Romanticism and Probability in Newman and George Eliot

Abstract

Romanticism and Probability in Newman and George Eliot Dwight A. Lindley III (bio) For a variety of reasons, the last three centuries of intellectual culture have seen a rise in the status of imaginative, or poetic, understanding. In the eighteenth century, this change could be felt in the way history was being narrated. "Poetry," wrote J. G. Hamann in 1762, "is the mother-tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the plowed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce."1 The German thinker Hamann was echoing, unconsciously for all we know,2 a thought voiced two decades earlier by the Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico, that poetry, in the order of experience, comes before philosophy. "As much as the poets had first sensed in the way of vulgar wisdom," wrote Vico in 1744, "the philosophers later understood in the way of esoteric wisdom; so that the former may be said to have been the sense and the latter the intellect of the human race."3 This "sense" of things available to the poet, and to people in general through poetic thinking, came more and more to the fore in the nineteenth century, as various Romantic movements arose throughout Europe. For the German Friedrich Schlegel, and the English William Wordsworth, among many others, the way of imagination afforded a kind of primitive insight into human life, and things in general, that the way of reason did not have access to.4 Alongside the Romantic turn to nature lay an equally earnest Romantic turn to imaginative, or poetic, thinking. [End Page 5] Over the course of the nineteenth century, one broad result of the Romantic shift toward imagination was a general rise in narrative thought. Many of the most important works of the century, especially in the Anglosphere, took the form of novels, histories, or personal narratives,5 the thought being that these could disclose something more basic and essential than a treatise could. In 1864 John Henry Newman wrote his autobiographical Apologia Pro Vita Sua, for example, to "give the true key to my whole life," by drawing out "as far as may be, the history of my mind."6 It will perhaps be obvious that a novelist such as George Eliot wished to unveil the soul of life in similar ways in her many fictional works.7 What is less understood is that Newman, even in his more theoretical works on epistemology and doctrinal development, followed a broadly narrative, dramatic framework of thought that is, I argue, more Romantic and imaginative than might at first appear.8 Reading Newman alongside Eliot, one of the two greatest novelists of his day, will actually illuminate that narrative, dramatic structure in fascinating ways. I propose to draw out his lines of convergence with Eliot, uncovering their shared mode of literary intelligence: they have in common a broadly Aristotelian conception of character, plot, and ethical probability. Putting the two together brings out elements of a common project we have not usually noticed or appreciated and suggests what is most unique and helpful in the contribution of each author. The connection between Newman and Eliot is in some ways present on the surface and is expressed in some shared terminology. They both frequently use the language of probability in relation to the practical judgments of life, a language with an Aristotelian theoretical framework beneath it. To get an idea of the way the theory works, it will be helpful to look first at a circle of concepts in Aristotle himself, then at the way they come out in Eliot and Newman. [End Page 6] ARISTOTELIAN CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK The relevant ideas in Aristotle come from his ethical, or "human," works,9 and have to do with the consistency and knowability of human character. One's character, or êthos, for Aristotle, is a kind of second nature developed by means of habit: habitual ways of acting and choosing come together to give one a semi-solid, predictable personality that can be known with some confidence.10 The kind of knowledge we can have of someone's character is probabilistic: he or she is likely (eikos) to...