Eliot, George (1819-1880)

The Mill on the Floss

Edinburgh and London

William Blackwood and Sons

1860

"For Tom had never desired success in this field of enterprise: and for getting a fine flourishing growth of stupidity there is nothing like pouring out on a mind a good amount of subjects in which it feels no interest."

From what you have seen of Tom, I think he is not a youth of whom you would prophesy failure in anything he had [end page 320] thoroughly wished: the wagers are likely to be on his side notwithstanding his small success in the classics. For Tom had never desired success in this field of enterprise: and for getting a fine flourishing growth of stupidity there is nothing like pouring out on a mind a good amount of subjects in which it feels no interest. But now Tom's strong will bound together his integrity, his pride, his family regrets and his personal ambition, and made them one force, concentrating his efforts and surmounting discouragements. His uncle Deane, who watched him closely, soon began to conceive hopes of him, and to be rather proud that he had brought into the employment of the firm a nephew who appeared to be made of such good commercial stuff. The real kindness of placing him in the warehouse first was soon evident to Tom, in the hints his uncle began to throw out that after a time he might perhaps be trusted to travel at certain seasons, and buy in for the firm various vulgar commodities with which I need not shock refined ears in this place; and it was doubtless with a view to this result that Mr Deane, when he expected to take his wine alone, would tell Tom to step in and sit with him an hour, and would pass that hour in, much lecturing and catechising concerning articles of export and import, with an occasional excursus of more indirect utility on the relative advantages to the merchants of St Ogg's of having goods brought in their own and in foreign bottoms - a subject on which Mr Deane, as a ship-owner, naturally threw off a few sparks when he got warmed with talk and wine. Already, in the second year, Tom's salary was raised; but all except the price of his dinner and clothes went home into the tin box; and he shunned comradeship, lest it should lead him into expenses in spite of himself. Not that Tom was moulded on the spooney type of the Industrious Apprentice; he had a very strong appetite for pleasure - would have liked to be a Tamer of horses, and to make a distinguished figure in all neighbouring eyes, dispensing treats and benefits to others with well-judged liberality, and being pronounced one of the finest young fellows of those parts; nay, he determined to achieve these things sooner or later; but his practical shrewdness told him that the means to such achievements could only lie for him in present abstinence and [end page 321] self-denial: there were certain milestones to be passed and one of the first was the payment of his father's debts. Having made up his mind on that point, he strode along without swerving, contracting some rather saturnine sternness, as a young man is likely to do who has a premature call upon him for self-reliance. Tom felt intensely that common cause with his father which springs from family pride, and was bent on being irreproachable as a son; but his growing experience caused him to pass much silent criticism on the rashness and imprudence of his father's past conduct: their dispositions were not in sympathy, and Tom's face showed little radiance during his few home hours. Maggie had an awe of him, against which she struggled, as something unfair to her consciousness of wider thoughts and deeper motives; but it was of no use to struggle. A character at unity with itself -- that performs what it intends, subdues every counteracting impulse and has no visions beyond the distinctly possible, is strong by its very negations. (pp. 320-2)

Plant::Flourishing

Reading A.S. Byatt's edition for Penguin Classics and searching at <http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/eliot/mill/>

See The Mill on the Floss (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1860). <Vol. I in Google Books><Vol. II><Vol. III>

06/25/2007