A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

32.
and his failure to appreciate the "hard unaccorrunodatins Actual."
101
But if he had had more self-awareness and a greater capacity for
making a realistic appraisal of circumstances, would this have made him
more free, less constrained, less certain of defeat? As we have seen,
102
freedom to George Eliot equals "necessity understood." Such under.-
standing, if Lydgate had been able to achieve it, would have given as
much freedom as we are granted in this causally determined universe.
George Eliot has been recognised as a Stoic in the doctrine of
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patient endurance which she advocates, but the similarities between her
world view and that of stoicism go deeper than the adoption of an attitude
of resignation towards the hardships of our lot. The selfinstruction
she records in a letter of 1868 expresses both the value of
endurance and the importance of working within the existing framework of
the laws of the universe. For here she insists that it is well "never to
beat and bruise one's wings against the inevitable but to throw the
whole force of one's soul towards the achievement of some possible
better." 103 This meliorist statement aligns George Eliot with other
nineteenth-century reformers who believed that Vie could make some progress
if we understood the laws and co-operated with them. However, her
basic belief in "invariability of sequence" 104 accords with the Stoic
emphasis on natural laws. A. A. Long discusses the Stoic definition of
the sage or the ideal good man as "one whose actions are consistently
determlned by a reasoning faculty which accords with the will of Nature
or God. This makes him the only free man. Reason does not give the sage
free will, in the sense that his actions are undetermined by character
and environment. But it enables him to make what will happen part of his
own will and plan." 105 The similarity between this definition and the
groundplan that has emerged from a study of Lydgute's freedom to choose
is unmistakable. Freadom for the Stoics as for George Eliot is necessity