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PARTISAN REVIEW
"root of conscience" can invite pain, enough to spoil the pleasures she
wants. "Pleasures" may not be the exact word here: she is not free
enough for pleasures, it is a breed of vanities that drives her. Finally,
Gwendolen is innocent. She is innocent of the world, of its hardness, of
her own self. As Henry James puts it: "The universe forcing itself with
a slow, inexorable pressure into a narrow, complacent, and yet after all
extremely sensitive mind, and making it ache with the pain of the
process-that is Gwendolen's story."
Her innocence comes out as both damaging and touching when
she seeks advice from the musician Klesmer. The family investments
having gone bad, she fancies becoming a singer or actress who will
assume a distinguished position in the arts because she is ... well,
herself. The enlightenment to which Klesmer subjects her is painful,
though he tries to be kind. He stresses the hard work such a career
demands; he is honest about the likelihood of failure, or a mediocrity
not much better, as the outcome even of hard work. "You have not said
to yourself, 'I must know this exactly,' 'I must understand this exactly,'
'I must do this exactly' ... You have not yet conceived what excellence
is; you must unlearn your mistaken admirations.... "
Klesmer is the first of the positive voices-there are not many-to
be heard in the novel: he speaks for the calling of art and, it's very much
worth noting, he speaks as an outsider, a German Jew, who has already
been seen in a bristling encounter with the amiable philistinism of the
English politician, Mr. Bult. Gwendolen has the brains to recognize
that Klesmer is telling her the truth, and the sensitivity to blush at the
presumptuousness he has been gentle enough not to name. She
concludes that there is no alternative
to
marrying Grandcourt.
Elegant, gliding with the slow movements of a " lizard," preceding
each sentence with an authoritative pause, this Grandcourt is one of
the supreme inventions of English fiction. He is not larger than life, as
a Lovelace or Heathcliff is sometimes felt to be; he is scaled to social
ordinariness, and the demonic principle to his ordinary flesh. He is not
torn, as Gwendolen can be, by divisions of the will, for he is the pure
double of her "lower self," bringing to completion all within her that
thrills to the demands of status, rank, money, power. Everything about
him is realized with a remarkable vividness, as if derived from an
enmity so deep as to dispense with rancor.
George Eliot is not often given credit for employing the novelistic
techniques usually associated with later, supposedly more sophisti–
cated writers like James and Conrad, but she does so with complete
authority in her treatment of Gwendolen and Grandcourt. The girl she
