Eliot: “A Minor Prophet”

To show how the Victorian poetess and the female prophet remain intimately associated even so late as the fin-de-siècle poetry of Blind and Naden, it is helpful to select from Eliot's Legend of Jubal collections a brief illustration of her own post-Christian notion of prophecy. One may be found in the lyric “A Minor Prophet,” a pastiche of some unusual religious views held by one Elias Baptist Butterworth, an American Quaker whose faith prophesies a progressive Millennium just around the corner (Armstrong and Bristow 381–88).³

In some ways, Eliot's poem is rather conservative. Radical Americans presented an obvious target for English satire in the first half of the 1860s (when this poem was written) because of international tensions during and after the American Civil War. Anthony Trollope, for instance, created similar caricatures in Jonas Spalding and Wallachia Petrie, the radical Northerners of He Knew He Was Right (1868–69). Like Baptist Butterworth, Trollope's Spalding and Petrie emphasize the follies of radical American political theory to show, by contrast, the commonsense sagacity of old-fashioned British ways.

Yet “A Minor Prophet” is only ostensibly about the Millennial hopes of this American zealot. Rather, the bulk of the poem presents the reflections of a skeptical female voice, who doubts her friend's prophecies, and who extends that doubt to all supernatural religious prophecies. So when the narrator's distinctly feminine voice emerges midway through this poem, it also becomes radical, in its way. The narrator instructs that, properly conceived, prophecy is not the product of supernatural insights, but of sentimental ones: images of the future derive from the prophet's fullness of heart. For, as she recounts,

These lines express a fundamentally skeptical view of prophecy, it is clear; the “endless vista of fair things” seen before a prophet are merely reflections of her own full-souled past, creating strong faith out of her own strength. And it is important to observe that this is a higher critical skepticism, based upon the Romantic apologetics of Strauss, rather than an iconoclastic one derived from the better-known skeptical traditions of the Enlightenment Deists.

Part of the genius of the higher criticism, after all, was its repudiation of the skeptical Deist argument (seen in the works of Thomas Paine, for instance, or Voltaire) that the authors of the Holy Scriptures were simply frauds. Instead, the higher critics held that the Scriptures were inspired in a thoroughly poetic way, and that it was through and as poetry that those writings were most fully appreciated. Strauss, for instance, maintained that religious myths emerge as truths out of their authors' sympathies with their subject. This is the idea that Eliot's narrator adopts to describe religious faith in general. As Eliot translated from Strauss's Life of Jesus:

In other words, Strauss claims that the formation of myth derives from a spiritual and affective sympathy that Eliot would come to associate with the poetess tradition, especially as practiced and personified by Barrett Browning. Eliot locates prophecy (as Strauss had before her) in earnest sympathy – the sympathetic soul reflects its desires into its future, as well as into its past. So just as Eliot's narrator voices her gentle reproof of one E. B. B. (Elias Baptist Butterworth), she implicitly affirms the confident prophecies of another (Elizabeth Barrett Browning). And, in the end, the epithet of the poem's title, “a minor prophet,” seems best applied to the post-Christian female skeptic, rather than the male religious zealot to whom it initially seems to belong.

Blind: The Prophecy of St. Oran

Given Blind's and Naden's scholarly inclinations, it should come as no surprise that Eliot's influence on them owes partly to the fact that Eliot incorporated radical intellectual ideas into her poetry more ably than had many earlier poetesses. The influence of Eliot's poetry upon Blind has been underestimated by scholars because we have taken for granted the assessment that Blind offers in George Eliot:

It seems imprudent, however, to accede too quickly to Blind's view that Eliot lacks “that ‘linked sweetness’ of sound and sense which is the birthright of poets” – or even to take it at face value. Blind recorded this judgment only after an initially divided critical community had decided against Eliot's poetic efforts. In this context, Blind's verdict seems reflexive and peremptory: it appeals to the je ne sais quoi that Victorian conservatives invariably found missing in women's art. At the same time, George Eliot attests that Blind studied Eliot's poetry despite her disappointment, recommending that it “should be carefully studied by all lovers of her genius, as affording a more intimate insight into the working of her own mind” (169). It therefore seems critical that Blind takes pains to praise Eliot's formal method and subject matter, reserving complaint for her style. She finds fault with Eliot's manner, but not with her method or matter. George Eliot depicts Eliot's poetry as a serviceable poetic model which lacks only the advantage of a truly felicitous music, or what Eliot called the “chords/Moving on some grand climax” in the quotation above. And Blind's consideration of this poetic model suggests an ambition to strike those missing chords. The Prophecy of St Oran gives form to that ambition.

Blind first conceived of The Prophecy of St. Oran in 1873, while visiting the Isle of Iona in Scotland; she recorded there that the religious austerity of its very landscape appealed to her literary sensibilities: “Here every stone, every mouldering cross speaks of St. Columba and his devoted little band, and whatever of truth and beauty was contained in Christianity forces itself on the imagination in this lonely spot” (Works 30). The plot of Blind's poem derives from a set of ancient legends surrounding St. Oran, a follower of the famous sixth-century Irish missionary to the Picts of Scotland, St. Columba. In Blind's account of the Oran legend, the young saint breaks his monastic vow of chastity with a Pictish woman who resides on the Isle of Iona, the site of Columba's first mission. When Oran is discovered, Columba orders him to be buried alive. And when he digs himself out of the grave, Columba orders him buried alive again.

Richard Garnett's memoir affords an account of how Blind's poem was read by her contemporaries:

Oran's “resurrection,” as Garnett puts it, occurs between his first and second burial, when he seizes the chance to rebuke his fellow monks (understandably, given the circumstances) and to mock the creed to which they subscribe:

The lengthy monologue from which these lines are excerpted is delivered by Oran from the mouth of his own grave. The monologue itself is, presumably, the prophecy promised in Blind's title, and the apostate monk who delivers it has widely been supposed by critics – then as now – to be the mouthpiece of Blind's progressive nineteenth-century views. The poem ends with Oran's second burial, during which the monks chant the Gaelic proverb that Blind uses as an epigraph to her poem: “Earth, earth on the mouth of Oran, that he may blab no more” (1).

In retrospect, however, it seems surprising that Garnett should represent the religious implications of Blind's poem as he does in the above paragraph. Among other things, Garnett encourages the misimpression that The Prophecy of St. Oran refurbishes an important minority religious tradition from the history of Ireland and Scotland, one that affords a Job-like challenge of Christian orthodoxy. Yet the highly developed field of nineteenth-century hagiographical scholarship provides little to justify Garnett's notion of Oran's significance. Oran's legends are not only obscure, but they lack the formal coherence that one finds in the Book of Job, to which Garnett compares them. Oran scarcely receives mention in the two great histories of Columba to appear in the nineteenth century, those of William Reeves and of Charles René Forbes, the Count de Montalembert.⁴

Rather, Blind's interest in Oran seems to stem from the fact that there are so very few extant legends of the saint, and that those few seem radically dissimilar in tone. Some traditions at Iona testify to Oran's perceived holiness. For instance, Montalembert notes that the burial ground chapel at Iona is “called St. Oran's, from the name of the first of the Irish monks who died after their landing on the island” (464). Reeves records that an otherwise healthy “Odhran” volunteered himself to be buried on the island in order to consecrate the soil of the chapel, and that for this voluntary death he ascended to Heaven (288). Yet these legends, or fragments of legends, represent the sum of nineteenth-century scholarly knowledge of Oran, and both seem curiously at odds with the aforementioned Gaelic proverb: “Earth, earth on the mouth of Oran, that he may blab no more.”

Scrupulous scholar that she was, Blind's interest in St. Oran seems to have been fired by the mutually incompatible state of the existing Oran traditions. It is not coincidental that parallels to their narrative fragmentation may be found in Strauss's Old Faith and the New, which Blind finished translating the year before she began her poem. Like Reeves's and Montalembert's hagiographical scholarship, Strauss's Biblical scholarship consisted in piecing together and making sense of ancient, incomplete, and often irreconcilable records. Yet unlike these more conventional scholars, who essayed to craft a coherent picture from the historical records of Columba, Strauss was primarily concerned to articulate the implications of his sources' limitations. As he summarized his own career in The Old Faith and the New:

For Strauss, the Gospels represent an imperfect binding together of the diverse Christian narratives circulating in the first century, just as Blind's poem presents an imperfect compilation of the fragments of Oran's legends. But the flip side of this hermeneutic is Strauss's insistence on the integrity of the evangelist's – and, by extension, the hagiographer's – impulse, especially from the evangelist's or hagiographer's personal standpoint. Blind understood from Strauss that to be Oran's latest hagiographer, she need not repeat all the inconsistencies and historical puzzles unearthed by Reeves and Montalembert. She might, in good faith, “find it convenient” (as Strauss puts it) to ascribe to her own historical hero, St. Oran, a profound conviction that Christians embrace a false creed – or, at best, that they misunderstand the better part of a true one.

This is not to say that Blind simply has Oran voice her own opinions. There is a difference between suggesting that John the Evangelist put his words into Jesus's mouth and saying that a first-century writer who assumed the allonym “John” found it just and true that the Christ should have expressed certain convictions in certain ways. Strauss repeatedly makes this distinction in Das Leben Jesu, and Blind, though she takes many liberties with Oran's history, surely appreciated Strauss's idea.⁵

It was all the more natural that she should do so because Eliot had so vividly evoked the same idea in such poems as “A Minor Prophet”: a genuinely sacred history always derives from a later author's sympathy towards an historical figure, and never from willful misrepresentation. Instead of suggesting that Blind uses Oran as her mouthpiece, then, as scholars have insinuated from Garnett to the present day, one should say that from the fragments of Christian history, Blind reconstructs a figure befitting the stature of a saint as she conceived of one. Oran's voice is not Blind's: rather, Oran's voice is the voice of the holy prophet, who can see as far into Victorian astronomy as Blind, his hagiographer, and who could announce to Oran's sixth-century contemporaries, “your heaven is unsubstantial air, / Your future bliss a sick brain's phantasy; / There is no room amid the stars which gem / The firmament for your Jerusalem.”

Oran's prophecy is simply true when viewed from the cosmogony of nineteenth-century scientist. Oran's fellow monks placed their faith in the Heavenly Jerusalem promised in Revelation, and doubtless located that Jerusalem in the firmament above them. For his part, Oran tells them that this place will never be found there. The New Jerusalem works wonderfully as a Biblical metaphor, but there was no room for it in a cosmos that the Victorians associated with telescopes, solar systems, and Sir John Hershel. As Ralph Waldo Emerson had put it with admirable succinctness, “I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of Redemption absolutely incredible” (157). Of course, it is not the metaphor of Heaven but the metaphor's fixity as religious dogma that Oran protests: their heaven “is unsubstantial air,” as he puts it, but this does not preclude the possibility of more substantial heavens. As Strauss writes of Genesis, “Nor shall we make it a reproach to the old Hebrew prophet that he was ignorant of the system of Copernicus, of the modern discoveries in geology. How unjust to such a biblical narrative, in itself dear and venerable, to thus petrify it into a dogma!” (17, trans. Blind). Doubtless inspired by Strauss, Blind's Oran reclaims the Biblical metaphor to urge his fellows to seek their Heavenly Jerusalem on Earth.

Thus Blind's poetry, like Eliot's, represents scientifically compelling prophecy from a committed unbeliever, and it represents the very idea of prophecy as compatible with fin-de-siècle positivism and post-Darwinian atheism. But linked to Oran's anticipation of Victorian science, and eclipsing it in importance, is his anticipation of the moral power that the nineteenth century found so often wanting in Christian theology and so powerfully figured in women's verse – after all, what is at issue in this passage is not the “firmament” of stars, but the “tender human ties” on Earth such as those that bound Oran to his Pictish lover. Oran ends his prophecy with the lines quoted above: “Dare to be men and break your impious vow, / Nor fly from woman as the devil's snare / For if within, around, beneath, above, / There is a living God, that God is Love.” Thus, for Oran, the uncertain existence of God is far less important than His substitution by beneficent sentiment.

It is this wedding of higher criticism and the poetess tradition for which Blind found so cunning a model in George Eliot's pious verses. Like Eliot's prophetess, Blind the hagiographer reshapes the Christian past in ways that more clearly resonate within the secular present, and the authorities she has for doing so are none other than the Evangelists themselves as understood by the higher critics. Following the examples of Strauss and Eliot, Blind saw the past as always receptive to such literary reconstruction. And confirmation of this method is found in Garnett's enthusiasm for the “saint” of Blind's poem, an enthusiasm that is meaningful for all its historical carelessness. According to Strauss, recorded history always entails such carelessness, and such enthusiasm. So if Oran is not the Job of the Hebrew scriptures, that did not mean that he could not become, through poetry, the Job of Garnett's fin de siècle.

Naden: “A Modern Apostle”

I do not mean here simply to present an influence study of Eliot's poetry. Rather, I mean to suggest that the intellectual change that Eliot embodies is profound and widespread in fin-de-siècle religious and (for lack of a better term) anti-religious poetry: visible in Blind's poetry despite her repudiation of Eliot's poetic virtuosity, and visible in Constance Naden's poetry although she dismissed Eliot's agnosticism in favor of an eccentric contemporary monism that she called “Hylo-Idealism” (about which more appears below).⁶

Naden did not leave Blind's ample record of acquaintance with the writings of Eliot, yet Naden's career, like Blind's, resembles Eliot's in important ways. As Rosemary Ashton has demonstrated, Eliot was arguably the century's most important translator of German ideas – not just by her example, but by her individual campaign to increase public awareness of those ideas in such essays as “Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar” (1855), “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister” (1855), “The Future of German Philosophy” (1855), “German Wit: Heinrich Heine” (1856), and, most candidly, “A Word for the Germans” (1865) (passim). Naden could hardly remain ignorant of Eliot's influence as she herself translated the poetry of Schiller, Goethe, Carl Siebel, Ernst Schulze, Julius Sturm, Luise von Ploennies, Paul Heyse, Friedrich Rückert, J. G. Fischer, Emmanuel Geibel, and Hieronymus Lorm. More importantly, Naden's artistic ambitions correspond closely to those of her predecessor. As I will demonstrate below, for instance, Naden's highly regarded narrative poem, “A Modern Apostle” (1887), exactly duplicates the unorthodox prophetic model depicted in Eliot's “A Minor Prophet”: in both works, the title character turns out to be not the unconventional religious male figure with whom the poem begins, but rather the skeptical, post-Christian, female figure with whom it ends. Naden thus demonstrates that even in the last half of the 1880s, one could depend upon the shock of recognition – Aristotle's anagnorisis – that Eliot uses to characterize the female prophet in post-Christian, post-higher critical scholarly culture (LaPorte 172).

Naden's protagonist in “A Modern Apostle” is an inspired young clergyman, Alan, whose acquaintance with secularist British authors and scientists leads him from the religion of his dissenting family through a period of anguished doubt to an idiosyncratic but firmly held mystical zeal, before he dies tragically young through complications arising from his work with the social underclasses. Like Naden herself (and like Eliot years before her), Alan loses his early Christianity through the reading of unorthodox nineteenth-century post-Christians, some of whom were associated with the higher criticism: “Carlyle he conned, and – guilt of dye intenser! / Dallied with Darwin and with Herbert Spencer” (Works 28). After an initial crisis, Alan joins a freethinking church, and, as Naden recounts,

That Alan's schismatic “pantheism” should be “christened” non-Christian indicates the gentle humor that Naden's poem reserves with respect to its hero and his cause. The poem exploits a comic gap between the formalism of its ottava rima verses and Alan's earnest democratic principles: his denunciations of religious and social form are ironically rendered in the strictest meter. This is, of course, the tradition of Byron's Don Juan – at once widely accessible and socially condescending – and Naden lets few of her readers forget his influence. Yet Byron is not Naden's only influence. Her comic rhymes evoke Arthur Hugh Clough's mild skepticism, and her rhythms suggest a lighter, more adroit version of her fellow atheist, James Thompson.

In terms of plot, Naden's poem resembles a rhyming abridgement of Mary Augusta [Mrs. Humphry] Ward's best-selling novel of the following year, Robert Elsmere (1888), a novel that demonstrated how very popular tales of earnest young mystics could be in the fin de siècle. It is the differences between “A Modern Apostle” and the plot of Ward's better-known work that interest me, but the similarities between them are marked, and were not lost on their Victorian readers (Induction xi). In each account, the ardent young man's nascent cult produces a number of converts, yet his religious ardor is resisted by his chosen love, a beautiful young woman of a markedly different philosophy: Catherine's evangelical faith in Robert Elsmere, Ella's atheism in “A Modern Apostle.” The zealot's zeal thus proves ironically and tragically impotent where religious seduction would mean most to him, and in each case, the young man dies to solve the narrative problems presented by this conflict of love and belief. Elsmere's death, indeed, plainly affords his author an escape from an increasingly unwieldy storyline: by the time Catherine warms to Elsmere's heterodoxy, he has apparently converted half of the East End underclasses. Short of actually producing this new religion à la L. Ron Hubbard, Ward needed a graceful exit from the contingencies of her plot.

By contrast, the death presented by Naden's Alan seems calculated to reiterate the social mission represented by his life, and to recast it as the actual future of his atheist lover, Ella. Upon his deathbed, the devoted Alan can ignore their previous religious incompatibility, and demand that his lover carry on with his mission to the English public:

Ella accepts his mission in the final stanzas of the poem:

Alan's exhortation is especially arresting because it so plainly reproduces the tropes of religious awakening (“to unseal / The meanings of the ages, and unshrine / All errors, all illusions”), even while it remains unspecified what Alan actually enjoins his love to preach in his stead. His instruction to decry the heresies of the nineteenth century is couched in entirely negative terms, and seems at best an apophatic theology, or via negativa. But this lack of specificity is what permits his lover to accept the charge. Alan insists upon the numinousness of reality with a flourish that recalls Barrett Browning's most Spasmodic religious imagery: “though the wine-press…Held blood-red grapes from the volcano's edge, / Yet the true purple full-ripe fruit I missed: / Seek you and find.” And Ella commits herself to this numinous reality, this underappreciated delight, without the least indication that she will leave behind her religious skepticism. Alan's and Ella's final vision, then, apparently reconciles philosophy and aesthetics with both the ethical rigor of Alan's “Pantheistic Socialism” and Ella's commitment to atheism.

“A Modern Apostle” declines to demonstrate how this reconciliation is to be effected, although Naden's prose writings might seem to do just that. These writings leave the impression that Naden believed in her own parable, and that she was personally committed to the evangelization of something like Alan's and Ella's shared dream. Her What is Religion? A Vindication of Neo-Materialism, for instance, argues explicitly that atheist materialists must learn to advance their view of the world with the zeal that usually distinguishes the purveyors of religion, and that they must take up something akin to what Ella identifies as her “great service” (Reliques 102–33). Naden scorns the nostalgic, weepy forms of post-Christianity so frequently associated with Victorian intellectuals, arguing instead that

More strikingly, Naden prophesied the day when “we shall no longer be able to distinguish between matter and spirit, and shall be forced to find in Hylo-Idealism the reconciliation of poetry, philosophy, and science” (125–26).

It is worth pointing out that the basis of Naden's “Hylo-Idealism” might seem unexceptional today: viz. that all knowable reality is physical. But Naden had no patience with mundane conceptions of materialist thought. She insisted that the enthusiasm, the sentiment, and even the morality traditionally found in religion ought properly to be celebrated in the purely physical world:

Hylo-Idealism, we see, does not merely describe reality, but redeems it: it is “our only hope of salvation.”⁷

And this salvation seems fully compatible with the provocative close of Naden's poem: Alan's denuded theology and Ella's emotional response to her dying lover. Naden's prose writings insist that neo-materialism ought to lend itself to a profound affective response. The materialist “must possess those high qualities and unselfish aspirations which were once the true life of religion. He…must none the less expand the sphere of self-love till it includes an ideal cosmos, of which all mankind are citizens” (131). Accordingly, even as Naden's poem seems to smile at Alan's early enthusiasms, it seems to celebrate Ella's later ones.

At the same time, Naden's writings reveal a strong sense of the generic divide between poetry and philosophy, and this divide helps explain why “A Modern Apostle” concludes with Alan's poignant death rather than with a Hylo-Idealist sermon. Philosophy ought to encompass all poetry, argued Naden in The Philosophy of Thomas Carlyle, but poetry need not encompass philosophy (Induction 144).⁸

Perhaps because Naden restricts herself to a smaller compass in her poetry, she evidences there a far lighter touch, a more subtle humor, and, arguably, a greater facility with abstractions. For this reason, it seems a mistake to regard “A Modern Apostle” as a sort of distilled version or coded embodiment of Naden's philosophy. What is Religion? and The Philosophy of Thomas Carlyle are recognizable instances of the Victorian high prophetic mode, yet Naden seems half persuaded that poetry does represent a purer form of inspiration, and a truer form of prophecy. Certainly her poem is more felicitous than the bulk of her prose writings, and she displays a rare virtuosity with the formal constraints of her selected meter. This is especially true later in the poem, where the keen irony of her early passages gives way to a genuine pathos.

As I have remarked, the interlocking rhymes of ottava rima lend themselves to comic effect in the poem's early sections, but in the final stanzas this quirky humor becomes fraught with the emotional force of her narrative. This is why Naden can so seamlessly rhyme “edge” and “pledge” with “sacrilege,” or “missed” and “kissed” with “Eucharist,” as she does in the stanzas above. Ordinarily, such sequences produce only bathos when their final terms are so incongruously weighty (and, as in the case of “sacrilege,” imperfectly rhymed). Yet Naden's willingness to locate these potentially jarring rhymes at the emotional climax of her poem serves to remind the reader of the detached amusement with which she began, and it makes the emotionally moved reader disavow that former detachment and irony. While such rhymes would be comical at the beginning of Alan's story, they are strangely moving here. Similarly, the simple rhyme concluding this stanza (“the very soul of each / Shone visible, disrobed of veiling speech”) belies the arch ridiculousness of earlier couplet rhymes (for example, “intenser!” / “Herbert Spencer,” or “schism” / “Pantheistic Socialism”), and by contrast it resonates with a profound level of humility and tenderness. Such an effect would be impossible in a poem more uniformly ironic, or more uniformly sentimental.

So despite its clichés and sentimental nature, Alan's deathbed scene seems finely calibrated to produce real affect, especially in that personal devotion that results in Ella's new vocation. And because Naden's poem so effectively weds affect and philosophy – or uses affect to augment philosophy – the most obvious philosophical model for “A Modern Apostle” is not that of Robert Lewins, her mentor, but that of Eliot, her predecessor, who so conspicuously essayed to harness the huge affective power of the poetess tradition in her skeptical depiction of the world. “Emotion and conviction must co-operate, otherwise both will be inefficient,” wrote Naden in What is Religion? (131). In “A Modern Apostle,” the sentimental tradition provides the emotional half of this cooperation. Nor does Naden permit us to lose track of this feminine poetic lineage, instructing us early in the poem that despite Ella's cool intellectual demeanor,

The dead child, here as in Eliot's Legend of Jubal, serves as the calling card of a certain body of sentimental poetry. Again, this notion of the female skeptic as flesh-and-blood heir to the Christian prophetess may be found in (if it does not derive from) Eliot's “A Minor Prophet,” which instructs that true prophecy resembles not Baptist Butterworth's scientific speculations nor his ambitious social reforms, but the reproduction of a feminine sympathy that in the nineteenth century had become the province of women. If the unbelieving woman was still a provocative notion in the century of Patmore's angel, Ella's unbelief becomes more provocative still as she so openly claims the inspiration associated with the poetess in nineteenth-century women's writing. Yet her claim to it is fully justified by the poem, for Alan's religious fervor, like Butterworth's scientific one, admits of theoretical doubts in a way that the zealous sympathy of each poem's prophetess does not. Thus Naden revisits the reversal – Aristotle's peripeteia – that makes Eliot's “A Minor Prophet” so striking: her apostle, like Eliot's prophet, is a woman imbued with the sensibilities generically inscribed in the Romantic poetess, but shorn of her specifically religious enthusiasm.

Marion Thain has recently remarked upon a feminist poetic identity in Naden's work (“Feminist Poetics”); I propose a feminist prophetic identity as well. Further, it seems clear that on both levels, Naden's Ella has descended, through Eliot, from Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, who was famously accused by her cousin Romney of “Measur[ing] to [her]self a prophet's place” (2.181). But skeptical post-Christian prophetesses in the model of Eliot do not need to usurp vatic authority from an implicitly masculine domain: they rely upon the evidence of scientific truths, and take for granted the limits of human knowledge. Naden's philosophy extols the virtues of scientific proof, but its expression in this poetry is entirely apophatic. Pantheism and atheism, Naden claimed in the Journal of Science, amount to the same thing (Induction 146). What remains central and clear from Alan's exhortations is not his message, but his messenger: “Trust me in this,” she assures us in the poem's penultimate stanza, “what Woman can, I will” (234). And in this arena Woman can do everything.

In sum, the domestic emphasis and pious tone of George Eliot's lyric poetry of the 1860s and 1870s might serve to remind us that she was a generation older than Blind, and that she could have been Naden's grandmother. Yet Eliot's poetry also lays ground for many of the most striking aspects of fin-de-siècle poetry on religious topics, such as Blind's decision to honor feminine sympathy in her sixth-century hagiographical revisionism, or Naden's suggestion that the atheist ought to inherit and carry all the religious inspiration of the poetess tradition. By the year 1900, Garnett could express surprise that a mid-century poem such as Aurora Leigh should have exhibited an influence upon fin-de-siècle woman poets: “This remarkable poem, overestimated in its own day, has been so unduly disparaged since, that it is a pleasure to find how capable it has been…of inspiring young and ardent minds” (Blind, Works 19). Yet viewing it through the lens of Eliot's poetry, one sees that Barrett Browning's classic work already contains the seeds of a radical prophetic tradition that would later find expression in the works of Blind and Naden.