assured that that is just a 'vain thought with which we men flatter ourselves'. But the claim, while crucial to the point, is not wholly convincing. It seems hard to swallow without an argument that if one had accurate predictions of the future, or accurate knowledge of another's mind, one would not be better placed to make plans. Of course if one only thinks one is in possession of the interesting facts, while destiny stands by sarcastic with dirty tricks up its sleeve, one won't be better placed. But then of course one doesn't know what one needs to know. On the other hand, if it can be assumed a priori that people are always foolish or self-deceived enough to misread what seem to be 'the facts', one won't be better placed either. But that again inclines us towards the thought that one cannot know the facts.
Those questions are not forwarded by this story. When Latimer 'knows' Bertha's mind, but does not know that she is planning to murder him
"For a moment I thought this fulfilment of my vision at Vienna marked some dreadful crisis in my fate, but I saw nothing in Bertha's mind, as she stood before me, except scorn for the look of overwhelming misery with which I sat before her..."Fool, idiot, why don't you kill yourself, then?" - that was her thought." (P. 53)
Is there a stress on 'yourself which he is too insensitive to catch? Or is his marvellous gift simply failing to deliver on the crucial issue? It's not clear. Either way, he doesn't have the knowledge he needs: he doesn't know that Bertha is planning to kill him. Similarly, when in a moment of supernatural foresight he foresees this savage moment, why does he decline to heed the warning? What he doesn't 'know' is that there will never be anything better in between his present yearning misery and his future miserable possession of Bertha. The phrases 'pitiless soul', 'barren worldliness', 'scorching hate', 'barren soul' and 'mean
thoughts' make his lack of knowledge puzzling, but it is clear that whatever he thinks he knows, it is consistent with his hope for some intervening period of joy.
More importantly, at least with regard to knowledge of the future, there is
something incoherent about the idea of separating knowledge and wisdom to show that we need wisdom to use knowledge of the future to our advantage. Uglow says
"In this Faustian story the hero chooses what he wants now, even though he knows the price will be later misery; for his visions are not of some absolutely determined future, but the future set in motion by the choices he makes.... It is not what we can foresee which is important, but how we live the intervening hours in the light of that knowledge.
Clearly, if Eliot were to be making a solid conceptual claim something like this would have to be true, but one doesn't have to have read Sophocles to feel that the idea of changing a glimpsed future is one of only very dubious coherence. Obviously, if we believe in causation, the future is always something 'set in motion by the choices we make', but presumably if one has glimpsed it, it is determined. Uglow's thought is that there is
thematic continuity between this novella and Eliot's realistic fiction because the supernatural elements of the story allow Eliot to develop her abstract ideas. On closer inspection, in the novella itself, the serious question about the contrast between knowledge and wisdom becomes obscured.
Certainly, Beryl Gray's remark seems too confident. She says, "George Eliot's own use of supernatural elements and psuedo-scientific inquiry undeniably makes The Lifted Veil a horror story bom of its time. It is the serious end to which she puts these elements that makes it also properly representative of her work." (P. 88)
If The Lifted Veil is 'properly representative' of Eliot's work, it is hard to explain the difficulty its categorisation seems to have presented to its author. As Beryl Gray herself points out, in describing it to John Blackwood, before its initial publication, Eliot called it "a slight story of an outré kind-not a jeu d'esprit, but a jeu de melacholie" This
deprecating judgement was not perhaps quite candid: that she thought it more weighty than a jeu of any kind is clear from the correspondence, some fourteen years later, concerning its republication. At that time she spoke of the idea it embodies as 'justifying' its
'painfulness'; she also composed the 'motto' which, in the slightly modified version quoted above, subsequently accompanied it; and she expressed a desire to "harness it with
Jennifer Uglow George Eliot Virago Pantheon Pioneers 1987 (P. 117)
62