ABSTRACT
In July 1856, shortly before she embarked on her first work of fiction, the future George Eliot reviewed the fourth volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters in the ‘Belles Lettres’ section of the Westminster Review. She describes the principal subject of the volume as ‘Mountain Beauty’ and quotes Ruskin at length on the paralysing effect of such beauty for the imagination and on how Shakespeare’s ‘perfectness’ required a different kind of nature as example and inspiration. Shakespeare’s ‘serenity’, ‘equity’ and ‘infinity’ are thus, for Ruskin, related to the quiet landscape of the Midlands in which he grew up:
This was, of course, George Eliot’s native landscape too, and she may well have drawn encouragement from Ruskin’s association of it with the highest form of literary inspiration. When, despite his admiration for ‘the redundant and ceaseless loveliness of the high mountain districts’, he argues that ‘it is in reality, better for mankind that the forms of their common landscape should offer no violent stimulus to the emotions’, the kinds of landscape he offers as examples of ‘the more frequent scenes of human life’ closely resemble those that will provide the setting or the backdrop of most of her own fiction: ‘the gentle upland, browned by the bending furrows of the plough, and the fresh sweep of the chalk down, and the narrow winding of the copse-clad dingle’ (WR, 66: 274). This is the world of George Eliot’s English novels, from Adam Bede, where the village of Hayslope offers a ‘view of gently-swelling meadow, and wooded valley, and dark masses of distant hill’ (2, 17), to Daniel Deronda and ‘the gradual rise of surging woods’, ‘the green breadths of undulating park’, and ‘the lofty curves of the chalk downs’ that make up the landscape of Wessex (3, 20).
