Ideas For Compare Contrast Essays Conte Exotique Milli
Keena Wiegert
and he sees cities which he had never visited, and foresees events which are fated to take place in the future. It cannot be said that the story is a success. Its central idea is expressed in the following words:
There are many story-tellers with not a tithe of George Eliot's intellect and genius who could have told the story better. For the mysterious power of invading the personalities of others and reading their thoughts is made to come and go in regard to individuals for no other reason than that the working of the plot demands these vagaries. This is a very serious artistic infirmity.
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But it will be well to put the story in harness with some other productions of mine, and not send it forth in its dismal loneliness. There are many things in it which I would willingly say over again, and I shall never put in any other form. The question is not in the least one of money, but of care for the best effect of writing, which often depends on circumstances much as pictures depend on light and juxtaposition.
Tennyson's doubter finds faith in his uncertainty; Latimer finds that the light of certainty incapacitates him from living a life which must be based on trust, a life which must be spent in that opaque veil or web whose texture George Eliot chose to analyze in her more realistic novels.
I inclose proof of the Lifted Veil. It is a very striking story, full of thought and most beautifully written. I wish the theme had been a happier one, and I think you must have been worrying and disturbing yourself about something when you wrote. Still, others are not so fond of sweets as I am, and no judge can read the Lifted Veil without deep admiration and the feeling that it is the work of a great writer.
The Princess is enabled to experience exalted feelings because double consciousness operates within her in perfect accord with her natural and trained talent for acting. Latimer too was aware that his emotions were enacting a drama, but always under the deadening perception of his second consciousness so that they could never escape into artistic expression or decisive action.
In the Magazine we would not put any author's name, and it would be great fun to watch the speculation as to the author's life. The style would be to me easily recognisable but no one, especially of the puffing writing and publishing order, would suppose that we would throw away such an advantage as putting the magic words by George Eliot at the head of a series of papers. In the long run however ours is the wisest course, as nothing equals the excitement of uncertainty.
Your letter confirms my presupposition that you would not find it worth your while to compensate me for the renunciation of the unquestionable advantages my book would derive from being presented to the public in three volumes with all its freshness upon it.
It was an oversight of mine not to inform you that I do not intend to part with the copyright, but only with an edition. As, from the nature of your offer, I infer that you think my next book will be a speculation attended with risk, I prefer incurring that risk myself.
The enclosed cool note from George Eliot has given me a fit of disgust and I think I shall notice it distinctly when I get home, which I intend to do upon Tuesday. It is quite as well however, and above all things, except doing what we thought fair and kind, it was desirable that if the most popular author of the day left us we should be able to show that she had been treated with unexampled liberality. However I do feel savage and am half disposed to write a formal note enclosing one you wrote to me expressing our feelings about the matter.
Up in Edinburgh Blackwood's printing manager, George Simpson, was too much on the daily scene not to be confided in, and he surreptitiously forwarded the information to Langford. About George Eliot's acceptance of the 800, he wrote:
Not a single expression of gratitude or acknowledgment of Mr. B's handsome conduct. The result is that both Mr. John and Major B are utterly disgusted and I do think would now decline the new book if it were offered them. Mr. John has been most thoroughly hood-winked. His enthusiasm about GE was extraordinary, and his feeling of sympathy for his unfortunate position most heartfelt, but I must say the reaction is very great.
a temporary refroidissement between writer and publisher, which, I confess for my part, makes rather an interesting break in the applause on one side and acceptance of it on the other, which, however we may join in the applause, makes us after a while desire the interposition of some other human sentiment to vary the prevailing note.
I am sorry to see my suspicions confirmed by your note of yesterday. G.E. has sold herself to the highest bidder. I said very early that he [George Eliot] was an avaricious soul, but even with this failing if he had known what dealing with Gentlemen was I think he would have explained the matter to the Messrs. B. before accepting the offer of another party. I have no doubt the temper is that fallen angel C.D.
As the time for the publication of my next work is not very far removed, and as thorough frankness is the condition of satisfactoriness in all relations, I am induced to ask you whether you still wish to remain my publishers, or whether the removal of my incognito has caused a change in your views on that point.
I have never myself thought of putting an end to a connection which has hitherto not appeared inauspicious to either of us, and I have looked forward to your being my publishers as long as I produced books to be published; but various indications, which I may possibly have misinterpreted, have made me desire a clear understanding in the matter.
As to the withdrawal of the incognito, you know how much I have been opposed to it all along. It may prove a disadvantage and in the eyes of many it will, but my opinion of your genius and confidence in the truly good, honest, religious, and moral tone of all you have written or will write is such that I think you will overcome any possible detriment from the withdrawal of the mystery which has so far taken place.
Although he read her letter immediately upon receiving it in Edinburgh, John Blackwood deliberately held off responding until he had arrived at Arbury Hall, where he was a houseguest of the Newdegates. He had taken care to send her letter to the major, who was pleased with it on the whole but far more cautious than his brother, to whom he wrote at Arbury:
The dropping of the incognito is the most serious part of the business and will, I feel satisfied, affect the circulation in families of any future work. Then there is the danger of G.E. coming before the public in his own name from some crotchet or another. I really think we should have some understanding with Lewes about this. Altogether it is a tangled kind of business, and though I feel that we should continue to publish for her as long as we have confidence in her other writings, we shall always, I am afraid, have disagreeables attending it in some shape or another. I think too very strongly that we should not bind ourselves until we have seen the new work.
In this regard, too, Lucy is a suitable model for a uniquely female response to entrapment, as our epigraphs illustrate. Whether they feel veiled like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or masked like Denise Levertov, women writers describe their sensation of being inescapably removed from the source of their own authority, even as they are tempted to make a special gain out of that sense of loss. Paradoxically, by the middle of the nineteenth century, when women were widening their political, social, and educational spheres of influence and activity,2 women writers, in retreat from revolt, became concerned with the issue of internalization. Thus although these artists of the mid-century are caught between the twin distinctively female temptations of angelic submission and monstrous assertion, they place a very special emphasis on the problematic role of women in a maledominated culture. And since all are avid readers of Austen, Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and the Bronts, these women writers consciously participate in a female subculture that explains the intimate bonds we sense between George Eliot and Christina Rossetti in England, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Italy, and Emily Dickinson and Harriet Beecher Stowe in America, to name but a few of the most prominent.
Not only does this plea for the redemptive imagination comment directly upon a story about alienation from human fellowship and incomplete manhood, it also immediately signals that this tale will focus on Eliot's anxiety about the light and power she knows to be hers, although she is just a man in name.
The telepathy of Latimer and Eliot can be viewed in part, therefore, as an extension of the woman's traditional role in the home, where she is taught to develop her sensitivity to the unspoken needs and feelings of her family: surely the other side of self-sacrificing renunciation is this schizophrenic sense that one is haunted by alien but familiar voices making demands at odds with one's own interest. Similarly, the ability of Latimer and George Eliot to see into a dreadful future which they are then helpless to avoid corresponds to the feeling among women that they are trapped in stories, unable to evade plots created for them by alien, if not hostile, authors and authorities. Mute despite their extraordinary gifts, Latimer and George Eliot remind us of the powerlessness of, say, Cassandra, whose expressive exertions never alter the events of the past or the future and whose speech is therefore as ineffectual as silence.
Whether they embrace or reject the veil, these poets remind us that the angelic muse seems to be just as easily transformed into the monstrous Medusa as she had been in Spenser's dismantling of Duessa or Swift's dressing room poems, or in The Blithedale Romance, a book that Eliot definitely read and may have reviewed (Letters, 2:56):
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