Eliot spoke of “the hinge of possibility”.98 For Smith, that hinge was to manifest itself – improbably and explosively – in the momentous events of 1876-1881: his arraignment, trial, dismissal from his professorial post and initiation into a new, wider life beyond the Free Church of Scotland. Alluding to J.S. Mill, George Eliot drew to the close of her essay with the comment:

A modern book on Liberty has maintained that from the freedom of individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world may be enriched.99

And, speaking of the Jews, she writes of those who have inherited “a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a new beneficent individuality …”.100 For any man to deny the potential of such latent forces is, she urges, to teach “a blinding superstition—the superstition that a theory of human wellbeing can be constructed in disregard of the influences which have made us human”.101