Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

by George Eliot

Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

Genres: Fiction, Classics, 19th Century, British Literature, Audiobook, Essays

163 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1871

About the author

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

Reviews

[Darryl Friesen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a very different way than Eliot’s novels, this book is completely brilliant! It is a collection of 18 essays, “written” by our fictional Theophrastus as observations, critiques, and commentary on British society. They are similar in many ways to the chapters in Eliot’s novels which seem digressions as she philosophizes; and while I’ve always enjoyed those moments of reflection in Eliot’s novels, it is true that they can have a somewhat disrupting effect on the flow of the narrative arc. However, because there is no such consideration here, the essays read surprisingly naturally, and completely held my attention.

As a recommendation to any future or potential readers, I would highly recommend considering the following:
1) Don’t read more than one essay each day, and maybe even read one essay every other day. These essays are certainly moderately dense in composition, so trying to read this quickly would likely not be either as effective or as enjoyable as is potentially possible.
2) Get the University of Iowa Press edition by Nancy Henry. It contains an outstanding introduction that really helps contextualize the book and gives it a framework in which to approach this unique book within Eliot’s oeuvre, 2 fragments of essays that were omitted from two of the essays upon their publication that have here been included in this edition based on early drafts of this work, and some of the best explanatory notes I’ve ever enjoyed alongside the book I’m reading. I seriously would not have enjoyed the book as much as I have if I didn’t have the help and support of Henry’s explanatory notes.

The essays in this collection are rooted in the idea that one must acknowledge their debt to their past while monitoring the value of their contribution to future generations (an idea introduced in Henry’s introduction). It felt shockingly relevant and timely as a reader in 2024, as we are still grappling with these universally human ideas within our own understanding and wrestling with our culture, heritage, relationship with technology, and misunderstandings of people who are different than us.

Some really fabulous quotes include:

“Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I should be known to hold it?”

“I saw that the bias of personal discontent was just as misleading and odious as the bias of self-satisfaction.”

“A little unpremeditated insincerity must be indulged under the stress of social intercourse.” 🤣

“The depths of middle-aged gentlemen’s ignorance will never be known, for want of public examinations in this branch.” 🤣

“It is a commonplace that words, writings, measures, and performances in general, have qualities assigned them not by a direct judgement on the performances themselves, but by a presumption of what they are likely to be, considering who is the performer.”

“A too intense kinship with all frailties and vices undermines the active heroism which battles against wrong.”

And the final essay should be included (and maybe it is, in certain editions, without my knowledge!) as supplemental material in every edition of Daniel Deronda. It contains an incredibly insightful and challenging look at how xenophobia creeps into a culture, specifically using the Jewish people as the case study. I could see Mordecai’s face before me the whole time I read it!

I admittedly went into this one with great trepidation, only willing to tackle it in my pursuit of being an Eliot completionist. However, I will most definitely NOT be unhauling my copy, as I plan to revisit this numerous times in the future! It was wonderful.

Finally, a huge thanks to my buddy reader, Anjie! It was great to read this together, and the rapidfire conversations, observations, musings, favourite quotes, and mutual cheering-on were most enjoyable and needed!!

[Darcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Eliot is one of my favorite Victorian authors. This book gives a series of character studies and I found it so intriguing and educational about the types of people that she presumably encountered in her circles of enlightened thought. I especially liked the character study of a woman who had written one book and the reviews of that book were all she ever seemed to talk about the rest of her life.

[Cssekar Uspl]

Fight

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[Yonina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is fantastic and blows a lot of my ideas about George Eliot out of the water. George Eliot as technological historian? Historian of the future? Going to do a quick piece about it.

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

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Impressions of Theophrastus Such
by George Eliot.
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This author, familiar for decades - her Silas Marner was read when one was in mid to late teens, and it was so obviously different, with a quality bordering on spiritual; later, her Mill On The Floss was Frank about admission and depiction of caste system of England, which was startling (most in West pretend, following Macaulay policy of equating everything bad with India and denying or falsifying everything good about her, so much so they don't realise it - not so different from what MS Clinton observed about Pakistan as she dealt with it while part of Obama administration); and then one read more, recently, when time was as much available, as were her works due to internet.

But reading the earlier essays, especially bit of this as one reads through, and the last one more than any other, is not just starting, it's shocking, leaving one aghast - this woman is so racist, it is Nazi in all but name.

She couldn't be unique in this, of course - this is probably true of most of West.
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Glad one didn't continue reading this in April!
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In the midst of reading a collection of works of George Eliot, if one has a "massive heart attack" that one doesn't know of until informed by medical authorities, and subsequently resumes the reading after return home post surgical procedure, one can be forgiven for being exasperated with George Eliot, by the time - after one finishes Daniel Deronda - one is brave enough to get through Felix Holt The Radical. Next, one opens Impressions of Theophrastus Such, and is too exhausted to see it, and gives up bitterly, not liking one bit the defeat against the very German style writing - where one has to read, reread, and repeat, before it faintly dawns what the long sentence says.

In German writing, so the joke goes amongst English speaking readers of German, there are frequently sentences two pages long, with a single word changing the whole meaning after one turns the page, due to a split verb. George Eliot, of course, is easier than that. She wrote in English.

But half a year later, having read a collection of works of Jane Austen, to one's great amazement - one has been familiar with her major works for half a century, but didn't know the rest! Or anything at all about her, either. - one returns to thus, and is quite amazed.

Who knew!

Who knew George Eliot could be other than ponderous, plodding through long sentences of ethical discussions about moral dilemma, and good heavens, so humorous! Who knew!
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Contents

I. Looking Inward.
II. Looking Backward.
III. How We Encourage Research.
IV. A Man Surprised at his Originality.
V. A too Deferential Man.
VI. Only Temper.
VII. A Political Molecule.
VIII. The Watch-Dog of Knowledge.
IX. A Half-Breed.
X. Debasing the Moral Currency.
XI. The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb.
XII. “So Young!”
XIII. How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials, and Believe in Them.
XIV. The too Ready Writer.
XV. Diseases of Small Authorship.
XVI. Moral Swindlers.
XVII. Shadows of the Coming Race.
XVIII. The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!
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Reviews
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I. Looking Inward.
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George Eliot opens with something familiar - friends, acquaintances, relatives, tend to assume they know you, everything about yourself, better than you do yourself; and if you contradict or differ, you are liable to be accused of prevarication.

Was this written and published before her identity was known to public? " I am a bachelor" she writes, not used for women until much later.
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"It is my habit to give an account to myself of the characters I meet with: can I give any true account of my own? I am a bachelor, without domestic distractions of any sort, and have all my life been an attentive companion to myself, flattering my nature agreeably on plausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me, and in general remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity which is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the careless inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held, express their desire to convert me to my favourite ideas, forget whether I have ever been to the East, and are capable of being three several times astonished at my never having told them before of my accident in the Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever since notably diminished my digestive powers. Surely I ought to know myself better than these indifferent outsiders can know me; nay, better even than my intimate friends, to whom I have never breathed those items of my inward experience which have chiefly shaped my life.

"Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even the acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and tenets as they would be if I were a dead philosopher, are probably aware of certain points in me which may not be included in my most active suspicion. We sing an exquisite passage out of tune and innocently repeat it for the greater pleasure of our hearers. Who can be aware of what his foreign accent is in the ears of a native? And how can a man be conscious of that dull perception which causes him to mistake altogether what will make him agreeable to a particular woman, and to persevere eagerly in a behaviour which she is privately recording against him? I have had some confidences from my female friends as to their opinion of other men whom I have observed trying to make themselves amiable, and it has occurred to me that though I can hardly be so blundering as Lippus and the rest of those mistaken candidates for favour whom I have seen ruining their chance by a too elaborate personal canvass, I must still come under the common fatality of mankind and share the liability to be absurd without knowing that I am absurd. ... "

True! And then she brings a smile with

"It is in the nature of foolish reasoning to seem good to the foolish reasoner."

Whether she knows, much less intends, or otherwise. Latter, one suspects.

"Hence with all possible study of myself, with all possible effort to escape from the pitiable illusion which makes men laugh, shriek, or curl the lip at Folly's likeness, in total unconsciousness that it resembles themselves, I am obliged to recognise that while there are secrets in me unguessed by others, these others have certain items of knowledge about the extent of my powers and the figure I make with them, which in turn are secrets unguessed by me. When I was a lad I danced a hornpipe with arduous scrupulosity, and while suffering pangs of pallid shyness was yet proud of my superiority as a dancing pupil, imagining for myself a high place in the estimation of beholders; but I can now picture the amusement they had in the incongruity of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. What sort of hornpipe am I dancing now?"
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" ... No man can know his brother simply as a spectator. ... And thus while I carry in myself the key to other men's experience, it is only by observing others that I can so far correct my self-ignorance as to arrive at the certainty that I am liable to commit myself unawares and to manifest some incompetency which I know no more of than the blind man knows of his image in the glass."

" ... In all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness which may have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to reticence by the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us and have had a mingled influence over our lives; by the fellow-feeling which should restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into an act of accusation against others, who have no chance of vindicating themselves; and most of all by that reverence for the higher efforts of our common nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonising struggles with temptation, in unbroken silence. ... Yet half our impressions of his character come not from what he means to convey, but from what he unconsciously enables us to discern."

" ... I am not indeed writing an autobiography, or pretending to give an unreserved description of myself, but only offering some slight confessions in an apologetic light, to indicate that if in my absence you dealt as freely with my unconscious weaknesses as I have dealt with the unconscious weaknesses of others, I should not feel myself warranted by common-sense in regarding your freedom of observation as an exceptional case of evil-speaking; or as malignant interpretation of a character which really offers no handle to just objection; or even as an unfair use for your amusement of disadvantages which, since they are mine, should be regarded with more than ordinary tenderness. ... "

And again, it brings a smile - how true! One feels - when she says -

" ... It is true, that I would rather not hear either your well-founded ridicule or your judicious strictures. Though not averse to finding fault with myself, and conscious of deserving lashes, I like to keep the scourge in my own discriminating hand. I never felt myself sufficiently meritorious to like being hated as a proof of my superiority, or so thirsty for improvement as to desire that all my acquaintances should give me their candid opinion of me. I really do not want to learn from my enemies: I prefer having none to learn from. Instead of being glad when men use me despitefully, I wish they would behave better and find a more amiable occupation for their intervals of business. In brief, after a close intimacy with myself for a longer period than I choose to mention, I find within me a permanent longing for approbation, sympathy, and love."
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Seriously, who ever knew, or expected, even suspected, George Eliot was a humorist?

" ... I am spoken of to inquiring beholders as "the author of a book you have probably not seen." (The work was a humorous romance, unique in its kind, and I am told is much tasted in a Cherokee translation, where the jokes are rendered with all the serious eloquence characteristic of the Red races.) ... "

And just in case the reader didn't get it, she drops subtlety -

" ... This sort of distinction, as a writer nobody is likely to have read, can hardly counteract an indistinctness in my articulation, which the best-intentioned loudness will not remedy. Then, in some quarters my awkward feet are against me, the length of my upper lip, and an inveterate way I have of walking with my head foremost and my chin projecting. One can become only too well aware of such things by looking in the glass, or in that other mirror held up to nature in the frank opinions of street-boys, or of our Free People travelling by excursion train; and no doubt they account for the half-suppressed smile which I have observed on some fair faces when I have first been presented before them. This direct perceptive judgment is not to be argued against. But I am tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have mentioned are apparently taken to warrant unfavourable inferences concerning my mental quickness. ... "

Wonder if this was where P. G. Wodehouse found inspiration?

" ... With all the increasing uncertainty which modern progress has thrown over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clear that wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the balance of the haunches in walking has nothing to do with the subtle discrimination of ideas. ... "

And after that has threatened the reader with serious pain due to laughter, she returns with the Oh, so true, don't we know it! -

" ... Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make a clever observation, and my good things are as unnoticed as if they were anonymous pictures. I have indeed had the mixed satisfaction of finding that when they were appropriated by some one else they were found remarkable and even brilliant. ... "

And then comes the unexpected googly, a frank and unconcealed reference to the caste system of England in particular and West in general, which intelligentsia of England was not unlikely to make, until Macaulay policy of lies against India was so deeply rooted as to hide truth in plain sight -

" ... It is to be borne in mind that I am not rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high connections such as give to a look of imbecility a certain prestige of inheritance through a titled line; just as "the Austrian lip" confers a grandeur of historical associations on a kind of feature which might make us reject an advertising footman. ... "

And back to a flash of humour, like a feint at a punch in the solar plexus -

" ... I have now and then done harm to a good cause by speaking for it in public, and have discovered too late that my attitude on the occasion would more suitably have been that of negative beneficence. ..."

Before the return to Serious Thought -

" ... Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I should be known to hold it? ..."

Before a bitter draught that most of us are only too familiar with -

" ... And as to the force of my arguments, that is a secondary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the ex pede Herculem principle, and from awkward feet infer awkward fallacies. Once, when zeal lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard an enlightened artisan remark, "Here's a rum cut!"—and doubtless he reasoned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she politely puts on an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and chills her glance in sign of predetermined neutrality: both have their reasons for judging the quality of my speech beforehand."

And she continues the one-two-three style, feint, punch, serious -

"This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, who has also the innocent vanity of desiring to be agreeable, has naturally a depressing if not embittering tendency; and in early life I began to seek for some consoling point of view, some warrantable method of softening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism which might supply the needed self-satisfaction. At one time I dwelt much on the idea of compensation; trying to believe that I was all the wiser for my bruised vanity, that I had the higher place in the true spiritual scale, and even that a day might come when some visible triumph would place me in the French heaven of having the laughers on my side. But I presently perceived that this was a very odious sort of self-cajolery. Was it in the least true that I was wiser than several of my friends who made an excellent figure, and were perhaps praised a little beyond their merit? Is the ugly unready man in the corner, outside the current of conversation, really likely to have a fairer view of things than the agreeable talker, whose success strikes the unsuccessful as a repulsive example of forwardness and conceit? And as to compensation in future years, would the fact that I myself got it reconcile me to an order of things in which I could see a multitude with as bad a share as mine, who, instead of getting their corresponding compensation, were getting beyond the reach of it in old age? What could be more contemptible than the mood of mind which makes a man measure the justice of divine or human law by the agreeableness of his own shadow and the ample satisfaction of his own desires?"

- before proceeding with the ethical and moral discussion one has come to expect from George Eliot.

But not before another punch.

"I dropped a form of consolation which seemed to be encouraging me in the persuasion that my discontent was the chief evil in the world, and my benefit the soul of good in that evil. ... In my conscience I saw that the bias of personal discontent was just as misleading and odious as the bias of self-satisfaction. Whether we look through the rose-coloured glass or the indigo, we are equally far from the hues which the healthy human eye beholds in heaven above and earth below. I began to dread ways of consoling which were really a flattering of native illusions, a feeding-up into monstrosity of an inward growth already disproportionate; to get an especial scorn for that scorn of mankind which is a transmuted disappointment of preposterous claims; to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper. The standing-ground worth striving after seemed to be some Delectable Mountain, whence I could see things in proportions as little as possible determined by that self-partiality which certainly plays a necessary part in our bodily sustenance, but has a starving effect on the mind."
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[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Making my way through Eliot, had this as an ILL from my local library. So even though this is her last "novel", I read it now. Glad I got it out of the way, and it was not my last impression of Eliot's writing.
Thankfully had the U of IA Press edition, with a wonderful Intro, and Notes, from Eliot scholar Nancy Green (looking forward to reading her book on Eliot and Imperialism).
Losely based on the book of character studies by minor Greek essayist Theophrastus (read much more often in the 18th and 19th C than now - but a new translation has just been published).
Turgid, just a chore to make your way through this @ 170 pp book!
Not surprising it is often paired with Eliot's essays, as it is "fiction/novel" in name only. Had to keep reminding myself it was not in Eliot's voice, but supposedly from modern day Brit Theophrasus (First Person, the beginning reminds you of her other work in First Person, the short "The Lifted Veil").
Probably for Eliot completists and scholars only. And thankfully it appears those are the only people who read this. Very, very little scholarly work done on this volume - and often when it is mentioned in passing the critic gets something wrong about it!
Gives an excellent idea of her thoughts, beliefs, and ideas on a variety of subjects. Even humorous at times! Interestingly, the last essay was the easiest to read - on British national character and Jews. I did not know that "Hep" was a Medieval based anti-Semitic phrase, had never heard of it before.
4 of 5 for presenting Eliot's ideas and beliefs, 2 out of 5 for writing. Just grinds you down while you read it!

[James Askari · Rating 3 out of 5]

More a pendent to Eliot's other writing than the distillation of a lifetime's wisdom, but always interesting. The book is a series of character-sketches, sometimes almost novelistic in their suggestiveness and breadth. In 'So Young!', Ganymede, who imagines himself forever the benjamin, marries an older woman to preserve his self-image and is indulged in his scholarly errors as a perpetual teachable neophyte. The sketches are notionally the work of Theophrastus Such, an unprepossessing and retiring student of human nature, who diagnoses foibles on the presumption that he surely shares in them. Increasingly, though, Eliot's own voice--that of the instinctive conservative but theoretic reformer; the lover of country, of the Midlands working countryside and national moral traditions; the reluctant literary lion and salon-hostess--is heard. Many of the judgments are striking, and many of the sentences indifferently long. Eliot never sacrifices ordinarily fallible human presumptuousness to an epigram. In perhaps the most incisive piece, on 'The Too Ready Writer', she criticises the man of letters, whose financial need to write before he is master of a subject, at first buoyed by his sense of exceptional genius, has hardened into mannerism and a peremptoriness of style. 'He is gradually ... condemned to have no genuine impressions', the formation of his views preempted by a concern by how they will look in print, and by their appearance of congruence with what he has already written--a state of mind and being, for Eliot, antithetical to that of the genuine moralist and critic.

[Laura]

I personally found this very interesting and rewarding for the most part, although it's a dense read and I can't imagine it appealing to Eliot fans who are there primarily for her characters or detailed depictions of communities. I don't agree with her on everything and where it MASSIVELY lost me was in the discussion of the necessity of nationhood for a people's morality. It's a little difficult to sympathise with when one of the examples she gives of a nation that COULD be formed is an apartheid state that's been waging a genocidal war for the last six months. Sure, you could probably make the case that she's speaking in the voice of Theophrastus, but I also think it's clear that there are points where their perspectives overlap, plus in that last essay he's not all that visible as a character, so all in all it unfortunately left a bad taste in my mouth even though, again, I enjoyed most of it.

[LiB · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried, I tried really hard to appreciate this book in context, but even where I agree with the moralising this is tedious in the extreme.

It’s like being lectured at by a bad-tempered humourless old bore who doesn’t realise other people have anything else to do with their time. It’s awful. I’m kicking myself for holding out for some value in this and reading the whole thing. Maybe had some point in the days when people read collections of worthy sermons, and wanted something something similar but less saccharine.

[anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a book about idyllic life in English countryside interrupted by sudden arrival of a mysterious stranger with obscure past or handsome clergyman. This is not a novel, but a collection of reflections on ancient Roman and Greek art, philosophy, human character , modern machines and English society of her era. It was difficult to stay focused on the text as the author made so many references to paintings and poems that often I had to put the book down to refresh my memory to make sense of the allusion. George Eliot was very well-read and had a refined taste in art but her points are slow in coming. This is not a book for leisure reading.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actually, giving this interesting book two stars is a bit mean. It is packed full of ideas and insights into the world Eliot moved in, shining a light on the thinking of the day in her milieu. It's hardly an easy read, because there's no narrative to carry you along, and the language is prolix. Much of what she discusses, however, reflects common human concerns, and gives us an idea of how things have, and haven't, moved on since her day.
It is short. If you're interested in Eliot's world, or 19th century western thought, it is well worth reading.

[Kathy Nealen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very difficult to read set of essays masquerading as character studies, or so it seems to me. It seems to be a way for Eliot to express her own opinions through the character of Theophrastus Such. The essays near the end were more interesting to me. In one, she speculates about the continued development of more and more sophisticated machinery, thus foreshadowing artificial intelligence. In another one, she notes the questionable exultation of a man as moral because he is faithful to his wife; though, the man cheats everyone in his business affairs. The last essay focuses on the hypocrisy of Christians who justify slavery, Anti-Semitism and other ethnic and religious discriminations despite Jesus’ teaching of mercy.

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite dry to get through but the last essay was particularly interesting in its application to the current state of affairs

[LauraT · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting even if a bit meandering. A deep insight into English habits and costumes, from a woman of the XIX century ....

[Nate James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only two chapters worth reading were Looking Backward and The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!

[Jake Bittle]

Not even sure I would recommend to completists. Some of the sketches are hilarious though.

[Amanda mcguire · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 stars

[Dennis Hedrikson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book will be read profitably by very few. It is not, as the Introduction would have you believe, that the cultural references are too obscure for the modern reader. It comes with plenty of footnotes, which assume the reader isn't even familiar with the Bible. But chapter after chapter basically describes a different type of bore one would run into at late Victorian cocktail parties; not so interesting, but Eliot is the most boring and conventional of them all. She thinks that anyone who generally opposes the current cultural trends is a fake. Well, throw me in: I think most contemporary award winning writing will soon be forgotten, and I think the scientific community is largely ignorant. 75% of the matter in the Universe is unexplained (physics) and Darwinism is ridiculously put forth, though it explains nothing concerning modern discoveries in cellular biology.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was tedious and boring with no plot or storyline. It is a collection of observations that did occasionally have an interesting idea or an amusing character or anecdote, but I would not recommend it.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some good ideas and a couple of amusing characters and anecdotes in this book, but there's not really a storyline, and it's pretty boring.

[Marilyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alissa gave me this book for my 57th birthday when we were in Maine.