CHAPTER XII.
MIDDLEMARCH.
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THE poetic impulse seems to have decayed soon after
the Spanish Gypsy, as George Eliot gradually became
absorbed in another novel. On 1st January 1869 she
notes that she has projected a novel, to be called Middlemarch,
besides a "long poem on Timoleon," of which we
hear nothing more. Middlemarch at first made slow
progress She began the "Vincy and Featherstone parts"
in August. It is not till December 1870 that she is
beginning a story to be called "Miss Brooke," without
any very serious intention "of carrying it out lengthily."
It became amalgamated with the other story. George
Eliot appears to have suffered even more than usual
from ill-health and despondency during the composition,
and was troubled at times by the difficulty of
bringing a superabundant variety of motives into
artistic unity. The book was published on a new plan,
coming out in eight parts--the first on 1st December
1871, and the last in December 1872. Middlemarch,
she says, was received with as much enthusiasm as
any of her former books, not even excepting Adam
Bede. Its commercial success is proved by the fact
that she made more by it than by Romola. Nearly
25,000 copies had been sold before the end of 1875.
George Eliot was now admittedly the first living
novelist. Thackeray and Dickens were both dead,
and no survivor of her generation could be counted
as a rival. When a writer's fame is once established,
the reception of his books is apt to be disproportionately
favourable. They are read not only by genuine
admirers, but by all who know that they ought to
admire. The immediate success of Middlemarch may
have been proportioned rather to the author's reputation
than to its intrinsic merits. It certainly lacks
the peculiar charm of the early work, and one understands
why the Spectator should have been led to say
that George Eliot was "the most melancholy of
authors." The conclusion was apparently softened to
meet this objection. There is not much downright
tragedy, but the general impression is unmistakably
sad. This, however, does not prevent Middlemarch
from having, in some ways, even a stronger interest
than its companions. George Eliot was now over
fifty, and the book represents the general tone of her
reflection upon life and human nature. By that age
most people have had some rather unpleasant aspects
of life pretty strongly forced upon their attention; and
George Eliot, though she made it a principle to take
things cheerfully, had never had much of the buoyancy
which generates optimism. She was not, she used to
say, either an optimist or a pessimist, but a "meliorist"--a
believer that the world could be improved, and was
perhaps slowly improving, though with a very strong
conviction that the obstacles were enormous and the
immediate outlook not specially bright. Some people,
it seems, attributed her sadness to her creed, though I
fancy that, in such matters, creed has much less to do
with the matter than temperament. So sensitive a
woman, working so conscientiously and with so many
misgivings, could hardly make her imaginary world a
cheerful place of residence. Middlemarch is primarily
a portrait of the circles which had been most familiar
to her in youth, and its second title is "a study
provincial life." Provincial life, however, is to exemplify
the results of a wider survey of contemporary
society. One peculiarity of the book is appropriate
to this scheme. It is not a story, but a combination
of at least three stories--the love affairs of Dorothea
and Casaubon, of Rosamond Vincy and Lydgate, and
of Mary Garth and Fred Vincy, which again are interwoven
with the story of Bulstrode. The various
actions get mixed together as they would naturally
do in a country town. Modern English novelists
seem to have made up their mind that this kind of
mixture is contrary to the rules of art. I am content
to say that I used to find some old novels written on
that plan very interesting. It is tiresome, of course,
if a reader is to think only of the development of the
plot. But when the purpose is to get a general picture
of the manners and customs of a certain social stratum,
and we are to be interested in all the complex play of
character and the opinions of neighbours, the method
is appropriate to the design. The individuals are
shown as involved in the network of surrounding
interests which affects their development. Middlemarch
gives us George Eliot's most characteristic view
of such matters. It is her answer to the question,
What on the whole is your judgment of commonplace
English life? for "provincialism" is not really confined
to the provinces. Without trying to put the answer
into a single formula, and it would be very unjust to
her to assume that such a formula was intended, I
may note one leading doctrine:--
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"An eminent philosopher among my friends," she
says, with a characteristiclly scientific illustration,
"who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting
it into the serene light of science, has shown me this
pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass, an extensive surface
of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid,
will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all
directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as
a centre of illumination, and the scratches will seem to
arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles
round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the
scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is
only your candle which produces the flattering illusion
of a concentric arrangement, its light falling into an
exclusive optical selection. These things are a
parable"--showing the effect of egoism., It may also
represent the effect of a novelist's mental preoccupation.
Many different views of human society may
be equally true to fact; but the writer, who has a
particular "candle," in the shape of a favourite principle,
produces a spontaneous unity by its application
to the varying cases presented. The personages who
carry out the various plots of Middlemarch may be, as
I think they are, very lifelike portraits of real life, but
they are seen from a particular point of view. The
"prelude" gives the keynote. We are asked to remember
the childish adventure of Saint Theresa
setting out to seek martyrdom in the country of the
Moors. Her "passionate, ideal nature demanded an
epic life ... some object which would reconcile
self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life
beyond self.... She ultimately found her epos in
the reform of a religious order." There are later-born
Theresas, who had "no epic life with a constant
unfolding of far-resonant action." They have had to
work amid "dim lights and tangled circumstances";
they have been "helped by no coherent social faith
and ardour which could perform the function of
knowledge for the ardently thrilling soul." They
have blundered accordingly; but "here and there is
born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose
loving heart-beats and sobs after an attained goodness
tremble off, and are dispersed among hindrances,
instead of centering on some long recognizable deed."
We are to see how such a nature manifests itself--no
longer in the remote regions of arbitrary fancy, but in
the commonplace atmosphere of a modern English
town. In Maggie Tulliver and in Felix Holt we have
already had the struggle for an ideal; but in Middlemarch
there is a fuller picture of the element of
stupidity and insensibility which is apt to clog the
wings of aspiration. The Dodsons, among whom
Maggie is placed, belong to the stratum of sheer
bovine indifference. They are not only without
ideas, but it has never occurred to them that such
things exist. In Middlemarch we consider the higher
stratum, which reads newspapers and supports the
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and
whose notions constitute what is called enlightened
public opinion. The typical representative of what it
calls its mind is Mr. Brooke, who can talk about Sir
Humphry Davy, and Wordsworth, and Italian art,
and has a delightful facility in handling the small
change of conversation which has ceased to possess
any intrinsic value. Even his neighbours can see that
he is a fatuous humbug, and do not care to veil their
blunt commonsense by fine phrases. But he discharges
the functions of the Greek chorus with a boundless
supply of the platitudes which represent an indistinct
foreboding of the existence of an intellectual world.
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Dorothea, brought up with Mr. Brooke in place of
a parent, is to be a Theresa struggling under "dim
lights and entangled circumstances." She is related,
of course, both to Maggie and to Romola, though she
is not in danger of absolute asphyxiation in a dense
bucolic atmosphere, or of martyrdom in the violent
struggles of hostile creeds. Her danger is rather that
of being too easily acclimatized in a comfortable state
of things, where there is sufficient cultivation and no
particular demand for St. Theresas. She attracts us by
her perfect straightforwardness and simplicity, though
we are afraid that she has even a slight touch of
stupidity. We fancy that she might find satisfaction,
like other young ladies, in looking after schools and
the unhealthy cottages on her uncle's estate. Still,
she has a real loftiness of character, and a disposition
to take things seriously, which make her more or less
sensible of the limitations of her circle. She has
vague religious aspirations, looks down upon the
excellent country gentleman, Sir James Chettam, and
fancies that she would like to marry the judicious
Hooker, or Milton in his blindness. We can understand,
and even pardon her, when she takes the pedant
Casaubon at his own valuation, and sees in him "a
living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile complete
knowledge with devoted piety, a modern Augustine
who united the glories of doctor and saint."
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Dorothea's misguided adoration is, I think, very
natural, but it is undeniably painful, and many readers
protested. The point is curious. George Eliot declared
that she had lived in much sympathy with
Casaubon's life, and was especially gratified when some
one saw the pathos of his career. No doubt there is
a pathos in devotion to an entirely mistaken ideal.
To spend a life in researches, all thrown away from
ignorance of what has been done, is a melancholy fate.
One secret of Casaubon's blunder was explained to his
wife during the honeymoon. He had not--as Ladislaw
pointed out--read the Germans, and was therefore
groping through a wood with a pocket compass where
they had made carriage roads. But suppose that he
had read the last authorities? Would that have really
mended matters? A deeper objection is visible even to
his own circle. Solid Sir James Chettam remarks
that he is a man "with no good red blood in his
body," and Ladislaw curses him for "a cursed white-blooded
pedantic coxcomb." Their judgment is confirmed
by all that we hear of him. He marries, we
are told, because he wants "female tendance for his
declining years. Hence he determined to abandon
himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was
surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it
was." His petty jealousy and steady snubbing of his
wife is all in character. Now we can pity a man for
making a blunder, and perhaps, in some sense, we
ought to "pity" him for having neither heart nor
passion. But that is a kind of pity which is not akin
to love. Dorothea's mistake was not that she married
a man who had not read German, but that she
married a stick instead of a man. The story, the more
fully we accept its truthfulness, becomes the more of a
satire against young ladies who aim at lofty ideals.
It implies a capacity for being imposed upon by a mere
outside shell of presence. Then we have to ask
whether things are made better by her subsequent
marriage to Ladislaw? That equally offended some
readers, as George Eliot complained. Ladislaw is
almost obtrusively a favourite with his creator. He is
called "Will" for the sake of endearment; and we
are to understand him as so charming that Dorothea's
ability to keep him at a distance gives the most striking
proof of her strong sense of wifely duty. Yet Ladislaw
is scarcely more attractive to most masculine readers
than the dandified Stephen Guest. He is a dabbler
in art and literature; a small journalist, ready to
accept employment from silly Mr. Brooke, and
apparently liking to lie on a rug in the houses of his
friends and flirt with their pretty wives. He certainly
shows indifference to money, and behaves himself
correctly to Dorothea, though he has fallen in love
with her on her honeymoon. He is no doubt an
amiable Bohemian, for some of whose peculiarities
it would be easy to suggest a living original, and
we can believe that Dorothea was quite content
with her lot. But that seems to imply that a Theresa
of our days has to be content with suckling fools and
chronicling small beer. We are told, indeed, that
Ladislaw became a reformer--apparently a "philosophical
radical"--and even had the good luck to be
returned by a constituency who paid his expenses.
George Eliot ought to know; but I cannot believe in
this conclusion. Ladislaw, I am convinced, became
a brilliant journalist who could write smartly about
everything, but who had not the moral force to be a
leader in thought or action. I should be the last
person to deny that a journalist may lead an honourable
and useful life, but I cannot think the profession
congenial to a lofty devotion to ideals. Dorothea was
content with giving him "wifely help"; asking his
friends to dinner, one supposes, and copying his ill-written
manuscripts. Many lamented that "so rare a
creature should be absorbed into the life of another,"
though no one could point out exactly what she ought
to have done. That is just the pity of it. There was
nothing for her to do; and I can only comfort myself
by reflecting that, after all, she had a dash of
stupidity, and that more successful Theresas may do a
good deal of mischief.
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The next pair of lovers gives a less ambiguous
moral. Lydgate, we are told, though we scarcely see
it, was a man of great energy, with a high purpose.
His ideal is shown by his ambition to be a leader in
medical science. In contrast to Casaubon, he is
thoroughly familiar with the latest authorities, and has
a capacity for really falling in love. Unfortunately,
Rosamond Vincy is a model of one of the forms of
stupidity against which the gods fight in vain. Being
utterly incapable of even understanding her husband's
aspirations, fixing her mind on the vulgar kind of
success, and having the strength of will which comes
from an absolute limitation to one aim, she is a most
effective torpedo, and paralyses all Lydgate's energies.
He is entangled in money difficulties; gives up his
aspirations; sinks into a merely popular physician,
and is sentenced to die early of diphtheria. A really
strong man, such as Lydgate is supposed to be, might
perhaps have made a better fight against the temptation
and escaped that slavery to a pretty woman which
seems to have impressed George Eliot as the great
danger to the other sex. But she never, I think,
showed more power than in this painful history. The
skill with which Lydgate's gradual abandonment of
his lofty aims is worked out without making him
simply contemptible, forces us to recognise the
truthfulness of the conception. It is an inimitable
study of such a fascination as the snake is supposed to
exert upon the bird: the slow reluctant surrender, step
by step, of the higher to the lower nature, in consequence
of weakness which is at least perfectly intelligible.
George Eliot's "psychological analysis" is
here at its best; if it is not surpassed by the power
shown in Bulstrode. Bulstrode, too, has an ideal of a
kind; only it is the vulgar ideal which is suggested by
a low form of religion. George Eliot shows the ugly
side of the beliefs in which she had more frequently
emphasized the purer elements. But she still judges
without bitterness; and gives, perhaps, the most satisfactory
portrait of the hypocrisy which is more often
treated by the method of savage caricature. If he is
not as amusing as a Tartuffe or a Pecksniff, he is
marvellously lifelike. Nothing can be finer than the
description of the curious blending of motives and the
ingenious self-deception which enables Bulstrode to
maintain his own self-respect. He is afraid of
exposure by the scamp who has known his past history.
"At six o'clock he had already been long dressed, and
had spent some of his wretchedness in prayer, pleading
his motives for averting the worst evil if in anything
he had used falsity and spoken what was not true
before God. For Bulstrode shrank from a direct lie
with an intensity disproportionate to the number of
his direct misdeeds. But many of those misdeeds
were like the subtle muscular movements which are
not taken account of in the consciousness, though they
bring about the end that we fix our mind on and
desire. And it is only what we are naïvely conscious
of that we can vividly imagine to be seen by Omniscience."
The culminating scene in which Bulstrode
comes to the edge of murder, and, though he does not
kill his enemy, refrains from officiously saving life, is
the practical application of the principles; and one is
half inclined to think that there was some excuse for
the proceeding.
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It is, I think, to the force and penetration shown in
such passages that Middlemarch owes its impressiveness.
It shows George Eliot's reflective powers fully ripened
and manifesting singular insight into certain intricacies
of motive and character. There is, indeed, a correlative
loss of the early power of attractiveness. The
remaining pair of lovers, Mary Garth and Fred Vincy,
the shrewd young woman and the feeble young gentleman
whom she governs, do not carry us away; and
Caleb Garth, though he is partly drawn from the same
original as Adam Bede, is unimpeachable, but a faint
duplicate of his predecessor. The moral most obviously
suggested would apparently be that the desirable thing
is to do your work well in the position to which
Providence has assigned you, and not to bother about
"ideals" at all. Il faut cultiver notre jardin is an
excellent moral, but it comes more appropriately at the end
of Candide than at the end of a story which is to give
us a modern Theresa.
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This, I think, explains the rather painful impression
which is made by Middlemarch. It is prompted by a
sympathy for the enthusiast, but turns out to be
virtually a satire upon the modern world. The lofty
nature is to be exhibited struggling against the
circumambient element of crass stupidity and stolid
selfishness. But that element comes to represent the
dominant and overpowering force. Belief is in so
chaotic a state that the idealist is likely to go astray
after false lights. Intellectual ambition mistakes
pedantry for true learning; religious aspiration tempts
acquiescence in cant and superstition; the desire to
carry your creed into practice makes compromise
necessary, and compromise passes imperceptibly into
surrender. One is tempted to ask whether this does
not exaggerate one aspect of the human tragicomedy.
The unity, to return to our "parable, is to be the
light carried by the observer in search of an idealist.
In Middlemarch the light shows the aspirations of the
serious actors, and measures their excellence by their
capacity for such a motive. The test so suggested
seems to give a rather onesided view of the world.
The perfect novelist, if such a being existed, looking
upon human nature from a thoroughly impartial and
scientific point of view, would agree that such aspirations
are rare and obviously impossible for the great
mass of mankind. People, indisputably, are "mostly
fools" and care very little for theories of life and
conduct. But, therefore, it is idle to quarrel with the
inevitable or to be disappointed at its results; and,
moreover, it is easy to attach too much importance to
this particular impulse. The world, somehow or other,
worries along by means of very commonplace affections
and very limited outlooks. George Eliot, no doubt,
fully recognises that fact, but she seems to be dispirited
by the contemplation. The result, however, is that
she seems to be a little out of touch with the actual
world, and to speak from a position of philosophical
detachment which somehow exhibits her characters in
a rather distorting light. For that reason Middlemarch
seems to fall short of the great masterpieces
which imply a closer contact with the world of realities
and less preoccupation with certain speculative doctrines.
Yet it is clearly a work of extraordinary
power, full of subtle and accurate observation; and
gives, if a melancholy yet an undeniably truthful
portraiture of the impression made by the society of
the time upon one of the keenest observers, though
upon an observer looking at the world from a certain
distance, and rather too much impressed by the
importance of philosophers and theorists
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