Here’s a sentence from chapter XIII of George Eliot’s Silas Marner, which I’m reading now. I’m quoting it not because it’s pithy and memorable, but because it’s awful in an exemplary fashion. After reading this a few times and making no sense of it, I went online to check the text—surely the edition I was reading had corrupted this passage. But, no. It’s spangled across cyberspace in just this form, in e-texts of the novel and, significantly, as a standalone quotation. Here it is:
“The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.”
I believe the author means to say that once a person gets used to acting deceitfully, it becomes easy for them to tell lies. She might have added that the difficult thing is to remember one’s lies, and to build on them consistently. But she has so worn herself out (along with us) in braiding this pretzel, that no further baking is accomplished.
I won’t go into how this relates to the narrative of Silas Marner, because that’s not relevant. This sentence sheds no particular light on the deceitful character whose actions are being described—it’s just dropped there as a sententious plum, which an author has every right to do, of course, if the epigram is fresh or well stated.
The problem starts with the redundant compound subject, ‘prevarication and white lies.’ These are near synonyms. Choose one, please. Next, we have a relative clause, beginning with ‘which’ and ending with ‘own.’ This takes up half the sentence, and contains two parts. The first part, up to the word ‘under,’ says that a pure mind is bothered by telling lies. The second part of this clause recursively calls on a great artist to support the pure mind, because, I suppose, the pure mind is just too witless to handle its job alone. And here we come to the heart of the problem. The pure mind that abhors deceit, and the great artist who recoils from inauthentic strokes of paint or pen, are both there to provide a contrast to the object of the sentence, the person who wears their prevarication lightly. However, since the verb phrase is in the passive voice, that objective scoundrel is a fugitive, a mere implicit figment. Meanwhile, the author has larded out the verb with a useless simile about ‘trimmings.’ Then, finally, we get to the point, such as it is, about ‘when once the actions have become a lie.’
Eliot seems to have wanted her readers to do a little bit of work to suss this idea out. It’s all about the shadowy nature of deception, and how lying is a trap that anyone can fall into. It’s the proverbial tangled web, in which a person may lose their reputation for honesty, and their moral integrity. OK, we get it. That person’s perfidy causes them to vanish from the discourse entirely, leaving only the evidence of their lies to speak for them.
Silas Marner appeared in 1861, and I’ve been enjoying it as a solid artifact of Victorian culture, one that has the distinction of having been used extensively as a high school reading text up through the mid-20th century. Stunning realism and sentimental twaddle go hand in hand here, as often they do in Dickens.
I suppose that I could have worked out the puzzle of the passage quoted above, and either accepted its cleverness or scoffed at its fussiness, and moved on. But I’m really not done yet with my botheration around this. Those two characters from the relative clause, the pure mind and the great artist—they seem heavily gendered, implicitly. And they’re scrambling out of the sentence like Furies in pursuit of the fleeing white liar.
Now, the Victorians had a complicated relationship with truth, which they admired, and bluntness, which they abhorred. Having to distinguish between those two qualities tripped them up quite a bit. After the First World War happened, the survivors of the generation that fought that war, in Europe and the US, effected a change in standards of discourse, admitting much greater discussion of hard truths, partly as a kind of prophylaxis against blundering into another global conflagration. And that effort failed. But the modern go at living in truth was something to look at. It was complicated and it came up short, but it was explicit, and foregrounded.
By virtue of this history, each modern reader, however naïve, carries a b-s detector as part of their mental toolkit. Perhaps the Victorians, who were far from naïve in general, didn’t read this way. As readers, then and now, we know that we are prone to lie outright, and to dissimulate in various ways. George Eliot, in Victorian fashion, enforces a solid moral barrier between truth and deceit. We teach the same thing to our children, to get them in the habit of sticking to the truth. But we recognize that this is a difficult ideal to live up to, and we say so, once the kids are a little older. The Victorians must have had the same awareness, but they kept it hid. And that, ultimately, is what throws me out when reading this exasperating sentence. It’s not just that it’s a needlessly complicated way of expressing a commonplace thought. It’s that the construction reinforces a fictional dichotomy between heroic truth tellers and villainous liars. You are one or the other, it says. Well, I don't think so.
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