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The Greeks, the Germans, and George Eliot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2010

Joseph Wiesenfarth
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Extract

In 1947–48 Vernon Rendall wrote the first essays on George Eliot's use of the classics in her novels and supplied the first tentative list of authors she was acquainted with: Aeschylus, Aristotle, Epictetus, Homer, Nonnus, Pausanias, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Xenophon in Greek; Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, Livy, Persius, Plautus, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Virgil in Latin. Rendall pointed to Sophocles and Horace as Eliot's favorites in each language. She is like the tragedian in that “Sophocles does not let himself go” in “the delineation of the passions”; and she “never lets herself go.” Horace is not only the Latin poet she most persistently alludes to but also the one she most nearly assimilates in the wit and point of her style. Of the other Greek writers, Aeschylus provided George Eliot with that concept of Nemesis which pervades her novels. The Latin writers supplied her with happy tag phrases diat punctuate the speech of feckless gentlemen – “A quotation or two adorns the whole man,” according to Heine – like Arthur Donnithorne and Arthur Brooke; in addition, they allowed George Eliot to give Politian and Scala ammunition for academic warfare in Romola. In his comments on Sophoclean control, Horatian wit, Aeschylean Nemesis, and classical allusion, Rendall initiated the study of George Eliot's use of the classics. He broke ground for others to excavate.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 10 , Spring 1982 , pp. 91 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

Notes

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29. “Arnold's Poems,” p. 1170.

30. Life and Works of Goethe in Works of J. W. von Goethe, XIII, 379.

31. “The Shaving of Shagpat,” Leader, 7 (1856), 16.