370
PARTISAN REVIEW
taken, in its perverse silkiness. Is there another writer in English
capable of this passage?
From the very first there had been an exasperating fascina–
tion in the tricksiness with which she had-not met his advances,
but-wheeled away from them. She had been brought
to
accept them
in spite of everything-brought
to
kneel down like a horse under
training for the arena, though she might have an objection all the
while. On the whole, Grandcourt got more pleasure out of this
notion than he could have done out of winning a girl of whom he
was sure that she had a strong inclination for him personally. And
yet this pleasure in mastering reluctance flourished along with the
habitual persuasion that no woman whom he favored could
be
quite
indifferent to his personal influence; and it seemed to him not
unlikely that by-and-by Gwendolen might be more enamored of
him than he of her. In any case, she would have to submit; and he
enjoyed thinking of her as his future wife, whose pride and spirit
were suited to command everyone but himself. He had no taste for a
woman who was all tenderness to him, full of petitioning solicitude
and willing obedience. He meant to be master of a woman who
would have liked to master him, and who perhaps would have been
capable of mastering another man.
To stress the social dimension in Eliot's portrait of Grandcourt
isn't of course to imply that he "stands for" the English aristocracy or
anything else so absurd. It is
to
suggest that in Grandcourt, George
Eliot brought to a point of completeness all those elements in the
psychology of aristocratic rulers (also, in part, nonaristocratic ones)
that destroy human affections, spontaneities of feeling, and mutual
respect. Henry James says of Grandcourt that he is "the most detestable
kind of Englishman-the Englishman who thinks it low
to
articulate,"
and this keenly links Grandcourt to ideas of class power: for to think it
"low to articulate" is to believe that others must be trained to obey
without so much as the need to assert your dominion. Grandcourt is
here not just an aberrant psychological "case," nor a male monster
conjured up by a feminine imagination hungry for revenge. His
historical plausibility once acknowledged, we can then, however, give
credit to Eliot's treatment of all that is personal or idiosyncratic in his
makeup. "The power of tyranny in him," she writes in a dazzling
sentence, "seemed a power of living in the presence of any wish that he
should die." No wonder the marriage is described as an "empire of
Fear," a phrase that comes shortly before the observation that Grand–
court would make an able governor for a "difficult colony."
If
we now turn to one of the greatest chapters in the novel, Chapter
