succumbs, like him, forced to realize that deceit may strike one with a tragic rebound.
Jermyn and Grandcourt, the latter especially, indulge in deceit out of pure selfishness, but in neither of them does George Eliot consider hypocrisy a matter for even satirical mirth. In lighter vein she does indeed show up the poseur in low life. Mr. Dowlas, oracle of The Rainbow, laying down the law about ghosts, is too frightened by the apparition of Silas Marner to speak. Having recovered and feeling "that he had not been quite on a par with himself and the occasion," he intrigues to get appointed as deputy constable, and consents to serve, after "duly rehearsing a small ceremony known in high ecclesiastical life as nolo episcopari." Mr. Scales, discoursing largely on excommunication, is another caught in the Socratic trap by being asked for definition of the term. He is no less ready than Mr. Curdle, though more sententious:[1]
"Well, it's a law term—speaking in a figurative sort of way—meaning
that a Radical was no gentleman."
It is George Eliot who sees the necessity of the mask
that most are content simply to tear away or disfigure.
Although she speaks through a worldly wise character,
she sounds no note of dissent:[2]
"'I'll tell you what, Dan,' said Sir Hugo, 'a man who sets his
face against every sort of humbug is simply a three-cornered
- ↑ Felix Holt, I, 152. Kingsley depicts the same thing in higher life, and takes it more seriously: Lancelot is contemptuous over the vicar,—"He told me, hearing me quote Schiller, to beware of the Germans, for they were all Pantheists at heart. I asked him whether he included Lange and Bunsen, and it appeared that he had never read a German book in his life. He then flew furiously at Mr. Carlyle, and I found that all he knew of him was from a certain review in the Quarterly." Yeast, 63.
- ↑ Daniel Deronda, II, 162.
